It will, it's just been lucky so far. Don't live on Titan.

America's tech leaders want to reduce wages.

You don't get it. Mass murderers always have a pretext. Hitler had some justification or other, but we still hanged his generals for invading Poland. Starting an offensive war is a crime against the peace, even if you can find a piece of paper that says you were already at war.

"No one has ever argued that Saddam was co-operating with the inspectors."

The inspectors themselves argued this. You have been lied to. You should look into it and find out who lied to you and why. A lot of people died because of this.

Good story, but it assumes a competent CIA.

That's revisionist bullshit. You don't need a treaty between two nations to make the act of war illegal. US forces that were shot at were violating Iraqi air space and were firing on Iraqi forces. That's an act of war, alright, but not on the part of the Iraqis.

Not only was the invasion illegal under international law, but under U.S. law as well, since the congressional authorization was conditional, and the conditions were never met.

You must be an old one indeed to have learned to dissemble so smoothly.

> You've disingenuously defined "people of the United State of America" as being "everyone who agrees with me."

Really? Where? I'm part of that people and I've got a modicum of that power, and what I'm telling you is how I use my tiny little piece of it.

Either you have power or you don't. If you don't then you have to struggle to get it if you want it. If you do have power, then you must decide how to use it. I think those with power have the moral responsibility to use the power for the betterment of the people over whom they have power. You are right in that correctly judging what's best is really an impossible task, but that doesn't alleviate the powerful from the responsibility of making those judgements anyway.

"We" is the people of the United State of America. What makes us special is that we've granted to ourselves the power to govern the country. There is no question that we ought to govern the country, the only question is how. You'd give unrestricted rights to businesses to do what they want. Id restrict businesses from acting in ways detrimental to their customers or to the economy as a whole. This means forcing competitors to compete and not collude, and forcing businesses to avoid conflicts of interest.

Prison companies shouldn't be able to lobby for tougher criminal laws.

Giant agribusinesses shouldn't get together to set grain prices.

Big finance shouldn't be able to recommend buying a security while they short the security.

A company that controls Aluminum transport shouldn't be able to place financial bets that the price of Aluminum will go up.

These are all happening right now, and if we let this continue and grow we'll turn into a corrupt third world hell hole.

This is just the robber barons of old. The original robber barons where Knights who built castles on the bank of the Rhine river. Any boat traveling the river had to pay or face the cannons of the castle. There was a new castle around every bend of the river, so you can imagine how expensive it was to ship anything up and down the Rhine.

These same folks can be found today in the "Government" checkpoints that you'll find every few miles in certain parts of Africa, or the Thai cop who stops you and asks for a bribe to let you go. Whether or not these Robber Barons are allowed to operate is the deciding factor in whether a society is free and vibrant or is ground down by corruption.

Not enough upvotes.

As Lloyd Blankfein said to congress when they asked him if shorting the very securities you were recommending to your clients was a conflict of interest,

"When it comes to making a profit, there is no conflict of interest."

I don't understand why we don't just restrict companies to do the thing they're supposed to do. You're a cable company? Ok, you're allowed to sell cable connections into people's homes. You want to say what traffic flows on your cable? Sorry, not in your charter.

Are you a movie company that wants to put in cable that carries only your movies? Sorry, not in your charter.

Of course this means that a company couldn't really own another company.

I think you guys just wrote an XKCD

Three dimensions is the only number of dimensions that allows objects to easily pass by / through each other but still allow for frequent interaction. In 2D, everything just runs into it's neighbors all the time. In 4d, you'd almost never have a collision, and long range forces would be too weak to do anything interesting.

GP is correct.

Software is difficult because it's hugely complex. Any mechanical component has about as many degrees of freedom as two or three lines of code. That means designing a 1000 line program, which is pretty small, is about as complex as designing a 300-400 part mechanical device. You just can't do that cheaply and get a result that's going to work perfectly the first time.

Indeed. What's the meaning of Stonehenge?!