ghda

Taiwan.

We all have our own “life taxes” to pay.

Here’s one: since men are larger and headboard than women, we need more food just to stay alive! A few hundred extra calories a day over a lifetime, the cost must be substantial — almost certainly greater than the cost of tampons.

Life is unfair to all of us, both sexes.

Better than letting human society collapse though. If that’s what you really believe will happen.

I don’t know if Finland as an example really proves or disproves anything. Finland is a small, homogeneous, and pretty unusual sort of country, and the fact that they happen to do well in certain standardised tests doesn’t mean that anything in particular they’re doing is optimised.

No, for conspiracy to break into DoD computers.

This actually seems like great news for journalists. The fact that this is the only charge implies that prosecutors have decided that wikileaks’ core activity of publishing classified information obtained by others was actually legal.

The fact that assisting someone to break into a DoD computer turns out to be illegal probably shouldn’t surprise anyone. If someone asked for your help breaking into a DoD computer would you say “oh sure, that sounds like a perfectly legal thing that can’t possibly get me into trouble”?

Are people obliged to abide by an obviously racially discriminatory contract under EU law?

This has always struck me as a weird sort of edge case, because the hypothetical situation is pretty disconnected from all the other situations where people might seek restrictions on free speech that it doesn’t really matter which way I go.

If I say that yes, I suppose we can carve out some sort of exception for people who directly cause harm to life and limb by falsely proclaiming the existence of immediate dangers in crowded areas, then this doesn’t seem like a slippery slope — I am not forced to then admit we should also start censoring anything else outside that very narrow category.

If, on the other hand, I say that free speech should apply even to those shouting fire in a crowded theatre, am I worried that this is going to suddenly become a major danger? Are psychopathic pranksters going to start causing fatal stampedes at every opening night? No, because it’s not something that actually happens; anyone shouting fire in a crowded theatre would probably just get shushed and escorted out by ushers; at worst they’d provoke an orderly evacuation through the plentiful emergency exits that theatres tend to have nowadays.

So I guess I’ll go for the second option — refuse to carve out the exception and accept the risk of the occasional unnecessary evacuation.

There are other small and well established edge-case restrictions on free speech I am willing to accept, mind you, eg market manipulation or giving false statements to police. But I don’t see the classic fire-in-theatre one as being relevant to anything.

We don’t push back on the process, we push back on the principle.

The point of the principle of free speech is not that all speech is beneficial but that we can’t possibly trust any agency with the power to decide what is and isn’t.

The “process” probably has no more flaws than any other process designed and implemented by mortals, it just goes to demonstrate why the whole censor-the-internet idea is wrong.

Invading Iraq was easy, the problems all arose at the “okay, now what?” level.

If the “happiness/satisfaction” metric is rubbish though, then all the correlations are fairly meaningless, and are of interest only to the extent that they do or do not back up one’s own political opinions.

Applying this scale cross-culturally, you just wind up measuring some weird convolution between actual subjective well-being and some kind of “what range of values is it culturally acceptable to answer this personal question about my wellbeing from a stranger with?” effect.

Based on your argument though, the sensible way to do it would be to offer asylum predicated on some kind of IQ test to ensure that we’re getting all the Caucher Bitkars our there and not wasting too many resources on lesser intellects.

Indeed, what would really make sense is for developed countries to be actively working to apply IQ tests to every third-world shanty town out there, and actively paying high-scoring individuals to immigrate.

In the real world this kind of thing is generally considered somehow to be in bad taste, so most developed countries go about it in a rather more roundabout way. Still, any country which actively started recruiting would find themselves with a huge advantage (at least when it comes to Fields Medals).