How strange it is, that once the politicians find themselves on the receiving end of all the surveillance tactics they enthusiastically support for regular citizens, they are up in arms and immediately start issuing bans and prohibitions! "We are shocked -- SHOCKED -- that these consequences of widespread mass surveillance would one day prove to have undesired side-effects! Who could have predicted this outcome???"

Wish I had mod points this week, because this is absolutely correct. The giveaway is right there in TFS:

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This is exactly what is driving these decisions. You know why Bayreuth is the only place in the world to do the full Ring cycle every year? Because mounting a 12-hour operatic spectacle is fucking expensive, and only the place with a guaranteed audience for it -- that is, an audience willing to pay a premium to see the opera in the house that was specifically built for this music -- can survivie doing it.

Make no mistake, the trends cited in TFA are not motivated by much creative interest. They are primarily motivated by cost-cutting and standardization drives, which -- you guessed it -- are the consequences of market capitalism. I mostly dislike orchestra unions -- they seriously interfered with a lot of work by myself and my colleages when we tried to compose things for orchestra that they didn't like -- but if we take your arguments and the OP's as valid, then they are protecting a legitimately valuable experience from debasement.

"Just that simple"? You like the idea of closing borders, evidently, but do you like the idea of produce prices, meat prices, service-economy costs, and just about every other menial-labor field seeing its labor costs double overnight? Because that's the consequence of requiring that citizens do those jobs. Stoop work is awful, backbreaking work that pays bullshit. It only survives because the immigrants who do it are so desperate for the work that they'll take it.

The moment you kick the immigrants out, you see cases like these ones, where billions of dollars of produce were left to rot in the fields because all the immigrants who would have picked them were driven out by tough anti-immigrant laws.
The US agricultural economy -- and a lot of the service economy -- is built on a steady influx of sub-minimum-wage labor, and only survives because of undocumented immigrants. Take it away, and large swaths of the economy collapse.

The congressional district Cantor represents (which is drawn differently than the one used for presidential and gubernatorial elections) is heavily gerrymandered. Dave Brat is going to win it hands-down.

This is all totally off-topic, but there is one part of your argument that merits discussion. Pointing out that a few people have experienced very lucrative social mobility is not evidence of the system as a whole being conducive to it. In fact, such arguments serve the exact opposite goal by thwarting meaningful discussion of social and economic policy. A handy thought experiment from Cracked makes it more clear:

Let's say there are a hundred of you and your friends all locked in a room, and you're all starving. I walk in, and out of my fat wallet I pull a wad of bills that it more money than you'd make in a year. I set it on a table, and say, "the last one of you left alive gets this pile of money." Then, when all your friends are dead, you get rich, and I say, "see? The system is fair: any one of you can become a rich person, if only you try hard enough. It deliberately conflates "any of you can get rich" with "all of you will get rich." And you and your friends are so busy fighting each other that nobody is asking why there was only money for one of you in the first place.

Dr. Dre may have become a billionaire, but he grew up in a neighborhood systematically ghettoized, and the majority of the kids he grew up with ended up dead or in jail, and almost all of them stayed poor.

No, the short form of mathematics is "math" in American English, as American English regards "mathematics" as a group term, thus singular. Second, American English does not transfer pluralizations in this way.

In all honesty, probably the better approach would be how it is done in German -- which I might point out shares a much older parent language with both versions of English -- in which "Mathematik" has no plural form, and is shortened to "Mathe." That makes grammatical sense. Also, I should mention that the idea of what is "standard" based on historical precedent cuts both ways: the way American English pronounces the R (which I have to admit, even as a native speaker, sounds hideous, is one of the things Americans consistently fail do lose when speaking German, and is also one of the hardest things for non-native speakers to pronounce correctly) is actually closer to how it was historically pronounced. Should your American colleagues give you lectures on how your pronunciation of R glides is non-standard and dialectical? (And here I'm even talking about the R in standard British English, not that god-awful north-country dialect that turns even non-terminal Rs into a sort of W).

I hate to be That Guy, but the English to which you refer is only "standard" among Commonwealth countries, and is not a global one. Presupposing Commonwealth English to be a standard from which all other versions are derivative might reflect historical lineage, but not present usage. Since the idea of what constitutes a standard derives from the latter and not the former, referring to British English as a/the standard is, at best, inaccurate.

Neither of us would presume to instruct our colleagues on the Indian subcontinent, for example, that English is the standard of Indoeuropean languages, and thus superior to, say, Hindi or Sanskrit. The same is true here: both British and American English in their present form are versions of an older language, and neither one of them should be construed as normative.

For the lazy/dumb, can you link a quick primer on why common-carrier designation is unfeasible?

This makes no sense at all. Is it just a bad summary? Waxman is citing testimony that internet fast lanes inevitably and necessarily degrade internet service for "non-premium" users, and Wheeler responds that the proposed regulation enables the FCC to prohibit that inevitable consequence of the system it creates?

"Yes, this regulation will degrade service, unavoidably. BUT! The regulation also says that we will make sure that this unavoidable consequence is prohibited, so it's all good!"

I don't think you understand how monopolies work. The majority of Comcast's customers have no alternatives. Where are they going to go? Back to dial-up? There are at best one or two other providers in any given market for internet service, and *none* for cable television. So, Google, Facebook, et al say they won't accept connections from Comcast servers, then ... what? Comcast's customers stop using those companies' services, but don't switch providers. In retaliation, the peering providers that used to trade back all that traffic that those sites were generating stop doing that, so those companies lose even more traffic.

This is the point of a monopoly: they control access, and so they can control how the market functions.

I don't mean the ISPs, I mean the rest of us. Wheeler is a cable lobbyist; I suspect the court striking down the Open Internet Order was exactly the excuse to scuttle the net neutrality that all his buddies hate so much. Besides: the court has been very clear on this matter. The only way the FCC could force net neutrality would be by declaring ISPs common carriers. The Republican Party -- and Wheeler himself -- is adamantly opposed to such an action, and so it will not happen.

This smacks very much of the Obama administration responding to all the illegal wiretapping the NSA and FBI et al were doing not by arresting the perpetrators, but by writing the laws to give them authority to go right on doing it.

your math is a bit wonky. "weight/kg) / height(m) * height(m)" is just "weight(kg)." Perhaps you meant "height(m)^2" ? Extra parentheses help clarify terms.

Here's a thought. Maybe the sport as a whole -- and the PGA in particular -- could take a look at the many many country clubs that are still whites-only, and think about whether tolerating overt racism in your sport is the best way to market it.

Don't get me wrong, I have no issues with people celebrating human sexuality or whatever, but isn't it a bit ... overindulgent to be treating a former Playboy Playmate as an authority on much of anything, or really caring at all what she says? I get that debunking anti-vaxxers is a good cause and all, but why are we bothering with this anti-vaxxer?

The problem lies, in part, with what I guess you could call the aesthetic of multitasking. We love to think that we're good at it, but -- as research has proven over and over [warning: first link is a pdf download] -- we are actually really shitty at it. The same is true of driving. I remember as a kid riding in my dad's car, how he would try to change the channel on the radio, or do something with the A/C, and immediately start veering the car off the road. At stoplights, the minute he stopped thinking about it, his foot came off the brake and the car would roll out into the intersection.

I don't think fixing cars or cell phones is going to get to the root of the problem. The root is that people think they can do more than one thing at a time and not trip over their own damn feet. Since changing the culture seems out of the question, no amount of technological fixes is going to save us from trying to do more than we're cognitively equipped to do.