because the question there is whether the US federal government has lawful authority under the Constitution to order people to buy things.

Huh? I believe that I'm "forced" to pay for Interstate Highways, Federal Police, the Military, and plenty of other things which are of only indirect benefit. If you don't like the health care proposal, do us all a favor and dislike it for a real reason, ok?

Right now I'm paying for people who don't have health insurance through higher hospital costs passed on to me due to all of the freeloaders who use the ER as their only doctor. I'd rather everyone pay less to keep them healthy and maybe employed, or at least employable, rather than pay more to have them sit around sick and on welfare. People losing their house is this manner is a direct analogy; too cheap to pay for their own fire service, they're even too cheap to pay $75 insurance for another town's fire service, they are now homeless and my taxes will go toward their welfare. Make the bastards pay a little so that we don't have to pay it all for them. Heck, the fire dept. was stupid too. It will cost us all a ton to help this family back onto their feet; if we'd just all be "forced" to pay in equally then this wouldn't happen. Or, give up, tell them to go homeless, and then pay more for police to arrest and house them (in prison) when they steal to eat.

Fact is, we all pay for everyone's stupidity. It's only a matter of how we pay, and how much. Your choice.

Bad laws, unfairly enforced, inevitably lead to the diminishment of all law. I don't think that Anonymous is doing a good thing, but it was inevitable given the way that lawsuits are being used as a terrorist weapon. The general lack of respect for law which this engenders is a bad thing for society.

We may cheer when mob violence is turned against targets we think deserve it (and I certainly think Scientology deserves some sort of consequences for their actions), but there is a reason mob violence has been replaced by the rule of law in most parts of the world.

I think that the big problem is that, in democracies of any sort, the mob makes the laws. Force of law is a very big stick to be wielding when so many disagree with the policies being enforced. In other words, people who champion the "law" nowadays are often just applauding their mob.

While most people who call themselves libertarians are just selfish asshats, they do have a good point that we can't regulate everything. If something isn't covered by a basic law such as "don't steal", we have to look more closely to decide whether it's something we should be regulating, or something we should allow to self-regulate. And even if we decide that it would be nice to regulate that thing, we also need to ask if it's feasible, cost-effective, or paid for in a fair manner. When it comes to almost anything, and the perfect example here is copyright, if people aren't generally ashamed to be caught doing something, there's no way a law is going to be effective without huge costs both in money and unintended consequences.

Call me paranoid, but maybe we should choose a center for our coordinate system that won't lead the aliens straight to us when we broadcast interstellar locations. How about using the center of our local group? Maybe just our own galaxy. General enough, yet convenient enough?

Safety doesn't really work that way at all

Exactly my point. For GGP's analogy to work, it makes nonsense of his argument.

There's a world of difference between maintaining an overall level of carbon emissions and speeding. For your analogy to work, the speeding law would have to average out the speeds on the road by requiring non-paying drivers to lower their speed below the posted maximum. In the real world trading carbon emissions rights works to limit the overall amount of carbon release and rewards those who are most efficient with money from those who aren't as efficient (ie it's like a free market). What the proposed speeding law does is allow people to buy immunity from the laws which are designed to limit the risk of collective use of a public good. Where I live it's flat enough that you can't use rifles during hunting season. This law would be like allowing people to pay for the right to break that regulation because they promise that their bullets won't go through any farm houses.

My guess is that the alarms going off if there is even a small leak is because those leaks need to be fixed so that they don't become big leaks. There's a difference between common alarms for small-but-important problems and alarms going off to remind you that you haven't brushed your teeth.

(oh, the beauty of e-readers).

While I'm sure that e-readers work great for you, others rely on "dead tree" versions for their satisfaction. It's that different people have different wants and needs which is at the crux of the discussion. How to balance what we want, what we need, and deciding if a group gets left behind or not.

While the time scale involved when talking about human civilization prior to 2003 is large, the increase in human population over the past two decades is an even larger factor. Consider that there are currently 6% of the people alive today that ever lived and died, in the entire history of humanity (really, look it up. That's 1/16 of the people in a 1/52,000yr time slice.), and you begin to realize the scale of what we produce, not just in information, but also in material. Factor in that writing materials weren't even invented for about 47,000 yrs of that history, and the knowledge of how to write (let alone alphabets and the very concept of writing) hasn't been widely known throughout most populations, and it becomes easier to realize that, yeah, those twitter posts add up.

given that firearms are more likely to kill the owner than anybody else.

I look at that fact as a darwinian solution to the problem ;)

then gave the man LESS than the MINIMUM number of troops the general asked for-- as if to claim that he somehow knew better.

Yah know, if you'd been able to substitute the words "guns" or "bullets" or "jeeps" or something like that for "troops", I might be more sympathetic to your cause. But we're talking about people and their lives. When we commoditize our fighting men and women the way we do our war material by bickering over who "gets" them, it's time to step back and ask ourselves what we're fighting for and if it's worth the costs; not just in "men and material", but also the goodwill of people of the world, and at home, as well as economic opportunity costs, and the terrible cost to the American psyche of being on a war footing for so long.

I think that Obama "gave" "his" general fewer troops exactly because he did think that he knew better. He had people considering more than just the military aspects of the problem looking at the request after all. A huge number of troops may have been the best military solution, but the problem goes far beyond the military alone.

You're under the wrong impression. While there are different structures in different places, toll roads are often leased to corporations to operate and profit from. The idea is that theres a "cost saved" by the taxpayers not having to maintain the roads. I've never understood this, as the private corporations are able to make a profit (see I-80/90 in Indiana, operated by an Australian firm) despite having to maintain the roads. BTW, the police still have to enforce traffic laws themselves, and bear that cost, and EMS, well just say I wouldn't want to get in an accident on I-80/90. Since it's not a true "public" road, EMS charges as if they had to drive a 100s of miles long private driveway to get to you and charge accordingly (for all our European friends, you pay for EMS yourself in America and Insurance pays only what they want to pay no matter how much EMS charges you). What I do understand is that the State of Indiana received 3.8 billion dollars for the lease of the road from Macquarie; that makes it easier to keep the rust-belt economy from falling completely apart without having to raise direct taxes. Of course, that revenue is lost in the future, but the current politicians only care about, well, themselves. So really, this car analogy does hold together. Private firms got the government to build them something expensive. Since they maintain that thing they get to pretend they own it and profit at the public expense. What they paid the politicians for it is far below market value, but as long as the politicians get re-elected, they really don't give a shit what's good for their constituents. And to top it off, we all bend over and say "please sir, can I have some more?"

Good point. I'm not a big Broadway fan, but isn't the point of a live show, after all, the fact that it's being performed, uh, live. If I want to heare edited recordings, or speakers, I'll go to a movie or wait for the Netflix viewing of the same story rather than pay for an expensive ticket to sit in a tiny theater in the middle of a dirty city to hear the same recorded sounds.

never ONCE has it or should it ever affect your work.

Except, of course, for that time when your boss was considering you for a promotion but chose the other candidate because he doesn't play that "stupid kid's game" in all his spare time.

True story: I moved to a new town and started a new job working at a management level with a few other degree-level pros and also a large group of high-school and GED level workers. I joined an online dating site and set one of my preferences to be for at least college level education. Some of the ladies at work checked out my profile (you can hide your name, but not having a photo means no views), and it got quickly spread that I was "against" only having high-school level education. Oh, well, right? Well, then I got transferred to work under an older supervisor with "only" a high-school diploma who'd gotten his current position by working for 30+ years in the industry. Yeah, lot of fun working under someone who believed the rumors that you don't think people with only high-school level education are worth anything. Maybe it shouldn't happen, but people judge you both on what you do online and what you're perceived as doing online. That's just the way the world works. Forcing people to use their real names will have many effects, but one big one is that it will cause many thinking people to simply not post anymore, good or bad posts.

Being wise and savvy and seeking understanding is the natural state of human beings.

Huh? What planet do you live on? Your entire argument today is flawed due to your original premise being off. These scammer may, indeed, serve a purpose of sorts, but not for reasons you give. The natural state of most men is willfull ignorance as they subsist in spirit as they struggle to meet the basic needs of survival for their bodies. Wonder might be a natural state, but wisdom, savvy, and understanding of self and nature are luxuries that few even feel the need to strive for, and which far fewer have the capacity to reach (one even, let alone all of these states). In fact, that these scumbags would prey upon the weak of their society in the manner they do is evidence that they don't understand how breaking the social contract in this way harms them by damaging the tenuous trust system upon which social interactions are based. Don't mistake blindly stumbling through life, on the part of the scammer or the scammee, despite either having found a niche to fill, as plan, wisdom, or (especially) desireable. Down that road leads unneeded suffering, more than you'll find already in life.

The ignorance and stupidity is a disease state.

Again, don't mistake base/default state for disease. Societally, ignorance and stupidity are a scourge or blight, but disease requires contagion of sorts. A default state merely requires being born. Also, the way our society is set up, disincentivization doesn't work. If the incentive of better jobs, an easier life, or even self-fulfillment hasn't already incentivized someone toward knowledge or wisdom, than why would being scammed work? Despite the cries of both the recently unemployed and our politicians, the safety net in the developed world is so deep and soft that fear of "failure" is not strong enough to act as strong incentive anymore.