...and have to deal with public schools. You will absolutely grind your teeth in rage that you have no choice about paying the princely salaries of those motherfuckers, and I use the word advisedly. I would rather deal with the cable company and the DMV on the same day I had a root canal than deal with a public school district.

It's different because what Amazon blocked, if his post is the full story, is purchases IN THE FUTURE of NEW content for his Kindle. How is that some evil taking back of things he thought he'd already paid for? It's not. He can still read all the books and content he's already purchased -- he just can't read anything new.

If you want to make a comparison to Home Depot, it's as if you bought a lawn mower, then returned it fifty times for this or that warranty repair, and they got pissed off at you, thought you were a whiner and a parasite, and banned you from buying accessories for the mower from their store.

Now, to make the analogy complete, we have to imagine that the mower is made by Home Depot, and you *can't* buy accessories elsewhere, so your mower will be a lot less useful in the future than you thought it would be. The action by Home Depot hurts more.

But I'm not seeing how any of your imagined property rights on your mower have been violated. You can still do what you damn well please with the mower. HD isn't restrictign your use of what you already own in any way at all. They're just declining to sell you additional parts that would make your mower still more useful, and I don't see what's wrong with that. Requiring them to make business transactions with you forever just because they did so once is obnoxious. Imagine if it worked the other way around -- if the law said that, once you bought a mower from Home Depot, YOU were required to buy all your future accessories from them. Suck much? But that's the forced-marriage deal you want to force on Home Depot. It fails the Golden Rule test.

I don't doubt that this guy is unhappy because he counted on being able to buy content from Amazon in the future for his Kindle. But...well, maybe he should have thought about that before returning SEVERAL $1000 pieces of big electronics. I mean, if doing business deals with him ends up costing Amazon money on the whole, instead of earning them money, what the hell did he expect? Why would they want to continue doing business with him? In essence, he's a "defective" customer, not working as they thought, and they're "returning" him. If, as he says, it's Amazon's fault, because they keep sending him defective merchandise, well, then he ought to be just as happy as Amazon that they're severing their business relationship.

So, just out of curiousity, what government policies and rules are you nominating as those which keep the price artificially high?

Or are you just saying the taxpayers should subsidize your online habit?

Global optimization! Sounds great!

Now, when you find the alien species, supremely smart and ultra powerful, who can find that global optimization and impose it on all those individuals (like every living human being) who would prefer his own local optimization (or more precisely is convinced that his "local" optimization is actually -- ha ha! such a coincidence! -- the global optimum) you let me know, and I'll sign up to have the compliance chip installed in my brain, too.

I saw NewsTrust when it first came out, and was one of the "founding" user-editors. I spent quite a lot of time seriously reading stories and rating them, particularly focussing on stories in my area of professional expertise (physical sciences). But I gave up in disgust after a few months, as it became clear the community (or at least that segment of it fanatical enough to spend the time necessary to push its agenda) could have been imported whole from digg.com. A crowd of folks apparently amazingly shallow, with a microscopic attention span, a taste for the sensational and paranoid, and whose moral viewpoint is so unimaginative and monolithic that it would make any totalitarian dictator sob with envy oh! if only I could get my subjects to march together in such perfect lockstep groupthink.

I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that the concept of the "community-driven" news site is an abject failure. Allowing a free-wheeling democracy to pick your top stories is basically just a method for discovering the lowest common denominator in taste, discovering what an electronic edition of the National Enquirer would publish, more or less. It's most definitely not what the inventors thought they'd get, which is the better discovery of unusual, underreported, or controversial stories. You get the very opposite of intellectual diversity, ironically enough.