It ends up in a situation where people really like to argue -- and that very much includes me... I expect this to raise a lot of bad blood but at the same time, at the end of the day, I don't think it really matters that much. Very fitting quote for our little community here.
Agreed, but lets also remember that when legally enforced DRM does not expire on its own, then it becomes both de facto and de jure an indefinitely granted Copyright which is unconstitutional.
And such a thing is terribly unwise for civilization, for any portion of our intellectual works to be artificially made so inherently easy to lose. In the past if even one copy of book survived a calamity, then it could be copied over and over again, but now with DRM we are creating a world where copying can be physically controlled long after that legal right has expired.
I don't believe I am overstating the threat to say that widespread DRM is a threat to the potential survival of human knowledge through natural disasters and war. Not only should DRM not receive additional legal protections, it should not be legally allowed.
Socially responsible investing is essentially impossible. Public companies are almost always too large and complex to boil down into a single binary good/evil decision matrix, and if one could, if investing in the evil company (for little direct benefit to the company by the way) you could do 25% more really good things (say 25% fewer malria cases or more clean drinking water in Africa, the moral calculus becomes quite complicated. No, turns out that isn't it at all. Really it was because when they started out reviewing corporate activities, they started out by reading the corporate mission statements and the only one that even bothered saying they wouldn't be doing any evil was Google Inc... so by their new policy the Gates' foundation would have had to invest solely in Google and that was just going to look bad for everyone. That and the board of directors heard some grumbling about "...that Damn Google..." coming from Bill's office.
But will it work with my Microtek 4850 flatbed scanner that came with a Windows and Mac driver CD but is still "unsupported" in SANE despite my e-mails to Microtek? You youngsters don't seem to remember the days when driver support for MacOS was few and far between. The point is that Apple stepped in and either provided themselves or worked with third party companies to provide competitively priced alternative peripherals that were guaranteed to work. The test for MacOS wasn't 'does every peripheral work with MacOS?', it was rather 'is there an option for a peripheral that we know will work with MacOS?'.
When I switched from Mac to Windows, I had to leave many of my peripherals behind. Why should it be any different with Linux? Sure that means that there are a lot of people with very expensive hardware that won't be able to just switch and expect seamless integration with their existing peripherals, but if we look at Linux rather as a future purchasing decision rather than just something to throw on old hardware, then it is more important to just have a collection of devices that will just work well out of the box, rather than to try and make every possible combination work just like Windows.
Right now there lacks a good certification program for third party Linux drivers that a vendor could just put some logo on the box, which could make a compelling selling point. I submit that if there was such a program then there would be little reason for most peripheral makers not to do it, but more importantly the many thousands of us that really hate Microsoft Windows would no longer have a good excuse not to drop it like a bad habit. I look for Linux compatibility, not because it is currently running my primary desktop, it isn't, but I look for compatibility so that some day I might be able to make the switch and never look back.
And a lot of the small Pacific island nations were taken over by the UK or Spain or France, but they figured out it is much cheaper to let them be sovereign and not be responsible for all their problems directly. They only become strategically important again when the US needs a place to land in an emergency or a place to store some ammo or test a nuclear bomb again.
Drivers for server devices and obsolete devices are good for increasing bullet point counts but not for having the best live-CD experience on real home PCs. Yes, the WindowsXP live CD is so much more impressive than Ubuntu Live CD! Oh wait.
Seriously though, imagine you had to buy a Dell without Windows and just had to figure out which drivers you needed for the hardware. You will spend hours with no assurance of success, trust me. You can be damned sure that Dell makes sure that the disk they distribute with their machines comes with all the drivers for the hardware they sell you and they will only sell hardware that they know will work with Windows.
Try one of these or these and it will be a desktop Linux that just works out of the box with the hardware that is attached to your computer, which is what matters.
Putting the bar at the point where the OS must support the same hardware that Windows XP supports is a bar too high for any OS. Just as there is no way Microsoft would allow itself to be compared by maintaining some arbitrary parity with the hardware devices that Linux supports. I imagine there are in fact some specialized peripherals that only have Linux drivers and not Windows, but you are right that isn't the point. That way of framing the question will always puts your efforts at chasing someone else's lead.
What Linux needs more of is more places, like the links above, to get fully integrated products that have you favorite distribution working with a full set of compatible hardware to meet your needs. And finally, all that Integration work can't make the product cost more than a few bucks more than a comparable Dell otherwise people are going to try and do it themselves like they have been, with mixed results.
No, the pricing of textbooks is a result of back-assed production systems, government contractor pricing, schoolbook adoption board warping of design, and terrible legacy choices related to all of the above. And with new digital printing systems coming on line all the time, real world limitations are dropping every year. Thanks for the insight, so the price is really the result of market control over distribution channels and not physical costs associated with printing. That issue is not so trivial. Seems that electronic distribution solves this problem though.
Admittedly, I'm delighted at all of the above. I'm just now bringing my first bound products to press and I expect to underprice the buggers by fifty to eighty percent. You can print your books, but can you distribute them? Seems places like amazon allow for greater choices in publishers, where they might not require distribution deals just to get your foot in the door. But there is a reason, they call the business "publishing" and not just "printing".
Seems electronic publishing has the potential to be a lot more competitive to the benefit of more consumers, in this case kids trying to learn something useful and to the benefit of smaller publishers who are not frozen out of the market anymore.
I'll admit that there's quite a few free ebooks, but the majority of them are 'literary classics' that a child couldn't read if it wanted to and college-level textbooks that a child couldn't read if it wanted to. And kids aren't smart enough to even use computers.;)
At such a high resolution this is primarily a computer monitor, not primarily a tv for all the reasons you state. But since it is 16:9 aspect ratio, then you can also conveniently show HD movies without stretching or letter boxing like you get on my Dell 24" monitor which is at a 16:10 aspect ration. It should be mentioned that 30" Wide screen LCD monitors are already selling at 2560x1600 resolutions, so 3840x2160 is a nice jump up from that but not a ridiculously big jump up in resolution at least computer wise. And really at 50" you are going to need that high a resolution if you want to get anywhere close to it to view presentations or work on graphics or animations. This might be in a lot of operations centers, conference rooms and the like as well as any office where displaying maps, or working on any other large format content in fine detail is needed. But if this was not much more than a 1080p HDTV, then why not buy it? You could then use it both as a computer with decent resolution and as a TV for when you want to pop in that 1080p blueray/HD DVD content. It wouldn't hurt the content, it might even look a bit better. And there could be a small consumer market for high end gaming, if the video cards can support this resolution at a decent frame rate. So, yes there is a consumer market for this monitor and price does matter.
I think you can agree that if when I clicked on a button on Dell's website that said Linux instead of Windows and it took 2 minutes to change Windows to Linux in the configurator, then you would hardly call that "easy" and certainly not convenient. You might even call customer support and complain about the responsiveness of the website. But you aren't even given that option, aren't told that it is an option, and have to call someone you do business on a regular basis in order to make it happen and then make it seem like it is no problem. Perhaps you were just trying to show it wasn't impossible to get what you want with Dell, but it is hardly good customer service.
You are calling "bullsh*t" about someone's post saying it was hard to buy a PC from Dell without Windows and then as a an example of how easy it is you say how you were able to "negotiate" with Dell to get a refund of $62 after you returned the installation media and had to promise that you reformatted the hard drive. Seems to me that you just proved the point that you were calling "bullsh*t" at the point in your story where you say "negotiate".
You can't just choose not to recognize the existence of a country and then invade it. You are right, I can't. But Tony Blair could. If it isn't a country then the UK would just be exercising its sovereignty in its own waters.
But even if it was a country then as individuals, we wouldn't be "invading" we would be migrating. And if we happen to be the majority then we have a democratic right to overthrow an oppressive regime.
Don't be too silly. International Law? No country has ever even officially recognized Sealand, it just puts up with it because it is kinda funny and they don't cause much trouble if they are left alone. To the UK it is just a bunch of local squatters in an abandoned sea platform, you have to believe that they would be thrown out if they discovered oil under it or needed to clear it to make way for a sea lane or something. The only reason you couldn't just show up and start fighting over it would be because the UK would finally move in with force and demolish it. Oh just try to open up a luxury casino or something and see if the UK doesn't step in to collect taxes.
Theories of international law are all well and good, but the only reason indefensible small island nations remain independent is because they usually aren't worth the trouble of taking them over or the cost of supporting them, and not because of any deeply held convictions over international law.
No longer possible. After Sealand, one of the first things that happened was a change of international jurisdiction concerning such renegade actions. It isn't like Sealand just declared Independence and everyone just said okay. They had to fight outsiders for it just like every other country. I believe they even took a prisoner when they were invaded. Since nobody was really hurt or died, it seems like it just became part of the colorful history of the place and just played into a British sense of humor. I doubt other countries would have allowed something like that simply on principle, but the British apparently admired such bravado enough as to allow it.
But really if you think about it, though I would be interested to hear what sort of Treaties were put in place regarding such things, the international jurisdiction is about the same as it has always been. Because outside laws don't matter in such endeavors, the only things that really matter are whether you are strong enough to keep the place and if there is anyone stronger than you that cares enough to take it from you. As for travel and trade relations, if you have so little as for it not even to be worth the paperwork of trading with, then you are out of luck trying to get your travel documents recognized elsewhere. The Prince of Sealand even said that he doesn't travel as much on his Sealand passport since 2001.
Considering the traditional way of determining the actual 'government' is 'who is in physical control of the country', you are now the ruler of Sealand. They are the 'government in exile'.
So... why put up the money in the first place if you are just planning on keeping it by force.
Our goal should be to stop climate change, not to pay for fixing its problems. The possible effects of climate change are unpredictable, because the earth is such a complex system. It is fully possible that damages could total trillions of dollars. It will be much cheaper to prevent climate change than to pay for it. There is no scientific basis for the idea that we can just stop global warming dead in its tracks overnight. To the contrary, best case that I have seen is that the Earth stabilizes at a higher temperature than today in the next 20-40 years, but even if we were to all suddenly find a away to make a living without carbon emissions then it would be some years before any reversal. Climate change has already happened and will continue. And Trillions of dollars over that time frame is a small price to pay for prosperity. I am not convinced that it will be easier to stop even a small amount of global warming than the effects. And that is not what anyone is talking about anyway, the idea of Kyoto was to freeze and reduce CO2 emissions back to 1992 levels or something like that. Which would still see at least some additional Global Warming.
Yes, but the improvements necessary to lower emissions do not require unskilled labor, not exactly the same thing. Your point was that it is not cheap for industry to relocate to other countries. My point was simply that the cost of labor is the determining factor. But if you want to talk about the costs of eaking out efficiency gains from our aging power plants, then those are some of the higher costs which require a lot of skilled engineering and are very expensive.
If you are concerned with global warming then a carbon tax is a much better solution than an untenable carbon trading system which doesn't include half the world. But if you just want to help poorer countries' economies, then simple limits on carbon emissions in rich countries will do it.
Yes, a carbon tax is a nice idea, but it does not guarantee that the carbon used will be used for the most efficient purpose. Rather it is a carbon credit that does not guarantee most efficient use, but a carbon tax does just that. The most efficient purpose will be what people are willing to pay for. Not necessarily just what big corporations are willing to pay in order to maintain their market control.
It seems more attractive to have a committee of scientists say "we need to reduce our levels to X tons this year" and then issue x tons of credits, and let things get figured out from there. Much better to have a group of scientists and economists get together and figure out what the actual remediation costs of CO2 emissions are projected to be in the near term and assess a carbon tax rate. Out of which we could pay for coastal flooding remediation, fusion research, compensating people for economic losses related to extreme weather and population relocation.
The question isn't about stopping global warming or reversing it, the question for us is to remediate its economic effects and limit it overall in the longer term.
The infrastructure improvements necessary to lower CO2 emissions are far cheaper than relocating to the other side of the world to a place without solid property rights or infrastructure. The cost of infrastructure improvements is tied to the cost of labor, which is far cheaper in other countries. The Empire State building was built in just one year during the Great Depression, because labor was so relatively cheap and they could afford to hire lots of people.
Yes, but production is not concentrated in just one country. If you create a carbon trading system in one country that increases the cost of manufacturing in one country then you will just shift that manufacturing to other countries. I suppose the majority of carbon emissions are personal transportation and home heating, but how much of that is really discretionary use? Why is there really a need for carbon trading system at all if we are talking about just needing to upgrade power plants to be more efficient? Just put a per kilowatt limit on emissions and give companies tax breaks for going below that limit. But if we are talking about energy used to create the products that people buy, then having a carbon emission sales tax makes more sense, otherwise you are really just driving manufacturing out of the countries that enact carbon limits and carbon trading on power production. A carbon sales tax would make the things that created a lot of pollution too expensive to buy and the things that were made more efficiently less expensive, just as a carbon trading system would, but since it applies to products and not energy production, then it could have the effect of reducing consumption of products from other countries that do not have pollution controls and are not as efficiency conscious.
Try all of them combined. And in a healthy economy, small businesses with good products and good management become bigger businesses.
With carbon trading, you drive production to other countries. With a carbon sales tax then all goods would have to be certified for their carbon emissions, it would at least be an even playing field.
How about rather a carbon system based upon demand? Kind of like a bottle deposit, a company has to calculate the emissions that went into its product, then that money is put towards remediation efforts. That would keep the economy from stagnating and keep large companies from creating carbon monopolies. So, companies which could prove that they produced their products more efficiently would benefit by being able to charge less for its products. Yes, it would be a separate sales tax and collected as such. And ideally it would be assessed by calculating the actual cost of the damage from global warming and pollution and then assess that cost on an even basis across product without hypocritical exemptions for things like solar panels and such. Might be complicated at first and hard to catch little differences, but it would very much be in line with food labeling requirements in which producers would be required to know what went into their products.
Europe figured out a efficient means of enforcement I'm not familiar with, but it seems like it has not been a problem.
Sure you might be able to enforce such things on large corporations, as with most regulations, but most of the world's industry is not large corporations. Regulations like this which create a barrier to entry for business hurt small companies, hurt individuals and hurt the economy as a whole. Europe has just shifted its emissions to China, so its politicians could make people feel good.
Most of the libertarians I talk to support government intervention in externalities, and most would support some sort of carbon tax/credit scheme. I could see how limits on carbon emissions might be placed on individuals in ways consistent with a Libertarian philosophy, because excess emissions apparently harm others. Philosophically it should be considered much like a restriction on playing particularly loud music as carbon emissions are perfectly natural and required for life in low amounts, but an excess does demonstrably harm others. But I oppose such penalties on carbon emission, rather, on grounds of impracticality and that they could do more harm than good. The effect would be just another way to tax something that people cannot live without rather than a way to actually reduce emissions substantially. So limits I could see, based on some sort of per person calculation, but taxation is just yet another power grab by authoritarians.
Maybe not in theory, but in reality, if you speak to a typical self-described libertarian - they tend to go beserk if you suggest that government authority is needed for anything. I guess the problem is that there's no strong consensus on what libertarianism actually means. This is a good primer.
I really don't see compatibility between anarchism and libertarianism. You can't have a society based on liberty if the community does not protect the weak from physical force, the threat of it, or fraud. And you cannot ensure freedom of movement without regulating the roads and other rights of way. Otherwise anyone could just set up a roadblock and start collecting tolls. That is essentially what these big telecoms are trying to do, just setting up roadblocks on public roads and collecting tolls based upon how rich you look or any other criteria they choose. This is precisely the type of thing government is there to prevent.
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Agreed, but lets also remember that when legally enforced DRM does not expire on its own, then it becomes both de facto and de jure an indefinitely granted Copyright which is unconstitutional.
And such a thing is terribly unwise for civilization, for any portion of our intellectual works to be artificially made so inherently easy to lose. In the past if even one copy of book survived a calamity, then it could be copied over and over again, but now with DRM we are creating a world where copying can be physically controlled long after that legal right has expired.
I don't believe I am overstating the threat to say that widespread DRM is a threat to the potential survival of human knowledge through natural disasters and war. Not only should DRM not receive additional legal protections, it should not be legally allowed.
That was supposed to be Funny, not Insightful.
When I switched from Mac to Windows, I had to leave many of my peripherals behind. Why should it be any different with Linux? Sure that means that there are a lot of people with very expensive hardware that won't be able to just switch and expect seamless integration with their existing peripherals, but if we look at Linux rather as a future purchasing decision rather than just something to throw on old hardware, then it is more important to just have a collection of devices that will just work well out of the box, rather than to try and make every possible combination work just like Windows.
Right now there lacks a good certification program for third party Linux drivers that a vendor could just put some logo on the box, which could make a compelling selling point. I submit that if there was such a program then there would be little reason for most peripheral makers not to do it, but more importantly the many thousands of us that really hate Microsoft Windows would no longer have a good excuse not to drop it like a bad habit. I look for Linux compatibility, not because it is currently running my primary desktop, it isn't, but I look for compatibility so that some day I might be able to make the switch and never look back.
And a lot of the small Pacific island nations were taken over by the UK or Spain or France, but they figured out it is much cheaper to let them be sovereign and not be responsible for all their problems directly. They only become strategically important again when the US needs a place to land in an emergency or a place to store some ammo or test a nuclear bomb again.
Sorry I meant to add in, imagine... "like it is for Linux". Sometimes my typing is slower than my brain.
Seriously though, imagine you had to buy a Dell without Windows and just had to figure out which drivers you needed for the hardware. You will spend hours with no assurance of success, trust me. You can be damned sure that Dell makes sure that the disk they distribute with their machines comes with all the drivers for the hardware they sell you and they will only sell hardware that they know will work with Windows.
Try one of these or these and it will be a desktop Linux that just works out of the box with the hardware that is attached to your computer, which is what matters.
Putting the bar at the point where the OS must support the same hardware that Windows XP supports is a bar too high for any OS. Just as there is no way Microsoft would allow itself to be compared by maintaining some arbitrary parity with the hardware devices that Linux supports. I imagine there are in fact some specialized peripherals that only have Linux drivers and not Windows, but you are right that isn't the point. That way of framing the question will always puts your efforts at chasing someone else's lead.
What Linux needs more of is more places, like the links above, to get fully integrated products that have you favorite distribution working with a full set of compatible hardware to meet your needs. And finally, all that Integration work can't make the product cost more than a few bucks more than a comparable Dell otherwise people are going to try and do it themselves like they have been, with mixed results.
Seems electronic publishing has the potential to be a lot more competitive to the benefit of more consumers, in this case kids trying to learn something useful and to the benefit of smaller publishers who are not frozen out of the market anymore.
At such a high resolution this is primarily a computer monitor, not primarily a tv for all the reasons you state. But since it is 16:9 aspect ratio, then you can also conveniently show HD movies without stretching or letter boxing like you get on my Dell 24" monitor which is at a 16:10 aspect ration. It should be mentioned that 30" Wide screen LCD monitors are already selling at 2560x1600 resolutions, so 3840x2160 is a nice jump up from that but not a ridiculously big jump up in resolution at least computer wise. And really at 50" you are going to need that high a resolution if you want to get anywhere close to it to view presentations or work on graphics or animations. This might be in a lot of operations centers, conference rooms and the like as well as any office where displaying maps, or working on any other large format content in fine detail is needed. But if this was not much more than a 1080p HDTV, then why not buy it? You could then use it both as a computer with decent resolution and as a TV for when you want to pop in that 1080p blueray/HD DVD content. It wouldn't hurt the content, it might even look a bit better. And there could be a small consumer market for high end gaming, if the video cards can support this resolution at a decent frame rate. So, yes there is a consumer market for this monitor and price does matter.
I think you can agree that if when I clicked on a button on Dell's website that said Linux instead of Windows and it took 2 minutes to change Windows to Linux in the configurator, then you would hardly call that "easy" and certainly not convenient. You might even call customer support and complain about the responsiveness of the website. But you aren't even given that option, aren't told that it is an option, and have to call someone you do business on a regular basis in order to make it happen and then make it seem like it is no problem. Perhaps you were just trying to show it wasn't impossible to get what you want with Dell, but it is hardly good customer service.
You are calling "bullsh*t" about someone's post saying it was hard to buy a PC from Dell without Windows and then as a an example of how easy it is you say how you were able to "negotiate" with Dell to get a refund of $62 after you returned the installation media and had to promise that you reformatted the hard drive. Seems to me that you just proved the point that you were calling "bullsh*t" at the point in your story where you say "negotiate".
But even if it was a country then as individuals, we wouldn't be "invading" we would be migrating. And if we happen to be the majority then we have a democratic right to overthrow an oppressive regime.
Don't be too silly. International Law? No country has ever even officially recognized Sealand, it just puts up with it because it is kinda funny and they don't cause much trouble if they are left alone. To the UK it is just a bunch of local squatters in an abandoned sea platform, you have to believe that they would be thrown out if they discovered oil under it or needed to clear it to make way for a sea lane or something. The only reason you couldn't just show up and start fighting over it would be because the UK would finally move in with force and demolish it. Oh just try to open up a luxury casino or something and see if the UK doesn't step in to collect taxes.
Theories of international law are all well and good, but the only reason indefensible small island nations remain independent is because they usually aren't worth the trouble of taking them over or the cost of supporting them, and not because of any deeply held convictions over international law.
But really if you think about it, though I would be interested to hear what sort of Treaties were put in place regarding such things, the international jurisdiction is about the same as it has always been. Because outside laws don't matter in such endeavors, the only things that really matter are whether you are strong enough to keep the place and if there is anyone stronger than you that cares enough to take it from you. As for travel and trade relations, if you have so little as for it not even to be worth the paperwork of trading with, then you are out of luck trying to get your travel documents recognized elsewhere. The Prince of Sealand even said that he doesn't travel as much on his Sealand passport since 2001.
Considering the traditional way of determining the actual 'government' is 'who is in physical control of the country', you are now the ruler of Sealand. They are the 'government in exile'.
So... why put up the money in the first place if you are just planning on keeping it by force.
If you are concerned with global warming then a carbon tax is a much better solution than an untenable carbon trading system which doesn't include half the world. But if you just want to help poorer countries' economies, then simple limits on carbon emissions in rich countries will do it.
The question isn't about stopping global warming or reversing it, the question for us is to remediate its economic effects and limit it overall in the longer term. The infrastructure improvements necessary to lower CO2 emissions are far cheaper than relocating to the other side of the world to a place without solid property rights or infrastructure. The cost of infrastructure improvements is tied to the cost of labor, which is far cheaper in other countries. The Empire State building was built in just one year during the Great Depression, because labor was so relatively cheap and they could afford to hire lots of people.
Yes, but production is not concentrated in just one country. If you create a carbon trading system in one country that increases the cost of manufacturing in one country then you will just shift that manufacturing to other countries. I suppose the majority of carbon emissions are personal transportation and home heating, but how much of that is really discretionary use? Why is there really a need for carbon trading system at all if we are talking about just needing to upgrade power plants to be more efficient? Just put a per kilowatt limit on emissions and give companies tax breaks for going below that limit. But if we are talking about energy used to create the products that people buy, then having a carbon emission sales tax makes more sense, otherwise you are really just driving manufacturing out of the countries that enact carbon limits and carbon trading on power production. A carbon sales tax would make the things that created a lot of pollution too expensive to buy and the things that were made more efficiently less expensive, just as a carbon trading system would, but since it applies to products and not energy production, then it could have the effect of reducing consumption of products from other countries that do not have pollution controls and are not as efficiency conscious.
Try all of them combined. And in a healthy economy, small businesses with good products and good management become bigger businesses.
With carbon trading, you drive production to other countries. With a carbon sales tax then all goods would have to be certified for their carbon emissions, it would at least be an even playing field.
How about rather a carbon system based upon demand? Kind of like a bottle deposit, a company has to calculate the emissions that went into its product, then that money is put towards remediation efforts. That would keep the economy from stagnating and keep large companies from creating carbon monopolies. So, companies which could prove that they produced their products more efficiently would benefit by being able to charge less for its products. Yes, it would be a separate sales tax and collected as such. And ideally it would be assessed by calculating the actual cost of the damage from global warming and pollution and then assess that cost on an even basis across product without hypocritical exemptions for things like solar panels and such. Might be complicated at first and hard to catch little differences, but it would very much be in line with food labeling requirements in which producers would be required to know what went into their products.
Europe figured out a efficient means of enforcement I'm not familiar with, but it seems like it has not been a problem.
Sure you might be able to enforce such things on large corporations, as with most regulations, but most of the world's industry is not large corporations. Regulations like this which create a barrier to entry for business hurt small companies, hurt individuals and hurt the economy as a whole. Europe has just shifted its emissions to China, so its politicians could make people feel good.
I really don't see compatibility between anarchism and libertarianism. You can't have a society based on liberty if the community does not protect the weak from physical force, the threat of it, or fraud. And you cannot ensure freedom of movement without regulating the roads and other rights of way. Otherwise anyone could just set up a roadblock and start collecting tolls. That is essentially what these big telecoms are trying to do, just setting up roadblocks on public roads and collecting tolls based upon how rich you look or any other criteria they choose. This is precisely the type of thing government is there to prevent.