In the broadest scope I've never understood why there has to be laws concerning marriage
Because it is one of the very few institutions found in all human cultures. Any legal system that doesn't deal with marriage in some fashion is profoundly deficient. I'd prefer that we separate the legal and spiritual aspects, but that's a separate argument.
The use of judicial fiat just creates anger and inhibits the building of consensus. It isn't something WE did, it's something THEY forced on us.
This, this, a thousand times this. Telling people "fuck you, that's the way it is, and no you have no choice" is why the US still has a huge anti-abortion lobby.
Cops almost always know who the Bad Guys are. Being able to prove it in court is an entirely different matter. But possession with intent to distribute? Trivial to prove, just have a couple of cops testilie that the defendant was acting strangely in their presence, justifying a detention and search, which led to the discovery of a large quantity of illegal narcotics. No witnesses to be intimidated, no real chance of escaping conviction, he takes a plea deal and does some time. One Bad Guy off the streets.
violent crime keeps decreasing but our prison populations keep rising
Some would say that the latter is a direct cause of the former, in which case it needs no further explanation. You just put the Bad Guys in prison, on whatever charges you can make stick (even if non-violent), and violent crime goes down.
The experience of Memphis, Tennessee, as reported in The Atlantic, with breaking up high-crime neighborhoods and redistributing their inhabitants to other places: the bad guys quickly find their feet and begin preying on a broader class of victims, while the decent-but-poor find their social networks shattered.
The port's no longer standard, but still readily available, and it's not like regular USB (the other end of the cable) as a charging standard is going to disappear any time soon. I agree - the RAZR is an easy choice here: cheap, readily available, still an aesthetically attractive phone, good battery life. The only possible knock against it as a dumbphone is that it has a camera, which will keep you from taking it into a federal office building.
The insurance risk of someone who drives 40k miles/year on rural freeways is a lot lower than that of someone who drives 40k miles/year on city streets.
It won't, because your job involves driving. Now, you'd have to be an absolute moron to tell your insurance company you were out Ubering for spare cash when it happened - but if they found out, they'd deny you right then and there.
1. Uber gives clearly posted rates and I've never had a bill higher than the expected maximum for the ride. Get a taxi to quote you the same thing.
2. It's insanely trivial to identify who an Uber driver is - it's tied to their smartphone. Not so much with traditional taxis.
3. A valid concern, one that Uber claims to have dealt with by having insurance themselves. However, it's not like you ask your taxi driver to show you an up-to-date, online verification of his insurance before you hop in, right? I mean, liability insurance is mandatory in my state... but I still have uninsured motorist coverage. So this is a general problem.
4. Have you ever ridden in a cab? Jankiest things on the road.
5. Uh, no, that's not how it works. If a company starts to abuse their position as a market leader, maybe you do that. But there's absolutely nothing illegal about being so damned good that you compete everyone else into bankruptcy. A monopoly is not inherently illegal, or even wrong.
As an aside, I have found that showing a taxi driver your destination on Google Maps on your phone is a very reliable way to insure that they take you via the quickest route. And Uber Black is well worth the small premium for the ride experience if you're not depending on it for day-to-day transportation.
And yet a lot more stuff was considered tax-deductible at the time, to the point that they instituted the alternative minimum tax because 155 high-income households had paid zero federal income tax. The AMT now routinely reaches into the upper middle class, but we don't have the deductions any more.
You have moved on to an aesthetic argument. That's suitable for discussions about how you spend your own money, but much less so when we're discussing the public fisc. Sociey may owe everyone a life without serious material want, but it doesn't owe them an ocean view.
Zillow has many listings down below $58K, none of them for trailers - check out, say, ZIP code 39212. I suggested four people could easily live on a median salary, not minimum wage. And as far as livability goes, it's highly undesirable, but that is more or less orthogonal to the issue of whether or not you can live there.
The average rental cost you can find is - I'm guessing here, correct me if I'm wrong - derived from online sources like Craigslist? That's not the average place on the market, which has a lot of Section 8. As for used trailers, look at something like this to get an idea of what's out there. And remember that Jackson is one of the most expensive places in the state... if you really get out in the boonies and know how to fix your own stuff (a $1500 car can last a lot more than a year if you know how to fix it yourself), it can be insanely cheap.
I'm not worried about the consumer surplus - I don't care if it's zero, in this particular case, because it's not Econ 101 but actual people with lives that need to have meaning and purpose.
The effective result is that society decides that people shouldn't starve just because they're not economically productive enough to feed themselves and their progeny, and society should own up to its duties and pay them the difference. Otherwise, what's the difference between you and your supposed conservative archenemy? You accuse them of lacking community spirit, but you want business owners to pay people lots of money just because you say they should, instead of contributing a non-negotiable part of your own paycheck (aka taxes) to pay for the social outcomes you want. Yeah, Walmart and McD's and a bunch of other business get cheap workers. But the alternative to that is that they adopt a different business model that involves a lot less people - Walmart vs Costco. Sure, it's a lot better to be a Costco employee than a Walmart one, but there are a hell of a lot less of them.
Hahaha, how funny. It just so happens that I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and having family there still, I'm quite conversant with the local economics. I'm assuming that you got a median house price, or a median mortgage, of $58k from somewhere. That's not an entirely unreasonable number, but the distribution is anything but normal - it's at least biphasic, probably triphasic (large underclass, modest middle class, small upper middle class, tiny sprinkling of really wealthy people). In much of the city, a large number of properties that have been repossessed for taxes can't be sold because the simple requirement to pay up to three years' back taxes in order to take possession of the property completely eliminates the potential profit.
You can buy a habitable home in a not-so-great neighborhood for under $50k, or a used trailer for something like $10k. You can easily rent a 2BR apartment in a bad neighborhood for $200/mo. The people I knew didn't drive new cars, and if one died in a way they didn't know how to fix, they'd buy something for $1500, max. They also didn't pay anything like Jackson prices for housing.
Incidentally, since when is a minimum wage job supposed to support a family of four on one income? I said you could do that on a median income, or yourself pretty easily at poverty line.
I never asked for data, I asked for plausible arguments why, if raising the minimum wage is such a good thing, we should stop at (say) $15/hr, or, more generally, if raising the minimum wage is such a good thing for society, why should only business owners should bear the cost?
You are welcome to live any life you can afford, but if you want to idealize the 1950s as the height of worker power and complain that you can't live as well now as you could then, that's incorrect. You can. You just have to live like the real 1950s, not the ones in your head.
Decades? You think most of the people on here are under 25? This ain't Reddit. I'm in the original reader group and I'm 40... but plenty of guys here up into their 60s and 70s. Anyone over 80 in the audience?
Bottom-rung workers should be on welfare. The alternative to working + welfare is just welfare - and that's far more corrosive to society. You can't make a person whose market value is $8/hr suddenly have a market value of $15/hr just by raising the minimum wage - you just make them unemployable. (Before you trot out the studies that show that modest increases in minimum wage don't increase unemployment, please be prepared to discuss just what qualifies as "modest", and why the results shouldn't be extrapolated to mandate a $100/hr minimum wage.)
You're just redefining what constitutes a livable wage. If you really want to live like someone in the 1950's, you can still do it quite easily on the median salary. No meals out, a house that's ~1000 square feet for a family of four (share the bedrooms and there's only one bath!), one television, no cable, one phone, one car, no air conditioning. Mom makes about half the clothes herself. Dad fixes the car whenever something goes wrong.
Back in the late nineties, I knew people who had their lives whittled down to about $8k/year in necessary expenses, and that was with air conditioning and modern cars. That's a little less than $12k today, basically right at the federal poverty line. They lived out in the boonies in trailers, but they had dial-up internet (as nearly all of us did at the time), and they were pretty happy with things the way they were.
The Heathrow Express ia the perfect example of how to deal with this. Paddington wasn't close to my hotel, per se, but it was much closer than Heathrow, and the Express was much faster and more convenient than taking a taxi from the airport.
Haha. When I was in med school, we got a lecture on arthropod-borne diseases from the state entomologist. The botfly is not the only fly that does this, just the only one that does it commonly in humans. Wild animals at certain times of year have very high parasite loads.
Doctors cannot write off unpaid portions of bills as a loss for tax purposes. Don't confuse "writing off bad debt" (i.e., you'll never collect it, so quit listing it as an asset on your balance sheet) with "writing off taxes". However, should you wish to rapidly solve the problem of the uninsured seeking access to medical care, it would be a highly effective change in the law.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a fan of democracy in general, but assuming you accept it as legitimate - on what planet is a decision by seven unelected judges "democracy"?
Thus the parable of Solomon, the baby, and the two claimant mothers. Family law is among the oldest parts of the law.
In the broadest scope I've never understood why there has to be laws concerning marriage
Because it is one of the very few institutions found in all human cultures. Any legal system that doesn't deal with marriage in some fashion is profoundly deficient. I'd prefer that we separate the legal and spiritual aspects, but that's a separate argument.
The use of judicial fiat just creates anger and inhibits the building of consensus. It isn't something WE did, it's something THEY forced on us.
This, this, a thousand times this. Telling people "fuck you, that's the way it is, and no you have no choice" is why the US still has a huge anti-abortion lobby.
violent crime keeps decreasing but our prison populations keep rising
Some would say that the latter is a direct cause of the former, in which case it needs no further explanation. You just put the Bad Guys in prison, on whatever charges you can make stick (even if non-violent), and violent crime goes down.
The experience of Memphis, Tennessee, as reported in The Atlantic, with breaking up high-crime neighborhoods and redistributing their inhabitants to other places: the bad guys quickly find their feet and begin preying on a broader class of victims, while the decent-but-poor find their social networks shattered.
The port's no longer standard, but still readily available, and it's not like regular USB (the other end of the cable) as a charging standard is going to disappear any time soon. I agree - the RAZR is an easy choice here: cheap, readily available, still an aesthetically attractive phone, good battery life. The only possible knock against it as a dumbphone is that it has a camera, which will keep you from taking it into a federal office building.
The insurance risk of someone who drives 40k miles/year on rural freeways is a lot lower than that of someone who drives 40k miles/year on city streets.
It won't, because your job involves driving. Now, you'd have to be an absolute moron to tell your insurance company you were out Ubering for spare cash when it happened - but if they found out, they'd deny you right then and there.
As an aside, I have found that showing a taxi driver your destination on Google Maps on your phone is a very reliable way to insure that they take you via the quickest route. And Uber Black is well worth the small premium for the ride experience if you're not depending on it for day-to-day transportation.
And yet a lot more stuff was considered tax-deductible at the time, to the point that they instituted the alternative minimum tax because 155 high-income households had paid zero federal income tax. The AMT now routinely reaches into the upper middle class, but we don't have the deductions any more.
It's all awesome to me, but yes - it's all disco.
You have moved on to an aesthetic argument. That's suitable for discussions about how you spend your own money, but much less so when we're discussing the public fisc. Sociey may owe everyone a life without serious material want, but it doesn't owe them an ocean view.
Zillow has many listings down below $58K, none of them for trailers - check out, say, ZIP code 39212. I suggested four people could easily live on a median salary, not minimum wage. And as far as livability goes, it's highly undesirable, but that is more or less orthogonal to the issue of whether or not you can live there.
The average rental cost you can find is - I'm guessing here, correct me if I'm wrong - derived from online sources like Craigslist? That's not the average place on the market, which has a lot of Section 8. As for used trailers, look at something like this to get an idea of what's out there. And remember that Jackson is one of the most expensive places in the state... if you really get out in the boonies and know how to fix your own stuff (a $1500 car can last a lot more than a year if you know how to fix it yourself), it can be insanely cheap.
I'm not worried about the consumer surplus - I don't care if it's zero, in this particular case, because it's not Econ 101 but actual people with lives that need to have meaning and purpose.
The effective result is that society decides that people shouldn't starve just because they're not economically productive enough to feed themselves and their progeny, and society should own up to its duties and pay them the difference. Otherwise, what's the difference between you and your supposed conservative archenemy? You accuse them of lacking community spirit, but you want business owners to pay people lots of money just because you say they should, instead of contributing a non-negotiable part of your own paycheck (aka taxes) to pay for the social outcomes you want. Yeah, Walmart and McD's and a bunch of other business get cheap workers. But the alternative to that is that they adopt a different business model that involves a lot less people - Walmart vs Costco. Sure, it's a lot better to be a Costco employee than a Walmart one, but there are a hell of a lot less of them.
Hahaha, how funny. It just so happens that I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and having family there still, I'm quite conversant with the local economics. I'm assuming that you got a median house price, or a median mortgage, of $58k from somewhere. That's not an entirely unreasonable number, but the distribution is anything but normal - it's at least biphasic, probably triphasic (large underclass, modest middle class, small upper middle class, tiny sprinkling of really wealthy people). In much of the city, a large number of properties that have been repossessed for taxes can't be sold because the simple requirement to pay up to three years' back taxes in order to take possession of the property completely eliminates the potential profit.
You can buy a habitable home in a not-so-great neighborhood for under $50k, or a used trailer for something like $10k. You can easily rent a 2BR apartment in a bad neighborhood for $200/mo. The people I knew didn't drive new cars, and if one died in a way they didn't know how to fix, they'd buy something for $1500, max. They also didn't pay anything like Jackson prices for housing.
Incidentally, since when is a minimum wage job supposed to support a family of four on one income? I said you could do that on a median income, or yourself pretty easily at poverty line.
I never asked for data, I asked for plausible arguments why, if raising the minimum wage is such a good thing, we should stop at (say) $15/hr, or, more generally, if raising the minimum wage is such a good thing for society, why should only business owners should bear the cost?
You are welcome to live any life you can afford, but if you want to idealize the 1950s as the height of worker power and complain that you can't live as well now as you could then, that's incorrect. You can. You just have to live like the real 1950s, not the ones in your head.
Decades? You think most of the people on here are under 25? This ain't Reddit. I'm in the original reader group and I'm 40... but plenty of guys here up into their 60s and 70s. Anyone over 80 in the audience?
And something like half the integrated circuit output of the entire world at the time.
Bottom-rung workers should be on welfare. The alternative to working + welfare is just welfare - and that's far more corrosive to society. You can't make a person whose market value is $8/hr suddenly have a market value of $15/hr just by raising the minimum wage - you just make them unemployable. (Before you trot out the studies that show that modest increases in minimum wage don't increase unemployment, please be prepared to discuss just what qualifies as "modest", and why the results shouldn't be extrapolated to mandate a $100/hr minimum wage.)
You're just redefining what constitutes a livable wage. If you really want to live like someone in the 1950's, you can still do it quite easily on the median salary. No meals out, a house that's ~1000 square feet for a family of four (share the bedrooms and there's only one bath!), one television, no cable, one phone, one car, no air conditioning. Mom makes about half the clothes herself. Dad fixes the car whenever something goes wrong.
Back in the late nineties, I knew people who had their lives whittled down to about $8k/year in necessary expenses, and that was with air conditioning and modern cars. That's a little less than $12k today, basically right at the federal poverty line. They lived out in the boonies in trailers, but they had dial-up internet (as nearly all of us did at the time), and they were pretty happy with things the way they were.
The Heathrow Express ia the perfect example of how to deal with this. Paddington wasn't close to my hotel, per se, but it was much closer than Heathrow, and the Express was much faster and more convenient than taking a taxi from the airport.
Haha. When I was in med school, we got a lecture on arthropod-borne diseases from the state entomologist. The botfly is not the only fly that does this, just the only one that does it commonly in humans. Wild animals at certain times of year have very high parasite loads.
Doctors cannot write off unpaid portions of bills as a loss for tax purposes. Don't confuse "writing off bad debt" (i.e., you'll never collect it, so quit listing it as an asset on your balance sheet) with "writing off taxes". However, should you wish to rapidly solve the problem of the uninsured seeking access to medical care, it would be a highly effective change in the law.