I don't think modifying rice to produce certain milk nutrients will help. If your allergic to something it doesn't matter what the medium, your still allergic.
But there don't seem to be any folks allergic to the proteins they're producing. Allergies are often to very specific proteins, not all parts of the organism. Even environmental allergies are like this; some people are allergic to cat fur and can therefore abide hairless cats, while others are allergic to cat dander, and will react to any cat... but less so to ones that are frequently bathed or treated with an anti-allergy solution.
in the case of the GM rice, it would be grown on islands which have no current production of rice.
Islands? Ok, we do have two islands in Los Angeles County (one of the California counties listed as locations where this rice can be grown) but I don't think that they restricted the growers to Catalina...
You probably misread something in the article. They said that the permission extends only to *counties* where rice is not currently grown... San Luis Obispo, Kern, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, San Diego and Imperial. Links included so that you can see that many of these counties are landlocked, and as such, have no islands. They also share borders with several unnamed counties, though as long as we can get rice pollen to respect those borders, this should not be an issue.
On a much more practical note: how exactly are they going to extract the drugs from the rice? Would the rice be sold with the drugs inside and then cooked prior to ingestion? Or would they be steamed and the resulting water ingested?
In this case, it would seem they'd have to extract the drugs first, then add them to other products... i.e. infant formula. Infants generally don't start munching on rice until they're at least four to six months old, which is kind of late to start them on this stuff.
What I wonder is, what do they do with the rice after the drugs are extracted? Do they plan to sell it as food? Use it as mulch? dump it in the river?
it makes far more sense to simply make sure babies get real, complete breast milk, and anything that might be seen to undermine that (hello, Nestle) is going to garner negative press.
There are cases where breast milk is not an option:
- Some mothers cannot produce milk at all or cannot produce sufficient milk to feed their baby.
- A mother who has to take certain drugs for her own health and well-being may not be able to breastfeed because of the risks those drugs present to the baby.
- Sometimes mom isn't available to breastfeed at all. Women still do occasionally die in childbirth, or more commonly, give their baby up for adoption at birth.
- Newborns can have several different disorders that make all milk products, including those from mom, anywhere from very uncomfortable to severely damaging to them. Phenylketonuria, severe lactose intolerance, etc.
So, for several reasons, it's a good idea to improve infant formula as much as possible. We'll probably never be able to get it as good as breast milk (since mom's body can adapt the formulation to environmental factors, such as passing on antibodies to whatever cold is going around), but it's not necessarily a bad idea.
Interesting that these can also serve as food preservatives, though. You may very well be right about the "true" motivations for this product.
If one needs drugs, they should take a pill. Leave the drugs out of the food supply for those of us who don't want it them in our food.
This isn't about fortifying food crops. It's about using food crops to produce pharmaceuticals. Chances are, this rice would not enter the food supply at all... it would be processed to extract the drugs, and then probably disposed of in some manner.
Of course, the issues of cross-pollination or unforseen effects on the environment are still present. But it's important to get the facts right.;-)
700 Acres per farm is a LOT. Constructing a building that large would not be very cost-effective.
Well, let's see...
Option 1: build smaller farms for pharmaceutical rice-growing.
Option 2: decide that maybe this is *not* a cheaper way to produce drugs after all, when you take environmental risks and containment into account.
It's not appropriate to let companies externalize environmental costs that are this severe. If this type of production cannot be done in a manner that is both cost-effective and minimizes environmental risks, then it probably shouldn't be done at all. On the other hand, it seems like it might *still* be cheaper to grow pharmarice indoors 30 acres at a time than to produce these drugs in a lab, so there you go.
Well, if genetically enhanced products are going to have a risk, we are going to have to find a way around it - the solution would not be to ban GE as a whole, right?
Right. But open-air cultivation of GE crops probably *should* be banned until we better understand the risks and are in a better position to meet them.
Think about it... greenhouse production is more expensive than open-air production. BUT, generally speaking, the reason to genetically modify crops is because they are more profitable (in this case, it's cheaper for them to grow proteins in rice than to make them in a lab). So, it's perfectly appropriate to require them to assume costs of keeping their produce contained. It's up to the company to then decide whether it's still more profitable this way.
Ban GE crops? Nah. But require them to be grown in a concrete liner, under an airtight enclosure with a specified filtration system? Why not?
Aren't public services (such as policing and justice) made to serve the public?
Ideally, yes.
First, you have to understand that us Americans aren't much for "public services." We tend to view anything that can be described as a public service as something that makes it easier for people to be poor, and by implication, lazy.
Next, once you get to public services that most people do feel are worthwhile (such as policing), there's still an idea that they serve the "Taxpayer." The Taxpayer is not someone who gets arrested. Those are Criminals. If you pay enough taxes (i.e. at least 12% of your income goes to income taxes, and you own property) the police are there to protect you from the rest of the world.
In many parts of a city like Los Angeles, the residents generally understand that authority in any form is there to protect the rest of the world from them. Cops do not patrol South LA to keep the residents there safe. They do it to catch the "bad guys," who usually are bad because they went somewhere else and did something nefarious, not because they're raising a ruckus right there where people live.
But I wouldn't say the US, as a whole, is against gluttony or religious fanaticism (as long as it's the "right" religion).
Then why do we have terms like zealot, fanatic, cultist, and the ever-applicable [insert belief] freak... or fatso, fatass, blubberbutt, etc., all of which have definite negative connotations?
Yet aside from "greedy," I'm hard-pressed to think of an insulting term for someone who makes "too much" money. Most insults that have to do with money are not about how much you make, but how willing you are to spend it... miser, tightwad, etc. And, as the movie Wall Street taught us, "greed is good."
It is very a very interesting feature of American culture that making money is tantamount to our state religion. The right to profit is sacred. Heck, even look at our drug laws... it's a bigger crime to sell crack than powder cocaine, and guess which is more profitable?;-)
I mean, it's one thing to sit outside of hydroponics stores and then watch those people to see if they have unexplained income (though I personally think that's a waste of law enforcement's time as well), it's a completely different thing to search every house that uses more electricity than the neighbors.
Wow... I guess we were lucky a few year's back, then.
A roommate who grew up in Hawaii (where, apparently, people live and die by the air conditioner) decided that, since the daily high temperature had topped 80 degrees, it was time to close all the doors and windows and run the aircon 24/7. This caused our electric bill to spike massively. Los Angeles Department of Water and Power automatically flags such sudden changes for further investigation, so that they don't send a shocking bill as a result of a broken meter or something. Unfortunately, our case got lost somewhere between being flagged and being investigated, so it was four months that we got no bills at all... and then someone finally came to our door to explain the situation with some embarrassment.
At the time, I found their policy to be quite enlightened. Now, I wonder if the LAPD has since usurped this process.:-/
Yeah, sue the bastards! Someone did something to you? Sue them! Make them pay! Who cares what happened, just sue them into the ground.
WTF are you talking about? How do you know his "erratic" behavior wasn't something a little more serious than celebrity impersonations? Maybe he urinated on a slot machine, or accosted an old lady or somethig.
Sue first and ask questions later? How American...
Um, sue the cops for holding the guy for two days instead of using the info he had on him to get him back to his family, actually.
Sure, take him into custody if he seems to be a threat. But as soon as you've got him *out* of that situation, you then get the story... before you plaster his contact info all over your daily email to the hungry lawyer population.
The problem is that they decided to "book first and ask questions later." Sometimes a lawsuit is the *only* way to ask the right questions (i.e. you can't get the answers without a subpoena).
Beat cops don't have the time or training to do a lot more than look at the current situation and quickly decide if they are going to remove someone. In a casino I bet it is an easy/quick decision. Then when he is no longer a threat to himself or anyone else, you have time to decide what to do.
Right.
The beat cop's job is to remove the danger. If the guy seems dangerous (to himself or to others) you get him out of there and take him to the station.
The very next step is to find out what happened. This is when they *should have* found his medical ID and contact info, and then called his parents. This is not, apparently, what they did. As far as we can tell, he was booked (at which point his arrest becomes public record), then maybe given tests for a drug, and sometime in the next 48 hours it was determined that the right place for him was a mental hospital, not a cell. After that, his parents were finally contacted.
You can't necessarily fault street cops for not knowing how to handle every possible situation perfectly. You *can* fault procedures and the cops responsible for implementing them if they lead to a guy sitting in a holding cell for two days when the info they needed to straighten out the issue was available. You can definitely fault policies that lead to arrest information being made public before the guy's wallet gets a look-see.
There is nothing wrong with what these lawyers are doing, it is no more or less than anyone with a skill to sell would do if they wanted to eat well and have nice shoes.
So, if you're arrested on suspicion of illicit drug use (but its found that there's another explanation for your odd behavior), you don't have a problem with receiving mail that has "Experts in Drug Charges" emblazoned on the envelope?
I live in a 40-unit apartment building. Folks see my mail all the time when I'm pulling it out of my box. Sometimes one of my neighbors accidentally gets my mail or vice versa. Do I want them thinking I'm their new hookup? Or that they better keep their children away from me because I'm up to no good?
Maybe there isn't anything wrong with advertising their services to their target market, but there's certainly something wrong with a lack of discretion in such matters.
it sounds like the state in question (california was it?) is selling this information
Actually, SpeedingTicket.net is based in North Carolina, and has recently expanded to Florida, New Jersey, Washington, Oregon, South Carolina, Georgia, Michigan and Oklahoma. I can see how confusing it would be; that information was in the paragraphs preceeding and directly after the one you quoted.
I think that people want to see manned space missions because, frankly, lots of folks would like to escape this planet someday. And someone has to go first, to prove it can be done.
Perhaps it's not terribly important for the science of it, but for those who would like to *live* on Mars in 50 years or so, it's a high priority to land some actual humans there.
No, no, no. Dupes are never *identical*, which means they are actually a sign of alternate universes bleeding into each other, where a particular story is posted on one day by one person, and the next day slightly differently by someone else.
Not to mention that this person obviously doesn't now what slashdot is... so duh.. yeah.. she's new here. And somehow that guy got modded funny for pointing out the obvious.
Perhaps we're laughing *at* him, not *with* him.;-)
I take it you're not a parent. Find one who wouldn't be concerned that we offered filter free, non-monitored use of the internet.
I'm very concerned that you DO offer non-monitored use of the internet.
You must be doing this, or you wouldn't need to have a computer system watching for buzzwords to let you know when to *start* monitoring.
Whatever happened to having a teacher or aide walk around the room, looking at what students are doing? A human who can ask questions, hear explanations, and interpret language? Oh, right. They're too expensive to waste on watching our children. We'll save them for when a computer tells us that a child *actually* needs watching.
I wonder how many cases that you catch a kid doing something "wrong" could have been avoided if there'd been a person they could ask about something...
Let's just say, you can take all kinds of responsibility for your kids and still miss things they hide from you.
So how do you get into a situation where your kids are hiding dangerous things from you?
More to the point, how do you *avoid* getting into that situation?
Kids should be able to trust their parents to be looking out for their best interests. If a kid wants to hide something from mom or dad, it's probably because they *know* it's wrong... in a healthy relationship. If they're hiding something and don't believe it's wrong, it's because they mistrust their parents' judgment or morality. This can occur because they personally witness their parents engaging in a double-standard, hypocritical behavior, or just flat-out breaking their own rules, but sometimes it's simply because parents make rules that are unreasonable and don't give their kids the resources to follow them (assuming it would be possible).
A good parent knows what's going on in their kid's life, in large part because the kid tells them. If you tell your teenager they're not allowed to date, that won't keep them from dating... it will keep you from knowing who they are dating. So when your 14-year-old college-junior prodigy is off losing her virginity to a 31-year-old jazz musician, you think she's at her friend's house for a slumber party... isn't that cute? (No, I didn't make that up off the top of my head... that was a good friend of mine.)
And then you have to explain the Rocky Horror Picture Show to them... fortunately, that's one my kids will probably learn about very young (at Alumni Night).
Had to look at those pictures carefully to make sure none of the Columbias were me;-) (Or in hopes that they were.../shrug)
Well, it wasn't, until the Supreme Court said it was. Dammit, now I have to find my notes from "Law and the Quality of Urban Life," to find the case... though it may be Mapp v. Ohio (1961). That's the earliest one I can find.
But, since some case the SC decided, privacy has most definitely been a constitutional right, and that precedent has been affirmed in many other cases, chiefly on reproductive rights and sexual conduct.
Stealing, on the other hand, is clearly an act of aggression, i.e. an initiation of force.
No, robbery is. Stealing is often done by stealth, without any aggression whatsoever. Consider the mugger vs. the pick-pocket. They may accomplish the same ends, but only one does so by aggression.
Just what kind of a message are we trying to get across here?
That the things we are forbidden to do are often things that some must do to survive, while others have no reason to do them at all. So laws are more easily abided by the privileged.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think modifying rice to produce certain milk nutrients will help. If your allergic to something it doesn't matter what the medium, your still allergic.
But there don't seem to be any folks allergic to the proteins they're producing. Allergies are often to very specific proteins, not all parts of the organism. Even environmental allergies are like this; some people are allergic to cat fur and can therefore abide hairless cats, while others are allergic to cat dander, and will react to any cat... but less so to ones that are frequently bathed or treated with an anti-allergy solution.
in the case of the GM rice, it would be grown on islands which have no current production of rice.
Islands? Ok, we do have two islands in Los Angeles County (one of the California counties listed as locations where this rice can be grown) but I don't think that they restricted the growers to Catalina...
You probably misread something in the article. They said that the permission extends only to *counties* where rice is not currently grown... San Luis Obispo, Kern, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, San Diego and Imperial. Links included so that you can see that many of these counties are landlocked, and as such, have no islands. They also share borders with several unnamed counties, though as long as we can get rice pollen to respect those borders, this should not be an issue.
On a much more practical note: how exactly are they going to extract the drugs from the rice? Would the rice be sold with the drugs inside and then cooked prior to ingestion? Or would they be steamed and the resulting water ingested?
In this case, it would seem they'd have to extract the drugs first, then add them to other products... i.e. infant formula. Infants generally don't start munching on rice until they're at least four to six months old, which is kind of late to start them on this stuff.
What I wonder is, what do they do with the rice after the drugs are extracted? Do they plan to sell it as food? Use it as mulch? dump it in the river?
it makes far more sense to simply make sure babies get real, complete breast milk, and anything that might be seen to undermine that (hello, Nestle) is going to garner negative press.
There are cases where breast milk is not an option:
- Some mothers cannot produce milk at all or cannot produce sufficient milk to feed their baby.
- A mother who has to take certain drugs for her own health and well-being may not be able to breastfeed because of the risks those drugs present to the baby.
- Sometimes mom isn't available to breastfeed at all. Women still do occasionally die in childbirth, or more commonly, give their baby up for adoption at birth.
- Newborns can have several different disorders that make all milk products, including those from mom, anywhere from very uncomfortable to severely damaging to them. Phenylketonuria, severe lactose intolerance, etc.
So, for several reasons, it's a good idea to improve infant formula as much as possible. We'll probably never be able to get it as good as breast milk (since mom's body can adapt the formulation to environmental factors, such as passing on antibodies to whatever cold is going around), but it's not necessarily a bad idea.
Interesting that these can also serve as food preservatives, though. You may very well be right about the "true" motivations for this product.
Generally, I agree with you, but to nitpick...
;-)
If one needs drugs, they should take a pill. Leave the drugs out of the food supply for those of us who don't want it them in our food.
This isn't about fortifying food crops. It's about using food crops to produce pharmaceuticals. Chances are, this rice would not enter the food supply at all... it would be processed to extract the drugs, and then probably disposed of in some manner.
Of course, the issues of cross-pollination or unforseen effects on the environment are still present. But it's important to get the facts right.
700 Acres per farm is a LOT. Constructing a building that large would not be very cost-effective.
Well, let's see...
Option 1: build smaller farms for pharmaceutical rice-growing.
Option 2: decide that maybe this is *not* a cheaper way to produce drugs after all, when you take environmental risks and containment into account.
It's not appropriate to let companies externalize environmental costs that are this severe. If this type of production cannot be done in a manner that is both cost-effective and minimizes environmental risks, then it probably shouldn't be done at all. On the other hand, it seems like it might *still* be cheaper to grow pharmarice indoors 30 acres at a time than to produce these drugs in a lab, so there you go.
There are certain situations where technology is the wrong answer and to a great extent, agriculture is one of those situations.
Ironic that this is a response to suggestions about controlling new technologies being introduced in agriculture...
If your statement is true, then should we really be debating how to handle GE crops at all?
Well, if genetically enhanced products are going to have a risk, we are going to have to find a way around it - the solution would not be to ban GE as a whole, right?
Right. But open-air cultivation of GE crops probably *should* be banned until we better understand the risks and are in a better position to meet them.
Think about it... greenhouse production is more expensive than open-air production. BUT, generally speaking, the reason to genetically modify crops is because they are more profitable (in this case, it's cheaper for them to grow proteins in rice than to make them in a lab). So, it's perfectly appropriate to require them to assume costs of keeping their produce contained. It's up to the company to then decide whether it's still more profitable this way.
Ban GE crops? Nah. But require them to be grown in a concrete liner, under an airtight enclosure with a specified filtration system? Why not?
If it "should probably read" that, why don't you just change it?
Think of it as a changelog.
Aren't public services (such as policing and justice) made to serve the public?
Ideally, yes.
First, you have to understand that us Americans aren't much for "public services." We tend to view anything that can be described as a public service as something that makes it easier for people to be poor, and by implication, lazy.
Next, once you get to public services that most people do feel are worthwhile (such as policing), there's still an idea that they serve the "Taxpayer." The Taxpayer is not someone who gets arrested. Those are Criminals. If you pay enough taxes (i.e. at least 12% of your income goes to income taxes, and you own property) the police are there to protect you from the rest of the world.
In many parts of a city like Los Angeles, the residents generally understand that authority in any form is there to protect the rest of the world from them. Cops do not patrol South LA to keep the residents there safe. They do it to catch the "bad guys," who usually are bad because they went somewhere else and did something nefarious, not because they're raising a ruckus right there where people live.
But I wouldn't say the US, as a whole, is against gluttony or religious fanaticism (as long as it's the "right" religion).
;-)
Then why do we have terms like zealot, fanatic, cultist, and the ever-applicable [insert belief] freak... or fatso, fatass, blubberbutt, etc., all of which have definite negative connotations?
Yet aside from "greedy," I'm hard-pressed to think of an insulting term for someone who makes "too much" money. Most insults that have to do with money are not about how much you make, but how willing you are to spend it... miser, tightwad, etc. And, as the movie Wall Street taught us, "greed is good."
It is very a very interesting feature of American culture that making money is tantamount to our state religion. The right to profit is sacred. Heck, even look at our drug laws... it's a bigger crime to sell crack than powder cocaine, and guess which is more profitable?
I mean, it's one thing to sit outside of hydroponics stores and then watch those people to see if they have unexplained income (though I personally think that's a waste of law enforcement's time as well), it's a completely different thing to search every house that uses more electricity than the neighbors.
:-/
Wow... I guess we were lucky a few year's back, then.
A roommate who grew up in Hawaii (where, apparently, people live and die by the air conditioner) decided that, since the daily high temperature had topped 80 degrees, it was time to close all the doors and windows and run the aircon 24/7. This caused our electric bill to spike massively. Los Angeles Department of Water and Power automatically flags such sudden changes for further investigation, so that they don't send a shocking bill as a result of a broken meter or something. Unfortunately, our case got lost somewhere between being flagged and being investigated, so it was four months that we got no bills at all... and then someone finally came to our door to explain the situation with some embarrassment.
At the time, I found their policy to be quite enlightened. Now, I wonder if the LAPD has since usurped this process.
Yeah, sue the bastards! Someone did something to you? Sue them! Make them pay! Who cares what happened, just sue them into the ground.
WTF are you talking about? How do you know his "erratic" behavior wasn't something a little more serious than celebrity impersonations? Maybe he urinated on a slot machine, or accosted an old lady or somethig.
Sue first and ask questions later? How American...
Um, sue the cops for holding the guy for two days instead of using the info he had on him to get him back to his family, actually.
Sure, take him into custody if he seems to be a threat. But as soon as you've got him *out* of that situation, you then get the story... before you plaster his contact info all over your daily email to the hungry lawyer population.
The problem is that they decided to "book first and ask questions later." Sometimes a lawsuit is the *only* way to ask the right questions (i.e. you can't get the answers without a subpoena).
Beat cops don't have the time or training to do a lot more than look at the current situation and quickly decide if they are going to remove someone. In a casino I bet it is an easy/quick decision. Then when he is no longer a threat to himself or anyone else, you have time to decide what to do.
Right.
The beat cop's job is to remove the danger. If the guy seems dangerous (to himself or to others) you get him out of there and take him to the station.
The very next step is to find out what happened. This is when they *should have* found his medical ID and contact info, and then called his parents. This is not, apparently, what they did. As far as we can tell, he was booked (at which point his arrest becomes public record), then maybe given tests for a drug, and sometime in the next 48 hours it was determined that the right place for him was a mental hospital, not a cell. After that, his parents were finally contacted.
You can't necessarily fault street cops for not knowing how to handle every possible situation perfectly. You *can* fault procedures and the cops responsible for implementing them if they lead to a guy sitting in a holding cell for two days when the info they needed to straighten out the issue was available. You can definitely fault policies that lead to arrest information being made public before the guy's wallet gets a look-see.
There is nothing wrong with what these lawyers are doing, it is no more or less than anyone with a skill to sell would do if they wanted to eat well and have nice shoes.
So, if you're arrested on suspicion of illicit drug use (but its found that there's another explanation for your odd behavior), you don't have a problem with receiving mail that has "Experts in Drug Charges" emblazoned on the envelope?
I live in a 40-unit apartment building. Folks see my mail all the time when I'm pulling it out of my box. Sometimes one of my neighbors accidentally gets my mail or vice versa. Do I want them thinking I'm their new hookup? Or that they better keep their children away from me because I'm up to no good?
Maybe there isn't anything wrong with advertising their services to their target market, but there's certainly something wrong with a lack of discretion in such matters.
it sounds like the state in question (california was it?) is selling this information
Actually, SpeedingTicket.net is based in North Carolina, and has recently expanded to Florida, New Jersey, Washington, Oregon, South Carolina, Georgia, Michigan and Oklahoma. I can see how confusing it would be; that information was in the paragraphs preceeding and directly after the one you quoted.
I think that people want to see manned space missions because, frankly, lots of folks would like to escape this planet someday. And someone has to go first, to prove it can be done.
Perhaps it's not terribly important for the science of it, but for those who would like to *live* on Mars in 50 years or so, it's a high priority to land some actual humans there.
No, no, no. Dupes are never *identical*, which means they are actually a sign of alternate universes bleeding into each other, where a particular story is posted on one day by one person, and the next day slightly differently by someone else.
Traditionally in Soviet Union everyone worked 6 day per week, and this calendar only shows the working days.
;-)
Funny how they circled a day in January that wasn't on the calendar, then...
I think the poster who suggested that Sunday was in a different color ink that has since faded probably has the right of it.
Not to mention that this person obviously doesn't now what slashdot is... so duh.. yeah.. she's new here. And somehow that guy got modded funny for pointing out the obvious.
;-)
Perhaps we're laughing *at* him, not *with* him.
I take it you're not a parent. Find one who wouldn't be concerned that we offered filter free, non-monitored use of the internet.
I'm very concerned that you DO offer non-monitored use of the internet.
You must be doing this, or you wouldn't need to have a computer system watching for buzzwords to let you know when to *start* monitoring.
Whatever happened to having a teacher or aide walk around the room, looking at what students are doing? A human who can ask questions, hear explanations, and interpret language? Oh, right. They're too expensive to waste on watching our children. We'll save them for when a computer tells us that a child *actually* needs watching.
I wonder how many cases that you catch a kid doing something "wrong" could have been avoided if there'd been a person they could ask about something...
Let's just say, you can take all kinds of responsibility for your kids and still miss things they hide from you.
So how do you get into a situation where your kids are hiding dangerous things from you?
More to the point, how do you *avoid* getting into that situation?
Kids should be able to trust their parents to be looking out for their best interests. If a kid wants to hide something from mom or dad, it's probably because they *know* it's wrong... in a healthy relationship. If they're hiding something and don't believe it's wrong, it's because they mistrust their parents' judgment or morality. This can occur because they personally witness their parents engaging in a double-standard, hypocritical behavior, or just flat-out breaking their own rules, but sometimes it's simply because parents make rules that are unreasonable and don't give their kids the resources to follow them (assuming it would be possible).
A good parent knows what's going on in their kid's life, in large part because the kid tells them. If you tell your teenager they're not allowed to date, that won't keep them from dating... it will keep you from knowing who they are dating. So when your 14-year-old college-junior prodigy is off losing her virginity to a 31-year-old jazz musician, you think she's at her friend's house for a slumber party... isn't that cute? (No, I didn't make that up off the top of my head... that was a good friend of mine.)
Actually, I tried it myself...
;-) (Or in hopes that they were... /shrug)
And then you have to explain the Rocky Horror Picture Show to them... fortunately, that's one my kids will probably learn about very young (at Alumni Night).
Had to look at those pictures carefully to make sure none of the Columbias were me
Privacy is not a constitutional right.
Well, it wasn't, until the Supreme Court said it was. Dammit, now I have to find my notes from "Law and the Quality of Urban Life," to find the case... though it may be Mapp v. Ohio (1961). That's the earliest one I can find.
But, since some case the SC decided, privacy has most definitely been a constitutional right, and that precedent has been affirmed in many other cases, chiefly on reproductive rights and sexual conduct.
Stealing, on the other hand, is clearly an act of aggression, i.e. an initiation of force.
No, robbery is. Stealing is often done by stealth, without any aggression whatsoever. Consider the mugger vs. the pick-pocket. They may accomplish the same ends, but only one does so by aggression.
Just what kind of a message are we trying to get across here?
That the things we are forbidden to do are often things that some must do to survive, while others have no reason to do them at all. So laws are more easily abided by the privileged.