Not good! So basically, gene NDM-1 jumps from bacteria carrying the gene to living bacteria that doesn't. I don't know exactly how this happens, but apparently this is a natural form of gene therapy.
I suspect this finding in the Chinese waste water plant is the tip of the iceberg. They seem to be treating waste at the most basic level by using lots of chlorine prior to discharging the treated waste. Nothing abnormal about that. I'm willing to bet that waste water treatment plants in every nation have this exact same issue! Hardy little buggers.
We don't actually know the exact mechanism by which chlorine kills or damages bacteria, but we do know that increased permeability of the cell membrane enhances its lethality (but is not mechanism of lethality in and of itself). Beta-lactam drugs work by monkeywrenching the process of building the peptidoglycan layer of bacterial cell walls, so it may be that some forms of resistance to cell wall wrecking drugs also help resist chlorination, which would make chlorination in turn select for that trait.
At this point, I'm in pure speculation territory, though. I am not a molecular biologist.
Beta lactam resistance is common. That's the class of antibiotics which includes penicillin; not an antibiotic of last resort by any means.
It's also the category which includes carbapenems like Imipenem and Meropenem which are last resort drugs. In particular, the production of metallo-beta-lactamases like NDM-1 is a key adaptation to resist them, and the article highlights the risk specifically to neutralizing carbapenems as the main cause of concern.
the "anti-bacterial" ingredients are chlorinated organics, they just poison bacteria. they are not in any way related to antibiotics and thus do not in any way conribute to resistance to antibiotics any more than your chlorinated kitchen cleanser does.
All antibiotics poison bacteria in some way, and several are chlorinated hydrocarbons, e.g. vancomycin, clindamycin, clofazimine, chloramphenicol, thiamphenicol, etc. Antibiotics are widely varied category of chemicals, and while triclosan isn't directly related to any families I'm aware of, that doesn't mean that resistance to it would be useless against antibiotics that operate on the same system.
A mutation capable of resisting the effects of one class of chemicals can often be useful for resisting very different chemicals that have the same effect. Triclosan works at higher, lethal concentrations by disrupting bacterial cell membranes. At lower concentrations it also suppresses fatty acid formation necessary for cell membrane creation by binding up two enzymes necessary for the process: ENR and NAD+. (This prevents reproduction but doesn't kill.)
Isoniazid is one of our first-line treatments for tuberculosis. Interestingly, it also works by binding to NADH and then binding to ENR and blocking fatty acid synthesis. Studies have shown that some strains of isoniazid-resistant mycobacteria are also pretty resistant to triclosan as a result. Others aren't, because they developed mutations that affected other parts of the process of the drug's interaction. These are unrelated compounds, but a mutation that affects an enzyme they both act on can promote resistance to both.
There is also evidence that evolution of triclosan resistance can increase resistance to ciprofloxacin. In that case, the mutation was to increase the expression of certain efflux pumps, used to pump toxic chemicals out of the cell. Turns out in that case that the same pump was used as part of the processes to eliminate both toxins.
So, in summary, while there isn't any evidence that triclosan is responsible for anywhere near the damage that usage in livestock has done, it's probably not a good idea to keep using a chemical that has risks in a situation where it has little benefit because it can aid in the development of resistance for some antibiotics.
That's not what the NSA did, and US legal code applies to US citizens, not foreign ones. Also, if the NSA is operating within boundaries set by other laws like the PATRIOT Act, which they were, then they're in the clear.
Blame the law and the politicians for poor oversight, the NSA is just a bureaucracy told to go do something without sufficient guidelines and oversight.
Several problems with this.
First, the NSA has swept up plenty of information about US citizens, e.g. in requesting phone records in bulk, and we only have their word that they're only interested in foreigners. Not that that legally justifies sweeping up people you're not allowed to look at without a warrant.
Second, James Sensenbrenner, the Republican main sponsor of the PATRIOT Act, has said that the NSA is far overreaching its authorization under the Act. It's very possible that the agency's interpretation of the Act is far out of bounds with its congressional intent (or possibly even its language).
Third, even if they did not go beyond the bounds of the law, the question of whether the law itself is constitutional isn't a settled one. Many of the provisions have been untested due to difficulty in claiming standing due to government secrecy about what they do with the information they've collected.
Fourth, the question of legality isn't the only one. There's also the question of morality, of hypocrisy, and of the dangers inherent to information asymmetry between the government and the people.
Fifth, absolving the actions of an agency (or any individual) who uses a lack of clear guidelines as an excuse to go as far into bad behavior as they think they can get away with is a terrible idea. It's the same sort of mentality that says, "Well, it wasn't illegal back then to rape your wife, so how could it have been wrong?" You wouldn't raise kids that way, and you shouldn't expect your government to behave responsibly if they know they can get away with anything as long as it hasn't been written down that they shouldn't.
The title is "California Man Arrested for Running 'Revenge Porn' Website." What is the meaningful semantic distinction that makes the use of "for it" improper here? He was arrested for activities core to the running of the site: privacy violations (the images hosted on the site) and blackmail (a major revenue source for the site). Just because he wasn't arrested for using the site doesn't mean that we wasn't arrested for running the site.
If he's going to bargain, he should probably offer something the police doesn't already have.
Plus, unless those people are mostly in California, it's far better to go with the big fish you already have than a widely spread trove of hard to reach minnows.
What's to fear? I cheerily inform folks that I do not believe in their particular sky faery. Should I expect violence? Condemnation? Whatever.
Well, to be honest, if you regularly phrase it that way, yes. No one likes having their beliefs in just about anything dismissively insulted, especially when it's something rather central to their life. That's less about religion and more about just not being a jerk to people you disagree with.
Try treating someone's home country or favorite sports team that way and see if you don't get a lot of anger directed your way too.
Thing is, it doesn't take an enormous amount of intelligence to drive.
Well, that explains the abysmally low accident rate...
Oh, wait.
Driver distraction is the number one cause of accidents. In your experience, would you positively or negatively correlate intelligence and distractability?
Flippant, joking question aside, it turns out that IQ actually does correlate with lower accident rates at a national level. It seems that the social conditions that promote greater intelligence in the populace (higher standard of living, income equality, a more polite society, greater individual liberty) are good for better driving.
even for humans, one's own feces are safe to eat, barring mouth sores and the like. there's nothing in it that didn't come out of you in the first place.
This is wrong. Bacteria are not evenly distributed throughout both the small and large intestines. Look up small intestinal bacterial overgrowth sometime.
Have you recently read of anything done by anyone WITH a court order? I wonder if the courts still remember how to write one.
Of course they do. Much like how the navy trains our sailors in rigging a traditional sailboat, it's a rich reminder of tradition and where they came from as well as a skill that many will practice as a hobby for the rest of their lives, despite the total lack of use in the modern day.
You're nitpicking a semantic strawman of your own creation. The GP only said that the constitution does not allow the state to favor one religion over another. He did not cite the First Amendment as the sole origin of this from the moment it was ratified on, and you yourself acknowledge that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates it against the states.
So, there was no reason to imply the GP had never read the First Amendment, because there's nothing he said that referenced it nor that was incorrect about the current state of the law.
Monotheism arose contemporaneously with modern civilization as a control framework for large societies. Monotheism encourages homogenous culture, thus discouraging creativity. Prior to that, polytheism, which implicitly implies multiplicity and diversity in all things, was the culture's guide. In a polytheistic culture every man can have his own muse without ridicule, fear or ostracism.
It's a nice story to tell yourself if you're disenchanted with modern Western culture and the still extant religions that founded it, but anyone with a deeper understanding of history and even of other modern cultures can tell you that isn't true at all.
Major polytheistic religions have more gods, but they don't work like your D&D game might make you think. You don't just pick one god and venerate that one at the expense of the others. No, you are expected to venerate all the gods in the proper mixture and at the proper time, and emphasizing one god above the others is a sign of eccentricity at best or disrespect to the gods you neglect at worst.
Plus, humans are humans, and the pressure to conform to the group is built into us at a evolutionary biology level. We're pack animals, and rules to conform identify who is "one of us" and who is "one of them" to compete with.
Do you think the Romans didn't have pressure to conform? Imperial China or the Mongols? Japan, back then and now? Do you not know anyone who is Hindu or read about some of the cultural clashes in India? Polytheism is no panacea.
My point is that generally it would seem that the higher the IQ, the more capable an individual is of being objective.
Generally, no. Objectivity is largely a function of temperament and deliberate effort rather than intelligence. Studies show that the more intelligent you are, the less objective you are. It seems that smart people are so used to being "right," that they are largely unprepared for the possibility that they are wrong. They also have an amazing ability rationalize and defend incorrect positions.
Worse, the more "informed" you are, the less impact facts have on you. Uninformed voters are more easily swayed with information challenging their beliefs, but people who know and have strong opinions on a subject are likely to become more entrenched in a position when confronted with facts that prove it wrong.
Objectivity takes training and deliberate practice. Being smart doesn't make you less susceptible to cognitive biases -- it just makes you much quicker at applying them, at least until you learn to recognize them and fight them.
Someone without the minimum skill is unemployable.
Odd. It sounds like you think people are entitled to never learn new skills, but aren't entitled to be able to support themselves through work. It's a strange world you propose that values ignorance more than life.
This is a Sophists' phrase, and it is an unnecessary constraint. Why would a man who failed to pray on $holy_day be prevented from punishing a rapist? Both men are sinners.
That's the point. We are all flawed, and we do not have the moral authority to condemn our peers merely because (in our opinions) our sins are lesser. Even if we are forgiven our sins, judgment is reserved for God, not man.
A Christian should not seek punishment and retribution in the law. While society needs the law to function, justice should lead to rehabilitation where possible and incapacitation where not, and a Christian should forgive those who sin against them ("turn the other cheek") regardless.
Even if you are not Christian, seeking retribution from the law is a hollow act that does nothing to undo the damage committed by the criminal. All it does is trade a life for a sense of satisfaction, and no justice comes from that. Two wrongs do not make a right.
Excuse me Euroweenie. The death penalty is about as direct eye for an eye and you are likely to see. This punishment is reserved for the worst of the worst.
Do you not remember John 7:53-8:11, the story of the adultress to be stoned? Jesus was not in favor of capital punishment ("Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."), and was in favor of forgiveness as a general principle.
At that, it's is almost totally unused in the states, with the exception of a few states. An in the cases where it is applied, this is always after numerous expensive appeals.
The death penalty is still in effect in 32 out of 50 states and at the federal level. 3 of the states which banned it recently have not done so retroactively, leaving prisoners still awaiting their execution. While Texas is an extreme outlier for executions, 10 states have had an average of 1 execution per year or more since the penalty was reestablished in 1976. The South as a whole has executed over 1100 people since then.
So we may disagree on this, but to characterize the US as a bunch of death penalty fiends is completely absurd.
And yet we're the only Western country that still has the death penalty; most of the civilized world has given it up. We're also the Western country with (by far) the highest rate of incarceration and the longest prison sentences. We're also one of the few that allows the use of plea bargaining to compel guilty pleas, and many of our states disenfranchise felons, which is also rare in Western democracies. Gallup polls show that 57% of Americans still support the death penalty (down from a peak of around 80% in 1994.)
Over all, we're a very harsh regime when it comes to law enforcement, and the death penalty is just part and parcel of a nation that believes on some level that criminals aren't human and don't deserve to be treated as such. Punishment is part of our culture, not rehabilitation, and certainly not Christian forgiveness.
That's not a good analogy. It's more like costing the victim the price of an AI enforcement bot that can tell a sit-in from legitimate customers. Both because nothing was destroyed and because the "fix" is horrifically expensive.
The imprecision of the analogy isn't not really the point. What's important is that his actions cost his victim to set up security to make sure it didn't happen again, and someone has to pay the cost of that.
So it seems you feel Koch paid too much to fix the harm caused. Ever hear of the "soft skull" rule? It's the general principle in law (assault cases specifically) that it doesn't matter if the damage you do is far beyond what you expected so long as you intended to do some harm to the victim. As long as you intended to transgress, you are responsible for the harm that results in intentional torts. (Negligence is complicated by issues of proximate cause, but this wasn't negligence.) If Koch said that it cost them that much money to investigate and fix the issues, and the court found this to be fact (via jury or bench trial), then that's the harm caused, end of story. You don't get to quibble with an assault victim over which doctor they went to or which insurance plan they picked.
Furthermore, who is to say that because a job or task doesn't produce $10/hr in output that job or task isn't a perfectly valid and useful job?
People who are forced to live on $10/hr. The minimum wage ensures that people who work hard for a living aren't forced into poverty just because competition for work turns wages into a "crab bucket" situation where people undercut each other just to have *something*.
You can see this especially today in the wake of the 2007 financial collapse. Poor people used to be able to / have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. They might end up working 50-60 hour weeks, but they could make ends meet. Today, however, with labor oversupplied and jobs in high demand, employers are able to demand "continuous availability." Not only will you not get a job if you want to have a specific day off or not to work on holidays, but you also can't get a job if you have another job that might want to schedule you at the same time. So people are forced to get by on single jobs that won't schedule them for full time and won't let them fill the hours at another job. You think minimum wage is somehow generous? Try living on it with only 30 hours a week. It's a large part of why the economy isn't recovering.
Besides, if a job is worth less than minimum wage, then it will be replaced with a solution that allows one person to do multiple people's jobs (aka increased productivity), or it will be brought up in value by charging more to the customers. Before you jump on the latter as making minimum wage hikes pointless, note that labor isn't the only factor in any goods' or services' costs, so the effect of raising wages isn't negated by raising the costs of goods and services, and this is a net benefit to the poor.
In other words, the minimum wage is possibly the single most important tool in ensuring that the income gap doesn't generate civil unrest and violence, like it did in the 19th century.
But now there's an international news story about cobalt-60, how deadly it is, and how amazingly simple it is to steal from Mexico. So we can expect a dirty bomb any minute now.
Thanks MSM!!!!
Would you rather be kept in the dark about government incompetence so that no one has reason to demand it be corrected? Not only will this news hopefully cause pressure within Mexico to fix the problem, but it will cause pressure from other countries to ensure that private facilities better secure radioactive materials.
Additionally, during the manhunt for the missing material, it was important to get the message out to warn people and also to hopefully let the criminals know what they stole before something like, well, this happened.
Slashdot Mirror
I run a quantum computer. Good luck getting noise from that.
Haha. Mine is entangled with yours. Gives a whole new meaning to spooky action at a distance.
Not good! So basically, gene NDM-1 jumps from bacteria carrying the gene to living bacteria that doesn't. I don't know exactly how this happens, but apparently this is a natural form of gene therapy.
Plasmid transfer.
I suspect this finding in the Chinese waste water plant is the tip of the iceberg. They seem to be treating waste at the most basic level by using lots of chlorine prior to discharging the treated waste. Nothing abnormal about that. I'm willing to bet that waste water treatment plants in every nation have this exact same issue! Hardy little buggers.
It may be worse than that. I found this last night while doing some reading related to the triclosan article but hesitated to bring it up, but it seems that chlorination itself may provide selection pressure that favors bacteria resistant to certain beta-lactam antibiotics..
We don't actually know the exact mechanism by which chlorine kills or damages bacteria, but we do know that increased permeability of the cell membrane enhances its lethality (but is not mechanism of lethality in and of itself). Beta-lactam drugs work by monkeywrenching the process of building the peptidoglycan layer of bacterial cell walls, so it may be that some forms of resistance to cell wall wrecking drugs also help resist chlorination, which would make chlorination in turn select for that trait.
At this point, I'm in pure speculation territory, though. I am not a molecular biologist.
Beta lactam resistance is common. That's the class of antibiotics which includes penicillin; not an antibiotic of last resort by any means.
It's also the category which includes carbapenems like Imipenem and Meropenem which are last resort drugs. In particular, the production of metallo-beta-lactamases like NDM-1 is a key adaptation to resist them, and the article highlights the risk specifically to neutralizing carbapenems as the main cause of concern.
For 10 cents a day, I'll take the risk that I'm wasting my money. It's cheap insurance, and there might even be a benefit.
You might want to consider that there might be a significant risk of harm too.
Slight negative effect on lung cancer survival for high doses of Vitamin A.
Increase risk of all-cause mortality for high doses of Vitamin E.
Significant increase in mortality from gastrointestinal cancers from high doses of antioxidants, A & E in particular.
Maybe this corn used for ethanol can be used for food again?
Better yet, maybe land can be set aside or used for other things than corn again.
the "anti-bacterial" ingredients are chlorinated organics, they just poison bacteria. they are not in any way related to antibiotics and thus do not in any way conribute to resistance to antibiotics any more than your chlorinated kitchen cleanser does.
All antibiotics poison bacteria in some way, and several are chlorinated hydrocarbons, e.g. vancomycin, clindamycin, clofazimine, chloramphenicol, thiamphenicol, etc. Antibiotics are widely varied category of chemicals, and while triclosan isn't directly related to any families I'm aware of, that doesn't mean that resistance to it would be useless against antibiotics that operate on the same system.
A mutation capable of resisting the effects of one class of chemicals can often be useful for resisting very different chemicals that have the same effect. Triclosan works at higher, lethal concentrations by disrupting bacterial cell membranes. At lower concentrations it also suppresses fatty acid formation necessary for cell membrane creation by binding up two enzymes necessary for the process: ENR and NAD+. (This prevents reproduction but doesn't kill.)
Isoniazid is one of our first-line treatments for tuberculosis. Interestingly, it also works by binding to NADH and then binding to ENR and blocking fatty acid synthesis. Studies have shown that some strains of isoniazid-resistant mycobacteria are also pretty resistant to triclosan as a result. Others aren't, because they developed mutations that affected other parts of the process of the drug's interaction. These are unrelated compounds, but a mutation that affects an enzyme they both act on can promote resistance to both.
There is also evidence that evolution of triclosan resistance can increase resistance to ciprofloxacin. In that case, the mutation was to increase the expression of certain efflux pumps, used to pump toxic chemicals out of the cell. Turns out in that case that the same pump was used as part of the processes to eliminate both toxins.
So, in summary, while there isn't any evidence that triclosan is responsible for anywhere near the damage that usage in livestock has done, it's probably not a good idea to keep using a chemical that has risks in a situation where it has little benefit because it can aid in the development of resistance for some antibiotics.
If pilots are doing 500+kts at altitudes reachable by grasshoppers, I'd be worried about the dents caused by trees. And small children.
You may have heard of locusts before. All a locust is is a grasshopper in its migratory phase. Many species of grasshopper can fly quite well.
That's not what the NSA did, and US legal code applies to US citizens, not foreign ones. Also, if the NSA is operating within boundaries set by other laws like the PATRIOT Act, which they were, then they're in the clear.
Blame the law and the politicians for poor oversight, the NSA is just a bureaucracy told to go do something without sufficient guidelines and oversight.
Several problems with this.
First, the NSA has swept up plenty of information about US citizens, e.g. in requesting phone records in bulk, and we only have their word that they're only interested in foreigners. Not that that legally justifies sweeping up people you're not allowed to look at without a warrant.
Second, James Sensenbrenner, the Republican main sponsor of the PATRIOT Act, has said that the NSA is far overreaching its authorization under the Act. It's very possible that the agency's interpretation of the Act is far out of bounds with its congressional intent (or possibly even its language).
Third, even if they did not go beyond the bounds of the law, the question of whether the law itself is constitutional isn't a settled one. Many of the provisions have been untested due to difficulty in claiming standing due to government secrecy about what they do with the information they've collected.
Fourth, the question of legality isn't the only one. There's also the question of morality, of hypocrisy, and of the dangers inherent to information asymmetry between the government and the people.
Fifth, absolving the actions of an agency (or any individual) who uses a lack of clear guidelines as an excuse to go as far into bad behavior as they think they can get away with is a terrible idea. It's the same sort of mentality that says, "Well, it wasn't illegal back then to rape your wife, so how could it have been wrong?" You wouldn't raise kids that way, and you shouldn't expect your government to behave responsibly if they know they can get away with anything as long as it hasn't been written down that they shouldn't.
He was arrested because of it, but not for it.
The title is "California Man Arrested for Running 'Revenge Porn' Website." What is the meaningful semantic distinction that makes the use of "for it" improper here? He was arrested for activities core to the running of the site: privacy violations (the images hosted on the site) and blackmail (a major revenue source for the site). Just because he wasn't arrested for using the site doesn't mean that we wasn't arrested for running the site.
If he's going to bargain, he should probably offer something the police doesn't already have.
Plus, unless those people are mostly in California, it's far better to go with the big fish you already have than a widely spread trove of hard to reach minnows.
What's to fear? I cheerily inform folks that I do not believe in their particular sky faery. Should I expect violence? Condemnation? Whatever.
Well, to be honest, if you regularly phrase it that way, yes. No one likes having their beliefs in just about anything dismissively insulted, especially when it's something rather central to their life. That's less about religion and more about just not being a jerk to people you disagree with.
Try treating someone's home country or favorite sports team that way and see if you don't get a lot of anger directed your way too.
The statistics from Britain, where something like 30% Muslims want the UK to become a SA-like theocracy, speak a little different.
Apparently, you have a different definition of "most" if the 70% that don't agree don't qualify.
Thing is, it doesn't take an enormous amount of intelligence to drive.
Well, that explains the abysmally low accident rate...
Oh, wait.
Driver distraction is the number one cause of accidents. In your experience, would you positively or negatively correlate intelligence and distractability?
Flippant, joking question aside, it turns out that IQ actually does correlate with lower accident rates at a national level. It seems that the social conditions that promote greater intelligence in the populace (higher standard of living, income equality, a more polite society, greater individual liberty) are good for better driving.
On an individual level, it's more of a wash. Individual income and academic education level do not correlate to accident rates, and both are good proxies for IQ. The study found that it's more "emotional intelligence" (aka conscientiousness) and level of driver training that mattered.
even for humans, one's own feces are safe to eat, barring mouth sores and the like. there's nothing in it that didn't come out of you in the first place.
This is wrong. Bacteria are not evenly distributed throughout both the small and large intestines. Look up small intestinal bacterial overgrowth sometime.
Have you recently read of anything done by anyone WITH a court order? I wonder if the courts still remember how to write one.
Of course they do. Much like how the navy trains our sailors in rigging a traditional sailboat, it's a rich reminder of tradition and where they came from as well as a skill that many will practice as a hobby for the rest of their lives, despite the total lack of use in the modern day.
You're nitpicking a semantic strawman of your own creation. The GP only said that the constitution does not allow the state to favor one religion over another. He did not cite the First Amendment as the sole origin of this from the moment it was ratified on, and you yourself acknowledge that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates it against the states.
So, there was no reason to imply the GP had never read the First Amendment, because there's nothing he said that referenced it nor that was incorrect about the current state of the law.
Monotheism arose contemporaneously with modern civilization as a control framework for large societies. Monotheism encourages homogenous culture, thus discouraging creativity. Prior to that, polytheism, which implicitly implies multiplicity and diversity in all things, was the culture's guide. In a polytheistic culture every man can have his own muse without ridicule, fear or ostracism.
It's a nice story to tell yourself if you're disenchanted with modern Western culture and the still extant religions that founded it, but anyone with a deeper understanding of history and even of other modern cultures can tell you that isn't true at all.
Major polytheistic religions have more gods, but they don't work like your D&D game might make you think. You don't just pick one god and venerate that one at the expense of the others. No, you are expected to venerate all the gods in the proper mixture and at the proper time, and emphasizing one god above the others is a sign of eccentricity at best or disrespect to the gods you neglect at worst.
Plus, humans are humans, and the pressure to conform to the group is built into us at a evolutionary biology level. We're pack animals, and rules to conform identify who is "one of us" and who is "one of them" to compete with.
Do you think the Romans didn't have pressure to conform? Imperial China or the Mongols? Japan, back then and now? Do you not know anyone who is Hindu or read about some of the cultural clashes in India? Polytheism is no panacea.
My point is that generally it would seem that the higher the IQ, the more capable an individual is of being objective.
Generally, no. Objectivity is largely a function of temperament and deliberate effort rather than intelligence. Studies show that the more intelligent you are, the less objective you are. It seems that smart people are so used to being "right," that they are largely unprepared for the possibility that they are wrong. They also have an amazing ability rationalize and defend incorrect positions.
Worse, the more "informed" you are, the less impact facts have on you. Uninformed voters are more easily swayed with information challenging their beliefs, but people who know and have strong opinions on a subject are likely to become more entrenched in a position when confronted with facts that prove it wrong.
Objectivity takes training and deliberate practice. Being smart doesn't make you less susceptible to cognitive biases -- it just makes you much quicker at applying them, at least until you learn to recognize them and fight them.
You want them to never have a job.
Someone without the minimum skill is unemployable.
Odd. It sounds like you think people are entitled to never learn new skills, but aren't entitled to be able to support themselves through work. It's a strange world you propose that values ignorance more than life.
This is a Sophists' phrase, and it is an unnecessary constraint. Why would a man who failed to pray on $holy_day be prevented from punishing a rapist? Both men are sinners.
That's the point. We are all flawed, and we do not have the moral authority to condemn our peers merely because (in our opinions) our sins are lesser. Even if we are forgiven our sins, judgment is reserved for God, not man.
A Christian should not seek punishment and retribution in the law. While society needs the law to function, justice should lead to rehabilitation where possible and incapacitation where not, and a Christian should forgive those who sin against them ("turn the other cheek") regardless.
Even if you are not Christian, seeking retribution from the law is a hollow act that does nothing to undo the damage committed by the criminal. All it does is trade a life for a sense of satisfaction, and no justice comes from that. Two wrongs do not make a right.
Minimum wage == minimum skill. Why do you hate the unskilled?
Kind of a ridiculous question. I don't. I just want better opportunities for them.
You might as well ask me why I hate children for not supporting their ability to work for a living.
Excuse me Euroweenie. The death penalty is about as direct eye for an eye and you are likely to see. This punishment is reserved for the worst of the worst.
Do you not remember John 7:53-8:11, the story of the adultress to be stoned? Jesus was not in favor of capital punishment ("Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."), and was in favor of forgiveness as a general principle.
At that, it's is almost totally unused in the states, with the exception of a few states. An in the cases where it is applied, this is always after numerous expensive appeals.
The death penalty is still in effect in 32 out of 50 states and at the federal level. 3 of the states which banned it recently have not done so retroactively, leaving prisoners still awaiting their execution. While Texas is an extreme outlier for executions, 10 states have had an average of 1 execution per year or more since the penalty was reestablished in 1976. The South as a whole has executed over 1100 people since then.
So we may disagree on this, but to characterize the US as a bunch of death penalty fiends is completely absurd.
And yet we're the only Western country that still has the death penalty; most of the civilized world has given it up. We're also the Western country with (by far) the highest rate of incarceration and the longest prison sentences. We're also one of the few that allows the use of plea bargaining to compel guilty pleas, and many of our states disenfranchise felons, which is also rare in Western democracies. Gallup polls show that 57% of Americans still support the death penalty (down from a peak of around 80% in 1994.)
Over all, we're a very harsh regime when it comes to law enforcement, and the death penalty is just part and parcel of a nation that believes on some level that criminals aren't human and don't deserve to be treated as such. Punishment is part of our culture, not rehabilitation, and certainly not Christian forgiveness.
That's not a good analogy. It's more like costing the victim the price of an AI enforcement bot that can tell a sit-in from legitimate customers. Both because nothing was destroyed and because the "fix" is horrifically expensive.
The imprecision of the analogy isn't not really the point. What's important is that his actions cost his victim to set up security to make sure it didn't happen again, and someone has to pay the cost of that.
So it seems you feel Koch paid too much to fix the harm caused. Ever hear of the "soft skull" rule? It's the general principle in law (assault cases specifically) that it doesn't matter if the damage you do is far beyond what you expected so long as you intended to do some harm to the victim. As long as you intended to transgress, you are responsible for the harm that results in intentional torts. (Negligence is complicated by issues of proximate cause, but this wasn't negligence.) If Koch said that it cost them that much money to investigate and fix the issues, and the court found this to be fact (via jury or bench trial), then that's the harm caused, end of story. You don't get to quibble with an assault victim over which doctor they went to or which insurance plan they picked.
Furthermore, who is to say that because a job or task doesn't produce $10/hr in output that job or task isn't a perfectly valid and useful job?
People who are forced to live on $10/hr. The minimum wage ensures that people who work hard for a living aren't forced into poverty just because competition for work turns wages into a "crab bucket" situation where people undercut each other just to have *something*.
You can see this especially today in the wake of the 2007 financial collapse. Poor people used to be able to / have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. They might end up working 50-60 hour weeks, but they could make ends meet. Today, however, with labor oversupplied and jobs in high demand, employers are able to demand "continuous availability." Not only will you not get a job if you want to have a specific day off or not to work on holidays, but you also can't get a job if you have another job that might want to schedule you at the same time. So people are forced to get by on single jobs that won't schedule them for full time and won't let them fill the hours at another job. You think minimum wage is somehow generous? Try living on it with only 30 hours a week. It's a large part of why the economy isn't recovering.
Besides, if a job is worth less than minimum wage, then it will be replaced with a solution that allows one person to do multiple people's jobs (aka increased productivity), or it will be brought up in value by charging more to the customers. Before you jump on the latter as making minimum wage hikes pointless, note that labor isn't the only factor in any goods' or services' costs, so the effect of raising wages isn't negated by raising the costs of goods and services, and this is a net benefit to the poor.
In other words, the minimum wage is possibly the single most important tool in ensuring that the income gap doesn't generate civil unrest and violence, like it did in the 19th century.
But now there's an international news story about cobalt-60, how deadly it is, and how amazingly simple it is to steal from Mexico.
So we can expect a dirty bomb any minute now.
Thanks MSM!!!!
Would you rather be kept in the dark about government incompetence so that no one has reason to demand it be corrected? Not only will this news hopefully cause pressure within Mexico to fix the problem, but it will cause pressure from other countries to ensure that private facilities better secure radioactive materials.
Additionally, during the manhunt for the missing material, it was important to get the message out to warn people and also to hopefully let the criminals know what they stole before something like, well, this happened.