Not a bad point. Asymmetric warfare does indeed cause problems. Goooood morning Vietnam... but the geurillas in Vietnam were backed by somebody, and ISIS is getting hi-tech from... well... I've heard some interesting theories. Round up the usual suspects.

It's like a fulcrum I suppose. Asymmetric warfare has always involved leverage. The weight is bigger on both sides now.

Very well, In a system with no property tax, there would be no disincentive to [ synonyms: stockpile, store, store up, stock up on, put aside, put by, lay by, lay up, set aside, stow away, buy up; cache, amass, collect, save, gather, garner, accumulate, squirrel away, put aside for a rainy day; informalstash away, salt away "they hoarded rations" ] please choose the preferred term which you regard as "unloaded". (synonyms courtesy of Google's dictionary).

If you get off on seeing people's wealth seized by force and redistributed,

That's all in your head of course.

Now, if you want to get to basics and discuss the pros and cons of allowing private ownership of what is called "real property" (basically land) in the first place, that is fair game.

OK, at the risk of this whole thing spiraling badly down the drain like my last back-n-forth with a libertarian, I'll bite.

Pro: Once you have the land, you don't have to worry about the government taking it away.

Con: Since you aren't paying property taxes, I see two possibilities: 1. The government gets the money some other way. 1a. Good for you, if you don't get caught up in the "some other way". 1b. Bad or neutral, depending on how expensive and/or inconvenient the "some other way" tax is. 2. The government doesn't provide the services customarily supported by property tax (e.g, schools, police).

Situation 2 is regarded as ideal by some people, and that's where I have a bone to pick. Why? Because if you don't pay the government tax, you pay what might be called the "natural tax" on the property. What's that? It's the cost of defending the land YOURSELF. IMHO, it tends to be much more expensive for most of us. It requires specialized skills most of us don't have--gunslinging, etc. Of course there are people willing to step in and do that for you. One of the most recognized organizations on the planet arose under just such a situation, where people were having a hard time defending their olive groves. This was in Sicily. I think you know where this is headed.

So, long story short, to paraphrase something often said about Unix: "Those who fail to understand government are doomed to reinvent it--poorly".

That's land value tax.

In a system with no property tax, there would be no disincentive to hoard property. This could have serious consequences for the economy. Imagine section after section of productive timber land being held simply on spec, while lumber prices soar..

If you're going to own real property, there's a general consensus that you should put it to productive use, or forfeit. Thus, that vacant lot in the city starts costing you... so you sell it off instead of holding it forever, and then somebody accumulates the lots, options an adjacent lot, gets plans approved for an apartment and... productive use.

Also, property tax is "progressive" in the sense that it's paid by people that have more wealth. Compare and contrast with sales tax which is "regressive"--taking a heavy toll on the poor.

Now of course all the "shrink government to the size of a thimble" people are going to come out of the woodwork. Sorry. It just isn't practical in the 21st century. We are not living in the days when bands of "Indians" with bow and arrow or colonists with muskets gave the British a run for their money. .

The market adjusts the values of these properties accordingly. It's part of the reason real estate is so expensive in CA (there are other reasons, but prop 13 contributes). The problem is that new buyers have to pay those inflated prices, usually with a mortage. So what? Think about it. If you're not swinging a smaller mortage and paying higher property taxes, you're paying more interest on your debt rather than paying higher property taxes. Thus, money that used to go to the state goes to the banks

Once again, it's not the only reason the real estate is expensive. I don't mean to imply that throwing more money at state services is necessarily that answer either--for PEUs have captured the apparatus of government just as surely as the banks have.

It's just one of the many facets of the ways in which California is disfunctional; but the whole USA is disfunctional in one way or another these days. There is no real escape. There is no easy fix, even though many people would like you to think there is.

Why do we still have these antiquated data caps?

To help find antiquated caching bugs!

Yep, it's not the relative strength of the currency that causes problems. It's the stability of the currency that causes problems. Having 1 Yen == $0.0098 is not be a problem even though the Yen is weak relative to the dollar.

Having 1 Yen == $0.01 today, $0.001 tomorrow and then $0.005 the next day would be a problem. It's an obvious problem for people with Yen in their bank accounts because they lost a lot of purchasing power. It's also a problem for anybody trying to write a contract that involves payment, since you don't know what the payment will be worth when the contract is complete.

So. While people may be worried about the USD exhibiting that kind of instability, it hasn't. Bitcoin, OTOH...

Because, in America, we threw out the old, broken notion of a one-hour road test and just give licenses out if you can show that you can operate a motor vehicle.

This is part of a larger problem as exemplified by the Bullit County, KY exam questions for jr. high that were widely circulated a while ago. Most college students these days don't have the level of education required for those questions.

My mother told me how she got her license in Rhode Island in the 50s. I don't know how much driving time was required, but she had to parallel park on a hill with a stick. She'd always tell me about that, I guess because it was the hardest part of the test.

Just use pneumatic or hydrolic actuators to raise a plat 45 degrees facing the cars at the stop line, goes down when the light turns green.

Finally, the impossible jumps seen during car chases in the movies will happen in real life.

Try spying on the US communications systems for the Russians, and see what happens when they catch you. Apparently, not OK with Americans.

It's OK If We Do It. America is the Shining City on the Hill, chosen by Providence to spread God's word and God's electronic eavesdropping to all the nations of the earth.

It's NOT OK with everyone else. And yes, they count.

Here's an idea: let's form a religion (or teaching within an existing religion) which mystically believes that insurance should be based on hedging against risk of catastrophically-large expenses, rather than dealing with small predictable non-emergent expenses. The key is it would be based on dogmatic belief in a supernaturally-conveyed (and impossible to disprove) command that we must only use insurance that way. Whenever anyone asks you why insurance should be about spreading risk, we'll always use our faith in paranormal phenomenon to explain.

NEVER will we discuss game theory, limiting overhead, common sense, etc. Let's keep this religious.

Q: "Why do you think insurance shouldn't cover these $10 pills?"

A: "He wrote it thus, when his arm was moved by the will of The Noodly One."

Q: "Do you think it is more efficient that the patient directly pay the supplier of the pills rather without going through a middleman or filing a claim to get reimbursed?"

A: "I have no opinion about that. I do not know nor do I care."

Q: "But don't you at least agree that if the patient shops around, the might be able to get the pills for $8 here instead of $10 there?"

A: "The questions is impertinent. You're missing the point: the cost is irrelevant. This is a matter of good versus evil, and recognizing the essential basil oil in our souls. We transact directly with our sellers because we must, not because it reduces cost."

Q: "What if you don't? Suppose I could reduce claims processing overhead so that--"

A: "Overhead is irrelevant!"

Q: "Ok, but what if I had you file a claim for an $8 bottle of pills?"

A: "The horror!! No, please, no. That is the Shadow Sauce speaking through you. I cannot transact a drug purchase in such a manner!"

Q: "Wait a minute. How do you know all this?"

A: "I just do."

The big question is: do you think you can handle doing this? Mystics make this stuff all look so easy but you have to understand, they train this behavior their whole lives, guided from the time they are children. It's a way of life.

I used quite a bit of tech in my last gardening endeavor, but not in an "Internet of things" way. I used Craigslist to scrounge for everything except my tomato seedlings. I used bamboo that was growing by the side of the house to cage the plants. It was like a big scavenger hunt to see whether or not I could get "something for nothing". I even saved seeds for the next year; but I think they got lost in the move. I moved too late in the growing season and had too much else going on to garden this year; but I can't wait to get back into it. My new place has an almond tree, so at least I've got nuts. Ummm... let me rephrase that...

Handling water may possibly become my first Arduino or RaspPi project, if I can get through my newbie ignorance, and learn some new tricks as an old dog.

We have flood irrigation that comes in from an acequia every couple weeks (used to be every week, but times are changing) at an irregular rate at irregular time-of-day. (You can't deal with this, just using timers, and the amount of water pressure is tiny compared to what you usually have on a typical garden hose, so lots of cheap ubiquitous gadgets don't work here.) I leave a floodgate open (i.e. remove a coffee can from the end of a tube), go to work, go back home for lunch, go back to work, go home at end of day. For various reasons that you can probably imagine, it's bad to leave the floodgate open after we have collected a certain amount of water. Things work out fine if it happens to finish at lunch time (or if it's so slow that it hasn't finished until end of day), but otherwise, someone has to leave their workplace and go home to deal with it.

That is lame, in a way that really does (slightly) matter.

Thus I'm tempted to either build a sensor (or just cheeze out with a webcam, though that's less geeky) and some kind of remote-controllable motorized floodgate.

AFAICT nobody sells anything for this; it's up to me. As it happens, there are lots of guides online for building this kind of stuff, but they're all within the context of Dwarf Fortress! Yeah, right, as if I want a gate that'll remain stuck open just because there's a butterfly or elephant carcass in the way.

Lower tech solution: find retired neighbor to do it, in exchange for beer or something. This is actually the cheapest/smartest way to do, but rubs me the wrong way. I'm sure you all understand.