What makes you think any of this is unconstitutional? The constitution places a lot of limits on what the FEDERAL government can do. State governments not so much.
I stopped reading your post there because that's so wildly inaccurate I wouldn't know how to set you straight.
Posting this mostly so you don't get modded informative.
By "full price", I am including externalities like pollution. So if a rich person uses $600 of electricity per day, he'll pay, for example, $220 for the actual production and $380 to cover the environmental damage he's causing. We wouldn't care how much smoke he's causing to be pummeled into the air since he's reimbursing us for the harm it's causing.
Um.. how does money "reimburse" anyone for environmental damage/pollution? There's not (yet) a company we can pay to vacuum that up.
Because all the morons polluting up the planet by leaving their AC on 24/7 make the rest of us suffer. Seriously, if it were only a matter of economics, there would be no alternative energy movement.
Actually most stores in this area (Virginia) ban the wearing of any hood/head concealing garment while in the premises. It goes along with them banning scarves/baklavas/3 hole head covering masks/cotton hats/ski-masks/etc
I mean, let's find all the people in the world who agree that you can kill anyone at will. And put them in one common country. Now who is anyone to say that their country is now doing something "wrong"?
We tried this, to some effect.
The eventually-formed country punished us with Crocodile Dundee.
I have a kid in the house, my kid might get curious, and though I will teach her about gun safety, I'm not going to risk her forgetting what she knows so she can get a good look at the business end.
While I think it's absolutely the responsible decision to not own a gun if you don't feel 110% comfortable doing so (kids or otherwise), it's worth mentioning a combination gun safe/case would be appropriate here if you still wanted to own one with a child present.
You can buy a good one for as little as $50, that doesn't occupy much more room than a pistol itself in your drawer.
Well, with the exception of the UK (too far gone past 1984) this kind of shit doesn't happen in strictly gun-controlled western Europe, because seeing such a gun is so unlikely that most people will assume it's a toy or something.
I travel all over the US, and can't remember the last time I saw a gun in public - save one holstered security/law enforcement personnel.
They are the ones who sometimes stop crimes before the police arrive. They are the ones who have CCW permits and stop deranged sociopaths who are going on public murder sprees before they can kill or before they can kill as many people as they'd like to.
The fantasy land of the gun proponent. There's a boogie man behind every corner out to get you, and the gun toting everyman hero saves the day. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. Legal gun ownership leads to nothing more than more guns in the wild for the bad guys to get their hands on and more gun accidents in general. The number of crimes foiled by gun carrying good guys is so small in comparison that it can barely be counted.
Number of gun owners in the US: 80,000,000.
Number of accidental gun deaths per year (all age groups): 1,500.
That's not entirely correct. The reason for that clause is primarily because the military was mostly disbanded after the revolutionary war, and the signers of that amendment wanted to ensure that somebody had firearms available. Possession of firearms was clearly linked, for that reason, to membership in a militia.
Now you can argue about the purposes of the militia, your theory there is as valid as any other, but it was definitely not ever intended to be interpreted the way that the NRA interprets it.
Our Constitution was designed and intended to limit what the federal government CAN do, not what the states and people CAN'T do.
Once everyone understands this simple principle, it makes this part of the debate moot.
Obama's anti-gun tendencies, eh? Go ahead and post your bullshit links to conspiracy fantasies on right wing blogs about that tired line. He's letting people bring guns into national parks but I guess thats anti-gun if you're a brainwashed ditto head. Not to mention the people who are bringing guns to protests outside his speaking venues with absolutely no retaliation, something Bush would have never allowed (hell, he wouldn't even allow protesters to be within sight of his travel routes, putting them in "free speech zones" as far away as he could manage). Hyperventilating right wing hypocrites sicken me.
Why do so many people refuse to accept that just because someone doesn't support Obama, they are automatically right-wing/republican/Bush fan?
It's quite possible (and is the case for me) that they support(ed) neither.
Conversely, in our current system - you may have been bored, but I'd lay even money you turned out just fine. You didn't need the help. You were just a spoiled brat who couldn't think of anyone besides yourself.
Or he would have been the next "Great Thinker," but now he's just cynical, bored and uninspired.
And now that we have a Democrat in the White House, I think it is exactly as important that we have a trustworthy election process as it was when had a Republican. I don't want anyone rigging elections, in favor of any candidate of any party.
That puts you and I squarely in the minority. I'm not an R or D, but much more towards the [fiscal, not social] conservative end, for what it's worth. The problem is our friends who vote for either party can't see past partisan issues to fix the ones that are actually important, like voting process integrity.
There's still a lot of work for human pilots, and there probably will be for at least another generation. The first UAVs that can handle manned-aircraft combat tasks are just now being deployed, and in many ways they're Not There Yet. Are you suggesting that air forces should stop training pilots now on the assumption that drones will take up the slack?
It's also worth mentioning that current-generation UAVs like the Predator are fully human-controlled by remote.
[Americans'] government simply chooses to spend its money on guns rather than social infrastructure. A very poor choice indeed.
Regardless of your political leanings, I think it's obvious that is a pretty easy statement to make when the rest of the world relies on the Americans' "guns."
I'd rather have a government monopoly that is at least accountable to me as a tax payer rather than a corporate one that is only accountable to its shareholders.
Strange. It's a lot easier to stop being a shareholder (sell), than to stop being a citizen (emigrate.)
In a free society, when a person dies an accidental death or becomes brain-dead from same, why does their right to leave a pretty corpse trump the right to life of someone who needs a transplant? Our current transplant system is opt-in...how is that justifiable? (Once again, I'm referring to donation at death rather than live donation.)
You own your body, for better or worse. A lot of people would have cultural and/or religious objections to being "harvested." I won't debate the logic of any beliefs, just answering your question. Free society = freedom of religion.
In any case, the claim is that they are looking for evidence that the owner of the laptop is a terrorist.
Ah yes, terrorism. The new boogieman that replaced drunk driving and child molesters. Wouldn't any halfway smart terrorist just buy a laptop here in the states and download whatever he needs through an encrypted connection to the terrorist data center back home in Dirkadirkastan?
That or he'd just walk across the hundreds (thousands?) of miles of unprotected border on both the northern and southern neighbors.
They don't want to know what's on your laptop - not really. There's 3 factors here. First, they enjoy intimidating people. It makes them feel important. Not because they're assholes, but because they're human. Part of the reason for the bill of rights is to protect us from ourselves. We are all capable of terrible things.
There's so much wrong with that statement it's hard to pick a point so I can coherently counter your foolishness.
That said- I assure you that the founders of this country didn't believe we needed protecting from ourselves. That's an English thing.
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What makes you think any of this is unconstitutional? The constitution places a lot of limits on what the FEDERAL government can do. State governments not so much.
I stopped reading your post there because that's so wildly inaccurate I wouldn't know how to set you straight.
Posting this mostly so you don't get modded informative.
By "full price", I am including externalities like pollution. So if a rich person uses $600 of electricity per day, he'll pay, for example, $220 for the actual production and $380 to cover the environmental damage he's causing. We wouldn't care how much smoke he's causing to be pummeled into the air since he's reimbursing us for the harm it's causing.
Um.. how does money "reimburse" anyone for environmental damage/pollution? There's not (yet) a company we can pay to vacuum that up.
Because all the morons polluting up the planet by leaving their AC on 24/7 make the rest of us suffer. Seriously, if it were only a matter of economics, there would be no alternative energy movement.
I run my AC 25/8 just to piss you off.
Actually most stores in this area (Virginia) ban the wearing of any hood/head concealing garment while in the premises. It goes along with them banning scarves/baklavas/3 hole head covering masks/cotton hats/ski-masks/etc
What do they have against delicious pastries?
I mean, let's find all the people in the world who agree that you can kill anyone at will. And put them in one common country. Now who is anyone to say that their country is now doing something "wrong"?
We tried this, to some effect.
The eventually-formed country punished us with Crocodile Dundee.
30% of the time when I try a website that's new to me I end up saying to myself "haven't people actually tried this"
And the answer is no, since Opera's desktop marketshare is a rounding error.
I have a kid in the house, my kid might get curious, and though I will teach her about gun safety, I'm not going to risk her forgetting what she knows so she can get a good look at the business end.
While I think it's absolutely the responsible decision to not own a gun if you don't feel 110% comfortable doing so (kids or otherwise), it's worth mentioning a combination gun safe/case would be appropriate here if you still wanted to own one with a child present.
You can buy a good one for as little as $50, that doesn't occupy much more room than a pistol itself in your drawer.
Well, with the exception of the UK (too far gone past 1984) this kind of shit doesn't happen in strictly gun-controlled western Europe, because seeing such a gun is so unlikely that most people will assume it's a toy or something.
I travel all over the US, and can't remember the last time I saw a gun in public - save one holstered security/law enforcement personnel.
They are the ones who sometimes stop crimes before the police arrive. They are the ones who have CCW permits and stop deranged sociopaths who are going on public murder sprees before they can kill or before they can kill as many people as they'd like to.
The fantasy land of the gun proponent. There's a boogie man behind every corner out to get you, and the gun toting everyman hero saves the day. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. Legal gun ownership leads to nothing more than more guns in the wild for the bad guys to get their hands on and more gun accidents in general. The number of crimes foiled by gun carrying good guys is so small in comparison that it can barely be counted.
Number of gun owners in the US: 80,000,000.
Number of accidental gun deaths per year (all age groups): 1,500.
Accidental deaths per gun owner: 0.0000188
That's not entirely correct. The reason for that clause is primarily because the military was mostly disbanded after the revolutionary war, and the signers of that amendment wanted to ensure that somebody had firearms available. Possession of firearms was clearly linked, for that reason, to membership in a militia.
Now you can argue about the purposes of the militia, your theory there is as valid as any other, but it was definitely not ever intended to be interpreted the way that the NRA interprets it.
Our Constitution was designed and intended to limit what the federal government CAN do, not what the states and people CAN'T do.
Once everyone understands this simple principle, it makes this part of the debate moot.
Obama's anti-gun tendencies, eh? Go ahead and post your bullshit links to conspiracy fantasies on right wing blogs about that tired line. He's letting people bring guns into national parks but I guess thats anti-gun if you're a brainwashed ditto head. Not to mention the people who are bringing guns to protests outside his speaking venues with absolutely no retaliation, something Bush would have never allowed (hell, he wouldn't even allow protesters to be within sight of his travel routes, putting them in "free speech zones" as far away as he could manage). Hyperventilating right wing hypocrites sicken me.
Why do so many people refuse to accept that just because someone doesn't support Obama, they are automatically right-wing/republican/Bush fan?
It's quite possible (and is the case for me) that they support(ed) neither.
Conversely, in our current system - you may have been bored, but I'd lay even money you turned out just fine. You didn't need the help. You were just a spoiled brat who couldn't think of anyone besides yourself.
Or he would have been the next "Great Thinker," but now he's just cynical, bored and uninspired.
And now that we have a Democrat in the White House, I think it is exactly as important that we have a trustworthy election process as it was when had a Republican. I don't want anyone rigging elections, in favor of any candidate of any party.
That puts you and I squarely in the minority. I'm not an R or D, but much more towards the [fiscal, not social] conservative end, for what it's worth. The problem is our friends who vote for either party can't see past partisan issues to fix the ones that are actually important, like voting process integrity.
They won't ask for money from the government, because then they'd be expected to actually improve their service.
This is true, the government has done a fine job of tracking all of the stimulus money placed.
There's still a lot of work for human pilots, and there probably will be for at least another generation. The first UAVs that can handle manned-aircraft combat tasks are just now being deployed, and in many ways they're Not There Yet. Are you suggesting that air forces should stop training pilots now on the assumption that drones will take up the slack?
It's also worth mentioning that current-generation UAVs like the Predator are fully human-controlled by remote.
Related, interesting link: http://www.military.com/news/article/human-error-cited-in-most-uav-crashes.html
the claims of urgency are a matter of political expedience, rather than what's actually in the country's best interest?
I think this best sums up both parties' strategy on *.
[Americans'] government simply chooses to spend its money on guns rather than social infrastructure. A very poor choice indeed.
Regardless of your political leanings, I think it's obvious that is a pretty easy statement to make when the rest of the world relies on the Americans' "guns."
Do you have a reference for this 3% figure?
I'd rather have a government monopoly that is at least accountable to me as a tax payer rather than a corporate one that is only accountable to its shareholders.
Strange. It's a lot easier to stop being a shareholder (sell), than to stop being a citizen (emigrate.)
I paid $19,500 in taxes last year. I've done my part and now for the government to turn its back on me is completely unacceptable.
Um, income taxes aren't to fund unemployment.
So, someone sets up a distributed computing project that decrypts them, and broadcasts working results online, everyone grabs them and watches TV.
I think you're on to something here. What would we call this peer-to-peer cyclone of swirling bytes, though?
In a free society, when a person dies an accidental death or becomes brain-dead from same, why does their right to leave a pretty corpse trump the right to life of someone who needs a transplant? Our current transplant system is opt-in...how is that justifiable? (Once again, I'm referring to donation at death rather than live donation.)
You own your body, for better or worse. A lot of people would have cultural and/or religious objections to being "harvested." I won't debate the logic of any beliefs, just answering your question. Free society = freedom of religion.
Much of Mexico has high-speed wireless access via Sprint et al.
In any case, the claim is that they are looking for evidence that the owner of the laptop is a terrorist.
Ah yes, terrorism. The new boogieman that replaced drunk driving and child molesters. Wouldn't any halfway smart terrorist just buy a laptop here in the states and download whatever he needs through an encrypted connection to the terrorist data center back home in Dirkadirkastan?
That or he'd just walk across the hundreds (thousands?) of miles of unprotected border on both the northern and southern neighbors.
They don't want to know what's on your laptop - not really. There's 3 factors here. First, they enjoy intimidating people. It makes them feel important. Not because they're assholes, but because they're human. Part of the reason for the bill of rights is to protect us from ourselves. We are all capable of terrible things.
There's so much wrong with that statement it's hard to pick a point so I can coherently counter your foolishness.
That said- I assure you that the founders of this country didn't believe we needed protecting from ourselves. That's an English thing.
Why?
I mean it is 200 years old document, some of it is hardly relevant today.
Too bad you're not American-born, you'd make a great modern president.