Incandescent light bulbs waste more energy than newer technologies waste. That energy comes from power plants, which generally run on coal. Coal pollutes. So, yes, the "breathing clean air" and "drinking clean water" bits are directly related to how much energy you are using in your private home.
Libertarianism is one of those political ideologies that sounds great until you actually learn things.
The video is answering a different question from the one I asked.
The video was not made in an attempt to answer your question. That someone improperly used it in response to your question does not mean that the video's argument is flawed.
The argument about the danger of talking to cops is based on a sampling error. Professor Duane says that criminal defense attorneys "always, always say it was a bad idea for their client to talk to the police". But this sample obviously only includes people who talked to the police and ended up getting arrested, and charged, and needing a criminal defense attorney. The sample wouldn't include anyone that the police talked to and decided not to arrest
That someone talked to the police and got away without being arrested does not mean that talking to the police was a good idea. This is in the same vein as thinking that launching the Shuttle with a flawed O-ring system was a good idea because they had gotten away with it in previous launches. As with NASA, you will get away with talking to police whenever you talk to police... Until the day that you don't.
His advice ignores the benefits of leniency if you're guilty and you're almost positive you'll be caught anyway
1) The police are under no obligation to follow through with their promise to seek leniency.
2) The judge/jury are under no obligation to agree to be lenient even if the cops ask them to.
3) Being lenient will still mean you get punished. If your lawyer can get you off without being punished, that would be the personally preferable outcome.
4) While the police are being lenient with you on the one crime they brought you in for, they can also be taking notes of the crimes you confess to, sometimes without even realizing it, that they didn't know about.
5) You have the right to an attorney. Use it. Having an attorney with you is not grounds to punish you more.
Even if that scenario is a valid reason not to talk to the police, it wouldn't be possible in a courtroom, where all of your answers are recorded, and it will be obvious if someone is trying to distort the meaning of something that you said earlier
All of your answers are not necessarily recorded in a side-of-road interrogation by the cops. And recordings that don't go the cops' way have been known to "be accidentally lost." If nothing else, your lawyer serves as a witness to what you else you said if something should... Happen to the tape.
Finally, are the police really that corrupt and/or stupid?
Some of them are, yes. Do we really need to show you the links? NOPD, LAPD, NYPD, and CPD are just some of the larger agencies that have had nationally televised lapses of judgment and ethics both in recent, and not-so-recent years. No one's arguing that every cop is corrupt, but the fact is that when you're talking to a cop whom you do not know, you have no way of knowing if that cop is corrupt or not. Why take the risk that you're talking to one of the bad ones?
Your entire post fails utterly to show that this video should not be taken seriously.
If the numbers work out, that's better. I get 3 weeks vacation and. . Well hell I don't even know how much sick time I get, because it's a lot. I use maybe 3 days a year at most, and since it rolls over where I work I could probably be paid to be sick for a year at this point. Last time I checked I was north of 2000 hours, and that was a while back. Point being, I'd love it if they'd convert us to 6 weeks PTO. Even reserving 2 weeks for sick leave, I'd still get 1 more week of vacation than I get now.
I think it's improper to make such a blanket statement about gamers. While you're certainly right that many gamers exhibit similar behaviors to clinical addicts (just watch the panic when an MMO goes down for any measurable length of time) there are others, myself included, who game for fun and who, when the game isn't available or is produced by a company we don't approve of, are perfectly fine not playing that game and doing something else instead.
I'll point out that deregulation was not the choice of much of the flying public. Deregulation happened when a large number of us were playing with airplanes from Matchbox. Speaking personally, I wasn't even at that stage - I was three when the President signed it into law. We didn't get a voice in that decision. While you're right that deregulation is the culprit for the mess we find ourselves in now, the blame goes to Congress for drafting it and President Carter for signing it, and subsequent Congresses for failing to repeal it even after AA's former CEO has said publicly that it was a mistake.
As for paying the lowest possible fare - well, from a consumer standpoint, airlines are parity products. I'm not going to get noticeably more legroom or a smoother ride or a better guarantee that my suitcase will arrive undamaged in the same airport I arrive at by paying more for a coach seat on the more expensive airline, so I might as well fly as cheap as I can.
The idea that we are unwilling to pay more for better service is untested, as really, "better service" is vaporware in the commercial aviation industry.
Well, 1000BC was Greece's Dark Ages, and their society was so illiterate that no one remembered how to read Linear-B, which their society had invented in better times. The study's author was probably thinking of Ancient/Classical Greece rather than Dark Age Greece, at which point this conversation applies, and still proves his conclusions to be suspect.
Generally, yes. If you're on probation, it means even the slightest screwup gets you arrested and hauled before a judge to potentially be tossed back in prison. Lying to your parole officer is a really good way to go back to jail.
Class actions are great, as long as you're a mass tort lawyer. If you're a victim, you get at best a few bucks. Oftentimes the lawyers walk away with millions while the class victims get a coupon for a certain percentage off of a product sold by the company that screwed them.
I agree with everything you said except for the part about it being gambling. It's only gambling if you don't know the outcome, but as you said, GS knew the mortgage mess was going to blow up (and in fact actively contributed to the explosion).
This was rigged "gambling," also known as racketeering, and should be prosecuted as such.
Depends. If you're talking about the public profile that anyone can look at, no they don't. If you're talking about the private profile that they have to break into your account or demand your login credentials to view, yes they do.
Exactly. I have a revolving argument with a friend of mine who gets obsessed about things. His latest obsession is Ubuntu, and he's constantly trying to get me to switch. When I point out that I need to run Photoshop and Premiere and After Effects, he tells me "well you can just dual boot," or "run WINE." Yeah, well, that's nice, but both of those solutions require that I be in a Windows environment, so what the hell would be the point of switching away from Windows in the first place? That plus the interface problems you described - even in Ubuntu, the last time I looked at it, you had to type in all sorts of shell commands to get things working, and as soon as the average person sees "Type "sudo bash blah blah"" or whatever, their eyes glaze over and they go back to clicking. Hell I came up on CP/M and DOS. I'm used to having to type weird commands every time I need to alter something, but you know what? Those OS's were in the 80's. This is 2011. Even I have come around to appreciate the value of a nice GUI where I don't have to remember esoteric commands just to load a damned printer driver. And then he tells me "Oh just wait till version Pissy Panda or whatever comes out and they say they might have a workaround for that." Big deal. Windows has it now.
But the main thing that kills Ubuntu and all the other Linux variants is that they don't do one single thing that Windows doesn't already do, and I already have all this expensive software for Windows, and I already know how to use Windows, and all my hardware works on Windows. If Linux did something unique that Windows couldn't touch, it'd be a different story, but that's not the case.
You didn't have to upgrade to Vista close to launch. You could have waited until your peripherals were supported, and then upgraded, which would mean you'd be doing the same thing some might be doing with Linux - waiting until they know it supports their stuff before they switch.
Apparently the latest incarnation of this scam is that they troll online dating sites like match.com and strike up an internet romance with lonely single women. They convince the women they're in international construction, or import/export, or some other field that would take them out of the country. Then they claim to be working a project (some of them even say it's in Nigeria, which I think is rather brazen) but will fly to the woman's city as soon as it's done. They get her excited about meeting their "boyfriend," and then write her saying the project got screwed up, they didn't get paid, and they can't make the trip unless she can send them money for the plane ticket.
It's really amazing how many women fall for this, too.
There's plenty of money available to a credentialed scientist who, either because he's wrong, or because he just wants money, is willing to deny environmental changes. Many very large business interests, the oil companies by far not the least among them, have a vested interest in convincing governments that nothing they're doing could possibly be responsible for anything that is happening to the planet, and by the way nothing is happening to the planet, honest.
The more people, and by extension, governments, become convinced that global warming is a) happening, b) bad, and c) possibly exacerbated by human activities, the more regulations will be imposed that will cut into their vast profits.
We saw a very similar showdown back when leaded gasoline was still common. Despite knowing since the 20's that leaded gasoline was quite literally poisoning everyone who made or used it, and knowing since the same time that there were alternative ways to incorporate anti-knock agents in gasoline, Standard Oil (that would be the same industry that is now arguing against the concept of global warming) insisted that leaded gasoline was perfectly safe - right up until the 1976 phaseout, and despite the fact that they were knowingly killing off their own plant workers with their lead.
And we saw the same thing in the fight against DDT.
Given that a corporation's only motivation is that of profit, literally every view put forth by one is inherently suspect. The very fact that oil companies are denying global warming is enough to bring intense scrutiny upon that claim, because we can be sure that they would not make such claims, true or not, if they were not attempting to profit, or protect profits, with them.
well i wouldn't say that the normal christmas lights are as dangerous as you make them out to be. After all, in our lawsuit happy society, where people sue McDonalds because they're fat, if christmas lights were dangerous, the lawsuits would be flying.
120V is not as dangerous as people make it out to be. You can get shocked by 120V and just feel some tingling in your arm. This has happened to me several times (you know the routine: "Honey is the power off?" "Yes" zzzap!) 120V only becomes dangerous in a couple of situations: Increase your conductivity significantly - stand in a basin full of salt water, for example. The other way it can become dangerous is if you let it cross your heart. You'd pretty much have to grab both sides of a split wire, completing the circuit, to do that. (this is why electricians have the "one hand" rule where one hand stays in your pocket when you're working on live wires) It's pretty unlikely that someone trying to extract a christmas bulb would be able to get both hands in a position where they could complete the circuit across their body - -the current would just jump from one hand to the other.
Plus keep in mind that most (if not all) christmas lights have fuses inside the plug. If someone starts getting shocked off of a broken bulb, the amp draw on that strand will go through the roof and blow the fuse.
That said, I'm not gonna accept any liability if someone reads this and goes off to shock themselves;)
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The strain caused by his usage should be reflected in his bill, thus he and his ilk end up paying for a slightly beefier power grid.
Except that isn't how it works. When the power company needs to upgrade its grid, it raises prices on everyone, not just the wasteful users.
Incandescent light bulbs waste more energy than newer technologies waste. That energy comes from power plants, which generally run on coal. Coal pollutes. So, yes, the "breathing clean air" and "drinking clean water" bits are directly related to how much energy you are using in your private home.
Libertarianism is one of those political ideologies that sounds great until you actually learn things.
The video is answering a different question from the one I asked.
The video was not made in an attempt to answer your question. That someone improperly used it in response to your question does not mean that the video's argument is flawed.
The argument about the danger of talking to cops is based on a sampling error. Professor Duane says that criminal defense attorneys "always, always say it was a bad idea for their client to talk to the police". But this sample obviously only includes people who talked to the police and ended up getting arrested, and charged, and needing a criminal defense attorney. The sample wouldn't include anyone that the police talked to and decided not to arrest
That someone talked to the police and got away without being arrested does not mean that talking to the police was a good idea. This is in the same vein as thinking that launching the Shuttle with a flawed O-ring system was a good idea because they had gotten away with it in previous launches. As with NASA, you will get away with talking to police whenever you talk to police... Until the day that you don't.
His advice ignores the benefits of leniency if you're guilty and you're almost positive you'll be caught anyway
1) The police are under no obligation to follow through with their promise to seek leniency.
2) The judge/jury are under no obligation to agree to be lenient even if the cops ask them to.
3) Being lenient will still mean you get punished. If your lawyer can get you off without being punished, that would be the personally preferable outcome.
4) While the police are being lenient with you on the one crime they brought you in for, they can also be taking notes of the crimes you confess to, sometimes without even realizing it, that they didn't know about.
5) You have the right to an attorney. Use it. Having an attorney with you is not grounds to punish you more.
Even if that scenario is a valid reason not to talk to the police, it wouldn't be possible in a courtroom, where all of your answers are recorded, and it will be obvious if someone is trying to distort the meaning of something that you said earlier
All of your answers are not necessarily recorded in a side-of-road interrogation by the cops. And recordings that don't go the cops' way have been known to "be accidentally lost." If nothing else, your lawyer serves as a witness to what you else you said if something should... Happen to the tape.
Finally, are the police really that corrupt and/or stupid?
Some of them are, yes. Do we really need to show you the links? NOPD, LAPD, NYPD, and CPD are just some of the larger agencies that have had nationally televised lapses of judgment and ethics both in recent, and not-so-recent years. No one's arguing that every cop is corrupt, but the fact is that when you're talking to a cop whom you do not know, you have no way of knowing if that cop is corrupt or not. Why take the risk that you're talking to one of the bad ones?
Your entire post fails utterly to show that this video should not be taken seriously.
If the numbers work out, that's better. I get 3 weeks vacation and. . Well hell I don't even know how much sick time I get, because it's a lot. I use maybe 3 days a year at most, and since it rolls over where I work I could probably be paid to be sick for a year at this point. Last time I checked I was north of 2000 hours, and that was a while back. Point being, I'd love it if they'd convert us to 6 weeks PTO. Even reserving 2 weeks for sick leave, I'd still get 1 more week of vacation than I get now.
I think it's improper to make such a blanket statement about gamers. While you're certainly right that many gamers exhibit similar behaviors to clinical addicts (just watch the panic when an MMO goes down for any measurable length of time) there are others, myself included, who game for fun and who, when the game isn't available or is produced by a company we don't approve of, are perfectly fine not playing that game and doing something else instead.
I'll point out that deregulation was not the choice of much of the flying public. Deregulation happened when a large number of us were playing with airplanes from Matchbox. Speaking personally, I wasn't even at that stage - I was three when the President signed it into law. We didn't get a voice in that decision. While you're right that deregulation is the culprit for the mess we find ourselves in now, the blame goes to Congress for drafting it and President Carter for signing it, and subsequent Congresses for failing to repeal it even after AA's former CEO has said publicly that it was a mistake.
As for paying the lowest possible fare - well, from a consumer standpoint, airlines are parity products. I'm not going to get noticeably more legroom or a smoother ride or a better guarantee that my suitcase will arrive undamaged in the same airport I arrive at by paying more for a coach seat on the more expensive airline, so I might as well fly as cheap as I can.
The idea that we are unwilling to pay more for better service is untested, as really, "better service" is vaporware in the commercial aviation industry.
Well, 1000BC was Greece's Dark Ages, and their society was so illiterate that no one remembered how to read Linear-B, which their society had invented in better times. The study's author was probably thinking of Ancient/Classical Greece rather than Dark Age Greece, at which point this conversation applies, and still proves his conclusions to be suspect.
Generally, yes. If you're on probation, it means even the slightest screwup gets you arrested and hauled before a judge to potentially be tossed back in prison.
Lying to your parole officer is a really good way to go back to jail.
Class actions are great, as long as you're a mass tort lawyer. If you're a victim, you get at best a few bucks. Oftentimes the lawyers walk away with millions while the class victims get a coupon for a certain percentage off of a product sold by the company that screwed them.
I agree with everything you said except for the part about it being gambling. It's only gambling if you don't know the outcome, but as you said, GS knew the mortgage mess was going to blow up (and in fact actively contributed to the explosion).
This was rigged "gambling," also known as racketeering, and should be prosecuted as such.
Depends. If you're talking about the public profile that anyone can look at, no they don't. If you're talking about the private profile that they have to break into your account or demand your login credentials to view, yes they do.
Exactly. I have a revolving argument with a friend of mine who gets obsessed about things. His latest obsession is Ubuntu, and he's constantly trying to get me to switch. When I point out that I need to run Photoshop and Premiere and After Effects, he tells me "well you can just dual boot," or "run WINE." Yeah, well, that's nice, but both of those solutions require that I be in a Windows environment, so what the hell would be the point of switching away from Windows in the first place? That plus the interface problems you described - even in Ubuntu, the last time I looked at it, you had to type in all sorts of shell commands to get things working, and as soon as the average person sees "Type "sudo bash blah blah"" or whatever, their eyes glaze over and they go back to clicking. Hell I came up on CP/M and DOS. I'm used to having to type weird commands every time I need to alter something, but you know what? Those OS's were in the 80's. This is 2011. Even I have come around to appreciate the value of a nice GUI where I don't have to remember esoteric commands just to load a damned printer driver. And then he tells me "Oh just wait till version Pissy Panda or whatever comes out and they say they might have a workaround for that." Big deal. Windows has it now.
But the main thing that kills Ubuntu and all the other Linux variants is that they don't do one single thing that Windows doesn't already do, and I already have all this expensive software for Windows, and I already know how to use Windows, and all my hardware works on Windows. If Linux did something unique that Windows couldn't touch, it'd be a different story, but that's not the case.
You didn't have to upgrade to Vista close to launch. You could have waited until your peripherals were supported, and then upgraded, which would mean you'd be doing the same thing some might be doing with Linux - waiting until they know it supports their stuff before they switch.
Apparently the latest incarnation of this scam is that they troll online dating sites like match.com and strike up an internet romance with lonely single women. They convince the women they're in international construction, or import/export, or some other field that would take them out of the country. Then they claim to be working a project (some of them even say it's in Nigeria, which I think is rather brazen) but will fly to the woman's city as soon as it's done. They get her excited about meeting their "boyfriend," and then write her saying the project got screwed up, they didn't get paid, and they can't make the trip unless she can send them money for the plane ticket.
It's really amazing how many women fall for this, too.
There's plenty of money available to a credentialed scientist who, either because he's wrong, or because he just wants money, is willing to deny environmental changes. Many very large business interests, the oil companies by far not the least among them, have a vested interest in convincing governments that nothing they're doing could possibly be responsible for anything that is happening to the planet, and by the way nothing is happening to the planet, honest.
The more people, and by extension, governments, become convinced that global warming is a) happening, b) bad, and c) possibly exacerbated by human activities, the more regulations will be imposed that will cut into their vast profits.
We saw a very similar showdown back when leaded gasoline was still common. Despite knowing since the 20's that leaded gasoline was quite literally poisoning everyone who made or used it, and knowing since the same time that there were alternative ways to incorporate anti-knock agents in gasoline, Standard Oil (that would be the same industry that is now arguing against the concept of global warming) insisted that leaded gasoline was perfectly safe - right up until the 1976 phaseout, and despite the fact that they were knowingly killing off their own plant workers with their lead.
And we saw the same thing in the fight against DDT.
Given that a corporation's only motivation is that of profit, literally every view put forth by one is inherently suspect. The very fact that oil companies are denying global warming is enough to bring intense scrutiny upon that claim, because we can be sure that they would not make such claims, true or not, if they were not attempting to profit, or protect profits, with them.
well i wouldn't say that the normal christmas lights are as dangerous as you make them out to be. After all, in our lawsuit happy society, where people sue McDonalds because they're fat, if christmas lights were dangerous, the lawsuits would be flying. 120V is not as dangerous as people make it out to be. You can get shocked by 120V and just feel some tingling in your arm. This has happened to me several times (you know the routine: "Honey is the power off?" "Yes" zzzap!) 120V only becomes dangerous in a couple of situations: Increase your conductivity significantly - stand in a basin full of salt water, for example. The other way it can become dangerous is if you let it cross your heart. You'd pretty much have to grab both sides of a split wire, completing the circuit, to do that. (this is why electricians have the "one hand" rule where one hand stays in your pocket when you're working on live wires) It's pretty unlikely that someone trying to extract a christmas bulb would be able to get both hands in a position where they could complete the circuit across their body - -the current would just jump from one hand to the other. Plus keep in mind that most (if not all) christmas lights have fuses inside the plug. If someone starts getting shocked off of a broken bulb, the amp draw on that strand will go through the roof and blow the fuse. That said, I'm not gonna accept any liability if someone reads this and goes off to shock themselves ;)