tsotha

Martha Stewart was convicted based on an investigator's memory and the notes he had written in his notebook. It wasn't what she said, but what she said in someone else's words.

Do you really want to bet your freedom on the basis of someone else's interpretation of what you said?

This is as good a place as any to re-post this:

http://corporate.findlaw.com/litigation-disputes/how-to-avoi...

Did you read the title of this post?

And yet the numbers back my interpretation.

The women I've known who "attempted" suicide weren't really trying to kill themselves. It was either attention seeking behavior or an attempt to punish people in their social circle. IMO it's more a question of intent than method.

That's why they call it "climate change" now, instead of "global warming". This way if it gets warmer - climate change. If it gets cooler - climate change. Bad weather? Climate change. Nice weather? Also climate change.

>But making the leap from that to "my code can't harm people" is a bridge too far.

Meh. My application is an internal app for a large company. It's basically scheduling software for a part of our business process. To even start to hack it you'd first have to break into the corporate network, and in the end you'd have data you didn't care about. Hell, I'm not even sure the people who use it care.

Worst case, a subtle bug (and it would have to be subtle for my users to miss it) might cost my employer a few thousand bucks.

Again, meh. There are a whole lot of internal applications that fall into this category.

My ethics are my own. I see no reason to make a public spectacle out of it one way or another.

It's odd that we never heard about that when the polar bears were supposed to drown.

>1) This is going to be used, fast, by the climate change denial camp to show "everything is OK", sad but true.

Seems pretty fair, doesn't it? I mean, any decreases have certainly been used by AGW promoters to show "the sky is falling".

I doubt there are many people entering prison who think they belong there.

I love the World Service. I just want to hear the news without gimmicks.

What makes it a story is the imbalance between the sexes. These women aren't married despite having a pretty unbalanced sex ratio to their advantage.

I'm not sure I would call herpes a benign virus. There are strains that will kill you.

That's a terrible example. Those John Doe investigations were a great example of prosecutorial abuse. If I had been Walker I would have had the state AG indict the prosecutors involved for corruption.

Most people who own a house or have savings or have family can scrape together enough money to engage a lawyer. How much that actually costs depends on the charge.

So many cases are pled out these days (98% at the federal level), I doubt more than a tiny percentage of defendants are spending anything like $100k.

Might be, but can you assume that without evidence?

Statistically the rich don't do any better than anyone who can afford a lawyer. The people who get screwed are the ones relying on court-appointed counsel. They do significantly worse.

It's really past time to get rid of the qualified immunity doctrine. It's yet another "law" made up by the supreme court from whole cloth.

Prosecutors should be fully liable for illegal actions they take even when they're performing official duties. This guy should be serving a sentence years long, not days.

To be fair, most Teslas are being bought by enthusiasts. When they start selling the model 3 to people who just want a reliable car, there may in fact be some demand for the services typically offered by a dealership.

Iranian patrol boats always had anti-shipping missiles. They don't have many patrol boats, though, and they don't have many missiles. Beyond that, if you're going to use a missile there's no point in putting it on a boat if your target is in the Straight of Hormuz. You just launch it from land.

The concern is the Iranians (or whoever) would use speedboats packed with explosives and ram them into US ships. Speedboats and explosives are cheap, so this is a pretty easy attack to put together, and if it's a sneak attack you could get closer by having them pretend to be ordinary civilian traffic.

But the attack is pretty easy to counter, too - the Navy issued .50 cal machine guns with a mount that clips on the rails. The M-2 has a range of almost two kilometers and will turn a speedboat into kindling in just a few seconds.

Beyond that, people (particularly Dolan, who thinks everybody not him is an idiot) who point to that particular exercise have a fundamental misunderstanding of the way these things work. You can't get that many people and ships together doing whatever they want and not have casualties. The Navy did stop the exercise, and while they're not talking the most likely reason is the red team wasn't following the rules. The point of these kind of exercises isn't to develop new and innovative tactics - the point is to make sure everybody does what they're supposed to do.

>Apple has a moral and ethical onus to make the right choices be it related to the confederate flag, changing drug laws, or using emoji to fight bullying, and we respect that.

I can't decide if he really respects that or if he's still hoping to get his app approved. Companies should not be in the business of trying to enforce (clearly unenforceable) laws by removing features that do perfectly legal things.

>A healthy economy will, in most cases, exhibit inflation.

A healthy economy will exhibit monetary inflation as it grows. But there's no reason for it to exhibit price inflation.

>The government has to print more money to keep up, otherwise it will fall short of people's needs.

That's a circular argument. It's not like people in a deflationary environment don't have any money - they have less money, but that money is worth more.

>There's a huge benefit. We want to encourage economic activity over inactivity.

Sure. I'm just not convinced getting people to go into debt really does that. Oh, it does in the short run. But once your debts start to pile up not only do you have to pay for the things you've already purchased, but you have to pay interest. If, instead of borrowing money, you'd just bought things as you could afford them, you would end up spending more.

>Money borrowed is money invested.

No, money borrowed is money spent. Sometimes that's investment. Sometimes it's not. If I borrow money to buy a bed made in China, that's not helping the US economy very much.

The idea deflation is bad for an economy doesn't hold up to historical scrutiny. The US grew strongly in the 19th century (far more strongly than today), and during that time it experienced long periods of growth accompanied by low deflation. People still have to buy food, pay the rent, buy clothes, etc even when the currency is deflating.

>That doesn't make very much sense to me. It's not as if the "new dollars" are worth $1.02, while the "old dollars" are worth $1.00.

It's very much like that, actually, except it's more like the new dollars are worth $1.00 and the old ones are now worth $0.98. The important factor is time. Suppose we live on an island and have a currency we'll call a "foo". There are 100 foos in circulation. Tax collection isn't what it should be, so the president of the island borrows ten foos from the central bank (which, like the fed, just updates the computer to create them) and uses them to pay the presidential guard.

When he spends those ten extra foos, the president is getting the current purchasing power of the foo. It will take some time for the value of each foo to adjust down to take into account there are now 110 foos instead of just 100. Two weeks from now everything priced in foos will have risen 10%, but since the economy didn't "know" about the extra foos the president was able to spend them at full value.

>The first-order effect is: banks are owed an amount of money denominated in nominal terms, and inflation will decrease the value of those debts.

That's true, but the bank isn't going to loan you money without taking inflation into account. That's why loan interest rates go up when inflation goes up.

Also, the bank is borrowing the money they're loaning to you, and after they make the loan they're going to sell it off to a GSE or market investors. So someone else is ultimately holding the bag if there's inflation.

>And even if this theory was true, inflation has been historically low (and below central-bank targets) for quite a few years, so whoever is pushing for higher inflation isn't very good at it.

Well, yes. The problem is two-fold. The first part is in a fractional reserve system the money supply depends on qualified candidates willing to borrow. In the midst of a recession there just aren't as many of them - people without jobs aren't buying houses, and businesses aren't expanding. So less new money is created.

The second part is loan defaults destroy money. If you get enough defaults you're going to get deflation.

It's not like the banks didn't get their money's worth, though, as the government used every trick in the book to add money to the economy. At one point in time the government was borrowing forty cents of every dollar it spent, and the Fed was injecting more directly though QE.

That was (mostly) true twenty years ago, but not any more.

On the other hand, you're commenting on HN instead of actually working :)

What you're missing is people with first access to new money are the ones who benefit the most in an inflationary environment. In a fractional reserve system that's the banks. Banks generally benefit from higher inflation up until the point where it's high enough to damage the economy.

It should come as no surprise that banks spend so much to influence public opinion and the political process.

>If the holders of wealth that seed the economy figure out that it's better for them to hold on to their assets rather than invest them, then people lose jobs.

That's the theory, but I'm skeptical. If the economy is healthy they'll have investment opportunities that compensate adequately for risk and they'll still invest.

Conversely, in an inflationary environment people with savings may invest their money, but they may also buy fixed assets like gold or real estate. That doesn't help the economy very much.

>Deflation also penalizes debt holders.

And inflation hurts savers. I don't see a benefit to prioritizing the interests of debtors over savers.

Anything that has a half-life of 500,000 years isn't very radioactive at all. The half life is directly related to the amount of harmful stuff it puts out.

It was inevitable. Tesla was, for a long time, over-hyped. Now the pendulum is swinging back the other way, and every little thing that goes wrong will get national attention.

I'd be very surprised if Tesla was "doomed".