I bet i could outfit this thing with a lawn dart.

That's not as magic as people want it to seem; but it is a force to be reckoned with. Do note that most goods are priced substantially above the minimum business viable price: there's huge mark-up on all kinds of shit, at all levels, even in markets with healthy competition. Apartments are practically divorced from price competition, for example, and tend to only shift prices with general demand (e.g. they get cheaper in a tough economy, they get more expensive when more middle class move to an area, but they don't become cheaper when more landlords own the same limited number of apartments).

The sympathy isn't for the poor, destitute, unworking American; it's for the hard worker who isn't making enough. We'd rather have 100,000 starving, jobless leeches and 20,000 upstanding, comfortable workers than 50,000 starving leeches and 70,000 struggling workers.

They still need to eat, too.

What you are missing is that a warrant for something un-Constitutional is invalid even if issued in accordance with unanimous decisions from the SCOTUS., therefor actions taken to execute said warrant are illegal and are criminal acts carried out under color of law. Dred Scott comes to mind, though hardly the only example of the SCOTUS ruling contrary to letter and/or intent of the Constitution.

Courts are not the final arbiters. People are. What can the government do if most of the population (including a large percentage of workers within said government and members of the military) refuses to comply?

There are already laws on the books regarding citizen rights & responsibilities pertaining to dealing with agents of the government committing criminal acts under color of law. I would refer you there.

Strat

So you would accept it as Constitutional if the courts rule that police randomly entering & searching your home without a warrant or probable cause to believe a crime is or is about to be committed is not a violation of the 4th Amendment?

No US court has the power to overrule the US Constitution, secret or otherwise. Any such rulings are by definition unlawful and un-Constitutional. An un-Constitutional law is no law at all, and it is the duty of every US citizen to ignore and/or disobey/violate it if/when it conflicts with the rights and freedoms enshrined in the Constitution.

Strat

You're thinking too much about laws and not enough about socialization. People make agreements between each other; lying is a violation of such agreements. By recognizing that a person has a certain expectation and then violating that expectation without addressing that it is wrong, you are lying.

I know a fair bit of history; you've said nothing useful here.

No, the nicotine does that. Everything else just causes cancer.

Nicotine in cigarettes is the equivalent of flaying open your skin when you're sitting in raw sewage: there's all kinds of nasty shit in the sewage, but removing your biggest layer of defense is kind of a bad thing.

It's Star Wars. The characters have always been tropes. The epic hero who finds the power within himself versus the evil empire. Hell, the original movies are easily likened to such epics as Final Fantasy 6 (which came later).

Most people are complaining because Jar-Jar is a goof, Anakin has a lot of teenage angst, the Jedi Council is entirely docile, Padme flips between a stiff diplomat and a flappy-mouthed chick, etc. Thing is, Jar-Jar is from an entire race of people who appear mentally retarded and act like overgrown children; Anakin was a slave child whose only social life was family life (with his mother) before he was ripped away from her, put up on a pedestal, manipulated by an evil sociopath, put into huge emotional conflicts, then faced with the death of his mother and the prophetic and eventual death of his girlfriend; the Jedi Council is made of deeply orthodox monks who value emotional stability and deep contemplation above all things; and Padme is exactly what real-life diplomats and politicians are.

People wanted Anakin to be this bland, cookie-cutter hero who magically turns villain at a small trigger, instead of growing through emotional turmoil and coming out evil. "Oh no, my wife died! Time to be Darth Vader!" is preferred over "Oh man, my childhood was so hard, there were all these people, saying all these things, I'm so confused, I've lost everything, I'm now just pissed at everything, fuck it all!" How do you complain about a teenager acting like a teenager?

Government bureaucrats & officials, and the innumerable laws, rules, and regulations at local, State and Federal levels at their disposal to interpret however they wish unless/until there's enough public attention and outrage to force the issue.

The same government that prevents Tesla Motors from selling cars directly and also in many areas limits the choices available for domestic home high speed internet services. The same government that completely ignores the US Constitution and shits all over the 4th Amendment with NSA bulk surveillance.

You know, the guys you help elect and vehemently defend because "he's your guy" and you don't want those other guys to get in even though they agree on everything except carefully focus-group tested and selected wedge issues designed to keep the electorate divided.

Strat

If you ever look at interviews or post-war writings by historical figures when their diaries are also available, you'll find a huge disconnect in perception. During the war, you get "nobody saw this happening" and "it's all winding down now, and will be blown over in a few days"; after the war, you get "everyone was on-edge with the thickening tensions in the air" and "the end was nowhere in sight, and we were desperately afraid it would go on forever." People remember a completely different narrative.

You know what I mean. What is the word for a play done on the screen, instead of live on stage?

Actually, all the money spent on welfare, plus about $100bn (not very much), amounts to $7,125 per person per year in 2012. The rough growth is 3.5% per year or something crazy (total amount of personal income increases by roughly 3.5% per year), so estimate $7900 in 2015, or $658/mo in 2015 for each natural-born, resident, American citizen over the age of 18.

Even at over $1/sqft (I paid less than $1/sqft to rent an apartment), a livable, 224sqft apartment can sell for $300/mo, leaving $358/mo for food, utilities (heating 224sqft isn't hard--I heated my living space for $60/mo for 4 years), soap, toothpaste, clothing, and the like.

By using a dedicated flat tax replacing OASDI, we tie it to total income: regardless of wages, operating costs, or price dynamics, we get the same money. If businesses automate and don't lower prices, they make a bigger profit (not paying labor), and the dividend increases by that proportion (10% more profit means 10% more in the dividend); if wages increase, profits slim down, and the rich come closer to the income of the middle class, we're taxing the middle class same as the rich to fund the dividend. No matter what the shape of the economic situation, we get the same amount of money.

$1.28 trillion comes out of the federal budget, and an extra $0.34 trillion imagined from the state's welfare budget. I actually leave that up to the states: there will be less need, therefor they can slim their welfare programs, possibly even eliminate them; but I'm against mandating anything in that regard. $1.62 trillion total in 2012, $1.72 trillion was what I estimated as a minimum; and the current situation probably changes the numbers a bit, such that we can implement a somewhat smaller tax and reach the same market situation (I haven't examined this yet, but it's a distinct possibility).

The total tax difference is some 3% in the worst case, and that's unbalanced; I can get it down to 1% by adjusting the base income tax brackets (which are slashed in half, mostly), and the worst case falls on the high-income earners. The current public disposition is a 50% or greater tax, rather than a 39.6% tax, on this class; I propose a 40%-42% tax, only if necessary to meet my end goals, which is vastly smaller.

It works. It makes the poor and unemployed a continuous profit source, creating a market opportunity to support them and become very rich in the process. It has a 15-year transition plan for social security (after which current retirees are grandfathered), and a risk control in that it doesn't decree the dissolution of state welfare (which largely drops state welfare costs, but leaves states room to catch my miscalculations and implement some sort of food security for large, unemployed families--a thing that shouldn't exist, but the world is a shit hole). It encourages work by continuing to pay out the same monthly dollar amount whether you sit at home watching TV or go CEO for a major oil company making billions of dollars.

Of all the UBI plans out there, mine is the only viable one. The idea is not new, but it's so newly integrated into the political mindset that people treat it like a secret sauce you can pour on top to make everything better. It's a very dangerous and volatile concept, and *will* destroy the economy if implemented incorrectly. I need people to catch up so they can suggest improvements, instead of "hey let's give everyone $20k/year and pay them $5k/year for each kid they have!" stupidity that will only lead to hyperinflation and a Reichmark economy.

It's a demonstration of someone who thought the acting in the screenplay for Rocky Horror Picture Show was vastly superior to the acting in Avengers, and who has watched books get criticism for "unrealistic characters" who act uncannily like real human beings put under extreme stress.