"When somebody invokes the authority of law enforcement, they assume the responsibility, too."
That is where you are wrong. Police are more or less unaccountable for their actions, because it usually boils down to their word against someone else, and their word always wins.
The exception is when the brutality is video taped and becomes evidence. Then and only then are the police given a paid vacation and a slap on the wrist. These laws only seek to give Police carte blanch to rule by the fist, and is but one more step along the road to tyrannical despotism.
"Right, that's why we don't reward professions that require a lot of education with money and prestige...oh wait we do."
No, we don't. The people who are rewarded most are those who are the most arrogant and conceited, and most willing to be morally flexible and exploit the desires of others to be like them. Celebrities. Rock Stars. Require little or no education - just certain personality traits.
"Well, that's why most kids say they want to be ditch diggers or work at Wal-Mart or at a slaughterhouse."
No, they don't. They want to be football players, music video stars, movie stars, sports stars, or whatever else makes the most money and requires the least education.
"Well, I guess it's like how we don't have a system of higher education that people come from all over the world to learn from"
We have a system of higher education that has basically unlimited government money to loan to poor foreign nationals. They don't come here for the education. They come here because we'll loan them the money to pay for it, and it's easy to get in because their secondary education is so much better than ours.
The slippery slope is a fallacy, except when dealing with government. When dealing with government, the slippery slope is Page 1 of the operations manual for increasing government control over everything.
For one week, I switched the coffee in our lab coffee club to decaf... nobody noticed. The one "proud" coffee addict even asked one day if I was making it stronger, while putting on an act of being over-stimulated.
There are ~10 people who use that machine. Seriously. Not one of them noticed they were drinking decaf for a week.
Comcast is going to get into some deep doodoo on this one. They advertise a speed, but don't make it readily apparent that you only really get that speed for a short burst of time, and then the connection falls back to some very slow speed.
Verizon Fios, on the other hand, advertises a speed, and at least for me, that's what I get, all the time - and sometimes a bit more.
I pay something like $38 for my 5/20, and I get 5/20 very reliabily. Comcast sells 3/16 for $65 in my area, and it's only 3/16 for the first 5MB or so of traffic, then it falls back to 768k/3.
No, it is not. I guarantee you that if you do an energy audit of what it takes to move the 150,000lb train car, along with the losses involved in generating the energy to move it, you'll find that there's no comparison at all. The OP is exactly right. The people in the car don't even weigh 10% of what the car weighs, and so you're wasting at least 90% of the energy just to move the car.
I don't know what you're doing to your bike, but please stop it.
I have been riding the same set of rims for nearly 35,000 miles now at around 10k miles per year. I've only had to replace the freehub body once or twice per year, and a spoke here and there. I get, on average, one flat about every 500 miles, and I patch my tubes 2 or 3 times before replacing them. I do chew through about 6-8 tires every year. I can't imagine what you're doing that you blow through 5 rims in 5000 miles. Perhaps you need to rethink your riding technique.
You cannot compare bike maintenance to any motorized vehicle. The maintenance costs for cars and trains are astronomical in comparison. I spend MAYBE $500/year for 10k miles on my bike. That's the catalog operating and maintenance cost of driving a car 1000 miles. I've also worked as a part-time wrench in a bike shop for 7 years, so I know a thing or two about what the costs are to maintain a bike.
"But it is clearly not a acceptable trade off for a entire society."
It clearly works just fine in Europe. I spent some time in Varkhaus Finland for my company and it was amazing how many people ride to work every single day. They have parking garages just for bikes, and there are thousands upon thousands of bikes in them.
I know that, on its face, it's difficult to accept that bike commuting is not just practical on a large scale, but is also the greenest way to move people. It doesn't take much scrutiny to realize it's an undeniable fact.
I live 8.9 miles from work. I ride a 22 mile route because it's fun. Today I took a 26 mile route because I got out of the house earlier than normal and had some extra time.
You can plant trees and reap the timber in just a few decades. You can plan to create new oil, but the process takes 50 million years. There's a slight difference in practicality between the two.
We've become exceedingly good at forest management (except in California where they're so concerned about saving the poor underbrush that they'd rather burn down the entire forest, along with San Diego, than properly manage their forests). Timber is a renewable resource, whereas we are pretty sure oil is not.
We can manage timber to avoid "peak wood," but we cannot manage oil to avoid "peak oil," if such a thing exists.
I've been hit by cars three times, and I'm still here. I was mostly unhurt in all three accidents. But, I'm pretty damn lucky.
Of course, if we really wanted to be green, we'd all just ditch the cars and live within biking distance to work, and employers would have bike racks, showers, and lockers.
A lot less than the cost of smelting thousands of tons of steel for rails and cars, creating the energy to make the trains move, the sunk cost of human/vehicle weight (100 humans on 2000lbs of bikes vs. 100 humans on 150,000lbs of train car), and so on.
Then, you still have to have the bike because the train doesn't go everywhere.
Granted, you have to have roads that are passable to bikes, but a light-duty concrete suitable for bikes is a lot less costly than rail.
I ride my bike 21.9 miles each way to work. I could take the train, but it's not as green as riding my bike. And yes, I do eat more food to cover it. My PowerTap usually comes up with about 1500kJ of energy per trip, which is roughly equivalent to 1500 calories of food (once all the conversions and efficiencies are taken into account).
Crating 1lb of pasta (1600cal) costs a lot less than moving me and my share of a 150,000lb train car 22 miles.
The "greenness" of a train doesn't come close to the "greenness" of a bike. It's not even within an order of magnitude... probably not even within two.
"You don't think this is a serious suit? Go count the number of labels on your ladder sometime. For a laugh, I went to look at mine. Almost all the exterior surface that you don't step on is covered in labels."
I work in an engineering office - so we have cubicles and electronics labs. We have to put NFPA labels on anything that is not obviously labeled for human consumption. We also have to maintain not one, not two, but THREE placards at each microwave: 1) Danger to pacemakers, 2) Do not leave unattended while in use, and 3) Location of nearest fire extinguisher.
Our 12-member HSE team has a bigger budget than my largest engineering lab. HSE gets to siphon money out of every project number without notice or review. We get treated like we work in a factory even though we work in an office, and it's all because of stupid morons like this woman who can't use a microwave without setting the building on fire.
I tried to use GMaps for bicycling directions once, and the results were nothing less than imminently life-threatening. They had me try to navigate down a US-### route, which was okay until it suddenly became a 4-lane divided highway with no shoulders and no escape for several hundred yards.
"Actually, the IRS will impute an amount of tip income based on your wages and the type of restaurant."
That is only true if you are an exempt employee (exempt from minimum wage, that is) and the restaurant pays you at less than minimum wage (on the assumption that tips make up for it).
Pizza delivery drivers are not exempt from minimum wage, and therefore cannot be subject to imputed income calculations. They are still, however, required by law to report all tip income and pay tax on it (not that any of them do).
Duh... it's George Bush's Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator! It's a conspiracy between Marvin and Old Georgie Boy to put out the sun since it's obviously the cause of global warming.
These are not fines. They are judgments. Fines are monetary forfeitures compelled by and payable to The State. Judgments are the determination of the financial magnitude of a wrong, essentially the amount of money required to be paid by the defendant to the plaintiff to make the plaintiff whole. While for a given act the actor may be both criminally and civilly liable, the criminal aspect results in fines, and the civil aspect results in judgments.
The 8th would only prohibit excessive fines levied by the government.
Slashdot Mirror
"When somebody invokes the authority of law enforcement, they assume the responsibility, too."
That is where you are wrong. Police are more or less unaccountable for their actions, because it usually boils down to their word against someone else, and their word always wins.
The exception is when the brutality is video taped and becomes evidence. Then and only then are the police given a paid vacation and a slap on the wrist. These laws only seek to give Police carte blanch to rule by the fist, and is but one more step along the road to tyrannical despotism.
"Right, that's why we don't reward professions that require a lot of education with money and prestige...oh wait we do."
No, we don't. The people who are rewarded most are those who are the most arrogant and conceited, and most willing to be morally flexible and exploit the desires of others to be like them. Celebrities. Rock Stars. Require little or no education - just certain personality traits.
"Well, that's why most kids say they want to be ditch diggers or work at Wal-Mart or at a slaughterhouse."
No, they don't. They want to be football players, music video stars, movie stars, sports stars, or whatever else makes the most money and requires the least education.
"Well, I guess it's like how we don't have a system of higher education that people come from all over the world to learn from"
We have a system of higher education that has basically unlimited government money to loan to poor foreign nationals. They don't come here for the education. They come here because we'll loan them the money to pay for it, and it's easy to get in because their secondary education is so much better than ours.
The slippery slope is a fallacy, except when dealing with government. When dealing with government, the slippery slope is Page 1 of the operations manual for increasing government control over everything.
It's called "Martial Law," and should only be invoked during times of dire emergency, if at all.
Not being able to check Facebook does not qualify as a dire emergency.
For one week, I switched the coffee in our lab coffee club to decaf... nobody noticed. The one "proud" coffee addict even asked one day if I was making it stronger, while putting on an act of being over-stimulated.
There are ~10 people who use that machine. Seriously. Not one of them noticed they were drinking decaf for a week.
*sigh
... but from whom? The people on the Internet? Or, the people sitting behind the keyboard?
Sometimes I feel like it's the latter...
Comcast is going to get into some deep doodoo on this one. They advertise a speed, but don't make it readily apparent that you only really get that speed for a short burst of time, and then the connection falls back to some very slow speed.
Verizon Fios, on the other hand, advertises a speed, and at least for me, that's what I get, all the time - and sometimes a bit more.
I pay something like $38 for my 5/20, and I get 5/20 very reliabily. Comcast sells 3/16 for $65 in my area, and it's only 3/16 for the first 5MB or so of traffic, then it falls back to 768k/3.
No, it is not. I guarantee you that if you do an energy audit of what it takes to move the 150,000lb train car, along with the losses involved in generating the energy to move it, you'll find that there's no comparison at all. The OP is exactly right. The people in the car don't even weigh 10% of what the car weighs, and so you're wasting at least 90% of the energy just to move the car.
Bikes >>> Trains ~> Cars
I don't know what you're doing to your bike, but please stop it.
I have been riding the same set of rims for nearly 35,000 miles now at around 10k miles per year. I've only had to replace the freehub body once or twice per year, and a spoke here and there. I get, on average, one flat about every 500 miles, and I patch my tubes 2 or 3 times before replacing them. I do chew through about 6-8 tires every year. I can't imagine what you're doing that you blow through 5 rims in 5000 miles. Perhaps you need to rethink your riding technique.
You cannot compare bike maintenance to any motorized vehicle. The maintenance costs for cars and trains are astronomical in comparison. I spend MAYBE $500/year for 10k miles on my bike. That's the catalog operating and maintenance cost of driving a car 1000 miles. I've also worked as a part-time wrench in a bike shop for 7 years, so I know a thing or two about what the costs are to maintain a bike.
"But it is clearly not a acceptable trade off for a entire society."
It clearly works just fine in Europe. I spent some time in Varkhaus Finland for my company and it was amazing how many people ride to work every single day. They have parking garages just for bikes, and there are thousands upon thousands of bikes in them.
I know that, on its face, it's difficult to accept that bike commuting is not just practical on a large scale, but is also the greenest way to move people. It doesn't take much scrutiny to realize it's an undeniable fact.
I live 8.9 miles from work. I ride a 22 mile route because it's fun. Today I took a 26 mile route because I got out of the house earlier than normal and had some extra time.
You can plant trees and reap the timber in just a few decades. You can plan to create new oil, but the process takes 50 million years. There's a slight difference in practicality between the two.
We've become exceedingly good at forest management (except in California where they're so concerned about saving the poor underbrush that they'd rather burn down the entire forest, along with San Diego, than properly manage their forests). Timber is a renewable resource, whereas we are pretty sure oil is not.
We can manage timber to avoid "peak wood," but we cannot manage oil to avoid "peak oil," if such a thing exists.
I've been hit by cars three times, and I'm still here. I was mostly unhurt in all three accidents. But, I'm pretty damn lucky.
Of course, if we really wanted to be green, we'd all just ditch the cars and live within biking distance to work, and employers would have bike racks, showers, and lockers.
A lot less than the cost of smelting thousands of tons of steel for rails and cars, creating the energy to make the trains move, the sunk cost of human/vehicle weight (100 humans on 2000lbs of bikes vs. 100 humans on 150,000lbs of train car), and so on.
Then, you still have to have the bike because the train doesn't go everywhere.
Granted, you have to have roads that are passable to bikes, but a light-duty concrete suitable for bikes is a lot less costly than rail.
I ride my bike 21.9 miles each way to work. I could take the train, but it's not as green as riding my bike. And yes, I do eat more food to cover it. My PowerTap usually comes up with about 1500kJ of energy per trip, which is roughly equivalent to 1500 calories of food (once all the conversions and efficiencies are taken into account).
Crating 1lb of pasta (1600cal) costs a lot less than moving me and my share of a 150,000lb train car 22 miles.
I think.. :)
The "greenness" of a train doesn't come close to the "greenness" of a bike. It's not even within an order of magnitude... probably not even within two.
"You don't think this is a serious suit? Go count the number of labels on your ladder sometime. For a laugh, I went to look at mine. Almost all the exterior surface that you don't step on is covered in labels."
I work in an engineering office - so we have cubicles and electronics labs. We have to put NFPA labels on anything that is not obviously labeled for human consumption. We also have to maintain not one, not two, but THREE placards at each microwave: 1) Danger to pacemakers, 2) Do not leave unattended while in use, and 3) Location of nearest fire extinguisher.
Our 12-member HSE team has a bigger budget than my largest engineering lab. HSE gets to siphon money out of every project number without notice or review. We get treated like we work in a factory even though we work in an office, and it's all because of stupid morons like this woman who can't use a microwave without setting the building on fire.
I tried to use GMaps for bicycling directions once, and the results were nothing less than imminently life-threatening. They had me try to navigate down a US-### route, which was okay until it suddenly became a 4-lane divided highway with no shoulders and no escape for several hundred yards.
"Actually, the IRS will impute an amount of tip income based on your wages and the type of restaurant."
That is only true if you are an exempt employee (exempt from minimum wage, that is) and the restaurant pays you at less than minimum wage (on the assumption that tips make up for it).
Pizza delivery drivers are not exempt from minimum wage, and therefore cannot be subject to imputed income calculations. They are still, however, required by law to report all tip income and pay tax on it (not that any of them do).
If you sell a car for $25,000 on ebay, it would have to be reported, even if you are just selling your personal vehicle for less than you paid for it.
Duh... it's George Bush's Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator! It's a conspiracy between Marvin and Old Georgie Boy to put out the sun since it's obviously the cause of global warming.
A-Data doesn't make FLASH ICs.
You had a connection slower than 96.45 kbps?
Mugging is robbery, not burglary.
These are not fines. They are judgments. Fines are monetary forfeitures compelled by and payable to The State. Judgments are the determination of the financial magnitude of a wrong, essentially the amount of money required to be paid by the defendant to the plaintiff to make the plaintiff whole. While for a given act the actor may be both criminally and civilly liable, the criminal aspect results in fines, and the civil aspect results in judgments.
The 8th would only prohibit excessive fines levied by the government.
What part of the Constitution prohibits the government making a law against stealing?
But, if by "made progress" they mean "slowed down," then I'd say it has progressed tremendously since 8.04.