And used car salesman are basically the experts when it comes to the sale and purchase of used cars. But you wouldn't trust them would you.

If someone trust a 'professional' so blindly with a huge amount of their own resources without stopping to think about the conflicts of interest that professional is subject to, then yes, they are behaving stupidly.

[quote]
*Just being able to create a viable simulation will serve as both motivator and validation for an enormous amount of new understanding of neurological behavior, knowledge which can then be applied to organic humans.
* if you ignore ethical considerations you now have a simulated living human brain that can be experimented on and monitored with an utterly unprecedented level of detail, and in ways that simply could not be realistically done to a brain that had physical substance. Such a tool would likely enable vast leaps in our understanding of how the human brain operates, and it's relationship with the mind. And you can bet that even if the more "enlightened" nations ban experimentation on simulated minds there will be plenty of places in the world where sufficiently unethical researchers will be able to do their work.
* You now have a predictable model of the brain to experiment on that puts white mice to shame in terms of experimental consistency. You could make multiple copies of the brain's exact state at a given moment and then expose it to exactly the same stimuli while tinkering with it's internals to gain an level of insigt into their effects that would be exhaustively dificult via other means. (this of course assumes that consciousness can exist in a discretely encoded simulation and that it's not necessary to incorporate the quantum effects that saturate an organic brain - a very large assumption I should think)
[/quote]

Could you give some specific examples of how we could do this?Its probably my lack of imagination, but I struggle to think of any that don't involve either/or:

a) a behavioural aspect - i.e. how does a change in the brain affect behaviour - which require a physical extension, a body, or at least some other way for the simulated brain to output to something (presumably if you're simulating a human brain then you would need to simulate an approximation of a human body through which the brain could express itself)

b) a psychological aspect - how does the change in the brain affect the emotional state of the mind it represents. This could be tested with a Turing test style text based interaction, but it requires that a personality be developed, which is something that takes years of societal interaction in biological humans (plus a body full of hormones and such like).

Unless you're an entangled boson.

There hasn't been a direct democracy since Athens, or possibly the French revolution. A representative democracy is still a democracy. Even Switzerland only has referenda on large scale issues, day to day government is still conducted by representatives.

The voters elect people to represent their interests in government. These representatives are accountable via the means of regular elections, by which unpopular actions on their part will result in their not being re-elected.

This of course requires an informed, educated electorate. But the same is true of a direct democracy.

You're changing the subject from that of whether governments 'take' money to that of whether the taking of money is justified.

Is 'brazillian' a unit of measure?

Why should those be the only two options?

Very few governments claim that protecting citizens' freedom is their central role.

Although, don't identify the donkey, otherwise you'll violate UK press law in another way.

Citation needed.

A, B ( a sort of buzzing thing )

That sounds like the old "two wrongs make a right" argument.

Explaining why the opposition is wrong does not make you right.

As a point of order - prices going up once due a spike (oil price rises, legislative wage increases, etc.) is not inflation. It's just a price increase. Inflation is steady increase of prices across the economy over time (a rate of change rather than a single measurement).

So if a company realises capital gains on its assets (since companies can own stock too) is it tax as income or profit?

If I suffer a capital loss can I have a rebate on my income tax?

I noticed that too. Plenty of people have never looked at a supply/demand curve and understood it.