Why replicate the fire-prone design? The original is gone - no use in pretending otherwise. Use modern materials which are visually indistinguishable but fire resistant. The oak beams were not visible from inside or outside the cathedral unless you went into the attic - they were not an important aspect of the design, but rather an implementation detail.

You are not reading his comments correctly. "tax the people that didnt go to college to subsidize those that did,"

This is criticizing things like Stafford Loans and proposals like loan forgiveness which benefit the 25% of Americans who actually get a bachelor's degree. The taxes are drawn from the fortunate, but also from the less fortunate. On balance these kinds of programs subsidize the most affluent Americans. See also the mortgage deduction and even "Medicare for all" proposals - poor and old people already qualify for Medicaid or Medicare and marginal people get subsidies under Obamacare. On balance the program would throw more money at the very people who can currently carry their own weight - the most affluent Americans. It's hilarious that these proposals get tagged as "progressive".

What Chomal suggested has very little to do with the empire expansion and conquest that dominated the interaction between Europeans and native peoples. There was no "collaboration" or "pollination", only one-way force-fed culture from one side to the other. Non-European ideas were at best "savage" and at worst blasphemous.

I don't know I don't live in those places. The idea that an iPhone is elite in the US where it has almost the whole market to itself is patently absurd. Most of the kids have them, and you get 2-for-1 deals at the cell phone shops.

Elite? If you go to any random high school and pick any random kid, you have a roughly 50/50 or better shot of getting a kid with an iPhone. How Elite can you be when you have the standard?

Four wheel drive helps a lot when you live in a marginal city for snow (like Philly), where dedicated snow tires make little sense, but the occasional snow storm pushes the limits of the so-called "mud and snow" tires that are popular here. Beyond 4-wheel-drive, ground clearance is the single most important feature if you are going to be on roads that have not seen a plow - again, back to Philly, which does not plow any side streets. Still, an SUV is not necessary - a jacked up car like a Subaru is more than sufficient. To be honest, most things that people call "SUVs" lack any real truck features and are in fact just jacked up hatchbacks or wagons. Many are really just a minivan without the sliding doors. Many don't have 4-wheel-drive and the performance models even sit low to the pavement.

Again, a semantic argument. No one "forces" you to pay, but you'd be a fool to pay more money for the same thing. The effect is the same - a monopoly. Force is not required to have a monopoly.

That's a semantic argument. You make my argument for me:

Yes, a very easy decision - so every high volume maker paid MS for every PC shipped, whether it had Windows on it or not. Thus MS was getting nearly 100% of the OS business, short of a few niche players. They had an effective monopoly, and if they hadn't propped up Apple financially they would have eliminated all of their non-free competition on the desktop.

You weren't forced to buy a Windows PC, but PC manufacturers were forced to purchase a Windows license for every PC they shipped, whether it had Windows on it or not. Thus the monopoly - there was no financial incentive to sell a PC with anything but Windows on it, and so there was no OS competition except for the single-digit rounding error sold by Apple itself and people doing their own builds from components.

This is a $7000 server CPU, not something for home gamers.

Why is a monopoly on radio advertising different than a monopoly on internet advertising. The market is sound from public airwaves. Facebook's market is eyeballs over the internet - there is a lot of competition for those same eyeballs. They are just one app/website - a big one, but hardly the only. What would people do if a monopoly radio owner shut down? Well, not listen to the radio, that's for sure. What would people do if Facebook shut down? Play with some other app on their phone. It's not a monopoly.

We tolerate this because we need the electricity. We need the water, the sewer, the gas. We tolerate this because we don't want every company putting up it's own sets of competing utility lines and pipes, negotiating their rights of way - similar to the way we regulate roads. These are an essential public good. Facebook is not essential, and it certainly isn't a public good. If the only way to save it is to turn it into a utility, I'd just assume shut it down.

Actually it has. In places without competition the infrastructure typically suffers a lack of investment, bloated bureaucracy, poor customer service, etc. Hallmarks of central control. Look no further than phone companies - compare the mobile phone and home phone customer experience. You can choose from 4 major and dozens of minor mobile phone companies. Service consists of walking into any of thousands of retail locations and handing an associate your phone, then waiting while they fix the problem for you. Contrast that with your home service, where even talking to a human is painful and service calls consist of all-day "windows". Chances are your bill is similar, even though with one phone you can travel anywhere in the world and call anyone from practically anywhere using cutting-edge technology and the other works from home and runs over 70-year-old infrastructure.

It's only a monopoly for people who want to play on Facebook. If you want to run an ad, there are numerous other outlets. If you want to connect to old school chums, there are other outlets. If you want to post shit and have people comment on it, there are numerous other outlets.

I know a few people who make a living producing video, and it does not involve YouTube. I know what you mean - there is an ecosystem of people who now depend on YouTube for their income... but that isn't a monopoly. The skills that go into the production of a YouTube video are transferable elsewhere. For viewers, there is plenty of boob tube content, even if YouTube closed tomorrow.

No question - but that was actually a monopoly. Except for a tiny niche, you couldn't really sell a PC in the US without paying MS. They owned the whole market. A market that was once rich with competition from names like Apple, IBM, Atari, Commodore, etc. was whittled down to a single player.

I want to get this right. You think that, if anyone - ANYONE - out there, no matter how harebrained the idea, no matter how incomprehensible their drivel - can't find a publisher for their content, that requires a government intervention to force people to host it? I remain unconvinced.

There are things that are almost perfectly analogous to yelling at people in a park, though. Usenet, for example.

Like forcing people to host other people's content? I remain unconvinced.

Why? Presidents have historically used whatever communications infrastructure was available to them. To my knowledge, Twitter hasn't censored the Donald's Tweets, but if they did... so what? Does he not have any other way to get his voice heard?

I'm not prone to conspiracy theories without evidence.

Again, you seem to be under the impression that "free speech" means "entitled to force other people to rebroadcast my ideas". It means no such thing. Are you really surprised that people with messages of white supremacy have trouble finding a payment processor? If a payment processor did knowingly accept such money, how long before people boycotted THEM? It's commercial suicide.

Usenet is about as close as you can get, and as far as I know you can go still go there and knock yourself out. There are darknets. Will your racist screed be rebroadcast by a top-10 website? No. Why is that a flaw in the system?

If you are really worried that people will have nowhere to go, have the government put up an uncensored (oh, well, except for the government censorship we endorse of course!) site. I bet it will be REALLY popular ::eyeroll::.