The big difference is that in Netherlands they can trust law enforcement to destroy the samples after that investigation was done. In the other hand, in NYC you can be fairly certain that law enforcement would hold on to those samples and resulting DB, breaking promises and maybe the law with impunity.

What the RCMP officers did VERY wrong was to blindly take sides in a dispute, helping an aggressor against his victim. They arrived to the scene where suspect A was assaulting, holding down and trying to destroy property of suspect B who was resisting the aggression and trying to protect his property. Then they proceeded to cuff suspect B (the victim), damage and confiscate his property, and arrest him; all while leaving suspect A (the aggressor) free.

A mall is a privately owned public place. If you invite the public into your privately owned property it is a public place and there is a limit to the crap you can throw at them.

They don't have “rape, beatings and stabbings” in Swedish prisons.

First, no human can know all the effects of all the ingredients of all the products someone consumes, not even a phd in medicine or bioquemestry. So no, I'm not saying consumers are retards, I'm saying they are only human.

And Second, yes, there is a concept of reputation, but it is something that, without oversight, can be easily manipulated by unethical advertising, fake reports/certifications, astroturfing, etc.

There are several flaws in your hypothetical no-legislation scenario:

• - Companies can get "voluntary certified" by their own shell companies or other kind of fake/biased certification, and there is no way for the consumer to distinguish a serious/real certification from a fake/biased one.
• - Companies can "voluntary inform" an incomplete list of ingredients and there is no way for the consumer to know which product have a real collectively exhaustive list or just the ones the producer wanted you to know.
• - Competitors can band together to omit inconvenient truths together

This policy went too far, the cost to personal freedoms is too great to be justified.

Having said that, I can understand the rationale behind it. I wouldn't like to hire a smoker (even one who smoked only after hours) the same way I wouldn't like to hire an alcoholic (I mean a non recovery one). Hiring any addict has costs, he will always have times where the only thing he can think is “where is my next fix”.

As I said before, their guidelines are published, but their interpretation of the guidelines are not. So that is not an open and transparent process.

It would be the equivalent of a country having public laws, but having all case records and jurisprudence sealed for everyone but the judge and the prosecutor. Then, if you lose in court, they just say “you lost” without giving you details, so you have no base to mount your appeals.

The fact that you, a consumer, is willing to let wireless carriers off the hook, and only demand just and descent service from wired carriers, only show that we all have been drinking too much of the wireless carriers' cool-aid.

I wish google would stand its ground on this issue and deny those apps with messed up policies until the developers fix that. If it is not required for the core functionality of the application then it should be blocked at OS level.

That is simply not true. Apple submission guidelines are ambiguous and their official interpretation of it is a secret. Once you are refused you have no way of knowing why or how to fix it. There are plenty of examples in the media of developers who, after having an app rejected, try in vain to get an answer from Apple on why exactly the app was refused. Most of those cases the developer simply loses all hope and abandon the app, losing months of development.

First of all, Free speech, as any natural human right, is restricted when it is considered to cause harm to other people. Different countries and cultures have different definitions of which speech causes harm and consequently restrict different kinds of speech. For example the USA (a good example because they declare themselves the champions of free speech), forbids the following classes of speech:

- obscenity,
- defamation,
- incitement,
- incitement to riot or imminent lawless action,
- fighting words,
- fraud,
- speech covered by government granted monopoly (copyright),
- speech integral to criminal conduct

So, regarding the brazilian case, I don't know if the allegations on the video are true of not, but that doesn't matter at this point because the candidate, as any other, has the natural human right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, and making such allegations right before the elections cause irreparable harm to the election process and consequently to the whole population of the city. If he is guilty of something, the right thing to do is to present the suspicions to the authorities for investigation, not to hold them for months/years in order to take a cheep blow to his campaign.

I'm not from there, but I applaud their justice system. It seams obvious to me that someone who opts to operate heavy machinery on a very public setting have to assume all the responsibilities that entails. A person walking or cycling should never be blamed for being crushed by such machinery, the operator bears all the blame.

Car taxation don't pay for the roads, it only pays for the additional road maintenance necessary because of the damage caused by cars passing on it.

Following your plan we will have to deal with tens of thousands (probably more like hundreds of thousands) of people with sedentarism related illnesses, including plenty of brain injuries in the form of strokes.