I don't get it; we can already calculate BMI, so anyone who wants to know, can know.  It seems like they're trying to create a database, and didn't want to ask people to submit a picture of themselves directly.

In a world where digital content can be copied and pasted very easily, old laws like copyright just aren't useful anymore.  As a soon-to-be content creator myself, I've decided to roll with the donation model of business; there's no point in selling my work since the people who want to give me money, already will, and the people who don't want to give me money, get it off torrent sites.  Might as well cut out the middle man and offer content for free: it allows your content to get into as many hands as possible, which increases the odds of finding people willing to pay for your content.

Piracy can never be theft as there is no deprivation involved: if people want to pay, they will, and if they don't, they won't; it doesn't change your profits whether or not piracy gets involved.  When you steal someone's shoe, they don't have that shoe anymore; you can't steal a copy of his shoe since he still has his shoe, and you have your copy.  One could argue intellectual property in the sense that an idea exists and copying that idea without permission is wrong, but considering how great the state has been at enforcing IP law, it's pointless to consider it: whether or not you think it's right or wrong, people will copy+paste anyway.  We're amoral creatures: if we can get away with something and it benefits us, we'll do it.  We could spend years arguing over the validity of piracy, and in those years, piracy will continue: it doesn't help the content creator to take a stance.

Certain websites like Patreon have already caught onto this trend; there, people offer to pay you every time to create something.  This is great for small things like YouTube videos and comics, but what if you wanted to make something that requires a large investment to get rolling, such as a movie, or line of clothing?  You don't have to get a loan from a bank anymore, you can go to Kickstarter or Indiegogo and get funded that way.  While a pirate can copy+paste your content without your permission, he cannot take something that does not yet exist, which is one major way entertainers make money: it then becomes a service, rather than selling a digital good.

I'm guessing she's unaware that Hitler and his army were catholic, or do they not count as Christian anymore?  Just goes to show you what God's will can do to a fella (just look what it does to Coulter.)  You know, the devil would have a much easier time convincing people to do evil if he wore a cross, carried a Bible and proselytized his own spin on the word of Christ.

I took a peek outside of the bubbles of academia and traditionalism and realized that worshiping a deity of any sort, whether in the form of God or man who calls himself "the government", always ended well for the deity and always ended bad for me.  Of course the deity wants me to believe I can't live without him, that's his bread and butter.  If you ask me, liberalism and conservatism are mostly two sides to the same coin: both agree people should have a ruling class, both believe the ruling class will lead them to the "promised land", both believe the ruling class is absolutely vital to human existence for no real reason (usually citing "so it has been so it shall always be!" which is a logical fallacy)...they just don't agree on what that ruling class should do.  (Which is funny, since the ruling class decides what it wants to do on its own anyway.)

I don't think we should have a ruling class, and that's how I exited mainstream politics and entered libertarian philosophies.

Religion was a more primitive form of politics where a God or a pantheon represented the ruling class and people made up whatever they wanted to enforce against others; this was usually coupled with a king who ruled by divine right from the gods, which many rulers still claim to do.  Nowadays it's more of a social thing (unless you're in the middle east, where religion and politics are still indistinguishable), so I really don't think it matters if someone is religious or atheist, since they probably practice secular religion anyway.  If anything I can be considered non-religious, which very few people on this planet can actually claim to be.

What I find hilarious is when someone insists we must all be equals, yet still believes we should have a ruling class.  What greater inequality is there than that?!  It's so hypocritical that I'm surprised they haven't collapsed in on themselves and formed a miniature black hole of hypocrisy.

Pretty neat; the video is a bit creepy though.  Something about lots of people speaking the same thing like they're all of the same mind gives me the willies.

The cop can legally shoot and kill you if you threaten his life.

He would've, since the law-enforcers are just as fucked up; their definition of "sane" is not the same as yours and mine.

Um, this is hundreds of millions of dollars, that's why it's different.  How are they going to confiscate something they don't even know you have?

I don't see why not; cow farmers tag their cattle with chips, why not human farmers?

No; if you are worth $15 dollars an hour, you will already be paid $15 an hour.  What if you're not worth $15 an hour and minimum wage is raised so that you have to take at least that much?  In other words, what if you cost a company more than you produce?  You don't get a pay increase, you get fired.  It has nothing to do with productivity, it has to do with efficiency.

Let's say a machine costs $12 an hour to produce $20 worth of goods or service an hour.  20 - 12 = $8 profit/hr.

Let's say a person is paid $10 an hour to produce $20 worth of goods or service an hour.  20 - 10 = $10 profit/hr.

The better option is the person.

Let's say the person has to work for $15 minimum an hour to produce $20 worth of goods or service an hour.  20 - 15 = $5 profit/hr.

The machine is the better option, but the person is still doable depending on the job.

However, consider this:

A machine costs $20 an hour to produce $10 worth of goods or service.  10 - 20 = $10 deficit/hr.

A person has to work for $15 minimum an hour to produce $10 worth of goods or service.  10 - 15 = $5 deficit/hr.

Clearly the better option, between the two, is the person; however, this doesn't mean the person will have a job, it means he will cost the company $5 an hour to work there.  Nobody can work that job anymore, because it's not profitable.  The job goes away, or gets consolidated into another job at that company, increasing the work load of the people still there and keeping the guy who doesn't have work unemployed.

In other words, a $15 minimum wage means anyone worth <$15 an hour now makes $0 an hour.  Their lives now must be paid by the people who do make more than $15 minimum wage, whether directly e.g. friends or parents, or indirectly i.e. welfare.  When is this ever sustainable?

Fast & Furious 7.

Even more ironic, republicans were the ones who were anti-slavery, democrats were always pro-slavery, scribed the Jim Crow laws and fought against civil rights for blacks for the longest time.  The democrats have apparently won, however, since they convinced most blacks that they're the good guys, and republicans are the bad guys, effectively erasing and rewriting years of fucked up behavior.

Patriarchy strikes again.

Anyone who isn't a radical left-wing extremist will appear so.

No, it's another conservative "devil", whose primary purpose is to scare you into changing your behavior back to whatever they feel society should be and stay as.  People have written about these things for a long time; in the Bible, it's said, likely numerous times, that if you don't blindly follow God, Jesus, and whatever other deity people worship, if you don't believe the things they believe and don't follow their teachings, i.e. if you think for yourself, you are turning to the devil.  I'm certain this narrative existed long before the Bible, but it's its most popular location.

Jump ahead to the formation of the illuminati fraternity in the late 1700's:


Sounds like classical liberalism; let's see what happens:


Already, the conservatives started painting the group as being some master orchestrator over other events, their conservative "devil", the scapegoat, something to pin the blame on, similar to saying it was caused by "witches" and pointing to people you don't like as being a "witch", makes people feel at ease knowing they've spotted and will defeat some enemy; another way of saying that, it makes people uneasy not knowing who their enemy is.

Today, the illuminati is used to pin said blame on anyone the user doesn't like, usually wealthy people who influence government with their money.  Problem is, it doesn't get to the root of the problem: it merely posits that, if the illuminati are destroyed, things will get better.  The reason why there will always be an illuminati until the root cause is changed, is that there will always be a chance to exploit government (politicians are only human after all, whether gov is big or small), which means there will always be some wealthy prick who influences it to get his way, ergo a perpetual illuminati secret society.

They exist in the sense that, if you call an orange an "apple", it's still there.  It's not an "apple", but it at least exists.  It's a way to explain phenomenon going on in the world, but it's self-defeating in that it has no real basis basis in reason and evidence (e.g. "he's a witch"), which limits it to a group of people who respond favorably to this specific devil, namely, conservatives.  Liberals have plenty of devils of their own ("White, straight males" off the top of my head), and they each share the "anarchism" devil, but illuminati seems exclusive to conservatives alone.

My advice to anyone curious about what's really going down, outside of the "devil" narratives, is to study Austrian Economics: How Crony Capitalism Corrupts the Free Market | David Stockman

This is incredibly inefficient; they put you into this thing that you never asked for, then charge you a ridiculous amount to get it taken off, if they allow it.  They could always just leave you alone but that would imply you aren't their property LOL

A president can't fix an economy, all he can do is stop strangling it.  Obama isn't the economy wizard, he doesn't have those kinds of powers, no single entity does (but if there is, check to ensure you're not living in a communist dictatorship.)  There's nothing more absurd than the belief that a man who is completely removed from the market, can somehow fix said market.  It's like studying quantum physics in preparation of running a marathon, there's no correlation.

You wanna know how to fix the economy?  Stop trying to fix it with politics.  Go start a company.  If you don't see what obstacles the state has set for you now, you'll see then.  Once again, as you'll find if you study any of these topics to any formal extent, the state is "solving" a problem it created.  Just like the state "solved" slavery, when slavery only existed because the state caught the slaves at public expense.  Just like the state "solves" our money problem, after creating a problem with the money.  The state "solves" the problem of a crumbling economy after waterboarding the economy with subsidies, regulations, patents, corporate shields, monopolies, on and on and on, not even including the direct wealth transfers via welfare, warfare and inflation.  The worst part is, nothing is any better, people just keep repeating "the economy is fixed now" until they believe it, head in the sand.  The truth is not democratic, however, and the woes of a dying economy are on a long-term course for annihilation of the state continues to interfere at the rate it does now.

I think your world view doesn't extend very far into the future