If I were in the UK, and received such a letter, it would be interesting information for me, because I like to know how my connection is being used. It's only an informational letter, after all.

In most RPGs, there's a very big difference between a player lying about a die roll and a GM lying about a die roll. The GM is not the players' opponent, and the GM's primary responsibility to to manipulate the situation so everybody has fun, regardless of what dice he or she may roll. The player character has certain abilities, and it hurts the game if the player fudges them.

The fact that you cannot foresee all consequences is not a fundamental error of consequentialism, any more than not knowing all applicable virtues and which to prioritize is a fundamental problem or not knowing exactly what God wanted in every specific instance is a fundamental problem. It's a complication. All moral systems have to deal with human fallibility, and the lack of omniscience is one fallibility that consequentialism has. I've met some very, very good people, but none who were absolutely always acting morally. I'm not interested in arguments for ethical systems that require perfection, since everybody fails in that case.

Let's consider a situation in which somebody else will be badly hurt unless you lie. A consequentialist will weigh the harm done in each case. Somebody who believes in the virtues of telling the truth and helping others will have to make a choice of virtues. A deontologist will have to decide what God requires in that instance. A sanctimonious asshole will try to remain morally pure, disregarding the consequences to others. In this case, we see that the consequentialist has more philosophical support for ambiguous situations than a virtue ethicist or deontologist.

The Versailles peace treaty, while harsh, was not as punitive as German nationalists painted it. The social crisis had passed well before the Nazis came to power. The Nazis, typically Goering, courted the industrialists to establish an economic power base.

Germany was a capitalist country with a totalitarian government. Really, for most of the war, German industrialists had more freedom than US industrialists had under the War Production Board.

Communism is a version of Socialism. The USSR was run by the Communist Party, which was communist in name (although it wasn't what Marx imagined).

You've seen that everywhere in the world. The extent to which it's true of any given country varies wildly.

Socialism means no private ownership of the means of production. That does not actually require a central authority, in theory. Marx wrote of the withering of the state once the dictatorship of the proletariat had been established, and I don't think he visualized an economic change happening then.

I can respect Marx' criticism of the capitalism of his time, although not his proposed solution. (It's worth noting that some elements of the Communist Manifesto have been accepted in capitalist democracies, public education being the most obvious case. Capitalist societies have changed since his day.)

IIRC, in the Soviet Union you could work for yourself and try to make a profit. You were absolutely not allowed to hire anybody, since that would be exploitation in the Marxist sense.

That's not the impression I get of libertarians. I find many of their writings naive and overly trusting. My conclusion is that a whole lot of libertarians are honorable and trustworthy people that just don't get the fact that others aren't like them. I'd be real hesitant to vote for a libertarian, but I'd have no qualms about having business dealings with one. I'd expect them to hold up their end of the deal without giving me any problems with it.

A Chinese woman I know went to a school that had portraits of Mao in every room. She says that the portrait spoke to her, telling her to be the best student she could be, although she now knows that didn't happen. I'm agreeing that that's a religion.

By 1800s standards, we are post-scarcity. There is ample food for everybody in the world, plenty of clothing, lots of housing. The things a person from the 1800s would be working hard to get are not scarce, although political and economic factors do interfere with feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.

Let's look at the US specifically. Poor people very often have color TVs and computers and/or gaming consoles, since those are cheap entertainment. Many of them have motor vehicles. These are things nobody had 150 years ago. Modern manufacturing has made stuff really cheap. (This includes stuff from way back, that is niche market now. You can get a very good sword for a few hundred dollars if you like, cheap if you have an actual use for it.)

Now, figure what's scarce in US society now. Imagine a society where all that is freely available, or at least cheap and easily available to everybody. I guarantee that the society will find new scarce things for everybody to covet.

We're never going to have a post-scarcity society. Never.

Scientific ideas do rise and fall based on their merits. In the case of really disruptive ideas (e.g., Special Relativity), it can take a generation. Fortunately, those come along infrequently enough that we can afford to delay.

And the fact is that at least ninety-nine percent of the ideas out there that look like crackpot notions are indeed crackpot notions.

I see, I just looked it up on Wikipedia. Interesting. Thanks for referring me.

This would appear to be asking people to pay more for artistic productions than they would for the same thing commercially. It is completely voluntary. It relies on some people paying a lot (your thousand people for a comfortable living suggests $40/year or so at minimum) while others pay nothing. Wikipedia also tells me that it was expected to have ten thousand artists as of about six months ago, and supporting them all at comfortable levels would require ten million donors, assuming that a thousand can comfortably support one.

Interesting experiment, but I'd bet against it being an adequate replacement for the traditional pay-by-copy. We'll have to see.

Do libertarians believe that something other than physical force can be coercion? Historically and currently, it appears that individuals who can exert some form of coercion, economic, physical, or other, frequently will.

As far as I know, if the police come across evidence of another crime while legitimately executing the original warrant, they are allowed to act on it. I don't think there's any court tests of this happening in disk or email searches, but IANAL.