I have to admit, I think that people *believe* that they don't want guns taken away from people. In reality, I think the gun rights people are actually seeing more clearly.
The problem people are upset about is the possibility of mass murders via these weapons. There's really no way to stop such things without the confiscation of as many weapons as possible. That level of confiscation would almost certainly go beyond any sort decrease of ownership that reasonable background checks would cause.
Consider that most of the people who have obtained weapons for mass murders have done so legally, and most would still be able to have done so legally even after enhanced background checks.
And we can see from the latest idea of removing people from gun ownership by being on a list which they were added to with no judicial due process, that no one really seems to care that this would void actually two different constitutional principles, the second amendment AND due process.
As long as mass murders like this are being televised and made a consistent rallying cry for those who oppose the current state of gun ownership, there is only one place this can go.
Seriously, there's nothing about an AR-15 that is more lethal than a semi-auto handgun in the close quarters that many of these shootings have taken place in, like the club in Orlando. The Dallas shootings were admittedly one exception because the shooter was a sniper where rifle range would have been needed for more ranged accuracy, but in that nightclub or in the movie theatre, I'd rather have someone try to point an AR-15 at me than a handgun. The AR takes longer to swing around, and fires a smaller caliber round at a higher velocity. So the bullet would do less damage, and has a much higher chance of exiting cleanly.
Incidentally, this is because military style weapons are actually regulated by convention to be "humane" and to not intentionally cause wound effects that are more than necessary to disable the opposition. They're not "safe" of course, but they are more likely to put a hole straight through you, which is much better than having it lodge inside you or tumble around and wreck internal organs.
Yet, we're focused on "assault-type" weapons as the problem.
I think we need to make a decision. The Second Amendment isn't about home self-defense or target shooting. It is about remaining armed to potentially resist invasions, both of foreigners and our own government. That means that the 2nd Amendment permits a dangerous situation to exist knowingly. In the end, you either support that, or you don't. And perhaps you don't. Fair enough. I'm not totally convinced that we all need to be armed either. But let's not for a second believe that, despite the best of intentions, the focus on mass shootings is going to lead us somewhere other than the end of the right to keep and bear arms.
You are right, they did not have time to cram through legislation.
I'd have to disagree with you that this means anything at all about the quality of what they were failing to push through. It is quite simply just as likely that they were caught in intra-party squabbling and just general political bullshit as any sort of quality control.
You might like the Democratic party's platform more than the other side, but their politicians are just as much of a bunch of hacks as the Republicans are. They're just pushing things you want, so you aren't as critical. They're not idiots, but they're all captive to the current system. Every single one of them.
The only thing that struck me about Rove's meltdown is that it was indicative of the Republican establishment's inability to see reality. Rove should have been smarter than that, but he was truly caught off guard. A victim of the calcification of attitudes in the Republican establishment.
I knew Mitt didn't have a chance from the start. He had almost half the vote, which may have seemed like he had a chance to the unwary, but once he picked up his constituency, that extra 2-3% might as well have been the Grand Canyon, because there was no way he was going to bridge that divide. He just wasn't that kind of candidate. He had what it took to make a decent Republican presidential candidate, but the rank and file Republicans do not represent the majority of Presidential voters any more. They need someone who can bring in new voters.
And nothing proves that more than Trump, who *did* bring in new voters, but in the most horrible possible way.
She's basically going to win because the 47-49% or so who turned out for Mitt aren't all going to turn out for Trump, and there won't be enough new "Trump independents" to make up for it.
Half the Republican party can't stand the guy and the other part is trying to derive short term advantage from him. That is not a recipe for a Trump victory.
The only surprise is if the Bernie independents decide that they hate the status quo more than they hate Republicans. But I don't see that happening. There are some die hards, but I expect most of them will all fall in line. I've already seen it happening with the people I know who supported Sanders. They know that a Trump victory isn't a victory for them.
That said... Hillary winning is just postponing the inevitable. Its less important who wins this year, because I already pretty much know who is winning. It's important what happens to those people who voted for Trump. Politically, they came out of nowhere, but of course, they've been here all along. More status quo antics from Hillary and the rest of the crew inside the Beltway and they may feel increasingly emboldened to not just go back the shadows.
Hillary is the most qualified of the two contenders, but that's me damning with faint praise. The Democratic Party platform is just as much of a shitshow as the Republican one, it's just more big tent about it. Personally, I'm looking for who to make my first third party vote for in November.
No, we don't. Sharing some aspects of a whole doesn't make a whole.
There is no leadership principle, there is no government coordination of industry, and as in the case of Spanish Fascism, there is no labor movement co-opted into the system. And the Nationalism aspect is definitely not focused on any one group.
China is more a candidate for fascism than the US, especially from the corporate coordination aspect. Which makes sense, since this is where "National Socialism" and Socialism/Communism have common ground. They believe the State should take the lead, they just differ in what it looks like (Corporations vs. Communes).
People who get hit and patched up can be expected to
a) Not choose to be hit. b) Take action to try and prevent it from happening again c) Not have a physical or mental dependency on walking in the middle of the road
I do agree that we should invest in mental health care, and drug use could be used to correlate cases of mental illness. However, that is treating someone for a disease they have that manifests as drug use. That is not 100% of cases.
In any event, I don't suggest that we don't treat drug users, but I do suggest that we make a very strong social and educational push to discourage people from taking up that habit.
Health care is pretty much a black hole sucking up money in a government budget. The longer you live, the more it costs. That's bad enough when people aren't choosing to cause problems for themselves to get high.
Actually, I am not suggesting anyone be locked up for it. The discussion is about whether it is something that needs to be covered by government money. This is not a justification for the "War on Drugs". I am opposed to maintaining the so-called War on Drugs, but that doesn't mean I don't think it is a serious problem.
Drug use in the privacy of your own home or other private premises should be 100% legal. Just don't get in a car under the influence and don't expect that your bad decision should be treated like a disease no one had a choice in contracting.
Yeah, but it is 100% possible that the other inconveniences of living in an area like that can also have an effect, even if you can live in a decent place due to long tenure.
Admittedly, I would think that having a stake in the area early would make it easier to stay, but I don't know if I'd want to live in SV or SF even if someone transplanted my single family home to a patch of sufficient land there. I've been both places, the only thing they've got going for them is the tech scene. SF is a nice city, but not so nice that it is worth the hassles that come with living there.
This is a good point. I can play games that came out in the 1990s on my PC with minor software installs. I can play my entire gaming collection on my PC. Which is really nice, because I like certain niche games that no one is likely to remake or re-release. And let's face it, I can hit up the Steam sale for a super cheap game that's not a AAA and is still fun, whereas if if I'm on a console, you just don't have the same selection.
I will say that back in the day, it was true that you needed to change your PC hardware fairly regularly to keep up, but I think that just isn't so much the case any more. I do need a new PC, but my current PC (built myself from parts) is over six years old now. And even now, I could probably still re-use many of the components like the 750W power supply and the case, as well as the HDDs without any trouble. I'll probably go to an all SSD solution with the next rebuild, but everything still works, I just can't seem to play AAA's any more on reasonable settings. That was a heck of a good run.
Man, I just realized that my main drive is actually ten years old. It came out of the box before this one. Geez. Talk about a good run... but I may want to think about some new storage soon.:)
Police safety is a secondary, but not throwaway concern. They are not expendable. They are professionals who do their job based on their training and requirements, but there is no requirement for them to not dispose of a threat that is armed, active, and willing to kill them.
It's all nice to be an armchair police commander, but the reality is that so-called non-lethal methods or sieges are not always what they are cracked up to be. At the end of the day, you need to explain to someone's family why you threw away your police officer's life trying to coax out an active shooter who had no intention of going peacefully even after negotiation.
If the non-lethal did not actually impair him, he might be induced to counter attack.
You are forgetting that this isn't in some safe gun range or something. Even with the area cordoned off and the cops under cover, when that guy starts shooting there is a non-zero chance that someone is going to be hurt or even killed before he goes down.
It is already clear that this guy's response to "fight or flight" was "fight". They don't owe him the chance to even shoot in their general direction again before he suicides by cop.
And what? Wait for him to go full suicidal? Sorry, no. In this case, they spent more than adequate time in working to bring him out alive.
You think a siege is going to make a guy like that just give up? The minute he realizes he has no change of escape, there is an extremely high chance he goes out fighting. There are procedures that are followed, and there was plenty of time for reflection on the shooter's part.
Unless you are suggesting that they were lying about negotiating with him, your characterization of him as non-threatening is simply wrong. If a cop accused me of shooting a bunch of cops and I had not done so, I may work to make sure I didn't get tagged by one on my way out, but I am not going to barricade myself indefinitely. That negotiator is going to be asked to provide me the means to walk out alive by some method, either TV cameras trained on me or something. What I am not going to do is tell them that I want to shoot white cops.
Firefighters and police put themselves in a lot more danger than a non-responder would, that is true.
That doesn't mean they are required to be suicidal. It just means that they need to assess the situation and act in a manner that is the result of training rather than blind self-preservation. Just running towards danger, as opposed to running away from it, is a significant sacrifice for anyone, armed or not.
When you have a sniper who is clearly trained in tactics and urban close quarters combat, you don't walk in there like John Wayne, you take him out with a sniper or failing that, you strap a bomb to a robot and blow him up. There is no reason to give him a chance to shoot more people. And yes, cops are people. If I was the commander at the scene, I'd do what I could to bring this guy in alive, but while my men are professionals, they not expendable. I don't owe him...what?... the "honor" of sending a man in to get his ass shot off just to not seem "calculating"? Fuck that.
There were negotiations and clear intent to kill from the suspect. It's not like they just blew the guy up as soon as they found him. At some point, he's going to realize he is either going to jail or get captured. If he doesn't want to go to jail and/or wants to kill cops before he goes out, he's going to have the chance to do damage because you won't be able to suppress his fire anymore. He knows he's dead, he just wants to kill one more of you before he goes out. And in no circumstances is that a situation that you can neatly control.
If he wanted a jury trial, he had ample opportunity to drop his weapon and walk out when he was, you know, talking to the hostage negotiator. It's not like they told him to come out with his hands up, let five seconds go by, and then blew him up.
I have some sympathy with people who are addicts, and I don't propose throwing them away.
But, come on. Look up heroin in the encyclopedia before you try it or something. Heroin has been well known for centuries to be highly addictive, and extremely debilitating as an addiction. You'd have to be a moron to not know the end result once you read up on it.
No, these are people who wanted to get high and put something in their system without knowing shit about it. There are plenty of facts about what opiates can do to you, they just failed their common sense roll and decided to not bother finding out anything about it. Anyone who takes an opiate except under extreme conditions of pain and/or under direct care of a doctor has made a poor choice that they didn't have to make.
I mean, we tend to trust our parents when they tell us to not drink antifreeze, you'd think that we'd extend them the same trust when it comes to not injecting something else.
Look, I am not against legalization, mostly because I think the "war" is worse than the epidemic. But don't tell me that addicts are equivalent to cancer patients. Hard drug use is a public health hazard and should be eradicated not enabled. I just think that the best way of doing that is by education and making social changes that make it less desirable.
And we do need to consider that our money is being spent on people who choose their disease, of their own free will. I have sympathy for them, because we all make mistakes, but it is a choice they made, and at some level they have to accept some responsibility for it and that it has reduced their standard of living.
Monopolies are not fictional, but what we have seen with them may not be the entire story. That's why I am very much tying the time frame of evolution to what would be needed to allow the free market to work properly. You can't simply look at something like a Gilded Age vertical or horizontally integrated monopoly and suggest that what happened can necessarily remain in existence forever.
When people see a monopoly, they think that it is the end result of capitalism, but how many monopolies have actually existed without the collusion of government in maintaining that scenario? IP laws, tariffs, protectionism, full employment efforts, central planning, union busting, closed union shops and others are situations that tend to prop up mega-corporations rather than break them down. For every anti-trust act you have, you have a multinational corporation that almost relies on a web of intellectual property laws, subsidies, pork barrel projects, and barriers to entry based on labyrinthine government requirements.
We tend to think of some things like the FDA and other regulators as being a good thing, and certainly they have good intentions.
However, there is a cost to that. The process to get new drugs to people is very, very expensive and time consuming. It may well generate higher quality in what does come out of the system, and prevent quacks and charlatans from running totally amok, but there is a reason there is such a thing as so-called "Big Pharma". You need a lot of money and resources to get a drug out these days. It may be a better drug, with fewer deaths due to under-tested product, but the ultimate result is generating a whole segment of a business simply for the purpose of navigating government paperwork. And I am not even talking about stronger requirements on studies and experiments.
I work with the government in many jobs I have taken, and it is one thing to implement a solid security program or a testing regime, and it is yet another thing entirely to fill out the forms and navigate the process of proving that to the regulators or the government. That's a barrier to entry, and that allows pharmaceutical companies who have those resources to thrive while smaller more nimble companies must struggle, and often decide that being a target of acquisition is much more viable than trying to compete as an independent.
But now look at the music industry. In the past they had a lot more control because bootlegging something very physical like an LP or trying to set up a radio station of your own is expensive.
Today, people can make music, post that music, share that music and have it be of more or less professional quality, all without the need for a publisher. The publishers, however, are using IP laws to maintain the grip that they used to be able to exert with a lot less effort. Publishers might have been able to coalesce into a monopoly in the past, but today, they have lost the power to control music pervasively. None of that happened via government regulation, and a lot of it happened in spite of IP laws.
So I think it is at least a reasonable, albeit untested, assertion that it is possible that without an outside intervention propping them up, monopolies will tend to fall apart either due to technological advance or stagnation. After all, we see this happen in history to governments all the time, and they are nothing if not monopolies themselves.
However, to even envision a system where a strong monopoly actually crumbles under its own weight, we really have to end concepts like corporate welfare, government protectionism, and yes, possibly even some of the "beneficial" regulation as well. The only way an actual monopoly should be able to exist indefinitely in that situation is to actually deliver the best value. Things like IP laws and certain other regulation create barriers to entry for people who might work to erode a monopoly naturally.
Look, I'm not trying to sell some perfect scenario like Marx and the "end of history". It is clear th
Best antivirus in a qualitative sense? Probably not.
Best antivirus in the sense that it blocks the source of significant amounts of malware, yes.
It does need to be pointed out that you're going to cut down considerably on malware by closing that channel, but you're still toast if you are opening attachments or you are the target of a specific attack which is less scattershot than an ad network.
We do need something *like* dedicated antivirus. It just has to be light-years better than the bloated crap that goes for AV today.
Yeah, at this point it is probably her or Trump, realistically. Nevertheless, I'm not voting for either one of them.
As I've said before, Hillary is the worst of the status quo, and Trump represents the dangers inherent when you're trying to change the status quo. Neither appeals to me very much.
Although I think Hillary is most likely to win, I take little satisfaction from the mediocre level of sanity that provides. Politicians like Hillary are the reason that a joke like Trump is even a factor in this race, let alone the contender.
You have a point, although it should be pointed out that natural selection, which is ultimately what the so-called "free market" really is, can create some very complex self-regulation which is very adaptive.
The problem, as many would be happy to tell you, is that such selection does often happen at the expense of individuals. So we get regulation to try and prevent those outcomes.
Of course, we know that even regulation doesn't save everyone, and it can have its own problems which are inherent to interventionist regulation.
So the question is probably phrased better as being whether, over the long term, we're better off with government regulation or the market being allowed to sort it out. It may well be possible that the market would have a better long term solution, but there is almost certainly going to be a cost to that. And yes, that cost could come at the expense of its very own proponents.
In and of itself, that doesn't actually discredit anything. There are those who believe that outlawing guns is the best thing to do to prevent most mass murders, and that would seem to be almost a no-brainer. However, that very same person might find themselves in a position where they were hurt or even killed in a situation they would not have if they had ready access to a gun. Most gun-control advocates would probably argue that just because that person in that one situation died for lack of a gun doesn't mean that the lack of guns is a bad idea overall.
There are two types of people who suggest a course of action that they know may come back and bite them in the ass personally: the stupid and the courageous. We assume that it is stupid to let the dog eat dog process of market forces create regulation for us, and perhaps it really is stupid and we can do a better job by intervention.
That said, I don't think those forces have ever really been allowed to operate to their full extent, for a sufficient amount of time, outside of fictional accounts. We have measured some of the costs of unregulated situations, but I'd argue that they have to play out over longer periods of time than we've ever actually allowed, for them to produce any tangible benefits.
I mostly agree, but it should be pointed out that unless those entities are trying on purpose to exclude, misreport, or disqualify the people whose blood is being tested, they are just as interested in getting back legitimate results as those being tested. Yes, there is probably an insulation factor, especially if it is a bureaucracy involved, and that means that the feedback from those sources could be delayed or muted.
It's my opinion that you probably could have the free market fulfill this function, but the path to getting there would be very trial and error, much like natural selection. And that would mean that some individuals could have some pretty horrific outcomes while the selection process worked out a method of effective self-regulation. That's generally the best argument for top down regulation, although we can have some horrific outcomes even with regulation, so it would be interesting to be able to compare both paths to see if the government regulation counterintuitively actually caused greater problems over a longer period of time, despite seeming to be taming the worst excesses of a market solution.
There doesn't have to be a Snowden. No one in Russia really believes that they aren't already somehow being watched at the level that the NSA is/was doing. They would likely shrug and start taking bets on how long Snowdenski would remain alive before someone slipped him some polonium.
Secretary Powell is probably correct. But that's how the government works.
Would anybody be standing up for some little guy if they broke those byzantine CYA rules, though?
It would be something if this caused some change which actually helped the people who have to work with these documents every day, but no one will. They would be seen as "weak on security". So what happens is that inconveniences to powerful people get ignored, and everyone else has to deal with it at risk of their jobs and possibly their freedom. That's part of the problem in DC. Doing things that others can't with complete impunity.
Power isn't supposed to be an argument before the law. The reason they aren't prosecuting the underlings is because they'd have to prosecute her. It is known that people like Huma Abedin, who is her Chief of Staff, tried to get her on to something more secure. The fact is that *she* didn't want to. Prosecuting her underlings for not opposing her may be possible, but would probably immediately expose that any intent to break the law started with her.
The issue you are proposing is not really a contradiction. They might prosecute an underling as a scapegoat, but they can certainly benefit from the same umbrella as their boss does. Especially if prosecuting an underling could be just as bad for the boss's campaign as for the underling.
To be honest, I don't actually think they're actively shielding her, they just don't want to go down the path of prosecuting her or her people if they can avoid it. That's the problem with power, it makes people not only less able to mess with you, it makes them less inclined to as well.
I have to agree. I love when there is a new probe sent out which arrives safely, and I know what a challenge it is to get something into Jupiter orbit without it frying the electronics of whatever is on it, but studying Jupiter's gas atmosphere? Okay, I guess some probe has to do it at some point.
It would be interesting to have some direct evidence of the liquid metallic hydrogen that is supposed to be under the cloud layers, but I agree that Venus would probably be a lot more interesting to us as Earth dwellers.
The Venera probe images have always been pretty interesting to me. Venus is basically Hell on Earth and you can see that in those images. That's got some real interest for me because it is at the same scale we think of with Earth, only gone horribly wrong.
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I have to admit, I think that people *believe* that they don't want guns taken away from people. In reality, I think the gun rights people are actually seeing more clearly.
The problem people are upset about is the possibility of mass murders via these weapons. There's really no way to stop such things without the confiscation of as many weapons as possible. That level of confiscation would almost certainly go beyond any sort decrease of ownership that reasonable background checks would cause.
Consider that most of the people who have obtained weapons for mass murders have done so legally, and most would still be able to have done so legally even after enhanced background checks.
And we can see from the latest idea of removing people from gun ownership by being on a list which they were added to with no judicial due process, that no one really seems to care that this would void actually two different constitutional principles, the second amendment AND due process.
As long as mass murders like this are being televised and made a consistent rallying cry for those who oppose the current state of gun ownership, there is only one place this can go.
Seriously, there's nothing about an AR-15 that is more lethal than a semi-auto handgun in the close quarters that many of these shootings have taken place in, like the club in Orlando. The Dallas shootings were admittedly one exception because the shooter was a sniper where rifle range would have been needed for more ranged accuracy, but in that nightclub or in the movie theatre, I'd rather have someone try to point an AR-15 at me than a handgun. The AR takes longer to swing around, and fires a smaller caliber round at a higher velocity. So the bullet would do less damage, and has a much higher chance of exiting cleanly.
Incidentally, this is because military style weapons are actually regulated by convention to be "humane" and to not intentionally cause wound effects that are more than necessary to disable the opposition. They're not "safe" of course, but they are more likely to put a hole straight through you, which is much better than having it lodge inside you or tumble around and wreck internal organs.
Yet, we're focused on "assault-type" weapons as the problem.
I think we need to make a decision. The Second Amendment isn't about home self-defense or target shooting. It is about remaining armed to potentially resist invasions, both of foreigners and our own government. That means that the 2nd Amendment permits a dangerous situation to exist knowingly. In the end, you either support that, or you don't. And perhaps you don't. Fair enough. I'm not totally convinced that we all need to be armed either. But let's not for a second believe that, despite the best of intentions, the focus on mass shootings is going to lead us somewhere other than the end of the right to keep and bear arms.
You are right, they did not have time to cram through legislation.
I'd have to disagree with you that this means anything at all about the quality of what they were failing to push through. It is quite simply just as likely that they were caught in intra-party squabbling and just general political bullshit as any sort of quality control.
You might like the Democratic party's platform more than the other side, but their politicians are just as much of a bunch of hacks as the Republicans are. They're just pushing things you want, so you aren't as critical. They're not idiots, but they're all captive to the current system. Every single one of them.
The only thing that struck me about Rove's meltdown is that it was indicative of the Republican establishment's inability to see reality. Rove should have been smarter than that, but he was truly caught off guard. A victim of the calcification of attitudes in the Republican establishment.
I knew Mitt didn't have a chance from the start. He had almost half the vote, which may have seemed like he had a chance to the unwary, but once he picked up his constituency, that extra 2-3% might as well have been the Grand Canyon, because there was no way he was going to bridge that divide. He just wasn't that kind of candidate. He had what it took to make a decent Republican presidential candidate, but the rank and file Republicans do not represent the majority of Presidential voters any more. They need someone who can bring in new voters.
And nothing proves that more than Trump, who *did* bring in new voters, but in the most horrible possible way.
She's basically going to win because the 47-49% or so who turned out for Mitt aren't all going to turn out for Trump, and there won't be enough new "Trump independents" to make up for it.
Half the Republican party can't stand the guy and the other part is trying to derive short term advantage from him. That is not a recipe for a Trump victory.
The only surprise is if the Bernie independents decide that they hate the status quo more than they hate Republicans. But I don't see that happening. There are some die hards, but I expect most of them will all fall in line. I've already seen it happening with the people I know who supported Sanders. They know that a Trump victory isn't a victory for them.
That said... Hillary winning is just postponing the inevitable. Its less important who wins this year, because I already pretty much know who is winning. It's important what happens to those people who voted for Trump. Politically, they came out of nowhere, but of course, they've been here all along. More status quo antics from Hillary and the rest of the crew inside the Beltway and they may feel increasingly emboldened to not just go back the shadows.
Hillary is the most qualified of the two contenders, but that's me damning with faint praise. The Democratic Party platform is just as much of a shitshow as the Republican one, it's just more big tent about it. Personally, I'm looking for who to make my first third party vote for in November.
No, we don't. Sharing some aspects of a whole doesn't make a whole.
There is no leadership principle, there is no government coordination of industry, and as in the case of Spanish Fascism, there is no labor movement co-opted into the system. And the Nationalism aspect is definitely not focused on any one group.
China is more a candidate for fascism than the US, especially from the corporate coordination aspect. Which makes sense, since this is where "National Socialism" and Socialism/Communism have common ground. They believe the State should take the lead, they just differ in what it looks like (Corporations vs. Communes).
People who get hit and patched up can be expected to
a) Not choose to be hit.
b) Take action to try and prevent it from happening again
c) Not have a physical or mental dependency on walking in the middle of the road
I do agree that we should invest in mental health care, and drug use could be used to correlate cases of mental illness. However, that is treating someone for a disease they have that manifests as drug use. That is not 100% of cases.
In any event, I don't suggest that we don't treat drug users, but I do suggest that we make a very strong social and educational push to discourage people from taking up that habit.
Health care is pretty much a black hole sucking up money in a government budget. The longer you live, the more it costs. That's bad enough when people aren't choosing to cause problems for themselves to get high.
Heroin is processed opium. The process of rendering it to be heroin does not really reduce any of the ill effects.
Actually, I am not suggesting anyone be locked up for it. The discussion is about whether it is something that needs to be covered by government money. This is not a justification for the "War on Drugs". I am opposed to maintaining the so-called War on Drugs, but that doesn't mean I don't think it is a serious problem.
Drug use in the privacy of your own home or other private premises should be 100% legal. Just don't get in a car under the influence and don't expect that your bad decision should be treated like a disease no one had a choice in contracting.
Yeah, but it is 100% possible that the other inconveniences of living in an area like that can also have an effect, even if you can live in a decent place due to long tenure.
Admittedly, I would think that having a stake in the area early would make it easier to stay, but I don't know if I'd want to live in SV or SF even if someone transplanted my single family home to a patch of sufficient land there. I've been both places, the only thing they've got going for them is the tech scene. SF is a nice city, but not so nice that it is worth the hassles that come with living there.
This is a good point. I can play games that came out in the 1990s on my PC with minor software installs. I can play my entire gaming collection on my PC. Which is really nice, because I like certain niche games that no one is likely to remake or re-release. And let's face it, I can hit up the Steam sale for a super cheap game that's not a AAA and is still fun, whereas if if I'm on a console, you just don't have the same selection.
I will say that back in the day, it was true that you needed to change your PC hardware fairly regularly to keep up, but I think that just isn't so much the case any more. I do need a new PC, but my current PC (built myself from parts) is over six years old now. And even now, I could probably still re-use many of the components like the 750W power supply and the case, as well as the HDDs without any trouble. I'll probably go to an all SSD solution with the next rebuild, but everything still works, I just can't seem to play AAA's any more on reasonable settings. That was a heck of a good run.
Man, I just realized that my main drive is actually ten years old. It came out of the box before this one. Geez. Talk about a good run... but I may want to think about some new storage soon. :)
Police safety is a secondary, but not throwaway concern. They are not expendable. They are professionals who do their job based on their training and requirements, but there is no requirement for them to not dispose of a threat that is armed, active, and willing to kill them.
It's all nice to be an armchair police commander, but the reality is that so-called non-lethal methods or sieges are not always what they are cracked up to be. At the end of the day, you need to explain to someone's family why you threw away your police officer's life trying to coax out an active shooter who had no intention of going peacefully even after negotiation.
If the non-lethal did not actually impair him, he might be induced to counter attack.
You are forgetting that this isn't in some safe gun range or something. Even with the area cordoned off and the cops under cover, when that guy starts shooting there is a non-zero chance that someone is going to be hurt or even killed before he goes down.
It is already clear that this guy's response to "fight or flight" was "fight". They don't owe him the chance to even shoot in their general direction again before he suicides by cop.
And what? Wait for him to go full suicidal? Sorry, no. In this case, they spent more than adequate time in working to bring him out alive.
You think a siege is going to make a guy like that just give up? The minute he realizes he has no change of escape, there is an extremely high chance he goes out fighting. There are procedures that are followed, and there was plenty of time for reflection on the shooter's part.
Unless you are suggesting that they were lying about negotiating with him, your characterization of him as non-threatening is simply wrong. If a cop accused me of shooting a bunch of cops and I had not done so, I may work to make sure I didn't get tagged by one on my way out, but I am not going to barricade myself indefinitely. That negotiator is going to be asked to provide me the means to walk out alive by some method, either TV cameras trained on me or something. What I am not going to do is tell them that I want to shoot white cops.
Firefighters and police put themselves in a lot more danger than a non-responder would, that is true.
That doesn't mean they are required to be suicidal. It just means that they need to assess the situation and act in a manner that is the result of training rather than blind self-preservation. Just running towards danger, as opposed to running away from it, is a significant sacrifice for anyone, armed or not.
When you have a sniper who is clearly trained in tactics and urban close quarters combat, you don't walk in there like John Wayne, you take him out with a sniper or failing that, you strap a bomb to a robot and blow him up. There is no reason to give him a chance to shoot more people. And yes, cops are people. If I was the commander at the scene, I'd do what I could to bring this guy in alive, but while my men are professionals, they not expendable. I don't owe him...what?... the "honor" of sending a man in to get his ass shot off just to not seem "calculating"? Fuck that.
There were negotiations and clear intent to kill from the suspect. It's not like they just blew the guy up as soon as they found him. At some point, he's going to realize he is either going to jail or get captured. If he doesn't want to go to jail and/or wants to kill cops before he goes out, he's going to have the chance to do damage because you won't be able to suppress his fire anymore. He knows he's dead, he just wants to kill one more of you before he goes out. And in no circumstances is that a situation that you can neatly control.
If he wanted a jury trial, he had ample opportunity to drop his weapon and walk out when he was, you know, talking to the hostage negotiator. It's not like they told him to come out with his hands up, let five seconds go by, and then blew him up.
I have some sympathy with people who are addicts, and I don't propose throwing them away.
But, come on. Look up heroin in the encyclopedia before you try it or something. Heroin has been well known for centuries to be highly addictive, and extremely debilitating as an addiction. You'd have to be a moron to not know the end result once you read up on it.
No, these are people who wanted to get high and put something in their system without knowing shit about it. There are plenty of facts about what opiates can do to you, they just failed their common sense roll and decided to not bother finding out anything about it. Anyone who takes an opiate except under extreme conditions of pain and/or under direct care of a doctor has made a poor choice that they didn't have to make.
I mean, we tend to trust our parents when they tell us to not drink antifreeze, you'd think that we'd extend them the same trust when it comes to not injecting something else.
Look, I am not against legalization, mostly because I think the "war" is worse than the epidemic. But don't tell me that addicts are equivalent to cancer patients. Hard drug use is a public health hazard and should be eradicated not enabled. I just think that the best way of doing that is by education and making social changes that make it less desirable.
And we do need to consider that our money is being spent on people who choose their disease, of their own free will. I have sympathy for them, because we all make mistakes, but it is a choice they made, and at some level they have to accept some responsibility for it and that it has reduced their standard of living.
Monopolies are not fictional, but what we have seen with them may not be the entire story. That's why I am very much tying the time frame of evolution to what would be needed to allow the free market to work properly. You can't simply look at something like a Gilded Age vertical or horizontally integrated monopoly and suggest that what happened can necessarily remain in existence forever.
When people see a monopoly, they think that it is the end result of capitalism, but how many monopolies have actually existed without the collusion of government in maintaining that scenario? IP laws, tariffs, protectionism, full employment efforts, central planning, union busting, closed union shops and others are situations that tend to prop up mega-corporations rather than break them down. For every anti-trust act you have, you have a multinational corporation that almost relies on a web of intellectual property laws, subsidies, pork barrel projects, and barriers to entry based on labyrinthine government requirements.
We tend to think of some things like the FDA and other regulators as being a good thing, and certainly they have good intentions.
However, there is a cost to that. The process to get new drugs to people is very, very expensive and time consuming. It may well generate higher quality in what does come out of the system, and prevent quacks and charlatans from running totally amok, but there is a reason there is such a thing as so-called "Big Pharma". You need a lot of money and resources to get a drug out these days. It may be a better drug, with fewer deaths due to under-tested product, but the ultimate result is generating a whole segment of a business simply for the purpose of navigating government paperwork. And I am not even talking about stronger requirements on studies and experiments.
I work with the government in many jobs I have taken, and it is one thing to implement a solid security program or a testing regime, and it is yet another thing entirely to fill out the forms and navigate the process of proving that to the regulators or the government. That's a barrier to entry, and that allows pharmaceutical companies who have those resources to thrive while smaller more nimble companies must struggle, and often decide that being a target of acquisition is much more viable than trying to compete as an independent.
But now look at the music industry. In the past they had a lot more control because bootlegging something very physical like an LP or trying to set up a radio station of your own is expensive.
Today, people can make music, post that music, share that music and have it be of more or less professional quality, all without the need for a publisher. The publishers, however, are using IP laws to maintain the grip that they used to be able to exert with a lot less effort. Publishers might have been able to coalesce into a monopoly in the past, but today, they have lost the power to control music pervasively. None of that happened via government regulation, and a lot of it happened in spite of IP laws.
So I think it is at least a reasonable, albeit untested, assertion that it is possible that without an outside intervention propping them up, monopolies will tend to fall apart either due to technological advance or stagnation. After all, we see this happen in history to governments all the time, and they are nothing if not monopolies themselves.
However, to even envision a system where a strong monopoly actually crumbles under its own weight, we really have to end concepts like corporate welfare, government protectionism, and yes, possibly even some of the "beneficial" regulation as well. The only way an actual monopoly should be able to exist indefinitely in that situation is to actually deliver the best value. Things like IP laws and certain other regulation create barriers to entry for people who might work to erode a monopoly naturally.
Look, I'm not trying to sell some perfect scenario like Marx and the "end of history". It is clear th
Best antivirus in a qualitative sense? Probably not.
Best antivirus in the sense that it blocks the source of significant amounts of malware, yes.
It does need to be pointed out that you're going to cut down considerably on malware by closing that channel, but you're still toast if you are opening attachments or you are the target of a specific attack which is less scattershot than an ad network.
We do need something *like* dedicated antivirus. It just has to be light-years better than the bloated crap that goes for AV today.
Yeah, at this point it is probably her or Trump, realistically. Nevertheless, I'm not voting for either one of them.
As I've said before, Hillary is the worst of the status quo, and Trump represents the dangers inherent when you're trying to change the status quo. Neither appeals to me very much.
Although I think Hillary is most likely to win, I take little satisfaction from the mediocre level of sanity that provides. Politicians like Hillary are the reason that a joke like Trump is even a factor in this race, let alone the contender.
You have a point, although it should be pointed out that natural selection, which is ultimately what the so-called "free market" really is, can create some very complex self-regulation which is very adaptive.
The problem, as many would be happy to tell you, is that such selection does often happen at the expense of individuals. So we get regulation to try and prevent those outcomes.
Of course, we know that even regulation doesn't save everyone, and it can have its own problems which are inherent to interventionist regulation.
So the question is probably phrased better as being whether, over the long term, we're better off with government regulation or the market being allowed to sort it out. It may well be possible that the market would have a better long term solution, but there is almost certainly going to be a cost to that. And yes, that cost could come at the expense of its very own proponents.
In and of itself, that doesn't actually discredit anything. There are those who believe that outlawing guns is the best thing to do to prevent most mass murders, and that would seem to be almost a no-brainer. However, that very same person might find themselves in a position where they were hurt or even killed in a situation they would not have if they had ready access to a gun. Most gun-control advocates would probably argue that just because that person in that one situation died for lack of a gun doesn't mean that the lack of guns is a bad idea overall.
There are two types of people who suggest a course of action that they know may come back and bite them in the ass personally: the stupid and the courageous. We assume that it is stupid to let the dog eat dog process of market forces create regulation for us, and perhaps it really is stupid and we can do a better job by intervention.
That said, I don't think those forces have ever really been allowed to operate to their full extent, for a sufficient amount of time, outside of fictional accounts. We have measured some of the costs of unregulated situations, but I'd argue that they have to play out over longer periods of time than we've ever actually allowed, for them to produce any tangible benefits.
I mostly agree, but it should be pointed out that unless those entities are trying on purpose to exclude, misreport, or disqualify the people whose blood is being tested, they are just as interested in getting back legitimate results as those being tested. Yes, there is probably an insulation factor, especially if it is a bureaucracy involved, and that means that the feedback from those sources could be delayed or muted.
It's my opinion that you probably could have the free market fulfill this function, but the path to getting there would be very trial and error, much like natural selection. And that would mean that some individuals could have some pretty horrific outcomes while the selection process worked out a method of effective self-regulation. That's generally the best argument for top down regulation, although we can have some horrific outcomes even with regulation, so it would be interesting to be able to compare both paths to see if the government regulation counterintuitively actually caused greater problems over a longer period of time, despite seeming to be taming the worst excesses of a market solution.
There doesn't have to be a Snowden. No one in Russia really believes that they aren't already somehow being watched at the level that the NSA is/was doing. They would likely shrug and start taking bets on how long Snowdenski would remain alive before someone slipped him some polonium.
Secretary Powell is probably correct. But that's how the government works.
Would anybody be standing up for some little guy if they broke those byzantine CYA rules, though?
It would be something if this caused some change which actually helped the people who have to work with these documents every day, but no one will. They would be seen as "weak on security". So what happens is that inconveniences to powerful people get ignored, and everyone else has to deal with it at risk of their jobs and possibly their freedom. That's part of the problem in DC. Doing things that others can't with complete impunity.
Power isn't supposed to be an argument before the law. The reason they aren't prosecuting the underlings is because they'd have to prosecute her. It is known that people like Huma Abedin, who is her Chief of Staff, tried to get her on to something more secure. The fact is that *she* didn't want to. Prosecuting her underlings for not opposing her may be possible, but would probably immediately expose that any intent to break the law started with her.
The issue you are proposing is not really a contradiction. They might prosecute an underling as a scapegoat, but they can certainly benefit from the same umbrella as their boss does. Especially if prosecuting an underling could be just as bad for the boss's campaign as for the underling.
To be honest, I don't actually think they're actively shielding her, they just don't want to go down the path of prosecuting her or her people if they can avoid it. That's the problem with power, it makes people not only less able to mess with you, it makes them less inclined to as well.
I have to agree. I love when there is a new probe sent out which arrives safely, and I know what a challenge it is to get something into Jupiter orbit without it frying the electronics of whatever is on it, but studying Jupiter's gas atmosphere? Okay, I guess some probe has to do it at some point.
It would be interesting to have some direct evidence of the liquid metallic hydrogen that is supposed to be under the cloud layers, but I agree that Venus would probably be a lot more interesting to us as Earth dwellers.
The Venera probe images have always been pretty interesting to me. Venus is basically Hell on Earth and you can see that in those images. That's got some real interest for me because it is at the same scale we think of with Earth, only gone horribly wrong.