Actually, since I am no longer involved in the firm, I don't have a vested interest in SOX at all. I personally don't think the SOX compliance market has much more growth in it; the amount of FUD and lobbying against it is too great.
You're analyzing a causal effect that just isn't true. Your "stats", while accurate, don't necessarily have any connection to the law itself being bad. For example, here's another stat: since the passage of SOX, there hasn't been a major corporate accounting scandal even approaching the scale of Enron or WorldCom. Hurray! SOX is a success!
Of course, you must realize that neither of those statements is valid in any way. Enron and WorldCom were both instances where people did things that were massively illegal under existing statutes, so SOX could only have have helped early detection, not prevention. When smart people want to lie, cheat, and steal like crazy, there's very little you can do to stop them. While I know less about WorldCom, I definitely don't think SOX could have stopped Enron.
The true cause of a lot of the buybacks and movement away from domestic IPOs is fear: the business media is saturated with negative press about SOX -- all based on interviews with random executives who are realistically tertiary to the SOX process. If you ask the CEO of a major corporation if he likes SOX, of course he's going to say no. Know why? Because if any of the stuff in his accounting statements is false, he is now personally liable! And traditionally, that same CEO had no real knowledge of what all the financials even WERE. But now, some error could land him in jail for a decade or two. Does that mean it's a bad idea? Hell no! If the executive management can go to jail for material misstatements, you can be damn sure that the financials are going to be correct before they go out the door. And THAT, my friend, is the point.
I mentioned it briefly, but did not elaborate. It's the fear tactics of "oh it costs so much money" that frightens smaller firms. I've worked with some small cap public companies and pre-IPOs, and the management of these companies, while smart, doesn't know the first thing about governance or SOX. They're scared silly by everything they read in the business rags, and everything they hear from people who have gone through the hassle (and yes, for executives, it is a hassle) of implementing the law.
For something most slashdotters can relate to, consider this: it's somewhat like trying to get someone to switch to Linux from Windows. Even if the reality of the situation is that the person could make an easy switch in just one or two days, prevailing "knowledge" and general inertia are enough to scare almost everybody off. Even if it could actually make your life better (though I think that result is much more open to debate than the results of SOX) -- you still couldn't get people to switch. And for the most part, it has nothing to do with the real REASONS for switching.
Basically, it's been my experience that these people are prime targets of FUD. And I definitely would have fallen into the same trap if I hadn't actually done the WORK of it myself. So I don't blame you -- but it still irks me.
It has resulted in fewer opportunities for the small investor (fewer companies going public, profitable public companies going private). SOX is a bad law.
I co-founded a Sarbanes-Oxley consulting firm a couple of years ago, and I can definitively say that this is not an accurate view of what SOX has done for investors. This is the "typical" line you hear from corporate types, one that's been fed by a huge PR machine -- and it's THAT machine that is primarily responsible for the symptoms you mention here.
All you hear about is how SOX costs are outrageous, and then get people scratching their heads and saying "well what does it really do?" Just because the answer to that question isn't obvious to Joe Blow doesn't mean it's not a good answer. Turns out that factually, and by factually I mean according to the data, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance is very beneficial for most companies. SOX compliance and good governance often results not only in increased investor confidence (almost two-fold increases in reported confidence in most studies), but also increased operational efficiency. In the cases of banks and large companies that process millions of transactions daily, it turns out that implementing controls to figure out WHERE all of that money goes actually reduces losses and streamlines business processes. Go figure.
The ironic thing is that most of what is entailed by SOX is really just honest business. So companies can't use mark-to-market accounting, or hide losses in front corporations -- is that really a bad thing? Companies have to tell the truth about how they make their money and what they do with it? How shocking! And you know what? It hardly hurts our competitiveness. Regulations like these have been in place in Germany for years, and Japan implemented SOX-like measures with almost no problem at all. It seems that only AMERICAN corporations want to clutch their shady dealings.
And the worst part is that greedy subversive corporations are lobbying against SOX under the guise of "helping out the little guy" -- since smaller public companies really do have good reasons not to implement SOX (really, is it even possible to implement thorough financial oversight in a finance group of 2 people?). SOX is not a bad law, it's just a law that doesn't fit our view of business: greased palms and ethics to the wind. That people like you get morally indignant about how BAD it has been is just beyond the pale.
That article is completely misleading. The ruling covers IP addresses only. Here's a better article from Wired. For the lazy, here's the text content:
-- Appeals Court Rules No Privacy Interest in IP Addresses, Email To/From Fields
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday in United States vs. Forester that IP addresses and the To/From fields in emails are the legal equivalent of dialed phone numbers and the government can get a court order to obtain them without showing probable cause as would be needed in a search one's house.
The Court extended to the internet a 1979 case known as Smith vs. Maryland, where the Supreme Court found that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the phone numbers they dial because they transmitted them to the phone company in order to complete the call. However, under Smith, the contents of the calls could not be listened in on without proving probable cause to a judge.
The Ninth Circuit, ruling in an appeal of an Ecstasy-drug ring conviction found that emails' To/From fields and visited IP addresses were the internet's equivalent of phone numbers. For example, the government could get a log that said a person visited to http://66.230.200.100/ (Wikipedia's address). However, the court suggested that knowing full urls are very close to content (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecstasy) and would likely require a higher burden of proof to obtain than mere IP addresses.
From a footnote in the decision:
Surveillance techniques that enable the government to determine not only the IP addresses that a person accesses but also the uniform resource locators (URL) of the pages visited might be more constitutionally problematic. A URL, unlike an IP address, identifies the particular document within a website that a person views and thus reveals much more information about the persons Internet activity. For instance, a surveillance technique that captures IP addresses would show only that a person visited the New York Times' website at http://www.nytimes.com/ whereas a technique that captures URLs would also divulge the particular articles the person viewed.
Professor Orin Kerr questions whether the decision is about getting this information from an ISP or whether it was from a device installed on a computer surreptitiously. He suggests the latter should require a higher standard, but I'm not sure why? Perhaps it's because that might require law enforcement to enter a person's house?
But a web address often has a 1-to-1 corespondence with its contents.
Exactly. Knowing the to/from ADDRESS is one thing; knowing the _content_ of the request is another thing. This ruling allows things like:
Monitoring search behaviors (since search contents are contained in GET URLs)
Near-full auditing of all Web content viewed, down to individual comments/forum pages
For some systems, warrantless snooping of usernames and passwords (when such information is contained in the URL)
I second this point. I work in a healthcare-related software company, and can tell you that far from being completely inelastic, medical care spending is actually quite elastic. You may need to have that chemo regardless of whether it's costly or not, but do you need to see that endocrinologist every other week?
More to the point, take a look at one of the very largest portions of healthcare spending: drugs. If you have insurance (and I live in MA, so I do =P), you'll notice that you get charged different co-pays for generic and brand-name drugs. Things like this are only the beginning of true consumer health care -- as our population gets older and health care continues to get more expensive, we're going to be paying more and more of our own health care costs.
Already, there are services to let you find cheaper or better doctors, and to stay educated about what your health care entails, so you can make smart decisions. In August 2007, Bush signed an executive order requiring health insurance providers to release their quality metrics on doctors and other providers (what, you thought that stuff didn't exist?) -- every sign points towards consumerism in medical care. So while care choices may have been price-insensitive in the past, most experts agree that those times are nearly over, much to the dismay of doctors, hospitals, and businesses that provide products for health care.
Wow. What kind of a jerk do you have to be to mod that funny?
He's absolutely right. I spent time researching in prisons, and while rape is not nearly as pervasive as the pop culture media would have you believe, it definitely occurs, especially in high security facilities. Our prison system is absolutely horrible in many ways, but the complete blind eye to horrible crimes is just sickening.
Let me tell you a story. I did my research in Ohio, where all sentences and inmate information are public (and available online). After doing some interviews with several inmates, I realized that two of the inmates I had interviewed were cellmates. Inmate #1 was a lifer; he was in for arson resulting in more than $1m in damages and killing 3 people with a sawed-off shotgun (at the same time). He was a fairly large, intimidating fellow. Inmate #2 was a small, timid guy who was pretty clearly lower down on the pecking order. Know what he was in for? 10 fucking years for FIRST TIME DRUG POSSESSION.
There's no doubt in my mind that this man was raped in prison. Now, I admit, he probably had a lot of worse drug charges that were dropped in a plea bargain for the possession, but come on. Do you think having or even selling a couple pounds of cocaine entitles you to TEN YEARS of rape and horror? Just think how long ten years is. And do you really think you're going to get functioning members of society OUT of a system like that? Yeah.
Reductio ad absurdum doesn't mean what you think it means, or at the very least it doesn't apply here. Furthermore, RAA is a _valid_ and powerful argumentative tool, and creates no "disingenuous conclusions" whatsoever. It goes like this:
1) Assume the opposite of what you're trying to prove.
2) Show that this opposite belief necessarily entails a contradiction.
3) I should probably put profit in here somewhere.
That's not to say claims like the laptop claim you point out aren't absurd -- and indeed a logical fallacy itself. In fact, it even has a name: incomplete induction or weak induction. RAA on the other hand is actually saying "well if you believe that, everything just goes to pot, so you can't believe that." For example, you could claim that Linux is a more popular OS than Windows. I would argue that if you believe that, it creates an obvious contradiction -- more people buy and use Windows, as far as we know, than Linux. Therefore, the opposite is true, that "it is not the case that Linux is a more popular OS than Windows."
Hopefully this clears it up -- I see this error all the time among misinformed contentious geeks =P.
It seems to me that by your definition, a "sincere Pacifist" society is destined to be subservient to a dictator or other power with fewer qualms about using violence.
You had me to there. Whether pacifism is right or wrong, the conclusion that dictators or people who use violence are necessarily going to become part of the system is just false. For example, assume you had a truly pacifist society. That is to say, the grand majority of your citizens believed in pacifism. Now, Hitler's born in your society. Let's assume that pretty much nobody can really affect a society with his OWN violence; you'd have to get a group of violent people to undermine a society. So Hitler riles up some folks, and incites them to violence.
At that point, Hitler and his crew are no longer part of the society, but the remainder of the pacifist society could continue on. Hitler threatens those people with death or enslavement or whatever. That in no way means they have to comply. Take, for example, the Mennonites, who have maintained a pacifist society for quite some time now. Especially in today's globalized society, wars are some of the most ineffective ways of getting things done. For the amount that we've paid for the Iraq war, we probably could have "convinced" almost all importers and exporters of Iraqi goods to stop doing business with Iraq. Or convinced people within the Iraqi government to completely undermine Saddam. I don't know about you, but if someone offered a bounty of $100m to permanently disable a WMD site in Iraq and I was working there, you can be damn sure I'd do it. Given that most soldiers in the army surrendered in record time, I'm guessing they would have too.
A pacifist society definitely isn't impossible; it's just really really hard. Everyone in the society has to REALLY stick to pacifism -- and there's the rub. Faced with death or suffering, it turns out that almost nobody is really a pacifist =). So the problem isn't really that it's impossible, just that it's improbable.
Your analysis is not only correct, but can also be expanded. To say that people go to war only to mitigate the loss of life/suffering is not only fallacious in that instance, it is fallacious in all instances. War takes at least two parties -- an attacker and a defender, or else it's just a slaughter. If the goal of war is to minimize suffering/casualties (though those two are actually in conflict in this scenario), then no person would ever start a war.
That said, that's not what the parent poster meant. Wars are ALWAYS motivated by other factors (such as greed, in your example, or megalomania, in WWII); often the opposition to the evilly-motivated party follows the pattern described by the parent poster. For example, in your Utopian war, let's add a third party. Aside from Utopia and Biraq, there's a third party, call it the UN-ited Countries. These countries think, as your analysis suggests, that Utopia is making a big mistake, increasing the level of death and suffering for unjustified cause. So they enter the war to stave off Utopia's invasion.
This motivation, while truly only a fantasy in this scenario, could be called the pacifist case. Unfortunately, this case is often one of the last considered when going to war. More often, the war is fought for selfish or political reasons, and the pacifist justification is only added post facto. For example, in your Biraq example, after the war has devolved into a quagmire, some Utopian groups, such as Bumblepublicans, search for non-selfish reasons to justify the conflict. Like making it seem non-Utopian to suggest that removing Habbam was insufficient justification: "what, you wanted him to keep killing people over there?" Or defending blatantly horrible practices like torture: "they gotta do what they gotta do to stay alive over there; what, you want them to just lay down and die for the Berrorists?"
So yes, your analysis is correct, but the parent strikes on something deeply important to war -- the external justification of otherwise unjustified wars (of which history has a preponderance).
That's a darn well paid union worker. [. ..] Are you making these numbers up out of your hat?
Why yes, I am. You want me to make it more accurate? Fine. Let's scale BOTH salaries down to 1/3 of what I originally supposed, since that is in fact more accurate. So in the original example, it would cost you 100k/year to produce 2*250 work units (if union people worked 50 weeks a year with no holidays). Ignoring that Chinese workers often get little/no vacation or holiday time at all, and also work 12+ hours a day, it would STILL cost you ony 6k/year to produce an equivalent number of work units.
No matter how much you think I'm making up numbers, no sane person thinks that the Chinese workers are MORE expensive to do the same amount of work. Now, you can make quality arguments (though that gap is closing insanely fast), but efficiency arguments? Yeah, right. So thanks for taking an example that illustrates the BASIC point I'm making and pretending it's somehow invalid when it's not. Look around you, pal. Have you ever hired or managed in an international environment? It's just cheaper -- and cheaper is one of the best possible justifications you can ever get for doing ANYTHING in the corporate world, good or bad.
Ah, I see. You can't read. I absolutely did not say that subsidies are the only reason for offshoring.
I thought you might say this at the time. I considered rephrasing my statement to make it non-absolute, but the intentional usage of your phrasing is basically equivalent to the statement that subsidies are the only factor for off-shoring. Not only do you play UP their significance, you completely ignore any other factors (such as actual free market factors like international competition). As you said:
Absent those subsidies, there's not so much reason to move things offshore.
Unless you suddenly started writing with an accent, I read that as: without subsidies, there's no reason to move corporate structures offshore ('not so much' being a common sarcastic phrase generally used in an ironic fashion -- the proper usage of ironic). Even if I only read it as: "without subsidies, there are only minor reasons to...," my criticism would still apply. Having studied how businesses actually work both inside and out, I can guarantee you that no company I have ever seen has EVER decided to offshore for ANY other reason than to cut labor costs due to inflated American wages. Well, except a couple trying to escape our legal system, but that's another matter.
My point there was just that the labor market is extremely non-free, and is tilted in favor of the corporate manager class to an extreme degree. You haven't disagreed with that; you've just made up strawman figures to support the arguments of those managers.
I agree that the labor market isn't free. However, as someone else noted, I'm not sure you understand exactly what a free market is. A free market would completely eliminate unions, and labor laws. These both artificially fix labor prices -- for example, barring people under 12 from working eliminates a huge source of cheap labor in America. If those people could work legally, it's likely they could drive down the costs of goods and services. Now, I don't think it's bad that the free market is restricted to eliminate those people from the workforce.
While I don't agree that the labor MARKET is tilted toward managerial-types, I agree that they pay structure certainly is, and artificially so. The problem is current structure of corporations -- to become a high-level manager, you have to "rise through the ranks" usually. This means that with each successful promotion, you generally get a raise, and promotions generally move people away from production, and into people or strategic management. However, it's certainly an available (and often obvious) argument that the actual work of managers can be less valua
If it were a free market, you would have the government enforcing labor laws, and you would most emphatically not have corporate subsidies to shift production overseas. Absent those subsidies, there's not so much reason to move things offshore.
What? I think you must be horribly confused. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do this math:
Well-trained union worker gets paid 100,000 USD a year. Let's say he has twice the average productivity (to grant unioners more than they probably deserve). He produces 2 work units/day
Lightly trained Chinese worker gets paid 3,000 USD a year (to grant Chinese workers more than they usually make). He produces 1 work unit/day.
Now, which is the more economically efficient? Unions are effectively a way to establish control in an otherwise free market (the market of wages). Though unioners may FEEL like they deserve 100k for their work, the fact that someone else can and will do the work for much less by definition means that their work is not WORTH spending 100k. Causing US companies to pay a premium for not-so-premium labor does hurt American competitiveness.
Whether the cost of decreased competitiveness is worth it so our citizens have a better quality of life is a different question entirely. But to say that the only reason for offshoring is subsidies is just ridiculous.
Who mods this stuff informative/insightful? To wit:
Hell they are EARBUDS!!! So far I've notice two things about earbuds. They are uncomfortable, and they are worthless compared to my headphones.
So let's see if I get the gist of your argument. Your earbuds suck, you've never owned high-quality earbuds, therefore they don't exist? That's kind of like saying my Ford Pinto is a terrible car, but I've never had a different car, therefore there are no good cars. If you'd ever TRIED Shures, you'd see why they cost ridiculous sums of money. You might be making the same ridiculous argument about your vaunted "headphones". Let's move on:
I don't exactly see why getting a "higher quality" headset would be desirable if it creates less of a difference instead of more of a difference between two bit rates. Higher quality means I should hear everything.
Terrible, again. Since you clearly didn't understand their explanation and others in these comments, let's return to an analogy. You have two cars (analogous to our earbuds): a Ford Pinto and a Bugatti Veyron. You decide to upgrade them both (like the upgrade from 128 to 256). So you slap a turbocharger on each. Much to your shock, you discover that the turbo has a much greater effect on the Pinto than the Bugatti (gasp).
In our earphone example, it is not only reasonable, but pretty clear, that the pod-phones don't reproduce audio as well as the Shures. One common problem, especially in earbuds, is that they suck in the midrange. When your highs get clipped off (as in 128k audio, but NOT 256k), the main source of "highs" comes in the midrange. Thus, adding clear highs can enhance the strengths of the pod-phones, making up for the terrible midrange. However, the Shures reproduce the midrange well, so it's harder to tell that clear highs have been added. Hopefully that's a clear enough explanation for you.
Yikes, that's a terrible oversimplification of philosophical ethics. Objectivism and relativism are by far not the most meaningful or common distinctions in ethics. While it's true that the dichotomy between them has been a major driver for many ethical debates (see: Socrates), those are definitely not the only positions available.
For example, there is also non-cognitivism, another common position, which says that ethical statements have no truth value at all. Thus, believing that something is right or wrong does not qualify as a "belief" as we normally consider it in epistemological terms -- when we make ethical statements, we're just pouring out nonsense emotions.
How does this relate to altruism? It makes a huge difference. Of the three listed positions (there are many more), only objectivism would seem to promote altruism wholesale. If you know what the right thing to do is, it's much easier to do it. If you think, as a relativist might, that "hey I don't know whether that guy thinks me giving him this hamburger is right or wrong... he could be a vegetarian", you might be less likely to commit altruistic acts. Under extreme relativism, it would literally be impossible to behave altruistically -- your system of ethics is so distinct from everyone else's that you could never do the "right" thing in their eyes. And non-cognitivists would deny that altruism is even possible, since altruistic acts assume that there IS a right thing to do.
Precisely. I'd also have to point out one of the most interesting "altruistic" behaviors -- tipping. While this research really just finds a biological basis for kin selection, it's very hard to deny that people make economically ill-advised decisions all the time.
Next time you're at a restaurant by yourself, do you think you'll tip the waiter/waitress? Why? I know that often times, especially when traveling, there is absolutely no chance I'll ever see that person again. If I just paid my bill exactly and left, the most it would warrant is an exasperated huff from the server when the table is cleared. Probably the only person that would even remember I didn't tip is me.
And it's not because I'd rather give up that fiver, or whatever. It's because it feels good to reward someone for an acceptable job, and to think that you're the kind of person who leaves good tips. Hence, TFA.
"The rest of us are expected to defend our prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe 'religious liberty'." In the US you can avoid military service if fighting is against your religion. Arguing that you disagree with war for moral/ethic beliefs is ignored.
Just as a factual aside, that's not true. You can be a "conscientious objector" regardless of religious designation-- you need consistent evidence that you have been a pacifist for some time. Often, these individuals are assigned to non-combat roles, though antimilitarists can also be assigned to civilian service duty.
I completely agree -- interest can help drive a lot of it. But talent matters a lot, too. Even if you loved programming, if you had an IQ of 70, I can guarantee you wouldn't be able to do it well.
Those people who you hear about who are "naturally talented" fall into one of two categories:
1) They are talented and spent a lot of time and effort getting that way, you just fail to see the time and effort -- you are just seeing the "end product."...
Oh, please. You're honestly telling me that you don't think people are naturally talented at things? You must be out of your mind. Let's put it this way: during high school, I was considered to be excellent at math. I competed in bunches of math competitions and won, I always scored high on every test, and so on, and so forth. Now, I must admit, that during those 4 years, I never (literally, never) opened a math textbook outside of class. I never studied, I hardly paid attention. I'm just being honest. I actually hate math -- despite the fact that it's probably my greatest talent. In college, I majored in philosophy, psychology, and german.
If you honestly think that any amount of XYZing will make you XYZ with the best, you need to get your head checked. Sure, the BEST are both talented AND hard-working. Take, for example, a legend like Muhammad Ali. Now, The Greatest trained hard. But if you trained 99.999% of the population twice as hard, they would never become half the fighter he was.
If you want a more relevant example for you, take a look at Von Neumann. A notable prodigy, he performed incredible feats, including massive mathematical computations, without having any clue how he did it. According to eye-witnesses, he would have a quasi-seizure, rock back and forth, and then spew whatever answer he needed, or some brilliant innovation. Feynman's accounts are remarkable. Feynman is also a fantastic example of how innovators can be completely lazy, intuitive, and just happen to strike intellectual gold through pure genetic luck.
Regardless, it doesn't matter. Your argument doesn't work either way -- especially if you consider that Bob's parents "owned" him. Your argument is a flawed reductio ad absurdum; it goes something like this:
"Slavery is wrong. If a moral system validates slavery ethically, it is unsupportable. Owning someone constitutes slavery. Thus, if someone is able to own someone else, the moral system that validated that act is unsupportable. If personal property property rights are foremost, then Alice's ownership of Bob might trump Bob's right to be free. Thus, the idea that "personal property rights are foremost" is false."
However, inside of that argument, you assume something (we like to call it modus tollens):
"Bob is an object that may be owned by someone, such as Alice."
Now, take the statements: "Bob is an object that may be owned by someone" & "owning someone constitutes slavery" & "if a moral system validates slavery ethically, it is unsupportable."
You'll note that your premises involve a contradiction -- namely, that your argument ASSUMES Bob can be owned legitimately, which kind of negates the purpose of proving that "HEY UNDER THIS SYSTEM BOB COULD BE OWNED LEGITIMATELY -- THAT IS WAY FUCKED UP". Arguing that his PARENTS might "own" him doesn't help that fact.
Listen, you can't have it both ways. IF it is OK (e.g., morally acceptable as long as it's his _parents_ who own him) for Bob to BE personal property, then you can't complain that he is ALLOWED to be personal property (i.e., a slave) under your made-up system.
If it's not OK for Bob to be owned by someone else (AS IS THE CASE IN AMERICA AND ALMOST ALL OF SOCIETY), then it is not a personal property issue at all, and therefore personal freedoms can claim the trump card.
You can't combat the argument that "personal property rights are foremost" by then claiming that something we don't consider personal property in any modern society IS in fact personal property. That's like saying we should be able to convict random Australians of US law (e.g., subjecting Australians to a class of law to which they clearly don't belong).
Here are the options. If you ACCEPT that people can be personal property (which nobody does, because it's morally reprehensible, which is the whole frigging idea you are trying to exploit): Bob's parents own Bob, and sell him to Alice. Everything's hunky-dory, as long as you ASSUME it's OK FOR BOB TO BE OWNED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
If you do NOT accept that people can be personal property (e.g., you're not living in the 1800s), then personal property claims do not apply when Alice claims to enslave Bob, since he is not able to be a piece of property. Instead, personal freedoms would apply.
I hope you get it now. I really hope you don't use that logic in real life; it's killer.
It is a simple psychological tool, called the stick. Sometimes the stick works with one kid, and sometimes only the carrot works.
As I worked extensively on a thesis that covered long-term results of physical discipline in American households, I can tell you with near-perfect statistical authority that "the stick" is a really bad idea. Not only does it not work in the short term (it turns out children are much more likely to subvert a parent's will when spanked), but in the long term, people who were spanked are much more likely to exhibit a wide variety of behaviors that we don't like.
For example, it turns out that people who are spanked are much more likely to: commit aggressive felonies, including sexual aggression and rape, be involved in domestic violence, develop a number of anxiety-related disorders, and detach from their parents at a young age (e.g., hate their parents). You can read about some of the effects here.
Most often, people who spank are really just manifesting their own rage, and inability to control it. They rationalize it with stupid "common knowledge" about how it's good for the kid, or he/she "had it coming." Of course, the truth is that often, these parents would rather scare their kids senseless than deal with the real problems of raising children. To each his own I guess.
Bull. You're trying to have it both ways in your argument. You can't say that someone CAN be owned but then deny that they were owned by themselves or some other entity before! What happens, SUDDENLY something becomes property where that classification was previously completely unavailable?
Anyway, I would argue that I definitely DO own myself, more than any other person possibly could. You say "People do not own themselves, because then people could sell themselves as slaves (which is entirely different from merely working at a job, in much the same way that an outright sale is different from a rental), or incur debts which result in being seized and auctioned like any other property."
I completely agree. This is something you COULD do, were it not for the laws in this country. Imagine if slavery were legal (which you HAVE to assume in order for Alice to enslave Bob, and your argument to work). If I wanted to, I could definitely sell myself into slavery, and if I so desired, attempt to repay outstanding debts with my personal freedom.
To say that one could be forced to surrender his freedom due to outstanding debts depends on the value upon which your ownership of yourself is placed. In America, that value is nearly inviolable (see: bankruptcy).
You can't say "people are not property at all" to quash objections after making an assumption of the ability to enslave another person. Either people ARE property or they're not. If they ARE, then it's a personal property issue. If they're NOT, your scenario is impossible (e.g., it's impossible for Alice to enslave Bob).
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Actually, since I am no longer involved in the firm, I don't have a vested interest in SOX at all. I personally don't think the SOX compliance market has much more growth in it; the amount of FUD and lobbying against it is too great.
You're analyzing a causal effect that just isn't true. Your "stats", while accurate, don't necessarily have any connection to the law itself being bad. For example, here's another stat: since the passage of SOX, there hasn't been a major corporate accounting scandal even approaching the scale of Enron or WorldCom. Hurray! SOX is a success!
Of course, you must realize that neither of those statements is valid in any way. Enron and WorldCom were both instances where people did things that were massively illegal under existing statutes, so SOX could only have have helped early detection, not prevention. When smart people want to lie, cheat, and steal like crazy, there's very little you can do to stop them. While I know less about WorldCom, I definitely don't think SOX could have stopped Enron.
The true cause of a lot of the buybacks and movement away from domestic IPOs is fear: the business media is saturated with negative press about SOX -- all based on interviews with random executives who are realistically tertiary to the SOX process. If you ask the CEO of a major corporation if he likes SOX, of course he's going to say no. Know why? Because if any of the stuff in his accounting statements is false, he is now personally liable! And traditionally, that same CEO had no real knowledge of what all the financials even WERE. But now, some error could land him in jail for a decade or two. Does that mean it's a bad idea? Hell no! If the executive management can go to jail for material misstatements, you can be damn sure that the financials are going to be correct before they go out the door. And THAT, my friend, is the point.
I mentioned it briefly, but did not elaborate. It's the fear tactics of "oh it costs so much money" that frightens smaller firms. I've worked with some small cap public companies and pre-IPOs, and the management of these companies, while smart, doesn't know the first thing about governance or SOX. They're scared silly by everything they read in the business rags, and everything they hear from people who have gone through the hassle (and yes, for executives, it is a hassle) of implementing the law.
For something most slashdotters can relate to, consider this: it's somewhat like trying to get someone to switch to Linux from Windows. Even if the reality of the situation is that the person could make an easy switch in just one or two days, prevailing "knowledge" and general inertia are enough to scare almost everybody off. Even if it could actually make your life better (though I think that result is much more open to debate than the results of SOX) -- you still couldn't get people to switch. And for the most part, it has nothing to do with the real REASONS for switching.
Basically, it's been my experience that these people are prime targets of FUD. And I definitely would have fallen into the same trap if I hadn't actually done the WORK of it myself. So I don't blame you -- but it still irks me.
I co-founded a Sarbanes-Oxley consulting firm a couple of years ago, and I can definitively say that this is not an accurate view of what SOX has done for investors. This is the "typical" line you hear from corporate types, one that's been fed by a huge PR machine -- and it's THAT machine that is primarily responsible for the symptoms you mention here.
All you hear about is how SOX costs are outrageous, and then get people scratching their heads and saying "well what does it really do?" Just because the answer to that question isn't obvious to Joe Blow doesn't mean it's not a good answer. Turns out that factually, and by factually I mean according to the data, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance is very beneficial for most companies. SOX compliance and good governance often results not only in increased investor confidence (almost two-fold increases in reported confidence in most studies), but also increased operational efficiency. In the cases of banks and large companies that process millions of transactions daily, it turns out that implementing controls to figure out WHERE all of that money goes actually reduces losses and streamlines business processes. Go figure.
The ironic thing is that most of what is entailed by SOX is really just honest business. So companies can't use mark-to-market accounting, or hide losses in front corporations -- is that really a bad thing? Companies have to tell the truth about how they make their money and what they do with it? How shocking! And you know what? It hardly hurts our competitiveness. Regulations like these have been in place in Germany for years, and Japan implemented SOX-like measures with almost no problem at all. It seems that only AMERICAN corporations want to clutch their shady dealings.
And the worst part is that greedy subversive corporations are lobbying against SOX under the guise of "helping out the little guy" -- since smaller public companies really do have good reasons not to implement SOX (really, is it even possible to implement thorough financial oversight in a finance group of 2 people?). SOX is not a bad law, it's just a law that doesn't fit our view of business: greased palms and ethics to the wind. That people like you get morally indignant about how BAD it has been is just beyond the pale.
I agree -- it didn't seem like a hard concept to grasp to me.
That's true. It's why I actually spelled out the text of the article in another post -- I was just trying to clear up a wrong post I'd made earlier.
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Appeals Court Rules No Privacy Interest in IP Addresses, Email To/From Fields
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday in United States vs. Forester that IP addresses and the To/From fields in emails are the legal equivalent of dialed phone numbers and the government can get a court order to obtain them without showing probable cause as would be needed in a search one's house.
The Court extended to the internet a 1979 case known as Smith vs. Maryland, where the Supreme Court found that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the phone numbers they dial because they transmitted them to the phone company in order to complete the call. However, under Smith, the contents of the calls could not be listened in on without proving probable cause to a judge.
The Ninth Circuit, ruling in an appeal of an Ecstasy-drug ring conviction found that emails' To/From fields and visited IP addresses were the internet's equivalent of phone numbers. For example, the government could get a log that said a person visited to http://66.230.200.100/ (Wikipedia's address). However, the court suggested that knowing full urls are very close to content (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecstasy) and would likely require a higher burden of proof to obtain than mere IP addresses.
From a footnote in the decision:
Surveillance techniques that enable the government to determine not only the IP addresses that a person accesses but also the uniform resource locators (URL) of the pages visited might be more constitutionally problematic. A URL, unlike an IP address, identifies the particular document within a website that a person views and thus reveals much more information about the persons Internet activity. For instance, a surveillance technique that captures IP addresses would show only that a person visited the New York Times' website at http://www.nytimes.com/ whereas a technique that captures URLs would also divulge the particular articles the person viewed.Professor Orin Kerr questions whether the decision is about getting this information from an ISP or whether it was from a device installed on a computer surreptitiously. He suggests the latter should require a higher standard, but I'm not sure why? Perhaps it's because that might require law enforcement to enter a person's house?
Hmm. Turns out the SF gate article is misleading. Disregard the above. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/07/appeals-c ourt-r.html
Exactly. Knowing the to/from ADDRESS is one thing; knowing the _content_ of the request is another thing. This ruling allows things like:
Yeah. Bad idea.
I second this point. I work in a healthcare-related software company, and can tell you that far from being completely inelastic, medical care spending is actually quite elastic. You may need to have that chemo regardless of whether it's costly or not, but do you need to see that endocrinologist every other week?
More to the point, take a look at one of the very largest portions of healthcare spending: drugs. If you have insurance (and I live in MA, so I do =P), you'll notice that you get charged different co-pays for generic and brand-name drugs. Things like this are only the beginning of true consumer health care -- as our population gets older and health care continues to get more expensive, we're going to be paying more and more of our own health care costs.
Already, there are services to let you find cheaper or better doctors, and to stay educated about what your health care entails, so you can make smart decisions. In August 2007, Bush signed an executive order requiring health insurance providers to release their quality metrics on doctors and other providers (what, you thought that stuff didn't exist?) -- every sign points towards consumerism in medical care. So while care choices may have been price-insensitive in the past, most experts agree that those times are nearly over, much to the dismay of doctors, hospitals, and businesses that provide products for health care.
Wow. What kind of a jerk do you have to be to mod that funny?
He's absolutely right. I spent time researching in prisons, and while rape is not nearly as pervasive as the pop culture media would have you believe, it definitely occurs, especially in high security facilities. Our prison system is absolutely horrible in many ways, but the complete blind eye to horrible crimes is just sickening.
Let me tell you a story. I did my research in Ohio, where all sentences and inmate information are public (and available online). After doing some interviews with several inmates, I realized that two of the inmates I had interviewed were cellmates. Inmate #1 was a lifer; he was in for arson resulting in more than $1m in damages and killing 3 people with a sawed-off shotgun (at the same time). He was a fairly large, intimidating fellow. Inmate #2 was a small, timid guy who was pretty clearly lower down on the pecking order. Know what he was in for? 10 fucking years for FIRST TIME DRUG POSSESSION.
There's no doubt in my mind that this man was raped in prison. Now, I admit, he probably had a lot of worse drug charges that were dropped in a plea bargain for the possession, but come on. Do you think having or even selling a couple pounds of cocaine entitles you to TEN YEARS of rape and horror? Just think how long ten years is. And do you really think you're going to get functioning members of society OUT of a system like that? Yeah.
Go ahead, mod this funny.
Reductio ad absurdum doesn't mean what you think it means, or at the very least it doesn't apply here. Furthermore, RAA is a _valid_ and powerful argumentative tool, and creates no "disingenuous conclusions" whatsoever. It goes like this:
1) Assume the opposite of what you're trying to prove.
2) Show that this opposite belief necessarily entails a contradiction.
3) I should probably put profit in here somewhere.
That's not to say claims like the laptop claim you point out aren't absurd -- and indeed a logical fallacy itself. In fact, it even has a name: incomplete induction or weak induction. RAA on the other hand is actually saying "well if you believe that, everything just goes to pot, so you can't believe that." For example, you could claim that Linux is a more popular OS than Windows. I would argue that if you believe that, it creates an obvious contradiction -- more people buy and use Windows, as far as we know, than Linux. Therefore, the opposite is true, that "it is not the case that Linux is a more popular OS than Windows."
Hopefully this clears it up -- I see this error all the time among misinformed contentious geeks =P.
You had me to there. Whether pacifism is right or wrong, the conclusion that dictators or people who use violence are necessarily going to become part of the system is just false. For example, assume you had a truly pacifist society. That is to say, the grand majority of your citizens believed in pacifism. Now, Hitler's born in your society. Let's assume that pretty much nobody can really affect a society with his OWN violence; you'd have to get a group of violent people to undermine a society. So Hitler riles up some folks, and incites them to violence.
At that point, Hitler and his crew are no longer part of the society, but the remainder of the pacifist society could continue on. Hitler threatens those people with death or enslavement or whatever. That in no way means they have to comply. Take, for example, the Mennonites, who have maintained a pacifist society for quite some time now. Especially in today's globalized society, wars are some of the most ineffective ways of getting things done. For the amount that we've paid for the Iraq war, we probably could have "convinced" almost all importers and exporters of Iraqi goods to stop doing business with Iraq. Or convinced people within the Iraqi government to completely undermine Saddam. I don't know about you, but if someone offered a bounty of $100m to permanently disable a WMD site in Iraq and I was working there, you can be damn sure I'd do it. Given that most soldiers in the army surrendered in record time, I'm guessing they would have too.
A pacifist society definitely isn't impossible; it's just really really hard. Everyone in the society has to REALLY stick to pacifism -- and there's the rub. Faced with death or suffering, it turns out that almost nobody is really a pacifist =). So the problem isn't really that it's impossible, just that it's improbable.
Your analysis is not only correct, but can also be expanded. To say that people go to war only to mitigate the loss of life/suffering is not only fallacious in that instance, it is fallacious in all instances. War takes at least two parties -- an attacker and a defender, or else it's just a slaughter. If the goal of war is to minimize suffering/casualties (though those two are actually in conflict in this scenario), then no person would ever start a war.
That said, that's not what the parent poster meant. Wars are ALWAYS motivated by other factors (such as greed, in your example, or megalomania, in WWII); often the opposition to the evilly-motivated party follows the pattern described by the parent poster. For example, in your Utopian war, let's add a third party. Aside from Utopia and Biraq, there's a third party, call it the UN-ited Countries. These countries think, as your analysis suggests, that Utopia is making a big mistake, increasing the level of death and suffering for unjustified cause. So they enter the war to stave off Utopia's invasion.
This motivation, while truly only a fantasy in this scenario, could be called the pacifist case. Unfortunately, this case is often one of the last considered when going to war. More often, the war is fought for selfish or political reasons, and the pacifist justification is only added post facto. For example, in your Biraq example, after the war has devolved into a quagmire, some Utopian groups, such as Bumblepublicans, search for non-selfish reasons to justify the conflict. Like making it seem non-Utopian to suggest that removing Habbam was insufficient justification: "what, you wanted him to keep killing people over there?" Or defending blatantly horrible practices like torture: "they gotta do what they gotta do to stay alive over there; what, you want them to just lay down and die for the Berrorists?"
So yes, your analysis is correct, but the parent strikes on something deeply important to war -- the external justification of otherwise unjustified wars (of which history has a preponderance).
That's a darn well paid union worker. [. . .] Are you making these numbers up out of your hat?
Why yes, I am. You want me to make it more accurate? Fine. Let's scale BOTH salaries down to 1/3 of what I originally supposed, since that is in fact more accurate. So in the original example, it would cost you 100k/year to produce 2*250 work units (if union people worked 50 weeks a year with no holidays). Ignoring that Chinese workers often get little/no vacation or holiday time at all, and also work 12+ hours a day, it would STILL cost you ony 6k/year to produce an equivalent number of work units.
No matter how much you think I'm making up numbers, no sane person thinks that the Chinese workers are MORE expensive to do the same amount of work. Now, you can make quality arguments (though that gap is closing insanely fast), but efficiency arguments? Yeah, right. So thanks for taking an example that illustrates the BASIC point I'm making and pretending it's somehow invalid when it's not. Look around you, pal. Have you ever hired or managed in an international environment? It's just cheaper -- and cheaper is one of the best possible justifications you can ever get for doing ANYTHING in the corporate world, good or bad.
Ah, I see. You can't read. I absolutely did not say that subsidies are the only reason for offshoring.
I thought you might say this at the time. I considered rephrasing my statement to make it non-absolute, but the intentional usage of your phrasing is basically equivalent to the statement that subsidies are the only factor for off-shoring. Not only do you play UP their significance, you completely ignore any other factors (such as actual free market factors like international competition). As you said:
Absent those subsidies, there's not so much reason to move things offshore.
Unless you suddenly started writing with an accent, I read that as: without subsidies, there's no reason to move corporate structures offshore ('not so much' being a common sarcastic phrase generally used in an ironic fashion -- the proper usage of ironic). Even if I only read it as: "without subsidies, there are only minor reasons to ...," my criticism would still apply. Having studied how businesses actually work both inside and out, I can guarantee you that no company I have ever seen has EVER decided to offshore for ANY other reason than to cut labor costs due to inflated American wages. Well, except a couple trying to escape our legal system, but that's another matter.
My point there was just that the labor market is extremely non-free, and is tilted in favor of the corporate manager class to an extreme degree. You haven't disagreed with that; you've just made up strawman figures to support the arguments of those managers.
I agree that the labor market isn't free. However, as someone else noted, I'm not sure you understand exactly what a free market is. A free market would completely eliminate unions, and labor laws. These both artificially fix labor prices -- for example, barring people under 12 from working eliminates a huge source of cheap labor in America. If those people could work legally, it's likely they could drive down the costs of goods and services. Now, I don't think it's bad that the free market is restricted to eliminate those people from the workforce.
While I don't agree that the labor MARKET is tilted toward managerial-types, I agree that they pay structure certainly is, and artificially so. The problem is current structure of corporations -- to become a high-level manager, you have to "rise through the ranks" usually. This means that with each successful promotion, you generally get a raise, and promotions generally move people away from production, and into people or strategic management. However, it's certainly an available (and often obvious) argument that the actual work of managers can be less valua
What? I think you must be horribly confused. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do this math:
Now, which is the more economically efficient? Unions are effectively a way to establish control in an otherwise free market (the market of wages). Though unioners may FEEL like they deserve 100k for their work, the fact that someone else can and will do the work for much less by definition means that their work is not WORTH spending 100k. Causing US companies to pay a premium for not-so-premium labor does hurt American competitiveness.
Whether the cost of decreased competitiveness is worth it so our citizens have a better quality of life is a different question entirely. But to say that the only reason for offshoring is subsidies is just ridiculous.
Who mods this stuff informative/insightful? To wit:
Hell they are EARBUDS!!! So far I've notice two things about earbuds. They are uncomfortable, and they are worthless compared to my headphones.So let's see if I get the gist of your argument. Your earbuds suck, you've never owned high-quality earbuds, therefore they don't exist? That's kind of like saying my Ford Pinto is a terrible car, but I've never had a different car, therefore there are no good cars. If you'd ever TRIED Shures, you'd see why they cost ridiculous sums of money. You might be making the same ridiculous argument about your vaunted "headphones". Let's move on:
I don't exactly see why getting a "higher quality" headset would be desirable if it creates less of a difference instead of more of a difference between two bit rates. Higher quality means I should hear everything.Terrible, again. Since you clearly didn't understand their explanation and others in these comments, let's return to an analogy. You have two cars (analogous to our earbuds): a Ford Pinto and a Bugatti Veyron. You decide to upgrade them both (like the upgrade from 128 to 256). So you slap a turbocharger on each. Much to your shock, you discover that the turbo has a much greater effect on the Pinto than the Bugatti (gasp).
In our earphone example, it is not only reasonable, but pretty clear, that the pod-phones don't reproduce audio as well as the Shures. One common problem, especially in earbuds, is that they suck in the midrange. When your highs get clipped off (as in 128k audio, but NOT 256k), the main source of "highs" comes in the midrange. Thus, adding clear highs can enhance the strengths of the pod-phones, making up for the terrible midrange. However, the Shures reproduce the midrange well, so it's harder to tell that clear highs have been added. Hopefully that's a clear enough explanation for you.
Yikes, that's a terrible oversimplification of philosophical ethics. Objectivism and relativism are by far not the most meaningful or common distinctions in ethics. While it's true that the dichotomy between them has been a major driver for many ethical debates (see: Socrates), those are definitely not the only positions available.
For example, there is also non-cognitivism, another common position, which says that ethical statements have no truth value at all. Thus, believing that something is right or wrong does not qualify as a "belief" as we normally consider it in epistemological terms -- when we make ethical statements, we're just pouring out nonsense emotions.
How does this relate to altruism? It makes a huge difference. Of the three listed positions (there are many more), only objectivism would seem to promote altruism wholesale. If you know what the right thing to do is, it's much easier to do it. If you think, as a relativist might, that "hey I don't know whether that guy thinks me giving him this hamburger is right or wrong... he could be a vegetarian", you might be less likely to commit altruistic acts. Under extreme relativism, it would literally be impossible to behave altruistically -- your system of ethics is so distinct from everyone else's that you could never do the "right" thing in their eyes. And non-cognitivists would deny that altruism is even possible, since altruistic acts assume that there IS a right thing to do.
It's a freakin' mess out there, eh?
Those in the art call this kin selection. Nothing original here, just some evidence to support what psychologists have thought for decades.
Precisely. I'd also have to point out one of the most interesting "altruistic" behaviors -- tipping. While this research really just finds a biological basis for kin selection, it's very hard to deny that people make economically ill-advised decisions all the time.
Next time you're at a restaurant by yourself, do you think you'll tip the waiter/waitress? Why? I know that often times, especially when traveling, there is absolutely no chance I'll ever see that person again. If I just paid my bill exactly and left, the most it would warrant is an exasperated huff from the server when the table is cleared. Probably the only person that would even remember I didn't tip is me.
And it's not because I'd rather give up that fiver, or whatever. It's because it feels good to reward someone for an acceptable job, and to think that you're the kind of person who leaves good tips. Hence, TFA.
Just as a factual aside, that's not true. You can be a "conscientious objector" regardless of religious designation-- you need consistent evidence that you have been a pacifist for some time. Often, these individuals are assigned to non-combat roles, though antimilitarists can also be assigned to civilian service duty.
I completely agree -- interest can help drive a lot of it. But talent matters a lot, too. Even if you loved programming, if you had an IQ of 70, I can guarantee you wouldn't be able to do it well.
Oh, please. You're honestly telling me that you don't think people are naturally talented at things? You must be out of your mind. Let's put it this way: during high school, I was considered to be excellent at math. I competed in bunches of math competitions and won, I always scored high on every test, and so on, and so forth. Now, I must admit, that during those 4 years, I never (literally, never) opened a math textbook outside of class. I never studied, I hardly paid attention. I'm just being honest. I actually hate math -- despite the fact that it's probably my greatest talent. In college, I majored in philosophy, psychology, and german.
If you honestly think that any amount of XYZing will make you XYZ with the best, you need to get your head checked. Sure, the BEST are both talented AND hard-working. Take, for example, a legend like Muhammad Ali. Now, The Greatest trained hard. But if you trained 99.999% of the population twice as hard, they would never become half the fighter he was.
If you want a more relevant example for you, take a look at Von Neumann. A notable prodigy, he performed incredible feats, including massive mathematical computations, without having any clue how he did it. According to eye-witnesses, he would have a quasi-seizure, rock back and forth, and then spew whatever answer he needed, or some brilliant innovation. Feynman's accounts are remarkable. Feynman is also a fantastic example of how innovators can be completely lazy, intuitive, and just happen to strike intellectual gold through pure genetic luck.
To sum up that counter-argument, bah humbug!
Regardless, it doesn't matter. Your argument doesn't work either way -- especially if you consider that Bob's parents "owned" him. Your argument is a flawed reductio ad absurdum; it goes something like this: "Slavery is wrong. If a moral system validates slavery ethically, it is unsupportable. Owning someone constitutes slavery. Thus, if someone is able to own someone else, the moral system that validated that act is unsupportable. If personal property property rights are foremost, then Alice's ownership of Bob might trump Bob's right to be free. Thus, the idea that "personal property rights are foremost" is false." However, inside of that argument, you assume something (we like to call it modus tollens): "Bob is an object that may be owned by someone, such as Alice." Now, take the statements: "Bob is an object that may be owned by someone" & "owning someone constitutes slavery" & "if a moral system validates slavery ethically, it is unsupportable." You'll note that your premises involve a contradiction -- namely, that your argument ASSUMES Bob can be owned legitimately, which kind of negates the purpose of proving that "HEY UNDER THIS SYSTEM BOB COULD BE OWNED LEGITIMATELY -- THAT IS WAY FUCKED UP". Arguing that his PARENTS might "own" him doesn't help that fact. Listen, you can't have it both ways. IF it is OK (e.g., morally acceptable as long as it's his _parents_ who own him) for Bob to BE personal property, then you can't complain that he is ALLOWED to be personal property (i.e., a slave) under your made-up system. If it's not OK for Bob to be owned by someone else (AS IS THE CASE IN AMERICA AND ALMOST ALL OF SOCIETY), then it is not a personal property issue at all, and therefore personal freedoms can claim the trump card. You can't combat the argument that "personal property rights are foremost" by then claiming that something we don't consider personal property in any modern society IS in fact personal property. That's like saying we should be able to convict random Australians of US law (e.g., subjecting Australians to a class of law to which they clearly don't belong). Here are the options. If you ACCEPT that people can be personal property (which nobody does, because it's morally reprehensible, which is the whole frigging idea you are trying to exploit): Bob's parents own Bob, and sell him to Alice. Everything's hunky-dory, as long as you ASSUME it's OK FOR BOB TO BE OWNED IN THE FIRST PLACE. If you do NOT accept that people can be personal property (e.g., you're not living in the 1800s), then personal property claims do not apply when Alice claims to enslave Bob, since he is not able to be a piece of property. Instead, personal freedoms would apply. I hope you get it now. I really hope you don't use that logic in real life; it's killer.
As I worked extensively on a thesis that covered long-term results of physical discipline in American households, I can tell you with near-perfect statistical authority that "the stick" is a really bad idea. Not only does it not work in the short term (it turns out children are much more likely to subvert a parent's will when spanked), but in the long term, people who were spanked are much more likely to exhibit a wide variety of behaviors that we don't like.
For example, it turns out that people who are spanked are much more likely to: commit aggressive felonies, including sexual aggression and rape, be involved in domestic violence, develop a number of anxiety-related disorders, and detach from their parents at a young age (e.g., hate their parents). You can read about some of the effects here.
Most often, people who spank are really just manifesting their own rage, and inability to control it. They rationalize it with stupid "common knowledge" about how it's good for the kid, or he/she "had it coming." Of course, the truth is that often, these parents would rather scare their kids senseless than deal with the real problems of raising children. To each his own I guess.
Bull. You're trying to have it both ways in your argument. You can't say that someone CAN be owned but then deny that they were owned by themselves or some other entity before! What happens, SUDDENLY something becomes property where that classification was previously completely unavailable? Anyway, I would argue that I definitely DO own myself, more than any other person possibly could. You say "People do not own themselves, because then people could sell themselves as slaves (which is entirely different from merely working at a job, in much the same way that an outright sale is different from a rental), or incur debts which result in being seized and auctioned like any other property." I completely agree. This is something you COULD do, were it not for the laws in this country. Imagine if slavery were legal (which you HAVE to assume in order for Alice to enslave Bob, and your argument to work). If I wanted to, I could definitely sell myself into slavery, and if I so desired, attempt to repay outstanding debts with my personal freedom. To say that one could be forced to surrender his freedom due to outstanding debts depends on the value upon which your ownership of yourself is placed. In America, that value is nearly inviolable (see: bankruptcy). You can't say "people are not property at all" to quash objections after making an assumption of the ability to enslave another person. Either people ARE property or they're not. If they ARE, then it's a personal property issue. If they're NOT, your scenario is impossible (e.g., it's impossible for Alice to enslave Bob).