> What if, instead of fuel being denied, it was in fact landing space being denied.
This isn't witty at all, because he's not being denied anything necessary to his survival. He's not being denied food, drink, or shelter, and he's not being denied a way to leave. He's just not happy that the way out they offered is going to cost him a lot of money, and a lot of pride.
> The article said that they would be shipping him out on a flight, so if a flight can get in, bringing a few jerricans would be a good idea and charging him for support costs is more than fair.
More than fair? You're right, it would be. Much more. The planes that fly into McMurdo go in fully loaded. They fly out nearly empty. Taking him out is just a matter of his getting on the plane. Taking his plane out in crates is just the extra effort to load it on the nearly-empty plane. Taking in "a few jerricans" (which is in fact two 55-gallon drums) means that the fully loaded plane going in needs to take on an extra quarter ton or so, at the expense of the other supplies that would have fit in that weight limit. In the extreme, it might even mean another flight needs to go in. So, it would indeed be far more than fair.
> Instead of shipping his plane out, ship fuel in. His dime.
> Instead of flying him out, fly more supplies in. His dime.
> Cheaper than shipping his plane out (or is it?!?), and doesn't make two countries
> look the part of a-holes.
Nope, these options are not cheaper than shipping his stuff out. See, when planes and ships take stuff to Antarctica, they go back empty, since not much gets shipped out of Antartica. So, taking his plane out is just a matter of disassembling it, crating it and loading it, but bringing extra fuel and supplies in means another flight in, most likely.
> This situation is not much different. You can call anyone stranded an "idiot", for poor planning, but if you refuse to help them you are contributing to the idiot population.
This is that place where your argument breaks down. They are helping him. They gave him food, drink and a place to stay out of the cold, for free. They offered him a free ride out on the next flight. They even offered to send his plane home with him if he's willing to pay for the cost to do so. That's a damn big bit of help, by my measure, for a guy who didn't even bother to call ahead and let McMurdo know he might be showing up if things went sour on him. The fact that they won't sell him AvGas that they might not be able to spare (or that they're unwilling to risk their safety reserves to let him fly out on his own as opposed to riding out on the next supply run) does not translate to their not helping him at all. Not by a long shot.
> Same with the coast guard. They pick up the sailors. Towing the boat back to harbor is rarely done by the rescuers.
Actually, the U.S. Coast Guard will quite often tow a disabled but floating boat back to shore (it can turn into a navigation hazard for commercial shipping otherwise), but they'll send you a bill for the towing charge.
> So they're basicly impounding his $20k-$30K aircraft.
Nope, not even close. If he can get fuel shipped in, he'll be free to fly it out, and they're willing to ship the craft out on the next ship, they're just not willing to do it at their own expense. Besides, it's not their fault he's a bad planner, and there's no reason they should go out of their way (any more than they already have) to bail him out of his own mistake.
You must keep in mind that their statement of discouraging tourism has more ramifications than just keeping people away from the station. There are many considerations that you're apparently not making. Here's a short list of reasons I can come up with, and I'm not even trying:
1.) They have a specific amount of fuel at the station, for their own use and for reserves. If they're to sell him any fuel, it must come from their working stock, or their reserves. The working stock is there to run their own machinery (snowmobiles, their own aircraft, generators and such) and the reserves are their safety net in case something goes wrong, because they're a long way from help if something does go really badly for them. What makes you think they can spare 400 liters of fuel without endangering themselves whenever someone shows up like this?
2.) They're afraid that if they give him the fuel, he'll do something utterly stupid, like, say, trying to fly his craft out instead of leaving in a safer, more sensible manner. The fact he's there to begin with is a testament to his lack of foresight, and maybe they don't want the added burden of a possible rescue mission, or knowing they gave him the rope to hang himself with. They offered him a free ride on the next boat out of the area, after all, so it's not like they're leaving him out in the cold (so to speak).
3.) They're genuinely afraid that if they give him the fuel, they'll have to deal with this situation again, with the ramifications of (1) and (2) above, when the next daredevil decides to drop in. By making his exit expensive and unglorious, they can discourage others from trying the same.
4.) Replacing the volume of fuel that he wants will require them to fit the extra fuel into their next shipment(s), and so rather than selling him the fuel and going through the effort to replace it, why wouldn't they just let him arrange (and pay for) his own fuel shipment? This doesn't help with (2) above, but even so, it's not their problem to solve.
All in all, it seems very short sighted of you to tell them how to run their outpost when you seem not to understand the situation they'll be putting themselves in by helping him.
> So - the end of lower unemployment justifies the means of theft? It appears to me that you are admitting that this is theft, but that it's okay because the government's goal is to reduce unemployment.
The reason it appears that I'm admitting that inflation is theft is because you have a very unusual definition of the word "theft" as regards value, in that you seem to think that inflation cannot occur without governmental intervention, and cannot occur without fiat money. Both assumptions are wrong, so I will have to drop this part of the argument until your definitions can come more in line with economic reality. Sorry to sound belligerent here, but your use of "theft" for fiscal policy is a machination that too many non-economic Libertarian types fall back on, and if you're not among those ranks I apologize for my irritation.
> It's not a misunderstanding. It's a simplification for the sake of argument. The issue is whether it's immoral for the government to destroy the value of money by expanding the supply of money (by whatever means).
I understand you're simplifying to make a point, but you simplified it to the point of incorrectness. And as a side note, the issue of immorality assumes that the government can destroy the value of money by any means, but more on that in a bit.
> I said: "The effect of counterfeiting - if left unchecked - is to destroy the value of money." This is absolutely true. If you're going to start inserting into the argument jibber-jabber about ones and zeroes in computers someplace...The operative phrase was "if left unchecked." If the government doesn't nip counterfeiters in the bud, then everyone would run a printing press. Everyone would be cracking the banks and adding a few extra zeroes to their bank accounts. As I said: this would destroy the value of money if left unchecked.
No need for jibber-jabber at all. You're not following the definition of money here. To wit, fiat money is created by a government, and the government supports and enforces (important point here) its spendability. The government can not only print a dollar bill, they can require that a merchant accept it in payment for a dollar's worth of goods or services. That's a very, very important point, because the enforceability of spending power and the concept of counterfeiting go hand in hand. If the government did not check the copying of dollars, then the value of money would not be destroyed, the value of dollars would be, and people would simply move to some other form of currency (or gold, if no government on Earth wanted to prevent counterfeiting). So to bring it all together, enforcement is part of fiat money to begin with. If a government creates a currency and then doesn't enforce some sort of counterfeiting prevention, I am very economically justified in saying that it's not really a currency, because if it can't hold value it'll be discarded. Again, you are the one who stated that counterfeiting currency is like counterfeiting paintings or collectibles (which comparison is inaccurate) and you're also the one who stated that counterfeiting destroys that value of money, when it only relocates it to other value-storing things.
> The plans exist. The equipment to build them no longer does. We'd have to rebuild our
infrastructure 1960's style to do it. It would be easier and cheaper to take cues from those designs and do a new set of drawings. Run a bunch of simulations. Improve the drawings. Then have modern machines using modern methods build it.
Well, this was actually the bent of my comment, in that although we can't build a Saturn-5 tomorrow, we could certainly build a Lagrange-shot rocket in less than a year. While your comment was specifically accurate (we don't have, at this moment, a viable heavy lifter design for better than LEO) we do have the groundwork for building one in very short order, or at least faster than any other country including China. Since designing the mission payload and training the astronauts would take longer than designing and building the propulsion, my rather snarky comment has a leg to stand on.
> Don't be absurd. You know perfectly well that this is entirely unlike what counterfeiters are doing.
Um, it was exactly my point that making my own "money" is nothing like what counterfeiters do.
> You see? It's not just fraud. The feds wouldn't care about the lie so much if it weren't for the *effects* of it. The effect of counterfeiting - if left unchecked - is to destroy the value of money.
Here's the sentence that reveals armchair economics at its worst. Money in the economy is represented by the term "M1". That number represents the amount of spending power that exists in the country, including the cash in your wallet, your bond portfolio, your bank account and tons of other places that value is held. The amount of physical, printed currency in circulation is a minute percentage of the value of M1, so in realistic terms the amount of printed money is not able to affect the money supply in meaningful ways. Counterfeiters would have to print hundreds or thousands of times more bills than the Treasury to have even the smallest effect on the value of the dollar. It's therefore vanishingly unlikely that the main reason the government pursues counterfeiters is because of deleterious effects on the value of money.
> Let's suppose I own the ball that Barry Bonds hit for his 73rd home run. This thing recently sold for $450,000. Now let's suppose that someone takes this thing and throws it into a giant box of a million baseballs that look *exactly* the same. What's the Bonds ball worth now? Answer: unless you can absolutely, positively, and with 100% certainty identify the Bonds ball, the Bonds ball has just become worthless (well, it's worth no more than any of the million other balls). In other words: it has been devalued.
Firstly, I was discussing knock-offs that I directly identified as knock-offs, so your example does not apply. The correct analogy to my argument is my putting a baseball on the market that I advertise as a Barry Bonds ball mock-up. More to the main point, though, is that while a forgery can indeed reduce the value of an original by confusing the potential market, this argument does not extend to currency, for the reason stated above that currency is a tiny portion of the money supply.
> > this drills an unrepairable hole in the "immoral to create new currency because it devalues currency" theory.
> As you can see, you are quite mistaken.
Nope, I'm still not mistaken, and this is the other part that shows an economic misunderstanding. The government doesn't create money by printing bills, because, as stated above, it wouldn't help. It creates money mostly by issuing bonds, and then spending the resulting income. While this behavior does indeed cause inflation, the tradeoff is lower unemployment, which has a negative relationship with inflation (the Phillips curve describes this relationship - as inflation rises, unemployment falls, and vice versa). Virtually all of fiscal policy is geared toward controlling this balance. The reason why this damages the immorality argument is that is can be argued (and is, at great length) that lower unemployment rates can justify inflation.
> Unfortunately, the US does not have a vehicle capable of carrying human cargo to any of the lagrange points.
Am I going too far out on a limb to say that the old Saturn-5 plans are probably still stuffed in a file cabinet somewhere and could be resurrected and pressed to task?
> Think about it. The reasons why governments go after counterfeiters and check-bouncers and people who sell fake "art" and what not is because these crimes result in the devaluation of the original commodities...
Well, I thought about it, but then I rejected it, because it's incorrect. The government goes after counterfeiters and checkbouncers (and forgers) because they're committing fraud. There's nothing wrong with my printing my own money, that says "this is good money". Stores do it constantly, in the form of gift certificates. Counterfeiters aren't inflating the money supply, they're making bills and passing them off as government money. The same is true of forgers, who one-off a painting, and then try to sell it as the original, thereby getting the buyer to pay them for the original's value. If they presented it as a knock-off, they wouldn't be committing forgery (perhaps copyright infringement, but not forgery), but then nobody would pay them the value of the original. It's also incorrect to say that these knock-offs would devalue the original.
Sorry to say, but this drills an unrepairable hole in the "immoral to create new currency because it devalues currency" theory.
> If you lend someone else your car, do you charge them for insurance?
If the person you lent the car to crashes it, do you expect them to pay for the damage? Do you loan your car to anyone who walks in and asks?
Your comparison isn't valid. It's completely reasonable for them to charge you for coverage for a commercial rental, because unlike your example there's no pre-existing expectation that you'll reimburse them for loss.
> One day everyone who sells on the web will work out that shipping should be free and absorbed into the cost of running the business. Do businesses bill you for the electricity they used in preparing your order?
Well, yes, they do, they just don't itemize it. How do you think they determine prices? Any business that doesn't consider sunk and processing costs when setting prices quickly goes out of business. But more to the point, why shouldn't you pay for the electricity they used preparing your order?
In reading your passage (fine work, by the way), I'm brought back to the question I asked when I was younger, that nobody ever cared to answer: if Jesus is the son of God, and born to Mary, a virgin, why does Jesus' lineage through Joseph matter? Joseph is a stepfather, according to the Bible, so there's no official lineage to trace.
> Wasn't Sting an elvish-blade called "Orc Cleaver" or something like that?
No, you're thinking of Orcrist, the "goblin cleaver", which was Thorin's blade. Sting was a short blade that Bilbo found under the Lonely Mountain (which was forged in the same city as Orcrist). Since it fell into Bilbo's posession for a long time, and was passed to his nephew, it's not incorrect to call it a Hobbit blade, although it wasn't forged by Hobbits.
> Gandalf is powerful because he doesn't flaunt his true powers like SOME KIND OF FUCKING FAIRY.
Deep, cleansing breaths, there. Gandalf is powerful because he isn't human, and apparently Istari are rather long-lived, much like that other one who does spend the story flaunting his true powers, because he's pissed about the trouble he's having findng something.
> No, you just use the higher rated cable for the entire run. Fire codes are *minimum* requirements. Assuming "riser" is rated higher than "plenum", then you can use "riser" rated cable wherever "plenum" is called for.
Not correct here, because according to code, riser and plenum cables are not interchangeable. They do different things (plenum is designed not to give off toxic fumes when it burns, and riser cable is designed not to burn). It's not a matter of "higher" ratings, it's that they're different.
> Yet some ignorant fool in L.A. county decided that slavery was an affliction exclusive to the black race- there's no other explanation for why master/slave is suddenly an insensitive term there.
Nice guess, but a guess nonetheless. There's no mention in the issuance by L.A. County about the race of the complainant, and no mention of race at all, in fact. It's possible that the person complaining is Hispanic, or even white, but you have no way of knowing, so you base your argument only on assumption. Since your assumption is apparently that anyone who is hypersensitive to "master/slave" must be black, you have little room commenting on bigotry.
> The problem I faced was, what about when you have to do both? (Run a distance on one floor, then go up to another floor and run a fair distance in another air space.) Either way you are breaking code somewhere.
If you don't want to break code, you split the cable at the turns, and use plenum for the floor runs and a section of riser cable for the floor change. Yes, it's inconvenient, but building codes are rarely written with convenience in mind. So, in a word, you don't use one long cable for that whole run.
OK, calm down, everybody. The amount of energy absorbed and converted to heat by the small amounts of metal in your body is not going to turn you into a human torch by a long shot. The reason EMP can be felt in an amalgam or metal filling is that it's in very close proximity to a very very sensitive nerve. Not only will the metal in your leg not heat up to damaging levels, but you won't even be able to feel the difference.
Deep, cleansing breaths, people. The damage to electronics is the bad part. The damage to humans is not, since an EMP bomb will only injure the humans it physically lands on.
> However, at some point each orbit must cross the other, so if timed properly...
Um, not only do you need to deorbit Hubble to the correct altitude so that it's at 500 km when it crosses the ISS orbit line, you also need the ISS actually to be near that crossing point at the time to capture it, and not at some other point in that orbit. Not likely at all. Forget this possibility, since it's not a possibility.
Slashdot Mirror
> What if, instead of fuel being denied, it was in fact landing space being denied.
This isn't witty at all, because he's not being denied anything necessary to his survival. He's not being denied food, drink, or shelter, and he's not being denied a way to leave. He's just not happy that the way out they offered is going to cost him a lot of money, and a lot of pride.
Virg
> The article said that they would be shipping him out on a flight, so if a flight can get in, bringing a few jerricans would be a good idea and charging him for support costs is more than fair.
More than fair? You're right, it would be. Much more. The planes that fly into McMurdo go in fully loaded. They fly out nearly empty. Taking him out is just a matter of his getting on the plane. Taking his plane out in crates is just the extra effort to load it on the nearly-empty plane. Taking in "a few jerricans" (which is in fact two 55-gallon drums) means that the fully loaded plane going in needs to take on an extra quarter ton or so, at the expense of the other supplies that would have fit in that weight limit. In the extreme, it might even mean another flight needs to go in. So, it would indeed be far more than fair.
Virg
> Instead of shipping his plane out, ship fuel in. His dime.
> Instead of flying him out, fly more supplies in. His dime.
> Cheaper than shipping his plane out (or is it?!?), and doesn't make two countries
> look the part of a-holes.
Nope, these options are not cheaper than shipping his stuff out. See, when planes and ships take stuff to Antarctica, they go back empty, since not much gets shipped out of Antartica. So, taking his plane out is just a matter of disassembling it, crating it and loading it, but bringing extra fuel and supplies in means another flight in, most likely.
Virg
> This situation is not much different. You can call anyone stranded an "idiot", for poor planning, but if you refuse to help them you are contributing to the idiot population.
This is that place where your argument breaks down. They are helping him. They gave him food, drink and a place to stay out of the cold, for free. They offered him a free ride out on the next flight. They even offered to send his plane home with him if he's willing to pay for the cost to do so. That's a damn big bit of help, by my measure, for a guy who didn't even bother to call ahead and let McMurdo know he might be showing up if things went sour on him. The fact that they won't sell him AvGas that they might not be able to spare (or that they're unwilling to risk their safety reserves to let him fly out on his own as opposed to riding out on the next supply run) does not translate to their not helping him at all. Not by a long shot.
Virg
> Same with the coast guard. They pick up the sailors. Towing the boat back to harbor is rarely done by the rescuers.
Actually, the U.S. Coast Guard will quite often tow a disabled but floating boat back to shore (it can turn into a navigation hazard for commercial shipping otherwise), but they'll send you a bill for the towing charge.
Virg
> So they're basicly impounding his $20k-$30K aircraft.
Nope, not even close. If he can get fuel shipped in, he'll be free to fly it out, and they're willing to ship the craft out on the next ship, they're just not willing to do it at their own expense. Besides, it's not their fault he's a bad planner, and there's no reason they should go out of their way (any more than they already have) to bail him out of his own mistake.
Virg
You must keep in mind that their statement of discouraging tourism has more ramifications than just keeping people away from the station. There are many considerations that you're apparently not making. Here's a short list of reasons I can come up with, and I'm not even trying:
1.) They have a specific amount of fuel at the station, for their own use and for reserves. If they're to sell him any fuel, it must come from their working stock, or their reserves. The working stock is there to run their own machinery (snowmobiles, their own aircraft, generators and such) and the reserves are their safety net in case something goes wrong, because they're a long way from help if something does go really badly for them. What makes you think they can spare 400 liters of fuel without endangering themselves whenever someone shows up like this?
2.) They're afraid that if they give him the fuel, he'll do something utterly stupid, like, say, trying to fly his craft out instead of leaving in a safer, more sensible manner. The fact he's there to begin with is a testament to his lack of foresight, and maybe they don't want the added burden of a possible rescue mission, or knowing they gave him the rope to hang himself with. They offered him a free ride on the next boat out of the area, after all, so it's not like they're leaving him out in the cold (so to speak).
3.) They're genuinely afraid that if they give him the fuel, they'll have to deal with this situation again, with the ramifications of (1) and (2) above, when the next daredevil decides to drop in. By making his exit expensive and unglorious, they can discourage others from trying the same.
4.) Replacing the volume of fuel that he wants will require them to fit the extra fuel into their next shipment(s), and so rather than selling him the fuel and going through the effort to replace it, why wouldn't they just let him arrange (and pay for) his own fuel shipment? This doesn't help with (2) above, but even so, it's not their problem to solve.
All in all, it seems very short sighted of you to tell them how to run their outpost when you seem not to understand the situation they'll be putting themselves in by helping him.
Virg
> So - the end of lower unemployment justifies the means of theft? It appears to me that you are admitting that this is theft, but that it's okay because the government's goal is to reduce unemployment.
The reason it appears that I'm admitting that inflation is theft is because you have a very unusual definition of the word "theft" as regards value, in that you seem to think that inflation cannot occur without governmental intervention, and cannot occur without fiat money. Both assumptions are wrong, so I will have to drop this part of the argument until your definitions can come more in line with economic reality. Sorry to sound belligerent here, but your use of "theft" for fiscal policy is a machination that too many non-economic Libertarian types fall back on, and if you're not among those ranks I apologize for my irritation.
> It's not a misunderstanding. It's a simplification for the sake of argument. The issue is whether it's immoral for the government to destroy the value of money by expanding the supply of money (by whatever means).
I understand you're simplifying to make a point, but you simplified it to the point of incorrectness. And as a side note, the issue of immorality assumes that the government can destroy the value of money by any means, but more on that in a bit.
> I said: "The effect of counterfeiting - if left unchecked - is to destroy the value of money." This is absolutely true. If you're going to start inserting into the argument jibber-jabber about ones and zeroes in computers someplace...The operative phrase was "if left unchecked." If the government doesn't nip counterfeiters in the bud, then everyone would run a printing press. Everyone would be cracking the banks and adding a few extra zeroes to their bank accounts. As I said: this would destroy the value of money if left unchecked.
No need for jibber-jabber at all. You're not following the definition of money here. To wit, fiat money is created by a government, and the government supports and enforces (important point here) its spendability. The government can not only print a dollar bill, they can require that a merchant accept it in payment for a dollar's worth of goods or services. That's a very, very important point, because the enforceability of spending power and the concept of counterfeiting go hand in hand. If the government did not check the copying of dollars, then the value of money would not be destroyed, the value of dollars would be, and people would simply move to some other form of currency (or gold, if no government on Earth wanted to prevent counterfeiting). So to bring it all together, enforcement is part of fiat money to begin with. If a government creates a currency and then doesn't enforce some sort of counterfeiting prevention, I am very economically justified in saying that it's not really a currency, because if it can't hold value it'll be discarded. Again, you are the one who stated that counterfeiting currency is like counterfeiting paintings or collectibles (which comparison is inaccurate) and you're also the one who stated that counterfeiting destroys that value of money, when it only relocates it to other value-storing things.
Virg
> The plans exist. The equipment to build them no longer does. We'd have to rebuild our infrastructure 1960's style to do it. It would be easier and cheaper to take cues from those designs and do a new set of drawings. Run a bunch of simulations. Improve the drawings. Then have modern machines using modern methods build it.
Well, this was actually the bent of my comment, in that although we can't build a Saturn-5 tomorrow, we could certainly build a Lagrange-shot rocket in less than a year. While your comment was specifically accurate (we don't have, at this moment, a viable heavy lifter design for better than LEO) we do have the groundwork for building one in very short order, or at least faster than any other country including China. Since designing the mission payload and training the astronauts would take longer than designing and building the propulsion, my rather snarky comment has a leg to stand on.
Virg
> Don't be absurd. You know perfectly well that this is entirely unlike what counterfeiters are doing.
Um, it was exactly my point that making my own "money" is nothing like what counterfeiters do.
> You see? It's not just fraud. The feds wouldn't care about the lie so much if it weren't for the *effects* of it. The effect of counterfeiting - if left unchecked - is to destroy the value of money.
Here's the sentence that reveals armchair economics at its worst. Money in the economy is represented by the term "M1". That number represents the amount of spending power that exists in the country, including the cash in your wallet, your bond portfolio, your bank account and tons of other places that value is held. The amount of physical, printed currency in circulation is a minute percentage of the value of M1, so in realistic terms the amount of printed money is not able to affect the money supply in meaningful ways. Counterfeiters would have to print hundreds or thousands of times more bills than the Treasury to have even the smallest effect on the value of the dollar. It's therefore vanishingly unlikely that the main reason the government pursues counterfeiters is because of deleterious effects on the value of money.
> Let's suppose I own the ball that Barry Bonds hit for his 73rd home run. This thing recently sold for $450,000. Now let's suppose that someone takes this thing and throws it into a giant box of a million baseballs that look *exactly* the same. What's the Bonds ball worth now? Answer: unless you can absolutely, positively, and with 100% certainty identify the Bonds ball, the Bonds ball has just become worthless (well, it's worth no more than any of the million other balls). In other words: it has been devalued.
Firstly, I was discussing knock-offs that I directly identified as knock-offs, so your example does not apply. The correct analogy to my argument is my putting a baseball on the market that I advertise as a Barry Bonds ball mock-up. More to the main point, though, is that while a forgery can indeed reduce the value of an original by confusing the potential market, this argument does not extend to currency, for the reason stated above that currency is a tiny portion of the money supply.
> > this drills an unrepairable hole in the "immoral to create new currency because it devalues currency" theory.
> As you can see, you are quite mistaken.
Nope, I'm still not mistaken, and this is the other part that shows an economic misunderstanding. The government doesn't create money by printing bills, because, as stated above, it wouldn't help. It creates money mostly by issuing bonds, and then spending the resulting income. While this behavior does indeed cause inflation, the tradeoff is lower unemployment, which has a negative relationship with inflation (the Phillips curve describes this relationship - as inflation rises, unemployment falls, and vice versa). Virtually all of fiscal policy is geared toward controlling this balance. The reason why this damages the immorality argument is that is can be argued (and is, at great length) that lower unemployment rates can justify inflation.
Virg
> Unfortunately, the US does not have a vehicle capable of carrying human cargo to any of the lagrange points.
Am I going too far out on a limb to say that the old Saturn-5 plans are probably still stuffed in a file cabinet somewhere and could be resurrected and pressed to task?
Virg
> Think about it. The reasons why governments go after counterfeiters and check-bouncers and people who sell fake "art" and what not is because these crimes result in the devaluation of the original commodities...
Well, I thought about it, but then I rejected it, because it's incorrect. The government goes after counterfeiters and checkbouncers (and forgers) because they're committing fraud. There's nothing wrong with my printing my own money, that says "this is good money". Stores do it constantly, in the form of gift certificates. Counterfeiters aren't inflating the money supply, they're making bills and passing them off as government money. The same is true of forgers, who one-off a painting, and then try to sell it as the original, thereby getting the buyer to pay them for the original's value. If they presented it as a knock-off, they wouldn't be committing forgery (perhaps copyright infringement, but not forgery), but then nobody would pay them the value of the original. It's also incorrect to say that these knock-offs would devalue the original.
Sorry to say, but this drills an unrepairable hole in the "immoral to create new currency because it devalues currency" theory.
Virg
> If you lend someone else your car, do you charge them for insurance?
If the person you lent the car to crashes it, do you expect them to pay for the damage? Do you loan your car to anyone who walks in and asks?
Your comparison isn't valid. It's completely reasonable for them to charge you for coverage for a commercial rental, because unlike your example there's no pre-existing expectation that you'll reimburse them for loss.
Virg
Is the allusion in your .sig intentional?
Virg
> One day everyone who sells on the web will work out that shipping should be free and absorbed into the cost of running the business. Do businesses bill you for the electricity they used in preparing your order?
Well, yes, they do, they just don't itemize it. How do you think they determine prices? Any business that doesn't consider sunk and processing costs when setting prices quickly goes out of business. But more to the point, why shouldn't you pay for the electricity they used preparing your order?
Virg
In reading your passage (fine work, by the way), I'm brought back to the question I asked when I was younger, that nobody ever cared to answer: if Jesus is the son of God, and born to Mary, a virgin, why does Jesus' lineage through Joseph matter? Joseph is a stepfather, according to the Bible, so there's no official lineage to trace.
Virg
> Wasn't Sting an elvish-blade called "Orc Cleaver" or something like that?
No, you're thinking of Orcrist, the "goblin cleaver", which was Thorin's blade. Sting was a short blade that Bilbo found under the Lonely Mountain (which was forged in the same city as Orcrist). Since it fell into Bilbo's posession for a long time, and was passed to his nephew, it's not incorrect to call it a Hobbit blade, although it wasn't forged by Hobbits.
Virg
> Gandalf is powerful because he doesn't flaunt his true powers like SOME KIND OF FUCKING FAIRY.
Deep, cleansing breaths, there. Gandalf is powerful because he isn't human, and apparently Istari are rather long-lived, much like that other one who does spend the story flaunting his true powers, because he's pissed about the trouble he's having findng something.
Virg
> No, you just use the higher rated cable for the entire run. Fire codes are *minimum* requirements. Assuming "riser" is rated higher than "plenum", then you can use "riser" rated cable wherever "plenum" is called for.
Not correct here, because according to code, riser and plenum cables are not interchangeable. They do different things (plenum is designed not to give off toxic fumes when it burns, and riser cable is designed not to burn). It's not a matter of "higher" ratings, it's that they're different.
Virg
> Images of British sailors with scurvy aside, all it really brings to mind are fruits.. Sorta like fags and cigarettes..
So fags smoke a lot of cigarettes in Britain?
Virg
> Like, I as a Canadian find that term offensive.
You lying sack of s%$#t, you're not Canadian. You typed six sentences, and didn't end any of them correctly, eh?
Virg
> Yet some ignorant fool in L.A. county decided that slavery was an affliction exclusive to the black race- there's no other explanation for why master/slave is suddenly an insensitive term there.
Nice guess, but a guess nonetheless. There's no mention in the issuance by L.A. County about the race of the complainant, and no mention of race at all, in fact. It's possible that the person complaining is Hispanic, or even white, but you have no way of knowing, so you base your argument only on assumption. Since your assumption is apparently that anyone who is hypersensitive to "master/slave" must be black, you have little room commenting on bigotry.
Virg
> The problem I faced was, what about when you have to do both? (Run a distance on one floor, then go up to another floor and run a fair distance in another air space.) Either way you are breaking code somewhere.
If you don't want to break code, you split the cable at the turns, and use plenum for the floor runs and a section of riser cable for the floor change. Yes, it's inconvenient, but building codes are rarely written with convenience in mind. So, in a word, you don't use one long cable for that whole run.
Virg
OK, calm down, everybody. The amount of energy absorbed and converted to heat by the small amounts of metal in your body is not going to turn you into a human torch by a long shot. The reason EMP can be felt in an amalgam or metal filling is that it's in very close proximity to a very very sensitive nerve. Not only will the metal in your leg not heat up to damaging levels, but you won't even be able to feel the difference.
Deep, cleansing breaths, people. The damage to electronics is the bad part. The damage to humans is not, since an EMP bomb will only injure the humans it physically lands on.
Virg
> However, at some point each orbit must cross the other, so if timed properly...
Um, not only do you need to deorbit Hubble to the correct altitude so that it's at 500 km when it crosses the ISS orbit line, you also need the ISS actually to be near that crossing point at the time to capture it, and not at some other point in that orbit. Not likely at all. Forget this possibility, since it's not a possibility.
Virg