The gag order is blatantly illegal under the 4th amendment, and as such carries no force of law.

the freedom of association is a good thing.

The freedom of association is a good thing, until those associations become criminal organizations. Banks are responsible for orders of magnitude more property crime than everyone in jail put together, and practically none of it gets punished. It would be easier to abolish them entirely.

Just because there exists a capitalist economic system in this country, does not mean you are required to participate in it.

Except that I need to eat and pay taxes. I don't get to do that unless I please the owners of the means of production.

It reduces bid/ask spreads and thus lowers the costs associated with making trades

You cannot extract money from a system and simultaneously lower costs. All the money an HFT guy makes would have ended up in someone elses pocket if he didn't get there first.

They buy low, use a propietary knowledge base to estimate fair value, factor in business costs, assume risk that items won't sell at an expected price, and try to turn a profit. I may not know where to find a velvet black-light poster of Elvis

You don't know where to find that black velvet Elvis, but everyone knows where to find stocks. That's what exchanges are for.

We already have them, they are called credit unions.

Exactly. So why should banks be legal? They provide nothing credit unions don't, and cause immense amounts of crime. e.g. the 2008 financial crisis was bigger than all property crime put together by a factor of 100.

If you think it is immoral to charge interest, then I suggest you refrain from being complicit in this immoral system by never taking out a student loan or a car loan or a mortgage.

So you're implying that I'm a hypocrit for living in the world I actually live in, instead of pretending that I live in the world we should strive to live in? Some things don't work until we all decide to do it. Some of those things work a lot better than the non-cooperative alternative. This is what government is for.

You should also lend other people money interest free so they don't need to turn to immorally usurious banks.

I'd go even further and abolish the idea of lending and private ownership of capital. Whoever needs the resources most should get them. This should be determined democratically, instead of autocratically.

The HFTs are paying the stock exchanges a fee to have access to faster trades. The service HFT provides is market making

If that was a valuable service, the stock exchanges would be paying the HFT guys, not the other way around.

Banks borrow money at a lower rate and and lend money at a higher rate creating profit with each transaction. This was seen as immoral at various times in history, but now we know this serves to create liquidity.

It's still immoral, despite creating liquidity. There's absolutely no reason we couldn't create all the liquidity we want with non-profit, publicly owned financial institutions.

How are they "siphoning" anything away from a majority of people?

Easy, the value they extract through arbitrage would otherwise be retained by the parties making actual trades.

How are they giving nothing in social value? The money these people make they spend on other business ventures

So do any other sort of theives, what's your point?

Problem is that nothing can replace FB. Want to listen to music on Spotify? Need a FB account.

Then fuck Spotify. Use RetroShare and listen to your friend's music.

Nothing out there even comes to what FB does, as in a big "watering hole" for people to post notes on, sync events, message, chat, or write notes

RetroShare does all of that. Status feeds, email, live chat, forums, file transfer, and more.

more to the point has someone done a distributed tor like social network with client side encryptions and easy key exchanges for adding new friends? like, is there anything we could move on to then..

Yes, that's RetroShare. It uses the PGP web of trust model to provide end to end encrypted equivalents email, IRC, file transfer, status feeds, newsgroups, and more. The only people who can actually prove you're on the network are those you are connected directly to. If you're doing it right those will be trusted friends.

Enforcing an unjust law is not just amoral, but immoral. "I was only following orders" is never an excuse.

I don't see why you have to be a dick to cops. Why wouldn't you just talk to them like a polite person? They don't have an easy job, and when people think of them the way rebelling teenagers think of their parents, it only makes their job harder to do well. It also increases the chances of them making horrible mistakes. I think we all have a stake in cops having accurate information when they're investigating crimes.

And? What's your point? If it furthers the public good, and won't get funded any other way, isn't it a good thing that the government steps in?

An outside door handle that anyone could have touched you mean? I think I spot the problem with using the presense of DNA on the door handle as evidence of, well, anything...

Stupid building codes, driver's permits, garbage collection, always making ME pay for them.

Why shouldn't the government pay for all of those things? Would we get better compliance if it did? Would that lead to improved quality of life for our citizens? These are testable hypotheses.

Would you really expect capacity to run out linearly? Write balancing means that you should expect every bit of flash to be written roughly the same amount on average. That means once you start losing the ability to write to some cells, you can expect more cells to fail in short order.

The fact that "cloud computing" needs 1.5 pages for definition alone is proof that the concept was created by the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

And here I thought it was Tyrell Corp, developing it as a ploy to use up the limited lifespan of any Android foolish enough to escape their servitude.