Not illegal to know people. I'm not responsible for what my friends do. Next.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we have incontrovertible evidence that this man was in contact with several drug dealers. What kind of citizen associates with criminals? A co-conspirator, of course. And what defense does he offer? 'Not illegal to know people.' Well, ladies and gentlemen, it is illegal to engage in criminal conspiracy! Justice demands that you find him guilty."

If you think people haven't been sent up on cases that flimsy, you're not part of the reality-based community. If you're white and wealthy you might be willing to take your chances on the system working; otherwise, if you're informed and interested in self preservation, invoke you legal rights at every opportunity and keep the so-called "criminal justice" system as far away from you as possible.

It's not so trivial to not be laughed at by the judge if you try it with approaches like yours above.

Sit in court sometime and see the flimsy cases that ordinary citizens are convicted under. Judges don't laugh at cops or prosecutes -- they're all colleagues, with the same government signing their checks.

I find it perplexing that a party who claims to be pro-freedom so quickly and aggressively attacked an unalienable right.

Neither party is pro-freedom. They are exactly and only pro-putting-members-of-their-own-party-into-office. One party has found hoplophobia useful for that, the other has found homophobia useful for that. Fsck 'em both. We need to break to two party system open now.

The Big Bang states that the Universe gave birth to itself, and by implication gave birth to any gods or other form of Deity that may be around today.

No, it doesn't. You might want to read up on the origins of the Big Bang theory, and the Catholic guy who invented it. It's entirely possible to believe that a being outside the space-time continuum created our universe with a bang -- or laid an egg which hatched, or farted or sneezed out the Cosmos.

I don't accept any of these theories, mind, but there's nothing directly contradictory about believing in a creator outside the continuum created in the Big Bang; indeed that's what some multiverse theories (e.g., black hole cosmology) amount to, though of course they're not speaking of a conscious creator.

But physicalism is indeed far to limited a model for observable reality.

Howso? You speak of "intelligence" and "consciousness", but the behavior I see of humans and other animals is quite adequately explained by a physicalist, neurological explanation. Sensory transducers tickle certain nerves, via the network of the nervous system other nerves fire in a chain and eventually make muscles move (or gland secrete or whatever). That these muscle movements in a human being sometime hit keyboard keys to spell out "I am a conscious being!", or cause complex vocalizations, is fundamentally no more mysterious than any other observable behavior of an organism with a brain.

Does this objective account explain my own subjective internal experience of life? The question is meaningless -- no set of observations of the external, objective universe have bearing on my internal, subjective experience. And if other beings have internal, subjective experiences, they are by definition not part of the external, objective, observable universe, and it's a fallacy to seek explanations of the unobservable in the observable. Indeed it seems a fallacy to seek explanations (in the causal sense) of the unobservable at all...

I'm completely harmless. I'm a married middle class worker who pays his taxes and has no interest in harming anyone.

Same could be said of most of the Japanese-Americans whom the federal government put in concentration camps during WWII.

Innocence and harmlessness are no protection when governments go bad.

those retailers pay very low transactions fees (less than 0.2%).

Not true. Apply Pay is linked to the buyer's credit card, so merchants still have to pay swipe fees to the bastards at Visa, MasterCard, et. al.

Why would I use it?

Because merchants are probably going to start charging you a fee to use your credit card. They may hide it by jacking up prices then offer a "CurrentC discount" or something (sort of like the so-called "cash discount" at the gas station), since it's still tricky to charge a CC fee, but merchants are getting reamed and are trying hard to find a way to stop it. Where do you think that cash back on your Visa card comes from?

It's a prison where horrible things had to happen to prevent ever more horrible things from happening.

It's a prison where people did horrible things and tried to excuse them by saying they had to, in order to prevent ever more horrible things from happening, but in reality prompted yet more horrible things. See political martyr, and please stop believing that you put out a fire by pouring more fuel on it, or stop horrors by committing more horrors.

LessWrong AI worship(the idea of "friendly AI" was created by that site)

O RLY?

All I said was that China and Russia call him a patriot and asked if you could be a patriot for more than one country.

A patriot is someone who loves their country. Snowden is a patriot who loves the United States. If some folks in Russia and China correctly identified this fact, good for them. (Note that loving the United States has nothing to do with loving its government: as Thoreau said, "A very few- as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men- serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.")

What happened to be "innocent until proven guilty"?

It went out of fashion in the 1990s. Because War On (some) Drugs.

Seriously, people, this civil forfeiture bullshit has been going on since the late 20th century. It's legal roots go back to the 1600s, but it was the U.S. in the 1990s where it started to get egregious.

Are y'all just learning about it? Start with the wik for a decent overview.

Or what? What are you going to do?

The Black Panthers had the only answer. The only thing that can stop a bad cop with a gun is a good citizen with a gun.

So, this is a voluntary thing, doesn't involve any certification, has no actual enforcement, and only exist in about half the US states or slightly less.

You're confusing certification with the status of a benefit corporation. Certification has no legal enforcement power other than revoking certification; OTOH, under the model legislation it just takes 2% of stockholders to initiate a benefit enforcement proceeding against a benefit corporation and have court enforce the public benefit provisions of its charter. (Your state may vary -- it looks like in NJ any stockholder can bring such action.)

So long as it exists in the state where Ello is incorporated (which is apparently does), it doesn't matter that not all states yet have benefit corporation legislation.

Yes, benefit corporations are new. If I was going to bet my life on questions of how courts will treat them I might be wary. But as a general matter they seem like they could be a useful way to reign in privacy violations by tech companies by providing a legally enforceable guarantee of behavior.

Well, you've not given a meaningful link since it's the same slashdot article we're all reading right now.

My bad on the HTML. I meant this.

It sounds good in principle, but is it really legally binding in any sense?

Yes. A corporation's charter is legally binding on it, and "benefit corporations" are a distinct type of legal entity.