Who'd want 3 different water/sewer systems connected to their house?

Ummm... me?

I'm currently forced to buy water from only the local government-granted monopoly water provider, who has decided not to provide one type of water I want to purchase (greywater) to residential customers. They sell it to commercial customers at1/10th the cost of their potable water lines, but despite the fact that the pipes and infrastructure supporting it are literally 2 feet from my property, I'm classified as residential, so no using greywater for landscaping for me.

There's another potential water provider less than a mile away in a different political jurisdiction who I could purchase from... if it was legally allowed for them to compete here, which it isn't.

The truth is that taking a government-created monopoly and saying that's proof that a market wouldn't support a non-monopoly setup is really saying that the legal framework creating the monopoly in the first place isn't really needed. So let's get rid of the government enforcing monopolies and see what's really a persistent natural monopoly vs what's actually a favor for buddies of the local politicians instead?

It was mentioned in the game Mass Effect 3. I figured it was just technobabble ... guess not.

It was mentioned in the game Mass Effect 3. I figured it was just technobabble ... guess not.

This argument doesn't make any sense, and certainly wouldn't to a strict-constructionist.

Either the Constitution was intended to cover any type of travel when originally written, or it wasn't.

If it was, then any type of travel is protected, because nothing in the Constitution authorizes the government to restrict travel.

If (as you argue) it wasn't intended to cover, say, flying, because it didn't exist at that time yet (silly, no one really argues that but let's go with it...), then still, nothing in the Constitution authorizes the government to restrict travel via flying.

The fallacy you seem to be falling into is thinking that the Constitution needs to explicitly permit or protect a particular freedom (like travel) or else the government can do what they want in regards to it. The Constitution doesn't grant people rights and doesn't protect only enumerated freedoms. It enumerates specific powers for the government and reserves everything not specifically granted to the States and the people.So if the Constitution doesn't apply to something, then the Federal government doesn't have any authority whatsoever in regards to that something.

In actual fact, the courts have ruled that any limitation on the fundamental right to travel must pass strict scrutiny. See a few hundred thousand links from Google.

There are maybe 4 authors that are obviously right wing and published by the big 6 in fiction.

And none of them got started in the last 15 years or so, they're all established names who sell too many books to justify dumping. You know TOR's editors hate that Card is their biggest selling author, but they can't come up with an excuse to drop him as long as he still sells well.

Anyone newer than that will be with Baen, or one of the smaller or indie imprints.

Quick, name one publicly right-wing midlist fiction writer currently published by one of the big 6.

Take all the time you want to think about it.

Non-fiction and (especially) celebrity/best-sellers who can write their own contract are treated differently.

As an author, I can tell you that Amazon and their eBook pricing means more money (overall) for Authors. Maybe not for the "best seller"s who don't actually sell many books, but their publishing house prints lots of them and sends them out to stores, so while they end up on the bargain rack or destroyed, they still make the NY Times list based on the lay-down. Yeah, the authors people don't actually want to read will ultimately make less money, but the real authors that people like and want to buy from will make a lot more.

There is currently a battle going on in the industry between the special favorites of the big 6 publishing houses and the midlisters and independents. There are very few authors who can get a reasonable deal out of one of the publishing houses. Everyone else is getting contracts which require them to sign away their works forever, sign away any future works in the same genre, sign away all electronic rights, etc... for a $5K advance on a one or two book contract.

The midlisters and indies are running to ebooks and small publishing houses as fast as they can. It's not a mystery why. Amazon will pay 70% on an ebook. A publisher will typically pay maybe 15% (on poorly documented bookscan sales numbers, even on eBooks, which should be exact!) Where they used to purcahse only limited publication rights, which expired after they took the book out of print, now they want contracts where the author will never get their book back, even if the publishing house isn't actually doing anything with it.

If you are a well-known celebrity, or you sell millions of copies, then a big 6 publisher may work with you on somewhat fair terms. Otherwise, they won't edit you (it's gotten much worse over the last few years), they won't market you and they'll barely make sure your latest book stays on store shelves for a month.

The big 6 publishers are not only an issue in terms of IP rights and author payments, but they are also a very bad gatekeeper. Ever wonder why so many old SF authors stopped publishing and much of what is out there now is crap? It's because they're being picked by a publishing house with a NY "editor" who probably doesn't even like SF. They literally drove popular authors (who wrote what people actually wanted to read) out of the business. If an author sold too much (i.e. more than the editor projected), did they reprint and push the book? No, they'd keep the same print run and just stop publishing it when it hit the number projected as the max, usually tiny. Baen was the only real exception of any size in the industry. Jim Baen also did eBooks right from the start (gave old ones away in order to promote newer books in the same series/by the same author). That's all just starting to turn around because of Amazon, on-demand publishing and eBooks. Old famous authors are even starting to put out the books their publishing house stopped selling, or that they couldn't get published in the first place because it wasn't the editor's latest fad.

Also, the big 6 publishing houses have a massively left-leaning bias. They've spent decades now killing the sales numbers of entire genres because the authors were required to toe the line of the latest politically correct movement. You can date books in some genres by the issues and characters the editors required. Many books that adults like have been pushed into YA categories, just because if it it's not "edgy" enough, the NY editors don't want to buy it. Forget about what will sell, they buy what they'll want to tell their NY publishing friends about at the next cocktail party.

Scalzi is the poster-child cheerleader for the big 6 publishing houses. He's on the "inside" of the publishing establishment and does everything he can to defend them. He could care less about SF authors, just about his publishing buddies.

You want the real scoop on Amazon and Authors? Go look at Mad Genius Club, or According to Hoyt.

You want contradiction. That's down the hall.

If it weren't for them, we'd have the environment of China because businesses do not care. Pollution is the tradgedy of the commons - folks pollute and the rest of society pays for the costs.

The "businesses" in China, in contrast to the environmentally cleaner portions of the world, are essentially part of the government. Chernobyl wasn't exactly a private enterprise either.

The solution to the tragedy of the commons is private ownership and liability in order to change the incentives, not more government government regulations. You complain about the Atlanta area, but last time I checked, Georgia Power was a regulated government-granted monopoly.

I agree that it makes sense for people to do things that save them money (and resources in the process), but I object to the idea that solutions to environmental problems is what more government control produces. The worst environmental offenders are government agencies and tightly government controlled industries around the world.

Who do you think takes better care of a forest? Tree farmers who own the land and want to get the most long term value out of it, or government bureaucrats who are marking time until their pension kicks in?

Most of the current fashion in environmentalism is a way for some people to tell themselves they're morally superior to the less "environmentally conscious" while they do ridiculous things like sorting and recycling glass, with the other side of the movement profiting handsomely by selling them what they want to hear and using it all as an excuse for the government officials to reward their friends.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

The natural price of a commodity is the clearing price, AKA the price where the available supply matches the available demand when those in the market for that commodity aren't prevented from agreeing on a mutually satisfactory price.

The government agencies setting the price artificially (which is why the reference to naturally) have tended to set it too low. That results in a shortage of water as more water is purchased for immediate use (vs among other things, storing for sale later, in forms such as an aquifer) than would be if the price were higher.

We've been using prices to ration scarce goods for thousands of years. They work very well at it. They lead to the situation where the most economically efficient use is made of the resource.

If you think the only cost of ground water in the west is digging a well and pumping it out, you likely don't live in the west. Essentially all the water in most western States is used by whomever owns the water rights. Most of the water rights are currently owned by government agencies, water boards, etc... which have been accumulating them for a long time (If you don't use your water rights continuously, the government will take them and add them to their own rights. If there is a water rights title dispute, the government purchases them for pennies on the dollar because then they can legally resolve the dispute in their own favor and claim the water rights, where a private citizen couldn't, etc...). They then turn around and sell the water at artificially low prices to the politically powerful. In CA, that's the farmers.

I happen to own (along with 500 acres with a well on it) a significant portion of 860 acre-feet of water rights in a rocky mountain state and I grew up in CA, so I'm fairly familiar with the way water works out west.

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.

The world isn't overpopulated.

There is one very simple option to prevent overuse....let the price rise naturally until water usage decreases enough that you aren't draining aquifers. Currently the local governments (CA,especially) artificially decrease the price of water for farms in the desert, so of course you get this entirely predicable (and predicted by economists in the past) result.