In any case... Bob Barr 2008! I'm just so sick of dumb and dumber
Your second sentence is in opposition to your first.
Let's remember that Barr was the author of the "Defense of Marriage Act"; he radically opposed medical marijuana laws, going so far as to create the "Barr Amendment" that prohibited future laws that would "decrease the penalties for marijuana or other Schedule I drugs" in Washington, D.C.; proposed that Wiccans be banned from the military; and voted for the Patriot Act and for the Iraq invasion. He was the leading cheerleader for impeaching Clinton over a blow job, but said that as of this summer it's too late to impeach Bush for his crimes against the Constitution. ("Hey, you've really been ruining the country and violating the most fundamental law of the land! We're going to give you just half a year longer to keep it up!")
He claims to have changed many of these positions within the past few years. Maybe so. But he was either ignorant enough or dumb enough to buy into them a few years ago. In the former case, there's no excuse for an adult college graduate to be that ignorant; in the later, it's not like IQ radically increases in adulthood. (Unless maybe he had a brain disorder that's been treated?)
I'm really disappointed in both the Libertarian and Green parties this year for running washed-up bottom-of-the-barrel nutjob major-party politicians who are recently converts to their respective new parties. Being in a solid blue state (Maryland) I usually like voting for third-party candidates, since it won't effect the outcome of the election and might help ballot access next time around. But I can't in good conscience vote for either Barr or McKinney.
But you're actually right about me defending the application of slavery laws while they were still valid. I would actually act like that...That's because I believe in the law system. I believe that having a common set of rules and the right institutions to enforce them is what moves the world forward. The whole abolition scene was filled with thug-like actions and helped to create a lot hate towards black people.
Well, there you have it.
You, sir, are not simply ignorant, not even irrational, well beyond a mere idiot. You are a complete failure as a moral being. You are the soil in which evil grows. People like you are the reason why slavery, fascism, repression, authoritarianism of every stripe, run so rich through human history. You are the "good German" who makes the Holocaust happen; you are the soldier who invaded the Cherokee Nation and forced them on the Trail of Tears.
Now, I do believe in redemption, that even so poor a specimen as yourself might someday find the light. So I wish you no ill will. Except for this: I hope one day you truly understand how hideous you, at this moment, are.
That will be painful for you. But it is the only way in which you might become an actual human being.
And how do TODAY'S numbers address the question of whether an appendectomy would be better than a placebo procedure? We don't have any numbers - from today or from yesterday - about how effective a placebo treatment would be!
Placebo surgeries were effective in treating angina, osteoarthritis, and Parkinson's; we cannot dismiss out of hand that one would be effective in appendicitis.
Yet that's what you're hinting at. Stop trying to play with semantics.
I am not "hinting" at anything, nor am I trying to play with semantics. I'm expressly making a specific and precise point.
Bypassing a blocked artiary is going to be more effective than pretending to do the bypass. We already know because people that don't get the bypass die.
Well, it is trivially true that people who don't have bypass surgery, die. So do people who do get bypass surgery. So do people who never get heart disease. But I assume you meant "die soon".
And many people receive CABG not because of imminent death, but as a treatment for angina. But we've already seen that a placebo surgery was effective in treating angina.
The evidence for the effectiveness of bypass surgery is suggestive, certainly, but not conclusive. The only way to get conclusive data about the results of coronary artery bypass versus a placebo surgery would be to actually do a placebo surgery.
If we're doing a scientific investigation of the question, we must consider the possibility that some people who benefit from bypass surgery are actually benefiting more from an enforced period of rest under skilled nursing care, plus improved psychological state, plus post-surgical therapies and lifestyle changes, then from the actual plumbing work.
If your only involvement with a business is to put money in and get a dividend statement every so often, you're not engaged in "hard work", you're an absentee owner. If your only involvement with a business is to buy and sell its stock, you're not engaged in hard work, you're engaged in speculation, in gambling. If your only involvement with a business is that you have a piece of paper from the state, a land deed, that forces that business to pay you for occupying that piece of the Earth's surface, you're not engaged in hard work. In each case, you're skimming off the value created by labor of others.
What is your alternative?
My alternative is policies that favor earned income over passive investments, rents, and inheritances, resulting in a flatter distribution of wealth.
Do you think there exists a system where the top 10% of the population only owns 10% of the wealth?
Neither necessary nor desirable. We don't need a completely flat distribution to have something much, much better than the L curve we have now.
The fact is that poor people breed like vermin, then they don't take care of their kids, then those kids go on to do the same.
Ah, I see. Poor people are "vermin".
Your own words indite you more than anything I could say.
Do you know for sure that none of the payment will go to the creators?
100 sure? No. But since the copyright holders would have been the company, not the actual creators, I can't see any way this would have benefited the creators. They almost certainly got their compensation via salary long ago
Plus, even if that *weren't* true, how is getting something illegally not detrimental to a functioning society?
When the law is bad, blind obedience to it is detrimental to a functioning society.
Smoking PCP by mixing it with cannabis is old news. (Stupid behavior, but old news.) It's no more "modifying" cannabis or filling it with "additives", then mixing a rum and Coke is putting "additives" into Coke.
This is not just about semantics. We are talking about different kinds of criminals and you know it.
You're the one conflating "criminal" with "murderer". A criminal is simply one who breaks a law, and there are few Americans who aren't, in the strict sense, criminals.
I'm not here to defend prohibition.
That is exactly what you're doing. Or trying to do: you can't successfully defend that which is fundamentally indefensible.
My points are: It's a lie to say that you're controlling the drug and not the other way around;
It's a lie to make sweeping, ignorant, and incorrect statements about drug use. Most people control their drug use quite well. About 15% of Americans will use an "illegal" drug this year; if drugs were controlling one-sixth of our population, we'd be completely boned.
Prohibition it's not about trying to control people, just for the fun of it, but it's mostly related to avoiding a negative cultural shift that might affect weak people;
You want to help "weak" people (a characterization which raises a host of issues that I'll pass by for now) who fall into addiction by making criminals out of them? By making it more likely that they'll die from contaminated drug, or OD on drugs of unknown strength? By fueling a violent black market that increases the chance that they - or innocent bystanders - will get shot in a drug deal gone bad? Gee, what a fscking humanitarian you are.
If you want to change the culture, write books and speak out. That's your right. But stop advocating that guns to be pointed at people who use, buy, or sell drugs that you don't like. Keep your laws off my brain.
These drugs ARE illegal at the current moment, so discussing proper ways of making this law achieve it's full effect is a valid discussion.
Hmm. "X is illegal at the current moment, so discussing proper ways of making this law achieve it's full effect is a valid discussion." Let's examine that argument, such at it is, with various bindings for X:
"Being a runaway slave IS illegal at the current moment, so discussing proper ways of making the fugitive slave law achieve it's full effect is a valid discussion."
"Being a Christian IS illegal at the current moment, so discussing proper ways of making the throw-them-to-the-lions law achieve it's full effect is a valid discussion."
"Voting by black people IS illegal at the current moment, so discussing proper ways of making Jim Crow achieve it's full effect is a valid discussion."
I don't care about drug users. But I do care about laws and personal ethics.
If you cared about ethics, you'd realize that what is ethical and what is right are two very different things. "Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher." -- John J. Miller
I would never, ever, ever, deal with a criminal (no, not someone selling bootleg tapes) just to have some fun.
Wait, are you saying that you wouldn't deal with someone selling bootleg tapes, or that someone selling bootleg tapes is not a criminal? If the former, if you won't deal with sellers of bootleg tapes, underage drinkers, speeders, and the like, you're going to find that you inhabit a very small world. If the later, you're just wrong; a criminal is one who violates the law.
But, it lacks most of the extremely powerful chemically-addictive characteristics of modified Marijuana, which is filled with additives to make its use more interesting.
"Modified marijuana"? "Filled with additives"? I've never heard of this. Please, provide citations.
The other reason is that drugs ARE illegal and the only way of purchasing them involves financing criminals. I will never, I repeat, never, agree with somewhone who finances murder and destruction of lives just because they want to have some fun.
Your first sentence is trivially true, as if one purchases "illegal" items - whether a "loosey" or a bootleg tape or a nuclear weapon - you're buying them from a "criminal".
But the allegation in your second sentence that all drug purchases finance murder is simply not true. Buying some homegrown cannabis or psilocybin mushrooms or even home-brewed LSD - or buying from someone who bought from such a supplier - is not financing murderous behavior.
Thanks to the prohibition that you love so much, buyers can't check on the ethical and social responsibility of their suppliers. If you want drug users to buy from people who are not engaged in violence, you need to bring the drug market out of the underground, make it possible for a sort of "Shopping for Better World" to the drug trade.
You can bash me for taking a "please, think of the children" approach, but I'm not currently a fan of this "recreational use" bullshit mostly because it creates a culture (and also a market) that allows teenagers to inherit this kind of behaviour.
Making teenagers behave is the responsibility of parents. You don't get to point a gun at me just because you don't want your kid doing what I'm doing.
I don't have my copy of the ACM code of ethics, but this seems pretty borderline to me.
Depending on the details, I don't really see an ethical issue here.
If "scraping" is done so as to not put a heavy load on the servers, it's no more unethical to do it automatically than to hire a bunch of drones to compile the data manually. Copyright does not apply to the raw data. Site's "Terms of Service" are baloney (by reading this post this far you agree to send me $20); when you publish information you cannot put restrictions on its use. I see more of an ethical problem with putting up such bogus "Terms of Service" than with using the data.
As for using free accounts, it might make for an unprofessional and shoddy product - which would be grounds to object - but there's nothing inherently unethical about using a free service for business purposes. A lot of small businesses use a Gmail or Yahoo! e-mail account, for example.
Nice stretch of reality there but it is a totally different scenario...It's when they decide that I need to provide them with something extra because of a choice they made outside the working environment that warrants the charge.
No, it's not a totally different scenario. Choosing to drive a car to work (rather than walk or take public transit or a taxi) is just as much a "choice they made outside the working environment" as choosing to bike to work. (Presuming your employees don't work in the parking lot.)
If you're willing to "provide [drivers] with something extra" by providing parking without charge, and to only provide facilities (less expensive than a parking space, considering land and maintenance) to bikers if you charge them, that shows you're just hostile to people who bike. Got it.
The question was if Joe would get boned if he made more than $250K.
A slight marginal tax increase on high incomes - a return to a top marginal rate that prevailed during the go-go 80's - is not "getting boned."
Obama said he would take Joe's money and "spread it around". Can you tell me the difference between that and stealing?
First, who issued that money? If we play with the government's counters, we don't have much room to complain when it wants a cut. "Render on to Caesar, what is Caesar's," as one philosopher put it.
Second, as I have already explained, that money was made and the rewards reaped by relying on a number of government services and policies. All claims of property ultimately rest of government action. You want the government to enforce your "property rights", you pay for it.
Making you pay for services rendered is not stealing.
WRONG. You assume that the purpose of the government is to keep rich people rich.
That is, under capitalism, exactly one of the purposes of government: to create and protect "property rights". As the rich are the ones with property, that means keeping rich people rich.
Let's say, for example, that the purpose is to bring jobs to a community that needs it. That community may give tax breaks to a company to try to entice it to move to a factory or whatever to this particular community
Why are there big companies at all? Why isn't the community growing small businesses to create jobs and create local wealth, instead of competing in a race to the bottom to whore itself out to one megacorporation or another?
These large companies exist because of government actions and government policies that funnel wealth and power to where it's already concentrated, and which screw over small and independent business. A company doesn't become "too big to fail" without some state action along the way.
Next, if you believe that life is better in those countries, you are free to move there. I live here because I like it here. I like knowing that I stand a chance of getting rich one day without having the government steal it from me. That's why I'm here. If I wanted something different, I'd move. Which makes me wonder, assuming you are in the US, WHY? If Denmark or Norway is so much better, MOVE THERE!
First, the point was that - assuming you don't come from a rich family - you stand bugger-all chance of getting rich one day. That's what a lack of intergenerational class mobility means. The "American Dream" that if you just work hard, you can get ahead, is right now better represented in those other nations I mentioned.
So if that's really your goal, and you don't want anything to change here, then YOU should MOVE THERE!
Second, are you really unable to comprehend that I can love the U.S. and yet see imperfections that I want to remedy?
You know, I hail from the great state of Maryland. It is my home, and I love it. I grew up here and so I love it; my friends and family are here, and so I love it. I love its geography, from the beaches to the mountains; its history, the Free State, the Battle of Baltimore; its culture, its crazy mix of South and North, th
She does all the work of raising her crop of tomatoes and getting it to market. No leeching there, she doesn't get government farm subsidies, she just works. But, whatever she makes for selling her crop, it depends in large part on having roads to transport it. It's not that she's a leech, nor lazy...
Using public goods, or other common resources, is not leaching off of others. I'm speaking of the parasitic nature of the "investment class", the absentee owners of capital, who do no productive work yet reap dividends.
Consider a worker on an assembly line. She assembles parts into a product worth (as valued by a free market) $10. Lets say that the parts that she starts with, plus the support services (the power and maintenance costs of the factory, the back office costs, and so on, again at a fair market value) come out to $7. Does she make $3 on the deal? No. Because the investors, who are not doing any work here, have to get their cut.
Let's look at some numbers. These are back-of-the-envelope calculations, but the U.S. GDP is about $14 trillion. With a workforce of about 150,000,000, that's about $93,000 per capita - $93,000 worth of value, created by the average American worker per year.
So where does the rest - the lion's share, indeed - of that value created by workers go? GDP is rents + interests + profits + wages + some statistical fudge factors; basically, about $50,000 of the value created by the average worker goes to the investing class in the form of
profits, interest, and rents.
That wasn't the point of Joe's question. Joe stated he wanted to buy a business and hoped that his hard work would bring in more than 250K. Obama stated that he wanted to take that success and spread it to people that made less than Joe hoped to make with his business acquisition and hard work.
One very, very rarely makes an income of more than a quarter of a million dollars in a year solely through one's own hard work. One usually makes it by leaching, to some degree, off the hard work of others. (The exceptions are mostly matters of dumb luck - a superstar performer getting "discovered", for example.)
And the answer to the GP's question is, yes, Joe (who is not really a plumber, under city of Toledo regulations) would get a tax break even if he owned the business, as will the vast majority of small businesses, assuming an Obama victory and that his plan goes ahead pretty much as stated.
It's one thing to say you want to "tax the rich" to fund the government, it's another when you want to do it to give other people the money, i.e., "Spread the Wealth".
In our capitalist system, the government does a tremendous amount to help those who have wealth, get more. It's so basic to the system we rarely think about it, but how much concentration of wealth would there be without government-issued corporate charters, land and resource deeds, copyrights, and patents? Not to mention a reserve banking system that lets privately owned banks make money out of thin air, and an economic policy that uses the DJIA as a measure of economic success.
The small effects of progressive taxation and social spending - spreading around the wealth that other government policies helped concentrate - act as a (small and inadequate) governor on the machinery of state capitalism.
Now, I would rather get rid of that machinery entirely, but I think that unlikely, at least in the near term. If we're going to have it, I'm all for decreasing the power of the government to help the wealthy become wealthier by adding some negative feedback to the system.
Well, we really agree. This is the crucial part. Do they work? Almost certainly yes.
Hold on, there, friend. We agree about cataract surgery, perhaps. There are other techniques I'm much more skeptical about. There are some orthopedic procedures that I would not be very surprised to see a placebo-controlled study find little or no value in.
I also wonder about cardiac bypass surgery, I wouldn't be surprised if a controlled study found it only beneficial for certain classes of high-risk patients - but I'd be very surprised if a such a study were ever conducted, since CABG is one of the High Rituals of the Church of the Holy Scalpel. And I think there's a significant chance that in the next twenty years someone will do a placebo controlled study of bariatric surgery and find it no better than a placebo technique. In these cases, it seems possible to me that the surgical experience may help the patient make significant post-operative changes in lifestyle that have more to do with the outcome than the cutting and sewing do.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure we don't need to do a placebo trial of surgical reattachment of amputated extremities, I'm willing to accept that one at face value.:-)
If surgeries which are clinically studied tend to be ineffective, it's because of a selection effect on which surgeries get studied, not because surgery as a whole is a bunch of crap.
That's a hypothesis worthy of investigation. And I'm not saying surgery as a whole is a bunch of crap; I'm just saying that it over-promises and under-delivers. And I'm saying that if we set the bar of "acceptable evidence" low enough to admit surgical techniques that have not been tested with controlled studies, it's irrational to exclude CAM techniques that have the same level of evidence.
And an aside: homeopathy, wildly popular? Not in my universe.
Note: I am not endorsing homeopathy. However, according to one market research group, it is trusted by "64% of people in India, 58% Brazil, 53% Chile, 49% Saudi Arabia, 49% United Arab Emirates, 40% France, 35% South Africa, 28% Russia, 27% Germany, 25% Argentina, 18% of America, and 15% Great Britain."
Now, would I expect a controlled study of cataract surgery to show that it is more effective than a placebo technique? Yes, I'd put my money on that. But as a matter of sound scientific knowledge, we can't say it's a proven technique; we have to admit the possibility that there's some other factor at work.
But most surgeries correct blatantly obvious mechanical defects.
Because those are all procedures which have been done on people I know quite well, and which have been enormously effective in the end.
You do realize that we can find testimony from people who will say that homeopathy or Scientology or Lourdes water were "enormously effective" for "people they know quite well", right? The folks who got results from the placebo surgeries in these tests also found them to be enormously effective.
If someone's appendix is infected and about to burst and this is surgically removed, are you going to tell me that it's no better than a placebo surgery which leaves the infected appendix in the abdomen?
I'm telling you that, scientifically, the proposition is untested.
As for appendectomy, the last time this topic came up my Google-ing found this little gem, a fascinating look at the subject from a century ago. The author finds a mortality rate of 6.6% in the period before appendectomy was used, and of 7.8% in the first few decades of its use. Of course the mortality rate is much lower today; but if mortality rates actually climbed after appendectomy was first introduced, then clearly the situation is complex than "cut, baby, cut!" (When all you have is a scalpel, everybody looks like a surgical candidate.)
Which is not to say that, under the right circumstances, I'm going to refuse an appendectomy. The surgery is a pretty good gamble. But is a real procedure more effective than a sham one? We cannot say.
Placebo treatment is not a new thing - my mom was a nurse in the 60s and 70s and would occasionally give them out.
Medicine has always had an element of the shaman about it. We should acknowledge it, understand that the mind plays a huge role in wellness and that effective medicine involves more than the mechanical repair of tissue. Healing is not something that doctors and therapists do to a patient, but something that the patient performs with the support - physical and emotional - of the community.
Cite! I know plenty of people who have received useless drugs. I cannot think of a single person I know who have had surgery that did not immediately have a dramatic positive effect on their condition.
Every surgical procedure that has been been tested versus placebo surgery, has proven to be no better than the placebo. (It is curious that many "skeptics" who demand rigorous double-blinded studies of "alternative" medical techniques, will go under the knife without a second thought.)
Of course, a rational actor might also realize that a functioning society was a benefit.
Are you suggesting that paying someone who was completely uninvolved with the creation of a work, and who will not pass any of that payment on to the creators, is somehow necessary or sufficient for a "functioning society"?
Since when did one need a rationale for paying for things that cost money? It's pirates who have to go to extra lengths to justify their behaviour, not purchasers.
Does not economics presume a "rational actor", acting in his or her self-interest? If I can choose between getting X for free and paying for X, then if I'm acting in my rational self-interest, I've got to take the free version unless there's some other consequence.
Slashdot Mirror
Your second sentence is in opposition to your first.
Let's remember that Barr was the author of the "Defense of Marriage Act"; he radically opposed medical marijuana laws, going so far as to create the "Barr Amendment" that prohibited future laws that would "decrease the penalties for marijuana or other Schedule I drugs" in Washington, D.C.; proposed that Wiccans be banned from the military; and voted for the Patriot Act and for the Iraq invasion. He was the leading cheerleader for impeaching Clinton over a blow job, but said that as of this summer it's too late to impeach Bush for his crimes against the Constitution. ("Hey, you've really been ruining the country and violating the most fundamental law of the land! We're going to give you just half a year longer to keep it up!")
He claims to have changed many of these positions within the past few years. Maybe so. But he was either ignorant enough or dumb enough to buy into them a few years ago. In the former case, there's no excuse for an adult college graduate to be that ignorant; in the later, it's not like IQ radically increases in adulthood. (Unless maybe he had a brain disorder that's been treated?)
I'm really disappointed in both the Libertarian and Green parties this year for running washed-up bottom-of-the-barrel nutjob major-party politicians who are recently converts to their respective new parties. Being in a solid blue state (Maryland) I usually like voting for third-party candidates, since it won't effect the outcome of the election and might help ballot access next time around. But I can't in good conscience vote for either Barr or McKinney.
Well, there you have it.
You, sir, are not simply ignorant, not even irrational, well beyond a mere idiot. You are a complete failure as a moral being. You are the soil in which evil grows. People like you are the reason why slavery, fascism, repression, authoritarianism of every stripe, run so rich through human history. You are the "good German" who makes the Holocaust happen; you are the soldier who invaded the Cherokee Nation and forced them on the Trail of Tears.
Now, I do believe in redemption, that even so poor a specimen as yourself might someday find the light. So I wish you no ill will. Except for this: I hope one day you truly understand how hideous you, at this moment, are.
That will be painful for you. But it is the only way in which you might become an actual human being.
Good day, sir.
"We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code." - David D. Clark, former chair of the IAB
You get to say the internet was "built wrong" as soon as we see your "better" idea run.
And how do TODAY'S numbers address the question of whether an appendectomy would be better than a placebo procedure? We don't have any numbers - from today or from yesterday - about how effective a placebo treatment would be!
Placebo surgeries were effective in treating angina, osteoarthritis, and Parkinson's; we cannot dismiss out of hand that one would be effective in appendicitis.
I am not "hinting" at anything, nor am I trying to play with semantics. I'm expressly making a specific and precise point.
No, in fact, we don't know that.
The differences in survival rate of CABG patients versus those who are treated with drugs, are not huge, on the order of about 5%; so saying "people that don't get the bypass die" is inaccurate.
Well, it is trivially true that people who don't have bypass surgery, die. So do people who do get bypass surgery. So do people who never get heart disease. But I assume you meant "die soon".
And many people receive CABG not because of imminent death, but as a treatment for angina. But we've already seen that a placebo surgery was effective in treating angina.
The evidence for the effectiveness of bypass surgery is suggestive, certainly, but not conclusive. The only way to get conclusive data about the results of coronary artery bypass versus a placebo surgery would be to actually do a placebo surgery.
If we're doing a scientific investigation of the question, we must consider the possibility that some people who benefit from bypass surgery are actually benefiting more from an enforced period of rest under skilled nursing care, plus improved psychological state, plus post-surgical therapies and lifestyle changes, then from the actual plumbing work.
No. That was one of Marx's greatest bloopers, to disregard intellectual labor.
"One's own hard work" in this context means physical or intellectual labor performed by one in support of the production of goods or services. Even the IRS recognizes the distinction between "material involvement" in a business and "passive activity".
If your only involvement with a business is to put money in and get a dividend statement every so often, you're not engaged in "hard work", you're an absentee owner. If your only involvement with a business is to buy and sell its stock, you're not engaged in hard work, you're engaged in speculation, in gambling. If your only involvement with a business is that you have a piece of paper from the state, a land deed, that forces that business to pay you for occupying that piece of the Earth's surface, you're not engaged in hard work. In each case, you're skimming off the value created by labor of others.
My alternative is policies that favor earned income over passive investments, rents, and inheritances, resulting in a flatter distribution of wealth.
Neither necessary nor desirable. We don't need a completely flat distribution to have something much, much better than the L curve we have now.
Ah, I see. Poor people are "vermin".
Your own words indite you more than anything I could say.
100 sure? No. But since the copyright holders would have been the company, not the actual creators, I can't see any way this would have benefited the creators. They almost certainly got their compensation via salary long ago
When the law is bad, blind obedience to it is detrimental to a functioning society.
Damn straight. The human race will begin solving it's problems on the day that it ceases taking itself so seriously.
I'm going to pretend I didn't see that.
Smoking PCP by mixing it with cannabis is old news. (Stupid behavior, but old news.) It's no more "modifying" cannabis or filling it with "additives", then mixing a rum and Coke is putting "additives" into Coke.
You're the one conflating "criminal" with "murderer". A criminal is simply one who breaks a law, and there are few Americans who aren't, in the strict sense, criminals.
That is exactly what you're doing. Or trying to do: you can't successfully defend that which is fundamentally indefensible.
It's a lie to make sweeping, ignorant, and incorrect statements about drug use. Most people control their drug use quite well. About 15% of Americans will use an "illegal" drug this year; if drugs were controlling one-sixth of our population, we'd be completely boned.
You want to help "weak" people (a characterization which raises a host of issues that I'll pass by for now) who fall into addiction by making criminals out of them? By making it more likely that they'll die from contaminated drug, or OD on drugs of unknown strength? By fueling a violent black market that increases the chance that they - or innocent bystanders - will get shot in a drug deal gone bad? Gee, what a fscking humanitarian you are.
If you want to change the culture, write books and speak out. That's your right. But stop advocating that guns to be pointed at people who use, buy, or sell drugs that you don't like. Keep your laws off my brain.
Hmm. "X is illegal at the current moment, so discussing proper ways of making this law achieve it's full effect is a valid discussion." Let's examine that argument, such at it is, with various bindings for X:
"Being a runaway slave IS illegal at the current moment, so discussing proper ways of making the fugitive slave law achieve it's full effect is a valid discussion."
"Being a Christian IS illegal at the current moment, so discussing proper ways of making the throw-them-to-the-lions law achieve it's full effect is a valid discussion."
"Voting by black people IS illegal at the current moment, so discussing proper ways of making Jim Crow achieve it's full effect is a valid discussion."
If you cared about ethics, you'd realize that what is ethical and what is right are two very different things. "Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher." -- John J. Miller
Wait, are you saying that you wouldn't deal with someone selling bootleg tapes, or that someone selling bootleg tapes is not a criminal? If the former, if you won't deal with sellers of bootleg tapes, underage drinkers, speeders, and the like, you're going to find that you inhabit a very small world. If the later, you're just wrong; a criminal is one who violates the law.
If you mean "violent crimina
"Modified marijuana"? "Filled with additives"? I've never heard of this. Please, provide citations.
Your first sentence is trivially true, as if one purchases "illegal" items - whether a "loosey" or a bootleg tape or a nuclear weapon - you're buying them from a "criminal".
But the allegation in your second sentence that all drug purchases finance murder is simply not true. Buying some homegrown cannabis or psilocybin mushrooms or even home-brewed LSD - or buying from someone who bought from such a supplier - is not financing murderous behavior.
Thanks to the prohibition that you love so much, buyers can't check on the ethical and social responsibility of their suppliers. If you want drug users to buy from people who are not engaged in violence, you need to bring the drug market out of the underground, make it possible for a sort of "Shopping for Better World" to the drug trade.
Making teenagers behave is the responsibility of parents. You don't get to point a gun at me just because you don't want your kid doing what I'm doing.
I'm saying that it's unknown if appendectomy is any better than a placebo operation.
I'm also saying that there is no surgical procedure that has been demonstrated in a controlled study to be more effective than a placebo.
Neither of these are the same as saying that "surgery isn't any better than a placebo".
Depending on the details, I don't really see an ethical issue here.
If "scraping" is done so as to not put a heavy load on the servers, it's no more unethical to do it automatically than to hire a bunch of drones to compile the data manually. Copyright does not apply to the raw data. Site's "Terms of Service" are baloney (by reading this post this far you agree to send me $20); when you publish information you cannot put restrictions on its use. I see more of an ethical problem with putting up such bogus "Terms of Service" than with using the data.
As for using free accounts, it might make for an unprofessional and shoddy product - which would be grounds to object - but there's nothing inherently unethical about using a free service for business purposes. A lot of small businesses use a Gmail or Yahoo! e-mail account, for example.
Duh. As I said: "Of course the mortality rate is much lower today".
Um, if you want to know what happened 100 years ago, a book published 100 years ago is a pretty good source.
No, it's not a totally different scenario. Choosing to drive a car to work (rather than walk or take public transit or a taxi) is just as much a "choice they made outside the working environment" as choosing to bike to work. (Presuming your employees don't work in the parking lot.)
If you're willing to "provide [drivers] with something extra" by providing parking without charge, and to only provide facilities (less expensive than a parking space, considering land and maintenance) to bikers if you charge them, that shows you're just hostile to people who bike. Got it.
In fact, according to Ohio building regulations, he must maintain his own license to do plumbing work. He has not completed any sort of training program. If Joe is a plumber, heck, so am I - I don't have a license and my training is minimal and informal, but I can sweat copper pipe or unclog a drain line or replace a valve washer.
A slight marginal tax increase on high incomes - a return to a top marginal rate that prevailed during the go-go 80's - is not "getting boned."
First, who issued that money? If we play with the government's counters, we don't have much room to complain when it wants a cut. "Render on to Caesar, what is Caesar's," as one philosopher put it.
Second, as I have already explained, that money was made and the rewards reaped by relying on a number of government services and policies. All claims of property ultimately rest of government action. You want the government to enforce your "property rights", you pay for it.
Making you pay for services rendered is not stealing.
That is, under capitalism, exactly one of the purposes of government: to create and protect "property rights". As the rich are the ones with property, that means keeping rich people rich.
Why are there big companies at all? Why isn't the community growing small businesses to create jobs and create local wealth, instead of competing in a race to the bottom to whore itself out to one megacorporation or another?
These large companies exist because of government actions and government policies that funnel wealth and power to where it's already concentrated, and which screw over small and independent business. A company doesn't become "too big to fail" without some state action along the way.
First, the point was that - assuming you don't come from a rich family - you stand bugger-all chance of getting rich one day. That's what a lack of intergenerational class mobility means. The "American Dream" that if you just work hard, you can get ahead, is right now better represented in those other nations I mentioned.
So if that's really your goal, and you don't want anything to change here, then YOU should MOVE THERE!
Second, are you really unable to comprehend that I can love the U.S. and yet see imperfections that I want to remedy?
You know, I hail from the great state of Maryland. It is my home, and I love it. I grew up here and so I love it; my friends and family are here, and so I love it. I love its geography, from the beaches to the mountains; its history, the Free State, the Battle of Baltimore; its culture, its crazy mix of South and North, th
Using public goods, or other common resources, is not leaching off of others. I'm speaking of the parasitic nature of the "investment class", the absentee owners of capital, who do no productive work yet reap dividends.
Consider a worker on an assembly line. She assembles parts into a product worth (as valued by a free market) $10. Lets say that the parts that she starts with, plus the support services (the power and maintenance costs of the factory, the back office costs, and so on, again at a fair market value) come out to $7. Does she make $3 on the deal? No. Because the investors, who are not doing any work here, have to get their cut.
Let's look at some numbers. These are back-of-the-envelope calculations, but the U.S. GDP is about $14 trillion. With a workforce of about 150,000,000, that's about $93,000 per capita - $93,000 worth of value, created by the average American worker per year.
Does the average American worker make anything like $93,000 a year? Not even close. The average (which seems to be mean, here) annual wage is about $39,000; the median, about $26,000.
So where does the rest - the lion's share, indeed - of that value created by workers go? GDP is rents + interests + profits + wages + some statistical fudge factors; basically, about $50,000 of the value created by the average worker goes to the investing class in the form of profits, interest, and rents.
One very, very rarely makes an income of more than a quarter of a million dollars in a year solely through one's own hard work. One usually makes it by leaching, to some degree, off the hard work of others. (The exceptions are mostly matters of dumb luck - a superstar performer getting "discovered", for example.)
And the answer to the GP's question is, yes, Joe (who is not really a plumber, under city of Toledo regulations) would get a tax break even if he owned the business, as will the vast majority of small businesses, assuming an Obama victory and that his plan goes ahead pretty much as stated.
In our capitalist system, the government does a tremendous amount to help those who have wealth, get more. It's so basic to the system we rarely think about it, but how much concentration of wealth would there be without government-issued corporate charters, land and resource deeds, copyrights, and patents? Not to mention a reserve banking system that lets privately owned banks make money out of thin air, and an economic policy that uses the DJIA as a measure of economic success.
These government actions and policies are so successful at concentrating wealth that the top 20 percent own 90% of all financial wealth. And it stays in the family; the U.S. has lower intergenerational mobility than France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway or Denmark
The small effects of progressive taxation and social spending - spreading around the wealth that other government policies helped concentrate - act as a (small and inadequate) governor on the machinery of state capitalism.
Now, I would rather get rid of that machinery entirely, but I think that unlikely, at least in the near term. If we're going to have it, I'm all for decreasing the power of the government to help the wealthy become wealthier by adding some negative feedback to the system.
Hold on, there, friend. We agree about cataract surgery, perhaps. There are other techniques I'm much more skeptical about. There are some orthopedic procedures that I would not be very surprised to see a placebo-controlled study find little or no value in.
I also wonder about cardiac bypass surgery, I wouldn't be surprised if a controlled study found it only beneficial for certain classes of high-risk patients - but I'd be very surprised if a such a study were ever conducted, since CABG is one of the High Rituals of the Church of the Holy Scalpel. And I think there's a significant chance that in the next twenty years someone will do a placebo controlled study of bariatric surgery and find it no better than a placebo technique. In these cases, it seems possible to me that the surgical experience may help the patient make significant post-operative changes in lifestyle that have more to do with the outcome than the cutting and sewing do.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure we don't need to do a placebo trial of surgical reattachment of amputated extremities, I'm willing to accept that one at face value. :-)
That's a hypothesis worthy of investigation. And I'm not saying surgery as a whole is a bunch of crap; I'm just saying that it over-promises and under-delivers. And I'm saying that if we set the bar of "acceptable evidence" low enough to admit surgical techniques that have not been tested with controlled studies, it's irrational to exclude CAM techniques that have the same level of evidence.
Note: I am not endorsing homeopathy. However, according to one market research group, it is trusted by "64% of people in India, 58% Brazil, 53% Chile, 49% Saudi Arabia, 49% United Arab Emirates, 40% France, 35% South Africa, 28% Russia, 27% Germany, 25% Argentina, 18% of America, and 15% Great Britain."
Did you also charge employees who drove to work for the use of parking spaces? Or are you just hostile to people who bike?
If it's big a deal to you, put in a coin-op shower. Then you can literally nickel-and-dime your employees.
If most people took them and felt nothing, they wouldn't be so wildly popular.
You have to be careful about sweeping statements regarding the human body.
Spontaneous resolution of a traumatic cataract caused by an intralenticular foreign body.
Spontaneous reduction and absorption of cataracts in childhood.
Spontaneous cataract absorption in patients with leptospiral uveitis.
Reversible cataracts in diabetes mellitus.
Now, would I expect a controlled study of cataract surgery to show that it is more effective than a placebo technique? Yes, I'd put my money on that. But as a matter of sound scientific knowledge, we can't say it's a proven technique; we have to admit the possibility that there's some other factor at work.
I'm sure that those doing the arthroscopic debridement and lavage procedures on the knee that were found to be no better than a placebo thought they were correcting blatantly obvious mechanical defects.
A car transmission does not have self-repair capability. A human body does.
You do realize that we can find testimony from people who will say that homeopathy or Scientology or Lourdes water were "enormously effective" for "people they know quite well", right? The folks who got results from the placebo surgeries in these tests also found them to be enormously effective.
Let me introduce you to the concept of anecdotal evidence.
I'm telling you that, scientifically, the proposition is untested.
Yes, it's amazing to think that some portion of the response to cataract surgery or appendectomy might be a placebo effect. But it's no less amazing to think that a type of brain surgery is no better than a placebo. The placebo effect covers several different things that may be at play.
As for appendectomy, the last time this topic came up my Google-ing found this little gem, a fascinating look at the subject from a century ago. The author finds a mortality rate of 6.6% in the period before appendectomy was used, and of 7.8% in the first few decades of its use. Of course the mortality rate is much lower today; but if mortality rates actually climbed after appendectomy was first introduced, then clearly the situation is complex than "cut, baby, cut!" (When all you have is a scalpel, everybody looks like a surgical candidate.)
Which is not to say that, under the right circumstances, I'm going to refuse an appendectomy. The surgery is a pretty good gamble. But is a real procedure more effective than a sham one? We cannot say.
Placebo treatment is not a new thing - my mom was a nurse in the 60s and 70s and would occasionally give them out.
Medicine has always had an element of the shaman about it. We should acknowledge it, understand that the mind plays a huge role in wellness and that effective medicine involves more than the mechanical repair of tissue. Healing is not something that doctors and therapists do to a patient, but something that the patient performs with the support - physical and emotional - of the community.
No. Cold=rhinovirus, or one of a couple others.
However, a cold is often accompanied by an opportunistic bacterial infection in the sinuses.
Google "placebo surgery.
The first time this was tested was in 1959, when a placebo-controlled trial of a then-popular technique for treating angina, involving tying off the an artery in the chest, was found to be no better than a placebo technique. Other techniques so tested include stem cell implants for treating Parkinson's, arthroscopic surgery for knee osteoarthritis. I think there might have been one or two others.
Every surgical procedure that has been been tested versus placebo surgery, has proven to be no better than the placebo. (It is curious that many "skeptics" who demand rigorous double-blinded studies of "alternative" medical techniques, will go under the knife without a second thought.)
Are you suggesting that paying someone who was completely uninvolved with the creation of a work, and who will not pass any of that payment on to the creators, is somehow necessary or sufficient for a "functioning society"?
Does not economics presume a "rational actor", acting in his or her self-interest? If I can choose between getting X for free and paying for X, then if I'm acting in my rational self-interest, I've got to take the free version unless there's some other consequence.