I don't think it's a matter of sanity. It's quite possible that someone knows right from wrong, but is completely unable to control themselves. Therefore they're not insane, but they pose a risk to society. So what do we do? Do we have to let them out and wait for them to commit a crime? Or can we commit them?
Fyngyrz seems to be hung up on the idea of punishment. The idea is that civil commitment isn't punishment, and isn't in response to a crime, but an unfortunately necessary side effect of severe mental illness. Now this might be a clever redefinition to skirt the law, or it might be totally allowed under the constitution.
Consider, do you need to be convicted by a jury of your peers to be confined to quarantine if you have a dangerous infectious disease? Is quarantine of those with infectious diseases punishment? How does severe mental illness that poses a public safety risk different from physical illness that poses a public safety risk?
We obviously have to be careful, because mental health is a whole lot less empirical than organic disease, but I don't think you can put a blanket ban on civil commitment for the mentally ill without doing away with legally enforced extra-judicial quarantine of other more corporeal illnesses.
The south was clearly fighting to preserve slavery (by expanding it to the territories).
The north, however, entered the fight very reluctantly. Only the most radical republicans in the 1860s wanted slavery to be an issue even after the war was started. The north was fighting to preserve the union. Freeing and arming slaves wound up being an important military tactic - and this was the prime reason for the emancipation proclamation. There were undoubtedly some abolitionists who wanted it to be about slavery, but that was neither the predominant public opinion, nor the position of the administration.
The soldiers may not have owned slaves, and the war may even have been sold to them as "a war of northern aggression." But the southern politicians agitating for secession and the generals organizing the rebellion knew all along it was about the danger of the growing and expanding free states marginalizing the slave states. The politics leading up to secession were all about one thing... slavery. Any other major factors, such as the malaise in the antebellum south can be tracked back to slavery. When labor is free why bother industrializing?
That's why the the Missouri compromise, the compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska act all presaged the war. That's why all the attempted compromises immediately before the war focused on slavery and fugitive slaves, and not at all on tariffs or any other trivial nonsense.
The first thing the Confederates did was seize union forts. Then they conscriped an army. Then they staged the army within striking distance of Washington at Manassas.
(none of this is to say that Lincoln would have just let the confederacy go, but the confederates were itching for a fight.)
Blue states like Georgia, Arizona, Utah, Florida, and South Carolina? link
California is a special case. It's f'd because of it's stupid referendum process and dysfunctional budgetary procedures. Everyone's hurting, and the idea that red states are more fiscally responsible is laughable.
While you might be technically correct, in this situation "state's rights" is synonymous with slavery.
Are you sure you want to be defending slavery?
The one thing the civil war finally decided (or rather the secession of the confederacy decided) was that whereas the federal government ultimately codified equal rights for all, states would persist in placing parochial interests ahead of human rights. (and this was demonstrated over and over again throughout the nadir of American race relations.)
The constitution explicitly allowed the original sin of our country, so I wouldn't go holding it up as some sort of infallible holy text.
The vertical winglets keep the high pressure air on the bottom of the wing and the low pressure air on the top of the wing. The elimination of that spill-over increases lift.
Votricies are aerodynamically messy, causing drag.
The size of the subprime mortgage market is ~ $1.3 trillion.
The losses from the subprime mortgage currently stand at ~$850 billion and stand to grow to ~$1.5 trillion. No, not the losses to the economy as a result of the financial crisis, the write-downs on sub-prime mortgages.
Read that again. The losses in the market are currently at 65% of the size of the entire market. Do you think that >65% of subprime borrowers defaulted? And remember they've made some payments, and the house is worth something. And it's growing. It seems likely that at the end of the day the losses are going to be larger than the original market. That means that if every single sub prime mortgage holder failed to pay the first cent of their mortgage and if every single foreclosed sub-prime house had an actual value of $0, that won't explain all the eventual losses.
How then do you explain the losses? Zero-sum bets (bad ones). On $1.3 trillion of mortgages there were $4 trillion of zero-sum credit default swaps. When a few sub prime mortgages started to fail the amount of money somebody owed somebody else started to explode, and it had little to do with the homeowner.
And the changes to the CRA in the 90's forced banks to make bad loans.
This is true.
The problem is that CRA loans were something like 15% of all subprime loans in 2006.
There's an awful lot of misinformation about the housing crisis out there. To be brief, homeowners were irresponsible, but not nearly as irresponsible as the lenders. It wasn't bad mortgages that made the economy crash, it was crazy derivatives and zero-sum bets on those derivatives that were the problem. (Compounded by the fact that these financial products were deliberately designed to be so complicated that it was impossible to accurately rate them.) Even with no change in the quality of mortgages issued, there would have been no financial collapse if not for the CDO (collateralized debt obligation). The banks would have taken some losses, sure, but the real problem was hedges against hedges and insurance on insurance. It's pretty simple, if you don't think a loan is worth offering, don't offer it - not offer it, sell it, bundle it, buy insurance against it, then bundle it again this time including the insurance. (and again CRA loans were a tiny fraction.)
Seriously. Read this. And let me know if you still think that the housing crisis was caused by over-regulation of the banking industry.
want rational wall street regulation? How's this: No Zero Sum bets. Zero sum bets don't provide an economic benefit, and and exist solely for the purpose of allowing money managers to place large bets with other peoples money.
Are you trying to suggest that the same conflicts of interest don't exist in government-operated schools?
Of course not, but I'd rather have governments own up to their responsibilities than abdicate it to unelected corporate interests.
It may be unavoidable that schools wind up enforcing authoritarianism, but they don't have to indoctrinate students with the notion that "government is good." A good history class that teaches about Japanese interment, Jim Crow, the red scare, and the Tuskegee experiments should put the notion of a benevolent government to bed.
I question the government quite a bit, but an educated populace is our greatest strength. Ignoring, for a moment the complicating factor of vouchers, if the state doesn't educate the populace, we'll be back to an undemocratic elite ruling an uneducated under-class. So yeah, I'd call it essential.
I've heard both, a function of living in what would then have been border states all my life. War for Southern Independence is at least accurate... War of Northern Aggression is just completely ahistorical.
(aside: "war between the states for independence" was the phrasing used in Bob McDonnall's ill convinced confederate history month proclamation. - though he did mention "civil war battlefields" as well.)
In most states individual school districts buy their own books. In Texas, the state buys the books for the whole state, which is why it is so influential.
Sam Adams was revolutionary, but he was a minor player in the founding of our government. The heavy hitters, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, were - at most - deists. (Caveat on Hamilton - he was a-religious during the period of founding, he found god latter in life.) The roots of this country lie in the enlightenment notions that no one has a god given right to rule other people, and that people ought not to rely on god for their earthly well being. The god of the founding fathers was the grand watchmaker. He set the universe in motion, but hasn't interfered lately. Jefferson's bible in particular focuses on Jesus as a philosopher. His bible is an illustration that the golden rule is important but the water-into-wine and resurrection-from-the-dead are silly.
The problem is that whenever someone says the US was founded as a christian nation, not only are they wrong, but (with the apparent exception of your post) invariably pushing for religion to have a greater role in public life today. They'll frequently point out that the phrase "separation of church and state" doesn't appear in the constitution, ignoring Jefferson's writings pointing out that the establishment clause was designed to erect a "wall between church and state." They'll also frequently quote the pledge of allegiance, not realizing that the "under god" bit was added in 1954.
Calling the War for Southern Independence a civil war is an example of historical spin.
Pardon? It was both a civil war and a war for independence. If the south would have succeeded in seceding it would be called a war of independence today. The unionists prevailed, so because the primary feature of the war was that it was between two groups who were part of the same country both before and after the conflict, it is accurate to call it a civil war.
I don't go picking fights with people who insist on calling is a war of independence (because as I've mentioned it was), but I do consider that they're trying to make it something more noble than it was. The only thing that irritates me is people who persist in flying the battle flag of the confederacy. I know that they've been taught that it's a sign of southern heritage, but this is a perfect example of politicization of history. It's a battle flag. It symbolizes rebellion against the United States of America. The only heritage it is attached to is a heritage of racially motivated anti-government sentiment. What really cracks me up is people who fly the flag of a failed rebellion and yet claim to be patriots.
No. More often than not the outsourcing of essential government functions to private industries results in conflicts of interest and disaster. Educational standards should not be next.
I agree with most of what you say, but I really don't like the idea of askign a 14 year old if he want's to go to college or not and then sculpting his high school career around his answer.
Ideally, I think we would want our mechanics and electricians to have a 12th grade college-prep education, since better educated people make better citizens. I think it would make sense for the college prep and trade school prep classes to only diverge at the end of high school.
America does have a good trade school program though. It's called the military. The problem is that soldiers have a hard time finding work when they don't get back because - wait for it - they don't have degrees.
Why, why, why on earth would anyone *EVER* want to legitimately activate a mode on their car where the brake function no longer corresponds to the brake pedal position?
ABS.
Modern car's know when they're skidding, and pulse the brakes to regain traction. There may be ways to be clever with "I'm skidding" signal to effectively disable the brakes.
Want another one? Regenerative braking.
This was the problem the Prius was having. If you brake with the throttle open you can ruin the car. The system was designed to cut throttle power before engaging the brake, and IIRC the flaw was the brakes wouldn't engage if, for some reason, the computer couldn't close the throttle. This was obviously a design flaw, but it is a legitimate reason you might want to run the brake signal through a computer.
Lowering the recidivism rate is easy, it's just not politically viable. See, any politician who wants to put ex-cons in community colleges, spend money on drug treatment, and have job placement programs, and lowering or eliminating sentencing for non-violent drug offenses is both fiscally irresponsible and more importantly SOFT ON CRIME.
To the average voter, every penny spent on rehabilitating prisoners while there's a pot hole on my street is a penny wasted, but every dollar spent on incarcerating degenerates is keeping us safer.
prefer to go for solutions with the smallest amount of delta to the status quo. Some people call that "conservative" (with a small "c"). I prefer to call it "the scientific method" - by reducing the delta to as small as possible to effect the change, we can be sure as to what we can attribute the change to, so others can replicate that success, or not duplicate that failure. Grand social experiments, I'm not so fond of. And, yes, it can be argued that privatising the prison industry was a grand social experiment. I wouldn't disagree. However, that's where the Americans are at the moment, so that's where you have to work from.
You've got some intriguing ideas, but the problem is that society is just too f'n complicated to run controlled experiments on. If recidivism is down in 5 years is that because of incentivising private prisons or was it because of some other minor change in law or demographics or judicial philosophy. If you're arguing for that status quo, well that's fine so long as you're ok with bank bailouts, oil spills, and substandard overpriced healthcare. If you want to change something, you have to account for the other part of the scientific method, that if you want observable results you have to apply a sufficient perturbation to overcome inertia and noise.
Actually, I remember a lawsuit recently being dismissed against gun manufacturers who consistently marketed their guns with "fingerprint resistant grips and triggers."
But, uh, they weren't marketing for use in crimes, because as everyone knows, fingerprint resistant is *completely* interchangeable with corrosion resistant - something every legitimate gun owner is interested in.
Additionally, I haven't used limewire in a long time, but do you have any examples of limewire promoting that message?
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I don't think it's a matter of sanity. It's quite possible that someone knows right from wrong, but is completely unable to control themselves. Therefore they're not insane, but they pose a risk to society. So what do we do? Do we have to let them out and wait for them to commit a crime? Or can we commit them?
Fyngyrz seems to be hung up on the idea of punishment. The idea is that civil commitment isn't punishment, and isn't in response to a crime, but an unfortunately necessary side effect of severe mental illness. Now this might be a clever redefinition to skirt the law, or it might be totally allowed under the constitution.
Consider, do you need to be convicted by a jury of your peers to be confined to quarantine if you have a dangerous infectious disease? Is quarantine of those with infectious diseases punishment? How does severe mental illness that poses a public safety risk different from physical illness that poses a public safety risk?
We obviously have to be careful, because mental health is a whole lot less empirical than organic disease, but I don't think you can put a blanket ban on civil commitment for the mentally ill without doing away with legally enforced extra-judicial quarantine of other more corporeal illnesses.
I don't know that you can go that far.
The south was clearly fighting to preserve slavery (by expanding it to the territories).
The north, however, entered the fight very reluctantly. Only the most radical republicans in the 1860s wanted slavery to be an issue even after the war was started. The north was fighting to preserve the union. Freeing and arming slaves wound up being an important military tactic - and this was the prime reason for the emancipation proclamation. There were undoubtedly some abolitionists who wanted it to be about slavery, but that was neither the predominant public opinion, nor the position of the administration.
Yeah, that's revisionist bullshit.
The soldiers may not have owned slaves, and the war may even have been sold to them as "a war of northern aggression." But the southern politicians agitating for secession and the generals organizing the rebellion knew all along it was about the danger of the growing and expanding free states marginalizing the slave states. The politics leading up to secession were all about one thing ... slavery. Any other major factors, such as the malaise in the antebellum south can be tracked back to slavery. When labor is free why bother industrializing?
That's why the the Missouri compromise, the compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska act all presaged the war. That's why all the attempted compromises immediately before the war focused on slavery and fugitive slaves, and not at all on tariffs or any other trivial nonsense.
Peacefully?
The first thing the Confederates did was seize union forts. Then they conscriped an army. Then they staged the army within striking distance of Washington at Manassas.
(none of this is to say that Lincoln would have just let the confederacy go, but the confederates were itching for a fight.)
Blue states like Georgia, Arizona, Utah, Florida, and South Carolina? link
California is a special case. It's f'd because of it's stupid referendum process and dysfunctional budgetary procedures. Everyone's hurting, and the idea that red states are more fiscally responsible is laughable.
While you might be technically correct, in this situation "state's rights" is synonymous with slavery.
Are you sure you want to be defending slavery?
The one thing the civil war finally decided (or rather the secession of the confederacy decided) was that whereas the federal government ultimately codified equal rights for all, states would persist in placing parochial interests ahead of human rights. (and this was demonstrated over and over again throughout the nadir of American race relations.)
The constitution explicitly allowed the original sin of our country, so I wouldn't go holding it up as some sort of infallible holy text.
both actually.
The vertical winglets keep the high pressure air on the bottom of the wing and the low pressure air on the top of the wing. The elimination of that spill-over increases lift.
Votricies are aerodynamically messy, causing drag.
Which increases lift...
The size of the subprime mortgage market is ~ $1.3 trillion.
The losses from the subprime mortgage currently stand at ~$850 billion and stand to grow to ~$1.5 trillion. No, not the losses to the economy as a result of the financial crisis, the write-downs on sub-prime mortgages.
Read that again. The losses in the market are currently at 65% of the size of the entire market. Do you think that >65% of subprime borrowers defaulted? And remember they've made some payments, and the house is worth something. And it's growing. It seems likely that at the end of the day the losses are going to be larger than the original market. That means that if every single sub prime mortgage holder failed to pay the first cent of their mortgage and if every single foreclosed sub-prime house had an actual value of $0, that won't explain all the eventual losses.
How then do you explain the losses? Zero-sum bets (bad ones). On $1.3 trillion of mortgages there were $4 trillion of zero-sum credit default swaps. When a few sub prime mortgages started to fail the amount of money somebody owed somebody else started to explode, and it had little to do with the homeowner.
This is true.
The problem is that CRA loans were something like 15% of all subprime loans in 2006.
There's an awful lot of misinformation about the housing crisis out there. To be brief, homeowners were irresponsible, but not nearly as irresponsible as the lenders. It wasn't bad mortgages that made the economy crash, it was crazy derivatives and zero-sum bets on those derivatives that were the problem. (Compounded by the fact that these financial products were deliberately designed to be so complicated that it was impossible to accurately rate them.) Even with no change in the quality of mortgages issued, there would have been no financial collapse if not for the CDO (collateralized debt obligation). The banks would have taken some losses, sure, but the real problem was hedges against hedges and insurance on insurance. It's pretty simple, if you don't think a loan is worth offering, don't offer it - not offer it, sell it, bundle it, buy insurance against it, then bundle it again this time including the insurance. (and again CRA loans were a tiny fraction.)
Seriously. Read this. And let me know if you still think that the housing crisis was caused by over-regulation of the banking industry.
want rational wall street regulation? How's this: No Zero Sum bets. Zero sum bets don't provide an economic benefit, and and exist solely for the purpose of allowing money managers to place large bets with other peoples money.
John Jay ... the founding father who didn't think Catholics should be eligible for office.
So yeah, John Jay may have been a christian dominionist, but that makes him the exception.
He should consider himself lucky.
Warning people of a speed trap could be considered obstruction.
Of course not, but I'd rather have governments own up to their responsibilities than abdicate it to unelected corporate interests.
It may be unavoidable that schools wind up enforcing authoritarianism, but they don't have to indoctrinate students with the notion that "government is good." A good history class that teaches about Japanese interment, Jim Crow, the red scare, and the Tuskegee experiments should put the notion of a benevolent government to bed.
I question the government quite a bit, but an educated populace is our greatest strength. Ignoring, for a moment the complicating factor of vouchers, if the state doesn't educate the populace, we'll be back to an undemocratic elite ruling an uneducated under-class. So yeah, I'd call it essential.
Define Messiah. Jefferson certainly didn't believe that Jesus was the divine son of god, but he valued Jesus' philosophical contributions.
I'm also interested to know how you define deist. If he believes in God, but rejects Jesus' divinity, what does that make him?
I've heard both, a function of living in what would then have been border states all my life. War for Southern Independence is at least accurate ... War of Northern Aggression is just completely ahistorical.
(aside: "war between the states for independence" was the phrasing used in Bob McDonnall's ill convinced confederate history month proclamation. - though he did mention "civil war battlefields" as well.)
In most states individual school districts buy their own books. In Texas, the state buys the books for the whole state, which is why it is so influential.
Hmm Jefferson is typically ranked as one of the ten best presidents.
I'm not all that familiar with Jefferson's presidency, but the Louisiana purchase and ending the slave trade are no small things.
Anyone care to recommend a good biography on TJ?
Sam Adams was revolutionary, but he was a minor player in the founding of our government. The heavy hitters, Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, were - at most - deists. (Caveat on Hamilton - he was a-religious during the period of founding, he found god latter in life.) The roots of this country lie in the enlightenment notions that no one has a god given right to rule other people, and that people ought not to rely on god for their earthly well being. The god of the founding fathers was the grand watchmaker. He set the universe in motion, but hasn't interfered lately. Jefferson's bible in particular focuses on Jesus as a philosopher. His bible is an illustration that the golden rule is important but the water-into-wine and resurrection-from-the-dead are silly.
The problem is that whenever someone says the US was founded as a christian nation, not only are they wrong, but (with the apparent exception of your post) invariably pushing for religion to have a greater role in public life today. They'll frequently point out that the phrase "separation of church and state" doesn't appear in the constitution, ignoring Jefferson's writings pointing out that the establishment clause was designed to erect a "wall between church and state." They'll also frequently quote the pledge of allegiance, not realizing that the "under god" bit was added in 1954.
Pardon? It was both a civil war and a war for independence. If the south would have succeeded in seceding it would be called a war of independence today. The unionists prevailed, so because the primary feature of the war was that it was between two groups who were part of the same country both before and after the conflict, it is accurate to call it a civil war.
I don't go picking fights with people who insist on calling is a war of independence (because as I've mentioned it was), but I do consider that they're trying to make it something more noble than it was. The only thing that irritates me is people who persist in flying the battle flag of the confederacy. I know that they've been taught that it's a sign of southern heritage, but this is a perfect example of politicization of history. It's a battle flag. It symbolizes rebellion against the United States of America. The only heritage it is attached to is a heritage of racially motivated anti-government sentiment. What really cracks me up is people who fly the flag of a failed rebellion and yet claim to be patriots.
No. More often than not the outsourcing of essential government functions to private industries results in conflicts of interest and disaster. Educational standards should not be next.
I agree with most of what you say, but I really don't like the idea of askign a 14 year old if he want's to go to college or not and then sculpting his high school career around his answer.
Ideally, I think we would want our mechanics and electricians to have a 12th grade college-prep education, since better educated people make better citizens. I think it would make sense for the college prep and trade school prep classes to only diverge at the end of high school.
America does have a good trade school program though. It's called the military. The problem is that soldiers have a hard time finding work when they don't get back because - wait for it - they don't have degrees.
ABS.
Modern car's know when they're skidding, and pulse the brakes to regain traction. There may be ways to be clever with "I'm skidding" signal to effectively disable the brakes.
Want another one? Regenerative braking.
This was the problem the Prius was having. If you brake with the throttle open you can ruin the car. The system was designed to cut throttle power before engaging the brake, and IIRC the flaw was the brakes wouldn't engage if, for some reason, the computer couldn't close the throttle. This was obviously a design flaw, but it is a legitimate reason you might want to run the brake signal through a computer.
Lowering the recidivism rate is easy, it's just not politically viable. See, any politician who wants to put ex-cons in community colleges, spend money on drug treatment, and have job placement programs, and lowering or eliminating sentencing for non-violent drug offenses is both fiscally irresponsible and more importantly SOFT ON CRIME.
To the average voter, every penny spent on rehabilitating prisoners while there's a pot hole on my street is a penny wasted, but every dollar spent on incarcerating degenerates is keeping us safer.
You've got some intriguing ideas, but the problem is that society is just too f'n complicated to run controlled experiments on. If recidivism is down in 5 years is that because of incentivising private prisons or was it because of some other minor change in law or demographics or judicial philosophy. If you're arguing for that status quo, well that's fine so long as you're ok with bank bailouts, oil spills, and substandard overpriced healthcare. If you want to change something, you have to account for the other part of the scientific method, that if you want observable results you have to apply a sufficient perturbation to overcome inertia and noise.
Actually, I remember a lawsuit recently being dismissed against gun manufacturers who consistently marketed their guns with "fingerprint resistant grips and triggers."
But, uh, they weren't marketing for use in crimes, because as everyone knows, fingerprint resistant is *completely* interchangeable with corrosion resistant - something every legitimate gun owner is interested in.
Additionally, I haven't used limewire in a long time, but do you have any examples of limewire promoting that message?