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Warrant to search phone company records for triangulation data not so cut n' dry.

They are required to get a warrant to do something like attaching a GPS tracker to your car. I fail to see the difference between that and scraping nearly-as-good-as-GPS location information from a 3rd party which would bring the need for a warrant into question.

They closed the entire DMV for several years in order to prevent people from acquiring an ID?

No, they focused heavily on the offices that minorities could conveniently use, which was kinda revealing.

The freaking blog you pointed to is a lie,

Identify one falsehood in it. Go ahead.

there are a lot of other things going on into making those decisions, you can get an ID at the post office, from the DMV through the mail or online.

Yes, racists are practiced at finding excuses for their behavior, literacy tests and poll taxes were usually defended under those same terms. Including you know, misinforming the public about the situation.

But hey, if you want the state to mail out ID to everybody, go ahead and propose it.

You need an ID to buy booze, medicine and cigarettes, you're saying no black person buys booze, medicine or cigarettes?

Actually, I've found that sales clerks will rarely bother me about booze or cigarettes even if they are supposed to get ID, but I understand some people do have complaints about that process, medicine is somewhat different, but then, there are problems with pharmacists denying people's prescriptions. And don't even get my mother started on the way they hassled her about her diabetic testing strips refill, then tried to bill her after they FAILED to give her the number of strips she needed the first time when she asked for more. She gets quite irate at them.

If you close 31 DMV offices you do not "save only $100,000" ... argh, there is just so much wrong with this that it's not even worth pointing out. If it isn't obvious that this is partisan bullshit grasping at straws to make a point then you're dumber than you realize..

Sure man, you come right after an accusation that relied on false counter cries of racism and bigotry to ignore actual racism and bigotry, and you think it's other people who are full of partisan bullshit.

Sorry man, there's a reason it keeps being revealed.

And it gets worse as apparently it was Bentley's paramour behind it.

Crickets, eh? Interesting sound they make.

Poor foresight on administrations enacted rules that incumbents took advantage as first installers

Lol. It wasn't poor foresight. The incumbents bought and paid for the law. They knew what they were doing because they have million dollar budgets dedicated to thinking this shit through. While a certain political party has been whittling away at congress's budget and resources to think shit through for decades now because when reality is biased against you, the best thing to do is make sure everybody's eyes are glued shut.

I like my Internet free, but recent article in The Atlantic made me second-guess this.

Then you misunderstand the concept of Net Neutrality. It does not guarantee that there has to be a competitor to eBay, for example. What it does guarantee is that if you wanted to start a competitor to eBay, or you're a customer of a hypothetical new auction site, ISPs can't give preferential treatment to traffic from eBay because they had the resources to pay to be in the "fast lane".

To see the future, look at the wireless industry, where it already pretty much doesn't apply:

Net Neutrality is supposed to prevent shit like https://www.t-mobile.com/offer...>this, where an ISP gives preferential treatment to specific sites, or on the flipside, throttles sites that haven't coughed up their "protection money".

Most wireless providers these days also scale down (usually to 480p) and recompress any video you stream - significantly reducing the quality from what was provided by the server of the original site.

Then there's my personal pet peeve - tethering fees. Many wireless providers actually expect you to pay an additional monthly fee, to share the same high-speed data allotment *you're already fucking paying for*, with another device. This would be tantamount to the water company putting individual water meters on each point-of-use in your house, and charging a higher fee for potable uses, even though it's all exactly the same water.

I like my Internet free, but recent article in The Atlantic made me second-guess this.

Key idea is as follows:

A public darling during the Obama years, when net neutrality won out, the tech industry has effectively become Big Tech, an aggressor industry along the lines of pharmaceuticals, oil, or tobacco. It’s true that one set of giant internet companies, like Comcast and Verizon, can’t currently mess with what people read, watch, and explore online. But another faction of giant internet companies can and do exert that power and control. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and others manage access to most of the content created and delivered via broadband and wireless networks.

The issue with that point is that an open-internet allows those tech giants to work on an even playing field, thus open to the threat of competition and future innovation. Myspace was king of social media at one point in time, but Facebook de-throwned it. The next Facebook is waiting to happen. Same with Yahoo, which dominated the web search market until Google came along. The next Google is out there. AOL isn't thriving atop the internet for a reason, and that reason is having open internet policies allowing for innovation to thrive.

A public darling during the Obama years, when net neutrality won out, the tech industry has effectively become Big Tech, an aggressor industry along the lines of pharmaceuticals, oil, or tobacco. It’s true that one set of giant internet companies, like Comcast and Verizon, can’t currently mess with what people read, watch, and explore online. But another faction of giant internet companies can and do exert that power and control. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and others manage access to most of the content created and delivered via broadband and wireless networks.

Did U Know? that poverty was going down in Appalachia until they started buying into racist dogwhistles and voting for Republican governance? You can look it up.

To be honest I'm not a big D nor R fan, though I dislike them for different reasons. The Democrats favor social engineering and have decided that white people and men are both bad (citation below). As I'm both that isn't appealing to me. Their non-stop race baiting is off-putting. If they decided that they were willing to drop the race baiting and go back to trying to focus on the working poor - upper middle class then I'd be happy to vote for them. The Republicans are a mix of rich for the rich but they at least don't call me names for the crime of being born white and male. To my mind they are both run by mega donors, you just have a choice of Soros vs Koch brothers. I dislike both.

Citations:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/... https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

a woman you know beaten and raped

One in five women are raped so yes, most of us probably have.

Most rapists are close with the victims. The idea that there are "those people" looking for white women to rape is a common myth that lead to cocaine being taken out of coca-cola. And it's never been based on anything other than paranoia.

Before Net Neutrality was a government regulation, it was the unwritten law of the land. If you ran an ISP, you treated two video packets the same regardless if one came from Netflix and the other came from some tiny, obscure site.

Actually... net neutrality was the law of the land until the Brand X scotus ruling. Basically net neutrality is a requirement of being classified as a "telecommunications service" but the FCC (under republican control during the Bush era) wanted to reclassify ISPs as "information services" which doesn't require net neutrality. The big telcos fought tooth and nail to say the FCC could arbitrarily decide how to classify them at the time. And then when the Obama FCC flipped the classification back the same big telcos fought tooth and nail to say the FCC didn't have the authority to arbitrarily decide.

Idjit Pai is trying to end-run around all that and make the classification much more permanent. Fuck that verizon cock holster.

First, the new region is actually not the first "secret" region. Amazon has been running an air-gapped intelligence community region for years: https://www.theatlantic.com/te... , there's even a marketplace for it: https://aws.amazon.com/ru/blog...

The new initiative is just an extension of it.

You jest, but people thought the machine gun was going to make war too terrible to wage.

The New York Times, in 1897, called Maxim’s invention “terrible automatic engines of war,” and suggested their mere existence might convince world leaders to settle conflicts diplomatically.

It seems that the worst things are often the handy work of people trying to prove something.

I'd love to see the original real citation for this welll known 'fact'.

There are many. Finding the original would be a pointless endeavor though.

I wonder if it includes things like the military, a federal expense, defending the liberal coasts, and pouring federal money into the navy and Air Force bases that do so.

Yes, those have been factored into many charts, though some concentrate on the "welfare" aspect.

That's free money for California, where I live btw.

Nope. Quite expensive actually. Military spending isn't funded by a magic fairy. The days of sending forth conquering armies to gather tribute are long gone.

Blue States are actually on the hook, especially for the Right-wing war-mongering. And frankly, the GOP would gladly close every base in California, they HATE the state enough to spite the country. It has become their Sodom and Gomorroh, and it's barely 30 years since Reagan, who they never mention as being governor of California or an actor.

I also expect that eliminating the state deduction will force out of control liberal states to lower their taxes and stop flushing money down the toilet and useless social programs that only grow every year but don't help the people they're supposed to much less have an end goal.

Except you are assuming they are "out of control" and "flushing money down the toilet" on "useless social programs" that "don't help the people" which is bad enough, yet your method is even more deeply flawed since instead of offering a better alternative, you are just randomly attacking your opposition under a false pretense of noble motives.

Eliminating the mortgage deduction should force housing prices to come down, too. I'm ok with that, also.

Except it won't happen, since you aren't even addressing the reason for high housing prices. Here's a hint: The financiers don't want housing prices to come down, they LOVE the escalation.

The tax system has artificially altered major parts of our economy into a twisted mutated wreck. Time to restore,rose rather than fight over who gets to fuck over whom in a giant game of musical taxation chairs.

You're blaming taxation. The true causes are far more sinister and nefarious. You're being exploited and oppressed, but you don't know who has the whip.

PS, Newt Gingrich claimed he fixed that bit about paying people not to work, rural poor people do vote for Republicans, and yes, big companies like Wal-Mart and McDonalds do instruct their employees to get on food-stamps and other programs.

Also, the pill-pushers are big pharma, who the GOP loves. Just like Big Tobacco.

Mysteriously, however, funding schools, health programs, and improving people's lives by fixing their homes is forbidden as it is offensive. Except for the private religious schools indoctrinating the next generation of Wor$hipers at the Church of Christ Money-lender. That is a goal worth billions.

You Have no idea , What Communists , Have done..

That's why sensible laws are written not with fixed fines but with fines based on your income. That's how a speeding ticket can cost more than your car.

Don't want to tell them how much you make? No problem. They'll "estimate". And trust me, you do not want them to. I think the formula is roughly "estimate annual income = how much someone in such a position could possibly make in a lifetime times however pissed the judge is at you"

Our good friends in Russia are still doing lots of business with North Korea.

Donald, they're laughing at you, not with you.

https://www.theatlantic.com/in...

The truly scary thing? North Korea might bribe a few American light plane pilots to get a Skywriter and form the words níggers in the airspace over a major metropolitan area. The blacks will go apeshit and riot like they always do anytime anything public doesn't go their way, like they do when a black man gets shot because he tried to fight with the cops and grab their gun which would get any white man shot too. It would cause great destruction and pandemonium although the whites branded "racist" would say things like "and you are surprised how?"

Our good friends in Russia are still doing lots of business with North Korea.

Donald, they're laughing at you, not with you.

https://www.theatlantic.com/in...

It is a synergistic effect between smartphones and social media. This is nothing like reading books, using a telephone or watching tv. The numbers are scary...:

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

There's a dramatic difference in the amount of time children are allowed to spend unsupervised today compared to a generation ago. See The Overprotected Kid

It's great that they try to make more exciting playgrounds with less supervision, but it isn't the same as being allowed to spend hours with a friend in the park by the lake, without adults.

Depends on the country. People in Denmark are very financially secure - no fears of being trapped in poverty if they get enough sleep.

The USA is a democracy. If Americans wanted enough sleep they could vote to be more like Denmark.

But instead Americans vote to be the opposite of Denmark - for Trump and his fellow Republicans. And then they complain that they're not getting enough sleep.

Denmark has the least attractive immigration policy for refugees.

So you're saying that voting for Trump was because we wanted to be less like Denmark?

Or are you saying we *should* be more like Denmark, and have highly restricted immigration?

I don't understand your point - can you be more specific about how voting for Trump made you feel bad?

1. Facebook and Twitter are not private companies. They are traded publicly (ticker symbols FB and TWTR.) But whether they're public or private has nothing to do with whether they can be treated as a public utility. They don't own pipes or wires that run up to your house.

From context it's clear he means privately-owned company, and it's perfectly acceptable terminology in North America to call either Facebook or Twitter a private company even though they are traded publicly. The opposite, a public company would be one that is owned by the government, like the U.S. Postal Service and NASA, though I am not actually sure that either is exactly a company, but you should get the idea.

2. I call bullshit on your claim of "calls on conservative sides" to treat these companies as utilities. I haven't heard any.

Do you recognize the name Steve Bannon?

And besides, that would be a really stupid move on the part of conservatives, many of whom want to kill Net Neutrality.

As far as I can tell, most conservatives want to keep Net Neutrality, except for the trolls and the people who don't even know what it is, but oppose it because liberals want it.

Do you think they could turn Facebook and Twitter into utilities, while at the same time say that the companies who provide the networks they use are not utilities?

Most likely the actual Republican leadership doesn't want to do any such thing, because it would fly in the face of their aggressively anti-regulation posturing. However, they may want their base to want them to do it, so they can use the threat of regulation against Facebook and Twitter to induce "good behaviour".

If they aren't required to know (and obey) the law, why should anybody else be held to that standard?

The JEWlery is somewhat of an asset that can be resold in ten years. (Sorry, being slashdot I couldn't resist.)

Not a good investment either. Diamonds in particular have very poor resale value. They aren't particularly rare. https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

Yeah, anonymous coward above actually has it right (for a change): there were tremendous government incentives and government development programs and government demonstration projects that, over the course of decades, led to today's low-cost solar panels. This just may end up being the poster-child example of the one time that government actions were done right.

That's only partially true. Govt subsidies had some impact on solar adoption, but likely far less than you would believe.

https://www.theatlantic.com/te...

In reality, it's a combination of tech advancements, drop in polysilicon cost, and chinese mass production. Subsidies are basically good for starting a trend and that's about it. Beyond that, it's all supply and demand.

But I still don't know why it is a news here... If the population of the country is 4x times the U.S. population, why wouldn't it be a surprise if their sale become higher at some point? Or they (phone companies) are trying to encourage Americans to own 2+ smartphone each now, so that Americans can brag about being the largest or second largest again?

Of course we have a "cell-phone gap" and this time it is more than likely actually real.

Then again, just like our "fast-food" culture, I have no idea why they would be willingly following us down this rabbit hole given the potential consequences...

I say we cede the high ground to China and India on this front...

Or even read what the traitors themselves said they were rebelling about.

It's from a few years back, but I cite an article (grain of salt, etc)
https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...

So to the police. https://www.theatlantic.com/te...

Just so we're clear, the "crime" you're accusing Hillary Clinton of is having a private email server and playing fast-and-loose with the rules about what's non-government business (allowed on a private server) vs. government business (not allowed on a private server). This is bad and should not be encouraged. But making a big deal about Hillary Clinton doing it is absurd when everyone does it (including multiple people in the current administration) and getting investigated for it is unheard of. Oh, wait, Bush (the second one) did, and also got a slap on the wrist, just like Hillary Clinton. Clearly those rules are not interpreted strictly by anyone not trying to come up with an excuse for an investigation.

Only 80 year olds get their news from NBC/CBS/ABC/NPR.

Fox News has the oldest audience of all TV news outlets, cable or network. The median age of a Fox News viewer is dead five years.

https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...

http://www.adweek.com/tvnewser...

Yes. https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...

The parents at "bad" schools are much, much poorer than the parents at "good" schools.

Poorer parents are far more likely to both be working, and work longer hours. Thus they have less time to raise their children. They also have less resources when a child has trouble - for example, middle-class and up can afford tutors/tutoring services.

Finally, the local property taxes bring in more money around "good" schools because the houses are worth more. That gives these districts more money, leading to better-equipped schools.

...to send me your life savings?

Actually the hysteria is mounting.

Fixed that for you.

The Russian's hacked power plants storyline was bullshit.
CrowdStrike is bullshit.
The "17 intelligence agencies" line was bullshit.
The Russia hacked election systems is bullshit.

find this report by the Director of National Intelligence particularly interesting

Sure, lets look at this - while remembering the FBI wasn't allowed to examine the DNC servers so how exactly would they have "high confidence" in any thing - but this time noting the weasel words:

We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.

Zero evidence provided, only claims and accusations. Well guess what Chem Trailers, Sandy Hook Truthers and Birthers have? Claims and accusations.

Then there's the fact the entire "Russia wanted Trump to win so hacked the election" makes no sense whatsoever. The election was Hillary's to lose, right up until she picked Tim Kaine as her running mate and decided to skip campaigning in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan. So according to the storyline, Putin was crafty enough to dig up dirt on Hillary (which was all true) but dumb enough to collude with someone as dumb as Trump. Which means the CIA, NSA & FBI would know all about it. Which meant Hillary would too, who had already campaigned on shooting down Russian jets in Syria. So what's really going on?

The entire "Russian hacking" storyline is nothing but Swiftboating from Clinton supporters, as she was the candidate who engaged in corrupt collusion with Russian interests to sell a fifth of America's uranium.

And you can skip that Snopes link that handwaives away Hillary's culpability for a number of reasons:
1) Access is corruption
2) Avoiding the appearance of impropriety applies to politicians, not just judges
3) Her own campaign was warned internally that the deal was a political liability for her
4) Hillary flat-out broke her confirmation promises on keeping a wall between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation

At this point, Chem Trailing anti-vaxxer Birther Sandy Hook Truthers have more respectability than Russiagaters.

It's so sad to see smart people dissolve into "blame the foreigners", the oldest trick in the book.

Buddy, Trump's entire campaign was based on "blame the foreigners". Now all of a sudden you don't like that approach? Have you changed your mind because the Russians are white people? Because the same white nationalist sentiment that keeps Putin in power is what got Trump elected?

https://www.realclearpolitics....

https://www.vox.com/2017/8/12/...

https://www.theatlantic.com/po...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

Long-time Slashdot reader apraetor counters, "But how do you determine what is 'true'?"

Red flag! Post-truth nonsense! We have science and live in an objective reality.

But are other things the equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded movie theatre?

You mean completely legal speech?

Part of the treaties that formally attached Puerto Rico to the US requires a vote every 10 years as to whether or not they want to 1) stay how they are, 2) become a state, 3) seek independence.

The last vote was in June. Become a state got 97% of the vote.

However, anything but option 1 requires Congress to do something. And I really don't think the current Republican Congress is interested in adding some safe Democratic seats to Congress.

How certain are we that solar panels are the way to go in a hurricane-prone region?

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/as...

It seems to me that fragile, lightweight solar panel farms could be equally devastated by the next hurricane to come along, destroying a massive investment, possibly before they've even paid for themselves. I'd hope that alternatives such as wave and wind power are considered as well. I'm no expert on solar farm construction, obviously, but as a layman, it seem like those are more suited to surviving a severe hurricane simply due to inherent design and construction methods.

I think the advantage solar might have is if it's very widely distributed, such as on homes and office buildings, which can at least provide small islands of limited power generation and storage. A good many of those will likely be destroyed, of course, but at least some percentage are likely to remain working.

I'm sure this is meant half jokingly, but American football as a whole is in trouble. Schools are starting to shut down their programs due to lack of interest. Parents, worried about their kids' brain health, are pushing them to play other sports. In time, the talent dropoff will be dramatic enough to significantly affect big college and pro football.

This is a legitimate concern (for the NFL). Fewer children playing will dry up the talent pool in another decade when those children would be at the age for the NCAA and (eventually) NFL. Sure, plenty of children will play, but consider how few of them have the necessary talent to succeed in the NCAA, and how few of those have the talent for the NFL. I did the math once and it is a small fraction of one percent of high school football players actually make it to the NFL, and most of them suck at the sport anyway. At any given time there are only enough good players to make three or four teams in the NFL.

The NFL itself is also really unpopular, with Roger Goodell pissing off the NFL's fans at least once every season and getting booed any time he shows up on TV in front of a live audience (e.g. Super Bowl, NFL draft). I think the only reasons the NFL is still popular are: fantasy football is still a huge thing, even drawing people in that hate the sport (I know people who hate the game but still play fantasy); and some vestigial attachment to one's home team, essentially pride in one's city to include its sports teams.

The decline for the NFL has accelerated much faster than expected. The league's necessary adjustments for safety has made the game less interesting to watch and the recent anthem "controversies" are not helping. Attendance and viewership is down. The decline has already started and doesn't look like it will abate soon. Think that football is too big to fail? 80 years ago Boxing was the #1 sport in America. Look at the state of boxing today.

I keep hearing these arguments, but have not seen any evidence to back them up. Ratings fluctuate, and are on a general down trend, but nothing massive - it is not like the sport is unpopular, it is just not quite as popular as it was previously. It does seem, however, that ratings have followed the general trend of everything receiving lower ratings.

This makes sense, as sports in general (in the USA) seem to have declining ratings. Cord cutting? Younger generation caring less? Who knows? It is a complex issue and there is likely not one cause, e.g. "the NFL is killing itself with how it changes the game."

curb the enshrined right of freedom of speech of NFL players protesting.

This is bullshit. There is no such right. The 1st Amendment protects them from government prosecution — one can not be jailed for making a statement. It does not protect them — nor anyone else — from the disgust of their fellow citizens. Private employers may fire assholes — indeed, just the other day y'all were celebrating firings of the folks (accused of) taking parts in KKK marches...

Consistency much?

...is mostly syntax-equivalent with Oracle PL/SQL. The GCC toolchain targets ADA with GNAT. As such, it would obviously link against C.

ADA is quite old and is likely missing many of the features you've outlined. Some of them may be present in the popular descendant of ADA known as SPARK.

It is well-known that our software breaks far too much. Denying the problem does not solve it. ADA was designed to address this issue head-on, which is why Boeing's airplane control software is not written in C.

Facebook's discrimination against anyone that isn't progressive or liberal is very well documented. Unfortunately this is an issue as they have a monopoly on social media the likes of which the world has never seen. This gives them the ability to manipulate public discussion and discord that is the envy of many nation states. An example of Facebook abusing their monopoly is their attempts to redefine the truth using progressive political activists as fact checkers.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016...
http://dailycaller.com/2016/12...
http://www.theblaze.com/news/2...
http://www.breitbart.com/radio...

People are waking up and realizing that the facebook ministry of truth is more focused on propaganda than facts. It hasn't even been a year and their fact checking efforts are having only a very slight difference or even backfiring.

https://www.theatlantic.com/te...

However, Facebook will unquestionably learn to be more subtle in their political manipulations in the future. When you privatize the public square you also effectively privatize constitutional rights. Should facebook be broken up or regulated? Their position, power and propensity to abuse their power has created a threat to our democracy.

The first one is an opinion piece that asks questions.

Sure. And that asking betrays the author's desire for "hate speech" being banned.

nobody who really doesn't believe in AGW would be prosecuted.

Ah, yes, yes, sure. As Snopes said:

California Senate Bill (SB) 1161 sought to make dissemination of scientifically inaccurate or misleading information by businesses and organizations an offense covered by California's unfair competition law.

Small comfort, though — because what is and what is not "scientifically inaccurate" will be up to the prosecutors (and then juries).

I'm certainly not going to want you shut down by legal means.

Most generous of you. There is, however, a sizeable minority, which sees it differently — and these Constitution-undermining proposals reach as high as pages of New York Times. And the far-Left is particularly against it — openly and unabashedly advocating violence against holders of certain opinions. Just as the subject of this thread says...

Don't take my word for it — the "classical" Liberals are appalled by these alt-Left's trends as well, even if their argument against it boils down to the self-serving "it will backfire" warnings...

No, it's consistent with previous rulings regarding GPS trackers

USSC did conclude, that the use of GPS-trackers requires a warrant (see, this is how you cite things.)

But that — unanimous — decision explicitly said:

In United States v. Jones, we held that “the Government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search.’ ”. We stressed the importance of the fact that the Government had “physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information.”

No such occupying private property took place in the case in TFA, which fully invalidates your argument.

Are you honestly suggesting the entire Russian troll army concept is fabricated? There seems to be an awful lot of evidence, some posted before the election. This is separate from the question of whether the Trump campaign was involved in the Russian interference, but the claim that Russia did not seek to interfere in the 2016 presidential elections is absurd.

It is clear that the Trump administration is better than Obama

We even have a photo of Donald Trump pointing out his accomplishments.

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/as...

Does Canada not have H1Bs? Does Canada not have sanctuary cities? Does Canada not have a welcoming policy for refugees from the entire world? Why aren't people flocking to staff these industries? Someone explain, I don't get it. #welcomerefugees

Your misinformed, or lying.
Every system has constraints, but near universal coverage with low out of pocket costs is something we should strive for.

"Approximately 74% of the population is compelled to join a sickness fund. Another 14% are members who join voluntarily even though their income exceeds the statutory cutoff. Of the remaining portion, 10% is covered by private insurance and 2% by police officers insurance, student insurance and public assistance. One of every 10 Germans covered by sickness fund insurance also purchases private supplementary insurance to cover co-payments and other amenities."

It may not be single payer, but a single payment negotation is also something Americans should not only dream about, but should demand.

"Perhaps the biggest difference between our two approaches is the extent to which Germany has managed to rein in the cost of healthcare for consumers. Prices for procedures there are lower and more uniform because doctors’ associations negotiate their fees directly with all of the sickness funds in each state. That's part of the reason why an appendectomy costs $3,093 in Germany, but $13,000 in the U.S."

Adam Smith also mentioned inequality. So does that make him a Marxist as well?

I don't know if he specifically mentioned the word "inequality" at any time, but his opinion on the subject isn't one of endorsement:

https://www.theatlantic.com/bu...

Yet there remains a broad consensus, even among scholars of the period, that [Adam] Smith was concerned by poverty but not by economic inequality itself. According to this view, Smith hoped to ensure that all members of society could satisfy their basic needs, but he was untroubled by relative differences in income and wealth.

Another source explains it in more detail:

http://as.tufts.edu/politicals...

Essentially, Smith didn't like extreme poverty, but beyond that he didn't see anything inherently wrong with income inequality, and in fact saw it as a required property of a flourishing economy. Virtually all capitalists hold this view.

Karl Marx advocated government ownership of the means of production, take by force from the capitalists, without compensation.

I'm well aware of this.

Please follow the link in TFA to the textbook, and see if you can find even a single passage that advocates anything even remotely comparable.

TFA specifically calls out issues of inequality, and Karl Marx is pretty much the first economist (even if he was a bad economist) to ever make an issue out of income inequality, which is also why he came up with his socioeconomic class system and the concept of class warfare.

When you see people in the checkout buying their food with EBT and then get $20 cash back so they can buy alcohol with cash at the same register. Your tax dollars at work.

Yeah because poor people shouldn't be allowed alcohol amirite? Also they shouldn't have other luxuries like netflix or cable or going to cinemas. Only what they get over-the-air on a TV set they got at Goodwill. And no vacations either. In fact they should be pretty much excluded from our shared media and culture until they're up on their feet, saved for their kids college, and able to afford a comfortable middle-class existence.

Lesson: whatever subsidy is given, be it in the form of EBT or tax refunds or UBI or handouts of actual physical foods or a soup kitchen or emergency medical treatment, will inevitably be used to spare other money for luxuries. That's inevitable. It's a consequence of money and everyone's autonomy to use it as they wish. The only way you can avoid this is (1) don't give any subsidy whatsoever, or (2) take away all autonomy and micro-manage their lives.

I don't need to get into moral judgments here because there are clear practical answers: dollar for dollar, if the government invests $1 on EBT then the economy will get $1.84 back in overall benefits (growing the taxpayer base, helping poor people out of poverty). So if you're a hard-nosed business investor looking for a savvy place to park your capital, food stamps are a good bet, better than the stock market. https://www.theatlantic.com/he...

As for giving people autonomy to chose how to spend money themselves? It's the capitalist way. I believe it works because, by and large, individuals are better at making investment judgments relative to their future than large organizations or business are. Sure, 80% of new business go bust in their first year, but we still invest money in new business (without hamstringing how they spend it) because on average it pays off. And sure, some people abuse food stamps, but we still invest money in them because on average it pays off.

Blockchain:

- Unclear accountability (the real reason for popularity)

- You're putting data on lots of computers, in different jurisdictions.

- Can't really delete anything (privacy nightmare)

- Not really anonymous.

- Encryption will be broken in time.

- Power not really distributed, just obfuscated (lies with devs).

- Slow and overly complex.

Sources:

http://estsjournal.org/article...

https://medium.com/enspiral-ta...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/j...

https://www.theatlantic.com/te...

https://blog.ethereum.org/2016...

http://blog.ezyang.com/2011/06...

We were instructed quite specifically that the state bringing a case against someone is not to be considered as any indication of guilt.

You have missed the point. Something like 97% of federal cases never even get to the courtroom.
Ref: Why U.S. Criminal Courts Are So Dependent on Plea Bargaining