Please fire this advisor without delay. He apparently doesn't understand process optimization. This is nothing new; Educators have been aware for decades that everyone has their own learning style, and therefore curriculum is tailored to try and use as many of those methods as possible for mass education.
What we've known for decades is that there are those who learn by seeing, those who learn by hearing, and those who learn by doing. But it doesn't take $30,000 to tell them apart. So either this program is particularly ballsy fraud, or it's about something new. So no, don't fire this advisor.
And for that matter, promote the advisor who asks why schools aren't using this well-known and easily detectable division between visual, auditory and kinesthetic types to offer different lesson plans?
You are not permitted to actually use the figures in the proof, they are only to allow you to visualize what the proof is about.
Yes, you are. But if you mark lines or angles or whatever as having a particular relationship, such as being equivalent, you must be able to actually derive that from first postulates (or from whatever postulates have already been derived from first postulates). For example, a classic derivation for the area of a parallelogram (and many other geometric shapes) is basically chopping off pieces and moving them elsewhere, to get a more convenient shape (in this case a rectangle).
This is an important thing to understand: manipulating geometric shapes is exactly equivalent to manipulating symbols representing these shapes. That's the very reason why mathematics has use in the real world. Sometimes one approach is more convenient than the other, but they're ultimately the same thing.
You can not claim to be compassionate, if you are spending (voting to spend) >somebody else's money â" however just and noble the cause.
How very fortunate, then, that you can't vote to spend somebody else's money. You can only vote on how to spend public money. As is your right, living in a democratic society and all, which of course gives you you duties as well - such as paying your taxes.
And if you can not persuade the selfish pricks (your fellow countrymen) to support a particular cause, forcing them to do it at gun-point (via the IRS) is not "compassionate"... It is patently dishonest.
Except, of course, that this isn't what's happening. The selfish pricks agreed to being taxed and having that tax money be controlled by representatives elected by popular vote by doing business in the US; them turning around and whining when it turns out they didn't get their way in said vote, now that is dishonest.
You don't get to agree on a deal and then call your debtor a thief when he comes collecting.
Ah yes, too big to fail. It's never been true so far, but let's keep using that excuse until we are all slaves again. It's just an excuse for the 1% to continue to extract wealth from the 99% "for their own good".
Any excuse will serve a tyrant. But that doesn't mean the excuse itself is necessarily false. And the US government defaulting on its debts would definitely cause a worldwide cascade failure due to the sheer amount in question.
As for too big to fail in general... the problem is that efficiency requires everything to be leveraged as far as it will go. But that kind of economy is fragile, where any disturbance will cause someone to go bankrupt, and that in turn causes other people to do so, and so on, until you have a cascading crash. Yet no one can choose not to leverage, because then they'll be outcompeted by those who do, and go bankrupt anyway when the general cascade failure occurs. It's a classic tragedy of the commons, and also occurs in non-economic ecosystems - specialization makes you more effective but also more vulnerable. Perhaps we could solve the problem the same way nature does: by introducing constant small-scale grief killing over-leveraged companies and ceasing that when a depression strikes?
The world is *vastly* overpopulated, to the point of potential runaway extinction of everything, including us.
The world is nowhere near overpopulated. Every single industrial country produces more food than it consumes. The only thing in short supply is energy, and even that is a matter of lacking proper infrastructure to extract it - whether nuclear, geothermal or solar, any of these could easily satisfy human needs several times over - rather than any inherent scarcity.
Since the rest of your points proceed from the incorrect first, I'll leave them be, except:
Forgo the tax to the capable *and* offer a lifetime stipend to every person of breeding age (15-50) who undergoes permanent sterilization, with option of free preservation of their ova or sperm in case one of their children dies before breeding.
This would be completely pointless. The average number of children in industrial countries is already beneath replacement rate (meaning population sans immigration is actually shrinking). If you are truly worried about population growth then concentrate on helping the developing countries along; that is the most efficient way and doesn't require ethically shady economic coercion, as well as helps optimize as many people as possible away from being "useless eaters" due to increased standards of education.
Second, there are an awful lot of Republicans who were elected on the premise that there wouldn't be an ACA no matter what it said.
And this here sums up perfectly what's wrong with US politics, and increasingly politics elsewhere: it's not about whether something is a good idea, it's about whether it's our idea or the other tribes idea. That would be fine if the debate was over what logo or slogan to use, but policies have a nasty tendency to have effects besides scoring political points.
So when you fail to show that the current SS recipients are the people to blame for the existence of SS, switch to debating whether SS is a true Ponzi scheme or not.
SS is not an investment scheme, so it can't be a Ponzi scheme. It's a pretty standard insurance scheme, where you trade a chance of disaster (too old to work and no money to feed yourself) to periodic predictable payments.
Alternatively, if you will, you can think of SS as a maintenance program: every retiree requires a certain amount of money per month. The total payment is bound by average pay per retiree x the number of retirees, and there's a steady pool of payers, so there's no reason why it couldn't be paid ad infinitum. By contrast, in a Ponzi scheme, the required payouts grow without bound, and the only source of income (new investors) will eventually dry out, so it's doomed to collapse.
Either way, claiming that SS is in any way similar to a Ponzi scheme is an outright lie.
Once we default on $1, our credit rating will drop and we'll finally be forced to pay off some of it or default on it all. Oh how I wish we'd just default on it all and start over.
Well, if that happens, at least you don't have to suffer any wiseass remarks about being careful about what you wish for, since you won't be able to afford an Internet connection. Assuming there will be an Internet after the cascade failure is done, of course.
With this standoff, I don't find it hard to believe they might keep this up for over a month - even while destroying the credibility of both sides in the process.
Both sides? As always, it's the Republicans playing shenanigans.
But that's the goal. We want to get rid of all the crappy, low-paying jobs so those people can move on to rewarding and life-affirming Grade-B jobs.
Except, of course, that if a person could move from crappy Grade-D job to rewarding and life-affirming Grade-B job, he'd already done so. Eliminating Grade-D job doesn't give people who previously did it an ability to get Grade-B jobs, it just means they're now facing a lot more competition and desperate since it's Grade-B or nothing.
This is a hopeful situation, if you believe that everyone has some special talent or skill that, if he were just given the opportunity to express it, would make the world a better place.
What happens when you no longer do get the opportunity to express this talent, because machines have automated the task or made it obsolete? What about those who's talent is buggy whip making? Or truck drivers, once cars are fully automated?
This is an oppressive situation, if you believe that some (many) people are no more capable of useful work than a gorilla, and need a highly prescribed, mindless job as a form of glorified welfare.
Or we could just accept that, as necessary work gets automated, most of humanity is going to be on welfare. It's like an idealized version of ancient Greece, except this time the slaves doing the work are machines and thus don't mind it. It does, however, require shifting away from using work as a measurement for the worth of an individual, like you're doing here.
Civil society doesn't spring form a vacuum. The US Republic built upon the British Parliamentary system, which built upon hereditary monarchy, and so on. The idea that anarchy will somehow make an injustice go away is not credible IMHO.
Except that both of those cases include an outright rebellion as the driving force for change. So you're actually lending the idea credit here.
The best way to correct an injustice is to work within the current civil system. If we were in a dictatorship, that might not be the correct path - but our starting condition is a republic.
The example you gave - American South - was a rebublic, but one that disenfranchised a large percentage of its population from the political process, and in fact allowed those who perpetuated injustice against them to vote in their name. That is just as bad as a dictatorship, and has the same potential for peaceful change.
But I'm struggling to see the analogy to Wall Street... do you consider them agents of a foreign power?
They're a parasite that perverts the rest of the society to maximize their profits, and part of that is jailing as many people as possible in private for-profit prisons. Why?
He's not only undermining the system - he's also undermining regular people's ability to use money and participate in commerce. Burning down the local cotton gin will certainly hurt the slave owners, but also the non-slave cotton farmers who depended on the gin for their income. It's like burning down your house to solve a mouse infestation.
It's an act of (covert) warfare. Economic ruin is the intended outcome, just as it would be with sending bombers to do so. It's not burning down my house, it's burning down the house of a lunatic who's kidnapped people and is holding them hostage.
I was going to use a Nazi example, but I didn't want to Godwin this thing:)
Godwinning is about claiming someone is a nazi, not about making thought experiments set in Nazi Germany. Since we have a real-life example of cartoonish supervillainy, why not use it?
That is far too easy, and the escapee is not guilty of any "crime" other than being the wrong religion or having the wrong gender preference. Allowing the prisoner to escape does not harm anyone except the corrupt regime. Silk Road seems to have involved organized crime activity like extortion and (new information today) contract murder. I'm not going to defend the war on drugs, which I find absurd, but I will defend arrests for fraud, theft, extortion, tax evasion, attempted murder, etc.
Silk Road customers are not guilty of any "crime" other than wanting to get high, and the sellers are not guilty of anything except providing that for a price. Silk Road was the victim in the alleged extortion case, and I find this accusation of contract murder extremely suspicious - it comes from the same regime that arranged for Assange rape charges and would be an extremely stupid thing for DPR to do, since it would undermine SR's reputation even if succesful. And you can hardly blame someone for not paying taxes when it's not possible to do so.
There have been a lot of slaves who benefited greatly from their condition.
Who, and in what way?
Slavery itself isn't the problem.
...
Well, I guess the rest of us must just hope you'll never have any power over anyone or anything, least you'd get a chance to act on your beliefs.
Also, I'm leaning towards the "religious nut" now - such arguments were used prior to the Civil War, and never admitting being wrong is the core tenet of too many denominations to count.
Slavery doesn't require any horrors in its implementation.
A particularly misguided libertarian who thinks forbidding slavery means the government is unjustly restricting economic activity, or a religious nut who thinks because the Bible mentions slavery it is therefore an institute approved and perhaps even mandated by his god.
We need to have law and order in a civil society, even when there are great injustices also taking place.
But if great injustices are taking place, then the society is not really civil, now is it? You can't act like a ruffian and expect to be treated like a lady.
As a thought experiment, imagine that you are living in South prior to the Civil War. Women can't vote and people are actually enslaved right in your very own town. Now you find out that a guy in town is passing off counterfeit money. Do you arrest and prosecute the guy, or do you let him go because what he is doing is a trivial crime because one of the most unspeakably horrible crimes that man has ever perpetuated upon man is occurring at the same time?
What if the counterfeiter is actually an agent sent from the North to undermine Southern economy, specifically to weaken it prior to the inevitable war? And even if he isn't, his actions still serve to help undermine the system that's perpetuating said crimes. If you arrest him, you are strenghtening it and therefore taking part in its crimes.
Also, why go that far back? We have more recent examples. For example, imagine you're a guard at Auschwitz. You notice a prisoner trying to escape. Should you do your legally mandated duty and sound the alarm, or should you tie your shoelaces for the next five minutes?
and you really think the market for meth will be controlled if we regulate it and tax it?
The market for alcohol is, despite the fact that you can make it by putting sugar, water and yeast in a bottle.
nevermind that this is a substance that does grave medical harm to people. you want us to freely sell such a substance?
Alcohol kills people. Tobacco kills people. Fat kills people. Sugar kills people. Salt kills people. All of these are addictive, cause grave and often lethal damage to the people using them, and all are legally available - the latter three without any limitations. So no, medical harm is not a credible explanation for why meth - or any other drug for that matter - is forbidden.
we don't regulate and tax a highly addictive and medically harmful substance: more people will simply be addicted and damaged, and society is not going to subsidize and tolerate this tragedy
No one is asking the society to subsidize meth, or any other mind-altering substance. On the other hand, society does subsidize and tolerate the production of high-fructose corn syrup, which is linked to diabetes and is highly addictive. Said poison is even being added to children's food, to get them addicted from the early age. So, obviously the society doesn't really give a rat's ass about the health of its members, and therefore there must be another reason for the War on Drugs - and likely an ignoble one, since it's not said out loud.
Of course all of this is ignoring the obvious solution: if attitudes about drugs could be changed, we could develop safer alternatives. There's no inherent reason why molecules binding to various synaptic chemicals need to have any other metabolic side effects, and a custom drug could also be designed against abuse - for example by having its own metabolites bind to it and render it inert, forcing a few days interval between hits.
Or we could teach everyone meditation techniques at school, letting them achieve altered states of consciousness without chemical substances. That might work too.
Speed limits fall into a large grey area which results from mixing the role of the owner of the road, who has every right to ban people from using it when they break the rules, with the role of the government, which has no business punishing anyone for merely going too fast or otherwise taking risks. If you actually hurt someone then that's your responsibility, otherwise we're well into the domain of pre-crime, punishing people for harm they haven't caused yet and may never cause.
Reckless endangerment is illegal because if you do something that's likely to result in me being killed, I'll have to take action out of self-preservation. Your right to swing your fist doesn't stop where my nose starts, it stops where I have to choose between reacting or being hit. And it is very much the role of the government to keep that from happening.
This confusion of roles is one of many moral hazards which could be avoided by making the roads (and other things) privately owned and operated.
That's been tried. Feudalism and the divine right of kings weren't much fun for the serfs. It turns out that having the owner be an abstract entity beholden to the residents works much better than , even if it leads to the moral hazard of not letting you endanger other people.
However he did provide a number of suggestions to his users and sending stuff to friend's houses, etc were among them, so it is surprising that he didn't listen to his own site.
It wouldn't really help. LEO have finite resources, so they can only spare so much for a single case. However, Silk Road was basically making a mockery of them, and even more importantly disproving the notion that every drug user is a junkie living in the streets - because you could hardly buy from there unless you were functional enough to have an Internet connection, manage Bitcoins, etc. - so once "Dread Pirate Roberts" was tracked down, it was just a matter of time. Humans aren't perfect, after all, so so one can avoid slipping up all the time.
Sucks for Ulbricht, but buyers and sellers will simply go to a competing site. The War on Drugs isn't winnable because people have an innate need to feel changed modes of consciousness, and legally available alcohol is terrible for that. Altough I suppose a good enough brain-computer interface or sufficiently advanced mental training techniques could make chemical substances obsolete.
Also, this proves that Bitcoin does/did not derive most of its value from Silk Road: it lost about 1/10th of its value, after which prices stabilized and seem to be climbing back to the normal range of around 100 euros/BTC.
I run slashdot on the "very" old classic mode. not even the web2.0 mode that is now slashdot default but an even older version.
Ditto. But do you know what would be really awesome? NNTP interface. Slashdot already allows disabling advertisements (at least it offered the option to me), and the discussions are thread-structured, so why not offer them up via Usenet server? Every section would be its own newsgroup, articles would be top-level posts, and filtering could be handled by having multiple newsgroups with different tresholds for various topics.
That way, you could have Web n+1.infinity for the ooh shiny -crowd, a program of their choice for hardcore users, and a good API for mobile access.
But I still think that Iceland should have granted him asylum.
Iceland couldn't grant Snowden asylum. It's an island with no army and no neighbours to buffer it from US peacekeeping operation. Nor could it smuggle him out of country through a blockade.
France with its nuclear weapons might have worked.
Both made very important statements we must pay attention to, but a fucking headshot beats hanging out in a Russian airport IMHO.
Both made important statements. However, that one managed to get away afterwards shouldn't weight against him.
Also, let's be honest here: that religion-dominated countries are horrible places to live is not news to anyone, nor is islamic countries being especially bad for women.
Do they do ANYTHING for the actual good of the country?
Why would they? The country is too big to fail. Just like the British Empire was.
That's the problem with expectionalism or manifest destiny: you start believing your own bullshit, start believing that you are destined for greatness and therefore don't need to work for it or even care at all about the consequences of your actions, since you're at the top and always will be. At that point the only question is whether a competitor knocks you down before your own internal corruption will.
American politics are full of hubris, and will result in a fall sooner or later. Probably sooner, since there's the tripple-whammy of competing superpowers, energy crisis and adapting to climate change all hitting at the same time. Any one of these would require competent leadership, but you get all three and a "leaders" incapable of even passing a budget without a political crisis. Kinda reminds me of the last days of the Soviet Union...
It would be a problem because you need to accelerate the bodies with the ship to ridiculous speeds at ridiculous accelerations. Even if you manage to accomplish that and keep the bodies stable in relation to the ship referential with pinpointed gravitational fields you would submit them to a ridiculous amount of stress because an extremely high resultant force must be applied to the body center of mass. You simply cannot give that amount of kinetic energy in this short time to a human body without making it fall apart.
Except, of course, there's no stress: giving energy through a uniform gravitational field means the body is basically accelerating in freefall. Every particle has the same acceleration vector, thus the difference vector between any two of them is null vector, thus the stress is zero.
Actually, coming to think of it, if you also use artificial gravity to accelerate you reaction mass, you get this "naturally": both the ship and the RM are basically falling away from a common center of gravity (presumably the engine), thus they are in freefall and experience no acceleration whatsoever. Tidal forces could be a problem, but the technology needed for artificial gravity would likely allow shaping fields too, so they would be uniform throughout the ship; if not, you could simply put the engine far behind the rest of the ship, tow it along with a cable and accept the resulting lower efficiency.
The Jedi, the most powerful beings in the galaxy, and within 20 years of their mass slaughter, they're forgotten and a joke,
Is that really that incredible? The Empire has every reason to make the Force seem like a "silly religion", both to hide Palpatine's true power and keep anyone from investigating the old stories and perhaps re-establishing a new Jedi Order. Real world is ripe of examples of just how easy it is to make people believe absurd bullshit.
and Obi-Wan's wistfully reminiscing about them, instead of having 'nam-style flashbacks to the worst trauma he had ever faced?
Obi-Wan lives as a hermit on a desert, comes up with pleasant lies about the past ("I didn't really hack my best friends limbs off and leave him to burn to death after he became a mass-murdering monster who tried to wipe us all out and establish tyranny on galaxy, only for him to survive and finish the job. Vader's a different guy, he did it, it's his fault!"), and when the opportunity comes, basically commits suicide by Vader. Yoda lives in a swamp, the only sapient being on the entire planet, ignoring the affairs of the galaxy even when a whole planet gets blown up, never once trying to fight the Emperor again, perhaps this time with Kenobi's help. I think it's safe to say both suffer from a heavy case of PTSD.
Slashdot Mirror
What we've known for decades is that there are those who learn by seeing, those who learn by hearing, and those who learn by doing. But it doesn't take $30,000 to tell them apart. So either this program is particularly ballsy fraud, or it's about something new. So no, don't fire this advisor.
And for that matter, promote the advisor who asks why schools aren't using this well-known and easily detectable division between visual, auditory and kinesthetic types to offer different lesson plans?
Yes, you are. But if you mark lines or angles or whatever as having a particular relationship, such as being equivalent, you must be able to actually derive that from first postulates (or from whatever postulates have already been derived from first postulates). For example, a classic derivation for the area of a parallelogram (and many other geometric shapes) is basically chopping off pieces and moving them elsewhere, to get a more convenient shape (in this case a rectangle).
This is an important thing to understand: manipulating geometric shapes is exactly equivalent to manipulating symbols representing these shapes. That's the very reason why mathematics has use in the real world. Sometimes one approach is more convenient than the other, but they're ultimately the same thing.
Dreams.
How very fortunate, then, that you can't vote to spend somebody else's money. You can only vote on how to spend public money. As is your right, living in a democratic society and all, which of course gives you you duties as well - such as paying your taxes.
Except, of course, that this isn't what's happening. The selfish pricks agreed to being taxed and having that tax money be controlled by representatives elected by popular vote by doing business in the US; them turning around and whining when it turns out they didn't get their way in said vote, now that is dishonest.
You don't get to agree on a deal and then call your debtor a thief when he comes collecting.
Any excuse will serve a tyrant. But that doesn't mean the excuse itself is necessarily false. And the US government defaulting on its debts would definitely cause a worldwide cascade failure due to the sheer amount in question.
As for too big to fail in general... the problem is that efficiency requires everything to be leveraged as far as it will go. But that kind of economy is fragile, where any disturbance will cause someone to go bankrupt, and that in turn causes other people to do so, and so on, until you have a cascading crash. Yet no one can choose not to leverage, because then they'll be outcompeted by those who do, and go bankrupt anyway when the general cascade failure occurs. It's a classic tragedy of the commons, and also occurs in non-economic ecosystems - specialization makes you more effective but also more vulnerable. Perhaps we could solve the problem the same way nature does: by introducing constant small-scale grief killing over-leveraged companies and ceasing that when a depression strikes?
The world is nowhere near overpopulated. Every single industrial country produces more food than it consumes. The only thing in short supply is energy, and even that is a matter of lacking proper infrastructure to extract it - whether nuclear, geothermal or solar, any of these could easily satisfy human needs several times over - rather than any inherent scarcity.
Since the rest of your points proceed from the incorrect first, I'll leave them be, except:
This would be completely pointless. The average number of children in industrial countries is already beneath replacement rate (meaning population sans immigration is actually shrinking). If you are truly worried about population growth then concentrate on helping the developing countries along; that is the most efficient way and doesn't require ethically shady economic coercion, as well as helps optimize as many people as possible away from being "useless eaters" due to increased standards of education.
And this here sums up perfectly what's wrong with US politics, and increasingly politics elsewhere: it's not about whether something is a good idea, it's about whether it's our idea or the other tribes idea. That would be fine if the debate was over what logo or slogan to use, but policies have a nasty tendency to have effects besides scoring political points.
SS is not an investment scheme, so it can't be a Ponzi scheme. It's a pretty standard insurance scheme, where you trade a chance of disaster (too old to work and no money to feed yourself) to periodic predictable payments.
Alternatively, if you will, you can think of SS as a maintenance program: every retiree requires a certain amount of money per month. The total payment is bound by average pay per retiree x the number of retirees, and there's a steady pool of payers, so there's no reason why it couldn't be paid ad infinitum. By contrast, in a Ponzi scheme, the required payouts grow without bound, and the only source of income (new investors) will eventually dry out, so it's doomed to collapse.
Either way, claiming that SS is in any way similar to a Ponzi scheme is an outright lie.
Well, if that happens, at least you don't have to suffer any wiseass remarks about being careful about what you wish for, since you won't be able to afford an Internet connection. Assuming there will be an Internet after the cascade failure is done, of course.
Both sides? As always, it's the Republicans playing shenanigans.
Except, of course, that if a person could move from crappy Grade-D job to rewarding and life-affirming Grade-B job, he'd already done so. Eliminating Grade-D job doesn't give people who previously did it an ability to get Grade-B jobs, it just means they're now facing a lot more competition and desperate since it's Grade-B or nothing.
What happens when you no longer do get the opportunity to express this talent, because machines have automated the task or made it obsolete? What about those who's talent is buggy whip making? Or truck drivers, once cars are fully automated?
Or we could just accept that, as necessary work gets automated, most of humanity is going to be on welfare. It's like an idealized version of ancient Greece, except this time the slaves doing the work are machines and thus don't mind it. It does, however, require shifting away from using work as a measurement for the worth of an individual, like you're doing here.
Except that both of those cases include an outright rebellion as the driving force for change. So you're actually lending the idea credit here.
The example you gave - American South - was a rebublic, but one that disenfranchised a large percentage of its population from the political process, and in fact allowed those who perpetuated injustice against them to vote in their name. That is just as bad as a dictatorship, and has the same potential for peaceful change.
They're a parasite that perverts the rest of the society to maximize their profits, and part of that is jailing as many people as possible in private for-profit prisons. Why?
It's an act of (covert) warfare. Economic ruin is the intended outcome, just as it would be with sending bombers to do so. It's not burning down my house, it's burning down the house of a lunatic who's kidnapped people and is holding them hostage.
Godwinning is about claiming someone is a nazi, not about making thought experiments set in Nazi Germany. Since we have a real-life example of cartoonish supervillainy, why not use it?
Silk Road customers are not guilty of any "crime" other than wanting to get high, and the sellers are not guilty of anything except providing that for a price. Silk Road was the victim in the alleged extortion case, and I find this accusation of contract murder extremely suspicious - it comes from the same regime that arranged for Assange rape charges and would be an extremely stupid thing for DPR to do, since it would undermine SR's reputation even if succesful. And you can hardly blame someone for not paying taxes when it's not possible to do so.
Who, and in what way?
...
Well, I guess the rest of us must just hope you'll never have any power over anyone or anything, least you'd get a chance to act on your beliefs.
Also, I'm leaning towards the "religious nut" now - such arguments were used prior to the Civil War, and never admitting being wrong is the core tenet of too many denominations to count.
A particularly misguided libertarian who thinks forbidding slavery means the government is unjustly restricting economic activity, or a religious nut who thinks because the Bible mentions slavery it is therefore an institute approved and perhaps even mandated by his god.
Any bets?
But if great injustices are taking place, then the society is not really civil, now is it? You can't act like a ruffian and expect to be treated like a lady.
What if the counterfeiter is actually an agent sent from the North to undermine Southern economy, specifically to weaken it prior to the inevitable war? And even if he isn't, his actions still serve to help undermine the system that's perpetuating said crimes. If you arrest him, you are strenghtening it and therefore taking part in its crimes.
Also, why go that far back? We have more recent examples. For example, imagine you're a guard at Auschwitz. You notice a prisoner trying to escape. Should you do your legally mandated duty and sound the alarm, or should you tie your shoelaces for the next five minutes?
The market for alcohol is, despite the fact that you can make it by putting sugar, water and yeast in a bottle.
Alcohol kills people. Tobacco kills people. Fat kills people. Sugar kills people. Salt kills people. All of these are addictive, cause grave and often lethal damage to the people using them, and all are legally available - the latter three without any limitations. So no, medical harm is not a credible explanation for why meth - or any other drug for that matter - is forbidden.
No one is asking the society to subsidize meth, or any other mind-altering substance. On the other hand, society does subsidize and tolerate the production of high-fructose corn syrup, which is linked to diabetes and is highly addictive. Said poison is even being added to children's food, to get them addicted from the early age. So, obviously the society doesn't really give a rat's ass about the health of its members, and therefore there must be another reason for the War on Drugs - and likely an ignoble one, since it's not said out loud.
Of course all of this is ignoring the obvious solution: if attitudes about drugs could be changed, we could develop safer alternatives. There's no inherent reason why molecules binding to various synaptic chemicals need to have any other metabolic side effects, and a custom drug could also be designed against abuse - for example by having its own metabolites bind to it and render it inert, forcing a few days interval between hits.
Or we could teach everyone meditation techniques at school, letting them achieve altered states of consciousness without chemical substances. That might work too.
Reckless endangerment is illegal because if you do something that's likely to result in me being killed, I'll have to take action out of self-preservation. Your right to swing your fist doesn't stop where my nose starts, it stops where I have to choose between reacting or being hit. And it is very much the role of the government to keep that from happening.
That's been tried. Feudalism and the divine right of kings weren't much fun for the serfs. It turns out that having the owner be an abstract entity beholden to the residents works much better than , even if it leads to the moral hazard of not letting you endanger other people.
On what evidence do you base this assertion?
It wouldn't really help. LEO have finite resources, so they can only spare so much for a single case. However, Silk Road was basically making a mockery of them, and even more importantly disproving the notion that every drug user is a junkie living in the streets - because you could hardly buy from there unless you were functional enough to have an Internet connection, manage Bitcoins, etc. - so once "Dread Pirate Roberts" was tracked down, it was just a matter of time. Humans aren't perfect, after all, so so one can avoid slipping up all the time.
Sucks for Ulbricht, but buyers and sellers will simply go to a competing site. The War on Drugs isn't winnable because people have an innate need to feel changed modes of consciousness, and legally available alcohol is terrible for that. Altough I suppose a good enough brain-computer interface or sufficiently advanced mental training techniques could make chemical substances obsolete.
Also, this proves that Bitcoin does/did not derive most of its value from Silk Road: it lost about 1/10th of its value, after which prices stabilized and seem to be climbing back to the normal range of around 100 euros/BTC.
Seconded. Slashdot is a debate club; the articles exist only to get things started.
Ditto. But do you know what would be really awesome? NNTP interface. Slashdot already allows disabling advertisements (at least it offered the option to me), and the discussions are thread-structured, so why not offer them up via Usenet server? Every section would be its own newsgroup, articles would be top-level posts, and filtering could be handled by having multiple newsgroups with different tresholds for various topics.
That way, you could have Web n+1.infinity for the ooh shiny -crowd, a program of their choice for hardcore users, and a good API for mobile access.
Iceland couldn't grant Snowden asylum. It's an island with no army and no neighbours to buffer it from US peacekeeping operation. Nor could it smuggle him out of country through a blockade.
France with its nuclear weapons might have worked.
Both made important statements. However, that one managed to get away afterwards shouldn't weight against him.
Also, let's be honest here: that religion-dominated countries are horrible places to live is not news to anyone, nor is islamic countries being especially bad for women.
Why would they? The country is too big to fail. Just like the British Empire was.
That's the problem with expectionalism or manifest destiny: you start believing your own bullshit, start believing that you are destined for greatness and therefore don't need to work for it or even care at all about the consequences of your actions, since you're at the top and always will be. At that point the only question is whether a competitor knocks you down before your own internal corruption will.
American politics are full of hubris, and will result in a fall sooner or later. Probably sooner, since there's the tripple-whammy of competing superpowers, energy crisis and adapting to climate change all hitting at the same time. Any one of these would require competent leadership, but you get all three and a "leaders" incapable of even passing a budget without a political crisis. Kinda reminds me of the last days of the Soviet Union...
Except, of course, there's no stress: giving energy through a uniform gravitational field means the body is basically accelerating in freefall. Every particle has the same acceleration vector, thus the difference vector between any two of them is null vector, thus the stress is zero.
Actually, coming to think of it, if you also use artificial gravity to accelerate you reaction mass, you get this "naturally": both the ship and the RM are basically falling away from a common center of gravity (presumably the engine), thus they are in freefall and experience no acceleration whatsoever. Tidal forces could be a problem, but the technology needed for artificial gravity would likely allow shaping fields too, so they would be uniform throughout the ship; if not, you could simply put the engine far behind the rest of the ship, tow it along with a cable and accept the resulting lower efficiency.
Is that really that incredible? The Empire has every reason to make the Force seem like a "silly religion", both to hide Palpatine's true power and keep anyone from investigating the old stories and perhaps re-establishing a new Jedi Order. Real world is ripe of examples of just how easy it is to make people believe absurd bullshit.
Obi-Wan lives as a hermit on a desert, comes up with pleasant lies about the past ("I didn't really hack my best friends limbs off and leave him to burn to death after he became a mass-murdering monster who tried to wipe us all out and establish tyranny on galaxy, only for him to survive and finish the job. Vader's a different guy, he did it, it's his fault!"), and when the opportunity comes, basically commits suicide by Vader. Yoda lives in a swamp, the only sapient being on the entire planet, ignoring the affairs of the galaxy even when a whole planet gets blown up, never once trying to fight the Emperor again, perhaps this time with Kenobi's help. I think it's safe to say both suffer from a heavy case of PTSD.