because some substances/ items actually cause harm and have no fucking reason to be in civil society

That can become a convenient excuse to justify forcing your personal preferences on other people. And if "civil society" reaches beneath my skin to claim ownership on my very body itself, it's hard to avoid thinking it as pretty totalitarian.

the concept of freedom?

completely untouched by this simple truth

That is an absurd claim. Of course freedom is affected by regulations. The question is whether a given set of regulations achieves goals worthy of the sacrifices it requires. Which, I suppose, is easy to answer if you, personally, aren't being called to sacrifice any activity you'd like to partake in.

we, society, LIKE restrictions on, for example, kiddie porn.

Yes, we do. We, as a society, are addicted to power and enjoy wielding it. That does not make such lording over others right. If anything, this particular addiction has caused more misery than all others combined.

this is where you get really mad at me and compare me to an authoritarian freedom crushing "statist" goon... just because i don't want people freely trading in kiddie porn or heroin. which would make you a brainless teenaged drama queen. let's hope you're not

Your entire argument is just one long appeal to authority, mixed with think of the children and with a little bit of an argument from intimidation at the end. You are an authoritarian, or if you prefer, a power addict.

As for trading "kiddie porn or heroin", these are very different and quite obviously so. Heroin is a chemical substance the production or use of which does not imply harm to anyone or anything except the user. A society might seek to ban it on those grounds, but current one jails addicts so its hard to take seriously it's concern over them. And that doesn't really leave many reasons other than a power trip.

I had an AMD 486DX-40 system with two VLB slots. I had both VLB graphics and multi-I/O. Before the Pentium era, a motherboard didn't usually have all the basic I/O on it, so you had to buy a card with serial, parallel, and usually an IDE controller on it. Anyway, the second most annoying thing with VLB is that it ran at your FSB speed, so if you had a 25 MHz FSB you could have three cards, 33 MHz you could have two. I had 40, so I was only supposed to have one. It was surprisingly stable, but when I had the occasional video glitch I understood why it happened and could deal. It got better when I dumped the Computer Shopper white-box special for a DX2/80 with a decent ASUS board.

The most annoying thing with VLB being, of course, that every card was almost full-length because the VLB part sat behind the ISA slot. They popped out all the time.

The vacuum seems to have energy, so if space itself expands, the vacuum left has to either not have any energy whatsoever or drain the energy from nearby space.

But if cosmological constant is greater thanzero, then our normal intuition of gravity is simply incorrect: what we perceive as gravitational potential is simply the crater at the top of a mountain of infinite height. No conservation law is being broken here, the universe simply contains a built-in wellspring of endless energy that's paying for the creation. Think of it as the ultimate renewable: very disperse but utterly inexhaustible.

Well, if you'd actually like to understand how politics works, you can start by realizing that people aren't going to vote for him if they don't A)know who he is and B) think he can accomplish what he promises.

Surely you at least realize that the age old trick of politicians everywhere is to tell people what they want to hear.

And so you've set up a nice non-falsifiable circle of logic. Hitler didn't have to convince Germany to go to war or persecute Jews. Every instance of him doing just that - making noises about getting living space or getting rid of subhumans - is really just an instance of him telling people what they already believed and/or wanted to hear. And of course this works for every other case of someone persuading someone else of something, or cause and effect in general.

It doesn't matter as long as we're talking about people long dead, but when the topic shifts to the inevitability or preventability of war, it might be best to demand more rigorous arguments. We wouldn't want to give up and accept defeat if victory is in fact possible, after all.

Given that half of the government is trying to actively sabotage Obamacare for ideological reasons, should its problems be considered failures or successes?

But to answer your question, just wait until Republicans get the presidential seat too. They can't outright repeal Obamacare, since it has already benefited enough people to make that a political suicide, but they can cause "unfortunate fuckups" to slowly erode it away.

We might be in for stormy weather, with Republicans in the US, various extremist movements rising as people get fed p with austerity in Europe, Islam being used to recruit cannon fodder fodder for various megalomaniacs empire building projects here and there, Chinese government trying to retain dictatorship while its economy starts catching up the rest of the world and the boom consequently fading...

You under-estimate the desire of the average citizen to have his country win.

That need not manifest in the form of war. Think of sports, for example.

To Godwin this thread immediately, consider that Hitler didn't have to convince his country to go to war.....he merely went along with a desire that already existed in his countrymen. This also goes along with his irrational hatred of the Jews.

Really? So all those speeches were really just because he loved his own voice? Not to mention the rest of the Nazi propaganda.

You would never see a restaurant like Bucca Di Peppo in Europe.

You wouldn't see a restaurant serving Italian food in Europe? WTF?

Suppose you work hard on something but it doesn't work out. Should the company be able to take your house from you to cover their losses? Of course not!

But you do lose your house. You'll get fired for failure, fail to pay mortgage, and the bank takes the house.

The employees are already forced to share the risks. There is no option to just do your job and not worry about being fired. If anything, employees have more risk than companies which, after all, are too big to be allowed to fail. But your sorry ass is out in the street as soon as there's even the tiniest hint of trouble.

It might be that this state of affairs is unavoidable, the cost of an efficient economy. But that's no excuse to pretend employees aren't in just as precarious a situation as "enterpreneurs".

Everyone should be on a level playing field, but I'm not going to stop cheating first, I'll cheat until the government forces me to stop. But someone should really step up their game and force me to stop cheating.

Tragedy of the commons: no one wants antibiotic-resistant bacteria, since they're a threat to everyone, but no one can stop cheating, since that means they'll go bankrupt and still get antibiotic-resistant bacteria caused by all the other cheaters. The only known solution is a Leviathan that forces everyone to stop cheating - or at least guarantees that anyone who continues cheating will not see any benefits from it.

So yeah, let's allow big pharma to cyberman our core nervous apparatus for something as incredibly stupid as a weight loss gimmick.

The summary is talking about people who are dying from their inability to control their appetite. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Altough real solution would be to treat sugar and fat as the dangerous, unhealthy, borderline poisonous substances they are. And at some point, we'll have to. Obesity epidemic - and all related metabological problems - are getting way out of control.