You still can do pretty much any of those things on your own land, just as you could in the 1800s. You can build your own gun, drive an unregistered car, and perform practically any work for your own personal enjoyment.

What part of liberty allow you to do anything you damned well please on *somebody else's* property? Cause if you think you can fire a gun or perform Shakespeare or ride your 4 wheeler in my back yard then FUCK YOU! Because that's the American way.

Possession is 90% of the law, defense is the other 10%. If you can get it and defend it, it's yours. It's the same principle on which ownership of every country on Earth is based.

No, the local cop saw someone speeding, chased him down, and then charged the person with drug possession after tossing a dime bag in the back seat after pulling them over.

The 3:2 version was better. As is the 4:3 iPad. I currently have a 16:9 windows tablet and iPhone, and they'd be much more useful as either of those two ratios. I rarely use my iPad anymore because it's so hobbled by the OS as to be utterly inefficient at anything productive, but it kicks the windows tablet's ass when it comes to reading/browsing anything. Jobs had it right, but the son of a bitch died and left a bunch of 12 year old girls running the company.

I think you were on to something with #1. What if it were hollow and came with a small funnel. It'd be a sight more useful in some meetings I've been to if filled with liquor rather than silicon and battery.

I'm amazed at how much people seem to need to watch fullscreen video on their phones. Don't get me wrong; there are times I'm stuck somewhere with just my phone, but unless you're commuting on a train - where do you find yourself for long periods of time where you have nothing better to do than watch tv/movies and only have your phone with you?

(yes, I know: work. ha ha.)

Medical "insurance" is generally not insurance, though. Well, it is, but it's a bastardization - a maintenance plan + insurance, kind of like like whole life (savings account + insurance).

Reassessing your risk, is not cheating you out of past premiums. Premiums (in the theoretical perfectly efficient market) are in the now and based on current risk for the term of the policy. It's that probability thing that people just don't get. Changing risk pools *should* be associated with your actual risk. You begin every year as a new assessment, and you end every year with a sunk cost. It's a die roll, and if it comes up snake eyes, you "win" restitution; if it doesn't you "win" by not having some tragedy befall you. Either way, you place your chips and roll the dice; but at the end of the round you can get up and leave.

The ACA changes the rules because healthcare, 51% of us have determined, should be different. So the range of premiums is compressed, and the healthcare cos must always keep the table open for you if you have chips to play. But for everything else, it's just another table game with the house favored by a few percent and a bankroll large enough to weather a bad run of dice.

1.25-1.5:1 How hard is that? We've got centuries of experience in making page sizes for reading and viewing, and most of them fall into that range. Unless you're Hasselblad, ditch the square. If you're not a television, please don't use 16:9.

#getoffmylawn

What's so funny (strange, not ha-ha) is that half of the bottom 80% are absolutely convinced that half of the 1% are on their side, and the other half similarly. The 9% are similarly split, but don't care as much because they make good enough coin to keep them in place. The 10% already mistrust everyone else, so they'll beat the shit out of the 80% as long as they can stay fed and above the squalor of the unwashed masses.

2 issues:
1. Where would you find the money to do it if all the wealth is concentrated at the top?

Organization and startup funds and getting things going from scratch just gets harder. In corporate terms, the "barriers to entry" for a new colony are higher today than at any time in the past.

2. What would you do with the unproductive?

If this is a world for the 99%, or even the 90%, you've still got to find something for the bottom 40% to do. You can leave out all the lazy people (if you think you can), but you've still got masses of the unqualified. Otherwise your utopia is just cherry picking the workers and it's 3-4 generations away from sliding back to the 80/20 mix of dullards (and I mean that in the nicest way) that causes economic segregation to occur.

I think those are bigger issues than the governmental hurdles or lack of an untamed wasteland to conquer.

But everyone wants to pay the rates of the healthiest, safest, best maintained because if you have to pay more than that you must be getting ripped off.

Most people can't understand statistics or probabilities that extend past a single coin flip. Hedges, short and long positions, defensive financial tactics are way beyond your typical American who can barely balance a checkbook. Understanding that insurance is a combination of both - not gonna happen. The only dichotomy that people "understand" about insurance is that it is an evil expense due every month that gives them nothing in return, and a magical pixie horse that pays you money if something bad happens to you.

In this case, the reliability will probably increase. Also, the certainty of production will increase. And even if it costs $10,000 a year for a skilled assembler in China, one of these will likely replace 2-3 workers and pay back in a single year for a device which (at least for Apple's purposes) has a 2 year life cycle. 100% ROI will make any CEO drool.

Tech support is somewhat different. Only 10% of people will need it, and only 1% will need it more than once in a year. It doesn't matter how crappy it is as long as most of the issues get resolved. And if you happen to be a serial user of tech support, I'd expect the company would rather you dog the competition than use up their phone lines. Besides, for the most basic level support the only reason there is a human on the other end is because people like to interact with humans. It's just a voice prompt system leading you through a menu of troubleshooting, with the rep on the back end pressing the "continue" button for you. Beyond that, of course, people with actual training are needed but for first level...

Man, I wish I had mod points today, 'cause you're dead on. Having worked with a lot of people "outside of my class" as a consultant in a (mostly) non-technical field, there are a LOT of people out there who couldn't do the advanced jobs these semi-skilled labor machines "create." We are marching ever faster to a place where 80% of the people in the first world will be unemployable simply because it costs less to build and maintain a machine over its life than it costs to hire a worker for a single year. It will get to the point where we can retask, recycle, or recreate a machine to do many jobs in less time than it takes to re-train the average human to do the same job at even half the efficiency.

The productivity gains from the industrial and information revolutions have not resulted in shorter work weeks for all, but rather a larger unemployed population. It's hard to imagine this will end well.

This is very true. Though, to be fair, when a sub surfaces ("lands") it can do it nearly anywhere, and there's a larger margin of acceptable surfacing speeds (relative to it's operating limits).

Software already flies your airplane for 95% or more of your journey.