In my part of EU it's actually pretty common, especially on exotic cars.
I guess the main appeal is "paint protection". Seems redundant to me, but people do like to apply screen protectors to their phones, which is another thing I don't fully comprehend so you know...
Most other countries seem to be able to have community service orders without labelling it “servitude”. Do you have a reference for why community service is defined as servitude in the US?
Are you saying that being ordered by a judge to perform work, without pay, and which you would not have done absent those orders, does not fit the definition of involuntary servitude?
Because while the precise definitions of servitude do vary from dictionary to dictionary, and some define it more harshly than others, in general it fits. One definition I found online (with no reference to which dictionary it came from) defines servitude as "A condition in which an individual is bound to work for another person or organization, typically without pay." Another one (Cambridge dictionary) says it's "the state of being under the control of someone else and of having no freedom". I couldn't check the Oxford English Dictionary as it requires a subscription to look up even one word. Merriam-Webster lists two meanings, one of which applies to land. the one that applies to people is "a condition in which one lacks liberty especially to determine one's course of action or way of life".
Now, being sentenced to community service is only a temporary condition of servitude, which ends as soon as a given number of hours have been served. And it might not fit the strict definition if the person being sentenced is allowed to choose the form their community service will take; I lack knowledge of what kinds of community-servitude sentences are commonly handed out. But if the person being sentenced does not get to choose the form his community service will take, but instead is told "Your community service will be served in the city clerk's office. Show up at 9:00 AM on Monday ready to make photocopies and run errands," then that counts as being under the control of another and lacking freedom during the period of community service. It's not a permanent state of servitude, but even a temporary state of servitude is forbidden by the 13th amendment (other than as a sentence for a crime), because otherwise people at the time would have argued "Oh, fifty years of involuntary servitude still counts as 'temporary', so I'm allowed to carry on with imposing debt peonage on my debtors."
(I should also mention that I am not a lawyer, so perhaps US lawyers have already reached broad consensus on whether community service counts as involuntary servitude under US law; if someone knows whether that's true, I welcome being corrected on my point).
The context for the 13th amendment was that slavery was legal in the US then. It mostly wasn’t in other countries, so they never had to try to find the language to allow judicial punishments while disallowing private slavery. If you are given a community service orders without labelling in the UK for example, nobody thinks it’s slavery or servitude, they just think it’s a valid sentence under the law. The grey area is probably around profiting off such work?
> It [slavery] mostly wasn't [legal] in other countries [at the time the 13th Amendment was passed, i.e. the mid 1860's]...
The history of the 19th century and when slavery was abolished in each one is actually a fascinatingly complex subject, and there's tons of interesting history hiding behind your word "mostly", to the point where I can't actually tell whether "mostly" is a correct or incorrect description. Judging by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave... I would lean towards "definitely correct in Europe and the Americas, a lot murkier in Africa and Asia". Oddly enough, a lot of Spanish colonies in South America abolished slavery before the United States did, yet Spain itself didn't pass its law ending slavery until a year after the US's 13th Amendment came into effect.
If you're at all interested in the history of that era, the film Amazing Grace, though it takes a few liberties with the historical facts, is a mostly-accurate depiction of what it took to get slavery abolished in the United Kingdom. Interestingly, the part of Prime Minister William Pitt was played by a then-unknown Benedict Cumberbatch (Amazing Grace came out in 2006, and most people first discovered Cumberbatch when Sherlock came out in 2010). I recommend the film if you enjoy historical films; it's quite fun. (I love the "I would have been bored by botany" line).
This is excellent but in typical low voltage scenarios (5V or lower) the 600mV diode voltage drop becomes very significant. Simple diode half wave rectification works fine at 100V, but at 3.3V it breaks down.
In two minds as to your sarcasm level. Anyone who has eaten bacon in Denmark or Raclette in Switzerland or a fresh pasta sauce in Italy could testify that the best stays home
I am so confused as to why everyone is talking about Switzerland, the country, acting in unison when it comes to exports. That's not really how it works... Some Swiss companies are more export focused, others are more domestically focused. There's no single central agency that goes around the country and grades cheese manufacturers and creameries and forces some to export, and others to sell to local grocery store chains...
I heard it from a Dane, but obviously your taste buds have allowed you to take a statistically meaningful sampling, that's pretty lucky.
The reason why I might give it some credence is twofold
1. I would suppose travel from point X to point Y might lead to degradation of quality and thus the top quality leaving at X might be passable when arriving at Y.
2. I suppose there are different income levels involved, Danes are pretty parsimonious.
I don't think most of them actually care about having the best, they care about having passable quality which is of course much better than a middle class person will have access to in the U.S, but perhaps they export the best and premium because obviously with a world wide market there would be enough really upper-scale rich buyers to make it worthwhile to do so.
I have to say I don't really care much, but I think there may be scenarios in which a large portion of the best quality of a nation's produce gets exported (obviously not all of it, but a large portion) and am interested in that as how economics works.
As far as anecdotes however, my Italian ex-wife said the best Italian food she ever had was at a fancy restaurant we went to in Prague. I thought it was good but I don't much care past a certain point, so I didn't notice. My favorite was a small restaurant in Vomero that just made the same two dishes all day long and all the workers came to eat there. I like Danish pork, but generally stuff like flæskesteg, which historically was yes, a luxury good, but a luxury good for peasants. So I think probably not the best.
Yes definitely anything I have eaten in Danish or Italian dishes in their homeland was better than what I ate in those culinary traditions in the U.S or England, but I doubt that was because I had a great sampling to choose from and could decide what was what based only on my experience.
Because simulated fire burns other things in the simulation just as much as “real” fire burns real things. Searle &co assert that there is a real world that has special properties, without providing any way to show that we are living in it
> Because simulated fire burns other things in the simulation just as much as “real” fire burns real things.
What we mean by a simulation is, by definition, a certain kind of "inference game" we play (eg., with beads and chalk) that help us think about the world. By definition, if that simulation has substantial properties, it isn't a simulation.
If the claim is that an electrical device can implement the actual properties of biological intelligence, then the claim is not about a simulation. It's that by manufacturing some electrical system, plugging various devices into it, and so on -- that this physical object has non-simulated properties.
Searle, and most other scientific naturalists who appreciate the world is real -- are not ruling out that it could be possible to manufacture a device with the real properties of intelligence.
It's just that merely by, eg., implementing the fibonacci sequence, you havent done anything. A computation description doesnt imply any implementation properties.
Further, when one looks at the properties of these electronic systems and the kinds of causal realtions they have with their environments via their devices, one finds very many reasons to suppose that they do not implement the relevant properties.
Just as much as when one looks at a film strip under a microscope, one discovers that the picture on the screen was an illusion. Animals are very easily fooled, apes most of all -- living as we do in our own imaginations half the time.
Science begins when you suspend this fantasy way of relating to the world, look it its actual properties.
If your world view requires equivocating between fantasy and reality, then sure, anything goes. This is a high price to pay to cling on to the idea that the film is real, and there's a train racing towards you in your cinema seat.
> By definition, if that simulation has substantial properties, it isn't a simulation.
This is kind of a no-true-scotsman esque argument though, isn't it? "substantial properties" are... what, exactly? It's not a subjective question. One could, and many have, insist that fire that really burns is merely a simulation. It would be impossible from the inside to tell. In that case, what is fantasy, and what is reality?
Define any property of interest. Eg., O = "reacting with oxygen"
S is a simulation of O iff there is an inferential process, P, by which properties of O can be estimated from P(S) st. S does not implement O
Eg., "A video game is a simulation of a fire burning if, by playing that game, I can determine how long the fire will burn w/o there being any fire involved"
S is an emulation model of O iff ...as-above.. S implements O (eg., "burning down a dollhouse to model burning down a real house").
If P successfully produces the relevant behaviors of O (burning, light, etc), then P is an implementation of O. There's no separate "real O" floating out there that P fails to capture. In other words, when you are playing the game, there _is_ fire involved.
You define a 'real' implementation to exclude computational substrate, then use the very same definition to prove that computational substrate cannot implement 'real' implementations. It's circular!
> Searle &co assert that there is a real world that has special properties, without providing any way to show that we are living in it
Searle described himself as a "naive realist" although, as was typical for him, this came with a ton of caveats and linguistic escape hatches. This was certainly my biggest objection and I passed many an afternoon in office hours trying to pin him down to a better position.
That is not true at all. Banks are not funded by depositors money. Banks create money when they make loans, and destroy money when loans are repaid. Deposits in current accounts are liabilities from the bank’s point of view.
Yes, deposits in current accounts are *liabilities* from a bank's point of view. This may seem counterintuitive, as we typically think of deposits as the bank's money. However, in accounting terms, a liability is something a business owes to others.
### The Bank Owes You Your Money
When you deposit money into a current account, you are essentially lending that money to the bank. The bank has an obligation to return these funds to you whenever you demand them, whether by withdrawing cash from an ATM, writing a check, or making an electronic payment. This obligation to repay the depositor is what makes the deposit a liability for the bank.
### How it Works on a Bank's Balance Sheet
A bank's financial health is represented by its balance sheet, which must always balance. The basic accounting equation is:
$$Assets = Liabilities + Equity$$
Here's a simplified breakdown of how your deposit fits in:
* *Liabilities:* Your current account deposit is recorded on the liability side of the bank's balance sheet. It represents a debt the bank owes to you. Other liabilities for a bank include savings account deposits, certificates of deposit (CDs), and money borrowed from other financial institutions.
* *Assets:* When you deposit cash, the bank's cash holdings (an asset) increase. The bank then uses the funds from your deposit to generate income by making loans to other customers or by investing in securities. These loans and investments are considered assets for the bank because they represent money that is owed to the bank.
*In essence, the bank takes on a liability (your deposit) and creates an asset (a loan or investment).* The bank's profit comes from the difference between the interest it earns on its assets (e.g., the interest rate on a loan) and the interest it pays on its liabilities (e.g., the interest paid on a savings account, though current accounts often have very low or no interest).
Therefore, from the bank's perspective, the money you have in your current account is not its own money but rather a debt it must be prepared to repay at any time.
