Great post. I'd like to respond to some of your thoughts:

The truly wealthy are only a tiny tiny minority of the population. All property claims function only by mutual consent of the public. So the wealthy, by themselves, are not really in a position to prevent a wealth tax from being instituted and collected. They need at least some amount of public support. They don't need anything close to unanimous support, but they at least need the support of say 10-20% of the population. They at least need an agreeable pool of people to hire mercenaries from, mercenaries who will defend their property by force from the disagreeing population. If no one at all is willing to defend the property of the wealthy, then the "wealthy" person is just one frail and fallible human being and is effectively powerless.

So the public consent is a huge deal. If the public consent is widely withdrawn on moral grounds, then the amount of friction and struggle needed to maintain enormous wealth is going to skyrocket.

This situation is similar to a thief fleeing the country. Yes, the thief may take a big hoard of gold with her, but she also takes all the thieving activities with her as well. It's a short-term loss and a long-term gain. As long as the country has sane, pragmatic and aware trade policies for dealing with other nations, there is no easy way for externally located super-wealthy to exploit people inside the nation who isn't consenting to exploitation.

As long as people believe in themselves (which is a big if), they don't need the nanny-type super-wealthy to hand out jobs. Jobs exists purely as function of demand. If there is demand, there are jobs. The super-wealthy do not create jobs. Instead demand creates jobs and the super-wealthy position themselves as intermediaries between demand for goods and services and job creation. In computer network security terms, the super-wealthy is a man-in-the-middle attack on job creation. They interpose themselves between demand and job creation. But they don't interpose themselves purely by their own power. They do so with our willing, grudging, brainwashed, or apathetic consent.

True. But this isn't a real impediment. For example, we all know that going 120 miles per hour is dangerous on highways not purposefully designed for such speed. At the same time we also know that going 20 miles per hour is too slow. But where would we draw the line? Well, in reality it's not a problem. We draw an arbitrary line somewhere in a reasonable spot. Not everyone is going to agree. Not everyone will think it's perfect. But in these matters perfection is not necessary. You draw the line anywhere within reason and people will work with it. So does everyone agree that 75 miles per hour is the right number for the speed limit? Of course not. But it's within reason so for most people it's not something worth arguing about.

Another example of this is age of consent for sexual intercourse. Obviously 5 year olds cannot give meaningful consent. And 25 year olds certainly can. But where would you draw the line? It seems like one of those "impossible" problems, but in reality it's very easy. In reality it actually doesn't matter that much. Be it 16 or 18 years of age, you just plop down some number which is somewhat arbitrary but also within reason, and people work with it.

The point is that a system doesn't have to be perfect in order to be workable. So, as another example, stopping every single crook is not a requirement for the police force. If we thought that one crook escaping justice implied total failure, we'd never bother with policing to begin with. But we don't think that way. We accept less than perfect systems as long as they have a positive overall effect. And the same is true here. We don't have to catch every single tax evader. We don't have to make sure we collect every last penny of what is owed. As long as taxes are collected within a reasonable ballpark, it's OK and it's a workable system.

As a final note, I personally wouldn't want to tax all personal holdings universally. I propose to only tax wealth beyond a certain fairly large amount. This way, if you manage to accumulate say 10 million dollars of wealth, let it be tax-free. You can keep it, pass it to your descendants, and basically do more or less what you want with it. Once you get beyond 10 million dollars, wealth taxes begin to gradually grow. I'm just throwing a 10 million figure out there as a starting point. It's not something definite. What I am trying to say is that I am not against some people being wealthy. Nor am I against all wealth inequality. I realize people aren't equal in all respects and we shouldn't force them to be completely equal. But I also realize that an extreme wealth inequality is immoral and corrosive to society and it has to be dealt with one way or another.

So if my blinds are shut, I must be guilty? Can't I just enjoy privacy anymore?

Ugh... most of the games on your list are terrible from my point of view. And even the non-terrible games are lukewarm rather than hot. Again, just my opinion. I certainly agree with those who say there is practically nothing worth playing on Wii.

Instead of "explained by" I think you mean "matched with" or "correlated with."

Now there's a web page written by a douchebag full of hot air. Chromium is open source and distributing your version of the same software with a few changes is not a "rip-off", it's part of the freedom that the open source programmers enjoy. And for this exercise of freedom he decided to sic patent trolls on the Iron's dev? I hope that's not for real.

I think you're wrong. I think Facebook is definitely going somewhere soon. There is google plus on the horizon, and the discontent with Facebook is growing every day. You say that Facebook is popular. I'll give you that. But myspace was also popular at one time. And before that livejournal was popular and so on.

I call them out all the time. But the problem is that ever since Apple adopted a Unix-y OS for its OS X, a large number of geeks have become fans and thereafter switched their brains entirely off. It's sad.

Facebook adds little to no value. There are much better, smaller, more private blogging options, with less spam, more freedom, and less privacy rape.

Also group blogging sites are highly prone to disruption. Just witness myspace, which seemed unstoppable in its heyday. The barrier to entry on blogging is low. I don't see Facebook continuing in its current state unchallenged and indefinitely.

This sounds like a good option, or at least an option worth considering. I don't think the cost would be "top" though. It would be somewhere in the middle. I think the cheapest bargains would vanish, but so would the most excessive markups for the cutting edge.

There are two ways to look at the situation. One way to look at it is to say that bargain hunters will not buy a CPU unless it costs $200 dollars or whatever the bargain price point is at these days.

Another way to look at it is like this. Cutting edge performance enthusiasts are more than willing to pay absurd amounts of money just to be able to feel that they are at the very top of the performance heap, and to be able to brag about it online for a month or so. If that's the case, why not create a product structure to milk that money out of them, if they are so willing to part with it?

Either way we know that the CPU business is highly profitable with the tiered price structure that it uses. In other words, the bottom dollar CPUs still generate profit, or they wouldn't be sold just to please the bargain hunters, would they? So if we start charging people a fair price for what the CPU really is, without artificially crippling the CPU, I think the price would normalize somewhere in the middle instead of at the top.

Whatever big businesses are doing it's almost always for their own selfish benefit and not for the benefit of the consumer. Businesses are not charities after all. So if a business creates a tiered price structure, it does so not so that it can serve the consumer better, but to extract more money from the market.

That's one heck of a claim. You do realize that, right? How long do you think until we get a 0-day that breaks out of NaCl sandbox? At this point it's probably not worth the trouble since NaCl is not even slightly close to being popular. But once and if it gets popular I say it will take something on the order of a few months for an exploit to show up.