Not really. Fourth Amendment law has been contracting since the civil rights era, and while people on the court are highly intelligent and want to decide in favor of their points of view (which they believe are right), they go to great lengths to avoid overturning former SCOTUS opinions. Neither liberals or conservatives are more hesitant about doing that.

However, the reasonable expectation of privacy standards stem from an era when most people shared a single telephone line with their neighbors, so the court is concerned with how tech changes privacy--not just the liberal minority. But at least part of the liberal minority has expressed a willingness to revisit some of the extant fourth amendment law, some of which--to be fair--is kind of silly and should be revisited, and some of which merely needs to be changed to reflect a newer world. That doesn't mean the conservative minority doesn't feel the same way, they just haven't expressed it.

But the liberal minority of the court has expressed a willingness to revisit that law, and the court itself is concerned enough with the implications of modern technology that it has actually ruled against GPS-tracking drug dealers for long periods of time.

> Also I have been a HUGE soda drinker all my life and I'm underweight.

That's great for you weight-wise, but it fails to address two issues.

One is the fact that any law reduces freedom to some extent--including, obviously, laws prohibiting harmful substances. The fact that this ban does not help you with a weight problem does not mean that it is not a net gain for society. Like banning cigarettes or smoking is annoying for people who don't get lung cancer.

The other is that soda pretty much *dissolves your bones*. Google it. It's acidic as hell. Even though it tastes so good. Even if you're not overweight, it's still pretty bad for you.

I don't think a ban on selling it is the right answer--it makes too many lawbreakers and criminals and grey market--but changing the conditions of sale may help. By doing things that make it more expensive, like this law.

That being said, I hear Bloomberg is an asshole. But that doesn't make this idea entirely wrong.

...recent Western culture has shown that a higher percentage of men have become fathers in the past few generations than before that.

As more and more males become adjusted to the instant high of popular culture, we'll just return to the times when a tinier percentage of men were having all the babies.

Marriage is already on a decline, in some races good husbands are hard to find so women have more biracial babies, and the powerful men won't stop spreading their seed.

Does it matter to me if the weak male class doesn't have kids? Hell no -- and they make good employees, too. Maybe better ones.

IIRC, The United States deliberately did not attempt to assert the right to the Moon on the basis of the Moon landing. The phrase "we came in peace for all mankind" points that out symbolically.

> Nuking from orbit, isn't that a bit extreme?

It's the only way to be sure.

Probably their X-Box people are the ones who developed it, so that was where its use originated. Also, starting w/ X-box starts it as something that is a great new toy which has lots of really useful industrial applications--it's much better marketing than making it a piece of medical or industrial equipment first.

It's not brilliant to make insanely stupid arguments. Among other things, a judge will eventually lose patience with those arguments, and they will cost the client and the reputation of the attorney. It's brilliant to make insanely creative arguments that sound rational and only slightly creative when you only have really bad arguments to make that you know will lose. There's a difference.

Neither one is exactly happening here. The arguments were probably just very stupid, not insanely stupid.

It is worth noting that this new precedent is only for the 9th circuit--contrary to the summary's implication, the Supreme Court refusing the hear it just means that they didn't overturn the 9th Circuit, not that they upheld the 9th circuit. There's a world of difference, because if they had upheld it, it would be law throughout the United States.

In the public grade schools in Hawaii, the class will share about four textbooks on any given subject, and the state mandates and actually teaches toward state tests with state lesson plans and quizzes that are frequently wrong. They mark the kids as wrong when they get things right, and then tell them "you were right but I have to mark it lower because the state's answer is X."

And I don't mean normal smarter-than-the-test wrong, I mean things like singular v. plural.

Parenting is deficient in a lot of places, even abusive, but it's far from only parenting that is fucking up U.S. education.