When a predator victimizes a child, the parents get blamed for not better protecting their children.
Since when?
When a child gets molested, it's generally down to one of two things. a) The child is kidnapped by the molestor. b) The child is enticed, or "groomed", by the molestor.
Is case a), no one, no one, could possibly blame the parents for not better protecting their children. Unless we're talking about parents who are known to leave their child home alone regularly, in which case we are really talking about neglect. You can't protect your children from kidnappers that appear our of thin air without chaining them to the wall in your basement or endorsing a police state. And both of those actions are even more wrong than the child actually getting kidnapped.
In the second case b), we're talking about parental neglect plain and simple. If you are so distant from your own offspring, who are living in the same house as you, that you didn't notice they were being lured away right under your nose, then sorry, you've taken your eye off the ball. I'll admit that, yes, you're not a mind reader and neither do you have a sixth sense, but people need to talk to their children about these things. The reality is, people know more about their coworkers social lives than they do of their children's. How sad is that.
So no. No reasonable individual blames parents of the victims for not better protecting their children. Anyone who does so is a sociopath.
If your house has no value to you then why do you own a house?
I never said that the house had no value. I said that it produced no income.
Income tax I understand. In order to make that money you, either directly or indirectly, required that the state and government exist in some fashion. (Local Warlords and their posses not looting your local town is evidence that the money is being put to some good use.) Same goes for sales tax, car tax, inheritance tax, and even gift tax to a degree.
But property tax isn't really as justified as the rest. Yes, it is true that for your house to exist and be safe you need some form of civilised government. However, that does not explain why some houses are taxed more than others, despite having the same acreage. Attempts to put a "value" on a house, or indeed any item for that matter, are flawed because no item can be said to have any real value at all until it comes to be sold.
A house is neither being recieved nor generating income over all the years it is being taxed. Furthermore, regardless of any improvements to either the building or the area, the house itself will never become any more or less of a liability to the government, so why does the tax increase based ona non tangable "valuation"? Unlike car tax, the simple presence of the house does not require maintainance or action on the part of the government, save only the provision of services, which are taxed seperately anyway.
The tax is based on the assumption that is appropriate to tax things of "value". But look around the house. Jewellery, electronics, clothes, furniture and indeed, even the owners money itself. These are all items of value, yet only the house is taxed? The house is the exception, not the rule, and the tax exists only as a holdover from when land was in fact the only real source of income. In those days, land tax meant income tax, but today your house and any land with it generate no income whatsoever for you. So why tax the roofs over people's heads?
I'm a believer that the primary form of tax should be on commerce. Commerce uses the governments currency, is protected by the government, upheld by its laws and supported by its infrastructure. The best and most appropriate time to levy a fair tax is when a financial transaction, be it in cash or asset, takes place. When there is no commerce, there should be no tax. If you allow that, you eventually get poll taxes. Restrict tax to commerce, and the government has no better incentive to promote prosperity.
I fail to see how a free trip to space equates to income. Yes, the trip ordinarily costs $138,000, but this paticular trip was priced at "Win this competition". That doesn't have any monetary value. X% of "Win this competition" is not equal to $25,000. As others have mentioned, the company could also have priced that paticular seat at $1 and been well withing their rights. This story seems bogus.
This kind of reminds me of property taxes, where someone walks up to your house, says "I reckons she's worth about this much, so you pay me that much", despite the fact that your house is earning you no income and will be taxed anyway when sold or inherited. It doesn't make much sense.
I'm a believer in financing the state through taxes. But I'm also of the opinion that there should be some kind of logic to tax. Charging people money for something when they haven't actually made any money, or indeed materially benefited in any way, as in this case is like something out of a one dimensional folk tale. When tax is levied, there should always be a question, why is it being levied?
We need taxes. But we also need to remember that the government is not our landlord. It is wrong to have a tax on simply being alive. Tax should be avoidable, if you have no money to pay any.
Protecting primary school kids is one thing, but 'protecting' adults is a whole different ball game.
Fuck the Children.
If they come across a porn site "by accident" amid their travel, I considering it part of a process called "growing up". Anyone with anecdotal evidence of some random teenager's life being "consumed" by porn is hearby and forever adviced to move to Saudi Arabia. They love you there.
The enitre HD scene is chock loaded with patent upon patent dealing with nearly every aspect of the hardware, software and content of the Cable/PVR/TV suite. It is impossible for competitors to emerge when the big companies involved are bristling with frivolous lawsuit ready patent portfolios.
Without fear of patents, imagine the possibilities. There's probably two dozen people reading this story who could string together a company selling linux based PVRs. I've half toyed with the idea of setting up some kind of company making pimped out terabyte TiVo/PVR home servers streaming content wirelessly to Joe SixPack's TV. I'd sell it to him like a microwave oven, and I'd make it usable. Off the shelf parts, screw it together yourself. You could make 30 a month in your garage.
But its a fantasy, and not only because I'm no real entrepreneur. For a start, thanks to the cable monopoly, I could never really get the PVR to "Just Work" with the cable signal. And that's before TiVo et al come pounding on my door with cease and desist orders.
Imagine how real entrepreneurs must feel. There's honest to goodness market out there, waiting with its cash for a good product. People want it, you can make it, but you just can't sell it.
But hey! Thats what patents are all about right? Stopping those greedy garage geeks dishonestly profiting from the tireless innovations of companies like Time Warner. Without patents, Time Warners CEOs would starve!
If ever you pony up $10 or whatever ludicrous price a publisher asks for some 10 page journal article, know that the authors get precisely 0% of that money.
It's typically around $30 per article. A PDF copy, downloaded, and you are obliged not to give copies to anyone else and limit the number of paper copies you own.
The price of academic articles ranges from between $20 and $50. Some of them aren't very good.... Who am I kidding? Most of them aren't very good. Most are pretty bad to be honest. Every time you pay, you're rolling a dice on whether the author has actually bothered to communicate their ideas or whether they just wanted another notch on their papers published quota. As a result, you often feel pretty sore when you pay $35 for a flop.
Authors don't get paid. Reviewers don't get paid. Editors, sometimes get paid. Authors do all the typesetting, spellchecking and formatting themselves. They draw their own diagrams, format everythign in latex and all the printer has to do is... actually, their usually just given "camera" dvi version of the file or something.
Publishers are not needed. They were needed, once upon a time, but not anymore. If they really wanted to survive, they'd perhaps try and improve the pretty mediocre standard of peer review, but I doubt the management of most publishers even know what fields their journals are in, let alone what consitutes a good paper. They are truely dinosaurs, but will probably go on walking the earth for quite some time as academics are about as revolutionary as Bourbons whos names begin with L.
Sometimes, when I play the orignal Blood Omen, or Soul Reaver, I sometimes forget that the other sequels even existed and wonder what the next game will be like. Then I remember that they went ahead and beached the good ship Kain on the shimmering, yet arid beaches of Higher Definition and Lower Content Gaming.
The primary problem with the modern game industry is that graphics designers are still working the the art world equivalent of assembly code. Efficeintly, intimitly and above all slowly. Budgets are being burned on giving Raziel and Kain anatomically correct eyelids when what was actually needed was more game.
It's your life - if you don't like what's happening to you, either grow a thicker skin or DO something about it ! And no, whining to the nearest "authorities" doesn't count - that's just avoiding the issue.
Yet those very same authorities will vent their fury on you if you do DO something about it. Your advice isn't really very sound, as inevitably the entire matter will be brought to the nearest "authority", except in your case it will be you who has the weaker position.
Unless you mean to say that when you DO something, the "authorities" should never hear about it. Because, is somehow DOING something, and action to be ashamed of? Something to forever hide?
What's more dignified? Justice in the alley? Or justice on the open street?
In the real world, self-defense is both a right and a duty.
And what happens when you can't defend yourself? What are your rights then? What's your duty?
Of course, the classic example is the smaller (male) kid being physically assaulted by the larger (male) kid. Indeed, this can be extended to an inexpierienced kid being assaulted by an expierienced, scuffle a day, kid. The standard response is to tell the kid to "Get Tough", "Learn to Fight Back" or some other equally useless advice.
Advice like that is akin to telling someone whos house has been burgled to "Buy Better Locks", or to telling a woman who has been raped "Don't Go Out At Night". The advice, may help prevent a repeat occurennce, but does nothing about the crime that has already been committed.
You're walking down the street, going about your business. Someone pickpockets/robs you. Imagine you can in fact name the person responsible and you report the incident to an officer cop. Imagine having the cop say to you "Sir, Self Defense is a Duty. You should have given chase/defended yourself. If you can do neither, you need to get tougher and/or faster. I'm not going to investgate this any further." Basically, the cop tells you to shove it, despite the fact you can even name your assailant.
I imagine you'd be pretty irritated with the cop. Yet you give exactly the same advice to people who have been assaulted, battered, slandered and libeled. They are expected to simply accept that injustices have been committed against them and will never be rectified? Is that just? Is that dignified? Will defending yourself against future injustices somehow "make up" for past ones?
The problem lies in "children's" exemption from the laws of the land. Even when those "children" would be considered full adults in many societies, and virtually all past ones. Our concept of a "child" has extended itself higher and higher up the age scale, until we are faced with near fully grown teenagers being bestowed with the same "purity" and "innocence" as a day old infant.
Crimes are being committed in our second level educational institutions. Crimes for which no one is held to account. If there's something people can do without being held to account, odds are, they'll do it. I favour holding teenagers accountable for their actions. I don't think its unreasonable. I wouldn't try them as adults, but neither would I grant them carte blanche to do as they pleased. Isn't it funny how all this bullying nonsense, in all its forms, drops dramatically the moment people reach the age of majority? I wounder why that could be?
And to those people who think that "roughhousing" and "teasing" are all a part of growing up, I dismiss your claims. If young people feel an urge to get physical, they should join a sports club. If they feel an urge tease, they should join a drama group or write. "Children", like everyone, should put their energies and talents to worthwhile use, not have them stagnate and emerge as bile to spit on those around them.
Sadly, high school students can't really hire lawyers to file slander and libel suits.
Slander and libel are most commonly seen as civil torts. But in fact, many states do have criminal slander and libel laws. In either event, reporting such behaviour to the police is well within your rights.
It's entirely possible this will settle into a steady-state of "no stock spam", since it will cease to be a big gain for any particular person and anybody can get in on the fun.
Possible, but improbable.
The most likely outcome is we will simply be stuck with a stable, yet high, level of penny stock spam.
If you place RFID readers at certain strategic locations, you can go a long way to detecting the presence of, say, pedophiles that have been paroled and are hanging out near a school (assuming you have hidden RFID readers near schools, of course.)
There must be some term coined by now, akin to Godwin's law, that as the length of a discussion increases, the probability of someone using combatting pedophillia to justify their argument approaches 1.
However, unlike Godwin's law, the person who brings up pedophillia usually ends up "winning" the argument, or at least persuading the most amount of people.
Do you think that if child porn is allowed in a country and is presented on the internet that viewers of that child porn should be allowed a free pass in countries where child porn is illegal? Should the purveyors of that child porn be allowed free access to travel countries where it is illegal?
Frankly, yes they should.
I had intended to write out a long paragraph in an attempt to explain jurispurdice, crime and punishment, human cultural diversity and western cultural snobbery. But instead of wasting my time, I'll just say that anyone who believes such people shouldn't get a free pass, should move to Iran or China or some other authoritarian regieme, because you'll feel much more at home there.
In conclusion, I would like to add that; I would rather have pictures of my childhood self in the hands of pedophiles, than have my own children live in a dictatorship.
Texas A&M, along with most schools, work hard to attract women because they know what our founding fathers knew. That talent does not depend solely on how you were born, but also on the effort you are willing to make to master and apply a skill.
It is amazing just how many people still deny this basic fact. That individuals, not the group they belong to, are responsible for their own achievements.
Eugenics is still alive and well in today's society. It's arguably even stronger now with more and more people citing genetics, medical science and above all statistics to show that group A is inferior/superior to Group B. Women are "not as good" at mathematics and the sciences. Men are "not as good" at raising children.
Sweeping statements like this are an insult to hard working and high achieving individuals in every group. If my ethic or gender group is found to score highly on some metric, does that mean that somehow my performance has increased overnight? How many people would argue that my abilities increase when others in my "group" perform better? Should I be paid more because my neighbour works harder?
And yet, people do make these decisions in the negative direction. If my group is found to score lower on some metric, then, invariably, my performance and abilities have been deemed to decrease overnight. Hard working individuals are penalised every day by misconstrument, and indeed in many cases, deliberate misinterpretation of basic probability and statistics.
Consider the following. Toss a coin and let it land on the ground. What is the probability that the coin is heads up?
If you answered 1/2, you do not understand basic probability theory, or statistics.
Now, consider that you have two candidates for an engineering/CS/science/mathematics position standing before you. One of the candidates is a woman, the other is a man. What is the probability that the man is a better candidate than the woman?
And that is why modern eugenics is fundamentally flawed.
Ernst Mach raised precisely this objection against atomic theory. He said that atoms were not real because we could not, and would never be able to, see them.
All I ask is that they stamp my letter saying "Welcome back Citizen, now behave this time OK?" and you will see a grown man break down in tears.
Considering that it's AC, I'm calling shennanigans on the whole story.
But on the offchance it is true, you lost the fight the moment you started waiting for them to clear your name. Only you can clear your name, because it's your name and you can't get another one. If you think it's worth fighting for, then you've got to fight for it. If you have to wait for someone to give it back to you, then you'll never get it back at all, whether or not they stamp that letter.
Let's face it, even the lowliest Whopper-flopper knows more about the inner workings of Burger King than most educated professionals, and can find a way to turn that into a feeling of superiority when the stupid customer doesn't realize that X meal is a better deal or whatever.
Danm Straight.
Christ, you work in a convenience store, Dante, and badly, I might add. I work in a shitty video store, badly as well. You know, that guy Jay's got it right, man. He has no delusions about what he does. Us, we like to make ourselves seem so much more important than the people that come in here to buy a paper, or, god forbid, cigarettes. We look down on them as if we're so advanced. Well, if we're so fucking advanced, what are we doing working here?
And so they distributed the wealth (mostly the land), taking from the rich and giving to the poor. And when they started, the rich white people saw what was happening, and they left, and the land was redistributed.
The whites left, and they took the country's wealth with them. That is a large part of the reason for Zimbabwe's and indeed South Africa's economic woes.
Colonists made fortunes from colonialism. The natives got nothing. The biggest mistake made at the end of apartheid was not to redistribute wealth, it was not to redistribute it enough.
A good economy rewards two things. Hard work, and risk. In order to function, it needs both of those things. Hard workers, and people willing to take risks.
The economy needs to reward both of these virutes, and it needs to do it in proportion to how important each is to society. It is right that Yuppies should be able to afford luxury cars and meals if they take the risk and invest their money in the creation of jobs, goods and ultimately benefit for society at large. If they do so, ultimately putting food in the mouths of and roofs on the houses of hundreds if not thousands of people, then what right has anyone to begrudge them the fruits of their labours?
That is, if they actually do benefit society.
The growing gap between incomes is telling us something. It's telling us that the risk takers are in real terms being rewarded more, while the workers are in real terms being rewarded less. Is this correct? Remember, the whole point of society even tolerating inequality was that society as a whole benefits. But if peoples incomes are decreasing in real terms, then what are we, via our taxes that finance the state in which the risk takers do business, actually paying for?
We, the people, have entered into a contract that says some of us may own more than others, because this benefits society accordingly. But when this arrangement breaks down, and those who benefit us less and less are rewarded more and more, why should we continue to support it? Why should I vote for lower taxes, or less market regulation , or even to keep private property itself legal, when to do so will only make me poorer and more miserable?
In the last century, when the inequality has reached enormous proportions, people asked themselves this question and gave the rational answer. They did not continue to support the system. Some chose radical steps; communism, totalitarianism, etc. But others chose a "New Deal". Basically a society where your risks are rewarded if they actually pay off for someone other than yourself. That's the society westerners have lived in for the last 60 years, and it worked.
But now the income gap is widening again. The question again faces us; should we continue to support the system as it stand, or should we change it? Happily, unlike our ancestors, we at least live in a democratic society where we don't need revolutions and world wars to decide this question. At least in theory.
Not everyone is so obsessed with money as you seem to think. Some people, even astute businesspeople, make decisions based on things like, "doing what's right", "giving back to the community", and "providing quality and value".
Some people also go broke.
Face it, you can put a price on human dignity. Marketers do it every day, and so do businesses. You honestly think any private company gives a danm about breaching customer's trust, making what were once regarded as private transactions, "business community" public. They don't care. And lets be honest, neither do most customers.
The difference between ISPs selling your browsing history and urologists selling pictures of your genitals is only one of opinion, not degree. Your data is out there, floating around changing hands, being poked and prodded, examined and analysed by marketers intent only on bothering you and others with more ads and spam. Worse, someone you trusted made money by putting that data up for sale.
Personally, I would regard this state of affairs as even more offensive than perverts masturbating to pictures my urologist sold them, but most people are quite happy to gurgle away browsing the internet while this is going on. It's a matter of opinion, not degree, but right now most people don't even realise when someone is personally insulting them anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
When a child gets molested, it's generally down to one of two things.
a) The child is kidnapped by the molestor.
b) The child is enticed, or "groomed", by the molestor.
Is case a), no one, no one, could possibly blame the parents for not better protecting their children. Unless we're talking about parents who are known to leave their child home alone regularly, in which case we are really talking about neglect. You can't protect your children from kidnappers that appear our of thin air without chaining them to the wall in your basement or endorsing a police state. And both of those actions are even more wrong than the child actually getting kidnapped.
In the second case b), we're talking about parental neglect plain and simple. If you are so distant from your own offspring, who are living in the same house as you, that you didn't notice they were being lured away right under your nose, then sorry, you've taken your eye off the ball. I'll admit that, yes, you're not a mind reader and neither do you have a sixth sense, but people need to talk to their children about these things. The reality is, people know more about their coworkers social lives than they do of their children's. How sad is that.
So no. No reasonable individual blames parents of the victims for not better protecting their children. Anyone who does so is a sociopath.
Income tax I understand. In order to make that money you, either directly or indirectly, required that the state and government exist in some fashion. (Local Warlords and their posses not looting your local town is evidence that the money is being put to some good use.) Same goes for sales tax, car tax, inheritance tax, and even gift tax to a degree.
But property tax isn't really as justified as the rest. Yes, it is true that for your house to exist and be safe you need some form of civilised government. However, that does not explain why some houses are taxed more than others, despite having the same acreage. Attempts to put a "value" on a house, or indeed any item for that matter, are flawed because no item can be said to have any real value at all until it comes to be sold.
A house is neither being recieved nor generating income over all the years it is being taxed. Furthermore, regardless of any improvements to either the building or the area, the house itself will never become any more or less of a liability to the government, so why does the tax increase based ona non tangable "valuation"? Unlike car tax, the simple presence of the house does not require maintainance or action on the part of the government, save only the provision of services, which are taxed seperately anyway.
The tax is based on the assumption that is appropriate to tax things of "value". But look around the house. Jewellery, electronics, clothes, furniture and indeed, even the owners money itself. These are all items of value, yet only the house is taxed? The house is the exception, not the rule, and the tax exists only as a holdover from when land was in fact the only real source of income. In those days, land tax meant income tax, but today your house and any land with it generate no income whatsoever for you. So why tax the roofs over people's heads?
I'm a believer that the primary form of tax should be on commerce. Commerce uses the governments currency, is protected by the government, upheld by its laws and supported by its infrastructure. The best and most appropriate time to levy a fair tax is when a financial transaction, be it in cash or asset, takes place. When there is no commerce, there should be no tax. If you allow that, you eventually get poll taxes. Restrict tax to commerce, and the government has no better incentive to promote prosperity.
I fail to see how a free trip to space equates to income. Yes, the trip ordinarily costs $138,000, but this paticular trip was priced at "Win this competition". That doesn't have any monetary value. X% of "Win this competition" is not equal to $25,000. As others have mentioned, the company could also have priced that paticular seat at $1 and been well withing their rights. This story seems bogus.
This kind of reminds me of property taxes, where someone walks up to your house, says "I reckons she's worth about this much, so you pay me that much", despite the fact that your house is earning you no income and will be taxed anyway when sold or inherited. It doesn't make much sense.
I'm a believer in financing the state through taxes. But I'm also of the opinion that there should be some kind of logic to tax. Charging people money for something when they haven't actually made any money, or indeed materially benefited in any way, as in this case is like something out of a one dimensional folk tale. When tax is levied, there should always be a question, why is it being levied?
We need taxes. But we also need to remember that the government is not our landlord. It is wrong to have a tax on simply being alive. Tax should be avoidable, if you have no money to pay any.
If they come across a porn site "by accident" amid their travel, I considering it part of a process called "growing up". Anyone with anecdotal evidence of some random teenager's life being "consumed" by porn is hearby and forever adviced to move to Saudi Arabia. They love you there.
From Soviet Russia, botnet fucks YOU!
The problem here, is patents.
The enitre HD scene is chock loaded with patent upon patent dealing with nearly every aspect of the hardware, software and content of the Cable/PVR/TV suite. It is impossible for competitors to emerge when the big companies involved are bristling with frivolous lawsuit ready patent portfolios.
Without fear of patents, imagine the possibilities. There's probably two dozen people reading this story who could string together a company selling linux based PVRs. I've half toyed with the idea of setting up some kind of company making pimped out terabyte TiVo/PVR home servers streaming content wirelessly to Joe SixPack's TV. I'd sell it to him like a microwave oven, and I'd make it usable. Off the shelf parts, screw it together yourself. You could make 30 a month in your garage.
But its a fantasy, and not only because I'm no real entrepreneur. For a start, thanks to the cable monopoly, I could never really get the PVR to "Just Work" with the cable signal. And that's before TiVo et al come pounding on my door with cease and desist orders.
Imagine how real entrepreneurs must feel. There's honest to goodness market out there, waiting with its cash for a good product. People want it, you can make it, but you just can't sell it.
But hey! Thats what patents are all about right? Stopping those greedy garage geeks dishonestly profiting from the tireless innovations of companies like Time Warner. Without patents, Time Warners CEOs would starve!
The price of academic articles ranges from between $20 and $50. Some of them aren't very good.
Authors don't get paid. Reviewers don't get paid. Editors, sometimes get paid. Authors do all the typesetting, spellchecking and formatting themselves. They draw their own diagrams, format everythign in latex and all the printer has to do is... actually, their usually just given "camera" dvi version of the file or something.
Publishers are not needed. They were needed, once upon a time, but not anymore. If they really wanted to survive, they'd perhaps try and improve the pretty mediocre standard of peer review, but I doubt the management of most publishers even know what fields their journals are in, let alone what consitutes a good paper. They are truely dinosaurs, but will probably go on walking the earth for quite some time as academics are about as revolutionary as Bourbons whos names begin with L.
Sometimes, when I play the orignal Blood Omen, or Soul Reaver, I sometimes forget that the other sequels even existed and wonder what the next game will be like. Then I remember that they went ahead and beached the good ship Kain on the shimmering, yet arid beaches of Higher Definition and Lower Content Gaming.
The primary problem with the modern game industry is that graphics designers are still working the the art world equivalent of assembly code. Efficeintly, intimitly and above all slowly. Budgets are being burned on giving Raziel and Kain anatomically correct eyelids when what was actually needed was more game.
Unless you mean to say that when you DO something, the "authorities" should never hear about it. Because, is somehow DOING something, and action to be ashamed of? Something to forever hide?
What's more dignified? Justice in the alley? Or justice on the open street?
Of course, the classic example is the smaller (male) kid being physically assaulted by the larger (male) kid. Indeed, this can be extended to an inexpierienced kid being assaulted by an expierienced, scuffle a day, kid. The standard response is to tell the kid to "Get Tough", "Learn to Fight Back" or some other equally useless advice.
Advice like that is akin to telling someone whos house has been burgled to "Buy Better Locks", or to telling a woman who has been raped "Don't Go Out At Night". The advice, may help prevent a repeat occurennce, but does nothing about the crime that has already been committed.
You're walking down the street, going about your business. Someone pickpockets/robs you. Imagine you can in fact name the person responsible and you report the incident to an officer cop. Imagine having the cop say to you "Sir, Self Defense is a Duty. You should have given chase/defended yourself. If you can do neither, you need to get tougher and/or faster. I'm not going to investgate this any further." Basically, the cop tells you to shove it, despite the fact you can even name your assailant.
I imagine you'd be pretty irritated with the cop. Yet you give exactly the same advice to people who have been assaulted, battered, slandered and libeled. They are expected to simply accept that injustices have been committed against them and will never be rectified? Is that just? Is that dignified? Will defending yourself against future injustices somehow "make up" for past ones?
The problem lies in "children's" exemption from the laws of the land. Even when those "children" would be considered full adults in many societies, and virtually all past ones. Our concept of a "child" has extended itself higher and higher up the age scale, until we are faced with near fully grown teenagers being bestowed with the same "purity" and "innocence" as a day old infant.
Crimes are being committed in our second level educational institutions. Crimes for which no one is held to account. If there's something people can do without being held to account, odds are, they'll do it. I favour holding teenagers accountable for their actions. I don't think its unreasonable. I wouldn't try them as adults, but neither would I grant them carte blanche to do as they pleased. Isn't it funny how all this bullying nonsense, in all its forms, drops dramatically the moment people reach the age of majority? I wounder why that could be?
And to those people who think that "roughhousing" and "teasing" are all a part of growing up, I dismiss your claims. If young people feel an urge to get physical, they should join a sports club. If they feel an urge tease, they should join a drama group or write. "Children", like everyone, should put their energies and talents to worthwhile use, not have them stagnate and emerge as bile to spit on those around them.
Possible, but improbable.
The most likely outcome is we will simply be stuck with a stable, yet high, level of penny stock spam.
"He who has the Gold, makes the Rules"
However, unlike Godwin's law, the person who brings up pedophillia usually ends up "winning" the argument, or at least persuading the most amount of people.
I had intended to write out a long paragraph in an attempt to explain jurispurdice, crime and punishment, human cultural diversity and western cultural snobbery. But instead of wasting my time, I'll just say that anyone who believes such people shouldn't get a free pass, should move to Iran or China or some other authoritarian regieme, because you'll feel much more at home there.
In conclusion, I would like to add that; I would rather have pictures of my childhood self in the hands of pedophiles, than have my own children live in a dictatorship.
It is amazing just how many people still deny this basic fact. That individuals, not the group they belong to, are responsible for their own achievements.
Eugenics is still alive and well in today's society. It's arguably even stronger now with more and more people citing genetics, medical science and above all statistics to show that group A is inferior/superior to Group B. Women are "not as good" at mathematics and the sciences. Men are "not as good" at raising children.
Sweeping statements like this are an insult to hard working and high achieving individuals in every group. If my ethic or gender group is found to score highly on some metric, does that mean that somehow my performance has increased overnight? How many people would argue that my abilities increase when others in my "group" perform better? Should I be paid more because my neighbour works harder?
And yet, people do make these decisions in the negative direction. If my group is found to score lower on some metric, then, invariably, my performance and abilities have been deemed to decrease overnight. Hard working individuals are penalised every day by misconstrument, and indeed in many cases, deliberate misinterpretation of basic probability and statistics.
Consider the following. Toss a coin and let it land on the ground. What is the probability that the coin is heads up?
If you answered 1/2, you do not understand basic probability theory, or statistics.
Now, consider that you have two candidates for an engineering/CS/science/mathematics position standing before you. One of the candidates is a woman, the other is a man. What is the probability that the man is a better candidate than the woman?
And that is why modern eugenics is fundamentally flawed.
<ochlocrat>
Ooggwwwaaaahhhhh!!! Lucky! Lucky!??! He wuz a PEDOPHILE!!!!! PEEED-O-FIIIILEE!!!! We. Have. To. Protect. Our. Children!!!!!
'anging to good fo' 'im!!!! But Hang 'im anyway!!!!!!
</ochlocrat>
Considering that it's AC, I'm calling shennanigans on the whole story.
But on the offchance it is true, you lost the fight the moment you started waiting for them to clear your name. Only you can clear your name, because it's your name and you can't get another one. If you think it's worth fighting for, then you've got to fight for it. If you have to wait for someone to give it back to you, then you'll never get it back at all, whether or not they stamp that letter.
Danm Straight.
Colonists made fortunes from colonialism. The natives got nothing. The biggest mistake made at the end of apartheid was not to redistribute wealth, it was not to redistribute it enough.
A good economy rewards two things. Hard work, and risk. In order to function, it needs both of those things. Hard workers, and people willing to take risks.
The economy needs to reward both of these virutes, and it needs to do it in proportion to how important each is to society. It is right that Yuppies should be able to afford luxury cars and meals if they take the risk and invest their money in the creation of jobs, goods and ultimately benefit for society at large. If they do so, ultimately putting food in the mouths of and roofs on the houses of hundreds if not thousands of people, then what right has anyone to begrudge them the fruits of their labours?
That is, if they actually do benefit society.
The growing gap between incomes is telling us something. It's telling us that the risk takers are in real terms being rewarded more, while the workers are in real terms being rewarded less. Is this correct? Remember, the whole point of society even tolerating inequality was that society as a whole benefits. But if peoples incomes are decreasing in real terms, then what are we, via our taxes that finance the state in which the risk takers do business, actually paying for?
We, the people, have entered into a contract that says some of us may own more than others, because this benefits society accordingly. But when this arrangement breaks down, and those who benefit us less and less are rewarded more and more, why should we continue to support it? Why should I vote for lower taxes, or less market regulation , or even to keep private property itself legal, when to do so will only make me poorer and more miserable?
In the last century, when the inequality has reached enormous proportions, people asked themselves this question and gave the rational answer. They did not continue to support the system. Some chose radical steps; communism, totalitarianism, etc. But others chose a "New Deal". Basically a society where your risks are rewarded if they actually pay off for someone other than yourself. That's the society westerners have lived in for the last 60 years, and it worked.
But now the income gap is widening again. The question again faces us; should we continue to support the system as it stand, or should we change it? Happily, unlike our ancestors, we at least live in a democratic society where we don't need revolutions and world wars to decide this question. At least in theory.
Face it, you can put a price on human dignity. Marketers do it every day, and so do businesses. You honestly think any private company gives a danm about breaching customer's trust, making what were once regarded as private transactions, "business community" public. They don't care. And lets be honest, neither do most customers.
The difference between ISPs selling your browsing history and urologists selling pictures of your genitals is only one of opinion, not degree. Your data is out there, floating around changing hands, being poked and prodded, examined and analysed by marketers intent only on bothering you and others with more ads and spam. Worse, someone you trusted made money by putting that data up for sale.
Personally, I would regard this state of affairs as even more offensive than perverts masturbating to pictures my urologist sold them, but most people are quite happy to gurgle away browsing the internet while this is going on. It's a matter of opinion, not degree, but right now most people don't even realise when someone is personally insulting them anymore.