Thing is, there's a fair number of blatantly unConstitutional laws passed for purposes of telling one's constituents that one did something, without the bother of figuring out what the law would do if the courts allowed it. A bill that treated the Bible as special would, unfortunately, fit right in. It's, unfortunately, believable.
Watching from the other political wing, I noted that right-wing nutcases went from blaming everything on Clinton to blaming everything on Obama about December 2008, a month before Obama was actually inaugurated. The left-wing nutcases do much the same, with different names written into the form with crayon.
If Netflix has a locus of business in Pennsylvania, they can be required to collect the taxes. If they don't, then they don't have to, and the residents of Pennsylvania would be required to file their use taxes (which almost nobody does), which are essentially sales taxes remitted by the purchaser.
Religious institutions tend to do a lot of charitable work, and churches very often function like tax-exempt organizations. Therefore, they're normally considered tax-exempt, although they may face audits (in my area, a preacher told his people to vote for a certain candidate by name, which is a no-no).
Unfortunately, this makes it easy to create something that should be taxed as a for-profit but is legally a church.
I don't know about Dillinger, but the Feds got Al Capone on income tax evasion charges. Turns out he wasn't reporting his illegal income, or not all of it, and they found proof. However, this was actual dollars coming in, not simply not paying for things. (My income tax forms have always had a line where I should enter illegal income. They don't ask for details.)
Similarly, sales tax is collected on, um, sales. If you find someone to give you a big discount on something, you don't owe sales tax on the list price. If you make something, you don't pay sales tax (you might be taxed on the materials). If you steal something, you don't owe sales tax on it (which doesn't absolve you of other charges that may be appropriate).
The other issue is that there really is no such thing as inherently infringing content. There's content that is infringing if the owner of the computer doesn't have a particular license or has something that wouldn't be ruled as fair use. There's perfectly legal stuff on my laptop that would be infringing on yours.
That those are your most-used applications marks you as a fairly elementary user, the sort that's typically better off on Ubuntu or Mint or whatever other Linux (or maybe *BSD) distro you like. Lots of people use apps that there is no F/OSS equivalent for, or at least not a satisfactory one. This may be personal accounting software, or Photoshop (there is no drop-in F/OSS equivalent), or something like needlepoint design software.
How about not being able to play content that the OS has wrongly classified as unauthorized? Having to wait for the OS to connect to an overburdened authentication server? How about content that your friendly government/powerful NGO doesn't like and has declared unauthorized? Content that you need now and will pay for ASAP, so everybody gets paid?
Any feature that can censor based on a complicated criterion like "authorization" can and WILL be used to censor based on other things.
Eliminating oppression is indeed the goal. The real problem is to find out what is de facto oppression and how to end it. It turns out to be awfully difficult, and more privileged people will argue hard that they got where they were by their own efforts and there is no discrimination. Privilege is no guarantee of anything, but I suspect that a black woman with my drive, determination, and intellect would still wind up worse off than I am.
Maybe they should have good prospects of benefiting from working hard and studying more. Anyone remember the story about the rich guy who had an impulse and told a bunch of minority students that he'd pay their way through college and set them up for success? Grades went up pretty much immediately.
What sort of increased efficiency are you going to get in the free market by people building pieces of road, more or less connected together, and drivers having to pay tool every twelve meters?
If the talent pool includes an overwhelming majority of people who look kinda like me, and a real shortage of those who look kinda like the First Lady, there are going to be black women who are there because they're damn good and are going to be in the field anyway. Preferring the minorities in the talent pool can result in a better work force. Other things being equal, I'd expect a work force that's more like the general population than the talent pool to be slightly better.
Other things being equal, the amount of experience and viewpoint I share with a random white man is probably a lot larger than with a random black woman. It may not be, but if I had to bet on diversity of thought and experience I'd go with the black woman.
It can be an opportunity. It's not as if everyone in the talent pool has a talent score burned into their left arms with divine lightning. Measures of talent are imprecise, and frequently favor the dominant racial/sexual/whatever group, so if you select a black woman over a white man with higher scores you might well be hiring the better candidate. If the talent pool is 95% white male, that other 5% will include some very good people (and frequently some very bad ones).
Looking for talent among minorities can be quite lucrative.
Once upon a time I had my son in a University day care facility that was primarily used by faculty. I met other parents sometimes. Fascinating people doing fascinating things, all sorts of skin colors, national origins, religions (frequently to not believe in), and a distinct lack of diversity in some ways.
Fat people, smokers, Muslims, geeks (not here), jocks (especially here), uppity or sexually active women (I never did understand why that's considered a bad feature in women), and the traditional ones depending on who's listening. I'm usually not bothered by being mocked and belittled as a member of a class, but that may be because I don't have a long history of having to put up with it.
Sorry, I'm not inventing statements. I'm trying to understand yours, and see how they match the world.
My observation is that there are a lot of people out there who don't believe global warming is going on, or don't think people caused it, and are willing to believe anything, how preposterous, as long as it agrees with these quasi-religious beliefs. I've observed people saying that yes, it's happening, and carbon taxes are not the answer, but not in anywhere near the same numbers. (They could just be quieter about it, I guess.) I've seen the reaction to the deniers, but not favoring carbon taxes isn't a very controversial stance, and while people disagree they don't make a splash.
In the meantime, there's other proposals being kicked around, by various people, including shading the planet and sequestering carbon dioxide. There was a Slashdot article recently about a proposal to use solar energy to create fuel from the atmosphere, and if that's practical it could be very useful. Heck, there are government subsidies for the development of renewable energy sources, and those exist right now and aren't carbon taxes. Your statement that carbon taxes are the only proposed government solution is false.
And, yes, I remember the 1970s, including the media campaigns about CFC. What I don't remember is people going out and buying non-CFC products out of desire to preserve the environment. I remember McDonald's changing from styrofoam to cardboard containers for their burgers without asking anyone. (They'd previously been pushing recycling their Styrofoam containers.) I remember CFC refrigerants not being easily available, and people complaining about that. (There really wasn't a good substitute for Freon at the time.) The change was not from direct consumer demand.
Really? Care to show me the media reaction to leaked RNC emails, for comparison? Or similar private conversations? Or are you talking about reactions to statements made publicly that were intended to be public? There's a difference there.
There's good reasons for party primaries, in that the party members can help determine who their nominees are. The other method in widespread use is caucuses, and caucuses are vulnerable to being taken over by relatively small numbers of determined people.
You're right, I don't see the multitudes. How many multitudes can you get into a Superamerica anyway? Have you actually seen multitudes of poor people inside a liquor store, or are you just spinning something somebody else told you?
And why do you expect poor people to be far better at short-term sacrifice and financial planning than everybody else? Better at shaking addictions?
I didn't find it believable in the first place. Drugs are expensive. I'd rather have mandatory drug testing for people making, say, over $250K/year. That, I think, would catch quite a few.
If you haven't noticed, Presidents do not get bills out of committee. If she promised to get it out of committee, then she was promising what she could not deliver, and by strict standards would be lying.
In fact, getting someone to introduce a bill against something is (at least to a small extent) being against that something, so if she was serious about getting a bill introduced she was against (that), so what I've got is that Hillary said something knowing the press would simplify it to something less detailed and still truthful, and therefore she was misleading. According to you.
If you've got an actual argument somewhere, please make it. If you just hate Clinton, say so.
Also, you really should try to establish that Clinton is more misleading than typical for candidates. Polifact rated her as one of the most truthful candidates (their methodology isn't rigorous, so I wouldn't take any more than that from it), and they do consider implications.
Some of what Stein said about vaccines is false, and seems to me to be intended to be at least somewhat misleading. How do you justify planning to vote for her?
Slashdot Mirror
Thing is, there's a fair number of blatantly unConstitutional laws passed for purposes of telling one's constituents that one did something, without the bother of figuring out what the law would do if the courts allowed it. A bill that treated the Bible as special would, unfortunately, fit right in. It's, unfortunately, believable.
Watching from the other political wing, I noted that right-wing nutcases went from blaming everything on Clinton to blaming everything on Obama about December 2008, a month before Obama was actually inaugurated. The left-wing nutcases do much the same, with different names written into the form with crayon.
If Netflix has a locus of business in Pennsylvania, they can be required to collect the taxes. If they don't, then they don't have to, and the residents of Pennsylvania would be required to file their use taxes (which almost nobody does), which are essentially sales taxes remitted by the purchaser.
Religious institutions tend to do a lot of charitable work, and churches very often function like tax-exempt organizations. Therefore, they're normally considered tax-exempt, although they may face audits (in my area, a preacher told his people to vote for a certain candidate by name, which is a no-no).
Unfortunately, this makes it easy to create something that should be taxed as a for-profit but is legally a church.
I don't know about Dillinger, but the Feds got Al Capone on income tax evasion charges. Turns out he wasn't reporting his illegal income, or not all of it, and they found proof. However, this was actual dollars coming in, not simply not paying for things. (My income tax forms have always had a line where I should enter illegal income. They don't ask for details.)
Similarly, sales tax is collected on, um, sales. If you find someone to give you a big discount on something, you don't owe sales tax on the list price. If you make something, you don't pay sales tax (you might be taxed on the materials). If you steal something, you don't owe sales tax on it (which doesn't absolve you of other charges that may be appropriate).
The other issue is that there really is no such thing as inherently infringing content. There's content that is infringing if the owner of the computer doesn't have a particular license or has something that wouldn't be ruled as fair use. There's perfectly legal stuff on my laptop that would be infringing on yours.
The beauty of F/OSS is that you need only one. If you're concerned, get together with other people to hire someone competent.
That those are your most-used applications marks you as a fairly elementary user, the sort that's typically better off on Ubuntu or Mint or whatever other Linux (or maybe *BSD) distro you like. Lots of people use apps that there is no F/OSS equivalent for, or at least not a satisfactory one. This may be personal accounting software, or Photoshop (there is no drop-in F/OSS equivalent), or something like needlepoint design software.
How about not being able to play content that the OS has wrongly classified as unauthorized? Having to wait for the OS to connect to an overburdened authentication server? How about content that your friendly government/powerful NGO doesn't like and has declared unauthorized? Content that you need now and will pay for ASAP, so everybody gets paid?
Any feature that can censor based on a complicated criterion like "authorization" can and WILL be used to censor based on other things.
Eliminating oppression is indeed the goal. The real problem is to find out what is de facto oppression and how to end it. It turns out to be awfully difficult, and more privileged people will argue hard that they got where they were by their own efforts and there is no discrimination. Privilege is no guarantee of anything, but I suspect that a black woman with my drive, determination, and intellect would still wind up worse off than I am.
Maybe they should have good prospects of benefiting from working hard and studying more. Anyone remember the story about the rich guy who had an impulse and told a bunch of minority students that he'd pay their way through college and set them up for success? Grades went up pretty much immediately.
What sort of increased efficiency are you going to get in the free market by people building pieces of road, more or less connected together, and drivers having to pay tool every twelve meters?
Fools learn on their own dime, in your experience? You have higher-grade fools than I see around here.
If the talent pool includes an overwhelming majority of people who look kinda like me, and a real shortage of those who look kinda like the First Lady, there are going to be black women who are there because they're damn good and are going to be in the field anyway. Preferring the minorities in the talent pool can result in a better work force. Other things being equal, I'd expect a work force that's more like the general population than the talent pool to be slightly better.
Other things being equal, the amount of experience and viewpoint I share with a random white man is probably a lot larger than with a random black woman. It may not be, but if I had to bet on diversity of thought and experience I'd go with the black woman.
It can be an opportunity. It's not as if everyone in the talent pool has a talent score burned into their left arms with divine lightning. Measures of talent are imprecise, and frequently favor the dominant racial/sexual/whatever group, so if you select a black woman over a white man with higher scores you might well be hiring the better candidate. If the talent pool is 95% white male, that other 5% will include some very good people (and frequently some very bad ones).
Looking for talent among minorities can be quite lucrative.
Once upon a time I had my son in a University day care facility that was primarily used by faculty. I met other parents sometimes. Fascinating people doing fascinating things, all sorts of skin colors, national origins, religions (frequently to not believe in), and a distinct lack of diversity in some ways.
Fat people, smokers, Muslims, geeks (not here), jocks (especially here), uppity or sexually active women (I never did understand why that's considered a bad feature in women), and the traditional ones depending on who's listening. I'm usually not bothered by being mocked and belittled as a member of a class, but that may be because I don't have a long history of having to put up with it.
Sorry, I'm not inventing statements. I'm trying to understand yours, and see how they match the world.
My observation is that there are a lot of people out there who don't believe global warming is going on, or don't think people caused it, and are willing to believe anything, how preposterous, as long as it agrees with these quasi-religious beliefs. I've observed people saying that yes, it's happening, and carbon taxes are not the answer, but not in anywhere near the same numbers. (They could just be quieter about it, I guess.) I've seen the reaction to the deniers, but not favoring carbon taxes isn't a very controversial stance, and while people disagree they don't make a splash.
In the meantime, there's other proposals being kicked around, by various people, including shading the planet and sequestering carbon dioxide. There was a Slashdot article recently about a proposal to use solar energy to create fuel from the atmosphere, and if that's practical it could be very useful. Heck, there are government subsidies for the development of renewable energy sources, and those exist right now and aren't carbon taxes. Your statement that carbon taxes are the only proposed government solution is false.
And, yes, I remember the 1970s, including the media campaigns about CFC. What I don't remember is people going out and buying non-CFC products out of desire to preserve the environment. I remember McDonald's changing from styrofoam to cardboard containers for their burgers without asking anyone. (They'd previously been pushing recycling their Styrofoam containers.) I remember CFC refrigerants not being easily available, and people complaining about that. (There really wasn't a good substitute for Freon at the time.) The change was not from direct consumer demand.
So I'd have to pay money to check up on your claim?
Really? Care to show me the media reaction to leaked RNC emails, for comparison? Or similar private conversations? Or are you talking about reactions to statements made publicly that were intended to be public? There's a difference there.
There's good reasons for party primaries, in that the party members can help determine who their nominees are. The other method in widespread use is caucuses, and caucuses are vulnerable to being taken over by relatively small numbers of determined people.
You're right, I don't see the multitudes. How many multitudes can you get into a Superamerica anyway? Have you actually seen multitudes of poor people inside a liquor store, or are you just spinning something somebody else told you?
And why do you expect poor people to be far better at short-term sacrifice and financial planning than everybody else? Better at shaking addictions?
I didn't find it believable in the first place. Drugs are expensive. I'd rather have mandatory drug testing for people making, say, over $250K/year. That, I think, would catch quite a few.
If you haven't noticed, Presidents do not get bills out of committee. If she promised to get it out of committee, then she was promising what she could not deliver, and by strict standards would be lying.
In fact, getting someone to introduce a bill against something is (at least to a small extent) being against that something, so if she was serious about getting a bill introduced she was against (that), so what I've got is that Hillary said something knowing the press would simplify it to something less detailed and still truthful, and therefore she was misleading. According to you.
If you've got an actual argument somewhere, please make it. If you just hate Clinton, say so.
Also, you really should try to establish that Clinton is more misleading than typical for candidates. Polifact rated her as one of the most truthful candidates (their methodology isn't rigorous, so I wouldn't take any more than that from it), and they do consider implications.
Some of what Stein said about vaccines is false, and seems to me to be intended to be at least somewhat misleading. How do you justify planning to vote for her?