if you make a threat, people aren't going to ignore that

this is not an overreaction or a big brother issue

you can never expect to make a statement which is clearly a threat and people are just going to ignore it

yup, well said

many of us also remember our youth fondly. when the teenage years are the most psychologically painful periods of a human life

we all have it. we forget the bad, and remember the good. it's also why people think things should be "like the good old days," to mythologize the past and always think things are getting worse. the truth of course that the past was more violent, poorer, and unhappier

it's a fundamental human conceit. historical myopia

you want to take away the government?

you want to magically remove corruptibility from the human race?

you don't want to go after the slimy assholes doing the corrupting?

you're a moron, really. not a baseless insult, an objective evaluation of your thinking. you want to ignore corruptors and focus only on the corrupted. fucking stupid

yes, absolutely, political corruption is a crime with a corruptor and a corrupted

why do you want to focus all blame on only one side of a deal that is the fault of two sides?

why do you focus zero blame on the guy who is paying for and often initiating the corruption? you think it's only innocent corporations being reached out to by sleazy politicians? seriously?

Err... really? Sixty million American Bison disappeared from the Great Plains because they were big? Then why did the passenger pigeon over the same period go from the most numerous bird in the world to extinct? It's true that the largest baleen whale -- the Blue Whale, is listed as "threatened"; but the smallest baleen whale, the pygmy right whale is either extinct or very close to it.

It's not as simple as big == headed for extinction. Sometimes bigness is a factor in extinction, sometimes it's a factor in survival.

Wow. Sunday, and we already have a winner for the week's most non-sensical analogy.

And you're telling me you and your friends never did anything stupid? When you were 15 you were as sober as a 30 year-old?

This is what is called a false dichotomy. You don't treat kids like adults who have misbehaved; you treat kids like kids who have misbehaved. Or do you think that a 12 year-old who starts a fire playing with matches should be treated like a 40 year who starts a fire playing with matches, because in the end they did the same thing?

What I'm saying is take the age of the offender into account in how you punish them. This isn't some kind of radical new liberal idea. It's how this country operated until the end of the 20th C.

"someone bribed the bank guard and robbed the bank"

"so fire the guard, problem solved"

"what about the robbers?"

"uhhh...."

So what if people bought cars in other countries? The biggest auto market was easily the US at that time.

As for Ford's and GM's management, yeah, they were really clueless, as they cashed in their huge paychecks. *rollseyes* It wasn't until the oil crisis that things went south, and that was many years later.

Yours apparently has some way to go. Or maybe it's too far gone.

The brain isn't one big ball of mush. It has different parts that perform different functions. You get injured in your Broca's area and you won't be able speak or write. I've seen it in stroke patients; it doesn't matter that the rest of their brains is just good as new, they don't have any expressive language. Likewise if your orbital frontal cortex is damaged or not fully developed yet, you're going to act like an ass. Doesn't matter how smart or well-meaning you are.

Teenaged brains can be misleading, because in some ways they're at their lifetime peak. But at the same time they suck at certain things. A smart fifteen year-old can explain the difference between right and wrong, between a smart and stupid action. But he can't be trusted to act in accordance to that kind of knowledge, because among other things the OFC isn't finished yet. This is why parents get fooled into thinking their wonderful children won't do dumb things. You simply cannot expect a teenager to act intelligently because he has knowledge. The knowledge helps, but it does't determine behavior in a fifteen year-old as it does in a thirty year-old.

i see it as a similar conceit to anti-vaxxers

anyone who grew up when it was common for children to die at a young age due to common diseases would vaccinate wholeheartedly. but, distant those horrors, the effort necessary to maintain the status quo of healthy children becomes all you see: vaccinations, sticking needles in children, strange concotions i don't understand...

likewise, you have these similar fools who see the benefits of a regulated marketplace, but only see the onerous regulations, and not the horrors of what an unregulated marketplace is really like. so they react to the regulations as if they are the actual evil, just like anti-vaxxers

anyone who survived (broke) one of the many banking panics of the 1800s would claim the FDIC the greatest godsend. but, now that we don't have runs on banks, we just have this "evil" "world domination" "freedom destroying" scheme called the FDIC: morons think the FDIC is the actual evil

it's a conceit of lack of experience, lack of education, no awareness of history, prideful ignorance

That's just a straw man argument. The actual problem with treating him as an adult is that that is contrary to fact. He is not an adult.

In the state of Georgia a fifteen year-old cannot vote; he cannot purchase liquor; cannot obtain a driver's license, cannot hold a full-time job. The rules we have for minors assume they're incapable of making adult choices. It's logically inconsistent to believe minors are not competent to make responsible decisions, but then claim we should treat them as if they can decide responsibly because they've failed to do so. When have you ever used reasoning like that for anything else? I had a housemate once who decided to become her own herbalist. She went to the herb store and bought a lot of herbal shit and promptly made herself sick. By your logic I should go to her for medical treatment because (a) I previously had reason to believe she was not competent to practice medicine and (b) her subsequent actions proved my suspicions correct.

You don't need some namby-pamby PC mumbo jumbo to know that most teenagers have a penchant for doing spectacularly stupid things, but that *most* of them grow out it. That's common sense, and the law should take that into account. And science actually backs up common sense here. Most people's brains go through a development spurt in their "executive functions" (acting according to long term plans, inhibiting impulsive actions, directing attention) when they're around fifteen. That means there's roughly a 50/50 chance someone under sixteen is neurologically incapable of not acting like a jackass.

So both science and common sense tell us that treating children as if they were adults is irrational and serves no useful purpose. That doesn't mean you do nothing when kids commit crimes. That's a false dichotomy. It means you do something different.

At one point nearly all of the sports-convertibles sold worldwide were from the United Kingdom,

So what? Those were never huge sellers in the American market anyway, they were a niche product. Americans were all busy buying giant gas-guzzling behemoths all the way to 1974 when the Oil Crisis hit.

So even in the early 60s, someone writing "Why Detroit will continue to rule" would have been absolutely correct; they had over 10 years of unchallenged dominance left, and even after 1974 it's not like things suddenly came to a halt there.

Ha. When I saw what I'd written, my first thought was "This sounds like a Monty Python skit."

You're obviously not very good at reading comprehension.

>>The kernel is the only thing they have in common.
>You didn't know it, but the kernel is Linux,

Obviously, I did know it.

No, Android is NOT "Linux". "Linux", in the context here, means desktop Linux. Tablets are NOT desktops. You may not like this fact but I know lots of people have problems with reality, that's life.