Tesla down, Bitcoin down, what's Slashdot going to push when they fold?

Every restaurant should have to post their inspection results on their website and in their window. They should be color-coded. That would be of immensely more public value than this

It's bad enough if someone else is slitting your throat - why do it for them?

This offer will directly undercut what remains of their business model. Someone might be a dumbass here, but it's not the shop owners.

No, I haven't been to Barnes and Noble in years. But I guess that's the point of what you're saying...

Yes, and the blocks will be fine, but the con-rods will be inferior to forged. There is simply nothing which produces the interlocking grain structure of forging. Sintered metal conn rods are inferior to forged today. You can see this in the 2000 7.3 Powerstroke. From 1995 to 2000 they used a forged rod, then they went to a powder metal rod which is cheaper because you can crack the caps instead of machining them. But they are both twice as likely to fail and have a ten times less desirable failure mode; they don't bend, they just break.

Even Microsoft can see the PC going away, from the average household anyway. There's no plan to replace the PC-as-terminal or the PC-as-workstation any time soon. They want gamers to buy their console, and they want everyone to buy their phone (heh heh) and they want people to buy their tablets and so on.

Amazon is offering an option. Don't like it? Don't play. However Amazon isn't going away, they aren't going to stop selling eBooks (or physical books). So plan accordingly. If you think not partnering with them is best do that, if you think it is best, do that. But don't assume you can cry and they'll go away. You WILL have to deal with their competition.

It depends on how much they had to pay for it. At this point the division will print money.

Then maybe your neighbor should have had fewer kids?

Maybe you could try not being a sociopath?

Or maybe he should do something worth as much as it costs to feed his family?

Like going to school to get a degree in something "worthwhile" only to end up back at Taco Bell because no one his hiring in his field, so you can sneer at him a second time for having student loan debt? Have you tried not being an elitist?

Find a company with a large low-paid workforce. Now look at how much they pay in taxes.

Typically very little.

What value is the government adding to this transaction, exactly?

What is the point of this non sequitur, exactly? It's not rocket science: you are paying more in taxes to support social services for low wage workers because they are paid so little. If they were paid more, they would need less government assistance, and you would pay less taxes.

As long as there is no slavery in law or in fact

A necessitous man is not a free man.

then the workers are getting paid the least they will accept and the most the company will pay. That's fair.

That's what your sociopathic predecessors said about children working in coal mines. No, it's not fair that someone would have to work at a Taco Bell counter for 24/7/365 for a few centuries to make what the CEO of Yum brands does in one.

You don't care that there are more poor people, as long as they're all equally poor?

Another non-sequitur. Most of your so-called job losses would come from workers cutting back from 3 jobs to 2, or 2 jobs to one.

Prior to the development of modern medicine, your neighbor's father would simply have died. The treatment for Parkinson's disease is expensive. Someone has to pay that cost; if your neighbor decides that it's worth her time to pay it, that's her prerogative. But what right does she or he have to conscript the rest of us to pay for his treatment?

What right do you have to make us pay for your sidewalks, fire service or police protection? This is Civilization 101, sociopath.

Your lack of control over some of your circumstances does not extend to you the right to take control over some of mine.

Like you Randians aren't handing control of your standard of living to FIRE, with or without any cronyism from the government.

The companies are paying the workers, and they are paying taxes

Workers could only dream that they would be taxed like businesses. Your house, your food, your transportation, your monthly bills would be tax-deductible business expenses.

Not in million dollar tax breaks in exchange for low-paid jobs.

The alternative to those low-paid jobs is no work. Is that better?

Have you considered not being a fascist? The jobs are there because the demand is there to support a business, and the tax rate on profits has nothing to do with that.

We did. That's why my uid is so high; I didn't bother getting an account until there got to be so many comments that I had to start filtering.

Yep, but many of the ignorant Snowden supporters see anything that mentions his crimes as an attack.

Because it invariably is? Same with the blatant concern trolling over Manning, where authoritarian hacks spend all day bitching about the rules broken by Manning, but never make a peep over the lawbreaking revealed by Manning. So they had a great deal of Concern over the UCMJ, etc, but would never mention the contractors that traded child sex slaves to warlords to be raped, or infants shot in the head during home invasions in Iraq.

If you're not an authoritarian hack AND you have a functioning sense of proportion, you'd never get to Snowden because you'd be too busy talking about the mountains from the NSA (warrantless wiretapping, fusion centers, perjury before Congress, etc etc) to ever get to the whisteblower.

It doesn't say it directly, but one of the big reasons that some of the people responsible for the constitution didn't want the Bill of Rights was for that reason: They didn't want those to be interpreted as the only rights people had. To placate that argument is why the 9th amendment exists. It turns out that those people were exactly right because many make the assumption those are your only rights, even WITH the 9th amendment in place.

Courts have repeatedly held that there is a de facto right to some level of privacy, regardless of its lack of constitutional enumeration, in part because it's highly implied by several of the amendments, especially the 4th.