The analogy also fails because there's no way to enforce a promise not to go to the emergency room if you don't have a way to pay. If you don't drive, we can see you walking or taking the bus. If you drive without insurance, the law lets cops demand to see proof of insurance (at least in my state). How can you not buy health insurance, not at least post a bond, and prove you won't be a burden to the health system without it
Another way to put it is - Only car owners need auto insurance, and only people who could need an emergency room need health insurance. Just because one group is much more inclusive than another doesn't mean it's unfair. Only commercial drivers need commercial grade driving insurance. Only pilots need light plane policies. Only people who build on a flood plain need flood insurance. But some of these are mandatory and others not - go figure.
Maybe, you could lobby to get some form of bonding recognised as an alternative to having health insurance. That's an alternative, after all, to mandatory driver's insurance.
I have a pre existing condition (Type 2 Diabetes). At this point, I have lost a net of 30 lbs, and built about 20 of muscle from when I was diagnosed. Though I still weigh 211, I am 6'1', and have a body-fat index of about 13% (lots of weight training and running).
I am currently throttling back on the last of my cheap oral meds as even my physician is beginning to agree I don't need them any more. I went from 2 types of Insulin, a cholesterol inhibitor and two oral drugs to just the pills in 3 months, to just one oral drug nine months later, and a little more than two years after that, probably don't even need minimal once daily doses of Glucophage (which is a 4 dollar generic at many pharmacies - lets hear a big whoopee/bitch if the insurer doesn't want to subsidise that, but somehow, I think I can manage).
I can even have a soda now and then, or a browny, but I keep those as once or twice a week treats to stay in real shape. I rigorously avoid HFC or pure glucose sweeteners, but drink fruit juices quite often, as I seem to be metabolising fructose at full normal speed.
I still meter 1x/day, alternating between testing just after I get up, and 2 hrs. after a meal. (metering costs about 80 bucks, every 100 days, for my level of usage. That's still probably affordable for most people, but I'm sure there are some poor people who skimp on it when they need to be doing it 2x or even 4x a day.).
The insurance companies take the first sentence of what I wrote into account.
The only thing emergency rooms are required to provide is immediate stabilisation and treatment for immediately life threatening conditions. You can walk in with a terminal cancer that will kill you in six months, might still respond to chemotherapy, and they can not put you in the cancer ward, not provide chemotherapy drugs, not give you painkillers, and then turn you away as soon as a triage person decides you are not about to die on them. By some interpretations, which many hospitals follow, they do have to get an actual attending physician to look you over, and for my example above, he or she will write you prescriptions for oral anti-cancer meds and painkillers in at least most cases. You then have to pay for those prescriptions yourself.
Many hospitals go beyond what the law requires, but the extra costs they incur giving out treatment can be substantial, and end up on other people's bills. Even minimal care for some conditions can be expensive (Suspected Heart Attacks mean you keep the person at least long enough for a series of EKGs, and maybe a treadmill test, not just a 30 minute stay.).
So yes, to that extent, there's free health care, and it does extend to non-citizens. A fair way to describe that is to say everybody, not limited to citizens, has a guarantee of imminent death care.
Personally, I don't see why you want to bring up the past administrations mistakes, but since you did...
Compromise with Dems and liberals caused the Bush administration's mistakes? Because it was the Dems and Liberals who wanted two wars at once? The Dems and Liberals who wanted to escalate the war against drugs? The Dems and Liberals pushed to bail out the banks with no strings attached? (I know the Dems and Liberals continued to bail out the banks once they got more power, but since they did at least add a few conditions, the no strings at all part was obviously the 'Repubs' and 'Cons' idea.).
Hey everybody, Bush 43 didn't really want to fake the claims of WMD in Iraq, the Dems and Liberals made him do it. They wanted to get Saddam to prove they were better than their daddies. Those CIA officers who kept reporting secretly to Dick Cheney after he left office? They secretly reported, and still report to Barney Frank, who also forged Gonzales signature as needed.
If you decide to become a road builder, you will get at least the vast majority of your work by contracting with 'the government', or you will starve. If you form a long haul trucking corporation, you will run on roads 'the government' controls (and they can set the terms, such as telling you your trucks can't use certain routes). If you become an architect, your buildings will meet the government's standards. If you become an electrician in the USA, you will meet at least one of three very broad codes, each applicable to 10 states or more, in all your work. If you become a dairy farmer, the government will inspect your product and put its seal of approval on it, or your avenues of sale will be limited at best (and if you refuse to let the govenment test your cows for BSE, they will shoot Old Bessie right in front of you, if necessary.).
As the law stands now, and as it will stand if all the most liberal of the new health care referendums pass, if you accept insurance as a payer, you must accept the rules that insuror sets. If government becomes one of the insurors (which it already has, by Medicare), you must accept their terms to take their money. Don't like it, don't accept their insurance, and don't treat the patients they cover. Stay in private practice. Oooohh! That's so Socialist!
Now, there are a few laws for exceptional, uncommon circumstances, requiring you, as a doctor, to make reasonable attempts to save lives in the event of immediate risk. That's cases where people have a heart attack right in front of you, not providing free ongoing care for even the most lethal chronic conditions. Those laws are bundled as part of 'Good Samaritan' laws that protect you (as a medical professional), from being sued if you try to render emergency assistance. They also match the first oath all doctors swear - there's more to the Hippocratic Oath than just "First, do no harm...". So do you want to be a special kind of doctor who doesn't respect the oath?
Some states rights issues make a lot of sense - drug law reform, setting speed limits, Individual States setting standards for insurance. Some are more ambiguous - The arguments for more local standards for education are not very convincing, despite No Child Left Behind being a pretty screwed up 'fix'. Some states rights are part of the problem. Sometimes, states rights really does get used as a code for nothing more than racism.
Here's the real problem though: The federals were never supposed to have this much power (in theory) - The big financial institutions were never supposed to act against their own interests and take so many incredibly stupid risks (also in theory, particularly Rand's and Greenspan's).
If you're an Objectivist, the burden is on you to explain why so many of our financial institutions ended up controlled by worthless moochers when we had been de-regulating for over a generation - shouldn't most of the top banks have been in the hands of rational individualists after 20 years of more and more freedom? I know we weren't at total deregulation yet, and a small percentage of the worst financials were actually subject to rules such as CRA, but compared to. say the Carter years, we were a lot closer to every one of the conditions Rand advocated for Capitalism. The guys who ran the big banks during the seventies must have been exaggerated, super-stereotyped versions of Elsworth Toomey and Wesley Mooch, for so much of that to survive til now. Why didn't any Midas Mulligans get into banking since the Reagan years?
If you're on the political right, how the hell can we get a small government where we spend this much on defense, prisons, and the war on some drugs? If we cut all social programs, the whole department of agriculture, federal DOT and NASA out of the mix, we'd still have a huge, bloated government.
I know there's some arguments over whether IQ tests measure intelligence. Please don't bother to rehash those, as they don't affect any of the points about IQ statistics and means and medians, bell curves and such, below.
1. Nobody actually scores a 10 or 20 on an IQ test. People that messed up can't take the test at all, so someone guesstimates a number. Really, it's hard to get an accurate number for anyone below the 'educable retarded' range, generally thought to be about IQ 50. The top range for diagnosing someone as retarded is about IQ 70 (According to the definition in the American Psychiatric Association 's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV)). Thanks to recent court decisions in the US, 70 is also the number used to determine if somebody can get the death penalty. 2. An IQ of 80-130 is considered the normal range, and 100 is considered average. The first point about bell curves is the normal range is not equally distributed around the average (20 points below, 30 points above). That definition, just by itself, means IQ simply can't fit a perfect Bell curve with there being the same numbers of people at the very top edge of the normal part of the curve and the bottom cut-off. 3. The first interesting point about medians and means is there's a 10 point gap between the bottom of the average range and the top of the retarded range. There is currently no standardised official name for people in that gap. Nobody really knows whether the percentages with those numbers between 70 and 80 fit any particular curve because they don't really have a classification scheme. There's been a great deal of research on the range we call retarded and the educable portion of that range, but much less research on what we could call the intermediate range.
Note that, by several estimates, that intermediate range contains the average IQ (or peak of the curve if you will ) for people the US has in prison for violent crimes. People with IQs between 70 and 90 have higher crime rates than people with IQs below or above this range, but it depends on whether you look at mean or median values whether the peak is in the gap range or just above it. So not only don't we know what to call the gap, we aren't sure whether that might be important for understanding violent crime or not. 4. An IQ of 121 or more can be expected in about 1 of every 10 people, drawn at random from the population. That's where the 90th %'ile falls. The bottom 10th %'ile should be close to IQ 79, (if you accept the classic bell curve distribution). The US armed forces have long claimed that the 10% percentile is at IQ 80, very close to that. However, they also claim that's their absolute cut off for taking a potential soldier, and looking at the percentages rejected for mental inadequacy during the specific years of peak recruiting stress (in other words, when quotas produce enormous pressure to take everybody possible), the numbers are closer to about 15-22%. Some of those skewed peak numbers show up in years 1964-68, at the height of the Vietnam war draft, when damned near every young male born on certain dates was tested. Those numbers therefore suggest there's an excess of below average to anything like a bell curve fit. 5. There is no top to the scale. IQ's estimated at well over 200 exist (i.e. Mozart, who gets a prodigious score if you treat writing his first pieces at 6 years old as indicative.). Technically, that again rules out a literally true bell curve, although you could get 99.99999% of people to fit under one if the top was the only problem.
I think somebody doesn't get the distinction between 3% or 6% Hydrogen Peroxide, which works well for cleaning out earwax and treating minor scrapes and cuts, 10 to 16% solutions, used to bleach things, including sometimes teeth although the weaker solutions are now preferred for safety, and 80-95% Hydrogen Peroxide, which is used as a mono-propellant (in the Bell Rocket Belt where It's not used an oxidizer, rather the peroxide breaks down directly into steam and O2 as it hits a catalytic screen in the reaction chamber), or as the oxidizer part of a bipropellant system, such as T-Stoff (80% concentrated hydrogen peroxide / 20% oxyquinoline) mixing with C-Stoff (methanol-hydrazine mixture) in some WW2 German rocketry.
Quoting just the part that is advice to the slave with a Christian master simply doesn't give a very full picture, unless you include the parts that are advice to the masters themselves:
How about Ephesians 6:9 "And masters, do the same things to them, and give up threatening, knowing that both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no partiality with Him. "
Or the People's New Testament commentary on Ephesians:
6:9 "And ye masters. The Roman law allowed masters to treat their slaves as brute beasts, to abuse and even to murder them. But Christianity at once put Christian masters under restraint. Do the same things unto them. Act on the same principles towards them, that the Lord requires of them towards you. There must be mutual good will and mutual service. Forbearing threatening. The habit of cruel masters. Knowing that your Master also is in heaven. That you have a Master who sees you, to whom your slave is just as dear as you are, and who will hold you to account if you wrong him."
or
Colossians 4:1 ( New International Version) "Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven." (ISV) puts this as "Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven."
It's disappointing to many that the New Testament doesn't explicitly say "Free all your slaves". It's hard to reconcile with the idea that the whole book is the word of God as some Christians claim. Personally, I regard books such as Timothy, or Paul's letters to the churches at Ephesus and others, as principally man-made texts, but that doesn't rule out a touch of Divine inspiration, in the sense that these people started getting the idea that slavery was wrong, and thinking about how to do right instead. Since the early church mostly believed that the second coming was likely to happen at any moment, worrying about how (or whether) to clean up the whole institution of slavery didn't mean as much as how to act for the immediate term and the individual case.
There was a fellow posting on Usenet under the nym 'Mirror Spock'. By his own claim, he isolated individual tracks from recordings of Simon and Garfunkle's "Sounds of Silence" and remixed them. It seems the original releases all had problems. On one released version Art Garfunkle was recovering from a cold, and they shifted the harmony down a fifth or so so he could reach the notes. On another, there was a famous studio musician who couldn't make it, etc. So Mirror Spock released a remix with all the 'best' versions of each track.
So here's a case where there's arguably some real creative effort, enough that it should easily pass the tests the courts use to determine that part, and yet it seems overwhelmingly probable it is still a copyright violation (one which at least some of the original creative people know of, and supposedly don't want to sue over, but does anyone doubt what the court would decide if it did get litigated?).
You're suggesting some real borderline examples of what is and isn't an original, and is or isn't 'creative', as that applies to being an original work. There are real cases that are solidly farther from that borderline. How that fits together is anyone's guess.
This is one of those situations where the industry is shooting itself in the foot. They've 'cried wolf' so often about people's defenses having no weight before, what happens when a truly absurd claim, such as this one, comes up? If the judge has dealt with the industry before, he probably doesn't jump through hoops to examine the briefs quickly and throw the argument out, but instead lets the case proceed more normally, which increases costs to the RIAA's clients.
Yes, stolen by living authors! (Note the lack of ironic quotation - I mean stolen, quite literally). What's been stolen are the extensions, not the original ownership.
The public had a deal, under the Constitution itself. We protect the person's copyright for X years. Not just by not violating it, but by paying costs to enforce protection as part of our taxes. After that, the work goes public, to benefit us, or at least our children, and their children and so on. Every time congress extended, they piled more benefits on one side of that deal, and took from the other. Stealing applies quite literally to that act. Note, this applies to rewriting the law so it covers works that were under the older social contract when they became protected. It's not stealing to write a law so new works will have longer protection in the future. (It's not automatically just law either, but it's not a taking without compensation)
The original right to copy was a physical or natural right (as in Nature or nature's God). A person could sit down with pen and paper, or a press if they owned one, and make a copy, for as long as they lived (and not a second longer). Technically, the moment Congress passed a law that had a rule like Life+50 years, they said copyright wasn't based on the transfer of a natural right any more, but of a right that exists only because of the government creating it. (You can't have a right to do something, by nature, after you are dead, after all.). That means congress is claiming the authority to manufacture or withhold a right as it chooses in this case, so technically, if they took back all copyright and claimed to be able to sell the works themselves and put the money in the government's kitty, they could do it, under modern copyright law. Ex-post-facto limits didn't apply to the extensions and don't apply if they seize all works, because it's only a government created priviledge, not a 'real' right anymore. If that's not more stealing, it's at least laying the groundwork for being able to steal better in the future.
And any break for living authors is a penalty to dead ones. Why should a person who started writing professionally at 15 (i.e. Michael Moorcock, now 70-something and still alive), have more protection than a late in life author such as Frank McCourt (already deceased in his late seventies)? 'Life plus' rewards long lived authors who start writing early, and you can't do that without penalising authors who die young or don't find their voices until they are older. If special treatment for being still living is right, how about special treatment for dying with heirs? Should authors with children have more rights than ones who don't? What would this do if it became a general principle in law? Would the length of a work's copyright depend on just what clauses the author put in the pre-nup he signed with his widow? Should authors with only one child need to worry that the death of that child without heirs would affect their copyright, as well as all the other problems it might entail?
Specific performances of Classical works are still in theory protected under copyright law. The biggest things that make this a legal absurdity in practice are twofold:
1. There''s a huge part of the classical catalogue that is recorded in the Soviet Union, with the USSR claiming to have held all copyrights under Communist principles. This includes actual Russian composers, but it also includes performances of just about all major composers of any nationalities. The same people who claim to be for capitalism as it applies to copyright also generally support the USSR's claims - if they didn't, the rights would have become public due to failure to renew - but since they do, they are endorsing what has been legally considered by the US as an illegal siezure.
2. Just about all western production of Classical recordings is taxpayer subsidised and publicly funded. To claim copyright on many performances, it is necessary to say, in effect, "Yes, the practices sessions took place under government grant, but that was just to subsidise the live performance, and in no way subsidised the recorded performance." (That's an actual, word for word claim made in 1997 by a spokesman for the Boston Philharmonic - his own board of directors rejected the claim and announced they would not persue it in court, but it's the sort of thing lawyers fall back on in arguing infringement for classical works).
You do know that this has already been addressed in the specifically Christian case? Augustine's arguments about whether Omnipotence means God could cease being good, or make a triangle with four sides, etc.
It's also rather advanced theology. Augustine was one of the earliest people to argue that an object the size of the earth would look like just a point if seen from the immense distances wherein we see the stars. His argument there wasn't widely accepted for several hundred years and even his own church dropped it during the counter-reformation, but that's the sort of building block he used to get to his definitions of omniscience and omnipotence.
Nothing personal. I don't agree with Augustine on all of this, I'm not trying to convert you to standard model Christianity (or anything else), and I don't think you necessarily need to be saved or that learning the answer to this will save you, or even bring you one step closer. If you do think you need saved, my advice to you is to treat everybody well and try to wake up to who you really are.
But you are really insisting on a 'simple' answer to a question that no one can discuss in its proper context without a lot of much more basic questions being addressed first. "God works in mysterious ways" is sometimes shorthand for "You need five years of upper level courses before we can tackle that one.". I know it seems like you can use words the way you do, and make the statements you made, and have reasoned correctly, and it may seem absurd to claim you've done just what people did, 'refuting' Einstein by saying "Space is curved? Poppycock, how can an emptiness curve? It's objects that can curve! The man's clearly dotty...". But it's my honest opinion that you are doing just that sort of thing.
You can read Augustine (in translation at least), you can read some other people such as C S Lewis for related topics, you can read a lot of Muslim scholars or Charismatics who will tell you why Augustine and Lewis were both wrong to put limits on God, or you can even read some Sufis or people like Wong Kiew Kit and learn how to unask the question. At some point in your life, maybe at the apparent end, you are likely to get a direct answer that will be better than all those, so relax.
There are probably some things Bernie can do that don't require much trust and still repay his victims (or society, or whomever we want to repay) a lot better than making burgers. Just detailing how he did it and helping spot similar cons still in process ought to be worth some real cash value. The fact that his 'debt to society' is unlikely to ever be fully paid back, especially by a man of his age, shouldn't mean we don't try for the best we can get. He could at least write a book for investors on avoiding fraud, with his share of the proceeds all going to his own former investors.
I suspect it's because we (in aggregate) are very unclear whether his real debt is to his direct victims or the whole culture that we don't have more programs to try and get something back out of people such as him. In cases such as his, we also aren't sure whether some of the blame lies with investor greed and things we don't really want to encourage, so do we really want all of them to get all their money back? If we aren't clear just how much he should pay back, no wonder we don't have a lot of mechanisms in place to make it happen.
Conscious awareness of our own free will is something we each experience. It's fundamental, as basic to all our observations as it gets, and in fact more fundamental than the existence of an objective physical universe.
Every single experience you have ever had points to your existence as a consiousness. Only some of the experiences you have had point to an external common reality. Your emotions are experiences you have had, and point to you as the experiencer, but they don't prove there is a common reality we share. Your dreams are experiences you were conscious of, but your dreams certainly don't prove anything about an external reality, whether one we both share or even a hypothetical one where I'm not real and only you are. Your memories can be in error, you can be fooled by an optical or other sensory illusion, so you can't claim all your memories or all your sense experiences point to an objective external reality either, just some.
All the models that involve neurons, chemicals and electricty, or genetics or DNA as defining the "reality of the human situation" or "our existence", are based on the idea that you have enough proof of the validity of an external, physical universe to prove all those things you directly experience, but that don't help you prove the external part, the physical part, or the universe part (uni-verse means one structure with common laws throughout, after all - we are claiming the real thing that is all things has common rules and isn't just a chaos).
How can you claim that science, which is about the common, externalized, objectively verifiable universe, has the power to completely explain all those experiences that don't justify science itself, but the converse is basically false? Science explains things such as dreams by starting off saying "dreams are nothing more than electrical noise in a brain that isn't fully active". It 'explains' consiousness much the same way.
Yet you and everyone else (if you all really exist), have much more direct evidence for your own consciousness than you do for that external universe in which science works. How can you argue that less than 50% of your experiences prove that more than 50% of your experiences aren't real, and can safely be reduced to basic models that trivialize much of them? How can you argue that anything less than 100% of your experience can explain everything important, except by starting off with the assumption that the other parts simply can't possibly be important?
(Go ahead, argue you don't, and yet you somehow know I don't either even though you are simultaniously claiming there's no real you to know anything at all - that's called naive realism, and real philosophers brush their teeth with people who believe that).
You've got a lot of nerve talking about whooshage when you're comparing the man to a predatory animal. We shoot them, and feel totally justified in removing them from our little pocket of society. Saying he's like a man eating lion, and therefore we should treat him the same way we should other races or sexual persuasions, is not a brilliant point that goes whooshing over our oh, so inferior heads, it's simply 100% wrong.
And to clarify what fiery death means, the wire running to the outlet will try to deliver the demanded current, and it's typically too small a gauge to supply it without heating internally. The wire heats up, and either a breaker trips (or fuse blows), or a fire starts, somewhere in the home walls where you can't see it at first.
You can get this with a typical room heater, drawing about 1750 Watts. at 110 volts, that's nearly 17 Amps, just a smidge more than the standard 15 Amp circuit is rated for. Put a couple of 150 Watt bulbs on the same circuit, and the circuit wiring will heat up. A 20 amp fuse or breaker on line only graded for 15 can be quite enough to let that heat get serious.
There are tolerances built into the ratings - if you're not an electrician (or an EE who actually has some practical experience), please forget I said that, and believe there are NO tolerances built into the ratings.
Don't get me started on aluminum wiring in mobile homes, and various other criminal practices still within the older codes.
I live in a sixty-five year old American house, which is all circuit breakers, and was originally built with at least one set of 3 prong, grounded outlets in every room. It didn't come with enough outlets for modern needs, but what it had, were mostly implemented well - it would have been damned hard to electrocute yourself by dropping a radio into the tub even when the house was first built.
I've replaced all the remaining 2 prong (non-polarized and non-grounded) outlets with 3 prong polarized throughout (Ground wires were provided to all the 2 prong boxes, and were metered by me to make sure during the upgrade, but every one was installed correctly by the original electricians). I've added GFI circuits to the baths and kitchen and removed two of the original 240 V circuits (the ones for the oven and dryer circuits, as we have a gas oven and dryer, and I needed the current for additional 120 V outlets), but that's about it. I still have a 240 V circuit that I upgraded in the 1970's from NEMA-10 series to NEMA-6-30 dual outlets, for some the basement power tools, but NEMA-10 was actually a very safe grounded system the way most contractors installed it, way back in the 1950's.
(Usually, people put NEMA-10 circuits in to work with all metal cased large appliances, with the case wired to the third pin for ground, even though they didn't technically have to by code, and the ground technically was only for neutral on various AC Motors inside the cases.). Many appliances were manufactured only with this system already in place, and often came with instructions to make sure your home wiring had already been done compatibly. Sure, the code didn't actually demand all that, but the typical person wiring up their own 240 volt dryer probably RTFM'ed back then, and anyone who bought the kind of power tools I still have on 240 V and didn't, probably died when the 44" inch bed planer/jointer ate their arms, usually long before they managed to get electrocuted (And I shudder to think what kind of accidents are possible with the arc welder whether it's grounded right or not.).
Comparing electrical codes doesn't tell you that much - at a guess, most places in the US that needed 240 seriously exceeded code back when NEMA-10 was common. The British code has ring-mains, and single drops off of rings. Supposedly, you're not supposed to wire a new line tee'd off of another line, just directly off of the main ring. How much would anyone bet that got followed often enough to make their systems actually safer?
On your first point, the law does not normally argue that sole possession is what the law means by either ownership or possession. People wanting to make that distinction are the ones who are going against centuries of common law, and they are thus the ones who need to face additional hurdles in that odd interpretation.
Being notified of a search warrant is simply not of little use, and you are right, you are being a little ridiculous. First, a higher court can technically stop a search or seizure in process. It seldom happens, but that's because in practice few judges will move that quickly and decisively - note that that's in practice, not as a matter of law, and that's seldom, not never. Second, the time to notify your own lawyer is as soon as you receive notice of a search - it is of more than a little use to you to have your lawyer involved weeks or months ahead of becoming aware by other means that your bank, ISP, doctor's office, or whatever has divulged your records. It is admittedly of little use to your accusers, so if we judge what the law should be solely by what law enforcement wants it to be, you become correct.
Your arguments all seem based on that idea - it would be at least as reasonable to argue that joint possession means the state has the extra burden of notifying multiple parties instead of it somehow lessening the state's burden - it would be equally reasonable to argue that collecting evidence from third parties sets a date for the start of a case, and various requirements to notify or proceed that are provided by various state laws must start from that date instead of when they normally begin.
You do make a good point where you raise how Google or whomever can notify you, they are just not required to do so. How about we start asking them to put that notification in their contracts? If enough people ask various ISPs to add this, then the only way the state could abuse its citzenry by this process would be to craft court orders that formally prohibit notification of the other parties as part of their warrants, which is making the government assume full responsibility rather than pass it around to private businesses.
You're about the third post in this thread to mention homes, and the answers in your case are: 1. Yes, and it's actually done quite frequently. 2. Technically yes, although it's been done mostly in some limited cases under laws such as RICO, and 20 states have some protections for some other possible abuses.
Without sweeping legal reforms, the same bullshit that lets them make this call on e-mail has already let them get your financial information - they just use the same argument that banking info is handled by a third party and notify the bank, not you, of what they'd like to see. If you look at how the federal government has treated those eminent domain cases where a mortgage is involved, the situation is analogous there unless you live in one of the 20 states that have state constitutional protections that exceed the federal rules. (And there are similar risks even for fully owned property where no mortgage is in effect, although those don't involve the government using this third party trick for eminent domain).
Just think of how broad, nebulous 3rd party rules can be used in home privacy law. Either you rent, and the landlord is a third party, or you own with payments, and a financial institution becomes the third party, or it's all paid off, but you still have local taxes, and local governments or private property assessors can be used as third parties. Then there's meter readers, repairpersons, and such.
The RICO act lets various justice departments make fertile use of 3rd party access - for example, there was an obscenity case in the 90s where the police agency determined through financial institution records that a speedboat existed among the person's assets, and then used the boat as an excuse to extend a home search warrant to the separate property where that boat was kept. (That is, the written justification for searching the boathouse at a marina owned by the accused and located about 40 miles from the main business offices or the accused's home, wasn't that they had reason to believe obscene material had been either filmed or stored there, but that they had reason to believe obscene materials were produced or stored at other locations, and that an asset which might qualify to be seized under RICO was there and they needed to determine its condition. In other words, they searched the boathouse to see how much they could likely get for the boat at auction.).
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The analogy also fails because there's no way to enforce a promise not to go to the emergency room if you don't have a way to pay. If you don't drive, we can see you walking or taking the bus. If you drive without insurance, the law lets cops demand to see proof of insurance (at least in my state). How can you not buy health insurance, not at least post a bond, and prove you won't be a burden to the health system without it
Another way to put it is - Only car owners need auto insurance, and only people who could need an emergency room need health insurance. Just because one group is much more inclusive than another doesn't mean it's unfair. Only commercial drivers need commercial grade driving insurance. Only pilots need light plane policies. Only people who build on a flood plain need flood insurance. But some of these are mandatory and others not - go figure.
Maybe, you could lobby to get some form of bonding recognised as an alternative to having health insurance. That's an alternative, after all, to mandatory driver's insurance.
I have a pre existing condition (Type 2 Diabetes). At this point, I have lost a net of 30 lbs, and built about 20 of muscle from when I was diagnosed. Though I still weigh 211, I am 6'1', and have a body-fat index of about 13% (lots of weight training and running).
I am currently throttling back on the last of my cheap oral meds as even my physician is beginning to agree I don't need them any more. I went from 2 types of Insulin, a cholesterol inhibitor and two oral drugs to just the pills in 3 months, to just one oral drug nine months later, and a little more than two years after that, probably don't even need minimal once daily doses of Glucophage (which is a 4 dollar generic at many pharmacies - lets hear a big whoopee/bitch if the insurer doesn't want to subsidise that, but somehow, I think I can manage).
I can even have a soda now and then, or a browny, but I keep those as once or twice a week treats to stay in real shape. I rigorously avoid HFC or pure glucose sweeteners, but drink fruit juices quite often, as I seem to be metabolising fructose at full normal speed.
I still meter 1x/day, alternating between testing just after I get up, and 2 hrs. after a meal. (metering costs about 80 bucks, every 100 days, for my level of usage. That's still probably affordable for most people, but I'm sure there are some poor people who skimp on it when they need to be doing it 2x or even 4x a day.).
The insurance companies take the first sentence of what I wrote into account.
The only thing emergency rooms are required to provide is immediate stabilisation and treatment for immediately life threatening conditions. You can walk in with a terminal cancer that will kill you in six months, might still respond to chemotherapy, and they can not put you in the cancer ward, not provide chemotherapy drugs, not give you painkillers, and then turn you away as soon as a triage person decides you are not about to die on them. By some interpretations, which many hospitals follow, they do have to get an actual attending physician to look you over, and for my example above, he or she will write you prescriptions for oral anti-cancer meds and painkillers in at least most cases. You then have to pay for those prescriptions yourself.
Many hospitals go beyond what the law requires, but the extra costs they incur giving out treatment can be substantial, and end up on other people's bills. Even minimal care for some conditions can be expensive (Suspected Heart Attacks mean you keep the person at least long enough for a series of EKGs, and maybe a treadmill test, not just a 30 minute stay.).
So yes, to that extent, there's free health care, and it does extend to non-citizens. A fair way to describe that is to say everybody, not limited to citizens, has a guarantee of imminent death care.
Personally, I don't see why you want to bring up the past administrations mistakes, but since you did...
Compromise with Dems and liberals caused the Bush administration's mistakes? Because it was the Dems and Liberals who wanted two wars at once? The Dems and Liberals who wanted to escalate the war against drugs? The Dems and Liberals pushed to bail out the banks with no strings attached? (I know the Dems and Liberals continued to bail out the banks once they got more power, but since they did at least add a few conditions, the no strings at all part was obviously the 'Repubs' and 'Cons' idea.).
Hey everybody, Bush 43 didn't really want to fake the claims of WMD in Iraq, the Dems and Liberals made him do it. They wanted to get Saddam to prove they were better than their daddies. Those CIA officers who kept reporting secretly to Dick Cheney after he left office? They secretly reported, and still report to Barney Frank, who also forged Gonzales signature as needed.
I'll just wait until they lower the price for open heart surgery. If I wait long enough, I may not meed it at all.
If you decide to become a road builder, you will get at least the vast majority of your work by contracting with 'the government', or you will starve. If you form a long haul trucking corporation, you will run on roads 'the government' controls (and they can set the terms, such as telling you your trucks can't use certain routes). If you become an architect, your buildings will meet the government's standards. If you become an electrician in the USA, you will meet at least one of three very broad codes, each applicable to 10 states or more, in all your work. If you become a dairy farmer, the government will inspect your product and put its seal of approval on it, or your avenues of sale will be limited at best (and if you refuse to let the govenment test your cows for BSE, they will shoot Old Bessie right in front of you, if necessary.).
As the law stands now, and as it will stand if all the most liberal of the new health care referendums pass, if you accept insurance as a payer, you must accept the rules that insuror sets. If government becomes one of the insurors (which it already has, by Medicare), you must accept their terms to take their money. Don't like it, don't accept their insurance, and don't treat the patients they cover. Stay in private practice. Oooohh! That's so Socialist!
Now, there are a few laws for exceptional, uncommon circumstances, requiring you, as a doctor, to make reasonable attempts to save lives in the event of immediate risk. That's cases where people have a heart attack right in front of you, not providing free ongoing care for even the most lethal chronic conditions. Those laws are bundled as part of 'Good Samaritan' laws that protect you (as a medical professional), from being sued if you try to render emergency assistance. They also match the first oath all doctors swear - there's more to the Hippocratic Oath than just "First, do no harm...". So do you want to be a special kind of doctor who doesn't respect the oath?
Some states rights issues make a lot of sense - drug law reform, setting speed limits, Individual States setting standards for insurance.
Some are more ambiguous - The arguments for more local standards for education are not very convincing, despite No Child Left Behind being a pretty screwed up 'fix'.
Some states rights are part of the problem. Sometimes, states rights really does get used as a code for nothing more than racism.
Here's the real problem though: The federals were never supposed to have this much power (in theory) - The big financial institutions were never supposed to act against their own interests and take so many incredibly stupid risks (also in theory, particularly Rand's and Greenspan's).
If you're an Objectivist, the burden is on you to explain why so many of our financial institutions ended up controlled by worthless moochers when we had been de-regulating for over a generation - shouldn't most of the top banks have been in the hands of rational individualists after 20 years of more and more freedom? I know we weren't at total deregulation yet, and a small percentage of the worst financials were actually subject to rules such as CRA, but compared to. say the Carter years, we were a lot closer to every one of the conditions Rand advocated for Capitalism. The guys who ran the big banks during the seventies must have been exaggerated, super-stereotyped versions of Elsworth Toomey and Wesley Mooch, for so much of that to survive til now. Why didn't any Midas Mulligans get into banking since the Reagan years?
If you're on the political right, how the hell can we get a small government where we spend this much on defense, prisons, and the war on some drugs? If we cut all social programs, the whole department of agriculture, federal DOT and NASA out of the mix, we'd still have a huge, bloated government.
I know there's some arguments over whether IQ tests measure intelligence. Please don't bother to rehash those, as they don't affect any of the points about IQ statistics and means and medians, bell curves and such, below.
1. Nobody actually scores a 10 or 20 on an IQ test. People that messed up can't take the test at all, so someone guesstimates a number. Really, it's hard to get an accurate number for anyone below the 'educable retarded' range, generally thought to be about IQ 50. The top range for diagnosing someone as retarded is about IQ 70 (According to the definition in the American Psychiatric Association 's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV)). Thanks to recent court decisions in the US, 70 is also the number used to determine if somebody can get the death penalty.
2. An IQ of 80-130 is considered the normal range, and 100 is considered average. The first point about bell curves is the normal range is not equally distributed around the average (20 points below, 30 points above). That definition, just by itself, means IQ simply can't fit a perfect Bell curve with there being the same numbers of people at the very top edge of the normal part of the curve and the bottom cut-off.
3. The first interesting point about medians and means is there's a 10 point gap between the bottom of the average range and the top of the retarded range. There is currently no standardised official name for people in that gap. Nobody really knows whether the percentages with those numbers between 70 and 80 fit any particular curve because they don't really have a classification scheme. There's been a great deal of research on the range we call retarded and the educable portion of that range, but much less research on what we could call the intermediate range.
Note that, by several estimates, that intermediate range contains the average IQ (or peak of the curve if you will ) for people the US has in prison for violent crimes. People with IQs between 70 and 90 have higher crime rates than people with IQs below or above this range, but it depends on whether you look at mean or median values whether the peak is in the gap range or just above it. So not only don't we know what to call the gap, we aren't sure whether that might be important for understanding violent crime or not.
4. An IQ of 121 or more can be expected in about 1 of every 10 people, drawn at random from the population. That's where the 90th %'ile falls. The bottom 10th %'ile should be close to IQ 79, (if you accept the classic bell curve distribution). The US armed forces have long claimed that the 10% percentile is at IQ 80, very close to that. However, they also claim that's their absolute cut off for taking a potential soldier, and looking at the percentages rejected for mental inadequacy during the specific years of peak recruiting stress (in other words, when quotas produce enormous pressure to take everybody possible), the numbers are closer to about 15-22%. Some of those skewed peak numbers show up in years 1964-68, at the height of the Vietnam war draft, when damned near every young male born on certain dates was tested. Those numbers therefore suggest there's an excess of below average to anything like a bell curve fit.
5. There is no top to the scale. IQ's estimated at well over 200 exist (i.e. Mozart, who gets a prodigious score if you treat writing his first pieces at 6 years old as indicative.). Technically, that again rules out a literally true bell curve, although you could get 99.99999% of people to fit under one if the top was the only problem.
And most of the "Benzoyl Peroxide" Acne treatments also rely on Hydrogen Peroxide in the mix.
I think somebody doesn't get the distinction between 3% or 6% Hydrogen Peroxide, which works well for cleaning out earwax and treating minor scrapes and cuts, 10 to 16% solutions, used to bleach things, including sometimes teeth although the weaker solutions are now preferred for safety, and 80-95% Hydrogen Peroxide, which is used as a mono-propellant (in the Bell Rocket Belt where It's not used an oxidizer, rather the peroxide breaks down directly into steam and O2 as it hits a catalytic screen in the reaction chamber), or as the oxidizer part of a bipropellant system, such as T-Stoff (80% concentrated hydrogen peroxide / 20% oxyquinoline) mixing with C-Stoff (methanol-hydrazine mixture) in some WW2 German rocketry.
Quoting just the part that is advice to the slave with a Christian master simply doesn't give a very full picture, unless you include the parts that are advice to the masters themselves:
How about Ephesians 6:9 "And masters, do the same things to them, and give up threatening, knowing that both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no partiality with Him. "
Or the People's New Testament commentary on Ephesians:
6:9 "And ye masters. The Roman law allowed masters to treat their slaves as brute beasts, to abuse and even to murder them. But Christianity at once put Christian masters under restraint. Do the same things unto them. Act on the same principles towards them, that the Lord requires of them towards you. There must be mutual good will and mutual service. Forbearing threatening. The habit of cruel masters. Knowing that your Master also is in heaven. That you have a Master who sees you, to whom your slave is just as dear as you are, and who will hold you to account if you wrong him."
or
Colossians 4:1 ( New International Version) "Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven."
(ISV) puts this as "Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven."
It's disappointing to many that the New Testament doesn't explicitly say "Free all your slaves". It's hard to reconcile with the idea that the whole book is the word of God as some Christians claim. Personally, I regard books such as Timothy, or Paul's letters to the churches at Ephesus and others, as principally man-made texts, but that doesn't rule out a touch of Divine inspiration, in the sense that these people started getting the idea that slavery was wrong, and thinking about how to do right instead. Since the early church mostly believed that the second coming was likely to happen at any moment, worrying about how (or whether) to clean up the whole institution of slavery didn't mean as much as how to act for the immediate term and the individual case.
There was a fellow posting on Usenet under the nym 'Mirror Spock'. By his own claim, he isolated individual tracks from recordings of Simon and Garfunkle's "Sounds of Silence" and remixed them. It seems the original releases all had problems. On one released version Art Garfunkle was recovering from a cold, and they shifted the harmony down a fifth or so so he could reach the notes. On another, there was a famous studio musician who couldn't make it, etc. So Mirror Spock released a remix with all the 'best' versions of each track.
So here's a case where there's arguably some real creative effort, enough that it should easily pass the tests the courts use to determine that part, and yet it seems overwhelmingly probable it is still a copyright violation (one which at least some of the original creative people know of, and supposedly don't want to sue over, but does anyone doubt what the court would decide if it did get litigated?).
You're suggesting some real borderline examples of what is and isn't an original, and is or isn't 'creative', as that applies to being an original work. There are real cases that are solidly farther from that borderline. How that fits together is anyone's guess.
This is one of those situations where the industry is shooting itself in the foot. They've 'cried wolf' so often about people's defenses having no weight before, what happens when a truly absurd claim, such as this one, comes up? If the judge has dealt with the industry before, he probably doesn't jump through hoops to examine the briefs quickly and throw the argument out, but instead lets the case proceed more normally, which increases costs to the RIAA's clients.
Yes, stolen by living authors! (Note the lack of ironic quotation - I mean stolen, quite literally).
What's been stolen are the extensions, not the original ownership.
The public had a deal, under the Constitution itself. We protect the person's copyright for X years. Not just by not violating it, but by paying costs to enforce protection as part of our taxes. After that, the work goes public, to benefit us, or at least our children, and their children and so on. Every time congress extended, they piled more benefits on one side of that deal, and took from the other. Stealing applies quite literally to that act. Note, this applies to rewriting the law so it covers works that were under the older social contract when they became protected. It's not stealing to write a law so new works will have longer protection in the future. (It's not automatically just law either, but it's not a taking without compensation)
The original right to copy was a physical or natural right (as in Nature or nature's God). A person could sit down with pen and paper, or a press if they owned one, and make a copy, for as long as they lived (and not a second longer). Technically, the moment Congress passed a law that had a rule like Life+50 years, they said copyright wasn't based on the transfer of a natural right any more, but of a right that exists only because of the government creating it. (You can't have a right to do something, by nature, after you are dead, after all.). That means congress is claiming the authority to manufacture or withhold a right as it chooses in this case, so technically, if they took back all copyright and claimed to be able to sell the works themselves and put the money in the government's kitty, they could do it, under modern copyright law. Ex-post-facto limits didn't apply to the extensions and don't apply if they seize all works, because it's only a government created priviledge, not a 'real' right anymore. If that's not more stealing, it's at least laying the groundwork for being able to steal better in the future.
And any break for living authors is a penalty to dead ones. Why should a person who started writing professionally at 15 (i.e. Michael Moorcock, now 70-something and still alive), have more protection than a late in life author such as Frank McCourt (already deceased in his late seventies)? 'Life plus' rewards long lived authors who start writing early, and you can't do that without penalising authors who die young or don't find their voices until they are older. If special treatment for being still living is right, how about special treatment for dying with heirs? Should authors with children have more rights than ones who don't? What would this do if it became a general principle in law? Would the length of a work's copyright depend on just what clauses the author put in the pre-nup he signed with his widow? Should authors with only one child need to worry that the death of that child without heirs would affect their copyright, as well as all the other problems it might entail?
Specific performances of Classical works are still in theory protected under copyright law.
The biggest things that make this a legal absurdity in practice are twofold:
1. There''s a huge part of the classical catalogue that is recorded in the Soviet Union, with the USSR claiming to have held all copyrights under Communist principles. This includes actual Russian composers, but it also includes performances of just about all major composers of any nationalities. The same people who claim to be for capitalism as it applies to copyright also generally support the USSR's claims - if they didn't, the rights would have become public due to failure to renew - but since they do, they are endorsing what has been legally considered by the US as an illegal siezure.
2. Just about all western production of Classical recordings is taxpayer subsidised and publicly funded. To claim copyright on many performances, it is necessary to say, in effect, "Yes, the practices sessions took place under government grant, but that was just to subsidise the live performance, and in no way subsidised the recorded performance." (That's an actual, word for word claim made in 1997 by a spokesman for the Boston Philharmonic - his own board of directors rejected the claim and announced they would not persue it in court, but it's the sort of thing lawyers fall back on in arguing infringement for classical works).
Isn't that "leylines"?
You do know that this has already been addressed in the specifically Christian case? Augustine's arguments about whether Omnipotence means God could cease being good, or make a triangle with four sides, etc.
It's also rather advanced theology. Augustine was one of the earliest people to argue that an object the size of the earth would look like just a point if seen from the immense distances wherein we see the stars. His argument there wasn't widely accepted for several hundred years and even his own church dropped it during the counter-reformation, but that's the sort of building block he used to get to his definitions of omniscience and omnipotence.
Nothing personal. I don't agree with Augustine on all of this, I'm not trying to convert you to standard model Christianity (or anything else), and I don't think you necessarily need to be saved or that learning the answer to this will save you, or even bring you one step closer. If you do think you need saved, my advice to you is to treat everybody well and try to wake up to who you really are.
But you are really insisting on a 'simple' answer to a question that no one can discuss in its proper context without a lot of much more basic questions being addressed first. "God works in mysterious ways" is sometimes shorthand for "You need five years of upper level courses before we can tackle that one.". I know it seems like you can use words the way you do, and make the statements you made, and have reasoned correctly, and it may seem absurd to claim you've done just what people did, 'refuting' Einstein by saying "Space is curved? Poppycock, how can an emptiness curve? It's objects that can curve! The man's clearly dotty...". But it's my honest opinion that you are doing just that sort of thing.
You can read Augustine (in translation at least), you can read some other people such as C S Lewis for related topics, you can read a lot of Muslim scholars or Charismatics who will tell you why Augustine and Lewis were both wrong to put limits on God, or you can even read some Sufis or people like Wong Kiew Kit and learn how to unask the question. At some point in your life, maybe at the apparent end, you are likely to get a direct answer that will be better than all those, so relax.
There are probably some things Bernie can do that don't require much trust and still repay his victims (or society, or whomever we want to repay) a lot better than making burgers. Just detailing how he did it and helping spot similar cons still in process ought to be worth some real cash value. The fact that his 'debt to society' is unlikely to ever be fully paid back, especially by a man of his age, shouldn't mean we don't try for the best we can get. He could at least write a book for investors on avoiding fraud, with his share of the proceeds all going to his own former investors.
I suspect it's because we (in aggregate) are very unclear whether his real debt is to his direct victims or the whole culture that we don't have more programs to try and get something back out of people such as him. In cases such as his, we also aren't sure whether some of the blame lies with investor greed and things we don't really want to encourage, so do we really want all of them to get all their money back? If we aren't clear just how much he should pay back, no wonder we don't have a lot of mechanisms in place to make it happen.
Conscious awareness of our own free will is something we each experience. It's fundamental, as basic to all our observations as it gets, and in fact more fundamental than the existence of an objective physical universe.
Every single experience you have ever had points to your existence as a consiousness. Only some of the experiences you have had point to an external common reality. Your emotions are experiences you have had, and point to you as the experiencer, but they don't prove there is a common reality we share. Your dreams are experiences you were conscious of, but your dreams certainly don't prove anything about an external reality, whether one we both share or even a hypothetical one where I'm not real and only you are. Your memories can be in error, you can be fooled by an optical or other sensory illusion, so you can't claim all your memories or all your sense experiences point to an objective external reality either, just some.
All the models that involve neurons, chemicals and electricty, or genetics or DNA as defining the "reality of the human situation" or "our existence", are based on the idea that you have enough proof of the validity of an external, physical universe to prove all those things you directly experience, but that don't help you prove the external part, the physical part, or the universe part (uni-verse means one structure with common laws throughout, after all - we are claiming the real thing that is all things has common rules and isn't just a chaos).
How can you claim that science, which is about the common, externalized, objectively verifiable universe, has the power to completely explain all those experiences that don't justify science itself, but the converse is basically false? Science explains things such as dreams by starting off saying "dreams are nothing more than electrical noise in a brain that isn't fully active". It 'explains' consiousness much the same way.
Yet you and everyone else (if you all really exist), have much more direct evidence for your own consciousness than you do for that external universe in which science works. How can you argue that less than 50% of your experiences prove that more than 50% of your experiences aren't real, and can safely be reduced to basic models that trivialize much of them? How can you argue that anything less than 100% of your experience can explain everything important, except by starting off with the assumption that the other parts simply can't possibly be important?
(Go ahead, argue you don't, and yet you somehow know I don't either even though you are simultaniously claiming there's no real you to know anything at all - that's called naive realism, and real philosophers brush their teeth with people who believe that).
You've got a lot of nerve talking about whooshage when you're comparing the man to a predatory animal. We shoot them, and feel totally justified in removing them from our little pocket of society. Saying he's like a man eating lion, and therefore we should treat him the same way we should other races or sexual persuasions, is not a brilliant point that goes whooshing over our oh, so inferior heads, it's simply 100% wrong.
And to clarify what fiery death means, the wire running to the outlet will try to deliver the demanded current, and it's typically too small a gauge to supply it without heating internally. The wire heats up, and either a breaker trips (or fuse blows), or a fire starts, somewhere in the home walls where you can't see it at first.
You can get this with a typical room heater, drawing about 1750 Watts. at 110 volts, that's nearly 17 Amps, just a smidge more than the standard 15 Amp circuit is rated for. Put a couple of 150 Watt bulbs on the same circuit, and the circuit wiring will heat up. A 20 amp fuse or breaker on line only graded for 15 can be quite enough to let that heat get serious.
There are tolerances built into the ratings - if you're not an electrician (or an EE who actually has some practical experience), please forget I said that, and believe there are NO tolerances built into the ratings.
Don't get me started on aluminum wiring in mobile homes, and various other criminal practices still within the older codes.
I live in a sixty-five year old American house, which is all circuit breakers, and was originally built with at least one set of 3 prong, grounded outlets in every room. It didn't come with enough outlets for modern needs, but what it had, were mostly implemented well - it would have been damned hard to electrocute yourself by dropping a radio into the tub even when the house was first built.
I've replaced all the remaining 2 prong (non-polarized and non-grounded) outlets with 3 prong polarized throughout (Ground wires were provided to all the 2 prong boxes, and were metered by me to make sure during the upgrade, but every one was installed correctly by the original electricians). I've added GFI circuits to the baths and kitchen and removed two of the original 240 V circuits (the ones for the oven and dryer circuits, as we have a gas oven and dryer, and I needed the current for additional 120 V outlets), but that's about it. I still have a 240 V circuit that I upgraded in the 1970's from NEMA-10 series to NEMA-6-30 dual outlets, for some the basement power tools, but NEMA-10 was actually a very safe grounded system the way most contractors installed it, way back in the 1950's.
(Usually, people put NEMA-10 circuits in to work with all metal cased large appliances, with the case wired to the third pin for ground, even though they didn't technically have to by code, and the ground technically was only for neutral on various AC Motors inside the cases.). Many appliances were manufactured only with this system already in place, and often came with instructions to make sure your home wiring had already been done compatibly. Sure, the code didn't actually demand all that, but the typical person wiring up their own 240 volt dryer probably RTFM'ed back then, and anyone who bought the kind of power tools I still have on 240 V and didn't, probably died when the 44" inch bed planer/jointer ate their arms, usually long before they managed to get electrocuted (And I shudder to think what kind of accidents are possible with the arc welder whether it's grounded right or not.).
Comparing electrical codes doesn't tell you that much - at a guess, most places in the US that needed 240 seriously exceeded code back when NEMA-10 was common. The British code has ring-mains, and single drops off of rings. Supposedly, you're not supposed to wire a new line tee'd off of another line, just directly off of the main ring. How much would anyone bet that got followed often enough to make their systems actually safer?
Yeah, and why aren't the flat chested poor acting busty to get rich?
On your first point, the law does not normally argue that sole possession is what the law means by either ownership or possession. People wanting to make that distinction are the ones who are going against centuries of common law, and they are thus the ones who need to face additional hurdles in that odd interpretation.
Being notified of a search warrant is simply not of little use, and you are right, you are being a little ridiculous. First, a higher court can technically stop a search or seizure in process. It seldom happens, but that's because in practice few judges will move that quickly and decisively - note that that's in practice, not as a matter of law, and that's seldom, not never. Second, the time to notify your own lawyer is as soon as you receive notice of a search - it is of more than a little use to you to have your lawyer involved weeks or months ahead of becoming aware by other means that your bank, ISP, doctor's office, or whatever has divulged your records. It is admittedly of little use to your accusers, so if we judge what the law should be solely by what law enforcement wants it to be, you become correct.
Your arguments all seem based on that idea - it would be at least as reasonable to argue that joint possession means the state has the extra burden of notifying multiple parties instead of it somehow lessening the state's burden - it would be equally reasonable to argue that collecting evidence from third parties sets a date for the start of a case, and various requirements to notify or proceed that are provided by various state laws must start from that date instead of when they normally begin.
You do make a good point where you raise how Google or whomever can notify you, they are just not required to do so. How about we start asking them to put that notification in their contracts? If enough people ask various ISPs to add this, then the only way the state could abuse its citzenry by this process would be to craft court orders that formally prohibit notification of the other parties as part of their warrants, which is making the government assume full responsibility rather than pass it around to private businesses.
You're about the third post in this thread to mention homes, and the answers in your case are:
1. Yes, and it's actually done quite frequently.
2. Technically yes, although it's been done mostly in some limited cases under laws such as RICO, and 20 states have some protections for some other possible abuses.
Without sweeping legal reforms, the same bullshit that lets them make this call on e-mail has already let them get your financial information - they just use the same argument that banking info is handled by a third party and notify the bank, not you, of what they'd like to see. If you look at how the federal government has treated those eminent domain cases where a mortgage is involved, the situation is analogous there unless you live in one of the 20 states that have state constitutional protections that exceed the federal rules. (And there are similar risks even for fully owned property where no mortgage is in effect, although those don't involve the government using this third party trick for eminent domain).
Just think of how broad, nebulous 3rd party rules can be used in home privacy law. Either you rent, and the landlord is a third party, or you own with payments, and a financial institution becomes the third party, or it's all paid off, but you still have local taxes, and local governments or private property assessors can be used as third parties. Then there's meter readers, repairpersons, and such.
The RICO act lets various justice departments make fertile use of 3rd party access - for example, there was an obscenity case in the 90s where the police agency determined through financial institution records that a speedboat existed among the person's assets, and then used the boat as an excuse to extend a home search warrant to the separate property where that boat was kept. (That is, the written justification for searching the boathouse at a marina owned by the accused and located about 40 miles from the main business offices or the accused's home, wasn't that they had reason to believe obscene material had been either filmed or stored there, but that they had reason to believe obscene materials were produced or stored at other locations, and that an asset which might qualify to be seized under RICO was there and they needed to determine its condition. In other words, they searched the boathouse to see how much they could likely get for the boat at auction.).