Usually people become wealthy by having wealthy parents.

Also, it's not really foolishness. If you make the assumption that the market is efficient, it is actually rational to use price as a signal of quality. So there's a bit of a catch-22 here: if the market is efficient, then price is a signal of quality. But if people see price as a signal of quality, then the market will no longer be efficient.

This isn't a matter of how free or not the market is. It's a matter of information.

If it weren't for a lack of information among market participants of this very sort, there would be no such thing as $10,000 ethernet cables.

Nations that have these laws usually also ensure that next to nobody has to live in such poverty that they can't afford a fine. The US is pretty exceptional in its callousness towards the poor.

Nah. The lawyer charging more will often get the deal because the wealthy person can afford it, and because they'll see the higher pricetag as a signal of how good the lawyer is.

The simplistic idea of competition you have invoked here depends upon all parties having all relevant information. This almost never happens in the real world.

There might be some issues with corporate-funded science (e.g. medical trials), but yeah, science is doing just fine overall. The ones who get things wrong all the time are journalists (there are a few good ones, but there are a plethora of horrible science journalists).

It's nice to have sometimes. For some things it's a lot easier than using the mouse pad (in particular it's faster to click on a specific thing). Usually I don't use it because I forget about it (as I spend most of my time with a desktop). But it definitely is a cool thing to have.

Nope. You have a fair amount of control as to how much data Google stores, and can tell Google to delete all of your data if you like. See here. I do think Google could stand to do a bit of work improving the interface, and making it more clear that they allow this sort of thing. But they do have pretty good privacy controls.

Even on a Chromebook, you can avoid Google collecting essentially anything connected to you if you simply browse in an incognito window and don't log into Google within that window.

If you have a weeks-running job and it isn't fault-tolerant, you're doing it wrong, period. As long as it's fault-tolerant, it isn't a big deal where it's run.

That said, if you have a job that takes days to run on a single computer, it'd be a good idea to either invest in a compute cluster or get some time on one.

At least women in STEM and global warming are important issues....

I started development in C++, but have since done quite a bit of development in Java, JavaScript, Go, and Python. I've really come to miss Clang's expressive compile errors, though there are other things about these languages that can be nice. Java is okay. JavaScript is abominable. Go is nearly as good as Java. Python is pretty terrible. As far as compile errors are concerned, anyway.

The other languages have other things that are good and bad, but C++, especially C++11 is great for just getting things to compile. One other cool thing about modern C++ is that it's easier than ever to force more and more errors to occur during compile time, instead of waiting for a runtime error to blow things up in production.

To make the most of C++ really requires good programming practices, though. For that I highly recommend Scott Meyers' "Effective C++" books.

There really isn't all that much difference, so that once you get comfortable with one you should be able to switch to the other without much difficulty if you need to. But I'd lean towards C++ because the tools are more mature.

Two other tips:

1. Use Clang (part of LLVM) as your compiler. The error messages are vastly easier to interpret, which should cut down on both learning and development time. Note that Clang supports both Objective C and C++.

2. If you do go for C++, make sure to start learning on C++11 or C++14. C++11 significantly changes quite a lot about the language, and if you start with older C++ books, you'll have to unlearn a lot of stuff if you want to develop modern C++. C++14 has mostly just minor fixes to C++11.

It generally doesn't work this way. Websites that claim vaccines are bad, or global warming is a hoax, or cell phones cause cancer, are typically littered with large numbers of easily-checkable factual errors. As long as the corpus on easily-verifiable facts is large enough, Google will almost certainly have little problem eliminating most of the bogus claims, even politically-controversial ones, from the top of its rankings.

Yes, it is mostly for cable, but some locations only have one DSL provider. And yet many cities do have exclusive franchises for cable Internet.

You can quibble all you like about it being a "franchise agreement" rather than a mandated monopoly, but to the consumer they're exactly the same thing: there is only one choice of provider, and that restriction is maintained by the local government.

As for the local government being "stupid", that's up for debate. It could just as easily be that the local government is corrupt (which can be difficult to avoid given how much money the large cable companies have compared to the local governments), or that they've fallen for some bad ideology related to "natural monopolies". Either way, the cable companies are absolutely not innocent here.

This isn't accurate. Many municipalities do indeed have ISP monopolies which are mandated by the local government. Typically they require specific regulations (such as price controls) in exchange for the local government enforcing the monopoly.

Such government-mandated monopolies aren't ubiquitous, but neither are they terribly uncommon in the US. There's no such thing at the state or federal level, of course, but there is at the local level.

As long as the new rules are successful in increasing competition among ISP's, this won't be a concern. And if the new rules aren't successful in increasing competition among ISP's, then I doubt price regulations would do much of anything to improve the situation.