Despite that he was fined because he didn't file first-quarter taxes (he didn't know he was supposed to).

So it's the local governments fault that your brother didn't learn even the basics of what is required to create a business before setting one up? And btw., there are hundreds, if not thousands, of companies that will handle all the work of setting up and filing required documents to get a small company set up - it can be done for anything from a few hundred dollars including first year accounts depending on the type of company. I know - I've done it many times.

And of course before the local state government even granted him anything (ID, name), he had to provide them proof of insurance because apparently private individuals have a choice Not to get insurance, but businesses don't. You must participate in the insurance ponzi scheme.

This "ponzi scheme" is what prevents the customers from getting screwed over by fly-by-night operators that don't give a shit and incur damage or see people hurt without having the money to pay up. It's there as a response to what used to be a significant problem, and what still IS a problem, and it is a compelling interest for society as confidence in the safety of entering into business arrangements with a company without needing to do a lot of credit checks and other due diligence for even relatively small transactions etc. is a major boon to boosting trade. People have different expectations when contracting with a company as opposed to sticking the neighbors son a few dollars.

In the end you're complaining about $2000 in costs that includes a fine resulting from his lack of research. If it wasn't worth $2000 to get set up, then he wasn't making enough money to be setting up a company in the first place - most jurisdictions have exceptions for income from "hobbies" etc. which allows people to do work below a certain threshold without registering as a business. He would still have to declare the income, but there'd be no accounts or other paperwork. Even without that, practically everywhere will allow you to run a business in your own name without setting up a company, and with only minimal paperwork

You're whining because you, and your brother, apparently completely fail to understand what is a fairly simple system (I've set up companies in four different countries - the principles and things to look out for are pretty much the same everywhere, and the paperwork is simple enough to do yourself - if not it's cheap to get the advice you need; heck even a lot of banks will provide free advice about the requirements as part of their business banking offerings because they want your business).

If they do it for the "hope that their work would benefit them and their family durably", then they are fucking stupid. As you say, most can hardly even make a living out of it. Yet they still do it, and they still did it BEFORE copyright even existed. Even today, people still write to self-publish AT A COST with no hope of even recouping the printing cost.

My contention is that the number of people who write primarily because they hope for a major monetary reward is vanishingly small. Even those that dream of being able to even live off their writing is likely a small minority.

You do pay tax on cash savings in many countries, as well as on any other asset, though usually at a much lower rate than on income.

Here's a search index: [1,55] [2,103] [2,178] [3,1] [3,2]. Give me all documents with a document id matching the second entry in each pair where the first entry is 2.

Do you know which word "2" represents, or what is in documents 103 and 178?

That's how you do it. You need to ensure there's no way of doing statistical analysis on the token list to recover plaintext info, and you need to not give them the dictionary mapping from plaintext to tokens.

No, it's not impossible. It's not even particularly hard. You do have some limitations though:

Search works by tokenizing a document, and creating an inverse index from tokens to documents. The tokens does not need to mean anything to the search engine. If you generate the tokens on the client, and don't transmit the dictionary that maps from word to token id, you can have "encrypted search".

The problem with doing that directly is that if you want to do proximity based search you need information on the token order, and they could do frequency analysis to come up with plain text guesses if they guess the language right. You can counteract that by mapping the same word to multiple tokens to even out the frequency of each token id, but it means you would need to search for multiple tokens to find all occurrences of a word.

If you don't are about word proximity it's much safer, as the index would only contain each token once per document at most.

You know some couples are actually secure enough with each other not to freak out if their partners hints that they sometimes think about other people, and are actually capable of taking a joke about it.

The main reason for a secret ballot is to prevent election fraud through vote buying and coercion. It was introduced exactly because of widespread fraud and abuse more or less everywhere that have tried voting without it.

Any system where it is reasonably easy to find out what specific people votes is prone to vote buying and coercion.

On the other hand it is fairly simple to protect a paper based election system (or one with a paper audit trail) relatively well against tampering: Ensure reasonably physical security and allow monitoring by any interested party at all times during transport and counting.

This is the fundamental problem with any discussion of free will: How do you even define it?

A random event would be unlikely to be considered evidence of "free will" by most people.

But an event that follows strictly from cause-effect definitively is not.

Possibly people consider something "free will" if there is some limited level of randomness in the brain so that the same history of the external universe could lead to different thought processes.

I just can't see any way of defining "free will" that doesn't involve randomness.

I sort of agree, but for that to work they'd have to actually produce decent headphones first. The Apple headphones are the only ones I've used that I've managed to get to literally fall apart, and they fit me badly, and don't isolate outside noise well enough.

Some of us are "just" running for the health benefits. I have no interest in being "serious" about running, nor do I have an interest in being "serious" about my music. I listen because I enjoy it, and because it reduces the boredom of running (yes, I get bored - immensely bored). And I also hate the Apple headphones - their effect is too low and the sound quality is horrendous, and they fit badly. The first and the last of those two are most important to me when running. I don't want them falling out, and I do want to hear the music over background noise.

If I had to use Apple headphones to use an iPod, I wouldn't be using an iPod. It's that simple.

I'd actually love one that was small enough to be part of one of the earbuds, and I'm sure that's where it'll be heading.

Pepsi tends to win blind taste tests between Pepsi and Coke. The moment people know which is which, a majority tends to insist Coke tastes better.

Not just that they prefer Coke, but that it actually tastes better. Clearly the taste doesn't change, but how people perceive taste is dependent on other factors than the actual taste.

Even more interesting: Play people the "bottle opening, followed by fizzing of soda" sound that's used in the Coke ads, and a lot of people will insist the soda tastes better - even if they're served the same soda twice (one with and one without hearing the sound).

Likes and dislikes is only superficially about "quality", even if quality could be objectively measured. It's also about what you're used to, as well as what people around you like and dislike, and what advertising tells you to like or dislike. You only need to look at the massive cultural diversity in type of music people like, or how they dress or act to realize that likes and dislikes is as much about culture, tradition and what is comfortably well known to you as about what is actually "good".

Of course it makes sense.

English grammar isn't prescribed by a central authority - it changes with use, and the "raise the question" meaning is now so common that it has been added to some dictionaries. Likely it will replace the original meaning almost totally within a generation. Give it up.

Is there is material you find objectionable, do not view it. The computer much like the television has an off switch.

I agree with that sentiment most of the time, but a substantial amount of material that would be deemed child pornography is a record of abuse of the child. Allowing that material to be disseminated further victimizes that child. Irrespective of other arguments against child pornography which may or may not hold (I am not aware of any proof that availability of child pornography affects the levels of abuse, for example - maybe it does, maybe it doesn't) the protection of the child against further effects of the abuse makes legal restrictions acceptable in my book.

That said, I think enforcing blocks on content through an organization that is not under democratic control and that there is no oversight of is despicable because of the huge potential for blocking legal material.

Funny that you should complain about decades of populist right-wing propaganda, yet confuse communism (which as a core premise wants to dismantle the state and grant wider personal freedom) with the old Soviet regime.