So, if the accusations are correct, those things are crimes. Treat them like any other crime. Report it to the police, and take it before a court and a jury. Was done with Bill Cosby, and he was duly convicted and penalized for the crimes he has committed.

But it shouldn't be worthy of any penalty to simply dissent from popular, orthodox opinion, even on controversial and sensitive subjects. Many dissenters are just cranks, but some raise a point we really ought to consider. We can't eliminate one and keep the other.

No a better comparison would be banning anesthesiologists from formulating their own fentanyl in the back of their van for use in surgery.

That's already illegal. As is selling home-brewed THC cartridges. So, basically, no new laws are needed, just enforcement of the ones already on the books.

Zero.

Drugs (except OTC) and procedures should be used when they are, in the opinion of the treating physician, the most medically appropriate option. The doctor should not be getting sent free swag or "wined and dined" to make him more likely to prescribe the drug or recommend the procedure. He should just have a list, know what they are and do, and choose the best one for the patient's scenario.

Couldn't care less if they "get a return on their investment". If drug research isn't profitable that way, do it at publicly-funded institutions, with all patents and proceeds available to the public at only cost of production.

The Internet would be almost inherently an "interstate commerce" issue, since data can pretty much never be guaranteed to stay within state lines. On such issues, Congress has the explicit authority to overrule state regulation.

That is not true on issues strictly internal to a state, but it would be vanishingly rare that a state could argue that an Internet-related issue is entirely internal to its own borders.

Gee, illegal street drugs can have dangerous things in them. I'm sure the FDA just now figured that one out.

The solution is simple: Legalize and regulate. People don't go blind from methanol poisoning when they buy a bottle of whiskey from the liquor store, because if a legal producer were to sell such a product, they'd get the shit sued out of them and likely face other sanctions as well. So, they're very careful about quality control. On the other hand, if you're buying a bottle of hooch out of some guy's trunk, well, you're taking your chances as to what's in it.

If you want to cut way down on the black market, create an alternative to it. How many people bought illegally produced liquor during Prohibition? How quick did that black market evaporate after it was ended?

Some days, I swear we never learn.

This isn't "the vaping industry" to begin with.

This is people who bought either cut-rate or illegal stuff out of someone's trunk, and then people are shocked, shocked I tell you, when such products are of, shall we say, highly variable quality and safety standards.

But dragging the legal market into it is idiotic. It would be like trying to ban anesthesiologists from using fentanyl because people die from overdoses of it when obtained illegally.

Then you sue the people who organized the event. If they'd distributed information about it on fliers, would you sue the companies that made the paper and ink?

Section 230 is really pretty clear. Service providers are not responsible for what their users do on their platforms. That doesn't mean no one's responsible; it means the users themselves are responsible for any illegal acts.

This is just a case of "Go after the deep pocket", rather than "Go after the actually responsible party." (If, of course, any laws were broken at all, which seems pretty doubtful; encouraging protest of the government has traditionally been a very highly protected form of speech.)

Yes, it is. What part of my statement was made up?

"Do this or starve" is the default position of all forms of life.

Sure. Fortunately, us humans and our big brains can move things away from those "nasty, brutish and short" defaults. Infections used to mean death or amputation, now you take some pills. It used to take months on a dangerous voyage to go to another continent, now you can do it in comfort, safety, and less than a day. We've made many things better than what "the universe" handed out.

Such a guarantee is impossible.

It always astonishes me that people call things which are currently being done "impossible". Many countries in Europe, for example, do exactly this. Something is by definition possible if it has in fact happened.

There is no "one side". There are millions of employers and millions of workers.

While this is true, that does not mean that the employers do not hold disproportionate power in that relationship.

If you see all possible employers as just "one side" which is out to get you ... chances are you're pretty much unemployable.

If you want to make it about me, I do just fine as a contractor. But I actually am legitimately one. Someone will tell me "I want a (website made|database fixed|application written), and here's what I want for it", and then leave me to figure out all the details. If, on the other hand, they expected me to display their logo on my car, and things like that, I would be an employee, not a contractor.

The biggest problem during the Gilded Age wasn't abusive employers, it was uncontrolled immigration.

That is patently false. Look up the Colorado Coalfield War for an example. That wasn't people who had immigrants take over their jobs; it was people who had jobs and were severely mistreated by their employers. And they couldn't just go get another job, because all the employers pulled the same things! The US wanted immigrants at that time; a tremendous amount of manual labor needed done and they couldn't let them in fast enough to fill the need.

When in the course of human history EVERY have people been guaranteed the necessities of life

The welfare state is hardly a new concept. It was done literally millennia ago. And many times since then. Many countries in Europe currently use it. So, yes, life can and has worked that way, in the course of human history.

Most (perhaps all?) Scandinavian countries currently use such a model, as do some others in Europe. They are doing fine. As to some people not wanting it...well, tough, taxes aren't optional. They can vote against candidates who support it, of course. But we'll need to do it anyway. Automation and computerization is progressing at such a pace that, probably by 2030 but definitely in the not too distant future, there will be far more working age adults than available jobs. At that point, "Just get a job, buddy" won't be a workable system. There won't be one to get.

That's really a great problem to have. Why should we have humans doing difficult, dangerous, or boring jobs when machines can do them instead? But in that case, we will have to figure out a different way to provide for those people who will be out of work.

Except when you don't eat or have a place to live if you don't "associate", you're not really freely associating. "Do this or starve" is really not too much different than putting a gun to someone's head.

If people were guaranteed the necessities of life no matter what, I would agree that then one party doesn't hold all the cards, and we should let people do as they will, and if they want to work for a penny an hour—well, they still get to eat. But when that's not the case, it's not really free association, and one side is disproportionately powerful. In that case, we need some external safeguards to prevent abuse of that power. And that's not hypothetical; look at what things were like during the Gilded Age. It got so bad that workers fought literal wars against employers because they were that abusive.

Kid-fucking is more than "an idea that I don't agree with".

You're right. But RMS did not fuck any kids. He just talked about the subject. So yes, it is very much exactly "an idea that (you) don't agree with."

If he were actually doing it, that would be a different story. But people should be permitted to hold unpopular and controversial opinions.

A lot of police vehicles already have auxiliary batteries used to power that stuff, because a car's basic electrical system already can't handle all of that additional load. I would see no reason that it couldn't be done in the Tesla models as well, so that the primary battery remains available just for powering the vehicle and its normal accessories.

Not just police vehicles, either. People who like to do big stereos, the big light bars, etc., also often have to power them off of an auxiliary battery. So, they might have to do that, but they probably already would've had to anyway.

Failure to regularly apply chemicals to organs tends to damage them in pretty short order, too.

Water is a chemical. Vitamins are chemicals. Trace minerals are chemicals. Proteins, lipids, carbohydrates and sugars? All chemicals.

The fact that something is a "chemical" does not, in and of itself, render it harmful. Many chemicals have little to no effect on human bodies, and some are even beneficial. Indeed, humans will die without regularly ingesting certain chemicals.

Has anyone, at any time, ever found it to be a wise idea to discuss politics at work? I can't possibly see that ending well; someone is going to disagree with you, and you have no idea who that "someone" might turn out to be.