If you want to have people wasting less of a GP's time, might I suggest nurse practitioners in front of the doctors? Because something like half of what people want when they see a GP could be satisfied by a NP, or at the very least the 20% who have no business even seeing a doctor could be turned away.
Or just having _more doctors_. Which is something we need seriously to do. By law, if needed, because the existing medical schools seem to enjoin constantly tightening their output, and having really stupid requirements. E.g., for the most idiotic example: 'We will make medical students people work 36 hour shifts at hospitals, and if you can't handle that, you flunk out, because of course you're not fit to run a private GP practice in a small town.'
The entire medical community, for decades, has been operating a...well, I hate to call it a 'conspiracy', but it is, where they are _deliberately_ restricting the amount of doctors that exist. (See also all the doctors from other countries that have showed up to fill in the gap.)
I free this is going to cause rather serious problems when we get the dual hit of more people having insurance _and_ the population getting older.(1)
However, speaking to the idea of small fees...what I'd like to actually see, if we really do somehow end up in a universe where the problem is _actually_ 'wasting doctors' time, is just a gatekeeper to doctors. It doesn't even have to be a NP, or even someone with a medical degree. It just needs to be someone who says 'So you have a cold? With perfectly normal cold symptoms? And you've have it for two days? Well, you have failed the checklist, you do not get to see a doctor. Come back if it has not cleared up in a week.'
This is presuming a world _very different_ from America now.
1) This is not, as idiots assert, some sort of _failure_ of the ACA. This is a failure of the _medical establishment_, who already didn't have enough doctors, certainly didn't have enough for the future, and now are even further away from enough now that entire swaths of the American people won't choose to go without medical care because they can't afford it.
Repeatedly dropping your body weight seven inches (Like when you go down stairs) onto a single leg is not good for your knees. And it's often not that awesome for your feet, either.
That is not something that happens anywhere near as often in nature. In nature, people walk slowly on slopes, and people don't take downhill slopes of the same slope as stairs at anywhere near the speed they take stairs. (I have lived in a house with a driveway of much lesser slope than stairs...and it's annoying as hell to walk straight down. And that's _concrete_, where I'm sure to have good footing...we go even slower down hills.)
Stairs gave us the ability to just repeatedly drop, over and over, and land well enough we can do it very quickly. It's great for efficiency...it's not great for the body.
This is not to say it going to always, or even usually, turn into a problem. However, if you have any sort of knee problems, repeatedly going down stairs will exacerbate them.
Upward climbing, OTOH, is fine. That we _are_ designed to do perfectly well. Which is probably why there are 'stair climbing' machines but no 'stair descending' machines.
I am a huge Yudkowsky fan. I don’t read anything on Less Wrong that isn’t from him though. Perhaps that’s why I don’t remember anything about an AI apocalypse.
You must be in a different simulated post-singularity universe than I am. (Another particularly odd idea over at Less Wrong.)
Yudkowsky is the guy who founded and runs the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a place dedicated to making sure the AIs that (they assure us) are going to very soon taking over the world are _good_ AIs.
Hell, he's got some sort of idiotic idea that even AIs in a completely closed environment aren't safe, that if they are allowed to communicate at all, they can convince people to let them out.
That's Yudkowsky himself.
Less Wrong is a great place to learn about probability and the stupid logical fallacies and biases that everyone uses, and how to avoid them. It also has some interesting ideas on moral philosophy and calculations, and even game theory.
And those things, incidentally, are what Less Wrong is _supposed_ to be about.
It gets rather stupid when it strays away from those things. And it does stray away from those things. All the time. (Although I haven't been reading it for a year or two because, well, the basics are easy to understand, and the complicated math stuff is not actually needed by anyone, and the rest is gibberish. I probably should figure out if there's a tag for 'interesting philosophical stuff' or something.)
To avoid this, you really need to make your predictions in advance, on paper, and in a single repository. If you fail to document your predictions, you are likely to lie to yourself retrospectively about how strongly you felt about the result. If your prediction was wrong, you can tell yourself you weren’t that confident in the first place anyway. If it’s true, you’ve reinforced your own hubris. If you don’t document all your predictions in single place, you can pick which predictions you count. This is good for your self-esteem, but bad for your development as a thinker.
This is one of the less stupider ideas over on Less Wrong. (I.e., it's one of the few ideas not related to an AI-apocalypse and/or immorality.)
They assert you should use probabilities, too. Instead of just saying 'I predict X.', you should say 'I think X is 75% likely'.
This is more complicated to score, but what you can do is gamble against yourself, assign the 'won't happen' side negative and the 'will happen' side positive, and try to average to zero over a set of predictions. (A 'set' being predictions you make all at once, otherwise you'll try to err to get back to zero when making new predictions.)
I do know a little about trade secrets, so I know the idea the chemical composition of the end result, which they _leave laying around on other people's property_, cannot possibly be a 'trade secret'. You cannot have a trade secret that consists of things you've randomly distributed buried under the ground of people not under an NDA. That is complete and utter nonsense.
And hence, with it _not_ being a trade secret, it seems rather odd that courts have refused to make them hand it over. At least the general chemical composition of it, if not the specific amounts and whatnot.
But, of course, we're talking about asshole 'pro-business' courts, who forget entirely how property rights work when that property is owned by individuals and businesses randomly harm it. See also: A system that will refuse to arrest or even _question_ bank officials for burglary when they accidentally 'foreclose' on (Aka, steal all the stuff of) the wrong people, but will happily convict protesters of trespassing if they accidentally stray over an imaginary line on the ground.
What people are actually demanding is that the company doing the fracking (often a service company, not the owner/operator of the well) reveal something for free that those people could obtain legally through other methods, but those methods cost a million dollars.
Those people are demanding the company doing the fracking reveal, for free, something that _that company is injecting into the ground that those people own_.
Fracking companies certainly have the right to drill and take natural gas, and I'm sure the mineral rights they got from the state specifies they can do it via fracking.
But they're leaving material on (Or, rather, in.) other people's property. Mineral rights don't give someone the right to _leave unknown shit laying around on someone else's land_ when they're done mining. No, it's not the job of the property owner to pay millions of dollars to recover _someone's else_ waste and test it.
It's like suddenly with fracking everyone forgets how property rights work. Just because I have bought mining right from the state to someone else's land doesn't mean I can dig a hole and dump random chemicals in it that I refuse to disclose and say 'It's mining! I'm allowed!'.
No one ever claimed that just because I can run Coca-Cola through a mass spectrometer that Coke is required to hand me a list of ingredients.
And that analogy makes no sense. No one is asking for what's in it, or if they are, it's because they think it's the easiest thing. They would be entirely happy with a sample of it.
And if you think a court wouldn't direct Coca-Cola to hand over a sample of their product, you're very confused.
It’s been a long time since I had intellectual property protection training at Bell Labs, but IIRC all you really need to do is declare that it’s a trade secret, then act internally as if it is. Never tell anyone on the outside, on-pain-of-death clauses in employment contracts, etc.
Erm, that's all you need to do in generally, because generally it doesn't actually _matter_. There's a lot of 'trade secrets' out there that are just called such.
But if you want trade secret protections _under the law_, if you want extra penalties and gag orders from people who have illegally taken it from you, you have to do more than just assert it's a trade secret.
And if they can get a hold of it without breaking a single law or NDA, it's not a trade secret at all. If, for example, you have placed it on random people's property who have not signed NDAs.
Fracking is the same way. It’s not just what’s in the fluid, but the order in which various steps — fracturing, introduction of proppants, acid etch — are applied, and at what pressures.
Um, yes, that clearly is a trade secret...but that's not actually what anyone wants.
What people are actually demanding is the _chemical composition_ of the stuff put in the ground.
Which people can get by pulling it back out, if anyone else had a well. So _that_ isn't a trade secret. You cannot insert something underground under an entire region, and then assert it is a trade secret in court.
I.e., if Coca-Cola tried to assert the _chemical composition_ of Coke was a trade secret, in a lawsuit where someone is suing them asserts there is arsenic in it (And for some reason couldn't get a sample of Coke for themselves to test.), Coca-Cola would get laughed out of court.
Drilling down to reach the remnants of the fracking fluid is likely illegal.
Drilling down certainly isn't illegal, if you do it on someone's land that allows it. Mining rights give a certain individual the right to _extract_ a certain thing from the ground...they don't forbid anyone from putting holes in the ground.
Now, whether or not they can extract the fluid is another issue. But mining rights generally don't include stuff that _other people_ put down there. If someone else has the gold mining rights to my property, that doesn't mean they can dig up a box I buried in the yard with gold in it. Mining rights almost always are of a certain compound, and only cover _natural_ deposits of that thing, so asserting mining rights over a random liquid they themselves put there won't work.
So I'm pretty certain that mining rights don't cover the liquid...but the drilling company might attempt to assert the liquid is _still their property_.
Which might actually stand up in court, but probably not. If I spray liquid on someone else's property, I generally am considered to have given up my property rights to that liquid. I can't demand they return my water or oil or urine or whatever. And that probably applies to inserting liquids deep underground on other people's property.
But regardless, I've certainly lost any trade secret protections of what that liquid is.
@Kazzy :
Yeah, I've been wondering about the fact we've sorta been ignoring that for the entire conversation. There are plenty of women I find sexually attractive that I would not attempt to date, because I know specific facts about their behavior in relationships.
But that's 'fact overriding desire'. Along with the more common situation of facts helping desire. 'I want to date that person because she lives in the same town as me' or even the less acceptable 'I want to date that person because she is rich'.
And, there's the other possibility, where facts actually alter desire itself.
We have incorporated certain things into our young imprinting, so learning those things makes someone physically more attractive to us.Sometimes such a thing can be directly traced back to a single incident in youth. Some boy watched Buffy, thought Willow was hot, and now learning a girl is a nerd makes them _physically_ more attractive. (Which is different than a logical addition or subtraction _to_ desire.)
This, incidentally, introduces another way to look at the whole transphobia thing. I'm sure that someone has done a study whether or not women are less physically attractive if men have been told they are transexuals, and I'm pretty certain I can guess the outcome of that study.
It actually would be interesting to see such a study done using pictures of black people that can pass as white, and one group told they are black and one group not, and having the groups rate them. Three decades ago, I could tell you what the results would be. Now, not so much.
Actual unrelated facts really can alter the physical desirability of someone, because that is such a weird subconscious thing.(1) And then whether or not you _decide_ to date them is on top of that, because your conscious brain can weigh in there.
@kim :
I'm not entirely sure if you're agreeing with me or not in your first paragraph. I was more talking about things like ancient Rome, where a good deal of sexual attraction was between men and boys. That didn't just magically appears in some genes somewhere and then go away. Boys were held up as the ideal of desire for men, and thus it's what men imprinted on as desirable.
@burt-likko :
Call me a libertarian (actually, don't) but I don't see why people should only get a free pass on their _subconscious_ desires. As long as they can find other people to go along with them.
1) I used to think Scully from the X-Files was fairly hot, and consequently, Gillian Anderson was hot. And then I saw an interview with Gillian Anderson...and she came off as an idiot.
I think part of this gets into the fact that everyone is lying to themselves about sexual attraction, and trans people is where they right right smack into the truth of that. So here goes my controversial statement:
Sexual attraction is, despite what we like to pretend, probably entirely learned. Yes, even sexual orientation.(1)
I _understand_ why gay people like to present it as genetic, but we have obvious ample evidence of this not being true that we completely ignore. (I.e., there has been _cultural_ homosexuality, stuff that makes no sense at all if it's some sort of inherent trait.)
Please note saying sexual attraction is learned is not the same thing as saying it is changeable past adolescence, nor is it saying we try to change it or should condemn any specific sort of it, like homosexuality. I honestly think the whole 'It's genetic' nonsense has done a grave disservice to our discussion of this. I understand where that idea came from, and the purpose that was trying to be served by it...but that doesn't mean it's actually true.
Anyway, trans people run right into that wall. Men (And it's usually men who are freaked out.) have imprinted on an attraction to a certain type of face, a certain shape of the body, a way of speaking and dressing, and think that means they are 'straight'...and then run smack into the idea that such a person is 'really' a man, and their circuit breakers all trip.
And I think a large part of that is that we're making assumptions about sexual orientation being some sort of 'true' thing, instead of just 'When my teenage mind was sexually developing, it became attracted to certain body types, and this person, regardless of how they were born or what they have between their legs, is that body type, and hence I am sexually attracted to them.'.
But instead we still get the whole 'Being gay is genetic!' silliness, which also means being straight is genetic, and hence straight people magically can't be attracted to someone born with a penis. And so if they _attracted_ to such a person, they clearly were 'tricked'. (The alternative being that they are actually gay, which means they must take the position they were tricked.)
Whether or not they still date the person is up-to-them, but it would at least reduce transpobia a great deal. And homophobia, too.
tl;dr: I think we'd be better off if we stopped talking about 'sexual orientation' and more about 'the types of people that the person finds sexually attractive'.
1) I have no idea if gender dysphoria is also the same thing, I'm just arguing sexual attraction here. I'm more inclined to think that gender dysphoria actually is genetic, or, rather, caused by hormonal variations during development. And not 'learned'. But some of it might be. And, again, that doesn't mean it can be _changed_ later, or we should attempt that.
1) Soundproofing. Duh. Ain’t never lived in a duplex, have ya?
Except they could just _buy_ soundproofing material and put it in walls during construction for a good deal less money than building two exterior walls, and it will work much better at soundproofing. (Depending on what the walls are made of, it's entirely possible that the existing setup is not very soundproof anyway.)
2) cost of living/standard of living. probably still cheaper than san francisco.
Looking at the cost of houses in Echo Park, it's not apparently that far out of line for houses of that square footage. So this is less an absurdity of 'skinny houses' and more an absurdity of LA's housing market.
3) Stairs are good for people. Exercise is good for people
Except that constantly going up and down stairs is not good for your knees. And in a flat condo, you have to walk _farther_, which is just as much exercise. There is no health benefit to translating horizontal movement, which our legs are designed to do, into stair movement, which our legs are _not_ designed to do.
Now, yes, if you live on the third floor of a block of condos, walking up the stairs instead of taking the elevator is better, because any movement is better than none. But stairs are not better than walking, so it's even better for you to take a lap around the garage and then take the elevator up.
I'm confused about the 'fracking chemicals don't reach the water' thing.
Mainly, I ask: Who said they did?
Everyone knows the chemicals they're using for the fracking don't generally reach the drinking water, or we would detect them _in the drinking water_. Duh.
Wasn't the problem that the natural gas reaches the water? That's why people can light their water on fire.
Also, is anyone else baffled at the idea they're allowed to call such chemicals 'trade secrets'? From what I understand, to keep a trade secret, you have to attempt to protect it...you can't just assert trade secret protections for every random thing.
You know how not to protect a trade secret? Insert it into the ground and leave it laying there where anyone can drill down and recover it, and run it though a mass spectrometer to find out what it is.
1) In what possible way is building two houses separated by a few inches better than building townhouses with shared walls? It takes more material, more heating and cooling, more of everything, and has no actual advantage at all except ego pumping to live in an 'actual house' instead of a condo.
They assert that the fees are 'smaller' than condo fees, but that can't possibly be _caused_ by how they're building the houses. (Shared walls, apparently, have really expensive upkeep? Somehow?) That's just because they're getting less amenities than condos usually provide, like no pool.
2) Five hundred thousand fucking dollars. At the low end. For 1000 square feet of house.
Yes, I know these are in the city, and land cost is high, but, uh, we're talking about 600 square feet of land.
3) Nice to see they're wasting all their space on stairs and garages and external walls. Instead of, I dunno, building a damn building of flat condos with shared garage and elevators and houses you didn't have to walk up a two flights of steps to go to bed in.
Why do I get the suspicion that when the analogy was made to a 'Prius', it wasn't because of the reason that normal people buy a Prius, it was that asshole stereotype Prius buyer.
I guess buying giant pointless super-expensive houses got too mainstream for those twits. Now they must buy _tiny_ pointless super-expensive houses.
My answers, as someone left of center, are:
The theocratic democracy, because civil rights start with due process and fair elections, and everything else is under that, because with those two things you can get to the other ones.
I am slightly worried that you did not mention freedom of speech, a right that often suffers in democratic theocracies, with 'anti-blasphemy laws', and such a loophole can be used to crack down on democracy...but I will assume that this democracy will _stay_ a democracy, and that it is legal to actually argue the anti-blasphemy laws should be changed without being subject to them.
If you cannot argue what the laws should be, and run on the platform of changing them, it is not actually a democracy. If _that's_ what you're trying to assert the theocratic democracy has, then that's not a democracy at all.
And, yes, that answer is fairly obvious. In an actual democracy, either the majority of citizens support something, or it doesn't exist. The problem isn't that the religion wants to ban homosexuality, the problem is that the majority of people see nothing wrong with banning it. If the people change their mind, than either the religion will change its mind, or the people will stop allowing the religion to make that law.
Having a religion inserted into a democracy's control is just a way to make that democracy slow to change and rather conservative. Which is annoying, but if it is an actual democracy, as in the citizens are _ultimately_ in charge, the religion has to play along with the actual wishes of the population or eventually lose control.
And now I have a question: What is meant by 'support'?
I 'support' a coup of any dictatorship in general, in the sense I _like_ such a thing. Dictatorships should not, and must not, be stable forms of government. I cheer when dictators are overthrown by _other dictators_. I'd much rather we keep reshuffling the deck on them to see if we can get some sort of democracy to fall out, than for something to happen like North Korea. We must never, ever, have a 'stable dictatorship', because those things are really hard to get rid of, especially after a generator or two.
But if by 'support' you mean _America_ support such a thing with military aid? That is a much more tricky situation, and depends a good deal on who the other side is. And, no, a lot of us on the left took issue with us helping the rebels in Egypt. (If we wanted to help the rebels, we should have just stopped _helping_
And while there are plenty of crappy places that _assert_ to be theocratic democracies, very few of them actually are such things. Most _actual_ theocratic democracies are, well, Europe. Meanwhile, there are functionally no non-crappy dictatorships, whether or not they care about religion. So your hypothetical is a bit silly to start with.
Incidentally, the problem with Mayalsia isn't that it has a state religion. It is that it does not have _due process_ for a large percentage of its population, subjecting them to religious courts. Which, of course, means they are subject to laws that are completely unchangeable...which means they are not living in a democracy. (Not to mention they're being subject to different laws than everyone else.)
While interracial porn may be more racist in it's portrayal of non-whites (I actually have no idea.), that was not actually the point.
The point is that it portrayals people of other races as _sexual beings_, and doing so will cause young watchers of it to add them to whatever it is in their head that categorizes people as 'sexually attractive'.
It might _also_ be racist and impart stereotypes, but that's sorta a different matter. That sort of bullshit is reprogrammable throughout life, and can be removed with anti-racism messages. Having seen a few racism porn videos is not probably going to make someone a racist.
But it will make, in twenty years or so, actual dark-black actresses start showing up in the media as 'attractive'.
Also, please note that, from what I am aware, often 'interracial porn' is actually black men and white women, which seems more likely to include such stereotypes...and not what I'm talking about at all anyway. The entire point of what I'm saying is to get white teenagers to look at black _women_ lustfully(1), and thus not install the little filter in their brain that says 'white=attractive'.
1) Normally, I'm against objectifying women...but try stopping a 16 year old boy from doing that. I'd rather they at least objectify them in a non race-based way.
I don’t think we’ve adequately defined poverty, at least for the purposes of dealing with poverty as an economic and social problem, unless we deal with opportunity issues that are not strictly determined by material conditions.
It's an interesting fact, and one that is never reflected in any measure of poverty, that someone who works two eight-hour jobs a day for $8 an hour is much much poorer than someone who works one eight-hour job a day for $16 an hour.
They both make $320 a week, but one of them has half the transportation costs, less child-care costs, can actually go grocery shopping and make meals instead of buying fast food, etc, etc.
A good deal of what actually limits the poor is lack of _time_, not money. That's half the reason they make the 'poor choices' that morons yammer about. They are eating at McDonalds instead of making sandwiches for lunch because they have no time to make sandwiches for lunch. It's like no one realizes the poor don't have damn personal assistants.
I'd like to see some sort of measurement of poverty that started taking away some of people's apparent income for each hour over ten a day they worked. Or, hell, just a cutoff...you work 14 hours a day, for the purposes of figuring if you're at the poverty line or not, we only count the first 10 hours of that, and the money that made you. (Except averaged, in case you work two jobs with different payscales.) Or at half the amount it makes.
Each hour worked over ten a day _does_ get someone more money, but it almost certainly adds so much more in costs back that we really should have something to represent that.
To the contrary, there are many topics where the GOP lines up closer to public opinion than their Democrat counterparts. For example, their support for gun rights had widespread agreement as does their stances on immigration and education.
Uh, no. The American people are often vastly in favor of gun control policies the right is shooting down, such as expanding background checks. ~86% of _Republicans_ are in favor of that.
If you actually start talking about _policies_, almost any policies the Democrats have suggested, there is anything from a slight majority to an overwhelming majority in favor of it. 51% want to ban 'assault weapons', whatever that means, 60% want bans on large clips, the entire damn country wants expanded background checks.
If you start talking about 'gun control' as a whole...well, I was going to say that the trained seals the Republican party had created will bark it down, but actually a very slight majority of American are in favor of stronger gun control, _period_. With no specifics at all. I will repeat: A slight _majority_ of Americans, when asked 'Would you like a law to restrict gun ownership more?', said _yes_, without a specific law or policy in front of them. (And another 35% or so said 'The laws are fine'. It's only 10% who want looser laws.)
Things that ~53% of the public support _as a general statement_, and support _even more_ with specific policies, are not something that people who oppose them are 'closer to public opinion' in.
Choosing a specific subset of 'women you are attracted to' as the sort of women you're marry is fine. Hell, everyone does that.
Likewise, even the situation described in this article, of who someone wants their daughter to marry...I don't think it's that reasonable to parental prejudices to show up there, but I _do_ think it's reasonable for parents to say 'I don't care who you marry, but I want you to raise our grandkids Jewish'. (Although note there's a different between them _saying_ that and thinking they have the right to demand that.)
In other words, I think people should butt out of other people's relationships, _especially_ if all they have to offer is random prejudices. Everyone has the right to date and marry whoever they want. (Erm, within the bounds. You start dating someone while married to someone else, people have the right to call you on it. Or if you generally act like an asshole to them, other people are going to start asking your SO why they're with you.)
But family traditions...yes, the family can suggest continuing them with children, as long as they understand they are not actually in charge, and take no for an answer. And someone can certainly base their 'Who will I marry?' decision on that.
Religion honestly isn't that different than any other thing that is a part of someone's life. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to find someone who also has the same thing as part of their life to marry.
Yeah, I find the concept those are the same thing somewhat confusing also.
I mean, for example, I don't date _men_, but, assuming I had a daughter, I presumably would not be upset at her marrying a man. (And I also would not be upset at a hypothetical son of mine marrying a man, but that's not the point here.)
Now, as for dating...there is an interesting 'standard of beauty' thing going on, and if we can't think that people of another race are _attractive_, there is some question if we can think of them as equals. And there's the whole problem of us assuming that 'attractive=better', which, combined with 'more attractive=more white' (Almost all 'attractive black women' that society presents are somewhat light skinned, of example.), is an actual concern.
But I suspect that's basically an exposure issue, and will sort itself out as actual racism gets stomped out. And part of it is that the media has a really fucked up idea of what is 'attractive' in the first place. And there's no real way to fix it _besides_ exposure...you figure out who is attractive when you're a teenager, and it sticks. (Apparently, I'm making a plea for more interracial porn.;) )
Meanwhile, judging people who are dating _other people_ is an entirely different thing. There are plenty of valid reasons to think that a couple is a bad couple. Their contrasting race is not one of them, and doing so makes you a racist idiot.
Also, and let me just point this out, in case this is something specific about fathers: It is not men's place to police who their adult daughter(1) marries or dates. Especially not based on their father's own prejudice.
That is not to say that _all_ possible concern are unwarranted. Sure, if he appears to never have a job and is living off her, raise that as a concern before marriage. If he steals all her stuff and sells it for drugs, it is indeed reasonable to assert that even dating him is a bad idea.
But fathers do not own their daughters. Or their daughter's vaginas.
1) I'm putting 'adult' in their specifically as a qualifier. It is indeed the job of parents to police their underaged children...but not in a racist or sexist way, and they also should probably not interfere with who their child decides to date. (How their child dates, however, is something else.) This is a much more complicated issue, so I restrict this to 'adult' children, considering the article is talking about who their daughter _marries_.
This is where my vestigial libertarianism makes itself known.
Heh, mine shows up here also.
And then I want to swing back the other way and say 'You are not 'your business'. Your corporation is a legal entity that has separate legal liability, finances, and now, stupidly, personhood. Corporations are allowed to exist only as public good. Just like we do not let legal liability of the corporation bleed over into you, we do not let your personal prejudices bleed over into the business. '
I.e., someone selling roasted peanuts on the side of the road, sure, they can discriminate. A _corporation_ selling something? No.
And, when I swing back the other way....what I do think that, _if_ we want to give corporations the right to refuse service to classes to people, they, _at minimum_, should be required to post that information in a visible place. 'We do not serve gay people'.
And, hell, they should probably have to put it in their corporate charter. Corporations are _supposed_ to be operated strictly for a single purpose, and for most for-profit corporations that purpose is 'making money'. If they have an exception to 'making money' because of 'gay cooties', they need to put that in their charter.
Yes, plenty of charters have wiggle room that would let them do stuff like that (For the same reason they can donate to charity...it makes them look good, so in theory makes them even more money than they donated.)...but it's perfectly reasonable to require them to _explicitly_ put specific sorts of behavior in their charter, as long as there is a long enough phase-in that existing corporations can modify their charter.
I am sometimes not as obviously funny as I think I am.
I am not _actually_ proposing this, because the entire idea of National Service is silly. As Kazzy pointed out, there are really no jobs it makes sense.
And in jobs where it _does_ make sense, we'd be better off giving those jobs to the unemployed instead of forcing random people to do it. Seriously, that would be rather assholish of us. 'Yes, I know you're unemployed and you _want_ to be paid $10 an hour to remove unauthorized flowers from the Metro, but instead we're going to force this rich idiot to do it'.
I was just pointing out how to not make such a tax regressive.
That's why I said 'All armed conflicts should be limited to fighting off invasions of US soil until a vote of the population is taken.' instead of 'war'.
The term 'war' is easy to manipulate. _No soldier should ever fire a weapon_ outside the US until we, as a nation, have voted. (With some sort of reasonable exemption for fighting off invaders. I'm okay for some sort of 'Canada has already invaded so we can preemptively shoot their soldiers even if they're standing over the border' rule.)
I don't know what sort of percentage should be required, or if we should use the electoral college or house districts or what. Hell, I'd argue it should follow law rules...let's require both a majority of house districts vote for it, and a majority of states to represent senators.
Regardless, all I do know is not only should there have to be a vote, it _shouldn't_ be by the people we elected to run our government normally, especially if we had no idea there would be the option of a war when we did the election.
War is too important. And it's treated like it's not.
And, yes, there are a lot of people calling for a draft to try to make this point, but that's nonsense. We don't need a draft so the country will take a war seriously...we just need to _ask_ the country, which already _does_ take wars seriously. It's the goddamn media and politicians who don't take it seriously.
Oh, I'm not trying to imply that a lot of them are. I'm sorry if it read that way. Almost no libertarians support that.
But the article cited here making the case _against_ libertarians supporting national service does exist for a reason. It is a real phenomenon. A completely, utterly baffling phenomenon.
..baffling, at least, until you remember the 'resenting the poor' libertarians. The ones who are libertarians because they don't want to support the 'lazy poor'...and here is a way to actually make those good-for-nothing people work! (I have no idea what _actual_ percentage of libertarians think like this, but when I discuss things long enough with libertarians online, I generally find this about 1/10th of them will just come out and say that. But that's a very self-selecting poll of people, namely, people who debate on the internet...and I have no idea how many of those people would support mandatory national service anyway. I'm just saying the ones who _do_ support that are that sort of libertarian.)
The irony, of course, is assuming that this national service paid people (and it wouldn't really work if it didn't.) and it was required to accept everyone and couldn't kick them out (which, again, is required for it to be 'mandatory'), the 'lazy poor' would be signing up for this left and right _without_ it being mandatory. Because it would be a _job_.
And the libertarians would be calling it 'large government' and 'make work'.
So what does it tell you when lots of so-called progressives clearly support it?
Assuming that 'lots' of progressives do support it, which I don't think is accurate, it tells me that those progressive supporters have not actually thought it through.
There's a difference between progressives, who are usually fine with most taxes, wanting to add a new one without thinking it though. Vs. libertarians, who often wish to remove most taxes and claim forcing people to do things is the _only_ thing the government should stop...suddenly start hoping the government will force people to do things.
People who support a stupid version of a thing that is _like_ what they normally support are just ignorant. People who support a stupid version of a thing that _they normally hate and is completely opposite every principle they hold_...something else is going on there.
You carry a cake past me every day, and one day you try to carry a giant unbalanced wedding cake and it falls on me...well, that was a stupid accident. You hate cakes, claim they are fattening and taste bad, and how you'd never eat one, and no one should ever carry one around...and then, one time, you buy a giant 'unbalanced' wedding cake and carry it past me and it 'falls on me'...yeah, right.
And this is, again, assuming that progressives actually support a _mandatory_ year of service. I've heard plenty of progressives talk about how national service would be awesome as something we expect of people, but heard very little talk about how it should be _required_. The _required_ talk all appears to be coming from right-ward.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Unclear on the Concept”
Conservatives have often found themselves on the wrong side of history.
But it's only recently that they appear to have become unable to recognize this _retroactively_.
On “Clinics Here, Clinics There”
If you want to have people wasting less of a GP's time, might I suggest nurse practitioners in front of the doctors? Because something like half of what people want when they see a GP could be satisfied by a NP, or at the very least the 20% who have no business even seeing a doctor could be turned away.
Or just having _more doctors_. Which is something we need seriously to do. By law, if needed, because the existing medical schools seem to enjoin constantly tightening their output, and having really stupid requirements. E.g., for the most idiotic example: 'We will make medical students people work 36 hour shifts at hospitals, and if you can't handle that, you flunk out, because of course you're not fit to run a private GP practice in a small town.'
The entire medical community, for decades, has been operating a...well, I hate to call it a 'conspiracy', but it is, where they are _deliberately_ restricting the amount of doctors that exist. (See also all the doctors from other countries that have showed up to fill in the gap.)
I free this is going to cause rather serious problems when we get the dual hit of more people having insurance _and_ the population getting older.(1)
However, speaking to the idea of small fees...what I'd like to actually see, if we really do somehow end up in a universe where the problem is _actually_ 'wasting doctors' time, is just a gatekeeper to doctors. It doesn't even have to be a NP, or even someone with a medical degree. It just needs to be someone who says 'So you have a cold? With perfectly normal cold symptoms? And you've have it for two days? Well, you have failed the checklist, you do not get to see a doctor. Come back if it has not cleared up in a week.'
This is presuming a world _very different_ from America now.
1) This is not, as idiots assert, some sort of _failure_ of the ACA. This is a failure of the _medical establishment_, who already didn't have enough doctors, certainly didn't have enough for the future, and now are even further away from enough now that entire swaths of the American people won't choose to go without medical care because they can't afford it.
On “Linky Friday #36”
use of knees is good for knees.
It's not 'use of the knees' that's the problem.
Repeatedly dropping your body weight seven inches (Like when you go down stairs) onto a single leg is not good for your knees. And it's often not that awesome for your feet, either.
That is not something that happens anywhere near as often in nature. In nature, people walk slowly on slopes, and people don't take downhill slopes of the same slope as stairs at anywhere near the speed they take stairs. (I have lived in a house with a driveway of much lesser slope than stairs...and it's annoying as hell to walk straight down. And that's _concrete_, where I'm sure to have good footing...we go even slower down hills.)
Stairs gave us the ability to just repeatedly drop, over and over, and land well enough we can do it very quickly. It's great for efficiency...it's not great for the body.
This is not to say it going to always, or even usually, turn into a problem. However, if you have any sort of knee problems, repeatedly going down stairs will exacerbate them.
Upward climbing, OTOH, is fine. That we _are_ designed to do perfectly well. Which is probably why there are 'stair climbing' machines but no 'stair descending' machines.
On “The Armchair CEO”
I am a huge Yudkowsky fan. I don’t read anything on Less Wrong that isn’t from him though. Perhaps that’s why I don’t remember anything about an AI apocalypse.
You must be in a different simulated post-singularity universe than I am. (Another particularly odd idea over at Less Wrong.)
Yudkowsky is the guy who founded and runs the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a place dedicated to making sure the AIs that (they assure us) are going to very soon taking over the world are _good_ AIs.
Hell, he's got some sort of idiotic idea that even AIs in a completely closed environment aren't safe, that if they are allowed to communicate at all, they can convince people to let them out.
That's Yudkowsky himself.
Less Wrong is a great place to learn about probability and the stupid logical fallacies and biases that everyone uses, and how to avoid them. It also has some interesting ideas on moral philosophy and calculations, and even game theory.
And those things, incidentally, are what Less Wrong is _supposed_ to be about.
It gets rather stupid when it strays away from those things. And it does stray away from those things. All the time. (Although I haven't been reading it for a year or two because, well, the basics are easy to understand, and the complicated math stuff is not actually needed by anyone, and the rest is gibberish. I probably should figure out if there's a tag for 'interesting philosophical stuff' or something.)
"
To avoid this, you really need to make your predictions in advance, on paper, and in a single repository. If you fail to document your predictions, you are likely to lie to yourself retrospectively about how strongly you felt about the result. If your prediction was wrong, you can tell yourself you weren’t that confident in the first place anyway. If it’s true, you’ve reinforced your own hubris. If you don’t document all your predictions in single place, you can pick which predictions you count. This is good for your self-esteem, but bad for your development as a thinker.
This is one of the less stupider ideas over on Less Wrong. (I.e., it's one of the few ideas not related to an AI-apocalypse and/or immorality.)
They assert you should use probabilities, too. Instead of just saying 'I predict X.', you should say 'I think X is 75% likely'.
This is more complicated to score, but what you can do is gamble against yourself, assign the 'won't happen' side negative and the 'will happen' side positive, and try to average to zero over a set of predictions. (A 'set' being predictions you make all at once, otherwise you'll try to err to get back to zero when making new predictions.)
On “Linky Friday #36”
I don't actually know what the law says.
I do know a little about trade secrets, so I know the idea the chemical composition of the end result, which they _leave laying around on other people's property_, cannot possibly be a 'trade secret'. You cannot have a trade secret that consists of things you've randomly distributed buried under the ground of people not under an NDA. That is complete and utter nonsense.
And hence, with it _not_ being a trade secret, it seems rather odd that courts have refused to make them hand it over. At least the general chemical composition of it, if not the specific amounts and whatnot.
But, of course, we're talking about asshole 'pro-business' courts, who forget entirely how property rights work when that property is owned by individuals and businesses randomly harm it. See also: A system that will refuse to arrest or even _question_ bank officials for burglary when they accidentally 'foreclose' on (Aka, steal all the stuff of) the wrong people, but will happily convict protesters of trespassing if they accidentally stray over an imaginary line on the ground.
"
What people are actually demanding is that the company doing the fracking (often a service company, not the owner/operator of the well) reveal something for free that those people could obtain legally through other methods, but those methods cost a million dollars.
Those people are demanding the company doing the fracking reveal, for free, something that _that company is injecting into the ground that those people own_.
Fracking companies certainly have the right to drill and take natural gas, and I'm sure the mineral rights they got from the state specifies they can do it via fracking.
But they're leaving material on (Or, rather, in.) other people's property. Mineral rights don't give someone the right to _leave unknown shit laying around on someone else's land_ when they're done mining. No, it's not the job of the property owner to pay millions of dollars to recover _someone's else_ waste and test it.
It's like suddenly with fracking everyone forgets how property rights work. Just because I have bought mining right from the state to someone else's land doesn't mean I can dig a hole and dump random chemicals in it that I refuse to disclose and say 'It's mining! I'm allowed!'.
No one ever claimed that just because I can run Coca-Cola through a mass spectrometer that Coke is required to hand me a list of ingredients.
And that analogy makes no sense. No one is asking for what's in it, or if they are, it's because they think it's the easiest thing. They would be entirely happy with a sample of it.
And if you think a court wouldn't direct Coca-Cola to hand over a sample of their product, you're very confused.
"
It’s been a long time since I had intellectual property protection training at Bell Labs, but IIRC all you really need to do is declare that it’s a trade secret, then act internally as if it is. Never tell anyone on the outside, on-pain-of-death clauses in employment contracts, etc.
Erm, that's all you need to do in generally, because generally it doesn't actually _matter_. There's a lot of 'trade secrets' out there that are just called such.
But if you want trade secret protections _under the law_, if you want extra penalties and gag orders from people who have illegally taken it from you, you have to do more than just assert it's a trade secret.
And if they can get a hold of it without breaking a single law or NDA, it's not a trade secret at all. If, for example, you have placed it on random people's property who have not signed NDAs.
Fracking is the same way. It’s not just what’s in the fluid, but the order in which various steps — fracturing, introduction of proppants, acid etch — are applied, and at what pressures.
Um, yes, that clearly is a trade secret...but that's not actually what anyone wants.
What people are actually demanding is the _chemical composition_ of the stuff put in the ground.
Which people can get by pulling it back out, if anyone else had a well. So _that_ isn't a trade secret. You cannot insert something underground under an entire region, and then assert it is a trade secret in court.
I.e., if Coca-Cola tried to assert the _chemical composition_ of Coke was a trade secret, in a lawsuit where someone is suing them asserts there is arsenic in it (And for some reason couldn't get a sample of Coke for themselves to test.), Coca-Cola would get laughed out of court.
Drilling down to reach the remnants of the fracking fluid is likely illegal.
Drilling down certainly isn't illegal, if you do it on someone's land that allows it. Mining rights give a certain individual the right to _extract_ a certain thing from the ground...they don't forbid anyone from putting holes in the ground.
Now, whether or not they can extract the fluid is another issue. But mining rights generally don't include stuff that _other people_ put down there. If someone else has the gold mining rights to my property, that doesn't mean they can dig up a box I buried in the yard with gold in it. Mining rights almost always are of a certain compound, and only cover _natural_ deposits of that thing, so asserting mining rights over a random liquid they themselves put there won't work.
So I'm pretty certain that mining rights don't cover the liquid...but the drilling company might attempt to assert the liquid is _still their property_.
Which might actually stand up in court, but probably not. If I spray liquid on someone else's property, I generally am considered to have given up my property rights to that liquid. I can't demand they return my water or oil or urine or whatever. And that probably applies to inserting liquids deep underground on other people's property.
But regardless, I've certainly lost any trade secret protections of what that liquid is.
On “Racism and Cross-racial Love”
And this was in the wrong place. Why the heck can't we talk more than four comments deep?
"
@Kazzy :
Yeah, I've been wondering about the fact we've sorta been ignoring that for the entire conversation. There are plenty of women I find sexually attractive that I would not attempt to date, because I know specific facts about their behavior in relationships.
But that's 'fact overriding desire'. Along with the more common situation of facts helping desire. 'I want to date that person because she lives in the same town as me' or even the less acceptable 'I want to date that person because she is rich'.
And, there's the other possibility, where facts actually alter desire itself.
We have incorporated certain things into our young imprinting, so learning those things makes someone physically more attractive to us.Sometimes such a thing can be directly traced back to a single incident in youth. Some boy watched Buffy, thought Willow was hot, and now learning a girl is a nerd makes them _physically_ more attractive. (Which is different than a logical addition or subtraction _to_ desire.)
This, incidentally, introduces another way to look at the whole transphobia thing. I'm sure that someone has done a study whether or not women are less physically attractive if men have been told they are transexuals, and I'm pretty certain I can guess the outcome of that study.
It actually would be interesting to see such a study done using pictures of black people that can pass as white, and one group told they are black and one group not, and having the groups rate them. Three decades ago, I could tell you what the results would be. Now, not so much.
Actual unrelated facts really can alter the physical desirability of someone, because that is such a weird subconscious thing.(1) And then whether or not you _decide_ to date them is on top of that, because your conscious brain can weigh in there.
@kim :
I'm not entirely sure if you're agreeing with me or not in your first paragraph. I was more talking about things like ancient Rome, where a good deal of sexual attraction was between men and boys. That didn't just magically appears in some genes somewhere and then go away. Boys were held up as the ideal of desire for men, and thus it's what men imprinted on as desirable.
@burt-likko :
Call me a libertarian (actually, don't) but I don't see why people should only get a free pass on their _subconscious_ desires. As long as they can find other people to go along with them.
1) I used to think Scully from the X-Files was fairly hot, and consequently, Gillian Anderson was hot. And then I saw an interview with Gillian Anderson...and she came off as an idiot.
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I think part of this gets into the fact that everyone is lying to themselves about sexual attraction, and trans people is where they right right smack into the truth of that. So here goes my controversial statement:
Sexual attraction is, despite what we like to pretend, probably entirely learned. Yes, even sexual orientation.(1)
I _understand_ why gay people like to present it as genetic, but we have obvious ample evidence of this not being true that we completely ignore. (I.e., there has been _cultural_ homosexuality, stuff that makes no sense at all if it's some sort of inherent trait.)
Please note saying sexual attraction is learned is not the same thing as saying it is changeable past adolescence, nor is it saying we try to change it or should condemn any specific sort of it, like homosexuality. I honestly think the whole 'It's genetic' nonsense has done a grave disservice to our discussion of this. I understand where that idea came from, and the purpose that was trying to be served by it...but that doesn't mean it's actually true.
Anyway, trans people run right into that wall. Men (And it's usually men who are freaked out.) have imprinted on an attraction to a certain type of face, a certain shape of the body, a way of speaking and dressing, and think that means they are 'straight'...and then run smack into the idea that such a person is 'really' a man, and their circuit breakers all trip.
And I think a large part of that is that we're making assumptions about sexual orientation being some sort of 'true' thing, instead of just 'When my teenage mind was sexually developing, it became attracted to certain body types, and this person, regardless of how they were born or what they have between their legs, is that body type, and hence I am sexually attracted to them.'.
But instead we still get the whole 'Being gay is genetic!' silliness, which also means being straight is genetic, and hence straight people magically can't be attracted to someone born with a penis. And so if they _attracted_ to such a person, they clearly were 'tricked'. (The alternative being that they are actually gay, which means they must take the position they were tricked.)
Whether or not they still date the person is up-to-them, but it would at least reduce transpobia a great deal. And homophobia, too.
tl;dr: I think we'd be better off if we stopped talking about 'sexual orientation' and more about 'the types of people that the person finds sexually attractive'.
1) I have no idea if gender dysphoria is also the same thing, I'm just arguing sexual attraction here. I'm more inclined to think that gender dysphoria actually is genetic, or, rather, caused by hormonal variations during development. And not 'learned'. But some of it might be. And, again, that doesn't mean it can be _changed_ later, or we should attempt that.
On “Linky Friday #36”
1) Soundproofing. Duh. Ain’t never lived in a duplex, have ya?
Except they could just _buy_ soundproofing material and put it in walls during construction for a good deal less money than building two exterior walls, and it will work much better at soundproofing. (Depending on what the walls are made of, it's entirely possible that the existing setup is not very soundproof anyway.)
2) cost of living/standard of living. probably still cheaper than san francisco.
Looking at the cost of houses in Echo Park, it's not apparently that far out of line for houses of that square footage. So this is less an absurdity of 'skinny houses' and more an absurdity of LA's housing market.
3) Stairs are good for people. Exercise is good for people
Except that constantly going up and down stairs is not good for your knees. And in a flat condo, you have to walk _farther_, which is just as much exercise. There is no health benefit to translating horizontal movement, which our legs are designed to do, into stair movement, which our legs are _not_ designed to do.
Now, yes, if you live on the third floor of a block of condos, walking up the stairs instead of taking the elevator is better, because any movement is better than none. But stairs are not better than walking, so it's even better for you to take a lap around the garage and then take the elevator up.
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I'm confused about the 'fracking chemicals don't reach the water' thing.
Mainly, I ask: Who said they did?
Everyone knows the chemicals they're using for the fracking don't generally reach the drinking water, or we would detect them _in the drinking water_. Duh.
Wasn't the problem that the natural gas reaches the water? That's why people can light their water on fire.
Also, is anyone else baffled at the idea they're allowed to call such chemicals 'trade secrets'? From what I understand, to keep a trade secret, you have to attempt to protect it...you can't just assert trade secret protections for every random thing.
You know how not to protect a trade secret? Insert it into the ground and leave it laying there where anyone can drill down and recover it, and run it though a mass spectrometer to find out what it is.
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I have three comments about these houses:
1) In what possible way is building two houses separated by a few inches better than building townhouses with shared walls? It takes more material, more heating and cooling, more of everything, and has no actual advantage at all except ego pumping to live in an 'actual house' instead of a condo.
They assert that the fees are 'smaller' than condo fees, but that can't possibly be _caused_ by how they're building the houses. (Shared walls, apparently, have really expensive upkeep? Somehow?) That's just because they're getting less amenities than condos usually provide, like no pool.
2) Five hundred thousand fucking dollars. At the low end. For 1000 square feet of house.
Yes, I know these are in the city, and land cost is high, but, uh, we're talking about 600 square feet of land.
3) Nice to see they're wasting all their space on stairs and garages and external walls. Instead of, I dunno, building a damn building of flat condos with shared garage and elevators and houses you didn't have to walk up a two flights of steps to go to bed in.
Why do I get the suspicion that when the analogy was made to a 'Prius', it wasn't because of the reason that normal people buy a Prius, it was that asshole stereotype Prius buyer.
I guess buying giant pointless super-expensive houses got too mainstream for those twits. Now they must buy _tiny_ pointless super-expensive houses.
On “Theocratic Democracy”
My answers, as someone left of center, are:
The theocratic democracy, because civil rights start with due process and fair elections, and everything else is under that, because with those two things you can get to the other ones.
I am slightly worried that you did not mention freedom of speech, a right that often suffers in democratic theocracies, with 'anti-blasphemy laws', and such a loophole can be used to crack down on democracy...but I will assume that this democracy will _stay_ a democracy, and that it is legal to actually argue the anti-blasphemy laws should be changed without being subject to them.
If you cannot argue what the laws should be, and run on the platform of changing them, it is not actually a democracy. If _that's_ what you're trying to assert the theocratic democracy has, then that's not a democracy at all.
And, yes, that answer is fairly obvious. In an actual democracy, either the majority of citizens support something, or it doesn't exist. The problem isn't that the religion wants to ban homosexuality, the problem is that the majority of people see nothing wrong with banning it. If the people change their mind, than either the religion will change its mind, or the people will stop allowing the religion to make that law.
Having a religion inserted into a democracy's control is just a way to make that democracy slow to change and rather conservative. Which is annoying, but if it is an actual democracy, as in the citizens are _ultimately_ in charge, the religion has to play along with the actual wishes of the population or eventually lose control.
And now I have a question: What is meant by 'support'?
I 'support' a coup of any dictatorship in general, in the sense I _like_ such a thing. Dictatorships should not, and must not, be stable forms of government. I cheer when dictators are overthrown by _other dictators_. I'd much rather we keep reshuffling the deck on them to see if we can get some sort of democracy to fall out, than for something to happen like North Korea. We must never, ever, have a 'stable dictatorship', because those things are really hard to get rid of, especially after a generator or two.
But if by 'support' you mean _America_ support such a thing with military aid? That is a much more tricky situation, and depends a good deal on who the other side is. And, no, a lot of us on the left took issue with us helping the rebels in Egypt. (If we wanted to help the rebels, we should have just stopped _helping_
And while there are plenty of crappy places that _assert_ to be theocratic democracies, very few of them actually are such things. Most _actual_ theocratic democracies are, well, Europe. Meanwhile, there are functionally no non-crappy dictatorships, whether or not they care about religion. So your hypothetical is a bit silly to start with.
Incidentally, the problem with Mayalsia isn't that it has a state religion. It is that it does not have _due process_ for a large percentage of its population, subjecting them to religious courts. Which, of course, means they are subject to laws that are completely unchangeable...which means they are not living in a democracy. (Not to mention they're being subject to different laws than everyone else.)
On “Racism and Cross-racial Love”
While interracial porn may be more racist in it's portrayal of non-whites (I actually have no idea.), that was not actually the point.
The point is that it portrayals people of other races as _sexual beings_, and doing so will cause young watchers of it to add them to whatever it is in their head that categorizes people as 'sexually attractive'.
It might _also_ be racist and impart stereotypes, but that's sorta a different matter. That sort of bullshit is reprogrammable throughout life, and can be removed with anti-racism messages. Having seen a few racism porn videos is not probably going to make someone a racist.
But it will make, in twenty years or so, actual dark-black actresses start showing up in the media as 'attractive'.
Also, please note that, from what I am aware, often 'interracial porn' is actually black men and white women, which seems more likely to include such stereotypes...and not what I'm talking about at all anyway. The entire point of what I'm saying is to get white teenagers to look at black _women_ lustfully(1), and thus not install the little filter in their brain that says 'white=attractive'.
1) Normally, I'm against objectifying women...but try stopping a 16 year old boy from doing that. I'd rather they at least objectify them in a non race-based way.
On “How to Measure Poverty”
I don’t think we’ve adequately defined poverty, at least for the purposes of dealing with poverty as an economic and social problem, unless we deal with opportunity issues that are not strictly determined by material conditions.
It's an interesting fact, and one that is never reflected in any measure of poverty, that someone who works two eight-hour jobs a day for $8 an hour is much much poorer than someone who works one eight-hour job a day for $16 an hour.
They both make $320 a week, but one of them has half the transportation costs, less child-care costs, can actually go grocery shopping and make meals instead of buying fast food, etc, etc.
A good deal of what actually limits the poor is lack of _time_, not money. That's half the reason they make the 'poor choices' that morons yammer about. They are eating at McDonalds instead of making sandwiches for lunch because they have no time to make sandwiches for lunch. It's like no one realizes the poor don't have damn personal assistants.
I'd like to see some sort of measurement of poverty that started taking away some of people's apparent income for each hour over ten a day they worked. Or, hell, just a cutoff...you work 14 hours a day, for the purposes of figuring if you're at the poverty line or not, we only count the first 10 hours of that, and the money that made you. (Except averaged, in case you work two jobs with different payscales.) Or at half the amount it makes.
Each hour worked over ten a day _does_ get someone more money, but it almost certainly adds so much more in costs back that we really should have something to represent that.
On “Centrism and the GOP”
To the contrary, there are many topics where the GOP lines up closer to public opinion than their Democrat counterparts. For example, their support for gun rights had widespread agreement as does their stances on immigration and education.
Uh, no. The American people are often vastly in favor of gun control policies the right is shooting down, such as expanding background checks. ~86% of _Republicans_ are in favor of that.
If you actually start talking about _policies_, almost any policies the Democrats have suggested, there is anything from a slight majority to an overwhelming majority in favor of it. 51% want to ban 'assault weapons', whatever that means, 60% want bans on large clips, the entire damn country wants expanded background checks.
If you start talking about 'gun control' as a whole...well, I was going to say that the trained seals the Republican party had created will bark it down, but actually a very slight majority of American are in favor of stronger gun control, _period_. With no specifics at all. I will repeat: A slight _majority_ of Americans, when asked 'Would you like a law to restrict gun ownership more?', said _yes_, without a specific law or policy in front of them. (And another 35% or so said 'The laws are fine'. It's only 10% who want looser laws.)
Things that ~53% of the public support _as a general statement_, and support _even more_ with specific policies, are not something that people who oppose them are 'closer to public opinion' in.
http://www.pollingreport.com/guns.htm
On “Racism and Cross-racial Love”
Choosing a specific subset of 'women you are attracted to' as the sort of women you're marry is fine. Hell, everyone does that.
Likewise, even the situation described in this article, of who someone wants their daughter to marry...I don't think it's that reasonable to parental prejudices to show up there, but I _do_ think it's reasonable for parents to say 'I don't care who you marry, but I want you to raise our grandkids Jewish'. (Although note there's a different between them _saying_ that and thinking they have the right to demand that.)
In other words, I think people should butt out of other people's relationships, _especially_ if all they have to offer is random prejudices. Everyone has the right to date and marry whoever they want. (Erm, within the bounds. You start dating someone while married to someone else, people have the right to call you on it. Or if you generally act like an asshole to them, other people are going to start asking your SO why they're with you.)
But family traditions...yes, the family can suggest continuing them with children, as long as they understand they are not actually in charge, and take no for an answer. And someone can certainly base their 'Who will I marry?' decision on that.
Religion honestly isn't that different than any other thing that is a part of someone's life. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to find someone who also has the same thing as part of their life to marry.
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Yeah, I find the concept those are the same thing somewhat confusing also.
I mean, for example, I don't date _men_, but, assuming I had a daughter, I presumably would not be upset at her marrying a man. (And I also would not be upset at a hypothetical son of mine marrying a man, but that's not the point here.)
Now, as for dating...there is an interesting 'standard of beauty' thing going on, and if we can't think that people of another race are _attractive_, there is some question if we can think of them as equals. And there's the whole problem of us assuming that 'attractive=better', which, combined with 'more attractive=more white' (Almost all 'attractive black women' that society presents are somewhat light skinned, of example.), is an actual concern.
But I suspect that's basically an exposure issue, and will sort itself out as actual racism gets stomped out. And part of it is that the media has a really fucked up idea of what is 'attractive' in the first place. And there's no real way to fix it _besides_ exposure...you figure out who is attractive when you're a teenager, and it sticks. (Apparently, I'm making a plea for more interracial porn.;) )
Meanwhile, judging people who are dating _other people_ is an entirely different thing. There are plenty of valid reasons to think that a couple is a bad couple. Their contrasting race is not one of them, and doing so makes you a racist idiot.
Also, and let me just point this out, in case this is something specific about fathers: It is not men's place to police who their adult daughter(1) marries or dates. Especially not based on their father's own prejudice.
That is not to say that _all_ possible concern are unwarranted. Sure, if he appears to never have a job and is living off her, raise that as a concern before marriage. If he steals all her stuff and sells it for drugs, it is indeed reasonable to assert that even dating him is a bad idea.
But fathers do not own their daughters. Or their daughter's vaginas.
1) I'm putting 'adult' in their specifically as a qualifier. It is indeed the job of parents to police their underaged children...but not in a racist or sexist way, and they also should probably not interfere with who their child decides to date. (How their child dates, however, is something else.) This is a much more complicated issue, so I restrict this to 'adult' children, considering the article is talking about who their daughter _marries_.
On “Religious Liberty Means Religious Privilege”
This is where my vestigial libertarianism makes itself known.
Heh, mine shows up here also.
And then I want to swing back the other way and say 'You are not 'your business'. Your corporation is a legal entity that has separate legal liability, finances, and now, stupidly, personhood. Corporations are allowed to exist only as public good. Just like we do not let legal liability of the corporation bleed over into you, we do not let your personal prejudices bleed over into the business. '
I.e., someone selling roasted peanuts on the side of the road, sure, they can discriminate. A _corporation_ selling something? No.
And, when I swing back the other way....what I do think that, _if_ we want to give corporations the right to refuse service to classes to people, they, _at minimum_, should be required to post that information in a visible place. 'We do not serve gay people'.
And, hell, they should probably have to put it in their corporate charter. Corporations are _supposed_ to be operated strictly for a single purpose, and for most for-profit corporations that purpose is 'making money'. If they have an exception to 'making money' because of 'gay cooties', they need to put that in their charter.
Yes, plenty of charters have wiggle room that would let them do stuff like that (For the same reason they can donate to charity...it makes them look good, so in theory makes them even more money than they donated.)...but it's perfectly reasonable to require them to _explicitly_ put specific sorts of behavior in their charter, as long as there is a long enough phase-in that existing corporations can modify their charter.
On “In Service To The State”
I am sometimes not as obviously funny as I think I am.
I am not _actually_ proposing this, because the entire idea of National Service is silly. As Kazzy pointed out, there are really no jobs it makes sense.
And in jobs where it _does_ make sense, we'd be better off giving those jobs to the unemployed instead of forcing random people to do it. Seriously, that would be rather assholish of us. 'Yes, I know you're unemployed and you _want_ to be paid $10 an hour to remove unauthorized flowers from the Metro, but instead we're going to force this rich idiot to do it'.
I was just pointing out how to not make such a tax regressive.
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That's why I said 'All armed conflicts should be limited to fighting off invasions of US soil until a vote of the population is taken.' instead of 'war'.
The term 'war' is easy to manipulate. _No soldier should ever fire a weapon_ outside the US until we, as a nation, have voted. (With some sort of reasonable exemption for fighting off invaders. I'm okay for some sort of 'Canada has already invaded so we can preemptively shoot their soldiers even if they're standing over the border' rule.)
I don't know what sort of percentage should be required, or if we should use the electoral college or house districts or what. Hell, I'd argue it should follow law rules...let's require both a majority of house districts vote for it, and a majority of states to represent senators.
Regardless, all I do know is not only should there have to be a vote, it _shouldn't_ be by the people we elected to run our government normally, especially if we had no idea there would be the option of a war when we did the election.
War is too important. And it's treated like it's not.
And, yes, there are a lot of people calling for a draft to try to make this point, but that's nonsense. We don't need a draft so the country will take a war seriously...we just need to _ask_ the country, which already _does_ take wars seriously. It's the goddamn media and politicians who don't take it seriously.
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Oh, I'm not trying to imply that a lot of them are. I'm sorry if it read that way. Almost no libertarians support that.
But the article cited here making the case _against_ libertarians supporting national service does exist for a reason. It is a real phenomenon. A completely, utterly baffling phenomenon.
..baffling, at least, until you remember the 'resenting the poor' libertarians. The ones who are libertarians because they don't want to support the 'lazy poor'...and here is a way to actually make those good-for-nothing people work! (I have no idea what _actual_ percentage of libertarians think like this, but when I discuss things long enough with libertarians online, I generally find this about 1/10th of them will just come out and say that. But that's a very self-selecting poll of people, namely, people who debate on the internet...and I have no idea how many of those people would support mandatory national service anyway. I'm just saying the ones who _do_ support that are that sort of libertarian.)
The irony, of course, is assuming that this national service paid people (and it wouldn't really work if it didn't.) and it was required to accept everyone and couldn't kick them out (which, again, is required for it to be 'mandatory'), the 'lazy poor' would be signing up for this left and right _without_ it being mandatory. Because it would be a _job_.
And the libertarians would be calling it 'large government' and 'make work'.
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So what does it tell you when lots of so-called progressives clearly support it?
Assuming that 'lots' of progressives do support it, which I don't think is accurate, it tells me that those progressive supporters have not actually thought it through.
There's a difference between progressives, who are usually fine with most taxes, wanting to add a new one without thinking it though. Vs. libertarians, who often wish to remove most taxes and claim forcing people to do things is the _only_ thing the government should stop...suddenly start hoping the government will force people to do things.
People who support a stupid version of a thing that is _like_ what they normally support are just ignorant. People who support a stupid version of a thing that _they normally hate and is completely opposite every principle they hold_...something else is going on there.
You carry a cake past me every day, and one day you try to carry a giant unbalanced wedding cake and it falls on me...well, that was a stupid accident. You hate cakes, claim they are fattening and taste bad, and how you'd never eat one, and no one should ever carry one around...and then, one time, you buy a giant 'unbalanced' wedding cake and carry it past me and it 'falls on me'...yeah, right.
And this is, again, assuming that progressives actually support a _mandatory_ year of service. I've heard plenty of progressives talk about how national service would be awesome as something we expect of people, but heard very little talk about how it should be _required_. The _required_ talk all appears to be coming from right-ward.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.