People will look back at us and find it disgusting we ate corpses.
You can brainwash a child even today. No need to wait for a century.
However no mental gymnastics can obscure the fact that humans are predators. You can live in a tower, surrounded by food synthesizers and whatnot. But if that tower one day crumbles and drops you into a forest, you *will* eat every corpse you can come across, and you will make many new ones in the process. Those who won't will die. Plants that you can find in a forest, or in a prairie, are not sufficiently developed to sustain you - and the pieces of your fallen tower destroyed your fields of cultured plants and all your machinery.
In other words, you can pretend that you are not what you are only when you are surrounded by machines that allow you to make your wishes real. Without those machines you are either an omnivore, or food for wild animals.
I hate fat, and I always remove it from beef. The taste of remaining meat is just fine. Perhaps my cooking habits are too harsh for some people, but I never eat meat unless it is very well done. (By that time all the fat melts out.) The lengthy, high temperature cooking also kills most of undesirable lifeforms.
I would be perfectly fine with a vat-grown meat. I only need proteins from it, not taste. I have no love of eating. If you can condense a daily, or even monthly meal into one tiny bitter pill, that would be perfectly fine with me. More time to do useful things.
the next generation just takes for granted that you don't eat living animals
As a side effect, they will be able to see a live cow only at a zoo. Eventually they will be extinct. Domesticated cattle cannot live outside of a ranch, and there won't be any ranches left.
Pick one of the smaller cities and zoom in.. you are indeed going to see lots of randomly scattered shacks.
That is true for most countries on the planet. Agriculture doesn't pay well, especially on small scale and when not assisted by the government. Small towns cannot support large industrial base. If you drive on county roads in the USA you will see plenty of towns that haven't changed in last 100 or 200 years - except some have a gas station.
Its a significant and real metric in the retail world.
Only among like products. A warehouse that sells hay has to be larger than a jeweler's store that sells diamonds - and both are larger than a tiny office of a stockbroker who will sell you a piece of paper that has no limit on value.
No, that's not true either. either of the.355 (9mm ) and.357" diameter bullet (.38 special and.357 magnum) is used more often the.22 LR in the USA.
.22LR is (was) bought in 500-rd boxes for $25 and fired without concern for cost. 500 rounds of 9mm, let alone revolver calibers, will be far more expensive, and your hand will be sore.
As many posters indicated in their comments, compliance is not even checked against your arbitrary list of technical measures. It is checked against an approved list of measures and actions that you are supposed to have and perform.
Good encryption would be a solution. You could have a server in North Korea and safely store all the secrets of portable nukes there, as long as they are well encrypted.
But the devil is in details. What does it mean "well encrypted?" What is even the criteria for "wellness" of your encryption? Would it be OK if I use ROT13? Ok, perhaps not. What if I use AES256? Now you are happy. Right? No, wrong - because I used a key that consists of all zeros. Or ones. Or something equally trivial.
But let's imagine you have a secure key. You used/dev/random, and it is random enough. Is it secure now? No, it isn't. You now have a known plaintext attack. AES may prevent you from reversing the key, but it still a block cipher - and many technical documents have similarities that can be exploited. Unless salted, every block of same plaintext will produce the same ciphertext. This is already a leak of data. Is it important? Maybe not. But there was no such leak before, and now there is a foothold. Can you guarantee that it won't get worse? Your adversary has all the resources of the state (albeit a poor one) and they are not constrained as much as you are.
This is why you never invent your own cryptosystem. NSA does that, and they approve and provide cryptosystems for various end users. If you can get NSA to approve a cryptosystem for your setup, you are golden. But chances of that are not very good. If you start building your own, nobody is even going to check what you did. If it is not approved, it's not good. DSS workers are not cryptographers; even most of NSA personnel are not cryptographers (as we know now.) It takes an inordinate amount of effort to approve a cryptosystem for a particular use. One can have a good algorithm that is implemented with a small bug, and that bug turns it from unbreakable to reversable in milliseconds. Cryptographers know what to watch for, and even they make mistakes sometimes. Can you get away with a crypto library that you downloaded from Internet? I don't think so. It may be perfectly secure, but that's not what you will be evaluated against.
IIRC, ITAR compliance would not be very compliant when foreign citizens - especially citizens of named prohibited nations - have access to your data, even if it occurs on US soil. That can easily happen because cloud companies are not restricted in who they hire; they aren't even required to monitor what their employees are doing with your data. If anything happens that you, the customer, don't like, their liability is limited to what you paid for the service in the last billing cycle.
You may encrypt your data, but I don't think this helps. Having data is a separate problem from having the key. These problems can be solved by independent methods.
That is the first result on Google, out of 1,229,682 in total. JS is a complete programming language; and while it runs mostly sandboxed, its effects are not sandboxed. For example, JS can do portscans of government computers on behalf of a third party. Do you want to probe Pentagon's servers while you read news on a blog? The FBI will come knocking down YOUR door, not the door of the hacker who inserted the code into someone else's server. JS code can upload illegal materials onto servers; that includes materials that you can go to prison for. JS makes your computer into a flexible proxy for a purpose that you do not know. It will cease to run after you leave the page; but with enough hits, the author does not care - every visitor will do his small bit of work. For all that work it will use your IP address. Good luck proving to a judge that it wasn't you who registered for an account and posted a CP photo. All the IP records will point at your PC.
The executive summary here is simple: today you should be fully aware of what your computer is doing. Running obfuscated, untraceable JS on random Web pages is the least wise idea here - especially when you don't need that JS. That's why NoScript defaults to deny. There are few pages that use JS for a reason; if you trust them, enable JS for them. Browsing random sites with JS on is not the best course of action.
It's not "derailing" - the term for this is "thread hijacking." BTW, it started just as a warning to others that the site won't render without JS. Unexpectedly, it generated a subdiscussion.
But considering how much of the web requires javascript these days, its hardly something to complain about in a comment.
Most of the Web gracefully degrades. At least you see enough to decide if you are still interested in the site or not, and how dangerous it looks like.
I don't want to enable JS to just read some dumb text - or worse, get a video playing "YOU HAVE BEEN 0WN3D!" in fullscreen mode. Most people would call it paranoia, but the Slashdot crowd is somewhat more aware of what lurks out there.
If you don't like it, get NoScript and move on with your life.
That's what I use. Exceptions are granted on "as needed after careful consideration" basis, not just because some damn site wants JS. There are too many news sites out there; I can't read them all even if I make it my full time job. A site that doesn't render for no good reason gets skipped. Buyer's market.
They should do that - it's a crime, after all. By not going after vandals they are saying that vandalism is safe for criminals. This is not the message that any sane society should send. Trayvon Martin was killed only because at no point in his life he was told to stop doing what he was doing. Per Peter's Principle he eventually bit more than he could chew. If you don't seek out and punish vandals, some of them will be soon playing knock out kings, or killing people for fun - and will get themselves killed. Arresting them early, for a small crime, may save them from committing a large crime.
You don't expect an investigation, collection of fingerprints, canvassing for witnesses, checking the local security cameras? I thought I had low expectations from city services, but I'm outmatched here:-)
What do you mean their opinion doesn't matter? Of course everyone gets to weigh in on whether or not parks are subsidized - cities are not run by dictators
... and...
the last time I needed the police, then didn't even come out to look at my vandalized car, they just had me fill out an online form to report it. In your unsubsidized city, why wouldn't you fund those services with user fees?
Funny how contradictory these statements are. City police is financed by the taxpayers of the city, and the citizens are free to weigh in, and the police chief is not a dictator... except when he is, as he denies you the service that you have already paid for.
As you noticed, I am proposing to not pay for fire and police per call simply because they are equally needed by all, at more or less the same rate. Charing per call would result in the same distribution of fees. However firefighting services often charge those who are responsible for fires, and those are some serious expenses ($10-20K, if the fire was large enough.) Ambulances are already private, and they charge you for a ride. Police will charge you if your house's alarm system triggers too often in error (there are a couple of free false alarms per year, or something - depends on the city.) Also the city nearby charges a separate tax on alarm systems, to help pay the extra expenses incurred by the police.
Most of our city parks do have homeless drug users in the bushes, but that doesn't make them awful places.
One person's measure of awfulness may differ from another person's measure. But you are right in some way. I often see people driving trucks that are covered in graffiti; and I see joggers that jog through trash-littered areas, navigating around homeless. I am amazed how well trained they are to tune out those aspects of civilization. I cannot do that as good as experienced riders of NYC subway do - who, clothed in very expensive business suits, walk around pools of supicious liquids on the floor and pretend that there is nothing there, and that the stench is just light fragrance of roses. Yes, I am quick to leave such places to never return. Having been born and raised in a 10M+ city made me hate crowds. Harry Harrison's short story Make Room! Make Room! resonates with me, and I understand Solarians.
They are subsidized by everyone, regardless of whether they want the park or use the train. Their opinion does not matter. If you want fairness, remove subsidies and charge visitors to the park. Wil you still jog there? The train ticket will also rise in price, making the car even more attractive.
There are only a few services that are equally applicable to everyone: fire, police, and such, just because everyone has more or less the same probability of needing them. There bickering about taxes to support them becomes unproductive. Everything else benefits one small group of people, while being paid for by everyone. I always say that such services should be financed by their users. If they are good, they can get even better. If they are bad, they should go out of business and give up the resources that they occupy to something else or to someone else who can do better things for people (and for which those people will want to pay.) As it is currently, the park may be an awful place, with a drug user under every bush, and still nothing would be done.
The system of cross-subsidies confuses the market so much that nobody can tell with any certainty who pays for what, and how much. Your example with roads is a good one. Who pays for upkeep of roads? What is the share of gas tax, city taxes, state taxes and federal taxes in all that? It's even dependent on the type of the road. No serious discussion can be held until all these numbers are easy to find and easy to understand. Such confusion is only helping bureaucrats to move money around, in and out of their personal slush funds, to finance whatever they feel important at expense of what the people find important.
Do you need a healthy meal a couple times per day, or you only want it? You will survive on water every day and on bread every week, after all. Does an artist need paper and pencil, or it's just something he wants?
There are few black people around here. They are not a significant factor in local crime. Illegal immigrants from Central America are the majority. They look the same as any other Latino who lives here for generations. Maybe you can tell by clothes. But behavior is the only reliable clue; and the good part is that it works on all races and all skin tones. In the end, you only care about actions.
Alas a lot of suburbanites, like the GP, get ridiculously defensive about their lifestyles. They know it's inefficient and causes excessive tax burdens, and the last thing they want to admit is that they might, actually, be happier living in a home on a street that has a convenience store on the corner and a bus stop three minutes walk away.
Not everyone is happy to live in a hive. It is nice to have a bus in 3 minutes; however from criminal statistics point of view availability of a bus directly translates into house robberies. Even if that is not your concern, the same bus will be making noise around your house. The convenience store on the corner is nice, but now you are locked into its prices (otherwise you lose the convenience of proximity.) You will have more neighbors, and you can talk to ten of them at once without raising your voice. They do the same; you will be aware, without even trying, of all their family problems; and when their son has a party the whole block can't sleep.
There is value in living farther away from all that human hive. The air is clearer; the birds are plentiful; the land is available to do whatever you want - a garden, a tree (or ten,) chickens, cattle - whatever you can imagine. Your activities are not seen by every passerby; your property has a gate; there is no HOA; there are no taxes to the city; there are no laws about having a tree, and there is no death penalty for cutting one down. If you have dogs, they have plenty of room to be dogs. If you have cars, they are parked on your property and you don't need to lock them. If you have projects to work on, there is space for them. You don't have any of that when you are constrained to 0.0025 of an acre that your backyard occupies. Perhaps city people can convince themselves that they want to live in such conditions - but as soon as someone makes it big they buy a mansion in suburbs, lock the gates, and live happily ever after without rubbing elbows with a crowd of neighbors.
Stirlitz went into Müller's empty office. He walked up to the safe and pulled on the handle. It wouldn't open. After making sure that he was alone, he took out his gun and blasted away. Still, the safe wouldn't open. Next, he put a hand grenade under the safe and removed the pin. After the smoke cleared, Stirlitz once again tried to open the safe. Again, however, he was unsuccessful. "Hmmm..." the experienced intelligence officer at last concluded, "must be locked."
From here. Very few of those jokes have been translated.
Not typical in cities, true, because shooting in cities triggers a major police response. However tagging of signs is commonplace. Probably 10% of road signs are tagged at any given time, on average, and 30% to 50% of suitable, inaccessible vertical surfaces. I see them every day.
Signs that are shot up are on rural roads. I saw them personally, close by. The nearest sign with a.22LR hole is about 100 yards from my home. The hole was still there yesterday. A year ago a police officer was calling up everyone in the area because a bullet struck a wall of a house a mile away from my house and he was investigating. It is very easy for gang members to drive up the road and shoot randomly from a moving car. There is nobody to see them doing it; certainly not after midnight. Shooting is legal in unincorporated areas, so the police won't even respond. Some neighbors shoot their own firearms on their land, so it's not possible to tell who is doing what.
Most likely I'll return to Canada after my work here is done. The USA is just too violent, and there is no cure that would pass the muster of democracy and political correctness. The country is going downhill. I'd love to stop that, but there isn't much I can do.
So you wouldn't mind paying back the FCC universal service fund subsides that help deliver your phone and internet service?
I'd pay them because it would be fair. However, in this particular case AT&T is no longer providing my Internet connection because they scrapped DSL equipment and focused on U-Verse or whatever it is that works only in cities. Now I have a pretty good dish that reaches the nearest tower of Clear.net. I can get up to 5 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up this way, for half the price. I have the land line, but I rarely need it, and I can give it up. (My AT&T microcell at home works over Internet.)
Even city dwellers manage to operate ham radios - VHF/UHF obviously has a lot of activity (and antennas are small and easy to disguise), but even HF is possible if you're creative
The apartment building was full of fluorescent lights, and more were in the street. I had noise at S9+ and couldn't get any signal at all. Perhaps a repeater at 2m would be an option, but there is no challenge in that. Push the button and talk; there isn't much else you can do.
I know people that set up a buddipole outside in a clear area with good results...
I have a Buddistick, and it is pretty good for such a compact antenna. But as every other high impedance antenna, it is narrowband, and it still won't work if there are hundreds of fluorescent lights all over you (in corridors, and at neighbors.) Now I have a proper, full height HF9V, half a mile away from the nearest neighbor, and the difference is astonishing.
take it to the beach for even better results.
It would look funny if you go to a beach at midnight to work some DX at 40m or 80m:-) Besides, that Buddi* won't be very good at those bands (it doesn't support them, IIRC.) Working a 24h or 48h contest from a beach... well, Field Day, perhaps, but not much else:-) You are talking about an incidental QSO now and then, to test the equipment. That you can always do. But if you are aiming for a bit more, like an award perhaps, you need to try harder. My FT-950 costs too much to operate it at the beach, where dust, salt and heat are plentiful.
If I want to use a machine shop or 3D printer, rather than spending money building my own small shop, I can join a hackerspace and have access to far better equipment than I could afford on my own
That is not the answer. You are telling me why I shouldn't be needing what I need. That's an entirely different discussion. Today you can have a 3D printer kit for a $999. A friend is already assembling that kit. It's not dirt cheap, but hobbies don't have to be cheap, especially if you don't drink and don't smoke (those "hobbies" are far more expensive.) You live only once; spend your money while you can - the last suit has no pockets. Besides, techies like myself are well paid, and I can afford gizmos like that.
Some of my friends rebuild cars - some are in love with old cars, other are building racing cars; yet another friend is a motorbike aficionado. You can't tell them to keep their projects in the club. There are other issues with machines, though. They require careful alignment before you can use them. That alignment takes time, and if you are the owner you know what was done and what was not done, so you don't have to recalibrate everything each time you walk up to the mill. There is value in owning your tools.
Slashdot Mirror
People will look back at us and find it disgusting we ate corpses.
You can brainwash a child even today. No need to wait for a century.
However no mental gymnastics can obscure the fact that humans are predators. You can live in a tower, surrounded by food synthesizers and whatnot. But if that tower one day crumbles and drops you into a forest, you *will* eat every corpse you can come across, and you will make many new ones in the process. Those who won't will die. Plants that you can find in a forest, or in a prairie, are not sufficiently developed to sustain you - and the pieces of your fallen tower destroyed your fields of cultured plants and all your machinery.
In other words, you can pretend that you are not what you are only when you are surrounded by machines that allow you to make your wishes real. Without those machines you are either an omnivore, or food for wild animals.
It's the fat that's delicious.
I hate fat, and I always remove it from beef. The taste of remaining meat is just fine. Perhaps my cooking habits are too harsh for some people, but I never eat meat unless it is very well done. (By that time all the fat melts out.) The lengthy, high temperature cooking also kills most of undesirable lifeforms.
I would be perfectly fine with a vat-grown meat. I only need proteins from it, not taste. I have no love of eating. If you can condense a daily, or even monthly meal into one tiny bitter pill, that would be perfectly fine with me. More time to do useful things.
the next generation just takes for granted that you don't eat living animals
As a side effect, they will be able to see a live cow only at a zoo. Eventually they will be extinct. Domesticated cattle cannot live outside of a ranch, and there won't be any ranches left.
Pick one of the smaller cities and zoom in.. you are indeed going to see lots of randomly scattered shacks.
That is true for most countries on the planet. Agriculture doesn't pay well, especially on small scale and when not assisted by the government. Small towns cannot support large industrial base. If you drive on county roads in the USA you will see plenty of towns that haven't changed in last 100 or 200 years - except some have a gas station.
Its a significant and real metric in the retail world.
Only among like products. A warehouse that sells hay has to be larger than a jeweler's store that sells diamonds - and both are larger than a tiny office of a stockbroker who will sell you a piece of paper that has no limit on value.
No, that's not true either. either of the .355 (9mm ) and .357" diameter bullet (.38 special and .357 magnum) is used more often the .22 LR in the USA.
As many posters indicated in their comments, compliance is not even checked against your arbitrary list of technical measures. It is checked against an approved list of measures and actions that you are supposed to have and perform.
Good encryption would be a solution. You could have a server in North Korea and safely store all the secrets of portable nukes there, as long as they are well encrypted.
But the devil is in details. What does it mean "well encrypted?" What is even the criteria for "wellness" of your encryption? Would it be OK if I use ROT13? Ok, perhaps not. What if I use AES256? Now you are happy. Right? No, wrong - because I used a key that consists of all zeros. Or ones. Or something equally trivial.
But let's imagine you have a secure key. You used /dev/random, and it is random enough. Is it secure now? No, it isn't. You now have a known plaintext attack. AES may prevent you from reversing the key, but it still a block cipher - and many technical documents have similarities that can be exploited. Unless salted, every block of same plaintext will produce the same ciphertext. This is already a leak of data. Is it important? Maybe not. But there was no such leak before, and now there is a foothold. Can you guarantee that it won't get worse? Your adversary has all the resources of the state (albeit a poor one) and they are not constrained as much as you are.
This is why you never invent your own cryptosystem. NSA does that, and they approve and provide cryptosystems for various end users. If you can get NSA to approve a cryptosystem for your setup, you are golden. But chances of that are not very good. If you start building your own, nobody is even going to check what you did. If it is not approved, it's not good. DSS workers are not cryptographers; even most of NSA personnel are not cryptographers (as we know now.) It takes an inordinate amount of effort to approve a cryptosystem for a particular use. One can have a good algorithm that is implemented with a small bug, and that bug turns it from unbreakable to reversable in milliseconds. Cryptographers know what to watch for, and even they make mistakes sometimes. Can you get away with a crypto library that you downloaded from Internet? I don't think so. It may be perfectly secure, but that's not what you will be evaluated against.
ITAR simply requires State-Side storage.
IIRC, ITAR compliance would not be very compliant when foreign citizens - especially citizens of named prohibited nations - have access to your data, even if it occurs on US soil. That can easily happen because cloud companies are not restricted in who they hire; they aren't even required to monitor what their employees are doing with your data. If anything happens that you, the customer, don't like, their liability is limited to what you paid for the service in the last billing cycle.
You may encrypt your data, but I don't think this helps. Having data is a separate problem from having the key. These problems can be solved by independent methods.
I know and understand enough not to have baseless fears.
You do? http://blog.aw-snap.info/p/examples-of-malicious-javascript.html
That is the first result on Google, out of 1,229,682 in total. JS is a complete programming language; and while it runs mostly sandboxed, its effects are not sandboxed. For example, JS can do portscans of government computers on behalf of a third party. Do you want to probe Pentagon's servers while you read news on a blog? The FBI will come knocking down YOUR door, not the door of the hacker who inserted the code into someone else's server. JS code can upload illegal materials onto servers; that includes materials that you can go to prison for. JS makes your computer into a flexible proxy for a purpose that you do not know. It will cease to run after you leave the page; but with enough hits, the author does not care - every visitor will do his small bit of work. For all that work it will use your IP address. Good luck proving to a judge that it wasn't you who registered for an account and posted a CP photo. All the IP records will point at your PC.
The executive summary here is simple: today you should be fully aware of what your computer is doing. Running obfuscated, untraceable JS on random Web pages is the least wise idea here - especially when you don't need that JS. That's why NoScript defaults to deny. There are few pages that use JS for a reason; if you trust them, enable JS for them. Browsing random sites with JS on is not the best course of action.
It's not "derailing" - the term for this is "thread hijacking." BTW, it started just as a warning to others that the site won't render without JS. Unexpectedly, it generated a subdiscussion.
So you have no objection to me running arbitrary code on your computer, without you knowing that?
The sanctions law will probably be so hastily/poorly written that if Snowden ever returns to the US, the US will have to sanction itself :-)
You mean the US government will actually follow the US law? That would be a neat novelty.
But considering how much of the web requires javascript these days, its hardly something to complain about in a comment.
Most of the Web gracefully degrades. At least you see enough to decide if you are still interested in the site or not, and how dangerous it looks like.
I don't want to enable JS to just read some dumb text - or worse, get a video playing "YOU HAVE BEEN 0WN3D!" in fullscreen mode. Most people would call it paranoia, but the Slashdot crowd is somewhat more aware of what lurks out there.
If you don't like it, get NoScript and move on with your life.
That's what I use. Exceptions are granted on "as needed after careful consideration" basis, not just because some damn site wants JS. There are too many news sites out there; I can't read them all even if I make it my full time job. A site that doesn't render for no good reason gets skipped. Buyer's market.
Business Insider have a somewhat cynical take on Snowden's asylum claim which I think is worth reading.
JavaScript required. Not worth reading.
Theft from a mailbox is easy to defeat by using a lockable, steel mailbox. This company also sells secure mailbox clusters.
They should do that - it's a crime, after all. By not going after vandals they are saying that vandalism is safe for criminals. This is not the message that any sane society should send. Trayvon Martin was killed only because at no point in his life he was told to stop doing what he was doing. Per Peter's Principle he eventually bit more than he could chew. If you don't seek out and punish vandals, some of them will be soon playing knock out kings, or killing people for fun - and will get themselves killed. Arresting them early, for a small crime, may save them from committing a large crime.
You don't expect an investigation, collection of fingerprints, canvassing for witnesses, checking the local security cameras? I thought I had low expectations from city services, but I'm outmatched here :-)
What do you mean their opinion doesn't matter? Of course everyone gets to weigh in on whether or not parks are subsidized - cities are not run by dictators
the last time I needed the police, then didn't even come out to look at my vandalized car, they just had me fill out an online form to report it. In your unsubsidized city, why wouldn't you fund those services with user fees?
Funny how contradictory these statements are. City police is financed by the taxpayers of the city, and the citizens are free to weigh in, and the police chief is not a dictator... except when he is, as he denies you the service that you have already paid for.
As you noticed, I am proposing to not pay for fire and police per call simply because they are equally needed by all, at more or less the same rate. Charing per call would result in the same distribution of fees. However firefighting services often charge those who are responsible for fires, and those are some serious expenses ($10-20K, if the fire was large enough.) Ambulances are already private, and they charge you for a ride. Police will charge you if your house's alarm system triggers too often in error (there are a couple of free false alarms per year, or something - depends on the city.) Also the city nearby charges a separate tax on alarm systems, to help pay the extra expenses incurred by the police.
Most of our city parks do have homeless drug users in the bushes, but that doesn't make them awful places.
One person's measure of awfulness may differ from another person's measure. But you are right in some way. I often see people driving trucks that are covered in graffiti; and I see joggers that jog through trash-littered areas, navigating around homeless. I am amazed how well trained they are to tune out those aspects of civilization. I cannot do that as good as experienced riders of NYC subway do - who, clothed in very expensive business suits, walk around pools of supicious liquids on the floor and pretend that there is nothing there, and that the stench is just light fragrance of roses. Yes, I am quick to leave such places to never return. Having been born and raised in a 10M+ city made me hate crowds. Harry Harrison's short story Make Room! Make Room! resonates with me, and I understand Solarians.
They are subsidized by everyone, regardless of whether they want the park or use the train. Their opinion does not matter. If you want fairness, remove subsidies and charge visitors to the park. Wil you still jog there? The train ticket will also rise in price, making the car even more attractive.
There are only a few services that are equally applicable to everyone: fire, police, and such, just because everyone has more or less the same probability of needing them. There bickering about taxes to support them becomes unproductive. Everything else benefits one small group of people, while being paid for by everyone. I always say that such services should be financed by their users. If they are good, they can get even better. If they are bad, they should go out of business and give up the resources that they occupy to something else or to someone else who can do better things for people (and for which those people will want to pay.) As it is currently, the park may be an awful place, with a drug user under every bush, and still nothing would be done.
The system of cross-subsidies confuses the market so much that nobody can tell with any certainty who pays for what, and how much. Your example with roads is a good one. Who pays for upkeep of roads? What is the share of gas tax, city taxes, state taxes and federal taxes in all that? It's even dependent on the type of the road. No serious discussion can be held until all these numbers are easy to find and easy to understand. Such confusion is only helping bureaucrats to move money around, in and out of their personal slush funds, to finance whatever they feel important at expense of what the people find important.
Do you need a healthy meal a couple times per day, or you only want it? You will survive on water every day and on bread every week, after all. Does an artist need paper and pencil, or it's just something he wants?
There are few black people around here. They are not a significant factor in local crime. Illegal immigrants from Central America are the majority. They look the same as any other Latino who lives here for generations. Maybe you can tell by clothes. But behavior is the only reliable clue; and the good part is that it works on all races and all skin tones. In the end, you only care about actions.
Alas a lot of suburbanites, like the GP, get ridiculously defensive about their lifestyles. They know it's inefficient and causes excessive tax burdens, and the last thing they want to admit is that they might, actually, be happier living in a home on a street that has a convenience store on the corner and a bus stop three minutes walk away.
Not everyone is happy to live in a hive. It is nice to have a bus in 3 minutes; however from criminal statistics point of view availability of a bus directly translates into house robberies. Even if that is not your concern, the same bus will be making noise around your house. The convenience store on the corner is nice, but now you are locked into its prices (otherwise you lose the convenience of proximity.) You will have more neighbors, and you can talk to ten of them at once without raising your voice. They do the same; you will be aware, without even trying, of all their family problems; and when their son has a party the whole block can't sleep.
There is value in living farther away from all that human hive. The air is clearer; the birds are plentiful; the land is available to do whatever you want - a garden, a tree (or ten,) chickens, cattle - whatever you can imagine. Your activities are not seen by every passerby; your property has a gate; there is no HOA; there are no taxes to the city; there are no laws about having a tree, and there is no death penalty for cutting one down. If you have dogs, they have plenty of room to be dogs. If you have cars, they are parked on your property and you don't need to lock them. If you have projects to work on, there is space for them. You don't have any of that when you are constrained to 0.0025 of an acre that your backyard occupies. Perhaps city people can convince themselves that they want to live in such conditions - but as soon as someone makes it big they buy a mansion in suburbs, lock the gates, and live happily ever after without rubbing elbows with a crowd of neighbors.
Stirlitz went into Müller's empty office. He walked up to the safe and pulled on the handle. It wouldn't open. After making sure that he was alone, he took out his gun and blasted away. Still, the safe wouldn't open. Next, he put a hand grenade under the safe and removed the pin. After the smoke cleared, Stirlitz once again tried to open the safe. Again, however, he was unsuccessful. "Hmmm..." the experienced intelligence officer at last concluded, "must be locked."
From here. Very few of those jokes have been translated.
Not typical in cities, true, because shooting in cities triggers a major police response. However tagging of signs is commonplace. Probably 10% of road signs are tagged at any given time, on average, and 30% to 50% of suitable, inaccessible vertical surfaces. I see them every day.
Signs that are shot up are on rural roads. I saw them personally, close by. The nearest sign with a .22LR hole is about 100 yards from my home. The hole was still there yesterday. A year ago a police officer was calling up everyone in the area because a bullet struck a wall of a house a mile away from my house and he was investigating. It is very easy for gang members to drive up the road and shoot randomly from a moving car. There is nobody to see them doing it; certainly not after midnight. Shooting is legal in unincorporated areas, so the police won't even respond. Some neighbors shoot their own firearms on their land, so it's not possible to tell who is doing what.
Most likely I'll return to Canada after my work here is done. The USA is just too violent, and there is no cure that would pass the muster of democracy and political correctness. The country is going downhill. I'd love to stop that, but there isn't much I can do.
So you wouldn't mind paying back the FCC universal service fund subsides that help deliver your phone and internet service?
I'd pay them because it would be fair. However, in this particular case AT&T is no longer providing my Internet connection because they scrapped DSL equipment and focused on U-Verse or whatever it is that works only in cities. Now I have a pretty good dish that reaches the nearest tower of Clear.net. I can get up to 5 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up this way, for half the price. I have the land line, but I rarely need it, and I can give it up. (My AT&T microcell at home works over Internet.)
Even city dwellers manage to operate ham radios - VHF/UHF obviously has a lot of activity (and antennas are small and easy to disguise), but even HF is possible if you're creative
The apartment building was full of fluorescent lights, and more were in the street. I had noise at S9+ and couldn't get any signal at all. Perhaps a repeater at 2m would be an option, but there is no challenge in that. Push the button and talk; there isn't much else you can do.
I know people that set up a buddipole outside in a clear area with good results...
I have a Buddistick, and it is pretty good for such a compact antenna. But as every other high impedance antenna, it is narrowband, and it still won't work if there are hundreds of fluorescent lights all over you (in corridors, and at neighbors.) Now I have a proper, full height HF9V, half a mile away from the nearest neighbor, and the difference is astonishing.
take it to the beach for even better results.
It would look funny if you go to a beach at midnight to work some DX at 40m or 80m :-) Besides, that Buddi* won't be very good at those bands (it doesn't support them, IIRC.) Working a 24h or 48h contest from a beach ... well, Field Day, perhaps, but not much else :-) You are talking about an incidental QSO now and then, to test the equipment. That you can always do. But if you are aiming for a bit more, like an award perhaps, you need to try harder. My FT-950 costs too much to operate it at the beach, where dust, salt and heat are plentiful.
If I want to use a machine shop or 3D printer, rather than spending money building my own small shop, I can join a hackerspace and have access to far better equipment than I could afford on my own
That is not the answer. You are telling me why I shouldn't be needing what I need. That's an entirely different discussion. Today you can have a 3D printer kit for a $999. A friend is already assembling that kit. It's not dirt cheap, but hobbies don't have to be cheap, especially if you don't drink and don't smoke (those "hobbies" are far more expensive.) You live only once; spend your money while you can - the last suit has no pockets. Besides, techies like myself are well paid, and I can afford gizmos like that.
Some of my friends rebuild cars - some are in love with old cars, other are building racing cars; yet another friend is a motorbike aficionado. You can't tell them to keep their projects in the club. There are other issues with machines, though. They require careful alignment before you can use them. That alignment takes time, and if you are the owner you know what was done and what was not done, so you don't have to recalibrate everything each time you walk up to the mill. There is value in owning your tools.