No, the project was not scrapped, it was reduced in size. The idea is to build the portion that has not been mired in political squabbles to enable it to then grow again to meet the full intended goals later.

I live about 300 meters from where the route was originally supposed to go through San Jose, so have seen a lot of the NIMBY arguments that have played out. A lot of it has been utterly dirty pool from those against the project.

A much more accurate statement is that the funds are only being used for a part of the intended purpose. This is not "misappropriation" as much as "under-appropriation".

And to pretend that part of this is not a revenge move by the President's Administration for disagreements in other areas is just disingenuous.

By your logic do you think work is evil? We tax income from work much more than we tax capital gains.

And the idea that people are going to stop investing because they earn a little less money from it is just silly. As long as they can increase their money by doing so, they are going to invest that money. The alternative is a bank account, and that earns even less (while still being vended out into the economy as loans). A little bit more or less income from it is not going to stop them from doing it. The only thing to worry about is if the policy creates the incentive to do something else with that money.

But far more to the point, those hyper-wealthy are not actually contributing actual work to the economy, and their reward for already having money is an even bigger portion of the money. At some point that just stops making sense.

It is not clear what you think who should have thought in '48. Are you arguing that there was a better thing to do with all of the European Jews that had been persecuted (to put it mildly) by their neighbours in Europe? I fully agree that England (the leader in creating what we now call Israel) made a hash of it (with full U.S. backing), but from a high-level perspective I don't see a better general solution than creating a homeland in land that was mostly empty (not completely empty), and had no real government at the time. Certainly they could have better handled the existing population, and tried to figure out a future for both groups, but it wasn't an obviously wrong solution, even in retrospect.

And I will also remind you that Israel has been very welcoming to people of the Jewish faith regardless of their racial heritage. See the large number of black/African Jews that have been settled in Israel. So the protection really has been based on faith, not decent.

Please try to look at both sides here. No-one comes out of the current problems in Israel/Palestine looking like the good guy. President Obama was leaning the U.S. towards a better position (physically defending Israel, while starting to castigate it for its mistakes), only to have been reversed by the Trump administration (who is blatantly and blindly on the side of Israel).

Most of the ISIS-related killings outside of the middle east have not been formal members of that group. Rather they watched and read propaganda online (this is now called "self radicalization"), and then often recorded a "I dedicate myself to the cause of ISIS" video immediately before setting off to kill people. In most cases they had never been in contact with anyone with an actual affiliation with ISIS. In others it was tenuous at best. There are exceptions (e.g.: the Bataclan killings were more involved), but there always are.

This is remarkably close to what many of those White Nationalists did: they read and watched things online and self-radicalized, then posted something before going on a killing spree. I think you are trying to make a distinction where there is none.

This sort of thing is the new norm, it appears that the recent killing in Northern Ireland by the "New IRA" is likely along the same lines. The internet has made it really easy for people to create and disseminate propaganda so that people can self-radicalize. Add to that easy access to weapons (guns, explosives, and cars), and the need for organized violent groups to get frequent violent actions has slipped away.

The problem is that once you get past the simplest of cases (single job the whole year, non-itemized deductions, no capital gains, and moderate income) then things get complicated and lawyers get involved way to quickly. You are probably going to correctly cover most people (so 80%+?), but any project without serious funding is going to have troubles quickly, and someone is going to get a call from the IRS, take that personally, and sue the project... which does not have the serious funding to pay for the lawyers it would need.

The IRS is in the right position to provide people with baseline guidance, and to create a system to handle the majority of people's needs, and be able to tell people (unfortunately I am one of them) when their taxes are going to be complicated enough to need non-simple forms. Unfortunately, there are companies (Intuit and H&R Block are two of the most egregious) who have made their business by putting themselves between taxpayers and the IRS, and live off the fees they can charge for extra services (e.g.: tax refund advances). They have been fighting hard (i.e.: paying tons of campaign donations) to make sure nothing threatens that revenues stream. Never mind that it would be more efficient for all other parties, they need to get their pound of flesh.

Apple is going through Goldman Sachs and MasterCard, so they will not have any effect on the transaction processing fees. If anything their focus on eliminating fees from the consumer side will probably wind up putting more pressure on the market to raise the transaction processing fees in order to maintain their profits.

Somewhere down the line I would love to see Apple getting into that part of the business to reduce those expenses, but for now they do not seem interested.

Actually, there are a number of different benefits to various players in credit cards:
- Consumers get fraud protection on their purchases. If someone is trying to cheat you then filing a claim with your credit card company is a fast way of resolving it. And as it stands now you are usually in the better position (merchant usually has to prove you are wrong).
- Consumers also get theft protection. In the case your wallet is stolen U.S. law limits your damages to $50 (waved my most credit card companies nowadays). That is not the case with any cash you have there.
- Merchants like not having to deal with cash. It is a lot harder for workers to steal from credit card transactions, and there are a lot of headaches with sacks of cash.
- Merchants love the disconnect that may people have between the pain of paying and buying. If you can just swipe many people don't connect that as much with the cost of things (this is obviously not a benefit for those consumers).

And there is not 0 cost to banks/creditcard vendors; they have to pay both for the systems involved, and for all the work of policing fraud/abuse and people who don't pay their bills. I am not going to argue that there is not good room for lowering the fees involved, but 0 is not the target.

On your second point you are somewhat wrong. Most (all?) of the credit card merchant agreements specifically forbid merchants from charging more for the use of a credit card. Any merchant found doing that loses their account (and ability to take credit cards). Whatever the advertised price is on the sticker must be the price charged to the card.

There is a loophole here: you can charge other methods (e.g.: cash) less than advertised price. But in most cases merchants like the lower amount of side-work (e.g.: carrying cash to the banks, who increasingly don't like handling cash themselves), and so encourage card used (though they like the lower fees and risks to them of debit cards).

Hiring someone is not collusion. And, from on objective standpoint she seems to have done everything required of her (making the records available), when it was required of her. She certainly should have done that earlier (e.g.: when she left office), but the actual laws were non-specific about that.

Yo mentioned Colin Powel, who absolutely broken both the spirit and letter of the law intentionally, and then don't mention that he has not been punished for this, nor that Clinton seems to have gone out of her way not to do that.

People are rightly asking that from a family that campaigned on someone not releasing records that they release their records. How can you really argue against that?

By that argument, all of the computer companies, and most of the phone companies do not make their products either. Almost all of them are assembled by contract companies, such as Foxcon or Pegatron. And then you can argue that they don't make things either because they are just assembling those items from components provided by an army of other companies.

All of that winds up with a useless argument. The reality is that Apple engineers the product, and is hyper-involved in directing the assembly and testing processes. Apple also is nearly solely responsible for the OS that goes on them, and has a huge hand in the firmware on the components as well. They often also own the machinery that is used in the manufacture and subsequent assembly of those components (to a level their competitors rarely are). For most modern definitions of "making" a product, Apple qualifies.

In "every case" are you including most of Europe? Most, if not everything I have seen pushed by the current Democratic Congressional Freshmen, or Presidential candidates are out-of-line with what you see in parts of Europe right now: single payer healthcare, living wages, etc... And it is pretty easy to argue that places like Germany or Sweden have not descended into Kleptocracies.

I never quite get this line of argument. In a "natural capitalist" society you would expect more desirable places to live to be more expensive, while less desirable places would be cheaper. And yet, people who claim to be capitalists somehow use California's expensive status as a sign that things are going wrong here...

1. Depending on exactly what time-frame you use (say within the last 20 years) you can make the argument that either Texas or California is doing better on GDP gains.
2. Texas has been doing better for a while on number of jobs added
3. California has been doing better on wages added (so less new jobs, but those jobs pay a lot more)
4. Texas's gains have largely been in gas/oil production (so will run out) where California's seem to be based on Film and IT, either of which could suddenly decide to flee the state (although there is no real sign of that).

So when you get down to brass tacks, there is no real evidence that one approach is generically better than the other.

So the school administration in this case were fools for having sited a school next to where a fertilizer plant would eventually decide to go? You seem to be missing the basic reason for laws: to make sure that your actions don't unduly (and this is where the rub is) affect others. Getting the balance is really tough... especially when people start spouting religion-like assertions like yours.

Cronyism is not socialism. Socialism is when the state controls the "means of production" (a.k.a. Capital), nominally for the betterment of all.

Cronyism is when individuals capture the power of the state to benefit themselves personally (and their associates... or cronies). Cronyism can me present in all forms of government that humans have yet tried. But the one most associated with it is Feudalism, where it is hard not to have it.