Ultimately, the liberal philosophy is that everybody gets the chance to be what they can be, without regard for sex, race, parents, whatever, and that government, however flawed, is very important in this. This probably involves taking care of pretty much everybody at some time or other, since very few people are consistently strong and empowered throughout their lives. This is pretty much your definition of conservative, much as approximately everyone is in favor of keeping government as small as possible, not just libertarians.

The difference between conservatives and liberals in philosophy is that conservatives are much more tolerant of inequality, particularly of opportunity. They also seem to want to regulate individual behavior. Liberals want the government to assure good medical care, and don't care who marries whom. Conservatives want to leave medical care up to individuals, not making it a government responsibility, and want to ban same-sex marriage by law. (These are sample issues for illustration only, and I know there's lots of individual exceptions.)

Obviously there are a lot of people who don't fit any of the camps, or talk a much better line than they walk, and so forth.

You left out the people currently selling illegal drugs, the kingpins anyway, who stand to make considerably less if the War on Drugs winds down. They have money, and like the way the US government suppresses competition for them. They'd be very hard hit by legalization of popular currently illegal drugs.

Also, this is one thing happening. What we know from this is that one school principal is an idiot and has no clue about copyright law. If you'd asked me if that was the case last week, I'd have suggested we probably have lots of them, given that there's about 100K K-12 schools in the US.

Multiple independent similar acts are important, as are single actions by government agencies, since it means some of us are likely to run into them. Individual people not acting in accordance with policy are unimportant. They also seriously distort our perceptions of the world, since people who read the story suddenly have more expectation that principals are stupid and arrogant and arbitrary (look up "availability heuristic").

Unfortunately, as long as they're good for clickbait, we'll have them.

One of my colleagues was recently promoted to management. I got a look at his schedule. I don't WANT a job with that many meetings when I can be spending time programming. Fortunately, I haven't had to worry about age discrimination since I started dying my hair. My oily complexion gave me a real acne problem decades ago, but seems to have kept my skin looking fairly young. Walking fast seems to make me seem younger, also.

What do you mean "fairly slow 7KW"? That's twice as fast as GM is willing to let their vehicles charge. Their idea is apparently that you charge it overnight and where you work, apparently under the impression that eighteen hours a day of charging is reasonable and won't drive anybody to buy a non-GM electric car.

Except that downloading cracked games hurts nobody. What matters is not how many copies are pirated, but how many are paid for. If somebody would buy a game, but instead downloads a cracked version, that hurts the game companies. If somebody doesn't have the money to buy games, it doesn't matter how many games that person pirates, since there was no lost sale. If somebody pirates games to figure out which are the good ones, and buys them, then not only were there no lost sales but the person is likely to spend more on games, since he or she knows he or she is paying for a good-quality game. If somebody pays for a game, and then downloads a cracked version because it doesn't have any problems with copy protection, that person is more likely to buy games with onerous DRM, and so it's a win for the game companies.

I'm in the US, so I look at the US Constitution. The clear intent is to make it more attractive to create something, to decide to go ahead with a project. The question is then how long anybody would look ahead when deciding to greenlight something. Personally, it seems extremely unlikely to me that any person or organization would think it worthwhile to do something based on any reward requiring a monopoly more than thirty years down the road. If anybody has arguments or examples to the contrary, I'd love to hear of it.

I'm therefore in favor of the copyright law we had when I was a kid, fourteen years, renewable for another fourteen-year term.

So, if there's a leak and you find out about it, it may be in your best interests not to tell anybody?

Did they ever check to see if those were real passwords? Somebody wants my password for a candy bar I like, I'll be happy to make up a password and give it to them. It's mine if I made it up, and whether it ever has worked or ever will work on a system somewhere really isn't my concern.

To be fair, Target took a serious hit in earnings for a security leak of unknown importance. Whether the lost earnings were proportionate to the offense, I don't know, and I also don't know what Target's culpability is (they were obviously negligent to a certain amount, but everybody is).

That's the Preamble, which describes the goals of the Constitution. It does not have any legal force, and should not be considered a promise. Consider it an attempt to lay out the spirit of the Constitution, and that those are proper US goals.

Ah, another idiot deceived by Nazi propaganda. Hint: any relationship between Nazi public announcements and reality was purely tactical, to make the propaganda more believable. The Nazis were tightly involved with private companies, which is the opposite of Socialism.

I can find many cases of Conservative totalitarianism, using Conservative as having something to do with conservation of current institutions. Ever heard of absolute monarchies? Was it the conservatives plotting to overthrow them or the left-wingers? Was Louis XVI a flaming leftist and were the revolutionaries conservatives?

If your answer is "yes" than you're using the word wildly differently from how most people use it, to the point of uselessness. If your answer is "no", you're directly contradicting your rules of thumb.

Depends.

Currently, there are two money amounts an employer is interested in when paying an employee: how much the employee adds value to the employer, and how much the employer would have to pay to get a replacement worker. What the minimum wage does is raise the latter price for low-end employees.

For sake of example, assume that the wages are the only cost to the employer, an employer will be OK with making a slim profit, and we're discussing raising minimum wage from $10/hour to $15/hour. Currently, the employer has multiple employees that are easy to replace, and hence pays $10/hour for them. Some of them presumably have only $11 value to the employer, and others have much higher value. A kid who restocks the shelves might be completely replaceable, but the business can't run without that function, so other, higher paid, employees would have to do it. Call the value $25/hour. A similar case might be a fast-food cashier during lunch hour. In those cases, the employer simply pays the higher minimum wage.

I've oversimplified that a lot, and you'll have to throw in additional factors. (I'm probably costing my company twice my salary, but I get paid time off and various benefits, so we'd use a smaller factor for the usual minimum-wage worker.)

So, for best impact on employees, we need to raise the minimum wage as high as we can without exceeding the value added for most workers. Most of us aren't worth $100/hour to our employers, so that would throw most people out of work. There are tradeoffs, but it's not a matter of destroying all current minimum-wage jobs, and it's definitely a matter for empirical consideration.

The effects on businesses will vary. A business with low labor costs won't be affected much, and a business employing mostly people well above the minimum wage won't be affected much. Businesses that have high labor costs and employ mostly minimum-wage (or slightly more) employees will be hit with nearly full impact by the raise. Some such businesses compete primarily with other such businesses, and they will raise their prices and be somewhat less profitable, and some will compete primarily with businesses without that problem, and they will be hit harder, since they can't raise prices. Some businesses will go out of business, and we don't want to do that to too many businesses. Again, it's a tradeoff with consequences we need to find empirically.

If the minimum-wage worker is eligible for government low-income benefits because of low pay, then the government is subsidizing the employers, and I'd like to see that end. It's a market distortion caused by externalizing the cost of keeping the employees in shape to work.

C'mon, using emacs doesn't mean you're too pampered. It means you're a heretic.

As a guy who mostly uses C++, at least half the comments I make on Visual Studio are uncomplimentary also. I keep wondering if people writing C# or other .NET languages like it better.