So because you believe something happened in the past that did not happen in the way you have been propagandized to believe, people should die at far greater rates and families and communities should be decimated ... ironically, exponentially more so in black communities? What is wrong with you sick people? Glee for the suffering and misery of people because other people may have done something you don't like to yet different people and did so a long time in the past. What vile and filthy hatred and savage spite. You're a heinous person.
Of course a self-loathing, self-hating, suicidally compulsive liberal degenerate would say such a thing. What is wrong with you people. People are dying and families and lives are being destroyed and whole communities crushed and decimated and all you psychopaths can say is that you are gleeful that America and the west is having chemical warfare waged against it for some fantastical, propaganda delusional narrative you have been misled to believe happened hundreds of years ago? You are sick.
I'm sure that alien contact will go really well. Because nothing but good things can come of that, right?
The state of willful self-delusion about reality among people is mind boggling to me. It's such a contradictory state that the most "educated" are also the most foolish at many times. In spite of all the calamities that are all caused by "experts" and the most "educated", no one ever seems to even question letting the most psychopathic of our species run things and make potentially and ever more existentially and terminally risky choices for everyone.
As Stephen Hawking said in paraphrase, "You may not want to draw alien life to Earth by broadcasting our location into space". There is approaching zero chance that an advanced alien life form will in any way be as psychopathically altruistic as the current state of western liberal self-destructively suicidal types.
It really won't matter when the mentally deranged have lured a pillaging alien life form to Earth, but what are the ethics of doing so while we still have time to prevent them from leading to the total erasure of humanity through the acts of an alien life form that does not care about humans?
Documented the economic activity? No, they documented deposits of particles that are claimed to be from the Roman Republic smelters and also which are only the particles that existing weather patterns happened to have lead to being deposited. Talk about derivative. Not even to mention that there is little that would imply that smelting for coin production would implicitly relate to economic activity. Run away inflation or corrupt rulers do not necessarily correlate to economic activity but could very well result in increased smelting just as well as technological advances that require more smelting or buildup of the military could.
I really wish there was not so much damn confusion about what non-profit and not-for-profit actually mean. They do not mean that the organizations are some altruistic organizations with helper complexes. They simply don't report any profits because they either put it into expansion, inefficiency, or simply heap the profits upon their executives. So while you are heaping wishful and magic thinking good karma on non-profits, you don't realize a huge number of them, essentially far more of them than not, are more or less fraudulent organizations, especially on the federal and global level. While you donate to do good, their executives and officers live like Princes and Kings while they spend just enough to generate marketing and PR materials so the fools will keep giving and donating and volunteering and supporting their little schemes.
I know people don't want to believe that and it's a difficult thing to accept, which is why most people just cling to the "non-profit" label, but reality is realty, whether you accept it or not.
I know TV and movies have imparted upon people that there is some kind of feeling of immense guilt, or maybe you are just dishing the ubiquitous passive aggressive shaming as a weak attempt at social control, but fact of the matter is that today's devs (yes, many if not all of us here) have exponentially less qualms about what we do and support and develop (let alone even fully understand the ramifications, as has become apparent to me) on a day to day basis, than any of the soldiers or henchmen or perpetrators of the favorite historical villains we are trained to hate from early on. Reality is that to the vast majority of people that are swept up in the cult mania and are essentially blindly and instinctually following their most basic herding impulses, the actions they are taking and the things they are doing are just fine as they say "it doesn't look like anything to me".
We have thoroughly entered a pathway with an ever more narrow set of possible outcomes, none of which are good, but just as all the other past events that all the "smartest" people were warned about well in advance and who self-magnanimously proclaim how the inevitable outcomes "could not have been predicted" in to protect, at all and any cost necessary, the most important thing there is ... something so important and sacrosanct that reality and fact and intellect and rationality will be suffocated and smothered and exterminated and sacrificed the very microsecond it potentially could even maybe rear its head .... their ego and incomprehensible notion of having to admit fault or infallibility.
It is utter hubris that will be bringing about the inevitable next calamity that will, due to the ever growing and expanding size of the house of cards, collapse under it's own self-deluding weight.
Remember kids, tech fraud valuations were based on sound business and house prices could only go up; and those were just the early tremors of what is to come ... unfortunately. All manias invariable are followed by crashes, regardless of how they manifest themselves. What goes up must come down and down, farther and harder, it will come crashing the higher it climbed into the sun. Lest us forget Icarus
Icarus (IK-uh-rus)
Son of Daedalus who dared to fly too near the sun on wings of feathers and wax. Daedalus had been imprisoned by King Minos of Crete within the walls of his own invention, the Labyrinth. But the great craftsman's genius would not suffer captivity. He made two pairs of wings by adhering feathers to a wooden frame with wax. Giving one pair to his son, he cautioned him that flying too near the sun would cause the wax to melt. But Icarus became ecstatic with the ability to fly and forgot his father's warning. The feathers came loose and Icarus plunged to his death in the sea.
The folly of Daedalus to not be mindful of the foolish youth of Icarus. But, do tell us of how the young of today will not cause the calamities of past generations of young who thought the too were infallible from their unearned privilege, pampered, and hedonic existence.
This really blows my mind. It really can't be some sort of pretension or cliquish type of instinctual herding impulse ... can it ???
I've never understood the whole concentration of the tech industry in such dense clusters, it's quite literally not only the opposite of what all the wise men predicted technology and the internet would do and is also totally contrary to some fundamental technology concepts. Talk about putting all your eggs in a basket.
On the other hand, I also don't understand how other cities seem to be unable to attract a kind of threshold level of tech people to incubate something similar elsewhere.
It feels like it is seriously way past due that the big tech companies get broken up and their monopolies shattered in order to allow for competition and diversification of the market.
I think there is a risk that some will say something along the lines of that in the example you give it is unfair for the plaintiffs to only get $5k and the lawyers $2.1M. Reality though is that not only would a lot of these cases never see the courts at all if the Lawyers were not paid, but also it is expensive as fuck to bring these cases and to the research and front end work, with a huge risk that you may not win the case at all.
I would be for courts to calculate compensation to plaintiffs as a ratio of, but on top of the award, i.e., if the punitive or compensatory award is X, the plaintiff's ratio is a minimum of 1/5, with total award being 1.2X.
I am not all that against blood sucking lawyers taking a pound of flesh and am open to the notion of their compensation being controlled and limited (which would NEVER happen considering the power and strangle hold the legal profession has on government ... bar (yes, that's intentional) lawyers from government and lobbying maybe???).
It's kind of a typical abusive relationship where one party sees not only the relationship fundamentally with a different light, but one party is quite duplicitous and nefarious and abusive and manipulative in their interactions with intent of deception and keeping a comfortable and useful situation going for them while they prey on their usually naive and gullible and rather delusional victim. It's the typical naive girl or boy dating a cheating, lying, player ... only a global, systemic, humanity impacting level never before witnessed or experienced by humanity.
On a side note; Apple has the opportunity to not only massively grow themselves, but also totally crush Facebook and Twitter if they were to build a product that centers control and power over information and data and content as much as possible with the users that generate it. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are revealing themselves as not just being a cute little mole, but full blown metastasized melanoma that must be treated immediately or it will invariably kill freedom and liberty on a scale and level that has also never been witnessed by humanity; a totalitarianism that will be virtually total in its surveillance and control and domination with zero ability for anyone to even object. The era of Techtalitarians is upon us.
I also don't trust these types of "surveys" that are usually based on sample sizes and extrapolation models that are unsuitable at best. This vaping thing is a phenomenon that is somewhat localized and clustered with a significant "explosive" spread vector. It's kind of like any infectious spread pattern or addiction/drug abuse spread pattern. You will see far higher rates in schools where it has taken hold, e.g., in FL and CA, especially in urban areas.
This is a "technology" that is very much like any other drug ... which it actually is ... that makes people physiologically addicted and dependent, only it's maybe even worse than, e.g., heroin, because it has a "cool factor" or "innocent" nature because "it's just water vapor" and "it's just glycol" that heroin really doesn't benefit from. What's the harm, right? It's cool' it's technology, it's "Science" (with a capital S for the cult proto-religious nature of the current Science cult). Best thing, we have absolutely zero understanding of its effects in the long run, let alone the fact that it creates psychological patterns of dependence and habits of self-abuse and compulsive self-harm.
In many ways anyone who is dependent on any drug, whether legal or illegal, be it nicotine, THC, heroin, Xanax, or Prozac should be declared mentally unfit and have their privileges curtailed.
Something you are forgetting, which is what will lead all this to blow up one way or another since the savages have gone LARPing as civilized people, is that these post-modern, Marxist cancerous virus in disguise, types looooove changing the rules of the game as it suits them, mid game, but they start screeching and yelling and throwing tantrums the second someone also changes rules mid game to counter their rigging and cheating and lying and deception, but they do so even when you just call them out as the cheating, lying, self-harming, mentally deranged psychopaths they are.
I don't know when it will happen and how long the caldron will boil until it boils over, but we are in an extremely dangerous time now with the civilized world dealing with the absolute worst enemy humans can face, unrealized internal treasonous saboteurs that are undermining and poisoning and polluting the civilized world to undermine it and make it collapse under its own weight.
We don't even realize it, like most hegemons throughout history, that the western, civilized, white world is in a world war, a new technology war a war of the information and emotional manipulation age that is an outcropping and expansion of psychological warfare. If America, let alone Europe and the western valued societies in general, do not wake up soon, they will simply collapse once the facade and defensive walls simply cannot even hold themselves up and will collapse under their own wight as their foundations have been thoroughly undermined.