You make a point that some people seem to have missed, so I will restate it. The official purpose of fines for traffic violations (and violations of other laws) is to discourage this behavior. If the gap between the behavior that the fine is intended to discourage and the fine being levied is too large, it will have no impact on the behavior because the person will not connect the punishment with the behavior.
I had not realized that license plate scanners had privacy. The summary does not seem to address the issue of whether the ACLU thinks that license place scanners should have privacy and don't or if they should not have privacy and do.
Reading the summary it seems that the ACLU is not questioning the privacy of license plate scanners, but is instead questioning the impact of license plate scanners on privacy. That is a very different question.
This is not the first sign of this. A few years back a large Indian Call Center company bought a U.S. Call Center company because they could not meet the demand for call center workers in India.
The problem with your suggested approach is that it does not lend itself to being used to get people to surrender control of their lives to government technocrats, which is the real point of AGW alarmism. Just look at the behaviors of the most vocal proponents of changing behaviors because of AGW, do they show any concern to limit the amount of CO2 they actually emit? The answer is, not to my knowledge.
If Richard Muller and Bjorn Lomborg are your examples of AGW skeptics, you must not get out much. Richard Muller has always been an AGW believer. He just was willing to admit that the Mann "hockey stick" graph was bad science. Richard Lomborg was a borderline skeptic. His primary argument has always been that ameliorating the results of Global Warming would be less expensive than trying to prevent it.
Statistically, it's on the order of ten times more likely your gun will accidentally hurt or kill you or a loved one than ever getting the opportunity to be used to defend against crime, let alone successfully.
The problem with that statistic is that we have no idea how often a gun is successfully used to defend against crime because a large number of the case never get reported (how large we have no way of knowing, since no one reports them). What is known is that criminals often choose not to commit crimes when they know that their target is armed with a gun. Most of the time when a gun is used to defend against crime it is not discharged
yes, not being chambered is helpful. Im not a fan of shotguns, I worry about collateral damage of someone nearby when trying to shoot the perp. My 9yr old has a daisy bb gun. Everytime we use it for target practice I make her recite the safety guidelines such as
- every gun is always loaded even if you think it isnt
- never ever point a gun at someone never point a gun at something/someone you do not intend to shoot
- never put your finger on the trigger until you are ready to shoot
The discussion was about the economy and why Obama did not take action to improve the economy and the poster I responded to brought up Gitmo. If there is no connection between Gitmo and the economy, than Gitmo is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
The House (which is controlled by the Republicans) passed a bill that continues funding for ITER and for the fusion experiments in the U.S.. It is Obama and the Democrats in the Senate who are proposing to cut the funding for the fusion experiments.
From my Canadian view, the top 1% of the wealth is in the Republican hands.
And there is your problem, the top 1% of the wealth is not in Republican hands. Are these names familiar to you? Warren Buffet, Michael Moore, Patrick Kennedy, Alec Baldwin, Larry Page, Sergey Brin. They are all in the top 1% of wealth and they are all very vocal supporters of Democrats. One could go on. However, a simple way to look at who the wealthiest in the U.S. support is to look at the representatives of the wealthiest counties in the country. Those counties are primarily represented by Democrats in Congress.
The Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress and the White House for two years. Two years during which time the Republicans could not stop the Democrats from doing whatever they wanted. Sorry, there was no "3 year period of doing nothing".
I do appreciate how hard Obama has worked to make the middle and lower classes completely dependent on the government while lining the pockets of the rich friends who helped him get into office. The wealthy consistently vote for Democrats for a reason.
I know someone who is heavily involved in business management (involved in management consultant at the Vice President and above level of companies like Nissan USA, IBM, GMAC, etc) who has repeatedly said that good advertising/marketing is providing information to your potential customers. He would argue that the only time a business really wants to advertise/market to someone is when they are looking for something that business sells.
Really the problem with advertising has become that businesses no longer see it as informing potential customers about the products they sell, but instead see it as some sort of magical incantation to get people to buy their product even when it isn't something those people actually want. The more often a businesses advertising causes a person to buy something they do not actually want, the less effective advertising becomes going forward. If businesses would focus on convincing the people who actually want their product that they want their product they would find advertising effectiveness to go up significantly.
The Democrats idea of negotiating can be summed up by Obama's response to the Republican's overture to negotiate on the stimulus bill, "I won". That is not negotiation, that is requesting the other side capitulate and go along with what you want. The Democrats never tried to negotiate with the Republicans. They tried to get some Republicans to go along with what they wanted to do so as to give cover to Democrats from vulnerable districts.
Really? That would explain why all of the "benefit" from the stimulus stopped as soon as the federal money stopped./s
That is not how a stimulus is supposed to work. It is supposed to work like priming a pump. The government puts some additional money into the economy to get the economy started, then the economy generates more money than what the government put in. What happened with the "stimulus" bill is that we got economic activity in the amount (or less) of the money that the government spent. That is not stimulus.
That would explain why the companies that Obama gave federal money to have gone bankrupt (after giving very nice campaign contributions to Democratic campaigns and nice profits to their initial investors).
Obama is a big government proponent. You may think that the answer is to give power to unelected bureaucrats like Obama does, but I don't. Obama is a true-blue progressive in the mold of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Mussolini. I fear that Romney may be as well, but Romney at least seems to value democracy.
If by "performing magnificently" you mean health care costs have risen faster in Massachusetts than in the rest of the country since it was implemented and people are having trouble finding a doctor, well then yes it is.
So, the Republicans are at fault because they did not "compromise" by voting for Obama's agenda which ran counter to what they were elected to do. But it was ok that Obama did not actually compromise by incorporating anything that the Republicans constituents actually wanted them to hold out for because he did not need the Republicans votes. Basically you are saying that it is the Republicans fault for not capitulating to Obama and that Obama should have just run roughshod over the Republicans even more than he did. The fact of the matter is that the only reason that Obama did not do as you seem to think he should have was because many of the Democrats in Congress were afraid that if they voted for all of Obama's policies they would lose in the 2010 election (or whenever they were next up for re-election). What the Democrats (and Obama) was enough Republicans to vote for their bills that they could swap out who voted for it so that all of the Dems from less than safe districts could each claim to have been "independent" minded because they voted against some of Obama's agenda. Now people like the original poster are blaming the Republicans for not being "bipartisan" and voting for the Democrats bills that contained nothing from the Republicans.
The Democrats managed to pass the massively unpopular Obamacare in that time period, do you mean to tell me that they could not have used similar tactics to do something about the economy?
He made no effort to incorporate any ideas from the Republicans. He wanted them to agree to his proposals with no modifications. It isn't compromise when you ask the other side to vote for your proposals while rejecting all of theirs. The reason he "dragged his feet" was because Democrats in Congress from less than liberal districts wanted the cover of Republicans voting for the bills.
Well, then Obama will not ever have an economic boom, he has been implementing policies that look like they are calculated to drive the cost of energy up: off-shore drilling ban, reject Keystone pipeline, etc.
By bipartisanship you mean when he told the Congressional Republicans who came to him to negotiate the first stimulus bill, "I won"? Or do you mean when he forced Obamacare through with legislative fancy tricks after the voters of Massachusetts (who have some experience with "healthcare reform" of their own) voted Scott Brown into the Senate to stop it, to a seat that has been reliably Democratic for more than a generation? Exactly when was Obama "bipartisan"?
Slashdot Mirror
You make a point that some people seem to have missed, so I will restate it. The official purpose of fines for traffic violations (and violations of other laws) is to discourage this behavior. If the gap between the behavior that the fine is intended to discourage and the fine being levied is too large, it will have no impact on the behavior because the person will not connect the punishment with the behavior.
I had not realized that license plate scanners had privacy. The summary does not seem to address the issue of whether the ACLU thinks that license place scanners should have privacy and don't or if they should not have privacy and do.
Reading the summary it seems that the ACLU is not questioning the privacy of license plate scanners, but is instead questioning the impact of license plate scanners on privacy. That is a very different question.
This is not the first sign of this. A few years back a large Indian Call Center company bought a U.S. Call Center company because they could not meet the demand for call center workers in India.
Of course over that same time period they were building one new coal power plant each week on average.
The problem with your suggested approach is that it does not lend itself to being used to get people to surrender control of their lives to government technocrats, which is the real point of AGW alarmism. Just look at the behaviors of the most vocal proponents of changing behaviors because of AGW, do they show any concern to limit the amount of CO2 they actually emit? The answer is, not to my knowledge.
If Richard Muller and Bjorn Lomborg are your examples of AGW skeptics, you must not get out much. Richard Muller has always been an AGW believer. He just was willing to admit that the Mann "hockey stick" graph was bad science. Richard Lomborg was a borderline skeptic. His primary argument has always been that ameliorating the results of Global Warming would be less expensive than trying to prevent it.
Widespread use of it will cause drivers to approach those intersections with even less caution.
Statistically, it's on the order of ten times more likely your gun will accidentally hurt or kill you or a loved one than ever getting the opportunity to be used to defend against crime, let alone successfully.
The problem with that statistic is that we have no idea how often a gun is successfully used to defend against crime because a large number of the case never get reported (how large we have no way of knowing, since no one reports them). What is known is that criminals often choose not to commit crimes when they know that their target is armed with a gun. Most of the time when a gun is used to defend against crime it is not discharged
yes, not being chambered is helpful. Im not a fan of shotguns, I worry about collateral damage of someone nearby when trying to shoot the perp. My 9yr old has a daisy bb gun. Everytime we use it for target practice I make her recite the safety guidelines such as
- every gun is always loaded even if you think it isnt - never ever point a gun at someone never point a gun at something/someone you do not intend to shoot - never put your finger on the trigger until you are ready to shoot
etc etc
The italics is the way I learned that rule.
The discussion was about the economy and why Obama did not take action to improve the economy and the poster I responded to brought up Gitmo. If there is no connection between Gitmo and the economy, than Gitmo is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
The House (which is controlled by the Republicans) passed a bill that continues funding for ITER and for the fusion experiments in the U.S.. It is Obama and the Democrats in the Senate who are proposing to cut the funding for the fusion experiments.
From my Canadian view, the top 1% of the wealth is in the Republican hands.
And there is your problem, the top 1% of the wealth is not in Republican hands. Are these names familiar to you? Warren Buffet, Michael Moore, Patrick Kennedy, Alec Baldwin, Larry Page, Sergey Brin. They are all in the top 1% of wealth and they are all very vocal supporters of Democrats. One could go on. However, a simple way to look at who the wealthiest in the U.S. support is to look at the representatives of the wealthiest counties in the country. Those counties are primarily represented by Democrats in Congress.
And they were all rejected by voters who asked the question, "Where does the Constitution give Congress the authority to get involved in healthcare?"
The Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress and the White House for two years. Two years during which time the Republicans could not stop the Democrats from doing whatever they wanted. Sorry, there was no "3 year period of doing nothing".
I do appreciate how hard Obama has worked to make the middle and lower classes completely dependent on the government while lining the pockets of the rich friends who helped him get into office. The wealthy consistently vote for Democrats for a reason.
I know someone who is heavily involved in business management (involved in management consultant at the Vice President and above level of companies like Nissan USA, IBM, GMAC, etc) who has repeatedly said that good advertising/marketing is providing information to your potential customers. He would argue that the only time a business really wants to advertise/market to someone is when they are looking for something that business sells.
Really the problem with advertising has become that businesses no longer see it as informing potential customers about the products they sell, but instead see it as some sort of magical incantation to get people to buy their product even when it isn't something those people actually want. The more often a businesses advertising causes a person to buy something they do not actually want, the less effective advertising becomes going forward. If businesses would focus on convincing the people who actually want their product that they want their product they would find advertising effectiveness to go up significantly.
The Democrats idea of negotiating can be summed up by Obama's response to the Republican's overture to negotiate on the stimulus bill, "I won". That is not negotiation, that is requesting the other side capitulate and go along with what you want. The Democrats never tried to negotiate with the Republicans. They tried to get some Republicans to go along with what they wanted to do so as to give cover to Democrats from vulnerable districts.
Really? That would explain why all of the "benefit" from the stimulus stopped as soon as the federal money stopped. /s
That is not how a stimulus is supposed to work. It is supposed to work like priming a pump. The government puts some additional money into the economy to get the economy started, then the economy generates more money than what the government put in. What happened with the "stimulus" bill is that we got economic activity in the amount (or less) of the money that the government spent. That is not stimulus.
That would explain why the companies that Obama gave federal money to have gone bankrupt (after giving very nice campaign contributions to Democratic campaigns and nice profits to their initial investors).
Obama is a big government proponent. You may think that the answer is to give power to unelected bureaucrats like Obama does, but I don't. Obama is a true-blue progressive in the mold of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Mussolini. I fear that Romney may be as well, but Romney at least seems to value democracy.
If by "performing magnificently" you mean health care costs have risen faster in Massachusetts than in the rest of the country since it was implemented and people are having trouble finding a doctor, well then yes it is.
So, the Republicans are at fault because they did not "compromise" by voting for Obama's agenda which ran counter to what they were elected to do. But it was ok that Obama did not actually compromise by incorporating anything that the Republicans constituents actually wanted them to hold out for because he did not need the Republicans votes. Basically you are saying that it is the Republicans fault for not capitulating to Obama and that Obama should have just run roughshod over the Republicans even more than he did. The fact of the matter is that the only reason that Obama did not do as you seem to think he should have was because many of the Democrats in Congress were afraid that if they voted for all of Obama's policies they would lose in the 2010 election (or whenever they were next up for re-election). What the Democrats (and Obama) was enough Republicans to vote for their bills that they could swap out who voted for it so that all of the Dems from less than safe districts could each claim to have been "independent" minded because they voted against some of Obama's agenda. Now people like the original poster are blaming the Republicans for not being "bipartisan" and voting for the Democrats bills that contained nothing from the Republicans.
The Democrats managed to pass the massively unpopular Obamacare in that time period, do you mean to tell me that they could not have used similar tactics to do something about the economy?
He made no effort to incorporate any ideas from the Republicans. He wanted them to agree to his proposals with no modifications. It isn't compromise when you ask the other side to vote for your proposals while rejecting all of theirs. The reason he "dragged his feet" was because Democrats in Congress from less than liberal districts wanted the cover of Republicans voting for the bills.
Well, then Obama will not ever have an economic boom, he has been implementing policies that look like they are calculated to drive the cost of energy up: off-shore drilling ban, reject Keystone pipeline, etc.
By bipartisanship you mean when he told the Congressional Republicans who came to him to negotiate the first stimulus bill, "I won"? Or do you mean when he forced Obamacare through with legislative fancy tricks after the voters of Massachusetts (who have some experience with "healthcare reform" of their own) voted Scott Brown into the Senate to stop it, to a seat that has been reliably Democratic for more than a generation? Exactly when was Obama "bipartisan"?