I can't speak to all the civil rights legislation, but as to the civil rights act itself you just ignored my entire point (and you were still wrong). Look at the vote totals:

        Southern Democrats: 7–87 (7–93%)
        Southern Republicans: 0–10 (0–100%)

        Northern Democrats: 145–9 (94–6%)
        Northern Republicans: 138–24 (85–15%)

Of course that has nothing to do with the era in question. If that person was white they'd probably get the service, but if they were black no matter how dignified they were they'd be denied service (or at least forced to wait behind the white person for service). Even if the owner themselves wasn't racist they'd have to discriminate or the prominent white folk in the community would single them out.

How do you approach that issue as a libertarian? Community groups forcing business owners to discriminate if they want to stay in business.

That article doesn't really disprove my point. No one claims that every Dixiecrat changed their party registration overnight, people are incredibly reluctant to change political identity and the first ones to do so will be the new ones entering the system. And I don't care about Goldwater as an anecdote, but if you were voting against civil rights for racist reasons (either personal or political) wouldn't you couch your vote in some better principal?

But to claim it has nothing to do with civil rights and racism is to be incredibly obtuse. The change started with the civil rights act, the south still has a lot of racism and civil rights issues, and the Republican party still has a lot of issues with civil rights and racism.

As the saying goes don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.

There are countless harebrained startup ideas launched everyday, why can't Mars One be one of them?

It's relevant since there's still a lot of racism on the right and even some who defend slavery as something that wasn't so bad.

You misremember.

Southern Democrats were more pro civil rights than Southern Republicans, and Northern Democrats were more pro civil rights than Northern Republicans. But Southern Democrats were opposed to civil rights as compared to Northern Republicans, and since there were a lot of Southern Democrats there were a lot of anti-civil rights Democrats.

The Democratic party chose to make a stand on civil rights, since then the South has belonged to Republicans.

We're apparently talking about different Democratic parties.

Your point is rational but your math is insane.

Living in a Democracy comes with some responsibilities, mandatory voting is one I'm comfortable with (you can still cast a protest vote/spoil a ballot).

The people who come out to vote now aren't informed as much as they are rabid partisans. Get everyone involved and the knowledge will tick up.

That's a wonderful idea. The last person I want voting is rabid partisans who thinks their candidate losing means the end of the world. You know why McCain chose Palin? Because they figured she could motivate the base. She did that brilliantly but it really took a staggering amount of extremism and incompetence on her part to become a hindrance to the campaign. In a mandatory system you'd never let a representative like her anywhere near the campaign.

I think that would be cool but I don't think it's the cause of your voting woes. A preferential system inserted into the current US system would simply mean more chaos and an electorate who has no idea who's doing what.

The Republicans have a turnout advantage so mandatory voting would certainly help the Democrats. However, it's still a really good idea.

Here's the fundamental issue with the current arrangement. Turnout is very low, particularly during midterms, this creates two big problems.

The first is that the only people coming out to vote are the highly motivated, they may be informed but they're going to include the fringes of society which is why they're so motivated. They're the people watching Glenn Beck thinking Obama is founding a secular Nazi caliphate or reading the Huffington Post health section and trying to ban vaccines to stop autism, they're the last people who want steering the government.

The second problem is it's really hard to change people's minds. So even in a Presidential election you don't win by swaying people to your side, you win by boosting your turnout and depressing the opponents turnout. That means more scaremongering and mudslinging, the Tea Party didn't succeed by convincing people of conservative ideals, it succeeded by riling up conservatives to go to the polls.

Change to mandatory voting and the only thing motivation helps is your volunteer base. If you want to win the election you need to win the centre which means changing peoples minds, and that's where you get a better political system.

Doubtful, since when have you heard of a social networking site getting sued for failing to prevent a crime by snooping on its users?

Far more likely this is actually a sincere attempt to save lives. The US has 41,000 suicides annually. Assume 50% of those people are on FB, and 10% of those actually post stuff that's a really strong indicators (guesstimates). That would mean that every year there are 2,000 deaths that FB could prevent if they intervened early enough.

The realization you could save thousands of lives isn't something many people would take lightly. True there are some creepy aspects too this project, but if this is effective you have to admit that FB has the opportunity to perform a pretty spectacular amount of good.

Maybe that's the reason why the laws weren't changed, but it's not the reason Uber is getting shut down.

They based their business model on breaking the law. When they were told they were breaking the law they ignored the authorities and kept on breaking it.

There are times when you break laws as a matter of civil disobedience, and there are other times when you break them because they're really hard to follow. This was neither, this was Uber saying they know they're breaking the law with every transaction they make and they're going to keep on breaking the law until you legalize what they're doing because they're make more money that way. That's not how things work, if you pretend the law doesn't exist then you experience the consequences.

It seems to me that banning non-competes increases both utility and liberty.

For the utility it seems obvious, non-competes are a tragedy of the commons. The talent pool is a common resource for companies and they all benefit from the largest and most talented pool, ie one without non-competes. But on an individual level a company benefits from having a non-compete since employees have a more difficult time leaving, so the entire talent pool suffers.

As for the freedom level I find the argument unconvincing. The only reason employees accept them is because they effectively have no choice since companies make it the standard. You're effectively talking about someone trading away a right for a very dubious personal benefit (how does a non-compete make you a better employee?) and a societal harm. If there's ever a cause for banning a class of contracts than non-competes would seem to qualify.

I think the article misses the mark when it focuses on inventors explicitly choosing districts with non-competes. That may be a factor, but I think people tend to choose the job based on the company and the offer. Things like non-competes are typically a secondary motivation.

Far more likely the effect comes from better skill utilization. If you work at a company for 5 years and become an expert at X then you're probably an extremely valuable employee when you do X. If you change jobs you'll be most effective at a new company where you can do X, but if you can't work for rivals the number of companies doing X might be drastically smaller.

Removing the non-compete lets employees use their full range of abilities, probably no one benefits more than startups since they're the ones with the least time and resources with which to mentor and develop a new employee into an expert.

Your original argument was that the mere desire to ban Koran burning made them Islamists, now you've switched to talking about the Muslims who want to kill you for it. That is another conversation.

And as you admit you're sympathetic to the people who want to ban flag burning (or at least threaten burners with violence) so you're apparently ok with people who want to ban burning of your special symbol, but when it comes to people who want to ban burning of their special symbol you label them Islamists and readily conflate them with people who will kill for the same reason. How would you feel about a Muslim who gave someone a black eye for burning a Koran?

Do you think it would be fair for me if in a discussion of anti-abortion protesters I kept on conflating them with the people who shot abortion doctors and blew up clinics? Why do you do the same to Muslims?

This seems a little crazy, assuming thieves make the same average purchase as non-thieves it suggests that about 1/20 people who walk into a store and use ApplePay are thieves.

How many people are using ApplyPay? I wonder if this isn't essentially a statistical blip of some gang hitting up a high end electronics store.

What about the laws of physics? Can I opt out of those as well?

If you're posting on slashdot you're probably from a wealthy nation, which means you have the ability to emigrate. You have the ability to either work to change the social contract of the nation you live in or move to another nation where the contract is more agreeable. But unless you have some political/cultural arrangement I'm not aware of I'm not sure there is such thing as a society where you don't have to agree to anything you don't want to.

I wasn't trying to take a side but I was pointing out that there are reasons he might not be criticizing Muslims besides fear.

If you don't think that the power and social standing of groups doesn't matter in humour then take the jokes a black comedian tells about blacks or a Jewish comedian about Jews and try telling them as a white non-Jew. It's not translatable because the context is completely different.

Possibly, but I don't recall him making fun of Hindu's, African Tribal religions, or Chinese culture either. He might be silent out of caution, or he might be ignoring them for the same reasons he ignores those other groups.

Since around 50% of Americans support a flag burning amendment does that make them all scary nationalist nuts? There's not even a god who's supposed to care about that one. As for Muslims some of what you're picking up on is just cultural differences, a Christian who talks about killing apostles is a pretty legitimate risk to go out and hurt someone because that kind of talk isn't part of modern Christianity. A Muslim who does so is mostly just aping cultural expectations, they're very unlikely to do anything about it, particularly in the west (though there are enough extremists that apostles still have legitimate cause for concern).