The idea that we need to regulate me paying one person to transport me from one spot to another is, frankly, ridiculous.

Voluntary certifications? Fraternal industrial associations? Basic safety inspections ? Fine.

What reason is there for regulating commerce in this manner besides cartelization of the transport industry?

Why is it a crime for me to charge someone $40 to take them to the airport in my car?

Uhh, what?

In 1980, Namibia had a higher GDP per capita than Brazil. How'd you all increase your IQs so much in a single generation?

Your country has been saved my embracing open-market capitalist reforms in the late 1990s and an oil boom, and has nothing to do with how smart you are or the color of your collective skin.

You already pick up that tab. People without insurance go to emergency rooms and medical clinics. They get treated and don't pay. Medicare and VA reimburse the hospitals for most of this "uncompensated coverage" (or "uncompensated care"); and most states have a fund that pays out to hospitals which provide a certain percentage of uncompensated coverage.

And of course if those payments are insufficient, doctors and hospitals just raise their rates, which is then passed onto insurance companies, which raise their premiums, which you pay.

I love it. "We organized better than you, we should get to pick our country's economic policy!" It's like yelling "Shotgun!" and demanding to drive the car off a cliff.

Comedy 101: If you're going for offensive, you have to be funny.

Seriously, that was Limbaugh-esque in its complete laziness.

No, they don't have any control over anything. It's only limited by your ability and desire to *pay* for that privilege.

Quit making up things that are not true. It lessens the real arguments, which are entirely economic in nature.

I love how you blithely limit the MPAA-members' financial clout to just their movie revnenue.

We're talking about Sony, Disney, GE, NBC Universal, Viacom, NewsCorp, and Time Warner here. They've got a lot more money than just the movie business, if they are so inclined to throw it around.

Aww, things I wrote 5 years ago now classify as "ancient"?

You cold, Internet.

I'm glad you brought the legal ramifications of this to Google's attention! Here they were just blithely going around instituting policies without any sort of labor attorneys providing counsel, so it's a good thing you showed up to set them straight (no pun intended.)

Seriously, though, as a straight guy, I would never complain about this. I'm not even sure you could win a discrimination lawsuit, since your net income is the same. But the tax is unfair, and I don't want to be the guy with "loves to take advantage of his privileged status" on his resume.

Since Google's entire business model revolves around advertising (and thus, customer targeting), while Microsoft, Apple (and Linux, in a fashion)'s business model revolves around selling OSes, I think it would be pretty easy for MS or Apple to simply say, "We will never collect any data about our OS users' application usage, browsing habits, or other personal information."

Google simply can't afford to say that. So no, not exactly the same thing at all.

Yeah, we have never elected Presidents and Congressmen whom we know to be cocaine users, adulterers, drunks, lechers, more-or-less murderers (Chappaquiddick), racists, sexists, anti-Semites, or just plain boors.

Oh wait.

She couldn't say so the person who stopped her? It's in her file, they could look it up if they didn't believe her.

I mean, this is a stupid rule put in place by stupid people. Don't add to the stupid.

I will bet $100 that the iPad and all of its following generations will not push 50 million units within the next 5 years, starting from the point of first sale. They simply don't have the versatility required to break out that big.

1) Take the date 3 months after the iPad is fully available in Europe and Asia.
2) Count the sales from that date 1 year forward.

It won't be anywhere close to the number of netbooks sold during that period.

Using the iPad's first quarter as some kind of predictive benchmark is foolish.

Not for nothing, but that actor autographing scans story was bullshit PR.

But I agree with you in general.