I think the point is not that kids were dying left and right, but that the (admittedly very very small) increase is safety due to widely available cell phones is likely much greater than the decrease in safety due to the larger EMF radiation. Pulling numbers out of my ass for effect: extra cell phone in class 0.000000001% increase in safety and 0.0000000000000000000001% increase in danger.
In any case, it isn't two-photon absorption we are talking about however, it is more like 9-photon absorption (or more, with a similarly reduced cross section) - so picture nine women, each one month pregnant and run the explanation that way...
I am not a Canadian, but you can't fool me with your talk of basketball, volleyball, and track.
I know for a fact that the only sports Canadian youth go for are beating each other up with hockey gloves, beating each other up with hockey sticks, beating each other up without gloves, and occasionally playing hockey.
Sure, but it is not done as part of the school system. The NHL has a farm system that (I kid you not) reaches down to the under-10 year level. OK, I kid you a little bit - I think that system stopped back in the 70s. Baseball in the US also has a pretty great farm system which is why college level baseball is not as important for player development as college level basketball and football. If you want to be a pro hockey or baseball player you don't need to go to college unless you want to. Football and basketball? The college system IS their farm system. To the determent of the education and of the sport in my opinion.
But more on topic: I think more people can be shown to have been injured tripping over ethernet cables in the schools than wireless issues.
And nevermind all those "EMF Sensitivity" cases - there's one confirmed case and he has to live as a hermit far from civilizatoin because of it - they couldn't even use a digital camera. Especially if you're trying to convince me you're sensitive to WiFi whilst using your microwave.
If you can find a like to this "confirmed case" I would be very interested. Every study I have seen is that whatever problem the "EMF Sensitive" folk have, it is not caused by EMF - relatively easily confirmed with a quick double-blinded test inside a Faraday cage.
Of course, just because it has always been that way doesn't mean that there have not been a lot of people who THINK that it works the other way.
It is similar to people who say things like "they only do that for the tax write-off" for things that may qualify as donations or business expenses - implying that the donation or expense costs the person spending the money nothing once the taxes are figured in. In virtually every case, making a donation or having something be a business expense ends up with the person/business poorer than if they had not made the purchase/donation in the first place - they get the benefit of not paying income tax on the money that they spend, but they still have less in their pocket after the transaction: for example, spending $100 as a business expense might reduce your tax liability by $40, but spending $100 in order to save $40 doesn't leave you better off - you are still $60 poorer than when you started.
As I understood the society in the novel, rather than tax anyone, at the end of the year they would calculate the increased value of the society based on some sort of GDP measurement, and then "print" enough new currency so as to keep the value of the "dollar" at the same level - so if the economy increased by 20% you would print 20% more money.
As much as I hate to argue against Heinlein, that makes one huge, wrong, assumption.
It assumes that economies will always grow.
I suspect that my understanding of the entire idea is cartoon at best - at the very least they were using some measure more sophisticated than GDP. Even with my cartoon description one could envision a system where some of the newly printed money in high-growth years could be saved for lower growth years, or have the amount averaged over multiple years to dampen swings in the index on short time scales. What I found interesting was the idea of examining the foundational concepts of money and value to try to address broader societal issues rather than to just accept the common understanding of them and being forced to work within those confines.
The idea of not collecting any taxes but to just "print more money" for public services is sort of like having a tax on dollars - every dollar you own decreases fractionally in value to provide the public services. I suppose this type of thing would drive people to heavily invest in non-dollar instruments so even if it worked in theory it might not in practice, but I still find it fascinating to think about.
when I was in grade school, I always heard about how unfair it was that, if you were on the cusp of a higher tax bracket, then a small pay raise could result in less net income, because your taxes increase. Then, we got reform. Instead of saying "you are in the 20% tax bracket. Subtract your deductions and pay 20% of what remains", we complicated the tax code. We divided up the tax brackets so that high-income people calculate as if a fraction of their income exists in each tax bracket.
I don't think the tax brackets have ever worked so that moving up a bracket decreased your net income in any jurisdiction - they have always been x% of first chunk of income, (x+y)% of higher chunk of income, etc.
While we are fantasizing, why not simplify all laws?
I think the idea of a required expiration date on all legislation is a pretty good one - say something like 20 years. This might provide an impetus to passing simple-to-understand-and-read legislation if you want it to be renewed far into the future; and it might work to get rid of stuff that seemed like a good idea at the time. If nothing else it would require re-visiting contentious issues on a time scale that might provide some new perspectives.
Balanced Budgeting: First thing is to default on the debt. This will piss off a lot of people but will free us from the debt and prevent us from being able to accumulate any more since nobody likes to lend to a dead beat.
According to Wikipedia only about 57% of the "debt held by the public" is foreign owned, and only 32% of the total debt is owned by foreigners. Thus 78% of the total debt is owed to other parts of the US Government or US citizens and businesses. Defaulting on that might not be so popular or good for the economy - or ethical for that matter. I would be surprised if doing so did not cause an even worse financial crisis than this whole sub-prime thing and the global recession we are starting to climb out of.
Getting hit by a continental earthquake that blows up all our nuke plants would probably be easier for the average family to deal with compared to collapsing our economic system and destroying any hope of international trade for a decade or more. Has any country ever been allowed to default on their debt? I recall that even Haiti managed to pay off their colonial/revolutionary debts back in the 1980s or something like that.
50%?!? I don't understand how anyone can justify giving up half of your income to the government.
If you think of "the government" as some outside thing, that does seem pretty unreasonable. If you think of it more as "society" or the "community" then it doesn't necessarily seem so unreasonable. What percentage does the publisher charge the author? The community provides the entire ecosystem within which each member operates. No individual can succeed to any great extent without the entire community around them working well enough to provide all the bits and pieces necessary for that success to happen.
How to reasonably account for all this sort of stuff is not particularly clear unfortunately. The current way we create and use money, and then tax it to fund the "community" is far from perfect.
One interesting system that Heinlein mentioned in one of his early novels (published posthumously - it wasn't really very good from a writing point of view) was "Social Credit". As I understood the society in the novel, rather than tax anyone, at the end of the year they would calculate the increased value of the society based on some sort of GDP measurement, and then "print" enough new currency so as to keep the value of the "dollar" at the same level - so if the economy increased by 20% you would print 20% more money. The government then drew its revenue from this pot and distributed the rest on a per-capita bases. Of course in this future society there was massive automation and little need for most forms of manual labour, so most people just lived off of their yearly societal income (thus the "social credit" name) spending their large amounts of leisure time in uplifting artistic pursuits and other utopian activities.
It does seem as thought it ought to be possible to design a society where increases in productivity and efficiency and technological advancements could have wider societal benefits. Since the 1920s our industrial systems have advanced tremendously and as a society we are way way way richer and more well off - but individually we have not advanced much. It seems like with all of these advances we should have been able to come up with a way to provide full employment while at the same time reducing the working hours of us all. By now we should all have an 8-hour work week and three months of vacation. Maybe such a system would come at the cost of speed of advancement, but I am more than willing to trade the decreased personal labour requirements today for a 1980s middle-class lifestyle which might be our level of advancement if we had somehow done this since the 1940s.
Of course I have no idea how to structure something like this in light of real human behaviour, greed, and the rewards of cheating any system we try to put into place.
The reality of the world is that it doesn't matter how the government collects its taxes - every dollar the government spends is productivity removed from the economy one way or another.
While emotionally it might not seem like it, you are aware that generally speaking, tax revenue is not just loaded in piles and burned, yes?
From an economic point of view - money taken from individuals and then spent by a group is not significantly different from that same money being spent by the individuals themselves. Yes, the way it is spent/invested/wasted might be different (more roadways, less plasma TVs), but it is not "removed from the economy".
It is interesting to look at differences in tax rates and governmental spending in different countries. The last time I looked at Canada and the USA for example I was surprised to learn that the tax burned on individuals in each country was broadly similar - I had always though that the more "socialist" Canada had significantly higher taxes than the US. Depending on the province and state you look at, Alberta for example was significantly "cheaper" than some US states. The big difference on the spending side of things is that the USA spends a shitload of money on "defense" (on a per-capita basis) compared to Canada (compared to anyone really). Chop that defense money down by 50% or more and the USA will be rolling in dough. Of course without that expensive military a big sector of the economy will be shuttered, and the barbarians will undoubtedly invade within a few weeks....
Oh, I agree - I'm just not convinced that the small number of people who need a-b-c and are not served by the current currency/banking system are going to be large enough to provide the incentives for "the masses" to adopt it.
The bitcoin system currently doesn't provide a simple way for these a-b-c types to get their money into and out-of bitcoin to allow them to buy fast cars and hot dates once their bitcoin transactions have occurred, so while they might like the a-b-c abilities, I don't see them getting heavily involved in it either.
Sure - it might be the best choice for an elemental currency, but it does that in spite of its industrial value, rather than because of them. The ideal currency should have no value beyond its value as a currency.
But if some of the "guys in the thick of it" get caught and start giving up their records and/or start working as informants, it seems as though it might be fairly straightforward to round up a lot of their customers or suppliers.
Gold has real value because it does have actual uses (although the price of gold is seriously inflated by hoarding, compared to what it should be based on natural scarcity alone), and government run fiat money has value because the government requires you to pay your taxes in it. BitCoin has no inherent value at all.
I thought that the value of gold from an industrial point of view was only a small fraction of its current (or historical) cost. Mostly it is "pretty", and pretty rare. If everyone decided overnight that it was no longer desired beyond industrial uses, it would have a value down there with copper. If it only cost as much as copper then it would have a whole bunch of other industrial usage, but still, if the gold market collapsed, I doubt the recyclers would be paying that much for it.
It needs a simple conversion to real goods and services in order to "take off". If this type of thing was easy to have happen, then local barter clubs would be much more prominent. Sure, bad guys A, B, and C might be able to make use of it to exchange their drugs, sex slaves, and guns amongst themselves, but they want to be able to buy houses and cars and fancy meals so eventually they will have to get someone to pay them local currency for some of their illegal swag.
I don't know that electronic currency is going to be much better than plain old cash for the ABC transactions anyhow. I guess suitcases of 20s are a bit of a pain to lug around, but at least a hard drive crash doesn't wipe them out.
The problem is not profiling as such, but rather thinking that profiling as generally practiced is an effective method of finding the "bad guys". If 70% of the "bad guys" have side-burns yet side-burners still make up significant fractions of the travelers, but only one out of a thousand travelers is a bad guy, pulling out all the side-burners for increased scrutiny is not really effective and it tends to cause resentment when innocents are treated poorly.
Random screening does not need to be biased equally on all travelers - game theory systems could be used where the screener checks off various "profiling" boxes on their hand-held and the device "rolls a dice" to decide if a random screening should occur. If the device designers can come up with some estimate of increased danger probablyity for any characteristic - put it in. You could then also have a feedback mechanism so that if they found a problem while doing a more thorough search those characteristics would get increased in importance, and if no problem was found, they would get decreased in importance.
I bet that will work as well as that pledge to not use sarcasm I signed.
I think there is actually some evidence that people contemplating suicide actually do tend to keep promises that they make to not kill themselves. Thus if you are talking to someone who is suicidal, getting them to promise not to off themselves tends to prevent them from doing so. I don't know about signing such a pledge well in advance of being suicidal however.
Too bad - but it looks pretty clear that in this case there is a lot of documentation from the time clarifying at least that the "at the time of addoption" part was to allow then-current citizens to hold the office, as the only natural born citizens were at the time mostly unborn.
He immediately took responsibility for the act and seemed very, very happy with the results. It's not like the guy would get on the stand at his trial and "take the 5th." More likely he'd use his day in court as a recruitment tool, reiterating his pride in the accomplishment.
No doubt. To me that is not a reason to forgo a trial. Doing the "right" thing isn't always easy.
I am not too comfortable with the use of assassination by our government against anyone. I would like to believe that we are better than that. I think we as a society are strong enough to use the criminal justice system for crimes such as mass murder.
We are. And we've shown that again and again in some very high-profile trials. Really, I'm with you 99.999% of the time. This is a rare exception. Even if we'd made every effort to capture him alive, I really doubt bin Laden would have allowed his capture --he'd much rather have been a martyr. It's hard to make the case that his death wasn't the best outcome.
So in this case you feel that he wanted his death (rather than his capture), presumably since it he thought it was better for his cause. And you think his death was the best outcome, presumably since you think it is better for "our" cause. Either one of the two of you is wrong, or the two of you have the same cause. (Or, I suppose, the idea that he preferred death to capture is incorrect.)
I think in this case, it wasn't the "best outcome", though it probably was the easiest, and probably better than many of the other possible (or even likely) outcomes.
"No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President;"
Have there been any court rulings on the definition of "natural born Citizen"? Is "Chris Johnson" is a "natural born" child of American citizens - is not Chris a Citizen of the United States regardless of the location of their birth? If your child is unexpectedly born while you are vacationing abroad does that or does that not limit their ability to become president?
(Actually, when parsing the above clause, it seems as though only people who were alive "at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution" would be eligible - which sort of messes up everyone alive today. Is that comma after "States" correct?)
The requirements for citizenship, and its definition in American statute law, have changed since the Constitution was ratified in 1788. Congress first recognized the citizenship of children born to U.S. parents overseas on March 26, 1790, stating that "the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States."[21]
Interestingly, it seems that McCain's citizenship status derives from his parentage rather than the location of his birth (on a US military base) since according to the Wikipedia article above:
Regarding people born at U.S. military bases in foreign countries, current U.S. State Department policy, as codified in the department's Foreign Affairs Manual, reads:
Despite widespread popular belief, U.S. military installations abroad and U.S. diplomatic or consular facilities are not part of the United States within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A child born on the premises of such a facility is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of birth.[29]
So it seems that if McCain is eligible, so is "Chris". And even if Obama was born outside of the US, as the child of a US mother, he would seem to be as eligible as McCain - unless it is the father that is important. Has McCain had a paternity test? The political difference between two situations couldn't have anything to do with their visible skin colour, could it?
Almost universally, I'm in favor of everybody getting their day in court. But this is more like cancer; the evidence is iron-clad, the danger is obvious, and the killer is completely remorseless. You don't excise a tumor and then culture it in a petri dish, so it can think about its crimes. Too many people get so hung up on revenge, they forget the most essential purpose of the law: protecting people.
Is the evidence iron-clad? I certainly haven't seen any of it personally. I don't really doubt he wasn't responsible, but without a reasonably transparent trial, how can we tell? It's not like we should just believe someone when they say "Really, there are lots of WMDs out there!".
As for the petri dish, I sort of think it is a good idea to take the tumor and culture it to get a better idea of what makes it tick - but that's a pretty poor analogy for prison.
I am not too comfortable with the use of assassination by our government against anyone. I would like to believe that we are better than that. I think we as a society are strong enough to use the criminal justice system for crimes such as mass murder. Not doing so, I feel, cheapens us all. In some very real sense it is utter foolishness to give our enemies the same rights and protections we give our friends - but in some also very real sense, it is an even greater tragedy not to do so.
Naw, I'm not in NY - they just happened to have figures I could find. It looks like NY gives about $15k to the state schools per student if I am reading this type of information correctly:
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point is not that kids were dying left and right, but that the (admittedly very very small) increase is safety due to widely available cell phones is likely much greater than the decrease in safety due to the larger EMF radiation. Pulling numbers out of my ass for effect: extra cell phone in class 0.000000001% increase in safety and 0.0000000000000000000001% increase in danger.
Surely however the cross section is pretty small?
In any case, it isn't two-photon absorption we are talking about however, it is more like 9-photon absorption (or more, with a similarly reduced cross section) - so picture nine women, each one month pregnant and run the explanation that way...
I am not a Canadian, but you can't fool me with your talk of basketball, volleyball, and track.
I know for a fact that the only sports Canadian youth go for are beating each other up with hockey gloves, beating each other up with hockey sticks, beating each other up without gloves, and occasionally playing hockey.
Sure, but it is not done as part of the school system. The NHL has a farm system that (I kid you not) reaches down to the under-10 year level. OK, I kid you a little bit - I think that system stopped back in the 70s. Baseball in the US also has a pretty great farm system which is why college level baseball is not as important for player development as college level basketball and football. If you want to be a pro hockey or baseball player you don't need to go to college unless you want to. Football and basketball? The college system IS their farm system. To the determent of the education and of the sport in my opinion.
But more on topic: I think more people can be shown to have been injured tripping over ethernet cables in the schools than wireless issues.
And nevermind all those "EMF Sensitivity" cases - there's one confirmed case and he has to live as a hermit far from civilizatoin because of it - they couldn't even use a digital camera. Especially if you're trying to convince me you're sensitive to WiFi whilst using your microwave.
If you can find a like to this "confirmed case" I would be very interested. Every study I have seen is that whatever problem the "EMF Sensitive" folk have, it is not caused by EMF - relatively easily confirmed with a quick double-blinded test inside a Faraday cage.
Of course, just because it has always been that way doesn't mean that there have not been a lot of people who THINK that it works the other way.
It is similar to people who say things like "they only do that for the tax write-off" for things that may qualify as donations or business expenses - implying that the donation or expense costs the person spending the money nothing once the taxes are figured in. In virtually every case, making a donation or having something be a business expense ends up with the person/business poorer than if they had not made the purchase/donation in the first place - they get the benefit of not paying income tax on the money that they spend, but they still have less in their pocket after the transaction: for example, spending $100 as a business expense might reduce your tax liability by $40, but spending $100 in order to save $40 doesn't leave you better off - you are still $60 poorer than when you started.
As I understood the society in the novel, rather than tax anyone, at the end of the year they would calculate the increased value of the society based on some sort of GDP measurement, and then "print" enough new currency so as to keep the value of the "dollar" at the same level - so if the economy increased by 20% you would print 20% more money.
As much as I hate to argue against Heinlein, that makes one huge, wrong, assumption.
It assumes that economies will always grow.
I suspect that my understanding of the entire idea is cartoon at best - at the very least they were using some measure more sophisticated than GDP. Even with my cartoon description one could envision a system where some of the newly printed money in high-growth years could be saved for lower growth years, or have the amount averaged over multiple years to dampen swings in the index on short time scales. What I found interesting was the idea of examining the foundational concepts of money and value to try to address broader societal issues rather than to just accept the common understanding of them and being forced to work within those confines.
The idea of not collecting any taxes but to just "print more money" for public services is sort of like having a tax on dollars - every dollar you own decreases fractionally in value to provide the public services. I suppose this type of thing would drive people to heavily invest in non-dollar instruments so even if it worked in theory it might not in practice, but I still find it fascinating to think about.
when I was in grade school, I always heard about how unfair it was that, if you were on the cusp of a higher tax bracket, then a small pay raise could result in less net income, because your taxes increase. Then, we got reform. Instead of saying "you are in the 20% tax bracket. Subtract your deductions and pay 20% of what remains", we complicated the tax code. We divided up the tax brackets so that high-income people calculate as if a fraction of their income exists in each tax bracket.
I don't think the tax brackets have ever worked so that moving up a bracket decreased your net income in any jurisdiction - they have always been x% of first chunk of income, (x+y)% of higher chunk of income, etc.
While we are fantasizing, why not simplify all laws?
I think the idea of a required expiration date on all legislation is a pretty good one - say something like 20 years. This might provide an impetus to passing simple-to-understand-and-read legislation if you want it to be renewed far into the future; and it might work to get rid of stuff that seemed like a good idea at the time. If nothing else it would require re-visiting contentious issues on a time scale that might provide some new perspectives.
Balanced Budgeting:
First thing is to default on the debt. This will piss off a lot of people but will free us from the debt and prevent us from being able to accumulate any more since nobody likes to lend to a dead beat.
According to Wikipedia only about 57% of the "debt held by the public" is foreign owned, and only 32% of the total debt is owned by foreigners. Thus 78% of the total debt is owed to other parts of the US Government or US citizens and businesses. Defaulting on that might not be so popular or good for the economy - or ethical for that matter. I would be surprised if doing so did not cause an even worse financial crisis than this whole sub-prime thing and the global recession we are starting to climb out of.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/United_States_public_debt#Foreign_ownership
Getting hit by a continental earthquake that blows up all our nuke plants would probably be easier for the average family to deal with compared to collapsing our economic system and destroying any hope of international trade for a decade or more. Has any country ever been allowed to default on their debt? I recall that even Haiti managed to pay off their colonial/revolutionary debts back in the 1980s or something like that.
50%?!? I don't understand how anyone can justify giving up half of your income to the government.
If you think of "the government" as some outside thing, that does seem pretty unreasonable. If you think of it more as "society" or the "community" then it doesn't necessarily seem so unreasonable. What percentage does the publisher charge the author? The community provides the entire ecosystem within which each member operates. No individual can succeed to any great extent without the entire community around them working well enough to provide all the bits and pieces necessary for that success to happen.
How to reasonably account for all this sort of stuff is not particularly clear unfortunately. The current way we create and use money, and then tax it to fund the "community" is far from perfect.
One interesting system that Heinlein mentioned in one of his early novels (published posthumously - it wasn't really very good from a writing point of view) was "Social Credit". As I understood the society in the novel, rather than tax anyone, at the end of the year they would calculate the increased value of the society based on some sort of GDP measurement, and then "print" enough new currency so as to keep the value of the "dollar" at the same level - so if the economy increased by 20% you would print 20% more money. The government then drew its revenue from this pot and distributed the rest on a per-capita bases. Of course in this future society there was massive automation and little need for most forms of manual labour, so most people just lived off of their yearly societal income (thus the "social credit" name) spending their large amounts of leisure time in uplifting artistic pursuits and other utopian activities.
I don't really know if the wikipedia article reflects any of this understanding:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Social_Credit
It does seem as thought it ought to be possible to design a society where increases in productivity and efficiency and technological advancements could have wider societal benefits. Since the 1920s our industrial systems have advanced tremendously and as a society we are way way way richer and more well off - but individually we have not advanced much. It seems like with all of these advances we should have been able to come up with a way to provide full employment while at the same time reducing the working hours of us all. By now we should all have an 8-hour work week and three months of vacation. Maybe such a system would come at the cost of speed of advancement, but I am more than willing to trade the decreased personal labour requirements today for a 1980s middle-class lifestyle which might be our level of advancement if we had somehow done this since the 1940s.
Of course I have no idea how to structure something like this in light of real human behaviour, greed, and the rewards of cheating any system we try to put into place.
The reality of the world is that it doesn't matter how the government collects its taxes - every dollar the government spends is productivity removed from the economy one way or another.
While emotionally it might not seem like it, you are aware that generally speaking, tax revenue is not just loaded in piles and burned, yes?
From an economic point of view - money taken from individuals and then spent by a group is not significantly different from that same money being spent by the individuals themselves. Yes, the way it is spent/invested/wasted might be different (more roadways, less plasma TVs), but it is not "removed from the economy".
It is interesting to look at differences in tax rates and governmental spending in different countries. The last time I looked at Canada and the USA for example I was surprised to learn that the tax burned on individuals in each country was broadly similar - I had always though that the more "socialist" Canada had significantly higher taxes than the US. Depending on the province and state you look at, Alberta for example was significantly "cheaper" than some US states. The big difference on the spending side of things is that the USA spends a shitload of money on "defense" (on a per-capita basis) compared to Canada (compared to anyone really). Chop that defense money down by 50% or more and the USA will be rolling in dough. Of course without that expensive military a big sector of the economy will be shuttered, and the barbarians will undoubtedly invade within a few weeks....
Oh, I agree - I'm just not convinced that the small number of people who need a-b-c and are not served by the current currency/banking system are going to be large enough to provide the incentives for "the masses" to adopt it.
The bitcoin system currently doesn't provide a simple way for these a-b-c types to get their money into and out-of bitcoin to allow them to buy fast cars and hot dates once their bitcoin transactions have occurred, so while they might like the a-b-c abilities, I don't see them getting heavily involved in it either.
Sure - it might be the best choice for an elemental currency, but it does that in spite of its industrial value, rather than because of them. The ideal currency should have no value beyond its value as a currency.
But if some of the "guys in the thick of it" get caught and start giving up their records and/or start working as informants, it seems as though it might be fairly straightforward to round up a lot of their customers or suppliers.
Gold has real value because it does have actual uses (although the price of gold is seriously inflated by hoarding, compared to what it should be based on natural scarcity alone), and government run fiat money has value because the government requires you to pay your taxes in it. BitCoin has no inherent value at all.
I thought that the value of gold from an industrial point of view was only a small fraction of its current (or historical) cost. Mostly it is "pretty", and pretty rare. If everyone decided overnight that it was no longer desired beyond industrial uses, it would have a value down there with copper. If it only cost as much as copper then it would have a whole bunch of other industrial usage, but still, if the gold market collapsed, I doubt the recyclers would be paying that much for it.
It needs a simple conversion to real goods and services in order to "take off". If this type of thing was easy to have happen, then local barter clubs would be much more prominent. Sure, bad guys A, B, and C might be able to make use of it to exchange their drugs, sex slaves, and guns amongst themselves, but they want to be able to buy houses and cars and fancy meals so eventually they will have to get someone to pay them local currency for some of their illegal swag.
I don't know that electronic currency is going to be much better than plain old cash for the ABC transactions anyhow. I guess suitcases of 20s are a bit of a pain to lug around, but at least a hard drive crash doesn't wipe them out.
The problem is not profiling as such, but rather thinking that profiling as generally practiced is an effective method of finding the "bad guys". If 70% of the "bad guys" have side-burns yet side-burners still make up significant fractions of the travelers, but only one out of a thousand travelers is a bad guy, pulling out all the side-burners for increased scrutiny is not really effective and it tends to cause resentment when innocents are treated poorly.
Random screening does not need to be biased equally on all travelers - game theory systems could be used where the screener checks off various "profiling" boxes on their hand-held and the device "rolls a dice" to decide if a random screening should occur. If the device designers can come up with some estimate of increased danger probablyity for any characteristic - put it in. You could then also have a feedback mechanism so that if they found a problem while doing a more thorough search those characteristics would get increased in importance, and if no problem was found, they would get decreased in importance.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings
They do not list ethnicity explicitly, but there certainly are a a number of "Caucasian" last names of hijackers listed.
If they are still using inches for anything in 2136 other than nostalgia in the "space federation" then they are doing something wrong.
I bet that will work as well as that pledge to not use sarcasm I signed.
I think there is actually some evidence that people contemplating suicide actually do tend to keep promises that they make to not kill themselves. Thus if you are talking to someone who is suicidal, getting them to promise not to off themselves tends to prevent them from doing so. I don't know about signing such a pledge well in advance of being suicidal however.
Too bad - but it looks pretty clear that in this case there is a lot of documentation from the time clarifying at least that the "at the time of addoption" part was to allow then-current citizens to hold the office, as the only natural born citizens were at the time mostly unborn.
He immediately took responsibility for the act and seemed very, very happy with the results. It's not like the guy would get on the stand at his trial and "take the 5th." More likely he'd use his day in court as a recruitment tool, reiterating his pride in the accomplishment.
No doubt. To me that is not a reason to forgo a trial. Doing the "right" thing isn't always easy.
I am not too comfortable with the use of assassination by our government against anyone. I would like to believe that we are better than that. I think we as a society are strong enough to use the criminal justice system for crimes such as mass murder.
We are. And we've shown that again and again in some very high-profile trials. Really, I'm with you 99.999% of the time. This is a rare exception. Even if we'd made every effort to capture him alive, I really doubt bin Laden would have allowed his capture --he'd much rather have been a martyr. It's hard to make the case that his death wasn't the best outcome.
So in this case you feel that he wanted his death (rather than his capture), presumably since it he thought it was better for his cause. And you think his death was the best outcome, presumably since you think it is better for "our" cause. Either one of the two of you is wrong, or the two of you have the same cause. (Or, I suppose, the idea that he preferred death to capture is incorrect.)
I think in this case, it wasn't the "best outcome", though it probably was the easiest, and probably better than many of the other possible (or even likely) outcomes.
Article II - The Executive Branch
Section 1 - The President
"No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President;"
Have there been any court rulings on the definition of "natural born Citizen"? Is "Chris Johnson" is a "natural born" child of American citizens - is not Chris a Citizen of the United States regardless of the location of their birth? If your child is unexpectedly born while you are vacationing abroad does that or does that not limit their ability to become president?
(Actually, when parsing the above clause, it seems as though only people who were alive "at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution" would be eligible - which sort of messes up everyone alive today. Is that comma after "States" correct?)
Anyhow, to answer some of my own questions, Wikipedia seems to have a bit of information on it, but it is not conclusive. Most of the discussion seem to be trying to decide the status of people born in the USA: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Natural_Born_Citizen_Clause
There is this bit:
The requirements for citizenship, and its definition in American statute law, have changed since the Constitution was ratified in 1788. Congress first recognized the citizenship of children born to U.S. parents overseas on March 26, 1790, stating that "the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, That the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States."[21]
Interestingly, it seems that McCain's citizenship status derives from his parentage rather than the location of his birth (on a US military base) since according to the Wikipedia article above:
Regarding people born at U.S. military bases in foreign countries, current U.S. State Department policy, as codified in the department's Foreign Affairs Manual, reads:
Despite widespread popular belief, U.S. military installations abroad and U.S. diplomatic or consular facilities are not part of the United States within the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A child born on the premises of such a facility is not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and does not acquire U.S. citizenship by reason of birth.[29]
So it seems that if McCain is eligible, so is "Chris". And even if Obama was born outside of the US, as the child of a US mother, he would seem to be as eligible as McCain - unless it is the father that is important. Has McCain had a paternity test? The political difference between two situations couldn't have anything to do with their visible skin colour, could it?
Almost universally, I'm in favor of everybody getting their day in court. But this is more like cancer; the evidence is iron-clad, the danger is obvious, and the killer is completely remorseless. You don't excise a tumor and then culture it in a petri dish, so it can think about its crimes. Too many people get so hung up on revenge, they forget the most essential purpose of the law: protecting people.
Is the evidence iron-clad? I certainly haven't seen any of it personally. I don't really doubt he wasn't responsible, but without a reasonably transparent trial, how can we tell? It's not like we should just believe someone when they say "Really, there are lots of WMDs out there!".
As for the petri dish, I sort of think it is a good idea to take the tumor and culture it to get a better idea of what makes it tick - but that's a pretty poor analogy for prison.
I am not too comfortable with the use of assassination by our government against anyone. I would like to believe that we are better than that. I think we as a society are strong enough to use the criminal justice system for crimes such as mass murder. Not doing so, I feel, cheapens us all. In some very real sense it is utter foolishness to give our enemies the same rights and protections we give our friends - but in some also very real sense, it is an even greater tragedy not to do so.
Naw, I'm not in NY - they just happened to have figures I could find. It looks like NY gives about $15k to the state schools per student if I am reading this type of information correctly:
http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?measure=36#