Most libertarians don't know what 'free market' in Adam Smith's sense means and instead are subscribed to the notion that 'free market' is unregulated market. It is an education failure that is simple to correct by reading, but alas, nowadays people get their information from comments on social sites.
I've said that in these Uber discussions before, and I'll say it again: I split my time between three or four different countries and everywhere the difference between Uber-like services and 'regular' taxis comes to exactly just a bit less than all tax, license and insurance they should be paying, but don't -- I've made the calculations out of pure curiosity.
Also, strangely, there are Uber-like companies that work over the Internet, service different taxi operators and licensed individuals, provide similar level of quality and speed and are not in conflict with anybody.
Finally, the 'living wage' argument isn't all that bad, apparently there were times when taxis were really dangerous because of the adverse selection of cars and drivers due to the low wages.
What 'tangible' service? They are just free riders which happen to be receiving payments in a jurisdiction where the tax authorities of the countries they operate in cannot get a hold of them.
There are three uber-like services at home, they all operate similar web services. The only difference is they provide those services to registered taxi operators -- individuals or companies.
There are fees that aren't due by the drivers. It is boring to explain, but basically the VAT, part of the social security and most insurance is due by the operator -- those who collect the fees and organize the service.
You can believe what you want, and refuse to believe what you choose, I'm not here to make you change your mind. However, except for the price there isn't really noticeable difference here, and that comes almost exactly to the amount they are "saving" in fees and taxes.
But "they" do where I live -- in two countries. Uber refuse to pay required taxes, licenses, insurance, social security payments. All this gets paid by someone -- me. Why? Because a few thousand hipsters think that taking a cab at a 30% discount is uber-cool. Thanks, but no thanks. And it only 'works' because Uber can collect payments outside of the jurisdiction they provide services in.
I don't know if retweeting even qualifies as 'immaterial' support. What if the fucking terrorist uses one of those fake Paulo Coelho quotes every other time they tweet? They'll get a following of imbeciles in no time, yet I bet there is an overzealous prosecutor who'll try to go ahead with finding some 'terrorist support' even in retweets like these. The damned Russian Federation was better than not 10 years ago. People who retweet out of stupidity need help and education, not prosecution.
And what should be the 'consequences' of 'being utterly stupid' while retweeting someone's tweet, as often happens? The electric chair? Lobotomy? Castration? 'Material support' implies one provides materials to the terrorists. Tweets are still speech and not really 'material', precious little there to justify prosecution.
I don't know about your area, but where I live, all licensed cabs have the driver's name, license number and a complaint phone or qr code on the dashboard. You can use these to complain to either the company or the municipal regulator. Here, both accept complaints online.
I've only been overcharged once, a couple of years ago, when I was asked to pay two times the amount I usually pay on a certain course. Interestingly, that was also the amount displayed on the meter. Since I travel that route quite often I simply called the cab company and complained to them about the problem. They did some short investigation, called me back and asked if I'd like to have my money back or a voucher for their services.
True, but the Internet was much smaller and less important then; it was, with few exceptions, a one-country, one-language affair and, luckily, that country wasn't Turkey, China, or the Soviet Union. That time is gone, however, now the Internet is big, international and outright dangerous to many a regime and government. So you're only going to see more of this.
Come on. I'm not a fan of either nuclear or the Japanese government, but that's just crap.
I don't know where in Japan you live, but in our jichikai (which is somewhere in the 24 districts of Tokyo) the old ladies had a contract with a private lab to test for "radiation poisoning" in early March 2011 already. They bought two geiger counters too, and even walked about for months measuring stuff. To their huge disappointment, not much was found. This was a completely private effort, that is, the "government" was not involved in any way.
If the jichikai tests had found something, anything, the news and the Internets would be all over the place (see below **). At the least, I would have heard about it. Also, I doubt ours was the only jichikai that went from totally unconcerned to seriously over-equipped and over-zealous about detecting radiation.
They were not the only ones measuring. Virtually every university, public or private, is doing measurements. So do or did many supermarket chains for a while. If there was a massive radiation contamination, it would have been found and reported. You can easily dig day-by-day data about radiation measurements, including independent ones, if you speak a little Japanese. Yes, they are still measuring.
As for the 'hot spots' in Tokyo, I recall two. One was a large cache of radium buried in a private garden by the grandkids of a watch repairman, who passed away in the 60s, the other was some equipment that was disposed of similarly by a company. Neither had anything to do with Fukushima, and IIRC, both were found by citizens with geiger counters and both made huge news on the TV, all channels covering and discussing them for days **. Care to mention what other spots are there, which were caused by Fukushima and I don't know about?
To wrap it up, it is quite impossible to hide a large scale contamination in Japan in the long run, because people here are health-conscious and wealthy enough to be able to run all kinds of tests independently, and the media, while not completely without influence, are free to cover what they want and some dislike the current government enough to publish anything that will harm its image.
So, either provide serious evidence about this conspiracy, or just shut up.
Not every disabled person is born that way. Sometimes people receive injuries later in life so that many more don't. Should we throw those people to the wolves as well?
Every-thing we eat is literally some variant of GMO, we've been making GMO foods since we've been cultivating crops and domesticating animals.
No, not at all. The 'natural' equivalent of genetic engineering is something called horizontal gene transfer, it is a process discovered only in 1951 or thereabouts and happens mostly inside simple single-cell organisms that lack nucleus and not so often in single-cell eukaryotes. As far as I am aware, there is not a lot of evidence that HGT is an important evolution factor in multicell organisms, and we mostly eat those.
before listening to Bill Nye [startalkradio.net] explain
I am not really familiar with this person, but apparently he's a former mechanical engineer turned a TV personality. That would explain his bad analogy, but by quoting him you commit a grave argument from authority fallacy:). He doesn't know any more about the subject than you, me or the average slashdotter.
Also finding out how freaking awesome their genetics lab work was amazingly impressive.
Your impression of someone's lab does nothing to alleviate legitimate concerns about the method. I'm sure that some of the doctors who appeared in tobacco commercials owned or worked in stellar hospitals.
There is no going "back to the old ways" on this where you sprinkle pollen on the stamen by hand and wait for it to grow before selecting. We're waaaay past that. We can improve the new GMO process but there's ZERO chance we're going back to the old ways.
As I already explained above, this is precisely the problem that necessitates the labeling.
At the moment, a few players with an early start have developed some techniques based on rather incomplete knowledge, and they want to monetize those fast. It is this drive for profit that is driving the process, not scientific curiosity or care about benefits to mankind. And in order to recoup the costs of the investment in the process, companies push to market things that are only tested in a laboratory, again, according to their understanding of what 'safe' and 'beneficial' means. Unfortunately, this understanding is often limited to the benefits to the investors. Some people may want to take the bet that these products are safe and buy them. Others may not. What matters is that people should have the right to know what they are buying and the right to choose how they spend their money. This is what freedom is about, no?
100's of geneticists do this for 3-4 years before handing it over to the FDA which reviews it for another 3 years.
You're badly misinformed. In fact, what happens is that hundreds of employees try to come up with evidence that their company's products are safe, and in FDA a much smaller and poorly funded group uses that carefully prepared evidence as a basis for certification.
The process is strongly influenced by politics and lobbies and is seldom too biased in favor of public safety. It is only after a significant amount of suffering accumulates that corrective measures begin to happen. You can observe the tobacco industry and the health consequences of smoking, or the fast food industry and the obesity epidemics as cases in point. There are, of course, many more specific examples that illustrate the problem with a wide range of products: medicines, particular food additives and so on.
We're now able to do in weeks what takes mother nature centuries. We can make plants resistant to bugs, pests, reduce the water they intake, make them more nutritious, give them a longer shelf life, reduce or eliminate natural toxins that many plants have, grow faster. This is really literally super food.
This is the advertisement line. But actually all 'we' have come up with is plants that are at best similar in quality with the garden variety, and the major difference is
I have the right to know if what I'm buying with my money is the result of a combination of genes that have undergone thousands of years of 'safety testing' known as evolution, or something concocted in a lab by people who don't even understand fully the basics of what they're doing, but whose employers are in a rush to make a quick buck while they have the patent; something, which is only 'tested' against the interpretation of the safety rules of the said employers for a year or two.
Even if there was a working thorough safety testing procedure and no cause of concern (which isn't the case just yet), if I'm buying something with my money, I still have the right to know what it is made of, just like I have the right to know what's on the ingredient list, where something was manufactured, what color is the item in the package, what is the CPU inside and how many points are there per inch, and just like I tell my clients what's in the product that I ship to them.
If you're against labeling on the ground that it creates 'fear', let's remove the country of origin stuff too, after all, the importers have done all the testing and it is quite certain there's no harm to the consumer. Let's remove info about nutritional value, because high calories or weird ingredients scare the consumer. Finally, let's get rid of the pesky expiry date stuff, we all know that businesses will thoroughly test and that they won't put something spoiled on the shelves.
Droid Wall is kinda dated now, but works. Android Firewall by Jason Tschohl, Xposed framework and Xprivacy let you have full and fine-grained control over everything, including file and data access to apps.
And now imagine they haven't overstepped their spying privileges in the first place, and have done better job building secure systems. Where would we all be now?
Slashdot Mirror
No, cows are smarter than that.
Most libertarians don't know what 'free market' in Adam Smith's sense means and instead are subscribed to the notion that 'free market' is unregulated market. It is an education failure that is simple to correct by reading, but alas, nowadays people get their information from comments on social sites.
[citation needed].
I've said that in these Uber discussions before, and I'll say it again: I split my time between three or four different countries and everywhere the difference between Uber-like services and 'regular' taxis comes to exactly just a bit less than all tax, license and insurance they should be paying, but don't -- I've made the calculations out of pure curiosity.
Also, strangely, there are Uber-like companies that work over the Internet, service different taxi operators and licensed individuals, provide similar level of quality and speed and are not in conflict with anybody.
Finally, the 'living wage' argument isn't all that bad, apparently there were times when taxis were really dangerous because of the adverse selection of cars and drivers due to the low wages.
Unpossible, there's no Galaxy with only three stars.
+1.
What 'tangible' service? They are just free riders which happen to be receiving payments in a jurisdiction where the tax authorities of the countries they operate in cannot get a hold of them.
There are three uber-like services at home, they all operate similar web services. The only difference is they provide those services to registered taxi operators -- individuals or companies.
Amazingly, they don't have problems with the law.
There are fees that aren't due by the drivers. It is boring to explain, but basically the VAT, part of the social security and most insurance is due by the operator -- those who collect the fees and organize the service.
You can believe what you want, and refuse to believe what you choose, I'm not here to make you change your mind. However, except for the price there isn't really noticeable difference here, and that comes almost exactly to the amount they are "saving" in fees and taxes.
But "they" do where I live -- in two countries. Uber refuse to pay required taxes, licenses, insurance, social security payments. All this gets paid by someone -- me. Why? Because a few thousand hipsters think that taking a cab at a 30% discount is uber-cool. Thanks, but no thanks. And it only 'works' because Uber can collect payments outside of the jurisdiction they provide services in.
I don't know if retweeting even qualifies as 'immaterial' support. What if the fucking terrorist uses one of those fake Paulo Coelho quotes every other time they tweet? They'll get a following of imbeciles in no time, yet I bet there is an overzealous prosecutor who'll try to go ahead with finding some 'terrorist support' even in retweets like these. The damned Russian Federation was better than not 10 years ago. People who retweet out of stupidity need help and education, not prosecution.
And what should be the 'consequences' of 'being utterly stupid' while retweeting someone's tweet, as often happens? The electric chair? Lobotomy? Castration? 'Material support' implies one provides materials to the terrorists. Tweets are still speech and not really 'material', precious little there to justify prosecution.
I don't know about your area, but where I live, all licensed cabs have the driver's name, license number and a complaint phone or qr code on the dashboard. You can use these to complain to either the company or the municipal regulator. Here, both accept complaints online.
I've only been overcharged once, a couple of years ago, when I was asked to pay two times the amount I usually pay on a certain course. Interestingly, that was also the amount displayed on the meter. Since I travel that route quite often I simply called the cab company and complained to them about the problem. They did some short investigation, called me back and asked if I'd like to have my money back or a voucher for their services.
So, it is really, really simple.
True, but the Internet was much smaller and less important then; it was, with few exceptions, a one-country, one-language affair and, luckily, that country wasn't Turkey, China, or the Soviet Union. That time is gone, however, now the Internet is big, international and outright dangerous to many a regime and government. So you're only going to see more of this.
Oblig DNT implementation: https://privatelee.com/search/...
Given that most "cyberattacks" are caused by crappy software, making software companies liable for their bugs looks like a better option to me.
Copyrighted. It is a copy-right, not a copy-write. Because it is the right-holders are important, and not the people who actually write. ;)
Come on. I'm not a fan of either nuclear or the Japanese government, but that's just crap.
I don't know where in Japan you live, but in our jichikai (which is somewhere in the 24 districts of Tokyo) the old ladies had a contract with a private lab to test for "radiation poisoning" in early March 2011 already. They bought two geiger counters too, and even walked about for months measuring stuff. To their huge disappointment, not much was found. This was a completely private effort, that is, the "government" was not involved in any way.
If the jichikai tests had found something, anything, the news and the Internets would be all over the place (see below **). At the least, I would have heard about it. Also, I doubt ours was the only jichikai that went from totally unconcerned to seriously over-equipped and over-zealous about detecting radiation.
They were not the only ones measuring. Virtually every university, public or private, is doing measurements. So do or did many supermarket chains for a while. If there was a massive radiation contamination, it would have been found and reported. You can easily dig day-by-day data about radiation measurements, including independent ones, if you speak a little Japanese. Yes, they are still measuring.
As for the 'hot spots' in Tokyo, I recall two. One was a large cache of radium buried in a private garden by the grandkids of a watch repairman, who passed away in the 60s, the other was some equipment that was disposed of similarly by a company. Neither had anything to do with Fukushima, and IIRC, both were found by citizens with geiger counters and both made huge news on the TV, all channels covering and discussing them for days **. Care to mention what other spots are there, which were caused by Fukushima and I don't know about?
To wrap it up, it is quite impossible to hide a large scale contamination in Japan in the long run, because people here are health-conscious and wealthy enough to be able to run all kinds of tests independently, and the media, while not completely without influence, are free to cover what they want and some dislike the current government enough to publish anything that will harm its image.
So, either provide serious evidence about this conspiracy, or just shut up.
Who runs the meter and collects the money?
Not every disabled person is born that way. Sometimes people receive injuries later in life so that many more don't. Should we throw those people to the wolves as well?
It is a hand bred variety of rapeseed invented
What you mean is that traits already existing in rapeseed were enhanced via a particular selection process.
Genetically engineered canola has only one 'useful' property - herbicide resistance.
Every-thing we eat is literally some variant of GMO, we've been making GMO foods since we've been cultivating crops and domesticating animals.
No, not at all. The 'natural' equivalent of genetic engineering is something called horizontal gene transfer, it is a process discovered only in 1951 or thereabouts and happens mostly inside simple single-cell organisms that lack nucleus and not so often in single-cell eukaryotes. As far as I am aware, there is not a lot of evidence that HGT is an important evolution factor in multicell organisms, and we mostly eat those.
before listening to Bill Nye [startalkradio.net] explain
I am not really familiar with this person, but apparently he's a former mechanical engineer turned a TV personality. That would explain his bad analogy, but by quoting him you commit a grave argument from authority fallacy :). He doesn't know any more about the subject than you, me or the average slashdotter.
Also finding out how freaking awesome their genetics lab work was amazingly impressive.
Your impression of someone's lab does nothing to alleviate legitimate concerns about the method. I'm sure that some of the doctors who appeared in tobacco commercials owned or worked in stellar hospitals.
There is no going "back to the old ways" on this where you sprinkle pollen on the stamen by hand and wait for it to grow before selecting. We're waaaay past that. We can improve the new GMO process but there's ZERO chance we're going back to the old ways.
As I already explained above, this is precisely the problem that necessitates the labeling.
At the moment, a few players with an early start have developed some techniques based on rather incomplete knowledge, and they want to monetize those fast. It is this drive for profit that is driving the process, not scientific curiosity or care about benefits to mankind. And in order to recoup the costs of the investment in the process, companies push to market things that are only tested in a laboratory, again, according to their understanding of what 'safe' and 'beneficial' means. Unfortunately, this understanding is often limited to the benefits to the investors. Some people may want to take the bet that these products are safe and buy them. Others may not. What matters is that people should have the right to know what they are buying and the right to choose how they spend their money. This is what freedom is about, no?
100's of geneticists do this for 3-4 years before handing it over to the FDA which reviews it for another 3 years.
You're badly misinformed. In fact, what happens is that hundreds of employees try to come up with evidence that their company's products are safe, and in FDA a much smaller and poorly funded group uses that carefully prepared evidence as a basis for certification.
The process is strongly influenced by politics and lobbies and is seldom too biased in favor of public safety. It is only after a significant amount of suffering accumulates that corrective measures begin to happen. You can observe the tobacco industry and the health consequences of smoking, or the fast food industry and the obesity epidemics as cases in point. There are, of course, many more specific examples that illustrate the problem with a wide range of products: medicines, particular food additives and so on.
We're now able to do in weeks what takes mother nature centuries. We can make plants resistant to bugs, pests, reduce the water they intake, make them more nutritious, give them a longer shelf life, reduce or eliminate natural toxins that many plants have, grow faster. This is really literally super food.
This is the advertisement line. But actually all 'we' have come up with is plants that are at best similar in quality with the garden variety, and the major difference is
Nope. The labels are about informed choice.
I have the right to know if what I'm buying with my money is the result of a combination of genes that have undergone thousands of years of 'safety testing' known as evolution, or something concocted in a lab by people who don't even understand fully the basics of what they're doing, but whose employers are in a rush to make a quick buck while they have the patent; something, which is only 'tested' against the interpretation of the safety rules of the said employers for a year or two.
Even if there was a working thorough safety testing procedure and no cause of concern (which isn't the case just yet), if I'm buying something with my money, I still have the right to know what it is made of, just like I have the right to know what's on the ingredient list, where something was manufactured, what color is the item in the package, what is the CPU inside and how many points are there per inch, and just like I tell my clients what's in the product that I ship to them.
If you're against labeling on the ground that it creates 'fear', let's remove the country of origin stuff too, after all, the importers have done all the testing and it is quite certain there's no harm to the consumer. Let's remove info about nutritional value, because high calories or weird ingredients scare the consumer. Finally, let's get rid of the pesky expiry date stuff, we all know that businesses will thoroughly test and that they won't put something spoiled on the shelves.
Droid Wall is kinda dated now, but works. Android Firewall by Jason Tschohl, Xposed framework and Xprivacy let you have full and fine-grained control over everything, including file and data access to apps.
You can get all the porn you want at nudevista. In google, you have to do something like +porn "Taylor Swift" -"Kim Kardashian" .
And now imagine they haven't overstepped their spying privileges in the first place, and have done better job building secure systems. Where would we all be now?