Well, James K can speak for himself, but I suspect that he wouldn't exactly join you in that statement -- as I read him, he'd say that if your goal is to help the workers in that sweatshop, then you should bear in mind that pressuring companies (via market pressure or political pressure) to not use sweatshop labor or to increase the labor costs at a sweatshop may result in the workers at those sweatshops losing their jobs and thus being worse off due to your decision.
Someone with the time and knowledge should write a greasemonkey script to let us filter out selected commenters, so we can each have our own private LoOG.
On Megan McArdle's Atlantic blog, frequent commenter Rob Lyman did a guest post on effective commenting, and his first point has stuck with me -- when you get into a blog discussion, you're not just talking to the other guy, you're talking to the audience.
BlaiseP is never going to be convinced of anything -- he's demonstrated that he's all about preaching, not listening. The only reason to mix it up with him is to get your point across to the other readers (or perhaps just to goad him for your own amusement, if that's the sort of thing you like -- but apparently it's not). As was made apparent from the comments on Pat's recent post, people are listening and learning, even when (perhaps especially when) they're not actively involved in the conversation.
All that to say, don't let BlaiseP or other hard-headed commenters drive you off -- ignore them or use them, but accept that not every mind can be changed.
I don't think Sandefur captured Scalia's point -- it's not so much that he's expecting the law to spell out the rule literally as that he doesn't like the idea that the "law" can change without any actual changes to the written laws. We like it in this case because it fits our preferred result, but it's not the ideal way for a democratic society to work -- ideally, changes to the law should happen through the legislature, not through the opinions of a small number of people who are mostly immune to the political process. Think of how frustrating this is when the justices are on the "wrong" side of an issue -- they're there for life and all you can do is wait for enough of them to die and hope that their replacements are better. At least with Congress you have a vote every couple of years.
Oh, and on the "open thread" angle, I thought this study might make for an interesting discussion around here, given all the gender-related topics that've been kicked about recently.
If you go in and end these practices, at the very least in the short-medium term the value and profitability of the firm is likely to suffer immensely and your own investment return on the capital you threw into acquisition (which would pretty substantial) would lose value.
Hmm... if you're asking a given company to change its practices in a way that will hurt its profitability, but you're not willing to put your own money on the line for your proposed standard, is it fair to ask the people who're already invested in the company to lose their money based on your standard?
I'm not invested in the story at all, but at a first read, the Atlantic Wire summation doesn't seem "pretty good" to me -- the writer is trying hard to keep treating the WaPo article as a strong refutation of the Daily Caller report, even though it looks a lot like they talked to the wrong woman. And the last update seems to not reflect well on WaPo's credibility on this.
I do agree with Mark that the possible corruption should be the bigger story in any case.
So I just thought of this illustration -- maybe it will help clarify, or maybe not:
Imagine a community of three people -- two millionaires M1 and M2, and one poor person P. P has no money and no options for work beyond what M1 and M2 might provide. M1 and M2 each have a farm. M1 is happy enough to do all the farmwork without any help, but M2 decides to hire P to do it all for him; but because he knows P is desperate, he offers P only $2/hour, and P accepts because he considers that better than his current situation.
Now from a conventional moral POV, we'd say that M2 is taking advantage of P and seems like a rotten person; but on the other hand, M2 is making P materially better off, while M1 isn't doing squat for P. If we demand that M2 pay P more but don't ask anything of M1, how is that fair or reasonable? And if the result of our demand is that M2 decides to do the work himself instead, how have we helped P?
you could check accidents rates between years before and after enacting regulations.
But to make a reasonable judgment on the desirability of the regulation, you'd also want to find some way to quantify the costs of the regulations, both monetary and non-, and then weigh the costs against the benefits.
Well, what do you really mean by "deciding for ourselves" in the context of an entire country? Wouldn't that be equivalent to the majority opinion? When it comes to "cruel and unusual", the last few decades have mostly seen a minority of the public from the left trying to thwart the will of the majority by arguing that "cruel and unusual" means something other than what the majority thinks it does -- if you're on the side of the left in these debates, then where would you derive the moral authority to overrule the majority's opinion about the proper semantic extension of those words?
I don't think it's so bizarre if you think of the Constitution like a contract. Imagine if people signed a contract 50 years ago, saying that if either one of them was cruel to an animal, he would have to pay the other $1000.00; but at the time they agreed to this contract, they were in a community where raising dogs to fight each other was normal and not considered cruel, and in fact both of them did this at the time. Thirty years later, one of them has a change of heart about dogfighting (as has a large part of the community they belong to) and accuses the other of cruelty to animals due his continuation of the practice. The other says that whatever "cruel" might mean now, at the pointwhen he signed the contract dogfighting clearly wasn't considered cruel, and he never would have agreed to the contract if he thought that it wouuld mean he couldn't do that. Whatever you might decide if you were the judge for this case, the dogfighter's argument at least seems reasonable, no?
Now imagine that instead of this being a contract between two people from 30 years ago, it's a contract between two organizations and it goes back 200 years, so that the people who originally agreed to the contract are long since dead. Does that change the reasoning at all?
One can object to being governed by 200-year-old dead white males, but on the other hand there's a value to keeping the law from changing right under our feet -- ideally what's legal today is legal tomorrow unless the law has explicitly been changed, or else we can never be quite sure what's legal.
Ohh, that's interesting. I do recall a newscaster saying that if the ice that we got towards the beginning of the storm had been snow instead, it would've added quite a few inches to what we ended up seeing, so that might explain the discrepancy.
Thanks for the good luck wishes. I managed to clear what I hope is a big enough path to back out, so that I can go get more gas for the poor overmatched blower tomorrow. And since then my body has been complaining at me mightily, except when I shut it up with some ibuprofen.
With the media, I'm sure most of it is ratings (I guess my wife and I are part of the problem, because whenever these big weather events happen, the two of us spend hours in front of the news), but I wonder if a bit of it is also a sense that they're better off overplaying it and having everyone run around for no reason than underplaying it and having people get caught out.
It seems that the measuring of snow is a difficult matter -- my town officially got 32 inches, but as I've been fighting the driveway this morning, it's "only" 22 for us. And I saw on the news that the record snowfall for Boston is officially a little over 27 inches, which makes the 'historic' talk a little more defensible given that there was a possibility of three feet.
Unfortunately I've got a long driveway and my snowblower was designed to clear the 8-10 inches that's our usual max, not the 22 inches we have (especially with the bottom 10 inches being heavy and icy). It's going to be a long weekend...
I do get where you're coming from, and frankly I think people generally should do a lot more serious questioning of their beliefs for any reason good or bad; but when you drill down into the logic of it, it seems equivalent to saying that if I hear that Hitler was a vegetarian, then I should really re-examine my own vegetarianism.
Why evil? Societies have norms, and just because they may be arbitrary and localized doesn't mean they're not functional; and even if we ignore them, we don't escape them because our ignoring them still communicates something to the rest of the world.
Think of it like language -- the sequence of sounds we use to represent a given concept is (almost) entirely arbitrary. Do you feel constrained and repressed when you're forced to stop the air coming through your mouth by putting your tongue against the ridge behind your teeth, then moving the middle of your tongue to the bottom of your mouth and letting the air flow out, then closing off the air by putting the back of your tongue against your soft palate, all while vibrating your vocal chords, just to express the concept of a four-legged mammal that people like to have as pets, play fetch with, and take on walks? If a child in your class is saying "dug" instead of "dog", wouldn't you gently correct him/her? If the child asked why, wouldn't the answer be "because that's how we say it"?
I haven't read Dorner's manifesto and I don't care to, but in general, just because a guy is crazy doesn't mean that everything he says is ridiculous -- he might make perfectly valid observations but just come to a crazy conclusion. I know people like that, though fortunately their crazy conclusions don't involve killing people.
Well, it hasn't been festering -- thanks to the magic of Google, just recalling the old conversation was enough. Although I guess it did sting enough to inspire me to go through the effort of searching for it and assembling the link.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Trade Sequence Part 5 – The Rich Man’s Burden”
Well, James K can speak for himself, but I suspect that he wouldn't exactly join you in that statement -- as I read him, he'd say that if your goal is to help the workers in that sweatshop, then you should bear in mind that pressuring companies (via market pressure or political pressure) to not use sweatshop labor or to increase the labor costs at a sweatshop may result in the workers at those sweatshops losing their jobs and thus being worse off due to your decision.
On “Libertarians Are Not Like Beryllium”
Someone with the time and knowledge should write a greasemonkey script to let us filter out selected commenters, so we can each have our own private LoOG.
"
Some advice from me, welcome or not:
On Megan McArdle's Atlantic blog, frequent commenter Rob Lyman did a guest post on effective commenting, and his first point has stuck with me -- when you get into a blog discussion, you're not just talking to the other guy, you're talking to the audience.
BlaiseP is never going to be convinced of anything -- he's demonstrated that he's all about preaching, not listening. The only reason to mix it up with him is to get your point across to the other readers (or perhaps just to goad him for your own amusement, if that's the sort of thing you like -- but apparently it's not). As was made apparent from the comments on Pat's recent post, people are listening and learning, even when (perhaps especially when) they're not actively involved in the conversation.
All that to say, don't let BlaiseP or other hard-headed commenters drive you off -- ignore them or use them, but accept that not every mind can be changed.
"
I'm a fan of this post, but the problem is that the people who most need to hear the message are the most likely to think it doesn't apply to them.
On “When Did It Become Unconstitutional?”
I don't think Sandefur captured Scalia's point -- it's not so much that he's expecting the law to spell out the rule literally as that he doesn't like the idea that the "law" can change without any actual changes to the written laws. We like it in this case because it fits our preferred result, but it's not the ideal way for a democratic society to work -- ideally, changes to the law should happen through the legislature, not through the opinions of a small number of people who are mostly immune to the political process. Think of how frustrating this is when the justices are on the "wrong" side of an issue -- they're there for life and all you can do is wait for enough of them to die and hope that their replacements are better. At least with Congress you have a vote every couple of years.
On “Friday Jukebox: Kill Your Television”
Oh, and on the "open thread" angle, I thought this study might make for an interesting discussion around here, given all the gender-related topics that've been kicked about recently.
"
There's also The Bobs' Kill Your Television, but that's really about bumper stickers.
On “A
progressive’sliberal’s answer on why we don’t do shareholder Activism”If you go in and end these practices, at the very least in the short-medium term the value and profitability of the firm is likely to suffer immensely and your own investment return on the capital you threw into acquisition (which would pretty substantial) would lose value.
Hmm... if you're asking a given company to change its practices in a way that will hurt its profitability, but you're not willing to put your own money on the line for your proposed standard, is it fair to ask the people who're already invested in the company to lose their money based on your standard?
On “A Small News Story Worth Watching Unfold”
I'm not invested in the story at all, but at a first read, the Atlantic Wire summation doesn't seem "pretty good" to me -- the writer is trying hard to keep treating the WaPo article as a strong refutation of the Daily Caller report, even though it looks a lot like they talked to the wrong woman. And the last update seems to not reflect well on WaPo's credibility on this.
I do agree with Mark that the possible corruption should be the bigger story in any case.
On “Why Can’t American Cities Create and Maintain a Middle Class?”
I used this exact metaphor when arguing with my (salesman) boss about his appraisal of various developers here.
Unfortunately it was a poor choice, because he's not a sports fan.
On “Thursday Night Bar Fight #1: What will be socially verboten in the future?”
So I just thought of this illustration -- maybe it will help clarify, or maybe not:
Imagine a community of three people -- two millionaires M1 and M2, and one poor person P. P has no money and no options for work beyond what M1 and M2 might provide. M1 and M2 each have a farm. M1 is happy enough to do all the farmwork without any help, but M2 decides to hire P to do it all for him; but because he knows P is desperate, he offers P only $2/hour, and P accepts because he considers that better than his current situation.
Now from a conventional moral POV, we'd say that M2 is taking advantage of P and seems like a rotten person; but on the other hand, M2 is making P materially better off, while M1 isn't doing squat for P. If we demand that M2 pay P more but don't ask anything of M1, how is that fair or reasonable? And if the result of our demand is that M2 decides to do the work himself instead, how have we helped P?
On “How Much Regulation Is Too Little?”
But to make a reasonable judgment on the desirability of the regulation, you'd also want to find some way to quantify the costs of the regulations, both monetary and non-, and then weigh the costs against the benefits.
On “RIP Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013)”
Well, what do you really mean by "deciding for ourselves" in the context of an entire country? Wouldn't that be equivalent to the majority opinion? When it comes to "cruel and unusual", the last few decades have mostly seen a minority of the public from the left trying to thwart the will of the majority by arguing that "cruel and unusual" means something other than what the majority thinks it does -- if you're on the side of the left in these debates, then where would you derive the moral authority to overrule the majority's opinion about the proper semantic extension of those words?
"
No disagreement here -- I wasn't advocating any particular flavor of originalism, just defending the abstract principle of interpretive stability.
"
Ugh -- "imagine if two people..."
"
I don't think it's so bizarre if you think of the Constitution like a contract. Imagine if people signed a contract 50 years ago, saying that if either one of them was cruel to an animal, he would have to pay the other $1000.00; but at the time they agreed to this contract, they were in a community where raising dogs to fight each other was normal and not considered cruel, and in fact both of them did this at the time. Thirty years later, one of them has a change of heart about dogfighting (as has a large part of the community they belong to) and accuses the other of cruelty to animals due his continuation of the practice. The other says that whatever "cruel" might mean now, at the pointwhen he signed the contract dogfighting clearly wasn't considered cruel, and he never would have agreed to the contract if he thought that it wouuld mean he couldn't do that. Whatever you might decide if you were the judge for this case, the dogfighter's argument at least seems reasonable, no?
Now imagine that instead of this being a contract between two people from 30 years ago, it's a contract between two organizations and it goes back 200 years, so that the people who originally agreed to the contract are long since dead. Does that change the reasoning at all?
One can object to being governed by 200-year-old dead white males, but on the other hand there's a value to keeping the law from changing right under our feet -- ideally what's legal today is legal tomorrow unless the law has explicitly been changed, or else we can never be quite sure what's legal.
On “The Great Blizzard of ’13”
Ohh, that's interesting. I do recall a newscaster saying that if the ice that we got towards the beginning of the storm had been snow instead, it would've added quite a few inches to what we ended up seeing, so that might explain the discrepancy.
"
Thanks for the good luck wishes. I managed to clear what I hope is a big enough path to back out, so that I can go get more gas for the poor overmatched blower tomorrow. And since then my body has been complaining at me mightily, except when I shut it up with some ibuprofen.
With the media, I'm sure most of it is ratings (I guess my wife and I are part of the problem, because whenever these big weather events happen, the two of us spend hours in front of the news), but I wonder if a bit of it is also a sense that they're better off overplaying it and having everyone run around for no reason than underplaying it and having people get caught out.
"
It seems that the measuring of snow is a difficult matter -- my town officially got 32 inches, but as I've been fighting the driveway this morning, it's "only" 22 for us. And I saw on the news that the record snowfall for Boston is officially a little over 27 inches, which makes the 'historic' talk a little more defensible given that there was a possibility of three feet.
Unfortunately I've got a long driveway and my snowblower was designed to clear the 8-10 inches that's our usual max, not the 22 inches we have (especially with the bottom 10 inches being heavy and icy). It's going to be a long weekend...
On “Signs That The Lunatics Are All Around Us”
I do get where you're coming from, and frankly I think people generally should do a lot more serious questioning of their beliefs for any reason good or bad; but when you drill down into the logic of it, it seems equivalent to saying that if I hear that Hitler was a vegetarian, then I should really re-examine my own vegetarianism.
On “Teaching Social Norms, Part 2”
Why evil? Societies have norms, and just because they may be arbitrary and localized doesn't mean they're not functional; and even if we ignore them, we don't escape them because our ignoring them still communicates something to the rest of the world.
Think of it like language -- the sequence of sounds we use to represent a given concept is (almost) entirely arbitrary. Do you feel constrained and repressed when you're forced to stop the air coming through your mouth by putting your tongue against the ridge behind your teeth, then moving the middle of your tongue to the bottom of your mouth and letting the air flow out, then closing off the air by putting the back of your tongue against your soft palate, all while vibrating your vocal chords, just to express the concept of a four-legged mammal that people like to have as pets, play fetch with, and take on walks? If a child in your class is saying "dug" instead of "dog", wouldn't you gently correct him/her? If the child asked why, wouldn't the answer be "because that's how we say it"?
On “Signs That The Lunatics Are All Around Us”
I haven't read Dorner's manifesto and I don't care to, but in general, just because a guy is crazy doesn't mean that everything he says is ridiculous -- he might make perfectly valid observations but just come to a crazy conclusion. I know people like that, though fortunately their crazy conclusions don't involve killing people.
On “A comments culture to strive for…”
FYIGM is great -- it's loud and obvious and makes my comment-reading triage process much easier.
"
Oh, I should've added -- thanks for the gracious response to my not-entirely-gracious calling out.
"
Well, it hasn't been festering -- thanks to the magic of Google, just recalling the old conversation was enough. Although I guess it did sting enough to inspire me to go through the effort of searching for it and assembling the link.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.