What I'd prefer seeing instead of a Sales Tax (consumption based) is a flat tax of ten percent with no deductions/allowances (everyone pays the same amount)
Ten percent on what? Income or profit?
If you say "profit", what do I get to deduct from my income to call "profit"? Wages? Rent? Equipment? Raw materials? Transportation costs? Marketing and advertising? Employee training? Sales retreats? Investment expenses?
If it is income, I buy 100 shares at $10, and sell that 100 shares for $11, when I sell the shares I have an income of $1100, but a profit of $100 (actually less once you figure in brokerage commission). Are you going to let me deduct the cost of the shares I bought and the brokerage commission? Or do I have to pay $110 in taxes on that trade?
If he wanted us to use sharpened sticks and clay tablets then why did he give me an appendage to write my name in the snow with?
Climate change -- no more snow. See -- this is what climate change brings. Touchscreen laptops. Now you know who to blame.
None of those things will help you. To the NSA, the content of your email may be less important than with whom you are communicating. Yes, the care about the content of some emails, but their dragnet appears to be for network analysis -- sender, recipients, date, time, etc. The NSA almost certainly catalogs every DNS lookup you do. This is the stuff that is erroneously being referred to as metadata.
One possibly surprising way to keep your communications private is to read/post your communications to a very public forum. That way the intended recipient is difficult to determine. Keep the communication slightly covert -- a little steganography goes a long way if you can fly under the radar. Just don't trust others with your privacy.
Our rights are inalienable -- but only if we use them.
I used to work doing IT for the ILEC and the more I worked with their systems the more surprised that I was able to pick up the phone and get a dial-tone. A friend of mine worked on the systems that managed the in-the-ground cables, he's the one that said the previous sentence. I worked mostly on the billing and ordering systems. They were not the most robust systems.
how far into bullshit do you have to go in the results before you find a meaning that fits this?
If you didn't see it immediately upon following the link, then I guess you will find the bullshit deeper than most.
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"