55% of Americans are invested in stocks. Are you saying that 55% of Americans are rich?

Just like I've never met a psychic who won the lottery.

That's why Randi's contest always seemed like BS. I could make way more than a million dollars if I was psychic... but probably not if everyone knew I was. Maybe, if my descendants were non-psychic, I would admit it on my deathbed.

The federal government is continuing to make more and more regulations to inhibit business activity. Two obvious examples are Obama's threat to destroy the coal industry and opposition to the pipeline from Canada. When a business can't be sure it won't be regulated out of business or have its profits stolen, it tends not to invest in new production, no matter how easy it is to borrow money to finance growth. There will be no recovery until Obama is out of office and it is known that his replacement is much better.

Always looking backwards, always telling us *why* something happened, never making future predictions.

That's just false. Stagflation in the 70's was predicted by some theories but not others. The theories that did not predict stagflation were scrapped or modified. The fact that it takes 10+ years of watching to decide between two competing models is annoying, but does not mean that predictions are not made. You just cannot show it in a classroom, like with fruit flies that breed once a day to show genetics/adverse selection.

Should we expect something like the Coca-Cola company, which has had a strong business for over a hundred years consisting of a brand name known worldwide, a worldwide distribution system, and of course its famous "secret formuler" to sell for just the price of its property, plant, and equipment?

Well, that's a pretty bad example. Coca-Cola famously sold off all it's bottling plants, etc. The fact that it has a monopoly on supplying syrup to a second company makes it harder to do this kind of comparison.

But secondly, book value includes intangibles, such as goodwill, brand name, distribution chain, etc.

The stock market is demonstrably not a zero sum system. It represents, roughly, the ownership of all production of goods and services. It increases in proportion to the population multiplied by average purchases (i.e. the GDP), both of which have been increasing over time.

People make stuff and do things to improve their lives. That activity is mostly in the context of investor-owned corporations, which is reflected, long term, in stock prices.

Obviously the answer is yes because, as time goes on, the period at which the CMB was emitted moves further into the past so obviously we are seeing "further back in time" but only at the rate of one year further per year past (on average). Since the universe is also expanding we are also looking further. This is about as insightful as pointing out that as time goes by I can remember events further back in time.

Of course it is not all thought out!

That is why we have Amendments and the Supreme Court.

The other side of the coin is "living document" where we change the meaning of the words to fit the current times.

I am much more in favor of using the tools given to us to change the Constitution vrs changing it's meaning based on current interpretation.

That "precedence" concept of common law should not apply to the Constitution, which is not "written in stone" but should be difficult to change to avoid repeats of Prohibition. The fact that Prohibition is one of the few "flip flops" in the Constitution shows that it works pretty well.

Amtrak ridership is 30 million per year (wikipedia). That's 82,000 per day, a pitifully small number for a nationwide service. Contrast that with three commuter rail lines operating out of NYC, each of which carries three times the traffic of Amtrak in the whole country..

You've hit the nail on the head. Congrats.

Amtrak, with a variety of administrators, has been trying and failing to not lose money for 44 years. What makes you think it's ever going to change?

It looks like you'd send people to prison if they failed, on government command, to turn lead into gold.

Do you have any idea what the coefficient of friction of steel on steel is, and how much lower it is if there's a little grease on the rails? How are you going to handle driveways and garages? Switches aren't cheap, and you'd need them every 50 feet in suburbs. Farm equipment? Are you going to lay down rails on roads that currently have so little traffic that it doesn't pay to have them paved, or plowed when it snows? How do you handle parking in cities and at shopping malls?

With an owner-driven car, drive one place to buy clothes (put them in the car), several more miles to buy books (put them in the car), still more miles to buy a shovel and a hedge trimmer (put them in the car), then yet more to buy groceries (put them in the car and drive home). You going to do that on public transport? (Don't give me any garbage about how everyone should live in cities -- what a drab, sad world that would be.)

Self-driving cars add cameras (cheap), processors (cheap), and actuators (motors and solenoids, moderate cost). The tough part is the software, but that's a one time expense.

Subways already run at a loss. Lower fares will mean greater losses, made up through the inefficient mechanism of taxes. (Alternately, the losses won't be made up, and to make payroll, repair workers will be fired and schedules cut. Eventually, deferred maintenance results in fatalities.) Increased taxes raise the cost of living, causing less disposable income. Furthermore, increased taxes mean any job gains will be in government, and government jobs are inherently antiproductive.

Some are payed entirely out of pocket, a labor of love by the host.

And it's cheap. Like, I've never had a webpage the gets hundreds of thousands of visitors, but it seems like the costs of hosting are really low even in that case. Of course, I would love to know if I'm really offbase.

should Slashdot exist?

I am spending time here, so obviously I would prefer if it did. But then again, it's 99.99% user generated content, so I don't see the high costs. I mean, correct me where I'm wrong, but the cost of maintaining Slashdot seems to be where hobbists can throw up a competing site with spare change and can maintain it for a hosting plan covering, what, maybe $50/mo?? I'm really unsure of the costs of a scaled solution, so would love some actual numbers.

But if I can get Buzzfeed to die in a fire, I'll be quite happy.

You know what ACTUAL theft is? Consuming someone's product (ie. visiting an ad-supported web site) and then refusing to pay (ie. allow the ads to be shown).

Well, I'll grant that I'm consuming resources on their server. I leave the whole semantic "can you steal informational content man" thing aside. But, there was no agreement that I would load their page to the entire degree they wanted. I mean, is it bad wrong if I use a translation service? If I use a screenreader to read the words outloud? If I decide I want every page to render in a fixed width font of at least a certain size?