When the government wastes money on ridiculous studies then they obviously have enough for the important things. Asking for more money is inappropriate and they shouldn't have it.

I think we can both agree on that. If you think federal money being spent on rabbit massages is a great idea, well, I don't know what to tell you other than you are part of the problem.

You also say that it's a drop in the bucket. Does that change the fact that it is a complete waste? Big or small, it is a sign that there is plenty of money for the important programs.

As an analogy, with your thinking, I could go to the extreme and say, "beating someone up isn't as big a deal as violent rape or murder, so we'll just let people get beat up." It's the same concept and also ridiculous. It's all wrong, and we should stop beatings along with rape and murder, yes?

But since you bring up the topic, what would I like to cut?

I'd be happy to cut the defense budget. I'm not convinced that we really need military bases scattered throughout the world, for example. We see articles here on Slashdot on a fairly regular basis about military boondoggles that cost many billions of dollars - so maybe we need stricter controls on military contracts.

Health care? Sure, I'm willing to make some cuts there. The problem is that we shouldn't have to, but unfortunately we're so far in debt that we're left with little other choice. So we'll have to make cuts there too.

What about welfare? If you have a cell phone, a car, a television with cable, you are not poor. America has the wealthiest "poor" in the world. Welfare should provide, truly, the bare minimum to get by. Keep the heat and lights on, some food in your belly, that's it. I'm not the biggest Clinton fan, but his changes to our welfare programs made a big difference. We should do more along those lines.

Ideally, the entitlement programs in general should not be in the federal purview. It should be a state issue. Same with education. Same with a lot of things.

Not all things that I want to cut, but out of necessity, something has to get the axe. So it might as well be a little bit of everything. No sacred cows.

Have you seen what happens when a government is so deeply in debt that all it can do is print stacks of cash and dive into hyper inflation? It's not pretty. We're headed down that road. Not tomorrow, not next year, but that's where we are going.

That was the brilliance of a limited federal government, by the way. If a state screwed up and made a mess of things, people could vote with their feet and go somewhere else until the legislature woke up and fixed their issues. If another state did something brilliant the others could follow suit. A marketplace of ideas, if you will.

With a single entity in charge of nearly everything these days, well, you're stuck. The feds make a bad policy decision and it affects everyone, and there's very little recourse for the individual.

But since you're here saying, "Well, that program doesn't matter because it was just a little waste," you're probably going to just gloss over all of this and slap up yet another tired progressive meme. Oh well.

Yes, adding yet another tax is one way to help that, but why do governments worldwide - mine included - never consider the possibility that they're spending too much money? When our government is spending money on swedish massages for rabbits and then whining that they don't have enough cash to toss around, I am completely uninterested in giving them a single penny more.

I also never knew it existed. Everyone is aware of NetFlix; a lot of people also know about Amazon Prime's video services, but most people don't seem to use it.

You can't compete if nobody knows that your service is out there.

Yes, he promised us the most transparent government ever. It's not his fault though, it's all those hard drives, you know, they just... Gosh, they keep crashing. Whoops.

I don't know much about the initd vs. systemd argument, I haven't kept up with it and honestly I don't care, but I would like to add this:

Isn't one of the beauties of Linux, and free software in general, the power of choice? systemd is offering a choice, an alternative. Surely there will be distributions that use systemd and those that do not. Now the end user has - gasp - a choice. How is this bad? If you think systemd sucks for whatever reason then just don't use it. If you think it is awesome, then go ahead and use it. This is the power of choice, the power of the free market, and when it comes to free software the market is very, very open.

Why are people getting so pissy over someone offering an alternative? Did systemd give all of these people a bad touch or something?

When I saw the headline I honestly did think that this project was someone creating a mockery of systemd, called "useless-d", which was built to take systemd's ideals to some kind of absurd extreme.

Now that I know useless-d is a real software project I'm inclined to give it even less attention. If the developers cannot be bothered to take their own software seriously, why should I? There is a space for tongue-in-cheek names, cute names, and all the rest, but this one is just plain bad.

This is an incredibly large undertaking, and problems with large undertakings are fairly common.

This was not an incredibly large undertaking. The functionality is not complex. Nothing about it is complex or incredible large.

It has to:
1. Allow you to create an account;
2. Verify your identify;
3. Show you available health care plans in your area;
4. Let you select one;
5. Help you pay for it.

In its basic form, this is something that a group of college kids could whip up in a week or so.

The only thing even approaching complex is scaling to handle a ton of load during the registration periods - and those are problems that have been solved at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and any other high traffic site.

Maybe you like this health care system, and that's okay. We can disagree on that point. What I cannot allow is for you to tell me that this website is some kind of horrible, complex, unknown beast that simply could not be tamed, a website so complex that few applications could approach it in terms of functional requirements.

Except that subsidies are the antithesis to a free market. It's cronyism.

I also thought I'd never say this... But I don't know if this is the right thing to do. It sounds all fancy and wonderful and all, but think about this:

Which ISPs can afford to upgrade their infrastructure to provide this speed to all their users? The large ones, the powerful ones, that ones that already have the money. This means that the smaller ISPs, the ones that are already struggling, will have an even more difficult time since they're no longer receiving your tax dollars.

My question is this: Why should there be subsidies at all? If there must be subsidies, why are they slanted to help the already-successful, larger companies?