After necessities like food, rent, electricity, phone, transportation, clothing, and so on, it's going to take some wicked budgeting skills to have any disposable income at all.

So? It sucks to be poor. It's *always* sucked to be poor. It always *will* suck to be poor. You can't legislate that away.

Lack of living wage jobs is a problem. But so are the excessive expectations, created in part by our material culture and in part by the belief (created from whole cloth) that nobody should ever suffer because life is unfair nor have a life that sucks.

ONCE I LIVED IN CAPITALS
MY LIFE INTENSELY PHALLIC

but now I'm sadly lowercase
with the occasional italic

Roger McGough.

I used the Internet, quite happily and successfully, for more than a decade, before HTTP (curse you, Tim Berners-Lee) began to intrude on the experience. I would be very happy to go back to those days. Throw in an IRC/FTP/RTP+RTSP "subscription" for content, and there's nothing I would miss.

Yet... here you are. And looking at your posting history, pretty regularly too.
 

The old adage about TV ("99 channels and nothing on") applies to the web, but with several orders more magnitude of noise to signal.

If there's "nothing on TV", then what exactly are you doing here? And seriously, In a day where there's practically nothing that's not got a web page and a user community somewhere... I suspect you're blowing smoke for the karma.

The gaming community really doesn't need this old stereotype of gamers as uptight nerds who are scared to step outside the bounds of adult-imposed propriety. I played D&D in high school in the 1980s, but I found plenty of time for illin' like any other teenager.

Pretty much this. The same guys I played D&D with on Saturday afternoons in '80/'81 were the same guys I cruised the Stratford Strip with on Friday night and went (underage) drinking with on Saturday night. And the same guys who drove their cars waaay too fast on the back roads around Rural Hall. And went shooting the appliances folks had dropped in the woods off of Payne Road with. (And occasionally took a pot-shot at the old Payne place, which was rumored to be haunted.) In fact, the only real difference between semi-redneck gamers and the semi-rednecks non gamers around us was that we played D&D (and Traveller, and Boot Hill, and Gamma World, and... a whole bunch of other games vanished into the mists of time). The only time I recall one of us getting beat up was when one (not me) made an ill-chosen remark about someone's sister.
 
D&D and other fantasy and war games were also quite popular when I was in the Navy - and the submarine service is hardly a bastion of conformist nerds.

Correlation does not equal causation. And you've left out how Gygax and Arneson were avid wargamers, and how the first ruleset of what would become D&D was an expansion (by Gygax) of a medieval rule set by Jeff Perren... and how Arneson (an avid player of Napoleonic figures based wargames) further expanded on the concept.

Are you one of the people who pays no taxes?

Since the significant point mentioned was "the presence of a CPU" and not "the presence of Microsoft".... your point would be what?

For penny-ante criminal activity, yeah, BTC might make it easier for perpetrator and harder for the cops if he uses his head and a little common sense.

But for the bigger stuff and full blown fraud? (I.E. anything that's going to bring the full weight down on your head.) I don't think BTC will change things much unless you're willing to never, ever touch the hidden or ill gotten money that you've somehow managed to never have in your name in traceable records in the first place. Once it's traceable, I suspect it doesn't matter much if it disappears as traceable USD and re-appears as a Tesla bought with (theoretically untraceable) BTC... You're going to have some explaining to do, and it's going to be very hard to create reasonable doubt.

But as always, the "if you can't do the time" rules applies unless you're 110% certain you'll never slip up. Because all it takes sometimes is once.

This. It's the the thing that the "it scales back slightly the decentralized and fee-less nature of Bitcoin, which are important features to many of its supporters" crowd doesn't grasp. (One of the many things about how the real world works that many BTC fanboys don't grasp.)

What sort of "rebels" would have the training an ability to set up and operate a crew served weapon?

Rebels that had that training before they became rebels? (And who could then give guys that didn't have the training the bare minimum they need to know.) That's a serious answer by the way, folks don't lose their knowledge just because they turn their coats. And on top of that, low level missile systems designed to be used in active combat (like the BUK) are generally not designed to operated by rocket scientists in the first place. They're simplified and designed to operate quickly with minimal controls.

I take it you've never studied forensic accounting, or met a forensic accountant? (I have both, as it's a specialty my wife (an accountant) was looking at going into.) It's actually very hard to make funds "disappear" unless they never "appeared" in the first place. The only way to hide illicit income is to never visibly spend it and never take traceable possession of it. You might be able to hide a big pile of wealth - but you will leave traces that you moved it. Paying someone under the table? Same problem. Etc... etc...

Or, to put it another way, like so many here on Slashdot, you seem to suffer from the delusion that you know better than the actual professionals. You don't. Forensic accounting and accountants have been around a long time, and they've seen everything you describe. Using bitcoin the Mob might be able to get away with these things for a while, but knowing what I do (and what you seemingly don't) I wouldn't even try.

But it will generally affect competitors equally. Two different taxi companies, or two different electricity generating companies that use coal. Or two different hotels of the same class and size in the same city.

And since competing businesses tend to have to lower prices in order to remain competitive in the same market as they pursue the same prospective customer, the tax burden is going to raise costs (and lower margins) more or less the same for both (or several) parties.

Is your only point to pick at the example or do you really disagree with the thesis?

I didn't pick at the example - I completely demolished your theory by demonstrating that your cheap and plentiful could not possibly exist. But you're to thickheaded to realize this.
 

Making your basket nuclear but still needing another 10 support baskets that limit its speed and supply its eggs with yoke defeats the purpose of having it nuclear!

Wrong again moron. The purpose of going nuclear wasn't to increase cruise speed, but to increase dash speed (I.E. at flight quarters), and to reduce the volume required for ship's propulsion to make greater volume available for aircraft fuel, munitions, spares, food, etc... (And as a bonus, they've discovered they can also carry about three days worth of fuel for the escort group - greatly improving the overall operational flexibility.)
 
Or, to put it another way, your cheap and simple is actually much more complicated and expensive than you think because you now need an enlarged logistics train to fuel the carrier. It's much more constrained in operations both because the lower dash speed limits the top weight of aircraft that can be launched and because it must be resupplied (with fuel, ammo, food, spares, etc...) more often.
 

What part of this is complicated?

It's very fucking complicated - and you have the understanding roughly equivalent to a five year old who goes "oooh, sun hot daddy!" and mistakenly believes he thus grasps the intricacies of the fusion reactions that produce that heat.

But because such penalties impact all businesses in whatever country is collecting them, it won't really change things - because all of those businesses will simply pass along the new government-mandated increase in their overhead along in the form of higher prices. To the businesses in question, it just goes in one door and out the other. You want to use the heavy hand of the tax collector to damage people's behavior in a way that makes them go out less, drive less, spend less, do less? Tax citizens directly, with a very special line item they can't miss, that says "carbon tax, because you exist" - and they'll act. Well, mostly they'll act to elect people who will undo that tax, but they'll act.