Because doing so implies that it's OK because it has a justification. "Hey, it's OK for doctors putting us at risk, because they have a really good reason".

This is a clear-cut example of that "needs of the many" thing. Yes, doctors encounter sickness more often then average. Yes, that probably means they get sick more often. Yes, their work is really hard.

Does the inconvenience of one doctor outweigh the inconvenience of 5 patients catching what he's got?

I once read a study where doctors refuse to use checklists, despite abundant evidence that doing so would reduce the incidence of hospital errors.

The reason? Doctors simply didn't want to use them - they felt that they were good enough not to need them.

(That was awhile ago - now checklists are starting to catch on.)

€144,000 annually is comfortable living by any metric.

Getting deeper into bed with them is not a sensible decision either. It may be necessary in the short term but what's the exit strategy? The most sensible decision would be to avoid putting yourself in the position where you have to make that choice. Failing that, I would personally take my chances with the authorities. Caving to blackmail is never a winning move in the long term.

If you don't want to get fleas don't lay down with dogs. The "mob" (a misleading title, given that TFA doesn't mention Cosa Nostra or any other organized crime syndicate....) didn't pick these two at random and hold guns to their head. They got involved with them willingly; one of the two was seeking start up capital for a business venture and quite likely ignored the little voice inside of his head because of greed. An old adage comes to mind, "If it sounds too good to be true....."

Incidentally, the "mob" as traditionally discussed in the United States doesn't tend to go after random citizens. They typically get hooks into their victims because of the victim's own bad judgment. Loansharking, gambling, prostitution, drugs, and so forth. At the street level the vast majority of violent crime is common criminal on common criminal. There aren't too many places in the First World where taxpaying citizens have to really worry about becoming a statistic. Common sense goes a long way....

Read TFA. Specifically these paragraphs:

To his surprise, Adibelli agreed. “If you wanted out, why didn’t you let us know?” he said. Maertens was too scared to bring up the beating and the kidnapping and death threats. “Obviously, you know we’re not in a legal business,” Adibelli added. “So if you talk to anyone, we know where you and your family live.”

Adibelli brought Van De Moere down next and asked him if he wanted out, too. Van De Moere said yes.

There was only one condition of the release: Van De Moere had to give Okul an intensive training session on Linux, the operating system on which Metasploit, the hacking software, is based. A few weeks later, according to police and interviews, he did so over one weekend at a Holiday Inn in Ghent. In November, Van De Moere returned two antennas and had a couple of beers with Okul. That was the last either man would see of the Turks.

Something doesn't jive here. The type of people that are willing to actually hold a gun to your head are not the type of people that are willing to let you walk away simply by giving your notice. I don't doubt that there was some level of intimidation at play but there were apparently limits to how far the bad guys were willing to go. Which begs the question of why these two didn't go to the authorities after they "got out." Perhaps they didn't wish to part with the €25,000 in cash they had previously received?

These two were making €12,000 and €20,000 per month, before their involvement with the criminal element. One of them was seeking start up capital for a business venture and allowed himself to get roped in that way. If you give them the benefit of the doubt the best you can say about them is they were naive. In the worst reading they were greedy and willfully complicit. I suspect reality falls between those two extremes.

New York State limits you to carrying no more than seven condoms at a time. It's a bit of common sense legislation; there's no legitimate reason why a non-rapist would need more than seven condoms. :)

Please name 38 States that you think would ratify such an amendment. My own State (New York) would not ratify a repeal of the 2nd Amendment, despite our hostility to gun rights; the votes simply aren't there in the New York State Senate. If New York State would not ratify it just who do you think would? Other than New Jersey there is no State that is more hostile to gun rights than New York. I could set the bar lower for you than an outright repeal and you still can't get to 38.

Politics is the art of the possible; whatever the merits or lack thereof of gun control you do need to acknowledge this reality.

That would be prior restraint; in the United States we do not apply prior restraint to fundamental rights. You can be denied your right to keep and bear arms because of an established mental illness (the Federal standard requires that you be deemed mentally incompetent by a court) but you can not be compelled to prove a negative in order to exercise it.

"I have schizophrenia." <--- Denied
"Prove you don't have schizophrenia." <--- Unconstitutional

If you're not an American that may seem like a weird place to draw the line but we've got centuries of case law and tradition behind this concept. Speech works the same way too.

Why is it taking people "years" to "learn to code"? That's the part that seems wasteful. You don't need to be a "computer scientist" to write useful code.

Sorry to anger you but I really meant nothing against the tech, just in for a simple laugh.

You have a point, but you also have to consider the context of comparison.

Plants grown outdoors face an array of problems that the farmer has to account for. Keeping insects off, keeping weeds at bay, keeping the plants watered and fertilized - all this comes at a cost to the farmer.

Indoor farming requires a more expensive infrastructure (the building, trays, and plumbing) but has great savings in some of the other areas. It's easier to keep weeds and insects out, for instance.

Of particular note, outdoors you can't recycle unused water or fertilizer, but this can be done indoors. Collect any unused water after the plants have drunk their fill, remove waste products, top off the fertilizer, and reuse.

So the economic question is this: is the extra money/effort spent on generating light compensated for by the savings in insecticides, roundup, fertilizer, and water?

I think the answer is probably "yes", given that LED lights are incredibly efficient. (Also of note: less of the environment is damaged by excess fertilizer and water drainage. Damaging the environment indirectly costs money.)

Then the next question is with the building: does it make sense to have big windows and use mostly solar light, and adjust as needed with indoor lighting?

Windows cost more than walls, they require extra heating and/or air conditioning, they're not as structurally sound, and the light isn't used efficiently in the 3-d volume; meaning, you can't grow corn on each story of a 5-story building, because the first layer will shade the ones below it. (And windows break, they have to be cleaned, they tend to leak, &c.)

It may be more economically sensible to grow corn in a 5-story warehouse close to a city simply because it reduces the transport costs. It also reduces the amount of land used - allowing more plots to go back to the wild.

And on top of all of this, researchers I've talked to are doing clever things with the light recipe they're giving to plants.

Some plants detect the reddening of the sun and "go to sleep" at sunset. By adjusting the light color, you can keep the plants growing 18 hours a day and then blast them with excess red light to get them to quickly go into night mode. This increases yield by reducing the growing period of their crops.

(A bunch of other experiments are really interesting, such as: hitting the crops with a particular frequency of light to cause their ripening flavors to go into overdrive, making a crop that is inordinately tasty.)

So in summary, we should do the economic experiment and see if it's viable, but in toto there's a lot to recommend indoor industrial gardening.

It's OK. I'm from Colorado, I know what you really meant.

Oh I accidentally replied to the wrong post, meant to reply to the one describing Vermont as a liberal (as in politics) state. Chicago is in a very liberal state.