That's a VAT or consumption tax.

A flat tax is just that. Same tax rate for everyone. Devil is in the details, most flat tax supporting politicians want to exclude capital gains and solely tax wages. That's essentially not going to work. Total wages were $6,009,831,055,912.11. FY2013 budget is $3.803 trillion. You'd need a 63% tax rate on all wages, with no exceptions, exemptions, EIC or deductions.

Current tax system is partly as FUBAR as it is because folks want to gouge the rich, and the rich don't want to be gouged. So you end up with both. If you're an honest self-employed contractor making between $35k-70k, your tax rate is about 44% in my state. Half of social security taxes are paid by the business, unless you're self-employed. The rich didn't like their 12.4% + 2.9% haircut on something they'll never use, so the SS and Medicare taxes cap out at $113,700.

If everyone paid their share without trying to gouge anyone else, it wouldn't be a nasty mess. But good luck trying to teach economics and tax codes to Occupy Wall Street crowd, and surprisingly some of the dumber or more short term focused rich folks.

Except most fair tax or flat tax proposals try to slip in no capital gain taxes. They'd find a lot more traction if it was on all income. Even if a flat tax rate existed, you'd still need an IRS.

NPS (National Park Service) is the agency in charge of US federal parks and monuments. Usually. They have intentionally blockaded monuments normally left "open" (it's a pile of metal or stone, in the open). That wasn't enough, so NPS Rangers blockaded private businesses that were located on public but federal land. Say, an inn that leases land along a highway on federal land. They can't turn off the federal highways (don't ask, long story), so they try to annoy citizens by blocking the sides of the road or chasing you off if you stop to take a picture. NPS officially acknowledged they got their orders from OMB, which is part of the White House.

Doesn't really stop anyone. 80-90 year old WWII vets basically dared NPS Rangers to try and arrest them. NPS backed down. It's meant to annoy Americans as a political gesture. That shutdowns are very bad, and it's all the fault of the other party.

One bad point is federal law enforcement and US military personnel are also experiencing pay issues. For instance, death benefits of US military personnel are not being paid. This is extremely unwise for anything other than extremely short. Shorting the pay of the Praetorian Guard tends to be a dangerous endeavor.

And all of that collected data can end up on a torrent. I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of all those lawsuits.

Actually, it does. Or should, rather. It doesn't mean freedom from consequences. Label or slander, for instance.

Even cheaper to just mine photos posted by the protesters themselves, and run photo analysis combined with time stamps on the photos themselves.

Well, here's hoping that Abrahams gets a fairly long sentence. Coercion and blackmail is coercion and blackmail, regardless of the circumstances.

Tapping undersea cables.

Powered glider, sure, you could make solar powered. Conventional aircraft for moving people or cargo don't have the surface area to be solar powered, even with 99.999% efficient cells. Too much power requirements for too small of a space.

My dad was a mid level political player in state politics. Even he joked that if voting could change anything, it'd be illegal. He grew up with the Philly Democrat machine. Every election was basically fixed. Republicans have their own parts of the country that they "own" as well.

Funny part is, even the people within the political machines with near certain victories tend to feel like they can't radically fix things because the system won't allow it. I'm not kidding, I've had politicians basically tell me so while intoxicated. "Your district is 99.99% (insert Repub or Dem), short of being caught with a live boy or dead girl, you're getting re elected. What's stopping you from going Ron Paul*? - You don't understand. You can't fight the system. You only have so much leeway to work within." * Not specifically endorsing Ron Paul, he's just well known for bucking the party line when it came to votes. I meant "Do whatever you want regardless of your party's desires."

Meh. Most people don't care because they're generally too busy trying to pay the bills, raise their kids, keep the car running, etc. More than 70% of Americans don't want to get involved in Syria. A lot of the more neutral polls show much much softer support for indefinite detention, pervasive surveillance state and the rest. Without rigged polls, the majority wants basically the status quo. They're fine with some degree of horrific government authority, for edge cases. They're not exactly drooling for the NSA to become the next Stasi.

That's how it always has been, that's how it always will be. The majority don't want to rock the boat because they're too busy trying to live. It's only a relatively handful of ideological extremists on either end of the spectrum that tend towards radical change, usually for the worse.

You must not be familiar with the democratic process or history.

Except sustainable practices alone won't feed everyone on the planet.

Unless you want to repurpose a substantial amount of the workforce back into agriculture, dramatically increase land for farming (terraforming, bulldozing houses or chopping down forests are your only choices), dramatically raise the price of food,etc. Most farmers do use crop rotation and other sustainable tricks, but also use chemical fertilizers and other "nonsustainable" choices. You do realize that the majority of chemical fertilizers are made from atmospheric nitrogen, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

Hopefully farming practices continue to advance. But the organic only, "sustainable" only, no GMO, etc crowd tends not to want to advance farming, but take it back to yeoman level tech. Which is not sustainable unless you dramatically decrease the number of humans on the planet.

Tis why I had my mechanic rig the auto start to shut off the engine if the brake is used without a key physically being in the ignition. You could still get into the car, sure. If a thief could hotwire a car, he can open a door anyways. Just don't keep anything exceedingly valuable in the car.

Also, properly positioned flood lights are your friend. The difference between my testimony convicting a a car thief and the guy not even being suspected in the first place was spending a couple extra bucks on good motion lighting and proper positioning.

Having seen civil wars overseas, I'm quite glad that folks think very long and hard before resorting to violence. Especially when you have no guarantee that the successor government will be better than the one you have now.

I very much prefer the current situation to any utopia envisioned by the far left and far right wings of our political environment.