Then how do you confirm Facebook is complying, and how do you confirm that the regulation they need to follow is sufficient, and if it's not, how do you really create any change to make it sufficient?
A good way to think about regulation and Facebook might be, would you rather continue using Facebook, knowing the government is supposedly regulating them, but you can never know for sure, or would you rather move on to a new and more interesting platform where privacy and security defaults are integrated into the platform from day one? Regulation that Facebook can point to and say, "See, we are following to rules!" will make it harder to convince your friends to leave Facebook.
California is one of the most agriculturally diverse and productive regions in the world. I'm not sure what your point is, but implying agriculture struggles in California is just plain wrong.
Employment is only a result of an individual wanting someone else to do something for them, because they don't have the time or skill to do it themselves. In exchange for someone doing this thing for them, they compensate them with something of value, normally payment in the form of currency. When you consider employment from this angle, I find it extremely hard to believe that a day will come where the majority of humans on this planet won't want help from other humans to accomplish their goals as they go about their daily lives. Yes, employment in the form of large corporations giving out biweekly paychecks may not exist anymore, but employment as a way to help your fellow human will never cease to exist.
Your argument is reasonable, until a better way to market to individuals comes along. It's not about the size of Facebook's user base or their reach on the web, it's how cheaply and effectively brands can sell their product by paying Facebook to help them do that. Once someone else can do it better, that's when it's game over for Facebook.
In the long view of your career, many people you meet will be bosses at one point, colleagues at another, and subordinates at another, possibly within the same group of people. Yes, power structures exist, but meaningful human relationships can exist above them, and can also overturn them.
That $51,000 to the accountant covers payroll for at least a couple accountants and a secretary, the taxes and rent those individuals pay personally, the rent the business pays locally, food spent at local restaurants and grocery stores, and the taxes and rent those businesses pay. Rent and food make up anywhere from 30-50% of most modest income household budgets, so it's reasonable to believe 30-50% of that $51,000 stays in the community.
The impact the NOAA, VA, etc has on a local community of 100,000 is, barring a local employment center, 100,000/330,000,000*$51,000. It's not even close how much more of an impact paying your taxes to your local accountant instead of the government would have on where you live.
That's a very broad generalization without any evidence to back it up as being anything more than an assumption. Considering one of the top ways the vast majority of the population avoids taxes is by writing off charitable donations, I'd say the truth is opposite of what you purport.
51k going to an accountant in your community is probably a more moral way to spend your money than 50k going to fund a war.
If one is going to judge a client's morality by his eagerness to spend more money than his tax bill in order to avoid paying that bill, that same moral lens needs to be applied to the accountant knowingly charging his client more than the client would save in taxes.
Not caring about money doesn't necessarily mean you are willing to pay more taxes than you are legally required to, especially a subjective amount that others deem 'reasonable'.
Stocks do the same thing, and after the split, the stock's price is determined by the market based on how much the new shares diluted the market. Seems like something very similar will happen here, with the difference being each fork will have a differing value determined by the market's exchange rate between forks?
Edit: I think many are missing the point that a fork and the original BTC blockchain are not of equal value. Maybe a more apt analogy would have been countries in the EU leaving and issuing their own currency.
My original point was that that money entered the system via large investment banks, whom use it to invest in publicly traded securities. Most of that money doesn't make it to circulation, it just inflates the price of those assets instead of all goods in the wider economy.
Printing money for the past decade and giving it to large banks will have that effect. It's the same as giving $100 to every person at the market and then wondering why an Apple costs $100.50. The large investment banks are consumers of public equities.
Social time with the freedom to choose how you spend it allows individuals to congregate into their own tribes and pursue interests pertinent to them. Forced social interactions that are the byproduct of other necessary transactions are how we learn from others unlike ourselves.
If individuals aren't free to make these financial decisions for themselves, then insurance companies or the government will. My mom had a severe infection while on chemo because the insurance company didn't want to pay for an injection that would've boosted her immune system. Having these decisions made at the population level, instead of the individual is far worse.
Net income adjusted for cost of living for software developers in Indianapolis is one of the highest in the country. Infosys and Salesforce are planning on adding thousands of jobs here over the next few years too, so it's likely those salaries will continue to rise.
All of these points are the exact same concerns I've had with serverless. The higher cost per CPU cycle, plus additional engineering cost managing all the functions and build processes seem better spent deploying on a dedicated server. For all the hype around serverless in 2017, I would love to hear from someone explaining why it's not just hype, and something valuable to developers as more than a side tool.
It was more of an off-handed comment, but I suppose you could rig some sort of carbon sensor that measures X amount of carbon pulled from the atmosphere. Of course any sort of sensor to the physical world can be rigged to produce a false signal.
The same mindset exists in many small businesses that require regular asset purchases, especially manufacturing. I'm not sure farming is special in this regard.
We don't have millions of people dying every year in the US from mosquitoes and this is only about US policy. Millions die every year globally, but this decision will only impact a minuscule portion of those deaths.
That's now how IP law works. If you invent material improvements on prior art, you are entitled to a patent as well, so long as you can articulate the material differences to the patent office.