No? Why not? Eating other sentient beings or not is a moral choice.
Because the actual damage of producing, obtaining, and transporting food is large. Meat is easier to keep than vegetables: you can slaughter animals as needed, but vegetables must be planted months in advanced and harvested at the right time. Blemished vegetables are often thrown out (we've started to use them to make soups); blemished fruits are more often thrown out; and a lot isn't sold from the supermarket. Grain stores better than anything, but still uses a lot of land, damaging farming practice, varmint management, etc.
Everything that we produce--food, non-food, the like--involves continuous harm to the environment at large, and direct harm to individual animals and insects. An animal you slaughter is just the end of a huge trail of dead insects and animals. It's imperative to kill all the rabbits, mice, voles, and moles living in your fields if you grow vegetables. Free-graze cattle and even grain-fed livestock don't deal with concerns of storage and preparation for human consumption; they also eat genetically modified foods, for better or worse, which require less damaging management.
The largest impact of human activity is how much. If you want to inflict less harm, eat less. For example: eat cow--large single animal--instead of chicken. The obvious deficiency is the ever-expanding human population: if we free-range hunted and gathered, we'd strip the land bare; dense human farming supports our population.
These are all technical considerations; they tell little of mindset. The most telling illustration of mindset is the regard vegans have when meat is proffered: they won't eat it. The food will be thrown away; future accommodations won't be made. The act of not eating prison mystery meat or the steak and shrimp served at a wedding does nothing except throw more food in the trash. At business functions, when a significant vegitarian or vegan population exists in the business, meetings which ordered 3 trays now order 4, consuming more (with attached increased suffering to animals) than if the vegans just ate the same food as everyone else.
None of this matters, because veganism is a matter of self: for a vegan to eat meat would be inexcusable even when you could demonstrate absolutely that consuming a vegetable instead would inflict more suffering on animals than if they just ate the meat provided. Consuming meat is an attack on a vegan's personal identity, and would be akin to slicing open your own arm: it cannot be done without significant psychological harm.
People have their own individual reasons for being rapists. "Alcohol isn't really rape, it turns a no into a yes so it's not rape." "She was all over me, then she started being a bitch." In the end, it all comes down to a macho feeling of control and a sexual outlet, coupled with lack of caring for the other person.
You say that "people have their own individual reasons for being vegans", and it holds the same weight: people are trying to assimilate a position of individuality, and don't have a real moral concern for anything when they go vegan. Vegans argue over whether bee honey is actually vegan, as it exploits slave insect labor; they don't understand that bees would leave the hive if their position was uncomfortable. Vegans argue against the killing of animals, while eating grain farmed in practices that wound or kill animals and insects continuously. The meat at the slaughter is the least of all suffering involved in food production: it is as if you burned down a 500 mile wide forest, and complained about someone stepping on a dandelion.
Vegans don't care about any of that. They honestly don't care. They are joining to an ideal--a packaged ideal. Buddha said that consumption causes suffering, and so we should not overconsume: he understood that eating too much, building too much, taking too much water, anything we do inflicts pain and suffering on a large scale to other humans and to animals and insects alike. Vegans are concerned with what, and not with how much; they aren't concerned about their food source having more loss, greater shipping requirements, and other demands which eventually lead to more consumption and more animal suffering. They just don't want to be involved in the suffering of a sheep or chicken somewhere.
It's an ideal system straddled purely to produce a social kinship feeling. It provides a self-identity. Vegans can't deviate and eat meat which will otherwise be thrown away not because it will somehow reduce suffering of some animal, but because it is an assault on their identity and sense of self.
The problem in the first case is you can't move faster than light: accelerating an object toward another object is impossible once that object is moving toward the first at nearly the speed of light. That said, one object moving versus another not moving is a matter of reference: one object is stationary regarding planets, galaxies, and so on; another is moving really fucking fast. Either the first can't move in the direction of the approaching object (for no apparent reason) OR it can move, light-constant to everything around it, thus causing it to be in two places at once (C and C, 0 and 0), and all positions between, and thus infinite places at once.
In the second case, if you rotate the entire universe but don't rotate a figure at the center, the figure at the center experiences centrifugal force. It will feel itself spinning, and being pulled outward. The result is identical to just spinning the figure. The whole exercise is actually impossible, because you would need a bigger mass to brace against to turn the whole universe.
A long time ago, when I was reading scifi, I asked a friend who is a theoretical quantum physicist about special relativity. I had two problems: first, that my internal simulation (I run complex systems like physics, economics, wars, and sociology in my head non-mathematically) indicated that time dilation would cause every object in the universe to exist in every position simultaneously; and second, that spinning the universe would be identical to standing in the center of the universe and spinning, except it would take more energy. Both of these are problems.
The first is simple: velocity is something like (v1+v2)/(1+ (v1)*(v2)/c), which is okay for two objects; but any third object would have a different velocity relative to either. This means two objects approaching each other both traveling at near the speed of light (0.99c and -0.99c) would not approach each other at nearly 2c, but rather at nearly c; meanwhile, they would pass other objects relatively stationary at nearly c. In other words: object A sees object B approaching it at the speed of light, and object P (planet behind) being left behind at the speed of light; object B is approaching object A and P at the same speed--the speed of light. But object P is getting further away from object A, but cannot be getting further away from object B! Object Q, behind object B, experiences a similar relationship. All objects in this system must be simultaneously stationary and moving away from or toward each other at the speed of light. Carrying this out to completion, all objects must be in an infinite number of positions, and in none of them.
The second has simple implications: spinning the universe and spinning a small object both amount to the same thing; thus it takes less energy to move more than half the mass in the universe, and almost no energy to move 100% of the mass.
My friend cited Mach's Theorem for the second, but declined to give a satisfactory answer about it. The whole thing is insanely complex, and beyond my existing mathematical knowledge. In short: if you spin the whole universe, the thing in the center feels the centrifugal forces pulling itself apart, as if it were spinning rather than the universe.
As for the first, he said quantum physics makes a lot of conjectures about multiple existences and everything being in every state--and thus every place--at once. It's even conceivable that every point in time exists at once, and thus that everything is simultaneously also in the same physical location--the proto-universe of the big bang was a single point, and, time being nothing, we are all both here, there, and everywhere we have and will be.
It was at this point I decided the universe is more broken than computer technology.
A law has to be complete. It has to state something covering exactly every situation, and no more. Our current problems stem from trying to be inclusive, and then overstepping the spirit of the law to leverage the broad letter of the law.
If we're using a C analogy, think about it like an overflow: the law was written with the intent of bringing in a certain scope of crime, but without explicit bounds checking for that scope; when a bigger scope is brought, the law doesn't contain instructions to exclude the overstep. Adding a statement of purpose creates bounds checking.
Also, the law wouldn't be essentially written twice. Boundaries are relatively easy to make. The ACA--all 828 pages of the original bill itself and 20,000+ pages of surrounding regulations--can be summarized in a few sentences:
This Act will supply all Americans with access to health insurance. It will do so by providing the Executive power to establish new insurer regulations to prevent exclusion of pre-existing medical conditions and discrimination by age and sex, to establish administrative functions to support the needs of this act, and to establish regulations for employers to provide health insurance to their employees; and by amending the tax code to supply funding for these measures.
Any provisions in the ACA to establish earmarks or other legislation not related to the above would be legally invalid. Any legally valid provisions of the ACA would be legally invalid as a prosecuting argument for any action not related to access to health insurance and falling within the above statement. The framework of the law would define what it does now, but it could not be applied outside the above restrictions.
Maryland Code has a full set of multi-section statutes covering sexual offenses. They can be summarized as establishing unwilling sexual activity, sex with minors, sexual activity within individuals sharing a direct official power structure, and unnatural sexual acts as a sexual offense, providing Judicial authority to sentence jail time and sexual offender registry for committing such offenses. Their provisions fit wholly inside this short definition, but are paragraphs and pages long and describe differences in age, varied offenses for varied ages (13 or younger vs 14/15), power structures (teacher/student), complex interactions therein, exemption when married, and so on.
Creating these bounds is an effective way to control the meaning of the law. Rather than read the law, you can glance at the boundaries and immediately identify that an action falls outside the provisions of the law. If the action does fall inside its provisions, then you can read the law to determine if said action is actually specified as illegal. Even if the law claims such action is directly unlawful, it doesn't count if the situation is outside the established bounds of the law (i.e. its purpose and scope).
We already have evidence-tampering laws. Sarbanes-Oxley makes evidence tampering a larger crime in certain contexts; but the Prosecutor is trying to interpret it in all contexts. It also makes evidence tampering a crime before charging, which is arguably a violation of the Fifth Amendment: it requires you to maintain evidence of your crimes in case you're arrested, so that you may surrender them to trial and prove yourself guilty.
It's amusing that catching an undersized fish puts you in possession of an undersized fish; returning it would be evidence tampering under the above interpretation. We can extend the law that far, and the courts would have to either decide that's stupid and not the intent of the law, or accept that interpretation.
The courts are effectively debating over whether Sarbanes-Oxley was ever intended to apply to anything beyond financial records and cases of business fraud, and thus whether they should apply it outside these cases.
If they're going for not being fucking stupid, they would try applying jurisprudence correctly.
And Justice Anthony Kennedy said he was troubled that a narrow reading of the statute might prove problematic.
The Supreme Court is charged with interpreting the spirit of the law. It is, therefor, a matter of jurisprudence that they assess this law's intent, that being to prevent Enron-style fraud and tampering, and recognize that its broad application is ridiculous and essentially extends evidence tampering so far as to eliminate the Fifth Amendment protections. Even short of that, the extension of evidence tampering in this way is well beyond the original intent of the law; therefor a narrow reading is correct.
Correct, as in the right answer. This is not an opinion; this is a solid fact.
This reading is the exact opposite of problematic: if Congress can't pass a law which more clearly outlines their law enforcement needs--perhaps because we would all descend on Washington to build gallows and guillotines for such ludicrous Congressional overreach--then no such law is needed. If this law is inadequate for the needs of the nation, write new laws.
Each extension of a law by judicial analysis effectively creates a new law without new legislation: if a law making it illegal to climb fir trees were applied suddenly to oak and maple trees, suddenly it would be a crime to climb oak and maple trees. This is true even of enforcement changes, such that a law written broadly and enforced narrowly for ten or twenty years is suddenly a new law if you start enforcing its original, broad terms. This is also an important matter of jurisprudence, although it is more difficult to enforce; it lends itself to the spirit of the law by providing evidence of its prior enforcement as evidence of its original intent, but clear wording can weaken this stance. The subtle difference between this and the Sarbanes-Oxley case is the well-established purpose of Sarbanes-Oxley: we know, and have always known, why it exists; we don't have to contort our minds around its enforcement thus far.
This is why I advocate statute requiring a statement of purpose and method at the top of every law. If the law is used outside that purpose, or if it intrudes on a person's rights outside the given method, then it is unenforceable. A law which seeks to control marijuana by controlling sale, for example, can have a clause that criminalizes production; but if the method does not state its intent for control of production, that clause is wholly unenforceable. A law should be what we intend to accomplish, how we intend to do it, and then the final legal diagram falling entirely within that framework; any application outside the what and how are obviously invalid.
The worst offense here is mechanism: the brain is not a muscle, and doesn't get weak and dull through disuse, or strong and sharp through work.
Every study on improving the brain through effort has taken a structure of giving people blunt memory tasks or having them study problem solving skills (i.e. mental math, problem analysis, even home economics). The memory studies show marked improvements; but any study which probes the subjects on thought process discovers they've started chunking or otherwise applying techniques to improve their memory. The other types of studies transfer some sort of skill, such as arithmetic strategies or efficient ways to do your housework, and then show a marked improvement.
In other words: people show improvement when they develop better methods to approach problems. People develop easier methods to handle problems they're exposed to (WELCOME TO TOOL-USING SPECIES!). People in dull shift work have NO REASON to develop more than marginal improvements in working ethic, for there is no return; so they don't use or develop any effective strategies, and so develop habitual dullness of mind.
A human is a special kind of knife which is sharp specifically because it wants to be sharp, and dull when it doesn't care to cut things or doesn't believe it can cut things better by being sharper.
Because you can't readily turn excess produced energy into biodiesel. You have to rig it directly to immediate use, or put it into batteries; if you want biodiesel from it, you need to put that excess into operating crop machinery.
The issue cited appears to be "A looks like B, B is considered good, thus package A as B". It's the same thing as progressive education in America: we discovered that faculty education was a broken theory (your brain isn't a muscle, and doesn't get stronger when you flex it), so we threw out everything in education that's actually "education", and replaced it with "experiences". Now American education is a huge waste of time and taxpayer money, but without the trauma of hard work or learning anything.
Poster seems to believe that tidal power won't return significant gains, but will involve extreme costs; thus tidal power is a pointless waste of time, effort, and money, and is equivalent to building a multi-million-dollar facility to run water 24 hours per day and see if it actually runs out.
"It's happening" "We're sure it's happening" "We lied: we knew it was happening, but we trimmed the numbers by 90% to make it not sound like bullshit; it's 10 times as bad as we said" "It's definitely happening, and it's all our fault" is a good way to convince people you're not full of shit.
Every country on this planet is currently in a Jobs War with each other. The countries which provide the best educated workforce and best living conditions are going to win that war.
Right, that's why we outsource to Indian programmers who can't fucking code, and to Chinese manufacture.
Let's be honest: we outsource to Mexico and China for cheap labor, and India for cheap phone support and code monkeys. These people don't have credentials; they have low wages. What are you going to do, outsource for a Dutch lawyer?
Why is it ok for corporations to offload all of their externalities and risks on to us citizens and then they get to pocket all of the profits yet when students do it, it's the evil and must be fixed?
When a student does it, it's mathematically impossible. It is the prisonner's dilemma: a student must examine the current market, predict how it will look a few years hence, and, in doing so, predict the career decisions of all other students. If I put two students in separate rooms and tell them they can choose a high-paying career or a mid-paying career, and if they both choose the high-paying career they will suffer low salaries and frequent unemployment, and if they both choose the low-paying career they will gain job stability but low salary, and if one chooses high and the other low then the one will gain a high salary and the other will suffer low salaries, what would happen? Of course you choose the high-paying career. You're doing this with millions and an unknown threshold.
When a business does it, several things happen different. First, a business knows what its strategy is, and so has a much higher chance of hiring employees it can profit from. The business takes a much reduced risk, and can quickly begin shifting work onto the employee, further reducing risk by profiting some from the employee even if they scrap their strategy. Second, the employee gets paid to work, rather than spending four years paying to NOT work.
As you can see, the risk a student must take is insurmountable and immutable. The student's resources are smaller, so the risk is a high percentage of the student's resources; the student's return is only after the whole impact of the risk is had, so risk cannot be managed as well; and the student will face changing conditions and the high probability of many students grabbing for a limited, high-value resource (employment in an in-demand career), which he cannot readily examine by numbers and must predict. Meanwhile, businesses only care about the employees they hire, and can immediately put those employees to work, and besides have larger resources and are risking less.
If the students offloaded their risks onto the US taxpayer, the costs would still be higher, and we would all pay for it. Shifting that risk back to the business reduces the total economic costs.
Everyone here on/. knows exactly how well that works out when one is enslaved to their company.
Have you read your employment contract? If you take any training, you're tied to the company for probably 2 years. Every business I've worked for does that. The escape clause is to inform your new employer that you are contracted to pay back your $5000 of training if you quit, and so they send $5000 to your old employer when they hire you away; you can manipulate the slavmeisters, you know.
State Representative, if I can get elected. I am not ready to tackle the needs of education: I know what to do, but not how it is to be done. I have developed urgent social policy which I must implement, and soon, to protect this nation from the coming crisis and to improve the general health and welfare of the economy.
I have developed policy of the utmost importance for implementation in short order. The primary effects are to eliminate poverty, by which I mean the looming threat and reality of homelessness and hunger in America; to maintain the health and well-being of the labor force, especially the mental health which is harmed by such things; and to ensure the strength and stability of our economy, such that it may suffer less from damaging effects and yet capitalize more on those opportunities which present themselves. Secondary effects, such as the vast reduction of crime, are not major points of consideration for me. The solution is simple and viable, as painless as a vaccination--which, unfortunately, is utterly painless, yet nearly everyone avoids them with all the energy they can muster.
The policy is quite simple in nature. I plan to eliminate all Federal welfare, comprised of the old-age pensions, disability insurance, housing assistance, food security (food stamps, WIC, EBT), and so on, but excluding hospital insurance, education, and other sweeping social policies. I plan to do this by mechanism of incorporating the 6.2% OASDI tax into each Income Tax bracket, and then reducing the total by 47%--the total percentage of Federal taxes spent on Welfare, although, with deficit spending, the total of Government spending is 36%--and then replacing this with a 14.5% Citizen's Dividend tax on all income, both business and individual. The returns from previous year's Citizen's Dividend are equally divided among each individual, natural-born, resident, American citizen.
This policy makes no provision for state welfare: it is left to the states to decide when and how to dismiss their own unemployment, food security, and housing assistance programs. This seems proper, but also allows for a smoother transition. Federal transition is more complex, and revolves around transitioning away from old-age pensions and disability insurance.
To accomplish this transition, all old-age pensions and disability insurance are reduced by the amount of the dividend: a person receiving $1300 in retirement will receive $1300, although it is now $700 of old-age pensions and $600 of Citizen's Dividend. The same goes for a person on Supplemental Disability Insurance. This reduces OASDI by 54%, and allows for a flat OASDI tax in transition of 3% (this is where the missing 6.2% of payroll tax went). Anyone not on SDI is no longer eligible, so that expense is evicted quickly; as for old-age pensions, I have selected a retirement time of 15 years after CD goes into effect as the grandfathering period; after that, all current retirees continue their benefit until they die, while no new retirees enter the system. The 3% tax gradually dies away.
This has a tax impact of leveling OASDI: it is currently a tax upon the poor and middle class, and so there is a hidden tax bracket at $117,000. The IRS lists tax brackets as 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, and so on; but, with OASDI, the actual tax is 16.2%, 21,2%, 31.2%, 25%, 28%, 33%, and so on. In all cases, my tax plan reduces taxes at the poor end and at the very high end (the 39.6% tax bracket drops by 0.2%-0.3%), and creates a tax increase around $117k which tapers off in each direction. The transition period is rough: until OASDI is fully eliminated, everyone under $80k has more income; after it's eliminated, everyone under $120k has more income. The maximum increase in taxes occurs around $300,000 at 3.03%, and tapers off after $400,000; during transition, the maximum is at $183,000 and a 4.87% tax increase, which tapers off following. These tax increases would be offset by a reduction in state welfare programs.
I'm currently studying philosophy. My next target salary is $174,000, and is largely supported by a study of history and philosophy. I am in IT right now and make $100,000 less than that.
It's much, much worse than that. People have been fooled into believing some bullshit about public support for college and upward mobility of the poor.
My position is to eliminate the Government from vocational education. In case you haven't figured it out yet, that means college, because all anyone hears when you say "college" is "that school I go to after school so that I can get a job", and because every career job requires a college degree. You have to go to medical school to be a doctor, and you can't start at medical school without a college degree in nursing--so what the fuck is medical school there for, if they can't train you in the basics of medicine?!
It's a position everybody hates, because they cannot think objectively when you are taking things away from them. It's the rope effect: if you give a man rope enough to hang himself, he will complain about being strangled to death in a noose, but will hold tight to that rope if you try to take it from him. That is what government support of college is, though: rope enough to hang yourself.
Without governments supplying loan programs, grants, state funding, and such, only rich kids could go to college. Ignoring that rich kids only care for MBAs, there just aren't nearly enough rich kids to fill all the needs of businesses. Businesses will need millions of newly-trained, skilled laborers every year; they can't have them if nobody is able to afford college on their own. This causes businesses to hire them from other businesses, and then lose them to other businesses, as salaries run through the roof: $250,000 Web designers, accountants, and programmers.
In the above scenario, a business would gain an enormous competitive advantage by hiring entrants, engaging them in on-the-job training, and educating them via funding their college and trade school. As these entrants gain skill, more work can shift onto them: even the least skilled carpenter can cut wedges and shims, and can soon be taught to lay joists; it takes a great deal of skill to cut and carve and shape decorative furniture, and the guy building the tables and chairs is not someone you want to pay to cut wedges and lay floor joists. Law entrants can be clerks and run around the office grabbing legal briefs, and then help with research; they will absorb knowledge, and can be shaped into competent lawyers. Plumbers, nurses, accountants, computer programmers. All of these, you can provide with menial tasks and with education to build skilled labor.
Instead, businesses wait for the Government to train students, with loans or with taxpayer money. Students speculate on what the businesses will need, and come into the market with many students who saw the hot job and have now flooded the market with excess supply. They then receive low salaries and experience long unemployment.
In short: our model of "get everyone an education by way of government" has produced an economy of putting risk and expense on individuals in order to create a crop of cheap labor for businesses. You are a commodity, and you have to invest in and sell yourself, and take all risks and costs thereof. Taxpayer funding would just spread the costs to all, without reducing the risk.
There is a third option. It is a political option: it is functionally equivalent to simply removing government intervention wholesale, but it sounds like the government is still supporting you, and it moves the cost onto the student. Keep our current system, but require businesses to sponsor a student: the businesses must provide that they will have a job for this person upon graduation, and select his degree program; if they fail to hire him after college, they must pay off his loans. Businesses taking those terms would need to keep the person employed long enough to escape that obligation, then cut him off; it would be a costly and inflexible investment for them, and a risk for the student.
The above makes it seem like we're helping to reduce a student's risk without taking
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No? Why not? Eating other sentient beings or not is a moral choice.
Because the actual damage of producing, obtaining, and transporting food is large. Meat is easier to keep than vegetables: you can slaughter animals as needed, but vegetables must be planted months in advanced and harvested at the right time. Blemished vegetables are often thrown out (we've started to use them to make soups); blemished fruits are more often thrown out; and a lot isn't sold from the supermarket. Grain stores better than anything, but still uses a lot of land, damaging farming practice, varmint management, etc.
Everything that we produce--food, non-food, the like--involves continuous harm to the environment at large, and direct harm to individual animals and insects. An animal you slaughter is just the end of a huge trail of dead insects and animals. It's imperative to kill all the rabbits, mice, voles, and moles living in your fields if you grow vegetables. Free-graze cattle and even grain-fed livestock don't deal with concerns of storage and preparation for human consumption; they also eat genetically modified foods, for better or worse, which require less damaging management.
The largest impact of human activity is how much. If you want to inflict less harm, eat less. For example: eat cow--large single animal--instead of chicken. The obvious deficiency is the ever-expanding human population: if we free-range hunted and gathered, we'd strip the land bare; dense human farming supports our population.
These are all technical considerations; they tell little of mindset. The most telling illustration of mindset is the regard vegans have when meat is proffered: they won't eat it. The food will be thrown away; future accommodations won't be made. The act of not eating prison mystery meat or the steak and shrimp served at a wedding does nothing except throw more food in the trash. At business functions, when a significant vegitarian or vegan population exists in the business, meetings which ordered 3 trays now order 4, consuming more (with attached increased suffering to animals) than if the vegans just ate the same food as everyone else.
None of this matters, because veganism is a matter of self: for a vegan to eat meat would be inexcusable even when you could demonstrate absolutely that consuming a vegetable instead would inflict more suffering on animals than if they just ate the meat provided. Consuming meat is an attack on a vegan's personal identity, and would be akin to slicing open your own arm: it cannot be done without significant psychological harm.
People have their own individual reasons for being rapists. "Alcohol isn't really rape, it turns a no into a yes so it's not rape." "She was all over me, then she started being a bitch." In the end, it all comes down to a macho feeling of control and a sexual outlet, coupled with lack of caring for the other person.
You say that "people have their own individual reasons for being vegans", and it holds the same weight: people are trying to assimilate a position of individuality, and don't have a real moral concern for anything when they go vegan. Vegans argue over whether bee honey is actually vegan, as it exploits slave insect labor; they don't understand that bees would leave the hive if their position was uncomfortable. Vegans argue against the killing of animals, while eating grain farmed in practices that wound or kill animals and insects continuously. The meat at the slaughter is the least of all suffering involved in food production: it is as if you burned down a 500 mile wide forest, and complained about someone stepping on a dandelion.
Vegans don't care about any of that. They honestly don't care. They are joining to an ideal--a packaged ideal. Buddha said that consumption causes suffering, and so we should not overconsume: he understood that eating too much, building too much, taking too much water, anything we do inflicts pain and suffering on a large scale to other humans and to animals and insects alike. Vegans are concerned with what, and not with how much; they aren't concerned about their food source having more loss, greater shipping requirements, and other demands which eventually lead to more consumption and more animal suffering. They just don't want to be involved in the suffering of a sheep or chicken somewhere.
It's an ideal system straddled purely to produce a social kinship feeling. It provides a self-identity. Vegans can't deviate and eat meat which will otherwise be thrown away not because it will somehow reduce suffering of some animal, but because it is an assault on their identity and sense of self.
As opposed to eating a proper diet that would actually keep her healthy.
It's not about "moral choices"; it's about conformity to a non-mainstream ideal so as to set oneself apart and produce a feeling of independence.
The problem in the first case is you can't move faster than light: accelerating an object toward another object is impossible once that object is moving toward the first at nearly the speed of light. That said, one object moving versus another not moving is a matter of reference: one object is stationary regarding planets, galaxies, and so on; another is moving really fucking fast. Either the first can't move in the direction of the approaching object (for no apparent reason) OR it can move, light-constant to everything around it, thus causing it to be in two places at once (C and C, 0 and 0), and all positions between, and thus infinite places at once.
In the second case, if you rotate the entire universe but don't rotate a figure at the center, the figure at the center experiences centrifugal force. It will feel itself spinning, and being pulled outward. The result is identical to just spinning the figure. The whole exercise is actually impossible, because you would need a bigger mass to brace against to turn the whole universe.
Seriously? There are theories about this?
A long time ago, when I was reading scifi, I asked a friend who is a theoretical quantum physicist about special relativity. I had two problems: first, that my internal simulation (I run complex systems like physics, economics, wars, and sociology in my head non-mathematically) indicated that time dilation would cause every object in the universe to exist in every position simultaneously; and second, that spinning the universe would be identical to standing in the center of the universe and spinning, except it would take more energy. Both of these are problems.
The first is simple: velocity is something like (v1+v2)/(1+ (v1)*(v2)/c), which is okay for two objects; but any third object would have a different velocity relative to either. This means two objects approaching each other both traveling at near the speed of light (0.99c and -0.99c) would not approach each other at nearly 2c, but rather at nearly c; meanwhile, they would pass other objects relatively stationary at nearly c. In other words: object A sees object B approaching it at the speed of light, and object P (planet behind) being left behind at the speed of light; object B is approaching object A and P at the same speed--the speed of light. But object P is getting further away from object A, but cannot be getting further away from object B! Object Q, behind object B, experiences a similar relationship. All objects in this system must be simultaneously stationary and moving away from or toward each other at the speed of light. Carrying this out to completion, all objects must be in an infinite number of positions, and in none of them.
The second has simple implications: spinning the universe and spinning a small object both amount to the same thing; thus it takes less energy to move more than half the mass in the universe, and almost no energy to move 100% of the mass.
My friend cited Mach's Theorem for the second, but declined to give a satisfactory answer about it. The whole thing is insanely complex, and beyond my existing mathematical knowledge. In short: if you spin the whole universe, the thing in the center feels the centrifugal forces pulling itself apart, as if it were spinning rather than the universe.
As for the first, he said quantum physics makes a lot of conjectures about multiple existences and everything being in every state--and thus every place--at once. It's even conceivable that every point in time exists at once, and thus that everything is simultaneously also in the same physical location--the proto-universe of the big bang was a single point, and, time being nothing, we are all both here, there, and everywhere we have and will be.
It was at this point I decided the universe is more broken than computer technology.
It's the Benchmark Bit!
A law has to be complete. It has to state something covering exactly every situation, and no more. Our current problems stem from trying to be inclusive, and then overstepping the spirit of the law to leverage the broad letter of the law.
If we're using a C analogy, think about it like an overflow: the law was written with the intent of bringing in a certain scope of crime, but without explicit bounds checking for that scope; when a bigger scope is brought, the law doesn't contain instructions to exclude the overstep. Adding a statement of purpose creates bounds checking.
Also, the law wouldn't be essentially written twice. Boundaries are relatively easy to make. The ACA--all 828 pages of the original bill itself and 20,000+ pages of surrounding regulations--can be summarized in a few sentences:
This Act will supply all Americans with access to health insurance. It will do so by providing the Executive power to establish new insurer regulations to prevent exclusion of pre-existing medical conditions and discrimination by age and sex, to establish administrative functions to support the needs of this act, and to establish regulations for employers to provide health insurance to their employees; and by amending the tax code to supply funding for these measures.
Any provisions in the ACA to establish earmarks or other legislation not related to the above would be legally invalid. Any legally valid provisions of the ACA would be legally invalid as a prosecuting argument for any action not related to access to health insurance and falling within the above statement. The framework of the law would define what it does now, but it could not be applied outside the above restrictions.
Maryland Code has a full set of multi-section statutes covering sexual offenses. They can be summarized as establishing unwilling sexual activity, sex with minors, sexual activity within individuals sharing a direct official power structure, and unnatural sexual acts as a sexual offense, providing Judicial authority to sentence jail time and sexual offender registry for committing such offenses. Their provisions fit wholly inside this short definition, but are paragraphs and pages long and describe differences in age, varied offenses for varied ages (13 or younger vs 14/15), power structures (teacher/student), complex interactions therein, exemption when married, and so on.
Creating these bounds is an effective way to control the meaning of the law. Rather than read the law, you can glance at the boundaries and immediately identify that an action falls outside the provisions of the law. If the action does fall inside its provisions, then you can read the law to determine if said action is actually specified as illegal. Even if the law claims such action is directly unlawful, it doesn't count if the situation is outside the established bounds of the law (i.e. its purpose and scope).
We already have evidence-tampering laws. Sarbanes-Oxley makes evidence tampering a larger crime in certain contexts; but the Prosecutor is trying to interpret it in all contexts. It also makes evidence tampering a crime before charging, which is arguably a violation of the Fifth Amendment: it requires you to maintain evidence of your crimes in case you're arrested, so that you may surrender them to trial and prove yourself guilty.
It's amusing that catching an undersized fish puts you in possession of an undersized fish; returning it would be evidence tampering under the above interpretation. We can extend the law that far, and the courts would have to either decide that's stupid and not the intent of the law, or accept that interpretation.
The courts are effectively debating over whether Sarbanes-Oxley was ever intended to apply to anything beyond financial records and cases of business fraud, and thus whether they should apply it outside these cases.
If they're going for not being fucking stupid, they would try applying jurisprudence correctly.
And Justice Anthony Kennedy said he was troubled that a narrow reading of the statute might prove problematic.
The Supreme Court is charged with interpreting the spirit of the law. It is, therefor, a matter of jurisprudence that they assess this law's intent, that being to prevent Enron-style fraud and tampering, and recognize that its broad application is ridiculous and essentially extends evidence tampering so far as to eliminate the Fifth Amendment protections. Even short of that, the extension of evidence tampering in this way is well beyond the original intent of the law; therefor a narrow reading is correct.
Correct, as in the right answer. This is not an opinion; this is a solid fact.
This reading is the exact opposite of problematic: if Congress can't pass a law which more clearly outlines their law enforcement needs--perhaps because we would all descend on Washington to build gallows and guillotines for such ludicrous Congressional overreach--then no such law is needed. If this law is inadequate for the needs of the nation, write new laws.
Each extension of a law by judicial analysis effectively creates a new law without new legislation: if a law making it illegal to climb fir trees were applied suddenly to oak and maple trees, suddenly it would be a crime to climb oak and maple trees. This is true even of enforcement changes, such that a law written broadly and enforced narrowly for ten or twenty years is suddenly a new law if you start enforcing its original, broad terms. This is also an important matter of jurisprudence, although it is more difficult to enforce; it lends itself to the spirit of the law by providing evidence of its prior enforcement as evidence of its original intent, but clear wording can weaken this stance. The subtle difference between this and the Sarbanes-Oxley case is the well-established purpose of Sarbanes-Oxley: we know, and have always known, why it exists; we don't have to contort our minds around its enforcement thus far.
This is why I advocate statute requiring a statement of purpose and method at the top of every law. If the law is used outside that purpose, or if it intrudes on a person's rights outside the given method, then it is unenforceable. A law which seeks to control marijuana by controlling sale, for example, can have a clause that criminalizes production; but if the method does not state its intent for control of production, that clause is wholly unenforceable. A law should be what we intend to accomplish, how we intend to do it, and then the final legal diagram falling entirely within that framework; any application outside the what and how are obviously invalid.
The worst offense here is mechanism: the brain is not a muscle, and doesn't get weak and dull through disuse, or strong and sharp through work.
Every study on improving the brain through effort has taken a structure of giving people blunt memory tasks or having them study problem solving skills (i.e. mental math, problem analysis, even home economics). The memory studies show marked improvements; but any study which probes the subjects on thought process discovers they've started chunking or otherwise applying techniques to improve their memory. The other types of studies transfer some sort of skill, such as arithmetic strategies or efficient ways to do your housework, and then show a marked improvement.
In other words: people show improvement when they develop better methods to approach problems. People develop easier methods to handle problems they're exposed to (WELCOME TO TOOL-USING SPECIES!). People in dull shift work have NO REASON to develop more than marginal improvements in working ethic, for there is no return; so they don't use or develop any effective strategies, and so develop habitual dullness of mind.
A human is a special kind of knife which is sharp specifically because it wants to be sharp, and dull when it doesn't care to cut things or doesn't believe it can cut things better by being sharper.
Because you can't readily turn excess produced energy into biodiesel. You have to rig it directly to immediate use, or put it into batteries; if you want biodiesel from it, you need to put that excess into operating crop machinery.
If you can exceed 1:1 power output to maintenance, you can create oil from air. Then you can use that oil as a fuel source.
If it's enormous and heavy, it won't have to spin fast to crush anything that tries to wedge itself in somewhere, and then grind it into a fine paste.
Perhaps he's English.
The issue cited appears to be "A looks like B, B is considered good, thus package A as B". It's the same thing as progressive education in America: we discovered that faculty education was a broken theory (your brain isn't a muscle, and doesn't get stronger when you flex it), so we threw out everything in education that's actually "education", and replaced it with "experiences". Now American education is a huge waste of time and taxpayer money, but without the trauma of hard work or learning anything.
Poster seems to believe that tidal power won't return significant gains, but will involve extreme costs; thus tidal power is a pointless waste of time, effort, and money, and is equivalent to building a multi-million-dollar facility to run water 24 hours per day and see if it actually runs out.
"It's happening" "We're sure it's happening" "We lied: we knew it was happening, but we trimmed the numbers by 90% to make it not sound like bullshit; it's 10 times as bad as we said" "It's definitely happening, and it's all our fault" is a good way to convince people you're not full of shit.
I dropped out of college a decade ago. I wound up with a job, which turned into a career. I already make $74k.
And of course you can make $174k with philosophy and history. There's one bloke making $400,000 from that, but he's the only one.
Every country on this planet is currently in a Jobs War with each other. The countries which provide the best educated workforce and best living conditions are going to win that war.
Right, that's why we outsource to Indian programmers who can't fucking code, and to Chinese manufacture.
Let's be honest: we outsource to Mexico and China for cheap labor, and India for cheap phone support and code monkeys. These people don't have credentials; they have low wages. What are you going to do, outsource for a Dutch lawyer?
Why is it ok for corporations to offload all of their externalities and risks on to us citizens and then they get to pocket all of the profits yet when students do it, it's the evil and must be fixed?
When a student does it, it's mathematically impossible. It is the prisonner's dilemma: a student must examine the current market, predict how it will look a few years hence, and, in doing so, predict the career decisions of all other students. If I put two students in separate rooms and tell them they can choose a high-paying career or a mid-paying career, and if they both choose the high-paying career they will suffer low salaries and frequent unemployment, and if they both choose the low-paying career they will gain job stability but low salary, and if one chooses high and the other low then the one will gain a high salary and the other will suffer low salaries, what would happen? Of course you choose the high-paying career. You're doing this with millions and an unknown threshold.
When a business does it, several things happen different. First, a business knows what its strategy is, and so has a much higher chance of hiring employees it can profit from. The business takes a much reduced risk, and can quickly begin shifting work onto the employee, further reducing risk by profiting some from the employee even if they scrap their strategy. Second, the employee gets paid to work, rather than spending four years paying to NOT work.
As you can see, the risk a student must take is insurmountable and immutable. The student's resources are smaller, so the risk is a high percentage of the student's resources; the student's return is only after the whole impact of the risk is had, so risk cannot be managed as well; and the student will face changing conditions and the high probability of many students grabbing for a limited, high-value resource (employment in an in-demand career), which he cannot readily examine by numbers and must predict. Meanwhile, businesses only care about the employees they hire, and can immediately put those employees to work, and besides have larger resources and are risking less.
If the students offloaded their risks onto the US taxpayer, the costs would still be higher, and we would all pay for it. Shifting that risk back to the business reduces the total economic costs.
Everyone here on /. knows exactly how well that works out when one is enslaved to their company.
Have you read your employment contract? If you take any training, you're tied to the company for probably 2 years. Every business I've worked for does that. The escape clause is to inform your new employer that you are contracted to pay back your $5000 of training if you quit, and so they send $5000 to your old employer when they hire you away; you can manipulate the slavmeisters, you know.
State Representative, if I can get elected. I am not ready to tackle the needs of education: I know what to do, but not how it is to be done. I have developed urgent social policy which I must implement, and soon, to protect this nation from the coming crisis and to improve the general health and welfare of the economy.
I have developed policy of the utmost importance for implementation in short order. The primary effects are to eliminate poverty, by which I mean the looming threat and reality of homelessness and hunger in America; to maintain the health and well-being of the labor force, especially the mental health which is harmed by such things; and to ensure the strength and stability of our economy, such that it may suffer less from damaging effects and yet capitalize more on those opportunities which present themselves. Secondary effects, such as the vast reduction of crime, are not major points of consideration for me. The solution is simple and viable, as painless as a vaccination--which, unfortunately, is utterly painless, yet nearly everyone avoids them with all the energy they can muster.
The policy is quite simple in nature. I plan to eliminate all Federal welfare, comprised of the old-age pensions, disability insurance, housing assistance, food security (food stamps, WIC, EBT), and so on, but excluding hospital insurance, education, and other sweeping social policies. I plan to do this by mechanism of incorporating the 6.2% OASDI tax into each Income Tax bracket, and then reducing the total by 47%--the total percentage of Federal taxes spent on Welfare, although, with deficit spending, the total of Government spending is 36%--and then replacing this with a 14.5% Citizen's Dividend tax on all income, both business and individual. The returns from previous year's Citizen's Dividend are equally divided among each individual, natural-born, resident, American citizen.
This policy makes no provision for state welfare: it is left to the states to decide when and how to dismiss their own unemployment, food security, and housing assistance programs. This seems proper, but also allows for a smoother transition. Federal transition is more complex, and revolves around transitioning away from old-age pensions and disability insurance.
To accomplish this transition, all old-age pensions and disability insurance are reduced by the amount of the dividend: a person receiving $1300 in retirement will receive $1300, although it is now $700 of old-age pensions and $600 of Citizen's Dividend. The same goes for a person on Supplemental Disability Insurance. This reduces OASDI by 54%, and allows for a flat OASDI tax in transition of 3% (this is where the missing 6.2% of payroll tax went). Anyone not on SDI is no longer eligible, so that expense is evicted quickly; as for old-age pensions, I have selected a retirement time of 15 years after CD goes into effect as the grandfathering period; after that, all current retirees continue their benefit until they die, while no new retirees enter the system. The 3% tax gradually dies away.
This has a tax impact of leveling OASDI: it is currently a tax upon the poor and middle class, and so there is a hidden tax bracket at $117,000. The IRS lists tax brackets as 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, and so on; but, with OASDI, the actual tax is 16.2%, 21,2%, 31.2%, 25%, 28%, 33%, and so on. In all cases, my tax plan reduces taxes at the poor end and at the very high end (the 39.6% tax bracket drops by 0.2%-0.3%), and creates a tax increase around $117k which tapers off in each direction. The transition period is rough: until OASDI is fully eliminated, everyone under $80k has more income; after it's eliminated, everyone under $120k has more income. The maximum increase in taxes occurs around $300,000 at 3.03%, and tapers off after $400,000; during transition, the maximum is at $183,000 and a 4.87% tax increase, which tapers off following. These tax increases would be offset by a reduction in state welfare programs.
The total effec
It doesn't matter. Everyone marks me troll because it's true *and* I'm bashing their religion.
I'm currently studying philosophy. My next target salary is $174,000, and is largely supported by a study of history and philosophy. I am in IT right now and make $100,000 less than that.
It's much, much worse than that. People have been fooled into believing some bullshit about public support for college and upward mobility of the poor.
My position is to eliminate the Government from vocational education. In case you haven't figured it out yet, that means college, because all anyone hears when you say "college" is "that school I go to after school so that I can get a job", and because every career job requires a college degree. You have to go to medical school to be a doctor, and you can't start at medical school without a college degree in nursing--so what the fuck is medical school there for, if they can't train you in the basics of medicine?!
It's a position everybody hates, because they cannot think objectively when you are taking things away from them. It's the rope effect: if you give a man rope enough to hang himself, he will complain about being strangled to death in a noose, but will hold tight to that rope if you try to take it from him. That is what government support of college is, though: rope enough to hang yourself.
Without governments supplying loan programs, grants, state funding, and such, only rich kids could go to college. Ignoring that rich kids only care for MBAs, there just aren't nearly enough rich kids to fill all the needs of businesses. Businesses will need millions of newly-trained, skilled laborers every year; they can't have them if nobody is able to afford college on their own. This causes businesses to hire them from other businesses, and then lose them to other businesses, as salaries run through the roof: $250,000 Web designers, accountants, and programmers.
In the above scenario, a business would gain an enormous competitive advantage by hiring entrants, engaging them in on-the-job training, and educating them via funding their college and trade school. As these entrants gain skill, more work can shift onto them: even the least skilled carpenter can cut wedges and shims, and can soon be taught to lay joists; it takes a great deal of skill to cut and carve and shape decorative furniture, and the guy building the tables and chairs is not someone you want to pay to cut wedges and lay floor joists. Law entrants can be clerks and run around the office grabbing legal briefs, and then help with research; they will absorb knowledge, and can be shaped into competent lawyers. Plumbers, nurses, accountants, computer programmers. All of these, you can provide with menial tasks and with education to build skilled labor.
Instead, businesses wait for the Government to train students, with loans or with taxpayer money. Students speculate on what the businesses will need, and come into the market with many students who saw the hot job and have now flooded the market with excess supply. They then receive low salaries and experience long unemployment.
In short: our model of "get everyone an education by way of government" has produced an economy of putting risk and expense on individuals in order to create a crop of cheap labor for businesses. You are a commodity, and you have to invest in and sell yourself, and take all risks and costs thereof. Taxpayer funding would just spread the costs to all, without reducing the risk.
There is a third option. It is a political option: it is functionally equivalent to simply removing government intervention wholesale, but it sounds like the government is still supporting you, and it moves the cost onto the student. Keep our current system, but require businesses to sponsor a student: the businesses must provide that they will have a job for this person upon graduation, and select his degree program; if they fail to hire him after college, they must pay off his loans. Businesses taking those terms would need to keep the person employed long enough to escape that obligation, then cut him off; it would be a costly and inflexible investment for them, and a risk for the student.
The above makes it seem like we're helping to reduce a student's risk without taking
Kidding aside it's a sad day for the family of the person killed.
Canadinese aside, how do you know? Maybe he was a total asshole.