It's not all bad. A good part of what Macklemore writes is in deliberate rejection of the 'gangsta' culture that is usually associated with rap music. While most rappers brag about their wealth, his rise to fame was a song mocking them for wasting their money on status symbols and bling.
The consultation questions show the plan is to require companies to beyond that - it proposes age confirmation via credit card, age-verified mobile network, or via a third-party verification service that checks against the electoral role.
So the future? "Welcome to www.smexyass.ru. Please enter your credit card number to confirm age. We promise we won't abuse it."
In practice it just means any site that doesn't take payment will host outside the UK to avoid the law, because handling credit card into requires expensive compliance standards and audits. In three years the new call will go up for a national firewall to block all those sites that are 'evading the law.'
The free market will solve it: Once word gets around that the products are dangerous, people won't buy them any more and the businesses will have no choice but to improve safety. Or at least rebrand.
I'm not thinking of a severe myostatic deficiency. Just a slight one. Enough that you can get the muscle mass that any unenhanced person could achieve with four hours a day at the gym, but without needing to waste all that time.
Ebola is self-limiting - it kills fast and the symptoms are obvious, so outbreaks are quickly noticed and easily contained. You get outbreaks, yes - but something slower like HIV or TB can spread a lot further and become truly endemic, killing a lot more people in the long run.
A particularly bad strain of flu is quite capable of killing millions. That's why there was such fear over bird flu and swine flu: They never amounted to much, but every new flu strain is a potential repeat of the 1918 pandemic. Eventually one of them will be.
If I were a mad scientist looking to kill as many people as possible, I'd got for TB. It's highly contagious, fatal, and runs slow enough to spread easily - you don't want something like ebola that kills people before they can spread it. TB is already a serious disease, all you'd need to do is splice in every known gene for antibiotic resistance and soup it up a little.
Super strength should be an easy one. Aim for MSTN, turn down myostatin production. There would be some side-effects though: Higher dietary requirements, and you'd want to do lots of animal modelling first to check for impact upon organs that include muscle tissue. Heart, digestive tract. But it's already well-studied in animals, so it might be achivable. If you've got money, an expert scientist, and a secret island base to hide from authorities.
But the quantity certainly isn't. Even the poorest Americans are not at risk of starvation. They might be homeless, without a penny to their name or a roof over their heads, but they still have food. It's so cheap that charitable organisations can give it away.
True. But remember that the Republican party has already demonstrated a willingness to shut down the federal government over issues less long-lasting than a lifetime supreme court appointment. If they threaten to do it again, is Obama going to call their bluff?
Republican freedom: Personal liberty for all and no government running your life! Except for abortion, federal funding for abstinence campaigns, strict regulation of broadcast profanity and indecency, criminalisation of pornography and prostitution, a strict war on recreational drugs, frequent government proclamations to make it clear that real americans worship Jesus and heretics are lesser citizens, and taxation to fund continued military buildup and corporate subsidies.
Democratic freedom: We'll still tax the hell out of you to pay for ill-managed social programs and micro-manage your life to meet our ideology, but at least we'll be honest about it.
Eventually, yes - but Republicans know that if they can just stall until November they've a pretty good chance of getting a Republican president, which means they can appoint someone more sympathetic to their policies. All they need to do is block any appointment since then - and that they can do.
I'm sure there are many lawyers making sure this works - but at a guess, those workers weren't actually replaced. Their job was instead outsourced to another company, that hired new workers on H1-B visas. Different company, different contract.
It's not uncommon. You should see the tangle that is Ark Experience, the creationist theme park - they've structured it in a manner that might be termed 'tax efficient.' Employees are actually under contract with a church in order to avoid state non-discrimination laws that forbid discrimination on grounds of religion, so the park can make sure only to hire young-earth-creationist Christian guides. The park itsself is run by a for-profit company in order to claim some government subsidies for tourism, but the most of the takings are not given to that company because then they would be taxed. Instead they are considered as 'donations' directly to another church (not even the same one as the employer) - because donations to a non-profit entity are untaxed. Or it was like that anyway, it's gotten in such legal mess I'm not sure how it works any more.
A similar trick is used by many franchises: The brand rights are held by a company in somewhere like Ireland or Luxembourg, where there is no corporation tax. The individual branches license the right to use the brand name for a fee calculated to be very slightly less than their net profit would otherwise be - so that almost all the profits are made by a company in a tax-free jurisdiction.
Really, if you structure a big company right, you can avoid all manner of laws.
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Can you bribe the IOC to host the game somewhere else?
But the money for the olympics is largely given by the host government, and ends up mostly in the hands of private companies.
It's not all bad. A good part of what Macklemore writes is in deliberate rejection of the 'gangsta' culture that is usually associated with rap music. While most rappers brag about their wealth, his rise to fame was a song mocking them for wasting their money on status symbols and bling.
Have to update it now though. If you want to confirm someone is over eighteen these days, you ask them to name all the spice girls.
The consultation questions show the plan is to require companies to beyond that - it proposes age confirmation via credit card, age-verified mobile network, or via a third-party verification service that checks against the electoral role.
So the future? "Welcome to www.smexyass.ru. Please enter your credit card number to confirm age. We promise we won't abuse it."
In practice it just means any site that doesn't take payment will host outside the UK to avoid the law, because handling credit card into requires expensive compliance standards and audits. In three years the new call will go up for a national firewall to block all those sites that are 'evading the law.'
They are not all the same sort of Islam. The country runs the whole spectrum from 'very devout muslim' to 'insanely devout muslim.'
Stents come to mind. It might be more biocompatible than the existing materials used.
Blood is a very awkward substance - it tends to clot on contact with practically anything that isn't a blood vessel.
The polymer used to make those bags has a curious property of weakening sharply when in proximity to a garden path.
Once again, I note the biggest error of the book 1984: It failed to anticipate the role the private sector would come to play in loss of privacy.
The free market will solve it: Once word gets around that the products are dangerous, people won't buy them any more and the businesses will have no choice but to improve safety. Or at least rebrand.
The current income tax rate depends upon your level of income.
I'm not thinking of a severe myostatic deficiency. Just a slight one. Enough that you can get the muscle mass that any unenhanced person could achieve with four hours a day at the gym, but without needing to waste all that time.
Money and power, same as always. A few of them are true believers in what they say - those are the most dangerous of all.
Ebola is self-limiting - it kills fast and the symptoms are obvious, so outbreaks are quickly noticed and easily contained. You get outbreaks, yes - but something slower like HIV or TB can spread a lot further and become truly endemic, killing a lot more people in the long run.
A particularly bad strain of flu is quite capable of killing millions. That's why there was such fear over bird flu and swine flu: They never amounted to much, but every new flu strain is a potential repeat of the 1918 pandemic. Eventually one of them will be.
If I were a mad scientist looking to kill as many people as possible, I'd got for TB. It's highly contagious, fatal, and runs slow enough to spread easily - you don't want something like ebola that kills people before they can spread it. TB is already a serious disease, all you'd need to do is splice in every known gene for antibiotic resistance and soup it up a little.
Eye color? Height? Stop thinking so small. How about ultra-violet vision?
You don't have to be a creationist, but you can't be anti-creationist either. They are still allowed to dodge the issue.
Super strength should be an easy one. Aim for MSTN, turn down myostatin production. There would be some side-effects though: Higher dietary requirements, and you'd want to do lots of animal modelling first to check for impact upon organs that include muscle tissue. Heart, digestive tract. But it's already well-studied in animals, so it might be achivable. If you've got money, an expert scientist, and a secret island base to hide from authorities.
But the quantity certainly isn't. Even the poorest Americans are not at risk of starvation. They might be homeless, without a penny to their name or a roof over their heads, but they still have food. It's so cheap that charitable organisations can give it away.
True. But remember that the Republican party has already demonstrated a willingness to shut down the federal government over issues less long-lasting than a lifetime supreme court appointment. If they threaten to do it again, is Obama going to call their bluff?
And to a conservative, all other political viewpoints are left-wing. That's just how it works.
This is why when the rhetoric gets heated liberals often compare conservatives to Hitler, and conservatives often compare liberals to... still Hitler.
"If the President gets a nominee past the Senate"
If pigs should rapidly evolve wings.
Republican freedom: Personal liberty for all and no government running your life! Except for abortion, federal funding for abstinence campaigns, strict regulation of broadcast profanity and indecency, criminalisation of pornography and prostitution, a strict war on recreational drugs, frequent government proclamations to make it clear that real americans worship Jesus and heretics are lesser citizens, and taxation to fund continued military buildup and corporate subsidies.
Democratic freedom: We'll still tax the hell out of you to pay for ill-managed social programs and micro-manage your life to meet our ideology, but at least we'll be honest about it.
Eventually, yes - but Republicans know that if they can just stall until November they've a pretty good chance of getting a Republican president, which means they can appoint someone more sympathetic to their policies. All they need to do is block any appointment since then - and that they can do.
I'm sure there are many lawyers making sure this works - but at a guess, those workers weren't actually replaced. Their job was instead outsourced to another company, that hired new workers on H1-B visas. Different company, different contract.
It's not uncommon. You should see the tangle that is Ark Experience, the creationist theme park - they've structured it in a manner that might be termed 'tax efficient.' Employees are actually under contract with a church in order to avoid state non-discrimination laws that forbid discrimination on grounds of religion, so the park can make sure only to hire young-earth-creationist Christian guides. The park itsself is run by a for-profit company in order to claim some government subsidies for tourism, but the most of the takings are not given to that company because then they would be taxed. Instead they are considered as 'donations' directly to another church (not even the same one as the employer) - because donations to a non-profit entity are untaxed. Or it was like that anyway, it's gotten in such legal mess I'm not sure how it works any more.
A similar trick is used by many franchises: The brand rights are held by a company in somewhere like Ireland or Luxembourg, where there is no corporation tax. The individual branches license the right to use the brand name for a fee calculated to be very slightly less than their net profit would otherwise be - so that almost all the profits are made by a company in a tax-free jurisdiction.
Really, if you structure a big company right, you can avoid all manner of laws.