There is no evidence that viewing child porn causes the consumer to commit more child abuse, and some evidence that it is preventative.
Really? As the many, very serious cases that have been all over the news, at least here in UK, like the Jimmy Savill case and others, pedophile predators cause immense harm that cripples the survivors for life.
You and the GP are arguing about two somewhat different things. You're conflating pedophilia with child abuse. The pedophile feels attraction -- the child molester acts on it with actual children. Obviously there is a lot of overlap, but the GP is saying there no evidence that viewing child porn makes a person a molester. The GP is not claiming that molesters do not cause great harm.
Waving away the organized crime connection of the Prohibition? Yes, if you define out all the negatives of something, it will look like it had good results. Is this more of that "post factual" thing I keep hearing about?
If you take something that people want and just make it illegal, then yes, you're going to get organized crime involved in it. That happens when the citizens don't respect the law or its intentions. It doesn't matter what you decide to criminalize, the act of criminalization of goods will spawn organized crime.
That's why I always carry at least two, and some crack just in case.
OK, OK. You guys made your point.
I should have said, "possession of marijuana in Tennessee and Florida is a felony for as little as 3/4 ounce. I could find more than that in the shag rug under my coffee table."
ISIS is not a country, they are an organization that has declared unilaterally that they have established a caliphate over the territory they control, but that territory is part of established nations who are fighting very hard to take that land and territory back. No nation has recognized any such new country or their borders. They are not a country, and they are losing the territory they control.
I believe that ISIS actually finds country borders to be anathema, because the only laws that man is allowed to enforce are Allah's laws. Since Allah did not draw up the countries, and borders are a law of man, countries are not allowed to exist. Which is one of the reasons why they don't like or respect the name "ISIS." To them there is only the "Islamic State" ruled by a caliphate as defined in the Koran, and non-islamic-state lands.
We have one of those laws where the judge can tell what is porn (aka "I know porn when I see it").
Ok.
In other words, if the judge gets a hard on from your kids' pics, you're going to jail.
That's not what the ruling said at all, or even implied. Are you gay? I'm just going to assume that you're straight because most people are. If you're straight, and you see a hardcore video of two guys going at it, or even a guy and a dog, do you get hard? No, you don't? Well porn has to make you hard, so clearly it's not pornographic.
False. It is like the SSI/FICA tax break a while ago. Rather than sending in $3000 to the Federal Government, you only sent in $2200. No money came YOUR way, less flowed out the other way. Giving the tax break in this case results in MORE revenue for the State and the Federal Government than not giving it - and letting the jobs go overseas. Better to lose 3-4 times the tax revenue AND have 1,100 more people out of work?
Let's say above the governmental budget is $M. You give a tax break of $Y to a company. Now the incoming receipts are $M-$Y. You give a bundle of cash, $Y, to a company instead. Incoming taxes/etc are still $M-$Y, and the budget is still $M (apparently I live in a fantasy world where the budget is balanced). In both cases the shortfall of $Y has to be made up somewhere, and it sure as hell won't be coming from the company, and only a small, small portion of that will come from those additional employees. It will come from the rest of us. We all end up paying for these jobs.
But, spread out over the populace, it's not that much, right? Sure, we'll pay a little bit more, but... American jobs. But it is not sustainable. How many companies are going to look at this situation and come to the same conclusion -- they can extort money from the government, they just need to come up with some sort of plan, any, to shift jobs overseas. If company X can do this, why can't company Y?
But I get it - Trump - can't say anything good about him, right?
Au contraire, this was one of.. well, basically, the only reason I could find to actually vote for Donald Trump, the free trade deals and the worker exodus that has worked out so very well for folks in other countries and the stocks of multinationals, even as they screwed the American people. But I'll give Donald a chance -- he's not ACTUALLY in office yet, and we've yet to see what sort of things he could do with the Office of the Presidency behind him. Maybe that opens up other opportunities than just having the rest of us paying companies to keep jobs here. I'm hoping for something better than that.
If AGW theories had enough solid evidence, the heavy involvement of politics would not be so essential.
The last year of politics in the USA have pretty much broken my belief that people can be convinced with logic and a good argument. People now only want confirmation of their previously-held beliefs, and they treat any challenging of it as an attack on their tribe.
We've come a hell of a long way down from the Enlightment and the Age of Reason that the US Founders tried to import.
The first birther rumors were started by the Hillary Clinton campaign in the 2008 primary race.
They were started by a former Clinton volunteer as Obama won the primary. That didn't go anywhere, but Trump picked it up and ran with it for the next eight years.
Given the choice between far left judges that want to reinterpret the Constitution to mean what they want it to mean thus usurping the legislative branch and the far right who interpret the Constitution exactly as it's written I think I'll take far right.
Oh, but if only that's what far-right judges believed in! I would have liked Antonin Scalia if he'd actually done what he claimed in his excellent writings.
A "tax break" is a bundle of cash. There's no different between paying X+Y dollars and receiving $Y back as a gift or a bribe or refund or whatever label you want to give it, and only paying X dollars in the first place because you got a tax break of $Y. The $Y from the tax break is going to come from somewhere, because expenditures aren't going down because of it.
"Tax breaks" that come from deals made between corporations and the government feel like the same sort of "picking winners and losers" that the Republicans were vocal about a few years ago.
And is anyone surprised this happened in San Francisco?
Actually, I am. The builders did not drive the concrete and steel supports all the way down to the bedrock because they said that the SF building code didn't mandate it in every situation. So they only drilled half as far as they needed to.
Think about that for a moment -- San Francisco's regulations were weak. That feels like a bizarro reality.
It couldn't be that it's because the sky-high rents in San Fran are forcing developers to try new things and build where they couldn't before.
The Millennium Tower builders loudly shout that because San Francisco didn't have an absolute requirement in every situation that the structure should be bolted to bedrock, instead they drilled down only half as far and bolted it to unstable bay fill.
He's spending US treasure dollars to pay the company to outsource half the jobs it planned. They're still outsourcing. And how many times can we afford to give companies bundles of cash? If I was a CEO, I would inflate the announced layoff numbers in hope for a payoff from the federal government too. This feels like the broken windows fallacy. A company threatens to leave, so you pay them to stay -- but the payment saps the rest of the economy.
Another way to read it: Carrier is going to outsource ~1000 jobs to Mexico... with Donald Trump's blessing (and US cash).
They took California for granted as they always do, because Californians - in enough numbers - are loyal servants to people like the Clintons. They were a given, and they were taken as such.
What that means is that more Democrats in traditionally strong-Democratic states voted in greater numbers for a third party candidate. They knew their state was going Democratic, so when the vote "didn't matter", they voted for non-Hillary instead.
Pelosi, once again in charge of the Democrat party's fortunes in the congress - fantastic! what a gift for the Republicans
The real win here is that Harry Reid is gone. Thank God for that.
To be more clear, I now consider Democrats to be the equivalent of the "other side" in a war - they will still oppose every and any thing your side does, they can lose a battle and still wage war, incessant and total non-compliance, they will fight to the last man, and any victory - even pyrrhic - is still a victory. Any means are justified in the pursuit of their ends.
That would be nice. It's the treatment Obama got from the Republicans, but I expect the Democrats are pussies who will put up token resistance and just complain and mutter while they fail to do anything substantial in opposing Trump's policies.
I'm not sure even that counts. Chris Christie was loyal to Trump and did a lot of work for him; he was kicked out of the transition team and his future is uncertain. Rudy Giuliani was amazingly loyal to Trump, appearing on every news show and defending him in the months leading to the election. Now the job he was assumed to take may be given to Mitt Romney (that would, at least, be the smart choice).
But have you considered that, for example, there was nothing stopping Trump from developing (or adopting) a coherent plan for, say, 'repealing and replacing Obamacare' sometime in the past 6 years. To me, the fact that he hasn't done so, and campaigned (and won) on a promise of 'something better', implies that he didn't have something better to offer - or he'd have offered it.
I'm not so sure about that anymore. I believe our election system rewards vague generalities and punishes specifics. People with a record to examine are now at a disadvantage compared to people who don't. If you make public a plan, you are only providing campaign fodder for the people disadvantaged by that plan. You're certainly not going to win among the people who would also have supported you with more vague promises.
Trump succeeded with basically "I'm going to do it all, and it's going to be great. It'll be a beautiful thing." He probably learned a lot of lessons from Herman Cain and his stupid "9-9-9" plan. Cain shouldn't have made that public.
Whether a politician has a good plan or not is hard to discern, these days articulating positions just lowers a politician's chances. "It's difficult and messy," is not the story people want to hear, "We're awesome and we're going to win" is much more comforting.
You know, Republicans managed to completely neuter the relatively harmless Obama within two years of his election, simply by putting up every roadblock they could. I think blocking the political agenda of someone running as a Fascist is considerably more worthy.
Democrats don't have the balls for it. They're too conciliatory. They rolled over for Bush, something tells me they're not going to like Trump but they'll "work with him" and his appointees.
Not really, no. They still didn't manage to top Bush in 2004 by very much, if that is your idea of huge motivation leading to be very active, that's sad.
They did enough. Close only matters with horseshoes or hand grenades.
So next time someone proposes a new power for the President, ask yourself, "Would I be comfortable with Donald Trump having this power?"
That's why I got a "very bad feeling" three years ago when Senate Democrats used "The Nuclear Option" to lower the bar to breaking a filibuster on the Senate floor. Sure, they wanted to make it easier to get bills for Obama to sign, but I knew it would eventually come back to bite them.
Blocking Amber Alerts on iOS is simple. Go to Settings -> Notifications, scroll down to the bottom of that page, unselect "AMBER Alerts" (and/or "Emergency Alerts"). I assume it's equally easy on Android.
I would like to get Emergency Alerts ("flash flooding in your area for the next two hours") while disabling Amber alerts ("child abducted by parent 500 miles away." Seriously. The last Amber Alert I got was two months ago for an event 383 miles away.. which had happened 18 hours earlier). How do I do that?
I don't mean to sound like a self-absorbed asshole, but an emergency alert should really be something that is an emergency FOR ME. And other people in my area.
That's a wonderful amount of self-security you have:) I hope you can accept that for victims of crime, this is cold comfort.
Laws should not be passed to give victims comfort. It may sound harsh, but outliers and a sad story with a friendly face should not drive policy. MAAD is not making a reasonable policy when they claim that anyone who has even small, tiny amount of alcohol should not drive afterwards, or that legal BAC limit should be reduced from.08% to.01% (they've argued both positions over the years). The tragic murder of Polly Klaas was whipped into a panic resulting in the passage of California's "three strikes" law -- a horrible mistake that saw prison populations soar with non-violent felons. The violent crime rate has dropped precipitously, but it's not at 0%. There will always be victims of violent crime, and the question is whether we're safer overall armed at home, or not.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no evidence that viewing child porn causes the consumer to commit more child abuse, and some evidence that it is preventative.
Really? As the many, very serious cases that have been all over the news, at least here in UK, like the Jimmy Savill case and others, pedophile predators cause immense harm that cripples the survivors for life.
You and the GP are arguing about two somewhat different things. You're conflating pedophilia with child abuse. The pedophile feels attraction -- the child molester acts on it with actual children. Obviously there is a lot of overlap, but the GP is saying there no evidence that viewing child porn makes a person a molester. The GP is not claiming that molesters do not cause great harm.
Waving away the organized crime connection of the Prohibition? Yes, if you define out all the negatives of something, it will look like it had good results. Is this more of that "post factual" thing I keep hearing about?
If you take something that people want and just make it illegal, then yes, you're going to get organized crime involved in it. That happens when the citizens don't respect the law or its intentions. It doesn't matter what you decide to criminalize, the act of criminalization of goods will spawn organized crime.
OK, OK. You guys made your point.
I should have said, "possession of marijuana in Tennessee and Florida is a felony for as little as 3/4 ounce. I could find more than that in the shag rug under my coffee table."
Happy now?
Very! Thank you! :-D
ISIS is not a country, they are an organization that has declared unilaterally that they have established a caliphate over the territory they control, but that territory is part of established nations who are fighting very hard to take that land and territory back. No nation has recognized any such new country or their borders. They are not a country, and they are losing the territory they control.
I believe that ISIS actually finds country borders to be anathema, because the only laws that man is allowed to enforce are Allah's laws. Since Allah did not draw up the countries, and borders are a law of man, countries are not allowed to exist. Which is one of the reasons why they don't like or respect the name "ISIS." To them there is only the "Islamic State" ruled by a caliphate as defined in the Koran, and non-islamic-state lands.
We have one of those laws where the judge can tell what is porn (aka "I know porn when I see it").
Ok.
In other words, if the judge gets a hard on from your kids' pics, you're going to jail.
That's not what the ruling said at all, or even implied. Are you gay? I'm just going to assume that you're straight because most people are. If you're straight, and you see a hardcore video of two guys going at it, or even a guy and a dog, do you get hard? No, you don't? Well porn has to make you hard, so clearly it's not pornographic.
A "tax break" is a bundle of cash.
False. It is like the SSI/FICA tax break a while ago. Rather than sending in $3000 to the Federal Government, you only sent in $2200. No money came YOUR way, less flowed out the other way. Giving the tax break in this case results in MORE revenue for the State and the Federal Government than not giving it - and letting the jobs go overseas. Better to lose 3-4 times the tax revenue AND have 1,100 more people out of work?
Let's say above the governmental budget is $M. You give a tax break of $Y to a company. Now the incoming receipts are $M-$Y. You give a bundle of cash, $Y, to a company instead. Incoming taxes/etc are still $M-$Y, and the budget is still $M (apparently I live in a fantasy world where the budget is balanced). In both cases the shortfall of $Y has to be made up somewhere, and it sure as hell won't be coming from the company, and only a small, small portion of that will come from those additional employees. It will come from the rest of us. We all end up paying for these jobs.
But, spread out over the populace, it's not that much, right? Sure, we'll pay a little bit more, but... American jobs. But it is not sustainable. How many companies are going to look at this situation and come to the same conclusion -- they can extort money from the government, they just need to come up with some sort of plan, any, to shift jobs overseas. If company X can do this, why can't company Y?
But I get it - Trump - can't say anything good about him, right?
Au contraire, this was one of.. well, basically, the only reason I could find to actually vote for Donald Trump, the free trade deals and the worker exodus that has worked out so very well for folks in other countries and the stocks of multinationals, even as they screwed the American people. But I'll give Donald a chance -- he's not ACTUALLY in office yet, and we've yet to see what sort of things he could do with the Office of the Presidency behind him. Maybe that opens up other opportunities than just having the rest of us paying companies to keep jobs here. I'm hoping for something better than that.
If AGW theories had enough solid evidence, the heavy involvement of politics would not be so essential.
The last year of politics in the USA have pretty much broken my belief that people can be convinced with logic and a good argument. People now only want confirmation of their previously-held beliefs, and they treat any challenging of it as an attack on their tribe.
We've come a hell of a long way down from the Enlightment and the Age of Reason that the US Founders tried to import.
The first birther rumors were started by the Hillary Clinton campaign in the 2008 primary race.
They were started by a former Clinton volunteer as Obama won the primary. That didn't go anywhere, but Trump picked it up and ran with it for the next eight years.
Given the choice between far left judges that want to reinterpret the Constitution to mean what they want it to mean thus usurping the legislative branch and the far right who interpret the Constitution exactly as it's written I think I'll take far right.
Oh, but if only that's what far-right judges believed in!
I would have liked Antonin Scalia if he'd actually done what he claimed in his excellent writings.
A "tax break" is a bundle of cash. There's no different between paying X+Y dollars and receiving $Y back as a gift or a bribe or refund or whatever label you want to give it, and only paying X dollars in the first place because you got a tax break of $Y. The $Y from the tax break is going to come from somewhere, because expenditures aren't going down because of it.
"Tax breaks" that come from deals made between corporations and the government feel like the same sort of "picking winners and losers" that the Republicans were vocal about a few years ago.
And is anyone surprised this happened in San Francisco?
Actually, I am. The builders did not drive the concrete and steel supports all the way down to the bedrock because they said that the SF building code didn't mandate it in every situation. So they only drilled half as far as they needed to.
Think about that for a moment -- San Francisco's regulations were weak. That feels like a bizarro reality.
It couldn't be that it's because the sky-high rents in San Fran are forcing developers to try new things and build where they couldn't before.
The Millennium Tower builders loudly shout that because San Francisco didn't have an absolute requirement in every situation that the structure should be bolted to bedrock, instead they drilled down only half as far and bolted it to unstable bay fill.
He's spending US treasure dollars to pay the company to outsource half the jobs it planned. They're still outsourcing. And how many times can we afford to give companies bundles of cash? If I was a CEO, I would inflate the announced layoff numbers in hope for a payoff from the federal government too.
This feels like the broken windows fallacy. A company threatens to leave, so you pay them to stay -- but the payment saps the rest of the economy.
Another way to read it: Carrier is going to outsource ~1000 jobs to Mexico... with Donald Trump's blessing (and US cash).
They took California for granted as they always do, because Californians - in enough numbers - are loyal servants to people like the Clintons. They were a given, and they were taken as such.
What that means is that more Democrats in traditionally strong-Democratic states voted in greater numbers for a third party candidate. They knew their state was going Democratic, so when the vote "didn't matter", they voted for non-Hillary instead.
Pelosi, once again in charge of the Democrat party's fortunes in the congress - fantastic! what a gift for the Republicans
The real win here is that Harry Reid is gone. Thank God for that.
To be more clear, I now consider Democrats to be the equivalent of the "other side" in a war - they will still oppose every and any thing your side does, they can lose a battle and still wage war, incessant and total non-compliance, they will fight to the last man, and any victory - even pyrrhic - is still a victory. Any means are justified in the pursuit of their ends.
That would be nice. It's the treatment Obama got from the Republicans, but I expect the Democrats are pussies who will put up token resistance and just complain and mutter while they fail to do anything substantial in opposing Trump's policies.
Loyalty is the one thing that counts,
I'm not sure even that counts.
Chris Christie was loyal to Trump and did a lot of work for him; he was kicked out of the transition team and his future is uncertain.
Rudy Giuliani was amazingly loyal to Trump, appearing on every news show and defending him in the months leading to the election. Now the job he was assumed to take may be given to Mitt Romney (that would, at least, be the smart choice).
But have you considered that, for example, there was nothing stopping Trump from developing (or adopting) a coherent plan for, say, 'repealing and replacing Obamacare' sometime in the past 6 years. To me, the fact that he hasn't done so, and campaigned (and won) on a promise of 'something better', implies that he didn't have something better to offer - or he'd have offered it.
I'm not so sure about that anymore. I believe our election system rewards vague generalities and punishes specifics. People with a record to examine are now at a disadvantage compared to people who don't. If you make public a plan, you are only providing campaign fodder for the people disadvantaged by that plan. You're certainly not going to win among the people who would also have supported you with more vague promises.
Trump succeeded with basically "I'm going to do it all, and it's going to be great. It'll be a beautiful thing." He probably learned a lot of lessons from Herman Cain and his stupid "9-9-9" plan. Cain shouldn't have made that public.
Whether a politician has a good plan or not is hard to discern, these days articulating positions just lowers a politician's chances. "It's difficult and messy," is not the story people want to hear, "We're awesome and we're going to win" is much more comforting.
You know, Republicans managed to completely neuter the relatively harmless Obama within two years of his election, simply by putting up every roadblock they could. I think blocking the political agenda of someone running as a Fascist is considerably more worthy.
Democrats don't have the balls for it. They're too conciliatory. They rolled over for Bush, something tells me they're not going to like Trump but they'll "work with him" and his appointees.
Not really, no. They still didn't manage to top Bush in 2004 by very much, if that is your idea of huge motivation leading to be very active, that's sad.
They did enough. Close only matters with horseshoes or hand grenades.
So next time someone proposes a new power for the President, ask yourself, "Would I be comfortable with Donald Trump having this power?"
That's why I got a "very bad feeling" three years ago when Senate Democrats used "The Nuclear Option" to lower the bar to breaking a filibuster on the Senate floor. Sure, they wanted to make it easier to get bills for Obama to sign, but I knew it would eventually come back to bite them.
Because Donald Trump is technically a sociopath?
Then you must be REALLY relieved that the Clintons didn't get the executive power they were hungry to regain.
Yeah, militarily, 1993 - 2000 REALLY sucked.
I wish I hadn't waited to register my account.
Mine too! I browsed for a few years anonymously before making an account. I could have gotten a 4 or 5-digit ID. I could have been a contender...
(Score: +1, True ) (Score:0)
Oh well. Nice try.
He promised he'd never spread loquacious views
Those definitely don't sound like words Trump would use.
Blocking Amber Alerts on iOS is simple. Go to Settings -> Notifications, scroll down to the bottom of that page, unselect "AMBER Alerts" (and/or "Emergency Alerts"). I assume it's equally easy on Android.
I would like to get Emergency Alerts ("flash flooding in your area for the next two hours") while disabling Amber alerts ("child abducted by parent 500 miles away." Seriously. The last Amber Alert I got was two months ago for an event 383 miles away.. which had happened 18 hours earlier). How do I do that?
I don't mean to sound like a self-absorbed asshole, but an emergency alert should really be something that is an emergency FOR ME. And other people in my area.
That's a wonderful amount of self-security you have :) I hope you can accept that for victims of crime, this is cold comfort.
Laws should not be passed to give victims comfort. It may sound harsh, but outliers and a sad story with a friendly face should not drive policy. .08% to .01% (they've argued both positions over the years).
MAAD is not making a reasonable policy when they claim that anyone who has even small, tiny amount of alcohol should not drive afterwards, or that legal BAC limit should be reduced from
The tragic murder of Polly Klaas was whipped into a panic resulting in the passage of California's "three strikes" law -- a horrible mistake that saw prison populations soar with non-violent felons.
The violent crime rate has dropped precipitously, but it's not at 0%. There will always be victims of violent crime, and the question is whether we're safer overall armed at home, or not.