more tolerant, more enlightened, and certainly more technically competent?

would he just shrug and accept his fate?

No, because those mercenaries would be acting like a government that is taxing him, and that would make them evil. He'd have to make a second Galt's Gulch island to protest his first island's statistism.

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Fine; but Cuba is one, at least as far as I know, that doesn't have a significantly built-out Internet structure, even though the hardware to do so is pretty far down the road to commoditization. They're very late to the game, and this should (ok, could) afford them some advantages. So what I was trying to say (and apparently, saying badly) was that it will be interesting to see how they go about it.

He said "One study estimated that it could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years"

Yes, he is promoting the idea that the ice caps are going to be gone.

You can see him claim 5-7 years here (from 2009) :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsioIw4bvzI

BTW, it is now 5 years later and there was still ice this summer.

"Too many" is not "wrong kind"

We should be able to articulate what we intended much better than was done here, especially those people criticizing literature and editing skills. If this was a formatting error (as was indicated) then that was the problem, the letter should have indicated it. And since it was a formatting problem, it was easy to fix, as was proven in this matter.

There was no need to remove the book, and a human (not an automated response) could (and should) have politely asked for a correction. Amazon simply came across as a boor.

And "The Interview" was a problem for Kim (North Korea, not Kardashian) so what? The problem with listening to every whiner is that they get too much power in the process, and normal people start being impacted by all the various "rules" the whiners come up with that serve no purpose other than to annoy everyone else.

Hey, I just described political correctness :-D

It'll be interesting to see how they choose to go. Perhaps they'll actually get something set up that is owned by the people, as their social system alleges a strong preference for.

It'd be fascinating to see how it works without big corporations in there making choices for them on a constant basis, if they can manage to avoid that.

Somehow, though, I keep coming back to the fact that no socialist or communist system has ever been seriously tried without some kind of de-facto dictatorship making the end goal impossible to reach. Equality is fine until the idiots who disagree want to be equal, too... All systems seem to have that particular fundamental problem. Equal unless different, otherwise ostracized.

My cynical side tells me palms will be greased, corporations will heavily engage, and your Cuban surfer will have a pretty typical bill to pay. Be delighted to be proven wrong, though.

But let's suppose you're right for a moment. This is your shell game. These are companies responding to the incentives you put in place. This is your supposed problem that you created. You have two choices as I see it: eliminate the welfare that leads to these alleged subsidies or suck it up.

I am right. But it's not my shell game, although it certainly is a problem that affects me. You naively assume that I, or more generally, the voting public, have control. I/we do not. First, we cannot craft legislation. This is not a democracy. It is, nominally in form at least, a republic. So we can only vote for representatives. However, the great majority of representatives are immediately and completely suborned and corrupted by corporate influence in the form of campaign support, straight-up bribes, assurances of employment, special deals, speaking engagements, and so on. The companies and other rich, well-connected entities actually set the rules. It is their shell game. It's a shell game called oligarchy masquerading as a republic-in-place. Only the politically naive still believe that it works by shuffling the representatives around. If it affects corporate earnings in any significant way, the tiller is taken from the representative's hands, and the course is set by the corporations themselves. That's how it actually works. I appreciate the warmness and fuzziness that might be grasped by imagining that the government is operating as a republic, but it just isn't so.

I think this is the most obnoxious part of the welfare state. The tool that created the unintended consequence gets used again and again, creating more and more unintended consequences as it goes. There never is any learning from failure by the masters of the tool of welfare. It's always the fault of all those counterrevolutionaries/greedy corporations/Tea Baggers/whatever who don't behave the way they're supposed to behave.

You think this because you subscribe to an illusory model of how things work. Until you become aware of the actual levers and forces of power that are in operation in and upon our government, the actual causes and effects, you will remain bewildered by the surface picture.

If the minimum wage were raised. (1) Business profits will drop -- as they should. (2) Government assistance will drop -- as it should. (3) The real costs of goods would be exposed -- as they should be. (4) The ability to lower taxes arises -- as it should.

Here's the problem: (1) will never be allowed to happen due to (2) (and the actual execution of (4) isn't very likely either.) The reason 1 will never be allowed to happen is that everything from lobbyists to "fact-finding" trips to post-political career sweeteners and far-flung friends and relatives and purveyors of opportunity will be sudden winners in the game of luck, all working to enrich the legislator. They will almost all fold, just as they always do, and the corporate choices become the legislator's choices. And in the process, a great hue and cry will arise from the bewildered, such as yourself, crying "throw the bums out", completely oblivious to the fact that the next set will act exactly the same, because the incentives being offered amount, in the end, to the ability grasp great wealth and power through the auspices of the corporations. There are very few poor legislators by the time their time in congress is over. This is why. Aside from internal corruption like voting themselves the ability to engage in insider trading, of course.

We can't change the game and we can't quit. The finger pointing between left and right is no more than a source of amusement to the corporations. Unless it's a purely social issue, they own enough of the playing field to positively control it. Should it happen that they don't, they will acquire more. They are rich and can concentrate their efforts. We cannot. We have nothing to offer that is legal other than election (generally from pre-selected party members, worse yet), and should we try to play it their way, enriching them and empowering them, even assuming we could, we'd be meeting the FBI immediately.