Umm... it's Greek, which is almost as common in medical and anatomical terminology as Latin. Lawyers rarely use Greek; (wWstern) clergy only when referencing early theological terms.
Is it okay for you to hire a gardener for 20 hours of work and have him actually work 10 hours and take a break for 10 hours?
Bah. This is the problem with the concept of an "hourly wage" in general. It really only makes sense on a production line, where all workers have to work at a particular rate and thus all are forced to work with equal efficiency.
A lot of people here are responding that being a programmer is different... or doing something creative is different... etc.
Total BS. The vast majority of tasks can be done more or less efficiently, and thus an hourly wage is nonsense for most tasks, whether programming or gardening.
Case in point. In the mid-90s I worked very briefly for a cell phone company collections department one summer after high school. The place was a disaster. After about a week, I had already figured out a dozen shortcuts to make my job quicker and easier. When my supervisor came over to monitor a few of my calls, she saw windows flashing briefly on the screen after a few keyboard shortcuts, and I was completing accounts in ridiculous amounts of time. She asked me what the hell I was doing -- I explained it to her, and then she implemented a few of the shortcuts across the department.
Even so, I kept finding ways to be more efficient (I was bored, and we weren't allowed to websurf), so I was handling 3-4 times as many accounts in one day as most people. One of my boss's boss's bosses even stopped by my desk one day to compliment me. That's all the reward I got.
Yet all the workers were all getting the same hourly wage. Is that "okay"?
All was going well until one day I skipped my lunch break and then took a 17-minute afternoon break, instead of 10 minutes. The next morning, my supervisor told me that my name was on a company-wide email about people taking breaks that were too long. I explained that I missed my lunch break, so the company actually got more hours out of me, but it didn't matter.
Meanwhile, I had been switched to collecting very delinquent accounts, which often made no money and which were often just sent out to collection agencies (or consisted of major screwed up messes that I had to contact people in 3 departments to figure out what had gone wrong months back).
Point is, even though I was processing 4 times as many accounts as the average worker, I wasn't bringing in as much money as everyone else.
My boss came and told me that, and said it needed to change. The next day I told her I wouldn't be coming back to work.
What should you be paid for? The number of hours you sit at a desk? The number of hours you actually work? How much you actually get done? How much money you bring in? You ask what appears to be a basic question, but it gets into the fundamental questions of economics.
By the way, that collections department was shipped out to a third-party company a couple months after I left. And the whole company folded within a couple years. Coincidence?
And don't forget the arbitrary rules put in place to ensure "strong" passwords
Yes, and the problem is often exacerbated by a combination of restrictive rules with other rules that aren't restrictive.
For example, about a year ago I had to reset a particularly important password. They had changed the rules so that you couldn't use any "words" longer than 2 characters in your password. I never do that anyway, but it turned out that the rule actually wouldn't allow ANY string of letters that was 3 letters or more. You had to alternate with numbers or other characters.
On the other hand, when I asked how long the password had to be, I was told it needed to be only a minimum of 6 characters. So, none of the password types I'm used to generating involving letters (both cases), numbers, and non-alphanumeric characters that are often at least 12 characters long were acceptable if I had even a single three-letter string.
Since I was in a hurry and needed to reset my password at a service desk, I just entered in a simple 6-character string of 4 lowercase letters interspersed by 2 numbers (and changed it later that day when I had more time to think). In the meantime, those rules certainly didn't help to make my account more secure at all....
Or perhaps it really is a giant con. 3D *is* a gimmick promoted by an industry which has run out of ideas, and will die a death like 'stereovision' before it. I can see the 3D effects, and have no interest in it.
I agree, though my experience seems to be different than most of the people I talk to. Most seem to either think 3D is the best thing ever, or they (like you) don't care.
I cared at Avatar, but only for about 30 minutes. After that, the effects just seemed to blend in for me and seemed completely unnecessary. Every once in a while, they would go to the trouble to make something really "come out at you," and I'd notice. But those things were usually unnecessary and almost disruptive. The rest of the time, I felt like I was watching a 2D movie -- and a bad one, at that.
It wasn't an awful experience. And I could definitely see the 3D. But after a few minutes, I got used to it, and it was no longer interesting.
It's sort of like movies in color. Some people simply think that color movies are superior, hence all the awful attempts at colorization for old classic films. My Dad, for example, grew up in the era where color movies were still advertised as being special. The big color spectacle movies were amazing to him. So, he always bitches about watching old movies in black-and-white; although he likes some of the films, he'd much prefer some crappy colorized version.
On the other hand, many directors over the years have realized the value of black-and-white, even when movies became (and still are) almost all in color. Color's useful for certain things, but it's not necessary, and for somer things black-and-white can be superior. Same with 3D -- except I think it could be a harder sell, which must be the reason behind this massive promotion with Avatar. 3D just doesn't seem "better" to me, and it's only even interesting for certain limited kinds of special effects. To shoot a movie in 3D for such minor effects seems ridiculous -- sort of like shooting a movie in color instead of black-and-white (back in the day) just so you could make some explosions look better or something.
We haven't put it to the test in the last 100 years or so, because we learned the lesson the first time. The industrial revolution in Britain and the United States was a free-market wet-dream.
While I get your point in principle, you're creating a false dichotomy. Most of the seemingly "evil" effects of the free-market industrial revolution were just as bad as before (just aggregated) or a result of new technology, new crowded conditions, etc. It took a while for a balanced solution to be found. For example:
No minimum wage,
Most corporations before the industrial revolution weren't big enough to make something like this necessary. Even as it is, one has to be careful with this sort of regulation. What often happens when a minimum wage is introduced is that a few people get higher wages, people in the middle get lower wages (closer to the minimum), and management goes on skimming the same amount off the top. While it does create a minimum standard, it actually can contribute to the same problem you bring up later (reduction of the middle class).
no worker safety,
Not needed as much before so many large scale machines began to be used in factories, so again, we should expect some time for a solution to evolve. Factories and farms before the industrial revolution weren't much safer; they just had different hazards (and admittedly less of them).
no anti-competitive status,
Ditto the sentiment above about large corporations.
and no child labor laws.
That's because childhood wasn't really invented until the 19th century. On the farm, you worked as soon as you were able. Same thing for apprentices in the city. (For poorer families, you'd even ship off your toddler to become a chimney sweep, since they were the only ones small enough to fit into those spaces.) Only rich kids got tutors and perhaps a few years resembling modern "childhood." Why would there be child labor laws when the concept of a child didn't exist? And once it gradually came into being, kids started going to public schools, and child labor laws began to evolve.
Why does a (relatively) free market necessarily need to allow such abuses? It doesn't. You're bringing up a historical situation that is relevant, but these problems need not occur again. And neither should any problems that we now have moral objections to. You don't need to allow murder or rape in order to have a free market; you don't need to allow child abuse either.
What happened was that industry found the sweet spot where they were just a hair better than staying on the farm (which also had none of those restrictions) so that they could run their machinery with a constant stream of new-arrivals.
Yeah, and life on the farm could be pretty bad. Children worked hard, one could easily get injured or killed by a farm machine or vehicle, animal, etc. And no wages either. Again, you're creating a false dichotomy, because the problems you bring up couldn't exist on farms, and they didn't exist until a novel historical situation came into being -- one that doesn't need to be repeated.
The result was sweat shops,
No restrictions were placed on workers before the industrial revolution, either. The abuses just happened on a larger scale. Ever read about feudalism? Serfs didn't have a lot of rights or the ability to take a day off either. The industrial revolution started only a short time after aristocrats began to lose their power. As for the people outside of towns in the US, if you took a day off on the farm or from hunting or whatever, your family might starve.
child labor,
Already talked about that one.
company towns,
A product of isolation that was still possible in the 19th century. Do you really think such
The credit reporting system is an ingenious scam. They've created a number from nothing.
Agreed. However....
They flood television with commercials spouting propaganda for the current system of credit. Responsible people pay their bills on time, even if it means they have to feed their kids crap food for dinner, or pull them out of private schools, or avoid taking them to the doctor because they can't afford it. Responsible people establish and maintain a good credit history. Responsible parents teach their kids about credit and help them get their first credit card. [...] Here's how it is folks: take care of yourself and your family first, even if your credit score takes a hit. You can't eat your credit score. It won't keep you warm in the winter.
I'm not sure I understand the position you're endorsing -- being "responsible" is "propaganda"?
"Responsible" people actually do pay bills on time, and they avoid doing things they can't afford. Sure, there are people out there who actually can't afford dinner at all, and those people may have legitimate issues. But you seem to mixing absolute necessities (heating in the winter) with expensive luxuries (private schools). Don't want to feed you kids "crap" for dinner, and you don't have a lot of money? Learn to cook. You can provide pretty nutritious meals pretty cheaply with just a little effort -- certainly better (and less expensive) than processed crap. Concerned about public schools? Challenge your kids yourself. I know plenty of kids who graduated from crap public schools at the top of their classes and went to Ivy League schools and places like MIT -- and schools like that have plenty of financial aid to hand out to families without a lot of money.
But back to credit -- the best policy is simply to avoid credit altogether, or perhaps only use it responsibly. Have just a few credit cards; pay them off every month. That, combined with a payment history on a standard loan, will get you all the good credit you'd ever need. If you actually want to be "responsible," consider all the crap that you don't need, and don't buy it -- or at least put off buying it until you have the money in the bank. Both sets of my grandparents never had a loan and never carried a credit card balance for their entire lives. When they bought a new car, they paid cash.
If you want to be "responsible," don't get into the habit of overspending in the first place. Live within your means. Put savings into a "rainy day" account until you have enough to survive for six months even in the case of a disaster. Most people can get to this point in just a few years if they aren't already in debt. Then you don't need to worry about those bills, because you'll always be able to pay them. Your kids can always stay in school, and you can always have heat in even the coldest winter -- because you have a cushion after living below your means for just a couple years.
So yes, take care of yourself and your family first -- by not getting into debt and the credit spiral in the first place. All the interest you will save over a lifetime could be enough to fund your retirement -- I'm not kidding. Do the math.
Social Security is welfare. The amount you receive is generally much, much higher than what you pay in.
Conceptually, at least, Social Security is supposed to be an insurance policy, not welfare. The idea is (or, rather, was when it was first implemented) that people might and do live past the average life expectancy. Such elderly people may no longer be able to work to support themselves, so they get to cash in on an insurance policy against getting too old. If there's a flood in your community where it rarely floods, and you have flood insurance, you'll probably collect much, much more than what you paid in. Same with fire insurance, etc. That's the nature of insurance. And Social Security is supposed to be insurance against living past your life expectancy.
Why did we need this insurance? Because even by the 1930s when the system got going, communities were starting to fragment as people became more mobile, No longer could grandpa depend on his children (or even his community) to support him when he couldn't work any longer. The Great Depression resulted in even greater problems with elderly people not having enough to survive; hence a massive "group insurance policy" to help out those who lost the gamble and lived too long.
But now, instead of life expectancy being about 65 (as it was when the program was started), now it's almost 80. So the vast majority of people are being awarded a decade or more of their "insurance" for living past their expected lifespan. It's sort of like a flood insurance company that insured only one area, and due to dams and other developments, that community became a flood plain. Pretty soon that insurance company wouldn't be able to operate -- it would be paying out to everyone.
Social Security was never intended to be a retirement plan, nor was it intended to be welfare. It's a broken insurance system. (People should pay attention, since the same problems with Social Security are destined for the national health care regulation when it goes from an insurance system to simply a distribution system, like Social Security has.)
Otherwise none of the terrible supreme court decisions could ever be overturned.
I find it interesting that you include two cases that haven't yet been overturned in your links, namely Wickard v. Filburn and Kelo v. New London. While Kelo, even though a horrible idea from a moral standpoint, could potentially be viewed as a reasonable interpretation of the law by some (the Fifth Amendment doesn't really say anything about when or why eminent domain could happen, only that one must be justly compensated when it does), Wickard is just a ridiculous abuse of law that has remained in effect for almost 70 years.
For those who don't know, Wickard is essentially the case that makes it right for the federal government to do just about anything in the name of "interstate commerce." In the ruling, a farmer who grew food on his own land for the consumption of his own family and his own animals was ordered by the federal government to destroy that food. Why? Because, by not buying food from local merchants, he somehow was participating in "interstate commerce," which the federal government has the power to regulate under the Constitution. If someone can ever explain to me the convoluted logic, not to mention the crazy moral position, that makes anyone think this is a just and fair ruling....
And yet, Wickard is what allows the federal government to do much of its work, including, for example, the recent health care stuff. And yet all of this power in the federal government is based on a case involving a horrific abuse of power. If the government can decide not to allow you to grow your own food to feed your own family, what can't it do?
From that logic, it follows that if you send a letter by snailmail, where the letter exist in the offices of the postal service, the postal service workers have the right to open and read your letter.
Actually it doesn't follow, because the United States Postal Service is operated by the federal government, which is explicitly banned from searching you without cause by the Fourth Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
In my opinion, my employers have no more right to read my personal email than a postal worker has reading my letters.
Your opinion is fine, but it doesn't follow logically because the law is different. The government (including the USPS) is bound by the Fourth Amendment, while businesses and other private entities can often conduct searches as they wish unless specifically restricted by law. Just because the post office can't restrict my free speech doesn't mean that my employer can't fire me if I use my "free speech" rights to slander the company, leak company secrets, etc.
Especially since the Constitution was really set up to protect the individuals right to privacy, that the government seems so willing to defer that right because a business is involved is very scary.
This demonstrates a remarkable misunderstanding of Constitutional law.
First off, the issue here is not "privacy" per se, but rather the right to be secure against unreasonable searches. The Constitution (as other comments have noted) says nothing about "privacy" per se, but rather mentions only a few related rights. "Privacy," as a legal concept, was founded in Supreme Court jurisprudence of the 20th century to strike down laws outlawing birth control, abortions, sodomy, etc. The "right to privacy," as defined in those court cases (and which is not explicitly in the Constitution) has to do with some amorphous right to do what you want in your own private life, with your own body, etc. This is a related but separate issue from things like the Fourth Amendment, which protects you from unreasonable searches. In any case, this is only one of many issues in the Constitution, so the idea that "the Constitution was really set up to protect the individual[']s right to privacy" is simply wrong.
Second, the right against unreasonable searches is a restriction on the powers of government, not of private individuals or entities. This is true of most "rights" granted by the Constitution in general. For example, you may have the right to "free speech" guaranteed by the Constitution, but if you choose to exercise that right in a way that annoys your boss, you can generally be fired. You can't be arrested by the government for exercising that right, but the limitations on the government's power has nothing to do with businesses. So, in a similar way, a company could have a policy requiring employees to undergo random searches periodically, random drug tests, etc. If the government did that, they would potentially be violating your Fourth Amendment rights against searches, but a private corporation is certainly allowed to search you in any way, as long as such searches don't subject you to harm or undue distress, aren't discriminatory, and particularly if you agreed to them as a condition of employment.
So, the whole idea that the government is "deferring" rights to businesses is nonsense. Businesses often have little obligation to hold up any of your rights unless there are specific laws requiring them to. The Bill of Rights is generally about various restrictions on the powers of the government. Those "rights" only extend to private entities when there are laws explicitly saying so.
Or at least (in the case of America) remind them that they can't simultaneously chant LAND OF THE FREE and omg, censor that.
I'm assuming you're referring to the "Star-Spangled Banner" with your "land of the free" quotation. If so, do keep in mind that the "Star-Spangled Banner" that is always sung (i.e., only the first verse) does not declare anything about the U.S. and the "land of the free." It simply asks a bunch of questions ("Can you see...?" "Whose broad stripes...?"), concluding with the question: "Oh say, DOES that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?" In other words, is the flag still flying (in the context of the poem)? Or, perhaps a better question for today -- is that flag still flying over the "land of the free"?
The answer to the question sung at most sporting events unfortunately seems to be an emphatic "NO!" these days. Perhaps that would be a more appropriate response than a bunch of cheers to a singer drawing out a long question and acting like it's a declarative sentence. People need to learn to parse grammar....
In other words, the argument of "only if you earn money" argument that you applied to income tax, applies to this fine as well.
Yes, but there are two important differences between income tax and health insurance:
(1) There's actually a Constitutional amendment that was passed to authorize Congress to be able to levy income taxes because such a power is not explicitly listed in the Constitution. Not so with health insurance, which is not listed under the enumerated powers.
(2) The income tax is simply based on the government collecting money from you based on your income. There are no other conditions involved. They can give various credits and deductions for you if you do various things, but they can't require you to pay more if you don't do something (unless not paying your taxes). But with health insurance, they are forcing everyone with a certain income level to enter into a private contract with a company for business purposes. They are saying, "If you don't buy this service, you must pay a fine." Just because low income earners are exempt doesn't mean that there isn't a significant difference in the philosophical conception of this. Why couldn't the government, on this logic, require everyone who earns above a certain amount to buy any other service or product or else be fined? Get a contract with the plumber we want you to, or you'll be fined. Buy the foods we want you to, or you'll be fined. Buy the cars we want you to, or you'll be fined.
Despite the Constitution, court precedents have granted Congress the power to do lots of things. But to my knowledge, Congress have never before been allowed to levy a fine on people for not buying something. This is a dangerous precedent.
If they wanted to give a tax credit for people with insurance, fine. If they want to require people to pay into a federal health-care system run by the government, that seems a little far reaching, but at least you'd be fined for not paying the government. But here we have a case where you get fined for not getting into a private business relationship. Forget about the exemption for low income -- this is significantly different from income tax in many ways.
Teenagers are not biologically predisposed to staying up late and getting up late, otherwise they would have been doing this in the 1800s.[...] It is all just social custom.
While part of me wants to agree with your point, it must be more than just "social custom." Throughout most of the 1800s, the average person couldn't really do much after dark except sit in a relatively dark room with candlelight. Well, you could also go to a pub and sit in a relatively dark room in candlelight (or smoky oil lamps). Only the rich could generally afford bright houses after dark (requiring many candles or, particularly later in the century, gas lighting).
But my point is -- what you certainly didn't do was sit around watching glowing boxes (televisions, computer screens, etc.) after the sun went down. You didn't have a room that might be lit up brighter than the room would naturally be even in the daytime.
A lot of our natural circadian rhythm has to do with light exposure. In the 1800s (and before), our exposure to bright light outside of sunlight was relatively limited. Now we have plenty of light sources available 24 hours/day if we want them. How does that light exposure change the way our natural body clocks work?
In other words, it's not an evolutionary development. But it may be more than just an arbitrary "social custom" as well. It may go to the very heart of the way our society is now structured, since artificial lighting is essential to most people's lives.
Hogwash. Tasting the difference between two wines is often very easy.
Yes -- if they are completely different types of wine, it is sometimes easy, though not as often as you might think. There is a 1963 study demonstrating that wine experts who were given white wine with food coloring gave the resulting wine taste characteristics of red wines instead of white.
More to your point, there was a 1990 study demonstrating that when experts were given three samples of a particular type of wine (e.g., pinot noir), two of which were the same wine, the experts were unable to identify the matching wines 1/3 of the time. That pretty much debunks your thesis.
And if that isn't enough, then there are the recent studies reported in the Wall Street Journal demonstrating that the expert panels of judges in California's biggest wine competition tended to vary by a ridiculous margin in their tastings of identical wines. And when the author looked at the statistics about which wines won medals in a given year, which ones consistently won medals, etc., it was clear that the judges really weren't any better than pulling medal winners out of a hat.
These are the experts. If experts display so much variance in their ratings of the same wine over a few tastings to the extent that their ratings are almost equivalent to chance, I think you could safely say that the average person, with presumably less experience, might not even be able to tell the difference between some different types of wine, let alone wines of the same type.
PS -- it goes without saying that the Army, Coast Guard, and FDA don't give a damn about you individually, and in almost all cases if you tried to sue them for not acting on your behalf, you'd be dismissed out of hand.
The government does not exist to care about individuals, and they will only act when it suits its purpose and/or to avoid embarrassment. If you expect it to act on behalf of individuals (as in most of your example scenarios), you'll likely be sorely disappointed unless they happen to have the resources easily available or it's good press for them.
In the local services, your comments are really not telling the whole story...
Fire departments? "Well, we'd love to put out the fire in your house, but you see, you don't pay the insurance company that we work for.
Actually, there is a trend toward fire departments charging insurance companies for certain services. And many fire departments (particularly in rural areas) aren't even paid; they are staffed by volunteers. As for other emergency services, namely ambulances, you should generally expect a (often hefty) bill to be paid by you or your insurance company.
Police? Or would you prefer to have privatized crime fighters? "Sorry, maam. You didn't pay, so we aren't interested in tracking down the person who shot your husband and kids and ran off with your jewellery".
Actually, a private crime fighter might be useful, if you actually want to be protected. See, the police actually have no duty to track down anyone or even to prevent you from harm (even rape or murder), even in the case of a prior restraining order, etc. So, if you actually want guaranteed protection, I wouldn't depend on the police. See South v. Maryland, Warren v. District of Columbia, Bowers v. DeVito, or, most recently, Castle Rock v. Gonzales.
You lose when you repeat the Limbaugh mantra of "taking over 1/6th of the economy". It isn't nationalizing health care--it's writing new laws that regulate how health insurance companies can operate.
I'm certainly no Limbaugh fan, but I believe that a little regulation by government often ends up with far worse consequences for most people than a complete takeover. Often such regulatory schemes are implemented because of abuses that affect some small percentage of consumers, but the rest of us end up suffering because of it.
Take a look at Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae. Not run by the government, but just enough regulation to make the government liable when things get screwed up. That's the worst possible position for a taxpayer in the equation -- leaving things to private enterprise (who will always act in what they perceive to be the quickest moneymaking schemes), while essentially insuring those enterprises against failure. When things go right, corporations win. When things go wrong, taxpayers lose. Taxpayers rarely win in situations like this.
Or, for a more recent example of regulation nonsense, consider the credit reform acts that recently regulated credit cards for consumers. The idea was to help people who got abused by credit card companies who raised rates suddenly when credit scores got worse, slapped penalties on people for not paying on time, etc. There was only one thing that needed real reform -- people needed to be able to force those companies to fix errors that could ruin credit. But the rest of it just ended up rewarding people for not following through with the contracts they themselves agreed to when they took the cards.
Meanwhile, what happened to the average citizen who pays his/her bills on time? They were hit with massive rate increases, the end of low fixed rate cards, more limited rewards, etc. In other words, to help out a few people (some of whom were legitimately abused by corporations), the rest of the population got screwed over. I have a number of friends who were managing credit card debt well, making regular payments, etc., and now they are struggling to keep up since cards doubled or tripled their rates before the reform act when into effect... even for good customers. I don't carry a balance anywhere, but I lost my low fixed rate card and a bunch of rewards, and my credit score is about as high as you can get.
This is the sort of thing you get when you try to regulate significant portions of the economy. Companies weasel around the regulations to maintain their profit margins, a small minority benefits, while everyone else ends up footing the bill. A little regulation is NOT a good thing.
Like the GP, I agree that we need a safety net in health insurance, just like we need to provide ways of solving major abuses by credit companies or by mortgage lenders. But a significant but ultimately hands-off amount of regulation by the government is about the worst possible outcome for most taxpayers. Wait a couple years, and you'll see how most people will suffer to pay for this plan, and a new massive bureaucracy will develop to allow insurance companies to get around regulations or actively benefit from them, at the expense of their customers.
I'd be much happier if they nationalized health care. Or if they left it alone except for restricting a few major abuses. Instead, they're doing just enough to make it far, far worse. And yes, given that this is 1/6 of the economy, tinkering with it is probably a heck of a lot worse than controlling it outright.
Oh, by the way, it seems many scholars believe that the growth of anti-capital punishment policy in Jewish law dates from the time when the conquering Roman empire took away the right of the Jewish leaders to give death sentences. In other words, the development of this "interpretation" was the only way the rabbis could come to terms with the fact that they couldn't impose death sentences. So they "reinterpreted" the law in such a way that made it essentially impossible for them to do so, and thus they could still believe themselves to be acting in accordance with the text, even if the exceptions were granted on technicalities. Not exactly textbook "interpretation," but rather adding rules for jurisprudence that weren't spelled out initially.
While those later rules effectively changed the plain wording of the law, I don't know how this sort of "interpretation" is any more hypocritical than most current Constitutional scholarship based on later precedents, which effectively alter the plain meaning of the Constitution. Religions aren't alone in this interpretation problem for their sacred documents.
whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall be put to death.
I wonder how the orthodox people "interpret" this today...
Basically, Jewish leaders and scholars over the centuries have added so many restrictions on what has to happen to lead to an actual death sentence that capital punishment was rarely performed, even hundreds of years ago. The burden of proof has so many stipulations on evidence, witnesses, etc. that it would be virtually impossible to sentence someone to death today. Even confessions are outlawed, on the logic (essentially) that a defendant might be suicidal and thus might be confessing falsely to die.
So, yes, this would have been a great example for the GP to give for his "interpretation" argument. I wasn't arguing with his point, just his example.
You are using the text in a book as factual support for the self same text. I shouldn't have to point the logic error there.
What logical error? This has nothing to do with any "fact" of the text. The GP said that religions don't follow their sacred texts. This was an assertion about the text itself. The analysis given claimed that there was one assertion in that sacred text, but that it had been twisted into another. Since both assertions are in the sacred text, the GP is wrong. End of story.
Besides, their argument is that "On the seventh day, God rested." was twisted into "But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work--you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns." within the aforementioned book.
I'm not sure who the "they" or "their argument" is. If it is the GP, I don't think your interpretation is correct. Follow the argument:
From "Obi Wan Kenobi once wore his hood up." to "Everyone has to wear their hood up at al times." isn't that big a leap.
The former is an example of something in the "sacred text." The latter is an interpretation or assumption for behavior that is outside that text
Compare, for example, "On the seventh day, God rested." -> "Everyone has to take a day off once every seven days.".
"Compare" implies that we're dealing with a similar situation. Thus, the claim is that the latter statement is not in the text, but outside of it. My post demonstrates that that assertion is false. (Moreover, I should note that the GP was claiming that the biblical example was a worse example of incorrect interpretation, hence the "isn't that big a leap" in the first example, which implicitly claims that the biblical example is a big leap.)
If by "they" in "their argument" you mean Jews, Christians, or whoever else reads the Bible, well, I'd say "citation needed" for the idea that the idea of "God rested" being an example of a claim that "was twisted into" another. The Genesis story and all the stuff I quoted are all from one scripture that was compiled long before we have any other decent history about that people, so it actually is a logical error to assume that any part of the text was prior to another in this instance. The reason for the resting could have been some community tradition that developed for other reasons, and the idea that "God rested" was a myth made up to explain that tradition, which later stories (as in the Bible) reverse. We simply don't know, because we don't have any other sources to determine anything about the internal structure of the text. (Well, there are analyses of the Bible that separate out various layers of authorship, but they wouldn't help on this particular issue.)
Besides, we're talking about an introductory course on physics. 20 pages of derivations is something you'll see in an advanced course on quantum field theory (if that). If every equation in an intro physics course were rigorously derived, it wouldn't add more than 2 weeks to the course (and perhaps 20 pages TOTAL to your notebook if you scrupulously wrote it all down).
Minor quibble here, but this really depends on what you mean by "rigorously derived." Derived from what? You always have to start with some fundamental assumptions, but depending on how far you go down in that chain for introductory physics, the derivations certainly would add a heck of a lot more than 20 pages to a notebook total.
But what it would do, in exchange for that minor inconvenience, is give you a level of understanding of the subject that (given the consolidation and refinement of the intervening years) would rival that of Newton himself.
Yeah -- I agree with you there. And that's partly because the post you're responding to claimed that he was learning about the way Newton himself did something. I find it highly unlikely -- unless this guy was in a history of science seminar -- and if that were true, I can easily see how elementary proofs might take 20 pages. Newton was working stuff out the first time over hundreds of pages, using methods we no longer use, proving things we now always take for granted, including steps we'd now think of as digressions, etc. What we get in intro physics is a sort of Cliff's Notes compared to the original.
Except with Newton, as opposed to a novel, we don't really tend to care about the complete story of how he got there. What we care about today is how we get there by doing proofs using methods and assumptions we are familiar with... and those are usually quite brief, but long enough to demonstrate a few essential underlying assumptions and methodologies which are important to understand how to use an equation in the end.
It makes absolutely no sense that you can have sex but not send a dirty picture of yourself to your boy/girlfriend, and if you do you will be taken to some kind of "education program".
I certainly agree with the general argument here. If you can have sex legally, you should legally be able to send dirty pictures.
On the other hand, "can" and "should" are two different things.
15-16 year old is perfectly capable to understand sex.
Teenagers are perfectly capable of understanding what sex is, and they can certainly figure out how it works. But are they capable of considering repercussions of those actions? Millions of unplanned teenage pregnancies (many of them followed by abortions or people dropping out of school, etc.) say otherwise.
Should teenagers have the freedom to send such pictures legally? Of course. But teenagers are also particularly bad at understanding long-term consequences -- like having a baby, or having your nude image plastered all over the internet because you sent it to the wrong person.
If I was a parent I wouldn't want to interfere with my 16-17 year old teen sex life, and I sure as hell didn't want my parents to interfere with mine when I was that age.
If you're responsible, sure, I agree. But at some point kids need some guidance. The parents are the most appropriate place to get that guidance, not some mandatory education program. Unfortunately, kids sometimes make stupid choices (even with good parents), and these parents are trying to help their kids out of a serious problem caused by a ridiculous prosecution. Do you really think parents should stay out of such matters when their kids' futures are at stake when they are being prosecuted for a crime?
And as for the "it's not accurate enough for research", I find that it's rarely REALLY wrong.
It depends. Mainstream science and math articles -- you're probably right. There's an occasional error or vandal, but by-and-large, you have quality information. But step off the beaten path into articles on even major figures or historical events in the humanities, and you're very likely to see scholarship that's 50 years out-of-date or more.
And I'm not talking about some crazy postmodern interpretations of the humanities -- I mean things like biographies of major historical figures that everyone's heard of where there are factual errors or historical arguments that simply don't make sense anymore given recent scholarship.
Sometimes these things are not really wrong per se, but they are still often grossly misleading. Often the more obscure humanities articles are maintained by small cliques of editors who are wedded to their own interpretation of the field, which generally is based on outdated scholarship, a few popular sources (sometimes even off-topic sources; certainly no specialist literature), and/or fringe ideas. I've even seen arguments break out between editors about the very existence of a major subfield in a humanities discipline that has half a dozen journals devoted to it and has been at the center of the discipline for decades.
When you have editors going around deleting articles because they don't even believe that entire subdisciplines exist, it's hard to trust the details or scholarship in any of the articles relating to such a discipline.
What if I write an essay for my class, and then include parts of it into Wikipedia?
A close friend of mine who is a professor in the humanities actually gave his students an assignment a couple years back to contribute new articles on significant works in the field that hadn't yet been covered in Wikipedia (or were just stubs). He checked them for accuracy once they were submitted. Everybody wins.
Most religions don't adhere that closely to their sacred texts. They 'interpret' them to mean something quite different, which changes over time. [...] Compare, for example, "On the seventh day, God rested." -> "Everyone has to take a day off once every seven days."
Umm... try Exodus 20:8-11 --
Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work--you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.
or Exodus 23:12 --
For six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest, so that your ox and your donkey may have relief, and your home-born slave and the resident alien may be refreshed.
or Exodus 31:14-15 --
You shall keep the sabbath, because it is holy for you; everyone who profanes it shall be put to death; whoever does any work on it shall be cut off from among the people. For six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord; whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall be put to death.
or Deuteronomy 5:13-14 --
For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work--you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you.
etc.
I don't think these passages require much "interpretation" to get to the idea that everyone needs to take a day off every seventh day... do you? Sounds pretty darn explicit to me.
Slashdot Mirror
coprolalia
Ah, Latin.
Umm... it's Greek, which is almost as common in medical and anatomical terminology as Latin. Lawyers rarely use Greek; (wWstern) clergy only when referencing early theological terms.
"kopros" = "dung, filth" + "lalein" = "to babble, prattle"
And, for the record, the word seems to have been coined by Tourette.
Is it okay for you to hire a gardener for 20 hours of work and have him actually work 10 hours and take a break for 10 hours?
Bah. This is the problem with the concept of an "hourly wage" in general. It really only makes sense on a production line, where all workers have to work at a particular rate and thus all are forced to work with equal efficiency.
A lot of people here are responding that being a programmer is different... or doing something creative is different... etc.
Total BS. The vast majority of tasks can be done more or less efficiently, and thus an hourly wage is nonsense for most tasks, whether programming or gardening.
Case in point. In the mid-90s I worked very briefly for a cell phone company collections department one summer after high school. The place was a disaster. After about a week, I had already figured out a dozen shortcuts to make my job quicker and easier. When my supervisor came over to monitor a few of my calls, she saw windows flashing briefly on the screen after a few keyboard shortcuts, and I was completing accounts in ridiculous amounts of time. She asked me what the hell I was doing -- I explained it to her, and then she implemented a few of the shortcuts across the department.
Even so, I kept finding ways to be more efficient (I was bored, and we weren't allowed to websurf), so I was handling 3-4 times as many accounts in one day as most people. One of my boss's boss's bosses even stopped by my desk one day to compliment me. That's all the reward I got.
Yet all the workers were all getting the same hourly wage. Is that "okay"? All was going well until one day I skipped my lunch break and then took a 17-minute afternoon break, instead of 10 minutes. The next morning, my supervisor told me that my name was on a company-wide email about people taking breaks that were too long. I explained that I missed my lunch break, so the company actually got more hours out of me, but it didn't matter.
Meanwhile, I had been switched to collecting very delinquent accounts, which often made no money and which were often just sent out to collection agencies (or consisted of major screwed up messes that I had to contact people in 3 departments to figure out what had gone wrong months back).
Point is, even though I was processing 4 times as many accounts as the average worker, I wasn't bringing in as much money as everyone else.
My boss came and told me that, and said it needed to change. The next day I told her I wouldn't be coming back to work.
What should you be paid for? The number of hours you sit at a desk? The number of hours you actually work? How much you actually get done? How much money you bring in? You ask what appears to be a basic question, but it gets into the fundamental questions of economics.
By the way, that collections department was shipped out to a third-party company a couple months after I left. And the whole company folded within a couple years. Coincidence?
And don't forget the arbitrary rules put in place to ensure "strong" passwords
Yes, and the problem is often exacerbated by a combination of restrictive rules with other rules that aren't restrictive.
For example, about a year ago I had to reset a particularly important password. They had changed the rules so that you couldn't use any "words" longer than 2 characters in your password. I never do that anyway, but it turned out that the rule actually wouldn't allow ANY string of letters that was 3 letters or more. You had to alternate with numbers or other characters.
On the other hand, when I asked how long the password had to be, I was told it needed to be only a minimum of 6 characters. So, none of the password types I'm used to generating involving letters (both cases), numbers, and non-alphanumeric characters that are often at least 12 characters long were acceptable if I had even a single three-letter string.
Since I was in a hurry and needed to reset my password at a service desk, I just entered in a simple 6-character string of 4 lowercase letters interspersed by 2 numbers (and changed it later that day when I had more time to think). In the meantime, those rules certainly didn't help to make my account more secure at all....
Or perhaps it really is a giant con. 3D *is* a gimmick promoted by an industry which has run out of ideas, and will die a death like 'stereovision' before it. I can see the 3D effects, and have no interest in it.
I agree, though my experience seems to be different than most of the people I talk to. Most seem to either think 3D is the best thing ever, or they (like you) don't care.
I cared at Avatar, but only for about 30 minutes. After that, the effects just seemed to blend in for me and seemed completely unnecessary. Every once in a while, they would go to the trouble to make something really "come out at you," and I'd notice. But those things were usually unnecessary and almost disruptive. The rest of the time, I felt like I was watching a 2D movie -- and a bad one, at that.
It wasn't an awful experience. And I could definitely see the 3D. But after a few minutes, I got used to it, and it was no longer interesting.
It's sort of like movies in color. Some people simply think that color movies are superior, hence all the awful attempts at colorization for old classic films. My Dad, for example, grew up in the era where color movies were still advertised as being special. The big color spectacle movies were amazing to him. So, he always bitches about watching old movies in black-and-white; although he likes some of the films, he'd much prefer some crappy colorized version.
On the other hand, many directors over the years have realized the value of black-and-white, even when movies became (and still are) almost all in color. Color's useful for certain things, but it's not necessary, and for somer things black-and-white can be superior. Same with 3D -- except I think it could be a harder sell, which must be the reason behind this massive promotion with Avatar. 3D just doesn't seem "better" to me, and it's only even interesting for certain limited kinds of special effects. To shoot a movie in 3D for such minor effects seems ridiculous -- sort of like shooting a movie in color instead of black-and-white (back in the day) just so you could make some explosions look better or something.
We haven't put it to the test in the last 100 years or so, because we learned the lesson the first time. The industrial revolution in Britain and the United States was a free-market wet-dream.
While I get your point in principle, you're creating a false dichotomy. Most of the seemingly "evil" effects of the free-market industrial revolution were just as bad as before (just aggregated) or a result of new technology, new crowded conditions, etc. It took a while for a balanced solution to be found. For example:
No minimum wage,
Most corporations before the industrial revolution weren't big enough to make something like this necessary. Even as it is, one has to be careful with this sort of regulation. What often happens when a minimum wage is introduced is that a few people get higher wages, people in the middle get lower wages (closer to the minimum), and management goes on skimming the same amount off the top. While it does create a minimum standard, it actually can contribute to the same problem you bring up later (reduction of the middle class).
no worker safety,
Not needed as much before so many large scale machines began to be used in factories, so again, we should expect some time for a solution to evolve. Factories and farms before the industrial revolution weren't much safer; they just had different hazards (and admittedly less of them).
no anti-competitive status,
Ditto the sentiment above about large corporations.
and no child labor laws.
That's because childhood wasn't really invented until the 19th century. On the farm, you worked as soon as you were able. Same thing for apprentices in the city. (For poorer families, you'd even ship off your toddler to become a chimney sweep, since they were the only ones small enough to fit into those spaces.) Only rich kids got tutors and perhaps a few years resembling modern "childhood." Why would there be child labor laws when the concept of a child didn't exist? And once it gradually came into being, kids started going to public schools, and child labor laws began to evolve.
Why does a (relatively) free market necessarily need to allow such abuses? It doesn't. You're bringing up a historical situation that is relevant, but these problems need not occur again. And neither should any problems that we now have moral objections to. You don't need to allow murder or rape in order to have a free market; you don't need to allow child abuse either.
What happened was that industry found the sweet spot where they were just a hair better than staying on the farm (which also had none of those restrictions) so that they could run their machinery with a constant stream of new-arrivals.
Yeah, and life on the farm could be pretty bad. Children worked hard, one could easily get injured or killed by a farm machine or vehicle, animal, etc. And no wages either. Again, you're creating a false dichotomy, because the problems you bring up couldn't exist on farms, and they didn't exist until a novel historical situation came into being -- one that doesn't need to be repeated.
The result was sweat shops,
No restrictions were placed on workers before the industrial revolution, either. The abuses just happened on a larger scale. Ever read about feudalism? Serfs didn't have a lot of rights or the ability to take a day off either. The industrial revolution started only a short time after aristocrats began to lose their power. As for the people outside of towns in the US, if you took a day off on the farm or from hunting or whatever, your family might starve.
child labor,
Already talked about that one.
company towns,
A product of isolation that was still possible in the 19th century. Do you really think such
The credit reporting system is an ingenious scam. They've created a number from nothing.
Agreed. However....
They flood television with commercials spouting propaganda for the current system of credit. Responsible people pay their bills on time, even if it means they have to feed their kids crap food for dinner, or pull them out of private schools, or avoid taking them to the doctor because they can't afford it. Responsible people establish and maintain a good credit history. Responsible parents teach their kids about credit and help them get their first credit card. [...] Here's how it is folks: take care of yourself and your family first, even if your credit score takes a hit. You can't eat your credit score. It won't keep you warm in the winter.
I'm not sure I understand the position you're endorsing -- being "responsible" is "propaganda"?
"Responsible" people actually do pay bills on time, and they avoid doing things they can't afford. Sure, there are people out there who actually can't afford dinner at all, and those people may have legitimate issues. But you seem to mixing absolute necessities (heating in the winter) with expensive luxuries (private schools). Don't want to feed you kids "crap" for dinner, and you don't have a lot of money? Learn to cook. You can provide pretty nutritious meals pretty cheaply with just a little effort -- certainly better (and less expensive) than processed crap. Concerned about public schools? Challenge your kids yourself. I know plenty of kids who graduated from crap public schools at the top of their classes and went to Ivy League schools and places like MIT -- and schools like that have plenty of financial aid to hand out to families without a lot of money.
But back to credit -- the best policy is simply to avoid credit altogether, or perhaps only use it responsibly. Have just a few credit cards; pay them off every month. That, combined with a payment history on a standard loan, will get you all the good credit you'd ever need. If you actually want to be "responsible," consider all the crap that you don't need, and don't buy it -- or at least put off buying it until you have the money in the bank. Both sets of my grandparents never had a loan and never carried a credit card balance for their entire lives. When they bought a new car, they paid cash.
If you want to be "responsible," don't get into the habit of overspending in the first place. Live within your means. Put savings into a "rainy day" account until you have enough to survive for six months even in the case of a disaster. Most people can get to this point in just a few years if they aren't already in debt. Then you don't need to worry about those bills, because you'll always be able to pay them. Your kids can always stay in school, and you can always have heat in even the coldest winter -- because you have a cushion after living below your means for just a couple years.
So yes, take care of yourself and your family first -- by not getting into debt and the credit spiral in the first place. All the interest you will save over a lifetime could be enough to fund your retirement -- I'm not kidding. Do the math.
Social Security is welfare. The amount you receive is generally much, much higher than what you pay in.
Conceptually, at least, Social Security is supposed to be an insurance policy, not welfare. The idea is (or, rather, was when it was first implemented) that people might and do live past the average life expectancy. Such elderly people may no longer be able to work to support themselves, so they get to cash in on an insurance policy against getting too old. If there's a flood in your community where it rarely floods, and you have flood insurance, you'll probably collect much, much more than what you paid in. Same with fire insurance, etc. That's the nature of insurance. And Social Security is supposed to be insurance against living past your life expectancy.
Why did we need this insurance? Because even by the 1930s when the system got going, communities were starting to fragment as people became more mobile, No longer could grandpa depend on his children (or even his community) to support him when he couldn't work any longer. The Great Depression resulted in even greater problems with elderly people not having enough to survive; hence a massive "group insurance policy" to help out those who lost the gamble and lived too long.
But now, instead of life expectancy being about 65 (as it was when the program was started), now it's almost 80. So the vast majority of people are being awarded a decade or more of their "insurance" for living past their expected lifespan. It's sort of like a flood insurance company that insured only one area, and due to dams and other developments, that community became a flood plain. Pretty soon that insurance company wouldn't be able to operate -- it would be paying out to everyone.
Social Security was never intended to be a retirement plan, nor was it intended to be welfare. It's a broken insurance system. (People should pay attention, since the same problems with Social Security are destined for the national health care regulation when it goes from an insurance system to simply a distribution system, like Social Security has.)
Otherwise none of the terrible supreme court decisions could ever be overturned.
I find it interesting that you include two cases that haven't yet been overturned in your links, namely Wickard v. Filburn and Kelo v. New London. While Kelo, even though a horrible idea from a moral standpoint, could potentially be viewed as a reasonable interpretation of the law by some (the Fifth Amendment doesn't really say anything about when or why eminent domain could happen, only that one must be justly compensated when it does), Wickard is just a ridiculous abuse of law that has remained in effect for almost 70 years.
For those who don't know, Wickard is essentially the case that makes it right for the federal government to do just about anything in the name of "interstate commerce." In the ruling, a farmer who grew food on his own land for the consumption of his own family and his own animals was ordered by the federal government to destroy that food. Why? Because, by not buying food from local merchants, he somehow was participating in "interstate commerce," which the federal government has the power to regulate under the Constitution. If someone can ever explain to me the convoluted logic, not to mention the crazy moral position, that makes anyone think this is a just and fair ruling....
And yet, Wickard is what allows the federal government to do much of its work, including, for example, the recent health care stuff. And yet all of this power in the federal government is based on a case involving a horrific abuse of power. If the government can decide not to allow you to grow your own food to feed your own family, what can't it do?
From that logic, it follows that if you send a letter by snailmail, where the letter exist in the offices of the postal service, the postal service workers have the right to open and read your letter.
Actually it doesn't follow, because the United States Postal Service is operated by the federal government, which is explicitly banned from searching you without cause by the Fourth Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
In my opinion, my employers have no more right to read my personal email than a postal worker has reading my letters.
Your opinion is fine, but it doesn't follow logically because the law is different. The government (including the USPS) is bound by the Fourth Amendment, while businesses and other private entities can often conduct searches as they wish unless specifically restricted by law. Just because the post office can't restrict my free speech doesn't mean that my employer can't fire me if I use my "free speech" rights to slander the company, leak company secrets, etc.
Especially since the Constitution was really set up to protect the individuals right to privacy, that the government seems so willing to defer that right because a business is involved is very scary.
This demonstrates a remarkable misunderstanding of Constitutional law.
First off, the issue here is not "privacy" per se, but rather the right to be secure against unreasonable searches. The Constitution (as other comments have noted) says nothing about "privacy" per se, but rather mentions only a few related rights. "Privacy," as a legal concept, was founded in Supreme Court jurisprudence of the 20th century to strike down laws outlawing birth control, abortions, sodomy, etc. The "right to privacy," as defined in those court cases (and which is not explicitly in the Constitution) has to do with some amorphous right to do what you want in your own private life, with your own body, etc. This is a related but separate issue from things like the Fourth Amendment, which protects you from unreasonable searches. In any case, this is only one of many issues in the Constitution, so the idea that "the Constitution was really set up to protect the individual[']s right to privacy" is simply wrong.
Second, the right against unreasonable searches is a restriction on the powers of government, not of private individuals or entities. This is true of most "rights" granted by the Constitution in general. For example, you may have the right to "free speech" guaranteed by the Constitution, but if you choose to exercise that right in a way that annoys your boss, you can generally be fired. You can't be arrested by the government for exercising that right, but the limitations on the government's power has nothing to do with businesses. So, in a similar way, a company could have a policy requiring employees to undergo random searches periodically, random drug tests, etc. If the government did that, they would potentially be violating your Fourth Amendment rights against searches, but a private corporation is certainly allowed to search you in any way, as long as such searches don't subject you to harm or undue distress, aren't discriminatory, and particularly if you agreed to them as a condition of employment.
So, the whole idea that the government is "deferring" rights to businesses is nonsense. Businesses often have little obligation to hold up any of your rights unless there are specific laws requiring them to. The Bill of Rights is generally about various restrictions on the powers of the government. Those "rights" only extend to private entities when there are laws explicitly saying so.
Or at least (in the case of America) remind them that they can't simultaneously chant LAND OF THE FREE and omg, censor that.
I'm assuming you're referring to the "Star-Spangled Banner" with your "land of the free" quotation. If so, do keep in mind that the "Star-Spangled Banner" that is always sung (i.e., only the first verse) does not declare anything about the U.S. and the "land of the free." It simply asks a bunch of questions ("Can you see...?" "Whose broad stripes...?"), concluding with the question: "Oh say, DOES that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?" In other words, is the flag still flying (in the context of the poem)? Or, perhaps a better question for today -- is that flag still flying over the "land of the free"?
The answer to the question sung at most sporting events unfortunately seems to be an emphatic "NO!" these days. Perhaps that would be a more appropriate response than a bunch of cheers to a singer drawing out a long question and acting like it's a declarative sentence. People need to learn to parse grammar....
In other words, the argument of "only if you earn money" argument that you applied to income tax, applies to this fine as well.
Yes, but there are two important differences between income tax and health insurance:
(1) There's actually a Constitutional amendment that was passed to authorize Congress to be able to levy income taxes because such a power is not explicitly listed in the Constitution. Not so with health insurance, which is not listed under the enumerated powers.
(2) The income tax is simply based on the government collecting money from you based on your income. There are no other conditions involved. They can give various credits and deductions for you if you do various things, but they can't require you to pay more if you don't do something (unless not paying your taxes). But with health insurance, they are forcing everyone with a certain income level to enter into a private contract with a company for business purposes. They are saying, "If you don't buy this service, you must pay a fine." Just because low income earners are exempt doesn't mean that there isn't a significant difference in the philosophical conception of this. Why couldn't the government, on this logic, require everyone who earns above a certain amount to buy any other service or product or else be fined? Get a contract with the plumber we want you to, or you'll be fined. Buy the foods we want you to, or you'll be fined. Buy the cars we want you to, or you'll be fined.
Despite the Constitution, court precedents have granted Congress the power to do lots of things. But to my knowledge, Congress have never before been allowed to levy a fine on people for not buying something. This is a dangerous precedent.
If they wanted to give a tax credit for people with insurance, fine. If they want to require people to pay into a federal health-care system run by the government, that seems a little far reaching, but at least you'd be fined for not paying the government. But here we have a case where you get fined for not getting into a private business relationship. Forget about the exemption for low income -- this is significantly different from income tax in many ways.
Teenagers are not biologically predisposed to staying up late and getting up late, otherwise they would have been doing this in the 1800s.[...] It is all just social custom.
While part of me wants to agree with your point, it must be more than just "social custom." Throughout most of the 1800s, the average person couldn't really do much after dark except sit in a relatively dark room with candlelight. Well, you could also go to a pub and sit in a relatively dark room in candlelight (or smoky oil lamps). Only the rich could generally afford bright houses after dark (requiring many candles or, particularly later in the century, gas lighting).
But my point is -- what you certainly didn't do was sit around watching glowing boxes (televisions, computer screens, etc.) after the sun went down. You didn't have a room that might be lit up brighter than the room would naturally be even in the daytime.
A lot of our natural circadian rhythm has to do with light exposure. In the 1800s (and before), our exposure to bright light outside of sunlight was relatively limited. Now we have plenty of light sources available 24 hours/day if we want them. How does that light exposure change the way our natural body clocks work?
In other words, it's not an evolutionary development. But it may be more than just an arbitrary "social custom" as well. It may go to the very heart of the way our society is now structured, since artificial lighting is essential to most people's lives.
Hogwash. Tasting the difference between two wines is often very easy.
Yes -- if they are completely different types of wine, it is sometimes easy, though not as often as you might think. There is a 1963 study demonstrating that wine experts who were given white wine with food coloring gave the resulting wine taste characteristics of red wines instead of white.
More to your point, there was a 1990 study demonstrating that when experts were given three samples of a particular type of wine (e.g., pinot noir), two of which were the same wine, the experts were unable to identify the matching wines 1/3 of the time. That pretty much debunks your thesis.
And if that isn't enough, then there are the recent studies reported in the Wall Street Journal demonstrating that the expert panels of judges in California's biggest wine competition tended to vary by a ridiculous margin in their tastings of identical wines. And when the author looked at the statistics about which wines won medals in a given year, which ones consistently won medals, etc., it was clear that the judges really weren't any better than pulling medal winners out of a hat.
These are the experts. If experts display so much variance in their ratings of the same wine over a few tastings to the extent that their ratings are almost equivalent to chance, I think you could safely say that the average person, with presumably less experience, might not even be able to tell the difference between some different types of wine, let alone wines of the same type.
The government does not exist to care about individuals, and they will only act when it suits its purpose and/or to avoid embarrassment. If you expect it to act on behalf of individuals (as in most of your example scenarios), you'll likely be sorely disappointed unless they happen to have the resources easily available or it's good press for them.
In the local services, your comments are really not telling the whole story...
Fire departments? "Well, we'd love to put out the fire in your house, but you see, you don't pay the insurance company that we work for.
Actually, there is a trend toward fire departments charging insurance companies for certain services. And many fire departments (particularly in rural areas) aren't even paid; they are staffed by volunteers. As for other emergency services, namely ambulances, you should generally expect a (often hefty) bill to be paid by you or your insurance company.
Police? Or would you prefer to have privatized crime fighters? "Sorry, maam. You didn't pay, so we aren't interested in tracking down the person who shot your husband and kids and ran off with your jewellery".
Actually, a private crime fighter might be useful, if you actually want to be protected. See, the police actually have no duty to track down anyone or even to prevent you from harm (even rape or murder), even in the case of a prior restraining order, etc. So, if you actually want guaranteed protection, I wouldn't depend on the police. See South v. Maryland, Warren v. District of Columbia, Bowers v. DeVito, or, most recently, Castle Rock v. Gonzales.
You lose when you repeat the Limbaugh mantra of "taking over 1/6th of the economy". It isn't nationalizing health care--it's writing new laws that regulate how health insurance companies can operate.
I'm certainly no Limbaugh fan, but I believe that a little regulation by government often ends up with far worse consequences for most people than a complete takeover. Often such regulatory schemes are implemented because of abuses that affect some small percentage of consumers, but the rest of us end up suffering because of it.
Take a look at Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae. Not run by the government, but just enough regulation to make the government liable when things get screwed up. That's the worst possible position for a taxpayer in the equation -- leaving things to private enterprise (who will always act in what they perceive to be the quickest moneymaking schemes), while essentially insuring those enterprises against failure. When things go right, corporations win. When things go wrong, taxpayers lose. Taxpayers rarely win in situations like this.
Or, for a more recent example of regulation nonsense, consider the credit reform acts that recently regulated credit cards for consumers. The idea was to help people who got abused by credit card companies who raised rates suddenly when credit scores got worse, slapped penalties on people for not paying on time, etc. There was only one thing that needed real reform -- people needed to be able to force those companies to fix errors that could ruin credit. But the rest of it just ended up rewarding people for not following through with the contracts they themselves agreed to when they took the cards.
Meanwhile, what happened to the average citizen who pays his/her bills on time? They were hit with massive rate increases, the end of low fixed rate cards, more limited rewards, etc. In other words, to help out a few people (some of whom were legitimately abused by corporations), the rest of the population got screwed over. I have a number of friends who were managing credit card debt well, making regular payments, etc., and now they are struggling to keep up since cards doubled or tripled their rates before the reform act when into effect... even for good customers. I don't carry a balance anywhere, but I lost my low fixed rate card and a bunch of rewards, and my credit score is about as high as you can get.
This is the sort of thing you get when you try to regulate significant portions of the economy. Companies weasel around the regulations to maintain their profit margins, a small minority benefits, while everyone else ends up footing the bill. A little regulation is NOT a good thing.
Like the GP, I agree that we need a safety net in health insurance, just like we need to provide ways of solving major abuses by credit companies or by mortgage lenders. But a significant but ultimately hands-off amount of regulation by the government is about the worst possible outcome for most taxpayers. Wait a couple years, and you'll see how most people will suffer to pay for this plan, and a new massive bureaucracy will develop to allow insurance companies to get around regulations or actively benefit from them, at the expense of their customers.
I'd be much happier if they nationalized health care. Or if they left it alone except for restricting a few major abuses. Instead, they're doing just enough to make it far, far worse. And yes, given that this is 1/6 of the economy, tinkering with it is probably a heck of a lot worse than controlling it outright.
Oh, by the way, it seems many scholars believe that the growth of anti-capital punishment policy in Jewish law dates from the time when the conquering Roman empire took away the right of the Jewish leaders to give death sentences. In other words, the development of this "interpretation" was the only way the rabbis could come to terms with the fact that they couldn't impose death sentences. So they "reinterpreted" the law in such a way that made it essentially impossible for them to do so, and thus they could still believe themselves to be acting in accordance with the text, even if the exceptions were granted on technicalities. Not exactly textbook "interpretation," but rather adding rules for jurisprudence that weren't spelled out initially.
While those later rules effectively changed the plain wording of the law, I don't know how this sort of "interpretation" is any more hypocritical than most current Constitutional scholarship based on later precedents, which effectively alter the plain meaning of the Constitution. Religions aren't alone in this interpretation problem for their sacred documents.
whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall be put to death.
I wonder how the orthodox people "interpret" this today...
Basically, Jewish leaders and scholars over the centuries have added so many restrictions on what has to happen to lead to an actual death sentence that capital punishment was rarely performed, even hundreds of years ago. The burden of proof has so many stipulations on evidence, witnesses, etc. that it would be virtually impossible to sentence someone to death today. Even confessions are outlawed, on the logic (essentially) that a defendant might be suicidal and thus might be confessing falsely to die.
So, yes, this would have been a great example for the GP to give for his "interpretation" argument. I wasn't arguing with his point, just his example.
You are using the text in a book as factual support for the self same text. I shouldn't have to point the logic error there.
What logical error? This has nothing to do with any "fact" of the text. The GP said that religions don't follow their sacred texts. This was an assertion about the text itself. The analysis given claimed that there was one assertion in that sacred text, but that it had been twisted into another. Since both assertions are in the sacred text, the GP is wrong. End of story.
Besides, their argument is that "On the seventh day, God rested." was twisted into "But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work--you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns." within the aforementioned book.
I'm not sure who the "they" or "their argument" is. If it is the GP, I don't think your interpretation is correct. Follow the argument:
From "Obi Wan Kenobi once wore his hood up." to "Everyone has to wear their hood up at al times." isn't that big a leap.
The former is an example of something in the "sacred text." The latter is an interpretation or assumption for behavior that is outside that text
Compare, for example, "On the seventh day, God rested." -> "Everyone has to take a day off once every seven days.".
"Compare" implies that we're dealing with a similar situation. Thus, the claim is that the latter statement is not in the text, but outside of it. My post demonstrates that that assertion is false. (Moreover, I should note that the GP was claiming that the biblical example was a worse example of incorrect interpretation, hence the "isn't that big a leap" in the first example, which implicitly claims that the biblical example is a big leap.)
If by "they" in "their argument" you mean Jews, Christians, or whoever else reads the Bible, well, I'd say "citation needed" for the idea that the idea of "God rested" being an example of a claim that "was twisted into" another. The Genesis story and all the stuff I quoted are all from one scripture that was compiled long before we have any other decent history about that people, so it actually is a logical error to assume that any part of the text was prior to another in this instance. The reason for the resting could have been some community tradition that developed for other reasons, and the idea that "God rested" was a myth made up to explain that tradition, which later stories (as in the Bible) reverse. We simply don't know, because we don't have any other sources to determine anything about the internal structure of the text. (Well, there are analyses of the Bible that separate out various layers of authorship, but they wouldn't help on this particular issue.)
Besides, we're talking about an introductory course on physics. 20 pages of derivations is something you'll see in an advanced course on quantum field theory (if that). If every equation in an intro physics course were rigorously derived, it wouldn't add more than 2 weeks to the course (and perhaps 20 pages TOTAL to your notebook if you scrupulously wrote it all down).
Minor quibble here, but this really depends on what you mean by "rigorously derived." Derived from what? You always have to start with some fundamental assumptions, but depending on how far you go down in that chain for introductory physics, the derivations certainly would add a heck of a lot more than 20 pages to a notebook total.
But what it would do, in exchange for that minor inconvenience, is give you a level of understanding of the subject that (given the consolidation and refinement of the intervening years) would rival that of Newton himself.
Yeah -- I agree with you there. And that's partly because the post you're responding to claimed that he was learning about the way Newton himself did something. I find it highly unlikely -- unless this guy was in a history of science seminar -- and if that were true, I can easily see how elementary proofs might take 20 pages. Newton was working stuff out the first time over hundreds of pages, using methods we no longer use, proving things we now always take for granted, including steps we'd now think of as digressions, etc. What we get in intro physics is a sort of Cliff's Notes compared to the original.
Except with Newton, as opposed to a novel, we don't really tend to care about the complete story of how he got there. What we care about today is how we get there by doing proofs using methods and assumptions we are familiar with... and those are usually quite brief, but long enough to demonstrate a few essential underlying assumptions and methodologies which are important to understand how to use an equation in the end.
It makes absolutely no sense that you can have sex but not send a dirty picture of yourself to your boy/girlfriend, and if you do you will be taken to some kind of "education program".
I certainly agree with the general argument here. If you can have sex legally, you should legally be able to send dirty pictures.
On the other hand, "can" and "should" are two different things.
15-16 year old is perfectly capable to understand sex.
Teenagers are perfectly capable of understanding what sex is, and they can certainly figure out how it works. But are they capable of considering repercussions of those actions? Millions of unplanned teenage pregnancies (many of them followed by abortions or people dropping out of school, etc.) say otherwise.
Should teenagers have the freedom to send such pictures legally? Of course. But teenagers are also particularly bad at understanding long-term consequences -- like having a baby, or having your nude image plastered all over the internet because you sent it to the wrong person.
If I was a parent I wouldn't want to interfere with my 16-17 year old teen sex life, and I sure as hell didn't want my parents to interfere with mine when I was that age.
If you're responsible, sure, I agree. But at some point kids need some guidance. The parents are the most appropriate place to get that guidance, not some mandatory education program. Unfortunately, kids sometimes make stupid choices (even with good parents), and these parents are trying to help their kids out of a serious problem caused by a ridiculous prosecution. Do you really think parents should stay out of such matters when their kids' futures are at stake when they are being prosecuted for a crime?
And as for the "it's not accurate enough for research", I find that it's rarely REALLY wrong.
It depends. Mainstream science and math articles -- you're probably right. There's an occasional error or vandal, but by-and-large, you have quality information. But step off the beaten path into articles on even major figures or historical events in the humanities, and you're very likely to see scholarship that's 50 years out-of-date or more.
And I'm not talking about some crazy postmodern interpretations of the humanities -- I mean things like biographies of major historical figures that everyone's heard of where there are factual errors or historical arguments that simply don't make sense anymore given recent scholarship.
Sometimes these things are not really wrong per se, but they are still often grossly misleading. Often the more obscure humanities articles are maintained by small cliques of editors who are wedded to their own interpretation of the field, which generally is based on outdated scholarship, a few popular sources (sometimes even off-topic sources; certainly no specialist literature), and/or fringe ideas. I've even seen arguments break out between editors about the very existence of a major subfield in a humanities discipline that has half a dozen journals devoted to it and has been at the center of the discipline for decades.
When you have editors going around deleting articles because they don't even believe that entire subdisciplines exist, it's hard to trust the details or scholarship in any of the articles relating to such a discipline.
What if I write an essay for my class, and then include parts of it into Wikipedia?
A close friend of mine who is a professor in the humanities actually gave his students an assignment a couple years back to contribute new articles on significant works in the field that hadn't yet been covered in Wikipedia (or were just stubs). He checked them for accuracy once they were submitted. Everybody wins.
Most religions don't adhere that closely to their sacred texts. They 'interpret' them to mean something quite different, which changes over time. [...] Compare, for example, "On the seventh day, God rested." -> "Everyone has to take a day off once every seven days."
Umm... try Exodus 20:8-11 --
Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work--you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.
or Exodus 23:12 --
For six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest, so that your ox and your donkey may have relief, and your home-born slave and the resident alien may be refreshed.
or Exodus 31:14-15 --
You shall keep the sabbath, because it is holy for you; everyone who profanes it shall be put to death; whoever does any work on it shall be cut off from among the people. For six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord; whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall be put to death.
or Deuteronomy 5:13-14 --
For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work--you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you.
etc.
I don't think these passages require much "interpretation" to get to the idea that everyone needs to take a day off every seventh day... do you? Sounds pretty darn explicit to me.