A straw man argument is when one party mischaracterizes what another party said in order to defeat the "reinterpreted" argument and thus appear to have "won". If you scroll up and actually read the words I wrote, you'll note that I never claimed HL took away anyone's freedoms or dictated choices to employees. Discounting the two straw man arguments in the previous post leaves your first line about why you're using your sock puppet account to reply and a statement about being free to negotiate a contract which clearly came from some other discussion. Rather than continue this thread, I think I'll just agree to disagree with you.
I tend to wonder if you'd feel the same way if you owned a business and the Federal government passed a law stating you had to pay for female genital mutilation procedures for young girls and "straight camps" for gays.
Assuming I found the idea of male or female genital mutilation and "straight camps" reprehensible I absolutely would feel the same way. See below.
There were 4 specific methods which the owners found to be abhorrent to their religious convictions. In essence, they consider those 4 specific methods to be murder.
If I consider cockroaches holy I still don't have the right to forbid or obstruct a fumigator from doing his job.
There are many actions I disagree with committed in my name (and with my tax money) by the federal, state and local governments in whose jurisdiction I happen to reside. The fact I don't like how my resources are being utilized does not give me the right to refuse to pay taxes, permission to disrupt law enforcement activities or anything similar. In both cases there is a law in place. In my case I have to comply or face the consequences. In HL's case, they apparently do not have to comply with some of the law because they don't like it? While I understand that HL was able to summon the money and political clout to push the issue clear through the Supreme Court for an exception, I remain unconvinced that what occurred here was just/right even though it's clearly legal.
OT: Thank you for your considered statements, reasonable tone and for not trying to turn this into a flame war.
You just cannot require hobby lobby to pay for the procedure.
Hobby Lobby may not want to pay for certain (or any) coverage, but they are required to. The ACA was signed into law on 3-23-2010.
We're discussing under what circumstances (sky wizard edict, talking unicorn, invisible secret friend) parts of this law can be ignored, if you really want to ignore it and own a company, in light of the recent SCOTUS decision.
...people that run businesses must not be abused by the government and having their freedoms revoked just because they are running a business.
As I mentioned above, the owners of HL are free to use (or not) contraceptives as they choose. Weather they should be required to provide the insurance in the first place is a different matter entirely. In this case which would you support, the freedom of the employees to make their own choices or the freedom of HL to try to dictate those choices for them?
They did not ask to be put into the situation where they control the womans healthcare. The government forced them, by law, to provide health care. Then the government forced them, by law, to include contraceptive devices that abort a fertilized fetus. (many of the contraceptive devices covered kill the post-fertilized egg) Their only option out was to pay a fine that would go directly to paying for the very same services they oppose.
From their point of view the government just required them to pay for their employees to have the ability to murder babies. Now, you can disagree with that point of view, I know I do. But it really is their point of view. They really do view it has killing babies. That's a violation of their ability to freely express their religion. The government could have addressed this a dozen different ways. Exempting them from the penalties if they didn't provide the care would have been the simplest. But they didn't. The whitehouse should have seen this coming, they should have provided a religious exemption, but they didn't.
This is getting a bit muddled, so I'd like to list a couple points of fact:
- HL is required to provide healthcare to their employees. The legislation has been enacted, it's a done deal.
- This birth control is part of that healthcare.
Nobody is telling the owners of HL not to use birth control. They have the right to make that choice for themselves.
We are talking about weather HL has the right to selectively refuse to provide this federally mandated medical care coverage to their employees because they (HL) don't like/agree/approve of it.
I have a client with a very fancy (and frighteningly expensive) Crestron setup, and nobody uses it. Too complicated and does not give repeatable results. OTOH, for about $35 one can get a Chromecast and via their "beta" functionality export the screen of any computer running Chrome. Sure it's laggy and I don't think it does sound, but when someone just wants a powerpoint on the screen with no room full of people waiting, it does the job admirably.
There will always be a need for car dealerships, but there is no good reason to ban direct sales. This is pure rent-seeking behavior. The dealerships should position themselves as Tesla's partners in buying/selling used Teslas and in repairs.
I'm not so sure about that. While I'm no expert on the subject I found this podcast. It's from NPR and 16 minutes long, but I thought it very informative.
Couldn't agree more. If someone has snuck across the border and evaded the established legal process to come here by doing so, that would make them an immigrant who has entered the country illegally. While it is technically correct to say they are "undocumented", it's also technically correct to say that Japan was "splashed" or "moistened" by that tsunami in 2011.
I seem to remember a fairly old (sci-fi?) story where the president got picked in a lottery. It dealt with the ramifications, both large and small scale, of this method. Anyone having better luck remembering or googling than me?
At a certain point, maybe just randomizing the system would result in a better setup than the entrenched, bought-and-paid-for bureaucracy we have now.
I seem to remember a fairly old (sci-fi?) story where the president got picked in a lottery. It dealt with the ramifications, both large and small scale, of this method. Anyone having better luck remembering or googling than me?
As a paperwhite owner, my device is almost always in airplane mode. Load books on it via Calibre over a USB cable and charge it every couple weeks. A modest investment of time and effort will thorougly break the "vice-like grip on the content" you referenced, but probably not for your father.
To be fair, neither do the vast majority of people who use spreadsheets for paid work, but they still believe they're better than you because they get paid to do it, because, ultimately, foreskins are the only metric that matters.
They're not worthless, we all just pretend "they are needed to help with the general order of society". They're like a figurehead we can all point to. You know who maintains the general order of society? Me. You. Walk down the street and look around you. Those people are the ones who determine how we all behave. In some circumstances, with a very limited local and temporary effect (cop pulls you over or tells people to get out of the street) a cop can make a change, but only because he's carrying weapons and body armor with backup on tap. Really we all are the ones in charge. What happens when we all abandon the rules we know we should follow? I think it's usually called a riot.
They do serve a purpose, but I think it's really important to realize what that purpose IS before supposing that changing the police force will drastically change the people they police or society at large.
Well, I had to get to page two of a google search on "Walmart Makes Stores Close" before I started coming to articles with numbers from sources I'd heard about, but here you'll find this quote: "A study published in 2008 in the Journal of Urban Economics examined about 3,000 Walmart store openings nationally and found that each store caused a net decline of about 150 jobs (as competing retailers downsized and closed) and lowered total wages paid to retail workers.".
This article was interesting to read but for those averse to clicking the link: "But the closer a store was to the Walmart location, the greater the likelihood it would close. Persky and his colleagues found that for every mile closer to the Walmart, 6 percent more stores closed. Close in around the store's location, between 35 and 60 percent of stores closed.
And depending on the type of business, the impact of a Walmart moving in can be much worse. Persky says that the per-mile closure rate increase for drugstores is almost 20 percent. For home furnishings, it's about 15 percent. For hardware stores, it's about 18 percent per mile. For toys, it's more than 25 percent per mile.".
Really, that's all the time I'm willing to invest in refuting the idea that somehow WalMart fosters a diverse / thriving / healthy business ecosystem.
Do you not see that your two statements above oppose each other?
Are you relegating arguments (presumably in favor of ideas) you don't like to/dev/null or welcoming them?
Anyone who ever argues with me otherwise (oh and there are loads of idiots that do) gets redirected to dev/null.
I'll let your own professed rejection of ideas you don't like speak for itself...
Anyone who ever argues with me otherwise (oh and there are loads of idiots that do) gets redirected to dev/null.
While I happen to agree with you, I voraciously listen to NPR's intelligence squared because an intelligent debate is great to educate you on viewpoints other than your own. Maybe, for your own sake, you should reconsider?
Our (US) criminal system was carefully set up to respect the rights of the citizenry, even if this meant some of the "bad guys" slipped through the cracks.
What we're talking about here is a tradeoff between
(1) LEO's rooting through your phone because they had a gun and body armor and took it from you.
vs.
(2) Your information being secure until said LEO can compellingly convince a judge to give them permission to search your effects.
Maybe these hyper tech savvy criminals are a threat to the populace at large, but I'm much more concerned about the erosion of our rights.
Slashdot Mirror
A straw man argument is when one party mischaracterizes what another party said in order to defeat the "reinterpreted" argument and thus appear to have "won". If you scroll up and actually read the words I wrote, you'll note that I never claimed HL took away anyone's freedoms or dictated choices to employees. Discounting the two straw man arguments in the previous post leaves your first line about why you're using your sock puppet account to reply and a statement about being free to negotiate a contract which clearly came from some other discussion. Rather than continue this thread, I think I'll just agree to disagree with you.
I tend to wonder if you'd feel the same way if you owned a business and the Federal government passed a law stating you had to pay for female genital mutilation procedures for young girls and "straight camps" for gays.
Assuming I found the idea of male or female genital mutilation and "straight camps" reprehensible I absolutely would feel the same way. See below.
There were 4 specific methods which the owners found to be abhorrent to their religious convictions. In essence, they consider those 4 specific methods to be murder.
If I consider cockroaches holy I still don't have the right to forbid or obstruct a fumigator from doing his job.
There are many actions I disagree with committed in my name (and with my tax money) by the federal, state and local governments in whose jurisdiction I happen to reside. The fact I don't like how my resources are being utilized does not give me the right to refuse to pay taxes, permission to disrupt law enforcement activities or anything similar.
In both cases there is a law in place. In my case I have to comply or face the consequences. In HL's case, they apparently do not have to comply with some of the law because they don't like it?
While I understand that HL was able to summon the money and political clout to push the issue clear through the Supreme Court for an exception, I remain unconvinced that what occurred here was just/right even though it's clearly legal.
OT: Thank you for your considered statements, reasonable tone and for not trying to turn this into a flame war.
You just cannot require hobby lobby to pay for the procedure.
Hobby Lobby may not want to pay for certain (or any) coverage, but they are required to. The ACA was signed into law on 3-23-2010.
We're discussing under what circumstances (sky wizard edict, talking unicorn, invisible secret friend) parts of this law can be ignored, if you really want to ignore it and own a company, in light of the recent SCOTUS decision.
...people that run businesses must not be abused by the government and having their freedoms revoked just because they are running a business.
As I mentioned above, the owners of HL are free to use (or not) contraceptives as they choose. Weather they should be required to provide the insurance in the first place is a different matter entirely.
In this case which would you support, the freedom of the employees to make their own choices or the freedom of HL to try to dictate those choices for them?
They did not ask to be put into the situation where they control the womans healthcare. The government forced them, by law, to provide health care. Then the government forced them, by law, to include contraceptive devices that abort a fertilized fetus. (many of the contraceptive devices covered kill the post-fertilized egg) Their only option out was to pay a fine that would go directly to paying for the very same services they oppose.
From their point of view the government just required them to pay for their employees to have the ability to murder babies. Now, you can disagree with that point of view, I know I do. But it really is their point of view. They really do view it has killing babies. That's a violation of their ability to freely express their religion. The government could have addressed this a dozen different ways. Exempting them from the penalties if they didn't provide the care would have been the simplest. But they didn't. The whitehouse should have seen this coming, they should have provided a religious exemption, but they didn't.
This is getting a bit muddled, so I'd like to list a couple points of fact:
- HL is required to provide healthcare to their employees. The legislation has been enacted, it's a done deal.
- This birth control is part of that healthcare.
Nobody is telling the owners of HL not to use birth control. They have the right to make that choice for themselves.
We are talking about weather HL has the right to selectively refuse to provide this federally mandated medical care coverage to their employees because they (HL) don't like/agree/approve of it.
I have a client with a very fancy (and frighteningly expensive) Crestron setup, and nobody uses it. Too complicated and does not give repeatable results.
OTOH, for about $35 one can get a Chromecast and via their "beta" functionality export the screen of any computer running Chrome. Sure it's laggy and I don't think it does sound, but when someone just wants a powerpoint on the screen with no room full of people waiting, it does the job admirably.
There will always be a need for car dealerships, but there is no good reason to ban direct sales. This is pure rent-seeking behavior. The dealerships should position themselves as Tesla's partners in buying/selling used Teslas and in repairs.
I'm not so sure about that. While I'm no expert on the subject I found this podcast. It's from NPR and 16 minutes long, but I thought it very informative.
Couldn't agree more. If someone has snuck across the border and evaded the established legal process to come here by doing so, that would make them an immigrant who has entered the country illegally. While it is technically correct to say they are "undocumented", it's also technically correct to say that Japan was "splashed" or "moistened" by that tsunami in 2011.
Found it! Franchise by Asimov.
I seem to remember a fairly old (sci-fi?) story where the president got picked in a lottery. It dealt with the ramifications, both large and small scale, of this method. Anyone having better luck remembering or googling than me?
At a certain point, maybe just randomizing the system would result in a better setup than the entrenched, bought-and-paid-for bureaucracy we have now.
Sorry, ignore the previous, I meant to reply to the post below...
I seem to remember a fairly old (sci-fi?) story where the president got picked in a lottery. It dealt with the ramifications, both large and small scale, of this method. Anyone having better luck remembering or googling than me?
As a paperwhite owner, my device is almost always in airplane mode. Load books on it via Calibre over a USB cable and charge it every couple weeks. A modest investment of time and effort will thorougly break the "vice-like grip on the content" you referenced, but probably not for your father.
... where the company's years-old ENTIRE lifetime of work and data is passed around e-mail as a 80MB Excel attachment.
This... is retarded enough to loop all the way around the spectrum and land squarely on awesome.
To be fair, neither do the vast majority of people who use spreadsheets for paid work, but they still believe they're better than you because they get paid to do it, because, ultimately, foreskins are the only metric that matters.
You missed some.
FTFY.
This is where the thread needs to stop.
Really!
Does this mean I can remove all the pictures of me drunk on Facebook???
Are you naked in them?
They're not worthless, we all just pretend "they are needed to help with the general order of society". They're like a figurehead we can all point to. You know who maintains the general order of society? Me. You. Walk down the street and look around you. Those people are the ones who determine how we all behave. In some circumstances, with a very limited local and temporary effect (cop pulls you over or tells people to get out of the street) a cop can make a change, but only because he's carrying weapons and body armor with backup on tap. Really we all are the ones in charge. What happens when we all abandon the rules we know we should follow? I think it's usually called a riot.
They do serve a purpose, but I think it's really important to realize what that purpose IS before supposing that changing the police force will drastically change the people they police or society at large.
Citation needed.
Well, I had to get to page two of a google search on "Walmart Makes Stores Close" before I started coming to articles with numbers from sources I'd heard about, but here you'll find this quote:
"A study published in 2008 in the Journal of Urban Economics examined about 3,000 Walmart store openings nationally and found that each store caused a net decline of about 150 jobs (as competing retailers downsized and closed) and lowered total wages paid to retail workers.".
This article was interesting to read but for those averse to clicking the link:
"But the closer a store was to the Walmart location, the greater the likelihood it would close. Persky and his colleagues found that for every mile closer to the Walmart, 6 percent more stores closed. Close in around the store's location, between 35 and 60 percent of stores closed.
And depending on the type of business, the impact of a Walmart moving in can be much worse. Persky says that the per-mile closure rate increase for drugstores is almost 20 percent. For home furnishings, it's about 15 percent. For hardware stores, it's about 18 percent per mile. For toys, it's more than 25 percent per mile.".
Really, that's all the time I'm willing to invest in refuting the idea that somehow WalMart fosters a diverse / thriving / healthy business ecosystem.
lol, yeah, and +50 to everyone who gets it.
Now THAT would be truly useful. I'd choose that over dirt repellant paint any day!
Are you relegating arguments (presumably in favor of ideas) you don't like to
Anyone who ever argues with me otherwise (oh and there are loads of idiots that do) gets redirected to dev/null.
I'll let your own professed rejection of ideas you don't like speak for itself...
Are we talking hand to hand combat with a gorn or a vulcan?
Anyone who ever argues with me otherwise (oh and there are loads of idiots that do) gets redirected to dev/null.
While I happen to agree with you, I voraciously listen to NPR's intelligence squared because an intelligent debate is great to educate you on viewpoints other than your own. Maybe, for your own sake, you should reconsider?
I'm visualizing a car with sparkling clean paint and an opaque coating of dirt on all the windows...
Our (US) criminal system was carefully set up to respect the rights of the citizenry, even if this meant some of the "bad guys" slipped through the cracks.
What we're talking about here is a tradeoff between
(1) LEO's rooting through your phone because they had a gun and body armor and took it from you.
vs.
(2) Your information being secure until said LEO can compellingly convince a judge to give them permission to search your effects.
Maybe these hyper tech savvy criminals are a threat to the populace at large, but I'm much more concerned about the erosion of our rights.