This sort of begs the question by assuming the vehicle manufacturers are at fault. By refusing to accept liability, they are basically claiming not to be at fault should something go wrong. Obviously a court could decide otherwise.
Hardly, it's more likely that your "accident" will contribute the increased estimated loss potential in your insurance pool, and result in increases for you in the long run. Just because it isn't your fault doesn't mean that your premium won't go up (just not relative to others).
It won't go up any more than if you didn't get into an accident. Maybe your particular accident will cause everyone's insurance to go up a fraction of a penny.
Even if the "at-fault" party is in your insurance pool, you shouldn't notice your own rate going up because of that. If you do (e.g. like if your insurance pool is 2 people), you can always switch to another insurance company.
Living is something you would be doing (and need to pay for) regardless. Lot's of people still live with their parents when they go to school. Part of how European countries can afford to provide free/cheap university educations, is because it is not the life experience that it is in the US. In Europe university is like high school but harder.
There are companies that will sell you a degree from any university you like for a couple hundred dollars.
If you want an education, you can read all the same books that would have been assigned to you, had you gone to university.
You don't need to go to a university and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn about art history. If you just want the education for yourself, then you don't need an official degree.
ANd that should be available to everyone for as cheaply as possible.
Things can be pretty cheap (for you) when you are forcing other people to pay for them.
If you want the full college experience of dorms, and cafeterias, and state of the art gyms, and new textbooks, and classes in buildings with gothic architecture, that is going to cost somebody a lot of money, whether it's your parents, or the tax payers, or you, or your bank (if you refuse to pay back your loan).
What I would add is that... If you don't want to get an education that is part of a larger economic plan to increase your ability to be productive in a way that is in high demand by society, then you should be willing to accept the financial consequences of this decision.
It's nice that you want to better yourself, but it is unreasonably selfish to better yourself at the cost of society, without giving anything back.
That assumes that the insurance companies all overestimate the risk. It is just as likely that they will underestimate the risk. They must remain competitive even when in uncharted waters. If all the insurance companies are over estimating the risk, then a single insurer can reap all the profit by undercutting their competition and still be safe.
You only present 1 scenario, where all the insurance companies overestimate the risk. I don't doubt that insurance companies will raise their rates to play it safe. But the other possibility is that they don't raise them enough, and they are all actually underestimating the risk, in which case the exact opposite outcome occurs.
Why should we have to pay for sick kids? I wasn't born sick, so I didn't incur a cost to society. If a kid is born sick, it should be their responsibility to pay the cost of fixing their own problems.
Where is the part where you are forced to use a self driving car? You are free to deny liability for anything you don't use.
Your liability is whatever the law says it is. If you buy an autonomous vehicle from a company that assumes no liability, then it's on you. You don't like it? Then don't buy it. If you buy an autonomous vehicle from a company that assumes full liability (and pay the extra cost of that), fine.
It doesn't really matter if you pay for the liability up front, or take a risk in maybe paying it later. You are still paying for it either way.
Even when you buy a router at best buy, the fact that it comes with a 1 year warranty makes the router a little more expensive than it otherwise would be. The company is assuming the liability if something breaks within the first year, but you are still paying for it.
You do, if you bought insurance specifically for that possibility. If you are deemed by the insurance companies to be high risk, they will simply charge higher premiums.
If your car is in an accident that is clearly not your fault (e.g. it was parked), then your premiums likely won't go up, because the insurance company won't see you as a higher risk (you were just unlucky). Even if they do try to raise your premiums, there should be plenty of other more rational companies willing to give you a good rate.
I can imagine uber being better than taxi companies for drivers as well. There are drivers with prejudices of certain categories of people tipping well or poorly. If people have already paid a fixed price, the motivation for the prejudice is gone. They can focus on giving people rides rather than trying to select good tippers and rejecting bad tippers.
Uber is probably bad for taxis that have already invested in a medallion, but it must be pretty nice for drivers without medallions that now have a better option than renting them.
Ultimately I see uber (and other ride sharing companies) as a middleman that is taking a much smaller cut of the pie than traditional taxi companies. Coupled with a nice app and the lack of some dumb rules, they can be more efficient.
I wasn't making a pro nor anti gun control argument.
But if you want to bring up logic, the example you cited of western countries with gun control having less gun violence illustrates a correlation, not causation.
It could be the case that countries that are naturally less violent are more likely to implement gun control laws, and it is the lack of violence that is causing the gun control laws and not the other way around.
There is a high correlation between hospital visits and death. Does this mean the hospital is the last place you should go if sick? No of course not.
There are lots of good arguments for gun control. Showing mere correlations isn't one of them.
A liberal Republican, Chafee was frequently ranked as the least conservative Senate Republican, and to the left of some conservative Democrats. He opposed eliminating the estate tax, voted to increase the top federal income tax rate, voted against allowing drilling in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, supported an increased minimum wage and was the only Republican Senator to vote against authorising the use of force in Iraq. Chafee is pro-choice, supports same-sex marriage, affirmative action, gun control and federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and opposes the death penalty and a Flag Desecration Amendment to the United States Constitution.
I don't know what to make of this, but he seems better than all the Republicans running so far.
This is a small suggestion, Aside from obvious cat6 wiring (which I did), the thing I wish my house had, was AC power going to the door bell. What my doorbell actually had was some Low Voltage wires that went through the whole house to a giant transformer mounted in a hallway, with some more low voltage wires going from there to an old AC adapter in the garage. This is a pretty common setup for wired doorbells.
What I would rather have is a regular AC access point near the doorbell. Then you can have a doorbell/camera/intercom system. A few of these already exist, but I expect them to get better.
For now I am trying to find the most painless way to get power to my doorbell, because I don't want to be running a camera/wifi off a battery.
Where AMD currently shines is in laptops without dedicated graphics. IGP performance is much more of a bottleneck than CPU performace is (where AMD doesn't currently shine).
So if you take an AMD laptop with an IGP, it will beat the core i5 with dedicated graphics in size, power consumption, and price.
What sucks is that not many manufacturers make laptop models with AMD chips, and when they do they are usually coupled with terrible components.
Even if I buy a "high end" laptop, I would rather have better integrated GPU than a better CPU. To me it's just a bonus that the AMD parts are so much cheaper. But as you say, it's nearly impossible to get a high end laptop with an AMD chip in it.
I'm not in the NRA, and I have no problem assigning whatever blame they deserve. I think it is fair to say that the NRA is responsible for the loopholes in gun control laws, and their resulting ineffectiveness.
I don't think the NRA is responsible for the focus on cosmetic appearance that many gun laws have.
Also, it seems quite clear to me that the 2nd amendment does in fact protect the individual right to own guns (among other more dangerous weapons). And I think rather than pretending it doesn't, there should be an effort to amend the constitution for the 21st century and it's weapons. I think the gun control lobby's alternate interpretation of the 2nd amendment is actually just going to be a huge setback for that movement.
Sure, anyone can make a gun*, but it requires effort and skill and risk taking and most people don't bother. If an easy kit is available they might, so it makes sense to look at limiting access to it.
What really screws things is up the emergence of 3D printers.
That was my point. Guns are in the category of "can not keep people from getting", *because* of the emergence of 3D printers.
The OP said:
Whoever thinks that making guns cheap and easy to fabricate without skills is a good idea, is nuts.
As if it was some decision made by a person in a position of authority. All it takes is one nut to figure out how to do it cheaply, and the toothpaste is out of the tube, and there is no putting it back in.
Now that the building blocks for this technology exist, what were the odds that 0 people out of 7 billion would figure out how to make cheap guns and release this information to the public? 0%.
That's my point. It doesn't matter if it's a good idea or not. All it takes is one person to do it, and then we live in a world where it's easy.
You can't even ban 3D printers, because not only do we have 3D printers that print out their own parts, you would just be uniting the gun nuts and the maker movement.
Otherwise, the criminal gets to keep the proceeds of their crime consequence free once they have washed it throught the system sufficiently.
You can still investigate money laundering, and if a crime is discovered, and a conviction is made, the money can be repossessed as a restitution for that crime.
What I am saying is that if you find someone laundering money, and it turns out that they haven't actually committed any other crimes, should they still be punished? I argue that they shouldn't.
I take it that you think that it is possible to stop government abuse of power with automatic rifles?
No I don't
I was merely showing how absurd your comment was, by making the exact same comment from the other side of the issue.
It is possible to think our gun control laws are ridiculous for a number of reasons (from the view that they violate the constitution to the view that they are ineffective at stopping violence), without being responsible for the violence committed by mentally unstable people with guns.
This is the same argument people make that goes "Well if you like high taxes so much, then you should volunteer to pay them"
I am aware of how hard it is to actually make the fuel undetected, my point was that the information is freely available.
It's not like you can ban aluminum. You used to be able to ban metal of a particular shape, but now people have the tools and information to make metal whatever shape they want.
It's way easier to ban a material like uranium or plutonium than it is to ban shapes. At least currently.
Whoever thinks that making guns cheap and easy to fabricate without skills is a good idea, is nuts.
It doesn't matter if it's a good idea or a bad idea. It's the world we live in now.
It was probably not a good idea to let murderous dictators and their regimes know about the equation E=MC^2. We would definitely be better off if crazy people lacked the information to make nuclear weapons. But that's not even a question worth considering, because that information is already out there. We live in a world where the knowledge of how to make a nuclear weapon can be found on wikipedia.
There is no good way to keep bad people from owning cars, cell phones, computers, kitchen knives, baseball bats, etc. Now guns are in this category as well. It is just a fact that in the 21st century, making a precise replica of a simple physical object is no longer hard nor expensive. Arguing whether it should be is pointless.
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This sort of begs the question by assuming the vehicle manufacturers are at fault. By refusing to accept liability, they are basically claiming not to be at fault should something go wrong. Obviously a court could decide otherwise.
Hardly, it's more likely that your "accident" will contribute the increased estimated loss potential in your insurance pool, and result in increases for you in the long run. Just because it isn't your fault doesn't mean that your premium won't go up (just not relative to others).
It won't go up any more than if you didn't get into an accident. Maybe your particular accident will cause everyone's insurance to go up a fraction of a penny.
Even if the "at-fault" party is in your insurance pool, you shouldn't notice your own rate going up because of that. If you do (e.g. like if your insurance pool is 2 people), you can always switch to another insurance company.
Living is something you would be doing (and need to pay for) regardless. Lot's of people still live with their parents when they go to school. Part of how European countries can afford to provide free/cheap university educations, is because it is not the life experience that it is in the US. In Europe university is like high school but harder.
I would like to point out that the S and the M in STEM, are both liberal arts subjects.
There are companies that will sell you a degree from any university you like for a couple hundred dollars.
If you want an education, you can read all the same books that would have been assigned to you, had you gone to university.
You don't need to go to a university and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn about art history. If you just want the education for yourself, then you don't need an official degree.
ANd that should be available to everyone for as cheaply as possible.
Things can be pretty cheap (for you) when you are forcing other people to pay for them.
If you want the full college experience of dorms, and cafeterias, and state of the art gyms, and new textbooks, and classes in buildings with gothic architecture, that is going to cost somebody a lot of money, whether it's your parents, or the tax payers, or you, or your bank (if you refuse to pay back your loan).
What I would add is that... If you don't want to get an education that is part of a larger economic plan to increase your ability to be productive in a way that is in high demand by society, then you should be willing to accept the financial consequences of this decision.
It's nice that you want to better yourself, but it is unreasonably selfish to better yourself at the cost of society, without giving anything back.
That assumes that the insurance companies all overestimate the risk. It is just as likely that they will underestimate the risk. They must remain competitive even when in uncharted waters. If all the insurance companies are over estimating the risk, then a single insurer can reap all the profit by undercutting their competition and still be safe.
You only present 1 scenario, where all the insurance companies overestimate the risk. I don't doubt that insurance companies will raise their rates to play it safe. But the other possibility is that they don't raise them enough, and they are all actually underestimating the risk, in which case the exact opposite outcome occurs.
Why should we have to pay for sick kids? I wasn't born sick, so I didn't incur a cost to society. If a kid is born sick, it should be their responsibility to pay the cost of fixing their own problems.
Where is the part where you are forced to use a self driving car? You are free to deny liability for anything you don't use.
Your liability is whatever the law says it is. If you buy an autonomous vehicle from a company that assumes no liability, then it's on you. You don't like it? Then don't buy it. If you buy an autonomous vehicle from a company that assumes full liability (and pay the extra cost of that), fine.
It doesn't really matter if you pay for the liability up front, or take a risk in maybe paying it later. You are still paying for it either way.
Even when you buy a router at best buy, the fact that it comes with a 1 year warranty makes the router a little more expensive than it otherwise would be. The company is assuming the liability if something breaks within the first year, but you are still paying for it.
You do, if you bought insurance specifically for that possibility. If you are deemed by the insurance companies to be high risk, they will simply charge higher premiums.
If your car is in an accident that is clearly not your fault (e.g. it was parked), then your premiums likely won't go up, because the insurance company won't see you as a higher risk (you were just unlucky). Even if they do try to raise your premiums, there should be plenty of other more rational companies willing to give you a good rate.
I can imagine uber being better than taxi companies for drivers as well. There are drivers with prejudices of certain categories of people tipping well or poorly. If people have already paid a fixed price, the motivation for the prejudice is gone. They can focus on giving people rides rather than trying to select good tippers and rejecting bad tippers.
Uber is probably bad for taxis that have already invested in a medallion, but it must be pretty nice for drivers without medallions that now have a better option than renting them.
Ultimately I see uber (and other ride sharing companies) as a middleman that is taking a much smaller cut of the pie than traditional taxi companies. Coupled with a nice app and the lack of some dumb rules, they can be more efficient.
I wasn't making a pro nor anti gun control argument.
But if you want to bring up logic, the example you cited of western countries with gun control having less gun violence illustrates a correlation, not causation.
It could be the case that countries that are naturally less violent are more likely to implement gun control laws, and it is the lack of violence that is causing the gun control laws and not the other way around.
There is a high correlation between hospital visits and death. Does this mean the hospital is the last place you should go if sick? No of course not.
There are lots of good arguments for gun control. Showing mere correlations isn't one of them.
Encryption (without back doors) for use by governments is absolutely essential to national security.
That had better be a Canadian violin, or else you are stealing.
Even better. He can't be worse than Hillary.
A liberal Republican, Chafee was frequently ranked as the least conservative Senate Republican, and to the left of some conservative Democrats. He opposed eliminating the estate tax, voted to increase the top federal income tax rate, voted against allowing drilling in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, supported an increased minimum wage and was the only Republican Senator to vote against authorising the use of force in Iraq. Chafee is pro-choice, supports same-sex marriage, affirmative action, gun control and federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and opposes the death penalty and a Flag Desecration Amendment to the United States Constitution.
I don't know what to make of this, but he seems better than all the Republicans running so far.
This is a small suggestion, Aside from obvious cat6 wiring (which I did), the thing I wish my house had, was AC power going to the door bell. What my doorbell actually had was some Low Voltage wires that went through the whole house to a giant transformer mounted in a hallway, with some more low voltage wires going from there to an old AC adapter in the garage. This is a pretty common setup for wired doorbells.
What I would rather have is a regular AC access point near the doorbell. Then you can have a doorbell/camera/intercom system. A few of these already exist, but I expect them to get better.
For now I am trying to find the most painless way to get power to my doorbell, because I don't want to be running a camera/wifi off a battery.
Where AMD currently shines is in laptops without dedicated graphics. IGP performance is much more of a bottleneck than CPU performace is (where AMD doesn't currently shine).
So if you take an AMD laptop with an IGP, it will beat the core i5 with dedicated graphics in size, power consumption, and price.
What sucks is that not many manufacturers make laptop models with AMD chips, and when they do they are usually coupled with terrible components.
Even if I buy a "high end" laptop, I would rather have better integrated GPU than a better CPU. To me it's just a bonus that the AMD parts are so much cheaper. But as you say, it's nearly impossible to get a high end laptop with an AMD chip in it.
I'm not in the NRA, and I have no problem assigning whatever blame they deserve. I think it is fair to say that the NRA is responsible for the loopholes in gun control laws, and their resulting ineffectiveness.
I don't think the NRA is responsible for the focus on cosmetic appearance that many gun laws have.
Also, it seems quite clear to me that the 2nd amendment does in fact protect the individual right to own guns (among other more dangerous weapons). And I think rather than pretending it doesn't, there should be an effort to amend the constitution for the 21st century and it's weapons. I think the gun control lobby's alternate interpretation of the 2nd amendment is actually just going to be a huge setback for that movement.
Sure, anyone can make a gun*, but it requires effort and skill and risk taking and most people don't bother. If an easy kit is available they might, so it makes sense to look at limiting access to it.
What really screws things is up the emergence of 3D printers.
That was my point. Guns are in the category of "can not keep people from getting", *because* of the emergence of 3D printers.
The OP said:
Whoever thinks that making guns cheap and easy to fabricate without skills is a good idea, is nuts.
As if it was some decision made by a person in a position of authority. All it takes is one nut to figure out how to do it cheaply, and the toothpaste is out of the tube, and there is no putting it back in.
Now that the building blocks for this technology exist, what were the odds that 0 people out of 7 billion would figure out how to make cheap guns and release this information to the public? 0%.
That's my point. It doesn't matter if it's a good idea or not. All it takes is one person to do it, and then we live in a world where it's easy.
You can't even ban 3D printers, because not only do we have 3D printers that print out their own parts, you would just be uniting the gun nuts and the maker movement.
I feel like you didn't read my comment.
Otherwise, the criminal gets to keep the proceeds of their crime consequence free once they have washed it throught the system sufficiently.
You can still investigate money laundering, and if a crime is discovered, and a conviction is made, the money can be repossessed as a restitution for that crime.
What I am saying is that if you find someone laundering money, and it turns out that they haven't actually committed any other crimes, should they still be punished? I argue that they shouldn't.
I take it that you think that it is possible to stop government abuse of power with automatic rifles?
No I don't
I was merely showing how absurd your comment was, by making the exact same comment from the other side of the issue.
It is possible to think our gun control laws are ridiculous for a number of reasons (from the view that they violate the constitution to the view that they are ineffective at stopping violence), without being responsible for the violence committed by mentally unstable people with guns.
This is the same argument people make that goes "Well if you like high taxes so much, then you should volunteer to pay them"
I am aware of how hard it is to actually make the fuel undetected, my point was that the information is freely available.
It's not like you can ban aluminum. You used to be able to ban metal of a particular shape, but now people have the tools and information to make metal whatever shape they want.
It's way easier to ban a material like uranium or plutonium than it is to ban shapes. At least currently.
Whoever thinks that making guns cheap and easy to fabricate without skills is a good idea, is nuts.
It doesn't matter if it's a good idea or a bad idea. It's the world we live in now.
It was probably not a good idea to let murderous dictators and their regimes know about the equation E=MC^2. We would definitely be better off if crazy people lacked the information to make nuclear weapons. But that's not even a question worth considering, because that information is already out there. We live in a world where the knowledge of how to make a nuclear weapon can be found on wikipedia.
There is no good way to keep bad people from owning cars, cell phones, computers, kitchen knives, baseball bats, etc. Now guns are in this category as well. It is just a fact that in the 21st century, making a precise replica of a simple physical object is no longer hard nor expensive. Arguing whether it should be is pointless.