They're a bit like religion. Yes, there are some good aspects, but in total, it's more of a hassle than the benefits warrant.

If you want to wage war, do it. Go grab a gun and go to war. But do it yourself. If the assholes who want a war would have to fight it, they'd not only be far shorter, there would also be far fewer of them.

And why about the rich ones?

Well, I don't know about you, but to me not wanting to go to war to die senselessly to protect the interest of a few and participate in the dick-measuring contest between US and USSR sounds like a really sane reason to get out of it.

Dude, think again. Kissinger has one. Obama has one. The EU has one. Giving one to Assange, Manning and Snowden sends the wrong signal, they're not crooks.

Statues erected to promote freedom of speech and tell people they should not be afraid to say when there is something going wrong are considered "provocative".

How does one kid go from getting a bad grade to breaking and entering... Probably by following the train of thought that anything is ok as long as you bring home good grades.

That's what good parenting is about, right? Making sure your kids knows that his grades mean everything.

Someone fucking up on a test, then having the bright idea of "hacking" a computer (when obviously having no skill whatsoever to do so), then lighting the computer on fire without either considering that this will not accomplish anything nor having the sense to know that this fire might not be limited to the computer but may spread...

If that are the actions of a rational adult, ... Ok, it's the US, I withdraw my argument.

Funny enough, if he actually HAD screwed like an adult, he'd probably be in trouble with the law now, too...

- 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.