I'm not quite as cynical (clever?) as you, but my first thought was that it is easier to protect wealth earned the day before the wedding than it is to protect wealth earned the day after, in the event of a divorce.
There is also the old-fashioned idea that a house is a place to live. Despite your assertion, you don't necessarily have to sell your house. Sure, life happens, and you might find yourself in a position where you do in fact have to sell your house. But that's not the most common scenario - most commonly people sell their house b/c they choose to move (better job, kids, whatever). Buying a house certainly limits your mobility options, but doesn't have to be a risky investment. It doesn't have to be viewed as an investment at all. You gotta live somewhere, buying on layaway is better than renting in the long term.
WTF is with you people all anthromorphizing a web search engine?!
That's how it's marketed, as your personal friend in a pocket. Have you seen the Sam L Jackson commercial, where at the end as his date shows up, he tells Siri to "take the night off", like she's an actual servant he doesn't want interrupting his date? I think it's creepy, but I also don't understand how anthropomorphizing food is a successful marketing strategy.
Using war time examples to show that the US is "bad" is not the way to do so. War is bad, it's ugly and horrible. You obviously get the hate factor since it sounds like you have been a victim. Saying the US is bad because [insert anything from a war] does not get the point across, and becomes very debatable because, well, it's a war.
While wartime sounds like a reasonable justification, it loses its appeal a bit when we are ALWAYS at war and the battlefield is EVERYWHERE. If we are going to excuse bad behavior b/c it's "wartime", we need to be a lot clearer on when and where we are at war. And hold our leaders accountable for their warmongering.
You know, I've often wondered why comma delimited became the standard, rather than pipe delimited. You run into a pipe in text data far less often than you run into a comma. No need for text qualifiers with a pipe delimiter. Is MS Excel the culprit?
Emergency departments are required to treat people. They will stabilize any immediately life threatening problems, then kick you out to seek ongoing care at the appropriate place - clinic, primary care, etc. All of whom charge. You won't die of trauma b/c you can't afford care, but the ED can't treat chronic illnesses that will eventually kill you without treatment, but won't kill you right now. That sort of treatment requires money.
What kind of absurdly intrusive government would try to criminalize blowjobs?
So true. Time and again we have seen that criminalizing these sorts of activities simply creates a black market, with the attending rises in crime and violence. The role of government here is clearly education and regulation.
It sounds like you found your job morally defensible, in and of itself. Me, I don't think I've ever spoken to a telemarketer that I didn't get the impression they were trying to scam me. But maybe I'm just overly cynical. Anyway, my point wasn't so much that all telemarketers are scum, so much as the fact that they are "just doing their job" in no way indemnifies them from their actions. If they are one of the telemarketers perpetrating a scam on behalf of their company, the fact that they are doing it for a paycheck doesn't make it somehow okay.
There is no way in hell that a politician is going to pay nearly a billion dollars to get into an office that won't pay out more than a couple of million in salary and perks over it's term without getting payback from somewhere else.
Why not? He spent $1B of other people's money to get the position that pays him a couple million in salary and perks. No moral fiber necessary at all to view that as a decent angle.
I fail to understand how the fact that they are doing this for money, rather than kicks, makes it ok. If they were calling me up, annoying me and wasting my time, simply because that was a hobby of theirs, I doubt you would defend them. But because they aren't doing it just to annoy me, but rather doing it despite knowing it annoys me in order to get money, I should have a higher opinion of them? Mafia goons that break the knees of debtors are just doing their jobs, but I doubt that defense holds much sway with you. While you obviously feel that the difference in degree is important, I feel the fundamental lack of respect for me as a human being is the defining characteristic. If the only justification you have for your actions is "Nothing personal, I'm just doing my job" then you are admitting that you do not think of me as a person, just another aspect of your job. If you can't treat me as a person AND do your job, your job is indefensible.
Cool, so now all we have to do is militarily defeat the TSA (which I imagine means overthrowing the US government) and we can punish these agents for "following orders"? Because I'm pretty sure that if Germany had won, Eichmann would have had quite a different fate.
No proof? You have no idea what experience he may have had in life that led him to his faith. If you then want to insist on scientific proof, let me ask you - does your wife love you? The last person to speak to you, what did they say? If you answered either of these question other than "I don't know", then you believe something based on nothing more than your anecdotal experience. Why do you insist on a level of rationality in his critical thinking that you don't require of your own?
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
The classic rebuttal is that, basically, you misunderstand omnipotence. "All powerful" does not mean "Capable of doing anything", it means "Capable of doing anything which is possible". As in "possesses all powers that exist". So, even God is constrained, for instance he can not make a married bachelor, that is logically impossible. Given that context, the conflict between evil and free will constrains God; to allow free will requires the possibility of evil acts. Apparently he went for free will.
Of course you can say faith is useful and even verifiable, given certain assumptions. To the faithful, faith is very useful - it provides comfort and direction. It can provide health benefits, such as reduced stress. It provides a built-in community of support. It provides a motivation for avoiding some unhealthy behaviors, such as drunkenness and promiscuity.
And the faithful experience phenomena that they interpret as verifying their faith. It isn't scientific evidence, but really, no one requires scientifically rigorous evidence for everything they accept in their life. Every human being on the planet has some beliefs, with varying degrees of reasonableness, that they accept without scientific evidence. Arguing that religious people must be idiots or mentally deficient, because they apply a common human practice in an area you don't, displays the exact sort of non-thinking judgment you seem to be decrying.
They're also good for social events where you want to pretty much constantly have a drink in your hand, but don't want to get drunk. Drink 6 Bud Lights over a few hours, no problem. 6 high gravity beers (say Bell's Two Hearted), you might be drunker than you want.
Yes, I understand that. But my argument is that I was told "Here, this is an authorized account. Go use it thusly." If I am never informed at any later time "Your account is no longer authorized. Stop using it.", how can I know that it is unauthorized? It works exactly like it always did, no one has told me anything different. I am not an agent of the system (or at least, not an authorization/deauthorization agent), how can it possibly be my responsibility to determine my own authorization status? I maintain that until I am told that I am unauthorized, either explicitly or implicitly through failure of my credentials, that I can not be legally held responsible for unauthorized access. If the speed limit on a road drops, but it isn't posted (for instance, the sign is vandalized or removed) then my speeding ticket will be thrown out. How is this different?
The important part is that the user, having broken the ToS, is no longer authorised by the system owner to access that computer system.
While I understand that is the argument, it seems faulty to me. If I break the TOS, that is cause for me to lose authorization. Once I have been authorized, however, until the system owner/system actively removes that authorization (or it naturally expires due to policy or something), I don't see how I can be considered unauthorized. I, personally, do not have the power (legally or technically) to authorize or deny authorization to access the system. How can my actions therefore determine my authorization without some action on the part of the system owner/system?
I wouldn't worry about it too much. Even without any actual political power, the Republicans can still threaten to call the Dems mean names in public, which seems to be about all it takes to oppose them.
I think you are confusing some different facts. yes, government pays for a majority of ER services, via Medicaid and Medicare. The exact percentages vary, but it's generally around 40-60% of ER visits. However, the 10-20% or so that neither insurance nor the patient (cash) pay for IS NOT paid by the government. That gets eaten by the hospital. Which is part of why your ER bill is so high - YOU are subsidizing the people that won't/can't pay their bill.
I think the point is that the only "crime" he committed was subverting the government's ability to monitor his perfectly legal transactions. Why is that a crime?
To me, the issue is the reason so much is unclear, i.e. the local police department took Zimmerman's word that is was self-defense and did no more than take witness statements. Based on the admitted killer's assertion it was self-defense, the local cops chose not to investigate. So valuable time was lost before more responsible law enforcement was brought in, as I recall in response to the parents claiming it was a racially motivated crime. Race shouldn't be the issue, but law enforcement was unwilling to investigate the death of a citizen at the hands of another until race was used to force the issue. That's the real story, to my mind.
Then again, I've never actually heard of a case of someone being refused critical care because they couldn't pay.
That's actually a huge part of the problem. Critical care is offered to those who can't afford it, b/c as a society we haven't quite yet decided that letting someone die b/c they are poor is okay. However, critical care is much more expensive than earlier interventions. So since I can't afford health care, I let my problem fester until it becomes critical, then go get it treated on the hospital's dime. I have worse health outcomes and the hospital has more costs than if I had come in earlier. And of course, the hospital (or clinic or whatever) then gets to try and figure out how to create a sustainable business model where an unknown (as in unpredictable from quarter to quarter) percentage of their costs don't correlate to an income stream. Frankly, we're in the worst of both worlds. Just socialist enough to see the costs to society, capitalistic enough to hand the profits generated by those costs over to private businesses.
Exactly this. If it is possible for two citizens to interact in a manner that results in one killing the other, yet both acted completely within the law at all times, then the law is completely useless. Well, to the citizens. It seems to have served admirably here as a justification to a police department that, for whatever reason, really didn't feel like investigating the death of a citizen.
I have all of human history showing an exponential technology growth, baring government intervention.
I won't get into the philosophical counterargument to your assertion that we should not constrain ourselves today in order to make tomorrow better - I think Mr. Coward did a good job of responding to that. I do have a couple of issues with this statement, though. First, it implies that government is bad for technological progress. I realize that another core conservative tenet is that government can't do anything well, and if it does, private markets could do it better. But that philosophy is nowhere more false than with technology. I'm sure government regulation has hindered some aspects of progress, but it has been a tremendous boon in some areas; space exploration and the Internet jump out as immediate examples. You can argue (and I've seen people do so) that these things could have been accomplished without government, but in reality, they weren't. We have government agencies to thank for those technologies.
Second, you continue to assert that the entirety of human history demonstrates an exponential growth curve in technology. It does not. Take the Bronze Age, for example. A 2000 year period of human history dominated by a single technological advance. I'm sure there were other advances, but it's hardly an exponential growth curve there. And then there's the Dark Ages, where technology and science regressed. The fact is, the current pace of technological advance is incredibly recent. Taking the whole of human history, this exponential curve is still a statistical anomaly. Simple common sense suggests that it is unsustainable - nothing else ever has sustained this sort of growth. Maybe I'm wrong and you're right, but embracing a currently unsustainable lifestyle b/c somewhere down the line someone will figure out how to sustain it based on this sort of optimism sounds less like an economic philosophy and more like a justification.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not quite as cynical (clever?) as you, but my first thought was that it is easier to protect wealth earned the day before the wedding than it is to protect wealth earned the day after, in the event of a divorce.
There is also the old-fashioned idea that a house is a place to live. Despite your assertion, you don't necessarily have to sell your house. Sure, life happens, and you might find yourself in a position where you do in fact have to sell your house. But that's not the most common scenario - most commonly people sell their house b/c they choose to move (better job, kids, whatever). Buying a house certainly limits your mobility options, but doesn't have to be a risky investment. It doesn't have to be viewed as an investment at all. You gotta live somewhere, buying on layaway is better than renting in the long term.
WTF is with you people all anthromorphizing a web search engine?!
That's how it's marketed, as your personal friend in a pocket. Have you seen the Sam L Jackson commercial, where at the end as his date shows up, he tells Siri to "take the night off", like she's an actual servant he doesn't want interrupting his date? I think it's creepy, but I also don't understand how anthropomorphizing food is a successful marketing strategy.
Using war time examples to show that the US is "bad" is not the way to do so. War is bad, it's ugly and horrible. You obviously get the hate factor since it sounds like you have been a victim. Saying the US is bad because [insert anything from a war] does not get the point across, and becomes very debatable because, well, it's a war.
While wartime sounds like a reasonable justification, it loses its appeal a bit when we are ALWAYS at war and the battlefield is EVERYWHERE. If we are going to excuse bad behavior b/c it's "wartime", we need to be a lot clearer on when and where we are at war. And hold our leaders accountable for their warmongering.
You know, I've often wondered why comma delimited became the standard, rather than pipe delimited. You run into a pipe in text data far less often than you run into a comma. No need for text qualifiers with a pipe delimiter. Is MS Excel the culprit?
Emergency departments are required to treat people. They will stabilize any immediately life threatening problems, then kick you out to seek ongoing care at the appropriate place - clinic, primary care, etc. All of whom charge. You won't die of trauma b/c you can't afford care, but the ED can't treat chronic illnesses that will eventually kill you without treatment, but won't kill you right now. That sort of treatment requires money.
Yep. Even with the gloves, I'm pretty sure boxers would shatter their hands if they were hitting as hard as football players.
What kind of absurdly intrusive government would try to criminalize blowjobs?
So true. Time and again we have seen that criminalizing these sorts of activities simply creates a black market, with the attending rises in crime and violence. The role of government here is clearly education and regulation.
It sounds like you found your job morally defensible, in and of itself. Me, I don't think I've ever spoken to a telemarketer that I didn't get the impression they were trying to scam me. But maybe I'm just overly cynical. Anyway, my point wasn't so much that all telemarketers are scum, so much as the fact that they are "just doing their job" in no way indemnifies them from their actions. If they are one of the telemarketers perpetrating a scam on behalf of their company, the fact that they are doing it for a paycheck doesn't make it somehow okay.
There is no way in hell that a politician is going to pay nearly a billion dollars to get into an office that won't pay out more than a couple of million in salary and perks over it's term without getting payback from somewhere else.
Why not? He spent $1B of other people's money to get the position that pays him a couple million in salary and perks. No moral fiber necessary at all to view that as a decent angle.
Telemarketers are just doing their job.
I fail to understand how the fact that they are doing this for money, rather than kicks, makes it ok. If they were calling me up, annoying me and wasting my time, simply because that was a hobby of theirs, I doubt you would defend them. But because they aren't doing it just to annoy me, but rather doing it despite knowing it annoys me in order to get money, I should have a higher opinion of them? Mafia goons that break the knees of debtors are just doing their jobs, but I doubt that defense holds much sway with you. While you obviously feel that the difference in degree is important, I feel the fundamental lack of respect for me as a human being is the defining characteristic. If the only justification you have for your actions is "Nothing personal, I'm just doing my job" then you are admitting that you do not think of me as a person, just another aspect of your job. If you can't treat me as a person AND do your job, your job is indefensible.
Cool, so now all we have to do is militarily defeat the TSA (which I imagine means overthrowing the US government) and we can punish these agents for "following orders"? Because I'm pretty sure that if Germany had won, Eichmann would have had quite a different fate.
No proof? You have no idea what experience he may have had in life that led him to his faith. If you then want to insist on scientific proof, let me ask you - does your wife love you? The last person to speak to you, what did they say? If you answered either of these question other than "I don't know", then you believe something based on nothing more than your anecdotal experience. Why do you insist on a level of rationality in his critical thinking that you don't require of your own?
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
The classic rebuttal is that, basically, you misunderstand omnipotence. "All powerful" does not mean "Capable of doing anything", it means "Capable of doing anything which is possible". As in "possesses all powers that exist". So, even God is constrained, for instance he can not make a married bachelor, that is logically impossible. Given that context, the conflict between evil and free will constrains God; to allow free will requires the possibility of evil acts. Apparently he went for free will.
Of course you can say faith is useful and even verifiable, given certain assumptions. To the faithful, faith is very useful - it provides comfort and direction. It can provide health benefits, such as reduced stress. It provides a built-in community of support. It provides a motivation for avoiding some unhealthy behaviors, such as drunkenness and promiscuity.
And the faithful experience phenomena that they interpret as verifying their faith. It isn't scientific evidence, but really, no one requires scientifically rigorous evidence for everything they accept in their life. Every human being on the planet has some beliefs, with varying degrees of reasonableness, that they accept without scientific evidence. Arguing that religious people must be idiots or mentally deficient, because they apply a common human practice in an area you don't, displays the exact sort of non-thinking judgment you seem to be decrying.
They're also good for social events where you want to pretty much constantly have a drink in your hand, but don't want to get drunk. Drink 6 Bud Lights over a few hours, no problem. 6 high gravity beers (say Bell's Two Hearted), you might be drunker than you want.
Yes, I understand that. But my argument is that I was told "Here, this is an authorized account. Go use it thusly." If I am never informed at any later time "Your account is no longer authorized. Stop using it.", how can I know that it is unauthorized? It works exactly like it always did, no one has told me anything different. I am not an agent of the system (or at least, not an authorization/deauthorization agent), how can it possibly be my responsibility to determine my own authorization status? I maintain that until I am told that I am unauthorized, either explicitly or implicitly through failure of my credentials, that I can not be legally held responsible for unauthorized access. If the speed limit on a road drops, but it isn't posted (for instance, the sign is vandalized or removed) then my speeding ticket will be thrown out. How is this different?
The important part is that the user, having broken the ToS, is no longer authorised by the system owner to access that computer system.
While I understand that is the argument, it seems faulty to me. If I break the TOS, that is cause for me to lose authorization. Once I have been authorized, however, until the system owner/system actively removes that authorization (or it naturally expires due to policy or something), I don't see how I can be considered unauthorized. I, personally, do not have the power (legally or technically) to authorize or deny authorization to access the system. How can my actions therefore determine my authorization without some action on the part of the system owner/system?
I wouldn't worry about it too much. Even without any actual political power, the Republicans can still threaten to call the Dems mean names in public, which seems to be about all it takes to oppose them.
I think you are confusing some different facts. yes, government pays for a majority of ER services, via Medicaid and Medicare. The exact percentages vary, but it's generally around 40-60% of ER visits. However, the 10-20% or so that neither insurance nor the patient (cash) pay for IS NOT paid by the government. That gets eaten by the hospital. Which is part of why your ER bill is so high - YOU are subsidizing the people that won't/can't pay their bill.
I think the point is that the only "crime" he committed was subverting the government's ability to monitor his perfectly legal transactions. Why is that a crime?
To me, the issue is the reason so much is unclear, i.e. the local police department took Zimmerman's word that is was self-defense and did no more than take witness statements. Based on the admitted killer's assertion it was self-defense, the local cops chose not to investigate. So valuable time was lost before more responsible law enforcement was brought in, as I recall in response to the parents claiming it was a racially motivated crime. Race shouldn't be the issue, but law enforcement was unwilling to investigate the death of a citizen at the hands of another until race was used to force the issue. That's the real story, to my mind.
Then again, I've never actually heard of a case of someone being refused critical care because they couldn't pay.
That's actually a huge part of the problem. Critical care is offered to those who can't afford it, b/c as a society we haven't quite yet decided that letting someone die b/c they are poor is okay. However, critical care is much more expensive than earlier interventions. So since I can't afford health care, I let my problem fester until it becomes critical, then go get it treated on the hospital's dime. I have worse health outcomes and the hospital has more costs than if I had come in earlier. And of course, the hospital (or clinic or whatever) then gets to try and figure out how to create a sustainable business model where an unknown (as in unpredictable from quarter to quarter) percentage of their costs don't correlate to an income stream. Frankly, we're in the worst of both worlds. Just socialist enough to see the costs to society, capitalistic enough to hand the profits generated by those costs over to private businesses.
Exactly this. If it is possible for two citizens to interact in a manner that results in one killing the other, yet both acted completely within the law at all times, then the law is completely useless. Well, to the citizens. It seems to have served admirably here as a justification to a police department that, for whatever reason, really didn't feel like investigating the death of a citizen.
I have all of human history showing an exponential technology growth, baring government intervention.
I won't get into the philosophical counterargument to your assertion that we should not constrain ourselves today in order to make tomorrow better - I think Mr. Coward did a good job of responding to that. I do have a couple of issues with this statement, though. First, it implies that government is bad for technological progress. I realize that another core conservative tenet is that government can't do anything well, and if it does, private markets could do it better. But that philosophy is nowhere more false than with technology. I'm sure government regulation has hindered some aspects of progress, but it has been a tremendous boon in some areas; space exploration and the Internet jump out as immediate examples. You can argue (and I've seen people do so) that these things could have been accomplished without government, but in reality, they weren't. We have government agencies to thank for those technologies.
Second, you continue to assert that the entirety of human history demonstrates an exponential growth curve in technology. It does not. Take the Bronze Age, for example. A 2000 year period of human history dominated by a single technological advance. I'm sure there were other advances, but it's hardly an exponential growth curve there. And then there's the Dark Ages, where technology and science regressed. The fact is, the current pace of technological advance is incredibly recent. Taking the whole of human history, this exponential curve is still a statistical anomaly. Simple common sense suggests that it is unsustainable - nothing else ever has sustained this sort of growth. Maybe I'm wrong and you're right, but embracing a currently unsustainable lifestyle b/c somewhere down the line someone will figure out how to sustain it based on this sort of optimism sounds less like an economic philosophy and more like a justification.