"Agreed, You know the only reason this is being introduced now is because the republican approval rating is circling the drain."
The Republican approval rating? You gotta be kidding!
According to a poll by Wasingtong Times the other day, all of Congress gets just a 5% approval rating (the lowest I have ever seen), while Obama's approval rating was also at a record low (37%).
Don't get me wrong; no doubt Republican approval rating IS down. But so is that of the Democrats... and which one is fighting hardest to go down the drain first is pretty much up in the air.
"There are numerous small tribes in Africa today which are self sufficient and require no magic technology to aide them in "living". Where they have problems in Africa today, many of these are caused by corporate intervention and ownership."
Except for one thing: your "communities" of 20-30 people are not entirely self-sufficient. Although such a community might otherwise be self-sufficient, reinforcement of recessive genes would cause them to die out. It takes a population of about 200 humans or more to maintain a viable gene pool. That's why such small tribes that have existed for any length of time ALL have a tradition of marrying outside the tribe or community.
Which again gets back to part of my point: even though keeping in touch with others, in person, might not be viable in daily life for some people, they still have reason for keeping in touch, in what ways they can.
"My only beef was with how you called it a 'poor substitute', which sounds like just another way of saying all of my copper-based friendships are some how 'less real' than any single face-to-face one."
Well, it is. If I have a reasonable choice, I would vastly prefer to have real-world contact than do it via remote electrons. It isn't that electrons aren't good... it's that they are a "poor substitute" for the other thing. They're okay but they don't compare.
"While I agree with your premise, I happen to also agree with the author. If the technology puts us on a pivot where we either massively die or have easy access to entertainment, it will swing to the one that make a couple people the most money."
A big part of MY point was that it isn't "technology" doing that, it's you.
If you decide to be dependent on that technology, that's your problem. Don't blame it on the technology. Technology isn't "putting us on a pivot", people are. And they have a choice.
"This is a back door way to make DRM violations against big corporations a felony. This has nothing to do with protecting users and everything to do with helping corporations."
I agree that it should probably be a felony to gather or misuse personal data. I do not think felony should be applied to copyrighted works. Very big difference, there.
Currently, "downloading" (making copies of copyrighted works for personal use), is not even a crime. Nor should it be. Piracy, however, which is a legal term referring to copying for profit (e.g., making bulk copies and selling them), IS a crime and probably should be.
But they are not the same things, despite the industry's attempts to deliberately confuse them.
"1) Sharing content with people online is a poor substitute for having real-life experiences with, like, kayaking and family gatherings and drinking and stuff."
True, but I consider it to be like pornography: It may be a poor substitute for the real thing but it's there if you need it.
And for those who live in the country, social networking is an IMPROVEMENT over the old isolation.
"2) Unless stopped, companies that build social-networking tools will create increasingly intrusive software."
Duh.
"3) The only sure way to stay sane our increasingly interconnected (Eggers would say over-connected) world is to drive at high speed off a bridge."
Bullshit.
Sure, there are negative elements in the above. But see (1) for example. Yes, there are addicts who exclude the real world for electronic "social" life. But for a great many people, it is a vast improvement over earlier times. It all depends on how you use it.
I use it for specific reasons and for specific purposes (and yes, this is one of them, for reasons of my own).
As for #2, it's what people like me have been saying for years. Does Dave Eggers think this is some kind of revelation or something?
And #3 is just nonsense. Unless you are the kind of person who has no control over her own decisions.
What's interesting here is that the courts applied a concept that is directly contrary to a legal principle here in the U.S.: the court ruled that the website should have exercised its right of censorship to remove "likely" offensive content.
As other people here have mentioned, the legal concept used by the court is self-defeating and doomed to fail, sooner or later.
However, if you're not familiar with JavaScript, let me point out that the value being assigned is a string delimited by single quotes... but it also contains a single quote. That doesn't work. The compiler will start the string after the first single quote, and end it at the second. The remainder will be a syntax error.
I mean, this is a genuine "WTF? You got paid actual money to do this?" kind of error.
"actual question here from an embedded programmer with little knowledge of javascript: is that code on line 79 trying to use the result of the "ffe.ee..." lookup as an index into a string array? What is the correct way to do this? C programming has lots of times where stuff like array[struct.var] = 4 is perfectly valid."
It appears to be a javascript associative array. Analogous (but not necessarily identical) to a hash table in some other languages.
"It's all right, there's no shame in not having the necessary reading comprehension skills to parse GP's difficult, difficult post. You're still special to me."
I did make a mistake. For some reason I didn't see "recipient".
"This is a step short of the lab's stated goal of "ignition", where nuclear fusion generates as much energy as the lasers supply. This is because known "inefficiencies" in different parts of the system mean not all the energy supplied through the laser is delivered to the fuel."
The article made it CLEAR that the energy output was more than the energy absorbed. But it also made it CLEAR that it was not as much energy as was input to the whole system.
... And just to clarify: when I say "mistakes" here, I'm talking about ERRORS. Not just bad style, or something else that is a matter of opinion. The javascript in this page simply cannot function in the manner intended; in fact it cannot function at all.
Try this on for size. This is line 79:
resources['ffe.ee.shared.formValidator.eeSSN'] = 'This Social Security number (SSN) isn't valid.';
Gee, see any problem there? I do. This is a rank newbie mistake. And I do mean rank. As in: it reeks. And this same BAD error is repeated in a great many places. There are about 2,725 lines of code, formatted. And at the very end is:
function() {
var passwordStatus = "expired"; //... followed by a commented block of 88k characters, and no closing bracket!
This is sad coding indeed. And this is for user registration!
"On the other hand, the Facebook comparison is ludicrous. FB didn't have to serve 40 million users on day one; they got to scale up slowly. HC.gov is in the unenviable position of having to have a system which will handle millions of users (and almost certainly an overload) the moment it opens, then never having to handle that great a load again."
The comparison isn't ludicrous. Here is what is ludicrous: the idea that you even CAN make a website that serves that many users, on day one. It was first and foremost a planning failure, before it was a failure of implementation.
But, having said that, seem my earlier comment a bit further up. I recently downloaded a javascript file from the site, just to see what it was like. (I want to emphasize "recently" because they have been trying to make repairs.) And it was horrendous. It is a very big file, yet even in the very beginning (I haven't gone through it all and may not) there are mistakes that even the most newbie of a javascript student would not make. It's a real joke.
So yeah, compare away. The website is a piece of garbage. There is no way on Earth it should have cost anybody even a million dollars.
"Dammit man! I know you in real life. You're better than this. There's no mention of a quota in any of those articles. There is mention of a preference, but no legal mandate. There are however legal mandates towards lowest cost in a contract, and legal mandates preventing discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation, etc."
I believe, up above (possibly after your comment here was written), somebody posted a link to an Executive Order that mandates "affirmative action" for contractors.
Now, while an Executive Order is not a "law", per se, because it cannot compel actions from civilians, it can have the effect of law, rightly or wrongly, because it tells Federal employees what to do.
Thus, an Executive Order saying "you cannot approve a contract unless it meets these guidelines" definitely affects civilians because then they have to meet those guidelines to win a contract.
Again, rightly or wrongly, that's the way it works. Executive Orders were not originally intended to work that way, but things have changed (for the worse) over the years.
"As for Obamacare, I really don't want to get into all of that here, but if the web portal dedicated to it has already cost over half a billion dollars, is six times over it's initial budget, and doesn't even function...not really sure how anyone without political motivations can call (at least this portion of it) that a good thing?"
I followed a link in an online article to a JavaScript file that is part of the healthcare.gov website. (I downloaded it straight from healthcare.gov. It isn't doctored.) I kept a copy of the file, to refer to and go through later, because it's not just bad, it's HILARIOUSLY bad.
It's a big file, yet I could see that the very first few lines contain errors that wouldn't be made by a student of JavaScript in their second day of class. I am NOT exaggerating. It's that bad.
If that is the kind of "service" we can expect from Obamacare (not to mention the other problems), I sure as hell don't want it.
"Yes, but only because the circumstances changed. Malthus, Hubbert, etc. were correct in predicting that if things continue as they are, what the effects would be. If there hadn't been a green revolution, food production would not have kept pace with population. If new methods of extraction hadn't been developed, oil production would peak and then decline. This isn't controversial, it's just math."
You just repeated, in different words, what I already said. You described taking a short-term trend and extending it out to infinity, without considering other VARIABLES (i.e., things that can change).
"But you're just coming up with exceptions and qualifiers to #1 and #2."
Not really. But there may be a misunderstanding here.
"1) Third-party witnesses, insofar as their testimony would not incriminate themselves, do not have a Fifth Amendment right to silence."
Correct. Because in general THEY DON'T NEED ONE. They are not prisoners of the police, and presumably there is nothing to "confess".
"2) They still have the right to refuse to answer questions from the police."
Correct. Witnesses are not in a position to have a CONFESSION beaten out of them by the police. For one thing, they are free to go: they are not in the custody of the police, and they give their actual testimony in court. Any police questioning is an attempt to gather evidence for a court case, which is far, far different from an attempt to get a confession.
"3) Therefore their right to refuse to answer questions from the police, does not come from the Fifth Amendment."
Aha. Maybe *I* misunderstood. If you mean that the right of a WITNESS to remain silent does not come from the 5th Amendment, then you are certainly correct. If that's what you meant, I apologize, because I missed the "their" in the sentence.
However, I do not see that this has any actual bearing on the existence of the 5th Amendment right for SUSPECTS, because they are in a vastly different situation than (most) witnesses.
"Sadly I fear your recipient is quite the mind-numbed Fox viewer; his (or her) ilk are creating a vast drag on this countries ability to succeed."
I believe you would find that your typical Fox viewer would further complain about government-mandated discrimination, rather than defending it. Try again.
"Isn't that how it is supposed to work? If he (and by extension, "the gov't") did what he damn well pleased, isn't that... a dictatorship...actual tyranny?"
No. The way it's supposed to work is that the government operates lawfully and Constitutionally.
The Government is breaking the law by not having passed a budget in 4 years or more. As a result of that (by definition) crime, the government has given itself discretion, not backed by any law, as to how it will spend its money.
Obama is further breaking the law by furloughing civilian employees at a Strategic Air Command base, when he just signed the Pay Our Military Act the other day, which was passed UNANIMOUSLY by congress, and which REQUIRES him to pay civilians working at military bases. Does it "make sense" to ignore the law you just signed over a political hissy fit? Isn't THAT "doing whatever you want"?
The fact is that Obama -- as long as he is not OTHERWISE breaking the law, as mentioned just above -- has a lot of discretion over how the government is spent. And there are government employees who have been saying they have been directed to make this shutdown "as painful as possible" for the general public, while he goes golfing and carries on as he pleases. His recent trip to Africa alone would pay to keep the White House tours for school children operating for the next 25 years! Yet he did go to Africa, and he shut down the tours.
No. THAT is not the way government is supposed to work.
No, I didn't miss your point. I, and others, have answered your question repeatedly. I'll try one last time.
"1) Third-party witnesses do not generally have a Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. (As the Josh Wolf case shows for example -- they can be compelled to answer questions by a court subpoena.)
2) And yet, third-party witnesses do have the right to refuse to answer questions when questioned by the police (not the courts).
3) Therefore, wherever the right to remain silent when questioned by the police, comes from, it can't come from the Fifth Amendment.
If you don't think that is correct, then which of #1, #2, or #3 do you think is incorrect?"
To some degree, all three.
(1) Third-party witnesses have the same right to 5th Amendment protection as anyone else. They cannot be compelled to incriminate themselves, either. ANYBODY can be compelled to testify via subpoena... but NOBODY can be compelled to do so if it they would incriminate themselves. You are making a distinction here that doesn't exist.
If you mean, however, that someone can be compelled to testify ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE, then yes that is generally true. But in general (as has been mentioned in this topic several times now) the threat of coercion is FAR lower. The witness is not in the custody of the police, so the police are hardly going to torture him (or her). Nobody is going to try to torture or threaten a witness in court. And we already have strong laws against coercing or intimidating witnesses.
It is important to note that suspects, when coerced by government, are almost invariably coerced into confessing their guilt. Which obviously does them harm, if they're innocent. Yes?
(2) Yes, they do have the right to refuse. But they aren't at risk of imprisonment, life or limb, as the suspect is (see #1 above). See that last sentence. And note that unlike a coerced suspect, compelling a witness to testify is not a compulsion to testify in a particular way. Unlike a coerced suspect, they might very well testify that the person is innocent. That is a HUGE difference.
So the issue is still one of motivation. IN GENERAL, there is no valid motivation for the government to try to coerce a witness. No doubt it has happened, but the risk of this kind of abuse -- and the consequences -- are generally far, far smaller than with coercing confessions.
(3) Because of the issues I have described regarding 1 and 2, 3 cannot be not a valid conclusion.
The problem here, it seems to me, is that you aren't seeing the very large and very real DIFFERENCES between the situation the suspect is in, and the situation a witness is in. So to me, it sounds like your arguing thus:
(1) Apples grow on trees, they're edible, they're round-ish, and have a sort of red color.
(2) Oranges grow on trees, they're edible, they're round-ish, and have a sort of red color.
(3) Therefore apples are a citrus fruit, and you can substitute oranges for apples in your apple pie recipe.
" It still amazes me that the financial markets continued acting like the dollar was on the gold standard for so long after FDR, but they did - I guess "community based reality" has always been central to the finance guys."
They did so for a very good reason. While the U.S. was not officially on a Gold Standard internally, the Bretton Woods agreement meant that in regard to international trade, the dollar was still tied to gold. So it didn't change all that much.
But in '71, the U.S. government had been spending too much money for its gold reserves to cover, so Nixon decided to renege on Bretton Woods. The result was the "gold shock" you mentioned... not only did it affect the local markets but for all practical purposes, Nixon defaulted on U.S. debt to other countries. They didn't call it that, but that's what he did. Because by nixing (pun definitely intended) Bretton Woods, Nixon effectively and quite massively devalued the dollar in foreign trade. So if some creditor owned, say, $1M in U.S. debt, it was now worth only $600k. The whole world was pissed off at us, as they rightly should have been. But it wasn't "us" who did it, it was the money-mongers in government who wanted to print more money (inflation).
"I can't see that deflation could ever be healthy, however - Japan presents decades of evidence to the contrary, and I don't see any real world evidence demonstrating that "healthy" view."
Look at the computer and smartphone market. They get better every year, and (per feature) they get much cheaper every year. That's deflation, and that's a HEALTHY market. I did say MILD deflation, though. In a healthy market, goods should get a little bit cheaper over time as technology and other factors make production more efficient.
But now let's look at what inflation does. That is PRICES OF GOODS in dollars (or dollar equivalent, in the earliest years) according to the definitive source of same (cited on the chart). Price is of course the inverse of buying power. Prices for real goods were FLAT from 1665 clear through 1913. There were blips when the government borrowed money during wartime (also marked on the chart). BUT... everything always went back to normal shortly afterward.
UNTIL you get to 1913 (the year the Fed was created). There is a clearly visible war blip, but it doesn't go back down. The chart starts to slope up. Then the slope changes again in 1934, when the Gold Standard was abolished (internally). The slope gets steeper. Internal inflation started hitting a bit harder and then in '71 Nixon canned Bretton Wood. And look at the damned thing now. I've had people look at that and say, "so what?" But if you want to chart buying power rather than price, all you have to do is flip the chart vertically. That tends to get more reaction.
" one of the premises that both sides have been assuming in these threads, is probably wrong -- that the Fifth Amendment is what gives you the right to be silent if the police question you"
It is not an "assumption". And this is what I've repeatedly asked you: do you seriously know absolutely nothing about the legal history of this country? I've explained this before, and it is comments like the one above that keep leading me to believe you are being deliberately obtuse.
It *IS* the 5th Amendment that protects you from police questioning -- with a caveat I will get to in a moment -- but it does so via the courts. It is not simply an order to the police to stop questioning you if you invoke the 5th.
In a physical sense, police in this country can and have used means up to and including torture to coerce confessions. But when it gets to court, the judge will say "no testimony about the coerced confession shall be allowed." (If he doesn't, that's why we have appeals courts.)
The whole point here is that the 5th Amendment removes any motivation to coerce a confession. If that motivation still existed, it could and would be abused, as history clearly tells us.
It is still done, but very rarely, and it is even rarer that they get away with it.
As for the caveat mentioned above: the rights mentioned in the Constitution, among them the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination, are not "government-granted". On the contrary, they were considered "natural rights" that exist for all human beings. The Constitution does not grant them, it simply acknowledges that they exist and that Government cannot violate them.
Which means, technically, that the 5th Amendment is not "the law" that protects you from police questioning. It is a statement that you have that inalienable right. The "law" part is the part that keeps government from interfering with that right.
"Really, I think the reason the police can't force you to answer a question, is the same reason they can't make you hop one one foot: The police can't make you do anything except comply with the law, and even after you've been arrested, the police can't make you do anything that isn't relevant to the arrest procedures (like give your fingerprints). By that reasoning, the Fifth has nothing to do with it."
And here you prove my point yet again. I see 2 possibilities: (1) this whole thing was simply an elaborate troll, and you have no intention of letting up on it, or (2) you have learned absolutely nothing from all the comments here that have explained to you how and why you are wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
"Agreed, You know the only reason this is being introduced now is because the republican approval rating is circling the drain."
The Republican approval rating? You gotta be kidding!
According to a poll by Wasingtong Times the other day, all of Congress gets just a 5% approval rating (the lowest I have ever seen), while Obama's approval rating was also at a record low (37%).
Don't get me wrong; no doubt Republican approval rating IS down. But so is that of the Democrats... and which one is fighting hardest to go down the drain first is pretty much up in the air.
"There are numerous small tribes in Africa today which are self sufficient and require no magic technology to aide them in "living". Where they have problems in Africa today, many of these are caused by corporate intervention and ownership."
Except for one thing: your "communities" of 20-30 people are not entirely self-sufficient. Although such a community might otherwise be self-sufficient, reinforcement of recessive genes would cause them to die out. It takes a population of about 200 humans or more to maintain a viable gene pool. That's why such small tribes that have existed for any length of time ALL have a tradition of marrying outside the tribe or community.
Which again gets back to part of my point: even though keeping in touch with others, in person, might not be viable in daily life for some people, they still have reason for keeping in touch, in what ways they can.
"My only beef was with how you called it a 'poor substitute', which sounds like just another way of saying all of my copper-based friendships are some how 'less real' than any single face-to-face one."
Well, it is. If I have a reasonable choice, I would vastly prefer to have real-world contact than do it via remote electrons. It isn't that electrons aren't good... it's that they are a "poor substitute" for the other thing. They're okay but they don't compare.
Not "less real", just "not as good".
"While I agree with your premise, I happen to also agree with the author. If the technology puts us on a pivot where we either massively die or have easy access to entertainment, it will swing to the one that make a couple people the most money."
A big part of MY point was that it isn't "technology" doing that, it's you.
If you decide to be dependent on that technology, that's your problem. Don't blame it on the technology. Technology isn't "putting us on a pivot", people are. And they have a choice.
"This is a back door way to make DRM violations against big corporations a felony. This has nothing to do with protecting users and everything to do with helping corporations."
I agree that it should probably be a felony to gather or misuse personal data. I do not think felony should be applied to copyrighted works. Very big difference, there.
Currently, "downloading" (making copies of copyrighted works for personal use), is not even a crime. Nor should it be. Piracy, however, which is a legal term referring to copying for profit (e.g., making bulk copies and selling them), IS a crime and probably should be.
But they are not the same things, despite the industry's attempts to deliberately confuse them.
"Strongly disagree. The friendships I formed over a copper wire are no less real than the ones you formed face-to-face."
I don't disagree. I know married people who met online. BUT... that wasn't the point.
The point being made is that given a choice, an experience with other live people is usually better than one online.
"1) Sharing content with people online is a poor substitute for having real-life experiences with, like, kayaking and family gatherings and drinking and stuff."
True, but I consider it to be like pornography: It may be a poor substitute for the real thing but it's there if you need it.
And for those who live in the country, social networking is an IMPROVEMENT over the old isolation.
"2) Unless stopped, companies that build social-networking tools will create increasingly intrusive software."
Duh.
"3) The only sure way to stay sane our increasingly interconnected (Eggers would say over-connected) world is to drive at high speed off a bridge."
Bullshit.
Sure, there are negative elements in the above. But see (1) for example. Yes, there are addicts who exclude the real world for electronic "social" life. But for a great many people, it is a vast improvement over earlier times. It all depends on how you use it. I use it for specific reasons and for specific purposes (and yes, this is one of them, for reasons of my own).
As for #2, it's what people like me have been saying for years. Does Dave Eggers think this is some kind of revelation or something?
And #3 is just nonsense. Unless you are the kind of person who has no control over her own decisions.
What's interesting here is that the courts applied a concept that is directly contrary to a legal principle here in the U.S.: the court ruled that the website should have exercised its right of censorship to remove "likely" offensive content.
As other people here have mentioned, the legal concept used by the court is self-defeating and doomed to fail, sooner or later.
"actual question here..."
However, if you're not familiar with JavaScript, let me point out that the value being assigned is a string delimited by single quotes... but it also contains a single quote. That doesn't work. The compiler will start the string after the first single quote, and end it at the second. The remainder will be a syntax error.
I mean, this is a genuine "WTF? You got paid actual money to do this?" kind of error.
"actual question here from an embedded programmer with little knowledge of javascript: is that code on line 79 trying to use the result of the "ffe.ee..." lookup as an index into a string array? What is the correct way to do this? C programming has lots of times where stuff like array[struct.var] = 4 is perfectly valid."
It appears to be a javascript associative array. Analogous (but not necessarily identical) to a hash table in some other languages.
See HERE, about halfway down the page.
"It's all right, there's no shame in not having the necessary reading comprehension skills to parse GP's difficult, difficult post. You're still special to me."
I did make a mistake. For some reason I didn't see "recipient".
"This is a step short of the lab's stated goal of "ignition", where nuclear fusion generates as much energy as the lasers supply. This is because known "inefficiencies" in different parts of the system mean not all the energy supplied through the laser is delivered to the fuel."
The article made it CLEAR that the energy output was more than the energy absorbed. But it also made it CLEAR that it was not as much energy as was input to the whole system.
This is a non-article about a non-issue.
HEADLINE: "People Read Article Wrong... Chaos Ensues!"
resources['ffe.ee.shared.formValidator.eeSSN'] = 'This Social Security number (SSN) isn't valid.';
Gee, see any problem there? I do. This is a rank newbie mistake. And I do mean rank. As in: it reeks. And this same BAD error is repeated in a great many places. There are about 2,725 lines of code, formatted. And at the very end is:
function() {
// ... followed by a commented block of 88k characters, and no closing bracket!
var passwordStatus = "expired";
This is sad coding indeed. And this is for user registration!
"On the other hand, the Facebook comparison is ludicrous. FB didn't have to serve 40 million users on day one; they got to scale up slowly. HC.gov is in the unenviable position of having to have a system which will handle millions of users (and almost certainly an overload) the moment it opens, then never having to handle that great a load again."
The comparison isn't ludicrous. Here is what is ludicrous: the idea that you even CAN make a website that serves that many users, on day one. It was first and foremost a planning failure, before it was a failure of implementation.
But, having said that, seem my earlier comment a bit further up. I recently downloaded a javascript file from the site, just to see what it was like. (I want to emphasize "recently" because they have been trying to make repairs.) And it was horrendous. It is a very big file, yet even in the very beginning (I haven't gone through it all and may not) there are mistakes that even the most newbie of a javascript student would not make. It's a real joke.
So yeah, compare away. The website is a piece of garbage. There is no way on Earth it should have cost anybody even a million dollars.
"Dammit man! I know you in real life. You're better than this. There's no mention of a quota in any of those articles. There is mention of a preference, but no legal mandate. There are however legal mandates towards lowest cost in a contract, and legal mandates preventing discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation, etc."
I believe, up above (possibly after your comment here was written), somebody posted a link to an Executive Order that mandates "affirmative action" for contractors.
Now, while an Executive Order is not a "law", per se, because it cannot compel actions from civilians, it can have the effect of law, rightly or wrongly, because it tells Federal employees what to do.
Thus, an Executive Order saying "you cannot approve a contract unless it meets these guidelines" definitely affects civilians because then they have to meet those guidelines to win a contract.
Again, rightly or wrongly, that's the way it works. Executive Orders were not originally intended to work that way, but things have changed (for the worse) over the years.
"As for Obamacare, I really don't want to get into all of that here, but if the web portal dedicated to it has already cost over half a billion dollars, is six times over it's initial budget, and doesn't even function...not really sure how anyone without political motivations can call (at least this portion of it) that a good thing?"
I followed a link in an online article to a JavaScript file that is part of the healthcare.gov website. (I downloaded it straight from healthcare.gov. It isn't doctored.) I kept a copy of the file, to refer to and go through later, because it's not just bad, it's HILARIOUSLY bad.
It's a big file, yet I could see that the very first few lines contain errors that wouldn't be made by a student of JavaScript in their second day of class. I am NOT exaggerating. It's that bad.
If that is the kind of "service" we can expect from Obamacare (not to mention the other problems), I sure as hell don't want it.
"Yes, but only because the circumstances changed. Malthus, Hubbert, etc. were correct in predicting that if things continue as they are, what the effects would be. If there hadn't been a green revolution, food production would not have kept pace with population. If new methods of extraction hadn't been developed, oil production would peak and then decline. This isn't controversial, it's just math."
You just repeated, in different words, what I already said. You described taking a short-term trend and extending it out to infinity, without considering other VARIABLES (i.e., things that can change).
"But you're just coming up with exceptions and qualifiers to #1 and #2."
Not really. But there may be a misunderstanding here.
"1) Third-party witnesses, insofar as their testimony would not incriminate themselves, do not have a Fifth Amendment right to silence."
Correct. Because in general THEY DON'T NEED ONE. They are not prisoners of the police, and presumably there is nothing to "confess".
"2) They still have the right to refuse to answer questions from the police."
Correct. Witnesses are not in a position to have a CONFESSION beaten out of them by the police. For one thing, they are free to go: they are not in the custody of the police, and they give their actual testimony in court. Any police questioning is an attempt to gather evidence for a court case, which is far, far different from an attempt to get a confession.
"3) Therefore their right to refuse to answer questions from the police, does not come from the Fifth Amendment."
Aha. Maybe *I* misunderstood. If you mean that the right of a WITNESS to remain silent does not come from the 5th Amendment, then you are certainly correct. If that's what you meant, I apologize, because I missed the "their" in the sentence.
However, I do not see that this has any actual bearing on the existence of the 5th Amendment right for SUSPECTS, because they are in a vastly different situation than (most) witnesses.
"Sadly I fear your recipient is quite the mind-numbed Fox viewer; his (or her) ilk are creating a vast drag on this countries ability to succeed."
I believe you would find that your typical Fox viewer would further complain about government-mandated discrimination, rather than defending it. Try again.
"Discrimination in the defense of progress is no vice!"
No... discrimination in the defence of progress is... discrimination.
It's really more of a crime than a vice.
"Isn't that how it is supposed to work? If he (and by extension, "the gov't") did what he damn well pleased, isn't that... a dictatorship...actual tyranny?"
No. The way it's supposed to work is that the government operates lawfully and Constitutionally.
The Government is breaking the law by not having passed a budget in 4 years or more. As a result of that (by definition) crime, the government has given itself discretion, not backed by any law, as to how it will spend its money.
Obama is further breaking the law by furloughing civilian employees at a Strategic Air Command base, when he just signed the Pay Our Military Act the other day, which was passed UNANIMOUSLY by congress, and which REQUIRES him to pay civilians working at military bases. Does it "make sense" to ignore the law you just signed over a political hissy fit? Isn't THAT "doing whatever you want"?
The fact is that Obama -- as long as he is not OTHERWISE breaking the law, as mentioned just above -- has a lot of discretion over how the government is spent. And there are government employees who have been saying they have been directed to make this shutdown "as painful as possible" for the general public, while he goes golfing and carries on as he pleases. His recent trip to Africa alone would pay to keep the White House tours for school children operating for the next 25 years! Yet he did go to Africa, and he shut down the tours.
No. THAT is not the way government is supposed to work.
"... help developers of new wireless devices and apps to turn their ideas into LOCKED-DOWN products THAT GOUGE USERS."
There. FTFY.
Come on, Verizon. Charging EXTRA to tether when they're ALREADY paying for the data?
Booooooooo.
"1) Third-party witnesses do not generally have a Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. (As the Josh Wolf case shows for example -- they can be compelled to answer questions by a court subpoena.) 2) And yet, third-party witnesses do have the right to refuse to answer questions when questioned by the police (not the courts). 3) Therefore, wherever the right to remain silent when questioned by the police, comes from, it can't come from the Fifth Amendment.
If you don't think that is correct, then which of #1, #2, or #3 do you think is incorrect?"
To some degree, all three.
(1) Third-party witnesses have the same right to 5th Amendment protection as anyone else. They cannot be compelled to incriminate themselves, either. ANYBODY can be compelled to testify via subpoena... but NOBODY can be compelled to do so if it they would incriminate themselves. You are making a distinction here that doesn't exist.
If you mean, however, that someone can be compelled to testify ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE, then yes that is generally true. But in general (as has been mentioned in this topic several times now) the threat of coercion is FAR lower. The witness is not in the custody of the police, so the police are hardly going to torture him (or her). Nobody is going to try to torture or threaten a witness in court. And we already have strong laws against coercing or intimidating witnesses.
It is important to note that suspects, when coerced by government, are almost invariably coerced into confessing their guilt. Which obviously does them harm, if they're innocent. Yes?
(2) Yes, they do have the right to refuse. But they aren't at risk of imprisonment, life or limb, as the suspect is (see #1 above). See that last sentence. And note that unlike a coerced suspect, compelling a witness to testify is not a compulsion to testify in a particular way. Unlike a coerced suspect, they might very well testify that the person is innocent. That is a HUGE difference.
So the issue is still one of motivation. IN GENERAL, there is no valid motivation for the government to try to coerce a witness. No doubt it has happened, but the risk of this kind of abuse -- and the consequences -- are generally far, far smaller than with coercing confessions. (3) Because of the issues I have described regarding 1 and 2, 3 cannot be not a valid conclusion.
The problem here, it seems to me, is that you aren't seeing the very large and very real DIFFERENCES between the situation the suspect is in, and the situation a witness is in. So to me, it sounds like your arguing thus:
(1) Apples grow on trees, they're edible, they're round-ish, and have a sort of red color.
(2) Oranges grow on trees, they're edible, they're round-ish, and have a sort of red color.
(3) Therefore apples are a citrus fruit, and you can substitute oranges for apples in your apple pie recipe.
" It still amazes me that the financial markets continued acting like the dollar was on the gold standard for so long after FDR, but they did - I guess "community based reality" has always been central to the finance guys."
They did so for a very good reason. While the U.S. was not officially on a Gold Standard internally, the Bretton Woods agreement meant that in regard to international trade, the dollar was still tied to gold. So it didn't change all that much.
But in '71, the U.S. government had been spending too much money for its gold reserves to cover, so Nixon decided to renege on Bretton Woods. The result was the "gold shock" you mentioned... not only did it affect the local markets but for all practical purposes, Nixon defaulted on U.S. debt to other countries. They didn't call it that, but that's what he did. Because by nixing (pun definitely intended) Bretton Woods, Nixon effectively and quite massively devalued the dollar in foreign trade. So if some creditor owned, say, $1M in U.S. debt, it was now worth only $600k. The whole world was pissed off at us, as they rightly should have been. But it wasn't "us" who did it, it was the money-mongers in government who wanted to print more money (inflation).
"I can't see that deflation could ever be healthy, however - Japan presents decades of evidence to the contrary, and I don't see any real world evidence demonstrating that "healthy" view."
Look at the computer and smartphone market. They get better every year, and (per feature) they get much cheaper every year. That's deflation, and that's a HEALTHY market. I did say MILD deflation, though. In a healthy market, goods should get a little bit cheaper over time as technology and other factors make production more efficient.
But now let's look at what inflation does. That is PRICES OF GOODS in dollars (or dollar equivalent, in the earliest years) according to the definitive source of same (cited on the chart). Price is of course the inverse of buying power. Prices for real goods were FLAT from 1665 clear through 1913. There were blips when the government borrowed money during wartime (also marked on the chart). BUT... everything always went back to normal shortly afterward.
UNTIL you get to 1913 (the year the Fed was created). There is a clearly visible war blip, but it doesn't go back down. The chart starts to slope up. Then the slope changes again in 1934, when the Gold Standard was abolished (internally). The slope gets steeper. Internal inflation started hitting a bit harder and then in '71 Nixon canned Bretton Wood. And look at the damned thing now. I've had people look at that and say, "so what?" But if you want to chart buying power rather than price, all you have to do is flip the chart vertically. That tends to get more reaction.
" one of the premises that both sides have been assuming in these threads, is probably wrong -- that the Fifth Amendment is what gives you the right to be silent if the police question you"
It is not an "assumption". And this is what I've repeatedly asked you: do you seriously know absolutely nothing about the legal history of this country? I've explained this before, and it is comments like the one above that keep leading me to believe you are being deliberately obtuse.
It *IS* the 5th Amendment that protects you from police questioning -- with a caveat I will get to in a moment -- but it does so via the courts. It is not simply an order to the police to stop questioning you if you invoke the 5th.
In a physical sense, police in this country can and have used means up to and including torture to coerce confessions. But when it gets to court, the judge will say "no testimony about the coerced confession shall be allowed." (If he doesn't, that's why we have appeals courts.)
The whole point here is that the 5th Amendment removes any motivation to coerce a confession. If that motivation still existed, it could and would be abused, as history clearly tells us.
It is still done, but very rarely, and it is even rarer that they get away with it.
As for the caveat mentioned above: the rights mentioned in the Constitution, among them the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination, are not "government-granted". On the contrary, they were considered "natural rights" that exist for all human beings. The Constitution does not grant them, it simply acknowledges that they exist and that Government cannot violate them.
Which means, technically, that the 5th Amendment is not "the law" that protects you from police questioning. It is a statement that you have that inalienable right. The "law" part is the part that keeps government from interfering with that right.
"Really, I think the reason the police can't force you to answer a question, is the same reason they can't make you hop one one foot: The police can't make you do anything except comply with the law, and even after you've been arrested, the police can't make you do anything that isn't relevant to the arrest procedures (like give your fingerprints). By that reasoning, the Fifth has nothing to do with it."
And here you prove my point yet again. I see 2 possibilities: (1) this whole thing was simply an elaborate troll, and you have no intention of letting up on it, or (2) you have learned absolutely nothing from all the comments here that have explained to you how and why you are wrong.