The problem is when the science starts with statistical observations. Statistics are never 100% and the argument can always be made that correlation does not mean causation. You see this with things like the question of how bad tobacco is for you and historically the germ theory of disease. The germ theory of disease was a good example with it starting with statistical observations like more people got typhus around particular wells and these wells seemed to be polluted by feces or women who were getting pre-natel exams who were the closest to the dissection room were likelier to get certain deadly infections. Politicians didn't want to pay to make sure sewage was separate from drinking water and Doctors didn't want to be bothered with intense washing and in both cases screamed that the idea of little invisible things making people sick was unscientific. Even Pasteur pretty well showing that there were little things that caused disease the denial was high. At what point is action taken on theories such as little invisible things causing disease? Especially when obviously some disease has other causes. In the case of the germ theory of disease eventually the science got good enough to show that little invisible things did cause disease and the old guard died out and now we have scientific consensus that some types of disease is caused by little things but there are still a few nut-jobs who deny it and others who argue that a little bit will disappear in that big lake because sewage treatment is expensive.
They've already had their 17 years of patent protection and charged enough to recoup their costs and make a decent profit which is the social contract with patents. Now they change the colour of the pill or some such minor change and expect another 20 years.
Racism including antisemitism was quite acceptable before WW2 all over the west. Hitler tried a few solutions before finalizing on the "final solution" starting out with simply exiling the undesirables. No one took them in, there were ship loads of Jews traveling around the worlds oceans looking for a country that would let them in and none did. This was one of the reasons that the final solution was considered acceptable, if other countries cared, they would have welcomed the undesirables. Things haven't changed that much besides the Jews doing a really good PR job. Think of the second most persecuted group in Nazi Germany and at least here in Canada they're still (lightly) prosecuted even while our PM claims the only reason people would dislike Israel is antisemitism and gives Israel a pass on breaking international law and running an apartheid state.
We can always go back to when one private security company (Pinkertons) out of many was bigger then the US armed forces. The government at the time was just strong enough to legitimize the private security companies who amongst other functions, did a lot of the work keeping the common worker in their place. Actually we are going back there, as long as the government is capable of deputizing the private security the rich and powerful can fuck people over without a powerful government. Many other things are the same, big industry just needs the government to be powerful enough to legitimize them, which just takes a law, regulation or executive order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... The private prison industry is another interesting expansion of private power.
As I get older and headlights get brighter I find even a bright flash can be irritating, especially if repeated flashing. The law in Canada does vary from province to province with someone else mentioning a similar case to the article in Quebec
The problem is these terms are pretty general. Trying to pigeon hole everyone into 2 categories ends with such generalizations that it is hard to say what most conservatives or liberals believe. Generally conservatives are pro-business and the left is pro-people. Of course America is screwed by how expensive it is to run for office and politics is now big business with both parties mostly existing to do the bidding of their masters and the idea of masters is usually considered right wing. What we really need is more focus on the other categories such as authoritarian to libertarian with sadly almost all politicians being well into the authoritarian side. Democracy is a pretty shitty system with the only thing going for it being it is better then the other options.
Is it OK to stand outside someones house all night with a megaphone blasting speech at them? Walking up to someone and blasting 200db of amplified speech directly into their ear to assault them OK? Blinding people with your high beams is similar, especially with the option of flashing your low beams. Of course really the law is about slowing people down to the legal speed and giving warning does the job which is why around here (BC) the cops phone up the radio stations and announce where their speed traps are.
In BC the cops want people to know where the speed traps are, so phone the radio stations and tell them. Speed traps are supposed to be about slowing people down.
The Canadian courts visited this issue recently with a Mormon sect claiming that their religion required it. They ended up ruling against it as most of the woman in the polygamous relationships were coerced into the relationship at very young ages and it also took away rights from the young males of the community as common practice was to kick most young males out at an early age due to them being competition. As usual it is a balance of rights and while polygamy amongst consenting adults seems fine, the prevalent practice doesn't, at least in Bountiful BC
An anti-liberty fascist is one type of conservative just like an anti-liberty communist is one type of socialist. There are multiple axis on the political chart, left vs right and authoritarian vs libertarian for a starts. Most politicians fall somewhere on the right and authoritarian with the few successful libertarian ones being to the left. Gandhi and Nelson Mandela are 2 examples. Extreme authoritarians include Stalin on the left and General Pinochet on the right. Funny enough Hitler was actually pretty close to the center with a mixture of left and right policies but extremely authoritarian. Really it is the authoritarians that we need to get away from but they're attracted to politics and usually ruthless.
From the outside looking in the ACA looks pretty conservative. Forcing people to deal with corporations is the opposite of socialism and it is so funny to hear American conservatives going on about how it is socialist. Its got the usual right wing authoritarian thing going of forcing you to give your money to big business. The left wing authoritarian thing would have been the government running it. Remember that the it started out by being proposed by a right wing think tank and championed by Romney who is even more right wing then Obama. Of course ideally would be non-authoritarian healthcare where right wing would be lots of competing small businesses and the left wing being lots of competing co-ops or at least local government.
Rather then bailing them out or letting them fail, the government could have nationalized them, kept them running and then broken them up into smaller pieces and sold them off. When I read about the amount of bonuses the banks paid out to the people that crashed the system I really think things are broken. If I break the (major) law and get caught, I lose most everything, not get bonuses backed by tax payer money.
My dial-up is close to $40 a month now that the race to the bottom is over and the only ISPs left are the ones that didn't go bankrupt competing on price or go out of business due to shitty service. The private bridges around here are limited by geography to the only places where bridges make sense, eg narrowing of the river and such. To go to the places where I used to go regularly means paying $3x2 two ways, an extra $12 on a trip that was barely affordable before, so I no longer go to those places. The businesses that built the bridges can't make the money that they were planning on so they've invested in politicians and the tax payers make up the operating costs and the expected profits. They also got laws passed limiting indemnity as well so thy don't have to worry about law suits. The government thinking that they would save money on bridges got re-elected on the platform of lower taxes and dropped taxes which means that gross wages went down to keep net wages the same. Now the government has less money, people have larger expenses, especially since everything went up in price to pay the tolls and most people are behind. The bridge owners did really well and now have more money to invest in politicians and propaganda about how things are better now as all the excess money is going into a few private hands instead of being spread around.
Well the obvious solution is to drop taxes. This is good as employers can then drop wages as they don't have to pay out as much to stay level when it comes to take home pay. Meanwhile everything can be privatized. This creates a bunch of opportunities for businesses to make money on fees, everything goes up in price while your take home pay has stayed close to the same and now you can magically save and invest. Even if magically the employers didn't drop your wages, the resulting inflation from all the new fees added to everything will eat away at your paycheck. It's great if you get in at the ground floor as you can be one of the ones pocketing the tax savings through lower wages and if you're really lucky you can be in the position to charge fees on things that are natural monopolies. Like the guy down the page who goes on about private bridges and thinks that there are infinite good bridge building spots so competition would happen when in reality bridges are built in places with infrastructure and natural advantages like a narrowing of the river.
While obviously someone illegally entering the country is breaking a law and subject to arrest and once officially arrested (here you have to be touched and informed that you are under arrest) can be searched, that is not what I'm talking about. What about if I legally cross the border for vacation reasons, once legally in the country (past the border) I can be legally searched since I'm not a citizen? How about people with a green card? Or my wife who theoretically can cross the border anywhere, carrying a backpack full of stuff and carrying a rifle and get most of the benefits of being a USA citizen including working etc due to treaties that America signed in the latter 18th century and reaffirmed in a treaty in 1814 or so? According to the American Constitution, treaties are the second highest law in the land, trumping everything except the Constitution. My countries Constitution specifically says that all people in the country get all rights excepting some mobility rights and voting. (yes voting is a right here)
I think you mean that you lived in a totalitarian socialist country. Socialism comes in many types, eg co-ops and credit unions are socialist as they are owned by the collective. Totalitarian is bad whether socialist or capitalist.
The 4th Amendment protects the rights of citizens to not have their things searched or siezed without a judicially sanctioned warrant based upon probable cause
And here I thought it protected people. Lets see,
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Yep, no mention of citizens, just people. Of course too many Americans seem to consider people to only consist of American citizens.
I agree which is why I said a different (meaning amended) Constitution. India for example has IIRC hundreds of amendments to its constitution. America couldn't even be bothered to do an easy one like making the Air Force constitutional. Part of the problem (especially here in Canada) is the fear of opening a can of worms.
People were pretty neutral about it at one time with shitting in streams being accepted and privies right besides wells. Using poop as fertilizer has also been pretty common at times. After the 1854 Broad Street cholera out break the reaction to the idea was To accept his proposal would have meant indirectly accepting the oral-fecal method transmission of disease, which was too unpleasant for most of the public to contemplate. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is when the science starts with statistical observations. Statistics are never 100% and the argument can always be made that correlation does not mean causation. You see this with things like the question of how bad tobacco is for you and historically the germ theory of disease.
The germ theory of disease was a good example with it starting with statistical observations like more people got typhus around particular wells and these wells seemed to be polluted by feces or women who were getting pre-natel exams who were the closest to the dissection room were likelier to get certain deadly infections. Politicians didn't want to pay to make sure sewage was separate from drinking water and Doctors didn't want to be bothered with intense washing and in both cases screamed that the idea of little invisible things making people sick was unscientific. Even Pasteur pretty well showing that there were little things that caused disease the denial was high.
At what point is action taken on theories such as little invisible things causing disease? Especially when obviously some disease has other causes.
In the case of the germ theory of disease eventually the science got good enough to show that little invisible things did cause disease and the old guard died out and now we have scientific consensus that some types of disease is caused by little things but there are still a few nut-jobs who deny it and others who argue that a little bit will disappear in that big lake because sewage treatment is expensive.
They've already had their 17 years of patent protection and charged enough to recoup their costs and make a decent profit which is the social contract with patents. Now they change the colour of the pill or some such minor change and expect another 20 years.
Racism including antisemitism was quite acceptable before WW2 all over the west. Hitler tried a few solutions before finalizing on the "final solution" starting out with simply exiling the undesirables. No one took them in, there were ship loads of Jews traveling around the worlds oceans looking for a country that would let them in and none did. This was one of the reasons that the final solution was considered acceptable, if other countries cared, they would have welcomed the undesirables.
Things haven't changed that much besides the Jews doing a really good PR job. Think of the second most persecuted group in Nazi Germany and at least here in Canada they're still (lightly) prosecuted even while our PM claims the only reason people would dislike Israel is antisemitism and gives Israel a pass on breaking international law and running an apartheid state.
We can always go back to when one private security company (Pinkertons) out of many was bigger then the US armed forces. The government at the time was just strong enough to legitimize the private security companies who amongst other functions, did a lot of the work keeping the common worker in their place.
Actually we are going back there, as long as the government is capable of deputizing the private security the rich and powerful can fuck people over without a powerful government. Many other things are the same, big industry just needs the government to be powerful enough to legitimize them, which just takes a law, regulation or executive order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The private prison industry is another interesting expansion of private power.
Blight sounded better
Every time I've tried the beta and try to see the comments, I get
Shazbot! We ran into some trouble getting the comments.
Try again... na-nu, na-nu!
signed another long time user who will be gone if the classic interface goes away.
The power of the purse was how the English Parliament became all powerful. Congress can defund or trade funding to neuter the executive.
As I get older and headlights get brighter I find even a bright flash can be irritating, especially if repeated flashing.
The law in Canada does vary from province to province with someone else mentioning a similar case to the article in Quebec
The problem is these terms are pretty general. Trying to pigeon hole everyone into 2 categories ends with such generalizations that it is hard to say what most conservatives or liberals believe. Generally conservatives are pro-business and the left is pro-people. Of course America is screwed by how expensive it is to run for office and politics is now big business with both parties mostly existing to do the bidding of their masters and the idea of masters is usually considered right wing.
What we really need is more focus on the other categories such as authoritarian to libertarian with sadly almost all politicians being well into the authoritarian side. Democracy is a pretty shitty system with the only thing going for it being it is better then the other options.
Is it OK to stand outside someones house all night with a megaphone blasting speech at them? Walking up to someone and blasting 200db of amplified speech directly into their ear to assault them OK? Blinding people with your high beams is similar, especially with the option of flashing your low beams.
Of course really the law is about slowing people down to the legal speed and giving warning does the job which is why around here (BC) the cops phone up the radio stations and announce where their speed traps are.
In BC the cops want people to know where the speed traps are, so phone the radio stations and tell them.
Speed traps are supposed to be about slowing people down.
The Canadian courts visited this issue recently with a Mormon sect claiming that their religion required it.
They ended up ruling against it as most of the woman in the polygamous relationships were coerced into the relationship at very young ages and it also took away rights from the young males of the community as common practice was to kick most young males out at an early age due to them being competition.
As usual it is a balance of rights and while polygamy amongst consenting adults seems fine, the prevalent practice doesn't, at least in Bountiful BC
An anti-liberty fascist is one type of conservative just like an anti-liberty communist is one type of socialist.
There are multiple axis on the political chart, left vs right and authoritarian vs libertarian for a starts. Most politicians fall somewhere on the right and authoritarian with the few successful libertarian ones being to the left. Gandhi and Nelson Mandela are 2 examples. Extreme authoritarians include Stalin on the left and General Pinochet on the right. Funny enough Hitler was actually pretty close to the center with a mixture of left and right policies but extremely authoritarian.
Really it is the authoritarians that we need to get away from but they're attracted to politics and usually ruthless.
From the outside looking in the ACA looks pretty conservative. Forcing people to deal with corporations is the opposite of socialism and it is so funny to hear American conservatives going on about how it is socialist.
Its got the usual right wing authoritarian thing going of forcing you to give your money to big business. The left wing authoritarian thing would have been the government running it.
Remember that the it started out by being proposed by a right wing think tank and championed by Romney who is even more right wing then Obama.
Of course ideally would be non-authoritarian healthcare where right wing would be lots of competing small businesses and the left wing being lots of competing co-ops or at least local government.
Rather then bailing them out or letting them fail, the government could have nationalized them, kept them running and then broken them up into smaller pieces and sold them off. When I read about the amount of bonuses the banks paid out to the people that crashed the system I really think things are broken. If I break the (major) law and get caught, I lose most everything, not get bonuses backed by tax payer money.
A co-op model is socialist, we should have laws against socialism as it is unAmerican and if we can't get laws we'll ramp up the propaganda.
My dial-up is close to $40 a month now that the race to the bottom is over and the only ISPs left are the ones that didn't go bankrupt competing on price or go out of business due to shitty service.
The private bridges around here are limited by geography to the only places where bridges make sense, eg narrowing of the river and such. To go to the places where I used to go regularly means paying $3x2 two ways, an extra $12 on a trip that was barely affordable before, so I no longer go to those places. The businesses that built the bridges can't make the money that they were planning on so they've invested in politicians and the tax payers make up the operating costs and the expected profits. They also got laws passed limiting indemnity as well so thy don't have to worry about law suits.
The government thinking that they would save money on bridges got re-elected on the platform of lower taxes and dropped taxes which means that gross wages went down to keep net wages the same.
Now the government has less money, people have larger expenses, especially since everything went up in price to pay the tolls and most people are behind. The bridge owners did really well and now have more money to invest in politicians and propaganda about how things are better now as all the excess money is going into a few private hands instead of being spread around.
Well the obvious solution is to drop taxes. This is good as employers can then drop wages as they don't have to pay out as much to stay level when it comes to take home pay. Meanwhile everything can be privatized. This creates a bunch of opportunities for businesses to make money on fees, everything goes up in price while your take home pay has stayed close to the same and now you can magically save and invest.
Even if magically the employers didn't drop your wages, the resulting inflation from all the new fees added to everything will eat away at your paycheck.
It's great if you get in at the ground floor as you can be one of the ones pocketing the tax savings through lower wages and if you're really lucky you can be in the position to charge fees on things that are natural monopolies. Like the guy down the page who goes on about private bridges and thinks that there are infinite good bridge building spots so competition would happen when in reality bridges are built in places with infrastructure and natural advantages like a narrowing of the river.
While obviously someone illegally entering the country is breaking a law and subject to arrest and once officially arrested (here you have to be touched and informed that you are under arrest) can be searched, that is not what I'm talking about. What about if I legally cross the border for vacation reasons, once legally in the country (past the border) I can be legally searched since I'm not a citizen? How about people with a green card? Or my wife who theoretically can cross the border anywhere, carrying a backpack full of stuff and carrying a rifle and get most of the benefits of being a USA citizen including working etc due to treaties that America signed in the latter 18th century and reaffirmed in a treaty in 1814 or so? According to the American Constitution, treaties are the second highest law in the land, trumping everything except the Constitution.
My countries Constitution specifically says that all people in the country get all rights excepting some mobility rights and voting. (yes voting is a right here)
I think you mean that you lived in a totalitarian socialist country. Socialism comes in many types, eg co-ops and credit unions are socialist as they are owned by the collective.
Totalitarian is bad whether socialist or capitalist.
The 4th Amendment protects the rights of citizens to not have their things searched or siezed without a judicially sanctioned warrant based upon probable cause
And here I thought it protected people. Lets see,
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Yep, no mention of citizens, just people. Of course too many Americans seem to consider people to only consist of American citizens.
I agree which is why I said a different (meaning amended) Constitution. India for example has IIRC hundreds of amendments to its constitution. America couldn't even be bothered to do an easy one like making the Air Force constitutional.
Part of the problem (especially here in Canada) is the fear of opening a can of worms.
People were pretty neutral about it at one time with shitting in streams being accepted and privies right besides wells. Using poop as fertilizer has also been pretty common at times. After the 1854 Broad Street cholera out break the reaction to the idea was To accept his proposal would have meant indirectly accepting the oral-fecal method transmission of disease, which was too unpleasant for most of the public to contemplate. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I predict masks will make an enormous debut in fashion...
There's already moves afoot to make masks illegal. Seems they're often used by protesters.
Eventually it'll be Google contact lenses and it'll be quite hard to tell if someone is wearing them.