1 out of 3 dollars spent is for "national defense." 33% is a pretty big "small" portion right off that bat.
That's a good example of what I refer to. US military spending is epic in its waste. For example, I was part of a non profit team that put an airship prototype up to 95k feet, which is a world record. The total cost over a number of years was somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars. The US military has paid over a hundred million dollars for an airship that failed in flight. Three orders of magnitude less cost and something that actually worked.
But then US military procurement is massively corrupt. For example, small caliber ammunition was for a time manufactured by a single plant in Missouri. When it couldn't keep up with ammunition demand after the Iraqi invasion in 2003, they finally opened up ammunition production to competition. This paper describes the issues surrounding that shortage. From it (emphasized phrase by me):
The reduction in funding during these years also affected the United Statesâ(TM) ammunition
production capability resulting in a steady decline since the Cold War. Since 1989, there has
been a 68% decrease in the capacity of the munitions industrial base. The number of facilities
mirrors this decline. Government owned facilities fell from 28 to 13, and privately owned
facilities decreased from 163 to 69. The production of small arms ammunition has been
consolidated in a single government owned facility at Lake City Army Ammunition Plant at Lake
City, Missouri.
It's also worth noting that defense spending is not 1 in 3 dollars, but rather 1 in 5 due to the presence of considerable entitlement spending into Social Security and Medicare (neither which serve a national interest I might add).
There are two things to note here. First, this is a rare legitimate application of the Commerce Clause. Second, the Supreme Court has upheld unconstitutional law before (such as the recent Obamacare ruling).
For example, you can't say the US liability shielding/exemption for nuclear power generation isn't a subsidy.
I agree that is a subsidy, but it's not an externality because an involved party (here, the US federal government) is still paying the bill. However, I have to say that this with slight modification could create both an externality and subsidy. Say, if nobody was required to pay (including the government) in the event of a nuclear accident when they would normally pay.
So my claim was wrong, but it would require deliberate shielding by the government. So going back to pixelpusher's original claim, if a company were dumping toxic waste into a stream, and the local government was actively shielding that company from lawsuits and regulation fines for the harm the pollution caused (in other words, without the active interference of the government, the company would be bearing the costs of its pollution one way or another), then that would be a case of something that was both an externality and a subsidy.
What they should be asking is whether anyone will ever live in the state of California (where this most notorious of conferences happened) again. One can't be human and live in such a state. It would warp the body and destroy the very soul to try.
So I imagine there are tens of millions of refugees trying to get into neighboring states like Arizona, Nevada, or Mexico. I say we welcome them with open arms and help heal these terrible things that have happened to them.
She also posted the photo to her blog as well along with her justification for doing so.
And by the way, codes of conduct are essentially useless. Attendees either behave in a socially acceptable way or they got booted. And the convention orgranizers get to decide what is socially acceptable.
Codes of conduct inform attendees of what the convention organizers probably will decide is socially acceptable.
What is worse is the reaction of teh internetz and how they responded in, pretty much the manner that she was originally was perturbed about.
Looking at the actual story (imagine that), it appears that she was using Twitter as communication with the conference staff (strategy #3) and they responded quickly. I still think that shows poor judgment since Twitter is still public like shouting and she included pictures. If at that point, she had done nothing else, she might still have a job.
But then she blogged about it and included the same picture in that blog post. That crosses the line. I would have fired her too even if those people had nothing to do with my business.
I think the following quote illustrates her thinking at the time:
The[n] it happenedâ¦.The trigger.
Jesse was on the main stage with thousands of people sitting in the audience. He was talking about helping the next generation learn to program and how happy PyCon was with the Young Coders workshop (which I volunteered at). He was mentioning that the PyLadies auction had raised $10,000 in a single night and the funds would be used the funds for their initiatives.
I saw a photo on main stage of a little girl who had been in the Young Coders workshop.
I realized I had to do something or she would never have the chance to learn and love programming because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so.
This is pure cliche. She decides that couple of sexist jokers need to be exposed to the world in a stereotypically passive aggressive way. For the kids. That behavior and rationalization shoehorns itself into the "PC feminist causes trouble for everyone" story. She becomes part of the problem she supposedly is trying to fix.
As to "comfort", I too have difficulties confronting jerks and whatnot. But it's a communication skill that one unfortunately needs. It is worth noting that apparently, until conference staff interceded, no one else had asked these guys to shut up either. While not everyone would have minded, that still leaves a lot of people who did nothing when just saying a few words could have saved two people their jobs.
Hence why we have a system of checks, balances, accountability, and transparency.
When those exist and are used. It's worth noting with the US system, that it has grown very byzantine and corrupt which tends to thwart all of those. While the absolute position derided by meglon is to a certain degree untenable, I think it's a bit disingenuous to ignore that government spends a lot more than the value it provides.
There's an inherent inefficiency to spending other peoples' money and it is worsened by this complex system which handles way too much money and power for what it provides.
I think it's also disingenuous to complain here when those services you mention are only a small portion of actual government spending. The various services you mention just don't cost that much to operate (and mostly aren't funded at the federal level in the US as well). What does cost a lot to operate is the vast ecology of rent seekers that has sprung up over the decades.
Fine, let him move off the grid... no electricity, no phone, no roads, no tv, no fresh water unless he goes down to the stream, no medical services, no police, no firefighters, no military protections...and if he's doing just as good as he is now with all that, then the Unibomber has found his long lost twin.
Or he could just pay per use. Just treat government, when it actually provides the service (which isn't always the case BTW), just like any private entity.
The biggest threat to our society isn't terrorists, or the national debt, it's fucking clueless asshats who can't think more than it takes to regurgitate a bumper sticker.
Well, that's good advice. I think you ought to consider actually taking it.
Due to time value, problems a century in the making are less of a cost than problems that happen now. As to the externality of coal, I've noticed that a lot of backers of taxes and emission credit markets are more interested in changing behaviors rather than determining how costly the coal externality actually is.
If you have doubts, please go purchase a cheap plot of land next to a plant or refinery and take up permanent residence
You do realize that isn't really a big deal? I've lived near plants and refineries before. There just isn't that much going on. There are some industries that do have considerable nuisance, such as landfills, sewage treatment plants, paper mills, etc.
Cutting government spending is also an investment into future generations.
Look at it this way... that money being taken from you isn't taxes, it's YOU paying for all the benefits YOU use.
Now look who's being fucking stupid. Call his bluff. Cut the taxes and the benefits. Then when he's doing really well despite life's adversities, you can tell him "I told you so".
Had she taken option #2 above the coordinators would have likely contacted the employer to inform them of the action they took and the reason behind it.
Not at all, since the coordinators wouldn't have been involved in the corrective action. Recall option #2 was:
2) turn around and tell them to stop
That simply is the most effective choice both in appropriate level of response and in speed of feedback. Even if she had to escalate to #3 (talk to the coordinators), it likely would not have involved the business directly unless the other people were unusually disruptive.
Her posting on Twitter was not for the people in the audience, it was for the PyCon coordinators.
If that were true, and I don't think it is, then she still showed remarkably poor judgment posting stuff that should have been confidential in public. This is not an appropriate use of Twitter.
Given the number of years she has probably had to put up with that sort of thing I see this as the straw that broke the camels back.
Given how quickly she apparently was fired, the employer agreed with her.
The logical implication of that is that you do not ban guns, but ban people (aka revoke their freedoms)
I sense you're not really into supporting this particular argument. There is the other option. We could instead provide consequences such as prison for those who harm others. That's what is currently done and it works pretty well.
You, and many others, seem to be equating subsidized with unproductive.
That merely is the reality of subsidy. If something is productive and provides value beyond its costs that is readily paid for, then it doesn't need subsidy.
I have to echo the disagreement with this sentence. Where does the money and resources for these subsidies come from? Somewhere there has to be a highly productive, viable-in-its-own-right portion of the economy to support all the stuff that needs to be subsidized.
As I see it, the only "balance" possible in this situation is to remove the hate speech laws. Canadian courts and tribunals are notorious for living in a fantasy land where crap law miraculously transforms into just law. The key problem:
Hate speech is hard to define.
The judges have defined it â" as that which âoea reasonable person, aware of the context and circumstances, would view the expression as likely to expose a person or persons to detestation and vilification on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.â They also provided âoea workable approachâ to combating it.
Why would a reasonable person ever make this determination? The detestation and vilification is already there. It doesn't go away merely because you've criminalized playground language and certain conspiracy theories.
I would not be comfortable with #2. So you are asking me to do something that I am not comfortable with.
I don't care. Sometimes doing the right thing is uncomfortable. Plus with #2, you get the opportunity for immediate correction of the offending behavior. They might not even remember the behavior by the time they read your accusations on Twitter.
Plus, there is that matter of consequences. Once again, how comfortable would you be, losing your job? There are appropriate channels in a workplace for complaining about such issues. They don't involve Twitter or publicly embarrassing the business you work for.
I've been saying that war is too civil, too precise, and not horrific enough.
One could say the same of any bad thing where there is moral hazard in the economic sense. But generally any time you have massive harm, there is benefit from reducing that harm.
They knowingly and thus intentionally violated the code of conduct for the conference, I find that unacceptable as well. Two wrongs don't make a right, of course, but it seems that the outrage should at the very least be equal over both issues.
Outrage should be equal for equal wrongs. These were not equal. Violation of a code of conduct is a weaker wrong than publicizing such transgressions.
Slashdot Mirror
You would see obscenity laws and digital copyright laws revoked in record time....
For Congress. They've made plenty of exceptions for themselves. The rest of us would have the usual law.
1 out of 3 dollars spent is for "national defense." 33% is a pretty big "small" portion right off that bat.
That's a good example of what I refer to. US military spending is epic in its waste. For example, I was part of a non profit team that put an airship prototype up to 95k feet, which is a world record. The total cost over a number of years was somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars. The US military has paid over a hundred million dollars for an airship that failed in flight. Three orders of magnitude less cost and something that actually worked.
But then US military procurement is massively corrupt. For example, small caliber ammunition was for a time manufactured by a single plant in Missouri. When it couldn't keep up with ammunition demand after the Iraqi invasion in 2003, they finally opened up ammunition production to competition. This paper describes the issues surrounding that shortage. From it (emphasized phrase by me):
The reduction in funding during these years also affected the United Statesâ(TM) ammunition production capability resulting in a steady decline since the Cold War. Since 1989, there has been a 68% decrease in the capacity of the munitions industrial base. The number of facilities mirrors this decline. Government owned facilities fell from 28 to 13, and privately owned facilities decreased from 163 to 69. The production of small arms ammunition has been consolidated in a single government owned facility at Lake City Army Ammunition Plant at Lake City, Missouri.
It's also worth noting that defense spending is not 1 in 3 dollars, but rather 1 in 5 due to the presence of considerable entitlement spending into Social Security and Medicare (neither which serve a national interest I might add).
This will be struck down.
There are two things to note here. First, this is a rare legitimate application of the Commerce Clause. Second, the Supreme Court has upheld unconstitutional law before (such as the recent Obamacare ruling).
For example, you can't say the US liability shielding/exemption for nuclear power generation isn't a subsidy.
I agree that is a subsidy, but it's not an externality because an involved party (here, the US federal government) is still paying the bill. However, I have to say that this with slight modification could create both an externality and subsidy. Say, if nobody was required to pay (including the government) in the event of a nuclear accident when they would normally pay.
So my claim was wrong, but it would require deliberate shielding by the government. So going back to pixelpusher's original claim, if a company were dumping toxic waste into a stream, and the local government was actively shielding that company from lawsuits and regulation fines for the harm the pollution caused (in other words, without the active interference of the government, the company would be bearing the costs of its pollution one way or another), then that would be a case of something that was both an externality and a subsidy.
What they should be asking is whether anyone will ever live in the state of California (where this most notorious of conferences happened) again. One can't be human and live in such a state. It would warp the body and destroy the very soul to try.
So I imagine there are tens of millions of refugees trying to get into neighboring states like Arizona, Nevada, or Mexico. I say we welcome them with open arms and help heal these terrible things that have happened to them.
And by the way, codes of conduct are essentially useless. Attendees either behave in a socially acceptable way or they got booted. And the convention orgranizers get to decide what is socially acceptable.
Codes of conduct inform attendees of what the convention organizers probably will decide is socially acceptable.
Information is free. Attention is not.
And yellow journalism has been around as long as there have been newspapers.
What is worse is the reaction of teh internetz and how they responded in, pretty much the manner that she was originally was perturbed about.
Looking at the actual story (imagine that), it appears that she was using Twitter as communication with the conference staff (strategy #3) and they responded quickly. I still think that shows poor judgment since Twitter is still public like shouting and she included pictures. If at that point, she had done nothing else, she might still have a job.
But then she blogged about it and included the same picture in that blog post. That crosses the line. I would have fired her too even if those people had nothing to do with my business.
I think the following quote illustrates her thinking at the time:
The[n] it happenedâ¦.The trigger.
Jesse was on the main stage with thousands of people sitting in the audience. He was talking about helping the next generation learn to program and how happy PyCon was with the Young Coders workshop (which I volunteered at). He was mentioning that the PyLadies auction had raised $10,000 in a single night and the funds would be used the funds for their initiatives.
I saw a photo on main stage of a little girl who had been in the Young Coders workshop.
I realized I had to do something or she would never have the chance to learn and love programming because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so.
This is pure cliche. She decides that couple of sexist jokers need to be exposed to the world in a stereotypically passive aggressive way. For the kids. That behavior and rationalization shoehorns itself into the "PC feminist causes trouble for everyone" story. She becomes part of the problem she supposedly is trying to fix.
As to "comfort", I too have difficulties confronting jerks and whatnot. But it's a communication skill that one unfortunately needs. It is worth noting that apparently, until conference staff interceded, no one else had asked these guys to shut up either. While not everyone would have minded, that still leaves a lot of people who did nothing when just saying a few words could have saved two people their jobs.
Hence why we have a system of checks, balances, accountability, and transparency.
When those exist and are used. It's worth noting with the US system, that it has grown very byzantine and corrupt which tends to thwart all of those. While the absolute position derided by meglon is to a certain degree untenable, I think it's a bit disingenuous to ignore that government spends a lot more than the value it provides.
There's an inherent inefficiency to spending other peoples' money and it is worsened by this complex system which handles way too much money and power for what it provides.
I think it's also disingenuous to complain here when those services you mention are only a small portion of actual government spending. The various services you mention just don't cost that much to operate (and mostly aren't funded at the federal level in the US as well). What does cost a lot to operate is the vast ecology of rent seekers that has sprung up over the decades.
Fine, let him move off the grid... no electricity, no phone, no roads, no tv, no fresh water unless he goes down to the stream, no medical services, no police, no firefighters, no military protections...and if he's doing just as good as he is now with all that, then the Unibomber has found his long lost twin.
Or he could just pay per use. Just treat government, when it actually provides the service (which isn't always the case BTW), just like any private entity.
The biggest threat to our society isn't terrorists, or the national debt, it's fucking clueless asshats who can't think more than it takes to regurgitate a bumper sticker.
Well, that's good advice. I think you ought to consider actually taking it.
Externalities aren't subsidies. A subsidy is a gift of value to the target while an externality is the imposition of a cost on a third party.
Due to time value, problems a century in the making are less of a cost than problems that happen now. As to the externality of coal, I've noticed that a lot of backers of taxes and emission credit markets are more interested in changing behaviors rather than determining how costly the coal externality actually is.
If you have doubts, please go purchase a cheap plot of land next to a plant or refinery and take up permanent residence
You do realize that isn't really a big deal? I've lived near plants and refineries before. There just isn't that much going on. There are some industries that do have considerable nuisance, such as landfills, sewage treatment plants, paper mills, etc.
Look at it this way... that money being taken from you isn't taxes, it's YOU paying for all the benefits YOU use.
Now look who's being fucking stupid. Call his bluff. Cut the taxes and the benefits. Then when he's doing really well despite life's adversities, you can tell him "I told you so".
Adding millions of years worth of CO2 to the atmosphere in just a century is much much different.
How much CO2 is a million years worth?
Had she taken option #2 above the coordinators would have likely contacted the employer to inform them of the action they took and the reason behind it.
Not at all, since the coordinators wouldn't have been involved in the corrective action. Recall option #2 was:
2) turn around and tell them to stop
That simply is the most effective choice both in appropriate level of response and in speed of feedback. Even if she had to escalate to #3 (talk to the coordinators), it likely would not have involved the business directly unless the other people were unusually disruptive.
Her posting on Twitter was not for the people in the audience, it was for the PyCon coordinators.
If that were true, and I don't think it is, then she still showed remarkably poor judgment posting stuff that should have been confidential in public. This is not an appropriate use of Twitter.
Given the number of years she has probably had to put up with that sort of thing I see this as the straw that broke the camels back.
Given how quickly she apparently was fired, the employer agreed with her.
The logical implication of that is that you do not ban guns, but ban people (aka revoke their freedoms)
I sense you're not really into supporting this particular argument. There is the other option. We could instead provide consequences such as prison for those who harm others. That's what is currently done and it works pretty well.
You, and many others, seem to be equating subsidized with unproductive.
That merely is the reality of subsidy. If something is productive and provides value beyond its costs that is readily paid for, then it doesn't need subsidy.
Nor are most things.
I have to echo the disagreement with this sentence. Where does the money and resources for these subsidies come from? Somewhere there has to be a highly productive, viable-in-its-own-right portion of the economy to support all the stuff that needs to be subsidized.
Hate speech is hard to define.
The judges have defined it â" as that which âoea reasonable person, aware of the context and circumstances, would view the expression as likely to expose a person or persons to detestation and vilification on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination.â They also provided âoea workable approachâ to combating it.
Why would a reasonable person ever make this determination? The detestation and vilification is already there. It doesn't go away merely because you've criminalized playground language and certain conspiracy theories.
I would not be comfortable with #2. So you are asking me to do something that I am not comfortable with.
I don't care. Sometimes doing the right thing is uncomfortable. Plus with #2, you get the opportunity for immediate correction of the offending behavior. They might not even remember the behavior by the time they read your accusations on Twitter.
Plus, there is that matter of consequences. Once again, how comfortable would you be, losing your job? There are appropriate channels in a workplace for complaining about such issues. They don't involve Twitter or publicly embarrassing the business you work for.
I've been saying that war is too civil, too precise, and not horrific enough.
One could say the same of any bad thing where there is moral hazard in the economic sense. But generally any time you have massive harm, there is benefit from reducing that harm.
They knowingly and thus intentionally violated the code of conduct for the conference, I find that unacceptable as well. Two wrongs don't make a right, of course, but it seems that the outrage should at the very least be equal over both issues.
Outrage should be equal for equal wrongs. These were not equal. Violation of a code of conduct is a weaker wrong than publicizing such transgressions.
then I should be able to chose any of the available options to me, specifically the one that I feel most comfortable with.
How comfortable are you with making choices that happen to cause you and others to lose their jobs?
Why should I have to cater to the person who is knowingly and intentionally violating the rules?
You don't have to "cater" to anything. As has been noted, choice #2 is an effective way to remind people of the rules.