Yes clearly my recommendation is jurisdiction-limited. In most countries they would probably wonder why you are talking about a state attorney general in the first place, as I doubt it's a common title outside of the US. Of course, a customer service rep in plenty of countries would probably wonder why you are speaking in English to them in the first place.

But seriously even if I had the choice between a bureaucrat in a well-functioning regulatory body versus an aggressive American lawyer I would still pick the attorney general to best protect my interests.

FTFY. Large companies generally aren't afraid of most government agencies, due to regulatory capture. But tell them that you might be in touch with the office of an ambitious politician with subpoena power and suddenly they become very helpful.

Yes it does. At least, it means more distance is covered during your reaction time, which is the same thing as driving slower and having an impaired reaction time due to not paying attention.

if the IRS should be allowed aggressive auditing powers (and I'm not saying they shouldn't), then it's only fair that an elected body such as Congress should have the right to aggressively audit those audits to ensure those powers aren't being abused. If the IRS can get out of that check by losing particular emails that is a serious problem, just as if the political non profits being audited could avoid problems by disposing of evidence they would rather not have the IRS look at

Unfortunately even that isn't true: see Simpson's Paradox. Not to pick on you, but it is really tough to make strong assertions one way or the other based on social science data. I think the best we can do is a Bayesian approach; start with some prior assumption based on ideology and personal experience, then adjust that prior based on the results of scientific studies. So in parent poster's case, his prior is that guns are pretty good in society, so the reinforcing data point that more guns = less crime makes his belief stronger. Someone whose prior is that guns are bad should probably not be as affected by that data (and if they are being intellectually honest, it would lessen their conviction that guns are bad), and someone who really had no opinion (if you could find such a person!) should be slightly more positively disposed to guns with that data. Of course, another study will typically come out shortly thereafter saying the opposite, so unless you get a series of studies all going in one direction, science will typically not change people's minds.

Von Neumann said it; that's close enough to a law for me!

But the effects of this on the non-zero sum economy are important to consider. If the new markings actually do discourage parking in front of the hydrant, then both New Yorkers and the New York Government can be better off because of the improved ability to control fires, thereby reducing damage and protecting firefighters. Hence the knowledge gained from proper analysis of the data makes the world a better place.

I'm not sure which of these technologies will be successful in the coming months, but I am certain that before the year is over we will see many job postings requiring 3 years experience with Swift.

And here this post is modded +5 Informative but somewhere else it's modded +5 Funny

Sounds like jury duty. Which was (and still is) one of the best technologies to fight tyranny.

The Nazi's what understood quite well? (check your possessive apostrophe)

I'll let someone else make the appropriate joke about a grammar nazi comment about real Nazis. So to feel like I contributed something serious to the discussion, I'll simply add that, whatever they understood about SIGINT, the Nazis were pwned by the English-speaking world too.

I agree that the first order effects should assume that the system generally works, but it is also important to consider second order effects of the inevitable failures that will occur, and whether the consequences of those failures are acceptable.

However, even the secondary effects of a loser pays system aren't too bad. It would add some Type I error for a (hopefully much larger) reduction in Type II error, which probably makes the system a little better overall.

The aqueduct?