We're talking here about tax departments that cannot manage to keep spreadsheet software operational on their office systems, cannot keep their own tax databases accessible of backed up, and worse. Never mind the fact that hardly any business administration is ever really correct in the first place. Having them run a centralized online service for millions and millions of customers sounds like a spectacularly bad idea. Besides, what about businesses without internet connection ?

I was amazed, when I first saw this, but cash registers never contain the amount of money their record claims they should at the end of the day. My jaw dropped to the floor for 20 minutes when I was told the same goes for ATMs. It tends to be a shortage because people are much more likely to complain when shortchanged (mostly accidentally), so it's expected to be a negative correction, up to 5% of the amount sold. This presents an obvious way to cheat that the taxman cannot (reasonably) attack businesses for.

Why fake the program when you could simply use the open source of that program to re-write the datafiles ?

Please note that it's an open question whether it's practical or not.

You could say the same about built-in kernel rootkits, they're very impractical to install on someone's machine. Yet we know about instances where machines were shipped with kernel rootkits installed.

Besides, why so complex ? Open sourcing these programs will lead to "tax optimizers". Write a program that reads in all the data files of the program, and outputs a "tax optimized" version with all the little details changed to better suit the business owner's tax situation. There will be absolutely zero ways of proving this was done, because the data files were generated by the exact same code that normally generates them based on sales, just with faked dates and missing transactions.

I wonder why everybody always comes with elaborate schemes to cheat using ridiculously complex methods to achieve these objectives when you could simply lie (and given the fact that no administration is ever accurate, finding an inconsistency is not exactly reason to throw the book at someone, keeping track of every single thing you do that involves money is a lot of work, you don't want to do it and as a result, accuracy is lacking at best).

If you think this is about efficient use of government money ... you've not been to these countries.

This is about punishing "employers", finding an excuse to nail a few of them to the nearest cross (and then afterwards complaining that everybody is raising prices and only big companies that bribe government survive). And, more general, punishing anyone perceived as a capitalist. People who trade for a living in public places are of course straight in front of the leftist's gun barrel.

It is not about money, beyond the level that is required for the state to survive (and given that the state has been living on >100% borrowed money for decades, ...)

Nobody's saying that. The argument is that allowing people to force (over 7x less efficient for plants) themselves on a "natural" diet leads to starvation of people who are priced out of the market by this. It also leads to more land use, pollution, chemical contamination, energy expenditure, etc, to compensate for the lesser efficiency.

And of course, natural foods are less safe when it comes to food diseases that can harm humans.

Having tried that once, let's just say I don't believe you. Class 2 is completely unbearably slow. Class 4 is tolerable, but ... class 10 is what you really want anyway. It's not a big cost compared to the phone's cost.

No you forget one important detail :

If history keeps repeating itself, 10-20 among today's tree-hugging hippies will shoot the rest and themselves become bankers and big oil executives.

Another problem is that SD cards are an external, possibly horribly broken component, that the manufacturer has no control over. Stick a class 2 SD card into your android phone and try it out, you'll see what I mean. The device becomes so slow that it seems broken.

And this is assuming you don't have a faked SD card.

Crappy USB sticks and any mass storage device suffers from the same problem. You can bet this will be blamed on the device manufacturer though. Why doesn't my (extremely cheap) SD card run on this phone ?

Alternatively, we could demand all aircraft in America are FCC verified, like every electronic. Two of the FCC rules are :
* the device must accept (meaning function correctly) no matter the interference received from other FCC compliant devices
* the device must not cause harmful interference (meaning power levels beyond FCC regulations) in other devices
That seems exactly what we want doesn't it ?

Granted, their existing testing equipment would not exactly fit around a modern plane, but I'm sure they'll come up with the solution.

Of course there's also another reason for no radios aboard planes : you don't want criminals to have the ability to organize something beyond customs before customs has had a chance to do something.

2048 bit encryption is far beyond the capabilities of any entity on earth (or even all combined) to brute-force. 256 bit AES is still considered beyond the reach of government to decrypt, but it is perhaps out of reach only by a factor 1000 or so. 2048 bit is perfectly secure.

Besides, since private entities cannot guarantee their physical security, how many bits they use is completely inconsequential : this is why. To protect a few files on your harddrive from your employer or your mom, 3bit encryption is probably fine.

Well Japan's population is 128 million. Labor force in Japan is 66 million according to CIA world factbook. That would make "labor participation", the only really meaningful metric of employment in my opinion, just over 50%.

For comparison, US is 313 million population, 153.6 million labor force, slightly worse than Japan, ever so slightly below 50%, but close enough to make any difference meaningless.

So in America and Japan, every working person supports 1 non-working person on average.

Sweden, by contrast, has 9 million population and 5 million labor force, or a lot better than the US (meaning the various US social security systems support more people per capita than Sweden's. Which confirms what I've heard from actual Swedes, btw, that actually getting social support in Sweden is hard).

So every working swede only supports 0.8 non-working Swedes.

One thing I'd like to see is how that picture would change if you take out the public sector.

Actually it's possible to make gas cars run on lots of stuff. From ethanol to hydrogen. And if you include the Fisher-Tropsch process, you could argue that it's possible to run a car on anything that produces heat.

Now as for the efficiency of doing that ... let's just not go there.

The final truth is that liquid (and gaseous) fossil fuels are amazingly compact and light, efficient fuels, so easy to use it's ridiculous, with an externality that only really manifests itself at enormous scale. Of course, we are currently operating at that enormous scale. Any energy policy that wants to have any hope of success would do well to acknowledge the advantages of fossil fuels.

Plenty of Ayn Rands fans in the valley. I have yet to meet the first one in favor of the patent system.

Am I missing something ?

Politics in a nutshell:

Step 1: A: your solution sucks !
Step 2: B: your solution sucks too !
Step 3: Profit !

Yes, but stopping or even reining in that spending will mean depriving people with no other source of income of their last dollar. In more than a few cases it will mean depriving Americans of medical treatments that are keeping them alive.

So, of course it's not fair taking this away, once you've given it. It's impossible.