The trouble is- most people can't - we get taxed BEFORE we earn. These avenues are available ONLY to those who have the kind of incomes that you earn BEFORE you are taxed - like corporations or stock investors and the like.
In other words - it's impossible to benefit from this unless you are *already* rich - if you earn a salary, your taxes are deducted before you get your paycheck.
The biggest regressive factor in modern taxation is this: Poor people pay tax, get the leftovers and have to pay their expenses out of that. Rich people get money, pay their expenses and only get taxes on the leftovers.
To then allow them to avoid even the little they are due in a way that is not POSSSIBLE unless you happen to be in the second category is flagrantly corrupt and should be illegal.
Not so long ago it was legal in America to force black people to go to the back of the bus -that doesn't mean it was not repugnant to do so.
Not so long ago in my home country of South Africa it was legal to throw somebody in jail for having sex with somebody of a different race. That doesn't mean it wasn't repugnant every time it was done.
When the government does something evil - even though it may be legal (and likely is - since they make the laws) it's still evil, and this is no less true of private citizens.
>We have plenty of perfectly legal domestic tax shelters.
It's more than that - what the Panama company mainly provided was truly anonymous shell corporations. Generally the ownership of a company is a matter of public record so hiding funds in one is difficult. Creating a shell company is also nothing bad in and off itself. When however that shell company's ownership is secret - that's a problem. You can't know whose money it's handling, who to tax - or how that money was made (lots of these leaked names belong to nefarious gun runners and drug cartels and the like - even politicians hiding bribe money).
The main reason there are so few American names on the list is because unlike most countries America lacks decent regulation to prevent forming shell companies anonymously - in general it's laws here are as lax as Panama's. It's criminals and elites from countries where such laws DO exist that used this company to cash in on Panama's lax regulation but US regulations are generally no better. Why would an American criminal who wants to launder his money go and pay a Panama legal firm to create his shell company when he can get one from Delaware or Las Vegas (the worst of a bad bunch) for a 25 dollar registration fee without submitting a single document ? No identification, not so much as a false social security number...
Actually no - they are all criminals - even if they are unlikely to be prosecuted. Failure to report a crime is itself a crime. It's already been revealed that this is the same organisation which handled the funding for Noriega, funneled the money for the Iran/Contra scandal, hides money for drug cartels and warlords around the world - it's a massive money laundry.
If we assume a best-case scenario - that the politicians and bankers and investors whose names are in there were not themselves profiting from it, they were nevertheless mixing their money into the laundromat for the most evil scum of earth. They knew where the dirty money was being laundered -and instead of reporting it and letting the authorities use that to shut down some of those evil bastards, they used the evil bastard's laundromat to avoid paying taxes.
Not only did they fail to report a crime (money-laundering is a crime) which they had intimate knowledge of, they made use of the same service used for this criminal enterprise which for any non-elite would be considered a severely aggravating circumstance. It's one thing to tell a judge "I didn't report the crime because I feared for my life" and quite another to tell him "I didn't report the crime because I thought I could make money by staying quiet".
Some people can and do. There are successful professional gamblers. Vegas exists because they are exceedingly rare and for every one of them there are a thousand who only think they are one of them. If anything, their existence makes Vegas more profitable - all the other people see them an imagine they can do the same.
Actual professional gamblers:net - Only play games where some degree of real skill influences outcomes - they never play slots or roulette but you will find them at the poker tables (blackjack can be beaten by skill but casino's will throw you out with a few bruises if they catch you doing it). - Pick their games carefully and only bet when they know they are likely to win - Usually have some sort of insider knowledge that can swing the odds in their favor - Tend not to boast and actually tend to keep a low profile, it's not good to be the guy the casino knows will likely take it's money
Once upon a time "breaking the bank" just meant winning enough that the local table can't pay and they have to resupply money to it. It's meaning has changed to mean "winning so much the casino doesn't have enough liquid assets to cover the bet" - which means that happens enough times for the phrase to have changed it's meaning. Once in a decade or 2 but still - I remember at least one news story in my teens where somebody managed it at the poker table. When that happens - the only thing that can save the casino is a whale that loses big.
>The Ay-rab world is screwed and will go bankrupt. Good riddance as funding for international terrorism disappears.
And instead we get world war 3. How enormously stupid are you ? Yes we need to get rid of fossil fuels - we also need to do it without screwing the middle east... you do not want a bunch of countries with powermad dictators and big armies with lots of powerful weapons pissed at us.
Generally speaking the green alternatives are actually cheaper in many cases.
In fact - you don't know how much cheaper.
My father is an electrical engineer - he is actually encouraging people now to BORROW money to go full solar - because the gains are so big that even while paying interest on the capital outlay you are still making a profit compared to remaining on the coal grid. It's a fairly complicated set of equations -starting with a highly conservative estimate of a mere 10% per annum increase in the coal electricity price (it's been consistently higher than that for years). A consideration of likely interest rates on a 20-year loan for the typical cost of a full solar+battery setup on a home and the monthly repayments. By year 5 the solar savings exceed the repayments. By year 7 (again conservative as they are actually rated for 10 years) you need to replace the batteries but you've already saved more than they cost (assuming less than half the annual decreases in costs that have been the trend so far). Etc. etc. etc. Oh and the calculation assumes no solar subsidies at all (they don't exist here, they used to exist for solar water heaters but those ended last year)
NOTE: These calculations were done in South Africa - they may not be true in your specific country, the cost of local grid power varies widely and will influence the math and timelines - they are merely given to illustrate how competitive green tech can actually be.
For large scale central grid generation green energy can also be more economic. Again - in South Africa the government is currently trying to negotiate a deal (with the builders of Chernobyl of all companies) to build 5 new nuclear generators. The 5 nukes are estimated to reach completion in 20 years and cost 15 billion dollars - each. That's 20 years before the first one comes online and due to the high cost we can only afford it if we build them in series (i.e. we'll be busy building nukes for the next 100 years)
No nuke in history has ever been finished on time or on budget and there are strong economic arguments that it's actually impossible to do so - but let's be generous and assume that they can manage it. How would it compare if we were to build equivalent large solar installations (maybe using molten salt towers as those are better for grid power since they operate at night as well) ? Building a decent sized molten salt tower takes about 2 years, costing maybe 1 billion. You can build multiple in parallel. To get the same output as all 5 nukes would give us in a century would cost maybe 12-billion (less than one nuke) and we can have them all by 2018... And that's nuclear, probably the most cost effective and least harmful fossil fuel there is (to the extent that uranium can be called a fossil fuel).
The reality is that fossil fuels have been outdone in both economic and technological terms for a long while now - it's political corruption and nothing else that keeps it entrenched.
My aunt went on a diet but, like so many, she didn't lose much weight and regained what little she did - based on your logic, I can therefore conclude that losing weight was never the intention of going on a diet.
>I've been accused of rape 3 times by 3 different women all of them false.
Unlikely, in fact, SO unlikely I am convinced by the mere fact you stated that they were all TRUE - and you are just another rapist bastard who beat the system. If there is any question about consent - you are guilty. Anything other than a sober, intentional "yes please" is rape.
If I can have lots and lots of sex while only ever touching a woman who has expressed a specific desire for said touching while of sound mind - then so can you.
> If it is true then as soon as a woman makes an accusation the man should simply be charged and sent straight to jail.
That's bullshit. Most rapes that *do* go to court are of the "violent stranger in the bushes" variety, where there is never any doubt that the rape occurred and the trials center almost entirely on "was THIS the man in the bushes or was it somebody else" ? Something determined by physical evidence. The cases where the man claims the sex was consensual are fairly rare, and most rapes like that go unreported. When they happen, more often than not the victim ends up being put on trial - was she drinking, what was she wearing etc. etc.
> In reality the real figure is probably that somewhere between 1 in 5 and 1 in 10 rape allegations are actually false. You base that on zero evidence other than your claimed accuracy of jury trials - which as I already pointed out is a hugely skewed sample and mostly deliberates a completely different topic (the identity of the rapist not whether it was rape).
>The question is are women human? if the answer is yes then they are just as likely to lie as men. Of course, your mistake is that you're assuming they are about a hundred million times stupider than men and about a billion times MORE likely to lie - which is what it would take for your reckoning to be true. The risks for the woman is just too high. She will definitely be put on trial, accused of "leading on", her behaviour questioned, crucified in the press (especially if the man is popular). You think women don't KNOW about the 14 year old girl who was given enough vodka to tranquilize a horse (meaning it was legally impossible for her to consent and ANY sexual activity was, by definition, rape) and then gangraped by 5 guys and when she charged them found the entire community blaming HER for getting the star football players in trouble. When the risks outweigh any rewards by that much - there's no point in lying. People lie for self-gain, they don't lie when it will likely hurt themselves more than the person they are trying to hurt. I suspect your belief that women lie about THIS so much is not really because you think women are of such inferior intelligence and/or superior vindictiveness... I think you just have absolutely no idea what hell awaits any woman who accuses a specific, known, man of raping her. Because you underestimate the risks - you overestimate the relative rewards and come up with a hugely increased likelihood of her thinking it's worth it. The reality is that nearly all men ever accused of rape WERE guilty and the vast majority of rapists never get punished.
>The younger you are, the prettier you are, if your sex is female, if you can cry on tap, all move the outcome statistics in a trial in your favour..
Yeah... that explains why the conviction rate in the "is it rape" cases is so ridiculously low. It's actually statistically impossible for that many accused rapists to be INNOCENT. Prosecutors are, after all, trained professionals and know how to keep their jobs and the number one way to keep your job is not to proceed with cases unless you think you have a good chance at winning.
I'm not in favour of it at all (in case that wasn't clear from my post). Maybe it was viable once, I don't have the information to form an opinion, but today it's a disaster. Judges get a lot of job security and leeway, exactly to ensure their impartiality - but this also means they should be selected with care. Preferably by people who have already gone through the process and can adjudicate their legal expertise and fairmindedness from an expert position. Judicial councils are a much better system. Probably not perfect of course - but far better than leaving the appointment of a judge up to whoever bothers to vote in such a small election.
>Bull. The entire SAT is completely racist. It favors those with white privilege.
I don't know if you're being serious or not - but it is in fact true and on PURPOSE. It was literally DESIGNED to do just that. Circa 1920 - Colombia University has become extremely popular among the Jewish population with lots of Jewish kids going there... and subsequently seen a massive drop in enrollment from white kids. White parents did not want their kids going to a university with a large number of Jews in attendance.
Harvard sees this happening, and gets worried that black enrollment would cause a similar case of the white-flight. And so they invent a system to make it almost impossible to get into Harvard unless you had a fairly typical white suburban upbringing with the kind of educational and cultural influences that entails. That system consisted of two tests designed by the openly racist, pro-eugenics, pro-segregation Carl Brigham.
The SAT was designed from it's very inception to keep black kids out of university in order to keep white kids in. Brigham did it because he was a white supremacist, but even the more moderate people on university councils went along with it because they seriously feared the financial losses of having the white kids going somewhere else.
We believe. When you're talking about an idea that old and so useful that culture after culture adopted it as soon as they encountered it - and going back much further than any written records, who knows. The Indian's may have claimed credit for something they inherited from some even earlier society. Granted the evidence is strong for the Indian invention hypotheses- but it's not conclusive. In the subject of history nothing ever is, and in the subject of ancient history - there is nothing, not a single word written that is stronger than hypotheses. There is just way too little evidence and far too much guesswork involved. Archeology gives us lots of pieces - but for something as complicated as history - they all add up to tiny little fractions - every paper published on ancient history is lucky if it gets to be based on 2 artifacts, a single artifact is much more common - and papers are interpretations of what that artifact may mean - backed up by reference to ancient writing (which, if nothing else, tells us something about the culture that produced them) and an attempt at logical reasoning.
That's it. I'm not disparaging historians - I am trying to convey just how incredibly difficult their job is - and how openminded a person has to be to actually do that job. The strongest proof we have that Indian mathematicians invented the arab numerals (as opposed to copying them from somebody else) is the writings of Indian historians - and you simply cannot trust ANY ancient writing to be accurate (even less so than modern writing - in terms of trustworthyness any book more than a thousand years old is slightly below an AC on slashdot).
> I expect she didn't KNOW it was math and assumed it was Arabbic
Well, if you want to get technical - it *was* Arabic. The number system in use in the West is called the "Arab Number system" with good reason (though there is some evidence the Arabs may have themselves inherited it from India even earlier).
But whether or not she knew this. While you may be right - about her assumption, that's not actually the most concerning thing. Much more concerning is the assumption that followed: that Arabic = Terrorist.
No, no. You misunderstood. When conservatives speak of "freedom" they mean "the freedom for corporations to rape you for a penny". When liberals speak of freedom they mean the freedom of you and me to live our lives however we see fit as long as we don't hurt anybody else or put them in unreasonable risk of harm.
The reason they use the same word is because they want the good connotations of what liberals mean by freedom, but they actually want something quite different. In the libertarian dream - we're all slaves and the government is accountable to shareholders rather than voters. None of them would describe it that way, hell most of them sincerely believes it would not end that way, but anybody who isn't willfully blind can see it's already going that way. Each time a critical function of government gets privatized to a profit-seeking company, it becomes a little more true. Private prisons have been plagued by levels of abuse and corruption far beyond anything that ever happened in a state prison (no state prison ever bribed a judge to convict the innocent because state prisons don't make more money the more people they lock up - the opposite in fact, they save money by having fewer inmates to feed). That's a perfectly typical example.
And go see where in the world today genuine slave labor persists (and not on a small scale - there are more slaves right now than the total ever transported in the transatlantic trade - and I mean actual "kidnap children and work them to death - never to see their families again" style slavery)... it's everywhere the government is small. Small government is powerless against wealthy elites - who can very soon afford to arm their private armies better than the government can arm the police and create their own private fiefdoms. The only difference between a corporate CEO and a warlord - is having a government big enough to prevent the one from becoming the other - which is what ALL of them WILL become unchecked - exactly as they do everywhere they ARE unchecked.
>So, what you are saying is that private jobs with any public risk should require recorded fingerprints
Nope. He didn't say that at all. He only said he would favor it for *specific* instances where the risk exist of giving criminals hugely improved opportunity. Nobody seriously complains that you become a preschool teacher if you're on a sex-offender's registry, and even as I agree with that I *also* oppose overzealous prosecution of "sex crimes" where the actions happening should never have been illegal in the first place (like forcing a 15 year old girl to register as a sex offender for the 'crime' of sexting her boyfriend). These are mutually supportive positions. We ought to be able to ensure that extremely high-risk scenarios of specific violent crimes are difficult to get a job in if you already have a history of committing such crimes, and we are *better* able to do that if we ensure the records that indicate that are reliable and genuine. After all - if enough 15-year old sexters end up on the sex offender registry... people will start assuming that being on there probably means you did nothing seriously bad - and stop paying attention to them where it matters - like hiring a preschool teacher (or applications for seminary school).
The point is - a lot of the jobs you mention do have some sort of background check, the type of checks vary depending on the specific situation (there is no reason a sex offender can't do ANY job - just keep him away from jobs where he will be alone with children or women or whatever he targeted). At the same time a taxi driver has somebody in a position of extreme vulnerability hundreds of times a day. It's perfectly reasonable to say that you should not BE able to get this job if you just got out on parole for a bloody tripple-murder or for raping somebody - and that the means of ensuring that should be reasonably robust.
Balance is actually important, absolutes - in the real world - mostly kill people and offer nothing of value in return. Recognizing that trade-offs need to exist, and that rights to privacy is important but not MORE important the right not to be shot in the face makes it possible to find a balance where only small trade-offs are made in specific cases where they can be justified due to the nature of the job.
You gave a long screed about an argument the GP never made (strawman fallacy) and never even considered the perfectly reasonable argument he DID make.
>Men in the UK have to face rape charges from women who can remain anonymous
Considering that every legitimate study and every reliable piece of data suggests that less than one in a million rape charges are falsely filed, this is really not a major concern. the fact that less than one in 20 actual rapes get reported at all - now that's a problem.
See, it's impossible for false rape charges to be a problem AND for rapes to be hugely underreported with a terribly low conviction rate and frequently followed by slap-on-the-wrist sentences. Making false rape charges make no sense. It's perjury - and if you're caught you risk serious jailtime, and you have almost no chance of actually getting the person prosecuted. You want to try to ruin his reputation in the court of public opinion ? Good luck when you remain anonymous. People will have serious doubts unless there is compelling evidence of guilt.
Hell considering how massive the rate of underreporting is in rape cases, if letting the victim keep her anonymity to protect her from a media circus after a traumatic experience gets just one in a hundred more of them reported - then that's worth it. Terrible choice of example - but I'm guessing from it that you're one of those MRA types who are immune to facts and sincerely believe that not only are false-rape charges a real thing that may happen to you, but that they are a bigger problem than rape. You're probably also opposed to affirmative consent, because if she's too drunk to say no you think it's NOT rape to fuck her ?
> I find it disturbing that anyone could manage to become a judge and either not understand that or not care.
In plenty of states judges are elected. That's one way to get incompetent people on the bench. Oh and did you know that the majority of judicial elections are uncontested ? A complete idiot can run and be guaranteed of getting a cushy job as a judge after scraping past the bar exam on his 14th try because nobody else is running and him and his mother are the only people who bothered to go vote...
>but that's not the same as signing away your rights to sue if for instance they forget to pack a parachute in your bag.
If they forget to pack your parachute... and you can still sue that would be pretty miraculous. They could argue that such an agreement prevents your family from suing but I'm fairly certain a sane judge will rule that they can't enforce the arbitration agreement on your family (who does, after all, have standing to sue for gross negligence and wrongful death) since they never signed the agreement - only you did and you're not the one suing (unless they have courts in heaven... which seems unlikely since all the dead lawyers are in hell).
Joking aside though - there is a lot of painful historical lessons behind the idea that justice must be seen to be done. Private justice is essentially an oxymoron. If it's more efficient then that's an argument for making courts less inefficient - not argument against the public having scrutiny over the justice done in it's name.
>That would make the AMD Athlon (aka K7) from 1999 the oldest still supported AMD chip.
Geez that takes me back, I had it's little-brother the Duron in my main machine for quite a while around that time, later one it would become my first dedicated media player machine (hooked up to the TV to watch movies on) - which I was still using until it finally gave out about 7 or 8 years ago.
>people are trying to repurpose old hardware and go "look it still works" rather than "I can do something fun with this"
Those are not mutually exclusive things. Some people think that getting ancient hardware into a workable state is a fun thing to do. A friend of mine managed to pick up an original apple II at a pawnshop, he spent weeks on the extremely arduous task of making workable boot disks for that thing on a modern system - and now it sits on his kitchen counter doing nothing but running a clock program. It's a serious conversation piece, a digital piece of modern art deco and he enjoyed doing it. So maybe the only use an apple II has today is as a glorified wall-clock but there's something special about a working piece of history that important - after all, the apple II was the machine that began the PC revolution.
The 386 is equally important a milestone - that was the CPU that first brought 32-bit support to PC's, that the first Linux kernel was written on, that I played Descent and Doom on as a kid (Doom on a 386 was pushing the very limits of it's abilities but it worked). And the 486 was the system that made PC's ubiquitous, for nearly 10 years it was intel's flagship product. How many CPU's before or since were market leaders for a full decade ?
Nobody said hypocrisy is not a thing. Nobody said it was a good thing. It is a thing, and it's a bad thing. But it's STILL a logical fallacy because it STILL has no impact on whether or not what is said is TRUE or not.
And only an idiot can't tell the difference between those concepts.
Pointing out hypocrisy is a valid criticism of a person - but NOT of their argument. And criticising a person INSTEAD of their argument is an ad hominem logical fallacy. An argument which is therefore worthy only of scorn since it says nothing useful about the subject at hand.
Not to mention you utterly ignored me pointing out that the accusation of hypocrisy is not even TRUE.
You are forgetting that the main reason there are numerous renewable energy technologies is geography. Renewables unlike fossil fuels are best sourced locally and which is best depends on local geography. You will never see a geothermal plant in South Africa because the place is as geologically stable as they come. You wont see much more hydro than the little we have either because its an arid country. No tidal either as we have very small tidal movements. But we do have an abundance of sun and in other places wind. Iceland on the other hand can get a buttload of power from geothermal. Norway has some of the biggest tides in the world.
The worst scenarios become far more unlikely because the there is not and cannot be a universally better renewable energy tech.
And even if they happened despite all that it would still help eradicate one of the most dangerous technologies in the world and save billions of lives. That is a major nett positive.
Because of large scale collusion in cartells like OPEC which however only happens within a single product. Natural gas prices are radically different from oil prices.
There is no reason to assume the dozens of renewable tech products would not be at least as different and for the same reasons: radically different input and manufacturing costs. Do you really think a hydro dam and a geothermal plant will ever cost the same ? Or that their per unit prices will be identical to solar or wind ?
For home generation solar and wind have radically different costs and always will because the raw materials are entirely different, the wear and tear have nothing in common and the manufacturing processes are nothing alike. On the large scale the cost of solar farms, wind farms and molten salt solar towers are unbelievably different.
You can only ever get similar end user prices if there are similar input costs. Even the most egregious price fixing has limited ability to impact radically different products in an industry.
No that world doesnt exist now and its impossible for it to ever exist unless all non fossil energy ends up being supplied by a single company. That will never happen either. The impossibly high barriers to entry in fossil fuels do not exist in many renewable products. The vast majority of solar jobs are one man businisesses thay operate in only one town for crying out loud.
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The trouble is- most people can't - we get taxed BEFORE we earn. These avenues are available ONLY to those who have the kind of incomes that you earn BEFORE you are taxed - like corporations or stock investors and the like.
In other words - it's impossible to benefit from this unless you are *already* rich - if you earn a salary, your taxes are deducted before you get your paycheck.
The biggest regressive factor in modern taxation is this:
Poor people pay tax, get the leftovers and have to pay their expenses out of that.
Rich people get money, pay their expenses and only get taxes on the leftovers.
To then allow them to avoid even the little they are due in a way that is not POSSSIBLE unless you happen to be in the second category is flagrantly corrupt and should be illegal.
Not so long ago it was legal in America to force black people to go to the back of the bus -that doesn't mean it was not repugnant to do so.
Not so long ago in my home country of South Africa it was legal to throw somebody in jail for having sex with somebody of a different race. That doesn't mean it wasn't repugnant every time it was done.
When the government does something evil - even though it may be legal (and likely is - since they make the laws) it's still evil, and this is no less true of private citizens.
>We have plenty of perfectly legal domestic tax shelters.
It's more than that - what the Panama company mainly provided was truly anonymous shell corporations. Generally the ownership of a company is a matter of public record so hiding funds in one is difficult. Creating a shell company is also nothing bad in and off itself. When however that shell company's ownership is secret - that's a problem. You can't know whose money it's handling, who to tax - or how that money was made (lots of these leaked names belong to nefarious gun runners and drug cartels and the like - even politicians hiding bribe money).
The main reason there are so few American names on the list is because unlike most countries America lacks decent regulation to prevent forming shell companies anonymously - in general it's laws here are as lax as Panama's. It's criminals and elites from countries where such laws DO exist that used this company to cash in on Panama's lax regulation but US regulations are generally no better. Why would an American criminal who wants to launder his money go and pay a Panama legal firm to create his shell company when he can get one from Delaware or Las Vegas (the worst of a bad bunch) for a 25 dollar registration fee without submitting a single document ? No identification, not so much as a false social security number...
Actually no - they are all criminals - even if they are unlikely to be prosecuted. Failure to report a crime is itself a crime.
It's already been revealed that this is the same organisation which handled the funding for Noriega, funneled the money for the Iran/Contra scandal, hides money for drug cartels and warlords around the world - it's a massive money laundry.
If we assume a best-case scenario - that the politicians and bankers and investors whose names are in there were not themselves profiting from it, they were nevertheless mixing their money into the laundromat for the most evil scum of earth. They knew where the dirty money was being laundered -and instead of reporting it and letting the authorities use that to shut down some of those evil bastards, they used the evil bastard's laundromat to avoid paying taxes.
Not only did they fail to report a crime (money-laundering is a crime) which they had intimate knowledge of, they made use of the same service used for this criminal enterprise which for any non-elite would be considered a severely aggravating circumstance. It's one thing to tell a judge "I didn't report the crime because I feared for my life" and quite another to tell him "I didn't report the crime because I thought I could make money by staying quiet".
Some people can and do. There are successful professional gamblers. Vegas exists because they are exceedingly rare and for every one of them there are a thousand who only think they are one of them. If anything, their existence makes Vegas more profitable - all the other people see them an imagine they can do the same.
Actual professional gamblers:net
- Only play games where some degree of real skill influences outcomes - they never play slots or roulette but you will find them at the poker tables (blackjack can be
beaten by skill but casino's will throw you out with a few bruises if they catch you doing it).
- Pick their games carefully and only bet when they know they are likely to win
- Usually have some sort of insider knowledge that can swing the odds in their favor
- Tend not to boast and actually tend to keep a low profile, it's not good to be the guy the casino knows will likely take it's money
Once upon a time "breaking the bank" just meant winning enough that the local table can't pay and they have to resupply money to it. It's meaning has changed to mean "winning so much the casino doesn't have enough liquid assets to cover the bet" - which means that happens enough times for the phrase to have changed it's meaning. Once in a decade or 2 but still - I remember at least one news story in my teens where somebody managed it at the poker table. When that happens - the only thing that can save the casino is a whale that loses big.
>The Ay-rab world is screwed and will go bankrupt. Good riddance as funding for international terrorism disappears.
And instead we get world war 3. How enormously stupid are you ?
Yes we need to get rid of fossil fuels - we also need to do it without screwing the middle east... you do not want a bunch of countries with powermad dictators and big armies with lots of powerful weapons pissed at us.
Generally speaking the green alternatives are actually cheaper in many cases.
In fact - you don't know how much cheaper.
My father is an electrical engineer - he is actually encouraging people now to BORROW money to go full solar - because the gains are so big that even while paying interest on the capital outlay you are still making a profit compared to remaining on the coal grid. It's a fairly complicated set of equations -starting with a highly conservative estimate of a mere 10% per annum increase in the coal electricity price (it's been consistently higher than that for years). A consideration of likely interest rates on a 20-year loan for the typical cost of a full solar+battery setup on a home and the monthly repayments. By year 5 the solar savings exceed the repayments. By year 7 (again conservative as they are actually rated for 10 years) you need to replace the batteries but you've already saved more than they cost (assuming less than half the annual decreases in costs that have been the trend so far). Etc. etc. etc.
Oh and the calculation assumes no solar subsidies at all (they don't exist here, they used to exist for solar water heaters but those ended last year)
NOTE: These calculations were done in South Africa - they may not be true in your specific country, the cost of local grid power varies widely and will influence the math and timelines - they are merely given to illustrate how competitive green tech can actually be.
For large scale central grid generation green energy can also be more economic. Again - in South Africa the government is currently trying to negotiate a deal (with the builders of Chernobyl of all companies) to build 5 new nuclear generators. The 5 nukes are estimated to reach completion in 20 years and cost 15 billion dollars - each. That's 20 years before the first one comes online and due to the high cost we can only afford it if we build them in series (i.e. we'll be busy building nukes for the next 100 years)
No nuke in history has ever been finished on time or on budget and there are strong economic arguments that it's actually impossible to do so - but let's be generous and assume that they can manage it. How would it compare if we were to build equivalent large solar installations (maybe using molten salt towers as those are better for grid power since they operate at night as well) ? Building a decent sized molten salt tower takes about 2 years, costing maybe 1 billion. You can build multiple in parallel. To get the same output as all 5 nukes would give us in a century would cost maybe 12-billion (less than one nuke) and we can have them all by 2018...
And that's nuclear, probably the most cost effective and least harmful fossil fuel there is (to the extent that uranium can be called a fossil fuel).
The reality is that fossil fuels have been outdone in both economic and technological terms for a long while now - it's political corruption and nothing else that keeps it entrenched.
My aunt went on a diet but, like so many, she didn't lose much weight and regained what little she did - based on your logic, I can therefore conclude that losing weight was never the intention of going on a diet.
>I've been accused of rape 3 times by 3 different women all of them false.
Unlikely, in fact, SO unlikely I am convinced by the mere fact you stated that they were all TRUE - and you are just another rapist bastard who beat the system.
If there is any question about consent - you are guilty. Anything other than a sober, intentional "yes please" is rape.
If I can have lots and lots of sex while only ever touching a woman who has expressed a specific desire for said touching while of sound mind - then so can you.
> If it is true then as soon as a woman makes an accusation the man should simply be charged and sent straight to jail.
That's bullshit. Most rapes that *do* go to court are of the "violent stranger in the bushes" variety, where there is never any doubt that the rape occurred and the trials center almost entirely on "was THIS the man in the bushes or was it somebody else" ? Something determined by physical evidence. The cases where the man claims the sex was consensual are fairly rare, and most rapes like that go unreported. When they happen, more often than not the victim ends up being put on trial - was she drinking, what was she wearing etc. etc.
> In reality the real figure is probably that somewhere between 1 in 5 and 1 in 10 rape allegations are actually false.
You base that on zero evidence other than your claimed accuracy of jury trials - which as I already pointed out is a hugely skewed sample and mostly deliberates a completely different topic (the identity of the rapist not whether it was rape).
>The question is are women human? if the answer is yes then they are just as likely to lie as men.
Of course, your mistake is that you're assuming they are about a hundred million times stupider than men and about a billion times MORE likely to lie - which is what it would take for your reckoning to be true. The risks for the woman is just too high. She will definitely be put on trial, accused of "leading on", her behaviour questioned, crucified in the press (especially if the man is popular). You think women don't KNOW about the 14 year old girl who was given enough vodka to tranquilize a horse (meaning it was legally impossible for her to consent and ANY sexual activity was, by definition, rape) and then gangraped by 5 guys and when she charged them found the entire community blaming HER for getting the star football players in trouble. When the risks outweigh any rewards by that much - there's no point in lying. People lie for self-gain, they don't lie when it will likely hurt themselves more than the person they are trying to hurt.
I suspect your belief that women lie about THIS so much is not really because you think women are of such inferior intelligence and/or superior vindictiveness... I think you just have absolutely no idea what hell awaits any woman who accuses a specific, known, man of raping her. Because you underestimate the risks - you overestimate the relative rewards and come up with a hugely increased likelihood of her thinking it's worth it. The reality is that nearly all men ever accused of rape WERE guilty and the vast majority of rapists never get punished.
>The younger you are, the prettier you are, if your sex is female, if you can cry on tap, all move the outcome statistics in a trial in your favour..
Yeah... that explains why the conviction rate in the "is it rape" cases is so ridiculously low. It's actually statistically impossible for that many accused rapists to be INNOCENT. Prosecutors are, after all, trained professionals and know how to keep their jobs and the number one way to keep your job is not to proceed with cases unless you think you have a good chance at winning.
I'm not in favour of it at all (in case that wasn't clear from my post). Maybe it was viable once, I don't have the information to form an opinion, but today it's a disaster. Judges get a lot of job security and leeway, exactly to ensure their impartiality - but this also means they should be selected with care. Preferably by people who have already gone through the process and can adjudicate their legal expertise and fairmindedness from an expert position. Judicial councils are a much better system. Probably not perfect of course - but far better than leaving the appointment of a judge up to whoever bothers to vote in such a small election.
1 in a million worldwide. I never said "in the UK"
>Bull. The entire SAT is completely racist. It favors those with white privilege.
I don't know if you're being serious or not - but it is in fact true and on PURPOSE. It was literally DESIGNED to do just that. Circa 1920 - Colombia University has become extremely popular among the Jewish population with lots of Jewish kids going there... and subsequently seen a massive drop in enrollment from white kids. White parents did not want their kids going to a university with a large number of Jews in attendance.
Harvard sees this happening, and gets worried that black enrollment would cause a similar case of the white-flight. And so they invent a system to make it almost impossible to get into Harvard unless you had a fairly typical white suburban upbringing with the kind of educational and cultural influences that entails. That system consisted of two tests designed by the openly racist, pro-eugenics, pro-segregation Carl Brigham.
The SAT was designed from it's very inception to keep black kids out of university in order to keep white kids in. Brigham did it because he was a white supremacist, but even the more moderate people on university councils went along with it because they seriously feared the financial losses of having the white kids going somewhere else.
>But invented by Indian mathematicians.
We believe.
When you're talking about an idea that old and so useful that culture after culture adopted it as soon as they encountered it - and going back much further than any written records, who knows. The Indian's may have claimed credit for something they inherited from some even earlier society.
Granted the evidence is strong for the Indian invention hypotheses- but it's not conclusive. In the subject of history nothing ever is, and in the subject of ancient history - there is nothing, not a single word written that is stronger than hypotheses. There is just way too little evidence and far too much guesswork involved. Archeology gives us lots of pieces - but for something as complicated as history - they all add up to tiny little fractions - every paper published on ancient history is lucky if it gets to be based on 2 artifacts, a single artifact is much more common - and papers are interpretations of what that artifact may mean - backed up by reference to ancient writing (which, if nothing else, tells us something about the culture that produced them) and an attempt at logical reasoning.
That's it. I'm not disparaging historians - I am trying to convey just how incredibly difficult their job is - and how openminded a person has to be to actually do that job.
The strongest proof we have that Indian mathematicians invented the arab numerals (as opposed to copying them from somebody else) is the writings of Indian historians - and you simply cannot trust ANY ancient writing to be accurate (even less so than modern writing - in terms of trustworthyness any book more than a thousand years old is slightly below an AC on slashdot).
> I expect she didn't KNOW it was math and assumed it was Arabbic
Well, if you want to get technical - it *was* Arabic. The number system in use in the West is called the "Arab Number system" with good reason (though there is some evidence the Arabs may have themselves inherited it from India even earlier).
But whether or not she knew this. While you may be right - about her assumption, that's not actually the most concerning thing.
Much more concerning is the assumption that followed: that Arabic = Terrorist.
No, no. You misunderstood. When conservatives speak of "freedom" they mean "the freedom for corporations to rape you for a penny". When liberals speak of freedom they mean the freedom of you and me to live our lives however we see fit as long as we don't hurt anybody else or put them in unreasonable risk of harm.
The reason they use the same word is because they want the good connotations of what liberals mean by freedom, but they actually want something quite different. In the libertarian dream - we're all slaves and the government is accountable to shareholders rather than voters. None of them would describe it that way, hell most of them sincerely believes it would not end that way, but anybody who isn't willfully blind can see it's already going that way. Each time a critical function of government gets privatized to a profit-seeking company, it becomes a little more true. Private prisons have been plagued by levels of abuse and corruption far beyond anything that ever happened in a state prison (no state prison ever bribed a judge to convict the innocent because state prisons don't make more money the more people they lock up - the opposite in fact, they save money by having fewer inmates to feed). That's a perfectly typical example.
And go see where in the world today genuine slave labor persists (and not on a small scale - there are more slaves right now than the total ever transported in the transatlantic trade - and I mean actual "kidnap children and work them to death - never to see their families again" style slavery)... it's everywhere the government is small. Small government is powerless against wealthy elites - who can very soon afford to arm their private armies better than the government can arm the police and create their own private fiefdoms. The only difference between a corporate CEO and a warlord - is having a government big enough to prevent the one from becoming the other - which is what ALL of them WILL become unchecked - exactly as they do everywhere they ARE unchecked.
>So, what you are saying is that private jobs with any public risk should require recorded fingerprints
Nope. He didn't say that at all. He only said he would favor it for *specific* instances where the risk exist of giving criminals hugely improved opportunity. Nobody seriously complains that you become a preschool teacher if you're on a sex-offender's registry, and even as I agree with that I *also* oppose overzealous prosecution of "sex crimes" where the actions happening should never have been illegal in the first place (like forcing a 15 year old girl to register as a sex offender for the 'crime' of sexting her boyfriend). These are mutually supportive positions. We ought to be able to ensure that extremely high-risk scenarios of specific violent crimes are difficult to get a job in if you already have a history of committing such crimes, and we are *better* able to do that if we ensure the records that indicate that are reliable and genuine. After all - if enough 15-year old sexters end up on the sex offender registry... people will start assuming that being on there probably means you did nothing seriously bad - and stop paying attention to them where it matters - like hiring a preschool teacher (or applications for seminary school).
The point is - a lot of the jobs you mention do have some sort of background check, the type of checks vary depending on the specific situation (there is no reason a sex offender can't do ANY job - just keep him away from jobs where he will be alone with children or women or whatever he targeted). At the same time a taxi driver has somebody in a position of extreme vulnerability hundreds of times a day. It's perfectly reasonable to say that you should not BE able to get this job if you just got out on parole for a bloody tripple-murder or for raping somebody - and that the means of ensuring that should be reasonably robust.
Balance is actually important, absolutes - in the real world - mostly kill people and offer nothing of value in return. Recognizing that trade-offs need to exist, and that rights to privacy is important but not MORE important the right not to be shot in the face makes it possible to find a balance where only small trade-offs are made in specific cases where they can be justified due to the nature of the job.
You gave a long screed about an argument the GP never made (strawman fallacy) and never even considered the perfectly reasonable argument he DID make.
>Men in the UK have to face rape charges from women who can remain anonymous
Considering that every legitimate study and every reliable piece of data suggests that less than one in a million rape charges are falsely filed, this is really not a major concern. the fact that less than one in 20 actual rapes get reported at all - now that's a problem.
See, it's impossible for false rape charges to be a problem AND for rapes to be hugely underreported with a terribly low conviction rate and frequently followed by slap-on-the-wrist sentences. Making false rape charges make no sense. It's perjury - and if you're caught you risk serious jailtime, and you have almost no chance of actually getting the person prosecuted. You want to try to ruin his reputation in the court of public opinion ? Good luck when you remain anonymous. People will have serious doubts unless there is compelling evidence of guilt.
Hell considering how massive the rate of underreporting is in rape cases, if letting the victim keep her anonymity to protect her from a media circus after a traumatic experience gets just one in a hundred more of them reported - then that's worth it. Terrible choice of example - but I'm guessing from it that you're one of those MRA types who are immune to facts and sincerely believe that not only are false-rape charges a real thing that may happen to you, but that they are a bigger problem than rape. You're probably also opposed to affirmative consent, because if she's too drunk to say no you think it's NOT rape to fuck her ?
> I find it disturbing that anyone could manage to become a judge and either not understand that or not care.
In plenty of states judges are elected. That's one way to get incompetent people on the bench. Oh and did you know that the majority of judicial elections are uncontested ? A complete idiot can run and be guaranteed of getting a cushy job as a judge after scraping past the bar exam on his 14th try because nobody else is running and him and his mother are the only people who bothered to go vote...
>but that's not the same as signing away your rights to sue if for instance they forget to pack a parachute in your bag.
If they forget to pack your parachute... and you can still sue that would be pretty miraculous. They could argue that such an agreement prevents your family from suing but I'm fairly certain a sane judge will rule that they can't enforce the arbitration agreement on your family (who does, after all, have standing to sue for gross negligence and wrongful death) since they never signed the agreement - only you did and you're not the one suing (unless they have courts in heaven... which seems unlikely since all the dead lawyers are in hell).
Joking aside though - there is a lot of painful historical lessons behind the idea that justice must be seen to be done. Private justice is essentially an oxymoron. If it's more efficient then that's an argument for making courts less inefficient - not argument against the public having scrutiny over the justice done in it's name.
>That would make the AMD Athlon (aka K7) from 1999 the oldest still supported AMD chip.
Geez that takes me back, I had it's little-brother the Duron in my main machine for quite a while around that time, later one it would become my first dedicated media player machine (hooked up to the TV to watch movies on) - which I was still using until it finally gave out about 7 or 8 years ago.
>people are trying to repurpose old hardware and go "look it still works" rather than "I can do something fun with this"
Those are not mutually exclusive things. Some people think that getting ancient hardware into a workable state is a fun thing to do. A friend of mine managed to pick up an original apple II at a pawnshop, he spent weeks on the extremely arduous task of making workable boot disks for that thing on a modern system - and now it sits on his kitchen counter doing nothing but running a clock program.
It's a serious conversation piece, a digital piece of modern art deco and he enjoyed doing it. So maybe the only use an apple II has today is as a glorified wall-clock but there's something special about a working piece of history that important - after all, the apple II was the machine that began the PC revolution.
The 386 is equally important a milestone - that was the CPU that first brought 32-bit support to PC's, that the first Linux kernel was written on, that I played Descent and Doom on as a kid (Doom on a 386 was pushing the very limits of it's abilities but it worked).
And the 486 was the system that made PC's ubiquitous, for nearly 10 years it was intel's flagship product. How many CPU's before or since were market leaders for a full decade ?
Nobody said hypocrisy is not a thing. Nobody said it was a good thing. It is a thing, and it's a bad thing. But it's STILL a logical fallacy because it STILL has no impact on whether or not what is said is TRUE or not.
And only an idiot can't tell the difference between those concepts.
Pointing out hypocrisy is a valid criticism of a person - but NOT of their argument. And criticising a person INSTEAD of their argument is an ad hominem logical fallacy. An argument which is therefore worthy only of scorn since it says nothing useful about the subject at hand.
Not to mention you utterly ignored me pointing out that the accusation of hypocrisy is not even TRUE.
You are forgetting that the main reason there are numerous renewable energy technologies is geography.
Renewables unlike fossil fuels are best sourced locally and which is best depends on local geography. You will never see a geothermal plant in South Africa because the place is as geologically stable as they come. You wont see much more hydro than the little we have either because its an arid country. No tidal either as we have very small tidal movements. But we do have an abundance of sun and in other places wind. Iceland on the other hand can get a buttload of power from geothermal. Norway has some of the biggest tides in the world.
The worst scenarios become far more unlikely because the there is not and cannot be a universally better renewable energy tech.
And even if they happened despite all that it would still help eradicate one of the most dangerous technologies in the world and save billions of lives. That is a major nett positive.
Because of large scale collusion in cartells like OPEC which however only happens within a single product. Natural gas prices are radically different from oil prices.
There is no reason to assume the dozens of renewable tech products would not be at least as different and for the same reasons: radically different input and manufacturing costs. Do you really think a hydro dam and a geothermal plant will ever cost the same ? Or that their per unit prices will be identical to solar or wind ?
For home generation solar and wind have radically different costs and always will because the raw materials are entirely different, the wear and tear have nothing in common and the manufacturing processes are nothing alike.
On the large scale the cost of solar farms, wind farms and molten salt solar towers are unbelievably different.
You can only ever get similar end user prices if there are similar input costs. Even the most egregious price fixing has limited ability to impact radically different products in an industry.
No that world doesnt exist now and its impossible for it to ever exist unless all non fossil energy ends up being supplied by a single company. That will never happen either. The impossibly high barriers to entry in fossil fuels do not exist in many renewable products. The vast majority of solar jobs are one man businisesses thay operate in only one town for crying out loud.