Don't get me wrong, I have immense respect for what my parents' generation managed, and even chose my college in part because of it. But the police back then knew that the media wasn't under government's thumb yet, so any brutal behavior would be accurately reported to the public and turn it in favor of the protesters much, much faster than happened.
Presumably the insurance files recently released contain all that data and more. If they decide to brand Miranda a terrorist or start attacking journalists as a matter of course the password will be released.
From the government bureaucrat perspective, that sounds like extortion, and the government will not negotiate with terrorists or extortionists. The standard government response to this situation would be a completely disproportionate attack on the perpetrator and anyone who has had a conversation with the perpetrator. Potentially out to 2 degrees of separation, to make very certain that no one is willing to touch the next "whistle-blower" data set.
The public don't care. Half of them believe Miranda is a terrorist just because he was stopped under a terrorism law, and the police mean well. Even if the public do care, then trumping up some charges allows the government bureaucrats to defend themselves with a "tough on crime" stance. If there's even one classified document one Miranda's devices, even some part of the Bradley Manning dataset, then they can legitimately pursue state secrets or 'communication of material to the enemy' charges and expect the letter, if not the intent, of those laws to have been soundly violated.
Are those who do not get vaccinated putting those of us who are at serious risk?
Remember, this is the US, where hospitals are forbidden by law for turning away seriously ill people but are not provided with any financial compensation for such care. In a community of people who are encouraged to turn first to God for their healthcare needs, health insurance is likely to be underutilized. So, after declining the $10 preventative vaccination, and coming down with an easily prevented disease, community members show up at the hospital, requiring but unable to pay for thousands of dollars of critical care. They take a hospital bed that might be used by someone with a non-preventable pathology. In the US, inflated medical costs are passed on to you the taxpayer through medicaid or to you the health insured by your insurance company.
And yes, propagating the virus raises the probability of a vaccine-resistant mutant.
In the Netherlands we only have exit exams in secondary school and if you manage to pass the highest level (called VWO or liberally translated: preparation for scientific education) you can go to any university within the Netherlands (ok; there's three different tracks and if you want to go to say the technical university to study computer science, you need the track with math, physics, etc.).
This is exactly the system that sethstorm seems to be arguing against. ie:
Doubly so if it gives rise to the faulty concept of educational streaming(the concept of shaping people's entire lives through test scores and controls on education acccess).
He appears to be suggesting that education through secondary (prior to university) should be completely generic, sort of life-preparatory, rather than training focused on 'streaming' people into university, trades, or other focus areas.
Using the internet to bypass physical checkpoints is all well and good, unless you're talking about hundreds of gigabytes and tens of hours of upload (and download). Or unless you think that your own or the US government is monitoring and intercepting internet communication. Or unless you think those governments might force your cloud provider to remove, alter, or corrupt your online storage. Then it might seem like a digital copy on a physical device in your own possession could be the most efficient and trustworthy source data.
Sometimes it's the right call. Do you spend the family fortune keeping grandma on life support for one more month or sending all four grandkids to college debt free? Which benefits society more? Most parents make huge personal sacrifices to provide the best for their kids: do you really think that sentiment evaporates with a cancer diagnosis?
All this talk of a "right to live" is ridiculous: humans are mortal and all must die. You don't need to be in a hurry to get there, but for god's sake, have some grace when your time is up and don't bankrupt your posterity for a few extra weeks of pain and disability.
1. Blacks commit violent crimes four to eight times the white rate. Hispanic commit violent crimes at approximately three times the white rate, and Asians at one half to three quarters the white rate
If you're using criminal statistics as the basis for selecting whom to arrest, then the appropriate way to state this is "99.9% of whites were not arrested for a violent crime, and 99.6% of blacks were not arrested for a violent crime." (please note, that this is the arrest rate, not the conviction rate) If you're randomly stopping people based on their race, in hopes that they might be a criminal, the rate of false positives is nearly indistinguishable.
It's an ethical dilemma to be sure. Do you wait until they kill someone before you arrest them? Or do you intrude on their lives and take away a gun they shouldn't have had just in case they might have used it violently at some point?
The question you're asking is: how many innocent people should be treated like criminals, in order to catch one actual criminal? This didn't used to be an ethical dilemma. The answer used to be "none," and everyone knew it. (In NYC, the answer appears to be 50-75) But the framing of the question has slowly changed from "how many innocent people should be jailed?" to "should you wait until they kill someone before you arrest them?" One is the question of a free and open society, and one is the question of a police state.
We apparently have around 24 million square miles of habitable land, if you divide that out per person it comes to 18 sq. ft per person.
Someone forgot to square his unit conversion. 24M square miles is nearly 7x10^14 square feet. That seems to give closer 100,000 square feet per person, or a bit more than 2 acres.
But on the other hand, it's very important that America isn't seen as a pushover either. The powers-that-be want to make an example of Snowden; they want him rotting in jail. "Mess with us and see what you get!" is an equally important message.
I am saddened by this attitude. The sentiment would sound appropriate coming from a 3rd world dictator, petty bureaucrat, or aspiring fascist, not from one of the most powerful and respected countries on the planet. Really, the idea that one man could do so much damage to the country or its leaders that rotting-in-jail-forever or death are not just appropriate but necessary forms of revenge, looks weak and fragile. A strong country has policies that reflect its ideals rather than its weaknesses. A strong country prevents rather than punishes failure. A strong country is resilient to dissent and thrives on differences in opinion.
Did Snowden disclose the identities of covert operatives and put them at risk? Did he unmask our moles in Al Quaeda or the Chinese government? Did he get confidential informants killed? Help North Korea build better nuclear bombs? No. He alleged that a US government agency chartered for foreign surveillance was, in fact, collecting and retaining a vast amount of domestic intelligence and doing so with questionable judicial authority. His claims raise serious questions about the legality of NSA procedures, and are only damaging if true. If they're not true, then why should anyone in government care what hoaxes a private citizen cares to raise?
The question is whether they are *your* papers. If they aren't then the 4th amendment doesn't apply. It is not entirely obvious whether phone records should count as your property nor is it clear whether you have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding them.
The papers themselves may belong to Verizon, but this information is about me. Calling them business records is fundamentally an end-run around the intent that a person's personal information be protected.
Look, technically, the results of my HIV test are just business records to my physician, but no one would argue that the government should be able to access and store that information. Phone metadata can be personally identified, which makes it the person's data. Just because some third party business is the entity that creates or collects the data doesn't make it any less my data, nor any less of an invasion for that third party to turn the data over to the government or the evening news. If the evening news opened every broadcast with a story about my latest medical test, or even just my current physical location, I would feel pretty fucking violated, regardless of whether any of their viewers "cared" or not.
"LOOK! SOMEONE has to stop the bad guys!""but... this isn't about the bad guys, this is about you breaking the constitution and spying on innocent citizens" "We don't! It's not like that?"
The argument they're making is that data collection is not spying. The argument is that it only becomes "spying" when the data reaches a human brain. Computers obviously can't commit crimes; computers can't be spies; so if it's all just computerized data archiving, then it can't possibly break any laws, because only humans can break laws.
I, personally, think this is an irrational argument, and that the distinction between "data we house" and "data we look at" is disingenuous. It seems to be the keystone of the NSA's argument, and it seems like many of our lawmakers are willing to treat that very fine legal distinction as a legitimate boundary that makes these programs not only acceptable but essential to our national security.
A smart investor would optimize the balance between risks and rewards - there is no profit in investing in a company that goes tits-up due to blindly taking too many stupid or unnecessary risks for the sake or profits.
Exactly. If you can get 2% return with 0 risk, and there's another option that returns 10%, but fails 8% of the time, then those are pretty equivalent. Now, let's say I can leverage my investment, so I get 20% return, except for 8% of time where I destroy twice the value of invested capital. (eg, lose a ship with 50% mortgage)
If I'm actually held liable for all of the loss I've created, then this is still equivalent. If, otoh, my liability is limited to my invested capital, then the leveraged instrument is much more attractive.
A high-level adversary intercepts and blackholes it, replacing it with "This is etc., my key is $NSA_KEY" and now intercepts all mail coming to you, reads it and sends it to you reencrypted with your key.
This requires intercept and rewrite capability, not just recording some metadata.
If you believe that all they're doing is collecting metadata, then encryption of any sort is unnecessary, because they aren't archiving the messages. No encryption technology will defeat collection of "computer X sent a message to computer Y." TOR, may obfuscate it enough to be practically useless. At this point, it looks to me like NSA has decided that they won't get useful information by grepping the internet for "kill Americans," have accepted that they can't maintain a real-time archive of the internet, and accepted the fall-back position of identifying social network structures. They don't (as a screening tool) care what you're saying, they care to whom you're saying it.
That's if you believe Snowden and the NSA's claims that they're only archiving metadata.
Consider an alternate welfare policy to those two. Pay everyone a fixed stipend (if you still want to avoid paying rich people, just set the income cut off at a rather high level) and completely do away with minimum wage. I'd also get rid of most health care mandates (the US style ones are particularly bad), regulatory burdens, and pensions. Someone can choose to get by on that stipend, or they can work, even a little, and get more without issue.
Interestingly, a very similar policy was implemented in Great Britain in the 19th century. Turns out to be a disaster. If workers can apply to the state for a "livable wage," then they will take ever poorer paying jobs. Actual wages collapse because employers can find willing workers at any wage, and make greater profits by not paying workers. The burden of wages ends up transferred to the state and only indirectly back to the profitable companies through taxes, but the disconnect between wages and productivity is the opposite of a healthy labor market.
The other problem is the economy is growing at maybe 1% a year and the entire stock market is doing 10-15%
This is balanced by the market sometimes declining by 20-30% in a year when the economy grows by only 0.5%. The stock market is more of a derivative on the actual economy. That's a complicated concept, though, and "too much" for the American public to deal with, so the popular press generally treats the DJIA or SP500 as though they are the economy. It's nice: a single number with a long history for comparison. You can always make some inane statement about whether it's better than last year and you can always make a straight-line projection to say where it might be next year.
Anybody who was surprised by his 'announcement' that the US government is 'invading your privacy' is an idiot.
I think John Oliver said it very well: it's like pee (or feces) in a pool. We all know it's there, we'd rather it weren't, but we've all agreed to either the collective lie that it isn't or to politely ignore it. Neither of those works to solve the problem, so we just keep swimming in shit. The guy by the side of the pool measuring the urine content, or the fecal coliform content, can at least remind us that the problem needs solved.
When the problem is as big as a fundamental conflict between your stated ideals of personal freedom/privacy and your government's practice of universal surveillance, then whistleblowers pointing out just exactly how universal that surveillance is are the only way we can move toward reconciling this doublethink. It prevents people from arguing "sure, there's widespread monitoring, but only of people linked to terrorism" or "sure, there's widespread monitoring, but only of international calls."
For at home, I'm a big fan of the Trader Joe's Columbian. I have family send it to me, since I cannot buy it where I live now. I make it in a french press -- don't know if different beans are better for drip vs press vs perc.
Drip vs Press makes an enormous difference in most commercial coffees, and is probably why most people don't realize what crap they're drinking. Drippers brew at distinctly lower temperatures than most people who press, and the lower temperature greatly reduces extraction of the most offensive flavors in cheap, stale, or moldy coffee.
Ethical vegetarians will eat this but still won't eat meat from animals. They would still be vegetarians. This wouldn't be "meat" to them.
These cells are grown in a soup with a high concentration of fetal bovine serum. ie, the fake meat is fed mostly from real meat. There's no reduction in harm to animals in this stuff. Probably a relative increase: it likely takes 2-5 liters of FBS to grow that much cell mass, and a 40 pound fetal calf only has so much serum.
the cognitive dissonance that comes from a corporation's computers knowing you're gay or depressed or having an affair before your friends and family do
And what exactly is a corporation going to do with that information? Blackmail you?
Well, they might tell the FBI that you live near Memphis and like the phrase "I'm KC and I approve this message." Those seem like pretty innocuous bits of information: a non-specific geographical location, two initials, and a sense of humor that includes mocking political disclosure laws. This weekend, that convergence of information was enough to win a free vacation with dramatic Federal interrogation and evening news appearances. Probably not what anyone had in mind when sharing that information.
My "health, education and safety" haven't been impacted by guns so far, and that's the case for most people.
I think you're mistaken. 30,000 people each year die of GSW, and few of them are the victim of random gun violence. 75% of domestic violence homicides are GSW, and you'd be surprised how many of those perpetrators are genuinely remorseful and shocked by their own behavior after they've sobered up and calmed down. Restricting guns won't take away domestic violence, but it will reduce the lethality of the weapon at hand in a fit of rage. Now, it's true that "most people" won't be killed by domestic violence, but I don't think that's any reason to dismiss these people.
All schools, from kindergarten to grad school, have elaborate emergency response programs specifically to deal with the threat of gun violence. In the wake of Newtown, many of them are hiring or adding armed security. True, most students will never see an on-campus shooting, but they do see the metal detectors, the prison-like security does influence their attitudes, and the costs of maintaining this security does come out of the education budget.
Public policy is about weighing the immediate cost to the individual against the diffuse benefit to society. If it were just about weight the cost to the individual against the benefit to that same individual, we'd call it "economics," and it wouldn't be nearly as hard to figure out.
Hollywood replicas are built to be external replicas.
They do not necessarily use the internal framing that would have made the original Bounty worthy of Cape Horn. They do not necessarily use the same materials (esp, type of wood) that would have made the original Bounty worthy of Cape Horn. They do not necessarily do maintenance that would have kept the original Bounty seaworthy for 20 years. And they do not necessarily take the ship out of service when rot and decay of natural materials cause skyrocketing maintenance costs to make the vessel un-economical to operate.
This is a common tragedy among both replica and historical tallships: the costs of maintaining them in condition for rough weather are astronomical and the receipts from tourists, day sails, and historical programs are rarely close to those costs. You make compromises, like being sure to steer clear of rough weather because you know how much more water comes in when the seams work, but you try to get as much sea time as possible. Spend enough time at sea, and maybe you start discounting the fundamental structural weakness. Fundamental structural weakness means that one point of failure, which might otherwise be inconvenient, becomes catastrophic. I can see myself in the crew's position, and I know that I would have made the choice to stay aboard.
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Don't get me wrong, I have immense respect for what my parents' generation managed, and even chose my college in part because of it. But the police back then knew that the media wasn't under government's thumb yet, so any brutal behavior would be accurately reported to the public and turn it in favor of the protesters much, much faster than happened.
You went to Kent State?
Presumably the insurance files recently released contain all that data and more. If they decide to brand Miranda a terrorist or start attacking journalists as a matter of course the password will be released.
From the government bureaucrat perspective, that sounds like extortion, and the government will not negotiate with terrorists or extortionists. The standard government response to this situation would be a completely disproportionate attack on the perpetrator and anyone who has had a conversation with the perpetrator. Potentially out to 2 degrees of separation, to make very certain that no one is willing to touch the next "whistle-blower" data set.
The public don't care. Half of them believe Miranda is a terrorist just because he was stopped under a terrorism law, and the police mean well. Even if the public do care, then trumping up some charges allows the government bureaucrats to defend themselves with a "tough on crime" stance. If there's even one classified document one Miranda's devices, even some part of the Bradley Manning dataset, then they can legitimately pursue state secrets or 'communication of material to the enemy' charges and expect the letter, if not the intent, of those laws to have been soundly violated.
Are those who do not get vaccinated putting those of us who are at serious risk?
Remember, this is the US, where hospitals are forbidden by law for turning away seriously ill people but are not provided with any financial compensation for such care. In a community of people who are encouraged to turn first to God for their healthcare needs, health insurance is likely to be underutilized. So, after declining the $10 preventative vaccination, and coming down with an easily prevented disease, community members show up at the hospital, requiring but unable to pay for thousands of dollars of critical care. They take a hospital bed that might be used by someone with a non-preventable pathology. In the US, inflated medical costs are passed on to you the taxpayer through medicaid or to you the health insured by your insurance company.
And yes, propagating the virus raises the probability of a vaccine-resistant mutant.
In the Netherlands we only have exit exams in secondary school and if you manage to pass the highest level (called VWO or liberally translated: preparation for scientific education) you can go to any university within the Netherlands (ok; there's three different tracks and if you want to go to say the technical university to study computer science, you need the track with math, physics, etc.).
This is exactly the system that sethstorm seems to be arguing against. ie:
Doubly so if it gives rise to the faulty concept of educational streaming(the concept of shaping people's entire lives through test scores and controls on education acccess).
He appears to be suggesting that education through secondary (prior to university) should be completely generic, sort of life-preparatory, rather than training focused on 'streaming' people into university, trades, or other focus areas.
Using the internet to bypass physical checkpoints is all well and good, unless you're talking about hundreds of gigabytes and tens of hours of upload (and download). Or unless you think that your own or the US government is monitoring and intercepting internet communication. Or unless you think those governments might force your cloud provider to remove, alter, or corrupt your online storage. Then it might seem like a digital copy on a physical device in your own possession could be the most efficient and trustworthy source data.
1. Die or let them die.
Sometimes it's the right call. Do you spend the family fortune keeping grandma on life support for one more month or sending all four grandkids to college debt free? Which benefits society more? Most parents make huge personal sacrifices to provide the best for their kids: do you really think that sentiment evaporates with a cancer diagnosis?
All this talk of a "right to live" is ridiculous: humans are mortal and all must die. You don't need to be in a hurry to get there, but for god's sake, have some grace when your time is up and don't bankrupt your posterity for a few extra weeks of pain and disability.
1. Blacks commit violent crimes four to eight times the white rate. Hispanic commit violent crimes at approximately three times the white rate, and Asians at one half to three quarters the white rate
If you're using criminal statistics as the basis for selecting whom to arrest, then the appropriate way to state this is "99.9% of whites were not arrested for a violent crime, and 99.6% of blacks were not arrested for a violent crime." (please note, that this is the arrest rate, not the conviction rate) If you're randomly stopping people based on their race, in hopes that they might be a criminal, the rate of false positives is nearly indistinguishable.
It's an ethical dilemma to be sure. Do you wait until they kill someone before you arrest them? Or do you intrude on their lives and take away a gun they shouldn't have had just in case they might have used it violently at some point?
The question you're asking is: how many innocent people should be treated like criminals, in order to catch one actual criminal? This didn't used to be an ethical dilemma. The answer used to be "none," and everyone knew it. (In NYC, the answer appears to be 50-75) But the framing of the question has slowly changed from "how many innocent people should be jailed?" to "should you wait until they kill someone before you arrest them?" One is the question of a free and open society, and one is the question of a police state.
We apparently have around 24 million square miles of habitable land, if you divide that out per person it comes to 18 sq. ft per person.
Someone forgot to square his unit conversion. 24M square miles is nearly 7x10^14 square feet. That seems to give closer 100,000 square feet per person, or a bit more than 2 acres.
But on the other hand, it's very important that America isn't seen as a pushover either. The powers-that-be want to make an example of Snowden; they want him rotting in jail. "Mess with us and see what you get!" is an equally important message.
I am saddened by this attitude. The sentiment would sound appropriate coming from a 3rd world dictator, petty bureaucrat, or aspiring fascist, not from one of the most powerful and respected countries on the planet. Really, the idea that one man could do so much damage to the country or its leaders that rotting-in-jail-forever or death are not just appropriate but necessary forms of revenge, looks weak and fragile. A strong country has policies that reflect its ideals rather than its weaknesses. A strong country prevents rather than punishes failure. A strong country is resilient to dissent and thrives on differences in opinion.
Did Snowden disclose the identities of covert operatives and put them at risk? Did he unmask our moles in Al Quaeda or the Chinese government? Did he get confidential informants killed? Help North Korea build better nuclear bombs? No. He alleged that a US government agency chartered for foreign surveillance was, in fact, collecting and retaining a vast amount of domestic intelligence and doing so with questionable judicial authority. His claims raise serious questions about the legality of NSA procedures, and are only damaging if true. If they're not true, then why should anyone in government care what hoaxes a private citizen cares to raise?
The question is whether they are *your* papers. If they aren't then the 4th amendment doesn't apply. It is not entirely obvious whether phone records should count as your property nor is it clear whether you have a reasonable expectation of privacy regarding them.
The papers themselves may belong to Verizon, but this information is about me. Calling them business records is fundamentally an end-run around the intent that a person's personal information be protected.
Look, technically, the results of my HIV test are just business records to my physician, but no one would argue that the government should be able to access and store that information. Phone metadata can be personally identified, which makes it the person's data. Just because some third party business is the entity that creates or collects the data doesn't make it any less my data, nor any less of an invasion for that third party to turn the data over to the government or the evening news. If the evening news opened every broadcast with a story about my latest medical test, or even just my current physical location, I would feel pretty fucking violated, regardless of whether any of their viewers "cared" or not.
"LOOK! SOMEONE has to stop the bad guys!""but... this isn't about the bad guys, this is about you breaking the constitution and spying on innocent citizens"
"We don't! It's not like that?"
The argument they're making is that data collection is not spying. The argument is that it only becomes "spying" when the data reaches a human brain. Computers obviously can't commit crimes; computers can't be spies; so if it's all just computerized data archiving, then it can't possibly break any laws, because only humans can break laws.
I, personally, think this is an irrational argument, and that the distinction between "data we house" and "data we look at" is disingenuous. It seems to be the keystone of the NSA's argument, and it seems like many of our lawmakers are willing to treat that very fine legal distinction as a legitimate boundary that makes these programs not only acceptable but essential to our national security.
They're wrong
A smart investor would optimize the balance between risks and rewards - there is no profit in investing in a company that goes tits-up due to blindly taking too many stupid or unnecessary risks for the sake or profits.
Exactly. If you can get 2% return with 0 risk, and there's another option that returns 10%, but fails 8% of the time, then those are pretty equivalent. Now, let's say I can leverage my investment, so I get 20% return, except for 8% of time where I destroy twice the value of invested capital. (eg, lose a ship with 50% mortgage)
If I'm actually held liable for all of the loss I've created, then this is still equivalent. If, otoh, my liability is limited to my invested capital, then the leveraged instrument is much more attractive.
A high-level adversary intercepts and blackholes it, replacing it with "This is etc., my key is $NSA_KEY" and now intercepts all mail coming to you, reads it and sends it to you reencrypted with your key.
This requires intercept and rewrite capability, not just recording some metadata.
If you believe that all they're doing is collecting metadata, then encryption of any sort is unnecessary, because they aren't archiving the messages. No encryption technology will defeat collection of "computer X sent a message to computer Y." TOR, may obfuscate it enough to be practically useless. At this point, it looks to me like NSA has decided that they won't get useful information by grepping the internet for "kill Americans," have accepted that they can't maintain a real-time archive of the internet, and accepted the fall-back position of identifying social network structures. They don't (as a screening tool) care what you're saying, they care to whom you're saying it.
That's if you believe Snowden and the NSA's claims that they're only archiving metadata.
Consider an alternate welfare policy to those two. Pay everyone a fixed stipend (if you still want to avoid paying rich people, just set the income cut off at a rather high level) and completely do away with minimum wage. I'd also get rid of most health care mandates (the US style ones are particularly bad), regulatory burdens, and pensions. Someone can choose to get by on that stipend, or they can work, even a little, and get more without issue.
Interestingly, a very similar policy was implemented in Great Britain in the 19th century. Turns out to be a disaster. If workers can apply to the state for a "livable wage," then they will take ever poorer paying jobs. Actual wages collapse because employers can find willing workers at any wage, and make greater profits by not paying workers. The burden of wages ends up transferred to the state and only indirectly back to the profitable companies through taxes, but the disconnect between wages and productivity is the opposite of a healthy labor market.
The other problem is the economy is growing at maybe 1% a year and the entire stock market is doing 10-15%
This is balanced by the market sometimes declining by 20-30% in a year when the economy grows by only 0.5%. The stock market is more of a derivative on the actual economy. That's a complicated concept, though, and "too much" for the American public to deal with, so the popular press generally treats the DJIA or SP500 as though they are the economy. It's nice: a single number with a long history for comparison. You can always make some inane statement about whether it's better than last year and you can always make a straight-line projection to say where it might be next year.
Anybody who was surprised by his 'announcement' that the US government is 'invading your privacy' is an idiot.
I think John Oliver said it very well: it's like pee (or feces) in a pool. We all know it's there, we'd rather it weren't, but we've all agreed to either the collective lie that it isn't or to politely ignore it. Neither of those works to solve the problem, so we just keep swimming in shit. The guy by the side of the pool measuring the urine content, or the fecal coliform content, can at least remind us that the problem needs solved.
When the problem is as big as a fundamental conflict between your stated ideals of personal freedom/privacy and your government's practice of universal surveillance, then whistleblowers pointing out just exactly how universal that surveillance is are the only way we can move toward reconciling this doublethink. It prevents people from arguing "sure, there's widespread monitoring, but only of people linked to terrorism" or "sure, there's widespread monitoring, but only of international calls."
For at home, I'm a big fan of the Trader Joe's Columbian. I have family send it to me, since I cannot buy it where I live now. I make it in a french press -- don't know if different beans are better for drip vs press vs perc.
Drip vs Press makes an enormous difference in most commercial coffees, and is probably why most people don't realize what crap they're drinking. Drippers brew at distinctly lower temperatures than most people who press, and the lower temperature greatly reduces extraction of the most offensive flavors in cheap, stale, or moldy coffee.
There are animals, such as the puffer fish, where parts are edible but other parts are poisonous. Many people have died from incorrectly prepared fugu
The toxin in puffer fish/fugu (and the other species that contain tetrodotoxin) probably isn't produced by those animals, but by a bacteria or plankton in their diet. Possibly with some processing by the host animal, but almost certainly not synthesized by the animal. More likely just concentrated in a highly specific biological filter.
Ethical vegetarians will eat this but still won't eat meat from animals. They would still be vegetarians. This wouldn't be "meat" to them.
These cells are grown in a soup with a high concentration of fetal bovine serum. ie, the fake meat is fed mostly from real meat. There's no reduction in harm to animals in this stuff. Probably a relative increase: it likely takes 2-5 liters of FBS to grow that much cell mass, and a 40 pound fetal calf only has so much serum.
I'll take the president. If he/she turns out to be a dick we can fire them.
All evidence to the contrary excepted.
the cognitive dissonance that comes from a corporation's computers knowing you're gay or depressed or having an affair before your friends and family do
And what exactly is a corporation going to do with that information? Blackmail you?
Well, they might tell the FBI that you live near Memphis and like the phrase "I'm KC and I approve this message." Those seem like pretty innocuous bits of information: a non-specific geographical location, two initials, and a sense of humor that includes mocking political disclosure laws. This weekend, that convergence of information was enough to win a free vacation with dramatic Federal interrogation and evening news appearances. Probably not what anyone had in mind when sharing that information.
My "health, education and safety" haven't been impacted by guns so far, and that's the case for most people.
I think you're mistaken. 30,000 people each year die of GSW, and few of them are the victim of random gun violence. 75% of domestic violence homicides are GSW, and you'd be surprised how many of those perpetrators are genuinely remorseful and shocked by their own behavior after they've sobered up and calmed down. Restricting guns won't take away domestic violence, but it will reduce the lethality of the weapon at hand in a fit of rage. Now, it's true that "most people" won't be killed by domestic violence, but I don't think that's any reason to dismiss these people.
All schools, from kindergarten to grad school, have elaborate emergency response programs specifically to deal with the threat of gun violence. In the wake of Newtown, many of them are hiring or adding armed security. True, most students will never see an on-campus shooting, but they do see the metal detectors, the prison-like security does influence their attitudes, and the costs of maintaining this security does come out of the education budget.
Public policy is about weighing the immediate cost to the individual against the diffuse benefit to society. If it were just about weight the cost to the individual against the benefit to that same individual, we'd call it "economics," and it wouldn't be nearly as hard to figure out.
They do not necessarily use the internal framing that would have made the original Bounty worthy of Cape Horn. They do not necessarily use the same materials (esp, type of wood) that would have made the original Bounty worthy of Cape Horn. They do not necessarily do maintenance that would have kept the original Bounty seaworthy for 20 years. And they do not necessarily take the ship out of service when rot and decay of natural materials cause skyrocketing maintenance costs to make the vessel un-economical to operate.
This is a common tragedy among both replica and historical tallships: the costs of maintaining them in condition for rough weather are astronomical and the receipts from tourists, day sails, and historical programs are rarely close to those costs. You make compromises, like being sure to steer clear of rough weather because you know how much more water comes in when the seams work, but you try to get as much sea time as possible. Spend enough time at sea, and maybe you start discounting the fundamental structural weakness. Fundamental structural weakness means that one point of failure, which might otherwise be inconvenient, becomes catastrophic. I can see myself in the crew's position, and I know that I would have made the choice to stay aboard.
Interactive map of SWAT screwups