Why should Muslims get a free pass, because it's currently unfashionable to call them out on antisocial and illegal behaviour (under the rubric of "anti racism")?
Because the vast majority Muslims who either enter or leave "the land of milk and honey" are not enemy combatants or terrorists or intending to fight any kind of war. For every genuine terrorist in the Muslim community, there are approximately 250,000 who have nothing to do with it. What you seem to be arguing is that we should oppress 249,999 innocent people in order to catch the 1 bad person.
My guess is that you don't know any Muslims personally. I've known a few over my life, from a bunch of different areas of the mostly Muslim world (Kurdistan, Bosnia, Lebanon, Algeria, Jordan, Pakistan, and home-grown American). They fundamentally want what you want: A nice place to live, a good job, education and opportunities for their children, political freedom, and hope that their lives will be better in a decade. And to think otherwise is simply bigotry.
Tenure? In state-funded primary and secondary schools? In a country as brutally meritocratic as the US?
Well, let me tell you of a couple of situations in my hometown in which tenure saved teachers' job.
The first teacher in question taught history, and one of his elective courses was focused on radical protest movements from 1950-1975. The thing was that many conservative elements in town wanted the course to not exist, or at the very least state quite clearly that all the radical protest movements were because of spies from the USSR. They had the ear of the dyed-in-wool conservative mayor, who in this city's structure was also the chair of the school board. They tried several tactics to fire him, including trying to convince the union to accept some nice cash benefits if they allowed a provision in the contract to create a process for firing teachers that were presenting content "detrimental to the community" or similar nonsense. The teacher continued to teach until his retirement, which allowed students to learn about that period in US history in a way that neither their textbooks nor their parents were really showing them.
The second teacher in question was the advisor of the award-winning school paper. Said award-winning school paper did some investigative journalism and discovered some not-nice things about an assistant superintendent, which they duly published. The assistant superintendent reacted by driving to the school, barging into the paper office, and almost physically threatening the student editor who happened to be there at the time. The paper of course duly reported on this incident in their next issue, so the assistant superintendent went to the advisor and demanded that the advisor give the entire editorial board suspensions for insubordination or some-such. The advisor refused, so the assistant superintendent immediately tried to get him fired.
So yes, tenure can and does matter, even for primary and secondary teachers.
Actually the federal government should not be writing any laws
Why is it, then, that the people who wrote the Constitution created a legislature who was specifically tasked with writing laws? They even gave that legislature a list of things to do, which includes a lot of things many libertarians oppose the federal government doing, like: - Lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises - Provide for the general welfare - Borrow money - Regulate interstate and international commerce - Manage the currency - Establish the postal system - Copyrights and patents - Anything necessary and proper for the officers of the US to carry out their assigned duties
because it means others might do things they disapprove of
Well, yes. I disapprove of people and organizations who murder, rob, rape, beat up, poison, cheat, and steal. Government is a check on all that by having an organized way of penalizing people who do those things. And it turns out that this is generally successful: There are a lot fewer murders, robberies, rapes, beatings, poisonings, and thefts in places where there is effective government than when there isn't (and yes, I'm considering people murdered by the government in unjustified shootings).
There are 2 points of real disagreement I have with libertarians: 1. They oppose government efforts to intervene when one person's activities are demonstrably harming somebody else. For example, most libertarians I've encountered believe environmental regulations are unnecessary and intrusive, but countries without environmental regulations have people dying of various water-borne and air-borne poisons every day. Most libertarians I've encountered disapprove of government efforts to ensure that products available in stores are what they say they are, but historically and in modern times private industry has demonstrated that it cannot regulate itself, nor can consumers organize lawsuits well enough to correct the market.
2. They oppose government doing what government can and has done more efficiently than private industry. That is in large part because their philosophy is predicated on the idea that government is always less efficient than private industry, so when some egghead quotes statistics that say that (for example) government-run health care gives better health care for less money than privately-run health care, the assumption is that the egghead is just making it up.
What a lot of people seem to be missing is that the GOP is in the middle of a transformation. I will not get into whether or not it is good or bad for the country or the party but the establishment republicans, those like romney or mccain are being pushed aside by more libertarian bent candidates.
Then how come McCain and then Romney were the presidential nominees? How come the rising stars that were supposed to be the next great Republican president were all fairly old school folks? How come the "more libertarian bent" rising star Paul Ryan is advocating what amount to the exact same policies Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich were pushing decades ago?
There are some people in the Republican Party who would really like it to not be the party who's primary demographic is old white people from the southeast. There are some people in the Republican Party who would really like it to not be as corrupt as it is (I'm not suggesting the Democrats are even close to saints in this regard). There are some people in the Republican Party who would like it to no longer be the party of bigotry. But right now, the core of the organization as a whole is a corrupt bunch of old white bigots from the southeast.
As far as the Republican's connection with libertarianism, they're libertarian whenever they're talking about tax rates, social welfare programs, or guns, but definitely not libertarian when it comes to military spending, personal freedoms, corporate subsidies (and subsidies disguised as tax loopholes), and religion.
Of course they would have: If they collude, they pay their people $100K/year. If they don't collude, everyone poaches from each other and they all end up paying their people $120K/year.
Number 2 is really just a symptom of corruption and your number 4.
No, it isn't entirely. There are Congressmen and national security types who, by all appearances, really believe that the right way forward is to ensure that the Russians and Chinese and North Koreans and Muslims are all dead. Some of them are religious nutjobs who want to bring about Armageddon. Some of them are old-school Cold Warriors. Some of them are motivated by simple bigotry and racism.
Smart is writing a dialog using some library that with the same code looks the right way on each platform.
The trouble with that is that this challenge extends to issues like: On a 2"x3" screen, it's preferable to have more screens with less on them, versus on a tablet or desktop, it's preferable to have fewer screens to go through. So now your library has to be smart enough to do the right thing on each platform, and realize that actually these 5 controls need to be moved onto a second screen, etc.
So it's not just making each piece of the puzzle look right, it's also about making the puzzle as a whole fit with the application and the platform. That's hard, but I don't see a way around actually writing 3 different UIs if you want to support 3 different platforms the Right Way (TM).
In this example, say that the employees of the colluding companies are making $100k/year whereas they are really worth $120k/year. Non-colluding companies can now easily poach these employees by offering them, say, $110k/year.
So let me get this straight: - Without the collusion between employers, the employees would make $120K/year. - With the collusion between employers, the employees would move to a different company and make $110K/year. - Conclusion: The collusion between employers is costing the employees at least $10K/year.
That's not a self-correcting system, that's damages. The companies who colluded can easily attract talented people making less than $100K/year by recruiting in different areas of the country (where techies frequently make less than $100K/year), or different areas of the world (where techies make far less than $100K/year) via H1B, so they'd suffer some turnover but no major disruptions.
A simple example of why this is wrong: Let's say you have a simple Yes/No question to ask. For tablets, the right thing to do is blank out the screen, put the question more-or-less in the middle, with two large icons to poke. For desktops, it's a standard Yes/No dialog box. For phones, you're better off with the question across the top, and then the Yes and No buttons taking up almost the entire screen.
That's 3 different interfaces with 3 different interactions that are easy to pull off because you're interacting with different kinds of objects. Trying to make them all the same is so monumentally and obviously stupid I'm at a loss for why attempting to do so is all the rage in the UI design world (I'm looking at you too, Gnome3 and Unity). My best guess is that UI designers are working feverishly on it because it's one of the few areas of their field where there isn't a pretty clear understanding of what the Right Thing is, and so that's where they can get creative and innovative (and ideally rich if they find a really really good idea and patent it).
Anyone here working in UI design that might be able to explain it better to me?
They figured that they could cut back and simply tag along and assist when the interests sufficiently coincide, since they thought the US was their chump.
And they were right! But that still doesn't explain why the US has enough military power right now to take on their allies as well as their enemies.
Yes, there is an alternative for the US, but one that at least one major political party can't stomach: 1. Acknowledge that trying to take over the world militarily is a stupid goal. (And that's the only logical reason for a military budget basically matching the entire rest of the world combined)
2. Stop pissing off the rest of the world so much. That will involve ending US support for really nasty dictators, using diplomacy and trade negotiations rather than military threats to move foreign countries in the direction the US wants. In addition, this will probably involve convincing Israel to behave in accordance with international law, which it hasn't for a really really long time.
3. Ramp down military spending to sane levels while ramping up non-military programs that can keep the people who used to work on military applications employed. There's a lot we could have these people working on instead: Renewable energy, high-speed rail systems, space vehicles, better commercial aircraft, self-driving cars, medical technology, etc.
4. Go after fraud and corruption with a vengeance. Prosecute and jail those who are bribing government officials to get sweet sweet contracts with no penalties for failing to deliver the promised product in the promised timeline.
This isn't impossible: The UK basically made the same choice decades ago.
1. One reason oil and coal appear to be cheaper is that the costs of CO2 emissions are completely externalized. Introduce a cap-and-trade system or a CO2 tax and suddenly those won't look quite as economically attractive. (Obviously, you'll have to ignore this point if you think that there are no costs of CO2 emissions, as some do.) 2. Another cost of oil that is mostly externalized and doesn't apply to solar are the military efforts to secure access to oil drilling locations. Again, less oil, less need for military ventures overseas that cost ridiculously large amounts of taxpayer money. 3. The cost per KwH for solar installations has been dropping steadily. That means that the capital investment that oil and gas are competing is going down, the time needed to pay back the investment in electric bill savings is dropping, which means more people will opt for solar panels, regardless of what happens to other markets. 4. There's a libertarian argument to be made here: If you have your own solar power plant that can power your house, then you don't need the heavily regulated utility companies. A power plant that doesn't exist has no government regulatory agency and the staff of bureaucrats that go with it. So by extension, you're reducing your own reliance on the government. 5. Even without addressing points 1 and 2, the cost of accessing oil has been going up over the long-term. That's going to affect demand sooner-or-later and push people towards alternatives.
It's sane, but I don't think it will happen by 2030. There's just too much money to be made in not having widespread solar power that I doubt we'll see a changeover anytime soon. And I'd expect homes to be converted before cars, since we know how to get a solar-powered home that works well, but electric cars have limits that are currently not as easy to adjust to.
I actually have recently made the move from a position in cubicle-land to an actual office. It hadn't been used in a while, but I was overjoyed to clean it out and have an actual space I could call my own at work.
And it helps, a lot: If I need to be uninterrupted (e.g. on the phone with a vendor), I can close the door and know that I'll be left alone. If I need to have a private discussion with my boss, we can go in there and not have to worry much about being overheard. If I'm away from the office, it's locked and I know there's little chance of random people messing with my desk. And so forth.
There's another reason too: The company is too cheap to buy offices or cubes for its employees.
And of course the real reason for cubicles is this: The company is too cheap to buy offices for its employees, except for the executives who make the decisions about what kind of office plan to have.
Just compare the number of people that immigrated to the USA with the number that emigrated from the USA and you will see how much it is a fallacy.
That's a matter of advertising, not a good measure of how well someone is actually treated. The classic joke about this is that immigrants came to America thinking the streets were paved with gold, but on arrival quickly discovered 3 things: 1. The streets were not paved with gold. 2. The streets were not paved. 3. It was their job to pave them.
Restrictions on handling classified documents only apply to people who seek security clearance, which means some education is given on what "should be" classified to people who are handling it.
The documents weren't classified, which means they could have been handled by anyone, not just those with security clearance. Therefor, there's no reasonable expectation that everyone handling the documents was aware that they should have been classified, and thus the leak was legal regardless.
It depends entirely on how broadly you read the ex post facto provision.
The clear intent was to prevent the government from prosecuting and punishing somebody who committed acts that were not illegal at the time the acts were committed. Releasing unclassified documents is not illegal. Declaring that he should have known they were classified, even though they weren't, is retroactively declaring his action a crime.
An entirely equivalent case: You park legally on the street and walk away from your car. While you're away, the police come by and put up a No Parking sign, and then immediately ticket you for parking there on the grounds that you should have known somehow that they were going to make it illegal to park there.
And the argument that it's a terrible law is obvious: It requires that all government personnel be mind-readers.
Voting for a third party can make a real difference, actually, and thinking otherwise is also demonstrating a poor grasp of US history: 1. An upstart single-issue party in the 1860's ran a not-very-prominent Congressman for President, and won. The party in question implemented the policy proposal they had organized around, dramatically changing the nature of the country.
2. A popular president who was disillusioned with the policies of his own party split off and formed his own party in 1912. He didn't win an unprecedented third term for the presidency, but his party elected a bunch of people to state offices and the US House. More importantly, many of the policies advocated by that party, previously considered political non-starters, were implemented in many of the states where the party had significant following, and a later president (more on him in a moment) implemented quite a few of those policies on the national level.
3. In the 1930's, the president who implemented the 1912 party's policies was able to convince his party to go along with it in part because they were supported by a third party that was winning hundreds of thousands of votes and some local elections in key states.
When you look at the history of third parties, generally speaking the credible threat of a third party challenge forces the major party that the third party is most like to adopt enough of that third party's positions to keep the voters who are considering bolting to the third party. Otherwise, the only competition the two major parties have is each other, and they can between the two of them take any issue completely out of public consideration by simply agreeing between the two of them that a particular policy is acceptable to both of them.
For a recent example of this, look at the Patriot Act - there was nobody to vote for that actually opposed it, so it was going to happen regardless of what the pesky voters thought. Had there been credible third-party threats opposing the move (e.g. Greens or Libertarians), then sitting Republicans would be worried that they might lose because enough people voted Libertarian to let the Democrat win, while sitting Democrats would be worried that they might lose because enough people voted Green to let the Republican win.
Bootlegging is killing the music industry and making it much more difficult for musicians to make money
Bootlegging has very little effect on the demand for live performances. It's not like a bar can't play recorded music easily enough, and the reason they get live bands in is because a lot of people like listening to live music more than recorded music and are willing to pay a cover charge for the privilege.
In fact, arguably, bootlegging increases demand for live performances. It certainly didn't hurt the Grateful Dead.
While politically agnostic the piece is squarely in support of Bitcoin...
In other words, he has an opinion, and as you pointed out his personal income is directly affected by whether he's right, but he's pretending to be an independent observer to try to make his argument more believable.
Here's the real story of Bitcoins (or any other cryptocurrency): It will fall victim to all the problems that plagued the US dollar from about 1790 through 1920 or so. That kind of massive volatility made any economic bad spot about 3 times worse than they had to be, because the currency could not adjust to counteract the business cycle.
I understand that UTF-8 and ASCII overlaps - that's why people do this and regularly get away with it for years.
And I have seen the double-encode phenomenon too - that usually happens when people know that doing things in ASCII is wrong, and read somewhere that they're supposed to UTF-8 encode, but don't really understand what they're doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should Muslims get a free pass, because it's currently unfashionable to call them out on antisocial and illegal behaviour (under the rubric of "anti racism")?
Because the vast majority Muslims who either enter or leave "the land of milk and honey" are not enemy combatants or terrorists or intending to fight any kind of war. For every genuine terrorist in the Muslim community, there are approximately 250,000 who have nothing to do with it. What you seem to be arguing is that we should oppress 249,999 innocent people in order to catch the 1 bad person.
My guess is that you don't know any Muslims personally. I've known a few over my life, from a bunch of different areas of the mostly Muslim world (Kurdistan, Bosnia, Lebanon, Algeria, Jordan, Pakistan, and home-grown American). They fundamentally want what you want: A nice place to live, a good job, education and opportunities for their children, political freedom, and hope that their lives will be better in a decade. And to think otherwise is simply bigotry.
Tenure? In state-funded primary and secondary schools? In a country as brutally meritocratic as the US?
Well, let me tell you of a couple of situations in my hometown in which tenure saved teachers' job.
The first teacher in question taught history, and one of his elective courses was focused on radical protest movements from 1950-1975. The thing was that many conservative elements in town wanted the course to not exist, or at the very least state quite clearly that all the radical protest movements were because of spies from the USSR. They had the ear of the dyed-in-wool conservative mayor, who in this city's structure was also the chair of the school board. They tried several tactics to fire him, including trying to convince the union to accept some nice cash benefits if they allowed a provision in the contract to create a process for firing teachers that were presenting content "detrimental to the community" or similar nonsense. The teacher continued to teach until his retirement, which allowed students to learn about that period in US history in a way that neither their textbooks nor their parents were really showing them.
The second teacher in question was the advisor of the award-winning school paper. Said award-winning school paper did some investigative journalism and discovered some not-nice things about an assistant superintendent, which they duly published. The assistant superintendent reacted by driving to the school, barging into the paper office, and almost physically threatening the student editor who happened to be there at the time. The paper of course duly reported on this incident in their next issue, so the assistant superintendent went to the advisor and demanded that the advisor give the entire editorial board suspensions for insubordination or some-such. The advisor refused, so the assistant superintendent immediately tried to get him fired.
So yes, tenure can and does matter, even for primary and secondary teachers.
Actually the federal government should not be writing any laws
Why is it, then, that the people who wrote the Constitution created a legislature who was specifically tasked with writing laws? They even gave that legislature a list of things to do, which includes a lot of things many libertarians oppose the federal government doing, like:
- Lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises
- Provide for the general welfare
- Borrow money
- Regulate interstate and international commerce
- Manage the currency
- Establish the postal system
- Copyrights and patents
- Anything necessary and proper for the officers of the US to carry out their assigned duties
because it means others might do things they disapprove of
Well, yes. I disapprove of people and organizations who murder, rob, rape, beat up, poison, cheat, and steal. Government is a check on all that by having an organized way of penalizing people who do those things. And it turns out that this is generally successful: There are a lot fewer murders, robberies, rapes, beatings, poisonings, and thefts in places where there is effective government than when there isn't (and yes, I'm considering people murdered by the government in unjustified shootings).
There are 2 points of real disagreement I have with libertarians:
1. They oppose government efforts to intervene when one person's activities are demonstrably harming somebody else. For example, most libertarians I've encountered believe environmental regulations are unnecessary and intrusive, but countries without environmental regulations have people dying of various water-borne and air-borne poisons every day. Most libertarians I've encountered disapprove of government efforts to ensure that products available in stores are what they say they are, but historically and in modern times private industry has demonstrated that it cannot regulate itself, nor can consumers organize lawsuits well enough to correct the market.
2. They oppose government doing what government can and has done more efficiently than private industry. That is in large part because their philosophy is predicated on the idea that government is always less efficient than private industry, so when some egghead quotes statistics that say that (for example) government-run health care gives better health care for less money than privately-run health care, the assumption is that the egghead is just making it up.
What a lot of people seem to be missing is that the GOP is in the middle of a transformation. I will not get into whether or not it is good or bad for the country or the party but the establishment republicans, those like romney or mccain are being pushed aside by more libertarian bent candidates.
Then how come McCain and then Romney were the presidential nominees? How come the rising stars that were supposed to be the next great Republican president were all fairly old school folks? How come the "more libertarian bent" rising star Paul Ryan is advocating what amount to the exact same policies Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich were pushing decades ago?
There are some people in the Republican Party who would really like it to not be the party who's primary demographic is old white people from the southeast. There are some people in the Republican Party who would really like it to not be as corrupt as it is (I'm not suggesting the Democrats are even close to saints in this regard). There are some people in the Republican Party who would like it to no longer be the party of bigotry. But right now, the core of the organization as a whole is a corrupt bunch of old white bigots from the southeast.
As far as the Republican's connection with libertarianism, they're libertarian whenever they're talking about tax rates, social welfare programs, or guns, but definitely not libertarian when it comes to military spending, personal freedoms, corporate subsidies (and subsidies disguised as tax loopholes), and religion.
Of course they would have: If they collude, they pay their people $100K/year. If they don't collude, everyone poaches from each other and they all end up paying their people $120K/year.
Number 2 is really just a symptom of corruption and your number 4.
No, it isn't entirely. There are Congressmen and national security types who, by all appearances, really believe that the right way forward is to ensure that the Russians and Chinese and North Koreans and Muslims are all dead. Some of them are religious nutjobs who want to bring about Armageddon. Some of them are old-school Cold Warriors. Some of them are motivated by simple bigotry and racism.
Smart is writing a dialog using some library that with the same code looks the right way on each platform.
The trouble with that is that this challenge extends to issues like: On a 2"x3" screen, it's preferable to have more screens with less on them, versus on a tablet or desktop, it's preferable to have fewer screens to go through. So now your library has to be smart enough to do the right thing on each platform, and realize that actually these 5 controls need to be moved onto a second screen, etc.
So it's not just making each piece of the puzzle look right, it's also about making the puzzle as a whole fit with the application and the platform. That's hard, but I don't see a way around actually writing 3 different UIs if you want to support 3 different platforms the Right Way (TM).
In this example, say that the employees of the colluding companies are making $100k/year whereas they are really worth $120k/year. Non-colluding companies can now easily poach these employees by offering them, say, $110k/year.
So let me get this straight:
- Without the collusion between employers, the employees would make $120K/year.
- With the collusion between employers, the employees would move to a different company and make $110K/year.
- Conclusion: The collusion between employers is costing the employees at least $10K/year.
That's not a self-correcting system, that's damages. The companies who colluded can easily attract talented people making less than $100K/year by recruiting in different areas of the country (where techies frequently make less than $100K/year), or different areas of the world (where techies make far less than $100K/year) via H1B, so they'd suffer some turnover but no major disruptions.
A simple example of why this is wrong: Let's say you have a simple Yes/No question to ask. For tablets, the right thing to do is blank out the screen, put the question more-or-less in the middle, with two large icons to poke. For desktops, it's a standard Yes/No dialog box. For phones, you're better off with the question across the top, and then the Yes and No buttons taking up almost the entire screen.
That's 3 different interfaces with 3 different interactions that are easy to pull off because you're interacting with different kinds of objects. Trying to make them all the same is so monumentally and obviously stupid I'm at a loss for why attempting to do so is all the rage in the UI design world (I'm looking at you too, Gnome3 and Unity). My best guess is that UI designers are working feverishly on it because it's one of the few areas of their field where there isn't a pretty clear understanding of what the Right Thing is, and so that's where they can get creative and innovative (and ideally rich if they find a really really good idea and patent it).
Anyone here working in UI design that might be able to explain it better to me?
Relativity is the most proven theory in the history of science.
Well, I think that's a bit exaggerated: We're pretty clear about gravity, for example. But you're right it's on very solid ground by now.
They figured that they could cut back and simply tag along and assist when the interests sufficiently coincide, since they thought the US was their chump.
And they were right! But that still doesn't explain why the US has enough military power right now to take on their allies as well as their enemies.
Yes, there is an alternative for the US, but one that at least one major political party can't stomach:
1. Acknowledge that trying to take over the world militarily is a stupid goal. (And that's the only logical reason for a military budget basically matching the entire rest of the world combined)
2. Stop pissing off the rest of the world so much. That will involve ending US support for really nasty dictators, using diplomacy and trade negotiations rather than military threats to move foreign countries in the direction the US wants. In addition, this will probably involve convincing Israel to behave in accordance with international law, which it hasn't for a really really long time.
3. Ramp down military spending to sane levels while ramping up non-military programs that can keep the people who used to work on military applications employed. There's a lot we could have these people working on instead: Renewable energy, high-speed rail systems, space vehicles, better commercial aircraft, self-driving cars, medical technology, etc.
4. Go after fraud and corruption with a vengeance. Prosecute and jail those who are bribing government officials to get sweet sweet contracts with no penalties for failing to deliver the promised product in the promised timeline.
This isn't impossible: The UK basically made the same choice decades ago.
1. One reason oil and coal appear to be cheaper is that the costs of CO2 emissions are completely externalized. Introduce a cap-and-trade system or a CO2 tax and suddenly those won't look quite as economically attractive. (Obviously, you'll have to ignore this point if you think that there are no costs of CO2 emissions, as some do.)
2. Another cost of oil that is mostly externalized and doesn't apply to solar are the military efforts to secure access to oil drilling locations. Again, less oil, less need for military ventures overseas that cost ridiculously large amounts of taxpayer money.
3. The cost per KwH for solar installations has been dropping steadily. That means that the capital investment that oil and gas are competing is going down, the time needed to pay back the investment in electric bill savings is dropping, which means more people will opt for solar panels, regardless of what happens to other markets.
4. There's a libertarian argument to be made here: If you have your own solar power plant that can power your house, then you don't need the heavily regulated utility companies. A power plant that doesn't exist has no government regulatory agency and the staff of bureaucrats that go with it. So by extension, you're reducing your own reliance on the government.
5. Even without addressing points 1 and 2, the cost of accessing oil has been going up over the long-term. That's going to affect demand sooner-or-later and push people towards alternatives.
It's sane, but I don't think it will happen by 2030. There's just too much money to be made in not having widespread solar power that I doubt we'll see a changeover anytime soon. And I'd expect homes to be converted before cars, since we know how to get a solar-powered home that works well, but electric cars have limits that are currently not as easy to adjust to.
I actually have recently made the move from a position in cubicle-land to an actual office. It hadn't been used in a while, but I was overjoyed to clean it out and have an actual space I could call my own at work.
And it helps, a lot: If I need to be uninterrupted (e.g. on the phone with a vendor), I can close the door and know that I'll be left alone. If I need to have a private discussion with my boss, we can go in there and not have to worry much about being overheard. If I'm away from the office, it's locked and I know there's little chance of random people messing with my desk. And so forth.
There's another reason too: The company is too cheap to buy offices or cubes for its employees.
And of course the real reason for cubicles is this: The company is too cheap to buy offices for its employees, except for the executives who make the decisions about what kind of office plan to have.
A republic is literally rex publica -- rule by the people
That's an incorrect etymology from the Latin: It's res publica, the public matters, and you can find that exact construction in Cicero.
Democracy, from the Greek (transliterated) demos kratos, is literally the rule of the citizenry.
Just compare the number of people that immigrated to the USA with the number that emigrated from the USA and you will see how much it is a fallacy.
That's a matter of advertising, not a good measure of how well someone is actually treated. The classic joke about this is that immigrants came to America thinking the streets were paved with gold, but on arrival quickly discovered 3 things:
1. The streets were not paved with gold.
2. The streets were not paved.
3. It was their job to pave them.
I'd love to be able to tell you, but the answer is classified!
Restrictions on handling classified documents only apply to people who seek security clearance, which means some education is given on what "should be" classified to people who are handling it.
The documents weren't classified, which means they could have been handled by anyone, not just those with security clearance. Therefor, there's no reasonable expectation that everyone handling the documents was aware that they should have been classified, and thus the leak was legal regardless.
It depends entirely on how broadly you read the ex post facto provision.
The clear intent was to prevent the government from prosecuting and punishing somebody who committed acts that were not illegal at the time the acts were committed. Releasing unclassified documents is not illegal. Declaring that he should have known they were classified, even though they weren't, is retroactively declaring his action a crime.
An entirely equivalent case: You park legally on the street and walk away from your car. While you're away, the police come by and put up a No Parking sign, and then immediately ticket you for parking there on the grounds that you should have known somehow that they were going to make it illegal to park there.
And the argument that it's a terrible law is obvious: It requires that all government personnel be mind-readers.
Voting for a third party can make a real difference, actually, and thinking otherwise is also demonstrating a poor grasp of US history:
1. An upstart single-issue party in the 1860's ran a not-very-prominent Congressman for President, and won. The party in question implemented the policy proposal they had organized around, dramatically changing the nature of the country.
2. A popular president who was disillusioned with the policies of his own party split off and formed his own party in 1912. He didn't win an unprecedented third term for the presidency, but his party elected a bunch of people to state offices and the US House. More importantly, many of the policies advocated by that party, previously considered political non-starters, were implemented in many of the states where the party had significant following, and a later president (more on him in a moment) implemented quite a few of those policies on the national level.
3. In the 1930's, the president who implemented the 1912 party's policies was able to convince his party to go along with it in part because they were supported by a third party that was winning hundreds of thousands of votes and some local elections in key states.
When you look at the history of third parties, generally speaking the credible threat of a third party challenge forces the major party that the third party is most like to adopt enough of that third party's positions to keep the voters who are considering bolting to the third party. Otherwise, the only competition the two major parties have is each other, and they can between the two of them take any issue completely out of public consideration by simply agreeing between the two of them that a particular policy is acceptable to both of them.
For a recent example of this, look at the Patriot Act - there was nobody to vote for that actually opposed it, so it was going to happen regardless of what the pesky voters thought. Had there been credible third-party threats opposing the move (e.g. Greens or Libertarians), then sitting Republicans would be worried that they might lose because enough people voted Libertarian to let the Democrat win, while sitting Democrats would be worried that they might lose because enough people voted Green to let the Republican win.
Bootlegging is killing the music industry and making it much more difficult for musicians to make money
Bootlegging has very little effect on the demand for live performances. It's not like a bar can't play recorded music easily enough, and the reason they get live bands in is because a lot of people like listening to live music more than recorded music and are willing to pay a cover charge for the privilege.
In fact, arguably, bootlegging increases demand for live performances. It certainly didn't hurt the Grateful Dead.
I guessed that from the summary:
While politically agnostic the piece is squarely in support of Bitcoin ...
In other words, he has an opinion, and as you pointed out his personal income is directly affected by whether he's right, but he's pretending to be an independent observer to try to make his argument more believable.
Here's the real story of Bitcoins (or any other cryptocurrency): It will fall victim to all the problems that plagued the US dollar from about 1790 through 1920 or so. That kind of massive volatility made any economic bad spot about 3 times worse than they had to be, because the currency could not adjust to counteract the business cycle.
I understand that UTF-8 and ASCII overlaps - that's why people do this and regularly get away with it for years.
And I have seen the double-encode phenomenon too - that usually happens when people know that doing things in ASCII is wrong, and read somewhere that they're supposed to UTF-8 encode, but don't really understand what they're doing.