I was taking that into account. Even in 1919, while rushing to the exits would be reasonable give the risk posed by a fire in an all-wood theater, trampling others to save yourself would not be.
In any event the famous "fire in a crowded theater" case wasn't really about fires in theaters, it was about justifying the imposition of censorship. The government wanted to stop people from publicly advocating for dodging the draft. In other words, the ruling was in support of restrictions on political speech. The only reason it was upheld at all was that the administration threatened to stuff the Court with its own lackeys until it obtained a favorable ruling (this being before the number of Supreme Court justices was fixed at nine).
You have as much right to use airspace as you have a right to a public road.
The biggest problem with that analogy is that public roads are a relatively small space which the government either homesteaded or purchased—perhaps using eminent domain, which is a whole other issue, but at least paying some compensation to the former owner. You can drive however you want on private property (with the consent of the owner), including private roads. But the government claims every bit of above-ground outdoor as "public airspace" under their jurisdiction, leaving nothing for private use.
There should be an explicit exception in the law (not just FAA regulations) for airspace below a reasonable altitude—at least 400 feet, higher in remote areas away from any common flight paths. Some, but not all, of that space will be privately owned; the rest would be available for any non-harmful use by any member of the public without interference from the FAA.
No airport exceptions: if they want that airspace to be clear to ground level they can very well go out and buy it themselves, or negotiate an easement.
Even in the US, the 1st amendment isn't totally immutable. There are concepts like "fighting words" and the notion that you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater. And I don't doubt that the court would go along with some limitations on 1st amendment rights during wartime.
Two out of three of those are simply flawed. Yes, courts have upheld "fighting words" laws and wartime restrictions, but that doesn't meant they aren't in conflict with the 1st Amendment.
As for shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, if someone acts on your false claim of fire in good faith, and someone comes to harm because of it, naturally you'd be liable for that harm. That's more akin to fraud than a restriction on speech. You either set out to cause harm using other people as mere tools, or showed negligent disregard for the harm that any reasonable person would expect to result from others behaving reasonably and lawfully in accordance with the (false) information you provided.
The problem with that ruling is that it assigns blame to the one shouting "fire" when the harm does not result from others acting on a belief that there is a fire in good faith. The harm addressed by that case was others getting trampled in a panicked stampede for the exits; the liability for that harm lies with those who panicked and trampled others in their rush to escape. The belief that there was a fire does not excuse such behavior, and that liability would be exactly the same whether or not the claim of fire was a lie. The proper liability for the one who shouted "fire" is limited to the damage that would have resulted from an orderly exit from the theater.
That being said, it is a shame we don't have the right symbols on your keyboards.
If you're using a Unix system, the programmable Compose key can be very useful. I generally map it to the Menu key and have a stripped-down custom.XCompose file with mnemonic bindings for the most common Unicode mathematical operators, Greek letters, currency symbols, and accented characters.
Of course, to use it you also need a programming language which allows custom operators with Unicode symbol characters. I recommend Haskell.
People override the basic operator names because they can't define their own. Languages which allow arbitrary sequences of symbols as operator names generally don't have the same problems with operator overloading that you get in e.g. C++. Of course, they generally also require operator names to be unique within the current scope, just like function names. If overloading is permitted at all, it's restricted to implementing a common interface which defines the type and semantics of the operator.
With proper language constraints, code which uses custom operators is no harder to read than code which uses custom function names. The operators are just functions named by symbols rather than alphanumerics.
I expect that to be honored until I choose to change my plan.
You have no legal basis for that expectation. Your service agreement only lasts so long as both you and the service provider agree to it. Either party can terminate the service at any time.
Article 1 Section 8's enumeration of Power of Congress are implicitly also exclusively *reserved* for Congress.
For example Congress is not merely empowered to establish currency; this task is reserved for congress. Congress is not merely empowered to declare wars or maintain the navy; the power to declare wars and maintain navies *rests* with congress. The states can't establish their own currencies, navies, nor declare their own wars.... nor can they establish their own post offices.
Nonsense. Section 8 only says what Congress is permitted to do. It doesn't mean, on its own, that any of those things are exclusive to Congress. That would mean, for example, that states couldn't establish their own courts ("To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court"). Most of what is in Section 8 only makes sense for Congress anyway, but the rest is fair game.
States don't get to declare war or maintain navies in peacetime because they are explicitly forbidden from doing so by Section 10, not because those things are listed as powers of Congress in Section 8. (Note that there's even an exception to that rule: "... or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.") States have issued their own currencies in the past, and there is nothing wrong with that so long as they don't try to make them legal tender. (Or they can use gold and/or silver, which they are permitted to make legal tender.)
Post offices already exist apart from those established by Congress. What do you think UPS and FedEx are? Just because they can't (cost-effectively) carry first-class mail thanks to laws favoring the USPS doesn't mean that they aren't a form of private postal service. The same goes for "post roads" not established by Congress—both private and state-level.
I have been buying my own phones so that I may keep my unlimited data plan, and now I hear the price will change? It makes no sense to retroactively change an agreement. I am most seriously displeased.
You have no agreement, apart from (at most) the next month's service, which you paid for in advance. Your contract ran out a long time ago; you're buying your service month-to-month. The service provider has no obligation to continue offering you a grandfathered service plan. The only reason they don't discontinue such plans and force everyone to switch is that they risk losing customers with grandfathered plans to the competition. Up till now, they would have rather lost money on you than lose you as a customer; however, that deal gets increasingly worse for them as time goes on and you show no sign of switching to a new plan.
"The same effect... in reverse." You mean the opposite effect? Empowering governments—and thus, indirectly, the corporations they represent—at the expense of individual citizens?
I think I made it clear that I think most of TPP is awful. Since they insisted that it be pass/fail via the fast-track process, I think that it should be unceremoniously rejected. Even without that, I doubt it could be amended into anything worth passing. However, any government giving up the power to make a product or voluntary action illegal is always a good thing, no matter who introduced the concept or applied the political leverage necessary to get it passed. So what if it's in the corporations' best interests? It's still the right thing to do.
I agree with you there, but I don't have any problem whatsoever with a government, at any level, agreeing not to commit acts of tyranny over any of its citizens—even if a majority of its citizens are in favor of such acts. Even if it does come at the behest of big, bad multinational corporations, in this one rare instance the TPP has the effect of enhancing the sovereignty of individual citizens over all the levels of government that would try to rule them.
Those 33.9% weren't asked how they felt about this particular issue. Maybe they really didn't care which representative got elected, when none of the available (and viable) candidates actually represented their views. Maybe they did care, but voting for a candidate whom they agree with on this issue would mean compromising on some other issue that matters to them at least as much; it's not uncommon or unreasonable to have more than one issue that matters to you. Or maybe they're just opposed to the whole system.
Statistics about the recurring popularity contest between candidates or political parties provide very little useful data regarding specific political views or preferences.
If you do that, it isn't a one-time pad any more, and none of the "provably unbreakable" guarantees of one-time pads apply. All you have is standard symmetric encryption with a stream cipher.
A critical part of any one-time pad is the fact that each bit of the pad is independently and uniformly random. If you generate the pad from a seed then an attacker no longer needs to find the pad; they only need to find the seed. And as there are far fewer seeds than plausible messages, they'll probably be able to detect when they've found the right one.
If your goal is simply to take money from people who earned it and give it to others who didn't, I can't help you. My impression was that you were trying to improve the economy, not destroy it.
Labeling it as "over-consumption" is value-laden, implying that people who spend it have "enough" and they are consuming too much.
No value judgment was intended. Over-consumption is a specific economic phenomenon which occurs when there is an external force acting on the system causing a shift away from saving and investment and toward consumption, compared to the same economy without that influence. It is excessive with respect to the values and preferences of those bearing the costs of the consumption, not some arbitrary external standard.
One example of a force causing over-consumption would be a subsidy for the purchase of consumer goods. The goods have a natural price of perhaps $12, but due to the subsidy they only cost $10. There is a range of uses valued between $10 and $12 where the good would not be consumed at the natural price, but will be consumed with the subsidy. This is over-consumption. A good with a natural price of $12 is being consumed to produce $10 or $11 in value, which is a net loss. Depending on how the subsidy is funded, that loss may be born by the consumers directory or externalized onto others.
Note that the opposite situation can also be a problem, external influences causing under-consumption and over-investment. There is a natural balance between consumption and investment. Deviating from this balance, in either direction, is a net loss for society as a whole.
... you could argue that part of the economy's inequality problem is corporations and very high income individuals sitting on cash because they don't have investment alternatives (think Apples billions in cash) -- as long as that money is held in short-term deposits and short term securities, it's not doing produtive work in the economy. Taxed and returned to the economy, it produces economic activity.
Economic activity is not a good in its own right, it's a mean to an end. And while money sitting in the bank may not be doing anything "productive", it also isn't consuming anything; it's neutral. Forcing that money back into the economy to be spent on extra (over-)consumption or on investments which will not provide a worthwhile return is a net loss for the economy, which is worst than being non-productive.
In my view of things, in any democratic society governed by the rule of law, people can only become as wealthy as the masses are willing to tolerate.... If the poor become angry enough, they will basically either steal all the shit that the rich person has by force, or just outright murder the fucker by forming an angry mob and going after them.
What does that have to do with the rule of law? What you're describing sounds more like a breakdown of law, or mob rule.
Keep in mind that the fact that some people are rich does not automatically imply that others must have a low standard of living. Having a couple million dollars in the bank and a few billion in investments does not mean that one is consuming a proportionally greater amount of goods and services than the average individual. Several times more, perhaps, but not a hundred or a thousand times more, and the very rich make up only a small fraction of the overall population. One consequence of this is that seizing and redistributing that wealth would not free up a proportional amount of the consumer goods and services demanded by the majority of the population; it would just drive prices sky-high, with lots of money chasing the same supply of goods in the short term, and over the long term, no one putting any effort into maintaining the capital (factories, machines, research, education, steady jobs) that allowed those goods to be produced inexpensively in the first place.
While, historically, poor living conditions and wealth disparity have tended to result in exactly the sort of mob rule that you describe, it's a reaction born of frustration and jealousy rather than reason. Wealth is not the problem, and seizing the assets of the rich is not a solution.
If we are able to determine the average length of a year over a large time span more accurately, it's quite probable that the easiest fix might actually be simply to redefine the second.
Maybe the adjustments will balance out, maybe they won't. Everything I've seen suggests that the Earth's rotation is slowing slightly, which would tend to result in more leap seconds than "leap anti-seconds" (or whatever the proper term is for skipping a second) on average.
However, I cannot imagine a world where the easiest solution would be to redefine the second. That would have ripple effects throughout physics, chemistry, astronomy, engineering, etc. Fundamental physical constants would have to change. All the existing published papers would contain invalid calculations. A far simpler change would be to redefine the number of seconds in a day to include a fractional part. Even there we would run into a problem, because the Earth's rate of rotation is not uniform, but at least there aren't many fundamental units defined in terms of days.
Why not let those seconds accumulate and have a second leap day every hundred thousand years or so?
Because for about half of those hundred thousand years, the gradual drift would mean that noon occurs in the middle of the night.
Leap days results in a difference of up to one day, with noticeable seasonal changes occurring on the order of at least a month. Correcting by a full day to account for discrepancies in the length of the day would mean being off by up to one full day-cycle. That's not something you can easily ignore.
Sure, that's what happens when the central planners decide that a shared resource will be set aside for "common use" and not allowed to be privately owned or managed.
Tragedy of the commons is self-correcting so long as there isn't some force preventing the commons from being homesteaded as private property. It's only when the resource is forced to remain a commons that you get a tragedy.
I'm probably 15 minutes walk from a couple of grocery stores...
Is that 15 minutes with or without carry a week's worth of groceries for a normal-size family? Or do you just spend more time and money doing your grocery shopping in small increments every day rather than buying in bulk?
The bikes do practically no damage to the road, so your point is moot.
Even assuming that bikes do no damage at all to the road, you still have the cost of constructing the road in the first place, and ongoing maintenance due to weather and age. The damage done to the roads by ordinary passenger vehicles, while more than the damage done by bicycles, is still a fairly small part of the overall cost.
The vehicles that cause the most wear by far are the heavy trucks, and for all that this city wants to promote bicycles for daily travel, they still need a way to deliver large and/or heavy goods to people's homes. You aren't going to get a new couch or full-size refrigerator delivered by bicycle. The moving van needs to be parked as close as possible to your new home or apartment. And so on; homes without some kind of vehicle access are not particularly practical, even if you don't have a vehicle of your own.
Or perhaps -1 for property rights. The drone operator clearly had a property right in the drone, which was destroyed. Exactly how far the right the owner of a piece of land to exclude others from the airspace above it extends is much less obvious. Some distance, certainly, but not "as far as one can see" or "up to the edge of space". At some distance the airspace is beyond the legitimate claim of any ground-based property owner and available for anyone to use.
I do think that an argument could be made that the drone operator was trespassing, and that destroying the drone might be justified given a pattern of continued trespass and an inability to locate or contact the drone's owner, but it wouldn't be clear and objective.
While I am a strong proponent of network neutrality as you describe it, there is a case to be made for handling packets different based on who is involved (even if the technical details are tricky).
No, handling packets differently based on who is involved is pretty much the opposite of neutrality.
Neutrality should mean that the specific source, destination, and content of a packet (including things like the "protocol" and "port" fields) have no effect on prioritization. Data which can influence prioritization includes the level of service the customer purchased, whether or not the packet must be routed outside the ISP's own network, general statistics about the customer's network traffic like historical bandwidth use and number of unique flows, packet sizes, explicit QoS flags (e.g. "high bandwidth", "low latency", "bulk traffic") set on the packets by the customer, and current capacity and loading of the network.
Any application of DPI automatically renders the prioritization non-neutral. Or more generally: If the presence or absence of encryption would affect prioritization, the prioritization rules are not neutral.
To be fair, the police DO get extra privileges and powers over ordinary citizens. If you see someone speeding on a highway, you can't just order them to pull over. If you see someone steal something extremely valuable, you can't lock him up in your basement for the night. If you have good reason to suspect your neighbor is up to no good, no judge will let you bang down his door and search his house for wrongdoings.
The traffic rules are a consequence of treating the roads as the government's private property—if you don't follow their rules, they can order you off their roads, and if you don't comply then you're trespassing. A private citizen could do the same with their own privately-owned roads.
Apart from that, use of special police powers requires (or at least, should require) a warrant—as in a document stating why this infringement of a citizen's rights was warranted. In the absence of a warrant, a law enforcement officer should be treated no differently than a regular civilian.
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I was taking that into account. Even in 1919, while rushing to the exits would be reasonable give the risk posed by a fire in an all-wood theater, trampling others to save yourself would not be.
In any event the famous "fire in a crowded theater" case wasn't really about fires in theaters, it was about justifying the imposition of censorship. The government wanted to stop people from publicly advocating for dodging the draft. In other words, the ruling was in support of restrictions on political speech. The only reason it was upheld at all was that the administration threatened to stuff the Court with its own lackeys until it obtained a favorable ruling (this being before the number of Supreme Court justices was fixed at nine).
You have as much right to use airspace as you have a right to a public road.
The biggest problem with that analogy is that public roads are a relatively small space which the government either homesteaded or purchased—perhaps using eminent domain, which is a whole other issue, but at least paying some compensation to the former owner. You can drive however you want on private property (with the consent of the owner), including private roads. But the government claims every bit of above-ground outdoor as "public airspace" under their jurisdiction, leaving nothing for private use.
There should be an explicit exception in the law (not just FAA regulations) for airspace below a reasonable altitude—at least 400 feet, higher in remote areas away from any common flight paths. Some, but not all, of that space will be privately owned; the rest would be available for any non-harmful use by any member of the public without interference from the FAA.
No airport exceptions: if they want that airspace to be clear to ground level they can very well go out and buy it themselves, or negotiate an easement.
Even in the US, the 1st amendment isn't totally immutable. There are concepts like "fighting words" and the notion that you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater. And I don't doubt that the court would go along with some limitations on 1st amendment rights during wartime.
Two out of three of those are simply flawed. Yes, courts have upheld "fighting words" laws and wartime restrictions, but that doesn't meant they aren't in conflict with the 1st Amendment.
As for shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, if someone acts on your false claim of fire in good faith, and someone comes to harm because of it, naturally you'd be liable for that harm. That's more akin to fraud than a restriction on speech. You either set out to cause harm using other people as mere tools, or showed negligent disregard for the harm that any reasonable person would expect to result from others behaving reasonably and lawfully in accordance with the (false) information you provided.
The problem with that ruling is that it assigns blame to the one shouting "fire" when the harm does not result from others acting on a belief that there is a fire in good faith. The harm addressed by that case was others getting trampled in a panicked stampede for the exits; the liability for that harm lies with those who panicked and trampled others in their rush to escape. The belief that there was a fire does not excuse such behavior, and that liability would be exactly the same whether or not the claim of fire was a lie. The proper liability for the one who shouted "fire" is limited to the damage that would have resulted from an orderly exit from the theater.
Every jurisdiction has the rights to create laws within its mandate.
[citation needed]
Every jurisdiction claims that right, since it's fundamental to the nature of government. That doesn't mean such a right actually exists.
That being said, it is a shame we don't have the right symbols on your keyboards.
If you're using a Unix system, the programmable Compose key can be very useful. I generally map it to the Menu key and have a stripped-down custom .XCompose file with mnemonic bindings for the most common Unicode mathematical operators, Greek letters, currency symbols, and accented characters.
Of course, to use it you also need a programming language which allows custom operators with Unicode symbol characters. I recommend Haskell.
People override the basic operator names because they can't define their own. Languages which allow arbitrary sequences of symbols as operator names generally don't have the same problems with operator overloading that you get in e.g. C++. Of course, they generally also require operator names to be unique within the current scope, just like function names. If overloading is permitted at all, it's restricted to implementing a common interface which defines the type and semantics of the operator.
With proper language constraints, code which uses custom operators is no harder to read than code which uses custom function names. The operators are just functions named by symbols rather than alphanumerics.
I expect that to be honored until I choose to change my plan.
You have no legal basis for that expectation. Your service agreement only lasts so long as both you and the service provider agree to it. Either party can terminate the service at any time.
Article 1 Section 8's enumeration of Power of Congress are implicitly also exclusively *reserved* for Congress.
For example Congress is not merely empowered to establish currency; this task is reserved for congress. Congress is not merely empowered to declare wars or maintain the navy; the power to declare wars and maintain navies *rests* with congress. The states can't establish their own currencies, navies, nor declare their own wars.... nor can they establish their own post offices.
Nonsense. Section 8 only says what Congress is permitted to do. It doesn't mean, on its own, that any of those things are exclusive to Congress. That would mean, for example, that states couldn't establish their own courts ("To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court"). Most of what is in Section 8 only makes sense for Congress anyway, but the rest is fair game.
States don't get to declare war or maintain navies in peacetime because they are explicitly forbidden from doing so by Section 10, not because those things are listed as powers of Congress in Section 8. (Note that there's even an exception to that rule: "... or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.") States have issued their own currencies in the past, and there is nothing wrong with that so long as they don't try to make them legal tender. (Or they can use gold and/or silver, which they are permitted to make legal tender.)
Post offices already exist apart from those established by Congress. What do you think UPS and FedEx are? Just because they can't (cost-effectively) carry first-class mail thanks to laws favoring the USPS doesn't mean that they aren't a form of private postal service. The same goes for "post roads" not established by Congress—both private and state-level.
I have been buying my own phones so that I may keep my unlimited data plan, and now I hear the price will change? It makes no sense to retroactively change an agreement. I am most seriously displeased.
You have no agreement, apart from (at most) the next month's service, which you paid for in advance. Your contract ran out a long time ago; you're buying your service month-to-month. The service provider has no obligation to continue offering you a grandfathered service plan. The only reason they don't discontinue such plans and force everyone to switch is that they risk losing customers with grandfathered plans to the competition. Up till now, they would have rather lost money on you than lose you as a customer; however, that deal gets increasingly worse for them as time goes on and you show no sign of switching to a new plan.
"The same effect ... in reverse." You mean the opposite effect? Empowering governments—and thus, indirectly, the corporations they represent—at the expense of individual citizens?
I think I made it clear that I think most of TPP is awful. Since they insisted that it be pass/fail via the fast-track process, I think that it should be unceremoniously rejected. Even without that, I doubt it could be amended into anything worth passing. However, any government giving up the power to make a product or voluntary action illegal is always a good thing, no matter who introduced the concept or applied the political leverage necessary to get it passed. So what if it's in the corporations' best interests? It's still the right thing to do.
I agree with you there, but I don't have any problem whatsoever with a government, at any level, agreeing not to commit acts of tyranny over any of its citizens—even if a majority of its citizens are in favor of such acts. Even if it does come at the behest of big, bad multinational corporations, in this one rare instance the TPP has the effect of enhancing the sovereignty of individual citizens over all the levels of government that would try to rule them.
And a further 33.9% didn't care either way...
As they say on Wikipedia: [citation needed].
Those 33.9% weren't asked how they felt about this particular issue. Maybe they really didn't care which representative got elected, when none of the available (and viable) candidates actually represented their views. Maybe they did care, but voting for a candidate whom they agree with on this issue would mean compromising on some other issue that matters to them at least as much; it's not uncommon or unreasonable to have more than one issue that matters to you. Or maybe they're just opposed to the whole system.
Statistics about the recurring popularity contest between candidates or political parties provide very little useful data regarding specific political views or preferences.
Do you want to outlaw something traded under this agreement in your own country?
Nope! Your government will be tried in an international court!
You seem to be trying to complain about one of the very few good aspects of this agreement.
The pad can be derived from a seed.
If you do that, it isn't a one-time pad any more, and none of the "provably unbreakable" guarantees of one-time pads apply. All you have is standard symmetric encryption with a stream cipher.
A critical part of any one-time pad is the fact that each bit of the pad is independently and uniformly random. If you generate the pad from a seed then an attacker no longer needs to find the pad; they only need to find the seed. And as there are far fewer seeds than plausible messages, they'll probably be able to detect when they've found the right one.
The "end" is better income distribution.
If your goal is simply to take money from people who earned it and give it to others who didn't, I can't help you. My impression was that you were trying to improve the economy, not destroy it.
Labeling it as "over-consumption" is value-laden, implying that people who spend it have "enough" and they are consuming too much.
No value judgment was intended. Over-consumption is a specific economic phenomenon which occurs when there is an external force acting on the system causing a shift away from saving and investment and toward consumption, compared to the same economy without that influence. It is excessive with respect to the values and preferences of those bearing the costs of the consumption, not some arbitrary external standard.
One example of a force causing over-consumption would be a subsidy for the purchase of consumer goods. The goods have a natural price of perhaps $12, but due to the subsidy they only cost $10. There is a range of uses valued between $10 and $12 where the good would not be consumed at the natural price, but will be consumed with the subsidy. This is over-consumption. A good with a natural price of $12 is being consumed to produce $10 or $11 in value, which is a net loss. Depending on how the subsidy is funded, that loss may be born by the consumers directory or externalized onto others.
Note that the opposite situation can also be a problem, external influences causing under-consumption and over-investment. There is a natural balance between consumption and investment. Deviating from this balance, in either direction, is a net loss for society as a whole.
... you could argue that part of the economy's inequality problem is corporations and very high income individuals sitting on cash because they don't have investment alternatives (think Apples billions in cash) -- as long as that money is held in short-term deposits and short term securities, it's not doing produtive work in the economy. Taxed and returned to the economy, it produces economic activity.
Economic activity is not a good in its own right, it's a mean to an end. And while money sitting in the bank may not be doing anything "productive", it also isn't consuming anything; it's neutral. Forcing that money back into the economy to be spent on extra (over-)consumption or on investments which will not provide a worthwhile return is a net loss for the economy, which is worst than being non-productive.
In my view of things, in any democratic society governed by the rule of law, people can only become as wealthy as the masses are willing to tolerate. ... If the poor become angry enough, they will basically either steal all the shit that the rich person has by force, or just outright murder the fucker by forming an angry mob and going after them.
What does that have to do with the rule of law? What you're describing sounds more like a breakdown of law, or mob rule.
Keep in mind that the fact that some people are rich does not automatically imply that others must have a low standard of living. Having a couple million dollars in the bank and a few billion in investments does not mean that one is consuming a proportionally greater amount of goods and services than the average individual. Several times more, perhaps, but not a hundred or a thousand times more, and the very rich make up only a small fraction of the overall population. One consequence of this is that seizing and redistributing that wealth would not free up a proportional amount of the consumer goods and services demanded by the majority of the population; it would just drive prices sky-high, with lots of money chasing the same supply of goods in the short term, and over the long term, no one putting any effort into maintaining the capital (factories, machines, research, education, steady jobs) that allowed those goods to be produced inexpensively in the first place.
While, historically, poor living conditions and wealth disparity have tended to result in exactly the sort of mob rule that you describe, it's a reaction born of frustration and jealousy rather than reason. Wealth is not the problem, and seizing the assets of the rich is not a solution.
If we are able to determine the average length of a year over a large time span more accurately, it's quite probable that the easiest fix might actually be simply to redefine the second.
Maybe the adjustments will balance out, maybe they won't. Everything I've seen suggests that the Earth's rotation is slowing slightly, which would tend to result in more leap seconds than "leap anti-seconds" (or whatever the proper term is for skipping a second) on average.
However, I cannot imagine a world where the easiest solution would be to redefine the second. That would have ripple effects throughout physics, chemistry, astronomy, engineering, etc. Fundamental physical constants would have to change. All the existing published papers would contain invalid calculations. A far simpler change would be to redefine the number of seconds in a day to include a fractional part. Even there we would run into a problem, because the Earth's rate of rotation is not uniform, but at least there aren't many fundamental units defined in terms of days.
Why not let those seconds accumulate and have a second leap day every hundred thousand years or so?
Because for about half of those hundred thousand years, the gradual drift would mean that noon occurs in the middle of the night.
Leap days results in a difference of up to one day, with noticeable seasonal changes occurring on the order of at least a month. Correcting by a full day to account for discrepancies in the length of the day would mean being off by up to one full day-cycle. That's not something you can easily ignore.
Ever heard of the tragedy of the commons?
Sure, that's what happens when the central planners decide that a shared resource will be set aside for "common use" and not allowed to be privately owned or managed.
Tragedy of the commons is self-correcting so long as there isn't some force preventing the commons from being homesteaded as private property. It's only when the resource is forced to remain a commons that you get a tragedy.
I'm probably 15 minutes walk from a couple of grocery stores...
Is that 15 minutes with or without carry a week's worth of groceries for a normal-size family? Or do you just spend more time and money doing your grocery shopping in small increments every day rather than buying in bulk?
The bikes do practically no damage to the road, so your point is moot.
Even assuming that bikes do no damage at all to the road, you still have the cost of constructing the road in the first place, and ongoing maintenance due to weather and age. The damage done to the roads by ordinary passenger vehicles, while more than the damage done by bicycles, is still a fairly small part of the overall cost.
The vehicles that cause the most wear by far are the heavy trucks, and for all that this city wants to promote bicycles for daily travel, they still need a way to deliver large and/or heavy goods to people's homes. You aren't going to get a new couch or full-size refrigerator delivered by bicycle. The moving van needs to be parked as close as possible to your new home or apartment. And so on; homes without some kind of vehicle access are not particularly practical, even if you don't have a vehicle of your own.
No, +1 for property rights.
Or perhaps -1 for property rights. The drone operator clearly had a property right in the drone, which was destroyed. Exactly how far the right the owner of a piece of land to exclude others from the airspace above it extends is much less obvious. Some distance, certainly, but not "as far as one can see" or "up to the edge of space". At some distance the airspace is beyond the legitimate claim of any ground-based property owner and available for anyone to use.
I do think that an argument could be made that the drone operator was trespassing, and that destroying the drone might be justified given a pattern of continued trespass and an inability to locate or contact the drone's owner, but it wouldn't be clear and objective.
While I am a strong proponent of network neutrality as you describe it, there is a case to be made for handling packets different based on who is involved (even if the technical details are tricky).
No, handling packets differently based on who is involved is pretty much the opposite of neutrality.
Neutrality should mean that the specific source, destination, and content of a packet (including things like the "protocol" and "port" fields) have no effect on prioritization. Data which can influence prioritization includes the level of service the customer purchased, whether or not the packet must be routed outside the ISP's own network, general statistics about the customer's network traffic like historical bandwidth use and number of unique flows, packet sizes, explicit QoS flags (e.g. "high bandwidth", "low latency", "bulk traffic") set on the packets by the customer, and current capacity and loading of the network.
Any application of DPI automatically renders the prioritization non-neutral. Or more generally: If the presence or absence of encryption would affect prioritization, the prioritization rules are not neutral.
To be fair, the police DO get extra privileges and powers over ordinary citizens. If you see someone speeding on a highway, you can't just order them to pull over. If you see someone steal something extremely valuable, you can't lock him up in your basement for the night. If you have good reason to suspect your neighbor is up to no good, no judge will let you bang down his door and search his house for wrongdoings.
The traffic rules are a consequence of treating the roads as the government's private property—if you don't follow their rules, they can order you off their roads, and if you don't comply then you're trespassing. A private citizen could do the same with their own privately-owned roads.
Apart from that, use of special police powers requires (or at least, should require) a warrant—as in a document stating why this infringement of a citizen's rights was warranted. In the absence of a warrant, a law enforcement officer should be treated no differently than a regular civilian.