Or both, since both sides call anything they don't like a socialist or teabagger, if you propose something that neither side likes, you're a Socialist Teabagger.
Don't forget Terrorist.
But at least it goes to show that America truly has the government it deserves.
It would be very simple and fair. Lastly it would encourage savings rather than consumption which is something we need desperately right now.
Because a recession is not bad enough already, let's discourage economic activity and turn it into Greater Depression!
Then again, much of the country can't save up because they're already living paycheck to paycheck, so I guess they'd end up paying more taxes and going into deeper debt. But I guess kicking people who are already down is some people's idea of "fair". What I don't get is why they think this won't lead to an outright rebellion.
Light aircraft don't use fly-by-wire, why do cars need it?
Because you can keep incompetent people from getting a pilot license, but you can't keep them from getting a driver's license, at least not without grinding the whole society to a standstill. So letting a computer handle as much of the driving as possible makes everyone safer.
I mean... I get that mature software doesn't necessarily deliver awe-inspiring features all the time, but
But we're talking about Firefox. It's not mature by any stretch of imagination.
why is it news?
Hype. The whole purpose of ditching major.minor.build versioning was to get the hype of a major release for every single new build. Well, that and it makes it less convenient to maintain old branches in bugfix state, thus forcing everyone to buy into every new feature and feature removal unless they want to be pwned. The developers have a vision and you will share it, dammit!
You know, I've had very little good to say about Snowden, considering him little more than some kid who punked the NSA, then mooned us on his way out the door.
/blockquote>
Who's us? The NSA? The people who'd rather keep their heads in bushes and pretend their governments are not their enemies? The people who benefit from all that illegal digital stalking?
Or are you simply an authoritarian who gets angry at the thought of the rule of law?
If one vendor is selling "Atlas Shrugged" for $1 (plus $4) shipping, and the other vendor is selling it for $2 including shipping, which one is cheaper?
Well, since dollar isn't backed by gold and is therefore worthless to the target audience, they're the same price: 5*0 = 2*0 = 0
Nazism is short for National Socialism. They aren't *like* socialists, they *are* socialists.
Or so they claimed, anyway. Do you also trust the rest of Nazi propaganda, or did you pick this particular item because it happened to make for a nice propaganda piece for you?
Anyway, you answered the summary's question by demonstration: USA can't get anything done right because Americans treat politics like a weird role-playing game where you are the hero and anyone who doesn't agree with you is a nazi communist zombie terrorist. Why would you expect fighting against figments of your own imagination to solve any actual problems, rather than making them worse?
Well, also don't forget that the businessman or doctor that get elected is also in that hated 1%, so half the people don't care what experience or knowledge they can bring to the table.
Doctors and other people who's income comes primarily from their own work aren't in the 1%, that's purely the domain of businessmen. And they don't usually stop being businessmen when they become politicians, which leads to conflicts of interest when talking about economics, which in turn causes problems with trustworthiness.
Let's stop subsidizing nuclear power accident liability costs: either you manage to design it to be safe enough to be privately insureable, or it's not safe enough to get built.
Sure thing. We'll just build a few coal plants instead. They're privately insurable despite killing people and destroying the environment when operating normally, since unlike nuclear no one expects them to pay for their externalities. Or we could build a hundred large solar plants, which together equal about one reactor as long as sun shines from cloudless skies. That shouldn't require any subsidies, and if it does, it's okay because it's not nuclear. Of course, they'll still need those coal plants for backup, but that's okay because dying from microparticle-induced cancer is a lot better than dying from radiation-induced cancer, amirite?
Exactly
... as the price of books go down, the demand for books increase. This is basic Econ 101. By setting a price floor, you are limiting the ability to reach customers who would otherwise want to buy more books.
No matter how cheap books are, you are still only able to read one or two per day. Therefore the demand is capped. On the other hand, two books are not inerchangeable unless they're copies of the same book; even if Amazon was giving books away for free, it might still be worse deal than keeping lots of small bookstores in business and thus ensuring that a single seller doesn't have a total power to determine what books and authors get on the market.
Maybe you should take a few more Econ classes.
If I have Ã100 in my pocket how many books am I going to walk out the store with?
Start with these. If it's sheer quantity you want, that should set you up for life.
The point is, people are voting with their money.
A vote which is both unequal - some people have more money to vote with, after all - and by definition corrupt - every single dollar vote you cast has a direct financial impact on you, after all. It's a fine tool for managing logistics, but completely unfit for making decisions that have long-term effects.
One justification for keeping the physical stores around Paris might be tourism but when you put it that way - i.e they are charging the taxpayers to decorate the city with bookstores - it does seem kinda silly. It's really just a preference of the ruling elite.
It's a preference of the elected representatives. And letting money decide everything is a preference of those who have it. Why should anyone who isn't rich follow an idelogy which disenfranchises them? Besides indoctrination, that is.
The right to keep and bear arms is the defining difference between a free man and a slave.
No. The difference between a free man and a slave is that a free man can live without obeying anyone. That requires means to defend yourself, for which a gun may or may not qualify, but it also means some way to get food without serving a master. You don't have that, you don't have freedom.
Meh. Paper books are heavy and take up a lot of space. Good riddance. Protecting paper book sellers is like protecting buggy whip makers when everyone is buying automobiles. How long can you try to hold off progress?
You comparison fails, because paper books are superior in many ways:
Electronic books are fragile, by their very nature dependent on a lot of infrastructure, both technical and social. Paper books are robust and require nothing but a relatively simple skill from the user. It would be foolish to risk losing access to knowledge following a breakdown, especially as future seems increasingly uncertain.
People and politicians have very little imagination. They can't believe a society can flourish with universal knowledge for all. So they have to be shown, first that the world isn't going to be destroyed if knowledge is free, and second that the benefits to society outweigh the benefits to a few corporate leeches of keeping knowledge locked up.
Politicians don't really care if a society can flourish. They sought power either because they have some kind of ideology they want to ram down everyone's throats, or because they saw corruption and wanted a piece of the action - or both. Leeches won't every prioritize common good over their leeching, obviously, and ideological fundamentalists don't want the society to flourish, they want it to follow their ideology, and if anything things improving will make it harder to accomplish that ("if we let people get used to Obamacare, we'll never get rid of it"). So does an educated population, for that matter, so they have an even greater incentive to try and censor whenever they can.
That said, bypassing official controls and making universal knowledge a reality is certainly a good idea. It won't change the minds of politicians, but it'll make them powerless to stop it, which is good enough.
Convert them to US dollars, just about the single most Bitcoin-legitimizing action I can imagine...
Which might actually be a good move. US dollar is going to undergo hyperinflation when the petrodollar scheme collapses and all those bucks return home, so by moving as much of the economy as possible to alternatives helps minimize the damage. At the far extreme, if the entire US economy uses something else than the dollar the Fed is free to treat it as monopoly money and simply laugh as its debt dissolves. And Bitcoin is a good substitute - it's not controlled by any (other) country, it's designed for the Interent economy, it's impossible to forge, all transactions are public knowledge...
I doubt the US government has such foresight and capacity for long-term planning, but an agency leader might.
Would you trust, for example, a VPN service that has accepted payments from the FBI?
Is there some reason to not to? The FBI can simply order a VPN to betray its customers, it doesn't need to bribe them.
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!
