Why stop with tax amnesty? If you're a holy, sainted Job Creator, you should be able to shoot poors in the street!

Right, the union is a problem, NOT corporate greed. Every problem you cited is 1000x worse on the management side. And unlike working people, they NEVER pay for their failures.

You just did, with your insightful post.

Gordon: "You're...just one guy?"

Batman: "Now we're two."

>> No one is going to compete for a revenue stream of size zero. Break up ISPs all you want, but it won't make them pull fiber or coax or whatever out into the sticks.

The ISPs will also send a fleet of lobbyists to the state house capital, begging the legislature to make municipal broadband illegal. I saw it happen in North Carolina after a small town (Wilson) built a fiber network that was 50 times faster than the commercial offerings, for pennies on the dollar. This was after years of begging and pleading with ISPs to expand to their town.

This is terrifying for Republicans, because it puts the lie to "government can do no right" and reveals what public/private partnerships are really all about: self-dealing, inefficiency and middlemen. We've done that for 40 years, and our government has only become more openly venal and dysfunctional. It's time to go back to New Deal-style efficiency and competence.

>> I do not disagree with the literal words at face value and devoid of context, but I very much object to the baggage that is strongly correlated with those words.

OK, so you treat the Constitution as a religious document. Something the founders certainly didn't do (and never intended anyone else to do, either). Speaking as a True Originalist (aka a medium that can talk to the Spirits of the Founders), I can tell you with perfect certainty that they (the Founding Fathers) think you're a weirdo. Also, Benjamin Franklin wishes he were still corporeal, so he could smell your hair and write dirty poems about it.

>>but substantial amounts of their GDP that pays for the cost of socialism is non-renewable and non sustainable.

Who cares? For a pittance of what we spend on military bases and private prisons for marijuana offenders, we could have a social safety net that puts the Nordic countries to shame. That is what the majority of Americans want. Not trillions of dollars for endless wars and oil subsidies.

OP was right. The Electoral College, the Senate, and the Supreme Court are all inherently undemocratic and minoritarian. We'd be a much happier and healthier country without them.

The minority CAN definitely enact change in this country-as long as they are wealthy. And THAT is why the US is a plutocracy, with a little bit of democratic republicanism thrown on the top as window dressing.

>> And people wonder why Americans are tired of subsidizing the defense of wealthy First World democracies who can easily afford it,

Don't worry, America is pulling out of Germany and Europe is slowly becoming its own power bloc, independent of the US. The recent deal the Euros signed with China is a big indicator of that shift.

Who knows, maybe one day Americans will be able to talk like adults about why we have 800 military bases around the world, but we "can't afford" universal healthcare. Hell, maybe one day America will actually BE a democracy, instead of a minoritarian oligarchy. A fella can dream, can't he?

>>So... does that mean wholesale theft of IP is now officially governmentally sanctioned?

It's been unofficially sanctioned by the US government for decades. Importing postdocs from China, India, Israel etc is much cheaper paying American scientists a living wage. Of course, the FBI knew that many of them getting into high-tech research universities were spies, but no one did anything about it.

  >> ''China's typical modus operandi is to steal American IP, replicate it, replace the U.S. company originating that IP in the Chinese domestic market, then displace the United States in the global market.''

People said that about the US when the UK was the most powerful country in the world. The US said it about Japan in the 1980's. It's a smart playbook, no wonder China is following it.

If you think this is bad, look who Republicans recently appointed to the judiciary, including the Supreme Court. It's basically Mitch's Work Study Program for Right-Wing Law School Graduates.

>> The government has offered to suspend the laws for 18 months and let an expert committee re-evaluate it.

"We'll still do this, but not for 18 months...and in the meantime, we'll set up a committee that no doubt will report back whatever we ask it to" - Would you be stupid enough to take that deal?

>> Every expert in agriculture including the ones from the state of Punjab have advocated for these very changes - private investment, opening up of markets etc.

What qualifies one to be an "expert in agriculture?" Does being a farmer help, or are they just dumb hicks that don't know what's best for them?

>> The farmers are being misled by their financiers who fear losing their commissions in cutting deals with the corrupt governments.

It all goes back to the Green Revolution. Instead of land reform (that awful Commie plot!), we figured out how to grow crops through atomic gardening, and turning fossil fuel into fertilizer. That saved countless lives, but it also destroyed topsoil and accelerated global warming.

Now the bill is coming due again, and Modi's answer (again) is to avoid land reform, and go even further in the wrong direction by ending farm subsidies. The farmers are right to reject the advice of "experts" who don't have expertise in anything but failed neoliberal market policies.

>> The obvious way to balance that is to pay delivery guys really well, which means a massive increase in delivery costs, which means that delivery will become a luxury.

Why do you think that paying people a living wage results in "massive" increases in delivery costs? That's not the case in NY, the UK, or anywhere else where there are some minimal labor protections.

>> The children of the super wealthy are typically not super lazy. They tend to be pushed hard by their parents. They may end up in the Ivy League, and even if they got preferential treatment, getting in these top level schools is brutal.

Then how do you explain Trump or Bush Jr? Two lazy failsons who teamed up to kill millions and drive the American Empire into the ground. (Not excusing Obama, he didn't help either).

I'm sure you could point to counterexamples, but no one on the planet have had even close to the impact of those two. This is why Americans used to be wary of generational wealth, and the quasi-royalty it creates.

>> Yes, people taking more agency in the outcomes of their own lives instead of demanding more regulation or goverment invervention is desirable.

The wealthy are the ones that demand (and get) government intervention and regulations that benefit them. Why shouldn't we?

Hiya folks!

YourMissionForToday here. Let's play a game called "does rmdingler argue in good faith?"

- Does he (like Governor Abbot) blame renewables for the outage (even though it was really natural gas, coal, and some nuclear that went offline)? Check!

- Does he claim that the snow and ice was an Act of God that no one, repeat, no one could have planned for (despite this happening in Texas 4 times in my lifetime, most recently in 2011)? Check!

- Does he conveniently forget to mention widespread death and preventable human suffering? Check!

And now, let's find out if rmdingler does in fact argue in good faith! Drum roll please....

>> If you listen to the sub-narrative of global warming, extreme weather, then you are kind of stuck justifying spending on way hot and way cold weather options. Note that achieving both is expensive and or impossible.

Not expensive or impossible. Which do you think costs more? The economic/health/property damage done by the power failures, or what it would have cost to winterize the grid?

If you have third-world expectations for your grid, you'll get third-world results.