Yes, it is. What part of my statement was made up?

"Do this or starve" is the default position of all forms of life.

Sure. Fortunately, us humans and our big brains can move things away from those "nasty, brutish and short" defaults. Infections used to mean death or amputation, now you take some pills. It used to take months on a dangerous voyage to go to another continent, now you can do it in comfort, safety, and less than a day. We've made many things better than what "the universe" handed out.

Such a guarantee is impossible.

It always astonishes me that people call things which are currently being done "impossible". Many countries in Europe, for example, do exactly this. Something is by definition possible if it has in fact happened.

There is no "one side". There are millions of employers and millions of workers.

While this is true, that does not mean that the employers do not hold disproportionate power in that relationship.

If you see all possible employers as just "one side" which is out to get you ... chances are you're pretty much unemployable.

If you want to make it about me, I do just fine as a contractor. But I actually am legitimately one. Someone will tell me "I want a (website made|database fixed|application written), and here's what I want for it", and then leave me to figure out all the details. If, on the other hand, they expected me to display their logo on my car, and things like that, I would be an employee, not a contractor.

The biggest problem during the Gilded Age wasn't abusive employers, it was uncontrolled immigration.

That is patently false. Look up the Colorado Coalfield War for an example. That wasn't people who had immigrants take over their jobs; it was people who had jobs and were severely mistreated by their employers. And they couldn't just go get another job, because all the employers pulled the same things! The US wanted immigrants at that time; a tremendous amount of manual labor needed done and they couldn't let them in fast enough to fill the need.

When in the course of human history EVERY have people been guaranteed the necessities of life

The welfare state is hardly a new concept. It was done literally millennia ago. And many times since then. Many countries in Europe currently use it. So, yes, life can and has worked that way, in the course of human history.

Most (perhaps all?) Scandinavian countries currently use such a model, as do some others in Europe. They are doing fine. As to some people not wanting it...well, tough, taxes aren't optional. They can vote against candidates who support it, of course. But we'll need to do it anyway. Automation and computerization is progressing at such a pace that, probably by 2030 but definitely in the not too distant future, there will be far more working age adults than available jobs. At that point, "Just get a job, buddy" won't be a workable system. There won't be one to get.

That's really a great problem to have. Why should we have humans doing difficult, dangerous, or boring jobs when machines can do them instead? But in that case, we will have to figure out a different way to provide for those people who will be out of work.

Except when you don't eat or have a place to live if you don't "associate", you're not really freely associating. "Do this or starve" is really not too much different than putting a gun to someone's head.

If people were guaranteed the necessities of life no matter what, I would agree that then one party doesn't hold all the cards, and we should let people do as they will, and if they want to work for a penny an hour—well, they still get to eat. But when that's not the case, it's not really free association, and one side is disproportionately powerful. In that case, we need some external safeguards to prevent abuse of that power. And that's not hypothetical; look at what things were like during the Gilded Age. It got so bad that workers fought literal wars against employers because they were that abusive.

Kid-fucking is more than "an idea that I don't agree with".

You're right. But RMS did not fuck any kids. He just talked about the subject. So yes, it is very much exactly "an idea that (you) don't agree with."

If he were actually doing it, that would be a different story. But people should be permitted to hold unpopular and controversial opinions.

A lot of police vehicles already have auxiliary batteries used to power that stuff, because a car's basic electrical system already can't handle all of that additional load. I would see no reason that it couldn't be done in the Tesla models as well, so that the primary battery remains available just for powering the vehicle and its normal accessories.

Not just police vehicles, either. People who like to do big stereos, the big light bars, etc., also often have to power them off of an auxiliary battery. So, they might have to do that, but they probably already would've had to anyway.

Failure to regularly apply chemicals to organs tends to damage them in pretty short order, too.

Water is a chemical. Vitamins are chemicals. Trace minerals are chemicals. Proteins, lipids, carbohydrates and sugars? All chemicals.

The fact that something is a "chemical" does not, in and of itself, render it harmful. Many chemicals have little to no effect on human bodies, and some are even beneficial. Indeed, humans will die without regularly ingesting certain chemicals.

Has anyone, at any time, ever found it to be a wise idea to discuss politics at work? I can't possibly see that ending well; someone is going to disagree with you, and you have no idea who that "someone" might turn out to be.

Because we want it to be better than two human eyes. Two human eyes can't be watching 360 degrees at all times, but a bunch of sensors can.

In the US at least, you can absolutely take photographs that include private property from a public place. You can't do it in such a way as to violate an actual reasonable expectation of privacy or to photo something you normally couldn't see (e.g., a long zoom through a bedroom window), but if something would be ordinarily visible from public space, it can be photographed. Copyright has nothing to do with it; the copyright belongs to the photographer. A car in a driveway is not reasonably expected to be in private, since anyone walking or driving by could see it.

The eyes can't trespass. If it's something you could see, you can photograph it. Ask Barbara Streisand about trying to stop photography.

The sad part of this is, a lot of these "anti-GMO" types claim they're protecting the environment. Yet they oppose a technology that could cause agriculture to require less land, less pesticide and herbicide, less fertilizer, and less water. Now they're even fighting against plants that would dramatically reduce CO2.

It reminds me a lot of the "anti-nuclear" activists who claim they're environmentalists. You don't get to call yourself that and then oppose technologies that would actually help. Some of these people need to learn to actually think.

Given that there's absolutely no reason to dislike the deal, and many companies have similar arrangements with USPS, I can't see any other reason. Trump is not attacking the idea of bulk service contracts in general, just with Amazon, but he's provided no numbers to indicate it's actually a bad deal. Conversely, the USPS has, and the deal is serving them quite well. It's certainly good for Amazon as well, but well, business contracts are usually entered into because both parties stand to benefit from them.

And Trump has blasted the Washington Post many times, but once again, he could not come up with one single thing that was factually inaccurate in their reporting. Now, if they were reporting something false, he'd have a good case for being pissed off at them, but, well, if the facts make you look bad, that doesn't put the blame on the one who reports those facts...

The USPS is bringing in tons of money through their deals with companies like Amazon. They're not somehow getting screwed. Like in a lot of cases, if you're going to buy a large amount of a product or service, you can generally negotiate to get it at a lower bulk rate. That's not somehow unusual.

It's essentially guaranteed business for USPS. If they double the rate, I'm sure FedEx, UPS, etc., will be quite happy to carry Amazon's packages instead, and the USPS will wind up being the one that loses.

But, what's that matter when you've got an ego to feed? This never was about postal rates. This is about Trump not liking Jeff Bezos, because the Washington Post has the gall to call people's attention to it when Trump says something stupid.

Very true indeed. I don't think my parents thought intentionally to do it, but I do have a very common one. If I google my name, I find that "I" am a comedian in Canada, an aerospace engineer in California, a lawyer in Florida, and was arrested for aggravated assault in Virginia when I was four years old. Even if some of the results that came up really were about me, it would be extremely difficult to filter that from the stuff about other people who share my name.

No, they couldn't. There was a time limit, I think an hour or two. That's long enough to decide if the app is worth what you paid for it, but not so much time that you could do whatever you wanted with it and get a refund a month later.

If they were giving refunds to people years down the line, it was in some other way, not the auto refund via Google Play since that was only available for a short while. But I would tend to agree with you that it's unreasonable to demand a refund for something that went EOL after being maintained for several years, especially when most of those apps only cost a buck or two. If I got five years' use out of an app I like for a couple bucks, I would certainly think I got my money's worth.