A pure animal whose actions are controlled by evolution of instinct, would stop killing to preserve the food supply. People killed the plains buffaloes just because they liked killing them, and to deny resources for the native Americans.
Of course, there may be a evolutionary advantage for the birds to kill the baby turtles. They might be a common food, and killing extra turtles might reduce competition for that food supply. Alternately, killing the extra baby turtles might actually increase the supply of adult turtles by weeding out the weak. Killing certain baby turtles might actually increase the bird's food supply in the long run.
Evolution doesn't usually work quite that well - it tends to be more "shortsighted". While it might be "better" if the birds picked off a certain type of turtle (say the fastest ones, leaving the slowest ones to breed), any bird that did that would be out-competed by the birds that were picking off the "easiest" turtles. Picking off the "easiest" turtles means the ones that survive are the hardest to catch/eat, and only the fastest birds end up eating them. Thus we get evolutionary "arms races" that make for more well protected turtles, and more dangerous (for the turtles at least) birds.
There are lots of examples of "foreign" animals being introduced to a new environment which completely take over certain niches - kudzo in the South USA and rats in Hawaii for example. Animals do not naturally limit themselves - they expand until they cannot expand further, and if that kills off their own food sources, they then die off themselves, or they go through boom and bust cycles (I think there are examples of islands with fox/rabbit populations that cycle up and down out of sync - if the island is too small eventually one of the down cycles ends up not having enough individuals to rebound and the cycles end).
Electricity generated using coal is indistinguishable from electricity generated by any other means. Minnesota cannot legally tax carbon that is released in another state.
As science-minded people, of course we see that there are not multiple "types" of electricity (or perhaps more accurately "electrical power"), but I wonder if legally there can be.
If there was some sort of MN certification authority for "organic" food, and non-organic food was taxed differently that organic food, would MN be allowed to tax non-certified food from out of state at the non-organic rate? They seem to be allowed to prohibit certain food from out of state under various health reasons according to someone else who linked to court cases about the MN food inspection. What about safety standards? California seems to be able to set vehicle emission standards for in-state sale - Dimedici's argument seems to be based on the idea that the regulation specifies some sort of specific product, a CA emmissions automobile is physically different than a non-CA emmissions automobile. This seems like a pretty reasonable position, but then again, legal truths are often not particularly "reasonable" in my observation. Hasn't the US Supreme Court ruled that Tomatoes are vegetables, while biologically they would be classified as fruits - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden
For some standards (EnergyStar and Underwriters Lab http://www.ul.com/ for example) two identical products could exist where the only difference is their certification by those bodies - could MN tax ES or UL certified products differently? If the answer to that is "yes", then having a tax on non-certified energy production would not seem to be different.
Actually, why do you think the US has the highest standard of living, best medical care, richest country in the world, etc? Could be be that we were the only country to ever use free markets? Nope, couldn't POSSIBLY be because of that!
What does it mean when none of your supposed results is factual (standard of living, medical care, richness), and your supposed reason (only country to use free markets) is also incorrect? Perhaps the rest of your comments are similarly inaccurate?
The freest economy of the world seems to be Hong Kong, with the US at #6. Surely all of the top six have "free markets" to at least a similar level as the US: http://www.heritage.org/index/
Without the P2P nature, protocols like bittorrent have little to offer over http for "legitimate" distributors of content. Grabbing the latest TeX distribution via http from the official mirrors is slow and puts a strain on the servers, getting it via bittorrent is faster and uses other user's bandwidth, releasing pressure from the servers. Without the "uploading" part, bittorrent has no extra value.
There might be a "game theory" type of reason for the $1000 littering fine and the $300 red-light fine having to do with the odds of getting caught for any one particular infraction. For a "fair" game, the payout over many playings should be equal to the cost. Thus a one dollar ticket with odds of winning of 1:100 should have a winning prize of $100.
With the littering fine, the infraction price is very high for what seems a fairly benign transgression, but the chance of being caught is pretty low, so to make sure people do not litter, you need to set the fine pretty high. The fact that you remember the $1000 fine does demonstrate that it made an impression. People need less to be convinced that running red lights is a bad thing to do, and perhaps the rate of being caught is comparatively higher, so a lower fine is reasonable.
From a municipal money-making point of view, if traffic violations are being used as income, there is the balance between maximizing revenue and minimizing the costs associated with collection. The fact that more people will with fight against and complain about higher ticket fines may be keeping their prices lower than optimal from a "discouraging behaviour" point of view.
I think it has to do with when craigslist created local sites - kijiji did essentially the whole world it lots of little pieces in one big creation event while craigslist adds new markets at a much slower pace. I much prefer CL but when advertising something, I will usually post on both - kijiji seems to get more eyeballs in my region.
How hard is it for you to understand that spies are fucking spies and we're not going to sit by and have them use our own laws to fuck us in the ass?
I think a strong argument can be made that by not using our own laws, legal traditions, and the like, we are doing much more self-damage than could ever have been accomplished by those external malevolent forces. I have seen no evidence that this type of behavior has increased our security in any way at all.
We seem to be fucking ourselves quite fine without any help from others.
Unless someone actually knows the lat/long for TS, I don't know how we can say which is "correct". The search puts the dot for TS at the correct point on the map, and at the wrong point on the image, but that would be the case if they do the placement of the dot via the map data rather than the lat/long data - regarless of which (map or image) is more accurately placed on their virtual globe representation.
And it's well established that university professor's lectures, notes, lesson plans, exams, etc. are all owned by their employer. While such institutions generally allow pretty liberal sharing/reuse, they most certainly would not allow a professor to re-sell their course materials or to offer the same courses outside of the regular university channels.
I do not think that this is "well established". The large number of text books authored by professors without any cut being given to the institution would tend to refute this type of blanket statement. I know of at least four institutions personally, where such was not the case. Where is your "well established" statement coming from?
You're gonna have to 'charge' more than $60 an hour so that your accumulated hours x3 adds up to a mac. And by a lot.
I'm not so sure. If you actually do good time accounting and include reasonable travel-time, 20-30 hours is not that much time to spend properly addressing a multitude of small issues - it can be easily made up in only three or four visits.
Five hours at $60 is already $300, and $900 is getting pretty close to the MacBook and iMac lower stat prices, and is well above the $600 and $800 MacMini prices.
The only problem I have is that she loves to print out recipes and she goes through toner cartridges like popcorn.
Laser printer toner cartridges? That's a lot of recipes! If you meant ink-jet cartridges, I suggest getting her a laser printer, preferably networked and double-sided.
You may think that is crazy, but a system can only be tested for its fairness by taking it to its extreme. Government programs and taxes always fail such tests, and in the end, they fail in real life as well, because they push it too far, in pursuit or personal power. It's a nasty business, and it does nothing but invite corruption.
Pardon me? All government programs, and taxes, everywhere fail in fairness tests? ALL of them? And then they ALL fail in real life too? Are you saying that every government in the world is failing in every measure? What colour is the sky in your world?
I agree there are difficulties in any enterprise, all the more so as you scale up the number of participants, but you know, we have been doing not-so-bad in this self-governing thing in the past hundred years or so here in the "western world". I certainly would chose to live under these societal conditions compared to pretty much any others that have actually survived more than a generation or two in the past. Even the "worst" of the "western world" societies doesn't seem to have significant numbers of people trying to emigrate.
Anyhow, as a counter-example, in the 1970's the USA put an effective tax on air pollution through the use of various cap-and-trade systems. It effectively put a price on what previously had been free - spewing pollution into the air. That seems to have worked well - and the money raised was not put into pollution cleanup to my knowledge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Rain_Program#Success
If it is being used to clean up the pollution, then fine, but it it is flowing into the general fund while the "problem" goes unresolved, then it really is nothing but a tax.
Sure, the government might waste the money, but the pricing signal remains. The whole point of this is that it adds to the cost of doing something that is felt to be bad, and thus provides economic pressure to have different behaviour. The cold-hearted-money-loving accountant doesn't care whether the increased cost goes towards cleanup or towards the governor's yearly orgy - in either case it costs an extra $0.009 per KWH (or whatever) to buy from "Bob's House of Dirty Electricity" as compared to "Bob's New House Of Clean Goodness", and so decisions can be made accordingly.
I do agree which what might be your overall point - if our accounting and knowledge was perfect, we could just somehow mandate that each economic activity (such as power generation) was required to pay the full cost of that activity (including polution, CO2 emmission, bird chopping, eyesore value, etc) and the money so generated would be used to mitigate those negatives. In such a system, it wouldn't matter if we used coal or wind or corpses stolen from graves for power generation since the cost for fixing all the downsides of the method of chosen would be embedded in the final price and at the "end of the day" all of those downsides would be fixed by application of the charged money to systems that would actually fix them.
I doubt we will the the "ideal" system any time soon. Systems I have seen proposed for carbon taxing that do not attempt to use the tax money to mitigate the problem generally just plow the taxes raised into general revenue, but then reduce other taxes so as to be revenue neutral. This seems like a reasonably good idea - reduce the overall tax rate and shift it to the shoulders of those doing things that are disproved of. If everyone cleans up their act and the funds generated via the "sin tax" fall, then of course one needs to either find more "sins", or charge more for the current ones, or shift the taxes back to the "regular" system. Or manage with lower taxes, but that seems about as likely as the "perfect" system as detailed above.
Where are you getting your numbers from? These folk seem to think Spain has a much lower total public debt than you do (my last reference was for the external (foreign) debt rather than total public debt).
We should also work on getting pricing signals into the market place in regards to external costs such as pollution and CO2 emissions. Most economists seemt to think that pollution and carbon taxes are the most efficient ways of doing that, but of course politically, anything called a "tax" is a hard sell.
Your per-capita debt seems pretty darn low - are you sure it is correct? These folk peg Spain at $26,799.72 per capita in 2007, number 21, well below the US ($40,678.76 per capita) France, Germany, Sweden and near the top, the UK at $171,942.20 per capita.
Or do you mean that of the $27,000 almost $700 is because of electrical subsidization? If so, with such a moderate overall debt, perhaps that is not such a bad economic policy?
Blame Canadian content laws. Amazon is classified as a bookstore in Canada, and therefore must sell X percent Canadian content - a protectionist policy that supposedly protects us from evil Americans taking over our media.
I think that it is Canadian ownership laws rather than content laws. I do not think that there are any laws stating that bookstores must sell a certain percentage of Canadian content. Knowing a number of workers and upper managers of Canadian bookstores, I have never heard any of them make any statements about Canadian content laws in relation to their businesses, and I can find no such references online to Can-con laws for bookstores.
All in all, the metric system is optimized for scientific work where conversions between units happen more often, and knowing that 100 million micrograms is.1 kilograms is useful. But it doesn't work so well for common, human scale use.
You know, I think you are right. I've been traveling around a bit and every place on the planet, I hear people say things like "Gosh I hate those weather reports! I can't tell if it is cold enough to wear a sweater!" and "It is so hard to estimate my height because the meter is so big and the centimeter is so small!" and "I hate grocery shopping because a kilo of apples is too much!"
The most common thing I hear people say, day-in and day-out is "I wish we had done what the USA did and used pounds, feet, inches, miles and degrees F!". I have never heard anyone say "Those Americans are idiots, aren't they?"
Sarcasm aside, using two systems is a royal pain in the ass. Even if there were some benefits to wide use of the non-SI units, the US has lost this battle. The rest of the world is not going to switch away from SI - the six billion plus people using SI are eventually going to make it economically impossible for the US to continue to try to maintain a separate bunch of weights and measures.
I think we lost this one. We would be best off going cold turkey and switching overnight sooner rather than later, but I suspect we will continue to drag along for another fifty years or so until someone finally drags us kicking and screaming into the nineteenth century.
You have some valid viewpoints, but just because YOU do not think the other side of each of those issues I raised is very good doesn't mean that others (such those in jurisdictions that have these types of regulations) don't.
Various European regions have a long history of legislative intervention in economic areas designed to allow not-perfectly-efficient systems to be maintained for secondary purposes. A lot of the citizens like it that way. A large enough (and/or powerful enough) group of people do not want small bookstores to have to compete on "rock bottom prices", and thus more, smaller stores are able to survive. Presumably they think the price paid is worth the benefit received. Germany HAS more small bookstores than the USA (per capita) so is seems that in this case their major goal has been achieved.
I guess you are just lucky not to live in one of these places.
None of those states allow fullblood first cousin marriages that would produce off-spring.
I know first cousins who have married and have had kids. I know they did some genetic counseling and/or testing beforehand, but I do not know that if that was a requirement of the state that they were married in.
In any case, if you do not like the citation I gave you, a google search: http://www.google.fr/search?q=restriction+on+marriage+cousins turns up a bunch of others, none of which support your position that no state allows first cousins to marry - most of them seem to say that 19 states allow first cousin marriages without restriction:
Massachusetts Supreme Court Orders All Citizens To Gay Marry
February 25, 2004 | Issue 4008
BOSTON--Justices of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled 5-2 Monday in favor of full, equal, and mandatory gay marriages for all citizens. The order nullifies all pre-existing heterosexual marriages and lays the groundwork for the 2.4 million compulsory same-sex marriages that will take place in the state by May 15....
Slashdot Mirror
Evolution doesn't usually work quite that well - it tends to be more "shortsighted". While it might be "better" if the birds picked off a certain type of turtle (say the fastest ones, leaving the slowest ones to breed), any bird that did that would be out-competed by the birds that were picking off the "easiest" turtles. Picking off the "easiest" turtles means the ones that survive are the hardest to catch/eat, and only the fastest birds end up eating them. Thus we get evolutionary "arms races" that make for more well protected turtles, and more dangerous (for the turtles at least) birds.
There are lots of examples of "foreign" animals being introduced to a new environment which completely take over certain niches - kudzo in the South USA and rats in Hawaii for example. Animals do not naturally limit themselves - they expand until they cannot expand further, and if that kills off their own food sources, they then die off themselves, or they go through boom and bust cycles (I think there are examples of islands with fox/rabbit populations that cycle up and down out of sync - if the island is too small eventually one of the down cycles ends up not having enough individuals to rebound and the cycles end).
"...spaghetti code..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster
As science-minded people, of course we see that there are not multiple "types" of electricity (or perhaps more accurately "electrical power"), but I wonder if legally there can be.
If there was some sort of MN certification authority for "organic" food, and non-organic food was taxed differently that organic food, would MN be allowed to tax non-certified food from out of state at the non-organic rate? They seem to be allowed to prohibit certain food from out of state under various health reasons according to someone else who linked to court cases about the MN food inspection. What about safety standards? California seems to be able to set vehicle emission standards for in-state sale - Dimedici's argument seems to be based on the idea that the regulation specifies some sort of specific product, a CA emmissions automobile is physically different than a non-CA emmissions automobile. This seems like a pretty reasonable position, but then again, legal truths are often not particularly "reasonable" in my observation. Hasn't the US Supreme Court ruled that Tomatoes are vegetables, while biologically they would be classified as fruits - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden
For some standards (EnergyStar and Underwriters Lab http://www.ul.com/ for example) two identical products could exist where the only difference is their certification by those bodies - could MN tax ES or UL certified products differently? If the answer to that is "yes", then having a tax on non-certified energy production would not seem to be different.
What does it mean when none of your supposed results is factual (standard of living, medical care, richness), and your supposed reason (only country to use free markets) is also incorrect? Perhaps the rest of your comments are similarly inaccurate?
The highest standard of living currently seems to be Norway, with the US at 6:
http://able2know.org/topic/55762-1
The best medical care seems to be in France or Italy (at least in 2000), with the US at 37th:
http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html
The richest country in the world via GNP/capita seems to be Liechtenstein, with the US at #8, according to the CIA, slightly different rankings via other sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
The freest economy of the world seems to be Hong Kong, with the US at #6. Surely all of the top six have "free markets" to at least a similar level as the US:
http://www.heritage.org/index/
Without the P2P nature, protocols like bittorrent have little to offer over http for "legitimate" distributors of content. Grabbing the latest TeX distribution via http from the official mirrors is slow and puts a strain on the servers, getting it via bittorrent is faster and uses other user's bandwidth, releasing pressure from the servers. Without the "uploading" part, bittorrent has no extra value.
There might be a "game theory" type of reason for the $1000 littering fine and the $300 red-light fine having to do with the odds of getting caught for any one particular infraction. For a "fair" game, the payout over many playings should be equal to the cost. Thus a one dollar ticket with odds of winning of 1:100 should have a winning prize of $100.
With the littering fine, the infraction price is very high for what seems a fairly benign transgression, but the chance of being caught is pretty low, so to make sure people do not litter, you need to set the fine pretty high. The fact that you remember the $1000 fine does demonstrate that it made an impression. People need less to be convinced that running red lights is a bad thing to do, and perhaps the rate of being caught is comparatively higher, so a lower fine is reasonable.
From a municipal money-making point of view, if traffic violations are being used as income, there is the balance between maximizing revenue and minimizing the costs associated with collection. The fact that more people will with fight against and complain about higher ticket fines may be keeping their prices lower than optimal from a "discouraging behaviour" point of view.
I think it has to do with when craigslist created local sites - kijiji did essentially the whole world it lots of little pieces in one big creation event while craigslist adds new markets at a much slower pace. I much prefer CL but when advertising something, I will usually post on both - kijiji seems to get more eyeballs in my region.
Whoops - should have linked to the paper at arxiv.org:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0812.2299
How hard is it for you to understand that spies are fucking spies and we're not going to sit by and have them use our own laws to fuck us in the ass?
I think a strong argument can be made that by not using our own laws, legal traditions, and the like, we are doing much more self-damage than could ever have been accomplished by those external malevolent forces. I have seen no evidence that this type of behavior has increased our security in any way at all.
We seem to be fucking ourselves quite fine without any help from others.
Unless someone actually knows the lat/long for TS, I don't know how we can say which is "correct". The search puts the dot for TS at the correct point on the map, and at the wrong point on the image, but that would be the case if they do the placement of the dot via the map data rather than the lat/long data - regarless of which (map or image) is more accurately placed on their virtual globe representation.
Interestingly, for Tianamen Square, the google maps location seems to be about a block east of the satellite photo:
http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=tiananmen+square,+china&sll=-25.335448,135.745076&sspn=39.349464,79.013672&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Tiananmen+Square,+Dongcheng,+Beijing,+China&ll=39.903745,116.393924&spn=0.016559,0.036564&t=h&z=15
compared to
http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=tiananmen+square,+china&sll=-25.335448,135.745076&sspn=39.349464,79.013672&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Tiananmen+Square,+Dongcheng,+Beijing,+China&ll=39.903745,116.393924&spn=0.016559,0.036564&z=15
I wonder if their maps are shifted or their images are shifted? Anyone in Beijing have a GPS handy to get a reading for the square?
And it's well established that university professor's lectures, notes, lesson plans, exams, etc. are all owned by their employer. While such institutions generally allow pretty liberal sharing/reuse, they most certainly would not allow a professor to re-sell their course materials or to offer the same courses outside of the regular university channels.
I do not think that this is "well established". The large number of text books authored by professors without any cut being given to the institution would tend to refute this type of blanket statement. I know of at least four institutions personally, where such was not the case. Where is your "well established" statement coming from?
You're gonna have to 'charge' more than $60 an hour so that your accumulated hours x3 adds up to a mac. And by a lot.
I'm not so sure. If you actually do good time accounting and include reasonable travel-time, 20-30 hours is not that much time to spend properly addressing a multitude of small issues - it can be easily made up in only three or four visits.
Five hours at $60 is already $300, and $900 is getting pretty close to the MacBook and iMac lower stat prices, and is well above the $600 and $800 MacMini prices.
The only problem I have is that she loves to print out recipes and she goes through toner cartridges like popcorn.
Laser printer toner cartridges? That's a lot of recipes! If you meant ink-jet cartridges, I suggest getting her a laser printer, preferably networked and double-sided.
You may think that is crazy, but a system can only be tested for its fairness by taking it to its extreme. Government programs and taxes always fail such tests, and in the end, they fail in real life as well, because they push it too far, in pursuit or personal power. It's a nasty business, and it does nothing but invite corruption.
Pardon me? All government programs, and taxes, everywhere fail in fairness tests? ALL of them? And then they ALL fail in real life too? Are you saying that every government in the world is failing in every measure? What colour is the sky in your world?
I agree there are difficulties in any enterprise, all the more so as you scale up the number of participants, but you know, we have been doing not-so-bad in this self-governing thing in the past hundred years or so here in the "western world". I certainly would chose to live under these societal conditions compared to pretty much any others that have actually survived more than a generation or two in the past. Even the "worst" of the "western world" societies doesn't seem to have significant numbers of people trying to emigrate.
Anyhow, as a counter-example, in the 1970's the USA put an effective tax on air pollution through the use of various cap-and-trade systems. It effectively put a price on what previously had been free - spewing pollution into the air. That seems to have worked well - and the money raised was not put into pollution cleanup to my knowledge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Rain_Program#Success
As an asside, this was an interesting discussion of the differences between emission trading schemes and emission taxes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading#Prices_versus_quantities.2C_and_the_safety_valve
If it is being used to clean up the pollution, then fine, but it it is flowing into the general fund while the "problem" goes unresolved, then it really is nothing but a tax.
Sure, the government might waste the money, but the pricing signal remains. The whole point of this is that it adds to the cost of doing something that is felt to be bad, and thus provides economic pressure to have different behaviour. The cold-hearted-money-loving accountant doesn't care whether the increased cost goes towards cleanup or towards the governor's yearly orgy - in either case it costs an extra $0.009 per KWH (or whatever) to buy from "Bob's House of Dirty Electricity" as compared to "Bob's New House Of Clean Goodness", and so decisions can be made accordingly.
I do agree which what might be your overall point - if our accounting and knowledge was perfect, we could just somehow mandate that each economic activity (such as power generation) was required to pay the full cost of that activity (including polution, CO2 emmission, bird chopping, eyesore value, etc) and the money so generated would be used to mitigate those negatives. In such a system, it wouldn't matter if we used coal or wind or corpses stolen from graves for power generation since the cost for fixing all the downsides of the method of chosen would be embedded in the final price and at the "end of the day" all of those downsides would be fixed by application of the charged money to systems that would actually fix them.
I doubt we will the the "ideal" system any time soon. Systems I have seen proposed for carbon taxing that do not attempt to use the tax money to mitigate the problem generally just plow the taxes raised into general revenue, but then reduce other taxes so as to be revenue neutral. This seems like a reasonably good idea - reduce the overall tax rate and shift it to the shoulders of those doing things that are disproved of. If everyone cleans up their act and the funds generated via the "sin tax" fall, then of course one needs to either find more "sins", or charge more for the current ones, or shift the taxes back to the "regular" system. Or manage with lower taxes, but that seems about as likely as the "perfect" system as detailed above.
Where are you getting your numbers from? These folk seem to think Spain has a much lower total public debt than you do (my last reference was for the external (foreign) debt rather than total public debt).
http://www.nationmaster.com/time.php?stat=eco_pub_deb-economy-public-debt&country=sp-spain
It also seems to be falling quite a bit. Maybe it has gotten much worse since 2007 but I cannot find any figures.
Not that I think debt is a good thing in general, but using debt for other economic goals is not inherently an awful idea.
We should also work on getting pricing signals into the market place in regards to external costs such as pollution and CO2 emissions. Most economists seemt to think that pollution and carbon taxes are the most efficient ways of doing that, but of course politically, anything called a "tax" is a hard sell.
Whoops - forgot the dept link: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_deb_ext_percap-economy-debt-external-per-capita
Your per-capita debt seems pretty darn low - are you sure it is correct? These folk peg Spain at $26,799.72 per capita in 2007, number 21, well below the US ($40,678.76 per capita) France, Germany, Sweden and near the top, the UK at $171,942.20 per capita.
Or do you mean that of the $27,000 almost $700 is because of electrical subsidization? If so, with such a moderate overall debt, perhaps that is not such a bad economic policy?
Blame Canadian content laws. Amazon is classified as a bookstore in Canada, and therefore must sell X percent Canadian content - a protectionist policy that supposedly protects us from evil Americans taking over our media.
I think that it is Canadian ownership laws rather than content laws. I do not think that there are any laws stating that bookstores must sell a certain percentage of Canadian content. Knowing a number of workers and upper managers of Canadian bookstores, I have never heard any of them make any statements about Canadian content laws in relation to their businesses, and I can find no such references online to Can-con laws for bookstores.
All in all, the metric system is optimized for scientific work where conversions between units happen more often, and knowing that 100 million micrograms is .1 kilograms is useful. But it doesn't work so well for common, human scale use.
You know, I think you are right. I've been traveling around a bit and every place on the planet, I hear people say things like "Gosh I hate those weather reports! I can't tell if it is cold enough to wear a sweater!" and "It is so hard to estimate my height because the meter is so big and the centimeter is so small!" and "I hate grocery shopping because a kilo of apples is too much!"
The most common thing I hear people say, day-in and day-out is "I wish we had done what the USA did and used pounds, feet, inches, miles and degrees F!". I have never heard anyone say "Those Americans are idiots, aren't they?"
Sarcasm aside, using two systems is a royal pain in the ass. Even if there were some benefits to wide use of the non-SI units, the US has lost this battle. The rest of the world is not going to switch away from SI - the six billion plus people using SI are eventually going to make it economically impossible for the US to continue to try to maintain a separate bunch of weights and measures.
I think we lost this one. We would be best off going cold turkey and switching overnight sooner rather than later, but I suspect we will continue to drag along for another fifty years or so until someone finally drags us kicking and screaming into the nineteenth century.
You have some valid viewpoints, but just because YOU do not think the other side of each of those issues I raised is very good doesn't mean that others (such those in jurisdictions that have these types of regulations) don't.
Various European regions have a long history of legislative intervention in economic areas designed to allow not-perfectly-efficient systems to be maintained for secondary purposes. A lot of the citizens like it that way. A large enough (and/or powerful enough) group of people do not want small bookstores to have to compete on "rock bottom prices", and thus more, smaller stores are able to survive. Presumably they think the price paid is worth the benefit received. Germany HAS more small bookstores than the USA (per capita) so is seems that in this case their major goal has been achieved.
I guess you are just lucky not to live in one of these places.
None of those states allow fullblood first cousin marriages that would produce off-spring.
I know first cousins who have married and have had kids. I know they did some genetic counseling and/or testing beforehand, but I do not know that if that was a requirement of the state that they were married in.
In any case, if you do not like the citation I gave you, a google search: http://www.google.fr/search?q=restriction+on+marriage+cousins turns up a bunch of others, none of which support your position that no state allows first cousins to marry - most of them seem to say that 19 states allow first cousin marriages without restriction:
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/LAW/04/columns/fl.grossman.incest.04.09/
http://marriage.about.com/cs/marriagelicenses/a/cousin.htm
so long as you don't make me marry a person of the same gender against my will...
This is pretty good: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30475
Massachusetts Supreme Court Orders All Citizens To Gay Marry
February 25, 2004 | Issue 4008
BOSTON--Justices of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled 5-2 Monday in favor of full, equal, and mandatory gay marriages for all citizens. The order nullifies all pre-existing heterosexual marriages and lays the groundwork for the 2.4 million compulsory same-sex marriages that will take place in the state by May 15. ...