No, DHS did not "steal" your boat. They confiscated it and you'll get it back by following some lengthy and convoluted appeal process.
But I seriously don't understand Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and why they have to be such utter dickheads on the Canadian border. Their Canadian counterparts (CBSA) are just as effective and efficient and somehow manage to be generally sane and rational.
They absolutely did "steal" his boat, for some definition of the word "steal."
The DHS agent will not be charged with theft or larceny. But he was in lawful possession of a boat, someone with a gun ordered him off the boat, and he is no longer in possession of a boat.
You raise an interesting point, by the way. America is partly founded on the idea that laws do not create rights, but instead recognize natural rights. If this story is accurate and the DHS agent did not recognize his natural rights, that is an offense. But if the law did not recognize his natural rights, that is an even greater offense.
I'm not sure - I think this is 'need a lawyer' territory.
But I would put forth the point that it's possible for an item to not be formally owned by anyone. Control is a kind of ownership, but it's not necessarily lawful ownership, otherwise a thief would lawfully own your car once he's driven off in it.
Perhaps it might be that he lawfully owns it, but can't lawfully control it until he gets the customs sign-off? But if he lawfully owned it while it's impounded, would that not mean he would have to pay licensing/registration for it while it sat there?
I frequently travel across the border in both directions between BC & Washington. To be honest I believe that your experience often comes down to the particular agent you have to deal with in your crossing & how they feel that day. I've had US CBP agents question me at length for a simple crossing ("Are you sure you have never been arrested? Really sure? ") and Canadian CBSA agents pat me down and search every square inch of my car.
Crossing the border is a bit easier with a Nexus card, but again your experience really depends upon the agent you come upon any given day.
Some people just shouldn't be working in positions of 'authority'.
When CBSA searched your car were they doing it as a power trip or were they doing it for some unexplained reason? The latter is just part of the job. I travel quite often to the states and find that the CBSA agents are almost uniformly polite and often friendly. Going the other way, I find CBP agents are generally surly and aggressive.
These guys are claiming 4 to 8 hours, 4,000 feet etc. http://www.uniteddrones.com/aether-aero/
Heck even 10 minutes flying and one day solar recharge would be awesome in an urban area for stealthy long term observation.
It's important to distinguish two, seemingly contradictory positions:
1 People won't love me for who I am. In fact, it's the job of the rest of the world to show me where I need to improve. But, on the other hand ...
2 I should love people for who they are. It's not my business to make people over. My job is to make myself over. There's more than enough work to be done there. Working on other people's supposed failings is just a distraction from my real business.
That's a rough paraphrase of Byron Katie's "Work", an approach that has helped me tremendously for the last dozen years or so. Whenever I get miserable it's usually a clue that I'm working on someone else's 'business'.
1. I believe that was addressed in the video. These are very short range devices that can be recharged by solar energy or by sitting on power lines.
2. See the video.
3. You might be able to deny access to buildings with mosquito nets but you're not going to stop close range surveillance, painting targets and other uses. Mosquito nets themselves would be relatively trivial to dismantle with a swarm of these (you'd only need to land one with explosives on the net).
1. The short range is a killer. You already need to know where the bad guys are, within an area of a few blocks. And solar panels with such small form factor are a joke in comparison with the energy demands of powered flight. (Sure, there are solar powered drones, but they need huge wings, perfect weather, and are little more than powered gliders.)
2. I didn't see any good counter-arguments there. Care to detail.
3. Explosions will alert the building's occupants, and you just sacrificed a complex, expensive device for a $0.50 mosquito net.
but those problems were just talked about, not solved. This is the US government we're talking about, so I bet they will never get far, and by the time they have something operational, you'll be able to but something 10x better on Amazon.
The US government also envisioned and funded the development of computer networking (though the actual work was done by companies), so it's ironic for someone to imply the government can't innovate on an internet forum.
I say this as someone who's basically libertarian.
But the nice thing about a publicly financed health care system is that early interventions become much more likely when people aren't forced to make decisions like "Should I spend my paycheck getting this lump in my breast checked out or should I spend it on groceries for the family."
Exactly. My mom is dying from terminal breast cancer and she avoided going to the doctor for more than a year for chest pains because she had anxiety issues and was too worried about the financial aspects to confirm whether it was anxiety issues or something more serious. It had to turn from chest pains to shortness of breath before she finally set aside the cash to get it checked out. Turns out the breast cancer had metastasized and ended up in her lung, bones and liver by the time they diagnosed the cause. By that point the cancer in her lung was the size of an orange.
Similar case with my uncle and colon cancer. The anxiety of knowing made the situation worse.
For most of us, the money can be attained, as evident by the electronic devices littering our homes and offices.
Related, I've found that many young people don't want to know what their credit card or bank balance is, for fear of seeing how little money they have left (or saved).
Everyone requires food, clothing and shelter, and yet we use other mechanisms to insure that our citizens don't go hungry. While not necessary for survival, education is guaranteed by the states, and we use a different model for its delivery.
Neither of those is to say that necessarily Obamacare is the wrong solution but its certainly not the only path.
Food insecurity is not the same thing as going hungry. Changing your food buying patterns, ie foregoing a purchase you might have otherwise made, to buy food is not pleasant, but it is not hunger.
When I was a kid, I used to read paper books in bed, at the dinner table, relaxing on the couch, sitting on the toilet, riding the bus, in my room when I was supposed to be doing my homework etc. Apparently that wasn't a problem but now if I use a digital device in much the same way, it's an ominous sign of the collapse of society and the coming apocalypse. Damn those corrosive pixels!
I'm astonished that anyone would hesitate for even a nano-second to give this kid anything less than a godspeed and God bless. I'm sorry, but the kid has already launched himself into orbit, he's not going to come back to earth for the sake of two or three years of choking down generic, all-purpose pablum at the local high school.
Would you mind explicitly stating the flaw in my argument instead of directing me to some website? I can (and often do) read articles of this nature but with a title of "Pro Gun Myths" I'd rather cut out any potential bias and hear your direct argument.
You write "it creates good behavior within society through induced paranoia toward people who have a mindset toward committing crimes"
I pointed you to stats which showed that people who carry firearms become more belligerent themselves, more likely to escalate an argument (because they know they can defend themselves) more likely to kill themselves or members of their families etc.
Far from "creating good behavior", firearms do the reverse by encouraging people who are weak, unstable, angry, depressed or confused to act out.
But I seriously don't understand Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and why they have to be such utter dickheads on the Canadian border. Their Canadian counterparts (CBSA) are just as effective and efficient and somehow manage to be generally sane and rational.