There are thousands. Bitpay alone is processing more than $2M a month in merchant transactions.
$2M a month is NOTHING. Mom and Pop grocery stores do that much (but I have yet to find any that will take my bitcoins).
There are several restaurants so you CAN buy food. As for rent, it isn't a given but your landlord just might take them if asked just like he probably would take gold if asked.
There was ONE here in town that did that - for a couple of months - for specific items - but the last time I went I was told it was "promotional" and they don't take them at all any more. Maybe there are some where you are, but I've NEVER been able to buy groceries with bitcoins, and never heard of anyone that could.
My landlord hasn't heard of them and isn't interested. He can't buy groceries with them either, so why would he. I transfer my rent payment from my bank to his every month, and he pays his mortgage the same way. I'm sure he would tell me his mortgage holder isn't going to take bitcoins either.
If your expectation of a new system is that it only exists if every vendor everywhere takes it from day one then you've set an impossible bar.
No need for this ridiculous straw man. Bitcoin trading is an extremely niche activity, regardless of your fantasies of their utility. Amazon coins are easier to trade and more utilitarian than bitcoins, as are oil paintings by obscure Mexican artists - I noticed you didn't bother to compare that to your irrational support of bitcoins as currency.
You must not have looked very hard. localbitcoin.com, bitinstant.com, mtgox.com... you can buy or sell a hell of a lot more than 2 BTC at any of these places.
bitinstant.com only SELLS bitcoins. I don't see any way to sell mine to them. "localbitcoin.com" doesn't seem to exist at all. And this Japanese site "mtgox.com" doesn't seem to be functional at all at this point. They're probably some of the ones I spent DAYS researching that simply do not work or won't buy my bitcoins.
And before any eco activists complain about my carbon footprint: My area is nuclear powered. Nuclear has an almost non-existent carbon footprint and is dirt cheap.
You might want to note that nuclear power is actually incredibly expensive if you count the long term costs of nuclear waste disposal/storage/processing. Not only does it cost $billions to build a plant (and a huge carbon footprint if you calculate in the carbon (diesel fuel powered equipment) to mine/smelt/cast the metal, the concrete, etc, plus the same for the actual construction of the plant), but *nobody* has calculated in the cost of safely storing nuclear waste for the next 500,000 years without it poisoning the environment (for reference, lookup the Hanford nuclear site, the problems of Fukushima, etc), nor of course the cost of mining/refining the nuclear material in the first place to make useful nuke plant fuel.
Nuclear is not really "cheap" at all, just the costs are far longer term and more hidden.
It's still a lot cheaper than everything else, including wind and solar (since you're including construction costs, disposal costs, and storage of hazardous materials). At least spent nuclear fuel has a half-life (a fairly short one if it's re-processed, which it should be). Cadmium lasts forever. And every 20 years or so when solar panels need to be replaced you end up with another 2 million pounds of lead and 600,000 pounds of cadmium that will need a new home.
Not sure who is generating demand for these other than other speculators. Apparently merchants need more incentive because there is a significant dearth of them right now. I still can't pay my rent or buy food with them. The one place I found that would actually offer Federal Reserve Notes for BTCs limited me to trading no more than 2. TWO! What do I do with the other 130 that I have? Not much, apparently. I found a site that will sell electronics for bitcoins - but nothing I want. No tablets or phones and no modern, efficient flat-screen monitors, just old crappy CRTs. Oh - and they want extra money for shipping, and you can't even pay that with bitcoins (!!).
Call me when there is an actual demand for them. Oil paintings by obscure Mexican artists make a better commodity trading medium than bitcoins.
The FDA has even gone as far as to BAN natural plant and agricultural products so that the drug companies have a monopoly on the same chemical, artificially produced and patented.
The reason given that they haven't proven efficacy. Rather than saying "it's safe, have fun - but not too much" they say "That treatment hasn't been proven to have the effect you claim, so we are confiscating it all." You are agreeing with the GP in a most disagreeable way.
No, you misinterpret. The "reason" isn't because efficacy hasn't been proven - it's because it has. The drug companies then pay hundreds of thousands in fees for "approval" to sell a compound that has been used for hundreds of years, and in return the FDA bans the naturally-occurring version so they have a monopoly on sales and can charge 100 times as much.
In other words, it's all about government enabling private profits at the expense of the public (something that used to be called fascism). To claim that it's just a shift from guarding for "safety" to guarding for "efficacy" misses the mark by a wide margin.
Sorry if I came off too "disagreeable" - it just seems way beyond credible any more to see those guys as doing anything beneficial for the general welfare.
They're not supposed to rule in favor of consumers. Or corporations. They're supposed to rule in "favor" of the law, regardless of which side is popular. The why of a ruling is more important, often, than which side wins and the "right" ruling can be made for the wrong reasons.
And yet 3 of the 9 actually thought it would be "right" to rule the other way. That's the truly frightening part of this decision.
But now the FDA's primary job seems to be to require that a drug does what is claimed, but far less so that a drug is actually safe.
Oh, please, how naive! The FDA now works almost exclusively for pharmaceutical companies, to help them make better profits. They do swat-style raids on food co-opts and Amish farms while drugs are advertised that clearly have side effects more harmful than the condition they claim to treat. The FDA has even gone as far as to BAN natural plant and agricultural products so that the drug companies have a monopoly on the same chemical, artificially produced and patented. Red yeast rice was the first I heard of, resulting in the most profitable US drug ever produced. They are now planning to ban the pyridoxamine form of Vitamin B6 so that it can be sold as a drug instead. There are many other examples.
So, no, the FDA's job is to keep people unhealthy, stupid, and beholden to the pharmaceutical companies. Period.
Beer is something that comes along, by the looks of it, after we have pretty much all the basics of sedentary agricultural societies already in place.
How? What are they growing the grain for? Because the wild grains they started with were not really suitable for bread - it's too small to be able to separate the nut from chaff, so even if they could have made something like bread it would have barely been palatable.
It's much more likely that the first use of grain was for brewing beer, which is easier to do with the grains that nomadic / early agricultural societies had access to. As they improved the grain by selection, making bread would be the next technology, but from a practical viewpoint, it's easier to chew / spit / boil and strain the stuff to make a beverage than learn to turn it into a nutritionally valuable food.
And if you get a ticket from a police officer in the US? At least in some states, the officer doesn't need to present any evidence other than their own testimony and you'll be fined.
At least it's a person accusing you, and at least the service of the summons is within the law (you have to sign the summons). Then you get your day in court and it's your word against the officer's (and whatever equipment he may have been using), and the judge can, you know, make a judgement call.
So instead they come up with a system where many days later you receive a letter in the mail demanding money. Put aside for a moment that USPS mail is not considered legal "service", and that you are not given a day in court - you have to show up in person to petition for that. So a machine declared you guilty and the system works on a presumption of guilt. If you do demand a day in court, it's going to cost you an extra $60.
So you get this letter. Some have the picture of your license plate, other places you have to request it. Were you really speeding that day at whatever place that is? Do you remember? How much did you look at your speedometer at that specific time. Some of these cameras are notorious for going off when a bird flies by. Others are notoriously inaccurate. Can you do the research to determine all of this? Will anyone do it for $105?
And that, right there, is just off the top of my head all the unconstitutional issues with these cameras. No, it's really not about safety, it's about money.
Essentially this is a fairly standard "everything should be private and for profit" attitude prevalent in US.
If the government is granting the monopoly, it's not "private" at all - it's a public-private-partnership (which is the new term for it - they used to call it fascism).
Interesting read. Although, of course, the speculation about dogs being the catalyst of civilization is completely wrong. Everyone knows it was beer that did that.
That's a big reason why I don't support the political party that most assume I would. I support individuals, even if I don't agree with them, based on their own qualities.
That's exactly what we need to get more people to do. The parties have platforms, but the politicians use the party labels without regard to what to those principles and vote how they want to. They'll switch parties when they feel it benefits them. And people that stick to voting for one party or another end up with NO influence. The two-party system causes so many problems it's ridiculous.
You're absolutely right. It's all the same repeated memes from low information voters. They hear and repeat this stuff so often in their echo chambers that it's entrenched in their heads, and of course there is no one teaching them any critical thinking skills.
You seem to be under the impression that executive positions are pay for x amount of work like wage positions. They're not. If a CEO hires VPs that can run their divisions well enough that he can sit at home playing video games all day, he's done his job and done it well. Only results matter, hours put in mean nothing.
If only results matter, how come so many CEOs whose companies are tanking still pull down big salaries and bonuses?
You know, I could see paying a CEO a percentage of the profits, so long as when the company lost money, he had to pay the same percentage of the losses.
Yep, that's the real issue. Being a CEO now just means being part of the drinking club, not being competent at running a company. When you see so many CEOs running companies into bankruptcy due to their own incompetence, and then cashing out with millions of dollars in their pocket, it's clear there is something broken with that system.
personally, i blame the regulations and the dept of ed. this is anecdotal based on my best friend who is a teacher as well as other friends no had proof
The empirical evidence for this is graphing the size / spending of the Department of Ed from its inception in the 1970's with the educational outcomes of public schools, based on global standards. Including total education spending makes the negative correlation even more stark.
Just how many teachers have tenure? Honest question, I thought it was quite rare. Here in Australia, we're spending more than ever on education (iPads, sporting stuff, school halls) and yet my cousin's school last year could not afford highschool maths text (poorly OCRd PDFs of painfully substandard material don't count). We have far worse education outcomes than 10 years ago. Our neighbours are kicking our arses in educating highschool kids, and one of the biggest differences is the totally opposite spending priorities - fewer computers and iPads, better paid (relative to median wage) teachers.
Sounds like they have adopted the American model. It's been like that in the US for 40 years.
Yea, I forgot the ? after the "Austrian" - I didn't know what you were talking about with "anti-Keynesian", and Austrian school theory is all I could think of. In fact, I didn't know what you were talking about throughout your entire post. I've read it three times now and I still don't.
You can call that "willful" if you want, but seeing as you didn't even make an effort to explain yourself in your reply, I prefer to chalk it up to a physicist being inarticulate. Don't feel bad - I can't do tensor math. Not everyone has a talent for expositionary English.
So Keynesianism worked great, with the exception of the most recent 30 or 40 years, and anti-Keynesian (Austrian) economics is clearly a failure and you know that's so even though it has never been applied (unlike Keynesian economics was for at least 50 years).
Yea, okay, that makes perfect sense. I suggest you stick to physics.
A recommended read, as appropriate today as it was 40 years ago.
Not really, no. Not any more than "Reefer Madness" or "Europe on $5 a day". Progress happens, scientific understanding improves, and government power brokers never let a program expire, they just add more. Notice, for instance, how horribly discredited mandatory ethanol-from-corn requirements and corn subsidies have proven to be, yet government bureaucrats keep expanding it and wasting more money on it.
We have to look at the law of diminishing returns. It makes a nice, emotional argument to claim that "if it saves the life of one child, it must be done," yet transferring billions of dollars for efforts that only improve things by 0.00001% are bound to have devastating negative consequences even if they aren't directly caused or occur years down the road. Where we are now is trapped in a myriad red-tape cage so constricting that small entrepreneurs are unable to make a move. That means only large corporations with big budgets for overhead and to pay lobbying groups are the only ones that can even know about all the regulation, much less spend the money to comply with them.
I notice that WalMart has come out in favor of Obama's proposed $9 / hour minimum wage. Why would that be? Simple - they can pay it, and it will drive even more small-business competition out of the market even faster.
But it was a net increase in debt. The treasury has bonds due on a daily, weekly, monthly, annual, etc. basis. They can buy and sell debt at any time (with the Federal Reserve). Since they still had a lot of debt external to internal accounting like SS, they could simply sell that off. It was a surplus on one set of books, but not in toto.
Oh, right, because faceless bureaucrats deciding what is best for your children is sooo much more effective than ensuring information is true and available and letting their parents decide.
Figures. Typical statist response: "Here's some examples of isolated idiots making poor decisions, that of course justifies my use of tyranny to control and punish the entire populace."
No mention of what happens when idiots make poor decisions for millions of people. How do you justify that?
Oh, right, because faceless bureaucrats deciding what is best for your children is sooo much more effective than ensuring information is true and available and letting their parents decide. After all, when it's a bureaucrat's job, if they make a mistake they can change course quickly. Oh, wait, they can't. But at least they can admit they made a mistake and and end the program. Oh, yea, that never happens. Well, someone else will add a NEW regulation to fix that, and any problems it causes can be fixed with another NEW regulation, and if they discover any problems there some other agency can create a NEW regulation and.. gee, this process, that affects millions of people with no say-so, doesn't really seem like it works very well.
And thus we demonstrate the fallacy of assuming there is a problem with the "free market", when in fact we have an entire industry (flame retardant chemicals) created by government regulations (the FTC requires certain manufactured goods to meet certain standards of flame resistance), which then creates a new business opportunity for lobbyists to support the new industry that is now threatened by additional regulations from other federal agencies (EPA).
No wonder the citizens in the Capital are living the good life while citizens in the Districts are barely getting by.
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There are thousands. Bitpay alone is processing more than $2M a month in merchant transactions.
$2M a month is NOTHING. Mom and Pop grocery stores do that much (but I have yet to find any that will take my bitcoins).
There are several restaurants so you CAN buy food. As for rent, it isn't a given but your landlord just might take them if asked just like he probably would take gold if asked.
There was ONE here in town that did that - for a couple of months - for specific items - but the last time I went I was told it was "promotional" and they don't take them at all any more. Maybe there are some where you are, but I've NEVER been able to buy groceries with bitcoins, and never heard of anyone that could.
My landlord hasn't heard of them and isn't interested. He can't buy groceries with them either, so why would he. I transfer my rent payment from my bank to his every month, and he pays his mortgage the same way. I'm sure he would tell me his mortgage holder isn't going to take bitcoins either.
If your expectation of a new system is that it only exists if every vendor everywhere takes it from day one then you've set an impossible bar.
No need for this ridiculous straw man. Bitcoin trading is an extremely niche activity, regardless of your fantasies of their utility. Amazon coins are easier to trade and more utilitarian than bitcoins, as are oil paintings by obscure Mexican artists - I noticed you didn't bother to compare that to your irrational support of bitcoins as currency.
You must not have looked very hard. localbitcoin.com, bitinstant.com, mtgox.com... you can buy or sell a hell of a lot more than 2 BTC at any of these places.
bitinstant.com only SELLS bitcoins. I don't see any way to sell mine to them. "localbitcoin.com" doesn't seem to exist at all. And this Japanese site "mtgox.com" doesn't seem to be functional at all at this point. They're probably some of the ones I spent DAYS researching that simply do not work or won't buy my bitcoins.
What was your point again?
And before any eco activists complain about my carbon footprint: My area is nuclear powered. Nuclear has an almost non-existent carbon footprint and is dirt cheap.
You might want to note that nuclear power is actually incredibly expensive if you count the long term costs of nuclear waste disposal/storage/processing. Not only does it cost $billions to build a plant (and a huge carbon footprint if you calculate in the carbon (diesel fuel powered equipment) to mine/smelt/cast the metal, the concrete, etc, plus the same for the actual construction of the plant), but *nobody* has calculated in the cost of safely storing nuclear waste for the next 500,000 years without it poisoning the environment (for reference, lookup the Hanford nuclear site, the problems of Fukushima, etc), nor of course the cost of mining/refining the nuclear material in the first place to make useful nuke plant fuel.
Nuclear is not really "cheap" at all, just the costs are far longer term and more hidden.
It's still a lot cheaper than everything else, including wind and solar (since you're including construction costs, disposal costs, and storage of hazardous materials). At least spent nuclear fuel has a half-life (a fairly short one if it's re-processed, which it should be). Cadmium lasts forever. And every 20 years or so when solar panels need to be replaced you end up with another 2 million pounds of lead and 600,000 pounds of cadmium that will need a new home.
So nuclear is still the cheapest.
Not sure who is generating demand for these other than other speculators. Apparently merchants need more incentive because there is a significant dearth of them right now. I still can't pay my rent or buy food with them. The one place I found that would actually offer Federal Reserve Notes for BTCs limited me to trading no more than 2. TWO! What do I do with the other 130 that I have? Not much, apparently. I found a site that will sell electronics for bitcoins - but nothing I want. No tablets or phones and no modern, efficient flat-screen monitors, just old crappy CRTs. Oh - and they want extra money for shipping, and you can't even pay that with bitcoins (!!).
Call me when there is an actual demand for them. Oil paintings by obscure Mexican artists make a better commodity trading medium than bitcoins.
some of the best pilots in RC are able to turn something they enjoy into something that can earn a very healthy living.
Healthy for who?
More to the point, unhealthy for who?
The FDA has even gone as far as to BAN natural plant and agricultural products so that the drug companies have a monopoly on the same chemical, artificially produced and patented.
The reason given that they haven't proven efficacy. Rather than saying "it's safe, have fun - but not too much" they say "That treatment hasn't been proven to have the effect you claim, so we are confiscating it all." You are agreeing with the GP in a most disagreeable way.
No, you misinterpret. The "reason" isn't because efficacy hasn't been proven - it's because it has. The drug companies then pay hundreds of thousands in fees for "approval" to sell a compound that has been used for hundreds of years, and in return the FDA bans the naturally-occurring version so they have a monopoly on sales and can charge 100 times as much.
In other words, it's all about government enabling private profits at the expense of the public (something that used to be called fascism). To claim that it's just a shift from guarding for "safety" to guarding for "efficacy" misses the mark by a wide margin.
Sorry if I came off too "disagreeable" - it just seems way beyond credible any more to see those guys as doing anything beneficial for the general welfare.
They're not supposed to rule in favor of consumers. Or corporations. They're supposed to rule in "favor" of the law, regardless of which side is popular. The why of a ruling is more important, often, than which side wins and the "right" ruling can be made for the wrong reasons.
And yet 3 of the 9 actually thought it would be "right" to rule the other way. That's the truly frightening part of this decision.
But now the FDA's primary job seems to be to require that a drug does what is claimed, but far less so that a drug is actually safe.
Oh, please, how naive! The FDA now works almost exclusively for pharmaceutical companies, to help them make better profits. They do swat-style raids on food co-opts and Amish farms while drugs are advertised that clearly have side effects more harmful than the condition they claim to treat. The FDA has even gone as far as to BAN natural plant and agricultural products so that the drug companies have a monopoly on the same chemical, artificially produced and patented. Red yeast rice was the first I heard of, resulting in the most profitable US drug ever produced. They are now planning to ban the pyridoxamine form of Vitamin B6 so that it can be sold as a drug instead. There are many other examples.
So, no, the FDA's job is to keep people unhealthy, stupid, and beholden to the pharmaceutical companies. Period.
80 mg Oxycontin tablets / month (suitable only for a seriously terminal cancer patient)
I have back pain, you insensitive clod. BACK PAIN It hurts!
Beer is something that comes along, by the looks of it, after we have pretty much all the basics of sedentary agricultural societies already in place.
How? What are they growing the grain for? Because the wild grains they started with were not really suitable for bread - it's too small to be able to separate the nut from chaff, so even if they could have made something like bread it would have barely been palatable.
It's much more likely that the first use of grain was for brewing beer, which is easier to do with the grains that nomadic / early agricultural societies had access to. As they improved the grain by selection, making bread would be the next technology, but from a practical viewpoint, it's easier to chew / spit / boil and strain the stuff to make a beverage than learn to turn it into a nutritionally valuable food.
And if you get a ticket from a police officer in the US? At least in some states, the officer doesn't need to present any evidence other than their own testimony and you'll be fined.
At least it's a person accusing you, and at least the service of the summons is within the law (you have to sign the summons). Then you get your day in court and it's your word against the officer's (and whatever equipment he may have been using), and the judge can, you know, make a judgement call.
So instead they come up with a system where many days later you receive a letter in the mail demanding money. Put aside for a moment that USPS mail is not considered legal "service", and that you are not given a day in court - you have to show up in person to petition for that. So a machine declared you guilty and the system works on a presumption of guilt. If you do demand a day in court, it's going to cost you an extra $60.
So you get this letter. Some have the picture of your license plate, other places you have to request it. Were you really speeding that day at whatever place that is? Do you remember? How much did you look at your speedometer at that specific time. Some of these cameras are notorious for going off when a bird flies by. Others are notoriously inaccurate. Can you do the research to determine all of this? Will anyone do it for $105?
And that, right there, is just off the top of my head all the unconstitutional issues with these cameras. No, it's really not about safety, it's about money.
Essentially this is a fairly standard "everything should be private and for profit" attitude prevalent in US.
If the government is granting the monopoly, it's not "private" at all - it's a public-private-partnership (which is the new term for it - they used to call it fascism).
Interesting read. Although, of course, the speculation about dogs being the catalyst of civilization is completely wrong. Everyone knows it was beer that did that.
That's a big reason why I don't support the political party that most assume I would. I support individuals, even if I don't agree with them, based on their own qualities.
That's exactly what we need to get more people to do. The parties have platforms, but the politicians use the party labels without regard to what to those principles and vote how they want to. They'll switch parties when they feel it benefits them. And people that stick to voting for one party or another end up with NO influence. The two-party system causes so many problems it's ridiculous.
You're absolutely right. It's all the same repeated memes from low information voters. They hear and repeat this stuff so often in their echo chambers that it's entrenched in their heads, and of course there is no one teaching them any critical thinking skills.
You seem to be under the impression that executive positions are pay for x amount of work like wage positions. They're not. If a CEO hires VPs that can run their divisions well enough that he can sit at home playing video games all day, he's done his job and done it well. Only results matter, hours put in mean nothing.
If only results matter, how come so many CEOs whose companies are tanking still pull down big salaries and bonuses?
You know, I could see paying a CEO a percentage of the profits, so long as when the company lost money, he had to pay the same percentage of the losses.
Yep, that's the real issue. Being a CEO now just means being part of the drinking club, not being competent at running a company. When you see so many CEOs running companies into bankruptcy due to their own incompetence, and then cashing out with millions of dollars in their pocket, it's clear there is something broken with that system.
personally, i blame the regulations and the dept of ed. this is anecdotal based on my best friend who is a teacher as well as other friends no had proof
The empirical evidence for this is graphing the size / spending of the Department of Ed from its inception in the 1970's with the educational outcomes of public schools, based on global standards. Including total education spending makes the negative correlation even more stark.
please, fox just lies, saying other news networks are somehow as bad is ridiculous.
So - "My propaganda is better than your propaganda."
Just how many teachers have tenure? Honest question, I thought it was quite rare. Here in Australia, we're spending more than ever on education (iPads, sporting stuff, school halls) and yet my cousin's school last year could not afford highschool maths text (poorly OCRd PDFs of painfully substandard material don't count). We have far worse education outcomes than 10 years ago. Our neighbours are kicking our arses in educating highschool kids, and one of the biggest differences is the totally opposite spending priorities - fewer computers and iPads, better paid (relative to median wage) teachers.
Sounds like they have adopted the American model. It's been like that in the US for 40 years.
Yea, I forgot the ? after the "Austrian" - I didn't know what you were talking about with "anti-Keynesian", and Austrian school theory is all I could think of. In fact, I didn't know what you were talking about throughout your entire post. I've read it three times now and I still don't.
You can call that "willful" if you want, but seeing as you didn't even make an effort to explain yourself in your reply, I prefer to chalk it up to a physicist being inarticulate. Don't feel bad - I can't do tensor math. Not everyone has a talent for expositionary English.
So Keynesianism worked great, with the exception of the most recent 30 or 40 years, and anti-Keynesian (Austrian) economics is clearly a failure and you know that's so even though it has never been applied (unlike Keynesian economics was for at least 50 years).
Yea, okay, that makes perfect sense. I suggest you stick to physics.
A recommended read, as appropriate today as it was 40 years ago.
Not really, no. Not any more than "Reefer Madness" or "Europe on $5 a day". Progress happens, scientific understanding improves, and government power brokers never let a program expire, they just add more. Notice, for instance, how horribly discredited mandatory ethanol-from-corn requirements and corn subsidies have proven to be, yet government bureaucrats keep expanding it and wasting more money on it.
We have to look at the law of diminishing returns. It makes a nice, emotional argument to claim that "if it saves the life of one child, it must be done," yet transferring billions of dollars for efforts that only improve things by 0.00001% are bound to have devastating negative consequences even if they aren't directly caused or occur years down the road. Where we are now is trapped in a myriad red-tape cage so constricting that small entrepreneurs are unable to make a move. That means only large corporations with big budgets for overhead and to pay lobbying groups are the only ones that can even know about all the regulation, much less spend the money to comply with them.
I notice that WalMart has come out in favor of Obama's proposed $9 / hour minimum wage. Why would that be? Simple - they can pay it, and it will drive even more small-business competition out of the market even faster.
But it was a net increase in debt. The treasury has bonds due on a daily, weekly, monthly, annual, etc. basis. They can buy and sell debt at any time (with the Federal Reserve). Since they still had a lot of debt external to internal accounting like SS, they could simply sell that off. It was a surplus on one set of books, but not in toto.
Oh, right, because faceless bureaucrats deciding what is best for your children is sooo much more effective than ensuring information is true and available and letting their parents decide.
Sometimes yes yes or even yes.
Figures. Typical statist response: "Here's some examples of isolated idiots making poor decisions, that of course justifies my use of tyranny to control and punish the entire populace."
No mention of what happens when idiots make poor decisions for millions of people. How do you justify that?
Oh, right, because faceless bureaucrats deciding what is best for your children is sooo much more effective than ensuring information is true and available and letting their parents decide. After all, when it's a bureaucrat's job, if they make a mistake they can change course quickly. Oh, wait, they can't. But at least they can admit they made a mistake and and end the program. Oh, yea, that never happens. Well, someone else will add a NEW regulation to fix that, and any problems it causes can be fixed with another NEW regulation, and if they discover any problems there some other agency can create a NEW regulation and .. gee, this process, that affects millions of people with no say-so, doesn't really seem like it works very well.
And thus we demonstrate the fallacy of assuming there is a problem with the "free market", when in fact we have an entire industry (flame retardant chemicals) created by government regulations (the FTC requires certain manufactured goods to meet certain standards of flame resistance), which then creates a new business opportunity for lobbyists to support the new industry that is now threatened by additional regulations from other federal agencies (EPA).
No wonder the citizens in the Capital are living the good life while citizens in the Districts are barely getting by.