gozur88

While it's true you can't have 0% unemployment in a free market, going from, say, 8% to 5% is a big deal that helps in a lot of ways.

30% unemployment, the way it's normally defined, means 30% of your population are looking for jobs and unable to find them. Which is an unmitigated disaster.

I think unemployment is more politically significant. The followup question for anyone reporting a rising GDP is "sure, but what does this do for job growth?"

That's what they used in the US when I was a kid. There are some legitimate-sounding reasons to switch to GDP instead, but I think the real reason was GNP turned negative.

It's difficult for me to imagine they won't get sued over this, and in a big way. Imagine if you're Amazon or Microsoft looking at a 30% reduction in salable CPU resources.

Plus a huge class action suit from consumers based on false advertising or some related claim.

Plus security. It's always been a skill in relatively high demand, but in the last ten years or so companies have been willing to pay whatever it takes to avoid getting hacked. My company brought in all sorts of consultants just after, coincidentally I'm sure, the Target CEO lost his job because of a hack.

The clear thing would have been to use the full date.

>It is not, after all, the employee's ability to pursue his own self-interest that makes him free rather than a slave.

Actually, yes it is. I'm sorry you feel let down, but your side of this discussion is frankly indefensible.

You had to stretch so far for that it's meaningless. You can't equate physical restraint, corporal punishment, and complete lack of self determination in your personal life with... the risk of losing your health coverage.

That's not a difference in degree at all. It's a difference in kind, and the distinction isn't even close.

I don't understand why it didn't affect the stock price more. This is a big deal.

I'm amazed the extent to which investors are willing to shrug off this kind of news when it comes to Tesla.

That's a pretty murky grey area, though. I remember the articles about aspects of loot boxes making them like gambling, and how that could make them illegal.

It's really difficult to say that's not true, and by throwing the weasel-word "could" into the sentence you do a lot to protect yourself from consequences.

>The difference between keeping slaves and having employees is one of degree, not of essential quality.

No. It is one of essential quality, because your employees are working for you by mutual assent and your slaves aren't. Employees can quit and work for someone else if they decide it's in their interest, whereas slaves are stuck with you no matter how you treat them.

Say everybody has ten acres of land, because we've taken all the land and divided it out among the world's population. Let's leave aside, for a moment, that's pretty much impossible, since everybody will want beachfront property in Hawaii, say, and not a patch of desert in BFE.

Now say I have fifteen children, and you have one. In the next reallocation, do we really divide out the land such that my family ends up with fifteen times the land your family has? Think about the incentives that kind of scheme creates.

Furthermore, there's a tragedy of the commons problem. If we all own the land, or it gets re-divided every generation, I have no reason to improve it. I'll get rich turning my land into a toxic wasted dump, because I don't have any interest in maintaining its value.

In the end, that's why we have property ownership. People don't take care of things they don't own.

Yes, yes, we can do all that stuff. But why would we? What justifies the expense?

We had bombs before the space race, too. That doesn't mean it wasn't, in essence, a military competition.

Sessions is, after a year in office, looking "very hard right now" at marijuana enforcement policy, which is bureaucratese for "don't hold your breath". He also said he thought the idea some people have put forward suggesting legal pot would solve the heroin problem is stupid. And... he's right. That is stupid.

He hasn't done anything, even things that were in his power to do.

No it wasn't. The War on Drugs was an attempt to take disparate anti-drug efforts and combine them into a more coherent whole. It was no different from the War on Poverty.

Were there people attempting to use drug policy to attack other people they didn't like? I've no doubt. But that wasn't the purpose of the War on Drugs and it would never have come into existence if it were.

>That's like going back to the 17th century and decrying the exploration of the New World because you're not certain just how much gold there may be and you can't predict what the New World economy might look like.

No it isn't. Exploration of the new world offered obvious substantive benefits - the trees alone were priceless to a countries that had to manage forests very carefully, not to mention new and useful crops coupled with an abundance of land. In short, it was a no-brainer.

And it was extremely cheap compared to building space infrastructure, since food could be grown or purchased from the natives, there was air, sunburn was the only radiation problem.

In space we'll have none of that. There are unsettled regions on earth far more hospitable to human life than anything we'll find outside our gravity well. The idea we ought to sink trillions of dollars into and infrastructure to produce things that are already good enough is hard to justify.

Yeah, except that Nixon just gave it that name. Drug prohibition in the US started when Nixon was learning to walk.

This "drug prohibition is about racism" is all post hoc ergo propter hoc stuff.

What is Sessions doing that Lynch didn't?

We would never have done it the first time if not for military competition with the USSR.

>Doing anything ambitious in space would require a lot of material, which has limited our ambitions since the 1970s.

We go to the moon because materials are cheap because... we want to build what?

Different class of drugs.

I remember when astronomers started using lasers for distortion canceling. A buddy of mine had been working on spy sats for a decade and said the government was using the same technology (though in the other direction) when he arrived.

Ah... I misunderstood. I thought you were sending them notes on your impressions of the candidates themselves.

On the contrary, there have been several high profile incidents where police radio traffic was used to demonstrate ill intent. It's difficult to use a tool day in, day out like that without getting complacent.

Open radio also makes it more likely the news media is there when the action is still happening instead of giving cops time to paper over their mistakes.

>Basically, we condense our notes about the candidate down to the most important points and send it to them.

This is an excellent basis for a lawsuit.

Yep. I've never worked for a company where we told people why they didn't make the cut. Heck, the person who delivered the bad news didn't even know - we selected the candidate we wanted (or none) and told HR to make the rest happen.

In most cases there's no answer beyond someone else seemed like a better fit for the position. How would it help to know you would have got the job if only this other person didn't apply?

It's a cynicism born of experience when it comes to crowdfunding.

Yep. If cops break into your house and point guns at you, you need to suppress your natural tendency toward modesty.

Add it to the lawsuit, later.