Commenter Archive

Well, yes, we could stop gay marriage as a way to frown on homosexual relationships. (Although this point in time, it is questionable whether society is generally against them.)

Except that part where we passed a law decades ago banning discrimination based on sex. You know, the law that should have instantly remove any sort of gender requirement for anything, including marriage.

I am confused as to how 'public safety' and 'how the public thinks you ought to behave' can't be the same thing.

The public is opposed to all sorts of things that endanger it, and thinks you ought not do them. (In fact, that's the most consistent thing the public opposes!)

I was just making the point that 'Ought' is just less than 'must'. Felonies are things you 'must' not do, so we oppose them very much, and will lock people away for them. Misdemeanors are supposed to be simply things you ought not do, and basically are public disapproval.

I think what a few people have failed to notice is that small fines and taxes are how we, as society, registers disapproval. Society is not small enough that we can give people a 'good frowning'. Instead, we have the police stop you and give you a ticket. (And some people have also failed to notice that skiing is an activity that almost entirely takes place inside of a specific business set up for that purpose, so requiring helmets will simply mean you get handed a helmet when you show up at the ski lodge, and they won't let you on the lift without it.)

There seems to be some sort of disconnection in libertarian thinking about the purpose of misdemeanors. Their purpose is not to punish people, or to protect other people, their purpose is to say 'We, as society, think you need to stop doing that.'. Aka, you do need to wear a helmet, you do need to buckle your seatbelt, you do need to stop parking in handicap places. We will keep annoying you until you do.

This is a _replacement_ for how the world used to work, in small villages, where people used to know who you were.

And, admittedly, abuse of police powers makes me hesitant to give them any more authority. But the correct solution is to stop them from abusing their powers.

Likewise, some stuff isn't really any of society's business. It's not really anyone's business whose sexual partner is whose, or what color bookcases you have in your house. This is a great advantage of having the shaming 'formalized', we can actually change it, instead of waiting 60 years for all the old busybodies to die off.

And there's a specific problem of misdemeanor creep, where we take misdemeanors and turn them into felonies when they almost certainly shouldn't be. For a random example, public indecency laws should be misdemeanors, not the 'sex felony' we've turned them into, which is worse then normal felonies. Likewise, drug use should be a misdemeanor, if that.

But, again, the correct solution something else, specifically to stop this 'tough on crime' nonsense. We need to be tough on _assailants_, tough on people who run around hurting others. We don't need to be tough on misdemeanors, which is _supposed_ to be how society wags its finger at people.

(Incidentally, I know there's a problem with misdemeanors and the level of punishment for the rich vs. the poor. But that's an issue for another day.)

Right. The show tends to use adults when talking about serious topics, or at least have them the subject of the topic.

Muppets are a stand in for children, yes, even the 'adult' muppets like Bert and Ernie. (People forget, they live alone with no authority figures, they are 'adults'. They're not a 'couple', but they are adult roommates. And it's to show how children should act when living with roommates.)

But 'adult' muppets are the equivalent of 'playing house'. It's a 'Here is what you can be when you grow up' fantasy, as opposed to 'Here are some adultish issues', which tend to be shown by having real humans.

Well, unless it's the kids themselves who have the issues, at which point they get muppets. The HIV-positive muppet, Tami, over in Africa, was not to teach children about 'people who have HIV', it's because of the sad fact is that all too many of Sesame Street's viewers _themselves_ have HIV, so those kids got a standin.

However, Sesame Street's viewers are not gay. Well, not yet...and there's plenty of talk about people who are 'different' that applies to gay (or pre-gay, or whatever you want to call it) children equally well.

However, they do know gay adults and teenagers. And thus there should be (human) adult gay characters on the show.

Erm, the idea of teaching gun safety to kids is not insane, and has probably already been done at some point on Sesame Street. Although at that age gun safety is 'Don't touch guns'. (Sometimes, I think a lot of people talking about Sesame Street don't actually remember it.)

I'll ignore the babysitter stuff, which is possibly a mistake on the part of lawmakers, and concentrate on the nannies, because the laws doesn't make sense there either.

I'm the last person to be willing to shrug and say 'They knew what they were in for' when it comes to employment. I don't think workers should be required to work in smoke-filled bars, or near dangerous machinery, even if they explicitly are told that as part of their employment. Employers can't just disclaim that sort of thing.

And even I think this law is stupid. Being woken up in the middle of the night is part of the actual job of a live-in nanny. That is the reason they exist. There is otherwise no purpose to having a nanny live in your house.

Likewise, part of the premise of a nanny is they are caring for children when there is no one else around. It makes absolutely no sense for them to have 'breaks'. Perhaps there could be some sort of mandated 'relaxation time' where the parents can't tell them what to do, and they're allowed to just stick the kids on the couch and relax...but I'm not entirely convinced this has ever not been happening. (We've all heard horror stories of parents who give babysitters entirely full schedules, with every minute planned out, and that might happen to 3 hours a month babysitters...I have a feeling it doesn't really happen with 40 hour a week nannies. No one has the time to schedule that stuff.)

I quite agree that a live-in nanny is an employee, not a contractor, and there have been all sorts of abuses in that regard, including minimum wage violations. But that doesn't mean regulating them as if their job is identical to everyone else's makes sense.

Although I will argue that there should probably be a slightly lower wage allowed if they are given room and probably board. Or just flat daily deduction from wages for that. Actually, I'd argue that someone living in your house on call at any time of day technically should be a contract worker, and not paid by the hour at all. Although danger lies in that direction, because you know people will pay for six hours of work a day and expect 14. But as that's already happening...

Ah, I don't use them there, because I had a limited amount, so I first replaced them in places I have on for hours at a time, like the kitchen and office and hall. I will make a note that short term lights need to be LEDs, which I've been planning on looking into anyway.

Incandescents, while we're talking about places you shouldn't use types of lights, are crap in enclosed fixtures. Incandescents get killed by heat, and it's amazing how poorly designed many lighting fixtures are.

I have some 'flower' looking fixtures in the kitchen, where the bare bulb points downwardish and is surrounded by fancy glass, and those just ate incandescent bulbs. The glass had holes that in theory would let the heat out, but that clearly didn't work.

Same with the desk lamps with the enclosed metal 'head' that you point downward. Even if you follow the rules and only use 45 watt, they only last so long before they cook themselves. (Table lamps, OTOH, have hole at the top the heat can escape out, so don't do that.)

If you have any of those, replace them with CFLs right now. (I don't actually know CFLs last longer if placed in the 'same' heat...but as they generate much less heat to start with, it's moot.) Although if you turn them on and off a lot, you might want LED.

I have exactly one CFL that has 'failed' over the three years or so I've been using them. And that failure seems to because the base is loose...I can tap it a few times it and it comes back on. This seems to be some sort of manufacturing defect, unless this is how CFLs 'burn out'. (I've been assuming they fail like normal florescent tubes...having weird flickers and light only at the ends. But I admit I don't know this for a fact.)

Meanwhile, I've replaced multiple incandescent bulbs over those three years, some of them multiple times. (I didn't replace them all with CFL at once because a) money, and b) I wanted use up all the old bulbs I had...which I am doing. It's about time for another bulk CFL purchase, though, I'm out of incandescent 60 watts, and had to stick a 45 in for one of them a few weeks ago.)

I have no idea if I'm saying money on the cost of the bulbs _alone_, but I'm pretty certain that once you factor in reduced power consumption and reduced air conditioning, I am.

And if CFLs are going out at your house, you probably have crappy power. Possibly you're having slight brownouts and under- or over-voltages. Do you also have problems with computers crashing? (Although note that the less crappy the power supply of a computer is, the less that will happen. Good power supplies can coast through those. And laptops obviously have no problem at all.)

I’m not sure which liberatarians you’re talking about.

I think you've misunderstood my post. I'm not talking about the actual 10% who do have a philosophical position. I know Paul is one of those, and Barr, after he retired, had a 'come to Jesus' moment about both marijuana and SSM. (He's doing work for the ACLU right now!) I don't know anything about Flake, but I'll take his web page at its word and assume he's one also.

I'm talking about people like Glenn Beck, whose described himself as 'conservative with a libertarian leaning'. I'm talking about a guy I talk politics with in real life, whose a 'libertarian' as long as we're talking about social services and thinks 'Obamacare' is unconstitutional, but has no problem with waging war forever.

And then they rant about 'big government' when it's talking about government regulation, and rant about being 'pro-family' when they're talking about forcing women to give birth, etc, etc.

The entire right seems have a series of random positions, and half a dozen philosophies that gets pulled out whenever needed to justify each individual position.

I can respect people who _actually have a position_, even if I don't agree with it. I can even respect people who mostly have a position but sometimes have exceptions to it, or at least what looks sorta like exceptions. (For example, a libertarian who thinks that drugs should be restricted, because everyone should be free to do whatever they want, and once people take addictive drugs, they are no longer free. I.e., people should be free, but not free to enslave themselves.)

But I can't respect people who can yank out a 'pro-family' position to demonize abortion, and then in their next breath yank out a 'small government' position to justify reducing WIC.

It sure is a bit strange that the issues the libertarians seem to be most vocal about (At least, the politicians calling themselves libertarians.) are issues that the right cares about, and issues the left opposes.

People actually concerned about liberty should be, for example, a little more worried about the apparent ability of the executive to imprison people without charge and torture them than the ability of the executive and legislative, together, to order people to pay for health insurance. The latter may also be a violation of rights, but it's the difference between someone stabbing me with a knife vs. someone stealing a nickel from me. And you can always vote those people out and change the law, unlike the whole 'torture' thing, which no one gave anyone any permission to start in the first place, and was in fact illegal.

Likewise, it sure is a coincidence that most things the 'balance the budget' people worry about are things the right cares about. $10 billion in education? Slash it. $300 billion for war? Keep it. $200 billion in tax cuts? Keep them.

And it sure is interesting how many pro-life people have some sort of opposition to government health care, even after you point out that the majority of abortions are due to financial costs and you could cut abortions by at least 25% by providing free pre-natal care and an easy way to give the baby up for adoption.

Seriously, I hate to actually say this here, because I know I'm talking to people for whom it is not true. You people here are honest.

But 90% of the people who claim to have a philosophical position on the right just appear to have picked some things they already wish to happen, found a philosophical position that can be used to argue those things, and done so. They do not actually seem to hold that philosophical position. They do not actually seem to want to balance the budget, or stop abortion, or stop government abuses of freedom...they wish to do something specific, and have decided claiming that they have a 'philosophy' is the best way to do it.

The funniest example of this is opposition to gay marriage, where the philosophical objections, uh, fell utterly apart and very sound stupid now, so there's just a bunch of people with an unjustifiable belief that gay people shouldn't marry and they're just randomly fishing for reasons, and randomly spouting nonsense.

'Children need mothers and fathers.' 'So single parents suck? And children should stay in the foster care system instead of being adopted?'
'People should only marry to have children.' 'So infertile people shouldn't marry?'
'It will hurt marriage.' 'You do realize that half of all straight marriages end in divorce, right? And what do you mean, 'hurt'? Marriage is legal status, it is not an actual object that can be damaged.'

They are literally flailing around trying to find some sort of philosophical justification, no matter how nonsensical, or how little those supposed problems have bothered us before. The anti-gay marriage crowd is, at this point, starting to sound deranged, and probably should switch to the actual reason they oppose it: 'We think gay sex is icky and/or we don't like people outside traditional gender roles.'

The right comes up with 'philosophies' like this (when it can) because all too often, what the right wants actually does sound deranged on its own, so it has to carefully crouched in some sort of system where it's 'required'. This is because what the right wants often is deranged, I am sorry to say.

Perhaps I biased, and the left is just as dishonest. But somehow I really don't think so.

Yes, I agree completely. I have no problems with all sorts of crazy tricks to get the suspect to reveal facts they don't know (1), or point to other evidence. I'll all for any sort of lies and trickery to get that, because someone can't panic and _falsely_ reveal where they buried the body. If someone blurts that out, it doesn't matter how we got them to do it. (Barring, obviously, torture, which is such a horrible thing that we would demand they get set free to keep from setting up any sort of torture regime. Or, at least, that's the theory.)

However, we have plenty of evidence that people will _confess_ to all sorts of nonsense if you get them in the right psychological state. Frankly, I'm this close to saying 'No confessions should be allowed, period'. (And certainly no non-documented confessions. I'm sorry, if you're not recording, the suspect didn't say it, period.)

The problem is, of course, the court system is so overburdened and underfunded that, without a huge amount of confessions and pleas, it would immediately fall apart. (Instead of the slow several-decade-long falling apart it's doing now.)

1) Which is why we should _absolutely_ record every moment of an interrogation, so we can say 'Hey, look, he just said the murder weapon was a shovel, and we've only told him and the media it was a blunt object', and actually have some sort of proof that somewhere in the four hour interrogation that no one _did_ say it was a shovel.

Like I said, I'm of the opinion that the defendant ought to be able to expand the bounds to whatever point he feels like.

Of course, expanding the boundaries would also mean the prosecution gets those expanded bounds in that case also. If the defendant claims they smoke pot to relieve pain, the prosecution can introduce evidence that they were convicted of possession previously, well before the pain supposedly started. Or that they do not, in fact, have any pain.

I think to have any sort of legal system, we have to allow defendants to make any sort of arguments they want and prove any sort of thing in court, as long as they actually _can_ prove it. (And as the entire point of court _is_ proving things, I don't really see the problem there.)

But, obviously, at the very very very least, the police should have to record interactions with a suspect. I was just pointing out that they oppose doing that because, apparently, juries don't like the police's tactics of lying when shown them, and find people not guilty.

I'm sorry, if apparently people do not like the tactics of the police so much they find people innocent when they learn police do that, perhaps we, as society, shouldn't be doing that. Seriously.

This is outside any sort of appeal to 'justice' or honesty or anything. The government should not be doing things that people find unpalatable to convict people in a representative society.

What I find astonishing is that the police use the fact they lies as part of the justification for not recording all interactions with defendents.

Apparently, juries really really don't like it when grab a random suspect, you lie to them, and they confess, and that's the entire case. They don't like it at all.

A lot of the problem with our justice system is that we've decided to restrict the information that juries know. I think that juries should have _every_ fact the defendant wants them to hear. Every single ones. The prosecutor, yes, should have to go through a filter and not be allowed to introduce certain evidence, but the defendant should be allowed to present any actually true fact as evidence.

Otherwise we get evidence that 'They signed a confession' and not 'They signed a confession because of this 10 hour long interrogation, which we will now play for the jury, and see how the jury feels at the end of it.'.

It also comes into effect in other places, where society considers certain things migrating factors and is hesitate to convict those people. Like someone with unmanageable pain rarely gets convicted of pot smoking even in places without medical marijuana. Solution: The law forbids them from mentioning their medical issues.

At some point we decided that juries were being too nice, and took way too many things away from them, including knowledge of actual facts.

I am confused at the idea that 'No doubt some bankers broke the law and should be held to account for it, but not all did.'

Really? Not all did? I love the fact that we have forgotten that banks knowingly giving people a loan those people can't afford is fraud.

We don't need to get into hypothetical, possible lies about documentation, the general nonsense in not trading the titles right, the utter failure to actually put loans in the CDOs...

...because a bank standing there and issuing someone a loan they know that person will not be able to pay off is, in and of itself, bank fraud. Really. That is not legal for a bank to do.

Granted, some of those loans were probably honest mistakes...just like some of the people standing inside a store with a broken window holding a TV were just carrying their legally purchased TV home via a poorly-thought-out shortcut.

But at this point, arresting every single loan originate who had more than X% of the loans they signed off on fail would be, statistically, more 'just' than arresting people in a mob of looters.

Both the mortgage crisis and the looting are a total breakdown in law and order...but one of them was done by professionals, after those professionals lobbied the government for years to remove regulation to stop it., whereas the looters are opportunistic people who showed up at riots.

I think, perhaps, we should consider the people responsibly for, the people who participated in, the mortgage crisis, to be just a little more premeditated. We can treat the 'looters' that way when they spend a decade creating laws that say the laws don't apply to what they're doing...actually, strike that...they'd still do a lot less damage.

A speech by a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/kroszner20081203a.htm

'Putting together these facts provides a striking result: Only 6 percent of all the higher-priced loans were extended by CRA-covered lenders to lower-income borrowers or neighborhoods in their CRA assessment areas, the local geographies that are the primary focus for CRA evaluation purposes. This result undermines the assertion by critics of the potential for a substantial role for the CRA in the subprime crisis. In other words, the very small share of all higher-priced loan originations that can reasonably be attributed to the CRA makes it hard to imagine how this law could have contributed in any meaningful way to the current subprime crisis.'

Actually, if taught _contextually_, I think the sane conclusion would be 'American used to suck'. The problem is that, just like no one bothers to explain the background status quo, like 'Being black in 1930 was no bed of roses, even for black people in New York.' Or 'For most of American history, Native Americans, even ones born in the boundaries of the US, were not citizens'. (Believe it or not, many people do not know that.)

So we end up as with history as a bunch of disjointed nonsense where people rose up to gross injustice...and it's hard not to come away with the impression that 'gross injustice' is the status quo. Which even if it was, it's not anymore. No, not even of gay people. Some injustice, sure, but not 'gross' injustice. Let's just say that the police are not randomly beating them anymore.

Of course, you can get an equally nonsensical concept that everything started being perfect in 1968 or whatever, ignoring the fact it basically took 10 years past then to even make open racism unacceptable.

Teaching random information, with the sole criteria that it was some big memorable thing, is a great way to get random ideas of the truth. No, teach actual history, in order. People will realize things got better.

And when you get to the present day, you can talk about the income gap between black and white people, and present a few theories about it, some of which don't reflect too badly on America (Perhaps people are a lot less economically mobile than we like to think, and black people have just not caught up to white people), and some of which do reflect badly.

But at that point, you're teaching actual truth, in context, and even if they take the worse possible interpretation, they know what it was like for black people 20 years ago, and 50 years ago, and 100 years ago, and 180 years ago, and can say 'I hope it continues to get better', instead of saying 'America sucks'.

I'm actually of the opinion that there are a few issues that shouldn't be intermingled with normal history class, and the treatment of minorities and women are one of them. Why? Because history get taught in order, and mostly out of context.

People _do_ need to know the actual treatment of blacks, in the North, before, during, and after the civil war. Not to make the South 'better', but because without the context, no one really understands anything.

But when exactly do you mention that? During the founding of the country? During the civil war? During the civil rights chapter?

There needs to be a class that says 'In England, here's how slavery started', and moves forward from there, tracing _just_ that one thing. Then rewinds and does women, and then rewinds and does Native Americans, and then rewinds and does the Chinese, and, heck, rewinds and does the Irish.

Or it could do them in linear order, but _just_ focusing on people, not other history.

I think if we taught American history that way, it would be much more obvious what should be included and what wouldn't. You wouldn't have 'Oh, everyone wasn't nice to black people, but the south enslaved them' randomly popping up during the civil war. You'd start with the beginning, and by the time the civil war was reached, everyone's already supposed to know how different places treated black people at that point.

The problem is, of course, a class like this just _begs_ to be called 'liberal indoctrination'. It's hard to even think of a name of it that people wouldn't object to.

I'm exactly with you on the worse case scenario. We have a pattern in this country. First-gen immigrants get here, work hard, and get crapped on, second-gen go out and become culturally Americans, and everyone after them celebrates their 'heritage' by once a decade taking a vacation to their 'home country' and eating some weird food they pretend to like, and then coming back home to America.

Let's not do anything to screw it up. It's made us one of the most resilient countries in the world, and it's a reason that smart people who never fit in in their home country come here.

OTOH, I probably should remember that, as long as it's been happening, there's been prejudice against it, too. So in the end, it will probably work out.

As for immigration reform, I'm all for it. One of the worst things that can happen to a country is to keep an underclass that is outside the law. It's a near infinite pool of victims, and a rather large pool of possible criminals, too. (This doesn't just apply to immigrants. See: prostitutes.) Likewise, having a huge funnel of people coming in illegally cannot possibly help keeping terrorists out.

I'll even admit that we have a somewhat unique situation with Mexico. It's a lot easier to get here from there then from, for example, Italy. Likewise, until the situation gets better over there, they won't stop coming here. (Which would seem to be self-correcting...except the problems there aren't due to over-population. They're due to violent drug cartels, which would be entirely happy with 95% of the population leaving Mexico.)

This is why, although I'm opposed to most forms of foreign aid, I actually think we should step in and fix Mexico, as best we can...it's one thing to screw around with countries halfway around the world, but they're neighbors. Especially as a very large portion of their problems are due to the drug war's money and hence are _our fault_.

But a lot of the people are, as you say, ready to close the borders and hunt 'illegals'. My state, Georgia, rather stupidly decided to keep them out of our fields...and lost half of our harvest this year.

He has a daughter. However, at no point does he appear to have a _wife_. It's the future. Him having a daughter with another man is entirely reasonable.

If they can create Khan in 1960 or whenever, surely they can create a person with two biological fathers by the time of TOS. (Hell, we're not that far away from that now.)

And while making Sulu gay(1) might be 'too obvious', sometimes the obvious thing is the easy thing, and it would be a nice acknowledgement to George Takei.

1) I say, writing from the hetronormative position that all people are straight until proven otherwise. In actual fact, it wouldn't be 'making him' gay, because we literally have no idea of his sexual orientation. (Alternate Sulu was straight, or at least bi...but alternate Kira was bi, and normal Kira is straight. So clearly that can vary between dimensions. Or perhaps all Sulus are just bi.)

History, in grade school, is taught as a sequence of events. In practice, this means government and social events. Textbooks are hardly going to talk about the longest pass in professional football, or the biggest ball of twine ever constructed. And government actions are pretty cut and dry: We declared war, we elected so-and-so, we bought Alaska, whatever. There's really not much of a political slant there, despite the fact you'll run across an odd book idolizing JFK or Reagan.

With social changes, you can go one of two ways: You can teach that things got better, or that things got worse. But then you're in a paradox on the slantedness. If you teach that things 'got better', you're implying that before then, they were wrong. If you teach that they got worse, you're implying they're bad now.

So the only changes that get taught are ones that everyone agrees on the direction of the change. Mostly good, but with some bad. (Like the racism and Jim Crow laws that built up after the civil war, for an example of bad.)

Likewise, you'll find that women gained a lot of rights during the 60s and 70s...but, strange, abortion does not seem to be listed there. You might, possibly, find a mention of it...but it will be minimized. Because they don't want to take a position on it. (In fact, they tend to paint an almost surreally distorted view of the social changes in that time period. I've even read a textbook which seemed unaware the Vietnam war and the draft played any part in the social unrest!)

But then you've shot yourself in the foot. Almost all societal changes, in recent American history, that people agree on the direction of, are liberal changes. And if you limit yourself to only good changes, well, now you've created a universe where everything good has been done by liberals.

This is why I keep saying the nativists in America are dangerous.

Why? Because we _have immigration_. Sure, we could we turn into Norway or Britian, we could start marginalizing immigrants...and then we have idiotic riots two generations later because we treat the 'Mexicans' like crap.

Or we can just assimilate them like we've always done, and two generations later the 'Mexicans' and everyone else will be the Cinco de Mayo parade...just like they're at the St. Patrick's one. And then they all go home as _Americans_, and we don't have idiotic society-destroying unrest. (Meanwhile, the Nativists will be yelling about Hindus or something. These Nativists, ironic and un-self-awaredly, will contain plenty of Mexican immigrants from two generations ago.)

There are two types of societies...there's America, and probably a few others I'm not aware of, that can bend and let others in...and there's the ones that break.

And I'm not sure in this modern world that attempting to stop immigration is very plausible. But we are _incredibly_ lucky to live in a country that knows how to deal with it, and not live in a place like Norway or Japan, or even a place like Britain.

This is because most 'zero tolerance' laws are about things that really really shouldn't be illegal in the first place.

For example, it is perfectly reasonable to have a school rule stating that students cannot carry heroin around. (Although I question why, exactly, you'd need that rule.) Saying they can't carry aspirin? What _exactly_ are we attempting to stop here? Students taking aspirin? Uh, why do we care about that?

There's a line somewhere, but it should probably be 'Students who have prescription drugs must keep them in the bottle and turn in a copy of the prescription to the office. And students are prohibits from exchanging either prescription or over-the-counter drugs with other students. Dosages of common over-the-counter drugs such as aspirin or cough syrup are available in the nurse's office if the student does not wish to bring them from home.' or something like that. Not insane 'ALL DRUGS GET YOU EXPELLED' nonsense.

Almost all 'zero tolerance' laws came about because someone pass a damn stupid law to start with, and the people in charge of enforcing it _saw_ how stupid it was and rarely enforced it.

Idiotic solution: Make it non-optional to enforce it.
Sane solution: Actually figure out that the law is dumb and perhaps needs remaking, or just getting rid of.

Meanwhile, we need to get rid of 90% of prosecutorial discression, and make sure we _document_ the rest of it so we know when it's clearly being applied against 'undesirables'. The problem is when cops can just let 'good' people keep going and catch 'bad' people.

If they actually have to put everyone in the system, and then note 'But they assured me they didn't know it was illegal, and swore they would stop, and I let them go with a warning.', people can actually look at the record and say 'Wait a minute, that happens 80% of the time when the guy is white, and 10% of the time when he's black'.

This is why I don't have much issue about proprietorial discretion by actual prosecutors, or jury nullification. Once it makes it into the system, you can notice and fix imbalances. It's when it's a cop sitting there who pulls over black drivers going 10 over the limit, and white drivers only if they're going 25, that we can't see the issue.

And it’s even _stupider_ when you realize ‘the poor’ aren’t some magical group of people who have always been poor.

Rereading my post, I realized something:

Everyone here who thinks this study makes any sense seems to implicitly think the 'the poor' are some separate group of people who have always been poor, and have been receiving government checks this entire time so they can 'rise out of poverty', and shouldn't have been wasting that money on luxuries. If they have just saved every incoming penny, now they'd have enough to...I dunno, buy their way out of it.

Or perhaps they were operating on the cusp of poverty, and decided to go out and spend wildly, buying another TV and DVD player and a fancy ceiling fan, so fell over the edge.

That is not how poverty works at all.

Poverty has almost nothing to do with small one time purchases, small being defined as anything under $200. There are purchases that can be the difference between poverty or not, but they're very large things, like cars and houses.

Small purchases don't get you into poverty, they don't keep you there, and not doing them won't get you out. People aren't 'poor by a few dollars'. Poor people are usually short by thousands of dollars, with a shortfall of $500 a month or whatever. Buying a fricking cordless telephone has nothing to do with it.

There are things on the list that are expensive enough that the poor should not buy, like Jacuzis and big screen TVs, where the cost would make an actual difference to their budget...and we have no evidence people are buying those while poor. We just know they're living in a household with them while poor. (Which doesn't even mean they own them, much less purchased them after becoming poor.)

Everyone who thinks 'the poor' purchasing a $20 coffee maker is a problem is a complete and total idiot who has no idea how poverty works...and I include the Heritage Foundation in that.

It doesn’t matter if the A/C is part of the house/apartment or not, if you bought the unit or not, if you have access to it, you have it, and A/C is a luxury both in it’s initial cost and continued cost, and there’s a few billion people out there that’d heartily agree.

First off, things that keep you from dying are by definition not 'luxuries', and second, you have absolutely no evidence that the AC continues to be 'continued cost'. That's if they have it, not if they use it.

In a good portion of the county, air conditioning units are built into every new building. As are dishwashers, and fricking ceiling fans.

In your universe, the poor magically can go 'Oh, no, the installation cost of the air conditioning, when avergaed over my rent payments, add an average $2. I better rent the identical apartment without the air conditioning installed that someone, for some insane reason, built next door, and also happens to be for rent.'

Do you really not see how stupid this is? People cannot actually choose what's built into the houses they are able to find and rent.

And it's even _stupider_ when you realize 'the poor' aren't some magical group of people who have always been poor. Perhaps they used to do okay, and built a house with AC, and now they aren't doing okay. As I pointed out, you can't pull parts of your house out and sell them! (Well, you can, but it's idiotic.)

And, actually, it's the same with pretty much everything on the list. It's not like you can go and resell old TV. Oh, look, this poor person has a 27" CRT, and a 17" inch CRT in the bedroom, bought back when he used to have a job. I guess he should...sell them? No, no one will buy them. Give them to charity? But then other poor people will end up with TVs!

I guess he should just smash them up, to demonstrate he's really poor.

About the only thing you could do that with where it would be worth, to sell something on that list you own, it is the Jacuzi...and I suspect the 0.6% of the poor are just renting somewhere with one. (Yes, it's sounds crazy, but that's not who _own_ one, that's if their 'household has one'. Way more than 0.6% of the poor are living with richer relatives, and a certain amount of those richer relatives are going to be wealthy enough to own a Jacuci.)

Oh, and BTW, a significant portion of rental properties, especially the apartments that the poor are likely to get, come with cable TV for free. And a smaller portion come with internet.

I find this list baffling. First of all, a refrigerator is not an 'amenity'. Neither is a store/oven or a microwave. Those are _necessities_. It's like citing how many poor people appear to own beds and light bulbs!

Likewise, I suspect the percentage of poor people who own air conditioners is mostly the same as all people who own them, nationwide...and an air conditioner is also a necessary in many parts of the country, or are we going to pretend that 200+ poor people don't _die_ in the 2006 heat wave because they don't have one?

Those crazy poor people, buying things so they don't die.

A clothes washer and dryer, of course, is also a neccessity, or you have to spend a lot of money at laundromats. I guess in Heritage's universe, people shouldn't wash clothes.

Secondly, a lot of stuff on that list is _cheap_. Has anyone priced a VCR lately? Anyone wh0 paid more than $10 for a VCR got ripped off. Oh no, some people have more than one! And DVD players are almost twice the price! Of course, some of those poor people might have gotten them for free or whatever, but we'll pretend they went out and spent our tax dollars on them.

Ooo, and fancy cordless phones. Another ten dollars! And answering machines...people out of work don't need those, potential employers can just telepathically call them whenever they're at home.

And I laugh at 'ceiling fans'. Yes, the poor have, inexplicably, refrained from ripping the ceiling fans out of the home they've lived in for a decade to sell for $2 or whatever a used ceiling fan would sell for. The same thing with dishwashers. Those are part of the damn house! It's at that point I realize the list is pretty blatantly dishonest...what's next, how many of the poor own them fancy 'doorbells'?

Once we've removed the things you actually _need_ from the list, and things built into the home, and purchases that literally cost two days worth of food., you run into some interesting facts. For example, less than a third of them have internet, which I guess is the first necessity that gets cut back, instead of cable, which would seem to make more sense. (But, then again, you need a computer for internet.)