Okay, you're saying a clump of 20 cells is a human life? It has rights? Well, guess what, about 25% of fertilized embryos end up not implanting in the uterus, and they (obviously) are expelled from the body and die.
How does this make you feel? It should make you feel like this, if you're being consistent: "OH MY GOD! WE HAVE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE DYING EVERY YEAR IN THIS COUNTRY FROM SOMETHING TOTALLY PREVENTABLE!"
Obviously, society needs to go search every sexually active woman's fallopian tubes with an electron microscope so those embryos can be artificially implanted somewhere and this singe-cell HUMAN BEING can be saved. Sure, it'll be hard to do and take resources, but we send search-and-rescue crews out to find people lost in the wilderness, right? It's like Horton Hears A Who, right? Right?
When your ideas are taken to the logical conclusion, you sound like a fool. This says something about your ideas.
Common languages promote efficiency, so the dominance of SAE in the United States is a good thing. The grammar might not be as beautiful as, say, Latin, but it is learnable, has a consistent, deterministic grammar, and is the overwhelmingly dominant language of the United States, the dominance of which has helped ensure unity despite the vast land area and diverse population of the country.
I would argue that it is ethical to promote integration. Encouraging minority languages and dialects only encourages factionalism and racial tension. It's much easier for everybody to get along when everybody can understand what is being said.
I find it highly likely that Scalia would not overturn a state's law allowing gay marriage; he would consider that the state's prerogative. Now, he would probably rule that there's nothing saying the IRS has to recognize that marriage, but the state can allow marriage for whomever it wants.
No, that's not true. A trust is a legal entity distinct from any person. The trust is created for the benefit of someone else, but that person is not the owner of the trust's property. The trustee has the rights to act on behalf of the trust, but the trustee is obligated to competently manage the trust's assets. Neither the trustee nor the beneficiary can accurately be described as "owning" the trust.
I agree with you completely, and you make a good point. Trolls are annoying; don't feed them. I'm sorry that video shook you up so much -- it sounds like it would shake up anyone with a normal psyche -- and thank you for posting: your experience may discourage others from making the same mistake.
You provided insufficient context for this citation. Here is the full section:
(19) that-- (A) is for-- (i) the violation of any of the Federal securities laws (as that term is defined in section 3(a)(47) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934), any of the State securities laws, or any regulation or order issued under such Federal or State securities laws; or (ii) common law fraud, deceit, or manipulation in connection with the purchase or sale of any security; and (B) results, before, on, or after the date on which the petition was filed, from-- (i) any judgment, order, consent order, or decree entered in any Federal or State judicial or administrative proceeding; (ii) any settlement agreement entered into by the debtor; or (iii) any court or administrative order for any damages, fine, penalty, citation, restitutionary payment, disgorgement payment, attorney fee, cost, or other payment owed by the debtor.
As you can see, the exception you cite exempts certain debts resulting from securities fraud from bankruptcy discharge and is not relevant to our discussion.
No, because the RIAA's suit is civil, not criminal. If a district attorney charged you and found you guilty of criminal copyright infringement, then the debt would not be dischargeable. However, that would be a completely different situation: the standard of proof would be "beyond reasonable doubt" instead of "preponderance of evidence", the statute has a few additional requirements (can't remember what they are right now), and district attorneys generally can't be arsed to sue random people from the Internet for downloading $1 songs.
> And wrong on the second part as well - you cannot escape a *legal* judgment by declaring bankruptcy. This isn't a debt. It's a court ordered judgment for violating a civil law.
Relevant snippet: The general rule is that bankruptcy discharges all judgments. However, bankruptcy does not discharge judgments for family support obligations, government-imposed fines or penalties, or taxes.
> Your last words there are where the problem is. "close to zero" just doesn't happen. There is a term for that, "race to the bottom" and you can't win it. If the market wants to lower the price below what you, the manufacturer, consider reasonable, you simply stop producing, thus introducing artificial scarcity. Example: De Beers and its diamonds. Example: Jewelry. Example: cell phones, plans and airtime. The cell phones are a great example, by the way, because the cellular network is already ran by robots. Humans can't even run it physically; they only can service it when required. And so what do we get out of those cell towers on every corner? We get plans that become more and more expensive every year, even though you'd expect a basic phone plan to be nearly free now.
De Beers is an unregulated monopoly, so it doesn't count. To the extent that people do not use artificial diamonds because they are artificial, it also overlaps with "jewelry". Jewelry is a sui generis thing -- there is plenty of cheap jewelry available, but people/want/ to spend a lot of money on it as a status symbol or grandiose gesture. Cell phones are not an example at all -- look at http://cellphoneforums.net/alt-cellular-motorola/t172527-1980s-cell-phones-how-costly-were-minutes.html for an example of how much prices have declined (even overpriced crap like the iPhone series doesn't cost $3500 today).
In today's world, there would not be a problem in finding new jobs for the auto workers. They probably won't make as much money as they did before, and they will likely have to be retrained, but the labor market would absorb this impact. Jobs have become obsolete many, many times throughout history. Iron lung workers, factory workers of numerous types, bank tellers, milkmen, icemen, and "computers" (people employed in the 1800s and early 1900s to do mathematical computations by hand all day) have all lost their jobs due to technological progress. And the world is better off for that fact.
Okay, let's say Toyota does that. It costs something close to $0 to produce a car now. Great. Toyota has competitors. Either they also automate, or they go out of business. Let's say they automate. Competition drives the price of a new car to... something close to zero. The shareholders make normal profits, every car worker needs a new job, and cars are ultra-cheap.
This, in isolation, isn't a problem -- the car workers can get new jobs, and cars become disposable products. Everyone is happy. There's only an issue here when so much stuff is automated that human labor really is overprovided. At this point, unemployment is high, and profits are low. Companies are going bankrupt because they are making products no one can afford to buy. Even if their costs are zero, their taxation is not, so it's not at all unbelievable the companies might sell themselves to the government for a one-time payment. Everyone gets everything for free, and it's all good. This would of course be a different social system, but I don't think we have to assume the transition is abrupt or violent. I like to think it will be something like, "first, we start using taxes to just pay money to poor people, then we begin nationalizing industry, and then we have a communist utopia". It would work, unlike communism in the USSR, because in this (far-distant future) scenario, there really is no scarcity left.
Well, when it gets to the point that very little human labor or entrepreneurship is necessary in creating goods, we will almost be at a point where economics basically doesn't apply anymore, because everything will be near-free. The human engineers will probably be very wealthy, yes, but there will be a lot of wealth distribution that should ensure other humans don't die out from starvation.
There will never be only robots left unless you believe the Terminator series is a prophesy;)
Apparently the harnessing of energy is not automated, otherwise it would not be included in the price. Therefore, you work at a nuclear power plant and have the income necessary to buy food.
If you hand-pick the origin/destination cities, then sure you can make it look like Amtrak costs as much as flying. Most of the benefit from Amtrak probably comes from where that's not the case. My own personal "random" test just now was a Chicago-New Orleans round trip from August 4th to August 12th, and the prices are close, but Amtrak still beats even Southwest by about $10. That is assuming full fare (Amtrak gives discounts for children, students, seniors, and some other groups), and no checked bags (you can check three huge boxes on Amtrak for free -- even Southwest will only give you two). This also doesn't include the value of the rewards program on Amtrak versus airlines (the Amtrak one is a bit more generous than any airline program I've found), the extra leg room (I find this very important), the ability to carry on items you wouldn't be able to get through airport security, or the general advantage of a train ride's ambiance. If this doesn't matter to you and you just want a demonstration of Amtrak creaming the airlines on price, look at a St. Louis-Chicago round trip.
Just so you know, neither train nor plane ticket prices are purely the result of free-market forces: [http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-12-30-cheap-flights_N.htm]. Every major form of transportation in the U.S. is subsidized in some way. I wish train transportation were subsidized a little more; then we could have 300mph trains zipping around the country and competing with the airlines on travel time. Europe has a rail system that good, so it's not far-fetched we could, too. But that's another issue.
I'd like to see your justification for that. The fact that a public utility operates at a loss when receiving only marginal cost for the service is not proof that the cost of the service exceeds the total benefit.
A defense to vehicular crime is that you were not driving the vehicle. If you can create reasonable doubt that you were driving the vehicle, you get off. Identifying who/was/ driving the vehicle is usually a side-effect of providing this evidence, but, if you can provide evidence that you weren't driving the vehicle without identifying who was, that's good enough.
Employees have a responsibility to behave ethically but do not, in general, have a legal responsibility to "blow the whistle". In fact, lawyers are ethically bound by confidentiality rules which foreclose except in very limited circumstances "blowing the whistle".
> You do not have the right to be exempt of risks.
Our legislature has decided that the risk of one's investment in a company is with very few exceptions limited to the loss of value in the stock, which is why shareholders are not liable to a bankrupt company's creditors and why shareholders do not have their shares seized by the government. Most rational people agree this makes sense because a random dude who bought shares of $CORP on E-Trade has absolutely nothing to do with $CORP polluting the environment, defaulting on bonds, or operating a cartel.
That's not true; T-Mobile's USB dongle plan is $30. There are cheaper pre-paid ones as well ($20 a month from Virgin Mobile USA). Another option would be to get a wireless dongle and pay a neighbor to use his satellite connection.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, you're saying a clump of 20 cells is a human life? It has rights? Well, guess what, about 25% of fertilized embryos end up not implanting in the uterus, and they (obviously) are expelled from the body and die.
How does this make you feel? It should make you feel like this, if you're being consistent: "OH MY GOD! WE HAVE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE DYING EVERY YEAR IN THIS COUNTRY FROM SOMETHING TOTALLY PREVENTABLE!"
Obviously, society needs to go search every sexually active woman's fallopian tubes with an electron microscope so those embryos can be artificially implanted somewhere and this singe-cell HUMAN BEING can be saved. Sure, it'll be hard to do and take resources, but we send search-and-rescue crews out to find people lost in the wilderness, right? It's like Horton Hears A Who, right? Right?
When your ideas are taken to the logical conclusion, you sound like a fool. This says something about your ideas.
---linuxrocks123
Common languages promote efficiency, so the dominance of SAE in the United States is a good thing. The grammar might not be as beautiful as, say, Latin, but it is learnable, has a consistent, deterministic grammar, and is the overwhelmingly dominant language of the United States, the dominance of which has helped ensure unity despite the vast land area and diverse population of the country.
I would argue that it is ethical to promote integration. Encouraging minority languages and dialects only encourages factionalism and racial tension. It's much easier for everybody to get along when everybody can understand what is being said.
---linuxrocks123
I find it highly likely that Scalia would not overturn a state's law allowing gay marriage; he would consider that the state's prerogative. Now, he would probably rule that there's nothing saying the IRS has to recognize that marriage, but the state can allow marriage for whomever it wants.
No, that's not true. A trust is a legal entity distinct from any person. The trust is created for the benefit of someone else, but that person is not the owner of the trust's property. The trustee has the rights to act on behalf of the trust, but the trustee is obligated to competently manage the trust's assets. Neither the trustee nor the beneficiary can accurately be described as "owning" the trust.
This is a brilliant analogy; I wish I had mod points.
That page hasn't been updated since 2000. The law has changed substantially since then.
I agree; they basically made it idiot-proof.
Link: http://www.google.cn/
I agree with you completely, and you make a good point. Trolls are annoying; don't feed them. I'm sorry that video shook you up so much -- it sounds like it would shake up anyone with a normal psyche -- and thank you for posting: your experience may discourage others from making the same mistake.
---linuxrocks123
You provided insufficient context for this citation. Here is the full section:
(19) that--
(A) is for--
(i) the violation of any of the Federal securities laws (as that term is defined in section 3(a)(47) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934), any of the State securities laws, or any regulation or order issued under such Federal or State securities laws; or
(ii) common law fraud, deceit, or manipulation in connection with the purchase or sale of any security; and
(B) results, before, on, or after the date on which the petition was filed, from--
(i) any judgment, order, consent order, or decree entered in any Federal or State judicial or administrative proceeding;
(ii) any settlement agreement entered into by the debtor; or
(iii) any court or administrative order for any damages, fine, penalty, citation, restitutionary payment, disgorgement payment, attorney fee, cost, or other payment owed by the debtor.
As you can see, the exception you cite exempts certain debts resulting from securities fraud from bankruptcy discharge and is not relevant to our discussion.
---linuxrocks123
No, because the RIAA's suit is civil, not criminal. If a district attorney charged you and found you guilty of criminal copyright infringement, then the debt would not be dischargeable. However, that would be a completely different situation: the standard of proof would be "beyond reasonable doubt" instead of "preponderance of evidence", the statute has a few additional requirements (can't remember what they are right now), and district attorneys generally can't be arsed to sue random people from the Internet for downloading $1 songs.
---linuxrocks123
You are wrong. Please see my comment here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1714430&cid=32857120
You are wrong. Please see my comment here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1714430&cid=32857120
---linuxrocks123
> And wrong on the second part as well - you cannot escape a *legal* judgment by declaring bankruptcy. This isn't a debt. It's a court ordered judgment for violating a civil law.
You are dead wrong about this: http://www.ehow.com/facts_5689609_can-bankruptcy-after-court-judgment_.html
Relevant snippet:
The general rule is that bankruptcy discharges all judgments. However, bankruptcy does not discharge judgments for family support obligations, government-imposed fines or penalties, or taxes.
---linuxrocks123
The Internet says you're wrong: http://insurance.freeadvice.com/insurance_help.php/102_170_601.htm
---linuxrocks123
> Your last words there are where the problem is. "close to zero" just doesn't happen. There is a term for that, "race to the bottom" and you can't win it. If the market wants to lower the price below what you, the manufacturer, consider reasonable, you simply stop producing, thus introducing artificial scarcity. Example: De Beers and its diamonds. Example: Jewelry. Example: cell phones, plans and airtime. The cell phones are a great example, by the way, because the cellular network is already ran by robots. Humans can't even run it physically; they only can service it when required. And so what do we get out of those cell towers on every corner? We get plans that become more and more expensive every year, even though you'd expect a basic phone plan to be nearly free now.
De Beers is an unregulated monopoly, so it doesn't count. To the extent that people do not use artificial diamonds because they are artificial, it also overlaps with "jewelry". Jewelry is a sui generis thing -- there is plenty of cheap jewelry available, but people /want/ to spend a lot of money on it as a status symbol or grandiose gesture. Cell phones are not an example at all -- look at http://cellphoneforums.net/alt-cellular-motorola/t172527-1980s-cell-phones-how-costly-were-minutes.html for an example of how much prices have declined (even overpriced crap like the iPhone series doesn't cost $3500 today).
In today's world, there would not be a problem in finding new jobs for the auto workers. They probably won't make as much money as they did before, and they will likely have to be retrained, but the labor market would absorb this impact. Jobs have become obsolete many, many times throughout history. Iron lung workers, factory workers of numerous types, bank tellers, milkmen, icemen, and "computers" (people employed in the 1800s and early 1900s to do mathematical computations by hand all day) have all lost their jobs due to technological progress. And the world is better off for that fact.
---linuxrocks123
Okay, let's say Toyota does that. It costs something close to $0 to produce a car now. Great. Toyota has competitors. Either they also automate, or they go out of business. Let's say they automate. Competition drives the price of a new car to ... something close to zero. The shareholders make normal profits, every car worker needs a new job, and cars are ultra-cheap.
This, in isolation, isn't a problem -- the car workers can get new jobs, and cars become disposable products. Everyone is happy. There's only an issue here when so much stuff is automated that human labor really is overprovided. At this point, unemployment is high, and profits are low. Companies are going bankrupt because they are making products no one can afford to buy. Even if their costs are zero, their taxation is not, so it's not at all unbelievable the companies might sell themselves to the government for a one-time payment. Everyone gets everything for free, and it's all good. This would of course be a different social system, but I don't think we have to assume the transition is abrupt or violent. I like to think it will be something like, "first, we start using taxes to just pay money to poor people, then we begin nationalizing industry, and then we have a communist utopia". It would work, unlike communism in the USSR, because in this (far-distant future) scenario, there really is no scarcity left.
---linuxrocks123
Well, when it gets to the point that very little human labor or entrepreneurship is necessary in creating goods, we will almost be at a point where economics basically doesn't apply anymore, because everything will be near-free. The human engineers will probably be very wealthy, yes, but there will be a lot of wealth distribution that should ensure other humans don't die out from starvation.
There will never be only robots left unless you believe the Terminator series is a prophesy ;)
---linuxrocks123
Apparently the harnessing of energy is not automated, otherwise it would not be included in the price. Therefore, you work at a nuclear power plant and have the income necessary to buy food.
---linuxrocks123
If you hand-pick the origin/destination cities, then sure you can make it look like Amtrak costs as much as flying. Most of the benefit from Amtrak probably comes from where that's not the case. My own personal "random" test just now was a Chicago-New Orleans round trip from August 4th to August 12th, and the prices are close, but Amtrak still beats even Southwest by about $10. That is assuming full fare (Amtrak gives discounts for children, students, seniors, and some other groups), and no checked bags (you can check three huge boxes on Amtrak for free -- even Southwest will only give you two). This also doesn't include the value of the rewards program on Amtrak versus airlines (the Amtrak one is a bit more generous than any airline program I've found), the extra leg room (I find this very important), the ability to carry on items you wouldn't be able to get through airport security, or the general advantage of a train ride's ambiance. If this doesn't matter to you and you just want a demonstration of Amtrak creaming the airlines on price, look at a St. Louis-Chicago round trip.
Just so you know, neither train nor plane ticket prices are purely the result of free-market forces: [http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-12-30-cheap-flights_N.htm]. Every major form of transportation in the U.S. is subsidized in some way. I wish train transportation were subsidized a little more; then we could have 300mph trains zipping around the country and competing with the airlines on travel time. Europe has a rail system that good, so it's not far-fetched we could, too. But that's another issue.
---linuxrocks123
I'd like to see your justification for that. The fact that a public utility operates at a loss when receiving only marginal cost for the service is not proof that the cost of the service exceeds the total benefit.
The weekend hacker will take the credit card numbers and send them through Google Checkout. And no one will know.
A defense to vehicular crime is that you were not driving the vehicle. If you can create reasonable doubt that you were driving the vehicle, you get off. Identifying who /was/ driving the vehicle is usually a side-effect of providing this evidence, but, if you can provide evidence that you weren't driving the vehicle without identifying who was, that's good enough.
---linuxrocks123
Employees have a responsibility to behave ethically but do not, in general, have a legal responsibility to "blow the whistle". In fact, lawyers are ethically bound by confidentiality rules which foreclose except in very limited circumstances "blowing the whistle".
---linuxrocks123
> You do not have the right to be exempt of risks.
Our legislature has decided that the risk of one's investment in a company is with very few exceptions limited to the loss of value in the stock, which is why shareholders are not liable to a bankrupt company's creditors and why shareholders do not have their shares seized by the government. Most rational people agree this makes sense because a random dude who bought shares of $CORP on E-Trade has absolutely nothing to do with $CORP polluting the environment, defaulting on bonds, or operating a cartel.
---linuxrocks123
That's not true; T-Mobile's USB dongle plan is $30. There are cheaper pre-paid ones as well ($20 a month from Virgin Mobile USA). Another option would be to get a wireless dongle and pay a neighbor to use his satellite connection.
---linuxrocks123