"Free market" as it is bandied about today has no defined meaning within economics - it is a general concept, usually employed as a political slogan. As Investopedia says Just like supply-side economics, free market is a term used to describe a political or ideological viewpoint on policy and is not a field within economics..

It is in the government's interest to introduce market forces into its acquisition system to create competition, and efficiency incentives, and avoid cronyism. This is what the bidding process does.

His explanation also falls apart about the over-spec'd trivialities.

A PC OS vs a Mac OS is a major difference in how the computer behaves, what software you can run on it. Such a requirements difference in a RFQ could easily be sustained.

An arbitrary monitor refresh rate cannot be shown to be a functionally meaningful requirement. A contract with such a provision would be laughed out of court if a losing bidder were to challenge it. If a bid request is steered to one vendor without a substantial, valid reason it is illegal.

In a world where you only wrote your own code from scratch for your own use would that be true.

Very, very few developers live in that world. Most work is done by software teams which maintain and extend legacy systems, where a legion of programmers have come before you. Any feature that any of those programmers use/used, and has not yet been stripped out of the code base, you are indeed forced to use as well.

Yep. Much like the "Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act", which was designed to make bankruptcy relief (used commonly by corporations to escape debt) virtually inaccessible to consumers. It was proposed in 1997 and rejected year after year until finally it passed in 2005. What the corporations and political establishment want, they will get - sooner or later.

Gibbon's Decline and Fall of Roman Enpire is the greatest work of classical historical scholarship on Rome - assembling and synthesizing all ancient sources available in the late 18th century - but quoting him as the final authority on "why Rome fell" is grossly misplaced reverence.

Gibbon saw things through the lens of contemporary social standards and historical concepts then current. Since then historical methods have advanced, scholars have had time to examine each aspect of the problem in much greater detail, and Gibbon of course had no access to the vast data we now have revealed by archaeology and modern science.

The core of the Fermi Paradox is that there does not appear to be any basic physical limitation that would prevent an intelligent civilization from colonizing the entire galaxy in much less than a 100 million years - yet there is no case that can yet be made that Earth is anything like a boundary case of the "earliest possible biosphere". It is not a solution to the Fermi Paradox to postulate reasons why one intelligent species or another might fail to do so, it has to apply to every one of them since one outlier would go on to colonize the galaxy.

I think part of the resolution of the paradox is the implicit notion common to us humans that our form of tool-using symbolic-communicating intelligence is some sense "inevitable" and will arise given enough time. Yet observing the evolution of the large animals on Earth does not give any reason for thinking this is some sort of normal progression. The Great Apes, very similar to hominids, have not shown any trend toward evolving larger brains since the hominid-ape split 7 million years ago. No general trend toward developing human style intelligence is evident anywhere. The emerging story of hominid development is that a long series of lucky accidents seems to have been necessary to bring it about.

Human-style intelligence may be extremely unlikely to evolve at all.

Blame Obamacare?!

Only if you are a moron.

If you bothered to read TFA you would see that The Economist is using data from 2006. I don't think Obamacare is so powerful that it changed working hours for the poor 3 years before it was written, and 7 years before it went into effect.

Correct, sir. This is a fully bipartisan, multi-Administration travesty of law and government. And it has been building since early in the Cold War, see United States v. Reynolds which created the "state secrets privilege" by a court ruling in 1952. It is very telling that the "facts" presented to the court in secret were, in fact, lies (learned on 48 years after the fact). In secret the government can lie to heart's content without worrying about its dishonesty being questioned or revealed.

It is form of a specialized axe, known as a maul. Still an axe, but only good for splitting short logs. Still, if you are busting wood for heating you would do well to have the right tool for the job.

Allow me: "Who-o-o-o-sh".

Whew! Its a good thing they never claimed they were doing any such thing.

"physics at the one-millimeter rock grain scale" does not mean that they were using a model grid of that same scale.

To show that the assumption that it must, or even should, is incorrect consider any engineering model that involves the effects of static friction.

The phenomena that cause static friction exist on the molecular and atomic level, and theoretical predictions of friction under arbitrary conditions need to be analyzed and calculated at that scale.

But once you have determined what the coefficient is under a given set of conditions, you only need to use the single number in a macro scale model.

That is what they did here. If you read TFA you will see that their macro model used coefficients calculated using the detailed physics.

I would take the "Globalfirepower" rankings a tad more seriously if they revealed the model they used to combine and weight all those factors, and if they weren't a "link farm" site that lists itself as being "for entertainment only" and the people running it weren't completely anonymous. There is no reason to attach any credibility to the ranking scores they offer.

When Obama became President, no one in the CIA was tracking down bin Laden in Pakistan. In 2005 George W. Bush shut down the CIA unit tasked with tracking bin Laden (code named Alec Station and established in 1996 by Bill Clinton). "C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden".

It took an executive action by Obama to recreate an intelligence unit to pick up the hunt, and then a tough call to send the SEAL team in when the intelligence about bin Laden's presence was still uncertain. A weaker man would have temporized about the uncertainty and done nothing (GW Bush and Tora Bora?).

BTW - the right's adulation of GW Bush as a hero, strutting in front of his "Mission Accomplished" banner, when he had never fired a shot in the invasion, while pretending Obama had nothing to do with the termination of bin Laden "because he wasn't on Seal Team Six" is a double standard so glaring that it makes one stand dumb-founded at the intellectual dishonesty involved. Yeah, and Reagan defeated the Soviet Union single-handedly. Right.

In addition, doesn't anyone bother to look up just how much of the U.S. "balls" China is holding? China holds just 6% of the U.S. Federal debt! ($1.1 trillion out of $17.6 trillion).

Ooh! Sc-a-r-r-y!

A graceless concession after a showed up the foolishness of your post, and more than a bit of a non sequitur, but I accept it anyway. Have fun waving whatever it is you are waving now.