And if that meant a bunch of people starving in the mean while, I say fuck'em if they can't take a joke.

But on a more serious side, you figure it's better to extract a not-so universal service fee from the population (even the population that has no phone) in the form of higher food costs than in the form of a small fee tacked on to the phone bill?

I know very well how the market works and doesn't work. Yes, I said the ultimate blasphemy and I meant it. The market doesn't always work. Hammers are quite useful, but the world is not composed entirely of nails.

Riddle me this. Private schools have been perfectly legal since forever. They have always been permitted to compete against the public schools. In some places parents have the option of applying all of the money that would have gone to the public school for their children and applying it to a private school instead.

So why hasn't that created an embarrassment of surplus funds? Why haven't those states seen a jump in standardized test scores? Where are all these kids who don't know about evolution coming from?

I find it amusing you claim health care. Laughable even. Did you know that in the U.S. we spend twice as much per-capita on health care as the UK with it's socialized medicine? We spend more than any country in the world, but we are only ranked 16th on measures of outcome. And meanwhile, other than a few who receive government based health insurance (medicare/medicaid) or veterans who use the VA system, healthcare in the U.S. has always been private and is to this day (Since the ACA mandates haven't kicked in yet).

The fact that you threw healthcare into the mix with public schools suggests that you haven't given this much real thought.

Actually, the monopoly was for other reasons entirely. I was referring to the universal service mandate that required Bell/AT&T to provide service even where it wasn't profitable. You know those places that are still stuck on dial-up? Thy wouldn't have phones at all if not for that intervention.

Before you say something like "too bad, they should move", I'll remind you that if they move, nobody will be growing food anymore.

Having a PC or a car didn't matter at all until somewhat later in the game when they were already getting much cheaper.

One approach would be to make the tailored education universal like they did for phone service.

And, of course, get their mugshot posted call over the internet.

No, I cannot trust them. Any truth I might derive from their utterances comes from assuming that their intent is to deceive and then to lie about the deception. That is not trust.

Not trusting them doesn't men I shouldn't evaluate what they have said in an attempt to get at a purely unintentional disclosure of truth. In lies, as in gifts, it's the thought that counts.

So Khan Academy is free?

They use weasel words so they can maintain a thin pretense that they "didn't *actually* lie". That doesn't alter the fact that they most certainly did intend to have people believe something other than the truth (that is, they lie).

That their method of lying can provide useful hints of the truth doesn't alter that one little bit. They are still habitual liars.

All our hard work has paid off! Those channels are more stuffed than ever before.We'll deal with the buyback clause quietly in a quarter or two.

It may seem obvious to you, but then the fanbois and apologists show up and prove that it's less obvious than you would hope.

In a fair legal system, the credit agencies would be guilty of libel Given how common credit card fraud is and that banks always try to make the individual the victim instead of them, simply taking a bank's word for it that you defaulted *IS* a reckless disregard for the truth.

Correction, everyone but the credit card company takes on the risk of fraud. Even though the credit card companies are the only ones in any position to prevent the fraud.

No. Identification and authentication are related but different things.

The courts have thrown up their hands and stated PUBLICLY that they can no longer reign this in. So much for judicial oversight. The NSA blatantly lied to Congress and has faced no consequences for it. So much for legislative oversight.

As for 2 or three, you maintain that it's fine to beat someone into a coma and as long as someone somewhere was killed outright the coma victim and family have no right to complain?

Sorry, I would prefer not to set the bar as low as Russia or China. Not the worst is not much of an aspiration.

That's just the theater. The real power never appears on television.

In other words, the episodes would be lost forever if not for blatant copyright infringement.

Too bad it costs a small fortune just to litigate to the point that the judge is in a position to toss this crap out.