To libertarians this probably looks like a communist nightmare,
What doesn't look like a communist nightmare to them?
Libertarians have no problem with communism, provided those so inclined recognize that there are people and property outside the commune. Respect non-communists' property claims, and don't force anyone to join or stay within the commune, and we'll get along just fine. After all, the central principle of libertarianism is that you have the right to live however you want provided you extend the same courtesy to others.
If society doesn't step in to help children in this situation when their parents apparently aren't able to support them properly so they have to resort to this, then society is failing. It doesn't mean children should be able to work full time.
Yes, it does. If you don't want to see children working full time, offer them an alternative out of your own resources. Don't pass laws which prevent them from providing for themselves in the absence of alternatives. This is exactly the same as the problem with minimum-wage laws, mandatory benefits, etc.—you aren't helping anyone by prohibiting them from being paid a wage in line with their productivity, when the alternative, for the marginal workers, is being unemployed and on the dole. You don't help children by eliminating their ability to provide for themselves, you help them by offering them a choice of other pursuits (like attending school on a scholarship) so that they aren't forced to enter the workforce. If they choose to work anyway, that is their right as free individuals.
But my basic point is that ascribing the status of a "right" to a tax deduction is ridiculous.
It's not as crazy as you're trying to make it sound. You have a natural right to keep your own property, whether homesteaded or received via contract. A tax deduction is the government "graceously allowing" you to keep some of your own property, rather than confiscating it for their own use. The tax itself is an infringement of your natural rights, and the deduction results in a lesser degree of infringement.
And, as proof that free speech is not inalienable, look at the laws preventing one from inciting [riots] and yelling fire in a crowded movie theater.
That's certainly one way of looking at it, although somewhat backwards. Normally the rights come first, and the rulings are supposed to conform to those rights, not define them.
The other way of looking at this situation is that freedom of speech, as a subset of liberty, is in fact an inalienable right, and the rulings you cited violate that right.
The idea that a person is responsible for what others choose to do, as in the damage caused by others after "inciting" a riot, or injuries caused by others in their panicked attempts to escape after one yells "Fire!" in a theatre, is as insidious as it is wrong. The members of an angry mob or a panicked audience are still in control of their own actions, and thus responsible for them, whatever anyone else may have said or done.
The First Amendment is a right FROM something.
Close. The First Amendment is a limitation on the power of government in support of the negative right known as freedom of speech; i.e., the right not to be coerced on the basis of something you said (or more generally, communicated). This is an aspect of liberty, which can be considered the negative right not to be coerced on the basis of anything short of practicing coercion on others.
Liberty, including freedom of speech, is logically inalienable, since the capacity for liberty is an element of personhood, self-ownership. No one else can exercise your liberty, so it's naturally non-transferable. You can't even forfeit liberty voluntarily; even if you were to authorize someone else to hurt you or take your property in response to certain non-coercive actions, it wouldn't be coercion, since you gave your permission beforehand.
Whether these rights can be "denied" is more debatable. However, my view is that while others may choose not to recognize your liberty or freedom of speech, and may even violate them, they can't really affect whether or not you have them. That is more or less something you have to decide for yourself. As such, no one else can "deny" you your rights without your cooperation.
I can readily believe that there is some impact on throughput; there is with software FDE, after all. I just find it hard to believe that 256-bit hardware AES would make the drive "horribly slow". Of course, how much of a throughput hit you can tolerate depends on the application.
Full AES encryption of all the data would make the drive horribly slow.
Really? Considering that full 256-bit AES encryption of all the data in software, e.g. with LUKS, is not "horribly slow", even on relatively ancient CPUs, a drive with a dedicated AES chip should be able to do the same thing while remaining reasonably performant.
Note that this does not mean that I would be surprised to hear that the designers cut corners, perhaps for cost reasons. I just don't see how it could be justified on a performance basis.
The slippery-slope fallacy consists of the non sequitor that, having moved from position A to position B, we must inevitably continue on in the same pattern to position C, rather than stopping at B or changing direction.
If evidence is presented for an actual "slippery slope", rather than simply assuming it as above, then the slippery-slope fallacy does not apply.
Remember, theology isn't science, and Occam's Razor is used as a logical principle - it can't be disproved.... Since there is never any direct experimental evidence, Occam is literally interpretable as a method to find the truth.
Again, it can't tell you whether anything is actually true or false, since the truth of Occam's Razor is simply assumed to begin with. As usual, this sort of theological "reasoning" is built on a house of cards. As a framework for encouraging a consensus on doctrine it served its purpose, but only in the context of writing internally-consistent fiction. That's appropriate, I suppose, given that the subject is theology.
Anyway, we're not talking about theology, or this weird variant of Occam's Razor, even if it did come first. We're talking about science, and the principle modern scientists refer to as Occam's Razor has nothing to do with theology or absolute truth. They use the same name, but are in fact two completely different principles. The older, theological version is off-topic for this thread beyond some interesting historical notes.
To go back to your original point, you're glossing over the important question of how to... identify a simpler model which still fits the data. Two models generally don't give identical results, so to decide which to use requires both a measure of complexity, and a measure of fit.
I agree that these are important questions, to which there are not always formal, objective answers. Identifying assumptions, and especially the magnitude of an assumption, is more of an art than a science, even in reference to scientific theories. Determining the degree to which a theory fits the data is more objective, but even here the answer depends on the precision of the theory and the data, which can be difficult to determine. The tradeoff between assumptions and fit is even more subjective.
Still, if you have two models which both make predictions which match the observed data to well within the margin of error, and one model makes notably more significantly assumptions than the other, the model to proceed with becomes clear. Occam's Razor is a rough guide, a rule-of-thumb, not something you can safely take to extremes. A method like the AIC might be appropriate as a guide to prioritizing research, but it's certainly not a determiner of "truth".
Originally, in a scholastic context, a better way describe Occam is that the theory with fewer assumptions was (logically, provably) the truth and the one with more assumptions and equal outcomes was (logically, provably) false.
Let's say that's true. In that case, Occam's Razor is (logically, provable) false. The number of assumptions in a theory proves nothing about whether it is true or false; it is obviously possible to make an assumption which turns out to be correct, even if there was no evidence for it at the time. It also has nothing to do with science, which isn't concerned with proving theories to be true, only with collecting evidence, formulating theories, and then trying to disprove them with more evidence.
Since in this scenario the original scholastic principle known as Occam's Razor is (a) false, and (b) irrelevant to the discipline of science, we might as well replace it with something more useful.
If I'm weakening "the power and purpose of Occam's Razor", that's only because "truly choosing the correct description of the purpose and will of god" was nonsense to begin with. Demoted to the role of an experimental guide, it serves a useful purpose. As an absolute determiner of truth, it was at best a misleading fantasy.
However it may have started out, what I described is how a scientist would apply "Occam's Razor" today. Meanings change over time; philosophical principles are gradually refined. The modern meaning of "Occam's Razor" has nothing to do with theology or absolute truth.
Occam's Razor is an experimental guide, not a standard of scientific proof.
Perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be that Occam's Razor doesn't tell you which model is right, or even more likely to be right in a probabilistic sense. Instead, it tells you not bother with a model which make unnecessary assumptions when there is a simpler model at hand with fewer assumptions which still fits the data. Simpler models make predictions which are both more precise and more testable, as they depend on fewer variables. This contributes directly to their usefulness. They also have fewer "points of failure", so to speak, since every extra assumption is one more thing which may be proven wrong by future observations.
If enough people start voting for who they want, you will start to see the top two parties lose percentage points to lesser known parties.
This is the problem. Those points are coming from the party which is closer to your position. Sure, if enough people join in you may be able to get someone even closer elected (though they may turn out to be just as bad once they're in power). The odds of that happening in any given election, however, are minuscule, so you'd just be hurting your own interests. If your candidate doesn't win, you've had no more positive effect on the election than if you'd stayed home. Rather than voting for third-party candidates in your own district with little other support, you'd do better to move to a district where a candidate you like actually has a chance of winning. As a bonus, the policies in that district are probably already closer to those you would prefer. Demonstrate that your policies are better, even if it has to be somewhere else, and it may just have a positive effect on the other districts.
The real solution is a better voting system, one that rewards candidates for offending the fewest voters—having a broad support base, even if some supporters like other candidates more—rather than achieving a simple plurality of voters' first choices. Almost any reasonable system would be better than the current first-past-the-post arrangement.
I know more than one person under 18 declared "adult" by the court so they could do things like rent an apartment so they could move out.
In that case they are no longer legally "minors", and in any event that sort of thing is rare. In extreme cases you may be able to get the age of legal adulthood lowered by a couple of years, at best. Normally children are required to submit to the custody of their parents, and are brought back if they run away. If there is abuse, the state pursues the case in place of their parents, whether they want it pursued or not; unless they are lucky enough to be emancipated, they don't have the option of pursuing the case on their own, or dropping the charges. It's wrong to force them to stay, even in a "good" home, but it's also wrong to force them to leave, or to punish the parents on their behalf, but against their wishes, even if they are suffering abuse. Either way, it should be their choice.
You assumed I was ignorant, when in fact I am perfectly well aware of the possibility of emancipation. It simply doesn't occur often enough to be relevant here. There are many cases of abuse where a request for emancipation wouldn't even be considered.
You can't win an argument simply by declaring your opponent to be wrong, particularly when that declaration is based, as usual, on a false assumption. I would appreciate it if you would limit yourself to serious responses and drop the unwarranted ad hominems.
So you think that emotionally abusing your children should be legal?
Legal, yes. The law doesn't really allow them to respond anyway, as minors, even if the abuse is declared illegal, and so far as I'm concerned they would be the only ones with the necessary standing if the abuse is considered illegal.
Note that "legal" is not the same thing as "socially acceptable", and that I also support the right of children of any age to leave their parents and either take care of themselves, if possible, or place themselves for adoption with a new, willing family. Parents do not "own" their children; they have a unique relationship and role, but no special rights. As such, subjecting your children to abuse of any sort would remain a good way to lose them, not to mention your standing in the community. You just couldn't be sued for it in the case of emotional abuse.
In which case, taking the intent is the best determination, and the adult lied for personal gain to harm a minor, with full knowledge that the death would result from the intentional harm.
Two problems here. First, "taking the intent" is just one more debatable definition of "harm", and not a very good one. Intent is relevant in determining whether retribution is justified in addition to reparations, but it doesn't affect whether or not there was harm. It's a separate issue.
Second, and more importantly, "with full knowledge that the death would result" is hyperbole on your part. There is no way that anyone could have such knowledge, since the death, as I already stated, was the result of someone else's choice. The other person could easily have chosen not to commit suicide. That choice may have been expected, but "full knowledge" before the fact is impossible. Even if it was expected, there remains the fact that no one should be held responsible for the result of someone else's choice.
She took an action designed and calculated to cause harm. In the commission of this harm, the person receiving the harm died.
First, that's based on a very sloppy definition of "to cause harm". Hurt feelings do not justify taking legal action. Second, if you don't want to die, don't commit suicide. The only action she is morally responsible for is deliberately hurting someone's feelings. The death was not a consequence of that action, that choice, but rather the choice and action, and thus responsibility, of the one committing suicide. If you want to hurt her feelings in return, on behalf of the victim, there is no rational way she could object to that. Anything more, however, would be out of proportion to the offense.
The upstream bandwidth is the ISP's resource to allocate as they see fit. If they want to reserve a part of it for prioritized services, that's their business, provided that part isn't included in the advertised Internet speed, and the advertisement is accurate. Customers benefit just as much from additional bandwidth for selected services, over and above their advertised Internet speed, as they do from co-location. Provided the non-prioritized competitor can make use of the advertised Internet bandwidth, there is no "sabotage".
I'm not sure about the Libertarian Party, which despite the name is not strictly libertarian, but libertarians place the Non-Aggression Principle above all other laws as a matter of principle. A strict constitutionalist policy would be a step in the right direction, but not sufficient on its own. While government authorized by the U.S. Constitution is a lot closer to following the N.A.P. than the government actually in power today, it's still allowed, and sometime required, to practice aggression in the form of levying taxes, fighting non-defensive wars, and enforcing regulations (as opposed to natural rights) through fines, imprisonment, and other forms of coercion. As such, any libertarian support must be relative to the even worse system we have, not unconditionally in favor of strict constitutionalism.
Would you mind explaining that comment? China's "success" correlates with a transition away from central planning. It's still heavily centralized, but no so much as it used to be. Moreover, the centralization which remains serves to ensure that most of the the benefits that accrue go to the central planners at the expense of the average citizen. Their economic model (if you can call "the government owns everything and everyone" an economic model) may help to make their government a world power, but it's the concepts of individual liberty and free markets gradually being imported from the West which bring wealth to their society.
Having already exchanged large one time pads solves the key exchange problem, forever.
For values of "forever" which are limited by the rate at which you need to communicate and the entropy in the pad. Hyperbole aside, however, this is exactly right. You can exchange one-time pads whenever you want, perhaps terabytes at a time on physically-secured HDDs. If the pads are compromised during delivery, and you are aware that they have been compromised, nothing of value has been lost; you just need to send another pad. Once the pads have been exchanged you can use them to communicate securely at your convenience.
A one-time pad trades one secure communications problem, delivering many small plaintexts over time while maintaining complete privacy, for an easier secure communications problem: delivering a single random pad while merely ensuring that leaks are detectable.
Finally there is quantum encryption, which is basically a one-time pad where quantum properties are used to detect anyone eavesdropping on the key exchange. With quantum mechanics, securely synchronizing one-time pads is a much more tractable problem than securely transferring the equivalent amount of plaintext.
If the service provider doesn't need to pass the request on to anyone else, but can fulfill it internally, then it's on the service provider's LAN, not the Internet.
So far as I know, no one has proposed banning CDNs or similar edge-network co-location schemes, even though they have more or less the same effect as prioritizing upstream bandwidth according to the content provider's ability/willingness to pay. Somehow people have an easier time seeing that it's wrong to dictate to ISPs regarding the operation of their own networks when actual servers are involved.
The only support I would lend to "network neutrality" relates to truth-in-advertising; namely, the advertised performance of the connection must measured against sites which have not made special arrangements with the ISP, including but not limited to prioritization or co-location. The "boosted" services can be advertised separately, but they can't count toward your Internet connection speed.
That idealized balance represents a metastatic equilibrium that only ever is reached in textbooks.
Obviously. In the real world not only is there imperfect information, but the actual balance point is constantly changing. Outside of textbooks you can never achieve complete balance, only approximate it. However, shifting influence away from those directly affected in favor of central planners, whose information is even more imperfect and outdated, isn't likely to bring you any closer to the ideal balance point.
Sales taxes disincentivises consumption, something that our nation is has no shortage of. Capital gains taxes disincentivises savings and investment, something that should be encouraged.
If your only goal is to improve your financial position, yes. However, keep in mind that the sole purpose of saving and investment is to enable future consumption of a net present value greater than the opportunity cost. There is a natural balance between present consumption and deferred consumption (saving), and targeting either with a tax to encourage the other results in misallocation of resources and consequently a loss of wealth.
The question he is posing is how tracking this single individual by GPS is any less legitimate than tracking him with an officer in an unmarked car.
The difference is that anyone can follow you around in an unmarked car on public property. Attaching a device of any sort to someone else's property, however, is normally illegal. Permission to do something which would normally be illegal is known as a warrant, and there are very specific rules regarding the situations under which warrants can be issued.
If you eat you use the roads for the trucks that bring the food to the store. You use the roads to bring the workers to the store to sell you your food.
This is a specious argument. The owners of the trucks which brought the food to the store paid for their use of the roads. Likewise with the store's employees. Those payments were included in the cost of the food you bought. There is no need to tax you directly, and properly apportioning a direct tax of that nature is nearly impossible—not that you were even trying to distribute the cost fairly. Everyone benefits, to be sure, but not everyone benefits equally. If you charge up-front for use of the roads, and otherwise refrain from interfering, the rest will take care of itself.
If you're actually a source of economic value, taxes don't affect you as much as you'd think. Government takes, gives to the poor, makes them a bit richer, and they end up buying more of your product. There may not be a 1:1 correlation, but $1 in new taxes probably ends up being far less than $1 out of their pocket when all is said and done. It may even make you more money.
Nice theory, with one glaring problem. If you thought that donating money to the poor would actually make you money in the end, enough to offset the total opportunity cost, you would have already done so. The only case where someone has to step in and compel you to give your money away is the one where you expect to be left worse off than before.
To summarize: someone else has resources you wish you had, and which you haven't managed to prove ill-gotten (as much as you'd like to). In the first case you consider yourself justified in reallocating those resource by force since obviously you know better than they do how to manage their affairs. In the second case you feel justified in reallocating the resources by force because—in your dubious opinion—their owner has them "purely because of luck". In neither case is the proposed coercion actually justified.
The "actual value creators" can manage their own affairs without your help, and those whose success is truly due to simple luck, rather than a consistent pattern of making correct decisions, will find that such success is fickle without you helping things along. If you have an actual grievance, proof of ill-gotten gains at your expense, take it to the courts, not the IRS.
We can either bypass the Constitution and get a mostly working government in a few days, or we can wait the 3-to-6 months it would take... to try to pass a Constitutional Amendment. This would happen every time we need a change.
Three to six months? Historically, six months is more of a minimum. Most existing amendments took about a year to be ratified, and some took several years. It takes a while for an entire society to soberly evaluate the implications of further empowering the government at the expense of the governed.
Anyway, if passing a Constitutional amendment is what it takes for the government to do something legally, then by all means they should wait until the amendment is passed rather than sacrificing their hard-won cloak of legitimacy by taking illegal actions beyond their designated powers. Their Constitutional powers are the only thing distinguishing them from any random group of powerful thugs, and they're a flimsy enough source of legitimacy as it is. They can always pass an amendment to speed up the process if it's really a problem, though the need to achieve consensus from the governed (with the states as proxies) before rushing headlong into tyranny is, on the whole, a positive aspect of the existing Constitutional revision process, not a handicap, and not something I'd care to see bartered away.
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To libertarians this probably looks like a communist nightmare,
What doesn't look like a communist nightmare to them?
Libertarians have no problem with communism, provided those so inclined recognize that there are people and property outside the commune. Respect non-communists' property claims, and don't force anyone to join or stay within the commune, and we'll get along just fine. After all, the central principle of libertarianism is that you have the right to live however you want provided you extend the same courtesy to others.
If society doesn't step in to help children in this situation when their parents apparently aren't able to support them properly so they have to resort to this, then society is failing. It doesn't mean children should be able to work full time.
Yes, it does. If you don't want to see children working full time, offer them an alternative out of your own resources. Don't pass laws which prevent them from providing for themselves in the absence of alternatives. This is exactly the same as the problem with minimum-wage laws, mandatory benefits, etc.—you aren't helping anyone by prohibiting them from being paid a wage in line with their productivity, when the alternative, for the marginal workers, is being unemployed and on the dole. You don't help children by eliminating their ability to provide for themselves, you help them by offering them a choice of other pursuits (like attending school on a scholarship) so that they aren't forced to enter the workforce. If they choose to work anyway, that is their right as free individuals.
But my basic point is that ascribing the status of a "right" to a tax deduction is ridiculous.
It's not as crazy as you're trying to make it sound. You have a natural right to keep your own property, whether homesteaded or received via contract. A tax deduction is the government "graceously allowing" you to keep some of your own property, rather than confiscating it for their own use. The tax itself is an infringement of your natural rights, and the deduction results in a lesser degree of infringement.
And, as proof that free speech is not inalienable, look at the laws preventing one from inciting [riots] and yelling fire in a crowded movie theater.
That's certainly one way of looking at it, although somewhat backwards. Normally the rights come first, and the rulings are supposed to conform to those rights, not define them.
The other way of looking at this situation is that freedom of speech, as a subset of liberty, is in fact an inalienable right, and the rulings you cited violate that right.
The idea that a person is responsible for what others choose to do, as in the damage caused by others after "inciting" a riot, or injuries caused by others in their panicked attempts to escape after one yells "Fire!" in a theatre, is as insidious as it is wrong. The members of an angry mob or a panicked audience are still in control of their own actions, and thus responsible for them, whatever anyone else may have said or done.
The First Amendment is a right FROM something.
Close. The First Amendment is a limitation on the power of government in support of the negative right known as freedom of speech; i.e., the right not to be coerced on the basis of something you said (or more generally, communicated). This is an aspect of liberty, which can be considered the negative right not to be coerced on the basis of anything short of practicing coercion on others.
Liberty, including freedom of speech, is logically inalienable, since the capacity for liberty is an element of personhood, self-ownership. No one else can exercise your liberty, so it's naturally non-transferable. You can't even forfeit liberty voluntarily; even if you were to authorize someone else to hurt you or take your property in response to certain non-coercive actions, it wouldn't be coercion, since you gave your permission beforehand.
Whether these rights can be "denied" is more debatable. However, my view is that while others may choose not to recognize your liberty or freedom of speech, and may even violate them, they can't really affect whether or not you have them. That is more or less something you have to decide for yourself. As such, no one else can "deny" you your rights without your cooperation.
I can readily believe that there is some impact on throughput; there is with software FDE, after all. I just find it hard to believe that 256-bit hardware AES would make the drive "horribly slow". Of course, how much of a throughput hit you can tolerate depends on the application.
Full AES encryption of all the data would make the drive horribly slow.
Really? Considering that full 256-bit AES encryption of all the data in software, e.g. with LUKS, is not "horribly slow", even on relatively ancient CPUs, a drive with a dedicated AES chip should be able to do the same thing while remaining reasonably performant.
Note that this does not mean that I would be surprised to hear that the designers cut corners, perhaps for cost reasons. I just don't see how it could be justified on a performance basis.
The slippery-slope fallacy consists of the non sequitor that, having moved from position A to position B, we must inevitably continue on in the same pattern to position C, rather than stopping at B or changing direction.
If evidence is presented for an actual "slippery slope", rather than simply assuming it as above, then the slippery-slope fallacy does not apply.
Remember, theology isn't science, and Occam's Razor is used as a logical principle - it can't be disproved. ... Since there is never any direct experimental evidence, Occam is literally interpretable as a method to find the truth.
Again, it can't tell you whether anything is actually true or false, since the truth of Occam's Razor is simply assumed to begin with. As usual, this sort of theological "reasoning" is built on a house of cards. As a framework for encouraging a consensus on doctrine it served its purpose, but only in the context of writing internally-consistent fiction. That's appropriate, I suppose, given that the subject is theology.
Anyway, we're not talking about theology, or this weird variant of Occam's Razor, even if it did come first. We're talking about science, and the principle modern scientists refer to as Occam's Razor has nothing to do with theology or absolute truth. They use the same name, but are in fact two completely different principles. The older, theological version is off-topic for this thread beyond some interesting historical notes.
To go back to your original point, you're glossing over the important question of how to ... identify a simpler model which still fits the data. Two models generally don't give identical results, so to decide which to use requires both a measure of complexity, and a measure of fit.
I agree that these are important questions, to which there are not always formal, objective answers. Identifying assumptions, and especially the magnitude of an assumption, is more of an art than a science, even in reference to scientific theories. Determining the degree to which a theory fits the data is more objective, but even here the answer depends on the precision of the theory and the data, which can be difficult to determine. The tradeoff between assumptions and fit is even more subjective.
Still, if you have two models which both make predictions which match the observed data to well within the margin of error, and one model makes notably more significantly assumptions than the other, the model to proceed with becomes clear. Occam's Razor is a rough guide, a rule-of-thumb, not something you can safely take to extremes. A method like the AIC might be appropriate as a guide to prioritizing research, but it's certainly not a determiner of "truth".
Originally, in a scholastic context, a better way describe Occam is that the theory with fewer assumptions was (logically, provably) the truth and the one with more assumptions and equal outcomes was (logically, provably) false.
Let's say that's true. In that case, Occam's Razor is (logically, provable) false. The number of assumptions in a theory proves nothing about whether it is true or false; it is obviously possible to make an assumption which turns out to be correct, even if there was no evidence for it at the time. It also has nothing to do with science, which isn't concerned with proving theories to be true, only with collecting evidence, formulating theories, and then trying to disprove them with more evidence.
Since in this scenario the original scholastic principle known as Occam's Razor is (a) false, and (b) irrelevant to the discipline of science, we might as well replace it with something more useful.
If I'm weakening "the power and purpose of Occam's Razor", that's only because "truly choosing the correct description of the purpose and will of god" was nonsense to begin with. Demoted to the role of an experimental guide, it serves a useful purpose. As an absolute determiner of truth, it was at best a misleading fantasy.
However it may have started out, what I described is how a scientist would apply "Occam's Razor" today. Meanings change over time; philosophical principles are gradually refined. The modern meaning of "Occam's Razor" has nothing to do with theology or absolute truth.
Occam's Razor is an experimental guide, not a standard of scientific proof.
Perhaps a better way of phrasing it would be that Occam's Razor doesn't tell you which model is right, or even more likely to be right in a probabilistic sense. Instead, it tells you not bother with a model which make unnecessary assumptions when there is a simpler model at hand with fewer assumptions which still fits the data. Simpler models make predictions which are both more precise and more testable, as they depend on fewer variables. This contributes directly to their usefulness. They also have fewer "points of failure", so to speak, since every extra assumption is one more thing which may be proven wrong by future observations.
If enough people start voting for who they want, you will start to see the top two parties lose percentage points to lesser known parties.
This is the problem. Those points are coming from the party which is closer to your position. Sure, if enough people join in you may be able to get someone even closer elected (though they may turn out to be just as bad once they're in power). The odds of that happening in any given election, however, are minuscule, so you'd just be hurting your own interests. If your candidate doesn't win, you've had no more positive effect on the election than if you'd stayed home. Rather than voting for third-party candidates in your own district with little other support, you'd do better to move to a district where a candidate you like actually has a chance of winning. As a bonus, the policies in that district are probably already closer to those you would prefer. Demonstrate that your policies are better, even if it has to be somewhere else, and it may just have a positive effect on the other districts.
The real solution is a better voting system, one that rewards candidates for offending the fewest voters—having a broad support base, even if some supporters like other candidates more—rather than achieving a simple plurality of voters' first choices. Almost any reasonable system would be better than the current first-past-the-post arrangement.
I know more than one person under 18 declared "adult" by the court so they could do things like rent an apartment so they could move out.
In that case they are no longer legally "minors", and in any event that sort of thing is rare. In extreme cases you may be able to get the age of legal adulthood lowered by a couple of years, at best. Normally children are required to submit to the custody of their parents, and are brought back if they run away. If there is abuse, the state pursues the case in place of their parents, whether they want it pursued or not; unless they are lucky enough to be emancipated, they don't have the option of pursuing the case on their own, or dropping the charges. It's wrong to force them to stay, even in a "good" home, but it's also wrong to force them to leave, or to punish the parents on their behalf, but against their wishes, even if they are suffering abuse. Either way, it should be their choice.
You assumed I was ignorant, when in fact I am perfectly well aware of the possibility of emancipation. It simply doesn't occur often enough to be relevant here. There are many cases of abuse where a request for emancipation wouldn't even be considered.
You can't win an argument simply by declaring your opponent to be wrong, particularly when that declaration is based, as usual, on a false assumption. I would appreciate it if you would limit yourself to serious responses and drop the unwarranted ad hominems.
So you think that emotionally abusing your children should be legal?
Legal, yes. The law doesn't really allow them to respond anyway, as minors, even if the abuse is declared illegal, and so far as I'm concerned they would be the only ones with the necessary standing if the abuse is considered illegal.
Note that "legal" is not the same thing as "socially acceptable", and that I also support the right of children of any age to leave their parents and either take care of themselves, if possible, or place themselves for adoption with a new, willing family. Parents do not "own" their children; they have a unique relationship and role, but no special rights. As such, subjecting your children to abuse of any sort would remain a good way to lose them, not to mention your standing in the community. You just couldn't be sued for it in the case of emotional abuse.
In which case, taking the intent is the best determination, and the adult lied for personal gain to harm a minor, with full knowledge that the death would result from the intentional harm.
Two problems here. First, "taking the intent" is just one more debatable definition of "harm", and not a very good one. Intent is relevant in determining whether retribution is justified in addition to reparations, but it doesn't affect whether or not there was harm. It's a separate issue.
Second, and more importantly, "with full knowledge that the death would result" is hyperbole on your part. There is no way that anyone could have such knowledge, since the death, as I already stated, was the result of someone else's choice. The other person could easily have chosen not to commit suicide. That choice may have been expected, but "full knowledge" before the fact is impossible. Even if it was expected, there remains the fact that no one should be held responsible for the result of someone else's choice.
She took an action designed and calculated to cause harm. In the commission of this harm, the person receiving the harm died.
First, that's based on a very sloppy definition of "to cause harm". Hurt feelings do not justify taking legal action. Second, if you don't want to die, don't commit suicide. The only action she is morally responsible for is deliberately hurting someone's feelings. The death was not a consequence of that action, that choice, but rather the choice and action, and thus responsibility, of the one committing suicide. If you want to hurt her feelings in return, on behalf of the victim, there is no rational way she could object to that. Anything more, however, would be out of proportion to the offense.
The upstream bandwidth is the ISP's resource to allocate as they see fit. If they want to reserve a part of it for prioritized services, that's their business, provided that part isn't included in the advertised Internet speed, and the advertisement is accurate. Customers benefit just as much from additional bandwidth for selected services, over and above their advertised Internet speed, as they do from co-location. Provided the non-prioritized competitor can make use of the advertised Internet bandwidth, there is no "sabotage".
I'm not sure about the Libertarian Party, which despite the name is not strictly libertarian, but libertarians place the Non-Aggression Principle above all other laws as a matter of principle. A strict constitutionalist policy would be a step in the right direction, but not sufficient on its own. While government authorized by the U.S. Constitution is a lot closer to following the N.A.P. than the government actually in power today, it's still allowed, and sometime required, to practice aggression in the form of levying taxes, fighting non-defensive wars, and enforcing regulations (as opposed to natural rights) through fines, imprisonment, and other forms of coercion. As such, any libertarian support must be relative to the even worse system we have, not unconditionally in favor of strict constitutionalism.
Would you mind explaining that comment? China's "success" correlates with a transition away from central planning. It's still heavily centralized, but no so much as it used to be. Moreover, the centralization which remains serves to ensure that most of the the benefits that accrue go to the central planners at the expense of the average citizen. Their economic model (if you can call "the government owns everything and everyone" an economic model) may help to make their government a world power, but it's the concepts of individual liberty and free markets gradually being imported from the West which bring wealth to their society.
Having already exchanged large one time pads solves the key exchange problem, forever.
For values of "forever" which are limited by the rate at which you need to communicate and the entropy in the pad. Hyperbole aside, however, this is exactly right. You can exchange one-time pads whenever you want, perhaps terabytes at a time on physically-secured HDDs. If the pads are compromised during delivery, and you are aware that they have been compromised, nothing of value has been lost; you just need to send another pad. Once the pads have been exchanged you can use them to communicate securely at your convenience.
A one-time pad trades one secure communications problem, delivering many small plaintexts over time while maintaining complete privacy, for an easier secure communications problem: delivering a single random pad while merely ensuring that leaks are detectable.
Finally there is quantum encryption, which is basically a one-time pad where quantum properties are used to detect anyone eavesdropping on the key exchange. With quantum mechanics, securely synchronizing one-time pads is a much more tractable problem than securely transferring the equivalent amount of plaintext.
If the service provider doesn't need to pass the request on to anyone else, but can fulfill it internally, then it's on the service provider's LAN, not the Internet.
So far as I know, no one has proposed banning CDNs or similar edge-network co-location schemes, even though they have more or less the same effect as prioritizing upstream bandwidth according to the content provider's ability/willingness to pay. Somehow people have an easier time seeing that it's wrong to dictate to ISPs regarding the operation of their own networks when actual servers are involved.
The only support I would lend to "network neutrality" relates to truth-in-advertising; namely, the advertised performance of the connection must measured against sites which have not made special arrangements with the ISP, including but not limited to prioritization or co-location. The "boosted" services can be advertised separately, but they can't count toward your Internet connection speed.
That idealized balance represents a metastatic equilibrium that only ever is reached in textbooks.
Obviously. In the real world not only is there imperfect information, but the actual balance point is constantly changing. Outside of textbooks you can never achieve complete balance, only approximate it. However, shifting influence away from those directly affected in favor of central planners, whose information is even more imperfect and outdated, isn't likely to bring you any closer to the ideal balance point.
Sales taxes disincentivises consumption, something that our nation is has no shortage of. Capital gains taxes disincentivises savings and investment, something that should be encouraged.
If your only goal is to improve your financial position, yes. However, keep in mind that the sole purpose of saving and investment is to enable future consumption of a net present value greater than the opportunity cost. There is a natural balance between present consumption and deferred consumption (saving), and targeting either with a tax to encourage the other results in misallocation of resources and consequently a loss of wealth.
The question he is posing is how tracking this single individual by GPS is any less legitimate than tracking him with an officer in an unmarked car.
The difference is that anyone can follow you around in an unmarked car on public property. Attaching a device of any sort to someone else's property, however, is normally illegal. Permission to do something which would normally be illegal is known as a warrant, and there are very specific rules regarding the situations under which warrants can be issued.
If you eat you use the roads for the trucks that bring the food to the store. You use the roads to bring the workers to the store to sell you your food.
This is a specious argument. The owners of the trucks which brought the food to the store paid for their use of the roads. Likewise with the store's employees. Those payments were included in the cost of the food you bought. There is no need to tax you directly, and properly apportioning a direct tax of that nature is nearly impossible—not that you were even trying to distribute the cost fairly. Everyone benefits, to be sure, but not everyone benefits equally. If you charge up-front for use of the roads, and otherwise refrain from interfering, the rest will take care of itself.
If you're actually a source of economic value, taxes don't affect you as much as you'd think. Government takes, gives to the poor, makes them a bit richer, and they end up buying more of your product. There may not be a 1:1 correlation, but $1 in new taxes probably ends up being far less than $1 out of their pocket when all is said and done. It may even make you more money.
Nice theory, with one glaring problem. If you thought that donating money to the poor would actually make you money in the end, enough to offset the total opportunity cost, you would have already done so. The only case where someone has to step in and compel you to give your money away is the one where you expect to be left worse off than before.
To summarize: someone else has resources you wish you had, and which you haven't managed to prove ill-gotten (as much as you'd like to). In the first case you consider yourself justified in reallocating those resource by force since obviously you know better than they do how to manage their affairs. In the second case you feel justified in reallocating the resources by force because—in your dubious opinion—their owner has them "purely because of luck". In neither case is the proposed coercion actually justified.
The "actual value creators" can manage their own affairs without your help, and those whose success is truly due to simple luck, rather than a consistent pattern of making correct decisions, will find that such success is fickle without you helping things along. If you have an actual grievance, proof of ill-gotten gains at your expense, take it to the courts, not the IRS.
We can either bypass the Constitution and get a mostly working government in a few days, or we can wait the 3-to-6 months it would take ... to try to pass a Constitutional Amendment. This would happen every time we need a change.
Three to six months? Historically, six months is more of a minimum. Most existing amendments took about a year to be ratified, and some took several years. It takes a while for an entire society to soberly evaluate the implications of further empowering the government at the expense of the governed.
Anyway, if passing a Constitutional amendment is what it takes for the government to do something legally, then by all means they should wait until the amendment is passed rather than sacrificing their hard-won cloak of legitimacy by taking illegal actions beyond their designated powers. Their Constitutional powers are the only thing distinguishing them from any random group of powerful thugs, and they're a flimsy enough source of legitimacy as it is. They can always pass an amendment to speed up the process if it's really a problem, though the need to achieve consensus from the governed (with the states as proxies) before rushing headlong into tyranny is, on the whole, a positive aspect of the existing Constitutional revision process, not a handicap, and not something I'd care to see bartered away.