As a loyal slashdotter I have carefully read the summary and nothing else. If I understood TFS this isn't about the paper itself... and the New York Times and not this article was the first to use the word in print. What is this celebrating again? The second time cyborg appeared in print?
"Plus, increasing competition means that the employee can easily find other jobs because the system encourages productive, job-giving companies rather than government-sponsored monopolies."
Increasing competition does mean that. But decreased regulation doesn't increase competition any more than increased regulation. If you have more regulation the wealthy pay for favorable regulation if you have less regulation they act directly to cut off competition. Either way competition cuts profits.
And as I've said elsewhere. If you are wealthy and have extra income to invest either in your own business or another there is a greater return in investing in entrenched powers than fighting them. The only one who has a motive to fight is the poor man and the poor man can't afford to fight.
"No, because then what happens is a new company needs to recruit people so they have better working conditions, etc"
There are no shortage of people willing to work with the same working conditions. There is no need for this competition so it won't happen.
"Trusts only work with government assistance."
Trusts? I was talking about collusion. It's illegal but happens both in spoken and unspoken fashion on a daily basis. The kind of competition you are talking about breaking these agreements is expensive and reduces profits. It is much more profitable to invest in the group of companies that collude with only token competition and have a rigged and controlled market than to invest in a new company that is constantly burning on tight margins in stiff competition.
"The "rich" don't magically have some sort of power because they have wealth."
Wealth is power. Wealth is leverage and has a momentum all its own. If you make furniture and a billionaire asks you to make a piece and hints there might be more commissions to come you give the job top priority, put your top craftsman on the piece and give him the lowest price you can sustain. If a poor man who saved for months comes in he pays full price and will get the piece when you get around to it.
Wealth also acts as a buffer. A wealthy man can afford to keep his investments until they are mature. A poor man must sell his goods at the first opportunity and hope for the best price because his family will starve if he holds the goods.
"If I didn't want my job, I'd say screw it and move on to another job or start my own company, both of which, barring the government fucking those up, would be very easy to do."
I wouldn't. I've owned my own company and it isn't an easy thing to do. There aren't really any governmental barriers the barriers are the far more wealthy companies that get prices because of their sheer size and thus can undercut your prices. Not to mention the brand power they bring to the table. As for the other job, the young and stupid quit their job and hop to another they do this until they realize that there really isn't a great deal of difference from one to the next.
"A) How did the rich become rich? In a free society it is because they (or an ancestor) did exceptional work"
Or lacked scruples or ethics, or were willing to steal from or exploit others. Doing exceptional work is more likely to get you exploited by someone with no scruples than rich.
"B) How did the poor become poor? In most cases its laziness."
Utterly ridiculous. The poor got poor by exploited by the rich or by having a lack of opportunity. There are lazy among both the rich and the poor. If anything there are more lazy among the rich than the poor.
Here is a good example. Look at the "what country Americans won their independence from" question. The answers other than US indicate people who didn't understand the question. Many of them probably thought "well we won independence in the revolutionary war from the british, I'm not sure who we won it from AFTER the revolutionary war... the French sound likely" some of those probably knew the french were our allies so it must have been someone else.
The "no opinion' category is 19% which is incorrectly interpreted as people who don't know the answer. The reality is that these are mostly people who are afraid any other answer will trigger a round of followup questions. Anyone who said "I don't care" was likely put in this category.
So you get closer to the number of Americans who know the answer to this question if you add up those who answered correctly and the "no opinion".
So 76% + 19% = 95% knowing the answer and a huge portion of the other 5% being tricked by the question.
Once upon a time I was a survey taker. Surveys are generally geared to show something and the questions reflect it. Even though the individual questions are not biased an intelligent individual can see the direction they are being led.
Often they misunderstand the question but more often they try to guide the survey to expressing their overall viewpoint rather than worrying about the accuracy of any given question.
To give an unrelated example. One survey we did was termed in house as being 'the tobacco survey'. The survey asked if they smoked. It asked how much. If they indicated they smoked what they survey considered heavily it then probed into their knowledge of the health risks and how concerned they are about them.
The first problem is that the survey asked how concerned you've been "over the last 6 months" over health risk x. Even if you said you weren't aware of that risk. They would protest that they were concerned now but didn't know about the risk. I wasn't allowed to guide them into providing their actual level of concern about the health risk I was forced to let them say "no" which was true but would give a bogus result out of context.
For some others it was obvious they felt the 40 questions about did you know this health risk or that seemed like an attack or a lecture.
Others simply tried to rig the game and give whatever answers would generate the least number of followup questions in order to get the $10 coupon offered for taking the survey.
"Maybe because the literacy tests had nothing to do with knowledge and everything about cultural familiarity?"
If you take out the word "white" from your sentence its actually an argument in favor of literacy tests. I'm not sure how our language is 'white' culture in the first place so it doesn't seem to belong.
Since English literacy is a requirement for gaining citizenship in the United States it seems fair enough to require it to vote.
"A corporation that screws their employees in a free society soon has no employees to work for them, so the company dies. A corporation that is unethical soon has no customers so it dies. Unlike governments, corporations must work to the will of the people or else die. "
Blatantly false. Corporations have common interests with their competitors. It is more profitable to collaborate with a small number of competitors than to have true competition and try to win out. One of the things they collaborate on is working conditions. You can't quit and go somewhere else because everywhere else does the same thing. Corporations have areas where they can compete now for employee attention, areas like invasive drug testing. Good luck quitting and causing the corporation to die because of drug testing.
What you are describing is not individual anarchy, you want individuals policed. But it is corporate and financial anarchy. It doesn't work to allow individuals to do what they want because the bad will they earn will not bring them in line. The same is true of corporate and financial anarchy.
Your system fails because right is not on the side of he with the most financial leverage. An employer always has the upper hand over an employee because the employee has only one job and employer has many employees. If an employee quits an employer simply replaces him because they structured things to handle the loss of employees but if the employee quits he may well starve.
The entire reason we form government in the first place is to more evenly distribute power. We have police because collectively the weak are stronger than the brute and with our police we equalize the brute to make everyone equally strong. The same is true of the financially strong, we must equalize their strength vs that of poor so the poor are not subject to wishes of the rich. Your idea of a weak government fails to protect the poor from the rich. Perhaps because you are rich yourself or hope to be or maybe you are poor and stupid and bought the rich mans line.
"When freed from excessive taxation, more people will donate money to private charities that can and will provide for people who actually need help and not people who game the system like what the Food stamps/welfare/unemployment benefits do in the US."
Give me a fscking break. They didn't do this before modern heavy taxation and they won't start if you take it away. The only reason they contribute now is the tax breaks.
Why would you want to go to a flat tax rate? The problem with the tax system as it stands is that the rich get out of paying their full share, not that they have a larger share.
In your world with smaller grids (or rather grids with only large transmission lines) and large highways do we all suddenly die from this lack?
Nope. In fact, what would all suddenly do is have more localized distribution of power and lower consumption of fossil fuels. We might even have a sustainable nation.
Just because we all used to these conveniences doesn't mean they are actually a good thing.
If you don't believe you can trust your observations than everything else becomes meaningless. The argument against this is that you can trust observations because they are corroborated by others. All objective evaluation, science, and measurement is built upon this fragile principle.
The only problem with that is that you don't really have any way to be certain if there ARE any others.
"If you do not trust the school to make the at least acceptable choices for your child while they are at school what on earth are you doing sending them there?"
You are required to by law. You don't have time to home school. You can't afford private school.
I don't think most parents send children to public schools because they trust them or think its the best option for their children. They do it because its better than no education and the best option they can afford.
"Guess what? We've got a pretty good idea how many crimes are committed where people aren't caught. People tend to report crimes, especially big ones."
That a rather large assertion without any support. I can't speak of all areas of crime, only 'cybercrime'. I can assure that most of this type of crime DOES NOT go reported regardless of size.
The reason is very simple. At this level both the robbed and the insurance company both have a great interest in making sure the event doesn't go public. That interest is greater than whatever help the police might provide. The insurance company has other clients who are likely vulnerable to the same thing. It is usually better to prevent others from finding out how to copycat than to stop this one guy. Especially if the guy is reported and not caught! The company robbed doesn't want to see a story about how they were attacked on MSNBC the next day. Their stock would plummet! Forget the company getting robbed, that would cost the CEO, VP's, and the board a lot of money on a personal level.
Your numbers about crime not being profitable run counter to common sense. The bulk of the things we outlaw are only called bad because they shift a large amount of wealth from one to another easily, consistently, and rapidly.
Also you pose this false dichotomy where one has to repeatedly take the same chance or else be able to live off a single event.
Five years ago it took 3hrs worth of work (but not time since you have to wait for mailings and such) to fake an identity get a few thousand in credit extended and convert that credit into cash. A reasonably intelligent person could figure out how to perform this task and make tracing and catching him meet the 'hard enough' threshold within an afternoon. That person could walk away with $5000. That is a pretty large chunk of cash for most of us.
The credit card company not only wouldn't report this but would fight with law enforcement in every way they legally could if law enforcement tried to investigate. Because of this if the 'victim' tries to report the crime the local police would say that interstate banking is the FBI problem. The FBI would tell her not to file the report because the card companies won't cooperate!
How do I know? I saw it first hand many times. If you did this enough the card companies would see a pattern and report you. They would cooperate. But if you were bright enough to stop at one or two times you could make $5k-$10k pretty much risk free.* Afterward you could continue your life the same as before but with a pretty substantial chunk, perhaps to invest for retirement. Perhaps for a child's college fund. Or maybe just to blow, it was free and easy money after all. As for taxes, $5k-$10k doesn't change a lifestyle and can easily be absorbed without having to pay the taxes as long as you don't deposit it all at once (or even at the same bank within a 3 month period, banks have to report large cash transactions over $5k or a suspicious combination of them).
* This is no longer the case. So many bright and unreported criminals did this that identity theft laws were lobbied for and put into place to make this more difficult.
Last I checked they don't chloroform you before any of those. It doesn't particularly matter how they got your prints, you know if you've been printed.
"Most criminals are just not that bright. A friend of mine has worked with the public defender's office and the stories he has of the stupid criminals they try to defend and just amazing. They get caught and busted by their own stupidity more than anything else."
Most people are not that bright so it stands to reason most crooks aren't either. That said, has it ever occurred to you that your friend and most others in the justice system aren't catching many smart crooks because smart crooks aren't getting caught?
"So you find that when you have that, you have options of where to work and what to do. Makes crime less attractive."
Crime pays better than legit work. That makes crime more attractive. Most smart people choosing legit work today simply haven't found a smart opportunity for crime or don't have the guts. With a big enough payoff, small enough risk, and small enough amount of effort most people would be all over it.
"especially on repeated attempts"
That's a given. But there is no particular reason there needs to be repeated attempts.
Yes and the cameras all have something in common, they are mounted up high to get maximum coverage. As long as you don't look up, they don't capture your face. ATMs are a different story.
Actually the preferred method is to use crooks who don't have a record and therefore don't have prints on file. If the cops have you to compare the prints you are already busted.
I don't know enough about Judicial precedent in Sweden to argue the point to be honest.
Here in the US courts have an odd habit of throwing out usual practice and technicalities if they don't pass the smell test. If investigations are exempt from copyright restrictions and the supposedly has a likelihood of being used entirely for investigations on par with likelihood of the existence of gravity a judge is likely to toss any argument saying that likelihood is hypothetical out as nonsense. Especially for the police. In the US courts (which are supposed to be impartial) tend to favor whichever party has a larger financial influence vs a smaller one and government over non-government and so on progressively up the food chain.
For example, if an individual uses legal instruments like trusts that can be drawn up without red tape and fees to gain any form of upper hand. The court will usually look at the bottom line as if none of that paperwork exists and see if there is a tangible exchange of money. If a bank does the same thing moving money around in 'accounts' on their books even though the money never leaves their bottom line and they never stop drawing interest, the court is likely to rule in their favor rather than according to their bottom line.
In this case, a US court would be looking for any excuse to find your attack on the police to be nonsense and defend law enforcement. After all the impartial judge is on the same team as the police.
Additionally there are the caloric costs of acquiring, chewing, and preparing the food in question. Depending on who you ask none of those count or all of them do because they can vary from one food to the next.
That may seem pretty trivial but a Celery stalk only contains six calories in the first place. And its not a given that you actually absorb all the nutritional content of the stalk so even though there are six calories in the stalk only 2 or 3 might be absorbed and count against the digestive process.
As much as I oppose anything that strengthens the police state (any police state really) I feel compelled to point something out. Shoeprints being part of a future police investigation is about as hypothetical as my claim that should I throw a rock in the air it will fall back down.
The volume of previous observations that can be found by searching through police files where shoe prints were in evidence is pretty substantial.
It's not as cut and dry as I made it sound. There are camps that negative food measurements are crediting too much to the digestion of the food and camps that claim the bunkers aren't counting enough.
I wouldn't go out and do the negative calorie diet regardless of which camp you fall in with though. It is a starvation diet and starvation diets are bad.
Slashdot Mirror
As a loyal slashdotter I have carefully read the summary and nothing else. If I understood TFS this isn't about the paper itself... and the New York Times and not this article was the first to use the word in print. What is this celebrating again? The second time cyborg appeared in print?
"Plus, increasing competition means that the employee can easily find other jobs because the system encourages productive, job-giving companies rather than government-sponsored monopolies."
Increasing competition does mean that. But decreased regulation doesn't increase competition any more than increased regulation. If you have more regulation the wealthy pay for favorable regulation if you have less regulation they act directly to cut off competition. Either way competition cuts profits.
And as I've said elsewhere. If you are wealthy and have extra income to invest either in your own business or another there is a greater return in investing in entrenched powers than fighting them. The only one who has a motive to fight is the poor man and the poor man can't afford to fight.
"No, because then what happens is a new company needs to recruit people so they have better working conditions, etc"
There are no shortage of people willing to work with the same working conditions. There is no need for this competition so it won't happen.
"Trusts only work with government assistance."
Trusts? I was talking about collusion. It's illegal but happens both in spoken and unspoken fashion on a daily basis. The kind of competition you are talking about breaking these agreements is expensive and reduces profits. It is much more profitable to invest in the group of companies that collude with only token competition and have a rigged and controlled market than to invest in a new company that is constantly burning on tight margins in stiff competition.
"The "rich" don't magically have some sort of power because they have wealth."
Wealth is power. Wealth is leverage and has a momentum all its own. If you make furniture and a billionaire asks you to make a piece and hints there might be more commissions to come you give the job top priority, put your top craftsman on the piece and give him the lowest price you can sustain. If a poor man who saved for months comes in he pays full price and will get the piece when you get around to it.
Wealth also acts as a buffer. A wealthy man can afford to keep his investments until they are mature. A poor man must sell his goods at the first opportunity and hope for the best price because his family will starve if he holds the goods.
"If I didn't want my job, I'd say screw it and move on to another job or start my own company, both of which, barring the government fucking those up, would be very easy to do."
I wouldn't. I've owned my own company and it isn't an easy thing to do. There aren't really any governmental barriers the barriers are the far more wealthy companies that get prices because of their sheer size and thus can undercut your prices. Not to mention the brand power they bring to the table. As for the other job, the young and stupid quit their job and hop to another they do this until they realize that there really isn't a great deal of difference from one to the next.
"A) How did the rich become rich? In a free society it is because they (or an ancestor) did exceptional work"
Or lacked scruples or ethics, or were willing to steal from or exploit others. Doing exceptional work is more likely to get you exploited by someone with no scruples than rich.
"B) How did the poor become poor? In most cases its laziness."
Utterly ridiculous. The poor got poor by exploited by the rich or by having a lack of opportunity. There are lazy among both the rich and the poor. If anything there are more lazy among the rich than the poor.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/3742/new-poll-gauges-americans-general-knowledge-levels.aspx
Here is a good example. Look at the "what country Americans won their independence from" question. The answers other than US indicate people who didn't understand the question. Many of them probably thought "well we won independence in the revolutionary war from the british, I'm not sure who we won it from AFTER the revolutionary war... the French sound likely" some of those probably knew the french were our allies so it must have been someone else.
The "no opinion' category is 19% which is incorrectly interpreted as people who don't know the answer. The reality is that these are mostly people who are afraid any other answer will trigger a round of followup questions. Anyone who said "I don't care" was likely put in this category.
So you get closer to the number of Americans who know the answer to this question if you add up those who answered correctly and the "no opinion".
So 76% + 19% = 95% knowing the answer and a huge portion of the other 5% being tricked by the question.
how about we use the giant black hole at the center of the universe?
Once upon a time I was a survey taker. Surveys are generally geared to show something and the questions reflect it. Even though the individual questions are not biased an intelligent individual can see the direction they are being led.
Often they misunderstand the question but more often they try to guide the survey to expressing their overall viewpoint rather than worrying about the accuracy of any given question.
To give an unrelated example. One survey we did was termed in house as being 'the tobacco survey'. The survey asked if they smoked. It asked how much. If they indicated they smoked what they survey considered heavily it then probed into their knowledge of the health risks and how concerned they are about them.
The first problem is that the survey asked how concerned you've been "over the last 6 months" over health risk x. Even if you said you weren't aware of that risk. They would protest that they were concerned now but didn't know about the risk. I wasn't allowed to guide them into providing their actual level of concern about the health risk I was forced to let them say "no" which was true but would give a bogus result out of context.
For some others it was obvious they felt the 40 questions about did you know this health risk or that seemed like an attack or a lecture.
Others simply tried to rig the game and give whatever answers would generate the least number of followup questions in order to get the $10 coupon offered for taking the survey.
"Maybe because the literacy tests had nothing to do with knowledge and everything about cultural familiarity?"
If you take out the word "white" from your sentence its actually an argument in favor of literacy tests. I'm not sure how our language is 'white' culture in the first place so it doesn't seem to belong.
Since English literacy is a requirement for gaining citizenship in the United States it seems fair enough to require it to vote.
"A corporation that screws their employees in a free society soon has no employees to work for them, so the company dies. A corporation that is unethical soon has no customers so it dies. Unlike governments, corporations must work to the will of the people or else die. "
Blatantly false. Corporations have common interests with their competitors. It is more profitable to collaborate with a small number of competitors than to have true competition and try to win out. One of the things they collaborate on is working conditions. You can't quit and go somewhere else because everywhere else does the same thing. Corporations have areas where they can compete now for employee attention, areas like invasive drug testing. Good luck quitting and causing the corporation to die because of drug testing.
What you are describing is not individual anarchy, you want individuals policed. But it is corporate and financial anarchy. It doesn't work to allow individuals to do what they want because the bad will they earn will not bring them in line. The same is true of corporate and financial anarchy.
Your system fails because right is not on the side of he with the most financial leverage. An employer always has the upper hand over an employee because the employee has only one job and employer has many employees. If an employee quits an employer simply replaces him because they structured things to handle the loss of employees but if the employee quits he may well starve.
The entire reason we form government in the first place is to more evenly distribute power. We have police because collectively the weak are stronger than the brute and with our police we equalize the brute to make everyone equally strong. The same is true of the financially strong, we must equalize their strength vs that of poor so the poor are not subject to wishes of the rich. Your idea of a weak government fails to protect the poor from the rich. Perhaps because you are rich yourself or hope to be or maybe you are poor and stupid and bought the rich mans line.
"When freed from excessive taxation, more people will donate money to private charities that can and will provide for people who actually need help and not people who game the system like what the Food stamps/welfare/unemployment benefits do in the US."
Give me a fscking break. They didn't do this before modern heavy taxation and they won't start if you take it away. The only reason they contribute now is the tax breaks.
Why would you want to go to a flat tax rate? The problem with the tax system as it stands is that the rich get out of paying their full share, not that they have a larger share.
If we are going to get rid of our massive government we need to get rid of corporations and liability mitigation schemes.
In your world with smaller grids (or rather grids with only large transmission lines) and large highways do we all suddenly die from this lack?
Nope. In fact, what would all suddenly do is have more localized distribution of power and lower consumption of fossil fuels. We might even have a sustainable nation.
Just because we all used to these conveniences doesn't mean they are actually a good thing.
There are people who don't believe in anything.
If you don't believe you can trust your observations than everything else becomes meaningless. The argument against this is that you can trust observations because they are corroborated by others. All objective evaluation, science, and measurement is built upon this fragile principle.
The only problem with that is that you don't really have any way to be certain if there ARE any others.
"If you do not trust the school to make the at least acceptable choices for your child while they are at school what on earth are you doing sending them there?"
You are required to by law. You don't have time to home school. You can't afford private school.
I don't think most parents send children to public schools because they trust them or think its the best option for their children. They do it because its better than no education and the best option they can afford.
"Guess what? We've got a pretty good idea how many crimes are committed where people aren't caught. People tend to report crimes, especially big ones."
That a rather large assertion without any support. I can't speak of all areas of crime, only 'cybercrime'. I can assure that most of this type of crime DOES NOT go reported regardless of size.
The reason is very simple. At this level both the robbed and the insurance company both have a great interest in making sure the event doesn't go public. That interest is greater than whatever help the police might provide. The insurance company has other clients who are likely vulnerable to the same thing. It is usually better to prevent others from finding out how to copycat than to stop this one guy. Especially if the guy is reported and not caught! The company robbed doesn't want to see a story about how they were attacked on MSNBC the next day. Their stock would plummet! Forget the company getting robbed, that would cost the CEO, VP's, and the board a lot of money on a personal level.
Your numbers about crime not being profitable run counter to common sense. The bulk of the things we outlaw are only called bad because they shift a large amount of wealth from one to another easily, consistently, and rapidly.
Also you pose this false dichotomy where one has to repeatedly take the same chance or else be able to live off a single event.
Five years ago it took 3hrs worth of work (but not time since you have to wait for mailings and such) to fake an identity get a few thousand in credit extended and convert that credit into cash. A reasonably intelligent person could figure out how to perform this task and make tracing and catching him meet the 'hard enough' threshold within an afternoon. That person could walk away with $5000. That is a pretty large chunk of cash for most of us.
The credit card company not only wouldn't report this but would fight with law enforcement in every way they legally could if law enforcement tried to investigate. Because of this if the 'victim' tries to report the crime the local police would say that interstate banking is the FBI problem. The FBI would tell her not to file the report because the card companies won't cooperate!
How do I know? I saw it first hand many times. If you did this enough the card companies would see a pattern and report you. They would cooperate. But if you were bright enough to stop at one or two times you could make $5k-$10k pretty much risk free.* Afterward you could continue your life the same as before but with a pretty substantial chunk, perhaps to invest for retirement. Perhaps for a child's college fund. Or maybe just to blow, it was free and easy money after all. As for taxes, $5k-$10k doesn't change a lifestyle and can easily be absorbed without having to pay the taxes as long as you don't deposit it all at once (or even at the same bank within a 3 month period, banks have to report large cash transactions over $5k or a suspicious combination of them).
* This is no longer the case. So many bright and unreported criminals did this that identity theft laws were lobbied for and put into place to make this more difficult.
Last I checked they don't chloroform you before any of those. It doesn't particularly matter how they got your prints, you know if you've been printed.
"Most criminals are just not that bright. A friend of mine has worked with the public defender's office and the stories he has of the stupid criminals they try to defend and just amazing. They get caught and busted by their own stupidity more than anything else."
Most people are not that bright so it stands to reason most crooks aren't either. That said, has it ever occurred to you that your friend and most others in the justice system aren't catching many smart crooks because smart crooks aren't getting caught?
"So you find that when you have that, you have options of where to work and what to do. Makes crime less attractive."
Crime pays better than legit work. That makes crime more attractive. Most smart people choosing legit work today simply haven't found a smart opportunity for crime or don't have the guts. With a big enough payoff, small enough risk, and small enough amount of effort most people would be all over it.
"especially on repeated attempts"
That's a given. But there is no particular reason there needs to be repeated attempts.
Yes and the cameras all have something in common, they are mounted up high to get maximum coverage. As long as you don't look up, they don't capture your face. ATMs are a different story.
Actually the preferred method is to use crooks who don't have a record and therefore don't have prints on file. If the cops have you to compare the prints you are already busted.
you do know common usage trumps the dictionary when it comes to language?
I don't know enough about Judicial precedent in Sweden to argue the point to be honest.
Here in the US courts have an odd habit of throwing out usual practice and technicalities if they don't pass the smell test. If investigations are exempt from copyright restrictions and the supposedly has a likelihood of being used entirely for investigations on par with likelihood of the existence of gravity a judge is likely to toss any argument saying that likelihood is hypothetical out as nonsense. Especially for the police. In the US courts (which are supposed to be impartial) tend to favor whichever party has a larger financial influence vs a smaller one and government over non-government and so on progressively up the food chain.
For example, if an individual uses legal instruments like trusts that can be drawn up without red tape and fees to gain any form of upper hand. The court will usually look at the bottom line as if none of that paperwork exists and see if there is a tangible exchange of money. If a bank does the same thing moving money around in 'accounts' on their books even though the money never leaves their bottom line and they never stop drawing interest, the court is likely to rule in their favor rather than according to their bottom line.
In this case, a US court would be looking for any excuse to find your attack on the police to be nonsense and defend law enforcement. After all the impartial judge is on the same team as the police.
Welcome to the world of nutrition 'science'.
Additionally there are the caloric costs of acquiring, chewing, and preparing the food in question. Depending on who you ask none of those count or all of them do because they can vary from one food to the next.
That may seem pretty trivial but a Celery stalk only contains six calories in the first place. And its not a given that you actually absorb all the nutritional content of the stalk so even though there are six calories in the stalk only 2 or 3 might be absorbed and count against the digestive process.
As much as I oppose anything that strengthens the police state (any police state really) I feel compelled to point something out. Shoeprints being part of a future police investigation is about as hypothetical as my claim that should I throw a rock in the air it will fall back down.
The volume of previous observations that can be found by searching through police files where shoe prints were in evidence is pretty substantial.
It's not as cut and dry as I made it sound. There are camps that negative food measurements are crediting too much to the digestion of the food and camps that claim the bunkers aren't counting enough.
But here is the idea:
http://www.burnthefat.com/negative_calorie_food.html
I wouldn't go out and do the negative calorie diet regardless of which camp you fall in with though. It is a starvation diet and starvation diets are bad.
You can find plenty of links for both camps:
http://www.google.com/search?q=negative+calorie+foods&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a