Most people would say that doubling one's income does indeed afford a significant change in lifestyle, so long as starting income is nonzero.
The article you link to has nothing to do with Africans calling for a halt to charity and everything to do with western charities simply pocketing donations instead of passing them along to those in need. Perhaps you meant to link to an article explaining how western food aid prevents any meaningful domestic agriculture industry from forming in Africa?
Don't mistake hatred for envy. I'd sooner end my own life than participate in the exploitation that the wealthy can't seem to get enough of.
Also, I'd like to point out that the idea of international wealth redistribution that you set forth is quite radical, and there is no international framework in place to implement anything like it. I'm not surprised that the discussion has turned to fishing in Africa, though that has very little to do with my previous point.
Additionally, you never answered the original question. Basic logic would suggest that if you tax the rich until there are no more rich, the end result should be a society with neither rich nor poor. You suggest that the poor would remain poor. I asked where the money went. You had no answer.
Regarding your signature, I recommend jacketed bullets. Less barrel fouling.
Indeed, I don't claim to be knowledgeable about this subject. I know next to nothing about mining.
However, reading the Wikipedia page on GMA-1872 leaves me with one burning question... Is it possible for me to lease land from the federal government for $5/acre?
At the top of the entry, I see "All citizens of the United States of America 18 years or older have the right under the 1872 mining law to locate a lode (hard rock) or placer (gravel) mining claim on federal lands open to mineral entry". Now, perhaps you have more insight into this than I do... presumably, any piece of federal land west of the Great Plains will contain at least a single atom of platinum, gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, uranium or tungsten. Would I be eligible to stake a claim and get myself an acre for $5, and retain that claim for as long as I perform "at least $100 worth of labor" every year? Presumably, 14 hours of digging around with a spade would be sufficient (assuming labor is valued at the federal minimum wage)?
"The mining law applies to some mineral products, but not others, and the list has changed over time. Since 1920, the list of locatable minerals does not include petroleum, coal, phosphate, sodium, and potassium. Rights to explore for and extract these are leased through competitive bidding." (Emphasis mine)
Presumably, once the staggering amount of wealth hoarded by the wealthy is redistributed to the rest of the participants in our economy, the poor will have ample money to feed themselves. Indeed, simply redistributing the wealth of the richest ten Americans would adequately fund a $1000 stimulus check for every man, woman, and child living in this country. I wish I were joking.
The only way our social programs can work is if the population of the united states continues to grow at the rate it did in the first half of this century, forever.
Or we could, you know, eliminate the cap on "payroll taxes".
Silly me, with my crazy ideas. I know, I know, we can't do that, because then our tax code wouldn't be regressive!
I'm not talking about vaguely written laws, or laws written with ambiguous language.
I'm talking about laws that state things in the clearest, most unambiguous language possible. Language so clear that there can only be one possible meaning.
For example: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
A literal reading of the second amendment is not what the SCOTUS is offering us. According to the text of this amendment, my right to own nuclear-tipped ICBMs shall not be infringed. Of course, nobody wants a society like that, so we turn to the SCOTUS to "interpret" the text for us. Their "interpretation" of "shall not be infringed" reads more like "shall not be infringed unless such infringement is justifiable and popularly desired". Personally, I'm of the opinion that their interpretation provides a better law than the written one. However, I'd greatly prefer if the Congress would simply amend the constitution so that the text of the law actually reflects this, instead of relying on a bunch of robed men to make these decisions for us.
Again, my objection is not with respect to ambiguous or vaguely written laws. I'm talking about when the SCOTUS sees something like "shall not infringe" and then "interprets" that to mean "may infringe". There is no basis in the English language for such an interpretation. The SCOTUS should not have the power to "interpret" laws in such a way that their very meaning is opposite that called for by a dictionary. Additionally, if we feel that current laws are somehow lacking, we should amend them instead of "interpreting" them to suit our needs.
The top 1% of income earners actually pay a smaller percentage of their incomes to taxes than the 9% just below them.
The top 1% of income earners earned 17.2% of the income. Since they paid 37.4% of all federal income tax, that suggests that their tax rate is roughly double that of "the 99%". Your provided statistic would be much less misleading if it was phrased "17.2% of the income yielded 37.4% of all federal tax revenue", but that doesn't have the same outrageous tone to it.
That's just income statistics, though. Let's take a look at how wealth is distributed:
The top 1% of wealth owners actually own between 35.4% and 42.1% of the country's wealth.
The bottom 40% of wealth owners hold 0.3% of the country's wealth. If you take away their government cheese, they will not lay down and quietly die (nor should they).
The middleman isn't getting paid for nothing, either. He provides value to the worker in the form of a predictable paycheck, and value to the customer by organizing workers to produce the desired goods. Without him the (now self-employed) workers would have to go out and find individual short-term jobs on their own, and customers would be limited to such goods as can be produced by individuals or small, close-knit groups.
You seem to know way too much about phones, so naturally I'm overwhelmed by the urge to ask you something tangentially related.
Is it possible to hack a PRL to get better connectivity? Say I have a CDMA phone (Samsung Galaxy S2 / Epic 4G Touch) on the Sprint network. Would it (at least in theory) be possible to modify the PRL in a way that results in the phone preferring Verizon towers over Sprint ones? Of course, this is assuming that Sprint and Verizon use the same frequencies and waveforms (I have no idea). I'd imagine it wouldn't work for data due to differences between the two networks...
Or am I totally stupid for thinking something like this could work?
While your comment is indeed funny, I can't help but jump in here.
As someone who has never had kids, I find it offensive and idiotic when people use this bullshit excuse to shut down a debate. I've never existed in a two dimensional universe, but that doesn't stop me from talking about basic geometry. To suggest that only direct experience qualifies one to take up any subject of discourse is absurd and wrong.
In the context of parents talking down to non-parents, it makes you guys look stupid. Being a parent is stressful, exhausting, and unpredictable. It's not rocket surgery. You don't have some sort of magical insight into things unfathomable to the rest of us. Unwarranted elitism is comical from the outside looking in.
This tends to attract snake oil peddlers in larger than average numbers since they know they can't be found out.
A snake oil salesman is someone who knowingly sells fraudulent goods. What, exactly, is Kurzweil selling? What fraudulent goods or services is he putting up for sale? Presumably you're talking about his books, speaking engagements, and other [barely] profitable activities he's engaged in. Are you suggesting that he doesn't actually believe the narrative he's offering? That he's peddling the singularity not because he believes it to be near, but because he sees great potential for profit from talking about it?
I see no evidence of this. His zealotry combined with his obsession with dietary supplements leave me quite convinced that he's totally earnest (although perhaps desperate) in his claims. Whether or not his claims have merit, well, that's tangential here. Snake oil peddlers are reviled because they knew their claims were false. To apply this label to Kurzweil is disingenuous at best, but consistent with your overall opinion of him as a bad person.
Of course, if Kurzweil actually believes the message that he's preaching, then he's merely publishing his own personal opinions, and claims of fraudulence are unfounded. If people are fascinated by them and willfully purchase his works is not something he should be shamed for.
If anything, your friends at the Max Planck Institute (and any other researchers in the field) are the snake oil salesmen. They're the ones accepting grants to supposedly work towards simulating a brain (which, according to your preferred metaphor, is the snake oil here).
I'd prefer if we simply ended the discussion here, but if you insist on replying, I suggest you actually think before you post.
I've read a good bit of the classics, and I agree they're just as valid today as they were back then. That likely explains why they're still studied to this day.
It's unfortunate that you don't seem to understand the value of thinking big. The life you enjoy today is rooted in "far in the future" concepts from the distant past, but you don't seem to be willing to recognize this fact. I hope that one day you develop the capacity to appreciate those who can think beyond the next paycheck/quarter/election.
In any case, it seems that this discussion isn't being very constructive at this point. Your personal obsession with Kurzweil is odd to me, as is your reluctance to discuss the future. Thanks for the talk, and good luck to your friends at Max Planck.
Ontologies don't simulate the brain in any common sense of the word simulate.
I agree. In fact if you read back *I* never gave ontologies as an example of brain simulation.
I refer you to:
So many I don't even know where to begin. Neural networks? cyc? expert systems? natural language processing? you name it.
Cyc/OpenCyc are ontologies. You mentioned Cyc. I dismissed it as off-topic, because we're not talking about the field of artificial intelligence as a whole but the specific idea of simulating a human brain.
I do see the difference. I'm saying something quite a bit more subtle than that. Let's say we do emulate the brain using transistors and fail to achieve strong AI. Then you could come back and say "that wasn't a real emulation for it to be a real emulation you actually need to perform the exact same chemical processes as the brain with a computer". What I'm saying is that all of those are simulations, is just that the level of resolution is finer.
I understand what you're saying. I specifically identified the required level of resolution as an unknown. However, no serious researcher ever thought absurdly high level simulations (say, perceptron networks) would yield a virtual human brain. Kurzweil never did, surely. However, there is some general agreement that it is very unlikely that we'd need to go to subatomic-scale simulations. It's not a hard bound, but it is there, and it's not just Kurzweil that's talking about it.
Back to the subject: high level simulation failed, Kurzweil the suggests to try lower level simulations which is only more difficult (but not without reason) and and then gives himself an absurdly short time span and declares it a certainty that it will happen by 2029. This makes him an outright crackpot.
Kurzweil never expected high level simulation to 'work". I don't know anyone that did. High level simulation is something that researchers were (and still are) playing with for exploratory purposes, not in any serious attempt to create consciousness. Indeed, perhaps 2029 is an absurdly short timespan. Kurzweil is undeniably an optimist. However, to paint him as an outright crackpot is misleading. His ideas are sound, and he does have at least some basis for saying 2029 is the year it will happen. I, personally, don't think it's likely to be quite that soon, but then again I'm more of a pessimist.
In any case, let's say Kurzweil is right, and that in 2029 we've got a sufficiently accurate map of a human brain and a sufficiently powerful computer to do a molecular-scale simulation in realtime, and everything works exactly as expected, exactly as Kurzweil is predicting. We still won't have any conscious computers. Why? Well, because what does a virtual brain do? It virtually dies. You can't have just a brain. The brain needs life support. Perhaps you can get around the requirement for simulating circulatory, respiratory, endocrine systems by simply inserting the right molecules in the right places at the right times in your simulation. But even then, a brain doesn't do much on its own. Without (virtual) sensors and actuators, it'll just sit there (in virtual space), even if you manage to keep it "alive". Even with these virtual eyes and virtual hands, how do you attach them to the virtual brain? Well, if they're based on accurate models of human eyes and hands, it might not be any harder than eye and hand transplants today: extremely difficult. But of course, now you need to accurately image eyes, hands, the whole human body, not just the brain. Now interfacing between physical reality and this simulated system is also another requirement, so that we can somehow interact with this simulated brain. Probably a simulated environment so that this virtual person doesn't freak out that they exist in a virtual vacuum. There's a lot of work between "100% successful brain si
You say that your example is not an interpretation, yet you say it ought to be legal. I notice you didn't use the word "is" in that sentence.
Indeed, that's my point. Somewhere along the way, this country got a real hard-on for the judiciary. The SCOTUS took upon itself the power to interpret the Constitution, despite not being explicitly granted such power by the Constitution. So began a long tradition of men in robes "interpreting" clear-as-day language, twisting its meaning until they found it suitable. I'm not talking about interpreting some thousand-page-long piece of legislation, which might legitimately be ambiguous. I'm talking about the blatant violations of the Bill of Rights that get a judicial okay simply because it's easier (and more politically feasible) than amending the Constitution again. When the law says "abridgement", it doesn't say "significant abridgement" or "extensive abridgement". In English, that means any abridgement, no matter how slight. That's not an interpretation, that's just using the dictionary in a situation where no ambiguity exists whatsoever.
I don't deny that the SCOTUS has arrived at a different "interpretation" as a matter of expediency. That's why I say the law "ought to be" as it is written. However, I understand that instead, the law "is" as the SCOTUS says it is, regardless of (and oftentimes contrary to) what is actually written.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people would say that doubling one's income does indeed afford a significant change in lifestyle, so long as starting income is nonzero.
The article you link to has nothing to do with Africans calling for a halt to charity and everything to do with western charities simply pocketing donations instead of passing them along to those in need. Perhaps you meant to link to an article explaining how western food aid prevents any meaningful domestic agriculture industry from forming in Africa?
Don't mistake hatred for envy. I'd sooner end my own life than participate in the exploitation that the wealthy can't seem to get enough of.
Also, I'd like to point out that the idea of international wealth redistribution that you set forth is quite radical, and there is no international framework in place to implement anything like it. I'm not surprised that the discussion has turned to fishing in Africa, though that has very little to do with my previous point.
Additionally, you never answered the original question. Basic logic would suggest that if you tax the rich until there are no more rich, the end result should be a society with neither rich nor poor. You suggest that the poor would remain poor. I asked where the money went. You had no answer.
Regarding your signature, I recommend jacketed bullets. Less barrel fouling.
Here comes the singularity!
:P
Disclaimer: posted in jest to rile up all the Kurzweil haters. Where's your "hit the limit of silicon" argument now, huh?
Indeed, I don't claim to be knowledgeable about this subject. I know next to nothing about mining.
However, reading the Wikipedia page on GMA-1872 leaves me with one burning question... Is it possible for me to lease land from the federal government for $5/acre?
At the top of the entry, I see "All citizens of the United States of America 18 years or older have the right under the 1872 mining law to locate a lode (hard rock) or placer (gravel) mining claim on federal lands open to mineral entry". Now, perhaps you have more insight into this than I do... presumably, any piece of federal land west of the Great Plains will contain at least a single atom of platinum, gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, uranium or tungsten. Would I be eligible to stake a claim and get myself an acre for $5, and retain that claim for as long as I perform "at least $100 worth of labor" every year? Presumably, 14 hours of digging around with a spade would be sufficient (assuming labor is valued at the federal minimum wage)?
According to Wikipedia:
"The mining law applies to some mineral products, but not others, and the list has changed over time. Since 1920, the list of locatable minerals does not include petroleum, coal, phosphate, sodium, and potassium. Rights to explore for and extract these are leased through competitive bidding." (Emphasis mine)
This plan would essentially put them in the driver's seat of the world economy.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Their economy seems to have been doing rather well for some time now, especially compared against ours.
That doesn't make the poor appreciably any better off
I think the poor would disagree with you there. That $283 is more than they make in a year.
Typical western ignorance.
As the song goes, "tax the rich, feed the poor, til there are no rich no more". We'll still have poor - just a lot more of them.
If everyone in this hypothetical scenario is poor, where did the money go?
Presumably, once the staggering amount of wealth hoarded by the wealthy is redistributed to the rest of the participants in our economy, the poor will have ample money to feed themselves. Indeed, simply redistributing the wealth of the richest ten Americans would adequately fund a $1000 stimulus check for every man, woman, and child living in this country. I wish I were joking.
Yes, an incredibly liberal lean.
Why, now that you mention it, I've never seen any libertarians on this site at all.
You have a point. Most SSI recipients are either too old or too crippled to wield torches and pitchforks.
The only way our social programs can work is if the population of the united states continues to grow at the rate it did in the first half of this century, forever.
Or we could, you know, eliminate the cap on "payroll taxes".
Silly me, with my crazy ideas. I know, I know, we can't do that, because then our tax code wouldn't be regressive!
I'm not talking about vaguely written laws, or laws written with ambiguous language.
I'm talking about laws that state things in the clearest, most unambiguous language possible. Language so clear that there can only be one possible meaning.
For example: "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
A literal reading of the second amendment is not what the SCOTUS is offering us. According to the text of this amendment, my right to own nuclear-tipped ICBMs shall not be infringed. Of course, nobody wants a society like that, so we turn to the SCOTUS to "interpret" the text for us. Their "interpretation" of "shall not be infringed" reads more like "shall not be infringed unless such infringement is justifiable and popularly desired". Personally, I'm of the opinion that their interpretation provides a better law than the written one. However, I'd greatly prefer if the Congress would simply amend the constitution so that the text of the law actually reflects this, instead of relying on a bunch of robed men to make these decisions for us.
Again, my objection is not with respect to ambiguous or vaguely written laws. I'm talking about when the SCOTUS sees something like "shall not infringe" and then "interprets" that to mean "may infringe". There is no basis in the English language for such an interpretation. The SCOTUS should not have the power to "interpret" laws in such a way that their very meaning is opposite that called for by a dictionary. Additionally, if we feel that current laws are somehow lacking, we should amend them instead of "interpreting" them to suit our needs.
The top 1% of income earners actually pay a smaller percentage of their incomes to taxes than the 9% just below them.
The top 1% of income earners earned 17.2% of the income. Since they paid 37.4% of all federal income tax, that suggests that their tax rate is roughly double that of "the 99%". Your provided statistic would be much less misleading if it was phrased "17.2% of the income yielded 37.4% of all federal tax revenue", but that doesn't have the same outrageous tone to it.
That's just income statistics, though. Let's take a look at how wealth is distributed:
The top 1% of wealth owners actually own between 35.4% and 42.1% of the country's wealth.
The bottom 40% of wealth owners hold 0.3% of the country's wealth. If you take away their government cheese, they will not lay down and quietly die (nor should they).
Citation.
The middleman isn't getting paid for nothing, either. He provides value to the worker in the form of a predictable paycheck, and value to the customer by organizing workers to produce the desired goods. Without him the (now self-employed) workers would have to go out and find individual short-term jobs on their own, and customers would be limited to such goods as can be produced by individuals or small, close-knit groups.
Over 80000 employees isn't that small.
You seem to know way too much about phones, so naturally I'm overwhelmed by the urge to ask you something tangentially related.
Is it possible to hack a PRL to get better connectivity? Say I have a CDMA phone (Samsung Galaxy S2 / Epic 4G Touch) on the Sprint network. Would it (at least in theory) be possible to modify the PRL in a way that results in the phone preferring Verizon towers over Sprint ones? Of course, this is assuming that Sprint and Verizon use the same frequencies and waveforms (I have no idea). I'd imagine it wouldn't work for data due to differences between the two networks...
Or am I totally stupid for thinking something like this could work?
What fraudulent goods or services is he putting up for sale?
Strong AI as if it was something achievable within the near term feature.
How much is he selling "Strong AI" for, and which retailers are carrying it?
I shed no tears for the willfully obtuse.
While your comment is indeed funny, I can't help but jump in here.
As someone who has never had kids, I find it offensive and idiotic when people use this bullshit excuse to shut down a debate. I've never existed in a two dimensional universe, but that doesn't stop me from talking about basic geometry. To suggest that only direct experience qualifies one to take up any subject of discourse is absurd and wrong.
In the context of parents talking down to non-parents, it makes you guys look stupid. Being a parent is stressful, exhausting, and unpredictable. It's not rocket surgery. You don't have some sort of magical insight into things unfathomable to the rest of us. Unwarranted elitism is comical from the outside looking in.
That needs to be turned into a t-shirt.
I'd buy one.
Even in nations that had no history of slavery.
Ah, yes. South Africa, that bastion of racial equality.
This tends to attract snake oil peddlers in larger than average numbers since they know they can't be found out.
A snake oil salesman is someone who knowingly sells fraudulent goods. What, exactly, is Kurzweil selling? What fraudulent goods or services is he putting up for sale? Presumably you're talking about his books, speaking engagements, and other [barely] profitable activities he's engaged in. Are you suggesting that he doesn't actually believe the narrative he's offering? That he's peddling the singularity not because he believes it to be near, but because he sees great potential for profit from talking about it?
I see no evidence of this. His zealotry combined with his obsession with dietary supplements leave me quite convinced that he's totally earnest (although perhaps desperate) in his claims. Whether or not his claims have merit, well, that's tangential here. Snake oil peddlers are reviled because they knew their claims were false. To apply this label to Kurzweil is disingenuous at best, but consistent with your overall opinion of him as a bad person.
Of course, if Kurzweil actually believes the message that he's preaching, then he's merely publishing his own personal opinions, and claims of fraudulence are unfounded. If people are fascinated by them and willfully purchase his works is not something he should be shamed for.
If anything, your friends at the Max Planck Institute (and any other researchers in the field) are the snake oil salesmen. They're the ones accepting grants to supposedly work towards simulating a brain (which, according to your preferred metaphor, is the snake oil here).
I'd prefer if we simply ended the discussion here, but if you insist on replying, I suggest you actually think before you post.
I've read a good bit of the classics, and I agree they're just as valid today as they were back then. That likely explains why they're still studied to this day.
It's unfortunate that you don't seem to understand the value of thinking big. The life you enjoy today is rooted in "far in the future" concepts from the distant past, but you don't seem to be willing to recognize this fact. I hope that one day you develop the capacity to appreciate those who can think beyond the next paycheck/quarter/election.
In any case, it seems that this discussion isn't being very constructive at this point. Your personal obsession with Kurzweil is odd to me, as is your reluctance to discuss the future. Thanks for the talk, and good luck to your friends at Max Planck.
Well, I'm sorry to inform you that the debate over vitalism versus mechanism predates Kurzweil by a few millenia.
Perhaps philosophical discussions just aren't for you?
I like how you assume GP is suffering from ingrained cultural bias.
OP said his/her wife is a human calculator.
A standard calculator does arithmetic, and that's it. He didn't say she's a scientific calculator, or a graphing calculator, or MATLAB.
Ontologies don't simulate the brain in any common sense of the word simulate.
I agree. In fact if you read back *I* never gave ontologies as an example of brain simulation.
I refer you to:
So many I don't even know where to begin. Neural networks? cyc? expert systems? natural language processing? you name it.
Cyc/OpenCyc are ontologies. You mentioned Cyc. I dismissed it as off-topic, because we're not talking about the field of artificial intelligence as a whole but the specific idea of simulating a human brain.
I do see the difference. I'm saying something quite a bit more subtle than that. Let's say we do emulate the brain using transistors and fail to achieve strong AI. Then you could come back and say "that wasn't a real emulation for it to be a real emulation you actually need to perform the exact same chemical processes as the brain with a computer". What I'm saying is that all of those are simulations, is just that the level of resolution is finer.
I understand what you're saying. I specifically identified the required level of resolution as an unknown. However, no serious researcher ever thought absurdly high level simulations (say, perceptron networks) would yield a virtual human brain. Kurzweil never did, surely. However, there is some general agreement that it is very unlikely that we'd need to go to subatomic-scale simulations. It's not a hard bound, but it is there, and it's not just Kurzweil that's talking about it.
Back to the subject: high level simulation failed, Kurzweil the suggests to try lower level simulations which is only more difficult (but not without reason) and and then gives himself an absurdly short time span and declares it a certainty that it will happen by 2029. This makes him an outright crackpot.
Kurzweil never expected high level simulation to 'work". I don't know anyone that did. High level simulation is something that researchers were (and still are) playing with for exploratory purposes, not in any serious attempt to create consciousness. Indeed, perhaps 2029 is an absurdly short timespan. Kurzweil is undeniably an optimist. However, to paint him as an outright crackpot is misleading. His ideas are sound, and he does have at least some basis for saying 2029 is the year it will happen. I, personally, don't think it's likely to be quite that soon, but then again I'm more of a pessimist.
In any case, let's say Kurzweil is right, and that in 2029 we've got a sufficiently accurate map of a human brain and a sufficiently powerful computer to do a molecular-scale simulation in realtime, and everything works exactly as expected, exactly as Kurzweil is predicting. We still won't have any conscious computers. Why? Well, because what does a virtual brain do? It virtually dies. You can't have just a brain. The brain needs life support. Perhaps you can get around the requirement for simulating circulatory, respiratory, endocrine systems by simply inserting the right molecules in the right places at the right times in your simulation. But even then, a brain doesn't do much on its own. Without (virtual) sensors and actuators, it'll just sit there (in virtual space), even if you manage to keep it "alive". Even with these virtual eyes and virtual hands, how do you attach them to the virtual brain? Well, if they're based on accurate models of human eyes and hands, it might not be any harder than eye and hand transplants today: extremely difficult. But of course, now you need to accurately image eyes, hands, the whole human body, not just the brain. Now interfacing between physical reality and this simulated system is also another requirement, so that we can somehow interact with this simulated brain. Probably a simulated environment so that this virtual person doesn't freak out that they exist in a virtual vacuum. There's a lot of work between "100% successful brain si
You say that your example is not an interpretation, yet you say it ought to be legal. I notice you didn't use the word "is" in that sentence.
Indeed, that's my point. Somewhere along the way, this country got a real hard-on for the judiciary. The SCOTUS took upon itself the power to interpret the Constitution, despite not being explicitly granted such power by the Constitution. So began a long tradition of men in robes "interpreting" clear-as-day language, twisting its meaning until they found it suitable. I'm not talking about interpreting some thousand-page-long piece of legislation, which might legitimately be ambiguous. I'm talking about the blatant violations of the Bill of Rights that get a judicial okay simply because it's easier (and more politically feasible) than amending the Constitution again. When the law says "abridgement", it doesn't say "significant abridgement" or "extensive abridgement". In English, that means any abridgement, no matter how slight. That's not an interpretation, that's just using the dictionary in a situation where no ambiguity exists whatsoever.
I don't deny that the SCOTUS has arrived at a different "interpretation" as a matter of expediency. That's why I say the law "ought to be" as it is written. However, I understand that instead, the law "is" as the SCOTUS says it is, regardless of (and oftentimes contrary to) what is actually written.