Both houses of the United States Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq. The 'war of aggression' charge in the Nuremburg trials had to do with wars of conquest, i.e. territorial annexation. That is quite a stretch, even for a Euro liberal.

We have this as well. It is true that our tort law is in need of some serious revision, but there are (and have been for a while) countermeasures for frivolous lawsuits, including counter-suits specifically because the lawsuit was frivolous and the loser being made to pay legal costs for both parties.

Italy is one of my favorite countries in the world, but these are some mightily rose-colored glasses you've got. The Italian labor market is a joke and starting a business there (even for an Italian) is next to impossible. Unemployment at 11.5% with a youth unemployment rate at 38.4% - the inevitable product of constitutionally 'protected' jobs.

But then I'd expect that sort of selective vision from someone whose signature tries to draw a conclusion from comparing the number of victims in a planned mass murder like 9/11 versus deaths by traffic accidents. Clearly we should just shrug our shoulders and do nothing because, well, they didn't kill as many people as auto accidents do. I'm no fan of GW Bush but you don't need to extend your hyperbole to war crimes to criticize him when he has plenty of perfectly ordinary political decisions to oppose.

Of course they're inaccurate. Do you imagine that anybody in the government or the auto industry believes otherwise?

Politicians want to set minimum MPG so they can win the environmental vote. But actually raising real world MPG is very expensive and puts an artificial constraint on the automotive market: they have to sell cars with more money allocated to MPG and less allocated to whatever it is that the market would otherwise induce them to do. To a certain point most people are comfortable with the government nudging industries in this fashion, as they also do with safety - but the resulting 'standards' are just Emperor's clothes so that all involved can go around patting themselves on the back.

It's a machine that has to be constantly fed, as well. It doesn't matter how many strides the automotive industry made four years ago; every fresh batch of politician needs to bring home fresh victories against Big Corporate America and this is one of them. Of course it's a desirable goal anyway, but by ceding the responsibility for this kind of thing to our elected officials we are telling them that they'll be rewarded for having a dog and pony show about their intentions to one day solve a problem (by which time they will be long gone) and so if we don't care for the resulting disconnect between reality and the pronouncements coming out of where executives are lying in bed with politicians, we have only ourselves to blame.

It's the same thing with health care and online sales taxes. The really big corporations - the ones with large lobbying budgets who can eat added costs - actually want regulatory compliance to be expensive. They've already made huge investments in people whose job it is to satisfy Washington. Small businesses can't do that, so they either go out of business or get bought by bigger business, and the result is that every industry in which the government has a large stake (which is most industries, these days) gets a big barrier to entry and you don't see as many people starting new ventures. That's why start-ups are synonymous with software. Before the ear of 1,000 page regulations passed by a congress that hasn't read it, you had automotive and aviation and energy startups, too. Now these things only happen with lots of money or as second or third ventures for people who have already got that money.

I took my business and my family out of the Northeast (we started in NYC) to Texas. It was like getting a 10% raise overnight, and I could buy property instead of rent. Property tax is high but it's a consumption tax, so it informed our decision of what kind of house to buy - and it doesn't penalize us for working harder.

Austin is one of the most expensive places in Texas but it's still peanuts compared to NYC or the Bay Area.

Austin may indeed be getting overrun with McMansions but guess who buys McMansions - middle class people moving up because of economic success. You and I may turn up our nose at them but it's a sign that things are happening as I certainly don't prefer halted new construction projects and people underwater on their mortgages.

None of this compares to moving to, say, Thailand, but I enjoy the first amendment.

It isn't EA's latest game - it's a beta test with rules and restrictions typical of beta tests.

The game doesn't come out until March. Being 'unable to log on' for three hours might be a worthy complaint after that.

In 2007 you could get 100 megabits from Cablevision. If you don't have that, probably your local borough council let in Time Warner and not Cablevision.

Because buying medication for poor people does not in any way address the root cause. It creates a dependency on whatever system it is that bought them their medication.

Spaceships, on the other hand, at least presumably, might create an entire industry of space travel, which in turn will require spaceship builders, painters, repair-people, flight attendants, travel agents, parking garages, et cetera, all of whom can presumably afford medication more than whomever it is you suggest that wealthy people should buy medication for.

Of all the things wealthy people could do with their money, I'm much more excited about space yachts than I am about some guy buying an island condo or a plain old water yacht. Those things both support industries too, but they're not going to launch entire new sectors of the economy.

Sure, but that was also before tort and the idea of 'full liability' were in place. Prior to the LLC, big businesses could shield their investors and owners but small businesses had a hard time doing so - the LLC was a way to equalize that protection.

Enough people with enough resources will always find a way to protect themselves. If you got rid of LLCs, that wouldn't change - but your average wannabe entrepreneur would have a lot harder time of things because he hasn't got access to all the lawyers and accountants you'd need to achieve limited liability without an easy legal avenue.

You don't have to know a lot about corporate law to realize why it makes sense. The most you risk when you change jobs is your new salary (in the event that your new job sucks, you get laid off, or your employer goes under). Entrepreneurs gamble a lot more to get off the ground (like savings or loans from family and friends) so their risk is already quite a lot higher -- enable their customers or investors to repossess their houses and cars and you'll just have fewer people starting businesses and cede more of the market to bigger corporations.

Nah, Domestic Giraffe sounds cool, too.

+1 for an LLC in DE. I am originally from DE so set up our company there but now live in elsewhere and still keep my DE LLC.

DE is just very easy to do business with. They're responsive and they're inexpensive. If your needs are simple then you don't need to go the extra step of being an S-Corporation (this may not be advisable for other reasons; that's a decision that you should have an accountant and/or a tax lawyer for). But your taxes won't change - you'll still do personal income taxes and a schedule C as an LLC. No separate corporate taxes or corporate tax rate, but the 'down side' is that every dollar you make is taxed as your personal income. For a small business this is usually a fair trade off as you want to be able to put money in and take money out very easily.

Corporations were not "granted" to anybody and certainly not in exchange for anything.

Corporate organization is done at the state level. Each state has different laws (though they typically have to accept 'foreign' entities, e.g. companies/corps from other states, if they want to do business in their state).

The federal government did not have some secret corporation power that it decided to bestow on people in exchange for something. States enabled people to form companies and corporations to further commerce. If everybody were personally liable for everything their company did (as opposed to, perhaps, limited/i> liability), nobody would run companies.

Naming a product to sell it in a commercial market has got nothing to do with internal release milestones, and you don't have to be a marketing expert to realize that 'Windows 11' doesn't sound especially cool, whereas 'X' or 'Wild Giraffe' both sound awesome.

The question is more ridiculous than the discrepancy.

And some people believe that having children or getting old (or both) entitles them to tell other people what to do because there might be an outside chance that their baby might get run over by a Camero.

That's true on your typical suburban road or city street. It is drastically less true on a highway where you don't have intersections, stop signs, or left turns. The biggest danger on a highway is not speed but speed differential, e.g. somebody going 40 when everyone else is going 65 or (more often) somebody going 65 when everyone else is going 75-80, aka 'usual interstate behavior.'

I live in Austin. This road is in the middle of nowhere and it's the sort of road where people are going to drive 80mph anyway.

It's not the lawsuits. It's the insurance doctors (and now some nurses and PAs) are required to get to insure you against those lawsuits. This can be north of $100k/yr and in some cases (depending on the state) close to a quarter million a year for a surgeon.

Other than the fact that both organizations host "news content," they aren't comparable. Whether or not you approve of it, the WSJ is a traditional newspaper with "journalism" sections and "opinion" sections with different editors and standards.

HuffPo may contain journalism but it isn't the point. It's a combination rabble-rouser + echo chamber. You would never see a headline like theirs on a WSJ news article because it's repackaging it as commentary rather than news -- and even if that's a difficult line to keep track of for every news organization, HuffPo doesn't pretend to try. And why should they? Their audience doesn't seem to want them to.