Gay people sometimes beat straight people to death for being straight. It happens.
Gay marriage is discriminatory against heterosexuals: it imposes minor economic pressure on the traditional nuclear family. Gay marriage provides economic relief to married homosexuals, but does not provide the same relief for bachelors, and the other two groups (pre-gay-marriage families and bachelors) experience increased economic pressure to supply the economic relief benefited to gays when they get married.
It's not called "Rehabilitation", it's called "Socialization". It's where we take you out of your little isolated world and make you part of society, and you become well-socialized and more understanding and empathetic. You may retain your opinions, you may even speak and act on them; but you also consider how your actions impact others, and you seek to do the least harm and to work for the betterment of society in a greater understanding of what that means.
By the by, if gays get married, they pay less in taxes. That's less money the government is bringing in in taxes. The government then needs to cover the same expenses--if they go through spending reform, they will have lower expenses, but still also have less income to cover them rather than having lower expenses and the same amount of income. Thus society suffers either from the ill effects of government debt or from an increase in taxes which is itself proportionally higher for the unmarried than the married. Since the gays have moved from one group to the other, the group of the married--paying less--is larger, and they suffer less from this adjustment, in the end coming out somewhat ahead financially while married heterosexual families come out slightly behind and unmarried singles come out significantly further behind.
So yes, there's benefit from Prop 8 for non-gays. It's small, but it's not zero. You could call it "negligible" or "insignificant", in the same way that stealing a nickel out of your ash tray is "negligible" and "insignificant". Obviously it's still stealing, but the effort to care is immensely larger than the value of a nickel.
Between the economic considerations, the discriminatory nature of institutionalized marriage (it redistributes wealth from people not married to people married), and the fact that gay marriage is a contentious moral issue for people of certain religions, the whole thing is a huge fucking ball of hypocrisy.
If you're not in the nuclear family... or gay and marrying some other gay person... you know, if you're single... then you deserve to share a larger proportion of the tax burden than the others. Gay marriage shifts gays under the same protective umbrella as the privileged married class, leaving those who choose not to participate in the state concept of marriage paying a higher proportion of their income in taxes. Those whose lives are fundamentally incompatible with such relationships--whose interests are not toward relationships and so who pursue time-consuming goals like scientific research or military deployment or freight hauling or airline stewardship, all of which strain romantic relationships--must either chose another type of life or enter into a (strained) relationship and experience high levels of stress AND put themselves at risk for divorce litigation to avoid the monetary penalty.
Those who are religious, whose beliefs are fundamentally that homosexuality is incorrect and should not be encouraged, are attacked for trying to work toward what they believe is the betterment of society. They feel that the institution of marriage should support the proper, appropriate nuclear family, encourage singles to pair up and get married in child-rearing structures, and not support homosexuals taking advantage of the same benefits offered to encourage these things. They are, of course, attacked for their beliefs. They tolerate the existence of homosexuals, rather than exiling them or burning them to death; but they are called intolerant for not handing them money for being actively gay.
It's not just ironic; it's ridiculous. Society is built on discriminatory treatment of various social groups, and now we have a social group that wants to get in on the benefit side rather than tear down the discriminatory institution entirely.
He's not intolerant. He believes that it's bad for society to allow gay marriage. Intolerance would involve putting gays in concentration camps (we call them 'prisons', a french word meaning 'concentration camp for jews and slave labor').
Those beliefs are valid: various moral systems assume that exposure to or encouragement of homosexuality is harmful to society as a whole, and thus the most tolerant thing to do is to show society that these things are discouraged but to not intervene on others' choices. When you get married, your tax burden decreases--society supports you monetarily, as in with money, by taking less money from you--which is diametrically opposed to the moral belief that homosexuality should be discouraged.
A person whose beliefs fall this way will, if tolerant, refuse to extend these convenience benefits: people who prefer to form a nuclear family get a monetary benefit, people who do not form such a nuclear family are given no such benefit. Such a person who is intolerant will execute these people or send them to Australia.
There is a difference between "tolerating", "accepting", and "encouraging". Marriage is a legal system to encourage certain behaviors by extending a monetary benefit. This monetary benefit comes at the expense of those who do not engage in those behaviors. Thus, marriage itself is government-mandated institutionalized discrimination: if you want equal rights, dissolve the institution of marriage.
Yeah but that guy is a known functional retard. He espouses that it is harmful for you to partake of certain services if the service provider doesn't offer certain other services. Like it's harmful for you to use online banking if they don't give you the source code to their Web server--not because it may have security flaws or anything, but because you're using something that's "not free".
It's like saying I should shut off my water service because the state doesn't give me a pump I can install in my house.
Because married gays can file jointly, reducing their tax burden. This means the proportion of taxes paid by gays is lower, and the proportion of taxes paid by other classes is slightly higher. Married couples already enjoy this benefit--married with no children and/or with dual-income enjoy this benefit sharply less. Singles don't. Legalized gay marriage slightly increases the proportion of taxes being paid by married couples, and increases the proportion of taxes being paid by singles by a slight but somewhat larger proportion.
It's like if 90% of the country is married with kids and paying 50% of the tax bill collected from personal income for the working class ($150k/year and below), and the gays and singles are paying the other 50% because they don't have all these tax benefits. Say 5% of the country is gays and lesbians paying 25%, the other 5% is straight people paying 25%, 50% + 25% + 25% = 100. Well, now gays get married and are paying 2.78% of the tax bill, and the country's bachelor population gets to pay 47.22% of the tax bill.
Those numbers are extremified and not correlated to reality; they're illustrative to show that having one group pay a lower proportion increases the proportion paid by the other group. In particular, the group 90%=married and 5%=gay becomes 95%=gay here, leaving 5%=single.
I advocated for banning marriage, but nobody listened to me.
Marriage equality is actually a form of oppression.
In the beginning, it was decided that women should stay at home, make babies, raise children, behave. Men go to work. A man, married, with a stay-at-home wife, filing jointly, with children, pays roughly half as much in taxes and gets a few thousand credited off for dependents. First-class citizens.
If they decide to not work, they don't get those few thousand credited off. It's something like $3500 first kid, $5000 second kid, $5500 third kid. Yeah we only give you $500 of aid when you add #3. Second-class citizens.
If that bitch dares to go out and get a job, the incomes combine. Married filing separately loses you all kinds of tax benefits that you get filing single, so you want to file jointly. Filing jointly with twice the income gets you taxed pretty much the same rate as filing single with half the income: those tax benefits for being married are revoked. But at least you have a dependent to file (spouse, even working), bringing the tax rate down. Third-class citizens.
Being a single male, I pay the same tax rate except without a dependent spouse. I pay more taxes even though I have less money. Fourth-class citizen.
Gays used to be in this boat. Now, however, they get married and get to file as either single-income married filing jointly (second-class citizens) or dual-income married filing jointly with an extra dependent (third-class citizens).
Now that gays are third-class citizens instead of fourth-class citizens, the government collects less in taxes from gays. Because the government collects less in taxes from gays, they must collect more in taxes from elsewhere. Thus they must increase the general tax rate slightly to make up (or take more debt, but that's unsustainable eventually). Because such an increase is partially discounted for married-filing-jointly (i.e. if you raise taxes 1%, it only goes up on them 0.5%-0.75%), it affects us single people more.
In other words: the tax burden is now reduced on gays, and increased on single people. The share of taxes being paid by this group is less, and the share of taxes being paid by this other group is more.
That's why gay marriage makes no sense. Marriage has always been a social and economical vehicle to enforce gender roles and societal ideals: it provides a strong tax benefit for nuclear families in which the woman stays home and makes babies while the man works. Childless couples are leeching off that, and dual-income families are punished by revoking that tax benefit. The purpose of marriage is not to provide rights; it's to abuse gays, single people, dual-income families, and childless couples by increasing their tax burden above that of nuclear families.
When am I, as a single male, going to get equality?
As a Gary Johnson fan, I'm curious what his stance on the whole deal with Tesla is. This is relevant since I may want to vote for him next election, and the implications of his opinions on this matter are going to reflect across his Presidential policies and how he encourages Congress and the American People to act.
It's always seemed to me (since they started pushing Unity, anyway) that Canonical is mainly concerned with pushing their own in-house software out as open source. It's like they want to point everywhere and say, "See, RedHat uses an init system we created, a display server we wrote, and a desktop environment we built. We ARE the Open Source Desktop."
Safety razors didn't replace barbers. There were publications as late as 1927 on how to shave... with a straight razor. Gilette was pushing to sell a marketable product, not creating a revolutionary new possibility; kids learned to shave when they were 13, if they could afford a razor.
A good straight razor costs money. The Gilette safety razor cost somewhat less, but only because the blades were expensive. Instead of a $20 razor, you bought a $5 razor and a few pennies for blades. A year later and those few pennies added up to $8. Back then, people had hones for woodworking tools or knives, even the poor--those old books always talk about Tom Sawyer or whatnot sharpening his knife on one. A $20 razor was a reasonable investment, unlike today where a straight razor is niche and costs $120, and you need a $100 hone you don't already have to maintain it.
The safety razor did the same as the plastic cup: it cost less than the things you already had. Cheap beer and plastic cups haven't stopped people from taking the $15 they can spend on a 12 case of Sierra Nevada and instead spending it on $4 individual bottles of Sierra Nevada at the pub. It has, however, diverted a lot of money to cheap beer and plastic cups, since lots of folks aren't going to spend $10 per glass for good quality glassware (the dollar store lime glass cracks even while hand washing with hot water; lime glass is easier to melt, so takes less energy to shape and form than better grades of glass, and glass is hella expensive to work with due to the sheer amount of fuel required to manufacture and work it).
Have you ever gone to the barber? A half hour to drive out there, park, and get in. Half an hour for a shave. Half an hour to drive back off home. I can shave myself in 10 minutes with a straight razor and do a better job than my local barber.
Personally, I'd assume it's because if he's picking up a gun, it should be ready for use, on principle, but my opinion is irrelevant.
That's correct; and jurors without that knowledge--many people without that knowledge--fail to make that assumption when told that a gun had a round chambered already. They assume it was put there for an immediate reason, not a general reason.
The public opinion, as decided by the media spin, creates a bias to what's considered important. If a popular crime drama focuses on how a killer prepared his gun before murdering someone, it's unfairly difficult for the defense to explain it away. On the other hand, scary news stories about armed paramilitary gangs roaming the streets would make the prosecutor's job unfairly difficult, because the public will be more inclined to consider it reasonable to walk outside with an intent to kill.
And none of that is relevant to the question:
Now, how does the Court of Public Opinion factor into basic knowledge of firearms safety and self-defense?
Because the question is about general knowledge.
Our courts have a habit of looking at anyone with working knowledge--engineers, lawyers, people whose careers are related to the underlying premise of the case, people whose hobbies give them a sound understanding of the events of the case--and remove them.
So you keep saying, but yet you show only evidence that we dismiss people with probably-unfair biases.
Each lawyer gets to remove a fixed number of jurors for no reason. In some states it's up to 12. Further, the lawyer has to show, to the satisfaction of the court, that additional jurors are disqualified if he wants to remove more. So for example in Maryland I can argue that 8 of 12 jurors on my case have CCW and this is a murder trial, and... Maryland courts, judges, police, and state regulators dislike guns, and will immediately accept that these people may be gun-totin' kooks. Then I can remove the other 4 just because they're too smart. In Florida, the administration strongly supports CCW, and a lot of people have it; Zimmerman got what he got because the prosecutor had no real way to create a slanted jury.
All of your excuses boil down to this: if you're qualified to make a judgment on this case, we can find a reason why you shouldn't be allowed to. We'll hand the case to people who have no understanding of the case, then manipulate them into making an unsound judgment. As for justice... oh hell this is just a dice game, have fun, maybe we'll hang you when we're done, execution sounds cool right?
simply repeating the verdict handed to them by the Court of Public Opinion.
You're retarded.
After the complete injustice of the Zimmerman trial, would a similar trial have any chance of justice, were it tried on preexisting "knowledge" rather than the facts of the case?
Let's imagine the Zimmerman trial in a different direction. In real life, the Zimmerman trial had several jurors who were mothers, who knew nothing about the case, and who carried firearms themselves. They had two opposing inherent biases: they had children of their own, and they felt that carrying a lethal weapon for protection was warranted in general.
In our fantasy trial, we kick out any juror who has a concealed carry permit. Remember the second bias: they already believe carrying a lethal weapon for protection is warranted in general, so will have a non-zero probability of just assuming that there was violence and George was defending himself. Thus we remove them.
Did you know George Zimmerman's gun had a round in the chamber even before he and Trayvon came face to face? That's right: George Zimmerman's gun was primed and ready for murder before he was ever threatened. Why would you put a round in the chamber?
Anyone who has gone through concealed carry safety and firearms self defense courses will know this one: it takes two hands to get a bullet into the chamber. A gun without a round in the chamber is a glorified hammer; it's too slow to prime the damn thing to fire. Revolvers always have a bullet in the chamber.
Lots of commentary on the case brought this up. I've seen hundreds of people without the pre-existing knowledge of firearms self defense point out that George had a bullet in the chamber, thus obviously was itching to kill someone. This lack of knowledge in a juror puts the case in jeopardy: all the prosecutor has to do is slip that fact into his argument, and the defense gets the tough job of explaining firearms self-defense to the jury without sounding like he's massaging the jury into siding with him through a long and overly verbose discussion to distract them from the facts of the case. The judge may sustain prosecution's objection to such distraction.
Now, how does the Court of Public Opinion factor into basic knowledge of firearms safety and self-defense?
Again: we kick out anyone who is knowledgeable about the case in any way. If the case is over Apple versus Samsung tablets and you were a cell phone engineer at Nokia, you're not fit to pass judgment because you actually know about the stuff being argued. If you're a civil rights lawyer, you're not fit to sit on a jury over a civil rights case. If you're a building inspector, you're not fit to sit on jury for a lawsuit against a builder for shoddy work. Why? Because you may be able to understand the actual evidence being presented, and what we want are no-knowledge jurors who can be swayed into making erroneous judgment by fancy emotional argument.
It's unfortunate that our legal system has chosen to interpret "impartial" as "unqualified". One of the greatest flaws in our legal system is that we want it to be "fair" by removing any hope of it being more than a crap shoot. I could be a lawyer with no legal training simply by manipulating the jury using basic negotiation tactics.
First thing: do you know the defendant or anyone else involved? Yes? Get out.
Second thing: do you know anything about this particular case? Yes? Get out.
Third thing: Do you know anything about anything involved in this case--for example, anything about the NSA spying programs, constitutional law related, other media coverage for similar cases i.e. Julian Assange, etc. Yes? Get out.
What we have left is people who know nothing about these activities, how it affects them, or what Snowden revealed. They haven't put any thought into government spying programs, and will likely see "Government protecting citizens" versus "insane conspiracy theorist throwing dangerous national secrets everywhere". Without a huge amount of analysis, backgrounds in criminology and philosophy, and a strong understanding of wide-spread social theory, they can't make a good judgment. They either immediately go, "Oh he broke the law and spilled a lot of our secret important government anti-terrorist protection activities all over, putting us in danger," or they'll go, "Government! I told you them commie son-bitches! They tryin' mind control us!"
It's like pulling a bunch of people into a lecture hall where they have a debate over quantum mechanics for a few hours a day, and then several days or weeks later they ask you how you think the protouniverse could have emerged from the quantum foam (where the fuck did the energy come from!?) and if black holes and dark matter are mutually exclusive or can co-exist in nine-dimensional space. And you're not allowed to study quantum theory before or during this whole affair.
Consequences carry. It doesn't matter what is right, just what is legal; the legal system doesn't concern itself with what is right and wrong. To an extent, what is right and wrong doesn't even cover all of what society needs--although my current theory is that operating in contrary to the three laws is always harmful to society, while fully following the three laws doesn't create an optimal society on its own.
Society has a certain tolerance for criminal behavior. You stole a pack of gum. You fucked a hooker. You downloaded illegal kiddy porn, like... a lot... when you were 17. Okay. It happens. Did you keep robbing convenience stores? Have you continued to violate the social contract selecting against prostitution? Do you still have 14 year olds texting you pictures of their boobs? No? Well... not a problem.
When you exceed these tolerances, you risk getting arrested. Running a child porn ring? FBI is coming. Mugging people in the streets? They will either Stand Their Ground or the police will come and get you, one day.
Privacy is not a fundamental right to not have other peoples' nose in your business; it's a fundamental requirement to allow people to engage in criminal behavior. If we didn't have the ability to get away with minor, easily-dismissed crime with a societal cost lower than the cost of individual effort to care, everyone would be in jail. Try stealing a 50 cent pack of Bubble Tape from a gas station once; the clerk will either not bother to call you on it, or will yell at you and throw you out--and they might still decide not to fight you over the gum, you can keep it. Police aren't involved because that is too much fucking effort for a 50 cent pack of gum.
If you keep doing it, the police will eventually get involved.
Sometimes, the cops just don't need to show up at everyone's door. Can you imagine how many people would be in jail or destroyed financially? Can you imagine how many people would be on the sex offender's list because they had a 17 year old girlfriend in high school and they turned 18 in like... May? Most of the population would be born in prison.
People always tell me wikipedia is not reliable because anyone can edit it. I'm like... so you'd rather a Web site anyone can pay $8 for and put whatever they want on it?
They seem to not like the statistic that Britannica and Encarta have more factual errors per article than Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is good for well-researched information. Information about pharmaceutical drugs, neuroscience, exercise, biology, physics, mathematics, animals, cosmology, etc. is usually pretty straight. Information about religion, spirituality, and so on is usually also well-researched.
When you get into practical alternative theory--not just spirituality systems, but applications of alternative medicine, spiritual healing, and so on--you start to get into the weird stuff. Wikipedia tries to distance itself from un-scientific claims: they'll tell you that meditation has been shown to induce calm and give people control over their blood pressure (biofeedback has been shown in controlled studies to allow for control over heart rate and blood pressure), but provide a cultural context for claims about having visions of the future or pulling energy from the spiritual realm or whatever.
The problem comes when it's hard to separate out pseudoscience from real science. Dietary supplements and alternative medical procedures get elbow-deep in this: acupuncture does not, as far as we have ascertained, do anything by balancing Xi; but some studies have shown that acupuncture is effective for treating certain minor nervous conditions or whatnot. Other studies debunk this. Explanation may lie in placebo effect. And so on. Now what? Never mind when you have things like whether or not a certain vitamin or concentrated extract of a given root does anything--milk thistle extract is actually used to treat liver damage, and Valerian acts like benzos, but will walnuts prevent cancer? We change our minds on the walnut thing every other week.
Awareness is useful. Knowing that some people believe meditation can increase physical stamina, for example, can be useful: when there's nothing else left, you may as well sit down and start chanting to yourself. I mean if you're trapped under a collapsed building, why the hell not? Rescue's going to come either way (or not), and maybe you'll slow your metabolism and last a few more hours, or at least amuse yourself. On the other hand, it's probably good to know that this mushroom that people think has special healing properties is viciously poisonous, so you shouldn't try eating it.
Slashdot Mirror
Brendan Eich publicly funded a political campaign to destroy the marriages and families of about 25% of his fellow Californians.
Gays are so faggotly unstable that a legal document is the only thing holding their relationships together. Great argument you have there.
The white, the black, the yellow, the red, the brown. No green bastards need apply.
Gay people sometimes beat straight people to death for being straight. It happens.
Gay marriage is discriminatory against heterosexuals: it imposes minor economic pressure on the traditional nuclear family. Gay marriage provides economic relief to married homosexuals, but does not provide the same relief for bachelors, and the other two groups (pre-gay-marriage families and bachelors) experience increased economic pressure to supply the economic relief benefited to gays when they get married.
It's not called "Rehabilitation", it's called "Socialization". It's where we take you out of your little isolated world and make you part of society, and you become well-socialized and more understanding and empathetic. You may retain your opinions, you may even speak and act on them; but you also consider how your actions impact others, and you seek to do the least harm and to work for the betterment of society in a greater understanding of what that means.
By the by, if gays get married, they pay less in taxes. That's less money the government is bringing in in taxes. The government then needs to cover the same expenses--if they go through spending reform, they will have lower expenses, but still also have less income to cover them rather than having lower expenses and the same amount of income. Thus society suffers either from the ill effects of government debt or from an increase in taxes which is itself proportionally higher for the unmarried than the married. Since the gays have moved from one group to the other, the group of the married--paying less--is larger, and they suffer less from this adjustment, in the end coming out somewhat ahead financially while married heterosexual families come out slightly behind and unmarried singles come out significantly further behind.
So yes, there's benefit from Prop 8 for non-gays. It's small, but it's not zero. You could call it "negligible" or "insignificant", in the same way that stealing a nickel out of your ash tray is "negligible" and "insignificant". Obviously it's still stealing, but the effort to care is immensely larger than the value of a nickel.
Between the economic considerations, the discriminatory nature of institutionalized marriage (it redistributes wealth from people not married to people married), and the fact that gay marriage is a contentious moral issue for people of certain religions, the whole thing is a huge fucking ball of hypocrisy.
If you're not in the nuclear family... or gay and marrying some other gay person... you know, if you're single... then you deserve to share a larger proportion of the tax burden than the others. Gay marriage shifts gays under the same protective umbrella as the privileged married class, leaving those who choose not to participate in the state concept of marriage paying a higher proportion of their income in taxes. Those whose lives are fundamentally incompatible with such relationships--whose interests are not toward relationships and so who pursue time-consuming goals like scientific research or military deployment or freight hauling or airline stewardship, all of which strain romantic relationships--must either chose another type of life or enter into a (strained) relationship and experience high levels of stress AND put themselves at risk for divorce litigation to avoid the monetary penalty.
Those who are religious, whose beliefs are fundamentally that homosexuality is incorrect and should not be encouraged, are attacked for trying to work toward what they believe is the betterment of society. They feel that the institution of marriage should support the proper, appropriate nuclear family, encourage singles to pair up and get married in child-rearing structures, and not support homosexuals taking advantage of the same benefits offered to encourage these things. They are, of course, attacked for their beliefs. They tolerate the existence of homosexuals, rather than exiling them or burning them to death; but they are called intolerant for not handing them money for being actively gay.
It's not just ironic; it's ridiculous. Society is built on discriminatory treatment of various social groups, and now we have a social group that wants to get in on the benefit side rather than tear down the discriminatory institution entirely.
That sounds an awful lot like "Mozilla doesn't want to be associated with Judeo-Christian beliefs because Catholics and Jews are bad people."
He's not intolerant. He believes that it's bad for society to allow gay marriage. Intolerance would involve putting gays in concentration camps (we call them 'prisons', a french word meaning 'concentration camp for jews and slave labor').
Those beliefs are valid: various moral systems assume that exposure to or encouragement of homosexuality is harmful to society as a whole, and thus the most tolerant thing to do is to show society that these things are discouraged but to not intervene on others' choices. When you get married, your tax burden decreases--society supports you monetarily, as in with money, by taking less money from you--which is diametrically opposed to the moral belief that homosexuality should be discouraged.
A person whose beliefs fall this way will, if tolerant, refuse to extend these convenience benefits: people who prefer to form a nuclear family get a monetary benefit, people who do not form such a nuclear family are given no such benefit. Such a person who is intolerant will execute these people or send them to Australia.
There is a difference between "tolerating", "accepting", and "encouraging". Marriage is a legal system to encourage certain behaviors by extending a monetary benefit. This monetary benefit comes at the expense of those who do not engage in those behaviors. Thus, marriage itself is government-mandated institutionalized discrimination: if you want equal rights, dissolve the institution of marriage.
Yeah, because you know. Love isn't valid if the state doesn't get involved.
I'm single. Do I get the special privilege to file jointly with myself and pay half as much taxes?
Yeah but that guy is a known functional retard. He espouses that it is harmful for you to partake of certain services if the service provider doesn't offer certain other services. Like it's harmful for you to use online banking if they don't give you the source code to their Web server--not because it may have security flaws or anything, but because you're using something that's "not free".
It's like saying I should shut off my water service because the state doesn't give me a pump I can install in my house.
I think this looks fair: https://twitter.com/omgbounces...
Because married gays can file jointly, reducing their tax burden. This means the proportion of taxes paid by gays is lower, and the proportion of taxes paid by other classes is slightly higher. Married couples already enjoy this benefit--married with no children and/or with dual-income enjoy this benefit sharply less. Singles don't. Legalized gay marriage slightly increases the proportion of taxes being paid by married couples, and increases the proportion of taxes being paid by singles by a slight but somewhat larger proportion.
It's like if 90% of the country is married with kids and paying 50% of the tax bill collected from personal income for the working class ($150k/year and below), and the gays and singles are paying the other 50% because they don't have all these tax benefits. Say 5% of the country is gays and lesbians paying 25%, the other 5% is straight people paying 25%, 50% + 25% + 25% = 100. Well, now gays get married and are paying 2.78% of the tax bill, and the country's bachelor population gets to pay 47.22% of the tax bill.
Those numbers are extremified and not correlated to reality; they're illustrative to show that having one group pay a lower proportion increases the proportion paid by the other group. In particular, the group 90%=married and 5%=gay becomes 95%=gay here, leaving 5%=single.
I advocated for banning marriage, but nobody listened to me.
Marriage equality is actually a form of oppression.
In the beginning, it was decided that women should stay at home, make babies, raise children, behave. Men go to work. A man, married, with a stay-at-home wife, filing jointly, with children, pays roughly half as much in taxes and gets a few thousand credited off for dependents. First-class citizens.
If they decide to not work, they don't get those few thousand credited off. It's something like $3500 first kid, $5000 second kid, $5500 third kid. Yeah we only give you $500 of aid when you add #3. Second-class citizens.
If that bitch dares to go out and get a job, the incomes combine. Married filing separately loses you all kinds of tax benefits that you get filing single, so you want to file jointly. Filing jointly with twice the income gets you taxed pretty much the same rate as filing single with half the income: those tax benefits for being married are revoked. But at least you have a dependent to file (spouse, even working), bringing the tax rate down. Third-class citizens.
Being a single male, I pay the same tax rate except without a dependent spouse. I pay more taxes even though I have less money. Fourth-class citizen.
Gays used to be in this boat. Now, however, they get married and get to file as either single-income married filing jointly (second-class citizens) or dual-income married filing jointly with an extra dependent (third-class citizens).
Now that gays are third-class citizens instead of fourth-class citizens, the government collects less in taxes from gays. Because the government collects less in taxes from gays, they must collect more in taxes from elsewhere. Thus they must increase the general tax rate slightly to make up (or take more debt, but that's unsustainable eventually). Because such an increase is partially discounted for married-filing-jointly (i.e. if you raise taxes 1%, it only goes up on them 0.5%-0.75%), it affects us single people more.
In other words: the tax burden is now reduced on gays, and increased on single people. The share of taxes being paid by this group is less, and the share of taxes being paid by this other group is more.
That's why gay marriage makes no sense. Marriage has always been a social and economical vehicle to enforce gender roles and societal ideals: it provides a strong tax benefit for nuclear families in which the woman stays home and makes babies while the man works. Childless couples are leeching off that, and dual-income families are punished by revoking that tax benefit. The purpose of marriage is not to provide rights; it's to abuse gays, single people, dual-income families, and childless couples by increasing their tax burden above that of nuclear families.
When am I, as a single male, going to get equality?
And he could have translitterated from Cyrillic to Tsarnayev himself and bypassed the no-fly list!
As a Gary Johnson fan, I'm curious what his stance on the whole deal with Tesla is. This is relevant since I may want to vote for him next election, and the implications of his opinions on this matter are going to reflect across his Presidential policies and how he encourages Congress and the American People to act.
It's always seemed to me (since they started pushing Unity, anyway) that Canonical is mainly concerned with pushing their own in-house software out as open source. It's like they want to point everywhere and say, "See, RedHat uses an init system we created, a display server we wrote, and a desktop environment we built. We ARE the Open Source Desktop."
Safety razors didn't replace barbers. There were publications as late as 1927 on how to shave... with a straight razor. Gilette was pushing to sell a marketable product, not creating a revolutionary new possibility; kids learned to shave when they were 13, if they could afford a razor.
A good straight razor costs money. The Gilette safety razor cost somewhat less, but only because the blades were expensive. Instead of a $20 razor, you bought a $5 razor and a few pennies for blades. A year later and those few pennies added up to $8. Back then, people had hones for woodworking tools or knives, even the poor--those old books always talk about Tom Sawyer or whatnot sharpening his knife on one. A $20 razor was a reasonable investment, unlike today where a straight razor is niche and costs $120, and you need a $100 hone you don't already have to maintain it.
The safety razor did the same as the plastic cup: it cost less than the things you already had. Cheap beer and plastic cups haven't stopped people from taking the $15 they can spend on a 12 case of Sierra Nevada and instead spending it on $4 individual bottles of Sierra Nevada at the pub. It has, however, diverted a lot of money to cheap beer and plastic cups, since lots of folks aren't going to spend $10 per glass for good quality glassware (the dollar store lime glass cracks even while hand washing with hot water; lime glass is easier to melt, so takes less energy to shape and form than better grades of glass, and glass is hella expensive to work with due to the sheer amount of fuel required to manufacture and work it).
Have you ever gone to the barber? A half hour to drive out there, park, and get in. Half an hour for a shave. Half an hour to drive back off home. I can shave myself in 10 minutes with a straight razor and do a better job than my local barber.
A brilliant rebuttal.
I try. One-liners are hard.
Personally, I'd assume it's because if he's picking up a gun, it should be ready for use, on principle, but my opinion is irrelevant.
That's correct; and jurors without that knowledge--many people without that knowledge--fail to make that assumption when told that a gun had a round chambered already. They assume it was put there for an immediate reason, not a general reason.
The public opinion, as decided by the media spin, creates a bias to what's considered important. If a popular crime drama focuses on how a killer prepared his gun before murdering someone, it's unfairly difficult for the defense to explain it away. On the other hand, scary news stories about armed paramilitary gangs roaming the streets would make the prosecutor's job unfairly difficult, because the public will be more inclined to consider it reasonable to walk outside with an intent to kill.
And none of that is relevant to the question:
Now, how does the Court of Public Opinion factor into basic knowledge of firearms safety and self-defense?
Because the question is about general knowledge.
Our courts have a habit of looking at anyone with working knowledge--engineers, lawyers, people whose careers are related to the underlying premise of the case, people whose hobbies give them a sound understanding of the events of the case--and remove them.
So you keep saying, but yet you show only evidence that we dismiss people with probably-unfair biases.
Each lawyer gets to remove a fixed number of jurors for no reason. In some states it's up to 12. Further, the lawyer has to show, to the satisfaction of the court, that additional jurors are disqualified if he wants to remove more. So for example in Maryland I can argue that 8 of 12 jurors on my case have CCW and this is a murder trial, and... Maryland courts, judges, police, and state regulators dislike guns, and will immediately accept that these people may be gun-totin' kooks. Then I can remove the other 4 just because they're too smart. In Florida, the administration strongly supports CCW, and a lot of people have it; Zimmerman got what he got because the prosecutor had no real way to create a slanted jury.
All of your excuses boil down to this: if you're qualified to make a judgment on this case, we can find a reason why you shouldn't be allowed to. We'll hand the case to people who have no understanding of the case, then manipulate them into making an unsound judgment. As for justice... oh hell this is just a dice game, have fun, maybe we'll hang you when we're done, execution sounds cool right?
simply repeating the verdict handed to them by the Court of Public Opinion.
You're retarded.
After the complete injustice of the Zimmerman trial, would a similar trial have any chance of justice, were it tried on preexisting "knowledge" rather than the facts of the case?
Let's imagine the Zimmerman trial in a different direction. In real life, the Zimmerman trial had several jurors who were mothers, who knew nothing about the case, and who carried firearms themselves. They had two opposing inherent biases: they had children of their own, and they felt that carrying a lethal weapon for protection was warranted in general.
In our fantasy trial, we kick out any juror who has a concealed carry permit. Remember the second bias: they already believe carrying a lethal weapon for protection is warranted in general, so will have a non-zero probability of just assuming that there was violence and George was defending himself. Thus we remove them.
Did you know George Zimmerman's gun had a round in the chamber even before he and Trayvon came face to face? That's right: George Zimmerman's gun was primed and ready for murder before he was ever threatened. Why would you put a round in the chamber?
Anyone who has gone through concealed carry safety and firearms self defense courses will know this one: it takes two hands to get a bullet into the chamber. A gun without a round in the chamber is a glorified hammer; it's too slow to prime the damn thing to fire. Revolvers always have a bullet in the chamber.
Lots of commentary on the case brought this up. I've seen hundreds of people without the pre-existing knowledge of firearms self defense point out that George had a bullet in the chamber, thus obviously was itching to kill someone. This lack of knowledge in a juror puts the case in jeopardy: all the prosecutor has to do is slip that fact into his argument, and the defense gets the tough job of explaining firearms self-defense to the jury without sounding like he's massaging the jury into siding with him through a long and overly verbose discussion to distract them from the facts of the case. The judge may sustain prosecution's objection to such distraction.
Now, how does the Court of Public Opinion factor into basic knowledge of firearms safety and self-defense?
Again: we kick out anyone who is knowledgeable about the case in any way. If the case is over Apple versus Samsung tablets and you were a cell phone engineer at Nokia, you're not fit to pass judgment because you actually know about the stuff being argued. If you're a civil rights lawyer, you're not fit to sit on a jury over a civil rights case. If you're a building inspector, you're not fit to sit on jury for a lawsuit against a builder for shoddy work. Why? Because you may be able to understand the actual evidence being presented, and what we want are no-knowledge jurors who can be swayed into making erroneous judgment by fancy emotional argument.
It's unfortunate that our legal system has chosen to interpret "impartial" as "unqualified". One of the greatest flaws in our legal system is that we want it to be "fair" by removing any hope of it being more than a crap shoot. I could be a lawyer with no legal training simply by manipulating the jury using basic negotiation tactics.
First thing: do you know the defendant or anyone else involved? Yes? Get out.
Second thing: do you know anything about this particular case? Yes? Get out.
Third thing: Do you know anything about anything involved in this case--for example, anything about the NSA spying programs, constitutional law related, other media coverage for similar cases i.e. Julian Assange, etc. Yes? Get out.
What we have left is people who know nothing about these activities, how it affects them, or what Snowden revealed. They haven't put any thought into government spying programs, and will likely see "Government protecting citizens" versus "insane conspiracy theorist throwing dangerous national secrets everywhere". Without a huge amount of analysis, backgrounds in criminology and philosophy, and a strong understanding of wide-spread social theory, they can't make a good judgment. They either immediately go, "Oh he broke the law and spilled a lot of our secret important government anti-terrorist protection activities all over, putting us in danger," or they'll go, "Government! I told you them commie son-bitches! They tryin' mind control us!"
It's like pulling a bunch of people into a lecture hall where they have a debate over quantum mechanics for a few hours a day, and then several days or weeks later they ask you how you think the protouniverse could have emerged from the quantum foam (where the fuck did the energy come from!?) and if black holes and dark matter are mutually exclusive or can co-exist in nine-dimensional space. And you're not allowed to study quantum theory before or during this whole affair.
Consequences carry. It doesn't matter what is right, just what is legal; the legal system doesn't concern itself with what is right and wrong. To an extent, what is right and wrong doesn't even cover all of what society needs--although my current theory is that operating in contrary to the three laws is always harmful to society, while fully following the three laws doesn't create an optimal society on its own.
Sure, why not?
Society has a certain tolerance for criminal behavior. You stole a pack of gum. You fucked a hooker. You downloaded illegal kiddy porn, like... a lot... when you were 17. Okay. It happens. Did you keep robbing convenience stores? Have you continued to violate the social contract selecting against prostitution? Do you still have 14 year olds texting you pictures of their boobs? No? Well... not a problem.
When you exceed these tolerances, you risk getting arrested. Running a child porn ring? FBI is coming. Mugging people in the streets? They will either Stand Their Ground or the police will come and get you, one day.
Privacy is not a fundamental right to not have other peoples' nose in your business; it's a fundamental requirement to allow people to engage in criminal behavior. If we didn't have the ability to get away with minor, easily-dismissed crime with a societal cost lower than the cost of individual effort to care, everyone would be in jail. Try stealing a 50 cent pack of Bubble Tape from a gas station once; the clerk will either not bother to call you on it, or will yell at you and throw you out--and they might still decide not to fight you over the gum, you can keep it. Police aren't involved because that is too much fucking effort for a 50 cent pack of gum.
If you keep doing it, the police will eventually get involved.
Sometimes, the cops just don't need to show up at everyone's door. Can you imagine how many people would be in jail or destroyed financially? Can you imagine how many people would be on the sex offender's list because they had a 17 year old girlfriend in high school and they turned 18 in like... May? Most of the population would be born in prison.
People always tell me wikipedia is not reliable because anyone can edit it. I'm like... so you'd rather a Web site anyone can pay $8 for and put whatever they want on it?
They seem to not like the statistic that Britannica and Encarta have more factual errors per article than Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is good for well-researched information. Information about pharmaceutical drugs, neuroscience, exercise, biology, physics, mathematics, animals, cosmology, etc. is usually pretty straight. Information about religion, spirituality, and so on is usually also well-researched.
When you get into practical alternative theory--not just spirituality systems, but applications of alternative medicine, spiritual healing, and so on--you start to get into the weird stuff. Wikipedia tries to distance itself from un-scientific claims: they'll tell you that meditation has been shown to induce calm and give people control over their blood pressure (biofeedback has been shown in controlled studies to allow for control over heart rate and blood pressure), but provide a cultural context for claims about having visions of the future or pulling energy from the spiritual realm or whatever.
The problem comes when it's hard to separate out pseudoscience from real science. Dietary supplements and alternative medical procedures get elbow-deep in this: acupuncture does not, as far as we have ascertained, do anything by balancing Xi; but some studies have shown that acupuncture is effective for treating certain minor nervous conditions or whatnot. Other studies debunk this. Explanation may lie in placebo effect. And so on. Now what? Never mind when you have things like whether or not a certain vitamin or concentrated extract of a given root does anything--milk thistle extract is actually used to treat liver damage, and Valerian acts like benzos, but will walnuts prevent cancer? We change our minds on the walnut thing every other week.
Awareness is useful. Knowing that some people believe meditation can increase physical stamina, for example, can be useful: when there's nothing else left, you may as well sit down and start chanting to yourself. I mean if you're trapped under a collapsed building, why the hell not? Rescue's going to come either way (or not), and maybe you'll slow your metabolism and last a few more hours, or at least amuse yourself. On the other hand, it's probably good to know that this mushroom that people think has special healing properties is viciously poisonous, so you shouldn't try eating it.
I love how people go online and sign petitions. Sign this petition to get AT&T to provide unlimited data 4G for like $10/mo.
You signed a petition. Cool.
Fuck you.
What do they expect? Seriously.