Overall, the vaccines are saver.

It depends on the vaccine, the disease and the patient.

The seasonal flu vaccine is pretty useless in healthy people, can have significant to serous side effect, and probably is not worth the risk in the general population. OTOH vaccines for polio, measles, and whooping cough are certainly safer for most folks than going unvaccinated.

All this does is get the public to curate their own data that is being mined. Instead, the FTC should allow you to intentionally corrupt the data.

This.

In fact, it's perfectly legal (or at least, it used to be; who knows these days) to give false information or a false name as long as you're not trying to commit fraud. (Or impede justice; don't lie to the cops, just remain silent.)

Why the hell would I want to do that?

I say lets inject even more noise into them. That won't matter if you're using the data for statistical purposes, and it gives some (alas, not much) plausible deniability for everything else.

In the USA, driving privileges are rarely revoked permanently.

It's a consequence of our public policy about development and mass transit. It is practically impossible for most of the population to remain gainfully employed without driving "privileges". We can tighten driving laws when and only when we improve mass transit and reduce sprawl.

Oh yeah, and he didn't support gay marriage a year ago...

He still doesn't. "Leave it to the states" is as unconstitutional and as evil in same-sex marriage as it would be in interracial marriage.

Why? Shouldn't everyone be able to exercise freedom of thought and speech as long as they don't commit any actual crimes?

Making a threat is an actual crime.

In some contexts, a public statement that "I'm going to do X!" is a threat. In others, it's not. To determine that context, you have to investigate.

costs me $5 in tolls
Or you could drive down Rt 7.

The birth control issue is about government forcing employers to pay for their employees' birth control.

No, it's about government forcing employers to pay for their employees' health insurance. Whether the employee uses that insurance to cover birth control or treatment for the clap or hemorrhoid surgery or a flu shot is none of the employer's fsck business.

The option, of course, would be to not have employers to pay for their employees' health insurance, and go to a rational "Medicare for all" system, but no one is willing to face the corporate monster that for-profit health care has created.

All the libertarians I know adopt the attitude "Leave me the hell alone". They don't want to be "given" anything. Just the right to keep the fruits of their own labor.

In the original sense, where libertarian == anarchist, that's true. But in the American sense, after capitalists hijacked the term and founded the so-called "Libertarian Party", we have a "Libertarianism" that wants to keep the fruits of other people's labor. That is, after all, the essence of capitalism: wealth for the owners of capital, a pittance for those who do the labor. Show me an American Libertarian who wants to tear up all government-issued land deeds, resource deeds, corporate charters, copyrights and patents: all the ways the investment class accumulates wealth without labor.

What the government hates most about the TEA Party is that it was largely dispersed and lacking centralized leadership and hierarchy.

SMH. The "tea party" movement was started by an astroturf movement put together by Fox News, Americans for Prosperity, and Koch Industries. Plenty of centralized leadership and hierarchy there.

That it was the Republican party that fought a civil war that helped to free American slaves.

True, though it's not like they had much choice after the "Confederate" terrorists attacked.

That it was the Republican party that fought for civil rights for minorities from the 40's all the way to the present.

False. The GOP became the anti-civil-rights party in the 70s and 80s, as Southern whites of the segregationist generation abandoned the Democrats (or vice-versa).

Liberalism is a mental disease.

"I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man's ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves." -- JFK. Not a Kennedy cultist by any means, but that's a nice string of words. Care to define what in it you find "diseased"?

The takers have run out of other peoples money and the workers are fed up.

Yes, the takers -- the banksters, the corporate welfare queens, the rent-seekers, the parasites, the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, the surveillance-industrial complex -- are indeed running out of blood to squeeze from the workers, after three decades of right-wing policies have almost destroyed the American middle class.

It's my understanding that it was proven they are scrutinizing some groups with specific ideologies and rubber-stamping groups with the opposite ideology.

That's certainly the Fox News understanding of the story.

Does it reflect reality? Not so much. "Progressive", "Occupy", and "Green Energy" groups got the hairy eyeball too.

Is there any compelling reason why you can't manufacture things in space?

The immense costs of building, maintaining, and staffing factories in space, and the difficulties of returning finished cargoes to Earth.

abundant free energy

If you've got the tech base for orbital factories, you've got the tech base for orbital photovoltaic beamed down to Earth. So that free energy's down here too.

pollute all you like

Nope. Space junk is an issue already.

raw materials literally raining on you

Huh? If you're talking about meteorites, Terra receives tens of thousands of tons of "raw materials" every year. But as was pointed out upthread, raw materials aren't the limiting factor. Heck, our garbage dumps are full of them.

and you can drop consignments next door to wherever they are meant to be going.

Uh, no. You can drop consignments in the middle of the ocean or some areas of scubland, subject to scheduling constraints to not hit any planes or ships...and the first time a cargo goes off course and crushes someone's house, expect a fair chance for your whole operation to be shut down.

but it is inevitable...

Oh, it's entirely evitable. You get up out of the planet's gravity well basically on top of a huge human pyramid. If it turns out to be practical to snag wealth while you're up there (a highly questionable proposition, but let's assume), there is zero incentive to pass it back down the pyramid.

ultimately when we've got deep orbit factories being fed an endless stream of ores by automated refinerminers that will hardly matter.

Yuor deep orbit factories are not going to be making food or houses or providing energy to the people on Earth's surface. They have nothing to do with meeting the basic physical needs of the majority of humanity; there's nothing "post scarcity" about it.

Asteroid mining is a romantic notion based on a propertarian myth of the frontier, where a hard-working man can make his fortune with his own two hands and no government interference (other than the government he relies on to register and defend his property claims).

[Carlin never said stuff, h]e said "shit". He talked about people running out of room for their shit and having to get a bigger house so they could put more shit into it.

No, he said "stuff". C'mon, dude, the title of the fucking album is A Place for My Stuff . Have some respect and don't misquote Carlin:

Actually, this is just a place for my stuff, ya know? That's all; a little place for my stuff. That's all I want, that's all you need in life, is a little place for your stuff, ya know? I can see it on your table, everybody's got a little place for their stuff. This is my stuff, that's your stuff, that'll be his stuff over there.
That's all you need in life, a little place for your stuff. That's all your house is- a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time.