Well we won't *ALL* be killing and robbing hookers; some of us will be the hookers and some will be the johns. The economic impact of an imbalance in the murderer/thief population would be devastating.

Plus I see this in more like 10-15, not 40. The tourism industry is fucked.

There should be a youtube series with a judge or well qualified lawyer that explains exactly where citizens (and non-citizens) stand in common situations like these (DHS and DUI checkpoints, audio/video recording of police, searches of vehicles and clothing/bags, stop and frisk, requests for identification, etc.). People would benefit from a clear explanation both from a constitutional perspective as well as the perspective of any precedence set by previous trials.

And to take this one step further: This should be funded BY the government! Law enforcement should Want people to know the law.
The fact that officers use the imbalance of power in these situations to force people into a positions where they don't know whether they are breaking the law or not is disgusting. Confusion about the law should not be a law enforcement tactic.

PoTUSA and a 21 year old intern is "two adults" like Mike Tyson fighting Robin Givens is two adults. The power imbalance there makes taking sexual advantage a bit of a craven act on the part of the powerful party.

That said, I'm just trying to be funny. I agree with you that the whole thing was blown out of proportion.

"...was believed to have a hormonal imbalance which triggered the attack"

They must have done some blood work from the jeep

"I've often wondered what a bull-giraffe's hoof stamping on my skull would feel like darling, let's holiday in Chad shall we, and find out!?"

Caveat: 99% of any features or apps on the Xbox 360 requires Xbox Live Gold. That means you pay even more out of yer pocket to use those things.

Is there anything useful for the Xbox Live Silver/free users? Yes, that tiny 1% that MS gives you. Everything else requires Live Gold. IE requires Gold. YouTube requires Gold. ESPN requires Gold (although reasonable given the app design). DailyMotion requires Gold. Netflix requires Gold.

There is a major imbalance in how Silver is designed when compared to Gold. There's no "app" that you can use. All you're left is playing music/movies from the Xbox itself or streamed from the network.

Smartglass? Nice idea. But shitty if none of the Xbox apps work w/o a Live Gold subscription. Xbox Live isn't simply a service where there is free and paid. It's all about paying to use Xbox Live despite having a free model.

A relative of mine owns a small business, and recognizes that an increase in purchasing power in the bottom 90% of Americans would drive more purchasing in the US, and more buying would drive more investment by him in terms of labor and non-liquid assets in his business. However a bit of cognitive dissonance leads him to "feel" that increasing taxes on large corporations and the very wealthy to lock in lower taxes on the middle class is not 'leveling the playing field', and "feels wrong".

Basically he optimistically feels that he may one day be in the top 1% of earners, and this weird selfishness that he may one day be incredibly wealthy and thus affected by a higher tax burden is leading him to vote against his own goddamn interest. This, and he "feels" that once taxes have been raised on the wealthy, there will be blood in the water and it will eventually slide down to those making $~100k. Its hard to argue with feelings about the future.


>> ^TheFreak:

Thank you QM for that thoughtful reply.
It just seems that the imbalance right now is in demand, not the availability of capitol to invest.

Thank you QM for that thoughtful reply.

It just seems that the imbalance right now is in demand, not the availability of capitol to invest.


>> ^quantumushroom:

Your logic isn't flawed per se, just incomplete.
In an unstable environment like the one created by Obama and his ilk, no sane wealthy person is going to expand businesses or invest.
Lower tax rates mean more investing and more lending to entrepreneurs. It also means less "hoarding" by the wealthy, who in an electronic world can transfer monies rapidly and keep them parked elsewhere.
The idea is that even though the tax rate is lower, there is more economic activity, and thus greater revenue.
Taxation is only half of the equation, the other is spending. Government spending will certainly not stop under a Romney Administration; a continuing taxocrat-majority Congress means spending will barely slow down.

Outrage over the Ryan proposal is selective at best. His Earness has already screwed the middle-class. Here are the new taxes the middle class will be paying for Obamacare. The ink is already dry.
>> ^TheFreak:
Give me $2500 over a year and it will all be spent on household expenses in the bat of an eye, directly into the economy. Give $250,000 to a millionaire and what exactly is it going to do? How is that money going to stimulate the economy better than the millions they're already hoarding?
Someone give me a coherent argument for how an extra fraction of wealth is going to encourage these people to invest and grow anything. Show me the flaw in my logic.

Edgeman, eating causes the release dopamine among other things. The clinical depression is a result of doing less of something your brain likes doing. Fat cells themselves also upregulate chemicals that increase the desire to eat, perpetuating the problem.
You however are citing the Solution to a problem AS the problem. (the problem beaing: eating as a key necessary trigger of hapiness in the individual). The solution, getting your weight under control is not what needs to be avoided here.

Again, this parallels perfectly to smoking. People become irritable/depressed/despondent if they fail, if they try and quit that behavior too. However, we still encourage people to stop smoking.
It is important that they stop for their health, and it, in terms of those in the public eye is a meaningful thing to avoid as a rolemodel.

Again, they are not depressed by weightloss, they are depressed by failing to partake in the dangerous/excessive behavior that causes pleasure. This neuro/chemical imbalance is something we have remedies for. Thanks Pharma!

>> ^Yogi:

It's an eco-disaster? I wouldn't think it could be that bad seeing as it's in a horrible wasteland of a desert. It makes sense it would harm the ocean near it though. I was more concerned as you said about the human rights aspect and the slave labor used to build it.


Wastelands are a result of an imbalance in a biosphere. They are usually a result of human interaction within an ecosystem, or occasionally large asteroids/meteors. Deserts are not wastelands, they have some of the most diverse and adaptive lifeforms on the planet.

Yes, fucking up a desert is still considered causing an Eco-disaster.

As for the slave labor... 95% of our goods in North America are from sweat shops over seas. Who are we to pass judgment on ethical practices overseas when we endorse those same practices in every consumer product we purchase?

There is a good reason I find it harder to sleep as each new night approaches.

Edit: dammit that made me bitter. It's a good video of people having fun.

@renatojj making a distinction between bad and no choice is a very fine line to walk on. It will always be arbitrary, as what for one is only bad, for another is no choice. An example: our Spanish friends have the option to work for a shitty fee (the bad choice) or not work at all (and possibly starve, arguably no choice). As there is only 1 choice (work for a shitty fee) is that a choice? Even if that choice was good, 1 choice means there is no choice. And in most cases, due to the same principles as apply to free markets, if there is only 1 choice (or less) that choice will be bad. Is this a case of free markets or should we have done something about the lack of choice? You can argue that policy makers did not do anything in Spain, and you are right. But again, they had their chance (and have a chance every day) to do the right thing. Having an opportunity to make things better is better than knowing 100% that things will go wrong in the end (total free market) even if in some cases human stupidity still F$^&& up the chances.

BTW, in your examples on Uganda and the homeless man, both are not situations of power. As in the giver has no power (or relation) over the receiver or vice versa. It is charity. There is no real economic reason to do it. An employer however does have power over a worker in various ways. You cant compare those examples. Coercion only happens in cases where there is an imbalance of power. Student to teacher, employee to employer, citizen to police. Those are exactly the moments when you need to make sure the ones with more power are scrutinized and can be stopped.

I agree that a free market wants to reduce "the choice remover" aka rules. The rules are however making sure there is balance and that the ones in power cannot remove all the choice from the ones without power. Creating good options for one side in free markets, can lead to bad options in the other, again, no choice. Rules can do the same, however the entire idea of the rules is to balance it and make sure the amount of good options for everyone is maximized.

I just read a great parable. Ill copy it in the next post as it says a lot about free market policies.

This is absurd, Darwin absurd.

That much sodium....they're filming him and waiting for him to just plop face down on the table dead due to an off-the-charts electrolyte imbalance among other things.

@dystopianfuturetoday I'd like to help you visualize what I understand a free market is or ought to be. When you say free markets are impossible, I tend to compare that to someone saying, "free speech is impossible" while holding an extreme or maybe unrealistic interpretation of what free speech ought to be as well.

Imagine when freedom of speech was first proposed, "What if we had a society where people could say whatever they want without fear of censorship or oppression?". Before we had a country where freedom of speech was in the first Ammendment of its Constitution, I'm pretty sure we didn't have freedom of speech anywhere, or mostly in any time in history. Someone could have replied, "A free speech society is impossible, which is why one has never existed, and why you were unable to come up with any working examples". Sure, because there would almost always be some asshole, usually a king, a despot or church, telling people what they could or could not say, and punishing them for it.

Now, do we enjoy absolute freedom of speech today? Not at all, and I'm fine with that. There are laws against libel, hate speech, obscenity, incitement to commit crimes, etc., which are all restrictions imposed on that very freedom.

However, all things considered, I think freedom of speech is mostly free. I don't know of anyone who advocates "restricted speech" or "highly regulated speech" as an ideal. More importantly, whenever censorship is reported or witnessed, everyone is instantly indignant and sometimes outraged, because we are all aware of how essential freedom of speech is to a free society, a freedom that should be cherished and protected.

Now let's take a look at the dynamics of free speech in society.

Just because people can say whatever they want, doesn't mean there won't be millions of people lying, deceiving each other, spreading ideologies that are COMPLETELY WRONG, etc.

Does that mean we should have laws banning ideas that are wrong? Not easy to do, because it is common sense that no one has absolute authority over truth, so such laws would hardly be fair.

Instead, we resort to letting ideas compete, letting people select for themselves what is true or not. That might doom society to eternal stupidity and ignorance or to a gradual process where truths will be preferred, and lies will tend to be exposed or ignored. Which outcome do you think is more likely? It takes time, but a free society matures with such freedoms. When abuses happen, society learns and deals with them without immediately resorting to laws and restrictions, because that would be considered censorship, and, therefore, usually unfair.

Now when it comes to economic freedom, liberals treat it as a whole different ball game, when I don't think it should be. First off, "free markets" = obscenity. They learn to understand it like you do, "absolutely free of government intervention, chaos everywhere, society is doomed", when in fact the proponents of free markets recognize that the State is necessary to enforce contracts, punish fraud and protect private property.

Liberals are mostly influenced by the socialist interpretation of capitalism as an inherently unfair system. Whenever any perceived abuse happens in an economy, they see it as resulting from an imbalance of economic power, so they rush to demand laws and regulations to forcibly correct them.

How about letting these abuses happen, and let society learn to deal with them, select them, and evolve? Just like what happens with free speech. Sure, if it's blatant fraud, theft, breach of contract, etc. the State can and should step in. Otherwise, let people come up with their own solutions. It will be a painful process, but it's better to let a free society mature by itself than oppressing it into behaving well.

Besides, if you think about it, politicians aren't any better than anyone at judging what economic practices are right or wrong. So the laws they make are usually unfair. They have the same kind of presumptuousness of someone who would claim authority over truth, and want to create laws censoring "wrong" ideas. Like keynesian economists who try to plan and steer economies because they have little theories where they claim it's smarter to use other people's money than letting people make decisions with their own money.

We would never put up with people trying to engineer society/culture through censorship. Why do we put up with that when it comes to economics?

About the thought experiment (hoping it's not a trick question), I don't see why there should be a limit on how much property a person can own, as long as the property is honestly obtained.

I don't think it's an injustice when someone owns more than others, maybe there are other factors to be considered? Forcibly redistributing property is usually more unfair than just letting society deal with any problem arising from someone having property that others want or need.

>> ^blutruth:

I'd love to know what caused that catastrophic failure.


I would guess rotor imbalance or ground resonance

Right QM. However, objective karma requires that there be a level playing field from the start. This is clearly not the case with social equity, political equality and racial equality. Liberalism is therefore an attempt to identify and correct imbalances be they natural or social.

What it seems to come down to is a pragmatic versus idealistic world view with each side claiming the higher ground.

@NetRunner,

From the author's own summary in the article you linked:

Improving observations of ocean temperature confirm that Earth is absorbing more energy from the sun than it is radiating to space as heat, even during the recent solar minimum.
In layman terms, ocean temp has increased over the last years were we have also been observing surface temp increases. If the heat content has gone up, it means more energy got in than went out.

This energy imbalance provides fundamental verification of the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global climate change.
If solar forcing decreased while the earth retained more energy, then it must have been other forcings driving the energy increase. This is verification of what we already know, that human GHG's are driving climate change. I'd argue that the 'dominant' part can only be justified in relation to solar forcing, would you say I'm overstepping with that?

I've read through the rest of the article as well. I don't see resounding evidence or confidence about CO2 dominating all other factors over the last 100 years. The most important section is on Fast-Feedback sensitivity. They have a method where they go against Paleo-climate data and conclude that Fast-Feedback sensitivity is much smaller than most previous studies. They even go to some length explaining the different results and admit that a major factor is what you count as a forcing vs. what you count as a feedback. More importantly to me, is that Paleo climate doesn't have the resolution to observe what we should expect from fast feedbacks within a century. Rank me a denier, but I count that as very significant. Mann et al's recent work seems to corroborate that over decadal timescales, climate can fluctuate a lot more than what shows up on long-term paleo reconstructions.