How is GMail necessary to the growth of the middle class? There's 1.3 billion people who can pick from any other email provider. Compared to creating an OS from scratch, creating and running an email service is trivial.

The bigger concern is that you may not be able to reach any users of the very popular (and state-supported) Chinese services. If you can't do business with people in China through Gmail (and corporate GMail is a significant portion of GMail), you will switch to a provider who does. Or Google figures out a workaround.

In other words, it's a real concern, but not one I would lose a tremendous amount of sleep over. I'd much rather worry about Chinese hackers absconding with my data than about the Great Firewall blocking my GMail.

Wrong. You said it yourself: radar technology is so sensitive that they have to dial it down, otherwise they're swamped by false positives. If a giant bomb-dropping machine traveling at Mach 2 can pretend to be a sparrow flying over some forest, it's already a win. So it's a huge positive when fighting someone even with that kind of technology. When fighting someone whose AA system is a guy holding an AK-47, it is 100% useless. Until we get to active camouflage.

Is that why the US almost leads the developed world in gun ownership, and blows it away in incarceration rates and gun deaths?

Well, I always like to point people to this incident as a great example of guns and rage really not mixing well: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/michigan-concealed-carry-road-rage-two-dead_n_3956491.html

And it is still far, far more common than in any other western countries that do have strong gun control laws.

Interesting. Just as a heads-up, HOAs are not all the same, and they're certainly not mandated by the state. They're mandated by developers, who love them due to the fact that they give them the ability to control the look of the development while they're still selling lots, all the while providing them with a lowered financial risk. In that sense, they're definitely not a normal free-association community: you want to buy that house, you join the HOA. Kinda like a union for rich people. Furthermore, they frequently end up being controlled by the people with the most free time: house wives whose kids have left the nest. And that leads to some ugly, ugly rules and enforcements.

What I always find fascinating is that the biggest libertarians invariably live in areas with very strong and expensive HOAs - if not outright gated communities.

Here's the thing: you don't live in your own universe. Where your activities impact and intersect with others, you need to come to agreements on how to behave with those others. Zoning laws are just one way to codify those agreements.

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=193060 Here's the link that states pretty clearly that the chicken pox vaccine is certainly not highly likely to actually cause Chicken Pox. It helps to read the actual literature.

What? ahref=http://www.cdc.gov/chickenpox/vaccination.htmlrel=url2html-1107http://www.cdc.gov/chickenpox/...> 98% immunity is pretty fucking good. From the same link: "However, the risk of getting shingles from vaccine-strain VZV after chickenpox vaccination is much lower than getting shingles after natural infection with wild-type VZV. " As far as I can tell, you're wrong on pretty much all counts.

The government, with a fund funded by vaccine makers.

If what you do with your body starts to affect my body, you better believe that I'll request a say in what you do with your body.

A democratic government isn't something separate from the population. The population gives legitimacy to the government through regular election. If you don't like the government, take it up with the population that elected it.

That said, this isn't even a case of tyranny of the majority. This is a case of the population codifying rules that are designed to prevent a few asshats from irreversibly harming many individuals and taxing society at large.

To put it in terms you understand: people got together and decided of their own accord that unvaccinated people present a massive and unwarranted risk to them, and they're setting up rules how the people who don't want to get vaccinated can interact with them. Furthermore, your personal freedoms end when they negatively impact my well-being.

Wow, new laws are being passed that impact people in new ways! Stop the presses, there's tyranny afoot!

Let me ask you this: why should everyone else subsidize building owners by footing the clean-up for their collapsed building?

Buildings don't decide anything, building owners do. The problem is that without building codes, building owners are incentivized to not make buildings earthquake safe: no one short of a civil engineer doing a tear-down analysis can figure out on their own if a building is earthquake-safe, which means that no one does, and everyone rolls the dice. Since earthquakes are rare, it's quite possible that the original builder will never be exposed to the results of shoddy building practices. However, it is guaranteed that someone will be. So we have a situation where the risk analysis is very difficult if not mandated ahead of time, the event is rare for a particular individual but guaranteed for a population, and the cost up-front for an individual is fairly large. The rational calculation for each individual builder is to not make it earthquake safe, and just claim it is ok. This shifts cost from individual builders onto the population at large.

Building codes are essentially the general population saying to individual builders "we made our risk-benefit analysis, and we're not going to subsidize you."