True enough. I've never smoked, but I am overweight, and realize it is a form of suicide- if a very tasty and slow one. But I'd point out that if we had more localized solutions for food (eliminating the need to ship and store food except for famine protection) we'd eliminate much of that.
I was talking more about the Declaration of Independence with its enumeration of "self evident" rights in a specific order, and using those to interpret the Constitution. Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights is a more specific application of this; but is a federalist, central government solution to a basic problem that I believe would be FAR better handled locally.
I'm actually quite sad to read this. I have little interest in so-called smart phones. I have computers and tablets for running serious software and for web browsing. I don't use a lot of cloud services like those hosted by Google and Facebook, and I have little need for the kind of software that exists only as a smartphone app.
So, for many years, I have just bought a cheap and cheerful Nokia feature phone. They invariably have good battery life compared to any smartphone. They are much smaller in my pocket. They run reliably for their entire useful lifetime, without breaking or shifting everything around arbitrarily during some dramatic firmware update. They don't come with the same level of creepware that smartphones from all the major brands now do. I can buy one for next to nothing at any phone shop, without signing up to pay half my salary on a phone plan with a multi-year lock-in to the same network. And they still let me do what I actually need a phone for: pushing a couple of buttons and then talking with someone, or maybe sending the occasional text message.
I realise that smart phones rule the universe these days and I'm some sort of technological Neanderthal (aside from all the other bleeding edge tablets, computers and software I work with everyday, obviously) but I for one will miss Nokia feature phones. I guess I'll go back to hoping for a resurgent BlackBerry that at least has a business focus and therefore something resembling security and not assuming I want a Facebook icon on my home screen that can't be deleted.
If you get the real thing, get rock salt load. Stings like the dickens- has a usually non lethal but the stopping power of a
BTW, with any pump action shotgun (even a BB one) their only warning should be "Ker Chunk". Everybody knows that sound, and they know what comes next is pain.
That's a bit backwards, however. If the Right to Life isn't how we interpret the Constitution (sure doesn't seem to be how the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution) then all we have is specific versions of the Right to Life handed out to groups as we see fit, and the Constitution, not respect for human life, is the foundation of law.
Health care is a natural right because life is a natural right, not because the 14th Amendment should be used to grant it to [women, blacks, Jews, Catholics, the unborn, etc]
"And maybe it's time to think about getting my first firearm. (And some lessons some where, having only ever shot a BB gun before.) I live in a nice neighborhood, but maybe that makes us a target."
A pump action BB Gun makes the same Ker-Chunk as a 12 gauge; the sound alone can make a burglar who knows what it is run. 12 pumps, and you have the equivalent of rock salt load in a 12 gauge.
At which point we get the steaming pile that is Cover Oregon, in which any subsidy you might get is swallowed up by the 10x increase in expense for the insurance.
I submit that before *any* right, are the needs indelible to the Right to Life, and until those are fulfilled for every citizen, all other rights are merely privileges granted to cronies in proportion to their usefulness to the oligarchy; nothing more, nothing less. Even the right of private property is worthless without protection of the basic needs.
Meanwhile, someone who isn't Google and doesn't have offices in the EU will surely make up a page of links to this information. If the page generates traffic, someone will pay for add space there.
And then the next logical step is for the EU to impose some sort of sanctions on the infrastructure and payment services involved if any of them have any connection to the EU -- just as the US government has done with things like DNS and payment services that are conveniently within its jurisdiction.
I'm not sure I like where this is all going. I'm sure we can all agree that overall the Internet has been a great advance for humanity, and in recent years governments from all over the world have presumed to carve it up and control it in their own interests, almost invariably to the detriment of people somewhere else (or, in some cases, their own people).
However, we are going to have to confront some difficult philosophical and ethical differences sooner or later, because clearly we also can't have a situation where the Internet is somehow above the law, but we don't always agree on what that law should be. Frankly, the US government have been throwing their own weight around for years, and Google have been doing things that push the boundaries of typical European legal and ethical standards for a long time too. Neither has shown any particular concern or remorse about the effects of their actions abroad, and neither has suffered any significant negative consequences so far, with the possible exception of the Snowden fallout. Sooner or later the rest of the world was going to push back.
In as much as this marks a change in the general acceptance that the US can export its laws and ethics but won't be subject to anyone else's, that is probably a good direction to move in. It will force the issues of Internet governance and extra-territorial law enforcement into the open, where at least we can scrutinise and debate them honestly, instead of everyone's government doing sneaky things often without much public scrutiny and often because of coincidences involving which infrastructure happened to fall somewhere they could get at it.
Imagine where we'd be if Palin were president.
Yeah, or that shining example of progressive intellectuual integrity, John Edwards.
"How many wars have been waged or led by democracies in the past 200 years? Quite nearly all of them. "
Or none of them. The ones democracies participated in, were started by dictatorships invading their neighbors. But even if you add up all the dead in all the wars of the last 200 years- you're still at only a fraction of the 56 million that we've lost to abortion in America alone since 1973.
"How many wars have been waged by actual socialist countries - not just ones who were playing with words - in the past 200 years? Almost none of them."
By playing with words, do you mean the ones who have actually claimed to be socialist? Plus, of course, socialism and democracy does have a rather strong overlap.
"Hell just the number of people that our democracy has killed in war in the past 15 years is likely larger than the total number killed by all the military actions of all actual socialist states in the past 200 years."
Hmm, larger than the 15 million Stalin killed outright? Not in war. But abortions, yes.
Your average modern war kills a few hundred thousand tops.
I don't disagree in general, but please remember the original context here was whether going it alone as a start-up might be a liability if Big Players declined to let you into those programmes, i.e., we are talking about precisely the situation where the platform maintainer might not have that implicit interest in your success.
The key difference IMHO is that I don't need Microsoft to care about me. I can write Windows-based software and sell it to Windows-using customers with no help from Microsoft except selling us Windows and any related tools in the first place, and all three parties win on the deal. If I want to sell an iPhone app, my entire revenue stream is entirely dependent on Apple, and Apple are not known in these parts for the care with which they examine new apps or the caution or neutrality they exhibit when banning something they decide they don't like.
"Democracy has a body count many orders of magnitude higher than socialism."
Only if you take abortion into account.
Oh here we go again... At least try to use the same mounting brackets.
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.
