I just got this:
Fall in Love with Kindle, Amazon's #1 Bestseller. Free Two-Day Shipping in time for Valentines Day. Offer valid only in the Continental U.S.
Heh.
j h woodyatt: It's not so much that I am talking about something different, as it is that you seem to have meant to say something other than what you did.
You said that fair treatment of high profile terrorism cases were mostly treated as if the accused were afforded the protections of the law.
when this was disputed you changed it to "broaden the scope". I would aver that they things you used to do such broadening aren't relevant. Battlefield crimes are not the same as behind the lines (or criminal) torture of prisoners.
They are far different from systematic use of such things as waterboarding.
And, while the allegations may have been seriously made, they weren't taken seriously, and so (as abi pointed out) didn't enter the public discourse as a thing to actually be considered as a real problem until well after the Reid case.
Mags: There are a lot of things going on when one is captured/interrogated. That he failed on a suicide mission is just one more factor in the list of tools to building an approach.
A good interrogator will look for those leads, and follow them. I know where I'd start. I also know what I'd be looking for to corroborate/invalidate that starting point.
j h woodyatt: I understand your being testy, but... as a matter of general public discourse there weren't really conversations about the merits of torture until after May 2005. The allegations/accusations of various irregularities/warcrimes were dismissed as, "the usual leftist knee-jerk hatred/failure to understand how war works" meme was used (and ever will be) to dismiss them.
Here is the real problem with the fixing it by executive order is that Art 125 is part of USC 10. It takes the Senate and House, together, to get it changed.
That said, there is a way an EO could change it: Absolute enforcement.
(a) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense.
If that were applied to everyone, across the board, the hue and cry would be enough to get it repealed.
Mags: I don't think that's a useful stereotype. There are lots of reasons someone might elect to engage in such things, and the myth of "72 virgins" is pernicious. It implies there is some fundamental difference between "them" and "us" (and it's not a valid one, since there are a lot of people who think dying in the cause of Jesus gets them an immediate entrée into heaven).
Given the vast differential in power, the various rhetorics about what we are doing (Bush calling it a Crusade, biblical verses cast into the furniture of gunsights sold to the military), and what our motives are (this is confused by both sides having different intepretations, and declartions of same); and the actual deeds we've done; I'm surprised there aren't more people who are that radical.
If what we've done to Iraq, and the sorts of things we've done in Afghanistan; as well as the various things we've said, done and not done, in regards to our positions on Palestine/Israel had been done to us instead of by us, there would be lots of people trying to "take it to the enemy".
j h woodyatt: It may have happened. I don't know that it mostly happened. The asserted facts (by Cheney) are that torture was a standard tool in the box.
We know they did a lot of it (the memos make it plain). We know a lot of it was done to people who are being kept outside the justice system.
We know (because of Jose Padilla) that being a citizen was no safety against it.
And I know that all of it was a wasted effort, legally and practically.
(nb, as a term of art, all intelligence is actionable. It's part of the definition. It's a peeve, sort of like the way the use of "caché" instead of cache grates. If it's not actionable its information)
Who was the actress in Boston Legal (I remember her from "The Road to Wellness). Large, and hot as blazes.
This seems, all things considered, a good OT to have this appear in.
I've been publishd in the Schmap Guide to the Monterey Bay Aqarium
albatross: Should employers try to discourage smoking among their employees? Perhaps by offering a discount or bonus if they pass their mouth-swab tobacco residue test?
No. See above: My life, my choices, my time. They may prohibit me from smoking on the job/the property. That's it.
If a company does this, would it be wrong, and would it be somehow illegal?
Yes it would be wrong. As to illegal, that depends. The Supreme Court has held that blanket drug tests are not overly intrusive (mostly because Blackmun thinks it's not an inconvenience to be made to piss in a bottle).
If you were to ask me: it's a moral wrong to have an employer intrude into my personal life (very much a social liberarian). Having unprotected sex is risky. It increases the risk of increased health costs.
Does an employer have a right to intrude into that?
If not, why not? Where, why, and how, do you draw that line?
As to not seeing the outcry... I've been arguing this point for decades. I am not alone. That you haven't seen it is, perhaps, my (our) fault, but it's not been not happening, and it's not all my fault, because I've said it on ML, and I've said it in this very thread.
re, "upselling": It has it's place. I sell cookware. I am, by all accounts, really good at it (esp. knives). One of the things I've seen is that the act of having a meaningful conversation about what the customer is doing/interested in, tends to add about 25 bucks to what they spend (as an average).
I know what the "target" is, for each person to walk in the door (it varies from 15-20 dollars), so I don't think we, as a chain, are being really "hard-sell" on it. I do think my shop does a good job (my boss[es] are very supportive of the idea of just talking to people, not shoving things into their bags), of not pushing things.
It probably helps that for most things, the average is really easy to make, with one person in 3 actually making a purchase, and most people have some idea of what they want, so it's not as if they were being pushed to make massive impulse buys.
Lelliot: There is a different problem with the Amazon model. They are dictating the retail price. They are taking advantage of market position to make it pretty much impossible for other retailers to sell at a higher price.
Given that the fixe costs of producing a book are such that it's not really survivable for the end cost to be depressed (because the wholesale cost can't go below 'x') and the present model is the publisher setting price (which is also true for things like snack foods). The seller can discount the labelled price, but that suggested retail is, ipso facto the upper bound of the cost.
Amazon is trying to break that. Not only are they trying to break that, they are trying (or so it seems to me) to do it in a way which also restricts customer choice (because the Kindle is a proprietary format; so the cost of releasing to Kindle is either an extra cost, or a limiting behavior).
That's the economics. Another thing Amazon seemed to be trying to do is imply that publishers are evil, and Amazon is looking to break a monopoly. That's a trifle disingenous. Macmillan is probably not an angel here, but the rationale they produced feels more honest to me than Amazon's, esp. as Amazon tried to shoot acros the bow of any other publisher which doesn't want to play ball.
By itself this might not be terrible, but the way they handled the PoD attempt (i.e. exclude anyone who didn't funnnel extra money to them) and the ways in which they have restricted access to features of Amazon which make it better for readers/authors (the GLBT Amazon fail, and it's attendent changes in rankings; which had effects outside of just purchasing at Amazon), all comine to make me less trusting of motives and explanations for them, than I am of Macmillan.
albatross: I'm not complaining because of those reasons (or at least not those reasons alone).
I'm complaining because it's being done, so far as I can tell, for completely venal reasons on the part of Whole Foods.
1: The correlation to health posited in the announcement is, at best, in question; and seems to be be generally held to be specious (and I don't mean in the public at large. I am discussing medical literature. No, it's not filtered down to the public level yet; as it has with smoking, but that's in part because we have a huge bias against it, which is evident in all sorts of place, not least in places like the tabloid/magazine faceouts at the cash registers in the supermarkets).
2: A single factor (BMI) trumps all others.
3: Weight isn't the reason for the costs of healthcare for Whole Foods Inc. to be where they are.
4: I don't think, as a matter of social policy an employer ought to be able to dick with what I do in my off time. If I want to smoke, eat, drink, sleep, rock climb, ride horses, fence, fight heavy weapons in the SCA, do pottery, photography, etc. Whole foods is attempting this (not completely, but partly. I am not all that willing to let the camel's nose into the tent. Am I Chicken Little, perhaps but this is part of that eternal vigilance required to keep liberties).
This isn't an incentive to keep people healthy (see 1 and 3 above). What would really work, is increasing their paycheck. More money in hand means more options for food. It means more money for the gym. It might mean a car, and so an increase in available time to do things like take walks, join the gym, start doing yoga; aikido, fencing, etc.
More to the point, this isn't really an incentive. If you lose weight, yes, you get a bigger discount, but if you don't everyone knows some aspect of your "health" isn't quite right. You are being shamed for failing to make the grade.
Not acceptable.
And the corrolary to smoking doesn't wash with me. I know lots of smokers who can't quit. I know a few who decided to quit because of cost (back in '87/88 when Calif. spiked a raise in the taxes). I know a lot more who didn't. I do think the place to intervene is at onset (because tobacco is addictive), and that cost is a reasonable stumbling block.
This isn't that.
Dave Kuzminski: The gasoline model isn't a very good analogy. The seller has a capped profit, and the producer charges what they like. ARCO used to have (my second stepfather worked for them, I don't know if this is still the case now), a station which was supplied from the refinery.
They charged a premium. Why? Because they could. They assumed employees would stop there out of company loyalty, and they added abut 5 cents a gallon (when the going rate was about $.80 per gallon). I've seen prices jump 10-15 cents per gallon, in a mile. The cost to the refiner hasn't really changed, and the only real difference I can see... the more expensive gas is in the poorer parts of town.
Tom Whitmore: In the US the life expectancy is about what it was a few years ago; so no, it's not dropping.
But... it's not rising either, and it's lagging behind (by a couple of years) the rest of the developed world.
Some of that (perhaps most, it's complex) is related to the various differences in healthcare (Cuba is almost the same as the US, Canada gets three years on us, and Macau comes in with an extra seven).
The real question is... how much of that is differential. Being a black male cuts about ten years off the life expectancy.
(Data drawn from the CIA Worldbook)
Kage Baker died this morning. I found out from friends who also knew her from the decades she spent working the Faire in Los Angeles/San Francisco.
mcz: Oh, and one of the things I noticed about the skink was the concrete. Much like the iguana, it looks like really fine sand.
mcz: I have some shots like some of those:
Land Iguana, Pta Ayora
and
Jodhpurs
Dave Bell: Filters still work, but a lot of it is easier to fix (that is takes less time) in editing. I've written up the use of filters for B&W Digital, and some (polarizing, ND) are still useful.
It's the same as it was, but some of the filtering aspects (81A/81B) are built into the camera as settings (cloudy/shady), and others aren't worth the light loss any more.
Elliot: digital zoom is anathema. Better to crop in post. If the detail is there, it's there. If it's not, the camera can't create it.
On camera flash is too close to the axis of the lens. The first thing most photographers ought to do to improve the look of their shots is get an off-camera strobe (the second is a tripod). One of the things I reccomend for people looking to get a camera is to look at the strobe options. If a cable can be used, that's one more plus to that camera.
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| 2008 | 1827 |
| 2007 | 776 |
| 2006 | 58 |
| 2005 | 30 |
| 2004 | 2 |
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