Unless you're a corporate "person" in which case it most certainly IS a magic purse.
Cute. "KKKorporations sit there in their... in their KKKorporation buildings, and... and, and see, they're all KKKorporation-y... and they make money."
Nice try switching the conversation to "corporations", but the truth is, most Americans now receive government benefits of some kind. You and your kind may think, this is marvellous, but the situation does not benefit the country — the primary beneficiaries are the vast body of government employees paid for confiscating the monies (the IRS) and handing some of it out...
taxi industry used every political maneuver in its arsenal to keep Uber and Lyft off the strip
The only way to keep a competitor out of "your" turf is — or ought to be — by providing superior service at lower price. Being able to use "political maneuvers" instead or even addition to that is a sign of bona fide corruption.
It does not matter, whether the politicians involved took bribes or were sincere — the government simply should not have the power to be a player. The war, that Uber, Lyft et al wage against taxis is simply the more visible of the fights, which private businesses wage every day. We can bemoan the undue influence of lobbyists all day long, but the underlying problem is that, given the number of licensing requirements and regulations, the corporations can not afford not to have a lobbyist on payroll. Instead of, or, at best, in addition to, pleasing us, the consumers, all businesses of appreciable size must be pleasing the government as well.
That's not free market capitalism, and it sucks...
the correct course of action would be to make the available everywhere, not to remove products
The announced product-removal is means to the end of making the service available everywhere.
There is nothing magical or exceedingly hard about Amazon Prime Video. My 2008 Sony can play it. If Google and Apple aren't offering it, it is because they don't want to, not because they can not.
Israel has very low rates of gun violence too, but many people are packing. And soldiers always carry their rifles — even when going to beach for R&R — with two magazines each. It is not uncommon to see a girl in a bikini guarding a gun-pyramid, while her girlfriends are swimming, for example...
Whatever the reasons for lower gun-violence in Japan or Israel or what have you, the ban on weapons is certainly not the only reason. Whether it is even a contributing factor is not at all obvious.
I don't know, what "OCD" means in this context. No, I don't want to publish my filters for they aren't sufficiently generic anyway. They will allow people to know, which sites I frequent, however.
The first step is to disable all of the "whitelists" in Ad Block-supplied filters. You know, the items shown in green — which are, what bigger sites have paid Ad Block authors to whitelist. You can do that by applying sed(1) to remove disabled=true to the ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/adblockplus/patterns.ini (while Firefox is not running)...
They did not have that many to begin with, but there were two unrelated mass-shootings in Australia in 2011 — in addition to massacres not involving a fire-arm. So much for "complete lack".
Yeah, an Illiberal web-site running an op-ed aiming to convince populace into obediently surrendering their rights. Surprise...
They fail, though. The only thing they even claim is "not a single case includes evidence that the killer chose to target a place because it banned guns". But they all (or most) did happen in a gun-free location. How do I know? Simple, if it weren't so, MotherJones would've highlighted this fact in the very title. They did a commendable job putting the 62 mass-shotings incidents over 30 years together, but, curiously, do not have a boolean column "Gun free zone Y/N" in it...
But the shooter picking a place because it is gun-free is only part of the problem. There is no one there to stop him — whether he was cunning enough to count on that or not.
I'm not old enough to compete with her... Read my first Unix book in 1988. Was exposed to a Unix-computer for the first time in 1990. Got my own computer upon moving to the US (486, 33MHz) — and installed FreeBSD on it in 1993. That made me a sysadmin instantly, so I claim 22 years...
Well, there are a lot of gun free / highly-regulated countries with far less gun crime than the US
There are also ones, where guns are very widely spread and yet gun-violence is lower than here.
But we don't need to go abroad — simply compare, say, Chicago, IL, where even a museum could not get permission to display a WW1-era rifle, with Austin, TX, where guns are easy to get... The strictness of the anti-gun laws and "regulations" (all of them obviously unconstitutional, BTW) simply does not correlate with gun-violence.
Slashdot, the land of libertarians
The entire US has this law known as "the 2nd Amendment", which declares arms-possession a right to be taken away from the bad, not a mere privilege to be granted to the good.
Yes. The campuses — including this one, the public schools are all legally gun-free. A pop-tart eaten to the shape of a pistol is enough for a kid to be kicked out.
If you once felt good enough about a person to not merely have sex, but to have a child together, he can not be a complete asshole in your opinion.
Remember this rule (it applies equally to mothers despite my use of male pronouns). The affection you once had may have disappeared, but, if you suddenly think much worse about him, then your own opinion of what constitutes an asshole is changing — your partner remains the same person as before.
You may no longer be friends, but watch yourself and don't let your friends/parents make you two into enemies. If that helps, think of yourselves as co-workers working on the same project for the next 15-20 years — and stay professional.
I use Ad-Block's element-hiding add-on to get rid of not merely ads, but various other elements I dislike — including the incessant newsletter sign-up invitations, footers full of legalese, persistent "navigation" menus, "share-bars" and "article-tools" (thank you, I can increase the font without your little icon), weather-widgets, "related articles", "back-to-top" (seriously, who needs these on a desktop??), "next" and "previous" arrows — all of that crap...
In fact, I'm addicted. Upon coming to a new (or recently redesigned) site, I must clean it up before reading. Web-browsing without AdBlocker is just scary nowadays. And revolting...
Gallup et al. will lose major portion of income, if the new service proves useful to politicians. And if it does not so prove, it will be useless to the rest of us too...
Well, I can't speak for the motives of those speaking in defence of refugees
Well, I can — and did. They are picking out "poster children" and lying to the rest of us by implying, the sample they picked is representative. It is not.
the motivation for the large number of young men running away [...] either enlist or kill every single military-age man just because
Those same assholes, who'd impress into service or kill men, would also rape women and/or sell them into slavery (pre-pubescent once included) — so that motivation does not explain the lopsided statistics... If these crowds really feared persecution, they would've contained entire families. Since they do not, the young men must be motivated by economic prospects, not danger.
But I don't blame the people wanting to move to a better-run country in the slightest. I am an immigrant myself.
Yet, I do not believe, the countries they chose have any obligation — neither legal nor even moral — to take them. And for those, who are so accepted — out of kind compassion (even if based on the above-discussed lie) — to seek changes to their new country (in particular to demand women be dressed a certain way on pain of rape) is an outrage. Maybe, their children will be entitled to vote for changes, but their own responsibility is to be appreciative and supportive of their new countries just as they found them.
It is this outrage, that is the motivation of the man in TFA, and I understand him very well.
The "analysts" quoted in TFA believe, the intelligence is spread equally among all income-groups and races — it is their axiom. Therefore, when they see any disproportion, they treat it as evidence of bias — case closed:
"Racial bias has to be operating, inequities are rampant. Discrimination does exist whether intentional or unintentional"... Ford found that both Hispanic and black students are underrepresented in gifted programs and that black students are missing out the most. She also found that about half the seats in those programs go to higher-income students, even though the majority of the district is poor.
A completely different result can be obtained from a different axiom: that tests are blind to the testee's color and background, and test simply for the actual ability. From this follows a different result — poor and Black children are less able — whether it is due to genes or upbringing is irrelevant.
Obviously, the second result is politically incorrect and that's why NPR is carrying the article. But, despite being politically incorrect, it may still be correct — and any attempts to force a change would be very wrong.
I say, any proponents of a change in the rules must positively identify what specifically is leading to the discrimination they allege to happen. The burden of proof is on them.
you want to bring in a discussion of personal property as it relates to liberties and suggest that is on topic
Because I estimate the correlation between people voting for "wealth-spreading" and those mongering the fear of the NSA as above 90%. All of them are either self-inconsistent fools or two-faced scumbags.
You seem to suggest the NSA's data will one day be used to confiscate wealth.
No, I'm saying, the IRS is already doing that. NSA's worst offence so far was providing other agencies (local and Federal) with information about real crimes — and freedom-loving Americans are outraged over those other police then lying to conceal the spies' involvement. Some day such lying may evolve and lead to innocent people being framed. But it is yet to happen — so far there aren't even any allegations of anybody being framed with NSA's involvement.
So there is my point if you don't let the government see your stuff they don't know where there is to try and take from you. So thank you Snowden for bringing to light the domestic spying!
Had Snowden escaped from the IRS, you would've had a point.
Maybe the NSA's domestic spying isn't the 'greatest' threat to liberty but it clearly is a A threat. I for one think we should resist all threats to personal freedoms not just the biggest ones.
Well, if your house were on fire, would you concentrate on putting it out, or will you also continue thinking of the danger of an air-plane falling on it some day? The focus ought to be on the clear-and-present threats, not the hypothetical ones from the future. Moreover, significantly reducing the taxation will also reduce the threat of NSA — by lowering the amounts of money at the government's disposal, you make it less attractive for assholes, who would abuse NSA (or any other agency) to remain in power the way they already use the IRS.
75% of these so-called refugees are military age men.
And that gives you a right to treat them with less respect?
And to punish the 25% for the 75%?
No, that gives me the right to question the motives of those, who attempt to shame me into helping them by portraying them all as helpless women, elderly, and children. Such portrayals are dishonest and thus any compassion they stir is based on a lie.
I vote that you move to somewhere where your money won't be taken from you by the government.
As is, of course, perfectly clear from my post, I do not object to all taxation. I do object to taxation required to fight the colossal failure lovingly referred to as "War on Poverty". The cost of which happens to eclipse the combined costs of all of our nation's real wars since the very establishment of the Republic combined.
From a military standpoint, Putin would have been stupid to just let it go.
I dunno, Britain has given up Hong Kong in accordance to an ancient agreement with China and that was that. No scandal, no war — honest dealing.
But thank you for — despite trying to excuse Putin's armed invasion and annexation — not trying to bring up "Ukrainian nazis" or "Kiev's junta" or "referendum" or some such crap...
I made a perfectly reasonable request, which you -- six months later -- are unable to fulfil. Were I a lawyer, I would've rested my case long ago confident, that a non-biased jury will side with me.
Instead I'm trying to convince you — and failing. Most likely because you aren't arguing in good faith here.
will just say "Read the Constitution and figure out what and why a warrant is required."
I know perfectly well, what the Constitution says on the matter. Moreover, I agree with you — and expressed this agreement already — that the way NSA is used is dangerous and illegal.
But my point remains — NSA has not been used to actually harm innocents (quite the contrary, actually). Some day they might be used to frame someone inconvenient — through actions going well beyond what you refer to as "parallel reconstruction" — but it has not even been alleged to have had happened so far.
Meanwhile the IRS has been utilized to suppress opposition — the point you've repeatedly ignored, most likely because you happened to dislike this particular opposition yourself.
Once again, while the NSA is dangerously powerful (and unaccountable), it is the notion of "spreading the wealth around", which we ought to fear and resist.
If the Justice system is being bypassed, how can you claim that someone deserved suffering exactly?
It is not bypassed. A court still needs to convict the accused and the prosecution still needs to present evidence of guilt.
You know that they are telling the truth about their lies how exactly?
Because the convictions aren't based on their statements. Convictions are based on evidence.
What "parallel construction" endangers is the doctrine of "fruit of poisonous tree" — a safeguard meant to discourage the Executive from using illegal means to obtain evidence under the belief, that the crimes themselves are less dangerous than the Executive's actions. The doctrine is worth defending, but the fact remains: NSA-provided data has not been — and can not be, not by itself, anyway — used to frame an innocent person.
Where I am from, a liar is a liar
Sure. But NSA is not doing any of the lying here. Local prosecutors — maybe. But that's not, where Snowden ran away from.
Meanwhile, the very fact that no disheartened leaker ran away from the IRS yet, ought to be telling us something about the relative quality of people between the two agencies...
Slashdot Mirror
Cute. "KKKorporations sit there in their... in their KKKorporation buildings, and... and, and see, they're all KKKorporation-y... and they make money."
Nice try switching the conversation to "corporations", but the truth is, most Americans now receive government benefits of some kind. You and your kind may think, this is marvellous, but the situation does not benefit the country — the primary beneficiaries are the vast body of government employees paid for confiscating the monies (the IRS) and handing some of it out...
Why do we need such laws?
The only way to keep a competitor out of "your" turf is — or ought to be — by providing superior service at lower price. Being able to use "political maneuvers" instead or even addition to that is a sign of bona fide corruption.
It does not matter, whether the politicians involved took bribes or were sincere — the government simply should not have the power to be a player. The war, that Uber, Lyft et al wage against taxis is simply the more visible of the fights, which private businesses wage every day. We can bemoan the undue influence of lobbyists all day long, but the underlying problem is that, given the number of licensing requirements and regulations, the corporations can not afford not to have a lobbyist on payroll. Instead of, or, at best, in addition to, pleasing us, the consumers, all businesses of appreciable size must be pleasing the government as well.
That's not free market capitalism, and it sucks...
Projecting much? Please, don't hate...
The announced product-removal is means to the end of making the service available everywhere.
There is nothing magical or exceedingly hard about Amazon Prime Video. My 2008 Sony can play it. If Google and Apple aren't offering it, it is because they don't want to, not because they can not.
Israel has very low rates of gun violence too, but many people are packing. And soldiers always carry their rifles — even when going to beach for R&R — with two magazines each. It is not uncommon to see a girl in a bikini guarding a gun-pyramid, while her girlfriends are swimming, for example...
Whatever the reasons for lower gun-violence in Japan or Israel or what have you, the ban on weapons is certainly not the only reason. Whether it is even a contributing factor is not at all obvious.
I don't know, what "OCD" means in this context. No, I don't want to publish my filters for they aren't sufficiently generic anyway. They will allow people to know, which sites I frequent, however.
The first step is to disable all of the "whitelists" in Ad Block-supplied filters. You know, the items shown in green — which are, what bigger sites have paid Ad Block authors to whitelist. You can do that by applying sed(1) to remove disabled=true to the ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/adblockplus/patterns.ini (while Firefox is not running)...
They did not have that many to begin with, but there were two unrelated mass-shootings in Australia in 2011 — in addition to massacres not involving a fire-arm. So much for "complete lack".
Yeah, an Illiberal web-site running an op-ed aiming to convince populace into obediently surrendering their rights. Surprise...
They fail, though. The only thing they even claim is "not a single case includes evidence that the killer chose to target a place because it banned guns". But they all (or most) did happen in a gun-free location. How do I know? Simple, if it weren't so, MotherJones would've highlighted this fact in the very title. They did a commendable job putting the 62 mass-shotings incidents over 30 years together, but, curiously, do not have a boolean column "Gun free zone Y/N" in it...
But the shooter picking a place because it is gun-free is only part of the problem. There is no one there to stop him — whether he was cunning enough to count on that or not.
I'm not old enough to compete with her... Read my first Unix book in 1988. Was exposed to a Unix-computer for the first time in 1990. Got my own computer upon moving to the US (486, 33MHz) — and installed FreeBSD on it in 1993. That made me a sysadmin instantly, so I claim 22 years...
There are also ones, where guns are very widely spread and yet gun-violence is lower than here.
But we don't need to go abroad — simply compare, say, Chicago, IL, where even a museum could not get permission to display a WW1-era rifle, with Austin, TX, where guns are easy to get... The strictness of the anti-gun laws and "regulations" (all of them obviously unconstitutional, BTW) simply does not correlate with gun-violence.
The entire US has this law known as "the 2nd Amendment", which declares arms-possession a right to be taken away from the bad, not a mere privilege to be granted to the good.
Yes. The campuses — including this one, the public schools are all legally gun-free. A pop-tart eaten to the shape of a pistol is enough for a kid to be kicked out.
That cinema, where "a joker" killed 12 people — that movie theater was not closest to his house, but it was the only one within a 20-minute drive, that declared itself "gun-free".
In denial much?
If you once felt good enough about a person to not merely have sex, but to have a child together, he can not be a complete asshole in your opinion.
Remember this rule (it applies equally to mothers despite my use of male pronouns). The affection you once had may have disappeared, but, if you suddenly think much worse about him, then your own opinion of what constitutes an asshole is changing — your partner remains the same person as before.
You may no longer be friends, but watch yourself and don't let your friends/parents make you two into enemies. If that helps, think of yourselves as co-workers working on the same project for the next 15-20 years — and stay professional.
I use Ad-Block's element-hiding add-on to get rid of not merely ads, but various other elements I dislike — including the incessant newsletter sign-up invitations, footers full of legalese, persistent "navigation" menus, "share-bars" and "article-tools" (thank you, I can increase the font without your little icon), weather-widgets, "related articles", "back-to-top" (seriously, who needs these on a desktop??), "next" and "previous" arrows — all of that crap...
In fact, I'm addicted. Upon coming to a new (or recently redesigned) site, I must clean it up before reading. Web-browsing without AdBlocker is just scary nowadays. And revolting...
Gallup et al. will lose major portion of income, if the new service proves useful to politicians. And if it does not so prove, it will be useless to the rest of us too...
15 minutes could save you up to 15% or more on car insurance.
Well, I can — and did. They are picking out "poster children" and lying to the rest of us by implying, the sample they picked is representative. It is not.
Those same assholes, who'd impress into service or kill men, would also rape women and/or sell them into slavery (pre-pubescent once included) — so that motivation does not explain the lopsided statistics... If these crowds really feared persecution, they would've contained entire families. Since they do not, the young men must be motivated by economic prospects, not danger.
But I don't blame the people wanting to move to a better-run country in the slightest. I am an immigrant myself.
Yet, I do not believe, the countries they chose have any obligation — neither legal nor even moral — to take them. And for those, who are so accepted — out of kind compassion (even if based on the above-discussed lie) — to seek changes to their new country (in particular to demand women be dressed a certain way on pain of rape) is an outrage. Maybe, their children will be entitled to vote for changes, but their own responsibility is to be appreciative and supportive of their new countries just as they found them.
It is this outrage, that is the motivation of the man in TFA, and I understand him very well.
The "analysts" quoted in TFA believe, the intelligence is spread equally among all income-groups and races — it is their axiom. Therefore, when they see any disproportion, they treat it as evidence of bias — case closed:
A completely different result can be obtained from a different axiom: that tests are blind to the testee's color and background, and test simply for the actual ability. From this follows a different result — poor and Black children are less able — whether it is due to genes or upbringing is irrelevant.
Obviously, the second result is politically incorrect and that's why NPR is carrying the article. But, despite being politically incorrect, it may still be correct — and any attempts to force a change would be very wrong.
I say, any proponents of a change in the rules must positively identify what specifically is leading to the discrimination they allege to happen. The burden of proof is on them.
He lives in Russia now and remains very useful to Putin.
Because I estimate the correlation between people voting for "wealth-spreading" and those mongering the fear of the NSA as above 90%. All of them are either self-inconsistent fools or two-faced scumbags.
No, I'm saying, the IRS is already doing that. NSA's worst offence so far was providing other agencies (local and Federal) with information about real crimes — and freedom-loving Americans are outraged over those other police then lying to conceal the spies' involvement. Some day such lying may evolve and lead to innocent people being framed. But it is yet to happen — so far there aren't even any allegations of anybody being framed with NSA's involvement.
But the IRS is already open and brazen about confiscating your monies on mere suspicion and target opposition-supporters for audits and other prosecution.
Had Snowden escaped from the IRS, you would've had a point.
Well, if your house were on fire, would you concentrate on putting it out, or will you also continue thinking of the danger of an air-plane falling on it some day? The focus ought to be on the clear-and-present threats, not the hypothetical ones from the future. Moreover, significantly reducing the taxation will also reduce the threat of NSA — by lowering the amounts of money at the government's disposal, you make it less attractive for assholes, who would abuse NSA (or any other agency) to remain in power the way they already use the IRS.
75% of these so-called refugees are military age men.
And that gives you a right to treat them with less respect? And to punish the 25% for the 75%?
No, that gives me the right to question the motives of those, who attempt to shame me into helping them by portraying them all as helpless women, elderly, and children. Such portrayals are dishonest and thus any compassion they stir is based on a lie.
As is, of course, perfectly clear from my post, I do not object to all taxation. I do object to taxation required to fight the colossal failure lovingly referred to as "War on Poverty". The cost of which happens to eclipse the combined costs of all of our nation's real wars since the very establishment of the Republic combined.
I dunno, Britain has given up Hong Kong in accordance to an ancient agreement with China and that was that. No scandal, no war — honest dealing.
But thank you for — despite trying to excuse Putin's armed invasion and annexation — not trying to bring up "Ukrainian nazis" or "Kiev's junta" or "referendum" or some such crap...
I made a perfectly reasonable request, which you -- six months later -- are unable to fulfil. Were I a lawyer, I would've rested my case long ago confident, that a non-biased jury will side with me.
Instead I'm trying to convince you — and failing. Most likely because you aren't arguing in good faith here.
I know perfectly well, what the Constitution says on the matter. Moreover, I agree with you — and expressed this agreement already — that the way NSA is used is dangerous and illegal.
But my point remains — NSA has not been used to actually harm innocents (quite the contrary, actually). Some day they might be used to frame someone inconvenient — through actions going well beyond what you refer to as "parallel reconstruction" — but it has not even been alleged to have had happened so far.
Meanwhile the IRS has been utilized to suppress opposition — the point you've repeatedly ignored, most likely because you happened to dislike this particular opposition yourself.
Once again, while the NSA is dangerously powerful (and unaccountable), it is the notion of "spreading the wealth around", which we ought to fear and resist.
It is not bypassed. A court still needs to convict the accused and the prosecution still needs to present evidence of guilt.
Because the convictions aren't based on their statements. Convictions are based on evidence.
What "parallel construction" endangers is the doctrine of "fruit of poisonous tree" — a safeguard meant to discourage the Executive from using illegal means to obtain evidence under the belief, that the crimes themselves are less dangerous than the Executive's actions. The doctrine is worth defending, but the fact remains: NSA-provided data has not been — and can not be, not by itself, anyway — used to frame an innocent person.
Sure. But NSA is not doing any of the lying here. Local prosecutors — maybe. But that's not, where Snowden ran away from.
Meanwhile, the very fact that no disheartened leaker ran away from the IRS yet, ought to be telling us something about the relative quality of people between the two agencies...