DFTT, please. He's one of those lunatics who thinks all taxation is slavery; you can't win an argument with him, because you're not inhabiting the same reality.

. . . says yet another person who appears to be totally ignorant about history. Do you really believe that if you went back in time to, say, 1950, you couldn't find politicians saying equally idiotic things, perhaps in even greater numbers? And do you think "technology" is limited to, say, space travel?

I am carrying, in my pocket, a computer significantly more powerful than anything I used as a child (and much cheaper in absolute dollars), with access to a global information network containing most of human knowledge, and the ability to instantaneously communicate with anyone in the world. The overall computing infrastructure is rapidly overtaking the technology depicted in a 20th-century show about 24th-century space exploration. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people across the planet, whose parents lived in virtually pre-industrial economies and regularly suffered from pandemics and famine, now have relatively comfortable middle-class lives thanks to improved technology and the expansion of the global economy. These improvements have mostly happened within my lifetime (i.e. since 1980 or so). So I'm not exactly losing sleep over the fact that the developed world still has a handful of proudly ignorant fools in government.

It's also worth remembering for context that shortly after the close of World War II, the British government drove one of its greatest scientists to commit suicide at the age of 41 because it was run by superstitious, self-righteous prudes who disapproved of his homosexuality. Today, the UK has some random back-bencher spouting nonsense about homeopathy. I think that's an improvement.

Sure there's a few Californias and Greeces out there

These two are nothing alike, unless you think the whole of the developed world can be judged solely by the condition of the central governments. Besides, California's debt-to-GDP ratio is only about 20% - Greece's is 175%.

Because he runs a business not a hippy commune.

But he has pretensions towards being a respected visionary scientist. It's not impossible to have it both ways, but it's really, really difficult. (Especially when you've taken the work you did as a student at a public university and commercialized it without giving a penny to the university.)

Saudi Arabia also requires exit visas to leave the country - which can only be obtained with permission from your employer. For many foreign nationals in the country, a large fraction of whom are domestic servants, it is essentially impossible to leave as a result. It's made even worse by the fact that work visas are also specific to the employer, so they can't switch jobs either. This is a country that didn't even officially outlaw slavery until after Castro's revolution, but even so they've kept slavery in all but name. (Not even going to start on their sponsorship of Salafi Islamist nutters across the globe.)

Besides, Cuba did finally allow foreign travel starting in 2013 (of course, most of its citizens are probably too poor to afford it, but the embargo certainly doesn't help). And we kept diplomatic relations and some commerce open with the Warsaw Pact at a time when they also restricted travel, which didn't stop their system from collapsing under its own weight.

I live in Berkeley, you insensitive clod! But no, ultra-liberals aren't even as powerful in Berkeley as you might think.

Perhaps, but this is still the city that had to call a special meeting of the city council to make a special exception to the "nuclear-free" law so that they could get the library book scanners fixed. And the city where in 2002, 30% of voters approved a proposition that would have imposed jail time for anyone selling non-shade-grown, non-organic, or non-fair-trade coffee.

The North Berkeley area is certainly not that bad, and I feel right at home.

Well, it's mostly not that bad... there is certainly a high quotient of what are commonly called "limousine liberals". I'm not sure how to classify the nutters trying to prevent more cellular relays being placed in the hills because they're afraid they'll get cancer. But if I lived somewhere else, they'd probably be praying for my soul instead, so I guess I'll settle for the devil I know.

I translate "data scientist" as "PhD in hard sciences who couldn't get a job in his or her field because we've been massively over-training PhDs for the last couple of decades, so he/she took a course in statistics and learned to write simple Python scripts and use scikit-learn and Hadoop." That seems to cover most of the ones I know, anyway. (Although to be fair, some of them knew Python already.)

you think it's _good_ to carry out mass-vaccination of a species

Smallpox killed more people in the 20th century than every war combined, and is now completely eradicated because of mass vaccination (sometimes coerced). Remember: vaccines are unnatural, but so is a life expectancy of 80 years.

Most libertarians I know are reasonable libertarians. They want some service and regulations, they just want such to be minimal and to be served by the lowest and most local level of government. Just enough for basic safety, a level playing field, equal opportunity and most importantly accountability to locals.

I'd argue that in California, the biggest contingent is what are sometimes called "liberaltarians" (I include myself in this group): secular, very libertarian on social issues, skeptical of interventionist foreign policy, broadly pro-capitalism, generally just want to mind their own business and make money and be left alone, but don't usually freak out over income taxes and mildly redistributionist policies and universal healthcare, and probably more environmentally conscious than average. Personally, I despise laws banning smoking in private business (e.g. bars), or requiring seat belt or bike helmet use, but on the other hand, I think California's law declaring the coastline public property was one of the wisest things the state ever did.

Most of us are willing to put up with the large number of crazies in the Bay Area because overall, they're not nearly as powerful as you might expect (outside of Berkeley, at least), and they also like weed, gay marriage, and Mexican food, so at least we have that much in common.

The hangers are the adult stage, and if you open your closet very quickly sometimes you can catch them mating.

I told this joke in Japan once and got a polite explanation that (1) socks don't go missing because Japanese people usually hang up their laundry to dry (2) they don't keep other people's pens because they are other people's property and besides they have their own pens (3) hangers don't accumulate because they return them to the cleaners.

Yes, indeed, they are free to quit their jobs — without having to give up on their house, country, and friends — if their assessment of the risk of coming to work is so drastically at odds with that of their employer.

Are you really so dense and solopsistic that you are incapable of understanding that for most people, this is no choice at all? For many Americans, yes, they will have to give up their house if they end up unemployed. Not to mention their health insurance - and I assume you aren't in favor of the government helping out with that either. You're pretending that personal autonomy isn't constrained by economic considerations, which is completely at odds with reality. You're also pretending that managers actually give a shit whether their employees are safe driving to work, when the history of industrial economies is full of evidence that they are often utterly careless without government intervention.

And if you don't like being told to move to Somalia, try getting some self-awareness and honesty, and admit that there are real tradeoffs to your utopian fantasies, with genuinely negative impacts on other people's lives. There are many persuasive and intellectually honest arguments for smaller government, but you're not making them.

individuals and businesses, made aware of the risks, can (and are supposed to!) make their own decisions

No, most individuals are at the mercy of whatever their employers decide, even if their employers decide that yes, they need to be at their jobs today even if it means driving in two feet of snow. Yes, they're quite "free" to quite their jobs, in the same sense that you are "free" to move to Somalia if you're unhappy with having a functioning government.

One problem with privacy is the lack of real information. I can read privacy policies. I can't be sure companies are following them.

Sure, but how can you be certain that the government is following the published laws? We've seen time and again that they'll simply ignore the law if it's inconvenient (my favorite example is China's state media whining about "constitutionalism", as if rule of law was some radical Western concept), and the US government has repeatedly used the justification of "we can't tell you why we're doing this because it's a matter of national security". If Google were to say "we can't show you our privacy policy because it's a trade secret", then you might have a legitimate comparison to make.

The US Government didn't have to pressure most telecoms to get access to their data.

They're the US government - the pressure is implicit. (And, I suspect, far more explicit than we've been told about, since some of the tech executives involved have made it clear that they can't really go into details about what happened behind the scenes.)

Presumably Google can purchase similar access.

Sure, but again, why is this necessarily more frightening than the government having access? If Google tries to blackmail or murder me, it's still against the law, but government employees have done exactly this with impunity, probably for as long as governments have existed. Again, this isn't an argument that we should trust corporations over governments - I'm simply trying to put our fears of companies like Google in the proper context. (Seriously, what's the creepiest thing that a tech company has done? Facebook's emotional manipulation is the best example I can think of, and while that's pretty creepy, it's still penny-ante stuff. And it's easy to avoid Facebook - I still don't have an account.)