Eh? While getting hip replacements, for instance, is subject to priority (young person that is a construction worker has a high priority, elderly golf-player has a low priority) it is not like you stop qualifying for it. Sure, it sucks, and some elderly managers/CEOs get private insurance in order to be able to get stuff fixed faster, but it is not like they get told "Sorry, Comrade, but the State has determined that your Social Usability Index is below 0.5 and thus you will not get any care."
We still do eye surgery on old people, even when they are unlikely to reap the benefit for more than one or two years. We don't leave our elderly to rot because they're no longer "useful."
Aye, no one would carpet the land with loads of goop just in order to let any asshat accelerate a chunk of mass in excess of one tonne to speeds easily beyond thrice that of a running man, not without having centrally control over these behemoths. The result would only end in pure mayhem, with a side-order of "death, destruction and injury on a massive scale."
Of course, some people thought different, and a lot (too many?) people zoom around in their "cars" as it were, and they have had the temerity to demand even more funds be allocated to subsidize their chosen mode of transportation.
The real issues with "flying cars" are a) flying requires energy to stay up there (or some sort of of balloon structure, which brings problems of its own due to increased size and wind effect), b) problems during flight are more risky (and needs to be handled differently than in cars where, say, an engine failure is not a major cause for concern, if irritating) and c) flying requires more training than driving, mostly in taking off and landing (how much is dependent on the vehicle, of course).
Theoretically, the airspace is much bigger than the mostly two-dimensional road system. Unfortunately, due to our current infrastructure, a lot of people do end up going to a very small part of the surface, which would tend to increase the probability for collisions.
Yes, and where capital punishment works, it is 100% effective.
Now... the problem is that there are, in the very sentence you quote, the understanding that the "Viido scheme" does NOT work in (some/most?) districts. To arrive at 3%, one can do some quick calculations and end up with the realization that if all districts where it worked, it worked at 15% efficiency, and it worked at 0% in others, we would need four times more 0% efficiency districts to reach 3%. I'm not saying that this is the way it is, just that your "15% > 3% HAH!" Of course, if it turns out that it reduced the % of crimes in the most crime prone areas and didn't reduce it in rural areas, it could *still* be a success, of sorts.
There are several problems with limited-access surveillance, particularly of the kind where the observers are considered as more reliable than the subjects they are monitoring. With the surfeit of laws, and the vagueness of certain recently passed legislation, everyone is most likely guilty of some crime. While we have such laws on the book, I do not want to give barely-overseen people even more ammunition to use against people they don't like. Such as the drug dealer they "know" is dealing dope, their daughters new "weird" boyfriend, the "foreign" couple across the street and the "slutty" next door neighbour.
I would not mind having nothing to hide if I could trust enforcement, retention and access, but today all of us are guilty, and our crimes will be brought to the attention of courts when the wrong done by us is great enough, the evidence against us is strong enough, or the dislike of us is big enough.
Some of them, of course, remember that the injunction in Exodus XXII, 18 ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live") has been carried out rather faithfully whenever it is believed that witches are among the pure Christians.
It is only rather recently that Western societies have been considering not killing the witches, even self-proclaimed ones.
Personally, I find Wicca to be just a bit better than Christianity, but perhaps it's merely that minority religions are better behaved and don't make as big messes on the carpet... or perhaps it is that because of their size that when they poop, they don't make a mountain of shit all over the place.
Still, as a Taoist Discordian, I don't pretend to having superiority in my religious fiction. But my Goddess is prettier than theirs. So there!
Yes, but what you say *can* be used in the investigation - the cops are under no obligation to delete everything you said from *their* memory. I would assume that they could ask for warrants based on this information and have the results of that investigation be applied to the case, thus avoiding the use of self-admitted inadmissible evidence.
I am not a citizen of the US, though, and have only the most tenuous of ideas how police work is done in reality - but it would be consistent with having a "can't use information directly" clause while still allowing you indirect use.
While you are correct about corporations not being supernatural immortals, scouring the land for plebes to drain of their assets and blood, human psychology makes it very easy for corporations to become, in fact and deed, immortal sociopaths.
Because people are people, we will be influenced by those who surround us, and the rules that we accept to live by. In the case of a corporation, as you say, the people who decide on something and the people who implement that decision can be sufficiently far away from one another that the externalities of that decision does not get fed back into the decision-making process.
It allows both parties to disclaim responsibility: "I just did what I was ordered to do" - which is true, and this sort of responsibility-evasion only gets nullified in truly heinous cases - poisoning people so that a few more will die in 30 years is not a problem. "I didn't/couldn't know" - which is a *fascinating* defence by the CEOs/board/directors - apparently, the less you know about the business you are supposedly controlling, the less responsibility you have - an awesome disincentive for informed control and for some reason does not make the shareholders rise up en masse and demand the immediate termination of said uninformed asshat.
Another reason for people seeing corporations as faceless demons are that corporations, unlike people, can reduce liability for their shareholders - and corporations can hold other corporations. Thus you have the sock-puppet defence "Oh, it wasn't MegaCorp that did that poisoning of your groundwater, that was CorpMega, an *entirely* different company which amazingly only handles subsurface storage of extremely toxic chemicals" - there are, of course, some recourse to this behaviour, but the problem is that the judicial system acts on a timescale that is quite a bit slower than the timescale within which companies can be created, sold, transferred and put into bankruptcy.
Because corporations currently allow the dilution and sometimes wholesale avoidance of liability, they can be very attractive both for investors and for workers in a litigation-happy society.
Essentially, corporations has had their rights expanded, and while corporations can be - for a brief while - kept in check by the morals and ethics of its leaders or board, with any public company whose first and last objective is increased profit to shareholders and with the limited liability to externalities that corporations currently enjoy, the morals and ethics of the individual worker is irrelevant as they will be replaced if objecting too strenuously.
Also, while whistle-blowers exist that actually do report irregularities, it is NOT a rational choice. From the studies I read, whistle-blowers while happy as a group perversely have less physical health than the normal population (probably due to the stress of not being able to find much work). People with intrinsically strong morals are rather rare, and most Western societies have been giving disincentives (both ethical and practical) to people being moral for quite a long while. Perhaps we're only seeing some of the consequences of that now. If we're going to rely on people to be moral and "do the right thing," we will continue to be sorely disappointed, especially if we keep punishing them for being moral.
The current young generation may, of course, turn out to save us all. I wouldn't bet on it, because they've see how much the flower power generation tolerates riots, dissent and disorderliness similar to the ones the flower children did - I wouldn't want to bet on the mercy of people who are very well aware of the fact that previous generations have pissed away the majority of the remaining natural resources in the world and now wishes to hold on to what they have "earned" no matter what it costs the current generation. Small wonder their generational dream seem to be to "work a bit and then travel" - why the heck would they want to keep up with the debt payments incurred by previous generations, when they are not even allowed to express their discontent the way the previous generation did?
I use Permit Cookies (Firefox extension) - it allows you to set cookie permissions (allowed - permanently, allowed for each session only and disabled) on a site basis. I then disable cookies by default, and use the Permit Cookies statusbar widget (or Alt-C) to control the permissions for sites that require cookies.
Note that it can cause problems - some sites go into infinite redirect mode when cookies are not allowed, and it may not be obvious which site you need to allow.
Nah - the losses by the US has really been very, very small. Compare it to 'nam - there you'd see more unrest, but also more people dying.
Using robots would decrease US losses further - I do not know if they would help the US "win the war" since the objectives of the war seems vaguely defined, but they would make the war less politically costly.
However, using robots will dramatically *increase* the amount of resources used - a "grunt" is remarkably versatile and on the whole cheap (on the pay balance-sheet). Manufacturing robots that take the place of most of the ground troops would cost a pretty penny.
The main concern is, I think, that if there is no personal risk involved in a war, starting or continuing one is much more likely since the public will tolerate them. Of course, it will allow some parity between large and small nations - it's faster to manufacture a few thousand robots than increasing your population.
There are other concerns - economical for one, as a Mark One Homo Sapiens can be cheaper than big non-autonomous robots.
I'm all for automating boring and risky tasks - I'm not sure that automating war is a good thing, and I definitely don't think big remote controlled robots is the way to go. If you wish to automate war, get some bee-sized robots going (eventually nanite), use your targets DNA profile as the search goal, then release a few million robots at the most probable areas.
If they were just shot, I doubt there would be much hue and cry (well, of course, PR spin would be put in place "US kills single mother without mercy").
It's the indefinite detention and probable torture that's iffy.
Indeed, why not become a psychopathic mass murderer - they're out there, aren't they, and they have killed people, so doing it to them first is a Good Thing(tm), right? And if some innocents are lost, well, that's the price you pay for pre-emptive warfare, now isn't it?
Friend, if you use the same "bad" methods as the enemy - an enemy who you have defined as such that their goal is to make you change for the worse, then how on Earth are you "winning" the war? It seems that all you are doing is their work for them.
Now, the problem is this: Torture is bad from an information gathering perspective according to most accounts I have heard (I haven't read any studies on the reliability of torture as a tool - there seems to be a dearth of data on it), bad from a misapplication point of view (the whole "creating enemies from neutral") and finally, I'd say that they are bad from a moral point of view as it has a tendency to cause the torturers to (in a rather rational but unwholesome manner) become inured to inflicting pain. You try to dehumanizes the enemy, and in so doing, you will also dehumanize the soldiers - which causes issues when these soldiers are reintegrated into society. We can, of course, avoid that by having a permanent war, a permanent warrior caste and ensuring that they have permanent privileges, but most nations are aware of the dangers of creating Janissaries.
Apparently, paying sales taxes in the state (and county) where the buyer is seems to be needlessly complicated. Others (above) have written about it and mentioned that you must as a buyer take out the full sales tax, whether or not the buyer qualifies for that or not (the burden of proof is on you in a tax revision, and records such as "the customer stated that they were subject to XYZ tax reduction" are not considered to be sufficient evidence).
So what this does is essentially a) increasing overhead for Internet-based businesses and b) de-emphasizing the actual location of your Internet-based business. It might also do c) promote mail-order businesses which apparently have the current "we don't pay no tax and we assume the other party does" thing going on as the 'net does.
Of course they do, it's the Museum for Ethical Politics - there's one in every country, and they're always vacant.
Well, either that, or they can take up lodging in some ditzy semi-celebrity's head... might be a bit hard to live with the peroxide and all, but it's going to be roomy, and the rent is cheap.:)
It's for those awkward dinners with relatives - no one has the heart to tell Grandma that her carrot-cake with rabbit stew isn't edible, and hasn't been for the last twenty years.
So everyone gets MREs so they don't starve to death. Either that, or people want food that doesn't spoil, or is impressed by the military aura or whatnot.
I doubt that it was the riots and ethnical problems that the parent was talking about - I assume that they meant to say that black citizens of Denmark are not "African-Scandinavian" - they are Danish.
This may seem little more than sophistry and playing with words, but words DO have meaning and in this case, looking at the US, you could easily get the impression that the unified nation actually consisted of a vast number of tribes, who differentiated between one another by the sort of cumbersome titles as "African-American," "Irish-American" or "Italian-American." For a citizen of a European nation, having people designate themselves as part of another nation and part of their current nation seems schizophrenic.
Perhaps it is simply a symptom of having a huge nation that make people want to feel part of a smaller community, but from my point of view you are either American, French or Italian. Of course, if you do happen to have multiple citizenships, you might call yourself French-American, but the degrees to which people go to further differentiate themselves from being "just" American makes me think that people in the USA does not consider their citizenship as sufficiently distinctive. There are, to my knowledge, no people calling themselves "Italian-Danish" - there are probably people from Italy in Denmark who are Danish citizens, but they are called Danes.
Don't worry, citizen (you *are* a citizen, aren't you? If not, please fill in form 42-B, segment H, and walk out the border).
There will be no unpleasantness unless you try to look back at the Neighbourhood Security Enhancement Agent.
Remember, walk straight, look at your shoes, and be vigilant. When we wish to register your opinion, we will beat it out of you. Surveys just ain't that kind of wholesome fun that an interrogation is.
Erhm... I don't get your crime / punishment argument. First you argue that punishing someone for doing something according to their nature is wrong if free will is eliminated, but then you start talking about adjusting the cost/benefit ratio of punishment when, in the "no-free-will" scenario, there is no reason to apply any punishment since punishment does not affect the will to crime.
Free will is a philosophical construct. In day-to-day life we ourselves reduce the unlimited amount of choice down to our perceived choices, with the perceived choices weighted according to our indoctrination/upbringing and experience. Within this small subsection of choice we may have "free choice/will", if the weights of several choices are considered as roughly equal.
*However* because we do weigh choices, and because we can change perceptions (over time), we can change the behaviours of ourselves and others. Because people are not particularly rational, however, the cheapest way to reduce crime is by "bringing them up right" (indoctrinating them with socially beneficial views) while deterrents often do not work until a person has been caught.
It is true that saying "Free Will is an illusion" would make it hard to argue why punishing crimes are needed, but it is merely because we have defined "Free Will" to be something that does not match reality.
Free to get laid? So, you go out on the street, bare-assed and without a deoderant, and ask people to get it on with you? Does this actually work?
Please describe your free get-laid strategy. Inquiring minds wants to know and are based on recent reports, quite willing to pony up some cash to get to know this free secret!
In seriousness, please STFU about it being free to get laid. It costs time and/or money as well as opportunity costs... the time I could have spent getting my level 14 paladin up to 60.;)
Ehm... what is a hobby if not an "entertaining waste of time"?
I mean, are you seriously contending that building model railways is not a hobby or that it is something more than an "entertaining waste of time"?
If it is not a hobby, then your definition of a hobby is quite different from what most people use it as.
In the end, passing time (and wind) is what life is about. The universe does not pass value judgments on the way you spend your life. Your perception of reality is what determines whether you are living life or squandering it.
That said, IMHO, playing WoW is worse than having a meaningful relationship with another person, and better than drinking yourself into a stupor every weekend in the hopes of finding a meaningful relationship with someone.
Most of us DO know what we are interrupting, since that person is TALKING REALLY LOUDLY IN ORDER TO MAKE THE MAGIC MEN IN THE MAGIC DEVICE USE PIXIE DUST TO SEND THE WORDS TO THE OTHER PERSON.
No, it's not legal. Yes, it's rude. Yes, you may be an ass. Unfortunately, the same people that will not shut up about how high they are gonna get next Saturday are the same persons who will get pissed off if you should dare ask them to keep it down, or tell them that a public area might not be a good place to talk about drugs or personal problems.
Of course, the best thing to do is to join in the conversation - make the other party aware that there are others listening. That usually helps - and pisses off people.
But if you are afraid that someone will use violence against you, and you still want to terminate their phone call, then go ahead and use a device such as this. It is, as you pointed out, no different from being ass - except you are anonymous, and as the 'net shows us, everyone can be an ass when they're anonymous.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh? While getting hip replacements, for instance, is subject to priority (young person that is a construction worker has a high priority, elderly golf-player has a low priority) it is not like you stop qualifying for it. Sure, it sucks, and some elderly managers/CEOs get private insurance in order to be able to get stuff fixed faster, but it is not like they get told "Sorry, Comrade, but the State has determined that your Social Usability Index is below 0.5 and thus you will not get any care."
We still do eye surgery on old people, even when they are unlikely to reap the benefit for more than one or two years. We don't leave our elderly to rot because they're no longer "useful."
Aye, no one would carpet the land with loads of goop just in order to let any asshat accelerate a chunk of mass in excess of one tonne to speeds easily beyond thrice that of a running man, not without having centrally control over these behemoths.
The result would only end in pure mayhem, with a side-order of "death, destruction and injury on a massive scale."
Of course, some people thought different, and a lot (too many?) people zoom around in their "cars" as it were, and they have had the temerity to demand even more funds be allocated to subsidize their chosen mode of transportation.
The real issues with "flying cars" are a) flying requires energy to stay up there (or some sort of of balloon structure, which brings problems of its own due to increased size and wind effect), b) problems during flight are more risky (and needs to be handled differently than in cars where, say, an engine failure is not a major cause for concern, if irritating) and c) flying requires more training than driving, mostly in taking off and landing (how much is dependent on the vehicle, of course).
Theoretically, the airspace is much bigger than the mostly two-dimensional road system. Unfortunately, due to our current infrastructure, a lot of people do end up going to a very small part of the surface, which would tend to increase the probability for collisions.
Yes, and where capital punishment works, it is 100% effective.
Now... the problem is that there are, in the very sentence you quote, the understanding that the "Viido scheme" does NOT work in (some/most?) districts. To arrive at 3%, one can do some quick calculations and end up with the realization that if all districts where it worked, it worked at 15% efficiency, and it worked at 0% in others, we would need four times more 0% efficiency districts to reach 3%.
I'm not saying that this is the way it is, just that your "15% > 3% HAH!"
Of course, if it turns out that it reduced the % of crimes in the most crime prone areas and didn't reduce it in rural areas, it could *still* be a success, of sorts.
There are several problems with limited-access surveillance, particularly of the kind where the observers are considered as more reliable than the subjects they are monitoring.
With the surfeit of laws, and the vagueness of certain recently passed legislation, everyone is most likely guilty of some crime.
While we have such laws on the book, I do not want to give barely-overseen people even more ammunition to use against people they don't like.
Such as the drug dealer they "know" is dealing dope, their daughters new "weird" boyfriend, the "foreign" couple across the street and the "slutty" next door neighbour.
I would not mind having nothing to hide if I could trust enforcement, retention and access, but today all of us are guilty, and our crimes will be brought to the attention of courts when the wrong done by us is great enough, the evidence against us is strong enough, or the dislike of us is big enough.
Some of them, of course, remember that the injunction in Exodus XXII, 18 ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live") has been carried out rather faithfully whenever it is believed that witches are among the pure Christians.
It is only rather recently that Western societies have been considering not killing the witches, even self-proclaimed ones.
Personally, I find Wicca to be just a bit better than Christianity, but perhaps it's merely that minority religions are better behaved and don't make as big messes on the carpet... or perhaps it is that because of their size that when they poop, they don't make a mountain of shit all over the place.
Still, as a Taoist Discordian, I don't pretend to having superiority in my religious fiction. But my Goddess is prettier than theirs. So there!
Waving the mace in front of their eyes. Keeps them nice and focused.
You *did* have a mace, right?
Yes, but what you say *can* be used in the investigation - the cops are under no obligation to delete everything you said from *their* memory. I would assume that they could ask for warrants based on this information and have the results of that investigation be applied to the case, thus avoiding the use of self-admitted inadmissible evidence.
I am not a citizen of the US, though, and have only the most tenuous of ideas how police work is done in reality - but it would be consistent with having a "can't use information directly" clause while still allowing you indirect use.
While you are correct about corporations not being supernatural immortals, scouring the land for plebes to drain of their assets and blood, human psychology makes it very easy for corporations to become, in fact and deed, immortal sociopaths.
Because people are people, we will be influenced by those who surround us, and the rules that we accept to live by. In the case of a corporation, as you say, the people who decide on something and the people who implement that decision can be sufficiently far away from one another that the externalities of that decision does not get fed back into the decision-making process.
It allows both parties to disclaim responsibility:
"I just did what I was ordered to do" - which is true, and this sort of responsibility-evasion only gets nullified in truly heinous cases - poisoning people so that a few more will die in 30 years is not a problem.
"I didn't/couldn't know" - which is a *fascinating* defence by the CEOs/board/directors - apparently, the less you know about the business you are supposedly controlling, the less responsibility you have - an awesome disincentive for informed control and for some reason does not make the shareholders rise up en masse and demand the immediate termination of said uninformed asshat.
Another reason for people seeing corporations as faceless demons are that corporations, unlike people, can reduce liability for their shareholders - and corporations can hold other corporations. Thus you have the sock-puppet defence "Oh, it wasn't MegaCorp that did that poisoning of your groundwater, that was CorpMega, an *entirely* different company which amazingly only handles subsurface storage of extremely toxic chemicals" - there are, of course, some recourse to this behaviour, but the problem is that the judicial system acts on a timescale that is quite a bit slower than the timescale within which companies can be created, sold, transferred and put into bankruptcy.
Because corporations currently allow the dilution and sometimes wholesale avoidance of liability, they can be very attractive both for investors and for workers in a litigation-happy society.
Essentially, corporations has had their rights expanded, and while corporations can be - for a brief while - kept in check by the morals and ethics of its leaders or board, with any public company whose first and last objective is increased profit to shareholders and with the limited liability to externalities that corporations currently enjoy, the morals and ethics of the individual worker is irrelevant as they will be replaced if objecting too strenuously.
Also, while whistle-blowers exist that actually do report irregularities, it is NOT a rational choice. From the studies I read, whistle-blowers while happy as a group perversely have less physical health than the normal population (probably due to the stress of not being able to find much work).
People with intrinsically strong morals are rather rare, and most Western societies have been giving disincentives (both ethical and practical) to people being moral for quite a long while. Perhaps we're only seeing some of the consequences of that now. If we're going to rely on people to be moral and "do the right thing," we will continue to be sorely disappointed, especially if we keep punishing them for being moral.
The current young generation may, of course, turn out to save us all.
I wouldn't bet on it, because they've see how much the flower power generation tolerates riots, dissent and disorderliness similar to the ones the flower children did - I wouldn't want to bet on the mercy of people who are very well aware of the fact that previous generations have pissed away the majority of the remaining natural resources in the world and now wishes to hold on to what they have "earned" no matter what it costs the current generation.
Small wonder their generational dream seem to be to "work a bit and then travel" - why the heck would they want to keep up with the debt payments incurred by previous generations, when they are not even allowed to express their discontent the way the previous generation did?
Yep - just call it win386.swp. Works like a charm.
I use Permit Cookies (Firefox extension) - it allows you to set cookie permissions (allowed - permanently, allowed for each session only and disabled) on a site basis. I then disable cookies by default, and use the Permit Cookies statusbar widget (or Alt-C) to control the permissions for sites that require cookies.
Note that it can cause problems - some sites go into infinite redirect mode when cookies are not allowed, and it may not be obvious which site you need to allow.
Nah - the losses by the US has really been very, very small.
Compare it to 'nam - there you'd see more unrest, but also more people dying.
Using robots would decrease US losses further - I do not know if they would help the US "win the war" since the objectives of the war seems vaguely defined, but they would make the war less politically costly.
However, using robots will dramatically *increase* the amount of resources used - a "grunt" is remarkably versatile and on the whole cheap (on the pay balance-sheet). Manufacturing robots that take the place of most of the ground troops would cost a pretty penny.
The main concern is, I think, that if there is no personal risk involved in a war, starting or continuing one is much more likely since the public will tolerate them.
Of course, it will allow some parity between large and small nations - it's faster to manufacture a few thousand robots than increasing your population.
There are other concerns - economical for one, as a Mark One Homo Sapiens can be cheaper than big non-autonomous robots.
I'm all for automating boring and risky tasks - I'm not sure that automating war is a good thing, and I definitely don't think big remote controlled robots is the way to go. If you wish to automate war, get some bee-sized robots going (eventually nanite), use your targets DNA profile as the search goal, then release a few million robots at the most probable areas.
If they were just shot, I doubt there would be much hue and cry (well, of course, PR spin would be put in place "US kills single mother without mercy").
It's the indefinite detention and probable torture that's iffy.
Indeed, why not become a psychopathic mass murderer - they're out there, aren't they, and they have killed people, so doing it to them first is a Good Thing(tm), right?
And if some innocents are lost, well, that's the price you pay for pre-emptive warfare, now isn't it?
Friend, if you use the same "bad" methods as the enemy - an enemy who you have defined as such that their goal is to make you change for the worse, then how on Earth are you "winning" the war? It seems that all you are doing is their work for them.
Now, the problem is this: Torture is bad from an information gathering perspective according to most accounts I have heard (I haven't read any studies on the reliability of torture as a tool - there seems to be a dearth of data on it), bad from a misapplication point of view (the whole "creating enemies from neutral") and finally, I'd say that they are bad from a moral point of view as it has a tendency to cause the torturers to (in a rather rational but unwholesome manner) become inured to inflicting pain.
You try to dehumanizes the enemy, and in so doing, you will also dehumanize the soldiers - which causes issues when these soldiers are reintegrated into society. We can, of course, avoid that by having a permanent war, a permanent warrior caste and ensuring that they have permanent privileges, but most nations are aware of the dangers of creating Janissaries.
Apparently, paying sales taxes in the state (and county) where the buyer is seems to be needlessly complicated. Others (above) have written about it and mentioned that you must as a buyer take out the full sales tax, whether or not the buyer qualifies for that or not (the burden of proof is on you in a tax revision, and records such as "the customer stated that they were subject to XYZ tax reduction" are not considered to be sufficient evidence).
So what this does is essentially a) increasing overhead for Internet-based businesses and b) de-emphasizing the actual location of your Internet-based business.
It might also do c) promote mail-order businesses which apparently have the current "we don't pay no tax and we assume the other party does" thing going on as the 'net does.
Of course they do, it's the Museum for Ethical Politics - there's one in every country, and they're always vacant.
:)
Well, either that, or they can take up lodging in some ditzy semi-celebrity's head... might be a bit hard to live with the peroxide and all, but it's going to be roomy, and the rent is cheap.
It's for those awkward dinners with relatives - no one has the heart to tell Grandma that her carrot-cake with rabbit stew isn't edible, and hasn't been for the last twenty years.
So everyone gets MREs so they don't starve to death.
Either that, or people want food that doesn't spoil, or is impressed by the military aura or whatnot.
I doubt that it was the riots and ethnical problems that the parent was talking about - I assume that they meant to say that black citizens of Denmark are not "African-Scandinavian" - they are Danish.
This may seem little more than sophistry and playing with words, but words DO have meaning and in this case, looking at the US, you could easily get the impression that the unified nation actually consisted of a vast number of tribes, who differentiated between one another by the sort of cumbersome titles as "African-American," "Irish-American" or "Italian-American." For a citizen of a European nation, having people designate themselves as part of another nation and part of their current nation seems schizophrenic.
Perhaps it is simply a symptom of having a huge nation that make people want to feel part of a smaller community, but from my point of view you are either American, French or Italian. Of course, if you do happen to have multiple citizenships, you might call yourself French-American, but the degrees to which people go to further differentiate themselves from being "just" American makes me think that people in the USA does not consider their citizenship as sufficiently distinctive. There are, to my knowledge, no people calling themselves "Italian-Danish" - there are probably people from Italy in Denmark who are Danish citizens, but they are called Danes.
Don't worry, citizen (you *are* a citizen, aren't you? If not, please fill in form 42-B, segment H, and walk out the border).
There will be no unpleasantness unless you try to look back at the Neighbourhood Security Enhancement Agent.
Remember, walk straight, look at your shoes, and be vigilant. When we wish to register your opinion, we will beat it out of you. Surveys just ain't that kind of wholesome fun that an interrogation is.
Erhm... I don't get your crime / punishment argument. First you argue that punishing someone for doing something according to their nature is wrong if free will is eliminated, but then you start talking about adjusting the cost/benefit ratio of punishment when, in the "no-free-will" scenario, there is no reason to apply any punishment since punishment does not affect the will to crime.
Free will is a philosophical construct.
In day-to-day life we ourselves reduce the unlimited amount of choice down to our perceived choices, with the perceived choices weighted according to our indoctrination/upbringing and experience. Within this small subsection of choice we may have "free choice/will", if the weights of several choices are considered as roughly equal.
*However* because we do weigh choices, and because we can change perceptions (over time), we can change the behaviours of ourselves and others. Because people are not particularly rational, however, the cheapest way to reduce crime is by "bringing them up right" (indoctrinating them with socially beneficial views) while deterrents often do not work until a person has been caught.
It is true that saying "Free Will is an illusion" would make it hard to argue why punishing crimes are needed, but it is merely because we have defined "Free Will" to be something that does not match reality.
I'd like to check up on your numbers, skeety*3.
;)
Free to get laid? So, you go out on the street, bare-assed and without a deoderant, and ask people to get it on with you? Does this actually work?
Please describe your free get-laid strategy. Inquiring minds wants to know and are based on recent reports, quite willing to pony up some cash to get to know this free secret!
In seriousness, please STFU about it being free to get laid. It costs time and/or money as well as opportunity costs... the time I could have spent getting my level 14 paladin up to 60.
Indeed, and I agree, the real life cycle of sleep -> eat -> work -> eat -> semi-social activity -> sleep is a bore.
;)
I mean, seriously, it's the same thing over and over again - right?
Ehm... what is a hobby if not an "entertaining waste of time"?
I mean, are you seriously contending that building model railways is not a hobby or that it is something more than an "entertaining waste of time"?
If it is not a hobby, then your definition of a hobby is quite different from what most people use it as.
In the end, passing time (and wind) is what life is about. The universe does not pass value judgments on the way you spend your life.
Your perception of reality is what determines whether you are living life or squandering it.
That said, IMHO, playing WoW is worse than having a meaningful relationship with another person, and better than drinking yourself into a stupor every weekend in the hopes of finding a meaningful relationship with someone.
Most of us DO know what we are interrupting, since that person is TALKING REALLY LOUDLY IN ORDER TO MAKE THE MAGIC MEN IN THE MAGIC DEVICE USE PIXIE DUST TO SEND THE WORDS TO THE OTHER PERSON.
No, it's not legal. Yes, it's rude. Yes, you may be an ass. Unfortunately, the same people that will not shut up about how high they are gonna get next Saturday are the same persons who will get pissed off if you should dare ask them to keep it down, or tell them that a public area might not be a good place to talk about drugs or personal problems.
Of course, the best thing to do is to join in the conversation - make the other party aware that there are others listening. That usually helps - and pisses off people.
But if you are afraid that someone will use violence against you, and you still want to terminate their phone call, then go ahead and use a device such as this. It is, as you pointed out, no different from being ass - except you are anonymous, and as the 'net shows us, everyone can be an ass when they're anonymous.
With great power comes... a whole lot of collateral damage.
I would guess that one example would be the privatization of Russia - economic laissez-faire on a grand scale.
An interesting experiment, with some very valuable lessons in it (but aren't history filled with those?).