It costs tens of billions of dollars to bid on licensed spectrum and billions more to actually deploy a modern cellular network. That's not to say that the wireless industry isn't profitable (it certainly is) but you can't equate their cost structure with wireline networks.

Gouging? How old are you? I remember paying $20/mo for dial up internet just 15 years ago. $40/mo if you count the second POTS line. Now I've got the rough equivalent of a T3 in my pocket, for $30/mo, that I can use almost anywhere in the continental United States.

Your information is out of date, T-Mo does not throttle on their unlimited plan. What they do is use QoS to prioritize customers in the bottom 97% percentile over customers in the top 3% during times of congestion. If you're connected to a non-congested tower you can suck data 24/7/365. Verizon does something similar with their 3G network. It's a whole lot of bellyaching about nothing in my experience; there are congested cell sites here and there but they're the exception rather than the rule.

Apart from that, the two key differences between T-Mobile and Verizon are:

1. T-Mo's unlimited plan doesn't include tethering. Verizon's does, free of charge with a rooted device or $30/mo without one. And no, it's not "stealing" to get it for free with root; the Band 13 rules specifically say you can use any application you want and Verizon has never hassled those that tether without paying for the hotspot feature. They even hassled people doing it on the 3G network even though it's a technical violation of the customer agreement and they'd be within their rights to prohibit it.

2. T-Mo's unlimited plan won't follow you when you're roaming domestically. Verizon doesn't care how much of your data or minute usage occurs on partner networks.

And who pays for his medical injuries if he gets injured while trespassing in an abandoned building that may well be structurally unsound or otherwise hazardous? There's typically a fence around such structures for a reason. One can laugh at the absurdity of the SWAT team getting involved over chemistry experiments without condoning the previous trespass. And, come to think of it, the SWAT team/bomb squad would never have gotten involved if he had procured his mercury legally.....

Antwerp that is. Not sure why I typed Amsterdam..... :)

It does cost more money to maintain an automobile in Europe; insurance, fuel, and even the cost of getting a license is much higher than in the States. The key difference is that in the vast majority of Europe you don't need an automobile. Even the low population density (Finland) countries make an effort to lay their cities and towns out in a way that's pedestrian friendly. The only people who need automobiles are those that truly live in rural areas and even in such areas you'll find that mass transit is more accessible than it would be in rural America.

Either way, you'll be hard pressed to convince me that you couldn't live a decent upper middle class life on €144k/yr. I know people who live decently in New York City on considerably less money than that. I highly doubt the cost of living in Amsterdam is higher than NYC.

€144,000 annually is comfortable living by any metric.

Getting deeper into bed with them is not a sensible decision either. It may be necessary in the short term but what's the exit strategy? The most sensible decision would be to avoid putting yourself in the position where you have to make that choice. Failing that, I would personally take my chances with the authorities. Caving to blackmail is never a winning move in the long term.

If you don't want to get fleas don't lay down with dogs. The "mob" (a misleading title, given that TFA doesn't mention Cosa Nostra or any other organized crime syndicate....) didn't pick these two at random and hold guns to their head. They got involved with them willingly; one of the two was seeking start up capital for a business venture and quite likely ignored the little voice inside of his head because of greed. An old adage comes to mind, "If it sounds too good to be true....."

Incidentally, the "mob" as traditionally discussed in the United States doesn't tend to go after random citizens. They typically get hooks into their victims because of the victim's own bad judgment. Loansharking, gambling, prostitution, drugs, and so forth. At the street level the vast majority of violent crime is common criminal on common criminal. There aren't too many places in the First World where taxpaying citizens have to really worry about becoming a statistic. Common sense goes a long way....

Read TFA. Specifically these paragraphs:

To his surprise, Adibelli agreed. “If you wanted out, why didn’t you let us know?” he said. Maertens was too scared to bring up the beating and the kidnapping and death threats. “Obviously, you know we’re not in a legal business,” Adibelli added. “So if you talk to anyone, we know where you and your family live.”

Adibelli brought Van De Moere down next and asked him if he wanted out, too. Van De Moere said yes.

There was only one condition of the release: Van De Moere had to give Okul an intensive training session on Linux, the operating system on which Metasploit, the hacking software, is based. A few weeks later, according to police and interviews, he did so over one weekend at a Holiday Inn in Ghent. In November, Van De Moere returned two antennas and had a couple of beers with Okul. That was the last either man would see of the Turks.

Something doesn't jive here. The type of people that are willing to actually hold a gun to your head are not the type of people that are willing to let you walk away simply by giving your notice. I don't doubt that there was some level of intimidation at play but there were apparently limits to how far the bad guys were willing to go. Which begs the question of why these two didn't go to the authorities after they "got out." Perhaps they didn't wish to part with the €25,000 in cash they had previously received?

These two were making €12,000 and €20,000 per month, before their involvement with the criminal element. One of them was seeking start up capital for a business venture and allowed himself to get roped in that way. If you give them the benefit of the doubt the best you can say about them is they were naive. In the worst reading they were greedy and willfully complicit. I suspect reality falls between those two extremes.

New York State limits you to carrying no more than seven condoms at a time. It's a bit of common sense legislation; there's no legitimate reason why a non-rapist would need more than seven condoms. :)

Please name 38 States that you think would ratify such an amendment. My own State (New York) would not ratify a repeal of the 2nd Amendment, despite our hostility to gun rights; the votes simply aren't there in the New York State Senate. If New York State would not ratify it just who do you think would? Other than New Jersey there is no State that is more hostile to gun rights than New York. I could set the bar lower for you than an outright repeal and you still can't get to 38.

Politics is the art of the possible; whatever the merits or lack thereof of gun control you do need to acknowledge this reality.

That would be prior restraint; in the United States we do not apply prior restraint to fundamental rights. You can be denied your right to keep and bear arms because of an established mental illness (the Federal standard requires that you be deemed mentally incompetent by a court) but you can not be compelled to prove a negative in order to exercise it.

"I have schizophrenia." <--- Denied
"Prove you don't have schizophrenia." <--- Unconstitutional

If you're not an American that may seem like a weird place to draw the line but we've got centuries of case law and tradition behind this concept. Speech works the same way too.

Maybe you should switch banks. I can't speak for the UK, but it never ceases to astound me how many people whine about banking in the United States when there are thousands of small community banks you could be doing business with. It's a tough industry and the little guys are facing setbacks on a daily basis, but they're still there if people are willing to look for and do business with them.

In the day and age of remote deposit there's no reason to do business with a large national bank. I get waived ATM fees worldwide, no account fees of any sort, and competitive loan and deposit rates, all from a little regional bank that you've probably never heard of unless you're from my small hometown.

For the life of me I don't understand why Chase, Capital One, or Bank of America have any retail customers at all. They bend people over on fees, structure your transactions to obtain yet more fees, and generally do all sorts of nefarious things while offering no real advantage over their smaller competitors.

You're implying that people of the same ethnicity find it easier to agree politically. Reality suggests that's far from the truth. The Finns fought a pretty nasty Civil War, even by Civil War standards, within living memory.

The reason the Finnish system works on consensus has to do with the structure of their political system and the rules in their Parliament. I suggest reading Finland: Myth and Reality; it's a bit dated, most of the foreign policy stuff lost relevance after the Cold War ended, but the domestic discussions are still applicable.

Finland has never had a "homogeneous" culture; it only appears that they do from the outside. Read the history of the Swedish speaking minority or of their civil war sometime when you're bored. The concept of Finland as a nation-state didn't even exist until the late 1800s and probably would never have evolved if the Russians had been a little bit more tactful. That's without even getting into the outside pressures and obstacles that they had to overcome.

What they have is trust in their institutions, a willingness to admit mistakes and try something new, and a political system that operates on consensus rather than a 50%+1 majority trying to ram its agenda down the throats of the opposition.

That may be a valid point, but it's worth mentioning that the welfare state doesn't have to be run at the national level. Much of Kela is run and funded by municipalities, not the national Government. Finland leads the world in education yet has no standardized tests or national curriculum mandates. Intuitive at the local level is encouraged, not stifled.

Of course it still won't happen here, even if we got over our love affair with top-down control. Our mistrust of institutions doesn't begin or end with the Federal Government. I do find these conversations interesting though; people on the American left talk a big game about how awesome the Nordic countries are but very few of them actually know anything about them. Finland has no concept of tuition -- even foreigners can go study there for free (with only one barrier to entry, it's called "Finnish") -- but they also have universal conscription.

Think there are many people on the American left that would support universal conscription? Not bloody likely. Which is too bad, because it would actually make interventionism less likely, not more. Anyhow, I digress.....