However, to assume that natural selection cannot accomplish in 4000 years, what we've done through selective breeding in ~40 years is odd to me. In humans there isn't some intelligence applying the selection,
Yes, there is. It is humans themselves. Natural selection means some get left behind. Humans work very hard to avoid that. Premies get intensive care, diabetics get insulin, and there are any number of other juvenile (and adult) diseases that don't "cull the herd" anymore. And even before modern medical miracles, humans went out of their way to deal with childhood diseases as an intelligent process. It has been a very long time since the wolves or other predators were allowed to pick off the weakest humans in the pack.
No, humans are not less robust, at least in an evolutionary sense, because evolution is all about survival in the environment as it is at the moment.
Diabetes, cancers, gastric disorders (Celiac, e.g.), endometriosis, fibromyalgia, and any number of other increasingly common disorders would contradict that. Even the now almost ubiquitous eye glasses show a declining trend in physical abilities. The increase in IVF for women who are otherwise unable to have children naturally only tends to continue the genes that create that problem.
There are no "bad" genes.
Of course there are, and you know what I meant was not "misbehaving" or any other sentient meaning to "bad", I meant genes that were involved in genetic disorders. Whether that's a gene that results in sickle cell or juvenile diabetes or whatever, that's what I mean by a "bad gene".
All traits are trade offs and to assume any trait is inherently "Bad" is to fall into the same faulty reasoning that led to eugenics in the first place.
Not all traits are trade-offs. Tell a child with leukemia or diabetes that his "trait" is actually beneficial in some way. Tell someone who is badly nearsighted and can't see anything without glasses that his trait is beneficial in some way. Tell the child who is born with a cleft palate that you aren't going to do cosmetic surgery because his trait is actually beneficial. Let the Down Syndrome kids use their beneficial trait to make good lives on their own.
You're bending so far over backwards to be politically correct that you're making ridiculous statements.
Evolution is not directional. There is not De-Evolution as a counter to Evolution.
I really don't care what name you want to apply to it, when you remove natural selection from the process of evolution, evolution no longer works. Humans have not been subject to natural selection for most negative traits for a very long time. No, we haven't managed to remove it completely and there is still infant mortality, but we're working as hard as we can to keep natural selection, and thus evolution, from working for us. By keeping natural selection from working for us, we're being "compassionate" and "social" and all those good things, but we're also allowing the non-beneficial changes to propagate and reducing the benefit from the beneficial ones.
Shortly after humans evolved tricolor vision we started loosing the ability to detect most pheromones.
I really have to figure out how the human fossil record gives you that information. No, I really don't care, because that's so far in the past that it was before existing civilizations and thus before current efforts to defeat natural selection that it is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
Having been born in Texas, the only union members I ran across
How many times do I have to say "I didn't say 'in every case'?" before you get the clue?
Just because everyone's an asshole to you (wonder why)
And now you've turned the discussion into ad hominem as you usually do.
Where are you where everyone's in a union?
I didn't say everyone was in a union, you fucking moron. I said "in many cases", which should make it clear that it isn't everyone. Sheesh, are you this dense deliberately, or do you come by it naturally?
New company owner is all about money and efficiency and shut that down almost immediately.
And I'll bet a large part of the decision to shut that down was based on the idea that every job should provide a "living wage" that could support a family and a house and... we now have people arguing that the minimum wage must be radically increased to provide that living wage. It's harder for any employer to have jobs like that anymore, with minimum wage and taxes and health insurance mandates.
Unionized secretary? What's the secretary's union?
SIEU, for one. AFSCME for another. OPEIU.
Or if you have problems thinking in terms of secretaries, try asking an electrician (IBEW) or auto worker (UAW), or dock worker (ILWU), or retail sales clerk (RWDSU), or actor (SAG, AFTRA, AEA), or bus driver (ATU), or grip (IATSE) to go get your dry cleaning just because they work for you. These are all workers who are bound to work for their pittance and are essentially, according to the OP, slaves. One big difference is, of course, that slaves don't have a contract or a union rep or grievance procedures and can't say "no" when you ask them to do something they aren't paid to do. (Try asking a set electrician to help move a prop like a chair and see how much of a slave these guys are. If they like you, and there isn't anyone to catch them infringing on the grip's job, they might do it. If they say 'no', you've got no right to complain. If you get the grips mad at you for having other people do their job, they MIGHT push you out of the way when a lighting instrument is about to fall on you, but they might also say "that's the electrician's job" and you go to the hospital.)
Like I said, I didn't say "in every case", so if you've never come across a secretary who belongs to a union, that's nice. Where I work they all do, as well as the electricians, plumbers, HVAC, painters, and a lot of other trades. Even the grad teaching assistants have a union here.
The idea that we have not had time to evolve to farmed food is just stupid. We've managed to completely revamp the modern pig phenotype from a slow growing lard producing machine,
By active gene manipulation through selective breeding. We do the same to our crops and produce. I think the term when applied to humans is "eugenics". We could create a super race of humans IF we kept the inferior humans from producing and encouraged the superior, just as we do with pigs. Maybe some day when the aliens with the book "To Serve Humans" show up and cart a bunch of us off to their planet we'll see a demonstration of that.
What we HAVE been able to do by avoiding eugenics with humans while applying modern medicine is to make less robust humans. In the "good old days", if you couldn't see the sabre tooth tiger coming to eat you, your bad eye genes didn't propagate into the rest of the population. Now that eye glasses are common, weak eyes are not selected against on a regular basis, and the genes that lead to them are spread.
The same goes for many medical conditions where our compassion has kept people with bad genes alive long enough to procreate. That's the basis for genetics and evolution, so you can't really say that it isn't happening.
We've seen human populations with distinct difference in their ability to handle different components of foodstuffs (lactose, gluten, fat, etc). Explain to me how that ISN'T evidence of evolution!
Because we've not allowed the driving mechanism for evolution to act when it comes to humans. What you are seeing is the survival of detrimental mutations or maladaptations, not natural selection against them. For example, an inability to handle HFCS in part of the population has not driven evolution to make humans more able to handle them in our processed foods, because we don't let the people who are maladapted die, we give them medicines to keep them alive and having children.
We fight to the death to keep evolution from adapting us, while using it on a regular basis to make our animals and foods better.
The people who HAVE seen it and are commenting about the effect it had on them. Well, the world doesn't revolve around them, and how profound it makes them feel to watch a snuff video.
"Yes, the most important thing IS my ego-centrism." -- Clara Oswald, "Deep Breath".
And that definition makes the word meaningless and devoid of any significance. If every time someone doesn't let you say something using their systems it is "censorship", then so what? When an editor of a newspaper cuts paragraphs from a reporter's story that are extraneous it is censorship, and it is a good thing because it keeps the article on-point and concise. When the same editor chooses not to print your rambling letter about JFK conspiracies, it is censorship and it is a good thing, otherwise the paper will be filled with malarky about JFK conspiracies instead of real news. When a discussion group moderator removes the clearly off-topic, or racist, or homophobic, or pornographic comments is it censorship and it is a good thing, because it makes finding the on-topic material much easier and prevents needless offense.
When the broadcast TV operator doesn't let you buy airtime during Saturday cartoons to advertise your "Hooker's Haven Brothel" or "Carl's Cocaine Emporium", or even "Denver John's Pot Palladium", that's censorship and it is a good thing.
When a textbook publisher doesn't print every conceivable theory regarding some controversial topic, it is censorship. I'll leave it up to you if them not printing metaphysical origins of the universe in a science textbook is a good or bad thing, even though it is censorship.
When YouTube takes down patently offensive and violent videos, that censorship and it is a good thing.
So, every time you use the word "censorship" to label a good thing, you dilute the meaning to the point that it is useless when it is used regarding a bad thing. If you want to argue that every instance of censorship is a bad thing, then we have no common ground upon which to hold a discussion, because there are so many clearly good instances of "non-publication decisions" that are, according to newspeak, "censorship" that you can't claim it is all bad and be taken seriously. The only response to "everything is censorship" is that no, not everyone is interested in turning every venue into a cesspool because you want absolute freedom to talk about whatever you want whenever and wherever you want. Anything less means there is someone stopping you, and that's censorship according to this new, useless definition.
If you're using the word applied to a good thing intending to evoke the emotions that are attached to bad censorship* because you have no argument to support your claim and you want to whip up a frenzy against something you don't like, you are being dishonest.
* -- the fact that we now have to differentiate between "good censorship" and "bad censorship" is proof that the word is useless. Imagine ever having to say that something was "bad racism" because so many innocuous or innocent things were being labelled racism that you had to differentiate. (I think we're almost there, by the way.)
The US grid is "quite reliable"... by third-world standards. I live in a city of a quarter million, and my power goes out for 4-24 hours at least 3 or 4 times a year.
You think that's third-world? You mean the world where people go to neighbor's houses on a regular basis to recharge their cell phones because they don't have power themselves and the neighbor has a solar panel and a battery? And a large philanthropic effort makes headlines because it designs laptops that mesh network (to get around no network infrastructure) and have hand-cranks so they can charge the batteries?
I knew someone from India who told us about his house and that they shut the power to the whole city off EVERY NIGHT.
Wow. Three or four temporary outages a year, and you think that's a grid issue. Call the power company and get your money back.
I've never had a job that didn't have "other duties as assigned". So there is nothing "outside the job description."
First, I said "in many cases", not "in every case", so perhaps YMMV. Second, just try asking a unionized secretary to go pick up your dry cleaning if that's not part of his job description. A true slave would have no option; an employee has a union rep and a grievance procedure, if simply quitting and finding another job wasn't an option at the time.
However, IF mobile phone signals interfere with flight controls and cause bizarre behaviour being at a high altitude is not much better, I'd say.
It has two significant advantages. 1. It doesn't run the aircraft right into the ground as a failure on approach or departure might, given that approach and departure are when the airplane is close to the gound. 2. It gives the flight crew time to determine there is a problem, fix it, or at least mitigate it.
A flight system that has an uncommanded pitch down can kill an entire flight of people if it happens close to the ground. The same failure will shake them up, maybe break a few bones as people get tossed about the cabin, if it happens at 10,000 feet AGL, but it won't put the plane into the ground immediately. Pitch-up into a stall, same idea, better to happen at a high altitude.
It's not an entirely insane idea because there are two significant advantages that wireless flight controls have over wired ones:
Having two advantages doesn't turn an insane idea into a sane one, it only means there are different considerations that make it an insane idea. The fact that a nearby transmitter could disable the aircraft control systems much more easily for a wireless (radio) system than for a wired one makes wireless control an insane idea. The fact that it makes it trivial for an attacker to disable an aircraft remotely makes it even more insane.
But not as insane as the promo I saw last night for some new stupid TV program involving hackers saving the world. Some hacking group has disabled all of LAX's traffic control systems and none of the airplanes can land. They'll all start CRASHING when they run out of fuel if the good hackers don't save them. As if none of the pilots would divert on their own to other airports if they can't talk to LAX. They'll all just circle overhead until they run out of fuel because they're all morons or something.
you can actually hear the PA system clearly with noise-cancelling headphones instead of just screaming children
FTFY.
No, he was right the first time. It is a question of hearing the PA announcements AT ALL, even without the engines on or any screaming babies.
This is why I simply cannot understand United's new policy of buying aircraft with NO entertainment system at all, not even one where you can just plug a headphone in so you can hear the announcements. It is a matter of cost savings over safety, and I hope it doesn't take a few deaths and serious injuries before the FAA acts to fix this problem. A couple of disabled people on the witness stand at a civil trial saying "we could have gotten off safely if we could have heard the safety announcements and emergency instructions... and the people behind us who didn't get off at all would have made it with us."
It is better if it blows up on the ground after all the people get off than while over southern California in the air with all on board. Thus diverting the flight to a closer airport where they can get on the ground and get all the people off sooner.
A bomb with a timer won't know that it should blow up sooner because the airplane will land sooner. A bomb with a pressure sensor will blow up on descent either way. Pick a path that does the least harm.
The only thing that's sickening are people who are crying to censor it.
YouTube and Twitter and every other private organization has every right to take down material they find offensive, and it is not censorship when they do it. They are not stopping you from publishing anything, they are only saying you will not use THEIR SYSTEMS to do so. They have that right. Calling it censorship just dilutes the true meaning of the word.
And the fact that the only thing you find sickening about the whole matter is this "censorship" speaks volumes about you.
Crony Capitalism is one of the natural outcome of Capitalism without regulation...
So just to be clear, then, you're admitting that the US doesn't have "crony capitalism", simply because we don't have capitalism without regulation. (Any capitalist system where growing potatoes and selling them to your neighbors is considered "interstate commerce" and has to meet all the regulations thereof, or where selling your newly developed automobile cannot be done without creating a dealership system to distribute them, or where you cannot sell a 39 cent light bulb because it uses too much energy, or where you cannot buy a 39 cent incandescent light bulb because you might be too stupid to know how much energy it uses, or where you cannot produce an out-of-patent generic drug without federal approval and supervision, cannot be called "unregulated" in any sense of the word.)
However, upon further reflection, I would say that crony capitalism is the natural outcome of over-regulation. You don't need cronies to help you get ahead in a system if there are no rules, you only need them to help you fix the game so the rules are written to your benefit.
The only "capitalism without regulation" appears to be your use of capital letters on arbitrary words.
The Lay case involved someone dying soon after conviction, so the money could have been pulled back quickly.
He was convicted more than four years after he left Enron. From the wiki:
Investors lost billions of dollars. Before Lay was put on trial he was estimated to have a gross wealth of approximately 40 million US dollars. It is believed that most of it was spent on his legal defense.
So, out of billions that investors lost (mostly to other people, not to Lay), Ken Lay had at most 40 million and actually much much less. That leaves very little for the "two children, three stepchildren, and twelve grandchildren". And wife.
So where did the money go? Did the family "blow it all in a few weeks"? No, the money went from one investor to another, from employees hoping to cash in big to stockholders who sold at inflated prices. Did either side in that do anything illegal? Not if it was Lay that was distorting the market and making some money, while the others went along for the ride. (You sold a house near the peak of the housing bubble for what it was appraised at. Two months later the value drops. Are you guilty of fraud?)
So, how do you fairly pull billions of dollars out of a family whose patriarch started with only $40 million before the lawyers hoovered it up into their pockets?
And "quickly"? Remember, he had been convicted but still had a full appeals process open to him. Had he lived, he had probably a full decade of appeals to go through. Because he didn't live and he didn't get the chance to appeal, the convictions have to be vacated.
That leaves the civil courts with lawsuits filed against people for money they never saw, who didn't commit a crime other than be related to Ken Lay, (some only by marriage), who no longer has a criminal conviction to be used as evidence IN that civil process.
I think "quickly" is a rather odd word to use for the decades of legal battles that would result from such a situation. And to be fair, you'd have to go after so many innocent parties to recover that it would be 1) a nightmare and 2) an economic powderkeg. How many retirement funds sold Enron stock because it was high and there was a demand? I dunno. They're all beneficiaries of the acts of Ken Lay, shouldn't they be sued, too?
so it's good to take care of those who fall behind.
And before the government started doing this, we had things called "charities" that people donated stuff to and they took care of those who fell behind. Now the government is taking the "donations" and doing the organizing, so why should people give money to anyone else to solve problems the government is supposed to fix? That's the problem with socialized charity -- people start losing track of personal responsibility to BE voluntary benefactors to others because they ARE already involuntary benefactors.
That means that socialism is not the natural result of free markets, the result is charity. Socialism is a result of a distortion of the charity market by government assumption of responsibility.
A wealthy member of a community, before this "genius" invention was made, would've been happy to organize large projects for the public good simply for the prestige of having been in charge of them.
And many of them still do. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for one. Ronald McDonald House. St. Jude's Children's Hospital (Danny Thomas may not have given all the money to build and run it, but he certainly organized it.) Dave Thomas and his work for adoption. We have a local version of the McD house in our city, funded by the local Pepsi bottling company owner. Mario Pastega, I think it is. There is a heart wing bearing the name of the donor who built it across the street. There is the name of a local timber baron on a lot of things that his money built for the good of the people. The new engineering building on campus bears the name of the donor for that.
Now they require that a portion of workers' labor be diverted to them permanently,
Huh? People who stay at McD house have to divert a portion of their labor to Ray Crock's estate permanently? No, the generosity of the rich is not based on requiring a lifetime of slavery from the recipients. The people who are "diverting a portion of their labor" are doing so for money so they can buy things that other people have made, and the people who run the companies are not limited to "the wealthy" you denigrate. But the charity activities are just that -- charity.
While it has made large projects easier to start, those projects have had less and less value to the common people over time.
The fact that there are more and more common people over time is a pretty good reason why any one large project has less of an impact on all of them. There are also more and more large projects, and many more small ones. A local businessman who hands a $1000 check to a local charity is doing what he can just as much as (or more than) Bill Gates handing a billion to someone. The fact that the organization getting the $1000 only operated in a city or county and not globally, well, there's room for ten thousand more organizations for those locations, and they likely already exist.
At this point, the labor market is an arrangement whereby you either build something you don't care about for a rich person, or you don't eat. It is functionally indistinguishable from slavery,
Except that "rich person" may be your next door neighbor who is scraping by because he has a payroll to meet and health insurance to buy for you and the city is levying a special tax for some project. In fact, he's more likely to be your neighbor because there are a lot more small businesses than you think.
And you working on something you don't care about is due to the specialization of society and the fact that not everyone can do the same job. You trade your labor doing something you don't like to do for money so you can buy things you want.
And of course, it differs from slavery because massa can't whip you for being late back from lunch, and he can't stop you from quitting and finding a different job, and he can't even make you do something outside your job descr
Isn't it time customer starting fleeing abusive tech outfits?
Fleeing to where? Some other company where the service is just as bad or worse?
I'm currently displeased with T-Mobile and the lies they told me about their "no overages fees" promise. I walked into AT&T and asked "how much to put your SIM in my phone?"
"$20 a month for 300Mb data, unlimited talk/text". Oh, ok!
"Plus $25/month to use a phone with that service." WTF? You can buy a service that requires a phone and then charge EXTRA to be able to use a phone with it? MY own phone, to boot?
I could understand if you were adding additional devices to the service (two phones sharing one plan, e.g.). I could understand a charge to get a phone from them. But I consider it dishonest to separate out the plan from any devices that you need to have to use that service. It makes the cost look artificially low.
$20/month! Great deal. $45/month, not so good anymore.
Adding in that they charge for texts coming through the email to SMS gateway despite being "unlimited text", the service was more expensive for less product. I could choose to send a message to T-Mobile but it would wind up costing me more per month, and I have no reason to believe that AT&T's customer service is any better than T-Mobile's.
So, it is likely that the idea of fleeing companies with bad customer service would only result in increased thrashing as 100 people move from company A to company B and 100 move from B to A, and 200 people find out that neither one is any good at helping them, and 200 people find out that they couldn't get as good a deal at their new provider as they had at the old.
There is also the issue of the devil you know vs. the one you don't. AT&T may have better service, but they probably don't, and I already know how bad T-Mobile is. Changing providers for no benefit, added cost, and potentially no better service is a lose for me and T-Mobile probably wouldn't even notice.
It is not punishing his family. It is restoring them to the status they would have been in if the culprit had not committed his crime.
That's not necessarily true. While his children may have benefited from growing up in a home with extra money, they are likely not benefiting from that money anymore (that source dried up a long time go), and taking their property does nothing but punish them for the acts of their father.
You believe it is appropriate to punish the children of a criminal when the criminal himself is no longer available for your revenge? Would you be receptive to someone who knocked on your door with a confiscation notice for your car because your father stole $100 from someone 20 years go and your father isn't around to be punished, so you must be in his place? How many generations would it take before the father's crimes would be cleared from the blood of the progeny?
Putting him in jail doesn't solve the problem with my parents retirement.
Nope. But it solves the problem of the next guy thinking "hey, I'll steal a bunch of money from old people because even if I get caught all I'll have to do is give the money back". And it solves the problem of THIS guy doing the same thing for at least a few years, because it is hard to run a financial scam business from inside prison.
Anything that doesn't refund my parents plus something extra for the trouble would be an injustice.
Here's a novel idea. Make the punishment time in jail AND reimbursement of the loss. I assume someone has already patented that idea, but if I say "reimburse the loss using a computer" I can get a new patent. Profit!
Whatever prevent the financial advisor from doing it again works fine.
"I couldn't steal from old people while I was in prison, and now that I'm out I really don't want to ever go back so I'm not going to do it again." Ok, prison time served to prevent this financial advisor from "doing it again". What's the problem with putting him in prison, again?
If someone can get away with 6 month for assault and battery
I punch you in the nose for continuing to fling dog poo into my front yard and you just won't stop. I get 6 months for assault. And you think someone who steals the entire life savings of old people shouldn't get more time than I did as a deterrent to him and others like him? The only punishment for him should be giving back the money, so he's no worse off than when he started and is free to do it again -- this time if he doesn't get caught it will be pure profit for him. You think a system where he has no risk and all reward is going to deter him? Man, your value system is really cock-eyed.
So you're referring to Ken Lay the weasel who was convicted on ten felony counts for his acts as the head of a corporation, but managed to avoid 20-30 years in prison as punishment for his crimes by having a heart attack and dieing. That's the guy you're unhappy got "no punishment at all"? The sneaky bastard planned all along on having a massive heart attack if he was ever convicted of anything as a way of avoiding a prison term, you bet.
Even though the criminal justice system had to vacate the convictions because he died before his appeals were exhausted (and he couldn't very well assist in his own defense at this point), "civil suits are expected to continue against Lay's estate." In other words, you can't imprison the dead man to punish him (or you could, but it wouldn't be a very effective punishment, deterrent, or rehabilitation effort), but his family can be punished by having money and property taken away from them through the civil courts.
Nice try.
At the bottom of the reference I linked to, they mention that there are conspiracy theorists that say that Lay faked his death and he's still alive. Are you one of them? Of all the people who saw his dead body, not a single one of them would come forward to tell his story for the probable six figure payment he'd get? Sure.
When I saw the headline for this article I could guess that it was biased and incorrect, and I was right. The guy got 33 months in prison not for recording a movie in a theater, he got the criminal sentence for distributing copies for sale. The former could have gone unnoticed and would have harmed nobody, had he not continued to distribute even after he was warned about it.
"Don't you dare serve the people, you shall only serve the corporations!"
No, in other words, don't assume the right to preempt state regulation because you want to force the states to allow something, based on your interpretation of a law controlling the FCC, because the next group in power will use the precedent YOU created to preempt other state regulations that you might not want preempted. That's a pretty simple, clear message.
If you actually read the article, you'll see THAT is the message he's sending. If you manage to use an interpretation of current laws regarding the FCC such that the FCC can preempt state controls on intrastate matters, then you've just opened the door to many other uses by people you don't want doing the same kind of thing in ways you don't like. I think the phrase "don't be a hypocrite" would apply.
I said it was a clear message, and it is a shame it has to be spoken. It is a shot across the bow, so to speak, for people who support the current FCC attempts to preempt state bans on municipal ISPs, so they'll know that the argument "you aren't authorized to do that" won't apply when the FCC under a potential different political control acts to preempt state regulation of other matters using the same law as justification.
Then you don't exactly belong in 'the land of the free and the home of the brave,' now do you?
He absolutely doesn't belong here, because in the land of the free there is no room to tolerate any differences of opinion. It simply cannot be allowed.
This issue is black-and-white, and settled.
While it may not be black and white, it has been settled. The Supreme Court has ruled that TSA security checkpoints are an obvious violation of the fourth amendment... ummm, wait a minute.
For fuck's sake. The point was that general warrants are unconstitutional,
No, the point I joined the discussion to make was that YOUR claim that there was some implicit waiving of rights was incorrect. YOU want to talk about warrants, as if warrants had something to do with this to begin with, and they don't. There are no warrants involved in any part of a TSA security process. Not a single one.
so why the hell would it be okay to search everyone *without even so much as having a warrant*?
Because the constitution says it is. There isn't a blanket prohibition against ALL searches, only UNREASONABLE ones. That word has come up more than once in just our discussion so I know you know it's there. It's a subjective term, just like "innocuous" that you want to think applies somehow. You do NOT need a warrant for a reasonable search, even if that reasonable search means you search everyone who wants "to do something". End of story. Every prospective juror going in the door (who "wanted to keep from going to jail for contempt of court") got searched -- no warrant required. Every visitor to the local jail inmates gets searched. No warrant required.
Warrants are not the issue because no warrants are involved. And before you try another bit of nonsense, the fourth amendment does not define "reasonable" to mean "a warrant has been issued", nor have the courts defined it that way.
I'm arguing that the idea that the government has the power to force you to surrender rights if you try to do something (in this case, travel on a plane) that isn't illegal (merely because some people could do something illegal) is absurd.
That's patently false. I've already given examples of where waiving the fourth amendment right is quite reasonable for certain values of "something". It isn't illegal to visit a prisoner in jail, but you have to waive your rights to do it. If you want to drive about on a military installation, you waive your rights. And if you obey the summons to jury duty, the government not only compels you to appear, they search you when you do. So no, just flapping your gums and saying they can't force you to waive your rights just to "do something" is absurd itself, and contradicted by many trivial examples.
But I see where this is going. Rather than focusing on my fundamental points, you're just being pedantic and nitpicking at my usage of the English language.
From the very beginning I have been explicit in saying that I'm talking about your claims of implicit waivers of rights. The fact that you are just catching on to that fact now tells me you didn't bother trying to comprehend the words I posted.
The implicit part is supposedly your acceptance of being searched,
No, it is not. Your act of passing the point where you have been told that you are subject to search is an EXPLICIT act, and it is an explicit acceptance of the terms. You didn't wander past the checkpoint entrance on a whim, you made a deliberate choice to enter.
Dude, you're pedantic as fuck. I don't know if you've ever heard of exaggerations or how normal people use language (which is rarely 100% precise), but you should get acquainted with those things, and fast.
You should stop writing things that are patently absurd and then jumping down the throats of those who tell you they are absurd. Maybe read what you're replying to before doing so, to keep yourself from finding out five levels down into the discussion that the person you are trying to convince how bad it is that there are searches ISN'T ARGUING WITH YOU ABOUT THEM BEING BAD, only about your incorrect representation of what is going on.
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However, to assume that natural selection cannot accomplish in 4000 years, what we've done through selective breeding in ~40 years is odd to me. In humans there isn't some intelligence applying the selection,
Yes, there is. It is humans themselves. Natural selection means some get left behind. Humans work very hard to avoid that. Premies get intensive care, diabetics get insulin, and there are any number of other juvenile (and adult) diseases that don't "cull the herd" anymore. And even before modern medical miracles, humans went out of their way to deal with childhood diseases as an intelligent process. It has been a very long time since the wolves or other predators were allowed to pick off the weakest humans in the pack.
No, humans are not less robust, at least in an evolutionary sense, because evolution is all about survival in the environment as it is at the moment.
Diabetes, cancers, gastric disorders (Celiac, e.g.), endometriosis, fibromyalgia, and any number of other increasingly common disorders would contradict that. Even the now almost ubiquitous eye glasses show a declining trend in physical abilities. The increase in IVF for women who are otherwise unable to have children naturally only tends to continue the genes that create that problem.
There are no "bad" genes.
Of course there are, and you know what I meant was not "misbehaving" or any other sentient meaning to "bad", I meant genes that were involved in genetic disorders. Whether that's a gene that results in sickle cell or juvenile diabetes or whatever, that's what I mean by a "bad gene".
All traits are trade offs and to assume any trait is inherently "Bad" is to fall into the same faulty reasoning that led to eugenics in the first place.
Not all traits are trade-offs. Tell a child with leukemia or diabetes that his "trait" is actually beneficial in some way. Tell someone who is badly nearsighted and can't see anything without glasses that his trait is beneficial in some way. Tell the child who is born with a cleft palate that you aren't going to do cosmetic surgery because his trait is actually beneficial. Let the Down Syndrome kids use their beneficial trait to make good lives on their own.
You're bending so far over backwards to be politically correct that you're making ridiculous statements.
Evolution is not directional. There is not De-Evolution as a counter to Evolution.
I really don't care what name you want to apply to it, when you remove natural selection from the process of evolution, evolution no longer works. Humans have not been subject to natural selection for most negative traits for a very long time. No, we haven't managed to remove it completely and there is still infant mortality, but we're working as hard as we can to keep natural selection, and thus evolution, from working for us. By keeping natural selection from working for us, we're being "compassionate" and "social" and all those good things, but we're also allowing the non-beneficial changes to propagate and reducing the benefit from the beneficial ones.
Shortly after humans evolved tricolor vision we started loosing the ability to detect most pheromones.
I really have to figure out how the human fossil record gives you that information. No, I really don't care, because that's so far in the past that it was before existing civilizations and thus before current efforts to defeat natural selection that it is completely irrelevant to this discussion.
Having been born in Texas, the only union members I ran across
How many times do I have to say "I didn't say 'in every case'?" before you get the clue?
Just because everyone's an asshole to you (wonder why)
And now you've turned the discussion into ad hominem as you usually do.
Where are you where everyone's in a union?
I didn't say everyone was in a union, you fucking moron. I said "in many cases", which should make it clear that it isn't everyone. Sheesh, are you this dense deliberately, or do you come by it naturally?
I'm very sorry but your approach does not lend itself to a book (or better yet, a series of books), supplements,...
But it would make a dandy newsletter, which I would be happy to subscribe to.
New company owner is all about money and efficiency and shut that down almost immediately.
And I'll bet a large part of the decision to shut that down was based on the idea that every job should provide a "living wage" that could support a family and a house and ... we now have people arguing that the minimum wage must be radically increased to provide that living wage. It's harder for any employer to have jobs like that anymore, with minimum wage and taxes and health insurance mandates.
Unionized secretary? What's the secretary's union?
SIEU, for one. AFSCME for another. OPEIU.
Or if you have problems thinking in terms of secretaries, try asking an electrician (IBEW) or auto worker (UAW), or dock worker (ILWU), or retail sales clerk (RWDSU), or actor (SAG, AFTRA, AEA), or bus driver (ATU), or grip (IATSE) to go get your dry cleaning just because they work for you. These are all workers who are bound to work for their pittance and are essentially, according to the OP, slaves. One big difference is, of course, that slaves don't have a contract or a union rep or grievance procedures and can't say "no" when you ask them to do something they aren't paid to do. (Try asking a set electrician to help move a prop like a chair and see how much of a slave these guys are. If they like you, and there isn't anyone to catch them infringing on the grip's job, they might do it. If they say 'no', you've got no right to complain. If you get the grips mad at you for having other people do their job, they MIGHT push you out of the way when a lighting instrument is about to fall on you, but they might also say "that's the electrician's job" and you go to the hospital.)
Like I said, I didn't say "in every case", so if you've never come across a secretary who belongs to a union, that's nice. Where I work they all do, as well as the electricians, plumbers, HVAC, painters, and a lot of other trades. Even the grad teaching assistants have a union here.
The idea that we have not had time to evolve to farmed food is just stupid. We've managed to completely revamp the modern pig phenotype from a slow growing lard producing machine,
By active gene manipulation through selective breeding. We do the same to our crops and produce. I think the term when applied to humans is "eugenics". We could create a super race of humans IF we kept the inferior humans from producing and encouraged the superior, just as we do with pigs. Maybe some day when the aliens with the book "To Serve Humans" show up and cart a bunch of us off to their planet we'll see a demonstration of that.
What we HAVE been able to do by avoiding eugenics with humans while applying modern medicine is to make less robust humans. In the "good old days", if you couldn't see the sabre tooth tiger coming to eat you, your bad eye genes didn't propagate into the rest of the population. Now that eye glasses are common, weak eyes are not selected against on a regular basis, and the genes that lead to them are spread.
The same goes for many medical conditions where our compassion has kept people with bad genes alive long enough to procreate. That's the basis for genetics and evolution, so you can't really say that it isn't happening.
We've seen human populations with distinct difference in their ability to handle different components of foodstuffs (lactose, gluten, fat, etc). Explain to me how that ISN'T evidence of evolution!
Because we've not allowed the driving mechanism for evolution to act when it comes to humans. What you are seeing is the survival of detrimental mutations or maladaptations, not natural selection against them. For example, an inability to handle HFCS in part of the population has not driven evolution to make humans more able to handle them in our processed foods, because we don't let the people who are maladapted die, we give them medicines to keep them alive and having children.
We fight to the death to keep evolution from adapting us, while using it on a regular basis to make our animals and foods better.
The people who HAVE seen it and are commenting about the effect it had on them. Well, the world doesn't revolve around them, and how profound it makes them feel to watch a snuff video.
"Yes, the most important thing IS my ego-centrism." -- Clara Oswald, "Deep Breath".
When the broadcast TV operator doesn't let you buy airtime during Saturday cartoons to advertise your "Hooker's Haven Brothel" or "Carl's Cocaine Emporium", or even "Denver John's Pot Palladium", that's censorship and it is a good thing.
When a textbook publisher doesn't print every conceivable theory regarding some controversial topic, it is censorship. I'll leave it up to you if them not printing metaphysical origins of the universe in a science textbook is a good or bad thing, even though it is censorship.
When YouTube takes down patently offensive and violent videos, that censorship and it is a good thing.
So, every time you use the word "censorship" to label a good thing, you dilute the meaning to the point that it is useless when it is used regarding a bad thing. If you want to argue that every instance of censorship is a bad thing, then we have no common ground upon which to hold a discussion, because there are so many clearly good instances of "non-publication decisions" that are, according to newspeak, "censorship" that you can't claim it is all bad and be taken seriously. The only response to "everything is censorship" is that no, not everyone is interested in turning every venue into a cesspool because you want absolute freedom to talk about whatever you want whenever and wherever you want. Anything less means there is someone stopping you, and that's censorship according to this new, useless definition.
If you're using the word applied to a good thing intending to evoke the emotions that are attached to bad censorship* because you have no argument to support your claim and you want to whip up a frenzy against something you don't like, you are being dishonest.
* -- the fact that we now have to differentiate between "good censorship" and "bad censorship" is proof that the word is useless. Imagine ever having to say that something was "bad racism" because so many innocuous or innocent things were being labelled racism that you had to differentiate. (I think we're almost there, by the way.)
The US grid is "quite reliable"... by third-world standards. I live in a city of a quarter million, and my power goes out for 4-24 hours at least 3 or 4 times a year.
You think that's third-world? You mean the world where people go to neighbor's houses on a regular basis to recharge their cell phones because they don't have power themselves and the neighbor has a solar panel and a battery? And a large philanthropic effort makes headlines because it designs laptops that mesh network (to get around no network infrastructure) and have hand-cranks so they can charge the batteries?
I knew someone from India who told us about his house and that they shut the power to the whole city off EVERY NIGHT.
Wow. Three or four temporary outages a year, and you think that's a grid issue. Call the power company and get your money back.
From my flight training, two things they say you can't have too much of - runway ahead of you, and altitude.
There are three things that are useless to a pilot: runway behind you, altitude above you, and fuel in the truck.
I've never had a job that didn't have "other duties as assigned". So there is nothing "outside the job description."
First, I said "in many cases", not "in every case", so perhaps YMMV. Second, just try asking a unionized secretary to go pick up your dry cleaning if that's not part of his job description. A true slave would have no option; an employee has a union rep and a grievance procedure, if simply quitting and finding another job wasn't an option at the time.
However, IF mobile phone signals interfere with flight controls and cause bizarre behaviour being at a high altitude is not much better, I'd say.
It has two significant advantages. 1. It doesn't run the aircraft right into the ground as a failure on approach or departure might, given that approach and departure are when the airplane is close to the gound. 2. It gives the flight crew time to determine there is a problem, fix it, or at least mitigate it.
A flight system that has an uncommanded pitch down can kill an entire flight of people if it happens close to the ground. The same failure will shake them up, maybe break a few bones as people get tossed about the cabin, if it happens at 10,000 feet AGL, but it won't put the plane into the ground immediately. Pitch-up into a stall, same idea, better to happen at a high altitude.
It's not an entirely insane idea because there are two significant advantages that wireless flight controls have over wired ones:
Having two advantages doesn't turn an insane idea into a sane one, it only means there are different considerations that make it an insane idea. The fact that a nearby transmitter could disable the aircraft control systems much more easily for a wireless (radio) system than for a wired one makes wireless control an insane idea. The fact that it makes it trivial for an attacker to disable an aircraft remotely makes it even more insane.
But not as insane as the promo I saw last night for some new stupid TV program involving hackers saving the world. Some hacking group has disabled all of LAX's traffic control systems and none of the airplanes can land. They'll all start CRASHING when they run out of fuel if the good hackers don't save them. As if none of the pilots would divert on their own to other airports if they can't talk to LAX. They'll all just circle overhead until they run out of fuel because they're all morons or something.
you can actually hear the PA system clearly with noise-cancelling headphones instead of just screaming children
FTFY.
No, he was right the first time. It is a question of hearing the PA announcements AT ALL, even without the engines on or any screaming babies.
This is why I simply cannot understand United's new policy of buying aircraft with NO entertainment system at all, not even one where you can just plug a headphone in so you can hear the announcements. It is a matter of cost savings over safety, and I hope it doesn't take a few deaths and serious injuries before the FAA acts to fix this problem. A couple of disabled people on the witness stand at a civil trial saying "we could have gotten off safely if we could have heard the safety announcements and emergency instructions ... and the people behind us who didn't get off at all would have made it with us."
A bomb with a timer won't know that it should blow up sooner because the airplane will land sooner. A bomb with a pressure sensor will blow up on descent either way. Pick a path that does the least harm.
The only thing that's sickening are people who are crying to censor it.
YouTube and Twitter and every other private organization has every right to take down material they find offensive, and it is not censorship when they do it. They are not stopping you from publishing anything, they are only saying you will not use THEIR SYSTEMS to do so. They have that right. Calling it censorship just dilutes the true meaning of the word.
And the fact that the only thing you find sickening about the whole matter is this "censorship" speaks volumes about you.
Crony Capitalism is one of the natural outcome of Capitalism without regulation...
So just to be clear, then, you're admitting that the US doesn't have "crony capitalism", simply because we don't have capitalism without regulation. (Any capitalist system where growing potatoes and selling them to your neighbors is considered "interstate commerce" and has to meet all the regulations thereof, or where selling your newly developed automobile cannot be done without creating a dealership system to distribute them, or where you cannot sell a 39 cent light bulb because it uses too much energy, or where you cannot buy a 39 cent incandescent light bulb because you might be too stupid to know how much energy it uses, or where you cannot produce an out-of-patent generic drug without federal approval and supervision, cannot be called "unregulated" in any sense of the word.)
However, upon further reflection, I would say that crony capitalism is the natural outcome of over-regulation. You don't need cronies to help you get ahead in a system if there are no rules, you only need them to help you fix the game so the rules are written to your benefit.
The only "capitalism without regulation" appears to be your use of capital letters on arbitrary words.
The Lay case involved someone dying soon after conviction, so the money could have been pulled back quickly.
He was convicted more than four years after he left Enron. From the wiki:
So, out of billions that investors lost (mostly to other people, not to Lay), Ken Lay had at most 40 million and actually much much less. That leaves very little for the "two children, three stepchildren, and twelve grandchildren". And wife.
So where did the money go? Did the family "blow it all in a few weeks"? No, the money went from one investor to another, from employees hoping to cash in big to stockholders who sold at inflated prices. Did either side in that do anything illegal? Not if it was Lay that was distorting the market and making some money, while the others went along for the ride. (You sold a house near the peak of the housing bubble for what it was appraised at. Two months later the value drops. Are you guilty of fraud?)
So, how do you fairly pull billions of dollars out of a family whose patriarch started with only $40 million before the lawyers hoovered it up into their pockets?
And "quickly"? Remember, he had been convicted but still had a full appeals process open to him. Had he lived, he had probably a full decade of appeals to go through. Because he didn't live and he didn't get the chance to appeal, the convictions have to be vacated. That leaves the civil courts with lawsuits filed against people for money they never saw, who didn't commit a crime other than be related to Ken Lay, (some only by marriage), who no longer has a criminal conviction to be used as evidence IN that civil process.
I think "quickly" is a rather odd word to use for the decades of legal battles that would result from such a situation. And to be fair, you'd have to go after so many innocent parties to recover that it would be 1) a nightmare and 2) an economic powderkeg. How many retirement funds sold Enron stock because it was high and there was a demand? I dunno. They're all beneficiaries of the acts of Ken Lay, shouldn't they be sued, too?
so it's good to take care of those who fall behind.
And before the government started doing this, we had things called "charities" that people donated stuff to and they took care of those who fell behind. Now the government is taking the "donations" and doing the organizing, so why should people give money to anyone else to solve problems the government is supposed to fix? That's the problem with socialized charity -- people start losing track of personal responsibility to BE voluntary benefactors to others because they ARE already involuntary benefactors.
That means that socialism is not the natural result of free markets, the result is charity. Socialism is a result of a distortion of the charity market by government assumption of responsibility.
A wealthy member of a community, before this "genius" invention was made, would've been happy to organize large projects for the public good simply for the prestige of having been in charge of them.
And many of them still do. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for one. Ronald McDonald House. St. Jude's Children's Hospital (Danny Thomas may not have given all the money to build and run it, but he certainly organized it.) Dave Thomas and his work for adoption. We have a local version of the McD house in our city, funded by the local Pepsi bottling company owner. Mario Pastega, I think it is. There is a heart wing bearing the name of the donor who built it across the street. There is the name of a local timber baron on a lot of things that his money built for the good of the people. The new engineering building on campus bears the name of the donor for that.
Now they require that a portion of workers' labor be diverted to them permanently,
Huh? People who stay at McD house have to divert a portion of their labor to Ray Crock's estate permanently? No, the generosity of the rich is not based on requiring a lifetime of slavery from the recipients. The people who are "diverting a portion of their labor" are doing so for money so they can buy things that other people have made, and the people who run the companies are not limited to "the wealthy" you denigrate. But the charity activities are just that -- charity.
While it has made large projects easier to start, those projects have had less and less value to the common people over time.
The fact that there are more and more common people over time is a pretty good reason why any one large project has less of an impact on all of them. There are also more and more large projects, and many more small ones. A local businessman who hands a $1000 check to a local charity is doing what he can just as much as (or more than) Bill Gates handing a billion to someone. The fact that the organization getting the $1000 only operated in a city or county and not globally, well, there's room for ten thousand more organizations for those locations, and they likely already exist.
At this point, the labor market is an arrangement whereby you either build something you don't care about for a rich person, or you don't eat. It is functionally indistinguishable from slavery,
Except that "rich person" may be your next door neighbor who is scraping by because he has a payroll to meet and health insurance to buy for you and the city is levying a special tax for some project. In fact, he's more likely to be your neighbor because there are a lot more small businesses than you think.
And you working on something you don't care about is due to the specialization of society and the fact that not everyone can do the same job. You trade your labor doing something you don't like to do for money so you can buy things you want.
And of course, it differs from slavery because massa can't whip you for being late back from lunch, and he can't stop you from quitting and finding a different job, and he can't even make you do something outside your job descr
Isn't it time customer starting fleeing abusive tech outfits?
Fleeing to where? Some other company where the service is just as bad or worse?
I'm currently displeased with T-Mobile and the lies they told me about their "no overages fees" promise. I walked into AT&T and asked "how much to put your SIM in my phone?"
"$20 a month for 300Mb data, unlimited talk/text". Oh, ok!
"Plus $25/month to use a phone with that service." WTF? You can buy a service that requires a phone and then charge EXTRA to be able to use a phone with it? MY own phone, to boot?
I could understand if you were adding additional devices to the service (two phones sharing one plan, e.g.). I could understand a charge to get a phone from them. But I consider it dishonest to separate out the plan from any devices that you need to have to use that service. It makes the cost look artificially low.
$20/month! Great deal. $45/month, not so good anymore.
Adding in that they charge for texts coming through the email to SMS gateway despite being "unlimited text", the service was more expensive for less product. I could choose to send a message to T-Mobile but it would wind up costing me more per month, and I have no reason to believe that AT&T's customer service is any better than T-Mobile's.
So, it is likely that the idea of fleeing companies with bad customer service would only result in increased thrashing as 100 people move from company A to company B and 100 move from B to A, and 200 people find out that neither one is any good at helping them, and 200 people find out that they couldn't get as good a deal at their new provider as they had at the old.
There is also the issue of the devil you know vs. the one you don't. AT&T may have better service, but they probably don't, and I already know how bad T-Mobile is. Changing providers for no benefit, added cost, and potentially no better service is a lose for me and T-Mobile probably wouldn't even notice.
It is not punishing his family. It is restoring them to the status they would have been in if the culprit had not committed his crime.
That's not necessarily true. While his children may have benefited from growing up in a home with extra money, they are likely not benefiting from that money anymore (that source dried up a long time go), and taking their property does nothing but punish them for the acts of their father.
You believe it is appropriate to punish the children of a criminal when the criminal himself is no longer available for your revenge? Would you be receptive to someone who knocked on your door with a confiscation notice for your car because your father stole $100 from someone 20 years go and your father isn't around to be punished, so you must be in his place? How many generations would it take before the father's crimes would be cleared from the blood of the progeny?
Putting him in jail doesn't solve the problem with my parents retirement.
Nope. But it solves the problem of the next guy thinking "hey, I'll steal a bunch of money from old people because even if I get caught all I'll have to do is give the money back". And it solves the problem of THIS guy doing the same thing for at least a few years, because it is hard to run a financial scam business from inside prison.
Anything that doesn't refund my parents plus something extra for the trouble would be an injustice.
Here's a novel idea. Make the punishment time in jail AND reimbursement of the loss. I assume someone has already patented that idea, but if I say "reimburse the loss using a computer" I can get a new patent. Profit!
Whatever prevent the financial advisor from doing it again works fine.
"I couldn't steal from old people while I was in prison, and now that I'm out I really don't want to ever go back so I'm not going to do it again." Ok, prison time served to prevent this financial advisor from "doing it again". What's the problem with putting him in prison, again?
If someone can get away with 6 month for assault and battery
I punch you in the nose for continuing to fling dog poo into my front yard and you just won't stop. I get 6 months for assault. And you think someone who steals the entire life savings of old people shouldn't get more time than I did as a deterrent to him and others like him? The only punishment for him should be giving back the money, so he's no worse off than when he started and is free to do it again -- this time if he doesn't get caught it will be pure profit for him. You think a system where he has no risk and all reward is going to deter him? Man, your value system is really cock-eyed.
Even though the criminal justice system had to vacate the convictions because he died before his appeals were exhausted (and he couldn't very well assist in his own defense at this point), "civil suits are expected to continue against Lay's estate." In other words, you can't imprison the dead man to punish him (or you could, but it wouldn't be a very effective punishment, deterrent, or rehabilitation effort), but his family can be punished by having money and property taken away from them through the civil courts.
Nice try.
At the bottom of the reference I linked to, they mention that there are conspiracy theorists that say that Lay faked his death and he's still alive. Are you one of them? Of all the people who saw his dead body, not a single one of them would come forward to tell his story for the probable six figure payment he'd get? Sure.
When I saw the headline for this article I could guess that it was biased and incorrect, and I was right. The guy got 33 months in prison not for recording a movie in a theater, he got the criminal sentence for distributing copies for sale. The former could have gone unnoticed and would have harmed nobody, had he not continued to distribute even after he was warned about it.
"Don't you dare serve the people, you shall only serve the corporations!"
No, in other words, don't assume the right to preempt state regulation because you want to force the states to allow something, based on your interpretation of a law controlling the FCC, because the next group in power will use the precedent YOU created to preempt other state regulations that you might not want preempted. That's a pretty simple, clear message.
If you actually read the article, you'll see THAT is the message he's sending. If you manage to use an interpretation of current laws regarding the FCC such that the FCC can preempt state controls on intrastate matters, then you've just opened the door to many other uses by people you don't want doing the same kind of thing in ways you don't like. I think the phrase "don't be a hypocrite" would apply.
I said it was a clear message, and it is a shame it has to be spoken. It is a shot across the bow, so to speak, for people who support the current FCC attempts to preempt state bans on municipal ISPs, so they'll know that the argument "you aren't authorized to do that" won't apply when the FCC under a potential different political control acts to preempt state regulation of other matters using the same law as justification.
Then you don't exactly belong in 'the land of the free and the home of the brave,' now do you?
He absolutely doesn't belong here, because in the land of the free there is no room to tolerate any differences of opinion. It simply cannot be allowed.
This issue is black-and-white, and settled.
While it may not be black and white, it has been settled. The Supreme Court has ruled that TSA security checkpoints are an obvious violation of the fourth amendment ... ummm, wait a minute.
For fuck's sake. The point was that general warrants are unconstitutional,
No, the point I joined the discussion to make was that YOUR claim that there was some implicit waiving of rights was incorrect. YOU want to talk about warrants, as if warrants had something to do with this to begin with, and they don't. There are no warrants involved in any part of a TSA security process. Not a single one.
so why the hell would it be okay to search everyone *without even so much as having a warrant*?
Because the constitution says it is. There isn't a blanket prohibition against ALL searches, only UNREASONABLE ones. That word has come up more than once in just our discussion so I know you know it's there. It's a subjective term, just like "innocuous" that you want to think applies somehow. You do NOT need a warrant for a reasonable search, even if that reasonable search means you search everyone who wants "to do something". End of story. Every prospective juror going in the door (who "wanted to keep from going to jail for contempt of court") got searched -- no warrant required. Every visitor to the local jail inmates gets searched. No warrant required.
Warrants are not the issue because no warrants are involved. And before you try another bit of nonsense, the fourth amendment does not define "reasonable" to mean "a warrant has been issued", nor have the courts defined it that way.
I'm arguing that the idea that the government has the power to force you to surrender rights if you try to do something (in this case, travel on a plane) that isn't illegal (merely because some people could do something illegal) is absurd.
That's patently false. I've already given examples of where waiving the fourth amendment right is quite reasonable for certain values of "something". It isn't illegal to visit a prisoner in jail, but you have to waive your rights to do it. If you want to drive about on a military installation, you waive your rights. And if you obey the summons to jury duty, the government not only compels you to appear, they search you when you do. So no, just flapping your gums and saying they can't force you to waive your rights just to "do something" is absurd itself, and contradicted by many trivial examples.
But I see where this is going. Rather than focusing on my fundamental points, you're just being pedantic and nitpicking at my usage of the English language.
From the very beginning I have been explicit in saying that I'm talking about your claims of implicit waivers of rights. The fact that you are just catching on to that fact now tells me you didn't bother trying to comprehend the words I posted.
The implicit part is supposedly your acceptance of being searched,
No, it is not. Your act of passing the point where you have been told that you are subject to search is an EXPLICIT act, and it is an explicit acceptance of the terms. You didn't wander past the checkpoint entrance on a whim, you made a deliberate choice to enter.
Dude, you're pedantic as fuck. I don't know if you've ever heard of exaggerations or how normal people use language (which is rarely 100% precise), but you should get acquainted with those things, and fast.
You should stop writing things that are patently absurd and then jumping down the throats of those who tell you they are absurd. Maybe read what you're replying to before doing so, to keep yourself from finding out five levels down into the discussion that the person you are trying to convince how bad it is that there are searches ISN'T ARGUING WITH YOU ABOUT THEM BEING BAD, only about your incorrect representation of what is going on.