I also know the guy who's in charge of systems integration for the Ares project. He's a young-earth creationist. I have little faith in the engineering acumen of anyone who can accomplish such a massive feat of ignoring experimental evidence.
Well, I don't know how long it took YOU to experimentally replicate the universe in your high school lab, but MINE certainly took less than 6 days to do.
Try factoring all the legal costs for every person involved. (lawyers, clerks, judges, jury (lost time form work)), also factor in any kind of incarceration/home arrest/ probation etc. It's easily 100 Billion a year. I won't argue the DEA figure cause it looks like you are right. But the other 90 million...see my post above.
Don't worry - I often get my billions and millions confused too. It's why I'm such a great economist.
Even if you add in the cost for states (in California http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/ it is about $9B a year for corrections, of which a certain fraction would go toward marijuana, and the total state DOJ budget is $800M) I doubt it would add up to $100B. And we're talking about the entire budget here - everything from travel for special agents to go to the Bellagio in Vegas for the International Fraud Convention (yep, it was last weekend) to paying for their copier expenses. The fraction devoted to marijuana prevention and et cetera is probably not insubstantial, but probably not anywhere near the numbers you're talking about.
>>Too bad it's from the government so his conspiracy-theory-addled mind will never accept it.
Yeah... he's got a crackpot notion that our federal government has nothing better to do than pour billions of dollars into wasteful programs that won't make a lick of difference. What a nutjob, eh?
>>No, no, no, only raves: "playing amplified music wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats during the night".
Interesting law. It specifies that it applies to people regardless of if they're trespassing, so they can be used to order people off their land, as long as a superintendent of the police thinks that 2 or more people are "making preparations" to hold a rave there.
If they don't leave their own land, a constable can arrest them without a warrant.
Crazy times.
However, it does define a rave as a nighttime party of 100 or more people, and I think the 15 dudes BBQing under a tent during the afternoon doesn't look much like a nighttime rave. The police were acting against the law.
High ranking police all over the planet have built beuracratic kingdoms around the idiotic idea of declaring war on a social problem. In the US where this moronic idea came from it costs $100 billion/year to police just pot alone, yes $100 BILLION every YEAR just to stop people smoking pot. $10 billion of that goes directly to the DEA who LOBBY legislatures to keep the status quo. One american is arrested and has their life ruined every 18 seconds just for smoking pot. UK, Australia, etc, are no different.
Oh, please. The entire DEA budget is only $1.9B, so I kind of doubt they spend $10B a year just on pot prevention. And where is the other $90B coming from?/rolleyes
It would be interesting to see if there were any political connections--local officials in this country have been known to use almost almost identical "SWAT-like" tactics to break up an opponent's fund raiser, for example.
Pfft. If you've read about the Busby affair, the dems in question were acting like little princesses and attacked a sheriff. They deserved to get pepper sprayed for their idiocy.
As the (winning) republican in the district said, "If that's how she handles leadership at her own events, how could you trust her with running a country?"
Ehh, it's not really like the NYSE. Lloyd's is Lloyd's. It's called a "market" but it's closer to a loose organization of organizations under a common brand. If that makes sense. The members of the NYSE don't have the same relationship that members of Lloyd's have with it.
>>My point was that the purpose of insurance has nothing to do with collectivization.
A major value of Lloyd's was actually that you could collectivize risk, in the sense that you could buy, say, a 10% share of risk on a certain venture, which would spread the risk out over the different names involved.
>>China was capitalist for thousands of years, and they remember hating it.
They're still capitalist. Their government is akin to a bunch of engineers playing SimCity, but the people in China are relentlessly capitalistic. Communism didn't do much to destroy that - you hear a lot more anti-capitalism nonsense in American universities than you do in ostensibly communistic China.
As for pay by the mile, it's similar to what we have already with things like Mexico Insurance - you need spot insurance for a couple days on a trip down to Baja? Pop in at one of the insurance companies specializing in it in San Diego, and for ten bucks a day or so you'll be covered.
And insurance companies already set rates based on how far you drive each year, dunno what the GP was talking about...
Historically insurance originated as part of the mercantile economy of the British Empire. A ship was an expensive thing, and the loss of a ship could ruin a middle class merchant. So they'd buy insurance--basically they'd pay a fee to a wealthy noble who would then gaurantee the value of the expedition--if the ship sank, they wouldn't lose anything. The amount they paid would be proportional to the risk of losing the ship, the value of the ship/cargo, and plus a margin of profit. Without that profit there'd have been no point for the nobleman to enter into the deal, and the state certainly wasn't about to assume to risk for the merchants.
You're leaving out Lloyd's, which was the most crucial link in the story.
Technically, the ship owner would approach Lloyd's of London, and they'd send a guy out to look at the ship and its crew. They'd then do some calculations based on the sailing date and expected weather, and come up with a price. The ship owner would pay the price, and Lloyd's would take a cut.
Lloyds THEN would turn around and sell all of the risk on the trip. They'd approach (as you say) a rich guy and offer to give him money in exchange for the rich guy to assume some or all of the risk on the trip, telling them the relevant details (good captain, but might run into storms, etc.)
In such a fashion, Lloyd's never had any risk at all, because they'd sell off all of the risk to others.
If the voyage did well, the rich guy(s) got to keep the money paid to them by Lloyd's, Lloyd's keeps their cut, and the ship owner has his ship. Everyone's happy. If the ship sinks, a well dressed gentleman from Lloyd's visits the rich guy(s) and tells them to pay up.
It still works that way today. If you're a wealthy Dubai tycoon, Lloyd's will happily pay you a nice sum of money to assume the risk on, say, an oil supertanker about to sail around the world.
If random corruption of "data" and "program code" in the brain is the root of creativity, then it seems to me that creativity is a very inefficient, brute-force method, which is only practical in people without schizophrenia because our brains have the processing power to discard (at some subconscious layer) the huge number of results that aren't worth pursuing.
I think that creativity is the ability to make associations/connections in unusual or unexpected ways. This can be good - applying, say, buddhist philosophy to electrical engineering has given us such advances as Fuzzy Logic, but when one's brain can only make inchoate connections, madness is the result.
I've always thought creativity, genius, and madness were closely related, and I'm by no means the only one. But this study may be evidence for it. Or it may not - psych studies are notorious for being filled with meaningless bullshit dressed up in a gown of hard statistics.
>>In the approval of any medicine, the first step is always to demonstrate that the substance is not itself poisonous.
Uh, no. Most drugs ARE poisonous. Testing establishes the following: Therapeutic Dosages at various thresholds Toxic Dosages at various thresholds
These thresholds are things like the VD50, which establishes the dosage at which there is a 50% chance of death, etc., which is (for obvious reasons) usually extrapolated from animal testing. You also have the lowest lethal dose, lowest toxic dose, etc.
The therapeutic window is the area between the optimal therapeutic dose and the toxic dosage level. For some drugs, like Vanco, this is a fairly narrow window, and so hospitals have to draw levels every so often to make sure the serum drug concentration is staying within the window, and dose adjust it every day or two.
For some drugs, though, the therapeutic window is *negative*, meaning the minimum effective therapeutic dose is above the toxic dose level. Chemos are famous for being this way. So you can't say that the FDA establishes that a substance is "not itself poisonous" because they do green-light drugs that are poisonous, but still will have a net positive benefit on a patient.
In the case of this Radaway drug (or what is the name of the rad meds from Galactica?), it might actually turn out to be toxic, but because it can save the life of someone who is going to die from radiation poisoning, might get approved anyway.
Personally I'm somewhat dubious about the effectiveness of the drug, since radiation kills your cells directly, and no amount of superglue will keep you alive when all your cells are dead. But maybe it would increase the exposure levels that we can save peoples lives, and that would be A Good Thing.
The DMCA is detrimental to the economy. The DMCA works to stifle innovation, in AMERICAN markets and for AMERICAN products.
Protectionist policies, like this one, are seldom a good idea. The free market always did better.
What? That has nothing to do with the issue in question.
A free market cannot operate without legal protection from fraud and theft.
These guys were trying to hack themselves some free TV and make a business stealing from DirectTV. That's the opposite of a free market... it's technically a black market, a market based on stolen goods and properties, and one that is (almost) never better for society than an open free market.
Honestly, it's better than either Morrowind or Oblivion. The sheer amount of twinkery you can do with the custom classes and magic item creation is just ridiculous and awesome.
Speaking as a 6'6" martial artist, college educated, etc., dude, who plays D&D and boardgames whenever given a chance, the trick is to find a hottie who has creativity. Some women (well, people in general) lack any sort of creative bone in their body, and... they're boring. If they have intelligence and creativity, they can get into RPGs and games. Non-creative types... can't.
But then again, I met my wife at a ballroom dance club, and one of the first things she asked me was if I read Robert Jordan.
Plus, it launched on July 4th, not a particularly significant day for North Koreans... And while anybody could look it up, who here can say they know the dates of big Chinese holidays? Really?
Anyone could also look up that big Chinese holidays don't have "dates".
They're tied to the lunar calendar, so it's kinda like asking "What is the date of Easter each year?"
Since your statement is about the ignorance of people in Korea, it's doubly ironic.
But also, none of that really addresses the question of the negative consequences of saying, "Corporations are not people and are not necessarily entitled to all of the same human rights as people, and therefore are not entitled to contribute to political campaigns."
I think it makes sense to make a legal distinction of being able to assign legal responsibility for an action to either the employee working for a company, the company itself, or the investor funding the company. I think all of that can be handled, however, without trying to grant inalienable human rights to the corporation.
I agree. We certainly don't acknowledge the right of "life" to corporations, as we allow them to be killed (go bankrupt or dissolved) or eaten by other "personages" (mergers and acquisitions). And if we don't even protect their (imaginary) lives, why on earth should they be allowed to donate to our politicians?
It should certainly be possible to legally set up corporations so as to shield investors from liability while not allowing corporations to donate to campaigns.
If you think about it, it really is common sense that we should only allow electors (members of an electorate) to contribute money to their elections. Corporations (thankfully) do not have the franchise.
>>This is just another example of a fundamental flaw in how campaign finance works in the US, and the current party in power shares the culpability with the prior party in power.
Out of curiosity, since corporations can't vote, why should they be allowed to donate money to campaigns at all?
>>The parent is correct: it appears the submitter wants 4:3 displays.
He's not alone. 4:3 displays make more sense than widescreens for pretty much every use I have on a computer: gaming, word processing, and coding. Honestly - have you ever seen MS word used on a widescreen monitor? It either displays two pages side by side (which breaks your flow) or just throws away half your usable screen space.
If coal is cheap and wind is clean, then we should burn coal to power turbines that generate wind, then get electricity from wind turbines. It becomes a win-win!
You have just described the entire ethanol industry.
Even if Starcraft 2 can P2P LAN games after connecting up on Battle.net, you still run into the issue that a LOT of home routers will can't recognize their own WAN port IP address from the LAN side, so those packets that could, technically, just stay on the local LAN will be routed out the router's WAN port to the first hop, then bounced back since they have the same public IP address. This is where the problem with sharing an internet connection will kill LANs...
Worse, my Time Warner cable modem actually blocks LAN connections. You HAVE to bounce out to the internet and back to talk to someone in your own house. Some sort of brain-dead security setting that you can't disable.
Given how shitty cable modem upload speeds are, and how annoying it is to get a LAN hooked up to the internet anyway (do you really want it running over wireless) it is basically a death knell for the traditional LAN party.
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I also know the guy who's in charge of systems integration for the Ares project. He's a young-earth creationist. I have little faith in the engineering acumen of anyone who can accomplish such a massive feat of ignoring experimental evidence.
Well, I don't know how long it took YOU to experimentally replicate the universe in your high school lab, but MINE certainly took less than 6 days to do.
Try factoring all the legal costs for every person involved. (lawyers, clerks, judges, jury (lost time form work)), also factor in any kind of incarceration/home arrest/ probation etc. It's easily 100 Billion a year. I won't argue the DEA figure cause it looks like you are right. But the other 90 million...see my post above.
Don't worry - I often get my billions and millions confused too. It's why I'm such a great economist.
Even if you add in the cost for states (in California http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/ it is about $9B a year for corrections, of which a certain fraction would go toward marijuana, and the total state DOJ budget is $800M) I doubt it would add up to $100B. And we're talking about the entire budget here - everything from travel for special agents to go to the Bellagio in Vegas for the International Fraud Convention (yep, it was last weekend) to paying for their copier expenses. The fraction devoted to marijuana prevention and et cetera is probably not insubstantial, but probably not anywhere near the numbers you're talking about.
>>Sorry, didn't realize you were just trolling. Carry on, then.
Oh, just the second time there. =)
>>Too bad it's from the government so his conspiracy-theory-addled mind will never accept it.
Yeah... he's got a crackpot notion that our federal government has nothing better to do than pour billions of dollars into wasteful programs that won't make a lick of difference. What a nutjob, eh?
Eh?
>>No, no, no, only raves: "playing amplified music wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats during the night".
Interesting law. It specifies that it applies to people regardless of if they're trespassing, so they can be used to order people off their land, as long as a superintendent of the police thinks that 2 or more people are "making preparations" to hold a rave there.
If they don't leave their own land, a constable can arrest them without a warrant.
Crazy times.
However, it does define a rave as a nighttime party of 100 or more people, and I think the 15 dudes BBQing under a tent during the afternoon doesn't look much like a nighttime rave. The police were acting against the law.
High ranking police all over the planet have built beuracratic kingdoms around the idiotic idea of declaring war on a social problem. In the US where this moronic idea came from it costs $100 billion/year to police just pot alone, yes $100 BILLION every YEAR just to stop people smoking pot. $10 billion of that goes directly to the DEA who LOBBY legislatures to keep the status quo. One american is arrested and has their life ruined every 18 seconds just for smoking pot. UK, Australia, etc, are no different.
Oh, please. The entire DEA budget is only $1.9B, so I kind of doubt they spend $10B a year just on pot prevention. And where is the other $90B coming from? /rolleyes
Facts - your new best friend: http://www.usdoj.gov/jmd/2010summary/pdf/dea-bud-summary.pdf
Sure, there's other things like the National Drug Information Center, and the ICDE, but their total budget is penny change, maybe $0.5B or so.
I love hyperbole as much as the next guy, but seriously, being off by two orders of magnitude is just ignorant.
It would be interesting to see if there were any political connections--local officials in this country have been known to use almost almost identical "SWAT-like" tactics to break up an opponent's fund raiser, for example.
Pfft. If you've read about the Busby affair, the dems in question were acting like little princesses and attacked a sheriff. They deserved to get pepper sprayed for their idiocy.
As the (winning) republican in the district said, "If that's how she handles leadership at her own events, how could you trust her with running a country?"
Ehh, it's not really like the NYSE. Lloyd's is Lloyd's. It's called a "market" but it's closer to a loose organization of organizations under a common brand. If that makes sense. The members of the NYSE don't have the same relationship that members of Lloyd's have with it.
>>My point was that the purpose of insurance has nothing to do with collectivization.
A major value of Lloyd's was actually that you could collectivize risk, in the sense that you could buy, say, a 10% share of risk on a certain venture, which would spread the risk out over the different names involved.
>>China was capitalist for thousands of years, and they remember hating it.
They're still capitalist. Their government is akin to a bunch of engineers playing SimCity, but the people in China are relentlessly capitalistic. Communism didn't do much to destroy that - you hear a lot more anti-capitalism nonsense in American universities than you do in ostensibly communistic China.
As for pay by the mile, it's similar to what we have already with things like Mexico Insurance - you need spot insurance for a couple days on a trip down to Baja? Pop in at one of the insurance companies specializing in it in San Diego, and for ten bucks a day or so you'll be covered.
And insurance companies already set rates based on how far you drive each year, dunno what the GP was talking about...
Historically insurance originated as part of the mercantile economy of the British Empire. A ship was an expensive thing, and the loss of a ship could ruin a middle class merchant. So they'd buy insurance--basically they'd pay a fee to a wealthy noble who would then gaurantee the value of the expedition--if the ship sank, they wouldn't lose anything. The amount they paid would be proportional to the risk of losing the ship, the value of the ship/cargo, and plus a margin of profit. Without that profit there'd have been no point for the nobleman to enter into the deal, and the state certainly wasn't about to assume to risk for the merchants.
You're leaving out Lloyd's, which was the most crucial link in the story.
Technically, the ship owner would approach Lloyd's of London, and they'd send a guy out to look at the ship and its crew. They'd then do some calculations based on the sailing date and expected weather, and come up with a price. The ship owner would pay the price, and Lloyd's would take a cut.
Lloyds THEN would turn around and sell all of the risk on the trip. They'd approach (as you say) a rich guy and offer to give him money in exchange for the rich guy to assume some or all of the risk on the trip, telling them the relevant details (good captain, but might run into storms, etc.)
In such a fashion, Lloyd's never had any risk at all, because they'd sell off all of the risk to others.
If the voyage did well, the rich guy(s) got to keep the money paid to them by Lloyd's, Lloyd's keeps their cut, and the ship owner has his ship. Everyone's happy. If the ship sinks, a well dressed gentleman from Lloyd's visits the rich guy(s) and tells them to pay up.
It still works that way today. If you're a wealthy Dubai tycoon, Lloyd's will happily pay you a nice sum of money to assume the risk on, say, an oil supertanker about to sail around the world.
If random corruption of "data" and "program code" in the brain is the root of creativity, then it seems to me that creativity is a very inefficient, brute-force method, which is only practical in people without schizophrenia because our brains have the processing power to discard (at some subconscious layer) the huge number of results that aren't worth pursuing.
I think that creativity is the ability to make associations/connections in unusual or unexpected ways. This can be good - applying, say, buddhist philosophy to electrical engineering has given us such advances as Fuzzy Logic, but when one's brain can only make inchoate connections, madness is the result.
I've always thought creativity, genius, and madness were closely related, and I'm by no means the only one. But this study may be evidence for it. Or it may not - psych studies are notorious for being filled with meaningless bullshit dressed up in a gown of hard statistics.
>>In the approval of any medicine, the first step is always to demonstrate that the substance is not itself poisonous.
Uh, no. Most drugs ARE poisonous. Testing establishes the following:
Therapeutic Dosages at various thresholds
Toxic Dosages at various thresholds
These thresholds are things like the VD50, which establishes the dosage at which there is a 50% chance of death, etc., which is (for obvious reasons) usually extrapolated from animal testing. You also have the lowest lethal dose, lowest toxic dose, etc.
The therapeutic window is the area between the optimal therapeutic dose and the toxic dosage level. For some drugs, like Vanco, this is a fairly narrow window, and so hospitals have to draw levels every so often to make sure the serum drug concentration is staying within the window, and dose adjust it every day or two.
For some drugs, though, the therapeutic window is *negative*, meaning the minimum effective therapeutic dose is above the toxic dose level. Chemos are famous for being this way. So you can't say that the FDA establishes that a substance is "not itself poisonous" because they do green-light drugs that are poisonous, but still will have a net positive benefit on a patient.
In the case of this Radaway drug (or what is the name of the rad meds from Galactica?), it might actually turn out to be toxic, but because it can save the life of someone who is going to die from radiation poisoning, might get approved anyway.
Personally I'm somewhat dubious about the effectiveness of the drug, since radiation kills your cells directly, and no amount of superglue will keep you alive when all your cells are dead. But maybe it would increase the exposure levels that we can save peoples lives, and that would be A Good Thing.
Note: IANAP,BIHSWO.
The DMCA is detrimental to the economy. The DMCA works to stifle innovation, in AMERICAN markets and for AMERICAN products.
Protectionist policies, like this one, are seldom a good idea. The free market always did better.
What? That has nothing to do with the issue in question.
A free market cannot operate without legal protection from fraud and theft.
These guys were trying to hack themselves some free TV and make a business stealing from DirectTV. That's the opposite of a free market... it's technically a black market, a market based on stolen goods and properties, and one that is (almost) never better for society than an open free market.
Your 10% into retirement isn't a tax.
Social security may very well be, since it's highly unlikely that anyone working today will get the expected return on investment out of it.
>>Unfortunately photos are always copyrighted, even if they are just an attempt at reproducing something not currently covered.
Uh, sorta. It really depends if they're considered duplicates or original works. Duplicates generally have the same rights as the original.
>>The game was so buggy it isn't worth free
To be honest, it got better.
After 40 patches or so.
Honestly, it's better than either Morrowind or Oblivion. The sheer amount of twinkery you can do with the custom classes and magic item creation is just ridiculous and awesome.
Speaking as a 6'6" martial artist, college educated, etc., dude, who plays D&D and boardgames whenever given a chance, the trick is to find a hottie who has creativity. Some women (well, people in general) lack any sort of creative bone in their body, and... they're boring. If they have intelligence and creativity, they can get into RPGs and games. Non-creative types... can't.
But then again, I met my wife at a ballroom dance club, and one of the first things she asked me was if I read Robert Jordan.
SOLD.
Plus, it launched on July 4th, not a particularly significant day for North Koreans... And while anybody could look it up, who here can say they know the dates of big Chinese holidays? Really?
Anyone could also look up that big Chinese holidays don't have "dates".
They're tied to the lunar calendar, so it's kinda like asking "What is the date of Easter each year?"
Since your statement is about the ignorance of people in Korea, it's doubly ironic.
But also, none of that really addresses the question of the negative consequences of saying, "Corporations are not people and are not necessarily entitled to all of the same human rights as people, and therefore are not entitled to contribute to political campaigns."
I think it makes sense to make a legal distinction of being able to assign legal responsibility for an action to either the employee working for a company, the company itself, or the investor funding the company. I think all of that can be handled, however, without trying to grant inalienable human rights to the corporation.
I agree. We certainly don't acknowledge the right of "life" to corporations, as we allow them to be killed (go bankrupt or dissolved) or eaten by other "personages" (mergers and acquisitions). And if we don't even protect their (imaginary) lives, why on earth should they be allowed to donate to our politicians?
It should certainly be possible to legally set up corporations so as to shield investors from liability while not allowing corporations to donate to campaigns.
If you think about it, it really is common sense that we should only allow electors (members of an electorate) to contribute money to their elections. Corporations (thankfully) do not have the franchise.
>>This is just another example of a fundamental flaw in how campaign finance works in the US, and the current party in power shares the culpability with the prior party in power.
Out of curiosity, since corporations can't vote, why should they be allowed to donate money to campaigns at all?
>>The parent is correct: it appears the submitter wants 4:3 displays.
He's not alone. 4:3 displays make more sense than widescreens for pretty much every use I have on a computer: gaming, word processing, and coding. Honestly - have you ever seen MS word used on a widescreen monitor? It either displays two pages side by side (which breaks your flow) or just throws away half your usable screen space.
If coal is cheap and wind is clean, then we should burn coal to power turbines that generate wind, then get electricity from wind turbines. It becomes a win-win!
You have just described the entire ethanol industry.
>>Oh, so new software takes too long to build because of lengthy manual optimization?
I indeed spend 18% of my coding time typing "gcc -O3".
Even if Starcraft 2 can P2P LAN games after connecting up on Battle.net, you still run into the issue that a LOT of home routers will can't recognize their own WAN port IP address from the LAN side, so those packets that could, technically, just stay on the local LAN will be routed out the router's WAN port to the first hop, then bounced back since they have the same public IP address. This is where the problem with sharing an internet connection will kill LANs...
Worse, my Time Warner cable modem actually blocks LAN connections. You HAVE to bounce out to the internet and back to talk to someone in your own house. Some sort of brain-dead security setting that you can't disable.
Given how shitty cable modem upload speeds are, and how annoying it is to get a LAN hooked up to the internet anyway (do you really want it running over wireless) it is basically a death knell for the traditional LAN party.
Damn, dude. You to' him up.