It's called the free market dumb dumb. It works for beans,it should also work for medicine.
No, it doesn't. Medical care does not meet the conditions necessary for a free market to reach efficient solutions: buyers and sellers do not meet in the marketplace with equal power, full knowledge, and all costs accounted for.
When you need medical care, when your life depends on it, you do not enter the market with equal power with those giving treatment. And since disease is communicable, there are large external costs to people not getting treatment - if my neighbor doesn't get his TB treated, or my next girlfriend's current boyfriend doesn't get an HIV test, it can have a serious effect on me.
In a business with this kind of budget problem you simply lay people off.
A business does not provide services essential to the safety, health, and welfare of a population.
When you lay off a bunch of hackers who code website backends, or a bunch of fry cooks at the local fast food joint, the broader social implications are nill. When you lay off firefighters or hospital workers, it's likely more people will die.
Sadly, as another poster mentioned, "rights", once lost, are restored very slowly, if ever. Likewise, taxes rarely disappear once they are put in place. Choose your poison.
I'll take higher taxes over infringement of liberties any day. Render on to Caesar what is Caesar's: money is a government creation, and while there are practical matters and while current tax schemes are rather invasive in terms of data gathering, I don't have a problem with the fundamental idea that if you want to play the game of state capitalism with the state's counters you've got to ante up.
Would I rather pay an extra thirty bucks a month in taxes, versus warrantless wiretapping? Versus illegal invasions of sovreign nations? A consistent attempt to force religion into biology classes? Attempts to criminalize medical procedures, to even re-outlaw birth control? Continual anti-gay bigotry shrouded in religious language? Ruinous borrow-and-spend policies that merely shift the tax burden on to future generations? I'd pay the extra thirty bucks and be happy.
Compared to the great economic boom of the 1950s, the rich are far, far, far undertaxed - under that radical leftist Eisenhower, top marginal rates were over 90%. And during the go-go early 80s it was 50%. So don't even try to play that raising the top rate back to the modest 39.6% it was during the Clinton years would ruin the economy.
I guess you want to accept the Constitution as some "holy" document, where the words must be followed to the letter.
I'm not asking for it to be treated as something "holy", but as words with meaning.
Same as any other law: if I'm hauled into court, my actions will be judged against the text of whatever statute I'm accused of violating.
I merely insist that the government be held to the same standard regarding following the law of the land, as the citizens are held to in following ordinary laws. I don't get to claim that the traffic laws are a "living document" with meaning contradictory to their plain text to justify my speeding; the feds shouldn't be allowed to make that claim about the Constitution to justify their power-grabbing.
Of course in any natural language document there are some ambiguities, and history precedent can be a useful guide in resolving them. Nor do I deny the importance of the common law tradition. But that doesn't change the fact that the words of the law of the land have meanings, that there are clear and unambiguous parts, and that ambiguous portions must still be understood in a manner that is not in direct contradiction to the actual text.
Here's the one thing to remember in terms of rsync. It's going to be the CURRENT snapshot of your data...you're going to want to have made additional local backups on a regular basis so you can roll back to one of those snapshots prior to when you hosed your DB.
rsnapshot may be the tool for you..."Using rsync and hard links, it is possible to keep multiple, full backups instantly available. The disk space required is just a little more than the space of one full backup, plus incrementals."
As for either tech being for people who have trouble walking, ask any doctor -- they'll tell you those are the people who need to walk.
America is not the world. This is a Japanese company making a product for Japan. Obesity is noticeable by its absence there.
What is noticible is the aging population. Think less "lazy pedestrian" and more "bionic granny".
I see this fitting in very well helping obaasan get around. You don't want her zipping through the shotengai at a Segway's top speed...and if you can make something small enough to take on the commuter train, outstanding.
...Not many places that accommodate any other mode of transit other than cars
They're debuting this in Japan. In the big cities[*], everyone has a bike, there are bike lanes on the sidewalks (not on the streets with the cars, on the sidewalks with pedestrians), public transportation is excellent, and many people do not own cars.
([*]At least in Osaka and Kyoto. I didn't spend enough time in Tokyo or Nagoya to get a feel for biking there. It's possible this is a Kansai thing, but I don't think so.)
With this winglet's 6km/h speed bicycle is also much faster.
According to TFA, "Toyota will test the Winglet in shopping crowds in 2009." In a Japanese shotengai, you won't go very fast on a bike, you basically have to walk it. (An empty shotengai, though, is a bicyclist's dream...)
Japan has an aging population and is doing a lot to use tech to address resulting issues. Elderly Nihonjin might appreciate the lift. Mecha for the senior set!
You also generally can't take a bike on a train. These are small enough that this might be possible.
this is consistent with history - sorta like how judicial review came about.
Which is also something not found in the Constitution.
If one accepts the premise that the actual words of the document have meaning - and I know that this is a radical concept in our legal system as it is practices, but still - then the fact that something is "consistent with history" does not mean it is Constitutional.
No, actually, it doesn't. The Constitution is very clear that rights are to be construed expansively and government powers narrowly - Amendment IX and X.
WTF does "personal responsibility" have to do with me having to pay $4.00 a gallon?
"Personal responsibility" has little to do with the price of gas, but everything to do with how it affects us. Had we not been building a nation of highways, buying SUVs, and building oversize houses that take tremendous amount of energy to heat, we'd be weathering this a lot better.
I don't know your situation. But I have little sympathy for the guy who's 50 mile commute in his SUV is getting outrageously expensive. He chose the house, the job, the vehicle - did he think cheap gas was an eternal verity? Tough tittie.
The problem is not that gas prices are too high. They're actually finally starting to get close to the true price. The problem is the jump has happened too quickly for behaviors to adjust.
When you artificially limit supply...
Nobody's artificially limiting supply, not in any significant way. The earth's supply of fossil fuels is finite. The population is growing. The percentage of that population in industrial cultures is growing.
Finite supply + growing demand = increasing prices. Forever, or at least until it runs out.
Searches at the border are legally reasonable. This has been held for a very very long time.
The government says warrantless searches at the border are legally reasonable, and has held this position for a long time. That doesn't make it so. There's no "except at the border" clause in the Fourth Amendment.
Are you honestly going to tell me PCP doesn't cause violence/insanity (which leads to violence most times)?
That's what the studies referenced say.
And here's another that notes that "Within this group, violent episodes were found to be rare, mainly involving efforts by law enforcement or hospital treatment staff to restrain users, thereby seeming to set off panic reactions and struggle." And here is more on the study that found PCP users no more violent then heroin users.
Do you have peer-reviewed studies saying otherwise, that PCP use causes violent behavior? Or are you just parroting more bullshit from the drug warriors?
I'm not recommending PCP - it's got nasty toxic effects, and better drugs will get you the effects you want, if that's your thing, with less danger. But paranoia about PCP is dangerous to us all, as you so well illustrate by your apology for the assault on Rodney King under the excuse "PCP! PCP!"
What biz it is of the governments to tell me where I can and can't use my cellphone?
The same biz of the of the governments it is to tell you where to can and can't take a piss.
Taking a piss on the street is annoying to other people. Smells bad, offensive to the senses. It might not be a big thing if one person does it once in a while (and the law should reflect that, making allowance for emergencies), but if everyone does it, quality of life for all is degraded.
Jabbering on your phone in an otherwise quiet place is annoying to other people. Sounds bad, offensive to the senses. It might not be a big thing if one person does it once in a while (and the law should reflect that, making allowance for emergencies), but if everyone does it, quality of life for all is degraded.
They could just let individual air lines react to market forces.
Air travel is nowhere near a free market. So long as so much of the infrastructure - airports, air traffic control systems, air security and safety (which, living under flight routes, I take to be an important government job, at least until they let me install my own anti-aircraft battery) - is government provided, talk of "market forces" is just more of the Religion of The Invisible Hand.
Yes or no: Was the Rodney King case excessive force? Keep in mind he was drunk, coked out, high as fuck on PCP, and was constantly trying to get up and attack the officers even while being beaten.
He was trying to break away from men who were torturing him? What a surprise. This one seems to be a favorite of apologists for police brutality: "After we threatened him, he tried to get away, so we had to beat him. And even though we told him not to move, rather than lie there and get beat, he struggled, so we had to beat him some more."
In a situation with a person who is high as fuck on PCP, your only choice is to beat the living shit out of them
Which makes it a perfect excuse for bad cops. "Thought he was on PCP. No choice, had to beat him." Which is bullshit; while PCP causes a disassociated state that render one pretty impervious to pain, it does not cause violent behavior more than other drugs. If someone is on PCP, the best thing to do is avoid anything that might provoke violent behavior.
'Cause you all think you've got better things to do than policing.
So long as policing involves the continued assault on civil liberties known as the War on Drugs, yes, I have better things to do with my time. Under the current system, almost any other way you spend time is likely to be more beneficial to humanity than policing.
It's a vicious circle: we get the cops we do largely because we have the laws we have, and we get the laws we do largely because the cops we have are willing to enforce them.
According to the wik, in 2006 there were 26,556 citizen complaints about excessive use of police force in large U.S. agencies. (These agencies make up only 59% of cops.) Only 2000 were found to have merit by the DOJ, but the DOJ is known to be a psychopathic organization full of suckers of Satan's cock, so there you go.
Other studies have found that only about 30% of incidents of brutality are reported.
So, somewhere between 2,000 (DOJ's figure) and 150,000 (taking the 26k figure as 59% of 30% of actual incidents) incidents of excessive force per year - is that "often" enough for you?
I've witnessed cops assault a person who wasn't even involved in the altercation they arrived to break up. I've heard a cop gleefully describe how he punched a petty thief who tried to run, saying "of course I gave him a few for trying to get away". And I'm a white middle-class suburban professional - if I lived in the inner city, you can bet I'd see a lot more of these incidents.
The average American police officer is undereducated and undertrained. He or she has volunteered to enforce a body of law that is largely unjust, and often uses as a matter of course techniques that are illegal violations of civil liberties. I've known some good cops, but as a body, these are not people to be trusted.
Conservative politicians like to conflate "entitlements" all together, which includes not just welfare but medical spending (prices for which are driven up by the for-profit model and by drug patents, both of which are made possible by government action), veterans affairs and military retirement payments (which should be properly counted under defense), and Social Security spending.
I am sugarcoating nothing. You are either confused, or deliberately choosing to not understand the difference between what is under discussion here and eugenics so that you can feel self-righteous.
Human DNA, viable (will survive and develop if kept in the right environment). Human. Where's the supernatural, where's the superstition ?
DNA is a molecule. Believing a molecule to be a person can only be the result of great confusion; do you believe every cell in your body to be a person? Under the right environment (cloning) the DNA from any cell can develop into a separate organism.
You're attributing some magical property to human DNA, something I'm going to wash a bunch of down the drain as soon as I shower. That's the supernatural or superstitious aspect here.
am sorry, but I do not agree. The probability that there won't be a single enjoyable moment in a human life is just too low, possibly even nonexistant. And that's all that is necessary to make living worth it.
You would choose to inflict years of intense suffering on a human being on the theory that a single enjoyable moment would justify it? You, sir, are either trolling or insane.
It's the only life they know and get. How can it be unsatisfactory?
Because every sentient being has a inborn urge to avoid pain, and suffers if it is thwarted. One doesn't have to live a life free from constant pain to have that urge. A person who lives a short life in intense pain will always be denied satisfaction of the most basic drive a sentient being knows - to not feel agony.
stay the heck away from deciding for someone else whether their life is "worth it".
We're not deciding whether a person's life is worth living, because we're talking about potential people, people who do not exist yet.
As they do not exist, they cannot decide whether that life would be worth living. So the decision falls to us. And making it is unavoidable - anyone who decides to have a child does exactly that.
Thankfully, I live in a civilized county where we don't have them.
Again, suthey are a horrible idea; back when I taught CPR classes, we always wanted people to err on the side of calling 911. A bill of several hundred dollars is a strong incentive to dismiss those chest pains as gas - and so wind up dead.
In a philosophical context, "individual human" is ambiguous. Do we mean a human organism? A brain-dead human is still a "human" organism, but is not a "person", that is, is not possessed of a mind, is not the "subject of a life".
"Personhood" is not than the biochemical process of life; it refers to mental activity, subjective experience. There may even be cases where a single "individual human" organism may correspond to more than one "person", such in the case of the famous split-brain patients, or (more controversially) in "multiple personality disorder". Some argue that some non-humans should be considered "persons" - chimps and gorillas, for example, or (hypothetical) machine entities that pass the Turing test.
And it's arguable that in some extreme cases, an "individual human" organism may never develop, or may lose, "personhood" - feral children, extreme brain damage, or even extreme psychological trauma.
I am "living with a severe disability", or rather one that did have an extremely gloomy outlook at birth, but I nonetheless survived for over three decades and I _like my life the way it is_ and if that ever changes, _I_ am going to something about it, not anyone else.
I'm glad that you like your life. I know this topic can be emotionally weighted. But let's be clear: no one is suggesting that, once a person exists, that person should be subject to involuntary euthanasia. Nor has anyone mentioned eugenics; the issue is the suffering of individual persons, not "improving the race".
In this case, what we're talking about is action taken before a person comes into existence, and whether we should act to stop the formation of persons whose lives will be nothing but suffering.
Consider: I have here a human ovum and a human sperm with a certain combination of genetic qualities. I know that if I introduce them and impregnate a woman with the zygote, eventually a human organism will be born that will develop into a person, and that person will (we have a high degree of certainty) experience a short and unsatisfactory life full of pain. Let's say that the child will live to the age of three, in constant severe and untreatable pain. Should I take action that would cause such a person to come into being? I think we all agree that the answer is, no.
What if I've already introduced the sperm and egg? Should I continue with implantation? Still, no. (Barring supernatural or superstitious arguments claiming that the zygote is a "person".)
What about after implantation? If we understand that "personhood" is not something that starts until after birth, then (not counting our emotional gut reaction, and assuming no medical impact to the woman carrying the embryo and her agreement) we will see that it's no different to abort the implanted embryo than to stop the sperm and egg from meeting. In both cases we're stopping "personhood" from starting; in neither case are we killing a "person".
And Singer's point is that, with the understanding that "personhood" does not start until after birth, it may, in some rare and extreme instances, be proper to act at an even later stage, after birth, to prevent the formation of a "person" who will be the subject of an extremely painful, suffering-filled, and unsatisfactory (from their own perspective) life.
You do realize, of course, that fire fighting services are, in fact, not free, right? Most (if not all) fire fighting services bill you for their services when they respond to a fire.
Where do you live that this is the case? That's a tremendously stupid way to run things: "Ah, my kitchen is on fire, but it'll cost money for my insurance deductable if I call it in. I'll put it out myself with the garden hose...Whoops! It was a grease fire! It's spreading! Now the whole block will burn down."
Out in the middle of the country, where houses are isolated, maybe they could get away with that, but in the city (the topic of discussion here) such a policy would get people dead. You never want to provide a disincentive for an honest activation of an emergency service, because delays can make the emergency worse. Therefore they must be tax-funded public or common goods.
I get nervous when folks start talking about "free" services.
Really? Do fire engines make you nervous, then? Or public water fountains? Street lights?
You must be a nervous wreck in any city.
As a practical matter, for humans to live in cities (and at this level of population and industry, a lot of us have to - more than half the human race now lives in cities), a number of public goods and common goods must be provided.
We can certainly debate whether "free" wi-fi should be one of them, but to get upset at the very idea of "free" services is pointless. (Unless perhaps you've got a time machine and plan to go back and either stop or radically change the course of, the industrial/urban revolution.)
Slashdot Mirror
No, it doesn't. Medical care does not meet the conditions necessary for a free market to reach efficient solutions: buyers and sellers do not meet in the marketplace with equal power, full knowledge, and all costs accounted for.
When you need medical care, when your life depends on it, you do not enter the market with equal power with those giving treatment. And since disease is communicable, there are large external costs to people not getting treatment - if my neighbor doesn't get his TB treated, or my next girlfriend's current boyfriend doesn't get an HIV test, it can have a serious effect on me.
A business does not provide services essential to the safety, health, and welfare of a population.
When you lay off a bunch of hackers who code website backends, or a bunch of fry cooks at the local fast food joint, the broader social implications are nill. When you lay off firefighters or hospital workers, it's likely more people will die.
I'll take higher taxes over infringement of liberties any day. Render on to Caesar what is Caesar's: money is a government creation, and while there are practical matters and while current tax schemes are rather invasive in terms of data gathering, I don't have a problem with the fundamental idea that if you want to play the game of state capitalism with the state's counters you've got to ante up.
We can get rid of taxes as soon as we can get rid of government, and we can get rid of government just as soon as the prerequisite of "universal enlightenment" is fulfilled. In the meantime, we Americans ought to stop our famous tax whining - compared to other industrialized nations we as a whole are under-taxed.
Would I rather pay an extra thirty bucks a month in taxes, versus warrantless wiretapping? Versus illegal invasions of sovreign nations? A consistent attempt to force religion into biology classes? Attempts to criminalize medical procedures, to even re-outlaw birth control? Continual anti-gay bigotry shrouded in religious language? Ruinous borrow-and-spend policies that merely shift the tax burden on to future generations? I'd pay the extra thirty bucks and be happy.
But I wouldn't have to, since the current Democratic plan is to shift taxes off of the middle class and back on to the wealthy who have benefited from years of rule by the investment class that owns the GOP, and off of the middle class. Under Obama's proposals, a family making $66,000/year would get a tax reduction of $1,042, while a family making $604,000 a year would see a tax increase of $116,000.
Compared to the great economic boom of the 1950s, the rich are far, far, far undertaxed - under that radical leftist Eisenhower, top marginal rates were over 90%. And during the go-go early 80s it was 50%. So don't even try to play that raising the top rate back to the modest 39.6% it was during the Clinton years would ruin the economy.
I'm not asking for it to be treated as something "holy", but as words with meaning.
Same as any other law: if I'm hauled into court, my actions will be judged against the text of whatever statute I'm accused of violating.
I merely insist that the government be held to the same standard regarding following the law of the land, as the citizens are held to in following ordinary laws. I don't get to claim that the traffic laws are a "living document" with meaning contradictory to their plain text to justify my speeding; the feds shouldn't be allowed to make that claim about the Constitution to justify their power-grabbing.
Of course in any natural language document there are some ambiguities, and history precedent can be a useful guide in resolving them. Nor do I deny the importance of the common law tradition. But that doesn't change the fact that the words of the law of the land have meanings, that there are clear and unambiguous parts, and that ambiguous portions must still be understood in a manner that is not in direct contradiction to the actual text.
rsnapshot may be the tool for you..."Using rsync and hard links, it is possible to keep multiple, full backups instantly available. The disk space required is just a little more than the space of one full backup, plus incrementals."
America is not the world. This is a Japanese company making a product for Japan. Obesity is noticeable by its absence there.
What is noticible is the aging population. Think less "lazy pedestrian" and more "bionic granny".
I see this fitting in very well helping obaasan get around. You don't want her zipping through the shotengai at a Segway's top speed...and if you can make something small enough to take on the commuter train, outstanding.
They're debuting this in Japan. In the big cities[*], everyone has a bike, there are bike lanes on the sidewalks (not on the streets with the cars, on the sidewalks with pedestrians), public transportation is excellent, and many people do not own cars.
([*]At least in Osaka and Kyoto. I didn't spend enough time in Tokyo or Nagoya to get a feel for biking there. It's possible this is a Kansai thing, but I don't think so.)
According to TFA, "Toyota will test the Winglet in shopping crowds in 2009." In a Japanese shotengai, you won't go very fast on a bike, you basically have to walk it. (An empty shotengai, though, is a bicyclist's dream...)
Japan has an aging population and is doing a lot to use tech to address resulting issues. Elderly Nihonjin might appreciate the lift. Mecha for the senior set!
You also generally can't take a bike on a train. These are small enough that this might be possible.
Which is also something not found in the Constitution.
If one accepts the premise that the actual words of the document have meaning - and I know that this is a radical concept in our legal system as it is practices, but still - then the fact that something is "consistent with history" does not mean it is Constitutional.
No, actually, it doesn't. The Constitution is very clear that rights are to be construed expansively and government powers narrowly - Amendment IX and X.
"Personal responsibility" has little to do with the price of gas, but everything to do with how it affects us. Had we not been building a nation of highways, buying SUVs, and building oversize houses that take tremendous amount of energy to heat, we'd be weathering this a lot better.
I don't know your situation. But I have little sympathy for the guy who's 50 mile commute in his SUV is getting outrageously expensive. He chose the house, the job, the vehicle - did he think cheap gas was an eternal verity? Tough tittie.
The problem is not that gas prices are too high. They're actually finally starting to get close to the true price. The problem is the jump has happened too quickly for behaviors to adjust.
Nobody's artificially limiting supply, not in any significant way. The earth's supply of fossil fuels is finite. The population is growing. The percentage of that population in industrial cultures is growing.
Finite supply + growing demand = increasing prices. Forever, or at least until it runs out.
The government says warrantless searches at the border are legally reasonable, and has held this position for a long time. That doesn't make it so. There's no "except at the border" clause in the Fourth Amendment.
That's what the studies referenced say.
And here's another that notes that "Within this group, violent episodes were found to be rare, mainly involving efforts by law enforcement or hospital treatment staff to restrain users, thereby seeming to set off panic reactions and struggle." And here is more on the study that found PCP users no more violent then heroin users.
Do you have peer-reviewed studies saying otherwise, that PCP use causes violent behavior? Or are you just parroting more bullshit from the drug warriors?
I'm not recommending PCP - it's got nasty toxic effects, and better drugs will get you the effects you want, if that's your thing, with less danger. But paranoia about PCP is dangerous to us all, as you so well illustrate by your apology for the assault on Rodney King under the excuse "PCP! PCP!"
The same biz of the of the governments it is to tell you where to can and can't take a piss.
Taking a piss on the street is annoying to other people. Smells bad, offensive to the senses. It might not be a big thing if one person does it once in a while (and the law should reflect that, making allowance for emergencies), but if everyone does it, quality of life for all is degraded.
Jabbering on your phone in an otherwise quiet place is annoying to other people. Sounds bad, offensive to the senses. It might not be a big thing if one person does it once in a while (and the law should reflect that, making allowance for emergencies), but if everyone does it, quality of life for all is degraded.
Air travel is nowhere near a free market. So long as so much of the infrastructure - airports, air traffic control systems, air security and safety (which, living under flight routes, I take to be an important government job, at least until they let me install my own anti-aircraft battery) - is government provided, talk of "market forces" is just more of the Religion of The Invisible Hand.
What evidence do you have that he was under the influence of cocaine or PCP? Tests on him for PCP were negative.
He was trying to break away from men who were torturing him? What a surprise. This one seems to be a favorite of apologists for police brutality: "After we threatened him, he tried to get away, so we had to beat him. And even though we told him not to move, rather than lie there and get beat, he struggled, so we had to beat him some more."
Which makes it a perfect excuse for bad cops. "Thought he was on PCP. No choice, had to beat him." Which is bullshit; while PCP causes a disassociated state that render one pretty impervious to pain, it does not cause violent behavior more than other drugs. If someone is on PCP, the best thing to do is avoid anything that might provoke violent behavior.
So long as policing involves the continued assault on civil liberties known as the War on Drugs, yes, I have better things to do with my time. Under the current system, almost any other way you spend time is likely to be more beneficial to humanity than policing.
It's a vicious circle: we get the cops we do largely because we have the laws we have, and we get the laws we do largely because the cops we have are willing to enforce them.
Define "often".
According to the wik, in 2006 there were 26,556 citizen complaints about excessive use of police force in large U.S. agencies. (These agencies make up only 59% of cops.) Only 2000 were found to have merit by the DOJ, but the DOJ is known to be a psychopathic organization full of suckers of Satan's cock, so there you go.
Other studies have found that only about 30% of incidents of brutality are reported.
So, somewhere between 2,000 (DOJ's figure) and 150,000 (taking the 26k figure as 59% of 30% of actual incidents) incidents of excessive force per year - is that "often" enough for you?
I've witnessed cops assault a person who wasn't even involved in the altercation they arrived to break up. I've heard a cop gleefully describe how he punched a petty thief who tried to run, saying "of course I gave him a few for trying to get away". And I'm a white middle-class suburban professional - if I lived in the inner city, you can bet I'd see a lot more of these incidents.
The average American police officer is undereducated and undertrained. He or she has volunteered to enforce a body of law that is largely unjust, and often uses as a matter of course techniques that are illegal violations of civil liberties. I've known some good cops, but as a body, these are not people to be trusted.
Eh? Spending on welfare (TANF) is a very small part of the budget, $16.5 billion. At a population of 301 million, that's $54.80/year/person, fifteen cents a day per person. The base defense budget - not including war funding - is more than $481 billion, $1598/person/year, $4.38 per day per person. U.S. military spending makes up the bulk of world military spending. We could cut ours in half and still enormously outspend all potential adversaries.
Conservative politicians like to conflate "entitlements" all together, which includes not just welfare but medical spending (prices for which are driven up by the for-profit model and by drug patents, both of which are made possible by government action), veterans affairs and military retirement payments (which should be properly counted under defense), and Social Security spending.
The NSF's budget is $6.065 billion, $20.15/year/person, about five and a half cents a day per person.
I am sugarcoating nothing. You are either confused, or deliberately choosing to not understand the difference between what is under discussion here and eugenics so that you can feel self-righteous.
DNA is a molecule. Believing a molecule to be a person can only be the result of great confusion; do you believe every cell in your body to be a person? Under the right environment (cloning) the DNA from any cell can develop into a separate organism.
You're attributing some magical property to human DNA, something I'm going to wash a bunch of down the drain as soon as I shower. That's the supernatural or superstitious aspect here.
You would choose to inflict years of intense suffering on a human being on the theory that a single enjoyable moment would justify it? You, sir, are either trolling or insane.
Because every sentient being has a inborn urge to avoid pain, and suffers if it is thwarted. One doesn't have to live a life free from constant pain to have that urge. A person who lives a short life in intense pain will always be denied satisfaction of the most basic drive a sentient being knows - to not feel agony.
We're not deciding whether a person's life is worth living, because we're talking about potential people, people who do not exist yet.
As they do not exist, they cannot decide whether that life would be worth living. So the decision falls to us. And making it is unavoidable - anyone who decides to have a child does exactly that.
Thankfully, I live in a civilized county where we don't have them.
Again, suthey are a horrible idea; back when I taught CPR classes, we always wanted people to err on the side of calling 911. A bill of several hundred dollars is a strong incentive to dismiss those chest pains as gas - and so wind up dead.
In a philosophical context, "individual human" is ambiguous. Do we mean a human organism? A brain-dead human is still a "human" organism, but is not a "person", that is, is not possessed of a mind, is not the "subject of a life".
"Personhood" is not than the biochemical process of life; it refers to mental activity, subjective experience. There may even be cases where a single "individual human" organism may correspond to more than one "person", such in the case of the famous split-brain patients, or (more controversially) in "multiple personality disorder". Some argue that some non-humans should be considered "persons" - chimps and gorillas, for example, or (hypothetical) machine entities that pass the Turing test.
And it's arguable that in some extreme cases, an "individual human" organism may never develop, or may lose, "personhood" - feral children, extreme brain damage, or even extreme psychological trauma.
I'm glad that you like your life. I know this topic can be emotionally weighted. But let's be clear: no one is suggesting that, once a person exists, that person should be subject to involuntary euthanasia. Nor has anyone mentioned eugenics; the issue is the suffering of individual persons, not "improving the race".
In this case, what we're talking about is action taken before a person comes into existence, and whether we should act to stop the formation of persons whose lives will be nothing but suffering.
Consider: I have here a human ovum and a human sperm with a certain combination of genetic qualities. I know that if I introduce them and impregnate a woman with the zygote, eventually a human organism will be born that will develop into a person, and that person will (we have a high degree of certainty) experience a short and unsatisfactory life full of pain. Let's say that the child will live to the age of three, in constant severe and untreatable pain. Should I take action that would cause such a person to come into being? I think we all agree that the answer is, no.
What if I've already introduced the sperm and egg? Should I continue with implantation? Still, no. (Barring supernatural or superstitious arguments claiming that the zygote is a "person".)
What about after implantation? If we understand that "personhood" is not something that starts until after birth, then (not counting our emotional gut reaction, and assuming no medical impact to the woman carrying the embryo and her agreement) we will see that it's no different to abort the implanted embryo than to stop the sperm and egg from meeting. In both cases we're stopping "personhood" from starting; in neither case are we killing a "person".
And Singer's point is that, with the understanding that "personhood" does not start until after birth, it may, in some rare and extreme instances, be proper to act at an even later stage, after birth, to prevent the formation of a "person" who will be the subject of an extremely painful, suffering-filled, and unsatisfactory (from their own perspective) life.
Where do you live that this is the case? That's a tremendously stupid way to run things: "Ah, my kitchen is on fire, but it'll cost money for my insurance deductable if I call it in. I'll put it out myself with the garden hose...Whoops! It was a grease fire! It's spreading! Now the whole block will burn down."
Out in the middle of the country, where houses are isolated, maybe they could get away with that, but in the city (the topic of discussion here) such a policy would get people dead. You never want to provide a disincentive for an honest activation of an emergency service, because delays can make the emergency worse. Therefore they must be tax-funded public or common goods.
"Democracy" is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for lunch. You don't get to vote away the rights of others people to control their bodies.
Really? Do fire engines make you nervous, then? Or public water fountains? Street lights?
You must be a nervous wreck in any city.
As a practical matter, for humans to live in cities (and at this level of population and industry, a lot of us have to - more than half the human race now lives in cities), a number of public goods and common goods must be provided.
We can certainly debate whether "free" wi-fi should be one of them, but to get upset at the very idea of "free" services is pointless. (Unless perhaps you've got a time machine and plan to go back and either stop or radically change the course of, the industrial/urban revolution.)