Realistically, by the time the SEC gets around to doing anything, the money is already long gone (Enron, Madoff, etc).

Yes, no doubt you learned the 'truth' at some super-reliable website.

The problem is that harassment is subjective, so you can only ask for people's opinions rather than setting an absolute standard.

Take your nice sweater example. If said casually it would just be friendly small talk. If said leeringly while standing uncomfortably close and trying to look down it that would be something else. In between there is a whole spectrum of behaviour and annoying as it is I'm afraid there is no ISO standard to compare it with.

Looking at very specific examples and asking if people felt uncomfortable is all we can do. Of course, we make a judgement, simply feeling uncomfortable is not in itself harassment.

I find it interesting that on the one hand we have complaints about men being assaulted not being taken seriously, while at the same time trying to dismiss complaints by women as trivial.

It's mostly homosexual harassment of men. Other words, it's almost always men doing the assaulting, even when men are the victims.

Well, that's why I wrote "or near". I'm aware that it's not applicable to all desert sites. I was just wondering under what circumstances it might be advantageous to lay pipes from places where there is seawater to places where there is both a lot of sunlight for local solar distillation and local water users. There could be locations like that as well.

The populous what?

And correct.

That is "are", and "an", respectively, idiot.

I only know what it is in epoch time.

Your interpretation of that seems overly broad. All actions are intentional, and some of them create the apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact, but does that imply that all intentional actions (which are all of them) creating the apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact intend to create the apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact? If I ask someone at night what's the time, 1) it's intentional, and 2) that person might mistakenly get the apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact, but 3) is it my intention to create the apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact? It's not the same thing as throwing a stone at someone and missing, where a misunderstanding is much less likely.

They do happen. But AFAIK, the guy in question did neither, contrariwise to what might happen in a similar situation elsewhere in the world, which perhaps was Dawkins' point. And as far as the guy's action resulting in something merely awkward and uncomfortable...well, I could think of dozens of things that happen in the society that make people feel awkward and uncomfortable.

In your place, I'd become suspicious somewhere around the 69th law.

Yes, you're right, I read it incorrectly.

As I said, I've been here for a decade now, and I work for a big company with great perks. It's been good for me, but now that I have a kid, the school-shootings thing is getting more and more worrisome. There's literally nothing I can do to prevent some moron raiding his mother's arsenal and killing my kid if that's how he wants to end his life.

Why this obsession with school shootings? You do realize your kid is far more likely to be murdered outside of school than in school? "Homicide is the second leading cause of death among youth aged 5-18. Data from this study indicate that between 1% and 2% of these deaths happen on school grounds or on the way to or from school." So 98%-99% of homicides of school-aged children happen outside of school. i.e. The place where your kids are safest by far from being shot or killed is in school.

If you look at the chart in the above link, on average fewer than 20 students are murdered each year in school shootings. If you look at causes of death, among 5-14 year olds (page 2), the #15 cause of death kills 18 per year, indicating school shootings doesn't even rank in the top 15. For age 15-24 (high school-college), the #15 cause kills 99 per year, so school shootings probably doesn't even make the top 20 or 30. By far the #1 killer of student-aged children is accidents - outnumbering homicides by nearly an order of magnitude, and school shootings by two orders of magnitude.

It's the media which has a morbid obsession with school shootings, causing them to devote wildly disproportionate amounts of coverage to it relative to other dangers and risks faced by school-aged children. Don't buy into it. Parents' fear of school shootings is completely irrational, just like fear of flying (which is also fed by the media's disproportionate coverage of plane crashes), or child abduction by a stranger (which is the rarest form of kidnapping, and also fed by the media's... well you get the picture).