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Wait, I'll be at liberty to get ISP service from a provider who guarantees Netflix streams don't hiccup and preload at blazing speeds?

I'm at liberty to accept a job for $3 an hour if I value the experience?

Regulation, pretty much by definition, must constrain liberty. It prevents people (working in corporation and without) from behaving in the way they would prefer. I think what you believe is it doesn't impact liberty in a way you think is valuable. Problem is, I might not agree.

This again? Businesses have rights because from a legal perspective, a business is a group of people and people don't give up their rights by joining a group. So a business has a right to free speech because the people constituting the business each have an individual right to free speech. Legally treating a business as a person is just shorthand to make things easier.

"Do space alien radio signals cause cancer? We report, you decide!"

Deal. Let's start building a Ringworld.

Precisely. Just undercutting someone's price isn't unfair. Even selling at a loss to get market share isn't unfair. Using political clout to get your competitors banned sure seems unfair.

I've always wondered what makes some competition fair and other not fair. Bribing officials and fraud seem unfair (although "illegal" seems more accurate). You could claim Uber, Lyft, and the like evade problematic laws and that is unfair to law abiding competitors. If, for example, ride-sharing rides don't pay a tax on commercial rides, well that doesn't seem right. I might not like the tax but that's a different story, you still need to pay it until the law changes. Just offering lower prices, even loss-leading prices, would be tough for the guy on the receiving end but that's not unfair.

Then by all means, ask for it. Better yet, start your own software firm offering that deal and poach all the good programmers. If the money is just sitting on the table, why aren't you out grabbing it?

The answer is, of course, that salaries are generally at equilibrium. Employees negotiate for as much as they can (I certainly do each time I change jobs), employers push back equally hard. Everyone arrives at the best deal they can. It's extremely unlikely there's a ton of extra salary just sitting there because IT pros forgot to ask for it or were all such pushovers they didn't get it.

Depends on your definition of "common". I don't think 10 deaths and 1000 injuries a year is common at all, that sounds quite rare.

Sure, just as soon as this bright spark also puts some money into getting more men into nursing, human resources, and primary education, all fields as dominated by women as IT is by men. Maybe more so. I don't think my kids' elementary school had a single man on the staff other than the janitor.

I don't have any reliable evidence one way or the other. It's hard to pin down what causes illnesses and I don't trust the sob stories you see in the news or documentaries. From what I understand about fracking, it seems implausible it's causing much more damage than other forms of gas drilling. It definitely seems more benign than coal mining and, joule for joule, better than wind. But it's such a hot button issue I'm always worried about bias and hidden agendas.

Here's my bias. I'm really happy to have cheaper natural gas and electricity than without fracking. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of people living in shale basins are happier having the fracking industry than not having it. The environmental cost is localized to those areas. Who am I to tell them they are wrong?

Danged if I know, they're really hard to compare, especially if you don't accurately account for both the costs and benefits. It's going to come down to a judgement call which ones you think are worth it. But that's not my point. It seems we vigorously enforce environmental laws until they inconvenience some pet project of progressives (e.g. wind power or high speed rail in California), then suddenly we can just issue a waiver. If you truly cares about the environment and believe environmental protection laws are a good thing, you must uniformly apply them, even when that makes it difficult to achieve some end you desire. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

What cheeses me off is wind farms get a federal exemption from their provable environmental damage while fracking (which has cut carbon emissions way more than wind farms) has to prove it's 110% safe.

As others have observed, there's no totally benign energy source. Maybe killing birds and tortoises is the least damaging thing we can do. Fine. But how about we have a comprehensive, reasoned discussion of the costs and benefits of wind, coal, fracked natural gas, nuclear, oil, etc.?

You really lost me at that. A contract is an agreement between two parties. The paper is just documentation, it's not the actual "contract". We grant governments the right to use force to enforce contract agreements because our society works much, much better when people can trust contractual agreements. I don't know anyone who thinks this is a bad thing, it's one of the most important reasons we institute governments (others being protecting property rights and personal safety).

Without a mechanism to force people to hold up their agreements, then contracts are worth no more than the paper they're written on. And that's why I prefer our society to the one of The Empire Strikes Back ("I am changing our agreement. Pray I don't change it again.").

What's odd is the Skunk Works was famous for banging out fantastic planes in record time. SR-71 development kicked off around 1960, the first flight was 1964, and it went into service in 1966, around six years after starting.

The fine article says the SR-72 will be ready for flight in '18 (five years from now) and might be operational in 2030 (!). Does it really take 17 years to develop an unmanned drone, albeit a really fast one?

Huh? There are mountain ranges east and west of me, a big chunk of flat land running north/south in the middle. Ground mostly made of silicon dioxide (with bonus toxins from the closed silicon fabs). Have you ever actually been here? Do come, it's lovely.

No competition? Tell that to the old AT&T, which got crushed by it's children. Or Yahoo as it watches Goggle zoom ahead. Or Google, as it watches Facebook grow its mobile ad revenue like there's no tomorrow. Or Microsoft as even microsofties use iPads. Or PanAm as Southwest ate their lunch. In my company, I get a win/loss email every week about how we won a customer from our rivals and they beat us at another.

It's a mixed bag. Some markets are more open to competition than others. But competition is alive and well in many, many places.