clearly it was a false-flag operation by the Secret Service themselves </tinfoilhat>

Nah, when a citizen gets murdered, there's supposed to be a trial.

Okay. You're alleging racist treatments of minorities based on prosecutors failing to indict cops who kill black people.

There's supposed to get a trial when a prosecutor thinks that he can convict the guy of some crime. "Police officer shoots random innocent in what appears to be a tragic accident possibly involving negligence" is apparently not one of those cases, for some reason or another -- probably the cozy relationship between prosecutors and the police, which is dubious enough.

But I want to contend that it's not really racist: they really wouldn't hold a trial in a similar case if the guy shot was white, and if you keep playing at it for racial reasons you will fail to effect meaningful policy changes that will address the issue, which would be more unfortunate for minorities than it would for me or most Slashdot readers (because we're demographically less likely to come into contact with law enforcement, in part because we're fancy computer programmer types who make a lot of money and can afford to live in neighborhoods which aren't riddled with crime).

I love the concept in theory, but a society rich enough to afford one is pretty unimaginable in today's world. Western societies are clearly incapable of even providing the current levels of welfare let alone a vastly larger level.

Well, to be fair to the basic-income schemes people propose, they're supposed to turn the current levels of overall welfare spending into more effective levels of welfare by disintermediating the funds from the millions of government employees who are paid to manage it (and paid reasonably well, at that).

What needs to die are the network equipment manufacturers who change the meaning of OIDs on minor firmware version updates (because they're autogenerated from some XML somewhere and someone deleted an element in the middle of a list).

Oh really? Broken-window fallacy much? Think of what our economy could do if these people spent that laptop cash on something better...

It's particularly lovely in this case because you need to record not just the customer's location and the tax rate there, but also some corroborating evidence that the customer is in fact in that location, then register with the appropriate authority in that location. The reporting burden is going to mean fewer small sites capable of doing their own checkout process.

If %G is good enough for Twitter, it's good enough for me!

It's Capitalism 101.

While the general snark in this comment is evident, I have to protest about conflating private ownership of the means of production with government agencies wasting money doing useless tasks (to say nothing of the risks associated with it).

Perhaps the inability to differentiate these two is actually something that's common these days, though, which would explain a lot about modern discourse on the topic -- likewise the conflation of "jobs" and "wealth" (the former being a means to an end).

I have switched from air to train travel in Europe because flying has become too uncomfortable for tall people.

From my preliminary understanding of things, you wouldn't be using Qatar Airways for flights within Europe anyway. They're more of a long-haul hub-and-spoke model airline that could take you from Europe to Africa or east Asia with a one-stop trip. For intra-European air travel you'd use a different airline, and probably a different model of airplane, optimized for fuel efficiency on shorter-haul trips (and possibly a narrowbody plane, if the airports in question aren't so busy that they're trying to max out every landing slot).

Open up a map and check out where Qatar is. It's kind of smack dab in the middle of the Eastern Hemisphere's inhabited landmasses. This makes for a really nice hub-and-spoke model air service.

You know, some day some group is going to rise up against a crony-infested system designed to funnel money to the wanton rapacious capitalist elites, and will replace it with a crony-resistant system -- instead of just replacing it with a differently awful crony-infested system using the leftism de jure.

the perennial favorite thermo-nuclear war. Though the last one would actually be pretty boring. The players would have to do nothing to compete.

The real problem with thermonuclear war as Olympic sport? The only way to win is not to play.

Every nation has a currency. The US economy is just as prone to stagnation, deficit, over, and under valuing as any other currency.

See, you used two words in that sentence. One of them is economy, the other is currency. They're related, but they're not the same. The thing that matters to most US residents is the economy -- specifically that it will be growing enough that it's possible to find a job in it which will secure a certain amount of output to secure one's well-being. (Residents saving for retirement benefit from both). The thing that matters to someone who borrow or lend or hold dollars isn't the economy per se, it's the fact that he can use that dollar in the future to buy a predictable amount of goods and services: price stability. (Stability is better than an increase in value of those dollars, because borrowing and lending need to balance each other out... besides, if you really wanted returns you'd find a real investment, not cash.)

The US has flirted with price stability issues in the past (look at the 1970s and early 1980s), but not to the extent that Russia is experiencing right now. Russia has issued additional rubles through the state-backed Rosneft bond offering (a bailout averting a bankruptcy for one of Putin's top cronies) which was the proximate cause of the ruble free-fall, and because of sanctions, falling oil prices, and general economic decline outside of the oil sector, the ability of a ruble to purchase valuable goods and services (like oil) in the future is in question. China, meanwhile, has its own set of currency controls (hence a thriving black market in RMB-USD) and central-bank interventions of a scope and magnitude which make QE and QE2 look small.

So what else are you going to use? Euros? No way, I thought you were worried about stagnation and deficits and stuff. Gold? Oh, yeah, obviously it's been an absolute MODEL of price stability lately, hahahahahahahahahaha... Bitcoin? Makes gold look good. Pounds sterling? Mmmaybe, in a pinch. Then most of the other currencies are on the small side, so it's harder to use them in high volumes.

Perhaps there's something to the pervasive media narrative about Silicon Valley after all. Not only do they have no ability to relate to the non-asian and non-white crowd but they also have no ability to relate to whites that aren't rich enough for east coast boarding schools either.

Wait, boarding schools? I don't think that's Silicon Valley you're talking about, my friend. I could see Wall Street being accused of that, maybe...

The taxi drivers feel like they own the customers. Not the whole customer, mind you (that'd be slavery). Just a little piece.