Firearms are used by individual citizens hundreds of thousands of times each year in self defense, typically without a shot being fired. Law enforcement agents carry firearms based on the rationale that they might need to engage violent criminals. Why are cars any more "necessary to life" than the tools you might need to defend your life?
Driving yourself to the hospital might be a matter of life and death (although most places have ambulance services). Otherwise, your life being dependent on access to an automobile is a direct result of your lifestyle choice.
Parents' discretion. If the kids are disciplined, it doesn't matter if they're idiots. From age 5 onward I knew better than to fool around with firearms. Even the antique shotgun on the wall was off-limits. I received my first.22 rifle at age ten and by age 15, I had a shotgun and deer rifle and was allowed to shoot alone and unsupervised. I've never shot anyone or had a firearms-related accident. Parents should be held responsible for recklessness and negligence which results in their kids causing injury or death. To hell with cookie-cutter solutions tailored to the least common denominator in our society.
Did you ask them why it was a problem? Are employers worried about your health, your learning ability or the degree to which your skills are up-to-date?
One of the considerations of any potential employer is healthcare costs. Even if they can't legally discriminate based on that consideration, they will be making a conscious appraisal of your perceived health and how it will relate to the total cost of employing you. If you are a healthy, active, 40+ person, let the employers know about it. They cannot legally ask for that information, but that does not mean you are legally prohibited from offering it. List your exercise routine as hobbies. Ask about the quality of the bike paths and running trails in the area. Inquire about the fitness center on site or if they offer discount gym memberships as a benefit.
I disagree. The union movement was not hatched in the halls of government. In fact, government was (and is) usually on the side of the businesses and has engaged in numerous bloody crackdowns on people attempting to organize and go on strike. The political left is fond of reminding us how unions fought for better working conditions, a 40 hour work week, etc. Then what happened? Government decided that it was government's job to guarantee these things. As a result, unions have withered and died. What's the point of keeping the union strong and paying dues if workers think Big Brother is going to protect them? By contrast, if the union is the only thing standing between a person and a hazardous job with miserable wages, they have every incentive to keep the union strong.
Back in the infancy of unions, what you're describing is exactly what happened. Not only would individuals be fired for attempting to organize their co-workers, companies would share a blacklist of such troublemakers preventing them from getting work anywhere. It took a lot of courage to be an organizer and the work had to be conducted largely in secret.
What's to prevent the company from ignoring the union and firing everyone? Reprisals by the workers. Sit-in strikes, blocking replacement workers and customers from accessing the business, organizing boycotts of the products and basically anything else that can be done to make the company's life miserable. It's necessary to make the pain of paying union wages and benefits much less than the pain of firing everyone. Even sabotage and property destruction might be on the table for pissed-off unemployed people. Also, do you notice how unions are typically for the skilled trades and are organized at an industry level vs. a company level? By doing this, you make it hard for a company to find a large pool of willing replacement labor with the same skills.
I don't think libertarians have drifted toward neoconservativism. If you're perceiving Republicans in libertarian clothing, I think there are a couple of things going on which might give that impression but neither is driven by a philosophical shift.
The whole "TEA Party" thing for example is a rejection of the big government neocons of the Bush era. It has a few libertarian leanings, but unfortunately maintains much of the Republican baggage. These neocon/libertarian hybrids have evolved in the opposite direction from what you're implying.
Then, you're also seeing the Rand Paul type folks who are willing to jump through the Republican hoops in order to bring a few libertarian ideas to the mainstream. Let's face it. In order to win the Republican presidential nomination, you need to have at least some appeal to the "family values" and "strong defense" contingents in the Republican base. The strategy of compromising principles for political appeal is a huge bone of contention among liberty activists. People willing to go down that road might also appear to be "pseudo-libertarians", but their drift toward the Republican orthodoxy is a matter of practical necessity, not political philosophy.
I find it highly unlikely that people who are behaving in a manner which is rude or reckless have deliberately developed a philosophical basis to justify their behavior.
Anyone interested in liberty from a societal standpoint knows that there can be no freedom which infringes on the freedom of others. Most liberty activists also hold private property rights in high regard, so I can't imagine an argument for allowing one's animal to defile the property of others.
At least try talking to your neighbors before calling men with badges and guns to mediate the dispute for you. I've never had a problem with a neighbor that couldn't be settled with dialogue. Most of the time, it's a case of one person having no clue that they were even bothering the other.
"government sucks... it is simply superior to all of the abuses possible without government, or with weak government"
Are you making that claim only in the context of the USA or would you apply it to the whole world? In the 20th century alone, governments have murdered well over 200 million people. Another 37 million have died and countless more have been maimed in wars largely caused by governments. Then, add in all of the people who have been tortured, incarcerated and otherwise abused by agents of government.
How could the absence of government possibly result in abuses any worse than that?
Banks do not accumulate $150 billion by lending their own money, or their depositors' money and charging interest. Nor do they get this by payments for handing card and check transactions. Thanks to their scam of fractional reserve banking, banks are granted the privilege of creating money out of thin air and loaning that money at interest as well. Easy to generate profits when you can loan out money you don't actually have. Almost all of the money in the U.S. economy is "created" based on a debt obligation to a bank. That's why practically everyone you know is in some form of debt. ALL the people doing the real work and producing all of the real goods and services in the economy struggle under a debt burden while bankers, who provide very little of value manage to suck hundreds of billions of dollars out of the economy. Watch a short film called "Money as Debt" (it's on YouTube) It's rather astounding that the bankers can run this enormous con game and people tolerate it. First step to solving the issue of poverty and wealth inequality would be to abolish this practice.
The government should just boycott the debt that the people of the USA supposedly "owe" to the private bankers who own The Federal Reserve. After 3 rounds of "Quantitative Easing" these scumbags are now the largest single holder of U.S. treasuries. Currently, The Treasury Department creates an interest-bearing note which they then sell to The Fed for money that the Fed created out of thin air. The income tax is used to pay the interest on this supposed "debt"? There is no reason that the Treasury Department could not create a debt-free U.S. dollar and bypass the banking cartel entirely.
True, but bitcoin doesn't have shareholders. There are also no big profits or lucrative post-government job offers to bribe regulators. When it comes to the federal government, "selective enforcement" is the name of the game. If you're a government employee, banker, big corporation or just plain wealthy and you pay your protection money, the laws and regs don't apply to you. Bitcoin users and exchange operators don't fit that criteria, so there's nothing to prevent Big Brother from cracking down on them at every opportunity.
It's illegal to operate a "money services business" without a license. Basically, they're saying he was operating like a bank or a Western Union by the mere act of selling $25k in bitcoins for cash. I think this is a first of its kind case when it comes to bitcoin.
He had been charged with money laundering, but that charge had already been dismissed
P.S. I forgot the USA's new defining attribute... looking for the slightest hint of "racism" from anyone, anywhere so that we can feel good about ourselves for condemning it.
I was cheering for the kid when I first heard the story about the 14 year old who "built" his own digital clock. I was curious as to the implementation. My first guess was an Arduino board, which would still be pretty cool. Turns out it's nothing but an old alarm clock that he disassembled and put into his pencil box.
What a giant let-down. He's getting attention from the White House and tech companies for stealing someone's work and passing it off as his own? Remember back when apple pie and baseball were quintessential "American" things? For some reason, this story seems to represent my impression of the new "America". A country that exudes fear and gives out awards to non-achievers.
It will be awesome if they make it readable to the whole world. Would also be nice if they added wiki features so that we could do our best to help keep it up-to-date. These federal aholes know every last detail about us. It would be poetic justice if their detailed personal information was available for our perusal. Perhaps the Chinese managed to acquire that data which was copied from the federal office of personnel management? I want to see names, addresses, photos, work responsibilities, (outrageous) salaries, etc. etc. Especially people in the NSA, ATF, IRS and other criminal organizations, as well as the corrupt and incompetent employees of the FDIC, SEC, OTS and OCC. Everyone that deserve to be fired and/or imprisoned.
Since when did/. become a hangout for politically correct BS?
A white kid with a pencil box containing batteries, a circuit board and 7-seg display would get the SAME treatment in schools all over the country. Public school students are getting in trouble for gun-shaped things made of pop-tarts, cardboard and legos for $deity's sake! If a pop-tart gun causes a freak-out, is it any wonder that a circuit in a box produces a similar (idiotic) response?
When "guns" made of pop-tarts, cardboard and legos can get a kid in trouble, is it ANY surprise that a pencil box containing a circuit board, batteries and 7-seg displays causes a similar freak-out?
A friend of mine and I (white kids) once got sent to the principal's office just for talking to the chemistry teacher. You can't buy nitric acid just anywhere and we knew we couldn't distill it with an apparatus made of metal pipes and containers. We were wondering if the acid would eat through that clear flexible plastic tubing that you can get at the hardware store and thinking maybe he'd give us a few drops to experiment. He didn't believe our story that we were polishing silver coins (even though that was EXACTLY what we wanted to do!)
This was before Columbine or 9/11, so a chat with the teacher & principal and a note to our parents (tell your kids not to f*** around with chemicals in your basement) was the extent of the discipline. Imagine what could happen today for cris'sakes! I can easily imagine the police arresting kids like us for conspiracy to make explosives or some such nonsense.
"racism"? Gimme a f***ing break. How about "intelligencism"?
In these sad times when public school "zero tolerance" policies punish kids for "gun-shaped" things made out of legos or cardboard, is it any surprise that morons freak out over a circuit board with batteries and wires hooked into a 7 segment display? Could just as easily have been a white kid.
Smart kid. I hope he gets a six figure settlement and a scholarship to pursue EE out of this fiasco.
I don't see how that technique enables you to pass a test on a subject you know nothing about. Even assuming you can correctly eliminate two of the choices from 100% of the questions, you're guessing between the remaining choices. Over a sufficient number of questions, that technique will therefore tend to result in a score of ~ '50' which is typically not a passing grade.
Definitely interesting, and It employs (AFAIK) unique methods for preventing other malware from being installed. The idea of "eliminating the competition" isn't anything new for malware however. Many malware packages have included pirated copies of commercial anti-virus type software to nuke any known competitors. I think the Anna K. virus might have had that feature. I remember a security researcher quoting people with infected PCs who said that their machines were running "better than ever".
The magnitude of this problem is absolutely enormous. It would take huge amounts of resources just to keep pace with the new crap being dumped into the oceans. Furthermore, a lot of this stuff has been broken down into very tiny pieces that a person couldn't just scoop out of the water. Right now, the most effective way of tackling this issue is preventing even more garbage from getting into the ocean. I'm not one of these "big government must do something" watermelon environmentalists, but I'm making a conscious effort to avoid plastics.
Given that the show is based on a series of books, I don't see how they could trim 75% of the content and also maintain the story. I think the violence is integral to the character development, especially when it comes to the villains. The "sensationalized cruelty" is a clever plot device by the author. He's taken characters that most readers would be inclined to hate and then put them in circumstances where it's easy to feel sympathy for them. That's also an essential element of the story and the development of particular characters.
SMH. The person asked postal worker to "hold on a second" as opposed to interrupting the phone conversation? With people waiting in line? WTF? Do these people not understand that they are being rude and obnoxious or do they just not care?
The fact that she refuses to interact with insurance companies or government bureaucrats does not, in and of itself, undermine her credibility. I agree that EHS is quackery, but many physicians are opting out of the insurance/government model of healthcare.
I don't understand your point. Despite the opinion of this one doctor, "electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome" is in much dispute and is not generally recognized by the medical community. By contrast, photosensitive epileptic seizures are a well known and well documented phenomenon which, AFAIK, is not being disputed. These types of seizures can be repeatedly induced and observed under laboratory conditions and confirmed by changes in brainwave patterns which show up on EEGs. Typical trigger frequency is more like 20 Hz however.
If the school, for some reason, had strobe lights (even fire alarm strobes) or say malfunctioning fluorescent lights. "What would happen" is that the school would be forced to make "reasonable accommodations" like excusing the kid from disco class or replacing the alarm system.
What "precedent" is this case going to set outside the context of "EHS"?
Slashdot Mirror
Firearms are used by individual citizens hundreds of thousands of times each year in self defense, typically without a shot being fired. Law enforcement agents carry firearms based on the rationale that they might need to engage violent criminals. Why are cars any more "necessary to life" than the tools you might need to defend your life?
Driving yourself to the hospital might be a matter of life and death (although most places have ambulance services). Otherwise, your life being dependent on access to an automobile is a direct result of your lifestyle choice.
Parents' discretion. If the kids are disciplined, it doesn't matter if they're idiots. From age 5 onward I knew better than to fool around with firearms. Even the antique shotgun on the wall was off-limits. .22 rifle at age ten and by age 15, I had a shotgun and deer rifle and was allowed to shoot alone and unsupervised. I've never shot anyone or had a firearms-related accident.
I received my first
Parents should be held responsible for recklessness and negligence which results in their kids causing injury or death. To hell with cookie-cutter solutions tailored to the least common denominator in our society.
Did you ask them why it was a problem? Are employers worried about your health, your learning ability or the degree to which your skills are up-to-date?
One of the considerations of any potential employer is healthcare costs. Even if they can't legally discriminate based on that consideration, they will be making a conscious appraisal of your perceived health and how it will relate to the total cost of employing you.
If you are a healthy, active, 40+ person, let the employers know about it. They cannot legally ask for that information, but that does not mean you are legally prohibited from offering it. List your exercise routine as hobbies. Ask about the quality of the bike paths and running trails in the area. Inquire about the fitness center on site or if they offer discount gym memberships as a benefit.
I disagree. The union movement was not hatched in the halls of government. In fact, government was (and is) usually on the side of the businesses and has engaged in numerous bloody crackdowns on people attempting to organize and go on strike. The political left is fond of reminding us how unions fought for better working conditions, a 40 hour work week, etc. Then what happened? Government decided that it was government's job to guarantee these things. As a result, unions have withered and died. What's the point of keeping the union strong and paying dues if workers think Big Brother is going to protect them? By contrast, if the union is the only thing standing between a person and a hazardous job with miserable wages, they have every incentive to keep the union strong.
Back in the infancy of unions, what you're describing is exactly what happened. Not only would individuals be fired for attempting to organize their co-workers, companies would share a blacklist of such troublemakers preventing them from getting work anywhere. It took a lot of courage to be an organizer and the work had to be conducted largely in secret.
What's to prevent the company from ignoring the union and firing everyone? Reprisals by the workers. Sit-in strikes, blocking replacement workers and customers from accessing the business, organizing boycotts of the products and basically anything else that can be done to make the company's life miserable. It's necessary to make the pain of paying union wages and benefits much less than the pain of firing everyone. Even sabotage and property destruction might be on the table for pissed-off unemployed people. Also, do you notice how unions are typically for the skilled trades and are organized at an industry level vs. a company level? By doing this, you make it hard for a company to find a large pool of willing replacement labor with the same skills.
I don't think libertarians have drifted toward neoconservativism. If you're perceiving Republicans in libertarian clothing, I think there are a couple of things going on which might give that impression but neither is driven by a philosophical shift.
The whole "TEA Party" thing for example is a rejection of the big government neocons of the Bush era. It has a few libertarian leanings, but unfortunately maintains much of the Republican baggage. These neocon/libertarian hybrids have evolved in the opposite direction from what you're implying.
Then, you're also seeing the Rand Paul type folks who are willing to jump through the Republican hoops in order to bring a few libertarian ideas to the mainstream. Let's face it. In order to win the Republican presidential nomination, you need to have at least some appeal to the "family values" and "strong defense" contingents in the Republican base. The strategy of compromising principles for political appeal is a huge bone of contention among liberty activists. People willing to go down that road might also appear to be "pseudo-libertarians", but their drift toward the Republican orthodoxy is a matter of practical necessity, not political philosophy.
I find it highly unlikely that people who are behaving in a manner which is rude or reckless have deliberately developed a philosophical basis to justify their behavior.
Anyone interested in liberty from a societal standpoint knows that there can be no freedom which infringes on the freedom of others. Most liberty activists also hold private property rights in high regard, so I can't imagine an argument for allowing one's animal to defile the property of others.
At least try talking to your neighbors before calling men with badges and guns to mediate the dispute for you. I've never had a problem with a neighbor that couldn't be settled with dialogue. Most of the time, it's a case of one person having no clue that they were even bothering the other.
"government sucks ... it is simply superior to all of the abuses possible without government, or with weak government"
Are you making that claim only in the context of the USA or would you apply it to the whole world? In the 20th century alone, governments have murdered well over 200 million people. Another 37 million have died and countless more have been maimed in wars largely caused by governments. Then, add in all of the people who have been tortured, incarcerated and otherwise abused by agents of government.
How could the absence of government possibly result in abuses any worse than that?
Banks do not accumulate $150 billion by lending their own money, or their depositors' money and charging interest. Nor do they get this by payments for handing card and check transactions. Thanks to their scam of fractional reserve banking, banks are granted the privilege of creating money out of thin air and loaning that money at interest as well. Easy to generate profits when you can loan out money you don't actually have.
Almost all of the money in the U.S. economy is "created" based on a debt obligation to a bank. That's why practically everyone you know is in some form of debt. ALL the people doing the real work and producing all of the real goods and services in the economy struggle under a debt burden while bankers, who provide very little of value manage to suck hundreds of billions of dollars out of the economy.
Watch a short film called "Money as Debt" (it's on YouTube) It's rather astounding that the bankers can run this enormous con game and people tolerate it. First step to solving the issue of poverty and wealth inequality would be to abolish this practice.
The government should just boycott the debt that the people of the USA supposedly "owe" to the private bankers who own The Federal Reserve. After 3 rounds of "Quantitative Easing" these scumbags are now the largest single holder of U.S. treasuries.
Currently, The Treasury Department creates an interest-bearing note which they then sell to The Fed for money that the Fed created out of thin air. The income tax is used to pay the interest on this supposed "debt"?
There is no reason that the Treasury Department could not create a debt-free U.S. dollar and bypass the banking cartel entirely.
True, but bitcoin doesn't have shareholders. There are also no big profits or lucrative post-government job offers to bribe regulators.
When it comes to the federal government, "selective enforcement" is the name of the game. If you're a government employee, banker, big corporation or just plain wealthy and you pay your protection money, the laws and regs don't apply to you. Bitcoin users and exchange operators don't fit that criteria, so there's nothing to prevent Big Brother from cracking down on them at every opportunity.
It's illegal to operate a "money services business" without a license. Basically, they're saying he was operating like a bank or a Western Union by the mere act of selling $25k in bitcoins for cash. I think this is a first of its kind case when it comes to bitcoin.
He had been charged with money laundering, but that charge had already been dismissed
P.S. ... looking for the slightest hint of "racism" from anyone, anywhere so that we can feel good about ourselves for condemning it.
I forgot the USA's new defining attribute
I was cheering for the kid when I first heard the story about the 14 year old who "built" his own digital clock. I was curious as to the implementation. My first guess was an Arduino board, which would still be pretty cool.
Turns out it's nothing but an old alarm clock that he disassembled and put into his pencil box.
http://makezine.com/2015/09/16...
What a giant let-down. He's getting attention from the White House and tech companies for stealing someone's work and passing it off as his own?
Remember back when apple pie and baseball were quintessential "American" things? For some reason, this story seems to represent my impression of the new "America". A country that exudes fear and gives out awards to non-achievers.
It will be awesome if they make it readable to the whole world. Would also be nice if they added wiki features so that we could do our best to help keep it up-to-date.
These federal aholes know every last detail about us. It would be poetic justice if their detailed personal information was available for our perusal. Perhaps the Chinese managed to acquire that data which was copied from the federal office of personnel management? I want to see names, addresses, photos, work responsibilities, (outrageous) salaries, etc. etc. Especially people in the NSA, ATF, IRS and other criminal organizations, as well as the corrupt and incompetent employees of the FDIC, SEC, OTS and OCC. Everyone that deserve to be fired and/or imprisoned.
Since when did /. become a hangout for politically correct BS?
A white kid with a pencil box containing batteries, a circuit board and 7-seg display would get the SAME treatment in schools all over the country. Public school students are getting in trouble for gun-shaped things made of pop-tarts, cardboard and legos for $deity's sake!
If a pop-tart gun causes a freak-out, is it any wonder that a circuit in a box produces a similar (idiotic) response?
When "guns" made of pop-tarts, cardboard and legos can get a kid in trouble, is it ANY surprise that a pencil box containing a circuit board, batteries and 7-seg displays causes a similar freak-out?
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
A friend of mine and I (white kids) once got sent to the principal's office just for talking to the chemistry teacher. You can't buy nitric acid just anywhere and we knew we couldn't distill it with an apparatus made of metal pipes and containers. We were wondering if the acid would eat through that clear flexible plastic tubing that you can get at the hardware store and thinking maybe he'd give us a few drops to experiment. He didn't believe our story that we were polishing silver coins (even though that was EXACTLY what we wanted to do!)
This was before Columbine or 9/11, so a chat with the teacher & principal and a note to our parents (tell your kids not to f*** around with chemicals in your basement) was the extent of the discipline.
Imagine what could happen today for cris'sakes! I can easily imagine the police arresting kids like us for conspiracy to make explosives or some such nonsense.
"racism"? Gimme a f***ing break. How about "intelligencism"?
In these sad times when public school "zero tolerance" policies punish kids for "gun-shaped" things made out of legos or cardboard, is it any surprise that morons freak out over a circuit board with batteries and wires hooked into a 7 segment display? Could just as easily have been a white kid.
Smart kid. I hope he gets a six figure settlement and a scholarship to pursue EE out of this fiasco.
I don't see how that technique enables you to pass a test on a subject you know nothing about.
Even assuming you can correctly eliminate two of the choices from 100% of the questions, you're guessing between the remaining choices. Over a sufficient number of questions, that technique will therefore tend to result in a score of ~ '50' which is typically not a passing grade.
Definitely interesting, and It employs (AFAIK) unique methods for preventing other malware from being installed. The idea of "eliminating the competition" isn't anything new for malware however. Many malware packages have included pirated copies of commercial anti-virus type software to nuke any known competitors. I think the Anna K. virus might have had that feature.
I remember a security researcher quoting people with infected PCs who said that their machines were running "better than ever".
The magnitude of this problem is absolutely enormous. It would take huge amounts of resources just to keep pace with the new crap being dumped into the oceans. Furthermore, a lot of this stuff has been broken down into very tiny pieces that a person couldn't just scoop out of the water.
Right now, the most effective way of tackling this issue is preventing even more garbage from getting into the ocean.
I'm not one of these "big government must do something" watermelon environmentalists, but I'm making a conscious effort to avoid plastics.
"The only sane reason I could see to dig the things up is so that they could be properly recycled..."
The "sane" reason for digging them up is that they were apparently worth $108,000 at auction. Very sane.
As far as a sane reason for buying one, I'm at a loss. Nostalgia?
Given that the show is based on a series of books, I don't see how they could trim 75% of the content and also maintain the story.
I think the violence is integral to the character development, especially when it comes to the villains. The "sensationalized cruelty" is a clever plot device by the author. He's taken characters that most readers would be inclined to hate and then put them in circumstances where it's easy to feel sympathy for them. That's also an essential element of the story and the development of particular characters.
SMH. The person asked postal worker to "hold on a second" as opposed to interrupting the phone conversation? With people waiting in line? WTF?
Do these people not understand that they are being rude and obnoxious or do they just not care?
Rude people definitely suck!
The fact that she refuses to interact with insurance companies or government bureaucrats does not, in and of itself, undermine her credibility. I agree that EHS is quackery, but many physicians are opting out of the insurance/government model of healthcare.
I don't understand your point. Despite the opinion of this one doctor, "electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome" is in much dispute and is not generally recognized by the medical community.
By contrast, photosensitive epileptic seizures are a well known and well documented phenomenon which, AFAIK, is not being disputed. These types of seizures can be repeatedly induced and observed under laboratory conditions and confirmed by changes in brainwave patterns which show up on EEGs. Typical trigger frequency is more like 20 Hz however.
If the school, for some reason, had strobe lights (even fire alarm strobes) or say malfunctioning fluorescent lights. "What would happen" is that the school would be forced to make "reasonable accommodations" like excusing the kid from disco class or replacing the alarm system.
What "precedent" is this case going to set outside the context of "EHS"?