but personally, and most of the world, would actually rather have things targeted at them with actual relevancy.
Most of modern advertising is an attempt to control your behavior -- it's applied psychology, a weak form of mind control designed to get you to buy stuff you do not need or want, to keep feeding the unsustainable society of consumption.
And you'd like it to be more targeted and effective? Fsck that.
But that isn't really the main point, the main point is you already never had any privacy when you decided to stay connected to society, live with it or leave society.
Uh, no. What you are saying makes no sense. Up until the late 20th century, for all of human history you had privacy as soon as you went home and closed the door, or even walked out into a field away from other people. Freedom from company, which was easily achieved, meant freedom from observation. But now we have machines to do the observation.
Your "live with it or leave" declaration is irrational. In order to make society livable and sustainable, we must construct it with respect for basic human needs. Privacy is one of them. Respect privacy or watch society collapse.
But the simple fact remains that if you live in the walls of society, you are expected to make sacrifices in freedoms and privacy in order to keep it stable.
No. Again, what you are saying makes no sense. A working society is a network whereby people expand their choices and thus have greater freedoms. And a respect for privacy is one of the fundamental requirement for a society to flourish.
We do not have a "free market" for insurance. Our current insurance industry is not an example of "capitalism". If the health insurance industry was subject to normal market forces, it would look a lot more like the renter's insurance market:
1) Please do not make the all-to-common mistake of confusing capitalism with the free market. These are orthogonal concepts, and a capitalist command economy is quite possible -- the U.S. during WWII, for examples, where more than 50% of GDP was government spending, yet bankers, landlords, stockholders, and the other parasites of the capitalist investment classes still raked it in. Or there are the models of Singapore's Temasek Holdings, or Japan's MITI, providing a high degree of government planning while maintaining private ownership.
2) Socialism refers to an economic system based on labor rather than capital, one run for the benefit of the people who do the work rather than for the minority of state-backed owners. Putting regulations on capitalism is not socialism; nor is a planned economy socialism.
3) Health care does not meet any of the three requirements for an effective free market. Buyers and sellers do not meet with equal power, since health care is often a matter of life-and-death for the buyer. They do not meet with full information, since a) diagnosis is part of the transaction, b) the seller has many years of specialized training, and c) patient education is part of the the transaction. And since disease is communicable, there are external costs when a buyer chooses to, or is forced to, delay treatment. Ergo, providing health care efficiently requires some degree of planning.
Which is yet another reason to dump the entire concept of prepaid medicine to begin with. Sure, keep true insurance around for catastrophic events, but otherwise let each person decide how to spend their own money on their own regular health care.
This is a terrible idea not just because people will damage their own health by not seeking early intervention and end up racking up greater costs later, but because in delaying they can damage the health of others. Disease is contagious. When my girlfriend's ex-boyfriend notices a funny rash, it is to my advantage that he does not have financial incentives to pinch pennies, skip seeing the doctor, and hope it goes away. There are also more subtle ways in which health is contagious.
The conditions for an effective free market are that buyers and sellers meet with equal power, full information, and no externalized costs. Health care badly misses all three of these points.
I don't know...my current doctor's about as ADD-ish as the average IT geek, and she's the best I've ever had.
medical practitioners simply cannot fit as much information into their heads...
Which is why, in the old days, doctors had big shelves of books in their offices, so they didn't have to remember map of the cat stuff. Now they use Google. (Yes, my doc actually used Google to rule out a potential diagnosis by using it to look up the incubation period of a virus.)
This is why the belief in a higher being is important to sanity and happiness. Science will fail you.
Try to make your trolls a little less obvious next time.
I.e., censorship is freedom. Let's celebrate the Information Purification Directives. Not so much Big Brother as iBrother.
Look, anyone who's been paying attention learned that Apple was evil back in the 1990s, with the look-and-feel lawsuits. Censorship is just the latest of its trail of bad behavior.
Further yet, any argument that "original intent" is not important is bankrupt on its face, because that is not the way language works.
Yes, it is in fact how language works. Words have meanings that are independent of what the speaker wants them to mean or may think that they mean. If my intent is to convey to my girlfriend that she looks absolutely ravishing, and I say, "that dress does a good job of hiding the pudginess of your butt", I am not going to be able to get out of trouble by claiming that my "original intent" should trump what I actually said.
The receiver can't just arbitrarily assign their own meanings to the symbols (words) then truthfully say "this is what that means".
Nor can the sender, especially after the fact ("baby, I didn't mean it that way!"); nor can those who claim to know (through their psychic powers or whatever) what the sender meant.
Furthermore, he was arguing against the authority of the "general welfare" clause a decade after the letter I cited. So if he was going senile, that's an argument against your point.
He contradicted his own earlier statements frequently, and was caught lying about his own words in regard to state interposition.
It's called being a politician, and has nothing to do with senility.
So if he's a standard issue flip-flopping lying politician, why would you want to place exceptional weight on his opinion as to how the Constitution should be interpreted?
Jefferson and Wilson disagreed with you
Jefferson was not involved in framing the Constitution, he was in France at the time. (And why we should respect the opinion of a slave rapist is beyond me.) James Wilson was the author of the obscene "three fifths" compromise, so, fuck him.
The Federal government was given only a limited set of powers.
Correct. One of those powers is to tax and spend for the general welfare. It's in the text of the document. "We didn't mean it to be there!" doesn't change that fact.
Even if you honestly believe that Madison's opinion at the time doesn't matter (which is about the silliest thing I can imagine...
If you believe that its silly that the text of the Constitution is primary, and that in case of ambiguity the understanding of the people who signed it is far more important that the intent of the authors, then take it up with Madison.
The general practitioner will recommend a specialist who will evaluate the situation and determine whether it falls within his area of expertise.
The GP needs a broad education so that they know which sort of specialist the patient should be referred to.
The specialist needs a deep education in their specialty. But once you get referred to a specialist, that specialist is quite likely to believe that their modality is the best thing for you. The orthopedic surgeon will say, "cut!" The physical therapist will say, "exercise and strengthen!" The psychiatrist will say, "the pain is psychosomatic -- cognitive-behavioral therapy!" And each is unlikely to refer you to one of the others.
I once went to see my GP about a rash. One possibility was something viral; she went off to her office for a minute to look something up. I pictured her consulting some large tome, one of her med school text books. She came back and said that we could rule out the virus, the incubation period didn't fit. She'd Googled it. That's map of the cat stuff, and I'm glad she was smart enough to not bother to memorize it.
When you go in for major surgery, do you choose the doctor who hasn't specialized in that and spent 5 minutes reading about it? Or do you go with the one who's done 1,000 of those operations with a 99.9% success rate?
You need both. You need the doctor who's read five minutes about the procedure -- and five minutes about each of the alternative procedures -- to help you make the choice; and you need the doctor who's specialized in the procedure you pick, who knows it up and down, forward and backward -- but nothing else.
When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; but when you've got a big box of tools, you won't learn the best hammering technique.
Private: "Sergeant, we've spotted some Nazi SS troops in the trenches. Shall we fire?"
Were the civilians murdered by the Apache crew wearing uniforms or insignia of a hostile military force? No. The whole point is that there was no factual basis to identify them as hostile. So your comparison sucks.
It wasn't that they wanted to kill civilians- they wanted to kill bad guys.
And that's the problem: they wanted to kill "bad guys" so bad that they had the murderer's equivalent of blue balls. "Please be a bad guy please be a bad guy please be a bad guy -- bad guy! kill! kill! kill Whoops, wasn't a bad guy after all."
(We'll disregard the question of whether so puerile a label as "bad guy" applies to someone fighting an invading army.)
The only person you can trust is a weapon is someone who will regret using it even in a justified case. As Lao Tzu (or someone using his name) put it,
Weapons are the tools of fear;
a decent man will avoid them
except in the direst necessity
and, if compelled, will use them
only with the utmost restraint.
Peace is his highest value.
If the peace has been shattered,
how can he be content?
His enemies are not demons,
but human beings like himself.
He doesn't wish them personal harm.
Nor does he rejoice in victory.
How could he rejoice in victory
and delight in the slaughter of men?
He enters a battle gravely,
with sorrow and with great compassion,
as if he were attending a funeral.
In an ideal capitalist economy, each person should gain according to the added value they generate.
There is a word for a system where workers who produce value, rather than parasitic shareholders and bankers and landlords, are the ones who gain. That word is most definitely not capitalism.
If the factory profits are much above what the workers earn, it's probable that something is very wrong
I agreee; but as this is the case in most big companies, that principle leads us to conclude that something is very wrong with the whole concept of industrial capitalism.
As a guide in expounding and applying the provisions of the Constitution, the debates and incidental decisions of the Convention can have no authoritative character. However desirable it be that they should be preserved as a gratification to the laudable curiosity felt by every people to trace the origin and progress of their political Insitutions, & as a source parhaps of some lights on the Science of Govt. the legitimate meaning of the Instrument must be derived from the text itself; or if a key is to be sought elsewhere, it must be not in the opinions or intentions of the Body which planned & proposed the Constitution, but in the sense attached to it by the people in their respective State Conventions where it recd. all the authority which it possesses.
"Original intent" is an intellectual dead end; the intent of the Founders was that their intent not be used to interpret the document.
The text says that Congress can tax and spend to support the general welfare. If Madison didn't like that fact, he can -- by his own lights -- suck it.
The Founders were pretty darned progressive in their day
No, they weren't. They created a document that explicitly supported slavery, for crying out loud. And it's not like the idea had not yet occurred to anyone that this was a bad thing -- read Tom Paine's essay "African Slavery In America". Now. Tom was a progressive. But he was an essayist, not a Founder.
The Founders got one big thing right: the notion of checks and balances. Beyond that, it's time to stop the mythology. The Constitution was an effort to increase federal power, after the failure of the Articles of Confederation. The Framers were scared that people were starting to take the rhetoric about democracy and freedom seriously; they needed to clamp down the possibility of an uprising against the mercantile classes. It was one thing to get rid of the king, leaving American bankers and landlords on top of the heap; it was a whole 'nother to rebel against those American bankers and landlords.
Anyway, as the issue of warning labels: it might make some sense to put a parental advisory on a copy of Tom Sawyer so that parents are prepared when little Johnny asks, "what's a 'nigger'?" (And if that word, unredacted, makes you uncomfortable, consider that evidence toward my point.) And similarly, it might make some sense to put a parental advisory on a copy of the Constitution, so that parents are prepared when little Johnny asks, "why are some people counted as three-fifths"?
History -- U.S. history not excluded -- is a mess of blood, bigotry, and banditry. You can either give kids the Disney version (which is pretty much how we teach things now), or you can teach them truth and be prepared for tough questions, and maybe a few nightmares.
I love how "promote the general welfare" is interpreted as a free pass for the federal government to expand its powers for anything that provides any benefit to a significant number of people.
Not to "expand its powers", no, but to spend its money. If Congress decides it is in the general welfare to buy us all ponies, it is within it Constitutional authority "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States" to do so. But if Congress decides it is in the general welfare to make us all take riding lessons upon pain of imprisonment, it does not have that power.
It could, however, probably figure out a way to use its power of taxation or interstate commerce regulation to encourage people to take riding lessons, by offering tax breaks to riding teachers, say, or by requiring cargo to be taken across state lines only on pony-back.
an analysis should be done as to whether the federal government's providing of a non-essential given service/product...contributes more to the general welfare than if it just let its citizens keep their money and choose the product/service for themselves.
That's why we pick our Congress democratically (at least, in theory, corruption and the two-party stranglehold not withstanding); if you think Congress buying us ponies is a waste of money, or if you think it's ridiculous that interstate commerce must go by pony, you get to try to vote them out.
It seems that Aldous Huxley's world (or John Galt's) can be achieved through a continuous series of efforts to "promote the general welfare".
Hey, I wish our system of government could get us to something like Huxley's Island, but I don't think so. (Huxley did write more than one book, you know.)
So because everyone is speeding, you're accusing them of racial profiling... by default?
If everyone is speeding, then it's very easy for the cops to pull over just the dark-skinned people and claim to have a legitimate stop. If you're a black guy pulled over for doing 70 in a 65 zone, you don't know if you just got unlucky, or if there's a pattern -- say, that black drivers are stopped four times as often as whites..
If something were really, really bad for you, the evidence would be overwhelming.
I'm sure your grandfather's doctor said the same thing to him in the 1950s about cigarette smoking. "Bad for you? Nonsense, we'd have overwhelming evidence by now. Have a Camel, they're good for you!"
You incorrectly classify murder as "a threat to the safety of others". It's not a "threat"; it's a direct violation of the safety of others
A minor quibble of semantics. Surely, to attempt a murder, one engages in behavior that is a threat to the safety of others. Beyond that, it is something of a matter of chance, just as it is a matter of chance as to whether one's excessive speed or failure to signal causes an accident.
You incorrectly classify public intoxication as "[not] a threat to anyone's safety, rights, or property". A drunken bum tripping off the curb because he can't walk straight is just as dangerous to traffic as a jaywalker.
But "tripping off the curb" was not the behavior specified. "Public drunkenness" was. One can be drunk, in public, and not tripping off the curb. Spent a few nights like that in Osaka a few years ago; walking home around 3am, drunk enough to stumbling a bit, definitely over the legal limit had I been back in the U.S. driving, even thinking that singing out loud was a good idea; but not falling down or heedless or "tripping off the curb", and not a threat to anyone's rights, safety, or property.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of modern advertising is an attempt to control your behavior -- it's applied psychology, a weak form of mind control designed to get you to buy stuff you do not need or want, to keep feeding the unsustainable society of consumption.
And you'd like it to be more targeted and effective? Fsck that.
Uh, no. What you are saying makes no sense. Up until the late 20th century, for all of human history you had privacy as soon as you went home and closed the door, or even walked out into a field away from other people. Freedom from company, which was easily achieved, meant freedom from observation. But now we have machines to do the observation.
Your "live with it or leave" declaration is irrational. In order to make society livable and sustainable, we must construct it with respect for basic human needs. Privacy is one of them. Respect privacy or watch society collapse.
No. Again, what you are saying makes no sense. A working society is a network whereby people expand their choices and thus have greater freedoms. And a respect for privacy is one of the fundamental requirement for a society to flourish.
1) Please do not make the all-to-common mistake of confusing capitalism with the free market. These are orthogonal concepts, and a capitalist command economy is quite possible -- the U.S. during WWII, for examples, where more than 50% of GDP was government spending, yet bankers, landlords, stockholders, and the other parasites of the capitalist investment classes still raked it in. Or there are the models of Singapore's Temasek Holdings, or Japan's MITI, providing a high degree of government planning while maintaining private ownership.
Our health insurance system has some (largely ineffective) regulation, but is still completely in the hands of the capitalists. UnitedHealth Group's profits -- not just revenues, but profits -- are greater than the GDP of many nations; no need to weep for the stockholders.
2) Socialism refers to an economic system based on labor rather than capital, one run for the benefit of the people who do the work rather than for the minority of state-backed owners. Putting regulations on capitalism is not socialism; nor is a planned economy socialism.
3) Health care does not meet any of the three requirements for an effective free market. Buyers and sellers do not meet with equal power, since health care is often a matter of life-and-death for the buyer. They do not meet with full information, since a) diagnosis is part of the transaction, b) the seller has many years of specialized training, and c) patient education is part of the the transaction. And since disease is communicable, there are external costs when a buyer chooses to, or is forced to, delay treatment. Ergo, providing health care efficiently requires some degree of planning.
This is a terrible idea not just because people will damage their own health by not seeking early intervention and end up racking up greater costs later, but because in delaying they can damage the health of others. Disease is contagious. When my girlfriend's ex-boyfriend notices a funny rash, it is to my advantage that he does not have financial incentives to pinch pennies, skip seeing the doctor, and hope it goes away. There are also more subtle ways in which health is contagious.
The conditions for an effective free market are that buyers and sellers meet with equal power, full information, and no externalized costs. Health care badly misses all three of these points.
I don't know...my current doctor's about as ADD-ish as the average IT geek, and she's the best I've ever had.
Which is why, in the old days, doctors had big shelves of books in their offices, so they didn't have to remember map of the cat stuff. Now they use Google. (Yes, my doc actually used Google to rule out a potential diagnosis by using it to look up the incubation period of a virus.)
Try to make your trolls a little less obvious next time.
Star Trek -- and many other SF worlds -- have these, or something like. They're called deflector shields.
It has nothing to do with any notion of "liability". It's all about Job's desire to control the flow of information he finds objectionable, to bring you "freedom from porn."
I.e., censorship is freedom. Let's celebrate the Information Purification Directives. Not so much Big Brother as iBrother.
Look, anyone who's been paying attention learned that Apple was evil back in the 1990s, with the look-and-feel lawsuits. Censorship is just the latest of its trail of bad behavior.
Yes, it is in fact how language works. Words have meanings that are independent of what the speaker wants them to mean or may think that they mean. If my intent is to convey to my girlfriend that she looks absolutely ravishing, and I say, "that dress does a good job of hiding the pudginess of your butt", I am not going to be able to get out of trouble by claiming that my "original intent" should trump what I actually said.
Nor can the sender, especially after the fact ("baby, I didn't mean it that way!"); nor can those who claim to know (through their psychic powers or whatever) what the sender meant.
So senile that Monroe sought his advice, he helped revise the Virginia state constitution, and took up a position as Rector at UVA. Sorry, the senility argument doesn't even pass the sniff test.
Furthermore, he was arguing against the authority of the "general welfare" clause a decade after the letter I cited. So if he was going senile, that's an argument against your point.
It's called being a politician, and has nothing to do with senility.
So if he's a standard issue flip-flopping lying politician, why would you want to place exceptional weight on his opinion as to how the Constitution should be interpreted?
Jefferson was not involved in framing the Constitution, he was in France at the time. (And why we should respect the opinion of a slave rapist is beyond me.) James Wilson was the author of the obscene "three fifths" compromise, so, fuck him.
Correct. One of those powers is to tax and spend for the general welfare. It's in the text of the document. "We didn't mean it to be there!" doesn't change that fact.
If you believe that its silly that the text of the Constitution is primary, and that in case of ambiguity the understanding of the people who signed it is far more important that the intent of the authors, then take it up with Madison.
The GP needs a broad education so that they know which sort of specialist the patient should be referred to.
The specialist needs a deep education in their specialty. But once you get referred to a specialist, that specialist is quite likely to believe that their modality is the best thing for you. The orthopedic surgeon will say, "cut!" The physical therapist will say, "exercise and strengthen!" The psychiatrist will say, "the pain is psychosomatic -- cognitive-behavioral therapy!" And each is unlikely to refer you to one of the others.
I once went to see my GP about a rash. One possibility was something viral; she went off to her office for a minute to look something up. I pictured her consulting some large tome, one of her med school text books. She came back and said that we could rule out the virus, the incubation period didn't fit. She'd Googled it. That's map of the cat stuff, and I'm glad she was smart enough to not bother to memorize it.
Since it only applied to "any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States", yes, regardless of any question of date. Slavery did not become illegal in the entire U.S. until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.
You need both. You need the doctor who's read five minutes about the procedure -- and five minutes about each of the alternative procedures -- to help you make the choice; and you need the doctor who's specialized in the procedure you pick, who knows it up and down, forward and backward -- but nothing else.
When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; but when you've got a big box of tools, you won't learn the best hammering technique.
Were the civilians murdered by the Apache crew wearing uniforms or insignia of a hostile military force? No. The whole point is that there was no factual basis to identify them as hostile. So your comparison sucks.
And that's the problem: they wanted to kill "bad guys" so bad that they had the murderer's equivalent of blue balls. "Please be a bad guy please be a bad guy please be a bad guy -- bad guy! kill! kill! kill Whoops, wasn't a bad guy after all."
(We'll disregard the question of whether so puerile a label as "bad guy" applies to someone fighting an invading army.)
The only person you can trust is a weapon is someone who will regret using it even in a justified case. As Lao Tzu (or someone using his name) put it,
Since, after all, they were only following orders, right? And apparently that's only an invalid defense if you're not an American.
Apparently not, since your description bears no relation to the video on Wikileaks.
Yes, they are. That is not an excuse to rank incompetence or for violation of basic standards of moral behavior.
So, many Bothans -- er, Chinese -- died to bring us this information appliance?
There is a word for a system where workers who produce value, rather than parasitic shareholders and bankers and landlords, are the ones who gain. That word is most definitely not capitalism.
I agreee; but as this is the case in most big companies, that principle leads us to conclude that something is very wrong with the whole concept of industrial capitalism.
Check out rsnapshot, which uses rsync and hard links.
Actually, Madison's opinion, and those of the other Founders, are irrelevant, according to Madison himself :
"Original intent" is an intellectual dead end; the intent of the Founders was that their intent not be used to interpret the document.
The text says that Congress can tax and spend to support the general welfare. If Madison didn't like that fact, he can -- by his own lights -- suck it.
No, they weren't. They created a document that explicitly supported slavery, for crying out loud. And it's not like the idea had not yet occurred to anyone that this was a bad thing -- read Tom Paine's essay "African Slavery In America". Now. Tom was a progressive. But he was an essayist, not a Founder.
The Founders got one big thing right: the notion of checks and balances. Beyond that, it's time to stop the mythology. The Constitution was an effort to increase federal power, after the failure of the Articles of Confederation. The Framers were scared that people were starting to take the rhetoric about democracy and freedom seriously; they needed to clamp down the possibility of an uprising against the mercantile classes. It was one thing to get rid of the king, leaving American bankers and landlords on top of the heap; it was a whole 'nother to rebel against those American bankers and landlords.
Anyway, as the issue of warning labels: it might make some sense to put a parental advisory on a copy of Tom Sawyer so that parents are prepared when little Johnny asks, "what's a 'nigger'?" (And if that word, unredacted, makes you uncomfortable, consider that evidence toward my point.) And similarly, it might make some sense to put a parental advisory on a copy of the Constitution, so that parents are prepared when little Johnny asks, "why are some people counted as three-fifths"?
History -- U.S. history not excluded -- is a mess of blood, bigotry, and banditry. You can either give kids the Disney version (which is pretty much how we teach things now), or you can teach them truth and be prepared for tough questions, and maybe a few nightmares.
Not to "expand its powers", no, but to spend its money. If Congress decides it is in the general welfare to buy us all ponies, it is within it Constitutional authority "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States" to do so. But if Congress decides it is in the general welfare to make us all take riding lessons upon pain of imprisonment, it does not have that power.
It could, however, probably figure out a way to use its power of taxation or interstate commerce regulation to encourage people to take riding lessons, by offering tax breaks to riding teachers, say, or by requiring cargo to be taken across state lines only on pony-back.
That's why we pick our Congress democratically (at least, in theory, corruption and the two-party stranglehold not withstanding); if you think Congress buying us ponies is a waste of money, or if you think it's ridiculous that interstate commerce must go by pony, you get to try to vote them out.
Hey, I wish our system of government could get us to something like Huxley's Island , but I don't think so. (Huxley did write more than one book, you know.)
If everyone is speeding, then it's very easy for the cops to pull over just the dark-skinned people and claim to have a legitimate stop. If you're a black guy pulled over for doing 70 in a 65 zone, you don't know if you just got unlucky, or if there's a pattern -- say, that black drivers are stopped four times as often as whites..
It takes a lot of examination of records on an on-going basis to show the bias.
I'm sure your grandfather's doctor said the same thing to him in the 1950s about cigarette smoking. "Bad for you? Nonsense, we'd have overwhelming evidence by now. Have a Camel, they're good for you!"
A minor quibble of semantics. Surely, to attempt a murder, one engages in behavior that is a threat to the safety of others. Beyond that, it is something of a matter of chance, just as it is a matter of chance as to whether one's excessive speed or failure to signal causes an accident.
But "tripping off the curb" was not the behavior specified. "Public drunkenness" was. One can be drunk, in public, and not tripping off the curb. Spent a few nights like that in Osaka a few years ago; walking home around 3am, drunk enough to stumbling a bit, definitely over the legal limit had I been back in the U.S. driving, even thinking that singing out loud was a good idea; but not falling down or heedless or "tripping off the curb", and not a threat to anyone's rights, safety, or property.
Citation? Everything I've seen says BPA exposure advances puberty: