This idea seems to encapsulate the belief that everything in the world is perfect. Laws are never arbitrary, enforcement is perfectly consistent, and knowledge is uniform. In the reality we actually live in, the sentiment ought to be "if the Nepalese don't want people filming anything, they should tell them that at the summit, or else confiscate their equipment, or levy a fee prior to entry." If they're not going to be upfront about it, that ought to be considered their own fault.

If they're so independent, then surely they can withstand the criticism of outsiders? If it offends them so much, they can just ignore it.

Unless you consider freedom of movement a right.

Except that the requirement was not clear before the fact. Capricious enforcement is in some ways worse than heavy handed but consistent enforcement.

Hence, "free press" and not just "free speech".

Nobody has your best interest at heart, except you. Anyone who claims to believe in the benevolence of abstract others has no idea what libertarianism is about.

It's not being stingy, it's changing the terms after the fact. If they don't want video recorded and transmitted, then they should charge a broadcaster's fee to anyone who brings a device capable of recording and transmitting video. We could go on and on with this "but the law said! the law must be followed!" bullshit all day long, but at the end of the day the law is never 100% clear and no one knows the law 100%, even in his own country, nonetheless a foreign one. Upfront enforcement should be the norm wherever possible, as it leaves nothing to doubt.

The funny thing about hosting someone with a "big bag of money hanging between [his] legs" is that you get to negotiate how much of that money the person will give to you in exchange for what you can offer to him. Someone running the gateway to the most well known mountain in the world should probably have some idea of how to negotiate with foreigners who want to climb it. No one has ever been "exploited" except because of his own ignorance or gullibility.

Indeed, there are natural rights (life, liberty, and property), and the rest is all privileges and entitlements, none of which is a "human right".

While you are correct that, in practice, the President is largely a powerless figurehead, the President actually does possess a number of useful powers. The problem is that most Presidents nowadays do not use them. The President has the veto power to reign in legislative excesses. The President has the power to commute and pardon prisoners to reign in judicial excesses. And the President has the ability to appoint the officers of government and terminate the employees of executive agencies. Although the extent of the President's independent warmaking powers is open to considerable debate, the President is indisputably the commander-in-chief and so has the power to set military priorities in peacetime and strategies in wartime. Of course, taking a bold position and exercising any of these powers judiciously would open the President up to personal responsibility, which means he couldn't shift blame to other people as much.

Who the hell thinks making 5% over inflation every year for 20 years is "very conservative"? That is quite a successful investment plan! Also, it only takes one of those heirs being profligate to destroy all of your "math". Moreover, real wealth cannot "multiply forever, faster and faster" unless economic activity as a whole does likewise. In other words, for every fat cat sitting in his mansion, somebody (most likely, many somebodies) had to be doing something useful with that money.

Yeah, I'm not gonna lie, my argument is crap. Rather, this is what I should have said:

1. The postal monopoly legally prohibits private carriers like FedEx and UPS from providing a service comparable to first-class mail delivery.

2. The price of first-class postage is regulated by the Postal Regulatory Commission, to which the USPS is beholden per its charter as established by Congress in the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 and amended by Congress in the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006. Hence $0.46 does not necessarily reflect the actual cost of delivery.

The quality of the research the VA does, while it might be quite beneficial to the field as a whole, is irrelevant to patient outcomes. You could make a case that research should be government-led while treatment should not be, but that was not the point originally at discussion.

While that's to the credit of the VA system, it hardly disproves that its outcomes are wildly inconsistent. Furthermore, it fails to address the quality of care that is provided (e.g., how many people got bacterial infections while their cancer was remediated?).

That is irrelevant to the Department of Veterans Affairs, which does not provide medical care in proximity (in space or time) to the battlefield. Also, I think you should look closer at what you are trying to say, because it implies that anything less than a grievous wound can be ignored, which is an attitude that is endemic to active-duty health care and leads to poor lifelong health outcomes for ex-soldiers.

The problem with your thesis is that it looks at correlation and infers causation. This is the fallacy that has driven "education reform" for decades and continues to drive educational outcomes downward. It is the same fallacy that created the previous housing bubble. Home ownership does not give a person responsibility; it used to take responsibility in order to own home. Likewise, education doesn't cause any of the things you say it does. Unfortunately, the causal relationships are in many cases very difficult if not impossible to identify, and even when they can be identified they typically cannot be controlled.

How do you get a kid who doesn't want to learn anything to pay attention? How do you get parents who don't value education to change their opinion? How do you get a school full of kids who believe their best chance of amounting to something is to form gangs, deal drugs, and kill each other to recognize that alternatives exist? These are difficult questions that are highly unlikely to be answered by twiddling with funding levels, tweaking curricular milestones, or administering standardized tests. Yet those are precisely the sorts of things that "education reform" has been, and will likely continue to be, about.

Never mind the grossly bloated administrative staffs, the extremely high liability insurance costs, the ridiculous inconsistency of teacher quality, the almost completely worthless and disgustingly expensive teacher certification programs, or any of the many other forms of structural rot that have taken hold. I've often thought that there is no such thing as a conspiracy in the US, because it's so hard to get two Americans to agree to anything that any "conspiracy" would have to be so decentralized that it would be unrecognizable as such. Nevertheless, if you set out to create a system for preserving the status quo while appearing sincerely intent on doing otherwise, you'd be hard pressed to do better than what we have.

There are two factors you are ignoring in proclaiming the greatness of government-run health facilities:

1. Quality. The military healthcare system is notorious for its terrible (or, at the very least, wildly inconsistent) quality of service and outcomes.

2. Confounding variables. There are examples of facilities (e.g. in India) which are not state-run yet achieve decent outcomes at much more reasonable prices.

The price to the consumer is not the same as the total cost. It likely costs the USPS roughly the same amount to deliver a package as it does UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. That you pay a lot less than that is not a marker of efficiency; on the contrary, it is a marker of the distortions in price as a consequence of Congress meddling with the USPS, which is supposedly a "private" company. Moreover, the USPS should be charging the other carriers for that last-mile delivery; if they're not charging what it costs to them to do it, then that is likely once again the fault of Congress.

The entire point of MariaDB is that it is a fork of MySQL which retains compatibility. It is, for the most part, a drop-in replacement.

25 mpg = 4 gal/100 mi
50 mpg = 2 gal/100 mi
75 mpg = 1.33 gal/100 mi

Look at gal/100 mi as a function of mpg. The difference between 50 and 25 is 25 and the difference between 2 and 4 is -2, so the slope of the tangent line is -2/25 = -0.08. The difference between 75 and 50 is 25 and the difference between 1.33 and 2 is -0.66, so the slope of the tangent line is -0.66/25 = -0.026. So the "linear" function has different slopes between different points, which is impossible, hence it is not linear at all. In fact, the curve is hyperbolic, which you might recognize from the fact that you are reciprocating one quantity to obtain the other.

I guess the change in alcohol consumption patterns during Prohibition was just a coincidence then?

In WPA-Personal (PSK) mode, the password is a shared secret, meaning that it is never passed over the air. Instead, authenticity is established by successful decryption: if I can use the password to decrypt a message I received from you, then I know that you knew the password when you encrypted it.

Technically, the password itself is not used as the key directly. It is repeatedly hashed with the SSID as a salt value to determine the pairwise master key (PMK) which is the actual encryption/decryption key. Since that key is a password equivalent (knowing it is as good as knowing the password), it is only used for the handshake process, which establishes two other keys, the PTK (pairwise transient key, used for unicast traffic) and the GTK (groupwise transient key, used for broadcast traffic), and those keys have no relation to the password.

The letters CDMA don't exist in your universe, do they?