This is totally wrong. Previous Supreme Court decisions, especially Gonzales v. Raich, have set a pretty clear precedent that the Federal Government has the authority to criminalize drugs even when their use is legal in a particular state.
Think of it this way. Your parents borrow $10000 to throw a big party--one that you were not allowed to attend. After they die, their wills are read, bequeathing unto you $10000 in festivity debt, plus 50 years of interest. They never paid for the party, despite having such a great time at it (or so you assume, not having been there to judge).
Now you have a choice. You can try to maintain the postmortem reputations of your parents, by accepting their debt and making the payments. Or you can tell the creditors to FOAD.
For some reason, not only did our parents do that to us, but our grandparents did it to them, they chose to inherit the debt, and they still borrowed more money to throw their own party.
With government debt, the generational boundaries are not so clear, and the inheritance of debt smears together across thousands of deaths. But essentially, previous generations have been paying forward their debts instead of paying them back, to the point where almost everyone in the society is essentially born owing money to someone else. We already have so much inherited debt that we just can't afford to borrow the money for our own party. Also, we can't opt out.
That's not altogether untenable. I'd be willing to save up money and wait to throw my party until after the budget requirement is met. But it's hard to save anything when so much of your income is being sucked up by your elder generations' debt payments. And it is especially galling when people the same generation as you appear to be enjoying a party to which you were not invited.
That's the most persuasive rhetoric I know of in favor of repudiating national debt. To not do so is to reward the gross fiscal irresponsibility of our forebears.
The rhetoric against it, and also against mere default, states that it would devastate the ability of the current government to borrow more money. In other words, it would require the government to be more prudent and rational in regard to its budgeting. How is that a negative?
But that wasn't why the House Republicans threatened default. They were sending a big "F U" to the Obama administration, and playing a juvenile game of Chicken to do it. And they were only going to force some missed interest payments, without questioning the principal. Repudiating the debt would mean no more interest payments, and no repayment of principal, either. That would also, of course, cause a massive financial catastrophe that would preclude any partying for a long, long time, but at least it would temporarily stop the vicious cycle of kicking the snowball further down the mountain until it is so large that it starts killing any people unlucky enough to get in its way.
I'd love to have the national credit rating lowered. It would help stop the party-goers from running up another trillion that the non-invitees are ultimately tasked with paying off.
There's another way of looking at it. Debt can be an investment. Compare the rates of inflation vs. the interest rates on bonds. Please let me know if I'm wrong, but... isn't the government making money with them at this point?
As long as the principal on the bond cannot be repaid out of actual revenues, every bond you sell at a negative yield is one that may have to be refinanced at a positive yield later.
I have an XPS 13 and run Linux on it. The drivers for the touchpad were very rough with the version of Ubuntu it shipped with, but updating to a Kernel version > 4 fixed all my problems.
1) the touchpad never worked;
2) the keyboard still has problems;
3) some of the more important programs look just horrible on Linux, as the resolution is just too high;
4) sometimes WiFi just does not work;
Is that with the 'Infinity' screen or whatever they called it? I just got the 1080p one and don't use scaling. I had a Yoga with a hidpi screen and agree that a bunch of programs just don't work at all with scaling in Linux.
It's sad to see you had trouble. With the latest version of it (9350), I had trouble at the beginning but upgrading the kernel to 4.4 solved all of them.
Also, regarding #3, I've heard Linux Mint as great HiDPI support in their last version.
I've had similar experience with my ASUS N76V: it worked fine for a number of recent releases, but only with the upgrade to Ubuntu 15.10 did the touchpad start working decently (I couldn't turn on two-finger scroll before, because that resulted in phantom multi-finger gestures).
Support was terrible last May when I bought the laptop. Now everything works except the hidpi issues. But that's not laptop problem.
Overall the only problems I face is with
- GTK2 apps, they look awkward. Eg. very small icons
- Spotify, Steam, Skype will look very small
However the biggest turnoff is that whenever I connect to external display (1080p), I have to apply a weird command with scaling and panning options. This results in blurred look, a bit lag and fan spinning hard. I wish there was some option to do selective font scaling based the screen.
There is no national body that oversees police, but Chicago has the Independent Police Review Authority. However IPRA rarely upholds complaints against police (it's staffed by ex-cops and other people connected to the police), and recently an investigator was fired after finding a shooting unjustified[1].
If you're interested in other things IPRA 'investigates', some people have FOIA'ed Chicago police misconduct complaints and created visualizations based on the data[1].
Devils advocate but wouldn't they investigate every shooting incident, so you'd expect the vast majority to be clean.
I know every discharged weapon in the UK is followed by immediate officer suspension and investigation, and I suspect very few are actually ruled as bad and rightly so.
We have a national body. It's called the citizenry. But, sadly, few people are rising up because it isn't happening in their back yard, or to their children.
Sure there will be comment threads on HN or some Facebook liking, but these are weak responses, and without more, change will come very slowly, and in the meantime thousands more will be trampled on, abused, violated or murdered.
The majority of people who are rising up are only the marginalized people who are the primary victims of police abuse and injustice. All you have to do is look on Twitter and look at the color of people who do the most tweeting about police injustice.
There is no way this would or could continue if a significant amount of the privileged population rose up.
Has this been proposed at all?
Is there anything weird about american policing/law that would mean a national, federal agency wouldn't be able to take on this role?
It would be unconstitutional for the Congress to pass laws taking full oversight of state and local police (it's not one of the Congress's enumerated powers, and per the Tenth Amendment 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.').
Sometimes police are found to have violated federal civil-rights law, but that is a bit of a sketchy backdoor.
The Right Thing would be for each state to create such a commission, and for the Congress to create one for federal law-enforcement agencies.
Actually, ensuring that states provide equal protection of the laws to all persons, that states do not deprive persons of life, liberty, or property without due process, and that states do not abridge the privileges and immunities of US citizens is an enumerated power of Congress; see the Fourteenth Amendment, particularly sections 1 and 5.
You make a good point. I suppose one might be able to justify such a commission on that basis (although that itself indicates the problem with the post-Civil War order).
It can be done. The DOJ does this on a case-by-case basis. And FBI has jurisdiction to investigate some of these things. Bernie Sanders has suggested requiring all police killings to be investigated.
Most Constitutional rights extend to people against the states. So if your civil rights (due process, etc) have been violated, it's against federal law.
It's problematic to expect relief for any but the worst abuses from FBI or indeed from any part of DoJ. They're all cops, and they're not going to be eager to police other cops. A more effective organization would be completely separate, and probably staffed by attorneys who had never served as prosecutors.
It would be difficult (maybe impossible?) to do given the US's Federal system of dividing powers between State governments and the National government. The Federal Department of Justice investigates, but the only power they have is to sue local police departments in court and make them agree to stop their unlawful behaviour.
The US Department of Justice does some of this. They sue for civil rights violations, often resulting in a "consent decree" where they either take over the police department or place them under a variety of restrictions.
This would be much easier to implement at the state level. Aside from a few specific instances with the DOJ such as the consent decree mentioned elsewhere, the federal government does not have any authority over local police departments such that it can do much of anything.
Unless I'm totally missing the point of the instant search feature, this is definitely something you can do in Emacs[1], and something I believe I've seen co-workers do in Sublime.
At a cursory glance, I'm not sure it is the same. Brackets keeps some type of index. So there is zero delay whenever you perform a project wide search.
Looks like Emacs helm uses Silver Searcher which is real time, but impressively fast.
Cider (for Clojure) and Ensime (for Scala) give you excellent support for auto-completion, documentation, and refactoring in Emacs. It's definitely possible, so it probably just depends on how popular Emacs/Vim are in your language community.
Russia was also one of the least industrialized countries in Europe in 1900 and had about 27 Million people killed in the Second World War vs about 400 Thousand Americans. This is not a valid comparison.
But that unfortunately erodes the free-as-in-beer advantage, since in this situation the software is effectively proprietary, and competes with proprietary code on an equal footing: bang for the buck.
"If we're going to pay to license freeware code as proprietary, let's look at all proprietary alternatives."
Is there any evidence that the author will sell commercial licences? Other comments are describing him as a strong proponent of free software, so it seems very unlikely that he is interested in selling proprietary licences.