Regulate Nicotine as the addictive non-medicinal drug it is. If it was introduced today it would be lumped in with cocaine, heroin, and marijuana.
Says the ignorant authoritarian fascist. Are you planning to regulate tobacco by spraying the fields with paraquat? You going after eggplants, potatoes, tomatoes, and the other plants that also contain nicotine? You planning to ban it and neonicotinoids from being used as insecticide (one of the safest in use, BTW)?
As far as your "non-medicinal" claim, nicotine has been shown in many studies, such as this one, that it is useful treatment for schizophrenics.
But, hey, screw those guys, right, Right? Better you get your bullshit authoritarian rules to control everyone's lives. A few sick people are just collateral. Right? RIGHT?
Why is suppression through taxation hypocritical? It's one of several methods of discouragement. Hypocritical because people benefit?
Thanks to the "deal" with big tobacco companies, a lot more revenue comes in to state and federal governments for cigarette sales. Banning e-cigarettes is a way to create greater demand for (much more dangerous) cigarettes.
It's interesting that the British NHS service is lately encouraging the use of e-cigarettes as a harm reduction strategy, while in the US, due to funding streams and corruption, health agencies are producing propaganda claiming that e-cigarettes are just as bad as cigarettes.
So I guess pharmaceutical companies don't "sell shit to nobody". 8^)
I realize my examples are extreme but the basic concept does hold with companies like big pharma.
Well big pharma is probably the most corrupt industry in the US, and has implemented the greatest capture of government regulation and mainstream media coverage (given the huge amount of advertising dollars they spend) of any industry ever. It's quite the outlier, that is, and in no way indicative of general commerce wherein companies create "widgets" in a competitive environment.
It's not greed that creates that kind of institutional power. It's corruption in the government, the regulating bureaucracies, and the "forth estate," which is now 90% owned and controlled by just six large, multinational corporations.
So what exactly does market cap have to do with how greedy a company is?
I could set up a small company that only has a market cap of $1mill. That company could still sell widgets for $1000 a pop that only cost $1 to produce.
I could set up a second company that is privately held (so no market cap) that sells widgets for $100 but those widgets may cost $90 to produce.
Which one is more greedy?
The second company. The first one ain't gonna sell shit to nobody.
I fail to see how bitcoin can be called a commodity at all. Commodities are generally considered things with intrinsic value, useful in the physical world, such as grain, cattle, and other agricultural product, or mined goods like copper and lead.
Wikipedia categorizes commodities as "Hard" (gold, helium, oil are examples), "Soft" (grown such as rice and corn) or "Energy". Bitcoin falls into none of those categories.
Bitcoin, rather, is more of a financial instrument, investment, or value store. It has no value as a useful good. It cannot be eaten, used in manufacturing, nor does it provide heat or power (in fact it consumes power to even exist.
Such ephemeral things cannot and should not be considered commodities.
Because american ultra capitalist culture admires greed, treachery, and deceit. Until social norms will change, what you call "lying-ass trash" will continue to be celebrated as heroes.
Right? Let's put those greedy lying-ass ultra capitalists in perspective for a moment, shall we?
Google: Market cap: 814.76 billion USD
Facebook: Market cap: 474.63 billion USD
Netflix: Market cap: 151.75 billion USD
Apple: Market cap: 1.06 trillion USD
Frontier Communications: Market cap: 571.37 million USD
You would think that the companies with the most resources would be interested in helping invest in the infrastructure needed to reach their customers (and their customers to reach them), rather than spending money on a slick marketing campaign to have the government for the (much less wealthy) ISPs how to manage traffic on their last mile.
I have cameras in my house that alert me if someone jumps a fence into my backyard. If I only had 4 hours of high speed then I wouldn't be able to receive any notifications.
The real problem here is that your cameras are connected to the Internet, where some random set of strangers have access to them and everything they record. In most cases, these camera company operators actually have more access to your camera's functions than you do.
It may seem convenient, it may make you feel better than some random stranger, probably in another country, is "monitoring" your property. But in plain terms, it's not security, it's a security hole that you pay for every month.
What the inequality of wealth brings is inequality of power. Those at the top of the food chain can make and enforce decisions that benefit them financially.
The reason some people have influence over government is not that they are wealthy, its because some people in government are for sale.
The solution to that is not to create more government, you fucking retards.
Yes, clearly the solution is to get rid of all governmental checks and balances, however inadequate, as once they are free from constraints, the wealthy only ever act for the public good.
That's a false dilemma, right there. For a productive and functional society, you need the right level of government regulation to promote a level playing field. Where we are right now is that the volume of regulation, and the costs of compliance, serve as a deterrent to competition and in some cases even ensure that businesses and entrepreneurs below a certain size / capitalization cannot even function. This serves to funnel money and power upward from small business to large, multinational corporations. That's actually worse because it means not only does it reduce competition and provide more power to the large corporations, but it means those corporations are not even beholden to a single government or people, and can exploit the cheapest labor in the least restrictive regulatory environment anywhere on the globe.
Isn't it Trump who keeps attacking the press and various other forms of speech?
No, Jim Acosta, he's complaining about "fake news," not the press, or any other form of speech. And yes, it is the enemy of the people. He even clarified it when Ivanka was asked if the press was an enemy of the people. "She's right," he said, "It's fake news that is the enemy."
Really it is authoritarians that hate free speech
That's correct, and today, the authoritarians on all on the left. They have even declared that "free speech is a tool of white supremacy." Speech codes on campus, compelled use of made-up, gender-fluent pronouns, attacked and fired for politically incorrect thoughts on Twitter, these are all tools of the authoritarian left, and truth and facts do not get a pass.
Since there is absolutely no history of liberals coming up with ideas that they regret when conservatives do them twice as big (*cough Biden rule *cough senate justice nuclear option *cough) I wonder how long it will be until there are 'intrusive' rules requiring a certain number of conservatives on company boards and college professorships. You know, for the sake of diversity.
Well if you use meaningless measurements like that I guess you're technically right.
But with more than 4x the population and less than twice the CO2. Anyone with a handful of working neurons will understand China is cleaner than America when it comes to CO2.
You think global warming cares how much CO2 PER PERSON is in the atmosphere? I think not. Besides, it's not like you can blame the rice patty farmers in the country to the off-the-grid trailer and cabin dwellers in flyover country. They're both damn close to zero. It's all about the oligarchs in their high-rises and mansions, and their demands of the global corporations for new iPhones, comfy Nest-controlled climate, and a constant stream of Netflix garbage. When they're not jetting between NY and LA, that is.
I'll believe the "crisis" is real when those guys start sacrificing their own lifestyle instead of complaining about "deplorables" not wanting to give up their 20-year-old trucks.
EU and China are both still at least less than half the CO2 as America.
WRONG
Highest Total CO2 emissions by country (kT)
The total level of CO2 emission by kilo Tonne.
1 China 10,291,926
2 United States 5,254,279
3 India 2,238,377
4 Russia 1,705,345
5 Japan 1,214,048
6 Germany 719,883
7 Iran. 649,480
8 Saudi Arabia 601,046
9 Korea, Rep. 587,156
10 Canada 537,193
11 Brazil 529,808
12 South Africa 489,771
13 Mexico 480,270
14 Indonesia 464,176
15 United Kingdom 419,820
16 Australia 361,261
17 Turkey 345,981
18 Italy 320,411
Is there bias against agreeableness because so many men already occupy leadership positions, and they promote other disagreeable people like themselves? How is this better?
Not sure what point you're trying to make, here. There are plenty of disagreeable women, and their competencies enable them to rise to leadership positions over agreeable women. Same is true for men. But on average, since men are slightly less agreeable than women, it means that at the edges of the bell curve (only a small percentage of the workforce ends up in leadership), you end up with more men in the leadership positions. Again, nothing to do with bias. Also nothing to do with "better." If you limit corruption and gender bias to the maximum, you still end up with more men in leadership.
You seem to be arguing for a system of enforced equality of outcomes. Here there be dragons. You end up with less competence, promotion by politics, and a dysfunctional system.
I'm not begging the question at all (you're not using that right, BTW). You're trying to argue that the average income over a broad sector of the workforce creates disparate incomes between men and women. And I'm telling you that it's way more complicated, and the VAST majority of the difference has zero to do with gender. It's a laudable goal to rid the system of any gender-based bias, that's corruption. But you haven't identified where it is. You really can't do that by looking at outcomes in the aggregate. Identify where corruption actually exists, and work on fixing that. Sure. Should be done. But you're not presenting any evidence that it exists or where it exists.
There are two reasons for that. First is that women work less hours than men, generally because they are more likely to desire a better work/life balance than men. The second is because women tend to be more agreeable than men. In many professions, agreeableness is a liability in leadership positions.
So, for instance, if you wanted to sell an item at a sale price of $50 while marking it as 50% off, someone else would have had to have paid $100 to buy that same item from you in, say, the previous month.
There is no way that's correct. Say you order a bunch of widgets and figure you can charge double your cost (because you bought a bunch of them). A month later, none of them has sold. Nobody is going to tell you that you can't discount those widgets until someone buys one at your inflated price.
That is correct. You are referring here to prices that belong to Amazon, and indicate possession with the 's.
most of the other seller's that use Amazon
That is incorrect. The s by itself is used to denote plural, more than one seller. You have confused the possessive seller's with the plural sellers, which it is clear you intended from the context.
More alarming is what might be described as the defendant being held in "contempt of cop" (not a legal term). That refers to someone who is detained by law enforcement being further detained and subject to searches on the basis that they refused to waive their rights or perhaps just disrespected the cop. The act of refusing to waive rights leads to dubious claims of probable cause and a fishing expedition by law enforcement. That seems to be the bigger problem.
Agreed. Why is it considered okay to call for a drug dog when a suspect refuses to consent to a search? If there is probable cause, the cop doesn't need consent. If there is no probable cause, wouldn't a dog search also be an unreasonable search? It seems to me cops should need some justification, or probable cause, to call in a drug dog. If they're running a checkpoint, or the cop has a dog with him anyway, maybe that would be different. But "I don't consent to a search" should not be responded to with "Well then I'm calling for a drug dog."
Plus, we all know that cops can signal drug dogs to lie. That happens all the time. "The dog indicated there were drugs." No, the cop TOLD the dog to signal.
Apparently, SCOTUS decided this was okay in Illinois v. Caballes, in a 6-3 decision. They said that sense the dog would only indicate when there was something illegal present, that the 4th Amendment doesn't apply to them. The only out is if it takes "too long" for the cop to get the drug dog to the scene. Basically, if police can’t bring a dog to the scene in the time it takes to run your tags and write a ticket, the use of the dog becomes constitutionally suspect. A really bad decision, IMHO. Especially when it has been shown that cops often get dogs to signal falsely just to justify a search.
Beyond that, the standard the cop needs to call the drug dog in the first place is "reasonable suspicion." That's a MUCH lower standard than probable cause. If they had such a suspicion in this case, it wasn't mentioned in the article. But I have heard of cops claiming that refusal to consent to a search is enough for reasonable suspicion. IDK.
You have to cross the border to claim asylum. What made up process are you imaging exists where you can claim asylum outside the US? No nation on earth allows you to claim asylum from outside the borders. NONE
Slashdot Mirror
Regulate Nicotine as the addictive non-medicinal drug it is. If it was introduced today it would be lumped in with cocaine, heroin, and marijuana.
Says the ignorant authoritarian fascist. Are you planning to regulate tobacco by spraying the fields with paraquat? You going after eggplants, potatoes, tomatoes, and the other plants that also contain nicotine? You planning to ban it and neonicotinoids from being used as insecticide (one of the safest in use, BTW)?
As far as your "non-medicinal" claim, nicotine has been shown in many studies, such as this one, that it is useful treatment for schizophrenics.
But, hey, screw those guys, right, Right? Better you get your bullshit authoritarian rules to control everyone's lives. A few sick people are just collateral. Right? RIGHT?
You're in a better situation, but I'd hardly call ingesting a carcinogen a much better situation.
Nicotine is not a carcinogen.
Why is suppression through taxation hypocritical? It's one of several methods of discouragement. Hypocritical because people benefit?
Thanks to the "deal" with big tobacco companies, a lot more revenue comes in to state and federal governments for cigarette sales. Banning e-cigarettes is a way to create greater demand for (much more dangerous) cigarettes.
It's interesting that the British NHS service is lately encouraging the use of e-cigarettes as a harm reduction strategy, while in the US, due to funding streams and corruption, health agencies are producing propaganda claiming that e-cigarettes are just as bad as cigarettes.
So I guess pharmaceutical companies don't "sell shit to nobody". 8^)
I realize my examples are extreme but the basic concept does hold with companies like big pharma.
Well big pharma is probably the most corrupt industry in the US, and has implemented the greatest capture of government regulation and mainstream media coverage (given the huge amount of advertising dollars they spend) of any industry ever. It's quite the outlier, that is, and in no way indicative of general commerce wherein companies create "widgets" in a competitive environment.
It's not greed that creates that kind of institutional power. It's corruption in the government, the regulating bureaucracies, and the "forth estate," which is now 90% owned and controlled by just six large, multinational corporations.
So what exactly does market cap have to do with how greedy a company is?
I could set up a small company that only has a market cap of $1mill. That company could still sell widgets for $1000 a pop that only cost $1 to produce.
I could set up a second company that is privately held (so no market cap) that sells widgets for $100 but those widgets may cost $90 to produce.
Which one is more greedy?
The second company. The first one ain't gonna sell shit to nobody.
Price for a commodity (and bitcoin is one)
I fail to see how bitcoin can be called a commodity at all. Commodities are generally considered things with intrinsic value, useful in the physical world, such as grain, cattle, and other agricultural product, or mined goods like copper and lead.
Wikipedia categorizes commodities as "Hard" (gold, helium, oil are examples), "Soft" (grown such as rice and corn) or "Energy". Bitcoin falls into none of those categories.
Bitcoin, rather, is more of a financial instrument, investment, or value store. It has no value as a useful good. It cannot be eaten, used in manufacturing, nor does it provide heat or power (in fact it consumes power to even exist.
Such ephemeral things cannot and should not be considered commodities.
Because american ultra capitalist culture admires greed, treachery, and deceit. Until social norms will change, what you call "lying-ass trash" will continue to be celebrated as heroes.
Right? Let's put those greedy lying-ass ultra capitalists in perspective for a moment, shall we?
You would think that the companies with the most resources would be interested in helping invest in the infrastructure needed to reach their customers (and their customers to reach them), rather than spending money on a slick marketing campaign to have the government for the (much less wealthy) ISPs how to manage traffic on their last mile.
I have cameras in my house that alert me if someone jumps a fence into my backyard. If I only had 4 hours of high speed then I wouldn't be able to receive any notifications.
The real problem here is that your cameras are connected to the Internet, where some random set of strangers have access to them and everything they record. In most cases, these camera company operators actually have more access to your camera's functions than you do.
It may seem convenient, it may make you feel better than some random stranger, probably in another country, is "monitoring" your property. But in plain terms, it's not security, it's a security hole that you pay for every month.
This is why there is poop all over the streets in San Francisco.
What the inequality of wealth brings is inequality of power. Those at the top of the food chain can make and enforce decisions that benefit them financially.
The reason some people have influence over government is not that they are wealthy, its because some people in government are for sale. The solution to that is not to create more government, you fucking retards.
Yes, clearly the solution is to get rid of all governmental checks and balances, however inadequate, as once they are free from constraints, the wealthy only ever act for the public good.
That's a false dilemma, right there. For a productive and functional society, you need the right level of government regulation to promote a level playing field. Where we are right now is that the volume of regulation, and the costs of compliance, serve as a deterrent to competition and in some cases even ensure that businesses and entrepreneurs below a certain size / capitalization cannot even function. This serves to funnel money and power upward from small business to large, multinational corporations. That's actually worse because it means not only does it reduce competition and provide more power to the large corporations, but it means those corporations are not even beholden to a single government or people, and can exploit the cheapest labor in the least restrictive regulatory environment anywhere on the globe.
Isn't it Trump who keeps attacking the press and various other forms of speech?
No, Jim Acosta, he's complaining about "fake news," not the press, or any other form of speech. And yes, it is the enemy of the people. He even clarified it when Ivanka was asked if the press was an enemy of the people. "She's right," he said, "It's fake news that is the enemy."
Really it is authoritarians that hate free speech
That's correct, and today, the authoritarians on all on the left. They have even declared that "free speech is a tool of white supremacy." Speech codes on campus, compelled use of made-up, gender-fluent pronouns, attacked and fired for politically incorrect thoughts on Twitter, these are all tools of the authoritarian left, and truth and facts do not get a pass.
Since there is absolutely no history of liberals coming up with ideas that they regret when conservatives do them twice as big (*cough Biden rule *cough senate justice nuclear option *cough) I wonder how long it will be until there are 'intrusive' rules requiring a certain number of conservatives on company boards and college professorships. You know, for the sake of diversity.
In California?? Never.
Well if you use meaningless measurements like that I guess you're technically right. But with more than 4x the population and less than twice the CO2. Anyone with a handful of working neurons will understand China is cleaner than America when it comes to CO2.
You think global warming cares how much CO2 PER PERSON is in the atmosphere? I think not. Besides, it's not like you can blame the rice patty farmers in the country to the off-the-grid trailer and cabin dwellers in flyover country. They're both damn close to zero. It's all about the oligarchs in their high-rises and mansions, and their demands of the global corporations for new iPhones, comfy Nest-controlled climate, and a constant stream of Netflix garbage. When they're not jetting between NY and LA, that is.
I'll believe the "crisis" is real when those guys start sacrificing their own lifestyle instead of complaining about "deplorables" not wanting to give up their 20-year-old trucks.
EU and China are both still at least less than half the CO2 as America.
WRONG
Highest Total CO2 emissions by country (kT)
The total level of CO2 emission by kilo Tonne.
1 China 10,291,926
2 United States 5,254,279
3 India 2,238,377
4 Russia 1,705,345
5 Japan 1,214,048
6 Germany 719,883
7 Iran. 649,480
8 Saudi Arabia 601,046
9 Korea, Rep. 587,156
10 Canada 537,193
11 Brazil 529,808
12 South Africa 489,771
13 Mexico 480,270
14 Indonesia 464,176
15 United Kingdom 419,820
16 Australia 361,261
17 Turkey 345,981
18 Italy 320,411
Is there bias against agreeableness because so many men already occupy leadership positions, and they promote other disagreeable people like themselves? How is this better?
Not sure what point you're trying to make, here. There are plenty of disagreeable women, and their competencies enable them to rise to leadership positions over agreeable women. Same is true for men. But on average, since men are slightly less agreeable than women, it means that at the edges of the bell curve (only a small percentage of the workforce ends up in leadership), you end up with more men in the leadership positions. Again, nothing to do with bias. Also nothing to do with "better." If you limit corruption and gender bias to the maximum, you still end up with more men in leadership.
You seem to be arguing for a system of enforced equality of outcomes. Here there be dragons. You end up with less competence, promotion by politics, and a dysfunctional system.
I'm not begging the question at all (you're not using that right, BTW). You're trying to argue that the average income over a broad sector of the workforce creates disparate incomes between men and women. And I'm telling you that it's way more complicated, and the VAST majority of the difference has zero to do with gender. It's a laudable goal to rid the system of any gender-based bias, that's corruption. But you haven't identified where it is. You really can't do that by looking at outcomes in the aggregate. Identify where corruption actually exists, and work on fixing that. Sure. Should be done. But you're not presenting any evidence that it exists or where it exists.
There are two reasons for that. First is that women work less hours than men, generally because they are more likely to desire a better work/life balance than men. The second is because women tend to be more agreeable than men. In many professions, agreeableness is a liability in leadership positions.
None of that is caused by bias.
VR for every student!
Well, they banned plastic bags. What did they think the homeless would use to poop in, when plastic bags were no longer available?
Or, she could just live in her car, like other Amazon workers are doing.
If you used the 5200 instead, you would have a longer-lasting seal.
So, for instance, if you wanted to sell an item at a sale price of $50 while marking it as 50% off, someone else would have had to have paid $100 to buy that same item from you in, say, the previous month.
There is no way that's correct. Say you order a bunch of widgets and figure you can charge double your cost (because you bought a bunch of them). A month later, none of them has sold. Nobody is going to tell you that you can't discount those widgets until someone buys one at your inflated price.
Some of Amazon's prices
That is correct. You are referring here to prices that belong to Amazon, and indicate possession with the 's.
most of the other seller's that use Amazon
That is incorrect. The s by itself is used to denote plural, more than one seller. You have confused the possessive seller's with the plural sellers, which it is clear you intended from the context.
Minus 10 points.
More alarming is what might be described as the defendant being held in "contempt of cop" (not a legal term). That refers to someone who is detained by law enforcement being further detained and subject to searches on the basis that they refused to waive their rights or perhaps just disrespected the cop. The act of refusing to waive rights leads to dubious claims of probable cause and a fishing expedition by law enforcement. That seems to be the bigger problem.
Agreed. Why is it considered okay to call for a drug dog when a suspect refuses to consent to a search? If there is probable cause, the cop doesn't need consent. If there is no probable cause, wouldn't a dog search also be an unreasonable search? It seems to me cops should need some justification, or probable cause, to call in a drug dog. If they're running a checkpoint, or the cop has a dog with him anyway, maybe that would be different. But "I don't consent to a search" should not be responded to with "Well then I'm calling for a drug dog."
Plus, we all know that cops can signal drug dogs to lie. That happens all the time. "The dog indicated there were drugs." No, the cop TOLD the dog to signal.
Apparently, SCOTUS decided this was okay in Illinois v. Caballes, in a 6-3 decision. They said that sense the dog would only indicate when there was something illegal present, that the 4th Amendment doesn't apply to them. The only out is if it takes "too long" for the cop to get the drug dog to the scene. Basically, if police can’t bring a dog to the scene in the time it takes to run your tags and write a ticket, the use of the dog becomes constitutionally suspect. A really bad decision, IMHO. Especially when it has been shown that cops often get dogs to signal falsely just to justify a search.
Beyond that, the standard the cop needs to call the drug dog in the first place is "reasonable suspicion." That's a MUCH lower standard than probable cause. If they had such a suspicion in this case, it wasn't mentioned in the article. But I have heard of cops claiming that refusal to consent to a search is enough for reasonable suspicion. IDK.
You have to cross the border to claim asylum. What made up process are you imaging exists where you can claim asylum outside the US? No nation on earth allows you to claim asylum from outside the borders. NONE
Nope, you're wrong. You go to the border at a port of entry and present yourself as an asylum seeker. That's the correct process, the legal one, and the one that will keep your family together. But the lines have gotten really long, and yes, they wait outside the border. Those arrested are trying to break the line, even when being told not to do that.
Why throw the parents in one cage and the children in a different cage? Why not keep them together?
They tried that, but the courts have ruled they cannot house children in the same facilities with adult detainees.