There's MORE SUPPLY THAN DEMAND. More supply means there's 100,000 of a thing and only 10,000 of the thing gets bought. If you add 20,000 more, now there's 120,000 of a thing and only 10,000 of the thing gets bought.
It's not a drop in the ocean; it's a non-impact. You can start selling windows, but there are only so many houses. If you sell any windows, someone else will sell exactly that many fewer.
False equivalence. You're trying to profiteer on illegal activity. Fast and Furious was ATF trying (ineffectively) to gain intelligence about illegal activity for the purpose of stopping it. The news made a bunch of noise about arming the cartels, but that's not really an issue because they are net armed the same as they would have been anyway; overall we have more intelligence, if only that we can't run a program the way we did and expect to gain anything useful from it.
We've learned this is a good way to waste money for poor results. The gain is minimal and possibly wasn't worth the cost. Also we got an ego-slap for trying to go it alone, especially without a plan.
That's not worth the huge public outrage centered around giving criminals guns. That particular aspect has no real impact: no one died because of this mishandling, as criminals could easily get guns elsewhere.
Regardless, there were no negative effects measurable, and logic indicates extreme likelihood that no negative effects exist. It's not like how you don't measure the ghosts a psychic medium is talking to, but you know science has never proven ghosts exist and all reports have been inconclusive or provable bullshit with cheese cloth, thus you can readily and safely assume (unscientifically) that there just aren't any ghosts. It's more like how you haven't opened a walnut, but you assume it has a walnut inside--it could have a bug in it instead, but that pretty much never happens.
We've learned now that this is a poor way to run such a program. We may also be able to mine other information. In any case, we have more intelligence than we went in, and the cost was minimal. Crying that the cost was dead federal agents because of guns the Mexicans wouldn't have otherwise had is ludicrous, like claiming we can't do a raid on a haunted church being used as a Mexican drug lord hide-out because our agents might get eaten by ghosts. Well... they might, I mean if they did that would be bad, but it's actually stupid to believe that's a real thing until it happens in front of you. We can assume the Mexicans will use lethal force against agents because we're roughly 100% certain they have firearms on site--they might not, but you would be stupid to assume they didn't until you walk in and find nobody brought their gun today.
The program was run poorly. Peoples' outcry is that we armed Mexican drug lords--that's not a real problem. The real problem is budgetary: we wasted money to less effect than expected, and it's questionable if the gains were worth the costs. As I understand, the costs were minimal, but still.
Because you're conflating emotional judgment with rational judgment.
Why are you even trying to defend actions like this?
Well, your argument is this: Mexicans would be incapable of murdering as many people if we didn't give them guns.
Let's look at the facts. Illegal firearms trafficking is highly lucrative. There is a healthy economy for illegal firearms, and in fact firearms can be made at home with a hammer, an anvil, some fire, and metal. Blacksmithing guns is a common hobby. CNC machines and other manufacture capabilities are cheap and readily available, so without a supply of trafficked firearms the illegal firearms supply economy could readily develop the capacity to make their own. They haven't because it's cheaper and easier to acquire them from legal sources, by fraud or theft.
In the absence of concrete statistical evidence, the circumstances strongly suggest that Mexican cartels have many sources of firearms and can acquire them at relative ease from any of them. This is the same as how we have so many drugs available in America--herione, marijuana, cocaine--including major imports from Canada (marijuana) and central/south America (cocaine), as well as the ready availability of child sexual human trafficking. There is a market demand for illegal firearms, and historically contraband has been hard for the everyman to get but relatively easy for organized cartels to get.
Under these premises, the only logical conclusion you can draw from a Mexican killing someone with a firearm that was sold under a Federal intelligence program is... that's where that particular firearm got to. Trying to conclude that there would be one less firearm in the hands of Mexican drug cartels is like trying to conclude that there will be less popcorn in theaters if Orvelle Reddenbacker stops selling popcorn. Okay, your local super market may have a shortage; your local theater will contact an alternate supplier and not miss a beat.
Moral victories are not real; they're imaginary constructions made so that you can criticize peoples' non-harmful actions as being terrible and evil.
I don't know about 'helping to arm the Mexican cartels'. I think the market for illegally obtained firearms is larger than the demand, so they'll apply the same resources with the same efficiency in any case.
It's like selling marijuana in Baltimore. Everyone has tons of marijuana. You can go outside and come back 5 minutes later with a bag full of marijuana even if you've never bought marijuana and have no idea how to go about getting any. Selling marijuana in Baltimore as an intelligence gathering information isn't going to put more weed on the streets.
People have been killed by bad drivers running red lights in Chevrolet cars. If Chevrolet didn't make cars then those people would not have been killed because said bad drivers would not have cars with which to run red lights.
Hold on. I'm immediately considering this. It would be amusing to see the fall-out, but I can't imagine a realistic scenario leading to this eventuality. If I were to bring up a bill banning blacks from marrying, I would probably promote it loudly en farce: I'd talk a lot about how blacks are being afforded large gains in society by taking advantage of marriage benefits to redistribute money from white families to black families, an abhorrent socialist practice. I think I could create some serious ripples in public debate, since the counter-arguments would all bring rebuttals which are fully logical and yet sharply critical of the institution of marriage in general.
But no real politician would pull a bill out like this with that kind of strategy. They all push legislation in earnest, while arguing dishonestly; they don't push legislation simply to create public attention that they can expand from to highlight a different issue.
But it puts us in a better position to gain intelligence. Sometimes that doesn't pan out, but it provides an opportunity and doesn't make the situation worse. In this case, we've learned the limits of acquiring intelligence in this exact way; maybe this is a limitation of trying to track guns, or a limitation of the methods we used, but regardless we've still learned something.
That information wasn't really obtained at any expense beyond the basic economic program expense, and it has some value. You just don't like people being an observer behind the green camera instead of the blue one; it's okay to be behind the blue camera, but only assholes look through the green one.
So, the same people would have killed the same other people with guns. But because it's these guns that got here by this program, this program is responsible? No you're dumb.
Maybe black people are humanoid. Homo sapiens negroid, instead of homo sapiens caucasoid. It's like canus lupus versus canus lupus familiaris. I'm not sure how that's relevant to a society.
I just realized the repeat argument you're making is also a false equivalence: you're comparing what people are (black, white) with how people behave (heterosexual, homosexual). NAMBLA argues for pedophile rights; I haven't seen a rights movement for horse fuckers, but I could theorize one.
Also you take a default favorable position: society has decided that blacks get rights. At the time, this was controversial. We also have animal rights movements, which are whacko: they're food and we kill them, but there are people who demand we make it illegal to murder animals. In some countries, it's illegal to murder cows for roughly the same reason it's illegal to murder blacks here. Elephants, as well, in societies which believe elephants are of sapient-level intelligence and thus have the rights of people.
You also seem to argue that the rights gap created by marriage itself is wrong. Therefor, we should not be allowing people to get married. At all. Legalizing gay marriage is, in your own broken analogy, like legalizing blacks to murder other blacks in the 1920s: whites had the right to hang blacks at will, so making it okay for blacks to hang other blacks would make their rights equal.
They're still discriminating against people who are married to animals, The Lord, or the single life. All of these groups need to pay more in taxes and get arrested if they take a lower tax payment and higher standard deduction by filing jointly.
You assert that someone who holds a certain opinion is bad because... people have been beaten. Implication is that he is guilty by association to people who have beaten other people to death.
I respond that some of those people have been beaten for being similar to other people who have beaten people to death. These people are bad people because they are in a way associated with people who have beaten other people to death.
So let's say we live in a society where black people are discriminated against (e.g. taxes at 100%). Do you think a reasonable solution is to also start discriminating against chinese people
It's more like white people are taxed 20%, black people are taxed 50%, chinese people are taxed 50%, and we make black people pay 20% taxes. Well, now instead of paying 50/120 of every tax dollar collected, chinese people are paying 50/90. Thus we've raised the taxes on chinese people.
I find it a bit of a double standard that you don't seem to have so much of a problem subsidizing straight people.
And this is where you expose yourself as having the analytical mind of a goldfish, since you responded to the exact opposite assertion above.
The argument is simple: we've "corrected" inequality by being more equal to one group, and less equal to another. We're putting gays into an expanding privileged group, and making the other unprivileged group pay for that. (Everyone else is paying for it, really, but the unprivileged are paying the most, proportionally)
That's exactly backwards. We're making a situation worse instead of better. We should make the situation better.
As far as technicalities go, by the way, people have always argued that gays have always had the right to get all the same protections under law by getting a "civil union". The entire dispute is over whether the legal structure is called by one word or two.
The other fire involved tripping over a 50 pound metal spike at 70mph, causing it to upend violently and drive itself through the underside of the car with the force of a cannon.
This one's easy to spin: "Tesla hits piece of metal on the road, catches fire." Problem was it hit a piece of metal on the road while going incredibly fast--fast enough for a piece of mild steel to puncture a 1/4 inch aluminum plate. Go find a 6mm thick piece of aluminum and try putting a nail through it. In theory, if the metal flipped upwards, it would skid off the bottom of the plate; if the ground end caught so it rotated, it would still skid across the aluminum plate. In reality, if you hit it hard enough, it'll either create a dimple or (more likely) it'll hit with enough force to wedge itself, creating enough friction that it tilts upward rather than skids--and if you're moving fast enough, that's enough energy to drive the fucking thing through the underside of the battery.
The other fires--fires caused by faulty wiring or wall chargers, who knows--were caused at the wall.
So the plate was replaced by a plate that can withstand retarded morons who should not be driving. That's basically what it amounts to. If you see a rusty trailer hitch in the road, try not to hit it so hard that it lifts your car up into the air. You should also try not to crash into a concrete barrier wall at 110mph, then through a reinforced buttressed concrete wall, then headlong into a tree. These are things they recommend against doing in driver's ed.
You asked why a reasonable person might support banning gay marriage. The above explanation is reasonable.
The fact that it would 'effect'(sic) taxes does make prop 8 a "complex issue" in this case. Most importantly: it would increase discriminatory taxes against another social class.
Also important: the purpose of the current tax structure is to encourage the nuclear family, heterosexual unions which breed and raise juvenile humans, by decreasing the financial burden on these families to allow for preparation to raise a child. This preparation comes in the form of more money so as to afford to purchase a house on a single income, to afford to take out savings, to afford better health care to support prenatal and juvenile care, and so on; as well as more income (by lower taxes) to afford the continuing cost of raising juvenile humans. Affording the same benefit to homosexuals achieves the goal of giving them welfare money for leisure spending.
Consider: if I want to race cars, I need to obtain my own money independently to upgrade my car into stock or modified-stock or racer class. If I want to play piano, I have to buy a piano with my own money. Why should families get special privileged money because they want to raise children? Why shouldn't they have to work and earn their own money? Why must I subsidize their personal lives? And why, now, must I also bear the additional burden of subsidizing gays?
I would rather pay my money for a piano than pay my money into taxes acting as a charity fund for gay people to buy pianos.
I have a recruiter telling me to stay where I am and try to maneuver upward in the organization before doing anything risky; and in the same breath telling me he would love to see me on the market and that I should stay off Dice and make sure to keep an updated resume on his desk because he'll have me a new position in five minutes if I ever do jump ship. I'm familiar with that feeling.
By the by, it's good to have both actual useful skills and career placement specialists as allies.
Slashdot Mirror
There's MORE SUPPLY THAN DEMAND. More supply means there's 100,000 of a thing and only 10,000 of the thing gets bought. If you add 20,000 more, now there's 120,000 of a thing and only 10,000 of the thing gets bought.
It's not a drop in the ocean; it's a non-impact. You can start selling windows, but there are only so many houses. If you sell any windows, someone else will sell exactly that many fewer.
False equivalence. You're trying to profiteer on illegal activity. Fast and Furious was ATF trying (ineffectively) to gain intelligence about illegal activity for the purpose of stopping it. The news made a bunch of noise about arming the cartels, but that's not really an issue because they are net armed the same as they would have been anyway; overall we have more intelligence, if only that we can't run a program the way we did and expect to gain anything useful from it.
We've learned this is a good way to waste money for poor results. The gain is minimal and possibly wasn't worth the cost. Also we got an ego-slap for trying to go it alone, especially without a plan.
That's not worth the huge public outrage centered around giving criminals guns. That particular aspect has no real impact: no one died because of this mishandling, as criminals could easily get guns elsewhere.
Regardless, there were no negative effects measurable, and logic indicates extreme likelihood that no negative effects exist. It's not like how you don't measure the ghosts a psychic medium is talking to, but you know science has never proven ghosts exist and all reports have been inconclusive or provable bullshit with cheese cloth, thus you can readily and safely assume (unscientifically) that there just aren't any ghosts. It's more like how you haven't opened a walnut, but you assume it has a walnut inside--it could have a bug in it instead, but that pretty much never happens.
We've learned now that this is a poor way to run such a program. We may also be able to mine other information. In any case, we have more intelligence than we went in, and the cost was minimal. Crying that the cost was dead federal agents because of guns the Mexicans wouldn't have otherwise had is ludicrous, like claiming we can't do a raid on a haunted church being used as a Mexican drug lord hide-out because our agents might get eaten by ghosts. Well... they might, I mean if they did that would be bad, but it's actually stupid to believe that's a real thing until it happens in front of you. We can assume the Mexicans will use lethal force against agents because we're roughly 100% certain they have firearms on site--they might not, but you would be stupid to assume they didn't until you walk in and find nobody brought their gun today.
The program was run poorly. Peoples' outcry is that we armed Mexican drug lords--that's not a real problem. The real problem is budgetary: we wasted money to less effect than expected, and it's questionable if the gains were worth the costs. As I understand, the costs were minimal, but still.
Because you're conflating emotional judgment with rational judgment.
Why are you even trying to defend actions like this?
Well, your argument is this: Mexicans would be incapable of murdering as many people if we didn't give them guns.
Let's look at the facts. Illegal firearms trafficking is highly lucrative. There is a healthy economy for illegal firearms, and in fact firearms can be made at home with a hammer, an anvil, some fire, and metal. Blacksmithing guns is a common hobby. CNC machines and other manufacture capabilities are cheap and readily available, so without a supply of trafficked firearms the illegal firearms supply economy could readily develop the capacity to make their own. They haven't because it's cheaper and easier to acquire them from legal sources, by fraud or theft.
In the absence of concrete statistical evidence, the circumstances strongly suggest that Mexican cartels have many sources of firearms and can acquire them at relative ease from any of them. This is the same as how we have so many drugs available in America--herione, marijuana, cocaine--including major imports from Canada (marijuana) and central/south America (cocaine), as well as the ready availability of child sexual human trafficking. There is a market demand for illegal firearms, and historically contraband has been hard for the everyman to get but relatively easy for organized cartels to get.
Under these premises, the only logical conclusion you can draw from a Mexican killing someone with a firearm that was sold under a Federal intelligence program is... that's where that particular firearm got to. Trying to conclude that there would be one less firearm in the hands of Mexican drug cartels is like trying to conclude that there will be less popcorn in theaters if Orvelle Reddenbacker stops selling popcorn. Okay, your local super market may have a shortage; your local theater will contact an alternate supplier and not miss a beat.
Moral victories are not real; they're imaginary constructions made so that you can criticize peoples' non-harmful actions as being terrible and evil.
I don't know about 'helping to arm the Mexican cartels'. I think the market for illegally obtained firearms is larger than the demand, so they'll apply the same resources with the same efficiency in any case.
It's like selling marijuana in Baltimore. Everyone has tons of marijuana. You can go outside and come back 5 minutes later with a bag full of marijuana even if you've never bought marijuana and have no idea how to go about getting any. Selling marijuana in Baltimore as an intelligence gathering information isn't going to put more weed on the streets.
People have been killed by bad drivers running red lights in Chevrolet cars. If Chevrolet didn't make cars then those people would not have been killed because said bad drivers would not have cars with which to run red lights.
Hold on. I'm immediately considering this. It would be amusing to see the fall-out, but I can't imagine a realistic scenario leading to this eventuality. If I were to bring up a bill banning blacks from marrying, I would probably promote it loudly en farce: I'd talk a lot about how blacks are being afforded large gains in society by taking advantage of marriage benefits to redistribute money from white families to black families, an abhorrent socialist practice. I think I could create some serious ripples in public debate, since the counter-arguments would all bring rebuttals which are fully logical and yet sharply critical of the institution of marriage in general.
But no real politician would pull a bill out like this with that kind of strategy. They all push legislation in earnest, while arguing dishonestly; they don't push legislation simply to create public attention that they can expand from to highlight a different issue.
But it puts us in a better position to gain intelligence. Sometimes that doesn't pan out, but it provides an opportunity and doesn't make the situation worse. In this case, we've learned the limits of acquiring intelligence in this exact way; maybe this is a limitation of trying to track guns, or a limitation of the methods we used, but regardless we've still learned something.
That information wasn't really obtained at any expense beyond the basic economic program expense, and it has some value. You just don't like people being an observer behind the green camera instead of the blue one; it's okay to be behind the blue camera, but only assholes look through the green one.
I try to argue against institutions I oppose rather than arguing for the broadening of those institutions.
So, the same people would have killed the same other people with guns. But because it's these guns that got here by this program, this program is responsible? No you're dumb.
Which proposition makes marriage to animals illegal? That seems to discriminate against the Welsh.
It's not like the Mexicans wouldn't have gotten their hands on guns some other way.
/nick David Smith
/nick Bill Gates
/nick Elon Musk
You can legally change your name to the name of someone who not only flies a lot, but will be pissed off a lot if they can't fly.
Of course, if you're traveling at 70mph on the road here I'll pass you on my bicycle. It's a Trek bike so it's very good.
Maybe black people are humanoid. Homo sapiens negroid, instead of homo sapiens caucasoid. It's like canus lupus versus canus lupus familiaris. I'm not sure how that's relevant to a society.
I just realized the repeat argument you're making is also a false equivalence: you're comparing what people are (black, white) with how people behave (heterosexual, homosexual). NAMBLA argues for pedophile rights; I haven't seen a rights movement for horse fuckers, but I could theorize one.
Also you take a default favorable position: society has decided that blacks get rights. At the time, this was controversial. We also have animal rights movements, which are whacko: they're food and we kill them, but there are people who demand we make it illegal to murder animals. In some countries, it's illegal to murder cows for roughly the same reason it's illegal to murder blacks here. Elephants, as well, in societies which believe elephants are of sapient-level intelligence and thus have the rights of people.
You also seem to argue that the rights gap created by marriage itself is wrong. Therefor, we should not be allowing people to get married. At all. Legalizing gay marriage is, in your own broken analogy, like legalizing blacks to murder other blacks in the 1920s: whites had the right to hang blacks at will, so making it okay for blacks to hang other blacks would make their rights equal.
I thought you were arguing that Brendan is a bad person because he supports Prop 8, because of the beatings of gays.
They're still discriminating against people who are married to animals, The Lord, or the single life. All of these groups need to pay more in taxes and get arrested if they take a lower tax payment and higher standard deduction by filing jointly.
I don't see purple.
You assert that someone who holds a certain opinion is bad because... people have been beaten. Implication is that he is guilty by association to people who have beaten other people to death.
I respond that some of those people have been beaten for being similar to other people who have beaten people to death. These people are bad people because they are in a way associated with people who have beaten other people to death.
So let's say we live in a society where black people are discriminated against (e.g. taxes at 100%). Do you think a reasonable solution is to also start discriminating against chinese people
It's more like white people are taxed 20%, black people are taxed 50%, chinese people are taxed 50%, and we make black people pay 20% taxes. Well, now instead of paying 50/120 of every tax dollar collected, chinese people are paying 50/90. Thus we've raised the taxes on chinese people.
I find it a bit of a double standard that you don't seem to have so much of a problem subsidizing straight people.
And this is where you expose yourself as having the analytical mind of a goldfish, since you responded to the exact opposite assertion above.
The argument is simple: we've "corrected" inequality by being more equal to one group, and less equal to another. We're putting gays into an expanding privileged group, and making the other unprivileged group pay for that. (Everyone else is paying for it, really, but the unprivileged are paying the most, proportionally)
That's exactly backwards. We're making a situation worse instead of better. We should make the situation better.
As far as technicalities go, by the way, people have always argued that gays have always had the right to get all the same protections under law by getting a "civil union". The entire dispute is over whether the legal structure is called by one word or two.
The other fire involved tripping over a 50 pound metal spike at 70mph, causing it to upend violently and drive itself through the underside of the car with the force of a cannon.
This one's easy to spin: "Tesla hits piece of metal on the road, catches fire." Problem was it hit a piece of metal on the road while going incredibly fast--fast enough for a piece of mild steel to puncture a 1/4 inch aluminum plate. Go find a 6mm thick piece of aluminum and try putting a nail through it. In theory, if the metal flipped upwards, it would skid off the bottom of the plate; if the ground end caught so it rotated, it would still skid across the aluminum plate. In reality, if you hit it hard enough, it'll either create a dimple or (more likely) it'll hit with enough force to wedge itself, creating enough friction that it tilts upward rather than skids--and if you're moving fast enough, that's enough energy to drive the fucking thing through the underside of the battery.
The other fires--fires caused by faulty wiring or wall chargers, who knows--were caused at the wall.
So the plate was replaced by a plate that can withstand retarded morons who should not be driving. That's basically what it amounts to. If you see a rusty trailer hitch in the road, try not to hit it so hard that it lifts your car up into the air. You should also try not to crash into a concrete barrier wall at 110mph, then through a reinforced buttressed concrete wall, then headlong into a tree. These are things they recommend against doing in driver's ed.
You asked why a reasonable person might support banning gay marriage. The above explanation is reasonable.
The fact that it would 'effect'(sic) taxes does make prop 8 a "complex issue" in this case. Most importantly: it would increase discriminatory taxes against another social class.
Also important: the purpose of the current tax structure is to encourage the nuclear family, heterosexual unions which breed and raise juvenile humans, by decreasing the financial burden on these families to allow for preparation to raise a child. This preparation comes in the form of more money so as to afford to purchase a house on a single income, to afford to take out savings, to afford better health care to support prenatal and juvenile care, and so on; as well as more income (by lower taxes) to afford the continuing cost of raising juvenile humans. Affording the same benefit to homosexuals achieves the goal of giving them welfare money for leisure spending.
Consider: if I want to race cars, I need to obtain my own money independently to upgrade my car into stock or modified-stock or racer class. If I want to play piano, I have to buy a piano with my own money. Why should families get special privileged money because they want to raise children? Why shouldn't they have to work and earn their own money? Why must I subsidize their personal lives? And why, now, must I also bear the additional burden of subsidizing gays?
I would rather pay my money for a piano than pay my money into taxes acting as a charity fund for gay people to buy pianos.
We've gone exactly backwards legalizing gay marriage.
It has to do with money. You see, married people get money from the government.
I have a recruiter telling me to stay where I am and try to maneuver upward in the organization before doing anything risky; and in the same breath telling me he would love to see me on the market and that I should stay off Dice and make sure to keep an updated resume on his desk because he'll have me a new position in five minutes if I ever do jump ship. I'm familiar with that feeling.
By the by, it's good to have both actual useful skills and career placement specialists as allies.