Except that the warrant will allow for searching your house for missing Girl Scouts. The police searching cannot legally look anywhere too small to hold a very small Girl Scout, nor can they open photo albums or take them away.

I don't see anything in the Constitution that says we can't be world police. The Constitution provides for an Army and a Navy (treated slightly differently), and makes the President the Commander-In-Chief, with the caveat that Congress declares war.

Now, I'd like it if we cut down on that, but it all seems constitutional to me.

So what you're saying is that they do excellent work when Congress isn't screwing them up?

I've given up on expecting NASA to accomplish anything new in manned rockets. I'm so glad we've at least got Space-X, which can design and build something without worrying about how many Congressional districts they're working in.

What is their defined country?

If you think race didn't make a difference back then, you were either not born yet or completely oblivious. Affirmative action quotas suck, but they're better than what we had back then.

Look up the history of the civil rights movement sometime. We won basic rights in the 50s and 60s, not anything approximating full equality.

Businesses can't arbitrarily raise prices to make more money. After all, if they could make more money by raising prices, they'd already have done it (with some minor exceptions, usually in live entertainment). They may have to compensate for higher costs of making and selling things (2% in this example), but raising prices less than 2% would hit the new optimum.

Very few people argue for more taxes than necessary, or more government restrictions than necessary. In that sense, we're all libertarians. We differ widely on what's "necessary".

Spare us your histrionics. Forcing businesses to pay employees a wage determined by politics will either 1) be irrelevant because the the minimum wage is set below labor market rates or 2) cost jobs and, if the minimum wage is set very high, cause businesses to close.

Nope. There are two reasonable measures of value for a worker. One is the replacement value, which is the labor market rate. Another is the value to the employer, which is going to be greater than the labor market rate (otherwise, why hire?). Like any free market, the labor market sets prices based on individual negotiations, which means that if the employers have more negotiation leverage than the employees, they're going to drive the price of labor down, even if they're already making a nice profit.

A minimum wage changes the negotiating position of the employee, who can't agree to a wage lower than the minimum. If the employee simply isn't worth that much to the employer, that kills the negotiation. If the employee is still worth the higher minimum wage, then the employee settles on it.

Example: suppose I can hire somebody to do a moderately unskilled job that's worth $15/hour to me (or maybe $20/hour but $5/hour goes to miscellaneous expenses of having an employee). If I can hire somebody at $7/hour, I do. I get about $8/hour out of the arrangement, but if the employee asks for more I'll just hire another minimum-wage employee. Now, the minimum wage goes up to $10. It's still worth it to hire somebody at $10, so I do it. The difference is that I'm only getting $5/hour profit out of this.

The questions to ask here are how many minimum wage employees are only worth minimum wage to their employers, and the effect on the employers' finances. Minimum wage workers that aren't worth the new minimum lose their jobs, and businesses that can't function on the reduced profits go out of business. Obviously, if most minimum wage workers are being paid what they're worth, raising the minimum wage will have bad consequences. On the other hand, if most are significantly more valuable than that, they'll keep their jobs and the employers will be able to absorb increased wages. Since lower-paid people tend to spend more of what they earn than higher-paid people, raising the minimum wage can put more money in the hands of the lower-paid, and that can generate economic activity if the economy needs it.

So, the right minimum wage is significantly below what the average unskilled worker is worth to his or her employer.

Your second paragraph seems confused. If something can't be tested by observation, it isn't science. It still may be true, and people may believe it (two different statements). I'm not aware of many scientists that disagree with that. Pain is an example of something that is subjective but real. We can't test to see if soft tissue injuries hurt, but doctors use pain as a diagnostic measure. Try philosophy: the logical positivist position is that anything you can't determine with objective evidence is meaningless, which meant positivists had to do a lot of philosophical scrambling whenever some Platonist stepped on their toe.

In particular, multiverse theory isn't science until somebody comes up with a testable prediction that would turn out differently if there is a multiverse vs. if there were none. Anybody who believes in multiverses currently is not being scientific in that.

I don't know anybody with a BA in mathematics.

Hi! There are a few of us, but most math bachelor's degrees are BSs.

I don't classify mathematics as a science. Coming to conclusions in mathematics is very different from coming to conclusions in science.

Math does not depend on evidence. Math depends on logical proof. There's evidence that Goldbach's Conjectore (that all even numbers > 2 can be represented as the sum of two primes) is true, but there isn't a proof.

Science doesn't depend on logical proof, but rather evidence. We've had very good mathematical models that failed under some circumstances. In science, people would be treating Goldbach's Conjecture as if it were true (if it actually mattered in some science).

People have been talking about micropayments pretty much since the web was created and enough of the net got off US government noncommercial sites that it was reasonable to put commercial stuff on it. I still don't know of any micropayment systems, which suggests that they aren't all that popular. It isn't that nobody's thought of them, or thought they'd be a good idea, it's that nobody has managed to put one together and gotten it popular.

I'll believe in micropayment systems when I see them being fairly common. Not before.

F/OSS is not a business model, although business models can be put together around it. Some of those are advertising-supported.

Realistically, the internet is not free. It costs money to maintain all that. Coming up with good stuff to put on websites can also cost money. There are a few models: subscription, subsidy (by the site owner or others), or advertisements. Subscription only seems to work for some sites, and subsidies are not reliable, particularly when the price is rising. People keep suggesting micropayments, but I really doubt they're ever going to be a solution.

I really don't know of any general business model besides advertising that's going to work for popular websites. Putting up stuff without expecting any sort of payment worked when the net was young, because it wasn't that big and personal stuff could easily piggyback on educational sites. It still works for small "vanity" sites, and there are indeed good ones, but that doesn't scale. Anything that gets popular is going to need revenue, and the most straightforward way to get it is advertising.

2K donors? Assume a book a year, making the author $10 a sale. Then two thousand regulars is twenty thousand a year, which I don't consider "reasonable comfort". It is possible for a good author to be more prolific, but on the whole the ones I like best don't seem to write quite one book per year. This also ignores costs of doing business, and good books usually have benefited from editing, which costs money. (Editors also like to get paid regularly.) It may be necessary to spend some money on marketing and advertisements to get a loyal following. There are other expenses. I'm going to figure more like ten thousand devoted fans to support an author. That's going to take some work.

All publishers are motivated by money. You may be distinguishing between those that squeeze their authors for short-term profit and those that take a longer-term view.

Thing is, if I lose my job, there's plenty of other jobs out there that I can get, and I can work there without being intimately and sexually involved with the companies. Finding a husband to support one is a lot dicier, and I know one woman who wound up with a really bad choice.

Picking a promising husband is a skill. Picking one that won't change for a variety of reasons, and won't die before the woman is already of retirement age, is a whole lot harder.