How do they identify a robot? Flash up a naked circuit board for the captcha and see if there's a complaint about pr0n on the bank login!

All centralized power will work to expand its reach. Sometimes nakedly as in Germany or the Soviet Union (neither place having developed a generations-long tradition of self-rule that makes such things taboo). Sometimes subtly, through agencies' expanded remits or assertions of authority to fill a vacuum. But nearly always in the name of some common good. Populism is a dirty word among some folks, you equate it with reactionary politics, but what word would you use to describe exercising "the people's power" on their behalf?

Republicans used to be protectionists until the middle of 20th century. Milton Friedman convinced a lot of people there were no downsides to outsourcing so long as the quarterly numbers were good. Dude even had the chutzpah to say it's okay to let the defense industry wither away because "steel can be stockpiled."

He was certainly influential. But now that I'm older and wiser, he's the poster child for why economists should be treated with all the respect that practioners of voodoo are due.

And the defined benefits get paid for with...

Well, in the automotive industry, which never fully off-shored, there are plenty of domestic suppliers in places like Alabama and Tennessee, where the factories have always been.

There were plenty of domestic electronics suppliers back in the 70s and 80s when Macs and IBM PCs and peripherals were mostly assembled domestically too. The final assembly went chasing slave labor overseas and surprise surprise the supply chain here withered away (or off-shored, too).

In aerospace where off-shoring is flat-out illegal in most cases (ITAR), the domestic supply network for both mechanical and electronics is quite robust.

Oh and I forgot to mention, places like Brazil have domestic production quotas for electronics too. Maybe they were helped along by the fact that until recently we had no such trade barriers in place. Or as a certain favorite politician opined, they were taking advantage of our trade policies to benefit their workforce.

Totally unique to the business schools. Absolutely none of that behavior among English majors or engineering undergrads. Anywhere. Ever. Born 40, all of them.

One of several that have developed in our system.

Greed is human nature. Profit-driven business decisions at their best harness this aspect of human nature to productive means, such as as making and selling widgets for the glory of your wallet; as opposed to destructive means such as warmaking for the glory of the state.

Profit as a destructive force in society is very much in the eye of the beholder. One man's ruthless cost-cutting to make the shareholders happy is another man seeing good returns in his retirement fund or his kids' college fund. To take one example.

Yeah. I have this great idea for predicting the future. It just needs some startup funding to get off the ground...

but don't a "boxing match" need *two* opponents?

Legally, isn't just livestreaming a workout with *very* specialized exercise equipment?

Speculative overinvestment is the only mechanism by which good ideas can actually get discovered and bad ideas can be identified. Everything else is armchair philosophy limited by the imagination of the philosopher.

Remember reading a witicism from a while back...went something like:

Instead of fighting the classification of strong encryption as a munition, y'all should have gone all in on it...and then whipped out the 2nd amendment for why you should be allowed to have unrestricted access to it.

I'm not a gamer, so I'm looking this from the outside. And what I see is both a very understandable ick factor of seeing Amazon yank 1984 from Kindles *and* the ick factor of legislation making certain kinds of software illegal. Remember how we all used to go to war over that one? OpenSSH, PGP, GPG and ITAR and all that?

I'd settle for beefed up truth-in-advertising laws regarding the distinction between purchases and leases, but I can't get on board with flat-out trying to legislate product features into existence.

Linear algebra is uncannily useful. As such, it has more ways of being monetized than there are grains of sand on the beach.

So it's okay if there's a mob to give you cover?

Good God. If your kind of thinking is the proferred alternative, is it any wonder people vote for guys like Trump?

Our family doctor was one of those late 90s/early 2000s technophiles. Dude was walking around with an iPaq https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and made a show of dispensing prescription slips with the flick of a stylus.