Are you kidding? The consumers have had to mess around lugging physical equipment back to the shop. And once they've found out why they had to... class action lawsuit.

It's physical.

Those "manholes" are what gives access to the tubes I'm talking about. So, again, why are you happy for tubes to be a natural monopoly and wires not?

I think you'll find that if you quoted my whole paragraph, I covered this.

No, money stopped going round because banks realised that the game was up and that value which didn't exist couldn't be used to leverage any more.

I don't: I mean since currency ceased to be tied to anything of actual value, e.g., gold.

Nope -- just the web ;)

You may have noticed that the wires of which you speak run under the road of which you speak. And I'm damned if the road is getting dug up every time some company comes offering my neighbour a dollar off his phone bill.

So perhaps you might build tubes under the road, and then any number of companies can come and lay their wires without disruption. Well, of course, wires also occupy physical space, so it isn't any number. And who owns the tubes? Why not just give the same entity the right to own the wires?

I don't get it. The currency may be worth a lot less, but it's still costing the lender.

Unless you're underestimating the scope of the problem.

Actually, the law changed to allow for sub-prime lending before it happened.

You're with the wrong bank. My money does earn when it's sitting in the bank. Not as much as it could if I had it tied up in some enterprise where I couldn't use it to pay my employees, but it's also less at risk.

The problem with your line of thought is that its logical conclusion is that money has to keep moving in order to be useful, which is exactly what got us into this whole mess.

I'm not even really referring to saving up problems: I'm saying, torture a thousand people today, and more than 500 of them will simply tell you what they think you want to hear.

Once again: the manufacturer will not replace them, because it's not the manufacturer facing the lawsuit.

Yep, just like everyone who's ever played a FPS knows exactly how terrible the horrors of war are.

And I've played enough Tetris in my life to know exactly what it's like to be a bricklayer.

We (you and I) reject torture on those grounds, sure. But to appeal to others (e.g. Neo-Cons) to stop doing it we have to make what is, in essence, an economic argument; that on balance, you'll get information of less value than if you took other approaches.