In an increasingly crowded world, wasted space and getting away from people is the height of luxury.

While I too have issues with Corporations being treated like people, your analogies are all very dramatic and unsubstantial.

Polygamy is not a merger. Mergers turn multiple entities into one single thing. Polygamy still retains the individual people. The appropriate analogy would be cannibalism, and even that is wrong since mergers are usually mutually beneficial.

As long as their business practices are legal, it is nothing like murder. If the business practices are illegal, then there is no argument.

Corporate dissolution is not like suicide. Suicide destroys the value inherent in the person, whereas dissolution only destroys the company's name. The better analogy would be more like a divorce, where the parents split up the property and change their names. Again, that's all quite legal and isn't special treatment for corporations.

Robbery is theft. A hostile takeover isn't theft. It is a purchase of ownership. The two are not alike at all. As for slavery, a hostile takeover has nothing like it. Slavery doesn't apply because you aren't allowed to treat people like property. Company ownership is property and is traded every day. And blackmail doesn't even apply.

You also ignore that there are many laws that apply only to businesses and not to people. When was the last time you:

• filed with the SEC?
• submitted paperwork to the FDA?
• Had a visit from OSHA?
• Ensured your family was compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley?
• Had your marriage certificate inspected by the FTC?
• etc...

There are lots of problems with how we treat companies like people -- we agree on that. But your analogies don't add to that argument.

Most politicians won't give answers to cuts in government since they greatly upset those directly affected by the cuts while only moderately increasing their standing among those not affected as much. It's how California got to be as bad as it is -- loud, small interests push for spending that can't be cut, and no large group has the same passion to cut it.

And when you do suggest cuts in spending a la Ron Paul (who wants to cut just about everything), you're not taken seriously.

It's not just a problem that no one wants to be the one to cut spending, but the voting masses wouldn't tolerate it even if someone did.

Sprint is upgrading to 4G on WiMax technology, and fast. They're pushing their EVO and such pretty heavily, along with their generous $70 talk-text-web plans. They're not likely to be interested in an iPhone unless its 4G, which just doesn't seem to be the case.

To boot, Sprint's 3G network is even less capable of handling the traffic than AT&T's, so I doubt their eager for the extra data the iPhone will bring.

That's not entirely true. HTC now advertises quite a few of its new handsets that feature Android.

But it is mostly true, as I usually see a new phone advertised with the carrier and not on its own.

An excellent post, but I think you neglect some salient points about the retail price. Since it would have to consider the funds not contributed, it would have to be a substantial sum. Let's spitball and say $2,000 as the retail price (a little under $75 times 30 years in the home). That's a fairly large sum for a lot of families, and many may not be able to pay that. The firefighters have no way to assess their ability to pay the sum on the spot, so they'd have to take their word that they can afford the retail price.

So if the retail price is too high, then the firefighters may lose money since they may never collect the retail price for the service. So let's lower the price to something more generally affordable. Let's say $300 (that'd be 4 years of coverage). That's a lot more affordable price, but then there's a lot less incentive to ever pay. If the retail price is too low compared to the insurance price, people will just pay retail when they need it and never pay the insurance price. Again, the firefighters don't get paid.

I think the solution may be something like putting a lien on the house for the retail price to ensure repayment, but I don't know how lien's work or what the legal costs would be for collecting on liens.

If you read the article, you would see that the firefighters did actually keep the flames from spreading to his neighbor's property, since the neighbor had paid the $75 fee. While I agree that it is a good idea to keep fires from spreading, in this case it was only spreading to private property that was already protected.

Actually, studies show that 78% of Slashdot posts that mention the author's certainty their post will be modded 'flamebait' or 'troll' are modded to at least +4 in either the insightful or informative categories (the split is usually 3:1 insightful to informative). The percentage jumps above 94% when the author uses the phrase 'karma to burn'.

Or you could use a perhaps more appropriate keyword for slashdot:

/.

Just sayin'.

How about just the fact that Henry Waxman looks a lot like a mouse? Just check out his face, it very much resembles a rodent: http://www.henrywaxman.house.gov/

Shouldn't we call him Henry CheeseMan or something like that? The resemblance always makes me laugh.

Are you suggesting that we have a large number of large citizens because we largely have our large heads up our large asses? Because having our heads up our asses will certainly make us larger than those who do not.

Well, if you consider how Gmail actually has the potential to be a large part of its Apps for Business, it sure helps that they can now offer the ability to call a real phone from your computer. Plenty of companies that use Apps could also use this to make in-office calls and now calls to customers/vendors/partners in the real world. Selling their Apps perhaps has the best potential for a second stream of revenue aside from advertising, just like how Office is the 2nd stream to Microsoft's Windows OS.

Cig taxes tend not to go up because studies show that increasing the tax generally decreases revenue. Cities and states care more about the revenue than your health (and rather short-sighted in that sense) so they haven't increased the taxes to deal with the health problems they cause. The revenue often doesn't go to paying health costs anyway.

This is true, though sometimes it takes even longer. In a recent case, it took Barack Obama 48 years to win a prize for being born.

You could say something similar about a certain President with his "boot on the neck" of BP looking for "who's ass to kick".