What it says to me is that you addressed one quarter of my complaints about this poster by saying things that I'll have to do a reasonable amount of research about to see if it's even true. Having seen no evidence or studies as to whether ADD "should statistically affect boys and girls equally", I can't even answer to it before I do some digging, but I notice you didn't bother to back that "fact" up with any citations, leaving it to me to do the legwork. On top of that, even if it turns out that false diagnoses are up, that doesn't give anyone dispensation to label all or even most of them as such without some sort of supporting proof.
So even assuming that I drop the entire line about the poster's comments about ADD diagnoses, you didn't say a word about all the rest of it. Considering that your argument fails to address much less rebut any of the other things I brought up, like claiming a majority of kids "do whatever they want" or "stuck to the fucking XBox for 12 hours a day" or that any reasonable percentage of parents "decided real parenting was too hard", and considering that these things (and the out-of-scope comments about ADD diagnoses) were to discuss why tenure shouldn't be used to protect someone like this from dismissal, I'd say you need to be a lot more thorough if you're going to join the argument.
The problem is that your argument isn't right-wing so much as old-fashioned. "Back in the old days" schools weren't doing the things you described, but they were doing things like failing kids out entirely and in the modern world that's no longer considered an acceptable solution. I agree that kids shouldn't be passed if they can't get the grades but they also shouldn't get dropped by the system and left to fend for themselves because the whole point of a public school system and mandatory education is to make sure that everyone gets educated, and the "good old days" schools didn't actually do a very good job of that. The whole concept of meals at school is that kids do better in school if they're not malnourished. Socializing children has been shown time after time to make for better educated kids. And sex education is education. Why would life skills not be a good thing to teach in a school?
Sadly, I am not at all shocked to see a bunch of knee-jerk attacks on someone suggesting that parents parent.
This ranter didn't suggest that parents should parent, s/he said that parents in general don't parent. Reacting to that isn't a knee-jerk, it's indignation at a falsehood presented to cover up for being jaded.
No one seems to want to take a look at what they might be doing wrong. It's always the fault of someone else.
This is true of the ranter as well.
Parents find it difficult to be there to instill values in their children when they have to work so much to afford the long defunct "american dream."...On the other hand, sometimes a parent is available, supportive and everything we're told needs to be done and it doesn't matter.
This is nonsensical. You're blaming parents for working too hard to parent effectively and then you say that sometimes they do everything right and it doesn't matter. So you say that sometimes nothing helps, but you'll still blame them for the failure because they should have done more? Pick a message, please.
You want to be a decent adult, take personal responsibility.
Maybe you could tell the ranter to do this as well.
And this is a good argument FOR Tenure systems. This statement of opinion has absolutely nothing to do with the person's teaching ability, and should not be something which would result in a firing, especially since it was done on his own time, outside the classroom, didn't involve his students... and frankly speaking in most cases it's completely 100% accurate.
This statement is crap, much like the parent statement, and it speaks directly to this person's ability to teach kids in this setting. Declaring that ADD diagnoses are "bullshit" is way outside the scope of a public school teacher unless that teacher happens to have a medical degree, and demonstrates a bias against something that they have no expertise to judge. Telling parents in general that they aren't doing their jobs or that even a majority of students are allowed to do whatever they like is simply untrue, and just because there are noticable kids who do this sort of thing doesn't by any stretch indicate that it's anything approaching common. Bitching about poor teachers being guarded by unions is a recent thing? My parents joined up with a dozen others fighting to remove an atrocious teacher more than forty years ago, long before the "fucking XBoxes" and "bullshit ADD diagnoses" that s/he rants against.
So, your "100% accurate" statement falls completely flat, and this person sounds so jaded that I'd want them out posthaste. Someone who's willing to make statements like this, even anonymously and outside work, can't possibly be taking a positive attitude into the classroom with them.
You're not paying attention to economics, as well as forgetting your history. China is undergoing an industrial revolution much like the U.S. did back at the open of the 1900s. They are doing massive agriculture and massive manufacturing, driven by cheap labor and a "smoke means progress" attitude from the government. Given those same conditions in our own country, we made a hellish mess of our environment too.
The author's contention is that, given the same motivation from the government, a command economy will more readily be able to handle the problem of pollution than a democracy because the government doesn't have to convince industry and the people to buy into it, they can simply demand compliance. That makes sense, at least from the relatively simplistic view. There are lots of problems with Communism, but getting projects done on a massive scale when the powers that be want it done isn't one of those problems. If China's government decided to "go green" tomorrow, you can bet that they'd get there a whole lot faster than the U.S. ever did.
Yes, some police officers do abuse their powers. But, that number is actually quite few. You are more likely to encounter an errant office worker than an abusive police officer.
The problem here is that encountering an errant office worker isn't likely to result in legal troubles for me, but encountering an abusive officer often does. More to the point, the concept that very few police officers abuse their powers is ludicrous in my experince with many police officers. The vast majority of officers don't maliciously abuse their power or do stuff that's extreme or egregious, but I've never met an officer who hasn't done stuff like running criminal checks on their neighbors just because they can or skating a traffic violation by flashing their badge to the arresting officer.
If you have encountered an abusive cop, I would suspect you probably were in the wrong in the first place, no?
Part and parcel of the abusive officer's creed, this is. No, it's not necessary to be wrong to be mistreated by an abusive officer, because that's the definition of "abusive".
Virg
Re:Still funny as hell
on
Ballmer To Retire
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't see any disparity. "Right" in this context means "best" so it doesn't contradict "perfect".
You still haven't backed up your statement, since toxic isn't carcinogenic and more importantly, you didn't cover whether there's really stuff like that in there, whether non-lead paints contain stuff that lead paint doesn't, and whether painting more often to deal with things like fading makes for more released toxins.
Also, huffing is dangerous independent of the chemicals used (people can and have died from using helium to talk funny, and that's completely inert), I've never seen a case where someone was caught huffing house paint, and the whole point of huffing is to super-concentrate the fumes because under normal use it doesn't have any effect.
What does this have to do with the discussion? If you're arguing that more money should be spent on securing schools, then do so, but unless you're positing that the only way to secure schools with money is arming teachers, then your argument is off point. My point isn't in how tiny the threat is, it's the fact that arming the teachers is adding more threat than having them armed takes away, so it's a bad idea at any price.
I throw away meat that is potentially contaminated with lead. Some people are not so smart and eat it.
Do you throw it somewhere that scavengers can't reach, and that doesn't result in the lead in the meat ending up in the environment at large? Didn't think so.
Go F yourself and your restrictions and controls. I'm an adult and can live my own life.
When your living of your own life results in an externality that can cause harm to others, it's the government's job to address it.
Declaring that arming teachers is a substantial improvement in security assumes that none of those teachers or guards will ever misuse their gun, have an accident with it or lose control of it, all to secure the school against the miniscule possibility of an armed assailant who said teachers or guards can take down without hitting any bystanders or getting shot themselves. I've never been a gun ban supporter but it's not hard to see the gaping holes in this argument.
Lead was also in paint because it was UV resistant and helped to avoid fading in sunlight. The replacement for lead in paint is repainting your house more often. Good for paint stores, bad for consumers.
This assumes that "removing lead from your environs" isn't also good for consumers, and plenty of tests show that it is a good thing.
As for the environment? Who knows? There are probably plenty of other carcinogens in non-lead based paints that you are now applying much more frequently than would have previously been necessary.
Without citing what those "carcinogens" might be, this is just scaremongering drivel. Back it up or pack it up.
Not to mention that lead based paint is STILL USED. The government gets to use it to paint stripes on the highway, and whatnot. Why? Because it holds up 10 times better than regular paint. But YOU can't use it on your house because "won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!"
The level of lead exposure that the children will get from licking a roadway is vastly less than the exposure they historically got from old lead paints used in their houses. This is what normal people call reasonable risk management.
..by "equal rights" you seem to actually mean "inclusion into the special rights club that all non-married people are still excluded from."
Either support the availability of all of the special rights that married people have to all unmarried people also, or stop calling it "equal rights."
This doesn't follow logic at all. The concept that marriage has certain "special rights" both ignores the concept that it also has certain responsibilities that unmarried people don't have to deal with, and ignores the idea that (in a perfect world) anyone is free to enter into marriage and free to leave it. Your argument makes about as much sense as getting mad that people can incorporate a company and get into some "special rights club" that unincorporated people don't enjoy. It may be technically accurate but it's nonsensical.
This is a trivial positional problem to solve. Computers have been able to calculate this sort of thing since the Moon landings, so I don't see any insurmountable problems with pulling off doubling a target.
A nudge I can understand if there is any way to create enough energy to push something that large out of the way, but what is the point of the nuke? How do we know this doesn't end up creating lots of smaller asteroids?
That's specifically how it works. The idea is that lots of small pieces are less damaging than the big chunk, because each little chunk can burn on its own instead of one big chunk making it to the ground. A bunch of small pieces reaching the ground do less damage than one big chunk (something the size of a house hitting the ocean is a tsunami, something the size of a city is a shockwave, and so on) so busting it up reduces the total damage by a huge amount even if total deflection isn't possible.
Hell of a bet to take on a hunch. Where are the simulation runs or is this a touchy-feely? How do you know it won't vapourize a nice big hole inside like the underground nuclear tests?
Firstly, setting up such a simulation is trivial so I'm sure it would be part of the plan. And to answer your question, vaporizing a big hole in one side would be extremely effective, since unlike an underground detonation there's no atmosphere in space. Turning a sizable divot in one side of an asteroid into liquid or gas would turn the divot into a natural rocket jet, as the matter blew off into space unrestricted by any air pressure. That kinetic energy would push the asteroid in a predictable direction, and that's the whole point of the operation.
If the government already knows about the evidence, they don't need me to provide it.
The issue arises when the officials know about the evidence but they don't have direct access. For example, you keep a set of books for illegal activities. An undercover agent saw the books when you were interacting with someone but didn't get a look at the whole book. That's an example where they can compel you to produce the books even though they don't know what's in the books. Or, an officer pursues you into your house, and sees you throw something in a wall safe and lock it. You can be compelled to open the safe in that case. But, for example, if that same thing happens but you went into someone else's house, tossed it in their safe and locked it, you could make a reasonable argument that you can no longer assist in discovery because you don't know the combination to a safe you don't own, and in that case you can't be compelled under contempt to provide the combination to that safe.
In the case at hand, the prosecutors couldn't prove that he actually had access to the decryption key for the device and having that key would implicate him, so they can't hold him in contempt if he says he's unable to provide it.
He should have qualified this because he didn't consider easy-go singletons in his comment, but the cost of a move isn't the only cost of moving. If you rent, you need to get a new place, and unless you can arrange it pretty well you'll need cash reserves because you won't get your deposit on the old place before you need to sign for the new place. If you own your real estate, then the cost jumps by a huge margin. If your place is bigger than you can fit in a U-Haul truck, you'll have to arrange for more, and in that case one other person is also not going to be enough to move it all so that adds more unless you can get free help. Add all the expenses involved in a change of address and the trouble in things like house/apartment hunting and maybe changing schools for the kids and that just adds to the tab.
So, for a large swath of people, moving is a very expensive prospect so the tax load would have to be pretty onerous to motivate relocation.
There's more than one place in the U.S.A. that doesn't require insurance to drive legally, and you can be comtemptible even if he is too, so your logic failed you on two counts.
If you were serious, you'd consider that people who are born religious can change to atheistic (and vice versa) and that religious people can act in multiple ways (for example, by voting to maintain separation of church and state) so there's no real issue with the circumstances of someone's birth.
If I own a medical device, utility meter, safety system, casino game, ATM, airplane navigation system, etc... then I absolutely should be allowed to do whatever I want with it. But none of us own most of those things.
I don't agree. The problem here is that you're thinking like an honest person, and that's where a lot of these things fail. For example, if you own a casino game, then there's a reasonable understanding that you're following the rules and regulations concerning casino games laid out by your government, and therefore there has to be some way to prevent you from sidestepping the regulations and changing the odds, for example, so you're not defrauding people who wouldn't play your game if they knew what you did to it. The same is true of safety systems so that an airline can't cut out a safety interlock to save fuel or a utility company to overcharge their customers or a convenience store owner who skims credit card numbers in their ATM. In all these cases, the owner of the device needs to be restricted from changing something that they directly own due to rules outside their ownership.
It's not exactly a Ponzi scheme because no new member is directly paying old members through the scheme. They are all increasing the value of shiny rocks however, as they become more commonly used. The only problem is that those shiny rocks have absolutely no use, and do not produce anything (that's why I didn't say gold; gold has uses).
This is the malfunction in your logic. Currency has use in the simple function of currency, as shown by paper money. It facilitates exchange, and therefore makes general commerce easier. To wit, what any currency, Bitcoin or shiny rock, "produces" is a better functioning economy. If Bitcoins have some advantage over other currencies, then they have an intrinsic value through that added (usability/portability/anonymity/whatever the advantage is). So in your example, shiny river rocks have a value in that everyone agrees to use them as a medium of value exchange, and that makes commerce move more efficiently.
While it's fun for as long as it works, one day people might realize they could use something else than shiny rocks, and their values will drop.
This is true of any currency. In fact, the rise and fall of currency values is a market unto itself. Even virtual currencies follow this pattern, as evidenced by the markets for both legitimate exchange (Bitcoin or Linden Dollars) and illegitimate (WoW gold or other game currencies).
In that sense, we should look at the post office as being no different from any other utility. How are other utilities succeeding while the post office fails?
The demand for most other utilities hasn't dropped off precipitously in the last two decades and other utilitied haven't been called on to operate at a loss for many years (if you think that they're not running at a loss, try getting any other company to deliver a letter for 46 cents in any time frame, much less in the usual time for the post). Also, the USPS is cutting back on Saturday delivery, which is a far cry from failing. Are you proposing that a for-profit business has never trimmed back less productive hours to save money?
That's because you're stuck thinking in consumer terms. The general public doesn't buy small 1080p screens but industry buys them in piles. Try outfitting a fleet of buses or planes, or doing displays for ad kiosks and suddenly you'll notice how many small hi-def screens get made and sold every year.
This doesn't square at all. Sherman wasn't fighting against an enemy who was a small percentage of the general population, hiding among them and coercing their cooperation. He was marching through what was essentially an enemy country where virtually everyone in his path was openly hostile to him. Contrast this to Afghanistan, where the Taliban doesn't represent the official government and a large portion of the population doesn't want them there, but the civilians are caught in the middle and selling out insurgents draws retaliation. Given that, you're never going to win through a "march to Kabul" because you'll be creating more enemies than you kill.
Carrying on to your example of Stalin, what he did had little to do with what we want in Afghanistan. I'd be willing to bet that if we decided to annex Afghanistan entirely, conquering it and putting it directly under U.S. rule to the point of forcing everyone to learn English and shooting anyone who spoke out against the United States openly (which is what Stalin did to Eastern Europe, if you'll recall), I bet we'd have about the same level of luck as the Soviets did with it. Since we don't want to turn Afghanistan into a prisoner state but would rather that the elected government stay in power, we have to play that a bit differently.
The United States isn't anything like the country was in 1860. Trying to use the way the Civil War developed as a marker for these days doesn't work because the country as a whole is a lot more homogenous than it was before the Civil War, and the war itself changed how the American people see and deal with internal struggles. Coming up with any ideal that so strongly divides large sections of the U.S. and follows any reasonable geographical lines (secession doesn't work if the disagreeing people live amongst each other) would take a sea change in the attitude of the American people, and mass communication put that idea to bed more than fifty years ago.
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What it says to me is that you addressed one quarter of my complaints about this poster by saying things that I'll have to do a reasonable amount of research about to see if it's even true. Having seen no evidence or studies as to whether ADD "should statistically affect boys and girls equally", I can't even answer to it before I do some digging, but I notice you didn't bother to back that "fact" up with any citations, leaving it to me to do the legwork. On top of that, even if it turns out that false diagnoses are up, that doesn't give anyone dispensation to label all or even most of them as such without some sort of supporting proof.
So even assuming that I drop the entire line about the poster's comments about ADD diagnoses, you didn't say a word about all the rest of it. Considering that your argument fails to address much less rebut any of the other things I brought up, like claiming a majority of kids "do whatever they want" or "stuck to the fucking XBox for 12 hours a day" or that any reasonable percentage of parents "decided real parenting was too hard", and considering that these things (and the out-of-scope comments about ADD diagnoses) were to discuss why tenure shouldn't be used to protect someone like this from dismissal, I'd say you need to be a lot more thorough if you're going to join the argument.
Virg
The problem is that your argument isn't right-wing so much as old-fashioned. "Back in the old days" schools weren't doing the things you described, but they were doing things like failing kids out entirely and in the modern world that's no longer considered an acceptable solution. I agree that kids shouldn't be passed if they can't get the grades but they also shouldn't get dropped by the system and left to fend for themselves because the whole point of a public school system and mandatory education is to make sure that everyone gets educated, and the "good old days" schools didn't actually do a very good job of that. The whole concept of meals at school is that kids do better in school if they're not malnourished. Socializing children has been shown time after time to make for better educated kids. And sex education is education. Why would life skills not be a good thing to teach in a school?
Virg
Sadly, I am not at all shocked to see a bunch of knee-jerk attacks on someone suggesting that parents parent.
This ranter didn't suggest that parents should parent, s/he said that parents in general don't parent. Reacting to that isn't a knee-jerk, it's indignation at a falsehood presented to cover up for being jaded.
No one seems to want to take a look at what they might be doing wrong. It's always the fault of someone else.
This is true of the ranter as well.
Parents find it difficult to be there to instill values in their children when they have to work so much to afford the long defunct "american dream."...On the other hand, sometimes a parent is available, supportive and everything we're told needs to be done and it doesn't matter.
This is nonsensical. You're blaming parents for working too hard to parent effectively and then you say that sometimes they do everything right and it doesn't matter. So you say that sometimes nothing helps, but you'll still blame them for the failure because they should have done more? Pick a message, please.
You want to be a decent adult, take personal responsibility.
Maybe you could tell the ranter to do this as well.
Virg
And this is a good argument FOR Tenure systems. This statement of opinion has absolutely nothing to do with the person's teaching ability, and should not be something which would result in a firing, especially since it was done on his own time, outside the classroom, didn't involve his students... and frankly speaking in most cases it's completely 100% accurate.
This statement is crap, much like the parent statement, and it speaks directly to this person's ability to teach kids in this setting. Declaring that ADD diagnoses are "bullshit" is way outside the scope of a public school teacher unless that teacher happens to have a medical degree, and demonstrates a bias against something that they have no expertise to judge. Telling parents in general that they aren't doing their jobs or that even a majority of students are allowed to do whatever they like is simply untrue, and just because there are noticable kids who do this sort of thing doesn't by any stretch indicate that it's anything approaching common. Bitching about poor teachers being guarded by unions is a recent thing? My parents joined up with a dozen others fighting to remove an atrocious teacher more than forty years ago, long before the "fucking XBoxes" and "bullshit ADD diagnoses" that s/he rants against.
So, your "100% accurate" statement falls completely flat, and this person sounds so jaded that I'd want them out posthaste. Someone who's willing to make statements like this, even anonymously and outside work, can't possibly be taking a positive attitude into the classroom with them.
Virg
You're not paying attention to economics, as well as forgetting your history. China is undergoing an industrial revolution much like the U.S. did back at the open of the 1900s. They are doing massive agriculture and massive manufacturing, driven by cheap labor and a "smoke means progress" attitude from the government. Given those same conditions in our own country, we made a hellish mess of our environment too.
The author's contention is that, given the same motivation from the government, a command economy will more readily be able to handle the problem of pollution than a democracy because the government doesn't have to convince industry and the people to buy into it, they can simply demand compliance. That makes sense, at least from the relatively simplistic view. There are lots of problems with Communism, but getting projects done on a massive scale when the powers that be want it done isn't one of those problems. If China's government decided to "go green" tomorrow, you can bet that they'd get there a whole lot faster than the U.S. ever did.
Virg
Yes, some police officers do abuse their powers. But, that number is actually quite few. You are more likely to encounter an errant office worker than an abusive police officer.
The problem here is that encountering an errant office worker isn't likely to result in legal troubles for me, but encountering an abusive officer often does. More to the point, the concept that very few police officers abuse their powers is ludicrous in my experince with many police officers. The vast majority of officers don't maliciously abuse their power or do stuff that's extreme or egregious, but I've never met an officer who hasn't done stuff like running criminal checks on their neighbors just because they can or skating a traffic violation by flashing their badge to the arresting officer.
If you have encountered an abusive cop, I would suspect you probably were in the wrong in the first place, no?
Part and parcel of the abusive officer's creed, this is. No, it's not necessary to be wrong to be mistreated by an abusive officer, because that's the definition of "abusive".
Virg
I don't see any disparity. "Right" in this context means "best" so it doesn't contradict "perfect".
Virg
You still haven't backed up your statement, since toxic isn't carcinogenic and more importantly, you didn't cover whether there's really stuff like that in there, whether non-lead paints contain stuff that lead paint doesn't, and whether painting more often to deal with things like fading makes for more released toxins.
Also, huffing is dangerous independent of the chemicals used (people can and have died from using helium to talk funny, and that's completely inert), I've never seen a case where someone was caught huffing house paint, and the whole point of huffing is to super-concentrate the fumes because under normal use it doesn't have any effect.
Virg
What does this have to do with the discussion? If you're arguing that more money should be spent on securing schools, then do so, but unless you're positing that the only way to secure schools with money is arming teachers, then your argument is off point. My point isn't in how tiny the threat is, it's the fact that arming the teachers is adding more threat than having them armed takes away, so it's a bad idea at any price.
Virg
I throw away meat that is potentially contaminated with lead. Some people are not so smart and eat it.
Do you throw it somewhere that scavengers can't reach, and that doesn't result in the lead in the meat ending up in the environment at large? Didn't think so.
Go F yourself and your restrictions and controls. I'm an adult and can live my own life.
When your living of your own life results in an externality that can cause harm to others, it's the government's job to address it.
Virg
Declaring that arming teachers is a substantial improvement in security assumes that none of those teachers or guards will ever misuse their gun, have an accident with it or lose control of it, all to secure the school against the miniscule possibility of an armed assailant who said teachers or guards can take down without hitting any bystanders or getting shot themselves. I've never been a gun ban supporter but it's not hard to see the gaping holes in this argument.
Virg
Lead was also in paint because it was UV resistant and helped to avoid fading in sunlight. The replacement for lead in paint is repainting your house more often. Good for paint stores, bad for consumers.
This assumes that "removing lead from your environs" isn't also good for consumers, and plenty of tests show that it is a good thing.
As for the environment? Who knows? There are probably plenty of other carcinogens in non-lead based paints that you are now applying much more frequently than would have previously been necessary.
Without citing what those "carcinogens" might be, this is just scaremongering drivel. Back it up or pack it up.
Not to mention that lead based paint is STILL USED. The government gets to use it to paint stripes on the highway, and whatnot. Why? Because it holds up 10 times better than regular paint. But YOU can't use it on your house because "won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!"
The level of lead exposure that the children will get from licking a roadway is vastly less than the exposure they historically got from old lead paints used in their houses. This is what normal people call reasonable risk management.
Virg
..by "equal rights" you seem to actually mean "inclusion into the special rights club that all non-married people are still excluded from." Either support the availability of all of the special rights that married people have to all unmarried people also, or stop calling it "equal rights."
This doesn't follow logic at all. The concept that marriage has certain "special rights" both ignores the concept that it also has certain responsibilities that unmarried people don't have to deal with, and ignores the idea that (in a perfect world) anyone is free to enter into marriage and free to leave it. Your argument makes about as much sense as getting mad that people can incorporate a company and get into some "special rights club" that unincorporated people don't enjoy. It may be technically accurate but it's nonsensical.
Virg
This is a trivial positional problem to solve. Computers have been able to calculate this sort of thing since the Moon landings, so I don't see any insurmountable problems with pulling off doubling a target.
Virg
A nudge I can understand if there is any way to create enough energy to push something that large out of the way, but what is the point of the nuke? How do we know this doesn't end up creating lots of smaller asteroids?
That's specifically how it works. The idea is that lots of small pieces are less damaging than the big chunk, because each little chunk can burn on its own instead of one big chunk making it to the ground. A bunch of small pieces reaching the ground do less damage than one big chunk (something the size of a house hitting the ocean is a tsunami, something the size of a city is a shockwave, and so on) so busting it up reduces the total damage by a huge amount even if total deflection isn't possible.
Hell of a bet to take on a hunch. Where are the simulation runs or is this a touchy-feely? How do you know it won't vapourize a nice big hole inside like the underground nuclear tests?
Firstly, setting up such a simulation is trivial so I'm sure it would be part of the plan. And to answer your question, vaporizing a big hole in one side would be extremely effective, since unlike an underground detonation there's no atmosphere in space. Turning a sizable divot in one side of an asteroid into liquid or gas would turn the divot into a natural rocket jet, as the matter blew off into space unrestricted by any air pressure. That kinetic energy would push the asteroid in a predictable direction, and that's the whole point of the operation.
Virg
If the government already knows about the evidence, they don't need me to provide it.
The issue arises when the officials know about the evidence but they don't have direct access. For example, you keep a set of books for illegal activities. An undercover agent saw the books when you were interacting with someone but didn't get a look at the whole book. That's an example where they can compel you to produce the books even though they don't know what's in the books. Or, an officer pursues you into your house, and sees you throw something in a wall safe and lock it. You can be compelled to open the safe in that case. But, for example, if that same thing happens but you went into someone else's house, tossed it in their safe and locked it, you could make a reasonable argument that you can no longer assist in discovery because you don't know the combination to a safe you don't own, and in that case you can't be compelled under contempt to provide the combination to that safe.
In the case at hand, the prosecutors couldn't prove that he actually had access to the decryption key for the device and having that key would implicate him, so they can't hold him in contempt if he says he's unable to provide it.
Virg
He should have qualified this because he didn't consider easy-go singletons in his comment, but the cost of a move isn't the only cost of moving. If you rent, you need to get a new place, and unless you can arrange it pretty well you'll need cash reserves because you won't get your deposit on the old place before you need to sign for the new place. If you own your real estate, then the cost jumps by a huge margin. If your place is bigger than you can fit in a U-Haul truck, you'll have to arrange for more, and in that case one other person is also not going to be enough to move it all so that adds more unless you can get free help. Add all the expenses involved in a change of address and the trouble in things like house/apartment hunting and maybe changing schools for the kids and that just adds to the tab.
So, for a large swath of people, moving is a very expensive prospect so the tax load would have to be pretty onerous to motivate relocation.
Virg
There's more than one place in the U.S.A. that doesn't require insurance to drive legally, and you can be comtemptible even if he is too, so your logic failed you on two counts.
Virg
If you were serious, you'd consider that people who are born religious can change to atheistic (and vice versa) and that religious people can act in multiple ways (for example, by voting to maintain separation of church and state) so there's no real issue with the circumstances of someone's birth.
Virg
If I own a medical device, utility meter, safety system, casino game, ATM, airplane navigation system, etc... then I absolutely should be allowed to do whatever I want with it. But none of us own most of those things.
I don't agree. The problem here is that you're thinking like an honest person, and that's where a lot of these things fail. For example, if you own a casino game, then there's a reasonable understanding that you're following the rules and regulations concerning casino games laid out by your government, and therefore there has to be some way to prevent you from sidestepping the regulations and changing the odds, for example, so you're not defrauding people who wouldn't play your game if they knew what you did to it. The same is true of safety systems so that an airline can't cut out a safety interlock to save fuel or a utility company to overcharge their customers or a convenience store owner who skims credit card numbers in their ATM. In all these cases, the owner of the device needs to be restricted from changing something that they directly own due to rules outside their ownership.
Virg
It's not exactly a Ponzi scheme because no new member is directly paying old members through the scheme. They are all increasing the value of shiny rocks however, as they become more commonly used. The only problem is that those shiny rocks have absolutely no use, and do not produce anything (that's why I didn't say gold; gold has uses).
This is the malfunction in your logic. Currency has use in the simple function of currency, as shown by paper money. It facilitates exchange, and therefore makes general commerce easier. To wit, what any currency, Bitcoin or shiny rock, "produces" is a better functioning economy. If Bitcoins have some advantage over other currencies, then they have an intrinsic value through that added (usability/portability/anonymity/whatever the advantage is). So in your example, shiny river rocks have a value in that everyone agrees to use them as a medium of value exchange, and that makes commerce move more efficiently.
While it's fun for as long as it works, one day people might realize they could use something else than shiny rocks, and their values will drop.
This is true of any currency. In fact, the rise and fall of currency values is a market unto itself. Even virtual currencies follow this pattern, as evidenced by the markets for both legitimate exchange (Bitcoin or Linden Dollars) and illegitimate (WoW gold or other game currencies).
Virg
In that sense, we should look at the post office as being no different from any other utility. How are other utilities succeeding while the post office fails?
The demand for most other utilities hasn't dropped off precipitously in the last two decades and other utilitied haven't been called on to operate at a loss for many years (if you think that they're not running at a loss, try getting any other company to deliver a letter for 46 cents in any time frame, much less in the usual time for the post). Also, the USPS is cutting back on Saturday delivery, which is a far cry from failing. Are you proposing that a for-profit business has never trimmed back less productive hours to save money?
Virg
That's because you're stuck thinking in consumer terms. The general public doesn't buy small 1080p screens but industry buys them in piles. Try outfitting a fleet of buses or planes, or doing displays for ad kiosks and suddenly you'll notice how many small hi-def screens get made and sold every year.
Virg
This doesn't square at all. Sherman wasn't fighting against an enemy who was a small percentage of the general population, hiding among them and coercing their cooperation. He was marching through what was essentially an enemy country where virtually everyone in his path was openly hostile to him. Contrast this to Afghanistan, where the Taliban doesn't represent the official government and a large portion of the population doesn't want them there, but the civilians are caught in the middle and selling out insurgents draws retaliation. Given that, you're never going to win through a "march to Kabul" because you'll be creating more enemies than you kill.
Carrying on to your example of Stalin, what he did had little to do with what we want in Afghanistan. I'd be willing to bet that if we decided to annex Afghanistan entirely, conquering it and putting it directly under U.S. rule to the point of forcing everyone to learn English and shooting anyone who spoke out against the United States openly (which is what Stalin did to Eastern Europe, if you'll recall), I bet we'd have about the same level of luck as the Soviets did with it. Since we don't want to turn Afghanistan into a prisoner state but would rather that the elected government stay in power, we have to play that a bit differently.
Virg
The United States isn't anything like the country was in 1860. Trying to use the way the Civil War developed as a marker for these days doesn't work because the country as a whole is a lot more homogenous than it was before the Civil War, and the war itself changed how the American people see and deal with internal struggles. Coming up with any ideal that so strongly divides large sections of the U.S. and follows any reasonable geographical lines (secession doesn't work if the disagreeing people live amongst each other) would take a sea change in the attitude of the American people, and mass communication put that idea to bed more than fifty years ago.
Virg