The baker has 13 digital loaves of bread and a market of 100 buyers.

The baker begins copying the loaves and distributing them to the market, reaching a pricing point that gets all 100 buyers to buy his loaves.

You copy one loaf of bread and use it for personal consumption. Impact on the baker's market is minimal.

You copy one loaf of bread from the baker, but then begin copying more for distribution. 25 buyers who would have bought a loaf of bread from the baker then copy your copied loaf of bread. Impact to the baker's market is substantial. Baker is forced to close down. Potential new bakers are scared away from the market due to the ease with which to copy loaves of bread. Famine ensues. Wives weep, children go hungry. Everyone dies.

But seriously, your story leaves a lot out of the equation.

I'm of the mind that what we're seeing is a regrowth of the powerful families system that has dominated government throughout most of human history, but in this iteration it's "corporate aristocratic" families instead. To me, it's roughly analogous to ancient Rome - the masses have at least the illusion of say and can get some things changed if they complain loudly enough, but for the most part things are run by, or on the behalf of, the powerful, wealthy, and privileged organizations of the day. The dissolution of the traditional large and extended noble family system created something of a power vacuum for a newer social unit to exert its interests through government... instead of the Julia, the Flavia, and the Cassius families, we have the Monsanto, Koch Industries, and ExxonMobil families.

If we're thinking of the same study, I think the subject had to believe the information was true before being told it was a lie for it to have an effect. If the subject dismissed the information outright, then telling them that it was a lie afterward actually increased their attachment to the subject of the propaganda. The interesting thing is that many of the tests subjects who initially believed it, were then told it was a lie, then later completely forgot about the propaganda still had substantially negative opinions about the propaganda target. The emotional meaning of the information was retained, but the factual information was discarded.

This raises the possibility that this propaganda isn't aimed at Muslims, but at us. Since we're more likely to believe it initially even if it's false, this could be an attempt to further solidify our dislike of OBL. It could have something to do with the increasing calls for an investigation into the legality of his killing by the left.

I think he meant economic profit, which is typically more what people mean when they say profit. In that sense he's correct (if imprecise), since perfect competition causes a move to normal profit (ie no economic profit) in the long term.

And anyway, his point still stands: incumbent firms do not want competitors entering and diluting the market and lowering their profit nearer to normal.

"a 'suspicious bump' in there data"

Sigh.

Women would be unable to become pregnant? On the contrary, it sounds like space is a GREAT place to have sex.

I'm not at all confident you know what you're talking about.

Actually, the greater your ability to focus on one task and maintain that concentration, the greater your ability to be hypnotized. A hypnotized person is in a super-concentrated state, and the hypnotist can use this to bypass conscious filters and "teach" things to the hypnotized person that they then "remember" and carry out. People with ADHD and diminished intelligence are actually much harder to hypnotize than educated, intelligent people, so strength of will and intelligence actually makes you a better candidate for hypnotism.

What you're probably after is gullibility, which is another thing entirely.

Our only long-term policy toward North Korea is "let's hope it collapses soon and everyone flees to China so we don't have to deal with it." As far as short-term policies go, we use inducements/sanctions. Kind of like how you'd treat a child.

Welcome to Earth. Unfortunately it happens quite often here.

Republican gerrymandering happened quite flagrantly ten years ago, prompting Rove and others to talk about a permanent conservative majority. It didn't happen. Gerrymandering is good at protecting incumbents from real opposition but it's bad at assigning districts to any particular party. Don't worry so much about gerrymandering, worry about certain SC decisions.

You need it to be an arrestable offense so that you can prevent the implementation of the planned crime. Convicting someone for it afterwards is meant to punish and prevent them from attempting to do it again.

Eliminating this would do mainly two things:

1. It would make trade within and outside the US very, very difficult. Internally it would get rid of what is basically a US Free Trade Agreement with Congress (and sometimes the Court) as the arbiter of disputes. Externally, it would allow states to set their own trade rules with foreign nations. Welcome to tariffs between states, "state trade blocs" that combine states and foreign nations against other states and foreign nations, and in general a massive spike in antagonism.

2. You like lawyers? You'd need an ungodly shit ton of them to sort through all the rules and regulations that would need to be created for states to coordinate interstate commerce. Never mind the explosion of corruption that would happen, when business/labor interests that are too small to fight on the federal level realize they only have to bribe a few of their state legislators to get what they want.

And why just stop at states? Why not allow individual counties to have total control over their commerce rules? Or maybe precincts? If people want more local control over commerce rules, then why stop at the state level?

Not to be picky, but Britain is a little over 80,000 square miles in area, while Rhode Island is around 1,200 square miles. Not even in the same ballpark.

Depends. What's their political affiliation?