And, yes, you are
advocating that abortion be made illegal. Stop trying to hide it.
No, I'm not. I'm actually in favor of legal abortion, at least on the earlier end of pregnancy. I'm just honest enough to admit that I'm in favor of legalized infanticide. So there, oh vacuous one.
No, the abortion question is about the women's dominion over her own body. Period.
We regulate all other medical treatment. When it was thought that breast implants were harmful, the (oh so coincidentally politically incorrect) procedure was made illegal. Nobody said, "hey, this is about women controlling their own bodies." That's cause you feminists are a bunch of liars. Of course you want to define it the way you did, because then you don't need to face the truth: A woman who wants a child and gets pregnant already thinks of it as a person, naming it, planning, making booties, etc., and grieving if she miscarries. What society doesn't want to admit is that very same woman would murder the little one if it is inconvenient for her "lifestyle". What I advocate for is the view that humans are brutal. Fags like you want to paper it over and pretend it's about "choice" or "liberty". It's not. It's about disposing of people when they are inconvenient.
in this story on zdnet
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2648 883,00.html
they say the units IBM was testing were not delivering on the battery life promises.
Oops, I forgot to address your other shaky arguments
Want to make a newborn miserable too?
people who are born and alive rarely wish that they were dead. When they do, it is entirely uncorrelated with their prenatal "wantedness". So, are these newborns miserable? no, though a case could be made that dead fetuses are strictly more miserable. I'm not, BTW, advocating that abortion be made illegal. I'm advocating that your arguments in favor of abortion are empty.
Go ahead, restrict the rights of women and their future.
It's true, abortion restrictions do restrict the rights of women, just like all laws restrict somebody. But the abortion question is about the unborn, not the parents.
Your logic is flawed. Should states outlaw SUV's because the marority of the people in that state feel they
are excessive?
where's my flaw? The People should regulate SUVs like they regulate all motor vehicles. Nobody except wacky extremists has a problem with regulating motor vehicles. The flaw in your logic, BTW, is not that I think people should enact any particular law, but they they should be allowed to enact the laws they'd like to.
That is, letting us (the people) make a very personal
decision (emotional and medical) about our own welfare.
Courts sometimes intervene to remove children from the homes of their parents. Are you against child abuse law? Isn't it intervening and making personal decisions about people's welfare?
On the abortion topic, in everybody's favorite "extreme" case, should exceptions to abortion laws be made to save the life of the mother? What mother would ever sacrifice her child to save herself? Quit hiding behind fuzzy emotional slogans, they are unconvincing. In a like manner, I was not attempting to convince you of anything with my phrase that you quoted; I was just making fun of a ridiculous pro-abortion slogan.
please: neither the word "constitutional" nor "republic" implies that a supermajority is required to change some laws. And there is nothing that says we MUST NOT anything, simply that we need several supermajorities (congress and the states) to enact changes.
In any case, Roe v. Wade represented a change enacted by fewer than 9 old men, and on a whim.
Ummm... I have an MBA. You rigged the numbers to explain opportunity cost which I already understand.
I'm not saying this is what's going on, but its certainly plausable
you were not saying what was going on, but I was. the problem with your opportunity cost example is that in hi tech markets, the latest and greatest carries a price premium, and older technologies often go unsold. What I was saying was that IBM would not be distracted by old ideas about what a good notebook has if there were a new technology that was compatible and dramatically extended battery life. I was implying that this must indicate that Transmeta does not deliver on its promise.
yeah, yeah, yeah, all reasonable reasons, but if IBM thought it performed OK and it gets the promised ~4X battery life, there'd be a market it for it at prices that would more than pay for what the chip costs. There's got to be more to this story.
A flat tax
on disposable income would be fair. But the only way to implement this is a higher tax percentage for higher
incomes.
You seem to be referring to marginal tax rates. If you are, you are leaving out nonlinearity in the form of income exemptions. The way the current system works, the first $5000 or so is exempt from all tax. This (possibly with some tweaking) is the system that you are proposing: taxes just on disposable income, income above the "needs" level.
the point of government isn't to push the economy as far as possible as fast as possible.
You're right it's not, but it really should be. Poor people today live longer and better lives than rich people did 100 years ago (in the form of healthcare, healthy food, heat, air conditioning, automobiles, and even entertainment like TV, radio, movies, etc.) I feel that pushing the economy forward as fast as possible today, even at the expense of some poor people today, would be the best thing for more poor people in the long run.
I guess my overarching point is that "your side" usually accuses "my side" of "not caring". I think we care just as much, or more, but are trying to be smarter about it.
What ever happened to innocent until proven guilty?
You share a misconception with a lot of people. You are entitled to a presumption of innocence in the eyes of the judge and jury, but the rest of the criminal justice system presumes you guilty if there is some evidence against you. This is how it needs to be to make the system work. If the entire system presumed you innocent, you wouldn't even need to show up in court. Why should you? Axe murderers couldn't be held till their trials. Evidence (in the example you are griping about) couldn't be collected.
I'm a Republican, through and through, but I live in a Democratic state so I'm going to vote Nader.
Why? if we can establish a permanent Green party, I'll benefit two ways: (1) all my Green friends will be happy which will make me happy, and (2) the Democrats will never win another election, which will make me happier:)
if ONE Supreme Court justice is replaced... abortion rights are history
No! if the balance on the court tilts, abortion rights are back in the hands of the people where they belong in a democracy. In a democracy, the definition of murder, manslaughter, medical care, legitimate, illegitimate, you name it, is in the hands of the people. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, The People will get the choice again, and many states (New York, Mass, Calif, etc) would not outlaw abortion, though they would probably curtail disgusting procedures like the infamous brain sucking late term techniques.
Furthermore, I think if The People were able to express themselves on the abortion issue, we'd see less polarization and more acceptance of differing opinions. If you don't trust The People with Choice, how can you trust them with children?;)
In the first trimester... I still don't consider it a person.
I don't consider it a person, either. But you know what makes me uncomfortable with abortion? If you talk to a women who wants to have a child, she does consider it a child. So if you consider it a woman's choice, it's ethically problematic that women get to decide on the basis of how they feel at that moment whether someone is a person or not, and whether they get to live or not. It is analgous to the situation in antebellum America: Some white people considered blacks to be people, and some did not, and each was able to treat blacks according to their own belief. Not a good system.
sin taxes are an interesting example from an economics perspective: the "sins" generally have a low elasticity of demand (changes in price do not change consumption much for gambling, cigarettes, alcohol, etc.). Because of this feature, taxes on these items do very little indirect damage to the economy. (if raising cigarette taxes does not reduce consumption, cigarette workers will not become unemployed, etc.)
This makes the sin taxes really good sources of revenue.
Internalizing the negative externalities, any economist will tell you, is not as simple as just taxing. The revenue generated from such a tax must be spent on mitigation of the ill itself. So, pollution should be taxed just enough to reduce it to the point that the tax collected is enough to clean up the remaining pollution, or treat (or pay off, actually) the respiratory ailments that result. The point is not only to make the price of the pollution generating activity equal to it's cost, but to make the external effect zero.
The problem with putting these things into the tax code is that they get confused with the revenue generating function, which cannot be neutral, and with political social engineering, which never is. Better to have a separate system of externality taxes.
By the way, given the screaming about the War on Drugs on Slashdot, it is interesting to note that asset forfeiture is an good example of just this sort of internalization of external costs.
dude, your post was really good! That is a truly great idea.
Moderators (actually, I'm one at the moment but I'm participating here at the moment so I can't moderate) please take note: DGolden in a couple of lines said something far more interesting than that long-winded boring karma whore posted by American AC in Paris that he was replying to. Why was that moderated so high, and this one not at all?
MS would have a very hard
time grinding all international free software devleopment to a halt
Not only that, but even in high profile cases, just seeing source code or even signing an NDA does not disqualify you from working in the same area. Many consultants work for many companies in the same domain. Heck, Microsoft themselves hires engineers away from competitors.
The opensource/freesoftware worlds are currently dominated by fussy little hairsplitters who have spent far too much time working on their licenses. The licenses are important, don't get me wrong, and somebody needed to work on them. But usually, when your lawyer is done you send him home, because lawyerthink is not the best for running things.
Also, one should take the caution against knowingly passing illegal copies of anything around, not because the ideas would taint you, but the crime might.
probably shouldn't involve kicking down their door
and throwing them in a federal prison
You're exaggerating.
I'm not going to defend the war on drugs (or DARE), but it is simply not true that the police are kicking down users' door. Drug use is easy and routine for anybody who wants to. The police do go after dealers, and you might be unlucky and drop your dope when you get stopped for speeding, but worry about your door getting kicked down? Nonsense. I'm sure the police use it as an excuse to harass certain populations, but they'd just find a different excuse if this one were takn away.
Quick show of hands here: who here has the skills, time and patience to analyze the performance of your
computer and actually find a way to improve the microcode performance on their computer?
Quick show of hands here: who has the skills, time, and patience to analyze the performance of your TCP/IP stack and write, debug, and test code to improve it?
Now, how many have the time to download and install performance enhancing updates if a small number of skilled people make them?
Oh, I see, we don't all need to do all the work all the time.
I'm so sick of the tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum debate that accompanies the "lesser of two evils" vs. "statement" debate.
Face it, you of both sides: your vote can make a (very small) statement, and can have a (very small) impact on the outcome, both in who gets elected and in how well the also-rans "show", potentially helping a future third party.
Problem is, you only get one vote. It's easy when someone like Ronald Reagan is running because you either buy that ideology or not. But when positions are in the fuzzy middle and the race is closer, the decision gets murkier. There is no right answer: you can spend your vote hoping to influence the "lesser of two evils" outcome, or you can signal a broader protest by moving to an extreme.
But what you can't do is convince me that there is just one way to go. It is obvious that there is merit to both sides of the argument.
But, truth be told, the President has very little to do with the economy other than perception. Rather, it is
congress and the senate that make the laws (actually bills). The president only signs them into the law.
But the "perception" you mention has a lot more to do with the way law gets made than you are giving it credit for. Also, the President's veto power, coupled with a narrow majority in Congress and with the rules of the Senate requiring a super-majority for business to move forward give President's a great deal of power. Reagan rammed much of his legislation through a strongly Democratic congress, and Clinton succesfully defanged his Republican opposition.
Presidents do get random credit or blame for economic conditions as you suggest, but they do deserve it for the legislation that takes place under their watches.
Yes, they are probably looking for some favors down the road, but none of these
companies screams out as one that needs legislation to be passed for them.
Actually, the problem with lobbying is that it is the sort of thing we almost never hear about, and some of those organizations do strike me as heavily involved with government regulation all the time, and expecting press coverage in the future.
Is this bad? I don't think so -- the amount of effort and money needed to run the debates is large in order for
them to be effective.
I do think it's bad, very bad. The amount of money you mention may be why we put up with the evil, but it's not less evil.
BTW, while I come down somewhat differently on your conclusions, don't make the wrong assumptions about what I do believe. For example, as bad as corporate sponsorship is, I think putting the incumbent government in control (what people like to call "public" funding) is far worse, so I'm not in favor of that either. I don't think corporates types or politicians are "bad" either, but I think they are human and are thus flawed and self-interested. Capitalism and markets work well because competition keeps the various factions keeping each other honest. Democracy works for the same reason. It's just hard to find the right feedback loops when it all comes together like this.
What you seem to be missing is the emotional subtext, which is blindingly clear to the weepy
masses.
I think "the weepy masses" best describes Slashdotters. A lotta people here are crying, but nobody in the real world was influenced at all by what Bush said. People are suspicious of some of the stuff they encounter and hear about on the internet. Look at it this way: given how often I encounter it by accident, I'll bet I could find kiddie porn on the internet in about 10 minutes. In the real world I wouldn't even begin to know where to look. That is something different; it's not nothing. And still, I see a lot more crying here than I do in the real world.
Good post, good explanation. But I think there is even less going on:
Saying that a teen had his heart turned dark on the internet is no different than saying a teen had his heart turned dark on the streetcorners of a slum. It's not blaming either the internet or streetcorners, nor is it saying that everyone will respond the same way. But it is saying that negative people and ideas that one might encounter can turn hearts dark.
We're in favor of free speech because speech matters, so we can't turn around and say, "oh, but ideas don't matter if they are dark."
I'm not saying you need to agree with the argument, but it is an argument to engage and rebut, not hyperventilate about.
Slashdot Mirror
And, yes, you are advocating that abortion be made illegal. Stop trying to hide it.
No, I'm not. I'm actually in favor of legal abortion, at least on the earlier end of pregnancy. I'm just honest enough to admit that I'm in favor of legalized infanticide. So there, oh vacuous one.
No, the abortion question is about the women's dominion over her own body. Period.
We regulate all other medical treatment. When it was thought that breast implants were harmful, the (oh so coincidentally politically incorrect) procedure was made illegal. Nobody said, "hey, this is about women controlling their own bodies." That's cause you feminists are a bunch of liars. Of course you want to define it the way you did, because then you don't need to face the truth: A woman who wants a child and gets pregnant already thinks of it as a person, naming it, planning, making booties, etc., and grieving if she miscarries. What society doesn't want to admit is that very same woman would murder the little one if it is inconvenient for her "lifestyle". What I advocate for is the view that humans are brutal. Fags like you want to paper it over and pretend it's about "choice" or "liberty". It's not. It's about disposing of people when they are inconvenient.
in this story on zdnet8 883,00.html
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,264
they say the units IBM was testing were not delivering on the battery life promises.
Want to make a newborn miserable too?
people who are born and alive rarely wish that they were dead. When they do, it is entirely uncorrelated with their prenatal "wantedness". So, are these newborns miserable? no, though a case could be made that dead fetuses are strictly more miserable. I'm not, BTW, advocating that abortion be made illegal. I'm advocating that your arguments in favor of abortion are empty.
Go ahead, restrict the rights of women and their future.
It's true, abortion restrictions do restrict the rights of women, just like all laws restrict somebody. But the abortion question is about the unborn, not the parents.
where's my flaw? The People should regulate SUVs like they regulate all motor vehicles. Nobody except wacky extremists has a problem with regulating motor vehicles. The flaw in your logic, BTW, is not that I think people should enact any particular law, but they they should be allowed to enact the laws they'd like to.
Courts sometimes intervene to remove children from the homes of their parents. Are you against child abuse law? Isn't it intervening and making personal decisions about people's welfare?
On the abortion topic, in everybody's favorite "extreme" case, should exceptions to abortion laws be made to save the life of the mother? What mother would ever sacrifice her child to save herself? Quit hiding behind fuzzy emotional slogans, they are unconvincing. In a like manner, I was not attempting to convince you of anything with my phrase that you quoted; I was just making fun of a ridiculous pro-abortion slogan.
In any case, Roe v. Wade represented a change enacted by fewer than 9 old men, and on a whim.
Ummm... I have an MBA. You rigged the numbers to explain opportunity cost which I already understand.
I'm not saying this is what's going on, but its certainly plausable
you were not saying what was going on, but I was. the problem with your opportunity cost example is that in hi tech markets, the latest and greatest carries a price premium, and older technologies often go unsold. What I was saying was that IBM would not be distracted by old ideas about what a good notebook has if there were a new technology that was compatible and dramatically extended battery life. I was implying that this must indicate that Transmeta does not deliver on its promise.
yeah, yeah, yeah, all reasonable reasons, but if IBM thought it performed OK and it gets the promised ~4X battery life, there'd be a market it for it at prices that would more than pay for what the chip costs. There's got to be more to this story.
You seem to be referring to marginal tax rates. If you are, you are leaving out nonlinearity in the form of income exemptions. The way the current system works, the first $5000 or so is exempt from all tax. This (possibly with some tweaking) is the system that you are proposing: taxes just on disposable income, income above the "needs" level.
the point of government isn't to push the economy as far as possible as fast as possible.
You're right it's not, but it really should be. Poor people today live longer and better lives than rich people did 100 years ago (in the form of healthcare, healthy food, heat, air conditioning, automobiles, and even entertainment like TV, radio, movies, etc.) I feel that pushing the economy forward as fast as possible today, even at the expense of some poor people today, would be the best thing for more poor people in the long run.
I guess my overarching point is that "your side" usually accuses "my side" of "not caring". I think we care just as much, or more, but are trying to be smarter about it.
You share a misconception with a lot of people. You are entitled to a presumption of innocence in the eyes of the judge and jury, but the rest of the criminal justice system presumes you guilty if there is some evidence against you. This is how it needs to be to make the system work. If the entire system presumed you innocent, you wouldn't even need to show up in court. Why should you? Axe murderers couldn't be held till their trials. Evidence (in the example you are griping about) couldn't be collected.
Why? if we can establish a permanent Green party, I'll benefit two ways: (1) all my Green friends will be happy which will make me happy, and (2) the Democrats will never win another election, which will make me happier :)
No! if the balance on the court tilts, abortion rights are back in the hands of the people where they belong in a democracy. In a democracy, the definition of murder, manslaughter, medical care, legitimate, illegitimate, you name it, is in the hands of the people. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, The People will get the choice again, and many states (New York, Mass, Calif, etc) would not outlaw abortion, though they would probably curtail disgusting procedures like the infamous brain sucking late term techniques.
Furthermore, I think if The People were able to express themselves on the abortion issue, we'd see less polarization and more acceptance of differing opinions. If you don't trust The People with Choice, how can you trust them with children? ;)
I don't consider it a person, either. But you know what makes me uncomfortable with abortion? If you talk to a women who wants to have a child, she does consider it a child. So if you consider it a woman's choice, it's ethically problematic that women get to decide on the basis of how they feel at that moment whether someone is a person or not, and whether they get to live or not. It is analgous to the situation in antebellum America: Some white people considered blacks to be people, and some did not, and each was able to treat blacks according to their own belief. Not a good system.
Something to think about, anyway.
sin taxes are an interesting example from an economics perspective: the "sins" generally have a low elasticity of demand (changes in price do not change consumption much for gambling, cigarettes, alcohol, etc.). Because of this feature, taxes on these items do very little indirect damage to the economy. (if raising cigarette taxes does not reduce consumption, cigarette workers will not become unemployed, etc.) This makes the sin taxes really good sources of revenue.
The problem with putting these things into the tax code is that they get confused with the revenue generating function, which cannot be neutral, and with political social engineering, which never is. Better to have a separate system of externality taxes.
By the way, given the screaming about the War on Drugs on Slashdot, it is interesting to note that asset forfeiture is an good example of just this sort of internalization of external costs.
Moderators (actually, I'm one at the moment but I'm participating here at the moment so I can't moderate) please take note: DGolden in a couple of lines said something far more interesting than that long-winded boring karma whore posted by American AC in Paris that he was replying to. Why was that moderated so high, and this one not at all?
Not only that, but even in high profile cases, just seeing source code or even signing an NDA does not disqualify you from working in the same area. Many consultants work for many companies in the same domain. Heck, Microsoft themselves hires engineers away from competitors.
The opensource/freesoftware worlds are currently dominated by fussy little hairsplitters who have spent far too much time working on their licenses. The licenses are important, don't get me wrong, and somebody needed to work on them. But usually, when your lawyer is done you send him home, because lawyerthink is not the best for running things.
Also, one should take the caution against knowingly passing illegal copies of anything around, not because the ideas would taint you, but the crime might.
You're exaggerating.
I'm not going to defend the war on drugs (or DARE), but it is simply not true that the police are kicking down users' door. Drug use is easy and routine for anybody who wants to. The police do go after dealers, and you might be unlucky and drop your dope when you get stopped for speeding, but worry about your door getting kicked down? Nonsense. I'm sure the police use it as an excuse to harass certain populations, but they'd just find a different excuse if this one were takn away.
Quick show of hands here: who has the skills, time, and patience to analyze the performance of your TCP/IP stack and write, debug, and test code to improve it?
Now, how many have the time to download and install performance enhancing updates if a small number of skilled people make them?
Oh, I see, we don't all need to do all the work all the time.
Face it, you of both sides: your vote can make a (very small) statement, and can have a (very small) impact on the outcome, both in who gets elected and in how well the also-rans "show", potentially helping a future third party.
Problem is, you only get one vote. It's easy when someone like Ronald Reagan is running because you either buy that ideology or not. But when positions are in the fuzzy middle and the race is closer, the decision gets murkier. There is no right answer: you can spend your vote hoping to influence the "lesser of two evils" outcome, or you can signal a broader protest by moving to an extreme.
But what you can't do is convince me that there is just one way to go. It is obvious that there is merit to both sides of the argument.
But the "perception" you mention has a lot more to do with the way law gets made than you are giving it credit for. Also, the President's veto power, coupled with a narrow majority in Congress and with the rules of the Senate requiring a super-majority for business to move forward give President's a great deal of power. Reagan rammed much of his legislation through a strongly Democratic congress, and Clinton succesfully defanged his Republican opposition.
Presidents do get random credit or blame for economic conditions as you suggest, but they do deserve it for the legislation that takes place under their watches.
Actually, the problem with lobbying is that it is the sort of thing we almost never hear about, and some of those organizations do strike me as heavily involved with government regulation all the time, and expecting press coverage in the future.
Is this bad? I don't think so -- the amount of effort and money needed to run the debates is large in order for them to be effective.
I do think it's bad, very bad. The amount of money you mention may be why we put up with the evil, but it's not less evil.
BTW, while I come down somewhat differently on your conclusions, don't make the wrong assumptions about what I do believe. For example, as bad as corporate sponsorship is, I think putting the incumbent government in control (what people like to call "public" funding) is far worse, so I'm not in favor of that either. I don't think corporates types or politicians are "bad" either, but I think they are human and are thus flawed and self-interested. Capitalism and markets work well because competition keeps the various factions keeping each other honest. Democracy works for the same reason. It's just hard to find the right feedback loops when it all comes together like this.
I think "the weepy masses" best describes Slashdotters. A lotta people here are crying, but nobody in the real world was influenced at all by what Bush said. People are suspicious of some of the stuff they encounter and hear about on the internet. Look at it this way: given how often I encounter it by accident, I'll bet I could find kiddie porn on the internet in about 10 minutes. In the real world I wouldn't even begin to know where to look. That is something different; it's not nothing. And still, I see a lot more crying here than I do in the real world.
Saying that a teen had his heart turned dark on the internet is no different than saying a teen had his heart turned dark on the streetcorners of a slum. It's not blaming either the internet or streetcorners, nor is it saying that everyone will respond the same way. But it is saying that negative people and ideas that one might encounter can turn hearts dark. We're in favor of free speech because speech matters, so we can't turn around and say, "oh, but ideas don't matter if they are dark."
I'm not saying you need to agree with the argument, but it is an argument to engage and rebut, not hyperventilate about.
flatpack's post is obviously a Troll. MattMann was simply pointing it out. Why did he get modded down?