If you didn't think the Native Americans owned land, try going back in time 600 years, walking up to a dwelling someone's living in, and making them leave and then you live there. Or attempting to physically move them or their dwelling.
The Native Americans didn't have ownership of most land, which is what happens with property ownership in a society without any resource limitation. If you can get as many X as you want, people don't bother to decide the ownership of 99.99999% of X. For Native Americans, land was X, they couldn't figure out why anyone would attempt to claim an empty field or a river, when there appear to be near-infinite amounts of those.
But people still own the X they're holding in their hand, or the X they're sleeping on, or the X they're wearing, or the X spot of the river they're currently fishing from.
No society ever has let you walk over and pick up someone else's shoes they just took off and claim them as your own.
And I'm not here to talk about 'sensible' ways to do thing. I'm simply saying that all societies have 'ownership' in the sense that people are recognized to have control over certain items. Our society has ownership of (almost) everything, whereas other societies might have only small personal possession and clothing and sleeping areas, but pretty much all of them have at least that much.
All societies have the concept of 'possession', that you are in control of certain things, and all of them extend that to things you are 'hypothetically' in possession of in general but not actually in possession of at this exact moment, like your bedroll over in the community tent.
Wrong. The way I stated it is is perfectly correct when in context.
If someone says '90% of X is very Y', it's perfectly correct to respond '90% of X isn't Y at all'. That does not mean that '90% of X is non-Y'.
If I had wanted to say '90% of the population was unemployed', I knew how to say that.
You've decided to read the '90% of the population' as some sort of statistic, like I was talking about the population.
A common way to understand it, but in context I was just using it as a repeat of his mention of 90%, and pointing out that his hypothetical 90% couldn't even be employed, much less have insurance than way.
Here is what I said, rephrased:
You assert that 90% of the people in this country have insurance via their jobs, but that's idiotic...they can't even have jobs, much less insurance.
Again, like I said, slightly confusing, and able to mislead people, but correct in the context of talking about 90% of people. And I immediately clarified what I was talking about in the next sentence, which rather makes you a grammar nazi.
I don't remember any examples from US history where people starved to death because private charity was overwhelmed. Do you have any particular cases you can point out?
Erm...what are you talking about?
Homeless people don't die of starvation. That takes several days. They die of exposure.
I have no idea how many of them would die of starvation if they had not died of exposure, but it's worth mentioning that the most common cause of homeless death, after drugs, violence, and exposure, is cardiac arrest. So either they all coincidentally have bad hearts, or they're chronically malnourished, one of the causes of cardiac arrest.
Yeah, that's a sorta vague term, isn't it?
OTOH, all political descriptions are sorta vague terms.;)
I, personally, am along the lines of Woodrow Wilson (domestically) and FDR. Namely, I agree that the government should attempt to implement the FDR's 'Second Bill of Rights', although it's absurd to call those 'rights'. They should, however, be government goals.
Members of a political philosophies need to be very aware where that philosophy has failed in the past. (Something I fear the conservatives are about to learn the hard way.)
In the case of progressives, almost all progressive failures have been attempting to solve the entirely wrong thing.
For example, Prohibition was an attempt to solve the problem of men spending all their family's money on drink, and then being abusive towards their wives. (Modern people read about 'demon liquor' and laugh, but they don't know the context of that.)
That problem was actually solved with divorce (Another progressive concept) and the ability of women to earn their own money (Which was a liberal concept.), and the eventual recognition of spousal abuse as a serious problem. (Also liberal concept.)
It's great to provide food for people who are starving due to no fault of their own, but it's not such a good policy to feed someone who can't buy food because he just blew his entire paycheck on the slot machines. Good luck devising a government policy that helps the former while denying the latter.
Indeed, that's the fine line that needs to be walked. Instead of trying to feed people without food, you try to feed people who have been laid off. (I.e., unemployment.)
Or you just feed children (I.e, WIC.)
Most of the complexities of welfare are an attempt to aim it at people in need, not people who don't have any money because of their own actions.
That's why charity should happen on an individual or local basis. The decisions need to be made on a case-by-case distributed basis instead of being centralized.
No, that introduces all sorts of personal prejudices in it.
Also, charity cannot possibly happen that way in cases of depressed areas of economic downturn. No one has any money to give to anyone.
Without them, some people can injury and kill another person, without that other person being able to stop them. The strong can prey on the weak.
With handguns, all people can injury and kill others.
But this also means all people can fight back when the other person tries to do that to them.
It's a basic equality thing. If some people have the ability to hurt others (And some of that subset, in fact, does.), those others should also have that ability to hurt them back.
Laws forbidding concealed carry are essentially saying 'Everyone must be as weak as they look, so the strong know who they can threaten safely'.
Indeed. I'm a progressive, and the huge mistake that progressivism has constantly made in history is attempting to ban effects, not causes.
Prohibition, gun bans, etc.
Even stuff like consumer and lending protection laws, which at least don't have any bad side effects, but are less useful than actual consumer education would be. Sometimes stopgaps are reasonable, but we really do need to get to the root of the problem: People have no idea how to manage their financial life.
Hell, education isn't the only solution. We could come up some cheap financial advisory industry. It's absurd that the legal and financial professions have priced themselves out of normal people being able to consult with them before doing major things.
And the right's not immune to it either, look at their little idiocy about illegal immigration. As long as you have a poor country, next to a rich company, where people can go and get much better jobs, you're going to have people doing that. As we can't do anything about the poor country, we don't want to do anything about the rich country, and we can't move our country, the only solution is, duh, not offer them jobs. Or, rather, crack down on people doing so. Instead we get 'law and order' nonsense.
All ideas of ownership don't exist outside of a legal structure. That's why people don't want anarchy because the only reason a person has something in anarchy is because they are powerful enough to take it. So we create an owner of X and create laws to defend that owner.
That's only true if you define 'ownership' as a legal right, which, duh, means it can't exist outside of a legal framework.
But plenty of societies without legal frameworks have the concept that you continue to have the right to use and control the use of (Which is the basic concept of ownership.) a tool you made, even if you set it down and someone picked it out. And you can trade or even 'rent' the tool to other people.
Same with the bed you sleep in. Or the clothes you wear.
People often think societies like that don't have ownership because they are usually communistic and have one group of people collect food, and another group maintain the shelters, and another group repair clothing, without any obvious tracking of 'who owes who what.'
But there's never been a recorded instance of a society where no one 'owns' anything. If someone takes off their clothes to go swimming, you can't just walk up and take them, or even replace them with other clothes.
As for 'anarchy', anarchy is not some actual thing. Anarchy is an invented concept that hasn't ever existed in any society. People often pretend it is the 'default' state of humans or that 'without government' we have it. But it's not, and we don't...for most of human history we've had tribalism, which is just really informal government. Modern days, 'without a government', we have warlordism, which just competing dictatorships.
Physical ownership exists because because there is only one of each thing, and only one person can use it at one time.
So a government comes along and says 'This is yours, even if you aren't possessing it', e.g., if you set it down for a second. Or it's what you sleep on.
Possession is, if you will, an inherent property of the universe. Everything that exists can have zero or one people in control of it. 'Property ownership' is just a way to continue 'possession' without actually possessing it, because, frankly, no one wants to carry around all their stuff all the time.
Land ownership is loosely related. It started with the concept that part of the ground, where you planted something or built a shelter, was yours. Admittedly, it's expanded past that point, and there have actually been quite a few people who want to 'correct' this back by taking land that no one's done anything with away from the owner.
Even really indirect ownership, like stock ownership, is still 'There is something that exists, and control over that thing needs to be decided, as only one person can actually 'control' it.'. The thing that exists is the physical assets of the company, and the control is an amazingly indirect mess, but it's still there in principle.
Compare to copyright, which doesn't have anything to do with possession or things that actually exist and can be controlled. Copyright is the ability to stop other people from doing things with their own stuff, like singing a song with their own mouth.
That's why people have ownership of a copyright, not ownership of a song. You can't actually own a sound pattern, that is not property that actually exists. You can, however, own the government-issued right to stop other people from replicating that pattern it.
Cookies are the only way to make the web stateful. (Well, not really, but all other ways have just as much privacy implications as cookies.)
The web is a lot more useful if it is stateful. Period.
Now, if people want to stop their browsers from doing that, I'm fine with it, and website designers should be aware that this may have happened and degrade gracefully.
Likewise, web designers should carefully consider if they need a non-session cookie.
But asserting that cookies should be banned simply because people collect large amounts of data is stupid. Why not simply ban attempting to correlate what sites people visit via cookies? Or, hell, require browsers to default to disallowing third party ones.
Saying 'Cookies are bad' is mindless and stupid. Most users actually want websites to remember what the hell they're currently doing. Like what terms they searched with last using what options, and what language they selected, and what point in the article tree they are.
Less than one percent of all people have scammed users on Facebook for profit. The number of people doing it is not the issue.
I'm not entire sure what your point is there. Are you asserting scamming people on facebook is deviant behavior, or you asserting my definition of deviant is wrong?
The parent to your post is talking about selfishness. Murder, beyond certain neurochemical imbalances, is a form of selfishness: I would rather someone else be dead.
Actually, only some murder is selfishness.
Some of it is anger, or hate. (Although it's possible that's what you mean by 'imbalances', I'm not sure.)
Perhaps this selfishness benefits society, even. But there are some things, like murder, we agree should not be allowed for the general good of society. Looking at the root causes, selfishness in this example, can be instructive. Some people, such as yourself, seem to shrug and say it's part of human nature so we should just let it go. Others, like the parent and his previous post, think we should restrict it.
Erm, I'm pretty certain I didn't say we should let people get away with murder.
You've actually started arguing with the wrong people in this discussion. QuoteMstr said 'rules should be structured so greed doesn't harm society'. Which, obviously, includes restricting the very harmful. It also means discouraging the moderately harmful.
In fact, QuoteMstr started by saying 'Thus, given that greedy people will inevitably be in positions of power, we need to construct rules which ensure that this greed doesn't harm society. These rules need to make it the greedy party's interest to be a good participant in society.'.
It is utterly baffling how people are reading his "Stop whining about greedy people, people are normally greedy, start making laws that keeps those people form hurting us" into some argument that it's okay for greed to hurt others. People who are okay with behaviors generally don't want to make laws against them.
I was replying to sowth, who who started talking about how thinking like that was destroying society and that we should all magically wish greed away or something. Blaming the acknowledgment and attempted control of greed for 'psychopaths' existing at all.
Seriously, you guys are total nutters. I don't even know how to deal with someone who can read clearly obvious statements that we should 'stop the greedy from hurting people' as some sort of justification for greedy people hurting others.
I, OTOH, didn't say anything about what we should do about greed. I just pointed out that QuoteMstr was right, that a lot of human behavior is caused by 'greed', but that is a dumb word for 'wanting to eat enough to live', that this 'greed' is actually an continuum that, at one end, is perfectly acceptable. (Aka, a 'greedy' person buying food for themself instead of giving it away.)
Your issue with "sociopath" vs. "psychopath" demonstrates this disconnect. Despite the motivation for the murder, the end result is that someone is still dead in either case. The parent proposes that advocating selfishness and greed causes problems, such as allowing sociopaths to internally justify a murder to get neat new shoes.
Yes, but it won't cause psychopaths to do anything, which is why I made my correction. Psychopaths are not, in fact, 'greedy'. They do not kill people for any gain, or any discernible purpose. Obviously, if they do have a reason to kill you, they'll do that too, but they'll also kill you because, hey, why not.
I don't have an 'issue' with the words, I'm pointing out he used the wrong one, that they are distinct psychological problems. I wouldn't have even mentioned it except the exact behavior he ascribed to psychopaths is actually the defining line between them and sociopaths...people are psychopaths if and only if they kill people for no reason whatsoever. People who kill remorselessly for a reason are just sociopaths.
It's sorta like claiming you went to see the musical 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', which you know is an musical because no one was singing. Yeah, um, you have that backwards.
That scam is the same, only worse, since today, 90% of people are covered by their employers,
Bzzzt, wrong, thank you for playing.
90% of the people in this country aren't even employed, you nimrod, so certainly '90%' can't have insurance via their employer. Even being generous and counting people who are covered by someone else's employer, like their spouse or parent, I assure you, more than 10% of the population is either retired or nonemployed without someone else providing their insurance. (Hell, the unemployment rate is very close to 10%, and that doesn't include all the people not looking for work or retired or too young to work.)
Likewise, the percentage of the insured in this country isn't 90%, so you've managed to be mathematically impossibly stupidly wrong two entirely different ways. 90% of people can't be insured a specific way if more than 10% of people are uninsured!
But let's really be charitable, and assume you meant '90% of insured people are covered by their employers, or someone's employers'. This is also hilariously incorrect, although at least now we're in the realm of mathmatically possibility.
Sadly for you, currently only about 56% of insured people are insured via their employer, a drop of 10% from a decade ago. Another 29% get it from the government. The rest buy it themselves.
But even those numbers are silly, because many of the 'employers' still providing insurance are, in fact, the government.
The amount of insured people who are getting insurance from a non-government job has, in fact, recently hit 47%. That's right, less than half of the people who have insurance have it via the private sector purchasing insurance for them.
With parking offenses, for example, they don't have to prove the defendant committed the crime. Because the crime isn't what people think it is. (Crimes often aren't legally what people imagine them to be.)
Strict liability with parking is solely 'Where is the car you own actually located?'. If it is in a place cars are not allowed to be, you are guilty of a parking violation regardless of who did it. You are given a ticket for owning a car that is illegally parked. (Not actually owning the car, of course, is a valid defense. Having it stolen and placed there is not technically a valid one, although most judges would throw out the ticket anyway.)
I.e., the crime isn't 'parking' at all, despite everyone calling it that. It is 'the physical location of your car is not a location that cars are allowed at'. As long as that is your car, and as long as that is the location it's at, and as long as said location is illegal to put a car in, you are guilty, period.
For that to be the same with photo tickets, it would be have to be an offense 'to own a car that was speeding', for example. If they try to use camera tickets without having writing the law that way, they get thrown out.
They could write a strict liability law the other way, where 'driving a car at above the speed limit', is strict liability, and for all I know that's actually how it's written normally, but, as you point out, that doesn't help them if they don't catch the driver's face on camera and 'driving', not 'owning', is the offense.
But that's not, for example, how speeding tickets work in my state, where there's all sorts of affirmative defenses in the law you can use to justify or reduce speeding tickets (Broken speedometer, sloped hill, medical emergency.), and you do, indeed, get a trial.
Yes, but I wasn't talking about willful blindness. I was talking about failure to pay attention while driving, and hence getting in an accident.
No one is deliberately failing to learn there's a car in front of them, which would be willful blindness. (I can just see it now, people driving while blindfolded. 'Officer, you can't give me a ticket, I couldn't see that that stop sign, or the speed limit, or the car I hit...'.)
There are three scenarios in which you rearend someone:
a) You did it on purpose, in which case it's intentional vandalism and probably intentional assault, but no one does that so it's not important.
b) You were driving too close behind them, and hit because you couldn't stop fast enough. In which case the crime isn't hitting them, it is intentionally 'following too close', which is what you'll get the ticket for. You're not, and can't be, charges for actually hitting them, it's just that actually hitting them is ipso facto evidence you were too damn close.
c) You weren't paying attention at all, and hit them.
'c' is interesting, because there appears to be no 'intent' at all. But there is. The intent was 'to do whatever made you not pay attention'. You started, and continued, doing whatever distracted you. You didn't intent for it to distract you, but you intended to do it.
It sounds like an oxymoron, 'intentionally being distracted', but it is not.
If you're doing c, they usually give you a ticket for b instead, but you could legitimately challenge that ticket in court if you could demonstrate you were, in fact, far enough way to stop, but failed to do so because you weren't paying attention.
Of course, legally, at some point, you were much too close to them for the speed you were going, like when you were two inches from them and going any speed at all, so legally at that point, you were 'following too close' under the law. And also they'd tack on 'reckless driving', which is the actual offense for 'c', and a worse offense than 'following too closely'.
If you could prove no intent at all, for example, say someone was shooting at you, which caused you to become distracted in a way that was not legally your fault, you could get out of all the tickets.
Incidentally, I've actually done 'c' before. I was parked at a red light, I was trying to get something out of my backseat, my foot fell off the brake, and I coasted forward and hit the guy in front of me. If they had actually given me a ticket, it would have been for 'reckless driving', not 'following too closely', which is probably why they didn't give me one. (No one got hurt.)
Yeah, I thought of that right after I posted the second time, but replying to yourself once is already bad enough form.
Laws can, constitutionally in the US, be strict liability only if they're misdemeanors. States can have enough tougher restrictions. In some places, only parking offenses can be that.
A lot of people have gotten out of traffic tickets in places where traffic laws aren't strict liability, because a picture of their car speeding does not equal them making their car speed, which is what the law requires. Usually the legislature attempt to change the laws to allow that, but often they run into various legal hurdles WRT civil rights.
Even so, you can actually get out of most strict liability offenses if, for example, your car is stolen, or slides down a hill. Or, in an ultimate absurdity, your legally-parked car gets hit by another car and shoved into a no-parking area. Even though technically you are still guilt of the charge, in most cases if you can actually demonstrate it happened without any of your actions reasonably leading to what happened, you'll get a pass.
Strict liability laws are mainly so you can't claim 'someone else parked your car', because it would be near impossible for the court to prove you did that.
Incidentally, in my state, we don't have strict liability for speeding, and hence a broken speedometer is grounds for getting out of a ticket. Of course, it's illegal to sell cars with speedometers that are off like that, and they're not allowed to pull anyone over who's going less than 5 over the limit, because the person can just say 'speedometer error' and get the ticket thrown out.
You're not entirely off the hook, however, because people are reasonably assumed to be able to notice their speedometers are broken by more than 5 mph. (By other traffic, and by the radar speed-limit measurers the police put up.)
Sure, I could use buttons that trigger a php script and store the preference in a session variable.
Except that session variables use cookies.
Seriously, I see the weirdest comments here about people that are just inexplicably silly. It's like people are missing how this works.
'Sessions' has nothing to do with this. A session just means the server remember the variables, and just wants the ID of the session for each page load...but someone still has to remember the session between page loads, so it's exactly the same thing.
The web is stateless. There is one good way to remember anything between page loads: Cookies.
There are half a dozen of bad ways, from guessing based on IP and User Agent (Fails horribly on NAT), to embedding information in the URLs (Extremely dangerous as URLs get passed around), to other ways that I can't even think of because it's stupid to use them instead of the actual thing designed for this purpose.
Strictly speaking, you can do sessions without cookies. You can put the session code in the URL.
This was invented by PHP, and was immediately decried by everyone, because it's absurdly dangerous. URLs are not secret. They get passed in referers, they get bookmarked, they get stored in browser histories. Some sites used to publish the referers of their visitors, until spammers started faking them.
Which means that other people can come along and open that URL and, boom, they magically have your session.
But, yes, the GP clearly has no idea what he's talking about. A 'session' is 'storing variables on the server-side, and having a unique ID to access those variables on a page load'. That is all that 'session' means.
Sessions are opposed the old way of having all those variables be passed around through the page load, either in cookies or other means, which means they go through the user and hence could be altered maliciously. (I'll just change user_id here to '0'...) That was dumb, so now we just hand the user a long string, called a session ID, and and say 'Give that back to us, and we'll use it to look up your information'.
This is almost always done by putting a session ID in a cookie. That's the point of cookies, to hand information to a web browser and then get it back on each page load. Other ways of doing it are complicated and risky, like I said above.
In fact, cookies that aren't using 'sessions' are less of a privacy risk, because you can see what's in them. For example, I have a language code on a website that wants 'en-US' or whatever. So I just give them that string in a cookie. They can see entirely what I'm doing, instead of me hiding that inside a session. If they alter it, well, that's not a security risk, they either get another language, or they get English if I can't figure it out.
User experience? WTF? Sorry,but the only reason you need invisible-to-the-user cookies is so you can monetize them without them realizing just how much privacy/anonymity they're giving up. Because that might give users pause before they accept your cookies, if they had an informed choice.
Um, or we want to remember how a user sorted a list when he was on a page last? Or how he navigated through the site so we can present the correct links to wind his way up the tree? Or his language?
All of which should be available to non-logged-in users.
You are looking at this through marketing-tinted glasses. In your world you only use cookies for tracking.
In actual web design world, we use cookies for passing information between pages. There's plenty of reasons to pass information between pages that have nothing to do with 'tracking'.
And no one knows what would considered to be 'required' cookies, and hence you don't have to prompt for.
Probably they're trying to mean 'shopping carts' and 'logins' are allowed to use cookies without asking, because users should know that makes a cookie, but do they include language selection? Theme selection? Sorting things? Saving search terms? What exactly 'requires' cookies?
Strictly speaking, every single thing done on the internet could be done without cookies using hidden form fields and altered URLs and AJAX.
Even 'Have you visited before, and when, and as who?' can be hacked via the various 'Is a specific file in the browser cache?' detection methods. You could even put the session ID in that file, and read it via Javascript which alters URLs, and it's a damn persistent cookie. (No one's ever bothered to do this, though, because it's stupidly roundabout.)
A better, and more useful, solution is to use CookieSafe in Firefox, or the other extensions that do the same thing.
It bans all cookies, without prompting, but you can turn them on per site.
After a few times, you learn to automatically think 'I wish to register for an account at this website, I will enable cookies for it first' and click the icon and Allow the site.
Also you can override websites only set per-session ones for websites that 'need' them but really shouldn't, like sites that keep track of what 'page' you're on via them.
A lot of sites, Joomla for example, create the session before you login.
I.e., everyone visiting a Joomla site gets a cookie to start with. Because they get a session to start with. When they login, that session contains their login (And they might get a non-session cookie if they choose to stay logged in.), but it exists before that.
It thus exists without any 'consent' on the part of the user.
Of course, this is a session cookie, which any sane law would explicitly exclude from attempting to control. Likewise, it doesn't have have any data at all besides 'I am the same web browser as that guy from a second ago'.
There is absolutely nothing such a session cookie can't do that a guessing IPs or having tracking code in the URL couldn't do.
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If you didn't think the Native Americans owned land, try going back in time 600 years, walking up to a dwelling someone's living in, and making them leave and then you live there. Or attempting to physically move them or their dwelling.
The Native Americans didn't have ownership of most land, which is what happens with property ownership in a society without any resource limitation. If you can get as many X as you want, people don't bother to decide the ownership of 99.99999% of X. For Native Americans, land was X, they couldn't figure out why anyone would attempt to claim an empty field or a river, when there appear to be near-infinite amounts of those.
But people still own the X they're holding in their hand, or the X they're sleeping on, or the X they're wearing, or the X spot of the river they're currently fishing from.
No society ever has let you walk over and pick up someone else's shoes they just took off and claim them as your own.
And I'm not here to talk about 'sensible' ways to do thing. I'm simply saying that all societies have 'ownership' in the sense that people are recognized to have control over certain items. Our society has ownership of (almost) everything, whereas other societies might have only small personal possession and clothing and sleeping areas, but pretty much all of them have at least that much.
All societies have the concept of 'possession', that you are in control of certain things, and all of them extend that to things you are 'hypothetically' in possession of in general but not actually in possession of at this exact moment, like your bedroll over in the community tent.
Wrong. The way I stated it is is perfectly correct when in context.
If someone says '90% of X is very Y', it's perfectly correct to respond '90% of X isn't Y at all'. That does not mean that '90% of X is non-Y'.
If I had wanted to say '90% of the population was unemployed', I knew how to say that.
You've decided to read the '90% of the population' as some sort of statistic, like I was talking about the population.
A common way to understand it, but in context I was just using it as a repeat of his mention of 90%, and pointing out that his hypothetical 90% couldn't even be employed, much less have insurance than way.
Here is what I said, rephrased:
You assert that 90% of the people in this country have insurance via their jobs, but that's idiotic...they can't even have jobs, much less insurance.
Again, like I said, slightly confusing, and able to mislead people, but correct in the context of talking about 90% of people. And I immediately clarified what I was talking about in the next sentence, which rather makes you a grammar nazi.
I don't remember any examples from US history where people starved to death because private charity was overwhelmed. Do you have any particular cases you can point out?
Erm...what are you talking about?
Homeless people don't die of starvation. That takes several days. They die of exposure.
I have no idea how many of them would die of starvation if they had not died of exposure, but it's worth mentioning that the most common cause of homeless death, after drugs, violence, and exposure, is cardiac arrest. So either they all coincidentally have bad hearts, or they're chronically malnourished, one of the causes of cardiac arrest.
Yeah, that's a sorta vague term, isn't it? OTOH, all political descriptions are sorta vague terms. ;)
I, personally, am along the lines of Woodrow Wilson (domestically) and FDR. Namely, I agree that the government should attempt to implement the FDR's 'Second Bill of Rights', although it's absurd to call those 'rights'. They should, however, be government goals.
Members of a political philosophies need to be very aware where that philosophy has failed in the past. (Something I fear the conservatives are about to learn the hard way.)
In the case of progressives, almost all progressive failures have been attempting to solve the entirely wrong thing.
For example, Prohibition was an attempt to solve the problem of men spending all their family's money on drink, and then being abusive towards their wives. (Modern people read about 'demon liquor' and laugh, but they don't know the context of that.)
That problem was actually solved with divorce (Another progressive concept) and the ability of women to earn their own money (Which was a liberal concept.), and the eventual recognition of spousal abuse as a serious problem. (Also liberal concept.)
It's great to provide food for people who are starving due to no fault of their own, but it's not such a good policy to feed someone who can't buy food because he just blew his entire paycheck on the slot machines. Good luck devising a government policy that helps the former while denying the latter.
Indeed, that's the fine line that needs to be walked. Instead of trying to feed people without food, you try to feed people who have been laid off. (I.e., unemployment.)
Or you just feed children (I.e, WIC.)
Most of the complexities of welfare are an attempt to aim it at people in need, not people who don't have any money because of their own actions.
That's why charity should happen on an individual or local basis. The decisions need to be made on a case-by-case distributed basis instead of being centralized.
No, that introduces all sorts of personal prejudices in it.
Also, charity cannot possibly happen that way in cases of depressed areas of economic downturn. No one has any money to give to anyone.
Handguns are the great equalizer.
Without them, some people can injury and kill another person, without that other person being able to stop them. The strong can prey on the weak.
With handguns, all people can injury and kill others.
But this also means all people can fight back when the other person tries to do that to them.
It's a basic equality thing. If some people have the ability to hurt others (And some of that subset, in fact, does.), those others should also have that ability to hurt them back.
Laws forbidding concealed carry are essentially saying 'Everyone must be as weak as they look, so the strong know who they can threaten safely'.
Indeed. I'm a progressive, and the huge mistake that progressivism has constantly made in history is attempting to ban effects, not causes. Prohibition, gun bans, etc.
Even stuff like consumer and lending protection laws, which at least don't have any bad side effects, but are less useful than actual consumer education would be. Sometimes stopgaps are reasonable, but we really do need to get to the root of the problem: People have no idea how to manage their financial life.
Hell, education isn't the only solution. We could come up some cheap financial advisory industry. It's absurd that the legal and financial professions have priced themselves out of normal people being able to consult with them before doing major things.
And the right's not immune to it either, look at their little idiocy about illegal immigration. As long as you have a poor country, next to a rich company, where people can go and get much better jobs, you're going to have people doing that. As we can't do anything about the poor country, we don't want to do anything about the rich country, and we can't move our country, the only solution is, duh, not offer them jobs. Or, rather, crack down on people doing so. Instead we get 'law and order' nonsense.
Who the hell cares about firearm homicides?
How much did all homicides change?
All ideas of ownership don't exist outside of a legal structure. That's why people don't want anarchy because the only reason a person has something in anarchy is because they are powerful enough to take it. So we create an owner of X and create laws to defend that owner.
That's only true if you define 'ownership' as a legal right, which, duh, means it can't exist outside of a legal framework.
But plenty of societies without legal frameworks have the concept that you continue to have the right to use and control the use of (Which is the basic concept of ownership.) a tool you made, even if you set it down and someone picked it out. And you can trade or even 'rent' the tool to other people.
Same with the bed you sleep in. Or the clothes you wear.
People often think societies like that don't have ownership because they are usually communistic and have one group of people collect food, and another group maintain the shelters, and another group repair clothing, without any obvious tracking of 'who owes who what.'
But there's never been a recorded instance of a society where no one 'owns' anything. If someone takes off their clothes to go swimming, you can't just walk up and take them, or even replace them with other clothes.
As for 'anarchy', anarchy is not some actual thing. Anarchy is an invented concept that hasn't ever existed in any society. People often pretend it is the 'default' state of humans or that 'without government' we have it. But it's not, and we don't...for most of human history we've had tribalism, which is just really informal government. Modern days, 'without a government', we have warlordism, which just competing dictatorships.
No. That's not the same thing.
Physical ownership exists because because there is only one of each thing, and only one person can use it at one time.
So a government comes along and says 'This is yours, even if you aren't possessing it', e.g., if you set it down for a second. Or it's what you sleep on.
Possession is, if you will, an inherent property of the universe. Everything that exists can have zero or one people in control of it. 'Property ownership' is just a way to continue 'possession' without actually possessing it, because, frankly, no one wants to carry around all their stuff all the time.
Land ownership is loosely related. It started with the concept that part of the ground, where you planted something or built a shelter, was yours. Admittedly, it's expanded past that point, and there have actually been quite a few people who want to 'correct' this back by taking land that no one's done anything with away from the owner.
Even really indirect ownership, like stock ownership, is still 'There is something that exists, and control over that thing needs to be decided, as only one person can actually 'control' it.'. The thing that exists is the physical assets of the company, and the control is an amazingly indirect mess, but it's still there in principle.
Compare to copyright, which doesn't have anything to do with possession or things that actually exist and can be controlled. Copyright is the ability to stop other people from doing things with their own stuff, like singing a song with their own mouth.
That's why people have ownership of a copyright, not ownership of a song. You can't actually own a sound pattern, that is not property that actually exists. You can, however, own the government-issued right to stop other people from replicating that pattern it.
Georgia.
I don't think the EU proposal goes far enough.
Then you don't build websites.
Cookies are the only way to make the web stateful. (Well, not really, but all other ways have just as much privacy implications as cookies.)
The web is a lot more useful if it is stateful. Period.
Now, if people want to stop their browsers from doing that, I'm fine with it, and website designers should be aware that this may have happened and degrade gracefully.
Likewise, web designers should carefully consider if they need a non-session cookie.
But asserting that cookies should be banned simply because people collect large amounts of data is stupid. Why not simply ban attempting to correlate what sites people visit via cookies? Or, hell, require browsers to default to disallowing third party ones.
Saying 'Cookies are bad' is mindless and stupid. Most users actually want websites to remember what the hell they're currently doing. Like what terms they searched with last using what options, and what language they selected, and what point in the article tree they are.
Less than one percent of all people have scammed users on Facebook for profit. The number of people doing it is not the issue.
I'm not entire sure what your point is there. Are you asserting scamming people on facebook is deviant behavior, or you asserting my definition of deviant is wrong?
The parent to your post is talking about selfishness. Murder, beyond certain neurochemical imbalances, is a form of selfishness: I would rather someone else be dead.
Actually, only some murder is selfishness.
Some of it is anger, or hate. (Although it's possible that's what you mean by 'imbalances', I'm not sure.)
Perhaps this selfishness benefits society, even. But there are some things, like murder, we agree should not be allowed for the general good of society. Looking at the root causes, selfishness in this example, can be instructive. Some people, such as yourself, seem to shrug and say it's part of human nature so we should just let it go. Others, like the parent and his previous post, think we should restrict it.
Erm, I'm pretty certain I didn't say we should let people get away with murder.
You've actually started arguing with the wrong people in this discussion. QuoteMstr said 'rules should be structured so greed doesn't harm society'. Which, obviously, includes restricting the very harmful. It also means discouraging the moderately harmful.
In fact, QuoteMstr started by saying 'Thus, given that greedy people will inevitably be in positions of power, we need to construct rules which ensure that this greed doesn't harm society. These rules need to make it the greedy party's interest to be a good participant in society.'.
It is utterly baffling how people are reading his "Stop whining about greedy people, people are normally greedy, start making laws that keeps those people form hurting us" into some argument that it's okay for greed to hurt others. People who are okay with behaviors generally don't want to make laws against them.
I was replying to sowth, who who started talking about how thinking like that was destroying society and that we should all magically wish greed away or something. Blaming the acknowledgment and attempted control of greed for 'psychopaths' existing at all.
Seriously, you guys are total nutters. I don't even know how to deal with someone who can read clearly obvious statements that we should 'stop the greedy from hurting people' as some sort of justification for greedy people hurting others.
I, OTOH, didn't say anything about what we should do about greed. I just pointed out that QuoteMstr was right, that a lot of human behavior is caused by 'greed', but that is a dumb word for 'wanting to eat enough to live', that this 'greed' is actually an continuum that, at one end, is perfectly acceptable. (Aka, a 'greedy' person buying food for themself instead of giving it away.)
Your issue with "sociopath" vs. "psychopath" demonstrates this disconnect. Despite the motivation for the murder, the end result is that someone is still dead in either case. The parent proposes that advocating selfishness and greed causes problems, such as allowing sociopaths to internally justify a murder to get neat new shoes.
Yes, but it won't cause psychopaths to do anything, which is why I made my correction. Psychopaths are not, in fact, 'greedy'. They do not kill people for any gain, or any discernible purpose. Obviously, if they do have a reason to kill you, they'll do that too, but they'll also kill you because, hey, why not.
I don't have an 'issue' with the words, I'm pointing out he used the wrong one, that they are distinct psychological problems. I wouldn't have even mentioned it except the exact behavior he ascribed to psychopaths is actually the defining line between them and sociopaths...people are psychopaths if and only if they kill people for no reason whatsoever. People who kill remorselessly for a reason are just sociopaths.
It's sorta like claiming you went to see the musical 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', which you know is an musical because no one was singing. Yeah, um, you have that backwards.
That scam is the same, only worse, since today, 90% of people are covered by their employers,
Bzzzt, wrong, thank you for playing.
90% of the people in this country aren't even employed, you nimrod, so certainly '90%' can't have insurance via their employer. Even being generous and counting people who are covered by someone else's employer, like their spouse or parent, I assure you, more than 10% of the population is either retired or nonemployed without someone else providing their insurance. (Hell, the unemployment rate is very close to 10%, and that doesn't include all the people not looking for work or retired or too young to work.)
Likewise, the percentage of the insured in this country isn't 90%, so you've managed to be mathematically impossibly stupidly wrong two entirely different ways. 90% of people can't be insured a specific way if more than 10% of people are uninsured!
But let's really be charitable, and assume you meant '90% of insured people are covered by their employers, or someone's employers'. This is also hilariously incorrect, although at least now we're in the realm of mathmatically possibility.
Sadly for you, currently only about 56% of insured people are insured via their employer, a drop of 10% from a decade ago. Another 29% get it from the government. The rest buy it themselves.
But even those numbers are silly, because many of the 'employers' still providing insurance are, in fact, the government.
The amount of insured people who are getting insurance from a non-government job has, in fact, recently hit 47%. That's right, less than half of the people who have insurance have it via the private sector purchasing insurance for them.
That is an excellent question.
Why the hell is this place still apparently operating?
Yes and no.
With parking offenses, for example, they don't have to prove the defendant committed the crime. Because the crime isn't what people think it is. (Crimes often aren't legally what people imagine them to be.)
Strict liability with parking is solely 'Where is the car you own actually located?'. If it is in a place cars are not allowed to be, you are guilty of a parking violation regardless of who did it. You are given a ticket for owning a car that is illegally parked. (Not actually owning the car, of course, is a valid defense. Having it stolen and placed there is not technically a valid one, although most judges would throw out the ticket anyway.)
I.e., the crime isn't 'parking' at all, despite everyone calling it that. It is 'the physical location of your car is not a location that cars are allowed at'. As long as that is your car, and as long as that is the location it's at, and as long as said location is illegal to put a car in, you are guilty, period.
For that to be the same with photo tickets, it would be have to be an offense 'to own a car that was speeding', for example. If they try to use camera tickets without having writing the law that way, they get thrown out.
They could write a strict liability law the other way, where 'driving a car at above the speed limit', is strict liability, and for all I know that's actually how it's written normally, but, as you point out, that doesn't help them if they don't catch the driver's face on camera and 'driving', not 'owning', is the offense.
But that's not, for example, how speeding tickets work in my state, where there's all sorts of affirmative defenses in the law you can use to justify or reduce speeding tickets (Broken speedometer, sloped hill, medical emergency.), and you do, indeed, get a trial.
Yes, but I wasn't talking about willful blindness. I was talking about failure to pay attention while driving, and hence getting in an accident.
No one is deliberately failing to learn there's a car in front of them, which would be willful blindness. (I can just see it now, people driving while blindfolded. 'Officer, you can't give me a ticket, I couldn't see that that stop sign, or the speed limit, or the car I hit...'.)
There are three scenarios in which you rearend someone:
a) You did it on purpose, in which case it's intentional vandalism and probably intentional assault, but no one does that so it's not important.
b) You were driving too close behind them, and hit because you couldn't stop fast enough. In which case the crime isn't hitting them, it is intentionally 'following too close', which is what you'll get the ticket for. You're not, and can't be, charges for actually hitting them, it's just that actually hitting them is ipso facto evidence you were too damn close.
c) You weren't paying attention at all, and hit them.
'c' is interesting, because there appears to be no 'intent' at all. But there is. The intent was 'to do whatever made you not pay attention'. You started, and continued, doing whatever distracted you. You didn't intent for it to distract you, but you intended to do it.
It sounds like an oxymoron, 'intentionally being distracted', but it is not.
If you're doing c, they usually give you a ticket for b instead, but you could legitimately challenge that ticket in court if you could demonstrate you were, in fact, far enough way to stop, but failed to do so because you weren't paying attention.
Of course, legally, at some point, you were much too close to them for the speed you were going, like when you were two inches from them and going any speed at all, so legally at that point, you were 'following too close' under the law. And also they'd tack on 'reckless driving', which is the actual offense for 'c', and a worse offense than 'following too closely'.
If you could prove no intent at all, for example, say someone was shooting at you, which caused you to become distracted in a way that was not legally your fault, you could get out of all the tickets.
Incidentally, I've actually done 'c' before. I was parked at a red light, I was trying to get something out of my backseat, my foot fell off the brake, and I coasted forward and hit the guy in front of me. If they had actually given me a ticket, it would have been for 'reckless driving', not 'following too closely', which is probably why they didn't give me one. (No one got hurt.)
Yeah, I thought of that right after I posted the second time, but replying to yourself once is already bad enough form.
Laws can, constitutionally in the US, be strict liability only if they're misdemeanors. States can have enough tougher restrictions. In some places, only parking offenses can be that.
A lot of people have gotten out of traffic tickets in places where traffic laws aren't strict liability, because a picture of their car speeding does not equal them making their car speed, which is what the law requires. Usually the legislature attempt to change the laws to allow that, but often they run into various legal hurdles WRT civil rights.
Even so, you can actually get out of most strict liability offenses if, for example, your car is stolen, or slides down a hill. Or, in an ultimate absurdity, your legally-parked car gets hit by another car and shoved into a no-parking area. Even though technically you are still guilt of the charge, in most cases if you can actually demonstrate it happened without any of your actions reasonably leading to what happened, you'll get a pass.
Strict liability laws are mainly so you can't claim 'someone else parked your car', because it would be near impossible for the court to prove you did that.
Incidentally, in my state, we don't have strict liability for speeding, and hence a broken speedometer is grounds for getting out of a ticket. Of course, it's illegal to sell cars with speedometers that are off like that, and they're not allowed to pull anyone over who's going less than 5 over the limit, because the person can just say 'speedometer error' and get the ticket thrown out.
You're not entirely off the hook, however, because people are reasonably assumed to be able to notice their speedometers are broken by more than 5 mph. (By other traffic, and by the radar speed-limit measurers the police put up.)
Sure, I could use buttons that trigger a php script and store the preference in a session variable.
Except that session variables use cookies.
Seriously, I see the weirdest comments here about people that are just inexplicably silly. It's like people are missing how this works.
'Sessions' has nothing to do with this. A session just means the server remember the variables, and just wants the ID of the session for each page load...but someone still has to remember the session between page loads, so it's exactly the same thing.
The web is stateless. There is one good way to remember anything between page loads: Cookies.
There are half a dozen of bad ways, from guessing based on IP and User Agent (Fails horribly on NAT), to embedding information in the URLs (Extremely dangerous as URLs get passed around), to other ways that I can't even think of because it's stupid to use them instead of the actual thing designed for this purpose.
Strictly speaking, you can do sessions without cookies. You can put the session code in the URL.
This was invented by PHP, and was immediately decried by everyone, because it's absurdly dangerous. URLs are not secret. They get passed in referers, they get bookmarked, they get stored in browser histories. Some sites used to publish the referers of their visitors, until spammers started faking them.
Which means that other people can come along and open that URL and, boom, they magically have your session.
But, yes, the GP clearly has no idea what he's talking about. A 'session' is 'storing variables on the server-side, and having a unique ID to access those variables on a page load'. That is all that 'session' means.
Sessions are opposed the old way of having all those variables be passed around through the page load, either in cookies or other means, which means they go through the user and hence could be altered maliciously. (I'll just change user_id here to '0'...) That was dumb, so now we just hand the user a long string, called a session ID, and and say 'Give that back to us, and we'll use it to look up your information'.
This is almost always done by putting a session ID in a cookie. That's the point of cookies, to hand information to a web browser and then get it back on each page load. Other ways of doing it are complicated and risky, like I said above.
In fact, cookies that aren't using 'sessions' are less of a privacy risk, because you can see what's in them. For example, I have a language code on a website that wants 'en-US' or whatever. So I just give them that string in a cookie. They can see entirely what I'm doing, instead of me hiding that inside a session. If they alter it, well, that's not a security risk, they either get another language, or they get English if I can't figure it out.
User experience? WTF? Sorry,but the only reason you need invisible-to-the-user cookies is so you can monetize them without them realizing just how much privacy/anonymity they're giving up. Because that might give users pause before they accept your cookies, if they had an informed choice.
Um, or we want to remember how a user sorted a list when he was on a page last? Or how he navigated through the site so we can present the correct links to wind his way up the tree? Or his language?
All of which should be available to non-logged-in users.
You are looking at this through marketing-tinted glasses. In your world you only use cookies for tracking.
In actual web design world, we use cookies for passing information between pages. There's plenty of reasons to pass information between pages that have nothing to do with 'tracking'.
And no one knows what would considered to be 'required' cookies, and hence you don't have to prompt for.
Probably they're trying to mean 'shopping carts' and 'logins' are allowed to use cookies without asking, because users should know that makes a cookie, but do they include language selection? Theme selection? Sorting things? Saving search terms? What exactly 'requires' cookies?
Strictly speaking, every single thing done on the internet could be done without cookies using hidden form fields and altered URLs and AJAX.
Even 'Have you visited before, and when, and as who?' can be hacked via the various 'Is a specific file in the browser cache?' detection methods. You could even put the session ID in that file, and read it via Javascript which alters URLs, and it's a damn persistent cookie. (No one's ever bothered to do this, though, because it's stupidly roundabout.)
And, just like wifi, the solution is that when people install the device or software, it should be required to default to no.
And let people turn it on after it's explained what's going on.
A better, and more useful, solution is to use CookieSafe in Firefox, or the other extensions that do the same thing.
It bans all cookies, without prompting, but you can turn them on per site.
After a few times, you learn to automatically think 'I wish to register for an account at this website, I will enable cookies for it first' and click the icon and Allow the site.
Also you can override websites only set per-session ones for websites that 'need' them but really shouldn't, like sites that keep track of what 'page' you're on via them.
A lot of sites, Joomla for example, create the session before you login.
I.e., everyone visiting a Joomla site gets a cookie to start with. Because they get a session to start with. When they login, that session contains their login (And they might get a non-session cookie if they choose to stay logged in.), but it exists before that.
It thus exists without any 'consent' on the part of the user.
Of course, this is a session cookie, which any sane law would explicitly exclude from attempting to control. Likewise, it doesn't have have any data at all besides 'I am the same web browser as that guy from a second ago'.
There is absolutely nothing such a session cookie can't do that a guessing IPs or having tracking code in the URL couldn't do.
But this, of course, assumes laws are sane.
That only makes any sense if you're a software development outfit.