Your simply wrong. Presser: (Obviously the last sentence is invalid with the 14th and incorporation) We think it clear that the sections under consideration, which only forbid bodies of men to associate together as military organizations, or to drill or parade with arms in cities and towns unless authorized by law, do not infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms. But a conclusive answer to the contention that this amendment prohibits the legislation in question lies in the fact that the amendment is a limitation only upon the power of congress and the national government, and not upon that of the state.
Miller: "In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a "shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length" at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment, or that its use could contribute to the common defense.
Guns can be used for good or ill and yes have at times been used for oppression. They have often been used to defend against oppression as well. My own state fought a literal shooting war to free itself from the oppression of a corrupt state and it's corporate owners. Gun control in this country however has been historically rooted in racism. Most early gun laws only gained traction because of a fear of "Them" having guns, who ever them may be at the time.
To address two of your posts. First the supreme court has recognized the 2nd as an individual right since at least 1857. It was always an assumption but that assumption is documented in the majority opinion of the Dred Scott case in which the court reasoned that Mr. Scott did not enjoy this constitutional protection to own and carry a weapon because of his race. In 1886 presser vs. Illinois the court explicitly ruled that the 2nd was an individual right and in the 1939 miller case the court only limited this in saying that protected weapons should be of military value. The 2008 Heller case affirmed this historical interpretation and farther left out the limitations from the Miller case, likely because it makes no since to protect M-16's but limit hunting riffles.
As to your earlier point, you are correct the constitution is not sacred. The institution of the constitution must however be held sacrosanct. If we want to limit gun ownership we must update or repeal the 2nd. Pretending away it's protections only servers to weaken the rest of the amendments. Just look at how willing sitting US senators where to eviscerate the 5th amendment with the no fly no buy idea. Do you really doubt that without strong constitutional protection the Republicans would hesitate to outlaw abortions again or to try and restrict the practice of Islam?
If that's the world you want then please keep working toward it as you have been. Otherwise educate yourself and act from a position of rational thought instead of emotional outrage.
You can't walk into a store (or a gun show even though that's a popular misconception) in the US and buy a gun without a background check. All gun dealers in the US are required to perform a NICS background check before the sale. There is only one exception to this rule and that is in some states a private individual selling his gun to another private individual is not required to perform any sort of background check. He is still responsible for only selling to someone who can legally own a gun. In fact no federal mechanism for them to do so currently even exists.
As to the car analogy, that's pretty much how it is. In the US you can own a car without any testing, licensing, or registration. You can drive that car on your own property and in fact many farms do just that with trucks that are "Farm Use Only". What you can't do is drive a vehicle on public roads without the testing, licensing, and registration. Depending on the state/city there may be additional tax issues at play. The gun control equivalent would be carry permits not ownership. Gun laws are currently very similar to the aforementioned car laws in that you can own a gun, keep it in your house, and shoot it on your property (assuming you have enough property) without any sort of permit (in most states). You may need to have a license (constitutional carry states not withstanding) to carry it in public.
In the end the biggest issue is that we are running into the limits of what the constitution will allow. If we want to enact actual gun restrictions the 2nd amendment must either be repealed or updated. Many experts believe the 1994 gun ban would have been overturned by the supreme court had it been left in place long enough. Fear of that precedent is one of the forces that kept it from being renewed. The lowest hanging fruit still available to us is to enable and require background checks for private sales and perhaps to improve reporting from states and the military to NICS. That would require some sort of publicly accessible background check portal for NICS or a requirement that FLL licensed dealers support checks on private sales for a minimum fee.
Mental health checks will be a no go because of a fear that they would be abused to limit ownership for political reasons rather than actual mental health concerns. This sort of abuse has been documented by some police with broad control over carry permits. They refuse to sign off on anyone because they are politically against private gun ownership. Likewise registration will never happen because of a prevailing fear of the sort of abuses California and New York perpetuated after their registration efforts. First they registered, then they banned. I don't think I'm overstating the issue when I say registration at a federal level would likely cause a civil war. Just look at the mass non compliance in Vermont for an example of peoples reactions to it since CA and NY.
Beyond closing holes the background check system there simply isn't much left that can be done without constitutional changes.
My dad used to manage a homeless shelter. He dealt with a lot of people who had mental illness. They would get on a regimen, start feeling normal, get back to some semblance of a normal life, and then decide they didn't need the medicine any more. It happened over and over to the same people. Get better, Convince yourself your healed, Fall back in the hole. It's a symptom of their illness and It's these type of folks that this would likely be most useful for.
I don't want to be overly critical because honestly I'm not certain what your trying to argue but I'm not sure why you think there is a difference. I'm not exactly ringing the dooms bell but even I can see the faulty logic in this statement. If you take a window of time and have warmer lows during that window the average temperature for that window will be warmer than previous years. If over the course time this trend continues you will be demonstrating that additional energy (in the form of heat) has in fact been added to the system. This doesn't really change anything. In fact it's what you would expect. Higher average temperatures.
I'm born and raised in WV. The people of Appalachia had their culture and economy destroyed long before Johnson entered into the picture. In fact it was the startling poverty and deep despair of the region that led to the social projects in Appalachia. Especially during the new deal era but also with Johnson. From the moment the first logging companies bought nearly every available scrap of land and latter sold the land back to the citizens without the mineral rights our area was finished. The money from logging, coal, and natural gas have been drained out of the area and into the hands of large corporations in wealthy north eastern states while the people lived like indentured servants right into the mid 1900's. The wealth from resource booms other areas would have used to modernize infrastructure and educate the population was stolen from Appalachia. The social programs of the 30's, 40's, 60's, and latter had little culture left to damage.
The irony being this is the exact attitude I'm talking about. You live in an area where the money made on the backs of these states has allowed your state to move forward. Now you are free judge the very people those states are responsible for holding back for continuing the only opportunity available to them. Enjoy your superiority.
I actually think the economic and moral divides that drove the last election are surprisingly comparable to the societal changes which led to the civil war. America had prospered greatly on the backs of slave labor and the largest percentage of those profits where amassed in the north. The industrial revolution allowed northern states to use that wealth to divest themselves of the morally repugnant tradition of slavery. This freed people from needing slavery to maintain their way of life leading to the abolitionist movements and eventually to the civil war. Outlawing slavery in the north was low hanging fruit with little cost to society at large.
The southern states which had a far smaller share of those profits couldn't invest in that same Industrial infrastructure and so couldn't move past slavery without sacrificing their quality of life and destroying the southern economy.
In much the same way profits from coal, oil, and gas have been concentrated mainly in the north eastern cities while the Appalachian states with those resources have no real profit to show from a century of extraction (both of the resources and the profits). They have been unable to leverage the extreme profits from those resources to modernizes and have been left in a place where loosing coal jobs will likely destroy what economy they have left.
This creates a divide where wealthy areas are able to see how damaging coal can be and move beyond it with little cost to themselves and are trying to push coal states in the same direction without any thought to the human cost in those states.
If we learn any lessons from the civil war and the last election it's that we must as a country provide the resources those states need to move past their (literal) dependence on coal or we will face farther division and possibly in the end civil war.
I started to write a longer explanation but the stupid started making my head hurt. The more concise answer is that at one point environmental movements where heavily tied to progressive politics in the US. One such environmental movement of the 80's and 90's opposed all nuclear development. The term NIMBY in the US rose in popularity at that same time to label home owners who also opposed nuclear plants in their towns, though for different reasons. Through some long strange contortions US progressives are routinely mislabeled as liberals in this country. There for NIMBY's are liberals.
A couple of foot notes. Miller would likely not have won his appeal either way because he was dead and his lawyer didn't bother to show up. Had he presented an actual defense to the supreme court it would have been trivial to point out that sawed off shotguns are in fact a militarily useful weapon in both trench warfare and close quarters urban combat (Though I'm not sure how that last bit would have been phrased in the vernacular of the time).
The Miller decision as it stands is the result of the court not being presented with a defense and not being familiar enough with military tactics to interpret the usefulness of the weapon on their own.
I get really irritated with 2 dimensional party line thinking and the political compass is a good tool for helping folks understand why. Your falling back in to that old 2 party way of looking at things though. Anarchist are the extreme left wing opposite of authoritarians (the extreme right). Traditionally Libertarians fall some where center left. The reason people often confuse them with right wingers is they are tend to not be progressive. Progressive/Conservative politics fall on a separate spectrum from Right/Left politics. I'm not certain how the UK parties fall but in the US the Democrats are a largely right leaning socially and economically progressive party. The Republicans are a largely right leaning morally progressive and economically conservative (although this is a split in the party) party with strong corporatist tendencies. And yes they are morally progressive regardless of how we view their definition of progress. US Libertarians tend to be left leaning, economic and socially conservatives.
You can think of it like this. An extreme Democrat will want a law mandating that all institutions must provide marriage services to same sex couples. An extreme Republican will want a law forbidding the same. Both right wing solutions intended to use the force of law to farther their respective agendas. An extreme Libertarian will want all laws allowing the government to exercise power over marriage revoked. A left wing solution intended to provide everyone freedom of choice and individual liberty. Obviously reality lies somewhere between the extremes.
That reasoning may resonate as a political talking point but it's factually flawed in a number of important ways. The US was a massive exporter during it's heyday of C02 emissions. To accurately calculate a countries individual historical impact you would need to account for all of the goods and advances they imported from the US. This line of reasoning seeks to force western nations to absolve their advantages through the use of guilt.
Beyond that western nations obviously didn't have modern alternatives available to them when they where industrializing. That's not the case today. We have both the science to explain the issue and technologies to help alleviate it. Knowingly ignoring the issue to leverage economic advantage on the world stage is not morally equivalent to the western worlds build up over the last couple of hundred years.
We should work on the issue from the realistic stand point of where we are. Anything else isn't attempting to solve climate change it's attempting to speed up redistribution of western wealth and power to developing nations. Fairness doesn't enter into it because the conditions are not equal.
P.S. None of that's to say I think the US should have pulled out of the agreement, if only because it cost us little beyond our current trajectory and provided motivation to other countries.
We'll have to agree to disagree then. I can't define exclusive franchise agreements as anything other than a government sponsored monopoly that needs to end.
My last comment was perhaps a bit of an ad hominem but I usually only see the semantic argument that exclusivity agreements aren't a government granted monopoly coming from people who have a vested interest in maintaining said monopoly.
Franchise requirements are part of the price cable companies agreed to in order to access public right of ways. They did so happily at a time when it saved them a great deal of money and allowed them to expand their subscriber base. I'll gladly forgo those franchise requirements and start charging them rent for the pole in my yard.
It's fully past time that they had to face competition. The form of that competition is irrelevant. I happen to live in an area where companies are unwilling to make the infrastructure upgrades needed to bring us anything approaching modern internet service (Let alone reliable television). The one company trying to do so (who happens to be in another city all together) is stuck in regulatory hell at both the state and city level. The only way I'm ever getting decent internet that doesn't cost more than some folks car payment is if my city creates their own service.
Perhaps you live in some utopian city (though I suspect your just defending your employer) where a dozen companies vie for your money but a lot of us don't. A lot of us live in areas where you have no choice but to do things yourself because no one else is ever going to.
Most of them achieve a monopoly at the city or municipality level of government. They also make use of state and city laws/regulations to squash any potential competition. In a lot of the US it's still a state sponsored monopoly, just enforced at a different level of government.
I was young when the breakup happened but I certainly remember it's fall out. I have no idea why you think the government would need to set rates just because it forced the separation of the various corporate divisions. In most civilized areas that's known as a straw man argument.
If internet services and cable access services where separate there's no reason to believe a new monopoly would form. Much like dial up before you would be able to pick any ISP you wanted for your internet needs. Local monopolies for cable providers would likely continue because of the nature of the municipal agreements in place but internet service would have no such restrictions. In fact it would be nearly impossible to impose such a restriction. It would be like your town telling you what VPN provider you must use.
Beyond that not everyone is lucky enough to live somewhere like you. In my area (We would consider 20,000 a largish city) we have exactly one cable company (spectrum formerly TWC) and a phone company that couldn't offer reliable DSL if their lives depended on it. We have no competition, we have no choices. We pay top dollar for bottom of the barrel service. If I cancel my cable service and keep my internet it would actually make my bill higher.
What we do have is a local company trying to roll out fiber to home one town over (An ex dialup turned business provider). Because of the anti competitive nature of the cable industry they are being blocked, bullied, and sued at every turn. How dare they offer people a service they want!
There is an additional issue. Not only are cable companies operating as state sponsored monopolies but since the deregulation of the late 90's they also tend to own both the means of production and the means of distribution. This gives them an increasingly powerful incentive to use internet services as a weapon against their competitors. That is what's driving the relatively new need for something like NN. I'm not sure if NN is the answer but I would whole heartedly support another Ma Bell'esq forced breakup of cabled companies from their ISP's and possibly from the media creation portions of the companies. You should be paying to lease a line from your cable company (or phone company, or fiber company, or local service district) and getting ISP service from a separate unaffiliated company of your choice.
Just for some education on beer styles. The primary difference between Ales and Lagers is in both the strain of yeast used and what temperatures they ferment best in.
Ales are less cold tolerant, are most active on the top of the wort, and produce more fruity esters.
Lagers are far more cold tolerant, are most active on the bottom of the wort, and produce a cleaner "crisper" beer. Lagers are then left post fermentation in a 40 degree or cooler chamber for a couple weeks. A process which has come to be known as lagering.
Both beers come from the same base ingredients and either can be hoppy or not. In fact the hoppiest beers we have today tend to be IPA's, which are ales incase the A didn't make that clear.
I've had an echo and two echo dot's around the house for several months. I keep the full size echo in the kitchen and it's incredibly useful. Just the voice controlled music is almost worth the price of admission but being able to set timers and convert measurements while your hands are covered in food is absolutely awesome.
The first dot mainly plays music in my living room but the second I use as an alarm clock and music player in my bed room. It's really nice not to have that bright LED screen glaring at you all night and the first time you check the time in the middle of the night with out opening your eyes you'll never want to go back.
Two changes I would like to see that would make the echo's even better are named timers (chicken 20 minutes, potatoes 10 minutes, etc..) and the ability to control other echos (like Sonos speakers).
I normally don't respond to AC's but as stated above. Current traffic control devices will incorporate a digital communication system in the future (including flag men). Even without autonomous cars that is already in the works. As to driving safely on ice, an autonomous vehicle will be able to respond to the situation in a variety of ways. It will have knowledge of road conditions well in advance of the hazard and can redirect, suggest stopping, or otherwise respond before it encounters the hazard directly. That's one of the advantages they will have over human drivers. Beyond that do you think a human who stops their car to "chip ice" off the road (what ever that means) wouldn't cause a traffic jam. I live in a rural heavy snow area. Believe me humans cause all kinds of traffic jams.
This is a bit short sighted. The number of problems caused by autonomous cars will be inversely proportional to the number on the road. There will be a critical mass beyond which insurance companies will begin charging extravagant fees for a manually operated vehicle. Autonomous vehicles will communicate with each other. They will know miles in advance when there is an accident, construction, or other hazard and be capable of responding accordingly (including re-routing if possible). Imagine a Network of cars alerting other vehicles behind them about road conditions, say an icy spot. Your car would then essentially have a map of areas to apply more caution in. They will be capable of monitoring for wild life with heat and infrared sensors. Grid lock on roads will be virtually eliminated because cars will be able to tell each other what they are about to do before they do it. Issues with reading signs are a non starter. Once adoption begins to pick up you will quickly see digital information systems added to existing road signs. All of this tech exist right now and most of it is mature. It just hasn't been put together yet. In about 20 years people will be complaining about how manual drivers are always causing accidents and issues with traffic flow.
So long as communication is only one way I agree that it adds some protection. At least in this one case. Number stations are a prime example of this sort of thing. Assuming your partner responds to your broadcast with a wireless transmission of their own and that such transmissions are being monitored it wouldn't take long to establish communications patterns in the radio broadcast themselves however. If they are recording broadcasts from multiple locations (Hey, lets put all those emergency repeaters across the country to good use!) then triangulation becomes fairly simple. The people involved would need to use separate transmission mediums that can't be cross correlated to effectively isolate themselves from one another. Other wise if one of you becomes a target as soon as some one looks at the data and says "Hey, these two encrypted stations appear to be communicating in response to one another" the white vans start roaming your neighborhood.
Lets first make the assumption you can find a safe device to begin with. Once you bring strong encryption into the picture the transmission medium is un-important. You must assume all encrypted traffic will be public, HAM certainly is. Either your encryption is strong enough to deal with the public scrutiny or it's no more effective than your "Tin foil hat" solution.
That said it is difficult to say that any telecommunications device is actually secure. The hardware it-self could be configured to make breaking encryption performed on it easier. Simpler yet to allow access to any communication or storage pre-encryption.
Once we fall into that rabbit hole though you had best be prepared to make your own chips to put in your home brewed HAM equipment because it's turtles all the way down.
I don't think your very familiar with the Libertarian Party. The only way they become more GOP like is if your looking at a purely economics based platform.
Libertarian's are typically small government. They adopt those policies from the standpoint of personal liberty though. They believe you should have the right to smoke, believe, say, or sleep with whatever or whomever makes you happy so long as the consequences of your actions are mainly yours to bare.
The Libertarian social platform is far more leftwing than the Democrats (if you can even call Dem's left wing these days). What they typically are not is progressive. Libertarians were the first political party in the nation to adopt same sex marriage as an issue, in the 70's. I'm not that old and I've been around long enough to have heard Democrats call them insane for it.
That said it would be against Libertarian philosophy to use the power of the government to punish say a caterer for refusing to cater a same sex marriage. That is usually where the Dem's and Libertarians part ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Your simply wrong.
Presser: (Obviously the last sentence is invalid with the 14th and incorporation)
We think it clear that the sections under consideration, which only forbid bodies of men to associate together as military organizations, or to drill or parade with arms in cities and towns unless authorized by law, do not infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms. But a conclusive answer to the contention that this amendment prohibits the legislation in question lies in the fact that the amendment is a limitation only upon the power of congress and the national government, and not upon that of the state.
Miller:
"In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a "shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length" at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment, or that its use could contribute to the common defense.
Guns can be used for good or ill and yes have at times been used for oppression. They have often been used to defend against oppression as well. My own state fought a literal shooting war to free itself from the oppression of a corrupt state and it's corporate owners. Gun control in this country however has been historically rooted in racism. Most early gun laws only gained traction because of a fear of "Them" having guns, who ever them may be at the time.
To address two of your posts. First the supreme court has recognized the 2nd as an individual right since at least 1857. It was always an assumption but that assumption is documented in the majority opinion of the Dred Scott case in which the court reasoned that Mr. Scott did not enjoy this constitutional protection to own and carry a weapon because of his race. In 1886 presser vs. Illinois the court explicitly ruled that the 2nd was an individual right and in the 1939 miller case the court only limited this in saying that protected weapons should be of military value. The 2008 Heller case affirmed this historical interpretation and farther left out the limitations from the Miller case, likely because it makes no since to protect M-16's but limit hunting riffles.
As to your earlier point, you are correct the constitution is not sacred. The institution of the constitution must however be held sacrosanct. If we want to limit gun ownership we must update or repeal the 2nd. Pretending away it's protections only servers to weaken the rest of the amendments. Just look at how willing sitting US senators where to eviscerate the 5th amendment with the no fly no buy idea. Do you really doubt that without strong constitutional protection the Republicans would hesitate to outlaw abortions again or to try and restrict the practice of Islam?
If that's the world you want then please keep working toward it as you have been. Otherwise educate yourself and act from a position of rational thought instead of emotional outrage.
You can't walk into a store (or a gun show even though that's a popular misconception) in the US and buy a gun without a background check. All gun dealers in the US are required to perform a NICS background check before the sale. There is only one exception to this rule and that is in some states a private individual selling his gun to another private individual is not required to perform any sort of background check. He is still responsible for only selling to someone who can legally own a gun. In fact no federal mechanism for them to do so currently even exists.
As to the car analogy, that's pretty much how it is. In the US you can own a car without any testing, licensing, or registration. You can drive that car on your own property and in fact many farms do just that with trucks that are "Farm Use Only". What you can't do is drive a vehicle on public roads without the testing, licensing, and registration. Depending on the state/city there may be additional tax issues at play. The gun control equivalent would be carry permits not ownership. Gun laws are currently very similar to the aforementioned car laws in that you can own a gun, keep it in your house, and shoot it on your property (assuming you have enough property) without any sort of permit (in most states). You may need to have a license (constitutional carry states not withstanding) to carry it in public.
In the end the biggest issue is that we are running into the limits of what the constitution will allow. If we want to enact actual gun restrictions the 2nd amendment must either be repealed or updated. Many experts believe the 1994 gun ban would have been overturned by the supreme court had it been left in place long enough. Fear of that precedent is one of the forces that kept it from being renewed. The lowest hanging fruit still available to us is to enable and require background checks for private sales and perhaps to improve reporting from states and the military to NICS. That would require some sort of publicly accessible background check portal for NICS or a requirement that FLL licensed dealers support checks on private sales for a minimum fee.
Mental health checks will be a no go because of a fear that they would be abused to limit ownership for political reasons rather than actual mental health concerns. This sort of abuse has been documented by some police with broad control over carry permits. They refuse to sign off on anyone because they are politically against private gun ownership. Likewise registration will never happen because of a prevailing fear of the sort of abuses California and New York perpetuated after their registration efforts. First they registered, then they banned. I don't think I'm overstating the issue when I say registration at a federal level would likely cause a civil war. Just look at the mass non compliance in Vermont for an example of peoples reactions to it since CA and NY.
Beyond closing holes the background check system there simply isn't much left that can be done without constitutional changes.
My dad used to manage a homeless shelter. He dealt with a lot of people who had mental illness. They would get on a regimen, start feeling normal, get back to some semblance of a normal life, and then decide they didn't need the medicine any more. It happened over and over to the same people. Get better, Convince yourself your healed, Fall back in the hole. It's a symptom of their illness and It's these type of folks that this would likely be most useful for.
I don't want to be overly critical because honestly I'm not certain what your trying to argue but I'm not sure why you think there is a difference. I'm not exactly ringing the dooms bell but even I can see the faulty logic in this statement. If you take a window of time and have warmer lows during that window the average temperature for that window will be warmer than previous years. If over the course time this trend continues you will be demonstrating that additional energy (in the form of heat) has in fact been added to the system. This doesn't really change anything. In fact it's what you would expect. Higher average temperatures.
I'm born and raised in WV. The people of Appalachia had their culture and economy destroyed long before Johnson entered into the picture. In fact it was the startling poverty and deep despair of the region that led to the social projects in Appalachia. Especially during the new deal era but also with Johnson. From the moment the first logging companies bought nearly every available scrap of land and latter sold the land back to the citizens without the mineral rights our area was finished. The money from logging, coal, and natural gas have been drained out of the area and into the hands of large corporations in wealthy north eastern states while the people lived like indentured servants right into the mid 1900's. The wealth from resource booms other areas would have used to modernize infrastructure and educate the population was stolen from Appalachia. The social programs of the 30's, 40's, 60's, and latter had little culture left to damage.
The irony being this is the exact attitude I'm talking about. You live in an area where the money made on the backs of these states has allowed your state to move forward. Now you are free judge the very people those states are responsible for holding back for continuing the only opportunity available to them. Enjoy your superiority.
I actually think the economic and moral divides that drove the last election are surprisingly comparable to the societal changes which led to the civil war. America had prospered greatly on the backs of slave labor and the largest percentage of those profits where amassed in the north. The industrial revolution allowed northern states to use that wealth to divest themselves of the morally repugnant tradition of slavery. This freed people from needing slavery to maintain their way of life leading to the abolitionist movements and eventually to the civil war. Outlawing slavery in the north was low hanging fruit with little cost to society at large.
The southern states which had a far smaller share of those profits couldn't invest in that same Industrial infrastructure and so couldn't move past slavery without sacrificing their quality of life and destroying the southern economy.
In much the same way profits from coal, oil, and gas have been concentrated mainly in the north eastern cities while the Appalachian states with those resources have no real profit to show from a century of extraction (both of the resources and the profits). They have been unable to leverage the extreme profits from those resources to modernizes and have been left in a place where loosing coal jobs will likely destroy what economy they have left.
This creates a divide where wealthy areas are able to see how damaging coal can be and move beyond it with little cost to themselves and are trying to push coal states in the same direction without any thought to the human cost in those states.
If we learn any lessons from the civil war and the last election it's that we must as a country provide the resources those states need to move past their (literal) dependence on coal or we will face farther division and possibly in the end civil war.
I started to write a longer explanation but the stupid started making my head hurt. The more concise answer is that at one point environmental movements where heavily tied to progressive politics in the US. One such environmental movement of the 80's and 90's opposed all nuclear development. The term NIMBY in the US rose in popularity at that same time to label home owners who also opposed nuclear plants in their towns, though for different reasons. Through some long strange contortions US progressives are routinely mislabeled as liberals in this country. There for NIMBY's are liberals.
Now where did I put my aspirin?
truecrypt, tinfoil hats may be needed.
A couple of foot notes. Miller would likely not have won his appeal either way because he was dead and his lawyer didn't bother to show up. Had he presented an actual defense to the supreme court it would have been trivial to point out that sawed off shotguns are in fact a militarily useful weapon in both trench warfare and close quarters urban combat (Though I'm not sure how that last bit would have been phrased in the vernacular of the time).
The Miller decision as it stands is the result of the court not being presented with a defense and not being familiar enough with military tactics to interpret the usefulness of the weapon on their own.
I get really irritated with 2 dimensional party line thinking and the political compass is a good tool for helping folks understand why. Your falling back in to that old 2 party way of looking at things though. Anarchist are the extreme left wing opposite of authoritarians (the extreme right). Traditionally Libertarians fall some where center left. The reason people often confuse them with right wingers is they are tend to not be progressive. Progressive/Conservative politics fall on a separate spectrum from Right/Left politics. I'm not certain how the UK parties fall but in the US the Democrats are a largely right leaning socially and economically progressive party. The Republicans are a largely right leaning morally progressive and economically conservative (although this is a split in the party) party with strong corporatist tendencies. And yes they are morally progressive regardless of how we view their definition of progress. US Libertarians tend to be left leaning, economic and socially conservatives.
You can think of it like this. An extreme Democrat will want a law mandating that all institutions must provide marriage services to same sex couples. An extreme Republican will want a law forbidding the same. Both right wing solutions intended to use the force of law to farther their respective agendas. An extreme Libertarian will want all laws allowing the government to exercise power over marriage revoked. A left wing solution intended to provide everyone freedom of choice and individual liberty. Obviously reality lies somewhere between the extremes.
That reasoning may resonate as a political talking point but it's factually flawed in a number of important ways. The US was a massive exporter during it's heyday of C02 emissions. To accurately calculate a countries individual historical impact you would need to account for all of the goods and advances they imported from the US. This line of reasoning seeks to force western nations to absolve their advantages through the use of guilt.
Beyond that western nations obviously didn't have modern alternatives available to them when they where industrializing. That's not the case today. We have both the science to explain the issue and technologies to help alleviate it. Knowingly ignoring the issue to leverage economic advantage on the world stage is not morally equivalent to the western worlds build up over the last couple of hundred years.
We should work on the issue from the realistic stand point of where we are. Anything else isn't attempting to solve climate change it's attempting to speed up redistribution of western wealth and power to developing nations. Fairness doesn't enter into it because the conditions are not equal.
P.S. None of that's to say I think the US should have pulled out of the agreement, if only because it cost us little beyond our current trajectory and provided motivation to other countries.
We'll have to agree to disagree then. I can't define exclusive franchise agreements as anything other than a government sponsored monopoly that needs to end.
My last comment was perhaps a bit of an ad hominem but I usually only see the semantic argument that exclusivity agreements aren't a government granted monopoly coming from people who have a vested interest in maintaining said monopoly.
Franchise requirements are part of the price cable companies agreed to in order to access public right of ways. They did so happily at a time when it saved them a great deal of money and allowed them to expand their subscriber base. I'll gladly forgo those franchise requirements and start charging them rent for the pole in my yard.
It's fully past time that they had to face competition. The form of that competition is irrelevant. I happen to live in an area where companies are unwilling to make the infrastructure upgrades needed to bring us anything approaching modern internet service (Let alone reliable television). The one company trying to do so (who happens to be in another city all together) is stuck in regulatory hell at both the state and city level. The only way I'm ever getting decent internet that doesn't cost more than some folks car payment is if my city creates their own service.
Perhaps you live in some utopian city (though I suspect your just defending your employer) where a dozen companies vie for your money but a lot of us don't. A lot of us live in areas where you have no choice but to do things yourself because no one else is ever going to.
Most of them achieve a monopoly at the city or municipality level of government. They also make use of state and city laws/regulations to squash any potential competition. In a lot of the US it's still a state sponsored monopoly, just enforced at a different level of government.
I was young when the breakup happened but I certainly remember it's fall out. I have no idea why you think the government would need to set rates just because it forced the separation of the various corporate divisions. In most civilized areas that's known as a straw man argument.
If internet services and cable access services where separate there's no reason to believe a new monopoly would form. Much like dial up before you would be able to pick any ISP you wanted for your internet needs. Local monopolies for cable providers would likely continue because of the nature of the municipal agreements in place but internet service would have no such restrictions. In fact it would be nearly impossible to impose such a restriction. It would be like your town telling you what VPN provider you must use.
Beyond that not everyone is lucky enough to live somewhere like you. In my area (We would consider 20,000 a largish city) we have exactly one cable company (spectrum formerly TWC) and a phone company that couldn't offer reliable DSL if their lives depended on it. We have no competition, we have no choices. We pay top dollar for bottom of the barrel service. If I cancel my cable service and keep my internet it would actually make my bill higher.
What we do have is a local company trying to roll out fiber to home one town over (An ex dialup turned business provider). Because of the anti competitive nature of the cable industry they are being blocked, bullied, and sued at every turn. How dare they offer people a service they want!
There is an additional issue. Not only are cable companies operating as state sponsored monopolies but since the deregulation of the late 90's they also tend to own both the means of production and the means of distribution. This gives them an increasingly powerful incentive to use internet services as a weapon against their competitors. That is what's driving the relatively new need for something like NN. I'm not sure if NN is the answer but I would whole heartedly support another Ma Bell'esq forced breakup of cabled companies from their ISP's and possibly from the media creation portions of the companies. You should be paying to lease a line from your cable company (or phone company, or fiber company, or local service district) and getting ISP service from a separate unaffiliated company of your choice.
Just for some education on beer styles. The primary difference between Ales and Lagers is in both the strain of yeast used and what temperatures they ferment best in.
Ales are less cold tolerant, are most active on the top of the wort, and produce more fruity esters.
Lagers are far more cold tolerant, are most active on the bottom of the wort, and produce a cleaner "crisper" beer. Lagers are then left post fermentation in a 40 degree or cooler chamber for a couple weeks. A process which has come to be known as lagering.
Both beers come from the same base ingredients and either can be hoppy or not. In fact the hoppiest beers we have today tend to be IPA's, which are ales incase the A didn't make that clear.
The first dot mainly plays music in my living room but the second I use as an alarm clock and music player in my bed room. It's really nice not to have that bright LED screen glaring at you all night and the first time you check the time in the middle of the night with out opening your eyes you'll never want to go back.
Two changes I would like to see that would make the echo's even better are named timers (chicken 20 minutes, potatoes 10 minutes, etc..) and the ability to control other echos (like Sonos speakers).
I normally don't respond to AC's but as stated above. Current traffic control devices will incorporate a digital communication system in the future (including flag men). Even without autonomous cars that is already in the works. As to driving safely on ice, an autonomous vehicle will be able to respond to the situation in a variety of ways. It will have knowledge of road conditions well in advance of the hazard and can redirect, suggest stopping, or otherwise respond before it encounters the hazard directly. That's one of the advantages they will have over human drivers. Beyond that do you think a human who stops their car to "chip ice" off the road (what ever that means) wouldn't cause a traffic jam. I live in a rural heavy snow area. Believe me humans cause all kinds of traffic jams.
This is a bit short sighted. The number of problems caused by autonomous cars will be inversely proportional to the number on the road. There will be a critical mass beyond which insurance companies will begin charging extravagant fees for a manually operated vehicle. Autonomous vehicles will communicate with each other. They will know miles in advance when there is an accident, construction, or other hazard and be capable of responding accordingly (including re-routing if possible). Imagine a Network of cars alerting other vehicles behind them about road conditions, say an icy spot. Your car would then essentially have a map of areas to apply more caution in. They will be capable of monitoring for wild life with heat and infrared sensors. Grid lock on roads will be virtually eliminated because cars will be able to tell each other what they are about to do before they do it. Issues with reading signs are a non starter. Once adoption begins to pick up you will quickly see digital information systems added to existing road signs. All of this tech exist right now and most of it is mature. It just hasn't been put together yet. In about 20 years people will be complaining about how manual drivers are always causing accidents and issues with traffic flow.
So long as communication is only one way I agree that it adds some protection. At least in this one case. Number stations are a prime example of this sort of thing. Assuming your partner responds to your broadcast with a wireless transmission of their own and that such transmissions are being monitored it wouldn't take long to establish communications patterns in the radio broadcast themselves however. If they are recording broadcasts from multiple locations (Hey, lets put all those emergency repeaters across the country to good use!) then triangulation becomes fairly simple. The people involved would need to use separate transmission mediums that can't be cross correlated to effectively isolate themselves from one another. Other wise if one of you becomes a target as soon as some one looks at the data and says "Hey, these two encrypted stations appear to be communicating in response to one another" the white vans start roaming your neighborhood.
That said it is difficult to say that any telecommunications device is actually secure. The hardware it-self could be configured to make breaking encryption performed on it easier. Simpler yet to allow access to any communication or storage pre-encryption.
Once we fall into that rabbit hole though you had best be prepared to make your own chips to put in your home brewed HAM equipment because it's turtles all the way down.
Libertarian's are typically small government. They adopt those policies from the standpoint of personal liberty though. They believe you should have the right to smoke, believe, say, or sleep with whatever or whomever makes you happy so long as the consequences of your actions are mainly yours to bare.
The Libertarian social platform is far more leftwing than the Democrats (if you can even call Dem's left wing these days). What they typically are not is progressive. Libertarians were the first political party in the nation to adopt same sex marriage as an issue, in the 70's. I'm not that old and I've been around long enough to have heard Democrats call them insane for it.
That said it would be against Libertarian philosophy to use the power of the government to punish say a caterer for refusing to cater a same sex marriage. That is usually where the Dem's and Libertarians part ways.