Mexican law enforcement has myriad problems. You have not demonstrated any logical connection suggesting cameras lead to such problems, or cameras will make existing problems worse. So your point seems to be that Chewbecca on Endor means we need to be scared of cameras.
My point is that if I were arrested, I could ask for the cameras documenting the arrest and search, all with time indices. In a society with ubiquitous cameras, mysteriously missing footage will scream coverup to the average juror.
I can promise you exactly that will happen, regardless what Google does or does not do. It may take ten years. It may take twenty. It will come.
On the plus side, it will be a powerful means of curbing police abuse, because under the bright lights of a courtroom turning off those cameras will seem suspicious to every jury. Furthermore the police will need to be trained how to handle false-positives in a professional manner, because the magic software will be constantly showing false positives.
On the down side, there are ways to abuse this information. Now is the time to think calmly about safeguards.
So what is so gosh darn special about the atheist community that having a few "just an _____ with anger management issues" in their midst is some special kind of problem worthy of note, while the theist versions of the same is not?
Part of the problem is that IT people end up needing to "manage up" and "manage laterally" on a day to day basis, in a way that regular people with normal high stress jobs do not have to.
Righteous hyperbole makes for an incoherent policy, as you aptly demonstrate here.
First of all, there is no direct connection between a home being "underwater" and whether the housing asset is affordable by the family dwelling therein. Lots and lots of people who are underwater can afford their mortgages just fine, and the fact that we have a merely a few millions foreclosures annually instead of a tens of millions in the last few years proves the point.
Second of all, relieving pressure on the housing market actually encourages those who are unable to afford their homes to leave. They can choose to make an orderly normal sale of the home to an interested buyer, thereby mitigating potential financial damage to both the lender and the present owner. That is not a band-aid, that is genuine healing of the particular problem.
Exactly. Betting against The Herd is hazardous, unless you are very sophisticated. That is not a game for the Little Guy to play. Take your money far, far away from the stampede.
The Giant Red Flag was apparent circa 2005 (IIRC), when The Economist magazine noted that housing prices were so far out of skew when compared to rental prices in almost every major metropolitan city in the world that buying a home looked completely irrational as a financial decision.
What are ascribing to Keynes is exactly the opposite of what Keynes advocated.
The stock crash that heralded the coming of the The Great Depression was created by the policies you criticize -- policies lauded by the Republicans and Wall Street at the time, as a matter of fact.
Keynes observed that when there is significant underutilized productive capacity, there was risk of a deflationary spiral that further disrupts production. Government spending under these circumstances can have a strong positive effect for little dollar cost or risk to long term economic health. It did not take a genius to recognize that when people were starving and shoeless, shoe factories were laying people off, and farmland was left fallow about being repossessed by the bank, a little stimulus can create a lot of useful growth "out of nowhere", without violating any law of thermodynamics. All it took is a little common sense.
The question is whether we have significant underutilized productive capacity in the American economy today. I do not have a strong opinion on that point one way or another.
What I do believe is that a little inflation, by means of monetary hocus pocus or whatever, is probably a good thing when the economy is weak and we were recovery from an asset bubble in housing. That relieves pressure on the housing market, by bringing some homes out from being "underwater". While not glamorous that was probably the right policy to pursue over the last several years. Whether it is worth continuing those policies for much longer is less clear, because the fall off in construction has brought home prices and rental prices roughly in line with the long term historical norms.
Along with what you are saying, Apple is both highly astute and highly ruthless about cutting out features and technology that are not necessary to the end user. Their judgement is not always right, of course. But you have to give credit to the company who put out the original iPhone without a camera, knowing full well that every tech reviewer was going to ding them for it. Such discipline and customer insight should be admired in a world where bloat is the norm.
Even you are being to overly generous to the parent. The only
point Lincoln would not bend on was not allowing slavery into new territories.
So when the South seceded to pursue their "God given right" to push slavery into new territories, where exactly were these territories going to come from? The CSA was boxed in on the north by the Union, the West by Union owned territories, the south by slave-free Mexican, plus the growing list of slave free nations in the Caribbean.
The southern states seceded specifically because living in peace was insufficient.
The CSA was built on a promise of spoils of war. Unless the southern politicians were all liars, there was no logical reason to believe that peace was possible. The CSA offered war, war, war, and more war from the get go. Once the southern started up the shooting and murdering*, raising a Union army was Lincoln's only reasonable option.
* Yes, murdering. For example, secession was hotly contested in Texas. Dozens of pro-unionists were murdered in broad daylight for voicing their political views. That is hardly the only example.
Yes, it certainly does create a moral hazard. But it is not "just another moral hazard". Unlimited liability partnerships proved to be an insufficient tool to organize the economy once we left the 18th century.
Do not get me wrong: I am all for better laws around corporate governance. But trying to turn back the clock to a mythical world run by yeomen and craftsmen and small family businesses is not going to get us anywhere. (Besides the obvious, those Goode Olde Days had its share of feudal lords, but we do not like to remember that.)
1. Form corporation named Timebomb.
2. Timebomb buys land
3. Timebomb "stores" pollutants in a manner that is safe for a whopping 10 years, charging tiny fees to mother corporation
4. Neighbors see coming disaster (maybe), but efforts gets tied up in courts
5. Mother corporation sloughs off Timebomb as independent legal entity
6. Timebomb poisons the water tables
7. Timebomb dies, and its only assets are poisoned land (which has negative value once it is a proven hazard)
Isn't it awesome how property rights solve all problems?
Those particular examples of juveniles tried as adults are well known precisely because they are anomalies from the norm. If only more prosecutors applied the discretion demonstrated in Steubenville, Weev would be picking up trash at the side of the road in an orange jumpsuit on weekends, and we would not be having this discussion.
Do you seriously want the DA to throw the entire book at everyone all the time? Because from the POV, Weev only got what he deserved.
The point I want to emphasize is that there are both good and bad reasons for red tape -- there is a positive underlying drive that is rational. As our individuals lives are presumed to be of greater economic value, the dollar price we are willing to pay in small bureaucratic "fees" to protect that life will go up. That should be balanced by other considerations, in context.
We can attempt to simplify red tape. We can raise the bar to justify the addition of red tape. We can reform existing red tape. But we are not going to simply remove red tape.
To some degree, red tape is an inevitable result of great success. As the populace has become more wealthy, each individual life is more valuable. Some of these threats to life and limb and pocketbook are most efficiently dealt with by experts backed by the power of government. Obviously there can be too much of a good thing, but, by general principles, it is actually the most rational choice.
Most "polls" that bypass the Do Not Call list are transparent efforts to figure out which bumper sticker or sound bite will manipulate the populace most efficiently. They have zero to do with getting input from the citizenry on the relative merits of a new public policy proposal. The only important policy input is provided by the corporations writing the checks.
Realistically, if you want to change policy, you have to change public opinion: like it or not, Cannabis reform isn't happening because it's not popular.
Not popular enough, yet. True.
Cannabis reform, very narrowly defined, is popular. But seem to be many more people who will show up to the polls to vote against a candidate that is labelled "wants to legalize dope", than will show up to the polls to punish a "for prohibition" candidate. Most anti-prohibition voters are already acclimatized to vote for pro-prohibition candidates. It will take a new generation of citizens who are used to voting against prohibition at their local elections to change this dynamic.
Faster change is most likely to come from law enforcement professionals, who want to prioritize resources in more useful ways.
Evidence based public policy decision making is a recent innovation understood by a very small minority of the populace. Doing what will get you liked by people like you has been baked into our genes for millions of years.
The problem with these guesses about salt is our kidneys are specifically designed for actively and precisely maintaining homeostasis of certain key ions (Na, Cl, K, Ca) in the bloodstream. If it weren't we would simply die within days or sooner. Moderate salt with good hydration is probably not harmful at all -- it is probably good for you as it helps the kidneys filter other bad stuff out. Low salt could easily be bad for you.
High salt plus low hydration might be bad. But where exactly is the line where moderate salt becomes high? Guessing based on what we eat is for witch doctors.
So I would like to see an actual study showing how adding/subtracting a little salt changes anything measurable at all about the long term serum average, otherwise I am inclined to believe that this guess is baloney. We are not walking petri dishes.
(There are specific diseases where controlling salts are very important, but that is a separate issue.)
It is clear that Lennard defined her interests differently. It is clear that Lennard would have preferred to suffer a very small but non-zero risk of indictment, rather than help send her love to jail.
It is not the lawyer's job to define the interests of their client, contrary to the actual beliefs of the client.
I actually do not think meeting with the prosecutor was necessarily wrong. The real problem is that Lennard had fundamental misunderstanding of how the prosecutor would use that meeting. Lennard was operating under a belief the lawyer should have understood was ludicrous. It is the lawyer's job to inform their client of the likely consequences of answering or not answering questions. That the lawyer failed to do.
Aaron was furious. He told me not to meet Steve. But no one, including Aaron, would tell me why. No one would tell me even how to get out of it. And still I had an unshakable belief that if I could just somehow explain all this it would go away. I delayed once, too sick to go. My lawyers told me Steve was furious at my medical delay. I might be arrested. I told Aaron, and others, that I wanted to talk to Steve human to human.
Never talking is not necessarily practical. But the problem is not recognizing that once something progresses to a certain point a "human to human" talk is never ever ever going to stop an investigation or prosecution. They were way past that point. That is where they get you: when you believe a human tale will persuade while they are looking for mis-steps that will hang you and all your friends.
The prosecution only hesitates when sources of evidence completely dry up. Talking encourages the prosecution.
These lawyers were giving ineffective counsel, even though they were probably thinking that they could get her immunity for her cooperation and testimony.
Like the Model T. It revolutionized the market by offering one thousand and one incremental improvements, in a package and price that made a huge untapped segment of potential customers excited about how great it was for such a wonderful price.
Nonetheless, the point stands. It is not necessary to threaten to US directly in order to achieve deterrence. It is only necessary to make a credible threat that US interests in the region would suffer as a result of US escalation. Tel Aviv and Riyadh are within reach.
Deterrence does not require Iran to win. Iran just needs the capacity to cause enough havoc that escalation looks like a lose-lose scenario from the standpoint of US interests.
There is no consensus in any national intelligence agency that Iran intends to build nuclear weapons -- that includes Israeli intelligence. In fact, some analysts suggest the surest means to guarantee Iran builds multiple nuclear weapons and puts them on missiles with a short fuse is to bomb Iran now -- the Iranian regime will believe they have no choice.
If Israel were actually certain of the necessity, they have the means to act. Whining has been a very effective tactic for cowing US politicians however, and it does not cost Israel one red cent.
In particular, if it is generally believed that Iran has a few bombs, Saudi Arabia can easily plunk down $50B and get a few of their own with only minor shaving of their existing defense expenditures. So nuclear weapons are not a great offensive threat if the long-term result is the whole neighborhood becomes more dangerous. Standing at the threshold is probably the rational optimum for a defensive posture.
Exactly how do you think having a couple of nuclear weapons would deter the U.S. from invading?
The deterrence is not to the physical safety of the US. The deterrence is the threat to US allies, who will not look kindly on paying the price for a brutish US policy.
Likewise North Korea could be starved down to size with no risk to US soil. But South Korea is not keen on the idea of 10000 conventional missile and 100,000 artillery shells raining down on their capital. Thus we tread lightly, out of deference to of our ally -- escalating would not be doing our friend a favor.
Slashdot Mirror
Mexican law enforcement has myriad problems. You have not demonstrated any logical connection suggesting cameras lead to such problems, or cameras will make existing problems worse. So your point seems to be that Chewbecca on Endor means we need to be scared of cameras.
My point is that if I were arrested, I could ask for the cameras documenting the arrest and search, all with time indices. In a society with ubiquitous cameras, mysteriously missing footage will scream coverup to the average juror.
I can promise you exactly that will happen, regardless what Google does or does not do. It may take ten years. It may take twenty. It will come.
On the plus side, it will be a powerful means of curbing police abuse, because under the bright lights of a courtroom turning off those cameras will seem suspicious to every jury. Furthermore the police will need to be trained how to handle false-positives in a professional manner, because the magic software will be constantly showing false positives.
On the down side, there are ways to abuse this information. Now is the time to think calmly about safeguards.
So what is so gosh darn special about the atheist community that having a few "just an _____ with anger management issues" in their midst is some special kind of problem worthy of note, while the theist versions of the same is not?
Part of the problem is that IT people end up needing to "manage up" and "manage laterally" on a day to day basis, in a way that regular people with normal high stress jobs do not have to.
Righteous hyperbole makes for an incoherent policy, as you aptly demonstrate here.
First of all, there is no direct connection between a home being "underwater" and whether the housing asset is affordable by the family dwelling therein. Lots and lots of people who are underwater can afford their mortgages just fine, and the fact that we have a merely a few millions foreclosures annually instead of a tens of millions in the last few years proves the point.
Second of all, relieving pressure on the housing market actually encourages those who are unable to afford their homes to leave. They can choose to make an orderly normal sale of the home to an interested buyer, thereby mitigating potential financial damage to both the lender and the present owner. That is not a band-aid, that is genuine healing of the particular problem.
Exactly. Betting against The Herd is hazardous, unless you are very sophisticated. That is not a game for the Little Guy to play. Take your money far, far away from the stampede.
The Giant Red Flag was apparent circa 2005 (IIRC), when The Economist magazine noted that housing prices were so far out of skew when compared to rental prices in almost every major metropolitan city in the world that buying a home looked completely irrational as a financial decision.
What are ascribing to Keynes is exactly the opposite of what Keynes advocated.
The stock crash that heralded the coming of the The Great Depression was created by the policies you criticize -- policies lauded by the Republicans and Wall Street at the time, as a matter of fact.
Keynes observed that when there is significant underutilized productive capacity, there was risk of a deflationary spiral that further disrupts production. Government spending under these circumstances can have a strong positive effect for little dollar cost or risk to long term economic health. It did not take a genius to recognize that when people were starving and shoeless, shoe factories were laying people off, and farmland was left fallow about being repossessed by the bank, a little stimulus can create a lot of useful growth "out of nowhere", without violating any law of thermodynamics. All it took is a little common sense.
The question is whether we have significant underutilized productive capacity in the American economy today. I do not have a strong opinion on that point one way or another.
What I do believe is that a little inflation, by means of monetary hocus pocus or whatever, is probably a good thing when the economy is weak and we were recovery from an asset bubble in housing. That relieves pressure on the housing market, by bringing some homes out from being "underwater". While not glamorous that was probably the right policy to pursue over the last several years. Whether it is worth continuing those policies for much longer is less clear, because the fall off in construction has brought home prices and rental prices roughly in line with the long term historical norms.
Along with what you are saying, Apple is both highly astute and highly ruthless about cutting out features and technology that are not necessary to the end user. Their judgement is not always right, of course. But you have to give credit to the company who put out the original iPhone without a camera, knowing full well that every tech reviewer was going to ding them for it. Such discipline and customer insight should be admired in a world where bloat is the norm.
Even you are being to overly generous to the parent. The only
point Lincoln would not bend on was not allowing slavery into new territories.
So when the South seceded to pursue their "God given right" to push slavery into new territories, where exactly were these territories going to come from? The CSA was boxed in on the north by the Union, the West by Union owned territories, the south by slave-free Mexican, plus the growing list of slave free nations in the Caribbean.
The southern states seceded specifically because living in peace was insufficient.
The CSA was built on a promise of spoils of war. Unless the southern politicians were all liars, there was no logical reason to believe that peace was possible. The CSA offered war, war, war, and more war from the get go. Once the southern started up the shooting and murdering*, raising a Union army was Lincoln's only reasonable option.
* Yes, murdering. For example, secession was hotly contested in Texas. Dozens of pro-unionists were murdered in broad daylight for voicing their political views. That is hardly the only example.
Yes, it certainly does create a moral hazard. But it is not "just another moral hazard". Unlimited liability partnerships proved to be an insufficient tool to organize the economy once we left the 18th century.
Do not get me wrong: I am all for better laws around corporate governance. But trying to turn back the clock to a mythical world run by yeomen and craftsmen and small family businesses is not going to get us anywhere. (Besides the obvious, those Goode Olde Days had its share of feudal lords, but we do not like to remember that.)
1. Form corporation named Timebomb.
2. Timebomb buys land
3. Timebomb "stores" pollutants in a manner that is safe for a whopping 10 years, charging tiny fees to mother corporation
4. Neighbors see coming disaster (maybe), but efforts gets tied up in courts
5. Mother corporation sloughs off Timebomb as independent legal entity
6. Timebomb poisons the water tables
7. Timebomb dies, and its only assets are poisoned land (which has negative value once it is a proven hazard)
Isn't it awesome how property rights solve all problems?
Those particular examples of juveniles tried as adults are well known precisely because they are anomalies from the norm. If only more prosecutors applied the discretion demonstrated in Steubenville, Weev would be picking up trash at the side of the road in an orange jumpsuit on weekends, and we would not be having this discussion.
Do you seriously want the DA to throw the entire book at everyone all the time? Because from the POV, Weev only got what he deserved.
Your concerns are well founded.
The point I want to emphasize is that there are both good and bad reasons for red tape -- there is a positive underlying drive that is rational. As our individuals lives are presumed to be of greater economic value, the dollar price we are willing to pay in small bureaucratic "fees" to protect that life will go up. That should be balanced by other considerations, in context.
We can attempt to simplify red tape. We can raise the bar to justify the addition of red tape. We can reform existing red tape. But we are not going to simply remove red tape.
To some degree, red tape is an inevitable result of great success. As the populace has become more wealthy, each individual life is more valuable. Some of these threats to life and limb and pocketbook are most efficiently dealt with by experts backed by the power of government. Obviously there can be too much of a good thing, but, by general principles, it is actually the most rational choice.
Most "polls" that bypass the Do Not Call list are transparent efforts to figure out which bumper sticker or sound bite will manipulate the populace most efficiently. They have zero to do with getting input from the citizenry on the relative merits of a new public policy proposal. The only important policy input is provided by the corporations writing the checks.
Realistically, if you want to change policy, you have to change public opinion: like it or not, Cannabis reform isn't happening because it's not popular.
Not popular enough, yet. True.
Cannabis reform, very narrowly defined, is popular. But seem to be many more people who will show up to the polls to vote against a candidate that is labelled "wants to legalize dope", than will show up to the polls to punish a "for prohibition" candidate. Most anti-prohibition voters are already acclimatized to vote for pro-prohibition candidates. It will take a new generation of citizens who are used to voting against prohibition at their local elections to change this dynamic.
Faster change is most likely to come from law enforcement professionals, who want to prioritize resources in more useful ways.
Evidence based public policy decision making is a recent innovation understood by a very small minority of the populace. Doing what will get you liked by people like you has been baked into our genes for millions of years.
The problem with these guesses about salt is our kidneys are specifically designed for actively and precisely maintaining homeostasis of certain key ions (Na, Cl, K, Ca) in the bloodstream. If it weren't we would simply die within days or sooner. Moderate salt with good hydration is probably not harmful at all -- it is probably good for you as it helps the kidneys filter other bad stuff out. Low salt could easily be bad for you.
High salt plus low hydration might be bad. But where exactly is the line where moderate salt becomes high? Guessing based on what we eat is for witch doctors.
So I would like to see an actual study showing how adding/subtracting a little salt changes anything measurable at all about the long term serum average, otherwise I am inclined to believe that this guess is baloney. We are not walking petri dishes.
(There are specific diseases where controlling salts are very important, but that is a separate issue.)
It is clear that Lennard defined her interests differently. It is clear that Lennard would have preferred to suffer a very small but non-zero risk of indictment, rather than help send her love to jail.
It is not the lawyer's job to define the interests of their client, contrary to the actual beliefs of the client.
I actually do not think meeting with the prosecutor was necessarily wrong. The real problem is that Lennard had fundamental misunderstanding of how the prosecutor would use that meeting. Lennard was operating under a belief the lawyer should have understood was ludicrous. It is the lawyer's job to inform their client of the likely consequences of answering or not answering questions. That the lawyer failed to do.
Aaron was furious. He told me not to meet Steve. But no one, including Aaron, would tell me why. No one would tell me even how to get out of it. And still I had an unshakable belief that if I could just somehow explain all this it would go away. I delayed once, too sick to go. My lawyers told me Steve was furious at my medical delay. I might be arrested. I told Aaron, and others, that I wanted to talk to Steve human to human.
Never talking is not necessarily practical. But the problem is not recognizing that once something progresses to a certain point a "human to human" talk is never ever ever going to stop an investigation or prosecution. They were way past that point. That is where they get you: when you believe a human tale will persuade while they are looking for mis-steps that will hang you and all your friends.
The prosecution only hesitates when sources of evidence completely dry up. Talking encourages the prosecution.
These lawyers were giving ineffective counsel, even though they were probably thinking that they could get her immunity for her cooperation and testimony.
Like the Model T. It revolutionized the market by offering one thousand and one incremental improvements, in a package and price that made a huge untapped segment of potential customers excited about how great it was for such a wonderful price.
Oh, yes.
Nonetheless, the point stands. It is not necessary to threaten to US directly in order to achieve deterrence. It is only necessary to make a credible threat that US interests in the region would suffer as a result of US escalation. Tel Aviv and Riyadh are within reach.
Deterrence does not require Iran to win. Iran just needs the capacity to cause enough havoc that escalation looks like a lose-lose scenario from the standpoint of US interests.
There is no consensus in any national intelligence agency that Iran intends to build nuclear weapons -- that includes Israeli intelligence. In fact, some analysts suggest the surest means to guarantee Iran builds multiple nuclear weapons and puts them on missiles with a short fuse is to bomb Iran now -- the Iranian regime will believe they have no choice.
If Israel were actually certain of the necessity, they have the means to act. Whining has been a very effective tactic for cowing US politicians however, and it does not cost Israel one red cent.
In particular, if it is generally believed that Iran has a few bombs, Saudi Arabia can easily plunk down $50B and get a few of their own with only minor shaving of their existing defense expenditures. So nuclear weapons are not a great offensive threat if the long-term result is the whole neighborhood becomes more dangerous. Standing at the threshold is probably the rational optimum for a defensive posture.
Exactly how do you think having a couple of nuclear weapons would deter the U.S. from invading?
The deterrence is not to the physical safety of the US. The deterrence is the threat to US allies, who will not look kindly on paying the price for a brutish US policy.
Likewise North Korea could be starved down to size with no risk to US soil. But South Korea is not keen on the idea of 10000 conventional missile and 100,000 artillery shells raining down on their capital. Thus we tread lightly, out of deference to of our ally -- escalating would not be doing our friend a favor.