Our past? Quite a broad topic for this short conversation, but we'll share a key piece of our history with you.
After we killed off the last Zebranky we faced an interesting dilemma.
Should we proceed, and establish a culture which would advance in art, technology and social sophistication?...
...Or should we just go back into the forest and kick back and enjoy ourselves knowing that a Zebranky wasn't gonna jump out of a bush and eat us!
Well, we DID go back into the forest.
We stayed there for about five thousand years and had a great time
Then, one stormy day, a Zoq, a Fot, and a Pik were walking up a steep path looking for something good to eat, when a bolt of lightning struck nearby.
With a huge flash of light, the bolt of energy carved a strangely-shaped chunk of granite out of a cliff.
It was a disk, with a hole in the middle!
As the rock began to roll down the hill, toward the three terrified beings some dry grass got caught in its hole, and since the rock was still hot the grass caught on fire.
When the rock finally got to the Zoq, the Fot, and the Pik they simultaneously discovered the Wheel, Fire, and Religion thus catapulting them on to the road of progress.
Which has led us to this day, Captain.
Oh! How did the flaming wheel give religion to our Culture, you ask?
I will explain.
You see, when it got to the threesome, the flaming wheel was going at a pretty good clip and it ran smack into the Zoq, killing him.
The Fot and the Pik felt so bad... they really liked that Zoq!... that they decided the Zoq hadn't really died when the wheel flattened him; he had just gone to `a better place.'
Why is it that some people care more about the death of 200,000 Syrians than the death of over a million jews during WWII?
Why is it that some people care more about the death of over a million Jews during WW2 (really more like five million) than the death of over twenty million Asians (Asian civilians, a clear case of genocide) during that same time period?
Let me guess, your history classes didn't really focus on that holocaust, did they?
I was joking, to some extent. But really, even an NSX (which is balanced quite a bit better than your MR2) will oversteer around a corner when you lose traction in snow. That's just the nature of rear-wheel drive. Sure, it won't be as bad as a Mustang or a Porsche, but a true sports car by definition exhibits some degree of oversteer.
Perhaps the rates for Toronto are so high due to the relative abundance of Asians on the road?
or making headlight replacement so annoying that you have to take half of the front quarter of the car apart
This has been pissing me off for the last decade or so. My last three cars have had impossible-to-change headlight bulbs. I'm no hearhead, I've never even changed my own oil, but I've never felt like such a failure as when I realized I had to go to Pep Boys to get a bulb replaced. When the "proper" way of changing a headlight bulb involves removing the battery and taking apart half of the intake, and the "easy workaround" way involves taking off a wheel, the consumer has lost. The war is over. I give up.
The Skyline finally made it over to the US as the GT-R. The 300ZX is now a 350Z (or 370Z?). You've got the Lotus Elise and Exige. The FR-S / BRZ is available for purchase. Yes, they're all a ton heavier than the fun cars of yesterday (well, maybe not the Lotus offerings), but you can thank our insatiable appetite for safety for that.
Cheapest insurance I could get in Toronto was $7500; and it went up from there to $13000. The car, a used MR2, was worth $5000.
Liability insurance on a rear-wheel drive car in snowy Canada was that cheap? I mean, when you consider that you were likely to fly off the road and into someone's living room at any moment for half the calendar year, that seems like quite a reasonable deal, no?
Bullshit. LWOP is cheaper than capital punishment in the United States. Fact.
FTFY.
I believe in Saudi Arabia, they take a convict, put them in a sack, and throw them over a cliff. If they're still alive after they hit the ground, they throw rocks at them until they die. Both the sack and the rocks can be reused many times. There is no costly automatic appeals process.
I'm not saying that we should implement this sort of capital punishment. I'm merely pointing out that it's not necessary that capital punishment be more expensive than incarceration.
We pay lip service to the ideal that we mete out justice by requiring the appeals process for any capital cases, but pretend that wrongly imprisoning someone for the remainder of their life is somehow acceptable. Based on our rationale for the automatic appeals process, how can we justify the lack of such a process in LWOP sentences? Shouldn't those cases also be unacceptably costly due to the appeals required to turn vengeance into justice? Or, conversely, if it's okay to lock someone up for life without the requirement for neverending appeals, why is it not similarly okay to just kill them sans appeals as well?
So in the event of an innocent person being put to death I would at the least hope that there [sic] last few minutes of life are not spent in agonizing pain.
Why is it that we hope that? Is it a misapplication of empathy? After all, dead is dead. It's not like this guy is now thinking to himself "Wow, that was a really painful way to die! It still hurts! The memory itself is accompanied by pain!"
After one dies, there is no further opportunity to reflect on or otherwise experience past pain. Once this criminal's brain function ceased, so too did any subjective experience of pain. So, what did it matter?
People often say they hope for a quick and painless death, suggesting that a slow and agonizing death is undesirable. People are generally appalled when they hear me say that I'd like to burn to death, preferably with the aid of drugs that help me retain full awareness for as long as possible. If you think about it, though, there is no better time to experience extraordinary, unimaginable pain than immediately prior to death. The pain is guaranteed to be totally gone when you die. No lingering soreness, no resulting chronic condition to worry about, no PTSD. Also, why not? I mean, after you're dead, you won't have any preference anyway. You'll be too dead to think "Wow, that really was more unpleasant and less interesting than I had expected, and perhaps it really would have been better to die in my sleep". In a sense, it won't matter at all how you died, at least not to you. Finally, I offer up the suggestion to think of death as an opportunity to do something that you can't otherwise do. There are countless experiences and activities that people rarely engage in due to the fact that they result in death. Not just feeling your flesh melt from your body, in which people may not see much novelty, but a wide spectrum of other things as well. One might skydive naked, or openly assassinate a monarch, or become a martyr. Of course, one will not have the opportunity to relish the uniqueness of these experiences any longer than one can regret having died, since in either case subjective experience hinges upon the continued life of the observer. In this way, death is a terrible thing to waste.
Looking at pictures of people wearing baseball caps, it seems to me they might block off the entirety of your top (both eyes) vision - just where a blind kid with a puppy might by waiting to walk his grandmother across the road in front of you, for example?
I'm no astrophysicist, but the respectable Randall Munroe suggests that "However big you think supernovae are, they're bigger than that."
According to this What If, you'd get more photons hitting your eye from a supernova seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth than the detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball... by nine orders of magnitude. So while stars are really massive objects, supernovae are apparently unimaginably energetic phenomena.
What the fuck would we do with platinum, palladium, and iridium in space? Did I sleep through the invention of the microgravity foundry? Aren't we getting a bit ahead of ourselves by focusing on precious metals before water?
Planetary Resources could sell water in LEO for $10000/kg. The demand is already there, right now, today. But instead they're looking to mine rare metals in space and drop them onto Earth where they're worth $45000/kg? This is just stupid. Any large deposits would significantly affect the value in commodities markets, as the value of precious metals is largely a result of their relative scarcity. While water in LEO is scarce, its cost is primarily a result of the cost of launching more water from Earth. No amount of LEO water with extraplanetary origins could drop the value of water below the cost of launching from Earth until Planetary Resources gets some other asteroid-mining competition.
This is the most depressing news I've read in a while. I though Planetary Resources would be providing a valuable service that expands humanity's footprint in the solar system, that enables the next step in space exploration. Now, what I'm hearing is that they thought they could make a buck by selling shiny trinkets here on Earth. Fuck em.
Wonder how they built the Death Star and all those massive ships? Droids.
Obviously you've never watched Clerks.
A construction job of that magnitude would require a helluva lot more manpower than the Imperial army had to offer. I'll bet there were independent contractors working on that thing: plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers.
In order to get it built quickly and quietly they'd hire anybody who could do the job. Do you think the average storm trooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing and white uniforms.
I did pull that claim entirely out of my ass, but I'm actually surprised that I was so close to being correct. Within an order of magnitude, even!
I've lived most of my life in NJ, where rifle hunting is pretty much illegal due to population density. I understand that what works in Maine might not work in places that aren't composed exclusively of large tracts of unpopulated wilderness.
But really, to cite safety concerns when talking about posting one's property is not much different than evaluating real estate primarily based on relative elevation (topographic prominence) out of concern about lightning strikes.
Perhaps you misunderstood the open land tradition bit. Property owners are allowed to post no trespassing signs in Maine. However, in the absence of such signs, hunting is permitted by law. The default position is one that allows unrestricted use of private land for hunting, fishing, camping, et cetera.
When I lived in Maine, I was about an hour drive from a 209,000 acre state park. Despite that, everyone hunted on private property anyway. Why drive an hour to access "only" 209,000 acres when you have literally millions of acres even closer?
It's unfortunate that you've had poor experiences with hunters that refuse to follow the law. It's well known that a certain subset of the hunting population harbors a flagrant disregard for the law. These assholes don't care if they're shooting across roadways, next to occupied dwellings, or even on posted land. In fact, there's a small subset of these assholes that actually prefers to hunt on posted land, as they see their actions as more of a justified civil disobedience than reckless endangerment. They see people that post their property as greedy, self-absorbed transplants "from away" that are coming into their state, buying up pristine land, and locking it away for their own exclusive use in opposition to traditional "open" usage. They see themselves as vigilantes, as freedom fighters, as members of some sort of traditionalist resistance movement. In reality, they tend to be assholes, putting the safety of property owners and others at risk.
That being said, I'm concerned that by posting your property, you're only getting rid of the responsible hunters. The ones that follow the rules. But you may actually be attracting the asshole variety. To them, your posted signs may simply be billboards pronouncing "I'm a city slicker that hates your traditional hunting culture and I'm doing everything in my power to destroy your lifestyle", however misguided such an interpretation may be. Nobody hates reckless "hunters" more than responsible hunters do. By allowing hunting on your property, you'd be increasing the odds that there's responsible hunters present in-season, which could in turn decrease the odds that the unsavory variety of hunter will show up. Unintended consequences and all that.
Regarding your wife's family's property in Mississippi, this argument is somewhat analogous to the free versus proprietary software argument. I understand the desire to preserve one's own work, to not have freeloaders to worry about. If everyone posted their land, nobody would have to get upset with strangers taking advantage of their work. However, if nobody posted their land, everyone would have a lot more land to hunt on. Your state's wildlife agency should be handling the game stock anyway, setting hunting tag quotas appropriately. I won't touch the issue of blinds beyond saying that I don't like them, since that's a subjective matter and everyone's entitled to hunt however they like (within the bounds of the law).
If you do end up buying that rural land, please consider either a) not posting it or b) posting it but going to great lengths to ensure that anyone trespassing is prosecuted. I personally love the idea of [undeveloped] private property still being available to the public, as it makes the best use of otherwise underutilized resources. However, if you must post your property, please do so in a way that does not further embolden these asshole "hunters" that seek out posted absentee-landlord lots simply to trash them. While I understand that protecting your personal investment may seem to be a higher priority than expending effort on re-educating assholes, a long term view on the matter may suggest otherwise.
You're right, someone died. We must do something. Perhaps we can outlaw hunting. Maybe we can mandate that full body kevlar suits be worn by everyone at all times. Or possibly we can take a step back and recognize that you're much more likely to be killed by lightning than a hunter's bullet.
I think the liability issue is nonexistent, if you either look at the current legislation or even just read the study I linked to.
If you think adverse possession is an issue, well, I'd have to ask you why it hasn't been brought up over the last few centuries.
Safety isn't an issue for any of the other participants in Maine's open land tradition, and they do in fact have houses nearby. That's the crux of my question. I was asking what special circumstances he finds himself in that might justify or otherwise explain his stance on this issue. Most people in Maine live in houses and don't post their property.
While you're entirely within your rights to be against hunters shooting on your property, I can't help but question whether this is an optimal stance on this issue.
In some places, there is a bit of an "open land tradition". That is, privately-owned land is, by default, treated as public land. This practice is most conspicuous in Maine:
At the same time, the public uses large amounts of forest – technically owned by private landowners – as if it were a common property resource. People hunt on land owned by others, run their snowmobiles and all terrain vehicles (ATVs) on it, and use the land for bird watching and cross country skiing. In northern Maine, people take hiking and canoeing trips in which they camp for days on end on land owned by others. Members of the public generally feel they have a “right” to use the land of others for recreation – particularly in the vast forested regions of northern Maine. Sometimes they ask permission to use the land, but often they do not.
I found this article insightful since it's packed rather full of factual information and interesting because I don't know which side of the argument I fall on. I can understand the desire of landowners to maintain control over their property. Similarly, I can understand the desire of hunters to oppose commodification of their cultural heritage. The study I linked to seems to suggest that generally speaking, people tend to support the side of the argument which most benefits them. That is, property owners that do not hunt tend to favor a policy that allows property owners to prohibit hunting on their land, and hunters that do not own property tend to favor the open land tradition. More succinctly, this study shows that, for the most part, people are selfish fucks, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone.
I myself have no horse in this race, as I neither own land nor hunt. I'm curious, though. Why are you against hunters shooting on your property? Is it simply because you believe the property is yours and yours alone, to be exploited by no one else? Or are there other concerns that have led you to take this position? Is your property posted to prohibit only hunting, or are you imposing a general prohibition against trespass? Why?
Not everyone throws away their vote on a Democrat or Republican. Some of us can think for ourselves and refuse to support the established powers. Independent and third-party voters still exist.
Re:Funny how he left out 60 Minutes' Benghazi stor
on
The Rise of Hoax News
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· Score: 2
I keep hearing people bitching about this Benghazi thing. It's been a while, but I still have no idea what all the controversy is about. My understanding is that our embassy got attacked, and the administration came out with one explanation for why it happened, but it turns out that there was another, better explanation in hindsight. Assuming that's correct, what's the cause for all the outrage? Why are people still muttering about impeaching Obama over this issue?
I didn't know the Flying Spaghetti Monster had a Multigrain cousin.
Now, you're being silly if you think that "alternative news media" exist. Bloggers aren't known for their investigative reporting prowess. Your best bet nowadays is to read multiple sources with conflicting biases. I'm a fan of Al Jazeera, Xinhua, and BBC, among others.
What, you wanted me to RTFA? Many of the comments here refer to Lauren as a female, and the name is typically that of a female. That being said, I feel like a bit of a douche for my previous comment, and it now seems evident that WOOFY GOOFY's comments may not be as uninformed as my first read suggested. My apologies, WOOFY GOOFY, and carry on!
Slashdot Mirror
Our past? Quite a broad topic for this short conversation, but we'll share a key piece of our history with you.
...Or should we just go back into the forest and kick back and enjoy ourselves knowing that a Zebranky wasn't gonna jump out of a bush and eat us!
After we killed off the last Zebranky we faced an interesting dilemma.
Should we proceed, and establish a culture which would advance in art, technology and social sophistication?...
Well, we DID go back into the forest.
We stayed there for about five thousand years and had a great time
Then, one stormy day, a Zoq, a Fot, and a Pik were walking up a steep path looking for something good to eat, when a bolt of lightning struck nearby.
With a huge flash of light, the bolt of energy carved a strangely-shaped chunk of granite out of a cliff.
It was a disk, with a hole in the middle!
As the rock began to roll down the hill, toward the three terrified beings some dry grass got caught in its hole, and since the rock was still hot the grass caught on fire.
When the rock finally got to the Zoq, the Fot, and the Pik they simultaneously discovered the Wheel, Fire, and Religion thus catapulting them on to the road of progress.
Which has led us to this day, Captain.
Oh! How did the flaming wheel give religion to our Culture, you ask?
I will explain.
You see, when it got to the threesome, the flaming wheel was going at a pretty good clip and it ran smack into the Zoq, killing him.
The Fot and the Pik felt so bad... they really liked that Zoq!... that they decided the Zoq hadn't really died when the wheel flattened him; he had just gone to `a better place.'
Presumably one without lethal flaming wheels.
Why is it that some people care more about the death of 200,000 Syrians than the death of over a million jews during WWII?
Why is it that some people care more about the death of over a million Jews during WW2 (really more like five million) than the death of over twenty million Asians (Asian civilians, a clear case of genocide) during that same time period?
Let me guess, your history classes didn't really focus on that holocaust, did they?
I was joking, to some extent. But really, even an NSX (which is balanced quite a bit better than your MR2) will oversteer around a corner when you lose traction in snow. That's just the nature of rear-wheel drive. Sure, it won't be as bad as a Mustang or a Porsche, but a true sports car by definition exhibits some degree of oversteer.
Perhaps the rates for Toronto are so high due to the relative abundance of Asians on the road?
[Also joking, silly.]
Plus, I don't know how you'd roll a joint in the cramped front seat of a 2009 Civic.
On a CD case resting in your lap.
or making headlight replacement so annoying that you have to take half of the front quarter of the car apart
This has been pissing me off for the last decade or so. My last three cars have had impossible-to-change headlight bulbs. I'm no hearhead, I've never even changed my own oil, but I've never felt like such a failure as when I realized I had to go to Pep Boys to get a bulb replaced. When the "proper" way of changing a headlight bulb involves removing the battery and taking apart half of the intake, and the "easy workaround" way involves taking off a wheel, the consumer has lost. The war is over. I give up.
So how do you make up for the time wasted by shopping so frequently? Your proposed solution seems incomplete if not outright disingenuous.
The Skyline finally made it over to the US as the GT-R. The 300ZX is now a 350Z (or 370Z?). You've got the Lotus Elise and Exige. The FR-S / BRZ is available for purchase. Yes, they're all a ton heavier than the fun cars of yesterday (well, maybe not the Lotus offerings), but you can thank our insatiable appetite for safety for that.
For the record, the Integra was never fun.
Cheapest insurance I could get in Toronto was $7500; and it went up from there to $13000. The car, a used MR2, was worth $5000.
Liability insurance on a rear-wheel drive car in snowy Canada was that cheap? I mean, when you consider that you were likely to fly off the road and into someone's living room at any moment for half the calendar year, that seems like quite a reasonable deal, no?
Bullshit. LWOP is cheaper than capital punishment in the United States. Fact.
FTFY.
I believe in Saudi Arabia, they take a convict, put them in a sack, and throw them over a cliff. If they're still alive after they hit the ground, they throw rocks at them until they die. Both the sack and the rocks can be reused many times. There is no costly automatic appeals process.
I'm not saying that we should implement this sort of capital punishment. I'm merely pointing out that it's not necessary that capital punishment be more expensive than incarceration.
We pay lip service to the ideal that we mete out justice by requiring the appeals process for any capital cases, but pretend that wrongly imprisoning someone for the remainder of their life is somehow acceptable. Based on our rationale for the automatic appeals process, how can we justify the lack of such a process in LWOP sentences? Shouldn't those cases also be unacceptably costly due to the appeals required to turn vengeance into justice? Or, conversely, if it's okay to lock someone up for life without the requirement for neverending appeals, why is it not similarly okay to just kill them sans appeals as well?
So in the event of an innocent person being put to death I would at the least hope that there [sic] last few minutes of life are not spent in agonizing pain.
Why is it that we hope that? Is it a misapplication of empathy? After all, dead is dead. It's not like this guy is now thinking to himself "Wow, that was a really painful way to die! It still hurts! The memory itself is accompanied by pain!"
After one dies, there is no further opportunity to reflect on or otherwise experience past pain. Once this criminal's brain function ceased, so too did any subjective experience of pain. So, what did it matter?
People often say they hope for a quick and painless death, suggesting that a slow and agonizing death is undesirable. People are generally appalled when they hear me say that I'd like to burn to death, preferably with the aid of drugs that help me retain full awareness for as long as possible. If you think about it, though, there is no better time to experience extraordinary, unimaginable pain than immediately prior to death. The pain is guaranteed to be totally gone when you die. No lingering soreness, no resulting chronic condition to worry about, no PTSD. Also, why not? I mean, after you're dead, you won't have any preference anyway. You'll be too dead to think "Wow, that really was more unpleasant and less interesting than I had expected, and perhaps it really would have been better to die in my sleep". In a sense, it won't matter at all how you died, at least not to you. Finally, I offer up the suggestion to think of death as an opportunity to do something that you can't otherwise do. There are countless experiences and activities that people rarely engage in due to the fact that they result in death. Not just feeling your flesh melt from your body, in which people may not see much novelty, but a wide spectrum of other things as well. One might skydive naked, or openly assassinate a monarch, or become a martyr. Of course, one will not have the opportunity to relish the uniqueness of these experiences any longer than one can regret having died, since in either case subjective experience hinges upon the continued life of the observer. In this way, death is a terrible thing to waste.
Looking at pictures of people wearing baseball caps, it seems to me they might block off the entirety of your top (both eyes) vision - just where a blind kid with a puppy might by waiting to walk his grandmother across the road in front of you, for example?
she was going 80, or at least close to it — this is San Diego, and pretty much everyone drives at around 75 - 80
That says more about how inappropriate our speed limits are than the safety of her driving.
I'm no astrophysicist, but the respectable Randall Munroe suggests that "However big you think supernovae are, they're bigger than that."
According to this What If, you'd get more photons hitting your eye from a supernova seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth than the detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball... by nine orders of magnitude. So while stars are really massive objects, supernovae are apparently unimaginably energetic phenomena.
Mod parent up.
What the fuck would we do with platinum, palladium, and iridium in space? Did I sleep through the invention of the microgravity foundry? Aren't we getting a bit ahead of ourselves by focusing on precious metals before water?
Planetary Resources could sell water in LEO for $10000/kg. The demand is already there, right now, today. But instead they're looking to mine rare metals in space and drop them onto Earth where they're worth $45000/kg? This is just stupid. Any large deposits would significantly affect the value in commodities markets, as the value of precious metals is largely a result of their relative scarcity. While water in LEO is scarce, its cost is primarily a result of the cost of launching more water from Earth. No amount of LEO water with extraplanetary origins could drop the value of water below the cost of launching from Earth until Planetary Resources gets some other asteroid-mining competition.
This is the most depressing news I've read in a while. I though Planetary Resources would be providing a valuable service that expands humanity's footprint in the solar system, that enables the next step in space exploration. Now, what I'm hearing is that they thought they could make a buck by selling shiny trinkets here on Earth. Fuck em.
Wonder how they built the Death Star and all those massive ships? Droids.
Obviously you've never watched Clerks.
A construction job of that magnitude would require a helluva lot more manpower than the Imperial army had to offer. I'll bet there were independent contractors working on that thing: plumbers, aluminum siders, roofers.
In order to get it built quickly and quietly they'd hire anybody who could do the job. Do you think the average storm trooper knows how to install a toilet main? All they know is killing and white uniforms.
Citation
I did pull that claim entirely out of my ass, but I'm actually surprised that I was so close to being correct. Within an order of magnitude, even!
I've lived most of my life in NJ, where rifle hunting is pretty much illegal due to population density. I understand that what works in Maine might not work in places that aren't composed exclusively of large tracts of unpopulated wilderness.
But really, to cite safety concerns when talking about posting one's property is not much different than evaluating real estate primarily based on relative elevation (topographic prominence) out of concern about lightning strikes.
Perhaps you misunderstood the open land tradition bit. Property owners are allowed to post no trespassing signs in Maine. However, in the absence of such signs, hunting is permitted by law. The default position is one that allows unrestricted use of private land for hunting, fishing, camping, et cetera.
When I lived in Maine, I was about an hour drive from a 209,000 acre state park. Despite that, everyone hunted on private property anyway. Why drive an hour to access "only" 209,000 acres when you have literally millions of acres even closer?
It's unfortunate that you've had poor experiences with hunters that refuse to follow the law. It's well known that a certain subset of the hunting population harbors a flagrant disregard for the law. These assholes don't care if they're shooting across roadways, next to occupied dwellings, or even on posted land. In fact, there's a small subset of these assholes that actually prefers to hunt on posted land, as they see their actions as more of a justified civil disobedience than reckless endangerment. They see people that post their property as greedy, self-absorbed transplants "from away" that are coming into their state, buying up pristine land, and locking it away for their own exclusive use in opposition to traditional "open" usage. They see themselves as vigilantes, as freedom fighters, as members of some sort of traditionalist resistance movement. In reality, they tend to be assholes, putting the safety of property owners and others at risk.
That being said, I'm concerned that by posting your property, you're only getting rid of the responsible hunters. The ones that follow the rules. But you may actually be attracting the asshole variety. To them, your posted signs may simply be billboards pronouncing "I'm a city slicker that hates your traditional hunting culture and I'm doing everything in my power to destroy your lifestyle", however misguided such an interpretation may be. Nobody hates reckless "hunters" more than responsible hunters do. By allowing hunting on your property, you'd be increasing the odds that there's responsible hunters present in-season, which could in turn decrease the odds that the unsavory variety of hunter will show up. Unintended consequences and all that.
Regarding your wife's family's property in Mississippi, this argument is somewhat analogous to the free versus proprietary software argument. I understand the desire to preserve one's own work, to not have freeloaders to worry about. If everyone posted their land, nobody would have to get upset with strangers taking advantage of their work. However, if nobody posted their land, everyone would have a lot more land to hunt on. Your state's wildlife agency should be handling the game stock anyway, setting hunting tag quotas appropriately. I won't touch the issue of blinds beyond saying that I don't like them, since that's a subjective matter and everyone's entitled to hunt however they like (within the bounds of the law).
If you do end up buying that rural land, please consider either a) not posting it or b) posting it but going to great lengths to ensure that anyone trespassing is prosecuted. I personally love the idea of [undeveloped] private property still being available to the public, as it makes the best use of otherwise underutilized resources. However, if you must post your property, please do so in a way that does not further embolden these asshole "hunters" that seek out posted absentee-landlord lots simply to trash them. While I understand that protecting your personal investment may seem to be a higher priority than expending effort on re-educating assholes, a long term view on the matter may suggest otherwise.
You're right, someone died. We must do something. Perhaps we can outlaw hunting. Maybe we can mandate that full body kevlar suits be worn by everyone at all times. Or possibly we can take a step back and recognize that you're much more likely to be killed by lightning than a hunter's bullet.
Thank you for restating my question, I guess?
I think the liability issue is nonexistent, if you either look at the current legislation or even just read the study I linked to.
If you think adverse possession is an issue, well, I'd have to ask you why it hasn't been brought up over the last few centuries.
Safety isn't an issue for any of the other participants in Maine's open land tradition, and they do in fact have houses nearby. That's the crux of my question. I was asking what special circumstances he finds himself in that might justify or otherwise explain his stance on this issue. Most people in Maine live in houses and don't post their property.
In some places, there is a bit of an "open land tradition". That is, privately-owned land is, by default, treated as public land. This practice is most conspicuous in Maine:
At the same time, the public uses large amounts of forest – technically owned by private landowners – as if it were a common property resource. People hunt on land owned by others, run their snowmobiles and all terrain vehicles (ATVs) on it, and use the land for bird watching and cross country skiing. In northern Maine, people take hiking and canoeing trips in which they camp for days on end on land owned by others. Members of the public generally feel they have a “right” to use the land of others for recreation – particularly in the vast forested regions of northern Maine. Sometimes they ask permission to use the land, but often they do not.
I found this article insightful since it's packed rather full of factual information and interesting because I don't know which side of the argument I fall on. I can understand the desire of landowners to maintain control over their property. Similarly, I can understand the desire of hunters to oppose commodification of their cultural heritage. The study I linked to seems to suggest that generally speaking, people tend to support the side of the argument which most benefits them. That is, property owners that do not hunt tend to favor a policy that allows property owners to prohibit hunting on their land, and hunters that do not own property tend to favor the open land tradition. More succinctly, this study shows that, for the most part, people are selfish fucks, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone.
I myself have no horse in this race, as I neither own land nor hunt. I'm curious, though. Why are you against hunters shooting on your property? Is it simply because you believe the property is yours and yours alone, to be exploited by no one else? Or are there other concerns that have led you to take this position? Is your property posted to prohibit only hunting, or are you imposing a general prohibition against trespass? Why?
Not everyone throws away their vote on a Democrat or Republican. Some of us can think for ourselves and refuse to support the established powers. Independent and third-party voters still exist.
No.
I keep hearing people bitching about this Benghazi thing. It's been a while, but I still have no idea what all the controversy is about. My understanding is that our embassy got attacked, and the administration came out with one explanation for why it happened, but it turns out that there was another, better explanation in hindsight. Assuming that's correct, what's the cause for all the outrage? Why are people still muttering about impeaching Obama over this issue?
I didn't know the Flying Spaghetti Monster had a Multigrain cousin.
Now, you're being silly if you think that "alternative news media" exist. Bloggers aren't known for their investigative reporting prowess. Your best bet nowadays is to read multiple sources with conflicting biases. I'm a fan of Al Jazeera, Xinhua, and BBC, among others.
What, you wanted me to RTFA? Many of the comments here refer to Lauren as a female, and the name is typically that of a female. That being said, I feel like a bit of a douche for my previous comment, and it now seems evident that WOOFY GOOFY's comments may not be as uninformed as my first read suggested. My apologies, WOOFY GOOFY, and carry on!