We have international courts and trade agreements. If they don't play fair, they can get slapped with tariffs or outright bans. And if they won't play ball at all, well, by our own rules we should not be trading with them.
You seem to be under the impression that our international treaties were written in a way to provide a fair shot for communities that favor strong environmental and labor protections over bottom-feeding rent-seekers.
Unfortunately, the WTO cares far more about trade barriers than the environment. While the WTO recognizes the right of nations to protect human health and their natural resources, it does not recognize any restraint on trade in "like products." So, for example, if you want to ban tuna caught in a way that threatens dolphins, you can't do that under WTO/GATT precedent if the end products (canned tuna) is the same. It doesn't matter that the method of making the product is different, and that customers may be concerned. Dolphin-safe & dolphin-unsafe canned meat is physically the same.
Here is a good list summarizing the big mixed-bag of WTO & GATT v. the environment lawsuits. Generally speaking, a law that governs the effects of a product once on US soil are fine, as long as you treat foreign and domestic products equally. A law that tries to govern how a product is made in another country which is indistinguishable from an equivalent product made elsewhere is generally not okay.
Reading about WTO/GATT cases is often very frustrating. Sometimes it's because the international bodies make decisions that seem grossly obstructionist to protecting the environment. Other times it's because countries are trying to hide flagrantly protectionist measures against foreign goods (while safeguarding domestic goods) under the rubric of protecting health & the environment. (Take the Thai cigarettes case, where the US sued Thailand for blocking cigarette imports for health reasons...but still allowed the sale of domestic cigarettes.)
Emphasis mine. According to this statement, Oritz says that he did not consider that banning salt in restaurants would affect the flavor of the foods served in those restaurants. It isn't possible for this to be true. He's lying through his teeth.
Personally, I don't think it's possible for anyone to suggest legislation like this without failing to consider a lot of very obvious things. I choose to blame stupidity over malice.
He's just another crazy, local lawmaker who has decided that he wants everyone in the world to bend around the way he wants to live his life. He just realizes that he'll have a lot less trouble finding low-salt foods if NO ONE can sell foods with regular amounts of salt, and he was too ignorant to realize what a blanket ban means when he proposed the law.
This is par for the course with local lawmakers, in my experience. Every few years someone crazy and self-centered (or overwhelmingly nanny-minded) crops up and tries to pass something insane and impractical because they don't think about unintended consequenes.
So now your "Zero Trans Fat" cookie contains an equally damaging amount of saturated fats from the palm oil.
Let's also not forget that the increased demand for palm oil is leading to the destruction of rain forests. Rain forests that wouldn't be destroyed if we just went back to hydrogenated soybean oil.
What's a health-conscious, environmentally-aware New Yorker to do?
Huh? What are you trying to say here? Is there some element of the GOP platform that I'm unaware of that supports murder or some such?
I think he's referring to the way that Republicans value human life merely existing but not wanting anything to do with the quality of others' lives that would involve taking themselves out of a comfort zone of only having to give a crap about anyone other than personal friends and family.
i.e. Not caring about what a pregnant woman has to sacrifice to keep an unwanted child, and not wanting to spend one red cent more in tax dollars to help out a single mother who wasn't ready to support the child. Her mistake. Not their eff'ing problem, and too bad if the child has to bear the ramifications of failing to be wanted. It's better that a child grow up miserable, poor, and unwanted than to not grow up at all. And it's better that they grow up that way than be supported by their country or community if that would mean paying more taxes.
In other words, it's not that they actually *value* the lives of the unborn, personally. Just in the abstract sense that abortion is wrong, and other people shouldn't be allowed to do it.
Or does it just bother you that the GOP is generally opposed to cradle to grave welfare states that take away our liberty under the guise of protecting people?
Yeah, 'cause God forbid we "take away our liberty under the guide of protecting people" in an attempt to better the lives of our citizens when we could just do it because we're scared of crazy people living in the deserts and holed up in mountains.
Of course McDonald's doesn't and shouldn't care if you are obese, that's nobody's business but your own.
I see where you're coming from for the most part, but I disagree with this statement in particular. Someone who sells a dangerous product that causes harm to other people bears some moral responsibility for what is done with the product. The more dangerous the product, and the fewer harmless uses there are for it, the greater the burden to sell responsibly (or the better reason to ban the product entirely).
Not that I think fast food should be banned. I just think the McDonalds does have a responsibility to its customers and society not to deliberately encourage bad habits via marketing, especially to children.
We're all thinking it, so I'll say it: "Hey, let's let our government handle healthcare to increase effeciency"
A single-payer system would eliminate a LOT of inefficiency at the doctor's office level in handling all the differences in the way insurance companies require you to submit claims.
Also worth mentioning is the fact that processing claims faster than private sector healthcare companies is not a particularly high bar to raise in my experiences. It's not like the government has anything like a lock on slow, inefficient, customer-hating bureaucracies. The market doesn't really seem to do much to hold down healthcare costs or promote better customer care, if my limited pool of friends and family are any indicator.
I see a lot of people around here just sort of "running out the clock" - I can't imagine we're unique.
Pfft. That's everywhere -- government, academia, and the private sector. The bit about not updating your technology to placate a stagnant workforce is more prominent in the former two than the latter where people are replaceable commodities (aka "human resources"), but running out the clock happens anywhere that people don't take a lot of pride in their work and just want to collect a paycheck and go home.
But even the private sector has legacy hardware to placate rather than update and replace. Why do you think COBOL and PL/I programmers did so well in the late 90s? Sometimes the pain of updating a process just can't be justified in the short term, and the private sector is even more focused on the quarterly/yearly budget than government & academia.
I'll bet the USPTO has been wanting to replace that process for years if not decades. It's not like OCR and mapping translation software hasn't been around for forever. It's probably some combination of "costs to much," "too afraid to let things get backlogged in the transition," and "if it isn't broke (enough), don't fix it."
But that's the point isn't it, atheism isn't concerned with improving anyones life, it's just concerned with what it's adherents consider bald fact (strong atheists), or lack of evidence existence of god(s) (weak). It's not nice, not self-affirming, and certainly not heartwarming, that's what "humanism" was invented for.
Well, it's true that atheism in and of itself is nothing more than a belief that God doesn't exist (almost always) coupled with a belief in a lack of any afterlife or supernatural forces, but that's not necessarily the end result of such a belief, and atheism doesn't have to be negative.
As you point out, there's humanism. There are also a host of other beliefs that can dovetail quite nicely with a lack of belief in God that could be considered to have a positive message. One example would be a belief that we have to treat the life we have now with greater importance since it's all we have.
But no one spend time on that half of the equation. It's all about a pissing contest to prove that you're right with no direction on what to do with yourself if you accept those beliefs. That's why I'm never impressed with evangelical atheists. People of other faiths, I can respect. Quiet atheists who just get on with their lives, I can respect. People who have nothing more than a desire to tear down other people's beliefs, I can't.
This has nothing to do with recent development. Remember that a few decades ago, it was perfectly fine to hit children with wooden rulers, sticks, belts, whatever was at hand. Not punishing children was but a temporary fad. [...] Just like any animal the old have to ensure their dominance lest they become obsolete.
You know, it's an interesting point you raise. Historically, parents have been far harsher with their children than they do today. In some ways, our treatment of children as precious is far in contrast to the days when children were passed off to hired help or put to work as laborers. Children were in many ways treated as the enemy.
Dan Carlin's podcast "Hardcore History" took a review of this in its December 9th episode. I highly recommend it.
You are aware that A Clockwork Orange was fiction, aren't you? It was a movie and not a documentary.
Ah, but you forget the grand trend of modern British socio-political evolution!
1) A science-fiction writer writes a dark, paranoid novel about how trends in society of his day will lead to a future, fascist dystopia. 2) A generation of students grows up reading the classic of literature and incorporating it into their worldview. 3) Technology catches up with fiction, and a generation of politicians raised on a SF classic decides it would be a good idea to implement by their "obviously more trustworthy than the villains of the novel" hands.
Sometimes I think of the UK as a nation trying its best to become the world first fully democratic police state.
Your sex isn't determined by your genetalia, but by the DNA in every cell in your body. Still, I amagine that some day there will be such a thing as a true sex change operation, but I think it will be far in the future.
Meh, that's one definition, and it's one that almost all transgender persons would completely deny. Furthermore, it's not a socially useful definition since humans aren't nearly as capable of detecting the chromosomes of others as we are the shape of their genitalia. Sex and gender aren't so black and white. What do you think most people would think someone with Swyer syndrome should be called?
Plus, under your definition, what is your sex if some of your body is XY and some of it is XX after a transplant? Take an XY male, replace his genitalia with a vagina, uterus, and ovaries and give him other tissue grafts (like breast tissue) from a XX gene donor, and what do you have? Is that person male? Female? Neither? Both? How much of a person would you have to replace to get a sex-change in your definition, and how little of the original in needed remain to prevent the switch?
There is no such thing as a sex change. You can reshape flesh to construct a penis for a woman, remove her breasts and inject hormones to give her facial hair, but she will still have two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome. Similarly, a man who has a "sex change operation" still has a Y chromosome. It's going to be a while before we're technologically advanced enough for a true sex change.
Why? If you're printing sex organs from scratch, it's not like you're reshaping tissue from the original body. Admittedly, I haven't heard of a paper where someone changed the gender of a donated set of genes during cloning, but I doubt it's impossible.
For that matter, there's no reason the new body parts have to be genetically identical to the rest of the body. Chimera exist in nature with little problem. In fact, you don't even have to use any of the patient's DNA if you've got a donor type match with the new tissue, but I would think that most people getting fresh grown sex organs would want their own genes if possible. Not that that would stop many if passing on someone else's genes was the only alternative.
The best part of the whole mess is that the council had to pay two legal teams extra money to fight whether or not the council paid for its own costs or... paid for its own costs.
Does anyone else find it hysterical when atheists evangelize?
Yes. Largely because they're so bad at it. Oh, let's not say that religious evangelists can't be awful, hateful, short-sighted, and full of mockery and disdain for those they oppose. But they can also be uplifting, positive, and kind. Religious evangelists can include people who speak about the positive influences of religion in their lives without having to act judgmental towards those who have not yet had the experience.
I've never seen an atheist evangelist who wasn't just mean, nasty, and often childish. It's rare that you see an atheist try to open up people with how much better their lives are with atheism without having to in some way degrade or insult theist thought. It's not like it's not possible! It's just that atheists who want to convert people always seem to want to do so out of a belief that people who aren't atheists are delusional, irrational, or just stupid. That's not really a good place to start from.
All this stunt really does is provide opportunity for like-minded people to mock and insult people who aren't atheists. It's just as repulsive as the guy who stands on the street corner with a sandwich board and tells everyone how they're going to Hell if they don't accept Jesus -- no one is going to listen except people who already believe it, and everyone else will just be turned off.
(Off-topic: Why does Idle have these horrible tiny comment forms when you don't have JavaScript enabled when it's not a problem for the rest of the site?)
If you would have asked people in the 50's if they would prefer DDT sprayed on their crops to kill the insects, creating cheaper food. They would have said yes. They didn't know the consequences, and were only presented with the benefits. As is the case here. How many of those who said they would be willing fully understand the security issues associated with that choice?
I think people aren't completely ignorant of the implications of such a device, nor are they necessarily more likely to carry irrational beliefs that the device is safe than irrational fears of phantom threats. It doesn't matter. People will willingly sacrifice the distant risk of tyranny for day-to-day convenience, and as much as I disagree with that decision, I can't call it an irrational one.
After all, if I asked you to carry around a device that would let the government track where you are at all times with little more than a warrant, would you accept? What if that device let you find friends and family in exchange for letting them keep in touch with you? Chances are you've already got a device like this.
It's called a cell phone. As much as I hated it at the time, I got one too, years ago, essentially because of peer pressure. Now that I'm used to having it and all its features (e.g. maps and web browsing), I doubt I'd give it up. But that was a choice to sacrifice some privacy and anonymity in exchange for convenience.
I've done the same thing with credit card purchases. The grocery store doesn't need some special customer card to keep track of everything I purchase -- my credit card number suffices for any good CRM system. But it's easier than carrying cash, especially when the grocery store doubles as my ATM.
When you consider that, just how much more danger is having a chip in your arm really? What are they going to be able to track that they can't already?
I always followed the "drink water" method in college, and I never got a hangover. But I did wake up in the middle of the night once with of horrific, hour-long leg cramp due to depletion of potassium and other electrolytes. Ever since then, I've preferred having a sport drink or two with me at a party or at least to make sure to eat a banana before going to bed.
D) But that's supposedly OK, because water somehow has "memory" and cures every symptom like a substance it ever encountered. (So I guess since a lot of water is more or less recycled, and so many people wank in the shower, tap water should be a bulletproof contraceptive.)
I think I love you, man. I have been searching for years for the single snarkiest example of what homeopathy should say ordinary tap water can do, and you have finally shown me the light. (Didn't hurt that I was drinking tap water at the time, 'cept for the coughing fit afterwards.)
Don't forget paraffin wax. And then apply to the forehead. Apply to the forehead. Apply to the forehead. Apply to the forehead. Ad naseum. (Pun intended.)
We have cryptographically secure algorithms for anonymous digital cash.
But who wants that? The little people? Hah.
There are only two institutions that could create and support an anonymous cash-free financial system: the government and big financial institutions. Where is a motive for either one that is more juicy than the possibilities of being able to track every monetary transaction you engage in?
Privacy is a tool of the people to evade control by those with too much interest in their day to day lives. No one with power wants to give that to the common man, and if some of us little people got together to try to build a network for handling cash out of the government's and the banks' eyes, it would be tied up in anti-terror laws faster than you can say, "Hawala."
Honestly, cash is something that would not be allowed to be invented today if it didn't already exist and wasn't too hard to get rid of.
Slashdot Mirror
We have international courts and trade agreements. If they don't play fair, they can get slapped with tariffs or outright bans. And if they won't play ball at all, well, by our own rules we should not be trading with them.
You seem to be under the impression that our international treaties were written in a way to provide a fair shot for communities that favor strong environmental and labor protections over bottom-feeding rent-seekers.
Unfortunately, the WTO cares far more about trade barriers than the environment. While the WTO recognizes the right of nations to protect human health and their natural resources, it does not recognize any restraint on trade in "like products." So, for example, if you want to ban tuna caught in a way that threatens dolphins, you can't do that under WTO/GATT precedent if the end products (canned tuna) is the same. It doesn't matter that the method of making the product is different, and that customers may be concerned. Dolphin-safe & dolphin-unsafe canned meat is physically the same.
Here is a good list summarizing the big mixed-bag of WTO & GATT v. the environment lawsuits. Generally speaking, a law that governs the effects of a product once on US soil are fine, as long as you treat foreign and domestic products equally. A law that tries to govern how a product is made in another country which is indistinguishable from an equivalent product made elsewhere is generally not okay.
Reading about WTO/GATT cases is often very frustrating. Sometimes it's because the international bodies make decisions that seem grossly obstructionist to protecting the environment. Other times it's because countries are trying to hide flagrantly protectionist measures against foreign goods (while safeguarding domestic goods) under the rubric of protecting health & the environment. (Take the Thai cigarettes case, where the US sued Thailand for blocking cigarette imports for health reasons ...but still allowed the sale of domestic cigarettes.)
She doesn't want to kill us off. We're her eggs. She wants us to leave the nest, and go reproduce her on other planets.
I always thought that Mother Nature didn't like to be anthropomorphized. She's tetchy like that.
Emphasis mine. According to this statement, Oritz says that he did not consider that banning salt in restaurants would affect the flavor of the foods served in those restaurants. It isn't possible for this to be true. He's lying through his teeth.
Personally, I don't think it's possible for anyone to suggest legislation like this without failing to consider a lot of very obvious things. I choose to blame stupidity over malice.
He's just another crazy, local lawmaker who has decided that he wants everyone in the world to bend around the way he wants to live his life. He just realizes that he'll have a lot less trouble finding low-salt foods if NO ONE can sell foods with regular amounts of salt, and he was too ignorant to realize what a blanket ban means when he proposed the law.
This is par for the course with local lawmakers, in my experience. Every few years someone crazy and self-centered (or overwhelmingly nanny-minded) crops up and tries to pass something insane and impractical because they don't think about unintended consequenes.
So now your "Zero Trans Fat" cookie contains an equally damaging amount of saturated fats from the palm oil.
Let's also not forget that the increased demand for palm oil is leading to the destruction of rain forests. Rain forests that wouldn't be destroyed if we just went back to hydrogenated soybean oil.
What's a health-conscious, environmentally-aware New Yorker to do?
If she has the right to remove a fetus, why doesn't she have the right to insert a needle full of heroin? It's her body, isn't it?
And why doesn't she have the right to inject heroin directly into her unborn fetus and see if she can get a buzz that way?
I'm... I'm going straight to hell when I die, aren't I?
Huh? What are you trying to say here? Is there some element of the GOP platform that I'm unaware of that supports murder or some such?
I think he's referring to the way that Republicans value human life merely existing but not wanting anything to do with the quality of others' lives that would involve taking themselves out of a comfort zone of only having to give a crap about anyone other than personal friends and family.
i.e. Not caring about what a pregnant woman has to sacrifice to keep an unwanted child, and not wanting to spend one red cent more in tax dollars to help out a single mother who wasn't ready to support the child. Her mistake. Not their eff'ing problem, and too bad if the child has to bear the ramifications of failing to be wanted. It's better that a child grow up miserable, poor, and unwanted than to not grow up at all. And it's better that they grow up that way than be supported by their country or community if that would mean paying more taxes.
In other words, it's not that they actually *value* the lives of the unborn, personally. Just in the abstract sense that abortion is wrong, and other people shouldn't be allowed to do it.
Or does it just bother you that the GOP is generally opposed to cradle to grave welfare states that take away our liberty under the guise of protecting people?
Yeah, 'cause God forbid we "take away our liberty under the guide of protecting people" in an attempt to better the lives of our citizens when we could just do it because we're scared of crazy people living in the deserts and holed up in mountains.
Of course McDonald's doesn't and shouldn't care if you are obese, that's nobody's business but your own.
I see where you're coming from for the most part, but I disagree with this statement in particular. Someone who sells a dangerous product that causes harm to other people bears some moral responsibility for what is done with the product. The more dangerous the product, and the fewer harmless uses there are for it, the greater the burden to sell responsibly (or the better reason to ban the product entirely).
Not that I think fast food should be banned. I just think the McDonalds does have a responsibility to its customers and society not to deliberately encourage bad habits via marketing, especially to children.
I'm not sure what sailors would be looking at things has to do with the article.
We're all thinking it, so I'll say it: "Hey, let's let our government handle healthcare to increase effeciency"
A single-payer system would eliminate a LOT of inefficiency at the doctor's office level in handling all the differences in the way insurance companies require you to submit claims.
Also worth mentioning is the fact that processing claims faster than private sector healthcare companies is not a particularly high bar to raise in my experiences. It's not like the government has anything like a lock on slow, inefficient, customer-hating bureaucracies. The market doesn't really seem to do much to hold down healthcare costs or promote better customer care, if my limited pool of friends and family are any indicator.
I see a lot of people around here just sort of "running out the clock" - I can't imagine we're unique.
Pfft. That's everywhere -- government, academia, and the private sector. The bit about not updating your technology to placate a stagnant workforce is more prominent in the former two than the latter where people are replaceable commodities (aka "human resources"), but running out the clock happens anywhere that people don't take a lot of pride in their work and just want to collect a paycheck and go home.
But even the private sector has legacy hardware to placate rather than update and replace. Why do you think COBOL and PL/I programmers did so well in the late 90s? Sometimes the pain of updating a process just can't be justified in the short term, and the private sector is even more focused on the quarterly/yearly budget than government & academia.
I'll bet the USPTO has been wanting to replace that process for years if not decades. It's not like OCR and mapping translation software hasn't been around for forever. It's probably some combination of "costs to much," "too afraid to let things get backlogged in the transition," and "if it isn't broke (enough), don't fix it."
But that's the point isn't it, atheism isn't concerned with improving anyones life, it's just concerned with what it's adherents consider bald fact (strong atheists), or lack of evidence existence of god(s) (weak). It's not nice, not self-affirming, and certainly not heartwarming, that's what "humanism" was invented for.
Well, it's true that atheism in and of itself is nothing more than a belief that God doesn't exist (almost always) coupled with a belief in a lack of any afterlife or supernatural forces, but that's not necessarily the end result of such a belief, and atheism doesn't have to be negative.
As you point out, there's humanism. There are also a host of other beliefs that can dovetail quite nicely with a lack of belief in God that could be considered to have a positive message. One example would be a belief that we have to treat the life we have now with greater importance since it's all we have.
But no one spend time on that half of the equation. It's all about a pissing contest to prove that you're right with no direction on what to do with yourself if you accept those beliefs. That's why I'm never impressed with evangelical atheists. People of other faiths, I can respect. Quiet atheists who just get on with their lives, I can respect. People who have nothing more than a desire to tear down other people's beliefs, I can't.
This has nothing to do with recent development. Remember that a few decades ago, it was perfectly fine to hit children with wooden rulers, sticks, belts, whatever was at hand. Not punishing children was but a temporary fad.
[...]
Just like any animal the old have to ensure their dominance lest they become obsolete.
You know, it's an interesting point you raise. Historically, parents have been far harsher with their children than they do today. In some ways, our treatment of children as precious is far in contrast to the days when children were passed off to hired help or put to work as laborers. Children were in many ways treated as the enemy.
Dan Carlin's podcast "Hardcore History" took a review of this in its December 9th episode. I highly recommend it.
You are aware that A Clockwork Orange was fiction, aren't you? It was a movie and not a documentary.
Ah, but you forget the grand trend of modern British socio-political evolution!
1) A science-fiction writer writes a dark, paranoid novel about how trends in society of his day will lead to a future, fascist dystopia.
2) A generation of students grows up reading the classic of literature and incorporating it into their worldview.
3) Technology catches up with fiction, and a generation of politicians raised on a SF classic decides it would be a good idea to implement by their "obviously more trustworthy than the villains of the novel" hands.
Sometimes I think of the UK as a nation trying its best to become the world first fully democratic police state.
Your sex isn't determined by your genetalia, but by the DNA in every cell in your body. Still, I amagine that some day there will be such a thing as a true sex change operation, but I think it will be far in the future.
Meh, that's one definition, and it's one that almost all transgender persons would completely deny. Furthermore, it's not a socially useful definition since humans aren't nearly as capable of detecting the chromosomes of others as we are the shape of their genitalia. Sex and gender aren't so black and white. What do you think most people would think someone with Swyer syndrome should be called?
Plus, under your definition, what is your sex if some of your body is XY and some of it is XX after a transplant? Take an XY male, replace his genitalia with a vagina, uterus, and ovaries and give him other tissue grafts (like breast tissue) from a XX gene donor, and what do you have? Is that person male? Female? Neither? Both? How much of a person would you have to replace to get a sex-change in your definition, and how little of the original in needed remain to prevent the switch?
There is no such thing as a sex change. You can reshape flesh to construct a penis for a woman, remove her breasts and inject hormones to give her facial hair, but she will still have two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome. Similarly, a man who has a "sex change operation" still has a Y chromosome. It's going to be a while before we're technologically advanced enough for a true sex change.
Why? If you're printing sex organs from scratch, it's not like you're reshaping tissue from the original body. Admittedly, I haven't heard of a paper where someone changed the gender of a donated set of genes during cloning, but I doubt it's impossible.
For that matter, there's no reason the new body parts have to be genetically identical to the rest of the body. Chimera exist in nature with little problem. In fact, you don't even have to use any of the patient's DNA if you've got a donor type match with the new tissue, but I would think that most people getting fresh grown sex organs would want their own genes if possible. Not that that would stop many if passing on someone else's genes was the only alternative.
The best part of the whole mess is that the council had to pay two legal teams extra money to fight whether or not the council paid for its own costs or... paid for its own costs.
Does anyone else find it hysterical when atheists evangelize?
Yes. Largely because they're so bad at it. Oh, let's not say that religious evangelists can't be awful, hateful, short-sighted, and full of mockery and disdain for those they oppose. But they can also be uplifting, positive, and kind. Religious evangelists can include people who speak about the positive influences of religion in their lives without having to act judgmental towards those who have not yet had the experience.
I've never seen an atheist evangelist who wasn't just mean, nasty, and often childish. It's rare that you see an atheist try to open up people with how much better their lives are with atheism without having to in some way degrade or insult theist thought. It's not like it's not possible! It's just that atheists who want to convert people always seem to want to do so out of a belief that people who aren't atheists are delusional, irrational, or just stupid. That's not really a good place to start from.
All this stunt really does is provide opportunity for like-minded people to mock and insult people who aren't atheists. It's just as repulsive as the guy who stands on the street corner with a sandwich board and tells everyone how they're going to Hell if they don't accept Jesus -- no one is going to listen except people who already believe it, and everyone else will just be turned off.
(Off-topic: Why does Idle have these horrible tiny comment forms when you don't have JavaScript enabled when it's not a problem for the rest of the site?)
If you would have asked people in the 50's if they would prefer DDT sprayed on their crops to kill the insects, creating cheaper food. They would have said yes. They didn't know the consequences, and were only presented with the benefits. As is the case here. How many of those who said they would be willing fully understand the security issues associated with that choice?
I think people aren't completely ignorant of the implications of such a device, nor are they necessarily more likely to carry irrational beliefs that the device is safe than irrational fears of phantom threats. It doesn't matter. People will willingly sacrifice the distant risk of tyranny for day-to-day convenience, and as much as I disagree with that decision, I can't call it an irrational one.
After all, if I asked you to carry around a device that would let the government track where you are at all times with little more than a warrant, would you accept? What if that device let you find friends and family in exchange for letting them keep in touch with you? Chances are you've already got a device like this.
It's called a cell phone. As much as I hated it at the time, I got one too, years ago, essentially because of peer pressure. Now that I'm used to having it and all its features (e.g. maps and web browsing), I doubt I'd give it up. But that was a choice to sacrifice some privacy and anonymity in exchange for convenience.
I've done the same thing with credit card purchases. The grocery store doesn't need some special customer card to keep track of everything I purchase -- my credit card number suffices for any good CRM system. But it's easier than carrying cash, especially when the grocery store doubles as my ATM.
When you consider that, just how much more danger is having a chip in your arm really? What are they going to be able to track that they can't already?
Aged 2 months and picked up at the grocery store?
I always followed the "drink water" method in college, and I never got a hangover. But I did wake up in the middle of the night once with of horrific, hour-long leg cramp due to depletion of potassium and other electrolytes. Ever since then, I've preferred having a sport drink or two with me at a party or at least to make sure to eat a banana before going to bed.
D) But that's supposedly OK, because water somehow has "memory" and cures every symptom like a substance it ever encountered. (So I guess since a lot of water is more or less recycled, and so many people wank in the shower, tap water should be a bulletproof contraceptive.)
I think I love you, man. I have been searching for years for the single snarkiest example of what homeopathy should say ordinary tap water can do, and you have finally shown me the light. (Didn't hurt that I was drinking tap water at the time, 'cept for the coughing fit afterwards.)
99.999% of homeopathy is either water or sugar.
Don't forget paraffin wax. And then apply to the forehead.
Apply to the forehead.
Apply to the forehead.
Apply to the forehead.
Ad naseum. (Pun intended.)
I bought the PS3 recently, my first console since the original nintendo. [...]
If they started charging now. Wow. That would factor in *hugely* in my decision on what to purchase in the future.
I'm sure that will matter immensely to Sony in the 2030s-2040s.
Please use a dictionary:
Please get a sense of humor.
We have cryptographically secure algorithms for anonymous digital cash.
But who wants that? The little people? Hah.
There are only two institutions that could create and support an anonymous cash-free financial system: the government and big financial institutions. Where is a motive for either one that is more juicy than the possibilities of being able to track every monetary transaction you engage in?
Privacy is a tool of the people to evade control by those with too much interest in their day to day lives. No one with power wants to give that to the common man, and if some of us little people got together to try to build a network for handling cash out of the government's and the banks' eyes, it would be tied up in anti-terror laws faster than you can say, "Hawala."
Honestly, cash is something that would not be allowed to be invented today if it didn't already exist and wasn't too hard to get rid of.