Lazy? A woma who spends all year teaching, composing, recording, touring and playing weddings, and whose holidays are almost always combined with work? A guy who plays and records with multiple bands and works as a theatre janitor because the theatre management understand his need for flexible work so he can go on tour? A guy who spent years on the breadline trying to get his break as a session musician in London, and now spends most nights in pubs singing other people's songs? Etc

Lazy people don't survive in music, and my friends all manage to make a living doing what they love. They don't do that by selling T-shirts.

Fuck off. Does that seem rude to you? To me, it's less rude than "get off your ass", because I'm not assuming anything about you when I tell you to fuck off. None of my friends who perform professionally or semi-professionally are lazy, but your statement assumes they are. They are hard-working and dedicated, but none of them sell mugs, T-shirts or keyrings because their audiences just aren't interested in tat like that. I don't buy band T-shirts, mugs or keyrings, and I'm not going to feel guilty for that. Do you know what I'm happy to pay for from musicians? I'll give you a clue: for doing their job; for making music. Should a baker have to sell T-shirts to his customers to make a living? Should I reward my taxi driver by buying a wallet with his face on it? No.

If that "better way" doesn't make profit for the labels or the artists, then why exactly should they support it? Spotify themselves bleat about making a "loss" on the free end of freemium whenever the labels and/or artists complain about low profits. But Spotify make money on every single advert for a free user, and the "losses" on free users all are just shuffling of moneys from premium users' plays to free users' plays, and they profit from both types of user. In the end, users get a cheap service not because of efficiencies or innovation at Spotify, but because Spotifypays its suppliers as unsustainable low rate.

That's a strawman. We're not talking about track-bundling here, we're talking about freemium services that are little more than leeches.

Recording contracts set out labels' and artists' shares as a percentage. Anything that increases the total income therefore benefits both label and artist. The whole point of a commission-based system is ensures that making money for the client is always in the representative's interest.

When a child becomes sick, someone else always pays. In this case, it's not the parents. Why should a child's health be determined by the parents' wealth?

Wealth is generated by society.

Money violates all natural laws. In a fully market-based healthcare system, a childless millionaire bachelor nearing the end of his natural lifespan can outbid a healthy 18-year-old accident victim for a scarce resource such as a liver. If it came down to a fight for control of the resource, I'd bet on the kids, his friends and his family over the lonely old man any day.

Really? Well that's fine -- I'm more interested in free healthcare than insurance. Like for example for my niece, born last night and already transferred to another hospital for potentially life-saving surgery. All bought and paid for out of general taxation, no premiums, no waivers, no limits.

I don't actually care, as I don't have a TV. What I was trying to do was demonstrate the extreme differences in cost between pooled and unpooled resources.

Of course it is. But the bigger the pool, the greater the efficiency savings. This is why healthcare in the US can bankrupt you, whereas healthcare in most of Europe is essentially a marginal cost.

I am not saying regulation is the only option, I'm saying it's the best option.

Neither "var" nor "let" is more approachable to someone not already informed. Programmers know variables, mathematicians are familiar with the "let" convention.

Optionals are actually pretty intuitive when you're not already in the programmer's mindset. Why can't we simply ask whether something is there or not? Many languages force you into all sorts of silly workarounds, including subtyping, flag management, or (lazy man's favourite) exception handler.s

There's never an easy answer to that one. Values are far more intuitive, but classes as values are never likely to work.

It had better be -- mules can carry some pretty nasty bugs down there....