I suspect you're right about price fixing. However, the fact that someone in the economy has to pay a large sum of real money is irrelevant in determining cost-benefit.

Yes, it's real money. But so are labor costs. And, in theory, those labor costs represent [a portion of] the real value that person is adding to the economy. So anything that makes the employee able to add value more efficiently is overall good.

In general, an employee would not be earning $200/hr on a $7,000 workstation if they weren't adding more than $200/hr of value to the economy in some way. So making them more efficient either allows them to add more value, or gives them more free time to do other things (which tend to benefit the economy and society as a whole).

So maybe there is collusion, price gouging, artificial shortages, or something going on... but I know people who would gladly pay a huge premium for minor speed increases. And that really drives development, which should ultimately benefit the home user.

You are the one making an elementary mistake, I am afraid. Your conclusion does not follow, even if we accept your entire argument.

You have heard the phrase "trust, but verify". It is far too easy to fake transparency and mislead other states. Every state throughout history has done this. At the very least, you need good intelligence sources to verify a state's public pronouncements regarding intentions are sincere. Even if they are sincere, you need to know the intentions/plans/abilities of internal players who may be in opposition.

Although I guess we could just take Putin at his word that he is just conducting military exercises and has no intentions towards Crimea? I'm sure he'll be giving Crimea back to Ukraine any day now.

Advocating covert verification of states' intentions and abilities has nothing to do with government accountability. That is an extreme oversimplification and false dichotomy.

No, any enterprise that cares about its data or uptime will use "enterprise" SSDs*. All** the big storage players have been using enterprise rated/labeled SSDs, and many of them use "enterprise" HDDs as well. So that's a pretty big chunk of the storage market. I'm not saying EMC doesn't have a high markup, but if you're using EMC storage with SSDs, you're using enterprise SSDs.

There are a bunch of reasons to use enterprise stuff in other situations as well, but I'm not going to try to debate the technicals right now.

As a side note, it sounds like your company is having pretty serious issues with storage and backup. What are they going to do when data grows a bit and daily backups start taking 25 hours?

*Or have a completely different architecture to sidestep the problem. It's harder than it sounds.
**There may be exceptions?

That is true of a lot of newer think tanks. You can generally judge a think tank by its ratio of PhDs to staff.

Brookings is part of the old guard. They employ a lot of serious researchers and generally strive towards objectivity. Nothing's 100%, but I'd say they're comparable to a good university.

Fair enough. I appreciate your honest reply.

W was a unique president. Off the top of my head, he's the only recent president who seems to have actually done everything wrong. Obama has done some good... but since everything he does is controversial and subject to the harshest rhetoric I've seen in the US, I decided to leave him out of this.

While that is correct, you are assuming vi has a steep upward slope. That was not the case for me.

1 minute in: "Oh crap... how I do I type? How do I EXIT?"
15 minutes in: "whew, helpful man page and articles." "cfg edited and saved. Go me!"
1 day later: "I just deleted two lines! Crap! How do I exit without saving? Ugh... what'd that man say again?"

A quick initial climb, a steep drop into a lake filled with tears, and then a gradual slope.

The problem is that in this statement:

you are imaging that the US is the "bully country", and failing to imagine what most other countries would do with control over the internet. And actively ignoring what many other countries do with control over their piece of the internet.

The US bullies on plenty of issues. Control over the internet really isn't one of them.

I got the impression you were making the argument about the federal government specifically. Sometimes the federal/state government increases liberty by getting rid of a federal/state regulation. Sometimes abolishing a regulation leads to less liberty.

Neither I nor the Green Party believes government never does harm. I am certainly not claiming that federal, state, or local governments are free of corruption.

The core of the argument is that 1) government is not inherently bad and 2) we can substantially improve the quality of our government through 3) changes in electoral rules, campaign financing, and the revolving door. When a large voting bloc stops believing 1 and 2, we're basically doomed. I'd much rather argue over the best #3 and how to get them implemented.

Key part of your quote:

Universally high quality drinking water? That's "remarkably well". Yes, infrastructure needs work because nobody is willing to spend the money to do it. But, as of today, nearly everyone has potable water.

I'm sorry, but you are misinterpreting or misrepresenting Greens, at least in this paragraph:

The entire point of that line is that governments are not always bad, and they can lead to liberty. The rest of the platform is basically saying "we need all of these things to have a good government again".

I'd call the notion that government never leads to more liberty "cute", but it's ugly and overly cynical. Let me give you a few examples of the federal government creating more liberty:
* abolishment of slavery (Civil War will give you a lot of fun arguing points, I'm sure, but still true)
* abolishment of Jim Crow laws
* child labor laws
* Roe v Wade (trollbait, but millions of Americans have been grateful for this liberty)
* hopefully someday, breaking cable's blockade of good internet (I don't have the liberty to have fiber because a municipal official made a deal with a donor?)

I'm not a Green, but I'm with them on this. And I think any sane person should be. Government is not always bad.

I agree with your point. But to be fair, I have seen 'geniuses' use one formula to do things which could have been written in 50 columns. There are advantages to breaking up the formula and "showing your work" in hidden columns. I hate trying to debug or change formulas with a thousand parentheses. Now if we can only get people to make their excel formulas readable and then start documenting...

Freedom? You want the "free speech right" of a rapist to trump a rape victim's freedom to decide whether or not to be be in an adult video.

It's possible you're not trolling, but it's absolutely ridiculous that anyone would mod you up. So much for #NotAllMen and all those "slashdot isn't misogynist!" comments...

Insightful? Only on Slashdot.

I am glad we agree on the first point. I may have missed some of the context of your post, and I often get the impression that some on slashdot would not agree that targeted rate cuts are a subsidy.

On the latter, I suspect we disagree somewhat. But we don't have to argue that point. Over the last 14 years, I have seen an ugly cycle of: 1) cut taxes disproportionately for the wealthy and corporations; 2) increase defense spending; 3) cite new deficits as justification for cutting entitlements by an amount dwarfed by 1 and 2; 4) propose new tax cuts. The claim that "tax cuts [always] pay for themselves" concerns me greatly.

So, to be clear, if Obama got on TV and announced that no taxes would need to be paid on corporate or personal income from renewable energy sales, you would NOT consider that a form of subsidy? And he would get no resistance from the right, because it would just be "taking less of someone's money"?