How close a friend must someone be for me to drive him or her to the airport? If I get gas money for so doing is it a crime? Why is Uber any different and how can it be legal to treat different people differently? Older modes of doing business will now vanish. It is called progress.
The cab drivers do not have a unique issue. I know a used car dealer who feels that only dealers should ever be allowed to sell vehicles as dealers have to pay fees and meet many regulations that private parties do not.
Obviously the only function of technology is to eliminate labor, both manual and intellectual. It is simply the cab drivers' turn to suffer the shock of a changing society. School teachers are being replaced by computers in many classrooms. yet we hear no uproar. Bookkeepers, girls Friday,and small office workers have suffered huge loss of employment due to cell phones and tax software. Even surgeons are at risk for replacement by robotics.
And the howling will get louder. Commercial vehicle drivers of all types are going to cease to exist soon. The construction trades will take a death blow from 3d printed housing and components as well.
This tide can not be held back nor should it be. Humans will be forced to change monetary and social policies in ways that no one has yet dreamed of and it is coming on fast.
This may mean it is easier for a democrat to win the general election. Although Virginia has many conservative voters I doubt that the majority of voters are looned out enough to elect a tea party candidate to congress. And frankly that is exactly what the tea party is. The are a bunch of naive and under educated fools with absurd beliefs. They can not even define what really bothers them. It is rather simple in fact. Over the decades our law makers have passed so many laws that react and interact with other laws that the power of the vote or the ability to pass new, better, laws is impeded. This leaves them with the feeling that their vote is meaningless. One one feels that one's vote has no meaning then the next leap of logic is to call the government some sort of corrupt dictatorship filled with power hungry monsters just itching to take your civil liberties away. Look at the number of nuts who have used the word treason to apply to President Obama. At least half of that caused by the president not being snow white in color.
Why would anyone think that secondary school teachers are not forced to toe a political or religious line from their superiors? In high school we had a class on forms of government. During the portion on communism the teacher would play the role of advocating communism. The teacher would also advocate for socialism and republics and monarchies as each was featured. That was in 1962. If we had that class today a teacher would be in serious trouble as the expectation of freedom of speech is not now what it once was.
I know someone will ask what advantage does communism offer. Rapid decisions without lengthy negotiations and consultations are one feature of communism. The other feature is that some communist nations actually have provided a safety net for the lowest classes of citizens. The bad part is that communist governments tend to murder people who do not eagerly fall in line with the plan of the hour.
Not all states allow unions to have much power at all. Favoritism and influence can play a huge part in getting School Board employees wrongfully fired. I will not say that I have never seen a lousy teacher but they are rare. I have seen numerous students that never should have been allowed in a classroom. Teachers have not been allowed to fail many students that need to be failed. In my area it seems that the teachers must beg and cajole students not to drop out of school as our beaches and the like are far too tempting and the curse of the GED diplomas causes kids to quite school early. I would suggest that no driver's license be allowed for school drop outs before the age of 35. That one law would stop half of our drop outs from happening. I would also like to se employers refusing to accept drop outs or GED graduates.
In 1962 the City of Ft. Lauderdale purchased a riot tank due to the overwhelming fear of college students on spring break.
I am now 90 miles north of Ft. Lauderdale and my tiny town has a tank designed to drive through the walls of homes on sudden, forced entries. It is a response to the odd drug dealer who wants to go down in a hail of bullets. No walls to hide behind with these tanks I suppose.
Some crops are so easy to grow that it would be next to impossible not to farm them even by accident. Other crops are difficult and take a lot of luck to produce. Gather some cotton and work it by hand to remove the seeds and drop a few seeds and see what happens. Cotton can almost grow on an excuse. Gather some guava and spit the seeds or cast away a guava fruit with a worm in it and you will probably have a guava plant soon in that spot. The little cherry tomatoes sprout from bird droppings in all kinds of places out in the wild. I suspect that to some degree people have always farmed.
Did they do these studies with one type of anesthesia or many? Were some worse than others?
I dread the thought of what we might use as an alternative. A punch in the jaw or a mallet to the top of the head are no longer acceptable.
I resent the blazes out of dredging to accommodate bigger ships. If anything we need far less ships here. Ships are a huge air pollution problem. You should see the cartons of cigarettes that people toss off of the cruise ships that wash up on Ft. Lauderdale's beaches. The other item is the tampon inserting tubes. They are plastic and we get all kinds of them in the surf.
You might be shocked at how many technicians and engineers have had their heads destroyed by industrial robotic arms by robots who never had a clue that humans had intruded into their working area. The speed of those heavy, robotic arms can be about the speed of the head of a golf club when it tries to knock a hole in one.
Here we have parents who have come to know that their offspring has defects and wants a situation where truth is buried so that their brat will get out of the house and have less need to borrow money from them for the rest of their lives. Being that morality is a strange notion to them it does not occur that people with the best life record should be rewarded by society to a greater degree than people who, one way or another, are a mess.
Yes some employers are creeps but some are not. And the employer who supports society by rewarding kids who have done well in school and had far fewer issues than the average kid get hired and promoted much faster than lesser folks. Assume that the data on two individuals is so close that one can not be told from the other. But one had a drunk driving arrest at the age of 14 when he swiped his mom's car. Which person should get the job at the age of 25? Everything counts for everybody every time. In the old days a wealthy family could cover up for a defective teen. Those days are vanishing. Now individuals may actually have to compete with other individuals with a lot more facts being known about everyone involved.
The very reason that many people own cars has to do with unusual routes and unusual hours. For example some bus routes shut down at 6PM. That doesn't seem like a big problem until your job insists that overtime be worked and you don't leave work until 7 PM.. And you can not assume that a taxi will be available either as drivers prefer certain routes and certain passengers. So now you are stranded, perhaps in an industrial area or an area with no sidewalks and you are actually in danger. I have seen times when even in a severe emergency one could not get a cop for 45 minutes. If the public is ever to trust bus services they need to keep running 24/7/365 with very short wait times as well as backup buses in case one stalls or gets a flat tire.
Obviously the old creep issued some really nasty remarks and the NBA really doesn't need owners that degrade the climate of the sport. Conversely we very well have an elderly man who is more or less in the throes of dementia. Questions such as how does the Americans With Disabilities Act pertain to unfortunate or ugly remarks by an afflicted person may be relevant. Beyond that is the glaring issue of forcing his wife to sell as well. After all, she is an individual, and deserves the full protection of the law just as we all do. The NBA took the position that she must sell due to the fact that she is married to the creep. And even above all of those issues is an even more troublesome issue of allowing any party other than the judiciary to assign punishments.
Suppose you are running a business and discover that you have a racist as an employee although he is rather quiet about his beliefs. Can you fire him with impunity? Keep in mind that racism is sometimes perceived where it does not exist or the group in question may not be popular. For example if you employ someone from Palestine and fire him he will find a lot less recourse in the American justice system than if you fired a Jewish person. Also many businesses use false pretenses when discharging an employee. Can society afford to get involved in all of this sort of thing?
The public has turned into a big sissy, frightened by the slightest perceived threat. And we have no common sense or agreement on what should be considered wrong or illegal. I would rather throw the people that advertise phony medications on the net under the bus than some guy who hacks into a banks computer and tells the world about who has the money in the community.
These batteries shift the need for gasoline to the power grid. But most utility companies are pretty lazy and I wonder if we develop great electric cars in quantities whether the power lines will start to glow like the wires in my toaster. We can hope that power companies are investing in far more robust systems. Oddly this car issue may actually save the power companies as charging all these electric cars may mean that less people self supply all of their homes electric needs. A home with three electric cars all wanting to charge up at the same time is unlikely to do well on solar panels on the roof.
It is obvious that we lost some wonderful and brave people on 9/11. We also lost some expensive buildings and the suffering of many people may ruin the lives of many families for life. Sometimes 9/11 is compared to Pearl Harbor. But in all seriousness 9/11 does not compare to Pearl Harbor at all. During that attack we lost ships and sailors and airmen that we would need to save our nation and the pain to our nation included the threat of loss of the nation. The 9/11 attack was not a major attack in that sense. I don't think many people viewed 9/11 as threatening to collapse the entire nation. The idea that for purposes of trial we label 9/11 as a major attack doesn't sit well with me. Yes, we do have a lunatic, cult like, group of incompetents who would like to crush us. But we see them more as idiots than a military threat. I think the term idiots is justified as none of the enemy will improve their place in life from the wretched little fight that these folks have put up. In the end these people live at our leisure. If they really were a "major threat" then we would have gone to the big weapons and simply erased them from the face of the Earth. Covert actions by our government may be far more dangerous than a bunch of religious primitives running about with AK47s.
OK, so first we will have the government scanning people in sensitive positions. Then employers will insist as well. And then we will see things like a drivers license brain exam to find out if the person has moments when he drives drunk or on dope or has hidden medical issues. But the most fun will come when it is routine for courts to require lawyers and all parties giving evidence to also be scanned. And then daddy will insist on scanning his female children to make sure they are not playing nasty with others etc. etc.. I have always felt that the truth shall set us free. These days the truth might turn 90% of us into howling maniacs. Maybe we could have a TV show that featured past crimes detected by mind scans. And the IRS would just enjoy the heck out of such a device. Lawyers would leap out of windows all across the nation as would quite a few judges and probably all of the House and Senate would have to jump as well.
Generalized surveillance such as hidden cams watching any car or foot traffic on a block is probably very common. Areas around schools are a great example as public interest wants kids to be able to walk home without being swept up and molested. Volunteer addresses may be a common practice such that bad guys can never operate with impunity.
The hidden debates are several in number. First there is no sane argument of the right of Americans to own guns. We are more than entitled to own guns. "To bear arms" means to carry guns at all times, everywhere, by all adults. But even that is not up for debate as it is the prime law of the United States that we all, always have the right to carry guns. The right to use deadly force is the real issue. And America is all messed up on that part of the issue. After all our forefathers did not consider carrying guns as if they were jewelry. The gun exists to stop attacks by beast or by man. Florida is so screwed up on that kind of thing that we have one man who is serving a very long sentence for firing a harmless, warning shot to warn an intruder to stop the attacks upon his wife and daughter. Florida also had a witch trial in which Mr. Zimmerman went to trial despite no reason at all to arrest or put him on trial. Nobody wishes to confront what really occurred. In Florida we now have a strong right to self defense. If it happens that no witnesses exist and a fatal shot takes place the real fact is that Mr. Zimmerman had no requirement to talk to the police at all. Without strong evidence the police had no right to detain or question Mr. Zimmerman. The prosecution of Mr. Zimmerman was political. He was not put on trial by a local prosecutor as they refused to do so. The investigating police refused to make the arrest until the governor got involved.
Now we get down to the grit of the issue. Some groups feel that their family members are more likely to commit crimes against others and they do not want people to be able to defend themselves. Said straight out crime brings a lot of cash into ghetto communities. And we have segments of society that want crime to persist. Think about it. Cops, the prison system, judges and lawyers would all be hurting if crime ceased to exist. Is it any wonder that we have prison systems that make criminals worse than they were before they were caught?
From the pics that I have seen life in their jails is probably nicer than the home of the average American. Their system does not have anything in common with ours. They seem to actually try hard to improve the life and behavior of an inmate. American prisons have forms of torture such as mind numbing boredom, isolation, unpleasant food, constant noise and deprivation as well as an ever present chance of violence. None of these things do anything to "correct" and inmate so naturally it is usually called The Department Of Corrections.
Serious economic scrutiny would stop a lot of crime. Does anyone not know someone or some business that gets by while perpetually breaking the law? How many people could not hope to explain how they can pay and expensive mortgage, a car lease or other symptoms of a rich life all the while declaring the income of a pauper?
My scheme was to use convict labor to build great pyramids by hand. Escape would not be likely as the desert spots would be way to far from the first water holes. Give convicts a credit for each good work day put in. That way instead of a ten year sentence we could give a 3,000 work day sentence. If the convict chooses not to work diligently he auto converts his sentence to permanent imprisonment. A few years of hard manual labor in the sun will tame almost anyone.
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How close a friend must someone be for me to drive him or her to the airport? If I get gas money for so doing is it a crime? Why is Uber any different and how can it be legal to treat different people differently? Older modes of doing business will now vanish. It is called progress.
I doubt that it is safe to count on most glass not failing under such stress. Climbing concrete or sheet rock might be a better notion.
The cab drivers do not have a unique issue. I know a used car dealer who feels that only dealers should ever be allowed to sell vehicles as dealers have to pay fees and meet many regulations that private parties do not. Obviously the only function of technology is to eliminate labor, both manual and intellectual. It is simply the cab drivers' turn to suffer the shock of a changing society. School teachers are being replaced by computers in many classrooms. yet we hear no uproar. Bookkeepers, girls Friday,and small office workers have suffered huge loss of employment due to cell phones and tax software. Even surgeons are at risk for replacement by robotics. And the howling will get louder. Commercial vehicle drivers of all types are going to cease to exist soon. The construction trades will take a death blow from 3d printed housing and components as well. This tide can not be held back nor should it be. Humans will be forced to change monetary and social policies in ways that no one has yet dreamed of and it is coming on fast.
This may mean it is easier for a democrat to win the general election. Although Virginia has many conservative voters I doubt that the majority of voters are looned out enough to elect a tea party candidate to congress. And frankly that is exactly what the tea party is. The are a bunch of naive and under educated fools with absurd beliefs. They can not even define what really bothers them. It is rather simple in fact. Over the decades our law makers have passed so many laws that react and interact with other laws that the power of the vote or the ability to pass new, better, laws is impeded. This leaves them with the feeling that their vote is meaningless. One one feels that one's vote has no meaning then the next leap of logic is to call the government some sort of corrupt dictatorship filled with power hungry monsters just itching to take your civil liberties away. Look at the number of nuts who have used the word treason to apply to President Obama. At least half of that caused by the president not being snow white in color.
Why would anyone think that secondary school teachers are not forced to toe a political or religious line from their superiors? In high school we had a class on forms of government. During the portion on communism the teacher would play the role of advocating communism. The teacher would also advocate for socialism and republics and monarchies as each was featured. That was in 1962. If we had that class today a teacher would be in serious trouble as the expectation of freedom of speech is not now what it once was. I know someone will ask what advantage does communism offer. Rapid decisions without lengthy negotiations and consultations are one feature of communism. The other feature is that some communist nations actually have provided a safety net for the lowest classes of citizens. The bad part is that communist governments tend to murder people who do not eagerly fall in line with the plan of the hour.
Not all states allow unions to have much power at all. Favoritism and influence can play a huge part in getting School Board employees wrongfully fired. I will not say that I have never seen a lousy teacher but they are rare. I have seen numerous students that never should have been allowed in a classroom. Teachers have not been allowed to fail many students that need to be failed. In my area it seems that the teachers must beg and cajole students not to drop out of school as our beaches and the like are far too tempting and the curse of the GED diplomas causes kids to quite school early. I would suggest that no driver's license be allowed for school drop outs before the age of 35. That one law would stop half of our drop outs from happening. I would also like to se employers refusing to accept drop outs or GED graduates.
In 1962 the City of Ft. Lauderdale purchased a riot tank due to the overwhelming fear of college students on spring break. I am now 90 miles north of Ft. Lauderdale and my tiny town has a tank designed to drive through the walls of homes on sudden, forced entries. It is a response to the odd drug dealer who wants to go down in a hail of bullets. No walls to hide behind with these tanks I suppose.
Some crops are so easy to grow that it would be next to impossible not to farm them even by accident. Other crops are difficult and take a lot of luck to produce. Gather some cotton and work it by hand to remove the seeds and drop a few seeds and see what happens. Cotton can almost grow on an excuse. Gather some guava and spit the seeds or cast away a guava fruit with a worm in it and you will probably have a guava plant soon in that spot. The little cherry tomatoes sprout from bird droppings in all kinds of places out in the wild. I suspect that to some degree people have always farmed.
Crime is no longer a career choice. Crime has long been the employment of quite a few members of society but now they will be caught.
Did they do these studies with one type of anesthesia or many? Were some worse than others? I dread the thought of what we might use as an alternative. A punch in the jaw or a mallet to the top of the head are no longer acceptable.
I resent the blazes out of dredging to accommodate bigger ships. If anything we need far less ships here. Ships are a huge air pollution problem. You should see the cartons of cigarettes that people toss off of the cruise ships that wash up on Ft. Lauderdale's beaches. The other item is the tampon inserting tubes. They are plastic and we get all kinds of them in the surf.
You might be shocked at how many technicians and engineers have had their heads destroyed by industrial robotic arms by robots who never had a clue that humans had intruded into their working area. The speed of those heavy, robotic arms can be about the speed of the head of a golf club when it tries to knock a hole in one.
Here we have parents who have come to know that their offspring has defects and wants a situation where truth is buried so that their brat will get out of the house and have less need to borrow money from them for the rest of their lives. Being that morality is a strange notion to them it does not occur that people with the best life record should be rewarded by society to a greater degree than people who, one way or another, are a mess. Yes some employers are creeps but some are not. And the employer who supports society by rewarding kids who have done well in school and had far fewer issues than the average kid get hired and promoted much faster than lesser folks. Assume that the data on two individuals is so close that one can not be told from the other. But one had a drunk driving arrest at the age of 14 when he swiped his mom's car. Which person should get the job at the age of 25? Everything counts for everybody every time. In the old days a wealthy family could cover up for a defective teen. Those days are vanishing. Now individuals may actually have to compete with other individuals with a lot more facts being known about everyone involved.
The very reason that many people own cars has to do with unusual routes and unusual hours. For example some bus routes shut down at 6PM. That doesn't seem like a big problem until your job insists that overtime be worked and you don't leave work until 7 PM.. And you can not assume that a taxi will be available either as drivers prefer certain routes and certain passengers. So now you are stranded, perhaps in an industrial area or an area with no sidewalks and you are actually in danger. I have seen times when even in a severe emergency one could not get a cop for 45 minutes. If the public is ever to trust bus services they need to keep running 24/7/365 with very short wait times as well as backup buses in case one stalls or gets a flat tire.
Obviously the old creep issued some really nasty remarks and the NBA really doesn't need owners that degrade the climate of the sport. Conversely we very well have an elderly man who is more or less in the throes of dementia. Questions such as how does the Americans With Disabilities Act pertain to unfortunate or ugly remarks by an afflicted person may be relevant. Beyond that is the glaring issue of forcing his wife to sell as well. After all, she is an individual, and deserves the full protection of the law just as we all do. The NBA took the position that she must sell due to the fact that she is married to the creep. And even above all of those issues is an even more troublesome issue of allowing any party other than the judiciary to assign punishments. Suppose you are running a business and discover that you have a racist as an employee although he is rather quiet about his beliefs. Can you fire him with impunity? Keep in mind that racism is sometimes perceived where it does not exist or the group in question may not be popular. For example if you employ someone from Palestine and fire him he will find a lot less recourse in the American justice system than if you fired a Jewish person. Also many businesses use false pretenses when discharging an employee. Can society afford to get involved in all of this sort of thing?
The public has turned into a big sissy, frightened by the slightest perceived threat. And we have no common sense or agreement on what should be considered wrong or illegal. I would rather throw the people that advertise phony medications on the net under the bus than some guy who hacks into a banks computer and tells the world about who has the money in the community.
These batteries shift the need for gasoline to the power grid. But most utility companies are pretty lazy and I wonder if we develop great electric cars in quantities whether the power lines will start to glow like the wires in my toaster. We can hope that power companies are investing in far more robust systems. Oddly this car issue may actually save the power companies as charging all these electric cars may mean that less people self supply all of their homes electric needs. A home with three electric cars all wanting to charge up at the same time is unlikely to do well on solar panels on the roof.
It is obvious that we lost some wonderful and brave people on 9/11. We also lost some expensive buildings and the suffering of many people may ruin the lives of many families for life. Sometimes 9/11 is compared to Pearl Harbor. But in all seriousness 9/11 does not compare to Pearl Harbor at all. During that attack we lost ships and sailors and airmen that we would need to save our nation and the pain to our nation included the threat of loss of the nation. The 9/11 attack was not a major attack in that sense. I don't think many people viewed 9/11 as threatening to collapse the entire nation. The idea that for purposes of trial we label 9/11 as a major attack doesn't sit well with me. Yes, we do have a lunatic, cult like, group of incompetents who would like to crush us. But we see them more as idiots than a military threat. I think the term idiots is justified as none of the enemy will improve their place in life from the wretched little fight that these folks have put up. In the end these people live at our leisure. If they really were a "major threat" then we would have gone to the big weapons and simply erased them from the face of the Earth. Covert actions by our government may be far more dangerous than a bunch of religious primitives running about with AK47s.
OK, so first we will have the government scanning people in sensitive positions. Then employers will insist as well. And then we will see things like a drivers license brain exam to find out if the person has moments when he drives drunk or on dope or has hidden medical issues. But the most fun will come when it is routine for courts to require lawyers and all parties giving evidence to also be scanned. And then daddy will insist on scanning his female children to make sure they are not playing nasty with others etc. etc.. I have always felt that the truth shall set us free. These days the truth might turn 90% of us into howling maniacs. Maybe we could have a TV show that featured past crimes detected by mind scans. And the IRS would just enjoy the heck out of such a device. Lawyers would leap out of windows all across the nation as would quite a few judges and probably all of the House and Senate would have to jump as well.
Generalized surveillance such as hidden cams watching any car or foot traffic on a block is probably very common. Areas around schools are a great example as public interest wants kids to be able to walk home without being swept up and molested. Volunteer addresses may be a common practice such that bad guys can never operate with impunity.
The hidden debates are several in number. First there is no sane argument of the right of Americans to own guns. We are more than entitled to own guns. "To bear arms" means to carry guns at all times, everywhere, by all adults. But even that is not up for debate as it is the prime law of the United States that we all, always have the right to carry guns. The right to use deadly force is the real issue. And America is all messed up on that part of the issue. After all our forefathers did not consider carrying guns as if they were jewelry. The gun exists to stop attacks by beast or by man. Florida is so screwed up on that kind of thing that we have one man who is serving a very long sentence for firing a harmless, warning shot to warn an intruder to stop the attacks upon his wife and daughter. Florida also had a witch trial in which Mr. Zimmerman went to trial despite no reason at all to arrest or put him on trial. Nobody wishes to confront what really occurred. In Florida we now have a strong right to self defense. If it happens that no witnesses exist and a fatal shot takes place the real fact is that Mr. Zimmerman had no requirement to talk to the police at all. Without strong evidence the police had no right to detain or question Mr. Zimmerman. The prosecution of Mr. Zimmerman was political. He was not put on trial by a local prosecutor as they refused to do so. The investigating police refused to make the arrest until the governor got involved. Now we get down to the grit of the issue. Some groups feel that their family members are more likely to commit crimes against others and they do not want people to be able to defend themselves. Said straight out crime brings a lot of cash into ghetto communities. And we have segments of society that want crime to persist. Think about it. Cops, the prison system, judges and lawyers would all be hurting if crime ceased to exist. Is it any wonder that we have prison systems that make criminals worse than they were before they were caught?
From the pics that I have seen life in their jails is probably nicer than the home of the average American. Their system does not have anything in common with ours. They seem to actually try hard to improve the life and behavior of an inmate. American prisons have forms of torture such as mind numbing boredom, isolation, unpleasant food, constant noise and deprivation as well as an ever present chance of violence. None of these things do anything to "correct" and inmate so naturally it is usually called The Department Of Corrections.
How often do investors or owners ruin a company with idiotic policies? I've seen it first hand.
Serious economic scrutiny would stop a lot of crime. Does anyone not know someone or some business that gets by while perpetually breaking the law? How many people could not hope to explain how they can pay and expensive mortgage, a car lease or other symptoms of a rich life all the while declaring the income of a pauper?
My scheme was to use convict labor to build great pyramids by hand. Escape would not be likely as the desert spots would be way to far from the first water holes. Give convicts a credit for each good work day put in. That way instead of a ten year sentence we could give a 3,000 work day sentence. If the convict chooses not to work diligently he auto converts his sentence to permanent imprisonment. A few years of hard manual labor in the sun will tame almost anyone.