Extensive... but not *that* extensive. Not nearly worth any extended period of interrupted trade between China and Japan, let alone the US.

As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"

A stopped clock is right twice a day, but RT *are* a stopped clock. They'd report any old bullshit if it helps their cause. Recall the reporting during the Libya campaign that Gaddaffi's victory was imminent, that the rebels were NATO troops, and so on?

The fixation on 'death panels' is based on a flawed understanding of the situation. If the NHS refuses to provide a treatment to you, you are still totally free to opt for private medical care. What the NHS provides is a certain minimum level (designed to be as efficient in saving lives as possible, given the available resources) to everyone.

That only makes sense in terms of how literally everything affects the rich less. But inflation tends to be less regressive. For the rich, the $20m in cash is also what generates most of your cashflow, as capital gains. Whereas someone with $20K in savings will only be seeing negligible interest payments from that. Instead, his daily life would be determined by his income from his job, which would scale automatically with inflation.

Deducting the value of a household's home (which scales with inflation) from their net worth, the median US household's inflation-vulnerable wealth is actually $-12,000. In other words, for most people, inflation actually increases their net worth, in real terms.

You need to look at the difference between wage inflation and cost of living inflation. The 1970s external oil price shocks created a cost of living spike. But nowadays the conservatives controlling the economy are worried about wage inflation for some deeply mysterious reason, despite the fact that the wages for the majority of people have been in decline. (Cost of living hasn't increased as a direct effect of this, because people literally can't afford to pay more.)

This runs totally counter to reality.

The rich have a lot of monetary assets. For example, money in the bank, investment vehicles, etc etc. Their wealth goes down *faster* than the majority of people. Unless they leave the country, of course.

The poor have less monetary wealth - indeed, most of their monetary stuff are *debts*. For example, mortgages. Under inflation, the amount you owe under your mortgage stays fixed nominally, while the price of your house increases. Thus you are better off. Under inflation, your wages will also rise to compensate for the rise in the cost of living. Hence, if you aren't living off of interest, you are relatively unaffected by the pain.

Historically, the poor have always clamoured for inflationary policy, while the rich have always pushed for deflation, for this exact reason. See the debates over free silver, leaving the gold standard, etc. This is textbook stuff.

Does Israel block tor?

Read between the lines. An *IT security company* (which includes protecting against Malware and botnets) wrote a press release saying that the recent increase in Tor traffic is due to something it co-incidentally provides a service protecting against.

This is a piece of advertising.

Here, look at this:

Pull up a google search:

http://www.vir.us.com/delete-trojanwin32mevade-b-user-guide-to-remove-trojanwin32mevade-b
> Countries Affected: Germany, USA, China, Switzerland, Canada etc.

Now look at the Tor user numbers from China:

https://metrics.torproject.org/users.html?graph=userstats-relay-country&start=2013-06-01&end=2013-08-30&country=cn#userstats-relay-country

Why is Mevade creating Tor traffic from places as tiny as Vatican city, and having zero impact from China? When apparently China *is* affected by the botnet, and if past knowledge is any indicator, is probably the world capital of malware?

It doesn't add up.

Libertarianism merely cuts out the middle man in letting the rich own you.

An impatient prankster can toss your phone into the loo and make your phone unusable for a good while longer.

There are 15 key elements instead of the usual 3-5, but they tend to be obvious and inevitable elaborations of the standard structural components, that the author decided to assign 5, or 10, or 15 pages for.

For example, 'Opening image', 'Theme is stated', 'Set-up' would all be part of the 'Exposition' part of the 5 part structure. In turn, 'Bad guys close in', 'All is lost', 'Dark night of the soul' would be parts of the 'Falling action' part of the 5 part structure. If your story involves bad guys at all, it's difficult to see how else you can do a falling action otherwise.

I don't think so. I think that companies fail, for sure, but this just doesn't lead to any grand arc of improvement. What it means instead is that the companies that remain are the ones that still also make a lot of mistakes and are filled with incompetence, but are more capable of absorbing this failure - typically by being larger and more diversified. Gradually the market gets taken over by these large monolithic entities, as things get tougher and tougher on the lower end since the threshold for failure gets lower and lower for the little guy.

Ensuring meritocracy isn't a private sector monopoly, it's just general good management, and can be imposed in any organisation or metaorganisation.

Those businesses go under, the people get fired, but the guys at the top still nevertheless collect their final bonuses, and then completely new businesses arise to make the same mistakes. In government, when things go bad, sometimes people actually learn lessons from their earlier mistakes.