I would agree that the idea that you can just geoengineer and not actually solve the problem is a serious issue— and ties into the problem of climate modification addiction. If you never solve the problem the engineering systems eventually will fail or fail to keep up and then you’ve just made the problem even worse.

by “regularly” I mean it happens a few times a year, as in, on a regular basis.  It’s not super common but it’s also not rare.

what kind of moon logic does it take to say that something that affects their budget so much they need an entire category for it has no impact on prices?!

the city has a great deal of control, they can legalize mini-houses, they can approve new developments, they can adjust property taxes, they can re-zone to make more residential property developable, they can use TIF districts and other tactics to make redeveloping blighted areas more economically viable, they can…

this one puzzles me. Elsewhere in the country people routinely argue that the mere act of turning around changes it from defense into murder if you shoot them in the back. People also argue, routinely, that the moment someone stops attacking, the mere second, it goes from defense to murder. Similarly follow-up shots…

because people can, and regularly do, die from being punched. 

this, so much. I seriously worry that “grooming” has been overused to the point of meaninglessness and that’s going to lead to parents overlooking ACTUAL grooming behavior because it doesn’t look like the grooming on TV.

This is more or less the only possible ruling.  There are lots of religions that have parts of their faith that justify (even demand) racial discrimination-- many faiths today have de-emphasized or re-interpreted such passages and don’t act on them in the modern day.  Personally I’m fine with banning religion, either…

That’s the thing, ALL religions have some degree of supremacist belief and they’re far from the only race supremacist religion. In modern practice most of them don’t use those beliefs or have de-emphasized or re-interpreted them, but they’re still there in the holy books.

And that’s before you get into other outright…

I believe it in this case. Their beliefs are extreme in a way that does not survive contact with reality and we are an increasingly multicultural society. A lot of people that stick with such beliefs do so because they are never really challenged— when you’ve never MET a black man or a Muslim or a gay person it’s easy…

While I obviously haven’t seen the grand jury evidence, this sounds like the right call to me. Artists are just contracted talent, the venue and promoter are the ones that make all the decisions about venue design, capacity, staffing, placement of staff and barricades, and every other choice that either allows…

the biggest risk of geo-engineering, to me, is so-called “addiction”. Once you are balancing the planet’s energy budget on the back of megaengineering projects YOU CANNOT STOP. You are stuck with having to keep at it until you reduce CO2 back to lower than when you started. If you decide to stop suddenly before you…

I think you see them more where they’re occasional recreational snowmobiles than something for work or actual transportation.  You see a fair number of Yamaha snowmobiles on trailers come springtime in Wisconsin, before they all go back in the garages.  I think part of it is the “people with a toy for every season”…

yes that’s exactly true, that’s how scuba diving works and they can do to astounding depths, acclimating to the pressure as they breathe gas under pressure. SCUBA divers hang out at depths that would kill them if they were to rise to the surface too quickly (pressure differential).

It also matters if the material is…

That has very little effect on the practical impact though. People will turn to them as a moral arbiter. It’s hard to see the Church working with secular universities and actual subject matter experts as anything but a very good thing, given the alternative is their position is developed in cathedrals by seminarians…

is/should. Should people? probably not. Do they? absolutely.

You may not, but millions of people around the world see them as the ultimate authority on morality.  They may not unilaterally set the conversation in today’s world but they are a massive voice with wide reach.

it’s very possible that the feds have this on their radar and are keeping their powder dry— because of the peculiarities of the dual sovereign doctrine the feds basically get a blanket exception to double jeopardy but ONLY as long as they let the state proceedings play out first.  I am not aware of nearly as much…

Murder would require that she intended to kill them, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable that the prosecutor didn’t want to take the chance getting into an argument about mental state. By charging with manslaughter all they have to prove is that a theoretical reasonable person would not have been in mortal fear— and…

The problem is that murder has intent requirements and I think there is legitimate doubt here. Manslaughter does not require you mean to kill someone, or even to hurt them, which means that they don’t have to prove anything about her mental state. All they need to disprove is that a “reasonable person” would have…