Selling drugs and weapons are serious crimes and should be justly punished.

Unless it's Caspar Weinberger or Eric Holder. Then it's totally legit.

~Loyal

More commonly known as the 1st amendment.

Yeah, except that the Patriot Act doesn't violate the first amendment.

~Loyal

Congress shall pass NO LAW...

I'm pretty sure that the Constitution of the United States doesn't say that. After all, the entire first article creates the congress and gives it the power to legislate. If the constitution then took all legislative power away then congress would be a useless bunch of ninnies...Well, I'm pretty sure it doesn't say that.

ie - the patriot act is unconstitutional - has been since day 1.

Why do you say that?

Anyone involved with passing the law, signing the law, and performing duties under said law are traitors to this country, and are guilty of treason.

No. Treason is defined in the constitution. It's: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. There's no way to stretch legislating, signing, or performing duties under the Patriot Act into that.

Since they all seem to consider this "a time of war" against terrorism, there's only one penalty for treason.

There are any number of penalties for treason. The congress gets to decide what the punishment is, so it's whatever they decide. The relevant section of the Constitution is: The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.

Get your asses up against the wall, and pass out the smokes and blindfolds. We'll fix the national debt by selling raffle tickets to be drawn for members of the firing squads.

You'll need a lot of luck getting a law like that one passed.

~Loyal

Same way here, and it's for a very good reason. Let's take NY, Imagine NYC with twice as many taxi's on the road. It happened and it made it extremely hard for emergency vehicles and anyone who wasn't a tax, or really just wanted to go anywhere. So they implemented a medallion system to limit the number of cabs on the road. See it's not a conspiracy involving the "taxi lobby", in fact it's to protect us from them.

That would be an interesting story if it were true; it's not. The medallion system was not instituted because of traffic congestion. Rather it was instituted because the growth of taxis during the depression resulted in more taxis than passengers. Taxi drivers began working longer hours, and there was public concern about the mechanical integrity and maintenance of the taxis. The first proposed taxi monopoly didn't go into effect because the mayor was accused of taking a bribe from the largest taxi company. Strangely, a lack of maintenance is more associated with monopoly than it is with competition, and it's entirely feasible that La Guardia, the mayor who finally instituted a taxi monopoly, was merely not caught accepting his bribe.

~Loyal

You have no idea if I support government expenditures or not.

Yes I do. You revealed it when you described a 20% increase as "only."

I'm just pointing out that your figures are flawed,

I suppose by, "your figures are flawed," you mean the figures are accurate. Your argument was not with the figures, but with the interpretation.

and since you are loosing that argument

Not to be pedantic, but that word should be "losing." Well, okay. To be pedantic. More to the point, I am not losing the argument. The original point was made by tompaulco. I am Loyal Opposition. We are not one and the same. So, if anyone were losing the argument it would be him, which it's not.

It's clear you lost,

I know some people believe that if you say something enough times then it must be true. Clearly you are one of those.

you know you lost and you are trying to shift the target by claiming I'm a statist.

I have shifted nothing. You objected to tompaulco's selection of basis year, so fine. I described the entire period of the twentieth century. Was that enough to show that federal spending has increased enormously? If not, then say why not. If it was, then admit it. Don't try to argue that I'm trying to change the discussion to whether or not you're a statist, which you admitted by describing a 20% increase in picayune terms. The argument is whether federal spending has increased, which I have proven through the use of Bureau of Labor Statistics statistics. Now, if I have committed some error in that, then feel free to show me. Don't argue whether I have enough evidence to conclude you're a statist.

~Loyal

Why don't you compare 1975 with 2015 instead?

Largely because it misses the point. Consider federal spending as a percentage of GDP between 1900 and 1917. For the entire period, federal spending hovered around 3%. Spending as a percentage of GDP leaped upward during WW1, reaching 23% at one point. It fell off after the war, but not to the prior levels. For the first decade after the war levels were at about 6%, rising to 9% for the second decade. (This period includes tompaulco's base year.) Spending as a percentage of GDP leaped upward again during WW2, reaching 45% at one point. It fell off again after the war, but not to prior levels, again. Since WW2 federal spending as a percentage of GDP has hovered around 17%. If we choose the base year you prefer, 1975, then we've disregarded three leaps in spending levels, not including the war years. tompaulco's point is that if the federal government was able to function with 3% of GDP in the first two decades of the twentieth century, why can't they function with those levels today?

The answer is not shifting burden from the states, because state levels of spending as a percentage of GDP have also increased during those years, just not as fast.

In this case government collection is up only 20% over the last forty years.

I can imagine some time in the future when federal spending is 98% of GDP. Statists, such as yourself, will be touting that spending has only increased by 2% over the previous four decades, and celebrating their restraint.

~Loyal

I love seeing this crap in American articles. "Oh Noes! If we pay people more, it will cost businesses more!"

The reason that business costs are lamented is because those costs represent the scarce resources with alternative uses that businesses must use in order to deliver their products. If a business's costs go up then there are a number of things that happen, all of them bad. All else being equal, this means that less of the resource will be used. Thirty years ago this was an uncontroversial tenet, with about 95% of economists holding it. Now, since the Card and Krueger study, it's slightly more controversial, with only 85% of economists holding it. The Card and Krueger study, and subsequent studies, are fatally flawed, and I'm happy to discuss that with you if you wish. (Note, there are rare exceptions to this. Those exceptions are called abnormal goods, of which the potato during the Irish Potato Famine is the most notable.)

To put it simply, if the price of labor is increased then less of it will be used. That means that after a minimum wage increase, assuming the minimum wage is greater than where wages would be if allowed to move freely, more people will be unemployed than there would be in the absence of the minimum wage increase.

Lets look at this for a second.... Who are a businesses customers? Hint: It's the people who get paid a wage.

Some are. Of course, others aren't. Some customers are living on a fixed wage, such as a pension or off of their savings, or from dividends. Some are people who earn more than the minimum wage, either before or after the change. Some customers are on food stamps. Some customers have income to which minimum wage minimums don't apply. (This often happens for small businesses.) It's wildly oversimplifying to say that a business paying minimum wage has customers who all earn minimum wage.

These people get more money, more businesses get more customers. More customers mean more sales.

You would need to make that case. An alternative is that businesses go out of business, so minimum wage earners don't earn any wage, and the former businesses stop making product. Another alternative is that the prices of the businesses goods go up sufficiently to consume the entirety, or more, of the wage increase. Another alternative is that the minimum wage earners save the additional proceeds. Another alternative is that the earners fail to qualify for government largesse after the minimum wage increase, and subsequently have less money to spend.

More sales means more profits.

You remind me of a passage in Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. In it, the protagonist remarked that it appeared as though China-men could make a profit starting business in craters on the moon selling rocks to each other and raise large families doing so. They could sell at a loss and make up the difference through volume. More sales means more profits, all else being equal. Of course, one change often begets another, and all else is seldom equal.

~Loyal

Repetitive skill-less tasks that take forever and are required to get to the promised exciting parts of the game.

It's not like that. I will admit to repetitive, but skill helps tremendously. The ban was applied to accounts using a bot that automated PvP...that means one human against another. Or, rather, twenty humans against twenty others. Since humans are so ingenious, it can be quite challenging, particularly against people who are experienced. However, since it was twenty against twenty a bot could be "carried" by nineteen humans and gain honor, which is coin with which to buy armour and weapons. The armour and weapons didn't allow you to get to an exciting part of the game, it made it more difficult for other human-operated characters to kill you. The bot allowed the owner to start it and leave, coming back hours later to spend the coins that it had received.

~Loyal

Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. Yogi Berra

What's the best example you know of for open-source documentation?

It's not open-source documentation, but the same general principles ought to apply. Years ago I bought an Epson dot matrix printer. The first chapter was called "Quick Start." Quick Start told you how to get up and running with the minimum of fuss. For example, it said, "connect all the cables" instead of saying, "connect plug a (pictured) of cable monster (pictured) to jack b (pictured) of printer 345DEF (pictured), along with all the warnings about what damages and injuries might be caused by improper connections of cables. The manual's author assumed the buyer was fairly knowledgeable and simply wanted to print his first file as quickly as possible. So, with a task at hand, and a knowledgeable user, the chapter because a quick, two page, guide that served as either an introduction or a reminder of how things work.

Chapter 2 did the same as chapter 1, but this time with all of the details. People used it to set their printer up using chapter 1, then, if they had trouble, would go to the corresponding portion of chapter 2.

Chapter 3 introduced seldom-used features by describing a task that required that feature and then describing all of the steps necessary to use that feature. It was only with chapter 4 or subsequent chapters that every detail of every possibility was described.

In short, the manual was task-oriented, tasks being the things the user wanted to accomplish, rather then being function-oriented, functions being the things that various parts of the printer were capable of. Engineers and programmers tend to be function-oriented because they design the various functions. Users tend to be task-oriented because things are tools used to get other things done.

I wrote a manual based on the organization of the Epson manual years later. I heard one story of an operator holding up my manual, and telling the speakers, "that's the way to write a manual." It's one of my proudest accomplishments.

~Loyal

This is very important, because religious wackos tend to be the ones against modern science and technology.

True. But then, irreligious wackos tend to be as well.

~Loyal

Not sure what your idea of recent is, but I have some pretty old books on mathematical astronomy dating back to the 70's that all refer to the Earth as an oblate spheroid.

Usually, you divide the "recent" time by the lifetime of the object in question. So, if we're talking about Mayflies then recent is anytime within the last 18 minutes. Since we're talking about the Earth, then you divide the time since the very early 70s (45 years) by the age of the earth (6000 years) to get 0.7%, so, yeah. That's recent.

~Loyal
 

It's pretty obvious to all but the hopelessly deluded that this event had absolutely nothing to do with free speech. Not even those offering that justification actually believe it.

Group A believes something. Group B believes the contrary. Group A threatens to kill group B if they say the contrary. Group B says the contrary. It smells like free speech to me.

~Loyal

I warn you - A government big enough to protect you is strong enough to destroy you.

A government small enough to be unable to destroy you is small enough to be destroyed by the government next door.

~Loyal

That's the level of deliberate stirring we're seeing and it is designed to get a response - bbq in synagogue level squared. If I was in law enforcement in that place I'd make them have their international trollfest way out in the desert so bystanders don't get killed if someone takes the bait.

Really? Do you feel the same way when the shoe's on the other foot? Like when people who subscribe to macro-evolutionary theory take the Ichthys symbol that Christians have used for about twenty centuries, put little footies on it and replace the "Ichthys" with "DARWIN"? Should the guys with that symbol on their cars be forced to drive them out in the desert?

~Loyal