What fucked up ethical system do you have that doesn't start by saying human life is inherently valuable?
It is we who choose to make human life valuable or not. And there are easy to conceive global collapse scenarios such as a global famine where human life has negative value - each additional mouth to feed takes food from everyone else and causes more suffering.
My view on this is that the economic mechanisms of trade and private ownership of capital have done far more to make human life valuable than any system of ethics. One can say the same of technology progress, particularly in agriculture, transportation, and labor saving devices.
Those double agents are not working in the interests of their country, they are working in the interests of the corrupt US corporations that control the US government.
You went way off the rails here. NSA has already done a lot to undermine corrupt and non-corrupt US corporations and nothing has been done about it. They still get their usual captive revenue stream (which let us note, will flow no matter how unhappy the business world gets about it). Just because large corporations are more useful to the US intelligence community than you are doesn't mean that they're in charge. It just means that the large corporation has some opportunity for profit as long as they continue to play ball. The tail, corporations aren't wagging this dog.
Do you really believe that curbing the power of businesses is going to result in the NSA spying less or hinder the other power grabs that the US federal government routinely engages in?
One of the huge things routinely missed in this topic is that business versus government is the huge informal division of power in democracies throughout the world. Making businesses absolutely subservient to government is another step towards tyranny. Sure, I don't think it's a good idea to let businesses rule our societies. But neither do I think it's a good idea to cripple them so much that they can't help us resist tyranny from the government side.
I can't help but think that you are an unwitting shill for a statist ideology which seeks to knock out the obstacles to rule.
Very well. There's still violation of a couple of department rules concerning preservation of emails and the scheme may also illegally obstruct FOIA requests.
No, it was a military action not a law enforcement action. And kidnapping by a military force waives a lot of human rights both in the document you mention and in the Geneva Conventions.
Larry Niven used Uranus and nuclear fusion of its atmosphere to move the Earth, via a series of flybys in the story, "A World Out of Time". I personally was thinking more loops of asteroids doing flybys of Earth and Jupiter, slowly transferring velocity from Jupiter to Earth and various other planets and bodies of interest. And yes, while the occasional impact by a misplaced asteroid would suck, getting baked by the Sun probably would suck a lot more.
Even in a world of strictly monetary values, very few own copyrights that held their value so long after creation. It's not everyone's monetary value that's being preserved, but rather that of a few. Limited duration IP has value even in the world of pure monetary value.
That's the power of a good ethics system. That it holds even with widely divergent moral viewpoints.
I thought it was widely known that when Yellowstone finally does go up, that will be an extinction-level event. Most of the planet will become completely uninhabitable for decades.
Not true. We need to remember that there are more than 100 known caldera eruptions of the Yellowstone hotspot as it migrated from eastern Oregon to its present location over the past 16 million years. None of these eruptions, including the big eruption of 2 million years ago, are tied to known global extinction events over this time period.
Sure, if you were a plant or animal with a limited range too close to one of these supervolcano eruptions, you were out of luck, but we don't see global impact over the known lifespan of the hotspot. If it were remotely as bad as you claim, we would have seen some obvious signs of it in the fossil record, which we don't.
Further, why would the Earth's atmosphere become unbreathable? Sure, there's a lot of ash and gases released in a supervolcano eruption. But the Earth's atmosphere is much bigger than that and most of those gases, aside from carbon dioxide and other relatively insoluble gases, would wash out in rain. The remnant that remains in the stratosphere wouldn't have much effect precisely because of how little there is in the stratosphere.
Prepping for this is a joke. No power, no running water, no crops, no breathable air on the surface, for years and years. Your basement shelter won't keep you alive for a month under those conditions.
Enough lead time and you can prep for anything nature throws at you other than universe-scale problems like the heat death of the universe. Maybe even that can be managed successfully though I'm not feeling up to it.
And if you look at how international law is created, such as the Geneva Conventions or the various nuclear nonproliferation treaties, your impression of the strangeness of international law would no doubt endure. This stuff is created by ad hoc groups of diplomats (which would be the bodies analogous to legislatures in the law making process) pulled together for the treaty in question. And they nakedly pursue the very specific interests they represent which may or may not be the specific interests they claim to represent. Legislatures have similar fig leaves, but those tend to be more carefully placed.
An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?
(Of course, this assumes that we'll have a few hours warning before the eruption
I think we'll probably have a few generations of warning. Ash is mostly silica, especially with Yellowstone eruptions. It won't be magnetic. And a bad eruption would be tens to hundreds of cubic kilometers of ash and stuff. You aren't going to push that around with wimpy balloons.
The ideal solution here is to build up a considerable global food supplies of several years and not be there when the volcano erupts.
The international law has to exist in the first place. There's a reasonable argument that Congress delegating its warmaking powers to the Executive Branch is unconstitutional, but your argument isn't going far, if you're going to claim that international law was broken.
You have yet to mention a thing relevant to libertarians or their beliefs on markets.
In addition to the instantaneous supply demand property - the grid is an electric circuit with ever changing loads that are both capacitive and inductive. Keeping power (both real and reactive) moving efficiently is a non-trivial task.
So this is hard? So is virtually everything we use markets for.
Regulated monopolies (in the US) have an "obligation to serve". If you want power the power company is not allowed to say no, even if the supply is insufficient.
They don't say "no", they just don't deliver at all. That's obviously a vast improvement. And of course, this has nothing to do with markets.
When Apple or Google can put up a data center in a few months from breaking ground to switching it on and draw energy equivalent to a steel mill, but new power plants require more than a decade to site, permit, build, test, and put in service the challenges can be daunting.
And most of the delay is due to California regulation. Again, we have that because this is "daunting", that somehow magically means it can't be done by a market.
Libertarian "markets good - regulation bad" can be as unhinged from reality as creationism. Its bad religion to pretend the world works in accordance with your faith regardless of the data. In these instances free market evangelism isn't an economic theory, its religion.
What data? What reality? I notice you don't bring any up yourself. It's annoying when libertarians are supposed to provide all this data and reality while their Slashdot critics can merely observe that electricity is hard and make up straw men on the fly.
They aren't the last to ignore costs. After all, most of the harm from the externality of pollution has been dealt with, often at inordinate cost to the would-be polluter, yet developed world societies still ratchet up pollution standards to ever more ridiculous levels.
[...] when in fact, we are seeing an out of control security government bureaucracy. Are my fellow old people concerned? Nope. We are all worried about Clinton's email server, Benghazi, IS, gay marriage, and other social "issues" that some how are going to ruin our country and our freedoms.
Benghazi is an out of control government issue. A number of high level government officials, including Clinton, lied about a relatively mundane security problem because it might harm them in the 2014 elections.
Similarly, Clinton's email server is another out of control government issue. She committed a felony by using that server. And there is some speculation that she had legitimate reasons for doing so, namely, an adversarial relationship with the rest of the Obama administration who might have used those emails against her.
Grouping that (and ISIS) with "social issues" illustrates the principle about throwing stones in glass houses. If you really are concerned about an out of control security government bureaucracy, then you need to be consistently concerned about it. When an important official successfully dodges federal email usage and retention rules (which were intended to make a more open and accountable government), that will make your concerns worse. When government officials succeed in lying about national security affairs, even minor ones such as Benghazi, that will make your concerns worse.
When government officials ignore important security matters in allied countries and that results in the establishment of ISIS in an important region to the US, that is greatly relevant to making your concerns worse.
Even social matters often have huge security apparatus implications. For example, due to the mandates of Social Security, income tax, various bioinformation data bases (like the FBI fingerprint database), and Obamacare health record mandates (both the conditions of the individual mandate and electronic record keeping), the federal government collects a huge amount of information about the US citizenry. They have information right there about who you are, where you are, your financial status, biometric information, and part of your medical records. Combine that with the NSA spying on US cell phone and internet conversations, then they have enough to do Roman Republic-era proscriptions - the drawing up of lists of political opposition, real and potential in order to punish or outright destroy them.
Honestly, I think it is because Millennials don't know who he is.
Why mention one particular group, when the ignorance is far more widespread?
They really don't, as a cohort, pay much attention to the news. I'd love it if these surveys also tested knowledge about basic facts on an issue, and not just opinions.
I wonder which generation would demonstrate the most ignorance on the Snowden affair, if you did that?
Slashdot Mirror
What fucked up ethical system do you have that doesn't start by saying human life is inherently valuable?
It is we who choose to make human life valuable or not. And there are easy to conceive global collapse scenarios such as a global famine where human life has negative value - each additional mouth to feed takes food from everyone else and causes more suffering.
My view on this is that the economic mechanisms of trade and private ownership of capital have done far more to make human life valuable than any system of ethics. One can say the same of technology progress, particularly in agriculture, transportation, and labor saving devices.
Those double agents are not working in the interests of their country, they are working in the interests of the corrupt US corporations that control the US government.
You went way off the rails here. NSA has already done a lot to undermine corrupt and non-corrupt US corporations and nothing has been done about it. They still get their usual captive revenue stream (which let us note, will flow no matter how unhappy the business world gets about it). Just because large corporations are more useful to the US intelligence community than you are doesn't mean that they're in charge. It just means that the large corporation has some opportunity for profit as long as they continue to play ball. The tail, corporations aren't wagging this dog.
Do you really believe that curbing the power of businesses is going to result in the NSA spying less or hinder the other power grabs that the US federal government routinely engages in?
One of the huge things routinely missed in this topic is that business versus government is the huge informal division of power in democracies throughout the world. Making businesses absolutely subservient to government is another step towards tyranny. Sure, I don't think it's a good idea to let businesses rule our societies. But neither do I think it's a good idea to cripple them so much that they can't help us resist tyranny from the government side.
I can't help but think that you are an unwitting shill for a statist ideology which seeks to knock out the obstacles to rule.
Laws aren't meant to stop things from happening.
They provide deterrence to certain behavior by providing negative consequences.
If this law can teach them how to behave in a civil manner
It can't. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
Very well. There's still violation of a couple of department rules concerning preservation of emails and the scheme may also illegally obstruct FOIA requests.
No, it was a military action not a law enforcement action. And kidnapping by a military force waives a lot of human rights both in the document you mention and in the Geneva Conventions.
They where in Pakistan, they should be charged by the Pakistani government, with Pakistani law.
Pakistan doesn't have the capability to enforce that law. What's plan B?
Larry Niven used Uranus and nuclear fusion of its atmosphere to move the Earth, via a series of flybys in the story, "A World Out of Time". I personally was thinking more loops of asteroids doing flybys of Earth and Jupiter, slowly transferring velocity from Jupiter to Earth and various other planets and bodies of interest. And yes, while the occasional impact by a misplaced asteroid would suck, getting baked by the Sun probably would suck a lot more.
Yeah, so we know that the sun will burn out in ~5 billion years. Get cracking.
Move to a star that isn't burning out at that time. In five billion years, you can move the Earth as well not just yourself. Solved that problem.
Actually, it's the other way around. As a market heads towards anarchy, it's the regulation imposed by traders that disappear first.
I'll meet your erroneous generalization with a real world counterexample.
Even in a world of strictly monetary values, very few own copyrights that held their value so long after creation. It's not everyone's monetary value that's being preserved, but rather that of a few. Limited duration IP has value even in the world of pure monetary value.
That's the power of a good ethics system. That it holds even with widely divergent moral viewpoints.
What a dumb thing to say.
I thought it was widely known that when Yellowstone finally does go up, that will be an extinction-level event. Most of the planet will become completely uninhabitable for decades.
Not true. We need to remember that there are more than 100 known caldera eruptions of the Yellowstone hotspot as it migrated from eastern Oregon to its present location over the past 16 million years. None of these eruptions, including the big eruption of 2 million years ago, are tied to known global extinction events over this time period.
Sure, if you were a plant or animal with a limited range too close to one of these supervolcano eruptions, you were out of luck, but we don't see global impact over the known lifespan of the hotspot. If it were remotely as bad as you claim, we would have seen some obvious signs of it in the fossil record, which we don't.
Further, why would the Earth's atmosphere become unbreathable? Sure, there's a lot of ash and gases released in a supervolcano eruption. But the Earth's atmosphere is much bigger than that and most of those gases, aside from carbon dioxide and other relatively insoluble gases, would wash out in rain. The remnant that remains in the stratosphere wouldn't have much effect precisely because of how little there is in the stratosphere.
Prepping for this is a joke. No power, no running water, no crops, no breathable air on the surface, for years and years. Your basement shelter won't keep you alive for a month under those conditions.
Enough lead time and you can prep for anything nature throws at you other than universe-scale problems like the heat death of the universe. Maybe even that can be managed successfully though I'm not feeling up to it.
And if you look at how international law is created, such as the Geneva Conventions or the various nuclear nonproliferation treaties, your impression of the strangeness of international law would no doubt endure. This stuff is created by ad hoc groups of diplomats (which would be the bodies analogous to legislatures in the law making process) pulled together for the treaty in question. And they nakedly pursue the very specific interests they represent which may or may not be the specific interests they claim to represent. Legislatures have similar fig leaves, but those tend to be more carefully placed.
An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?
(Of course, this assumes that we'll have a few hours warning before the eruption
I think we'll probably have a few generations of warning. Ash is mostly silica, especially with Yellowstone eruptions. It won't be magnetic. And a bad eruption would be tens to hundreds of cubic kilometers of ash and stuff. You aren't going to push that around with wimpy balloons.
The ideal solution here is to build up a considerable global food supplies of several years and not be there when the volcano erupts.
The international law has to exist in the first place. There's a reasonable argument that Congress delegating its warmaking powers to the Executive Branch is unconstitutional, but your argument isn't going far, if you're going to claim that international law was broken.
And if they didn't go there, they couldn't have been taken hostage.
I have to disagree. We need to keep in mind who kidnapped who and started this mess in the first place.
In addition to the instantaneous supply demand property - the grid is an electric circuit with ever changing loads that are both capacitive and inductive. Keeping power (both real and reactive) moving efficiently is a non-trivial task.
So this is hard? So is virtually everything we use markets for.
Regulated monopolies (in the US) have an "obligation to serve". If you want power the power company is not allowed to say no, even if the supply is insufficient.
They don't say "no", they just don't deliver at all. That's obviously a vast improvement. And of course, this has nothing to do with markets.
When Apple or Google can put up a data center in a few months from breaking ground to switching it on and draw energy equivalent to a steel mill, but new power plants require more than a decade to site, permit, build, test, and put in service the challenges can be daunting.
And most of the delay is due to California regulation. Again, we have that because this is "daunting", that somehow magically means it can't be done by a market.
Libertarian "markets good - regulation bad" can be as unhinged from reality as creationism. Its bad religion to pretend the world works in accordance with your faith regardless of the data. In these instances free market evangelism isn't an economic theory, its religion.
What data? What reality? I notice you don't bring any up yourself. It's annoying when libertarians are supposed to provide all this data and reality while their Slashdot critics can merely observe that electricity is hard and make up straw men on the fly.
They aren't the last to ignore costs. After all, most of the harm from the externality of pollution has been dealt with, often at inordinate cost to the would-be polluter, yet developed world societies still ratchet up pollution standards to ever more ridiculous levels.
The Shadows sap all life energy with their traditional doomsday weapons. It's the Vorlons who blow things up.
No, their behavior is a far more solid indication of ignorance than whether or not they agree with me.
Stops don't show up in the book. You can only find them by triggering them.
[...] when in fact, we are seeing an out of control security government bureaucracy. Are my fellow old people concerned? Nope. We are all worried about Clinton's email server, Benghazi, IS, gay marriage, and other social "issues" that some how are going to ruin our country and our freedoms.
Benghazi is an out of control government issue. A number of high level government officials, including Clinton, lied about a relatively mundane security problem because it might harm them in the 2014 elections.
Similarly, Clinton's email server is another out of control government issue. She committed a felony by using that server. And there is some speculation that she had legitimate reasons for doing so, namely, an adversarial relationship with the rest of the Obama administration who might have used those emails against her.
Grouping that (and ISIS) with "social issues" illustrates the principle about throwing stones in glass houses. If you really are concerned about an out of control security government bureaucracy, then you need to be consistently concerned about it. When an important official successfully dodges federal email usage and retention rules (which were intended to make a more open and accountable government), that will make your concerns worse. When government officials succeed in lying about national security affairs, even minor ones such as Benghazi, that will make your concerns worse.
When government officials ignore important security matters in allied countries and that results in the establishment of ISIS in an important region to the US, that is greatly relevant to making your concerns worse.
Even social matters often have huge security apparatus implications. For example, due to the mandates of Social Security, income tax, various bioinformation data bases (like the FBI fingerprint database), and Obamacare health record mandates (both the conditions of the individual mandate and electronic record keeping), the federal government collects a huge amount of information about the US citizenry. They have information right there about who you are, where you are, your financial status, biometric information, and part of your medical records. Combine that with the NSA spying on US cell phone and internet conversations, then they have enough to do Roman Republic-era proscriptions - the drawing up of lists of political opposition, real and potential in order to punish or outright destroy them.
Now we might not get to eat too.
I don't see the problem here. Your food is not worth my freedom.
Honestly, I think it is because Millennials don't know who he is.
Why mention one particular group, when the ignorance is far more widespread?
They really don't, as a cohort, pay much attention to the news. I'd love it if these surveys also tested knowledge about basic facts on an issue, and not just opinions.
I wonder which generation would demonstrate the most ignorance on the Snowden affair, if you did that?