If you are fabulously wealthy that you can [have a latte each morning], let alone [buy it at Starbucks], you can afford [an additional tax on your latte for the peasant that got the coffee beans.]
A latte is $3.65. If you made your own cup at home, you would spend $0.05. Starbucks is 73x. I believe you need to stop buying lattes from Starbucks and start making your own coffee at home like I do. Stop being such an elitist. Get to work.
I make my coffee at home. Sustainable shade grown fair trade coffee in my parts costs $15.50 a pound. 17g of coffee for a cup is $0.58 per cup. So for sustainable coffee you are off by an order of magnitude.
Not to mention for an 8 oz latte you'll be paying around $0.70-$1.20 for organic, pasture-raised, eco-friendly milk. We're already at a $1.70 for a morning latte.
What is pretentious about buying products that attempt to be better for the earth, and better for your body? It's fine if "coffee is coffee" for you (heck, I've been known to skip coffee altogether in favor of caffeine pills), but there's nothing pretentious about being conscious of one's consumer choices.
I'm sorry! Was that an attack? I figured if you are into telling others how they should spend their money or live their lives or be taxed by government in freedom-restricting ways, then that maybe you would be intellectually honest and not be bothered if I TOLD YOU what to do with some element of your life. How is that an ATTACK?
My friend who majored in biomed kept getting passed over during her job search. Turns out all the biomed companies just wanted to hire mechanical engineers. (She did eventually find a job in her field.)
I guess it's analogous to the data science degrees popping up today. Will be interesting to see if it ends up as a fad degree or a legitimate career path.
My impression (as someone who was once very interested in biomedical engineering) was that it was always mostly mechanical engineering plus some bio/chem and teaming up with doctors. I didn't end up going that route but I got an ME from a school where a number of mechanical engineering professors worked with the affiliated hospital on projects.
The people I knew that majored in biomedical engineering went on to med school... Probably one of those areas that is always in the news and science magazine but still too early to revolutionize life.
I remember when Dolly was cloned and we would have a whole new industry...
YOU value the free speech of whoever is speaking, but not that of the counter protesters. Who themselves value THEIR free speech, but not that of whoever is speaking.
But the counter protesters are free to organize their own speaker engagement. They ARE allowed to speak about their position. My point was that there is lack of civility in discourse. What's the point of interrupting another speaker? Let every speaker speak their mind, in an orderly manner, without interruption.
The problem is that some groups have defined "intolerance of intolerance" to be somewhat good, so then discourse stops.
If a bunch of Americans want to yell at each other, they're free to do so. That's what the First Amendment is all about. And that's what I think you guys all don't understand. The government doesn't have to give you pristine conditions under which you can speak, they just have to let you speak.
Unfortunately... they have to let everyone else speak too.
At the same time if those people choose.
That's what freedom is all about. That's why America is great.
I dislike Donald Trump, but, for example the CNN fish feeding story (CNN zoomed into an existing video, to obscure the Japanese president dumping their box of fish food, then zoomed out to show Trump dumping his, and made up a story about Trump commiting a faux pas by dumping his first) is provably false, and still up on CNN's site with no retraction or apology.
Likewise The Gaurdian's headline about the 'unarmed' guy with a gun is his car, which they were forced to retract by the PCC.
The country was founded on the notion that all you have is the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So I rather defend myself.
If you want to “happily pay for” your own protection, you should hire your own bodyguard. I don’t want my taxes to go to your protection just because you want the government to solve all your problems.
"The community is better at self defense than the individual."
- Not sure what this means. My own experience comes from someone abusing someone at a bus. Nobody intervenes. Just a bunch of sheep until I have to say "Stop it". So while the community may be better defending, they don't, and it is up to the individual to secure his / her own protection.
If my family was murdered while I was out, then by definition I cannot defend them. The law system will take care of it presumably, but that is not "defense", it is post-fact "justice."
Unclear what your mutually destruction comment was.
In your first example - why aren't there more assaults on buses? Why wasn't there a gang member on the bus demanding a secondary fare or "protection fee"? Because your taxes pay for a local police department and a federal policing force. I'm not talking about "bystander effect" here, I'm talking about government resources designed to protect the population at whole. Isolated incidents will still happen. The Law, and Government, is about doing as much good as possible.
Your family is de-facto defended from murder because it is harder to commit murder and get away with it when the FBI exists, generating criminal investigation resources and distributing them among local police detectives. Your taxes pay for this and are protecting you right now. The very existence of a justice system is preventing crime. Not all crime, obviously, but a great deal. The remainder is more a socioeconomic failure of this country than a justice system failure (or, a justice system failure in that the war on drugs is policy failure enforced by the justice system).
Mutually assured destruction is more a macro-comment. Why aren't hordes of Russian barbarians coming over the hill? Because the US exerts its sovereignty within its borders. Why doesn't an organized community (government) challenge that? Because both communities would be vaporized.
Since we're on the subject, your taxes are a much cheaper way to get clean water, medicine that you are guaranteed actually contains the active ingredients you're looking for, food that won't poison you, and ensure that the city upriver doesn't dump toxic waste into the river. If you wanted to "take care of those problems yourself," you'd be running around like a headless chicken. Communitize, instead.
I think most hackers are concerned with public safety. The problem is subgroups of hackers differ on how to achieve it. Some hackers want to remove the rights of people not involved in a crime (like, me) to defend themselves and protect their families (interestingly, they also complain of clear plastic backpacks for kids in school, which I agree is equally ineffective in stopping crime). Other hackers want to preserve the right to defend themselves and their families from crime.
Therefore the debate is not about hacking. It’s about a different view of the world.
Therefore, there are other forums better suited for the debate, which really has nothing to do with hacking (with some exceptions).
