461–470 of 486 posts
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Oh another “The US is big” post. The EU has 30% more people There are 60 times as many privately owned guns in the EU as there are in Montana. There are 5 time as many guns in the US, but 20 times as many murders. There is a cultural problem in the US with firearms.
Nobody really lives in Montana so that's not a big surprise.
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The private sector is not expected to be able to self-regulate by free market advocates. With the exception of anarcho-capitalists, those who believe in a free market regard the government's role as integral, in providing public goods like an effective justice system that polices misbehavior like fraud. What distinguishes a belief in free markets is believing that misbehavior—that government bodies have a right to pu…
Every time I see the phrase "free market" I like to point out the term originated from Adam Smith who used it to describe "markets free from rent-seeking behaviour." Which is COMPLETELY different than the way the phrase is used today. Also, "Capitalism" used to mean "using capital to increase capital." We now use it to mean "using capital to increase private wealth." I understand what you're trying to say and am not…
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We don't tell people if they have the right to reproduce, and we shouldn't tell people if they have the right to protect themselves.
Your insistence on a right to a gun for self-protection comes at the cost of others using their right to a gun for crime. If nobody had guns, you wouldn't need to a gun to protect yourself from someone else with a gun. The problem of course is that the genie is already out of the bottle. We can't take the guns away, they're all over the place in the USA already. Even if the Second Amendment was repealed, all that wou…
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Copyright is a property right. It is not unreasonable for theft of property to carry the possibility of criminal charges. This is not strictly done in service of big media---if organized crime rings come in to town and do a ton of rogue hookups with impunity, then the cable company leaves and you have a cycle of degradation in the quality of life. Preventing organized crime is why it is a federal offense. Of course,…
> Copyright is a property right Huh? The term "Intellectual Property" is a metaphor, not literal. There is zero intrinsic moral imperative against copying; copyright is a policy decision to encourage creation under a capitalist system. Other systems for encouraging creation have existed in the past (and exist concurrently with copyright). If copyright were a property right, then "fair use" would be legalized theft.
Copyrights are transferable intangible assets created by the legal instruments of the capitalist system. If you were to buy the copyright to the Metallica catalog, you can license that catalog for a return on your investment. It would be an asset of your estate like any other paper investment.
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A good story, the only interest was in the hack. A lot of older sci-fi books, eg Heinlein, had hacker types discovering some highly profitable thing, but being uninterested except it was fun to figure out. This was often to the mystification of "normal" people, who would plead for them to work the idea into profit. Often they were tricked into making the process profitable, by being told how impossible it was. I resp…
Would you please inform me, if you can, as to which books are you thinking of? I have read a few Heinlein novels but would like to know if I'm missing a classic in your eyes.
But I just recall small exchanges, im many of his works, where Long or another character, would notice some scientist archetype come up with an idea, yet not care one wit about exploiting it.
It was all about the puzzle of discovery, and Long/etc was often amused.
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To be specific - Poland. We don't have enough immigrants from middle east and africa for this to be noticeable problem. It's mostly uneducated drunk idiots who target ER teams. Firefighters - I didn't heard about them being targeted yet. Edit: I don't say that MENA immigrants targeting public services is not an issue. I say that this issue exists globally too, it's a result of having a lot of uneducated demoralised p…
>It's mostly uneducated drunk idiots who target ER teams. It's the aftershocks of all the coronavirus/antivaxx conspiracy theories. The people who got brainwashed hard attack doctors/ER teams because they see them as murderers.
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Well yes. Openreach were fixing a problem with my phone like yesterday, that’s generally a monopoly. My layer 3 service is from A&A, which suits my needs. Other people probably wouldn’t want to chat with the engineers on IRC when there’s a problem though so they would go with talk talk or Bt or whatever.
Oh man. I would have LOVED to be able to talk to Lumen engineers via IRC a couple years ago. It took about 4 1/2 months to work through the army of script-reading CS reps to get to a manager who agreed to let me talk to a tier-2 rep who immediately put me in the queue for a callback from an engineer. Within 5 minutes of talking with THAT engineer, they had enough info to realize someone had mis-keyed my account numbe…
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> In the USA you can just buy a black-powder cannon if you want Is this... common? Can't imagine why anyone would want one.
It's not common and they're expensive, but it's possible and apparently fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXtswMYlBd0 (It's probably $5k to $10k to get a working cannon, and most owners are probably reenactors and movie-proppers.)
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I live in New Zealand, and many people have guns. The difference is if you point it at someone at minimum you’ll lose your gun licence and have the weapon confiscated. I used to work at a multinational, we were quite amused when we saw an update to the US workplace rules that prohibited firearms anywhere on company property. One of my colleagues has his rifle in the office - he was going on a hunting trip and leaving…
Threatening someone with a firearm is felony assault and definitely will result in you losing your right to own firearms and having it confiscated.