seriously though, the Chinese can destroy our country without setting a single boot on the ground simply through economic measures.

*Poof* You have your wish. China ceases all trade with the U.S. The $122 billion in stuff going to China, and $440 billion in stuff coming from China vanishes.

The U.S. economy has a GDP of $16.8 trillion. Trade with China was equivalent to 3.3% of that. And in fact since the U.S. runs a trade deficit, the cessation of trade with China actually increases its GDP to $17.1 trillion.

China's economy has a GDP of $6.8 trillion. The vanished trade was equivalent to 8.3% of that. And since they ran a trade surplus, their GDP shrinks to $6.5 trillion.

So China's GDP is hurt more and they lose a bigger chunk of their economy from these "economic measures." And you somehow interpret this as China having the power to destroy the U.S. economically?

Here's what people like you don't get - China needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs China. The U.S. buys manufactured goods from China. It doesn't have to buy from China. If China boycotted us, we could pay for manufacturing in Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, or one of a hundred other developing countries eager for the business. OTOH, where is China going to sell the stuff they manufacture? If the U.S. doesn't buy it, who else will? There just aren't that many first world customers willing to fork over cash for merchandise. China already sells to all the first world customers willing to buy. The U.S. doesn't buy from all the developing nations willing to manufacture.

This particular cable merger would be bad. With that out of the way:

Tons of mom-and-pop shops with a good product but terrible process get bought by companies like Proctor & Gamble who have far better and more efficient processes. They then produce the same great product with more reliable quality at a much lower cost.

    My own company may well become an example- we make terrible products, and have bad process, leading to very slow customer service, etc. That's because I'm very good at designing innovative new software systems, and very bad at running a business. I can think of a dozen well-run software shops that would make us better by taking us over. Their process, their customer service, billing department, etc and our products would be a huge improvement.

Aside from small companies who just never developed good processes, there have been many famous brands that have been bankrupt or on the way to bankruptcy before being aquired by a better company with a clearer vision or better execution. Given that these companies were going bankrupt, or already bankrupt, for them to survive at all (as a division of a larger company) is better.

One big, big name is Youtube, who was burning through other people's money faster than a drunk Kennedy and getting rightfully sued every 5 minutes for copyright infringement. They had a cool idea, and a completely non-sustainable business model that was guaranteed to put them belly-up within 36 months until Google bought them. Google brought to bear their expertise in funding a free service in a way that keeps customers happy (aka the best targeted advertising available) , allowing YouTube to survive and thrive rather than burning away investors' money until investors got sick of it and'the whole thing imploded.

How so? The "No True Scotsman" fallacy doesn't apply. You know, people _can_ lie and misrepresent themselves. It can happen in the real world. And you don't get to just yell "No True Scotsman" to make it go away. The hilarious thing is you're actually quoting a fallacy that doesn't apply to misdirect the conversation away from the dirty little secret: that socialism works; and that the overwhelming weight of evidence is that it's alternatives do not.

It's the old "No True Scottsman" argument. At any rate what you're describing is called _communism_. You can have socialism (large scale involvement by a central power in the well being of the common man along with wealth distribution) and still have ownership. You just don't allow ownership to become power at the expense of people's well being. As soon as you do that you've just crossed over to socialism.

businesses flock to Canada because their socialized medicine is so much cheaper than America's employer based system. Germany's Unionized car manufacturing is the envy of the world. Meanwhile the UK, who implemented American style policies under Thacher, has been in a nose dive for decades. Where in the world have you been?

I was going to say that they shouldn't use Thor because that was already used in Stargate, but the reality is that half of DS9 was stolen from Babylon 5 so what the hell? Go with it.

There's too much retcon in Trek to suggest that the canon might be immutable. But it's also valuable. The history not only provides back story automatically, but it also gives it gravitas for free if you just don't shit on it. Like, for example, the theme song to Enterprise. Ugh. That was some of the worst awfulness which was ever awful. I was constitutionally unable to watch that show if I had to sit through the intro music.

They made exciting movies, but I don't want to watch them again, because they had no substance. They trotted out some characters we were supposed to care about, and then crapped on all the reasons we cared about them. If they were good movies, they wouldn't have needed to call them Star Trek. They weren't, so they needed Trek characters to bastardize.

When they come asking what we spent all their money on we'll just say: "All these Bombs and missiles..."

He didn't know, and LotR makes it abundantly clear that he did not know; he had to go hit a library and do a bunch of research to even be sure that it was the One Ring. That fits the narrative of Bilbo coming upon the ring completely by chance. The Ring is consistently speaking of as having fallen out of all knowledge while Gollum was living under the mountain.

and the only real navy in the worlds. Our military can defend our country against anything, and we can pretty much seize anything we want. China isn't a credible threat. We still have more than enough nukes to make the world uninhabitable and any time we stop feeding their population they collapse...

and our leadership knew it. After WWII they towed their tanks back home with pack animals because they didn't have gas for christ's sake. We needed a foe to keep the military industrial complex going, and we needed the Military Industrial Complex to keep wealth inequality from tanking our economy again. Fear of communism is the only thing that kept the vulture capitalists at bay...

No. I want it to be in corrected but not adjusted color. It gets hard to see some stuff in some video otherwise. It probably ought to be a config flag, though.

Perhaps a program is also needed to manage resolv.conf, but it doesn't need to be a daemon. Or, if you're willing to use a daemon, you can have a user-space caching resolver, like dnsmasq.

Advanced Business & Capitalism 2nd Edition Player's Handbook, page 32, second paragraph:

"The object of the game is not to out-compete your opponent; that's just a means to your ultimate goal of becoming a monopoly. Level 20 corporate persons gain the ability to stile all competition and absorb all wealth in a 12' radius. When rolling a natural 20 on a 1d20 the government passes a law allowing the player to charge all other beings within his castle walls rent."

Not protect them as in security, they are still festering holes of vulnerability that you wouldn't go near without a VPN. Protect them as in stop any competition that might force them to be competitive.