You are so close to getting it. Without multiple electric grids, you can't have "competition" for distribution service. It's pretty obvious we won't ever get redundant grids - there isn't room, the enormous expense of building that much redundant infrastructure should make it clear how crazy the idea of competition should be...
Except it doesn't, for you? Are you really expecting to convince anyone that they can go out and start up a competitor to Comcast and Verizon? Or that they can expect anyone else will?
Ah, you may as well boycott the roads. They'll be thrilled, because your boycott is obviously doomed, and the very few silly enough to try it will curtail their own mobility (/ability to participate in society/democracy), hurting rather than helping their cause.
The only nuclear option is in the polling place in the next election. Any elected representative who isn't fighting this is out of office.
Back when we all used modems to get on the internet, and anyone could set up shop with a bank of modems, and any customer could call any ISP they wanted, sure.
Let's compare and contrast that with today's broadband ISPs.
Broadband requires copper or fiber to each premises. Physical limitations prevent competitors, for the same reason you wouldn't have multiple electric utilities with multiple electric grids and multiple outlets in your house for each one. Then there are barriers to entry; if it costs billions plus a block-by-block, house-by-house battle for access, incumbents are sufficiently insulated from competition as to be a functional monopoly, or (if there are, say, 2 of them, cable and telecom) an oligopoly (or cartel).
Markets are amazing and wonderful. They just don't solve everything. You can't have a free market in police forces. Free market in judicial systems. Free market in electricity. Etc. Some things, it doesn't quite work.
The Internet, classic example, only exists because of DARPA - centrally controlled, big government research.
There were lots of telecoms that could have provided a network like it, but all of them were thinking about "how can I charge the most for the least" instead of "let me make something completely new, and make it incredibly cheap, and then there'll be a new telecom paradigm." To the extent they were aware of new paradigms as a possibility, they were concerned with stopping them, to preserve their existing businesses.
The government-scientist invented, publicly funded, Internet was wildly more successful than anything created by the free market to that time. Eventually the government privatized it, turning it over to a few companies, who became fantastically wealthy on the back of it.
2012, Verizon was demanding google block tethering apps on android because it let owners avoid their $20 tethering fee. This was despite guaranteeing they wouldn't do that as part of a winning bid on an airwaves auction. (edit: they were fined $1.25million over this)
2015 was just the FCC formalizing what we've had since the internet was first invented. The Internet only exists because it was always neutral. This is about breaking the entire premise of the internet, after decades of it working properly.
You think you can have meaningful competition in "last mile" for internet, any more than you can have it for electricity? Hilarious. Someone's going to start up a new ISP, somehow get right of way to everyone's last mile? That's your competitive marketplace?
"Oh but the local governments." I can give you another list of all the cities and towns full of people who can't get decent service at all, from any ISP, and then when they try to build their own, the big ISPs sue and harass them to stop them from doing it...
Ah, right. The feds will hold the ISPs to their word. Then the invisible hand of the market will take care of everything.
It's like these assholes think the free market fairy can just wave her little magic wand and make anything work.
Except they don't think that. They know you have only 1-2 choices for ISP, and if both suddenly decide to provide shittier service, you're fucked. They even know that you know that. They're just testing to see if this makes it in above the pain threshold of the American voter, because everything that you can suffer, you will be made to suffer.
Actually, now that you mention it, being AT&T exclusive pretty much is why Android is the world's most popular mobile OS and iOS is a minority operating system.
Meanwhile, is Amazon as good at this as Apple? Is it 2007, or 2014?
You remind me of the people who always whine about dupes.
It was always amusing that people cared about that. Half the time I missed the original post. The other half I missed the dupe. Maybe you're just checking slashdot too much.:)
You know what? Other people come and have the same discussion. Redundancy of discussion is assumed and unavoidable, since this is a news site, with comments on each of the endless stream stories.
He misses an important point, too. If people are successfully able to opt-out of tracking, this does nothing other than concentrate the power to track into the hands of the few giants that people affirmatively log into, and who are also plugged into half the internet. Namely, Google, Facebook.
It's reading comprehension then. You apparently really think what went on in Boston rivals what Israelis deal with. OK then.
"The father of three was killed when terrorists infiltrated Israel from Sinai and led a coordinated attack against those constructing the fence on the Israel-Egypt border. The attacking terrorists used automatic rifles in addition to anti-tank missiles." When you have a team of guys with anti-tank missiles running around Boston, and it's not the first time this year, and your body count from terror is routinely actually higher than your body count from accidental shooting by police, we'll talk. That entire country is one big ongoing rampage. You would be able to see it as easily as the rest of the world, if you weren't doing the mental equivalent of cowering in your basement even still.
I see you still have no answer for my point. It really doesn't matter if you get it or not - only if the next people who'd like to shut down Boston get it.
The T was closed. Which means among many, many other things some people couldn't even easily get to medical care.
As officers fanned out across the Boston area, Bryce Acosta, 24, came out of his Cambridge home with his hands up.
"I had like 30 FBI guys come storm my house with assault rifles," he said. They yelled, "Is anybody in there?" and began searching his house and an adjacent shed, leaving after about 10 minutes.
*****
Watertown, Mass. — Samantha Piccaluga, a 23-year-old university student, said that at about 3:30 p.m. Friday, jittery police whipped out their guns and rushed toward a man who appeared to come out of a house on Dexter Street in Watertown, near where the shootings had occurred in the early morning.
The neighborhood has been cordoned off by police, who have ordered residents to stay inside.
“They’re yelling, ‘Why did you get out of your house,’” Piaccaluga said, as she watched the drama unfold from her upstairs window on nearby Nichols Avenue. Angry, cursing police were “in his face,” she said. They then slapped handcuffs on the man, who was about 40 years old and was wearing a T-shirt, she said, and then began interviewing him.
Early in the morning, she said, she saw officers bring a nude, handcuffed man down the street and put him into a patrol car. “He was completely naked, no underwear,” she said, adding that police brought the man a blanket. At around 4 a.m., the man was taken out of the car and apparently transferred away in an ambulance, she said. She said she did not know who the man was.
*****
Apparently the police in Boston and the IRS have a slightly different definition of "voluntary" than you or I.
Second, they may have interned US citizens, but let's not switch topics from the fact that they didn't panic and shut down their cities.:) And by the way, what did it take them to even start interning people? Wake me up if Al Qaeda manages to field a million person army and expresses intent to invade and occupy. Yes 9/11 is scary and the Boston bombing is scary, but let's not forget, these people are just criminals with a bit of creativity, hoping for some free PR for their cause. This is theater, and this level of panic is like giving the terrorists a standing ovation. With this kind of encouragement, expect repeat performances.
Dude, I'm not the one saying "So yes i can see rescuing the morons costing more than just shutting down the state because every moron that slips in the snow will be suing the state for 20 million bucks."
There just is no tort reform angle on the Boston Bombing. None. There isn't even a tort reform angle period; the only reason to be worrying about it is because you lost about 1,000 other more important issues off your list. Which in fairness happens to me all the time on the days when I start drinking early. But still.
I mean, if you don't read the news and can't Google, I don't know why you want to come here and hold forth on these topics.
Any fool knows that things happen in Israel all the time that make those two kids, with their civilian guns and their couple of pressure cooker bombs look like an episode of sesame street:
I see you didn't answer my main point at all - which is that any two kids can cause the city of Boston to shut down, and cost the economy potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. So how long until it happens again? The US has a glass jaw to the world's thugs with this attitude of "run to your houses and hide under your beds" at the first sign of terrorism. We cower and ask how quickly we can roll back the bill of rights, when our grandparents would have stood vigilant to guard them. And all for what - something less dangerous to us than slipping and falling. Terrorists are forced to use the media and fear because they are so ineffective at actually causing harm. Why on earth hand them the win?
One guy? Really? An entire city cowers in fear from one guy?
Go to Israel, man. Look into their eyes as they confront fear and show you what bravery is.
They have a lot more than one guy after them on any given day, and they refuse to hide unless a missile is actually going to land near them.
Americans once had some backbone, too. Now that we've announced it's open season on our economy, we're going to see how many other terrorists and hostile foreign powers want to arrange the shutdown of a major city via one or two armed kids.
Oh no sir. You raised the coward flag. You just rolled out the red-carpet to every terrorist and hostile foreign power. They now know for a certainty that all it takes to shut down a city the size of Boston is two kids with a couple of shitty guns and some home-made bombs that, while actually functional, would flunk you out of IED class back in Afghanistan or Iraq.
It's going to get so much worse. Because of this degree of weakness, of overreaction and immaturity, I can guarantee we will have just enticed more who wish to be as famous and momentarily powerful as we chose to make these two assholes.
Whatever happened to the America of our grandparents? Hitler said every day, "I want all your cities closed," and we said, every day, "Not for an hour, not for a minute."
All kidding aside, do you not watch the news? Which is full of surveillance video of people robbing, raping, and murdering on a scale any terrorist organization can never dream of? Pick just one case: grainy footage of a group of several guys who killed someone just like you, raped someone just like your wife, and then disappeared into the night, most certainly to be seen again soon?
I await your command to shut down every city where this occurred this week.
200 whole rounds of ammo? I cringe in wide-eyed fear. The NYPD once spent 41 rounds of ammo shooting at a single unarmed civilian (reference).
Cops are way more likely to kill you by accident than terrorists are on purpose (reference).
If the cops really thought it was dangerous outside, instead of just putting on security theater, they'd have let the donut shops close too (reference).
The war on terror is like real war, except that we have millions of people in our "army" and they have dozens in theirs. Peanut allergies kill more Americans than terrorists.
This cowardly attitude is an open invitation for any terrorist or hostile foreign government to shut down any American city any time they choose by sending one or two armed men to our shores. Or, apparently even recruiting one or two people from our labor pool. If our grandparents thought this way while fighting the Nazis, Hitler could have won the war against the allies with a hundred "terrorists."
And... we shut the whole city down - except for the Dunkin Donuts shops?
Wow - you felt like this was the right time to beat the "tort reform" horse?
Dead civilians, dead cops, and you pulled that hoary old saw out of your trove of political hobbyhorses?
By the way - you can let it go.
Visit China or Mexico or India. The courts have no power over the rich in those places, and safety measures are considered a foreign luxury. If while at work on the assembly line, you lose your hand en la Máquina then there's no system at work to tell anyone it should have had a simple safety feature to keep your hand out - you were the careless one, after all - so you just go on the street to beg with your other hand, with the crowd of other one-handed people. Your life is worth less than the little money and effort a bit of safety engineering would cost, in those places.
Oh, for the millions of people it benefits, a small percentage of people abuse it - just like health insurance, taking fake sick days at work, the welfare system, the military procurement system, and every other human system ever invented, except at least in the case of torts, you have to fool both a judge and a jury to do it. It's actually one of the least abusable systems we have. If only everything else worked that way.
And yet, propagandists will try to convince you to be riled up over someone who got a jury award in a courtroom because they want to distract you from a banker who got a bonus on a bailed out bank, or bribery in congress, or a drug company who thinks quality control is a big government intrusion onto their profits.
Even that lady who got millions for spilling McDonalds coffee on herself... didn't get millions for spilling coffee on herself. She got $640k, in the end, because McDonalds decided to serve coffee 40 degrees hotter than everyone else, and when it spilled on her lap, she suffered horrific agony, massive burns on her vagina, needed skin grafts, and her medical treatments continued for two years. McDonalds already knew they were injuring hundreds of people like her, and even paid out up to half a million in the past in settlements, but they couldn't be bothered to tell people to turn down the knob in the coffee makers to where everyone else sets it. And the manager of that particular location was a douche, and decided "no one should get money for spilling coffee." Well, if you make it hot enough, you do injure people, to the point where it shocks the conscience. (reference) Amazingly after this case the knobs got turned down and the coffee went to normal temperature and everyone stopped getting hurt.
This is why I say you can let it go. Get outraged about legal bribery (Citizens United, etc), bank bailouts and billions of military budget dollars wasted and lost that was supposed to go support our troops. If you really hold on to tort reform so much that it seems relevant in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, go live in one of the many earthly paradises that has no tort, and see for yourself what it's like.
Tell that to the hourly employee living close to the line, who now can't make her rent. It's not as rare a condition as we'd like tell ourselves, in the post-Bush economy. In Boston there are thousands.
Slashdot Mirror
You are so close to getting it. Without multiple electric grids, you can't have "competition" for distribution service. It's pretty obvious we won't ever get redundant grids - there isn't room, the enormous expense of building that much redundant infrastructure should make it clear how crazy the idea of competition should be...
Except it doesn't, for you? Are you really expecting to convince anyone that they can go out and start up a competitor to Comcast and Verizon? Or that they can expect anyone else will?
Ah, you may as well boycott the roads. They'll be thrilled, because your boycott is obviously doomed, and the very few silly enough to try it will curtail their own mobility (/ability to participate in society/democracy), hurting rather than helping their cause.
The only nuclear option is in the polling place in the next election. Any elected representative who isn't fighting this is out of office.
There is no functioning market in broadband ISPs.
Back when we all used modems to get on the internet, and anyone could set up shop with a bank of modems, and any customer could call any ISP they wanted, sure.
Let's compare and contrast that with today's broadband ISPs.
Broadband requires copper or fiber to each premises. Physical limitations prevent competitors, for the same reason you wouldn't have multiple electric utilities with multiple electric grids and multiple outlets in your house for each one. Then there are barriers to entry; if it costs billions plus a block-by-block, house-by-house battle for access, incumbents are sufficiently insulated from competition as to be a functional monopoly, or (if there are, say, 2 of them, cable and telecom) an oligopoly (or cartel).
Markets are amazing and wonderful. They just don't solve everything. You can't have a free market in police forces. Free market in judicial systems. Free market in electricity. Etc. Some things, it doesn't quite work.
The Internet, classic example, only exists because of DARPA - centrally controlled, big government research.
There were lots of telecoms that could have provided a network like it, but all of them were thinking about "how can I charge the most for the least" instead of "let me make something completely new, and make it incredibly cheap, and then there'll be a new telecom paradigm." To the extent they were aware of new paradigms as a possibility, they were concerned with stopping them, to preserve their existing businesses.
The government-scientist invented, publicly funded, Internet was wildly more successful than anything created by the free market to that time. Eventually the government privatized it, turning it over to a few companies, who became fantastically wealthy on the back of it.
It still stuns me when people say stuff like this. But then I remember, maybe they weren't here, and didn't see what happened.
The net has always been neutral. From time to time an ISP would try to test the boundaries, and then we would stop them:
2005 - Madison River Communications was blocking VOIP services. The FCC put a stop to it.
2005 - Comcast was denying access to p2p services without notifying customers.
2007-2009 - AT&T was having Skype and other VOIPs blocked because they didn't like there was competition for their cellphones.
2011 - MetroPCS tried to block all streaming except youtube. (edit: they actually sued the FCC over this)
2011-2013, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon were blocking access to Google Wallet because it competed with their bullshit. edit: this one happened literally months after the trio were busted collaborating with Google to block apps from the android marketplace
2012, Verizon was demanding google block tethering apps on android because it let owners avoid their $20 tethering fee. This was despite guaranteeing they wouldn't do that as part of a winning bid on an airwaves auction. (edit: they were fined $1.25million over this)
2012, AT&T - tried to block access to FaceTime unless customers paid more money.
2013, Verizon literally stated that the only thing stopping them from favoring some content providers over other providers were the net neutrality rules in place.
2015 was just the FCC formalizing what we've had since the internet was first invented. The Internet only exists because it was always neutral. This is about breaking the entire premise of the internet, after decades of it working properly.
You think you can have meaningful competition in "last mile" for internet, any more than you can have it for electricity? Hilarious. Someone's going to start up a new ISP, somehow get right of way to everyone's last mile? That's your competitive marketplace?
"Oh but the local governments." I can give you another list of all the cities and towns full of people who can't get decent service at all, from any ISP, and then when they try to build their own, the big ISPs sue and harass them to stop them from doing it...
Ah, right. The feds will hold the ISPs to their word. Then the invisible hand of the market will take care of everything.
It's like these assholes think the free market fairy can just wave her little magic wand and make anything work.
Except they don't think that. They know you have only 1-2 choices for ISP, and if both suddenly decide to provide shittier service, you're fucked. They even know that you know that. They're just testing to see if this makes it in above the pain threshold of the American voter, because everything that you can suffer, you will be made to suffer.
Actually, now that you mention it, being AT&T exclusive pretty much is why Android is the world's most popular mobile OS and iOS is a minority operating system.
Meanwhile, is Amazon as good at this as Apple? Is it 2007, or 2014?
You remind me of the people who always whine about dupes.
It was always amusing that people cared about that. Half the time I missed the original post. The other half I missed the dupe. Maybe you're just checking slashdot too much. :)
You know what? Other people come and have the same discussion. Redundancy of discussion is assumed and unavoidable, since this is a news site, with comments on each of the endless stream stories.
He misses an important point, too. If people are successfully able to opt-out of tracking, this does nothing other than concentrate the power to track into the hands of the few giants that people affirmatively log into, and who are also plugged into half the internet. Namely, Google, Facebook.
Just say it out loud: Abolish software patents.
+1
You are truly one nasty sack of shit.
And you, clearly, are a scholar of international law.
Uh, title of the story is "Bruce Schneier On the Marathon Bomber Manhunt."
I'll come back when you've sobered up. :)
It's reading comprehension then. You apparently really think what went on in Boston rivals what Israelis deal with. OK then.
"The father of three was killed when terrorists infiltrated Israel from Sinai and led a coordinated attack against those constructing the fence on the Israel-Egypt border. The attacking terrorists used automatic rifles in addition to anti-tank missiles." When you have a team of guys with anti-tank missiles running around Boston, and it's not the first time this year, and your body count from terror is routinely actually higher than your body count from accidental shooting by police, we'll talk. That entire country is one big ongoing rampage. You would be able to see it as easily as the rest of the world, if you weren't doing the mental equivalent of cowering in your basement even still.
I see you still have no answer for my point. It really doesn't matter if you get it or not - only if the next people who'd like to shut down Boston get it.
The T was closed. Which means among many, many other things some people couldn't even easily get to medical care.
As officers fanned out across the Boston area, Bryce Acosta, 24, came out of his Cambridge home with his hands up.
"I had like 30 FBI guys come storm my house with assault rifles," he said. They yelled, "Is anybody in there?" and began searching his house and an adjacent shed, leaving after about 10 minutes.
*****
Watertown, Mass. — Samantha Piccaluga, a 23-year-old university student, said that at about 3:30 p.m. Friday, jittery police whipped out their guns and rushed toward a man who appeared to come out of a house on Dexter Street in Watertown, near where the shootings had occurred in the early morning.
The neighborhood has been cordoned off by police, who have ordered residents to stay inside.
“They’re yelling, ‘Why did you get out of your house,’” Piaccaluga said, as she watched the drama unfold from her upstairs window on nearby Nichols Avenue. Angry, cursing police were “in his face,” she said. They then slapped handcuffs on the man, who was about 40 years old and was wearing a T-shirt, she said, and then began interviewing him.
Early in the morning, she said, she saw officers bring a nude, handcuffed man down the street and put him into a patrol car. “He was completely naked, no underwear,” she said, adding that police brought the man a blanket. At around 4 a.m., the man was taken out of the car and apparently transferred away in an ambulance, she said. She said she did not know who the man was.
*****
Apparently the police in Boston and the IRS have a slightly different definition of "voluntary" than you or I.
(found here)
Second, they may have interned US citizens, but let's not switch topics from the fact that they didn't panic and shut down their cities. :) And by the way, what did it take them to even start interning people? Wake me up if Al Qaeda manages to field a million person army and expresses intent to invade and occupy. Yes 9/11 is scary and the Boston bombing is scary, but let's not forget, these people are just criminals with a bit of creativity, hoping for some free PR for their cause. This is theater, and this level of panic is like giving the terrorists a standing ovation. With this kind of encouragement, expect repeat performances.
Dude, I'm not the one saying "So yes i can see rescuing the morons costing more than just shutting down the state because every moron that slips in the snow will be suing the state for 20 million bucks."
There just is no tort reform angle on the Boston Bombing. None. There isn't even a tort reform angle period; the only reason to be worrying about it is because you lost about 1,000 other more important issues off your list. Which in fairness happens to me all the time on the days when I start drinking early. But still.
I mean, if you don't read the news and can't Google, I don't know why you want to come here and hold forth on these topics.
Any fool knows that things happen in Israel all the time that make those two kids, with their civilian guns and their couple of pressure cooker bombs look like an episode of sesame street:
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/victims.html
I see you didn't answer my main point at all - which is that any two kids can cause the city of Boston to shut down, and cost the economy potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. So how long until it happens again? The US has a glass jaw to the world's thugs with this attitude of "run to your houses and hide under your beds" at the first sign of terrorism. We cower and ask how quickly we can roll back the bill of rights, when our grandparents would have stood vigilant to guard them. And all for what - something less dangerous to us than slipping and falling. Terrorists are forced to use the media and fear because they are so ineffective at actually causing harm. Why on earth hand them the win?
One guy? Really? An entire city cowers in fear from one guy?
Go to Israel, man. Look into their eyes as they confront fear and show you what bravery is.
They have a lot more than one guy after them on any given day, and they refuse to hide unless a missile is actually going to land near them.
Americans once had some backbone, too. Now that we've announced it's open season on our economy, we're going to see how many other terrorists and hostile foreign powers want to arrange the shutdown of a major city via one or two armed kids.
You think it's a one-time deal?
Oh no sir. You raised the coward flag. You just rolled out the red-carpet to every terrorist and hostile foreign power. They now know for a certainty that all it takes to shut down a city the size of Boston is two kids with a couple of shitty guns and some home-made bombs that, while actually functional, would flunk you out of IED class back in Afghanistan or Iraq.
It's going to get so much worse. Because of this degree of weakness, of overreaction and immaturity, I can guarantee we will have just enticed more who wish to be as famous and momentarily powerful as we chose to make these two assholes.
Whatever happened to the America of our grandparents? Hitler said every day, "I want all your cities closed," and we said, every day, "Not for an hour, not for a minute."
All kidding aside, do you not watch the news? Which is full of surveillance video of people robbing, raping, and murdering on a scale any terrorist organization can never dream of? Pick just one case: grainy footage of a group of several guys who killed someone just like you, raped someone just like your wife, and then disappeared into the night, most certainly to be seen again soon?
I await your command to shut down every city where this occurred this week.
You've never been to East New York, obviously.
200 whole rounds of ammo? I cringe in wide-eyed fear. The NYPD once spent 41 rounds of ammo shooting at a single unarmed civilian (reference).
Cops are way more likely to kill you by accident than terrorists are on purpose (reference).
If the cops really thought it was dangerous outside, instead of just putting on security theater, they'd have let the donut shops close too (reference).
The war on terror is like real war, except that we have millions of people in our "army" and they have dozens in theirs. Peanut allergies kill more Americans than terrorists.
This cowardly attitude is an open invitation for any terrorist or hostile foreign government to shut down any American city any time they choose by sending one or two armed men to our shores. Or, apparently even recruiting one or two people from our labor pool. If our grandparents thought this way while fighting the Nazis, Hitler could have won the war against the allies with a hundred "terrorists."
And... we shut the whole city down - except for the Dunkin Donuts shops?
http://www.popehat.com/2013/04/20/security-theater-martial-law-and-a-tale-that-trumps-every-cop-and-donut-joke-youve-ever-heard/
We cower in fear from these two kids, so that we don't even read them their rights when we arrest them?
Somewhere your grandparents are rolling in their graves from shame, that this is the once mighty country they fought wars to defend.
It wasn't optional. My job closed. My school closed. My government office closed.
Everything closed but Dunkin Donuts, because... well, read it:
http://www.popehat.com/2013/04/20/security-theater-martial-law-and-a-tale-that-trumps-every-cop-and-donut-joke-youve-ever-heard/
Wow - you felt like this was the right time to beat the "tort reform" horse?
Dead civilians, dead cops, and you pulled that hoary old saw out of your trove of political hobbyhorses?
By the way - you can let it go.
Visit China or Mexico or India. The courts have no power over the rich in those places, and safety measures are considered a foreign luxury. If while at work on the assembly line, you lose your hand en la Máquina then there's no system at work to tell anyone it should have had a simple safety feature to keep your hand out - you were the careless one, after all - so you just go on the street to beg with your other hand, with the crowd of other one-handed people. Your life is worth less than the little money and effort a bit of safety engineering would cost, in those places.
Oh, for the millions of people it benefits, a small percentage of people abuse it - just like health insurance, taking fake sick days at work, the welfare system, the military procurement system, and every other human system ever invented, except at least in the case of torts, you have to fool both a judge and a jury to do it. It's actually one of the least abusable systems we have. If only everything else worked that way.
And yet, propagandists will try to convince you to be riled up over someone who got a jury award in a courtroom because they want to distract you from a banker who got a bonus on a bailed out bank, or bribery in congress, or a drug company who thinks quality control is a big government intrusion onto their profits.
Even that lady who got millions for spilling McDonalds coffee on herself... didn't get millions for spilling coffee on herself. She got $640k, in the end, because McDonalds decided to serve coffee 40 degrees hotter than everyone else, and when it spilled on her lap, she suffered horrific agony, massive burns on her vagina, needed skin grafts, and her medical treatments continued for two years. McDonalds already knew they were injuring hundreds of people like her, and even paid out up to half a million in the past in settlements, but they couldn't be bothered to tell people to turn down the knob in the coffee makers to where everyone else sets it. And the manager of that particular location was a douche, and decided "no one should get money for spilling coffee." Well, if you make it hot enough, you do injure people, to the point where it shocks the conscience. (reference) Amazingly after this case the knobs got turned down and the coffee went to normal temperature and everyone stopped getting hurt.
This is why I say you can let it go. Get outraged about legal bribery (Citizens United, etc), bank bailouts and billions of military budget dollars wasted and lost that was supposed to go support our troops. If you really hold on to tort reform so much that it seems relevant in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, go live in one of the many earthly paradises that has no tort, and see for yourself what it's like.
Tell that to the hourly employee living close to the line, who now can't make her rent. It's not as rare a condition as we'd like tell ourselves, in the post-Bush economy. In Boston there are thousands.