All taxes get paid by the people purchasing products and services.

Taxes are paid by those against whom they are levied.

Those entities may try and recover that cost elsewhere. They may or may not be successful in doing so.

If you tax only the rich, the poor will pay the differences.

So you don't think anyone will step in and provide equivalent products and services at a lower cost than established players because they're prepared to accept a smaller profit margin ?

Ie: markets don't work ?

There are plenty of rich people who don't own and run businesses, or have substantial income and wealth outside of their business interests.

and no, you cannot address that with any legislation because congress does not have the power to do so.

Firstly, the world is not America.

Secondly, even in the US, between local, state and federal Governments, they can legislate nearly anything they want to. If, of course, they want to. But there's been little interest in trying to build a better society since the neoliberal right took over the western world in the '70s and started pursuing the greatest wealth transfer from the

There is nothing there that could not be addressed with appropriate legislation.

And it's all completely irrelevant to the original claim that "all taxes are regressive".

Want to see real change and justice? Talk to the actual owners of Uber and see if you can convince them to make a better company.

Uber is run by libertarian psychopaths. Their thought process - though they would obviously never say it in public - is "nobody made you get into the taxi, tough luck".

Even the slightest voluntary attempt to try and ameliorate the risk involved would be an anathema - "nanny state regulation" or some such bullshit - to them.

Probably better because who can say how many cab drivers make it in via political favors?

Given the life and pay of a taxi driver, I'd go with "sweet fuck all".

People calling in "political favours" to be a *taxi driver* ? Did you even think about that before you wrote it ? Do you think garbage collectors get jobs through "political favours" as well ?

The problems in the taxi industries worldwide have nothing to do with regulations around safety, and everything to do with the regulations around taxi plates (or "medallions" I think they call them in the states).
Uber vehicles should be required to carry the same safety facilities as a taxi, including video/audio recording and driver duress buttons.
This sort of situation and the absurdly trivial solutions for reducing its risk (what's the cost of a few dash cams ?) were entirely predictable and the only reason Uber did not act proactively was because it's a company run by libertarian psychopaths who think rules shouldn't apply to them.

Global Warming is a theory. So is gravity. Are you worried about suddenly flying off into space ?

All the AGW models have failed, miserably.
If that were true it would not be getting hotter (or getting colder).
"It's not getting hotter as quickly as predicted, but it is getting hotter as expected" is not "miserable failure".

of course, its people who dont use X who always want to raise taxes on X
Similarly, the people who can easily afford the things taxes pay for are always in favour of eliminating them

And why I keep saying ALL Taxes are regressive. Please, tell me more about how a taxes that only targets the top 1%, 0.1% and 0.01% would be "regressive".

Yet my income is well below the poverty level, [...]
Then how do you afford the things you say you have ? Because a thousand bucks a month minus necessities like food and shelter, doesn't leave a lot left over to pay for iPads, big TVs and cars.
The rest of your post is just straw men and non-sequiturs.

I agree: Lua is absolutely one of the best things to be teaching high school students. You can either sit entirely in the Lua language itself, or you can learn to extend the capabilities of the VM and interface with outside libraries and frameworks.

Give them any ideas ? What do you think they've been doing for decades ? What do you think the whole point of "globalisation" is ?

Grab an LSI controller off eBay (IBM or Dell-branced) for <$100 and you can have another 8 SATA/SAS ports.
I've got 10 drives (6x2.5 + 4x3.5) in one of my Microservers.
Unfortunately ZFS shows up the weak CPU under heavy load, but most of the time (with an additional dual-port ethernet card as well) it's a real trooper.

As I understand it, the differences are mostly mechanical. It's worth noting that the weights of the Green, Red and Black drives are all identical (1.5kg for the 4TB), despite the latter being 7200rpm and the former two being "Intellipower" (5900rpm ?). This suggests they're all mechanically identical. The "Datacentre" drives are heavier (1.66kg @ 4TB), so they are definitely mechanically different. I haven't looked into the specs in depth, but I assume it's an extra platter. If it's not, it's probably a better motor. They're difficult to find these days, but those who have handled 15k 3.5" drives will know they are substantially heavier than 7.2k SATA drives (which I always attributed to better mechanicals). I think you will find the difference between the different consumer-level drives is entirely in firmware (things like TLER, idle head parking, etc).

To maintain and support an entire OS takes a lot of work. We aren't talking about just development here, but checking to make sure things run properly and making the changes needed to ensure stuff is supporter. The point I would start looking at rolling your own distribution and supporting it is the day you decide to start selling your distribution.

For internal use, sure you might have to have a team to do internal work to modify certain sections in order to make the OS work for you, but they are relatively minor compared to ensuring an entire distribution works as needed. Let another company do the heavy lifting and just have your company modify it and submit changes back through the system as desired. Feedback works as well.

To run an entire distribution and all the subsystems takes billions, look at IBM donating to Linux as a whole they give value back to the community rather than trying to extend and embrace for their own purposes. Redhat does the same and they do distribution and sales. Other companies are the same. I guess you can make the decision on your own but personally I suppose the time to switch is when you have support fees in excess of what it would cost to maintain an entire distribution. I'd assume someone around a thousand people focused on the project would be about right. A thousand people's salaries would buy a lot of support. A better idea might be to hire developers for the subsections of the OS that you need and have them work with the community.