It's not so much that the value of their work is being taken by their employers (though it is some of that, but that's a consequence of unequal bargaining power due to what I'm about to say), it's more that so much of what they do make it taken by people who already have enough assets that they can afford to lend them out, as a fee for the poor people to use those rich people's assets. I mean rent, including rent on money, better known as interest.

If such a huge chunk of the income people do make didn't have to go toward servicing the assets they have to borrow from the people who have enough to lend them out, the income issue wouldn't be nearly such a big problem. I make twice the median income and consume quite comfortably, and if it weren't for rent and frantically saving for a big enough down payment so I can eventually stop renting and not pay even more in interest, I could consume at my comfortable level on an income about 2/3 of minimum wage.

As a bonus, if people weren't all one paycheck away from losing everything if they can't make one month's rent on time, they could tell shitty jobs to shove it up their ass, and actually get paid more for their work as well.

All monetary transactions involve one party wanting to charge as much as possible and another wanting to pay as little as possible.

But most of them don't involve negotiation.

Instead the just involve the threat that if the offer/price isn't good enough, the applicant/shopper will go elsewhere.

What's backward in the labor market vs the grocery market (etc) is that in most cases the seller sets the price and the buyer takes it or leaves it, while in this case it's the buyer setting the price and the seller can take it and possibly cut costs or accept losses if they do, or else go out of business.

The labor market right now is like a grocery store where every customer walks in, picks what they want to buy, offers some money for it, and just walks out if the store wants more than that, so the stores for the most part just have to take whatever customers will offer for their goods (and if they can't afford to stay in business like that, tough shit for them eh?)

I've been under the impression that the two groups largely coincided, and conveniently defined their activities as "not bullying" because it's "for a good cause", i.e. the ends justified the means.

Exactly. There are two orthogonal issues at hand here:

- Should there be laws regulating what kind of software can control vehicles on public roads?

- Should there by laws regulating whether the owner of a vehicle can look at and modify the software in his car?

It's perfectly analogous to existing hardware modifications. There's no laws saying you can't modify you car in any way you damn well please. There are laws about what kinds of cars can be operated on public roads. There's a possibility that some modifications you make (hardware or software) may make your car unsuitable to operate on public roads. But that doesn't mean you are preemptively prohibited from making those changes — just that you can be liable for operating such a modified vehicle on public roads.

I don't consider myself a programmer at all. The languages I know, I consider scripting languages, not programming languages, and I'm so uncomfortable with them that I try to avoid having to use them unless there's some problem I just can't solve without scripting something.

However I have held jobs with the title Software Engineer.

I feel like an embarrassment to real programmers everywhere.

Mulder and Scully didn't so much represent "supernatural" vs "logic, science, and reason" as they did paranormal vs mundane. A whole lot of the things Mulder thought were happening were things that could have had a naturalistic explanation that you could do science to understand if they actually were happening at all —they were just extraordinary things the likes of which would require extraordinary evidence to accept. Scully was rightly hesitant to accept such things without extraordinary evidence, but then, she also accepted supernatural things that are widely accepted and considered mundane, normal beliefs by society — her religious beliefs.

That was actually my favorite thing about the show and something I thought, around (I think it was) the season seven finale, they were going to shift to exploring: the paranormalization of religion. Looking at religious beliefs as just as weird and extraordinary as the aliens and monsters Mulder was always on about, and possibly actually connected to those very same things, but at the same time all of it still rationally, naturalistically, scientifically explainable. But of course that would never fly, especially on Fox, and they chickened out and ignored it aside from some vague allusions to Mulder being Alien Jesus or something in the terrible last two seasons.

What I find even more impressive than the awesome Four Chords is Rob Paravonian's Pachabel Rant, which shows how those same four chords show up in everything from classical music to punk rock over a span of hundreds of years.

I don't know about any later intent of Tolkien to finally publish the Silmarillion alongside the LOTR, but the bulk of the material that was eventually published posthumously as "The Silmarillion" was written long before Tolkien ever scribbled down "in a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit", much less wrote a whole book around that phrase, much less the obligatory sequel that got so big it became a trilogy connected to his old mythopoeia about the Eldar and their history.

Also, the LOTR is internally structured into six "books". Each published volume contains two of them. I'm not sure how many volumes Tolkien intended it to be published as, but at first glance that would suggest six.

I don't know how it does it (except that it doesn't involve Startup Items), but it works for apps that don't use installers (which is most of them), so an installer isn't needed just for that.

As a Mac user, I don't trust installers at all. Why the fuck do I need to run another program to get a program onto my system when it could just be the app bundle in the archive? What else is this installer doing to do besides copy that app bundle into the Applications folder, which I can happily do myself if I want?

The airlock thing was a reference to the story, for the treatment of people who do not get along cooperatively with other people but act in selfish destructive manners that jeopardize the wellbeing of the whole society. Nobody was forced to participate in anything, but the whole society looked down harshly on those who would positively interfere with those who did choose to participate voluntarily in the cooperative tasks necessary to protect the whole of society. Sick kids don't go out airlocks. Violent criminals do.

Libertarianism says nothing against teamwork. Only that such teamwork has to be voluntary and not coerced. If it's necessary to keep every individual from dying a sudden and terrible death at any moment in the harshness of space, you betcha there will be a lot of voluntary teamwork.

And anyone who jeopardizes that gets thrown out an airlock.

That's not how you use "QED". You have to say what you're going to argue, then make an argument (list propositions then show a conclusion that follows from them), then you get to say "QED", which means "which is what was to be demonstrated", i.e. "which is the point I'm arguing for". You just listed two propositions. There's no argument. What exactly was to be demonstrated then?

Regarding damaging relationships...

Say some woman comes on to me in a bar, and comes back to my place an we sleep together. Afterward, I learn that she is married, and I tell her husband, out of concern for him. The husband is rightfully upset, and all of their friends hear about her actions, and a bunch of relationships are damaged.

Who damaged those relationships? The cheater, who betrayed her husband's trust and is rightly reviled for that in the eyes of her friends; or me, who unwittingly facilitated it and then informed the betrayed party at the earliest convenience?