how will you prevent universal health care from being abused - IOW, how would you prevent the fat, lazy, and stupid from running the health bills up that the rest of us would have to pay for?
How will you prevent universal fire service from being abused - IOW, how would you prevent the accident-prone, careless, and stupid from playing with matches or storing oily rags next to the furnace, and running up the tax bills for fire department services?
We don't worry much about that because we know that no one gets their house burned down by choice, even if fire service is free. (I.e., without additional cost to the recipient - of course TANSTAAFL, it's paid for by taxes.) We do of course engage in public education campaigns to reduce the risk, mandate building codes, put warning labels on dangerous things (I love the label on my water heater, which features a burning stick figure running from an explosion - a very clear message of "do not fsck with this appliance"), but by and large we don't interfere with people's daily lives to make sure they're not risking the public expense of a fire.
And in the same way, no one gets sick by choice, even if medical care is free. I don't care if you start giving away coronary bypass surgery, paying the sick leave, and giving away a free bottle of single malt with every surgery (a drop of the craythur thins the blood and helps prevent blocked arteries, you know) - I'd rather not have my chest carved open and a vein ripped out of my leg, so I try to eat right and exercise.
Also, we understand that it's to my benefit to have my neighbor's flaming house put out before the fire spreads. We ought to understand that it's also to my benefit to have my neighbor get his TB or herpes or bird flu treated before it spreads - or better, gets preventative care to maintain his health so he doesn't get infected in the first place. Especially in this age of bioterrorist threats, universal basic health care is part of the state's mandate to "provide for the common defense".
If the Interstate Highway System is seen as part of the nation's defense (as it allows for troop mobility), surely an Interstate Health System that protects against epidemics (natural or through enemy action) and keeps Americans healthy enough to fight ought to be justified as well.
Nature will wipe us out just as happily as we wiped out the passenger pigeon.
I don't think it's very likely that humanity will die out in the next few hundred years.
It's quite possible that humanity as we know it will not exist five hundred years from now. We will either have fscked up completely and be extinct; or we will have changed so much, hit some sort of Vingean singularity, that "human" will no longer be fully descriptive.
especially to a second generation Holocaust survivor such as myself.
Excuse me, but "second generation Holocaust survivor"? That's a very odd usage. I don't think we get to take credit for things our ancestors went through like that...am I a "second generation Vietnam vet" because my father got sent over to Southeast Asia? Do it give me special privilege to comment on that war?
Totalitarianism isn't a crime. When totalitarians take over the government, they make what they're doing nice and legal. That's the beauty of it - he who writes the laws will never be a criminal.
The ancestors of most of these "knuckledragging retards" were smart enough to leave the UK (by force) 230 years ago.
No, the ancestors of most of these "knuckledragging retards" washed up here as economic refugees from various problems, or were dragged over here in chains. Few of us are descended from the original colonists.
A better civil disobedience act, more in the vein of The Chaser's War on Everything would be for a team to swan around the city posing as a CCTV camera cleaning crew, albeit using a can of black spray paint instead of proper cleaning equipment.
You think that all that getting all that done, by people, all over the place who really don't care (because electricity isn't expensive enough to force the issue)
Electricity - and every other form of energy - is going to be more expensive. That's inevitable, as population grows and other nations industrialize and stocks both of fossil and fissile fuels decline. Societal change is needed whether we use fission or not; "electricity too cheap to meter" was a pipe dream. The question is do we do it now or later, do we do it in a controlled fashion as we ride out the last of our fossil fuels and move to sustainable and safe power, or do we put our hope in a deus ex atomica that gives us a few decades of dirty and dangerous power before we fall off the "energy cliff" and dump the problem on a future generation.
is easier than waiting for these reactor vessels to be forged?
The reactor vessels are not the only problem with fission.
So, I can either eat the electricity bill for a few years until either small LEDs are cost effective or someone makes a mini CFL that will fit or I can replace all the fixtures (there's over a dozen). Guess which option I'm taking?
I don't know. What's your electric rate? What will it be in five years? How expensive are the fixtures? Are you handy enough to replace them yourself, or do you have a friend who'll do it in return for another favor? There might be good economic incentives to start swapping (don't have to do them all at once).
Dropping in nuclear power plants, as difficult and messy as it may be, is the probably the easiest way to drop CO2, mercury emissions, and other pollutants from electrical generation.
Fission plants create plenty of pollution - not just the radioactive waste produced by their operation and by mining for fuel, but plenty of CO2 emitted during plant construction and decommission and in mining operations. And CO2 emissions from mining and processing rise as ore grade falls; the Oxford Research Group study I link to above estimates this would make the CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour for fission exceed those from fossil fuels before the end of this century.
Proliferation is how others come into possession. Banning proliferation is saying "we can have X but you can't", which is not a stance that carries any moral weight.
Under the NPT, the nuclear nations had an obligation to work seriously toward disarmament. They chose to ignore it, and at this point, it's too late for nonproliferation. Everyone will have the bomb within fifty years.
I think the best end result we can hope for is every nation with just one or two nuclear weapons as a deterrent, and an international agreement that any government to engage in first use of WMD becomes the enemy of the world and loses its sovereignty.
I understand that "information wants to be free" and that "censorship is bad", but I think we need to recognize that there is a limit to the healthy release of this sort of information.
How can we have any meaningful discussion on arms control if we don't know how difficult or easy it is to build nuclear weapons?
Iran and North Korea already know this stuff. It's to our benefit to stop pretending that engineering knowledge can be kept away from the "bad guys", and get everything out in the open.
Photovoltaic is already cheaper than a tie-in if you're far from the grid. There are people right now living off-grid with photovoltaic.
The cost of fossil fuels doesn't include the cost of global warming; the cost for fission doesn't include the cost of waste disposal, as that's an unsolved problem. (Nor does it count the heavy, heavy government subsidies needed to get a plant built). All factors in account, photovoltaic does well. Yes, you need energy storage systems for cloudy days.
Is there a reason you're against building new ones?
Nuclear waste, the environmental devastation of uranium mining, nuclear proliferation dangers, the terrorism dangers, the inherent dangers of operating a controlled chain reaction (no, even pebble bed reactors are not safe)
All that, and supply is very limited. At current usage rates, the world's known uranium supply will last less than a century - much less if usage grows. Yes, there may be technical solutions (reprocessing and breeding) to that, but 1) they're not here now, and 2) they all seem to end up going to thorium in the end.
Heavy deployment of fission-as-we-know-it is a band-aid, a stop-gap that gives a false sense of security that we can continue with the assumptions of cheap energy . Don't waste time and money on a half-assed temporary solution that pushes the problem off onto our grandkids (well, the grandkids of breeders), fix the problem right by reducing usage and developing clean sustainable sources.
Just look at Germany, pushing renewables as hard as they can...
German has allocated of 800 million Euros for research into renewables for 2005-2010. That's 160 million Euros annually, about 2 Euros per German citizen per year. Out of a yearly budget of
254 billion Euros.
160 million Euros is 250 million USD. We spend that in a couple of hours in Iraq.
As for exotic nuclear technologies... the basic science has been done for fusion too...
Not really. We've never gotten power out a fusion reactor, but we have gotten power from thorium, using a combined U/TH fuel. Now it's just a question of replacing that dirty uncontrollable and dangerous (from a weapons proliferation POV) with another neutron source. That's a lot closer than fusion.
Do you REALLY think we're in any position to ignore ANY technology?
Ignore? No. I'm saying that we shouldn't ignore fission's problems, that a thorough look at fission shows that it's a highly suboptimal solution.
Whereas a human can and must find a way to end the test -- humans have lives to live, and aren't willing to be stuck in a box their whole lives.
What, you've never been to a cubicle farm?
Some humans are very happy to be stuck in a box their whole lives. Conformity is very popular, as is obedience to authority.
The AI cannot do beyond what's been programmed -- to it, there's really no such thing as cheating, only additional cases that allow for exceptions to the general rule.
Human beings cannot do beyond what they're programmed - by genetics and environment - either. "Cheating" isn't magic, it's just following a more fundamental set of rules. If humans seem to break "rules of human behavior", that just means the rules were a misstatement.
You're just a computer made out of fatty meat, there's no fundamental reason why a computer made out of silicon can't do any intellectual process that you can do.
Cool, now which one of these renewables or fission reactors is actually in a state where we can start replacing coal plants on a large scale tomorrow?
Photovoltatics and wind are here now. Better energy efficiency is here now.
New fission plants, as TFA mentions, are years away.
I'd rather not sit on coal reactors for another 20 years waiting for some breakthrough instead of utilizing the pretty good solution in nuclear plants that we have right now.
Sure, use the ones we have now, might as well get the best use out of them. I'm against building new ones, I'm not arguing for shutting down the ones we have. (Of course, I do want very strict safety practices in the existing ones.)
I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time you
are finished talking, type RET twice.
Send your questions to ``ASK ZIPPY'', Box 40474,
San Francisco, CA 94140, USA
Why do you say that?
.. I want a COLOR T.V. and a VIBRATING BED!!!
What makes you believe you might want to have this color?
Wait.. is this a FUN THING or the END of LIFE in Petticoat Junction??
Earlier you said you would like to have this color?
OMNIVERSAL AWARENESS?? Oh, YEH!! First you need 4 GALLONS of JELL-O
and a BIG WRENCH!!... I think you drop th'WRENCH in the JELL-O as if
it was a FLAVOR, or an INGREDIENT......or...I...um... WHERE'S the
WASHING MACHINES?
You have your mind on machines, it seems.
.. If I cover this entire WALL with MAZOLA, wdo I have to give my
AGENT ten per cent??
Maybe your plans have something to do with this
If I had a Q-TIP, I could prevent th'collapse of NEGOTIATIONS!!
And if it takes a century to develop the replacement technology...
Efficiency improvements and increased use of renewables don't have to be developed. They're here. They just need to be deployed. Rather than putting that money into building fission reactors, put it toward equipping homes with high-efficiency heat pumps (ground-source ones in cold climates), good insulation, a PV module or small windmill, and efficient appliances. We also need investment in mass transit - and in community planning so people don't have to drive all over creation to get shit done. This is all stuff we could do right now, today, without needing to wait in line for a steel factory in Japan to make special reactor vessels.
Orbital photovoltaic could be done in twenty years if we had the will. (Hell, ten if we really got busy, total WWII-style mobilization.) It's an engineering problem, not a science one.
Accelerator-driven nuclear technologies, IIRC, also have most of the basic science worked out and fall into engineering rather than science problems.
The only thing I mentioned that might take a century to work out is fusion. (Yeah, I know, it's just twenty years away...)
Nuclear fission is a poor solution anyway. Inherent safety problems, limited fuel supply (on the order of a century or two at most, perhaps much less), security concerns (both weapons technology proliferation and terrorist targeting concerns), unsolved waste disposal problems - the only reason this gets the support it does is because the military-industrial complex loves nuclear technologies, and some technical types who grew up on science fiction have a romantic attachment to Harassing the Power of the Atom.
We should be devoting our resources to efficiency, renewables (including orbital photovoltaic), accelerator-based thorium reactors, and fusion. Building new fission reactors is a distraction from the real solutions.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but when you refer to people evicted from that land, it's not who you think. No Arabs were required to leave in 1948.
Because they'd already been kicked out by then. The problem starts with the UK's Balfour Doctrine back in 1917, and the British Mandate of Palestine essentially kicking Arabs off the land to make way for Jewish settlers. 1948 was the end, not the beginning; and the ones mostly to blame were neither the Arabs nor the Jews, but the conniving British Empire who doublecrossed them both.
Your response, and that of the AC above, suggests there might be a clear advantage in deciding to treat mentally ill people before they go "batshit-Loco" and harm themselves and others.
Not just getting treatment, but getting good treatment, not the pharmaceutical roulette - "Take this pill. Stop complaining yet? No? Take this other pill." - that's standard today.
It's worth nothing that several of the perpetrators of mass school shootings were either taking antidepressants or had recently stopped (which can cause a sort of "bounce-back" reaction). Columbine shooter Eric Harris was on Luvox. Steve Kazmierczak, the NIU shooter, had recently stopped taking Prozac.
This site tracks news stories about SSRIs and violent behavior. (In case anyone is worried about their own use of such medications I will quote that's sites very very important warning: "Withdrawal can often be more dangerous than continuing on a medication. It is important to withdraw extremely slowly from these drugs, usually over a period of a year or more, under the supervision of a qualified specialist.")
While you might consider drug use to be a victimless crime, I do not - both the person taking drugs and that person's family usually suffer.
Nonsense. You don't get to point a gun at someone to enforce their family's will upon them, not in a free country; nor do you get to decide whether my "suffering" outweighs my "benefits" for my choices.
Or do you think I should be forced to go to church, because my family "suffers" my lapsed Catholicism? Do you think I should be able to force you to eat a healthy diet and exercise, because you'll suffer ill-health if you don't?
Gambling is quite addictive
Only if we redefine "addiction" to be meaningless.
Yes, some people have problems with gambling - and some have problems with watching TV, sex, eating sweets, and pretty much any behavior you can name. Conflating these (very real) problems, with the physiological changes to the nervous system brought about by long-term use of drugs like alcohol or opiates, is not helpful.
Nor is making criminals out of people with such problems helpful. Using the threat of government violence to attempt to stop me from playing a few hands of poker because you're worried somebody might have a problem controlling their gambling, is ridiculous.
And further, doesn't the "right of free association" necessarily include the right NOT to associate? IF (and notice I said IF and not SINCE) I and all my friends choose not to associate with certain people, how can the government tell me I have to?
You have the right to associate or not associate with whomever you please in you home and private life. If you want the privilege of the state creating and enforcing property rights for your business - if you want to call the cops to be able to remove "trespassers" from your store or whatever - then the state gets to set some conditions on that. Owning land for business purposes is not a natural right.
It is NOT the cops responsibility to judge the laws they are given to enforce.
Of course it's their responsibility. "I was only following orders" doesn't cut it. Separation of powers has a purpose: the legislature has a responsibility to not create unjust laws, the executive has a responsibility to not enforce unjust laws, and the judiciary has a responsibility to not convict anyone under unjust laws.
If so, is it right for a police officer to not bring charges against the owner of an establishment because they do not allow black people to enter?
No, because anti-discrimination laws are just. Was it right for a cop in 1860 to let a fugitive slave go? Yes, because fugitive slave laws were unjust.
You cannot determine the morality of an action solely by asking if it is consistent with the law.
Slashdot Mirror
How will you prevent universal fire service from being abused - IOW, how would you prevent the accident-prone, careless, and stupid from playing with matches or storing oily rags next to the furnace, and running up the tax bills for fire department services?
We don't worry much about that because we know that no one gets their house burned down by choice, even if fire service is free. (I.e., without additional cost to the recipient - of course TANSTAAFL, it's paid for by taxes.) We do of course engage in public education campaigns to reduce the risk, mandate building codes, put warning labels on dangerous things (I love the label on my water heater, which features a burning stick figure running from an explosion - a very clear message of "do not fsck with this appliance"), but by and large we don't interfere with people's daily lives to make sure they're not risking the public expense of a fire.
And in the same way, no one gets sick by choice, even if medical care is free. I don't care if you start giving away coronary bypass surgery, paying the sick leave, and giving away a free bottle of single malt with every surgery (a drop of the craythur thins the blood and helps prevent blocked arteries, you know) - I'd rather not have my chest carved open and a vein ripped out of my leg, so I try to eat right and exercise.
Also, we understand that it's to my benefit to have my neighbor's flaming house put out before the fire spreads. We ought to understand that it's also to my benefit to have my neighbor get his TB or herpes or bird flu treated before it spreads - or better, gets preventative care to maintain his health so he doesn't get infected in the first place. Especially in this age of bioterrorist threats, universal basic health care is part of the state's mandate to "provide for the common defense".
If the Interstate Highway System is seen as part of the nation's defense (as it allows for troop mobility), surely an Interstate Health System that protects against epidemics (natural or through enemy action) and keeps Americans healthy enough to fight ought to be justified as well.
There were between 3 and 5 billion passenger pigeons in North America when the Europeans showed up. Less than five hundred years later, in 1914, the last one died.
Nature will wipe us out just as happily as we wiped out the passenger pigeon.
It's quite possible that humanity as we know it will not exist five hundred years from now. We will either have fscked up completely and be extinct; or we will have changed so much, hit some sort of Vingean singularity, that "human" will no longer be fully descriptive.
Excuse me, but "second generation Holocaust survivor"? That's a very odd usage. I don't think we get to take credit for things our ancestors went through like that...am I a "second generation Vietnam vet" because my father got sent over to Southeast Asia? Do it give me special privilege to comment on that war?
Totalitarianism isn't a crime. When totalitarians take over the government, they make what they're doing nice and legal. That's the beauty of it - he who writes the laws will never be a criminal.
No, the ancestors of most of these "knuckledragging retards" washed up here as economic refugees from various problems, or were dragged over here in chains. Few of us are descended from the original colonists.
I kind of like the Surveillance Camera Players's idea.
Electricity - and every other form of energy - is going to be more expensive. That's inevitable, as population grows and other nations industrialize and stocks both of fossil and fissile fuels decline. Societal change is needed whether we use fission or not; "electricity too cheap to meter" was a pipe dream. The question is do we do it now or later, do we do it in a controlled fashion as we ride out the last of our fossil fuels and move to sustainable and safe power, or do we put our hope in a deus ex atomica that gives us a few decades of dirty and dangerous power before we fall off the "energy cliff" and dump the problem on a future generation.
The reactor vessels are not the only problem with fission.
I don't know. What's your electric rate? What will it be in five years? How expensive are the fixtures? Are you handy enough to replace them yourself, or do you have a friend who'll do it in return for another favor? There might be good economic incentives to start swapping (don't have to do them all at once).
Fission plants create plenty of pollution - not just the radioactive waste produced by their operation and by mining for fuel, but plenty of CO2 emitted during plant construction and decommission and in mining operations. And CO2 emissions from mining and processing rise as ore grade falls; the Oxford Research Group study I link to above estimates this would make the CO2 emissions per kilowatt-hour for fission exceed those from fossil fuels before the end of this century.
Proliferation is how others come into possession. Banning proliferation is saying "we can have X but you can't", which is not a stance that carries any moral weight.
Under the NPT, the nuclear nations had an obligation to work seriously toward disarmament. They chose to ignore it, and at this point, it's too late for nonproliferation. Everyone will have the bomb within fifty years.
I think the best end result we can hope for is every nation with just one or two nuclear weapons as a deterrent, and an international agreement that any government to engage in first use of WMD becomes the enemy of the world and loses its sovereignty.
How can we have any meaningful discussion on arms control if we don't know how difficult or easy it is to build nuclear weapons?
Iran and North Korea already know this stuff. It's to our benefit to stop pretending that engineering knowledge can be kept away from the "bad guys", and get everything out in the open.
Photovoltaic is already cheaper than a tie-in if you're far from the grid. There are people right now living off-grid with photovoltaic.
The cost of fossil fuels doesn't include the cost of global warming; the cost for fission doesn't include the cost of waste disposal, as that's an unsolved problem. (Nor does it count the heavy, heavy government subsidies needed to get a plant built). All factors in account, photovoltaic does well. Yes, you need energy storage systems for cloudy days.
Nuclear waste, the environmental devastation of uranium mining, nuclear proliferation dangers, the terrorism dangers, the inherent dangers of operating a controlled chain reaction (no, even pebble bed reactors are not safe)
All that, and supply is very limited. At current usage rates, the world's known uranium supply will last less than a century - much less if usage grows. Yes, there may be technical solutions (reprocessing and breeding) to that, but 1) they're not here now, and 2) they all seem to end up going to thorium in the end.
Heavy deployment of fission-as-we-know-it is a band-aid, a stop-gap that gives a false sense of security that we can continue with the assumptions of cheap energy . Don't waste time and money on a half-assed temporary solution that pushes the problem off onto our grandkids (well, the grandkids of breeders), fix the problem right by reducing usage and developing clean sustainable sources.
That's as hard as they can? No. From 6.3 percent in 2000 to 12 percent in 2006 is significant, but "pushing as hard as they can" would mean a wartime level of mobilization.
German has allocated of 800 million Euros for research into renewables for 2005-2010. That's 160 million Euros annually, about 2 Euros per German citizen per year. Out of a yearly budget of 254 billion Euros.
160 million Euros is 250 million USD. We spend that in a couple of hours in Iraq.
Not really. We've never gotten power out a fusion reactor, but we have gotten power from thorium, using a combined U/TH fuel. Now it's just a question of replacing that dirty uncontrollable and dangerous (from a weapons proliferation POV) with another neutron source. That's a lot closer than fusion.
Ignore? No. I'm saying that we shouldn't ignore fission's problems, that a thorough look at fission shows that it's a highly suboptimal solution.
What, you've never been to a cubicle farm?
Some humans are very happy to be stuck in a box their whole lives. Conformity is very popular, as is obedience to authority.
Human beings cannot do beyond what they're programmed - by genetics and environment - either. "Cheating" isn't magic, it's just following a more fundamental set of rules. If humans seem to break "rules of human behavior", that just means the rules were a misstatement.
You're just a computer made out of fatty meat, there's no fundamental reason why a computer made out of silicon can't do any intellectual process that you can do.
Photovoltatics and wind are here now. Better energy efficiency is here now.
New fission plants, as TFA mentions, are years away.
Sure, use the ones we have now, might as well get the best use out of them. I'm against building new ones, I'm not arguing for shutting down the ones we have. (Of course, I do want very strict safety practices in the existing ones.)
If you haven't yet discovered it, GNU Emacs' M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead is very entertaining:
I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time you are finished talking, type RET twice.
Send your questions to ``ASK ZIPPY'', Box 40474, San Francisco, CA 94140, USA
Why do you say that?
What makes you believe you might want to have this color?
Wait.. is this a FUN THING or the END of LIFE in Petticoat Junction??
Earlier you said you would like to have this color?
OMNIVERSAL AWARENESS?? Oh, YEH!! First you need 4 GALLONS of JELL-O and a BIG WRENCH!!... I think you drop th'WRENCH in the JELL-O as if it was a FLAVOR, or an INGREDIENT... ...or...I...um... WHERE'S the
WASHING MACHINES?
You have your mind on machines, it seems.
Maybe your plans have something to do with this
If I had a Q-TIP, I could prevent th'collapse of NEGOTIATIONS!!
I don't understand.
And why is eatting cornflakes, riding a horse, or having children necessary to be considered an intelligent being? The guy who wrote The Diving Bell and the Butterfly couldn't do any of those things.
Efficiency improvements and increased use of renewables don't have to be developed. They're here. They just need to be deployed. Rather than putting that money into building fission reactors, put it toward equipping homes with high-efficiency heat pumps (ground-source ones in cold climates), good insulation, a PV module or small windmill, and efficient appliances. We also need investment in mass transit - and in community planning so people don't have to drive all over creation to get shit done. This is all stuff we could do right now, today, without needing to wait in line for a steel factory in Japan to make special reactor vessels.
Orbital photovoltaic could be done in twenty years if we had the will. (Hell, ten if we really got busy, total WWII-style mobilization.) It's an engineering problem, not a science one.
Accelerator-driven nuclear technologies, IIRC, also have most of the basic science worked out and fall into engineering rather than science problems.
The only thing I mentioned that might take a century to work out is fusion. (Yeah, I know, it's just twenty years away...)
Any sufficiently advanced chatbot is indistinguishable from an intelligent being.
(Not to say this is in any way a sufficiently advanced chatbot.)
How? We have no industrial base anymore. It's the "information age", we're a "service economy", remember? Actually making steel is, like, so 1970s.
U.S. Steel now makes about as much steel now as it did in 1902. The once-mighty Bethlehem Steel? Gone. National Steel? Kaput.
We traded our ability to make stuff, for our ability to by cheap imports at Wal*Mart.
Nuclear fission is a poor solution anyway. Inherent safety problems, limited fuel supply (on the order of a century or two at most, perhaps much less), security concerns (both weapons technology proliferation and terrorist targeting concerns), unsolved waste disposal problems - the only reason this gets the support it does is because the military-industrial complex loves nuclear technologies, and some technical types who grew up on science fiction have a romantic attachment to Harassing the Power of the Atom.
We should be devoting our resources to efficiency, renewables (including orbital photovoltaic), accelerator-based thorium reactors, and fusion. Building new fission reactors is a distraction from the real solutions.
Because they'd already been kicked out by then. The problem starts with the UK's Balfour Doctrine back in 1917, and the British Mandate of Palestine essentially kicking Arabs off the land to make way for Jewish settlers. 1948 was the end, not the beginning; and the ones mostly to blame were neither the Arabs nor the Jews, but the conniving British Empire who doublecrossed them both.
Not just getting treatment, but getting good treatment, not the pharmaceutical roulette - "Take this pill. Stop complaining yet? No? Take this other pill." - that's standard today.
It's worth nothing that several of the perpetrators of mass school shootings were either taking antidepressants or had recently stopped (which can cause a sort of "bounce-back" reaction). Columbine shooter Eric Harris was on Luvox. Steve Kazmierczak, the NIU shooter, had recently stopped taking Prozac.
This site tracks news stories about SSRIs and violent behavior. (In case anyone is worried about their own use of such medications I will quote that's sites very very important warning: "Withdrawal can often be more dangerous than continuing on a medication. It is important to withdraw extremely slowly from these drugs, usually over a period of a year or more, under the supervision of a qualified specialist.")
Nonsense. You don't get to point a gun at someone to enforce their family's will upon them, not in a free country; nor do you get to decide whether my "suffering" outweighs my "benefits" for my choices.
Or do you think I should be forced to go to church, because my family "suffers" my lapsed Catholicism? Do you think I should be able to force you to eat a healthy diet and exercise, because you'll suffer ill-health if you don't?
Only if we redefine "addiction" to be meaningless.
Yes, some people have problems with gambling - and some have problems with watching TV, sex, eating sweets, and pretty much any behavior you can name. Conflating these (very real) problems, with the physiological changes to the nervous system brought about by long-term use of drugs like alcohol or opiates, is not helpful.
Nor is making criminals out of people with such problems helpful. Using the threat of government violence to attempt to stop me from playing a few hands of poker because you're worried somebody might have a problem controlling their gambling, is ridiculous.
You have the right to associate or not associate with whomever you please in you home and private life. If you want the privilege of the state creating and enforcing property rights for your business - if you want to call the cops to be able to remove "trespassers" from your store or whatever - then the state gets to set some conditions on that. Owning land for business purposes is not a natural right.
Of course it's their responsibility. "I was only following orders" doesn't cut it. Separation of powers has a purpose: the legislature has a responsibility to not create unjust laws, the executive has a responsibility to not enforce unjust laws, and the judiciary has a responsibility to not convict anyone under unjust laws.
No, because anti-discrimination laws are just. Was it right for a cop in 1860 to let a fugitive slave go? Yes, because fugitive slave laws were unjust.
You cannot determine the morality of an action solely by asking if it is consistent with the law.
It doesn't.