Policing by other users is an invention that was brought to /. by the leftist idiot who calls himself "Cowboy Neal". I know this because he was kind enough to brag about that on Slashdot. The net result is that I no longer visit, except very occasionally, and always with ad block on, so that they don't get to profit from my visit. Slashdot is a cesspool of boring leftists, hardly anything here worth attention. Good riddance!

The country is very good, that's why everybody wants to come here. I was born outside of the USA and I immigrated to the USA because USA is much better than my country of origin. Of course, USA has its share of problems and will always have its fair share of problems. However, from my personal experience, USA are the greatest country on the Earth.

Funny leftist conspiracy theories, typical for Slashdot. Mueller didn't find anything actionable. This one is particularly funny. What does Federalist Society have to do with Tesla? Does Federalist Society own Tesla? The rot goes really deep, I agree. Our president is a senile old oligarch who has been in public service for half a century and has millions of dollars. How did he get rich as a public servant? Yet, that fairly obvious and well documented corruption doesn't bother people nearly as much as Trump's loudmouth behavior. I believe that leftard's are more bothered by Trump's cutting taxes and regulation then by corruption.

Slashdot is a leftist cesspool with rampant censorship. The main mechanism for the censorship on Slashdot is so called "karma", invented by an idiot who calls himself "Cowboy Neal". My understanding is that he's no longer with Slashdot, but he's still an idiot with some following. His "karma" system is still in place, which makes /. not worth reading any more. I only pop in once every month or two, just to see whether there is anything interesting. And, of course, I am using ad blocker.

Ah, so open border and millions of illegals is somehow not the problem? It is all a contrivance by Gregg Abott? Somehow, I am not convinced. The fact is that she has failed miserably. I am impressed by the speed of Kamala trolls appearing on /. It really tells me everything that I need to know about /.

"Your betters" do not decide your income. The market does. That is the good thing about the market capitalism. If someone is willing to pay X for your work, then that's what you're work. Also, my managers are not "my betters". That is such a medieval term! My managers are people who are specialized in managing people and resources. I specialized in managing databases. The fact that my boss can tell me what to do does not mean that he's better than me. Also, to paraphrase Tommy DeVito from Goodfellas (played by Joe Pesci) better how?

Slashdot is about the same as CNN. Biased and left oriented. I am using an ad blocker to avoid generating any profit for Slashdot. Cowboy Neal is an imbecile who has introduced "karma" to censor the ideological opponents. He will be forever remembered as an imbecile. Now, that a former president is convicted in a kangaroo court, all masks are off. We have to get rid of the commies everywhere: in the ivy league, in courts and in the media. The utter idiocy of the underlying article about "saving $250B by using wind and solar" is not even worth commenting. It is just one of the "environmental" articles trying to eliminate gas and oil because "we will all die in 12 years" (AOC). Only a steaming pile of dogs*t like Slashdot would even publish such crap.

Only if you don't have to calculate the past. Since we weren't around 2000 years ago and since the backup technology was much more primitive then, we don't really have the numbers for 2000 years ago. That means that we have to calculate or, "predict" if you wish, the numbers. I believe that 2000 years ago, during the reign of Pontius Pilate and his friend Biggus, we only had an early version of NetBackup and LTO 1 tape which cannot be read any more. GPS records from those days are also not very reliable. So we don't have the records and we do need to "predict the past", as you've succinctly put it.

Spot on! The purpose of those articles is to scare the population into giving more power to the government, who will "rescue us". We allegedly need to be rescued from our earnings and freedom and I am sure that the government will oblige, if the population is scared enough. In my opinion, big government is much scarier than the climate change.

That is because Slashdot has become a leftist cesspool. Idiot "Cowboy Neal" and his moronic "karma" ensure that nobody can express a PI opinion. I rarely ready Slashdot these days. I switched to Register and Ars Technica. The vast majority of interesting articles on Slashdot comes from those two sites.

I doubt that this is the only choice. Rich people in the west have created the technology that is used by the whole world, including the leftist yahoos. First of all, we cannot "address inequality". People are not equal, even if we veer to the "Harrison Bergeron" territory. I cannot jump or dunk like Lebron. I am not a physicist like Ed Witten or Richard Feynman. l have my unique combination of strengths and weaknesses, which makes me a valuable employee. Having everybody "equal" is actually impossible. And if people are different, their success in life will be different. In other words, you will always end up with "the richest man in the world" and he will always be much, much richer than the average. That "addressing inequality" is a socialist wet dream. Socialists have been around for a while, their methods have been tried, they don't work.

We can improve internal combustion engine until it pollutes less and behaves better with respect to the environment. Fortunately, there is no climate emergency. We have enough time. Within the next 50 years, we will have Thorium reactors and, possibly, nuclear fusion. There is no need for desperate "solutions", like socialism. Capitalism serves us well. It always has.

You don't want to maintain your standard of living? How many people live off Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Larry Ellison? How many salaries do those guys pay every month? Funny thing is that the standard of living of the working-class people is heavily dependent on the standard of living of the entrepreneurial class. Of course, talking about "classes" is a Marxist concept and Marx was just an author of bad fiction. His economic ideas were debunked while he was still alive because the labor theory of value was proven to be false by Frederic Bastiat and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk in the first half of the 19th century. These days we live through the revival of Marxism, embodied into the "oppressor/oppressed dynamic". Words like "oppressor" and "oppressed" have replaced the notions of "working class" and "bourgeoisie", but the philosophy is the same. A word of caution for the leftist younglings: Marx has never brought anything but misery. All attempts to bring forth Marx's utopia have failed miserably, causing widespread poverty, murders of millions and totalitarian regimes. The neo-Marxist ideas in circulation are as idiotic as the original Marxist ideas based on Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto. All the "oppresseds" are in fact living in the wealthiest and the most prosperous time ever, and we have capitalism and profits to thank for that. Capitalism is simply an economic system based on the property rights. All suggestions of "abolishing capitalism" are simply suggestions to restrict the right to own property and the economic freedom. Our teenage imbeciles want to bring about a totalitarian regime. Fortunately, it looks like they'll fail miserably.

And without profits you wouldn't have a job. Most of the EU countries are in recession. They need cheap energy to sustain their industries and economies. There will be a heck to pay, should their economy fail, as in the Weimar Republic.

Leftists, especially the younglings, speak derogatory of profits as the root of all evil, but profits are what gave us cell phones, computers, cars and airplanes. Even worse, we wouldn't have the wonderful medicine we have now, so life expectancy would be around 50, as it was in the early 1900s.

I am looking forward to the new "girl boss" movies that I will not watch. As long as Kathleen Kennedy remains the head of Lucasfilm, I will not watch any SW movies. May the movies flop heroically!

How about taxes not being used to right some imaginary wrongs but used to finance the government, which is the primary purpose of taxes? Yes, if you have a lot of money, you don't have to spend it. The government can wait until you do. And no, poor people do not suffer more with the consumption based tax. You are paying for what you spend. If you want to buy a private plane and fly around in an environmentally friendly way like Ms. Swift, or you buy bread and milk, you pay based on consumption. The consumption based scheme would not require as much bureaucracy as the income based scheme in which IRS agents are snooping through your finances, trying to catch you hiding income. Personal liberties are still important, are they not? Also, the price of bureaucracy would make the consumption based scheme more efficient than the current tax code. Taxes are not the method for achieving the "perfect society", whatever that might be, taxes are here to finance the government. This philosophy of using the power of the state to change society for better is called "progressivism" and its most notable advocate was Woodrow Wilson, one of the worst US presidents ever. Government is always less efficient and more expensive than market based solutions. That is why our education system and health system suck. And that simple fact about the inefficiency of the government is also the reason why progressivism cannot work. In order to ensure that the government is powerful enough to change the society for the better, we must make the change for the worse and give the government authoritarian powers. Call me crazy, but I don't believe in the government as force for good. Having grown up in a socialist country, government is something that I am deeply suspicious toward and something that I think that needs to be drastically reduced in both size and authority