Well, they should get off their fannies and do something about this whole ridiculously resilient ridge that's keeping it from raining at all this winter in California (and is possibly related to the arctic conditions elsewhere...?) Damn it, you just can't trust the military industrial complex to do ANYTHING right. Where are the supervillains when you need 'em?

Yes, I would. In the advent that I had enough money to pay someone to give me an organ, I'd still be aware that the point at which someone is will to violate their bodily integrity for money is someone who is so hard up for cash that the issues of consent become irreparably fucked up.

The issues are different if we're only talking organ donation from corpses, but as other people have pointed out, even that creates extremely perverse incentives.

Kind of off topic here, but the past tense there is sadly inappropriate. Prison labor is still pretty common especially in the south.. They're even having prisoners do labor for corporations. That way, the big companies get all the savings of using unfree labor in china, but they get to do it at home, so they can stick a "made in america" label on it.

And the prisons are still full of people who are guilty of being black. Then there's the whole extraordinarily depressing school-to-jail thing. (including a judge in Pennsylvania who was taking bribes to ship kids off to juvie and....well, this http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/11/school_prison_pipeline_meridian.html where kids end up incarcerated for things like talking back to teachers.

Because it's exploitative, the way the act of performing surgery is not. Compare to how selling yourself into slavery is illegal, even though theoretically it's "your own body".

I wish more people would think of it that way. On both sides. I've gotten caught in a few too many very irritating conversations with people who were...damn, really, the only way to say it was that they were evangelists for various mind-altering substances who would seriously not let it go when told that while I was appreciative, I wasn't interested in experimenting because of a family history of mental illness and a tendency to psychotic episodes triggered by drug use. But it's HARMLESS, those are all LIES blah blah blah and you're just a TOOL of the CONSPIRACY AGAINST FREEDOM and blah blah blah. On and on for ever. Sigh. It was really, really weird, I'd never before encountered anyone whose reaction to being turned down on sharing was anything but "oh, cool. More for me".

You should be worried abut them knowing everything about you. Think of all the little laws (and maybe big ones) you have purposefully or inadvertently broken in your life. This kind of data collection means that if you ever got on the government (or some government worker, or some politician)'s shitlist, they could selectively skim through the information on you until they found things they could charge you with/sue you for/broadcast.

It's really pretty depressing how credulous people are when it comes to "don't worry, this is only applied to BAD people, and we need it to stop those bad people doing evil things." But that's not just in the case of asset forfeiture. You could just as easily substitute "horrifically militaristic raids that lead to civilian fatalities" or mass surveillance or extraordinary rendition or whatever. Few people really seem to care. You get a lot of, "yes, but..."s. At least I do. From pretty smart people, too.

The fourth amendment has been dead since civil forfeiture became common.

So being attractive is, in your mind, correlated with being unintelligent. For women, at least. Awesome. Dude, I probably don't have to tell you this, but you have issues. Misogyny is the least of them.

"an attractive candidate for the job" is a phrase that means different things than "an attractive woman", which is what the poster said. In any case, "attractive" would be an unusual word to apply to "candidate" unless one is speaking of physical attributes. Prospects are attractive, because you are drawn to them. Candidates are more likely to be called promising. Of course, that doesn't rule out just a slip of the tongue, figuratively speaking, but still, considering the rest of the post and everything, I'm kinda thinking that yeah, "physically attractive" was what was meant.

Do you actually hear what you're saying? You think that being attractive automatically means not being geeky, or not being attractive makes someone geeky? what the hell, dude? Geekiness is about your interests and your passions, which, unsurprisingly, have very little to do with what you look like.

Oh, I'd say that deciding to hire "attractive" women for jobs (bonus if they're smart!) is ridiculously sexist.

The storm that hit London does not even begin to compare to Sandy or other disasters. I don't know about you guys, but I don't count a storm that mostly doesn't more than inconvenience people (yes, I know, a few people died from having trees fall on them, but c'mon, that's more of a freak accident than anything.) There was a lot of bitching about disrupted commutes- not even entirely disrupted, just made more difficult- but man, I'm of the opinion that disasters require major consequences. If it's just business as usual, it's not really a disaster. It's just a shitty thing.

Roma does not equal Romanian, just FYI.

I'm disinclined to buy this, although that's admittedly because of my own biases and experience. It's just that my spacial reasoning skills (as of that of my sister, who is one of the most creative and witty people I've ever met) are so insanely poor that it actually counted as a learning disability in school. (And thank god for that, because if I'd had to stick with the "visual math" curriculum my school'd been pushing, I'd still probably being trying to complete per-algebra...or at least their bizarre, mystifying version of it).

Spacial puzzles are a special kind of hell for me. But my inability to rotate objects in my head, draw with the level of accuracy most 8 year olds can accomplish, or learn any knots more complex than a square knot has never actually seemed to hold me back when it has come to problem solving or coming up with creative solutions...well, except when those problems are "fit as many dishes as possible into this dishwasher", but still.