Your drivers license has your Date of Birth, your address and probably a few more identifiers on it. Plus it is only available to people who pass a driving test. So it 1 gives up more privacy than you should give up, and it is not universally available. Those that don't have one will have to provide significantly more uniquely identifying information

Unless your response was sarcasm?

Trump has a problem with the truth. He keeps saying the Iranians agreed to things that they didn't and is angry when they don't follow what he imagines they said.

But the bigger problem is Iran isn't negotiating with Trump. They are negotiating with the USA. The USA went back on the last deal the Iran made over nuclear fuel enrichment. The USA attacked and assassinated the Iranian leadership while the Iranians thought the USA was negotiating with them. No matter what the Iranians agree to there is nothing stopping the USA from attacking or changing the deal. The USA signed a treaty to protect Ukraine from any aggression when Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons, the USA has torn up or threatened to rescind trade agreements with their closest friends. There is no arbitrator or court that the USA needs to answer to. Which means there is no deal that Trump can sign that is worth the paper it is written on.

If you and I want to enter any kind of contract we have to uniquely know who each other are. If you don't have a single, national ID, I then have to know your name, date of birth, address, phone number, previous addresses, mother's maiden name etc so that I can uniquely identify you. And then we just assume companies need to know our slashdot id, sex, eye color, height, sexual orientation, weight...

At this point I think as an organization, losing might actually be better for the Dems. Losing increases the donations and number of volunteers they get. Winning means governing and having to fulfill conflicting promises. The Republicans, batshit crazy as they are, want to win.

Bare with me this takes a bit of logic
The purpose of the economy is to produce things for humans to consume.
The economy has 2 inputs, Capital and Labour, and two outputs more capital and consumption.
We produce more than we ever have in history.
*Billionaires and Trillionaires do not consume much more food than the rest of us. They consume more luxury items than regular people but not 1000x more. Most of the earnings of the very rich go to producing more capital.

*The over 55 make up 27% of the Canadian population. If they are working, they have the highest incomes of any workers. They have pensions and investment income. They enjoy living in the most desirable parts of our cities. They enjoy 60% of the healthcare. The over priced housing represents trillions in consumption transfer from younger workers to them. My guess is that the oldest 27% of Canadians are being subsidized, if you include the over priced housing, by 30% of Canadian GDP. This is on top of their earnings and pensions.

The first liars are the over 55, crying poor and voting for more benefits to themselves. Voting to further restrict new housing to push up the value of their homes.
The second liars are the wanna be boomers, those that are hoping the pyramid scheme of our economy will keep going just one more generation. They own homes with huge mortgages. They are counting the days till they retire.

The moron - this is the person blaming the billionaires for their plight. For their lack of opportunity. You have to feel sorry for the moron. They are desperate for an easy solution and the two liars are happy to let the moron blame the billionaire for their plight.

Every contract you enter into requires both parties to uniquely identify each other. Without a unique government ID number the parties will have to know names, addresses, phone numbers, date of birth, email address and probably your mother's maiden name. Giving all that is far more of an invasion of privacy than giving someone a 9 digit number. Yes, maybe fewer of those identifiers will work for a given person but for some people you will need the entire set of personal information.

In Canada we have pretty much stopped policing shoplifting and causing a disturbance in private places. My youngest daughter doesn't feel safe on some bus routes or is some shopping areas. If society as a whole won't do this type of policing and keeping drunks, shoplifters or those who are high out of shopping malls and stores the store owners or mafia will have to. This isn't about a police state, this is about others filling the void the state has abandoned. The government is the one who provides services. The number one service of a society is the enforcement of commercial contracts. I know that last sentence will upset people but all societies are built on people coming together to shop and to trade services. Protecting that is more important than preventing murder, fire protection and all the social services. If the government abandons that people will very quickly find another group to do it.

Rona (think the Canadian equivalent of Lowe's and Homedepot) has been doing this for 20+ years. They hire either students or retired people. They hire way more than they need and let everyone choose the shifts they want. Kids get mentored and retired people have something to do. Plus you actually get staff at the stores that can explain things.

Rona was purchased by Lowe's a few years ago, rebranded Lowe's and is now being rerebranded Rona.

Remember the kid who was arrested for making a private bomb joke? It was obviously a joke and it got escalated to the point of fighter jets being scrambled. https://www.bbc.com/news/world...

We see this time and time again where people in authority face no consequences of escalating a threat when common sense would at least warrant a bit more investigation. The police officers in the case above should be reprimanded and a note be made about their lack of judgement. Either that or they need to show the person sending them out for this arrest had claimed the information they were given was correct with a high degree of confidence. Blindly passing on incorrect or information that has a reasonable chance to be incorrect without also forwarding the confidence level of that information is incompetent and needs to have a consequence.

Samsung is making great profits right now but the higher prices are encouraging competition and customers to look for substitutes or to make do with less. Samsung sees the current high price as damaging to future profits, hence the reason they are paying massive bonuses to keep their factories going 24/7.

If I have already built my infrastructure, have paying customers and a profitable business model and the government wants me to change how I do business they have to pay me enough to make it worth my while. Setting up rules after I have invested is not just morally wrong but extremely damaging to business confidence in a country. Companies, if they are being regulated into doing something will try and avoid it, they might even just drop the critical infrastructure all together. Plus the government will f#$k it up. And even if they don't f#$k it up writing the rules they will fail to enforce the rules so the companies that try to be compliant will end up being less competitive.

So if the government wants companies to build more robust "stuff", the government (society as a whole) had better pay.

SPCX carries 196 million shares sold short, representing 31% of the float. Anyone other than Musk or large pre IPO investors can sell at any time. Musk and the pre IPO investors can start selling a different times in August, September and October. 2 days after the Q2 earnings report (180 days after the IPO) there will be no restrictions for anyone.

So basically you have no idea what you were talking about

If you know SpaceX isn't worth 2T you can always short their shares.

Most rich people pay a stupid amount for cellular and home internet. There are probably 500M people who will pay over $100/month, another 500M who pay at least $50 and another 5B who pay $15 or more. So 150B/month = 1.8T per year. Assuming Starlink only gains 20% of the world market and their capital is obsolete in 5 years. They need to spend less than 1.8T every 5 years to be profitable. Space is expensive but not that expensive. I've seen some estimates as low as 10B. That's a rounding error compared to the revenue. Maybe you hate Musk and Bezo but you have to admit, in a reasonably fair market they are providing a valuable service to people.

Is to raise money to create new capital. High stock prices enable companies to buy machinery, invest in R&D. Stock options are used to attract better talent without having to spend money early on. Dividends on the stock are the motivation for people to buy stocks. Speculative profits are really a distant fourth function of the stock market.

I always hated having to buy 4 different standards each referencing the next about some requirement for my key pad that I must have, only to find buried in the 4 document that my correction button had to be yellow. I generally avoided any standard that required payment to implement, even if the standard claimed to be open (looking at you Connected Standards Alliance).

The more general problem for society is allowing existing groups to govern who can join or practice in their field. Hair stylists should not be able to restrict who is able to cut hair. Doctors should not be policing themselves. A Law society, run by lawyers, definitely shouldn't be the ones you have to complain to about a problem lawyer. Here is a good libertarian take on it: https://reason.com/2022/03/21/...