"Mature and civilized society." Civilized societies are highly un-civil. They're irrational and have these ideals about "Cruelty" and "Civility" and whatever else. They will cling to these ideals at great expense, causing pain and suffering only to protect their own feelings and show themselves as "Civil". Lethal injection is a great example: it's a slow march toward your death, a good half hour or more of terror--marched to the door behind which you will die, strapped down, watch and hear the doctors prep the drugs, insert the IV... that is your death coming, the terror mounting. A bullet to the head is the same, but cut short... but messy, and anything brutal feels worse; if it's horrible for the condemned but to our senses feels soft and pleasant, then we will simply claim we are being "Civil".
A man's suffering for "justice" is debatable, and very philosophical. The death penalty IS a deterrent--in some cultures. In some US states, banning the death penalty causes a doubling or quadrupling of murder rates; in others it does nothing. In my city, for example, a ban or lack thereof on execution wouldn't do shit: the criminal element exposes themselves to situations where the vast majority of them die from gang crime. We don't arrest murderers here; they murder the hell out of each other. 1 murderer in jail for every several hundred who is killed by other murderers.
Carry this out logically: we are going about execution the wrong way. A fast, brutal execution is best. Our execution that inflicts much suffering but displays little terrifying imagery helps us to feel that execution isn't so bad, that we are just "Going to die" if we are arrested for murder. But a brutal beheading, or tying a man's head and shoulders and swiftly ripping each from each other... now that will put you out instantly, but there is no way in HELL anyone watching that wants to EVER sit in that seat! It's not peaceful; it's fucking terrifying. Humane, yes; ugly and messy.
Besides. If we want to be civil, we should expose ourselves fully to our convictions. Execution should be ugly. Hanging is terrifying; it doesn't have to be bloody and messy to accomplish that. We don't need to have public executions; we just need people to know that, yes, these happen. Maybe a handful of witnesses to tell the story--the horrifying act of violence they witnessed, society's retribution, a thing they'll likely never see again. But let's be honest with ourselves: we are committing an unpleasant, violent act.
Is this thoroughly debunked as in "we found the origin for these claims and they are patently non-existent anecdote made up by old men seeking attention from women by riling up their peers in a big display of fluffed up feathers" or is this thoroughly debunked as in "we know that can't happen so it didn't"?
It depends. Many people are averse to utilitarian rationalization: if executing 100 murderers results in 10 innocents dying, but keeping them incarcerated results in 100 petty thieves being murdered or in a lack of deterrent causing additional murderers leading to 100 more deaths, people will prefer to not execute the 10 innocent. Why? Because that's 10 peoples' blood on their hands, and having the blood of in total 90 more innocents spilled puts the blood of 100 innocents on... someone else's hands!
In other words: my justification for getting you killed is that *I* didn't kill you, so what I did was fine.
I tend to bank on the utilitarian concept that putting someone in jail for 20 years is not harmless. People talk about how at least you can let someone out of prison in 15-20 years if they're innocent, and life goes on. Oh, and what of it? What kind of life? No amount of compensation--not all the money, wine, and women in the world--can replace those lost years or repair the damage done. The damage is substantial. We're not talking about making amends; we're talking about, if we didn't just dump them back on the street, simply making the rest of their shitty, tattered life somewhat comfortable while they drag themselves through it.
There's something very wrong with people in general.
My Nest automatically manages my humidifier. It also automatically begins heating my house 15 minutes before it's programmed to, because it's set to 71 degrees and it takes 15 minutes to get from 62 to 71 (it has tracked this). This is down from 45 minutes, since I insulated. It adjusts for outside temperature. It tracks changes and adjusts for them--new furnace, insulation, whatever. If I adjust the thermostat, it eventually (in about a week) starts making those adjustments automatically--no reprogramming. If I have multi-stage heating and cooling, it'll use the most efficient stages and just start up early to achieve the same goals without using as much energy.
My Nest shows me a report of the past week's furnace run-time history, set temperatures, whether it ran more or less because it was cold or because I was out of the house more often, etc. I can set myself away or adjust the temperature from my phone or Internet. It tells me the current temperature inside, outside, and even tells me the humidity. Every month, I get an energy report based on everything that happens.
The OP said "Switch bitcoin with stocks" and your argument was like "It's not stocks". Well if you tried to dump $28 million of some stocks in some big companies--Build-a-Bear Workshop a prime example--you'd find that this will take over a year to pull off. The volume just isn't there.
Same problem: BTC volume may or may not be there. It may be there, but not big enough to prevent a price crash. Some stocks--Berkshire-Halthaway--are so big that dumping a few million bucks at once is just common practice.
The only difference between a pink-sheet penny stock and GOOG or AAPL is that more people have their hands in GOOG and AAPL every day. More trades are happening. Build-a-Bear Workshop has a trading volume so low you can't even buy in $200,000 to it because of the 5% of volume rule.
We're not talking about different things here; we're talking about the same things with different properties. Commodities and Stocks are different things, even Preferred and Common stocks are different things: Commodities are physical things you own (if you own 2 tonnes of coal when it lands, you better come get it); Preferred stock is a partnership in a company, with voting rights; Common stock is a pink sheet, possibly with voting rights, but it can be revoked if the company files bankruptcy (Preferred makes you a stakeholder, and if you liquidate the company then the Preferred shareholders get a cut of whatever's left after paying creditors). Trading across these has similar properties, but in groups: trading common stock can be like trading commodities--high liquidity, volatility, etc--but both can also take other forms--low liquidity, low volatility, etc--and they are in ways unlike regardless.
Bitcoin is another speculative market. Don't tell me it's "not a stock" because it's not GOOG; it is similar to trading stocks enough to point out stocks, or commodities, or whathaveyou, that are exactly like trading BTC.
There are plenty of stocks you can make money on that are just too damned volatile to play that game. If they can break down stability enough, they can break down confidence. Savvy investors will profit from this, recognizing the transient crashes for what they are; but the general population will interpret this as instability, and start to lose confidence. That will create a definite long-term down-trend that savvy investors will recognize, and then start to bail out of the market on, continuing the slow down-trend.
When it's noticed that bitcoin has moved from "it was $5... then $20, then $200, then $1000!" to "It's been floating around $900... well, now $850-ish... $825-ish... $795-ish..." a year later--a nice, slow decline, not a panic crash--people will stop looking at the up-and-up-and-up graphs and salivating, and savvy investors will start pumping the dying commodity before backing out. Then it will die off and be worth very little, interest will drop because bitcoins aren't an elite commodity worth tons of money and likely to be worth tons more in a few years, and the whole thing will phase out. At the very least, if they can peg the value of bitcoins so low that there's only tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in them, then it's only a fraction of the economy--it's simply not big enough to supply the economy: everyone in the US would have like a dollar.
They didn't say that in so many words; they simply said that they wouldn't expend the resources to send agents if there wasn't property of at least $50,000 value to be seized. Nobody said it was okay or that you could go ahead and do it. Maybe the state police show up. The DEA certainly didn't say you had a free pass and that your kiloz uv drugz were totally cool with them. They just said they weren't going to waste their time and money if there wasn't a big pay-off come with it.
And your point is? Maybe it needs a rewrite. The UN already has universal, global human rights doctrine, and we can template off the Bill of Rights as well.
I am a fan of abolishing the US Constitution. Recognizing that eliminating the Federal Government is huge and difficult, I have been working on a rewritten US Constitution which more firmly establishes the powers that the government does and does not have, filling the holes in the original, as well as backpedaling on a few things that were wrong. That's an easier campaign to make because it's an easier transition. The Bill of Rights would be abolished in the process as well--some of those rights would be folded into the new Constitution, others would be rewritten to more securely guarantee and expand those rights and added as amendments. Anything unstable would be added as initial amendments because it's shaky if we're getting it right this time, too. Look at patents and copyright: we actually have to TRIM those rights, because they're too broad in the Constitution!
There's no reason 50 individual states can't do the same thing. In fact, it gives you 50 tries to get it right and 50 chances for one state or another to amend their broken shit, rather than waiting for one lumbering entity to admit its wrongdoing (that being: those in power who are reaping the benefits of their corruption and tyranny admit that what they're doing is wrong, and so correct the rules so they can't live like kings and stomp on the poor worthless peasantry anymore). It's arguably a better situation--very arguably, it's an argument you can win, and it's an argument that some fairly well-established and notable philosophers, mathematicians, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists agree with me on. Nicholas Taleb would call it "creating 50 times as many opportunities for constructive black swans".
The solution is to abolish the federal government. The problem is people whine. "Oh, but if we stop drinking uranium-flavored soda, we won't have delicious yumminess..." BUT THAT'S HOW YOU STOP DYING OF RADIATION POISONING!
People don't want to deal with the five or ten years of uncomfortable fall-out from having to shift retirement benefits, medicare, and other government services to the states. They also complain that welfare, unemployment, WIC, social security, and medicare only supply theater: that they usually don't supply enough to help. But they don't want to let go of even the broken parts--or the parts they perceive to be broken, which is more important for discussion than if they actually are broken.
It's like being black in 1850 and not wanting to be freed because, although you're being worked to death and beaten brutally 4 times a day, you don't know where you'd get food if you didn't live on the plantation. And the plantation owner has an eye on your 13 year old daughter... but that's okay, she can endure rape because being free would be scary. That's how people are behaving.
Finally someone who understands that trading is about "extracting wealth from others". I keep explaining to people that getting money out of the stock market is essentially just robbing dumb people, and they keep explaining to me that money is somehow created in the stock market--that you put $20 in, stock becomes worth more, and $1000 goes out without anyone actually putting $980 more in. Because they're too retarded to understand pink sheets.
The DEA actually had put out a memo a few years back that said they will not bother to raid properties where persons are using drugs if the property is worth less than $50,000. It was the memo about how landlords forfeit their right of ownership if they knowingly allow the usage of drugs on their property--which was attached particularly to people having some kind of pot-smoking parties in states that had legalized or had planned to legalize marijuana. They directly stated that action would not be taken--no raids, no arrests, no seizure--on properties valued at under $50,000.
It's not C++, so it can be used from C applications and bound to other languages more easily. C++ is a horrific language anyway; the guy who invented it says the defining characteristic of his life is shame.
Most "civilized" countries also consider it in poor taste to physically defend yourself from attack. I was raised to be "civilized"--they told us in 6th grade if someone is trying to severely injure us, we should cover our head and absolutely never fight back. Those sort of people, they learned to talk around authority and continue behaving hostilely.
It's uncivil, as well, to intervene where another person is physically threatened. Civil people turn their noses up, maybe call the constable, and retain the conviction that someone else being raped or murdered is not their business.
Going onto the air to accuse someone of committing a crime is called slander. Printing it is called libel. The ultimate defense to either of these is that it is the truth; failing that, it has to be reasonably assumed by the public in general both that what you're saying is false and that you're not intending to actually convince anyone that it's not (i.e. everyone has to be convinced you're just being an ass, and everyone has to believe that you know they think you're just being an ass).
Civil countries carry high penalties for hurting someone's feelings. Used the wrong word to describe someone's skin color? Well there goes 5 years of your life, out in jail.
I prefer the uncivilized, but more rational and intelligent. Too bad I live in an uncivilized shithole run by crazies and morons.
The $100k+ they deserve? Were you born in the 80s? $200k programmer salaries came because there were no programmers. You don't deserve $100k+ you entitled bastard; everyone in the fucking world went to college to be a Web designer and now we can just hire one for a few shiny nickels.
Look up how guilds work. You know, medieval unions. They increase salaries by having skilled workers not work--less labor availability. We have the opposite: get everyone a college education so we can pay people less.
In the story of Soddom and Gomora, God destroyed the city because it was a terrible, horrible place. There was a story of an 11 year old girl who gave a starving traveler a piece of bread--she was hanged and skinned alive for showing compassion. The biblical example of the two visiting angels was that the townspeople were of the mind to maliciously rape the visitors--mainly to inflict pain and humiliation. In short, the whole town was rotten to the core and needed to be fenced in and set ablaze.
There was also a court decision after a traveler had a beggar arrested for hitting him with a rock--the court decided that the traveler had bled from the assault, and so was liable to pay the beggar for the service of bloodletting. This sounds like the sort of moon logic that you're describing above with the police lawsuit, which itself sounds like modern America.
If the Catholic church was paying attention at all, it would pull completely out of America before God smites us.
If you're being racist, that's a first-amendment right. If you're being racially discriminatory or you're committing assault or vandalism, that's not. But you're well within your rights to tell someone to go back to Africa (actually they're from the Carribean, so you're also stupid).
The "First Amendment" is the go-to for anything that involves communication in the US. I have a first-amendment right to show a 9 year old girl my penis--I mean it's just "expression" right? That's the kind of argument being made here: they're free to "express" that their patent is being infringed.
The problem with that argument is of course the same problem with my extreme example: you can express whatever the hell you want--as above, I expressed the concept of showing my wang to a schoolgirl--but you can't take other actions. You can express that your patent is being infringed; but you can't take legal action if you don't meet the enforceability standards set out by the FTC within their power as granted by the law. That is: if the FTC decides you can't enforce your patent under those conditions, then you can tell people that Company X is using your patented work, you can even claim they're "Violating" it and that the US has all these hair-brained laws about how you can't do anything about it even though it's your god damned right to enforce it.
What you can't do is slam a legal document on their desk and make them expend resources having their lawyers analyze your claim--since the claim is false, you're harassing them and owe them damages. Continued lawsuits could get you barred from the court systems. "First Amendment Rights" don't go this far, just like they don't go so far as explaining pederasty by physical example.
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"Mature and civilized society." Civilized societies are highly un-civil. They're irrational and have these ideals about "Cruelty" and "Civility" and whatever else. They will cling to these ideals at great expense, causing pain and suffering only to protect their own feelings and show themselves as "Civil". Lethal injection is a great example: it's a slow march toward your death, a good half hour or more of terror--marched to the door behind which you will die, strapped down, watch and hear the doctors prep the drugs, insert the IV... that is your death coming, the terror mounting. A bullet to the head is the same, but cut short... but messy, and anything brutal feels worse; if it's horrible for the condemned but to our senses feels soft and pleasant, then we will simply claim we are being "Civil".
A man's suffering for "justice" is debatable, and very philosophical. The death penalty IS a deterrent--in some cultures. In some US states, banning the death penalty causes a doubling or quadrupling of murder rates; in others it does nothing. In my city, for example, a ban or lack thereof on execution wouldn't do shit: the criminal element exposes themselves to situations where the vast majority of them die from gang crime. We don't arrest murderers here; they murder the hell out of each other. 1 murderer in jail for every several hundred who is killed by other murderers.
Carry this out logically: we are going about execution the wrong way. A fast, brutal execution is best. Our execution that inflicts much suffering but displays little terrifying imagery helps us to feel that execution isn't so bad, that we are just "Going to die" if we are arrested for murder. But a brutal beheading, or tying a man's head and shoulders and swiftly ripping each from each other... now that will put you out instantly, but there is no way in HELL anyone watching that wants to EVER sit in that seat! It's not peaceful; it's fucking terrifying. Humane, yes; ugly and messy.
Besides. If we want to be civil, we should expose ourselves fully to our convictions. Execution should be ugly. Hanging is terrifying; it doesn't have to be bloody and messy to accomplish that. We don't need to have public executions; we just need people to know that, yes, these happen. Maybe a handful of witnesses to tell the story--the horrifying act of violence they witnessed, society's retribution, a thing they'll likely never see again. But let's be honest with ourselves: we are committing an unpleasant, violent act.
Is this thoroughly debunked as in "we found the origin for these claims and they are patently non-existent anecdote made up by old men seeking attention from women by riling up their peers in a big display of fluffed up feathers" or is this thoroughly debunked as in "we know that can't happen so it didn't"?
It depends. Many people are averse to utilitarian rationalization: if executing 100 murderers results in 10 innocents dying, but keeping them incarcerated results in 100 petty thieves being murdered or in a lack of deterrent causing additional murderers leading to 100 more deaths, people will prefer to not execute the 10 innocent. Why? Because that's 10 peoples' blood on their hands, and having the blood of in total 90 more innocents spilled puts the blood of 100 innocents on ... someone else's hands!
In other words: my justification for getting you killed is that *I* didn't kill you, so what I did was fine.
I tend to bank on the utilitarian concept that putting someone in jail for 20 years is not harmless. People talk about how at least you can let someone out of prison in 15-20 years if they're innocent, and life goes on. Oh, and what of it? What kind of life? No amount of compensation--not all the money, wine, and women in the world--can replace those lost years or repair the damage done. The damage is substantial. We're not talking about making amends; we're talking about, if we didn't just dump them back on the street, simply making the rest of their shitty, tattered life somewhat comfortable while they drag themselves through it.
There's something very wrong with people in general.
Gas chamber flood with nitrogen gas. During sleep.
My Nest automatically manages my humidifier. It also automatically begins heating my house 15 minutes before it's programmed to, because it's set to 71 degrees and it takes 15 minutes to get from 62 to 71 (it has tracked this). This is down from 45 minutes, since I insulated. It adjusts for outside temperature. It tracks changes and adjusts for them--new furnace, insulation, whatever. If I adjust the thermostat, it eventually (in about a week) starts making those adjustments automatically--no reprogramming. If I have multi-stage heating and cooling, it'll use the most efficient stages and just start up early to achieve the same goals without using as much energy.
My Nest shows me a report of the past week's furnace run-time history, set temperatures, whether it ran more or less because it was cold or because I was out of the house more often, etc. I can set myself away or adjust the temperature from my phone or Internet. It tells me the current temperature inside, outside, and even tells me the humidity. Every month, I get an energy report based on everything that happens.
It's not exactly a $20 programmable thermostat.
The OP said "Switch bitcoin with stocks" and your argument was like "It's not stocks". Well if you tried to dump $28 million of some stocks in some big companies--Build-a-Bear Workshop a prime example--you'd find that this will take over a year to pull off. The volume just isn't there.
Same problem: BTC volume may or may not be there. It may be there, but not big enough to prevent a price crash. Some stocks--Berkshire-Halthaway--are so big that dumping a few million bucks at once is just common practice.
The only difference between a pink-sheet penny stock and GOOG or AAPL is that more people have their hands in GOOG and AAPL every day. More trades are happening. Build-a-Bear Workshop has a trading volume so low you can't even buy in $200,000 to it because of the 5% of volume rule.
We're not talking about different things here; we're talking about the same things with different properties. Commodities and Stocks are different things, even Preferred and Common stocks are different things: Commodities are physical things you own (if you own 2 tonnes of coal when it lands, you better come get it); Preferred stock is a partnership in a company, with voting rights; Common stock is a pink sheet, possibly with voting rights, but it can be revoked if the company files bankruptcy (Preferred makes you a stakeholder, and if you liquidate the company then the Preferred shareholders get a cut of whatever's left after paying creditors). Trading across these has similar properties, but in groups: trading common stock can be like trading commodities--high liquidity, volatility, etc--but both can also take other forms--low liquidity, low volatility, etc--and they are in ways unlike regardless.
Bitcoin is another speculative market. Don't tell me it's "not a stock" because it's not GOOG; it is similar to trading stocks enough to point out stocks, or commodities, or whathaveyou, that are exactly like trading BTC.
There are plenty of stocks you can make money on that are just too damned volatile to play that game. If they can break down stability enough, they can break down confidence. Savvy investors will profit from this, recognizing the transient crashes for what they are; but the general population will interpret this as instability, and start to lose confidence. That will create a definite long-term down-trend that savvy investors will recognize, and then start to bail out of the market on, continuing the slow down-trend.
When it's noticed that bitcoin has moved from "it was $5... then $20, then $200, then $1000!" to "It's been floating around $900... well, now $850-ish... $825-ish... $795-ish..." a year later--a nice, slow decline, not a panic crash--people will stop looking at the up-and-up-and-up graphs and salivating, and savvy investors will start pumping the dying commodity before backing out. Then it will die off and be worth very little, interest will drop because bitcoins aren't an elite commodity worth tons of money and likely to be worth tons more in a few years, and the whole thing will phase out. At the very least, if they can peg the value of bitcoins so low that there's only tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in them, then it's only a fraction of the economy--it's simply not big enough to supply the economy: everyone in the US would have like a dollar.
They didn't say that in so many words; they simply said that they wouldn't expend the resources to send agents if there wasn't property of at least $50,000 value to be seized. Nobody said it was okay or that you could go ahead and do it. Maybe the state police show up. The DEA certainly didn't say you had a free pass and that your kiloz uv drugz were totally cool with them. They just said they weren't going to waste their time and money if there wasn't a big pay-off come with it.
And your point is? Maybe it needs a rewrite. The UN already has universal, global human rights doctrine, and we can template off the Bill of Rights as well.
I am a fan of abolishing the US Constitution. Recognizing that eliminating the Federal Government is huge and difficult, I have been working on a rewritten US Constitution which more firmly establishes the powers that the government does and does not have, filling the holes in the original, as well as backpedaling on a few things that were wrong. That's an easier campaign to make because it's an easier transition. The Bill of Rights would be abolished in the process as well--some of those rights would be folded into the new Constitution, others would be rewritten to more securely guarantee and expand those rights and added as amendments. Anything unstable would be added as initial amendments because it's shaky if we're getting it right this time, too. Look at patents and copyright: we actually have to TRIM those rights, because they're too broad in the Constitution!
There's no reason 50 individual states can't do the same thing. In fact, it gives you 50 tries to get it right and 50 chances for one state or another to amend their broken shit, rather than waiting for one lumbering entity to admit its wrongdoing (that being: those in power who are reaping the benefits of their corruption and tyranny admit that what they're doing is wrong, and so correct the rules so they can't live like kings and stomp on the poor worthless peasantry anymore). It's arguably a better situation--very arguably, it's an argument you can win, and it's an argument that some fairly well-established and notable philosophers, mathematicians, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists agree with me on. Nicholas Taleb would call it "creating 50 times as many opportunities for constructive black swans".
Link to editorial please.
The solution is to abolish the federal government. The problem is people whine. "Oh, but if we stop drinking uranium-flavored soda, we won't have delicious yumminess..." BUT THAT'S HOW YOU STOP DYING OF RADIATION POISONING!
People don't want to deal with the five or ten years of uncomfortable fall-out from having to shift retirement benefits, medicare, and other government services to the states. They also complain that welfare, unemployment, WIC, social security, and medicare only supply theater: that they usually don't supply enough to help. But they don't want to let go of even the broken parts--or the parts they perceive to be broken, which is more important for discussion than if they actually are broken.
It's like being black in 1850 and not wanting to be freed because, although you're being worked to death and beaten brutally 4 times a day, you don't know where you'd get food if you didn't live on the plantation. And the plantation owner has an eye on your 13 year old daughter... but that's okay, she can endure rape because being free would be scary. That's how people are behaving.
Finally someone who understands that trading is about "extracting wealth from others". I keep explaining to people that getting money out of the stock market is essentially just robbing dumb people, and they keep explaining to me that money is somehow created in the stock market--that you put $20 in, stock becomes worth more, and $1000 goes out without anyone actually putting $980 more in. Because they're too retarded to understand pink sheets.
Bitcoin annoys authority. Of course they're more interested in crashing bitcoin. They want to destroy confidence in anything that annoys authority.
False. They're roughly the same (BTC is more of a commodity). Try selling 28 million dollars in BBW.
The DEA actually had put out a memo a few years back that said they will not bother to raid properties where persons are using drugs if the property is worth less than $50,000. It was the memo about how landlords forfeit their right of ownership if they knowingly allow the usage of drugs on their property--which was attached particularly to people having some kind of pot-smoking parties in states that had legalized or had planned to legalize marijuana. They directly stated that action would not be taken--no raids, no arrests, no seizure--on properties valued at under $50,000.
It's not C++, so it can be used from C applications and bound to other languages more easily. C++ is a horrific language anyway; the guy who invented it says the defining characteristic of his life is shame.
Most "civilized" countries also consider it in poor taste to physically defend yourself from attack. I was raised to be "civilized"--they told us in 6th grade if someone is trying to severely injure us, we should cover our head and absolutely never fight back. Those sort of people, they learned to talk around authority and continue behaving hostilely.
It's uncivil, as well, to intervene where another person is physically threatened. Civil people turn their noses up, maybe call the constable, and retain the conviction that someone else being raped or murdered is not their business.
Going onto the air to accuse someone of committing a crime is called slander. Printing it is called libel. The ultimate defense to either of these is that it is the truth; failing that, it has to be reasonably assumed by the public in general both that what you're saying is false and that you're not intending to actually convince anyone that it's not (i.e. everyone has to be convinced you're just being an ass, and everyone has to believe that you know they think you're just being an ass).
Civil countries carry high penalties for hurting someone's feelings. Used the wrong word to describe someone's skin color? Well there goes 5 years of your life, out in jail.
I prefer the uncivilized, but more rational and intelligent. Too bad I live in an uncivilized shithole run by crazies and morons.
Thanks, exactly. The whole "doomsday" metric is stupid.
The $100k+ they deserve? Were you born in the 80s? $200k programmer salaries came because there were no programmers. You don't deserve $100k+ you entitled bastard; everyone in the fucking world went to college to be a Web designer and now we can just hire one for a few shiny nickels.
Look up how guilds work. You know, medieval unions. They increase salaries by having skilled workers not work--less labor availability. We have the opposite: get everyone a college education so we can pay people less.
In the story of Soddom and Gomora, God destroyed the city because it was a terrible, horrible place. There was a story of an 11 year old girl who gave a starving traveler a piece of bread--she was hanged and skinned alive for showing compassion. The biblical example of the two visiting angels was that the townspeople were of the mind to maliciously rape the visitors--mainly to inflict pain and humiliation. In short, the whole town was rotten to the core and needed to be fenced in and set ablaze.
There was also a court decision after a traveler had a beggar arrested for hitting him with a rock--the court decided that the traveler had bled from the assault, and so was liable to pay the beggar for the service of bloodletting. This sounds like the sort of moon logic that you're describing above with the police lawsuit, which itself sounds like modern America.
If the Catholic church was paying attention at all, it would pull completely out of America before God smites us.
If you're being racist, that's a first-amendment right. If you're being racially discriminatory or you're committing assault or vandalism, that's not. But you're well within your rights to tell someone to go back to Africa (actually they're from the Carribean, so you're also stupid).
The "First Amendment" is the go-to for anything that involves communication in the US. I have a first-amendment right to show a 9 year old girl my penis--I mean it's just "expression" right? That's the kind of argument being made here: they're free to "express" that their patent is being infringed.
The problem with that argument is of course the same problem with my extreme example: you can express whatever the hell you want--as above, I expressed the concept of showing my wang to a schoolgirl--but you can't take other actions. You can express that your patent is being infringed; but you can't take legal action if you don't meet the enforceability standards set out by the FTC within their power as granted by the law. That is: if the FTC decides you can't enforce your patent under those conditions, then you can tell people that Company X is using your patented work, you can even claim they're "Violating" it and that the US has all these hair-brained laws about how you can't do anything about it even though it's your god damned right to enforce it.
What you can't do is slam a legal document on their desk and make them expend resources having their lawyers analyze your claim--since the claim is false, you're harassing them and owe them damages. Continued lawsuits could get you barred from the court systems. "First Amendment Rights" don't go this far, just like they don't go so far as explaining pederasty by physical example.
I don't know if a bear is going to stand up to 30 or 40 people chasing after it. Plus if we all have pointy sticks, we might kill it first!
My household current is 110V and the appliance claims to draw 1800W at 110V. If I give it 120V, it'll draw more than 1800W.