It's not just about who has the bigger guns. If the US has the biggest guns on earth. They can't stop drugs from being smuggled into the US. They have bigger guns than the drug dealers. Smuggling drugs is easier than preventing drug smuggling. Just like using bitcoin is easier than stopping people from using bitcoin.
You brought up Iraq. How come we haven't destroyed Al queda yet? It's actually bigger now than before 9/11.
So it still only has value because both people agree it has value, just like fiat currency.
Well it's not like normal fiat currency, because normal currency is easy to produce when it is controlled by an authority that can just print it. Bitcoin is more like gold. Gold is also only valuable because people agree it is valuable, but unlike US$ new gold/bitcoins can not be mined cheaply.
As someone else pointed out, once answered the solution is no longer rare.
There is still something actually rare about a bitcoin. But it's complicated because it has to do with asymmetric cryptography. Asymmetric cryptography involves math problems that are hard to solve but easy to verify that answers are correct (like factoring prime numbers). Once you solve a hard problem like mining a bitcoin, others can easily verify that the solution is correct. But that's not the whole story. When you mine a bitcoin, you also sign it with your private key which means only you are able to prove that it belongs to you. When you transfer it to someoneelse, you sign a transaction order to that person, now they are the only person who can prove it belongs to them.
Your private key is secret (only known to you), this is what creates the rarity. Yes anyone can prove that a bitcoin exists (the result of a hard problem being solved), but only 1 person can prove that they are authorized to spend it (another hard problem whose solution is only known by one person).
Gold can only be possessed by one person because it is a physical object. Bitcoin works in almost the same way. However they sense of ownership is just a convenient metaphor. You can't really own information (i.e. prevent others from having it once they know it). You can however choose not to share information that is nearly impossible to guess.
I know that there are drug deals that end badly, and a lot of violence that occurs because of drugs and the cartels that try to control the trade.
That said, I don;t think it's fair to lump in crime with the trading of all drugs. In the case of drugs that can be manufactured by small groups of people rather than large organizartions (e.g. marijuana, etc), I don't think come with the same sorts of relationships with crime. I don't use marijuana, but I have had, and do have lots of friends who do. They all get their marijuana from someone. Never once have I heard of someone being robbed or had a gun pointed at them. These are peaceful people who don't want anything to do with violence.
I suspect the same is probably not true with drugs like cocaine and heroin that need to be imported from other countries via illegal means.
That said, I don't expect you to be able to ascertain what kinds of drugs are being sold in your neighborhood, but I think it's important to realize that all drug transactions are not violent or even likely to be violent. If it were me, I would just use my judgement. You can usually tell the difference between potheads and meth/crackheads.
If that was the thinking behind Bitcoin maybe that should have been thought over a little better.
Who knows what the person who made bitcoin thought. We don't even know who he/she is.
What we do know is that Bitcoin is not able to be controlled by any individual or government. At least not in the way that it can control currency that it prints.
For example, while the US is probably powerful enough to affect gold prices, it can not control the price of gold because it can not prevent people from mining or selling gold in other places around the world. It is even easier to avoid detection with in the case of bitcoin, as the mining happens in a personal computer.
The United States can pass a regulation that all aliens in the universe must use US dollars as their currency, but they will not be able to enforce it.
The US may one day, if extremely lucky, be able to imprison or kill a few aliens for violating US law, just like how the US may imprison a few people for using bitcoin, but that is not really "enforcement" in any meaningful sense.
Yes there are bitcoin speculators. But there are also Euro and Yen speculators. The difference between these and oil speculators is that the price of oil actually affects people who choose not to deal in oil speculation. If you decide to have no part in bitcoin, then the price of bitcoin, however inflated or deflated from speculation, has no effect on you.
When people speculate on oil, the price of gasoline goes up in every currency (and then down when the bubble bursts). That is because oil is also a commodity and things like gold silver and bitcoins are not.
Bitcoin is backed by something rare (even if not tangible). It is backed by the solutions to hard math problems, which are just as hard to acquire in terms of expended resources as precious metals are. This is why there is an exchange rate from gold to bitcoins, even if it fluctuates.
Your defense has become based false and fabricated information (claiming I made statements that are never made)
I did not claim that you said anything that you didn't say
You have zero facts about the alien abductions during the african slave trade
I am only referring to the fact that by your retarded logic, we can never compare anything because we always have zero facts about things we don't know about. (whether they actually happened or not)
There is no point in debating with someone that refuses to live in reality.
I am not the one living in tinfoil-hat conspiracy land.
You can absolutely compare things when you don't know 100% of the facts, but when you have 0 facts it is impossible to make comparisons.
You have zero facts about the alien abductions during the african slave trade
What I am saying is that we can't consider evidence we don't have. Maybe there was a coverup, maybe there wasn't. Until we have evidence, we don't know. The burden of proof is on the claimant.
NEVER have I stated that the Franklin cover up was as bad as slavery. Go back and read my comments again without your emotions being tainted. I stated that we don't know the current extent of human slavery. The Franklin cover up shows us why we don't know. If we don't know, we can not compare and claim that slavery of African's was worse than current human slavery. It's speculation, and could very easily be wrong! Read the estimated numbers provided by international organizations and the UN! The numbers are at least similar to the African slave trade, and many times much worse.
you claim that you never said the franklin slave trade was worse than the african slave trade, and in the same paragraph you [kind of] cite evidence that that is in fact the case.
Furthermore even if we believe the worst case scenario conspiracy theory version of the Franklin slave trade, it's still not as bad as the african slave trade, which I will reiterate, included children, and involved millions of people over 3 centuries.
And this brings me back to what you originally said
Where I disagree is in that we don't know the full extent of US violence.
No we don't know the full extent of the history of US violence. However, barring some remarkable new evidence, I don't see how any claim that the US was the most violent government in US history is not completely ridiculous.
This is like saying that Jodi Arias is the most evil person that ever lived. You she is not a good person, she has murdered someone. But the number of people worse than her is almost uncountable. And it's true that we don't know the full extent of how bad she is, but it is extremely unlikely that she has committed genocides worse than all others in human history. We can say right off the bat that Hitler and Stalin are more evil than her.
Just like we can say right off the bat that the Vikings, the Mongols, and Roman Empire were more violent than the US government.
If the person was illegally selling petunias out of their garage I'd probably report it, if it was bringing all sorts of riffraff to my neighborhood and keeping me awake.
That was really what I was trying to get at. Is it the fact that it's illegal that bother you, or the actual results (i.e. the riffraff) that bothers you?
I suspect it is the riffraff, which is why I asked if there was any harm done other than you getting flipped off and blocked in your driveway.
I think the punishment for attracting riffraff should reflect the harm caused by the riffraff. The punishment for having a wild party attracts belligerent drunk people is not years of prison time. I am not sure I would call the cops on some guys dealing marijuana out of their garage if I knew it meant that their lives would be ruined.
If the dealers are Columbian drug cartel goons with ak-47's then I think there is a fair expectation that these are bad guys and I can safely ruin their lives without any guilt. But the reason I call the cops is not because what they are doing is illegal. It is because I think they are going to cause harm.
I can sympathize with users, but sellers, hell no.
I think the majority of marijuana dealers are not violent. I don't feel that these people are doing anything immoral. If they are doing other things like murder, theft, fraud, vandalism, intimidation, etc, then those things are bad by themselves. If using a product is not immoral, why is selling it to them immoral?
Someone who is running an illegal business out of a private residence and flagrantly breaking all sorts of laws, you think this person should _not_ report this sort of activity?
Did you fail to get to this part of my post?
I don't think you were wrong to call the cops on them. I wouldn't want a bunch of drug deals going down where I lived either
I didn't say it worked well. But the features it had made it more secure and able to utilize more memory. When vista came out it had lots of problems, so a lot of people went back to XP.
1. I don't think it's fair to compare the state of windows XP in 2007 with the state of windows vista in 2007 as far as bugs go.
2. Windows XP wasn't an upgrade in performance if you had a fast computer with a lot of memory. If you had an old enough computer upgrading from windows 98 to windows XP was a downgrade in performance too.
3. I don't know if the benefit of not being constantly infected by viruses due to a bad security model can be overstated.
If you think that the main innovation in Windows Vista was the frosted glass, or any other UI feature, you are retarded.
While I think Windows Vista was far from perfect (so far that I didn't buy it), Windows XP was 5 years old and showing it. It was not designed for 64 bit architecture, and could not address more than 4GB of memory. Yes I know there was 64-bit windows XP, but that opens up a whole new can of worms. All windows OSes up through windows XP had horrible security models that lead to rampant infections by viruses.
Windows XP was based on 1990's NT technology. Windows vista was a near complete rewrite of the OS to bring windows into the 21st century. It had lots of problems, but I'd sure as hell use it over XP if given a choice.
I am not a M$ fanboy either. I use both windows and linux both at work and at home. I'd probably own a mac too if I had more disposable income.
By your logic we can never compare anything. When do you ever have all the facts. Even if you did have all the facts, how could you ever know that for sure?
You say the Franklin child prostitution ring was just as bad as the African slave trade, but you fail to account for the millions of children used in alien/human hybrid experiments in the 19th century. I don't know if you are aware that the slave traders were else selling slaves to aliens. There are not any facts available about it because of of massive coverups by the government.
We have never had a media free from corruption and powerful interests. This doesn't mean that every conspiracy theory should be considered true. Lack of evidence is not evidence of a coverup.
I just think people are freaking out over the wrong thing. They equate drones to invasion of privacy and covert assassinations, when in reality it is just incidental that drones are now used for those things. It was easy to do those things before drones. Drones just made it even easier.
Rather than focusing on foreign policy and government surveillance in general we see people clamoring for bans on drones. I find this rather short sighted as drones can be used for good or evil just like any tool can be. We are at the point where the line between drones and children's toys is being blurred.
Was it better when it was more expensive to spy on people? I don't know. Yeah they probably did it less, but they still did it, and wasted more tax money doing it. But it is moot now anyway. The economics of everything change as new technology arises. This is a lesson of how we shouldn't rely on the cost of a negative action to be a permanent deterrent to it. We should be focusing on making our laws more reflective of what we actually want.
It was probably also bad when we were being spied on with piloted aircraft, or when we were having our phones bugged manually. It should have been subject to oversight back then as well. Fixating on the specific tools rather than what it is those tools are used for is a recipe for making the same mistakes in the future.
The African slave trade certainly included children. Not only that, but at the time the African slave trade was happening, it was justified by the idea that Africans were not human beings. The Franklin child prostitution ring, if it was real, happened in an age when slavery of any kind was not acceptable. This is evidenced by the fact that there needed to be a trial to determine the guilt/non-guilt of those involved. During the slave trade, if you were a slave owner, you did not have to hide anything you did to your slaves (adults or children). Slaves were not people, they were property. I can't imagine how anyone could think this is not a worse state of affairs.
No one is saying things like slavery, torture, etc, don't still happen, but the atmosphere is very different today. Now if you want to do those things you need to do them in secret and if you are caught you are subject to severe punishment. Even the US government is forced to constantly proclaim that water-boarding is not torture, because it is unacceptable to admit that the US government tortures. Contrast this to when torture of humans was routine and entertainment for those not being tortured.
Drones do have autopilot, but the entire time they are in the air, a pilot is still sitting in a chair watching them in case something goes wrong. They are expensive enough that having a person sitting there to watch them is cheap compared to the cost of losing one.
There were also a lot more people in the world during WW2 than during antiquity. When measuring deaths per capita, the 20th century has been the most peaceful century in human history even including WW2.
According to Stephen Pinker's book "The better angels of our nature", based on deaths per capita, WW2 is only the 9th largest mass killing in human history, and the rest of the 20th century was shockingly peaceful. WW1 is not even in the top 10.
torture was practiced by the United States during the Bush administration, and human trafficking still takes place in many countries.
There is an enormous difference between a clandestine, illegal, and universally decried practice in a few parts of the world and an open, institutionalized, and universally approved practice everywhere in the world. Human trafficking, as terrible as it is, cannot be compared to the African slave trade (see pp. 157–188), nor can the recent harsh interrogation of terrorist suspects to extract information, as indefensible as it was, be compared to millennia of sadistic torture all over the world for punishment and entertainment (see pp. 130-132 and 144–149). In understanding the history of violence, one has to make distinctions among levels of horror.
We are living in a relative paradise compared to what human society was like in the past. I am not saying we shouldn't strive to continue to improve. I fully anticipate future human society to make us look like savages by comparison. When we say things like "The US is the most violent government in history" we fail to acknowledge the progress made by humanity thus far.
The drones that people are freaking out about (e.g. the ones with missiles) are more expensive than regular aircraft. The smaller drones are glorified RC airplanes and the larger ones are just as expensive as fighter jets.
Did these "druggies" actually hurt anybody? I mean besides flipping you off and blocking you in your driveway. It seems that you just didn't like them, and they happened to be a minor inconvenience (not unlike someone playing loud music or just being an asshole), and what they were doing happened to be illegal and you took advantage of that.
I would say in an ideal world we would end the war on drugs, rather than manufacturing reasons to make criminals out of people that aren't hurting anyone (except maybe themselves), and in the process funneling money to brutal drug cartels.
I don't think you were wrong to call the cops on them. I wouldn't want a bunch of drug deals going down where I lived either, but I think the real problem is that because it's illegal, it attracts a criminal element, and not the other way around.
In some ways the U.S. government is the most violent that has ever existed.
I am not a fan of US foreign policy either, but these sorts of exaggerations are just ridiculous. Is the US government really more violent than the Roman Empire or the government of Genghis Khan? In the middle ages you were 35 times as likely to die as a result of violence from another human being (murder, war, etc) than today.
The US may be a violent (or maybe even the most violent) nation by today's standards, but it is certainly not anywhere close to being the most violent that ever existed. This is a gross overstatement.
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It's not just about who has the bigger guns. If the US has the biggest guns on earth. They can't stop drugs from being smuggled into the US. They have bigger guns than the drug dealers. Smuggling drugs is easier than preventing drug smuggling. Just like using bitcoin is easier than stopping people from using bitcoin.
You brought up Iraq. How come we haven't destroyed Al queda yet? It's actually bigger now than before 9/11.
So it still only has value because both people agree it has value, just like fiat currency.
Well it's not like normal fiat currency, because normal currency is easy to produce when it is controlled by an authority that can just print it. Bitcoin is more like gold. Gold is also only valuable because people agree it is valuable, but unlike US$ new gold/bitcoins can not be mined cheaply.
As someone else pointed out, once answered the solution is no longer rare.
There is still something actually rare about a bitcoin. But it's complicated because it has to do with asymmetric cryptography. Asymmetric cryptography involves math problems that are hard to solve but easy to verify that answers are correct (like factoring prime numbers). Once you solve a hard problem like mining a bitcoin, others can easily verify that the solution is correct. But that's not the whole story. When you mine a bitcoin, you also sign it with your private key which means only you are able to prove that it belongs to you. When you transfer it to someoneelse, you sign a transaction order to that person, now they are the only person who can prove it belongs to them.
Your private key is secret (only known to you), this is what creates the rarity. Yes anyone can prove that a bitcoin exists (the result of a hard problem being solved), but only 1 person can prove that they are authorized to spend it (another hard problem whose solution is only known by one person).
Gold can only be possessed by one person because it is a physical object. Bitcoin works in almost the same way. However they sense of ownership is just a convenient metaphor. You can't really own information (i.e. prevent others from having it once they know it). You can however choose not to share information that is nearly impossible to guess.
I know that there are drug deals that end badly, and a lot of violence that occurs because of drugs and the cartels that try to control the trade.
That said, I don;t think it's fair to lump in crime with the trading of all drugs. In the case of drugs that can be manufactured by small groups of people rather than large organizartions (e.g. marijuana, etc), I don't think come with the same sorts of relationships with crime. I don't use marijuana, but I have had, and do have lots of friends who do. They all get their marijuana from someone. Never once have I heard of someone being robbed or had a gun pointed at them. These are peaceful people who don't want anything to do with violence.
I suspect the same is probably not true with drugs like cocaine and heroin that need to be imported from other countries via illegal means.
That said, I don't expect you to be able to ascertain what kinds of drugs are being sold in your neighborhood, but I think it's important to realize that all drug transactions are not violent or even likely to be violent. If it were me, I would just use my judgement. You can usually tell the difference between potheads and meth/crackheads.
If that was the thinking behind Bitcoin maybe that should have been thought over a little better.
Who knows what the person who made bitcoin thought. We don't even know who he/she is.
What we do know is that Bitcoin is not able to be controlled by any individual or government. At least not in the way that it can control currency that it prints.
For example, while the US is probably powerful enough to affect gold prices, it can not control the price of gold because it can not prevent people from mining or selling gold in other places around the world. It is even easier to avoid detection with in the case of bitcoin, as the mining happens in a personal computer.
The United States can pass a regulation that all aliens in the universe must use US dollars as their currency, but they will not be able to enforce it.
The US may one day, if extremely lucky, be able to imprison or kill a few aliens for violating US law, just like how the US may imprison a few people for using bitcoin, but that is not really "enforcement" in any meaningful sense.
Yes there are bitcoin speculators. But there are also Euro and Yen speculators. The difference between these and oil speculators is that the price of oil actually affects people who choose not to deal in oil speculation. If you decide to have no part in bitcoin, then the price of bitcoin, however inflated or deflated from speculation, has no effect on you.
When people speculate on oil, the price of gasoline goes up in every currency (and then down when the bubble bursts). That is because oil is also a commodity and things like gold silver and bitcoins are not.
Bitcoin is backed by something rare (even if not tangible). It is backed by the solutions to hard math problems, which are just as hard to acquire in terms of expended resources as precious metals are. This is why there is an exchange rate from gold to bitcoins, even if it fluctuates.
Your defense has become based false and fabricated information (claiming I made statements that are never made)
I did not claim that you said anything that you didn't say
You have zero facts about the alien abductions during the african slave trade
I am only referring to the fact that by your retarded logic, we can never compare anything because we always have zero facts about things we don't know about. (whether they actually happened or not)
There is no point in debating with someone that refuses to live in reality.
I am not the one living in tinfoil-hat conspiracy land.
You can absolutely compare things when you don't know 100% of the facts, but when you have 0 facts it is impossible to make comparisons.
You have zero facts about the alien abductions during the african slave trade
What I am saying is that we can't consider evidence we don't have. Maybe there was a coverup, maybe there wasn't. Until we have evidence, we don't know. The burden of proof is on the claimant.
NEVER have I stated that the Franklin cover up was as bad as slavery. Go back and read my comments again without your emotions being tainted. I stated that we don't know the current extent of human slavery. The Franklin cover up shows us why we don't know. If we don't know, we can not compare and claim that slavery of African's was worse than current human slavery. It's speculation, and could very easily be wrong! Read the estimated numbers provided by international organizations and the UN! The numbers are at least similar to the African slave trade, and many times much worse.
you claim that you never said the franklin slave trade was worse than the african slave trade, and in the same paragraph you [kind of] cite evidence that that is in fact the case.
Furthermore even if we believe the worst case scenario conspiracy theory version of the Franklin slave trade, it's still not as bad as the african slave trade, which I will reiterate, included children, and involved millions of people over 3 centuries.
And this brings me back to what you originally said
Where I disagree is in that we don't know the full extent of US violence.
No we don't know the full extent of the history of US violence. However, barring some remarkable new evidence, I don't see how any claim that the US was the most violent government in US history is not completely ridiculous.
This is like saying that Jodi Arias is the most evil person that ever lived. You she is not a good person, she has murdered someone. But the number of people worse than her is almost uncountable. And it's true that we don't know the full extent of how bad she is, but it is extremely unlikely that she has committed genocides worse than all others in human history. We can say right off the bat that Hitler and Stalin are more evil than her.
Just like we can say right off the bat that the Vikings, the Mongols, and Roman Empire were more violent than the US government.
If the person was illegally selling petunias out of their garage I'd probably report it, if it was bringing all sorts of riffraff to my neighborhood and keeping me awake.
That was really what I was trying to get at. Is it the fact that it's illegal that bother you, or the actual results (i.e. the riffraff) that bothers you?
I suspect it is the riffraff, which is why I asked if there was any harm done other than you getting flipped off and blocked in your driveway.
I think the punishment for attracting riffraff should reflect the harm caused by the riffraff. The punishment for having a wild party attracts belligerent drunk people is not years of prison time. I am not sure I would call the cops on some guys dealing marijuana out of their garage if I knew it meant that their lives would be ruined.
If the dealers are Columbian drug cartel goons with ak-47's then I think there is a fair expectation that these are bad guys and I can safely ruin their lives without any guilt. But the reason I call the cops is not because what they are doing is illegal. It is because I think they are going to cause harm.
I can sympathize with users, but sellers, hell no.
I think the majority of marijuana dealers are not violent. I don't feel that these people are doing anything immoral. If they are doing other things like murder, theft, fraud, vandalism, intimidation, etc, then those things are bad by themselves. If using a product is not immoral, why is selling it to them immoral?
Someone who is running an illegal business out of a private residence and flagrantly breaking all sorts of laws, you think this person should _not_ report this sort of activity?
Did you fail to get to this part of my post?
I don't think you were wrong to call the cops on them. I wouldn't want a bunch of drug deals going down where I lived either
I didn't say it worked well. But the features it had made it more secure and able to utilize more memory. When vista came out it had lots of problems, so a lot of people went back to XP.
1. I don't think it's fair to compare the state of windows XP in 2007 with the state of windows vista in 2007 as far as bugs go.
2. Windows XP wasn't an upgrade in performance if you had a fast computer with a lot of memory. If you had an old enough computer upgrading from windows 98 to windows XP was a downgrade in performance too.
3. I don't know if the benefit of not being constantly infected by viruses due to a bad security model can be overstated.
If you think that the main innovation in Windows Vista was the frosted glass, or any other UI feature, you are retarded.
While I think Windows Vista was far from perfect (so far that I didn't buy it), Windows XP was 5 years old and showing it. It was not designed for 64 bit architecture, and could not address more than 4GB of memory. Yes I know there was 64-bit windows XP, but that opens up a whole new can of worms. All windows OSes up through windows XP had horrible security models that lead to rampant infections by viruses.
Windows XP was based on 1990's NT technology. Windows vista was a near complete rewrite of the OS to bring windows into the 21st century. It had lots of problems, but I'd sure as hell use it over XP if given a choice.
I am not a M$ fanboy either. I use both windows and linux both at work and at home. I'd probably own a mac too if I had more disposable income.
By your logic we can never compare anything. When do you ever have all the facts. Even if you did have all the facts, how could you ever know that for sure?
You say the Franklin child prostitution ring was just as bad as the African slave trade, but you fail to account for the millions of children used in alien/human hybrid experiments in the 19th century. I don't know if you are aware that the slave traders were else selling slaves to aliens. There are not any facts available about it because of of massive coverups by the government.
We have never had a media free from corruption and powerful interests. This doesn't mean that every conspiracy theory should be considered true. Lack of evidence is not evidence of a coverup.
That will likely one day be the case, but it is not how they are used today aside from a few exceptions.
I just think people are freaking out over the wrong thing. They equate drones to invasion of privacy and covert assassinations, when in reality it is just incidental that drones are now used for those things. It was easy to do those things before drones. Drones just made it even easier.
Rather than focusing on foreign policy and government surveillance in general we see people clamoring for bans on drones. I find this rather short sighted as drones can be used for good or evil just like any tool can be. We are at the point where the line between drones and children's toys is being blurred.
Was it better when it was more expensive to spy on people? I don't know. Yeah they probably did it less, but they still did it, and wasted more tax money doing it. But it is moot now anyway. The economics of everything change as new technology arises. This is a lesson of how we shouldn't rely on the cost of a negative action to be a permanent deterrent to it. We should be focusing on making our laws more reflective of what we actually want.
It was probably also bad when we were being spied on with piloted aircraft, or when we were having our phones bugged manually. It should have been subject to oversight back then as well. Fixating on the specific tools rather than what it is those tools are used for is a recipe for making the same mistakes in the future.
Commercial Airliners have autopilots as well.
The African slave trade certainly included children. Not only that, but at the time the African slave trade was happening, it was justified by the idea that Africans were not human beings. The Franklin child prostitution ring, if it was real, happened in an age when slavery of any kind was not acceptable. This is evidenced by the fact that there needed to be a trial to determine the guilt/non-guilt of those involved. During the slave trade, if you were a slave owner, you did not have to hide anything you did to your slaves (adults or children). Slaves were not people, they were property. I can't imagine how anyone could think this is not a worse state of affairs.
No one is saying things like slavery, torture, etc, don't still happen, but the atmosphere is very different today. Now if you want to do those things you need to do them in secret and if you are caught you are subject to severe punishment. Even the US government is forced to constantly proclaim that water-boarding is not torture, because it is unacceptable to admit that the US government tortures. Contrast this to when torture of humans was routine and entertainment for those not being tortured.
Drones do have autopilot, but the entire time they are in the air, a pilot is still sitting in a chair watching them in case something goes wrong. They are expensive enough that having a person sitting there to watch them is cheap compared to the cost of losing one.
There were also a lot more people in the world during WW2 than during antiquity. When measuring deaths per capita, the 20th century has been the most peaceful century in human history even including WW2. According to Stephen Pinker's book "The better angels of our nature", based on deaths per capita, WW2 is only the 9th largest mass killing in human history, and the rest of the 20th century was shockingly peaceful. WW1 is not even in the top 10.
to quote form Stephen Pinker:
torture was practiced by the United States during the Bush administration, and human trafficking still takes place in many countries. There is an enormous difference between a clandestine, illegal, and universally decried practice in a few parts of the world and an open, institutionalized, and universally approved practice everywhere in the world. Human trafficking, as terrible as it is, cannot be compared to the African slave trade (see pp. 157–188), nor can the recent harsh interrogation of terrorist suspects to extract information, as indefensible as it was, be compared to millennia of sadistic torture all over the world for punishment and entertainment (see pp. 130-132 and 144–149). In understanding the history of violence, one has to make distinctions among levels of horror.
We are living in a relative paradise compared to what human society was like in the past. I am not saying we shouldn't strive to continue to improve. I fully anticipate future human society to make us look like savages by comparison. When we say things like "The US is the most violent government in history" we fail to acknowledge the progress made by humanity thus far.
The drones that people are freaking out about (e.g. the ones with missiles) are more expensive than regular aircraft. The smaller drones are glorified RC airplanes and the larger ones are just as expensive as fighter jets.
Did these "druggies" actually hurt anybody? I mean besides flipping you off and blocking you in your driveway. It seems that you just didn't like them, and they happened to be a minor inconvenience (not unlike someone playing loud music or just being an asshole), and what they were doing happened to be illegal and you took advantage of that.
I would say in an ideal world we would end the war on drugs, rather than manufacturing reasons to make criminals out of people that aren't hurting anyone (except maybe themselves), and in the process funneling money to brutal drug cartels.
I don't think you were wrong to call the cops on them. I wouldn't want a bunch of drug deals going down where I lived either, but I think the real problem is that because it's illegal, it attracts a criminal element, and not the other way around.
Would you have felt much safer if the pilot was in the airplane rather than being on the ground?
In some ways the U.S. government is the most violent that has ever existed.
I am not a fan of US foreign policy either, but these sorts of exaggerations are just ridiculous. Is the US government really more violent than the Roman Empire or the government of Genghis Khan? In the middle ages you were 35 times as likely to die as a result of violence from another human being (murder, war, etc) than today.
The US may be a violent (or maybe even the most violent) nation by today's standards, but it is certainly not anywhere close to being the most violent that ever existed. This is a gross overstatement.