The problem is, back before morphiates were made illegal there was this syrup called laudanum that you rubbed on the gums of a baby to stop it complaining about teething. Lots of kids got addicted before they could even talk.
SOME regulation is needed. The problem is how to have regulations that cause less harm than the harm they're actually (not ostensibly) preventing.
For a start, I'm all in favor of total legalization with only a couple of provisos: 1) Everything needs to be clearly labeled so that people know what they are buying. (This includes warnings, but not overkill warnings such as those that currently come with prescription drugs.) 2) No advertising.
The problem with this is that drugs aren't a thing, they're a pretty smooth gradient along several axes, some of which are independent of each other. Examples to help you think: Coffee, cigarettes, joints, hash, methdone, heroin, sugar, flour, chocolate, cocaine, Yerba Matte, Yohimbe, Asprin, Psilocibin, steak, morphine, snuff, lsd, DMA, Guiness, DMT, ecstasy, PCP, roast turkey, ibuprofen. Those are all drugs. Some are also foods, but that doesn't keep them from being drugs. I'd have included niacin, but nobody likes the effect, which sort of puts it in a separate category. The general category description is "mood altering substances".
Don't think that legalization solves all problems. It's a lesser evil. And advertising should be forbidden, but that's a sticky problem, as there's a smooth gradient between cocaine and chocolate. And I'm not sure WHERE sugar fits in. Or flour.
Clearly the advertising of tobacco is a major part of the tobacco problem. Now figure out how to ban it without doing more harm than you prevent.
The best answer I have is the one the dairy companies used against margarine back in the 1940's and early 50's. Don't allow them to be an ingredient. You can buy the drugs, but if you want to make brownies, you've got to bake them yourself. But I think the supreme court decided that was unconstitutional, and they had to allow the color to be mixed into the margarine before it was sold. And since corporations are people, they have the right to free speech, and since money == free speech, they have the right to pay people to promote their stuff. So how do you ban advertising?
That's basically the reason I've been against legalization. I think that possession should come with a 5 minute sentence, no fine, and no permanent record. That way it's legal to continue to forbid advertising the stuff.
Not standardized, but labelled. Alcohol comes in various proofs, not at a standard proof. But it's labelled. This is reasonable.
As for safety...I don't think a drug being dangerous (to the user) is reason to forbid its sale. It might be reason to forbid it being an ingredient in something else, I'd need to think about that for awhile. But the danger needs to be clearly stated on the label.
What I'm not sure about at all is which drugs one should be allowed to advertise. I'm not sure that ANY should, but where do you draw the line? There isn't a reasonable sharp distinction. And experts rate tobacco as harder to quit than either alcohol or heroin, but I'm not sure that's true. Nobody has had a chance to compare legal heroin withdrawal with tobacco withdrawal, and the illegal heroin is nearly guaranteed to be impure.
Actually, I'm in favor of much less regulation than that. MUCH less. My feeling is that if someone wants to kill themselves with an overdose of morphiates, that should be their right. Just that it shouldn't happen by accident. So I am strongly in favor of simple, explicit, and informative packaging requirements. Sort of like a cross between tobacco and liquor, with an extra prohibition on advertising.
Now I will grant that some states require you to buy alcohol at the stat dispensary, but that's not on my agenda.
P.S.: I think it should also be legal to grow white poppies and marijuana for commercial distribution, as well as for home use. Just not to advertise it. And commercial sale to end users should require that informative packaging labeling. Which would drive up the cost a bit for small scale commercial operations. But the intent is not to drive up the cost, but rather to ensure purity of the merchandise, and that people can (if they read) find out what they're buying.
I've never been sure about the truth of that argument. OTOH, it seems to be true about cocaine addiction. Many cocaine addicts start out quite wealthy, and some continue to be so, but many appeat not to. OTOH, some start out as already failures. Many never seem to get violent, but certainly some do.
Still, if cocaine were cheap enough, perhaps people would kill themselves before they begain harming others. And banning it causes so many additional problems that I think legalizing it is the lesser evil. But it should certainly be illegal to advertise it.
One drug that I think probably *should* be illegal is PCP. OTOH, I doubt that having it illegal is a big problem. Few people appear to be attracted to it. The reason that I think it probably should be illegal is that reports are that it causes people to become excessively violent without warning. (I.e., I don' t think it should be illegal to protect the users against themselves, but rather to protect bystanders.)
All that said, even if drugs were legalized that wouldn't solve the problem, it would merely mean that the main suffers would be the people who were addicts, not everyone else. Even then, if there were purity requirements, i.e. protection against contaminants, then the drugs would probably be not only cheaper, but less harmful. However it's definitely important to realize that "less harmful" doesn't mean "harmless". If you want to understand what removing legalization would result in, I recommend that you read "Diary of a Drug Fiend" by Aliestar Crowley. This is apparently a pretty accurate reportage by someone who was quite intelligent, if a bit unconventional ("Wickedest man in the World" -- John Bull).
Actually, many drugs are bad. But not as bad as the results on making them illegal. OTOH, I do think it should continue to be illegal to advertise them. Possibly except to doctors, but I'm not even sure about that exception.
The thing, is, where do you draw the line? Coffee? Tea? Sugar? Flour? (I could have gone in the other direction too, but the point is there's a gradation. There aren't any sharp boundaries.)
FWIW, I've seen reviews of research that said that marijuana was dangerous to most people under that age of 23 or 24. Something about a brain process that needed to complete, involving the pruning of neurons.
No. Convergent evolution deals with appearance or function, not with genetics, details of implementation, etc.
The classic example of convergent evolution is the icthyosaur and the dolphin. Both have LOTS of similarities in form and shape. The details of their function are different, but you need to look fairly closlely to see that. E.g. the Icthyosaur had huge eyes where the dolphin has sonar. The two animals have the axis of their tails at right angles to each other, etc. But you can trace the axis of the dolphin's tail back to the galloping gait of it's terrestrial ancestor, while the icthyosaur had a side to side movement, similar to that of a fish, because it's ancestor didn't gallop, but had a much more lizardish gait (and thus was more similar to a fish).
Basically what convergent evolution tells us is that function follows form, and vice versa.
What would be really interesting is if they could show that the tree climbing lizards on the various islands had adapted to climbing trees by activating the same genes. I don't expect that, but if it could be shown it would be evidence for a higher order of evolution, sometimes called "the evolution of evolveability". Nobody has yet shown that it exists, but it hasn't been proven theoretically impossible.
That's only the case when there are a limited number of ways to adapt successfully to a changed condition. What this seems to show is that there are is not a limited number of ways, at least a preferred number of ways. Which means that the mutations necessary to adapt to them don't occur at random.
There are a couple of ways this could be done, but the reasoning isn't straightforwards. OTOH, if you instead can say "Well, the last time this situation occurred, that was the response", and make a correct prediction based on that, then you don't need the underlying reasoning to make it work. Historical observation suffices.
Don't worry, you're just dealing with the part that hasn't yet been automated. Haven't you noticed the increasing automation of the calls? At the current rate I expect them to start trying to get your credit card number before you reach a person within the next two years.
My feeling is that anything beyond algebra is unnecessary for programmers (in general) EXCEPT logic. I think every programmer should have two or three semesters, or even years, of logic. Programming languages just don't cover quite the same area, and usually skimp badly on logic. (I will agree, however, that theoretically the logic could be taught within the context of programming, except for a tiny bit that should deal with reasoning in unbounded contexts, i.e., infinitesimals, infinities, omega-completeness, etc. and that could be covered within a single quarter. It's just that programming classes don't bother to teach logic, because they assume that you got it elsewhere.)
There *is* evidence to support it, though the evidence that I know of is not compelling.
What I'm remembering is a report of a study of several, or at least one, artificial sweetener that caused one to not be able to tell how many calories that one had eaten. It seemed that there was a learning estimate of how much one had eaten when things were flavored with sugar, but when the artificial sweetener was used there was learning that a sweet taste didn't mean caloric burden. And the result was increased eating.
I only saw this reported once, over a decade ago now, I think. So I'm a bit vague on the details, and can't offer a link. But that's *some* evidence. OTOH, it definitely didn't include all possible artificial sweeteners, and may only have tested one or two.
There's multiple groups involved here. Some researchers are trying to find cures. Pharma companies are much more interested in treatments. If their competion has a treatment for a disease, then they are interested in a cure, also.
There are a lot of perverse incentives in the drug business as currently organized, and the Pharma companies are trying to maximize their profits under the existing rules, which means they have a lot of perverse incentives institutionalized. You don't need a conspiracy, you just need to understand how systems work. To put it in other terms...
Have you ever had to maintian code on a deadline that severl other people have also had to maintain under the same conditions? You may all have had the best of intentions, but the code will be a nightmare. And it gets worse if different people had different coding styles. (One maintainer I can think of liked to take common C sub-expressions and create macros of them with "mnemonic" names that he used instead of the standard language. It was fast for him...but nobody else.)
Complex systems don't need malicious conspiracies to go off the track in crazy ways. Unfortunately, we've also got a few actual conspiracies (only some of which are criminal). And the results of their actions are also being maintained by well intentioned people just trying to do their job as best they can.
Looking at it from the outside we can say it's maliciously designed chaos, or that it's a conspiracy. What we have a hard time understanding is that the chaos wasn't intentional. Sometimes the parts run by the conspiracy are the sanest part of the system. What it *is* is a complex system that has evolved to survive in an environment that fosters certain kinds of actions, whether any participant is aware that those actions are happening or not.
And one result of that is that vaccinations don't get significant research funding. This isn't due to a conspiracy, it's a bunch of individuals each acting in their own perceived self interest in a complex environment. They there are cases where there apparently *is* a conspiracy. E.g., Cohchicine was taken off the market as a generic drug and reauthorized as a trademarked drug. I'm willing to believe that that was due to a criminal conspiracy. I'm not willing to attempt to prove it, because other explanations are possible, if quite unlikely.
Be sure to avoid the Atkins diet. I'm not sure that was what drove me to pre-diabetic, but there's circumstantial evidence that it was involved. And you don't need that risk.
You are overgeneralizing. Some people clearly enjoy exercising, and they do it. Others can force themselves to do it, and they tend to prefer not to think about it, much less talk about it, when they're not doing it.
At one age I was in the first group, but for the last several decdes I have been in the second group. Unfortunately, as I've aged pain during exercise has been added to the "I just don't like it", which has made it more difficult to continue. I can still usually coerce myself into an hour of exercise a day, but only with external support (i.e., my wife encouraging me). But I don't like it at all, even though most days I don't really dislike it except for the pain.
That's OK, if US citizens were involved he'd waffle his way around it. This is high level politics, individual people aren't of much concern.
An interesting question is "Is this proper?". If I trusted the government to have the best interests of the citizens as their goal, then I'd say yes. Unfortunately...
Healthy food tastes fine (to me). Unfortunately it tastes too fine. And while some people start to like exercise, I don't. This is made worse because I have various joint problems that make (many) exercises not only unpleasant, but actively painful.
I definitely need to lose weight, but the only diets that have had any results have left me unhappy and depressed all the time. Except Atkins, which was not only expensive, but which raised my triglycerides. Before the Atkins(ish) diet, I needed to lose weight, but had no signs of diabetes. Now I'm pre-diabetic, even though I almost never eat either sugar or refined carbohydrates (including potatoes as refined carbs). And I don't even eat that many whole grains. It's largely beans and vegetables, with some meat (chicken or fish).
Some people start liking exercises after they do them for awhile. The talk about feeling a glow, etc. I don't experience that, and didn't even 50 years ago in high school. I did before I was 12, though, and I don't know when or why I stopped feeling it. But now if I walk too long, my knees start telling me to think about replacement surgery. (I have. Not a good idea. They need to be a lot worse than they are before it would be reasonable...O, and I should lose weight to make the surgery safer.) My ankles aren't happy either (I've a few bone spurs). Etc.
I should probably bite the bullet and go total vegetarian (including no eggs and no cheese). Most vegetarians are rather thin. So far, however, I haven't got the conviction to stick to it, and I'd need to convince my wife.
Every government is the enemy of human rights and liberties.
Yes, that's true. But governments aren't the only enemies of human rights and liberties. And frequently governments are less vile enemies and act to keep those others in check. The problem in the US is that those other enemies of human rights and liberties have purchased the government. I don't think this is true everywhere. There are places where the government itself is the major enemy. There also are, or were, places where there is a kind of balance.
Sorry, but there are points of view (currently unpopular) from which genocide is considered virtuous. The Romans would have had no problem with it, if they didn't need the slave labor. (But consider what they did to Carthage. The only work they preserved was a treatise on how to control slaves.)
It's difficult to come up with a moral code that is both absolute, and that preserves the values we consider proper. E.g., I generally consider lying a immoral action, but there are circumstances where I would consider a lie the lesser evil. You can't win this one by an appeal to natural law, either, because chimpanzees wage intentional war on other, weaker, groups of chimpanzees. Also some entire species of ant have evolved specifically to operate as slavers. You've got to win this one by an appeal to a "higher morality", which is damnably difficult to pin down as anything more than "This is what I feel is right." (or possibly "This is what god told me to do.").
Life is not a Hollywood move, but there are good guys and bad guys. Not many of either, most are somewhere in between, and there are more good guys than bad guys, but one bad guy can do more damage than 100 good guys can repair. And the US feds seem to prefer to hire and promote badish guys...the worse, the stronger the preference.
You are correct that the Constitution, as originally interpreted, reserved to the individual states the right to decide that they had additional rights. Do, however, note that many states already has constitutions graranteeing at least some of the rights enumerated in the "Bill of Rights", as that "Bill of Rights" was largely copied from the constitution of the state of Virginia. Also note that yet again, in the Bill of Rights it is explicitly stated that those powers not explicitly enumerted in the Constitution were reserved to the states or the people.
You are right that the Constitution didn't give much power over the states to the Federal government, and didn't prohibit the individual states from denying particular rights to their citizenry. But it wasn't as state constitution, it was the Federal Constitution, so that is a statement that the powers of the federal government were limited. State constitutions were the means chosen for limiting the powers of the state governments.
NONE of this justifies the obscene expansion of power that twisted interpretations of the US Constitution have saddled us with. There needs to be a constitutional amendment explicitly granting the right to recall any federal official holding any office whatsoever, and without requiring that the official have been originally elected. And it needs to be fairly easy to get that recall petition started, and while one should be able to remove ones name from beinf signatory, it should be difficult to get the petition removed short of a general vote. And a recall should prohibit further participation in government at the federal level, whether as a contractor, an administrator, a legislator, or a technical specialist, or any other position not currently mentioned except that they should not be prevented from receiving social security, health insurance, or general assistance via a program generally available to the populace.
I agree that frequent standardized tests are poison, but a yearly test for assessment is both reasonable and probably necessary.
Mind you, what I'm advocating isn't anything like the current government policy, which I agree with you is poison. It's more like things were where I lived in 1970. I suspect that the tests were mandated by the state rather than by the feds, and they weren't difficult (at least for me). And nobody even considered "teaching to the test".
Considering that most of the casualties appear to be civilians, I'm not sure that there's any penalty for wearing a uniform...except that it costs extra money. So that logic fails to impress me. An artillery shell doesn't see the clothing of its target. and drones don't appear to either given the number of funerals that they've targeted. Unless, of course, they are intentionally targeting civilians because they are "soft targets".
In either case, the argument for not expanding the coverage fails, because civilians don't HAVE any extra advantage.
Balancing would be very difficult, but why bother. You just set things up so that your combined ship has a mass of 1 microgram. This means you MUST use incoming matter as your reaction mass, though...unless your proposed push-me-pull-ya drive would actually work that way. I have a hard time believing that, even though the equations WERE good enough for Dr. Forward to publish a story based around it. (He *did* assume that when negative mass contacted positive mass they both evaporated...so that's probably the right way to assume things would work out, though I wonder about electric charge, magentic fields, rotary inertia, etc.)
FWIW, I believe that General Relativity is based on the idea that those aren't really two distinct things, but rather the two "ideas" of what mass is are two different ways of talking about the same basic reality. If you want to really consider them as separate things that just happen to be equal, then I think you need to replace General Relativity with something else...and there don't appear to be any good candidates.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, back before morphiates were made illegal there was this syrup called laudanum that you rubbed on the gums of a baby to stop it complaining about teething. Lots of kids got addicted before they could even talk.
SOME regulation is needed. The problem is how to have regulations that cause less harm than the harm they're actually (not ostensibly) preventing.
For a start, I'm all in favor of total legalization with only a couple of provisos:
1) Everything needs to be clearly labeled so that people know what they are buying. (This includes warnings, but not overkill warnings such as those that currently come with prescription drugs.)
2) No advertising.
The problem with this is that drugs aren't a thing, they're a pretty smooth gradient along several axes, some of which are independent of each other. Examples to help you think:
Coffee, cigarettes, joints, hash, methdone, heroin, sugar, flour, chocolate, cocaine, Yerba Matte, Yohimbe, Asprin, Psilocibin, steak, morphine, snuff, lsd, DMA, Guiness, DMT, ecstasy, PCP, roast turkey, ibuprofen.
Those are all drugs. Some are also foods, but that doesn't keep them from being drugs. I'd have included niacin, but nobody likes the effect, which sort of puts it in a separate category. The general category description is "mood altering substances".
Don't think that legalization solves all problems. It's a lesser evil. And advertising should be forbidden, but that's a sticky problem, as there's a smooth gradient between cocaine and chocolate. And I'm not sure WHERE sugar fits in. Or flour.
Clearly the advertising of tobacco is a major part of the tobacco problem. Now figure out how to ban it without doing more harm than you prevent.
The best answer I have is the one the dairy companies used against margarine back in the 1940's and early 50's. Don't allow them to be an ingredient. You can buy the drugs, but if you want to make brownies, you've got to bake them yourself. But I think the supreme court decided that was unconstitutional, and they had to allow the color to be mixed into the margarine before it was sold. And since corporations are people, they have the right to free speech, and since money == free speech, they have the right to pay people to promote their stuff. So how do you ban advertising?
That's basically the reason I've been against legalization. I think that possession should come with a 5 minute sentence, no fine, and no permanent record. That way it's legal to continue to forbid advertising the stuff.
Not standardized, but labelled. Alcohol comes in various proofs, not at a standard proof. But it's labelled. This is reasonable.
As for safety...I don't think a drug being dangerous (to the user) is reason to forbid its sale. It might be reason to forbid it being an ingredient in something else, I'd need to think about that for awhile. But the danger needs to be clearly stated on the label.
What I'm not sure about at all is which drugs one should be allowed to advertise. I'm not sure that ANY should, but where do you draw the line? There isn't a reasonable sharp distinction. And experts rate tobacco as harder to quit than either alcohol or heroin, but I'm not sure that's true. Nobody has had a chance to compare legal heroin withdrawal with tobacco withdrawal, and the illegal heroin is nearly guaranteed to be impure.
Actually, I'm in favor of much less regulation than that. MUCH less. My feeling is that if someone wants to kill themselves with an overdose of morphiates, that should be their right. Just that it shouldn't happen by accident. So I am strongly in favor of simple, explicit, and informative packaging requirements. Sort of like a cross between tobacco and liquor, with an extra prohibition on advertising.
Now I will grant that some states require you to buy alcohol at the stat dispensary, but that's not on my agenda.
P.S.: I think it should also be legal to grow white poppies and marijuana for commercial distribution, as well as for home use. Just not to advertise it. And commercial sale to end users should require that informative packaging labeling. Which would drive up the cost a bit for small scale commercial operations. But the intent is not to drive up the cost, but rather to ensure purity of the merchandise, and that people can (if they read) find out what they're buying.
I've never been sure about the truth of that argument. OTOH, it seems to be true about cocaine addiction. Many cocaine addicts start out quite wealthy, and some continue to be so, but many appeat not to. OTOH, some start out as already failures. Many never seem to get violent, but certainly some do.
Still, if cocaine were cheap enough, perhaps people would kill themselves before they begain harming others. And banning it causes so many additional problems that I think legalizing it is the lesser evil. But it should certainly be illegal to advertise it.
One drug that I think probably *should* be illegal is PCP. OTOH, I doubt that having it illegal is a big problem. Few people appear to be attracted to it. The reason that I think it probably should be illegal is that reports are that it causes people to become excessively violent without warning. (I.e., I don' t think it should be illegal to protect the users against themselves, but rather to protect bystanders.)
All that said, even if drugs were legalized that wouldn't solve the problem, it would merely mean that the main suffers would be the people who were addicts, not everyone else. Even then, if there were purity requirements, i.e. protection against contaminants, then the drugs would probably be not only cheaper, but less harmful. However it's definitely important to realize that "less harmful" doesn't mean "harmless". If you want to understand what removing legalization would result in, I recommend that you read "Diary of a Drug Fiend" by Aliestar Crowley. This is apparently a pretty accurate reportage by someone who was quite intelligent, if a bit unconventional ("Wickedest man in the World" -- John Bull).
Actually, many drugs are bad. But not as bad as the results on making them illegal. OTOH, I do think it should continue to be illegal to advertise them. Possibly except to doctors, but I'm not even sure about that exception.
The thing, is, where do you draw the line? Coffee? Tea? Sugar? Flour? (I could have gone in the other direction too, but the point is there's a gradation. There aren't any sharp boundaries.)
FWIW, I've seen reviews of research that said that marijuana was dangerous to most people under that age of 23 or 24. Something about a brain process that needed to complete, involving the pruning of neurons.
No. Convergent evolution deals with appearance or function, not with genetics, details of implementation, etc.
The classic example of convergent evolution is the icthyosaur and the dolphin. Both have LOTS of similarities in form and shape. The details of their function are different, but you need to look fairly closlely to see that. E.g. the Icthyosaur had huge eyes where the dolphin has sonar. The two animals have the axis of their tails at right angles to each other, etc. But you can trace the axis of the dolphin's tail back to the galloping gait of it's terrestrial ancestor, while the icthyosaur had a side to side movement, similar to that of a fish, because it's ancestor didn't gallop, but had a much more lizardish gait (and thus was more similar to a fish).
Basically what convergent evolution tells us is that function follows form, and vice versa.
What would be really interesting is if they could show that the tree climbing lizards on the various islands had adapted to climbing trees by activating the same genes. I don't expect that, but if it could be shown it would be evidence for a higher order of evolution, sometimes called "the evolution of evolveability". Nobody has yet shown that it exists, but it hasn't been proven theoretically impossible.
That's only the case when there are a limited number of ways to adapt successfully to a changed condition. What this seems to show is that there are is not a limited number of ways, at least a preferred number of ways. Which means that the mutations necessary to adapt to them don't occur at random.
There are a couple of ways this could be done, but the reasoning isn't straightforwards. OTOH, if you instead can say "Well, the last time this situation occurred, that was the response", and make a correct prediction based on that, then you don't need the underlying reasoning to make it work. Historical observation suffices.
Don't worry, you're just dealing with the part that hasn't yet been automated. Haven't you noticed the increasing automation of the calls? At the current rate I expect them to start trying to get your credit card number before you reach a person within the next two years.
My feeling is that anything beyond algebra is unnecessary for programmers (in general) EXCEPT logic. I think every programmer should have two or three semesters, or even years, of logic. Programming languages just don't cover quite the same area, and usually skimp badly on logic. (I will agree, however, that theoretically the logic could be taught within the context of programming, except for a tiny bit that should deal with reasoning in unbounded contexts, i.e., infinitesimals, infinities, omega-completeness, etc. and that could be covered within a single quarter. It's just that programming classes don't bother to teach logic, because they assume that you got it elsewhere.)
That's not what my doctor said. Do you have an authroitative link?
There *is* evidence to support it, though the evidence that I know of is not compelling.
What I'm remembering is a report of a study of several, or at least one, artificial sweetener that caused one to not be able to tell how many calories that one had eaten. It seemed that there was a learning estimate of how much one had eaten when things were flavored with sugar, but when the artificial sweetener was used there was learning that a sweet taste didn't mean caloric burden. And the result was increased eating.
I only saw this reported once, over a decade ago now, I think. So I'm a bit vague on the details, and can't offer a link. But that's *some* evidence. OTOH, it definitely didn't include all possible artificial sweeteners, and may only have tested one or two.
There's multiple groups involved here. Some researchers are trying to find cures. Pharma companies are much more interested in treatments. If their competion has a treatment for a disease, then they are interested in a cure, also.
There are a lot of perverse incentives in the drug business as currently organized, and the Pharma companies are trying to maximize their profits under the existing rules, which means they have a lot of perverse incentives institutionalized. You don't need a conspiracy, you just need to understand how systems work. To put it in other terms...
Have you ever had to maintian code on a deadline that severl other people have also had to maintain under the same conditions? You may all have had the best of intentions, but the code will be a nightmare. And it gets worse if different people had different coding styles. (One maintainer I can think of liked to take common C sub-expressions and create macros of them with "mnemonic" names that he used instead of the standard language. It was fast for him...but nobody else.)
Complex systems don't need malicious conspiracies to go off the track in crazy ways. Unfortunately, we've also got a few actual conspiracies (only some of which are criminal). And the results of their actions are also being maintained by well intentioned people just trying to do their job as best they can.
Looking at it from the outside we can say it's maliciously designed chaos, or that it's a conspiracy. What we have a hard time understanding is that the chaos wasn't intentional. Sometimes the parts run by the conspiracy are the sanest part of the system. What it *is* is a complex system that has evolved to survive in an environment that fosters certain kinds of actions, whether any participant is aware that those actions are happening or not.
And one result of that is that vaccinations don't get significant research funding. This isn't due to a conspiracy, it's a bunch of individuals each acting in their own perceived self interest in a complex environment. They there are cases where there apparently *is* a conspiracy. E.g., Cohchicine was taken off the market as a generic drug and reauthorized as a trademarked drug. I'm willing to believe that that was due to a criminal conspiracy. I'm not willing to attempt to prove it, because other explanations are possible, if quite unlikely.
Be sure to avoid the Atkins diet. I'm not sure that was what drove me to pre-diabetic, but there's circumstantial evidence that it was involved. And you don't need that risk.
You are overgeneralizing. Some people clearly enjoy exercising, and they do it. Others can force themselves to do it, and they tend to prefer not to think about it, much less talk about it, when they're not doing it.
At one age I was in the first group, but for the last several decdes I have been in the second group. Unfortunately, as I've aged pain during exercise has been added to the "I just don't like it", which has made it more difficult to continue. I can still usually coerce myself into an hour of exercise a day, but only with external support (i.e., my wife encouraging me). But I don't like it at all, even though most days I don't really dislike it except for the pain.
That's OK, if US citizens were involved he'd waffle his way around it. This is high level politics, individual people aren't of much concern.
An interesting question is "Is this proper?". If I trusted the government to have the best interests of the citizens as their goal, then I'd say yes. Unfortunately...
Healthy food tastes fine (to me). Unfortunately it tastes too fine. And while some people start to like exercise, I don't. This is made worse because I have various joint problems that make (many) exercises not only unpleasant, but actively painful.
I definitely need to lose weight, but the only diets that have had any results have left me unhappy and depressed all the time. Except Atkins, which was not only expensive, but which raised my triglycerides. Before the Atkins(ish) diet, I needed to lose weight, but had no signs of diabetes. Now I'm pre-diabetic, even though I almost never eat either sugar or refined carbohydrates (including potatoes as refined carbs). And I don't even eat that many whole grains. It's largely beans and vegetables, with some meat (chicken or fish).
Some people start liking exercises after they do them for awhile. The talk about feeling a glow, etc. I don't experience that, and didn't even 50 years ago in high school. I did before I was 12, though, and I don't know when or why I stopped feeling it. But now if I walk too long, my knees start telling me to think about replacement surgery. (I have. Not a good idea. They need to be a lot worse than they are before it would be reasonable...O, and I should lose weight to make the surgery safer.) My ankles aren't happy either (I've a few bone spurs). Etc.
I should probably bite the bullet and go total vegetarian (including no eggs and no cheese). Most vegetarians are rather thin. So far, however, I haven't got the conviction to stick to it, and I'd need to convince my wife.
Every government is the enemy of human rights and liberties.
Yes, that's true. But governments aren't the only enemies of human rights and liberties. And frequently governments are less vile enemies and act to keep those others in check. The problem in the US is that those other enemies of human rights and liberties have purchased the government. I don't think this is true everywhere. There are places where the government itself is the major enemy. There also are, or were, places where there is a kind of balance.
Sorry, but there are points of view (currently unpopular) from which genocide is considered virtuous. The Romans would have had no problem with it, if they didn't need the slave labor. (But consider what they did to Carthage. The only work they preserved was a treatise on how to control slaves.)
It's difficult to come up with a moral code that is both absolute, and that preserves the values we consider proper. E.g., I generally consider lying a immoral action, but there are circumstances where I would consider a lie the lesser evil. You can't win this one by an appeal to natural law, either, because chimpanzees wage intentional war on other, weaker, groups of chimpanzees. Also some entire species of ant have evolved specifically to operate as slavers. You've got to win this one by an appeal to a "higher morality", which is damnably difficult to pin down as anything more than "This is what I feel is right." (or possibly "This is what god told me to do.").
Life is not a Hollywood move, but there are good guys and bad guys. Not many of either, most are somewhere in between, and there are more good guys than bad guys, but one bad guy can do more damage than 100 good guys can repair. And the US feds seem to prefer to hire and promote badish guys...the worse, the stronger the preference.
You are correct that the Constitution, as originally interpreted, reserved to the individual states the right to decide that they had additional rights. Do, however, note that many states already has constitutions graranteeing at least some of the rights enumerated in the "Bill of Rights", as that "Bill of Rights" was largely copied from the constitution of the state of Virginia. Also note that yet again, in the Bill of Rights it is explicitly stated that those powers not explicitly enumerted in the Constitution were reserved to the states or the people.
You are right that the Constitution didn't give much power over the states to the Federal government, and didn't prohibit the individual states from denying particular rights to their citizenry. But it wasn't as state constitution, it was the Federal Constitution, so that is a statement that the powers of the federal government were limited. State constitutions were the means chosen for limiting the powers of the state governments.
NONE of this justifies the obscene expansion of power that twisted interpretations of the US Constitution have saddled us with. There needs to be a constitutional amendment explicitly granting the right to recall any federal official holding any office whatsoever, and without requiring that the official have been originally elected. And it needs to be fairly easy to get that recall petition started, and while one should be able to remove ones name from beinf signatory, it should be difficult to get the petition removed short of a general vote. And a recall should prohibit further participation in government at the federal level, whether as a contractor, an administrator, a legislator, or a technical specialist, or any other position not currently mentioned except that they should not be prevented from receiving social security, health insurance, or general assistance via a program generally available to the populace.
I agree that frequent standardized tests are poison, but a yearly test for assessment is both reasonable and probably necessary.
Mind you, what I'm advocating isn't anything like the current government policy, which I agree with you is poison. It's more like things were where I lived in 1970. I suspect that the tests were mandated by the state rather than by the feds, and they weren't difficult (at least for me). And nobody even considered "teaching to the test".
Considering that most of the casualties appear to be civilians, I'm not sure that there's any penalty for wearing a uniform...except that it costs extra money. So that logic fails to impress me. An artillery shell doesn't see the clothing of its target. and drones don't appear to either given the number of funerals that they've targeted. Unless, of course, they are intentionally targeting civilians because they are "soft targets".
In either case, the argument for not expanding the coverage fails, because civilians don't HAVE any extra advantage.
Balancing would be very difficult, but why bother. You just set things up so that your combined ship has a mass of 1 microgram. This means you MUST use incoming matter as your reaction mass, though...unless your proposed push-me-pull-ya drive would actually work that way. I have a hard time believing that, even though the equations WERE good enough for Dr. Forward to publish a story based around it. (He *did* assume that when negative mass contacted positive mass they both evaporated...so that's probably the right way to assume things would work out, though I wonder about electric charge, magentic fields, rotary inertia, etc.)
FWIW, I believe that General Relativity is based on the idea that those aren't really two distinct things, but rather the two "ideas" of what mass is are two different ways of talking about the same basic reality. If you want to really consider them as separate things that just happen to be equal, then I think you need to replace General Relativity with something else...and there don't appear to be any good candidates.