How does that work out for high-voltage transmission lines? Or roads? It doesn't.

I'm surprised you libertarians haven't tried starting your own church yet; you already have a religion that makes about as much sense as Xenu and the Galactic Confederation and Teegeeack.

In places where rural electric coops already exist, then can certainly act for the good of all their customers (in the community) and redistribute stored energy, provide them energy (from the utilities they buy from) during dark periods, etc. What the previous poster was suggesting was creating new coops to directly compete with already-established utilities to do this. That won't work, for the reasons I stated: you can't have someone competing directly with a public utility monopoly. The rural coops only work for the reason you stated: the private companies didn't feel like running power lines, so someone set up a community-owned power company to do the same thing. In places where the private companies already have run power lines, you can't have someone else running more power lines parallel to theirs and competing with them. The local governments won't stand for it. The utility enjoys a monopoly because it's given that right by the government (at state and/or local levels), so that government isn't going to turn around and say that someone else (who's a non-profit, unlike the utility company) can now compete with them.

Considering how it treats homosexuals, I'd say it's a pretty crappy place.

The weather certainly isn't anything to get excited about either.

That's not a bad idea; that model works pretty well for the USPS. Utilities really shouldn't be for-profit entities.

That's a lot more than we can say about Slashdot.

They don't have to worry about hundreds or thousands of mini-Snowden/Mannings popping up; it only takes one or two to cause a huge shitstorm, so they have to be very worried about that. However, there's not likely to be than many Snowden/Mannings either, because the risk is so insanely high. Manning was caught and is now in a military prison for a very long time, and Snowden evaded capture by the skin of his teeth, and is now stuck in crappy Russia trying to make a new life (after living in warm and beautiful Hawaii, I hope he likes snow and cold). Given the high risk of capture and imprisonment, there aren't likely to be very many people willing to try this in the future, however as I pointed out, it only takes one to cause an international incident.

I wonder how history would have turned out differently had Guy Fawkes succeeded with his plot.

Teenagers don't question authority, by and large. They yell, throw tantrums, stomp their feet, and make a lot of noise, and then once that angst is out of their system, they promptly tend to get to doing whatever it is that the authorities have told them they should do to "get ahead".

Exactly. Teenages only rebel in small ways; they don't really think about things from a big-picture point-of-view. I remember going to middle school and high school in an upper-middle-class suburban area: all the kids at my schools were die-hard Republicans (this was back in the Reagan/GHWBush years, so this meant something slightly different back then). It wasn't until they went to college that many of them started changing their views radically.

There are, but they aren't compatible with all the wacky macros that companies have built on top of MS Office.

In a libertarian's ideal world, you'll only have one road to your house (since obviously, there's only room for one; it's kinda hard to have two roads joining up at one driveway), and you'll simply have to pay a toll to whoever owns that road. And since you have no choice, you'll have to pay whatever toll that person or company wants you to pay. But libertarians don't see the problem with this.

That isn't possible here, because to share power among the members of the coop, you need electric transmission lines, and towers to hold them up, which means you need land, right-of-way, etc. You can only get that with the government's blessing, and they've already given that blessing to the local power utility monopoly. They're not going to give it to someone else, because the whole point of a utility monopoly is that you only need one set of infrastructure because it's infeasible to have dozens of sets of transmission lines running all over, so you give one company a monopoly for this, and have them regulated by the government so they don't go nuts with their monopoly. The government can't give other companies the same rights because then they'd be admitting they're doing a poor job in their capacity as regulators.

Maybe, but I doubt that's the case here: cats are attracted to spots where the dirt is soft and it's easy to dig and deposit their turds. It's the same reason that indoor cats will happily use a litter box instead of pooping all over your house. Potted plants and flower beds have nice, soft, diggable dirt, unlike most other places in someone's yard.

The solution is some kind of cat repellent. Some kind of pepper powder might work, and I'm sure there's other commercial purpose-made repellents available as well. I've seen some made more for deer and other animals; they'd probably work for cats too.

Sorry, no. I can understand why you might have that perception, but the fact here is that on this issue, the liberals and the extremist (economic) libertarians (the ones who think all the roads should be privatized, etc.) are in agreement, as well as the Republicans. How can this be? Simple: the liberals will defend any of Obama's actions or inactions, even when they're identical to something the Republicans would have done. So these days, liberals are big proponents of no-strings bailouts, bogus healthcare "reform" that only benefits insurance companies and was designed by a right-wing thinktank, warmongering, NSA spying on citizens, prosecuting marijuana crimes at the Federal level and busting medical marijuana dispensaries, etc. Heck, if Obama suddenly decided to round up homosexuals and put them in concentration camps, and ban contraception too, the liberals would be all for those things as well.

That is just one tiny example of why gov't shouldn't be regulating any businesses, why it shouldn't be involved in any projects, including infrastructure - no competition. If this law passes, it just gives the gov't established monopoly a special power to tax people because they have no competition. No competing grids, no competing roads, no competing water and sewer and garbage providers, etc.etc. This company COULD, in a free market, do the same thing: impose a fee like that. However if it did, people would have a choice to switch to another provider, however that would have been done, but we can't even KNOW at this point, because of gov't meddling, which gives monopolies to the most connected players.