Because "lessen demand for public transport" usually implies "increase demand for cars," which in turn has historically resulted in "get stuck in more traffic" and "replace more of the city with parking lots." It also runs the significant risk of indirectly leading to "screw over the poor and other transit-dependent people."
Hey now, some of us live in big cities but still think Uber and Lyft are not how things are supposed to work. They're symptomatic of a crappy public trans system more than anything, if you ask me.
And if you have lived with a "wrong" name throughout your childhood and adolescence, you should have to pay for your parents' decision why?
Should you? No. (snip)
Great! You understand then! Of course I know about the other stuff you listed which was totally irrelevant to my initial point. Biology is hard to change, arbitrary social forces less so!
I mean, if we're talking about what people ought to do, why not say that white hiring managers should be less discriminatory, rather than constraining people's arbitrary choices?
Because this conversation has already given up on that idea by declaring discrimination *so* completely systemic that having the wrong name is enough to prevent you getting 50% of normal callbacks on job applications. The reductio ad absurdum of that position is that you change your name, or get yourself the right nickname, and your job prospects will improve.
Because, you know, we are all, after all, defined by our jobs and the amount of money we do or don't make.
Who's giving up? I'm not giving up. Why are you giving up?
Wait, you're not actually sarcastically agreeing with me, are you?
And if you have lived with a "wrong" name throughout your childhood and adolescence, you should have to pay for your parents' decision why? I mean, if we're talking about what people ought to do, why not say that white hiring managers should be less discriminatory, rather than constraining people's arbitrary choices?
Let's put some of the blame where it belongs -- on the students who take out ridiculous loans to study financially worthless subjects.
Show some evidence that this is the cause of people being unable to pay back their loans. At the very least you should be able to show that an increase in "useless" degrees correlates with an increase in student loan default or a decrease in gainful employment by grads. You can even pick which degrees are useless to you.
I believe the problem is the size of the tax and that it's to be arbitrarily leveled per gigabyte, not the general notion of an Internet tax. Most of us here (at least those of us in countries where Internet connections are mostly unmetered) would balk at being charged per GB, never mind being taxed as such.
On one hand, I agree, but on the other hand, marginalization of heterodox economics is a thing. Talk about making economics less doctrinaire and more adhering to the ideals of scientific inquiry (including the part about respecting and teaching competing theories!) and then I might agree that we have at least the intellectual framework for handling this exact problem, if not (yet) the structure in place to experiment with economic policies other than the standard neo-classical/Keynesian approach.
Are you saying, though, that there's no difference between needs and wants? Regardless of who is qualified to make such a decision about you (never mind if a government can generalize about an entire nation), surely there exist things we desire that are completely unnecessary for a happy life, aren't there? Insisting otherwise sounds to me like a dogmatism — of a completely different kind, of course, but no less dogmatic than that of those central planners you despise.
I don't see how it's "fair" for anyone to remotely disable a vehicle you bought on credit (the loan on which you are legally obligated to repay). If the creditor can legally put a lien on the thing because you've missed payments, then they can use the GPS to repossess it. If that's too onerous for their profit margins, then maybe they shouldn't be issuing so many subprime loans to begin with.
That's weird to say there was any one "intent" of the federal government under the Constitution, given the differing intents of the various people who contributed to it, but your viewpoint is certainly not consistent with that of, say, Alexander Hamilton. Nor is consistent with the views of John Marshall, who established judicial review in what was essentially a power vacuum. Nor is it consistent with the fact that we're discussing the modern validity of speculative viewpoints on optimal government from 227 years ago as if they're automatically relevant in a world of outsourcing, petroleum politics, derivatives, and beheadings for international ransom on YouTube, as if we can roll back to a scope and manner of government that was established partially to appease a slave-holding, cotton-plantation-economy South before it tried to secede anyway. You're talking about 25 years before we decided to invade Canada, for the glory of the Republic, to strike back against (among other things) British forced conscription of American sailors! A lot of things have changed since then! So has the government.
The history of education consists of many long traditions of direct interaction between teacher and student (and to a lesser extent between students). MOOCs undermine that, so really it would be more surprising if in any permutation they did work for any more than the small minority of autodidacts.
In the future, will the government also have the freedom to interact with (and send a symbolic message to) dogmatic free-marketeers by cutting off their access to the publicly owned roads on which they carpool, at least until they demonstrate at least a passing knowledge of the history of how markets and monetary systems were created by heads of state? That would be my utopian fantasy and I think it's better than yours.
Are you saying that judges are inherently less corruptible than regulators? If you're referring to the fact that US judges can be voted out of office, that's the sort of unusual feature that leads to more politicization of the judicial process, not less. Unelected bureaucrats wrote our constitution, don't forget!
When they pay- when they are the owners, they tend to take better care of things. It's because when it breaks and comes out of your pocket, you notice it more than when someone just replaces it. If more people paid federal income taxes (Not social security or medicaid taxes), they might have more of an interest in their governance.
This strikes me as a presumption — got any data to back up that assertion? In my mind the causality could just as easily go in the other direction: When people are sufficiently financially shafted by the society they live in such that any kind of income tax is officially considered a hardship, they have less of a chance of believing (or of having the educational wherewithal to believe) that taking an interest in their governance could make two shits of difference in their lives.
What you're describing might make perfect sense for a lawn mower, but government isn't a lawn mower. If you can find any similarities, they aren't by default meaningful unless you can prove them so.
And how are you going to do that? Make bicycling illegal because it inconveniences you? By what right do you get special privileges just because you're in a car?
I don't know why you're calling big cities with lots of jobs and cultural opportunities "hellholes." You have the choice to live in the suburbs or a smaller city, and clearly that's the one that makes sense for you. But why do you tell one person how limited their worldview while yourself attacking people different from you?
That sounds like that's more about bad public trans, not the necessity of cars. Don't know where you are where it's -20C all winter, but it does drop that low in Chicago, and waiting 5 minutes for the L under heat lamps isn't particularly worse than any other means of getting around. Much better than having to scrape ice off your windshield if you ask me.
Plus, who takes the bus to get groceries? I don't know anyone who'd say that wouldn't suck. If you're going to live by choice without a car, you make sure you've got a grocery store within walking distance. Just common sense. The family home thing is trickier (I haven't been in that situation) but it doesn't take so much imagination to see how people in parts of the world with better trains might have a different opinion. A lot of us have to fly to visit family anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Because "lessen demand for public transport" usually implies "increase demand for cars," which in turn has historically resulted in "get stuck in more traffic" and "replace more of the city with parking lots." It also runs the significant risk of indirectly leading to "screw over the poor and other transit-dependent people."
Hey now, some of us live in big cities but still think Uber and Lyft are not how things are supposed to work. They're symptomatic of a crappy public trans system more than anything, if you ask me.
Sounds like someone's stuck riding the N-Judah! (Or the 38, or the 30, or...)
And if you have lived with a "wrong" name throughout your childhood and adolescence, you should have to pay for your parents' decision why?
Should you? No. (snip)
Great! You understand then! Of course I know about the other stuff you listed which was totally irrelevant to my initial point. Biology is hard to change, arbitrary social forces less so!
I mean, if we're talking about what people ought to do, why not say that white hiring managers should be less discriminatory, rather than constraining people's arbitrary choices?
Because this conversation has already given up on that idea by declaring discrimination *so* completely systemic that having the wrong name is enough to prevent you getting 50% of normal callbacks on job applications. The reductio ad absurdum of that position is that you change your name, or get yourself the right nickname, and your job prospects will improve.
Because, you know, we are all, after all, defined by our jobs and the amount of money we do or don't make.
Who's giving up? I'm not giving up. Why are you giving up?
Wait, you're not actually sarcastically agreeing with me, are you?
And if you have lived with a "wrong" name throughout your childhood and adolescence, you should have to pay for your parents' decision why? I mean, if we're talking about what people ought to do, why not say that white hiring managers should be less discriminatory, rather than constraining people's arbitrary choices?
I don't see what any of this has to do with anarchism (as opposed to libertarianism, say).
Can't tell if sarcastic or just WHOOSH!
Funny, I saw this part:
That's not to implicitly forgive any past gerrymanderings by democrats or anything,
Either you didn't, or you deliberately ignored it to be a dick. Which one was it?
Let's put some of the blame where it belongs -- on the students who take out ridiculous loans to study financially worthless subjects.
Show some evidence that this is the cause of people being unable to pay back their loans. At the very least you should be able to show that an increase in "useless" degrees correlates with an increase in student loan default or a decrease in gainful employment by grads. You can even pick which degrees are useless to you.
I believe the problem is the size of the tax and that it's to be arbitrarily leveled per gigabyte, not the general notion of an Internet tax. Most of us here (at least those of us in countries where Internet connections are mostly unmetered) would balk at being charged per GB, never mind being taxed as such.
On one hand, I agree, but on the other hand, marginalization of heterodox economics is a thing. Talk about making economics less doctrinaire and more adhering to the ideals of scientific inquiry (including the part about respecting and teaching competing theories!) and then I might agree that we have at least the intellectual framework for handling this exact problem, if not (yet) the structure in place to experiment with economic policies other than the standard neo-classical/Keynesian approach.
Are you saying, though, that there's no difference between needs and wants? Regardless of who is qualified to make such a decision about you (never mind if a government can generalize about an entire nation), surely there exist things we desire that are completely unnecessary for a happy life, aren't there? Insisting otherwise sounds to me like a dogmatism — of a completely different kind, of course, but no less dogmatic than that of those central planners you despise.
I don't see how it's "fair" for anyone to remotely disable a vehicle you bought on credit (the loan on which you are legally obligated to repay). If the creditor can legally put a lien on the thing because you've missed payments, then they can use the GPS to repossess it. If that's too onerous for their profit margins, then maybe they shouldn't be issuing so many subprime loans to begin with.
Hey look, it's that famed West Coast sense of humor as well!
That's weird to say there was any one "intent" of the federal government under the Constitution, given the differing intents of the various people who contributed to it, but your viewpoint is certainly not consistent with that of, say, Alexander Hamilton. Nor is consistent with the views of John Marshall, who established judicial review in what was essentially a power vacuum. Nor is it consistent with the fact that we're discussing the modern validity of speculative viewpoints on optimal government from 227 years ago as if they're automatically relevant in a world of outsourcing, petroleum politics, derivatives, and beheadings for international ransom on YouTube, as if we can roll back to a scope and manner of government that was established partially to appease a slave-holding, cotton-plantation-economy South before it tried to secede anyway. You're talking about 25 years before we decided to invade Canada, for the glory of the Republic, to strike back against (among other things) British forced conscription of American sailors! A lot of things have changed since then! So has the government.
Profound analysis. By your logic, why don't we just give up on anything requiring centralized government then?
Ah, yes. What a trenchant explanation!
I love how you accuse him of an ad hominem attack (against no one in particular) right after you said:
Your entire post is one bitter rationalization of how you don't really want the things you don't have money to buy.
Was that not supposed to be an ad hominem attack, or is it just that it's OK when you do it?
The history of education consists of many long traditions of direct interaction between teacher and student (and to a lesser extent between students). MOOCs undermine that, so really it would be more surprising if in any permutation they did work for any more than the small minority of autodidacts.
In the future, will the government also have the freedom to interact with (and send a symbolic message to) dogmatic free-marketeers by cutting off their access to the publicly owned roads on which they carpool, at least until they demonstrate at least a passing knowledge of the history of how markets and monetary systems were created by heads of state? That would be my utopian fantasy and I think it's better than yours.
Are you saying that judges are inherently less corruptible than regulators? If you're referring to the fact that US judges can be voted out of office, that's the sort of unusual feature that leads to more politicization of the judicial process, not less. Unelected bureaucrats wrote our constitution, don't forget!
When they pay- when they are the owners, they tend to take better care of things. It's because when it breaks and comes out of your pocket, you notice it more than when someone just replaces it. If more people paid federal income taxes (Not social security or medicaid taxes), they might have more of an interest in their governance.
This strikes me as a presumption — got any data to back up that assertion? In my mind the causality could just as easily go in the other direction: When people are sufficiently financially shafted by the society they live in such that any kind of income tax is officially considered a hardship, they have less of a chance of believing (or of having the educational wherewithal to believe) that taking an interest in their governance could make two shits of difference in their lives.
What you're describing might make perfect sense for a lawn mower, but government isn't a lawn mower. If you can find any similarities, they aren't by default meaningful unless you can prove them so.
And how are you going to do that? Make bicycling illegal because it inconveniences you? By what right do you get special privileges just because you're in a car?
I don't know why you're calling big cities with lots of jobs and cultural opportunities "hellholes." You have the choice to live in the suburbs or a smaller city, and clearly that's the one that makes sense for you. But why do you tell one person how limited their worldview while yourself attacking people different from you?
That sounds like that's more about bad public trans, not the necessity of cars. Don't know where you are where it's -20C all winter, but it does drop that low in Chicago, and waiting 5 minutes for the L under heat lamps isn't particularly worse than any other means of getting around. Much better than having to scrape ice off your windshield if you ask me.
Plus, who takes the bus to get groceries? I don't know anyone who'd say that wouldn't suck. If you're going to live by choice without a car, you make sure you've got a grocery store within walking distance. Just common sense. The family home thing is trickier (I haven't been in that situation) but it doesn't take so much imagination to see how people in parts of the world with better trains might have a different opinion. A lot of us have to fly to visit family anyway.