Sometimes your signifigant other just doesnt want to have sex and you do.
True, but not important in this context as we were not talking about single individual events, but long-term trends. And if you never get any sex because your sleep schedules are different, I dare say that's a pretext.
Language differences. I didn't mean before wedding day and after divorce, I meant before getting married and after having married, i.e. during is very much included.
Women love sex as much as men do. They don't advertise it as much, because while men who boast about sex are considered studs, women who do are considered sluts. So they keep it to themselves and their best friends.
So if a woman doesn't want to have sex with you, chances are that it's not about the sex, it's about you.
. . .
Now that it's sunk in a bit, I should add that most of the "about you" reasons are no cause for alarm, they're along the lines of "you aren't her current boyfriend and she's faithful". But if you in fact are her current boyfriend, and she doesn't want to have sex, then there is more likely something wrong with you then her.
Pro hint: Go and ask her what it is. As soon as you stop the blame game, conversation is a marvelous tool of solving puzzling questions like that. If she doesn't trust you with an honest answer, then sex is the least of your worries, trust and honesty are the bigger issues in your relationship, in which case I refer back to my original advise.
relatively new to (residential) US, they have been used for awhile in Europe.
"awhile" is downplaying it. When I bought this place 12 years ago, I replaced the old tankless water heater with a new one. In general, over here, my impression is that only old houses still have tanks.
One, my boss was the CFO. I think I can claim a limited insight into the accounting details. Two, limited life span is true. For some equipment, that life span is 30 years. And we're not talking throwaway PCs here. I've seen old switching equipment being shipped a thousand miles in order to not having to buy a new one at the other location. Three, the cost isn't zero, ever. That's the asset value on the books, but that's not cost. There are operating costs, and they are considerable. Four, telcos have competition - each other. Like every business. You don't exactly get gas at the grocery or a haircut in the pub.
I don't. But neither do I know that it isn't. And that is exactly the point I am trying to make all this time.
We don't know that these people committed the crimes of which they're accused.
But neither do we know that they didn't. Yes, I know about in dubio pro reo - but that term means doubt about the case at hand and not about the metaphysical aspects of the legal system.
I will say it one more time: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. A flawed legal system resulting in injust convictions does not mean every conviction is injust. Just because every chicken is a bird doesn't mean every bird is a chicken.
Is that really so hard to understand?
Sure, if I could on the basis of omniscience know who was guilty and who wasn't, then I could convict people who actually did crimes.
Every legal system in the history of mankind has convicted people without the benefit of omniscience. We simply accept that there is an error rate. We try to keep it low, but somewhere in the behind-the-scenes, we always know that it exists.
Here's how you really do it:
A totalitarian country doesn't have to "hide" its political prisoners. They don't jail people for made-up crimes, simply because they don't have to. They don't have to make up evidence for murder if they really want to put you away for politics, because they've made those political activites a crime already and can easily put you away for them, end of story. So what you do when you get put in charge is to go through the court records and overturn those easily spotted political convictions, and then set people on to investigate the grey areas.
How do I know? Because I live in a country where this is what we had to deal with. When Germany was re-united, we inherited the GDR with everything in it, including the prisons and its prisoners. And some were there for perfectly good reasons, and some were political prisoners. We pulled the records apart and set the political prisoners free and kept the murderers and rapists behind bars.
I know it can be done in a reasonable way, because it has been done.
users of social networks are friends with people that are opposed to social networks. The second group misses out on an important social component.
Time to delete my G+ profile. Seriously, how fucked up is this kind of thinking?
People who are ignorant of social networks may be "missing out" on something. People who are opposed to social networks are not "missing out", they have opted out. They know what they are missing and have decided that they are better off without.
This is such a fucked-up mindset they are displaying, I don't even know any appropriate english words. It's just hostile to treat people who have intentionally decided against your product as if they were ignorant stupid little children who need to be helped along.
No, they don't. Maybe you think your product is the best thing since sliced bread, but that doesn't mean you are right nor that everyone who disagrees is an idiot.
Now excuse me, I need to find the "delete my profile and all its data" on Google Plus. Any bets that it will be either missing or carefully hidden?
Disclaimer: I used to work for a telco, and was close to the C-level, so some actual business insight might be included, as long as supplies last, some assembly required.
The problem the telcos are trying to solve is twofold, especially for the old and large (often ex-government) ones.
The economic problem is that they have massive amounts of hardware, space and other investments tied up into POTS systems. Putting up the whole IP infrastructure wasn't cheap either, and now one of them is destroying the other. That's like having two cars and then your wife leaves - there's simply too much hardware in your garage you don't need. If you can't get rid of it, you will find yourself trying to use both, convincing yourself that one is better for city driving while the other is better for hauling stuff or long-distance or whatever. But the simple fact is that you simply don't like going perfectly good stuff to waste.
The other problem is pricing. Internet access was initially sold as an add-on, to gain more customers. The price point was designed for that case. Also, after privatisation, many countries in Europe entered a price-war amongst the telcos, driving prices down to a level that only few could sustain for long. Now they are at that point, usage patterns have long since changed with IP traffic being orders of magnitude higher, but they can't raise the prices because that would mean losing customers to the competition. And customers mean everything, because this is one of the businesses where the big honcho monkeys believe that only the top players can compete in the long run, so losing customers is the direct route for the CEO to lose his job. Not because of any actual facts, even if he keeps the company profitable, but because the big shareholders have all subscribed to a mantra that is accepted at face value.
All the throttling and filtering and bla that is being discussed is because during the land-grab phase of getting as many customers as possible, and Internet access being one big weapon in that, they basically allowed marketing to dig them into a very deep hole with its promises of unlimited high-speed access for almost no money.
This guy was sentenced to death (our topic) for killing no less than 13 people. I don't know if the sentence has been carried out already. For the sake of the argument, assume that it hasn't.
You say, without having a look at the actual evidence or the case itself, that this man should be out on the street again?
This guy held two girls as sex-slaves, one for a year and the other for two years, and raped nine other women. Again, let's assume the sentence has not yet been carried out. Please explain to the two girls that you set this man free without so much as a look at the case because of an abstract argument regarding the meta-evaluation of the chinese legal system. I'm sure they will be really open to your argument that because of other, completely unrelated, political cases, the specific evidence in their case is also in doubt.
You are still confusing knowledge about facts with the facts themselves.
I would agree that it is difficult to ascertain the properties of a verdict in a legal system that is itself in doubt. But the fact that you do not know if the decision is proper is not identical with the decision not being proper.
If I tell you that there is a cat sitting on my desk right now, you do not know if that is true or not - but regardless of your knowledge, it either is or isn't true. It's not a SchrÃdinger's Cat.
Likewise our hypothetical culprit can be either innocent or guilty. And thus the verdict can be either just or injust. I would agree that in a legal system that we don't know to be clean, we don't know which it is.
But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!. Just because we can not be sure if the individual verdicts are just or injust does nost automatically make them injust.
Think your thought through to the logical conclusion. Imagine China collapses tonight and you are put in charge of the justice system and have to decide what happens to everyone convicted in the past. Would you set everyone free, knowing that there are with near certainty rapists and murderers amongst them? That is just as stupid as keeping everyone behind bars.
I'm sorry, but I have to add insanity to the fanatism. You are trapped in your circular arguments. You seriously believe that a chinese court can not issue a proper verdict because - well, it is a chinese court. No matter what it does, no matter how clean the judge, no matter how obvious the crime, how solid the evidence, if the culprit freely put down a full confession, even if absolutely everything is 100% spotless and would pass the highest international standards, it can't be. Because it can't. Because it's not american.
That is so far out there, I wonder how anyone gets there without serious drug abuse.
I don't think this argument is making any progress. We are talking about entirely different things and I don't get the impression I could even make clear what the difference is. So I'll drop it here because I tire of it.
Wait, a vast increase in demand means no incentive to supply?
Not for someone thinking at the scale. If you are hungry, how much effort would you be willing to do to obtain a single raisin? Wouldn't you put your efforts into something that is more likely to get you a full meal?
Yes, money. That right there is two million dollars a year.
Again, you are completely ignoring the core of my argument, and I find that quite a bit insulting. For the chinese government, 2 mio. $ isn't even pocket change. Rewriting the law, briefing all the local government branches and publishing it around the country would probably eat up the profits.
Which happens to be killing a thousand people a year. Which makes it not a small thing. Especially, if that crime ring happens to be serving high ranking politicians and their friends and relatives with life-saving organs. In that case, it becomes a potent power base for someone.
Another total non-sequitor. If you're a high ranking politician in China, I'm pretty sure there are two dozen easier ways to get a couple hundred thousand bucks (your share of this assumed cooperation).
Of course, it doesn't. The Chinese government doesn't admit mistakes unless they're vast in size.
Sorry, now you've gone off the deep end completely. You appear to be hell-bent on attributing everything to evil and malice. No evidence, no proof, no nothing, just a constant repetition of the "China is evil, therefore..." mantra. Everything flows from that one assumption. And that's just ridiculous. You, sir, are a fanatic.
They can indeed do that. And when you can be convicted and executed for the organs you carry,
Aaargh. But you can't ! That you can is exactly the unproven assumption that you continue to make. Show me the  of the chinese law that says "good organs we can use = death penalty". Or show me actual, documented examples of innocent people being sentenced to death for their organs.
Oh, wait:
Nobody has been sorting these out.
You can't. You simply assume that because it could theoretically happen, it certainly does. On a vast scale.
And that's exactly the argument I don't buy. Show me evidence of the things you claim or fuck off. Seriously, this is completely ridiculous.
The US has legal processes for insuring that the innocent are not convicted. China doesn't.
Yeah, right. US good, China bad. Black-white. Good-evil. I'm sorry, but there are plenty of documented cases of injustice in the US. People jailed innocently for years, sometimes decades, because a police officer lied, a prosecutor fabricated evidence or a jury fucked up.
I'm fairly confident the legal system in the US is still better than the one in China, but this "we good, they bad" attitude is just really, really ignorant and stupid.
There are more abuses of the law in China than in the US - I'm willing to believe that. But you basically claim that there are next to none in the US and lots and lots in China - and unless you can show that to be true, it's just a fanatical believe in extremes.
Powerful bureaucracies can make up laws on the fly.
They are called "president of the USA". Remember how many laws GWB broke, ignored or invented?
You claim that there are "perfectly good convictions". Well, which ones are the perfectly good convictions and which ones are not? In particular, there's no evidence that China has perfectly good convictions in any sense.
I doubt this. But travel agents have to adapt, just like the music and movie industry.
The times where you needed a travel agency to book your holidays is past. You average, standard "fly me to the beach and give me some hotel I don't care about" traveller is going to get his trip online, no doubt.
But you still have customers like me. I spend a few thousand Euros on a two-week holiday, because I'd rather do that and have a really, really great time then spend half of it and hate it. Plus I very much love that I can call my travel agency, be greeted by name, and tell them that I'm thinking about my next holiday, give them a few items (beach or no, culture or relaxation, which continent, etc.) and then drop by a day or two later and they have a couple recommendations for me.
I know that I have booked several trips there that I would have never found online. A fantastic tiny hotel in Bali's Ubud, 10 bungalows, incredibly friendly staff, almost certainly in no catalogue. An incredible summer cottage on St. Lucia, our own pool and outdoor BBQ, our own private beach, for the price of a good hotel room. My honeymoon trip on exactly the day we wanted, even though it was on short notice to a very popular location, with a luxury flight (premium economy class on Garuda airlines, if anyone remembers) for a fantastic price.
No, travel agents won't go the way of the Dodo. But the market segment will change. Your average mass-market customer will book online. But there's plenty of people like me who want to walk in to someone who knows what they want (because you've known me for years) and simply say "I want another holiday, I have no idea where, throw me a few suggestions."
If the specific real life examples contradict the theoretical concept as they do here, then the concept is wrong.
Not if they are examples of the wrong thing. Examples of modern cars don't invalidate facts about how cars were originally invented. I'm sure you see the difference.
It's irrelevant that these particular religions might be refinements of previous religions
Why? You make a claim with no evidence. All of these religions were created within an already religious population. That is an important difference right there. Selling christianity to jews is a very different process from selling christianity to animalistic tribal people. For the point under discussion, the important part is that there was already a moral code. None of these religions invented a moral code, they merely gave it a framework. Arguably, they did nothing but pick up then-current moral trends and package them.
How much are organs worth? Sounds like it's thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. Plenty of incentive to kill people for organs. You have been shown.
You simply take the most important part as given: That the people who actually make the decisions, i.e. the judges, are taking blood money. That's a very serious allegation. I'm not so dumb that I don't see the organ-trade connection, but if you make extraordinary claims, the burden of proof rests on you.
What obstacles keeps the Chinese government (or for that matter relatively autonomous elements of the Chinese prison system) from harvesting organs for profit or political gain?
I already answered that. Numbers. There's a million people waiting for donor organs in China at this time. Another thousand or so people killed doesn't even register as a rounding error, it's not even a tiny fraction of a solution to the shortage. Money? Please. China's GDP is almost 6 trillion US$. A thousand bodies at a couple thousand $ profit for their organs are nothing. The government probably spends a hundred times that on pencils.
So we're down to individuals or small groups. A corrupt judge or two together with a few officials, a doctore - a small organ-harvesting crime ring.
Possible, yes. Probable, yes. But isn't the proper response there to fight them as the criminals they are? It's not like a hundred like them already exist, except that they kill people in back-alleys instead of prisons.
China has already admitted that the practice of killing people for organs has gotten so massive that the main government has had to announce that the practice will be ended for a time.
TFA doesn't claim that, the reasons mentioned are mostly medical (low quality organs, infections, etc.)
This applies everywhere in law. When the law is unjust and arbitrary, when punishment can be meted out merely to satisfy organ harvesting quotas, then everything is in doubt. Everything.
Again you bring unproven assumptions into your chain of argument which then is supposed to support those very same assumptions. You can't claim that organ harvesting is going on because the chinese legal system is bad and at the same time argue that the chinese legal system is bad because there is organ harvesting going on. That's a circular argument.
Every act of law in China is a travesty.
That's bullshit. Really heavy bullshit. There are cases of injustice in the US legal system as well, does that also mean that every act of law in the USA is a travesty?
Make no mistake, I'd rather face a trial in Europe or even in the US than in China - but you are going way overboard. I'm quite sure that thousands of actual criminals are getting perfectly good convictions in China every years. Thieves, robbers, scammers, rapists, murderers, the lot. I'm also sure that they convict a lot of people that I don't think of as having done anything wrong. But neither of these two aspects negates the other.
Sorry, but that isn't true, or at least not everywhere and for everyone.
My travel agency still routinely recommends me this or that airline for my holiday trips because it offers more leg space or some other advantage and they know from the many years I've been a customer there that I'm willing to pay a few bucks extra to have a good trip.
And since I'm never the only person on the plane, I'm apparently not the only one thinking that way.
It's nothing for Apple to throw a few million dollars at a patent suit.
The business plan isn't to win a lawsuit. The business plan is to make it cheaper and more convenient for them to make me go away with a nice settlement than actually have the lawsuit happen.
Maybe it's because I used to work in IT Security, but if any prospective employer had asked me for my credentials to anything, I'd have had a good laugh and then told them to go fuck themselves with a forklift because they apparently not only don't understand the first thing about security, but they're also a bunch of psychopathic assholes who I wouldn't be working for if they paid me twice what I'm asking.
Yes, and? This has been known for many years. Most airlines have special kitchens for their chefs to work in which artificially create in-flight atmosphere (pressure, humidity, etc.) so the chefs can taste what their food is like to the passengers.
I don't see any recent breakthroughs mentioned. So what the heck is this blogging nonsense doing on the frontpage?
Ah, there's the confusion. You are talking about individual religions, I am talking about religion as a concept.
You will notice that all of your examples are religions that refinements or evolutions of existing religions (sometimes merging several older ones into one new one).
These are part of what I call the adaptation of religion. All religions change their teachings to reflect the moral code of the day, just like, say, christianity has highlighted different aspects of the faith during its existence. The parts about killing people for ridiculous stuff isn't particularily spotlighted today, while the parts about love are. During various parts of the middle ages, that was the other way around. And sometimes, when it's breaking apart, religions re-invent themselves, as happened with judaism and christianity.
Killing someone for their organs
But there you are back at asserting your assumption. I may need to spell it out: If that is what happens, them I'll with you. But I have yet to see that it actually does. "Chinese are evil" is the "best" argument put forth so far to validate the claim.
being a convicted criminal in China doesn't mean you actually committed anything we'd consider a crime.
That's a feature of having nation states. I'm sure there are crimes in the US that China doesn't recognize as such, just like any nation has its own set of laws.
state creates institutionalized incentives to kill people for organs, then most likely, people get killed for organs.
Agreed.
Now show me the incentives you claim are being created. I've read most of the horror-story articles linked in comments, and they are quite horrifying, but none of them even once shows evidence that someone was sentenced to death because of his organs.
When we protest against surveillance networks, we all agree that just because something could theoretically be abused (say, the Internet to plan a crime) doesn't mean it is right to assume that it will and to put every communication under surveillance.
And yet when China wants to, excuse the words, use stuff that would otherwise be thrown away to save lifes, we are afraid that it could potentially be abused.
Don't you see the dissonance in our arguments?
Deliberate injustice can't be justified by occasional acts of justice. Why can't you see that?
I don't say that anything justifies anything. I am saying that just because some parts of the chinese legal system do not equal our own it does not necessarily follow that everyone convicted in China would be found innocent in a western court.
While we read a lot about the dissidents, bloggers and other political prisoners, we shouldn't forget that very, very likely, a large part of the convicts in China are convicted for theft, fraud, robbery, rape, murder or any other crime that we don't see all that different.
"an improvement over conventional systems for initializing static arrays by reducing the amount of code executed by the virtual machine to statically initialize an array,"
You can get a patent for stuff like that?
Fuck me sideways! I need to get a couple hundred patent applications filed!
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes your signifigant other just doesnt want to have sex and you do.
True, but not important in this context as we were not talking about single individual events, but long-term trends. And if you never get any sex because your sleep schedules are different, I dare say that's a pretext.
Language differences. I didn't mean before wedding day and after divorce, I meant before getting married and after having married, i.e. during is very much included.
Seriously?
Women love sex as much as men do. They don't advertise it as much, because while men who boast about sex are considered studs, women who do are considered sluts. So they keep it to themselves and their best friends.
So if a woman doesn't want to have sex with you, chances are that it's not about the sex, it's about you.
.
.
.
Now that it's sunk in a bit, I should add that most of the "about you" reasons are no cause for alarm, they're along the lines of "you aren't her current boyfriend and she's faithful". But if you in fact are her current boyfriend, and she doesn't want to have sex, then there is more likely something wrong with you then her.
Pro hint: Go and ask her what it is. As soon as you stop the blame game, conversation is a marvelous tool of solving puzzling questions like that. If she doesn't trust you with an honest answer, then sex is the least of your worries, trust and honesty are the bigger issues in your relationship, in which case I refer back to my original advise.
relatively new to (residential) US, they have been used for awhile in Europe.
"awhile" is downplaying it. When I bought this place 12 years ago, I replaced the old tankless water heater with a new one. In general, over here, my impression is that only old houses still have tanks.
c) find a better wife
Seriously, I've never understood all the horror stories, not before and not after my own marriage.
One, my boss was the CFO. I think I can claim a limited insight into the accounting details.
Two, limited life span is true. For some equipment, that life span is 30 years. And we're not talking throwaway PCs here. I've seen old switching equipment being shipped a thousand miles in order to not having to buy a new one at the other location.
Three, the cost isn't zero, ever. That's the asset value on the books, but that's not cost. There are operating costs, and they are considerable.
Four, telcos have competition - each other. Like every business. You don't exactly get gas at the grocery or a haircut in the pub.
indeed, it isn't hidden much. Parent AC is right and deserves to be modded up.
And you know this evidence is real how?
I don't. But neither do I know that it isn't. And that is exactly the point I am trying to make all this time.
We don't know that these people committed the crimes of which they're accused.
But neither do we know that they didn't. Yes, I know about in dubio pro reo - but that term means doubt about the case at hand and not about the metaphysical aspects of the legal system.
I will say it one more time: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. A flawed legal system resulting in injust convictions does not mean every conviction is injust. Just because every chicken is a bird doesn't mean every bird is a chicken.
Is that really so hard to understand?
Sure, if I could on the basis of omniscience know who was guilty and who wasn't, then I could convict people who actually did crimes.
Every legal system in the history of mankind has convicted people without the benefit of omniscience. We simply accept that there is an error rate. We try to keep it low, but somewhere in the behind-the-scenes, we always know that it exists.
Here's how you really do it:
A totalitarian country doesn't have to "hide" its political prisoners. They don't jail people for made-up crimes, simply because they don't have to. They don't have to make up evidence for murder if they really want to put you away for politics, because they've made those political activites a crime already and can easily put you away for them, end of story.
So what you do when you get put in charge is to go through the court records and overturn those easily spotted political convictions, and then set people on to investigate the grey areas.
How do I know? Because I live in a country where this is what we had to deal with. When Germany was re-united, we inherited the GDR with everything in it, including the prisons and its prisoners. And some were there for perfectly good reasons, and some were political prisoners. We pulled the records apart and set the political prisoners free and kept the murderers and rapists behind bars.
I know it can be done in a reasonable way, because it has been done.
users of social networks are friends with people that are opposed to social networks. The second group misses out on an important social component.
Time to delete my G+ profile. Seriously, how fucked up is this kind of thinking?
People who are ignorant of social networks may be "missing out" on something.
People who are opposed to social networks are not "missing out", they have opted out. They know what they are missing and have decided that they are better off without.
This is such a fucked-up mindset they are displaying, I don't even know any appropriate english words. It's just hostile to treat people who have intentionally decided against your product as if they were ignorant stupid little children who need to be helped along.
No, they don't. Maybe you think your product is the best thing since sliced bread, but that doesn't mean you are right nor that everyone who disagrees is an idiot.
Now excuse me, I need to find the "delete my profile and all its data" on Google Plus. Any bets that it will be either missing or carefully hidden?
Disclaimer: I used to work for a telco, and was close to the C-level, so some actual business insight might be included, as long as supplies last, some assembly required.
The problem the telcos are trying to solve is twofold, especially for the old and large (often ex-government) ones.
The economic problem is that they have massive amounts of hardware, space and other investments tied up into POTS systems. Putting up the whole IP infrastructure wasn't cheap either, and now one of them is destroying the other. That's like having two cars and then your wife leaves - there's simply too much hardware in your garage you don't need. If you can't get rid of it, you will find yourself trying to use both, convincing yourself that one is better for city driving while the other is better for hauling stuff or long-distance or whatever. But the simple fact is that you simply don't like going perfectly good stuff to waste.
The other problem is pricing. Internet access was initially sold as an add-on, to gain more customers. The price point was designed for that case. Also, after privatisation, many countries in Europe entered a price-war amongst the telcos, driving prices down to a level that only few could sustain for long. Now they are at that point, usage patterns have long since changed with IP traffic being orders of magnitude higher, but they can't raise the prices because that would mean losing customers to the competition. And customers mean everything, because this is one of the businesses where the big honcho monkeys believe that only the top players can compete in the long run, so losing customers is the direct route for the CEO to lose his job. Not because of any actual facts, even if he keeps the company profitable, but because the big shareholders have all subscribed to a mantra that is accepted at face value.
All the throttling and filtering and bla that is being discussed is because during the land-grab phase of getting as many customers as possible, and Internet access being one big weapon in that, they basically allowed marketing to dig them into a very deep hole with its promises of unlimited high-speed access for almost no money.
For judicial decisions, yes it is.
Another claim with no evidence or supporting argument.
No, in this case I would release everyone.
I'm not sure you really understand what you are saying. Here's an actual example:
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/02/chinese-mass-murderer-sentenced-to-death/
This guy was sentenced to death (our topic) for killing no less than 13 people. I don't know if the sentence has been carried out already. For the sake of the argument, assume that it hasn't.
You say, without having a look at the actual evidence or the case itself, that this man should be out on the street again?
Here's another:
http://www.siasat.com/english/news/serial-chinese-rapist-sentenced-death
This guy held two girls as sex-slaves, one for a year and the other for two years, and raped nine other women. Again, let's assume the sentence has not yet been carried out. Please explain to the two girls that you set this man free without so much as a look at the case because of an abstract argument regarding the meta-evaluation of the chinese legal system. I'm sure they will be really open to your argument that because of other, completely unrelated, political cases, the specific evidence in their case is also in doubt.
No. I believe it cannot issue a proper verdict
You are still confusing knowledge about facts with the facts themselves.
I would agree that it is difficult to ascertain the properties of a verdict in a legal system that is itself in doubt. But the fact that you do not know if the decision is proper is not identical with the decision not being proper.
If I tell you that there is a cat sitting on my desk right now, you do not know if that is true or not - but regardless of your knowledge, it either is or isn't true. It's not a SchrÃdinger's Cat.
Likewise our hypothetical culprit can be either innocent or guilty. And thus the verdict can be either just or injust. I would agree that in a legal system that we don't know to be clean, we don't know which it is.
But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!. Just because we can not be sure if the individual verdicts are just or injust does nost automatically make them injust.
Think your thought through to the logical conclusion. Imagine China collapses tonight and you are put in charge of the justice system and have to decide what happens to everyone convicted in the past. Would you set everyone free, knowing that there are with near certainty rapists and murderers amongst them? That is just as stupid as keeping everyone behind bars.
Yes
I'm sorry, but I have to add insanity to the fanatism. You are trapped in your circular arguments. You seriously believe that a chinese court can not issue a proper verdict because - well, it is a chinese court. No matter what it does, no matter how clean the judge, no matter how obvious the crime, how solid the evidence, if the culprit freely put down a full confession, even if absolutely everything is 100% spotless and would pass the highest international standards, it can't be. Because it can't. Because it's not american.
That is so far out there, I wonder how anyone gets there without serious drug abuse.
[religion]
I don't think this argument is making any progress. We are talking about entirely different things and I don't get the impression I could even make clear what the difference is. So I'll drop it here because I tire of it.
Wait, a vast increase in demand means no incentive to supply?
Not for someone thinking at the scale. If you are hungry, how much effort would you be willing to do to obtain a single raisin? Wouldn't you put your efforts into something that is more likely to get you a full meal?
Yes, money. That right there is two million dollars a year.
Again, you are completely ignoring the core of my argument, and I find that quite a bit insulting. For the chinese government, 2 mio. $ isn't even pocket change. Rewriting the law, briefing all the local government branches and publishing it around the country would probably eat up the profits.
Which happens to be killing a thousand people a year. Which makes it not a small thing. Especially, if that crime ring happens to be serving high ranking politicians and their friends and relatives with life-saving organs. In that case, it becomes a potent power base for someone.
Another total non-sequitor. If you're a high ranking politician in China, I'm pretty sure there are two dozen easier ways to get a couple hundred thousand bucks (your share of this assumed cooperation).
Of course, it doesn't. The Chinese government doesn't admit mistakes unless they're vast in size.
Sorry, now you've gone off the deep end completely. You appear to be hell-bent on attributing everything to evil and malice. No evidence, no proof, no nothing, just a constant repetition of the "China is evil, therefore..." mantra. Everything flows from that one assumption. And that's just ridiculous. You, sir, are a fanatic.
They can indeed do that. And when you can be convicted and executed for the organs you carry,
Aaargh. But you can't ! That you can is exactly the unproven assumption that you continue to make. Show me the  of the chinese law that says "good organs we can use = death penalty". Or show me actual, documented examples of innocent people being sentenced to death for their organs.
Oh, wait:
Nobody has been sorting these out.
You can't. You simply assume that because it could theoretically happen, it certainly does. On a vast scale.
And that's exactly the argument I don't buy. Show me evidence of the things you claim or fuck off. Seriously, this is completely ridiculous.
The US has legal processes for insuring that the innocent are not convicted. China doesn't.
Yeah, right. US good, China bad. Black-white. Good-evil. I'm sorry, but there are plenty of documented cases of injustice in the US. People jailed innocently for years, sometimes decades, because a police officer lied, a prosecutor fabricated evidence or a jury fucked up.
I'm fairly confident the legal system in the US is still better than the one in China, but this "we good, they bad" attitude is just really, really ignorant and stupid.
There are more abuses of the law in China than in the US - I'm willing to believe that. But you basically claim that there are next to none in the US and lots and lots in China - and unless you can show that to be true, it's just a fanatical believe in extremes.
Powerful bureaucracies can make up laws on the fly.
They are called "president of the USA". Remember how many laws GWB broke, ignored or invented?
You claim that there are "perfectly good convictions". Well, which ones are the perfectly good convictions and which ones are not? In particular, there's no evidence that China has perfectly good convictions in any sense.
Ok, let's get this over with:
Do you seriously claim t
I doubt this. But travel agents have to adapt, just like the music and movie industry.
The times where you needed a travel agency to book your holidays is past. You average, standard "fly me to the beach and give me some hotel I don't care about" traveller is going to get his trip online, no doubt.
But you still have customers like me. I spend a few thousand Euros on a two-week holiday, because I'd rather do that and have a really, really great time then spend half of it and hate it. Plus I very much love that I can call my travel agency, be greeted by name, and tell them that I'm thinking about my next holiday, give them a few items (beach or no, culture or relaxation, which continent, etc.) and then drop by a day or two later and they have a couple recommendations for me.
I know that I have booked several trips there that I would have never found online. A fantastic tiny hotel in Bali's Ubud, 10 bungalows, incredibly friendly staff, almost certainly in no catalogue. An incredible summer cottage on St. Lucia, our own pool and outdoor BBQ, our own private beach, for the price of a good hotel room. My honeymoon trip on exactly the day we wanted, even though it was on short notice to a very popular location, with a luxury flight (premium economy class on Garuda airlines, if anyone remembers) for a fantastic price.
No, travel agents won't go the way of the Dodo. But the market segment will change. Your average mass-market customer will book online. But there's plenty of people like me who want to walk in to someone who knows what they want (because you've known me for years) and simply say "I want another holiday, I have no idea where, throw me a few suggestions."
If the specific real life examples contradict the theoretical concept as they do here, then the concept is wrong.
Not if they are examples of the wrong thing. Examples of modern cars don't invalidate facts about how cars were originally invented. I'm sure you see the difference.
It's irrelevant that these particular religions might be refinements of previous religions
Why? You make a claim with no evidence. All of these religions were created within an already religious population. That is an important difference right there. Selling christianity to jews is a very different process from selling christianity to animalistic tribal people.
For the point under discussion, the important part is that there was already a moral code. None of these religions invented a moral code, they merely gave it a framework. Arguably, they did nothing but pick up then-current moral trends and package them.
How much are organs worth? Sounds like it's thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. Plenty of incentive to kill people for organs. You have been shown.
You simply take the most important part as given: That the people who actually make the decisions, i.e. the judges, are taking blood money. That's a very serious allegation. I'm not so dumb that I don't see the organ-trade connection, but if you make extraordinary claims, the burden of proof rests on you.
What obstacles keeps the Chinese government (or for that matter relatively autonomous elements of the Chinese prison system) from harvesting organs for profit or political gain?
I already answered that. Numbers. There's a million people waiting for donor organs in China at this time. Another thousand or so people killed doesn't even register as a rounding error, it's not even a tiny fraction of a solution to the shortage.
Money? Please. China's GDP is almost 6 trillion US$. A thousand bodies at a couple thousand $ profit for their organs are nothing. The government probably spends a hundred times that on pencils.
So we're down to individuals or small groups. A corrupt judge or two together with a few officials, a doctore - a small organ-harvesting crime ring.
Possible, yes. Probable, yes. But isn't the proper response there to fight them as the criminals they are? It's not like a hundred like them already exist, except that they kill people in back-alleys instead of prisons.
China has already admitted that the practice of killing people for organs has gotten so massive that the main government has had to announce that the practice will be ended for a time.
TFA doesn't claim that, the reasons mentioned are mostly medical (low quality organs, infections, etc.)
This applies everywhere in law. When the law is unjust and arbitrary, when punishment can be meted out merely to satisfy organ harvesting quotas, then everything is in doubt. Everything.
Again you bring unproven assumptions into your chain of argument which then is supposed to support those very same assumptions. You can't claim that organ harvesting is going on because the chinese legal system is bad and at the same time argue that the chinese legal system is bad because there is organ harvesting going on. That's a circular argument.
Every act of law in China is a travesty.
That's bullshit. Really heavy bullshit. There are cases of injustice in the US legal system as well, does that also mean that every act of law in the USA is a travesty?
Make no mistake, I'd rather face a trial in Europe or even in the US than in China - but you are going way overboard. I'm quite sure that thousands of actual criminals are getting perfectly good convictions in China every years. Thieves, robbers, scammers, rapists, murderers, the lot. I'm also sure that they convict a lot of people that I don't think of as having done anything wrong. But neither of these two aspects negates the other.
This.
Seriously, parent deserves a +10 insightful.
Sorry, but that isn't true, or at least not everywhere and for everyone.
My travel agency still routinely recommends me this or that airline for my holiday trips because it offers more leg space or some other advantage and they know from the many years I've been a customer there that I'm willing to pay a few bucks extra to have a good trip.
And since I'm never the only person on the plane, I'm apparently not the only one thinking that way.
It's nothing for Apple to throw a few million dollars at a patent suit.
The business plan isn't to win a lawsuit. The business plan is to make it cheaper and more convenient for them to make me go away with a nice settlement than actually have the lawsuit happen.
Why would FB want to engage in litigation with potential customers?
You aren't FB's customer. You are its goods. Companies who buy ads are the customers.
This is really going on?
Maybe it's because I used to work in IT Security, but if any prospective employer had asked me for my credentials to anything, I'd have had a good laugh and then told them to go fuck themselves with a forklift because they apparently not only don't understand the first thing about security, but they're also a bunch of psychopathic assholes who I wouldn't be working for if they paid me twice what I'm asking.
Next thing, they are asking for a blowjob.
Yes, and? This has been known for many years. Most airlines have special kitchens for their chefs to work in which artificially create in-flight atmosphere (pressure, humidity, etc.) so the chefs can taste what their food is like to the passengers.
I don't see any recent breakthroughs mentioned. So what the heck is this blogging nonsense doing on the frontpage?
Counterexamples: Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Confucianism.
Ah, there's the confusion. You are talking about individual religions, I am talking about religion as a concept.
You will notice that all of your examples are religions that refinements or evolutions of existing religions (sometimes merging several older ones into one new one).
These are part of what I call the adaptation of religion. All religions change their teachings to reflect the moral code of the day, just like, say, christianity has highlighted different aspects of the faith during its existence. The parts about killing people for ridiculous stuff isn't particularily spotlighted today, while the parts about love are. During various parts of the middle ages, that was the other way around.
And sometimes, when it's breaking apart, religions re-invent themselves, as happened with judaism and christianity.
Killing someone for their organs
But there you are back at asserting your assumption. I may need to spell it out: If that is what happens, them I'll with you. But I have yet to see that it actually does. "Chinese are evil" is the "best" argument put forth so far to validate the claim.
being a convicted criminal in China doesn't mean you actually committed anything we'd consider a crime.
That's a feature of having nation states. I'm sure there are crimes in the US that China doesn't recognize as such, just like any nation has its own set of laws.
state creates institutionalized incentives to kill people for organs, then most likely, people get killed for organs.
Agreed.
Now show me the incentives you claim are being created. I've read most of the horror-story articles linked in comments, and they are quite horrifying, but none of them even once shows evidence that someone was sentenced to death because of his organs.
When we protest against surveillance networks, we all agree that just because something could theoretically be abused (say, the Internet to plan a crime) doesn't mean it is right to assume that it will and to put every communication under surveillance.
And yet when China wants to, excuse the words, use stuff that would otherwise be thrown away to save lifes, we are afraid that it could potentially be abused.
Don't you see the dissonance in our arguments?
Deliberate injustice can't be justified by occasional acts of justice. Why can't you see that?
I don't say that anything justifies anything. I am saying that just because some parts of the chinese legal system do not equal our own it does not necessarily follow that everyone convicted in China would be found innocent in a western court.
While we read a lot about the dissidents, bloggers and other political prisoners, we shouldn't forget that very, very likely, a large part of the convicts in China are convicted for theft, fraud, robbery, rape, murder or any other crime that we don't see all that different.
You fly to Paris only to fly back to London, all in order to save a buck?
Is the tax your first-born child or is your time really worth so little?
"an improvement over conventional systems for initializing static arrays by reducing the amount of code executed by the virtual machine to statically initialize an array,"
You can get a patent for stuff like that?
Fuck me sideways! I need to get a couple hundred patent applications filed!