drcube

Yeah, comparing city parks to national parks is silly. A green space designed by government workers and built using modern technology is not the same as Yellowstone or Yosemite. Municipal parks, lawns, golf courses and playgrounds are not "nature" in any reasonable sense of the word except in the sense that they're not supernatural.

Nurse practitioners are doctors. None of the others listed can legally diagnose illnesses or prescribe treatment. That's the point. If nurses could open up their own practice and prescribe meds, that would be more like what the OP is proposing.

You don't have relatives across the country? Or you just don't visit them?

I expect almost any laptop I buy will work (with minimal tinkering) with any flavor of Linux I use, but something tells me that is not the case with BSD. Are they all running it on a virtual machine? Or is there a lot more people writing drivers for BSD than I imagined?

The BSDs seem like they have a lot of what I love about Slackware, only more so. I'd really like to try installing one, and might do so on an old laptop this weekend.

All treaties have to be approved by the Senate. They just voted this time to approve a special "fast track" for TPP, which gives it a strict up or down vote in the Senate while waiving their right to amend the treaty or add attachments.

Because breaking encryption breaks it for everyone. If the cops can get your data, so can a hacker. There is simply no way to compromise. You either are encrypted, in which case nobody but you can decrypt your data, or you're not encrypted at all.

Remember the "TSA locks" we're all required to use on our luggage at the airport? Nobody but the government was supposed to be able to unlock them. But now anyone who wants to ruffle through your luggage can get universal keys for all TSA locks. What happens when that same scenario plays out with your bank account, your company emails, or any online store you've made purchases from?

The government only insures up to $250k. Beyond that, the bank is a lot riskier place to store money than the US Treasury. Maybe you could get four bank accounts if you have $1M, but what if you have $250 million, or a billion? In other words, this is for rich people.

Why does it matter what Apple wants? Oh yeah, it's Apple's phone, I'm just temporarily using it.

> Do you have any sources for this?

"A new report by In the Public Interest finds that private prison contracts that include “occupancy requirements” — effectively inmate quotas — are alarmingly common. Among the 62 contracts that they were able to obtain, 65 percent contained occupancy provisions that required prisons to remain between 80 and 100 percent full, and can last for as long as 20 years. If beds sit empty, states still have to pay, which the report dubbed a “no-crime tax.” And even when the abuses and violations for which these private firms are notorious cause the state to remove prisoners, contractual deals compel the state to keep paying."

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/09/20/2658701/private-...

So iOS ad-blockers only work in the browser? They don't block ads in apps?

But why do they quit their jobs? If it's to start a business, educate themselves, obtain skills for landing a job they enjoy more, etc, then all those are good things, and not a downside to basic income.

And if they're just too damn lazy to work, and are satisfied with whatever minimal amount of basic income they receive, and have no drive to do better, then maybe employers are better off without them?

Basic income is for everyone, workers and the unemployed, rich and poor alike. Or at least it should be. Every dollar you earn should be a bonus, on top of basic income, or else like you said, you create disincentives to work. If you're referring to the "fairness" of the distributed tax burden, that's a problem with or without basic income.

At a rate of $1B per year, they'll be out of cash in... 300 years.

Gentrification is bad because it pushes out the people who can no longer afford it. How does Arduino do this to electronics hobbyists?

No, the mind of the perpetrator is relevant, not the victim. And it isn't just "he said, she said", but the court tries to actually understand what was going on in the perpetrator's mind. For example, you can't shove merchandise down your pants at Walmart, sneak out the front door and claim "I thought it was mine".

MTV isn't free. Paying customers are still their product.

>> In the time of patronage, it wasn't the intellectual property that was bought and sold, rather the artist. Slavery and patronage are very related systems of organizing human capital. They're both based around primitive ideas of the relationship between labor and capital.

This is absurd. Paying for expert services is not the same thing as slavery. I work as a consultant. Am I a slave?

Why can billions of people go to work each day and earn a paycheck with no expectation of getting paid ever again for that day's work, but with artists, the world owes them a living based off of work they did years ago? And if they must continue to work to get paid it's tantamount to slavery? You won't win any friends with that kind of logic. Most of us earn paychecks, dude, not royalties.

I think the OP is illustrating the pedantry of "well technically solar energy is atomic energy" by pointing out that, by that standard, so is coal and oil. In other words, I don't think you disagree with the OP.

It doesn't matter who invented it. It matters what it is. And marriage is fundamentally a government institution. It concerns laws and legally granted privileges. If there's a sacred component, let the churches keep that part, but that's not what the SCOTUS ruled on, and it's not what millions across the country have been demanding for decades.

Marriage has always been a government institution. Religion co-opted it for themselves at a later time. This "leave marriage to the churches where they belong" cry is disingenuous. Marriage is about a contract between individuals. It provides government granted privileges in regards to taxes, healthcare, inheritance, court testimony and child custody. It has nothing to do with religion. If you want to have a religious ceremony to celebrate and "sanctify" your government granted marriage, so be it. But don't pretend this is a religious tradition meddled with by government. It is a government institution that has been meddled with by religion since before religion and government were separate.

Regarding the whole burial aspect -- the guy was already buried! With a ceremony according to his own religious beliefs as he practiced them, not whatever religion descendents 8 millennia distant currently practice. Shouldn't they just put him back where they found him?

Statistically, eh? Got a cite?

Dirt is shit. Shit is dirt. It is everywhere you walk. Every animal in the world shits on the ground. This is literally the most trivial issue on earth.

What harmful chemicals are those, exactly?

In Illinois, the law says you only have to go to school until you're 16. Doesn't mean most people don't go to school for longer, 16 is just the earliest you can drop out by law.

>It Gets Converted to Energy (So wrong. Mass cannot be converted to energy except through nuclear reactions)

This is not true. There is energy in chemical bonds, and that energy is released when the bonds break. When you burn gasoline, the mass of the resulting molecules adds up to less than the mass of the original gasoline. A tiny, tiny fraction less, but still less. Because there was energy in those bonds, and energy has mass.

It's wrong in another way, too, because even in nuclear reactions mass isn't converted into energy. Mass is mass, but energy also has mass. No mass is lost in a nuclear (or chemical) reaction, it just goes somewhere else. There is no "conversion" going on.

This is the same Peter Singer who told parents not to send their kids to college and instead send their tuition money to Africa. But apparently, if you send your kid to college anyway, he could make enough to send half his salary to Africa every year, far outweighing his parents' initial college fund. So who is right?

I like that Singer holds this guy up as an example, for doing the exact opposite of what Singer actually claimed was morally right.

I don't see how this is any more likely than a teetotaler taking cash bribes for information.

I think it's funny that anyone anywhere thinks that whether you smoked pot in the last year is "a matter of national security".

As a kid I made "ant poison" by mixing various household chemicals and water in a gallon jug. Then I'd pour it on ants. Sure enough, they died. Mostly by drowning, but still. It worked.

I wouldn't be comfortable buying a pesticide based on that research, however.