I'm not convinced that the above is a bad thing -- if the goal was to get lots of solar installed, and cost-shifting incentivized people to figure out how to accomplish that goal, then good -- it worked as designed.
As a kickstarter, it's probably not unreasonable. Kind of a giant experiment to see where solar could go. The problem is that subsidies tend to be like painkillers. They're great at first, but then you get really cranky when someone wants to take them away.
And for good reason, often the people running these business know that it's not a self-sustaining economy, their profit margin is basically made up of short-term rebate payments and long-term differentials between the remaining payments on the financed panels and the net metering savings.
Once the utilities eventually choke off net metering to wholesale rates or lower, the entire economy could collapse as unsustainable.
In some ways the net metering subsidy is worse than the installation subsidy because it doesn't provide any incentive to make use of unused capacity. Maybe if the net metering subsidy didn't exist, it would have spurred research into better storage systems for excess capacity.
I'm sure it started out as a fine idea, designed to boost the "solar power economy" -- create a demand for a product, and maybe you will stimulate the industry that makes this product and drive down prices through innovation and economies of scale.
I think once panels got good enough and residential installs big enough, somebody figured out that with net metering you could structure panel installs in such a way that the installer collected the subsidy and the homeowner paid for the panels over time with the savings from net metering.
Basically, they figured out how to sell panels where the cost of them got significantly shifted to someone else -- the government and the utility, and the benefit went to the installer and the homeowner.
I'm curious how many installs would have been done without subsidies and cost shifting.
It seems like so much relies on the bad way of doing it. The larger narrative is just an annoying teaser that they don't seem to develop very well but tease out. It's seems like just laziness on the part of the writers.
I think the best method is to have multiple story arcs. Very small stories that can fit into a single episode, medium sized ones that can span 2-4 episodes and a larger arc that spans the season and/or series.
It grows tiresome quickly though when the series narrative only comes out in dribbles and is used mostly as a teaser. The "standalone" content is often formulaic and only loosely tied to the overarching narrative.
I'm watching Fringe right now and it's so annoying to deal with basically the same episode structure over and over only to get bits and pieces of the larger narrative. Maybe it's just a JJ Abrams thing, but I'd rather have a true narrative that spans episodes than a mix of repetitive filler with only a small amount of the larger narrative.
You're kind of making an economic argument that basically says that property taxes serve as an incentive to keep economically valuable assets from sitting idle.
I actually considered this, but I'm not sure I buy the argument.
For one, a single family house isn't really a productive economic asset. It's principal value is that it provides shelter for a person. An executive living in an apartment isn't going to be any more productive as human capital living somewhere else.
It might produce property tax revenue, but it largely produces the same revenue whether some old guy who bought in 1950 lives there or whether some executive lives there. There's some marginal argument that a new owner might spiff the place up, but unless it's a rundown dump in a neighborhood full of new construction, the market value will only go up so far and the property tax increase will be relatively small.
Your arguments about the value of moving make financial sense, but impose a lot of externality costs on the people living there, often costs society is forced to pay for when you consider that the low income people living there are old or handicapped or have some other reason they aren't making tons of money -- those kinds of people who lose access to their support system can become an economic burden, experience negative health outcomes, etc.
But why should you get to live in the same place all your life? Other people want to live there, too. How do we decide who gets to live where? Under Capitalism, there's only one reasonable way.
Well, how about because I own the place outright? A long and deep legal tradition of special rights conferred on property ownership, especially of one's dwelling? I'd say the burden of proof is on you to tell me why I *can't* live on property I own forever when the alternative is just somebody else occupying my home.
I'd go even further to say that I don't think "we" should get to decide who lives where. That certainly isn't the purpose of the property tax even if it is an unintended consequence. Ironically it's often an unintended outcome of high poverty and overextended government.
I wonder if any manufacturer of highly integrated platforms like laptops, tablets, NUCs, etc, has thought about a "prosumer" line of products tailored to those kinds of needs. At the end of the day, I don't think it needs gross enhancement -- support for more RAM and possibly a second NIC.
The "workstation" laptop seems just overwrought -- they're too big and too expensive.
Personally, I'd like to do a VMware cluster on NUC but would really appreciate a second NIC.
It's kind of too bad that USB3 can't get more enterprise software support. 3.1 is supposed to support 10 Gbit/sec and seems from my experience more than adequate for a lot of lab/test kinds of purposes and probably a lot of actual low-end production workloads. I hope that eventually we reach the point where a mass-produced interface becomes both a common consumer standard AND enterprise standard, like, say, gigabit ethernet.
I don't really think of either the Alen or Bladerunner films as being terribly good examples of corporate dystopia.
Weyland-Yutani may have done evil, but the society itself didn't seem as if it was entirely run by them economically and politically. They also didn't seem anymore than run of the mill greedy in the same way Kerr-McGee was with Karen Silkwood. The same thing seems even more true of the Tyrell Corporation -- if anything, Tyrell's problem seems largely connected to the somewhat existential moral questions of creating replicants.
Both of those films seemed to represent the general dystopia of an overcrowded, environmentally challenged present future and not one that represented a particular political agenda of repression by corporate interests.
One of the few films that seems to truly represent a corporate political dystopia is Rollerball, where the corporation really does run the world. But even then the dystopic element of this is challenged somewhat by John Houseman when he tries to convince James Caan to retire, claiming that it was the *corporations* who rescued the world from war and chaos.
There's probably no good single explanation, but it might revolve around property tax being something of a usage tax for local government services that mostly relate to property, such as police, fire, and civil infrastructure in the local community.
I think in a lot of ways it's probably an inherited anachronism from an era before income taxes when towns or counties (in the US) needed a source of revenue to provide services. There was no income tax and few other ways to generate funds for local government.
Unfortunately, it's grown very regressive because property owners are taxed on the unrealized market value of the property. If you bought your house for $10,000 and it went up in value to $500,000 (less hyperbolic than it sounds in many places) you're stuck paying a tax on an asset whose value increase you can't realize without selling it and chances are your income hasn't risen as fast as your asset value.
A lot of elderly people on fixed incomes get pushed out of their houses because they can no longer pay the property taxes on houses they own outright -- their fixed incomes don't increase to match the increase in value and taxes.
There's all kinds of ways they try to fix this, like homestead exemptions and income tax based property tax refunds, but it just feels like a bad patch on an obsolete system.
I would bet that the dollar cost of a Harvard education has less to do with the education and more with the people you will go to college with.
I'd bet that at least for the liberal arts part of it, you could probably hire luminaries in the liberal arts fields and gain private instruction for less than many elite Universities.
I think that's mostly it, it's this refusal to acknowledge that at scale, corporations are as much (if not a greater) risk to freedom as government. Probably even greater risk when collusion with government is part of the equation and you take into consideration the effects of monopoly power, the lack of democratic redress, etc.
Comcast willfully interfered with a business relationship they weren't a party to further their own enrichment, Comcast willfully degraded the service provided to their customers as a means to pressure a competitor of video services, and consumers will likely see price increases as Netflix's costs rise to accommodate payments to Comcast.
If UPS were to erect roadblocks in front of Fedex terminals and refuse to remove them unless Fedex paid them off, we'd rightly call that extortion, regardless of whether they resolved it "within the existing legal framework".
I can't believe the bullshit I see from some of the "conservatives" I know who treat this like some kind of commie takeover of the Internet.
One guy I used to work with was trying to run an SMB network off his cable modem service from home and did nothing but complain for weeks about the runaround he got trying to get multiple static IPs due to ridiculous cable vendor policies (solved with some MAC spoofing/VLAN hackery in his firewall) and the pathetic bandwidth allocations he was able to get in addition to the general lack of alternatives in his area.
Yet this same numbskull is parroting this ridiculous "Obama takeover of the Internet" bullshit against net neutrality.
I just don't see how "conservatives" are willing to go totally rabid when it comes to government meddling yet so many (but not all) see outrageous monopoly manipulation and rent-seeking as just the good-old free market working like it's supposed to. I can't make this dichotomy make any sense.
I'm not sure MLK could have done it today. He might have wound up with a 20-year sentence for terrorism.
King probably would have had his plagiarism and adultery exposed in the media, which would have served to discredit him. That's how they do it these days.
I'm reading a book about airliner hijackings, "The Skies Belong to Us" and one of the central hijacker subjects was an African American whose father was a career Navy sailor. He was assigned to a station in Coos Bay, Oregon until his family was basically driven out by the town's racist behavior -- thugs at their house, demanding they move, his mother spit on by women(!) at the grocery store and his 10 year old son beaten in school so bad he was hospitalized. All of this happened to a basically middle class black family in the Pacific Northwest, not to some sharecropper in Alabama, and something that never made the news or became a publicized incident.
So on the other hand, it's difficult to really grasp the magnitude of racial discrimination and hostility of that era in today's era. I think even Fox News viewers would find some of the pre-Civil Rights era behavior shocking and repulsive, so it's hard to know exactly how the public would treat someone nonviolently resisting this kind of oppression even if he was "exposed".
Seems a bit unnecessarily old-fashioned, since with computerized passport control these days
You're assuming that escape from UAE will be on a flight through a border control.
If you escape without passing through border control, having a passport will make it a damn sight easier to get INTO another country. The lack of an exit stamp from your last country might be a hassle at entry somewhere else, but a lot less of a hassle than not having a passport at all.
Frankly, I think a lot of taxes aren't about revenue but more about ways of controlling something when there's no constitutional or legal framework for doing so.
For example, the National Firearms Act didn't outlaw machine guns, it just required they be registered and taxed. Outright bans probably wouldn't have been viewed as constitutional when the NFA was passed in the 1930s but taxing and registration served as a control mechanism. The $200 transfer tax is $3500 inflation-adjusted, which would have kept automatic weapons out of the hands of most people.
The same is probably true for cars -- freedom of movement is largely held to be a constitutional right, and it probably would have been difficult to regulate free movement by automobile without significant constitutional challenges. Cars can confound this logic, though, as the road network is complex and expensive and taxation serves a useful funding purpose, plus operating vehicles on the road is inherently dangerous and there's a reasonable safety need for insuring drivers have some understanding of the rules of the road.
I think there will still be requirements for a license but it will be about the state apparatus' interest in controlling movement of citizens and not about driving the car.
At first, it will still be about "driving" as I think that the transition to self-driving cars will be somewhat gradual. I don't think it will be the case that this year's model is manual and next year's is fully automated. Automation will be phased in where the car can handle more and more routine driving situations until eventually no driver control will be required, and during this transition it will still be possible (and necessary) to actually drive the car.
Even the first fully automated cars will probably allow some kind of user overrides as to where the car goes, how fast, etc, so you will still need to have a driver responsible.
But after cars become fully automated, it won't be about "driving" anymore, it will be about the state's interest in controlling who can go where and when.
I get that maybe some elderly people can be victimized by carefully tailored scams that target the elderly, but when some guy from India calls some old white guy in Indiana about his computer, is he really going to buy into it?
And this other stuff about your credit cards, free trips, auto warranty -- who is buying this kind of thing over the phone anymore?
I'm curious what the narrative about the cradle of civilization is if the Romans hadn't gotten their shit together. Marius, despite his wealth, is discredited by the Senate and never implements the Marian reforms, the Cimbri and Teutones defeat a sapped Rome, sack Rome and the Romans never manage to become more than a regional power in the Italian peninsula and the widespread influence of Greek-influenced Roman culture never takes hold in Western Europe.
FWIW, I might proffer the Battle of Breitenfeld as being nearly as valuable to Western civilization as Tours and Vienna. It marked the end of Catholic religious domination, broke the political monopoly of the Catholic Church through the establishment of the modern nation-state with the signing of Peace of Westphalia.
As far as I know, this is only true prior to creating the debt. You can decide you'll only sell your widget for credit cards, in trade for tribbles or whatever payment method you decide on. But you can only do so BEFORE the sale.
After the sale (once the debt is created), you MUST accept legal tender to settle the debt when it is offered. If I sit down in a restaurant and eat a meal without any notice that I can't pay my bill in cash and then I want to pay in cash, they must take my cash.
Maybe, it is all about single-parenthood â" all human cultures were highly suspicious of bastard children (the very term is a derogatory one). And not because the mother "sinned" â" if that were the case, her subsequent marriage would not have absolved the child â" but because it is much harder for a single parent to raise a child into a decent human being.
I'm not so sure it's bastard children but the decline of the multigeneration household. I think in centuries past, despite the social penalties, there were probably a lot of single-parent families but the loss (or lack) of a parent was less burdensome because of the presence of other adults in the home.
I also think bastard children were disliked less for the moral implications and more because they represented a disruption to succession of leadership. If Grog was the head of his clan and he had a sons with his wife and his mistress, there's always the chance that the son of his mistress might challenge the son of his wife for clan leadership. I seem to recall from a history class that the Catholic hierarchy in Europe grew quite a bit as bastard children of royalty were put into the Church to give them something to do and get them out of the way.
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I'm not convinced that the above is a bad thing -- if the goal was to get lots of solar installed, and cost-shifting incentivized people to figure out how to accomplish that goal, then good -- it worked as designed.
As a kickstarter, it's probably not unreasonable. Kind of a giant experiment to see where solar could go. The problem is that subsidies tend to be like painkillers. They're great at first, but then you get really cranky when someone wants to take them away.
And for good reason, often the people running these business know that it's not a self-sustaining economy, their profit margin is basically made up of short-term rebate payments and long-term differentials between the remaining payments on the financed panels and the net metering savings.
Once the utilities eventually choke off net metering to wholesale rates or lower, the entire economy could collapse as unsustainable.
In some ways the net metering subsidy is worse than the installation subsidy because it doesn't provide any incentive to make use of unused capacity. Maybe if the net metering subsidy didn't exist, it would have spurred research into better storage systems for excess capacity.
Why subsidize residential PV?
I'm sure it started out as a fine idea, designed to boost the "solar power economy" -- create a demand for a product, and maybe you will stimulate the industry that makes this product and drive down prices through innovation and economies of scale.
I think once panels got good enough and residential installs big enough, somebody figured out that with net metering you could structure panel installs in such a way that the installer collected the subsidy and the homeowner paid for the panels over time with the savings from net metering.
Basically, they figured out how to sell panels where the cost of them got significantly shifted to someone else -- the government and the utility, and the benefit went to the installer and the homeowner.
I'm curious how many installs would have been done without subsidies and cost shifting.
It seems like so much relies on the bad way of doing it. The larger narrative is just an annoying teaser that they don't seem to develop very well but tease out. It's seems like just laziness on the part of the writers.
I think the best method is to have multiple story arcs. Very small stories that can fit into a single episode, medium sized ones that can span 2-4 episodes and a larger arc that spans the season and/or series.
It grows tiresome quickly though when the series narrative only comes out in dribbles and is used mostly as a teaser. The "standalone" content is often formulaic and only loosely tied to the overarching narrative.
I'm watching Fringe right now and it's so annoying to deal with basically the same episode structure over and over only to get bits and pieces of the larger narrative. Maybe it's just a JJ Abrams thing, but I'd rather have a true narrative that spans episodes than a mix of repetitive filler with only a small amount of the larger narrative.
Seriously.
Especially with the dual NICs.
Nobody will want your low-rent mass-produced $600 watch in a generation, let alone generations, even if it is an automatic movement.
The pass-it-down starting price is probably about 10x that.
You're kind of making an economic argument that basically says that property taxes serve as an incentive to keep economically valuable assets from sitting idle.
I actually considered this, but I'm not sure I buy the argument.
For one, a single family house isn't really a productive economic asset. It's principal value is that it provides shelter for a person. An executive living in an apartment isn't going to be any more productive as human capital living somewhere else.
It might produce property tax revenue, but it largely produces the same revenue whether some old guy who bought in 1950 lives there or whether some executive lives there. There's some marginal argument that a new owner might spiff the place up, but unless it's a rundown dump in a neighborhood full of new construction, the market value will only go up so far and the property tax increase will be relatively small.
Your arguments about the value of moving make financial sense, but impose a lot of externality costs on the people living there, often costs society is forced to pay for when you consider that the low income people living there are old or handicapped or have some other reason they aren't making tons of money -- those kinds of people who lose access to their support system can become an economic burden, experience negative health outcomes, etc.
But why should you get to live in the same place all your life? Other people want to live there, too. How do we decide who gets to live where? Under Capitalism, there's only one reasonable way.
Well, how about because I own the place outright? A long and deep legal tradition of special rights conferred on property ownership, especially of one's dwelling? I'd say the burden of proof is on you to tell me why I *can't* live on property I own forever when the alternative is just somebody else occupying my home.
I'd go even further to say that I don't think "we" should get to decide who lives where. That certainly isn't the purpose of the property tax even if it is an unintended consequence. Ironically it's often an unintended outcome of high poverty and overextended government.
I wonder if any manufacturer of highly integrated platforms like laptops, tablets, NUCs, etc, has thought about a "prosumer" line of products tailored to those kinds of needs. At the end of the day, I don't think it needs gross enhancement -- support for more RAM and possibly a second NIC.
The "workstation" laptop seems just overwrought -- they're too big and too expensive.
Personally, I'd like to do a VMware cluster on NUC but would really appreciate a second NIC.
It's kind of too bad that USB3 can't get more enterprise software support. 3.1 is supposed to support 10 Gbit/sec and seems from my experience more than adequate for a lot of lab/test kinds of purposes and probably a lot of actual low-end production workloads. I hope that eventually we reach the point where a mass-produced interface becomes both a common consumer standard AND enterprise standard, like, say, gigabit ethernet.
I don't really think of either the Alen or Bladerunner films as being terribly good examples of corporate dystopia.
Weyland-Yutani may have done evil, but the society itself didn't seem as if it was entirely run by them economically and politically. They also didn't seem anymore than run of the mill greedy in the same way Kerr-McGee was with Karen Silkwood. The same thing seems even more true of the Tyrell Corporation -- if anything, Tyrell's problem seems largely connected to the somewhat existential moral questions of creating replicants.
Both of those films seemed to represent the general dystopia of an overcrowded, environmentally challenged present future and not one that represented a particular political agenda of repression by corporate interests.
One of the few films that seems to truly represent a corporate political dystopia is Rollerball, where the corporation really does run the world. But even then the dystopic element of this is challenged somewhat by John Houseman when he tries to convince James Caan to retire, claiming that it was the *corporations* who rescued the world from war and chaos.
There's probably no good single explanation, but it might revolve around property tax being something of a usage tax for local government services that mostly relate to property, such as police, fire, and civil infrastructure in the local community.
I think in a lot of ways it's probably an inherited anachronism from an era before income taxes when towns or counties (in the US) needed a source of revenue to provide services. There was no income tax and few other ways to generate funds for local government.
Unfortunately, it's grown very regressive because property owners are taxed on the unrealized market value of the property. If you bought your house for $10,000 and it went up in value to $500,000 (less hyperbolic than it sounds in many places) you're stuck paying a tax on an asset whose value increase you can't realize without selling it and chances are your income hasn't risen as fast as your asset value.
A lot of elderly people on fixed incomes get pushed out of their houses because they can no longer pay the property taxes on houses they own outright -- their fixed incomes don't increase to match the increase in value and taxes.
There's all kinds of ways they try to fix this, like homestead exemptions and income tax based property tax refunds, but it just feels like a bad patch on an obsolete system.
I would bet that the dollar cost of a Harvard education has less to do with the education and more with the people you will go to college with.
I'd bet that at least for the liberal arts part of it, you could probably hire luminaries in the liberal arts fields and gain private instruction for less than many elite Universities.
I think that's mostly it, it's this refusal to acknowledge that at scale, corporations are as much (if not a greater) risk to freedom as government. Probably even greater risk when collusion with government is part of the equation and you take into consideration the effects of monopoly power, the lack of democratic redress, etc.
There's prima facie evidence of consumer harm.
Comcast willfully interfered with a business relationship they weren't a party to further their own enrichment, Comcast willfully degraded the service provided to their customers as a means to pressure a competitor of video services, and consumers will likely see price increases as Netflix's costs rise to accommodate payments to Comcast.
If UPS were to erect roadblocks in front of Fedex terminals and refuse to remove them unless Fedex paid them off, we'd rightly call that extortion, regardless of whether they resolved it "within the existing legal framework".
I can't believe the bullshit I see from some of the "conservatives" I know who treat this like some kind of commie takeover of the Internet.
One guy I used to work with was trying to run an SMB network off his cable modem service from home and did nothing but complain for weeks about the runaround he got trying to get multiple static IPs due to ridiculous cable vendor policies (solved with some MAC spoofing/VLAN hackery in his firewall) and the pathetic bandwidth allocations he was able to get in addition to the general lack of alternatives in his area.
Yet this same numbskull is parroting this ridiculous "Obama takeover of the Internet" bullshit against net neutrality.
I just don't see how "conservatives" are willing to go totally rabid when it comes to government meddling yet so many (but not all) see outrageous monopoly manipulation and rent-seeking as just the good-old free market working like it's supposed to. I can't make this dichotomy make any sense.
I'm not sure MLK could have done it today. He might have wound up with a 20-year sentence for terrorism.
King probably would have had his plagiarism and adultery exposed in the media, which would have served to discredit him. That's how they do it these days.
I'm reading a book about airliner hijackings, "The Skies Belong to Us" and one of the central hijacker subjects was an African American whose father was a career Navy sailor. He was assigned to a station in Coos Bay, Oregon until his family was basically driven out by the town's racist behavior -- thugs at their house, demanding they move, his mother spit on by women(!) at the grocery store and his 10 year old son beaten in school so bad he was hospitalized. All of this happened to a basically middle class black family in the Pacific Northwest, not to some sharecropper in Alabama, and something that never made the news or became a publicized incident.
So on the other hand, it's difficult to really grasp the magnitude of racial discrimination and hostility of that era in today's era. I think even Fox News viewers would find some of the pre-Civil Rights era behavior shocking and repulsive, so it's hard to know exactly how the public would treat someone nonviolently resisting this kind of oppression even if he was "exposed".
Seems a bit unnecessarily old-fashioned, since with computerized passport control these days
You're assuming that escape from UAE will be on a flight through a border control.
If you escape without passing through border control, having a passport will make it a damn sight easier to get INTO another country. The lack of an exit stamp from your last country might be a hassle at entry somewhere else, but a lot less of a hassle than not having a passport at all.
Frankly, I think a lot of taxes aren't about revenue but more about ways of controlling something when there's no constitutional or legal framework for doing so.
For example, the National Firearms Act didn't outlaw machine guns, it just required they be registered and taxed. Outright bans probably wouldn't have been viewed as constitutional when the NFA was passed in the 1930s but taxing and registration served as a control mechanism. The $200 transfer tax is $3500 inflation-adjusted, which would have kept automatic weapons out of the hands of most people.
The same is probably true for cars -- freedom of movement is largely held to be a constitutional right, and it probably would have been difficult to regulate free movement by automobile without significant constitutional challenges. Cars can confound this logic, though, as the road network is complex and expensive and taxation serves a useful funding purpose, plus operating vehicles on the road is inherently dangerous and there's a reasonable safety need for insuring drivers have some understanding of the rules of the road.
I think there will still be requirements for a license but it will be about the state apparatus' interest in controlling movement of citizens and not about driving the car.
At first, it will still be about "driving" as I think that the transition to self-driving cars will be somewhat gradual. I don't think it will be the case that this year's model is manual and next year's is fully automated. Automation will be phased in where the car can handle more and more routine driving situations until eventually no driver control will be required, and during this transition it will still be possible (and necessary) to actually drive the car.
Even the first fully automated cars will probably allow some kind of user overrides as to where the car goes, how fast, etc, so you will still need to have a driver responsible.
But after cars become fully automated, it won't be about "driving" anymore, it will be about the state's interest in controlling who can go where and when.
Who's actually spending money on this stuff?
I get that maybe some elderly people can be victimized by carefully tailored scams that target the elderly, but when some guy from India calls some old white guy in Indiana about his computer, is he really going to buy into it?
And this other stuff about your credit cards, free trips, auto warranty -- who is buying this kind of thing over the phone anymore?
I'm curious what the narrative about the cradle of civilization is if the Romans hadn't gotten their shit together. Marius, despite his wealth, is discredited by the Senate and never implements the Marian reforms, the Cimbri and Teutones defeat a sapped Rome, sack Rome and the Romans never manage to become more than a regional power in the Italian peninsula and the widespread influence of Greek-influenced Roman culture never takes hold in Western Europe.
FWIW, I might proffer the Battle of Breitenfeld as being nearly as valuable to Western civilization as Tours and Vienna. It marked the end of Catholic religious domination, broke the political monopoly of the Catholic Church through the establishment of the modern nation-state with the signing of Peace of Westphalia.
Right, they can refuse the sale ahead of time. There is no debt before the sale.
But once the debt exists, they cannot refuse to accept legal tender for its payment.
As far as I know, this is only true prior to creating the debt. You can decide you'll only sell your widget for credit cards, in trade for tribbles or whatever payment method you decide on. But you can only do so BEFORE the sale.
After the sale (once the debt is created), you MUST accept legal tender to settle the debt when it is offered. If I sit down in a restaurant and eat a meal without any notice that I can't pay my bill in cash and then I want to pay in cash, they must take my cash.
If the Cartel finds a likely candidate on its own head-hunt, what's to keep the guy from narcing them out?
Oh, I don't know, maybe something about how THEY TAKE CHAINSAWS TO PEOPLE WHO ARE ALIVE.
But think of all the possible benefits, like all the coke and heroin you can handle.
Maybe, it is all about single-parenthood â" all human cultures were highly suspicious of bastard children (the very term is a derogatory one). And not because the mother "sinned" â" if that were the case, her subsequent marriage would not have absolved the child â" but because it is much harder for a single parent to raise a child into a decent human being.
I'm not so sure it's bastard children but the decline of the multigeneration household. I think in centuries past, despite the social penalties, there were probably a lot of single-parent families but the loss (or lack) of a parent was less burdensome because of the presence of other adults in the home.
I also think bastard children were disliked less for the moral implications and more because they represented a disruption to succession of leadership. If Grog was the head of his clan and he had a sons with his wife and his mistress, there's always the chance that the son of his mistress might challenge the son of his wife for clan leadership. I seem to recall from a history class that the Catholic hierarchy in Europe grew quite a bit as bastard children of royalty were put into the Church to give them something to do and get them out of the way.