Yes, yes I have. She was hot, but she was the dealer's girlfriend.
I wasn't going to try to take her home. I mean, I could have probably done it, but she'd have just gone back to him anyway. He had the coke.
Plus, why would I have wanted to piss off the only coke dealer I knew at the time? It's not my favorite drug, but it can be fun at a party. I don't go to that kind of party these days, but I remember them fondly.
Plus, it was the favorite drug (or at least second after oxycontin) of the friend through whom I met both the dealer and the dealer's girl. Why would I want to cause the grief?
Still, I kinda wish I'd have hooked up with her at some point. Another friend of ours did after she was through with the dealer for a while, and he said she was an animal in bed... and a squirter. I've never been with an honest-to-goodness squirter myself, and I'd like to have tried it before I tied myself down to my non-squirting wife.
Yeah, this is Slashdot. Stereotypes are misleading sometimes, you see. I also played sports for a while in junior high and high school, also did quiz bowl, I do some woodworking and other things involving power tools that are not PC case modding (although that's fun too sometimes), and had sex before I was even in high school. I listen to country, rave techno, blues, rock, reggae, disco, classical, ska, big band, bluegrass, chill, house, ambient, metal, and show tunes. I'm a baseball, MMA, football (American), skateboarding, volleyball, and shooting sports fan, and I've tried all those sports and more myself.
Go ahead, tell me what pigeon hole I belong in now.
Oh, actually, I do have ADHD. As in I have ADHD actually diagnosed by a holder of a Medical Doctorate degree and a board certification in Psychiatry. It's all ADHD, BTW. ADD is just something some people call ADHD "sufferers" who don't show obvious signs of hyperactivity.
It's not actually a very risky "disorder". I think differently than some people. I get distracted when I'm bored, and it's somewhat worse than people without ADHD. I can focus quite intensely when I'm interested, in ways that most "normal" people find quite interesting when they witness it. I brainstorm on projects very effectively, because it's natural for me to move from one thought to another and come back to the ones that show promise.
So please, quit fear mongering by denigrating people who live happy, successful lives just because they are not like you.
Unregulated marijuana on the black market is much more likely to be cut with meth or some other non-marijuana drug. It's also much more likely to be sold by someone selling meth, heroin, crack, or oxycontin than a pack of marijuana at a convenience store next to the Marlboros would be.
Gateway drug? Well, maybe, but I've never seen a definitive study. Gateway drug dealers? Yes, definitely. I've seen this happen.
It seems very few medical marijuana patients in California go on to harder drugs by proportion. a study done through the University of New Hampshire says that the so-called "gateway effect" is probably less harmful to teens than getting stigmatized by a pot arrest, since unemployment in a person's twenties is a bigger factor in the use of other drugs. (Yes, that's a link to a pro-pot site, but they cite the sources.) There is other evidence that any gateway between marijuana and harder drugs is small, possibly smaller than that of underage drinking and cigarette use, and that it may have more to do with marijuana sharing its illegal status with other drugs than anything else.
Likewise, illegal prostitution is much more likely to involve violence, disease, robbery, theft, kidnapped or runaway workers, underreported income or tax evasion, and other problems than legal and regulated prostitution. Leaving it illegal is like inviting these problems upon the whores and their clients.
Both issues also use more law enforcement time and budget that could be going to either helping with real crime and combating drugs that are actually really harmful like crystal meth. Maybe even some of that budget could be saved. They also lead to other problems for the government like more undocumented workers, more problems collecting taxes, more incarceration costs, more court costs, more public health problems, more money laundering, etc.
In fact, if the government is actually concerned about terrorists using drugs and hookers to get money, they should make all that business show up on audited books. It's just the right thing to do for the safety and security of the American people.
Also, get it off the street corners and into registered brothels or call-out services. Kids see those street hookers, and ask Mommy what they're doing. Think of the children!
Well, the victim is the 12-year-old runaway who has sex with countless strangers because her pimp is the only one who keeps her fed, or the 11-year-old girl kidnapped and shipped overseas to be sold into sexual slavery.
The problem is, that's not the only type of prostitution that's illegal. Stop the kidnappers when you can, and get the runaway back to her parents or into foster care.
Leave the adults to do what they want, and tax it and regulate it for safety. If there's a legal market for prostitution that doesn't include some of the worst abuses in the illegal market, the worst abuses will be less tolerated by those doing it legally. They'll report violent pimps, underage girls, kidnapped girls, and johns who hit or rob them much more often if they're not in fear of getting busted themselves.
And no, I am not in favor of prostitution. I've always had enough sex without paying for it, and I don't have a desire to start. I don't think it's the healthiest of activities for the whores or their clients. I'm not one to pry into the sex lives of others on a regular basis, though, and I think it's clear that banning and prosecuting prostitution makes things worse.
If they're going to do it and you can't stop them, make it safer for them to do it. Even people opposed to the practice need to be smart enough to see that banning it does no good.
Legality is not an endorsement by the state or by a town's population. We have legal tobacco products with heavy taxes that pay for press to keep people from smoking and chewing. We teach kids it is dangerous and irresponsible to smoke. Yet it's legal. Legality just means there's no reason for something to be illegal or that the benefits to legality outweigh the benefits to a ban and failed enforcement.
There is a lot of belief in politics that if we make something illegal, people will lose their cars to the law enforcement agency that catches them doing the illegal thing in their cars.
Outlawing it, declaring war on it, having shitty prosecution numbers, and hiring more cops and corrections officers to deal with arresting and incarcerating the "offenders" makes a wonderful jobs bill.
Also, many johns and drug buyers are now caught in asset forfeiture nets if they use a car, cell phone, or some other piece of easily seizable property to commit the illegal act. That helps pay for the extra cops and corrections officers.
That's what they want the defendant to do: show the court how they are innocent. It's pretty fucking hard to do that if you ignore the summons and never contact the court.
As someone who has experienced the working world, I can tell you that if you're employed by someone other than yourself there's often no bonus points for efficiency, either. If you get more work done, you get assigned more work or you may actually get some extra free time between projects. In your review after a certain amount of time, you may get a raise or a promotion based in part on your efficiency. Your work defect rate being low within the assigned deadlines is far more important than getting done well ahead of deadlines, though.
If you're self-employed for contract work, you may get the same benefits for being efficient as the rapid student. If your work passes muster and you can do it faster than some other guy, you get either more free time as free time or more time to spend doing another project. You're still usually under no pressure to do the job substantially faster from the client, although sometimes that does happen because the client failed to plan ahead or their other contractor fell through. That's when you can charge and expedite fee, though. What the client wants is a workable solution within their deadline. If you can deliver early and move on to another client, that's more money, but you might prefer a break between clients sometimes. (Actually, don't deliver too early or they'll think they've overpaid. If your estimate was too long by too big a margin, hold back on delivery a bit but still deliver somewhat early.) You still have to go out and find that next client, though, so the extra time doesn't always become extra money even if you want it that way.
If you're manufacturing something, the biggest concern in efficiency is in the process. Taking a given amount of time to improve the process is fine. The manufacturer, except in rare situations, would rather you work to deadline to get a bigger efficiency gain in the manufacturing process than to get a small gain in the process well ahead of deadline. If you can easily implement a partial upgrade early and still get a bigger gain at the end of the project without a lot of extra downtime for the two separate implementations, then that might be worthwhile. In no case is a large-scale process owner going to be happy with just a 2% gain designed in two days if they gave you a month of engineering time. They'll want you to spend the rest of the month coming up with further process improvements whether you can implement them separately or not.
The only real-world situation that comes to mind in which efficiency always brings a direct monetary reward is sales. The faster you can close sales and actually collect on them, the faster you can make money. Even then, some salespeople would rather get the same amount of money in less time (after a point, of course) than more money in the same amount of time.
Temporary definitions are often made to limit the range of discussion. Saying "when we talk about X in the course of our discussions, we're limiting ourselves to definition Y" is common even in non-scientific magazine articles.
You don't think that when CNN reports an unemployment rate without qualifiers that they're talking about global unemployment, right? Yet such a concept exists, and would still be called an unemployment rate. It's just outside the contextual definition that a US national news network would assume.
Saying that "life" means X, Y, and Z in the context of a certain set of studies doesn't mean there aren't other processes that resemble life. It just means those other processes aren't useful to the current discussion.
You do realize that the children and spouses of soldiers shop at stores on base, too, right? GameStop doesn't have to sell this game in their stores at all. They've chosen to sell it in stores other than those on bases.
I'd guess the biggest problems this will cause for military personnel are that they have to get a liberty to go buy it in person if they are in one of the positions otherwise confined to base and that they'll have to pay sales tax.
You assume complete annihilation or permanent occupation of the conquered. That's not how modern warfare works. There will still be people in Afghanistan who are literate after the US has pulled out. They can write their own history books.
Whether you'd kick his ass or not, he says he wouldn't want to do it. Someone else might not try it specifically because you're such a Bruce "Rampage" Norris badass. Just because there's more than one reason not to do it doesn't mean he'd have to consider them all to make a decision not to.
Damn, this is supposed to be a geek site. How can you not understand:
if ( could_try_to_cut_in_line ) {
if ( is_rude_enough ) {
if ( is_not_afraid ) {
cut_in_line();
}
} }
I mean, there's absolutely no reason to imagine what would happen if he did something if he had no desire to do it in the first place. It's like saying you don't want to be kicked in the balls because you might get mud form someone's shoe on your pants crotch. I'd say I didn't want to be kicked in the balls in the first damn place, so I wouldn't worry about the mud.
There is nothing in any of the articles linked even three deep which specifically suggests he never served the defendant named in the case. He obviously convinced the court someone was served, or a judgement would never have been entered. He may not have served the wrong defendant correctly, but you can't just assume that.
If it was a false lien you should have contacted your state's regulatory board for his industry and your state's attorney general's office. Filing a false lien is a crime, not just a civil matter. If you had a mortgage, your bank would probably be sufficiently pissed that he was trying to leapfrog into the first lienholder position past them without reason, too.
You could have not only defended against him, but countersued him and maybe even sued the primary contractor if they had ever actually contacted him about contracting on the property. It'd be their responsibility first to pay a subcontractor and only yours if the contractor failed to pay them. If the primary contractor failed to pay them for something they actually did, that would leave the primary contractor liable to reimburse you. Both of the contractors should be licensed and bonded with your state. You could reasonably expect to be paid your judgments from their bond.
IANAL, but I have studied to be a real estate sales agent and passed my course with flying colors (although I never bothered to take the licensing exams due to other factors in my life at the time). Lots of this very basic stuff about property law is quite simple in theory, but of course a lawyer should be contacted about the particular case.
I don't know the particulars of your case beyond what you've said here, but it seems your lawyer just wanted the quick payday just like the housing subcontractor. I think if your case was as strong as it reads, a good lawyer could have won your case and recovered fees. The headache and time might not have been worth it, though, and that was for you to decide, not your attorney.
Sure, you can sue for no apparent reason. So what? You'll get burned for filing a frivolous complaint, possibly for harassment, and if you abuse the privilege maybe even contempt of the court. You'll end up with massive fines, massive damages found against you, and possible jail time.
Then again, this guy wasn't trying to sue someone on false grounds. He just made an egregious mistake in filing the suit against the proper defendant.
The options are actually that you can use the civil court system for redress of grievances and that you can't. If a defendant can ignore a summons, you can't use the civil courts at all. It's just as simple as that. Whether that leads to vigilante justice isn't automatically answered, but vigilante justice is what the courts are designed to avoid.
It's easy in many cases to disprove a negative. You only need one positive example.
What you can't do is disprove something that can't be proven. To say "there is no god" means you'd have to be able to prove there was one if there was.
Yes, civil law and criminal law do work differently. Still, a defendant is assumed innocent of causing damages in civil court until the plaintiff proves damages.
The required proof is lower. A civil case is based on a preponderence of evidence, or basically a 55%-ish or more probability that the defendant caused the harm. A criminal case is supposed to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
One thing both have in common, though, is that the defendant is required to answer the complaint. In a civil case not answering the complaint can mean default judgment. In criminal court, it can mean a fresh criminal charge and a bench warrant for the arrest of the defendant. One can even be convicted of criminal failure to appear if eventually found innocent of the initial charge.
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Yes, yes I have. She was hot, but she was the dealer's girlfriend.
I wasn't going to try to take her home. I mean, I could have probably done it, but she'd have just gone back to him anyway. He had the coke.
Plus, why would I have wanted to piss off the only coke dealer I knew at the time? It's not my favorite drug, but it can be fun at a party. I don't go to that kind of party these days, but I remember them fondly.
Plus, it was the favorite drug (or at least second after oxycontin) of the friend through whom I met both the dealer and the dealer's girl. Why would I want to cause the grief?
Still, I kinda wish I'd have hooked up with her at some point. Another friend of ours did after she was through with the dealer for a while, and he said she was an animal in bed... and a squirter. I've never been with an honest-to-goodness squirter myself, and I'd like to have tried it before I tied myself down to my non-squirting wife.
Yeah, this is Slashdot. Stereotypes are misleading sometimes, you see. I also played sports for a while in junior high and high school, also did quiz bowl, I do some woodworking and other things involving power tools that are not PC case modding (although that's fun too sometimes), and had sex before I was even in high school. I listen to country, rave techno, blues, rock, reggae, disco, classical, ska, big band, bluegrass, chill, house, ambient, metal, and show tunes. I'm a baseball, MMA, football (American), skateboarding, volleyball, and shooting sports fan, and I've tried all those sports and more myself.
Go ahead, tell me what pigeon hole I belong in now.
My dad worked nights when I was very little. I grew up watching TV with him in the day and my mom at night. I never...
Oh! Look! OMG! Ponies!.
Oh, actually, I do have ADHD. As in I have ADHD actually diagnosed by a holder of a Medical Doctorate degree and a board certification in Psychiatry. It's all ADHD, BTW. ADD is just something some people call ADHD "sufferers" who don't show obvious signs of hyperactivity.
It's not actually a very risky "disorder". I think differently than some people. I get distracted when I'm bored, and it's somewhat worse than people without ADHD. I can focus quite intensely when I'm interested, in ways that most "normal" people find quite interesting when they witness it. I brainstorm on projects very effectively, because it's natural for me to move from one thought to another and come back to the ones that show promise.
So please, quit fear mongering by denigrating people who live happy, successful lives just because they are not like you.
You've never gone to a party with a coked-up 24-year-old redhead chick, have you?
Unregulated marijuana on the black market is much more likely to be cut with meth or some other non-marijuana drug. It's also much more likely to be sold by someone selling meth, heroin, crack, or oxycontin than a pack of marijuana at a convenience store next to the Marlboros would be.
Gateway drug? Well, maybe, but I've never seen a definitive study. Gateway drug dealers? Yes, definitely. I've seen this happen.
It seems very few medical marijuana patients in California go on to harder drugs by proportion. a study done through the University of New Hampshire says that the so-called "gateway effect" is probably less harmful to teens than getting stigmatized by a pot arrest, since unemployment in a person's twenties is a bigger factor in the use of other drugs. (Yes, that's a link to a pro-pot site, but they cite the sources.) There is other evidence that any gateway between marijuana and harder drugs is small, possibly smaller than that of underage drinking and cigarette use, and that it may have more to do with marijuana sharing its illegal status with other drugs than anything else.
Likewise, illegal prostitution is much more likely to involve violence, disease, robbery, theft, kidnapped or runaway workers, underreported income or tax evasion, and other problems than legal and regulated prostitution. Leaving it illegal is like inviting these problems upon the whores and their clients.
Both issues also use more law enforcement time and budget that could be going to either helping with real crime and combating drugs that are actually really harmful like crystal meth. Maybe even some of that budget could be saved. They also lead to other problems for the government like more undocumented workers, more problems collecting taxes, more incarceration costs, more court costs, more public health problems, more money laundering, etc.
In fact, if the government is actually concerned about terrorists using drugs and hookers to get money, they should make all that business show up on audited books. It's just the right thing to do for the safety and security of the American people.
Also, get it off the street corners and into registered brothels or call-out services. Kids see those street hookers, and ask Mommy what they're doing. Think of the children!
Well, the victim is the 12-year-old runaway who has sex with countless strangers because her pimp is the only one who keeps her fed, or the 11-year-old girl kidnapped and shipped overseas to be sold into sexual slavery.
The problem is, that's not the only type of prostitution that's illegal. Stop the kidnappers when you can, and get the runaway back to her parents or into foster care.
Leave the adults to do what they want, and tax it and regulate it for safety. If there's a legal market for prostitution that doesn't include some of the worst abuses in the illegal market, the worst abuses will be less tolerated by those doing it legally. They'll report violent pimps, underage girls, kidnapped girls, and johns who hit or rob them much more often if they're not in fear of getting busted themselves.
And no, I am not in favor of prostitution. I've always had enough sex without paying for it, and I don't have a desire to start. I don't think it's the healthiest of activities for the whores or their clients. I'm not one to pry into the sex lives of others on a regular basis, though, and I think it's clear that banning and prosecuting prostitution makes things worse.
If they're going to do it and you can't stop them, make it safer for them to do it. Even people opposed to the practice need to be smart enough to see that banning it does no good.
Legality is not an endorsement by the state or by a town's population. We have legal tobacco products with heavy taxes that pay for press to keep people from smoking and chewing. We teach kids it is dangerous and irresponsible to smoke. Yet it's legal. Legality just means there's no reason for something to be illegal or that the benefits to legality outweigh the benefits to a ban and failed enforcement.
There is a lot of belief in politics that if we make something illegal, people will lose their cars to the law enforcement agency that catches them doing the illegal thing in their cars.
Outlawing it, declaring war on it, having shitty prosecution numbers, and hiring more cops and corrections officers to deal with arresting and incarcerating the "offenders" makes a wonderful jobs bill.
Also, many johns and drug buyers are now caught in asset forfeiture nets if they use a car, cell phone, or some other piece of easily seizable property to commit the illegal act. That helps pay for the extra cops and corrections officers.
That's what they want the defendant to do: show the court how they are innocent. It's pretty fucking hard to do that if you ignore the summons and never contact the court.
As someone who has experienced the working world, I can tell you that if you're employed by someone other than yourself there's often no bonus points for efficiency, either. If you get more work done, you get assigned more work or you may actually get some extra free time between projects. In your review after a certain amount of time, you may get a raise or a promotion based in part on your efficiency. Your work defect rate being low within the assigned deadlines is far more important than getting done well ahead of deadlines, though.
If you're self-employed for contract work, you may get the same benefits for being efficient as the rapid student. If your work passes muster and you can do it faster than some other guy, you get either more free time as free time or more time to spend doing another project. You're still usually under no pressure to do the job substantially faster from the client, although sometimes that does happen because the client failed to plan ahead or their other contractor fell through. That's when you can charge and expedite fee, though. What the client wants is a workable solution within their deadline. If you can deliver early and move on to another client, that's more money, but you might prefer a break between clients sometimes. (Actually, don't deliver too early or they'll think they've overpaid. If your estimate was too long by too big a margin, hold back on delivery a bit but still deliver somewhat early.) You still have to go out and find that next client, though, so the extra time doesn't always become extra money even if you want it that way.
If you're manufacturing something, the biggest concern in efficiency is in the process. Taking a given amount of time to improve the process is fine. The manufacturer, except in rare situations, would rather you work to deadline to get a bigger efficiency gain in the manufacturing process than to get a small gain in the process well ahead of deadline. If you can easily implement a partial upgrade early and still get a bigger gain at the end of the project without a lot of extra downtime for the two separate implementations, then that might be worthwhile. In no case is a large-scale process owner going to be happy with just a 2% gain designed in two days if they gave you a month of engineering time. They'll want you to spend the rest of the month coming up with further process improvements whether you can implement them separately or not.
The only real-world situation that comes to mind in which efficiency always brings a direct monetary reward is sales. The faster you can close sales and actually collect on them, the faster you can make money. Even then, some salespeople would rather get the same amount of money in less time (after a point, of course) than more money in the same amount of time.
Germany and Japan have history books written by the Japanese and Germans, and not by the US textbook press.
You know that it should be created by ° or ° in HTML regardless of OS, right? Except Slashdot hates HTML entities.
Temporary definitions are often made to limit the range of discussion. Saying "when we talk about X in the course of our discussions, we're limiting ourselves to definition Y" is common even in non-scientific magazine articles.
You don't think that when CNN reports an unemployment rate without qualifiers that they're talking about global unemployment, right? Yet such a concept exists, and would still be called an unemployment rate. It's just outside the contextual definition that a US national news network would assume.
Saying that "life" means X, Y, and Z in the context of a certain set of studies doesn't mean there aren't other processes that resemble life. It just means those other processes aren't useful to the current discussion.
Does the three-hour final give bonus points to the guy who finished in an hour instead of three hours?
You realize not all soldiers live on base, right?
What, you mean a car accident?
You do realize that the children and spouses of soldiers shop at stores on base, too, right? GameStop doesn't have to sell this game in their stores at all. They've chosen to sell it in stores other than those on bases.
I'd guess the biggest problems this will cause for military personnel are that they have to get a liberty to go buy it in person if they are in one of the positions otherwise confined to base and that they'll have to pay sales tax.
What do you mean "over there"? There are GameStop stores on combat field bases in Afghanistan?
You assume complete annihilation or permanent occupation of the conquered. That's not how modern warfare works. There will still be people in Afghanistan who are literate after the US has pulled out. They can write their own history books.
Whether you'd kick his ass or not, he says he wouldn't want to do it. Someone else might not try it specifically because you're such a Bruce "Rampage" Norris badass. Just because there's more than one reason not to do it doesn't mean he'd have to consider them all to make a decision not to.
Damn, this is supposed to be a geek site. How can you not understand:
if ( could_try_to_cut_in_line ) {
if ( is_rude_enough ) {
if ( is_not_afraid ) {
cut_in_line();
}
}
}
I mean, there's absolutely no reason to imagine what would happen if he did something if he had no desire to do it in the first place. It's like saying you don't want to be kicked in the balls because you might get mud form someone's shoe on your pants crotch. I'd say I didn't want to be kicked in the balls in the first damn place, so I wouldn't worry about the mud.
There is nothing in any of the articles linked even three deep which specifically suggests he never served the defendant named in the case. He obviously convinced the court someone was served, or a judgement would never have been entered. He may not have served the wrong defendant correctly, but you can't just assume that.
If it was a false lien you should have contacted your state's regulatory board for his industry and your state's attorney general's office. Filing a false lien is a crime, not just a civil matter. If you had a mortgage, your bank would probably be sufficiently pissed that he was trying to leapfrog into the first lienholder position past them without reason, too.
You could have not only defended against him, but countersued him and maybe even sued the primary contractor if they had ever actually contacted him about contracting on the property. It'd be their responsibility first to pay a subcontractor and only yours if the contractor failed to pay them. If the primary contractor failed to pay them for something they actually did, that would leave the primary contractor liable to reimburse you. Both of the contractors should be licensed and bonded with your state. You could reasonably expect to be paid your judgments from their bond.
IANAL, but I have studied to be a real estate sales agent and passed my course with flying colors (although I never bothered to take the licensing exams due to other factors in my life at the time). Lots of this very basic stuff about property law is quite simple in theory, but of course a lawyer should be contacted about the particular case.
I don't know the particulars of your case beyond what you've said here, but it seems your lawyer just wanted the quick payday just like the housing subcontractor. I think if your case was as strong as it reads, a good lawyer could have won your case and recovered fees. The headache and time might not have been worth it, though, and that was for you to decide, not your attorney.
Sure, you can sue for no apparent reason. So what? You'll get burned for filing a frivolous complaint, possibly for harassment, and if you abuse the privilege maybe even contempt of the court. You'll end up with massive fines, massive damages found against you, and possible jail time.
Then again, this guy wasn't trying to sue someone on false grounds. He just made an egregious mistake in filing the suit against the proper defendant.
The options are actually that you can use the civil court system for redress of grievances and that you can't. If a defendant can ignore a summons, you can't use the civil courts at all. It's just as simple as that. Whether that leads to vigilante justice isn't automatically answered, but vigilante justice is what the courts are designed to avoid.
No.
It's easy in many cases to disprove a negative. You only need one positive example.
What you can't do is disprove something that can't be proven. To say "there is no god" means you'd have to be able to prove there was one if there was.
Yes, civil law and criminal law do work differently. Still, a defendant is assumed innocent of causing damages in civil court until the plaintiff proves damages.
The required proof is lower. A civil case is based on a preponderence of evidence, or basically a 55%-ish or more probability that the defendant caused the harm. A criminal case is supposed to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
One thing both have in common, though, is that the defendant is required to answer the complaint. In a civil case not answering the complaint can mean default judgment. In criminal court, it can mean a fresh criminal charge and a bench warrant for the arrest of the defendant. One can even be convicted of criminal failure to appear if eventually found innocent of the initial charge.