You also want to encourage businesses to build and maintain permanent housing for your residence so at least a few people can live without 4 hour daily commutes.

The most common one is the company still has a lot of good employees, and the buyer wants those.

Another common reason is that if the company has good credit you can buy them, borrow a bunch of money, pay yourself consultancy fees from the borrowed money and then let the company go bankrupt. It's called "Vulture Capitalism".

It also works if a company owns a lot of property. The sci-fi pulp magazines went out of business in the 80s because their distributor got bought out when somebody noticed they were sitting on a bunch of property that was undervalued. They bought 'em, sold the property and shut down the business, leaving the pulp mags without a distributor.

Sometimes too the companies have a bunch of money from investors and it's use it or lose it time. I think Facebook is here, and that's why they bought out Occulus Rift.

And occasionally it's just because the company is over valued. HP is currently in a lot of hot water with their stock holders for spending several billion on a company that was massively over valued.

you need to upgrade. Sooner or later one of the poorly policed ad networks will serve you up a virus. I run some ads off my home page to pay for hosting/etc and I stick to google's ads because so far every site I browse has been shut down at least once when their ad networks served up a virus. Angry Nintendo Nerd, Spoony Experiment, Something Positive. All of them. Heck, I think even Penny Arcade's been nailed.

It's not a matter if if, it's when. Which is why I'm posting from Win 7 today :(...

That's just it, Russia didn't even try. The went straight into fascism. China was the same thing. That said, I don't think you can go from violent revolution coupled with extreme poverty right into Socialist Utopia. Again, Russia was pretty bad off after WWII, and it didn't get rebuilt like Japan did...

It's possible, but most don't make it. Everyone remembers Abe Lincoln, but can you name any of those kids from his Log Cabin School?

Also, learning to develop is now very, very expensive. A college degree that was $50k in my day is $200k now. That degree gets you the same $50k to $60k year job today, but with 4 times more debt...

You got lucky enough to pick an industry that didn't get devastated in your area and you didn't have anything really, really awful happen to you. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for you, but you're very much the exception, not the rule...

their moms/dads are rich. They can blow off school and go back whenever you feel like it. If you look at just about every successfully "Entrepreneur" they come from upper (way upper) middle class to very rich.

We here in America like to pretend we've got a lot of upward mobility that isn't really there. So when somebody starts making millions we pretend they pulled themselves up by bootstraps. Heck, Bill Gates started out with nothing except a 1 million dollar trust fund, his father's years of experience as a business lawyer and his mother's seat on IBM. If he can make it anyone can.

We should have socialized medicine so people can actually get treatment. Use the money you save putting the insurance industry out of work to pay for it.

Because they mostly did it to poor people.

it's printed right on the money: "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". You're legally required to accept US Currency. It's up to you how much, but if you have a debt you don't get to say no. You can require that the currency be in certain denominations (e.g. you can decline a jar full of 10,000 pennies) but that's about it.

If you say no and it's enough money to go to court over than sooner or later a judge is going to make you take the money. If you tell a judge no he throws you in prison for contempt of court.

I suppose you could overthrow the US Gov't, but other than that our money is pretty sound.

Oh, gold's intrinsic value is that rich people like to wear it. It's one of the few metals that won't leave marks on your skin. Since rich people are, by definition, the most important players in any economy they sorta set the value. It's been a long time since we were the sort of hunter-gathers that couldn't see the intrinsic value of gold...

copper very much either works or it doesn't. It's reliable, but once it starts degrading it goes fast.

Cell service can often _barely_ work. This leaves you in the position of fighting tooth and nail with a phone company to get the service you've been promised. Unless you're wealthy you going to lose that fight.

The other day I thought I saw a horse at the park, but it was just a Unicorn with it's horn broke off.

Sorry, you just reminded me of that joke.

True, but ensuring corporations remain profitable and the stock price goes up every year is the real role of gov't. At least until Citizens United get overturned.

Yeah, but it simplifies it to a frightening degree. I when can ship an office max 10 or 20 types of plastic they can turn into 1 million different products it'll be the kind of revolution we haven't seen since the hey day of the internet.

just about every big regulator goes to work for the industry when he's done. It's so common we have a name for it: Regulatory Capture.

Here in America we've been voting pro corporate right wingers into office since Reagan. They stacked the supreme court and have been chipping away at the gains made after WWII non-stop since those gains were made. It's not a battle I see us winning :(.

the problem is instant manufacturing. It won't be a 3D printer in your home, it'll be one at the store. That'll be doable in my life time. Heck, some officemaxs already have 3D printers, and there's a little commune of hobbyists doing 3D printing too.

It means the end of an entire industry of logistics, shipping, etc. That combined with automation (most factories employee less than 100 people unless they're paying subsistence wages) is going to cause huge social upheaval.