What the fuck kind of relationship exists between the US and the Saudis? There's been some strange shit going on over there for a very long time now. That they were able to get our military out of there only suggests that the relationship is even more unique than I had previously suspected.
Thankfully, it seems that the extended period of cheap oil is really killing their economy, and that Saudi rule as we know it won't be sustainable for more than a couple more years. This is evidenced by the major recent cuts to social programs, etc.
Let's hope the house of Saud collapses and we finally learn what all this has been about.
Since when does the USA voluntary WITHDRAW its presence from a foreign country?
Apart from West Germany (now completely stable), I can't recall this ever happening in the past.
Today, USA still has several dozen Army installations in Germany, all of them in territory that was formerly considered West Germany. Furthermore, there are currently over 37000 American troops deployed in Germany.
The USA does not voluntarily withdraw its presence from a foreign country, period. Not even from West Germany.
There are two things to consider here: whether or not the police are a bunch of bastards that should be locked up, and whether or not the family starts claiming that they are before they have all the information.
If the cops are not a bunch of bastards that should be locked up and the family starts claiming that they are before they have all the information, that's no good. The family is now unjustifiably harming the interests of the cops. Once they have all the information, they'll feel badly about making the claims that they did. It will be possible for them to apologize, though there may be some minimal lasting impact on the public's perception of cops due to these false allegations. False positive. Overall not a great outcome, I'd say 3/10.
If the cops are a bunch of bastards that should be locked up and the family starts claiming they they are before they have all the information, that's mostly good. People should be held accountable for their actions, and this is doubly true for people in positions of power. While it would be great if this accountability stemmed from verifiable information and not hearsay from a family member (or sheer chance, gnosticism, etc.), it's still great that people are rightly held accountable. True positive (but for the wrong reasons). Overall a decent outcome, 8/10.
If the cops are not a bunch of bastards that should be locked up and the family doesn't start claiming that they are, that's good. Family's actions are in line with reality, no unjustifiable claims are made, no justifiable claims are not made. True negative. Overall a great outcome, 10/10.
If the cops are a bunch of bastards that should be locked up and the family doesn't start claiming that they are before they have all the information, that's entirely unforgivable, even tragic. It is not easy to raise awareness of police abuse of authority, as is evident from the fact that countless people have been wrongly being killed by police every year for ages, and only now is there some marginalized movement forming around the issue. If this is an issue Ian felt passionately enough about to have given his own life for it to raise awareness, this would amount to squandering what little media attention his death received on nothing at all. Whereas in the first scenario an ex post facto apology would be somewhat diminished by its lateness, in this scenario a delayed claim of police being bastards would be entirely robbed of any efficacy. The window of opportunity for raising awareness by suicide is nearly instantaneous -- Ian's death will be a long-forgotten memory in the media's mind by the time "all the information" comes out, assuming it ever does at all. In this scenario, if the information comes out supporting claims of cops being a bunch of bastards, it will already be too late for Ian's death to have meant anything, and it will all have been for naught. Overall an unacceptable outcome, 0/10.
tl;dr: It's like Pascal's wager, but instead of being a fallacious argument supporting a belief in God, it's a fallacious argument supporting claims that the police are a bunch of bastards that should be locked up.
Perhaps my American public schooling (in the 90s) is atypical, but I remember a disproportionate amount of time being spent studying "the" holocaust. I was quite surprised to learn at a later date that, for example, there was an order of magnitude more Chinese casualties in the Asian theater than there were Jewish casualties in the European theater. In light of that fact, it seems odd that "the" holocaust would have been happening concurrently with another much larger mass genocide of civilians -- why isn't it merely "a" holocaust, or why isn't the Chinese one "the" holocaust? That there are thousands of books about the Bataan Death March on Amazon alone doesn't change the fact that there is a disproportionate focus on Nazi Germany's role in WW2 in American public schools. I believe that this is merely an inherent Western bias in the focus of history classes here, but it doesn't make sense to dismiss this bias as nonexistent.
It's evident that you haven't read this, which answered this question over 14 years ago, before it was even relevant. Here's the relevant exerpt:
After sixty years of devoted service, Moore’s Law will die a dignified death no later than the year 2019. By that time, transistor features will be just a few atoms in width, and the strategy of ever finer photolithography will have run its course. So, will that be the end of the exponential growth of computing?
Don’t bet on it.
-- Ray Kurzweil, March 2001
The section after that, titled "Moore’s Law Was Not the First, but the Fifth Paradigm To Provide Exponential Growth of Computing", is where you'll find your answer.
It wasn't until later that non-landowners were allowed to vote, and later women, and later black people (the last one didn't really happen until the late 1960s).
Blacks won the right to vote [nationally] in 1869.
Women won the right to vote [nationally] in 1920.
The Civil Rights Acts of 1957/1960 took steps to ensure that the right to vote that blacks had won nearly a century earlier was actually respected.
That being said, blacks won the right to vote a half century before women, at least legally [if not in practice].
I have a degree in EE and did some grad work in CS. Did a robotics internship with NASA many years ago and have been working as a software developer ever since. Some DoD contracting, now working in cybersecurity, but I don't find any of this stuff too fulfilling. I'm a huge 12-year-old at heart -- I want to be working on robots or spaceships!
That being said, based on my experience, those jobs don't exist [here]. I closest thing I could find was working for a contract manufacturer of medical devices, and that gig would've come with a 30% pay cut. I'd take a 30% pay cut to work on something truly inspiring, but diabetes test gear just doesn't have that same 'wow' factor for me.
So, since you seem to have better insight into the industry, what gives? Is everything out in California? Is NYC especially terrible for robotics? Am I just terrible at life?
So the ones that are not under 250g would require registration?
Furthermore, attaching a 250g lead weight to any wind-up flying toy would trigger this registration requirement?
Totally agree. The second amendment protects the individual right to bear nuclear arms, and for that reason it must be repealed and replaced with something more sensible.
Japan's national debt was 226% of GDP as of 2013. That's worse than Zimbabwe's 203%.
Say what you will about economists or economics, but that's some shit right there. And you think this is "not bad"? At what point do you think national debt becomes bad? 300% GDP? 400%?
I don't know of many economists that would describe it that way (though, granted, there are other issues at play besides the demographic catastrophe).
And honestly, the way you pitch it, it sounds like exploitation.
It probably is, but I try not to make value judgements.
I wasn't arguing in favor of immigration any more than I was arguing against it. I was just trying to inject some points that you seem to have omitted in the hope that people would have more of a complete picture to draw their own conclusions from.
One of these is not like the others. Making the populace too frightened to send their kids to school or to board and airplane really undermines the ability of a society to function at a basic level, because education and transportation are critical to a society's continued operation as well as long-term success. Immigration (particularly from middle eastern nations) is NOT necessary for a society's survival or prosperity. You can argue that it enriches a country to some extent, or that it's a humanitarian thing that's good for humanity at large, but how is it necessary for a particular nation? It's not.
Necessary for what?
Nothing is "necessary" except obeying the laws of physics. It's not "necessary" that any Americans continue to have a pulse, even. It's not "necessary" to maintain public education or public roads -- there was a time when these things didn't exist, and the universe didn't collapse into some internally-contradictory nonexistence. Using words like "necessary" without any further details is a great rhetorical device, as it allows one to make ridiculous claims that logically can't be argued against.
Immigration is necessary to maintain our standard of living without implementing some other form of population control (e.g. compulsory reproduction) or scrapping our current economic system. Of course, it is not necessary that we maintain our standard of living, or that we avoid population control, or that we maintain our current economic system. But, if we are to do all of those things, then it is necessary to continue a policy of allowing immigration.
I know there's all this talk about thought-crime and whatnot, but I'd just like to chime in for a moment...
Gilberto "Cannibal Cop" Valle illegally used a police database to research his potential victims. This was illegal, regardless of whether or not he actually planned to use the information he gained to commit any crimes, and has nothing to do with the thought-crime part of this case. By breaking the law, Cannibal Cop committed a crime, so a crime did occur.
The reason this appeals court threw out the conviction for illegal use of a police database is because of the issue of jurisdictional. That is, he got off on a technicality. Granted, he served some time already, so in a sense, he didn't get away with it entirely. However, his conviction record is now squeaky clean, and I'm sure he'll be back on the force in no time.
And without tax breaks this would have never happened, right?
For all the "it's not a zero-sum game!" objections we so regularly hear from apologists for the wealthy, it's pure gold to see this dramatic about-face.
First, thanks for the reasonable response! It's not every day that people are willing to participate in this discussion in a strictly rational sense.
For one, it's very prevalent in this debate and similar ones that there's a black and white line between criminals and law-abiding citizens. This is not the case: a petty thief willing to bluff you out of your money with a gun is not necessarily willing to risk the severe penalty associated with acquiring a gun in a gun-less society.
While I grant that this is certainly possible, I'd just like to add that this hinges upon the assumption that there's a severe penalty associated with acquiring a gun in a gun-less society, a penalty at least as severe as that associated with bluffing you out of your money with some non-gun weapon. If we look at today's laws as a guideline, I'd guess (pure conjecture, I'm not a lawyer nor am I intimately familiar with sentencing guidelines regarding this subject) that armed robbery carries a stiffer penalty than illegal possession of a firearm. Of course, this could be remedied by increasing the penalties for illegal possession of a firearm (or decreasing the penalties for armed robbery), so this isn't really much of an objection to your claim.
Secondly, while everyone who commits a violent act with a gun is, by the technical definition, a criminal, a not-insignificant portion of gun violence is committed by otherwise law-abiding people, either by accident or in the heat of the moment. None of these people planned to commit gun violence, and if they didn't have a gun in the first place (in a society where they're banned), then the violence never would have happened.
While what you say is true, I question how relevant this is in the grand scheme of things. I believe that crimes of passion, which is what you refer to here, account for a very, very small minority of gun deaths -- most stem from inner-city gang-related crime. Now, it could be argued that any lives that can be saved should be saved, no matter how few, but that's really a matter of opinion or personal ideology. It could conversely be argued that a disproportionate focus on trying to prevent crimes of passion constitutes a misallocation of resources, and that focusing on stopping inner-city gang-related crime could potentially be more efficient (in terms of lives saved per effort exerted). However, it's not clear that outlawing guns would limit access to firearms for gang criminals to the same extant that it would for ordinary law-abiding citizens (who we talk about in the context of crimes of passion), since gang criminals already demonstrate a clear indifference for the law (by definition).
Thirdly, if guns are banned, then the lack of a consumer demand will necessarily mean there are fewer producers, and I think it's therefore reasonable to assume there will physically be fewer guns in the country. This makes it harder for a criminal to get one.
This is a valid point, and hard to argue against. The only question it raises is, how much harder would it be for criminals to get guns under such a regime? I've yet to hear any meaningful answer to this one. Clearly a reduction in supply (and an assumed constant demand) should increase the price of black market firearms, but it's unclear what would happen from there. What is the elasticity of demand for black market firearms? Is it not possible that criminals will continue to arm themselves in whatever way is most cost-efficient?
In the end, I'll concede that it's overwhelmingly likely that what you say is true. Make guns illegal and there will be fewer criminals with guns. Not solely due to the deterrence of the law, but perhaps even from market forces. But of course, I'd imagine that the "gun nut" response would question the extent to which this result would be meaningful, and whether that justifies the perceived loss in individual liberty that goes along with it. If such an approach would be 90% eff
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Thanks! I find this especially fascinating.
What the fuck kind of relationship exists between the US and the Saudis? There's been some strange shit going on over there for a very long time now. That they were able to get our military out of there only suggests that the relationship is even more unique than I had previously suspected.
Thankfully, it seems that the extended period of cheap oil is really killing their economy, and that Saudi rule as we know it won't be sustainable for more than a couple more years. This is evidenced by the major recent cuts to social programs, etc.
Let's hope the house of Saud collapses and we finally learn what all this has been about.
Since when does the USA voluntary WITHDRAW its presence from a foreign country?
Apart from West Germany (now completely stable), I can't recall this ever happening in the past.
Today, USA still has several dozen Army installations in Germany, all of them in territory that was formerly considered West Germany. Furthermore, there are currently over 37000 American troops deployed in Germany.
The USA does not voluntarily withdraw its presence from a foreign country, period. Not even from West Germany.
There are two things to consider here: whether or not the police are a bunch of bastards that should be locked up, and whether or not the family starts claiming that they are before they have all the information.
If the cops are not a bunch of bastards that should be locked up and the family starts claiming that they are before they have all the information, that's no good. The family is now unjustifiably harming the interests of the cops. Once they have all the information, they'll feel badly about making the claims that they did. It will be possible for them to apologize, though there may be some minimal lasting impact on the public's perception of cops due to these false allegations. False positive. Overall not a great outcome, I'd say 3/10.
If the cops are a bunch of bastards that should be locked up and the family starts claiming they they are before they have all the information, that's mostly good. People should be held accountable for their actions, and this is doubly true for people in positions of power. While it would be great if this accountability stemmed from verifiable information and not hearsay from a family member (or sheer chance, gnosticism, etc.), it's still great that people are rightly held accountable. True positive (but for the wrong reasons). Overall a decent outcome, 8/10.
If the cops are not a bunch of bastards that should be locked up and the family doesn't start claiming that they are, that's good. Family's actions are in line with reality, no unjustifiable claims are made, no justifiable claims are not made. True negative. Overall a great outcome, 10/10.
If the cops are a bunch of bastards that should be locked up and the family doesn't start claiming that they are before they have all the information, that's entirely unforgivable, even tragic. It is not easy to raise awareness of police abuse of authority, as is evident from the fact that countless people have been wrongly being killed by police every year for ages, and only now is there some marginalized movement forming around the issue. If this is an issue Ian felt passionately enough about to have given his own life for it to raise awareness, this would amount to squandering what little media attention his death received on nothing at all. Whereas in the first scenario an ex post facto apology would be somewhat diminished by its lateness, in this scenario a delayed claim of police being bastards would be entirely robbed of any efficacy. The window of opportunity for raising awareness by suicide is nearly instantaneous -- Ian's death will be a long-forgotten memory in the media's mind by the time "all the information" comes out, assuming it ever does at all. In this scenario, if the information comes out supporting claims of cops being a bunch of bastards, it will already be too late for Ian's death to have meant anything, and it will all have been for naught. Overall an unacceptable outcome, 0/10.
tl;dr: It's like Pascal's wager, but instead of being a fallacious argument supporting a belief in God, it's a fallacious argument supporting claims that the police are a bunch of bastards that should be locked up.
The Debian community is fulfilling Ian's family's wishes by not drawing attention to the issue and respecting their privacy.
That being said, I think Ian's family is being selfish by acting against Ian's last wishes and virtually ensuring that Ian's death was in vain.
Let the information blackout continue, and pretty soon everyone will forget Ian ever existed.
Yes, really.
Perhaps my American public schooling (in the 90s) is atypical, but I remember a disproportionate amount of time being spent studying "the" holocaust. I was quite surprised to learn at a later date that, for example, there was an order of magnitude more Chinese casualties in the Asian theater than there were Jewish casualties in the European theater. In light of that fact, it seems odd that "the" holocaust would have been happening concurrently with another much larger mass genocide of civilians -- why isn't it merely "a" holocaust, or why isn't the Chinese one "the" holocaust? That there are thousands of books about the Bataan Death March on Amazon alone doesn't change the fact that there is a disproportionate focus on Nazi Germany's role in WW2 in American public schools. I believe that this is merely an inherent Western bias in the focus of history classes here, but it doesn't make sense to dismiss this bias as nonexistent.
After sixty years of devoted service, Moore’s Law will die a dignified death no later than the year 2019. By that time, transistor features will be just a few atoms in width, and the strategy of ever finer photolithography will have run its course. So, will that be the end of the exponential growth of computing?
Don’t bet on it.
-- Ray Kurzweil, March 2001
The section after that, titled "Moore’s Law Was Not the First, but the Fifth Paradigm To Provide Exponential Growth of Computing", is where you'll find your answer.
But the net effect is the voting population acts like children. They vote for services but vote down paying for them.
I can understand why this might seem like an accurate description of the situation. However, the reality is a bit less internally contradictory.
Liberals vote for services but then conservatives vote down paying for them.
It wasn't until later that non-landowners were allowed to vote, and later women, and later black people (the last one didn't really happen until the late 1960s).
Blacks won the right to vote [nationally] in 1869.
Women won the right to vote [nationally] in 1920.
The Civil Rights Acts of 1957/1960 took steps to ensure that the right to vote that blacks had won nearly a century earlier was actually respected.
That being said, blacks won the right to vote a half century before women, at least legally [if not in practice].
First, thank you for the work you've been doing.
Second, can we help? If so, how?
When you remove the signals, the end result becomes much, MUCH worse.
Does it become... noise?
Hey, quick question.
I have a degree in EE and did some grad work in CS. Did a robotics internship with NASA many years ago and have been working as a software developer ever since. Some DoD contracting, now working in cybersecurity, but I don't find any of this stuff too fulfilling. I'm a huge 12-year-old at heart -- I want to be working on robots or spaceships!
That being said, based on my experience, those jobs don't exist [here]. I closest thing I could find was working for a contract manufacturer of medical devices, and that gig would've come with a 30% pay cut. I'd take a 30% pay cut to work on something truly inspiring, but diabetes test gear just doesn't have that same 'wow' factor for me.
So, since you seem to have better insight into the industry, what gives? Is everything out in California? Is NYC especially terrible for robotics? Am I just terrible at life?
So the ones that are not under 250g would require registration?
Furthermore, attaching a 250g lead weight to any wind-up flying toy would trigger this registration requirement?
Did some SJW have deadlines and no ideas?
Now, I'm an ornery son of a bitch with no patience for SJWs, but, really, what the fuck does this story have to do with SJWs?
That's from the ground up, not 400ft AGL, not 500ftAGL, not some small amount unless you lease them your airspace right of way...
Honest question here. Does a UAS like this one now require registration?
Totally agree. The second amendment protects the individual right to bear nuclear arms, and for that reason it must be repealed and replaced with something more sensible.
I just wanted to chime in: there's also the 'slaveowning abolitionist' group that the AC seems to be mentioning in jest.
I own five firearms and regularly see and hold each of them. I support repealing the second amendment.
Japan's national debt was 226% of GDP as of 2013. That's worse than Zimbabwe's 203%.
Say what you will about economists or economics, but that's some shit right there. And you think this is "not bad"? At what point do you think national debt becomes bad? 300% GDP? 400%?
Japan seems to get along just fine
I don't know of many economists that would describe it that way (though, granted, there are other issues at play besides the demographic catastrophe).
And honestly, the way you pitch it, it sounds like exploitation.
It probably is, but I try not to make value judgements.
I wasn't arguing in favor of immigration any more than I was arguing against it. I was just trying to inject some points that you seem to have omitted in the hope that people would have more of a complete picture to draw their own conclusions from.
One of these is not like the others. Making the populace too frightened to send their kids to school or to board and airplane really undermines the ability of a society to function at a basic level, because education and transportation are critical to a society's continued operation as well as long-term success. Immigration (particularly from middle eastern nations) is NOT necessary for a society's survival or prosperity. You can argue that it enriches a country to some extent, or that it's a humanitarian thing that's good for humanity at large, but how is it necessary for a particular nation? It's not.
Necessary for what?
Nothing is "necessary" except obeying the laws of physics. It's not "necessary" that any Americans continue to have a pulse, even. It's not "necessary" to maintain public education or public roads -- there was a time when these things didn't exist, and the universe didn't collapse into some internally-contradictory nonexistence. Using words like "necessary" without any further details is a great rhetorical device, as it allows one to make ridiculous claims that logically can't be argued against.
Immigration is necessary to maintain our standard of living without implementing some other form of population control (e.g. compulsory reproduction) or scrapping our current economic system. Of course, it is not necessary that we maintain our standard of living, or that we avoid population control, or that we maintain our current economic system. But, if we are to do all of those things, then it is necessary to continue a policy of allowing immigration.
har-har-har
happy days and jubilation!
I know there's all this talk about thought-crime and whatnot, but I'd just like to chime in for a moment...
Gilberto "Cannibal Cop" Valle illegally used a police database to research his potential victims. This was illegal, regardless of whether or not he actually planned to use the information he gained to commit any crimes, and has nothing to do with the thought-crime part of this case. By breaking the law, Cannibal Cop committed a crime, so a crime did occur.
The reason this appeals court threw out the conviction for illegal use of a police database is because of the issue of jurisdictional. That is, he got off on a technicality. Granted, he served some time already, so in a sense, he didn't get away with it entirely. However, his conviction record is now squeaky clean, and I'm sure he'll be back on the force in no time.
I can't imagine this being useful for a post office in developed countries.
Japan
And without tax breaks this would have never happened, right?
For all the "it's not a zero-sum game!" objections we so regularly hear from apologists for the wealthy, it's pure gold to see this dramatic about-face.
These foundations are putting their money to far better use than the government would.
So often do I hear apologists for the wealthy make the claim that "it's not a zero-sum game!"
I find it amusing that suddenly it looks like the upper hand is on the other foot.
For one, it's very prevalent in this debate and similar ones that there's a black and white line between criminals and law-abiding citizens. This is not the case: a petty thief willing to bluff you out of your money with a gun is not necessarily willing to risk the severe penalty associated with acquiring a gun in a gun-less society.
While I grant that this is certainly possible, I'd just like to add that this hinges upon the assumption that there's a severe penalty associated with acquiring a gun in a gun-less society, a penalty at least as severe as that associated with bluffing you out of your money with some non-gun weapon. If we look at today's laws as a guideline, I'd guess (pure conjecture, I'm not a lawyer nor am I intimately familiar with sentencing guidelines regarding this subject) that armed robbery carries a stiffer penalty than illegal possession of a firearm. Of course, this could be remedied by increasing the penalties for illegal possession of a firearm (or decreasing the penalties for armed robbery), so this isn't really much of an objection to your claim.
Secondly, while everyone who commits a violent act with a gun is, by the technical definition, a criminal, a not-insignificant portion of gun violence is committed by otherwise law-abiding people, either by accident or in the heat of the moment. None of these people planned to commit gun violence, and if they didn't have a gun in the first place (in a society where they're banned), then the violence never would have happened.
While what you say is true, I question how relevant this is in the grand scheme of things. I believe that crimes of passion, which is what you refer to here, account for a very, very small minority of gun deaths -- most stem from inner-city gang-related crime. Now, it could be argued that any lives that can be saved should be saved, no matter how few, but that's really a matter of opinion or personal ideology. It could conversely be argued that a disproportionate focus on trying to prevent crimes of passion constitutes a misallocation of resources, and that focusing on stopping inner-city gang-related crime could potentially be more efficient (in terms of lives saved per effort exerted). However, it's not clear that outlawing guns would limit access to firearms for gang criminals to the same extant that it would for ordinary law-abiding citizens (who we talk about in the context of crimes of passion), since gang criminals already demonstrate a clear indifference for the law (by definition).
Thirdly, if guns are banned, then the lack of a consumer demand will necessarily mean there are fewer producers, and I think it's therefore reasonable to assume there will physically be fewer guns in the country. This makes it harder for a criminal to get one.
This is a valid point, and hard to argue against. The only question it raises is, how much harder would it be for criminals to get guns under such a regime? I've yet to hear any meaningful answer to this one. Clearly a reduction in supply (and an assumed constant demand) should increase the price of black market firearms, but it's unclear what would happen from there. What is the elasticity of demand for black market firearms? Is it not possible that criminals will continue to arm themselves in whatever way is most cost-efficient?
In the end, I'll concede that it's overwhelmingly likely that what you say is true. Make guns illegal and there will be fewer criminals with guns. Not solely due to the deterrence of the law, but perhaps even from market forces. But of course, I'd imagine that the "gun nut" response would question the extent to which this result would be meaningful, and whether that justifies the perceived loss in individual liberty that goes along with it. If such an approach would be 90% eff