Okay let me paraphrase.

Hello I am trying to raise $30B to build a pipe line, would you like to contribute? Be advised however if you choose not to contribute and I don't reach my goal I am going to spend the money lobbing instead to get government to force you to contribute via taxation under threat of prison.

By your logic we should only produce anything were all the raw input materials happen to be locally available. If we bought into that theory there are lots of things we simply could not produce.

Yes they say that so they can avoid stupid protectionist regulation that would otherwise lock them out of the market. The original reasons limiting the number 'real cab service vehicles' was to create tax revenue for big cities; and maybe to reduce the number of motor vehicles on the road. Both horses have left the barn it does not matter.

I don't see any advantage to 'real cabs'. The they know the roads argument is utter bullshit. Every cab I have been in lately the first thing the guy does it punch the address into a smart phone and let GPS take him there; hint the same thing every uber driver does.

As to out of the major routes bit, I also don't believe this is a problem, for admittedly anecdotal reasons. I have done lots of hiking on the east coast trails, AT, Long Trail, etc. That hobby has found me wanting rides along the side of lots of little rural roads outside lots of small towns. There is ALWAYS a "cab service". Why? Because the need for cabs is relatively low. Typically the folks running the local gas station, convince store, or hardware store fill this role by moon lighting. When someone calls up for a ride (rare) they just close up for a few moments and take care of it. The also know the fair is almost certain to be a good number of miles and is therefor worth their time. Uber is actually PERFECT for this business model.

"price gouging" laws almost always have an emergency component, that is the only thing that makes them remotely Constitutional. They also generally apply only to items considered necessary for survival; ie food, water, gasoline in a quantity you might be using to travel out of a disaster area, etc.

Uber probably could be prevented from using surge pricing or prosecuted for it where they to do it in the middle of hurricane or something. "The local sports team just finished playing" isn't an emergency. So its not illegal at all. I don't know what it is about Slashdot that seems to make people asume anything they don't like must be someone getting away with a crime.

Surge pricing is a good thing!

Drivers are a resource like any other. People have lives etc, and most can't just hit the road because the cost of rides has gone up. Overtime though I am sure that people who want to do Uber as more than just a hobby can and do observe when prices are highest and re-arrange their activities so they can be driving at those times. That is a process that probably happens over months though not, moments. Its just simple supply and demand and its how the market should operate. If you want a ride so bad at the same moment everyone else does you should be willing to pay! If you time is so valuable you can't hang out for a couple hours for the rush to die down, than you ought to pay someone who is trying to earn a living driving for the privilege of immediate transportation. If you are unwilling to pay that driver deserves the change to sell their services to someone who is!

People who complain about it pretty much are crying that they can no longer take advantage of livery drivers not having good information about the market and being able to revalue their services accordingly. They are just use to drivers having no choice but to set a price the market will usually support and missing the opportunity to earn more at peak times. So I say shut the fuck up if you have enough money to pay someone to drive your ass around you have enough money to pay them what it worth at that time. Otherwise wait, walk, take public transit, drive your own vehicle, etc.

There lies the rub. If you push to much of the burden out to homeowners they just might start going off the grid. A little in improvement in battery or other storage tech and it could happen.

That is a problem too because it will create a question of capital. If I have the capital resources to invest in a home energy system to go off the grid and say the payback time is 15 years. I and many other people might decide to do just that.

Where does that leave the people who don't have $30K + maintenance costs to purchase said system? It leaves them on a grid with fewer and fewer customers and probably the customers less dependable for on time payment at that. Because the grid has to go where the people are the fixed operating costs don't go down much, and I doubt the variable costs of distribution are significant. Eventually the local PUC will have to allow distribution and connection fees to go up faced with a bankrupt distributor that nobody will buy and may simply shut its doors otherwise.

The situation on the generation side too is not entirely dissimilar, although the generation business has more variable costs their are limits to how quickly it can scale down. Certainly not as fast as individual home owners can deploy domestic systems. Plants are built with 60 year anticipated service life, if you suddenly only need to generate only 30% of the power in year 20 you anticipated, it may not be efficient to operate the plant profitably at that level.

I want to EMPHASIZE STRONGLY I AM NOT ADVOCATING ANY POLICY POSITION in this post but I think its an interesting question because technology that allows middle class folks to go off grid affordably very much has the potential to result in haves and have-nots when it comes to reliable electrical power, while today even the very poor for the most part have dependable electricity in this country(USA).

Working code speak volumes in the standards process and that is okay. You take on the risk that nobody will be interested in what you have built or you may discover political opposition that you never counted on; if the resistance is strong enough you get left holding the bag having spent time and treasure on something that will never see wide use.

On the other hand if you start out with a large open consensus building process as you say its very likely you don't get anywhere, or end up with a bastardized design by committee mess, and we spend the next two decades reading on slashdot about how if only people had listened to Person about X during the design process the world would be better.

Short answer is there are problems with both approaches and neither is right or wrong, you just have to go with what makes the most sense in terms of resources and time scale for you.

Although, put out by HandSpring (with palm OS) and than later required by Palm, the Treo phones were some of the earliest of what we might consider to be modern 'smart' phones and they really were the best of their generation. Yes Blackberry might have had some more feature richness but needed a lot of propriety costly infrastructure behind it to deliver that functionality. A Treo could do IMAP etc so was actually useful to 'regular' people and businesses that were to small to justify a BES server.

I don't think HandSpring/Palm were wrong to move into the mobile phone market. I don't think they positioned themselves well. Had they gone after the consumer market and branded themselves as the Blackberry for anyone not a shyster^H^H^H^H^H^H sales professional they might have succeeded. If anything they were perhaps to early to market.

Hype or no hype that last clause is a pretty big deal when it comes to anything related to rocketry.

Unless you live in Massachusetts and you are actually dealing with Romneycare and not just the ACA I don't see how you can blame Republicans who did literally everything in their power to stop it save for a handful of traitors to the party; and no the fact the Heritage foundation floated a similar idea in 1989 that went nowhere does not somehow make it GOP party plank in 2010.

As to propping up the insurance industry, you are nutz there too. Seriously if you think the Democratic party votes to pass healthcare reform that obliterated the private insurance industry would have been there, I have a bridge to sell you! Remember every state as a byzantine set of rules to more or less force every insurer to have some local presence and probably tax exposure there.

After that you have an entire chain middle men like brokers, resellers, re-insurers, who all have an intrest in private health insurance remaining the norm. If that isn't enough you also have a chain of hedge funds, mutual funds, bond funds and their respective ownerhsip that invests in these large mostly public private health insurers that also don't want to see change.

There are enough monied constituencies, that actually implementing single payer would be political suicide. I am serious we could have the president, senate, and house in DNC control and still no progress toward single payer would occur. Its one of those issues very much like abortion(at the national level). The pols are happy to talk about it but they don't want to actually deal with it legislatively, its better to use as a political football to stir up the base. If you are a Democrat and you need the optics of lots of people marching for social justice say some stuff about single payer. If you are republic and you need to ensure your base will show up on election day, tell them your opponent wants single payer.

You gotta love the cognitive dissonance. We are perfectly 'okay' (societally) with same gender patdowns because you know that can't be 'sexual' or exploitative, yet we no longer consider homosexuality to be deviant behavior to the point we largely support marriage equality.

My take on its government should not be allowed to have it both ways. You either don't believe in homosexuality as a normal state, or you can't support TSA patdowns. Sexual assault is sexual assault no matter what gender or sex the other persona happens to be unless its invited. And the TSA procedure meets every definition for assault. Do you feel free to turn around and leave if you are selected for an enhanced search? I don't I'd be considerably afraid that if I they suggested they needed to do a patdown and I responded "no thanks I'll just head back to my car" that I would find myself detained shortly their after.

Richrz,

I feel you but I am really afraid that Rand simply isn't his father. I am not sure who Rand or Ted Cruz really are. They don't seem very consistent to me, and in Rands case I don't see much evidence that once faced with 'the realities of the office' he would utterly bend over and just pick up with Bush and Obama left off.

Who we need is someone like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
who has announced he is going to run in 2016.

What are you smoking. Sure the feds can't use a warrant obtained in the US to go kick in a door on foreign soil, they have to ask the local government their nicely to do it for them (unless its in the Middle East than we just do it anyway); but they certainly can subpena records.

You think for example during the Enron trials if they had just said "gee SEC we don't have to comply with these subpenas for records because we do all out accounting out of our Mexico City office", the feds would have responded "Oh well than I guess there is nothing we can do". No they would have been held in contempt and punished that way.

No its not. A records request in accordance with some kind of due process that is public information and established before the event, is decidedly not spying.

You are welcome to consider such a process bad law, and objectionable for any number of reasons but its a very different animal. At least someone is accountable for it, whether its a judge who signed a warrant and legislator who signed the law authorizing record sharing with $AGENCY. There is a (theoretically) functional political process by which you can attack the problem.

On the other hand spying is done in secret, so nobody is effectively accountable. You never learn that it happened in many cases so you can never seek redress. The politician and legal process for dealing with it when revelations do come out are entirely broken, look at the legal standing issues around the phone metadata law suits ,etc.

Domestic spying is IMHO way way worse, in that it represents and entirely extra-legal undemocratic application of government power, without due process and frequently in violation of other civil rights. Government fundamentally can't be by the people and for the people when its secret from the people. All those who support these programs are immediately wrong for doing so, be they are contrary to the fundamental mission of our government set fourth in the Constitution and its Bill of Rights. There can be no justification.

This isn't about spying its about compliance with records requests and privacy laws. EU has all kinds of (frankly downright crazy) privacy laws around email. That make it difficult to hand records to anything third party (that isn't an EU or member nation organ) and still be in compliance with the letter of the law; the US government is arguing that our courts etc have the power to subpena records on overseas servers.

This puts companies like Microsoft between a rock an hard place, they essentially can't follow both sets of rules if US jurisdictional rules are not limited in scope to well, the US.

I am not sure what the right answer is here, but it is a problem.

Really why? I mean you know we have things like disinfectants and such that would make it entirely safe right? A little soap water, and some elbow grease to clean it, then follow it with a little Lysol (which probably from a health stand point isn't even needed) and it should be cleaner and more germ free than before there was a turd on it.

Have you ever been around small children or had sick pet? If your standard is must dispose of anything that has even been in contact with fecal matter must be disposed of you had better avoid both pets and children or be prepared to replace all your furniture several times over.

That said I would much my ordering of things would be:
Pie theft
Turd leaving
iPad theft

I mean Pie's are cheap and easy to make. If the wife does not feel like making another we can just go get ice-cream or something. Occasionally turds have to be cleaned up, that comes with life and I can handle it, but I'd rather bake a pie. The iPad is pretty pricy.