"So what do you think should be Israel's response to the constant bombing of their country?"

What constant bombing? Hamas has honored truces and cease-fires in the past, it's the IDF that keeps breaking them. How do you think the Palestinians should respond to Israel periodically 'mowing' their families down 'like grass?'

Ultimately you simply cannot keep a nation captive forever, nor can you exterminate them, and Israelis of all people should realize that.

NT

Which makes it sound like some sort of attack on the ad network.

Without more details it's hard to say, but it sounds like the ad network should file a complaint with the UK and get these overenthusiastic corporate cops charged.

There's a battle to love - ad networks versus the 'city of london.' May they fight forever and leave the rest of us in peace.

"...but there is this thing called Truth in Advertising."

Doubtless it's in hiding in a parallel dimension, along with the unicorns and all these other things that nobody has ever seen, right?

P.S. please if you get a chanse put some flown on Algernons grave in the bak yard.

And the other huge problem here with selection bias: he targeted people who'd used both virtual and physical keyboards. In other words, the people who had at one point gone out of their way to buy a physical keyboard when there were other options. Not many people (percentage wise) ever bothered, so the set is very much limited to those who were motivated to like the non-virtual option.

I see a lot of theories but no one seems to have hit on the most obvious one yet.

*You* are not the customer. *You* are the product to be sold. *They* dont care what you want. *They* want you to have a big screen to more effectively display their ads, and so that is what you get.

Russia is certainly a bit authoritarian, but they dont tolerate outright neo-nazis.

Whereas the Ukrainian putsch relies heavily on two overtly neo-nazi parties. Their members hold several cabinet posts including security and defense. Their names are Svoboda and Right Sector, you can look them up yourself.

And frankly does not matter even if it were true.

If Chinese backed neo-nazis took over Mexico city and threw the country into a civil war, I wouldnt be surprised if we gave the loyalists a little discrete help here and there as well.

"The choices are unelected leaders, elected leaders or no leaders. "

That's not actually an exhaustive list to start with, and even if it were it still conceals differences. Perhaps it does not matter so much exactly how the 'leaders' are chosen, but instead their competence, loyalty, and relationship with the law? Perhaps even more important than their personal properties are the properties of the office itself, as Lord Acton observed?

The kings were filthy thugs, but they never dreamed of being able to visit the sort of horror on their 'subjects' that modern states have visited on their supposed citizens, in e.g. Nazi Germany, the USSR, Turkey, and many other places over the last 200 years. They simply did not have that kind of power.

Given the situation, the outcome was quite easily predictable.

If it was that easy FP&L would be making plans to close Turkey Point instead of expand it. That whole site is going to be underwater and, before that happens, there's going to be a storm surge high enough to swamp it. That's a guarantee which seems to fly in the face of your supposition.

I worked in the nuclear industry for nearly a decade. What I saw with my own eyes could best be described as straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.

"By bulk are you referring to the number of people in the political system, or something else? "

The number of people whose livelihoods depend on taxation, if that is what you mean by 'in the political system,' would be one good proxy for bulk. Another would be the percentage of GDP spent by government, either directly or indirectly (through mandates for example.)

"If instead the argument is that government is trying to help too many people (ie the country is so large that government from a federal level is impossible and should be abandoned), I don't necessarily disagree."

That's a whole different barrel of worms, and not what I was saying at all. Power is the problem, power itself. It's essentially the same creature whether it is the local strongman and busybody or the national ones, except that the national level can obviously arrange for larger disasters. Devolving power from the national to the local level may be worthwhile, but it's not an end-all. Local tyrannies are still tyrannies.

A subsidiary problem is government trying to follow heart-wrenching but utterly inchoate missions like 'help people' btw. Government programs are easy to institute but damn near impossible to shut down, so if you have any interest at all in stopping it somewhere short of complete totalitarianism you really must come up with much more specific, well-defined, and suitable missions. Like 'provide a court and law enforcement system of last resort' or 'prevent Mexico from reclaiming her northwestern states' for example.

"I do think it is likely time to split our country up into 2 (or more) independent nations. Frankly I don't expect that our country will survive more than another 10-20 years without that happening anyways"

You know, when other countries have problems with different groups not seeing eye to eye on everything, one common remedy suggested by Merikans has been something called federalism. It allows the country to keep the benefits of union, while avoiding much of the squabbling, by keeping the central government relatively weak and small so that it doesnt matter so much which region controls it. Perhaps we should investigate that before splitting up?

I seem to recall some old white dudes named Jefferson and Madison and that whole generation even talked about it a bit. Nah, couldnt be. If they had, we would have a federal system here already, and we wouldnt be talking about breakup, right?

"Is regressive taxation not state action? "

Taxation *is* state action. It is the primordial state action, because it is the see of all other state actions which require funds.

"How about restrictions on health care for certain parts of the population?"

Restrictions on health care, like all restrictions on peaceful honest business, should be repealed.

Gas lines need nonconductive sections to protect from becoming long ground loops.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

What that suggests to me is rather that the specific shape of the political system matters less than its bulk, which in turn suggests that any ideology that advocates state action (regardless of the high minded goal which that ideology expects it to serve) should be viewed very critically.