And thus the people trying to abolish the death penalty are wrong, for they are trying to establish that killing a man is wrong and we shouldn't do that.
He has a defamation lawsuit against OKCupid that he should use to destroy them and/or become very rich.
He doesn't have a slander or libel lawsuit; however, there is still a strong argument that OKCupid acted to irreparably and directly harm the reputation of Brendan Eich. The argument becomes stronger when observing that there was no issue with Eich prior to being promoted to CEO.
In all likelihood, Eich would either win a defamation of character lawsuit or have it downgraded to a strong harassment lawsuit. Harassment is nearly inescapable in this context: Eich was called out by name directly to all users of Mozilla browsers in a public campaign by OKCupid, and has experienced direct harm by these actions. Further, these were not allegations of continuing behavior; rather they were attacks on past behavior, with no accusations current--no accusation of Eich implementing hostile corporate behavior in his career.
The latter is O(n*(m!/n)*s) or O(m!s) for n common passwords and m user accounts and s shares. You only need to show that you've found a set of accounts which seem to validate together like this.
Taking a look at the most common passwords gleaned from millions of leaked passwords, we can actually find examples where a hundred or so users have the password "123456". If your threshold is 50 shares and you have 30,000 users (i.e. the typical user count for a shaving forum for straight razor users), an attacker could just use '123456" across a subset.
The big problem here is the factorial term; however, it's probabilistic. We can take the top 10 common passwords and estimate that, say, 20% of the user base has them. If our shares (s) are 50, we can then pick 50*5 = 250 users. If we're going with 5% of the userbase using 12345, it's 50*20 (50 / 4%) = 1000, but it's essentially a binary count.
Breaking a window is rather noisy and gains too much attention. It takes some time to rob a house; I've seen people smash doors in, but they usually kick the door down, grab one thing, and leave. The first valuable, light-weight thing they find--a bicycle, a laptop, whatever's in plain view. They often wind up with a $12 wal-mart bike.
In this scheme, you could do that. In this scheme, if your admin takes 30 seconds to log in and type the password, he might be slower than the 300 people trying to log in--of which the first 30 get "service unavailable, try again." It makes the problem self-resolving.
Standard salted secure hashes must be stored with the hash as well. You'd have to give us the hash algorithm, the salt, and the hash. Without these, the computer can't compute them.
With the proposed scheme, the salt is unknown; we must compute that first.
You're wrong. Reverse-computing a password (including testing guesses) requires energy. If the energy required is more than the entropy available in the universe, then the universe will reach its base energy state before calculation completes. At that point, there is no more energy to derive: every moment in time is like every following moment in time, as nothing changes, and thus time has ended.
The phenomena of time physically ending can also be called "an infinite amount of time". For our purposes, if you land in that time scale, it takes literally FOREVER.
Make passwords 20 characters. Lower case letters and the underscore or space. Expire once per 100 years. More than 60 attempts in 60 seconds gets a 60 second ban. Tell the user to slap 4 random dictionary words together. Use a random salt value per-password and a strong hash.
Security is about accessibility, integrity, and confidentiality. Passwords are used to authenticate, while access control schemes are used to authorize. Authentication and authorization come together to tell you if a person is allowed to read or modify data and permissions on data. Other security systems (High-availability, etc.) help ensure accessibility--integrity as well, since destroying data makes it non-accessible.
Security is a risk management scheme. If the severity of a risk event is high, you implement security no greater than the cost of that event to manage the risk. Contingencies, mitigation, and so on. Locks are a mitigation, as they prevent people from opening doors on their way by without significant effort and additional risk. Pick-resistant locks reduce probability of attack by making it less likely that any given attack will succeed, both by sheer resistance and by requiring the attacker to develop a skill to mitigate the security features--most attackers won't have that skill, especially if it's actively non-trivial (i.e. bumping a lock is easy to learn in 3 seconds; picking an anti-pick tumbler lock can be done in 45 seconds, but requires months of practice on a variety of locks, and may require different fine motor controls on different models).
Have you patched things up with Lee yet or are you still having a falling-out? Fans are eagerly to see another collaboration, perhaps a new steak sauce or rub.
I remember thinking some of these things. Then I did more researched and learned that I was wrong. One day you'll catch up to me, maybe. But I've been where you were and I thought the same things.
Oh really? Then how was that 1999 $250k programmer salary, Web designers making $120k, nurses making ass loads? And now they make $40k. These economic behaviors happen again and again in our society.
You say I can't try to do what I think is right without facing the consequences. Like Martin Luther King, who was assassinated.
You keep talking about "rights", but I don't see any "rights" involved. I see a privileged class getting tax deductions and a standard contract of asset ownership, estate transfer, and limited power of attorney.
Boycotts are the societal-scale equivalent of not feeding your kid. You're not "harming" them, you're just not "supporting them with money or labor." In this case, a boycott of Mozilla would cause collateral damage to Mozilla Inc due to their association with Eich; this would then show the industry that they need to not support Eich, making him less hirable. If we took it out to completion, we could boycot McDonalds if he ends up as a burger flipper; this would soundly tell the industry not to hire him, because WalMart doesn't want a quarter of 8 billion dollars of lost revenue for this dude etc. Then he would die on the streets alone.
The action is defensive in the same way that a sanction against North Korea is. We make it harder for those who work to harm us to get the resources they need to do so, until they decide they no longer want to harm us. Any harm they suffer is just a side-effect.
By that logic, I have a strong incentive to boycott OKCupid and you personally. You are harming my right to participate in the political process.
I believe, based on rational economic analysis, that supplying higher education (college, vocational training) to everyone as a default societal benefit is wrong. Firmly wrong. I believe this comic is fundamentally incorrect in many assumptions. Panel 5 especially: "Free education reduces social inequality, and benefits both individuals and society in the long run." I believe this is fundamentally backwards: Free education increases social inequality, and harms both individuals and society in the long run.
The equal supply of free education to all individuals creates a huge societal problem: when a particular vocational skill is in demand, a lot of people invest years of their time into developing that skill. The work force saturates, and these individuals find that the demand for hundreds of thousands of computer programmers or nurses or accountants is still there... but there are now millions of programmers, or nurses, or accountants. Thus they cannot get jobs, and the i.e. 1 in 10 who can get jobs are paid a paltry salary. In the interim, their employment opportunities were limited to unskilled labor--which we can replace with machines (hotdog and hamburger prep machines, automatic checkouts, janitorial robotics), and probably will when the minimum wage gets high enough and the cost of such automation becomes lower.
Without this supply or any government backing, businesses would suffer. Without skilled labor, they would pay excessively high salaries to hire experienced skilled labor--and then fail to support their business strategy, because another firm would poach their labor with higher salaries. The only way to escape this is for businesses to hire entrants to offset their skilled laborers, shifting the less-skilled tasks onto the entrants so the skilled laborers can apply themselves more effectively, while simultaneously training the entrants on the job and by paying their education. These entrants would become the new crop of skilled laborers, gaining modest salary increases above living wage.
Can you imagine if I were CEO of Mozilla Inc, having openly campaigned against the United States providing any sort of economic benefit to encourage education? No funding of universities, no government-backed loan program, no grants. You want school? Pay for it, either from your own funds or by employer sponsorship.
I would be burned alive.
There would be massive media backlash against Mozilla Inc. I would be forced out by the board as CEO to save the company. Nobody would hire me. Even in engineer-level or middle management positions, interviewers would recognize me as "that anti
I used to think that way. Then I rejected the idea. That's called growing up, and it's what most people don't do.
Society puts all kinds of funny pressure on people. A lot of things are flat wrong, and I have tended to tell people this. Look at stock advice and idioms: don't look a gift horse in the mouth, don't judge a book by its cover, don't make assumptions. Yet people give away shit that's broken and you wind up paying more to fix it or dispose of it than you would to replace it. You can't read all books; you have to make some surface judgments, and for example how do you optimally decide who to talk to at a party or a bar aside from their surface attractiveness (behavioral, physical, etc.)? And of course all human behavior relies on assumptions, else when someone tells you the sky is yellow you'd have to go outside and check if that's changed recently rather than assuming it's still blue and/or you haven't slipped into an alternate reality or suffered a mental disorder that's altered your memories.
Society has told me that we must either provide high amounts of welfare or that we should cut taxes; I've decided a basic income is simpler and better, striking a balance where we don't rob the rich (92% taxes!) but rather where we set a flat income tax that covers the basic income, such that total income (affected by inflation) adjusts the basic income independent of whether the middle class is shrinking (the rich are taking all the fucking money) or growing (the workers are making headway against their masters). Society also avoids pain, and prefers to take a continuous slide into failure rather than inflict short-term suffering for long-term prosperity; I find this wrong, and would rather sacrifice the life, health, and prosperity of several million for the next few years to avoid billions of lives over the next decades being cast into ruin, as it is not virtuous to bring everyone down so that those who will fail have a few more fleeting moments to hang on.
Societal pressure tells me I should fight for stronger post-secondary education guarantees, making society pay to educate the masses with college. Everyone believes this. Everyone is wrong. The general availability of vocational education shifts costs and risks away from businesses and onto individuals; businesses then have a large crop of prepared individuals to choose from, and can give restrictive salaries. Without this availability--without government loan programs taking the risk off banks, without government-funded colleges or free public university access--businesses would have a shortage of prepared skilled workers, and would have to provide vocational training to entrants in order to build a workforce. The first model disadvantages the poor and supports the rich; the second model doesn't much disadvantage the rich or the businesses (separate groups), but gives the poor great upward mobility by the application of hard work and ambition.
Societal expectations tell us to do stupid things that are harmful to us. People defend these expectations with incomplete or inaccurate knowledge, but hold to it because they don't want to become an outcast in society for being right.
Yes but that's getting into circular logic and odd philosophy.
The philosophy behind Aikido categorizes aggression. It says the lowest form of aggression is to attack an individual and kill him. The second lowest form of aggression is to goad an individual (not originally assailant) into attacking you, then kill or maim them. Close is responding to an aggressor by killing or maiming them. The highest form of aggression is to apply the minimum amount of force necessary to end hostilities, inflicting the least harm on your opponent. I feel Morihei Ueshiba is more appropriate to this discussion than Miyomoto Musashi.
In this case, we have people claiming that Eich's participation in society has an impact on other people whom he disagrees with on a philosophical level, and that such behavior which is inconvenient to others is wrong. This is followed by claims that we also have the right to behave in the same way, and can actively seek to harm Eich because our opinions diverge from his. It is as if we are saying that such behavior is not wrong when we do it to someone we don't like, but it is wrong when they do it.
Ueshiba's third form of aggression is similar, although both the second and third are similar philosophically. In both of these, we assume in one form or another that attacking someone is wrong; then we either wait for someone to attack us or we encourage them to do so, in either case applying far more force than we believe is necessary. We respond to Eich's actions not simply by shooting down Prop 8, or by placing the pressure of society's views upon him, but rather by placing the pressure of society's rejection upon him: we want to exclude him from society, so that he may live a less-fulfilling life and ultimately suffer. This action is not to defend ourselves, but to inflict harm and vengeance.
Is this who we are as a people? Is this who we are as Americans?
Strong lifelong bonds are not a real thing. Here's your first hint: you want to marry your girlfriend so that a lawyer can bestow upon you a lasting emotional bond.
Gay people in Canada were holding signs that said "marriage is love" when they were protesting. Marriage is love. Because love isn't a thing, it needs a legal contract.
People naturally get together, fornicate, and drift apart. People naturally get together, fornicate, form strong bonds, stay together, make children, fornicate more, then become interested in others and fornicate with them, then drift apart and end up with their new fornication buddies. People do not naturally get together and hold hands for 80 years; that is an artificial construct.
Wikipedia actually has this well-cited. The vast majority of scientific research on the topic suggests that people desperately want to get away from each other at some point, and either adapt to tolerate their partner (and thus become comfortable, which makes it undesirable to leave the relationship--even if it's combative rather than constructive) or abandon the relationship. Your girlfriend will just dump you when it's failed to work out for the past 8 months; your wife will not want the incredible hassle and insecurity of a divorce, but if it's just not going to work it will come.
So if I make $60k now, I pay about 25% in taxes overall
If I get married, I pay about 15% in taxes. On top of that, my standard deduction becomes $6,000 higher, so I pay taxes on 10% less money. This standard deduction only has the "disadvantage" that it makes it visibly obvious that mortgage interest tax deduction isn't a real thing, since even at my single-filing level I've NEVER taken an itemized deduction--the standard has always been higher. When my dad bought his $250k house, he paid $12k in interest on his first solid year; the standard deduction was $11,200 at the time, and his full deductions came to some $3000 more. I'm on a 15-year term, so my payment is proportionally much less interest (30% of my first payment was interest).
If the median salary for both men and women were $115k, you might be able to argue a marriage penalty: you'd get married and bump up a whole 3% income tax when you crossed that $226k income bracket. Oh, by the way, that's only on the upper bracket: of that total $230k, you pay the increased rate on the last $4k. By the by, since it's a bracketed system, you still have much larger swaths of income you're paying lower taxes on: even when you're balls-deep in that 36% income range instead of the 33% range, 95% of your income is being taxed at a much lower rate and 5% is being taxed at a slightly higher rate. It's not until you're both making somewhere north of $300k EACH that you start actually incurring more taxes.
And we all know most people make about $350k or thereabouts. It's only a handful of disadvantaged Americans who aren't drawing somewhere north of a quarter mil a year.
I didn't say marriage inevitably breaks down. I said relationships break down, and marriage creates pressure to hold a dysfunctional relationship together. It's society's way of forcing you into a behavior.
Marriage also produces a societal baseline which tells people what is socially acceptable. People find me incredibly strange for not wanting a relationship, to the point even that highly serviceable girls take it as a personal attack when they're turned down and go off and sulk. There has always been a pressure to go and get married; this doesn't need citation or defense because it is so common and visible that it's encoded in popular culture, for example with the running theme of Bruce Wayne constantly being referenced as "Gotham's most eligible bachelor" and dropped hints in almost every media interview and side discussion that he should find himself a wife. This is how we always regard single people: they need to get married.
Hunter-gatherer society did not have the luxury of living in mud huts with the wife and kids. It's accepted that paleo-man or proto-humans or what have you operated in nomadic groups operating as a single undifferentiated unit. Up until a few hundred years ago, groups of humans (sometimes extended families, sometimes just low-income commoners) cohabited in housing and still had sex in the presence of others--they'd sleep with a dozen or so in the same room and couples would get it on, regardless of other people or children or whoever around to hear the woman screaming.
These things are covered when you study decision making and communications. Hunter-gatherer society is a common example of extremely specialized communications needs for rapid group decision making. When sex was less a taboo topic and more a procedural one (i.e. church said don't fuck outside of wedlock, but yes fucking is a thing we do), 'fuck' wasn't a strong expletive as it is now; 'damn' was an IMMENSELY powerful expletive when religion was the dominant force. General sex terms weren't even considered obscene in Greco-Roman societies but, due to active-passive sexuality instead of hetero-homo sexuality, one of the most vulgar and offensive words in Roman culture was a latin word that essentially meant what is today called a "bottom".
Argument by volume and verbosity aside, humans are essentially societal creatures. We are not familial. Social animals tend to follow either a social sexual hierarchy (i.e. dogs, lions, etc., alpha male makes babies) or have temporary families. Human courtship is not exceedingly long; there is strong scientific basis suggesting it's shorter than 7 years, mainly as an attempt to explain why people even in healthy emotional relationships tend to get right up to the 7 year mark and then want to start screwing other people again (and of course that often leads to courtship, which is artificially terminated by worries about the existing relationship). Early Abrahamic religions suggest that a man may take a second wife, but must still care for the first; if he does not--if he doesn't have sex with her, even--she is divorced without punishment so she can find another man.
Abrahamic religion seems to have inherited marriage from two ideals: first, that women are property (rich people have many wives, and Eve was the whore that caused the fall of man from the garden); and second, monogamy is a fucking awesome state institution to propagate the state (or religion). The Romans were very free sexually, but they created monogamous marriage for the purpose of producing new children. Children were explicitly granted citizenship (new Romans), expanding the empire.
This whole concept of life-long marriage seems to be a visible corruption. The earliest records indicate marriage was the possession of a thing of value (a woman), and temporary, and was also a state function to simplify tax and possession and to create new citizens (i.e. soldiers). If we accept marriage as a natural institution, we have to accept that women are property; we may need to accept that marriage is temporary. It stops sounding like a relationship, and even stops sounding like marriage--it sound like owning or dating.
the atmosphere shuffles heat from the tropics to the polls
You did not say
Heat intake tends to concentrate at the poles, rather than the equator.
You indicated that heat is MOVED from one place to another. Physically removed from here, deposited over there. This is like if you have a pile of poker chips on the table, and you get a shuffleboard rod and shuffle them from one side of the table to the other.
It was a ridiculous statement showing a great lack of grasp of the English language if not the topic at hand. Are you Bosnian?
Slashdot Mirror
And thus the people trying to abolish the death penalty are wrong, for they are trying to establish that killing a man is wrong and we shouldn't do that.
He has a defamation lawsuit against OKCupid that he should use to destroy them and/or become very rich.
He doesn't have a slander or libel lawsuit; however, there is still a strong argument that OKCupid acted to irreparably and directly harm the reputation of Brendan Eich. The argument becomes stronger when observing that there was no issue with Eich prior to being promoted to CEO.
In all likelihood, Eich would either win a defamation of character lawsuit or have it downgraded to a strong harassment lawsuit. Harassment is nearly inescapable in this context: Eich was called out by name directly to all users of Mozilla browsers in a public campaign by OKCupid, and has experienced direct harm by these actions. Further, these were not allegations of continuing behavior; rather they were attacks on past behavior, with no accusations current--no accusation of Eich implementing hostile corporate behavior in his career.
The latter is O(n*(m!/n)*s) or O(m!s) for n common passwords and m user accounts and s shares. You only need to show that you've found a set of accounts which seem to validate together like this.
Taking a look at the most common passwords gleaned from millions of leaked passwords, we can actually find examples where a hundred or so users have the password "123456". If your threshold is 50 shares and you have 30,000 users (i.e. the typical user count for a shaving forum for straight razor users), an attacker could just use '123456" across a subset.
The big problem here is the factorial term; however, it's probabilistic. We can take the top 10 common passwords and estimate that, say, 20% of the user base has them. If our shares (s) are 50, we can then pick 50*5 = 250 users. If we're going with 5% of the userbase using 12345, it's 50*20 (50 / 4%) = 1000, but it's essentially a binary count.
Breaking a window is rather noisy and gains too much attention. It takes some time to rob a house; I've seen people smash doors in, but they usually kick the door down, grab one thing, and leave. The first valuable, light-weight thing they find--a bicycle, a laptop, whatever's in plain view. They often wind up with a $12 wal-mart bike.
Alice's lock and Bob's key.
In this scheme, you could do that. In this scheme, if your admin takes 30 seconds to log in and type the password, he might be slower than the 300 people trying to log in--of which the first 30 get "service unavailable, try again." It makes the problem self-resolving.
Standard salted secure hashes must be stored with the hash as well. You'd have to give us the hash algorithm, the salt, and the hash. Without these, the computer can't compute them.
With the proposed scheme, the salt is unknown; we must compute that first.
You're wrong. Reverse-computing a password (including testing guesses) requires energy. If the energy required is more than the entropy available in the universe, then the universe will reach its base energy state before calculation completes. At that point, there is no more energy to derive: every moment in time is like every following moment in time, as nothing changes, and thus time has ended.
The phenomena of time physically ending can also be called "an infinite amount of time". For our purposes, if you land in that time scale, it takes literally FOREVER.
You lock the door so the police need a warrant. "It was open" is an occasionally accepted excuse.
Make passwords 20 characters. Lower case letters and the underscore or space. Expire once per 100 years. More than 60 attempts in 60 seconds gets a 60 second ban. Tell the user to slap 4 random dictionary words together. Use a random salt value per-password and a strong hash.
QED.
Your argument is dumb.
Security is about accessibility, integrity, and confidentiality. Passwords are used to authenticate, while access control schemes are used to authorize. Authentication and authorization come together to tell you if a person is allowed to read or modify data and permissions on data. Other security systems (High-availability, etc.) help ensure accessibility--integrity as well, since destroying data makes it non-accessible.
Security is a risk management scheme. If the severity of a risk event is high, you implement security no greater than the cost of that event to manage the risk. Contingencies, mitigation, and so on. Locks are a mitigation, as they prevent people from opening doors on their way by without significant effort and additional risk. Pick-resistant locks reduce probability of attack by making it less likely that any given attack will succeed, both by sheer resistance and by requiring the attacker to develop a skill to mitigate the security features--most attackers won't have that skill, especially if it's actively non-trivial (i.e. bumping a lock is easy to learn in 3 seconds; picking an anti-pick tumbler lock can be done in 45 seconds, but requires months of practice on a variety of locks, and may require different fine motor controls on different models).
Register 10 accounts, or use the most common passwords on various combinatons of account data for about 5 minutes.
Have you patched things up with Lee yet or are you still having a falling-out? Fans are eagerly to see another collaboration, perhaps a new steak sauce or rub.
In Washington DC, a nurse with a Master's Degree and 3 years of experience makes $40k.
I remember thinking some of these things. Then I did more researched and learned that I was wrong. One day you'll catch up to me, maybe. But I've been where you were and I thought the same things.
Oh really? Then how was that 1999 $250k programmer salary, Web designers making $120k, nurses making ass loads? And now they make $40k. These economic behaviors happen again and again in our society.
You say I can't try to do what I think is right without facing the consequences. Like Martin Luther King, who was assassinated.
You keep talking about "rights", but I don't see any "rights" involved. I see a privileged class getting tax deductions and a standard contract of asset ownership, estate transfer, and limited power of attorney.
Boycotts are the societal-scale equivalent of not feeding your kid. You're not "harming" them, you're just not "supporting them with money or labor." In this case, a boycott of Mozilla would cause collateral damage to Mozilla Inc due to their association with Eich; this would then show the industry that they need to not support Eich, making him less hirable. If we took it out to completion, we could boycot McDonalds if he ends up as a burger flipper; this would soundly tell the industry not to hire him, because WalMart doesn't want a quarter of 8 billion dollars of lost revenue for this dude etc. Then he would die on the streets alone.
The action is defensive in the same way that a sanction against North Korea is. We make it harder for those who work to harm us to get the resources they need to do so, until they decide they no longer want to harm us. Any harm they suffer is just a side-effect.
By that logic, I have a strong incentive to boycott OKCupid and you personally. You are harming my right to participate in the political process.
I believe, based on rational economic analysis, that supplying higher education (college, vocational training) to everyone as a default societal benefit is wrong. Firmly wrong. I believe this comic is fundamentally incorrect in many assumptions. Panel 5 especially: "Free education reduces social inequality, and benefits both individuals and society in the long run." I believe this is fundamentally backwards: Free education increases social inequality, and harms both individuals and society in the long run.
The equal supply of free education to all individuals creates a huge societal problem: when a particular vocational skill is in demand, a lot of people invest years of their time into developing that skill. The work force saturates, and these individuals find that the demand for hundreds of thousands of computer programmers or nurses or accountants is still there... but there are now millions of programmers, or nurses, or accountants. Thus they cannot get jobs, and the i.e. 1 in 10 who can get jobs are paid a paltry salary. In the interim, their employment opportunities were limited to unskilled labor--which we can replace with machines (hotdog and hamburger prep machines, automatic checkouts, janitorial robotics), and probably will when the minimum wage gets high enough and the cost of such automation becomes lower.
Without this supply or any government backing, businesses would suffer. Without skilled labor, they would pay excessively high salaries to hire experienced skilled labor--and then fail to support their business strategy, because another firm would poach their labor with higher salaries. The only way to escape this is for businesses to hire entrants to offset their skilled laborers, shifting the less-skilled tasks onto the entrants so the skilled laborers can apply themselves more effectively, while simultaneously training the entrants on the job and by paying their education. These entrants would become the new crop of skilled laborers, gaining modest salary increases above living wage.
Can you imagine if I were CEO of Mozilla Inc, having openly campaigned against the United States providing any sort of economic benefit to encourage education? No funding of universities, no government-backed loan program, no grants. You want school? Pay for it, either from your own funds or by employer sponsorship.
I would be burned alive.
There would be massive media backlash against Mozilla Inc. I would be forced out by the board as CEO to save the company. Nobody would hire me. Even in engineer-level or middle management positions, interviewers would recognize me as "that anti
I used to think that way. Then I rejected the idea. That's called growing up, and it's what most people don't do.
Society puts all kinds of funny pressure on people. A lot of things are flat wrong, and I have tended to tell people this. Look at stock advice and idioms: don't look a gift horse in the mouth, don't judge a book by its cover, don't make assumptions. Yet people give away shit that's broken and you wind up paying more to fix it or dispose of it than you would to replace it. You can't read all books; you have to make some surface judgments, and for example how do you optimally decide who to talk to at a party or a bar aside from their surface attractiveness (behavioral, physical, etc.)? And of course all human behavior relies on assumptions, else when someone tells you the sky is yellow you'd have to go outside and check if that's changed recently rather than assuming it's still blue and/or you haven't slipped into an alternate reality or suffered a mental disorder that's altered your memories.
Society has told me that we must either provide high amounts of welfare or that we should cut taxes; I've decided a basic income is simpler and better, striking a balance where we don't rob the rich (92% taxes!) but rather where we set a flat income tax that covers the basic income, such that total income (affected by inflation) adjusts the basic income independent of whether the middle class is shrinking (the rich are taking all the fucking money) or growing (the workers are making headway against their masters). Society also avoids pain, and prefers to take a continuous slide into failure rather than inflict short-term suffering for long-term prosperity; I find this wrong, and would rather sacrifice the life, health, and prosperity of several million for the next few years to avoid billions of lives over the next decades being cast into ruin, as it is not virtuous to bring everyone down so that those who will fail have a few more fleeting moments to hang on.
Societal pressure tells me I should fight for stronger post-secondary education guarantees, making society pay to educate the masses with college. Everyone believes this. Everyone is wrong. The general availability of vocational education shifts costs and risks away from businesses and onto individuals; businesses then have a large crop of prepared individuals to choose from, and can give restrictive salaries. Without this availability--without government loan programs taking the risk off banks, without government-funded colleges or free public university access--businesses would have a shortage of prepared skilled workers, and would have to provide vocational training to entrants in order to build a workforce. The first model disadvantages the poor and supports the rich; the second model doesn't much disadvantage the rich or the businesses (separate groups), but gives the poor great upward mobility by the application of hard work and ambition.
Societal expectations tell us to do stupid things that are harmful to us. People defend these expectations with incomplete or inaccurate knowledge, but hold to it because they don't want to become an outcast in society for being right.
Does Matti Leshem need to get Buzz Aldin'd?
Yes but that's getting into circular logic and odd philosophy.
The philosophy behind Aikido categorizes aggression. It says the lowest form of aggression is to attack an individual and kill him. The second lowest form of aggression is to goad an individual (not originally assailant) into attacking you, then kill or maim them. Close is responding to an aggressor by killing or maiming them. The highest form of aggression is to apply the minimum amount of force necessary to end hostilities, inflicting the least harm on your opponent. I feel Morihei Ueshiba is more appropriate to this discussion than Miyomoto Musashi.
In this case, we have people claiming that Eich's participation in society has an impact on other people whom he disagrees with on a philosophical level, and that such behavior which is inconvenient to others is wrong. This is followed by claims that we also have the right to behave in the same way, and can actively seek to harm Eich because our opinions diverge from his. It is as if we are saying that such behavior is not wrong when we do it to someone we don't like, but it is wrong when they do it.
Ueshiba's third form of aggression is similar, although both the second and third are similar philosophically. In both of these, we assume in one form or another that attacking someone is wrong; then we either wait for someone to attack us or we encourage them to do so, in either case applying far more force than we believe is necessary. We respond to Eich's actions not simply by shooting down Prop 8, or by placing the pressure of society's views upon him, but rather by placing the pressure of society's rejection upon him: we want to exclude him from society, so that he may live a less-fulfilling life and ultimately suffer. This action is not to defend ourselves, but to inflict harm and vengeance.
Is this who we are as a people? Is this who we are as Americans?
Strong lifelong bonds are not a real thing. Here's your first hint: you want to marry your girlfriend so that a lawyer can bestow upon you a lasting emotional bond.
Marriage--the legal institution--provides stable relationships.
Gay people in Canada were holding signs that said "marriage is love" when they were protesting. Marriage is love. Because love isn't a thing, it needs a legal contract.
People naturally get together, fornicate, and drift apart. People naturally get together, fornicate, form strong bonds, stay together, make children, fornicate more, then become interested in others and fornicate with them, then drift apart and end up with their new fornication buddies. People do not naturally get together and hold hands for 80 years; that is an artificial construct.
Wikipedia actually has this well-cited. The vast majority of scientific research on the topic suggests that people desperately want to get away from each other at some point, and either adapt to tolerate their partner (and thus become comfortable, which makes it undesirable to leave the relationship--even if it's combative rather than constructive) or abandon the relationship. Your girlfriend will just dump you when it's failed to work out for the past 8 months; your wife will not want the incredible hassle and insecurity of a divorce, but if it's just not going to work it will come.
So if I make $60k now, I pay about 25% in taxes overall
If I get married, I pay about 15% in taxes. On top of that, my standard deduction becomes $6,000 higher, so I pay taxes on 10% less money. This standard deduction only has the "disadvantage" that it makes it visibly obvious that mortgage interest tax deduction isn't a real thing, since even at my single-filing level I've NEVER taken an itemized deduction--the standard has always been higher. When my dad bought his $250k house, he paid $12k in interest on his first solid year; the standard deduction was $11,200 at the time, and his full deductions came to some $3000 more. I'm on a 15-year term, so my payment is proportionally much less interest (30% of my first payment was interest).
If the median salary for both men and women were $115k, you might be able to argue a marriage penalty: you'd get married and bump up a whole 3% income tax when you crossed that $226k income bracket. Oh, by the way, that's only on the upper bracket: of that total $230k, you pay the increased rate on the last $4k. By the by, since it's a bracketed system, you still have much larger swaths of income you're paying lower taxes on: even when you're balls-deep in that 36% income range instead of the 33% range, 95% of your income is being taxed at a much lower rate and 5% is being taxed at a slightly higher rate. It's not until you're both making somewhere north of $300k EACH that you start actually incurring more taxes.
And we all know most people make about $350k or thereabouts. It's only a handful of disadvantaged Americans who aren't drawing somewhere north of a quarter mil a year.
I didn't say marriage inevitably breaks down. I said relationships break down, and marriage creates pressure to hold a dysfunctional relationship together. It's society's way of forcing you into a behavior.
Marriage also produces a societal baseline which tells people what is socially acceptable. People find me incredibly strange for not wanting a relationship, to the point even that highly serviceable girls take it as a personal attack when they're turned down and go off and sulk. There has always been a pressure to go and get married; this doesn't need citation or defense because it is so common and visible that it's encoded in popular culture, for example with the running theme of Bruce Wayne constantly being referenced as "Gotham's most eligible bachelor" and dropped hints in almost every media interview and side discussion that he should find himself a wife. This is how we always regard single people: they need to get married.
Hunter-gatherer society did not have the luxury of living in mud huts with the wife and kids. It's accepted that paleo-man or proto-humans or what have you operated in nomadic groups operating as a single undifferentiated unit. Up until a few hundred years ago, groups of humans (sometimes extended families, sometimes just low-income commoners) cohabited in housing and still had sex in the presence of others--they'd sleep with a dozen or so in the same room and couples would get it on, regardless of other people or children or whoever around to hear the woman screaming.
These things are covered when you study decision making and communications. Hunter-gatherer society is a common example of extremely specialized communications needs for rapid group decision making. When sex was less a taboo topic and more a procedural one (i.e. church said don't fuck outside of wedlock, but yes fucking is a thing we do), 'fuck' wasn't a strong expletive as it is now; 'damn' was an IMMENSELY powerful expletive when religion was the dominant force. General sex terms weren't even considered obscene in Greco-Roman societies but, due to active-passive sexuality instead of hetero-homo sexuality, one of the most vulgar and offensive words in Roman culture was a latin word that essentially meant what is today called a "bottom".
Argument by volume and verbosity aside, humans are essentially societal creatures. We are not familial. Social animals tend to follow either a social sexual hierarchy (i.e. dogs, lions, etc., alpha male makes babies) or have temporary families. Human courtship is not exceedingly long; there is strong scientific basis suggesting it's shorter than 7 years, mainly as an attempt to explain why people even in healthy emotional relationships tend to get right up to the 7 year mark and then want to start screwing other people again (and of course that often leads to courtship, which is artificially terminated by worries about the existing relationship). Early Abrahamic religions suggest that a man may take a second wife, but must still care for the first; if he does not--if he doesn't have sex with her, even--she is divorced without punishment so she can find another man.
Abrahamic religion seems to have inherited marriage from two ideals: first, that women are property (rich people have many wives, and Eve was the whore that caused the fall of man from the garden); and second, monogamy is a fucking awesome state institution to propagate the state (or religion). The Romans were very free sexually, but they created monogamous marriage for the purpose of producing new children. Children were explicitly granted citizenship (new Romans), expanding the empire.
This whole concept of life-long marriage seems to be a visible corruption. The earliest records indicate marriage was the possession of a thing of value (a woman), and temporary, and was also a state function to simplify tax and possession and to create new citizens (i.e. soldiers). If we accept marriage as a natural institution, we have to accept that women are property; we may need to accept that marriage is temporary. It stops sounding like a relationship, and even stops sounding like marriage--it sound like owning or dating.
That's not what you said. You said:
the atmosphere shuffles heat from the tropics to the polls
You did not say
Heat intake tends to concentrate at the poles, rather than the equator.
You indicated that heat is MOVED from one place to another. Physically removed from here, deposited over there. This is like if you have a pile of poker chips on the table, and you get a shuffleboard rod and shuffle them from one side of the table to the other.
It was a ridiculous statement showing a great lack of grasp of the English language if not the topic at hand. Are you Bosnian?
So it's no longer his right to participate in full in society because he exercised his right to participate in full in society?