I don't live out west; the lands the railroads have around here, they bought. And I don't need the FDA to get safe food; I can (e.g.) look for one of the Kosher marks to identify something that meets basic food quality standards. Just like I buy appliances that are UL listed - UL isn't a federal agency. And it's worth noting that the Internet exploded... just after the NSF got out of the backbone business and pulled the anti-commercial AUP.
state government is still government, and can take away your rights
Yeah, but it's pretty easy to move from one state to another. Moving to another country is a lot more difficult.
Actually, it would be pretty easy. We're talking about the federal government, here, not state and local ones. I can easily use city streets and the (private) railways to supply my needs.
I'd rather have my local affairs run... locally. And by my state rather than the feds. So what if they don't choose perfectly? At least I'm not stuck trying to get 60 votes in the US Senate to overturn ideas that don't work.
My car isn't empty; it contains my sunglasses (multiple pair; I've been known to lose them from time to time), a stereo preset to my preferred radio stations, and seats that are heated, cooled, and covered in my choice of fabric. It contains a first-aid kit of my own construction, jumper cables, a flashlight, $20 in emergency cash, a pocketknife, a Space Pen (writes upside down and under water!), a full tank of gasoline, a cigarette lighter, small containers of hand sanitizer, a Bluetooth system that is already synced to my phone, and a few other items.
I'm certainly not going to carry all of those around with me - indeed, in the case of the pocketknife I sometimes can't. I don't have any interest in carrying a box containing "stuff you'll need eventually when you're in the car", so there is one in my car and one in my wife's. I don't pay for my car to sit there; I pay for it to be three feet from my back door whenever I want, on zero notice, for my exclusive use. Car-sharing doesn't offer that. It's not that car-sharing never makes sense; it's just that it only makes sense in very densely populated areas where owning a car is a real pain.
The social stigma of riding the bus is not slight. It's huge. Almost nobody who can afford other means uses buses - despite their theoretical advantages, they're slow for point-to-point travel, meaning that you have to put near-zero value on your time in order to make them worthwhile.
I'd love self-driving cars. They'd be great. But I don't want to ride in a bus. It beats walking, but that's about it.
The fact that it is possible to live a nomadic life in which you carry everything you may need around with you doesn't mean that people want to live that life. And once you start paying for the car to sit there, empty, it rapidly becomes less and less appealing vs owning your own.
You can pay a per-mile tax by increasing gasoline taxes, too, and in the bargain you don't have to hand the government a list of every single place you've driven in the past year.
Cars will continue to be owned by individuals so long as we have drunks and vandals to make publicly-owned vehicles dirty, nasty, and unpleasant. Especially if there's no driver in the car to stop them. Not only that, you can leave things in the car - from small objects like sunglasses, to large packages while shopping.
That's a civil case, not a criminal one. Don't know Canadian law but those are subject to very different standards of proof in the US - and I strongly suspect this is similar between the two countries.
And at age 91, your life expectancy is 3.54 years - i.e., having lived another year, you have a life expectancy that has gone down by only about three months.
I do see a lot of the ones that are in special care, though I will admit that my information is anecdotal. If you look at the table that the AC that replied to me pointed out, you can see that by 90, another year of life only decreases your life expectancy by about three months. Their odds may not be better than 50%, but they're a lot better than the average 30-year-old's.
People over the age of 90 are typically very healthy - people with bad health habits often die before 70, though a few last until their mid-80s. If you make it to 90, you've got a very good chance of making 100. In addition, healthy people usually have good intellects regardless of their age - I've met more than a few 90+ year olds who are quite sharp.
You've got it backward; it's that a job that denies you a normal sex life is going to attract a disproportionate number of people who aren't interested in a normal sex life, because they like to fuck kids.
What do you expect out of a system that denies priests the right to marry? These scandals don't routinely rock the Episcopal, Lutheran, or Orthodox communities, because you can be a priest and still have a sex life in those denominations.
Having some photos of girls that might be 16-17 showing off their tits (developed tits) at a club or party is not child porn.
It is, however, prosecutable as such. Just as an FYI. And yes, judges are acutely aware of the fact that it is legal for some people (e.g., two 16-year-olds) to have sex in almost every state but illegal for them to look at each other's bodies while they do so.
Not finding it, but genuinely interested if you do track one down. As I noted in another comment, I've heard it mentioned that fishermen and whalers had contact with North America (the Grand Banks, Newfoundland, etc.), from the 1300s on, but nothing more than that.
Is pre-Clovis really that important? I'm not a historian, not even a history buff, so I am merely parroting Jared Diamond's original assessment here, but if the pre-Clovis cultures were so small and materially insignificant as to leave almost no trace, why does it need to be covered in high school in more than one sentence? "There is evidence of some small settlements in the pre-Clovis era; however, Clovis cultures ultimately defined the continents' population."
Verizon has one problem: their 3G network is pretty slow. I've got an AT&T 3G iPad and a Verizon Moto Droid, and the speed is noticeably higher on AT&T. Of course, the Droid can actually get data service a lot more places than the AT&T device, but it's a real dilemma.
If this were the iPhone 5, with LTE data speeds, I'd have pre-ordered and switched. As it is, I'm already used to the way Android does things (i.e., the unpolished bits don't bother me much) and will probably get a Galaxy Nexus or Droid HD to get the speed upgrade.
Forgive me for being a bit undereducated on this point, but in what way is Columbus not hugely significant in the European discovery of the Americas? Sure, there's L'Anse aux Meadows, and I've heard (though never actually read) that fishermen had discovered the Grand Banks and traded with Newfoundland, etc. But none of those were publicized and none kicked off larger rounds of exploration and colonization, so it's a bit like saying that James Watt invented the steam engine. He didn't, but he made it a lot better - turning it from an interesting contrivance into something that could drive the Industrial Revolution.
This is a roundup of a lot of scholarly work on what the Americas were like before Columbus. In short, the book contends that there were an awful lot of people in North America prior to the Age of Exploration who were extraordinarily susceptible to European diseases. While many practiced straight-up agriculture, a lot of others essentially "farmed" wild game - early European colonists into the Ohio Valley noted that the land often looked like European parks (i.e., trees spaced far enough apart that wagons could easily be driven between them, with occasional copses, making perfect habitat for deer), and that an extraordinarily high percentage of the trees that were there were nut-producers (i.e., they planted those and cut down anything else). It also argues that the early explorers (especially de Soto's expedition) weren't making things up when they talked about cities with tens of thousands of inhabitants lining the sides of rivers. When they died en masse, the "old-growth" forests arose.
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state government is still government, and can take away your rights
Yeah, but it's pretty easy to move from one state to another. Moving to another country is a lot more difficult.
Actually, it would be pretty easy. We're talking about the federal government, here, not state and local ones. I can easily use city streets and the (private) railways to supply my needs.
I'd rather have my local affairs run... locally. And by my state rather than the feds. So what if they don't choose perfectly? At least I'm not stuck trying to get 60 votes in the US Senate to overturn ideas that don't work.
My car isn't empty; it contains my sunglasses (multiple pair; I've been known to lose them from time to time), a stereo preset to my preferred radio stations, and seats that are heated, cooled, and covered in my choice of fabric. It contains a first-aid kit of my own construction, jumper cables, a flashlight, $20 in emergency cash, a pocketknife, a Space Pen (writes upside down and under water!), a full tank of gasoline, a cigarette lighter, small containers of hand sanitizer, a Bluetooth system that is already synced to my phone, and a few other items.
I'm certainly not going to carry all of those around with me - indeed, in the case of the pocketknife I sometimes can't. I don't have any interest in carrying a box containing "stuff you'll need eventually when you're in the car", so there is one in my car and one in my wife's. I don't pay for my car to sit there; I pay for it to be three feet from my back door whenever I want, on zero notice, for my exclusive use. Car-sharing doesn't offer that. It's not that car-sharing never makes sense; it's just that it only makes sense in very densely populated areas where owning a car is a real pain.
The social stigma of riding the bus is not slight. It's huge. Almost nobody who can afford other means uses buses - despite their theoretical advantages, they're slow for point-to-point travel, meaning that you have to put near-zero value on your time in order to make them worthwhile.
I'd love self-driving cars. They'd be great. But I don't want to ride in a bus. It beats walking, but that's about it.
The fact that it is possible to live a nomadic life in which you carry everything you may need around with you doesn't mean that people want to live that life. And once you start paying for the car to sit there, empty, it rapidly becomes less and less appealing vs owning your own.
You can pay a per-mile tax by increasing gasoline taxes, too, and in the bargain you don't have to hand the government a list of every single place you've driven in the past year.
Cars will continue to be owned by individuals so long as we have drunks and vandals to make publicly-owned vehicles dirty, nasty, and unpleasant. Especially if there's no driver in the car to stop them. Not only that, you can leave things in the car - from small objects like sunglasses, to large packages while shopping.
That's a civil case, not a criminal one. Don't know Canadian law but those are subject to very different standards of proof in the US - and I strongly suspect this is similar between the two countries.
"Very good" is, of course, a relative term.
fucking
***.
Well, do you want to curse me, or not? And how do you come to the conclusion that you have a 33% chance of dying?
And at age 91, your life expectancy is 3.54 years - i.e., having lived another year, you have a life expectancy that has gone down by only about three months.
I do see a lot of the ones that are in special care, though I will admit that my information is anecdotal. If you look at the table that the AC that replied to me pointed out, you can see that by 90, another year of life only decreases your life expectancy by about three months. Their odds may not be better than 50%, but they're a lot better than the average 30-year-old's.
People over the age of 90 are typically very healthy - people with bad health habits often die before 70, though a few last until their mid-80s. If you make it to 90, you've got a very good chance of making 100. In addition, healthy people usually have good intellects regardless of their age - I've met more than a few 90+ year olds who are quite sharp.
You've got it backward; it's that a job that denies you a normal sex life is going to attract a disproportionate number of people who aren't interested in a normal sex life, because they like to fuck kids.
What do you expect out of a system that denies priests the right to marry? These scandals don't routinely rock the Episcopal, Lutheran, or Orthodox communities, because you can be a priest and still have a sex life in those denominations.
Having some photos of girls that might be 16-17 showing off their tits (developed tits) at a club or party is not child porn.
It is, however, prosecutable as such. Just as an FYI. And yes, judges are acutely aware of the fact that it is legal for some people (e.g., two 16-year-olds) to have sex in almost every state but illegal for them to look at each other's bodies while they do so.
Thanks for the heads up. I'll check it out.
Not finding it, but genuinely interested if you do track one down. As I noted in another comment, I've heard it mentioned that fishermen and whalers had contact with North America (the Grand Banks, Newfoundland, etc.), from the 1300s on, but nothing more than that.
Is pre-Clovis really that important? I'm not a historian, not even a history buff, so I am merely parroting Jared Diamond's original assessment here, but if the pre-Clovis cultures were so small and materially insignificant as to leave almost no trace, why does it need to be covered in high school in more than one sentence? "There is evidence of some small settlements in the pre-Clovis era; however, Clovis cultures ultimately defined the continents' population."
In fairness, the relevance of the Spanish conquest of Central and South America to the history of the United States is actually pretty small.
Mecator's pre-1492 maps of the Americas
If you're talking about Gerardus Mercator, he wasn't born until 1512. Clarification?
Verizon has one problem: their 3G network is pretty slow. I've got an AT&T 3G iPad and a Verizon Moto Droid, and the speed is noticeably higher on AT&T. Of course, the Droid can actually get data service a lot more places than the AT&T device, but it's a real dilemma.
If this were the iPhone 5, with LTE data speeds, I'd have pre-ordered and switched. As it is, I'm already used to the way Android does things (i.e., the unpolished bits don't bother me much) and will probably get a Galaxy Nexus or Droid HD to get the speed upgrade.
Forgive me for being a bit undereducated on this point, but in what way is Columbus not hugely significant in the European discovery of the Americas? Sure, there's L'Anse aux Meadows, and I've heard (though never actually read) that fishermen had discovered the Grand Banks and traded with Newfoundland, etc. But none of those were publicized and none kicked off larger rounds of exploration and colonization, so it's a bit like saying that James Watt invented the steam engine. He didn't, but he made it a lot better - turning it from an interesting contrivance into something that could drive the Industrial Revolution.
This is a roundup of a lot of scholarly work on what the Americas were like before Columbus. In short, the book contends that there were an awful lot of people in North America prior to the Age of Exploration who were extraordinarily susceptible to European diseases. While many practiced straight-up agriculture, a lot of others essentially "farmed" wild game - early European colonists into the Ohio Valley noted that the land often looked like European parks (i.e., trees spaced far enough apart that wagons could easily be driven between them, with occasional copses, making perfect habitat for deer), and that an extraordinarily high percentage of the trees that were there were nut-producers (i.e., they planted those and cut down anything else). It also argues that the early explorers (especially de Soto's expedition) weren't making things up when they talked about cities with tens of thousands of inhabitants lining the sides of rivers. When they died en masse, the "old-growth" forests arose.