Are you saying they lied about the lease terms, meaning that what they said about the lease terms was different than the actual lease terms? And then people signed up for the lease without reading the actual lease terms?
Feeling superior are we? Yes I called you a fucking idiot because nothing gets through to you. I love how you ignored everything I said because you were so distracted and offended by that, whereas you expect people to tolerate your own arrogance and smugness.
You can't explain it because you're wrong. That's it. In the world of hypothetical money, the government could charge you $1 million for something, anything. It's hypothetical. Yet they didn't. In your world that must be a subsidy.
If not, explain how it's not.
Pro-tip: you can't, because this analogy is quite good... the LACK of a legal requirement to pay something, either insurance for nuclear damage, or something else
It would be different if you WERE required to pay something but got a special dispensation not to. That's not hypothetical money because you can point to some people having to pay it and others not paying it.
You haven't addressed a single point I've made, but you feel superior because dumb shit like "I'm not going to argue with people who cannot understand that dollars are dollars" is more polite in your world than "fucking idiot." Fucking idiot.
What would be the difference between a company paying for 12 billion dollars of insurance coverage, and one paying for 10 or 20 times that?
Do you not understand numbers or something? You don't know the difference between X and 10X and 20X?
I would like that setup for say, my house insurance. Since we bought our place, it has trebled in value, and I have had to pay more every time it gets re-assessed.
No you don't. Once you own your home, you don't have to have homeowner's insurance at all. It's only your mortgage agreement with a bank that requires you to. Oh hey you learned something new!
A better example would be car insurance since it's legally required in order to drive on public roads. But hey look what do you know, car insurance does not require you to cover a worst case scenario! In my state it's $30k for bodily injury. Now can you use a few brain cells and come up with a situation where $30k wouldn't cover the medical fees for a car accident? Hm? On the other hand you probably ARE the kind of idiot who treats that lack of required unlimited insurance as a driving subsidy.
And as it turns out, there is a federal flood insurance program that does similarly to the Nuc industry exemption from liabilit
You're really not understanding the issue are you? Flood insurance protects the person who holds the policy. If your house floods, you get a new house. If you don't have flood insurance, you don't get a new house. The end.
Now what happens if there's a nuclear disaster? The insurance isn't to protect the company's assets, it's to protect the public. Flood insurance is a terrible analogy.
But I would indeed have about 20 thousand dollars sitting around that I would have not had to pay out over time if I could have been covered in the same way the nuc plants are covered.
Hey well since hypothetical money is real to you, guess what? You're a millionaire! Because the government *could* have a 90% tax rate! And it *could* assess a 100% asset tax every year. And it *could* require everybody to have a $10 million umbrella insurance policy just in case. And it *could* reverse the tax benefit of dependents so you pay $5 million for each child you have.
Wow! You have like literally millions of dollars of hypothetical money lying around! So that means you have millions of real dollars lying around right?
I'm not going to argue with people who cannot understand that dollars are dollars
Buddy, please explain it, because I really don't understand. Why don't you have $500 million in the bank, since the government could assess various fees totaling $500 million against you? You didn't have to pay that, so it should be just lying around unused right?
Explain, I'm soooo confused! Or I would be if I was a fucking idiot like you and thought hypothetical dollars were real.
And like I said, this limitation of liability applies to nearly everyone in the modern world. Debt slavery is gone. Debts are not passed to others. So we are all being subsidized by your logic, which is illogical.
Hey a homeless guy could start a fire in a big city and cause millions of dollars of damage. And he wouldn't have to pay a dime. So the government is subsidizing homeless guys to start fires!!! That's the equivalent of your logic. It's nonsense.
If there is money that you DO have to pay, and the government allows you to not pay it, then that could be considered a subsidy. But if it's money that you DO NOT have to pay, such as a $250 billion charge for Chernobyl, then it's nonsense to call that a subsidy. It was never owed or expected to be paid.
I totally agree with you.. this should not be hard to understand.
The limitation on liabilities isn't even "money that you don't have to pay." It's money that some groups (like Energy Fair) *wish* you had to pay. Otherwise, the maximum liability would be capped at the assets of the company anyway.
I mean I guess you consider that a subsidy, so actually everybody is being subsidized due to bankruptcy laws. That doesn't seem like a useful definition. It's worthless in fact.
Whoa, what? So you reject everything I said because I said "anti-nuclear"? Did you think I just applied that label because I assume they're anti-nuclear due to their use in the article? No, here's the wikipedia page about them: "Energy Fair in the United Kingdom is a group of six people leading a campaign that claims that the nuclear power industry receives unfair subsidies"
That's just what they do. They have tried to come up with every conceivable point to use against nuclear power, whether they are rational or not.
Either it was a poor assumption on your part, or you know better in which case you're just the type of person who enjoys living in their bubble. I mean really that's shocking, anybody interested in talking about pro OR anti nuclear power should not dismiss others for saying "pro" or "anti" -- it's like a joke.
I've always assumed it's some kind of tax scam. To take another example like medical costs.. an ER might have a negotiated rate with an insurance company that is 75% lower than what they charge an uninsured individual. My question is, does that mean if the uninsured person doesn't pay, the ER gets to write off the inflated price as bad debt? So in that case, boosting the price by 4x actually results in the write-off being profitable, assuming say 35% tax. In other words, hey we get to deduct $1000 against the profits we made on patients who paid, that's worth $350 to us, rather than hey we get to deduct $250 against the profits we made, that's worth $87.50 to us. But I don't know.
I've seen that list so there's an easy example to give you.
One of the largest subsidies is the cap on liabilities for nuclear accidents which the nuclear power industry has negotiated with governments. “Like car drivers, the operators of nuclear plants should be properly insured,” said Gerry Wolff, coordinator of the Energy Fair group. The group calculates that, "if nuclear operators were fully insured against the cost of nuclear disasters like those at Chernobyl and Fukushima, the price of nuclear electricity would rise by at least €0.14 per kWh and perhaps as much as €2.36, depending on assumptions made".
So an anti-nuclear group came up with some assumptions that make nuclear energy look bad. News at 11.
This is an example of what I'm talking about... this "subsidy" is actually not a payment to any fossil fuel producer or user.
Another one...
The three largest fossil fuel subsidies were:
1. Foreign tax credit ($15.3 billion)
Now I don't know if you know anything about taxes, but foreign tax credits are not a subsidy to fossil fuels. They are part of the tax treaties we have with many many countries. I get a foreign tax credit every year (about $2... but hey...) for withheld taxes on dividends from foreign corporations that I hold in some mutual funds.
So yes, I'm sure that if Exxon is producing oil from Canada, and must pay a royalty to the Canadian province where it's happening and also to the Canadian federal government, they get an equivalent tax credit here... that's to prevent double taxation because otherwise they'd be paying taxes on the full price of a barrel of oil, when in reality up to half of it is directly given to Canada.
That usually means they have installed (or contracted) a certain amount of wind power that equals out to the amount of electricity they use, not that they have severed their connection to the baseline generation provided by the grid.
But if oil and gas can have the huge subsidies they've gotten
What huge subsidies are you referring to? All of the articles I've seen about fossil fuel subsidies are mostly bullshit. They'll include intangibles like "not having to pay for cancer or climate change caused by coal... that's worth $89 trillion!!!" as a subsidy. Or they'll include as a subsidy the full cost of the highway system, because "that's just for gas burning cars man! that's worth trillions!!!" (I guess they'll have to give up that line now that there are viable electric cars in mass production.) Or some percentage of the defense budget because "muh middle east wars are obviously 100% for oil."
If corporate makes something clear to employees, and trains employees on it, and enforces it, and then an employee does it anyway, then corporate is only accountable to prove that the employee was trained appropriately, and then to fire the employee.
Right, so the employee gets fired. But let me note that it's not like it's required by law that the employee gets fired. That's the company's choice.
But with a contractor, corporate is accountable at all. It doesn't need to train contractors. It doesn't need to prove that contractors understood anything. It doesn't even need to fire the contractors.
I don't understand... if the contractor misbehaves, that will likely breach the contract, and the company is probably not going to enter a new agreement with that person. Why do you think nothing would happen? Wouldn't the broker lose a lot of credibility?
Brokers don't set policies, they simply decide whom to broker. Recruiting agencies don't set hiring requirements either.
They can decide whom to broker based on a set policy though. For instance it's common to have a service like a nanny finding service that does screening for you, background checks, reference checks, etc. There are 2 contracts involved... my contract with the nanny finding service, and the service's contract with nannies. But there is interaction.. my contract with the agency will definitely include things like doing criminal background checks, and that means the agency's contract with the nanny will also include that.
the key question appears to be: who controls the relationship? Under rules 1 and 2, it seems pretty clear that it's Uber, not the driver. Yes, the driver supplies the car and fuel. But that's because Uber says so.
I'm not sure how you determined that. If we look at a more clear cut case like a plumber, it seems like the same things hold. I've never been asked by a plumber to provide his tools or other supplies, and I would find it highly inappropriate and unprofessional if that came up. I don't think that makes me his employer or gives me more or less power in the relationship.
For #3 you're right, but how do you square that with concepts like subcontracting? A subcontract is obviously part of the primary business of the overall contract. If I win a contract to build a new tank, and I subcontract development of the tank engine to some other company, obviously I haven't taken over that company and "employ" them exclusively.
What company do you work for that allows unlimited unpaid leave at your discretion? Or if you're not willing to say, can you say whether it's not wholly or in part owned by you or a relative of yours?
But when you start to meddle with the individual transactions (creating uniform pricing, dictating standards for worker behavior, etc)
Sounds like what Amazon is doing with their new service options. I bought a kitchen faucet last month on Amazon and they gave me the option of adding installation. Uniform pricing, at least some standards (they claim they handpick the businesses involved, require screening, and set standards on scheduling and cancellation).
I wonder if they are considered Amazon employees? I would think not.
You could simply stop driving for Uber any time, but in an at-will state you could walk out at any time. That alone doesn't make you a contractor.
An Uber driver can stop driving at any time, and then start again at any time. That's a huge difference. I can't walk out of my job with no notice or approval and then come back in 8 weeks and say "Well that was a nice vacation!" You can't do that at any job that I know of. Full freedom of setting your own schedule is practically the definition of "being your own boss."
That's not a thing that a client can do to contractors. Can certainly fire contractors for it, but can't promise passengers that contractors will do or not do anything.
What are you trying to say? If the threat of being fired doesn't keep a contractor honest, neither will the the threat of being fired keep the same person honest if you call him an employee instead. So that has no bearing on whether someone is a contractor or an employee.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what Uber drivers do, but I'd say they are clearly not employees under #1. Isn't driving for Uber completely up to the driver on a moment by moment basis? Like I can say, oh I don't feel like working from 9am-11am, so I wont. You can't do that at a real job and keep your employment. Likewise you choose your car and you choose where you drive every day. I don't see how that's anything like a normal job in terms of controlling employee behavior.
You might be thinking of "natural resource" which is a specific type of resource. General use of "resource" would actually include labor, intellectual property, usage rights to your physical property, etc.
Also I find it very hard to believe that we went 100k years without the idea of territory. We're territorial animals. Even during our nomadic phases, we had the concept of personal space and territory that we defended from others.
I'd guess that one of the reasons we don't inherit bodies is that traditionally they have no economic value in our society. Because of modern medicine, now they do. If people ever widely accept the idea of compensating organ donors (which I think is growing.. look at egg donation, it's pretty well compensated in the US), I think it'll be a natural consequence that a person's organs go to his estate upon death.
and why should I give a rat's ass what your ethics are?
That's true no matter what the basis for your ethics.
I drive to work every day, and I don't worry about threats that are a lot less significant than that.
Hmm I don't know about that. Are you sure? There are so many factors that go into risk, but one of the biggest must be mitigation steps. Dying in a car is more likely than dying in a fire, but I bet you have smoke alarms in your house.
How would you even measure the risk of dying from organ harvesting? It's not like they're going to put cause of death: needed his lungs for someone else. It'll say cause of death: car accident.
I think when thinking about probabilities you have to keep in mind Bayes' Theorem, which is about probabilities given prior knowledge of conditions. Yes, the overall absolute chance that I die because someone wants to harvest my organs is teeny tiny. But that's because to be in that situation I first have to have a life threatening injury, which is very unlikely day to day. The question is really what is the probability GIVEN that I'm already in that situation? If it's 1%, that's pretty high. I don't do things that have a 1% risk of death very often.
At one point it was difficult to find a TV that didn't have the 3D feature. Has that changed? When I bought my current TV a few years ago, the only way to avoid 3D was to get one of the ultra-low-end Walmart TVs from a brand you've never heard of. My TV has 3D support that I've used approximately 1 time (maybe twice, but it was the same movie both times, and it sucked).
I did not realize that. No need to be a complete dick about it. It's yet another design flaw in our patent system.. patents are a type of intellectual property, and patent rights are usually analogized to property rights. If I own have the deed for my house free and clear, it means I have complete control over my house (notwithstanding laws)... not just that I can keep other people off, but I have positive control over it as well. You're saying patents are negative only. That totally runs counter to the common understanding of it.
Just as problematic is the "scenery analyzer" that would require the user of the phone to pan its camera around to see if the phone is where the driver sits, or if it's in the "safe zone" of the car. It seems like this is prone to error and would require software
Please tell me that such software does exist or that you don't know what you're talking about? The alternative is that we have a patent system which lets you patent things that don't exist and that you don't know how to implement or describe. And that is ridiculous. Can someone get a patent on just any random words they throw down on paper (okay to be fair, it's more of a vague description than random words)? Let's see, how about "device to automatically hang laundry, with an extensible arm or two and a camera and software to recognize clothes, figure out how to untangle them and turn them the right side out, manipulate a hanger with the arm, and then just do it." Is that actually possible? And then if someone comes up with the software, I can sue them? I'm 100% sure such a device is possible, and will eventually be invented, I just don't know how to write the software part of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you saying they lied about the lease terms, meaning that what they said about the lease terms was different than the actual lease terms? And then people signed up for the lease without reading the actual lease terms?
1) Hyperloop runs along the entire top of Mexico wall
I know you're kidding but that's kind of a cool idea.
Feeling superior are we? Yes I called you a fucking idiot because nothing gets through to you. I love how you ignored everything I said because you were so distracted and offended by that, whereas you expect people to tolerate your own arrogance and smugness.
You can't explain it because you're wrong. That's it. In the world of hypothetical money, the government could charge you $1 million for something, anything. It's hypothetical. Yet they didn't. In your world that must be a subsidy.
If not, explain how it's not.
Pro-tip: you can't, because this analogy is quite good... the LACK of a legal requirement to pay something, either insurance for nuclear damage, or something else
It would be different if you WERE required to pay something but got a special dispensation not to. That's not hypothetical money because you can point to some people having to pay it and others not paying it.
You haven't addressed a single point I've made, but you feel superior because dumb shit like "I'm not going to argue with people who cannot understand that dollars are dollars" is more polite in your world than "fucking idiot." Fucking idiot.
What would be the difference between a company paying for 12 billion dollars of insurance coverage, and one paying for 10 or 20 times that?
Do you not understand numbers or something? You don't know the difference between X and 10X and 20X?
I would like that setup for say, my house insurance. Since we bought our place, it has trebled in value, and I have had to pay more every time it gets re-assessed.
No you don't. Once you own your home, you don't have to have homeowner's insurance at all. It's only your mortgage agreement with a bank that requires you to. Oh hey you learned something new!
A better example would be car insurance since it's legally required in order to drive on public roads. But hey look what do you know, car insurance does not require you to cover a worst case scenario! In my state it's $30k for bodily injury. Now can you use a few brain cells and come up with a situation where $30k wouldn't cover the medical fees for a car accident? Hm? On the other hand you probably ARE the kind of idiot who treats that lack of required unlimited insurance as a driving subsidy.
And as it turns out, there is a federal flood insurance program that does similarly to the Nuc industry exemption from liabilit
You're really not understanding the issue are you? Flood insurance protects the person who holds the policy. If your house floods, you get a new house. If you don't have flood insurance, you don't get a new house. The end.
Now what happens if there's a nuclear disaster? The insurance isn't to protect the company's assets, it's to protect the public. Flood insurance is a terrible analogy.
But I would indeed have about 20 thousand dollars sitting around that I would have not had to pay out over time if I could have been covered in the same way the nuc plants are covered.
Hey well since hypothetical money is real to you, guess what? You're a millionaire! Because the government *could* have a 90% tax rate! And it *could* assess a 100% asset tax every year. And it *could* require everybody to have a $10 million umbrella insurance policy just in case. And it *could* reverse the tax benefit of dependents so you pay $5 million for each child you have.
Wow! You have like literally millions of dollars of hypothetical money lying around! So that means you have millions of real dollars lying around right?
I'm not going to argue with people who cannot understand that dollars are dollars
Buddy, please explain it, because I really don't understand. Why don't you have $500 million in the bank, since the government could assess various fees totaling $500 million against you? You didn't have to pay that, so it should be just lying around unused right?
Explain, I'm soooo confused! Or I would be if I was a fucking idiot like you and thought hypothetical dollars were real.
And like I said, this limitation of liability applies to nearly everyone in the modern world. Debt slavery is gone. Debts are not passed to others. So we are all being subsidized by your logic, which is illogical.
Hey a homeless guy could start a fire in a big city and cause millions of dollars of damage. And he wouldn't have to pay a dime. So the government is subsidizing homeless guys to start fires!!! That's the equivalent of your logic. It's nonsense.
If there is money that you DO have to pay, and the government allows you to not pay it, then that could be considered a subsidy. But if it's money that you DO NOT have to pay, such as a $250 billion charge for Chernobyl, then it's nonsense to call that a subsidy. It was never owed or expected to be paid.
I totally agree with you.. this should not be hard to understand.
The limitation on liabilities isn't even "money that you don't have to pay." It's money that some groups (like Energy Fair) *wish* you had to pay. Otherwise, the maximum liability would be capped at the assets of the company anyway.
I mean I guess you consider that a subsidy, so actually everybody is being subsidized due to bankruptcy laws. That doesn't seem like a useful definition. It's worthless in fact.
Whoa, what? So you reject everything I said because I said "anti-nuclear"? Did you think I just applied that label because I assume they're anti-nuclear due to their use in the article? No, here's the wikipedia page about them: "Energy Fair in the United Kingdom is a group of six people leading a campaign that claims that the nuclear power industry receives unfair subsidies"
That's just what they do. They have tried to come up with every conceivable point to use against nuclear power, whether they are rational or not.
Either it was a poor assumption on your part, or you know better in which case you're just the type of person who enjoys living in their bubble. I mean really that's shocking, anybody interested in talking about pro OR anti nuclear power should not dismiss others for saying "pro" or "anti" -- it's like a joke.
I've always assumed it's some kind of tax scam. To take another example like medical costs.. an ER might have a negotiated rate with an insurance company that is 75% lower than what they charge an uninsured individual. My question is, does that mean if the uninsured person doesn't pay, the ER gets to write off the inflated price as bad debt? So in that case, boosting the price by 4x actually results in the write-off being profitable, assuming say 35% tax. In other words, hey we get to deduct $1000 against the profits we made on patients who paid, that's worth $350 to us, rather than hey we get to deduct $250 against the profits we made, that's worth $87.50 to us. But I don't know.
I've seen that list so there's an easy example to give you.
One of the largest subsidies is the cap on liabilities for nuclear accidents which the nuclear power industry has negotiated with governments. “Like car drivers, the operators of nuclear plants should be properly insured,” said Gerry Wolff, coordinator of the Energy Fair group. The group calculates that, "if nuclear operators were fully insured against the cost of nuclear disasters like those at Chernobyl and Fukushima, the price of nuclear electricity would rise by at least €0.14 per kWh and perhaps as much as €2.36, depending on assumptions made".
So an anti-nuclear group came up with some assumptions that make nuclear energy look bad. News at 11.
This is an example of what I'm talking about... this "subsidy" is actually not a payment to any fossil fuel producer or user.
Another one...
The three largest fossil fuel subsidies were:
1. Foreign tax credit ($15.3 billion)
Now I don't know if you know anything about taxes, but foreign tax credits are not a subsidy to fossil fuels. They are part of the tax treaties we have with many many countries. I get a foreign tax credit every year (about $2... but hey...) for withheld taxes on dividends from foreign corporations that I hold in some mutual funds.
So yes, I'm sure that if Exxon is producing oil from Canada, and must pay a royalty to the Canadian province where it's happening and also to the Canadian federal government, they get an equivalent tax credit here... that's to prevent double taxation because otherwise they'd be paying taxes on the full price of a barrel of oil, when in reality up to half of it is directly given to Canada.
That usually means they have installed (or contracted) a certain amount of wind power that equals out to the amount of electricity they use, not that they have severed their connection to the baseline generation provided by the grid.
But if oil and gas can have the huge subsidies they've gotten
What huge subsidies are you referring to? All of the articles I've seen about fossil fuel subsidies are mostly bullshit. They'll include intangibles like "not having to pay for cancer or climate change caused by coal... that's worth $89 trillion!!!" as a subsidy. Or they'll include as a subsidy the full cost of the highway system, because "that's just for gas burning cars man! that's worth trillions!!!" (I guess they'll have to give up that line now that there are viable electric cars in mass production.) Or some percentage of the defense budget because "muh middle east wars are obviously 100% for oil."
If corporate makes something clear to employees, and trains employees on it, and enforces it, and then an employee does it anyway, then corporate is only accountable to prove that the employee was trained appropriately, and then to fire the employee.
Right, so the employee gets fired. But let me note that it's not like it's required by law that the employee gets fired. That's the company's choice.
But with a contractor, corporate is accountable at all. It doesn't need to train contractors. It doesn't need to prove that contractors understood anything. It doesn't even need to fire the contractors.
I don't understand... if the contractor misbehaves, that will likely breach the contract, and the company is probably not going to enter a new agreement with that person. Why do you think nothing would happen? Wouldn't the broker lose a lot of credibility?
Brokers don't set policies, they simply decide whom to broker. Recruiting agencies don't set hiring requirements either.
They can decide whom to broker based on a set policy though. For instance it's common to have a service like a nanny finding service that does screening for you, background checks, reference checks, etc. There are 2 contracts involved... my contract with the nanny finding service, and the service's contract with nannies. But there is interaction.. my contract with the agency will definitely include things like doing criminal background checks, and that means the agency's contract with the nanny will also include that.
the key question appears to be: who controls the relationship? Under rules 1 and 2, it seems pretty clear that it's Uber, not the driver. Yes, the driver supplies the car and fuel. But that's because Uber says so.
I'm not sure how you determined that. If we look at a more clear cut case like a plumber, it seems like the same things hold. I've never been asked by a plumber to provide his tools or other supplies, and I would find it highly inappropriate and unprofessional if that came up. I don't think that makes me his employer or gives me more or less power in the relationship.
For #3 you're right, but how do you square that with concepts like subcontracting? A subcontract is obviously part of the primary business of the overall contract. If I win a contract to build a new tank, and I subcontract development of the tank engine to some other company, obviously I haven't taken over that company and "employ" them exclusively.
What company do you work for that allows unlimited unpaid leave at your discretion? Or if you're not willing to say, can you say whether it's not wholly or in part owned by you or a relative of yours?
But when you start to meddle with the individual transactions (creating uniform pricing, dictating standards for worker behavior, etc)
Sounds like what Amazon is doing with their new service options. I bought a kitchen faucet last month on Amazon and they gave me the option of adding installation. Uniform pricing, at least some standards (they claim they handpick the businesses involved, require screening, and set standards on scheduling and cancellation).
I wonder if they are considered Amazon employees? I would think not.
You could simply stop driving for Uber any time, but in an at-will state you could walk out at any time. That alone doesn't make you a contractor.
An Uber driver can stop driving at any time, and then start again at any time. That's a huge difference. I can't walk out of my job with no notice or approval and then come back in 8 weeks and say "Well that was a nice vacation!" You can't do that at any job that I know of. Full freedom of setting your own schedule is practically the definition of "being your own boss."
That's not a thing that a client can do to contractors. Can certainly fire contractors for it, but can't promise passengers that contractors will do or not do anything.
What are you trying to say? If the threat of being fired doesn't keep a contractor honest, neither will the the threat of being fired keep the same person honest if you call him an employee instead. So that has no bearing on whether someone is a contractor or an employee.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what Uber drivers do, but I'd say they are clearly not employees under #1. Isn't driving for Uber completely up to the driver on a moment by moment basis? Like I can say, oh I don't feel like working from 9am-11am, so I wont. You can't do that at a real job and keep your employment. Likewise you choose your car and you choose where you drive every day. I don't see how that's anything like a normal job in terms of controlling employee behavior.
You might be thinking of "natural resource" which is a specific type of resource. General use of "resource" would actually include labor, intellectual property, usage rights to your physical property, etc.
Also I find it very hard to believe that we went 100k years without the idea of territory. We're territorial animals. Even during our nomadic phases, we had the concept of personal space and territory that we defended from others.
I'd guess that one of the reasons we don't inherit bodies is that traditionally they have no economic value in our society. Because of modern medicine, now they do. If people ever widely accept the idea of compensating organ donors (which I think is growing.. look at egg donation, it's pretty well compensated in the US), I think it'll be a natural consequence that a person's organs go to his estate upon death.
and why should I give a rat's ass what your ethics are?
That's true no matter what the basis for your ethics.
I drive to work every day, and I don't worry about threats that are a lot less significant than that.
Hmm I don't know about that. Are you sure? There are so many factors that go into risk, but one of the biggest must be mitigation steps. Dying in a car is more likely than dying in a fire, but I bet you have smoke alarms in your house.
How would you even measure the risk of dying from organ harvesting? It's not like they're going to put cause of death: needed his lungs for someone else. It'll say cause of death: car accident.
I think when thinking about probabilities you have to keep in mind Bayes' Theorem, which is about probabilities given prior knowledge of conditions. Yes, the overall absolute chance that I die because someone wants to harvest my organs is teeny tiny. But that's because to be in that situation I first have to have a life threatening injury, which is very unlikely day to day. The question is really what is the probability GIVEN that I'm already in that situation? If it's 1%, that's pretty high. I don't do things that have a 1% risk of death very often.
At one point it was difficult to find a TV that didn't have the 3D feature. Has that changed? When I bought my current TV a few years ago, the only way to avoid 3D was to get one of the ultra-low-end Walmart TVs from a brand you've never heard of. My TV has 3D support that I've used approximately 1 time (maybe twice, but it was the same movie both times, and it sucked).
I doubt it. They'd take their chances with the court system.
I did not realize that. No need to be a complete dick about it. It's yet another design flaw in our patent system.. patents are a type of intellectual property, and patent rights are usually analogized to property rights. If I own have the deed for my house free and clear, it means I have complete control over my house (notwithstanding laws)... not just that I can keep other people off, but I have positive control over it as well. You're saying patents are negative only. That totally runs counter to the common understanding of it.
Just as problematic is the "scenery analyzer" that would require the user of the phone to pan its camera around to see if the phone is where the driver sits, or if it's in the "safe zone" of the car. It seems like this is prone to error and would require software
Please tell me that such software does exist or that you don't know what you're talking about? The alternative is that we have a patent system which lets you patent things that don't exist and that you don't know how to implement or describe. And that is ridiculous. Can someone get a patent on just any random words they throw down on paper (okay to be fair, it's more of a vague description than random words)? Let's see, how about "device to automatically hang laundry, with an extensible arm or two and a camera and software to recognize clothes, figure out how to untangle them and turn them the right side out, manipulate a hanger with the arm, and then just do it." Is that actually possible? And then if someone comes up with the software, I can sue them? I'm 100% sure such a device is possible, and will eventually be invented, I just don't know how to write the software part of it.