Hey that is not fair, for years Kissenger systematically carpet bombed civilians in countries that were not a threat to the US at all (Laos, Cambodia)... and then he stopped.

That means he single handedly stopped a horrific, unjust and criminal war. If that doesn't deserve a peace prize, it certainly deserves some kind of prize.

That argument could be used to discourage all fiction, from books to films, and also vast swathes of philosphy including all of metaphysics and a good part of all the other disciplines. You have no imagination. Not only is it a lot of fun to think about interesting questions and go over potential answers in one's mind, it has also been long established that this is a healthy and useful activity that leads to a better understanding of the world.

How can you even live without occasionally considering some questions where a definite answer is impossible to establish? This in itself is an unanswerable question and one I find myself considering very often while reading comments like yours.

But you can't be bothered helping me in my ignorance by explaining the facts, or linking another source.

I was basing that statement on the commonly held definitions as summed up in this wikipedia article. To better understand why you are confused about this from living in the US, the section 'Contemporary usage in the United States' describes the usage you are used to in context.

It is also recommended that you read the rest of the article, which describes what the terms actually mean to the majority of the world. These are subjective terms however so you are not categorically wrong, just informationally challenged.

There are no 'leftists' in US politics. You only have extreme right and moderate right, and there are very few of the latter.

There are other costs, a lot of them. Probably the biggest one is the effect it has on education. Problems in education knock on into problems for the whole of society in the future not least economically. Criminality is also a major cost.

Keeping people fed the one of the primary purposes of a state - let's face it USA, if you can't even stop your own people from starving you are a failure and should give up. Maybe ask Canada if they need a giant new province. Anyone advocating taking food away from starving people is evil. There are evil people posting in this thread. They do not appear to be able to feel shame.

This conversation is about marijuana. Your refences to alcohol, meth and 'drugs' in general suggest that you make no distinction between these substances and marijuana. The is an overwhelming body of evidence that suggest that marijuana is different to these other substances, in terms of its psychological, social and health effects. Ignoring this and lumping them all together suggests to me that you are serving an agenda rather than attempting to actually add information to the discussion.

It is also worth mentioning, with all this Tesla fire hype: Recalling parts for safety reasons in the automotive industry is the rule not the exception. Almost every model from every car manufacturer has had some parts or systems recalled. Fire is the cause of a significant percentage of recalls. It is hard to get exact numbers as each country has it's own database. I looked at the US one quickly for an example. Selected a random model and year (Aluma 2009), and sure enough there were three recalls for that year alone. The first one i clicked had the text "THIS DEFECT COULD RESULT IN A FIRE.".

Given the percentage of the vehicle fleet that is made of Teslas, this is not really relevant news.

In contrast, teenagers that break windows with a total worth of $550 get felony jail time.

Yes, this is the video I was hoping for when I clicked the stupid one above

There is another aspect that limits this sort of machine learning, the need for direct positive/negative feedback. Games that don't have a score counter are pretty much unlearnable. Obviously you can base the feedback on something else like level reached but in some games, like kings quest for example, a neural network will not be able to figure out when it is doing well and when it isn't. Often a separate heuristic AI is needed just for this.

So we shouldn't believe in conspiracies because they are all part of a big conspiracy to get us to believe in conspiracies?

People conspire every day, it is a provable fact. Let's not buy into the whole tinfoil hat stereotype too hard.

Sure, the idea is bloody obvious at this stage, why couldn't a farmer come up with it? My father was a builder and he came up with a lot of good ideas outside of his field. Of course he didn't have enough money to patent or market them.

Can someone mod this shill as a troll I have no points atm

Given that the nonsense it is replying to is marked +3 insightful, I think this one deserves some mod points too. Are there seriously people who just up and deleted winamp off their machines because AOL told them to?

IRA, Hizbollah and Hamas are all nationalistic organisations in countries that are under intense external pressure, either politically, militarily or economically, to such an extent that the general population are suffering. The same was true of Germany in the 1930's. While I agree with the points you make I feel that most discussions on this topic miss the most important point of all. Yes democracy can throw up some problem leaders, but ignoring the circumstances that lead up to each of these cases is failing to learn lessons from history. While it is possible that removing the treaty of Versailles may not have prevented the nazis' rise to power, it seems almost certain that Hamas would never have been elected without the Israeli blockade and attacks. It also seems hard to imagine the IRA getting any power in a world where Ireland was not subject to brutal repression for a couple of centuries.

Democracy is not the problem, it is imperialism that is the problem. Desperate people act desperately, and voting is no exception.