Just like Chik-fil-A boycott? Oh wait they've seen record profits lately. Perhaps it's because the silent majority of people are sick of gay culture? Fortunately I live in Russia where we've recently and unanimously passed several bills defending traditional marriage.[1] I would much rather my child read an anti-gay author than a gay one, and Ender's Game is a classic that I will surely pass on after I have a real marriage. A real marriage is consummated, which is defined by intercourse, which is defined by penis in vagina, which same-sex couples cannot do. The point of marriage is to have kids and build a strong family. But homosexuals would rather change the definition of a word to win the argument (moving the goal posts). In America, marriage will die off since it will become a meaningless government contract.
That rant is so tired, so inconsistent, so laced with hate-speech, its become wearisome to respond to its ilk. Let me just say, lots of older couples, infertile couples, 'normal' couples get married never intending to have children, even in your own religion, that that fundamental argument is silly.
Why do you keep making it? You come off sounding desperate, defensive, selfish. You make sex sound mechanical, impersonal. I cannot imagine what kind of marriage you are describing, but it is not a marriage of joy and commitment.
This is like the made up term "homophobia". Just because I disagree with you and use my free speech to do so, does not give you the right to assume my opinions are coming from negative attributes. On the contrary, I care deeply about the future for my children.
lots of older couples, infertile couples, 'normal' couples get married
And they certainly can get married and consummate. It's unfortunate they won't be able to have children but perhaps they can adopt. I do not think same-sex couples should adopt, because this kind of terrible things happen[1].
Why do you keep making it?
This is the first time I've posted about gay marriage on HN.
I cannot imagine what kind of marriage you are describing, but it is not a marriage of joy and commitment.
Any parent will tell you: children are the greatest joy and a huge commitment. That is exactly what I'm describing.
>* Just because I disagree with you and use my free speech to do so, does not give you the right to assume my opinions are coming from negative attributes.*
Free speech is a responsibility - not a right to say dumb things just because you can.
Actually, yes, free speech includes the right to say dumb things just because you can. The responsibility is entirely optional. Otherwise it wouldn't be free speech. It would be called "responsible speech."
> Actually, yes, free speech includes the right to say dumb things just because you can. The responsibility is entirely optional. Otherwise it wouldn't be free speech. It would be called "responsible speech."
Actually no. There's defamation laws and such like that trump free speech.
People need to learn that free speech isn't an excuse for trolls and bigots to post unfounded and hateful remarks. "Free speech" doesn't mean "free pass to act like a dick and intentionally piss of whole subsections of society". Which is why I refer to it as a responsibility; as with all great power comes great responsibility.
No, defamation laws "and such" are extremely limited in scope, for a reason. None of them stops people from "saying dumb things." It specifically DOES allow, protect, end entitle someone to "act like a dick and intentionally piss off whole subsections of society." There could be no discourse otherwise.
You may be confusing United States law with many European nations, which have very different interpretations of speech rights. For example, in Germany it is illegal to advocate for NeoNazism. In the United States, it is perfectly legal, even though it fits all of your "disallowed" criteria.
> No, defamation laws "and such" are extremely limited in scope, for a reason. None of them stops people from "saying dumb things." It specifically DOES allow, protect, end entitle someone to "act like a dick and intentionally piss off whole subsections of society." There could be no discourse otherwise.
That doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. If I was to make up some rubbish about you (eg selling drugs to school kids), then you'd be able to take me to court over those things that I said. Thus there are limitations on freedom of speech as those laws are there to protect people like you from in situations like the aforementioned. They're not there to protect people from /SAYING/ dumb things - like you stated. The laws are there to protect the subject /AGAINST/ dumb things being said.
However that's a tangent as it was never my original point. As I'll explain next:
> You may be confusing United States law with many European nations, which have very different interpretations of speech rights. For example, in Germany it is illegal to advocate for NeoNazism. In the United States, it is perfectly legal, even though it fits all of your "disallowed" criteria.
I'm not confusing any laws here. You're misunderstanding me as you're talking purely from a legal perspective where as I'm talking about social obligation. A rather crude example would be gun laws in the US. A large number of people are calling for guns to be banned because a small minority chose to abuse their right to own a gun. Sure, they broke other laws (just as people who abuse their free speech might break defamation (et al) laws). And just like with free speech, we have a moral obligation not to dilute our freedom of speech with mindless hatred as otherwise we might see such rights taken away "for our own benefit". In fact we are seeing this already with idiots who post dumb comments on Twitter getting arrested. They set a precedence where the police can intervene, which makes it easier for police and "do gooders" to take action in future times when circumstances might not be so extreme. And we've seen it with the pressure that Facebook face to sensor the messages left on there because of a meme going out of hand.
Sometimes having freedoms is as much about knowing when not to abuse it as it is about knowing when to exercise your freedoms. Which is why I say great power comes great responsibility. Just because someone legally can do something, it doesn't mean that they should.
Are you living in a cave? The opinions that I am espousing are fully supported by huge modern nations such as Russia. I just gave you a link showing the government's unanimous support of bills banning gay propaganda. So why do you assume I'm a troll? Does it shatter your fragile world view to realize many intelligent and sane individuals are against gay marriage, so you have to imagine me as a joke?
That's what this whole news story is about. A dignified and successful author is against homosexuality, and the progressive community can't handle any opposition to their views so they tar and feather their reputation. So much for tolerating other viewpoints...
"Tolerance" is being thrown around as though yours and OSC's arguments are equal, on the same lines as Apple vs. Android or Chocolate vs. Vanilla.
On one side lies liberty and civil rights, and the other is for disenfranchising people. It's a slanted argument. You're accusing one group of people of being inferior and immoral. It's a dig against other human beings, an assertion that some aren't as deserving.
One can debate methods or policy as to which is more effective, or whether or not designated hitters should be allowed in baseball. It's another thing entirely to assert that a whole range of people are unworthy of the same rights as others. Regardless of whether you or I prefer we live our lives in a different way, doesn't imply that somehow we should trample the liberties of others.
"Intelligent and sane" individuals don't tolerate segregation, racism, or the persecution of others based on their orientation. That your puppet legislature miraculously cast a unanimous vote for continued repression while all other governments across the world continue to roll back this anachronism speaks much for the state of "modern" Russia.
The point of marriage is to have kids and build a strong family
What are you, a Russian peasant? Did you grow up in a Kolkhoz? In a small village in Siberia? Is that a joke? "Yes, we Russians want good, strong, healthy family. We like our women with strong child-bearing hips". I hope the readers here don't get the impression that you represent Russian culture, so just to make things clear: just like in America, these views are more representative of Russian hillbilly rednecks. Russia has given us some of the most subversive, interesting, anti-bourgeois minds in all of Western culture.
There is no market demand for unskilled labor at $7.25 an hour. Even if you removed minimum wage laws, you would still need to pay people enough to eat and stay functional in the workplace, which nowadays I imagine isn't much lower than $7.25, especially considering the only practical unskilled labor roles today are physical toiling, since almost everything else can be very easily automated away, so you need to fix their broken bones.
So I'd argue the open market in the US don't have enough demand for physical human labor at the bare minimum cost to keep people alive. The consequence is a lot of people are just not working. We have nothing for them to do at the given price that anyone is willing to pay.
So if the market has no unmet demands for toil, then guaranteeing a minimum wage job means you are wasting that persons time on some task that nobody needs done, at least not for the price he is paid, and you are not only biasing away the labor market you are wasting that persons time on some task that isn't valuable to be done.
Even if you have some market demand, the given rate is dropping annually due to the cheaper and more efficient automation of physical duties. I guarantee you once automated vehicles are entering the market and are legally allowed, there will be an absurd displacement of menial labor driving delivery trucks.
Other industries rife for that kind of displacement are farming (considering most farming tasks are procedural, automated farming machinery is practical, even if it needs high precision to harvest using computer vision), retail (with automated vehicles, you might as well buy all your goods online, shipped directly to your home, with no need for an intermediary store except in rare conditions like furniture and cars where you want to "sample" in person the goods), and construction (if you plant factory made homes, might as well build a foundation machine to excavate and lay a foundation without human intervention).
And then you have no use for human meat sacks moving their arms. We are already approaching that - it is why this problem even exists today. What happens when we get there?
Humans are not ready for the post-work era, and probably won't be for a few generations. When there truly is no more need for actual labor to make the world run, humans will have to reform their notion of "unemployed". As of now, we define people based what they give to the world, and so far the easiest way to measure that is through work. That's why it's such a huge deal that our unemployment rate is high, we have these immense conceptual blocks that we'll need to shed for the post work era.
In the mean time, we have to accommodate the current generations of people by subsidizing work. It's the only way to sustain our current paradigm and give people livelihoods, instead of leaving them desolate in the transition phase with callous explanations of technological progress.
You're describing a situation where most of the economic work of producing the necessities of human life can be done by robots (food/clothing/shelter/electricity/transportation of those goods to the humans that need them).
When that happens, the human race will be able to retire -- communism / Basic Income will actually work in that world, everyone will be able to get the necessities of life, and the small proportion of people who are willing to work for fun, or unnecessary luxuries that aren't necessary for survival, will be very small compared to today's pool of human labor, but still enough to maintain the robots and do the remaining jobs that robots can't do.
Offering money to drop out of high school would cause the drop out rate to increase further. Besides, I get the feeling that most high school drop outs aren't really looking for work. This is a hard problem to solve.
The money would be unconditional, not in exchange for dropping out of high school. You may as well say that soup kitchens are offering soup to drop out of high school and are causing the drop out rate to increase further.
It has some advantages over more traditional welfare systems. For instance it could be implemented with far less bureaucracy and would help improve labor mobility in the middle class by decreasing the friction of changing jobs and moving to different areas with better jobs (improving labor mobility would benefit the economy at large).
18 is probably too old. We want the child support handout to be separated from the parent as early as possible. Giving 12 year olds their own income is probably better than either welfare queens or fertility police.
If you are an economist (a field is already more an ideology / spin machine than science -- the science part in it is basically math), and you are more into entertainment (e.g making the NYT best selling list of shallow books) than science, then you can "prove" a lot of things, without actually proving anything.
Start with a few unexamined wrong assumptions, select the data that fit your conclusion, dress them up with anecdotes and prose, and there you go!
They are real numbers, for which we have just proven it is impossible to find a description that will match them. We have proven that no description will ever describe them.
Of course you can describe them. But describe them in terms of what? I think that's the key. Let's say you have a pencil and you want to describe its length, which will be a unit multiplied by a number. If I were to try to describe the true length in meters it will be: 0.0178(...) * meters. This would be an "indescribable" number the author talks about.
However, I can just describe it in terms of itself and call it one pencil long - we use the pencil itself as the basis of the unit so the number we multiply the unit to is just: 1 * pencil long.
Describe them (completely) in terms of any finite series of symbols.
Some numbers can be described as "7". Some as "pencil length". Some as "the fourth zero of the third Bessel function of the first kind". These are all describable numbers.
Yet there are vastly more numbers that cannot be described in this way -- vastly more numbers that we miss than that we hit.
What you've shown is that that particular number (0.0178.../the length of the pencil in metres) is describable. This isn't the same as showing every real number is describable. There are some numbers which are not the length of anything (in metres), or the mass of anything (in kilograms), or the square root or sin of anything. You could try to capture more numbers by using descriptions like "the length of this pencil in feet" and other made-up units of measurement, but you'll never describe them all.
Decimal system (well, numbers in general) is a great way to describe things as they provide infinite accuracy both in positive and in negative directions. But you must describe them relative to something - some kind of unit.
So your balloon, to fully described its length, you have chosen to describe it relative to meters. Here's the kicker - how well you can measure the length of the balloon depends also on how well you can measure a meter. In the real world, if you try to measure both, the decimal number that describes how relative a meter is to your balloon will only be limited by how accurate your methods of measuring are. You can develop better measuring technology that will forever approach but never reach the True value (only God knows). It is if you try to measure an analog signal, you can only get a digital estimation. But extracting knowledge requires energy, so you need greater computing power to measure an analog signal but all the computing power in the universe couldn't acquire the True value.
This is the result of the real world being nondiscrete and containing infinite knowledge. You can measure things by proportion (such as tau (2*pi) being the relative constant of circle circumference to radius); these numbers are transcendental and we don't know their True value. Your "indescribable" numbers are as indescribable as transcendentals. So yes the decimal goes on forever, but you can still describe it in terms of itself and just give a constant name (like pi).
The Bitcoin Foundation is not in the business of selling bitcoin to consumers and does not otherwise operate a bitcoin exchange. Even if it did sell bitcoin to consumers, however, the Foundation believes it would not be regulated as a seller or issuer of payment instruments because a bitcoin is not a payment instrument under California law.
I don't mean to offend, but this is what is wrong with the typical tl;dr summary; you've excerpted a core part of the argument, but you haven't explained the assertion made therein. To follow on (in my own words):
As Bitcoin is a separate currency from the USD, the kind of transactions that Bitcoin Foundation members are engaged in are in effect foreign exchange (forex) transactions, and Forex is not considered subject to money transmission regulations by the state of California.
I'm not sure I buy this argument, but haven't studied the legal background enough to form a proper opinion yet. the reason I was so pleased to see a link to a document with primary sources is that it makes it a lot easier to research the arguments therein, inviting good-faith attempts at falsification.
Perhaps they're just waiting for the state of California to declare in a legally binding way that Bitcoin is not a "separate currency from the USD". That'd be something a _lot_ of people would love to be able to promote and quote prominently…
For those too lazy to read ukoto's post, here's the TL;DR summary:
We don't sell bitcoin; not like it matters anyways.
If that was too long, here's the TL;DR of the Bitcoin Foundation's response to California's Department of Financial Institutions:
You're wrong.
Of course, my point is that if someone is actually interested in bitcoin and learning the legal arguments behind it, don't waste your time with incomplete summaries; just read the actual letter. It only takes a few minutes.
Indeed, but either the DFI knew this, in which case the threat was malicious, or they didn't know this, and the threat was incompetent. Either way, it's not a good position to start from.
There's a third possibility, which is that the BF argument is flawed and the DFI is actually correct.
I'm not at all sure about this and have yet to check, but I have my doubts about whether BTC/$ exchange can truly be called a Foreign Exchange transaction as BTW are not issued by a sovereign entity and thus may not be considered a Foreign Currency for the purposes of this law.
Maybe, maybe not. It depends what sort of agency relationship exists between the Foundation and its members, whether the members are considered beneficial owners and so on.
It's not obvious from the website what corporate structure the Bitcoin Foundation has, for example. If it's a nonprofit, it has yet to file a 990 tax form. I find it understandable the the CA regulator wants to know what sort of entity it is dealing with.
I could argue that this is the sort of thing a non-profit ought to figure out before soliciting donations. At present I can find no record of the Bitcoin Foundation having filed for nonprofit status, and they don't explain their corporate structure on their website. You can't just say you're a nonprofit entity, there are rules about how you must apply for that status and what sort of public declarations you must make.
How do you know, for example, that it's not a scam? According to the letter, BF it is incorporated in DC and has offices in Seattle, but good luck finding the address or any other information. Regulators are not psychic, and they're well within their rights to say 'stop soliciting money from the general public until you've made the requisite declarations,' because entities that solicit money without having their paperwork in order often turn out to be operating illegally.
I did bother looking. Why isn't it conspicuously declared on their website? For that matter, why are you averse to supporting your argument with links?
As for their bylaws, I did find those before I wrote my remarks above. Besides the fact that github is not exactly a standard place for posting corporate information, it still doesn't include things like the address of the Seattle offices.
The Bitcoin Foundation has not filed any documents with the SEC according to an SEC EDGAR search, nor can I find any existing IRS 990 record. I'm not a lawyer, and especially not a corporate lawyer, but I think you're required to file with those entities if you're a company and if you're claiming nonprofit status, respectively. Why haven't they done so, and why doesn't their website have any of that information available?
As for why the state of CA is involved, the fact that the BF has organized a conference in San Jose seems sufficient to establish minimum contact required to say that the company has operations in California.
::shrugs:: The bylaws github page is linked on the Bitcoin foundation's website.
> The Bitcoin Foundation has not filed any documents with the SEC according to an SEC EDGAR search, nor can I find any existing IRS 990 record. I'm not a lawyer, and especially not a corporate lawyer, but I think you're required to file with those entities if you're a company and if you're claiming nonprofit status, respectively
No. SEC only deals with publicly traded corporations, and only some non-profit organizations must file a 990. Bitcoin foundation hasn't existed long enough for any 990s to be publicly available in any case— they're filed a year behind and there is usually a year lag before anyone posts them.
>It's pretty GD scary - how are we supposed to identify the good guys?
The bad guys are the ones initiating aggression - it doesn't matter what uniform they wear (or non-uniform).
The 4th amendment is being destroyed because other amendments are also being weakened that would normally protect it. The 1st and 2nd amendment could easily protect this shocking situation from occurring. The 1st allows us the free speech to inform the public of what's happening. In terms of the 2nd amendment - if this woman had been carrying a pistol in her purse (which is common in the South) to protect her from being overpowered, she would have a chance to defend herself. Just one incident of a citizen defending themselves would see the immediate halting of these kinds of thuggish tactics.
"Just one incident of a citizen defending themselves would see the immediate halting of these kinds of thuggish tactics."
That turns out not to be the case with our modern "the most important thing is to get home safe" law enforcement officers who replaced old fashioned peace officers, and the prosecutors and judges who support them, for there are a lot of incidents where this has happened. Here are two particularly heinous ones where Southerners defended themselves in no-knock raids, first got killed and had drugs planted to make it look good, the other was sentenced to death, and eventually plead to manslaughter (making him a felon), the 10 year sentence was less than time served:
This is one of the greatest fears of the armed citizen; this case in Arizona is a typical example with the normal outcome, dead citizen (his rifle on safe, he hadn't even made the shoot/no shoot decision or had decided the latter), nothing happens to the cops: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Guerena_shooting
(Well, I suppose the most common example is puppycide, tangible in a way that most raids aren't, but that's not what you're talking about.)
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russias-duma-...