Courts in the US, Canada, and the UK all disagree with your statement. Operating in a country does not require you to have a physical presence anymore, just "meaningful ties".

The British disagreed with their Empire breaking up, but it did anyway. Nor was Soviet leadership capable of keeping power through force despite controlling the military. Or perhaps we should as Gaddafi how it's going?

Nations are held together by a nebulous thing called legitimacy. Totalitarianism is a system where the state's legitimacy is absolute: it can do whatever it pleases. The other end of the spectrum is constitutionalism, where the state earns legitimacy by safeguarding the interests of its citizens. Nowadays we see an emergence of a third "pole", where a state's legitimacy depends from not just how it treats its citizens but also from how it behaves as a part of the international community. We are seeing the rise of an world system, a "city of nations", so to say. Sadly, just as humans are prone to self-centered megalomania, so are our social systems. Thus we should expect jealous attempts to claim "their" people's loyalty through, for example, nationalism and censorship.

Of course the irony is that a properly working world system will be a far safer place with more opportunity than the violent chaos of ages past for nations, just like a nation is a safer place with more opportunity than a jungle for humans. But that doesn't stop people from bitterly complaining how they're robbed by taxes, even as the only reason they have any income to tax besides whatever berries they managed to grap while running from lions is the very infrastructure maintained by said taxes. And of course would-be tyrants see their window of opportunity slipping away, and have every reason to delay the inevitable as long as possible by stirring up trouble and creating resentment. They'll fail, but time will tell how long it'll take.

One does not need to be "rich and famous" to buy a $70k car

If you can afford to pay $70k for a car, you're rich. Fame isn't necessary, though.

Dams are highly destructive of the environment.

All renewables have high enviromental impact, due to requiring huge areas dedicated to gathering disperse energy. The only even theoretically low-impact one is geothermal, since the gathering area is deep beneath what's usually considered environment, but sadly we lack drilling technology needed to utilize it in non-volcanic areas.

The only low-impact way of generating energy we currently have is nuclear, and that's dead in the water, so the future looks dark, but at least it'll be warm.

Likewise, the Canadian government is not just impotent but incompetent to think they could actually control foreign entities.

They don't want to control foreign entities, they want to control the cultural inputs their subjects are exposed to. We're going to keep seeing more and more such efforts as the Internet threatens to create non-geographic groups for people to identify with, which in the extreme would make local powers into little more than regional managers.

After all, the idea that people owe allegiance to a distant capital rather than a particular city is relatively new one. Who's to say loyalty to a web forum couldn't end up outweighting loyalty to a nation?

So just because a bunch of really smart people who have spent their adult lives studying something say that something is so, doesn't make it so.

No, but does strongly suggest that it is so. You can always explain away all evidence you don't like because yes, it's possible that all climate scientists of the world are involved in a conspiracy aimed at destroying your standard of living, just like it's possible that Obama is a reptilian overlord from Regulus or that the Soviet Union actually never fell and media has been lying to you all these years. It's just not very likely.

People like John Oliver, trotting out a bunch of people in lab coats saying, "look how many people say your wrong" is not an argument; funny yes, but not a valid argument.

It's a perfectly valid probabilistic argument.

Yes, but the corporations don't come and shoot you if you don't choose to give them your money.

They don't have to. All the resources of the world and nature's bounty are claimed by them, and those claims are backed by violence, paid for by your taxes of course. So you get to choose between giving them your money, or dying in the dark.

I ended up in the United States of America because back then the U. S. of A. was the epitome of liberty, freedom and democracy (at least to a Chinese refugee)

Every place looks like the epitome of good things to a newcomer, since they haven't been around long enough to catch a glimpse of the grinning skull behind the happy smile. US marketed itself as beacon of freedom but was willing to use morally bankrupt tactics in its fight with the Soviet Union; it was inevitable that the national security apparatus built for that fight would eventually turn against its host. Institutions don't just quietly vanish after their job is done, nor does the spirituality - the mess of justifications, excuses, cynicism and outright delusions - that allowed them to replace democratically elected governments with dictators "for freedom".

That's something to remember as we watch the US plummet into the abyss: it's reaping what it sowed. Karma can be a bitch.

You know what? The vast majority of people just don't care. Some even support it.

People care, they just don't think they can change it. It's learned helplessness, a reign of terror that keeps people bound in delusions of powerlessness. Some identify with the oppressor - an entity which ultimately exists only in our collective imagination - either because it lets them pretend they're not chained, or gives gives them material privilege, or often both. Some cover in fear from the horrible thing slithering in their midst, hoping they will be devoured last, and some are "just doing their jobs", since someone else will do it otherwise, treating mere cultural norms as unchangeable constants of nature. And so the monster we've created continues its scorched-earth march through time, claiming new host bodies through acclimatization into twisted cultural values and oppressive social expectations and casting them aside when they're used up. It's like a real-world zombie apocalypse, and like one the real threat is fear, panic and hopelessness before the sheer mass of accumulated evil.

Or, as a dude called John once put it: "Who is like the Beast, and who can fight against it?" This has been going on for a long time, possibly since the dawn of civilization. Which also nicely explains some of the weirder theologies that keep coming from the Religious Right: they're attempts to overlook the fact that their holy book is talking about them, and not in the role of heroes.

It's easier here and now to "tap into Capitalism for reasonable income" than most times and places.

Capitalism didn't exist in most places and times, so naturally. But it's getting harder to get or keep a job, and if you have one, it pays less than it used to. Which is perfectly logical from Capitalism's point of view - why pay people when you can invest in machines? - but the lack of disposable cash is slowly strangling the entire system.

Starting a business is still pretty straightforward - sure, health care requirement are more complex, and some industries just have to many regulations for small players, but that's not the norm.

Starting a business is a matter of creating a legal entity. Now what are you going to produce, who are you going to sell to, and how are you going to afford the capital to get started? You can't compete with multi-billion dollar companies on price, quality doesn't matter to people already starved for disposable income, and while you could take a loan most new businesses fail - and the banks know it too.

Or if, like me, you like passive investing, it's trivially easy to invest online with only small amounts to start with now.

Investing requires disposable income to begin with, and actually makes the systemic problem worse since it further lowers demand for end products.

"Capitalism" just means that the means of production are acquired by buying then, vs military conquest or cronyism.

Capitalism, as it's commonly used, also implies that production is demand-driven: people buy the products they want, this changes their relative profitability, which in turn shifts production resources to increase or decrease supply as needed. The problem is, as more and more people are made unemployed or fall into poverty despite having jobs, they no longer have the means (money) to communicate their desires, and the system breaks down. And to make matters worse, as demand slumps unemployment increases and wages fall, which drives demand down further, leading to a vicious circle - a tailspin, really.

The most painless way to fix the situation would be to institute an unconditional minimum income - citizen wage - to ensure demand stays up and even the unemployed can communicate their desires. However, as the prevailing ideal is still the "hero of labour" of the Industrial Era, this is unlikely to be politically feasible. Thus I suspect we'll be seeing a full-blown economic apocalypse - an utter collapse of Capitalism - before things start looking up.

If 3D printers ever mature, owning your chunk of the means of production will be easier still.

Not really. It simply means "end products" will be electricity and ink-equivalent.

Power dynamics, bro. How do you think it (might) have went down? "I'll bend over for a review" or "I can do a lot for your project, what can you do for me?"

This has already been debated out by professionals. Giving a bribe makes makes you just as guilty whether you offered one or the other party requested one.

Trying to reframe a clear case of bribery as a helpless victim of teh patriarchy being unjustly blamed for submitting to the greesy gasp of a dick-wielding overlord for desperately needed publicity doesn't work for the simple reason that sure she would had gotten all the advertisement she wanted simply by publishing such advances. And I suppose you know this too, hence you tagging "bro" there.

The companies say there aren't enough IT workers. The IT workers say there aren't enough jobs. It really comes down to there being huge numbers of IT workers but very few good ones.

Or, alternatively, very few companies willing to pay for good work. Minimum wage = minimum effort. This is not limited to IT, but extends to every industry and occupation. Yet for some strange reason the notion that table scraps entitle you to heroic efforts rather than hatred and resentment persists.

A rising tide lifts all boats!

The next rising tide will come with the next economic system, at least in the West. Capitalism was the system of Industrial Age, and is defunct now that everything's getting automated (except in countries that a still industrializing), since ordinary folks no longer have ways to tap into it for reasonable income.

I wonder what the Information Age economic system will be called, and what equivalent to Communism will its inevitable abuses spawn?

Gays always had the same rights to marry that everyone else has had- to marry someone of legal age of the opposite sex who was not closely related to them.

And blacks always had the same rights as everyone else on same terms as everyone else: that they needed to be white to have any.

Look into Eugenics to find more but it was the same line of thinking of nazies and the aryan race.

Yes, it is. And frankly, those of us who aren't Nazis are starting to get a bit tired of having this exact same conversation over every single group you wish to take your problems out on. So please follow your fuhrer to the wastebin of history already.

You have no coherent argument against my statement, so you resort to the old standby in an attempt to squash dissenting views.

You statement is invalid because it contains no precise data or even estimates, but uses weasel words like "large swaths" and "many" in their place. It is incomplete because it contains no references whatsoever to back your assertions, even if they were precise enough to backed, which they aren't. And it is also pointless because with over 1 billion muslims on this planet, there are undoubtedly "many" with "something fundamentally broken" with them.

In short, clumsy propaganda.

If b is an expression that returns a reference to a newly allocated resource, such as fopen or malloc, this if

So it's a tradeoff: get neat one-liners for a thing most C programmers don't bother to do, at the expense of adding a hard to notice source of bugs to every if statement.