Decriminalization in Mexico won't help Mexico much, since their main drug business is involved with bringing them to the US. The US doing anything to make it easier for local growers than smugglers would actually help Mexico more, since the cartels would lose their economic incentive to do their business.
Absolutely. It is interesting to note that this huge increase in violence in Mexico corresponds pretty well with the federal regulations restricting the purchase of pseudofed in the USA. For those of you haven't had a cold in the last few years if you want to buy pseudofed its now semi-behind-the-counter, you don't need a prescription but you do have to give up all kinds of personal information to the pharmacy who will report it to the feds and stash it away in their own databases for who knows what uses and abuses. The first guy arrested under this program was stocking up on pseudofed for his kid who had allergies...
Pseudofed is the main ingredient in the easiest recipe for crystal meth. Prior to the legislation there were thousands of crystal-meth "moonshiners" -- literally one and two man operations making the shit in a shed out back. The drug warriors trumpet how the pseudofed laws have shut down these onesie-twosie operations. What they don't talk about, but even the FBI admits in their own public analysis, is that the amount of crystal meth usage dipped immediately after the law went into effect but hasn't substantially changed over the long run because the mexican gangs have filled the vacuum.
Instead of a bunch of little guys making the stuff in their backyard or at the local storage facility, most of it now comes from "superlabs" south of the border that are run by the cartels with lots of very violent men hired to protect and enforce their marketshare. And what do we have to show for it? The everyman's loss of privacy to the big drugstore chains anytime we need an effective cold medicine. Gee thanks congress!
I'd go a step further and make hard drugs prescription drugs. Go to a doc, get a receipt telling you're addicted and get your dose in the next hospital. Sure that works easier with social healthcare, but according to Obama the US are gonna get that soon anyway, can as well append that to the deal.
Huh? Why do you think socialized versus privative medicine would have any impact on that approach "working?" Is it that you think if the junkies can get it for free then they won't steal to buy it? I dunno, I think that if someone is so far along that they can't hold down enough of a job pay for drugs that no longer have the price supports of illegalization that almost by definition they are so far gone that they should be in treatment and that giving them "free" drugs isn't an answer, unless the goal is to enable self-euthanasia.
Huh? Special technical trials? Why? The current system already allows lawyers to bring in expert witnesses to explain stuff. And lawyers are allowed to do a bit of story telling during their opening and closing arguments, and they can use that opportunity to explain thing in other terms (including car analogies, if they choose).
Once upon a time a "jury of your peers" really meant peers, and not just the most easily swayed people in the jury pool. I'm not saying every single person on the jury needs to be a network engineer, but you can pretty much count on the prosecutor objecting to anyone in the pool with any technical expertise relevant to the case.
So, not special trials per se, but a process that rules out anyone with domain knowledge relevant to the trial is fundamentally broken. The number of really bad car analogies that get made here everyday among the relatively technically astute should be proof enough that requiring the issues to be dumbed down for an uneducated jury is not a very good way to run the system.
I would really be surprised if they weren't also storing high-resolution bitmaps. The physical scanning is the hardest part, no way would they be foolish enough to throw out the basic results of those labors. They can always OCR a file once their algorithms improve. Or outsource it to the 3rd world for a human to to 100 pages a day for $4 or less.
I think that given a choice between sickness and health, everyone should be free and able to choose health without severe personal consequence.
Ah, a back down from your original hyperbole. I wasn't surprised. Apparently the hyperbole plays well with the peanut gallery though since I got modded "off-topic" but you haven't been.
Still, you have plenty of consequences in your fantasy-land. They just are a few degrees removed so they aren't as obvious. Should the person who requires 10 million dollars of treatments have the same privilege? What if the treatments only have a 30% success rate? Where are you willing to draw the line, or do you believe that resources are infinite?
So great it is, living as a tax-paying, insurance-card-holding American, that I must contemplate having these things looked at before actually doing it. Yeah.
You can't be serious. Of course you need to think about it. Everything in life is a trade-off. Do you really yearn so much for the nanny-state that you actually believe that weighing the consequences of your decisions is something that you should not have to do? That there could ever exist a world in which that was really the case?
if it indeed does become the dominant economy on the planet... presumably that entails the strongest military and really if they wanted to invade some country at that point there probably wouldn't be much the world would do about it.
It is unlikely to become dominant the way the US has been for the last couple of decades. We'll see a transition from the mono-polar world of US hegemony to multi-polar with China, the US, the EU and maybe India if they get their heads out of their bureaucratic asses. In that situation China may perhaps be #1 but only in a very close race such that an alliance of any of the others would be more powerful than China.
Yes. Of course, capitalist countries without a health care system manage this without bribes.
If only we could have socialized government services so you don't need to bribe that cop or the local building inspector or the licensing clerk or the judge...
I'm fairly sure that the Internet Archive is a nonprofit.
Yep. Ironically Kahle started it the same year Larry Page started the research project which became google.
But, even if it is a non-profit that doesn't mean MS/Yahoo/Amazon aren't supporting it for their own reasons. I just hope Kahle is shrewed enough to milk as much support out of these new-found 'friends' as he can without giving away the cow.
Google's initiative is remarkably one-sided. But a lot of the opposition seems to be from 'old-media' types who want to keep things locked up in dead trees and paywalls rather than a solution that opens up as much information to as many people as possible. Kahle's got the opportunity to do not just the right thing, but the best thing, I hope he can get away with it.
All you've demonstrated is that a reporter was probably biased.
Um... reporter ARE the press.
You have a small problem understanding quantities don't you?
Also, you've ignored the UCLA study that backs my claim up. See, it's not just me. There are many MANY studies that all say the same thing.
There you go with the misunderstanding of quantities. The link your provided claims it is the only such study. Yet you claim there are are MANY of them. Furthermore, there are plenty of criticisms of Groseclose's study that suggest poor methodology on his part - like his claim of the Wall Street Journal being highly liberal being based only a specific 4 month period while similar analysis for NPR and CBS covered nearly 12 years.
It is illegal for any telemarketer or any organization to call you on a cell phone for commercial purposes, including charities, etc. unless you already have an existing current business relationship with that specific business ("marketing partners, etc." don't count). This is also true for 800 numbers, pagers and any other type of phone line where you might be charged to receive the call.
Yeah, and spam is illegal too. All it means is that the calls you get will be from the least scrupulous marketers out there. I had a cellphone number that regularly got calls about all the same crap most people get in spam - prescription drugs, dick extensions, herbal hair rejuvenators, etc. Most the time these guys don't even have valid caller-id numbers. They are total fly by nights and hunting them and their 'clients' down is almost certainly a lot of work for what will ultimately turn out to be an uncollectable judgment.
I solved the problem by ultimately migrating to grandcentral/google-voice and forcing all calls to go through their screener before my phones even ring.
Look into a dry-loop option. If your alarm monitoring company has any competence whatsoever they will be very familiar with it. Similarly, a lot of DSL providers have figured out how to offer DSL over a dry-loop connection too. I've done it myself with verizon before I went fios. Saved me the ~$25/month fee.
The sound quality is far better than any cell I've ever had
With good reception a decent cellphone is indistinguishable from a a good landline. The problem is that there is a lot of areas with only average reception. I use voip (ooma) since my home has crappy reception and the sound quality is just as good as a regular landline so far and in the case of ooma, just one up-front payment, they don't even have my real name or address on file. Its hard to imagine it being any simpler.
Perhaps another person could say why the bank account/paypal is free and the other stuff costs money.
Probably because there are no fees for a bank transfer - its very much like writing a check - and all the other options are basically credit cards which do have transaction fees.
Allow me to point you to the word ILLEGAL in your sentence above.
Wow, another dumbfuck who thinks he's clever. The discussion has been about violent crime and the effects on society. Your contribution adds no insight to the discussion but does permit you the incredible opportunity to display your mastery of the obvious.
illegals make up almost 30% of federal prisoners,
False.
half of California's state prison population,
False
Or how about the fact that more Americans have been killed by illegal aliens than in Iraq since 9/11?
Or how about the fact that 100x more Americans have been killed by Americans than illegal aliens since 9/11?
Actually, there's a funny thing about being an illegal alien. It's actually illegal to be in this country illegally, so 100% of illegal aliens are criminals.
(A) Forest for the trees. Your cleverness isn't irrelevant. (B) Criminals on the order of a jaywalkers.
you write as if freedom of speech is a privilege and not a requirement for a functioning democracy.
I do no such thing. ... I argue that free speech cannot trump public safety.
Lol. Its funny how you seemed to have so thoroughly convinced yourself of your righteousness that you can directly contradict yourself just a few sentences later and not even realize it. Public safety above all else is a standard leg of any authoritarian regime. Never mind that it rarely works out that way in the long run, its still a primary tenant.
Funny how you omitted the Chicago Democratic convention from 1968 that formed the 2nd example in my argument. In that case, the city didn't give the protesters ANY place to hold their rally and they violently cracked down when they showed up anyway. Free speech zones are actually an improvement from that situation.
One example versus hundreds? And a vastly over-simplified one at that. No surprise I ignored it. You tend to hang your hat on hyperbole and seem frustrated when called on it.
Now you are getting rude again.
Chill.
And yes, parades are a lot like protests. Why so condescending?
They are a lot like each other except in the one reason that matters to this discussion. No one wants to censor grandma and apple pie, most parades are just a version of that. The ones that aren't are protests and, surprise, they get a lot more restricted like the gay participants in the st patrick's day parade.
Illegal aliens are off the chart in terms of violent crime, and half (a large figure, most researchers round it off to around one half or even higher) the violent crime goes unreported inside their own communities, so the official figures are skewed to the lower end
If true, I don't know, you are free to cite rates of incarceration and crimes and the demographics involved, simply being an illegal alien doesn't necessarily translate into being a criminal.
It's like the wall, built to keep people out the end result is that it has caused an increase in the number of permanent illegal aliens because formerly seasonal migrants aren't willing to risk it a second a time, so they stay permanently. Similarly the more you ostracise a population the more it will turn to crime because the criminals feel trapped without any other options and their victims feel trapped because reporting a crime means they risk deportation themselves. Its a classic pressure cooker scenario and adding more pressure sounds great to the vindictive personality types but is probably only going to make it even worse.
Most of the US where illegal aliens aren't present in huge numbers does not suffer the same crime rates, and this is just pure data. Not to say there is "no" crime, just much less, especially violent crimes.
You mean cities like El Paso and Laredo?
Or how about the fact that non-citizens are vastly under-represented in prison? There are roughly 2M people in prison in the US for violent and non-violent crimes. ~70% of them entered with incomes below the poverty line. Nearlly all illegal immigrants live below the poverty line so ~12M illegals plus another 35M citizens living under the poverty line equals a pool of 47M people. Illegals make up ~25% of that group. But they only account for 6.4% of the people in prison. Seems like they are 4x more law-abiding than the citizens in that group.
The only downside is if you don't tell the company how on earth are they going to know?
TDR. Seriously, it isn't that hard for a network technician to measure the quality of network infrastructure without the active participation of the end-points.
Comcast dosen't have infrastructure passing through 99% of its customers land.
Of course it does. The wiring runs across the property of every single person on the street where service is made available. If they want to get to house A+1 they gotta go across the property of house A.
The local governments represent ALL of the people in their area, not just the ones that use comcast. The great numbers of other non-comcast using members of that area are hurt by that idea
Tough shit. When it comes to right of way its no longer simply the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Property rights are one of the most scarosanct there are in the USA and violating them requires a much higher standard than that.
Yeah, place the obligation on others instead of the users of the service. Here is a capitalistic idea. . . . if YOU don't like the service, YOU stop using it, stop putting the onus of responsibility on someone else.
Who do you think those local governments represent? Who do you think owns the ground that comcast's cabling run over?
We are them. Its our land, and our rights of way which we have collectively granted to comcast.
Slashdot Mirror
Decriminalization in Mexico won't help Mexico much, since their main drug business is involved with bringing them to the US. The US doing anything to make it easier for local growers than smugglers would actually help Mexico more, since the cartels would lose their economic incentive to do their business.
Absolutely. It is interesting to note that this huge increase in violence in Mexico corresponds pretty well with the federal regulations restricting the purchase of pseudofed in the USA. For those of you haven't had a cold in the last few years if you want to buy pseudofed its now semi-behind-the-counter, you don't need a prescription but you do have to give up all kinds of personal information to the pharmacy who will report it to the feds and stash it away in their own databases for who knows what uses and abuses. The first guy arrested under this program was stocking up on pseudofed for his kid who had allergies...
Pseudofed is the main ingredient in the easiest recipe for crystal meth. Prior to the legislation there were thousands of crystal-meth "moonshiners" -- literally one and two man operations making the shit in a shed out back. The drug warriors trumpet how the pseudofed laws have shut down these onesie-twosie operations. What they don't talk about, but even the FBI admits in their own public analysis, is that the amount of crystal meth usage dipped immediately after the law went into effect but hasn't substantially changed over the long run because the mexican gangs have filled the vacuum.
Instead of a bunch of little guys making the stuff in their backyard or at the local storage facility, most of it now comes from "superlabs" south of the border that are run by the cartels with lots of very violent men hired to protect and enforce their marketshare. And what do we have to show for it? The everyman's loss of privacy to the big drugstore chains anytime we need an effective cold medicine. Gee thanks congress!
I'd go a step further and make hard drugs prescription drugs. Go to a doc, get a receipt telling you're addicted and get your dose in the next hospital. Sure that works easier with social healthcare, but according to Obama the US are gonna get that soon anyway, can as well append that to the deal.
Huh? Why do you think socialized versus privative medicine would have any impact on that approach "working?"
Is it that you think if the junkies can get it for free then they won't steal to buy it?
I dunno, I think that if someone is so far along that they can't hold down enough of a job pay for drugs that no longer have the price supports of illegalization that almost by definition they are so far gone that they should be in treatment and that giving them "free" drugs isn't an answer, unless the goal is to enable self-euthanasia.
Huh? Special technical trials? Why? The current system already allows lawyers to bring in expert witnesses to explain stuff. And lawyers are allowed to do a bit of story telling during their opening and closing arguments, and they can use that opportunity to explain thing in other terms (including car analogies, if they choose).
Once upon a time a "jury of your peers" really meant peers, and not just the most easily swayed people in the jury pool. I'm not saying every single person on the jury needs to be a network engineer, but you can pretty much count on the prosecutor objecting to anyone in the pool with any technical expertise relevant to the case.
So, not special trials per se, but a process that rules out anyone with domain knowledge relevant to the trial is fundamentally broken. The number of really bad car analogies that get made here everyday among the relatively technically astute should be proof enough that requiring the issues to be dumbed down for an uneducated jury is not a very good way to run the system.
I would really be surprised if they weren't also storing high-resolution bitmaps.
The physical scanning is the hardest part, no way would they be foolish enough to throw out the basic results of those labors.
They can always OCR a file once their algorithms improve. Or outsource it to the 3rd world for a human to to 100 pages a day for $4 or less.
I think that given a choice between sickness and health, everyone should be free and able to choose health without severe personal consequence.
Ah, a back down from your original hyperbole. I wasn't surprised.
Apparently the hyperbole plays well with the peanut gallery though since I got modded "off-topic" but you haven't been.
Still, you have plenty of consequences in your fantasy-land. They just are a few degrees removed so they aren't as obvious.
Should the person who requires 10 million dollars of treatments have the same privilege? What if the treatments only have a 30% success rate? Where are you willing to draw the line, or do you believe that resources are infinite?
So great it is, living as a tax-paying, insurance-card-holding American, that I must contemplate having these things looked at before actually doing it. Yeah.
You can't be serious. Of course you need to think about it. Everything in life is a trade-off. Do you really yearn so much for the nanny-state that you actually believe that weighing the consequences of your decisions is something that you should not have to do? That there could ever exist a world in which that was really the case?
if it indeed does become the dominant economy on the planet... presumably that entails the strongest military and really if they wanted to invade some country at that point there probably wouldn't be much the world would do about it.
It is unlikely to become dominant the way the US has been for the last couple of decades. We'll see a transition from the mono-polar world of US hegemony to multi-polar with China, the US, the EU and maybe India if they get their heads out of their bureaucratic asses. In that situation China may perhaps be #1 but only in a very close race such that an alliance of any of the others would be more powerful than China.
Yes. Of course, capitalist countries without a health care system manage this without bribes.
If only we could have socialized government services so you don't need to bribe that cop or the local building inspector or the licensing clerk or the judge...
I'm fairly sure that the Internet Archive is a nonprofit.
Yep. Ironically Kahle started it the same year Larry Page started the research project which became google.
But, even if it is a non-profit that doesn't mean MS/Yahoo/Amazon aren't supporting it for their own reasons. I just hope Kahle is shrewed enough to milk as much support out of these new-found 'friends' as he can without giving away the cow.
Google's initiative is remarkably one-sided. But a lot of the opposition seems to be from 'old-media' types who want to keep things locked up in dead trees and paywalls rather than a solution that opens up as much information to as many people as possible. Kahle's got the opportunity to do not just the right thing, but the best thing, I hope he can get away with it.
have a little bit of knowledge of what you are asking
Lol. You might try taking your own advice before pontificating.
This could have happened instead:
http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/stories/2009/06/11/wrong_house_demolished.html
It's funny how today's PCs continue to take architectural queues from earlier mainframe and minicomputer designs.
And fifos, and skip lists too!
All you've demonstrated is that a reporter was probably biased.
Um... reporter ARE the press.
You have a small problem understanding quantities don't you?
Also, you've ignored the UCLA study that backs my claim up. See, it's not just me. There are many MANY studies that all say the same thing.
There you go with the misunderstanding of quantities. The link your provided claims it is the only such study. Yet you claim there are are MANY of them. Furthermore, there are plenty of criticisms of Groseclose's study that suggest poor methodology on his part - like his claim of the Wall Street Journal being highly liberal being based only a specific 4 month period while similar analysis for NPR and CBS covered nearly 12 years.
It is illegal for any telemarketer or any organization to call you on a cell phone for commercial purposes, including charities, etc. unless you already have an existing current business relationship with that specific business ("marketing partners, etc." don't count). This is also true for 800 numbers, pagers and any other type of phone line where you might be charged to receive the call.
Yeah, and spam is illegal too. All it means is that the calls you get will be from the least scrupulous marketers out there. I had a cellphone number that regularly got calls about all the same crap most people get in spam - prescription drugs, dick extensions, herbal hair rejuvenators, etc. Most the time these guys don't even have valid caller-id numbers. They are total fly by nights and hunting them and their 'clients' down is almost certainly a lot of work for what will ultimately turn out to be an uncollectable judgment.
I solved the problem by ultimately migrating to grandcentral/google-voice and forcing all calls to go through their screener before my phones even ring.
DSL
My security alarm needs it
Look into a dry-loop option. If your alarm monitoring company has any competence whatsoever they will be very familiar with it. Similarly, a lot of DSL providers have figured out how to offer DSL over a dry-loop connection too. I've done it myself with verizon before I went fios. Saved me the ~$25/month fee.
The sound quality is far better than any cell I've ever had
With good reception a decent cellphone is indistinguishable from a a good landline. The problem is that there is a lot of areas with only average reception.
I use voip (ooma) since my home has crappy reception and the sound quality is just as good as a regular landline so far and in the case of ooma, just one up-front payment, they don't even have my real name or address on file. Its hard to imagine it being any simpler.
Perhaps another person could say why the bank account/paypal is free and the other stuff costs money.
Probably because there are no fees for a bank transfer - its very much like writing a check - and all the other options are basically credit cards which do have transaction fees.
Watch that and please tell me that the press is not biased.
The press is not biased in the way you want them to be.
All you've demonstrated is that a reporter was probably biased.
Allow me to point you to the word ILLEGAL in your sentence above.
Wow, another dumbfuck who thinks he's clever. The discussion has been about violent crime and the effects on society. Your contribution adds no insight to the discussion but does permit you the incredible opportunity to display your mastery of the obvious.
illegals make up almost 30% of federal prisoners,
False.
half of California's state prison population,
False
Or how about the fact that more Americans have been killed by illegal aliens than in Iraq since 9/11?
Or how about the fact that 100x more Americans have been killed by Americans than illegal aliens since 9/11?
Still, such problems can be 100% discovered remotely. That they aren't is a reflection on the provider's interest in providing a quality service.
Actually, there's a funny thing about being an illegal alien. It's actually illegal to be in this country illegally, so 100% of illegal aliens are criminals.
(A) Forest for the trees. Your cleverness isn't irrelevant.
(B) Criminals on the order of a jaywalkers.
you write as if freedom of speech is a privilege and not a requirement for a functioning democracy.
I do no such thing.
...
I argue that free speech cannot trump public safety.
Lol. Its funny how you seemed to have so thoroughly convinced yourself of your righteousness that you can directly contradict yourself just a few sentences later and not even realize it. Public safety above all else is a standard leg of any authoritarian regime. Never mind that it rarely works out that way in the long run, its still a primary tenant.
Funny how you omitted the Chicago Democratic convention from 1968 that formed the 2nd example in my argument. In that case, the city didn't give the protesters ANY place to hold their rally and they violently cracked down when they showed up anyway. Free speech zones are actually an improvement from that situation.
One example versus hundreds? And a vastly over-simplified one at that. No surprise I ignored it. You tend to hang your hat on hyperbole and seem frustrated when called on it.
Now you are getting rude again.
Chill.
And yes, parades are a lot like protests. Why so condescending?
They are a lot like each other except in the one reason that matters to this discussion. No one wants to censor grandma and apple pie, most parades are just a version of that. The ones that aren't are protests and, surprise, they get a lot more restricted like the gay participants in the st patrick's day parade.
Illegal aliens are off the chart in terms of violent crime, and half (a large figure, most researchers round it off to around one half or even higher) the violent crime goes unreported inside their own communities, so the official figures are skewed to the lower end
If true, I don't know, you are free to cite rates of incarceration and crimes and the demographics involved, simply being an illegal alien doesn't necessarily translate into being a criminal.
It's like the wall, built to keep people out the end result is that it has caused an increase in the number of permanent illegal aliens because formerly seasonal migrants aren't willing to risk it a second a time, so they stay permanently. Similarly the more you ostracise a population the more it will turn to crime because the criminals feel trapped without any other options and their victims feel trapped because reporting a crime means they risk deportation themselves. Its a classic pressure cooker scenario and adding more pressure sounds great to the vindictive personality types but is probably only going to make it even worse.
Most of the US where illegal aliens aren't present in huge numbers does not suffer the same crime rates, and this is just pure data. Not to say there is "no" crime, just much less, especially violent crimes.
You mean cities like El Paso and Laredo?
Or how about the fact that non-citizens are vastly under-represented in prison? There are roughly 2M people in prison in the US for violent and non-violent crimes. ~70% of them entered with incomes below the poverty line. Nearlly all illegal immigrants live below the poverty line so ~12M illegals plus another 35M citizens living under the poverty line equals a pool of 47M people. Illegals make up ~25% of that group. But they only account for 6.4% of the people in prison.
Seems like they are 4x more law-abiding than the citizens in that group.
The only downside is if you don't tell the company how on earth are they going to know?
TDR. Seriously, it isn't that hard for a network technician to measure the quality of network infrastructure without the active participation of the end-points.
Comcast dosen't have infrastructure passing through 99% of its customers land.
Of course it does. The wiring runs across the property of every single person on the street where service is made available. If they want to get to house A+1 they gotta go across the property of house A.
The local governments represent ALL of the people in their area, not just the ones that use comcast. The great numbers of other non-comcast using members of that area are hurt by that idea
Tough shit. When it comes to right of way its no longer simply the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Property rights are one of the most scarosanct there are in the USA and violating them requires a much higher standard than that.
Yeah, place the obligation on others instead of the users of the service. Here is a capitalistic idea. . . . if YOU don't like the service, YOU stop using it, stop putting the onus of responsibility on someone else.
Who do you think those local governments represent?
Who do you think owns the ground that comcast's cabling run over?
We are them. Its our land, and our rights of way which we have collectively granted to comcast.