Are you sure about that? I only see immunity in the version of the law I just looked through in cases where the person killed was the one on whom deadly force was used in self-defense.
I don't see anything about "my stray bullet hit a neighborhood teenager in the head 3 blocks away, but since I was defending myself against another attacker, that kid's death is just a freebie for me."
I'd expect that "acting in self defense" would be a mitigating circumstance and that you would be charged with something more like manslaughter than murder in that situation, but I don't see any clear "you're free from wrongful death suits," except in the specific case of the deceased attacker's family.
Be honest - nobody here reads the fucking articles anyway. We come here for the discussion.
And in general, the discussion you're going to find here on Slashdot is quite different than the character of the discussion you're going to find on many other news sites.
I appreciate seeing discussions like this, because, while I don't always agree with the people I'm discussing the issue with, I can generally rely on finding at least a couple well-informed "opposition viewpoints" that will show me something new, or frame the discussion in a way I hadn't considered before. I find that to be tremendously valuable; and let's be honest - if you're really offended by this type of story showing up - don't click on it, don't post a comment, just ignore it.
I don't get all excited every time Raspberry Pi releases a press release announcing a new delay - so I don't usually click on those articles, I just bypass them.
Actually, it's best regarded as a donation to a cause you've deemed worthy, with no guarantee of actual results, and no way of holding the recipient accountable, just a vague hope that the idea + team will yield a finished product.
Because that's exactly what it is. It's not an investment, it's not a "pre-order," it's a gift.
If there are no physical goods, then what start-up costs do they have, other than the time spent on the creative part.
It's the patronage model. And it's been practical and workable for centuries. A rich patron gives the artist money for living expenses, supplies, etc., and in return, the artist focuses on producing new art, without the distractions of having to work a 9-5 to pay the rent. Except now, rather than one wealthy patron, an artist can search for 500 middle class patrons who can each kick in $30 towards the recording of their new album.
Calling it Unix, is spitting in the face of unix community.
Actually, calling it Unix is factual reporting. OS X, as of Snow Leopard (10.5), is not just "unix-like," it is "Unix."
Also, I'm not sure what the problem is with grep on your system, but the version of grep on mine reports as:
$ uname -a Darwin redacted.local 11.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 11.3.0: Thu Jan 12 18:47:41 PST 2012; root:xnu-1699.24.23~1/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64
$ which grep /usr/bin/grep
$ grep --version grep (GNU grep) 2.5.1
Copyright 1988, 1992-1999, 2000, 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Somewhat older version of grep, but it works just fine for me... and it works just the same as GNU versions of the software... because it *is* the GNU version of the software.
truly concerned about giving them your information?
Aren't tax returns public information anyway? What information would you be "handing over" to TurboTax that anybody else couldn't get with a properly-formatted FOIA request to the IRS anyway?
Actually, he said "this type of product" is created with the oversight of tax lawyers and accountants. And he's right - because writing software to calculate all of the arcane nuances of tax stuff is something that requires fairly detailed knowledge of the tax code, and how it works.
There's a difference between "everybody needs a tax lawyer and an accountant, no matter how simple their particular return may be," and "writing generalized software that implements (correctly) the interacting tax codes of 50 states plus the federal government, and covers all of the non-standard, rare, and strange situations that can arise for small numbers of people requires specialized knowledge that a tax lawyer and/or accountant needs to provide."
There's already free, and easily available tools for e-filing a simple 1040 EZ and many state tax forms. Presumably, the poster has a more complex tax situation - and in that case, he'd be a fool to not want a product that was created with feedback and insight provided by tax experts.
But yeah, your strawman was pretty nice too.
Also: people who want the software are by definition very much NOT interested in doing it themselves, they are specifically seeking to outsource their need to understand the tax code to someone else who has figured out how to add, subtract, multiply and divide all of the right fields in the right order to get the right number at the end. The people asking for software may be *capable* of doing it themselves, but they are most explicitly not *interested* in doing it themselves if they're looking to outsource the job to someone else's software.
As I said, I believe that people should be allowed to harm themselves, as long as they do not harm others.
But harm takes many forms, and these decisions are never made in a vacuum. Sure, you're not blowing smoke in my face, but you're costing me and everybody around you far more money in health care costs, in reduced access to doctors & healthcare, and in increased costs managing emergency services personnel - healthcare is not a perfectly elastic resource that can scale up to provide everybody everything they need the instant they need it. So, while you're getting rushed to the emergency room for your emphysema brought on by your smoking, I'm being told I need to wait for an ambulance to transport me for treatment of the stroke I'm having, despite my not being a smoker. Your choice to smoke is never as isolated as it seems. If we're going to claim the right to curtail someone's choice to smoke because it has an ill effect on someone else's health, I see no reason why we can't claim the right to curtail someone's choice to smoke entirely, because there are numerous ways it can negatively impact other peoples' health.
Assuming single-payer universal healthcare, someone deciding to smoke has two very direct health related consequences to me which are completely independent of whether or not a single particle of their secondhand smoke ever sullies my lungs: I either pay more money into the healthcare fund because smokers have driven up average costs, or I get less actual healthcare out of the system via less access to doctors, medication, and treatments that I may need.
If we're socializing costs, and taking on the role as "health advocates" as a society, we really can't afford to simply say "you can do whatever you want, no strings, no restrictions," because that's a blank check, and sooner or later, it's going to end up overdrawn. Remember, once you give the government the power to force you to do something, all it takes is a single reversal of power in an election to put that power into the hands of people who disagree with you. Give them a blank check, and they might just decide to cash it in for something you're not particularly supportive of.
In my opinion, the slight inconvenience of smokers having to go outside for a smoke is far outweighed by the ability of non-smokers to actually go to a restaurant or work there.
I understand where you're coming from, but I still disagree with your principle. I don't think any group of people should be in the habit of making their lives more comfortable at the expense of the comfort of others. Smoking in bars is a trivial example, admittedly, but I'm uncomfortable with the slippery slope potential of the precedent.
Why do you keep posting this video? It's admittedly a lovely looking visualization of a model of the spread of something from the Fukushima plant, but it lacks any context whatsoever: What do the colors mean? How concentrated are the materials? What materials is this purporting to show the spread of? Is the model valid? Have the results of this visualization largely been borne out by the actual measurements and analysis that the NOAA team did?
Anybody with a brain knows "that radioactive shit is going to spread when it's released into the water," and that's really all your visualization shows - that it spreads. It does not establish that there's an elevated risk, or that the situation is not, as the NOAA has concluded, largely harmless due to the huge dilution of the materials in question.
If you are privy to some information backing this video that would contradict the NOAA's findings, by all means share it. If you have nothing, then I'm gonna figure that the NOAA are more qualified to issue a finding on this matter than you & youtube are.
Your basic clams end up with like 110,000 times the radioactivity of the surrounding seawater, because all they do, all day long, is filter seawater.
The two long-lived isotopes which might be significantly concentrated are Strontium-90 and Cesium-137.
About 70-80% of ingested strontium is excreted; the remainder is generally absorbed into biochemical pathways where it replaces Calcium. Thus it will primarily be found in the bones of vertebrates and the shells of creatures like clams and isopods. The bioaccumulation in things like clams will tend to be comparatively lower in the "edible tissue", and certainly nowhere near "110,000 times" the surrounding water. The flesh will exhibit some elevated levels of Strontium, but a significantly lower elevation than bone/shell material.
Cesium is slightly more problematic, because it tends to be absorbed into chemical pathways which use Potassium, and thus will be found throughout the body in blood and other tissues. However studies have found that concentration factors range from ~2 to ~35x the concentration of surrounding waters for that, as well.
At the dilution levels we're talking about for this material, you'd have to be more concerned about "bioaccumulation" of the radioactive potassium that occurs naturally in seawater, which represents a much larger proportion of the background radiation dose than any of the materials released, at the concentrations they're present. Realistically, these materials low enough concentrations that you would have to eat nothing but clams harvested from just off the Fukushima coast 3 meals a day for years for there to be any significant increase in your chances of health problems.
As best I can see, yes - the products are much safer than mercury. As best I can tell, from the article and a bit of digging on the big radioisotopes released into the water and air around the Fukushima plant, there's just not a lot to worry about, even as these materials decay.
Cesium 134 decays down to Barium which is highly reactive with water to form Barium Hydroxide, which in turn reacts with Carbon Dioxide to form Barium Carbonate which in turn reacts with acids to form highly water-soluble salts (e.g., Barium Chloride) - which is toxic, but requires a 1-5g dose for toxicity in an 'average' person, and this amount of concentration in other life forms would pretty much render them dead long before they reached your table.
Iodine 131 will decay down to inert Xenon (and rapidly - about 8 day half life). Tellurium 129 has a half life of 6 days, and decays to low-energy Iodine 129, which has a half life in the millions of years, and will eventually decay to inert xenon-129.
Cesium 137 and Strontium 90 are the two "long-lived" isotopes released, and present the largest danger, but the materials are diluted to levels below even background radiation from isotopes normally found in seawater (e.g. Potassium-40), meaning you should be much more worried about naturally occurring radioactive potassium in your fish than you should be about the Cesium and Strontium released by Fukushima.
Not a chemist by training or trade, so feel free to offer corrections, but it certainly doesn't seem like there's much cause for concern.
For somebody so obviously liberal in his leanings, you sure do a good impression of a bigoted asshole. Woody Allen once remarked, "Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem," and it's clear from your commentary that you're just brimming with confidence and certainty in the righteousness of your opinion.
When your entire commentary rests on the assumption "anybody who doesn't agree with me is a backwards rube to be mocked," you pretty much give up any chance at being taken seriously, or of being engaged in a serious attempt at discourse. Your problem - and yes, it is a problem - is that you've almost certainly never made a good-faith attempt to *understand* the positions of people who disagree with you.
Why would people be against a law that only benefits them? I can't speak on behalf of anybody, but I'd expect that it's far more likely to be driven by an objection like "it runs counter to my view of justice and fairness," or "I object to the philosophical underpinnings of this law" than it is to be driven by ignorant religiosity as you've suggested.
But of course, that couldn't be, could it? In your breathtaking arrogance, you've already concluded that you're right, no dissent is valid, and anybody who disagrees with you is automatically assigned the label of "backwoods idiot." I'm glad I'm not as smart as you - it must be enervating, looking down on so many people all the time.
even if it may cost me some money to patch you up (healthcare taxes)
And that is precisely why I don't get it. You say you don't care about the money, and are willing to pay more, so long as healthiness is maximized. But you're not maximizing health this way - maximum health (maximum good for the most people) would be achieved not by banning smoking in restaurants, but by banning smoking altogehter - period, full stop. We've banned other drugs, why not tobacco?
If maximizing health is your goal, why not a full ban on tobacco products? Consider: -- EVERYBODY is healthier, not just the people who don't smoke;
This is also compatible with the notion of socialized healthcare! Consider: -- Healthier people are more economically valuable because they are productive; -- Healthcare costs are lower, meaning more money is freed up to support other social programs (or *gasp* given back to the people it was taxed from to use for whatever purpose they wish);
This maximizes overall health, and it also has the side benefit of minimizing health costs related to smoking, which are shared across all of society in a universal health care scenario. It's also likely, statistically speaking, that lower-income people will smoke / use tobacco products - the people who would most benefit from lower health care costs (and thus increased access to health care, either more of it, or cheaper for the same level), or who would most benefit from having an extra $100 in their paycheck each month that wasn't tied up in feeding their nicotine addiction and defraying the social cost of healthcare through healthcare taxes.
And if it's not about "maximizing health for all," but about "maximizing health for ME," then how does the law change anything about the situation? You're free to choose not to smoke; you're free to avoid places where smokers congregate; you always have been; so other than legislating a group of people into a second class citizen status - "We want you to have the freedom to smoke, we just don't want you to do that filthy shit around US, you disgusting addicts!" - what has banning smoking in restaurants accomplished? What makes the health of at-will employees of a restaurant more deserving of legislative protection than the health of smokers, who have been sadly tricked into becoming addicts by deceptive and manipulative advertising, through no fault of their own?
No, if you're banning smoking for health reasons, it's pretty clear that you need to ban smoking entirely, or you need to reconcile "everybody needs to pay for everybody to have healthcare" with "you're free to make bad and stupid health decisions that drive up everybody's costs, and result in reduced quality of care for everybody" - i.e., "You can't take a dump in the publicly maintained park, because it shits up the scenery for everybody."
At some point, all matters of taxation and entitlements and socialized costs become a financial analysis, no matter how much you may wish it weren't and protest that it isn't about dollars and euros and yen. If you're going to force other people to pay for a person's healthcare, you should also be willing to force that person to use that healthcare money wisely.
"first-hand" smoke is your choice. If you do not want health problems, just don't smoke. If you choose to smoke, blame yourself when you have health problems.
See, I don't get this, it seems like a remarkable double standard to me. You're not allowed to smoke in public places, because it'll hurt other people, but you're allowed to smoke at home, because it only hurts yourself. Except, in hurting yourself, you're driving up the costs of healthcare for everybody - especially in a "universal health care" situation.
This hurts other people by forcing them to pay for your unhealthy choices, leading to either reduced quality of care for them, or higher prices == higher taxes == less money for their own discretionary spending. If society has the right to stop you from smoking in public because it'll hurt someone else, don't they have the right to stop you from smoking in your home, and hurting yourself, and hurting other people through higher healthcare costs in this manner?
And if you maintain they *don't* have the right to stop you from doing this... how do you reconcile that with the fact that you have no problem curtailing their liberties in one venue, but not in another? Honest question about how you can be both for public smoking bans, and against private smoking bans - I don't see a logical way to reconcile them, if the justification for a smoking ban is simply that "it harms other people."
The smoking ban, as I understand it, is more for the protection of the employees than the patrons.
Yes, you're right. That's often the argument. What I'm curious about though is this: if we're so eager to protect the health of people from second-hand smoke, why aren't we eager to ban "first-hand" smoke as well? Why is tobacco not outlawed entirely?
As we move closer and closer to socialized health plans, the cost of smoking will be socialized as well: why have I heard very little call for an outright ban on cigarettes and other tobacco products? Seems like it'd be a great way to help manage costs of universal health care, wouldn't it? After all, does somebody have the "right" to smoke, if I'm going to be made to pay for their emphysema or cancer treatments down the line? Should *I* be able to smoke, knowing the cost it will incur on my fellow citizens?
This is an honest question. We're quick to ban smoking, but why not just stop it at the source? Everybody would be healthier for it, and it would lower health care costs. Win-win, isn't it?
First-gen iPhone: still working, still in daily use. Battery life has suffered a bit, but I don't use it heavily enough to care. About 4 years old. 5th-gen iPod: still in regular use, now about 6 years old. Again, battery life has declined a bit, but I use the iPod in my car most of the time, where it's connected to a power/usb cable, so battery life isn't *that* important to me. MacBook Pro: bought in early 2006. Still good enough for most purposes, needed a single repair to a faulty spring inside the power button, which was occasionally getting stuck instead of springing back. Mac Mini: bought late 2005. Hard drive failed in 2010, still in use as a small file server on my home network.
I know at least 5 or 6 other people with Apple gear who've had similarly long lifespans, far beyond any warranty period available through AppleCare. And there's a reason why Apple has consistently high ratings for customer satisfaction and reliability. For all that people love to claim it's overpriced junk, it tends to last - and hold its value pretty well, too.
That's right, with the new VibroSand, you can masturbate secure in the knowledge that embarrassing questions and revelations will be a thing of the past!
Our tasteful, patented "lube-soaked pile of sand" is something you can display proudly to all of your family and friends when they visit your home!
Order today, and we'll throw in this tastefully designed display case with special musem-quality track lighting to highlight the beautiful industrial design that went into your one-of-a-kind product!
Yes. Tens or hundreds of thousands of troops deployed. At worst, a few dozen cases of people doing awful things. (Please note: "shooting someone" doesn't mean "atrocity," friend. Accidental killings do happen, as unfortunate as that may be.)
Violent crime (murder, rape, assault, robbery) in the US is about 400 incidents per 100,000 population in one year - 2010. Take 150,000 people from the population at random, and plunk them down somewhere, and you'd expect that number to be somewhere around 600 violent crime incidents per year.
Please show us even 100 separate cases of the 600 or so "expected" violent crimes from 2010? Then do the same for every year we've been there.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure about that? I only see immunity in the version of the law I just looked through in cases where the person killed was the one on whom deadly force was used in self-defense.
I don't see anything about "my stray bullet hit a neighborhood teenager in the head 3 blocks away, but since I was defending myself against another attacker, that kid's death is just a freebie for me."
I'd expect that "acting in self defense" would be a mitigating circumstance and that you would be charged with something more like manslaughter than murder in that situation, but I don't see any clear "you're free from wrongful death suits," except in the specific case of the deceased attacker's family.
Be honest - nobody here reads the fucking articles anyway. We come here for the discussion.
And in general, the discussion you're going to find here on Slashdot is quite different than the character of the discussion you're going to find on many other news sites.
I appreciate seeing discussions like this, because, while I don't always agree with the people I'm discussing the issue with, I can generally rely on finding at least a couple well-informed "opposition viewpoints" that will show me something new, or frame the discussion in a way I hadn't considered before. I find that to be tremendously valuable; and let's be honest - if you're really offended by this type of story showing up - don't click on it, don't post a comment, just ignore it.
I don't get all excited every time Raspberry Pi releases a press release announcing a new delay - so I don't usually click on those articles, I just bypass them.
Actually, it's best regarded as a donation to a cause you've deemed worthy, with no guarantee of actual results, and no way of holding the recipient accountable, just a vague hope that the idea + team will yield a finished product.
Because that's exactly what it is. It's not an investment, it's not a "pre-order," it's a gift.
Not to mention that they've been posting regularly with updates on their work, so it's not like they took the money and disappeared into the night.
They slipped their release date a few months; anybody who thinks this doesn't happen regularly, especially with a new product, is kidding themselves.
It's the patronage model. And it's been practical and workable for centuries. A rich patron gives the artist money for living expenses, supplies, etc., and in return, the artist focuses on producing new art, without the distractions of having to work a 9-5 to pay the rent. Except now, rather than one wealthy patron, an artist can search for 500 middle class patrons who can each kick in $30 towards the recording of their new album.
"She said it was a good size!"
It appears they're not - my mistake. I was somehow under the impression that the tax records went public after a time.
Further reading here on the irs website, prompted by yours & and alexander_686's response disabused me of the notion.
I learned something new today!
Actually, calling it Unix is factual reporting. OS X, as of Snow Leopard (10.5), is not just "unix-like," it is "Unix."
Also, I'm not sure what the problem is with grep on your system, but the version of grep on mine reports as:
Somewhat older version of grep, but it works just fine for me... and it works just the same as GNU versions of the software... because it *is* the GNU version of the software.
Aren't tax returns public information anyway? What information would you be "handing over" to TurboTax that anybody else couldn't get with a properly-formatted FOIA request to the IRS anyway?
Actually, he said "this type of product" is created with the oversight of tax lawyers and accountants. And he's right - because writing software to calculate all of the arcane nuances of tax stuff is something that requires fairly detailed knowledge of the tax code, and how it works.
There's a difference between "everybody needs a tax lawyer and an accountant, no matter how simple their particular return may be," and "writing generalized software that implements (correctly) the interacting tax codes of 50 states plus the federal government, and covers all of the non-standard, rare, and strange situations that can arise for small numbers of people requires specialized knowledge that a tax lawyer and/or accountant needs to provide."
There's already free, and easily available tools for e-filing a simple 1040 EZ and many state tax forms. Presumably, the poster has a more complex tax situation - and in that case, he'd be a fool to not want a product that was created with feedback and insight provided by tax experts.
But yeah, your strawman was pretty nice too.
Also: people who want the software are by definition very much NOT interested in doing it themselves, they are specifically seeking to outsource their need to understand the tax code to someone else who has figured out how to add, subtract, multiply and divide all of the right fields in the right order to get the right number at the end. The people asking for software may be *capable* of doing it themselves, but they are most explicitly not *interested* in doing it themselves if they're looking to outsource the job to someone else's software.
But harm takes many forms, and these decisions are never made in a vacuum. Sure, you're not blowing smoke in my face, but you're costing me and everybody around you far more money in health care costs, in reduced access to doctors & healthcare, and in increased costs managing emergency services personnel - healthcare is not a perfectly elastic resource that can scale up to provide everybody everything they need the instant they need it. So, while you're getting rushed to the emergency room for your emphysema brought on by your smoking, I'm being told I need to wait for an ambulance to transport me for treatment of the stroke I'm having, despite my not being a smoker. Your choice to smoke is never as isolated as it seems. If we're going to claim the right to curtail someone's choice to smoke because it has an ill effect on someone else's health, I see no reason why we can't claim the right to curtail someone's choice to smoke entirely, because there are numerous ways it can negatively impact other peoples' health.
Assuming single-payer universal healthcare, someone deciding to smoke has two very direct health related consequences to me which are completely independent of whether or not a single particle of their secondhand smoke ever sullies my lungs: I either pay more money into the healthcare fund because smokers have driven up average costs, or I get less actual healthcare out of the system via less access to doctors, medication, and treatments that I may need.
If we're socializing costs, and taking on the role as "health advocates" as a society, we really can't afford to simply say "you can do whatever you want, no strings, no restrictions," because that's a blank check, and sooner or later, it's going to end up overdrawn. Remember, once you give the government the power to force you to do something, all it takes is a single reversal of power in an election to put that power into the hands of people who disagree with you. Give them a blank check, and they might just decide to cash it in for something you're not particularly supportive of.
I understand where you're coming from, but I still disagree with your principle. I don't think any group of people should be in the habit of making their lives more comfortable at the expense of the comfort of others. Smoking in bars is a trivial example, admittedly, but I'm uncomfortable with the slippery slope potential of the precedent.
Why do you keep posting this video? It's admittedly a lovely looking visualization of a model of the spread of something from the Fukushima plant, but it lacks any context whatsoever: What do the colors mean? How concentrated are the materials? What materials is this purporting to show the spread of? Is the model valid? Have the results of this visualization largely been borne out by the actual measurements and analysis that the NOAA team did?
Anybody with a brain knows "that radioactive shit is going to spread when it's released into the water," and that's really all your visualization shows - that it spreads. It does not establish that there's an elevated risk, or that the situation is not, as the NOAA has concluded, largely harmless due to the huge dilution of the materials in question.
If you are privy to some information backing this video that would contradict the NOAA's findings, by all means share it. If you have nothing, then I'm gonna figure that the NOAA are more qualified to issue a finding on this matter than you & youtube are.
The two long-lived isotopes which might be significantly concentrated are Strontium-90 and Cesium-137.
About 70-80% of ingested strontium is excreted; the remainder is generally absorbed into biochemical pathways where it replaces Calcium. Thus it will primarily be found in the bones of vertebrates and the shells of creatures like clams and isopods. The bioaccumulation in things like clams will tend to be comparatively lower in the "edible tissue", and certainly nowhere near "110,000 times" the surrounding water. The flesh will exhibit some elevated levels of Strontium, but a significantly lower elevation than bone/shell material.
Cesium is slightly more problematic, because it tends to be absorbed into chemical pathways which use Potassium, and thus will be found throughout the body in blood and other tissues. However studies have found that concentration factors range from ~2 to ~35x the concentration of surrounding waters for that, as well.
At the dilution levels we're talking about for this material, you'd have to be more concerned about "bioaccumulation" of the radioactive potassium that occurs naturally in seawater, which represents a much larger proportion of the background radiation dose than any of the materials released, at the concentrations they're present. Realistically, these materials low enough concentrations that you would have to eat nothing but clams harvested from just off the Fukushima coast 3 meals a day for years for there to be any significant increase in your chances of health problems.
As best I can see, yes - the products are much safer than mercury. As best I can tell, from the article and a bit of digging on the big radioisotopes released into the water and air around the Fukushima plant, there's just not a lot to worry about, even as these materials decay.
Cesium 134 decays down to Barium which is highly reactive with water to form Barium Hydroxide, which in turn reacts with Carbon Dioxide to form Barium Carbonate which in turn reacts with acids to form highly water-soluble salts (e.g., Barium Chloride) - which is toxic, but requires a 1-5g dose for toxicity in an 'average' person, and this amount of concentration in other life forms would pretty much render them dead long before they reached your table.
Iodine 131 will decay down to inert Xenon (and rapidly - about 8 day half life). Tellurium 129 has a half life of 6 days, and decays to low-energy Iodine 129, which has a half life in the millions of years, and will eventually decay to inert xenon-129.
Cesium 137 and Strontium 90 are the two "long-lived" isotopes released, and present the largest danger, but the materials are diluted to levels below even background radiation from isotopes normally found in seawater (e.g. Potassium-40), meaning you should be much more worried about naturally occurring radioactive potassium in your fish than you should be about the Cesium and Strontium released by Fukushima.
Not a chemist by training or trade, so feel free to offer corrections, but it certainly doesn't seem like there's much cause for concern.
Wrap the smoker in bubble wrap too!
It is so realistic. It just requires bubble wrap. LOTS and LOTS of bubble wrap.
For somebody so obviously liberal in his leanings, you sure do a good impression of a bigoted asshole. Woody Allen once remarked, "Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem," and it's clear from your commentary that you're just brimming with confidence and certainty in the righteousness of your opinion.
When your entire commentary rests on the assumption "anybody who doesn't agree with me is a backwards rube to be mocked," you pretty much give up any chance at being taken seriously, or of being engaged in a serious attempt at discourse. Your problem - and yes, it is a problem - is that you've almost certainly never made a good-faith attempt to *understand* the positions of people who disagree with you.
Why would people be against a law that only benefits them? I can't speak on behalf of anybody, but I'd expect that it's far more likely to be driven by an objection like "it runs counter to my view of justice and fairness," or "I object to the philosophical underpinnings of this law" than it is to be driven by ignorant religiosity as you've suggested.
But of course, that couldn't be, could it? In your breathtaking arrogance, you've already concluded that you're right, no dissent is valid, and anybody who disagrees with you is automatically assigned the label of "backwoods idiot." I'm glad I'm not as smart as you - it must be enervating, looking down on so many people all the time.
And that is precisely why I don't get it. You say you don't care about the money, and are willing to pay more, so long as healthiness is maximized. But you're not maximizing health this way - maximum health (maximum good for the most people) would be achieved not by banning smoking in restaurants, but by banning smoking altogehter - period, full stop. We've banned other drugs, why not tobacco?
If maximizing health is your goal, why not a full ban on tobacco products? Consider:
-- EVERYBODY is healthier, not just the people who don't smoke;
This is also compatible with the notion of socialized healthcare! Consider:
-- Healthier people are more economically valuable because they are productive;
-- Healthcare costs are lower, meaning more money is freed up to support other social programs (or *gasp* given back to the people it was taxed from to use for whatever purpose they wish);
This maximizes overall health, and it also has the side benefit of minimizing health costs related to smoking, which are shared across all of society in a universal health care scenario. It's also likely, statistically speaking, that lower-income people will smoke / use tobacco products - the people who would most benefit from lower health care costs (and thus increased access to health care, either more of it, or cheaper for the same level), or who would most benefit from having an extra $100 in their paycheck each month that wasn't tied up in feeding their nicotine addiction and defraying the social cost of healthcare through healthcare taxes.
And if it's not about "maximizing health for all," but about "maximizing health for ME," then how does the law change anything about the situation? You're free to choose not to smoke; you're free to avoid places where smokers congregate; you always have been; so other than legislating a group of people into a second class citizen status - "We want you to have the freedom to smoke, we just don't want you to do that filthy shit around US, you disgusting addicts!" - what has banning smoking in restaurants accomplished? What makes the health of at-will employees of a restaurant more deserving of legislative protection than the health of smokers, who have been sadly tricked into becoming addicts by deceptive and manipulative advertising, through no fault of their own?
No, if you're banning smoking for health reasons, it's pretty clear that you need to ban smoking entirely, or you need to reconcile "everybody needs to pay for everybody to have healthcare" with "you're free to make bad and stupid health decisions that drive up everybody's costs, and result in reduced quality of care for everybody" - i.e., "You can't take a dump in the publicly maintained park, because it shits up the scenery for everybody."
At some point, all matters of taxation and entitlements and socialized costs become a financial analysis, no matter how much you may wish it weren't and protest that it isn't about dollars and euros and yen. If you're going to force other people to pay for a person's healthcare, you should also be willing to force that person to use that healthcare money wisely.
See, I don't get this, it seems like a remarkable double standard to me. You're not allowed to smoke in public places, because it'll hurt other people, but you're allowed to smoke at home, because it only hurts yourself. Except, in hurting yourself, you're driving up the costs of healthcare for everybody - especially in a "universal health care" situation.
This hurts other people by forcing them to pay for your unhealthy choices, leading to either reduced quality of care for them, or higher prices == higher taxes == less money for their own discretionary spending. If society has the right to stop you from smoking in public because it'll hurt someone else, don't they have the right to stop you from smoking in your home, and hurting yourself, and hurting other people through higher healthcare costs in this manner?
And if you maintain they *don't* have the right to stop you from doing this... how do you reconcile that with the fact that you have no problem curtailing their liberties in one venue, but not in another? Honest question about how you can be both for public smoking bans, and against private smoking bans - I don't see a logical way to reconcile them, if the justification for a smoking ban is simply that "it harms other people."
Yes, you're right. That's often the argument. What I'm curious about though is this: if we're so eager to protect the health of people from second-hand smoke, why aren't we eager to ban "first-hand" smoke as well? Why is tobacco not outlawed entirely?
As we move closer and closer to socialized health plans, the cost of smoking will be socialized as well: why have I heard very little call for an outright ban on cigarettes and other tobacco products? Seems like it'd be a great way to help manage costs of universal health care, wouldn't it? After all, does somebody have the "right" to smoke, if I'm going to be made to pay for their emphysema or cancer treatments down the line? Should *I* be able to smoke, knowing the cost it will incur on my fellow citizens?
This is an honest question. We're quick to ban smoking, but why not just stop it at the source? Everybody would be healthier for it, and it would lower health care costs. Win-win, isn't it?
I like how you declined to address any point he made, in favor of simple ad hominem.
I had my doubts, but I'm convinced of the righteousness of your cause, now.
Anecdotal, but:
First-gen iPhone: still working, still in daily use. Battery life has suffered a bit, but I don't use it heavily enough to care. About 4 years old.
5th-gen iPod: still in regular use, now about 6 years old. Again, battery life has declined a bit, but I use the iPod in my car most of the time, where it's connected to a power/usb cable, so battery life isn't *that* important to me.
MacBook Pro: bought in early 2006. Still good enough for most purposes, needed a single repair to a faulty spring inside the power button, which was occasionally getting stuck instead of springing back.
Mac Mini: bought late 2005. Hard drive failed in 2010, still in use as a small file server on my home network.
I know at least 5 or 6 other people with Apple gear who've had similarly long lifespans, far beyond any warranty period available through AppleCare. And there's a reason why Apple has consistently high ratings for customer satisfaction and reliability. For all that people love to claim it's overpriced junk, it tends to last - and hold its value pretty well, too.
Wow. Everything you know about suburban & rural america, you learned by watching MSNBC. Congratulations, you're an idiot.
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Yes. Tens or hundreds of thousands of troops deployed. At worst, a few dozen cases of people doing awful things. (Please note: "shooting someone" doesn't mean "atrocity," friend. Accidental killings do happen, as unfortunate as that may be.)
Violent crime (murder, rape, assault, robbery) in the US is about 400 incidents per 100,000 population in one year - 2010. Take 150,000 people from the population at random, and plunk them down somewhere, and you'd expect that number to be somewhere around 600 violent crime incidents per year.
Please show us even 100 separate cases of the 600 or so "expected" violent crimes from 2010? Then do the same for every year we've been there.