I was in an Irish bar when the IRA killed Lord Mountbatten. The IRA was not popular that evening. I remember the Irish barmaid saying that they killed children and hitting the counter with a beer mug in anger.
There were a lot of killings by both sides. It escalated. I think a sovereign government is in a better position to stop it. Thatcher's tough-guy approach didn't do any good.
When you want to commit suicide, guns are seconds away.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine tracked the owners of new gun permits to find out what happened to them. For every gun owner who used his gun in self-defense, 8 of them used it to commit suicide.
The NRA responded by lobbying for laws that prevented the release of information about gun permits, to prevent research like this from happening again.
You're much more likely to use a gun to kill yourself than to defend yourself.
My recollection from reading the news articles was that Assange's lawyers offered to comply with the Swedish prosecutors' request, including depositions and blood tests, if he could do it from the UK, but the prosecutors refused.
It didn't make any sense for Ms. Revenge to demand a blood test after a week had passed, because if Assange did have AIDS, and had transmitted it to her, she could have detected it with her own blood test. Same with any other STDs.
With Gorbachev, the good guys basically won. Gorbachev wanted nuclear disarmament (Reagan didn't). Gorbachev was more interested in growing chickens than in conquering the world. Gorbachev invited Sakharov back to Moscow from exile. In American terms, Gorbachev was the best leader they could possibly have had.
During the entire history of the Soviet Union, their leaders were afraid to let down their guard, take a risk, and cooperate with the West, for fear the West would stab them in the back. Gorbachev was a leader who was finally willing to take a risk to get peace and cooperation. What did the West do? They stabbed him in the back.
When I went to high school in the 1950s, we were were in an arms race and a space race with the Soviet Union.
A bunch of clever educators -- here and in the USSR -- used the the arms race to get broad support for science education. That was the easiest time I can think of to get a good education without too much money. Some of the best colleges, like CCNY, were free. The state university systems and land-grant colleges were almost free. They had to be. We were competing with Moscow University.
None of this bullshit about going into debt for the rest of your life to pay for college tuition. I got scholarships. Go read the autobiographies on the Nobel Prize web sites. Lots of scientists say they never could have afforded to go to college if it wasn't free.
They were spending money on basic science then like they're spending money on the military today. And there was a lot of spillover into the rest of education.
The Democrats and Republicans were competing with each other to see who could spend more for scientific research. They put a lot of money into basic research -- and it worked.
The one thing the Soviet Union did well was their education system. Talk about German rocket scientists. How many Soviet scientists and engineers came here during the 1980s? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Brin
If competition is good, the Soviets were the best competitors we could have had. America would probably be better off if they were still here.
Sergei Brinn's parents were both PhDs, educated in the Soviet educational system, which was in some ways the best in the world. It's true that Sergei came here at the age of 6, so he never actually studied in the Soviet system, but you get your fundamental education from your parents.
So maybe that was the greatest accomplishment of the Soviet Union: Google.
Nikita Krushchev invites his mother to the Kremlin to show off his success. He takes her through the palatial rooms, the luxurious furnishings, the uniformed guards, the gourmet meals.
His mother says: "Very nice, Nikita. But what if the Communists take over?"
Both determined that intrusive monitoring of microbiologists engaged in unclassified research would not necessarily increase protection against insider threats and rejected broad adoption of procedures that scientists and military personnel who work with nuclear weapons and fissile material must endure, such as random testing for alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, or amphetamines; observation of off-duty behavior; video monitoring of laboratory activity; annual psychological assessments; or mandatory privacy waivers to allow supervisors to review mental health treatment records.
For one, he had suspicions; that alone is the legal boundary.
Is that the legal boundary? If I work in a hardware store, and somebody wants to buy a bolt cutter from me, am I supposed decide whether I'm suspicious that he might use it to steal bicycles?
If 99% of the time, people displaying the behavior in question are criminals, its not really a safe bet to claim you assumed they weren't.
How about 50% of the time? How about 10% of the time? How about 1% of the time? Suppose you don't know what percentage of the people are criminals?
Maybe it's not a safe bet, but that's not the question. The question is, are you as guilty as everybody else because you didn't turn their work down based on an unprovable suspicion that they might be criminal?
Until recently, in American law the answer was no. Now, the answer is yes. Or rather, "Yes if the federal prosecutors want to abuse their power to pressure you into being a rat. Even if that means that you and your family will get killed."
It's really none of his business unless he explicitly knew he sold drugs for money, some people just have lots of money, that's not a crime in and of itself.
Correct.
I had a couple of cousins who ran an upscale discount dress shop in Cleveland. One week they came into New York to buy merchandise in the garment district, and stayed over at my house. At the kitchen table, they pulled out rolls of $100 bills. It actually was customary in the wholesale garment business to buy merchandise for cash. (How else could they pay for merchandise?)
According to the New York Times, the wholesale businesses in Manhattan still deal in cash. But they're losing a lot of business, because foreign customers, who used to fly in with large amounts of cash to buy merchandise, are now having problems getting through airline security.
There are lots of perfectly legal situations in which somebody could be carrying large amounts of cash.
You certainly can't say, "If he's carrying a lot of money, that means he's dealing drugs."
"Generally speaking, you're not going to be liable for failing to act, or for selling equipment to a criminal. You don't have a duty to police others." -- Cartoon Guide to the Law idem.
The issue here is that the law starts from the principle that a vendor isn't liable for selling equipment to a criminal, but then the feds came up with the idea of prosecuting them for conspiracy. They've spread the net of liability wider and wider.
The hardware store isn't liable if somebody buys fertilizer and shovels. How does the hardware dealer know whether he's growing pot? What if the customer buys grow lights? I might be suspicious of somebody who buys grow lights, but I don't know that he's growing pot. How much evidence does the hardware dealer need before he becomes liable if the customer turns out to be growing pot? If 9 of his customers are growing orchards, and 1 of them is growing pot, is the hardware dealer going to jail because of that 1 customer growing pot? The hardware dealer could say, I know some customers are likely to be growing pot, but I don't know which ones, and I don't know for sure. What am I supposed to do, stop selling grow lights to all my customers?
(Slashdot had a story about Madoff's IT guy, who ran programs that would create phony financial reports. Madoff told him that they were running sample databases. It was a high-security business where you're not supposed to ask too many questions.)
As this comic book explains, an ordinary citizen doesn't have an obligation to do the cops' job for them. A citizen used to be able to sell dual-use equipment to anyone off the street, without being liable if they used it to commit crimes. Now the feds are expanding that liability. You're supposed to be suspicious, and refuse to sell them equipment. How suspicious? The feds are lowering the threshold. They're saying, in hindsight, "You should have known." On what evidence? Carrying large amounts of cash? Wearing flashy clothes? Being Mexican?
Yeah, the compartment guy suspected that they were dealing drugs, and he avoided dealing with them once in an abundance of caution, but he didn't know that they were dealing drugs.
A lot of people here argued that the feds were stretching the law to create conspiracy charges in order to pressure him to rat. And they didn't just want him to testify about what he knew, but to wear a wire to get new information about crimes that he didn't know about. Those arguments convinced me.
You don't have an obligation to be a cop. And if you're selling a product with legitimate uses, you're not liable if somebody uses your product for criminal purposes, under American law. Or at least that was the law before the war on drugs. Now prosecutors are expanding the law sending people to jail for activities that used to be legal.
That's not what the juries decided in product liability cases.
If a manufacturer knows simple, cheap ways to to prevent accidental deaths, and he doesn't use them, the manufacturer is responsible.
The juries don't buy "It's nobody's fault but your own."
A lot of times, an engineer will get on the witness stand and say the kind of things you're saying right now. That's when the juries really get annoyed and hit the companies with big damage judgments. That's what happened in the McDonald's case, when one of their engineers testified that if the customers burned themselves with coffee, it was their own fault.
This is not 1 person dying in 300 million. If you believe Federman on Huffington Post, 2 million sets were sold. The CDC said 1 child died and 33 wound up in the ER requiring surgery (which may not be all Buckyballs). If 1 child dies for every 2 million sets, for a toy, yes, that's too much. And about 1 child winds up in the ER for every 100,000 sets. That's also too much.
I'll tell you what. Let's let the free market handle it, through the tort system. When somebody dies from a Buckyball, they can sue Zucker, and the jury will award them whatever compensation they think fair.
There is a long series of case law in America that it's not enough to put a label on the product to absolve the manufacturer of responsibility for the damage that the product does. Juries don't accept it.
There's a reason why bleach bottles have childproof caps.
I don't know why you place all the responsibility on the user and none of the responsibility on the company that knows their product is injuring and killing children.
I've read FDA hearing transcripts, and they go through cost-benefit calculations (that is, cost in terms of harm, not money).
OTOH, there are the benefits of Buckyballs as an adult toy. I appreciate that. After all, Albert Einstein played with magnets as a child. And the other benefit of Buckyballs is that Craig Zucker, who co-founded the company, got a big hit and was making a few million dollars. I appreciate that. I'd like to make a few million dollars myself.
OTOH, the cost of these cool toys are 1 death and 33 emergency room surgeries. (And these were serious abdominal surgeries -- some of the kids certainly would have died otherwise.) It's like a gunshot wound with no entry point.
Then along comes Zucker and argues that the benefits of Buckyballs outweighs the cost of 1 child's death, and 33 ER visits, because it's the parent's responsibility, not his, to make sure they don't misuse them. I'm not convinced.
It's true there are dangers to common household products like bathtubs, Clorox and peanuts. But these are products with significant benefits beyond being cool toys. If we ban bathtubs, I can't take a bath. If we ban Buckyballs, I have to make do with paper clips.
I don't see it. I weigh all the benefits of Buckyballs against even one toddler dying, and it's just not worth it. Do I want to play with Buckyballs if my access to Buckyballs means killing a child (even a child with supposedly irresponsible parents)? No. Do you?
Zucker is saying, "I'm willing to kill a child if I can make $10 million out of it." That's a different calculation.
Ralph Nader settled that. Read Unsafe at Any Speed.
The automobile companies got up in court, and in Congressional hearings, and said, "Oh, yeah, we knew that 5,000 people a year were getting killed by being impaled on the steering column in minor crashes, and it would cost $50 to eliminate that hazard, but we didn't think it would sell cars so we didn't do it."
Most believe that if you're making a car, and you know how to save 5,000 lives a year, it's your responsibility to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
Who's terrorists? They're both terrorists -- the British soldiers who killed 26 peaceful protesters, and the IRA who fought back.
I live in New York. We have a lot of Irish immigrants. From what they tell me, there was a lot of provocation by the British government. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972)
I was in an Irish bar when the IRA killed Lord Mountbatten. The IRA was not popular that evening. I remember the Irish barmaid saying that they killed children and hitting the counter with a beer mug in anger.
There were a lot of killings by both sides. It escalated. I think a sovereign government is in a better position to stop it. Thatcher's tough-guy approach didn't do any good.
When you want to commit suicide, guns are seconds away.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine tracked the owners of new gun permits to find out what happened to them. For every gun owner who used his gun in self-defense, 8 of them used it to commit suicide.
The NRA responded by lobbying for laws that prevented the release of information about gun permits, to prevent research like this from happening again.
You're much more likely to use a gun to kill yourself than to defend yourself.
Right. I read Science and the New England Journal of Medicine.
In principle, I could read them on an e-reader, and I'm sure some day there will be an e-reader to match paper, but it's not here yet.
My recollection from reading the news articles was that Assange's lawyers offered to comply with the Swedish prosecutors' request, including depositions and blood tests, if he could do it from the UK, but the prosecutors refused.
It didn't make any sense for Ms. Revenge to demand a blood test after a week had passed, because if Assange did have AIDS, and had transmitted it to her, she could have detected it with her own blood test. Same with any other STDs.
With Gorbachev, the good guys basically won. Gorbachev wanted nuclear disarmament (Reagan didn't). Gorbachev was more interested in growing chickens than in conquering the world. Gorbachev invited Sakharov back to Moscow from exile. In American terms, Gorbachev was the best leader they could possibly have had.
During the entire history of the Soviet Union, their leaders were afraid to let down their guard, take a risk, and cooperate with the West, for fear the West would stab them in the back. Gorbachev was a leader who was finally willing to take a risk to get peace and cooperation. What did the West do? They stabbed him in the back.
When I went to high school in the 1950s, we were were in an arms race and a space race with the Soviet Union.
A bunch of clever educators -- here and in the USSR -- used the the arms race to get broad support for science education. That was the easiest time I can think of to get a good education without too much money. Some of the best colleges, like CCNY, were free. The state university systems and land-grant colleges were almost free. They had to be. We were competing with Moscow University.
None of this bullshit about going into debt for the rest of your life to pay for college tuition. I got scholarships. Go read the autobiographies on the Nobel Prize web sites. Lots of scientists say they never could have afforded to go to college if it wasn't free.
They were spending money on basic science then like they're spending money on the military today. And there was a lot of spillover into the rest of education.
The Democrats and Republicans were competing with each other to see who could spend more for scientific research. They put a lot of money into basic research -- and it worked.
The one thing the Soviet Union did well was their education system. Talk about German rocket scientists. How many Soviet scientists and engineers came here during the 1980s? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Brin
If competition is good, the Soviets were the best competitors we could have had. America would probably be better off if they were still here.
The Soviets gave us a lot of good computer scientists. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Brin
Sergei Brinn's parents were both PhDs, educated in the Soviet educational system, which was in some ways the best in the world. It's true that Sergei came here at the age of 6, so he never actually studied in the Soviet system, but you get your fundamental education from your parents.
So maybe that was the greatest accomplishment of the Soviet Union: Google.
We destroyed them with our secret weapon: We conned them into adopting the neocon free market.
Nikita Krushchev invites his mother to the Kremlin to show off his success. He takes her through the palatial rooms, the luxurious furnishings, the uniformed guards, the gourmet meals.
His mother says: "Very nice, Nikita. But what if the Communists take over?"
Amount of people killed in the U.S. invasion of Iraq:
150,000 (New England Journal of Medicine estimate)
600,000 (Lancet estimate)
The longer an Internet discussion goes on, the higher the probability that someone will bring up anything.
This is the kind of "scrutiny" they're talking about, BTW.
http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/lessons-not-learned-insider-threats-pathogen-research
Both determined that intrusive monitoring of microbiologists engaged in unclassified research would not necessarily increase protection against insider threats and rejected broad adoption of procedures that scientists and military personnel who work with nuclear weapons and fissile material must endure, such as random testing for alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, or amphetamines; observation of off-duty behavior; video monitoring of laboratory activity; annual psychological assessments; or mandatory privacy waivers to allow supervisors to review mental health treatment records.
For one, he had suspicions; that alone is the legal boundary.
Is that the legal boundary? If I work in a hardware store, and somebody wants to buy a bolt cutter from me, am I supposed decide whether I'm suspicious that he might use it to steal bicycles?
That's not what the comic books say. http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=505
If 99% of the time, people displaying the behavior in question are criminals, its not really a safe bet to claim you assumed they weren't.
How about 50% of the time? How about 10% of the time? How about 1% of the time? Suppose you don't know what percentage of the people are criminals?
Maybe it's not a safe bet, but that's not the question. The question is, are you as guilty as everybody else because you didn't turn their work down based on an unprovable suspicion that they might be criminal?
Until recently, in American law the answer was no. Now, the answer is yes. Or rather, "Yes if the federal prosecutors want to abuse their power to pressure you into being a rat. Even if that means that you and your family will get killed."
It's really none of his business unless he explicitly knew he sold drugs for money, some people just have lots of money, that's not a crime in and of itself.
Correct.
I had a couple of cousins who ran an upscale discount dress shop in Cleveland. One week they came into New York to buy merchandise in the garment district, and stayed over at my house. At the kitchen table, they pulled out rolls of $100 bills. It actually was customary in the wholesale garment business to buy merchandise for cash. (How else could they pay for merchandise?)
According to the New York Times, the wholesale businesses in Manhattan still deal in cash. But they're losing a lot of business, because foreign customers, who used to fly in with large amounts of cash to buy merchandise, are now having problems getting through airline security.
There are lots of perfectly legal situations in which somebody could be carrying large amounts of cash.
You certainly can't say, "If he's carrying a lot of money, that means he's dealing drugs."
... but I do read law comic books.
http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=446
http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=471
http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=481
http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=496
http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=499
http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=502
And here's the critical part for purposes of this prosecution:
http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=505
"Generally speaking, you're not going to be liable for failing to act, or for selling equipment to a criminal. You don't have a duty to police others." -- Cartoon Guide to the Law idem.
The issue here is that the law starts from the principle that a vendor isn't liable for selling equipment to a criminal, but then the feds came up with the idea of prosecuting them for conspiracy. They've spread the net of liability wider and wider.
The hardware store isn't liable if somebody buys fertilizer and shovels. How does the hardware dealer know whether he's growing pot? What if the customer buys grow lights? I might be suspicious of somebody who buys grow lights, but I don't know that he's growing pot. How much evidence does the hardware dealer need before he becomes liable if the customer turns out to be growing pot? If 9 of his customers are growing orchards, and 1 of them is growing pot, is the hardware dealer going to jail because of that 1 customer growing pot? The hardware dealer could say, I know some customers are likely to be growing pot, but I don't know which ones, and I don't know for sure. What am I supposed to do, stop selling grow lights to all my customers?
(Slashdot had a story about Madoff's IT guy, who ran programs that would create phony financial reports. Madoff told him that they were running sample databases. It was a high-security business where you're not supposed to ask too many questions.)
As this comic book explains, an ordinary citizen doesn't have an obligation to do the cops' job for them. A citizen used to be able to sell dual-use equipment to anyone off the street, without being liable if they used it to commit crimes. Now the feds are expanding that liability. You're supposed to be suspicious, and refuse to sell them equipment. How suspicious? The feds are lowering the threshold. They're saying, in hindsight, "You should have known." On what evidence? Carrying large amounts of cash? Wearing flashy clothes? Being Mexican?
Yeah, the compartment guy suspected that they were dealing drugs, and he avoided dealing with them once in an abundance of caution, but he didn't know that they were dealing drugs.
A lot of people here argued that the feds were stretching the law to create conspiracy charges in order to pressure him to rat. And they didn't just want him to testify about what he knew, but to wear a wire to get new information about crimes that he didn't know about. Those arguments convinced me.
You don't have an obligation to be a cop. And if you're selling a product with legitimate uses, you're not liable if somebody uses your product for criminal purposes, under American law. Or at least that was the law before the war on drugs. Now prosecutors are expanding the law sending people to jail for activities that used to be legal.
I suggest you read the entire comic book.
That's not what the juries decided in product liability cases.
If a manufacturer knows simple, cheap ways to to prevent accidental deaths, and he doesn't use them, the manufacturer is responsible.
The juries don't buy "It's nobody's fault but your own."
A lot of times, an engineer will get on the witness stand and say the kind of things you're saying right now. That's when the juries really get annoyed and hit the companies with big damage judgments. That's what happened in the McDonald's case, when one of their engineers testified that if the customers burned themselves with coffee, it was their own fault.
This is not 1 person dying in 300 million. If you believe Federman on Huffington Post, 2 million sets were sold. The CDC said 1 child died and 33 wound up in the ER requiring surgery (which may not be all Buckyballs). If 1 child dies for every 2 million sets, for a toy, yes, that's too much. And about 1 child winds up in the ER for every 100,000 sets. That's also too much.
I'll tell you what. Let's let the free market handle it, through the tort system. When somebody dies from a Buckyball, they can sue Zucker, and the jury will award them whatever compensation they think fair.
There is a long series of case law in America that it's not enough to put a label on the product to absolve the manufacturer of responsibility for the damage that the product does. Juries don't accept it.
There's a reason why bleach bottles have childproof caps.
With Buckyballs, the warning labels just didn't work. http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/23/doctors-warning-labels-on-magnetic-toys-arent-enough/
I don't know why you place all the responsibility on the user and none of the responsibility on the company that knows their product is injuring and killing children.
I've read FDA hearing transcripts, and they go through cost-benefit calculations (that is, cost in terms of harm, not money).
OTOH, there are the benefits of Buckyballs as an adult toy. I appreciate that. After all, Albert Einstein played with magnets as a child. And the other benefit of Buckyballs is that Craig Zucker, who co-founded the company, got a big hit and was making a few million dollars. I appreciate that. I'd like to make a few million dollars myself.
OTOH, the cost of these cool toys are 1 death and 33 emergency room surgeries. (And these were serious abdominal surgeries -- some of the kids certainly would have died otherwise.) It's like a gunshot wound with no entry point.
Then along comes Zucker and argues that the benefits of Buckyballs outweighs the cost of 1 child's death, and 33 ER visits, because it's the parent's responsibility, not his, to make sure they don't misuse them. I'm not convinced.
It's true there are dangers to common household products like bathtubs, Clorox and peanuts. But these are products with significant benefits beyond being cool toys. If we ban bathtubs, I can't take a bath. If we ban Buckyballs, I have to make do with paper clips.
I don't see it. I weigh all the benefits of Buckyballs against even one toddler dying, and it's just not worth it. Do I want to play with Buckyballs if my access to Buckyballs means killing a child (even a child with supposedly irresponsible parents)? No. Do you?
Zucker is saying, "I'm willing to kill a child if I can make $10 million out of it." That's a different calculation.
There are drilling machines that will bore railroad tunnels and 4-lane highways through granite.
I'm sure can be defeated in time with civil engineering equipment.
You could ask those guys who bore railroad tunnels through the alps.
Ralph Nader settled that. Read Unsafe at Any Speed.
The automobile companies got up in court, and in Congressional hearings, and said, "Oh, yeah, we knew that 5,000 people a year were getting killed by being impaled on the steering column in minor crashes, and it would cost $50 to eliminate that hazard, but we didn't think it would sell cars so we didn't do it."
Most believe that if you're making a car, and you know how to save 5,000 lives a year, it's your responsibility to do that.