You mean, keeping track of who is being naughty or nice and reporting it to the NSA, CIA, FBI, local law enforcement, and other commercial entities?

Yep. It has been happening at least since the early 90s. Where do you think most/all of those police-department lambourghinis and mustangs and zrocs came from? They seize people's shit, keep what they want, auction off the rest and pocket the money. You can get incredible deals at police auctions, but I refuse to ever buy anything, myself, because I find it disgusting.

The point of Silk Road was private transactions. They tried to propagandize the idea t hat it's "only for illegal drugs" to justify their actions, when what they were really angry about was simply cracking down on purportedly untraceable money. That people are going around repeating the drug thing suggests their effort worked.

"I came here with a simple dream. A dream of killing all humans." B.B. Rodriguez

The problem is that Amazon and most other distributors don't represent the transaction properly. It says "BUY NOW" and "GIVE GIFT INSTANTLY".

News flash: The content on those DVDs, CDs, BluRays, and other formats that you have? You are LICENSING that content.

That's cute, grandpa.

You have to remember, the democrats and liberals have to demonize and misrepresent libertarians because they thrive on a two party (acting as one) system and the republicans and conservatives have to demonize and misrepresent libertarians because they thrive on a two party (acting as one) system.

It's cute how the idiots of the internet have come to confuse "Libertarian" with "Republican" the last few years.

I'm really tired of the media and politicians dismissing our lack of investment in science and space exploration by belittling Chinese efforts. "Durp durp, we already done been to the Moon, you stupid backwards Chiners durp durp!".

It's a first step that they'll likely quickly capitalize on and while our media and government like to convince us that the Chinese are goofy little 50-years-later-runners-up, they're an economic and political powerhouse that will, if they decide to invest further in it, leapfrog our accomplishments by light years. And sooner rather than later.

If we don't get serious about doing it ourselves -- or even better, co-operating with scientists on an international scale for the betterment of everyone -- we're going to look like the back water yokels.

This sounds like an awful massive case of "hey, not my responsibility!" justifications.

Hey, only the fucked parts of this rollout are fucked and we aren't going to count those, so shit ain't fucked.

No, you're right. The best solution is to keep dumping a metric-fuck-ton of cash into the medical industry, via a layer of insurance that people don't treat like insurance, then distribute the expense of even paying for *that* to the rest of society.

The more you distance the insured from the medical costs and the more you reduce their individual bearing of the cost and offload it to the rest of society, the less reason there is for the medical industry to ever address the absurd costs.

If all you're doing is shifting around the obligation to pay among different sources, then YOU ARE NOT DOING ANYTHING TO PROVIDE LOW COST HEALTH CARE. The health care remains the same expense. You just spread the cost around. I mean, if you're fine with forcing every individual to participate in granting a sort of "welfare check" to the medical industry, then by all means . . . but I'd rather see the medical industry and insurance treated like car insurance. When it is, everyone will be able to pay their own way, just like car insurance.

I love when you hear people bitch and moan about how the federal government ought to impose more federal laws on every state to do things *they* want to see done. They are often the people most celebrating the changing marijuana laws in some states. You know, the laws that exist because of the structure of our government which allows states to operate independently and determine their own laws without regard to the federal government?

Hypocrites.

You might need to clarify your statement. Are you implying that the state government in Oregon is less shitty than the federal government?

Becuase, I can assure you, that doesn't hold water to any actual Oregonian.

I don't see how that matters. They spent $300m on building and advertising the program. Who cares how much of that was spent on printing pamphlets and how much was spent on shitty little jingles from the cello project hipsters to entice people to enroll? It's the same amount of money for the same purpose/program, any way you slice it and in a state of 3.9m, they've only had 44 web sign ups.