Without public funding and guaranteed loans to get people into college: Gotta hire a good, hard-working entrant, train them, educate them, move them up.

With public funding and guaranteed loans to get people into college: Cash crop of cheap labor. Lots of risk on individuals (waste 4 years without job on education, possibly get oversupplied degree), the poor are least able to handle this risk, followed closely by the disenfranchised (anyone often passed over in the local culture, e.g. blacks or women).

Tax-funded college and government-guaranteed student loans benefit hiring businesses at the expense of the individual. This is hard to grasp because it looks like money and education and other tangible goods are being handed to the individual, while the market effects are more abstract and difficult to understand without having a huge amount of knowledge in the area.

No we're not. We have to solve the energy crisis first. That requires a dyson sphere, which will provide 13,000 trillion times the energy we use today.

Molybdenum and Cesium are so rare we make them using inefficient, energy-heavy nuclear fusion. We have the ability to literally turn lead into gold, or dog shit into gold, or gold into platinum, or piss into Strontium-90; it's really fucking expensive, more expensive than just mining a brick of gold, so we don't. It's expensive because of the massive amount of energy required.

With thousands of trillions of times the energy available, we could turn anything into anything else. Automation would be a drop in the bucket: those machines are powered by a minimal amount of energy, but they'd be built with material we made dumping in billion of times as much energy to just turn sand into steel. We'd mine asteroids by turning base materials into fuel oils and hydrogen gas, then converting garbage silica rock and other bullshit that's not nickel-iron into nickel-iron, or oil, or gold, or palladium; we wouldn't need to find a high-ore-content rock to bring down.

That's post-scarcity. So much automated, so much that can just be done by magic, we don't need people doing anything. We'd have multi-level structures running hydroponic gardens for farms, rather than large swaths of arable land; it would take immense amounts of energy and material, but all that would be a drop in the bucket compared to the full power of the sun itself.

It's a hand-out to our slave masters.

The push to educate everyone has come from the Government's great support arm. It uses taxpayer money or Federal guaranteed loans and cultural pressure, both decoupled from risk requirements that stop banks from handing out tons of free money, to get everyone to go to college and get a degree.

This strategy churns out piles of cheap labor, freeing businesses from the social responsibility of building a workforce. Without these public efforts, most students wouldn't be able to go it on their own; businesses would have to hire good, solid entrants and send them to school on the company dime, taking the risk of training them. Businesses are good at minimizing that risk, and so would build a well-tuned, highly-selected workforce with little economic loss. Individuals have to assess an opaque market of both business demand and the state of business demand and candidate availability in several years; they take huge personal risks simply not present when a business does it.

This cheap labor costs businesses little in salary, even less in training risk (training useless individuals), thus displacing their responsibility onto the individual. It puts risks most easily handled by the rich and impossible to handle by the poor onto the individual, disadvantaging those who are less-advantaged or who will have more difficulty getting a job anyway (e.g. minorities in more racist communities). It's bad for the individual, but good for business.

Should read, "Jackass shockjock makes up fantasy about Nintendo re-releasing Virtual Boy"

I saw headlines that 50 Cent was shot dead last year and Terry Pratchett died this year. What? Are they BOTH alive?

Income tax: Best Buy gives you $800 paycheck, you pay $200 in taxes. You spend $600 at Future Shop to buy video games, Future Shop pays $200 in taxes.

Consumption tax: Best Buy gives you $800, pays $200 in taxes. You spend $600 at Future Shop to buy video games, pay $200 in taxes.

Nope.

In a competitive market, costs tend to be more stable. They don't race to the bottom; they just don't spiral out of control. With the hundreds of supermarkets in my area selling fruit at $5/lb, I'm going over to the smaller specialty stores to buy the same fruit for $1/lb. Pizza parlors have the same deal: you keep seeing $2.50/slice pizza and $2.25 for a 32oz soda, but once in a while they all get pissy because someone breaks rank and starts selling $1/slice pizza, $5 whole pizzas (instead of $9.99), and $1 sodas--and turning a huge profit. The independent shops... just keep their prices high, and keep selling, until that idiot realizes he's not going to get 3 times as much business that way.

In a competitive market, the price usually moves toward a cross-over point in the supply-demand curve, where raising the price brings in less profit. Without competitors, people aren't able to shop around, so the price can be raised more before people find an alternate means (harder than just finding an alternate supplier).

Aside, and less related, some markets aren't competitive, but appear to be. Rental housing, for example, is not competitive: entering the rental market is high-risk, as too many players in the market quickly causes massive economic problems; the rental market will tend to supply enough units to meet demand, but won't tend to allow new competitors to come in with lower rent prices to drive costs down, because they won't be able to fill units to cover costs. Prices in the rental market tend to increase when more wealthy people move into the area, as they're willing and able to spend more for the same apartment units.

Market is hard shit.

This is really kind of dangerous. It's a "we know it when we see it" kind of law. What if your company is HQ in Bermuda, and you operate an independent subsidiary in UK? How is this different from your company being HQ in the UK, yet purchasing services from a company in Bermuda?

The real problem is countries getting too greedy about profits all over the world, though. America wants to tax Apple for iTunes sales in Europe, and whines when Apple opens a European subsidiary that gets contracts and sells its iTunes tracks and thus doesn't have American income. Well, that's a European company operating in a European market making European profits; do you also want to tax Mercedes-Benz for their profits in Germany?

Mobile and PC games are just as shitty as all those Steam games you get on XBox One. Welcome to Unity.

Currently, I'm on http://it.slashdot.org/

They're doing the 90s Security Secret Sauce thing, where using encryption somehow means security. They don't have a threat model for this; they just said, "Oh, we get hacked sometimes! Turn on HTTPS!"