Unfortunately, the restrictions against people who have seizures are so strict, that many people who occasionally have minor seizures fail to report them, because it can be ruinous to lose your driver's license.
Indeed. My ex-gf (and a close friend still) has type 1 diabetes. Though she has, in her 7 years of having it, *never* come close to a seizure/collapse the state wants her to have a doctor's report every six months or so saying that she's in good condition to drive. (And the DMV messes this up and accidentally misses the report and suspends her license anyway.)
She is currently without a license because her endocrinologist is a new doctor and won't sign off on the form for some time.
I told her the last time she got her license that she should just say that she was cured. Who is the DMV to say that she's not?
I'm sincerely at a loss here. What made you say this? (Undoubtedly there are things which I do/think/say which make me hypocritical, and typically I will admit to it, but I haven't figured this one out yet.:-)
I'd like to add a few things here...
*I was born with dual citizenship of the United States and Costa Rica. (Whatever you're accusing of me being a hypocrite may be enhanced or detracted with that information.)
*The concept of giving a monetary value to citizenship is not foreign to me. Alas, I'm an economist and I give everything a damn monetary value.
*I am fascinated and deeply saddened by the (relatively recent, in human history) development of citizenship and documentation as a way of controlling the movements of people. The historical record implies that the current regime (photograph passports, visas, etc) could have been easily thwarted (I seem to recall reading that the elimination of passports was a goal of the failed League of Nations.) The fact that we do control immigration is better thought of as an accident of history.
*I agree with quite a lot of what you said...particularly "You also have an exagerrated concept of what your skills would really buy on the world markets. Most Americans do." (At least, I agree with the point that Americans have an exaggerated concept of their skills in the world market...and we are slowly learning that a new reality is in town and it includes very cheap outsourcing from other nations. The economist in me believes the natural outcome of this will be new price levels will be reached, and that will have to include major downward reevaluations of what things cost in the US--arguably, this is happening simply be devaluing our currency. In doing so, the comparitive value of US citizenship is dropping.)
*Where I don't agree is the statement "Frankly, if your libertarian wet dream were actually tried, it would result in _huge_ inequality of wealth/income very rapidly." Arguably, as I said above, this is already happening. Futurist types like Thomas Friedman, particularly in his book The World is Flat believe that a consequence of the flattening world is the slow irrelevance of the nation state. The nation state was kept significant because immigration (and in some cases, emigration) were so difficult that the had a captive audience and no particular need to compete with other nations all that hard. This process is happening a lot slower than Friedman would suggest, but clearly there are countries which are aware of this and are either embracing the change or tightening their people controls.
But since 300 million people in India, and 400 million in China, have escaped poverty in the last 10-15 years or so because those countries embraced world markets, and in doing so, make their citizenship more useful, I find it difficult to see how a complete freedom to immigrate/emigrate would have resulted in greater wealth inequality. (Imagine, momentarily, if the League of Nations had been successful and travel/immigration restrictions had not existed after World War I.)
The thing is that citizenship rights are a form of property. If you allow immigrants that don't maintain the property values, you dilute the value of citizenship.
I find something deeply perverted about saying citizenship rights are a form of property. Citizenship rights might have different forms of value (usefullness), but they serve more as a way of controlling people.
After all, citizenship and immigration laws are directly impeding *my* property rights. If I own property it would make sense that I could invite anyone whom I would want to have on my property. I also should have the ability to conduct business with whomever I want on my property. If the government insists that I can't, then my property rights are diluted. As long as I don't have full use of my own property, then you could argue that my citizenship value is lower than what it should be--since my property's usefulness is directly related to the country it's in and the citizenship I hold.
Like with trade, tariffs and other trade impediments lower everyone's citizenship values. The way to maximize them is to equalize them, not erect barriers.
I think that you, like many other people, misunderstand this precept. The idea is that ignorance of the law cannot be considered a valid legal defense, basically because it would be absurd to have to prove that someone knew the law in question.
It actually goes deeper than this.
The legal concept of Ignorantia juris non excusat is that you should be not be able to escape liability for a law that you should have reasonably known.
So for everyone, obvious crimes against people and property do not necessarily require strict knowledge. Also considered reasonable are the laws which cover hot-dog vending kiosks...if you should be a hot dog vending kiosk owner. If you are engaged in a particular business, there would be the reasonable assumption that you would know the laws that might cover that business.
One area where ignorance of the law can be an excuse? A lot of tax law. It's so terribly complex that people can't be expected to know and understand all of it.
Do your phones play nicely with other countries when you're overseas?
Not really. Overseas roaming is an enormous cost center.
According to an Economist article from several weeks ago, the pricing system in the US does encourage more mobile phone use. On average, the average American cell phone account is used about 1000 minutes/month whereas everyone else in the world talks about 200 minutes/month.
The problem with that is, these days, parents get their children cell phones so that they can contact them wherever they are. (In that regard, cell phones have made parenting much easier, and it's made it easier on kids as well--you have a lot of freedom to do what you want and the only thing you're required to do is keep the phone on and always answer it.)
At any rate, the easiest and cheapest thing to do is just to add a phone to your family plan. That way phone calls between the phones are all free.
Prepaid phones, however, cannot take calls from the parent's phones for free.
There are definitely some types of systemic fraud that could be significant. Targeted disenfranchising of voters for instance.
On the other hand, hacking a few machines strikes me as counterfeiting dimes. All of our energies regarding voting machines have been focused on individual machines, which would make for a slow vote-altering conduit.
I don't sign my credit cards; they are marked "please ask for ID" on the signature line.
I strongly recommend against that, and this is why:
What you're essentially doing is trading a very low fraud risk (in person credit card fraud is the least likely of credit card frauds) that is not a liability borne by the consumer even it does happen, for a higher fraud risk that is borne by the consumer because you're handing over all the information that is found on the front of your driver's license.
Can someone commit identity theft with name, address, DL number and date of birth? Absolutely. It really helps too when they know that you have a credit card ending in 1234 from Bank of Anystate.
All it requires is someone with a good memory. What are you going to do...hand over the ID but then prohibit the cashier from looking at it too long?
I'd also add that technically the Visa/MC merchant agreements require the card to be signed. The signature on the card is indication that you have agreed to the terms and conditions of card issuance. It's not enforced much, but all the Post Offices in my region enforce it.
Of course I guess your signature could magically be "see ID." But I suspect if you sign your driver's license with that, you might disappear in a loop.:-)
I've seen a useful distinction here: Democrats who commit fraud tend to prefer voter fraud -- people voting twice, the dead voting, etc. Republicans who commit fraud tend to prefer election fraud -- gaming the system, disenfranchising voters, making "mistakes" that can't be corrected before the election, etc.
I suggest you're looking at it incorrectly.
Republicans are most concerned about "voting integrity" issues such as voter ID issues. That's their focus and that's what they harp on about.
Democrats are most concerned about "systemic integrity" issues such as hacking voting machines etc. That's their focus and what they harp on about.
I reject that either occurs in a big way. As one commentator put it, one is the equivalent of counterfeiting nickles and the other is the equivalent of counterfeiting dimes.
It's about how much more we could do by using technology in a sensible way
A friend of mine sold used cars and was terribly frustrated by the used hybrid/diesel market. Why? He said that the biggest demand for fuel efficient diesels and hybrids was always coming from the people who drove the least. From an environmental and efficiency point of view, it makes the most sense that the limited quantity of highly efficient vehicles should be in the hands of those people who drive the most. However, my friend noted that it's the well-off urbanites and "aging professor" types who would bid up the resale price of the cars, and had the money to buy them in the end. But what does it matter if someone has a hybrid if they only drive 8000 miles a year? Let someone who will drive 30,000 miles a year have the hybrid.
Detroit just doesn't like diesel. The executives are gasoline fans, always will be.
You will find that Detroit had a massive experiment with Diesels in the 1970s and it was a total disaster (badly designed engines.) Because of that, the American consumer was quite scarred and wouldn't touch Diesel for decades.
Chances are those scars are gone now and Diesels can be re-entertained. Low-sulphur diesel is finally here stateside, and GM has plenty of experience with diesels in its European divisions (Opel, Saab, etc.)
Besides, who is to say the government didn't pay the image artist a fair royalty, or better, just contracted someone to do the work for whatever compensation seems fit?
Because they might purposefully want the original company to hold copyright.
One interesting example has to do with keys. There are a bunch of key companies in this world who copyright their key design to prevent other companies from creating machines that can copy the keys. I think of it like that. Just because a large government institution was using the keys doesn't mean the copyright would switch hands.
Anything the gov't puts out is in the public domain.
Isn't it possible that the copyright for a document (such as an ID card) is held by the company who designed the document and whose machines are used in printing it?
Of course, that was all back before the War on Underage Drinking.
They sure went for an inflexible solution with the whole underage drinking thing.
If the reason for the photo on the license is to prevent underage drinking, then all you need to do is stipulate that only photo licenses would have the date of birth on them. If you have a non-photo license, it wouldn't have the date of birth on it.
1. Limited, humane "war". Oxymoron if their ever was one. Usually a failure, re: Vietnam.
A very interesting article called this type of war a "spoiling attack." ("The spoiling attack is an offensive operation; however, its goal is not to defeat the enemy but to disrupt enemy offensives -- to, in effect, prevent a defeat by the enemy.") The article is available here. I'm interested to see your thoughts on it.
The article considers Korea and Vietnam spoiling attacks. It also think that spoiling attacks are not planned that way in advance, but are side-benefits of, essentially as you said, keeping the war at a low-level.
Libertarians are the group most vehemently against this concept
There is a branch of libertarianism, which I hope is emerging, called "libertarian paternalism" (It's also called "soft paternalism", but both those terms I dislike.) At any rate, the vision is for a regulatory structure that "guides" people to good decision making (thereby saving the good of regulation) without specifically prohibiting/requiring transactions (which is what get libertarians all upset.)
Regrettably, not much research or academic inquiry has been put into the topic. I can only assume that it's too middle of the road to appeal to libertarian interests, but too libertarian to appeal to other interests.
This will probably ending up going to the Supreme Court, and I hope Montana wins.
It doesn't need to. The REAL ID Act had a built in provision for opting out (that's not what it was intended to be, but that's how it's going to work.)
It may take a generation or two before the stigma wears off and/or unions don't keep making the same mistakes.
That's unlikely. There are several states in which the majority of unionized employees are government employees. We are about a decade or two for most union workers in the US to be government employees. Once that happens, unions will never be able to shake their reputations.
Simply put, an employer does not have to test the labor market before hiring a foreign worker on an H-1B.
It was eliminated for good reason however. Labor market tests are well-known to be a bureaucratic exercise of pointlessness--companies who sincerely attempt the labor market test end up falling prey to an outcome which is "ambiguous" and doesn't necessarily meet the immigration criteria. Companies who don't care about being sincere adjust their said requirements so that only one candidate in a million can fit it (which is of course recommended even to the honest companies to avoid the ambiguous result.)
It's really just stupid for everyone involved. Countries usually use the labor market test as a way of preventing most types of immigration.
The Economic Policy Institute has a great article on this that should probably be submitted to the main page.
Eh. It's an article written by a partisan think tank, and the more I analyze it, the more it hits me as BS. There are much more neutral and realiable sources of info on this rather complex topic. The connection between the fact that Wipro is a major Indian company that does outsourcing and the fact that they have requested the most H1Bs is specious at best. After all, Wipro has expanded dramatically outside of India, and as part of that expansion, they needed a large quantity of North American employees--hence, they were asking for lots of H1Bs. Wipro and Infosys don't need the US employees to outsource to India. They were simply starting new outsourcing facilities in the US.
camperdave (969942) That's odd. It started to decline just after I joined.
After *you* joined?
Let me tell you something ya whipper-snapper...this site declined when they introduced user accounts.
(I actually remember waiting weeks before signing up for my user account because I didn't see the point of having one. When they were first introduced, there was a time period when you could post with any name you wanted. This feature was eliminated in favor of the AC, forcing you to get a user account if you didn't want to post as AC.)
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Unfortunately, the restrictions against people who have seizures are so strict, that many people who occasionally have minor seizures fail to report them, because it can be ruinous to lose your driver's license.
Indeed. My ex-gf (and a close friend still) has type 1 diabetes. Though she has, in her 7 years of having it, *never* come close to a seizure/collapse the state wants her to have a doctor's report every six months or so saying that she's in good condition to drive. (And the DMV messes this up and accidentally misses the report and suspends her license anyway.)
She is currently without a license because her endocrinologist is a new doctor and won't sign off on the form for some time.
I told her the last time she got her license that she should just say that she was cured. Who is the DMV to say that she's not?
Frankly, I think you are a hypocrite.
:-)
I'm sincerely at a loss here. What made you say this? (Undoubtedly there are things which I do/think/say which make me hypocritical, and typically I will admit to it, but I haven't figured this one out yet.
I'd like to add a few things here...
*I was born with dual citizenship of the United States and Costa Rica. (Whatever you're accusing of me being a hypocrite may be enhanced or detracted with that information.)
*The concept of giving a monetary value to citizenship is not foreign to me. Alas, I'm an economist and I give everything a damn monetary value.
*I am fascinated and deeply saddened by the (relatively recent, in human history) development of citizenship and documentation as a way of controlling the movements of people. The historical record implies that the current regime (photograph passports, visas, etc) could have been easily thwarted (I seem to recall reading that the elimination of passports was a goal of the failed League of Nations.) The fact that we do control immigration is better thought of as an accident of history.
*I agree with quite a lot of what you said...particularly "You also have an exagerrated concept of what your skills would really buy on the world markets. Most Americans do." (At least, I agree with the point that Americans have an exaggerated concept of their skills in the world market...and we are slowly learning that a new reality is in town and it includes very cheap outsourcing from other nations. The economist in me believes the natural outcome of this will be new price levels will be reached, and that will have to include major downward reevaluations of what things cost in the US--arguably, this is happening simply be devaluing our currency. In doing so, the comparitive value of US citizenship is dropping.)
*Where I don't agree is the statement "Frankly, if your libertarian wet dream were actually tried, it would result in _huge_ inequality of wealth/income very rapidly." Arguably, as I said above, this is already happening. Futurist types like Thomas Friedman, particularly in his book The World is Flat believe that a consequence of the flattening world is the slow irrelevance of the nation state. The nation state was kept significant because immigration (and in some cases, emigration) were so difficult that the had a captive audience and no particular need to compete with other nations all that hard. This process is happening a lot slower than Friedman would suggest, but clearly there are countries which are aware of this and are either embracing the change or tightening their people controls.
But since 300 million people in India, and 400 million in China, have escaped poverty in the last 10-15 years or so because those countries embraced world markets, and in doing so, make their citizenship more useful, I find it difficult to see how a complete freedom to immigrate/emigrate would have resulted in greater wealth inequality. (Imagine, momentarily, if the League of Nations had been successful and travel/immigration restrictions had not existed after World War I.)
The thing is that citizenship rights are a form of property. If you allow immigrants that don't maintain the property values, you dilute the value of citizenship.
I find something deeply perverted about saying citizenship rights are a form of property. Citizenship rights might have different forms of value (usefullness), but they serve more as a way of controlling people.
After all, citizenship and immigration laws are directly impeding *my* property rights. If I own property it would make sense that I could invite anyone whom I would want to have on my property. I also should have the ability to conduct business with whomever I want on my property. If the government insists that I can't, then my property rights are diluted. As long as I don't have full use of my own property, then you could argue that my citizenship value is lower than what it should be--since my property's usefulness is directly related to the country it's in and the citizenship I hold.
Like with trade, tariffs and other trade impediments lower everyone's citizenship values. The way to maximize them is to equalize them, not erect barriers.
I think that you, like many other people, misunderstand this precept. The idea is that ignorance of the law cannot be considered a valid legal defense, basically because it would be absurd to have to prove that someone knew the law in question.
It actually goes deeper than this.
The legal concept of Ignorantia juris non excusat is that you should be not be able to escape liability for a law that you should have reasonably known.
So for everyone, obvious crimes against people and property do not necessarily require strict knowledge. Also considered reasonable are the laws which cover hot-dog vending kiosks...if you should be a hot dog vending kiosk owner. If you are engaged in a particular business, there would be the reasonable assumption that you would know the laws that might cover that business.
One area where ignorance of the law can be an excuse? A lot of tax law. It's so terribly complex that people can't be expected to know and understand all of it.
Do your phones play nicely with other countries when you're overseas?
Not really. Overseas roaming is an enormous cost center.
According to an Economist article from several weeks ago, the pricing system in the US does encourage more mobile phone use. On average, the average American cell phone account is used about 1000 minutes/month whereas everyone else in the world talks about 200 minutes/month.
Two words: Prepaid phone.
The problem with that is, these days, parents get their children cell phones so that they can contact them wherever they are. (In that regard, cell phones have made parenting much easier, and it's made it easier on kids as well--you have a lot of freedom to do what you want and the only thing you're required to do is keep the phone on and always answer it.)
At any rate, the easiest and cheapest thing to do is just to add a phone to your family plan. That way phone calls between the phones are all free.
Prepaid phones, however, cannot take calls from the parent's phones for free.
There are definitely some types of systemic fraud that could be significant. Targeted disenfranchising of voters for instance.
On the other hand, hacking a few machines strikes me as counterfeiting dimes. All of our energies regarding voting machines have been focused on individual machines, which would make for a slow vote-altering conduit.
In my country (Argentina) Visa explicitly requires merchants to request an ID
Three reasons for that
a.) Visa/MC marketing in the US has offered the credit card as being convenient because you don't need to show ID
b.) the nature of identity theft is different in the US, and could be caused simply by showing your ID
c.) Argentina has, what I call, a different "photo-ID" culture. Expectations regarding document use are stronger in Argentina.
I don't sign my credit cards; they are marked "please ask for ID" on the signature line.
:-)
I strongly recommend against that, and this is why:
What you're essentially doing is trading a very low fraud risk (in person credit card fraud is the least likely of credit card frauds) that is not a liability borne by the consumer even it does happen, for a higher fraud risk that is borne by the consumer because you're handing over all the information that is found on the front of your driver's license.
Can someone commit identity theft with name, address, DL number and date of birth? Absolutely. It really helps too when they know that you have a credit card ending in 1234 from Bank of Anystate.
All it requires is someone with a good memory. What are you going to do...hand over the ID but then prohibit the cashier from looking at it too long?
I'd also add that technically the Visa/MC merchant agreements require the card to be signed. The signature on the card is indication that you have agreed to the terms and conditions of card issuance. It's not enforced much, but all the Post Offices in my region enforce it.
Of course I guess your signature could magically be "see ID." But I suspect if you sign your driver's license with that, you might disappear in a loop.
I've seen a useful distinction here: Democrats who commit fraud tend to prefer voter fraud -- people voting twice, the dead voting, etc. Republicans who commit fraud tend to prefer election fraud -- gaming the system, disenfranchising voters, making "mistakes" that can't be corrected before the election, etc.
I suggest you're looking at it incorrectly.
Republicans are most concerned about "voting integrity" issues such as voter ID issues. That's their focus and that's what they harp on about.
Democrats are most concerned about "systemic integrity" issues such as hacking voting machines etc. That's their focus and what they harp on about.
I reject that either occurs in a big way. As one commentator put it, one is the equivalent of counterfeiting nickles and the other is the equivalent of counterfeiting dimes.
It's about how much more we could do by using technology in a sensible way
A friend of mine sold used cars and was terribly frustrated by the used hybrid/diesel market. Why? He said that the biggest demand for fuel efficient diesels and hybrids was always coming from the people who drove the least. From an environmental and efficiency point of view, it makes the most sense that the limited quantity of highly efficient vehicles should be in the hands of those people who drive the most. However, my friend noted that it's the well-off urbanites and "aging professor" types who would bid up the resale price of the cars, and had the money to buy them in the end. But what does it matter if someone has a hybrid if they only drive 8000 miles a year? Let someone who will drive 30,000 miles a year have the hybrid.
Detroit just doesn't like diesel. The executives are gasoline fans, always will be.
You will find that Detroit had a massive experiment with Diesels in the 1970s and it was a total disaster (badly designed engines.) Because of that, the American consumer was quite scarred and wouldn't touch Diesel for decades.
Chances are those scars are gone now and Diesels can be re-entertained. Low-sulphur diesel is finally here stateside, and GM has plenty of experience with diesels in its European divisions (Opel, Saab, etc.)
Besides, who is to say the government didn't pay the image artist a fair royalty, or better, just contracted someone to do the work for whatever compensation seems fit?
Because they might purposefully want the original company to hold copyright.
One interesting example has to do with keys. There are a bunch of key companies in this world who copyright their key design to prevent other companies from creating machines that can copy the keys. I think of it like that. Just because a large government institution was using the keys doesn't mean the copyright would switch hands.
Anything the gov't puts out is in the public domain.
Isn't it possible that the copyright for a document (such as an ID card) is held by the company who designed the document and whose machines are used in printing it?
Of course, that was all back before the War on Underage Drinking.
They sure went for an inflexible solution with the whole underage drinking thing.
If the reason for the photo on the license is to prevent underage drinking, then all you need to do is stipulate that only photo licenses would have the date of birth on them. If you have a non-photo license, it wouldn't have the date of birth on it.
Simple solution...but not done in a single state.
1. Limited, humane "war". Oxymoron if their ever was one. Usually a failure, re: Vietnam.
A very interesting article called this type of war a "spoiling attack." ("The spoiling attack is an offensive operation; however, its goal is not to defeat the enemy but to disrupt enemy offensives -- to, in effect, prevent a defeat by the enemy.") The article is available here. I'm interested to see your thoughts on it.
The article considers Korea and Vietnam spoiling attacks. It also think that spoiling attacks are not planned that way in advance, but are side-benefits of, essentially as you said, keeping the war at a low-level.
One nutbag talking to a bunch of nutbags...
I've seen that in Boy's Town in Chicago, but this is Utah. You'd think that that much nutbagging would be illegal.
Libertarians are the group most vehemently against this concept
There is a branch of libertarianism, which I hope is emerging, called "libertarian paternalism" (It's also called "soft paternalism", but both those terms I dislike.) At any rate, the vision is for a regulatory structure that "guides" people to good decision making (thereby saving the good of regulation) without specifically prohibiting/requiring transactions (which is what get libertarians all upset.)
Regrettably, not much research or academic inquiry has been put into the topic. I can only assume that it's too middle of the road to appeal to libertarian interests, but too libertarian to appeal to other interests.
This will probably ending up going to the Supreme Court, and I hope Montana wins.
It doesn't need to. The REAL ID Act had a built in provision for opting out (that's not what it was intended to be, but that's how it's going to work.)
It may take a generation or two before the stigma wears off and/or unions don't keep making the same mistakes.
That's unlikely. There are several states in which the majority of unionized employees are government employees. We are about a decade or two for most union workers in the US to be government employees. Once that happens, unions will never be able to shake their reputations.
Simply put, an employer does not have to test the labor market before hiring a foreign worker on an H-1B.
It was eliminated for good reason however. Labor market tests are well-known to be a bureaucratic exercise of pointlessness--companies who sincerely attempt the labor market test end up falling prey to an outcome which is "ambiguous" and doesn't necessarily meet the immigration criteria. Companies who don't care about being sincere adjust their said requirements so that only one candidate in a million can fit it (which is of course recommended even to the honest companies to avoid the ambiguous result.)
It's really just stupid for everyone involved. Countries usually use the labor market test as a way of preventing most types of immigration.
The Economic Policy Institute has a great article on this that should probably be submitted to the main page.
Eh. It's an article written by a partisan think tank, and the more I analyze it, the more it hits me as BS. There are much more neutral and realiable sources of info on this rather complex topic. The connection between the fact that Wipro is a major Indian company that does outsourcing and the fact that they have requested the most H1Bs is specious at best. After all, Wipro has expanded dramatically outside of India, and as part of that expansion, they needed a large quantity of North American employees--hence, they were asking for lots of H1Bs. Wipro and Infosys don't need the US employees to outsource to India. They were simply starting new outsourcing facilities in the US.
a job offer is practically guaranteed a visa
Which is not strictly speaking untrue, but Canada's immigration system is notorious for being slow.
I wonder how much it would cost to build a vaccuum tunnel to run very high speed train in at a fraction of the power required by the TGV...
There was an effort by the Swiss called Swissmetro to create partial vacuum tubes for train speeds of 500mph between major swiss cities.
However, the project appears dead at the moment.
camperdave (969942)
That's odd. It started to decline just after I joined.
After *you* joined?
Let me tell you something ya whipper-snapper...this site declined when they introduced user accounts.
(I actually remember waiting weeks before signing up for my user account because I didn't see the point of having one. When they were first introduced, there was a time period when you could post with any name you wanted. This feature was eliminated in favor of the AC, forcing you to get a user account if you didn't want to post as AC.)
Star Wars film release: 1977
Did the first movie discuss the two suns of Tatooine?
(I actually can't remember.)