Well, my 2-year-old certainly can't take care of himself. If I were unemployed and homeless, I definitely could not provide him with the same quality of education or prepare him to afford to take care of himself any better than I could. And then he would grow up without learning how not to be unemployed and homeless and have his own 2-year-old he couldn't prepare for society. Your college degrees may not give you the income you deserve for them, but you underestimate yourself. You can read and write, you can probably do basic arithmetic and algebra, and you probably believe you are at least capable of making a middle class income and contributing to society. Ask an inner city high school teacher sometime how many of their students are at least that capable, and what is life like at home for those who are not.

If other posts here on Slashdot are any indication, "Mr. Councilman" is just as likely to lose political points by supporting the poor.

You can pay taxes to give the poor public housing and opportunities to train for work (like having access to Wikipedia et al). Or you can pay taxes to arrest the poor when they start stealing the things they can't afford (like food), pay taxes to clean up the dead bodies from drug overdose and gang violence, and pay taxes for the grand public housing scheme known as our overcrowded prison system. Or you can pay taxes and your immortal soul to round them all up and kill them every few generations (and hope you don't get rounded up when this happens). You may think for some idiotic reason that being nice is morally the wrong thing to do, but being an asshole may just cost you more in taxes than it does to give the poor the same entitlements you got from your parents.

Who said anything about a modem or a router? We're not talking single family homes here; we're talking apartment buildings. Give them ethernet plugs in the walls and hide the routers. Even better, just put up a wireless network and hide the routers. If the whole building is getting free internet, why in hell would anybody try to put a modem in every individual apartment?

We Are All Confident Idiots...In America.

I would like to thank you, TsuruchiBrian, for engaging with me in a thoughtful discussion about the second amendment to the US Constitution. I think we've both made good points, and perhaps come to a meaningful conclusion. I do not wish to rebut your argument; I am only posting now to say two things:

1. 1. I am defining militia as a citizen-operated organization that is registered with the government. That registration would enable the government to regulate the safety and security of its armory, and possibly other concerns. With those regulations in place, some classes of weapon which would be too dangerous for individual citizens to acquire (especially those classes of weapon which the authors of the constitution could not even imagine) could be made available to those militia. But this is only an idea not directly supported by the constitution; it's my attempt to reimagine the full purpose of the 2nd amendment (allowing citizens to form paramilitary groups to keep the government from overstepping its bounds) to still be reasonable in a world full of such previously unimaginable destruction.
2. 2. Once again, thank you for the all-too-rare opportunity for intelligent conversation on the internet. This is a complicated issue that deserves to be discussed, and by discussing it I think we have revealed flaws in each others' arguments that we would not have considered ourselves. I believe this makes our democracy stronger. Thank you. Let us hope this kind of discussion is not so rare in the future.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank TsuruchiBrian for engaging with me in a thoughtful discussion about the role of gun ownership in our country and what various levels of government are or are not authorized to do. This is a serious issue with many nuances, most of them directly impacting life or death situations. People die every day from both gun violence and from government oppression; we happen to live in a country where the former is more common, but that does not mean I am oblivious to the dangers of overly restricting the rights of the people.

The US Constitution is a living document which has been interpreted in many different ways by many different people in many different generations. We the people of the United States of America are obliged to discuss and debate its role and meaning in our society with every new generation, lest we fail to understand its purpose and its moral and just application. To reduce any aspect of the constitution to such blacks and whites as you have done, beastofburden, is to preclude any meaningful understanding of the foundation of our society. Ultimately, such antagonism and partisanship will lead us into an era where our opinions are dictated by the political elite who have for their own purposes spent enormous resources to convince us that one way or another is not just the right way, but the only way. I pray we do not find ourselves in such a future.

It is not prohibited, and state governments can do whatever the hell they want as long as it isn't explicitly prohibited. The federal government can probably get away with it as well because of interstate commerce.

Registered state militia does not have to mean government. A militia is by definition a very local group, and I would expect to see them form at the town level, or in large cities at the district level. Militias, then, could have anybody they want based solely on the desires of the local people in charge (and who that is would ideally depend on local democracy). With possible exceptions for violent felons and the mentally unstable, which would go along with reasonable safety and security regulations to make sure, among other things, that the militia armory is appropriately secured from theft.

I think that everything I have said is consistent with the United States government having meaningful restrictions on how it can infringe upon the right to bear arms and the right to free expression. But "meaningful restriction" does not mean "total restriction". The 2nd amendment was written with an explicit purpose, it is my belief that any restriction on gun ownership and use may be constitutional as long as it is still possible to form a well-regulated militia with meaningful self-defensive force.

I wasn't implying it only granted a limited right to own guns. But it still only prevents certain kinds of gun control. Notice the wording: A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people ... shall not be infringed. It is telling government that it cannot infringe on the people's right to bear arms (but it can still infringe on any individual's rights), for the purpose of the people forming a well-regulated militia.

And what is it you think I want to do? The 2nd amendment does not promise every individual to obtain any gun for any purpose. It is within the bounds of the constitution to, as happens in most states, ban the sale of guns to convicted felons or the mentally unstable. It is also within the bounds of the constitution to enforce such restrictions with background checks. It is within the bounds of the constitution to collect forensic data of every gun sold and connect that data to an ID number printed on the gun (and by extension, make unlawful the removal of those numbers). It would also be constitutional to register those guns to their owners in a national database (and guess who has such a database? Our "friends" the NRA!).

If we were to take it even farther, it would still be constitutional to restrict the sale of all firearms to registered state militia only, placing safety and security restrictions on those militia. Which I am not advocating; I would only like to see military arms (including anything with an automatic or semi-automatic feature) fall under such a restriction. And even under such a restriction, a small community (which is not the same as some single vigilante type) could respond to tyranny by assembling the militia and opening the armory. And think about what kind of situation we'd be in where that was necessary. We're talking collapse of government authority here, which would probably undermine local law enforcement. There would be mass looting. Do you really want guns in the hands of non-militia members when the time comes to bear our arms?

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

So you can protect yourself from tyranny. Not so you can blow shit up for fun.

Yes, but also dangerous. We don't all need personal access to them to have access to entertainment, and the more dangerous weapons need very controlled conditions to be enjoyed safely. I would not be opposed to well-regulated shooting ranges renting out (on their secured premises) some of those weapons that have no other legitimate civilian purpose. That would probably actually be a great way to store such weapons for the purposes of the "well-regulated militia" our founders envisioned with the 2nd amendment (with caveats regarding safety and security regulations).

Welcome to planet Earth, where men and women are different and have different options socially available to them. Where men are not allowed to play the victim (or else they're too sissy) and women are not allowed to have outspoken opinions (or else they're too butch). Sorry your orientation took so long.

A light bulb is not just a wire in a vase, FYI. First, the "wire", or filament, has to be a specific compound that generates light when electrified. As it turned out, every material they could find that would do that would also catch on fire and burn up. So the major innovation of the light bulb is the manufacturing process that removes all the oxygen from inside the bulb (leaving either vacuum or an inert gas) so that the filament does not combust. If we actually had all of that technology before the invention of the light bulb, it would not have taken an Edison-level inventor to put it all together.

That context is not how I ever understood the example. Within the limits of how I interpreted it, it could not be used to punish a speech against the draft. That does not cause immediate panic, nor is it likely to directly cause injury. I made those caveats intentionally, and as written they exclude outlawing speaking out against government policies, even if the government considers them to be vital to the survival of the citizenry.