Reports indicate that the rise of biofuels has only contributed about 10%-30% of the rising price in food. Part of this is because the US is subsidising corn (which is good for food, but not good for biofuel) and imposing tariffs on the import of Brazilian sugarcane (which is good for biofuel).
The rise in food costs is driven largely by the rise in the cost of oil, which in turn is partly driven by the investors believing that governments will reduce subsidies for biofuel due to the food shortage - paradoxically, biofuel subsidies are serving to keep food prices low by reducing the price of oil, as well as keeping them up by using up food. The key is not to refuse to make any biofuels or to go overboard on the production of them, but to use farmland efficiently - i.e. use sugarcane rather than corn, for a start.
The situation is very complicated, and you don't actually know as much about it as your simplistic imperative implies.
I do. My entire livelihood depends on copyrighted material, and believe me, I don't want to do any job other than the one I'm doing right now.
I think copyright is a valid way of rewarding content producers for their efforts. It may not be the best way but it does provide some much-needed security. I certainly wouldn't repeal it without putting something else in its place.
On the other hand I don't think that noncommercial filesharing should be criminalised. I'm also in favour of libraries and second-hand bookstores. I'm mostly concerned that there should be some hurdles involved in casual piracy. That is to say, buying the product should always be the path of least resistance, the easiest option. When downloading a product for free becomes as easy as searching for the product on google - no need for P2P clients or torrent trackers or cracks - then I think sales will suffer.
For now, though, filesharing is the equivalent of going to the library when you want to read a book - slightly more hassle, you may not find what you want, but at least it's free.
What eliminates a race that focuses all of its agression against others not of their race?
By race, you of course mean species? Your argument seems to be that there might be a species as xenophobic and violent as humans who focus all of their aggression on 'aliens'. However, in the absence of 'real' aliens they will, like is, find local aliens - blacks, jews, muslims, catholics, irish, spaniards or whatever - to fill the role.
exterminating their neighbors with relativistic bombardments, not from malice, but simply because it is the most logical action.
And um, no, that's still malice. Where I come from we call that psychotic xenophobia. It's not that foreigners of various kinds don't present a threat - any stranger presents a potential threat, whether he's from the next town or another star - it's that it's irrational to presume hostility to that extent.
Imagine you're a guy in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, wandering around and scavenging for food. You meet someone only once every few weeks, and when you do, you kill them just in case. This doesn't ensure your survival; in fact it ensures your death when you encounter an organised group or someone who gets the drop on you. As a species this is analogous, space bastards may exist but only because there's a regrettable time lag between idiocy and death.
You've already been rightly mocked for confusing emphatic speech with violent aggression, and for comparing boxing to the Circus Maximus. The rest of your post isn't much better.
People are a product of their culture, but their behaviour is mostly shaped by the real parts of their culture - family, school, church, day to day activities, not by the make-believe parts, the things they see on television or in games. You use the example of America's high crime rate, but you also mention Japan, which has a tremendous amount of violent and sexually explicit media of its own. People aren't substantially inspired to murder by the television, but by the circumstances of their own lives.
Most people do not learn their problem-solving skills from television, so it's not elitist to suggest that you don't either. It's just another way of saying you're not mentally deficient.
That '4000' murders figure is obviously bunk. Someone presumably totalled the number of days a ten year old has been alive and rounded it up to the nearest thousand, because kids watch a lot of TV and there's a cop show with a murder on pretty much every day, right? If the methodology was any more rigorous than that, I'll be surprised.
Your accusation that the previous poster is 'tacitly accepting baby rape' is absurd and manipulative. Real baby rape isn't a free speech issue; it's a physical act that nobody outside a rubber-padded cell approves of. Simulated disgusting imagery is just that, simulated. Refusing to ban the simulation doesn't mean you approve of the reality, otherwise anyone who didn't declare that Schindler's List should be banned would be guilty of tacitly accepting fucking genocide.
There are lots of things that are so disgusting I'd like to ban them, but other than books clearly intended as guides for committing murder (which can be categorised as not only information but as actual tools of the trade) I try to resist my censorious urges. As vile as I might find a given piece of speech, the freedom to say what we want matters more than our right not to be offended.
You're even wrong about games being singled out. Games are immersive, they teach skills (whether those skills are useable in real life depends on the game) and they generally involve direct identification with a character or group in the game world, while movies cast you as a detached observer. The reason games shouldn't be banned isn't that they aren't more potentially influential than movies - they are - but that censorship in general is pointless and wrong.
The shape provides a comfortable rest for your hand. The ball is neither too big nor to small and rests under the fingers. Sorry, thumb-ball apologists, the thumb is just not as dextrous as the fingers. I don't care if it's 'good enough', the fingers are better. The thumb here is used for pressing buttons - the left and right button can be pressed seperately or together with the tiniest movement of the thumb. The buttons have a large surface area and press easily. The wheel is on the left hand side, so it doesn't have to compete for attention with the ball or buttons.
The only reason I'm not still using this device is that it isn't optical, and the two I own have lost precision due to wear on the rollers over the years. I've tried several of the newer trackballs. The current MS trackball has a wheel between the buttons on the side, and the ball is unecessarily big and heavy. Putting the wheel between the buttons makes sense on a mouse where you can have a finger on each button and one on the wheel if necessary, but three controls is a little much for the beleagered thumb.
The logitech I've been using recently ( http://thetechzone.com/db_images/id228_images/pic1 .gif ) is the best I've found so far. The shape is okay, the ball is about right, and the location of the wheel is not ideal but tolerable. Unfortunately the latest version of the driver software doesn't allow the right/left buttons to be mapped to the side of the mouse. I'd use the earlier drivers, but the new drivers also support my keyboard. I also found that the buttons on the side required just enough pressure to click that they'd jog the position of the ball slightly when clicked, which is problematic for certain procedures. The locking ring that held the ball in place on the intellimouse was also a little more comfortable to use than the sharp edge of this one's cradle. Finally, it's wireless, which means changing batteries. I think the arguments for making mice wireless are much stronger than the those for trackballs. A USB dock would have been a nice compromise, but honestly I'd be happy to get a trackball with the buttons in the 'right' place at this point.
But if you don't know him, you don't know if he's like them. He's violent, they're violent, but how can you claim to know the reasons why? A psychiatrist wouldn't make a diagnosis in absentia, and for good reason. What makes you think you can?
You want to tell me the kid who stabbed your brother was a psychopath? Fine. That case you know something about; this one you don't.
Seriously, I can't stress this enough: you're a moron.
You're too stupid to have your own opinions, so you copy them from the boy's stepmother. You're too stupid to come up with your own insults, so you copy them off me.
At that point, he no longer qualifies as "kid" in my book, he qualifies as a dangerous animal no different than a rabid dog.
Yeah, fine, cretin, nobody's going to disagree that he's grown up to be a bully and a murderer, but that isn't what you said. This is what you said:
"He was a fucked up sociopath, completely self-centered, manipulative, and abusive. He was a kid born bad and that was that, and doing any less wouldn't have given him any reason to change that or be nicer to anyone else."
And you don't fucking know that. When will that get through your thick head? You don't know shit about this boy, his home life, or the veracity of his stepmother's claims. That he turned out bad, everyone agrees; whether something more could have been done about it, we don't fucking know, and you certainly don't fucking know.
I'm not the only person who asked you how you think you know the boy so well. Onerous Coward said, "Explain to me precisely how you know this. Explain to me how you know that there is nothing anyone anywhere could have done differently to change the personality that eventually developed in this kid." You've dodged the question both times, of course, because stupid as you are, you're not so stupid as to think you can actually answer it and not look like an ass.
The best outcome is achieved...
by recognizing when someone is a waste of oxygen, and revoking their breathing privileges.
I think this kid fits that.
Remember what I said about much of the evil and stupidity in the world coming from people who think like you? Thanks for advocating killing kids and proving my point for me.
Seriously, I can't stress this enough, you're an idiot. Just stop trying to convince anyone of your opinions in this matter, because your opinions are ignorant and stupid. You don't know anything about this shit.
The law should limit the loser to paying only as much as his or her own attorney fees to the winner. That way it only depends on how seriously each side takes its case
The law should make it illegal to pay your lawyers directly; instead, both sides in a trial should pay into a central 'trial fund' out of which each side can spend half the total on lawyers. In this way both sides can throw as many lawyers of the same calibre at one another as the richer party cares to, but neither ever has a clear unfair advantage.
Free will of some sort exists. We clearly have the ability to make choices. On the other hand, it's quite true that we seek happiness, and don't make choices that don't give us some sort of satisfaction. We need incentives, reasons. Doing something for no reason isn't free will, it's insanity.
Quite possibly there was something wrong with the boy's brain. I don't discount that at all. But I do think it's a cop-out, an easy way to dismiss people as being 'unfixable', when perhaps what we should be questioning is the need to 'fix' them.
Reading the letter, there's something quite noble about this young man's passive resistance to all attempts to control his behaviour through punishment. I'm quite serious, although it doesn't make his violent behaviour any less loathesome. Let's look at the letter again:
"We tried absolutely everything we could think of to get him to behave like a normal human being... we tried groundings, negative reinforcement / punishment, positive reinforcement, counseling, and anything and everything the counselors suggested. We tried to get him interested and involved in extracurricular activities, like hockey, drama, music, art, anything, but he got himself kicked out of every group he was in with his "make me" attitude. When we would ground him, we took away everything. No TV, no computer, no phone, no leaving the house, no snacks or junk food.... Everything. [...] He would just sit there and take it... the groundings had absolutely no affect on him at all. [...] Most kids get grounded or punished a couple of times, and then they want to avoid having to go through it again... not this kid, nothing seemed to phase him."
The first thing I notice here is that she's not thinking in terms of 'stop him beating up other kids'. She's thinking in terms of making him into 'a normal human being'. She's already admitted that she hates him; for her, the person was the problem, not the violent behaviour.
I also note that they weren't simply trying to get him to stop doing wrong. Think about how you'd feel if you were being punished for beating up a disabled kid. Quite reasonable, yes?
Now imagine you're being punished for not wanting to play hockey.
The problem is it's a complete package. He either fights his guardians or works with them. Just as they reject him by trying to turn him into something else, rejecting both the violent behaviour (evil) and the lack of interest in clubs and activities (who cares?), he had to either accept their training or revolt against it. Sure, if he had a strong moral sense of his own (which he obviously didn't - that's what they were supposed to be instilling in him) he could have chosen to stop abusing other people and still resisted their attempts to mold him into the mirror image of his brother. But he would not have been rewarded for it - instead of being punished for beating up disabled kids, he would have been punished for talking back and for 'attitude'. He would have seen no reason to learn to be a moral person - it would not have improved his situation at the time. We know better, but most of us have the advantage of normal, healthy upbringings and a well-developed moral sense.
All of this is conjecture based on the statement of one person who claims to have been there. Yet from her own statement I feel inclined to suspect that the way this boy was treated was abusive, and his rebellion against the abuse also became a rebellion against the rules of simple human decency, because the two were presented to him as being one and the same. Rejecting them both made him into a bully and a murderer.
His mother couldn't do jack shit.
He figured out a way around everything.
The kid didn't care about "right." He did what he felt like doing, and that was that. He was a fucked up sociopath, completely self-centered, manipulative, and abusive.
Were you there? Did you see this? Do you know what she did, and what else she could have done? Did you open the kid's head up and look inside and find the label reading 'psychopath'?
No, you didn't. All you know for sure is that the stepmother claimed there was nothing she could do, and he was a psychopath. Some of that she doesn't know any better than you do - neither of you has an encyclopaedic knowledge of childcare and psychology, neither of you can read the young man's mind. The things she does know, she has reason to be less than entirely honest about, having failed as a parent to prevent her stepson going out and killing someone. Which is not to say she wasn't entirely honest - but you can make no determination on her word alone. None at all.
I'm reminded of a quote I read some time ago, and now I wish I could remember who said it, but the gist was that humans are not a rational species. They don't look at facts and evaluate them critically. Rather, they wait for someone to tell them something, accept it without question, and adopt it as their own position, violently defending it against anyone who later suggests anything to the contrary.
Which is exactly what you've done. You've no reason to accept the conclusions of this woman on PA as fact, or reject the slashdot poster's suggestion that putting less pressure on the child might have resulted in less resistance. You are the moron, and you didn't even need to be high to get that way. You're a moron because you didn't think or question what you were told. You're a moron because you got aggressive and insulting with someone who made a perfectly reasonable suggestion. And I'm calling you a moron because the inability to question critically is a greater source of dangerous stupidity in the world than any mere difference of opinion.
And if you disagree, answer me this: How do you know all the things you claimed above? How do you fucking know?
If pirates want to steal from the music industry, then the music industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable record store will allow you to buy another CD. If the pirates can't buy the CDS to begin with, then they won't be able to copy them over The Internet, will they?
"The Listener's License was created by the conglomerates.
They all got together
If you wanted to see a movie, hey if you had your listener's License you could get in for 2dollars. (chuckle) 2 bucks.
Oh you don't have a Listener's License, well you can't get in.
Se they couldn't control the piracy so they stopped it at its source
If ever you were found to be a pirate or if your computer was ever found to have MP3's that weren't appropriate on it you were eliminated, your listener's License was revoked and you were out of the loop.
Its all private enterprise, you don't have a right to music, you never had a right to it. Its all private."
'Turkeys voting for Christmas' is a figure of speech, commonly used (by people who don't spend all day sequestered in their parents' basement, not that I'm implying anything) to point out the flaw in a prediction which involves people making decisions against their own interest.
Your complaint about my comment makes no sense; who is talking about inverted heirachies? The point is that the majority of the existing leaders of business are generally themselves of the business caste, because, duh, that's what they do. To stretch the caste analogy and take an example from Babylon 5, the Minbari religious caste had fleets and warriors, but they were no match militarily for those of the warrior caste who made fighting their calling.
Can't argue against that, even though it isn't the Federal government's job to feed the children (it's the parents, then city's, then county's, then state's job, if any). So the federal politicians set a precedent that they must feed the children. This gets extended to they must feed the old, too. Then everybody. Then[slap!]
Then the free but basic food provided by the state competes with the supermarkets, driving down the cost of essential foodstuffs for everyone and driving up standards in the luxury food market. Everyone's standard of living improves.
And if you think the government would really have to pay more for a meal than you do, I have one word for you: mul-ti-pack.
This wouldn't work for everything, ('free ferraris for everyone!') and certainly government projects are _capable_ of enormous waste, but it's absurd, knee-jerk antisocialist dogma to oppose feeding the hungry given the scale of modern economies.
The fact that such policies don't generally exist is evidence that governments make their decisions on such knee jerk reactions - that a policy is 'too socialist' or 'too capitalist' - rather than on simple pragmatism, that it _works_.
I suspect the UN would do no worse nor better a job of managing DNS than ICANN. It's not like it's a hard job. Making decisions on the matter based on 'OMG statists!' is inane, however.
Slashdot Mirror
Reports indicate that the rise of biofuels has only contributed about 10%-30% of the rising price in food. Part of this is because the US is subsidising corn (which is good for food, but not good for biofuel) and imposing tariffs on the import of Brazilian sugarcane (which is good for biofuel). The rise in food costs is driven largely by the rise in the cost of oil, which in turn is partly driven by the investors believing that governments will reduce subsidies for biofuel due to the food shortage - paradoxically, biofuel subsidies are serving to keep food prices low by reducing the price of oil, as well as keeping them up by using up food. The key is not to refuse to make any biofuels or to go overboard on the production of them, but to use farmland efficiently - i.e. use sugarcane rather than corn, for a start. The situation is very complicated, and you don't actually know as much about it as your simplistic imperative implies.
I think copyright is a valid way of rewarding content producers for their efforts. It may not be the best way but it does provide some much-needed security. I certainly wouldn't repeal it without putting something else in its place.
On the other hand I don't think that noncommercial filesharing should be criminalised. I'm also in favour of libraries and second-hand bookstores. I'm mostly concerned that there should be some hurdles involved in casual piracy. That is to say, buying the product should always be the path of least resistance, the easiest option. When downloading a product for free becomes as easy as searching for the product on google - no need for P2P clients or torrent trackers or cracks - then I think sales will suffer.
For now, though, filesharing is the equivalent of going to the library when you want to read a book - slightly more hassle, you may not find what you want, but at least it's free.
What eliminates a race that focuses all of its agression against others not of their race?
By race, you of course mean species? Your argument seems to be that there might be a species as xenophobic and violent as humans who focus all of their aggression on 'aliens'. However, in the absence of 'real' aliens they will, like is, find local aliens - blacks, jews, muslims, catholics, irish, spaniards or whatever - to fill the role.
exterminating their neighbors with relativistic bombardments, not from malice, but simply because it is the most logical action.
And um, no, that's still malice. Where I come from we call that psychotic xenophobia. It's not that foreigners of various kinds don't present a threat - any stranger presents a potential threat, whether he's from the next town or another star - it's that it's irrational to presume hostility to that extent.
Imagine you're a guy in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, wandering around and scavenging for food. You meet someone only once every few weeks, and when you do, you kill them just in case. This doesn't ensure your survival; in fact it ensures your death when you encounter an organised group or someone who gets the drop on you. As a species this is analogous, space bastards may exist but only because there's a regrettable time lag between idiocy and death.
People are a product of their culture, but their behaviour is mostly shaped by the real parts of their culture - family, school, church, day to day activities, not by the make-believe parts, the things they see on television or in games. You use the example of America's high crime rate, but you also mention Japan, which has a tremendous amount of violent and sexually explicit media of its own. People aren't substantially inspired to murder by the television, but by the circumstances of their own lives.
Most people do not learn their problem-solving skills from television, so it's not elitist to suggest that you don't either. It's just another way of saying you're not mentally deficient.
That '4000' murders figure is obviously bunk. Someone presumably totalled the number of days a ten year old has been alive and rounded it up to the nearest thousand, because kids watch a lot of TV and there's a cop show with a murder on pretty much every day, right? If the methodology was any more rigorous than that, I'll be surprised.
Your accusation that the previous poster is 'tacitly accepting baby rape' is absurd and manipulative. Real baby rape isn't a free speech issue; it's a physical act that nobody outside a rubber-padded cell approves of. Simulated disgusting imagery is just that, simulated. Refusing to ban the simulation doesn't mean you approve of the reality, otherwise anyone who didn't declare that Schindler's List should be banned would be guilty of tacitly accepting fucking genocide.
There are lots of things that are so disgusting I'd like to ban them, but other than books clearly intended as guides for committing murder (which can be categorised as not only information but as actual tools of the trade) I try to resist my censorious urges. As vile as I might find a given piece of speech, the freedom to say what we want matters more than our right not to be offended.
You're even wrong about games being singled out. Games are immersive, they teach skills (whether those skills are useable in real life depends on the game) and they generally involve direct identification with a character or group in the game world, while movies cast you as a detached observer. The reason games shouldn't be banned isn't that they aren't more potentially influential than movies - they are - but that censorship in general is pointless and wrong.
http://www.hi-ho.ne.jp/vine/annex/x03-09209/index. htm
The shape provides a comfortable rest for your hand. The ball is neither too big nor to small and rests under the fingers. Sorry, thumb-ball apologists, the thumb is just not as dextrous as the fingers. I don't care if it's 'good enough', the fingers are better. The thumb here is used for pressing buttons - the left and right button can be pressed seperately or together with the tiniest movement of the thumb. The buttons have a large surface area and press easily. The wheel is on the left hand side, so it doesn't have to compete for attention with the ball or buttons.
The only reason I'm not still using this device is that it isn't optical, and the two I own have lost precision due to wear on the rollers over the years. I've tried several of the newer trackballs. The current MS trackball has a wheel between the buttons on the side, and the ball is unecessarily big and heavy. Putting the wheel between the buttons makes sense on a mouse where you can have a finger on each button and one on the wheel if necessary, but three controls is a little much for the beleagered thumb.
The logitech I've been using recently ( http://thetechzone.com/db_images/id228_images/pic1 .gif ) is the best I've found so far. The shape is okay, the ball is about right, and the location of the wheel is not ideal but tolerable. Unfortunately the latest version of the driver software doesn't allow the right/left buttons to be mapped to the side of the mouse. I'd use the earlier drivers, but the new drivers also support my keyboard. I also found that the buttons on the side required just enough pressure to click that they'd jog the position of the ball slightly when clicked, which is problematic for certain procedures. The locking ring that held the ball in place on the intellimouse was also a little more comfortable to use than the sharp edge of this one's cradle. Finally, it's wireless, which means changing batteries. I think the arguments for making mice wireless are much stronger than the those for trackballs. A USB dock would have been a nice compromise, but honestly I'd be happy to get a trackball with the buttons in the 'right' place at this point.
But if you don't know him, you don't know if he's like them. He's violent, they're violent, but how can you claim to know the reasons why? A psychiatrist wouldn't make a diagnosis in absentia, and for good reason. What makes you think you can?
You want to tell me the kid who stabbed your brother was a psychopath? Fine. That case you know something about; this one you don't.
You're too stupid to have your own opinions, so you copy them from the boy's stepmother. You're too stupid to come up with your own insults, so you copy them off me.
At that point, he no longer qualifies as "kid" in my book, he qualifies as a dangerous animal no different than a rabid dog.
Yeah, fine, cretin, nobody's going to disagree that he's grown up to be a bully and a murderer, but that isn't what you said. This is what you said:
"He was a fucked up sociopath, completely self-centered, manipulative, and abusive. He was a kid born bad and that was that, and doing any less wouldn't have given him any reason to change that or be nicer to anyone else."
And you don't fucking know that. When will that get through your thick head? You don't know shit about this boy, his home life, or the veracity of his stepmother's claims. That he turned out bad, everyone agrees; whether something more could have been done about it, we don't fucking know, and you certainly don't fucking know.
I'm not the only person who asked you how you think you know the boy so well. Onerous Coward said, "Explain to me precisely how you know this. Explain to me how you know that there is nothing anyone anywhere could have done differently to change the personality that eventually developed in this kid." You've dodged the question both times, of course, because stupid as you are, you're not so stupid as to think you can actually answer it and not look like an ass.
Remember what I said about much of the evil and stupidity in the world coming from people who think like you? Thanks for advocating killing kids and proving my point for me.
Seriously, I can't stress this enough, you're an idiot. Just stop trying to convince anyone of your opinions in this matter, because your opinions are ignorant and stupid. You don't know anything about this shit.
The law should make it illegal to pay your lawyers directly; instead, both sides in a trial should pay into a central 'trial fund' out of which each side can spend half the total on lawyers. In this way both sides can throw as many lawyers of the same calibre at one another as the richer party cares to, but neither ever has a clear unfair advantage.
Quite possibly there was something wrong with the boy's brain. I don't discount that at all. But I do think it's a cop-out, an easy way to dismiss people as being 'unfixable', when perhaps what we should be questioning is the need to 'fix' them.
Reading the letter, there's something quite noble about this young man's passive resistance to all attempts to control his behaviour through punishment. I'm quite serious, although it doesn't make his violent behaviour any less loathesome. Let's look at the letter again:
"We tried absolutely everything we could think of to get him to behave like a normal human being... we tried groundings, negative reinforcement / punishment, positive reinforcement, counseling, and anything and everything the counselors suggested. We tried to get him interested and involved in extracurricular activities, like hockey, drama, music, art, anything, but he got himself kicked out of every group he was in with his "make me" attitude. When we would ground him, we took away everything. No TV, no computer, no phone, no leaving the house, no snacks or junk food.... Everything. [...] He would just sit there and take it... the groundings had absolutely no affect on him at all. [...] Most kids get grounded or punished a couple of times, and then they want to avoid having to go through it again... not this kid, nothing seemed to phase him."
The first thing I notice here is that she's not thinking in terms of 'stop him beating up other kids'. She's thinking in terms of making him into 'a normal human being'. She's already admitted that she hates him; for her, the person was the problem, not the violent behaviour.
I also note that they weren't simply trying to get him to stop doing wrong. Think about how you'd feel if you were being punished for beating up a disabled kid. Quite reasonable, yes?
Now imagine you're being punished for not wanting to play hockey.
The problem is it's a complete package. He either fights his guardians or works with them. Just as they reject him by trying to turn him into something else, rejecting both the violent behaviour (evil) and the lack of interest in clubs and activities (who cares?), he had to either accept their training or revolt against it. Sure, if he had a strong moral sense of his own (which he obviously didn't - that's what they were supposed to be instilling in him) he could have chosen to stop abusing other people and still resisted their attempts to mold him into the mirror image of his brother. But he would not have been rewarded for it - instead of being punished for beating up disabled kids, he would have been punished for talking back and for 'attitude'. He would have seen no reason to learn to be a moral person - it would not have improved his situation at the time. We know better, but most of us have the advantage of normal, healthy upbringings and a well-developed moral sense.
All of this is conjecture based on the statement of one person who claims to have been there. Yet from her own statement I feel inclined to suspect that the way this boy was treated was abusive, and his rebellion against the abuse also became a rebellion against the rules of simple human decency, because the two were presented to him as being one and the same. Rejecting them both made him into a bully and a murderer.
Were you there? Did you see this? Do you know what she did, and what else she could have done? Did you open the kid's head up and look inside and find the label reading 'psychopath'?
No, you didn't. All you know for sure is that the stepmother claimed there was nothing she could do, and he was a psychopath. Some of that she doesn't know any better than you do - neither of you has an encyclopaedic knowledge of childcare and psychology, neither of you can read the young man's mind. The things she does know, she has reason to be less than entirely honest about, having failed as a parent to prevent her stepson going out and killing someone. Which is not to say she wasn't entirely honest - but you can make no determination on her word alone. None at all.
I'm reminded of a quote I read some time ago, and now I wish I could remember who said it, but the gist was that humans are not a rational species. They don't look at facts and evaluate them critically. Rather, they wait for someone to tell them something, accept it without question, and adopt it as their own position, violently defending it against anyone who later suggests anything to the contrary.
Which is exactly what you've done. You've no reason to accept the conclusions of this woman on PA as fact, or reject the slashdot poster's suggestion that putting less pressure on the child might have resulted in less resistance. You are the moron, and you didn't even need to be high to get that way. You're a moron because you didn't think or question what you were told. You're a moron because you got aggressive and insulting with someone who made a perfectly reasonable suggestion. And I'm calling you a moron because the inability to question critically is a greater source of dangerous stupidity in the world than any mere difference of opinion.
And if you disagree, answer me this: How do you know all the things you claimed above? How do you fucking know?
"The Listener's License was created by the conglomerates. They all got together If you wanted to see a movie, hey if you had your listener's License you could get in for 2dollars. (chuckle) 2 bucks. Oh you don't have a Listener's License, well you can't get in. Se they couldn't control the piracy so they stopped it at its source If ever you were found to be a pirate or if your computer was ever found to have MP3's that weren't appropriate on it you were eliminated, your listener's License was revoked and you were out of the loop. Its all private enterprise, you don't have a right to music, you never had a right to it. Its all private."
'Turkeys voting for Christmas' is a figure of speech, commonly used (by people who don't spend all day sequestered in their parents' basement, not that I'm implying anything) to point out the flaw in a prediction which involves people making decisions against their own interest. Your complaint about my comment makes no sense; who is talking about inverted heirachies? The point is that the majority of the existing leaders of business are generally themselves of the business caste, because, duh, that's what they do. To stretch the caste analogy and take an example from Babylon 5, the Minbari religious caste had fleets and warriors, but they were no match militarily for those of the warrior caste who made fighting their calling.
Can't argue against that, even though it isn't the Federal government's job to feed the children (it's the parents, then city's, then county's, then state's job, if any). So the federal politicians set a precedent that they must feed the children. This gets extended to they must feed the old, too. Then everybody. Then[slap!]
Then the free but basic food provided by the state competes with the supermarkets, driving down the cost of essential foodstuffs for everyone and driving up standards in the luxury food market. Everyone's standard of living improves.
And if you think the government would really have to pay more for a meal than you do, I have one word for you: mul-ti-pack.
This wouldn't work for everything, ('free ferraris for everyone!') and certainly government projects are _capable_ of enormous waste, but it's absurd, knee-jerk antisocialist dogma to oppose feeding the hungry given the scale of modern economies.
The fact that such policies don't generally exist is evidence that governments make their decisions on such knee jerk reactions - that a policy is 'too socialist' or 'too capitalist' - rather than on simple pragmatism, that it _works_.
I suspect the UN would do no worse nor better a job of managing DNS than ICANN. It's not like it's a hard job. Making decisions on the matter based on 'OMG statists!' is inane, however.