the State has no power to overturn economic realities
Right. And one of those economic realities is that health care is not an area where a "free market" can efficiently allocate resources. Buyers and sellers do not meet in the marketplace with equal power and full knowledge.
If you think corporate profits are the only reason, or even the major factor in the exorbitant expense of health care, you are naive. It's expensive because it takes vast resources to do the job.
It takes no more resources to provide an American citizen with health care than a German or a Japanese one. Yet every other developed nation has better outcome at less cost. The difference is the obscene profits realized by companies like United Health.
there should be no worries about medical records being leaked and/or used against individuals or organizations since the IRS will keep those safe for all of us.
duckduckgo returns whatever bing returns:) It's just an anonymizing front end to bing.
No. It's not.: "DuckDuckGo gets its results from over 50 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb, Bing, Yandex, and Blekko." Please don't FUD on the Duck.
Google does not want an app out there that comes standard that downloads all their videos.
I'm sure Google doesn't. So what? "Want" and "is legally entitled to" are very different things. Google isn't legally entitled to tell MS what sort of software MS can write.
I'm no fan of MS, but Google sucks also. Google doesn't get to tell MS what sort of software MS can write. It's a remarkable and accidental occurrence, but it looks like MS is on the side of software freedom here.
I mean, in most rampages so far, we have seen the perpetrators use long guns.
No. Not only have plenty of rampage shooters used handguns, some have used revolvers.
Campo Elias Delgado killed between 26 and 30 people (accounts differ and some may have been killed by police in the crossfire) and wounded 15 with a knife and a single revolver..
Wellington Menezes de Oliveira killed 12 (not including himself) and wounded 12, using two revolvers and firing over 60 shots.
Thomas Hamilton, the Dunblane shooter, killed 17 people (not including himself) and wounded 15 more. He had four handguns: two six-round revolvers and two 9mm pistols.
Personally I think we are better off not living in the wild west, where our only protection is a revolver and our posse.
It is a fact of human existence that the only direct protection a person has against someone intent on violence is their own ability to use defensive force ("a revolver"), or the ability and willingness of others to use force on their behalf ("our posse"). That's true whether you live in ancient Rome, the Wild West (which was probably not as "Wild" as our mythology makes it out to be), a gang-controlled part of a city, or a low-crime gated community.
Indirect forms of protection, where we have socioeconomic, educational, criminal justice, and mental health care systems that don't lead to people developing along violent lines or make serious efforts at reform if they do, may have more overall impact. But when a crazed stalker breaks into your home, it's past the time where those can come into play.
I don't believe it is actually legal to make a refusal an admission of DWI. But they can make the penalty the same.
No, they can't.. DWI is a crime and can land you in jail. Declining a search or declining to testify is never a crime, and can at best lead to a revocation of a privilege (driving on the public roads).
Since the comparison is between trying to generally reduce access to firearms and an attempt to reduce drunk driving deaths, the relevant death comparison is all gun deaths and all drunk driving deaths.
No, it's not, because the majority of those "gun deaths" would simply take place via other means if guns magically vanished, not to mention that legal attempts to reduce access to firearms have always failed; while drunk driving deaths would not occur at all if drunk driving magically stopped. (Whether legal attempts to reduce drunk driving have worked is an open question; they've generally been accompanied by public awareness campaigns that may have had more to do with any observed effect than an increase in legal penalties.)
Anything you disable, will re-start shortly and cannot be uninstalled (without rooting and voiding warranty).
Voiding warranty, my eye. If you don't root your gorram phone., it's not "yours" in any meaningful sense. If a hardware problem develops, do a factory reset and send it back for a replacement
So, yeah...unwanted services on my phone, not an issue.
freedom of speech doesn't mean you can say whatever you like
Uh, yes, actually, that's exactly what it means.
Restrictions can be placed on where, when, and how you say it in order to protect the rights of others (you don't have a right to blare it from loudspeakers at 3am and disturb my right to reasonable peace and quiet, you don't have a right to say it while waving a knife and disturb my right to reasonable safety, etc.), but in terms of content, you can say whatever you damn well please. Any government that doesn't recognize that doesn't recognize freedom of speech.
It seems to work somewhat too - while there still are individuals who preach hatred, there have been no organized atrocities against minorities in Germany after the war,
Post hoc ergo prompter hoc is a fun fallacy, isn't it?
You're really that much of a Linux-centric jackoff that you're not even familiar with the basic fucking equivalent terminology from another operating environment?
Linux-centric, yes, and I may or may not be a jackoff. But I suppose what I'm asking is what basic fucking equivalent is involved here? When I plug my phone into my PC, it becomes either a standard USB external drive or (once rooted and with the right tethering app on the phone) a standard USB modem. I don't have to run any vendor-provided application software on my PC for it to talk to my phone...so what's the fucking equivalent? Thanks.
Some of these are devastating problems, certainly. Whether calling them "diseases" is accurate, is part of the question here.
Non medical treatment hasn't been shown to be terribly effective.
Medical treatment hasn't been shown to be terribly effective.
What the hell else do you do?
How about treating a cognitive and behavioral problem with cognitive and behavioral solutions?
The brain is clearly chemical in nature
Computers are electronic in nature, but you don't fix a software bug by rewriting them. (Yes, the computer/brain analogy can be hazardous if carried too far.)
Bad example, because it actually is tracked who owns and uses a car.
And certainly if I was going to go buy a car to mow down a bunch of pedestrians, I'd go title and register it at the MVA after I buy it from some guy on Craigslist for $500.
Of course, a hyper regulated country with an ever shrinking 'freedom sandbox' is the leftist definition of liberty
No, it's not. Left vs. right is the "common people" vs. the aristocrats axis -- labor vs. capital, in modern times. One's opinion on how much government regulation there should be is independent of one's opinion on whether that regulation should benefit working people or the investment class.
Why do we have laws at all then? Why do we say don't have sex with children when criminals are just going to do it anyway?
If I sell you a gun, you and I both consent to the transaction. Doesn't matter whether it's legal or not, neither of us will call the cops.
If you sexually assault someone, that person is not consenting, and will call the cops (or their parents will).
You cannot effectively enforce a law against a transaction where all parties involved consent, and even trying to do so inevitably involved measures corrosive to liberty.
I think there are plenty of perfectly nice large and strong people to handle the tiny few who suddenly decide to go rogue.
Violent people very rarely "suddenly decide to go rogue". They typically have a history of increasing violence.
The odds of one of those perfectly nice large and strong people being around when one of those rogues attacks you is low; and firearms enable people who are perfectly nice but not large and strong to protect you.
Hey, I already walk around unarmed --- a short, flabby weakling --- and yet don't regularly get beset by burly bandits.
Nor are you regularly shot at by gun-toting thugs.
Part of the reason that, if you live in a middle-class area, you're not very likely to be assaulted is because we hire people with guns to lock up burly bandits. And also because potential burly bandits know that some portion of potential victims are armed -- armed citizens create a penumbra of protection.
With guns, I'm still at the mercy of those better armed, with better marksmanship, and more willingness to initiate violence with the element of surprise
All of those factors apply even more without guns (except substitute "marksmanship" with more general "skill"). In a typical assault scenario, if you have a gun your attacker is not significantly "better armed" even if he has a bigger gun, and marksmanship is not much of a factor because assaults happen at close range. With knives or other weapons, both the size of the attacker and of the weapon matters much more, and skill is a huge factor.
Moreover, the data shows that lack of gun availability really does reduce suicide rate
No, it doesn't. What the data shows is that people who choose to commit suicide and have a gun around, will use a gun; that suicide is more common in rural areas; and that people in rural areas are more likely to have a gun around. International comparison shows that the U.S. has a lower suicide rate than many nations with strict gun control.
Generally speaking suicides are impulsive acts, and the person committing suicide isn't willing to go through a complicated process to do so.
Observation of cultures with higher suicide rates disproves this hypothesis. Jumping off a building or in front of a train takes some preparation.
Anyone can build a bomb with instructions on the internet, but most of us don't. Why? The public has decided that bombs kill way too many people and the law (in the United States, at least), severely punishes people who, successfully or otherwise, blow up a bomb.
SHM. No. The reason most of us don't build bombs has nothing to do with bomb control laws. The reason most of us don't build bombs is because bombs are not useful to most people.
Guns are useful to 1) good citizens who want to defend themselves, and 2) bad people who want to hurt, steal from, and kill other people.
Good citizens can't use a bomb to defend themselves against someone home invaders or muggers. Bad people can't rob or rape someone with a bomb. (Though most robberies and rapes don't use firearms). Bombs are poor tools for murdering a specific person, and most murderers want to kill someone specific.
When bad people actually want bombs, as Boston proved it's not hard for them to get them.
Slashdot Mirror
Citation needed.
Roughly 6% of murders are committed with fists and feet. Not only are such weapons produced in an uncontrolled manner, we even give out tax breaks to those that produce them.
Right. And one of those economic realities is that health care is not an area where a "free market" can efficiently allocate resources. Buyers and sellers do not meet in the marketplace with equal power and full knowledge.
It takes no more resources to provide an American citizen with health care than a German or a Japanese one. Yet every other developed nation has better outcome at less cost. The difference is the obscene profits realized by companies like United Health.
Guess how long I had to wait for United Health to approve an MRI?
No, the ACA does not allow the IRS to access your medical records.
The allegation is that they exceeded the authority of a warrant and demanded copies of servers containing records for ten million people from an unnamed company. Is it true? Neither you nor I know. But the suit is unrelated to the ACA.
No. It's not.: "DuckDuckGo gets its results from over 50 sources, including DuckDuckBot (our own crawler), crowd-sourced sites (in our own index), Yahoo! (through BOSS), embed.ly, WolframAlpha, EntireWeb, Bing, Yandex, and Blekko." Please don't FUD on the Duck.
I'm sure Google doesn't. So what? "Want" and "is legally entitled to" are very different things. Google isn't legally entitled to tell MS what sort of software MS can write.
Meaningless. As Google has argued itself, an API is not subject to copyright, therefore you cannot impose TOS on someone writing code that uses it.
I'm no fan of MS, but Google sucks also. Google doesn't get to tell MS what sort of software MS can write. It's a remarkable and accidental occurrence, but it looks like MS is on the side of software freedom here.
No. Not only have plenty of rampage shooters used handguns, some have used revolvers.
Campo Elias Delgado killed between 26 and 30 people (accounts differ and some may have been killed by police in the crossfire) and wounded 15 with a knife and a single revolver..
Wellington Menezes de Oliveira killed 12 (not including himself) and wounded 12, using two revolvers and firing over 60 shots.
Charles Andrew Williams killed 2 people and wounded 13 with a single revolver.
Thomas Hamilton, the Dunblane shooter, killed 17 people (not including himself) and wounded 15 more. He had four handguns: two six-round revolvers and two 9mm pistols.
George Hennard, the Luby's shooter, killed 23 (not including himself) and wounded 20 with two semi-automatic handguns.
Jiverly Antares Wong, the Binghamton shooter, killed 13 people (not including himself) and wounded four more with two handguns.
Nidal Malik Hasan, the Foot Hood shooter, fired 214 rounds from a single handgun, killing 13 people and wounding 13.
Patrick Henry Sherrill, the Edmond post office shooter, killed 14 people and wounded six. He had three handguns and fired approximately 50 rounds.
Howard Unruh killed 13 people and wounded 3 with a Luger (a handgun).
The demonization of rifles is completely irrational, not just in terms of their overall use in homicides but in terms of their use in spree shootings.
The proper object of fear here is the person pointing the gun. If someone seriously threatens to kill me, you bet your ass I'll be afraid, whether they have a gun, a knife, a baseball bat, or their own hands and feet. (More people are murdered via hands and feet than via either rifles or via blunt objects.)
It is a fact of human existence that the only direct protection a person has against someone intent on violence is their own ability to use defensive force ("a revolver"), or the ability and willingness of others to use force on their behalf ("our posse"). That's true whether you live in ancient Rome, the Wild West (which was probably not as "Wild" as our mythology makes it out to be), a gang-controlled part of a city, or a low-crime gated community.
Indirect forms of protection, where we have socioeconomic, educational, criminal justice, and mental health care systems that don't lead to people developing along violent lines or make serious efforts at reform if they do, may have more overall impact. But when a crazed stalker breaks into your home, it's past the time where those can come into play.
No, they can't.. DWI is a crime and can land you in jail. Declining a search or declining to testify is never a crime, and can at best lead to a revocation of a privilege (driving on the public roads).
No, it's not, because the majority of those "gun deaths" would simply take place via other means if guns magically vanished, not to mention that legal attempts to reduce access to firearms have always failed; while drunk driving deaths would not occur at all if drunk driving magically stopped. (Whether legal attempts to reduce drunk driving have worked is an open question; they've generally been accompanied by public awareness campaigns that may have had more to do with any observed effect than an increase in legal penalties.)
Voiding warranty, my eye. If you don't root your gorram phone., it's not "yours" in any meaningful sense. If a hardware problem develops, do a factory reset and send it back for a replacement
So, yeah...unwanted services on my phone, not an issue.
Uh, yes, actually, that's exactly what it means.
Restrictions can be placed on where, when, and how you say it in order to protect the rights of others (you don't have a right to blare it from loudspeakers at 3am and disturb my right to reasonable peace and quiet, you don't have a right to say it while waving a knife and disturb my right to reasonable safety, etc.), but in terms of content, you can say whatever you damn well please. Any government that doesn't recognize that doesn't recognize freedom of speech.
Post hoc ergo prompter hoc is a fun fallacy, isn't it?
Linux-centric, yes, and I may or may not be a jackoff. But I suppose what I'm asking is what basic fucking equivalent is involved here? When I plug my phone into my PC, it becomes either a standard USB external drive or (once rooted and with the right tethering app on the phone) a standard USB modem. I don't have to run any vendor-provided application software on my PC for it to talk to my phone...so what's the fucking equivalent? Thanks.
Sorry, can someone explain to a Linux/Android guy how having an iPhone implies you can't kill misbehaving software on your Windows box?
The evidence is tiny because there is enormous pressure to treat schizophrenia with drugs; but it disagrees with your assertion. "CBT is a feasible treatment for people with schizophrenia who are not prescribed antipsychotic medication. It may be a valuable alternative to medication in treating symptoms of schizophrenia."
Some of these are devastating problems, certainly. Whether calling them "diseases" is accurate, is part of the question here.
Medical treatment hasn't been shown to be terribly effective.
How about treating a cognitive and behavioral problem with cognitive and behavioral solutions?
Computers are electronic in nature, but you don't fix a software bug by rewriting them. (Yes, the computer/brain analogy can be hazardous if carried too far.)
And certainly if I was going to go buy a car to mow down a bunch of pedestrians, I'd go title and register it at the MVA after I buy it from some guy on Craigslist for $500.
Here's how effectively cars are tracked: despite the law, 1 in 7 drivers are not insured.
No, it's not. Left vs. right is the "common people" vs. the aristocrats axis -- labor vs. capital, in modern times. One's opinion on how much government regulation there should be is independent of one's opinion on whether that regulation should benefit working people or the investment class.
If I sell you a gun, you and I both consent to the transaction. Doesn't matter whether it's legal or not, neither of us will call the cops.
If you sexually assault someone, that person is not consenting, and will call the cops (or their parents will).
You cannot effectively enforce a law against a transaction where all parties involved consent, and even trying to do so inevitably involved measures corrosive to liberty.
Violent people very rarely "suddenly decide to go rogue". They typically have a history of increasing violence.
The odds of one of those perfectly nice large and strong people being around when one of those rogues attacks you is low; and firearms enable people who are perfectly nice but not large and strong to protect you.
A quick internet search turns up many instances of ">older ladies defending themselves with firearms, and of mothers defending themselves and their kids, when no nice young large and strong folks were around. People who want all guns to disappear want a world where those ladies would be defenseless against their attackers.
Nor are you regularly shot at by gun-toting thugs.
Part of the reason that, if you live in a middle-class area, you're not very likely to be assaulted is because we hire people with guns to lock up burly bandits. And also because potential burly bandits know that some portion of potential victims are armed -- armed citizens create a penumbra of protection.
All of those factors apply even more without guns (except substitute "marksmanship" with more general "skill"). In a typical assault scenario, if you have a gun your attacker is not significantly "better armed" even if he has a bigger gun, and marksmanship is not much of a factor because assaults happen at close range. With knives or other weapons, both the size of the attacker and of the weapon matters much more, and skill is a huge factor.
No, it doesn't. What the data shows is that people who choose to commit suicide and have a gun around, will use a gun; that suicide is more common in rural areas; and that people in rural areas are more likely to have a gun around. International comparison shows that the U.S. has a lower suicide rate than many nations with strict gun control.
Observation of cultures with higher suicide rates disproves this hypothesis. Jumping off a building or in front of a train takes some preparation.
SHM. No. The reason most of us don't build bombs has nothing to do with bomb control laws. The reason most of us don't build bombs is because bombs are not useful to most people.
Guns are useful to 1) good citizens who want to defend themselves, and 2) bad people who want to hurt, steal from, and kill other people.
Good citizens can't use a bomb to defend themselves against someone home invaders or muggers. Bad people can't rob or rape someone with a bomb. (Though most robberies and rapes don't use firearms). Bombs are poor tools for murdering a specific person, and most murderers want to kill someone specific.
When bad people actually want bombs, as Boston proved it's not hard for them to get them.