Nah, I'm not nearly rad enough to drive an AMC Pacer. My car is just a nice, low-miles Miata.

Also, these days, Vanilla Ice is a general contractor / house-flipper. Not a bad gig, to be honest -- once I'm making enough money I'm maxing my tax-deferred investments, I indeed might try acting like him.

Plus, oversimplification can be used to justify all kinds of short-sighted behavior, with all the plausible deniability you describe.

I remember learning my company's brand of six sigma, and they stressed not having more than a few CTQs for any process. It made for really nice-looking powerpoint slides (which seemed to be the main output of my company's six sigma efforts). It also made for some really broken processes in some cases, because the stuff the company was making was really hard to make. There were cases where somebody would optimize out some $10 part and end up destroying a million dollars worth of product from time to time due to a failure to deliver an acceptable level of quality. But, when you only focus on 3-5 key quality attributes, it is hard to justify every little $10 part in the multi-million-dollar manufacturing process.

I'm fairly convinced that far more was lost in market share due to an inability to meet demand than was ever gained from optimizing out the odd $10 part.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
--H. L. Mencken

You poor, naive fool! A Charter merger with Time Warner would inevitably degrade Charter's customer service to Time Warner's level, not the other way around.

My 25-year-old Mazda* has a tape deck, and I'm perfectly happy with that. (Okay, I do have a minor quibble that there's no line-in port, but that's no big deal. At least it doesn't have a CD player instead; if that were the case then I'd actually have to get an aftermarket stereo.)

(*Don't knock it; it's very much on the "classic sports car" end of the spectrum, not the "old junky econobox" end.)

See it's not a conspiracy involving the "taxi lobby", in fact it's to protect us from them.

Let's be honest here: there's no reason why it can't be a little from column A and a little from column B.

That's why we must preserve what little is left, for its rarity makes it finite and precious.

I like that better than adopting a defeatist attitude and assuming all is lost.

In general I would agree with you, but not in this case. That they are natural monopolies would be grounds for a summary rejection. There's no reason that cannot be a special exception.

That it got this far without being summarily rejected is problematic all by itself.

A summary rejection, now that would demonstrate the slightest concern for preserving competition.

As to comedians being better at the news... no. Comedians are as good at science as they are at reporting the news. They talk about what they think is funny and what will get the crowd on their side.

In medieval Europe, it was only the court jester who could, without [much] fear, speak uncomfortable truths to the king.

You've sadly fallen into the trap of thinking the daily show is an actual news program.

You misunderstand me: I'm well aware that it's not. The problem is that the "real" news programs are much, much worse!

2) IRL it's very complex to value sprawling cul de sacs of suburban development. When first built they're great because the people who live there are the kind of people who almost never need the government, and have a fairly good income. If they weren't both they wouldn't be able to afford to buy into a suburb. This means a miniscule tax rate is enough to run the city. Then life happens, and 50 years later you've got houses designed to standards nobody wants, owned by people who were too poor to move out, which means that a) they need lots of government services, and b) they can't pay for those services with the miniscule tax rate, leading to c) the City Manager scrambling around to save the city while the long-time residents are convinced that it's still an upper-income enclave. Quite a few very smart people have pointed out that it's much easier to build new suburbs then build a new Brooklyn because of the way the Feds give out grants.

You missed out on (arguably) the most important factor, which is that suburban sprawl is a gigantic pyramid scheme.

When a developer builds a new subdivision, he not only pays to construct the infrastructure for it, but also spends a bunch of money on building permits and (theoretically) impact fees, which go into the city's coffers. (I say "theoretically" because some particularly short-sighted, pro-development cities might undercharge on the impact fees.)

Those fees are supposed to go towards maintaining and upgrading the rest of the city's infrastructure to pay for the development's impact, but they don't. Instead they get used to balance the budget this year. In a couple of decades when that subdivision's infrastructure needs to be repaired or replaced, where does the money come from? If the city is lucky, it comes from the impact fees of whatever new neighborhood is being built then. If not, then the city is screwed.

The growth of the suburbs really exploded around WWII, so we're just now really starting to see the consequences of Ponzi development. If you think older, inner-ring suburbs are in a bad state now (except for the ones that managed to gentrify, and have all those mid-century ranches torn out and replaced with McMansions), just wait. It'll get worse before it gets better.

That is a fairly naive viewpoint. No business approaches loans in this way. A loan is a contract, with terms that apply in the event of default, and terms governing repayment. Defaulting on a loan has consequences, but most businesses do not view it as a moral issue. If it ever becomes advantageous to default on a loan, they will do so. If it is advantageous to take measures to hinder attempts at collection, they will do this as well. As far as they're concerned, it isn't theft - it is just the terms of the agreement the lender agreed to. Most nations have bankruptcy laws, and sovereign nations have, well, sovereignty. Lenders who agree to make loans do so with full knowledge of these laws.

So, if a person declares bankruptcy I do not believe they are committing theft - the lender understood the bankruptcy laws when they freely made the loan, and they did so at an interest rate that they considered profitable even in light of this risk. Likewise, when a bank lends to a sovereign nation, they do so knowing that they have very little recourse if the nation chooses to default on the loan.

To the extent that anybody was forced to loan money against their will, they might be able to claim that whoever forced them to lend money was a thief.

Oh yeah, they are highly regulated, which leads a rational mind to believe that is why they are significantly rare in crime.

Bullshit. They're not rare in crime because they're highly regulated; they're rare in crime because they're the wrong tool for the job. After all, WTF does a criminal care if he breaks the law by carrying a "regulated" gun? He's planning to commit a bunch of other crimes anyway!

Moreover, when automatic weapons are the right tool for the job, then criminals will have them. The Mexican drug cartels, for example, recently shot down a helicopter with a goddamn RPG! I have no doubt that owning an RPG is illegal in Mexico, but do you think they gave a flying fuck?

It is for ease of use, people don't want to set up a base station or server, it's just another thing then need to have.

Exactly: "it's just another thing [they] need to have." It's an entire extra product that these companies could be selling them (and profiting from!), but aren't. The question you should be asking yourself is "why are they foregoing that profit?"

The answer, of course, is "they aren't." The violation of privacy is more valuable!

Then there's the other side of it, if you're using a thermostat connected to Google then the data about when you use and don't use energy could be used to recommend an energy company that gives you the best rate for those times. How is that a bad thing?

1. First of all, my electric company is a monopoly, so that alleged benefit is irrelevant.
2. Second, have you ever heard of the term "confusopoly"? I don't really want to have to choose between 10 different electric companies with 10-different time-of-day-varying rate plans (none of which will actually match my usage pattern, of course). I already have to choose between natural gas providers, and it's a pain in the ass!
3. Third, I don't want Google to know about my hypothetical grow-op, Bitcoin mine, particle accelerator, or whatever the fuck I'm using the electricity for, not only because it's none of their damn business as a general principle, but also because I don't want them to report me to the DEA, SEC, or Department of Energy (respectively) and I don't want them showing embarrassing ads (for drug paraphernalia or plutonium) in my browser search results at work!
4. Fourth, but not least, I don't want Google to know about my lack of electricity use, either. The last thing I need is some Googler using his "20% time" to develop "Google Burglary," a tool for criminals to find out when I'm not using electricity and thus probably on out of town.

There is too much news to cover the slow way exclusively.

No. There's too much irrelevant celebrity bullshit and unimportant fluff to do that, but that kind of "news" is designed to distract, not inform. Only cover the important issues and there's plenty of time.

As to this all being corporate media's fault... can you give me a counter non-corporate media example that is better?

Any comedian (and yes, I realize what that implies about what a fucking sad a state of affairs we're really in). In particular, John Stewart, Steven Colbert and John Oliver are infinitely more informative than any allegedly-"actual" "news." And I mean "infinitely" literally, by the way -- measuring the valuable insight of, say, Fox News is like dividing by zero.

For example, John Oliver devoted an entire half-hour to government surveillance, including an interview with Edward Snowden where he (humorously) distilled these privacy issues into terms the general public would understand. I'm fucking appalled to have to say this, but that is many orders of magnitude better journalism than I've seen from any of those pathetically worthless toadies who actually call themselves "journalists" in decades.

And that's not even all! If you look at Youtube's autoplay list for John Oliver's videos, it appears that just about every goddamn episode covers an actually-important issue (civil forfeiture, the wealth gap, crumbling infrastructure, police brutality, net neutrality, etc.) and does it better than anyone in the mainstream media has managed since Walter fucking Cronkite!

Go fuck yourself. You've proven over and over again to be a worthless authoritarian bootlicker, and I see no reason to pay attention to anything you say.

For the benefit of everyone who isn't piece-of-shit Cold Fjord, I'll point out that (a) there's a difference between exercising civil rights and rioting, but the law enforcement agencies in the St. Louis area apparently can't tell what it is, and (b) the pattern of rounding people up for no reason (as well as "mob violence," if by "mob" you mean the police) started long before Michael Brown was shot.