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Why not leave anything that could start a major diplomatic incident (at best) to the hands of amateurs!

Hey, we tried leaving the North Korea issue to Darth Albright and we got from that a long-range-missile-armed North Korea with a nuclear program and artificial grapefruits.

Get Bezos to fund the drones and start delivering diaper wipes and we might actually do some good for these people.

we should instead think in terms of how can we verify what they're worth?

Agreed. I wrote this five years ago and mostly still agree with it:

Whenever I've been interviewed for a newspaper, words and facts have been twisted and/or just gotten wrong. Whenever I read a popular press article in an area where I have in-depth knowledge, it's wrong, at least in the details.

So, I just assume that's true all the time and go to specialists for real news reporting. I haven't checked, but I'd assume a place like Jane's would have a good article on this GPS thing.

How about this business model: be a journalist who's a bona-fide expert on GPS. Write completely accurate, insightful, and helpful news articles on GPS happenings. Charge alot for them.

The last part is the trick of course. But how many GPS journalists does the world need? No more than a handful. With the Internet it should be possible to greatly reduce the number of generalist journalists and start making 'newspapers' much better with experts. There's probably too much inertia at established papers but a disruptive model seems possible.

that a large enough population of people who vote will actually say who they vote for given the chance and that result reflects reality.

Last year I kept track of the Facebook Likes over time for our State gubernatorial primary candidates, and used both the final Like-count and the momentum to make a prediction:

http://www.billmcgonigle.com/can-facebook-predict-the-nh-primary/

The actual vote was very close to prediction, especially considering the 'intelligencia' was predicting a very close race with opposite winners.

we must do everything we can to keep it static

Funny how that's pretty much the definition of "Conservative", eh?

and they aren't the religious nuts, they're the eco-nuts.

Those are just the useful idiots. Greenpeace, for example, who incidentally have another reason to hate nuclear power over this thing in Chad (oh, wait, no, that's the opposite).

they've built their home on it and it must be preserved

Ah, yes, now we're getting there. Northern Europe represents vast property wealth in an area that's only viable with the Gulf Stream keeping it warm. There's a fear that when the Greenland ice shelves melt again (it's eventually inevitable) the thermohaline circulation will change and deflect the Gulf Stream away from Northern Europe. In which case its environment would be like most of the other land at that latitude.

It's a small chance, but when you own a large chunk of Europe and have significant control over most of the western governments, you have no problem spending other people's money to protect your own.

The same goes for coastal areas in the US. Just like we have the National Flood Insurance Program so poor people in the US can subsidize the vacation homes of the wealthy, so too must those same people have their wealth seized on a gamble that it'll stop beach erosion. Heck, when I was a kid, the beaches all had shacks and bungalows on them (because there was a good chance of them getting destroyed by a hurricane) and now those are all gone and replaced with multi-million dollar mansions, because they can now be insured by the Feds.

Ron is not using the State to acquire RonPaul.com

Yeah, he is. He's making the case for an 'Intellectual Property' right to the name. Such ideas are only State-derived.

What's most sad is that the free market solution is so obvious.

Madoff had a serious impact on rich peoples' lives.

Here's my flowchart on how this works.

is this site parading around purporting to be the official Ron Paul domain? No? Then what exactly are your allegations?

That's exactly the crux of the matter - Ron Paul is acting, and I believe he is confused into thinking that he is justified in pursing a trademark claim because last time he pursued a claim over his name he was justified. Ah, hell, I'll just copy the article here (click the link if Slashdot's inability to handle basic Unicode is too uncomfortable):

Ron Paul is Confused on RonPaul.com
Posted by bill_mcgonigle on 2013/02/12

Ron Paul is seeking to own the RonPaul.com domain name, which has been run by some of his supporters since 2007. Those supporters have proposed a package of the domain name and their mailing list [aside: is that in keeping with their privacy policy?] for $250,000 and in response Ron Paul has filed a complaint with the WIPO which handles domain name disputes.

The trouble with this situation is that the Ron Paul supporters are focusing on WIPOâ(TM)s status as a UN organization, because Ron Paul has been vocally opposed to the UN consistently, and they see him as now being hypocritical on the matter. This is the wrong focus for two reasons: first because WIPO has a monopoly on resolution, but more importantly because the hypocrisy is about the core libertarian value of private property, not the UN.

During the primary campaign, individuals opposed to Ron Paulâ(TM)s nomination uploaded a video to YouTube that was in quite poor taste and slapped Ron Paulâ(TM)s name on it. Ron Paul took the stance that this was fraud (it was) and used the Trademark Law as a means to counter the fraud. This is where Ron Paul became confused â" he associated use of his name with Trademark Law, which is now the basis of the WIPO claims.

The error in logic here is the assumption that any use of the Ron Paul name is justifiably actionable under Trademark Law because itâ(TM)s a case of fraud. This is not the case, clearly, for RonPaul.com. The only argument against RonPaul.com is that the name âoeRon Paulâ is the Intellectual (aka Imaginary) Property of Ron Paul.

So, hereâ(TM)s where it gets dicey â" Imaginary Property is a direct affront on the principle of private ownership of property (it restricts the arrangement of private property of the People to the benefit of the one), which is the foundation of modern Libertarian thought. Now, the Constitution of the United States authorized the use of Imaginary Property monopolies through the Copyrights and Patents process, but this has proven subject to rampant abuse to the degree that it does more harm than good. And it was clear in Ron Paulâ(TM)s farewell address that he had found the Constitution lacking in its ability to restrain the governmentâ(TM)s abuses, if not in its intent. The Constitution doesnâ(TM)t even authorize trademark protection â" that has to be inferred through the Commerce Clause and the minarchist view of governmentâ(TM)s role to prevent fraud.

What Ron Paul is effectively saying here, probably unconsciously, is that the RonPaul.com folks may not organize their articles (their property) in the way that they see fit (under the RonPaul.com label) when they have committed no acts of aggression towards Ron Paul (quite the opposite â" they contributed to his current status in society). Heâ(TM)s literally saying that the RonPaul.com domain belongs to him because he wants it, and the notion of Imaginary Property gives cover to this illusion (it must be remembered that government abuses exist because each individual holds on to that one function of government that they cannot let go of). This is an assault on the private property rights of the people at RonPaul.com (stop being anonymous, guys, it does not help your image), and, yes, he is using government force to back his aggression.

Itâ(TM)s a zer

Thank you. I've expanded on the thought a bit here.

Doesn't the U.K. have a "knife crime" problem. Hence the seemingly ridicules laws about carrying edged weapons?

Non-sequitor. We wiped out all our knife laws in NH a couple years ago. No sudden surge in knife crime. The two are not correlated.

Then again, we have a low crime rate overall, about on par with Switzerland (which has a massively high gun ownership rate). Still, we have a big incarceration problem - not as bad as the US overall, but worse than Mexico, China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Does that seem right to you?

He 'stole' from rich people. That's how it works in the 21st century.

Doing it retrospectively will, as the OP suggests, cost a fortune.

I figured it would cost $8/mo for an average ratepayer to bury all the lines in New Hampshire.

Strictly back of the envelope calculation, but the power company claims it would cost 10x that much.

Just to clarify:

2) Tell Mossad to stop assassinating their scientists, or face sanctions of their own.

Iran is also using this for cover on a few of their own problems. The guy who got hit with the motorcycle/magnetic bomb was a string theorist and a political dissident.

Of course the news focuses on Israel taking out their 'nuclear scientists'. Which they probably are, also. Which is troubling as Israeli intelligence doesn't even think that Iran is working on an actual nuclear bomb at this point.

Anyhow, if you want to steal wealth from the average family there's no surer way than printing lots of new currency, which dilutes the value of existing currency, and handing that new currency to your buddies on Wall Street (Goldman Sachs/etc) and politically connected corporate socialists.

And yet you'll get people here holding this^ up as an example of how capitalism has failed...

I think an explanation that's easier for the Slashdot crowd to understand is the idea of distributed decision making. Imagine the Internet model vs. the AOL model. We're 100% better off with millions of websites starting and thriving or failing on their own vs. the idea of what people will access online being decided inside a board room at Time Warner. For non-computer geeks I've described this as Organic vs. Industrial Economics.