Me too. I skimmed through the paper; he just defines some functions, and he calls his new model Beckstrom's Law. How is his definition a law?
It's handy that he named his observation "Beckam's Law" for us, because then we can apply inviolet's law:
A new discovery is headline-grabbing FUD/bunk if its discoverer names it after himself. Whereas a new discovery is probably useful if others name it after its discoverer.
Think of it as an extrapolation of the importance of peer review. Pretty handy, eh? That's why I named it after mys-- aw, damnit!
Has anyone recorded earthquake prediction measurements and compared them? I would be curious to know which ones have been closest to the mark and on what frequency? I suspect different measurements are likely to be right some of the time, but not all the time, because the seismic triggers may vary from region to region.
That would be kewl, because then we would be able to predict earthquake predictions.
Eh, maybe not, we might stack-overflow the cosmos, and God would be mightly ticked off at us. Can you imagine walking up the pearly gates, and you peer through the bars and see that God is angrily looking through a coredump that YOU caused? Yikes!
Hungarian law requires half of all MP's to be present to make any vote legit. I imagine it would have helped here.
Yes, Hungarian law would've helped here, but it would've imposed some significant costs too... not least of which is the requirement that every MP change his last name to include the first letter of his party affiliation, like George H. W. rBush, Hillary R. dClinton, etc.
While my initial thought is "Shame on those people who subverted the democratic process" I can't help but think.. "Shame on the faulty system with such a stupid loophole." Did they subvert the democratic process? Kinda. But did they do things within the boundries of their law? Apparently so.
That's not what happened. When a vote on an issue like is needed, and everyone agrees with the new law but don't want to be on record saying so, an after-hours party like this is arranged. Everyone who agrees goes home with a wink, a nod, and plausible deniability.
If you even read the whole summary, you'd note that the Russians began it by charging to use "their" resources. U.S. astronauts can't use Russian facilities either without incurring a hefty bill. Both sides are being petty children.
No, this one is on the Russians. They started it. The Americans are just playing tit-for-tat (with random forgiveness, we presume), which is always an appropriate moral strategy.
This is not the first time the Russians, bankrupt, have pulled a stunt like this. Mir was full of junk because the Russians would lease space to whoever to run an experiment and would then refuse to bring the experiment's materials back to Earth. They kept them on board in order to continue charging the (exorbitant) rent for space aboard Mir. The cosmonauts complained about the piles of junk, though not publicly.
So, basically, a bunch of officially-included bookmark shortcuts.
Opera has had this for ages. It is truly sweet to be able to type "g Argle Fargle" into the address-bar to do a google-search for "Argle Fargle" without ever touching my mouse. There is also 'z' for Amazon search, 'a' for Ask.com, 'b' for bittorrent, 'y' for Yahoo, etc. etc. And you can add your own.
High-sounding but irrelevant verbiage having no bearing on the facts. I mean, how grandiose you are in dismissing one simple fact: working our manufacturing economy was how Americans managed to have a standard of living envied by most of the world. How do you think wealth is created? By magic? Hardly: it's by building and selling things to other countries, it's called trade. The fact is, we've been doing a lousy job of that for the past thirty-odd years and that's why our standard of living is dropping and unemployment is increasing. Suppose we took your idea to its logical conclusion, and ended up with an entirely automated production system with no need for people at all. We'd all be unemployed at that point. No thanks.
You have not thought this through. Who provides raw materials, who designs/maintains/fixes the system, who designs new products, who handles sales and distribution? (Each of those topics represents an entire organization, or several.) The only part of that which presently does not involve many humans, and should not involve any at all, is the mindlessly repetitive steps.
Fact is, there are millions upon millions of people that are perfectly happy installing wingnuts for a living, and there's not a goddamn thing wrong with that.
What is the value of the placement of a wingnut on a threaded shaft? How much food or gold or oil would you trade for someone to screw fifty wingnuts on for you? A very small bite of your bread? Maybe now you see what kind of standard of living a repetitive manual labor job objectively justifies.
You decide. But at this point in history, there's only one way to create wealth, and you don't do it by not working. Robots may be more efficient at manufacturing some products than human beings, but keep firmly in mind that civilization does not solely revolve around manufacturing trade goods efficiently. People have to figure in there somewhere. That's China's biggest problem right now: their people are little better than organic robots. In any event, if you look at efficiency as the only reason for industry, then you're no better than the typical American CEO slimeball that sold his own people down the river for a quick buck.
If you don't look at efficiency as the only reason for industry, you wannabe Philosopher King, then you are proposing that humans benefit by receiving less value per manhour. It feels virtuous to come in here and shout about vague "higher purposes" for the faceless crowd, but to any actual individual, time is precious and so you are full of s***.
You can tell you are full of s*** because you think that quickness itself makes a buck somehow illegitimate. Go join the Amish, they love people who talk like you.
That won't happen until (and if) we get our own manufacturing base back on track and can wean ourselves off the Chinese tit of cheap imports.
Why should Americans, or the citizens of any modernized educated enlightened society, perform repetitive labor?
That's a job for robots... and a teething phase for wanna-be-modern societies.
That, or grow some balls and raise the tariff structure to prevent the destruction of our remaining domestic industries.
Tariffs opearte by raising the final costs to the consumer. By your cavalier attitude I assume you are willing to accept that (how thrilling it is to be grandiose with other peoples' money!). The much larger downside that you should not accept, is the reestablishment of repetitive-labor jobs currently performed in China. Keeping that work in China keeps the pollution in China (a fact which they accept). And keeping that work in China signals to all Americans that "you will not be able to earn a living doing mindless work".
Presently, a lot of Americans are laboring under the delusion that they should somehow get a house, car, TV, medicine, and internet in exchange for installing wingnuts all day on an assembly line.
No. Millions of people losing their jobs is a nationwide problem. Teenagers taking naked pictures of themselves is a non-issue. These aren't exploited kids being molested or stripped against their will. And I guarantee you at least one of these prosecutors streaked, went skinny-dipping, etc. in their youth. This is just ridiculous. Don't we as a nation have better things to be worried about than a teenager getting naked for another teenager?!
In the (paraphrased) words of Lewis Black...
"This issue is right up there with the question of, 'Are we eating too much garlic as a people?'."
Its the opposite. The government is not punishing any existing newspapers that wish to continue to endorse candidates, instead, they're providing a reward for news papers that wish to return to reporting news instead of making it.
Suppose you are the Salt Lake Tribune, and you want to continue as a regular newspaper, in which event you will be taxed. And suppose that your competitor, the Deseret News or whatever, chooses tax-exempt status and hence gets a 20% 'reward'.
Do you think you'll be able to compete with that for long? How are you able to believe that in this situation, the government is "not punishing" your Salt Lake Tribune?
There is no way to turn the sow's ear of preferential tax breaks into a silk purse of "fair economic controls" or "level playing field" or "reward Paul without punishing Peter".
Because "stable" is relative. You probably notice the seasons changing, too. But we've been in a stable range for the past 12,000 years or so, neither ice age nor steamy jungle (or parched desert), which is unusually long. We're becoming unstable not from any natural increase in Greenhouse gases or other factors, but from the dramatic and recent increase in accumulating Greenhouse gases from human activity (a dramatic and recent increase in the human population has contributed). The human activity contribution has multiplied many times over, tipping the natural balance from the old stability towards some new global climate different from the old one.
I see you've mastered the art of frosting your conjectures with sufficient eloquence to silence the opposition. Now that you understand this power, you can recognize it when you see it in yourself and others.
If you refer to one of the other replies to the parent article, you will find links to the real explanation, namely, the periodic cycles within our current ice age. Even the current ramp upward in global mean temperatures is a repeat of an old, stable, oft-repeated trend.
Having been a hiring manager for a couple of years, I got used to scanning resumes and deciding within 10 seconds whether to read further or not. Guess what: the one thing that matters is relevant experience.
The reason that everyone gives conflicting advice about "how to get hired" or "what to put on a resume" is that there is no universal formula. There is none, because if there was, everybody would game it, and then it would stop working.
The stock market works the same way. If someone is publicly advocating or selling a formula, then you already know that the formula doesn't work any more.
Women work this way too. They must give conflicting signals in order to avoid getting gamed. Only by watching you flop around trying to understand what they say they want, can they gather enough data to infer your true character.
There will never be a general success formula for any of these realms, because the payoffs (salary / money / womb-space) are too big.
I think their definition of free will is rather weak, probably equivalent to non-deterministic.
Indeed. Lots of people are under the impression that free will is a function of randomness. Sorry guys, but randomness is insanity. I would prefer that my actions flowed deterministically from my inner mental state. How else could I act according to my convictions?
Anyway, the question is only relevant in the context of religion. Without a bearded guy giving out passes to heaven, it doesn't matter whether the universe could've progressed differently. Our actions ought to progress lawfully and predicatably from the programming that we've build into our minds.
Or maybe people are just afraid of the concept of predictability. In a jungle or a battlefield, predictability is terrible, so perhaps we've got a race memory against it.
Just wondering, who exactly is paying the state the property taxes on acres and acres and acres of unused desert?
You are not understanding what real estate taxes are for.
A hundred acres of very valuable assets (solar panels + hardware) are now sitting in the middle of nowhere. This creates a burden for law-enforcement and also for the fire department, who must both now protect them. It is expensive to protect a target that is simultaneously distant and valuable.
Normally that burden would be underwritten by the solar farm's real-estate taxes. If the farm demanded preferential tax treatment, then its burden is simply transferred to the rest of the community.
If the plant generates 100 million a year in revenue, and it costs 1 billion, it will pay for itself and return a profit in 10 years (small change for employee and maintenance aside).
No it will not.
The TVM on $1b capital is at least $50m a year, but for a moderately risky investment it will be more like $75m. That means that your example plant only generates $25-50m profit a year. That's a 20-30 year payback, which is close to the design lifetime of the panels (20-25 years) and certainly less than the design lifetime of all the other components in the plant (rotators, inverters, storage devices).
Plus real-estate taxes (which you may get a pass on, which means your state gets poorer) plus insurance (against, say, hail damage) plus lots of maintenance on a quantity of panels and infrastructure large enough to supply $100m of electricity. You handwave these things away but they are dealbreakers when the plant can already barely pay for itself by the time it wears out.
I'm not saying that actual solar plants have financials along these lines (though they are still underwater, which is the reason nobody is building them). I'm just using this to show that you don't know your economic fundamentals.
I know that there's no intelligent motive behind evolution
What a remarkably obtuse thing to say. How can anyone know -- short of subjective observations, which are inherently non-scientific, i.e. revelation from such an "evolution-motivating" intelligence -- whether or not there is an intelligent motive behind any such process?
-5, Burden of Proof
Look, if you want to ridicule the "creationists" and "intelligent design" proponents, just have the balls to come out and say it; don't pussyfoot around, trying to be clever. Or, better yet, just keep your bigotry to yourself.
-5, Argument From Intimidation
Which means that I get to do the same to you. Ready? Here goes...
Just look at your post -- "just have the balls"?! If you want to ridicule the "scientists" and "rational thought" proponents, just have the salt to come out and say it; don't pussyfoot around, trying to be clever. Or, better yet, just keep your sexism to yourself.
Wow, you're right. That was tons easier than composing a rational rebuttal. I think I'll run for public office.
Yup. This is a pet-peeve of mine, too. Humans have between 9-16 senses (or more), depending on how you want to count/divide them. The "5 senses" idea dates back to Aristotle... and we've learned quite a bit about the world and the human body since then. Frankly it's ridiculous that even in grade school children are told that humans have 5 senses: it's patently false. And it's quite easy to demonstrate otherwise (e.g. ask a person if they can sense which way is down).
I find this absurd situation to be quite useful. The "five senses" claptrap is a quick and easy way to demonstrate to a ballast^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlay person that a 'fact', known by everyone, written in every textbook, and taught in every school, is obviously wrong.
From there they are on the way to "floating above" their society -- finally being able to see it objectively and pass judgement on its mores. Then they can compare it against other societies, uninstall whatever religion rootkit they didn't know they were hosting, and become a full-power subversive.
the marketplace WILL NOT TAKE CARE OF THIS PROBLEM ON ITS OWN IN AN EQUITABLE MANNER
We all already know that markets cannot handle certain problems; indeed, you could define coercion as "that which markets cannot deal" or "that which abrogates market function".
The only thing your words are doing is substituting the word 'equitable'. We still have the very difficult problem of choosing who gets to choose what is coercion, what is persuasion, and what is a border-case (e.g. monopoly, or some guy buying all the land around yours and charging you to pass).
i say: leave to the marketplace issues that progress in the marketplace can solve
Wait wait, let me guess! *You* get to decide which market solutions are 'equitable'.
And I'll bet you've bought in to the fadish new definition for the word 'justice' ("equal outcomes").
irrefutable fact you need to learn: the marketplace is not where all progress in the world takes place, and does not answer every question that needs answering. this sort of marketplace fundamentalism some morons believe in is a simpleton's ideology that needs to die
Your verbiage, too, is just simplistic platitudes smeared over the underlying problem that you don't have a solution for... other than your exceedingly un-novel "I am a better judge of persuasion-vs-coercion than y'all are!" idea.
The erotic services section in Craigslist is very clearly geared towards prostitution. Almost every ad offers "full service" and sets out rates as "donations." The photos are usually of nude or scantily clad women. The services they offer are usually vernacular for specific sex acts. The vast majority of the ads there are for prostitution or reviews of prostitutes.
Indeed. The Sheriff is correct that craigslist is carrying ads that any reasonable person would conclude are for prostitution. For sure.
The question is, what are the Sheriff's real motivations? Law-enforcement crackdowns on prostitution are spotty at best, so why this, why now?
The primary motivation against prostitution comes from females, who loathe it like all businesspeople loathe competition. These days success in business comes easiest to those who seize the law to ban their competition, and women-in-general have done exactly this.
To put it another way: the presence of legal prostitutes will increase what your female partner is willing to do in bed.
Given this, all male attacks on prostitution must be some attempt to curry favor with females. Or they've got a bad case of the Jesus.
Racial discrimination ended because it was a false outdated notion we are quickly discarding that was totally incompatible with "All men are created equal..." Progress doesn't happen all at once, it just took a little while after those words were set down for society to catch up to all of the implications. And while everyone isn't exactly 'equal' we are close enough that the concept of equality before the law makes so sense it could form the basis of the most successful nation in human history. Throw in a bunch of genetic supermen and some custom designed semi sentient drones into the population and those ideas are null and void. Discrimination DOES make sense because people won't even be close to equal anymore. When the dumbest superman is smarter than Hawking, wiser than Mark Twain and will likely still have the body of a Greek God when he is a hundred years old the question of whether us mundanes should even be allowed to vote is a valid one. We probably won't like their answer.
Considering that democracy historically ends (and, right now, is ending) due to bankruptcy, and considering that the bankruptcy is brought on by increasingly massive redistribution, and considering that people vote for redistribution only when they feel it is more profitable than their own productivity, and considering that the genetic improvements will almost certainly make people more confidently productive...
...democracy may be a stable political system only among a genetically improved electorate.
There's a design methodology that's used by NASA for manned missions: Any individual component should be able to fail without compromising the mission. Of course, in the last few decades we've seen 2 out of 5 Shuttles go ka-boom! so obviously this NASA guideline isn't enough and it's *REALLY* hard to prevent failure when a perfect storm of multiple systems experience failure at the same time.
Oh they knew perfectly well that the Challenger disaster would happen. The breathtaking silliness of using o-rings to seal a solid-rocket booster was discussed more than enough times. The problem, there and everywhere, was politico-economic concerns shifting the risk thresholds farther than we (afterward) feel they should be shifted.
NASA can't win though. If anything, we should fault them for taking too few risks, especially given the very large number of people who would line up to volunteer for even a crazy risky mission. (The are "lined up" in the sense that NASA has stacks of applications even though the prereqs are currently higher than Mount Everest.)
The worst thing NASA did to space exploration was make it boringly safe and cautious. Why do you think everybody got so excited about Rutan's cheesey nonorbital craft?
Absolutely true. I personally know a restaurant owner in San Francisco that complains about these suggestive calls.
Apparently the Better Business Bureau operates the same way, but with more obfuscation.
Membership in the BBB allows your company to 'respond' to customer complaints, which means that your company no longer has a nasty "complaints unresponded" number. You don't actually have to do anything about the complaints; you just have to respond, which requires member$hip.
The "if you've got nothing to hide..." argument is quite the slippery slope. It's a bit authoritarian to criminalize everything you don't personally do or agree with yourself, isn't it?
Worse than that. That argument implies that the public's moral code is always right, and hence all privacy is suspect.
In reality I find the opposite is usually true. The public gets is moral code from television anyway. Meanwhile virtuous people must remain stealthy lest they be drained for their productivity and punished for their certainty.
Slashdot Mirror
It's handy that he named his observation "Beckam's Law" for us, because then we can apply inviolet's law:
A new discovery is headline-grabbing FUD/bunk if its discoverer names it after himself. Whereas a new discovery is probably useful if others name it after its discoverer.
Think of it as an extrapolation of the importance of peer review. Pretty handy, eh? That's why I named it after mys-- aw, damnit!
That would be kewl, because then we would be able to predict earthquake predictions.
Eh, maybe not, we might stack-overflow the cosmos, and God would be mightly ticked off at us. Can you imagine walking up the pearly gates, and you peer through the bars and see that God is angrily looking through a coredump that YOU caused? Yikes!
Yes, Hungarian law would've helped here, but it would've imposed some significant costs too... not least of which is the requirement that every MP change his last name to include the first letter of his party affiliation, like George H. W. rBush, Hillary R. dClinton, etc.
That's not what happened. When a vote on an issue like is needed, and everyone agrees with the new law but don't want to be on record saying so, an after-hours party like this is arranged. Everyone who agrees goes home with a wink, a nod, and plausible deniability.
No, this one is on the Russians. They started it. The Americans are just playing tit-for-tat (with random forgiveness, we presume), which is always an appropriate moral strategy.
This is not the first time the Russians, bankrupt, have pulled a stunt like this. Mir was full of junk because the Russians would lease space to whoever to run an experiment and would then refuse to bring the experiment's materials back to Earth. They kept them on board in order to continue charging the (exorbitant) rent for space aboard Mir. The cosmonauts complained about the piles of junk, though not publicly.
Opera has had this for ages. It is truly sweet to be able to type "g Argle Fargle" into the address-bar to do a google-search for "Argle Fargle" without ever touching my mouse. There is also 'z' for Amazon search, 'a' for Ask.com, 'b' for bittorrent, 'y' for Yahoo, etc. etc. And you can add your own.
You have not thought this through. Who provides raw materials, who designs/maintains/fixes the system, who designs new products, who handles sales and distribution? (Each of those topics represents an entire organization, or several.) The only part of that which presently does not involve many humans, and should not involve any at all, is the mindlessly repetitive steps.
What is the value of the placement of a wingnut on a threaded shaft? How much food or gold or oil would you trade for someone to screw fifty wingnuts on for you? A very small bite of your bread? Maybe now you see what kind of standard of living a repetitive manual labor job objectively justifies.
If you don't look at efficiency as the only reason for industry, you wannabe Philosopher King, then you are proposing that humans benefit by receiving less value per manhour. It feels virtuous to come in here and shout about vague "higher purposes" for the faceless crowd, but to any actual individual, time is precious and so you are full of s***.
You can tell you are full of s*** because you think that quickness itself makes a buck somehow illegitimate. Go join the Amish, they love people who talk like you.
Why should Americans, or the citizens of any modernized educated enlightened society, perform repetitive labor?
That's a job for robots... and a teething phase for wanna-be-modern societies.
Tariffs opearte by raising the final costs to the consumer. By your cavalier attitude I assume you are willing to accept that (how thrilling it is to be grandiose with other peoples' money!). The much larger downside that you should not accept, is the reestablishment of repetitive-labor jobs currently performed in China. Keeping that work in China keeps the pollution in China (a fact which they accept). And keeping that work in China signals to all Americans that "you will not be able to earn a living doing mindless work".
Presently, a lot of Americans are laboring under the delusion that they should somehow get a house, car, TV, medicine, and internet in exchange for installing wingnuts all day on an assembly line.
In the (paraphrased) words of Lewis Black...
"This issue is right up there with the question of, 'Are we eating too much garlic as a people?'."
Suppose you are the Salt Lake Tribune, and you want to continue as a regular newspaper, in which event you will be taxed. And suppose that your competitor, the Deseret News or whatever, chooses tax-exempt status and hence gets a 20% 'reward'.
Do you think you'll be able to compete with that for long? How are you able to believe that in this situation, the government is "not punishing" your Salt Lake Tribune?
There is no way to turn the sow's ear of preferential tax breaks into a silk purse of "fair economic controls" or "level playing field" or "reward Paul without punishing Peter".
I see you've mastered the art of frosting your conjectures with sufficient eloquence to silence the opposition. Now that you understand this power, you can recognize it when you see it in yourself and others.
If you refer to one of the other replies to the parent article, you will find links to the real explanation, namely, the periodic cycles within our current ice age. Even the current ramp upward in global mean temperatures is a repeat of an old, stable, oft-repeated trend.
The reason that everyone gives conflicting advice about "how to get hired" or "what to put on a resume" is that there is no universal formula. There is none, because if there was, everybody would game it, and then it would stop working.
The stock market works the same way. If someone is publicly advocating or selling a formula, then you already know that the formula doesn't work any more.
Women work this way too. They must give conflicting signals in order to avoid getting gamed. Only by watching you flop around trying to understand what they say they want, can they gather enough data to infer your true character.
There will never be a general success formula for any of these realms, because the payoffs (salary / money / womb-space) are too big.
Indeed. Lots of people are under the impression that free will is a function of randomness. Sorry guys, but randomness is insanity. I would prefer that my actions flowed deterministically from my inner mental state. How else could I act according to my convictions?
Anyway, the question is only relevant in the context of religion. Without a bearded guy giving out passes to heaven, it doesn't matter whether the universe could've progressed differently. Our actions ought to progress lawfully and predicatably from the programming that we've build into our minds.
Or maybe people are just afraid of the concept of predictability. In a jungle or a battlefield, predictability is terrible, so perhaps we've got a race memory against it.
You are not understanding what real estate taxes are for.
A hundred acres of very valuable assets (solar panels + hardware) are now sitting in the middle of nowhere. This creates a burden for law-enforcement and also for the fire department, who must both now protect them. It is expensive to protect a target that is simultaneously distant and valuable.
Normally that burden would be underwritten by the solar farm's real-estate taxes. If the farm demanded preferential tax treatment, then its burden is simply transferred to the rest of the community.
No it will not.
The TVM on $1b capital is at least $50m a year, but for a moderately risky investment it will be more like $75m. That means that your example plant only generates $25-50m profit a year. That's a 20-30 year payback, which is close to the design lifetime of the panels (20-25 years) and certainly less than the design lifetime of all the other components in the plant (rotators, inverters, storage devices).
Plus real-estate taxes (which you may get a pass on, which means your state gets poorer) plus insurance (against, say, hail damage) plus lots of maintenance on a quantity of panels and infrastructure large enough to supply $100m of electricity. You handwave these things away but they are dealbreakers when the plant can already barely pay for itself by the time it wears out.
I'm not saying that actual solar plants have financials along these lines (though they are still underwater, which is the reason nobody is building them). I'm just using this to show that you don't know your economic fundamentals.
-5, Burden of Proof
-5, Argument From Intimidation
Which means that I get to do the same to you. Ready? Here goes...
Just look at your post -- "just have the balls"?! If you want to ridicule the "scientists" and "rational thought" proponents, just have the salt to come out and say it; don't pussyfoot around, trying to be clever. Or, better yet, just keep your sexism to yourself.
Wow, you're right. That was tons easier than composing a rational rebuttal. I think I'll run for public office.
I find this absurd situation to be quite useful. The "five senses" claptrap is a quick and easy way to demonstrate to a ballast^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlay person that a 'fact', known by everyone, written in every textbook, and taught in every school, is obviously wrong.
From there they are on the way to "floating above" their society -- finally being able to see it objectively and pass judgement on its mores. Then they can compare it against other societies, uninstall whatever religion rootkit they didn't know they were hosting, and become a full-power subversive.
Hopefully.
That is EXACTLY what I said prostitution does.
It lowers the market price of sexual services, which (romantic platitudes aside) is what most women trade in their relationships.
So be it. It must be tiring to be offended by such readily available observations.
We all already know that markets cannot handle certain problems; indeed, you could define coercion as "that which markets cannot deal" or "that which abrogates market function".
The only thing your words are doing is substituting the word 'equitable'. We still have the very difficult problem of choosing who gets to choose what is coercion, what is persuasion, and what is a border-case (e.g. monopoly, or some guy buying all the land around yours and charging you to pass).
Wait wait, let me guess! *You* get to decide which market solutions are 'equitable'.
And I'll bet you've bought in to the fadish new definition for the word 'justice' ("equal outcomes").
Your verbiage, too, is just simplistic platitudes smeared over the underlying problem that you don't have a solution for... other than your exceedingly un-novel "I am a better judge of persuasion-vs-coercion than y'all are!" idea.
Indeed. The Sheriff is correct that craigslist is carrying ads that any reasonable person would conclude are for prostitution. For sure.
The question is, what are the Sheriff's real motivations? Law-enforcement crackdowns on prostitution are spotty at best, so why this, why now?
The primary motivation against prostitution comes from females, who loathe it like all businesspeople loathe competition. These days success in business comes easiest to those who seize the law to ban their competition, and women-in-general have done exactly this.
To put it another way: the presence of legal prostitutes will increase what your female partner is willing to do in bed.
Given this, all male attacks on prostitution must be some attempt to curry favor with females. Or they've got a bad case of the Jesus.
Then we have the same problem in the real world -- everyone is using the same formula. For example, the formula you cite is also:
But since you've gotten the ball rolling on the subject of spitting meaningless venom onto the audience, let me join in with one of my own:
the formula that killed wall street: O+U+T+S+O+U+R+C+I+N+G
Considering that democracy historically ends (and, right now, is ending) due to bankruptcy, and considering that the bankruptcy is brought on by increasingly massive redistribution, and considering that people vote for redistribution only when they feel it is more profitable than their own productivity, and considering that the genetic improvements will almost certainly make people more confidently productive...
...democracy may be a stable political system only among a genetically improved electorate.
Oh they knew perfectly well that the Challenger disaster would happen. The breathtaking silliness of using o-rings to seal a solid-rocket booster was discussed more than enough times. The problem, there and everywhere, was politico-economic concerns shifting the risk thresholds farther than we (afterward) feel they should be shifted.
NASA can't win though. If anything, we should fault them for taking too few risks, especially given the very large number of people who would line up to volunteer for even a crazy risky mission. (The are "lined up" in the sense that NASA has stacks of applications even though the prereqs are currently higher than Mount Everest.)
The worst thing NASA did to space exploration was make it boringly safe and cautious. Why do you think everybody got so excited about Rutan's cheesey nonorbital craft?
Apparently the Better Business Bureau operates the same way, but with more obfuscation.
Membership in the BBB allows your company to 'respond' to customer complaints, which means that your company no longer has a nasty "complaints unresponded" number. You don't actually have to do anything about the complaints; you just have to respond, which requires member$hip.
MBAs are wrecking our society.
Worse than that. That argument implies that the public's moral code is always right, and hence all privacy is suspect.
In reality I find the opposite is usually true. The public gets is moral code from television anyway. Meanwhile virtuous people must remain stealthy lest they be drained for their productivity and punished for their certainty.