I somehow doubt that having to take on people with preexisting conditions will prevent them from charging enough money to put themselves in the poor house.
I desperately wish I could make fun of you for your paranoia. unfortunately your concerns are terrible necessary considering this(USA) country's shift towards socialism and the opinion of governing bodies that they know what is best for you as well as the tendency to give corporations more rights than citizens.
Seriously. W. T. F.
The school is just telling kids how to monitor their heart rate. Back in my youth, we used to do this with a wristwatch and our fingers on our wrists or necks. They then use the numbers to make sure that kids learn how hard to workout to get the best results out of exercise and to make sure that kids aren't overdoing it -- for their own safety and health, the very things a PE teacher is supposed to care about. The only twist here is that they are using tools that can do the job better than your fingers and a watch.
But, OH NOES SOCIALSIM! TEH EVULZ! You people don't even understand what socialism is and isn't as a purely economic policy (and how it generally stands in opposition to giving corporations more rights than citizens, btw) -- it's just the latest watchword for everything you don't like. Just sad.
Increasing the tax and pushing people to more fuel efficient cars will actually make the funding problem worse, not better.
This is true. But so what? Which is more important? Ensuring that roads are paid via taxes on cars or discouraging the use of vehicles that burn copious amounts of fossil fuels?
A better solution is to find some other way to fund roadwork. After all, we don't pay for elections via poll taxes or for public schools by taxing having children. Why must we pay for roads via use taxes when everyone benefits from them?
Actually, Oregon is better than most states on taxes. We're rated 10th best in the nation for businesses, and we're at 26th (just over the middle line on the cheaper side) for personal tax rates. Our top state income tax bracket the highest in the nation, but in spite of that, our overall state/local tax burden is 9.4%, which beats the national average of 9.7%. Oh, and our property taxes are middle of the pack, and we have no sales tax at all. We're also a net donor of federal income taxes rather than a net leech, unlike most red states.
But I wouldn't expect someone ranting about people living in tents without electricity and eating dirt (mixed with copious hostile profanity) to be actually living in a world based on facts.
Actually, as an Oregon Democract, this is one issue where I'd like to punch my governor in the teeth.
Not only is this proposal an offensive infringement of my rights, but it also takes away incentives to buy more fuel efficient vehicles. The core reasoning for this tax scheme is that greater fuel efficiency has led to serious drops in state fuel tax revenues. But rather than embrace this as a good thing, the "brain trust" in Salem would rather take away the incentive.
It's like being upset that less smokers means less sin taxes and deciding to put a high tax on nicotine gum to compensate. What. The. Hell.
The negative consequences of a powerful, centralized government entity that controls your life and has the power of the law behind it are obvious.
And the negative consequences of powerful corporate bureacracies that put their pursuit of profit above that of the welfare of their workers and the surrounding community and which are accountable to no one but a market that places more value on cheap goods that human rights is equally obvious.
Pick your poison: Misery through too much nanny-state meddling or misery through callous indifference.
Or maybe instead, you can try to work out some sort of balance where one picks up where the other sucks.
Second, there's the social cost. You're either teaching them that "This routine physical activity we're requiring you to engage in is so dangerous it could *kill you* and you need to wear one of these to be safe," or "Our society is so ridiculously litigious and cowardly that this is what it's come to." That generation's going to be even more fucked up than the one that thought the TSA sounded like a good idea.
Err... Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the main point of a heart monitor was to teach you what level of physical activity was necessary to properly burn calories (i.e. over 65% of your max heart rate to being aerobic exercise). I didn't think it was about scaring people into wondering when their heart was going to explode.
Though... now that you mention it...
When I was a kid I remember having to do these heart rate tests in gym where they recorded the results, but I was never actually told whether the fact that my heart rate would quadruple after heavy exercise was a good thing or not, so I was left with the impression that I was dangerously out of shape and wasn't told what a good max heart rate for my age should've been. I guess I was kind of scared into thinking my heart was going to explode without fancy equipment! I had totally forgotten about that. Huh.
Arguably people get staph infections in hospitals because hospitals put so much effort into sterilizing every little thing. It leaves the hardiest, and fastest spreading bacteria and viruses to fill the vacuum rather than the millions of common germs that our body knows how to deal with.
Actually, "hardiest" and "fastest-spreading" are generally mutually opposed. Most mutations to develop antibiotic resistance are costly and inefficient compared to non-resistance. This is why these traits, which spontaneously appear in the population from time to time, do not become dominant without the use of antibiotics or other outside pressures to cull the herd in favor of resistance.
However, you are right in some contexts. Some genes for resistance to antibiotics also aid in resistance to certain disinfectants.
"Compounds such as household disinfectants and other antibacterial agents can also select for antibiotic resistance. Triclosan and pine oil, which are widely used in home cleaning products are able to select for multidrug-resistant mutants, either by mutation in the target genes or in the regulatory mar system, providing a pleiotropic resistance to disinfectants, multiple structurally unrelated antibiotics, organic solvents and oxidative stress agents. Constitutive expression of an MDR efflux pump which confers resistance to triclosan is also reported in P. aeruginosa. Given the increased use of these agents in households, one can imagine dramatic changes in the environmental flora that impact antibiotic resistance."
On the one hand (and I'd say the bigger hand), the Green Revolution ushered in the world-wide use of many really good technologies for helping to feed the planet -- high-yield crops and better use of irrigation.
On the other hand, it also ushered in a world of heavy use of herbicides and pesticides (much of which is petroleum based) and nitrogen-fertilizers (which are made in a process that burns natural gas). Fertilizer run-off is killing huge swaths of the Gulf of Mexico due to algal blooms and anoxic zones, and pesticide use in some Midwestern states taints the groundwater and causes birth defects. The dependency on petroleum resources in our agriculture bodes ill because of climate change and dwindling oil supplies over the next century.
In the balance between the two, it's undeniable that the Green Revolution has saved far more lives than it has harmed, but a lot people in the environmental movement tend to less aware of the problems solved by the solutions of half a century ago than the problems they cause today. That latter fact tends to lead (as ANY political argument about ANYTHING does) to demonizing people responsible for the problems we face today, when we should view the Green Revolution as a great achievement with a few flaws here and there that can be improved upon with better science and with grassroots demand for cleaner, greener food (and not just cheap food). We can thank the Green Revolution for the luxury to demand that.
No not zero at all. Nowhere near zero in fact. Chance is probability, and the probability is defined by the number of planets, which mathematically works out to "quite a lot".
Only if you ignore reasonable sub-light travel times. If you don't, it becomes "very, very few" instead. This comes up with the SETI project when you consider the number of starts with in a mere 100 light-years of us. There are only 511 G stars (those like our sun) in that distance and if you narrow the volume to a 50 ly radius, there are only 63 G stars. Within 20 ly, you can count the number on one hand -- 4.
(Note: We don't have any known, non-speculative technology that could get us above 0.1c, so I think I'm safe in considering a 1000 year trip to be unreasonable.)
The closest Earth-like planet we've found is 20.5 light years away around Gliese 581. The Wikipedia article I linked to goes through a lot of the possibilities for habitable planets, but there's a lot of uncertainty there.
Keep in mind that if you want to find a planet as good as Earth (much less better) you need to match all of the following criteria: 1) Earth-like gravity. 2) Earth-like temperatures and season. 3) Earth-like atmosphere (right mixture of nitrogen and oxygen; no toxics; right pressure; not too turbulent). 4) Earth-like rotational period (daily and yearly for growing crops). 5) Earth-like sunlight (intensity and wavelengths). 6) Earth-like water (not too dry; not completely water-covered; not iced over; non-toxic). 7) Earth-like tectonics. 8) An ozone layer and strong magnetic belts or some other means of deflecting harmful solar emissions.
Additionally, you might like to find arable soil, edible native species, a good supply of metals and other heavier elements, and other niceties. You might also hope not to find any surprising difficulties like high radioactivity, pervasive heavy metals, highly aggressive native species, etc.
That's just to find a *livable* planet. To find one that's *better* is just probably never going to happen. Not only is it hard to define what "better" means to a species that's adapted to its own world (and not only is "better" likely to only apply to a narrow subset of the available biomes of an entire planet), but it's just so improbable in the space we have to work with. If we ever do live on a better world, it will be because we *made* it that way, and it won't happen in our lifetimes without a radical breakthrough in physics followed by an equally great breakthrough in economics and politics.
Franly, between soy and hemp we could pretty much eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, the needs for both ranching and logging [...]
Egh. Don't tell me you're one of those tofu and TVP "meat-substitute" vegetarians that hasn't discovered that pulses and legumes are a FAR tastier was to get complete protein. Because I just had to suffer through the culinary horror of you people's bland lack of sophistication last night, and it made me eat meat (almost in protest) as soon as I got home so that I wouldn't feel so hungry and unsatisfied.
You'd think thousands of years of Vedic culture and delicious, complex spices would have SOME influence on all modern, Western vegetarians, but noooooooo.... I'm going to have to suffer through an entire semester of uninspired, mostly flavorless, vegetarian meals by classmates who haven't learned how to compensate for the lack of meaty flavor in their dishes with something equally exciting to the taste buds. Kale. Tofu. "Morningstar Farms." Blech.
(And what's so unnatural about chard anyway? Stuff's good for you.)
No it isn't. What is really funny is all the vegetarians tend to be Evolutionists who haven't figured out that Humans are Omnivores designed to eat just about anything. oops, I said Designed, gasp.
So why not human flesh? It seems like it would be the most nutritionally compatible protein. I mean, if we're just only considering what the flesh is designed to process and not considering any ethical concerns (that we were perhaps designed to be able to contemplate), then I don't see a justification for it that is any less ridiculous than avoiding meat in general.
Unlike you, I've actually worked on a farm, so don't bring that nonsense around here.
You ever work on a factory farm, like a hog farm or a huge row of chicken houses? Your small, open field farms aren't the problem. It's farms owned by companies like Smithfield or Tyson that cause a lot of us distress.
I hate factory farms, and I'm still largely carnivorous -- I just buy my meat from more ethical meat producers.
This is an inherent loser of a case. To make out a claim for malicious prosecution based on racial lines, you'll need to prove discriminatory effect and discriminatory intent. To do this, you'll generally have to find clear examples where the prosecutor has been either pursuing cases on behalf of white victims or against black cops -- enough to establish an actual pattern of bias. Even then, the court will likely defer to prosecutorial discretion if any other explanation would suffice to explain the discrepancy (such as lack of resources, insufficiency of the evidence in the case, etc.). The courts have almost never been willing to step in an act as "super-prosecutors" with responsibility over mandating which cases get brought before them or not.
You're being creative and I give you points for that compared to the whole "conspiracy to commit theft" angle that others have taken, but criminal mischief typically involves damage or defacement to property. No harm happened here.
However, I'm thinking that he's perhaps committed wire fraud, since there was a clear intent to deceive based on a material representation through interstate wire facilities. If you could get a federal prosecutor to take the charge seriously, he could be up for 20 years. (Given the nature of the actual harm involved and the harshness of the penalties, I doubt you'd get one to look into prosecuting the case.)
If you want to repeat history, by all means, crack down on the ELF and send them all to prison and beat up anyone in the group. Throw the PATRIOT act in their faces. Within no time at all you will have given their movement the publicity and recruiting tools to really cause problems. Within no time at all you will have given their movement the publicity and recruiting tools to really cause problems. And erode public support as more and more people are locked up by guilt from association.
I agree with all of your post except this point. Unlike many Islamic terrorist groups, the ELF rarely if ever takes any sort of positive action "back home" to draw in sympathy (e.g. Hamas and Hezbollah run charity hospitals). Additionally, those organizations have an enemy that is widely reviled by their neighbors and considered a threat to their lives and way of life (i.e. Israel and the US). Sympathy for terrorism only happens when normal people feel there's some sort justification for the terrorists' actions.
ELF, in contrast, strikes out seemingly randomly at many targets that are not nearly the worst offenders, like the radio station here or by burning an entire car dealership for selling SUVs. Worse for them, the rest of the green movement is generally filled with people who respect principles of nonviolence and wouldn't support such against against even the worst offenders. That's why next to no one has any sympathy for ELF; they're practically green anarchists. I'm about as tree-hugging as you can get, but absolutely NO environmentalist that I know has ANY sympathy for these losers.
Personally, I'd be happy if they were all locked up so that those of us who aren't violent radicals wouldn't have to have them used against us by people on the other side of the debate.
Unless you are from one of the five no-sales-tax states, if you purchased anything from an Internet retailer who didn't charge sales tax, and you didn't pay the required tax voluntarily, then you, sir, are a tax cheat.
Another reason it's nice to live in Oregon.
Also, in case you didn't read the link (which I'm sure you didn't), you have to willfully attempt to evade taxes by illegal means.
(Hey, kids!: Quick poll. Who among you were completely honest on your IRS Form 1040 last year? Anyone?)
To the best of my knowledge, I was. Not only do I genuinely believe that you're a parasite if you try to take advantage of government services while paying as little as possible for them, but I'm not a fan of lying to save/make a buck (aka fraud), and I'm not a big enough gambler to think that a few bucks here and there is worth up to $100,000 and 5 years in prison.
Actually, I wouldn't choose a bullet. I think jumping off Half Dome sounds a lot more fun. Or seeing exactly just how fast I can take those turns in a motorcycle on Skyline, and then push just a bit more. Go sky diving and simply don't pull the cord. How about taking an overdose of some very fun drug while enjoying the company of a well-paid lady friend? Free-climb some way-too-hard slope without a rope? Rent a Corvette, and crash it at 170Mph. See just how far you can swim into the ocean, or just how far you can free-dive, and then push a bit further. I think I'd prefer any of those to a slow painful death stretched over months or years. You only get to die once. Might as well die doing something you'd normally be to scared to try.
Personally, I'd rather not be the kind of jerk that leaves a huge mess for someone else to clean up when it's time to fold up my affairs, but YMMV.
Languages cannot _degrade_ because the users will always modify their speech towards greater understanding
I'm not sure I agree with this premise. While there are natural selection pressures on languages, inching closer to perfect understanding on the intended statement is not always the only pressure. For example, the text messaging slang that prompted this whole email chain.
For example, "r u goin 2 prom?" is not easier to understand than "Are you going to prom?" but it's a lot easier to type and thus enables faster communication through not greater understanding -- just "good enough" communication.
Similarly, we got rid of the thorn as a letter largely because we were importing typesets from Germany and Italy. As you probably know, "ye" was pronounced "the," but originally spelled "(thorn)e" but this wasn't because using "y" to mean two dissimilar sounds increased understanding -- it was because it was easier to print the first English Bibles using stock letters. Personally, I think English is less enriched for having do use a digraph for the sound -- leaving us with the ambiguity of "hothouse" and "rather."
Anyway, I am not a linguist, and these are just my two cents.
So a Fox affiliate employee took the opportunity to...
1) Downplay some senseless and sensationalist bit of fear-mongering... 2) While saying something nice about a green technology that suffers from a lot of NIMBYism... 3) And he based it all on solid science and some common sense?
Slashdot Mirror
According to the Fortune 500, the health insurance industry is the 9th most profitable out of 52 industries with an average profit of 10.6% of revenues.
I somehow doubt that having to take on people with preexisting conditions will prevent them from charging enough money to put themselves in the poor house.
I desperately wish I could make fun of you for your paranoia. unfortunately your concerns are terrible necessary considering this(USA) country's shift towards socialism and the opinion of governing bodies that they know what is best for you as well as the tendency to give corporations more rights than citizens.
Seriously. W. T. F.
The school is just telling kids how to monitor their heart rate. Back in my youth, we used to do this with a wristwatch and our fingers on our wrists or necks. They then use the numbers to make sure that kids learn how hard to workout to get the best results out of exercise and to make sure that kids aren't overdoing it -- for their own safety and health, the very things a PE teacher is supposed to care about. The only twist here is that they are using tools that can do the job better than your fingers and a watch.
But, OH NOES SOCIALSIM! TEH EVULZ! You people don't even understand what socialism is and isn't as a purely economic policy (and how it generally stands in opposition to giving corporations more rights than citizens, btw) -- it's just the latest watchword for everything you don't like. Just sad.
You know, the video does show that fact around the 31 second mark. FYI.
Increasing the tax and pushing people to more fuel efficient cars will actually make the funding problem worse, not better.
This is true. But so what? Which is more important? Ensuring that roads are paid via taxes on cars or discouraging the use of vehicles that burn copious amounts of fossil fuels?
A better solution is to find some other way to fund roadwork. After all, we don't pay for elections via poll taxes or for public schools by taxing having children. Why must we pay for roads via use taxes when everyone benefits from them?
Ok. Here is my "thoughts" on Oregon.
Fixed that for you.
Actually, Oregon is better than most states on taxes. We're rated 10th best in the nation for businesses, and we're at 26th (just over the middle line on the cheaper side) for personal tax rates. Our top state income tax bracket the highest in the nation, but in spite of that, our overall state/local tax burden is 9.4%, which beats the national average of 9.7%. Oh, and our property taxes are middle of the pack, and we have no sales tax at all. We're also a net donor of federal income taxes rather than a net leech, unlike most red states.
But I wouldn't expect someone ranting about people living in tents without electricity and eating dirt (mixed with copious hostile profanity) to be actually living in a world based on facts.
Actually, as an Oregon Democract, this is one issue where I'd like to punch my governor in the teeth.
Not only is this proposal an offensive infringement of my rights, but it also takes away incentives to buy more fuel efficient vehicles. The core reasoning for this tax scheme is that greater fuel efficiency has led to serious drops in state fuel tax revenues. But rather than embrace this as a good thing, the "brain trust" in Salem would rather take away the incentive.
It's like being upset that less smokers means less sin taxes and deciding to put a high tax on nicotine gum to compensate. What. The. Hell.
The negative consequences of a powerful, centralized government entity that controls your life and has the power of the law behind it are obvious.
And the negative consequences of powerful corporate bureacracies that put their pursuit of profit above that of the welfare of their workers and the surrounding community and which are accountable to no one but a market that places more value on cheap goods that human rights is equally obvious.
Pick your poison: Misery through too much nanny-state meddling or misery through callous indifference.
Or maybe instead, you can try to work out some sort of balance where one picks up where the other sucks.
Second, there's the social cost. You're either teaching them that "This routine physical activity we're requiring you to engage in is so dangerous it could *kill you* and you need to wear one of these to be safe," or "Our society is so ridiculously litigious and cowardly that this is what it's come to." That generation's going to be even more fucked up than the one that thought the TSA sounded like a good idea.
Err... Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the main point of a heart monitor was to teach you what level of physical activity was necessary to properly burn calories (i.e. over 65% of your max heart rate to being aerobic exercise). I didn't think it was about scaring people into wondering when their heart was going to explode.
Though... now that you mention it...
When I was a kid I remember having to do these heart rate tests in gym where they recorded the results, but I was never actually told whether the fact that my heart rate would quadruple after heavy exercise was a good thing or not, so I was left with the impression that I was dangerously out of shape and wasn't told what a good max heart rate for my age should've been. I guess I was kind of scared into thinking my heart was going to explode without fancy equipment! I had totally forgotten about that. Huh.
Arguably people get staph infections in hospitals because hospitals put so much effort into sterilizing every little thing. It leaves the hardiest, and fastest spreading bacteria and viruses to fill the vacuum rather than the millions of common germs that our body knows how to deal with.
Actually, "hardiest" and "fastest-spreading" are generally mutually opposed. Most mutations to develop antibiotic resistance are costly and inefficient compared to non-resistance. This is why these traits, which spontaneously appear in the population from time to time, do not become dominant without the use of antibiotics or other outside pressures to cull the herd in favor of resistance.
However, you are right in some contexts. Some genes for resistance to antibiotics also aid in resistance to certain disinfectants.
"Compounds such as household disinfectants and other antibacterial agents can also select for antibiotic resistance. Triclosan and pine oil, which are widely used in home cleaning products are able to select for multidrug-resistant mutants, either by mutation in the target genes or in the regulatory mar system, providing a pleiotropic resistance to disinfectants, multiple structurally unrelated antibiotics, organic solvents and oxidative stress agents. Constitutive expression of an MDR efflux pump which confers resistance to triclosan is also reported in P. aeruginosa. Given the increased use of these agents in households, one can imagine dramatic changes in the environmental flora that impact antibiotic resistance."
-- TM Barbosa, SB Levy. The impact of antibiotic use on resistance development and persistence. Drug Resist Update. 2000;3:303-11.
There's an amazing video of the native bat running, because it'd evolved to be flightless like the birds.
Video
Shame on you for talking up something so cool and not providing a link.
On the one hand (and I'd say the bigger hand), the Green Revolution ushered in the world-wide use of many really good technologies for helping to feed the planet -- high-yield crops and better use of irrigation.
On the other hand, it also ushered in a world of heavy use of herbicides and pesticides (much of which is petroleum based) and nitrogen-fertilizers (which are made in a process that burns natural gas). Fertilizer run-off is killing huge swaths of the Gulf of Mexico due to algal blooms and anoxic zones, and pesticide use in some Midwestern states taints the groundwater and causes birth defects. The dependency on petroleum resources in our agriculture bodes ill because of climate change and dwindling oil supplies over the next century.
In the balance between the two, it's undeniable that the Green Revolution has saved far more lives than it has harmed, but a lot people in the environmental movement tend to less aware of the problems solved by the solutions of half a century ago than the problems they cause today. That latter fact tends to lead (as ANY political argument about ANYTHING does) to demonizing people responsible for the problems we face today, when we should view the Green Revolution as a great achievement with a few flaws here and there that can be improved upon with better science and with grassroots demand for cleaner, greener food (and not just cheap food). We can thank the Green Revolution for the luxury to demand that.
No not zero at all. Nowhere near zero in fact. Chance is probability, and the probability is defined by the number of planets, which mathematically works out to "quite a lot".
Only if you ignore reasonable sub-light travel times. If you don't, it becomes "very, very few" instead. This comes up with the SETI project when you consider the number of starts with in a mere 100 light-years of us. There are only 511 G stars (those like our sun) in that distance and if you narrow the volume to a 50 ly radius, there are only 63 G stars. Within 20 ly, you can count the number on one hand -- 4.
(Note: We don't have any known, non-speculative technology that could get us above 0.1c, so I think I'm safe in considering a 1000 year trip to be unreasonable.)
The closest Earth-like planet we've found is 20.5 light years away around Gliese 581. The Wikipedia article I linked to goes through a lot of the possibilities for habitable planets, but there's a lot of uncertainty there.
Keep in mind that if you want to find a planet as good as Earth (much less better) you need to match all of the following criteria:
1) Earth-like gravity.
2) Earth-like temperatures and season.
3) Earth-like atmosphere (right mixture of nitrogen and oxygen; no toxics; right pressure; not too turbulent).
4) Earth-like rotational period (daily and yearly for growing crops).
5) Earth-like sunlight (intensity and wavelengths).
6) Earth-like water (not too dry; not completely water-covered; not iced over; non-toxic).
7) Earth-like tectonics.
8) An ozone layer and strong magnetic belts or some other means of deflecting harmful solar emissions.
Additionally, you might like to find arable soil, edible native species, a good supply of metals and other heavier elements, and other niceties. You might also hope not to find any surprising difficulties like high radioactivity, pervasive heavy metals, highly aggressive native species, etc.
That's just to find a *livable* planet. To find one that's *better* is just probably never going to happen. Not only is it hard to define what "better" means to a species that's adapted to its own world (and not only is "better" likely to only apply to a narrow subset of the available biomes of an entire planet), but it's just so improbable in the space we have to work with. If we ever do live on a better world, it will be because we *made* it that way, and it won't happen in our lifetimes without a radical breakthrough in physics followed by an equally great breakthrough in economics and politics.
Franly, between soy and hemp we could pretty much eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, the needs for both ranching and logging [...]
Egh. Don't tell me you're one of those tofu and TVP "meat-substitute" vegetarians that hasn't discovered that pulses and legumes are a FAR tastier was to get complete protein. Because I just had to suffer through the culinary horror of you people's bland lack of sophistication last night, and it made me eat meat (almost in protest) as soon as I got home so that I wouldn't feel so hungry and unsatisfied.
You'd think thousands of years of Vedic culture and delicious, complex spices would have SOME influence on all modern, Western vegetarians, but noooooooo.... I'm going to have to suffer through an entire semester of uninspired, mostly flavorless, vegetarian meals by classmates who haven't learned how to compensate for the lack of meaty flavor in their dishes with something equally exciting to the taste buds. Kale. Tofu. "Morningstar Farms." Blech.
(And what's so unnatural about chard anyway? Stuff's good for you.)
No it isn't. What is really funny is all the vegetarians tend to be Evolutionists who haven't figured out that Humans are Omnivores designed to eat just about anything. oops, I said Designed, gasp.
So why not human flesh? It seems like it would be the most nutritionally compatible protein. I mean, if we're just only considering what the flesh is designed to process and not considering any ethical concerns (that we were perhaps designed to be able to contemplate), then I don't see a justification for it that is any less ridiculous than avoiding meat in general.
Unlike you, I've actually worked on a farm, so don't bring that nonsense around here.
You ever work on a factory farm, like a hog farm or a huge row of chicken houses? Your small, open field farms aren't the problem. It's farms owned by companies like Smithfield or Tyson that cause a lot of us distress.
I hate factory farms, and I'm still largely carnivorous -- I just buy my meat from more ethical meat producers.
This is an inherent loser of a case. To make out a claim for malicious prosecution based on racial lines, you'll need to prove discriminatory effect and discriminatory intent. To do this, you'll generally have to find clear examples where the prosecutor has been either pursuing cases on behalf of white victims or against black cops -- enough to establish an actual pattern of bias. Even then, the court will likely defer to prosecutorial discretion if any other explanation would suffice to explain the discrepancy (such as lack of resources, insufficiency of the evidence in the case, etc.). The courts have almost never been willing to step in an act as "super-prosecutors" with responsibility over mandating which cases get brought before them or not.
You're being creative and I give you points for that compared to the whole "conspiracy to commit theft" angle that others have taken, but criminal mischief typically involves damage or defacement to property. No harm happened here.
However, I'm thinking that he's perhaps committed wire fraud, since there was a clear intent to deceive based on a material representation through interstate wire facilities. If you could get a federal prosecutor to take the charge seriously, he could be up for 20 years. (Given the nature of the actual harm involved and the harshness of the penalties, I doubt you'd get one to look into prosecuting the case.)
If you want to repeat history, by all means, crack down on the ELF and send them all to prison and beat up anyone in the group. Throw the PATRIOT act in their faces. Within no time at all you will have given their movement the publicity and recruiting tools to really cause problems. Within no time at all you will have given their movement the publicity and recruiting tools to really cause problems. And erode public support as more and more people are locked up by guilt from association.
I agree with all of your post except this point. Unlike many Islamic terrorist groups, the ELF rarely if ever takes any sort of positive action "back home" to draw in sympathy (e.g. Hamas and Hezbollah run charity hospitals). Additionally, those organizations have an enemy that is widely reviled by their neighbors and considered a threat to their lives and way of life (i.e. Israel and the US). Sympathy for terrorism only happens when normal people feel there's some sort justification for the terrorists' actions.
ELF, in contrast, strikes out seemingly randomly at many targets that are not nearly the worst offenders, like the radio station here or by burning an entire car dealership for selling SUVs. Worse for them, the rest of the green movement is generally filled with people who respect principles of nonviolence and wouldn't support such against against even the worst offenders. That's why next to no one has any sympathy for ELF; they're practically green anarchists. I'm about as tree-hugging as you can get, but absolutely NO environmentalist that I know has ANY sympathy for these losers.
Personally, I'd be happy if they were all locked up so that those of us who aren't violent radicals wouldn't have to have them used against us by people on the other side of the debate.
Unless you are from one of the five no-sales-tax states, if you purchased anything from an Internet retailer who didn't charge sales tax, and you didn't pay the required tax voluntarily, then you, sir, are a tax cheat.
Another reason it's nice to live in Oregon.
Also, in case you didn't read the link (which I'm sure you didn't), you have to willfully attempt to evade taxes by illegal means.
(Hey, kids!: Quick poll. Who among you were completely honest on your IRS Form 1040 last year? Anyone?)
To the best of my knowledge, I was. Not only do I genuinely believe that you're a parasite if you try to take advantage of government services while paying as little as possible for them, but I'm not a fan of lying to save/make a buck (aka fraud), and I'm not a big enough gambler to think that a few bucks here and there is worth up to $100,000 and 5 years in prison.
Actually, I wouldn't choose a bullet. I think jumping off Half Dome sounds a lot more fun. Or seeing exactly just how fast I can take those turns in a motorcycle on Skyline, and then push just a bit more. Go sky diving and simply don't pull the cord. How about taking an overdose of some very fun drug while enjoying the company of a well-paid lady friend? Free-climb some way-too-hard slope without a rope? Rent a Corvette, and crash it at 170Mph. See just how far you can swim into the ocean, or just how far you can free-dive, and then push a bit further. I think I'd prefer any of those to a slow painful death stretched over months or years. You only get to die once. Might as well die doing something you'd normally be to scared to try.
Personally, I'd rather not be the kind of jerk that leaves a huge mess for someone else to clean up when it's time to fold up my affairs, but YMMV.
A. Your perception of Fox, while by no means groundless, is a little over-the-top.
Pro-tip: Exaggerating something that's true until it's out of proportion and ridiculous is a common method of telling a joke.
Languages cannot _degrade_ because the users will always modify their speech towards greater understanding
I'm not sure I agree with this premise. While there are natural selection pressures on languages, inching closer to perfect understanding on the intended statement is not always the only pressure. For example, the text messaging slang that prompted this whole email chain.
For example, "r u goin 2 prom?" is not easier to understand than "Are you going to prom?" but it's a lot easier to type and thus enables faster communication through not greater understanding -- just "good enough" communication.
Similarly, we got rid of the thorn as a letter largely because we were importing typesets from Germany and Italy. As you probably know, "ye" was pronounced "the," but originally spelled "(thorn)e" but this wasn't because using "y" to mean two dissimilar sounds increased understanding -- it was because it was easier to print the first English Bibles using stock letters. Personally, I think English is less enriched for having do use a digraph for the sound -- leaving us with the ambiguity of "hothouse" and "rather."
Anyway, I am not a linguist, and these are just my two cents.
Considering that this has thus been posted twice, maybe Slashdot should read Slashdot.
So a Fox affiliate employee took the opportunity to...
1) Downplay some senseless and sensationalist bit of fear-mongering...
2) While saying something nice about a green technology that suffers from a lot of NIMBYism...
3) And he based it all on solid science and some common sense?
He was fired immediately after, right?