That's not how it works. What if a parent feels that severely beating their child is an effective way to modify troublesome (also defined by them) behavior, and therefore worth the physical discomfort? We've decided based on the evidence of the harm inflicted and its value in preventing other harm, that's bullshit and they can't do it because they disagree. What about parents who want to claim they disagree that molestation is harmful, and is instead beneficial sexual education? Yeah, not all kids who are molested suffer lasting trauma, so I guess they've got their fact-backed value-based dispute right? Back on the medical side, parents who refuse treatment for a fatal but curable disease because it offends their religion? Bullshit that's freedom. Same deal for vaccines. Parents don't get to just decide they disagree with the value of abusing their child and therefore are allowed to. Their freedom ends where their childs individual rights begin.
Well the reasoning isn't quite the same because evidence indicates that just as with adult pornography and the incidence of rape, so to does access to CP provide an outlet that makes pedophiles less likely to offend with an actual child. It's punishing thoughtcrime at the expense of actual child rape (which becomes even more apparent when the typical penalties are harsher for pictures than actual rape). Furthermore, law enforcement resources are finite and the vast majority are spent on shooting fish in a barrel with the low hanging fruit of possession, instead of the more difficult and important work of tracking down major distributors and producers. The most recent major bust was a farce, 11 months, eclipsing the 11 days of the first time this behavior shocked us, of the government being the world #1 CP distributor, for a few hundred possession busts globally and a grand total of 2 people who actually abused children.
I can't help but wonder if it wouldn't be true here; if the information can't be obtained any other way, would censoring it be more or less likely to encourage others to obtain the information in a similar manner? We're a long way from shedding the need for data from real human patients.
Don't legislate prohibition, politicians! Don't support it, everyone!
The fentanyl crisis was directly precipitated by abruptly limiting or terminating access to known-dose pharmaceutical products. Everyone with a clue knew the opiate crackdown would cause an OD spike. Everyone involved in passing, enforcing, or supporting these policies has blood on their hands. The dealers who sell products of unknown potency are more culpable, but those who created, enforced, or supported that situation despite expert advice informing them of the consequences aren't fully innocent. And, they bear even more responsibility to the people who've killed themselves after being forced to go from livable discomfort to bedridden agony as their prescriptions were cut or terminated. The myth that alternatives always work better is bullshit, and the 'study' showing NSAIDs are as effective is garbage science specifically designed to limit its scenarios to reach the desired outcome (they used subclinical dosages of the opiates, 5mg of hydrocodone doesn't do much? ya don't say), twisted into worse propaganda (tiny dose for minor pain -> all doses for all pain-- even Ars Technica (and here, IIRC) peddled this deliberately false headline).
There were many ways to tackle the real problem of diversion and abuse without causing an OD and suicide spike while condemning loads of people to needless suffering. Those were proposed and rejected as the media and fools everywhere cheered an indiscriminate crackdown of forced tapers, forced cessation, refusal to treat pain in new patients at all, and imprisoning doctors. We once again took the path that maximized the negative outcomes while failing to achieve progress on the ostensible goals (overall abuse is up).
If you have the habit someone with his money can afford, your tolerance quickly escalates to the point where death from respiratory depression is impossible even if you take a dose orders of magnitude higher than normal. You know how you can't even get 5mg of oxycodone for a compound fracture these days? I've seen people inject thousands of milligrams in the space of a few hours.
But even basic safety precautions prevent ODs in anyone with even modest tolerance. If it's a new batch, push in very slowly, you'll know if it's way stronger before a lethal dose goes in.
The ACLU isn't so hot on the 1st Amendment anymore either. They've decided free speech hurts marginalized people and will no longer defend speech cases that would hurt their social justice agenda. Link.
a growing challenge for regulators and telecom companies
And that challenge is: How to placate the plebs without actually taking any action that would jeopardize the fortune they make off of allowing these abusive calls.
I'm sure Ajit Pai and his masters will feed us something good!
The vast, vast majority of websites load in a couple seconds for me. I'm not interested in a page loading in 1 second instead of 3 in exchange for giving up better plugins and UI, or slightly better security that's better handled by just providing a toggle for people who know what they're doing. That's just not a worthwhile tradeoff. For people who think it is, there's Chrome.
Some people are under the mistaken impression that something wildly inaccurate and highly biased towards false positives wouldn't be sufficient to void Constitutional rights. The Supreme Court put that notion to rest when they ruled a cop merely needs to claim a dog trained to please him gave permission, and the 4th Amendment is gone. People who think inaccuracy is a good thing will be sorely disappointed. Well, they won't until the day comes when they're on the receiving end of police bullshit, but then they will.
Damn I know reading the article is against our principles here, but at least read the summary. They're talking about the other networks Facebook owns, like Instagram, being split off, not turning FB itself into smaller FBs.
So property crime... like people might commit to fund a drug habit that costs a fortune because of black market price inflation?
Violent crime... like the kind caused by arguments over drug deals, gang violence where gangs are enabled by drug money, and violence from mentally unstable people on drugs that would benefit from spending our money on treatment and prevention instead?
You're taking far too narrow of a view of the damage inflicted by the war on drugs. It's behind many of the "non-drug" charges people are locked up for. That's not to say there's no other major contributing factors to incarceration... poverty doesn't help, but the biggest other reasons are our absolutely draconian sentences and complete unwillingness to provide effective rehabilitation and reentry resources.
Yeah it's not like there's been actual news articles about that problem, I could only possibly have known about it first hand.
And even more offensive, I'm not even close to conservative, I vote straight (D) and support single payer, drug legalization, criminal justice reform in general, discrimination protection for LGBTQIA+ and trans right to use the facility of their choice, abortion rights, legalizing prostitution, and etc; it's getting more and more tiring to explain how not all liberals are SJWs and batshit crazy progressives obsessed with identity and grievance politics.
For now... don't forget, children don't place very high on the Victimhood Hierarchy, so this policy is ok as long as it doesn't hurt anyone with a higher rank... and if it does, fuck the children... literally: recall the enlightened progressive European Court of Human Rights, desperate to defend Muslim feelings from those crazy people who for some reason take issue with people having sex with 9 year olds, declared that as long as you keep sleeping with them after they hit puberty, it's not pedophilia, and therefore illegal blasphemy to call Muhammad a pedo. Yes, really.
Well, I guess that at least explains YouTube's inability to do something about all the creepy guys who flood the comments of little girls' gymnastics videos.
I'm not sure banning human legs is practical; since they can make you run.
Scooters by Lime and Bird have a top speed of 15mph, well within the human running range (and not just the top athletes, those guys can hit the mid 20s). Or should running on the sidewalk be banned too? I think the issue isn't speed itself, but unsafe speed. Ticket people being unsafe on these things like we ticket unsafe driving and biking.
You forgot about the part of Republican philopsophy that believes the applicability of the law is inversely proportional to your net worth. You're also going to have a hard time reconciling accusing Democrats of legislating 'what's good idea most of the time' when Republicans vote in lock step for laws based on what people may and may not do with and put in their own bodies.
And I definitely don't see Republicans standing in opposition to banning these scooters, if you think it's a liberal thing it's because they're only useful in cities, and cities are liberal. Republicans would jump on the chance to further regulate behavior if these popped up in an area they controlled.
Are you really so naive as to be unaware that the objection is not to the display of advertising itself, but the invasive and deceitful ways they acquire data to target those ads, and the reselling of that data to third parties?
I don't mind that GMail shows me ads, I mind that Google tracks me by GPS and logs every site I visit.
I don't mind that Facebook shows me ads, I mind that they steal my private photos and contacts without permission. (There's lots of talk about the latter, but the former should be by far the bigger outrage... the Facebook app uploads your recent pictures, and not just ones taken through their app-- whatever the system camera app took, to their servers, then asks if you want to share it... even if you don't I doubt they delete it.. no Facebook I don't want to share a picture of my dick to my family; and the only way to stop this behavior is to disable access to media, which also blocks sharing the photos you *do* want to share).
Microsoft [...], where they are now working hard to regain trust with customers again.
LOL what!?!?!? They force installed an OS that is both adware and spyware with no way to permanently disable either of those behaviors, and they won't even sell the little people the version that lets you only get advertised to and spied on a little. Windows 10 is by a wide margin the greatest violation of trust they've EVER pulled, and good god is there heavy competition.
He's not wrong though. Throwing up satellite internet that covers the globe is actually a far simpler and cheaper thing to do than providing infrastructure and stable food supply to all. It's not like you could take the money Starlink will cost and solve any of those problems on a global scale. I'm not sure you appreciate the full scope of issues involved, or the degree to which increased access to information and resources on the internet promotes local development. And since you seem to think it's somehow relevant, I actually have gone without food for weeks (food banks etc aren't helpful when you live far from anything and lack transportation. Sadly, the grocery store wouldn't accept my white privilege card.), and had my life threatened at gunpoint (by another white person, so I didn't try telling him "But I'm white, you can't threaten my life".. should I have tried?). And... er, well I guess I'm just another clueless moron because the ubiquity of free water kept me from being thirsty too.
Well just because you don't like storing media locally doesn't mean everyone wants to be at the mercy of streams. I'm currently at 20/22TB used... when I can afford a new drive, it's always just to expand, so it's across 10 separate drives now. By the time 20TB comes down to my price range, I'm sure it'll just get tossed in with the rest as I stop downloading untouched Blurays and 4K Netflix/Amazon shows (at 8-20GB/episode these add up fast) and start up with 8K.
I have fairly narrow taste, so when I find something I like, I'm almost certainly going to watch it again, but besides favorites that's usually every 2-4 years. Streaming services simply can't be trusted to maintain that availability on those timescales, and outside the very most popular things, neither can torrents (at least for quality 1080p; and 4K already has torrent lives measured in mere days, with the most popular releases only lasting a couple months).
So please, bring on the ever more massive drives.
You're really comparing a measure against a burglar looking for the easiest house to someone who's traveled hundreds of miles to relocate their entire life and sometimes family grabbing a ladder? Well, fits right in Republicans inability to live in reality at least.
Among the many bullshit aspects of your post, the biggest by far is that the wall won't do jack shit to stop illegal immigration or drug trafficking. Other border security measures will, and Trump is refusing to accept funding for those while he stomps his feet and cries 'I want my wall!!!!' You idiots need to stop conflating Trump's codpiece and actual border security.
Interestingly enough, during Sandy, we lost power for 11 days (so no wire based VOIP) but never lost cell phone service. The closest tower went down but the next closest gave me 2-3 bars. Presumably it too had battery backup since I don't think anywhere in the range of a tower serving a high-density area like this had power. Never took more than 3 tries to get a call through the busy network (first try half the time).
And in a shocking display, on day 3 Verizon rolled a couple trucks into our town just to park in the street and put out a whole bunch of power strips where the community gathered to charge our devices. The devastation was quite severe here (Hoboken, on the other side of the Hudson from midtown Manhattan), and cell phones were surprisingly adequate. Not to mention, having up-to-the-minute info from people all over town and the local government on FB was vastly superior for finding open stores/places with power/those VZW trucks/locations of emergency relief services/etc etc than just the local radio broadcast or phone message updated every few hours.
Under the default settings, every file download is sent to Google*. What respect, that you can stop that behavior if you're savvy enough to play around with about:settings?
*-And oh no, the griping doesn't stop there. False positives on non-executables. The URL is sent after the download, and positives are permanently deleted beyond forensic software ability to recover, so you have to re-DL, even if it was something you had just spent 7 hours downloading from a slow server across the globe. After, of course, you disable the damn thing entirely because there's no 'Fuck off I know what I'm DLing' option.
The current GOP is so pathetically spineless they wouldn't impeach if Trump straight up handed Putin the launch codes and told them to kiss his ass. Not that Dems are entirely off the hook, they seem to have the opposite problem, where rumors and trivial offenses against PC culture make them eat their own routinely.
Not only will they not revisit old cases, prosecutors and the 'Justice' Department are fighting like hell to not even stop using long-discredited bunkum in trials going forward. That was one of the first DOJ actions under Trump/Sessions, to disband a recently formed committee attempting to ensure valid science in trials.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not how it works. What if a parent feels that severely beating their child is an effective way to modify troublesome (also defined by them) behavior, and therefore worth the physical discomfort? We've decided based on the evidence of the harm inflicted and its value in preventing other harm, that's bullshit and they can't do it because they disagree. What about parents who want to claim they disagree that molestation is harmful, and is instead beneficial sexual education? Yeah, not all kids who are molested suffer lasting trauma, so I guess they've got their fact-backed value-based dispute right? Back on the medical side, parents who refuse treatment for a fatal but curable disease because it offends their religion? Bullshit that's freedom. Same deal for vaccines. Parents don't get to just decide they disagree with the value of abusing their child and therefore are allowed to. Their freedom ends where their childs individual rights begin.
Well the reasoning isn't quite the same because evidence indicates that just as with adult pornography and the incidence of rape, so to does access to CP provide an outlet that makes pedophiles less likely to offend with an actual child. It's punishing thoughtcrime at the expense of actual child rape (which becomes even more apparent when the typical penalties are harsher for pictures than actual rape). Furthermore, law enforcement resources are finite and the vast majority are spent on shooting fish in a barrel with the low hanging fruit of possession, instead of the more difficult and important work of tracking down major distributors and producers. The most recent major bust was a farce, 11 months, eclipsing the 11 days of the first time this behavior shocked us, of the government being the world #1 CP distributor, for a few hundred possession busts globally and a grand total of 2 people who actually abused children.
I can't help but wonder if it wouldn't be true here; if the information can't be obtained any other way, would censoring it be more or less likely to encourage others to obtain the information in a similar manner? We're a long way from shedding the need for data from real human patients.
Don't legislate prohibition, politicians! Don't support it, everyone!
The fentanyl crisis was directly precipitated by abruptly limiting or terminating access to known-dose pharmaceutical products. Everyone with a clue knew the opiate crackdown would cause an OD spike. Everyone involved in passing, enforcing, or supporting these policies has blood on their hands. The dealers who sell products of unknown potency are more culpable, but those who created, enforced, or supported that situation despite expert advice informing them of the consequences aren't fully innocent. And, they bear even more responsibility to the people who've killed themselves after being forced to go from livable discomfort to bedridden agony as their prescriptions were cut or terminated. The myth that alternatives always work better is bullshit, and the 'study' showing NSAIDs are as effective is garbage science specifically designed to limit its scenarios to reach the desired outcome (they used subclinical dosages of the opiates, 5mg of hydrocodone doesn't do much? ya don't say), twisted into worse propaganda (tiny dose for minor pain -> all doses for all pain-- even Ars Technica (and here, IIRC) peddled this deliberately false headline).
There were many ways to tackle the real problem of diversion and abuse without causing an OD and suicide spike while condemning loads of people to needless suffering. Those were proposed and rejected as the media and fools everywhere cheered an indiscriminate crackdown of forced tapers, forced cessation, refusal to treat pain in new patients at all, and imprisoning doctors. We once again took the path that maximized the negative outcomes while failing to achieve progress on the ostensible goals (overall abuse is up).
If you have the habit someone with his money can afford, your tolerance quickly escalates to the point where death from respiratory depression is impossible even if you take a dose orders of magnitude higher than normal. You know how you can't even get 5mg of oxycodone for a compound fracture these days? I've seen people inject thousands of milligrams in the space of a few hours.
But even basic safety precautions prevent ODs in anyone with even modest tolerance. If it's a new batch, push in very slowly, you'll know if it's way stronger before a lethal dose goes in.
A comment suggesting voice assistants should call the cops on us if we say the wrong thing is modded +4 Insightful... so disappointing.
The ACLU isn't so hot on the 1st Amendment anymore either. They've decided free speech hurts marginalized people and will no longer defend speech cases that would hurt their social justice agenda. Link.
a growing challenge for regulators and telecom companies
And that challenge is: How to placate the plebs without actually taking any action that would jeopardize the fortune they make off of allowing these abusive calls.
I'm sure Ajit Pai and his masters will feed us something good!
The vast, vast majority of websites load in a couple seconds for me. I'm not interested in a page loading in 1 second instead of 3 in exchange for giving up better plugins and UI, or slightly better security that's better handled by just providing a toggle for people who know what they're doing. That's just not a worthwhile tradeoff. For people who think it is, there's Chrome.
Some people are under the mistaken impression that something wildly inaccurate and highly biased towards false positives wouldn't be sufficient to void Constitutional rights. The Supreme Court put that notion to rest when they ruled a cop merely needs to claim a dog trained to please him gave permission, and the 4th Amendment is gone. People who think inaccuracy is a good thing will be sorely disappointed. Well, they won't until the day comes when they're on the receiving end of police bullshit, but then they will.
Damn I know reading the article is against our principles here, but at least read the summary. They're talking about the other networks Facebook owns, like Instagram, being split off, not turning FB itself into smaller FBs.
So property crime... like people might commit to fund a drug habit that costs a fortune because of black market price inflation?
Violent crime... like the kind caused by arguments over drug deals, gang violence where gangs are enabled by drug money, and violence from mentally unstable people on drugs that would benefit from spending our money on treatment and prevention instead?
You're taking far too narrow of a view of the damage inflicted by the war on drugs. It's behind many of the "non-drug" charges people are locked up for. That's not to say there's no other major contributing factors to incarceration... poverty doesn't help, but the biggest other reasons are our absolutely draconian sentences and complete unwillingness to provide effective rehabilitation and reentry resources.
Yeah it's not like there's been actual news articles about that problem, I could only possibly have known about it first hand.
And even more offensive, I'm not even close to conservative, I vote straight (D) and support single payer, drug legalization, criminal justice reform in general, discrimination protection for LGBTQIA+ and trans right to use the facility of their choice, abortion rights, legalizing prostitution, and etc; it's getting more and more tiring to explain how not all liberals are SJWs and batshit crazy progressives obsessed with identity and grievance politics.
For now... don't forget, children don't place very high on the Victimhood Hierarchy, so this policy is ok as long as it doesn't hurt anyone with a higher rank... and if it does, fuck the children... literally: recall the enlightened progressive European Court of Human Rights, desperate to defend Muslim feelings from those crazy people who for some reason take issue with people having sex with 9 year olds, declared that as long as you keep sleeping with them after they hit puberty, it's not pedophilia, and therefore illegal blasphemy to call Muhammad a pedo. Yes, really.
Well, I guess that at least explains YouTube's inability to do something about all the creepy guys who flood the comments of little girls' gymnastics videos.
I'm not sure banning human legs is practical; since they can make you run.
Scooters by Lime and Bird have a top speed of 15mph, well within the human running range (and not just the top athletes, those guys can hit the mid 20s). Or should running on the sidewalk be banned too? I think the issue isn't speed itself, but unsafe speed. Ticket people being unsafe on these things like we ticket unsafe driving and biking.
You forgot about the part of Republican philopsophy that believes the applicability of the law is inversely proportional to your net worth. You're also going to have a hard time reconciling accusing Democrats of legislating 'what's good idea most of the time' when Republicans vote in lock step for laws based on what people may and may not do with and put in their own bodies.
And I definitely don't see Republicans standing in opposition to banning these scooters, if you think it's a liberal thing it's because they're only useful in cities, and cities are liberal. Republicans would jump on the chance to further regulate behavior if these popped up in an area they controlled.
Are you really so naive as to be unaware that the objection is not to the display of advertising itself, but the invasive and deceitful ways they acquire data to target those ads, and the reselling of that data to third parties?
I don't mind that GMail shows me ads, I mind that Google tracks me by GPS and logs every site I visit.
I don't mind that Facebook shows me ads, I mind that they steal my private photos and contacts without permission. (There's lots of talk about the latter, but the former should be by far the bigger outrage... the Facebook app uploads your recent pictures, and not just ones taken through their app-- whatever the system camera app took, to their servers, then asks if you want to share it... even if you don't I doubt they delete it.. no Facebook I don't want to share a picture of my dick to my family; and the only way to stop this behavior is to disable access to media, which also blocks sharing the photos you *do* want to share).
Microsoft [...], where they are now working hard to regain trust with customers again.
LOL what!?!?!? They force installed an OS that is both adware and spyware with no way to permanently disable either of those behaviors, and they won't even sell the little people the version that lets you only get advertised to and spied on a little. Windows 10 is by a wide margin the greatest violation of trust they've EVER pulled, and good god is there heavy competition.
He's not wrong though. Throwing up satellite internet that covers the globe is actually a far simpler and cheaper thing to do than providing infrastructure and stable food supply to all. It's not like you could take the money Starlink will cost and solve any of those problems on a global scale. I'm not sure you appreciate the full scope of issues involved, or the degree to which increased access to information and resources on the internet promotes local development.
And since you seem to think it's somehow relevant, I actually have gone without food for weeks (food banks etc aren't helpful when you live far from anything and lack transportation. Sadly, the grocery store wouldn't accept my white privilege card.), and had my life threatened at gunpoint (by another white person, so I didn't try telling him "But I'm white, you can't threaten my life".. should I have tried?). And... er, well I guess I'm just another clueless moron because the ubiquity of free water kept me from being thirsty too.
Well just because you don't like storing media locally doesn't mean everyone wants to be at the mercy of streams. I'm currently at 20/22TB used... when I can afford a new drive, it's always just to expand, so it's across 10 separate drives now. By the time 20TB comes down to my price range, I'm sure it'll just get tossed in with the rest as I stop downloading untouched Blurays and 4K Netflix/Amazon shows (at 8-20GB/episode these add up fast) and start up with 8K.
I have fairly narrow taste, so when I find something I like, I'm almost certainly going to watch it again, but besides favorites that's usually every 2-4 years. Streaming services simply can't be trusted to maintain that availability on those timescales, and outside the very most popular things, neither can torrents (at least for quality 1080p; and 4K already has torrent lives measured in mere days, with the most popular releases only lasting a couple months).
So please, bring on the ever more massive drives.
You're really comparing a measure against a burglar looking for the easiest house to someone who's traveled hundreds of miles to relocate their entire life and sometimes family grabbing a ladder? Well, fits right in Republicans inability to live in reality at least.
Among the many bullshit aspects of your post, the biggest by far is that the wall won't do jack shit to stop illegal immigration or drug trafficking. Other border security measures will, and Trump is refusing to accept funding for those while he stomps his feet and cries 'I want my wall!!!!' You idiots need to stop conflating Trump's codpiece and actual border security.
Interestingly enough, during Sandy, we lost power for 11 days (so no wire based VOIP) but never lost cell phone service. The closest tower went down but the next closest gave me 2-3 bars. Presumably it too had battery backup since I don't think anywhere in the range of a tower serving a high-density area like this had power. Never took more than 3 tries to get a call through the busy network (first try half the time).
And in a shocking display, on day 3 Verizon rolled a couple trucks into our town just to park in the street and put out a whole bunch of power strips where the community gathered to charge our devices. The devastation was quite severe here (Hoboken, on the other side of the Hudson from midtown Manhattan), and cell phones were surprisingly adequate. Not to mention, having up-to-the-minute info from people all over town and the local government on FB was vastly superior for finding open stores/places with power/those VZW trucks/locations of emergency relief services/etc etc than just the local radio broadcast or phone message updated every few hours.
Under the default settings, every file download is sent to Google*. What respect, that you can stop that behavior if you're savvy enough to play around with about:settings?
*-And oh no, the griping doesn't stop there. False positives on non-executables. The URL is sent after the download, and positives are permanently deleted beyond forensic software ability to recover, so you have to re-DL, even if it was something you had just spent 7 hours downloading from a slow server across the globe. After, of course, you disable the damn thing entirely because there's no 'Fuck off I know what I'm DLing' option.
The current GOP is so pathetically spineless they wouldn't impeach if Trump straight up handed Putin the launch codes and told them to kiss his ass. Not that Dems are entirely off the hook, they seem to have the opposite problem, where rumors and trivial offenses against PC culture make them eat their own routinely.
Not only will they not revisit old cases, prosecutors and the 'Justice' Department are fighting like hell to not even stop using long-discredited bunkum in trials going forward. That was one of the first DOJ actions under Trump/Sessions, to disband a recently formed committee attempting to ensure valid science in trials.