Government 'insurance' makes no sense, but that's only because fools continue to try to structure it as insurance.
If I'm driving, and I break someone else's car or their body, I should be liable. I should have to pay for it, and, in the likely event I can't pay for it at the moment, the government should pay for it and make me pay them back. With, say, a flat monthly rate that I can accord. That isn't 'insurance', that's the government giving me a loan because I owe money outside my ability to pay for it, and the people need the money now.
Also, I'd require a 1000 dollar bond to start with, before you can drive. It sounds like a lot, but that's roughly what the first year of car insurance costs anyway. I'm very tempted to make people add 500 a year until they reach 3000 dollars or so. This bond, of course, would be used to pay off any accidents they cause first, with the government kicking in the rest if they can't cover it. (I was about to say something about it collecting interest, but, hey, let's just drop the cost of renewing driver's licenses and say we're paying that with the interest.)
Or if I run off and can't be found, or die without enough assets to cover it, or because of some other reason are unlikely to ever pay it back, the government should eat the cost and pay for the repairs. (Paid for with some sort of per-mile driving tax, usually expressed as a 'gas tax'.) Of course, in a perfect universe, medical costs would be paid by the government to start with, because all medical expenses should be all be paid by the government.
If I break my own car, I should have to fix it myself, or I could get private insurance to handle that, but that should be totally unrelated to anything. If people are at fault in a lot of car accidents, they might, indeed, want insurance to cover that also, although I'd be amazed if anyone would sell it to them.
Continuing to operate in the 'insurance' paradigm for government supplied services is completely nonsensical. This idiotic concept is, right now, screwing up socialized medicine, and I'm sure it will eventually screw up car insurance reform. Governments do not, and cannot under any sane operating principle, 'insure' people, and it's amazing how this concept continues to screw up government policy.
Another place cooperatives are very nice is utility companies. I have Amicalola Electric Membership Corporation, an electric co-op. Right now, they're giving money back.
In my state, and I suspect other ones, you can self-insure just like that if you can get a group of ten cars. Number of people doesn't matter, just cars.
They are not intended to prevent terrorists (not sure how you made the connection in the first place, though I am rather curious on that front) but to prevent movie studios from shutting down the city every other day while they make a movie.
You're an idiot. Movie studios need permits because they, in essence, rent parts of the city. They gain control of a street or a park and can bar people from it at will. Quite obviously, people can't be given the ability walk around claiming sections of public areas for their own, and no one else's, use, for several hours. That sort of activity must have some sort of regulation and, hopefully, payment to the government that owns said space.
This has nothing to do with someone walking around and filming or taking pictures in a public area without interfering with anyone else's use of the public space, which is what the government has recently started meddling in under the guise of 'terrorism prevention'.
This is why they're trying to regulate 'groups' and 'tripods' instead of single users, because this law is very very close to be unconstitutional. The government can issue permits allowing groups to take control of places, aka, 'reservations', and courts have said that governments can require groups to make reservations if they are large enough and would be disruptive enough. (I.e, if it's a tiny city park and someone is going to hold a family reunion there and basically take up the entire park for four hours.) And governments can restrict 'equipment' in parks...for example, they can keep out bikes and skateboards, and it looks like they're trying to extend that to tripods.
Incidentally, as I recall correctly, it was conservatives who made a big outcry over FISA warrants when they were created, not liberals. The current issue with FISA is that the government is utterly ignoring the regulations laid out in it. If I have issues with cops speeding that doesn't mean I have issues with the existence of speed limits, and that premise actually doesn't even make any sense. FISA is a great law, allowing the government to act in emergencies and justify it later. I just wish the government would, you know, obey it.
And the moment those people come up with any information to support that theory, hey, maybe they'll be worth listening to.
Right now the only useful information we have to predict odds is: There does not appear to be macroscopic life in our solar system, and we don't see signs of life in nearby systems.
That's it. We have no idea how likely life is to start, because we don't actually know how life started. Anyone who thinks it's possible to to calculate the odds of something which we don't actually know what it is is an idiot.
And even if we knew exactly how life started on this planet, we'd still have no idea of the odds, because we don't know the exact conditions of any planet outside this system, and we don't know of other ways life could start.
Basically, humanity was asked to draw a random number from a hat, we pulled 122, and we were told it was a winning number. Yes, it could have been the sole winning number out of a hundred trillion in the hat, but, for all we know, all even numbers win, or all numbers below ninety trillion, or maybe there were only 200 numbers in the hat.
I.e., we don't know the rules of the game, and, even if we knew the rules, we'd still have no idea of the actual odds. It's actually doubly impossible to say how likely life is. It's a X out of Y chance, where we don't know X or Y, with the added complication there might be a whole nother game out there we are entirely unaware of with entirely different odds. (Life developing inside suns, for example.)
Now, it's possible to assume a universe where the odds are very unlikely, but, while we're pulling probility out of our ass, that sort of universe appears very unlikely to me.
All ID theory states is that statistically it's impossible for what is now have come to be without some intelligence guiding the process.
No scientific theory can ever state the likelihood of something that has only been observed once, especially something where not only are not all the factors known, but things we know are factors are unmeasurable for anywhere except here and maybe a few dozen surrounding stars. But more to the point, it doesn't matter a rat's ass if it's statistically unlikely, because, as far as we know, it's only happened once.
It is statistically unlikely to win the lottery, too, and, yet, people often appear to do so. Odd, huh? Now, it would be astonishing if millions of people won the lottery every day, but if the odds are a million to one against, and a million tickets are bought, it's not actually that amazing that one or two people win. It'd actually be more amazing if no one ever won at all.
Likewise, if we accept if we accept your premise that life is very unlikely, which you actually have absolutely no evidence for, but, if we accept it, it would be astonishing only if life had developed all over the place. Pointing to an empty universe where life developed once, out of trillions of possible places it could have developed, and say 'That's so amazingly unlikely, it's a trillion to one against' doesn't prove meddling, it disproves meddling, and is statistically exactly where you'd expect it to be.
Any statistician...hell, any moderately intelligent human beings...knows you can't interview lottery winners and act surprised they won. Of course they won, that's why you're interviewing them.
Exactly which parts couldn't have arisen, of course, are subject to change as soon as the old examples get explained.
It's the 'There's a unicorn hiding behind that tree' method of science, forcing real sciences to drag everyone over and explain that, no, yet again, there's no unicorn there, whereas the IDers then spy another likely tree and start exclaiming how there's a unicorn behind that one.
Pay a rather large fee? Have you any idea what it costs to immigrate the LEGAL way? Compared to that, it's not a large fee by any means.
What the hell are you gibbergabbering about? That is the fee to enter legally. The fee they would pay to enter legally is the fee required to enter legally. What is this, some sort of anti-tautology argument?
I'll tell you what's so horrible about amnesty. Every immigrant doing it the legal way still has to face the difficulties of the system and some will no doubt be deported for crap as insignificant as undelivered mail (which they tried to do to my wife) while politicians try to "fix the problem" by giving illegal immigrants the right to stay.
If 'every' immigrant doing it the legal way will face that, then ones who previously attempted to enter illegally, but are now here legally, would also be facing it. Duh.
And Z visas have almost no chance of passing the House, and, if they do, they'll probably have a touchback requirement attached. But, more to the point, guest workers only get to be here three years in a row regardless, so it's not any sort of permanent residency.
Of course, as of this moment, the bill hasn't passed the house, and who knows how the differences will be ironed out. But the Democrats aren't going to go along with the Republicans more silly suggestions, although pretending the Republicans all want amnesty is just craziness.
It may have been easier if my wife had entered illegally. And that's just what I can't stand, the fact that they're making it easier and arguably better to do it the wrong way. Just this one time, again.
Well, don't blame the Republicans for trying to pass this bill for the insane backlog and hoops to jump through for legal immigrants, blame the people who have, for the last two decades, consistently underfunded immigration servi...oh, nevermind. You got the right people after all.
That's the only reason I can think of for trying to derail the whole thing.
There is one question that people in the immigration debate can differ on: How many, and under what rules, will we allow workers into the country?
Everything else is basically a non-issue. We obviously need to crack down on employers hiring people illegally, we'll worry about a damn fence if we need one after changing the rules (Um, duh. It's stupid to build fences that you don't end up needing.), trying to compel English is an idiotic politic stunt, etc.
Anyone raising other questions besides 'We don't need that many (or 'we need more') guest workers.' or 'They should or should not be eligible for citizenship.' is a fool trying to derail immigration reform so they can continue to exploit people.
Especially the 'amnesty' people, who think they're doing it because they're racist idiots who don't want any immigration. Yes, you read that right. They think they're doing it because it will magically get rid of the dirty Mexicans, but they are actually doing it because big business wants to continue to exploit people.(1) So the right, puppets all of them, are parroting some inane and nonsensical objection to 'amnesty' which doesn't make a damn bit of sense. The end result, of course, will be continuing exactly the absurd situation we have now.
But, hey, as long as that 'amnesty' gibberish continues to tear the Republican party apart, I'm all for it. If it actually does get derailed, hey, we can fix it in a year and a half.
1) Something like half the issues on the right are like this. They claim it's for one reason, they secretly think it's for another reason, but in actuality it's for a third. Like objecting to government health care: They claim it's because they want a small government and it won't work, they think, secretly, it's a good way to keep the poor poor, but in actuality it's because the health insurance industry wants to continue to exist.
DRM makes piracy *harder*. Not impossible, just harder, and that's all it takes to be effective.
DRM doesn't make piracy one bit harder for the average user:
Without DRM: User goes online and downloads pirated work.
With DRM: User goes online and downloads pirated work.
Yeah, I can see how DRM is really helping there.
DRM makes the creation of the work a bit harder, but it's a one time cost, and, actually not even that. It's a one time cost to set up a rig that breaks DRM, and from then on it's automatic.
And people saying 'No, they wouldn't do that', are sorta ignoring the fact pirates already do. They have nice TV recording setups hooked to their digital cable, they clip out commercials, etc. Yes, cracking some DRM schemes would appear to need specialized hardware, but unless that hardware costs thousands of dollars, you're still at a price that pirate groups are willing to spend.
The great irony is, right as they've finally coming out with 'encrypted all the way to the screen' DRM, the price of such hardware is getting low enough that, by the time people actually want all that data that in their rips, which will be in about ten years, they'll be cheap enough for pirate groups to rip apart.
Right now, people are more than happy at HD resolution ripped off digital cable, about 3 megs a second.
Yeah, the whole thing is stupid, because people aren't thinking.
Someone would crack DRM. This wouldn't require an OS image, that would be a damn stupid way to distribute anything. It would be a crack that installs in a guest VM. Copyright violators would install a copy of Windows (Which they surely already have.) inside a VM, run the crack, and have a 'DRM-enabled' VM.
They'd then attach to the sound and video of it and rip copies from that.
This is, of course, assuming that there's a DRM crack that lets a non-protected machine validate, but somehow not then allow the interception of the streams. In actuality, I rather doubt that, and I suspect copiers would just install the crack in their actual OS and rip the content from there. Using a VM might make a crack slightly easier to write, but not by much, and I suspect it would be harder in many ways.
But, either way, once it's ripped, DRM is a complete non-issue. You don't have to distribute a whole OS, you don't have to distribute a crack, you don't have to distribute anything but the media file.
Someone is, one of these days, going to have to explain why 'amnesty' is such a horrible idea.
We want to stop illegal immigration. I'm somehow failing to see how barring people who came here illegally from coming here again is at all useful. Those are, after all, the people who want to be here and who already know how to function here.
And if this 'No amnesty' crap is just a way to say 'Cut off all immigration', then say that, because right now your position makes no sense at all. If you mean 'Seriously crack down on illegal immigration and don't have any sort of guest worker or residency program', well, that at least makes sense, although the agriculture industry will crucify you. Saying 'have a guest worker program...that excludes the people who've been doing it for decades', that's completely incomprehensible.
It's akin to legalizing prostitution...except for anyone who's ever been arrested for it before. It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
And saying 'They're criminals, we don't want them.' is stupid. The punishment for coming here illegally is to be deported. All proposed immigration reforms require they do that,and pay a rather large fee. Aka, they 'served their time'.
There's no tax consequences on the check. I was talking about the original transactions. All transactions that end in exactly the same money and property in everyone's hands are not legally identical.
For a home loan, for example, the bank could a) loan you the money, and you pay it to the owners, or b) pay the owners directly. a) consists of you temporarily possessing $150,000, which you do, indeed, have to pay income taxes on, even if it was only yours for a few seconds. (Yes, you'd possibly also get a large deduction, but it would not equal out.)
When it's your own money, it hardly matters if you pay it to the bank, or stick it in a bank account (where it is still legally yours) and write a check on that account. When it's not starting as your own money, like a loan, it certainly does matter, both for taxes and other reasons.
Of course, it matters so much that banks won't actually do it the other way.
Ah, you're confusing cashier's checks and certified checks. All cashier's checks are certified, but all certified checks are not cashier's. Certified checks and money orders are 'normal checks', just on accounts that are untouchable by the owners. Banks have basically stopped writing certified checks, because there isn't a lot of point...if something needs assurances of funds, that now is normally done by a electronic transfer.
A cashier's check, OTOH, is written on the bank itself, not on an account in the bank. (Well, technically, they're written on an account owned by the bank, but whatever. The bank must honor it no matter what.) Certified checks and money orders have an account 'in your name' (Or, in the case of money orders, a bearer account for the possession of the receipt.) with the money behind them, although it's an account you can't actually touch. Cashier's checks do not. They aren't backed by, even if it's just in some theoretical sense, 'your' money in 'your' account.
They are most often issued in situations like you said, where a financial institution wants to give money to someone 'in your name', but not in any way that you can legally claim ownership of the money while in transfer. This is almost always because the financial institution is give you some sort of loan to pay off someone.
Or, for a nicer POV, they do it to let you avoid the tax liability that being given that much money, even if you then immediately handing it to someone else, could incur. It was never legally yours, and thus you do not have to pay taxes on it.
Let's say that you need to pay James 250 dollars to buy his TV, but can't, so I've offered to pay it for you and you can pay me back. A cashier's check is like I write a check for James, and give it to you to pass along, getting your TV in exchange...you don't pay taxes on that. (You wouldn't anyway, but whatever.) The money went from me to James, and later money is going to go from you to me. Two money transfers. You physically possessed the actual check, but not the money behind it.
OTOH, a certified check is is if I put the money in an (somehow legally untouchable by you) account in your name, write out a check on that account and have you sign it, and have you give that to James. You would legally own that money for a short period of time. When you factor in your repayment to me, that's three money transfer, me to you, you to James, and you to me, so more possible taxes, and a place for you to screw with the transfer while the money is legally yours.
(Notice when I was talking about taxes, I was talking about income and whatnot, not sales.)
You can say 'wrong' all you want, but my bank does this. If I write someone a check, and they go to my bank to cash it, my bank charges five dollars.
All you people saying 'No they don't'...have you actually done this in the last year or two, or did you miss the point where I said they started doing this?
People who accept the liberty dollar because they don't trust the government are morons. Contrary to the liberty dollar's propoganda, it is not a backed currency. It has some value in silver, but that value is less than what it is being exchanged for, and will remain so for quite some time. It is fiat money. The only way to make it actual backed money would be to unlink it from dollar values and trade it at the value of the silver.
As long as it says '10 dollars' on it, and can only be exchanged for eight dollars or so of silver, it is fiat money, and, more than that, it's a scam. If you think doing business in 'silver' is a good idea, buy some damn silver and use it. Don't buy eight dollars worth of silver and print '10 dollars' on the certificates and try to scam people into accepting them. Actually, looking at the current price of silver, it's closer to six dollars at this point.
Now, liberty dollars supporters will point out that the price of silver has, at one point, gotten so high they had to 'reboot' the currency...taking in 10 dollar pieces and relabeling them 20 dollars pieces. Which is good, but still less worthwhile than just buying some actual silver to start with. (OTOH, when that happens again, I expect silver investors to run around buying all the liberty dollars they can and immediately trading them in for the silver, ripping off all the liberty dollar holders who don't keep up with the daily price of silver and don't realize they're holding something labeled '10 dollars' that is actually worth 11.)
Incidentally, Liberty Dollars are not legal tender at all, under any theory of law. Pretending they are legal tender is called 'counterfeiting' and is illegal.
And businesses only have to accept 'legal tender' if you have incurred a debt and no restrictions were placed on payment of that debt before it happened. Otherwise, they can accept whatever they want, in any manner, in any amount. They can accept payment only in pennies or gold or live badgers.
A government institution requiring you to go to some non-governmental party and give them the cash, and then return with a piece of paper or plastic to pay for something, however, is a bit iffy.
Especially as many of those third parties are discriminatary based on amount of money you have, charging differing fees and interest depending on what sort of money you have. If you need to pay 1000 dollars, and only have 1000 dollars, than, at most banks, you'll be below a required daily average and hit with a fee, or have to pay money for a money order, or all sorts of things that are going to cost you about 1002 dollars by the end. Whereas if you have have 10,000 dollars, you can throw that in a bank account, write a 1000 dollar check, and close the account the next day without a fee. If you have a high enough credit rating, you can get a credit card, pay with that, get some money back, and close the account making a profit! Yes, that seems trivial, but it's utterly inane to allow our government to require us to use third parties with random fee structures, where some people end up paying more based on semi-random things.
Schools, and all government agencies, should be required to accept cash, even for non-debts. I don't know if they are required, but they should be.
If the some government institution truly doesn't want to deal with cash, it would be rather trivial to create a national free deposit system at, say, post offices, which have to deal with valuable stuff anyway. Or at courthouses.(1) Where if you owned the government some money, you could walk in there and pay it in cash and have it forwarded to whatever agency at whatever level of government.
And, before anyone says postal orders, postal orders are not free. Now, it would be trivial to make them free if they were written to government agencies...
Hell, courthouses could profit from that internally. At my courthouse, a small one, there are at least three seperate areas that accept cash: The property tax/car tax/car tag office (They were smart enough to combine these with the same back-area.), the court itself for fines and such, and the marriage/fishing/hunting license office. And probably some more I don't know about. And, across the street, the library. (And I think bail is paid at the jail, but confusingly fines are paid at the courthouse.) How much expensive handling of money would be saved if there are literally one place where you gave the county government money?
Writing on the stub of a money order is just for your own records. The point is, indeed, to keep the number so if someone disputes they got it, you can look it up.
Also, money orders expire, and when they do so without being deposited, you can get your cash back if you have the stub.
Money orders are essentially 'certified checks' that are in the name of someone else. When you buy them, you put the money in said account. As long as you have the stub, you can do things with that account. (But not cancel the money order or take your cash back before they expire.)
I don't think certified checks are issued anymore, but that used to be what they were. You'd take money from your bank account and put it in a seperate untouchable account and get a single check written on that account for that amount. Money orders are someone else doing that for you.
When was this? Banks only started doing it recently. All banks around here. It started with business accounts, and now it applies to all checks.
I've complained to my bank about their policy repeatedly. It is my damn money, and when I write a check to someone, I expect my bank to give them that amount of money, regardless of how my bank gets the check. It actually costs them more to handle their own checks coming in from other banks than to deal with them at the counter.
OTOH, if everyone starts cashing checks manually, they'd have a problem: They couldn't charge outrageous fees on people who deposited bad checks. They can't fine people who show up in person to deposit a bad check, all they can do is not give them the money and give them the check back.
Banks are completely out of control with fees at this point. The ironic things is, banks know this and advertise a lack of fees, but they mean 'monthly fees', which no one gives a shit about. We're not idiots, we can add up the monthly fees mentally into one sum and know that's the cost of the account. They still charge crazy amounts for overdrafts of penny and charge customers for bad checks they deposit and now charge check cashers for getting money an account holder has written a check for.
All sorts of crap they can only get away with by forcing people to use banks more and more. They've already started giving discounts for direct deposit, which in reality means they're charging people for not using it. Soon they'll start charging people for not using automatic bill pay.
I'm not one of those crazy people who rant about 'conspiracies' and stuff, but banks are making it harder and harder for you to operate in any manner besides having an account with them, and, since they know you have to have said account, are then feeling free to completely rip people off. What are you going to do, go to another bank that does exactly the same thing?
Oh, yeah, the 'voter caging' is another hugely illegal thing that may be why all that mail was deleted. One that just surfaced, and I'll admit I don't know much about it at this point.
That, or the aforementioned illegal politizing of civil service positions, are the real story there, both being completely illegal, no kidding around. The 'firing USAs' is only illegal if done deliberately to kill a specific investigation.
It just so happened in trying to cover up the other stuff, the DoJ lied about the firings, and thus managed to make things worse. At least that's the logical reason, although it doesn't actually seem to make any sense. It seems like they could have said 'Yeah, we fired them for political reasons. Bite our ass.'. They can't possibly care about opinion at this point, and, as was repeated at the start of this, those are political positions and they can be removed at will. If they'd just admitted that, all those other people wouldn't have testified as to actaul illegal (As opposed to just suspicious) conduct.
Just looking at this administration, it's amazing how incompetently the criminal conspiracies were run.
Slashdot Mirror
Government 'insurance' makes no sense, but that's only because fools continue to try to structure it as insurance.
If I'm driving, and I break someone else's car or their body, I should be liable. I should have to pay for it, and, in the likely event I can't pay for it at the moment, the government should pay for it and make me pay them back. With, say, a flat monthly rate that I can accord. That isn't 'insurance', that's the government giving me a loan because I owe money outside my ability to pay for it, and the people need the money now.
Also, I'd require a 1000 dollar bond to start with, before you can drive. It sounds like a lot, but that's roughly what the first year of car insurance costs anyway. I'm very tempted to make people add 500 a year until they reach 3000 dollars or so. This bond, of course, would be used to pay off any accidents they cause first, with the government kicking in the rest if they can't cover it. (I was about to say something about it collecting interest, but, hey, let's just drop the cost of renewing driver's licenses and say we're paying that with the interest.)
Or if I run off and can't be found, or die without enough assets to cover it, or because of some other reason are unlikely to ever pay it back, the government should eat the cost and pay for the repairs. (Paid for with some sort of per-mile driving tax, usually expressed as a 'gas tax'.) Of course, in a perfect universe, medical costs would be paid by the government to start with, because all medical expenses should be all be paid by the government.
If I break my own car, I should have to fix it myself, or I could get private insurance to handle that, but that should be totally unrelated to anything. If people are at fault in a lot of car accidents, they might, indeed, want insurance to cover that also, although I'd be amazed if anyone would sell it to them.
Continuing to operate in the 'insurance' paradigm for government supplied services is completely nonsensical. This idiotic concept is, right now, screwing up socialized medicine, and I'm sure it will eventually screw up car insurance reform. Governments do not, and cannot under any sane operating principle, 'insure' people, and it's amazing how this concept continues to screw up government policy.
Another place cooperatives are very nice is utility companies. I have Amicalola Electric Membership Corporation, an electric co-op. Right now, they're giving money back.
In my state, and I suspect other ones, you can self-insure just like that if you can get a group of ten cars. Number of people doesn't matter, just cars.
You may have to put up a bond or something, too.
Clint Curtis
They are not intended to prevent terrorists (not sure how you made the connection in the first place, though I am rather curious on that front) but to prevent movie studios from shutting down the city every other day while they make a movie.
You're an idiot. Movie studios need permits because they, in essence, rent parts of the city. They gain control of a street or a park and can bar people from it at will. Quite obviously, people can't be given the ability walk around claiming sections of public areas for their own, and no one else's, use, for several hours. That sort of activity must have some sort of regulation and, hopefully, payment to the government that owns said space.
This has nothing to do with someone walking around and filming or taking pictures in a public area without interfering with anyone else's use of the public space, which is what the government has recently started meddling in under the guise of 'terrorism prevention'.
This is why they're trying to regulate 'groups' and 'tripods' instead of single users, because this law is very very close to be unconstitutional. The government can issue permits allowing groups to take control of places, aka, 'reservations', and courts have said that governments can require groups to make reservations if they are large enough and would be disruptive enough. (I.e, if it's a tiny city park and someone is going to hold a family reunion there and basically take up the entire park for four hours.) And governments can restrict 'equipment' in parks...for example, they can keep out bikes and skateboards, and it looks like they're trying to extend that to tripods.
Incidentally, as I recall correctly, it was conservatives who made a big outcry over FISA warrants when they were created, not liberals. The current issue with FISA is that the government is utterly ignoring the regulations laid out in it. If I have issues with cops speeding that doesn't mean I have issues with the existence of speed limits, and that premise actually doesn't even make any sense. FISA is a great law, allowing the government to act in emergencies and justify it later. I just wish the government would, you know, obey it.
And the moment those people come up with any information to support that theory, hey, maybe they'll be worth listening to.
Right now the only useful information we have to predict odds is: There does not appear to be macroscopic life in our solar system, and we don't see signs of life in nearby systems.
That's it. We have no idea how likely life is to start, because we don't actually know how life started. Anyone who thinks it's possible to to calculate the odds of something which we don't actually know what it is is an idiot.
And even if we knew exactly how life started on this planet, we'd still have no idea of the odds, because we don't know the exact conditions of any planet outside this system, and we don't know of other ways life could start.
Basically, humanity was asked to draw a random number from a hat, we pulled 122, and we were told it was a winning number. Yes, it could have been the sole winning number out of a hundred trillion in the hat, but, for all we know, all even numbers win, or all numbers below ninety trillion, or maybe there were only 200 numbers in the hat.
I.e., we don't know the rules of the game, and, even if we knew the rules, we'd still have no idea of the actual odds. It's actually doubly impossible to say how likely life is. It's a X out of Y chance, where we don't know X or Y, with the added complication there might be a whole nother game out there we are entirely unaware of with entirely different odds. (Life developing inside suns, for example.)
Now, it's possible to assume a universe where the odds are very unlikely, but, while we're pulling probility out of our ass, that sort of universe appears very unlikely to me.
All ID theory states is that statistically it's impossible for what is now have come to be without some intelligence guiding the process.
No scientific theory can ever state the likelihood of something that has only been observed once, especially something where not only are not all the factors known, but things we know are factors are unmeasurable for anywhere except here and maybe a few dozen surrounding stars. But more to the point, it doesn't matter a rat's ass if it's statistically unlikely, because, as far as we know, it's only happened once.
It is statistically unlikely to win the lottery, too, and, yet, people often appear to do so. Odd, huh? Now, it would be astonishing if millions of people won the lottery every day, but if the odds are a million to one against, and a million tickets are bought, it's not actually that amazing that one or two people win. It'd actually be more amazing if no one ever won at all.
Likewise, if we accept if we accept your premise that life is very unlikely, which you actually have absolutely no evidence for, but, if we accept it, it would be astonishing only if life had developed all over the place. Pointing to an empty universe where life developed once, out of trillions of possible places it could have developed, and say 'That's so amazingly unlikely, it's a trillion to one against' doesn't prove meddling, it disproves meddling, and is statistically exactly where you'd expect it to be.
Any statistician...hell, any moderately intelligent human beings...knows you can't interview lottery winners and act surprised they won. Of course they won, that's why you're interviewing them.
Exactly which parts couldn't have arisen, of course, are subject to change as soon as the old examples get explained.
It's the 'There's a unicorn hiding behind that tree' method of science, forcing real sciences to drag everyone over and explain that, no, yet again, there's no unicorn there, whereas the IDers then spy another likely tree and start exclaiming how there's a unicorn behind that one.
Pay a rather large fee? Have you any idea what it costs to immigrate the LEGAL way? Compared to that, it's not a large fee by any means.
What the hell are you gibbergabbering about? That is the fee to enter legally. The fee they would pay to enter legally is the fee required to enter legally. What is this, some sort of anti-tautology argument?
I'll tell you what's so horrible about amnesty. Every immigrant doing it the legal way still has to face the difficulties of the system and some will no doubt be deported for crap as insignificant as undelivered mail (which they tried to do to my wife) while politicians try to "fix the problem" by giving illegal immigrants the right to stay.
If 'every' immigrant doing it the legal way will face that, then ones who previously attempted to enter illegally, but are now here legally, would also be facing it. Duh.
And Z visas have almost no chance of passing the House, and, if they do, they'll probably have a touchback requirement attached. But, more to the point, guest workers only get to be here three years in a row regardless, so it's not any sort of permanent residency.
Of course, as of this moment, the bill hasn't passed the house, and who knows how the differences will be ironed out. But the Democrats aren't going to go along with the Republicans more silly suggestions, although pretending the Republicans all want amnesty is just craziness.
It may have been easier if my wife had entered illegally. And that's just what I can't stand, the fact that they're making it easier and arguably better to do it the wrong way. Just this one time, again.
Well, don't blame the Republicans for trying to pass this bill for the insane backlog and hoops to jump through for legal immigrants, blame the people who have, for the last two decades, consistently underfunded immigration servi...oh, nevermind. You got the right people after all.
Are we talking about Pegasus replicators or Milky Way replicators?
That's the only reason I can think of for trying to derail the whole thing.
There is one question that people in the immigration debate can differ on: How many, and under what rules, will we allow workers into the country?
Everything else is basically a non-issue. We obviously need to crack down on employers hiring people illegally, we'll worry about a damn fence if we need one after changing the rules (Um, duh. It's stupid to build fences that you don't end up needing.), trying to compel English is an idiotic politic stunt, etc.
Anyone raising other questions besides 'We don't need that many (or 'we need more') guest workers.' or 'They should or should not be eligible for citizenship.' is a fool trying to derail immigration reform so they can continue to exploit people.
Especially the 'amnesty' people, who think they're doing it because they're racist idiots who don't want any immigration. Yes, you read that right. They think they're doing it because it will magically get rid of the dirty Mexicans, but they are actually doing it because big business wants to continue to exploit people.(1) So the right, puppets all of them, are parroting some inane and nonsensical objection to 'amnesty' which doesn't make a damn bit of sense. The end result, of course, will be continuing exactly the absurd situation we have now.
But, hey, as long as that 'amnesty' gibberish continues to tear the Republican party apart, I'm all for it. If it actually does get derailed, hey, we can fix it in a year and a half.
1) Something like half the issues on the right are like this. They claim it's for one reason, they secretly think it's for another reason, but in actuality it's for a third. Like objecting to government health care: They claim it's because they want a small government and it won't work, they think, secretly, it's a good way to keep the poor poor, but in actuality it's because the health insurance industry wants to continue to exist.
DRM makes piracy *harder*. Not impossible, just harder, and that's all it takes to be effective.
DRM doesn't make piracy one bit harder for the average user:
Without DRM: User goes online and downloads pirated work.
With DRM: User goes online and downloads pirated work.
Yeah, I can see how DRM is really helping there.
DRM makes the creation of the work a bit harder, but it's a one time cost, and, actually not even that. It's a one time cost to set up a rig that breaks DRM, and from then on it's automatic.
And people saying 'No, they wouldn't do that', are sorta ignoring the fact pirates already do. They have nice TV recording setups hooked to their digital cable, they clip out commercials, etc. Yes, cracking some DRM schemes would appear to need specialized hardware, but unless that hardware costs thousands of dollars, you're still at a price that pirate groups are willing to spend.
The great irony is, right as they've finally coming out with 'encrypted all the way to the screen' DRM, the price of such hardware is getting low enough that, by the time people actually want all that data that in their rips, which will be in about ten years, they'll be cheap enough for pirate groups to rip apart.
Right now, people are more than happy at HD resolution ripped off digital cable, about 3 megs a second.
Yeah, the whole thing is stupid, because people aren't thinking.
Someone would crack DRM. This wouldn't require an OS image, that would be a damn stupid way to distribute anything. It would be a crack that installs in a guest VM. Copyright violators would install a copy of Windows (Which they surely already have.) inside a VM, run the crack, and have a 'DRM-enabled' VM.
They'd then attach to the sound and video of it and rip copies from that.
This is, of course, assuming that there's a DRM crack that lets a non-protected machine validate, but somehow not then allow the interception of the streams. In actuality, I rather doubt that, and I suspect copiers would just install the crack in their actual OS and rip the content from there. Using a VM might make a crack slightly easier to write, but not by much, and I suspect it would be harder in many ways.
But, either way, once it's ripped, DRM is a complete non-issue. You don't have to distribute a whole OS, you don't have to distribute a crack, you don't have to distribute anything but the media file.
Someone is, one of these days, going to have to explain why 'amnesty' is such a horrible idea.
We want to stop illegal immigration. I'm somehow failing to see how barring people who came here illegally from coming here again is at all useful. Those are, after all, the people who want to be here and who already know how to function here.
And if this 'No amnesty' crap is just a way to say 'Cut off all immigration', then say that, because right now your position makes no sense at all. If you mean 'Seriously crack down on illegal immigration and don't have any sort of guest worker or residency program', well, that at least makes sense, although the agriculture industry will crucify you. Saying 'have a guest worker program...that excludes the people who've been doing it for decades', that's completely incomprehensible.
It's akin to legalizing prostitution...except for anyone who's ever been arrested for it before. It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.
And saying 'They're criminals, we don't want them.' is stupid. The punishment for coming here illegally is to be deported. All proposed immigration reforms require they do that,and pay a rather large fee. Aka, they 'served their time'.
It only requires awareness. If you don't want your conversation recorded, you merely have to stop talking.
There's no tax consequences on the check. I was talking about the original transactions. All transactions that end in exactly the same money and property in everyone's hands are not legally identical.
For a home loan, for example, the bank could a) loan you the money, and you pay it to the owners, or b) pay the owners directly. a) consists of you temporarily possessing $150,000, which you do, indeed, have to pay income taxes on, even if it was only yours for a few seconds. (Yes, you'd possibly also get a large deduction, but it would not equal out.)
When it's your own money, it hardly matters if you pay it to the bank, or stick it in a bank account (where it is still legally yours) and write a check on that account. When it's not starting as your own money, like a loan, it certainly does matter, both for taxes and other reasons.
Of course, it matters so much that banks won't actually do it the other way.
Ah, you're confusing cashier's checks and certified checks. All cashier's checks are certified, but all certified checks are not cashier's. Certified checks and money orders are 'normal checks', just on accounts that are untouchable by the owners. Banks have basically stopped writing certified checks, because there isn't a lot of point...if something needs assurances of funds, that now is normally done by a electronic transfer.
A cashier's check, OTOH, is written on the bank itself, not on an account in the bank. (Well, technically, they're written on an account owned by the bank, but whatever. The bank must honor it no matter what.) Certified checks and money orders have an account 'in your name' (Or, in the case of money orders, a bearer account for the possession of the receipt.) with the money behind them, although it's an account you can't actually touch. Cashier's checks do not. They aren't backed by, even if it's just in some theoretical sense, 'your' money in 'your' account.
They are most often issued in situations like you said, where a financial institution wants to give money to someone 'in your name', but not in any way that you can legally claim ownership of the money while in transfer. This is almost always because the financial institution is give you some sort of loan to pay off someone.
Or, for a nicer POV, they do it to let you avoid the tax liability that being given that much money, even if you then immediately handing it to someone else, could incur. It was never legally yours, and thus you do not have to pay taxes on it.
Let's say that you need to pay James 250 dollars to buy his TV, but can't, so I've offered to pay it for you and you can pay me back. A cashier's check is like I write a check for James, and give it to you to pass along, getting your TV in exchange...you don't pay taxes on that. (You wouldn't anyway, but whatever.) The money went from me to James, and later money is going to go from you to me. Two money transfers. You physically possessed the actual check, but not the money behind it.
OTOH, a certified check is is if I put the money in an (somehow legally untouchable by you) account in your name, write out a check on that account and have you sign it, and have you give that to James. You would legally own that money for a short period of time. When you factor in your repayment to me, that's three money transfer, me to you, you to James, and you to me, so more possible taxes, and a place for you to screw with the transfer while the money is legally yours.
(Notice when I was talking about taxes, I was talking about income and whatnot, not sales.)
More to the point, charge the customer for checking, which is what actually makes sense in the first place.
You can say 'wrong' all you want, but my bank does this. If I write someone a check, and they go to my bank to cash it, my bank charges five dollars.
All you people saying 'No they don't'...have you actually done this in the last year or two, or did you miss the point where I said they started doing this?
People who accept the liberty dollar because they don't trust the government are morons. Contrary to the liberty dollar's propoganda, it is not a backed currency. It has some value in silver, but that value is less than what it is being exchanged for, and will remain so for quite some time. It is fiat money. The only way to make it actual backed money would be to unlink it from dollar values and trade it at the value of the silver.
As long as it says '10 dollars' on it, and can only be exchanged for eight dollars or so of silver, it is fiat money, and, more than that, it's a scam. If you think doing business in 'silver' is a good idea, buy some damn silver and use it. Don't buy eight dollars worth of silver and print '10 dollars' on the certificates and try to scam people into accepting them. Actually, looking at the current price of silver, it's closer to six dollars at this point.
Now, liberty dollars supporters will point out that the price of silver has, at one point, gotten so high they had to 'reboot' the currency...taking in 10 dollar pieces and relabeling them 20 dollars pieces. Which is good, but still less worthwhile than just buying some actual silver to start with. (OTOH, when that happens again, I expect silver investors to run around buying all the liberty dollars they can and immediately trading them in for the silver, ripping off all the liberty dollar holders who don't keep up with the daily price of silver and don't realize they're holding something labeled '10 dollars' that is actually worth 11.)
Incidentally, Liberty Dollars are not legal tender at all, under any theory of law. Pretending they are legal tender is called 'counterfeiting' and is illegal.
And businesses only have to accept 'legal tender' if you have incurred a debt and no restrictions were placed on payment of that debt before it happened. Otherwise, they can accept whatever they want, in any manner, in any amount. They can accept payment only in pennies or gold or live badgers.
A store, yes.
A government institution requiring you to go to some non-governmental party and give them the cash, and then return with a piece of paper or plastic to pay for something, however, is a bit iffy.
Especially as many of those third parties are discriminatary based on amount of money you have, charging differing fees and interest depending on what sort of money you have. If you need to pay 1000 dollars, and only have 1000 dollars, than, at most banks, you'll be below a required daily average and hit with a fee, or have to pay money for a money order, or all sorts of things that are going to cost you about 1002 dollars by the end. Whereas if you have have 10,000 dollars, you can throw that in a bank account, write a 1000 dollar check, and close the account the next day without a fee. If you have a high enough credit rating, you can get a credit card, pay with that, get some money back, and close the account making a profit! Yes, that seems trivial, but it's utterly inane to allow our government to require us to use third parties with random fee structures, where some people end up paying more based on semi-random things.
Schools, and all government agencies, should be required to accept cash, even for non-debts. I don't know if they are required, but they should be.
If the some government institution truly doesn't want to deal with cash, it would be rather trivial to create a national free deposit system at, say, post offices, which have to deal with valuable stuff anyway. Or at courthouses.(1) Where if you owned the government some money, you could walk in there and pay it in cash and have it forwarded to whatever agency at whatever level of government.
And, before anyone says postal orders, postal orders are not free. Now, it would be trivial to make them free if they were written to government agencies...
Hell, courthouses could profit from that internally. At my courthouse, a small one, there are at least three seperate areas that accept cash: The property tax/car tax/car tag office (They were smart enough to combine these with the same back-area.), the court itself for fines and such, and the marriage/fishing/hunting license office. And probably some more I don't know about. And, across the street, the library. (And I think bail is paid at the jail, but confusingly fines are paid at the courthouse.) How much expensive handling of money would be saved if there are literally one place where you gave the county government money?
Writing on the stub of a money order is just for your own records. The point is, indeed, to keep the number so if someone disputes they got it, you can look it up.
Also, money orders expire, and when they do so without being deposited, you can get your cash back if you have the stub.
Money orders are essentially 'certified checks' that are in the name of someone else. When you buy them, you put the money in said account. As long as you have the stub, you can do things with that account. (But not cancel the money order or take your cash back before they expire.)
I don't think certified checks are issued anymore, but that used to be what they were. You'd take money from your bank account and put it in a seperate untouchable account and get a single check written on that account for that amount. Money orders are someone else doing that for you.
Or go to the company's bank, and they'll cash it for free. No account needed.
Wrong. Banks have started charging fees on cashing their own checks at their counter.
It's fucking absurd, I know, but true.
When was this? Banks only started doing it recently. All banks around here. It started with business accounts, and now it applies to all checks.
I've complained to my bank about their policy repeatedly. It is my damn money, and when I write a check to someone, I expect my bank to give them that amount of money, regardless of how my bank gets the check. It actually costs them more to handle their own checks coming in from other banks than to deal with them at the counter.
OTOH, if everyone starts cashing checks manually, they'd have a problem: They couldn't charge outrageous fees on people who deposited bad checks. They can't fine people who show up in person to deposit a bad check, all they can do is not give them the money and give them the check back.
Banks are completely out of control with fees at this point. The ironic things is, banks know this and advertise a lack of fees, but they mean 'monthly fees', which no one gives a shit about. We're not idiots, we can add up the monthly fees mentally into one sum and know that's the cost of the account. They still charge crazy amounts for overdrafts of penny and charge customers for bad checks they deposit and now charge check cashers for getting money an account holder has written a check for.
All sorts of crap they can only get away with by forcing people to use banks more and more. They've already started giving discounts for direct deposit, which in reality means they're charging people for not using it. Soon they'll start charging people for not using automatic bill pay.
I'm not one of those crazy people who rant about 'conspiracies' and stuff, but banks are making it harder and harder for you to operate in any manner besides having an account with them, and, since they know you have to have said account, are then feeling free to completely rip people off. What are you going to do, go to another bank that does exactly the same thing?
Oh, yeah, the 'voter caging' is another hugely illegal thing that may be why all that mail was deleted. One that just surfaced, and I'll admit I don't know much about it at this point.
That, or the aforementioned illegal politizing of civil service positions, are the real story there, both being completely illegal, no kidding around. The 'firing USAs' is only illegal if done deliberately to kill a specific investigation.
It just so happened in trying to cover up the other stuff, the DoJ lied about the firings, and thus managed to make things worse. At least that's the logical reason, although it doesn't actually seem to make any sense. It seems like they could have said 'Yeah, we fired them for political reasons. Bite our ass.'. They can't possibly care about opinion at this point, and, as was repeated at the start of this, those are political positions and they can be removed at will. If they'd just admitted that, all those other people wouldn't have testified as to actaul illegal (As opposed to just suspicious) conduct.
Just looking at this administration, it's amazing how incompetently the criminal conspiracies were run.