Commenter Archive

NASA's problem isn't that it's NASA. NASA's problem is that it's part of the government. Believe me when I say that being a rocket scientist contracting to the USAF is no better than being one contracting for NASA.

On the other hand, at least neither of us is working for the Army.

Well I dunno, Tony, I guess I could always burn my house down and go live under a bridge, like you.

"Maybe I’m not sure what you’re getting at, DD."

Actually, you completely understand my argument and disagree with me. (which is okay, I actually like not having to repeatedly explain myself.)

"Obviously you can argue that any reduction of any tax burden in any form frees up private money to go elsewhere and some of that money will go to religious causes..."

Which is what I'm claiming; and you say that..."

"...at some point the relationship between religious spending and tax breaks will become too indirect to trace fairly or reasonably."

And I think that that defining that point depends on a judgement call, and winds up being more overtly an Establishment violation than just giving people vouchers.

If the government starts putting conditions and restrictions and limitations on tax credits or benefits vis-a-vis religious donations, then is not that an example of the Government making laws respecting religion or preventing the free exercise thereof?

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As a side question, if your argument is that money spent to support religious activity shouldn't be deductible, then shouldn't homeschoolers who attend church not be permitted to deduct mortgage interest?

"The government must tolerate (or to use another phrase, “accomodate”) religious indoctrination of children and thus must allow and fairly accredit private schools; however, it ought not to support it by, inter alia, providing tuition-paying parents with tax breaks to subsidize that religious indoctrination."

But--I want to make this clear--you believe this means that a parent whose child attends a religious private school should not receive any kind of tax break for ANYTHING? No deductions from income taxes for mortgage interest or medical care or charitable giving? No tax credits for buying electric vehicles or using mass transit? No ability to make pre-tax contributions to retirement plans?

Indeed, what about people who donate to church? Should church donations not be deductible? Okay, I could see that, but you could make the argument that allowing other deductions or credits gives that person more disposable income which they turn around and give to a church, so it's "indirectly supporting religion".

"Parents of children who attend private schools receive a tax credit on their state income taxes for money donated to scholarship programs for private school tuition. Most of that money winds up in practice going to pay the tuition of religious schools and reading between the lines, specifically to pay the tuition of the children of the donors."

Doesn't this mean that parents of children who attend private religious schools shouldn't receive any tax credits at all? After all, that tax-break money increases the overall funds available to those parents, and those funds allow them to send their children to the private religious school.

I'm immediately reminded of Transplanted Lawyer's Tennessee Taxonomy; the "deserving versus undeserving poor" seems like an example of applying Labor Class values to Entitlement Class people.

San Jose *did* ban Happy Meal sales. It's not particularly gullible to believe that other places might do the same thing.

This seems like the equivalent of those arcades where, instead of putting quarters into the games, you get a "points card" and you slide the points card through a slot.

The idea being that, if one "play" costs 147 points, and you get 202 points for each dollar you spend, you're less likely to realize that you just spent seventy-five cents to play "Pac-Man".

Incidentally, Hocking recently signed a deal with a publishing house.

So, I guess, there we are.

Plenty of economists "saw the coming of the GFC", etcetera. They were ignored.

Oh crap, here comes a G/N/S flamewar...

"Someone deliberately wasting their company’s money to do deals with friends instead of whatever would be the best for their company is called a ‘Breach of Fiduciary Duty’ against the company they are employed for, and is a type of fraud."

I know my friend. I know he'll do a good job (or, at least, an acceptable job) on this thing. How is it a Breach Of Fiduciary Duty for me to give work to someone I know will do it properly? Indeed, wouldn't stockholders prefer a low-risk option to some fly-by-night guy who's never done anything before claims he can do it in half the time for half the cost?

"I guess Iraq and Afghanistan are not enough. We need to go to war now with Libya as well. We never learn, do we?"

I'm thinking more like Kosovo, here.

Which, as O'Rourke put it, "the lesson the world learned from Kosovo was that if a government commits genocide on its own people, the US will show up six months later and bomb the country next to where it happened."

You're right that it's necessary to consider food animals as non-beings for us to countenance killing and eating them.

Fortunately, humans have always been good at "othering".

...didn't Wickard v. Filburn establish the appropriate legal response to an artisan who fabricates products for his own use which he might have bought in a store?

Define "overpay". "overpay based on the best possible price that anyone could possibly have negotiated the seller down to" isn't exactly a blistering indictment of Saturn's predatory sales policies.

I do think it's funny how the argument is "power has grown too concentrated, the only possible response is for whatever power's left to be further concentrated!"

"When lumber operations began, people would put out the fires as soon as they began."

Near where I live, in Santa Cruz, environmentalists have declared brush-clearing to have "severe environmental impact", and have sued on multiple occasions to stop it happening. Because, y'know, it's the environemnt, and people are doing things to it, and that's bad and stuff. The result, as you describe, is huge fires that burn people's houses down and wipe out thousand-year-old redwood groves.

The local corporations and property owners would be quite happy to engage in brush-clearing, which would protect the value of their property.

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This analogy dovetails neatly with yours. Financial regulatory activity could be seen as brush-clearing activity. And, during the run-up to the Great Financial Crisis, it was decided that clearing away those brushes had a serious environmental impact, because some of those "brushes" were loans made so that poor people could buy houses. However, there was *also* the assumption that the forest's owners would do an okay job clearing the brushes themselves, and the government didn't need to go poking its nose into things.

"When I write an article...it goes on to the guy who gets paid for it who makes it real. You can’t cut him out of the loop, because he knows the industry, and knows what the places he’s sending it on to want. "

What if the place I'm sending it to is the readers themselves? What if the people doing my advertising are also my customers? What if there is no middleman?

"So, is there any way a person from the in-group could respond to this question, other than saying what the critics want to hear..."

To go by what we see in the racism discussions, no, there isn't any answer that the out-group's designated representatives would consider acceptable other than "I'm a despicable bigot".

"...what is being done to him is about the opposite of humane treatment."

A prisoner declares his intention to commit suicide. Is it humane to leave him his pants, socks, underwear, shirt, and belt?

The racial argument is entirely relevant to this discussion, because when you change "academia" to "workplace", and "conservative ideology" to "black", you get exactly the same arguments. For both sides. "cultural attitudes" and "irreconcilable philosophical differences" and "it doesn't really exist" and "just work harder you lazy scuts", versus "unconscious privilege" and "in-group versus out-group" and "gatekeepers".

Indeed, when you say...
"But this presupposes that a) the case against non-conservative bias has been made (it hasn’t), b) that the data in question cannot be accounted for by factors restricted to the out-group itself (which you haven’t refuted), and c) circularly uses the unexplained raw data as proof that ‘there is a problem’, even tho ‘the problem’ hasn’t been explicated. Apparently, this is a serious issue simply because conservatives say it is, and as a result, non-conservatives in the academy must address it. All this without so much as a coherent argument yet made."

...this sounds exactly like the arguments people make in every 'White Privilege' discussion. Bias doesn't exist, you haven't proven that bias exists, it's only an issue because you're acting like there is one, and even if there *is* a problem then it's your own fault.

A State wonk taking an opportunity to shit on the DoD? Well, I never.

"Unfortunately, everybody wants to be an author. I’m not sure everyone wants to be an editor."

I'm not sure that we'll have the choice anymore, simply due to the march of technology.

We don't have draftsmen at our engineering firm. We don't have special document-handling workers, either. Improved tools make drafting and configuration control simple enough that the engineers now do them by themselves. Does this mean that they spend less than 100% of their time doing engineering? Sure, but the overall savings mean that everyone comes out ahead.

"Career editor at a big publishing firm" and "author who does nothing but jam handwritten pages into a telex" are jobs that will end up in the same place as things like "switchboard operator"; a job which was very important at a very specific point in time, and now that point in time is over. I hate saying "outdated business model" because it gives me the idea of some snotty teenager explaining why he shouldn't have to pay for Linkin Park's latest single, but...well, there it is.

"The conclusion I come to is that conservatives aren’t determining their policy beliefs as logical consequences of a (static) set of first principles, nor are they shaping their policy views by looking at the evidence, nor are they constrained in their beliefs by a minimal standard of rational consistency. They make up their beliefs as they go, without any rational constraints whatsoever. And they stick to em."

This isn't a joke, right? This is supposed to be serious, right? The irony is too thick for me to believe that you aren't taking the piss here.