So a free market is bad when everybody is able to invest, but is good when a chosen few are able to invest?

Now I feel left out, the Commodore PET's we had in school did not have mice, or hard drives, or usb. Just a keyboard and a 5.25" floppy drive. :(

The worst one was where they advertised a guy who took out a loan to fill up his car. Yes, the car he probably just hocked the title to. I actually yelled "Are you fucking kidding me?!?" at my TV.

I built my antenna out of about $10 of scrap metal, a coax splitter/balun, and some solder. The most expensive bit was a 20ft coax cable needed to reach my TV. The one-time cost is nothing.

You forgot to mention the commercials where they advertise going to those godawful payday or title loan places to get money to pay your bills. Yeah, it's a fucked up world.

The cocaine-huffing media executives don't think that way. They're still living a few decades ago when they had a captive audience they could gouge with impunity. Back then, the only real piracy of live events going on was the occasional guy with a dodgy cable hookup.

Can Open/Libreoffice edit Docx files without breaking them? That was a big problem for me a few years ago.

True enough- IF you can prove it was a murder and not an accident.
 
Can you prove intent with global climate change? If you ignore the utterly non-scientific process of "scientific consensus", do you even have enough data left to prove the murder weapon?
 
And in the long run, does it matter? We're still left with the decision to either adapt or die; we're far too late for any mitigation attempt to work. Blame the culprit is a waste of time in this case.

In what way is insuring a fair and free market collectivism?

Species that are unable to adapt have been going extinct without mankind's help for 9/10ths of the planet's history. For the remaining 1/10th, we've been a major motivator of evolution, that's true- Dodos and wooly mammoths and the like. But we are also to the point with GMO research that we can be a major cause of increased adaptation- we can speed up evolution, and likely will, because beef is tasty (among many other species that are directly useful to us, such as bees). Speaking of that last, just saw a report on OPB about a pair of beekeepers with a unique solution to colony collapse disorder- they're breeding stronger queen bees that can live through Oregon winters.

If mankind wants to survive, food needs to be our top priority. Luckily, as I mentioned someplace above I think, food production is also an answer to excess atmospheric carbon. Especially if we keep locking our own carbon up in airtight containers buried in concrete when we die.

I suppose everyone else is a "liberal" to extreme right-wingers. Clinton was a moderate by USA standards, but he was a right-winger by world standards. If the USA political spectrum were a football field (with the moderates at the 50-yard line), the repubs would be situated down past their side's goalposts, through the bleachers, and somewhere out in the parking lot. It's fucking scary.

Don't blame Clinton for the shutdown. I'm not sure what was in that budget, but it must have been terrible since as a moderate, Clinton was willing to negotiate most of the time. You seem to overlook the fact that the repubs were the ones issuing threats. How little has changed. They're still a bunch of spoiled children, as evidenced by their last shutdown a year or two ago.

You're damn right this country was great back when we had strong union jobs and a family could live comfortably on a single income. There were strong regulations and the top tax bracket was near 90%. Things weren't great for everyone but at least we weren't fucked like we are now.

I'd like to see where you're getting your numbers.

So tell me, how do tax cuts for the rich translate into lower deficits? Repubs have been promising that for decades and it has never worked. It's fools math the repubs like to sell to folks who don't know any better. The government requires money to run. If you're not getting the money from taxes, it needs to come from someplace else. You either need to borrow it to pick up the slack (deficit) or do cuts (which affects most people rather badly). So where does the extra money come from?

The mortgage debacle was caused by corporate greed and lack of regulation. The banks would give a loan to anyone who could fog a mirror because they could make a quick profit iby reselling those shit loans and leave someone else holding the bag. Furthermore, Bush had advance warning of 9/11 and did nothing.

Except a lot of the dems don't advocate all those things. They play lip service to the ideas but they never follow through. What is liberal or socialist about that? The dems' only saving grace is they aren't as spiteful as the repubs-- the repubs have often been incredibly mean-spirited lately just to gin up their racist inbred base, and I for one am sick of it.