On election days, I swing by the voting place on my way to work. It's open, and very rarely crowded. It's not a burden of any sort, and it's kind of fun. I don't need more motivation than that.

Some people are at some distance from their polling place, working, while the polls are open. They'd have to take time off work (which is illegal not to grant, but employers of minimum-wage people don't necessarily abide by the law, and they're often fast to fire those who insist on their legal rights), or maybe go to their home neighborhoods in a break between two jobs (and public transit in my city is not good).

I have no real objection to having some sort of hindrance to keep those who don't care from voting, but I'd like it to be reasonably even. Right now, it can be easy for some people and very difficult for others.

No for-profit businesses open? What happens if I don't get enough food in the house before Election Day? I can't go to restaurants, and I can't buy groceries. I don't think you've thought this through.

Fascism is not a move to the left, and the movement in the US is towards increased corporate control. Programs like the ACA are consistent with the right (as it currently exists in this country); remember that Social Security was invented by that flaming liberal Otto von Bismarck, and that the ACA puts us a little closer in health care to first world status, not all the way. If you consider any other developed country to be not leftist, then the ACA isn't leftist, and it does have strong Republican roots.

My observation is that my more liberal friends are more concerned with the move towards a police state, and more likely to involve themselves with anti-police-power movements like "Black Lives Matter".

And, yes, I keep missing real Republicans, like they had when I was a kid. I disagreed with them, but I much preferred them to the current variety. For one thing, they were a party of fiscal responsibility, and currently the more fiscally responsible party is the Democrats. I wish the conservatives luck in coming up with a major political party, because I think one of those would be valuable to the country.

Your statement about licenses/medallions/whatever is true in some areas and not others. In New York City, the medallion price is also very high, but Uber does not operate under the NYC cab laws (they don't accept hails, but need to be reserved in advance - not necessarily far in advance, but in advance). In Germany, according to people in this thread, there is no restriction on who can become a cabbie; it just takes additional insurance and licensing, which isn't particularly onerous. I don't know about France or South Korea (my guess would be that there are national but not local rules here, but I'm just guessing).

So, Uber should be able to operate in Germany legally since the laws are regulatory and not restraint of trade. If they're paying no attention to laws where they aren't de facto or dejure restraint of trade, something's wrong with them.

Depends on the basic licensing requirements we're talking about. Taxi licenses (of whatever form) should not be used to limit competition the way they do. However, there are other regulations about commercial licensing and insurance that Uber tends to ignore when it can.

As far as sex and violence goes in entertainment, I'd like to see more sex and less violence. I really don't like it that harming people is more offensive to a lot of people than loving them. I'd rather have an environment where a bullet hole is considered less acceptable than a nipple.

So, I'm not impressed by GTA.

An open platform, supporting a variety of marketplaces, could be a disaster for the consumer. Right now, Apple does a good job of keeping serious malware out of the App Store, and hence people's iOS computers. A variety of marketplaces would include some that provided free malware with their apps, and they could cause a good deal of harm.

It's primarily a security issue. Apple does not want malware on users' iDevices.

Blacklists don't work, because malware can appear far faster than it can be found and blacklisted. AV programs don't work. The best way found to have security is whitelisting software. If the user has an easy way of bypassing the whitelist, then the software isn't effectively whitelisted, because users can be talked into allowing things. It's been amply demonstrated that users will click through any impediment to seeing the dancing pigs.

The whitelist doesn't have to hold against people like you and me. It has to hold in general, for people who are not all that knowledgeable about computers.

Users in general are not going to understand permissions in general. In general, they won't be completely innocuous (otherwise why have them as permissions). The practice of listing the worst case with all permissions will get users in general to avoid looking at them entirely.

I far prefer the iOS approach, in which permissions are asked for at the time of use, and can be granted or denied then.

That's been true in Minnesota since 1982. I don't know where to go to find a list.

I think you're mixing up NDAs with "at will" states, in which employment can bet terminated by either side with no reason (there's a list of illegal reasons, but typically no reason will be given). NDAs can be banned or allowed without paying attention to "at will" status. ("Right to work", which means an employee cannot be required to join a union, are something else entirely and frequently confused)

Yeah, the voter ID amendment in Minnesota was deliberately deceptive on the ballot. Fortunately, it failed (it would have caused a lot of problems with absentee voting, for example, and absentee voting was not mentioned on the ballot).

US fleet carriers are not tremendously fast. There's been a tremendous amount of nonsense written about it. The reactors aren't that powerful, and no matter how much stuff you put in the hull all that energy has to be transmitted through the screws into the water. Look at the propellors, folks, because that is a genuine bottleneck. They don't expend fuel as such, being nuclear powered.

What they can do is maintain nearly full speed pretty much indefinitely, while other ships would spend a tremendous amount of fuel to keep up.

They also could accelerate a lot faster than conventional steam vessels, which means they could zoom out of a formation while the escorts struggled to catch up. This is the source of a lot of the stories.

No, that's not the only way it can decline. The value of a stock is what you can get somebody to pay for it. If you could sell your shares for $100 each yesterday, and only $80 today, you've lost 20% of your value. That can happen with a sudden loss of confidence in the company, without anybody cashing out. The value of my house has fluctuated a lot over the years, affecting my net worth.

Similarly, if a bank invests heavily in some sort of security, and carries it as value on its books, and the security turns out to be worthless, the bank can be badly hurt financially without any money changing hands.