“belong” is a flexible word. You’re right in theory but depending on the situation money in your bank account is worth more to you than an equivalent amount of money in a company’s bank account (of which you are a shareholder).
A sufficiently advanced technological field is one where any expert would start laughing at you for suggesting "hardening" against bullets. The denominator for rockets is always mass. Most of the difficulty is derived from not just doing a thing, but doing it in as lightweight a way possible. There are rocket stages that won't even stand up under their own weight, we have to inflate them like balloons just to move them.
There are rarely mentioned cases where you do actually want to be able to pierce a rocket with a bullet. Mostly related to recovery (or not...) post-flight.
The issue isn't that people are trying to change people's minds. There are two issues here:
First, the rich have unimaginably more power in changing people's minds. This isn't sitting down at a bar and having a chat with hank to try to convince him to vote on prop 99. It is the wealthy putting their opinions on your phone, television, and billboards, reminding you of it multiple times per day. If politics is truly a contest of ideas, then the playing field needs to be level so that the ideas can be evaluated fairly, rather than it simply being a contest of who can buy enough ad space to brainwash people to vote against their interests.
Second, the wealthy don't have to change people's minds. They can purchase politicians by "donating" to them, going to million-dollar-per-plate dinners hosted by them, directly giving them money by staying in their hotels, etc. You don't have to convince a politician that they should vote on prop 99, you just need to pay them however much they want for their vote.
If the wealthy had exactly as much power in politics as a fireman or nurse, then I'd be all for their participation.
> First, the rich have unimaginably more power in changing people's minds
If that was true everyone would love billionaires. I'm fascinated by the cluelessness of this assertion!
The actual research on campaign finance says that once you've managed to inform the voters about what you stand for and who you are, further spending does very little.
> simply being a contest of who can buy enough ad space to brainwash people to vote against their interests
This is the most anti democratic statement I've seen in a while!
If you think voters are such easily brainwashed fools, you can hardly be pro democracy!
Money are not speech. Yes, I know supreme court is openly pro corruption and lawlessness when to comes to their guys. That does not mean I have to buy that sophistry too.
Modern loitering laws in small-town America, post-Civil-War, were typically originally intended to enslave the entire population of black men remaining in town, or otherwise drive them out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA It took most of a century for the economy to really convert everything over to an hourly-pay model. This is not the only reason, but it is the dominant, proximate one that enshrined the practice.
Places with less black-white racial animus were comfortable adopting animus for other minorities, or for the poor in general. Post-Civil-Rights, loitering laws (and a panoply of other practices ranging from swimming pools to mortgage approvals to cul-de-sacs) were exploited not to enslave, but principally to simply eject categories of people.
My understanding is that loitering laws are much older than that - the first versions of these laws seems to date to 1342 [1].
IMO what all these laws have in common is that they're designed to allow the police to legally ask questions to people (or straight up remove them) who look suspicious but haven't committed any crime. Why would anyone want to remove people who haven't done anything wrong is a more nuanced question that I'm not qualified to properly answer.
Have an unmarked "free candy" type van park across your street from your house day in and day out, moving with just enough regularity to avoid parking too long, and you might begin to understand why "look suspicious but haven't committed any crime" starts to weird people out.
There's an inherent tension between protecting public spaces and protecting vulnerable but disruptive people.
Your link refers to an article which is very American and very 2018. Lots of large font size headings about race and sexuality and gender. I don't think it's a productive take on how to manage the tension. Racially homogenous societies still need to decide how to handle people who try to sleep at train stations and yell at the commuters.
Sleeping at train stations is fine (as is sleeping on trains), and yelling at commuters is disruptive / antisocial behaviour. (I don't like the word "antisocial" in laws, because it's too open to interpretation, and then you have a load of case law defining what precisely "antisocial" means, known only to legal experts, leaving everyone else ignorant of the law.) It seems to me that additional rules against loitering are not useful for the situation you described.
Why is sleeping at a train station fine? (Unless you're talking about infrequent long distance trains).
Trains are transportation infrastructure. Drivers don't have to put up with people setting up a queen bed in the middle of their lane on the highway. If a country doesn't protect its public transport infrastructure, then the rich and the middle class stop taking the train, the poor have to put up with things, and the mentally ill get an overpriced and noisy mobile homeless shelter. One that costs more and helps less than crisis accommodation.
Sorry, different person here, why does "sleeping at a train station" imply "setting up a queen bed in the middle of their lane on the highway" or anything of the sort?
People use a train station for travel. We don't allow people to sleep blocking a road, because that would obstruct travel, even though a road is a public space. Likewise, we shouldn't allow people to sleep in a train station where they'll obstruct travel, even though it's a public space.
I agree that the two aren't exactly the same, but public transport users have a right to safe, comfortable, unobstructed travel. There's a difference between preventing a class of people from using public transport to travel, vs preventing everyone from using public transport to sleep.
I also note that the case of long distance travel is an exception, because you might legitimately need to sleep at a station between legs. I'm talking about people who sleep in train stations with no intent of travelling anywhere.
Sorry, I'm still failing to see how someone rough-sleeping on a bench is in anyway comparable to blocking a road and obstructing travel. The actual equivalent would be laying across the track... which is not what's happening. I have seen disturbing images of places who so acutely fail to support their homeless populations that they have no other choice than to sleep in the roads, but even then they're up against the curb, not actually blocking the road.
At this point, I'm beginning to think you consider the mere presence of a rough-sleeper at a train station to be blocking the use of that train station, regardless of what it is they're actually doing.
A reason I suspect (though, truly it is only a guess) is as a way to force people to spend money. Something akin to "either buy something or leave" to try and capture just that tiny bit of additional revenue.
"Buy something or leave" has become a kind of sinister, unwritten, yet overarching principle organizing and governing everyone's lives. Participation in the work-earn-spend economy has become less and less optional with each passing day.
I'm not sure that's actually true in a typical park. It may very well be true for a bunch of noisy kids in a shopping mall which exists and is paid for for the purpose of people, well, shopping.
The engine noise can still be conducted through the body of the plane. With the kind of ramjet being talked about, I think that's still likely to be significant even at very high altitude.
This effect would help mitigate the noise heard by people outside of the plane (but I suspect that noise is negligible compared to the sonic boom), but in the plane the sound would mostly be propagated though the fuselage of the plane, not through air, so it's not going to help.
Correct, and it is overall a positive impact. There is marginal increased competition for a limited number of professions, and a meaningful boost to local economies
I used to have a more naive libertarian view, but after the last decade, observing both my countries (US and Sweden), I agree that you need to keep the immigration at a level where they have to adapt to your existing culture, not the opposite.
That said, importing smart engineers and entrepreneurs from the world is so absurdly beneficial for the US that... I can't find words right now.
The targeted ads in Google Search were hugely helpful, at least in the beginning.
Suddenly, you could search for something obscure and get ads about that exact topic. This enabled a huge number of small niche businesses to exist and prosper.
We now live in the world Google Ads created, and we take for granted the there will be someone selling Bulgarian accordion cleaning kits out there that I can easily find. But targeted ads made this world possible!
I can't imagine in what world it sounds like a good idea to attach an extra insurance product as a mandatory step to use cash online. Feel free to take out insurance for every 5€ product you buy online but I don't want to pay an extra % of my income to the finance industry just to use the money I've earned
This one, apparently, based on how the CC duopoly keeps freezing out legitimate businesses based on the concern du jour. Payment providers should be dumb pipes with other services bolted on top as needed.
It turns out that for many purposes friction and externalities are small enough that they can be ignored for most purposes.
Physicists and Economists are very aware of the tradeoffs.
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