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Comment Re:maybe (Score 0) 512

Hey, AC. I'm going to assume you live in the US.

Let's assume the following hypothetical. A bunch of the Aztlan nutjobs somehow manage to assume some power in Tijuana. They decide that they want California "back".

They start sending suicide bombers into So Cal. The Mexican government does nothing. They start launching rockets into So Cal. The Mexican government does nothing.

What should the US Government do in this situation?

Comment Re:Not going to happen again any time soon (Score 2) 211

Get this: Hussein installs a black guy in as NASA chief,...

I'm not from the USA so I don't understand your country but your joke? confuses me. Hussein is dead. His fellow Iraqis hung him after a lengthy trial. Also, it has not been seen as a common role of anyone from the USA to help Moslems feel good about anything. You have it in your constitution to keep church & state separate. That's why nobody would get elected president if they were an atheist or anything but a follower of a western variant of Christianity.

Comment Re:Connect with a VPN (Score 1) 390

As I've blathered on for years, business doesn't make fortunes by manufacturing product, but by manufacturing scarcity. Lumber. Water (soon!). Bandwidth.
And people: Businesses make monopolies, not governments. Businesses want to control supply, create scarcity and drive up prices and buy up their competitors so they can drive up prices again. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Market. The oil cartels control oil supply, Diamond controls comic book distribution, etc. Choke points *they* create by ruthlessly destroying their competition. Government can't mandate competition in the sense you can't pass a law to make sharks stop eating tuna. They persist in eating the damned tuna; it's their nature. Sometimes, as in the last 30 right-wing years, the tuna *is* the government.
Monopoly exists 'cause lack of regulation, not 'cause of it.
In cabling the US, the US businesses refused to provide service unless they had local monopoly, so the cities divvied up their territories and the cable companies rolled out. That was a business-demanded requirement, not a government-demanded one. They would not provide unless they were exclusive. The only alternative was municipal cable, which happened, but is mostly sued or otherwise driven out of business. Right now a federal law, paid for by the big cable companies, is about to make muni rollout *illegal*. You may blame government, but the businesses are buying that law.

Earth

Giant Crater Appears In Northern Siberia 122

New submitter DavidMZ writes: The Siberian Times reports on a large crater of unknown origin that has appeared in the Yamal Peninsula in northern Siberia. The Russian government has dispatched a group of scientists to investigate the 80-meter-wide crater. Anna Kurchatova from Siberia's Sub-Arctic Scientific Research Center believes the crater was a result of an explosion when a mixture of water, salt, and natural gas exploded underground. The Yamai Peninsula is known to hold Russia's biggest natural gas reserve."
Businesses

Time Warner Turns Down Takeover Bid From Rupert Murdoch 70

Dave Knott (2917251) writes The media giant 21st Century Fox, the empire run by Rupert Murdoch, made an $80 billion takeover bid in recent weeks for Time Warner Inc. but was rebuffed. Time Warner on Wednesday confirmed that it had rejected a cash and stock offer from 21st Century Fox, saying that it was not in the company's best interests. Time Warner's board discussed the proposal at length and early this month it sent a terse letter rejecting the offer, saying the company was better off remaining independent. A Time Warner statement pointed to its own strategic plan, what it said was "uncertainty" over the value of 21st Century Fox stock and regulatory risks as among the reasons for its rebuff. The company said that 21st Century Fox had offered a premium of roughly 22 percent to Time Warner's closing price on Tuesday. Shares of Time Warner were up about 20 percent in premarket trading on Wednesday morning. The combined company would have total revenue of $65 billion.

Comment Re:Political background (Score 1) 151

Whether you like it or not, the tide of history is moving from smaller to larger groups.
Once it was small groups of humans led a hunter gatherer life. Then the groups got bigger, people settled and the villages turned into towns and so on.
We have seen that progress. Most city states are now subsumed into nation states and the trend over the last 50 years has been for voluntary association of nations into larger units. The UK is in several of these units including NATO and the EU. There will always have been people harping back to the "good old days" and we certainly have some of those. Scotland has escaped too much attention from UKIP and other xenophobes because they are often seen as specifically southern English. When we want ignorant statements about people on the other side of a line on a map,or speak differently, we have our own.

I really could not care about how the UK was not created well. It can work well nowadays. 1745 was a long time ago. It is good for tourism and film makers but I do not work in either of those industries. Like many people, I benefit from being in the EU. It means that, as part of the United Kingdom, I am part of an economic grouping that is bigger than North America. Despite what the SNP tells us, if Scotland leaves the UK, it leaves every alliance the it is in. It will be able to apply for entry but this is not a fast process and meantime, we are outside.

The UK is not perfect but neither is my car. I won't make my car work better by sawing bits off. We need to fix things, not land the entire population of England perpetually under Conservative government because we have taken our MPs out of parliament.

Lets move the capital of the UK to somewhere near the middle of this island and away from the cleared swamp that is a drain on the whole country. How about York?

Comment Re:What? (Score 4, Insightful) 382

Thank you. For once, this would be a legitimate use of the Interstate Commerce Clause.

Clearly, this *is* the purview of Congress, not the President, but all that the White House needs to do to make the petitioners happy is have one of its pet Congresscritters introduce legislation.

It seems to me that the state regulations banning such sales are an intrusion upon the prerogatives of Congress.

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