> BTW, I would have pulled over and dragged the couch off the highway myself, and then simply driven away.;)
Then you either misunderstand the road I am talking about,.... or you are batshit crazy.:)
I was on rt 2, about 3-4 miles outside of Boston. It was a mostly empty road, but it was very dark and people fly through there at anywhere from 55-75 MPH. I might try crossing that highway if I really had to... but I wouldn't spend any amount of time out in the middle of it.
That and, I was going a good clip when I flew by it. I didn't even have to slow down to note the mile marker and call.... to do something about it would have meant stopping...then going back to it.... then dragging it off the road as a single person with nobody to keep traffic away? Not without a second set of hands and some rod flares handy...at the very least.
> Example: If I witness a violent crime, then yes, I will do the right thing and report what I know. This is the exception rather than the rule. > > Example: If I am rear-ended by a careless driver resulting in a dent on my bumper, I tell him not to worry about it and move on. This is the rule rather > than the exception.
With you on those.... one exception.... I would add violation of the safety of others to 'violent'. The 3 times I have ever called 911.... a dumpster fire I drove by and saw down in the projects, a desk in the middle of the highway at night (or a couch, I couldn't tell at that speed in the dark). The third was this woman who I saw in a parking lot who was way way too fucked up to be driving, who I first thought was just sitting in the car with the A/C on to cool off....then she put the car in gear (after 10 minutes of heavy opiate nods) and drove off.... not cool... especially not in the middle of the day. I have far less problem with someone with a buzz on driving home at 2 am than someone in the middle of the day or so fucked up on anything that they can't even remain awake...I mean come on... its one thing to think the limits are set to low, but... actually passing out is clearly over any defensible line.
Well...yes, some of us are Anarchists. However, I wouldn't say "the government" shouldn't be allowed to "enforce any laws". Its not exactly like that...
I would say I don't feel any need to call any particular organisation "the government". I have no problem with any organisation existing and making decisions to do things, in principle.
However, I don't really give any special significance to the law either. The law is a set of someone's rules. A person may choose to follow it or not. Now, as for "enforcement"..... well I don't believe anyone has the right to enforce their rules on others.
That said... when they go after murderers, rapists, fraudsters, and other assorted true miscreants who break the social contract by infringing upon others rights, then I see no need to protest. Let them and the jack booted thugs from the government have eachother.
However, when they go after peaceful people. Drug users, prostitutes and other consenting adults.... well... that I have an issue with. I recognise no such right, of anyone or any group.
Are you sure there isn't a one of the thousands of local and federal laws you haven't broken? Spank your wife? That is criminal here, even if she likes it and asks you to do it. Did you break any of the sodomy laws before they were struck down? Never smoke pot I take it...that can be anything from a civil infraction to a felony depending on the details. In fact, even where its a civil infraction and $100 fine for the pot... you can still be charged criminally for the paraphernalia.
Are you sure there is no pot in your car? Before you answer, are you sure no passenger dropped any? How about your shoes? Do you check your shoes every time you get in the car to be sure you didn't step on a roach that someone tossed out a window? Because that little roach, carried in on the bottom of your shoe.... could be your ticket to the slammer.
Yes yes but any large enough org starts to stop acting like a single company at some point, and more like a country. Sure there is some central group who speak for everyone and claim singular direction and vision, when the reality is, they are full of different and often competing interests.
It would surprise me more if they had all of the source for all of their software hosted on an unsecured FTP server...just because its unlikely there is a single company-wide repository...or even if there is one.... that it, in fact, contains everything it should. Hell I would not be surprised if there were several unsecured ftp servers, each run by individuals or groups who, if asked, would say they are the single central repository.... and when asked about eachother, don't even know that they exist.
I was just modeling a project that I was working on THIS MORNING using it.
My only issue, and I think this may be because of how i ran it, was I couldn't export my circuit. I hit export, and it gave me a netlist, but I couldn't copy/paste it. Maybe if I download the whole package and run it outside of my browser?
I have played with ngspice and easy_spice a bit. The learning curve is steep. I wanted to model some current sources and mirrors. Nothing too fancy but, getting the right models, then looking at output graphs and interpreting them was a lot more work than I needed for this project.
As it is, just messing around quickly with it, I found some failure modes that I am going to have to think about (if one transistor fails open, the rest of the mirrors run out of control.... seems worth putting some backup limiting on the mirror)
Spice will be an invaluable tool, and I expect to use it as I move on, but, the this one is perfect for experimenting and building a model of what is happening.
Why would we want to support it? Because fuck them. They have been stealing our money for years now, and mortgaging the country down the drain all to support a few overly wealthy people's financial interests and personal pipe dreams.
The moment he sent those files was the first REAL service he did for the american people, when he became a whistle blower and started sending out their secrets so we could see what they have been doing behind our backs while they steal our resources to do it.
Bradley Manning is a true American Hero. One of the very very few amongst a legion of slaves who do little more than what they are told while they pat themselves on the back for guarding freedom.
I hope they give him the Nobel Peace Prize, he is far more deserving than that war monger Obama.
I can't speak for the whole community of universities, nor have I worked at one in a few years. That said, I think there are cultural issues here. WHen I worked at a University, we even debated whether someone would have a legitimate reason to receive email viruses.
At the place I worked, there was NO firewall. Well..there was, but, it was opt in, only specific critical hosts were behind it. Users were not, the main service machines were not.
It was seen as a matter of intellectual freedom and not wanting to restrict anything that might be legitimate research. However, as I started with...its cultural. We had people in IT who were long time academics and who were used to this and even championed it.
Scammers can be weird. I actually go scammed IRL a while back. Actually lived with the guy for about 2 months before I figured out what he was up to and kicked him to the curb. He was excellent at it too.... he was the kind that would claim to be a law student to everyone, could tell you his course load, what he was taking, who the professor was.... all correct for the school that he wasn't going to (eventually I called them to verify he was a student, they said they had no such student).
I found out he had been scamming his previous landlord (writing bad checks, and stealing the bounce notices from the mail), and even scammed the bar he worked at (the only real job he had as far as I could figure) into giving him a $3000 payment up front to redo their website!
Anyway after we confronted him, he denied it all. He left... leaving me with no repayment of rent he owed from the previous month, and a $900 phone bill that he charged up on my landline while I was at work.
Then... for a few weeks later, every few days he would IM me....as if nothing happened. "Hey hows it going" and even "its my birthday today, but I am kind bummed". It was a bit...surreal at times.
Actually HPV is spread by contact, not just sex. I think the HPV vaccine would benefit greatly by disassociation from sex. HPV is the same virus that causes warts on feet, hands, and many other places. Sure specific strains tend to go after specific areas but.... it hardly takes actual sex to spread it.
In fact, HPV is highly transmissible. I would actually be shocked if we didn't find that some (possibly small percentage of) people get active HPV infections of the normally sexually transmitted strains in other areas, like hands and feet. HSV 1 & 2 can each infect the other's prefered location (yes folks, up to 30% of genital herpes infections are the "oral" strain)... with rare infections on hands, eyes, and other places.
I think you are asking entirely the wrong questions. No, legality doesn't directly matter to the addict. However, it matters to the supply chain that brings him his drugs. Legality is why heroin and OCs are available, and opium and codine are not. Many addicts would choose safer drugs and other routes of administration if they had the option.
Even the swiss heroin study shows addicts can hold down jobs if the heroin is provided to them at a price similar to what we would expect it to be on an open market. They didn't even explore the real situation that would develop if not for prohibition.
Wouldn't it be better if he never picked up a needle? What about the 50% of burn victims who are there because of incompetent meth production? Wouldn't their lives be better if they could have bought a bottle of pills at a reasonable price?
Addiction is a problem, but its a problem magnified by prohibition. How much faster could addiction be dealt with without stigma? If a person could say to his doctor or family "yah Ive been taking alot of this lately". Alcoholism is bad enough but at least people can admit to it and talk about it.
Would his life have been improved by jail time? Maybe getting HIV sharing needles in jail? Sharing needles, another great tradition caused by prohibition. First driving up the prices until people turn to IV use because high strength product is all their dealers will supply and they can afford... then making needles unavailable or dangerous by labeling them as paraphenelia...leading to more time in jail.
Yes.... addiction is bad, its terrible.... but prohibition makes in unmanageable and life destroying.
I want to save lives. None of those meth cooks needed to burn. Nobody needed to be murdered in turf wars. Nobody needed to be denied finanacial aid for college over a few joints. This is atrocity that makes a bad situation worst.
Ask yourself this...if your son didn't have a supportive family, where would he be now? Would his life be made better by going to jail? Lot of people in those situations. Not everyone is middle class and has the support network to recover. They are the ones who really get ground up in this system. Not the middle class kids with strong families who get spared from the real horrors.
I am not oblivious, I am saying its not up to you, or anyone else to engineer the society that you want. You want to use state power to go after violent acts, more power to you, but just to make the society you want? No way. I do not consent. Keep your laws off my, and everybody elses bodies, they don't belong there....and they are getting quite bloodied that way.
Drug use and addiction is a personal medical matter. A matter for families, a matter for doctors and counselling. It is not a matter for police and courts.
There is plenty of evidence that addiction, while it is a problem, is not as big a problem as you are making it out to be. Addicts hold down jobs, addicts do all sorts of normal every day things. Addiction is a bigger problem for some than others and all of the problems of addiction are made worst by prohibition.
So are you saying not a single alcoholic out there is in a loving relationship? Not a single tobacco smoker? Not a single heroin addict? Really? I call bulshit. Extreme cases, sure. However those cases are made worst by prohibition too.
You think opiate addiction was as bad before IV use? Before opium was squeezed out of the market for stronger and cheaper to transport drugs? You really think opium addiction is anywhere near as debilitating as IV heroin use? Maybe next you will tell us how oral amphetamine use is exactly the same as oral use too.
I am all for helping people who need and want it.... but when you just come up with excuses to decide someone doesn't deserve to make decisions for themselves because you applied some blanket label to them, I have an issue with that.
Well for starters, stop calling them "criminals". This "crime" exists only in the law. It has no victim. In fact, the law has victims, the users.
The law has driven up the price. Where there were once a few addicts who popped pills, or smoked some opium, we now have IV drug users. Where the worst people used to be was a bit lazy and checked out, we now have desperate people commiting petty crimes to get by. This is the result of the prohibition not the drug.
The evidence keeps mounting that prohibition is the cause of the real issues. Yet, the drug users are still the criminals, and not the politicians and cops who created this situation. Some areas report 50% of burn victims are the result of meth labs. Meth labs that exist only because of prohibition. 50% of burn victims are victims of prohibition. How many of those thousands of people would still have ended up there? 1 or 2? If that!
The majority of the problem is the situation. Blaming people for playing the game as it is set up for them is ridiculous. The law created the situation, the blame resides in only one place...bad policy making.
Yup, reminds me of the friend of mine who got in trouble with the bank because he noticed an extra $500 in his account (a lot for him at the time), and immediately withdrew it and spent the money. The bank then took the money back from his account, leaving him negative, and demanded the money.
Dumbass. Though, at the same time.... I don't know if I feel right calling what she did stealing. It was her account, if someone is moving that kind of money in her name, I think she should feel she has every right to take that money and, at least, "hold onto it". Maybe not keep it, but, put a kabosh on the activity at least and hold it to find out whats really going on.
She may be wrong to keep it.... but, certainly not to put a stop to grab the money and hold onto it until an explanation can be found for why it is there, regardless of who put it there or why.
Well it was what made me sit back and think. I had to A) worry that they might get mad and retaliate...afterall they had my address and B) Would they even send a real $500 or would they just send counterfits anyway?
Its not like it was a sure thing. Also, this was several years back.... hmm I probably still have the IM logs somewhere....
Guy was trying to contact me for weeks. It was pretty amusing.
I tried to scam some scammers once, for far less money. I can definitely see how that would feel like a huge triumph.
I had gotten a response to an ad looking for a roomate. This fuckwad strung me along for days before revealing that they intended to pay for the first months rent and security deposit with a travelers check and "could you please cash it and forward the balance to....".
Oh I was fuming. I put the room back on the market, and continued with the scammer as if nothing happened. I told them the first set of travelers checks never arrived, even though they had and i already verified with the post office that they were fake.... then I got the second set....and admited I knew it was a scam.
At this point, things took a turn for the hilarious. Immediately he switched over to admitting it was a scam and....trying to recruit me to help! He claimed he needed a mailing address in the US, and needed someone to send out packages....claimed he would pay $500 per package of letters!
So of course, I told him I would do it but I needed the money up front...fully intending to keep the money and spend the next decade gloating over how I scammed the scammer.... he even told me he could get counterfit bills.... which got me thinking how fun it would be if this all resulted in my getting to report him to the SS.
Of course, the whole thing broke down when he wanted to talk on the phone....and I wasn't willing to give out my real phone number. I suppose he already had my address so it hardly mattered, but, I didn't want harassing calls either.
I think the article, and student who proposed it, hit the nail right on the head:
If we can't defend against an attack, perhaps the rational response is to reduce the incentives to attack. Rather than designing space suits, maybe we should focus on ways to eliminate the reasons to annihilate us. Rather than stirring up a hornet's nest and then hiding behind a bush, maybe the solution is to avoid the causes of rage. Crazies, of course, can't be reasoned with. But we can reduce the incentives to become a crazy. We could reduce the reasonableness - from a certain perspective - for finding ways to destroy us.
I think there is a lot of truth to that. Its not hard to imagine the mindset that would lead a person down the path to doing terrible things. It doesn't even really require anything that I would call particularly insane. Its not hard to put together some anti-US rhetoric, for example. All you need to do is do things like point to the dichotomy between claiming respect for human rights and calling out others for torture, then having a torture program of our own. Starting wars...which can never truely be fully controlled and will always result in atrocities....every one of which is a recruitung tool for those who would claim such tactics.
Reducing the reasonableness, from other perspectives than our own, of finding ways to destroy us is not exactly hard, however, it does require actually giving a shit, which doesn't seem to be compatible with the belief that you are the best and the strongest and don't have to care.
Of course.... right or wrong.... people can still be arrested and made to fight for "right", they can still find themselves dragged through courts for months or years on end.
Personally, I have no respect for the federal government so I say....give em hell. Even if they win back their freedom and their federal power to molest people as a precondition for otherwise legal travel.... at least they will have to fight for it, and at least they will have headaches and disruptions in the mean time.
Plus it makes them look like jackasses who disrespect state law. Anything that drives a wedge into the union is A-OK in my book. We don't need an empire, anything to bring it down!
I don't know if I would truely call Ron a corporatist. The libertarian philosophy is far more radical than it gets credit. In many ways his ideas are very bad for large corps.
The federal government is, essentially, a one stop shop. If you want to do business everywhere in the US, you want to deal with them because they can set policy. Take away their regulatory abilities, and it all reverts to the states, which means that one stop shop becomes 50, which benefits the local businesses in each area over that of large multinational corps, who now have 50 times the number of palms to grease, if they intend to hit every state.
Thats just the tip of the iceberg though. He definitely sounds more Libertarian ideologue than corporatist. Hell, if he was really a corporatist, then why do they do everything they can to not support him? He isn't the one getting the huge corporate sponsorship.
Slashdot Mirror
> BTW, I would have pulled over and dragged the couch off the highway myself, and then simply driven away. ;)
Then you either misunderstand the road I am talking about,.... or you are batshit crazy. :)
I was on rt 2, about 3-4 miles outside of Boston. It was a mostly empty road, but it was very dark and people fly through there at anywhere from 55-75 MPH. I might try crossing that highway if I really had to... but I wouldn't spend any amount of time out in the middle of it.
That and, I was going a good clip when I flew by it. I didn't even have to slow down to note the mile marker and call.... to do something about it would have meant stopping...then going back to it.... then dragging it off the road as a single person with nobody to keep traffic away? Not without a second set of hands and some rod flares handy...at the very least.
> Example: If I witness a violent crime, then yes, I will do the right thing and report what I know. This is the exception rather than the rule.
>
> Example: If I am rear-ended by a careless driver resulting in a dent on my bumper, I tell him not to worry about it and move on. This is the rule rather
> than the exception.
With you on those.... one exception.... I would add violation of the safety of others to 'violent'. The 3 times I have ever called 911.... a dumpster fire I drove by and saw down in the projects, a desk in the middle of the highway at night (or a couch, I couldn't tell at that speed in the dark). The third was this woman who I saw in a parking lot who was way way too fucked up to be driving, who I first thought was just sitting in the car with the A/C on to cool off....then she put the car in gear (after 10 minutes of heavy opiate nods) and drove off.... not cool... especially not in the middle of the day. I have far less problem with someone with a buzz on driving home at 2 am than someone in the middle of the day or so fucked up on anything that they can't even remain awake...I mean come on... its one thing to think the limits are set to low, but... actually passing out is clearly over any defensible line.
My condolences.
Well...yes, some of us are Anarchists. However, I wouldn't say "the government" shouldn't be allowed to "enforce any laws". Its not exactly like that...
I would say I don't feel any need to call any particular organisation "the government". I have no problem with any organisation existing and making decisions to do things, in principle.
However, I don't really give any special significance to the law either. The law is a set of someone's rules. A person may choose to follow it or not. Now, as for "enforcement"..... well I don't believe anyone has the right to enforce their rules on others.
That said... when they go after murderers, rapists, fraudsters, and other assorted true miscreants who break the social contract by infringing upon others rights, then I see no need to protest. Let them and the jack booted thugs from the government have eachother.
However, when they go after peaceful people. Drug users, prostitutes and other consenting adults.... well... that I have an issue with. I recognise no such right, of anyone or any group.
No its not.
Smoking pot is criminal activity.
Murder is criminal activity.
Criminal activity is not all created equal.
Are you sure there isn't a one of the thousands of local and federal laws you haven't broken? Spank your wife? That is criminal here, even if she likes it and asks you to do it. Did you break any of the sodomy laws before they were struck down? Never smoke pot I take it...that can be anything from a civil infraction to a felony depending on the details. In fact, even where its a civil infraction and $100 fine for the pot... you can still be charged criminally for the paraphernalia.
Are you sure there is no pot in your car? Before you answer, are you sure no passenger dropped any? How about your shoes? Do you check your shoes every time you get in the car to be sure you didn't step on a roach that someone tossed out a window? Because that little roach, carried in on the bottom of your shoe.... could be your ticket to the slammer.
Yes yes but any large enough org starts to stop acting like a single company at some point, and more like a country. Sure there is some central group who speak for everyone and claim singular direction and vision, when the reality is, they are full of different and often competing interests.
It would surprise me more if they had all of the source for all of their software hosted on an unsecured FTP server...just because its unlikely there is a single company-wide repository...or even if there is one.... that it, in fact, contains everything it should. Hell I would not be surprised if there were several unsecured ftp servers, each run by individuals or groups who, if asked, would say they are the single central repository.... and when asked about eachother, don't even know that they exist.
Dilbert explains the concept well:
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-03-05/?CmtOrder=Rating&CmtDir=DESC
Sony are you ok? Are you ok Sony?
And all humor begins with not taking things too seriously.
Is that the physicists equivalent of rubbing two sticks together?
I was just modeling a project that I was working on THIS MORNING using it.
My only issue, and I think this may be because of how i ran it, was I couldn't export my circuit. I hit export, and it gave me a netlist, but I couldn't copy/paste it. Maybe if I download the whole package and run it outside of my browser?
I have played with ngspice and easy_spice a bit. The learning curve is steep. I wanted to model some current sources and mirrors. Nothing too fancy but, getting the right models, then looking at output graphs and interpreting them was a lot more work than I needed for this project.
As it is, just messing around quickly with it, I found some failure modes that I am going to have to think about (if one transistor fails open, the rest of the mirrors run out of control.... seems worth putting some backup limiting on the mirror)
Spice will be an invaluable tool, and I expect to use it as I move on, but, the this one is perfect for experimenting and building a model of what is happening.
Why would we want to support it? Because fuck them. They have been stealing our money for years now, and mortgaging the country down the drain all to support a few overly wealthy people's financial interests and personal pipe dreams.
The moment he sent those files was the first REAL service he did for the american people, when he became a whistle blower and started sending out their secrets so we could see what they have been doing behind our backs while they steal our resources to do it.
Bradley Manning is a true American Hero. One of the very very few amongst a legion of slaves who do little more than what they are told while they pat themselves on the back for guarding freedom.
I hope they give him the Nobel Peace Prize, he is far more deserving than that war monger Obama.
I can't speak for the whole community of universities, nor have I worked at one in a few years. That said, I think there are cultural issues here. WHen I worked at a University, we even debated whether someone would have a legitimate reason to receive email viruses.
At the place I worked, there was NO firewall. Well..there was, but, it was opt in, only specific critical hosts were behind it. Users were not, the main service machines were not.
It was seen as a matter of intellectual freedom and not wanting to restrict anything that might be legitimate research. However, as I started with...its cultural. We had people in IT who were long time academics and who were used to this and even championed it.
Scammers can be weird. I actually go scammed IRL a while back. Actually lived with the guy for about 2 months before I figured out what he was up to and kicked him to the curb. He was excellent at it too.... he was the kind that would claim to be a law student to everyone, could tell you his course load, what he was taking, who the professor was.... all correct for the school that he wasn't going to (eventually I called them to verify he was a student, they said they had no such student).
I found out he had been scamming his previous landlord (writing bad checks, and stealing the bounce notices from the mail), and even scammed the bar he worked at (the only real job he had as far as I could figure) into giving him a $3000 payment up front to redo their website!
Anyway after we confronted him, he denied it all. He left... leaving me with no repayment of rent he owed from the previous month, and a $900 phone bill that he charged up on my landline while I was at work.
Then... for a few weeks later, every few days he would IM me....as if nothing happened. "Hey hows it going" and even "its my birthday today, but I am kind bummed". It was a bit...surreal at times.
Actually HPV is spread by contact, not just sex. I think the HPV vaccine would benefit greatly by disassociation from sex. HPV is the same virus that causes warts on feet, hands, and many other places. Sure specific strains tend to go after specific areas but.... it hardly takes actual sex to spread it.
In fact, HPV is highly transmissible. I would actually be shocked if we didn't find that some (possibly small percentage of) people get active HPV infections of the normally sexually transmitted strains in other areas, like hands and feet. HSV 1 & 2 can each infect the other's prefered location (yes folks, up to 30% of genital herpes infections are the "oral" strain)... with rare infections on hands, eyes, and other places.
I think you are asking entirely the wrong questions. No, legality doesn't directly matter to the addict. However, it matters to the supply chain that brings him his drugs. Legality is why heroin and OCs are available, and opium and codine are not. Many addicts would choose safer drugs and other routes of administration if they had the option.
Even the swiss heroin study shows addicts can hold down jobs if the heroin is provided to them at a price similar to what we would expect it to be on an open market. They didn't even explore the real situation that would develop if not for prohibition.
Wouldn't it be better if he never picked up a needle? What about the 50% of burn victims who are there because of incompetent meth production? Wouldn't their lives be better if they could have bought a bottle of pills at a reasonable price?
Addiction is a problem, but its a problem magnified by prohibition. How much faster could addiction be dealt with without stigma? If a person could say to his doctor or family "yah Ive been taking alot of this lately". Alcoholism is bad enough but at least people can admit to it and talk about it.
Would his life have been improved by jail time? Maybe getting HIV sharing needles in jail? Sharing needles, another great tradition caused by prohibition. First driving up the prices until people turn to IV use because high strength product is all their dealers will supply and they can afford... then making needles unavailable or dangerous by labeling them as paraphenelia...leading to more time in jail.
Yes.... addiction is bad, its terrible.... but prohibition makes in unmanageable and life destroying.
I want to save lives. None of those meth cooks needed to burn. Nobody needed to be murdered in turf wars. Nobody needed to be denied finanacial aid for college over a few joints. This is atrocity that makes a bad situation worst.
Ask yourself this...if your son didn't have a supportive family, where would he be now? Would his life be made better by going to jail? Lot of people in those situations. Not everyone is middle class and has the support network to recover. They are the ones who really get ground up in this system. Not the middle class kids with strong families who get spared from the real horrors.
I am not oblivious, I am saying its not up to you, or anyone else to engineer the society that you want. You want to use state power to go after violent acts, more power to you, but just to make the society you want? No way. I do not consent. Keep your laws off my, and everybody elses bodies, they don't belong there....and they are getting quite bloodied that way.
Drug use and addiction is a personal medical matter. A matter for families, a matter for doctors and counselling. It is not a matter for police and courts.
There is plenty of evidence that addiction, while it is a problem, is not as big a problem as you are making it out to be. Addicts hold down jobs, addicts do all sorts of normal every day things. Addiction is a bigger problem for some than others and all of the problems of addiction are made worst by prohibition.
So are you saying not a single alcoholic out there is in a loving relationship? Not a single tobacco smoker? Not a single heroin addict? Really? I call bulshit. Extreme cases, sure. However those cases are made worst by prohibition too.
You think opiate addiction was as bad before IV use? Before opium was squeezed out of the market for stronger and cheaper to transport drugs? You really think opium addiction is anywhere near as debilitating as IV heroin use? Maybe next you will tell us how oral amphetamine use is exactly the same as oral use too.
I am all for helping people who need and want it.... but when you just come up with excuses to decide someone doesn't deserve to make decisions for themselves because you applied some blanket label to them, I have an issue with that.
Well for starters, stop calling them "criminals". This "crime" exists only in the law. It has no victim. In fact, the law has victims, the users.
The law has driven up the price. Where there were once a few addicts who popped pills, or smoked some opium, we now have IV drug users. Where the worst people used to be was a bit lazy and checked out, we now have desperate people commiting petty crimes to get by. This is the result of the prohibition not the drug.
The evidence keeps mounting that prohibition is the cause of the real issues. Yet, the drug users are still the criminals, and not the politicians and cops who created this situation. Some areas report 50% of burn victims are the result of meth labs. Meth labs that exist only because of prohibition. 50% of burn victims are victims of prohibition. How many of those thousands of people would still have ended up there? 1 or 2? If that!
The majority of the problem is the situation. Blaming people for playing the game as it is set up for them is ridiculous. The law created the situation, the blame resides in only one place...bad policy making.
Yup, reminds me of the friend of mine who got in trouble with the bank because he noticed an extra $500 in his account (a lot for him at the time), and immediately withdrew it and spent the money. The bank then took the money back from his account, leaving him negative, and demanded the money.
Dumbass. Though, at the same time.... I don't know if I feel right calling what she did stealing. It was her account, if someone is moving that kind of money in her name, I think she should feel she has every right to take that money and, at least, "hold onto it". Maybe not keep it, but, put a kabosh on the activity at least and hold it to find out whats really going on.
She may be wrong to keep it.... but, certainly not to put a stop to grab the money and hold onto it until an explanation can be found for why it is there, regardless of who put it there or why.
I am pretty sure it didn't exist then, if it did, I didn't know about it. This was at least 6 years ago, possibly more.
Well it was what made me sit back and think. I had to A) worry that they might get mad and retaliate...afterall they had my address and B) Would they even send a real $500 or would they just send counterfits anyway?
Its not like it was a sure thing. Also, this was several years back.... hmm I probably still have the IM logs somewhere....
Guy was trying to contact me for weeks. It was pretty amusing.
I tried to scam some scammers once, for far less money. I can definitely see how that would feel like a huge triumph.
I had gotten a response to an ad looking for a roomate. This fuckwad strung me along for days before revealing that they intended to pay for the first months rent and security deposit with a travelers check and "could you please cash it and forward the balance to....".
Oh I was fuming. I put the room back on the market, and continued with the scammer as if nothing happened. I told them the first set of travelers checks never arrived, even though they had and i already verified with the post office that they were fake.... then I got the second set....and admited I knew it was a scam.
At this point, things took a turn for the hilarious. Immediately he switched over to admitting it was a scam and....trying to recruit me to help! He claimed he needed a mailing address in the US, and needed someone to send out packages....claimed he would pay $500 per package of letters!
So of course, I told him I would do it but I needed the money up front...fully intending to keep the money and spend the next decade gloating over how I scammed the scammer.... he even told me he could get counterfit bills.... which got me thinking how fun it would be if this all resulted in my getting to report him to the SS.
Of course, the whole thing broke down when he wanted to talk on the phone....and I wasn't willing to give out my real phone number. I suppose he already had my address so it hardly mattered, but, I didn't want harassing calls either.
Have you read Lawrence Lessig's "Insanely Destructive Devices": http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.04/view.html?pg=5
I think the article, and student who proposed it, hit the nail right on the head:
I think there is a lot of truth to that. Its not hard to imagine the mindset that would lead a person down the path to doing terrible things. It doesn't even really require anything that I would call particularly insane. Its not hard to put together some anti-US rhetoric, for example. All you need to do is do things like point to the dichotomy between claiming respect for human rights and calling out others for torture, then having a torture program of our own. Starting wars...which can never truely be fully controlled and will always result in atrocities....every one of which is a recruitung tool for those who would claim such tactics.
Reducing the reasonableness, from other perspectives than our own, of finding ways to destroy us is not exactly hard, however, it does require actually giving a shit, which doesn't seem to be compatible with the belief that you are the best and the strongest and don't have to care.
Of course.... right or wrong.... people can still be arrested and made to fight for "right", they can still find themselves dragged through courts for months or years on end.
Personally, I have no respect for the federal government so I say....give em hell. Even if they win back their freedom and their federal power to molest people as a precondition for otherwise legal travel.... at least they will have to fight for it, and at least they will have headaches and disruptions in the mean time.
Plus it makes them look like jackasses who disrespect state law. Anything that drives a wedge into the union is A-OK in my book. We don't need an empire, anything to bring it down!
I don't know if I would truely call Ron a corporatist. The libertarian philosophy is far more radical than it gets credit. In many ways his ideas are very bad for large corps.
The federal government is, essentially, a one stop shop. If you want to do business everywhere in the US, you want to deal with them because they can set policy. Take away their regulatory abilities, and it all reverts to the states, which means that one stop shop becomes 50, which benefits the local businesses in each area over that of large multinational corps, who now have 50 times the number of palms to grease, if they intend to hit every state.
Thats just the tip of the iceberg though. He definitely sounds more Libertarian ideologue than corporatist. Hell, if he was really a corporatist, then why do they do everything they can to not support him? He isn't the one getting the huge corporate sponsorship.