Domain: washingtonpost.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to washingtonpost.com.
Comments · 10,374
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Re:Are we going to pay for the long term damage?
Republican voters are constantly being convinced into voting against their own interests, to the point where they'll still pull that lever even knowing ahead of time that it's going to hurt them. My favorite example of this sad phenomenon has to be Kentuckians voting a tea-party Republican into the governor's office, fully aware that he's taking away their healthcare.
On Election Day, Blackburn voted for Bevin because he is tired of career politicians and thought a businessman would be more apt to create the jobs that Pike County so needs. Yet when it comes to the state's expansion of health insurance, "it doesn't look to me as if he understands," Blackburn said. "Without this little bit of help these people are giving me, I could probably die... It's not right to not understand something but want to stamp it out."
Here is a guy who has liver problems, neuropathy, back pain, and arrhythmia. His medical care was coming from a clinic funded by the Medicaid expansions that came with the Affordable Care Act. He knows that Bevin, the Republican candidate, has pledged to eliminate the Medicaid expansions in Kentucky. He thinks Bevin doesn't understand that the Medicaid expansions are the only thing helping him and many people like him. He thinks it's wrong that Bevin wants to eliminate this program. He knows that he might die if Bevin is elected and his medical treatment is no longer covered. And he still voted for Bevin because that was the Republican candidate.
Let that sink in. This man intentionally voted to eliminate his own health care and then complained that the person he voted for is taking that coverage away.
Some folks have drank so much of the Kool-aid, there's no helping them.
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Re:Perfectly Secure Computer: unplugged
'Torvalds has often said — and reiterated after the meeting in Seoul — that he is open to new kernel defenses if the cost in performance is reasonable. But debate remains about what qualifies as “reasonable.”,
“I don’t think you have an alternative,” Torvalds said in the interview with The Post. “I don’t think you can design things better than they evolve. ... It really is working very well.” ref -
Re:One obvious question.
Ah, if *most* jurisdictions have provisions, that means it's not a problem? For example, feel free to peruse the relevant WA state legal code and point out the relevant provision (spoiler: the ACLU doesn't seem to think it exists). In any case, 18 US code 2251, a law against child porn is a federal law and - while I believe it only covers inter-state or foreign transmission - contains no such provisions. Fortunately, minors are definitely never in a different state from their SOs, and if they somehow were, would never request or send naughty pictures, right? Not that I know of any cases of the feds prosecuting such a case of private communications between consenting teens, but if they did the law would appear to be on their side.
While states certainly have some de facto control over what cases they will prosecute, in many cases they have certainly attempted to convict sexting teens as child pornographers, and sometimes they have succeeded. The situation does seem less outrageous than I believed it to be, especially after the first few cases to make the news generated enough outrage at this travesty, but it's still far from perfect.
http://www.cnet.com/news/polic... - 17 and 16 year old in Florida prosecuted, found guilty, conviction upheld on appeal.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2... - 15 year old arrested on felony charge (apparently got put on no-cell-phone-or-unsupervised-Internet probation, charges probably dropped afterward)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/2... - 7 teens charged with felonies, at least 6 plea bargained to misdemeanors (better than it could have been, still very wrong)
http://laist.com/2013/05/17/re... - Key quote: "... anyone who sends obscene images of persons under the age of 18, whether it’s of themselves or someone else, are violating child pornography laws,” San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Dept.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... - Cops photographing a 17-year-old's junk to try and enter the pictures as evidence. They eventually backed down, after massive public ridicule, on the plan to have him given an injection to make him erect before photographing him *again*.
http://pilotonline.com/news/go... - Provisions, you say? Nope, can't even downgrade it to a misdemeanor, gotta stay a felony!Sorry for doing the research...
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Re:Where is deniability?
Yes, and I know of some cases where the punishment was a warning and a note on file. No prison term or burning at the stake...
And in some cases it wasn't.
And judges have this thing called discretion. Look it up.
1. they don't always use discretion
2. People hace discretion too (look it up).Sometimes yes sometimes no.
How the fuck is a teenager taking naked selfies causing harm to others?
Here's an example of people using discretion:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://uk.businessinsider.com/...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...Just because it could have been worse doens't mean it wasn't bad.
And here's a lawyers take on it
https://www.isba.org/ibj/2010/...If *you* report a minor like that and thy wind up in prison because a judge does not use discretion, you are just as culpable as the judge.
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Re:How smart?
Google for news articles about the Armatix IP1 smart gun. It's a "smart gun" that requires the user to wear a watch with an authorized RFID chip in order to fire.
Unless the watch somehow can't be worn by a child, this is not a "childproof gun".
Perhaps you're unaware of the facts about the iP1 protests? It's not the availability of misdesigned guns that got people (pardon the pun) up in arms about it, it's the fact that such availability triggers (again, pardon) yet another pointless bit of firearm criminalization in the name of the culture-war push to scapegoat guns for violent crime.
No one who owns a firearm for self-defense wants a firearm that has an additional failure mode. But those unable to see that violence is a problem rooted in people rather than things have already managed to pass a law mandating that that once such unreliable guns are available, they will be the only legally available ones in one state. (For ordinary citizens, at least. I'm sure cop privilege will apply as usual.)
A rule of thumb for evaluating this study, or any one about guns, BTW: anything coming from an institute of public health rather than an institute of criminology is not credible. Crime and violence are not diseases. We have scientific discipline that studies crime; but for prohibitionists, it keeps coming up with the "wrong" answer regarding gun control.
HTH. HAND.
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Re:How smart?
Anyone who has ever cycled the slide on a semi auto can tell you that it's pretty much beyond a "child's" capability.
Oops, somebody didn't tell this 9 year-old.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
You are a moron. An Uzi is not a pistol, it is a sub-machine gun (not relevant but I thought I would mention that anyway).
#1 Full-auto is not semi-auto.
#2 The instructor handed her the weapon with a live round in the chamber since the video clearly shows she never cycled the action. Children are quite capable of flipping off a safety.Please read a post and fully understand it before replying. I have highlighted the pertinent points for you.
Anyone who has ever cycled the slide on a semi auto can tell you that it's pretty much beyond a "child's" capability.
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Re:How smart?
Anyone who has ever cycled the slide on a semi auto can tell you that it's pretty much beyond a "child's" capability.
Oops, somebody didn't tell this 9 year-old.
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Re:You've already accepted a roll-back
Or perhaps is has to do with you pausing before under god for some reason when the pause is only after under god.
Nope. It has something to do with George MacPherson Docherty.
So, this is somehow forcing you to believe in the Christian God, vs the Jewish, Muslim, or whoever else's god/gods, or none at all?
It's forcing a message to be promulgated with the money of the state.
Personally, I find it offensive as a religious person though, money and God do not mix.
Let me guess, blocking religious law from becoming state law is now a bad thing?
It is when you block particular people of a particular religion from using their religious law to guide their own personal decisions, don't you think?
This means, for example, that your own will can be invalidated if you rely upon a given set of laws in it, even if it violated no express concern of the state's existing jurisprudence otherwise.
It'd be one thing if a state had found some will instructions to be problematic, like disinheriting minor children, but this is a blanket ban with no such consideration.
But go ahead and pretend you're interested solely in banning religious law from becoming state law. Nobody catches a whiff of hypocrisy there. You'll note how none of the Amendments, whether in North Carolina, Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota or Tennessee ever seem to note the perils of Christian legal abuses. At most they try to smoke-screen it by being generic, saying foreign law, or international law. Which by a proper reading of the Constitution, would be invalid since it violates the treaty clause. Yet still they do it.
Why?
Of course, the irony is that it is these same states that were most often opposed to civil rights in America. That protested how they were being oppressed by giving up segregation and anti-miscegenation laws. And where they most stridently demand their right to have a big ole display of the Ten Commandments.
Sorry, but Roy Moore is in your bunch, and by their works you shall know them.
You do realize that this is not against the First amendment right? Preventing others from displaying their religious symbols however is.
You do realize that your First Amendment Rights are your speech, not your use of other people's property?
You don't have a right to use the public property to display your religious symbols, especially not your religious symbols alone.
Besides, nobody had to bring up the First Amendment. They can bring up things like Section II-5 of the Oklahome Constitution.
Curse you modern liberal atheists and your time travel machine, rewriting a state constitution!
In english please? I do believe that there has been much from the Left restricting people from praying, even on their own quietly to themselves at team sporting events...that is against religious liberty.
That's against facts you mean, as in reality. Unless you can cite an actual example to substantiate your belief, you're probably just falling into the idea that you MUST be being persecuted. After all, you're a Christian, you're always being thrown to the lions. Always.
Mean while This does happen.
Where is the law stating that you must be a Christian and must go to church on Sundays?
Probably in the darkest recesses of the minds of certain wretched folks who think if only that were the case, all
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Re:War was not invented 10k years ago
The title is pretty honest: this is early evidence of war. I agree that we likely cannot observe too many battlegrounds 10,000 years later. The annoying thing about these reporting on this article is that it makes it sound like humans invented war 10,000 years ago! A human 10,000 years ago is virtually identical to us today, so why would we expect them any less capable or motivated to commit mass murder than someone today?
War seems to be a consequence of population density. The bigger populations get and the scarcer the resources are, the more you are likely to get war. That makes sense since long as there is plenty of land to hunt in and humans are thin on the ground like they were in Europe up to ~25.000 years ago why would I go to war with the first group of people I have run into in six months when I can settle in the uninhabited valley across the ridge be friends with the neighbours and swap single men/women with them (i.e. arrange marriages)? This is one reason why the theory that Modern Humans and Neanderthals lived in Europe side by side for 15.000 to (possibly up to) 25.000 years, never interacted in a significant way and that two teenagers from either group never did what horny teenagers do with the resulting pregnancies, pair-bonding and hybrid offspring. There is hardly a shred of evidence for warfare in Europe, for example, until the Neolithic and the Copper/Bronze-age when warfare (well mostly raiding) really starts to become fairly common. This is not to say that war is unknown in low density populations. there is always some witchdoctor with a claim that is conjuring up evil spirits and sending them over to make your tribe's kids sick (or something) resulting in a massacre but that seems to be quite rare as long as population density is small. There are some examples of Neanderthal, Heidelbergensis and proto-modern human skeletons with cut marks on them that are quite old but that could just as easily be evidence of ritual cannibalism or ritual de-fleshing of the dead as it is evidence of warfare/predatory-cannibalism.
P.S. This is not that much older than the previous oldest example (that I can remember off hand) which is Kennewick Man who died in 8.9k to 9k BP and had a spear point embedded in his hip (a would he survived by many years): https://img.washingtonpost.com... Just a reminder that these people were tougher than nails. -
Re:Slick or sickIf Eisenhower was warning the US about World War II military spending, then why did he make the speech January 17, 1961?
but the overall trend has been decline since the height of WW2...
Not according to the Washington Post
You're awarethat the US has the world's largest military budget aren't you?
You're wrong.
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Re: FUD
No, the butterflies didn't actually die from BT crops: http://www.pnas.org/content/98/21/11937.full
No, the bees aren't sick: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/call-off-the-bee-pocalypse-u-s-honeybee-colonies-hit-a-20-year-high/
No, the roundup resistant crops aren't killing other crops in Argentina. (Seriously, I don't even know how to search for such idiocy.) Crops in one field don't kill crops in another.
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Re:No Backdoorts
Well then, you should welcome me to your club.. Your panic is duly noted. Wake up, white people!
Remember when I wrote that people in the UK and Europe were afraid of reporting, investigating, or prosecuting immigrants for fear of being called racists? You just demonstrated my point with your little race baiting comment.
Rotherham: In the face of such evil, who is the racist now?
The Yorkshire town where 1,400 girls have been sexually abused by Asian men is a byword for depravity – all because people wouldn’t rock the multicultural boat
Rotherham child abuse scandal: 1,400 children exploited, report finds
A 'new dimension' of sexual assault in Cologne
Germans outraged by mayor’s advice for women after raft of harassment
It’s not only Germany that covers up mass sex attacks by migrant men... Sweden’s record is shameful -
Re:So what?
By all means, provide your source that supports your ridiculous claims.
If I had made any ridiculous claims, I would be glad to supply sources. But since everything I brought to your attention is in the public record, maybe you should shun those moronic sites you have been reading and try reality for a while.
FBI's "Suicide Letter" to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance
Pete Seeger
Woody Guthrie
John Lennon
Even more black people were lynched in the U.S. than previously thought, study finds
The Murder of Emmett Till
There's the short list detailing everything you've worked so hard to ignore. So, how about if you do a little reading and see if you can find out how many people went to jail for those thousands of lynchings history has recorded. And while you're at it, how about if you show me where in the FBI's charter authorizes surveillance on lawful folk singers, non-violent rock stars as well as religious men who preached peaceful assembly to redress what they believed to be illegal grievances.
Ignorance can be unlearned while willful ignorance is an inexcusable state of mind. -
"Loans" to pay back political supporters?
That's worth 8 Solyndras
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Re:invite more people in?
Except most Chinatowns in the U.S. are where non-Chinese people go to eat exotic food, not a separate city-within-a-city where any non-Chinese who enter will be beaten (or worse).
Going back a century or more, Chinatowns were ethnic ghettos not that different from other examples. Brought together by the pull of being close together with familiar people with shared backgrounds -- and the push of being excluded from elsewhere.
Of course, what is different is that the Chinese opened businesses, and so they needed to welcome outsiders to come and spend money there. To the point that in some Chinatowns have become business districts where few Chinese actually still live:
https://www.washingtonpost.com... -
Re:This has obvious value
It helps that we don't rely on Saudi oil as much as we used to. Fracking is kinda filthy, but for the first time in my lifetime we don't need to be muscled around by the Saudis to keep our nation moving. And they feel the hurt - to raise cash, they've announced they may offer shares of their state-owned oil company to the pubic. And that's not the worst... the whole region is literally heating up, to the point it may become uninhabitable in 80 or 90 years.
It may not hurt now to re-think who's side we have to be on in the weird cat-fight between the Saudis and Iran that serves to fuck up the entire region. The way it used to be, we'd bend-over backward for the Saudis, even in spite of their frequent violations of human rights (like this one)... all because we needed a friend in the region with oil. Now, maybe not so much. Hell, Iran is actually trying to make nice with us. Changing times, maybe.
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Re:You know? Something here is disturbing...
Rand Paul said vaccines can lead to mental disorders: http://crooksandliars.com/2015...
Also, WaPo did a story about CA anti-vaxxers that showed they tended to share Paul's world view...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...Between religious conservatives and "sovereign individual" types, anti-vax sentiment tends to come from the Right. The Left tends to oppose pharma companies on grounds that their products are overpriced and restricted with corrupt IP practices (IOW they want MORE, not less).
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Re:I don't see why...
It was a stupid tweet. Trump is on the record making it clear where his priorities are.
The local boy laughed, told the presidential candidate "yeah," and said: "I want to know your opinions on NASA."
Trump wanted to make sure he correctly heard the question, turning to those around him to clarify if the boy was asking about the national space program or the North American Free Trade Agreement. A woman near the boy shouted: "Space!"
"You know, in the old days, it was great," Trump told the boy, along with an audience of more than 600. "Right now, we have bigger problems — you understand that? We've got to fix our potholes. You know, we don't exactly have a lot of money."
One can agree with his sentiment or not (which he's made before), but he's certainly not going to be doing anything "inspirational" with NASA.
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Prostitution Precrime just for driveling down a ro
Prostitution Precrime just for driveling down a road
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To understand Rubio, you need to see this
Rubio is a leading opponent of municipal broadband deployment, which would offer 'unfair competition' to struggling cable providers like Comcast and AT & T.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... -
Re:Obama, Champion of the Firearms IndustryI am not a lawyer, and obviously neither are you because your pie in the sky idea of liability does not even come close to reality.
I would not be surprised if, some day, liability for firearms had an attractive-nuisance provision associated with it, and that the legitimate owner of the firearm would have to maintain insurance on that firearm that covered the liability of that firearm's misuse until that firearm were legally transferred to a new owner or until that firearm were documented as destroyed.
An attractive nuisance is defined as anything that could be considered to attract children onto someones property, for example pools or fountains. Unless firearms owners are storing their weapons by strewing them about in the back yard or have a sign up saying "Guns are here" I doubt a case could be made that it is an attractive nuisance.
And worse for the firearm owner, if that firearm is stolen, unlike vehicles that are generally stolen to be disassembled for parts, the liability of the firearm would probably never go away and if they discontinued insurance then they would still have a degree of liability for what transpired for a firearm that they let get out of their possession.
What you think will happen here is tantamount to charging a car theft victim for a bank robbery committed by the thief, or a phone theft victim for a drug deal arranged with their stolen cell phone. That is not how liability works and unless the courts go pants on head retarded it will not work that way in the foreseeable future.
The biggest problem is the lack of personal responsibility at every stage of the process, right up to the legitimate owner. Absolutely there are owners that are quite responsible, but on the other hand we routinely hear of incidents where children have shot people, be it a young friend, young sibling, a parent, or in extreme cases a firearms instructor with an UZI, because firearms have been left out where people too young to understand their usage manage to get a hold of them.
Leaving weapons out where children can access them is actually already a crime and negligent owners are being prosecuted for it. Case in point is thiscase where a father left his weapon rolled up on top of the fridge and the child wanted to play cops and robbers. It is a tragic story but the father is responsible and should be charged. I am not sure how you think this shows a lack of responsibility.
We routinely hear of people's homes being broken into and their firearms stolen.
I am not what responsibility you are expecting burglary victims to hold for the theft of their belongings, do we hold big screen owners responsible when their house is robbed as well?
We routinely hear of spousal shootings.
Again we hold people responsible for that as well, shooting your spouse is against the law and people go to jail for that.
We routinely hear of gun-cleaning accidents where someone didn't clear the chamber after removing the magazine.
If a person injures someone while cleaning and is found to be negligent they can and have been charged. However if it is a true accident then there may be no charges because it was an accident, same as if a person accidentally hit a child with a car. Honestly it seems you want gun owners to be under a different standard under the law than is applicable to any other group. I would caution you that unequal treatment for groups was done in the past and it was as wrong then as it is now.
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Two types of Error
"Smart" gun means two things:
(1) it will fire when it is supposed to fire
(2) it will not fire when it is not supposed to fire.These are the classic types of errors, type-1 error and type-2 error. The lock on your door, for example, has two failure modes: not opening when it is supposed to, or opening when it's not supposed to.
As is always true, you can make the rate of one type of error arbitrarily close to zero by making the other type of error higher. You can lower the failure rate of your door not opening when you want it to, for example, by removing the lock entirely. That increases the failure mode "will open when it's not supposed to," since it now opens to anybody who wants to enter, whether you want them to or not.
The question for "smart" guns is, can you improve the option "won't fire when it's not supposed to" without seriously increasing the probability of it failing to fire when it is supposed to?
The failure mode "gun fires when it isn't supposed to" covers cases such cases as, your 4-year old finds it and shoots somebody, or somebody grabs your gun and shoots you, or even you drop the gun and it fires.
Right now, the recommended solution to the failure mode "make sure the gun doesn't fire when it's not supposed to" is "keep the gun in a locked gun safe", and, if you want to make it even safer against that failure, "store the ammunition somewhere else." This does have the problem that when you do want to make the gun fire, you have to unlock the gun safe, take out the gun, and then go to the separate location to load the gun. This solution is so cumbersome that--surprise--a lot of people don't implement it.
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Re:Don't underestimate what they are trying to doThe media seem to hype so much about the involvement in Syria and (may be) Ukraine cost the Russia's economy that much, and they love to do that. In fact, by many sources, all have similar calculation that the airstrike in Syria costs about 1-2 billions a year, and Putin himself said that, it's the cost of training soldiers and now they are just trained in Syria.
You are right about Ukraine, too. It seems that the West don't love Ukraine anymore, it's done: As a symbolic moment, when Ukraine was the center of events, was the card they need, Poroshenko was gave a honorable welcome, but at Paris last month, no one was at the airport to wait for him, and he was put among the developing Africa national leaders.
http://southfront.org/france-p...
and U.S.A don't bother to send usable weapons to them:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
When the EuroMaidan 'revolution' happened, there are about 50-50 supporters for both side, in fact there are no 'revolution' in the South and the East of nation. The Southern and Eastern people had no chance to express their opinions. After the so-called 'revolution', the same old, even worse politicians went to office. Poroshenko was rated even below previous Yanukovich (when he was president), the corruption is not decreased but higher than ever. Saakashvili in recently meeting in Kiev:"During all the time I'm here, I haven't met a single person who would say corruption had waned since the times of Yanukovich," Saakashvili noted. "What's more, I'm hearing now and then that the fees today are much higher. I haven't spoken to a single small or medium-sized business owner who wouldn't tell me the situation at present is as bad as it ever was under Kuchma or the 'orange' government or Yanukovich,"
Note: It's also funny that, Saakashvili is 'gray' as well:
http://www.day.kiev.ua/en/arti...After the incident, Saakashvili immediately gave a press conference at the Presidential Administration, where he said: “From the first minute of his speech, Avakov began to say that I was not speaking emotionally, unlike in a TV show. He insulted me and raised the question of Uralkhim. I do not know this oligarch, I do not know what Uralkhim is, and I have never met this oligarch [although later the Ministry of Interior published a video of Saakashvili meeting with the Russian oligarch Dmitry Mazepin. – Author]
At least, under Yanukovich, there were some 'democracy', parties supported him and others against him. After the 'activists' forced oppositions resigned and/or beat them, the 'lustration' law becomes reality, which bans all the officials under old government participate in the new one to 'clean' the corruption (of course, not the 'revolution' leaders) WITHOUT any judgment. Now all against them be named 'FSB agents'.
After years of propaganda in the media, such as 'President v oligarch', it likely that the West can't stand with their 'chosen' people: Corruption in Ukraine is so bad, a Nigerian prince would be embarrassed, Poroshenko, Yatseniuk, Avakov... all are even worse than Yanukovich before. Here is just a snippet:Poroshenko is the only one of Ukraine’s 10 richest people to see his net worth actually increase in the past year, and his bank continues to expand while others lose their licenses. One of his industrial compa
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Re:Already accomplishing
But if you just like the idea of a rules-for-everything society, California's the place ya oughta be.
http://knowmore.washingtonpost...
Seems people don't like the idea.
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Re:So...federal breakfast+lunch+dinner+... = fail?
No I didn't.
You said: "No it's not and no it doesn't. Indeed, the whole point of it is to achieve the complete opposite result." That statement is semantically identical to: "It doesn't do that because we do it intending for it to not do that." Your *intent* doesn't mean your understanding is correct; I pour kerosene into my car engine intending to improve its longevity by cleaning the gunk out of it, and there are a lot of mechanics suggesting this as a method to clean your engine, but it could be a really good way to just destroy your engine (and some mechanics have suggested that it does exactly that).
Your progressive tax example is misleading because it uses a divide between the bottom 90% and the top 10%,
I believe the term you're looking for is "Illustrative," which means "Shows the mechanism in a more complex system by a simplified example." "Misleading" means "draws an incorrect conclusion."
and uses this as a basis of comparing to the Romans to (seemingly) make an argument that "things aren't so bad today".
It argues that things are different in some ways and similar in other ways. The Romans had a healthy society with an income gap; we have a bigger income gap and a healthier society. These aren't correlates; the wider income gap is not harmful because our wealth is higher, and a much wider income gap *today* (say, 70% of the money going to the top 10%, right now, without us being any more wealthy) would precipitate an economic collapse. An income gap such as we have today might have precipitated an economic collapse in Rome; I don't care to do the analysis, as I'd have to examine the finances of Rome and the standard-of-living at various class levels, which is hard since I don't have year-by-year Roman census data. IF the vulgar Roman class were poor enough, THEN moving more of their income to the rich would push them into a level of absolute poverty triggering a collapse of the workforce and consumer base.
Wealth and income distribution today is mind-bogglingly skewed towards the top fractions of a percent of the population, and is becoming increasingly more so over the last few decades
THIS IS A FALLACIOUS ARGUMENT. It's begging the question. Why is it mind-boggling? What is "skewed"? How is the increasing income gap different than the increasing income gap that occurred all throughout history?
Let's ask a bit more on that last one. The income gap across history has widened as GDP per capita has increased; does it seem significant that the income gap appears to have widened more quickly during a massive spike in productivity starting just after 1960? Is *everything* happening faster; and is every argument that the rich are suddenly taking more each year than they did before just ignoring that we are *making* more each year than before? Are we getting richer twice as fast, and the rich padding themselves with the lion's share they've always taken twice as fast in turn?
Your argument assumes a widening income gap is bad, and that a flatter income gap is good.
Now, why do you think a bunch of people sitting around doing nothing (a BIG) is less wasteful than the same bunch of people doing productive work (a jobs guarantee) ?
People doing productive work draw a cost. You have argued that "NUH UH IT'S FREE!" and "WELL WE JUST MAKE THE RICH PAY FOR IT LULZOR!" The rich are not a natural resource.
You're even stupid enough to argue that taxes are not for revenue. Let's just shut off all taxes, and see how the government pays for anything. You have no concept of economics and would pay $1,000 to save yourself $500, then claim being $500 poorer is better than missing out on such great saving!
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Re:It's a great move forward.
A lot of the things that have happened recently in the U.S. could have been put to rest - one way or another - with first person video (and often multiple points of view). Dash cams are great, and we should continue using them on EVERY car, but every officer should also have this kind of tech. There should also be punishments or reprimands if the device is turned off during a shift (malfunctions aside). The video should also be streamed to their vehicles and, perhaps, even relayed directly back to the station.
I'm all for this, but some recent events caught on video haven't been enough to draw up charges. They make sure to take care of their own.
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Re:America Doesn't Have a Gun Problem...
Chigaco is not, and never has been, the murder capital of the country.
That is a myth.
That FBI releases the numbers every year.Chicago is not even close to being the most dangerous city in the US.
6 cities have held the title 'murder capital' since 1985. None was Chicago.
In fact the city most often claiming the title, is New Orleans.
And it's one of those that is barred from crafting any firearms ordinances by state law.
What state is that? Why, Louisiana, the 2nd most dangerous state I the nation, with some of the weakest gun laws in the nation.And at the other end of the spectrum, one of the safest cities in the country is, repeatedly, New York City, replete with its very strict gun control.
Located in New York state, one of the safest states in the nation, a state with tough gun control, and already closed the gun show loophole among other things.Funny how you types always leave that out.
And some more reading:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
http://www.kansascity.com/opin...
https://www.washingtonpost.com... -
Re:Sooner or later...
And whose fault is this? Who's been developing the technology and selling it to anyone willing to bankrupt themselves to prevent possible US invasion?
Give me a P! Give me an A! Give me a K! Give me an I! Give me an S! Give me a T! Give me an A! Give me an N!
That's right, the friendly host of Osama bin Laden himself after we invaded Afghanistan! You guessed it! Pakistan! They bought themselves a great big "get out of invasion free!" card by letting US forces use Pakistan airfields in the "war on some terrorists", but they've been selling nuclear technology for decades now. Where do you think North Korea *bought* the tools to refine nuclear fuel?
If you think I'm kidding, checkout https://www.washingtonpost.com... .
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Re:cause and effect
when people disagree to an extreme and those in authority do nothing, you wind up with vigilantes.
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Oops, wrong already
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Re:State doing the CYA thing
Story about a guy named David Petraeus who mishandled classified information and got into a lot of trouble.
Looks like you lied to try and cover up for the Hillary. And the name calling once again shows the "tolerance" of the left-wing. How many times can you call people wackos and racists and hateful before everyone realizes you are all that?
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Re:I.S.I.S.
As Islamic fundamentalism spreads through Africa...
There's a reason why the most virulent movements spawn in the most backwards areas, where comfort, safety and security are at their lowest.
According to THIS, it's well-educated engineer types who are most likely to embrace terrorism.
See also the recent terrorist attack in California. The male attacker (at least) was a well-educated, well-paid, long-term resident. He and his wife had a brand new baby, and the innocent people who they slaughtered had given them a baby shower earlier this year. That new baby is an orphan because the parents decided that slaughtering innocent people was more important than living their very successful lives and raising their child.
Islam is different..
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Re:Accuracy 52% with 600 programmers and 8 samples
good luck with your investigation when your useless algorithm with a 50/50 "success" rate throws you off track with a false negative.
Police drug sniffing dogs have an accuracy of around or under 50% and the courts have ruled that's just fine. It's We the People who are going to need the good luck. Cops don't need it, they can just throw 100 bogus charges at the wall and see what sticks, day in and day out. It's not like they get fired for failure.
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Re: Climatology
http://www.scientificamerican....
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
and on and on and on... -
Re:The US is not a Democracy it is a Republic...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Once again, if you're going to talk about something, perhaps you should actually learn a little about what you talk about. The only thing you said that was accurate was that we have an electoral college... the rest is just ignorance. -
Re:Why we shouldn't vote every day...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
I seem to keep having to post this because people seem to keep not taking basic poly-sci classes, but still want to flap their gums. -
Re:For the last time...
And I'm getting sick and tired of explaining to you creatures that we live in a REPUBLIC.
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Re: Republic vs Democracy
Western reality: https://www.washingtonpost.com...
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Re: SIgh
In a direct democracy, that's exactly what would happen. We live in a constitutional republic, which is basically indistinguishable from a representative democracy. https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Several of the founding fathers had very negative feelings towards democracy, give the only democracies around at the time were direct democracies. They saw tyranny of the majority play out, where what they believed to be inalienable rights could be stripped from people purely by the vote of the majority. A great example of that is these people who claim that states should have the right to vote on whether or not to allow same sex marriage. That is a classic example of tyranny of the majority.
The constitution doesn't empower the majority, it restricts them from committing tyranny of the majority and subjugating the minority to the majority's whims. -
Pot calling kettle back
Your Beliefs Doesn't Make You A Better Person, Your Behavior Does.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/... -
Re: cultural artifact how?
And rabbits
And cane toads
And pigs
And cats (okay, to be fair, they haven't necessarily lost this one yet, but feral cats are pretty goddamn good at surviving).Australia: The world's favorite destination for invasive species.
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Re:Is this interesting anymore?
Congrats, you didn't actually read the thread. See the picture of him in front of it moments later with a Slashdot post number... Also, you know the original WAS a hoax, then he went and did it for real, right?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
So who is trolled now? -
Re:What I Don't Understand...Even if you counted all the "bad, less bad, and not really bad just misinformed people living next door to you that are all more likely to cause you harm than ISIL and terrorism are" as terrorists themselves, they'd still be statistically less of a threat to your life than, say, your own furniture.
Terrorism is ultimately another bogeyman, and while a problem nonetheless, I believe that we are interpreting a situational cause (the "Great Game" that has practically never ended, resulting in turmoil in various countries and causing more people to look for extremist solutions to impose order) as fundamental (that Islam predisposes people to terrorism, which is contradicted by a study (Lewis, Bernard, 'Islam: The Religion and the People' (2009), pg. 53) finding Islamic jurisprudence to be at odds with terrorism and a report by MI5 finding Islamic terrorists not being particularly religious or irreligious on average).
The fundamental problem is that when you have a lot of young people who either live in or have active ties to a region that has been screwed over for a long time, you are bound to see increasing numbers of people getting angry about it and thus increasing (but still small) numbers of people channeling that anger into horrific acts (which will, of course, be high profile compared to more statistically significant threats), believing those acts to be a solution, and perverting a belief system shared by most other people from the group they believe to themselves to be fighting for to justify them and popularize their cause.
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Re:No excuse for not hiring more trannies and sjw'
The reason I would suggest GGP talk to a psychologist is because somehow GGP has the delusion that there's anybody who would rather have a trans woman as an employee.
Employers actively discriminate against male-to-female transsexuals. Female-to-male transsexuals reported no loss of earnings, and increased respect.
Before that sex change think about your next paycheck
You might expect that anybody who has had a sex change, or even just cross-dresses on occasion, would suffer a wage cut because of social stigmatization. Wrong, or at least partly wrong. Turns out it depends on the direction of the change: the study found that earnings for male-to-female transgender workers fell by nearly one-third after their gender transitions, but earnings for female-to-male transgender workers increased slightly.
and
Ben Barres, a female-to-male transgender neuroscientist at Stanford, found that his work was more highly valued after his gender transition. “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today,” a colleague of his reportedly said, “but then his work is much better than his sister’s.”
Dr. Barres, of course, doesn’t have a sister in academia.
3) Poverty is a massive problem in the trans community.
Transgender respondents were nearly four times more likely to have a household income of less than $10,000, compared to the general population, Injustice at Every Turn found. They were unemployed at twice the rate of the general population, or roughly between 10 percent and 14 percent throughout 2008, the year the survey was conducted.
Trans Americans 4 times more likely to be living in poverty
In one of its most striking findings, MAP and CAP report that trans people are nearly four times more likely to have a yearly household income below $10,000 (15 percent vs. 4 percent of the nontrans population). The numbers go up if a trans individual is a person of color, with Asian American/Pacific Islander and Latino trans folks nearly six times as likely to be living in poverty as their API or Latino cisgender counterparts.
Maybe they see us as a threat because many of us are forced to either work for (much) lower wages or work the streets.
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Routers alone = shit (here's proof #6/15)
http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
http://thestack.com/root-comma...
http://thestack.com/zyxeltech-...
http://threatpost.com/12-milli...
http://threatpost.com/dns-base...
http://threatpost.com/internet...
http://tools.cisco.com/securit...
http://tools.cisco.com/securit...
http://tools.cisco.com/securit...
http://voices.washingtonpost.c...
http://www.bing.com/search?q=r...
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/s...
http://www.dshield.org/diary/+...
http://www.dshield.org/diary/2...
http://www.dshield.org/diary/5...APK
P.S.=> So much for your faith in routers alone stupid (225 in total, 15 posts with 15 items each)... apk
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Re:Can somebody explain to me
No matter. The gun grabbers have shifted gears.
They lost the Constitutional argument and now they are trying to work the Terrorist angle. Gun owners = terrorists, etc.
Just witness that effort to restrict rights based on the No Flty List
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Why buy childhood when you can buy congress?
Disney have repeatedly and successfully lobbied for increases of the H1B scheme, and are notorious abusers and beneficiaries of it.
Paul Ryan has just gifted them a 400% increase in the number of H2-B visas issued. To be used for, surprise, surprise, cheap labor at theme parks.
Copyright terms get extended every time Micky Mouse or Snow White approach the public domain.
Bought attorney generals and corrupt judges are working to sink fantasy sports sites, the NFL's plan-B to preserve revenue as ESPN subscription decline. (This increases Disney's chances of getting a larger slice of a shrinking pie at the expense of the leagues.)
Yada, yada, yada.
It's a sad day when I agree with a pathetic old cook like Bernie Sanders, but the US is controlled by evil corporations, and none are more evil that Disney.
Defund DSNY!
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Re:America
sugar in nearly all processed foods - Yes, but who's forcing you to buy processed foods? Vote with your wallet and don't buy processed foods. Simple.
I really hate this argument. Like the only option is to 'not buy processed foods' right. How about speaking up about the unhealthy stranglehold the American Sugar Industry has?
You know, the same Sugar Industry that lobbied against introducing a 10% hard limit to added sugar, which is a standard worldwide. Or more recently, lobbied hard against placing a limit on the size of drinks. Hell, they're big enough and powerful enough to keep keep foreign competitors at bay, when other industries are opening the doors to foreign competition.
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Great, if your counter arguments were true at all
Your points would be fantastic, if any of them were true: 1. I live amongst more educated people: While many in California feel you are better than everyone else, the rankings say...not so much. Tenth worst, actually.
http://247wallst.com/special-r...
2. Most welfare mouths are in the midwest: Here is a list of the states with most welfare population compared to working population. 1. Ca 2. NM 3. HI 4. MI 5. Al 6. SC 7. IL 8. KT 9. Oh 10. NY. Now, two of those are midwest, and because IL and OH enjoy large, urban centers.
http://brandongaille.com/welfa...
3. Most are white: Slightly more welfare recipients are black compared to white (39.8 vs. 38.8) but, black people make up 13% and white are about 63 percent, to say most are white is such a torture of reality it borders on a sickness.
http://www.statisticbrain.com/...
4. The one you did get right is that most welfare people did not finish school. However, when you look at graduation rates, places that I am fairly sure you would say are "educated" i.e. coastal meccas, are not exactly nation beaters. Ca is middle at best and New York is near the bottom. Br> https://www.washingtonpost.com...
I know making such statements are cool in some circles, but facts and links make for stronger arguments, better policy, and more honest discussion. You simply can not fix problems without this. I for one, want to fix issues, not play blame games. -
Re:John Oliver
Honest citizens are still mostly badly trained dumbasses.
And yet, GP's point is still correct. Taking guns away from the law-abiding would not decrease your risk.
Do you live your life by real numbers or just gut feelings?
Oh, real numbers, definitely.
Since 1992, the number of unintentional shootings has declined by 57% in the USA:
http://sssfonline.org/nssf-report-unintentional-firearms-fatalities-historic-low/
Since the early 90's, the number of intentional shootings has also fallen roughly in half. It fell more quickly than the unintentional numbers but then plateaued. Note that this statistic excludes suicides... properly, IMHO, as I don't believe that guns cause suicide.
And both of these declines are despite the fact that there are more firearms available than ever before. This article has a chart that starts in 1996; it shows that in 1996 there were less than 250 million firearms in the USA, and currently there are over 350 million firearms in the USA. That's over a 40% increase in the number of firearms.
Therefore, the increase in guns must prove that the guns caused the reduction in violence, right? Well, no. Correlation doesn't prove causation.
However, these numbers do show that guns don't magically cause violence. If guns caused violence, then the massive increase in the number of guns should be correlated with an increase of violence rather than a decline.
So: if you "live your life by real numbers", and you want to argue in favor of taking firearms away from the law-abiding, then please provide some statistics that support your plan.