No. In my state, they're legal at 16 (but it's still highly illegal to get a video of legal sex with a 16-year-old). There are exceptions that apply to the age of 18, and there is no age of consent for therapist-client sex, but the age similarity laws apply to 15 and under.
Given mutual desire and willingness, it would be perfectly legal for me to have sex with a sixteen-year-old girl. However, even disregarding what my wife would think of this, I don't find young women personally sexually attractive. I sometimes fantasize about introducing them to my son, so they're more potential daughters-in-law than potential sex partners. Such is age.
We've got unfortunate people who are sexually attracted to children. For the most part, they control the urges, and nobody gets hurt. Some act out on them, and people get hurt bad. There really isn't much safe help available to help people with the attraction not act on it, which doesn't make much sense.
We need to have the topic sufficiently in the open that pedophiles can get help without risking ruining their lives. This is going to destigmatize it anyway. We need to be able to talk about child pornography: is the CP produced without harming children going to increase or decrease the amount of molestation?
Obviously a pedophile would, all things being equal, have sex with a child rather than a robot. However, the robot does have advantages: it's legal and moral. Certainly most of the basement dwellers masturbating to porn on the internet would prefer a real women, but that doesn't mean they're going to rape one.
You haven't shown any reason why gender issues have gone too far. You've said that they go beyond what you want to think about. There are very few people whose sex and/or gender actually matter to me. In all other cases, I'll just accept what the person in question thinks of themself, except in cases of actual harm to others.
Who the heck can run oversight on the overall population? If the overall population can't be trusted, well, we'll have to do without trust in them, because we have no choice.
Yes, but changes in the cost structure do change the optimum price for everybody.
Changes in the marginal cost per unit sold change the optimum price. Changes independent of the number of units sold do not. Those costs determine how profitable the business is. A business may go from sufficiently profitable or insufficiently profitable because of such changes, and then the business will go away. When that happens, it may cause a change in the supply curve, but that's indirect.
Fixed costs can be ongoing costs. If it costs $3K/month to keep the business running independent of how much is sold, and that goes to $3.5K, that will not itself affect the supply curve.
Free markets work best without information asymmetries. If a VC is accepting bribes of whatever sort, the investors should ideally know about it, and then they can make their own decisions. (What they decide isn't my business, but keeping information available is at least a little my business.)
There's lots of car dealers. If you don't get along with one, you can easily get another who will happily sell you a car. The VC and entrepeneur business is different. There's a limited number of VCs. The quality of the ideas doesn't work the way you seem to think. If it's obviously a good idea, chances are that lots of people are already doing it, and that makes it not so good an idea. VCs typically want the occasional big payoff, and for that they have to go for the dubious ideas (including going into an already crowded field - who would have expected Google to unseat Altavista and Lycos?). The really big payoffs will often be from dumb-looking ideas. There is an imbalance of power here.
I haven't been trying to ingratiate myself with women, I've been trying to understand them. Lots of human behavior seems odd and interesting to me. I don't treat women with caution, and I frequently disagree with one or more women. You have the wrong viewpoint here.
Neither Minnesota nor Wyoming were pre-existing states. Both were formed out of federal land. Neither had a choice in whether to be part of the US, and so the EC was imposed on both states. For practical and legal purposes, we live in the same democracy, with lower-level differences.
Okay, get out your basic microeconomics book. Look at price-setting. Fixed costs do not change optimum prices. If a rational business could raise prices and get more money out of its customers, it would already have done so. The price for optimal profit minus certain fixed costs is the price for optimal profit minus different fixed costs. It doesn't matter whether the fixed costs are negligible or sizable: they don't affect the optimum price. If you are still unclear on this concept, ask specific questions.
Not all accommodations are ongoing costs. Install a conforming bathroom or a curb cut and that's up-front non-recurring costs.
You seem awfully unconcerned that somebody is handing over other people's money in large quantities in exchange for sexual favors. The VC firm is well served by having that behavior reported with strong evidence ASAP. Investors have to put a certain amount of trust into the firm they're investing in, and should not have to be responsible for guarding against quiet corruption.
You are probably correct in that, if your application was answered by a request for a blow job, the VC would be dismissing you. This isn't nearly as certain for a female applicant.
Nor are we talking about any great care with women here. In this case, it was a matter of someone in a position of power over the woman asking for sexual favors. If nobody had done that, we wouldn't have had the story here on Slashdot. We have a case of gross misconduct that took quite a few women working together to bring up. If people had acted halfway decently (even if not all the way decently) there would have been no story.
If you can't get that through your head, then it's best that you treat women with caution. Personally, I get along very well with feminists, I don't walk on my tiptoes around women, and I don't get any complaints. There's real advantages to doing things my way.
I want the system set up to serve people as well as possible. This includes increasing my own taxes. I don't mind if every bracket below me avoids tax hikes.
You are telling me that conservatives are selfless in wanting their taxes to be lower at the expense of less fortunate people. Right.
I don't really care who pokes around in my stuff, personally, and I doubt reputable cloud providers poke into clients' private information. You're free to use your own encryption.
Sure I can get a flash drive, but 32G isn't going to do it for me. I've got something over 150G of stuff on Dropbox right now. Not all of it is irreplaceable, but most of it would be at least awkward or uncertain to replace. This isn't a problem. I've got a 40 Mb connection, and so I've got a backup of most of what I do in a session before I leave the computer. I don't have to get out the 256G flash drive and take it to the safe-deposit box. (If I were into video editing, I'd want a lot more than that backed up.)
So, cloud storage (so-called?) works well for my purposes. If you handled your own strong encryption, it would work well for you, and it's a lot easier than hitting the safe-deposit box daily.. As far as "someone who wants to be lazy" - what do you mean by that? I have my computers to do various things with, and if I can get good backups for minimal effort that's good.
You're contrasting two dictionaries with the same philosophy when it comes to definitions. They just differ on how much usage it takes to be worth putting something into their dictionary. There is no "correct" meaning of a word or usage, there's only what people will say and understand. Preferring a more conservative approach is fine (I'm something of a language traditionalist), but it is a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind.
No, words mean what you can convince enough people they mean. If you manage to get enough people using traditional racial epithets to mean "someone who wears shoes", those uses will wind up in the dictionaries. It's been done before. Heinlein invented "grok" in his book "Stranger in a Strange Land", and it got popular.
The obvious intent is actually to record the language as it's being used, rather than trying to stick to an approved language like the French are trying to do. If you don't like the way people are using the language and creating new words, that's one thing, but trying to freeze an evolving language is stupid. (See "the French" earlier.) The changes you call "arbitrary" are based on actual usage, and it's OK if you disapprove of it because your opinion doesn't matter. You can of course refuse to use neologisms yourself, but you're one among hundreds of millions, and the OED is unlikely to notice thatone fewer person uses "bootylicious".
The problem is that providing last-mile wire or fiber service is expensive, and therefore there's a large barrier to entry no matter what, and the existing players can cut their profits for a time to discourage such investment. The political obstacles are less important.
Which probably means you never supported them and just wanted to publicly dump on them more. People almost never go from support to eternal non-support because of one incident that doesn't really concern them.
0F? I've been told that more people die from the cold when it's in the forties (Fahrenheit) than when it's around zero. 40F seems deceptively safe until the hypothermia kicks in. (Actually, after that it feels even safer, but isn't.)
With a hammer, wrench, a torch, fuel, and a pile of scrap metal a small team of moderately skilled workers can build a coal fired power plant.
Not a good one, and you're either going to need a lot of specific scrap metal or some fairly sophisticated metalworking technology. Once you've built it, you have to bring in coal, which is a nontrivial task.
Take that and add a couple nuclear engineers and they'll build a nuclear reactor.
Not a safe one. Those things need to be well designed and put together, with lots of quality checks, and you're going to need a highly specialized heap of scrap metal. Then you get to deal with used fuel. You're going to need an awful lot of infrastructure.
Solar power requires so much more.
It requires a source of solar panels, which is certainly less infrastructure than providing a constant source of coal. The panels last a long time, so driving a large pickup truck full of panels in every 25 years or so will provide a good deal of power.
We know we can build coal and nuclear power plants with "spanner and hammer" technology because we did it before. We can do it again.
We know we can build flint tools with even more primitive technology, but people insist on this metal stuff.
Seriously, we want better technology because we want better stuff. Would you like to hang around Slashdot with a computer made of discrete transistors and core memory?
I don't have an EV, but if I did it would have to be charged when I was home, and in the winter I'm often not home when the sun is up for entire work weeks.
The problem we're looking at isn't power production so much as constant availability. Do your parents need power during the night? Do they ever have strings of days when they don't make produce more energy than they need? Do they ever run more appliances than the panels can support all at once? In short, are your parents dependent on the grid for reliable 24/7 power?
As long as your parents produce excess energy, these problems would be solved by a sufficiently good electrical energy storage system, and battery technology isn't really up to that yet. The panels are more than good enough now, but the batteries aren't.
Navy nukes can rely on an essentially infinite supply of water that doesn't go above a certain temperature, so they wouldn't work in quite a few areas on land. They also don't have to be particularly economical, since the purpose is to create an effective warship (nowadays a submarine or carrier) rather than supplying cheap power with no other considerations.
I don't know when to end the jumpstart, but we do need an end point. What if coal power was still on jumpstart subsidies now?
Those ratios aren't fixed. If people use less power, but still need connections now and then, the grid cost will stay the same while power costs go down.
Slashdot Mirror
No. In my state, they're legal at 16 (but it's still highly illegal to get a video of legal sex with a 16-year-old). There are exceptions that apply to the age of 18, and there is no age of consent for therapist-client sex, but the age similarity laws apply to 15 and under.
Given mutual desire and willingness, it would be perfectly legal for me to have sex with a sixteen-year-old girl. However, even disregarding what my wife would think of this, I don't find young women personally sexually attractive. I sometimes fantasize about introducing them to my son, so they're more potential daughters-in-law than potential sex partners. Such is age.
We've got unfortunate people who are sexually attracted to children. For the most part, they control the urges, and nobody gets hurt. Some act out on them, and people get hurt bad. There really isn't much safe help available to help people with the attraction not act on it, which doesn't make much sense.
We need to have the topic sufficiently in the open that pedophiles can get help without risking ruining their lives. This is going to destigmatize it anyway. We need to be able to talk about child pornography: is the CP produced without harming children going to increase or decrease the amount of molestation?
Obviously a pedophile would, all things being equal, have sex with a child rather than a robot. However, the robot does have advantages: it's legal and moral. Certainly most of the basement dwellers masturbating to porn on the internet would prefer a real women, but that doesn't mean they're going to rape one.
You haven't shown any reason why gender issues have gone too far. You've said that they go beyond what you want to think about. There are very few people whose sex and/or gender actually matter to me. In all other cases, I'll just accept what the person in question thinks of themself, except in cases of actual harm to others.
Who the heck can run oversight on the overall population? If the overall population can't be trusted, well, we'll have to do without trust in them, because we have no choice.
Changes in the marginal cost per unit sold change the optimum price. Changes independent of the number of units sold do not. Those costs determine how profitable the business is. A business may go from sufficiently profitable or insufficiently profitable because of such changes, and then the business will go away. When that happens, it may cause a change in the supply curve, but that's indirect.
Fixed costs can be ongoing costs. If it costs $3K/month to keep the business running independent of how much is sold, and that goes to $3.5K, that will not itself affect the supply curve.
Free markets work best without information asymmetries. If a VC is accepting bribes of whatever sort, the investors should ideally know about it, and then they can make their own decisions. (What they decide isn't my business, but keeping information available is at least a little my business.)
There's lots of car dealers. If you don't get along with one, you can easily get another who will happily sell you a car. The VC and entrepeneur business is different. There's a limited number of VCs. The quality of the ideas doesn't work the way you seem to think. If it's obviously a good idea, chances are that lots of people are already doing it, and that makes it not so good an idea. VCs typically want the occasional big payoff, and for that they have to go for the dubious ideas (including going into an already crowded field - who would have expected Google to unseat Altavista and Lycos?). The really big payoffs will often be from dumb-looking ideas. There is an imbalance of power here.
I haven't been trying to ingratiate myself with women, I've been trying to understand them. Lots of human behavior seems odd and interesting to me. I don't treat women with caution, and I frequently disagree with one or more women. You have the wrong viewpoint here.
Neither Minnesota nor Wyoming were pre-existing states. Both were formed out of federal land. Neither had a choice in whether to be part of the US, and so the EC was imposed on both states. For practical and legal purposes, we live in the same democracy, with lower-level differences.
Okay, get out your basic microeconomics book. Look at price-setting. Fixed costs do not change optimum prices. If a rational business could raise prices and get more money out of its customers, it would already have done so. The price for optimal profit minus certain fixed costs is the price for optimal profit minus different fixed costs. It doesn't matter whether the fixed costs are negligible or sizable: they don't affect the optimum price. If you are still unclear on this concept, ask specific questions.
Not all accommodations are ongoing costs. Install a conforming bathroom or a curb cut and that's up-front non-recurring costs.
You seem awfully unconcerned that somebody is handing over other people's money in large quantities in exchange for sexual favors. The VC firm is well served by having that behavior reported with strong evidence ASAP. Investors have to put a certain amount of trust into the firm they're investing in, and should not have to be responsible for guarding against quiet corruption.
You are probably correct in that, if your application was answered by a request for a blow job, the VC would be dismissing you. This isn't nearly as certain for a female applicant.
Nor are we talking about any great care with women here. In this case, it was a matter of someone in a position of power over the woman asking for sexual favors. If nobody had done that, we wouldn't have had the story here on Slashdot. We have a case of gross misconduct that took quite a few women working together to bring up. If people had acted halfway decently (even if not all the way decently) there would have been no story.
If you can't get that through your head, then it's best that you treat women with caution. Personally, I get along very well with feminists, I don't walk on my tiptoes around women, and I don't get any complaints. There's real advantages to doing things my way.
I want the system set up to serve people as well as possible. This includes increasing my own taxes. I don't mind if every bracket below me avoids tax hikes.
You are telling me that conservatives are selfless in wanting their taxes to be lower at the expense of less fortunate people. Right.
I don't really care who pokes around in my stuff, personally, and I doubt reputable cloud providers poke into clients' private information. You're free to use your own encryption.
Sure I can get a flash drive, but 32G isn't going to do it for me. I've got something over 150G of stuff on Dropbox right now. Not all of it is irreplaceable, but most of it would be at least awkward or uncertain to replace. This isn't a problem. I've got a 40 Mb connection, and so I've got a backup of most of what I do in a session before I leave the computer. I don't have to get out the 256G flash drive and take it to the safe-deposit box. (If I were into video editing, I'd want a lot more than that backed up.)
So, cloud storage (so-called?) works well for my purposes. If you handled your own strong encryption, it would work well for you, and it's a lot easier than hitting the safe-deposit box daily.. As far as "someone who wants to be lazy" - what do you mean by that? I have my computers to do various things with, and if I can get good backups for minimal effort that's good.
You're contrasting two dictionaries with the same philosophy when it comes to definitions. They just differ on how much usage it takes to be worth putting something into their dictionary. There is no "correct" meaning of a word or usage, there's only what people will say and understand. Preferring a more conservative approach is fine (I'm something of a language traditionalist), but it is a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind.
No, words mean what you can convince enough people they mean. If you manage to get enough people using traditional racial epithets to mean "someone who wears shoes", those uses will wind up in the dictionaries. It's been done before. Heinlein invented "grok" in his book "Stranger in a Strange Land", and it got popular.
No, "experts" say the mass of "non-experts" is right by definition.
The obvious intent is actually to record the language as it's being used, rather than trying to stick to an approved language like the French are trying to do. If you don't like the way people are using the language and creating new words, that's one thing, but trying to freeze an evolving language is stupid. (See "the French" earlier.) The changes you call "arbitrary" are based on actual usage, and it's OK if you disapprove of it because your opinion doesn't matter. You can of course refuse to use neologisms yourself, but you're one among hundreds of millions, and the OED is unlikely to notice thatone fewer person uses "bootylicious".
The problem is that providing last-mile wire or fiber service is expensive, and therefore there's a large barrier to entry no matter what, and the existing players can cut their profits for a time to discourage such investment. The political obstacles are less important.
Which probably means you never supported them and just wanted to publicly dump on them more. People almost never go from support to eternal non-support because of one incident that doesn't really concern them.
US copyright laws don't recognize effort. They recognize creativity. Did Google employees do anything creative in creating Street View?
What business is it of yours what other people do with their websites?
0F? I've been told that more people die from the cold when it's in the forties (Fahrenheit) than when it's around zero. 40F seems deceptively safe until the hypothermia kicks in. (Actually, after that it feels even safer, but isn't.)
Yeah. A geek site should list it as 327 kelvins.
Not a good one, and you're either going to need a lot of specific scrap metal or some fairly sophisticated metalworking technology. Once you've built it, you have to bring in coal, which is a nontrivial task.
Not a safe one. Those things need to be well designed and put together, with lots of quality checks, and you're going to need a highly specialized heap of scrap metal. Then you get to deal with used fuel. You're going to need an awful lot of infrastructure.
It requires a source of solar panels, which is certainly less infrastructure than providing a constant source of coal. The panels last a long time, so driving a large pickup truck full of panels in every 25 years or so will provide a good deal of power.
We know we can build flint tools with even more primitive technology, but people insist on this metal stuff.
Seriously, we want better technology because we want better stuff. Would you like to hang around Slashdot with a computer made of discrete transistors and core memory?
I don't have an EV, but if I did it would have to be charged when I was home, and in the winter I'm often not home when the sun is up for entire work weeks.
The problem we're looking at isn't power production so much as constant availability. Do your parents need power during the night? Do they ever have strings of days when they don't make produce more energy than they need? Do they ever run more appliances than the panels can support all at once? In short, are your parents dependent on the grid for reliable 24/7 power?
As long as your parents produce excess energy, these problems would be solved by a sufficiently good electrical energy storage system, and battery technology isn't really up to that yet. The panels are more than good enough now, but the batteries aren't.
Navy nukes can rely on an essentially infinite supply of water that doesn't go above a certain temperature, so they wouldn't work in quite a few areas on land. They also don't have to be particularly economical, since the purpose is to create an effective warship (nowadays a submarine or carrier) rather than supplying cheap power with no other considerations.
I don't know when to end the jumpstart, but we do need an end point. What if coal power was still on jumpstart subsidies now?
Those ratios aren't fixed. If people use less power, but still need connections now and then, the grid cost will stay the same while power costs go down.