History is filled with examples and counter-examples, but to me the best historical example that gun restrictions can lead to a large scale rise in tyranny is that after World War I the German government was prohibited from having heavy weapons by treaty, so they in turn decided that they didn't want a civilian population as well armed as the government and began taking away people's right to own weapons. This in turn left the civilian population vulnerable to the type of thuggery that the Nazi party used in order to intimidate people at the local level. By the time the Nazi's rose to power it was too late and millions of people died, but it seems there was a crucial period where a well armed civilian population could have made a difference in preventing the rise of the Nazi party. Individuals didn't have the peace of mind that comes from knowing you can protect yourself from a gang of local thugs and criminals and the local thugs knew that a few guys with sticks and bricks can intimidate a community, especially in cities. At some point thuggery just reaches a critical political mass if it isn't nipped in the bud.
My concern isn't that the people have sufficient arms to over throw a government, might doesn't make right regardless of the motivation, my concern is that people are so disarmed that any group of thugs and organized criminals can intimidate an entire community and use that local power to seize control of government power themselves. Once thugs are in power and control the government then it is likely too late for a disorganized and oppressed population to do anything about it without outside help regardless of the right to own weapons.
We see this local effect of thuggery time and time again especially in cities, but also in some towns, where politicians come to power with the backing of organized crime. That kind of thuggery trickles up.
250,000-500,000 people a year die from the flu, more than 50,000 in the US (that's more than both traffic accidents and gun deaths combined). It's not something to fuck around with.
There are many different viruses and bacteria (including Ebola) that have flu-like symptoms and based on the summary of methodology for these CDC numbers I don't believe the CDC is doing enough regular randomized testing with controls to determine how many of those flu deaths are actually "the flu" or something else with "flu-like symptoms".
There should be two types of randomized testing. First general monitoring, where the CDC pays doctors to perform blind tests on patients with certain symptoms. The tests need to be blind because testing for a specific disease will bias the results... meaning doctors will see it as a test of their diagnostic skills to get it right if you hand them a test for the flu or something else specific. Rather what we should be after is a sense of what percentage of people showing up with a cough of any kind or other symptoms have certain viruses or bacteria. Just a blind test with a direction, give to someone with a cough of any severity. Or give to someone with a fever, headache etc.
The other thing would be for people who are in hospital or who die and had any flu-like symptoms to receive such randomized testing in order to gather enough data to get a specific breakdown on the cause of death beyond just flu-like symptoms. Otherwise if you just did the randomized testing of people showing up to the doctor's office and not those who are seriously ill or die, then you would mistakenly project the percentage of deaths as the percentages of illnesses circulating at the time, when we really want to know which of the viruses and bacteria are contributing to more deaths.
Taxes are also sometimes about influence, control, and information as much as revenue. If the motivation was simply to raise revenue then they picked an unnecessarily intrusive way to do it by taxing bandwidth instead of taxing as a percentage of the monthly bill or even imposing a flat tax fee.
I agree to the extent that America has never lived up to its ideals. With a history of mass slavery, genocide and ethnic cleansing against native Americans, suppression of the press, book burning, oppression of women which are all things that are contrary to the ideals of Liberty and democracy. Where others only see the hypocrisy and the corruption of those ideals, I see a nation which is trying to maintain those ideals of Liberty and become better at their practice. The important thing about America is that its ideals of Liberty and Democracy are worth believing in and fighting for. That we don't always, or even usually, live up to those ideals is disheartening. Whatever your take on the current state of America, we all need to be better at telling the difference between rhetoric and reality, but that doesn't mean we become cynical about our own ideals. It just means when we fall short we try harder.
Having not had enough money to get a new car or repair my old one, I can tell you the "kinetic divide" actually involves sitting by the side of the road waiting for a tow.
But the point is made... people without enough money need more money not just more bandwidth.
The class should be expanded to cover everyone in the profession not just employees of the companies. Many more people were damaged by this illegal conspiracy because these companies were in large part influencing the setting of wages for the industry. By illegally restraining trade they illegally depressed salaries for the entire market.
Why aren't nurses required to wear the same protective gear as the people cleaning up Ebola contaminated waste... fresh from the patient projectile vomit seems like a much higher risk than three day old bed sheets yet the requirements don't seem to be in place for full protective gear for nurses... I think if the CDC guidelines aren't updated to include full protective gear such as requiring full hazmat suits when in the isolation room with the patient, then we haven't learned anything.
And more importantly... who in their right mind still uses IE? Internet Explorer is currently blocked by my company's proxy server because it is considered so insecure and isn't likely to get unblocked any time soon.
The way these things are killed are to under budget them, then blame cost overruns as justification for canceling the project. Then everyone says they gave it a chance and it failed and no other similar projects get funding... There are many many varied interests that don't want this type of technological advancement.
the point was that fusion works. it is an observed physical phenomena. My idea for containing it is have a bunch of engineers design a reactor, have a bunch of other engineers and physicists validate the concept and then build it.
If their design and the math checks out, then it is easily worth $2.7 billion to validate the design by constructing a full size reactor. Heck add another billion to the budget just in case.
Libertarian Party does not equal libertarianism. I think the dilution of the word libertarian has been very deliberate. The fundamental ideal of libertarianism is simply the minimization of the threat or use of force in society.
There is no right for corporations to exist. There is a freedom of association, but that is of no specific form. Corporations are government contrived legal entities that are given rights by laws.
Not quite that clear. Congress makes all sorts of laws to enable companies to exist in the first place. If some of those laws enable companies to unreasonably stifle free speech then that would be a violation of the first amendment by proxy.
Not at all. Today's vast accumulations of wealth are enabled by government regulations that promote that concentration of wealth in private hands and under limited liability corporate entities. Government protections for private property should have some limits and there also must be limits on private security forces. I don't suggest higher taxes on the ultra rich as a libertarian ideal, or as a left leaning way to concentrate wealth in government hands which is no better than concentration of wealth in private hands. I would lower taxes on the merely rich and middle-class, it is at the extremes of wealth that go beyond mere luxury living that become about coercive and fuedal control of necessary resources.
That needs to be addressed through government policy because Liberty shouldn't self destruct.
Not this libertarian. A free market requires freedom not feudalism. And the only way capitalism is an efficient system is when capital is spread out into as many hands as possible. Capitalism is meant as the economic form of democracy in the sense that many hands will most often make better decisions than central planners or kings. Free Market Capitalism isn't meant as a winner take all sport of who can accumulate the most capital in order to buy Hawaii... ie Larry's World. For Free Market Capitalism to work as a system there have to be high taxes on the most rich and/or on vast estates as a way to periodically re-level the playing field and keep some equity in the system.
In the case of nuclear power I think we need a government subsidized build out to insure longer term stability of our energy supply in a carbon free future rather than leave it up to short term whims of profiteers. With nuclear materials the risks and benefits are just too high to leave it to the free market alone.
Common Core is a set of curriculum standards not a detailed curriculum itself or the educational materials that go along with that. Having a Common Core shared by most states allows for more competition in educational products such as books, software, handouts and curriculum. This allows publishers to focus on quality rather than spending much time aligning their content to 50 different state standards. I believe the overall effect on education quality has been to raise it, but there are many more important factors to education than just the Common Core.
I think a debate over particular requirements is good and the Common Core should be updated to reflect best practices as much as possible and there should be room in state and Federal funding for new curriculum standards being adopted by schools or school districts in order to properly assess them, but for the most part what I've heard is sniping over examples of poor implementation of the Common Core which is more an issue of bad purchasing decisions by schools and individual school districts.
I think the Google rule is more a function of battery life since that kind of constant radio communication uploading video back to the cloud is a drain on batteries.
In terms of personal privacy or police state concerns... The police already have decent facial recognition technology available to police and government along with fixed cameras that are hard wired for power. Yes there is a performance issue if you try to match too many faces to too many faces, but as others have said this is subject to Moore's law and the price performance curve of Cloud Computing making this more attainable and more affordable starting with the police and government and hopefully working its way down to civilian use.
To me it is of greater concern if facial recognition technology remains only affordable and practical for the police and government when the technology could be of great help to pro democracy activists. If I were a pro democracy activist in a police state I would want access to facial recognition in order to identify known or suspected police agents that were trying to thwart, subvert or otherwise undermine political organizing activities. Basically all it takes is one paid operative within a peaceful protest to start throwing rocks at the police to justify a police crackdown as law and order rather than political repression. It has even been an issue in the US with paid police infiltrators caught being the ones inciting violence and criminality in order to justify the subsequent police crackdown. If that person could be identified ahead of time as a police operative, then organizers can intervene and expel the person from the protest before they start causing trouble.
Identifying and controlling the troublemakers that try to blend in and cause trouble would be a sea change in a groups ability to organize peaceful protest. Not all troublemakers are paid operatives, some people just like causing trouble. So the ability to take someone's picture, tag them as a potential or known troublemaker and then share that with other organizers would be of great help in countering and exposing that kind of government sponsored sabotage or even just criminal elements out to cause trouble for sport.
The original post was edited to correct the language. When it was first posted it just said the letters were "sent out" but it didn't say to whom they were sent so it could be inferred the 2.4 million letters were sent to the people they were trying to get signatures from.
If the form says... fill out this form and we will send this form letter with this wording to your representatives... then that is just an honest and straightforward exercise of free speech. Making it convenient for people that share your views to express their views is the most honest thing that is done in politics.
Bribing newspapers and media to cover your issues or candidates in a favorable light by spending big money on advertising is dishonest and undermines our democratic system. Individuals sending individual feedback to their congressmen is a good thing no matter how that is facilitated.
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History is filled with examples and counter-examples, but to me the best historical example that gun restrictions can lead to a large scale rise in tyranny is that after World War I the German government was prohibited from having heavy weapons by treaty, so they in turn decided that they didn't want a civilian population as well armed as the government and began taking away people's right to own weapons. This in turn left the civilian population vulnerable to the type of thuggery that the Nazi party used in order to intimidate people at the local level. By the time the Nazi's rose to power it was too late and millions of people died, but it seems there was a crucial period where a well armed civilian population could have made a difference in preventing the rise of the Nazi party. Individuals didn't have the peace of mind that comes from knowing you can protect yourself from a gang of local thugs and criminals and the local thugs knew that a few guys with sticks and bricks can intimidate a community, especially in cities. At some point thuggery just reaches a critical political mass if it isn't nipped in the bud.
My concern isn't that the people have sufficient arms to over throw a government, might doesn't make right regardless of the motivation, my concern is that people are so disarmed that any group of thugs and organized criminals can intimidate an entire community and use that local power to seize control of government power themselves. Once thugs are in power and control the government then it is likely too late for a disorganized and oppressed population to do anything about it without outside help regardless of the right to own weapons.
We see this local effect of thuggery time and time again especially in cities, but also in some towns, where politicians come to power with the backing of organized crime. That kind of thuggery trickles up.
250,000-500,000 people a year die from the flu, more than 50,000 in the US (that's more than both traffic accidents and gun deaths combined). It's not something to fuck around with.
There are many different viruses and bacteria (including Ebola) that have flu-like symptoms and based on the summary of methodology for these CDC numbers I don't believe the CDC is doing enough regular randomized testing with controls to determine how many of those flu deaths are actually "the flu" or something else with "flu-like symptoms".
There should be two types of randomized testing. First general monitoring, where the CDC pays doctors to perform blind tests on patients with certain symptoms. The tests need to be blind because testing for a specific disease will bias the results... meaning doctors will see it as a test of their diagnostic skills to get it right if you hand them a test for the flu or something else specific. Rather what we should be after is a sense of what percentage of people showing up with a cough of any kind or other symptoms have certain viruses or bacteria. Just a blind test with a direction, give to someone with a cough of any severity. Or give to someone with a fever, headache etc.
The other thing would be for people who are in hospital or who die and had any flu-like symptoms to receive such randomized testing in order to gather enough data to get a specific breakdown on the cause of death beyond just flu-like symptoms. Otherwise if you just did the randomized testing of people showing up to the doctor's office and not those who are seriously ill or die, then you would mistakenly project the percentage of deaths as the percentages of illnesses circulating at the time, when we really want to know which of the viruses and bacteria are contributing to more deaths.
Taxes are also sometimes about influence, control, and information as much as revenue. If the motivation was simply to raise revenue then they picked an unnecessarily intrusive way to do it by taxing bandwidth instead of taxing as a percentage of the monthly bill or even imposing a flat tax fee.
I agree to the extent that America has never lived up to its ideals. With a history of mass slavery, genocide and ethnic cleansing against native Americans, suppression of the press, book burning, oppression of women which are all things that are contrary to the ideals of Liberty and democracy. Where others only see the hypocrisy and the corruption of those ideals, I see a nation which is trying to maintain those ideals of Liberty and become better at their practice. The important thing about America is that its ideals of Liberty and Democracy are worth believing in and fighting for. That we don't always, or even usually, live up to those ideals is disheartening. Whatever your take on the current state of America, we all need to be better at telling the difference between rhetoric and reality, but that doesn't mean we become cynical about our own ideals. It just means when we fall short we try harder.
Having not had enough money to get a new car or repair my old one, I can tell you the "kinetic divide" actually involves sitting by the side of the road waiting for a tow.
But the point is made... people without enough money need more money not just more bandwidth.
The class should be expanded to cover everyone in the profession not just employees of the companies. Many more people were damaged by this illegal conspiracy because these companies were in large part influencing the setting of wages for the industry. By illegally restraining trade they illegally depressed salaries for the entire market.
Why aren't nurses required to wear the same protective gear as the people cleaning up Ebola contaminated waste... fresh from the patient projectile vomit seems like a much higher risk than three day old bed sheets yet the requirements don't seem to be in place for full protective gear for nurses... I think if the CDC guidelines aren't updated to include full protective gear such as requiring full hazmat suits when in the isolation room with the patient, then we haven't learned anything.
And more importantly... who in their right mind still uses IE? Internet Explorer is currently blocked by my company's proxy server because it is considered so insecure and isn't likely to get unblocked any time soon.
The way these things are killed are to under budget them, then blame cost overruns as justification for canceling the project. Then everyone says they gave it a chance and it failed and no other similar projects get funding... There are many many varied interests that don't want this type of technological advancement.
the point was that fusion works. it is an observed physical phenomena. My idea for containing it is have a bunch of engineers design a reactor, have a bunch of other engineers and physicists validate the concept and then build it.
If their design and the math checks out, then it is easily worth $2.7 billion to validate the design by constructing a full size reactor. Heck add another billion to the budget just in case.
tell that to the sun
Libertarian Party does not equal libertarianism. I think the dilution of the word libertarian has been very deliberate. The fundamental ideal of libertarianism is simply the minimization of the threat or use of force in society.
There is no right for corporations to exist. There is a freedom of association, but that is of no specific form. Corporations are government contrived legal entities that are given rights by laws.
Not quite that clear. Congress makes all sorts of laws to enable companies to exist in the first place. If some of those laws enable companies to unreasonably stifle free speech then that would be a violation of the first amendment by proxy.
Not at all. Today's vast accumulations of wealth are enabled by government regulations that promote that concentration of wealth in private hands and under limited liability corporate entities. Government protections for private property should have some limits and there also must be limits on private security forces. I don't suggest higher taxes on the ultra rich as a libertarian ideal, or as a left leaning way to concentrate wealth in government hands which is no better than concentration of wealth in private hands. I would lower taxes on the merely rich and middle-class, it is at the extremes of wealth that go beyond mere luxury living that become about coercive and fuedal control of necessary resources. That needs to be addressed through government policy because Liberty shouldn't self destruct.
Let me try... The free market isn't a game someone wins it is the playing field and the rules of the game.
Not this libertarian. A free market requires freedom not feudalism. And the only way capitalism is an efficient system is when capital is spread out into as many hands as possible. Capitalism is meant as the economic form of democracy in the sense that many hands will most often make better decisions than central planners or kings. Free Market Capitalism isn't meant as a winner take all sport of who can accumulate the most capital in order to buy Hawaii... ie Larry's World. For Free Market Capitalism to work as a system there have to be high taxes on the most rich and/or on vast estates as a way to periodically re-level the playing field and keep some equity in the system.
In the case of nuclear power I think we need a government subsidized build out to insure longer term stability of our energy supply in a carbon free future rather than leave it up to short term whims of profiteers. With nuclear materials the risks and benefits are just too high to leave it to the free market alone.
Instead, we'll probably breed right up to the edge of capacity and then die in billions when something unexpected happens.
It should not be considered unexpected.
Common Core is a set of curriculum standards not a detailed curriculum itself or the educational materials that go along with that. Having a Common Core shared by most states allows for more competition in educational products such as books, software, handouts and curriculum. This allows publishers to focus on quality rather than spending much time aligning their content to 50 different state standards. I believe the overall effect on education quality has been to raise it, but there are many more important factors to education than just the Common Core.
I think a debate over particular requirements is good and the Common Core should be updated to reflect best practices as much as possible and there should be room in state and Federal funding for new curriculum standards being adopted by schools or school districts in order to properly assess them, but for the most part what I've heard is sniping over examples of poor implementation of the Common Core which is more an issue of bad purchasing decisions by schools and individual school districts.
I think the Google rule is more a function of battery life since that kind of constant radio communication uploading video back to the cloud is a drain on batteries.
In terms of personal privacy or police state concerns... The police already have decent facial recognition technology available to police and government along with fixed cameras that are hard wired for power. Yes there is a performance issue if you try to match too many faces to too many faces, but as others have said this is subject to Moore's law and the price performance curve of Cloud Computing making this more attainable and more affordable starting with the police and government and hopefully working its way down to civilian use.
To me it is of greater concern if facial recognition technology remains only affordable and practical for the police and government when the technology could be of great help to pro democracy activists. If I were a pro democracy activist in a police state I would want access to facial recognition in order to identify known or suspected police agents that were trying to thwart, subvert or otherwise undermine political organizing activities. Basically all it takes is one paid operative within a peaceful protest to start throwing rocks at the police to justify a police crackdown as law and order rather than political repression. It has even been an issue in the US with paid police infiltrators caught being the ones inciting violence and criminality in order to justify the subsequent police crackdown. If that person could be identified ahead of time as a police operative, then organizers can intervene and expel the person from the protest before they start causing trouble.
Identifying and controlling the troublemakers that try to blend in and cause trouble would be a sea change in a groups ability to organize peaceful protest. Not all troublemakers are paid operatives, some people just like causing trouble. So the ability to take someone's picture, tag them as a potential or known troublemaker and then share that with other organizers would be of great help in countering and exposing that kind of government sponsored sabotage or even just criminal elements out to cause trouble for sport.
Teaser has been updated, so disregard the first paragraph of what I wrote.
The original post was edited to correct the language. When it was first posted it just said the letters were "sent out" but it didn't say to whom they were sent so it could be inferred the 2.4 million letters were sent to the people they were trying to get signatures from.
It is called a form letter. They are used by issue advocacy groups all the time.
If the form says... fill out this form and we will send this form letter with this wording to your representatives... then that is just an honest and straightforward exercise of free speech. Making it convenient for people that share your views to express their views is the most honest thing that is done in politics.
Bribing newspapers and media to cover your issues or candidates in a favorable light by spending big money on advertising is dishonest and undermines our democratic system. Individuals sending individual feedback to their congressmen is a good thing no matter how that is facilitated.