I think that was his point. ICBMs don't orbit, the shuttle does. If you loaded the shuttle up with nukes it would be much more effective than a 'dumb' ICBM. Except that the technology has advanced to the point where it could be shot out of the sky now.
well, yeah, they're not some anti-democratic cabal running the country as they see fit (I'm not suggesting that you said that they were, I'm just expressing the point again). They keep an eye on the elected house when they start proposing legislation which they have no particular mandate to propose. There was an interesting question raised about a year back as to whether the Lords would block a law which was the direct opposite of what the government had put in its manifesto. I don't remember the outcome though.
actually, it's because in scotland the law against theft\robbery doesn't include the word 'permanently', so if I refuse to pay up and you remove my car until I do, you've stolen my car and you're going to jail. I think the courts also see preventing me using my car by attaching clamp to it to fall under the theft law as well.
As for south of the border, there are occasional prosecutions of wheel clampers for common-law blackmail as well, but because it's such a pain to mount such a case they usually only go after the ones who do stupid things like trying to clamp moving vehicles. I suspect that it's because of a perception amongst a large number of law-enforcement professionals that wheel clampers are somehow their colleagues, and so they give they largely leave them alone so long as they act 'by the book' (where the clampers have written the book). Interestingly a friend of a friend was clamped on what turned out to be a public road, the clamping company claimed that they had old maps (yeah, right), and apart from having his money refunded, no action was taken, despite the enormous raft of offences which must have been committed (not least of which is under section 25 of the Road Trafic Act 1988, Tampering with a vehicle; as well as blackmail and other fun common-law stuff).
The best immediate defence that I can come up with is to always carry some thin chain and a couple of padlocks with you, and if you find your car clamped, chain your tow hook to some immoveable piece of street furniture, this will stop it being removed and leave you no more than the release fee down if you can't force them to remove the clamp through the courts (as opposed to release fee + towing fee + astronomical daily storage costs which keep ticking up even while a court case is ongoing).
Again, you attack the example, you fail to attack the point. You cannot make the blanket statement that a person who does not live in the US, and has not served in a jury is incapable of viewing the facts from the outside & coming to a worthwhile view.
Again, you opposed the example, and then went on as if the point had been opposed when infact only the example had been.
Nope, I acknowledged that you should budget for unexpected expenditure in general, that does not then mean that everyone should be expected to have spare funds to be able to afford to perform civic service. Nor does it justify imposing upon people the burden of having to expend that surplus. The following is an example, if you want to oppose the point in the first half of the paragraph, you have to oppose the point, not just the example: Is it ok for me to steal your car because you have it insured?
Jury service is indeed not a voluntary position, but it is still unpaid work which deprives a person of their ability to perform paid employment. I don't see how you can manage to treat not being paid to do some work as conceptually different to working for free.
I think that you've managed to jumble two points into the next sentence. I'm going to take the second one first.
If I get hit by another vehicle while driving and spend several months recovering I DO get lost wages, I claim them from the person who hit me (and their insurer). Apparently most of the expenditure on settling insurance claims for car accidents is for paying long term lost earnings to people horribly maimnd in accidents.
I gave you three options:
accept that you were wrong, jurors should be prevented from being out of pocket by paying their lost earnings out of general taxation
Assert that jurors should be out of pocket (independent of whether that causes them significant hardship)
Accept that jurors should not be out of pocket, but oppose the notion that they should be paid from general taxation, in which case you have the identify where the money to pay them should come from
I did not call the US government opressive for having juries! I said that the purpose of juries is to protect citizens from oppressive governments (even if there's isn't one in power right now). Whether that oppression is a single corrupt judge, a tunnel-vision suffering prosecution, or a wholesale conspiracy to lock people up for politically opposing the government by getting them on trumped up charges. As such, they are supposed to be impartial any only find someone guilty if they actually did the crime. None of that, however, precludes their being paid sufficiently that they don't end up out of pocket.
I then went on a small digression about juries in civil cases. Which pointed out that in a criminal trial you're serving your fellow citizens by keeping the government in check (soap, ballot, jury, ammo), but in a civil trial you're the finder of fact in a dispute between two third parties, and that it's grossly unfair for people to be picked upon to provide that service, not only for nothing, but at the expense of their ability to earn a wage. Particularly when everyone else who makes the court work (the judge, the clerk etc) is getting paid.
I don't need experience of being a juror in the US to absorb the facts that (a) the average wage in the US is $120 per working day[2007] (b) most states give in the region of $10-$20 per day to jurors. Nor do I need experience of being a juror in the US to notice that at best there's a $100 loss per day of service, nor do I need any particular experience of anything to see that people being randomly chosen to do service which will cost them $100 \day isn't fair. What I then proposed was that people should be prevented from being out of pocket by being paid properly (where 'properly' is short of details, because I'm talking about principles), and that since the government is charged with providing properly functioning courts, the government should pay for it ou
Ok, I'm also confused about why you don't understand the value of an objective point of view (do we say that discussion of the appropriate penalty for robbing a bank is the exclusive domain of convicted bank robbers?), but anyway, to return to the rest of our disagreement.
Every time you oppose one of my statements you fail to oppose my point, you oppose my example and then imply that the actual point is invalid.
Here is the argument broken down into stages:
Serving on a Jury will prevent you from going to work, this will mean that you won't be paid, this will leave you out of pocket. People should not be out of pocket for having served on a Jury. Therefore, people who serve on a Jury should be paid sufficiently to make up for lost earnings. The govenrment provides courts, all the stuff in a court which isn't provded by either party (i.e. the judge, the bailiffs, the fabric of the building itself, the clerk etc.) is provided and paid for by the government, it is therefore logical that the jury, which is provided by the government should be paid for by the government.
Now, the only way for you to wriggle out of that is either to say that people should be out of pocket for having served on a jury, or to dispute the logical step from the government providing a jury to the government having to stump up the money to pay them, in which case you must nominate someone else to pay them.
I don't live in the US, nor have I served on a jury. This gives me something called an 'objective point of view'.
Look, my point is that I earn money to spend on what I want to spend it on, and it's not right that I should be prevented from spending it on that (whether it be a new hat or Christmas presents for my hypothetical kids) because I'm put upon to not earn any money. Why do you think that my labour for free is society's entitlement?
I do budget for non-necessities, what I do not, and should have to do, is budget for is a massive loss in my income because I'm randomly picked to stay off work so I can labour for the government for free
I don't know why you think that paying jurors from general taxation would be a 'gross misuse of taxpayer dollars'. That's the exact type of thing that taxes are collected for. Government wants something done, government pays for it to be done, government generates that money through taxation.
Your whole point about jurors being impartial has no bearing on whether or not they should be paid properly.
We have juries to protect citizens against oppressive governments trying to railroad people through the courts. That's what they're there for. We (you) may not have an oppressive government right now, but the possibility of one existing in the future is why we have juries. When juries came into being, the people who served on them were uniformly (a) filthy rich (b) people who derived their income from other people doing work. Things have changed, the system hasn't caught up.
Society has determined that part of living in this country and reaping its benefits (such as laws, public utilities, roads, and a general sense of order) has a cost, which includes taxes and public service (including jury duty).
I reject that principle. The cost is taxes, everything else is paid for with the taxes, people should not be picked at random to carry more than their share of the burden. You ARE working for free, I don't know how to explain that more clearly. You're not doing your day job because you're being required to perform some other function, and you're not being paid (in any real sense) to do it. What other definition of 'working for free' is there? You can argue (wrongly) that people should work for free, but you can't argue that jurors are not working for free. I fail to see why doing productive work, paying taxes on your wages, and then expecting those taxes to cover your wages when it's your turn to do work in service of society is 'being a mooch'.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Well I'm not, sorry to break your illusions. You're wrong, and I'll keep telling you that until you understand it.
Hopefully, at the very least, the fact that parliament has realised this fact will mean that copyright laws will get a little more sane.
I don't want to see more laws, I want to see some prosecutions! Common-law blackmail is still illegal, and still carries life imprisonment & an unlimited fine, and doesn't require the thing threatened to be illegal.
Except that bampot Pa Broon is in no position to wield a large majority, AND there's a general election in May, so there's only actually around 30 days of parliamentary business left to try and force this through, with a majority so thin that he's had to give major concessions (with our money) to minority parties to get his bills through in the past.
The Lords can block 'money' bills but, by convention, don't. They did once at the start of the 20th century, that's why we had the first parliament act. The Lords also let through any bill which is an implementation of the ruling party's last manifesto.
re: your last paragraph, so as long as you know 3 months in advance that you won't be able to earn your living for (say) 2 months, everything is fine? Convenience, and being able to give your employer advance notice of an extended absence is all well and good, but doesn't drill down to the bedrock of the problem and that is that jurors on long trials end up significantly out of pocket through no fault of their own and the debate as to what can be done about it. Maybe starving to death is over the top, but I bet a handfull of cases could be found where people have lost their homes, and there must be more cases where people suffer some significant level of hardship. Do you want to have to tell your kids in early November "Daddy's doing Jury service for a month, so you won't be getting any Christmas presents. Also, turn the heating off, we can't afford it."? Or how about not having a holiday this year because there's a gaping $1000+ hole in your finances?
If instead, the combined salary of everyone on the jury is half of that (a couple people make a couple hundred grand, the rest are unemployed), and the trial lasts 3 days, the cost would be $750. If you are filing a lawsuit over nonpayment of contract fees for 5 grand, that's a significant portion of your cost, that gets incurred whether or not your case actually goes to trial.
This seems to be a major disjoint in the thinking - I suspect that everyone advocating paying jurors more than a nominal sum is assuming that the government will cough up the money to fund it. If the costs of running the civil courts properly exceeds the amount that can be generated through reasonable court costs, then the civil courts will have to be funded through some other means (i.e. general taxation). Even if you don't agree with that, why should the desire to keep plantiffs costs down be used as a justification for picking people at random and forcing them to work for free? Even if we say that jurors in criminal cases are performing some civic duty to be the last bulwark between their fellow citizens and an oppressive government, why should we extend that the juries in civil trials? They are being made to work for free so two other third parties can settle their dispute at a minimum of cost. It's little better than talking about how cheap a commodity sugar was 200 years ago.
so does the European Convention on Human Rights (and, by incorporation, the Human Rights Act 1998), and general common law principle. It won't stop the government trying to do it, and it won't always stop them getting away with it either.
yeah, if it's 3 days it's a minor inconvenience. What if it's 3 months? What if it's longer? Randomly taking Joe Citizen out of the entire routine of his life (and to an extent that it may be difficult for him to get back into it) because a computer spat his name out strikes me as unreasonable, and I think that every effort should be made to minimise that disruption. (and that means no blanket bans of facebook).
Getting a jury of your own isn't a payoff - you're being tried, that trial being 'fair' because you have a jury only returns you to a positon of equilibrium. In the mean time the jury exists because random groups of people are picked to have their lives disrupted - that's a cost to them and what I'm proposing is that since jurors do an unpleasant job which it necessary to keep everyone else (if they're unfortunate enough to be on trial) at some level of equilibrium they should be properly paid to do that by everyone else, because they're serving everyone else.
Yes, I accept that stuff happens sometimes and brings with it costs (financial and personal), but it shouldn't happen because the government deliberately makes it happen by randomly picking people to incure costs because the government wants something done. To move things to a purely financial view of costs, say the government has a budget shortfall of $1,000,000. Is it right for it to plug that by sending out a demand for payment of a one-off $1000 tax to 1000 randomly selected people? Or to spread the costs evenly over all everyone? Well, now it needs something which entails personal costs, however it can convert those personal costs to financial costs by picking people at random, and paying them properly to do the job. The financial costs can then be borne by everyone through general taxation. Is that not a preferable way to go about doing things?
One final thought - drafted soldiers still get proper wages.
Did you skip 'Civics' in Jr. High to get high? What part of 'jury DUTY' did you not understand? Pain and suffering? WTF?!?! You self-entitled asshat!
1) A duty is something that I accept, it is not assigned to me by someone else who thinks that I ought to do it 2) Do you know what the difference between $100\day and $15\day is over the course of a month? $1700. How many months of being $1700 in the hole could you survive before your finances collapsed? And even if you didn't lose your home, you would still be down that much money to spend on whatever else you wanted to spend your money on. OP's use of 'pain & suffering' may be a little over the top, but the point that as a juror you're prevented from earning your living, and should be properly compensated for that is a valid one.
'Duty' normally implies that someone with a vested interest in you doing something wants to construct an emotive reason why you should, because they can't justify it any other way.
A better term would be jury service, because you are serving your community, but servants still get paid, a butler will be paid ~ £30,000 \year - he may be a servant, but he's paid a stonking pile of cash because of the unpleasant stuff that he has to put up with.
In conclusion, I'd be more in favour of jurors being treated like dirt if they were being paid handsomely, rather than being essentially required to perform voluntary work, and then being told that as a condition of doing this voluntary work, they have to shred their ability to maintain a social life.
So provide the jury with a copy of Blacks Legal Dictionary. Or start operating the courts in English so that normal dictionaries are as right as any others.
I really don't see why you think you have all these rights when flying. People just keep forgetting that flying is not a right. Nope, not guaranteed anywhere.
As far as I'm concerned it's my right, and mine alone, to decide who I expose myself to. Why do you think that that should not be the case mearly because I want to use an aircraft? It's deeply personal, and even if you're happy to show off, you don't get to tell other people that what's good for you is what's good for them.
I largely agree with you, a fear of nakedness can never be an excuse for less security.
Why not? Why should the handful of people who set up security measures be allowed to tell everyone else what a sufficient level of decency & dignity is for them? Being able to tell someone when they're allowed to be dressed or not is extremely personal, and more-or-less the last hurdle to cover before you as-good-as own them.
Yeah, I know that it's moron recruiters trying to draw a line, and doing so ineptly. No-one seems to take notice of the word 'physics' either and sees a degree in physics to be equal to a degree in anything else at the same grade.
I don't have any non-academic experience because no-one is interested in giving me a job, catch-22.
I have an MSc, no-one is very interested in that either.
Having a degree is not all it's cracked up to be anymore. The economy having gone down the tube probably doesn't help either, but all I've got out of it so far (3 years in the summer) is >£10000 worth of debt.
Slashdot Mirror
the side discussion was about the likely actions of the PRC if the situation were reversed
I think that was his point. ICBMs don't orbit, the shuttle does. If you loaded the shuttle up with nukes it would be much more effective than a 'dumb' ICBM. Except that the technology has advanced to the point where it could be shot out of the sky now.
well, yeah, they're not some anti-democratic cabal running the country as they see fit (I'm not suggesting that you said that they were, I'm just expressing the point again). They keep an eye on the elected house when they start proposing legislation which they have no particular mandate to propose. There was an interesting question raised about a year back as to whether the Lords would block a law which was the direct opposite of what the government had put in its manifesto. I don't remember the outcome though.
doesn't ebay essentially have a monopoly on the online auction market?
actually, it's because in scotland the law against theft\robbery doesn't include the word 'permanently', so if I refuse to pay up and you remove my car until I do, you've stolen my car and you're going to jail. I think the courts also see preventing me using my car by attaching clamp to it to fall under the theft law as well.
As for south of the border, there are occasional prosecutions of wheel clampers for common-law blackmail as well, but because it's such a pain to mount such a case they usually only go after the ones who do stupid things like trying to clamp moving vehicles. I suspect that it's because of a perception amongst a large number of law-enforcement professionals that wheel clampers are somehow their colleagues, and so they give they largely leave them alone so long as they act 'by the book' (where the clampers have written the book).
Interestingly a friend of a friend was clamped on what turned out to be a public road, the clamping company claimed that they had old maps (yeah, right), and apart from having his money refunded, no action was taken, despite the enormous raft of offences which must have been committed (not least of which is under section 25 of the Road Trafic Act 1988, Tampering with a vehicle; as well as blackmail and other fun common-law stuff).
The best immediate defence that I can come up with is to always carry some thin chain and a couple of padlocks with you, and if you find your car clamped, chain your tow hook to some immoveable piece of street furniture, this will stop it being removed and leave you no more than the release fee down if you can't force them to remove the clamp through the courts (as opposed to release fee + towing fee + astronomical daily storage costs which keep ticking up even while a court case is ongoing).
Again, you attack the example, you fail to attack the point. You cannot make the blanket statement that a person who does not live in the US, and has not served in a jury is incapable of viewing the facts from the outside & coming to a worthwhile view.
Again, you opposed the example, and then went on as if the point had been opposed when infact only the example had been.
Nope, I acknowledged that you should budget for unexpected expenditure in general, that does not then mean that everyone should be expected to have spare funds to be able to afford to perform civic service. Nor does it justify imposing upon people the burden of having to expend that surplus. The following is an example, if you want to oppose the point in the first half of the paragraph, you have to oppose the point, not just the example: Is it ok for me to steal your car because you have it insured?
Jury service is indeed not a voluntary position, but it is still unpaid work which deprives a person of their ability to perform paid employment. I don't see how you can manage to treat not being paid to do some work as conceptually different to working for free.
I think that you've managed to jumble two points into the next sentence. I'm going to take the second one first.
If I get hit by another vehicle while driving and spend several months recovering I DO get lost wages, I claim them from the person who hit me (and their insurer). Apparently most of the expenditure on settling insurance claims for car accidents is for paying long term lost earnings to people horribly maimnd in accidents.
I gave you three options:
I did not call the US government opressive for having juries! I said that the purpose of juries is to protect citizens from oppressive governments (even if there's isn't one in power right now). Whether that oppression is a single corrupt judge, a tunnel-vision suffering prosecution, or a wholesale conspiracy to lock people up for politically opposing the government by getting them on trumped up charges. As such, they are supposed to be impartial any only find someone guilty if they actually did the crime.
None of that, however, precludes their being paid sufficiently that they don't end up out of pocket.
I then went on a small digression about juries in civil cases. Which pointed out that in a criminal trial you're serving your fellow citizens by keeping the government in check (soap, ballot, jury, ammo), but in a civil trial you're the finder of fact in a dispute between two third parties, and that it's grossly unfair for people to be picked upon to provide that service, not only for nothing, but at the expense of their ability to earn a wage. Particularly when everyone else who makes the court work (the judge, the clerk etc) is getting paid.
I don't need experience of being a juror in the US to absorb the facts that (a) the average wage in the US is $120 per working day[2007] (b) most states give in the region of $10-$20 per day to jurors.
Nor do I need experience of being a juror in the US to notice that at best there's a $100 loss per day of service, nor do I need any particular experience of anything to see that people being randomly chosen to do service which will cost them $100 \day isn't fair.
What I then proposed was that people should be prevented from being out of pocket by being paid properly (where 'properly' is short of details, because I'm talking about principles), and that since the government is charged with providing properly functioning courts, the government should pay for it ou
Ok, I'm also confused about why you don't understand the value of an objective point of view (do we say that discussion of the appropriate penalty for robbing a bank is the exclusive domain of convicted bank robbers?), but anyway, to return to the rest of our disagreement.
Every time you oppose one of my statements you fail to oppose my point, you oppose my example and then imply that the actual point is invalid.
Here is the argument broken down into stages:
Serving on a Jury will prevent you from going to work, this will mean that you won't be paid, this will leave you out of pocket. People should not be out of pocket for having served on a Jury. Therefore, people who serve on a Jury should be paid sufficiently to make up for lost earnings.
The govenrment provides courts, all the stuff in a court which isn't provded by either party (i.e. the judge, the bailiffs, the fabric of the building itself, the clerk etc.) is provided and paid for by the government, it is therefore logical that the jury, which is provided by the government should be paid for by the government.
Now, the only way for you to wriggle out of that is either to say that people should be out of pocket for having served on a jury, or to dispute the logical step from the government providing a jury to the government having to stump up the money to pay them, in which case you must nominate someone else to pay them.
Your choice. You can:
The discussiuon will be over once you pick one.
I don't live in the US, nor have I served on a jury. This gives me something called an 'objective point of view'.
Look, my point is that I earn money to spend on what I want to spend it on, and it's not right that I should be prevented from spending it on that (whether it be a new hat or Christmas presents for my hypothetical kids) because I'm put upon to not earn any money.
Why do you think that my labour for free is society's entitlement?
I do budget for non-necessities, what I do not, and should have to do, is budget for is a massive loss in my income because I'm randomly picked to stay off work so I can labour for the government for free
I don't know why you think that paying jurors from general taxation would be a 'gross misuse of taxpayer dollars'. That's the exact type of thing that taxes are collected for. Government wants something done, government pays for it to be done, government generates that money through taxation.
Your whole point about jurors being impartial has no bearing on whether or not they should be paid properly.
We have juries to protect citizens against oppressive governments trying to railroad people through the courts. That's what they're there for. We (you) may not have an oppressive government right now, but the possibility of one existing in the future is why we have juries. When juries came into being, the people who served on them were uniformly (a) filthy rich (b) people who derived their income from other people doing work. Things have changed, the system hasn't caught up.
Society has determined that part of living in this country and reaping its benefits (such as laws, public utilities, roads, and a general sense of order) has a cost, which includes taxes and public service (including jury duty).
I reject that principle. The cost is taxes, everything else is paid for with the taxes, people should not be picked at random to carry more than their share of the burden.
You ARE working for free, I don't know how to explain that more clearly. You're not doing your day job because you're being required to perform some other function, and you're not being paid (in any real sense) to do it. What other definition of 'working for free' is there?
You can argue (wrongly) that people should work for free, but you can't argue that jurors are not working for free.
I fail to see why doing productive work, paying taxes on your wages, and then expecting those taxes to cover your wages when it's your turn to do work in service of society is 'being a mooch'.
You should be ashamed of yourself.
Well I'm not, sorry to break your illusions. You're wrong, and I'll keep telling you that until you understand it.
Hopefully, at the very least, the fact that parliament has realised this fact will mean that copyright laws will get a little more sane.
I don't want to see more laws, I want to see some prosecutions! Common-law blackmail is still illegal, and still carries life imprisonment & an unlimited fine, and doesn't require the thing threatened to be illegal.
Except that bampot Pa Broon is in no position to wield a large majority, AND there's a general election in May, so there's only actually around 30 days of parliamentary business left to try and force this through, with a majority so thin that he's had to give major concessions (with our money) to minority parties to get his bills through in the past.
The Lords can block 'money' bills but, by convention, don't. They did once at the start of the 20th century, that's why we had the first parliament act.
The Lords also let through any bill which is an implementation of the ruling party's last manifesto.
re: your last paragraph, so as long as you know 3 months in advance that you won't be able to earn your living for (say) 2 months, everything is fine? Convenience, and being able to give your employer advance notice of an extended absence is all well and good, but doesn't drill down to the bedrock of the problem and that is that jurors on long trials end up significantly out of pocket through no fault of their own and the debate as to what can be done about it. Maybe starving to death is over the top, but I bet a handfull of cases could be found where people have lost their homes, and there must be more cases where people suffer some significant level of hardship. Do you want to have to tell your kids in early November "Daddy's doing Jury service for a month, so you won't be getting any Christmas presents. Also, turn the heating off, we can't afford it."? Or how about not having a holiday this year because there's a gaping $1000+ hole in your finances?
If instead, the combined salary of everyone on the jury is half of that (a couple people make a couple hundred grand, the rest are unemployed), and the trial lasts 3 days, the cost would be $750. If you are filing a lawsuit over nonpayment of contract fees for 5 grand, that's a significant portion of your cost, that gets incurred whether or not your case actually goes to trial.
This seems to be a major disjoint in the thinking - I suspect that everyone advocating paying jurors more than a nominal sum is assuming that the government will cough up the money to fund it.
If the costs of running the civil courts properly exceeds the amount that can be generated through reasonable court costs, then the civil courts will have to be funded through some other means (i.e. general taxation). Even if you don't agree with that, why should the desire to keep plantiffs costs down be used as a justification for picking people at random and forcing them to work for free? Even if we say that jurors in criminal cases are performing some civic duty to be the last bulwark between their fellow citizens and an oppressive government, why should we extend that the juries in civil trials? They are being made to work for free so two other third parties can settle their dispute at a minimum of cost. It's little better than talking about how cheap a commodity sugar was 200 years ago.
No-one will be expecting the Spanish Inquisition...
so does the European Convention on Human Rights (and, by incorporation, the Human Rights Act 1998), and general common law principle. It won't stop the government trying to do it, and it won't always stop them getting away with it either.
Ah, yes, a poll tax. Nice idea. It certainly went well for Mrs. Thatcher.
yeah, if it's 3 days it's a minor inconvenience. What if it's 3 months? What if it's longer? Randomly taking Joe Citizen out of the entire routine of his life (and to an extent that it may be difficult for him to get back into it) because a computer spat his name out strikes me as unreasonable, and I think that every effort should be made to minimise that disruption. (and that means no blanket bans of facebook).
Getting a jury of your own isn't a payoff - you're being tried, that trial being 'fair' because you have a jury only returns you to a positon of equilibrium. In the mean time the jury exists because random groups of people are picked to have their lives disrupted - that's a cost to them and what I'm proposing is that since jurors do an unpleasant job which it necessary to keep everyone else (if they're unfortunate enough to be on trial) at some level of equilibrium they should be properly paid to do that by everyone else, because they're serving everyone else.
Yes, I accept that stuff happens sometimes and brings with it costs (financial and personal), but it shouldn't happen because the government deliberately makes it happen by randomly picking people to incure costs because the government wants something done.
To move things to a purely financial view of costs, say the government has a budget shortfall of $1,000,000. Is it right for it to plug that by sending out a demand for payment of a one-off $1000 tax to 1000 randomly selected people? Or to spread the costs evenly over all everyone?
Well, now it needs something which entails personal costs, however it can convert those personal costs to financial costs by picking people at random, and paying them properly to do the job. The financial costs can then be borne by everyone through general taxation. Is that not a preferable way to go about doing things?
One final thought - drafted soldiers still get proper wages.
Did you skip 'Civics' in Jr. High to get high?
What part of 'jury DUTY' did you not understand?
Pain and suffering? WTF?!?!
You self-entitled asshat!
1) A duty is something that I accept, it is not assigned to me by someone else who thinks that I ought to do it
2) Do you know what the difference between $100\day and $15\day is over the course of a month? $1700. How many months of being $1700 in the hole could you survive before your finances collapsed? And even if you didn't lose your home, you would still be down that much money to spend on whatever else you wanted to spend your money on.
OP's use of 'pain & suffering' may be a little over the top, but the point that as a juror you're prevented from earning your living, and should be properly compensated for that is a valid one.
'Duty' normally implies that someone with a vested interest in you doing something wants to construct an emotive reason why you should, because they can't justify it any other way.
A better term would be jury service, because you are serving your community, but servants still get paid, a butler will be paid ~ £30,000 \year - he may be a servant, but he's paid a stonking pile of cash because of the unpleasant stuff that he has to put up with.
In conclusion, I'd be more in favour of jurors being treated like dirt if they were being paid handsomely, rather than being essentially required to perform voluntary work, and then being told that as a condition of doing this voluntary work, they have to shred their ability to maintain a social life.
So provide the jury with a copy of Blacks Legal Dictionary. Or start operating the courts in English so that normal dictionaries are as right as any others.
I really don't see why you think you have all these rights when flying. People just keep forgetting that flying is not a right. Nope, not guaranteed anywhere.
As far as I'm concerned it's my right, and mine alone, to decide who I expose myself to. Why do you think that that should not be the case mearly because I want to use an aircraft?
It's deeply personal, and even if you're happy to show off, you don't get to tell other people that what's good for you is what's good for them.
Perhaps its going straight into their proposed centralised database along with your other biometrics.
Crikey! with RFID passports that's actually within the realms of possibility now. I hadn't considered that. Now these things seem even more sinister.
I largely agree with you, a fear of nakedness can never be an excuse for less security.
Why not? Why should the handful of people who set up security measures be allowed to tell everyone else what a sufficient level of decency & dignity is for them? Being able to tell someone when they're allowed to be dressed or not is extremely personal, and more-or-less the last hurdle to cover before you as-good-as own them.
Luton, Stanstead, Gatwick, City - even if you want to go from London there are (currently) other options
don't worry, that's what the .1 is for
Yeah, I know that it's moron recruiters trying to draw a line, and doing so ineptly. No-one seems to take notice of the word 'physics' either and sees a degree in physics to be equal to a degree in anything else at the same grade.
I don't have any non-academic experience because no-one is interested in giving me a job, catch-22.
I have an MSc, no-one is very interested in that either.
Having a degree is not all it's cracked up to be anymore. The economy having gone down the tube probably doesn't help either, but all I've got out of it so far (3 years in the summer) is >£10000 worth of debt.