At the moment politicians serve almost exclusively those who choose to donate large sums of money. That's honestly not a better situation than your alternative, even if it came to pass as you describe.

I totally agree we need pollution tax. However we have to be careful with its introduction as you may introduce a competitive disadvantage for your businesses. So the tax needs to fall on both domestic and foreign business (for example be applied at the point of sale).

The dependence on campaign funding negates the idea that everybody has one vote and each vote is as important as the other.

Forward secrecy is desirable as we see the NSA hoover up messages then store them until they crack the keys.

Has anybody attempted to bolt forward secrecy on top of SMTP? I would assume that it would need some kind of session key exchange between sender and recipient which would preclude the use of SMTP.

Writing an OS kernel is very tough work

Writing a shell is very tough work

Writing a graphics driver is very tough work

Developing a package management infrastructure and packaging a large number of programmes is very tough work

Developing a compiler is very tough work.

I maintain that elementary OS have contributed no more than 1% of the effort of their distribution.

I am not saying that elementary don't deserve money, but that they should get to the back of the queue and they absolutely should not demand money for other people's work.

Elementary OS' contribution to their own distribution is probably less than 1%. Almost all the effort into writing and packaging the software has been carried out by others. They are standing on the shoulders of giants. Why the fuck should they demand money for other people's work? It is disrespectful to call people cheaters, when they are grabbing money in exchange for other people's work! If anything, that is cheating. Elementary OS are so entitled its untrue.

Manually saving an application's state doesn't make sense

But in summary your advice is not to use the application :)

...but its been missing some basic features for years (in the windows and android versions):

1) preserve playlist between invocations of the programme (playlist resets every time you close vlc)
2) preserve state of music library as soon as you make changes to it (add music to vlc library, don't close vlc, library never gets saved)

This is one time where survivorship bias is not a flaw. If someone who got elected says it costs this much, then it probably did. We don't hear from all the people who spent less, *because they failed to get elected*!

Personally I think at least part of government should be drawn by lot (a la jury service), as elections really devolve to a spending contest, despite being at least theoretically democratic.

In the UK we have had majority governments formed from one of two parties for decades. At the last election (and almost certainly at the upcoming one) we had for the first time a coalition government where one of the main 2 parties had to team up with a minority party in order to form a government. This is a big improvement as by being forced to compromise with the minority party, the larger party has had to same some of its more extreme instincts.

There is no reason it couldn't also happen in the USA. However if you convince yourself that it can never happen (and worse convince others that this is the case), then maybe it won't.