And typically European, both apathetic and completely misunderstanding. If you do not buy it from a physical store, the store charges the tax and you do not even need to look. It is only for online ordering and mail order that you need to even consider it.

In the US, you can do the same with the exception of internet/mail ordering. Quit trying to make this seem harder than it really is.

So you dislike the tax system that actually lets you see how much the government is charging you for the purchase. And apparently averse to any change in that.

And here you're just being an ass, regardless of it being true or not.

A Use Tax is basically a Sales Tax. A VAT is something slightly different, but with major effects. A Use/Sales tax is a tax levied on the final price of an item. A VAT is levied every time the item is transferred/incorporated all the way up the production chain. For example, the raw materials used in a capacitor placed on a mother board used in a computer. In a sales tax, the final cost of the computer is taxed. Under VAT, there is a tax applied on the price increase at each stage of sale. If you're talking something produced and sold entirely in country, there is no difference. However, anything that is produced outside of the country is not taxed under VAT but is effectively taxed user a sales tax. For items sold outside of the country, the reverse is true. This basically has the end effect of a sales tax treating imports and domestic production equally which a VAT gives a penalty to domestically produced goods for goods sold in country.

You ever look at your annual state income tax form? Most, if not all, have a line item from goods ordered from outside the state such as through mail order catalogs or the internet. If you didn't pay state sales tax on it when you bought it, you are supposed to pay a Use Tax on it. So, Tax Holiday? Not so much. Just a matter of people not paying the taxes.

How about a game a bit more complicated than Monopoly? Start with games by Avalon Hill.

Well, we could start with the UK Libel laws, where the truth is no defense.

Well, we could always start by decreasing the surplus population. I vote we start with anyone posting as Anonymous Coward.

Expanding on the search for alternatives, they also fail to account for changes in technology. Whale Oil was replaced by natural gas. The same will happen when Coal, Oil and Gas start to become scarce. Fusion may or may not be viable by that point but we still have Hydro, Wind and Solar going in the mean time.

Joy. Another AC Troll. A business has no rights its owners do not. When a 'business' murders someone, some individual(s) at the company murdered that someone. Those individual(s) are punished.

Would you blame the car used in a hit and run or would you blame the driver? Your analogies are trying to blame the car and leave the driver blameless.

In which case your question is the same as to why we have decided it is not acceptable to restrict individuals. The question is then to ask why is it acceptable to restrict the government but not individuals? Well, lets see. Because the government is made up of the people. The people being you, me and every citizen in the country. You, in your home, have the liberty to choose to restrict yourself with regards to your own property or not. The people who own the corporation, which likely includes you if you own any stock, have decided to place no restrictions upon the company you own. The simple reason is, because we have decided to place some restrictions upon ourselves, but not others.

If you want to know why that is, I suspect we all have our own reasons for this. But let me ask you this, since you believe businesses should be restricted. Do you believe you should be restricted in the same reason as the government? Do you believe you getting together with a couple of people for some reason means you should be restricted in the same reason as the government? Do you believe you opening a store means you should be restricted in the same reason as the government? Do you believe you opening a store with a couple people means you should be restricted in the same reason as the government?

A business has no rights that its owner(s) do not. To remove rights from a business is to remove those same rights from the owner(s). So just because someone decides to open a business, alone or with other people, is no reason to deny them rights that those who do not open a business have.

Because of equality under the law. Because of this thing called the 14th amendment. Because we, through our elected representatives, have had the government restrict itself to prevent tyranny by the government.

You got a source for that? Your standard Gasoline engine is 20-25% efficient. Gas turbines have are over 60% efficient. That's one reason they are used in power plants.

Don't think "right now today", think five years from now. If you only think today, you'll always be in crisis management.

The number of ipods 10 years ago? What does that matter? If you want to look at ipods, look at how many people have owned in the past 10 years. Most people are on their 3rd ipod at this point, with two previous ones in the trash. Think about the amount of electronics we've thrown away in the past 30 years.

By the way, what makes recycling successful is not that demand outweighs supply, it's that the cost to make new is more than the cost to recycle. Aluminum takes 20 times as much energy to extract new as it does to recycle. That's why recycling is driven. All that is really necessary is for the cost to recycle to be less than the sale cost.

Before last month, have you seen recycling of rare earth metals anywhere? It's been economical to recover the gold in circuit boards for five years or more now. We already have places to drop off old computers in the US. To add rare earths to the mix is not a stretch.

I fail to see the downside.

In 1920 the operators at AT&T striked. This led AT&T to pick up the pace and change it's entire network over to switches and the rotary phone. AT&T had resisted this prior to it realizing how vulnerable it was to a strike.

It would be just history repeating itself if this action by China led us to a way to replace Rare Earths entirely rendering them obsolete. But that still depends on us being able to duplicate the effects.

Consider it is still possible to recycle/reuse the rare earths from the existing equipment when it wears out. Recycling exists you know.