I don't know what's Orwellian about it, but that's the general idea. A private company can only charge customers, a government can charge/tax everyone. So certain projects (ie ones that require infrastructure) may be to expensive for a private company to undertake if they get too few customers. But a group of citizens can get together and say "It would benefit the whole town if everyone/most had blah (water, electricity, sewage, postal service, internet, etc)". So once a certain majority agrees, a law is passed, and they can spread the cost out over everyone. So a well run government operation will be able to undercut a private business every time.

The issue is how well run the government can do things. With no competition there's room for pork, waste, etc. That why it's important to still allow private companies to compete in certain areas, and for there to be citizen oversight over others. For example, if your water bill gets too high you start throwing out the current bureaucrats to bring it back under control. My Dad's actually involved in doing that right now in his city.

If that were true the Treasury (part of the Executive branch) wouldn't be able to issue debt. Up until WWI Congress decided how much debt to issue. During WWI a lot of expenses started adding up (tanks, planes, etc) and Congress found debating how sell bonds to be boring. So they gave that responsibility over to the Treasury and said "If we've made it part of a law and it requires money, issue as much debt as needed to pay for it". Later, they imposed a "debt limit", but it's odd to impose the debt limit on the Treasury given the fact that the Treasury is only finding ways to fill in the funding gaps laid out by Congresses budget.

Just like how it wouldn't matter if you told your kids the evolution is a myth and that all species were created the way that they've always been?

Then wouldn't our very own moon be a planet and not a moon by that definition?

The interest was designed to route around Nuclear bombs, but apparently not copper thieves.

If we're going to define capitalism as what was laid out by Adam Smith in On the Wealth of Nations (generally considered to be the founding document of capitalism), it certainly didn't praise corporate greed. Adam Smith takes a lot of time to bash on corporations, and how they need to be regulated. Not just that they need to be regulated, but exactly the manner in which they need to be.

They are the best. Old laws were written way before all of the 'politics' which happens today. New laws are complex, and complexity is fraud. Some old laws are wrong, and have been thrown out, but if the longer the law has survived the better it is.

Web standards have been constantly evolving.

Sadly, they learned that if they don't change some user visible items, many people won't consider upgrading because "Why would I upgrade, it looks exactly like the existing one, so it must be the same thing".

The way to block ads, is to black list certain third party sources for web pages. That way regardless of the technology used behind the ads, it's never requested for.

And do you know what happens when you start using a client that doesn't have your digital signature? Nobody cares. At most they'll think "Oh good, that annoying icon (or whatever) isn't there". Not a single one of the people you communicate will get suspicious at all that the email from you isn't you, if it isn't signed.

If the client sends mail to the server over an encrypted connection, and the transport servers all communicate over TLS, and the receiving client connects to its server over an encrypted connection, the message will be pretty secure from prying eyes. The problem is that the big guns (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) aren't willing to pull the trigger and accept TLS only connections. The first step in getting better encrypted communications is to upgrade every system to be able to understand the latest TLS.

Really? The best phrase that exists for Russia and Eastern Europe is "parts of the former Soviet Union"? Might as well just say "part of the former Pangaea".

It still works over Wi-Fi if you have Wi-Fi calling enabled.

My shop teacher in the mid 90's mentioned how big a deal it was to get exacto knives. Whatever bureaucratic change that had recently happened denied his request to get a class set. He responded with the fact that those would be the least dangerous items we the students would use during the course of the semester. In the end he got the knives, but there had to be a big deal about checking them in/out every class. There certainly wasn't nearly as big a deal made about using the table saw, or other powered tools in the shop, since they were purchased before the latest regime.