Really, that's your response to his take down of your earlier non-response?

This is wrong, wrong, wrong. Edward Snowden chose the reporters he talked to very carefully and asked them to be responsible with their disclosures. He did not just dump documents and run, and he did take steps to distinguish between necessary and unnecessary disclosure.

Pot smoke has not been shown to cause cancer or emphysema. Even if there are other health effects, I'm not sure how we are helping people by putting them in jail for doing it. The message seems to be, "Don't do this harmful thing, or we'll do this other harmful thing to you."

The police can't violate people's rights in pursuit of law breakers. The ends don't justify the means.

Am I to understand that you do not exist, having never been created?

Yeah, but what about Comcast? They're the most hated company in the country. They screw their customers and no one wants to do business with them. So everyone exercised their power as consumers and sued Comcast or simply took their business elsewhere. Eventually Comcast went out of business because they provided such terrible service.

Isn't that how it happened?

People, and free-market Libertarians in particular, have this idea that if there is a problem between two parties, one can just sue the other and it'll get worked out. They don't seem to realize that a lawsuit is a huge pain in the ass for everyone involved (except the lawyers), and is also very expensive. Lawsuits are out of reach for most people simply because of the cost. It's just not realistic.

For more insight, I would point you to Fletcher Reede in "Liar Liar", when his car is damaged by a tow company:

"You know what I'm going to do about this? Nothing! Because if I take it to small claims court, it will just drain 8 hours out of my life and you probably won't show up and even if I got the judgment you'd just stiff me anyway; so what I am going to do is piss and moan like an impotent jerk, and then bend over and take it up the tailpipe!"

Actually, it's not like that at all. As I said, experience has a value. What that value is, is up to interpretation of course. But no two people are alike, so it's not just like two copies of the same book. Besides, the labor market is about more than just supply and demand. As the AC below said, there would be plenty of people willing to do a CEO's job for less than he is doing it for. But for some reason there is not a race to the bottom for the salaries of top management.

The article puts the lie to the idea that these H-1B workers are filling jobs that there are no good American candidates for. The article, and one linked in it, talk about existing workers training their H-1B replacements. So, there are manifestly American workers who can do these jobs. They are doing them right now! The article also says they are often older workers being replaced. You know what that means; these older workers are highly compensated. As usual it's about the bottom line, with humans as resources to be exploited.

We have the world's largest prison population. How could we not be the land of the free?

But why was Mosaddegh overthrown?

Near me there is a gas station that charges fully 10 cents less per gallon if the buyer uses cash. Their credit card price is competitive with other stations in the area. So it shows just how much the consumer ends up paying for using credit cards.

Credit also pushes up prices in general, since you can buy higher priced items if you can pay them off over time. If people had to actually save up the cash to make large purchases it would delay the purchases and put downward pressure on prices.

At base, all I'm saying is that the US government can create enough money to get it done. The companies or industries affected would not have to worry about the cost if the government were to fill the gap. They had plenty of money to bail out Wall Street, but don't seem to have the same will when it comes to dealing with climate change. Maybe it's the imminence of the threat, as you say.

As a larger point, I'm glad we are discussing money as a means of control. Most people don't understand it as such, but that's what it is. Our monetary system is a debt-fueled societal control mechanism. The question of course is who is doing the controlling and to what end. Since money is central to all this (and everything else) I would like to see it used more for the public good, and less for private gain. That's why I said we need a new paradigm; one that emphasizes the public good, not profit. Because the need for profit is preventing us from doing what is necessary.

You can call me a socialist utopian, and you'd probably be right. I'm not saying that my idea of how things should be has any chance of coming about. But I do think it's necessary for our survival. Focusing on private gain and immediate self-interest, which is the incentive in our economic system, is inadequate to tackling such a large and inter-dependent problem as climate change. It is not set up for concerted action. But we will cling to it because of powerful interests and a lack of imagination. We are circling the drain, and it is of our own choosing.

10 years ago, I knew the system was fucked. But it's nice that the general consensus is coming around to agree with me, more or less. It reminds me of when everyone else finally realized what a terrible president Gorge W. Bush was, or that the NSA really is spying on them.

The problems go deeper than you probably know; deep enough that you would again consider me a crank if I told you. The fraud and regulatory capture are only the beginning. Where it gets really interesting is where the corporate and financial bigwigs get together with the intelligence agencies and start spying and manipulating. They are driving world events with deception and propaganda, and doing things most would consider to be impossible.