If the major oil players stopped production cold, you wouldn't have so much of a "brief period of instability" as say, "mass societal collapse and widespread starvation".

Whether Exxon by itself would be enough to trigger a collapse is a good question, but I'd say the consequences there would still be somewhat worse than a "brief period of instability".

Well, yes. I think everyone must concede that the text of the section applies to the states and not the federal government. I was talking about interpretations stemming from the interplay of state and federal obligations related to money, not this passage by itself.

I wasn't making an argument one way or the other; I was clarifying what the AC was talking about. Your snark is appreciated, however.

That is to say, you have a certain interpretation as to the meaning of the words, and are not completely unaware of the words.

In the future, it might be best to just lead with your interpretation instead of snark about "double-secret probation editions" of the constitution. It would be more conducive to productive conversation that way.

A believe he's referring to Article 1, Section 10:

"No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.

Apparently, losing 70% of their market cap in one day and shopping themselves around frantically hoping to be "acquired" before they go bankrupt is just "day-to-day minutia" for their CEO.

the girl clearly violated a Court Order and also well-established law

Not as clear cut, actually. Here's Eugene Volokh's take:

An order barring a victim from revealing the names of her assailants is, I think, clearly unconstitutional, even when the assailants are juveniles. Oklahoma Publishing Co. v. District Court (1977) expressly rejected the notion that courts or legislatures may bar the publication of the names of juvenile offenders; that case involved a newspaper's publishing the name of the juvenile offender, which it learned from a court hearing, but the rationale applies at least as strongly to a person's publishing a name that she learned from the attack itself. Likewise, even when it comes to grand jury proceedings - probably the most historically secret part of the criminal justice system - Butterworth v. Smith (1990) held that, while a grand jury witness could be barred from revealing what he learned as part of the grand jury proceedings, the witness could not be generally barred from revealing information that he had learned on his own (even if that was the subject of his testimony).

Arguing about which party is "responsible" for our current economic woes is like arguing over which driver of the car is pushing down the gas pedal harder as it careens towards the cliff. In the end, it's the direction that matters, not how fast or slow we're headed there.

What we're seeing is nothing more than the death rattle of economies built on paper currency debt. It has happened before, and it will happen again.

I won't defend RMS's support for things like the GPL, because I do find him hypocritical on that point. It's one of the reasons I dislike the GPL, actually.

Additionally, my comment about the price of an infinitely reproducable good going to zero is still spot on, regardless of how much money was required to develop it. The price of something is not set by the cost of its creation, initial or otherwise, but by the intersection of supply and demand. The goal, then, is to sell things that are scarce. As an example, consider that the creation of art is a scarce good; charge for that (e.g. Kickstarter) and not for the copies after creation is completed.

And finally, I do not believe that you can own a configuration of bits on a hard drive. To believe such a thing is to believe that everybody who has ever organized the bits on a hard drive in a certain manner has a property right in my physical hard drive, such that they can demand that I not organize the bits on it in the same manner. Thus, these fake "intellectual property" rights are actually violations of real, physical property rights. If I own the pen, and I own the paper, I can damn well write whatever I please with them, regardless of what someone half a world away may have already written in the past.

The artist should be perfectly free to charge any fee he wants to send a copy of his art to a potential customer. He should also be free to make that customer sign a contract stipulating that said customer won't make copies for any else (a contract that can and should be enforced).

What he does not have the moral right to do, however, is attempt to make that contract binding on third parties who have not agreed to it. This presents a practical problem with such a business model, but it is a business model problem. Attempting to charge for copies runs up against a hard truth of economics: the price of a good that can be copied at zero cost trends to zero. Artists can either whine about the law of supply and demand, or use better business models.

any answer to this "problem" that does not involve a mutually agreeable voluntary transaction between the purchaser and the seller is immoral

I agree, in cases where the artist is a party to the transaction. If he refuses to let me see his new work, I absolutely don't have the right to hack into his server and copy it off. However, when I connect up to a torrent, it is in fact a voluntary transaction between my computer and the other computers in the swarm. The artist is not a party to the transaction, does not have property rights in either my computer or the computers that I'm receiving data from, and therefore doesn't factor in.

No it isn't; artists are perfectly free to create new works and then never share them with anyone.

The barriers to entry in a market are created by the government in the first place. You're putting the cart before the horse.

Big business uses government regulation to create cartels and monopolies. You're basically saying that we need a government big enough to save us all from destructive influence of big government.

Just so I have this straight, China unfairly damages the US economy when they:

1. Trade low-cost goods with us.
2. Don't trade low-cost goods with us.

Those bastards! *shakes fist*

"Nice company you got there; it'd be a shame if the anti-trust department took a keen interest in it. Say, we have some requests for user information here . . ."

"Manipulation of their currency" in this case is pegging the yuan to the dollar, meaning they print yuan and use it to buy dollars, which they then convert into US treasuries. In practical terms, this means that China is taking upon themselves the inflation that we would otherwise see due to our massive budget deficit, and as a bonus we get cheap goods. This is supported pretty heavily by the inflation data for both of our countries.

Far from taking advantage of us, we're taking advantage of them.