Comment Re:Fire all the officers? (Score 1) 515
Looks like somebody else had a similar idea in congress.
Looks like somebody else had a similar idea in congress.
The problem here is that prosecutors and cops need to get along and need to trust each other and the public needs to see cops held to account for their actions. I am leaning toward "bypass the grand jury for public servants" as a solution to ensure that not only is justice done, but so that it is seen to be done.
Or maybe the pension so there is peer pressure to not screw up?
Well said.
Customer: [turns off neon BEER sign in living room]
Police: Hey, open up, we know you turned off the beer sign!
Customer: Sure, so what? The electric company sent it over, but I pay for the electricity to power that thing and it was annoying.
Police: Sir, you cannot turn off the beer sign because then you might not buy beer.
Customer: I wasn't planning to buy beer.
Police: Doesn't matter. The beer company got an injunction against having their signs turned off. Turn it back on and leave it on.
Customer: That doesn't make sense! I shouldn't have to pay to power a sign I never wanted, this is crazy!
Police: This is France.
Thank goodness. For a minute there I thought browsing with elinks was illegal.
By way of reference, I suggest you review the Founding Fathers' thoughts on slavery and women's right to vote and stuff.
I think this is the real point and real problem. The founding fathers were creating a consortium of states with a minimal federal government and were trying to protect the freedoms they felt were important. I am lucky to have benefited from a society built on them, but our people now would never agree with our founding fathers' beliefs.
That doesn't even touch on preventing the poor from voting.
The blunt fact is that the Constitution of the US was quite useful and has allowed the formation of a successful society with one of the highest standards of living in the world. And it is flawed since it was written by humans who were also flawed.
We should rewrite the Constitution from scratch around the beliefs we actually care about. We can't because we can't agree about anything and we'd have another civil war if we even tried. We can't even get anywhere near the point of being able to amend it. I for one wouldn't trust either party's representatives currently in power to do something nearly as successful for so long.
The only way we could fix it would be to do the debate and drafting without informing the public. When something is done in secret, you can make deals, agree to give up one thing in order to get something you feel is more important. Maybe we'd see the right to a free press succeed because the right to marry someone of the same sex would get dropped. Can you imagine the uproar if that was a debate in the public eye? There would be riots. Ultimately I think that's why treaties are handled in secret; a public debate would cause so much fighting it would do more harm than good.
Rarely do I see someone engage with the AC trolls and maintain their position calmly and rationally. Kudos to you sir.
There are a lot of people who think drunk driving is equivalent to drive-texting, but that's illogical since people can set a phone down and ignore it, but they can't undrunk. I think the comparison is bad because it makes drunk driving seem less dangerous than it is and it makes it sound like you don't understand the difference between being in an diminished state and avoiding a distraction.
That said, making it illegal to operate electronic devices while driving a motor vehicle is a pretty reasonable start. It doesn't matter *why* a person is driving unsafely, what matters is that they are. I find the specification of "electronic" a little silly since that makes any car with a battery (all of them in production) technically illegal, but I like the consistency. Do something that distracts your attention from an inherently dangerous activity (driving) and you break the law? Logical. Even if I don't personally like it. (I like lots of things that aren't logically supported by my long term goals; naps, beer, webcomics and cheetos spring to mind.)
"Ban cheetos! They make people fat!" Fine, I'll switch to pringles and vote against you in the election. "Ban naps and beer!" I'll drink wine and sleep in and vote against you in the election. "Ban snacks!" you say? I'll attend your funeral and eulogize "Here lies Silvrmane, at least his argument was consistent."
Fair enough. I hope you do "buy a dash cam, record these knuckleheads and then post shame videos on youtube," but please don't just limit it to the people you know or suspect are driving badly due to texting. Driving unsafely is and should be against the law. We're in complete agreement on that.
Please don't suggest that texting while driving is "just as dangerous as drunk driving" though, as that's an illogical comparison and it weakens your position. I can set a cheeseburger down, I can leave the radio alone, I can let the obnoxious gps navigator be wrong, I can ignore the fighting children in the backseat, I can ignore the ranting of my passenger and I can choose to give my full attention to the road. I can set a phone down. What I cannot do is undrunk myself because traffic demands it.
If you're convinced that texting while driving should always be illegal everywhere and in every situation, then you have a perfectly logical argument. Don't diminish it by conflating it with driving intoxicated. It makes drunk driving seem less dangerous than it is and it makes it sound like you don't understand the difference between being in an diminished state and avoiding a distraction.
Fair enough. I agree the tone of the reply you're commenting on was silly, so allow me to present a counter argument, hopefully slightly more logical.
It's very hard to put a drunken state down because traffic demands it, while it is easy to put a phone down.
I routinely take calls while driving, and as the evidence indicates, I'm typical in my response of driving much more conservatively when that happens. Personally, I'm probably safer when I'm taking a call than I am normally, because I back way off and try to stay well away from other cars when I'm on a call. If I'm going to reply to a text, I'm going to wait until I'm pretty lonely on the road and start paying a lot of attention to the driving when otherwise I'd normally be pretty much on auto-pilot. If there is heavy traffic and I need to use my phone for some reason, I find an exit and pull off. If I'm averaging 5mph and take a call and traffic picks up, I switch to hands free or if it looks like it is resuming normal speeds, say I'll have to call back.
Contrast that with driving intoxicated. If I'm behind the wheel, there is nothing I can stop doing as a result of my analysis of traffic. I can try to drive slower, but cause a whole set of different problems by impeding normal traffic flow. There is no "set it down" or "I'll have to call you back" option.
None of this means that texting or talking on the phone while driving is as safe as not doing those things. I don't think anyone is suggesting that a driver should do things that decrease the safety of the situation. All I am saying is that there are clear differences between driving intoxicated and engaging in texting while driving.
If I *had* to text while driving, my driving would be significantly impaired, just like it is in a study comparing reaction times. The fatality rates of motorists has actually decreased while mobile phone use has increased. (Look it up. I had to before I believed it.) The corollary is obviously NOT an indication that mobile phone use while driving improves safety, there are a lot of other things offsetting the hazard posed by texting while driving, but the idea that texting drivers is making the roads more dangerous than they used to be is false. The idea that texting drivers is making the roads more dangerous than they need to be is fair. There is a difference.
I hate it when people confuse improper and immature behavior with the technology they're using. Bittorrent is a very logical and quite useful protocol and it has a bad name because it is associated with the behavior of many people who use it. Outlawing the bittorrent protocol is just as reasonable as outlawing texting while driving. Unsafe driving should be (and is) against the law, just as copyright infringement is against the law. The technology isn't *ever* the problem, the people making bad decisions are the problem.
Just FYI for the purposes of considering how useful Waze is:
If you're a dedicated Waze user, don't worry: Google said it will leave the Waze team in Israel, where they will operate independently "for now." (That caveat implies Waze will be brought to America at some point.)
Are you wanting to compare voluntary spending or involuntary spending?
Some miniscule amount of tax money goes to defending sport franchises' rights, where a very significant percentage of the taxes people pay goes toward education.
Now comparing voluntary spending on education to sports related spending would be a very interesting number indeed. People pay for college and private school but only some of them and generally only for a limited period of their life. The spending on sports is much more prevalent and is generally spread over a lifetime.
Spending on health is another issue entirely, but voluntary verses involuntary numbers would indeed be interesting.
I'd very much like to see MSN or CNN or even Fox offer a $2000 bounty and protection from identification as a source to anyone who shows that they've successfully accessed mass information on healthcare.gov. I've never been there, but I'm a little concerned that some of my records might be accessed through the site and I don't think the people working on it are placing a high enough priority on security. I'd rather it was done by someone to provide to a news agency that gets publicly reported than someone who does it for personal profit, even though both are illegal.
Publishing the results of a successful hack of healthcare.gov, or more likely a dozen successful hacks of it, would serve the public good by providing information to the public about the failures of our government, which is pretty much what freedom of the press is for.
I hope Gawker wins for the same reason I am glad that Larry Flint won: Protecting the rights of scum ensures that my rights are safe as well.
God help those who do not help themselves. -- Wilson Mizner