OKCupid's next step should be a button all users see on login: "Do you support the marriage-equality movement?" [yes/no]. If you click No it deletes your account.

In for a penny, in for a pound, right?

No, it's not about money. It's about fulfilling his adolescent fantasies of being the guy who programs a lame facebook-branded Second Life knockoff. I MEAN, programming the Metaverse from Snow Crash.

(Sorry, dropped out of the fantasy too early there.)

Good luck trying to convince people to not have children, especially the Bible Belt people who literally believe it's their God-given right to litter the Earth with their offspring.

It's not just the Bible Belt -- the UN Fundamental Declaration of Human Rights (article 16) declares that "men and women of full age ... have the right to marry and to found a family." It's pretty totalitarian to suggest otherwise... which you really should try to be more aware of, lest it damage your pitch...

Dumb ruling, or accurate ruling on a dumb law?

It is no longer strictly a private affair. However, if the government decides to make certain laws that substantially burden some individual's ability to exercise his religion, such as by limiting the conditions under which he may operate a business, then those laws may be found unconstitutional -- something about "congress shall make no law" blah blah blah.

I think it's not as simple as that and we're being confused by the proximate issue. I know that a typical case is "is it okay for a business run by some fundamentalist Christians allowed to refuse service to bake cakes or provide flower arrangements a gay wedding." Let's use different groups here to make the issues clearer. Is it okay for an event-planning business run by a Buddhist to refuse service to plan a KKK rally? To refuse to bake a cake that says [insert offensive thing a KKK member might want on a cake here]? How about just to refuse to provide services to a KKK member? Refuse to provide sale of goods?

If the answer is "no" to the Christian baker's refusals and "yes" to the KKK rally refusal, what are the differences between these hypothetical situations? If relevant, what are the differences between the rally and the general sale of goods? What are the differences between these hypothetical situations and the law(s) being proposed?

You can't take the sky from me.

The thing is, broadcasters aren't bringing this case over lost advertising revenue. And they're not bringing it over increasing the size of the broadcast area.

They're bringing this case because if Aereo-like services lets people access the broadcasts within the broadcast area in more convenient ways, that means the broadcasters can't make as much money from selling more-convenient access to their content (e.g. by charging cable-TV retransmission fees, or making a deal with Time-Warner Cable to let subscribers visit special subscriber-only webpages or install subscriber-only apps to stream content).

Yes, indeed: depending on who you believe you could believe in a bias in either direction. :P

Inflation is like a tax on accounts denominated in dollar amounts, it's true. However, you'll also note that inflation in the US is relatively steady since the 1980s when Volcker took over. That's why the US dollar is relatively steady right now - unlike in 1981, when inflation was 13.5% . The dollar is trusted as far as it proves trustworthy.

But you can still get monetary shocks even if you don't depend on fiat currency: read up on the inflationary consequences of the gold rush of 1849 on the (gold-backed) money supply: "Soaring gold output from the California and Australia gold rushes is linked with a thirty percent increase in wholesale prices between 1850 and 1855."

Yes, well, insofar as the US Government promises not to substantially manipulate the dollar, the dollar is stable. Insofar as they don't, the value of the dollar falls relative to other, more trustworthy currencies (and commodities) and people demand higher interest for government bonds, loans, and similar instruments, to compensate for the decaying value of the dollar.

(Of course, some "manipulation" is necessary to match fluctuations in the overall state of the economy and achieve a stable dollar. But even in ancient economies with commodity money, persistent deflation and monetary shocks were reasonably common.)

It's the distance.

The US parties may collude on a variety of things (like counterterrorism, or if you prefer, "counterterrorism") but they have significantly differing views on the relationship of the role of government to the citizenry and the economy. For instance, on the national level, the US Democratic party has been pushing for things like the recent health-care reform laws (for good or ill), additional environmental regulation, increases in the minimum wage, and other increases in taxes and spending which see the government taking a larger role in the economy, including transfer payments (welfare, etc). They also resent military spending as a rule. The Republican party pushes for less government involvement in the economy, lower/flatter tax regimes, market solutions to issues like healthcare and wages, and a regulatory regime which is not simply less stringent, but also more streamlined where it is in fact present (and they do not resent military spending, at least not as a rule).

Things are different outside the economic arena, true, but 2008-2016's top issues were, in order: the economy, the economy, and the economy. So.

Clearly you don't do a lot of networking between home computers like a NAS or something.

And this is why we're still decades away from having mortgages denominated in bitcoin. :P