i would never think a country like britain would fall victim to this sort of censorial nonsense, and it is a troubling development

however, i don't buy the argument it is because of feminism

you need to understand that feminism there is the older valid causes against the maltreatment of women and the removal of their rights. which used to be far worse in the west. and is indeed still a major problem in the world, especially in areas like india and islamic countries

but the kind of feminism you seem to be reacting to isn't really feminism at all, it is instead this sort of clueless teenaged reactive naval gazing by immature clowns

kind of like how dismantling all governmental protections against abuses by large market players is called "libertarianism" in the usa. while actual genuine libertarianism of the original european sort has to do with social issues. real valid libertarians are interested in legalizing marijuana, not freeing plutocrats from paying their fair share of taxes

so like the word "libertarian" in the usa has been hijacked corrupted and rendered invalid by a plutocrat agenda, so to have a few headcases coopted the word "feminist" and advanced truly nutty causes that only mark the believer in those causes as having some sort of psychological or social deficiency

furthermore, for you to react to these fringe idiots, and believe what they stand for is actual feminism, just means you have been horribly trolled. snap out of it, you've been fooled

real, valid feminism is a very important ideology in this world, against the very real and very evil treatment of women in many parts of this world

thank you, that's a valid clarification

i am aware some countries outlaw fantasy cartoon child porn as well as actual real child porn

while real child porn should never be legal and should always be blocked, i think that fantasy drawings and cartoons do have valid cathartic use and should be legal

also, the legal status quo against fantasy content precludes the tactic of honey pots

outlawing the fantasy content drives it underground, while allowing it to flow freely allows the authorities to track profile, and locate consumers of it

as they should

because viewing this material indicates a proclivity that allows us to find pedophiles

and pedophiles should never be able to exist in open society without monitoring

like drug addiction, we should not incarcerate pedophiles, we should treat them as having a healthcare issue. pedophiles, once identified, should be treated, not jailed

and closely watched nonetheless

because like how valid porn between consenting adults does not prevent all rape, only minimize it, fantasy child porn would also only mitigate child abduction and victimization, not prevent all of it

being a pedophile marks you as fundamentally incompatible with human society in a truly horrible way. i feel sorry for pedophiles, i'd rather have painful cancer than be a pedophile, it is a truly life destroying, life hobbling vile affliction

because to be a pedophile means you have a sexual proclivity which immediately elicits the completely valid parental response and societal response to protect their children. some of that instinct outside the realm of law will find immediate and violent impulse, and even large sympathy for that violent impulse. the imperative to protect children is strong, as it should be, and pedophilia is a valid threat. but even in the realm of legality, society has to strongly consider the potential for grave harm that a pedophile represents in open society. a pedophile is truly screwed in many ways, and there is little empathy for them

pedophilia, like homosexuality, is merely a genetic aberration in the formation of sexual attraction. but while homosexuality is fine because it involves consenting adults, pedophilia will never be ok because it involves one party that can never consent (in an informed way, not a bullshit "i gave you toys and candy and you said 'ok' to my suggestion of sex" because a child can never give informed consent on the topic)

i think maybe in the future we can treat pedophilia with child shaped robots

but even so, treatment will never prevent all pedophiles from hurting real children. and therefore society must always view them in a very critical, suspicious, dim light. because they always represent the potential for grave harm

i think if i were a pedophile i'd choose self-banishment to greenland or something. having a strong sense of morality is only a guide, not a cloak of protection, we all have moments of weakness, and i would never want a moment of weakness of mine to result in harm to a child

truly a life-crippling, monstrous affliction

No, it just shows your lack of reading comprehension. Go back and find any mention in my posts of morality. It's OK. I'll wait.

agreed 100%

you have no principles or morality in your "thinking" on the topic. that's the actual point

you have mindless contrarianism where one person can do something evil because somebody else did. and then blame that evil action on someone else anyways, due to your lack of understanding of the concept of accountability

you demonstrate your own personal failures of character rather than any valid commentary on geopolitics. you are projecting choices and consequences as understood by your own dim wattage mind:

1. "somebody did something bad so i should be able to do something bad"

two-wrongs-make-a-right logic

2. "the reason i did something bad is because of what someone else did that does not actually logically imply my action, but whatever"

wife beater logic

your arguments depend upon this "thinking", therefore you mark yourself as an immoral and irresponsible douchebag

i actually feel sorry for anyone who has to work with you or is related to you/ friends with you. you're obviously a horrible piece of shit in the way you think about what is justified or not in this world according to #1 and #2 above

here's some bullshit arguments similar to yours:

"if we legalize marijuana, that means we have to legalize heroin and meth"

"if we legalize gay marriage, that means we have to legalize marrying corpses or animals"

see the problem? people actually think in your world. and they can tell the difference between different topics. we don't slide effortlessly into lack of thought on major issues of liberty and rights. no one does. your argument is illogical FUD

simply having the tool or liberty to do one thing, does not automatically mean that using that tool or liberty in all cases is therefore legitimized or inevitable or even more likely

because people can tell the difference between different topics. we think. we're not blind

the very concept of the slippery slope is a logical fallacy that instantly marks the argument as invalid. it is used to make fear-based demagogue arguments

this doesn't mean i support blocking porn websites, it simply means that the act of blocking websites: phishing sites, child porn sites, etc., does not in any way have anything to do with restricting websites that have genuine free expression use that the govt may not like. to block those, the govt has to actually do that, and therefore is doing something new and different and not in any way related to blocking sites that really do need to be blocked (child porn, phishing, etc.)

you have to remove the thinking human being from the equation to make your bullshit argument work. or do you believe blocking websites requires some vast infrastructure that would not be viable nor exist if we didn't block child porn first? nonsense

you can say having a police dept is a slippery slope to martial law. except there is no actual slippery slope because people can actually tell the difference between different concepts of use for a police dept. as recent controversies in the usa demonstrate. and in fact without a police dept, society quickly succumbs to chaos

think

invoking the concept of the slippery slope removes you from the land of logic and reason and places you firmly in the land of fear based emotion

more socially conservative societies that restrict outlets for harmless sexual release do indeed have higher rates of rape and sexual violence in general. there is much truth to the concept of catharsis as a way to reduce rape and sexual violence. it doesn't prevent everything, just some of it

but bringing up child porn in this context is a red herring because the creation of child porn victimizes actual children, and this is why it is genuinely immoral illegal and verboten

sexual content between consenting adults is completely unrelated to child porn. to believe it is marks you as woefully inadequate to comment intelligently on the topic, or a failed troll

how socially clueless and sheltered can someone be?

you have asperger's maybe?

there's some sort of large social deficit at work here resulting in spouting this nonsense

We should also let the market decide if the military and the police are worth paying for.

There are a few people who believe that we don't need a government; that the free market can solve all problems up to and including national defense. These people are called anarcho-capitalists.

Other people believe that government should handle things for people that the people cannot handle for themselves, and military and police fall into the latter category. I am in this camp; I consider myself a minarchist.

Still other people believe that government should be really big and do lots of stuff; not just the core functions like military and police, but government should feed people, provide medical care for people, etc.

Your joke about making military and police optional is kind of funny, but actually conflating military and police with renewable energy policy is fuzzy thinking.

The big problem with anarcho-capitalism, IMHO, is the free rider problem. If 90% of the people make their voluntary contributions to the national defense, and 10% don't, it is not possible for the defense to allow attacks on the 10%. National defense is either effective for everyone or effective for nobody.

On the other hand, privatized fire departments actually work. Not only have they been tried, they actually are in current operation in the USA. It's simple: if you don't pay for fire protection, the fire department doesn't save your house; they watch it burn down (and make sure the fire doesn't spread to paid-up neighbors' homes). No free-rider problem.

So while I don't actually believe that privatized police and military would work, other things like power generation and fire departments could work. Then it becomes a political question of what the majority of people prefer. (I don't expect ever to see the government get as small as the imaginary minarchist model would propose; I'd be happy just to see it get smaller. Most people like public fire departments and would vote to keep them, and I'm not such a hard-core frothing-at-the-mouth minarchist that I have a real problem with this. Overall, public fire departments are working okay.)

The cost of solar has fallen dramatically, so lots of people will build solar even if the government doesn't do anything.

The government could best encourage solar by streamlining regulations, and possibly with some sort of low-interest loan program to help people get past the initial cost. If solar makes sense, people could save enough money on their electricity to pay back the loans.

My big fear though is that if the government tries to force this, it will turn out like the similar program in Germany. Because of the lack of practical grid-scale energy storage, Germany has simultaneously managed to produce huge amounts of free renewable power while making the German citizens pay far more than ever for power and while burning more coal than ever. (Germany is shutting down nuclear power plants; solar and wind aren't dependable enough; result, more coal burned.)

President Obama's administration has implemented new rules to reduce coal burning, but the example of Germany shows that this shall really cause a dramatic increase in prices so it will not be politically possible for that plan to be fully implemented. It's easy to talk about it now, but it will be hard for politicians to say "your electricity cost will necessarily skyrocket and you just need to deal with it, and vote for me." (The plan contains "escape hatches" that will allow the utilities to keep producing power with coal if the plan doesn't work out.)

I think that all we really need is practical grid-level energy storage, and the "green energy" solution will take off like a rocket with no government intervention needed. I have hopes for liquid metal batteries but any high-density storage solution would solve the problem.

If we get grid-level storage in the near future, solar and wind power will become much more economically attractive and we will get more of it. Then politicians will claim the credit and the coal-burning reductions will actually happen. If solar and wind power remain economically problematic and government forces us to use more, we will all pay more for power, and politicians will say there is nothing they can do.

Sure, but that's only an issue if the regulations specify Tesla levels of performance and efficiency. I'm suggesting the regs could be written with the most efficient ICE automobiles on the market *today* as the benchmark for what is feasible. These are by not necessarily fantastically expensive, nor are they hair-shirt city cars. The Mazda 3 is a four door sedan that seats five and has an engine that delivers 184 hp at 26 mpg city/35 highway; MSRP is 18.8K$. If you need a people mover you can get a seven passenger Mitsubishi minivan rated 25 city/31 highway for 23.2k$.

It's clear that the current state of the art in ICE makes affordable, practical cars that exceed the current average mileage technologically feasible. They're being sold now. If on the other hand you want high performance, e.g., to go 0-60 mph in under 4 seconds, then you're talking big bucks and exotic technology.

What manufacturers won't be able to do is slap a tarted-up body on a primitive $26,000 truck chassis, call it an SUV, and charge $50,000 for it. I'm talking about the Silverado based Suburban. I think there's a place in the world for such vehicles, but it's insane to charge an additional 24k to slap two rows of seating in place of a pickup bed; there's plenty of headroom to charge a gas guzzler tax on that one.

Did he not have a charger at home? If he lived in a place where he couldn't charge his car, a Tesla was probably not a good choice for him. If he did, he should easily been able to fully charge his car every single day.

You don't need social networking for your apps, but you do need identity management. You have to log in.

That login is incredibly important. It's a pain in the ass for every site to implement their own identity management. It's really hard to do well, and developers would rather focus on the site/app's usage after the user has logged in.

So there's a weird overlap between Facebook and Google, even though they serve very different purposes. Both have become practically universal, and increasingly, sites are leveraging their identity management platforms. Facebook's ubiquity meant that Google risked losing their edge there. Can you imagine the point where Google says, "Screw it, we're just going to let people link their Google Docs to their Facebook account"?

Privacy advocates go nuts about that, of course, but a large swath of users are perfectly content to have the improved simplicity of just pressing a button to sign in to something once they've verified their identity to the device. It enables all kinds of evils, since your eggs are now all in one basket, and even a company without evil intentions is going to profit off being able to peek in the basket. The right tech can limit what information you're sharing, but Google and Facebook knew all.

Both Facebook accounts and Google accounts are ubiquitous, and if anybody could dislodge Facebook, it was Google. Facebook took it seriously, and they really upped their game to prevent G+ from taking over. The advantages G+ offered were slim. They tried to market it with better privacy, but few people want to work that hard. It attracted a bunch of privacy nerds, and nobody wants to be social with them but other techies.

Google wasn't ready to manage identity. They didn't offer any real advantages for it. People seem to be content to manage two identity management platforms when needed; we've been trained to think that having dozens of passwords is reasonable. I believe they could have succeeded if they'd gone to the next level, making Google Wallet really ubiquitous. Facebook's feature is rudimentary. Pay systems on the Internet still suck. But Google wasn't ready to pull that feat off, and people just didn't need a second social network when they had one they were happy with.

Indeed. But it's also true that change per se puts more stress on less innovative or agile companies, especially companies that have massive investments sunk into older technologies. No matter what rules you set it'll benefit some companies over others; rules that are very favorable to GMC would be unfavorable to Tesla and vice versa. They'll both argue that rules that benefit them the most are best for the country.

I'll say this for Tesla's position, though: the notion that it's physically impossible to build fuel efficient cars that people will want to buy is balderdash.

How about because when NATO ignores Russian security concerns and expands recklessly, Russia responds with low-level, plausibly deniable invasions and destabilizations in the states they feel are strategically within their sphere, much like the US does with literally the entire Western hemisphere.

1. we went over this moron. "it's ok for russia to do bad things because USA does bad things" intellectual and moral bankruptcy

first off fuck the usa. it's committed many crimes in this world. but more importantly, your "two wrongs make the right" thinking only goes to show you lack morals and principles. in your world it's ok for anyone to commit any crime they want at any time. the justification being someone else got away with the same crime once, so they should be able to too. it's sophistry and empty contrarianism

it's like "i hate the usa so i have to love the iranian bomb program." or "i hate iran so i have to love american imperialism." both suggestions are fucking idiotic, and it's the way you think about russia and the usa. in reality, populated with people with actual principles, you can hate both iran, and the usa, for their separate crimes. likewise, it's totally possible to hate the usa, and russia, and not give one or the other a pass because "it's not fair mommy, that kid got away with shoplifting too" like an immature douchebag, which is what you are with your words here. by thinking this way you're just announcing your own intellectual and moral failure

2. if NATO did not exist, russia would be doing the same, or worse. why do you blame the malice of one party on someone else? it's like you lack a basic abstract social model of cause and effect in your mind, something developed by most people in elementary school

example: lets say the USA invades canada in 10 years. according to your logic, we can say it's bin laden's fault, because of 9/11, which did this to american politics, and that to american concerns, and turned them into raging warmongers, etc. so it's all bin laden's fault for the usa attacking canada. completely stupid. but that's your logic here

some moron like yourself would agree with this contrived bullshit, because you believe NATO is somehow to blame for what *russia* does. get it? do you possibly sense the social problem you have on assigning responsibility and accountability for what one person does to another person?

another example: i dent your car. you pull out a gun and blow my head off. according to your wife beater logic, i'm at fault for getting my head blown off. because i dented your car

but in reality, you have many choices to responding to me denting your car. swear at me. ignore me. ask me to pay. punch me. insult my friends and family. dent my car back. make jokes. whatever. how you respond to the stresses of life is about YOUR character and YOUR thinking, and you're only demonstrating your own low character and weak mental capacity at understanding who is responsible for what

in fact, blaming your bad choices on who you choose to victimize is called avoiding responsibility. and for you to fall for this lame "poland wanted to dance with NATO so russia had to beat up ukraine" wife beater stupidity, and your other "the usa does bad things so it's ok for russia to do bad things" two wrongs make a right idiocy, it tells us you are person of no morals who blames your bad choices and your crimes on others

your geopolitical analysis tells us nothing about the reality of russia and NATO, and only about your own intellectual and moral failure

your country is probably some broken shithole with many problems all due to local corruption and bad domestic choices, but blind pride means you believe what some chest thumping demagogue feeds you "it's all the usa's fault because they did bad thing {X} to our country in the cold war 50 years ago" and so you never take any responsibility for your own failures, invent fantastic bullshit cause and effect chains of reasoning for why what you do wron gis actually someone else's fault, and you never fix your fucking problems or even admit you created them

some kid hit you in the face in elementary school once, and you carry that chip on your shoulder your entire life and blame all your failures on what that kid did to you long ago. no, you're just a loser with weak character who looks to point blame rather than just fixing your own fucking problems

do you know what the usa did to japan?

they NUKED them

did the japanese whine and bitch and blame their eternal poverty and squalor and local corruption on the usa forever thereafter? no. japan has national character, they built themselves right back up to a world power status. for a while in the last century they dominated. only 40 years after being fucking nuked. and they are FRIENDS with the usa

that's a country with character. you? you are the problem in this world. you are an example of why your country is a fucking cesspool. it's in your two-wrongs-make-a-right "logic" and your wife beater "logic"

for you commenting on geopolitics doesn't inform us, it is merely a window for us into your own pathetic failed weak mentality, illustrated by how you rationalize immorality and irresponsibility

china is outpacing india economically and militarily

india better catch up

if india had any cojones it would also be more assertive on the issue of tibetan independence. mongolia exists because russia could outweigh china's imperialism. tibet does not exist because india could not do the same

because the govt doesn't require you report to a govt building to get your cash and undergo a registration and a background check, genius