No, you're describing what unions do today. What they were started to do was protect workers from employer abuses like being worked to death, having to work in hazardous conditions, being denied pay and medical coverage when injured on the job, being disciminated against or fired because you refused to let the manager screw your spouse or refused to clean his house on the weekends.

But somewhere in the second half the 20th century many unions switched from "protect members against abusive employers" to "protect members no matter what". I think we still need a lot of the original unions in the U.S., but I'm at a loss as to how to switch from the new form back to the old one.

I think you're looking in the wrong places then. While Comcast and Verizon are content to legislate their positions so they can rest on their laurels and get fat by fucking consumers, companies like Amazon, Walmart, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are doing the same kind of empire-building that happened in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are arguably more ethical about it than Walmart and Amazon, but in all five cases the companies are relentlessly trying to extend their businesses both in breadth by going into more countries and in depth by more aspects of consumer life. Walmart and Amazon are trying to be the world's store, the only world's store, and they're innovating in that direction. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are each trying to be the cloud provider for the world, and right now Amazon is king in that arena. Google and Apple are working on products for cars, and self-driving cars. Google and Microsoft have projects to bring internet to remote parts of the world.

As an aside, three years ago I would have said Google was the most powerful of the five in terms of diversity of interests and global reach. Now I'm starting to think it's Amazon. They're working on being the world's store, the world's cloud provider, the world's favorite tablet manufacturer, and now they're attempting to establish a serious foothold into the Android market - and it may work. Unfortunately they also squeeze suppliers, squeeze content creators, work their warehouse employees to exhaustion, and avoid releasing any software as open source. So I'd say Jeff Bezos is making it a personal goal to teach Walmart and Microsoft a lesson in cutthroat business.

But that's capitalism - the capitalists lobbied to get government granted monopolies, and they got them. It's fundamental to the system - businesses will attempt to influence lawmakers to gain an unfair advantage.

The libertarian fantasy is that you can remove these legal advantages and the market will improve by being fair. But it's a fantasy because once you deregulate, nothing short of divine intervention will prevent companies from lobbying to get favorable legislation again. It's their ticket to easy street, they'll never stop reaching for it. The best that can be done is what we already do - try to keep the regulators honest.

You can't say "it's not capitalism when the capitalists corrupt the legislators" any more than someone can say "it's not communism when the communists use secret police to identify and eliminate people that disagree". They're both fundamental parts of their respective systems.

2 points:

1. Even in the areas of highest population density in the US: New York City, Los Angeles, Orlando, etc... the internet connection cost far more for far poorer bandwidth than the average internet connection in some foreign countries.

2. 31% income tax. Oh no! Let's see, I pay 1% local income tax, 3% state income tax, 20% federal income tax, 8% Social Security and Medicare tax. Well damn, looks like Sweden isn't so bad. Now imagine if I lived in America but instead of having a nice middle class income from my job, I had a 10 million dollar investment portfolio. The portfolio grows in value 4% for the year, so now it's 10.4 million dollars. But I only cash out $100,000 for my living expenses. I pay a 15% federal capital gains tax on the $100,000, plus state and local income taxes, and no Social Security or Medicare tax. That's a 19% tax rate - so I pay considerably less than the equivalent person with a job. But it gets better - my actual net wealth went up $400,000 for the year, but I only paid that 19% on the $100,000 I cashed out, so really my "income" tax for the year was 19%/4 = 4.75%. Let me know when they change the preamble to our Consitution to "Of the Rich, By the Rich, for the Rich". Sweden's doing it right, not us.

As opposed to blind patriotism and the blanket acceptance of the status quo as the best of all possible outcomes for the US?

The right and the left in the United States spend too much time making speeches about how awesome our country is. If George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were satisfied with the state of the 13 colonies, we would still be part of the United Kingdom. If Abraham Lincoln was satisfied with the state of the United States, there would still be slavery. Our national motto is not and should not be, "Look at how awesome we are." We should never forget the good that's already been accomplished, but the national motto should always be "We can do better." More freedom, more justice, more economic opportunity, better education.

Looking at other countries for ideas isn't a sign of weakness or laziness, it's just practical. It's absurd to believe without any doubts that no other nation can do better than the United States at anything important.

But the point is that the cable provider is collecting probably $60 per month from every person on the plan. So if there's 500 homes sharing your connection and hogging the bandwidth, the cable company is collecting $360,000 per year from your neighborhood. They could replace all of their copper wiring with fiber and upgrade your connection speed so that everyone in the neighborhood has all the connectivity they can use, and recover the cost of their investment within a few years and have plenty of happy customers.

But why should they bother, when they have a natural monopoly and effectively no competition. They can let you and your neighbors fight for bandwidth on the copper cables, ignore your dissatisfaction, and just cover their operating costs and stick most of the $360,000 per year right into the "net profit" category.

I'm a very fat guy, and I herniated a disk in my lower back five years ago. (Hint: when you're carrying a twenty pound baby seat with a twenty pound one year old around for hours at a time and days in a row, make sure to switch hands frequently and keep the time held by each hand even. I got a few weeks of agony just from being fat and always carrying the baby seat with my right hand.) But my problem was completely fixed with physical therapy. I've found that a daily fifteen minute set of back, stomach, and hamstring exercises does an amazing job keeping my back feeling fine and I'm even fatter now than I was when I got injured. A bodybuilder stresses his back far more than I do on a weekly basis, but the muscles that protect the spine are correspondingly far stronger on him than on me. I'm guessing it's still a net advantage. But that's a wild guess.

Look at Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock) or Mariusz Pudzianowski. They both have enormous muscles, but when you see the former acting in his WWE roles or the latter competing in the Worlds Strongest Man competition, they have plenty of agility. Do you really think putting an extra 40 pounds of muscle on either one so they could step onto the stage next to Jay Cutler would suddenly mean they can't touch their toes, or hoist another 240 pound man overhead, or pull a car? If putting 20 pounds of muscle on a regular guy doesn't slow him down (except in long distance competition where weight is a factor), and putting 20 more pounds of muscle on that guy doesn't slow him down (again, except for long distance), and 20 more than that doesn't slow him down... suddenly the last 20 brings him to a halt? In some of Schwarzennegger's earliest movies he was just a few years out from his Mr. Olympia titles, and they show him sprinting - Predator, The Running Man (ironically), etc... does he look like a clumsy oaf?

I'm not saying a competitive bodybuilder can move more heavy things than someone who trains to move heavy things. If you spent a lot of time training to carry stuff and move it, and especially you put a lot of work into your grip, then I'm confident you would outdo many bodybuilders. But I am certain they would still fare much better than someone with little or now strength training in their regular fitness routine.

The Golden Age may be awful, but it's interesting to some people just because it was the beginning of the medium. The first movies mostly suck, but they're still interesting because they're the first movies. James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans" is an awful book, it would never sell if someone wrote it today, but it's notable because at that time and place adventure novels were rare. etc... etc...

Golden Age comics are from the beginning of the medium in the 1930s, to its skyrocket to high sales in 1939 when Superman became immensely popular, until the mid 1950s. The stories you're describing may be really cool, but they're not Golden Age.

And I can't believe the fight between Superman and Doomsday is exciting to anyone. Stories are exciting because of characters, because of emotion, because of facing your demons and overcoming them or falling victim to them. Doomsday was drawn well, but otherwise he has no depth, nothing to make him interesting. Plus, he can't fly - so the only reason Superman didn't fly him to Venus, drop him off forever (or at least until the next supervillain found him and brought him back), and return to Earth was because DC decided to make some extra money by ganking Superman and they couldn't come up with a better premise.

The Ten Cent Plague is a bit of a slow read and repetitive, I really didn't like how it was organized. But it does have plenty of interesting information.

Spend it on something worthwhile, like a giant fucking pickup truck, or a Porsche, or a house with 1000 more square feet of space than you need and ceilings 3 feet higher than you can use for aesthetic reasons and damn the extra $500 a year it adds to your utility bills. Or maybe get a 60" 4K television. Take that trip to Hawaii. Go to strip clubs. Follow The Rolling Stones on tour. Cultivate a gambling addiction. Become an alcoholic. Do something important with your money, dammit! None of this comics crap!

.... seriously, as far as money-burning hobbies for adults go, comics are among the cheapest and least harmful. What do you care if I want to find out what the Green Lantern was doing in 1952?

I'm a weak, sheltered, pasty-white, marshmallow-armed basement-dwelling pussy myself. I just read a lot about strength training. :)

I mean 'practical' as in "can actually move heavy weights". The way the grandparent post is written, I had the impression the writer believes the big bodybuilders have developed huge muscles without also developing the ability to lift and carry heavier weights than the average adult male. i.e. The muscles are all show and no "go". In my personal experience, limited though that may be, that's not the case.

If you're asking about "practical" as in "useful on a day to day basis", then I think there are plenty of manual labor jobs where they are useful. You would never, or almost never, be required to move a 400 pound object in most laborer jobs. But if you're capable of moving a 400 pound object, you should be able to tolerate carrying a firefighter's gear, or delivering 200 pound washing machines, or working as a mason with far less wear and tear to your body and fatigue from the work than a regular person would receive.

Endurance is relative to work load. What's a typical triathlon competitor's endurance when carrying 500 pounds? 0. I guess that means their endurance sucks, right?

Put a triathlete in a contest carring 200 pound sacks against the guys on stage in a bodybuilding competition. He'll finish last, or near last.

When you're running, cycling, or dancing, extra muscle mass is dead weight as sure as fat. That means the people who excel in those exercises tend not to have much extra fat or much extra muscle mass. When you're pushing cars, carrying heavy sacks, throwing 40 pound tires, etc... you need all of the muscle mass you can build.

Sure, there may not be much practical value in a bodybuilder doing isolation exercises for their rear shoulder muscles, or wrist curls to increase the girth of their forearms, or neck roller moves to thicken the neck, or calf raises to increase the size of their calves. But to strengthen many of the most visible muscles on a stage - quadriceps on the thigh, gluteus in the butt, abdominal muscles, upper back, lower back, shoulders, chest, and upper arms these guys do squats, deadlifts, pullups, overhead press, and bench press. Those five exercises might be done for the sake of vanity, but the result is still plenty of practical strength.

"pretty much pussies" yeah sure.