That underlying infrastructure very often involves trenching and stringing wire across with old fashioned labor. Nobody is going to do that kind of labor at that kind of a scale simply out of the goodness of their heart. At some point they're going to want a return on that investment.
Yes, but how much does that cost, in total? Or, let's put it a different way: How many global Internets do you think you can build (wires, routers, etc.) for just the 19 billion that FB paid for WhatsApp?
The infrastructure is not the problem, and running the infrastructure commercially is not causing the Internet to become filled with ads and scams.
And figured out that his MSFT business approach was counter-productive as far as bettering the world goes.
Negative on that. He runs his charity much like he ran MS. In fact, several other charities are complaining how he's driving out the "competition" - which even though it's not about profits does have the same result we all know from MS: A lot of the aid programs now depend on his foundation in one way or the other. Especially in his most public work against malaria, he's made the pharma companies he works with near monopolies (and, surprise, he owns stock in them).
He's doing good now, but his methods are still the same.
Gates has been on a campaign to whitewash his image for many years now. He probably realized that he has more money than he can ever spend in his lifetime, even if he sleeps on a bed of dollar bills ever day - and burns it in the morning.
But one day he also realized that he'll go down in history as a sleazebag. So he did what all the robber barons have done before him, he turned to philantropy and creating a nice new image of himself, hoping that ten years from now people will remember that part of his life and forget the other.
And it just might work, because humans in general are stupid. Too few realize that since he made most of his fortune extracting economic rent, the damage he has done to society is larger than the money he has, so no matter what he does, if he wants to become a net positive for the human race, he has to do a lot more than just give away his wealth.
Don't say it can't be done. For thousands of years societies traded sex for marriage. People wanted sex, society wanted stability, and it was decided that the society would expect you to get married before having sex. Most people complied.
Still works that way, in a way.
When the government dramatically raised university feeds in my country, several commentators were half-jokingly commenting that politicians voted yes mostly in order to ensure a steady stream of young student prostitutes.
Money for sex usually also means money flowing from an older generation that had time to acquire it to a younger generation.
The "will you get better" question doesn't seem to come in to play when the government assigns the designation of handicapped.
You just said it did, because when you break a leg, you get a temporary handicap placard.
Still my point remains. Even if you broke your leg yourself, you can't will it to heal and it will magically do so. But you can lose weight by behaving in the correct way (diet and excercise).
Or, in other words, it is your choice to remain in that state. I don't care how you got there, for all I know you could've been captured by a lunatic with a fat fetish and force-fed seven times a day for half a year.
I don't blame anyone for being fat. I do blame everyone who remains so. And that's the difference. I can't blame someone with one leg for not growing the missing one back. It's simply not within his powers to do so. Losing weight absolutely is within your power.
The human body changes over time. You don't expect a 5 year old to eat and drink the same things as a 5 month old, do you? So why do you expect that the same diet for a lifetime will have the same effect all the time?
When you're 40, your body is not the same as it was when you were 20. You can see it in sports, if you're competitive it is very clear. In many sports you can still compete with the youngsters, because experience and training compensate for changes in biology, but I don't think anyone actually active will deny the basic fact that the body changes. So you need to change your training regime and your diet with it.
Change. It's really the most basic fact of the universe. Why is our brain so stupid that it treats the world as constant, when the only constant phenomenon in it is change?
And the fact that we make fatties comfortable, that the public agenda is "don't be ashamed of your body" instead of "get to the fucking gym you loser" is a primary reason, even if they nicely call it "social factors" in that research.
There's nothing new there. We've known for basically as long as nutritional studies as a field exists that the human body is designed to store away extra food, because it evolved in a time of scarcity and still thinks that the plenty won't last.
We've known for hundreds if not thousands of years that people who have enough food to eat constantly will put on weight. For hundreds of years being overweight was a status symbol.
However, it is very recent that the combination of constant food full of fat and sugar and a lifestyle with very little physical effort has allowed people to grow far beyond anything nature has ever imagined.
And it is just as simple that when natural pressure drops away, you have to do the work yourself, you need motivation and discipline and some information on the right food and sports.
No, I reject your conclusion and that research, for semantic terms. "It is quite hard" is very different from "not possible". Of course it's possible. Most people just lack the motivation, energy or discipline to do it.
And that's why we should work on the social factors, because in the short run, we can't change the biological ones. Shaming along is not enough. But imagine that - somehow - we turned society into a motivational factor, where people would tell you to not accept your body, but eat better and exercise more, with the right combination of shaming and positive feedback.
Wanna bet most fatties would not look like overfed elephants anymore?
Picking up the smell of tobacco smoke is amazingly easy even if you are not a smoker.
That's true, and one of the reasons I avoid places where they allow smoking - I smell horribly when I come home and there's no way I can stand myself without a shower.
But there's a marked difference between a non-smoker whose cloths and hair picked up the smell and a smoker, who practically oozes it from every pore. It's true. I've stopped hooking up with smoking girls after I noticed that even if they hadn't had one for a whole day, I could still smell it coming from their skin.
If there are underlying medical reasons that should dictate special treatment, then it's those reasons that should give an obese person their special treatment, not the fact that they are obese.
Exactly. The 0.1% or so of fat people who are so because of a medical condition already have a medical diagnosis. They don't need a second one.
For almost everyone who is fat, the medically correct terminology for their condition is called "laziness". Not just to not excercise, but more importantly to not spend the effort on eating right, and on finding the right mix between diet and sports.
There's no excuse for being fat. If you are fat, it is because of choices you made and keep making every day.
I guess the overall plan makes sense; if you were to chop off your own leg you'd be considered disabled; I don't think the law makes any exceptions for self inflicted disability.
The difference is that you can't put your leg back. You can lose weight.
Obesity needs the treatment that smoking was given.
Sign me up.
I own a small company. Very small, but I have hopes. If this ruling gets through, I'll make it inofficial company policy to not hire fat people, just like I'll never hire a smoker (and trust me smokers, we non-smokers smell it as soon as you enter the room, if you've had one in the past few hours).
I know that many small companies have reservations hiring women because if they get pregnant, you've lost 10% (or so) of your team. But at least that's something that is temporary.
So judges - yes, please, turn more people into liabilities. I've been on both sides of the fence, working for employee rights as well as on the employer side. Giving disadvantaged people special rights has one effect in the real world - pushing them further out and making them less desireable as employees.
So... thinking about it... yes, please make it a disability with all the special rights that come with it. That'll make sure fatties have a harder time finding a job, which just might provide motivation for some of them to finally get their life together.
Obesity is a mental disability, most often an addiction to a wrong diet containing many addictive ingredients.
While there are elements of a mild addiction, it's not a disease. It falls into the same category as, say, a shopping habbit, or a strong sex drive - things that you are quite capable of having under control, and some control can be expected from an adult.
Please treat it as an addiction, not as a phyisical disability.
At the most, yes.
Tall people can't help being tall, fat people in over 95% of the cases can help it if they kick the habit. If you treat obesity as a physical disability, you are insulting everyone with a physical disability for which there is no cure.
99% of the cases, at the very least. There are one or two actual bodily malfunctions that cause obesity, but they are extremely rare.
Yeah, obesity is a disease... affecting about 0.1% of the obese people. For everyone else, it's called not having your life under control.
We need to get back to a time where fat people are ridiculed in school, not accepted as the standard. But we need to add another message as well: That it's something you can fix. Eat right, exercise and you can stop being fat.
And that's why it is not a disease. Because people don't need medicine or treatment or anything, they just need to get their priorities right. Or not, frankly I don't care. Wait, I do care. Fatties are more expensive on the medical system, meaning I already pay for their lifestyle choice.
I have a very simple principle in life that has gotten me far: I don't feel pity for things that people do to themselves. Obesity falls into that category. Sure, if you grew up badly, thinking pizza and McD are normal food, blame your parents. But as soon as you're an adult, you can take care of yourself, you can learn to cook, you can do sports. Maybe it's tough, but that's life.
I wasn't referring to that scheme in particular, because there are many such and I was referring to them in general.
Because once you're super-rich, the rules of the game change. From what I gather from friends working in various industries that serve the 0.01%, these people have more ways of hiding their money then you and I have of making money.
It's a PR stunt, nothing more. That, or design-by-manager, which is about twice as bad as design-by-committee, because with a committee, you have a small chance that there's someone on it who knows a thing or two.
That's an old thought, but won't work. The reason is that people who have these insane amounts of money don't need to draw it as income. They can purchase things with stocks they own, for example. They can keep it "invested". Your tax gain would be much less than you anticipate, and of course there would be some exceptions and loopholes and they would be abused.
If you want to return the world back to a different age where humans matter more than corporations, you have to tax the corporations high and the humans low, so that taking the money out of the corporations is the better way for the super-rich. Make it so that drawing that income is profitable to them, and re-investment happens not inside the corporate circle but through shareholders adding more capital.
Taxing corporations doesn't really gain you anything. If you shift 100% of the tax burden to individuals, they give up x% of their money to the government. If you shift 100% of the tax burden to corporations, the people still give up x% of their money to the government, just in the form of higher prices and lower wages.
This is what the 0.01% want us to believe, so they can keep corporate taxes low. It is, however, a very blatant lie.
There are two ways that corporations can compensate higher corporate taxes. One is the way you allude, by passing the burden on to their employees and customers. But it's not the only way. They could also take a hit to their profits, which quite frankly are obscene:
Apple - revenue 170 billion, profit 37 billion = 21% Google - revenue 60 billion, profit 14 billion = 23% Microsoft - revenue 78 billion, profit 22 billion = 28%...and so on...
20-30% of corporate income go to the shareholders. Some of which are your pension fund, but most of which are either other corporations or the super-rich.
Imagine we put a 5% tax on just the profit. Would they hike up prices by 5%? If we assume that the free market still works, they might not. If a competitor only raises prices by 3% and absorbs the rest, you would have effectively taxed 2% away from the super-rich. And once that starts, someone would go to 2.5% then 2% - until a stable level is reached, probably at something like 1%. So the consumers would pay 1% of that tax (but get 5% back in tax money) while the super-rich and corporations pay the rest, and with profits between 17% and 24% would still live comfortably.
The problem is that to change the tax system fundamentally (which is very seriously required), you need the cooperation of those who profit most from the current system, because they've essentially bought our governments.
Non-DRM games would make it much easier for the casual user to copy.
That's true to some extent, but to be quite honest, you don't need DRM for that. The most simple copy protection would stop 95% of the casual users.
Not sure what your point is.
My point is that for practical purposes in this context, copyright is not very limited, because the limits don't apply to computer games.
I guess we will just have to agree to disagree on solution to measuring the impact of DRM on copying. I think there is data to show it does; you obviously disagree. That's the beauty of economics, not only can people disagree on data and theories but two can win the Nobel in the same year for saying exactly opposite things.
I cannot speak about every European country, but for my native Germany, for example, guns are quite difficult to get. Ownership permissions are manageable if you jump through a ton of hoops, but carrying permissions, for example, are almost impossible.
Compared to the US where many states have open and/or concealed carry right in the law, with no permissions or documents needed, I'd count that as strict.
Don't give me that BS, I've been raped; it doesn't matter how it happens, you've still been sexually violated against your will. Would you honestly use your line of argument for anything else? "Well, yeah, he burned down my home, but he was really polite and apologetic about it, so it's not REAL arson...."?
I'm not talking about someone being polite.
The arson metaphor doesn't really work here, but how about other things people do when they're drunk? Two persons are both heavily drunk, they're on a bridge, joking around, A teases B by taking away something and B tell A to throw it into the river, it'll be fun.
Next day, B says it was theft, because B was non compos mentis when B said it.
Maybe legally it was theft. I would still maintain that it's a different category of action as A robbing B at gunpoint, even though both acts resulted in B losing posession of the item.
You know what the worst part of it is, IMHO? How you can't talk about it afterwards. [...] because assholes like you would begin to question whether it was "real" rape or whether I brought it on myself by dressing too seductively or did enough to fight off the attacker.
You're emotional about a person you don't know. You assume that my behaviour in a theoretical argument on the Internet would be the same as when faced with an actual even in the real world. That's an insane assumption.
Given the fact that you're having a problem with people saying that you raped them (according to your first post), perhaps YOU'RE just thrilled with your behavior, but the women you're raping are not.
I don't know where you got that first part from, but I am quite certain about the second part. In fact, if this weren't an Internet argument, I could point you to the girls in question and tell you to ask them yourself.
I'd like to ask you to make fewer assumptions. You're now at the point where you make assumptions about the feelings of people you not only don't know, but of whose existence you've only just learnt from someone you don't know, on the Internet. That's at least 3 layers of indirection. Even under the best of assumptions, any guesses you make about persons you know so little about is guaranteed to be basically random.
Wait a minute, so you *are* getting some form of consent before the sexual activity, checking to see if she's into it? You're not just assuming unending consent, as you described previously?
No, you described "unending consent". I did not. Please do not turn assumptions you made around and claim they were words from my mouth.
There's a huge imbalance, all right, but it's towards people getting away with rape scott-free.
That is true. It does not, however, justify incarcerating innocent people or expanding the legal definitions ad infinitum. It asks for better enforcement of the existing laws.
But of course you're not railing against them because you don't care about them, you just want to be able to F*** girls without their permission.
You keep repeating baseless accusations of a very personal nature. I don't think I want to continue an argument where the other part is basically screaming at me half the time. Seriously, if people treated you the same way, would you enjoy it?
If you want to accuse me of something that's a crime in my country, contact my local police: +49-40-4286-50. If you think this rage is some kind of argument, and you only keep repeating it for dialectic reasons, then I don't think we have enough common ground to continue a discussion.
I thought I answered that question, and quite clearly.
If you're blind drunk and/or unconscious and someone takes advantage of your condition without explicit consent(*), that's rape.
But that is the minority of cases. One report says that in 83% of these so-called rape cases, both parties had been drinking. Another study concludes that about half of so-called "date rapes" are actually morning-after regrets, i.e. both people were drinking, enjoying the night, decided to go somewhere and have a fuck, and after sobering up the next morning one party changed their mind and said "shit, what have I done?".
At which point I would tell them to not drink if they can't handle it, or have a friend who stays sober and can bring them home and/or talk them out of stupid decisions.
I don't feel much pity for people who incapacitate themselves. I'm talking about normal drinking here, not about some scenario where someone got slipped a drug or whatever, just to make that clear.
But more importantly, I don't want to mix people whose perception of attractiveness got drowned in a bunch of drinks they voluntarily had with real victims who were brutally raped, often beaten and sometimes murdered. These two things are not in the same class. And as much as I don't feel pity for drunken girls going home with a guy they don't like anymore in the morning, my thoughts are very much with any victim of an actual rape, which I consider one of the most horrible crimes out there, on par with torture and mutilation. And that is exactly why I'm so opposed to mixing things into it that belong into different categories.
(*) by which I mean proper consent, given while the person was sober and conscious, something like "hey, if I get drunk later, fuck me properly, will you? I love it when you do that."
Slashdot Mirror
That underlying infrastructure very often involves trenching and stringing wire across with old fashioned labor. Nobody is going to do that kind of labor at that kind of a scale simply out of the goodness of their heart. At some point they're going to want a return on that investment.
Yes, but how much does that cost, in total? Or, let's put it a different way: How many global Internets do you think you can build (wires, routers, etc.) for just the 19 billion that FB paid for WhatsApp?
The infrastructure is not the problem, and running the infrastructure commercially is not causing the Internet to become filled with ads and scams.
And figured out that his MSFT business approach was counter-productive as far as bettering the world goes.
Negative on that. He runs his charity much like he ran MS. In fact, several other charities are complaining how he's driving out the "competition" - which even though it's not about profits does have the same result we all know from MS: A lot of the aid programs now depend on his foundation in one way or the other. Especially in his most public work against malaria, he's made the pharma companies he works with near monopolies (and, surprise, he owns stock in them).
He's doing good now, but his methods are still the same.
Anyone surprised?
Gates has been on a campaign to whitewash his image for many years now. He probably realized that he has more money than he can ever spend in his lifetime, even if he sleeps on a bed of dollar bills ever day - and burns it in the morning.
But one day he also realized that he'll go down in history as a sleazebag. So he did what all the robber barons have done before him, he turned to philantropy and creating a nice new image of himself, hoping that ten years from now people will remember that part of his life and forget the other.
And it just might work, because humans in general are stupid. Too few realize that since he made most of his fortune extracting economic rent, the damage he has done to society is larger than the money he has, so no matter what he does, if he wants to become a net positive for the human race, he has to do a lot more than just give away his wealth.
The part where sex is exchanged for another valuable.
Here's a free pro hint for next time: Read, comprehend, comment - in that order.
Don't say it can't be done. For thousands of years societies traded sex for marriage. People wanted sex, society wanted stability, and it was decided that the society would expect you to get married before having sex. Most people complied.
Still works that way, in a way.
When the government dramatically raised university feeds in my country, several commentators were half-jokingly commenting that politicians voted yes mostly in order to ensure a steady stream of young student prostitutes.
Money for sex usually also means money flowing from an older generation that had time to acquire it to a younger generation.
Yeah, it's a bit sad.
The "will you get better" question doesn't seem to come in to play when the government assigns the designation of handicapped.
You just said it did, because when you break a leg, you get a temporary handicap placard.
Still my point remains. Even if you broke your leg yourself, you can't will it to heal and it will magically do so. But you can lose weight by behaving in the correct way (diet and excercise).
Or, in other words, it is your choice to remain in that state. I don't care how you got there, for all I know you could've been captured by a lunatic with a fat fetish and force-fed seven times a day for half a year.
I don't blame anyone for being fat. I do blame everyone who remains so. And that's the difference. I can't blame someone with one leg for not growing the missing one back. It's simply not within his powers to do so. Losing weight absolutely is within your power.
Those aren't "facts", those are idiocities.
The human body changes over time. You don't expect a 5 year old to eat and drink the same things as a 5 month old, do you? So why do you expect that the same diet for a lifetime will have the same effect all the time?
When you're 40, your body is not the same as it was when you were 20. You can see it in sports, if you're competitive it is very clear. In many sports you can still compete with the youngsters, because experience and training compensate for changes in biology, but I don't think anyone actually active will deny the basic fact that the body changes. So you need to change your training regime and your diet with it.
Change. It's really the most basic fact of the universe. Why is our brain so stupid that it treats the world as constant, when the only constant phenomenon in it is change?
And the fact that we make fatties comfortable, that the public agenda is "don't be ashamed of your body" instead of "get to the fucking gym you loser" is a primary reason, even if they nicely call it "social factors" in that research.
There's nothing new there. We've known for basically as long as nutritional studies as a field exists that the human body is designed to store away extra food, because it evolved in a time of scarcity and still thinks that the plenty won't last.
We've known for hundreds if not thousands of years that people who have enough food to eat constantly will put on weight. For hundreds of years being overweight was a status symbol.
However, it is very recent that the combination of constant food full of fat and sugar and a lifestyle with very little physical effort has allowed people to grow far beyond anything nature has ever imagined.
And it is just as simple that when natural pressure drops away, you have to do the work yourself, you need motivation and discipline and some information on the right food and sports.
No, I reject your conclusion and that research, for semantic terms. "It is quite hard" is very different from "not possible". Of course it's possible. Most people just lack the motivation, energy or discipline to do it.
And that's why we should work on the social factors, because in the short run, we can't change the biological ones. Shaming along is not enough. But imagine that - somehow - we turned society into a motivational factor, where people would tell you to not accept your body, but eat better and exercise more, with the right combination of shaming and positive feedback.
Wanna bet most fatties would not look like overfed elephants anymore?
Picking up the smell of tobacco smoke is amazingly easy even if you are not a smoker.
That's true, and one of the reasons I avoid places where they allow smoking - I smell horribly when I come home and there's no way I can stand myself without a shower.
But there's a marked difference between a non-smoker whose cloths and hair picked up the smell and a smoker, who practically oozes it from every pore. It's true. I've stopped hooking up with smoking girls after I noticed that even if they hadn't had one for a whole day, I could still smell it coming from their skin.
If there are underlying medical reasons that should dictate special treatment, then it's those reasons that should give an obese person their special treatment, not the fact that they are obese.
Exactly. The 0.1% or so of fat people who are so because of a medical condition already have a medical diagnosis. They don't need a second one.
For almost everyone who is fat, the medically correct terminology for their condition is called "laziness". Not just to not excercise, but more importantly to not spend the effort on eating right, and on finding the right mix between diet and sports.
There's no excuse for being fat. If you are fat, it is because of choices you made and keep making every day.
I guess the overall plan makes sense; if you were to chop off your own leg you'd be considered disabled; I don't think the law makes any exceptions for self inflicted disability.
The difference is that you can't put your leg back. You can lose weight.
Obesity needs the treatment that smoking was given.
Sign me up.
I own a small company. Very small, but I have hopes. If this ruling gets through, I'll make it inofficial company policy to not hire fat people, just like I'll never hire a smoker (and trust me smokers, we non-smokers smell it as soon as you enter the room, if you've had one in the past few hours).
I know that many small companies have reservations hiring women because if they get pregnant, you've lost 10% (or so) of your team. But at least that's something that is temporary.
So judges - yes, please, turn more people into liabilities. I've been on both sides of the fence, working for employee rights as well as on the employer side. Giving disadvantaged people special rights has one effect in the real world - pushing them further out and making them less desireable as employees.
So... thinking about it... yes, please make it a disability with all the special rights that come with it. That'll make sure fatties have a harder time finding a job, which just might provide motivation for some of them to finally get their life together.
Obesity is a mental disability, most often an addiction to a wrong diet containing many addictive ingredients.
While there are elements of a mild addiction, it's not a disease. It falls into the same category as, say, a shopping habbit, or a strong sex drive - things that you are quite capable of having under control, and some control can be expected from an adult.
Please treat it as an addiction, not as a phyisical disability.
At the most, yes.
Tall people can't help being tall, fat people in over 95% of the cases can help it if they kick the habit. If you treat obesity as a physical disability, you are insulting everyone with a physical disability for which there is no cure.
99% of the cases, at the very least. There are one or two actual bodily malfunctions that cause obesity, but they are extremely rare.
I do agree with everything else you've said.
Yeah, obesity is a disease... affecting about 0.1% of the obese people. For everyone else, it's called not having your life under control.
We need to get back to a time where fat people are ridiculed in school, not accepted as the standard. But we need to add another message as well: That it's something you can fix. Eat right, exercise and you can stop being fat.
And that's why it is not a disease. Because people don't need medicine or treatment or anything, they just need to get their priorities right. Or not, frankly I don't care. Wait, I do care. Fatties are more expensive on the medical system, meaning I already pay for their lifestyle choice.
I have a very simple principle in life that has gotten me far: I don't feel pity for things that people do to themselves. Obesity falls into that category. Sure, if you grew up badly, thinking pizza and McD are normal food, blame your parents. But as soon as you're an adult, you can take care of yourself, you can learn to cook, you can do sports. Maybe it's tough, but that's life.
Hm, I already have full control over ads on Facebook. It's called AdBlock Edge.
I wasn't referring to that scheme in particular, because there are many such and I was referring to them in general.
Because once you're super-rich, the rules of the game change. From what I gather from friends working in various industries that serve the 0.01%, these people have more ways of hiding their money then you and I have of making money.
It's a PR stunt, nothing more. That, or design-by-manager, which is about twice as bad as design-by-committee, because with a committee, you have a small chance that there's someone on it who knows a thing or two.
That's an old thought, but won't work. The reason is that people who have these insane amounts of money don't need to draw it as income. They can purchase things with stocks they own, for example. They can keep it "invested". Your tax gain would be much less than you anticipate, and of course there would be some exceptions and loopholes and they would be abused.
If you want to return the world back to a different age where humans matter more than corporations, you have to tax the corporations high and the humans low, so that taking the money out of the corporations is the better way for the super-rich. Make it so that drawing that income is profitable to them, and re-investment happens not inside the corporate circle but through shareholders adding more capital.
Taxing corporations doesn't really gain you anything. If you shift 100% of the tax burden to individuals, they give up x% of their money to the government. If you shift 100% of the tax burden to corporations, the people still give up x% of their money to the government, just in the form of higher prices and lower wages.
This is what the 0.01% want us to believe, so they can keep corporate taxes low. It is, however, a very blatant lie.
There are two ways that corporations can compensate higher corporate taxes. One is the way you allude, by passing the burden on to their employees and customers. But it's not the only way. They could also take a hit to their profits, which quite frankly are obscene:
Apple - revenue 170 billion, profit 37 billion = 21% ...and so on...
Google - revenue 60 billion, profit 14 billion = 23%
Microsoft - revenue 78 billion, profit 22 billion = 28%
20-30% of corporate income go to the shareholders. Some of which are your pension fund, but most of which are either other corporations or the super-rich.
Imagine we put a 5% tax on just the profit. Would they hike up prices by 5%? If we assume that the free market still works, they might not. If a competitor only raises prices by 3% and absorbs the rest, you would have effectively taxed 2% away from the super-rich. And once that starts, someone would go to 2.5% then 2% - until a stable level is reached, probably at something like 1%. So the consumers would pay 1% of that tax (but get 5% back in tax money) while the super-rich and corporations pay the rest, and with profits between 17% and 24% would still live comfortably.
The problem is that to change the tax system fundamentally (which is very seriously required), you need the cooperation of those who profit most from the current system, because they've essentially bought our governments.
So basically, it's not going to happen.
Non-DRM games would make it much easier for the casual user to copy.
That's true to some extent, but to be quite honest, you don't need DRM for that. The most simple copy protection would stop 95% of the casual users.
Not sure what your point is.
My point is that for practical purposes in this context, copyright is not very limited, because the limits don't apply to computer games.
I guess we will just have to agree to disagree on solution to measuring the impact of DRM on copying. I think there is data to show it does; you obviously disagree. That's the beauty of economics, not only can people disagree on data and theories but two can win the Nobel in the same year for saying exactly opposite things.
Nicely said. :-)
I cannot speak about every European country, but for my native Germany, for example, guns are quite difficult to get. Ownership permissions are manageable if you jump through a ton of hoops, but carrying permissions, for example, are almost impossible.
Compared to the US where many states have open and/or concealed carry right in the law, with no permissions or documents needed, I'd count that as strict.
Don't give me that BS, I've been raped; it doesn't matter how it happens, you've still been sexually violated against your will. Would you honestly use your line of argument for anything else? "Well, yeah, he burned down my home, but he was really polite and apologetic about it, so it's not REAL arson...."?
I'm not talking about someone being polite.
The arson metaphor doesn't really work here, but how about other things people do when they're drunk? Two persons are both heavily drunk, they're on a bridge, joking around, A teases B by taking away something and B tell A to throw it into the river, it'll be fun.
Next day, B says it was theft, because B was non compos mentis when B said it.
Maybe legally it was theft. I would still maintain that it's a different category of action as A robbing B at gunpoint, even though both acts resulted in B losing posession of the item.
You know what the worst part of it is, IMHO? How you can't talk about it afterwards. [...] because assholes like you would begin to question whether it was "real" rape or whether I brought it on myself by dressing too seductively or did enough to fight off the attacker.
You're emotional about a person you don't know. You assume that my behaviour in a theoretical argument on the Internet would be the same as when faced with an actual even in the real world. That's an insane assumption.
Given the fact that you're having a problem with people saying that you raped them (according to your first post), perhaps YOU'RE just thrilled with your behavior, but the women you're raping are not.
I don't know where you got that first part from, but I am quite certain about the second part. In fact, if this weren't an Internet argument, I could point you to the girls in question and tell you to ask them yourself.
I'd like to ask you to make fewer assumptions. You're now at the point where you make assumptions about the feelings of people you not only don't know, but of whose existence you've only just learnt from someone you don't know, on the Internet. That's at least 3 layers of indirection. Even under the best of assumptions, any guesses you make about persons you know so little about is guaranteed to be basically random.
Wait a minute, so you *are* getting some form of consent before the sexual activity, checking to see if she's into it? You're not just assuming unending consent, as you described previously?
No, you described "unending consent". I did not. Please do not turn assumptions you made around and claim they were words from my mouth.
There's a huge imbalance, all right, but it's towards people getting away with rape scott-free.
That is true.
It does not, however, justify incarcerating innocent people or expanding the legal definitions ad infinitum. It asks for better enforcement of the existing laws.
But of course you're not railing against them because you don't care about them, you just want to be able to F*** girls without their permission.
You keep repeating baseless accusations of a very personal nature. I don't think I want to continue an argument where the other part is basically screaming at me half the time. Seriously, if people treated you the same way, would you enjoy it?
If you want to accuse me of something that's a crime in my country, contact my local police: +49-40-4286-50.
If you think this rage is some kind of argument, and you only keep repeating it for dialectic reasons, then I don't think we have enough common ground to continue a discussion.
I thought I answered that question, and quite clearly.
If you're blind drunk and/or unconscious and someone takes advantage of your condition without explicit consent(*), that's rape.
But that is the minority of cases. One report says that in 83% of these so-called rape cases, both parties had been drinking. Another study concludes that about half of so-called "date rapes" are actually morning-after regrets, i.e. both people were drinking, enjoying the night, decided to go somewhere and have a fuck, and after sobering up the next morning one party changed their mind and said "shit, what have I done?".
At which point I would tell them to not drink if they can't handle it, or have a friend who stays sober and can bring them home and/or talk them out of stupid decisions.
I don't feel much pity for people who incapacitate themselves. I'm talking about normal drinking here, not about some scenario where someone got slipped a drug or whatever, just to make that clear.
But more importantly, I don't want to mix people whose perception of attractiveness got drowned in a bunch of drinks they voluntarily had with real victims who were brutally raped, often beaten and sometimes murdered. These two things are not in the same class. And as much as I don't feel pity for drunken girls going home with a guy they don't like anymore in the morning, my thoughts are very much with any victim of an actual rape, which I consider one of the most horrible crimes out there, on par with torture and mutilation. And that is exactly why I'm so opposed to mixing things into it that belong into different categories.
(*) by which I mean proper consent, given while the person was sober and conscious, something like "hey, if I get drunk later, fuck me properly, will you? I love it when you do that."
Those countries that have strict gun control laws that you speak of are likely UK and Australia, right?
Actually, only in part. Much of Europe has similar laws, and it's not an island.