YMMV by state, but in New Hampshire you may retrieve your stolen property by use of force, if done so immediately:
Section 627:8
627:8 Use of Force in Property Offenses. - A person is justified in using force upon another when and to the extent that he reasonably believes it necessary to prevent what is or reasonably appears to be an unlawful taking of his property, or criminal mischief, or to retake his property immediately following its taking; but he may use deadly force under such circumstances only in defense of a person as prescribed in RSA 627:4.
Further, the mugger has no right to defend himself against the original owner:
III. A person is not justified in using deadly force on another to defend himself or a third person from deadly force by the other if he knows that he and the third person can, with complete safety:
(b) Surrender property to a person asserting a claim of right thereto;
Now in your friend's case, a two day delay certainly doesn't qualify as 'immediate.' My intent is to point out that your mileage my vary by state, with respect to lawfully using force to retrieve your property.
He was held up AT GUNPOINT! This wasn't a "broke the car window and swiped a laptop" type of crime, this was someone brandishing an instrument of death. Yes, sir, I want that person locked up until such time(if any) as they can be rehabilitated.
The author shooting the crook dead on the spot would have been an acceptable outcome to me, and also in accordance with the laws of several states.
This is the guy that went on the airwaves with a "memo" supposedly typed in the 1970's, with proportional fonts and different-font sized superscripts! I would not trust someone like that to tell me it's raining.
That alone is perhaps forgivable if he pulled an immediate mea culpa when it was clear (within a day) that the documents where forgeries.
He didn't, however. He defended them for twelve days as genuine and even late in 2006 was still defending them as legit fakes (whatever that means).
It's amusing you've shut down so much of your mental facilities that you're unable to distinguish between a child throwing a temper tantrum and a man standing alone in front of tyranny.
It's sad that you get modded up for it, because it shows that there are plenty of people on slashdot who are also incapable of making the distinction.
Your post & similiar thinking is the ultimate in chauvanism.
In your little world 'they' only act in direct response to what 'we' do and they have no agency or purposes of their own.
At the end of that train of thought is the assumption that 'we' are the only real people, as only 'we' are capable of acting, everyone else is only capable of reacting.
I'm not saying there isn't interplay between US and Russian activities, just that your compulsive need to blame Bush leads you down an absurd, insulting path.
You don't know anything about me. I happen to be DEEPLY involved with "The Problem" and spend much of my waking life working at pulling us away from the precipice.
Yes! RS and his kin are our savoirs! Hallelujah!
Have you ever actually accomplished anything? Playing chicken little isn't an accomplishment, incidentally.
Look, I checked over your link and there are some decent observations in there about energy usage, and then there are some absurd leaps of logic as well.
Honestly it's rather what I expected. Take some facts, then attach an analysis and a call to action based on absurdly limited view that only addresses that which matches your political pet peeves.
For example, your page speaks of the anarchy & poverty in africa and the backsliding population of russia as examples of what is to come for western civilization because of energy usage.
I don't even know where to begin. Suffice it to say, many of the things you Observe are correct, but your interpretations and the plans based on them are quite suspect.
What you base your interpretations and action plans on is verifiable fact. This gives you false confidence that you're right when combined with the consensus of the people you associate with.
That you are missing other casual factors or other potential solutions where you are not the hero is completely hidden to you.
And all this, could like, totally be prevented if we listened to the infinite wisdom of yourself and other self-accreddited intellectual elites, right?
Like, totally it would be stopped!
You're a twit. Your post reeks of sophmoric college politics, where a bunch of unnaccomplished nobodies* sit around praising each other on their depth and intellect merely on the basis of agreeing with everyone in the room.
*This includes most liberal arts professors as well, possesing a title based mostly on the basis of agreeing with everyone in the room for a decade or so, and not actually having accomplished a damn thing.
One is a matter of verifiable science, the likes of which the bounty of western civilization is laid upon.
The other is a matter of faith, and while a belief may or may not be individually enriching, any answer does nothing to advance the useful sciences.
Myself?
I believe that God created the earth and every creature upon it. However, God being God, I see no reason why He couldn't have set up the rules of the universe so that the results He desired came about from a complex interaction of natural and logical processes over countless eons.
Can I prove it? Hell no. Do I want to teach my personal theory in schools? No. Such questions about the origin of life and the universe are very, very important- to the individual. They contribute not one wit to the advancement of the useful arts and muddy the waters when it comes to the scientific process.
You could say I believe in Intelligent Design, but that isn't the whole story, because I know quite well that belief can produce no useful results outside of my life. I know that trying to prove such a belief is impossible, and trying to explain it in scientific terms would be silly.
I see so much beauty in this world that I simply cannot accept that it happened all by some cosmic accident.
I don't see how it could have happened without guidance and structure from above. Yes, I'm aware it's possible that life spontaneously formed and evolved by random chance. I'm aware there are enough stars in the sky that, going on raw statistics, it's probable it had to happen somewhere, and we could be the lucky ones. I just find the chance of that happening absurdly unlikely.
Seperating science from faith and realizing their seperate roles in our society is the key to settling this issue. Literal Biblical creationists are of course monumentally ignorant. Intelligent Designers need some education on the purpose and utility of science. And evolutionary anti-theists need to realize that, in all their smarmyness and superiority, that cold hard science with guesses to fill in the vast blanks doesn't answer the most compelling questions a person may have about their existence.
Compartmentalize, folks. These things can co-exist.
There was a crew from MIT (IIRC) that got around this for quite some time by having the card counter and the high roller be seperate people. The card counter would always bet the same small amount but would subtly signal the 'high roller' to come and play at the table when the odds were favorable.
They got away with hundreds of thousands of dollars before they were caught and banned. I think there's a book out about it.
What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.
... To be this good, the on-board shuttle group has to be very different -- the antithesis of the up-all-night, pizza-and-roller-hockey software coders who have captured the public imagination. To be this good, the on-board shuttle group has to be very ordinary -- indistinguishable from any focused, disciplined, and methodically managed creative enterprise.
... At the on-board shuttle group, about one-third of the process of writing software happens before anyone writes a line of code. NASA and the Lockheed Martin group agree in the most minute detail about everything the new code is supposed to do -- and they commit that understanding to paper, with the kind of specificity and precision usually found in blueprints. Nothing in the specs is changed without agreement and understanding from both sides. And no coder changes a single line of code without specs carefully outlining the change. Take the upgrade of the software to permit the shuttle to navigate with Global Positioning Satellites, a change that involves just 1.5% of the program, or 6,366 lines of code. The specs for that one change run 2,500 pages, a volume thicker than a phone book. The specs for the current program fill 30 volumes and run 40,000 pages.
"Our requirements are almost pseudo-code," says William R. Pruett, who manages the software project for NASA. "They say, you must do exactly this, do it exactly this way, given this condition and this circumstance."
I imagine that's as good as it gets for proper coding.
My programming education never made it past the C programming course I needed for my BSME. The fastcompany story looks relevent though.
I just wanted to share the process of how these things are done- reasonable people can certainly disagree about the decision. I don't know enough specifics about the EPA permit & the great lakes to form an opinion.
A relevant part of the question is this: What is the flow rate/water turnover rate in lake michigan?
The lake is over 1,000 cubic miles of water, so even if the water was stagnant it would take a long time to raise the PPM of the discharge to a harmful level, assuming good mixing (yes, yes, assumptions make an ass out of you and me, blah blah blah).
If the flow rate through the lake is several million gallons a day then this discharge could be diluted to the point of irrelevance, and it probably is.
Now you'd want to take into account other man made discharges into the lake, but these are the questions you ask to determine if this actually causes any harm. What I described is pretty much what the state and national EPA does for these sorts of things.
The fact is that human activity has an impact on the environment. Given that, the pragmatic question is how much can mother nature "take for the team." The answer? some, definately, without causing any harm.
It's an old maxim- the dose makes the poison. You can put bad stuff into something you want to preserve without causing harm. Now I will admit I don't know enough about ocean and freshwater chemistry to know where to even start figuring out the ultimate disposition of the dumped products. I am guessing, however, that somebody who works for the EPA and is involved in the permiting process has a decent idea of how that all works.
The power plant I work at frequently discharges water with various chemical adultrents into the atlantic ocean at up to 100 gallons per minute. That discharge, however, is diluted by 420,000 gpm of straight sea water used for cooling, and then mixed in well below the surface a mile offshore.
What could you safely drink if it was diluted to 1 part per 4,200 parts? sulfuric acid? Antifreeze? Drano? All of the above?
(pardon the shitty writing, I'm tired & about to go to bed)
What a patently silly question! Have we forgotten the hundreds if not thousands of people who died of the heat waves in the last few years in Europe.
Just a nitpicky point: Europe, especially France where the deaths occured, is supposedly a collection of modern nations with access to things such as the century old technology of (drum roll please)....
Air conditioning.
That 3,000 elderly died in a heat wave (August 2003) tells you a lot more about the country that had the deaths, and not so much about the climate. The temperature was 40C/104F- hot, but managable with the modern technology that France should have.
Other than that, carry on. Not that I agree with you, it's just that there's no point in arguing.
Only in the USA do people actually think of health care like a luxury good, rather than as a basic human right.
Health care isn't a luxury good. Most of the stuff we pay for everyday, with money we could use for our healthcare, is a luxury.
Further, only europeans and their ilk would think anything that requires other people's time, money, and products is a 'right.' You folks invent new rights everyday. I'll pass on your definition of 'right', thanks.
If you said universal healthcare is a nice thing that advanced civilizations do for their citizenry, that's at least a plausible argument. But a right? No way. You do not have a right to other people's efforts and goods, because if you do, the providers of those efforts and goods have no rights.
Fire department services aren't a right. Police services aren't a right. Plenty of places in the US exist with the none of or the barest of those services. Besides, I spent most of my post talking about maintanance.
For your analogy to hold water, you would have to have a 'right' to smoke detectors and fire extinguishers. You'd have to have a right to 2" deadbolt locks and bars on the windows.
When you go down your definition of what's a 'right', there is no end. The final outcome of such a definition of 'right' is nations full of infants, relieved of all responsibility for their lives by the state.
Well, I can see the conversation is being dominated by the pro socialized/single-payer/government funded healthcare crowd, but I'll try anyway.
First, let's be clear that what everyone is talking about isn't 'insurance' for the most part, but 'maintanence.' Health 'insurance' is the only sort of insurance where the insurer is expected to pay for day-to-day stuff.
You don't call up your auto insurance people when your car develops a squeal or it starts pulling to the right. You live with it, or you take it to the mechanic and pay them yourself.
You don't call your homeowner's insurance when your toilet is clogged up, you call a plumber, and you pay him yourself.
Yet for care that requires much more expertise and training than either of those two problems, we expect the normal situation to be we present ourselves at the doctor's office and somebody else pays the bill.
People are prepared to pay for maintanence in other areas of their life and typically budget for it or find someway to pay it.
The best comparison in the US is HSA (Health Savings accounts) + catastrophic insurance. The idea is you're able to pay so much per year for health care (usually $5000), and then more traditional insurance takes over above that. This way is much, much cheaper than what's normally considered 'health insurance.'
You're going to pay for health insurance in any case, weather by taxes, or buying products, or income you might have been otherwise paid, etc. The HSA way cuts out the most middlemen for every day care.
Incidentally most health care facilities offer substantial cash discounts. You handing over a check is much, much cheaper to them than filling out all kinds of paperwork for medicare or the insurance company. (Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital gives a 20-30% cash discount, for example)
Yes, some insurance companies will try to f*ck you anyway once they have to start paying. Do some research and sign up with the company least likely to screw you.
Any other way causes a seperation between the cost of a service and the decision to use it. Because of what's considered 'normal' nowadays, people don't even consider that consuming health care services might result in cutting somewhere else in their life. Get that lump checked out? You might have to go without cable this month. See a doctor for that persistant, nagging three week old cough? No eating out for you for a while.
Those kinds of equations don't enter into anyone's head, but those are rational questions. Do you value watching the sapranos this month over nipping that problem in the bud? Do you want pizza hut a few times this month more than you want to get rid of that cough?
Are you folks really going to tell me that someone shouldn't have to make a decision between the countless luxuries we enjoy in this day and age, and their health?
Are you going to tell me that not only is healthcare a 'RIGHT', but everything they would have to give up to pay for healthcare themselves is also a 'RIGHT'?
This is the discussion we're having for everybody above the poverty level.
There's so much more wrapped up in this issue, but I'll leave it at that for now.
So you say you work out the middle man in this horrible scheme of capitalism. But I'm still concerned that the people who are farming right now at a severely reduced pay rate are doing so because they don't have the money to front for the operation and they have no choice but to remain a pawn. They make very little money and the real profits go to some American guy manipulating them all and paying for their accounts.
Tell me again how your service does not promote this middle man from acting like a player? How am I assured that my gold is not earned by some innocent kid who is doing this as a job to make money? How am I assured this isn't still some cog in a scheme to exploit foreign workers?
Disclaimer for the rest of Slashdot: I'm well aware of the situations where this may be the person's only means of income. I still would rather not support this system.
Your premise is entirely wrong, therefor it's not really possible to answer your question in a way that will satisfy you.
The only part of your question that's relevent is this: Is everyone freely engaging in these transactions? If so, they must believe that they benefit from it. Can the worker quit and find another way to eek out a living? Can the employer fire him and hire someone else? Are you free to not play the MMOG in question? Are you free to not buy gold from this seller? Is the seller free to not sell gold from you? The alternatives may be less pleasent, but they are still alternatives.
By arbitrarily saying I'm well aware of the situations where this may be the person's only means of income. I still would rather not support this. You're setting up field such that no answer will satisfy you, and any transaction that involves Americans paying foriegners for unskilled labor is evil exploitation.
No one who thinks like you do can possibly be pleased. Why bother?
This is what happens when you take too many classes about 'social justice': Your head gets filled with confused thinking about victims, oppressors, capitilist pigs, poor exploited foreigners and the like.
This is a very productive conversation, very insightful, and I'm glad we're having it.
But what the hell. We're just non-specifically tossing insults around, so let's continue.
Or because jackasses like you have been shitting on this country day in and day out for the last 27 years.
Why don't you poke it and test for wetness. I'll bet it's bone dry, because it was left there by the commie bastard libs and the decades they had in power before reagan.
I'm an ME with very limited programming experience who nonetheless hangs around slashdot, and even I've read enough to think this is fluff crap.
If there wasn't a pic of a cute professor involved, would anyone care?
Pretty sure you nailed it right there. On the one hand, this kind of crap isn't going to help her be taken seriously at all. On the other hand, she is very, very cute.
It's entirely possible that Prof Hottie ^H^H^H Hazelwood discovered some new arcana in the field and the reporter can't even come close to understanding 3/4 of it, so she just went with the easy stuff. More likely, Hazelwood rediscovered the FPGA.
Not really. Which one is better than the rest and in what way ?
In my second response to you I included two links, one on prime divider societies and one on the Thar mentality.
They explain it better than I. Please read and consider them. The "Prime Divider" article is the shorter if you're pressed for time, but the "Thar" one is also worth reading.
Pulling out the 'racist & nazi' card so early? Isn't that what your type does when they no longer believe they have the strong position in an argument? It's a cheap cop-out.
You do not grasp how deeply toxic cultures are ingrained in their participants.
Such a comment sends shivers through my backbone and I see a vision of the third reich. We are better than them? I don't want to even talk to you anymore.
There's a difference between race and culture. Race isn't what I'm talking about. Culture is, and culture is a learned set of behavoirs ingrained in since birth.
Are you of the opinion that no learned set of behavoirs is better than any other?
The fundamental defect in your position is that you ascribe western values as universal and just below the surface in everyone- hence, your faith in education alone. You do not grasp how deeply toxic cultures are ingrained in their participants.
Modern western society is built on several fundamental concepts that we take for granted, and practice unconsciously to the point where many of us can't conceive of a vastly different line of thought. Here's a primer of one to get you started: Thar Mentality
Yes, but i know that relative comfort is only because there are people around the world who live in despicable conditions - which is why there are a lot of people envying and hating us.
Wealth is not a zero-sum game. You could wall off modern nations from 'developing'/3rd world nations completely and the bottom 1% of western nations would still be better off than the the 80th percentile of the rest of the world. Sure, there would be some painful adjustment but the basis of western wealth is not the taking of raw materials cheaply from undeveloped countries. It's the processing and use of such materials that make us wealthy, and they can be pretty much had for a somewhat higher price with the borders of modern nations.
Oh, envy is a base human emotion, and I will not adjust my behavoir according to someone else's character defects. I may keep my behavoir in check out of humility, but that's not the same as weakining oneself to avoid envy.
killing ? NEVER. fighting,dieing: yes.
You're missing something fundamental about the concept of 'fighting', but If you can't figure it out by reading your own words, I don't imagine I can explain it to you.
Yes, by educating them, sure. by letting them live their own life, With ya there too by giving them chances,... I'm all for that NOT BY POINTING GUNS.
Here's the short version of the relevance: In any undeveloped country, there are the poor starving & suffering masses, and there are the few elite who do profit and live comfortably by theft, intimidation and outright murder. (This is different from wealth created by western societies, which is much more widespread and based on conducting mutually agreeable transactions)
Educating the masses in more productive ways of life will improve them, but it challenges the authority & wealth of the current people in the top positions & their cronies.
Such people aren't usually conducive to the changes, because the change into an overall better society involves an immediate and real decline in their prestige. They may very well protect their positions with force, and you asking them nicely to step down so their subjects can be better off isn't going to work. The only way to get such people out of the way is to remove them from the public scene, and if there's too many of them that are too well armed to imprison, then you have to kill them.
Again, the fundamental western concepts you unconsciously take for granted are not universal. You imagine great change in the societies we talk about, yet you imagine those who currently benefit will go quietly into the night. You want the crops without tilling the earth. You want the beauty of a snow-covered scene without the blizzard the night before. You want the life-giving rain without the thunder, lightning and floods that come with it.
It ain't that easy. Please, follow the links I put up there with an open mind. We gave peace a chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Further, the mugger has no right to defend himself against the original owner:
Now in your friend's case, a two day delay certainly doesn't qualify as 'immediate.' My intent is to point out that your mileage my vary by state, with respect to lawfully using force to retrieve your property.
He was held up AT GUNPOINT! This wasn't a "broke the car window and swiped a laptop" type of crime, this was someone brandishing an instrument of death. Yes, sir, I want that person locked up until such time(if any) as they can be rehabilitated.
The author shooting the crook dead on the spot would have been an acceptable outcome to me, and also in accordance with the laws of several states.
YMMV.
That alone is perhaps forgivable if he pulled an immediate mea culpa when it was clear (within a day) that the documents where forgeries.
He didn't, however. He defended them for twelve days as genuine and even late in 2006 was still defending them as legit fakes (whatever that means).
It's amusing you've shut down so much of your mental facilities that you're unable to distinguish between a child throwing a temper tantrum and a man standing alone in front of tyranny.
It's sad that you get modded up for it, because it shows that there are plenty of people on slashdot who are also incapable of making the distinction.
Your post & similiar thinking is the ultimate in chauvanism.
In your little world 'they' only act in direct response to what 'we' do and they have no agency or purposes of their own.
At the end of that train of thought is the assumption that 'we' are the only real people, as only 'we' are capable of acting, everyone else is only capable of reacting.
I'm not saying there isn't interplay between US and Russian activities, just that your compulsive need to blame Bush leads you down an absurd, insulting path.
You don't know anything about me. I happen to be DEEPLY involved with "The Problem" and spend much of my waking life working at pulling us away from the precipice.
Yes! RS and his kin are our savoirs! Hallelujah!
Have you ever actually accomplished anything? Playing chicken little isn't an accomplishment, incidentally.
Look, I checked over your link and there are some decent observations in there about energy usage, and then there are some absurd leaps of logic as well.
Honestly it's rather what I expected. Take some facts, then attach an analysis and a call to action based on absurdly limited view that only addresses that which matches your political pet peeves.
For example, your page speaks of the anarchy & poverty in africa and the backsliding population of russia as examples of what is to come for western civilization because of energy usage.
I don't even know where to begin. Suffice it to say, many of the things you Observe are correct, but your interpretations and the plans based on them are quite suspect.
What you base your interpretations and action plans on is verifiable fact. This gives you false confidence that you're right when combined with the consensus of the people you associate with.
That you are missing other casual factors or other potential solutions where you are not the hero is completely hidden to you.
OMG!
And all this, could like, totally be prevented if we listened to the infinite wisdom of yourself and other self-accreddited intellectual elites, right?
Like, totally it would be stopped!
You're a twit. Your post reeks of sophmoric college politics, where a bunch of unnaccomplished nobodies* sit around praising each other on their depth and intellect merely on the basis of agreeing with everyone in the room.
*This includes most liberal arts professors as well, possesing a title based mostly on the basis of agreeing with everyone in the room for a decade or so, and not actually having accomplished a damn thing.
One is a matter of verifiable science, the likes of which the bounty of western civilization is laid upon.
The other is a matter of faith, and while a belief may or may not be individually enriching, any answer does nothing to advance the useful sciences.
Myself?
I believe that God created the earth and every creature upon it. However, God being God, I see no reason why He couldn't have set up the rules of the universe so that the results He desired came about from a complex interaction of natural and logical processes over countless eons.
Can I prove it? Hell no. Do I want to teach my personal theory in schools? No. Such questions about the origin of life and the universe are very, very important- to the individual. They contribute not one wit to the advancement of the useful arts and muddy the waters when it comes to the scientific process.
You could say I believe in Intelligent Design, but that isn't the whole story, because I know quite well that belief can produce no useful results outside of my life. I know that trying to prove such a belief is impossible, and trying to explain it in scientific terms would be silly.
I see so much beauty in this world that I simply cannot accept that it happened all by some cosmic accident.
I don't see how it could have happened without guidance and structure from above. Yes, I'm aware it's possible that life spontaneously formed and evolved by random chance. I'm aware there are enough stars in the sky that, going on raw statistics, it's probable it had to happen somewhere, and we could be the lucky ones. I just find the chance of that happening absurdly unlikely.
Seperating science from faith and realizing their seperate roles in our society is the key to settling this issue. Literal Biblical creationists are of course monumentally ignorant. Intelligent Designers need some education on the purpose and utility of science. And evolutionary anti-theists need to realize that, in all their smarmyness and superiority, that cold hard science with guesses to fill in the vast blanks doesn't answer the most compelling questions a person may have about their existence.
Compartmentalize, folks. These things can co-exist.
There was a crew from MIT (IIRC) that got around this for quite some time by having the card counter and the high roller be seperate people. The card counter would always bet the same small amount but would subtly signal the 'high roller' to come and play at the table when the odds were favorable.
They got away with hundreds of thousands of dollars before they were caught and banned. I think there's a book out about it.
So there you have it.
Excerpt:
I imagine that's as good as it gets for proper coding.
My programming education never made it past the C programming course I needed for my BSME. The fastcompany story looks relevent though.
The 1/4200 ratio I gave was for mostly water vs seawater, so the actual dilution rate is much higher.
Anywhich way, I don't know the dilution specifics and neither do you. I'm no defending the BP decision. My goal was to say how the decision was made.
All that is certainly true, but the 100gpm I refered to is mostly water anyway. The actual chemical vs water ratio is much higher than 1:4200.
Oh, and we don't discharge any of those things you listed.
I just wanted to share the process of how these things are done- reasonable people can certainly disagree about the decision. I don't know enough specifics about the EPA permit & the great lakes to form an opinion.
A relevant part of the question is this: What is the flow rate/water turnover rate in lake michigan?
The lake is over 1,000 cubic miles of water, so even if the water was stagnant it would take a long time to raise the PPM of the discharge to a harmful level, assuming good mixing (yes, yes, assumptions make an ass out of you and me, blah blah blah).
If the flow rate through the lake is several million gallons a day then this discharge could be diluted to the point of irrelevance, and it probably is.
Now you'd want to take into account other man made discharges into the lake, but these are the questions you ask to determine if this actually causes any harm. What I described is pretty much what the state and national EPA does for these sorts of things.
The fact is that human activity has an impact on the environment. Given that, the pragmatic question is how much can mother nature "take for the team." The answer? some, definately, without causing any harm.
It's an old maxim- the dose makes the poison. You can put bad stuff into something you want to preserve without causing harm.
Now I will admit I don't know enough about ocean and freshwater chemistry to know where to even start figuring out the ultimate disposition of the dumped products. I am guessing, however, that somebody who works for the EPA and is involved in the permiting process has a decent idea of how that all works.
The power plant I work at frequently discharges water with various chemical adultrents into the atlantic ocean at up to 100 gallons per minute. That discharge, however, is diluted by 420,000 gpm of straight sea water used for cooling, and then mixed in well below the surface a mile offshore.
What could you safely drink if it was diluted to 1 part per 4,200 parts? sulfuric acid? Antifreeze? Drano? All of the above?
(pardon the shitty writing, I'm tired & about to go to bed)
What a patently silly question! Have we forgotten the hundreds if not thousands of people who died of the heat waves in the last few years in Europe.
Just a nitpicky point: Europe, especially France where the deaths occured, is supposedly a collection of modern nations with access to things such as the century old technology of (drum roll please)....
Air conditioning.
That 3,000 elderly died in a heat wave (August 2003) tells you a lot more about the country that had the deaths, and not so much about the climate. The temperature was 40C/104F- hot, but managable with the modern technology that France should have.
Other than that, carry on. Not that I agree with you, it's just that there's no point in arguing.
Only in the USA do people actually think of health care like a luxury good, rather than as a basic human right.
Health care isn't a luxury good. Most of the stuff we pay for everyday, with money we could use for our healthcare, is a luxury.
Further, only europeans and their ilk would think anything that requires other people's time, money, and products is a 'right.' You folks invent new rights everyday. I'll pass on your definition of 'right', thanks.
If you said universal healthcare is a nice thing that advanced civilizations do for their citizenry, that's at least a plausible argument. But a right? No way. You do not have a right to other people's efforts and goods, because if you do, the providers of those efforts and goods have no rights.
Fire department services aren't a right. Police services aren't a right. Plenty of places in the US exist with the none of or the barest of those services. Besides, I spent most of my post talking about maintanance.
For your analogy to hold water, you would have to have a 'right' to smoke detectors and fire extinguishers. You'd have to have a right to 2" deadbolt locks and bars on the windows.
When you go down your definition of what's a 'right', there is no end. The final outcome of such a definition of 'right' is nations full of infants, relieved of all responsibility for their lives by the state.
Well, I can see the conversation is being dominated by the pro socialized/single-payer/government funded healthcare crowd, but I'll try anyway.
First, let's be clear that what everyone is talking about isn't 'insurance' for the most part, but 'maintanence.' Health 'insurance' is the only sort of insurance where the insurer is expected to pay for day-to-day stuff.
You don't call up your auto insurance people when your car develops a squeal or it starts pulling to the right. You live with it, or you take it to the mechanic and pay them yourself.
You don't call your homeowner's insurance when your toilet is clogged up, you call a plumber, and you pay him yourself.
Yet for care that requires much more expertise and training than either of those two problems, we expect the normal situation to be we present ourselves at the doctor's office and somebody else pays the bill.
People are prepared to pay for maintanence in other areas of their life and typically budget for it or find someway to pay it.
The best comparison in the US is HSA (Health Savings accounts) + catastrophic insurance. The idea is you're able to pay so much per year for health care (usually $5000), and then more traditional insurance takes over above that. This way is much, much cheaper than what's normally considered 'health insurance.'
You're going to pay for health insurance in any case, weather by taxes, or buying products, or income you might have been otherwise paid, etc. The HSA way cuts out the most middlemen for every day care.
Incidentally most health care facilities offer substantial cash discounts. You handing over a check is much, much cheaper to them than filling out all kinds of paperwork for medicare or the insurance company. (Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital gives a 20-30% cash discount, for example)
Yes, some insurance companies will try to f*ck you anyway once they have to start paying. Do some research and sign up with the company least likely to screw you.
Any other way causes a seperation between the cost of a service and the decision to use it. Because of what's considered 'normal' nowadays, people don't even consider that consuming health care services might result in cutting somewhere else in their life. Get that lump checked out? You might have to go without cable this month. See a doctor for that persistant, nagging three week old cough? No eating out for you for a while.
Those kinds of equations don't enter into anyone's head, but those are rational questions. Do you value watching the sapranos this month over nipping that problem in the bud? Do you want pizza hut a few times this month more than you want to get rid of that cough?
Are you folks really going to tell me that someone shouldn't have to make a decision between the countless luxuries we enjoy in this day and age, and their health?
Are you going to tell me that not only is healthcare a 'RIGHT', but everything they would have to give up to pay for healthcare themselves is also a 'RIGHT'?
This is the discussion we're having for everybody above the poverty level.
There's so much more wrapped up in this issue, but I'll leave it at that for now.
Your premise is entirely wrong, therefor it's not really possible to answer your question in a way that will satisfy you.
The only part of your question that's relevent is this: Is everyone freely engaging in these transactions? If so, they must believe that they benefit from it. Can the worker quit and find another way to eek out a living? Can the employer fire him and hire someone else? Are you free to not play the MMOG in question? Are you free to not buy gold from this seller? Is the seller free to not sell gold from you? The alternatives may be less pleasent, but they are still alternatives.
By arbitrarily saying I'm well aware of the situations where this may be the person's only means of income. I still would rather not support this. You're setting up field such that no answer will satisfy you, and any transaction that involves Americans paying foriegners for unskilled labor is evil exploitation.
No one who thinks like you do can possibly be pleased. Why bother?
This is what happens when you take too many classes about 'social justice': Your head gets filled with confused thinking about victims, oppressors, capitilist pigs, poor exploited foreigners and the like.
But what the hell. We're just non-specifically tossing insults around, so let's continue.
Why don't you poke it and test for wetness. I'll bet it's bone dry, because it was left there by the commie bastard libs and the decades they had in power before reagan.
If all you see is a world of shit, maybe it's because your head is up your ass.
Cute but unfounded. But hey,You've been modded up for pandering to the political sensitivities of slashdot mods. Win for you!
Pretty sure you nailed it right there. On the one hand, this kind of crap isn't going to help her be taken seriously at all. On the other hand, she is very, very cute.
It's entirely possible that Prof Hottie ^H^H^H Hazelwood discovered some new arcana in the field and the reporter can't even come close to understanding 3/4 of it, so she just went with the easy stuff. More likely, Hazelwood rediscovered the FPGA.
Think she'll show up to defend herself?
In my second response to you I included two links, one on prime divider societies and one on the Thar mentality.
They explain it better than I. Please read and consider them. The "Prime Divider" article is the shorter if you're pressed for time, but the "Thar" one is also worth reading.
Such a comment sends shivers through my backbone and I see a vision of the third reich. We are better than them? I don't want to even talk to you anymore.
There's a difference between race and culture. Race isn't what I'm talking about. Culture is, and culture is a learned set of behavoirs ingrained in since birth.
Are you of the opinion that no learned set of behavoirs is better than any other?
The fundamental defect in your position is that you ascribe western values as universal and just below the surface in everyone- hence, your faith in education alone. You do not grasp how deeply toxic cultures are ingrained in their participants.
... I'm all for that
Modern western society is built on several fundamental concepts that we take for granted, and practice unconsciously to the point where many of us can't conceive of a vastly different line of thought. Here's a primer of one to get you started: Thar Mentality
Yes, but i know that relative comfort is only because there are people around the world who live in despicable conditions - which is why there are a lot of people envying and hating us.
Wealth is not a zero-sum game. You could wall off modern nations from 'developing'/3rd world nations completely and the bottom 1% of western nations would still be better off than the the 80th percentile of the rest of the world. Sure, there would be some painful adjustment but the basis of western wealth is not the taking of raw materials cheaply from undeveloped countries. It's the processing and use of such materials that make us wealthy, and they can be pretty much had for a somewhat higher price with the borders of modern nations.
Oh, envy is a base human emotion, and I will not adjust my behavoir according to someone else's character defects. I may keep my behavoir in check out of humility, but that's not the same as weakining oneself to avoid envy.
killing ? NEVER. fighting,dieing: yes.
You're missing something fundamental about the concept of 'fighting', but If you can't figure it out by reading your own words, I don't imagine I can explain it to you.
Yes, by educating them, sure.
by letting them live their own life, With ya there too
by giving them chances,
NOT BY POINTING GUNS.
Another concept you're unfamiliar with: Prime divider societies
Here's the short version of the relevance: In any undeveloped country, there are the poor starving & suffering masses, and there are the few elite who do profit and live comfortably by theft, intimidation and outright murder. (This is different from wealth created by western societies, which is much more widespread and based on conducting mutually agreeable transactions)
Educating the masses in more productive ways of life will improve them, but it challenges the authority & wealth of the current people in the top positions & their cronies.
Such people aren't usually conducive to the changes, because the change into an overall better society involves an immediate and real decline in their prestige. They may very well protect their positions with force, and you asking them nicely to step down so their subjects can be better off isn't going to work. The only way to get such people out of the way is to remove them from the public scene, and if there's too many of them that are too well armed to imprison, then you have to kill them.
Again, the fundamental western concepts you unconsciously take for granted are not universal. You imagine great change in the societies we talk about, yet you imagine those who currently benefit will go quietly into the night. You want the crops without tilling the earth. You want the beauty of a snow-covered scene without the blizzard the night before. You want the life-giving rain without the thunder, lightning and floods that come with it.
It ain't that easy. Please, follow the links I put up there with an open mind. We gave peace a chance.