Prevents, no....but there is nothing that ever prevents such things. The best we can ever hope to do is add hurdles in front of such changes.
Our constitution, for example, what stops congress from declaring it invalid? Nothing really except its own clauses. It is just an agreement. Now that isn't to say they are likely to get away with it. It isn't to say it wouldn't divide the country. In fact, it would do those things...which is the major hurdle to them just "changing their mind".
Likewise, if the Monarch signs a bill put before her which reserves her own power to change it, which puts specific and onerous requirements on parliament in order to change it.... then it is what it is, a new law.
What is to stop them from going back on that and just putting a new bill before the Monarch just like that to nullify it? The same nothing that is stopping congress here: Only the implications of doing so. Implications created by the promises in the document itself.
In the end that is all a constitution is. Its a document which declares the legitimacy of the government and lays out a number of promises to the people about how power will be used; and how these promises can be changed should the need arise. That is all it really is.
They can do that, and with time, those promises will become so ingrained that they will catch appropriate rations of shit should they violate them, and hopefully risk losing their own power.
However, that isn't really the end of the story is it? After a claim or two it isn't unheard of for an insurance company to drop a customer, or raise rates. It also isn't unheard of for Insurance companies to mandate their customers comply with standards higher than that of legal obligation.
Seems to me it would be perfectly legitimate for an insurance company which insures a company that is distributing software to take appropriate precautions commensurate with industry best practices or else void their policy.
If you want an example of this, many films often license all music clips they use, regardless of whether the length or context would actually require it legally, because the insurance companies will not insure the film producers otherwise.
"Oh you you are being sued over a loss due to software you released which didn't encrypt stored passwords" "That is correct" "You are not covered for that; and now your policy is cancelled. Have a nice day." "Wait; Do you have a policy for that?" "Yes we do sir, our policy is not to do business with reckless idiots. Can I help you with anything else today?"
> and nothing one Parliament can do that prevents a future Parliament from changing it's mind, with > the single proviso that the current monarch is willing to put their signature to whatever piece of > legislation Parliament puts before them. > The second option is to persuade the current and future monarchs to reserve certain powers
Don't these together suggest a solution: Their parliament could put a constitution before the current monarch to sign, one which gives up certain powers entirely without some unusually hard process (like ours 2/3 majority and ratification by the states) to change.
Its not perfect, certainly ours has been circumvented to a very large extent over time, but, its a starting point; and it is something they could do if they wanted to fix it. Of course, its rare that people work to limit their own powers.
Normally the best you get are the Obama types whose attitude is "Well I shouldn't have and don't want this power, but I wont oppose it, I will just promise not to use it more than I see fit."
Except those same founding fathers were ALSO in the UK when they decided that they had had enough and were going to stop being part of the UK over the whole deal.
The founding father's were UK citizens in what was then the UK. Your argument is invalid.
That was my thought too, but, it should be possible to detect such conditions. The better question is where the threshold is. There may be conditions that fish and marine life would survive where this device may not produce enough air for a human.
I imagine more of a hybrid system where this provides the normal breathing, and a backup tank only for emergency or low oxygen conditions. Even in a condition where it only provides half the oxygen you need, it could still reduce demand on the air tank allowing you to have a smaller tank than you would need otherwise.
Not just any given food source but... there is a base assumption in this simplified "logic" that any once choice is necessarily viable as an only option. What if no member of the set A, B, or C, provides all of the needed nutrients? Sure I can eat A preferencially, but, if I eat it to exclusion, that means that I live chronically with any deficits in what it provides.
Since its unlikely that any given organism can fully distinguish its own nutritional needs compared to a single food source, drawing from multiple food sources to get a blend of nutrient compositions is not a terrible strategy.
Did you see data detailed somewhere? because I wasn't even trying to present the data supporting those conclusions, I was only summarizing the conclusions and the general form of the data that was used to come to them.
I am sure such a discussion of the original relevant studies and their data might be interesting but, it would require actual data and not just my brief summary.
> For the record, they started these investigations after specific requests from Congress to make sure > these nonprofits
I see, and why is it that congress should be making such specific requests and even more so, why is it that the IRS should be listening to them? Congress has many powers, including making the laws and funding the groups that enforce them, and oversight of the same. However, that is not the same as having the power to decide who should be under consideration for enforcement.
It would be one thing if a congressman reported, just like anyone else can, evidence that he thought a specific group was in violation of the law. Sure. However, I see no reason why such a report should be taken as especially likely to be true over anyone else or given any more special priority; nor do I see why they should be able to make broader requests about categories of groups.
All of this pretty clearly falls under executive functions. To allow members of congress to direct executive functions risks the use of those functions for political reasons, which, is clear corruption any way you slice it.
Except that it has been found that one of the single largest predictors of success in the study of math specifically (and I do believe this translates to many other areas) has been whether a person believes in talent and abilities vs learned skills.
That is to say, it was found that people who believe math to be a talent perform worst than people who believe it is a skill that can be mastered with effort.
So if you really think it comes down to "abilities" then just go flip on the TV, you probably aren't going to find abilities in anything if you aren't willing to work at getting them.
> 2. If you want drivers to give you space, do your best to look and act like an incompetent idiot. > Note: this works for motor vehicle operators as well.
This. I don't think people really often appreciate what information they use when driving. Just this morning I was thinking about this on my commute as someone pulled over without signalling. There was an awkward moment where it wasn't clear whether she was avoiding something in the road, or she was distracted/drunk.
It also is the opposite of the first thing my father taught me about riding in the street which was, you shouldn't ride in the street unless you can ride in a straight line, because swerving around distracts drivers.
I notice it all the time, I slow down and give a lot more space to someone riding slowly swerving back and forth a little than I do to a cyclist who is booking down the road in a straight line. Likewise, I grew up on a main road (longest road in one of the most denesly populated cities in the country) I remember the first few times a city bus blew by me at 3 feet; its a little harrowing the first few times...but you get used to it.
In any case, it is a lot more than just whether a person wears a helmet, watch the line their wheels follow, some people really do just swerve back and forth like a shit-faced driver.
The natural consequence of what you are describing then would be that the injury statistics do not change, but the death statistics should. Afterall, if the injury severity is just "shifted down one" then the final category of injury: death, should see a decrease since it has no more severe category to shift from.
but... it seems to me a more effective strategy would involve...I dunno...maybe they should stop funding the gangs by providing them with the profitable drug market to draw from and buy their guns in the first place?
The police and their politician masters created the gangs....again. Just like they did back in the 20s.
Sure but you could still retain the option of double checking with a local PC that you are working on a legitimate block. Such checking wouldn't even have to be mandatory, if even a small but random population of miners in a pool bothered to check, it would make cheating by the operator much harder.
Ok so basically, the pool miners are designed specifically without any controls to prevent the pool operator from cheating? Nice. As I already mentioned in a previous post, that is ridiculous since it would be trivial to set it up such that the individual clients could (if they wanted to), double check to be sure they were mining for a legitimate and not a cheating pool.
Yah, I probably should have lowered it, again, it is an optional and voluntary fee. Still compared to transfering $100 through other means, not terrible. I may be more generous than I need to be sometimes, that doesn't really bother me.
Odd, especially since it would be trivial for the mining client to do a double check. In fact, all it needs to do is to track the current block chain length and last block hash, which has to be the same as the one in the header of whatever block you are currently working on, whether it is in a pool or not.
If the client just kept track of that, cheating should be impossible for the pool admins.
> From my understanding, it's always the same amount, no matter how much you transfer.
Don't get confused.... the amount defined as the default in the client doesn't change. However, it is a setting. You can, if you like, set it to 0 and pay no fee at all, or you can lower it. Depending on the client this might be a global setting or might be able to be overridden on a per transaction basis. Either way, it is always reconfigurable.
Except it is only a perception. How would they pull off such an attack unless the majority of the pool was running a hacked client that specifically ignored the rules? I have mined in a pool (briefly back before ASICs) and the pool doesn't actually have the kind of control over its members, who download their own software and set it up...and then join the pool.
Sure except for the fact that I don't believe this is actually an accurate description of the 'control' a mining pool actually has. Generally people go get their client and join the pool. This sort of control would require that everyone (or most anyway) who joins the pool uses a specialized client designed specifically to ignore the rules of bitcoin and work on a fraudulent block chain.
It can't be done by just pooling together people running the normal clients that everyone else uses. Doing it via a pool like this would either mean tricking lots of people, some of whom are technically saavy and have a vested interest in bitcoin prices not being destroyes so the pool owners can cheat...or by having everybody be in on it... either way making it unlikely they would get away with it unnoticed.
Actually most people just pay the tiny voluntary transaction fee....which the miners scoop up. It is actually a massive implementation not only of a digital economy but of a microtransaction based gift economy as transaction costs are voluntary but default so people do actually pay them.
Last bitcoin transaction I made, I actually double checked the fee.... it worked out to about 50 cents on $100. Seemed quite worth it to me given that paypal would have taken more.
It may not be but I generally prefer youtube links because watching videos anywhere else requires a minute or two of fiddling with my requestpolicy settings to figure out which site is actually hosting the video and allow its player.
> Remember that Anslinger was related to Hearst, through marriage IIRC.
That I did not know.
I guess nothing ever really changes. Hell wasn't it just in the past 2 years that Florida's governor was pushing for drug testing everyone on welfare, and using the drug testing company his Wife owned. He made millions off that, and the program didn't save a dime - it cost somewhere around $7000 for every dollar in revoked benefit that it resulted in.
Not just a bad idea, an ineffective one.....at least he made money hand over fist on the deal (sorry, his wife did...how could I ever confuse the two)
I don't think its entirely fair to just blame the paper industry. After prohibition ended the FBN, precursor to the DEA which was created to enforce alcohol laws, was very involved in pushing for the new anti-marijuana laws.
It seems the laws were the result of a confluence of forces, not the least of which was a government agency with precious little to do that was looking for ways to justify its own job.
Some of the correspondence of the time would be hillarious if not for what it really meant was going on.... Harry Anslinger (FBN chief) was sending out letters to police chiefs around the country asking them to keep tabs on "jazz musicians" because they had a reputation for smoking pot...and how there was going to be some operation to round them all up one day.
Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, jazz musicians, and entertainers. Their satanic music is driven by marijuana, and marijuana smoking by white women makes them want to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and others. It is a drug that causes insanity, criminality, and death â" the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.
Most violence causing drug in the history of mankind..... lol...pot.
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Prevents, no....but there is nothing that ever prevents such things. The best we can ever hope to do is add hurdles in front of such changes.
Our constitution, for example, what stops congress from declaring it invalid? Nothing really except its own clauses. It is just an agreement. Now that isn't to say they are likely to get away with it. It isn't to say it wouldn't divide the country. In fact, it would do those things...which is the major hurdle to them just "changing their mind".
Likewise, if the Monarch signs a bill put before her which reserves her own power to change it, which puts specific and onerous requirements on parliament in order to change it.... then it is what it is, a new law.
What is to stop them from going back on that and just putting a new bill before the Monarch just like that to nullify it? The same nothing that is stopping congress here: Only the implications of doing so. Implications created by the promises in the document itself.
In the end that is all a constitution is. Its a document which declares the legitimacy of the government and lays out a number of promises to the people about how power will be used; and how these promises can be changed should the need arise. That is all it really is.
They can do that, and with time, those promises will become so ingrained that they will catch appropriate rations of shit should they violate them, and hopefully risk losing their own power.
However, that isn't really the end of the story is it? After a claim or two it isn't unheard of for an insurance company to drop a customer, or raise rates. It also isn't unheard of for Insurance companies to mandate their customers comply with standards higher than that of legal obligation.
Seems to me it would be perfectly legitimate for an insurance company which insures a company that is distributing software to take appropriate precautions commensurate with industry best practices or else void their policy.
If you want an example of this, many films often license all music clips they use, regardless of whether the length or context would actually require it legally, because the insurance companies will not insure the film producers otherwise.
"Oh you you are being sued over a loss due to software you released which didn't encrypt stored passwords"
"That is correct"
"You are not covered for that; and now your policy is cancelled. Have a nice day."
"Wait; Do you have a policy for that?"
"Yes we do sir, our policy is not to do business with reckless idiots. Can I help you with anything else today?"
> and nothing one Parliament can do that prevents a future Parliament from changing it's mind, with
> the single proviso that the current monarch is willing to put their signature to whatever piece of
> legislation Parliament puts before them.
> The second option is to persuade the current and future monarchs to reserve certain powers
Don't these together suggest a solution: Their parliament could put a constitution before the current monarch to sign, one which gives up certain powers entirely without some unusually hard process (like ours 2/3 majority and ratification by the states) to change.
Its not perfect, certainly ours has been circumvented to a very large extent over time, but, its a starting point; and it is something they could do if they wanted to fix it. Of course, its rare that people work to limit their own powers.
Normally the best you get are the Obama types whose attitude is "Well I shouldn't have and don't want this power, but I wont oppose it, I will just promise not to use it more than I see fit."
Except those same founding fathers were ALSO in the UK when they decided that they had had enough and were going to stop being part of the UK over the whole deal.
The founding father's were UK citizens in what was then the UK. Your argument is invalid.
That was my thought too, but, it should be possible to detect such conditions. The better question is where the threshold is. There may be conditions that fish and marine life would survive where this device may not produce enough air for a human.
I imagine more of a hybrid system where this provides the normal breathing, and a backup tank only for emergency or low oxygen conditions. Even in a condition where it only provides half the oxygen you need, it could still reduce demand on the air tank allowing you to have a smaller tank than you would need otherwise.
I just like pointing out that "Common Sense" is what tells you to put out a grease fire with water and steer your car out of a skid.
Not just any given food source but... there is a base assumption in this simplified "logic" that any once choice is necessarily viable as an only option. What if no member of the set A, B, or C, provides all of the needed nutrients? Sure I can eat A preferencially, but, if I eat it to exclusion, that means that I live chronically with any deficits in what it provides.
Since its unlikely that any given organism can fully distinguish its own nutritional needs compared to a single food source, drawing from multiple food sources to get a blend of nutrient compositions is not a terrible strategy.
> Your data is consistent with either conclusion.
Did you see data detailed somewhere? because I wasn't even trying to present the data supporting those conclusions, I was only summarizing the conclusions and the general form of the data that was used to come to them.
I am sure such a discussion of the original relevant studies and their data might be interesting but, it would require actual data and not just my brief summary.
> For the record, they started these investigations after specific requests from Congress to make sure
> these nonprofits
I see, and why is it that congress should be making such specific requests and even more so, why is it that the IRS should be listening to them? Congress has many powers, including making the laws and funding the groups that enforce them, and oversight of the same. However, that is not the same as having the power to decide who should be under consideration for enforcement.
It would be one thing if a congressman reported, just like anyone else can, evidence that he thought a specific group was in violation of the law. Sure. However, I see no reason why such a report should be taken as especially likely to be true over anyone else or given any more special priority; nor do I see why they should be able to make broader requests about categories of groups.
All of this pretty clearly falls under executive functions. To allow members of congress to direct executive functions risks the use of those functions for political reasons, which, is clear corruption any way you slice it.
Except that it has been found that one of the single largest predictors of success in the study of math specifically (and I do believe this translates to many other areas) has been whether a person believes in talent and abilities vs learned skills.
That is to say, it was found that people who believe math to be a talent perform worst than people who believe it is a skill that can be mastered with effort.
So if you really think it comes down to "abilities" then just go flip on the TV, you probably aren't going to find abilities in anything if you aren't willing to work at getting them.
> 2. If you want drivers to give you space, do your best to look and act like an incompetent idiot.
> Note: this works for motor vehicle operators as well.
This. I don't think people really often appreciate what information they use when driving. Just this morning I was thinking about this on my commute as someone pulled over without signalling. There was an awkward moment where it wasn't clear whether she was avoiding something in the road, or she was distracted/drunk.
It also is the opposite of the first thing my father taught me about riding in the street which was, you shouldn't ride in the street unless you can ride in a straight line, because swerving around distracts drivers.
I notice it all the time, I slow down and give a lot more space to someone riding slowly swerving back and forth a little than I do to a cyclist who is booking down the road in a straight line. Likewise, I grew up on a main road (longest road in one of the most denesly populated cities in the country) I remember the first few times a city bus blew by me at 3 feet; its a little harrowing the first few times...but you get used to it.
In any case, it is a lot more than just whether a person wears a helmet, watch the line their wheels follow, some people really do just swerve back and forth like a shit-faced driver.
The natural consequence of what you are describing then would be that the injury statistics do not change, but the death statistics should. Afterall, if the injury severity is just "shifted down one" then the final category of injury: death, should see a decrease since it has no more severe category to shift from.
So do the number of deaths go down?
but... it seems to me a more effective strategy would involve...I dunno...maybe they should stop funding the gangs by providing them with the profitable drug market to draw from and buy their guns in the first place?
The police and their politician masters created the gangs....again. Just like they did back in the 20s.
Sure but you could still retain the option of double checking with a local PC that you are working on a legitimate block. Such checking wouldn't even have to be mandatory, if even a small but random population of miners in a pool bothered to check, it would make cheating by the operator much harder.
Ok so basically, the pool miners are designed specifically without any controls to prevent the pool operator from cheating? Nice. As I already mentioned in a previous post, that is ridiculous since it would be trivial to set it up such that the individual clients could (if they wanted to), double check to be sure they were mining for a legitimate and not a cheating pool.
Yah, I probably should have lowered it, again, it is an optional and voluntary fee. Still compared to transfering $100 through other means, not terrible. I may be more generous than I need to be sometimes, that doesn't really bother me.
Odd, especially since it would be trivial for the mining client to do a double check. In fact, all it needs to do is to track the current block chain length and last block hash, which has to be the same as the one in the header of whatever block you are currently working on, whether it is in a pool or not.
If the client just kept track of that, cheating should be impossible for the pool admins.
> From my understanding, it's always the same amount, no matter how much you transfer.
Don't get confused.... the amount defined as the default in the client doesn't change. However, it is a setting. You can, if you like, set it to 0 and pay no fee at all, or you can lower it. Depending on the client this might be a global setting or might be able to be overridden on a per transaction basis. Either way, it is always reconfigurable.
Except it is only a perception. How would they pull off such an attack unless the majority of the pool was running a hacked client that specifically ignored the rules? I have mined in a pool (briefly back before ASICs) and the pool doesn't actually have the kind of control over its members, who download their own software and set it up...and then join the pool.
Sure except for the fact that I don't believe this is actually an accurate description of the 'control' a mining pool actually has. Generally people go get their client and join the pool. This sort of control would require that everyone (or most anyway) who joins the pool uses a specialized client designed specifically to ignore the rules of bitcoin and work on a fraudulent block chain.
It can't be done by just pooling together people running the normal clients that everyone else uses. Doing it via a pool like this would either mean tricking lots of people, some of whom are technically saavy and have a vested interest in bitcoin prices not being destroyes so the pool owners can cheat...or by having everybody be in on it... either way making it unlikely they would get away with it unnoticed.
Actually most people just pay the tiny voluntary transaction fee....which the miners scoop up. It is actually a massive implementation not only of a digital economy but of a microtransaction based gift economy as transaction costs are voluntary but default so people do actually pay them.
Last bitcoin transaction I made, I actually double checked the fee.... it worked out to about 50 cents on $100. Seemed quite worth it to me given that paypal would have taken more.
It may not be but I generally prefer youtube links because watching videos anywhere else requires a minute or two of fiddling with my requestpolicy settings to figure out which site is actually hosting the video and allow its player.
> Remember that Anslinger was related to Hearst, through marriage IIRC.
That I did not know.
I guess nothing ever really changes. Hell wasn't it just in the past 2 years that Florida's governor was pushing for drug testing everyone on welfare, and using the drug testing company his Wife owned. He made millions off that, and the program didn't save a dime - it cost somewhere around $7000 for every dollar in revoked benefit that it resulted in.
Not just a bad idea, an ineffective one.....at least he made money hand over fist on the deal (sorry, his wife did...how could I ever confuse the two)
I, for one, like bitcoin more than I like the office of the president or its elections.
I don't think its entirely fair to just blame the paper industry. After prohibition ended the FBN, precursor to the DEA which was created to enforce alcohol laws, was very involved in pushing for the new anti-marijuana laws.
It seems the laws were the result of a confluence of forces, not the least of which was a government agency with precious little to do that was looking for ways to justify its own job.
Some of the correspondence of the time would be hillarious if not for what it really meant was going on.... Harry Anslinger (FBN chief) was sending out letters to police chiefs around the country asking them to keep tabs on "jazz musicians" because they had a reputation for smoking pot...and how there was going to be some operation to round them all up one day.
Most violence causing drug in the history of mankind..... lol...pot.