i countinously question my co-workers (social workers) in telling the youth what is propper and not.
I'm glad they're telling the youth what is proper; you're clearly incompetent to do so.
using words... is becoming more than just the normal, it is becoming the standard.
Is that right? Using words is "becoming more than just the normal"? I've been using words for years now; I'm glad to hear that's becoming the standard. Your post is a perfect example of why people should learn to write in something approaching standard English. Your meaning is barely intelligible, and you sound like an idiot.
There's also a fairly recent book entitled _Grendel_ that looks at the entire story from the monster's point of view
I was hoping someone would mention that. That'd be John Gardner'sGrendel, published in 1971. Which I guess is recent compared to the 8th century. "I was Grendel, Ruiner of Meadhalls, Wrecker of Kings! But also, as never before, I was alone."
The problem is that U.S. government bonds, held by the U.S. government, represent nothing more than a promise to tax the American people.
Analogy: I'm a trustworthy guy; if you lend me $500 I'll pay you back when you need it. Your money is safe. But if I lend myself $500, write myself an IOU, and spend the money, when I need that money I'm going to have to go out and work for it. Just like I would've had to do if I didn't have the IOU.
The Social Security trust fund is the same kind of accounting fiction as the IOU that I write to myself. The government collects the money, and spends it. When it needs that money later, it has to collect taxes to pay itself off. Which is exactly what it would do if there were no "trust fund".
I respect Republicans for being willing to talk honestly about Social Security, while the Democrats seem committed to claiming there's no problem. Unfortunately Bush's attempts to fix Social Security are completely undermined by the fact that he's running up huge government debts at the same time.
So I ask again: what else should have been done with the S.S. money?
Probably nothing different. By spending it, as we did, we kept our real (as opposed to official) Federal deficits from being as high as they would've been - which is saving, in a sense (just like if I used that $500 I lent myself to pay off my credit cards). But whatever we should have done with it, we should acknowledge that we don't have it anymore.
Re:The annoying "Did you mean" feature
on
Google Tidbits
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· Score: 2, Funny
Yeah, I also left out the time value of money because I thought a longer explanation would just confuse things -
But what is interesting is not that I'd rather have a smaller amount now than a larger amount in a week. What's interesting is that if you had asked me to make that decision a year ahead of time I would made the opposite choice. (I would have said I wanted the larger amount, in a year and a week.)
And neither inflation nor the time value of money can provide any explanation of why that should be true.
It is called time preference, but the expectation of inflation doesn't explain it.
For $100 today to be worth more than $115 a week from now, you'd have to have %100,000 annual inflation, which is well outside the expectation of Americans.
And if you adjust all the numbers in question for 10% inflation, for instance, people would then be choosing between $100 today and $115 in a week; and between $91 a year from now and $105 in a year and a week (rounding off the pennies). The rational choice would be to prefer the larger amount in each case; in fact people prefer $100 now to $115 in a week, but would presumably still be indifferent between the $91 and the $105, or if anything prefer the $105.
In considering the more distant future, then, people make more obviously rational decisions, taking the inflation rate into account. But in considering the immediate future people put an apparently irrational premium on having cash in hand.
A number of papers have been written on why this kind of time preference might have been selected for under the circumstances man evolved in; the idea is roughly that "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" is a good rule of thumb for hunter-gatherers. See Evolution and Human Nature (pdf) from the Journal of Economic Perspectives, for instance.
"If you're concerned with protecting children..."
on
Smart Guns are Coming
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· Score: 1
...the latest (2001) figures from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had 2,911 children and teens dead that year from gunshot wounds. Not even 1/2 that many children in the same age group drown each year, let alone in plastic buckets.
I don't know about plastic buckets, but the CDC data from 2002 show that drowning killed almost fourteen times as many children under age 15 as firearm accidents. So zorander is correct in suggesting that keeping kids away from water would save far more lives than childproofing guns.
Apparently you are including homicides among older teens in your numbers, which is fine if you just want to prove that the grandparent post is imprecisely worded. But knowing how many, say, 18-year old drug dealers get shot in a year is not at all relevant to judging the threat guns kept in a home pose to children.
I read a book about that once - Copernick's Rebellion. Amusing SF novel, apparently out of print. The only problem with the trees in the book was that sometimes toilets would sprout in the middle of beds and digest people in their sleep.
And in doing so inspired Scottish hippie-folk-troubador Donovan to write a fairly awful song called "The Intergalactic Laxative," with lyrics like "You may well ask, 'now what becomes of liquid they consume?'/ A tube is led from penis head to a unit in the room...":
I was impressed like everyone when man began to fly, Out from earthly regions to planets in the sky, With total media coverage we watched the heros land, As ceremoniously they disturbed the cosmic sand.
In awe with admiration we listened to them talk, Such pride felt they, such joy to be upon the moon to walk, My romantic vision shattered when it was explained to me, Spacemen wear old diapers in which they shit and pee.
They don't partake like you and I of beefy burger mush, Their food is specially designed to dissolve into slush, Absorbed by multi-fibers in the super diaper suit, Otherwise the slush would trickle down inside the boot
You may well ask now what becomes of liquid they consume, A tube is led from penis head to a unit in the room, The water is recirculated, filtered for re-use, In case some anti-gravity pee gets on the loose.
Whenever man has conquered in his quest for frontiers new I'm glad that he's still had to do the numbers one and two, It makes it all so ordinary, just like you and me, To know the greatest heroes, they had to shit and pee.
Oh the intergalactic laxative will get you from here to there, For cosmic constipation, there's none that can compare, If shitting is your problem when you're out there in the stars, Oh the intergalactic laxative, the intergalactic laxative, the intergalactic laxative will get you from here to Mars.
From his 1973 Cosmic Wheels album. I feel bad inflicting knowledge of the song on others, but it seemed relevant.
It's working for Apple, but I still don't think per-song pricing makes sense. At $.79/song, do I pay $.79 for Thick as a Brick and $20.54 for The Wall? And in that case I could get Yes's entire catalog for about five bucks.
Wolves are not genetically identical to dogs, any more than beagles are genetically identical to rotweilers: the consistent phenotypic differences between dog breeds, and between dogs and wolves, are genetically determined. If being genetically identical were the key, each human (or pair of twins) would be a species unto himself.
But what people mean by species is usually more determined by whether the animals interbreed and produce fertile offspring (this gets fuzzy with plants and is more or less irrelevant to bacteria, but still...).
Dogs and wolves are close enough to interbreed, successfully and often, and a lot of people would class dogs as a subspecies of wolf (Canis lupus latrans).
But classification by genus and higher levels is fairly arbitrary, based mostly on what people see as significant differences and similarities (e.g. people are different from apes, cats all kind of look alike). The only important thing is that the basic nesting is right, so that if species A and B have a common ancestor, and C and D are descended from B, then if A and C are in one class, B and D are also in that class.
It might be more rational to have a system that took each branching into account, but we don't have enough information for that, and it would be inconvenient to deal with.
To sum up: the argument that no one calls a wolf a dog is incorrect, but there's still no point in calling a chimp a Homo.
Everything I know about nanotechnology I learned by reading Michael Crichton's "Prey".
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age is a better book, if not necessarily a better reference. It goes beyond the technology itself and deals with the consequences of a future where mass-production is so cheap as to make basic goods free. And the nanotech in it seems to have been inspired largely by Drexler's Engines of Creation, which is an inspiring read until you realize it came out fifteen years ago.
My thought is that Quantum Spin is exactly that, spin.
Which would mean what? That if you painted little stripes on an electron you could watch them going around like a barbershop pole? You can't do that, or anything like it. And quantum spin does not behave like everyday macro spin, either.
...words and terms that closely match actual circumstances.
I would say that there are no "actual circumstances," beyond what can in principle be observed. You can imagine electrons as little balls spinning around, or you can imagine angels pushing the planets around, but in neither case is that "what's really happening," because there is nothing to know, beyond the observable consequences and the equations governing them.
But I've been told positivism is outmoded for some reason, so I could be wrong.
Grow a luxury treehouse...
on
Back to the Trees
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There's a book I read years ago, Copernick's Rebellion (Leo Frankowski), where a mad-scientist-type produced genetically engineered giant trees that would grow into nice houses, with rooms inside the trunk and enzyme-filled composting toilets and so on. Seemed like a good idea to me at the time. The only problem with the trees in the book was that sometimes toilets would sprout in the middle of beds and digest people in their sleep.
In Robert Heinlein's Sixth Column the good guys (defending America against Pan-Asian invaders) use "subsonics" to make people uneasy. That's what this study says "infrasound" (same thing, different name) would do: make people who were already nervous more nervous, without their knowing why. I assumed this was already well known science; the other possibility is that Heinlein was uncannily prescient (even for him.) Anyone have more background on this?
American Voting is hugely influenced by the amount of money a political party has. This is why it's so insanely difficult for an additional party to make any gains.
Is it your contention that Democrats and Republicans tend systematically to be richer than Libertarians? Or that Democratic policies are reliably friendlier to business than Libertarian proposals? Libertarians can't win major elections because not enough people hold libertarian positions. If there were enough earnest Libertarians out there, there would be plenty of money for the LP, because there would be plenty of donors (and plenty of voters). Spend any amount of money you want and you still won't get too many public school teachers to support vouchers, steel workers to support free trade, or Blacks to support an apartment owner's right to rent to whomever he wants.
It is worth pointing out that "campaign finance reform" bills that restrict campaign contributions will only make things harder for third parties. Third party candidates benefit more from whatever money they do get, since Democratic and Republican candidates already have built in credibility and exposure once they're on the party ticket.
24-track digital multi-track recorder($3,500)......How good do you think that Pink Floyd album of yours would have sounded if it had been recorded in a garage using bicycle spokes and wooden spoons for the synthesized sound?
Hmm. Piper at the Gates of Dawn was recorded on what, four-track?
Aside from a few semiverbal chimps and parrots, all speech is speech by "persons." ("All music is folk music - I ain't never heard no horse sing.") That speech is publicized through the joint resources of a large number of individuals, acting in concert, does not have any obvious bearing on its constitutional standing.
will it be the "corporate right to keep and bear arms" tomorrow? I don't know what you're picturing- afraid Nike, Inc. will bludgeon you with a blunt financial instrument? But certainly all of Nike's executives, stockholders, and (US) workers are free to keep and bear arms, and I don't see why legal ownership of arms couldn't be held through the corporation.
The rights corporations have are derive from the rights of the people making up the corporation. So those people can speak, separately or together, but they don't get an extra vote in presidential elections.
Congressman Bernie Sanders spoke once at an anti-sweatshop gathering at my college, decrying the evils of corporate exploitation of the third world. Then a student from Bangladesh stood up and said that where he came from people were glad to get those exploitative jobs. If the companies had to pay the Bangladeshis more, or accept the costs of better working conditions, a lot of those Bangladeshis would be out of work.
I was glad he was there to say it. Not that I don't think companies should treat their workers well, but when you talk about companies exploiting third world labor forces, keep in mind that those labor forces are being willingly exploited.
there is evidence that the increasingly pervasive electrical fields we are exposed to every day may not be having a neutral effect on our mental states.
Not unlike the situation in Robert Heinlein's 1940s SF/fantasy story "Waldo," where human-produced radiation was making people physically weak (excepting those [wise/paranoid] enough to wear lead clothes).
Except in Waldo the problem was solved when electromagnetic-based power and communication were replaced by the strange magic of the Pennsylvania Dutch.
This just a geek-centric example of the way the concept of rights has shifted from meaning "things the government can't keep you from doing" to "things the government must force other people to do for you."
What people who think that this is a joke fail to consider, however, is the fact that without the ADA in place, businesses can and will discriminate against handicapped people.
What you apparently fail to consider is that wheelchair ramps don't grow on wheelchair ramp trees. If a disabled person can do a job as well and as cheaply as anyone else, no one will hesitate to hire him. To the extent that the disability keeps the person from being hired, it is either because he would do the job less well, or incur costs (e.g. elevators, bathroom remodelling) which would have to be paid by the consumers and stockholders. If this is discrimination, it is rational discrimination, making a valid distinction.
I wouldn't hire a waiter with Tourette's, and I wouldn't hire a waiter who was just clumsy. I wouldn't hire a teacher who was mentally retarded, and I wouldn't hire a teacher who was just plain dumb. I wouldn't hire a firefighter who was too weak to lift a hose, and I wouldn't hire a firefighter with no arms.
Why should half of those I named be set apart as protected groups, guaranteed jobs in which they will hurt the rest of society more than they help it?
I've been talking about hiring, but this is even more true of ramps, remodelings, etc. that are mandated merely for the benefit of disabled customers- those in movie theaters, for instance. If the benefit to the disabled of using those ramps is greater than the cost of building the ramp, it will be worth the theater's trouble to build the ramp, because the disabled customers will be willing to pay enough in tickets to cover the ramp's price. If not, why does the smaller benefit to disabled customers trump the greater cost to able-bodied customers?
For non-novels, More's "Utopia" would be the other big classic utopia, since it's the source of the word. Meaning either "the good place," eu-topos, or "nowhere," ou-topos. Or, pessimistically but most likely, both.
Neither's a real good read, though. Glaucon's such a yes-man.
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i countinously question my co-workers (social workers) in telling the youth what is propper and not.
I'm glad they're telling the youth what is proper; you're clearly incompetent to do so.
using words... is becoming more than just the normal, it is becoming the standard.
Is that right? Using words is "becoming more than just the normal"? I've been using words for years now; I'm glad to hear that's becoming the standard. Your post is a perfect example of why people should learn to write in something approaching standard English. Your meaning is barely intelligible, and you sound like an idiot.
There's also a fairly recent book entitled _Grendel_ that looks at the entire story from the monster's point of view
I was hoping someone would mention that. That'd be John Gardner's Grendel , published in 1971. Which I guess is recent compared to the 8th century.
"I was Grendel, Ruiner of Meadhalls, Wrecker of Kings! But also, as never before, I was alone."
How many of us wouldn't choose to work part-time if we could convince our employers to let us do that? Even if it meant half the pay?
I agree - I've often wished I had an identical twin, so that we could get a job, posing as a single person, and take alternating month-long vacations.
The problem is that U.S. government bonds, held by the U.S. government, represent nothing more than a promise to tax the American people.
Analogy: I'm a trustworthy guy; if you lend me $500 I'll pay you back when you need it. Your money is safe. But if I lend myself $500, write myself an IOU, and spend the money, when I need that money I'm going to have to go out and work for it. Just like I would've had to do if I didn't have the IOU.
The Social Security trust fund is the same kind of accounting fiction as the IOU that I write to myself. The government collects the money, and spends it. When it needs that money later, it has to collect taxes to pay itself off. Which is exactly what it would do if there were no "trust fund".
I respect Republicans for being willing to talk honestly about Social Security, while the Democrats seem committed to claiming there's no problem. Unfortunately Bush's attempts to fix Social Security are completely undermined by the fact that he's running up huge government debts at the same time.
So I ask again: what else should have been done with the S.S. money?
Probably nothing different. By spending it, as we did, we kept our real (as opposed to official) Federal deficits from being as high as they would've been - which is saving, in a sense (just like if I used that $500 I lent myself to pay off my credit cards). But whatever we should have done with it, we should acknowledge that we don't have it anymore.
Did you mean: abbreviations
Yeah, I also left out the time value of money because I thought a longer explanation would just confuse things -
But what is interesting is not that I'd rather have a smaller amount now than a larger amount in a week. What's interesting is that if you had asked me to make that decision a year ahead of time I would made the opposite choice. (I would have said I wanted the larger amount, in a year and a week.)
And neither inflation nor the time value of money can provide any explanation of why that should be true.
It is called time preference, but the expectation of inflation doesn't explain it.
For $100 today to be worth more than $115 a week from now, you'd have to have %100,000 annual inflation, which is well outside the expectation of Americans.
And if you adjust all the numbers in question for 10% inflation, for instance, people would then be choosing between $100 today and $115 in a week; and between $91 a year from now and $105 in a year and a week (rounding off the pennies). The rational choice would be to prefer the larger amount in each case; in fact people prefer $100 now to $115 in a week, but would presumably still be indifferent between the $91 and the $105, or if anything prefer the $105.
In considering the more distant future, then, people make more obviously rational decisions, taking the inflation rate into account. But in considering the immediate future people put an apparently irrational premium on having cash in hand.
A number of papers have been written on why this kind of time preference might have been selected for under the circumstances man evolved in; the idea is roughly that "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" is a good rule of thumb for hunter-gatherers. See Evolution and Human Nature (pdf) from the Journal of Economic Perspectives, for instance.
...the latest (2001) figures from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had 2,911 children and teens dead that year from gunshot wounds. Not even 1/2 that many children in the same age group drown each year, let alone in plastic buckets.
I don't know about plastic buckets, but the CDC data from 2002 show that drowning killed almost fourteen times as many children under age 15 as firearm accidents. So zorander is correct in suggesting that keeping kids away from water would save far more lives than childproofing guns.
Apparently you are including homicides among older teens in your numbers, which is fine if you just want to prove that the grandparent post is imprecisely worded. But knowing how many, say, 18-year old drug dealers get shot in a year is not at all relevant to judging the threat guns kept in a home pose to children.
I read a book about that once - Copernick's Rebellion . Amusing SF novel, apparently out of print.
The only problem with the trees in the book was that sometimes toilets would sprout in the middle of beds and digest people in their sleep.
And in doing so inspired Scottish hippie-folk-troubador Donovan to write a fairly awful song called "The Intergalactic Laxative," with lyrics like " You may well ask, 'now what becomes of liquid they consume?'/ A tube is led from penis head to a unit in the room
From his 1973 Cosmic Wheels album. I feel bad inflicting knowledge of the song on others, but it seemed relevant.
It's working for Apple, but I still don't think per-song pricing makes sense. At $.79/song, do I pay $.79 for Thick as a Brick and $20.54 for The Wall?
And in that case I could get Yes's entire catalog for about five bucks.
Sorry but Canis lupus latrans is the old name for the Prankster known as the Coyote. The domesticated dog is C. lupus familiaris.
Thanks for the correction. I'd mod you up if I could.
Wolves are not genetically identical to dogs, any more than beagles are genetically identical to rotweilers: the consistent phenotypic differences between dog breeds, and between dogs and wolves, are genetically determined.
If being genetically identical were the key, each human (or pair of twins) would be a species unto himself.
But what people mean by species is usually more determined by whether the animals interbreed and produce fertile offspring (this gets fuzzy with plants and is more or less irrelevant to bacteria, but still...).
Dogs and wolves are close enough to interbreed, successfully and often, and a lot of people would class dogs as a subspecies of wolf (Canis lupus latrans).
But classification by genus and higher levels is fairly arbitrary, based mostly on what people see as significant differences and similarities (e.g. people are different from apes, cats all kind of look alike). The only important thing is that the basic nesting is right, so that if species A and B have a common ancestor, and C and D are descended from B, then if A and C are in one class, B and D are also in that class.
It might be more rational to have a system that took each branching into account, but we don't have enough information for that, and it would be inconvenient to deal with.
To sum up: the argument that no one calls a wolf a dog is incorrect, but there's still no point in calling a chimp a Homo.
Everything I know about nanotechnology I learned by reading Michael Crichton's "Prey".
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age is a better book, if not necessarily a better reference. It goes beyond the technology itself and deals with the consequences of a future where mass-production is so cheap as to make basic goods free.
And the nanotech in it seems to have been inspired largely by Drexler's Engines of Creation, which is an inspiring read until you realize it came out fifteen years ago.
My thought is that Quantum Spin is exactly that, spin.
...words and terms that closely match actual circumstances.
Which would mean what? That if you painted little stripes on an electron you could watch them going around like a barbershop pole? You can't do that, or anything like it. And quantum spin does not behave like everyday macro spin, either.
I would say that there are no "actual circumstances," beyond what can in principle be observed. You can imagine electrons as little balls spinning around, or you can imagine angels pushing the planets around, but in neither case is that "what's really happening," because there is nothing to know, beyond the observable consequences and the equations governing them.
But I've been told positivism is outmoded for some reason, so I could be wrong.
There's a book I read years ago, Copernick's Rebellion (Leo Frankowski), where a mad-scientist-type produced genetically engineered giant trees that would grow into nice houses, with rooms inside the trunk and enzyme-filled composting toilets and so on.
Seemed like a good idea to me at the time. The only problem with the trees in the book was that sometimes toilets would sprout in the middle of beds and digest people in their sleep.
In Robert Heinlein's Sixth Column the good guys (defending America against Pan-Asian invaders) use "subsonics" to make people uneasy. That's what this study says "infrasound" (same thing, different name) would do: make people who were already nervous more nervous, without their knowing why.
I assumed this was already well known science; the other possibility is that Heinlein was uncannily prescient (even for him.)
Anyone have more background on this?
American Voting is hugely influenced by the amount of money a political party has. This is why it's so insanely difficult for an additional party to make any gains.
Is it your contention that Democrats and Republicans tend systematically to be richer than Libertarians? Or that Democratic policies are reliably friendlier to business than Libertarian proposals?
Libertarians can't win major elections because not enough people hold libertarian positions. If there were enough earnest Libertarians out there, there would be plenty of money for the LP, because there would be plenty of donors (and plenty of voters).
Spend any amount of money you want and you still won't get too many public school teachers to support vouchers, steel workers to support free trade, or Blacks to support an apartment owner's right to rent to whomever he wants.
It is worth pointing out that "campaign finance reform" bills that restrict campaign contributions will only make things harder for third parties. Third party candidates benefit more from whatever money they do get, since Democratic and Republican candidates already have built in credibility and exposure once they're on the party ticket.
24-track digital multi-track recorder($3,500)... ...How good do you think that Pink Floyd album of yours would have sounded if it had been recorded in a garage using bicycle spokes and wooden spoons for the synthesized sound?
Hmm. Piper at the Gates of Dawn was recorded on what, four-track?
Aside from a few semiverbal chimps and parrots, all speech is speech by "persons."
("All music is folk music - I ain't never heard no horse sing.")
That speech is publicized through the joint resources of a large number of individuals, acting in concert, does not have any obvious bearing on its constitutional standing.
will it be the "corporate right to keep and bear arms" tomorrow?
I don't know what you're picturing- afraid Nike, Inc. will bludgeon you with a blunt financial instrument?
But certainly all of Nike's executives, stockholders, and (US) workers are free to keep and bear arms, and I don't see why legal ownership of arms couldn't be held through the corporation.
The rights corporations have are derive from the rights of the people making up the corporation. So those people can speak, separately or together, but they don't get an extra vote in presidential elections.
Congressman Bernie Sanders spoke once at an anti-sweatshop gathering at my college, decrying the evils of corporate exploitation of the third world. Then a student from Bangladesh stood up and said that where he came from people were glad to get those exploitative jobs. If the companies had to pay the Bangladeshis more, or accept the costs of better working conditions, a lot of those Bangladeshis would be out of work.
I was glad he was there to say it.
Not that I don't think companies should treat their workers well, but when you talk about companies exploiting third world labor forces, keep in mind that those labor forces are being willingly exploited.
there is evidence that the increasingly pervasive electrical fields we are exposed to every day may not be having a neutral effect on our mental states.
Not unlike the situation in Robert Heinlein's 1940s SF/fantasy story "Waldo," where human-produced radiation was making people physically weak (excepting those [wise/paranoid] enough to wear lead clothes).
Except in Waldo the problem was solved when electromagnetic-based power and communication were replaced by the strange magic of the Pennsylvania Dutch.
This just a geek-centric example of the way the concept of rights has shifted from meaning "things the government can't keep you from doing" to "things the government must force other people to do for you."
What people who think that this is a joke fail to consider, however, is the fact that without the ADA in place, businesses can and will discriminate against handicapped people.
What you apparently fail to consider is that wheelchair ramps don't grow on wheelchair ramp trees.
If a disabled person can do a job as well and as cheaply as anyone else, no one will hesitate to hire him. To the extent that the disability keeps the person from being hired, it is either because he would do the job less well, or incur costs (e.g. elevators, bathroom remodelling) which would have to be paid by the consumers and stockholders.
If this is discrimination, it is rational discrimination, making a valid distinction.
I wouldn't hire a waiter with Tourette's, and I wouldn't hire a waiter who was just clumsy.
I wouldn't hire a teacher who was mentally retarded, and I wouldn't hire a teacher who was just plain dumb.
I wouldn't hire a firefighter who was too weak to lift a hose, and I wouldn't hire a firefighter with no arms.
Why should half of those I named be set apart as protected groups, guaranteed jobs in which they will hurt the rest of society more than they help it?
I've been talking about hiring, but this is even more true of ramps, remodelings, etc. that are mandated merely for the benefit of disabled customers- those in movie theaters, for instance. If the benefit to the disabled of using those ramps is greater than the cost of building the ramp, it will be worth the theater's trouble to build the ramp, because the disabled customers will be willing to pay enough in tickets to cover the ramp's price. If not, why does the smaller benefit to disabled customers trump the greater cost to able-bodied customers?
Ah... Ever read "Harrison Bergeron"?
"We're letting you separate the wheat from the chafe," Mitchell said.
Separate the wheat.
But from the "chafe"? I think not.
Wheat in your jockstrap?
For non-novels, More's "Utopia" would be the other big classic utopia, since it's the source of the word. Meaning either "the good place," eu-topos, or "nowhere," ou-topos. Or, pessimistically but most likely, both.
Neither's a real good read, though. Glaucon's such a yes-man.