I am not sure how that works for German residents that German gov forced to pick up private health insurance like me. From what I understand there have been court cases where jobless idiots could not cover their insurance because their private one was too expensive while if they had been insured by the state this would all be covered. There are some other cases where illness in old age where change of insurance is legally and practically impossible that chronic illness made people sell their houses. This is not a common situation as private insurance is not very popular in Germany (ever wondered why?) but it still happens.

I thought shooting people without even an intention to ask questions is a specialty of the land of the free?

I thought the same for a long time and still do to some extent. But the last World Cup changed my view slightly. Consistent performance of Germany in recent tournaments show that not only the trainer was good and his strategy was OK but also that basics like team work, good local players that is not easy to get if most of your stars are from abroad as seems to be the case in England top league. If the main clubs have so much money then they buy their players in the whole world as that is easier than taking care of local players. So yes some of them are overpaid but success is not always in the budget or at least not only there.

Other than that they can dope, go to hookers and drive under influence for what I care - they are not my people. You can also see that in football countries there is sometimes a trend to lower leagues where football match is what it used to be - a game between two teams of which one is local in a very good sense i.e. people know these guys and by supporting them often meet their neighbours. That is 'slightly' different from premier league. Maybe it is a coincidence but in the world cup 2014 you could see how teams built from stars fail and how teams built on team spirit win. Or so I would like to see it maybe.

People talk about capitalism as if there were one. If there is one principal system you can call capitalism it is a very simple and not very realistic one. In all our societies some market and some ownership of property exist. These are basic for capitalism or rather for capitalist society yet private property and market exist even in communist countries like Cuba, Soviet Union or NK. All complementing features for such systems may differ slightly and thus a person in some states may have more customer rights in another it may have to sue instead, in some there is a safety net in another it is just a concrete floor somewhere. In some places markets have more rules than in others. In reality an absolutely free market does not even exist. Leave capitalism alone - it is just a tool or a basic way the economy operates - all other things that make this economy and society in which it is embedded function are adds on and those adds-on make a difference between the systems. We call some type of such systems communists albeit this has more to do with political freedom and oppression from the state and some others capitalist albeit there is a huge difference between Denmark, Germany, UK, Canada and US for instance. These countries are based on capitalist principles but their function is very different in few quite important aspects. So Capitalist as an description of a society is just insufficient. You have to be a bit more specific.

I suppose that is an aspect of the societal development that the grounding fathers tried hard to prevent from occurring and failed miserably. You know all these scumbags kings and nobles from old Europe that did whatever they pleased to complete their murky plans on the costs of the society on which these parasites fed. Now you have your own 'nobles' and funny thing is - most of them most of you never know that they exist - they are that far from the rest of the society.

that is only partially true. If these things fail (which they may) this most likely destroys the payload which even if insured i.e. does not bring too much damage financially, still costs time to rebuild, even if 3d printer can do it all. so safety standards do matter unless there are replacement parts for payload objects that you can buy in walmart. I am not saying this is going to happen or that spaceX uses substandard safety standards or not at all but that is a valid concern that matters for spaceX and its customers.

the golden 3 are most likely corrupt till bone mark or maybe just silly not sure which one is more damaging - I guess this works best if combined!

who cares if that was independent or not - UK, US and others have to pay royalties on this great invention of patents to if I understand correctly - an italian city of Venice.

I think British public services are a perfect example of privatization that went wrong. I wonder if some good examples also could be provided for services like public transport, health care, water etc. It works well in Gemany where communities own water companies, gas and energy companies and even housing estates. The later was a hot thing to sell few years back and some communities want to buy them back because private ownership proved inefficient. As per a documentary I saw on telly some time ago this seems also to be the reason why lobbyists want so much to outlaw such buybacks by public in free trade agreement between US and EU entities - which is another story of course.

I am sure there is an US army sponsored private enterprise that knows an answer to this problem. There always is these days, it seems.

Indeed but I still save power but not going out and not using FB.

Besides I tried the world outside and after all the years I realized that it was not worth it.

what is that? Why not furlongs or Manhattans?

Ever since Putin shot down this plane over Ukraine we do not have any doubts anymore about anything US does: free trade agreement that is so good that it has to be kept secret from the people it concerns, spying everybody, supporting evil regimes )hey they are our bastards), extrajudicial killings, extended interrogation techniques etc. all this forgotten because of Putin. We even got humanitarian bombing in Iraq which if the place was not messed up by US few years back would be the first ethical thing in years that US military actually did.

Come to think of it Putin is the best thing that happened to US for quite some time. And the best thing is that the French and Germans cannot do new business with Ruskis. I still do not understand why this all is happening - is this a PR stunt by NSA or some other deepshits or what exactly that is done for?

it is? You must get different news feeds that I do.

Memory management is different in different programming environments and one has to do different things for different application types. Thus saying learn programming X is just silly especially as there is not many jobs that require assembler. I would say that using brain and having open mind with some basic skills would go a long way. But hey - go and teach people assembler for all the fame of finding code badly generated by gcc or 'knowing' how bare metal works. I learned quite early that coding is only quite small part of my job as a software engineer. I thought that recent times changed that but after overcoming the assault of many gurus I came to a conclusion that common sense, communication skills and some sense of humour bring me further than any magic bullet that gurus sell.

Yea I remember that too - I just came back from shop where I bought my lunch and I had to stand in the line too - terrible!

Other than that - there is more media than back then but there is no more freedom of press now than it used to be - there is no state censorship but corporate one instead. Modern media are abused more than they server democracy and human rights.

What else - ah torture and extrajudicial killings by 'Securitate' - I recall the guys in the freedom movements were seriously pissed off by that - guess what - we still have that - progress has been made as people do not die accidentally during water boarding anymore, I have to give you that.

Och and overwhelming surveillance - yea communists did not do it right, did they? Incompetent idiots!

I can sue the government this much is true and I did and I won. Still when I went to a lawyer to get back the house that communists took from my grandpa he (the lawyer) said - I want your money but your case has no chance as your grandpa was of wrong nationality - so this much about rule of law and all this other shit in EU. It is still more than we had before. Elections albeit not rigged now can be seen for what they are - exercise in futility as govs do what they want anyway.

The real progress and there is no 'but' this time is in pr0n - I can watch as much as I want to albeit it is admittedly of bad quality. Still where we had to run a bit embarrassed to get video now we can just watch it directly.