It seems to me that we are approaching a brave new time when only the skills and knowledge which are economically valuable will be taught.
You can drop the qualifier, "economically". The only sort of value is economic value because if something has value, then that means you're willing to sacrifice something of significance for it. And that's all economics really is about, making choices with tradeoffs in order to get the stuff you value more.
This paragraph gives me the impression that you advocate educational institutions should resist giving what students and society wants out of education and instead deliver what some intellectual elite thinks is more valuable.
WTF a book written by an eye witness is no evidence?
Yes, you idiot. How many hundreds of thousands of deaths did those eye witnesses personally count?
Once again, something is evidence if it distinguishes between two hypotheses. If it doesn't, then it isn't evidence. There is no question that a lot of people died. What is being discussed here is how many.
Of course the books ARE EVIDENCE, they written mainly by people who lived in the areas and lost their families and friends.
Of course, they aren't. They don't tell us the number of deaths. No one is contesting whether there was use of atomic bombs.
When they tell that a grand parent has survived the blast and the weeks afterwards but came into hospital 1960 where he was in a special treatment area with dozens of similar cases, and the author visited his grand pa every week for years... why should anybody doubt that?
So there were "dozens" of deaths in the aftermath of these bombings? We already know there were at least 1900. These stories don't tell us whether there was 1900 or 400k such deaths.
people continued dying till the late 1970s early 80s
People will continue to die until there are no more people. Again, you don't seem to understand what evidence is.
Since I pity your inability to form a logical argument, I'll give you a freebie. There are other ways to die after the fact from an atomic explosion than radiation.
If you get burned over half your body, that'll hurt your chances of future survival, even if you recover from it. It might even result in higher cancer rates due to the tissue regeneration and healing. Similarly, if you are permanently blinded by the flash from the atomic explosion then that can increase your chances of dying from various sorts of accidents (such as falling).
There should be a lot of people who die from what injuries they suffered from the atomic bomb blasts. They just won't be dying from radiation-caused deaths.
But rather than serious estimates based on actual injuries received, we get the anti-nuke hysteria. The whole point of these ridiculously exaggerated death counts is to scare people now not do a proper accounting of what happened then.
There's only one budget. There are no "separate" funds. Social Security doesn't actually pay more into the budget than it pays out. And no one in government has ever done a proper accounting of these programs.
but from the opposite perspective what sort of man slaughters people without even giving them a chance to fight back?
Well, such things are useful to winning wars though there are plenty of examples throughout history of that not being a sufficient condition for victory. But there is also the other side of the coin, what have these people subject to slaughter done to deserve a fair fight?
I can't think of any of my rights (as a citizen of the USA) that are taken away by my association with a corporation.
That's because of corporate personhood. But if a government in the US could just seize or tax the assets of a corporation discriminatorily and without proper compensation, then that would be in violation of Section 8 and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.
Similarly, if a government could ban the speech of an agent of the corporation from speaking on behalf of the corporation, then that's violation of the First Amendment (and the reason for the Citizens United ruling - Congress made it illegal for certain sorts of political speech by individuals when they were working for corporations).
I just don't see that the company I work for has a right to exercise any rights on my behalf without my explicit permission.
These are about the reverse - you exercising your rights on the behalf of a corporation.
I think it's better to contest these sorts of fantasy numbers wherever they appear. The US military did their own studies on deaths. They had far more incentive to exaggerate the effects of the blasts (for Cold War propaganda against the USSR) than your sources did and yet they didn't come up with 400k deaths in the first week but more like 150k deaths.
Let's examine something you wrote a little earlier:
There plenty of books (over thousand) hundrets translated into german and english, written by people who lived during that time. The late death, mostly suffering for years and the malformed born are
Note that this is not evidence (and yet this is the only thing so far that you have presented as such aside from hypothetical "hospital bills"). Whether the atomic bombs killed 150k or 800k, those testimonies would still exist in similar number. They fail to distinguish between the official version and your version.
My view is that people who exaggerate harm, even when they don't have to, are peddlers of propaganda without even a remote interest in the truth. You should be very careful of these people.
The Code only meant anything AFTER Hammurabi used violence to conquer everybody else in the region to establish his rule, and wouldn't hold meaning if he didn't use violence to enforce it. Hammurabi had power, so he decided for all his subjects what "justice" is, and if they didn't obey he'd use violence to enforce his will.
So "using violence" or "having power" somehow precludes the concept of justice?
Hammurabi could have just not bothered with the exercise in the first place. But that "rationalization" was more important to him than his power was.
What rights of biological humans associated with corporations are taken away? I am employed by a rather large corporation and I can't think of any rights I have that come through that association.
Think about what you wrote. Do you really think that having rights come through an association (sentence two) is equivalent to having rights taken away through an association (question one)?
The point is that rights shouldn't be taken away by association with a corporation. That's the whole point to the corporate personhood exercise.
People would also be willing to pay some amount more for artificial meat.
Some people. And some people, I'd wager much more, would not. After all, there are a number of artificial meat products already in the market. I think that it will take artificial meat being significantly cheaper before it will replace most of the meat from animals market.
Licenses, the No Fly list, public school diplomas, legally recognized marriage, and many other things are also artificial creations of law. Should the state have the power to arbitrary restrict the rights of people who have or want these things because they are artificial creations of law?
Note this strikes to the core of the same sex marriage debate. If the US government can decide marriage means only a marriage between two people of opposite sex with the justification effectively because legally recognized marriage is an artificial creation of law and the state said so, then that means they just created a legal situation that favors one group unfairly at the expense of a second.
The key problem here is simply that the state can create and grant privileges in a way that increases their power to the detriment of society. If they have the ability to regulate the behavior of corporations then they can choose to honor the rights of those associated with one corporation at the expense of those associated with another. They can pick favorites or cripple enemies. Corporate personhood was created in order to fight this abuse.
I make a distinction between a biological human* the legal fiction that is a corporate person.
So what? Everyone does including the law. Your distinction however illegally takes away the rights of biological humans associated with corporations.
Further, what is the problem with the legal fiction of corporate personhood? Should we really create unique structures of law for every distinct legal concept out there?
First, do you understand the difference between illegal acts and criminal acts? Second, do you understand the difference between a business and a corporation? You can't really understand what's going on without that basic sort of understanding. Recall that your original comment was the over-the-top statement:
If a person was treated like a corporation, murder would be legal. You could walk up to somone with 10,000 witnesses, 10 video cameras coving you, then shoot someone. If you were tried for it, you'd challenge the prosecution to prove you didn't have a muscle spasm that caused the trigger pull.
You are saying that corporations can somehow magically commit horrendous crimes of some sort with impunity. But you just wrote:
Individual workers doing illegal acts are shielded by the fact it was done inside a company.
Now, it's merely illegal acts (and given that the example you gave a little back is a single case of dumping hazardous waste, not very illegal acts) inside a business. You moved the goalposts.
Further, if I were a single person dumping hazardous waste, I wouldn't receive any more punishment than I would as an agent of a business. There is no such "shield".
When someone in a corporation illegally dumps hazardous chemicals, they aren't held responsible.
Incorrect.
The guy who told them they were safe isn't held responsible because he didn't know they weren't.
Incorrect.
The person who put the hazardous chemicals in the general bin thought the rubbish handlers would identify and separate them.
Incorrect.
It's worth noting here that dumping hazardous materials is illegal, but it isn't a crime. And by regulation, the business is fined. This has nothing to do with the business being treated as a person or being able to commit a crime or break the law. The "being held responsible" duty is first left to the agents of the business to carry out.
Now, if the above parties continue in their misbehavior despite repeated sanctions, then someone is doing something criminal, not just merely illegal. All these parties can't simultaneously continue to claim ignorance in the face of continued fines, warnings, etc. At that point, the behavior goes from being illegal to being criminal and people get fined and can end up in jail.
But since the TEA party doesn't like that, they called it something else.
So do you also dislike having the government tax your local business in order to pay for illegal government spying activities? Or is this just a TEA party thing?
The people (within a corporation) are, generally, not held responsible.
I don't see the problem. If a few people in a corporation commit a crime, then they should held responsible for the crime. The rest of that corporation shouldn't be since they didn't actually commit the crime. Similarly, the corporation shouldn't be because it can't actually commit crimes.
It's like saying that if a resident of New York City mugs someone, then everyone in New York City is responsible for that crime and in particular, New York City itself is responsible for that crime.
You have nothing useful to say. Even though we don't magically agree on what is "just" doesn't mean that there is no such concept or that we shouldn't attempt to strive for it.
Justice is decided by whoever has power.
No, to the contrary, it's been from the beginning the constraining of the powerful to the benefit of the weak and all of mankind. From the preamble to the Code of Hammurabi:
When Anu the Sublime, King of the Anunaki, and Bel, the lord of Heaven and earth, who decreed the fate of the land, assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, God of righteousness, dominion over earthly man, and made him great among the Igigi, they called Babylon by his illustrious name, made it great on earth, and founded an everlasting kingdom in it, whose foundations are laid so solidly as those of heaven and earth; then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.
Justice is a particularly difficult ideal to approximate, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist or that we should not try to achieve it.
"Justice" is when we humans try to rationalize that it was "right" or justified to kill a man, be it the poor man, the rich man, or both (maybe they're both terrorists, or enemy combatants, or whatever the boogeyman of the day is)
We can rationalize on different sorts of bases. For example, I could rationalize that killing you was justified because you had money I wanted. Or maybe I just never bothered to rationalize my acts at all.
But most of the time, I'll rationalize some reason for not killing you or even for that matter, bothering you in some way. Everyone does that. So these rationalizations can and have saved your life on many, many occasions. So that seems a very poor reason to discount "justice".
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There are other values. Moral values for example.
No, there aren't. If you aren't willing to do or sacrifice anything for those moral values, then they aren't actually valuable to you.
In fact, it often has negative economic value, as the economy is harmed by people trying to pursue morals.
Not to the person holdings those moral values. Value is always relative.
Becoming a mathematician is like becoming someone who is fascinated in shoes, or briefcases or watches or hammers.
An important class of people inordinately fascinated by shoes, briefcases, watches, and hammers are manufacturers.
It seems to me that we are approaching a brave new time when only the skills and knowledge which are economically valuable will be taught.
You can drop the qualifier, "economically". The only sort of value is economic value because if something has value, then that means you're willing to sacrifice something of significance for it. And that's all economics really is about, making choices with tradeoffs in order to get the stuff you value more.
This paragraph gives me the impression that you advocate educational institutions should resist giving what students and society wants out of education and instead deliver what some intellectual elite thinks is more valuable.
WTF a book written by an eye witness is no evidence?
Yes, you idiot. How many hundreds of thousands of deaths did those eye witnesses personally count?
Once again, something is evidence if it distinguishes between two hypotheses. If it doesn't, then it isn't evidence. There is no question that a lot of people died. What is being discussed here is how many.
210 k - 250k death are the direct death of the attacks and have nothing to do with the people who died later.
A no brainer to realize the number is not conclusive if it is equal to the amount of people that died in the blast.
150k are. The US studied this in careful detail.
Of course the books ARE EVIDENCE, they written mainly by people who lived in the areas and lost their families and friends.
Of course, they aren't. They don't tell us the number of deaths. No one is contesting whether there was use of atomic bombs.
When they tell that a grand parent has survived the blast and the weeks afterwards but came into hospital 1960 where he was in a special treatment area with dozens of similar cases, and the author visited his grand pa every week for years ... why should anybody doubt that?
So there were "dozens" of deaths in the aftermath of these bombings? We already know there were at least 1900. These stories don't tell us whether there was 1900 or 400k such deaths.
people continued dying till the late 1970s early 80s
People will continue to die until there are no more people. Again, you don't seem to understand what evidence is.
Since I pity your inability to form a logical argument, I'll give you a freebie. There are other ways to die after the fact from an atomic explosion than radiation.
If you get burned over half your body, that'll hurt your chances of future survival, even if you recover from it. It might even result in higher cancer rates due to the tissue regeneration and healing. Similarly, if you are permanently blinded by the flash from the atomic explosion then that can increase your chances of dying from various sorts of accidents (such as falling).
There should be a lot of people who die from what injuries they suffered from the atomic bomb blasts. They just won't be dying from radiation-caused deaths.
But rather than serious estimates based on actual injuries received, we get the anti-nuke hysteria. The whole point of these ridiculously exaggerated death counts is to scare people now not do a proper accounting of what happened then.
My version is official as yours, after all most numbers I mentioned are on wikipedia with cross references.
Wikipedia tops out at an estimate of 250k deaths. And only 1900 deaths afterward are attributed to radiation-caused deaths.
There's only one budget. There are no "separate" funds. Social Security doesn't actually pay more into the budget than it pays out. And no one in government has ever done a proper accounting of these programs.
but from the opposite perspective what sort of man slaughters people without even giving them a chance to fight back?
Well, such things are useful to winning wars though there are plenty of examples throughout history of that not being a sufficient condition for victory. But there is also the other side of the coin, what have these people subject to slaughter done to deserve a fair fight?
I can't think of any of my rights (as a citizen of the USA) that are taken away by my association with a corporation.
That's because of corporate personhood. But if a government in the US could just seize or tax the assets of a corporation discriminatorily and without proper compensation, then that would be in violation of Section 8 and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.
Similarly, if a government could ban the speech of an agent of the corporation from speaking on behalf of the corporation, then that's violation of the First Amendment (and the reason for the Citizens United ruling - Congress made it illegal for certain sorts of political speech by individuals when they were working for corporations).
I just don't see that the company I work for has a right to exercise any rights on my behalf without my explicit permission.
These are about the reverse - you exercising your rights on the behalf of a corporation.
Let's examine something you wrote a little earlier:
There plenty of books (over thousand) hundrets translated into german and english, written by people who lived during that time. The late death, mostly suffering for years and the malformed born are
Note that this is not evidence (and yet this is the only thing so far that you have presented as such aside from hypothetical "hospital bills"). Whether the atomic bombs killed 150k or 800k, those testimonies would still exist in similar number. They fail to distinguish between the official version and your version.
My view is that people who exaggerate harm, even when they don't have to, are peddlers of propaganda without even a remote interest in the truth. You should be very careful of these people.
I didn't say lefties are causing the problem with SS, I'm pointing out your way of thinking is not so different from the lefties.
Ok, how is "my way of thinking" similar? Or your way, for that matter.
The Code only meant anything AFTER Hammurabi used violence to conquer everybody else in the region to establish his rule, and wouldn't hold meaning if he didn't use violence to enforce it. Hammurabi had power, so he decided for all his subjects what "justice" is, and if they didn't obey he'd use violence to enforce his will.
So "using violence" or "having power" somehow precludes the concept of justice?
Hammurabi could have just not bothered with the exercise in the first place. But that "rationalization" was more important to him than his power was.
What rights of biological humans associated with corporations are taken away? I am employed by a rather large corporation and I can't think of any rights I have that come through that association.
Think about what you wrote. Do you really think that having rights come through an association (sentence two) is equivalent to having rights taken away through an association (question one)?
The point is that rights shouldn't be taken away by association with a corporation. That's the whole point to the corporate personhood exercise.
I'm a bit tired about the downplaying of the atomic bombs, is that a way to try to feel less guilty?
I think it's more that I'm getting real tired of the bullshit.
People would also be willing to pay some amount more for artificial meat.
Some people. And some people, I'd wager much more, would not. After all, there are a number of artificial meat products already in the market. I think that it will take artificial meat being significantly cheaper before it will replace most of the meat from animals market.
Just introducing a couple rich guys who hate animal cruelty and a few scientists working on the problem will accomplish more than any prize.
Depends how big the prize is and what those people end up doing. Also, I'd have to favor the results-oriented reward over the process-oriented reward.
Using different analogies to highlight different parts of the constant and immutable statement doesn't count as "moving the goalposts".
Well, I guess others can read what I wrote and come to their own conclusions on that. But I believe posterity for the most part will agree with me.
Licenses, the No Fly list, public school diplomas, legally recognized marriage, and many other things are also artificial creations of law. Should the state have the power to arbitrary restrict the rights of people who have or want these things because they are artificial creations of law?
Note this strikes to the core of the same sex marriage debate. If the US government can decide marriage means only a marriage between two people of opposite sex with the justification effectively because legally recognized marriage is an artificial creation of law and the state said so, then that means they just created a legal situation that favors one group unfairly at the expense of a second.
The key problem here is simply that the state can create and grant privileges in a way that increases their power to the detriment of society. If they have the ability to regulate the behavior of corporations then they can choose to honor the rights of those associated with one corporation at the expense of those associated with another. They can pick favorites or cripple enemies. Corporate personhood was created in order to fight this abuse.
I make a distinction between a biological human* the legal fiction that is a corporate person.
So what? Everyone does including the law. Your distinction however illegally takes away the rights of biological humans associated with corporations.
Further, what is the problem with the legal fiction of corporate personhood? Should we really create unique structures of law for every distinct legal concept out there?
If a person was treated like a corporation, murder would be legal. You could walk up to somone with 10,000 witnesses, 10 video cameras coving you, then shoot someone. If you were tried for it, you'd challenge the prosecution to prove you didn't have a muscle spasm that caused the trigger pull.
You are saying that corporations can somehow magically commit horrendous crimes of some sort with impunity. But you just wrote:
Individual workers doing illegal acts are shielded by the fact it was done inside a company.
Now, it's merely illegal acts (and given that the example you gave a little back is a single case of dumping hazardous waste, not very illegal acts) inside a business. You moved the goalposts.
Further, if I were a single person dumping hazardous waste, I wouldn't receive any more punishment than I would as an agent of a business. There is no such "shield".
When someone in a corporation illegally dumps hazardous chemicals, they aren't held responsible.
Incorrect.
The guy who told them they were safe isn't held responsible because he didn't know they weren't.
Incorrect.
The person who put the hazardous chemicals in the general bin thought the rubbish handlers would identify and separate them.
Incorrect.
It's worth noting here that dumping hazardous materials is illegal, but it isn't a crime. And by regulation, the business is fined. This has nothing to do with the business being treated as a person or being able to commit a crime or break the law. The "being held responsible" duty is first left to the agents of the business to carry out.
Now, if the above parties continue in their misbehavior despite repeated sanctions, then someone is doing something criminal, not just merely illegal. All these parties can't simultaneously continue to claim ignorance in the face of continued fines, warnings, etc. At that point, the behavior goes from being illegal to being criminal and people get fined and can end up in jail.
But since the TEA party doesn't like that, they called it something else.
So do you also dislike having the government tax your local business in order to pay for illegal government spying activities? Or is this just a TEA party thing?
The people (within a corporation) are, generally, not held responsible.
I don't see the problem. If a few people in a corporation commit a crime, then they should held responsible for the crime. The rest of that corporation shouldn't be since they didn't actually commit the crime. Similarly, the corporation shouldn't be because it can't actually commit crimes.
It's like saying that if a resident of New York City mugs someone, then everyone in New York City is responsible for that crime and in particular, New York City itself is responsible for that crime.
Justice is decided by whoever has power.
No, to the contrary, it's been from the beginning the constraining of the powerful to the benefit of the weak and all of mankind. From the preamble to the Code of Hammurabi:
When Anu the Sublime, King of the Anunaki, and Bel, the lord of Heaven and earth, who decreed the fate of the land, assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, God of righteousness, dominion over earthly man, and made him great among the Igigi, they called Babylon by his illustrious name, made it great on earth, and founded an everlasting kingdom in it, whose foundations are laid so solidly as those of heaven and earth; then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.
Justice is a particularly difficult ideal to approximate, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist or that we should not try to achieve it.
"Justice" is when we humans try to rationalize that it was "right" or justified to kill a man, be it the poor man, the rich man, or both (maybe they're both terrorists, or enemy combatants, or whatever the boogeyman of the day is)
We can rationalize on different sorts of bases. For example, I could rationalize that killing you was justified because you had money I wanted. Or maybe I just never bothered to rationalize my acts at all.
But most of the time, I'll rationalize some reason for not killing you or even for that matter, bothering you in some way. Everyone does that. So these rationalizations can and have saved your life on many, many occasions. So that seems a very poor reason to discount "justice".