honzzz

And working as a minimum wage 'robo-slave' in a pen factory for one week when I was at high school made me realize that this kind of work is no cake either.

Entrepreneurship, however hard, is still one of the easiest methods how to make a living.

Your reasoning seems logical... and yet according to my lifelong research, at least 50% of women (even confident and hot women) use some kind of padding in their bras. I guess the point is to make good first impression so you get the chance to build a connection before shoes/bra go off.

You might want to set up a Google alert and try to be on all of these lists.

Obviously I cannot tell how efficient Iron Dome is but they certainly have other effective tools at their disposal.

[1] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9249866/Red_Alert_app...

How can the nation so famous for its entrepreneurial spirit not understand that you have to accept some risks in order to thrive. You can never be totally safe - there is always going to be some attack vector left. You have two options - accept that some bad things will happen, limit the control you try to have over society, and thrive. Or try to act on everything, prevent every risk... and you will fail... and damage your society more than any terrorist ever could in the process.

I am not naive - there needs to be some surveillance. Of course that safety is an important value. But it should not be the most important everything-else-trumping value.

If your security services react to a real intelligence about a real threat - that is great. But if they react to stuff like some old guy taking a picture of art (and this is not the only case, nowadays it seems more like a rule than exception) - well, you might be building a cowardly society that is so risk-averse that it will degrade its progress in the future.

This also basically means losing war on terror and giving them what they want.

Some of those tactics were surprisingly creative and twisted... from using 'flexible laws' to justify arrests and constant surveillance to tricking him into emigration - he was a playwright and when police gave him a permission to travel to Austria to see the opening night of one of his plays he thought it was maybe a peace offering after years of troubles with the police. He went there with his wife but while they were there the police invalidated their passports and when they wanted to return home they were not allowed to cross the border and they were both forced to emigrate.

BTW, it might also be a nice way to explain why punishments tend to be so much harsher than for example in Europe - in the US can being 'tough on crime' be profitable.

Could you please recommend a book about this accessible to a curious layman?

Would that be surprising to you? I assume you might be an American - I was really surprised when I visited the US and noticed that most people use unlocked boxes located outside of their houses to get their mail. Where I live people either lock their mailboxes or they get mail through a slot in their locked door - nobody leaves their mail accessible.

But why is the regulatory climate so problematic? I guess it's because our current form of democracy is highly inefficient - politicians have much stronger incentives to do what rich entities represented by lobbying firms want than they have incentives to do what is beneficial for the general public. Bad laws are basically written by those who benefit from them and that's why it takes so long to change the bad laws and that's why the new laws are always half-assed and full of loopholes. This is not going to change any time soon.

The more I think about it the more I think that government regulation is neither fair nor efficient and I wonder... how difficult would it be to partially escape government regulation by creating a distributed company? Think of Linux on Bitcoins. No single entity to sue. Some kind of self-regulation based on millions of stakeholders carefully disconnected from their real-world identities voting with their money or something.

This is just a very vague idea - I am not sure it could solve anything and I am pretty sure that it would create a lot of new problems but I feel it is useful to think about this stuff because we cannot expect governments to efficiently regulate society in a way beneficial to general public. Democracy needs to improve in order to keep up.

Please do not pretend that I am saying something terrible that I never said. It is obvious from what I said in this thread that I am all for 'getting consent' - I just do not think that problem of lack of respect for women can be solved by mandating verbal consent instead of non-verbal. I think your latest response is intellectually dishonest because it takes my "because you feel like it" quote out of context in such a way which implies that I would be OK with no consent at all... that is something I would never say.

Talk about a mood-killer. Please try to imagine it. If your proposal gets traction I will probably never have sex again. It's a good thing I do not live in the US - I am afraid they will need signed contracts for that. I am sorry but I really think we are solving the wrong problem here - this is not going to save the victims but it might ruin something very precious. Am I being over-sensitive?

I think this is based on incorrect understanding of the real cause of the problem. The problem was not the lack of knowledge about the fact that she was not consenting - it was clearly apparent to everybody else, she did not need to verbalize it. The problem was that he was not able to perceive her obvious signals or did not care about them or was not able to control himself. Therefore we need men who have empathy, respect for other people and self-control. Men like that do not need to ruin intimate moments asking weird questions. Men who are not like that ignore even clear no, verbal or nonverbal. That's the problem - the lack of empathy, respect, self-control. Not getting hammered might be important part of solving that. The rest is more complicated - how can society support personal growth and maturity?

Abusive behaviour of this kind might be just a personal failure of some employee... in that case they need to be fired and severely punished. If those things happen on multiple occasions and nothing happens, nobody is fired/punished, nobody apologises... than you have a reason to believe that it is a systematic failure to uphold to certain standards commonly associated with states that are not police states. That seems to be the case in the US.