If it costs too much, don't buy it. It's not like they're colluding to corner the market on food staples or water.

This is a money-grab by lawyers, nothing else.

I do. The cool thing is that they all fit in a tiny portion of my portable hard drive.

It's amazing that the entirety of everything I've produced since high school can fit on a single $100 device, with plenty of room to spare.

Getting older will help your stamina too.

In a true free market, Amazon, the organization that the government gives special privileges to by calling it a Corporation, would not exist.

So, the current situation doesn't resemble a conceptual free market. And historically the instances of one entity being able to control large portions of an economy without resorting to some sort of coercion (via laws or organized crime) are few.

Anti-trust laws are intended to prevent monopolies.

Here, however, nobody is preventing the publishing and sale of a book. Amazon gets to decide what is sold on its site. I don't see the problem.

This is not a political slogan, it speaks to the nature of how government achieves its goals. The power of government stems from the threat of violence and loss of liberty. To deny that is to deny reality.

When people sit in wonderment as to how anyone could possibly oppose *favorite government program*, it's worthwhile to remind them of the ultimate source of government power, because this is the premise of the argument (call it libertarian, conservative, what have you).

The reason the U.S. Constitution was so revolutionary was because it was one of the first times these issues were taken into account. To ignore that and simply argue over a plan's perceived efficiency and pass it because "we want to," rightly gives thinking Americans pause.

Insurance provides management of risk. Using it as a middleman for payment of routine health care costs is an inefficient perversion of its purpose.

And please explain how the overhead of any middleman between me and a doctor would be more cost-effective.

Even a very basic mathematical analysis shows that any of these systems is less efficient than "customer pays."

If your answer is that the government will have none of the problems that using insurance companies as a middleman have, because the government is good and insurance companies are bad, please try again.

It's like this: routine care has a cost x. Redistribution of money to pay cost x has an additional cost y, no matter who does it. If the customer pays cost x, adding cost y will increase costs.

Do you expect your car insurance to pay for your gasoline? Why not? If I offered to provide you with a gasoline payment policy, in which for a monthly fee I'd pay all of your gasoline bills, would you sign up expecting to get a good deal? Would you expect the price or availability of gasoline to change? What if everyone signed up for the same program? Would the incentive be to conserve your usage of gasoline, or to use as much as possible?

If the overhead for my gasoline single-payer program is only 10%, you're worse off in the program unless your gasoline usage is greater than 10% of the average among all users. Essentially, the bottom 60% is subsidizing the top 40%, and the system as a whole is 10% less efficient than everyone paying for their own gasoline.

If you're saying that people should subsidize others who can't afford basic care, fine. We have medicare and medicaid, which a majority of those people already qualify for. If there are 5% that don't, expand that program; don't force me into a single-payer program I don't want.

It's going to take quite a bit of convincing for me to believe that this is the case, especially considering the traditional efficiency of U.S. government.

Really, you expect that because the government is paying, quality of service will magically increase? And that any possible increase in efficiency would not be offset by the overhead of a single payer system? And you have proof that this will be the case IN THE U.S., whose government cannot even pay for its current obligations, who routinely has annual deficits greater than the GDP of most countries, and whose problems will only compound as the population ages?

Okay....

The U.S. is one of the most charitable countries in the world. For the most part, however, we don't appreciate coercion.

It's quite simple. Government is not charity, it's legalized theft. If you don't understand the distinction, please read this excellent article.

When I hear that I know it's time to change the radio station.

So what IS the alternative to a relatively scaled HTML table in CSS that works across all browsers?

As of a few years ago, I found none.

If you had read the real play you would know your post contained numerous errors.

This is why you have a dog, too.

"You are more likely to be shot if you own a gun"

You're also more likely to be stabbed to death if you own a knife, but that's not a logical argument against knives.

So Edward fixes the bugs in his program, and a month later, receives a similar letter. More cautious now, he opens it to find that the letter contains real output this time:

"Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."

I thought of a device that will send video output to my TV via an ATSC 8VSB signal. That exists too.