MrFunnyMoustache

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (6 children)

High intelligence, low wisdom.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I think laws should be as clear as possible, not vague. By making a law vague, you're leaving it for the courts to interpret, and there are plenty of Florida judges who would absolutely stretch their interpretation of the law in a way that conforms to their beliefs.

But I completely agree that making it a criminal act to attempt to circumvent this law would be a key here. Maybe even forcefully dissolving the company entirely for repeating offenders.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Damn, I forgot that pile of garbage existed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Funnily enough, between the time I wrote the comment you replied to, and the time I saw your response I thought of a loophole capitalists could exploit which needs to be addressed.

If corporations aren't allowed to own residential properties, and a person is only allowed to own a single home, a capitalist could find a person who doesn't own a home in that territory, buy them a house with the condition that they will manage the property and get 99.9% of the profit it generates. That way, a corporation could go business as usual while technically being compliant...

The proposed law needs to include a section that addresses these sort of loopholes.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

The bystander effect is really common. I remember when I got first aid training, they told us that in an emergency, you have to tell a specific person to do something rather than ask "someone call an ambulance".

I think bystander effect should be regularly discussed in schools so people will be aware of it. Getting people to automatically respond and do something and offer help is a pretty important step to making our society safer and healthier.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (2 children)

100%, when I was in middle school and highschool I was regularly called gay for not liking football, or not knowing random car facts, or not liking spicy food, and other stuff like that. It was much better in university, but it was in a different region so I can't compare directly.

Interestingly, one of these bullies came out as gay 10 years later, which I find sad that someone had so much internalised self hatred that he had to project it outwards to feel better about himself.

I don't know what middle/high schools are like today since I don't know anyone in that age range, but I bet it's much better now with today's internet culture being much more queer positive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (5 children)

True, but I'm pretty sure it'll be easy to do. If you own more than one home, BAM, penalty tax that is equal to 100% on the rent on that property. If your second home is empty, BAM, quadruple the property tax. You've just made owning a second home impossible to profit from.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (7 children)

I think there should be some leeway for people who own one home, but want to temporarily live in another city, so they rent their home while living in another rental property at the other city.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

But even if you replace the bow with a brick, it is still a weapon when someone smashes people's faces with it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Take the same car to a modern city - and while you can still cause damage with it, it wouldn't be as devastating since they know how to deal with cars and have the infrastructures and rules to safely deal with them. Bring a tank, however, and it'd be a different story.

Just because a tank is a more powerful weapon than a car doesn't invalidates a car as a weapon. You can take a brick and go on a smashing spree in a populated city, and they will stop you fairly quickly, take a machine gun and you will be able to hurt a lot more people with it. That doesn't mean the brick isn't a weapon when someone uses it to kill people, it's just a different level of weapon.

And yes, a K3 civilization will not consider a 10^15 watt ship trying to attack it as an existential threat like a sub K1 civilisation will, but a modern military won't find a guy with bow and arrow as a threat (unless he is Rambo), still, a bow is a weapon regardless. It won't win a war, but it can still kill.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (5 children)

Fair enough about the FTL thing.

And as for cars, like I said earlier, I am pretty much on the fence about it. I think we can look back into prehistoric times when people would throw rocks, and I think that it's fair to say that these rocks were also weapons, but not that every rock is a weapon, but any rock can be a weapon if someone grabs it.

The same can be said for a spaceship; even if it isn't it's primary purpose, much like the rock, it has a high potential for destruction that can't be ignored. A single interstellar spaceship probably has enough energy to boil all the water on earth without even pushing it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (7 children)

That's a fair critique.

About cars, road injuries are responsible for about 1.2 million deaths per year, they are extremely dangerous death machines, so I think it is reasonable to say that a car can't be unarmed, though I agree that it would stretch it. By that definition, a large wrench can be a weapon, so I am hesitant to just call anything that can be used as a tool for violence as a weapon, because almost anything can be... I have a pretty heavy keyboard which could be used as a weapon if I really wanted to.

If you consider a weapon as an instrument that increases the attack potency or range of the wielder, a car is certainly can be used as a weapon... We even require people to have a license because of how dangerous they are, just like weapons.

If you consider only something that was designed for the purpose of increasing the attack potency or range of the wielder, then a car isn't one. It all boils down to how you define a weapon.


And about the FTL thing, assuming it is possible, I can still think of a couple of ways any relativistic/FTL ship can be used as a weapon even without using it's kinetic energy for impacts.

Blue shift of electromagnetic radiation. If you are getting closer to the target at either relativistic or FTL speeds and you release electromagnetic radiation (not necessarily visible light, even a powerful radio, which I'd imagine all interstellar ships would need in order to communicate over enormous distances), or even just a regular thruster... the blue shift would turn it into extremely lethal, short wavelength, somewhere in the deep X ray.

If the FTL system works by stretching and compressing spacetime around it to travel distances with some kind of field... It would be theoretically possible to asymmetrically stretch space in a way that would wreck a target's structural integrity, and depending how aggressive you can take it, go full blown spaghettification like black holes do.

view more: ‹ prev next ›