First, you're wrong on the facts. The Gun Control Act of 1968 prohibited FFL dealers from selling at shows. That restriction was removed in 1986, under FOPA. But what we're talking about here is not FFL dealers.
The "gun show exemption" - good god, an angel on my shoulder is asking, why are you bothering - refers to two factual scenarios:
1) First, from the seller side, the law controlling who has to become an FFL dealer largely targets "do you have a storefront". This means that you can sell guns quite freely at gun shows without having to be (and keep records as, perform background checks as, et cetera) an FFL dealer. That setup imagines 'real dealers' as people with stores. But gun shows are now very large and very frequent events. You can, clearly, be very much in the gun dealing business - buying lots of guns from wholesale sources, selling lots of guns a week, doing it as your primary source of income - while operating only at gun shows and not having to register as an FFL dealer.
2) Second, from the buyer side, if you do your buying at gun shows you aren't "buying from your neighbor". Your experience is like that of going to a store; you have a huge selection, you can go practically anytime, and so on.
So, to summarize, the de facto gun show exemption is that in the drafting of the older laws regulating gun sales, legislators were presumably imagining "we won't apply normal regulation sales at gun shows, because we don't want to burden people engaged in piddly little private transactions with their personal property with the kind of rules we apply to dealers in stores." That's a pretty normal take in legislation generally - consider, for instance, the differences between how private party used car sales are regulated and how used car dealers are.
The massive growth in the size and frequency of gun shows, though, turned what was intended to be a pretty trivial loophole into a huge one. That's the 'exemption'.
First, those other contracts have continued - they didn't drop out of the total when the ACA was passed.
Even the ACA contract isn't for 'building a website', kids. It's for creating and running the 36 federal-based exchanges. The design of the web site you use to access the exchanges is a very, very small part of that.
I'm not saying the website wins any prizes, of course. But as far as what money is being spent on, everyone here is doing the equivalent of confusing the cost of, say, creating American Express' web site with the cost of running American Express. This is ridiculous.
"The World War II Memorial wasn't around in 1995-96, but the National Park Service shut down the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and other Washington tourist attractions during those shutdowns, keeping out an estimated two million visitors. That was on Bill Clinton's watch, but the practice is bipartisan: In the brief Columbus Day shutdown of 1990, George H.W. Bush shut down Washington's monuments and museums, too."
It cites a contemporary CRS report. What have you got?
Now, to try and clear this up a bit:
The lines around what the government legally has to do in a shutdown are certainly hazy. We're working off a very slim body of law, it's only been done a few times (and usually quite briefly), and so on. But there is nothing extraordinary about sensitive, valuable, highly trafficked property being closed when the owner is unable to supervise it. There are not always staff at the Washington Monument, perhaps, but there are always staff on and around the National Mall, not far away. There are staff at NPS offices able to respond to reported events, and more senior staff to administer those staff. There are staff who come in in the morning and clean up any messes from the night before. None of that is legally allowed to happen now. Similarly, the NPS is unable to collect rent from its private tenants or to respond to their problems should any arise.
As others have pointed out, as a legal matter this has nothing whatsoever to do with whether putting up barricades costs more than leaving things running; there are expenses allowed by the law, and expenses not allowed. I certainly agree that the shutdown is, ultimately, enormously expensive for government.
Beyond all that, what's really striking is the charge that closing some national monuments is some sort of stunt. The government has shut down programs that feed hungry children, that prevent massive environmental pollution, that conduct crucial scientific and medical research, that guard food safety, that watch for hurricanes and incoming asteroids - and you think putting up some fences around some marble is a way of making the shutdown hurt?
It's business as usual in AGW-land. Yet another unforseen event? No worries, blame it on CO2 and add another complexity layer on the model.
It's interesting that this has become the default criticism of climate science on Slashdot, found many times in the comments below. "No matter what happens, they'll blame it on CO2!"
It's usually (always?) claimed without evidence, and often - as here - regardless of the details of the story. (I suppose that makes it projection-as-usual, come to think; it is itself the very thing it purportedly complains about. No matter what the climate story is, deniers will say "they'll blame anything on CO2!") Here, of course, what happened was pretty much exactly what was predicted. (I guess you have to read all the way to the second paragraph of the article to find that out, though.)
This isn't even a case of "global warming can lead to unexpected results or more extreme weather locally", where the "they blame everything on warming" line (though still untrue and unevidenced) at least makes some sort of intuitive sense. This is the most ordinary sort of phenomenon, a downward trend with random variations on top of it. Some years will be lower than other years, but the trend remains downward - in this case, so dramatically downward that this "up" year will still be among the worst handful of years on record.
This is eighth-grade statistics at best. If you can't understand it, you'd probably better stick to commenting on YouTube; you're out of your depth here.
As far as cap gains goes, you don't have to convert your shares into money (i.e. sell them) in order to be subjected to the tax. You would also owe it if you bartered them for something else, or if any number of other "taxable events" changing the status of the shares occurred. The rules are complicated, but basically the idea isn't "money is magically the only thing we tax", it's just "we tax it when your ownership in the property ends or changes". I'm talking about the U.S. here - I don't think Canadian law is drastically different. It's possible to tax you, say, annually on the value of changes in your property, instead of waiting for it to be disposed of in some way as we do, but that's administratively very inconvenient (not all property is easy to value), and can be pretty unfair when property has frequent large price fluctuations.
One of the oddities of this debate is that whenever something happens in weather and scientists point out it may be climate change related, this sort of objection comes up - 'you're using ANYTHING as evidence of global warming!' 'They're saying it's cold out because of global warming heh heh!'
Things like this aren't used as evidence of global warming, in the same way that measurements of plant respiration aren't used as evidence that the sun came up this morning. The evidence of global warming is, by and large:
a) we understand the physics of what's going on here, and we have since the 19th century; b) we measure the planet's temperature and it's getting warmer; and c) we can't come up with another explanation for b) that makes any sense.
There are other things, of course, but that's pretty much sufficient.
Unusual weather events are sometimes pointed at as 'evidence' in the sense of "if you people won't understand the science or just trust the scientific community, maybe that BIG HURRICANE over there will convince you", but in the scientific sense, they're of virtually no importance as "evidence global warming is happening." What events like this serve as evidence for (and most of what climate models are used to sort out) are the exact ways in which global warming will affect weather and climate - a much more difficult question, and one that undoubtedly still needs lots of work on the details, as anyone involved will admit. Knowing the planet is retaining more heat from the sun than it would with a different atmosphere is easy; figuring out how that's going to affect precipitation in Pennsylvania in March is more difficult.
To analogize, I'm virtually certain that the denialists on Slashdot will manage to misunderstand something in this post; but predicting exactly what that something will be is far beyond my capabilities.
I would imagine our culture would just adapt to the idea of being always visible (once again?) Most people are already kind of bored with "America's Funniest Home Videos", after all, and seldom stay very interested in webcams for long. No reason I have to care that someone is able to see my every movement.
More sinister types of orwellian mass surveillance will not, I think, be aided by this, at least for long. The big problem in spying now isn't gathering information, it's processing the incredible amounts of info that can easily be gathered. If the FBI had 24-hour video of everyone in the US, all the time, how would they make any use of it? And as these devices became cheap, their own activities would become public- and they're far more afraid of that then we are.
The one activity that would really be aided would be obsessive stalking. But I think culture would adapt to that too... there have been many successful cultures with far less privacy than ours (any primitive village), and others with far more. Humanity is quite capable of adapting to this.
Re:Total Power Available 3mW
on
RoboFly
·
· Score: 1
That's not necessarily so bad. You yourself are running on only 100W or so- do the calorie count. So probaby a milliwatt is around the scale an actual fly runs at! The reason we don't see flying plants probably has more to do with lack of evolutionary imperative than energy difficulties. We see very few carnivorous plants, yet that's a very simple adaptation- the design of a venus flytrap is nothing compared to most of nature- and costs no significant amount of energy. My guess would be that the flies are going to rest, store up a small amount of battery power, then fly. That's all that would be needed for spying; usually, you could transport the flies yourself to the region you wanted them to watch, after all.
We had Freeman Dyson, the physicist at Princeton, down here on the U. Penn campus the other day, and one of the many things he said that surprised me was that he knew Gold, and had complete confidence in him as a scientist. Dyson's own credibility in science is without question, so I found that pretty impressive.
I don't have the impression that Gold is against peer review, or anything; I just think he feels that it's gotten a bit too conservative, which is certainly possible. Speculation is a valid part of science; it needs to be identified for what it is, but it also needs to be heard.
I posted this in a semi-related thread above, but the U.S. Navy has removed this regulation- even for pilots- recently, and it seems likely that the other forces will follow suit.
Actually, most of those problems are associated with old-style RK (which makes much larger incisions in the eye) rather than current laser surgeries, which do experience these problems but at a frequency of maybe 1% when performed by experienced doctors. It is legal to fly a private plane after surgery, and it was recently allowed by revised Navy pilot standards too- night landings on aircraft carriers and all. I'd expect the FAA and the Air Force to follow suit relatively soon as the procedures continue to improve. Myself, I'm content to wait a few years until it's perfected.
I think you've find that, in this case as in many others, possession is nine tenths of the law. After all, if you went there and declared autonomy, who would come stop you?
Well, I'm fundamentally dependent on Earth for resupply, and I'm quite vulnerable to attack. But there's a much more fundamental problem then that: Because the Outer Space Use treaty and related international law prevent any nation from making a territorial claim in space, private organizations are effectively blocked from going anywhere. We worry about this often over on sci.space.policy and everywhere in the space-advocacy community.
The gist is this: suppose I'm a company that sees some value in putting up a moonbase, or maybe I'm the Artemis Project. I need to put, let's say, $10 billion into accomplishing that. Unfortunately, I'm trying to build something that has no protections whatsoever under national or international law. How do I convince investors this is a good bet? How do I value off-planet property as a corporate asset in an IPO, when I can't even determine legally what my property is? How do I insure against accident? Insurers like to have a really specific notion of what they're getting into. If the Department of Defense decides they need my moonbase more than I do, am I protected by eminent domain laws, or not?
Remember, I'm not just the 6 guys up on the moon protecting their property rights by lobbing rocks at the Capitol building; I'm also the enormous organization back on the ground that got them there. Lack of law makes my life very, very difficult back on Earth.
The folks down at SpaceDev (http://www.spacedev.com) are running a private research mission to an asteroid, and their chances of making it look pretty good right now. If they do, Jim Benson (their CEO) has said he expects to lay claim to it as property. Moved to Earth, its mineral value is probably in the tens of trillions of dollars. Should he get to keep it? We obviously need a system where entrepeneurs get to keep the fruits of their labor, or no one will ever bother with space- as most people aren't bothering now, in the absence of that system. But we don't want people making enormous claims based on minor accomplishments, either, and at some point any large development in space is going to be more than just property; it'll be a nation, or at least a city, too. How do we structure law to enable this, and can we get any new treaty past China's veto anyway? I'd love to hear some new geek ideas.
To clarify, all the current ways of producing nanotubes involve making a big mess out of some carbon, and then separating the nanotubes out. While the percentage of molecules that turn out to be nanotubes can be improved with sophisticated techniques like the one described above, it seems like what you'd want for construction would be long tubes. I can't see how you'd get those other than with nano- or organic assemblers...
"The hard part is putting enough weight up in space to be able to lift a large load.. and keeping stability would be tough too. It's like using a baloon."
Not so; do the math. A space elevator is at tension; it's anchored to two points at very different (linear) velocities, and all the points in between want to fly off. Due to the strength required for this, not to mention the enormous length, the thing is far more massive even at its smallest imaginable size than anything you might want to lift on it, and stablility problems are similarly solved.
Not surprising, really. Why would anyone run a poll this way? When you poll people, you ask them about themselves- what they do or feel or think. This is especially true on the internet, where a poll can hope to reach truly large numbers of people.
pop.org seems to be polling people about everyone else. If you want to know more about population growth, you collect information- you ask people, "Why are you having this number of children?" Asking "Why do you think someone else is having this number of children?" is a way of collecting disinformation. It doesn't yield facts, only opinions, which can then be construed to mean almost anything the poller wants- particularly when, as in this case, the real conclusion (that westernized societies will inevitably have fewer children) has already been assumed.
Slashdot Mirror
First, you're wrong on the facts. The Gun Control Act of 1968 prohibited FFL dealers from selling at shows. That restriction was removed in 1986, under FOPA. But what we're talking about here is not FFL dealers.
The "gun show exemption" - good god, an angel on my shoulder is asking, why are you bothering - refers to two factual scenarios:
1) First, from the seller side, the law controlling who has to become an FFL dealer largely targets "do you have a storefront". This means that you can sell guns quite freely at gun shows without having to be (and keep records as, perform background checks as, et cetera) an FFL dealer. That setup imagines 'real dealers' as people with stores. But gun shows are now very large and very frequent events. You can, clearly, be very much in the gun dealing business - buying lots of guns from wholesale sources, selling lots of guns a week, doing it as your primary source of income - while operating only at gun shows and not having to register as an FFL dealer.
2) Second, from the buyer side, if you do your buying at gun shows you aren't "buying from your neighbor". Your experience is like that of going to a store; you have a huge selection, you can go practically anytime, and so on.
So, to summarize, the de facto gun show exemption is that in the drafting of the older laws regulating gun sales, legislators were presumably imagining "we won't apply normal regulation sales at gun shows, because we don't want to burden people engaged in piddly little private transactions with their personal property with the kind of rules we apply to dealers in stores." That's a pretty normal take in legislation generally - consider, for instance, the differences between how private party used car sales are regulated and how used car dealers are.
The massive growth in the size and frequency of gun shows, though, turned what was intended to be a pretty trivial loophole into a huge one. That's the 'exemption'.
First, those other contracts have continued - they didn't drop out of the total when the ACA was passed.
Even the ACA contract isn't for 'building a website', kids. It's for creating and running the 36 federal-based exchanges. The design of the web site you use to access the exchanges is a very, very small part of that.
I'm not saying the website wins any prizes, of course. But as far as what money is being spent on, everyone here is doing the equivalent of confusing the cost of, say, creating American Express' web site with the cost of running American Express. This is ridiculous.
No.
This seems to be widely believed in conservative-land - I'm not sure why - but it is not, in fact, true. See, e.g.,
http://theweek.com/article/index/250498/is-it-really-necessary-to-shut-down-all-the-monuments-in-washington
"The World War II Memorial wasn't around in 1995-96, but the National Park Service shut down the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and other Washington tourist attractions during those shutdowns, keeping out an estimated two million visitors. That was on Bill Clinton's watch, but the practice is bipartisan: In the brief Columbus Day shutdown of 1990, George H.W. Bush shut down Washington's monuments and museums, too."
It cites a contemporary CRS report. What have you got?
Now, to try and clear this up a bit:
The lines around what the government legally has to do in a shutdown are certainly hazy. We're working off a very slim body of law, it's only been done a few times (and usually quite briefly), and so on. But there is nothing extraordinary about sensitive, valuable, highly trafficked property being closed when the owner is unable to supervise it. There are not always staff at the Washington Monument, perhaps, but there are always staff on and around the National Mall, not far away. There are staff at NPS offices able to respond to reported events, and more senior staff to administer those staff. There are staff who come in in the morning and clean up any messes from the night before. None of that is legally allowed to happen now. Similarly, the NPS is unable to collect rent from its private tenants or to respond to their problems should any arise.
As others have pointed out, as a legal matter this has nothing whatsoever to do with whether putting up barricades costs more than leaving things running; there are expenses allowed by the law, and expenses not allowed. I certainly agree that the shutdown is, ultimately, enormously expensive for government.
Beyond all that, what's really striking is the charge that closing some national monuments is some sort of stunt. The government has shut down programs that feed hungry children, that prevent massive environmental pollution, that conduct crucial scientific and medical research, that guard food safety, that watch for hurricanes and incoming asteroids - and you think putting up some fences around some marble is a way of making the shutdown hurt?
It's business as usual in AGW-land. Yet another unforseen event? No worries, blame it on CO2 and add another complexity layer on the model.
It's interesting that this has become the default criticism of climate science on Slashdot, found many times in the comments below. "No matter what happens, they'll blame it on CO2!"
It's usually (always?) claimed without evidence, and often - as here - regardless of the details of the story. (I suppose that makes it projection-as-usual, come to think; it is itself the very thing it purportedly complains about. No matter what the climate story is, deniers will say "they'll blame anything on CO2!") Here, of course, what happened was pretty much exactly what was predicted. (I guess you have to read all the way to the second paragraph of the article to find that out, though.)
This isn't even a case of "global warming can lead to unexpected results or more extreme weather locally", where the "they blame everything on warming" line (though still untrue and unevidenced) at least makes some sort of intuitive sense. This is the most ordinary sort of phenomenon, a downward trend with random variations on top of it. Some years will be lower than other years, but the trend remains downward - in this case, so dramatically downward that this "up" year will still be among the worst handful of years on record.
This is eighth-grade statistics at best. If you can't understand it, you'd probably better stick to commenting on YouTube; you're out of your depth here.
As far as cap gains goes, you don't have to convert your shares into money (i.e. sell them) in order to be subjected to the tax. You would also owe it if you bartered them for something else, or if any number of other "taxable events" changing the status of the shares occurred. The rules are complicated, but basically the idea isn't "money is magically the only thing we tax", it's just "we tax it when your ownership in the property ends or changes". I'm talking about the U.S. here - I don't think Canadian law is drastically different. It's possible to tax you, say, annually on the value of changes in your property, instead of waiting for it to be disposed of in some way as we do, but that's administratively very inconvenient (not all property is easy to value), and can be pretty unfair when property has frequent large price fluctuations.
One of the oddities of this debate is that whenever something happens in weather and scientists point out it may be climate change related, this sort of objection comes up - 'you're using ANYTHING as evidence of global warming!' 'They're saying it's cold out because of global warming heh heh!'
Things like this aren't used as evidence of global warming, in the same way that measurements of plant respiration aren't used as evidence that the sun came up this morning. The evidence of global warming is, by and large:
a) we understand the physics of what's going on here, and we have since the 19th century;
b) we measure the planet's temperature and it's getting warmer; and
c) we can't come up with another explanation for b) that makes any sense.
There are other things, of course, but that's pretty much sufficient.
Unusual weather events are sometimes pointed at as 'evidence' in the sense of "if you people won't understand the science or just trust the scientific community, maybe that BIG HURRICANE over there will convince you", but in the scientific sense, they're of virtually no importance as "evidence global warming is happening." What events like this serve as evidence for (and most of what climate models are used to sort out) are the exact ways in which global warming will affect weather and climate - a much more difficult question, and one that undoubtedly still needs lots of work on the details, as anyone involved will admit. Knowing the planet is retaining more heat from the sun than it would with a different atmosphere is easy; figuring out how that's going to affect precipitation in Pennsylvania in March is more difficult.
To analogize, I'm virtually certain that the denialists on Slashdot will manage to misunderstand something in this post; but predicting exactly what that something will be is far beyond my capabilities.
I would imagine our culture would just adapt to the idea of being always visible (once again?) Most people are already kind of bored with "America's Funniest Home Videos", after all, and seldom stay very interested in webcams for long. No reason I have to care that someone is able to see my every movement.
More sinister types of orwellian mass surveillance will not, I think, be aided by this, at least for long. The big problem in spying now isn't gathering information, it's processing the incredible amounts of info that can easily be gathered. If the FBI had 24-hour video of everyone in the US, all the time, how would they make any use of it? And as these devices became cheap, their own activities would become public- and they're far more afraid of that then we are.
The one activity that would really be aided would be obsessive stalking. But I think culture would adapt to that too... there have been many successful cultures with far less privacy than ours (any primitive village), and others with far more. Humanity is quite capable of adapting to this.
That's not necessarily so bad. You yourself are running on only 100W or so- do the calorie count. So probaby a milliwatt is around the scale an actual fly runs at! The reason we don't see flying plants probably has more to do with lack of evolutionary imperative than energy difficulties. We see very few carnivorous plants, yet that's a very simple adaptation- the design of a venus flytrap is nothing compared to most of nature- and costs no significant amount of energy. My guess would be that the flies are going to rest, store up a small amount of battery power, then fly. That's all that would be needed for spying; usually, you could transport the flies yourself to the region you wanted them to watch, after all.
We had Freeman Dyson, the physicist at Princeton, down here on the U. Penn campus the other day, and one of the many things he said that surprised me was that he knew Gold, and had complete confidence in him as a scientist. Dyson's own credibility in science is without question, so I found that pretty impressive.
I don't have the impression that Gold is against peer review, or anything; I just think he feels that it's gotten a bit too conservative, which is certainly possible. Speculation is a valid part of science; it needs to be identified for what it is, but it also needs to be heard.
I posted this in a semi-related thread above, but the U.S. Navy has removed this regulation- even for pilots- recently, and it seems likely that the other forces will follow suit.
Actually, most of those problems are associated with old-style RK (which makes much larger incisions in the eye) rather than current laser surgeries, which do experience these problems but at a frequency of maybe 1% when performed by experienced doctors. It is legal to fly a private plane after surgery, and it was recently allowed by revised Navy pilot standards too- night landings on aircraft carriers and all. I'd expect the FAA and the Air Force to follow suit relatively soon as the procedures continue to improve. Myself, I'm content to wait a few years until it's perfected.
Well, I'm fundamentally dependent on Earth for resupply, and I'm quite vulnerable to attack. But there's a much more fundamental problem then that: Because the Outer Space Use treaty and related international law prevent any nation from making a territorial claim in space, private organizations are effectively blocked from going anywhere. We worry about this often over on sci.space.policy and everywhere in the space-advocacy community.
The gist is this: suppose I'm a company that sees some value in putting up a moonbase, or maybe I'm the Artemis Project. I need to put, let's say, $10 billion into accomplishing that. Unfortunately, I'm trying to build something that has no protections whatsoever under national or international law. How do I convince investors this is a good bet? How do I value off-planet property as a corporate asset in an IPO, when I can't even determine legally what my property is? How do I insure against accident? Insurers like to have a really specific notion of what they're getting into. If the Department of Defense decides they need my moonbase more than I do, am I protected by eminent domain laws, or not?
Remember, I'm not just the 6 guys up on the moon protecting their property rights by lobbing rocks at the Capitol building; I'm also the enormous organization back on the ground that got them there. Lack of law makes my life very, very difficult back on Earth.
The folks down at SpaceDev (http://www.spacedev.com) are running a private research mission to an asteroid, and their chances of making it look pretty good right now. If they do, Jim Benson (their CEO) has said he expects to lay claim to it as property. Moved to Earth, its mineral value is probably in the tens of trillions of dollars. Should he get to keep it? We obviously need a system where entrepeneurs get to keep the fruits of their labor, or no one will ever bother with space- as most people aren't bothering now, in the absence of that system. But we don't want people making enormous claims based on minor accomplishments, either, and at some point any large development in space is going to be more than just property; it'll be a nation, or at least a city, too. How do we structure law to enable this, and can we get any new treaty past China's veto anyway? I'd love to hear some new geek ideas.
To clarify, all the current ways of producing nanotubes involve making a big mess out of some carbon, and then separating the nanotubes out. While the percentage of molecules that turn out to be nanotubes can be improved with sophisticated techniques like the one described above, it seems like what you'd want for construction would be long tubes. I can't see how you'd get those other than with nano- or organic assemblers...
"The hard part is putting enough weight up in space to be able to lift a large load.. and keeping stability would be tough too. It's like using a baloon."
Not so; do the math. A space elevator is at tension; it's anchored to two points at very different (linear) velocities, and all the points in between want to fly off. Due to the strength required for this, not to mention the enormous length, the thing is far more massive even at its smallest imaginable size than anything you might want to lift on it, and stablility problems are similarly solved.
Not surprising, really. Why would anyone run a poll this way? When you poll people, you ask them about themselves- what they do or feel or think. This is especially true on the internet, where a poll can hope to reach truly large numbers of people.
pop.org seems to be polling people about everyone else. If you want to know more about population growth, you collect information- you ask people, "Why are you having this number of children?" Asking "Why do you think someone else is having this number of children?" is a way of collecting disinformation. It doesn't yield facts, only opinions, which can then be construed to mean almost anything the poller wants- particularly when, as in this case, the real conclusion (that westernized societies will inevitably have fewer children) has already been assumed.