I think that's a reasonable approach. We can never have perfection, but we can strive to avoid mistakes, and one way is through requiring better evidence, as you called it "beyond doubt". What standards would you suggest?

I actually wonder if anyone needs to be paid to handle this stuff. It's a useful service, and hence potentially profitable - why wouldn't the market deal with it? Once we start getting substantial excesses of power from residential solar, the energy companies would be seeking for places to dump it, and one can offer such a thing, for a fee. And then sell that power back to the company when they need it (peak of consumption) at a slightly higher rate. So long as this roundtrip is cheaper than the cheapest generated power, the energy companies would participate.

Natural gas is already paid separately for the connection and for the gas itself, so adopting such a model wouldn't be breaking any new ground.

Sure. And a starving guy who can't find a job is not entitled to the contents of your wallet if he finds it on the street, but you'd have to be a sociopath or a retard to actually blame him for not returning it to you, even if that's a "right thing" to do. Or claiming that he's somehow a bad guy if he doesn't.

Those Mexican citizens aren't trying to solve the problems of Mexico as a whole. They're trying to solve the problems that they have as individuals.

And, of course, no-one asked them if they want to be citizens of Mexico when they were born, so Mexico is not entitled to having them solve its problems, either.

They don't have sovereignty, the Mexican state does. To what extent it actually represents the citizens in general, and these citizens in particular, is a question that you should ask before pursuing this line of argument any further.

Shipping Mexican citizens into the US won't fix the problems in Mexico.

Those Mexican citizens aren't trying to solve the problems of Mexico as a whole. They're trying to solve the problems that they have as individuals.

And, of course, no-one asked them if they want to be citizens of Mexico when they were born, so Mexico is not entitled to having them solve its problems, either.

They don't have sovereignty, the Mexican state does. To what extent it actually represents the citizens in general, and these citizens in particular, is a question that you should ask before pursuing this line of argument any further.

While I'm sure there are some people who use the current crop of PCIe SSDs to max out databases, builds or whatever, the number of people for whom it makes a real difference is pretty small. For the overwhelming number of people there's just another, different bottleneck they're now hitting or the speed difference isn't noticeable.

It currently seems to be hitting a bit of a benchmark-mania where people run disk benchmarks just for the numbers without any actual improvement in usable performance in most areas.

Saying that green card lottery is a viable way to legally immigrate is like saying that gambling is a viable way to legally earn money for a living. It's true in a very pedantic way, but practically meaningless.

I'm not saying anything of a kind. In fact, I didn't say a single word about what government should or shouldn't do, only about your attitude towards people who break that particular law. I don't know about you, but I know dozens of people who break the law - most of them smoke weed. I don't see why it should affect my opinion of them in any way, since it's obviously a bad and stupid law that I don't have to respect.

Ah, I missed the Sweden reference, thanks. Too much stuff to read this morning and I'm skimming at best.

I am an H1B as well, so I can relate. But ...

Let me make this clear: you are being abused (the terms of H1 visas are effectively abusive for would-be immigrants due to the way they tie you to a specific employer with a very complicated switching process, and reset your green card application if you switch while it's still ongoing), and so you don't like it when other people - who don't get even the abusive option that you do - dodge that?

(And of course being in US as an illegal immigrant is still a very subpar experience to being legal ... hell, just try opening a bank account that way!)

The point is, people tout the illegal status of an immigrant as some kind of huge moral character flaw or failure, sufficient in and of itself to treat them as scum. I'm merely point out that it's not true in general, and specifically depends on how easy it is to immigrate legally for the same person, and how strong are the reasons that prompt them to immigrate. As I'm sure you know full well from your own experience, it's not a light decision to take in the first place, and US immigration system in particular is a mess of gigantic proportions with no coherent immigration policy whatsoever - just a confusing mish-mash of random decisions made over the last few decades.

Can you give an example of an immigration track for an average Mexican, then? What visa he should apply for first etc.

The only thing I can think of is the green card lottery. But it is just that, a lottery, it's not something you can actually rely on to get you there, no matter how long you wait.

Suppose that everything was true, except that they were there illegally (because there is no way for them to immigrate legally, which is the case for most Mexicans). Would your opinion of them change?

Wannabe central planners think they have all the answers.

Here's a crazy idea - stop artificial price fixing of water and let the stupid uses become unprofitable through millions of decisions by people who know about their own business.

"Oh, no," they say, "we know better. Even though they created this mess with that attitude.

Remember, Slate's entire business model is to find fault where there is none and assign blame. Keep this in mind when you read their next inflammatory article and you'll see the pattern.

I'm not against the death penalty; I'm against making irreparable mistakes.

There's a way to prevent gung-ho justice: if judgment is later found to be in error, visit the same penalty on those who condemned. Tho I vaguely recall this principle comes from Sharia law, and if so it doesn't seem to limit behavior much in Real Life.

I don't know the case -- was it an American elk or a moose? Cuz both are dangerous under the wrong circumstances, but moose far more so.