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And if the Government doesn't prosecute, then the law falls off the books as not being prosecutable anymore when they don't prosecute for 10 million violations.
You forgot the excluded middle. There are a variety of ways, legal and illegal, that the IRS can evade this even if your assertion is true. Merely claiming that they're a vital bureaucracy pursuing a vital national task may do the trick.
If seizing medical records en-masse was their solution, perhaps a better method might be needed
Such as reversal of the law that generates a "need" for the IRS to do that. I see no reason for the US federal government to be involved in health care at all. Keep in mind that US states already have sufficient authority to institute state-wide health care systems of fairly arbitrary scope (such as the Massachusetts version of Obamacare) while the federal level had significant constitutional obstructions against making such policy.
1. Climate change is man made, but we still don;t have the tools to stop it (i.e. it's too late)
No, because we supposed here that it wasn't mostly man-made.
2. Climate change is not man made, but we can still stop it (i.e. it's too late)
How? Our assumption means the effects of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is greatly weaker than we currently suppose. What's in our tool box at this point?
And I see repeated use of the phrase "it's too late". It's too late for what?
I didn't say that we were trying to make sure the climate was the same as 1850. The goal would be to negate any bad effects such as loss of biodiversity in ecosystems, disease prevention, famine prevention, etc.
Then why aren't you considering such effects with respect to proposed mitigation strategies? For example, a possible tool in the box is supposed to be reduction of carbon dioxide emissions via abandoning of a hydrocarbon based transportation system. But currently, that means abandoning a huge amount of infrastructure and knowledge with a rather large negative impact on society.
Sure, down the road, it might not, say because hydrocarbons from fossil fuels and other sources grew expensive enough to obsolete this infrastructure. But that's a huge economic change with large negative consequences for which embracing an early transition seems poorly advised. Especially since it can result in the same "loss of biodiversity in ecosystems, disease prevention, famine prevention" though perhaps with greater effect.
Also, it's worth noting that none of the above problems is particularly reliant on climate change and there are fixes that whether in the presence or absence of climate change that could greatly reduce the problem. Loss of biodiversity is primarily a result of habitat destruction that hasn't almost nothing to do with climate change. It can be partly fixed by dedicating land, particularly corridors to allow movement of species to new biomes (as would be necessary under a significant global warming scenario). Disease and famine prevention is primarily a result of fixing dysfunctional societies - it's not a feature of developed world societies.
I am not saying those things will definitely happen, but it is certainly worth trying to stop if there is a reasonable expectation that they will happen if we continue on our present course.
Only, if they're more likely to occur than if we choose other paths. That's part of the point of a cost-benefit analysis. You look at the costs and benefits of every choice relative to other choices, not strictly the benefits of the choice you'd like to make versus the costs of the choice you don't want to make.
One of the problems I see here is that climate change is greatly weighted as a concern relative to other, bigger problems of humanity such as poverty, corruption, disease, desertification, overpopulation, etc. There's little consideration of how the proposed solutions for global warming will effect these bigger problems or conversely how not addressing these bigger problems as effectively (due to our skewed priorities) will effect our ability to address global warming.
The current "do nothing" strategy actually has profound effects on the bigger problems. It increases human wealth and higher value of female labor both which are negatively correlated with all of these problems. Conversely, the wealth destruction of a possible AGW strategy could result in increases in these big problems which in turn tend to work against both the global coherence of an AGW strategy (by increasing the relative effect of these problems with respect to AGW issues) and the societies themselves, meaning there is a negative feedback working against the proposed strategy which isn't being considered.
Even if that wealth is going to be destroyed anyway due to a "peak oil" situation, being destroyed in a distant future is less costly than being similarly destroyed today due to economic time value.
Actually, the Currency datatype provides a fixed decimal. It was removed in VB.NET for no clear reason, but provided a 64-bit value with a constant 4 base 10 digits in the fraction.
And I believe the official abbreviation is "PL/I".
Or if Sysco just reported disapointing earning and the price is starting to go down you can quickly short the stock from other computer programs further away from the floor and still make money in a few millionths of a second.
And the problem with that is? If they get it right, it's a faster responding market. And if they get it wrong, it's free money for everyone else.
A program sees you reach out for it
This is a variation of insider trading. Your act of "reaching" is not public knowledge. And HFT programs aren't trying to "rape" the small investor. There's no money in it.
Plus, you get around the "rape" issue via limit orders. That's like only reaching for milk that costs no more than $3.99. So if the program raises the cost of my milk to $4.50, then the milk disappears and I don't grab anything.
Simple math dictates that for someone to win someone else has to lose right?
No. If it were true, then we'd have never gotten around to building a civilization. Cooperation helps everyone involved. Stock markets are a fairly limited, but very efficient form of cooperation.
I really don't get the point of your arguments. They're not hard to deflate once you have an understanding of how markets work and who's on them.
Further, you're not trying to outwit or outmaneuver HFT and other traders with ridiculous advantages. Instead, you're trying to lend money to relatively honest businesses in exchange for some sort of return, such as a dividend or an increase in the price of the stock.
HFTs are making their bank on a millisecond advantage that others can't get. It's better than insider trading.
Well, HFT is legal. But if that weren't so, then it wouldn't be better than insider trading.
I think that's sort of the appeal of combining COBOL and Java in one server product. Now, PHBs can use Java for record-oriented applications and COBOL for everything else. Prior to that, they'd have to pick one or the other.
How does COBOL stack up against classic VB for record handling? Or older BASICs for that matter? The BASIC family is generally held to be pretty good in that department.
Why don't they just site their centers up north?
That works - if there are fat enough pipes available to handle the data. If there isn't, and you have to roll your own, then it's probably not cost efficient to do so.
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