Delta1212

I think you may mean "fly in the face." "Spit in the face" is rather hostile language. Also, I'm going to go dig around for some numbers and see if I can figure out what the actual results are based on various stats. I find that when I look for articles, they're usually looking to push a narrative, one way or the other, so I'm going to see if I can get us a better organized list of raw numbers we can look at and discuss. I'm going out to dinner tonight, so I'm not sure what time I'll be done with it, but I'll try to post something before I go to bed at least.

Everyone but Trump dropped out of the race weeks ago and today he got enough delegates to win the nomination, so there is no world in which Trump is not the GOP nominee unless he dies in the next couple months.

In the frame of either proton, the other is not approaching faster than c. So yes, closing speed of two objects that are both moving in the frame where the measurement is being taken can be greater than c (but no greater than 2c) as long as there is no frame in which anything is traveling faster than c within that frame.

A government, especially when speaking of a hypothetical one like we are right now, is fundamentally a set of rules for organizing society, including rules for how rules are created, abolished, amended and enforced. If you really want to take a stab at an ideal government, I don't think you can take any of the laws that presently exist wherever you live or any of the government structures for granted. If you think a rule should exist, I think you need to address the following: What problem does this rule solve? Is that the actual problem or am I really attempting to solve a different problem by proxy? Is there evidence of this rule actually being effective at solving this problem? Is there evidence of any more effective way of solving this problem? What are the potential consequences of this rule beyond its effect on the problem it is intended to solve? Is there any way mitigate potential negative consequences? Are there any alternatives with fewer or less serious consequences? You need to go through that list of questions for everything, from murder and theft to drug laws and economic regulations to voting and civil rights. Anything you assume is a good thing without analysis is a potential point of failure, source of negative externalities and missed opportunity for something better. That's why I think it's important to dig down to what you fundamentally want your government to accomplish. Do you want a happy society? A healthy society? A productive society? A moral society? An educated society? What are your priorities? What is most important? Is it better for people to be happy but ignorant or educated but miserable? Productive but unhealthy or healthy but unproductive? What values are important? Which ones take precedence when there is a conflict between them? And how do the rules you put in place accomplish your objectives? There is no rule that is good simply for its own sake. We have it drilled into us that democracy is good for its own sake, but is it really? Why is democracy a good thing? What does it accomplish that other forms of government do not? Why do we have prisons instead of some other form of punishment? Why do we have fines? What are these things meant to accomplish and what do they actually accomplish? What are the pros and cons? These are all things you need to analyze in a serious way if you want to design an ideal ruleset. You can't take for granted that because you are familiar with a certain way of doing things that it is the best way. You need to figure out why it is the best way, and if it is not the best way, what can be improved upon. You can't do that until you think about why something is the way it is and what the benefits and drawbacks of that way of doing things are.

Just to point out, gang wars are the result of drugs being illegal. The same wars existed around on the alcohol trade during Prohibition. Those organizations lost a lot of power when Probition ended and in many cases fell apart completely. Organized crime thrives on black market vices, but to have a black market, something needs to be unavailable on the regular market. I'm not saying full legalization does not have its own issues, but you do have to keep in mind that a lot of the problems, not all but a lot of them, especially the more social issues, are as much or more a result of the way legislation treats drugs as anything. They're not necessarily an inherent problem of the drugs themselves the way that health and behavioral issues might be. Even then, it's also important to keep in mind that, as bad as many drugs are for your health, most of them are also made worse by the fact that there are no regulations surrounding their quality, which means that they are often cut with even worse chemicals in order to increase potency or decrease costs by lowering purity, and a good number of overdoses are the result of people taking drugs if inconsistent strength or quality, either because they get a high quality dose when they are used to ones that have been diluted and take too much, or because they are actually taking something that is an entirely different drug or chemical than they were told they were getting because of what it has been cut or replaced with. I'm not saying there aren't plenty of social ills and negative health effects associated with drugs, but you have to consider whether people taking drugs is actually the root problem that you want to address, or whether it's the associated negative effects (public health, violence, poverty, etc) that are actually the problem. It's easy to say that something is associated with negative behaviors and say "Ok, let's make that illegal" and the. forget about it, but that's a simple solution and simple solutions aren't always the same as good solutions. You need to figure out whether that actually solved the problem(s) and, if not, whether there is a more direct way to tackle those issues. When it comes to make policy, you need to be a little more nuanced than simply making things illegal and must look at what the consequences, intended and unintended, of any policy actually are and then select what will most effectively accomplish your goal. Often the goal of a ban on most things is to make people feel like something is being done about it, rather than doing anything to solve the root of the problem, whatever that may be. I think a perfect government would be more focused on outcomes than on putting band aids on things to make it seem like something is being done.

Pretty sure I've heard all of those before so of course I got them, but the first one really works better when told to someone rather than written down. That way they can't just go back and re-read the first sentence to remind themselves what has and hasn't been said about the bus driver and remember that it is them.

There are East Asian countries where the punishment for selling drugs is death and yet they still have a drug trade. Severity of the punishment does not have a trivial correlation with how frequently people do something. We should also keep in mind that the United States is currently a close second to North Korea in terms of the percentage of our population that we have imprisoned due in large party to mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug users, which is creating a whole host of secondary problems both with our prison industry and the way law enforcement resources are expended. You also have to decide what drugs you are talking about. Heroin you've said. Ok, how about marijuana? Alcohol? I've known people whose lives were derailed by both, and yet I doubt their lives would have been improved by being arrested for use of each. Who gets to decide which drugs are ok for people to use and which ones a person will be punished for using? And if you're doing it to help people's lives from being ruined, how does harsher punishment than what we have now accomplish that? We have seatbelt laws to protect people, but you get a ticket for not buckling up, you don't get slapped with felony seatbeltlessness. If this is meant to be setting goals, why is the goal to punish people for using drugs instead of decreasing the health and social damage that drugs do to people in society? There may be better ways of doing that than punishment, and I'm not sure that creating a government for the express goal of punishing a segment of the population as its reason for existing is getting off to a particularly auspicious start.

What about drugs would be punished more harshly? Producing, selling, taking? And especially in the last case, why harsher punishment? Also, why is punishment a goal in and of itself? I would view punishment as a means to an end: That is, reducing the instances of behaviors that we don't want to see prevalent in society. But there may be other means that work better than punishment for some things. It's like building a house and saying that one of the things you want for your house is to use at least 1,000 nails in its construction. That's kind of an odd goal to have as a foundational goal.

Not to jump ahead, but you have to keep in mind that you need a definition for what qualifies at murder. And because definitions can often be somewhat blurry and subject to unforeseen circumstances, having a completely immutable and unchangeable under any circumstances set of rules is rarely a good idea when establishing a government. (I had to get that in on behalf of an old friend of mine. I was involved with an online political sim for quite a few years and wrote several documents outlining government structures that were used to organize players and had a friend I'd bounce ideas off of whose big thing was amendment processes).

What if someone decides worshipping a god or gods is disturbing? Where does the line of "disturbing" get drawn? How is "disturbing" defined? Is it just "things I don't like?" Because that is going to vary wildly from person to person and be subject to rather extreme abuse if the court decides to just ban all religions that the people on it decide they don't personally like.

Brief explanation of gerrymandering: States are broken into Congressional districts. Each district elects one of the state's representatives to Congress. Every 10 years there is a census, and the districts have to be redrawn so that roughly the same number of people fall within the boundaries of each district within a state. The way that the districts are drawn can have a major impact on how elections play out and how many representatives from each party wind up being elected to Congress from that state. For example, let's have a super simple example where we have a state that has a population of 100 people that need to be divided up among 5 districts. Let's say that 50 belong to the Gerry party and 50 belong to the Mander party. Now, if the people are distributed randomly across the state and the map is drawn fairly, you'd expect that to have 5 districts that each have 10 Gs and 10 Ms in them. But people tend to cluster, and a gerry meandered map takes advantage of clusters and draws maps that lump people together in ways that are advantageous to one party or the other. For example, you could have one district with 18 Ms and 2 Gs, and then divide up the other 4 districts so that they each have 12 Gs and 8 Ms. That's 20 people per district, and a total of 50 Ms and 50 Gs, but by clustering a lot of Ms all into one district, it dilutes the number that are in the other districts, and despite the ratio of Ms to Gs in the overall population being a perfect 50/50 split, the Gs have 4 districts that they will win and the Ms have one. You can see an example of an over gerrymandered map here: Note the odd borders and elongated shapes of some of the districts as the people who drew the map attempted to group people from different areas into a single district. Also note that the thin blue area between districts 8 and 9 is an actual district and not a lake.

Just as it is technically possible to use 'gay marriage' to mean a happy marriage but that isn't usually what it is understood to mean, 'gun control' is generally understood to mean legal regulation of firearms rather than physically maintaining control of your own weapons.

That's not gun control. That's gun safety and responsible storage.

Stuff doesn't just stay in space on its own. If it's close to a gravity well (like Earth) it needs to be moving fast enough to keep from getting pulled in, and if you want it to remain near the Earth instead of flying past it, it needs to be moving in an orbit.

That's an exceptionally difficult task as it depends heavily on both the circumstances of the country in question and the goals of person designing the government. Geography, economy, neighboring countries, natural resources, technology, size, population, and culture all play into the shape a government needs to take in order to effectively shape society, and what a perfect society even looks like is going depend on who you ask. Given a stated goal and a set circumstances, you can potentially design a government to maximize the chances of that goal succeeding, but even that can be incredibly difficult with circumstances liable to develop over time in unforeseeable ways. With those constraints, it's effectively an impossible task. This isn't even addressing an issue of governmental philosophy or structure but rather a single, fairly narrow policy position, and even that doesn't have a truly correct answer because it depends on what you want. Is gun ownership something you want to preserve? How much are you willing to curtail it in the name of restricting gun violence? How much additional gun violence are you willing to accept in order to maintain some level of popular ownership? Are you willing to implement regulations on gun manufacturing? There are trade offs to everything and how much you are willing to accept of one thing over another, or whether you even consider some outcome of a policy to be a positive or negative depends heavily on what you want and believe. The policies that we have are rarely the result of someone working out a perfect policy position, because few people can agree on what one would even look like, and more often the result of competing interests trying to balance each other out with many people rarely getting precisely what they would like.

Also the post office. Although it charges for service, because it is under public rather than private control, it's primary mandate is delivering mail rather than making a profit, and as a consequence it will deliver mail essentially anywhere in the United States regardless of whether it is profitable to have the infrastructure set up to do so. This is not the case with private mail delivery services which will sometimes charge much higher rates to deliver to difficult to get to areas or even outsource the delivery to the USPS. There are flavors, degrees and differing styles of socialism, as there are with any given ideology. Some proposed implementations have something similar. On the other hand, income taxes that pay for public services are already in some respect what you are describing. There are also proposals where no one gets a paycheck. You do your job and in exchange, your needs are provided for by society en toto at no cost. Food, housing, entertainment, etc. there are various proposals even for that as to how to organize such a system so that it functions properly, but again, lots of variations on any given ideology. Your teacher's explanation seems to play on a socialist principle that goes along the lines of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" but framed in a rather simplified way obviously meant to portray it in an unflattering light. Which may simply be how it was taught to the teacher as well.

The more key aspect of socialism is that of social ownership. Public property is a socialist concept. So public parks, public libraries, public schools, etc are all socialist institutions.

I think even "X ideology is good for some things but needs to be regulated" is looking at it in somewhat the wrong way. Different practices have different outcomes. It's important to determine what those outcomes are, and then apply the right tools to the correct problems depending on what outcomes you want. Some things don't function well in the free market because the principles that drive growth, innovation and efficiency in the market don't apply to those sectors for one reason or another. Healthcare, especially emergency healthcare, for example, often doesn't allow "consumers" much in the way of options as far as shopping around goes, and choosing to forgo accepting a healthcare provider's service may result in death, which makes it difficult to negotiate prices in good faith. If a store jacks up the price of a TV, you can go buy the TV somewhere else, or decide you don't want a TV after all. Meanwhile you can pass out from a medical emergency, have a stranger order you an ambulance that drops you off at a hospital you had no input in choosing and you wake up with tens or potentially even hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills that your insurance may or may not cover. The other question is whether you believe that people who can pay more for healthcare deserve to get better care than people who don't have the money for treatment. That's a value judgement you need to make as a society and then set the system up so that you get the outcome you want. Sometimes a capitalist solution will work best. Sometimes it doesn't result in the outcome that you want. The problem is when you get people who insist that capitalism or socialism or communism, etc etc are the best systems and that the outcomes they provide are therefore inherently desirable because they are the outcome of that system, or that because that system is the best, it will provide the best outcome in every situation, regardless of whether the outcome under discussion is remotely likely to be the outcome that the system in question ultimately results in.

I don't think talking about an overall up or down trend is very useful. Something have improved markedly and some things have gotten worse. We have better protections and improved rights surrounding sexual orientation, but we have more money influencing politics than the recent historical average. We have more people insured, but weakened consumer protections. Focusing on an overall trend across all issues can mask areas of improvement in the case of a negative trend or overshadow issues that clearly still need work in the case of a positive trend. It's best to celebrate what is good and focus on what needs improvement on an issue by issue basis. I also think that ascribing some of those issues, especially the issues surrounding money in politics, as merely being politics and not an issue of government is misguided. The problems in our political sphere are not just because that is what politicians decide to do, but because that is what the regulations around how politics are conducted allow for or encourage. And how politics is regulated is very much a government issue.

I think we've certainly got better regulation than the gilded age, but a lot of those regulations and worker protections were put in following the Great Depression, and they've been eroded and repealed in a fashion over the last several decades such that we've been backsliding economically. Wages have been stagnant for twenty years while the wealthy have seen unprecedented growth in their wealth, the middle class is rapidly vanishing with the median income in the US currently being well and firmly in the "lower class" bracket, and repeated studies finding that how popular a policy is among the general population has almost no correlation with legislative action on the issue, which is consistently much more strongly related to the views of the wealthiest citizens and business elites. We're at a point where Congressmen spend more time fundraising than doing legislative work. That is not hyperbole, that is based on an actual breakdown of how representatives in Congress spend the hours in their workday, and that is not an historically normal average.

Actually, sorry about that. Your comment triggered the thought but I didn't entirely mean to dump that all on your doorstep. It's more about a consistent pattern that I've noticed, but as with any pattern one notices as it applies to people, what it means for any single individual is rather up in the air.

The problem with saying that you're an "ist" is that you wind up having to own the whole ideology. I'm not an anything-ist, except possibly a pragmatist with an idealistic streak. Or maybe an idealist with a pragmatic streak. In any case, I find that associating yourself with any ideology tends to narrow your thinking in an unproductive way with few to no advantages to offset the cost. Taking on an ideology as an identifier makes you resistant to the idea that that ideology can be wrong, because if it's an aspect of who you are then if it is wrong, it means you are wrong as a person and people don't like to be wrong on a fundamental level. Ideas should be evaluated on their merits, not based on whether they are ascribed to your "team" or not. And the only way to avoid that kind of thinking is to avoid picking a team. Once you assign yourself a team, there's not much you can do to keep it from biasing your thinking no matter how objective you think you can be.

It's indirectly testable. You can create models that simulate how things should behave according to the physical laws as we understand them here, and then see whether what we see elsewhere in the universe matches with that. And by and large it does. The one area we really can't test is whatever lies beyond the observable universe, but there is every reason to believe that we will never be able to interact with anything beyond that, so if the laws change somewhere out past our little bubble of observable universe, it's unlikely that we will ever know about it or that it will ever affect us in any way.

I always find it interesting how often that argument is framed as "Why should I work harder if I won't be paid more than everyone else?" instead of "Why should I worker harder if it won't increase my pay?" There doesn't seem to be a huge difference, but the fact that it is so often explained that way is interesting since I would think that the primary concern should be making sure that you feel you are being properly compensated for your effort vs making sure that you are doing better than someone else that you don't think deserves as much as you. I know people who, if offered a 50% raise with the condition that, should they accept it, their lazy do-nothing co-worker will receive a 100% raise, would turn it down and prefer to get nothing than see someone else get more. I think this ties back into the thread on homelessness, actually.

Presumably the owner of the road is already paying the police to protect his road from free riders, so I imagine outbidding him could be expensive indeed.