ta75757

    a country can print as much money as it wants

Printing money is essentially a tax, because it reduces the value of the currency everyone else is holding through inflation.

Or another way: money is not physical resources, it is a measure of resources. How could printing money increase the physical resources available to a country?

You hold the assets until the accused is either found guilty or innocent. If they are innocent you return the assets. (Never mind that they are now doing exactly that to prevent people from using their own money to pay for their own defense.)

When we grant law enforcement authority, we are extending them trust not to abuse it. They have failed to not abuse it, therefore the authority should be revoked. So yes, drug dealers should keep their money, so that random people don't get robbed by the police. If the police whine, tell them it's their own fault for abusing their power. (Of course this is idealistic garbage, the police are politically entrenched and rarely ever lose any power.)

There are both state and federal laws for the practice. So this will slightly decrease the situations in which the state/local police can do this. Likely to be compensated for by new state laws. And of course this doesn't stop the Federal law enforcement from doing this. Civil forfiture needs to be abolished period. It boggles my mind, as a layman, that this is considered to satisfy the requirement of "due process" and is therefore constitutional. Sure, there's a process, but it's not the due process.

I understand his question.

The question is: Why is it acceptable for a group of people defined by "nationality" to form a collective (government) that creates and enforces economic protection for itself against non-members, but not acceptable for a group defined by "race" to do the same?

The closest you came to answering this was when you wrote "Given that it does exist, it should operate for the benefit of its citizens." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8886112) which to me reads as "it is acceptable because that's the way it is today" or possibly "it is not acceptable but that's just the way it is".

You are not disputing anything I wrote. You seem to be replying as if I were arguing against this, when I was actually pointing out a fact that you failed to acknowledge when you wrote "no violence towards Nigerians who come to the US looking for work. Perhaps a mild deportation".

Note that while you wrote "no violence towards Nigerians", in the post you replied to yummyfajitas wrote ""threaten with violence" which is not quite the same.

    mild deportation

All laws/regulations (even the good ones) are ultimately enforced by the implicit threat of violence. You only get a "mild deportation" if you cooperate in the process.

Socially they are different, but labor has an equal claim to "free trade" as capital for economic reasons. If you grant it only capital, labor can rightly feel screwed over.

Imagine the EU, but without free movement of labor. So Western companies come into the East, buy up anything worth buying (including farmland and mineral rights) and out compete anything that's not (putting people out of work), but then a citizen in the East who wants to get a good job in the West and will do it for less than a Westerner is told to GTFO.

For those who don't know what this means:

"In modern times, the territory is generally and almost universally known as part of the West Bank."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shomron)

I don't know. I personally have a mild dislike of self-applied labels like this.

"You know what punkers don't do? Call themselves punkers."

How many people reading that headline do you think actually think of suicides when they read it?

The reason for determining the deadliness of guns is to know whether they should be banned or not. And we're arguing that since suicides don't justify prohibition, it's not fair to include them in "deadliness". Suicides don't justify prohibition because I as a person should have the right to choose to own a gun at the small risk that I may commit suicide with it. It is not the governments place to protect me from that small risk.

    It seems as though advocates are arguing that the statistics should 
    be filtered to make guns appear less statistically deadly.

And the other side is doing the same thing, inflating the statistics with deaths that we believe should not affect the policy decision.

    gun deaths are trending upward

Not according to the graph in the article: http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecac...

Thing many people are missing, I think, is that the position of the NRA is not necessarily based on the merits of that particular issue. It is based on the STRATEGIC view of the political battle to restrict and eliminate firearm ownership.

The gun control side claims they "don't want to take away your guns" or they "don't want to take away all guns" but when you look at DC and Chicago, where they have the most power, they completely banned private ownership of handguns. This demonstrates their goal, and this is what the NRA is fighting against.

It is much harder to repeal a gun control law than to pass it (if you look at things on the scale of decades and/or centuries), partly because this is a demographic issue and the pro-gun demographic is smaller and shrinking.

So the NRA has absolutely no incentive to concede ground in the battle for private gun ownership. I've never heard a gun control proponent suggest "OK if you give us background checks, registration and capacity limits, we will loosen gun laws in states where they are more strict and promise never ever to go further." That would be compromise. I've never heard it, neither has the NRA.

That is why they are absolutists, because ultimately so is the other side. (Their leadership anyway, which is what counts, not the moderate "let's split the difference" voter who only cares about the issue when its a major news item.)

I don't see the direct connection between the suicide risk of a single gun owner and the ratio of suicide to homicide in total gun deaths.

The claim regarding suicide vs homicide is easy to confirm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...). It is not possible to predict every suicide, the best we can do is make an approximation using obvious risk factors like hospitalization for mental illness. There are millions of gun owners in the US, so yes the chance of a suicide is small.

Cars are not a good example because people need cars. But alcohol is a good example, nobody needs alcohol and plenty of innocent people die from drunk drivers. Yet most people consider alcohol "normal" and the idea of restricting it to home use only, for example, as absurd. But since these people didn't grow up with guns they consider them "abnormal" and see no problem with restricting them, since it doesn't affect them. This is why I think the conflict is mainly cultural.

But you're doing that at the cost of denying all non-suicides the right to own a gun. The government's mandate is not to eliminate all deaths at all costs. It is to balance a wide variety of conflicting issues. And many people who wish to own firearms do not believe that the very small chance that they may commit suicide justifies the government preventing them from owning a firearm.

How so?

Because the fact that there is a very small chance that a person may kill themselves with a gun does not mean the government should deny that person the right to own a gun. And people with a history of mental illness are already excluded from owning guns.

Paul Graham is fighting for his side. I hope any developers here are smart enough to fight for theirs.

He's arguing that the same companies who colluded illegally to drive down the wages of the "best" programmers, now have no interest in lowering their wages when they're arguing for increased immigration. LOL.

I am not opposed to the tax, I simply think it's pointless to talk about what it's "for". That's what I meant to convey with the second line. It's a tax. If you don't pay this one, you'll pay another. And the government will spend the money where/how it sees fit.

From what I've read ordinary passenger vehicles put just about no strain on modern roads. Only heavy vehicles like semis do.

Tax is tax, money is fungible.

They're not giving you $0.60, they're completing the transaction of you giving them $2.40. Socially it's not the same.

I used to say something similar until I read an even better version:

"What doesn't kill me makes me stronger."

"I hope a bus tries to make you stronger."

(source: http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/09/how_does_the_shutdown...)

There was an article submitted here a long time ago, it's title was:

"Fuck you, pay me."

I find it applicable here as well.

If programmers were paid like doctors, more talented people would start considering programming over med school or finance as a career. And then you would have more "talent". That's economics, that's capitalism. (Yes, laws hindering immigration are a trade barrier, and hiring immigrants is "more efficient" and therefore "better for consumers". But free trade advocates tend to only favor free trade for them. See, e.g. farming subsidies.)

So the question is, who deserves the money more, the developers or the CEOs and shareholders? Well, in our system today, the money goes to whoever has more power and fights harder for it. So, as a developer, I'm inclined to fight for my side, just as OP is fighting for his.

In that case you have to say "no thank you" every time someone new comes along and they decide they need to be helpful without any indication from you. And that can get irritating really fast. Imagine how sick tall people must be of being asked their height. Now add to that pity and condescension.

As a former "alien" myself, I was never offended by this. It's a technical term.

The point isn't whether he's guilty or not, the point is whether the actions of law enforcement are useful. If they create the crime they then prevent, did they really prevent a crime?

The answer is "just barely". Sure, real terrorists could have recruited this guy and given him a bomb, but then the real threat is still those terrorist who already have a bomb and not this guy.