You gloss over the "if they could get away with raising prices" part. The reason they can't get away with it is competition; if Amazon and all of it's competitors have to pay an additional X% of their revenue in taxes there is no competitive pressure to stay at the lower price - prices will go up X%

Of course it depends on when and how the tax is added to what the consumer pays. In most retail you pay a certain price plus the tax. In that case then yes, the price won't change when the tax goes up. On the other hand if the tax is already included in the price that the consumer pays then the price will indeed go up. Ether way the effect is the same, the consumer pays more.

No kidding. Convicts who decided to change their life - changed their life. Those who went right back to their old neighborhood and fellow ex-cons went right back to their old life. Who woulda thunk it?.

Incarceration is an admission that the convicted person is a threat to society and needs to be removed. We don't know how to rehabilitate felons, but we do know how to lock them up so they can't hurt people, at least for a while.

I don't think it's Oracle. But someone has noticed that Java's popularity is in free fall. Some would argue that it can be used for anything; on the other hand - for whatever you are trying to do, there's a better language to do it in than Java. Web app? Node. Statistics? R. Scripting? Python. Etc.

If the only tool you have is a hammer you try to use it on everything, with predictable results

Exactly. They're busy writing Java code. Meanwhile the rest of us used productive languages, completed the project, and enjoyed the weekend.

Someone's trying to use Hillary's "What difference does it make?" defense.

The original story was that she influenced the sale in exchange for donations. Now the response from her defenders is "So what? We have plenty of uranium".

Nice attempt at changing the subject; I say "What difference does it make if there's plenty of uranium ore, the deal still looks shady"

No, they don't demolish the idea.

Their argument is that since demand in the past was lower than the global supply of uranium ore, there is no reason to worry that Russia and China are trying to corner the supply. That doesn't make any sense to me based on what we've seen from both countries.