Point of order, surely you're not attempting to equate Equal Rights Under the Law with scientific disagreement. Surely you're not trying to say that saying that some people are more equal than others and disagreeing on anthropogenic climate change are the same thing. You're not, right?

One can be debated, the other cannot.

I will admit I have not. Of course, that's because no one would be willing to pay me what I'd require to work in "the city" let alone live there. I'd prefer to live in the part of the US which respects all my Rights and not just the ones they feel like respecting today.

An admittedly quick bit of research indicates that for more than it costs to buy a house with an acre of land where I live you can get yourself a 1 bedroom 1 bath cracker box in various parts of "the city". I'd rather not pay more and get one quarter the space.

Also, when you say "the city" as if it is the only city in the world it sounds all kinds of pretentious and self-important.

Cost of living in NYC, by which I mean a place to live, is sky high because of a combination of lack of physical space on the ground and rent control. There's no point in building giant expensive and nice apartment buildings when the government will just come in and force you to rent it out for far less than it ought to cost. Therefore supply is choked off, shortages result and the only way you can get a decent apartment is practically if someone dies.

Without rent control things would most likely still eventually get expensive because of lack of real estate but you'd also likely have people trying to build more options whereas right now what's the point?

Except that spending my money to improve a crap hole neighborhood is almost certainly not in my best interests. It would cost far more money, have far greater risks and likely benefit me not at all beyond a PR move. Building a new corporate HQ in a blighted area is almost always going to be a moronically bad idea for nearly everyone concerned except the city which gets to tax you to hell and gone for the privilege. On top of that you're almost certainly going to have greater security concerns and far higher crime rates to deal with.

Can you imagine the recruiting message for getting new employees to work at said HQ? Come work in beautiful downtown Crimeville! AKs provided for your security! Only 12 muggings this week!

Yep, awesome idea.

Bitter much? I and several people I know worked their way well into the middle, if not upper middle, class by our own hard work and talent after starting out anywhere from poor to dirt poor. You can take your defeatist attitude and go right back to the sad little world you live in and continue hating on those who can and do make something of themselves.

As wealth is not finite, thanks for conceding that right off the bat, it cannot be hoarded therefore my point is correct and everything you said is defeated by that admission. QED. If you think that the American Dream is a lie then that too is your problem. Those who come here every day to live that Dream don't need people like you trying to drag them down.

Most people in this world who are well off got there by hard work and talent. If you can't hack it, that's your problem and not one that is the fault of the system or anything else or would you rather just take from those who can create and make? What a sad, gray and terrible world you live in.

So, in your world wealth is finite and if I have more then by definition it is because I, directly or indirectly, took it from someone that has less? What a dreary and depressing little world you live in.

Out here in the real world wealth is created by the process of work and innovation among other things. Wealth is not this finite pool where if I have more then you have less.

There will never be a post scarcity economy until we figure out a way for virtually limitless energy. Not very cheap, but limitless and the ways to use it to directly provide goods. That is what makes the Federation run and allows people to work more or less only when they want to. The combination of replicators and limitless energy, which at this point may as well be magic. Coincidentally magic is pretty much required to make any socialist utopia run for too long so I guess one ought not be surprised.

One thing that is never answered in the ST universe is why would anyone want to be a waiter in a restaurant (or similar service job)? They show them from time to time but the number of people who feel their true calling in life is to bring people food and deal with crappy attitudes is vanishingly small so where do they come from?

Either you don't buy much in the way of electronics, or you live in a place with lots of options. I do buy a fair bit and live in a place where the best computer store is Best Buy. Sure, I could wait days and days for something to show up (and still pay for even that likely) or with Prime I can order as late as Thursday and have it no later than Saturday.

Given the alternative for someone in my position is to wait up to a week for something to show up, or buy it locally at highly inflated prices and just take whatever the local stores feel like carrying it's a pretty simple thing.

Newegg wants to charge 23 bucks to ship anything over night. Prime will do it for 3.99 and you only have to do that a handful of times for Prime to pay for itself.

Of course, YMMV.

The giant difference is the amount of influence you have against your city or State government is far far greater than you do against anyone in Fed.gov. Depending on the size of the city you're in your Mayor may care what you personally think and say. The President of the US cares not one little bit what you personally think and your Senator's likely care little more. You're a number among millions and they are going to be far more influenced by someone down on K Street than you.

That's the point in the end. Your direct power over someone in the Fed.gov is very limited simply as a function of numbers. Your direct power over your State rep is far greater and in the end if your State sucks in your mind, you can relatively easily move to one that matches your view points. Don't like the conservatism of the Mid-west for instance, move to California or vice versa. The Founders reasonably foresaw this and they may have no idea what a computer was but that doesn't make the Federal system they crafted antiquated and we are poorer for having moved from it. They might wonder why there were so many "free slaves walking around" (or not, as many of them were abolitionists or proto-abolutionists) but they definitely would wonder why in the world we had let Fed.gov become the out of control leviathan it is and how in the world it has been allowed to reach into the life of every last man, woman and child.

Sorry, no. That logic would only apply if the budget were insane and passed by the House specifically to fail. In any case, if the Senate thought the budget was crazy they should have taken it up and voted it down. Instead they simply said "meh" to their Constitutional duties and ignored the budget for years and years.

Their bloody job is to take it up, vote it up or down and/or amend and return it. Not to bloody ignore it so they can avoid going on the record.

Odd, I was able to search and find a delete your google plus link easily. I do agree that it is slightly annoying they don't have a check box to not create the G+ profile but it isn't like they automatically fill it out and push everything into it. You have to manually go to G+ and finish the process if you want it, delete it if you don't.

The poster's stalker premise is also pretty silly. If I'm being stalked am I really going to be dumb enough to create accounts with my actual name on them? The whole thing still strikes me as a tempest in a teapot.

Agree with everything... Though, who actually checks system requirements these days unless you know your machine is so marginal that it isn't even funny. I'll grant maybe I'm not the average, maybe I'm blinded by my own experiences and resources, but unless you're wanting to play Crysis at won't most people's normal machines handle the vast vast majority of games without even blinking?

Am I wrong here?

I'm not totally sure that's the case though. I'm sure many would see the necessary powers to do that as a gross intrusion. One may not like it but the freedom to succeed includes the freedom to fail. The freedom to spend your money as you see fit includes the freedom to possibly be defrauded out of it. That sucks, but the alternative is that government monitor and approve directly or otherwise every single transaction or at least the conditions under which those transactions take place. I have a hard time imagining a libertarian granting government the power to do that, no?

Agreed. It is an excellent example of the true nature of government. It grows and gobbles up power unless something comes along to stop it. Once SCOTUS ruled that the ICC was pretty much the blank check you mentioned there was nothing left to limit Congress from doing whatever the hell it wanted as long as it could some how or another tie it to either commerce or the market in general.

Because clearly the solution to this problem, like all problems, is ever more government intrusion. Big Brother must be allowed to protect us morons from ourselves. Someone has to do it, no?

I'd take issue with them nominating themselves as the one true source, but that's neither here nor there. The real question is whether people will be willing to pay exorbant prices for relatively ancient hardware on the grounds that it very slightly increases the amount of "freedom" they have. Given that 99.95% of people will have no idea what this is about and further wouldn't care if they did (as we're talking about an increase that is difficult if not impossible to measure and arguably doesn't exist) I wouldn't hold your breath on this becoming anything more than an isolated instance.

In short, unless one can prove that even a tiny percentage of computer BIOSes and the like are phoning home or contacting the NSA with daily activity reports exactly no one, on the grand scale, will care. It reminds me of all the efforts to create a "free" CPUs or graphics cards in the past. Sure, you could do it and have them as long as you're okay with 10 or 15 year old technology that is incapable of doing anything that is currently useful. But it's Free! :D