Free markets are only optimal for exploiting resources...
That's a very astute observation, OTOH; OPEC is not a free market, it's a cartel. A free market is one where anyone is free to participate, it has nothing to do with the quantity or quality of regulation.
Calls actually haven't needed to be "traced" since the 1960s, but nobody told the government.
I think you meant to say, 'nobody told hollywood', I was born in 1959, it has been common knowledge since at least the early 70's that the "keep 'em on the line" trope is bullshit, in the same way CSI style "infinite zoom" is widely seen as a 'theatrical device" today.
Personally I appreciate it when hollywood takes pride in getting the scientific and technical detail straight and the idea seems to be more popular than ever with shows like the Simpsons, Futurama, BBT, etc. But I still enjoy Star Trek, Dr Who, Buffy, et-al because the trick to good entertainment is not accuracy, colour, or special effects, it's about "suspension of disbelief". We enjoy drama because it tells a human story, it's the fictional human interactions that enthrall us, not the fictional events they are reacting to. If the interactions are implausible the theater will be empty, if the events are implausible it often adds interesting twists to the human story, eg Douglas Adams infinite improbability drive..
say you play with legos, like the rest of us do
Must be an American thing, here in Oz your average John-o and Steve-o play with their leg-o, great for keeping them occupied while dad nicks down to the bottle-o.
Will the people who "stole" your credit card ever be caught? No.
I think you will find the remand centers of the western world are chock full of people defending credit card fraud charges.
Will the people who decided NOT to protect it ever be punished? No.
Not sure about the US but most of the western world have laws covering the storage of financial data, belive me you don't want to fuck with the banks on those rules.
Is there anything you can do? Aside from using cash everywhere? Not really.
Again, not sure what happens in the US but here in Oz the credit company foots the bill if you've been ripped off. People who foot the bill themselves are usually doing so to avoid having a relative or "friend" formally charged with fraud. If you do get stung by a drive by hacker it takes a few weeks to sort but everyone I know who has had that problem has had their money returned by the bank, one card was drained of 25K by people having a wonderful time touring Europe.
It's worked that way since the mid-90's, possibly earlier. At the end of the day it's in their best interest to keep the customer happy and claw back the "spillage" with interest rates. If they were to change their policy and tell everyone "tough titties" it wouldn't take more than a few years to reach the point where everyone had a few friends who really did lose thousands in one hit. At that point the credit cards would have a terminal problem with distrust since any rational person would start avoiding plastic like the plague.
what's the problem?
Ironically, your assumption that fish just calmly swim about waiting to be eaten by a 30 ton killer whale is an excellent example of the GP's original point about humans and jail cells.
Is a parrot "communicating" with you when it says "Polly want a cracker?"
If it wants one and has received them in the past using that sound, then clearly, yes. The "monkey see, monkey do" hypothesis is nonsense born from the perfectly natural tendency of humans to believe they hold a special place in the animal kingdom. For example, there's a native bird in the hills near where I live called a lyrebird. It's said to be the world's best mimic (check it out on YT), it will accurately mimic any other sound it hears.
What people rarely mention, or even notice, about this "mimic" is that it is also displaying creativity when it takes those sounds and forms a unique song. Once it has created its own unique song it remembers it and builds on it in the next mating season, similar to the way jazz musicians improvise around a basic theme. But a more accurate analogy would be a musician who creates aesthetically pleasing soundtracks from samples to attract and impress the opposite sex, both analogies also imply the opposite sex posses some form of "artistic taste".
What TFA really shows is that dolphins and whales adapt their "language" to the environment they find themselves in. Humans also do this, nobody is surprised when an English baby born in England but raised by Chinese parents in China, grows up speaking Chinese. Apes can do it via sign language but they will never speak to us because their vocal chord anatomy is not up to the task
"relative freeness of market"
Nitpick: The "free" in "free market" says nothing about regulations it simply means anyone is free to trade in the market. An economic market is not a place or a thing it's a set of regulations governing trade. Fox News has sold Americans an oxymoron, unfortunately a great number of them have bought it and spread it across the globe via mass media. Now that they have bought a false assumption about a key concept in economics, it distorts their reasoning about economics to the point where they often argue against their own best interests.
Village bartering is often held up as an example of a "natural free market" by romantic libertarians, but at a minimum there must be some form of property law for it to exist. Also bartering doesn't scale very well, which is why we invented currency in the first place.
Yes, corporations are a "legal fiction", but at the end of the day, so are markets, free or otherwise.
"I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android