Your Constitutional Rights have freed you from morality.

Oklahoma didn't realize anything wouldn't pass muster. They were shocked and horrified by a gruesome sight. They are afraid to face the reality of what they do; lethal injection is a long, slow, terrifying process which appears peaceful to the observer so that he may absolve himself of the commission of murder.

An execution should be quick and gruesome. It should be visible death, not peaceful rest. A hanging, a beheading, shooting, a beating to death. A thing that shows us what we do so that we may face it and understand it is terrible but it is just. The more zeal a people have for a punishment, the more visible and terrible it should be so that the people are shocked and sickened back into the understanding of what it is they do.

"It is no use saying, 'We are doing our best.' You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary." Winston S. Churchill.

Execution is a deterrent in many places; in others it is not. Various punishments have various effects, influenced by the culture around them. If we forgo execution to save an innocent man, but condemn two more to die, we have failed; it is necessary to accept our flaws and do what is necessary to save lives. If losing one man by our own action is unacceptable, losing two more by our inaction is not a solution; we must necessarily learn better to identify the innocent.

I condone the discomforting terror that sweeps a society when they see a despicable man brutalized by the sheer, violent unleash of hatred upon him for his terrible acts.

To be more correct, we feel that we should claim a moral superiority by deciding an action is wrong on arbitrary grounds.

It's more complex than that.

You face many concerns considering legal punishment: deterrent effect, risk of harm to innocents, and direct impact of punishment, to name three. These depend largely on the crime, the punishment, and the surrounding culture.

The deterrent effect, for example, has two major factors: perceived severity of the punishment and perceived threat of punishment. A weak punishment, colloquially a "slap on the wrist", carries little deterrent effect; a strong punishment carries high deterrent effect. A punishment lacks threat if it is unlikely to actually occur.

The strength of punishment comes from perception: jail time, pain, execution, fines, and how much the individual fear these personally. Some individuals do not fear prison; others fear it a lot. The poor fear fines more than the rich. Death almost universally incites terror. Pain is unpleasant, but imprisonment may destabilize personal security and provide greater fear.

Punishment carries threat when it is likely. The death penalty is a great example: in drug-riddled ghettos where criminal activity meets its abrupt end 99% by death and 1% by state execution, state execution carries no threat. In peaceful but armed suburbs, attacking someone may get you shot. Either way, someone will probably shoot you in the face before the state gets to you; if the police do catch you, they may simply provide a noose to save you from a bullet. In peaceful suburbs with low justifiable homicide rates, state action is the dominating outcome to murder; execution becomes a looming, subconscious threat.

Putting these together: the death penalty is a deterrent only where death is feared and state execution is a likely consequence of capital crime. In places where the criminal base is used to and does not fear death at a distance, state execution is a laughable thing; the first thing to consider is how to not get killed committing your crimes.

Once it's determined the deterrent effect, you have to consider other consequences. Fines and jail time can destroy lives. Executions kill people. If 4% of the executed are innocent, but executions provide such a deterrent effect as to stave off a hundred murders for each innocent executed, then that is unfortunate. If 4% of the executed are innocent, and executions provide no deterrent, then that is unacceptable.

And of course there are other considerations. I mentioned direct impact of punishment. You will want a punishment which rehabilitates criminals if repeat offense represents a larger proportion of the crime than the additional general deterrent from the next best method. Putting together further conditions, you can increase the severity of punishment as the risk of punishing innocents decreases (it's null if the punishments to innocents is dismissed on appeal 100% of the time before the time is served--increase punishment as much as you like). It gets extremely complex.

Justice is like sex: it feels good, but that doesn't make it wrong. Executing a man who stalks, rapes, and murders a woman feels immensely liberating to some; it is anxiolytic to a society who can distance themselves from the act of killing yet feel that they have participated in punishment. At the same time, such a man has earned his punishment. We may look down on people for enjoying vengeance, but we should not thus assume punishment is wrong.

Wow. Leach is actually a chemistry term. Leech means to drain or draw off; Leach means to dissolve and carry away a chemical content by the passing of water. Didn't know that.

Yeah, but you can hide a microSD card anywhere. You could slip it into the last of your shoe by a tear at the very tip. Into a pen cap or inside a watch band. So if you can copy those 8" floppies onto a MicroSD, you can leave with them.

This takes forever, and it's a lot of work shuffling 8 inch floppies around. If the media were much more dense, you would have a much higher probability of success for copying the same amount of data, blocked off in chunks the size of the media. Gigabyte Jazz drives? You're dealing with one 400KB floppy or one 100,000KB floppy--you now may copy 250 times as much data with the same rate of success. Get it onto a MicroSD, conceal it, and leave. Copy it once, rather than 250 times.

Oh, you're right. Basically all stocks pay dividends, and stocks which pay dividends aren't discounted in value by the value of the dividend. It's not like the spot price of a stock rises subtly as it approaches dividend ex date and then drops suddenly after the ex date.

And of course that money comes out of nowhere. It's not injected into the SECURITIES MARKET from other sources like company earnings. The company is doing well, and money just magically manifests due to the Jewon particles colliding with the energy of excitement of a well-performing company with high earnings, and money manifests in the securities market and precipitates out to share holders. It's not like it stats in the company coffers as earnings and is transferred to shareholders.

Wrong. You own a block of shit you paid $30,000 for. Your $30,000 is now someone else's cash holding. Your $30,000 has gone into the market; you just lost your ability to extract that $30,000 back out. Your $30,000 doesn't evaporate.

Why?

You started with some money ($10,000). You paid $10,000 for 100 shares of Hardwood Corp. James now has $10,000, you now have $0. Your shares of Hardwood Corp. become worth $0, but James still has $10,000 and goes on to buy Java Corp shares from Marcus. There's still $10,000 floating around.

Meanwhile James' Java Corp shares become worth twice as much. He sells them to Marcus for $20,000. Marcus... can't buy them. He only has $10,000.

Marcus goes to his bank account, and deposits -$10,000 into the bank (withdraws $10,000). He comes back to the Exchange and deposits $10,000 into the exchange. He then buys your $20,000 of Java Corp. Marcus' external assets are changed -$10,000, while the balance of cash in the market is now +$10,000, totaling $0. As the balance of cash was $10,000 from the money you put into the market earlier, the sum total of money in the market is $20,000.

At this point, $20,000 has gone into the market, and the market has $20,000. Java Corp pays a dividend of $500, making Java Corp's corporate bank accounts -$500 and making the market now hold $20,500. Total $20,500 has gone into the market, and it now holds $20,500.

If we keep looking at the money flowing in and the money flowing out--Marcus sells half his shares, James pays him $10,000, Marcus puts $10,500 into the bank, the market now has $10,000 in play--we see that James has $10,000 from you, Marcus has $10,000 from James which is now in the bank, and Marcus also has $500 from Java Corp dividends which were SUBTRACTED from Java Corp's corporate bank accounts and ADDED to the market.

That's zero-sum.

Contrast this to general economic advancement. In the economy, I may spend $10,000 on labor to make 500 shirts, costing $20 of labor per shirt. Now, I may expend $50,000 of research and development and $20,000 of manufacture to build sewing machines. For that $70,000, I can now expend $980 of labor and $20 of machine cost and maintenance (amortized over the machine's lifetime) to make $500 shirts. The $50,000 doesn't recur (unless I develop a new machine), and the $20,000 is part of the cost and maintenance over lifetime. So now it costs me $2 per shirt rather than $20 for the labor of creating a shirt.

In this scenario, I've created $18 per shirt of wealth. Once I have manufactured 2,778 shirts to meet demand for 2,778 shirts, I've broken even. Beyond that, society has more goods with less use of resources (labor, in this case). That's a positive sum: society has expended some mass of resources and produced an outcome which provides the same output but with a reduced expenditure of resource.

A person can make a shirt in 20 minutes instead of 6 hours., therefor there are 5 hours 40 minutes of additional human time available per shirt made now than before. As the demand for shirts increases and shirts are sold, the gains increase.

Contrast this to the stock market: If you have a mass sell-off and ever-growing demand by hoarders, the hoarders will run out of money. Then your liquidity ends, and the share price plummets. The absolute limit of wealth in the market is the precise cash amount which people are currently willing to spend in the market, no more and no less. That means all of the money which has ever been placed in the market minus all of the money which has ever been withdrawn from the market is the exact real value of the market. The stocks available are only what has been issued, and there is no decrease of resource utilization by an increase in investor value.

Do you know what it's called when a complete set of actions neither creates no destroys anything, but simply exchanges one thing for another thing, and which must devalue things to add more of those things?

Stocks aren't value; they are valuation. The only value common stock has is as a trading medium to another person so that you can make money by speculation. The NYSE doesn't price stocks based on corporate performance; it prices them based on what people are buying and selling for. That's why we have Price to Earnings and such measurements: to show how much more valued a stock is than the actual value of the company it's named in.

OH, by the way: I'm filing Chapter 13 bankruptcy. All that common stock you're holding that's worth $30,000? It's canceled, and you get nothing. Have a nice day.

Actually, you're wrong.

These old networks are airgapped in so many ways, not just by removing the CAT6 to the Internet. The disks themselves are airgapped, as they're not constantly in systems which can read them; likewise, there's a huge airgap between a spy and a reader: if the disks are stolen, they need a huge honkin' machine to read them, or they need to use base facilities which have cameras and guards. Further, the media is low-density: you need to physically transport a truckload to get what fits on a modern CD-R, much less on a 64GB microSDHC.

Just as with 1000 iteration hashing, these large systems impose a time limitation on mass copy. If you want to access this top-secret file, it's merely 15kB of text stored on a 40kB disk. If you want to steal the wealth of information archived here, you must find the disks you want and then copy each of them. If you want it all, you must spend weeks if not months copying each individual disk to a portable flash drive.

There are some real difficulties involved in stealing this much data in this form. That provides a layer of security by requiring high-visibility or excessively slow methods of data access, both of which sharply increase risk in espionage. You are more likely to catch and interrupt any significant espionage attempt in this model than in a model where we put all our stuff on a USB drive that's taken to a modern machine in a secure room.