This is just so... girlintraining makes an argument that accusations of rape and sexual impropriety are bizarrely common among whistleblowers, and provides examples such accusations. Your response is: "Well, looks like you've shown that lots of people are being accused of rape and sexual impropriety. So it can't really be out of the ordinary, can it?"
The idea behind restitution is to make whole someone who has been injured or caused some loss by another's actions. Unless this is a copyright issue, I don't see how possessing or distributing child pornography could be associated with any kind of monetary restitution. Creation of child pornography perhaps - the child could claim some trauma or, maybe at the outside, damage to their reputation. This doesn't make any sense though.
Both of your examples are a little off. The auto unions certainly had influence, and it's true that ridiculous pension plans are a part of what brought down the US auto industry, but it wasn't because the unions were demanding ridiculous pension plans. Those happened because it was a concession that the auto execs could give to the unions that wouldn't negatively impact short-term investors.
The hostess thing was a little different. Apparently the company had been so mismanaged that the baker's union couldn't bring themselves to believe the claims that the executives were making, they thought it was a bluff. And there's always the possibility that they were right - this could easily have been a case of the two sides playing chicken until they crashed and the company went belly-up.
Regardless, it's very clear that the unions don't "hold all the power." That claim just doesn't make any sense in the face of these two events or any other. You could make the claim that the unions "hold some of the power" as opposed to the executives having all of it. I don't see that as a bad thing.
So... they should be wagging their fingers at the Chinese instead? Because it's okay to pollute as much as you want as long as it's less than someone else? Isn't it possible for us to wag our fingers at both China and the US?
Firefall's been getting attention, from me at least, because it's done by ex-Tribes devs. Granted, there are many many games out there that don't do the free-to-play bullshit and are probably much more deserving of attention, but my love for Tribes doesn't let me ignore this one.
The scary part to me was the fact that a flu preparedness plan was classified in the first place. That every document and plan would be classified by default, no matter how unthreatening it may be, that's the the scary thing.
Martin Luther King Jr. lived in a vastly different time.
Maybe if you live up north, but down here the differences are a lot less dramatic. "Stop talking about racism" will be a good idea eventually, but we're not to the point yet where we can just let it drop.
Any large company will have some employee or subsidiary engaging in some questionable activities. For a company as large and old as Nestlé, this is nothing. You've got maybe three points here that are worth consideration and whole lot of fluff. If you cut the chaff (Marketing infant formula? What the Fuck? That's supposed to be "evil?") you'd make a stronger case - here the reader sees a bunch of garbage and says to himself, "This is the worst they could come up with? Nestlé must be a pretty decent company."
Yes of course it's about the money, but what you should read into this is that our government has failed at ensuring that the cost of power generation reflects the true cost to society. Dirty power is only cheap in the short term because it's allowed to be, with the long term effects ignored and unpaid for.
If our government was doing its job this wouldn't have happened.
Are you sure you're responding to the right comment? My point had nothing to do with America. I was correcting the grandparent who had made the claim that the US had assassinated one of its citizens (who I assumed to be Anwar al-Awlaki) for engaging in protected speech. That was not why he was killed.
Not to nitpick, most of your points are fine, but if this: "How many of those countries have openly assassinated one of their citizens for engaging in protected speech?" is referring to Anwar al-Awlaki, then you need to realize that not all speech is protected and that he was killed for non-protected speech. Specifically, "planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans."
You're complaining about safety regulations? The big bad government keeps fucking stuff up because it cares too much about people dying, eh? High speed rail in the US can't get up to genuinely high speeds because it's making use of old tracks which can't sustain those speeds. High speed rail in France and Japan manage just fine with their newer tracks, despite all that regulation weighing them down.
The reason why people like rail as a means of high speed transport is because you can move a large number of people relatively quickly and efficiently. If we didn't care about efficiency we could just keep using costly polluting planes to travel everywhere. This is in the hyperloop proposal, in fact - efficiency gains trail off at distances of greater than one thousand miles or so. He suggests sticking with planes to link cities that are further apart.
Have you read any of the proposals? Do you know anything about either the high-speed rail or the hyperloop? Do you think you're bringing something new to the table with this comment?
Rather than a hypothetical, a better example might be the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, which increased benefits for prescription drugs but explicitly prevented any sort of price controls. The result has been, predictably, higher cost drugs.
"Meddling" is a little too vague though - when the government gives subsidies without any sort of restrictions it will inevitably lead to increased costs. This does not mean that any government action on the demand side of the supply/demand system results in inefficiencies. Municipal broadband for example, when it's actually gotten past the telco lawsuits, has reduced costs for residents of the municipality in question in most instances.
Well fuck. I've already written two lengthy responses to this and lost both thanks to the god damn back button sitting next to the arrow keys on my laptop. I am not buying another Thinkpad.
Short version: the patriot act does not grant surveillance powers to the president, it grants them to the director of the FBI. The FBI is required to act under the guidelines of the attorney general, and that's as close as it gets to control by the executive branch. This again means that the justice department is the problem here which, as I said, has committed the only real offenses that I've seen during his presidency. There are two ways to look at this: one is that the justice department is just a bunch of presidential lackeys, capable of no independent action, and the president is to blame for everything that they do. This is the Bush approach - they "serve at the pleasure of the president" and he can do whatever he wants with them. The other way to look at it is that this is not how the justice department is supposed to work. They are supposed to act independently, otherwise the president or other lawmakers could use the legal system as a cudgel to get whatever they wanted from whoever they wanted. Putting the power to prosecute (or not prosecute) under the power of a lawmaker is an invitation for corruption.
Of course, if you take this second approach then the attorney general and the director of the FBI are the ones to blame for the surveillance - people appointed by the president. So he doesn't get off scott free, though I'll point out that he also didn't appoint them unilaterally. They were approved by congress.
Guantanamo and indefinite detention was a failure to end. He tried and failed. The Bush tax cuts was a failure to end, he tried to eliminate the worst parts of them and failed. I don't know what he's done or what arguments he's made, as president, about the patriot act, but as a senator he did try (and fail) to limit surveillance.
The tax cuts and the patriot act are sore spots, since he could have just vetoed both of those. So again: I don't love everything he's done, but after you cut through the rhetoric the only real offenses that I've seen during his presidency have been by the justice department. I don't understand the persecution of Thomas Drake, even wearing my most cynical hat that doesn't make sense to me. "Obama bad" is not a sufficient explanation.
Of course he's better than Bush. Failure to end all of Bush's policies doesn't make him worse, or even as bad, as Bush. I'm disappointed, as most people are, since ending Bush's policies was basically the reason why I voted for him. That's pretty much all that I wanted him to do, though I appreciate the improved health care, so I'm not delighted by his presidency so far, but the hyperbolic rhetoric doesn't help anything - he is still head and shoulders better than Bush.
Disappointingly, I haven't seen many suggestions for Lavabit replacements in this thread. However, in answer to your question about providers, this one looks decent enough to me. It's more expensive than Lavabit, but they offer a few more services and they're based in Switzerland so are presumably that much more secure. I'd suggest that you also register a domain name with an anonymous registrar and use that rather than the one that the service provides - that way if something happens to compromise the new service you won't lose your email address.
I'm in the same boat you are (although I don't have two thousand dollars to donate). Good luck.
Well obviously I didn't include any citations to studies on the effects of carrying guns because my comment was not about the effects of carrying guns. My comment was about the NRA. I did include a couple of examples of their responses to mass shootings, because my comment was about how ridiculous their responses are and how far they're willing to bend logic to make sure that gun availability is never blamed for anything.
Because that's what the NRA does - everything it can to make sure that nothing ever changes, no matter how ridiculous the claims they make have to become. You remember the bit about arming all teachers and posting armed guards at every elementary school? Or other bullshit. That's their thing, that's why they exist.
I had that problem with convincing my dad to eat meat substitutes - he kept treating them like meat, and expecting them to taste and behave the same way. Ultimately he dismissed the whole category. Ridiculous. A black bean / chipotle veggie burger is fuckin' delicious, it doesn't matter if it doesn't taste like meat.
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This is just so... girlintraining makes an argument that accusations of rape and sexual impropriety are bizarrely common among whistleblowers, and provides examples such accusations. Your response is: "Well, looks like you've shown that lots of people are being accused of rape and sexual impropriety. So it can't really be out of the ordinary, can it?"
The idea behind restitution is to make whole someone who has been injured or caused some loss by another's actions. Unless this is a copyright issue, I don't see how possessing or distributing child pornography could be associated with any kind of monetary restitution. Creation of child pornography perhaps - the child could claim some trauma or, maybe at the outside, damage to their reputation. This doesn't make any sense though.
Both of your examples are a little off. The auto unions certainly had influence, and it's true that ridiculous pension plans are a part of what brought down the US auto industry, but it wasn't because the unions were demanding ridiculous pension plans. Those happened because it was a concession that the auto execs could give to the unions that wouldn't negatively impact short-term investors.
The hostess thing was a little different. Apparently the company had been so mismanaged that the baker's union couldn't bring themselves to believe the claims that the executives were making, they thought it was a bluff. And there's always the possibility that they were right - this could easily have been a case of the two sides playing chicken until they crashed and the company went belly-up.
Regardless, it's very clear that the unions don't "hold all the power." That claim just doesn't make any sense in the face of these two events or any other. You could make the claim that the unions "hold some of the power" as opposed to the executives having all of it. I don't see that as a bad thing.
Of the people I know who still play the game, most of them only do so to sell items for cash.
Apparently that's something they'd like to change.
So... they should be wagging their fingers at the Chinese instead? Because it's okay to pollute as much as you want as long as it's less than someone else? Isn't it possible for us to wag our fingers at both China and the US?
Firefall's been getting attention, from me at least, because it's done by ex-Tribes devs. Granted, there are many many games out there that don't do the free-to-play bullshit and are probably much more deserving of attention, but my love for Tribes doesn't let me ignore this one.
The scary part to me was the fact that a flu preparedness plan was classified in the first place. That every document and plan would be classified by default, no matter how unthreatening it may be, that's the the scary thing.
It's in the summary. You are in before nothing.
Martin Luther King Jr. lived in a vastly different time.
Maybe if you live up north, but down here the differences are a lot less dramatic. "Stop talking about racism" will be a good idea eventually, but we're not to the point yet where we can just let it drop.
Any large company will have some employee or subsidiary engaging in some questionable activities. For a company as large and old as Nestlé, this is nothing. You've got maybe three points here that are worth consideration and whole lot of fluff. If you cut the chaff (Marketing infant formula? What the Fuck? That's supposed to be "evil?") you'd make a stronger case - here the reader sees a bunch of garbage and says to himself, "This is the worst they could come up with? Nestlé must be a pretty decent company."
Yes of course it's about the money, but what you should read into this is that our government has failed at ensuring that the cost of power generation reflects the true cost to society. Dirty power is only cheap in the short term because it's allowed to be, with the long term effects ignored and unpaid for.
If our government was doing its job this wouldn't have happened.
Are you sure you're responding to the right comment? My point had nothing to do with America. I was correcting the grandparent who had made the claim that the US had assassinated one of its citizens (who I assumed to be Anwar al-Awlaki) for engaging in protected speech. That was not why he was killed.
Not to nitpick, most of your points are fine, but if this: "How many of those countries have openly assassinated one of their citizens for engaging in protected speech?" is referring to Anwar al-Awlaki, then you need to realize that not all speech is protected and that he was killed for non-protected speech. Specifically, "planning and directing efforts to murder innocent Americans."
You're complaining about safety regulations? The big bad government keeps fucking stuff up because it cares too much about people dying, eh? High speed rail in the US can't get up to genuinely high speeds because it's making use of old tracks which can't sustain those speeds. High speed rail in France and Japan manage just fine with their newer tracks, despite all that regulation weighing them down.
The reason why people like rail as a means of high speed transport is because you can move a large number of people relatively quickly and efficiently. If we didn't care about efficiency we could just keep using costly polluting planes to travel everywhere. This is in the hyperloop proposal, in fact - efficiency gains trail off at distances of greater than one thousand miles or so. He suggests sticking with planes to link cities that are further apart.
Have you read any of the proposals? Do you know anything about either the high-speed rail or the hyperloop? Do you think you're bringing something new to the table with this comment?
Rather than a hypothetical, a better example might be the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, which increased benefits for prescription drugs but explicitly prevented any sort of price controls. The result has been, predictably, higher cost drugs.
"Meddling" is a little too vague though - when the government gives subsidies without any sort of restrictions it will inevitably lead to increased costs. This does not mean that any government action on the demand side of the supply/demand system results in inefficiencies. Municipal broadband for example, when it's actually gotten past the telco lawsuits, has reduced costs for residents of the municipality in question in most instances.
The problem is that if Hushmail was actually secure they wouldn't have the ability to decrypt emails at all. They should not have the encryption key.
If I had mod points I'd give them to you, just for being one of the very few people here who is actually making an attempt to answer the question.
Well fuck. I've already written two lengthy responses to this and lost both thanks to the god damn back button sitting next to the arrow keys on my laptop. I am not buying another Thinkpad.
Short version: the patriot act does not grant surveillance powers to the president, it grants them to the director of the FBI. The FBI is required to act under the guidelines of the attorney general, and that's as close as it gets to control by the executive branch. This again means that the justice department is the problem here which, as I said, has committed the only real offenses that I've seen during his presidency. There are two ways to look at this: one is that the justice department is just a bunch of presidential lackeys, capable of no independent action, and the president is to blame for everything that they do. This is the Bush approach - they "serve at the pleasure of the president" and he can do whatever he wants with them. The other way to look at it is that this is not how the justice department is supposed to work. They are supposed to act independently, otherwise the president or other lawmakers could use the legal system as a cudgel to get whatever they wanted from whoever they wanted. Putting the power to prosecute (or not prosecute) under the power of a lawmaker is an invitation for corruption.
Of course, if you take this second approach then the attorney general and the director of the FBI are the ones to blame for the surveillance - people appointed by the president. So he doesn't get off scott free, though I'll point out that he also didn't appoint them unilaterally. They were approved by congress.
Guantanamo and indefinite detention was a failure to end. He tried and failed. The Bush tax cuts was a failure to end, he tried to eliminate the worst parts of them and failed. I don't know what he's done or what arguments he's made, as president, about the patriot act, but as a senator he did try (and fail) to limit surveillance.
The tax cuts and the patriot act are sore spots, since he could have just vetoed both of those. So again: I don't love everything he's done, but after you cut through the rhetoric the only real offenses that I've seen during his presidency have been by the justice department. I don't understand the persecution of Thomas Drake, even wearing my most cynical hat that doesn't make sense to me. "Obama bad" is not a sufficient explanation.
Of course he's better than Bush. Failure to end all of Bush's policies doesn't make him worse, or even as bad, as Bush. I'm disappointed, as most people are, since ending Bush's policies was basically the reason why I voted for him. That's pretty much all that I wanted him to do, though I appreciate the improved health care, so I'm not delighted by his presidency so far, but the hyperbolic rhetoric doesn't help anything - he is still head and shoulders better than Bush.
Disappointingly, I haven't seen many suggestions for Lavabit replacements in this thread. However, in answer to your question about providers, this one looks decent enough to me. It's more expensive than Lavabit, but they offer a few more services and they're based in Switzerland so are presumably that much more secure. I'd suggest that you also register a domain name with an anonymous registrar and use that rather than the one that the service provides - that way if something happens to compromise the new service you won't lose your email address.
I'm in the same boat you are (although I don't have two thousand dollars to donate). Good luck.
Well obviously I didn't include any citations to studies on the effects of carrying guns because my comment was not about the effects of carrying guns. My comment was about the NRA. I did include a couple of examples of their responses to mass shootings, because my comment was about how ridiculous their responses are and how far they're willing to bend logic to make sure that gun availability is never blamed for anything.
Because that's what the NRA does - everything it can to make sure that nothing ever changes, no matter how ridiculous the claims they make have to become. You remember the bit about arming all teachers and posting armed guards at every elementary school? Or other bullshit. That's their thing, that's why they exist.
I had that problem with convincing my dad to eat meat substitutes - he kept treating them like meat, and expecting them to taste and behave the same way. Ultimately he dismissed the whole category. Ridiculous. A black bean / chipotle veggie burger is fuckin' delicious, it doesn't matter if it doesn't taste like meat.