Kindergarten kids chose that?

People laid off during the downturn chose that?

If you think one in 6 Americans chose poverty, then you are seriously deluded. Your country has a problem. The rich have commandeered all the resources of the country, and realistically, those 50 million people have to work for them or not work at all. They do not have land (they were born without it), they do not have access to the means of production, and they do not have capital, or access to capital to be able to work themselves out of the mess they are in. Even access to education, the key tool by which the poor could lift themselves out of poverty, is now dependent on money. So basically, they have no realistic hope of competing with the haves.

The American economy is now dominated by super large corporations and there is no way for most small businesses to compete.Yes, a few thousands out of the 50 million may be able to pick themselves out of

I don't think anyone is advocating getting rid of capitalism, but its excesses must surely be tempered. There are many examples of countries that are fantastically wealthy, and yet seem to have a much better balance between wealth and poverty than the USA. Countries were pretty much no one can be bankrupted by medical bills, where access to quality education is based on ability and hard work, rather than whether or not an 18 year old can afford it. America seems to believe it is OK to punish children for the sins of their parents.

Doesn't have to be the elite who suffer. In Russia, it was the landowners. They were thrown in gulags in Siberia.

I am a big fan of capitalism. I think communism is a response to excesses, and the world is moving towards that. I recently watched a programme called Panorama on the BBC. The program was looking at the plight of the poor in the USA. The indignity of American citizens having to queue up in the small hours of the morning to get a chance to see a doctor who will work for free was shocking. And that is to a guy who is from Zimbabwe. The wealthiest country in the world, and people live in tents and its OK?!

Once the poor have nothing to lose, they will start a revolution. They will make the tea partiers and the occupiers look like a walk in the park. Do you know the reason that the west has seen a long sustained period of peace? It's because everyone had something to lose if the peace was broken. Once people feel like they don't have a stake in America, and believe me, many people now don't, they will make life hard for everyone else.

Then the US buys the debt (basically repays the debt at a very low price), and afterwards borrows properly again. China would be stupid to reduce the price of US dollars.

You have such a specialised use case that they should not even bother optimising the _default_ desktop for you. Just saying.

If your own vote is not verifiable, then there is nothing stopping them swapping your ballot papers for fake ones. Ever heard of vote rigging. Since you don't know which ballot paper you marked (to preserve secrecy) there is plausible deniability of any tampering.

How very sanctimonious. If you really feel that bad about Apple (and you didn't divest because you felt Apple had no upside left) then you should really give up all the gains you made because you profited from it. Yes, you should donate it to charity. Until you do that, you are just a man (or woman) with a high horse, trying to preach what you do not practice. You profited from it.

Like it or not, Apple is doing more for the poor people of China than is, well, pretty much anyone else. Those people have jobs and do not have to wait for charity. They do not have to work the rice paddies. Stop applying your first world standards to people in decidedly third world situations. It does not help. Their wages are already rising higher than yours, and mine, and inflation. Long may it be so.

Not easier, cheaper.

How the heck is pirating easier than opening iTunes, or searching in Amazon, and searching for the song you want, and clicking on the buy button.

The lengths people go to to justify themselves!

Maybe we need to get rid of the secret ballot then. People should be allowed to vote through an entity they trust to keep score properly. So you should line up in front of the blue or red voting machine and cast your vote there. Interested parties can observe that the count increments correctly when a vote is cast. The only reason rigging is possible is because votes are secret.

How are they manipulated? Do you think Chinese leaders have made their country poor so that they can pay their workers a pittance?

China is mostly a poor country. There is such poverty as you are not likely to see in the US. No one is going to offer such poor people a wage comparable to one offered in the USA. I come from a poor country myself, and the working conditions, when I go back home to visit, are such as I would not want to ever work in. Until those countries take themselves out of poverty, you are going to get those bad working conditions. The only thing that will stop those bad conditions is economic progress. China is on its way to doing that. Unfortunately, it is not this generation that will see those benefits, just like the generation of children who worked in mines in the UK did not see the benefits of an industrialised Britain, or the slaves in America did not see the benefits of an industrialised US.

This is not relativising. The only thing that keeps them in jobs is the fact that they are willing to work for so little, and in such conditions. If we impose much higher standards and pay on them, they lose their jobs, because all of the advantages of employing them vanish. Then what? We send them aid? That would be even worse. Aid destroys countries. I have seen it first hand.

How is pirating a game (yes I used the pirate word) the same as legally and freely downloading a Linux distro. There are many good reasons to buy games nowadays, not least if you want to play online. And movies, well, if your time is worth little, and you are still watching movies on the laptop, then maybe. And if you are into watching more than the average big budget blockbuster, you may find that your choices are severely limited.