Another possibility is how end of life is handled. The very old sometimes simply refuse to eat until they die. The issue then becomes, how is that written up?
RE: And I also suspect that it would make more sense compare naturally-occurring (Not including accident or violence) death rates of various income levels, instead of trying to figure out which deaths are ‘malnutrition’.
The death rate across all income levels holds steady at 100%
RE: I think ‘letting the mentally ill wander the streets without food’ is sorta an economic issue. As is the failure to have any sort of elderly monitoring program.
We'll have to disagree. Social and/or cultural, certainly, but the issue seems to be unlikely to be one of lack of money.
RE: It seems like a big part of malnutrition, at least in developed nations, would be how healthy the *cheapest* food is, the food people select when they have absolutely no money.
Locally the cheapest food is basically handed out at church run food pantries. I think it's mostly potluck (donations from people and businesses... probably including grocery stores). As far as nutrition, potluck wouldn't be a bad way to go. I assume it's stuff the stores somehow got oversupplied on, but it's possible there's more intelligence involved than that.
I believe his argument is going toward utility. If we have OSHA, what is the utility of worker safety rules from a union?
More like "marginal utility".
With OSHA (and for that matter, the increasingly 'office' nature of work and the shift in culture in the last century), there is less need for union created safety.
If it's unsafe work, and/or if management only does the bare min, then sure, a union can probably justify it's existence.
If it's safe work and/or if management prides itself on having zero injuries, then the need for a union is clearly less, but presumably the cost of having one would be the same.
Doing things that are conditions of your employment is not, generally speaking, involuntary, since you can always quit.
Normally the phrase "conditions of your employment" applies to things like...
A: Job description - defining the role, responsibility level (eg Manager, Deputy Manager, Assistant etc).
B: Entitlement - rate of pay, benefits, bonus/overtime rates, etc.
C: Responsibilities: working hours, dress code, reporting illness/absence, annual assessments, complaints procedures, notice periods for leaving/dismissal, requirements to change working hours.
D: General: Depending on the type of job, there might be other conditions restricting the employee taking other part-time work, confidentiality clauses, using company equipment for private use (eg phones, computers, vehicles) general codes of behaviour and adherence to certain corporate practices, health & safety regulations, etc.
Here we're talking about being forced to financially support a leftist political organization whose economic "services" might be (worse than) useless to you and with whose political/policy goals you strongly disagree.
You get to object to calling it "involuntary" when it's actually "voluntary".
To be fair to Sam, elsewhere in this thread, he does suggest some fixes, like better record keeping (which may have enabled doctors to know that the parent in this case had been shopping around for treatments); more followup testing, when the first test proves negative for an ailment.
My experience has been that really good tracking and information just results in a more competent monster.
This is, incidentally, higher than most of Europe, except for France, which has a *horrific* rate of 2.25 for some reason.
The "best" countries all report rates of zero, which I don't believe. Nor do I believe that North Korea does a much better job than France.
IMHO what these numbers tell us is that starvation/malnutrition simply aren't due to economic issues in the first (or even 2nd) world. My expectation is we're looking at mental illness and elderly shut-ins as the real problems here.
France may do a better job reporting it's numbers than most, or it may do a worse job helping it's elderly.
1) In the real world, operating a union is an *annoyance*, not some sort of money-making position
In the real world, union officials earn a LOT of money.
In Washington, D.C., and the 24 states without right-to-work laws, workers can be forced to pay a union in order to have a job. For many Americans, this means paying tribute to aggressively left-wing union officials with incomes ten or twenty times greater than their own.
Stillwater: “Why not just reduce the sentence for situations like this?” Because doing so will open up lots more murders under color of law.
Which implies, to me, that what we currently have is the best system possible. Which, again, strikes me as a really high compliment…
The number of cases "like this" is roughly zero. That means any changes we make are mostly going to be applied in cases which are NOT "like this"; and the benefits for cases "like this" is going to be roughly zero.
Read my post at the bottom for how this works mechanically, and let me stress monsters like this are seriously skilled, smart, determined, and they're going to manifest as concerned parents. Unlike the movies they don't wear black hats and the people dealing with them will have NEVER seen anything similar to this before. Even the local experts in child abuse (including judges, counselors, etc) will have NEVER seen this before.
So with all that in mind, what, exactly, do you suggest which is going to make things better without making them worse?
As far as I can tell, the only way to treat Dee Dee differently is to treat everyone differently. If you have a different solution, please put it on the table.
And modern life, being more Interconnected and complex than ever before, is a particularly bad place for big sweeping principles.
Pass a law so complex and long that even it's authors can't read it and have little idea what's in it (or pass several conflicting ones over the years). Hand this over to multiple bureaucracies with conflicting ideas on what to do, give them authority (i.e. guns) to enforce their will, let them build their little empires. Be surprised that the larger players build their own bureaucracies to deal with yours.
Now complain about how complex modern life is, and claim that because it's so complex we need multiple bureaucracies.
Expecting things to work better by handing them over to a large, complex, government command-and-control bureaucracy is itself a sweeping principal. Somehow we're always shocked that there are unintended consequences, poorly aligned incentives, and we ignore the massive cost/overhead which comes with this solution.
Banking regulations are there because there is a ginormous disparity in the ability of the bank shareholders and the ability of the bank’s retail customers(*), and their community, to withstand a bank failure.
We have FDIC because of this, and that's great. By all means protect the little guy against the big one.
However what we've seen is, over time, banks capture their regulators and/or figure out ways to twist those regulations into profit and blow themselves up. Then we step in to bail them out and create new regulations/regulators. We've gone through multiple iterations of this.
The principled way to handle it without command and control would be to let the banks do whatever they want, and then when we need to bail them out make sure the top three levels of management suffer appropriately for it. Fire them and retroactively take back the bonuses they earned blowing things up.
Dark Matter: Anyone who has to deal with a monopoly can be hurt by substandard service and by their interests not lining up with your own.
DavidTC: Hell, if unions *were* monopolies, they wouldn’t have to negotiate at all!
We're talking about workers dealing with their unions, especially unions they're forced to join against their will.
So what do unions "negotiate" with their subject workers?
If a worker thinks he'd get paid better if he represented himself, can he?
If a worker thinks his political money would be better spent on the GOP, can he redirect it?
If a worker thinks a different union would do a better job, can he switch?
If the union wants to strike and a worker wants to work, can he still?
The core question wasn't on the definition of the word "monopoly", the core question was what happens when the worker thinks he is poorly served by the union and his interests don't line up with its. Or worse, what can he do if he thinks he's actually being abused by the union.
That list is *both* union and anti-union violence…but you’ll notice while reading it that a rather large majority of it is anti-union, with very few parts of it being union-initiated.
That's a list of workers killed. The most recent death was in 1959, and before that 1940, so everything is 50+ years ago and the bulk is 75+ years ago. However that list skips both non-workers killed by union activists and union-on-union violence.
So the 98 tourists burned to death by union activists in 1987 for using the wrong hotel aren't on the list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dupont_Plaza_Hotel_arson
If we limit things to the last 10 years, then we still have things like assault and murder threats because of political views in 2012 (Lansing), and beating up non-union workers in 2013 (Philadelphia Ironworkers).
The US tax code really isn’t that bad — for most people.
I use turbo tax. Twice in the last several years the IRS has sent me a check because they believe I filled out my taxes incorrectly.
I've no idea what the problem was, Turbo Tax claimed both times there were no problems.
So either the engineers who created TurboTax don't know how to read the tax code or the IRS doesn't know how to read it. I'm not sure which alternative is more likely or worse.
I have at least three other examples in this sort of thing separate from TT where the black letter of the tax code I'm reading apparently isn't what the IRS wants to hear. Once again, in each case, I really don't know what planet they're on because the black letter is the black letter. Presumably there's something buried in another document that I simply haven't read which says something else.
Sam Wilkinson: . So far, everything I have proposed has been dismissed with an insistence that to do anything differently will cause suffering. So perhaps the better question is: what changes would you be willing to consider?
I'm confused. What exactly have you proposed?
The ideas I've come up with seem likely to be far more damaging than the current reality. The math and reality are grim and suggest false positives will dominate to a silly degree, however I'd love a way to put some of these evil nuts in jail or at least get their kids out of harm's way.
If you have some actual proposal which sidesteps the math and emotion in this case, please put it on the table for evaluation.
That’s a nice idea and all, but the question isn’t, “Should it exist?” Lots of things exist that are either useless are actively harmful. The question is whether the cure is worse than the disease.
Agreed, totally, with all of that.
However something taking money
involuntarily
out of someone else's pocket is, by definition, actively harmful.
I've no idea whether or not the typical union can justify it's existence to it's typical worker, but I'm sure it should.
Large organizations do what is good for the large organization, even at the expense of it's members. There needs to be a way to hold them accountable and making it "voluntary" seems like the minimum.
Are work regulations, welfare provisions, etc. good or bad? I understood you thought they were bad, but I don’t know anymore.
The first dollar of something, including gov regulation, is amazingly good. Your city's first cop, outlawing abuse of workers/child labor, preventing people from starving, etc.
However every election we get a fresh group of politicians who need to justify their existence, we're LONG past the first dollar and deep into negative returns.
It's a good thing to prevent management from killing the workers. It's a bad thing that management needs an army of bureaucrats and compliance officers who do nothing but deal with their opposite numbers in other companies or the gov. It's a bad thing that we have a tax code too complex for any human being to understand. It's a bad thing that we believe a group of gov paper pushers are going to control the banks better than the market. It's a bad thing that we view job creation as a privilege we hand out to companies.
All of these things have invisible costs and retard growth, we badly need growth if we're not going to be breaking promises about pensions.
Sam Wilkinson:
@Oscar GordonOne would think that a parent receiving the news that their daughter does not in fact have the ailment being claimed would be good news; that it was in fact not responded to in that fashion should have been a red flag, even if the failed test was not. And yet, in both cases, medical professionals ignored both in quick succession.
That's because a negative test is NOT "good news" for a parent.
Your kid is suffering, maybe even dying. Her symptoms match something really nasty but at least well understood. The tests come back negative... so the medical types have NO CLUE what is wrong with your kid.
A positive test tells you what is going on, a negative test means more suffering and there may not be a cure or even a treatment because whatever-it-is is that rare.
Kid in my high school died, slowly, because there weren't enough people like him to bother researching a treatment.
A *monopoly* of labor would hurt the *purchaser* of labor, not labor who was part of that monopoly.
Anyone who has to deal with a monopoly can be hurt by substandard service and by their interests not lining up with your own.
Unions want to pay everyone equally or by seniority, that's a problem for rockstar employees who are above average. Twice over my career I've negotiated 40% pay increases for myself. If I had to take whatever the union standard was, that would have been less.
There's also the bigger issue which is, what prevents the union from abusing me if it's a monopoly and I'm forced to be a member? Unions have a rep for intimidation and violence, those shouldn't be needed if they're doing something positive for me, rather than a lack of something negative.
One of the stated premises of the efficient market model is that there are no entrance or exit barriers. But starving is an exit barrier, so labor is not an efficient market.
Across the entire nation, the number of unemployed is currently between 8 million and 40 million people.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/31/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-us-has-93-milion-people-out-work/
Excluding mental illness, crime, and extreme isolation, the number of people who starved to death last year was roughly zero.
Including mental illness (etc), the number was less than four thousand in 2014.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-Americans-starve-to-death-each-year
What about workers safety? How does the market manage that?
At the moment, with government agencies. That's why you can't see Orcas swimming with their trainers any more.
@davidtc
The usual things which are illegal would still be illegal. So no 'occupying' buildings against their owner's wishes, no beating up people for crossing picket lines, etc. Without the threat of violence, I think some companies would simply break the union and that would be that. Without the union actually contributing something to the company or the workers, I don't think it survives.
But, remember, no union regulation, so we’re talking about random, mid-shift strikes, just flat walkouts. And sympathetic strikes, don’t forget those.
And we’re talking about slowdowns, we’re even probably talking about systemic minor lawbreaking like ‘accidentally’ breakages of machinery and goods and individual strikers, one at a time, getting arrested for blocking an entrance.
Without a union, management's answer to this sort of thing is "fire everyone involved".
If there are enough workers to make this work, a majority or even a significant minority, then management is so dysfunctional that they deserve to have a union inflicted on them. But it's not just management which can be abusive and dysfunctional, unions have a sordid history of that sort of thing as well.
The market cannot solve most externalities, the problem of the commons, and other similar issues. It can’t. It never could. It does not have feedback mechanisms to tackle those.
The problems on the table are worker-pay and employment, for which the market does have feedback mechanisms. The problem here isn't that the market isn't working, the problem is that it is working and various people don't like the message it's sending.
Whenever people speak of free trade, they almost always also speak, with equal vehemence, of robust protection of property and contract even though those concepts always interact with each other in ways that harm different people’s interests.
The problem is that, in practice, hiring a bunch of people who refuse to join the union is an effective way for employers to undermine unions.
If management is oppressing the workforce, then the union has a great reason to exist and hiring people who refuse to join the union will be a non-issue because they'll change their mind.
If the workforce is poorly served by the union (which includes simply having no reason to exist or worse, oppressing the workforce itself), then it shouldn't exist at all.
A union is not a good thing simply because it's a union, it needs to justify it's existence with something other than rhetoric and ancient history.
Not a whole lot for the 50+ crowd who just got obsoleted.
The descriptions of some of these programs seem like they're exactly the sort of thing which is supposed to help workers displaced by free trade. As far as I can tell, the $18 Billion a year we're spending on job training does indeed do that sort of thing, just so badly no one notices.
The Trade Adjustment Assistance Act of 1962 provided subsidies to workers who lost their jobs due to import competition. The Manpower Development and Training Act, also enacted in 1962, aimed to retrain workers displaced as a result of automation. (etc). The JTPA (1982).
I think many of these were created during the horse trading of free trade, we forget how badly they work in practice, and then recreate the wheel on the next free trade bill.
My family has run into this. It's important to understand how this works.
- Every doctor will have run into anxious parents every day.
- Every doctor will have run into tests that simply fail.
- This is a rare disorder, likely each doctor will have never run into a lying parent of this nature.
- Dee Dee will have been a world class liar and actress.
- Dee Dee will have been knowledgeable about medical matters and able to drop all of the buzz words and discuss all the 'symptoms' in a reasonably professional manor.
- Dee Dee will have been quoting everyone not in the room as supporting her.
- For every doctor, this will have been their FIRST encounter with Dee Dee.
- If and when a doctor becomes suspicious, or even knowledgeable about the kid, Dee Dee will have ended the relationship.
- Any single incident wouldn't have been enough to strip child custody. Good parents can make bad calls, and even bad parents don't have their custody stripped, you have to be a monster.
- Dee Dee was deliberately misspelling her name and moving around so that the authorities couldn't put together all the information.
The legal/medical/social system is not set up to deal with this, and perhaps can't be. When I think of the tools it'd need to do something I end up thinking about forcing people to take mental health exams and taking kids away from 'concerned' parents. By the nature of the math those tools would be directed at innocent people FAR more than the guilty.
This is a rare disorder, divorce is common, people lying is common, concerned parents are common, accusations of Muchausen by proxy are roughly 10x (or more) common than the actual disorder. If the system had better tools to deal with this I'd expect false positives/accusations would be 100x or 1000x as common.
We don't know what to do with the mentally ill who are well enough to claim they're not mentally ill. Dee Dee was both that and smart enough to abuse the system. Dee Dee could/would have hired lawyers to 'represent her rights' and the system would be forced to take her seriously.
Or gov aid enables mom with child to leave an abusive husband.
And agreed, this is a good thing.
But trying to pretend that all uses of welfare are 'good' is not. Welfare is a tool, it can be misused, and people being people, it WILL be misused.
One hopes my extended family's experience was atypical... but all three could be presented as gov 'success' stories and were probably counted that way in the stats.
But there are a lot of details that maybe the market isn’t’ the best at. That is where other values might be more important than what the market wants.
Open that door and we mostly find out those 'other values' equate to 'political power', and the person picking up the check is the taxpayer.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
@davidtc
RE: France
Another possibility is how end of life is handled. The very old sometimes simply refuse to eat until they die. The issue then becomes, how is that written up?
RE: And I also suspect that it would make more sense compare naturally-occurring (Not including accident or violence) death rates of various income levels, instead of trying to figure out which deaths are ‘malnutrition’.
The death rate across all income levels holds steady at 100%
RE: I think ‘letting the mentally ill wander the streets without food’ is sorta an economic issue. As is the failure to have any sort of elderly monitoring program.
We'll have to disagree. Social and/or cultural, certainly, but the issue seems to be unlikely to be one of lack of money.
RE: It seems like a big part of malnutrition, at least in developed nations, would be how healthy the *cheapest* food is, the food people select when they have absolutely no money.
Locally the cheapest food is basically handed out at church run food pantries. I think it's mostly potluck (donations from people and businesses... probably including grocery stores). As far as nutrition, potluck wouldn't be a bad way to go. I assume it's stuff the stores somehow got oversupplied on, but it's possible there's more intelligence involved than that.
"
@oscar-gordon
More like "marginal utility".
With OSHA (and for that matter, the increasingly 'office' nature of work and the shift in culture in the last century), there is less need for union created safety.
If it's unsafe work, and/or if management only does the bare min, then sure, a union can probably justify it's existence.
If it's safe work and/or if management prides itself on having zero injuries, then the need for a union is clearly less, but presumably the cost of having one would be the same.
"
@pillsy
Normally the phrase "conditions of your employment" applies to things like...
A: Job description - defining the role, responsibility level (eg Manager, Deputy Manager, Assistant etc).
B: Entitlement - rate of pay, benefits, bonus/overtime rates, etc.
C: Responsibilities: working hours, dress code, reporting illness/absence, annual assessments, complaints procedures, notice periods for leaving/dismissal, requirements to change working hours.
D: General: Depending on the type of job, there might be other conditions restricting the employee taking other part-time work, confidentiality clauses, using company equipment for private use (eg phones, computers, vehicles) general codes of behaviour and adherence to certain corporate practices, health & safety regulations, etc.
Here we're talking about being forced to financially support a leftist political organization whose economic "services" might be (worse than) useless to you and with whose political/policy goals you strongly disagree.
You get to object to calling it "involuntary" when it's actually "voluntary".
On “Gypsy Blancharde Is In Jail For Killing Her Mother”
@gabriel-conroy
My experience has been that really good tracking and information just results in a more competent monster.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
@davidtc
That sounds about right, and thanks for the link.
The "best" countries all report rates of zero, which I don't believe. Nor do I believe that North Korea does a much better job than France.
IMHO what these numbers tell us is that starvation/malnutrition simply aren't due to economic issues in the first (or even 2nd) world. My expectation is we're looking at mental illness and elderly shut-ins as the real problems here.
France may do a better job reporting it's numbers than most, or it may do a worse job helping it's elderly.
"
@davidtc
In the real world, union officials earn a LOT of money.
In Washington, D.C., and the 24 states without right-to-work laws, workers can be forced to pay a union in order to have a job. For many Americans, this means paying tribute to aggressively left-wing union officials with incomes ten or twenty times greater than their own.
http://watchdog.org/261142/meet-bosses-americas-highest-paid-labor-union-officials/
On “Gypsy Blancharde Is In Jail For Killing Her Mother”
@stillwater
The number of cases "like this" is roughly zero. That means any changes we make are mostly going to be applied in cases which are NOT "like this"; and the benefits for cases "like this" is going to be roughly zero.
Read my post at the bottom for how this works mechanically, and let me stress monsters like this are seriously skilled, smart, determined, and they're going to manifest as concerned parents. Unlike the movies they don't wear black hats and the people dealing with them will have NEVER seen anything similar to this before. Even the local experts in child abuse (including judges, counselors, etc) will have NEVER seen this before.
So with all that in mind, what, exactly, do you suggest which is going to make things better without making them worse?
As far as I can tell, the only way to treat Dee Dee differently is to treat everyone differently. If you have a different solution, please put it on the table.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
@j_a
Pass a law so complex and long that even it's authors can't read it and have little idea what's in it (or pass several conflicting ones over the years). Hand this over to multiple bureaucracies with conflicting ideas on what to do, give them authority (i.e. guns) to enforce their will, let them build their little empires. Be surprised that the larger players build their own bureaucracies to deal with yours.
Now complain about how complex modern life is, and claim that because it's so complex we need multiple bureaucracies.
Expecting things to work better by handing them over to a large, complex, government command-and-control bureaucracy is itself a sweeping principal. Somehow we're always shocked that there are unintended consequences, poorly aligned incentives, and we ignore the massive cost/overhead which comes with this solution.
We have FDIC because of this, and that's great. By all means protect the little guy against the big one.
However what we've seen is, over time, banks capture their regulators and/or figure out ways to twist those regulations into profit and blow themselves up. Then we step in to bail them out and create new regulations/regulators. We've gone through multiple iterations of this.
The principled way to handle it without command and control would be to let the banks do whatever they want, and then when we need to bail them out make sure the top three levels of management suffer appropriately for it. Fire them and retroactively take back the bonuses they earned blowing things up.
"
@davidtc
We're talking about workers dealing with their unions, especially unions they're forced to join against their will.
So what do unions "negotiate" with their subject workers?
If a worker thinks he'd get paid better if he represented himself, can he?
If a worker thinks his political money would be better spent on the GOP, can he redirect it?
If a worker thinks a different union would do a better job, can he switch?
If the union wants to strike and a worker wants to work, can he still?
The core question wasn't on the definition of the word "monopoly", the core question was what happens when the worker thinks he is poorly served by the union and his interests don't line up with its. Or worse, what can he do if he thinks he's actually being abused by the union.
That's a list of workers killed. The most recent death was in 1959, and before that 1940, so everything is 50+ years ago and the bulk is 75+ years ago. However that list skips both non-workers killed by union activists and union-on-union violence.
So the 98 tourists burned to death by union activists in 1987 for using the wrong hotel aren't on the list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dupont_Plaza_Hotel_arson
If we limit things to the last 10 years, then we still have things like assault and murder threats because of political views in 2012 (Lansing), and beating up non-union workers in 2013 (Philadelphia Ironworkers).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_violence_in_the_United_States
If we limit ourselves to the last 50 years, then yes.
"
@morat20
I use turbo tax. Twice in the last several years the IRS has sent me a check because they believe I filled out my taxes incorrectly.
I've no idea what the problem was, Turbo Tax claimed both times there were no problems.
So either the engineers who created TurboTax don't know how to read the tax code or the IRS doesn't know how to read it. I'm not sure which alternative is more likely or worse.
I have at least three other examples in this sort of thing separate from TT where the black letter of the tax code I'm reading apparently isn't what the IRS wants to hear. Once again, in each case, I really don't know what planet they're on because the black letter is the black letter. Presumably there's something buried in another document that I simply haven't read which says something else.
On “Gypsy Blancharde Is In Jail For Killing Her Mother”
@sam-wilkinson
I'm confused. What exactly have you proposed?
The ideas I've come up with seem likely to be far more damaging than the current reality. The math and reality are grim and suggest false positives will dominate to a silly degree, however I'd love a way to put some of these evil nuts in jail or at least get their kids out of harm's way.
If you have some actual proposal which sidesteps the math and emotion in this case, please put it on the table for evaluation.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
:sigh: I meant "involuntary" to be bold.
"
@pillsy
Agreed, totally, with all of that.
However something taking money
out of someone else's pocket is, by definition, actively harmful.
I've no idea whether or not the typical union can justify it's existence to it's typical worker, but I'm sure it should.
Large organizations do what is good for the large organization, even at the expense of it's members. There needs to be a way to hold them accountable and making it "voluntary" seems like the minimum.
"
@j_a
The first dollar of something, including gov regulation, is amazingly good. Your city's first cop, outlawing abuse of workers/child labor, preventing people from starving, etc.
However every election we get a fresh group of politicians who need to justify their existence, we're LONG past the first dollar and deep into negative returns.
It's a good thing to prevent management from killing the workers. It's a bad thing that management needs an army of bureaucrats and compliance officers who do nothing but deal with their opposite numbers in other companies or the gov. It's a bad thing that we have a tax code too complex for any human being to understand. It's a bad thing that we believe a group of gov paper pushers are going to control the banks better than the market. It's a bad thing that we view job creation as a privilege we hand out to companies.
All of these things have invisible costs and retard growth, we badly need growth if we're not going to be breaking promises about pensions.
On “Gypsy Blancharde Is In Jail For Killing Her Mother”
@sam-wilkinson
@oscar-gordon
That's because a negative test is NOT "good news" for a parent.
Your kid is suffering, maybe even dying. Her symptoms match something really nasty but at least well understood. The tests come back negative... so the medical types have NO CLUE what is wrong with your kid.
A positive test tells you what is going on, a negative test means more suffering and there may not be a cure or even a treatment because whatever-it-is is that rare.
Kid in my high school died, slowly, because there weren't enough people like him to bother researching a treatment.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
@davidtc
Anyone who has to deal with a monopoly can be hurt by substandard service and by their interests not lining up with your own.
Unions want to pay everyone equally or by seniority, that's a problem for rockstar employees who are above average. Twice over my career I've negotiated 40% pay increases for myself. If I had to take whatever the union standard was, that would have been less.
There's also the bigger issue which is, what prevents the union from abusing me if it's a monopoly and I'm forced to be a member? Unions have a rep for intimidation and violence, those shouldn't be needed if they're doing something positive for me, rather than a lack of something negative.
"
@j_a
Across the entire nation, the number of unemployed is currently between 8 million and 40 million people.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/aug/31/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-us-has-93-milion-people-out-work/
Excluding mental illness, crime, and extreme isolation, the number of people who starved to death last year was roughly zero.
Including mental illness (etc), the number was less than four thousand in 2014.
https://www.quora.com/How-many-Americans-starve-to-death-each-year
At the moment, with government agencies. That's why you can't see Orcas swimming with their trainers any more.
"
@davidtc
The usual things which are illegal would still be illegal. So no 'occupying' buildings against their owner's wishes, no beating up people for crossing picket lines, etc. Without the threat of violence, I think some companies would simply break the union and that would be that. Without the union actually contributing something to the company or the workers, I don't think it survives.
Without a union, management's answer to this sort of thing is "fire everyone involved".
If there are enough workers to make this work, a majority or even a significant minority, then management is so dysfunctional that they deserve to have a union inflicted on them. But it's not just management which can be abusive and dysfunctional, unions have a sordid history of that sort of thing as well.
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@j_a
The problems on the table are worker-pay and employment, for which the market does have feedback mechanisms. The problem here isn't that the market isn't working, the problem is that it is working and various people don't like the message it's sending.
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@chip-daniels
Expand on this please.
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@pillsy
If management is oppressing the workforce, then the union has a great reason to exist and hiring people who refuse to join the union will be a non-issue because they'll change their mind.
If the workforce is poorly served by the union (which includes simply having no reason to exist or worse, oppressing the workforce itself), then it shouldn't exist at all.
A union is not a good thing simply because it's a union, it needs to justify it's existence with something other than rhetoric and ancient history.
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@oscar-gordon
The descriptions of some of these programs seem like they're exactly the sort of thing which is supposed to help workers displaced by free trade. As far as I can tell, the $18 Billion a year we're spending on job training does indeed do that sort of thing, just so badly no one notices.
The Trade Adjustment Assistance Act of 1962 provided subsidies to workers who lost their jobs due to import competition. The Manpower Development and Training Act, also enacted in 1962, aimed to retrain workers displaced as a result of automation. (etc). The JTPA (1982).
I think many of these were created during the horse trading of free trade, we forget how badly they work in practice, and then recreate the wheel on the next free trade bill.
http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/labor/employment-training-programs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_Training_Partnership_Act_of_1982#Employment_and_training_assistance_for_dislocated_workers
On “Gypsy Blancharde Is In Jail For Killing Her Mother”
My family has run into this. It's important to understand how this works.
- Every doctor will have run into anxious parents every day.
- Every doctor will have run into tests that simply fail.
- This is a rare disorder, likely each doctor will have never run into a lying parent of this nature.
- Dee Dee will have been a world class liar and actress.
- Dee Dee will have been knowledgeable about medical matters and able to drop all of the buzz words and discuss all the 'symptoms' in a reasonably professional manor.
- Dee Dee will have been quoting everyone not in the room as supporting her.
- For every doctor, this will have been their FIRST encounter with Dee Dee.
- If and when a doctor becomes suspicious, or even knowledgeable about the kid, Dee Dee will have ended the relationship.
- Any single incident wouldn't have been enough to strip child custody. Good parents can make bad calls, and even bad parents don't have their custody stripped, you have to be a monster.
- Dee Dee was deliberately misspelling her name and moving around so that the authorities couldn't put together all the information.
The legal/medical/social system is not set up to deal with this, and perhaps can't be. When I think of the tools it'd need to do something I end up thinking about forcing people to take mental health exams and taking kids away from 'concerned' parents. By the nature of the math those tools would be directed at innocent people FAR more than the guilty.
This is a rare disorder, divorce is common, people lying is common, concerned parents are common, accusations of Muchausen by proxy are roughly 10x (or more) common than the actual disorder. If the system had better tools to deal with this I'd expect false positives/accusations would be 100x or 1000x as common.
We don't know what to do with the mentally ill who are well enough to claim they're not mentally ill. Dee Dee was both that and smart enough to abuse the system. Dee Dee could/would have hired lawyers to 'represent her rights' and the system would be forced to take her seriously.
On “Globalism vs Populism vs Empricism”
@greginak
And agreed, this is a good thing.
But trying to pretend that all uses of welfare are 'good' is not. Welfare is a tool, it can be misused, and people being people, it WILL be misused.
One hopes my extended family's experience was atypical... but all three could be presented as gov 'success' stories and were probably counted that way in the stats.
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@greginak
Open that door and we mostly find out those 'other values' equate to 'political power', and the person picking up the check is the taxpayer.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.