You have not been paying attention to me then. I constantly point out that, as a confirmed bachelor with so little interest in relationships that I've never even had a girlfriend (I've rejected dates and made people cry, which confuses the shit out of me), gay marriage increases the percentage of the tax burden that I must cover. All these married people pay less in taxes, but what about people who don't believe in marriage? People who raise children and have a family without a state institution involved, or who just don't engage in that kind of relationship? We're taxed more, and when some section of the population is promoted into that privileged class they pay less taxes and who makes up the bulk of the difference when the tax hikes come back around?
Marriage exists solely as a societal mechanism to enforce the concept of a nuclear family. In Fredrick Pohl's Heechee Saga, the Heechee don't have marriage and don't form nuclear families; women become fertile, they have sex (or die from arousal stress if not mated with), then they become productive members of society for another year. Men and women don't live together and raise children; their entire society functions as a unit, all working to the betterment of the whole, and so they never developed the need to form protective groups.
Human marriage binds people through inconvenience. The relationship is long dead after several years, both of them are fucking other people and lying about it, they hate each other, but divorce is hard. For the longest time divorce wasn't even legal: Henry VIII used to execute his wives so he could remarry. Marriage is an institution to forcefully create a fundamentally unnatural group unit of society called "family" as a replacement to the fundamentally natural group unit of society called "tribe".
On top of that, we give married couples big tax deductions--which become even bigger when they have children, and are not as significant when they have a dual income because women belong in the kitchen and not in the work force. Those of us who aren't married are subsidizing those who are married. With money. We are paying more money, they are paying less. It's as if we started on fair, even ground, all paid our fair share, and then round two comes along and the tax man takes part of our money and gives it to married people. It's the same outcome. Now there are more of them taking our money.
In this case, it's not a matter of boycotting a corporation for being harmful to society; rather, it's a case of boycotting a corporation because we want to inflict pain and harm and vitriolic hatred on an individual associated with the corporation.
The message here is that Brendan Eich does not deserve rights and should be barred from any highly-gainful employment. He could work at McDonalds, but then he would be making hamburgers we'd refuse to eat. Not until Brendan Eich is on the streets starving to death will we be satisfied.
Feels good to attack someone whose opinions on what social policies are good for society as a whole you disagree with, eh?
Ok, you gotta help me with this... They're sending people to jail for selling weapons to Mexican cartels "so EVERYONE doesn't [do it], since the situation could be worse. Maybe because you have to cull down the supply". And yet, when the police add to the supply, since there's so much supply "it's a non-impact".
Scenario 1: hacking into computers isn't illegal. Result: most teenagers and middling adults learn to hack into computers. They start hacking into computers, damaging service, stealing sensitive information, and the economy collapses.
Scenario 2: Hacking into computers is illegal. Result: A lot of people know not to do that shit. The ones that do are more careful, avoiding high-value targets and generally trying to not get caught. Opportunities are smaller. Collateral damage is smaller.
Scenario 3: Scenario 2, but also you hire a penetration tester. More information is gathered, and the hackers not dissuaded by Scenario 2 have more difficulty breaking into your shit.
Clear enough? Or are you going to argue that shit being illegal and getting people arrested isn't a deterrent for other people who would do said illegal shit?
But the atmosphere shuffles heat from the tropics to the polls
Moving heat from one place to the other--the idiomatic interpretation of the above, probably the only valid way to interpret this in vernacular English, certainly the only common interpretation for native speakers--would involve cooling one area and warming another. Cooling is not my addition.
There will probably be dramatic effects at 2C, which you will see in your lifetime if you are young. A 5C change would make large parts of the globe uninhabitable (too hot for mammals), and many meters of sea level rise.
Irrelevant. You said we're probably heading upwards of 4-6C. There's a time scale issue here. We're probably running out of fossil fuels in like 20-150 years depending on who you ask. There's a lot of interesting logistics issues, such as if we're going to hit 2C in the next decade or if that's 90 years away (i.e. 0.5C in 30 years, multiplied by 3 times more). 90 years is not likely my lifespan.
The solution is to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas pollution. Remember? CO2? It's really not that hard, and not going to cause that many problems,
Anyone who says something isn't going to cause "that many problems" is full of shit. Anyone who says a major, far-reaching change isn't going to cause any problems is insane. Risk can be managed, but it's going to be an expensive task to make things work out right within the status quo.
Change tends to break the status quo. For example: politicians always do what's great for their city or state, usually pushing poor people into the streets and then out of the area (dead, jail, another city with cheap rent) while attracting upper middle class to replace them; then they get to talk about how great their initiatives were and how you should vote for them again, when the last batch that voted for them had their lives destroyed.
Good initiatives handled correctly are still painful. I want a basic income system (see signature), which if we eliminated all welfare, social security, and government pensions, but kept medicare, would amount to about $13,800 per person per year. Getting there would be slow, would be disruptive, and would involve shuffling taxes around. After 5-10 years, we'd be better off; we wouldn't be full benefit until probably 30 years down the line. In the first few years, however, welfare and unemployment benefits would be replaced with something smaller, and we'd be in terrible flux. Like treating cancer: it hurts more during treatment than it does while you're dying, but then after treatment you get better.
And anyway, much of the efforts we want to pursue involve scaling up energy production with stuff that collects incoming heat, warming the planet. A lot of the problem is energy consumption.
When Europe announced their GPS system, there was a minor backlash from a bunch of political commentators talking about how Europe is just trying to be anti-America by implementing the same thing we have. The problem is it's technically better.
The same thing is true of the climate models. Europe is investigating all climate change effects, including warming trends and cooling trends. The EU is not as bullish on global warming as the US, nor on the human impact; the UN is driven by the US (I mean it's in fucking New York), and puts out reports mostly driven by US research. Europe's more conservative stance is based on data that's just better.
By the by, they also vaccinate chickens for salmonella.
Gee I don't know. Why are we sending people to prison for being hookers? There are so many hookers around here.
Oh. Maybe its so EVERYONE doesn't become a hooker, since the situation could be worse. Maybe because you have to cull down the supply to "exactly meets demand" before you can cull it further to "comes below demand". You know, what they were trying to do: find out more about how this whole gun trafficking thing goes on so they can make maximally-effective stings, increasing risk and causing price increases (artificial scarcity).
Also: there's a distinct difference between arms trafficking and government-sanctioned espionage that involves arms trafficking. Why do people constantly pull out this "well the government did X and that exists in a bubble regardless of all other things that happened?" The government charges you taxes; should we arrest them for robbing you at gun point, since they send people with guns if you don't pay them?
My argument is that they would have whatever the hell they want because the market is not only there, but strong. You can get AK-47s on the black market, man.
Just 'cause a method is less ideal doesn't mean it's going to be that much less ideal. Wal-Mart is a less ideal source of office paper than ordering online with Staples, but I'm not having Staples ship to my house because they ship FedEx and FedEx refuses to leave a package at my door (UPS will), to the point that support told me I should just go to the distribution center 10 miles away and an e-mail to the CEO (elevated 4 times before I went that high) got a personal letter from an Executive Aid that comes down to, "Well, too bad" (even the CEO emphasizes that it's at the sole discretion of FedEx whether or not to actually deliver a package they've been paid to deliver, even if they've been authorized and instructed to release it at the porch by the recipient in writing).
Paper from Wal-Mart is the same brand. I have to drive and go get it, but hassling with FedEx is less ideal than hassling with the drive to Wal-Mart. UPS dropping paper at my door is most ideal.
Illegal sourced ARs are trafficked or stolen. There's a delivery fee and risk: it costs money to traffic them, but it also costs money to get across the US border and back without getting arrested for trafficking guns. They're the same guns. Dealing with the black market is non-opportune: disputes can turn into firefights--a risk--and your suppliers can be somewhat unreliable. Dealing with retail is smooth and static, very low risk, and can be of higher cost: it can be slower to get the guns you want without raising too many flags, or the whole process may just cost more (black market firearms can be cheaper than retail, or more expensive, depending on many factors--stolen shit is often cheap). While the guns are typically the same stock, they may be discard stock: it's less "more accurate and reliable" and more "chance of getting non-functional garbage", but that rarely happens to big mafioso customers because they send the mob to come kill your entire shop.
An AR-15 is inferior to an AK-47. Butterfly effect is non-existent: events are resistant to noise, not impacted by cascading failure. Computer nerds are all over this imaginary property because it's part of software hashes: change one bit in the input and your hash or your encrypted data or whatever comes out completely different. In real life, small changes don't lead to big changes; they lead to minor adjustments.
Because you don't fucking understand economics. Do you not know what scarcity is? When 100 people want meat, and there is a deer, the deer can feed like 20 people. THAT'S SCARCE!
When you go speeding, you consume a resource: the road can only handle so many cars traveling at a given speed. The higher the speed, the fewer cars it can handle. This is a space issue: more space, more speed. Speeding consumes a resource, and if everybody tried to do it we would wind up in traffic jams. Speeding is an example of a scarce resource: the ability to go fast in traffic, in which if enough people went fast we would wind up in a traffic jam.
Look, go your ass to California and try to get water. There's no water there! They pipe it in from Nevada! It's not scarce because there's no water; it's scarce because there's not enough water to meet the demand for water!
Where are all the responses explaining that the flat/cooling trend they've been modeling in Europe is a lie?
I have a colleague who is into politics--I mean really into politics, beyond party bullshit and into looking at the whole world and going, "Damn, but look over here!" He's been pointing out crazy shit like how Europe's new GPS replacement has much higher resolution than the American GPS satellite system, and how Europe's climate models are all-inclusive while American models tend to use specific models for specific analysis and ignore the vast majority of the data.
Speeding is scarce, not rare. More to the point: space is scarce. If we lived on a planet 20 times bigger and you only ever saw a car every 300 miles of driving, we'd be very lonely. Also, if 90% of the world started speeding one day, nobody would notice because hardly anybody would ever see anyone else to know they were speeding too.
When you start speeding, everybody notices. You are essentially consuming a resource that can't accommodate everyone. Everyone wants to speed: everyone wants to blast their ass down the road at 90mph to get where they're going. They can't. A few of us can. Assuming we all have the skill to do this successfully in normal circumstances (i.e. pass all the traffic), we'd wind up with unimpeachable traffic congestion if we all tried to speed down the road ridiculously fast. Really, when there's enough cars on the road, we can't even drive half the speed limit. We'd pack the cars together really fast, then all have to drive slow again. Very slow.
Black market firearms are not scarce. There's more firearms available than there are purchase orders for firearms. There's a huge market for black market firearms and it draws a lot of arms dealers.
I'd say dead people are measurable negative effects, it's just a bit like pollution deaths - did this particular death result from factory A, B, or C? We can't tell.
Not so. For the hundredth time, false equivalence.
We know in this case that this particular death resulted from firearm C, purchased at market rate, and allowed through by federal oversight intentionally letting it slip.
In the case of factory pollution, it's a long-term health consequence from the combined effect. More importantly, adding more factories creates more pollutants. More guns on the market is one thing: black market arms is a hot market, and there's more guns than buyers; adding a few more guns won't do anything because you just have that many more unsold guns. More pollutants in the air is different: you add factory D, you will be inhaling that much more shit.
This is why the whole media circus affair annoys me to no end: people constantly spout stupid shit like "well people were killed with these guns, so this program caused people to die, because otherwise the murderers wouldn't have guns!" It's like people imagine the Mexican Mafia is a street gang with 5 or 6 members, scraping by on their drug money while stealing food and living in a burned-out shack, got a whole $300 of profit this year and bought some Nikes. It's not; it's an international organized crime ring that fights the authorities directly, living in mansions and running trucks wherever the hell they want. When they want guns, they get guns. One of these guys loses a gun, he doesn't have to wait until they can find and buy/steal another one; it's like the US Army, they go to the Mexican Drug Mafia Armory and get another AK, buy more to restock later.
The range of complaints needs to exclude stupid shit that didn't really happen.
False equivalence. Try something that's not scarce. Every speeder on the road adds 1 more speeder to the freeway. By contrast, there are so many guns on the black market that they can't sell them all.
For that matter, the interference had a purpose. It's not like you start selling weed to profit and you're basically breaking the law. This was a (poorly) planned operation aimed at finding more information to use in the pursuit of enforcement against Mexican drug cartels. It didn't work, but it wasn't just "breakin' da law!"
Use the rational part of your brain. The one called the prefrontal contex. That Amygdala thing is nothing but trouble; it causes you to not actually think.
Get that through your head: I don't care about the law.
All I care about is cause and effect. What was the impact of this mishandling? The media says there are many guns in the hands of cartels where they would have no guns, and many people have died who would not be dead because the cartels would not have tools of murder. I don't believe that for one second: there are so many guns for sale on the black market that you can build a small army on a middle-class salary.
People aren't crying over the law; they're using the law as a shillelagh to beat people over the head with because of an emotional reaction to a non-issue. All these firearms could have been prevented from getting into the hands of Mexicans; instead, they would get different firearms, possibly better ones like AK-47s, which are readily available even in fucking Libya.
Uh, let's try this again: There is more weed available in Baltimore than can be sold. If you can sell 100 of a thing, but you have 1000 of a thing, giving you 100 more means you end the day with 1000 of that thing instead of 900 of that thing.
Do you not know about scarcity? Please go study high school economics again; you're not ready for college yet.
And legal arguments are not factual, logical arguments; they're rule-set arguments, mainly philosophical, based on approximated models of reality and idealism. This gets into complex arguments about culling down a behavior even though "if I didn't do it then someone else would" i.e. removing one group's contributions is a null factor, versus allowing that same behavior for an alternative purpose. For example: we allow research where people are given marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and psilocybin mushrooms to consume, even though we ban these substances... should researchers be legally culpable for this? What's the difference between research and dealing on the streets?
You CAN say that because that guy killed this guy with a gun you gave him, you helped him do it.
No, you can't. You can make a philosophical argument, but you can't make a real argument. It's the Ship of Theseus: you still have a ship, but is it THE Ship of Theseus? Well, in a sense, yes. And no. Kind of. Both, really, and neither. There's a fuzzy point where it's no longer the Ship of Theseus, but nobody can pin down when that is; and if the other ship didn't exist, it would definitely be the Ship of Theseus. But if it was built with the same material, in the same shape, molecularly identical but with a different sequence of events, it would definitely NOT be the Ship of Theseus.
Don't believe me? I can't possibly post all of the case law that hinges on this very notion. You are just wrong and can't admit it.
Nope, that's irrelevant. Case law hinges on a "notion", an ideal, as you said. It doesn't hinge on rationality, but rather on judgment.
For example:
you cannot say with certainty that this guy will kill that guy no matter what I do.
That's true. However, in this case, we can say with certainty that this guy did kill this other guy with a firearm. We can also say with high certainty that this guy would have acquired a firearm no matter what you do--to the point that arguing that he wouldn't is irrational and flat out idiotic. It's like if you argued that if you, personally, didn't buy me lunch last week, then I would starve to death. As I have a job and tend to buy my own lunch, it's most likely I would have found food by my own means.
The philosophical ideal that providing firearms in this program makes you culpable is only philosophical. It is not actually rational in an environment where the supply of black-market firearms outstrips the demand. To argue otherwise is to argue that we can't really know that chicken eggs are from chickens, since the farmer just finds 99.999% of eggs under chickens and doesn't witnessing them berthing the eggs, thus the eggs may be put there secretly by gnomes.
You have zero evidence that the gun used in a murder was not another gun that had the same physical characteristics, up to and including a reproduction of some marking like the serial number. It's statistically unlikely, but you cannot say with any certainty that it was actually the same gun, right?
We have statistical evidence showing that there is a huge supply of black-market firearms for cheap, competitive with market prices. We can actually say with what is called "high certainty" that Mexican drug cartels would have gotten firearms in some other manner. That's what statistics is: certainty. Not 100% certainty. Just certainty.
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So you want an insincere political show indistinguishable from genuine remorse?
You prefer to put people into power and have them manipulate you publicly?
It's just too much of a bother for some of us to post anonymously. We don't get messages when people respond.
It may be possible to create a form of marriage that works for three people, but it's not necessarily straightforward.
It's called Articles of Incorporation.
You have not been paying attention to me then. I constantly point out that, as a confirmed bachelor with so little interest in relationships that I've never even had a girlfriend (I've rejected dates and made people cry, which confuses the shit out of me), gay marriage increases the percentage of the tax burden that I must cover. All these married people pay less in taxes, but what about people who don't believe in marriage? People who raise children and have a family without a state institution involved, or who just don't engage in that kind of relationship? We're taxed more, and when some section of the population is promoted into that privileged class they pay less taxes and who makes up the bulk of the difference when the tax hikes come back around?
Marriage exists solely as a societal mechanism to enforce the concept of a nuclear family. In Fredrick Pohl's Heechee Saga, the Heechee don't have marriage and don't form nuclear families; women become fertile, they have sex (or die from arousal stress if not mated with), then they become productive members of society for another year. Men and women don't live together and raise children; their entire society functions as a unit, all working to the betterment of the whole, and so they never developed the need to form protective groups.
Human marriage binds people through inconvenience. The relationship is long dead after several years, both of them are fucking other people and lying about it, they hate each other, but divorce is hard. For the longest time divorce wasn't even legal: Henry VIII used to execute his wives so he could remarry. Marriage is an institution to forcefully create a fundamentally unnatural group unit of society called "family" as a replacement to the fundamentally natural group unit of society called "tribe".
On top of that, we give married couples big tax deductions--which become even bigger when they have children, and are not as significant when they have a dual income because women belong in the kitchen and not in the work force. Those of us who aren't married are subsidizing those who are married. With money. We are paying more money, they are paying less. It's as if we started on fair, even ground, all paid our fair share, and then round two comes along and the tax man takes part of our money and gives it to married people. It's the same outcome. Now there are more of them taking our money.
In this case, it's not a matter of boycotting a corporation for being harmful to society; rather, it's a case of boycotting a corporation because we want to inflict pain and harm and vitriolic hatred on an individual associated with the corporation.
The message here is that Brendan Eich does not deserve rights and should be barred from any highly-gainful employment. He could work at McDonalds, but then he would be making hamburgers we'd refuse to eat. Not until Brendan Eich is on the streets starving to death will we be satisfied.
Feels good to attack someone whose opinions on what social policies are good for society as a whole you disagree with, eh?
Ok, you gotta help me with this... They're sending people to jail for selling weapons to Mexican cartels "so EVERYONE doesn't [do it], since the situation could be worse. Maybe because you have to cull down the supply". And yet, when the police add to the supply, since there's so much supply "it's a non-impact".
Scenario 1: hacking into computers isn't illegal. Result: most teenagers and middling adults learn to hack into computers. They start hacking into computers, damaging service, stealing sensitive information, and the economy collapses.
Scenario 2: Hacking into computers is illegal. Result: A lot of people know not to do that shit. The ones that do are more careful, avoiding high-value targets and generally trying to not get caught. Opportunities are smaller. Collateral damage is smaller.
Scenario 3: Scenario 2, but also you hire a penetration tester. More information is gathered, and the hackers not dissuaded by Scenario 2 have more difficulty breaking into your shit.
Clear enough? Or are you going to argue that shit being illegal and getting people arrested isn't a deterrent for other people who would do said illegal shit?
But the atmosphere shuffles heat from the tropics to the polls
Moving heat from one place to the other--the idiomatic interpretation of the above, probably the only valid way to interpret this in vernacular English, certainly the only common interpretation for native speakers--would involve cooling one area and warming another. Cooling is not my addition.
There will probably be dramatic effects at 2C, which you will see in your lifetime if you are young. A 5C change would make large parts of the globe uninhabitable (too hot for mammals), and many meters of sea level rise.
Irrelevant. You said we're probably heading upwards of 4-6C. There's a time scale issue here. We're probably running out of fossil fuels in like 20-150 years depending on who you ask. There's a lot of interesting logistics issues, such as if we're going to hit 2C in the next decade or if that's 90 years away (i.e. 0.5C in 30 years, multiplied by 3 times more). 90 years is not likely my lifespan.
The solution is to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas pollution. Remember? CO2? It's really not that hard, and not going to cause that many problems,
Anyone who says something isn't going to cause "that many problems" is full of shit. Anyone who says a major, far-reaching change isn't going to cause any problems is insane. Risk can be managed, but it's going to be an expensive task to make things work out right within the status quo.
Change tends to break the status quo. For example: politicians always do what's great for their city or state, usually pushing poor people into the streets and then out of the area (dead, jail, another city with cheap rent) while attracting upper middle class to replace them; then they get to talk about how great their initiatives were and how you should vote for them again, when the last batch that voted for them had their lives destroyed.
Good initiatives handled correctly are still painful. I want a basic income system (see signature), which if we eliminated all welfare, social security, and government pensions, but kept medicare, would amount to about $13,800 per person per year. Getting there would be slow, would be disruptive, and would involve shuffling taxes around. After 5-10 years, we'd be better off; we wouldn't be full benefit until probably 30 years down the line. In the first few years, however, welfare and unemployment benefits would be replaced with something smaller, and we'd be in terrible flux. Like treating cancer: it hurts more during treatment than it does while you're dying, but then after treatment you get better.
And anyway, much of the efforts we want to pursue involve scaling up energy production with stuff that collects incoming heat, warming the planet. A lot of the problem is energy consumption.
Interesting. So a 0.5C rise actually cools the equator, and warms the ice caps, you say?
And after 0.5C in some decades, we're going to jump 10 times that in what? 300 years?
And the solution to this is what? To bring in and retain more heat from space on the planet's surface?
When Europe announced their GPS system, there was a minor backlash from a bunch of political commentators talking about how Europe is just trying to be anti-America by implementing the same thing we have. The problem is it's technically better.
The same thing is true of the climate models. Europe is investigating all climate change effects, including warming trends and cooling trends. The EU is not as bullish on global warming as the US, nor on the human impact; the UN is driven by the US (I mean it's in fucking New York), and puts out reports mostly driven by US research. Europe's more conservative stance is based on data that's just better.
By the by, they also vaccinate chickens for salmonella.
Gee I don't know. Why are we sending people to prison for being hookers? There are so many hookers around here.
Oh. Maybe its so EVERYONE doesn't become a hooker, since the situation could be worse. Maybe because you have to cull down the supply to "exactly meets demand" before you can cull it further to "comes below demand". You know, what they were trying to do: find out more about how this whole gun trafficking thing goes on so they can make maximally-effective stings, increasing risk and causing price increases (artificial scarcity).
Also: there's a distinct difference between arms trafficking and government-sanctioned espionage that involves arms trafficking. Why do people constantly pull out this "well the government did X and that exists in a bubble regardless of all other things that happened?" The government charges you taxes; should we arrest them for robbing you at gun point, since they send people with guns if you don't pay them?
My argument is that they would have whatever the hell they want because the market is not only there, but strong. You can get AK-47s on the black market, man.
Just 'cause a method is less ideal doesn't mean it's going to be that much less ideal. Wal-Mart is a less ideal source of office paper than ordering online with Staples, but I'm not having Staples ship to my house because they ship FedEx and FedEx refuses to leave a package at my door (UPS will), to the point that support told me I should just go to the distribution center 10 miles away and an e-mail to the CEO (elevated 4 times before I went that high) got a personal letter from an Executive Aid that comes down to, "Well, too bad" (even the CEO emphasizes that it's at the sole discretion of FedEx whether or not to actually deliver a package they've been paid to deliver, even if they've been authorized and instructed to release it at the porch by the recipient in writing).
Paper from Wal-Mart is the same brand. I have to drive and go get it, but hassling with FedEx is less ideal than hassling with the drive to Wal-Mart. UPS dropping paper at my door is most ideal.
Illegal sourced ARs are trafficked or stolen. There's a delivery fee and risk: it costs money to traffic them, but it also costs money to get across the US border and back without getting arrested for trafficking guns. They're the same guns. Dealing with the black market is non-opportune: disputes can turn into firefights--a risk--and your suppliers can be somewhat unreliable. Dealing with retail is smooth and static, very low risk, and can be of higher cost: it can be slower to get the guns you want without raising too many flags, or the whole process may just cost more (black market firearms can be cheaper than retail, or more expensive, depending on many factors--stolen shit is often cheap). While the guns are typically the same stock, they may be discard stock: it's less "more accurate and reliable" and more "chance of getting non-functional garbage", but that rarely happens to big mafioso customers because they send the mob to come kill your entire shop.
An AR-15 is inferior to an AK-47. Butterfly effect is non-existent: events are resistant to noise, not impacted by cascading failure. Computer nerds are all over this imaginary property because it's part of software hashes: change one bit in the input and your hash or your encrypted data or whatever comes out completely different. In real life, small changes don't lead to big changes; they lead to minor adjustments.
Because you don't fucking understand economics. Do you not know what scarcity is? When 100 people want meat, and there is a deer, the deer can feed like 20 people. THAT'S SCARCE!
When you go speeding, you consume a resource: the road can only handle so many cars traveling at a given speed. The higher the speed, the fewer cars it can handle. This is a space issue: more space, more speed. Speeding consumes a resource, and if everybody tried to do it we would wind up in traffic jams. Speeding is an example of a scarce resource: the ability to go fast in traffic, in which if enough people went fast we would wind up in a traffic jam.
Look, go your ass to California and try to get water. There's no water there! They pipe it in from Nevada! It's not scarce because there's no water; it's scarce because there's not enough water to meet the demand for water!
it appears to me there's good money to be made in solar power and electric cars. A business case for more wind turbines could make someone very rich.
Where are all the responses explaining that the flat/cooling trend they've been modeling in Europe is a lie?
I have a colleague who is into politics--I mean really into politics, beyond party bullshit and into looking at the whole world and going, "Damn, but look over here!" He's been pointing out crazy shit like how Europe's new GPS replacement has much higher resolution than the American GPS satellite system, and how Europe's climate models are all-inclusive while American models tend to use specific models for specific analysis and ignore the vast majority of the data.
America is practically third-world.
A whole half a degree over the average?
Going to send Jesus preachers to your house for as long as it takes for you to listen.
Speeding is scarce, not rare. More to the point: space is scarce. If we lived on a planet 20 times bigger and you only ever saw a car every 300 miles of driving, we'd be very lonely. Also, if 90% of the world started speeding one day, nobody would notice because hardly anybody would ever see anyone else to know they were speeding too.
When you start speeding, everybody notices. You are essentially consuming a resource that can't accommodate everyone. Everyone wants to speed: everyone wants to blast their ass down the road at 90mph to get where they're going. They can't. A few of us can. Assuming we all have the skill to do this successfully in normal circumstances (i.e. pass all the traffic), we'd wind up with unimpeachable traffic congestion if we all tried to speed down the road ridiculously fast. Really, when there's enough cars on the road, we can't even drive half the speed limit. We'd pack the cars together really fast, then all have to drive slow again. Very slow.
Black market firearms are not scarce. There's more firearms available than there are purchase orders for firearms. There's a huge market for black market firearms and it draws a lot of arms dealers.
I'd say dead people are measurable negative effects, it's just a bit like pollution deaths - did this particular death result from factory A, B, or C? We can't tell.
Not so. For the hundredth time, false equivalence.
We know in this case that this particular death resulted from firearm C, purchased at market rate, and allowed through by federal oversight intentionally letting it slip.
In the case of factory pollution, it's a long-term health consequence from the combined effect. More importantly, adding more factories creates more pollutants. More guns on the market is one thing: black market arms is a hot market, and there's more guns than buyers; adding a few more guns won't do anything because you just have that many more unsold guns. More pollutants in the air is different: you add factory D, you will be inhaling that much more shit.
This is why the whole media circus affair annoys me to no end: people constantly spout stupid shit like "well people were killed with these guns, so this program caused people to die, because otherwise the murderers wouldn't have guns!" It's like people imagine the Mexican Mafia is a street gang with 5 or 6 members, scraping by on their drug money while stealing food and living in a burned-out shack, got a whole $300 of profit this year and bought some Nikes. It's not; it's an international organized crime ring that fights the authorities directly, living in mansions and running trucks wherever the hell they want. When they want guns, they get guns. One of these guys loses a gun, he doesn't have to wait until they can find and buy/steal another one; it's like the US Army, they go to the Mexican Drug Mafia Armory and get another AK, buy more to restock later.
The range of complaints needs to exclude stupid shit that didn't really happen.
Conspiracy theory, but still better than "people died because we sold the Mexicans guns." The conspiracy theory is actually more likely.
It's all this vaccination. People aren't vaccinating their kids, and their kids are contracting the mumps and developing brain damage.
False equivalence. Try something that's not scarce. Every speeder on the road adds 1 more speeder to the freeway. By contrast, there are so many guns on the black market that they can't sell them all.
For that matter, the interference had a purpose. It's not like you start selling weed to profit and you're basically breaking the law. This was a (poorly) planned operation aimed at finding more information to use in the pursuit of enforcement against Mexican drug cartels. It didn't work, but it wasn't just "breakin' da law!"
Use the rational part of your brain. The one called the prefrontal contex. That Amygdala thing is nothing but trouble; it causes you to not actually think.
I don't care about US law.
Get that through your head: I don't care about the law.
All I care about is cause and effect. What was the impact of this mishandling? The media says there are many guns in the hands of cartels where they would have no guns, and many people have died who would not be dead because the cartels would not have tools of murder. I don't believe that for one second: there are so many guns for sale on the black market that you can build a small army on a middle-class salary.
People aren't crying over the law; they're using the law as a shillelagh to beat people over the head with because of an emotional reaction to a non-issue. All these firearms could have been prevented from getting into the hands of Mexicans; instead, they would get different firearms, possibly better ones like AK-47s, which are readily available even in fucking Libya.
Uh, let's try this again: There is more weed available in Baltimore than can be sold. If you can sell 100 of a thing, but you have 1000 of a thing, giving you 100 more means you end the day with 1000 of that thing instead of 900 of that thing.
Do you not know about scarcity? Please go study high school economics again; you're not ready for college yet.
And legal arguments are not factual, logical arguments; they're rule-set arguments, mainly philosophical, based on approximated models of reality and idealism. This gets into complex arguments about culling down a behavior even though "if I didn't do it then someone else would" i.e. removing one group's contributions is a null factor, versus allowing that same behavior for an alternative purpose. For example: we allow research where people are given marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and psilocybin mushrooms to consume, even though we ban these substances... should researchers be legally culpable for this? What's the difference between research and dealing on the streets?
You CAN say that because that guy killed this guy with a gun you gave him, you helped him do it.
No, you can't. You can make a philosophical argument, but you can't make a real argument. It's the Ship of Theseus: you still have a ship, but is it THE Ship of Theseus? Well, in a sense, yes. And no. Kind of. Both, really, and neither. There's a fuzzy point where it's no longer the Ship of Theseus, but nobody can pin down when that is; and if the other ship didn't exist, it would definitely be the Ship of Theseus. But if it was built with the same material, in the same shape, molecularly identical but with a different sequence of events, it would definitely NOT be the Ship of Theseus.
Don't believe me? I can't possibly post all of the case law that hinges on this very notion. You are just wrong and can't admit it.
Nope, that's irrelevant. Case law hinges on a "notion", an ideal, as you said. It doesn't hinge on rationality, but rather on judgment.
For example:
you cannot say with certainty that this guy will kill that guy no matter what I do.
That's true. However, in this case, we can say with certainty that this guy did kill this other guy with a firearm. We can also say with high certainty that this guy would have acquired a firearm no matter what you do--to the point that arguing that he wouldn't is irrational and flat out idiotic. It's like if you argued that if you, personally, didn't buy me lunch last week, then I would starve to death. As I have a job and tend to buy my own lunch, it's most likely I would have found food by my own means.
The philosophical ideal that providing firearms in this program makes you culpable is only philosophical. It is not actually rational in an environment where the supply of black-market firearms outstrips the demand. To argue otherwise is to argue that we can't really know that chicken eggs are from chickens, since the farmer just finds 99.999% of eggs under chickens and doesn't witnessing them berthing the eggs, thus the eggs may be put there secretly by gnomes.
You have zero evidence that the gun used in a murder was not another gun that had the same physical characteristics, up to and including a reproduction of some marking like the serial number. It's statistically unlikely, but you cannot say with any certainty that it was actually the same gun, right?
We have statistical evidence showing that there is a huge supply of black-market firearms for cheap, competitive with market prices. We can actually say with what is called "high certainty" that Mexican drug cartels would have gotten firearms in some other manner. That's what statistics is: certainty. Not 100% certainty. Just certainty.