Right, but that's only because various municipalities allowed all kinds of monopolies in order to build the thing their constituents weren't willing to pay for themselves at the time. Hey comcast, come and lay this cable here at your expense and we'll give you legally enforced monopoly in exchange. Later: OMG monopoly!!!

Is there anything stopping people from putting on the ballot and voting for a tax increase to lay down fiber paid and owned for by them, in order to create more competition?

And you missed my point. It seems pretty obvious to me that cultural differences play much bigger part in incarceration rates than laws or government policy. To take another example, Japanese Americans have the lowest crime rate of any ethnic group in the US, and is very similar to the crime rate in Japan itself. Surely if your theory is correct you would see a much higher crime rate among Japanese Americans than among Japanese in Japan, since they also live under "idiotic" US laws.

I notice Europeans are much less skeptical of their governments and society in general whereas Americans complain about and trash theirs all the time. I think the latter is actually a healthier attitude.

Europeans seem to be happy just to have any kind of democracy. Look at the continent's 20th century history which is nothing but war and rule by dictatorships. This is not ancient history either: Spain and Greece were ruled by fascist dictatorships into the 1970s, Eastern Europe into the 1990s. USA by contrast has had elected democracy and significant individual liberty since 1776 and has been free of domestic war since 1865. It's a different mindset.

So your theory is that every difference between countries is due solely to their governments and f the governments were the same, there would be no difference in prison statistics? Right?

What if it turned out that among 4.3 million Americans of Swedish ancestry there is a similar or lower rate of incarceration than in Sweden? Maybe there is something about Swedes that makes them commit very few crimes, and it has nothing to do with the government. Would you consider that a possibility or is that not allowed under the PC rules you are thought to follow?

Actually NASA budget is around 17 billion and ESA budged is $5 billion. In fact, NASA budget is greater than the budgets of European, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Indian space agencies put together.

Another choice is to privatize. One thing that sets apart those profitable Asian companies versus unprofitable N. American and European ones is that Asian ones are almost all run by for-profit private companies, while US and European ones are almost always run by local governments.

Even though Asian ones are heavily regulated and have to operate unprofitable routes plus typically have the pricing structure capped by regulation, the efficiency comes from being held accountable by shareholders and competitors as opposed to union infested local monopolies accountable to nobody except a corrupt government committee.

The existing high-speed rail in the US is largely in the Northeast corridor because it can make money there.
 
Not a single public transportation system in the US or Europe makes money. They all operate at a annual loss of anywhere between 10% (London Underground) and 90% (Austin CMTA): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

Only a couple of places in the densest areas in the far east make enough to cover ongoing operating expenses but even they are not close to ever covering the initial cost to build it.

The first rule of public transport is that it will always be heavily subsidized by the taxpayers.

Fidel, is that you?

We were the only ones to have them in WWII. Hard to use a weapon you don't posses.

The only problem with that argument is that we are not 5 year olds and court of law is not school playground. We all know that the purpose of pirate bay was to share copyrighted content, not peoples personal files. Try setting up an online marketplace for child porn and see how quickly you end up in jail even though all you were doing is posting "pointers" to it. and not hosting it yourself. They knew what they were doing and they made no effort to remove "pointers" to illegal materials even when notified, in fact they went out of their way to avoid removing them going as far as moving servers around and using every trick in the book to evade the law. Give me a break.

How does a book author make money from touring? He spends years writing a book and some jackass puts it on a website for free and makes money off advertising and buys a house in Phuket.

Taking that copy causes NO loss of resources to the artist, the resources being used are by the sharer and the downloader. The artist didn't lose anything.
 
"Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country, that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights to its use and distribution, usually for a limited time, with the intention of enabling the creator to receive compensation for their intellectual effort." So what the fuck are you talking about? It is not about artist 'losing resources' it is about granting the artist "exclusive" right to sell their work in order to provide them with fair compensation for their work.

They are not gatekeepers. You are free to produce your movie, music or whatever the fuck you want and distribute it all by yourself and keep all the money. Who is stopping you?

That's pretty much what's happening here. Robocoin will hardly prosper by providing a "service" like this and getting sued for breach of contract. In fact that's how the world works in general except where companies are granted special privileges by the government.