What's spooky is, if they really only printed 40 M to 200 M in bills in that time, their start up costs probably come to a significant fraction of total profits, and if they had been caught only two or three months into the operation, they could have actually taken a loss.
In a recent speech, the President of the United States said, in just one sentence, that Snowden did not first approach his own supervisors with his concerns and that Snowden was protected by a particular law reguarding whistleblowing. Both those points are demonstratably false. (That Snowden did discuss the situation with some supervisory authorities first is a matter of record both sides of the debate have agreed to, and the law President Obama mentioned specifically does not apply to contractors but only goverment grade system persons.).
I'd say that's supporting evidence right there - the POTUS either actually lying or uncritcally believeing what he's told by one side and using those statements to influence the public, when a trial may still happen and his government is still actively supporting just such a trial. I don't know if Snowden would have successfully been silenced, as that's a prediction on a hypothetical. That the attempts would have been made is overwhelmingly likely, given what attempts are being made to either stop others considering futher revelations or punish the man now. Trying to prejudice a jury with false statements is playing pretty dirty pool - I think that puts the ball in your court*, to prove the people who are doing it won't go "a little farther", into illegal detention or even assassination.
* not so much you personally, as all the people who are claiming the government wouldn't be doing anything illegal or dirty if Snowden hadn't done X, Y, or Z first. We know the government is currently breaking the law re. Snowden, and trying to taint a man's right to a fair trial is a damned serious case of both illegal and dirty - that means the burden of proof is to you, and others who agree with you, to prove the government won't go any further into felony level actions, or is doing this only reluctantly because Snowden crossed certain thresholds first, etc.
Normally, when we see people breaking laws, we assume they are likely to break others. I'll even use a simple car analogy if that will make it clearer. If I see a young adult just attempting to syphon gas from my car, and it's parked on the street, not my property, that's probably not even a felony unless he broke a lock to enter, but I have the right at that point to consider the man as probably willing to use force to keep me from detaining him for the police, and to draw a weapon to defend my property (I'm not in Florida, and If I was, I personally still wouldn't just shoot him unless he actually attacked me anyway (because I'm not a hate filled psychopath - taking a man's life is the ultimately serious choice, and even if he doesn't value his life all that much, I do), but he can't get me charged with 'intimidation by threat of lethal force' or anything like that either - the law protects my presumption). The police approaching him have that same right, and can also presume he might be responsible for other, possibly more serious crimes in the area - for examples, when they arrest him, they can look for his prints on other cars and on my home entrances, they can take DNA samples whch would probably only be useful in the case where he also commmited a rape or murder, they can question him about where he was when other thefts in the area were occuring, et cetera. That's all reasonable for a crime of less than felony status. So why shouldn't we, the people, presume that if Snowden had worked 'within the system' for longer before going out, the same people who are playing dirty now would have played dirty in your hypothetical? Again, the burden of proof shifts to your side, by any normal logic.
Parent poster is not postulating "at the same time". "If the market crashed" is a conditional that itself indicates there are two times being considered, a before and after. "If the market crashed" also sets a condition - if the market for some item crashes, it can't be simultaniously stay in oversupply (it can theoretically start off in oversupply, it just can't possibly stay there). The supply drops precipitately, as nobody with the item wants to sell at those prices. Supply is therefore elastic (extremely so for organs - they'd make a great textbook example). Demand, in this case, is inelastic if we are speaking of human need, but somewhat elastic if we are using formal economic terms the way some economists use them, as in some economic models only people who can afford what they want to buy at the current prices are considered to count as demand, and not the ones who are 'demanding' the item, but only at a lower price. If 'demand' means everybody who needs an organ, it's just about perfectly inelastic, while if we use the other definition, demand is elastic, but goes UP if price drops. What, I think, is confusing about the original post is the phrase "and good luck getting a donation when you can buy one on the market.". I suspect the original poster meant 'good luck getting a donation when until recently you could buy one on the market'. This is more reasonable - massive price drops usually create a great deal of lag. People will stop donating gratis thinking the sales market is handling need, and they won't rush to fill out donor cards as the price drops because they will be thinking that dropping prices means the demand is lessening. The demand may in fact not be lessening at all, if the price drop is driven by other factors, (such as vendors evading anti-trust and trying to collude in driving prices down), but organ donation requires a lot of those organs come from people who don't know economics and simply don't act as "rational entities" the way an economist usually means that term.
...where the pope was the temporal king, and gave the equivalent of a court order during trial (ordering Galileo to make his arguments in learned Latin and not in common Italian until the court/church ruled on the case). G. did precisely the equivalent of defying many a modern judge's orders not to talk about the trial publicly while it was still going on, and not to try and inflame public sentiment while the trial was still going on. Then he insulted the judge as part of it (which would be most analogous to modern day contempt of court). The sentence Galileo got was less severe than in many modern cases. (Look at his house arrest vrs. modern open ended contempt citations).
The church was also going through the counter-reformation, which was historically an atypically bad part of church history. Galileo would have gotten away with more just 10-20 years before or (probably) 30 years later. This is why using the Galilean trial to prove anything about the relations of science and religion is roughly meaningless, it's like pointing to the story in To Kill a Mockingbird to prove Jury Trials in general are somehow a bad thing.
Kepler's own residence was certainly a factor, but this different treatment also happened because of his mother. Kepler's semi-SF writing, Somnium seu de astronomia lunari (roughly "Dream Voyage to the Moon"), is allegedly based on tales his mother told him. Kepler's mother was accused of witchcraft at one point, but Kepler was able to successfully defend her. An early move by the family was in all probability to find a political climate more congenial to protestant thinking and general freedom of belief, and when his mother was later accused of witchcraft, this probably paid off. Kepler didn't just live in the Holy Roman Empire, he sought to live in a part of it that was particularly enlightened and tolerant, and that helped immensely during a period when Europe in general, and not just the Papal states, was temporarily regressing towards the middle ages.
I think the point was, a logical argument fails if it reaches what is called a reductio ad absurdum. People who can argue that capital punishment is acceptable even when it's being applied to innocent people have reached a logical absurdity. If they are still arguing, they will argue that Brittany Spears is the Pope and Kermit the Frog is the Space Shuttle before they will admit they are wrong, so they aren't really there to debate, or to let observers judge their arguments, ergo, the argument (or thread) is over.
On some designs, a 16 key pad has extra pinouts which were originally intended to drive the circuits for Dual Tone Multi Frequency signalling built in (think of AT&T). These don't drive tone generators in ATMS, but they may reliably put out a square wave 1/2 second long pulse while the main pinouts are outputting a pulse of the length the finger stays on the key.
On other designs, it has sensors to disable signaling when temperatures get above a certain value (think of the anti-fire security common on elevator keypads - this gets used on some 16 key designs because they also get used in door security systems, rather than them commonly being used in elevators, or people really worrying that an ATM on fire may start spewing money).
Some designs used to incorporate the very same additional chipset used in soda machines so the owner could put those into maintenance modes (see "hacking coke machines"), and they let the ATM service tech run diagnostics by entering a reserved pin number or longer sequence, but I'm not sure if any of those last are still in use.
There are rumors of radio frequency signalling built in, and sometimes actually used to get the pad signal to the servos it controls when the physical mounting for the ATM is in a sufficiently awkward location. I don't think those rumors are likely, but I wouldn't just assume they are completely bogus either. Alternately, I suspect the parent poster may be referring to various claims that the pads can be used to scan fingerprints and even to tell a live finger from a severed one, but these last are certainly urban legends.
The Roman Catholic church has these fellows called "Priests", who actually expect all good Catholics to confess their specific sins, and recieve counseling and do penance for each one as set by the priest. It often defaults to a scoring system, where sex gets you points, then planning for the sex in advance by buying condoms gets you more. Some people therefore feel less guilty, and are treated as officially less guilty, if they can say they didn't plan the sex in advance, it just happened. Since the sex itself can be a powerful motivator, doing the least 'sins' that still result in the reward is often the choice, instead of 'not sinning' at all.
The question is, even under RC doctrine, why is sex a sin and doing something that indicates you planned it in advance a greater sin, instead of sex itself being a sin, but trying to reduce bad consequences such as disease spread to yourself OR YOUR PARTNER not a sin? Why is it assumed that using a condom is either to avoid preganacy (again, itself a sin), or to protect only yourself from the "God given consequences" of sin, but never out of genuine feeling for your partner? Why are priests specifically trained to discount that possibility?
Agreed, lions don't hunt like wolves - for one thing, the typical lion runs only about 30 meters to hit prey from ambush. But lionesses hunt a bit more like wolves than male lions do. Averaging close to 250 Kg., Male lions don't do more than 5% of the routine hunting. They do, however, handle other predators for the pride. Hyenas, in particular, would probably love it if male and female lions both weighed only about 100 Kg. Dog-like pack tactics would probably beat the more loosely organized cat group tactics consistantly, except the male lions are just too damned big. (And yes, Hyenas are not really very close to wild dogs, but they use pretty similar methods as pack hunters.). Female lions have proportionately larger hearts than males, but in both cases, the heart is proportionately smaller than for a wolf or other sustained runner. Lions do have some cooling systems and are observed to pant, but the male's typical heavy mane menas they have less efficiency at cooling than even their size differences would suggest, and again, cooling is less efficient than for a wolf.
Even if they did somehow just lay down and die peacefully and voluntarily, somebody has to get paid to bulldoze all the bodies into the pit. If they don't do it quickly, somebody has to get paid a lot more to treat the diseases spread by all those bodies laying around. Somebody has to get paid just to dig the damned pit. Now ask yourself why some people are assuming costs savings from cutting all the social programs if the people on those programs probably won't just lay down and die peacefully. If some of them will turn to crime, rebellion, and warfare to survive, how much will that cost?
Maybe I'm not seeing the subtleties of the nuanced "Libertarian Freedom" position, but when people start ignoring the real costs of how things would be even if an unrealisticly lucky (for them - they're presumably not the ones being bulldozed) outcome happened, I start thinking they are not driven by logic or reason anymore, they just want some people they hate to die, even if it costs more.
A 2 liter of Walmart's own house brand soda? 2 liters = 4.23 pts, a little more than 1/2 gallon. Current price, observed today, in an actual Walmart: 55 cents US. So, YES THE MILK IS MORE EXPENSIVE. People averaging results such as mine have figured out it's more expensive currently by a factor of about 3 and 1/4 to 1. Thank you for playing "I'm so out of touch that I think the average minimum wage worker buys the expensive brands and I'll sieze on that to 'prove' there's no problem." Please look at how much space your own Walmart devotes to their own generic brand and how much to the big name brands on the shelves. If it's 2 to 1 or better, well, there's your quick visual gauge of how bad poverty is in your area. Some stores have ratios above 5 to 1.
This version gets much closer to testable than the usual multiverse model. (The stock multiverse starts with an assumption that certain physical constants must be random - that's pretty much as untestable as saying those same constants cannot be random and must have been chosen by something). Unlike that, this version seems to be edging into the area of testability, at least in part.
We can test some of the predictions of the various inflationary models, to fine tune them to better account for current, observable conditions, and the best inflationary models are making predictions about the universe we observe now and not just the early universe. We can just possibly test the idea that the vacuum constant energy follows a quantum mechanic model where it's "smeary" in the sense the math describes it. We will probably be able to devise tests for how QM applies at higher and higher energies, going much higher than the present day supercoliders, although there will be a limit to just how high energy laboratory physics gets. We may not be able to test anything even close to the energy levels of the expanding universe, but we don't know just how close we might be able to get just yet - that's similar to whether quantum decoherence can be opposed long enougn for a large enough number of atoms, for practical quantum computing purposes - we don't know for sure yet - define practical.
We will probably never be able to build a "U-window" and look into a parallel universe, or that sort of test, but then, we can't seperate bound quark triplets and observe single quarks, but they still predict and explain so much else that Quantum Chromodynamics as a whole is regarded as pretty darned testable.
You know, whatever model of the observable universe you like, even leaving out all the possible things beyond the observable boundry, it looks extremely doubtful that we would ever be able to make a second universe and observe it to see if it duplicates the behavior of our own. (When it comes to universes, rerunning the experiment is probably not a possible test). Define testability as being able to vary initial conditions or confine the subject under lab conditions, and testability vanishes for just about all astronomy, not just cosmology.
What's spooky to me is we may be able to devise just enough testing that we will think it's probably true, but not enough to have high confidence. Eternal Inflation may end up always a hypothesis, never a theorem.
I left the header that says "My God.." on this post, but tossing out the "G" word, in the context of cosmology, tends to shift the discussion in directions where there's more heat shed than light. I don't think the original poster meant the word as a claim so much as an exclamation of how baffeled he or she was by the article, yet look how swiftly words such as faith start following.
Some 'tiny little portion' of my taxes were spent recently in bailing out some banks. Enough credit card fraud, and I'm totally confident the 'too big to fail' bunch will be back at the public trough asking for more of my taxes soon. At least a good chunk of the money these banks are risking now is tax money they got in the bailout, not their own money. It doesn't matter if I trust the card system, or even have a credit card at all. So, do you pay taxes? If so, why don't you care?
First issue is that those viewers are time-shifting. The broadcasters hate that because some of their advertisers want the ads to be seen at that time.
The broadcasters will only "hate"* it if the advertisers stop paying as much. Are there advertisers who think Aereo is reducing the number of viewers who see the ads at the 'right' time? Do they think that reduction is greater than the gain for having their name and product come to more people's attention at all? Can the broadcasters show where this has come up in negotiating prices? I ask, because the broadcasters don't seem to be using that as part of their case. If they have specific cash amounts they could point to, that's actual damages, and so far, the case seems to be about potential or statutory damages instead. Showing where a given advertiser has offered less because the time shifting makes that timeslot less valuable would be refreshing, as it would let the broadcasters claim damages based on a simple straight-forward calculation that wouldn't look like Hollywood accounting gone mad.
* Hopefully, the broadcasters aren't sueing because they 'hate' anybody - lawsuits are supposed to be about making financial matters straight. Responsible adults don't sue becasue they hate someone and want to do whatever kind of damage they can to them, but to make the bottom line come out right. A civil trial is deliberately supposed to be an extraordinarily poor substitute for ripping someone's jugular out.
So, since the US constitution is not yet three centuries old, you're advancing the bold claim that there have been at least two things some people somewhere consider abuses? That's really a statement about as novel and insightful as "The sky is up". I find your sig ironic in a non-Morissetteian sense.
as infantry soldiers do not get full auto M-16s This is technically at least semi-true - the M4 used by non-special forces has a 3 round burst setting, which is not equivalent to the FULL auto setting of the M16-A1 from the Vietnam era, or other full auto weapons systems since then.
Most individual infantry in Afghanistan carry an M4 and at least one M67 hand grenade. The M4MWS (Modular Weapons System) is used by conventional forces, the M4A1 is used by Special operation Forces. The chief difference between the M4MWS and the M4A1 is the M4MWS is only semi/burst and the M4A1 is semi/auto. So if your infantry are not part of a SOG (Special Operations Group), they start with no full auto at the individual level. At the 4 soldier fireteam level, one soldier will have a M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. There's your full auto, in the form of a weapon carrying typically a 100 round bag of rifle cartridges or a 200 round drum (that's a lot of auto). Alternate loads for the 4th soldier include the FGM-148 Javelin (a 1 soldier fire and forget anti-tank missle - back when I was a tanker, the old Dragon design made me very touchy about friendly fire, but these things are definitely 'intenser' ), or a Squad Designated Marksman (DM), carrying an M14 rifle. (Those two aren't full auto, so technically, you can have a fireteam with no automatic weapon, but the US is not deploying a lot of anti-tank teams currently, and the SDM system amounts to three soldiers covering and supporting one good sniper most of the time, so there aren't a lot of those either) As we go up to 9 man squads, platoons, and companies, there are lots of additional full auto weapons added, plus other fun things. I think there are still some M-16s issued to line units somewhere, but offhand, I can't think of any. I carried one sometimes, I also stuck with a 45 a lot when 9 mms came in. Really, I didn't pay a lot of attention to the little stuff - the Bradley's M-242 Bushmaster is a 25 mm chaingun, which fires 180 rounds of depleted uranium a minute on full auto, and can punch the engine of a full length school bus out through the back end and literally chop the whole bus in half lengthwise. Bradleys are issued for 9 soldier (mechanised) infantry squads, and they have some anti-tank missles and a 7.62 machine gun too. I mostly commanded things for when Bradleys weren't enough - so If I was actually needing something I could pick up single handed, the Foo had already hit the Baz.
So, do civilans get grenades? Does one civilian in four get an M-249, and one in nine a M-242 (and something to tote it)? I don't think any US forces are using RPGs (Rocket Propelled Grenades) currently. The Army doesn't have nukes. Presidents and Admirals have nukes. Maybe boomer sub commanders could theoretically have nukes without the Admiral's permission, or maybe that silly Red Tide movie got that wrong, but either way, the Army doesn't have nukes. They had a few way back when, including one that could be delivered by backpack, but not recently.
Some civilans do have Armored Personnel Carriers, now that I think of it. The park service uses 113's with modified mortars to trigger avalanches in ski country sometimes. Maybe they've gone to Bradleys by now...
I agree so far, but what are the implications of marriage as a right of the (individual) people, vrs. a right of the states?
1. Marriage can be a right of at least some individual persons (for one example, it could be a right of all those of over a certain age), even though it takes at least two to enter into a marriage. There are individual rights which can be practiced by a lone person (i.e. travel, or petition of authorities), and rights which require at least two (for examples, contract or assembly). 2. If marriage is solely a right of the states, the states could, for just one example, limit marriage to just two people at a time. On the other hand, if the due faith and creedence clause means that the constitution has given the federal government authority to prohibit the states from refusing to recognize the validity of another state's marriage, just one state choosing to allow poligamy (Not to reveal any particular state's names that realistically might, but one of them's initials are Utah), and other states would have to recognize it, even if they didn't allow such marriages to be performed in their own boundaries. The constitution definitely does prohibit some rights of the states to control some aspects of marriage, by the due faith and creedence rule. 3. If marriage has both state's rights and individual rights aspects, it gets really interesting. (And to be fair, that's far from a hypothetical - an awful lot of common law does seem to assume that there are both components to marriage). We would still have to decide which limits federal law is placing on the states are potentially valid. Laws based on the idea that the federal government has a right to control how the states approach marriage simply on its own behalf wouldn't have anything in the constitution to justify them, as the parent poster points out. If the federal government were to regulate the states in the same manner as they have for speed limits and medical mariajuana use, they would have to exceed their constitutional authority, and they'd probably have to stretch the commerce clause or something of that nature even more out of recognizable shape, to even try and provide a faux veneer of legitimacy.
But laws supposedly protecting the individual's rights from the states siezing full control over all aspects of those rights would have the same validity as laws protecting individual right of contract or petition, if the constitution supports that right as being a right of the people and not the states. That's part of what prohibited to the states means, not just that there's a specific list of things prohibited to them, but that things can be prohibited to the states by being reserved to the people instead. Note that this doesn't mean that any argument the federal government attaches to a law claiming it supports an individual right makes that law valid - it means that a valid argument supporting a right being a right of the people may give the federal government the right, in turn to make laws that restrict what a state can do, even if it's not specifically spelled out that the right isn't reserved to the states. When does that "may" happen? When the federal government does have some power delegated to it, such as enforcing full faith and creedence, the interstate commerce clause, or similar parts of the constitution.
(We spent a lot of blood to settle this point once - an authority a lot higher than the 9 supremes eventually ruled at Gettysburg and beyond - And anyone who reads the constitution and says that Grant v. Lee wasn't a valid precident for interpreting it should really think about just what happens if they are somehow right, as initiating the appeals process this time would pretty much have to involve capturing an arsenal containing thermonuclear weapons rather than Muskets, Sharps and Henry rifles and horse drawn cannon - If you're not prepared to take it that far, your opinion of the limits of federal power in the defense of individual rights becomes, strictly speaking, irrelevant).
One thing to consider is that states are more able to defend their rights against the feds than are individual citizens. So if the right is held by the state, it's less likely to be infringed by the feds. Maybe. States have some power from unified action, with advantages such as most state attny. generals being pretty damned good lawyers and having support teams already lined up for the specialty areas.
I could make a counter-argument however: As you yourself put it "It's not clear what rights should devolve on the states.".
A lot of the original constitutional rights that are actually written down or can be found in other writings of the founders are clearly individual rights (and then, there's those pesky unenumerated rights*). Take copyright, for example. It's clear from the way the constitution puts it that it's based on the individual physical capability to make a copy of something, and it's a pretty straight-forward argument that when the constitution talks about a limited time for the government to control copying, that's in relation to the time available to the individual (which makes "life plus" laws unconstitutional, as nobody can give up more of a right than they have). How could a state defend its 'right' to control copyright, when there's no way to claim the state ever had such a right? Could anyone seriously argue that "Nature and Nature's God" created a right to copy as having belonged to the state governments and not individuals, from the time it came to exist? In the same way, a "right to life", if such a thing exists, is a right of individuals - what would even be the point of claiming that the death penalty was unconstitutional for the federal government, but only because it was a right of the sovereign states?
* I don't know of any good book on constitutional law that even trys to figure up what all the unenumerated rights actually being violated are, let alone how many of them derive from any natural law argument. Does the federal government usurp more rights of the states or of the people individually? How could we weigh the impact of federally mandated speed limits against the prohibition of pot and decide which of these, and a hundred other issues, actually involve an unenumerated right, and which are actually the more important violations?
Until I know just what the robotic {blank} AC wants on the 'giant magical box' is, I'm going to imagine things much more interesting than a sno-cat. AC, you are one sick puppy!
I was one of those people who voted for President Obama mostly because he wasn't quite as bad (IMHO) as the only (mainstream) alternative. If the race hadn't looked very close in my state, I might well have voted on other matters and picked nobody for president, or at least gone 3rd party.
So then you use a phrase like "God and personal Savior Obama". We've never even met, so why did you just spit in my face? Way to win people over to your side of the argument there.
You missed the real, deeper points. Religion X says that they are giving health insurance as an additional incentive to work for them, in other words - "pay". Then they are against some of the things the employee might spend that pay on, so they want the right to restrict how that employee spends what they have already been paid. In short, as you put it, the goverment has decided that once you pay somebody something, you have no right to dictate how they spend that money. (That's why saying "In Short..." is usually a mistake, it makes it to easy to reduce one side's more complex, nuanced opinion to a sound-bite that "nobody in their right mind" could possibly disagree with). Christians that have taken the position their church can or should control money they have already given to an employee are so far over the line on "rendering unto Caesar", that they might as well openly announce they have fallen into a Satanic heresy. Oh, but it's birth control. By some churches birth control is such a big sin that it's special, a bigger deal than all other sins... Which leads inexorably to the next point...
Point the Second, there are tax breaks for providing employees with health insurance, and these churches have already benefitted from them. By what right can they take such benefits and then insist on not meeting the minimum standards for types of coverage the entity paying out those benefits imposes to get them? Does a moral position against abortion or birth control give the holder right to break agreements, take money under false pretences, and lie? Great! I can get out from under about 30-40% of the 10 commandments just for being anti-abortion. I can steal and bear false witness with impunity, and i might be able to stretch it enough to get the bit about coveting dropped too. That's darned near as good a deal as geting to drink and screw around if I just fly one little plane into one little building afterwards, in Allah's name. (In fact, it's a better deal, at least until we get to the part about having to break in 72 virgins - that might be a tie breaker, but I'm not sure which way. {rocket_j_squirrel} "But are they friendly virgins?"{/rocket_j_squirrel})
What's the moral difference between paying someone in health coverage and then trying to control how they spend it, and paying someone the cash portion of their pay in company money that can only be spent at the company store? Can the church demand to pay somebody their cash wages only by direct deposit, and then demand to see their monthy debit card statements each month to prove they haven't been spending any of that money on booze or lap dances during the time they weren't working? More simply, could a church even demand all its employees accept direct deposit on any purely moral grounds? What about other benefits? Can a church that is morally opposed to cremation for the deceased refuse to pay out a death benefit if it's to be used for cremation expenses? Some faiths really do oppose cremation, but I don't know of any that have vetted their life insurance provider to make sure there's a no cremation rider in the policy (and there's no special tax benefits to offering burial insurance, so those churches couldn't milk those nonexistent benefits if they wanted to).
You truly want it to happen...
You want the less powerful offenders, the non-violent ones, the ones who aren't so dangerous, raped by the most violent and physically dangerous prisoners. You want those already most dangerous ones to get the message that a moderate amount of crime doesn't pay, but pedal to the metal violent overdrive has its perks. You want the guards to have to work around criminals who expect to be bought off with a supply of victims instead of staying in line for fear of more punishment. You want the prisons to be full of racist gangs constantly ready to riot, and using protection from the rapists on the other side as their chief recruiting tool. You want the rapists and murderers in there to get more practice at violence before their inevitable release, more confirmation that violence gets them what they want. You want prison to not be as bad for the worst of the worst, by making it hell for the rest of the people in there.
Yes, you want it, and now you know, deep inside, that your want has nothing to do with justice.
it would be interesting to see how many people that get paid to do graphics, and have legit copies of Photoshop, keep the Gimp or other free and open source tools on their workstations, and use them at least for some work. I don't know what the percentage would be in the arts, but if its anything like the situation with math or science programs, it's at least in the double digits, and I wouldn't be surprised if its near half.
Earth formed from heavy elements produced in at least one prior generation star, but there could be more than just one prior generation (It's very, very unlikely that all or nearly all the medium weight elements above lithium, in our solar system, came from just one older star, and pretty unlikely even that all the heavies above Iron were cooked up in just one supernova).
It's not a safe assumption that stars last an average of 10 Billion years. The most numerous types, red dwarfs, make up 80-90% of all stars, last a lot longer than that, and probably stay stable on the main sequence for 100-200 billion years (American Billions). They also shouldn't spread elements around much when they finally do leave the main sequence. Stars about the size of our Sun, spectral class G2, typically live about 10 Billion years, but make up only about 2% of stars. Big stars, type O, B, and A, burn more quickly, and it's possible to get enough hydrogen together for a star to burn through all its fuel and supernova in mere hundreds of thousands of years, or possibly even a blazing fast 10's of thousands. Those stars are rare, but they are so massive that even a few produce enough heavy elements and push enough gas around when they supernova, to create hundreds of sun sized and smaller stars and all the heavy elements to give such stars the solid, rocky planets we now think are practically ubiquitous.
The supernova explosions are a common source for two effects - heavy element formation, and compressive shock waves that trigger new stars forming in nearby interstellar gas clouds. Many of these gas clouds are already enriched with heavy metals from previous supernovae, Spiral galaxies tend to get regions of new star formation, and quiet regions. But, the high and low density regions in spirals like our Milky Way exist on larger scales than the star forming "nursery" clouds, and this is largely because gas clouds are not just compressed by novae - both the dense star forming clouds and very large but more difuse clouds colide with other clouds, including clouds that were part of dwarf galaxies being captured by the big spirals. So, it's a partial coincidence - Older generation stars have some influence on the shapes of spiral galaxy features, but dwarf galaxy capture has more, and the rare colisions of spirals with other big galaxies show just how much influence the large scale objects can have, producing wildly twisted galaxys such as
If anyone wants to read up on this sort of thing, please remember, because astronomers named them before they knew anything about why there were multiple distinct types of stars in the same mass ranges, Population II stars are actually older than Population I, and Population III older than II. A given population usually includes multiple generations of stars. As an exception, the very oldest, massive stars that novaed within the first million years or so after star formation began, and produced so many heavy elements are called Population III, and most probably represent just a single generation and possibly only the largest types.
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What's spooky is, if they really only printed 40 M to 200 M in bills in that time, their start up costs probably come to a significant fraction of total profits, and if they had been caught only two or three months into the operation, they could have actually taken a loss.
Have too! Several in fact. The first two were named Neil and Buzz. Autonomous as all hell...
In a recent speech, the President of the United States said, in just one sentence, that Snowden did not first approach his own supervisors with his concerns and that Snowden was protected by a particular law reguarding whistleblowing. Both those points are demonstratably false. (That Snowden did discuss the situation with some supervisory authorities first is a matter of record both sides of the debate have agreed to, and the law President Obama mentioned specifically does not apply to contractors but only goverment grade system persons.).
I'd say that's supporting evidence right there - the POTUS either actually lying or uncritcally believeing what he's told by one side and using those statements to influence the public, when a trial may still happen and his government is still actively supporting just such a trial. I don't know if Snowden would have successfully been silenced, as that's a prediction on a hypothetical. That the attempts would have been made is overwhelmingly likely, given what attempts are being made to either stop others considering futher revelations or punish the man now. Trying to prejudice a jury with false statements is playing pretty dirty pool - I think that puts the ball in your court*, to prove the people who are doing it won't go "a little farther", into illegal detention or even assassination.
* not so much you personally, as all the people who are claiming the government wouldn't be doing anything illegal or dirty if Snowden hadn't done X, Y, or Z first. We know the government is currently breaking the law re. Snowden, and trying to taint a man's right to a fair trial is a damned serious case of both illegal and dirty - that means the burden of proof is to you, and others who agree with you, to prove the government won't go any further into felony level actions, or is doing this only reluctantly because Snowden crossed certain thresholds first, etc.
Normally, when we see people breaking laws, we assume they are likely to break others. I'll even use a simple car analogy if that will make it clearer. If I see a young adult just attempting to syphon gas from my car, and it's parked on the street, not my property, that's probably not even a felony unless he broke a lock to enter, but I have the right at that point to consider the man as probably willing to use force to keep me from detaining him for the police, and to draw a weapon to defend my property (I'm not in Florida, and If I was, I personally still wouldn't just shoot him unless he actually attacked me anyway (because I'm not a hate filled psychopath - taking a man's life is the ultimately serious choice, and even if he doesn't value his life all that much, I do), but he can't get me charged with 'intimidation by threat of lethal force' or anything like that either - the law protects my presumption). The police approaching him have that same right, and can also presume he might be responsible for other, possibly more serious crimes in the area - for examples, when they arrest him, they can look for his prints on other cars and on my home entrances, they can take DNA samples whch would probably only be useful in the case where he also commmited a rape or murder, they can question him about where he was when other thefts in the area were occuring, et cetera. That's all reasonable for a crime of less than felony status. So why shouldn't we, the people, presume that if Snowden had worked 'within the system' for longer before going out, the same people who are playing dirty now would have played dirty in your hypothetical? Again, the burden of proof shifts to your side, by any normal logic.
Parent poster is not postulating "at the same time". "If the market crashed" is a conditional that itself indicates there are two times being considered, a before and after. "If the market crashed" also sets a condition - if the market for some item crashes, it can't be simultaniously stay in oversupply (it can theoretically start off in oversupply, it just can't possibly stay there). The supply drops precipitately, as nobody with the item wants to sell at those prices. Supply is therefore elastic (extremely so for organs - they'd make a great textbook example).
Demand, in this case, is inelastic if we are speaking of human need, but somewhat elastic if we are using formal economic terms the way some economists use them, as in some economic models only people who can afford what they want to buy at the current prices are considered to count as demand, and not the ones who are 'demanding' the item, but only at a lower price. If 'demand' means everybody who needs an organ, it's just about perfectly inelastic, while if we use the other definition, demand is elastic, but goes UP if price drops.
What, I think, is confusing about the original post is the phrase "and good luck getting a donation when you can buy one on the market.". I suspect the original poster meant 'good luck getting a donation when until recently you could buy one on the market'. This is more reasonable - massive price drops usually create a great deal of lag. People will stop donating gratis thinking the sales market is handling need, and they won't rush to fill out donor cards as the price drops because they will be thinking that dropping prices means the demand is lessening. The demand may in fact not be lessening at all, if the price drop is driven by other factors, (such as vendors evading anti-trust and trying to collude in driving prices down), but organ donation requires a lot of those organs come from people who don't know economics and simply don't act as "rational entities" the way an economist usually means that term.
...where the pope was the temporal king, and gave the equivalent of a court order during trial (ordering Galileo to make his arguments in learned Latin and not in common Italian until the court/church ruled on the case). G. did precisely the equivalent of defying many a modern judge's orders not to talk about the trial publicly while it was still going on, and not to try and inflame public sentiment while the trial was still going on. Then he insulted the judge as part of it (which would be most analogous to modern day contempt of court). The sentence Galileo got was less severe than in many modern cases. (Look at his house arrest vrs. modern open ended contempt citations).
The church was also going through the counter-reformation, which was historically an atypically bad part of church history. Galileo would have gotten away with more just 10-20 years before or (probably) 30 years later. This is why using the Galilean trial to prove anything about the relations of science and religion is roughly meaningless, it's like pointing to the story in To Kill a Mockingbird to prove Jury Trials in general are somehow a bad thing.
Kepler's own residence was certainly a factor, but this different treatment also happened because of his mother. Kepler's semi-SF writing, Somnium seu de astronomia lunari (roughly "Dream Voyage to the Moon"), is allegedly based on tales his mother told him. Kepler's mother was accused of witchcraft at one point, but Kepler was able to successfully defend her. An early move by the family was in all probability to find a political climate more congenial to protestant thinking and general freedom of belief, and when his mother was later accused of witchcraft, this probably paid off. Kepler didn't just live in the Holy Roman Empire, he sought to live in a part of it that was particularly enlightened and tolerant, and that helped immensely during a period when Europe in general, and not just the Papal states, was temporarily regressing towards the middle ages.
I think the point was, a logical argument fails if it reaches what is called a reductio ad absurdum. People who can argue that capital punishment is acceptable even when it's being applied to innocent people have reached a logical absurdity. If they are still arguing, they will argue that Brittany Spears is the Pope and Kermit the Frog is the Space Shuttle before they will admit they are wrong, so they aren't really there to debate, or to let observers judge their arguments, ergo, the argument (or thread) is over.
On some designs, a 16 key pad has extra pinouts which were originally intended to drive the circuits for Dual Tone Multi Frequency signalling built in (think of AT&T). These don't drive tone generators in ATMS, but they may reliably put out a square wave 1/2 second long pulse while the main pinouts are outputting a pulse of the length the finger stays on the key.
On other designs, it has sensors to disable signaling when temperatures get above a certain value (think of the anti-fire security common on elevator keypads - this gets used on some 16 key designs because they also get used in door security systems, rather than them commonly being used in elevators, or people really worrying that an ATM on fire may start spewing money).
Some designs used to incorporate the very same additional chipset used in soda machines so the owner could put those into maintenance modes (see "hacking coke machines"), and they let the ATM service tech run diagnostics by entering a reserved pin number or longer sequence, but I'm not sure if any of those last are still in use.
There are rumors of radio frequency signalling built in, and sometimes actually used to get the pad signal to the servos it controls when the physical mounting for the ATM is in a sufficiently awkward location. I don't think those rumors are likely, but I wouldn't just assume they are completely bogus either. Alternately, I suspect the parent poster may be referring to various claims that the pads can be used to scan fingerprints and even to tell a live finger from a severed one, but these last are certainly urban legends.
The Roman Catholic church has these fellows called "Priests", who actually expect all good Catholics to confess their specific sins, and recieve counseling and do penance for each one as set by the priest. It often defaults to a scoring system, where sex gets you points, then planning for the sex in advance by buying condoms gets you more. Some people therefore feel less guilty, and are treated as officially less guilty, if they can say they didn't plan the sex in advance, it just happened. Since the sex itself can be a powerful motivator, doing the least 'sins' that still result in the reward is often the choice, instead of 'not sinning' at all.
The question is, even under RC doctrine, why is sex a sin and doing something that indicates you planned it in advance a greater sin, instead of sex itself being a sin, but trying to reduce bad consequences such as disease spread to yourself OR YOUR PARTNER not a sin? Why is it assumed that using a condom is either to avoid preganacy (again, itself a sin), or to protect only yourself from the "God given consequences" of sin, but never out of genuine feeling for your partner? Why are priests specifically trained to discount that possibility?
Agreed, lions don't hunt like wolves - for one thing, the typical lion runs only about 30 meters to hit prey from ambush. But lionesses hunt a bit more like wolves than male lions do.
Averaging close to 250 Kg., Male lions don't do more than 5% of the routine hunting. They do, however, handle other predators for the pride. Hyenas, in particular, would probably love it if male and female lions both weighed only about 100 Kg. Dog-like pack tactics would probably beat the more loosely organized cat group tactics consistantly, except the male lions are just too damned big. (And yes, Hyenas are not really very close to wild dogs, but they use pretty similar methods as pack hunters.). Female lions have proportionately larger hearts than males, but in both cases, the heart is proportionately smaller than for a wolf or other sustained runner. Lions do have some cooling systems and are observed to pant, but the male's typical heavy mane menas they have less efficiency at cooling than even their size differences would suggest, and again, cooling is less efficient than for a wolf.
Even if they did somehow just lay down and die peacefully and voluntarily, somebody has to get paid to bulldoze all the bodies into the pit. If they don't do it quickly, somebody has to get paid a lot more to treat the diseases spread by all those bodies laying around. Somebody has to get paid just to dig the damned pit. Now ask yourself why some people are assuming costs savings from cutting all the social programs if the people on those programs probably won't just lay down and die peacefully. If some of them will turn to crime, rebellion, and warfare to survive, how much will that cost?
Maybe I'm not seeing the subtleties of the nuanced "Libertarian Freedom" position, but when people start ignoring the real costs of how things would be even if an unrealisticly lucky (for them - they're presumably not the ones being bulldozed) outcome happened, I start thinking they are not driven by logic or reason anymore, they just want some people they hate to die, even if it costs more.
A 2 liter of Walmart's own house brand soda?
2 liters = 4.23 pts, a little more than 1/2 gallon. Current price, observed today, in an actual Walmart: 55 cents US.
So, YES THE MILK IS MORE EXPENSIVE. People averaging results such as mine have figured out it's more expensive currently by a factor of about 3 and 1/4 to 1. Thank you for playing "I'm so out of touch that I think the average minimum wage worker buys the expensive brands and I'll sieze on that to 'prove' there's no problem." Please look at how much space your own Walmart devotes to their own generic brand and how much to the big name brands on the shelves. If it's 2 to 1 or better, well, there's your quick visual gauge of how bad poverty is in your area. Some stores have ratios above 5 to 1.
This version gets much closer to testable than the usual multiverse model. (The stock multiverse starts with an assumption that certain physical constants must be random - that's pretty much as untestable as saying those same constants cannot be random and must have been chosen by something). Unlike that, this version seems to be edging into the area of testability, at least in part.
We can test some of the predictions of the various inflationary models, to fine tune them to better account for current, observable conditions, and the best inflationary models are making predictions about the universe we observe now and not just the early universe. We can just possibly test the idea that the vacuum constant energy follows a quantum mechanic model where it's "smeary" in the sense the math describes it. We will probably be able to devise tests for how QM applies at higher and higher energies, going much higher than the present day supercoliders, although there will be a limit to just how high energy laboratory physics gets. We may not be able to test anything even close to the energy levels of the expanding universe, but we don't know just how close we might be able to get just yet - that's similar to whether quantum decoherence can be opposed long enougn for a large enough number of atoms, for practical quantum computing purposes - we don't know for sure yet - define practical.
We will probably never be able to build a "U-window" and look into a parallel universe, or that sort of test, but then, we can't seperate bound quark triplets and observe single quarks, but they still predict and explain so much else that Quantum Chromodynamics as a whole is regarded as pretty darned testable.
You know, whatever model of the observable universe you like, even leaving out all the possible things beyond the observable boundry, it looks extremely doubtful that we would ever be able to make a second universe and observe it to see if it duplicates the behavior of our own. (When it comes to universes, rerunning the experiment is probably not a possible test). Define testability as being able to vary initial conditions or confine the subject under lab conditions, and testability vanishes for just about all astronomy, not just cosmology.
What's spooky to me is we may be able to devise just enough testing that we will think it's probably true, but not enough to have high confidence. Eternal Inflation may end up always a hypothesis, never a theorem.
I left the header that says "My God.." on this post, but tossing out the "G" word, in the context of cosmology, tends to shift the discussion in directions where there's more heat shed than light. I don't think the original poster meant the word as a claim so much as an exclamation of how baffeled he or she was by the article, yet look how swiftly words such as faith start following.
Some 'tiny little portion' of my taxes were spent recently in bailing out some banks. Enough credit card fraud, and I'm totally confident the 'too big to fail' bunch will be back at the public trough asking for more of my taxes soon. At least a good chunk of the money these banks are risking now is tax money they got in the bailout, not their own money. It doesn't matter if I trust the card system, or even have a credit card at all. So, do you pay taxes? If so, why don't you care?
First issue is that those viewers are time-shifting. The broadcasters hate that because some of their advertisers want the ads to be seen at that time.
The broadcasters will only "hate"* it if the advertisers stop paying as much. Are there advertisers who think Aereo is reducing the number of viewers who see the ads at the 'right' time? Do they think that reduction is greater than the gain for having their name and product come to more people's attention at all? Can the broadcasters show where this has come up in negotiating prices? I ask, because the broadcasters don't seem to be using that as part of their case. If they have specific cash amounts they could point to, that's actual damages, and so far, the case seems to be about potential or statutory damages instead. Showing where a given advertiser has offered less because the time shifting makes that timeslot less valuable would be refreshing, as it would let the broadcasters claim damages based on a simple straight-forward calculation that wouldn't look like Hollywood accounting gone mad.
* Hopefully, the broadcasters aren't sueing because they 'hate' anybody - lawsuits are supposed to be about making financial matters straight. Responsible adults don't sue becasue they hate someone and want to do whatever kind of damage they can to them, but to make the bottom line come out right. A civil trial is deliberately supposed to be an extraordinarily poor substitute for ripping someone's jugular out.
So, since the US constitution is not yet three centuries old, you're advancing the bold claim that there have been at least two things some people somewhere consider abuses? That's really a statement about as novel and insightful as "The sky is up". I find your sig ironic in a non-Morissetteian sense.
as infantry soldiers do not get full auto M-16s
This is technically at least semi-true - the M4 used by non-special forces has a 3 round burst setting, which is not equivalent to the FULL auto setting of the M16-A1 from the Vietnam era, or other full auto weapons systems since then.
Most individual infantry in Afghanistan carry an M4 and at least one M67 hand grenade.
The M4MWS (Modular Weapons System) is used by conventional forces, the M4A1 is used by Special operation Forces. The chief difference between the M4MWS and the M4A1 is the M4MWS is only semi/burst and the M4A1 is semi/auto. So if your infantry are not part of a SOG (Special Operations Group), they start with no full auto at the individual level.
At the 4 soldier fireteam level, one soldier will have a M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. There's your full auto, in the form of a weapon carrying typically a 100 round bag of rifle cartridges or a 200 round drum (that's a lot of auto). Alternate loads for the 4th soldier include the FGM-148 Javelin (a 1 soldier fire and forget anti-tank missle - back when I was a tanker, the old Dragon design made me very touchy about friendly fire, but these things are definitely 'intenser' ), or a Squad Designated Marksman (DM), carrying an M14 rifle. (Those two aren't full auto, so technically, you can have a fireteam with no automatic weapon, but the US is not deploying a lot of anti-tank teams currently, and the SDM system amounts to three soldiers covering and supporting one good sniper most of the time, so there aren't a lot of those either)
As we go up to 9 man squads, platoons, and companies, there are lots of additional full auto weapons added, plus other fun things.
I think there are still some M-16s issued to line units somewhere, but offhand, I can't think of any. I carried one sometimes, I also stuck with a 45 a lot when 9 mms came in. Really, I didn't pay a lot of attention to the little stuff - the Bradley's M-242 Bushmaster is a 25 mm chaingun, which fires 180 rounds of depleted uranium a minute on full auto, and can punch the engine of a full length school bus out through the back end and literally chop the whole bus in half lengthwise. Bradleys are issued for 9 soldier (mechanised) infantry squads, and they have some anti-tank missles and a 7.62 machine gun too. I mostly commanded things for when Bradleys weren't enough - so If I was actually needing something I could pick up single handed, the Foo had already hit the Baz.
So, do civilans get grenades? Does one civilian in four get an M-249, and one in nine a M-242 (and something to tote it)? I don't think any US forces are using RPGs (Rocket Propelled Grenades) currently. The Army doesn't have nukes. Presidents and Admirals have nukes. Maybe boomer sub commanders could theoretically have nukes without the Admiral's permission, or maybe that silly Red Tide movie got that wrong, but either way, the Army doesn't have nukes. They had a few way back when, including one that could be delivered by backpack, but not recently.
Some civilans do have Armored Personnel Carriers, now that I think of it. The park service uses 113's with modified mortars to trigger avalanches in ski country sometimes. Maybe they've gone to Bradleys by now...
I agree so far, but what are the implications of marriage as a right of the (individual) people, vrs. a right of the states?
1. Marriage can be a right of at least some individual persons (for one example, it could be a right of all those of over a certain age), even though it takes at least two to enter into a marriage. There are individual rights which can be practiced by a lone person (i.e. travel, or petition of authorities), and rights which require at least two (for examples, contract or assembly).
2. If marriage is solely a right of the states, the states could, for just one example, limit marriage to just two people at a time. On the other hand, if the due faith and creedence clause means that the constitution has given the federal government authority to prohibit the states from refusing to recognize the validity of another state's marriage, just one state choosing to allow poligamy (Not to reveal any particular state's names that realistically might, but one of them's initials are Utah), and other states would have to recognize it, even if they didn't allow such marriages to be performed in their own boundaries. The constitution definitely does prohibit some rights of the states to control some aspects of marriage, by the due faith and creedence rule.
3. If marriage has both state's rights and individual rights aspects, it gets really interesting. (And to be fair, that's far from a hypothetical - an awful lot of common law does seem to assume that there are both components to marriage). We would still have to decide which limits federal law is placing on the states are potentially valid. Laws based on the idea that the federal government has a right to control how the states approach marriage simply on its own behalf wouldn't have anything in the constitution to justify them, as the parent poster points out. If the federal government were to regulate the states in the same manner as they have for speed limits and medical mariajuana use, they would have to exceed their constitutional authority, and they'd probably have to stretch the commerce clause or something of that nature even more out of recognizable shape, to even try and provide a faux veneer of legitimacy.
But laws supposedly protecting the individual's rights from the states siezing full control over all aspects of those rights would have the same validity as laws protecting individual right of contract or petition, if the constitution supports that right as being a right of the people and not the states. That's part of what prohibited to the states means, not just that there's a specific list of things prohibited to them, but that things can be prohibited to the states by being reserved to the people instead. Note that this doesn't mean that any argument the federal government attaches to a law claiming it supports an individual right makes that law valid - it means that a valid argument supporting a right being a right of the people may give the federal government the right, in turn to make laws that restrict what a state can do, even if it's not specifically spelled out that the right isn't reserved to the states. When does that "may" happen? When the federal government does have some power delegated to it, such as enforcing full faith and creedence, the interstate commerce clause, or similar parts of the constitution.
(We spent a lot of blood to settle this point once - an authority a lot higher than the 9 supremes eventually ruled at Gettysburg and beyond - And anyone who reads the constitution and says that Grant v. Lee wasn't a valid precident for interpreting it should really think about just what happens if they are somehow right, as initiating the appeals process this time would pretty much have to involve capturing an arsenal containing thermonuclear weapons rather than Muskets, Sharps and Henry rifles and horse drawn cannon - If you're not prepared to take it that far, your opinion of the limits of federal power in the defense of individual rights becomes, strictly speaking, irrelevant).
One thing to consider is that states are more able to defend their rights against the feds than are individual citizens. So if the right is held by the state, it's less likely to be infringed by the feds.
Maybe. States have some power from unified action, with advantages such as most state attny. generals being pretty damned good lawyers and having support teams already lined up for the specialty areas.
I could make a counter-argument however: As you yourself put it "It's not clear what rights should devolve on the states.".
A lot of the original constitutional rights that are actually written down or can be found in other writings of the founders are clearly individual rights (and then, there's those pesky unenumerated rights*). Take copyright, for example. It's clear from the way the constitution puts it that it's based on the individual physical capability to make a copy of something, and it's a pretty straight-forward argument that when the constitution talks about a limited time for the government to control copying, that's in relation to the time available to the individual (which makes "life plus" laws unconstitutional, as nobody can give up more of a right than they have). How could a state defend its 'right' to control copyright, when there's no way to claim the state ever had such a right? Could anyone seriously argue that "Nature and Nature's God" created a right to copy as having belonged to the state governments and not individuals, from the time it came to exist? In the same way, a "right to life", if such a thing exists, is a right of individuals - what would even be the point of claiming that the death penalty was unconstitutional for the federal government, but only because it was a right of the sovereign states?
* I don't know of any good book on constitutional law that even trys to figure up what all the unenumerated rights actually being violated are, let alone how many of them derive from any natural law argument. Does the federal government usurp more rights of the states or of the people individually? How could we weigh the impact of federally mandated speed limits against the prohibition of pot and decide which of these, and a hundred other issues, actually involve an unenumerated right, and which are actually the more important violations?
Until I know just what the robotic {blank} AC wants on the 'giant magical box' is, I'm going to imagine things much more interesting than a sno-cat. AC, you are one sick puppy!
I was one of those people who voted for President Obama mostly because he wasn't quite as bad (IMHO) as the only (mainstream) alternative. If the race hadn't looked very close in my state, I might well have voted on other matters and picked nobody for president, or at least gone 3rd party.
So then you use a phrase like "God and personal Savior Obama". We've never even met, so why did you just spit in my face? Way to win people over to your side of the argument there.
You missed the real, deeper points. Religion X says that they are giving health insurance as an additional incentive to work for them, in other words - "pay". Then they are against some of the things the employee might spend that pay on, so they want the right to restrict how that employee spends what they have already been paid. In short, as you put it, the goverment has decided that once you pay somebody something, you have no right to dictate how they spend that money. (That's why saying "In Short..." is usually a mistake, it makes it to easy to reduce one side's more complex, nuanced opinion to a sound-bite that "nobody in their right mind" could possibly disagree with). Christians that have taken the position their church can or should control money they have already given to an employee are so far over the line on "rendering unto Caesar", that they might as well openly announce they have fallen into a Satanic heresy. Oh, but it's birth control. By some churches birth control is such a big sin that it's special, a bigger deal than all other sins... Which leads inexorably to the next point...
Point the Second, there are tax breaks for providing employees with health insurance, and these churches have already benefitted from them. By what right can they take such benefits and then insist on not meeting the minimum standards for types of coverage the entity paying out those benefits imposes to get them? Does a moral position against abortion or birth control give the holder right to break agreements, take money under false pretences, and lie? Great! I can get out from under about 30-40% of the 10 commandments just for being anti-abortion. I can steal and bear false witness with impunity, and i might be able to stretch it enough to get the bit about coveting dropped too. That's darned near as good a deal as geting to drink and screw around if I just fly one little plane into one little building afterwards, in Allah's name. (In fact, it's a better deal, at least until we get to the part about having to break in 72 virgins - that might be a tie breaker, but I'm not sure which way. {rocket_j_squirrel} "But are they friendly virgins?"{/rocket_j_squirrel})
What's the moral difference between paying someone in health coverage and then trying to control how they spend it, and paying someone the cash portion of their pay in company money that can only be spent at the company store? Can the church demand to pay somebody their cash wages only by direct deposit, and then demand to see their monthy debit card statements each month to prove they haven't been spending any of that money on booze or lap dances during the time they weren't working? More simply, could a church even demand all its employees accept direct deposit on any purely moral grounds? What about other benefits? Can a church that is morally opposed to cremation for the deceased refuse to pay out a death benefit if it's to be used for cremation expenses? Some faiths really do oppose cremation, but I don't know of any that have vetted their life insurance provider to make sure there's a no cremation rider in the policy (and there's no special tax benefits to offering burial insurance, so those churches couldn't milk those nonexistent benefits if they wanted to).
You truly want it to happen...
You want the less powerful offenders, the non-violent ones, the ones who aren't so dangerous, raped by the most violent and physically dangerous prisoners. You want those already most dangerous ones to get the message that a moderate amount of crime doesn't pay, but pedal to the metal violent overdrive has its perks. You want the guards to have to work around criminals who expect to be bought off with a supply of victims instead of staying in line for fear of more punishment. You want the prisons to be full of racist gangs constantly ready to riot, and using protection from the rapists on the other side as their chief recruiting tool. You want the rapists and murderers in there to get more practice at violence before their inevitable release, more confirmation that violence gets them what they want. You want prison to not be as bad for the worst of the worst, by making it hell for the rest of the people in there.
Yes, you want it, and now you know, deep inside, that your want has nothing to do with justice.
it would be interesting to see how many people that get paid to do graphics, and have legit copies of Photoshop, keep the Gimp or other free and open source tools on their workstations, and use them at least for some work. I don't know what the percentage would be in the arts, but if its anything like the situation with math or science programs, it's at least in the double digits, and I wouldn't be surprised if its near half.
Earth formed from heavy elements produced in at least one prior generation star, but there could be more than just one prior generation (It's very, very unlikely that all or nearly all the medium weight elements above lithium, in our solar system, came from just one older star, and pretty unlikely even that all the heavies above Iron were cooked up in just one supernova).
It's not a safe assumption that stars last an average of 10 Billion years. The most numerous types, red dwarfs, make up 80-90% of all stars, last a lot longer than that, and probably stay stable on the main sequence for 100-200 billion years (American Billions). They also shouldn't spread elements around much when they finally do leave the main sequence. Stars about the size of our Sun, spectral class G2, typically live about 10 Billion years, but make up only about 2% of stars. Big stars, type O, B, and A, burn more quickly, and it's possible to get enough hydrogen together for a star to burn through all its fuel and supernova in mere hundreds of thousands of years, or possibly even a blazing fast 10's of thousands. Those stars are rare, but they are so massive that even a few produce enough heavy elements and push enough gas around when they supernova, to create hundreds of sun sized and smaller stars and all the heavy elements to give such stars the solid, rocky planets we now think are practically ubiquitous.
The supernova explosions are a common source for two effects - heavy element formation, and compressive shock waves that trigger new stars forming in nearby interstellar gas clouds. Many of these gas clouds are already enriched with heavy metals from previous supernovae, Spiral galaxies tend to get regions of new star formation, and quiet regions. But, the high and low density regions in spirals like our Milky Way exist on larger scales than the star forming "nursery" clouds, and this is largely because gas clouds are not just compressed by novae - both the dense star forming clouds and very large but more difuse clouds colide with other clouds, including clouds that were part of dwarf galaxies being captured by the big spirals. So, it's a partial coincidence - Older generation stars have some influence on the shapes of spiral galaxy features, but dwarf galaxy capture has more, and the rare colisions of spirals with other big galaxies show just how much influence the large scale objects can have, producing wildly twisted galaxys such as
If anyone wants to read up on this sort of thing, please remember, because astronomers named them before they knew anything about why there were multiple distinct types of stars in the same mass ranges, Population II stars are actually older than Population I, and Population III older than II. A given population usually includes multiple generations of stars. As an exception, the very oldest, massive stars that novaed within the first million years or so after star formation began, and produced so many heavy elements are called Population III, and most probably represent just a single generation and possibly only the largest types.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nursery#Stellar_nurseries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_collision
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_I_stars#Population_I_stars
and, for those people wanting more than just the Wikipedia versions, a little real source material:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0012399v2.pdf
Whooshathotep!