`diff` begs to disagree.

I think you misunderstood. I'm talking about the hold that one person can have over another for an extended period of time. I'm not talking about a john -- I'm talking about the traffickers. It's the same relationship as black-mailing a politician, or having family back home in Mexico under constant threat, etc. There's no free market system that can make those pictures disappear from someone else's camera, there's no free-market police to protect your family. I see it like a "hold" or a "lock" (martial arts); if someone already has limited mobility [by our policies], it's much easier to trap them. The more freedoms we grant each other, the less likely someone is to get stuck in one of those positions. Yes, we should help each other out, too, but that doesn't excuse us for having created the situation in the first place.

If it's consenting and safe, who cares if the demand curve shifts?
Who's talking of making it legal and acceptable for teenagers to be enslaved and raped? We have laws against exploitation of children, regardless of industry. (Well, almost. I don't get why farm and rail industries get so many exemptions from labor laws.) [Also, I could have used murder in my analogy, but didn't. So sorry. Trump you later?]
You could go a long way to helping and encouraging people to use the justice system if you don't shame them and pursue them for what is their job either by choice, by circumstance, or by force, if you didn't mis-use the justice system's resources pursuing the wrong crimes. Society has a weird feedback loop where if we make something illegal, we by extension make it morally wrong, rather than the other way around. So before they can get help from their friends, family, and society at large, you have to change the law, to change the attitudes.

Selling sex for money can be victimless, even if the "prostitution system" isn't. But why can women (and men!) be exploited? It's generally because there's some other reason:
a) lack of justice system to protect them: as long as the cops are out arresting johns and prostitutes, instead of traffickers, we have a problem.
b) drugs: by making them illegal, we drive up the price, drive the users into the arms of sellers, drive the addicted underground, and make them slaves of the drug lords -- we're driving them away.
c) trafficking: has a lot to do with immigration, international politics and global economics; we need to work on the poverty problems around the world, and maintain open-border immigration policies, so our labor/market can resolve itself, without driving people to do insane things like sell their bodies to traffickers in the hope of a better life down the road -- only to be unable to break free for fear of being thrown out of the country, or worse, have their family thrown out.

The problems you see with prostitution are the symptoms that accompany any illegal activity: all illegal activities tend to get conglomerated under a single umbrella organization (mafia, etc.) because they have the contacts, they have the know-how, they have the experience to run all those businesses, cross-monetize, etc. You make money from trafficking someone across the border, then you make money from getting them hooked on drugs, then you make money selling their services...

Making a single point in the system illegal doesn't solve the overall problem. Making things legal actually solves more, besides agreeing with basic human rights of self-determination.

When prostitution becomes legalized in an area, demand outstrips supply, prices go up enough that traffickers move in [...]

This would be as opposed to when it's illegal, thus the supply of legal services = 0, so traffickers *necessarily* move in? How is that better? And really, that's like saying that we shouldn't allow poor people near rich people, because when the demand gets high enough, there will be theft -- as if we, as a society, had never invented a justice system to deal with these situations, where a demand exists that shouldn't be supplied. As long as prostitution is illegal, those who are *not* consenting cannot make good use of the justice system to protect themselves.

Thank you. I kept scrolling, hoping someone would already have brought this up. What happened to polluting the sea, smog, acid rain, cancer, asthma? What happened to sustainability, fairness? The shift to a debate over "global warming," which can be argued for decades, has co-opted what should have been plainly obvious discussion of environmental policy.

I believe the standard response, after 9/11, was "if you don't like it, you can move to France." That is, even if laws are federal, people will just be told to switch countries instead of states. It's not a solution, it's just a retort. Your argument seems like it would recommend open borders, freedom of immigration and emigration. (Emigration is rather easy, but if nobody will accept you, it's pointless.) If the people of Mexico don't like it down there, why shouldn't they move here? Oh, wait, because we don't want to let them in! Why not? We're not afraid of migration between states because there's little incentive to move -- only minor differences, thus minor sloshing about. If we have more variety, I expect states will setup barriers to entry, as we have at the national level, because that's what we do when we start having places that are "this way" vs. "that way". We start to want to keep people out who might want to make changes inside our sacred place, people who could skew our votes and cause us to need to leave and setup a new place. And so forth for all eternity, as we run away from each other. Hurray?

If you're going to go down this path, how about something more clean: any group of people, at any point, can essentially secede from the union, take their land, and make a new country/state/whatever, with their own laws. Why should "states" be sacred? Why should you obey the laws of your own country, when you didn't decide to live here in the first place? Your citizenship (by birth) in this country doesn't guarantee you the right to change citizenship at 18, so you're essentially a prisoner anyway. You should have a right to form your own country, inside the boundaries of this one, and cut ties! If we're going to slosh about, let's do it joyously.

You mention NY City, but provide no argumentation on why the Federal government should give up power specifically to the State, and not to Cities, etc. I still argue you're making arbitrary distinctions. I'm sure you'd leave some powers at the Federal level, but so far the only argument I see is that the Constitution says so, or that we should amend the Constitution -- but how do we do that, other than through our current process? If 51% of us (at the national level) are okay with that power staying with the Federal government, then you have no way of achieving State power. You have to have the power before you can get the power.

To be clear: I'm not arguing against individuals having more say, or reducing government, or whatever -- I just don't understand the fascination with *state* rights.

But that still doesn't answer why the State is the ideal layer for this to happen. It's arbitrary. Sure, we can quote the Constitution, or bring up the Founding Fathers, to justify doing things "by the book", but why? Just because that's the way some dead guys designed the system? Including dead guys who felt they had very little right to tell the next generation how to run the show? So then it just becomes an argument about either doing things by the book, or rewriting the book. Which is fine and dandy, but it doesn't speak to the issue of *why*. Why can't I make prostitution illegal on my plot of land? Ultimately, shouldn't I be able to decide? And I'm sure anti-abortionists would feel that banning it in some states, and not in others, is akin to having slavery in the state next door: morally unjustifiable. We clearly recognize that there are basic human rights -- and some less obvious -- that deserve upholding both here and abroad. We don't consider murder in Somalia acceptable just because there's no functioning government to decide that it's wrong -- we're unlikely to be okay with morality issues varying much at all across state (or county) boundaries. We're uncomfortable with them varying across national boundaries as it is.

Yes, variety is great. But people don't make decisions purely on one factor. You're not going to create a state to put all the republicans in, because it'll satisfy their political desires -- because ultimately, they decide where to live based on politics, religion, family, jobs, landscape, weather, friends, history, culture. You can't create enough buckets to make everyone, or even most, or likely even some, people happy. As it is, clearly, people don't move just because of economic choices -- the south would be empty by now. Clearly, people don't move because of pollution or overpopulation, the north-east would be empty. They don't move because of housing prices, the west would be empty. They don't move because of legalization, the west would be even fuller. The whole "if you don't like it, you can move" argument fails the reality test. People only move when they HAVE to. They move when their governments start shooting them -- and even then, not everyone does. They move when famine sets in -- and even then, not everyone does.

We need to find solutions that don't require removing people from their current geographical area.

All power to the Counties! All power to the Cities! All power to the neighborhoods!

What is the deal with States, that they're so awesome? Maybe it's because I live in Oklahoma at the moment, but I'm just not seeing it. When we talk about mobility, you have to remember that the reason it's relatively (not absolutely, by a long shot) easy to pick up and move between states is that there's a certain amount of standardization provided by the federal government. Even something as simple as "states must recognize marriages from other states" makes a huge difference in where people could/would move for a job, for economic reasons. And it just goes up from there.

Also, do you really think the people of Missouri have sufficiently different needs and wants from the people of Oklahoma, that they need different laws? Maybe Utah does, and Texas just needs it for its ego, but really? We're all humans [for now], we're all potential works and employers. You might argue that when economic trouble hits, different regions need different economic policies applied because of local industry variations, but that's not prevented by the federal government; it already doles out money to various industries selectively, affecting regions differently. We decry the International Criminal Court as a violation of our sovereignty, we despise super-national unions like the EU, but really we're just drawing arbitrary lines in the sand. This far, and no further.

Are some states "red" and others "blue"? Maybe, but does that mean that we need states that are right next to each other, with either a 49/51 or 51/49 ratio, to be run entirely differently? Do you think that the resulting "sloshing", as people move out of their current states to escape overly-partisan policies, is good for us in the long term? Do you think polarizing our populations even more will solve our problems?

I realize this is about ideology, whether you believe that we are generally smarter or dumber as a group than as an individual. And I think that it's both, depending on the issue. Maybe we're smarter individually when running a small business, but we're dumber when it comes to planning health insurance, the military, etc. All of that is debatable, and actively debated, and that's healthy. I guess we could just split the union. Two countries. One centralized, one completely decentralized. Tear families apart. Break our economy. Increase tensions. Lose power in the world. And then split again, when each side disagrees on how much centralization is good.

States' rights sound awesome, but what would you *do* with that power and granularity, that can't or shouldn't be done at a higher or lower level?

Exactly. I wrote a custom plugin for intranet-only use, to be deployed in the enterprise; I set to it allow up to 4.x, thinking that was plenty, and I hadn't seen anything in 4 beta that would break it. And then 5 comes along, and the plugin won't run. Now I have to go to the effort of changing it, signing, deploying, waiting for that to update everywhere, etc. to fix the problem. Why? No good reason. None. It should work fine in 5.x, which is really 4.x with tiny goodies, we just assumed that another big version # change should also require thorough testing, whenever that happened, if ever. I'm pretty sure this one doesn't. Nor will 6.x, 7.x, or 19.x. I was thinking next time of setting the upper bound to 99.x, because that'll last me, what, a year? Yay!
Stupid.
If you want to call your browser "Firefox 23", go for it. But internally, please let plugins still see "4.3.21", so they can make good decisions about compatibility. Maybe even assign version numbers to various chunks of the code: chrome, DOM, utilities, etc. so a plugin can detect API changes to a given section? Don't up the major version unless you remove or seriously change existing API's in that section.

As much as we would defend your right to *try* to buy groceries by trading anything you have (legally) for merchandise from the grocer, sure. That doesn't mean we'll fight until you succeed. We'll merely defend your right to try to negotiate a mutually-agreeable deal with the grocer. We've always had the right to trade with each other. There's no good reason for a government to prevent that, saying you *can't* trade pigs for beer if you want to. So it's a liberty that should be defended. And the only entity you fight when defending liberties is the government -- not individual grocers, etc., as they're not the ones imposing a lack of freedom. Maybe a lack of choice (by all agreeing that bitcoins suck), but not of freedom.

See the last section of this "Ask Slashdot" entry from 2008, for the Ron Paul campain: http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/08/02/05/1511225/Ron-Paul-Campaign-Answers-Slashdot-Reader-Questions

DMV? In Oklahoma, at least, those are privately-run. All of them. Even if you order your tags online (through a state site), it asks you which private DMV you want to use, and you get your tags from that one physical location ("Tag agency".) States like Oklahoma would require the Feds to put in a clause that states can opt to provide the service any way they see fit, so states can compete, and through competition, figure out which method is best for our dearest citizens. (Note: I think competition between states is a ridiculous concept. Nobody gives California props for "trying things out" for the rest of us, nor does anyone interpret the mass migration to California as proof that its government had the best ideas.)

I'm curious: what if someone downloaded 10000 videos of people being shot by their governments? Would that be sick shit? Would it be bad? Would they become responsible for the deaths of thousands? (I'm not talking about Hollywood movie clips, I'm talking about, say, amateur video of street protests being repressed violently.)

Can we centralize the "alternatives to MySQL" thread here? My vote's for Firebird.