- there is absolutely 0 wrong with providing a company with a promise to buy scheduled services on the clock without interruptions and to pay for the service whether or not you can use 100% of its capacity that day.

If I want to start a shipping business I can talk to an import/export broker and work out a schedule, where regardless of my circumstances I will ship 1 container every 2 days with him on a clock and because of that certainty of payment he will give me a much better price than he could anybody else.

As to Rockefeller's 'secret deal to prevent shipping for others' - baloney. The so called 'secret deal' was no such thing, it was a discount that Rockefeller was getting that nobody else could get because they would not ship a supply of that much oil on the clock, whether they have it or not that time and pay for a prearranged amount of delivery as promised.

Rockefeller was absolutely right and the reason that oil never went below 7 cents was exactly because government destroyed his company and did not allow him to find new ways to increase demand by lowering prices even further. Nobody was finding any better way of doing business in that time, otherwise they would have won against Rockefeller and that is all there is to it.

Microsoft had a temporary monopoly for a very good reason: they provided the computing platform that nobody else could provide at the price and just because you can't accept that doesn't change that fact. Microsoft and others also pushed hard enough in the market that competitors actually had to innovate to become competitive in that market, which is how free and open source software came to existence.

As to me being 'religious' about free market - I cannot stand hypocrisy of the modern society that will vilify the individual and promote the collective and use the force of the collective to oppress the individual. If I am 'religious' about anything that would be the belief that individual freedom tramps every so called 'societal good' that you can come up with that is based on lies, oppression, destruction of the individual, theft from the individual, slavery of the individual by the collective.

In other words, your government is busy protecting the interests of your own country and considers the concerns that only benefit a foreign nation secondary?

Any chance that we could borrow them for a while? I wonder what it's like to have a government like that.

So if you want to protect something from your government, get your coworkers, your neighbors, your parents and every other "normal" person you might know to use it heavily.

Banning YouTube might not be easy. Normal people are using it.

The "what" is that the majority of those readers will end up on ebay. You're dealing with people who are SO deep in debt that you can't even see their hair tips anymore. Giving them something they can easily sell means that it's sold in "never removed from box, mint condition".

The real problem is the lack of social mobility. Poor people are lumped together in poor areas, have poorly funded and staffed schools where you may learn little more than what is necessary to serve your masters. Yes, every blue moon someone manages to claw his way out of it on his own... only to face the backlash of the whole "affirmative action" bullshit. Because after a wave of poorly trained people (due to poor education from understaffed, underfunded schools), everyone from the demographic will be seen as the "quota $disadvantaged_group" and treated accordingly. And self fulfilling prophecies are damn hard to beat.

People see what happens around them. They see how Mike from next door who has always been a really bright kid did some studying outside of school because he couldn't learn a thing in the overfilled classes and he wanted to "get big" and out of the ghetto, They see how he studied late at night and made projects in his spare time, how he took every stinkin' job to get through college somehow because his parents just could not support him at all, and how he now has some cheesy nondescript title that means jack and reports to Ron who has always been sharp as a sponge and twice as smart whose only redeeming feature and whose only justification to the job is that his parents were rich enough to buy him a degree from some more reputable college. The only thing Ron is really great at is taking credit for Mike's work, and since he's his subordinate nobody questions it. And of course Mike's chance to actually climb the ladder is nil because Ron of course knows that his position is dependent on keeping Mike, and keeping him down.

This in turn means that nobody wants to dream the American pipedream anymore. The whole "work hard, climb the ladder and you can be rich" bullshit, nobody believes it anymore! Yes, that did work a long while ago. It hasn't worked for quite a while now. The new American dream is winning the lottery. Or suing some rich guy who runs you over.

Solving this is a lot harder, of course. With the current system, a solution is near impossible. Europe's social structure is a lot more permeable due to a bigger role of public schools (that are pretty well funded, too). Admission to universities is tied to your academic success and progress rather than your parents' wallet, and tuition fees are very affordable (running in the three digits per semester, usually). That would maybe be a first step.

The noise you hear overhead is the sound a joke makes while traveling at high speed through a gaseous medium.

Yes, I am saying precisely that, because free market is market free from government oppression, which means government cannot give a monopoly to a company and as long as a monopoly status is not given and not protected by a government the so called 'monopoly' is a temporary state of affairs that clients assign to a company if the company does exactly what the clients want.

A monopoly in a free market is not a problem at all because it doesn't become a monopoly by using force and oppression of government, so it may be a temporary monopoly (temporary as long as the company provides the best product at the best price) but no company stays a monopoly for too long. As an example I consider the break up of Standard Oil in 1911 to be a complete and utter travesty and destruction of individual freedoms. That company was started with one goal, to make money the best way Rockefeller knew how: by building a company that over time reduced prices and improved quality of service, both of which that company did.

The prices for oil product (kerosene at the time) went down from 60 or so cents in 1860s to just around 7 cents a gallon by late 1890s. All of this improved standard of living for people buying the product, the government wanted to steal the proceeds and let inefficient friends to enter the market where in the free market they could not compete on those prices at all.

Yes, a monopoly in a free market shows that the company is doing everything right.

This. Does anyone think this is going to help them in any way?

The way the US treats its poor reminds me a lot of the colonialism of earlier times. Patronizing, without any real care or concern and so far detached from the real problems that one has to wonder whether they are just stupid or whether their motives ain't what they claim to be.

Considering that the US still retains the 2nd, very obviously it can.

If they do, the US is probably suffering badly for it.

Think who has the most intellectual property. Ponder who does the most research. Consider that spying is cheaper than researching. Know that a backdoor does not care who is using it.

And now ponder what using this backdoor in the computers of a US corporation by a Chinese corporation could do to the GDP of either country.

And that is exactly the problem. Let's even assume for a moment that they actually are the good guys.

Wanting a backdoor for the "good guys" means wanting a backdoor for everyone. By definition. A backdoor in encryption is what everyone who tries to spy on someone else wants. The FBI wants it to spy on their enemies. Corporations want it to spy on other corporations. And I'm pretty sure China and Iran would love to use it to take a peek into some US government information.

Access to such a backdoor is hard to control. Mostly because the entity that COULD control it, the one where the backdoor is installed, is not supposed to even know it exists. In other words, such a backdoor will not stay secret for long. The relevant people will be bribed, bullied or forced. We're talking about nations here, not some petty hacker groups.

That's like the "do not track" thing in my browser, right?

Well, to be fair, this particular politician actually holds a relevant degree.

Yeah, the alternatives would have made all the difference.

Whether a broken vase is red or blue matters little concerning its usefulness.