With luck you could make a fortune. Any time a business claims a person is an independent contractor numerous state and federal agencies are defrauded. Workman's Compensation can not charge the usual fees. Unemployment is also defrauded. Programs such as food stamps and welfare suffer losses and others I probably have not thought of. For example the supposed contractor will take all kinds of illegal deductions from his taxes. The fraud it enables is endless. In theory the various agencies could enforce existing laws and you would get a substantial living just on turning in the companies that violate the law. But here is the sad and demonstrable fact. Businesses who get caught get very mild punishments. The actual punishments are so few and so cheap that the businesses keep right on with the violations. Compare it with companies that make huge sums defrauding the public. They steal a billion bucks and are ordered to pay back only one hundred million. The message is loud and clear. Business is above the law and above the government. In my area the great offender is the phone sales and telemarketing racket. I could easily catch and turn in three companies every day of the week except Sunday. Almost none of these employees are in fact contractors. And pretty much every phone call they make is criminal. But make note that the government rarely shuts them down and when they do the punishments are so minor that they open up right away a few blocks down the street. American business is pretty much a criminal conspiracy and nothing more than that.

The mentally ill do need to be confined at times as do many alcoholics and drug addicts. We are losing millions of good people who could have been helped or cured because we can not break up the patterns of their illnesses.

Drones can interrupt crime in progress and in many cases I see nothing at all wrong with shooting the criminals. Imagine a ranch or large farm with crime issues or wild hogs ripping up crops at night. What better use for a drone than to exterminate wold hogs or people trying to steal live stock or farm equipment in the wee hours of night?

OK so a drummer or a windmill could strike this substance with a drum stick and power would flow. Really? How about we put bumps in the road and coat them with this paper. Every time a car's wheel touches the paper we get power. We could even coat statues in the park with this stuff and every time a pigeon lands we will get power. Or how about big sheets of this paper and rain drops striking it?

Julia Childs was also a spy for allied forces. She placed herself in a position such that she cooked for an important German general and thus overheard conversations with meaningful information which was passed on to military intelligence. People often use the term CIA when mentioning Julia but I would think they should be saying OSS or perhaps the Brit's Special Executive Branch as the CIA did not exist at that time. Obviously the lady placed herself in harms way for the war effort. She was an unlikely heroin just as one can not quite picture Eddie Albert as a serious war hero in the Pacific. Even Audi Murphy was a tiny guy who one would not suspect as being our most decorated hero in WW2.

Florida has a grocery store that had a homeless man arrested for charging his phone with an outlet outside the store. He took perhaps 15 cents in electricity and was sentenced to seven months in jail. You see Florida really loves and cares for the homeless. It sort of gives a whole new meaning to Christian charity doesn't it?

You have it pretty much nailed. But other organizations have joined in and helped the right wing for many decades. Many churches support all kinds of right wing, violent groups. Many protestant churches supported the KKK. The republican party sheltered the KKK. The Catholic church has its own right wing issues including aiding the Nazis during WW2 which is doubly confusing as many priests and nuns went to the death camps.

I agree with Barney on almost everything he has ever said but this time I don't like it. I like leftest politicians who will not compromise one little bit and will gather 51% of the vote and crush the right wing forever. Compromise with the right is simply not acceptable under even the most dire conditions. I would rather the whole planet be turned into a nuclear cloud with extermination of all life than allowing the right wing to have one tiny bit of an opinion in this world.

The right wing loonies in Florida have pushed through a law that causes all kinds of nightmares for everyone involved. If you have a wreck you must ask for transport to a hospital claiming that you are hurt. If you do not leave the scene in an ambulance your lifetime limit on all injuries from that wreck is $600. That means if you bump you head just a bit and do not go by ambulance and go blind or become wheelchair bound for life due to brain swelling you still can not collect one red cent over $600. So victims, hospitals, tax payers and lawyers all get into the fray and everyone looses except the bad driver who caused the wreck in the first place. And he may never even get a traffic ticket. For decades we have had auto insurance medical policies that offer ten or twenty thousand maximum for bodily injury. Obviously that is absurd. We do see people who will face better than thirty million dollars in medical losses alone not to mention loss of earnings and being in pain in intensive care nursing homes for life. Yet real medical liability insurance is considered too expensive and in fact would take 99% of people off the roads as drivers.

I'm not so certain that Uber could survive if the drivers were considered employees. If they were then any injuries to them or their passengers would be held against Uber. That would make the scheme an economic failure. Further why would employees be supplying the car? The IRS defines who is or is not an independent contractor and things like providing a desk or certainly a car make you an employee. The drivers would also need a business permit and you can bet the insurance would bring it all to a screeching halt. But let's go full circle with this. The government has begged us to share rides for decades. Now we have a way to share rides and the government says oh no! It reminds me of the house wife who confronts a prostitute and calls her names. the prostitute calmly replies so I get paid to do what you do for free. The human mind is all too weird. But somehow when money is added to a situation it somehow is seen as being entirely different. But in fact it is the same thing.

Growth always leads to wreckage. It's sad but true. An area has some big attraction and then the money people start riding the wave and attracting ever more people. A dense population will demonstrate worse behaviour, drug addictions, alcoholism, mental health issues and eventually an exodus with huge debts and poverty left behind. Brooklyn, the Bronx, Detroit, and Flint Michigan as well as Miami Florida are all places once considered desirable but now are places best avoided. Right now no one sees the next big thing. But at some point the next big thing won't be anywhere near San Francisco and the death spiral will begin. The answer is in controlling population density and forcing popular businesses to locate a good distance from each other. Crwoding leads to really ugly living conditions.

The right wing rules the ignorant with fearful suggestions. The leadership of the right situates themselves in plush conditions and justifies their existence by claiming ever more need for security. The catch is that there is no absolute security. No matter how much spying that is done we will always be prone to either individuals or groups committing violence or mayhem. And it is obvious that terrorists are acutely aware of just how chronic terror attacks can be. Even if we get rid of all organized terror groups we will still have self styled lunatics setting off bombs and the like. Both Great Britain and France were driven out of Arab regions by ongoing terror tactics. The best thing Americans can do is to simply obey the law themselves, pay their taxes and be willing to report any unusual people or actions to the police. As far as stopping snooping by the authorities simply over load the net with constant encrypted or nonsensical messages such that machine time or human time make searching messages ineffective. Passing deeply encrypted nonsense messages with certain upsetting key words could keep agencies clogged to a state of nonfunction. For example pass a cake recipe with the words submarines in port embedded and then encrypt the message using numerous schemes and send it from person to person. Spy agencies would go nuts.

We see the same nonsense in the US. The problem is that security can never be perfect and that is used as an excuse for ever more invasive security measures. In the US we had the 9/11 terror attacks. The public got severely upset and government jumped off the rails. And I have no way to give numbers or specifics but I strongly believe that the US could absorb a punch as severe as the 9/11 at least once a year without the nation falling apart. But we are already seeing a loss of free speech and people must guard their remarks rather carefully. I am not convinced that our security and military efforts have done anything good for us at all.

I have a friend from South Carolina who moved to Florida and was gone from his home town for five years or so. He felt a strong calling to get back together with his high school sweetheart and after letters and phone calls sent her a package. Instead of the Post Office delivering the package the police came to her home with the package. The police were concerned that the package came from Florida. You know, Florida! The land of perverts, junkies and people who are not baptists. The cops wanted to protect her in case something shocking or perverse was inside this package from the godless land called Florida. So they opened the package in front of her to reveal the treats that girls tend to like such as candy, perfume and other fluff. She then informed them that packages from her boy friend should be allowed to be delivered to her home. This all happened well before 9/11. Apparently small towns in the deep south look at other US states about like we look at Syria or Yemen.

Obviously we need intelligence agencies as part of our national defense. But our agencies have become too dangerous to allow them to continue to exist. Maybe it is time to shut down the CIA, NSA and FBI completely and start new agencies that are required to follow much stricter and very public oversight. Our laws have become so complex that often the motive for a law is hidden while some other need for the law gets it promoted into place. A simple example is when law enforcement becomes a tax collector instead of a law enforcement agency. In many places the police force simply exists to rake in fines for the town or county. Traffic laws should be about public safety and not about raising money. Another example : You get into a shouting match with your partner. The cops come and arrest one or both of you for the loud argument. The judge fines you and orders marriage counseling weekly for two years at the public clinic at $75. per week for you and another $75. per week for your wife. Then he also fines each of you $500. for the police being involved. So you have $1000 in fines as well as $150 a week times 104 weeks for the counseling which all flows back to the county's bank account. This type of thing is happening commonly in our legal system.