Life expectancy, infant mortality, poverty rates, general reported happiness, leisure and vacation time, broadband availability... virtually any measure of "standards of living" one could come up with, except perhaps "number of dollars taken home in one's paycheck".
Now, Mr. Citation Needed, the ball is in your court. Where's all the destruction caused by the power to tax? What horrors in Europe or Canada are we avoiding by having lower taxes here in the US? What horrors in the US could we avoid by moving to a place without a functioning government to destroy us with taxes, like Somalia or Afghanistan?
Health care is never free. Whether you're talking government-run socialized medical systems (ala Germany or Canada) or those based upon private insurance like the U.S., the money comes from somewhere. The term "free health care" is a misnomer.
Well, if you want to be a stickler about it, nothing man-made is ever free. Someone had to invest time and money to produce it, even if the end user doesn't pay for it. Maybe they pass the cost on to you some other way, or to their other customers, or maybe they absorb the cost themselves, but the cost doesn't go away.
Therefore, in discussions like this, it makes sense to adopt a less pedantic definition of "free"; otherwise the word is simply wasted. National health care is marginally free, like public libraries -- it doesn't cost you anything extra to use them, you're paying the same taxes either way.
Believe me, there's plenty of "free" health care in the United States. Unfortunately, little to none of it is available to me as a gainfully-employed U.S. citizen who pays his taxes on time and in full, so it comes out of my salary instead.
There's another kind of "free" health care: the emergency room. When people aren't covered by Medicare but can't afford to pay for their own health care, they often wait until their problem gets bad enough that they can't wait any longer, and then they go to the ER, which can't refuse to treat them. The cost is passed on to everyone else who visits that hospital -- and overall, it costs us more than it would've cost to pay for an office visit when the problem first started.
So you'll forgive me if I'm a little bitter about the way my government(s) handle my money. They're not very good at it, and I really don't see that giving them even more of my hard-earned cash will help.
Countries with national health care systems spend less on health care overall, and achieve equal or better outcomes. Don't you think we could too, if we held our government to the same level of accountability?
Tax is not zero sum - it is a negative use of money. It should be kept to those minimal actions necessary for the survival of a society - like the Constitution envisioned.
This implies that nothing is worth doing unless it's either (1) profitable or (2) absolutely necessary for the survival of a society, by which you presumably mean defending the borders and not much else. I think most people would disagree with you on that.
Or, they're always fair, but "fair" doesn't mean "you get back exactly the amount of services that your taxes paid for".
I mean, as you say, one could argue that a tax on brick and mortar stores pays for such things as roads to get to the stores, police to watch the store, etc. But it's not like a $1000 piece of jewelry (for which you pay $80 in sales tax) costs that much more to transport and guard than a $10 package of steaks (for which you pay 80 cents in sales tax). And it's not like the money is earmarked to be spent only on things that directly apply to retail stores.
The fairness in taxes, or lack thereof, comes from how they're applied to people, not how the money is spent. Sales tax is arguably fair because everyone pays the same rate per purchased item. Income tax is arguably fair because the burden is highest for those who have the most disposable income. (Of course, these arguments are conflicting: if you like income tax because it's progressive, you ought to dislike sales tax because it's regressive.)
Robert Heinlein said it best, "The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys." ("The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", 1966)
Hmm... judging from the fact that countries with far higher tax rates than ours are still around, facilitating higher standards of living rather than becoming dystopian hellholes of oppression, it looks like Heinlein was wrong.
Interesting, but there are some serious flaws there. First, correlation is not causation; it seems likely that people who hold certain attitudes about sex are likely to view porn more often as a result, rather than vice versa. Second, there's no mention of how these results compare to those of adults.
Oh, you're a psychic too? Wow! What other tricks have you got up your sleeve?
Heh. You think I need to be a psychic to know that 14-year-olds in Wisconsin have to attend a school chosen by their parents and/or the state? That's pretty funny.
Maybe this particular girl could've convinced her parents to put her in a different school, or maybe not. It seems that you're the one claiming psychic powers by suggesting she could have, though.
And you think every adult has the option of switching jobs?
Legally, yes, of course they do. (Unless they're in the military, but we don't have a draft anymore, so that's still a voluntary choice.)
The rest of the world has plenty of people who do the same job for their entire lives, simply because they feel that they have no other choice. Do the experience of those unfortunates mean that we live in an oppressive society in which nobody is able to switch careers or chose employers?
No, but you'd have to be retarded to think their situation is analogous.
There's a big difference between someone who's denied the legal right to choose which school to attend (or whether to attend school at all), and someone who has the right to change jobs but chooses not to exercise it (or is unable to exercise it because of personal circumstances).
If you ever rejoin the rest of the human race, let me know and we can try having a civilized discussion.
Oh, please. You've shown again and again that you're incapable of having a civilized discussion. I'm sure it makes you feel better to blame your own dishonesty on me, but you can't lie to yourself forever.
We ban R-rated films from minors without a parent accompanying the kids. The reason for this is the graphic nature of many films.
More specifically, the reason for this is a common belief that the graphic nature of many films makes them "inappropriate" to be viewed by minors. This belief, however, is based on ideology rather than evidence.
There's a reason these things should not be available to kids without guidance. The human brain does not develop its judgement part until between 18-22 years old
This is blatantly false: minors make judgments all the time. Perhaps you meant to say that minors make judgments you disagree with.
and the judgement of kids younger than 18 is notoriously horrible.
You could say the same thing about any other group: "the judgment of women is notoriously horrible". And it'd be just as inaccurate. You could even come up with five examples of women making bad judgments, but you'd have to overlook the countless examples of everyone else making their own bad judgments.
I love libertarian views, but this stuff is not meant for people who have no rational frame of reference.
Luckily, most minors do have a rational frame of reference, whether you care to admit it or not.
I do not want these people influenced by something they are physically incapable of understanding.
There's no rational reason to believe minors are "physically incapable of understanding" them in the first place. What makes you think there is?
We likewise can agree that certain subject matter such as sexually explicit material are inappropriate for people under a certain age.
Speak for yourself. There's no factual evidence that viewing sexually explicit material is harmful to anyone under any particular age. Calling it "inappropriate" is a matter of opinion, no different from calling political or religious material "inappropriate".
Really? Gee, I'm sure glad I didn't know that when I was in school. Might have stopped me from switching.
Since you're "NOT an American" according to your signature, and this article is about a 14 year old Wisconsin girl, I'm not sure how your experience is relevant.
If you live someplace where minors are allowed to choose their own school, rather than having that choice made for them by their parents or the state, then congratulations for living in such an enlightened place. I wish that sort of thing were more common. But around here, it isn't. The girl in the article did not have the ability to make that decision; it was made for her.
On the other hand, if what really happened is that you told your parents you wanted to switch schools and they made the decision for you, based on your input, then that's something else entirely: the choice was out of your hands, and you were just lucky enough that the folks with the power chose to listen to you. Not everyone can expect to be so lucky.
My comment had absolutely nothing to do with democracy. Children do not live in a democracy.
Yes, that's exactly the point. The rules we impose on minors are no more legitimate than the rules imposed by a dictator.
There's a world of difference between "not being responsible" and "having no say".
Once again, you'd rather play word games than have an honest discussion. Everyone who can speak has some amount of "say" on any issue they care to speak about, in a sense, but you and I both know that wasn't the sense I meant. And yet here you are, pretending it was, because you're incapable of responding to my argument head-on.
And, before you throw another feint at me, I just gotta ask... what the fuck are you trying to prove, exactly? That minors should have the exact same rights and responsibilities as adults?
What I've proved is that the analogy between students and employees is invalid: we shouldn't expect students to follow arbitrary school rules the same way we expect employees to follow their employer's rules, and we shouldn't react to a rebellious student the same way we'd react to an insubordinate employee.
If so, you may as well end this conversation right now, since you're even more of a fool than I thought.
You, however, are exactly as much of a bigot as I thought. Denying rights based on an arbitrary age cutoff is no less reprehensible than denying them based on skin color or religion.
The teacher noticed and it annoyed her. Therefor it interrupted every single student's education.
It sounds like the teacher was the disruptive one, then. Maybe she should've reacted a little more professionally when she noticed this harmless annoyance.
A lot of kids have ONE job to do, and that's to go to school so they can do something besides sleep, eat, shit and text.
A job is something you take on voluntarily for compensation. Attending school against your will, under the threat of legal penalty, is more of a sentence.
No, they can't. Once again, that's the difference between students and employees!
The choice of which school to attend, or whether to attend school at all, is out of the student's hands. It's forced upon them by someone else, with the threat of fines, confinement, and other legal penalties if they refuse to comply. At best, they can offer an opinion on the matter, and it may or may not be taken into account by the person who actually makes the decision.
Sure, [school codes of conduct] don't fall into the categories of [any type of "law" or "legality" which would be germane to a thread about someone being arrested]. But that doesn't mean they're not laws - only that they're not in the category you're thinking of.
What it means is you'd rather play word games than have an honest discussion.
All of which is irrelevant, since you were arguing that minors cannot change laws, and I showed that you're full of shit.
All you showed is a poor understanding of democracy.
I was arguing that minors aren't responsible for the laws they're expected to follow. The government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and someone who's not allowed to participate in choosing that government -- that means voting, not making phone calls or holding signs -- cannot consent to it.
At least be honest enough to admit that you were wrong, before jogging your goalposts another hundred yards upfield.
Students don't get to vote on the rules they're expected to follow in school, or on the laws that require them to attend in the first place. They're subjects, not citizens. The goalposts are where they've always been; you're just hiding in the stands because it's safer there.
Sure, they can try to influence the process from outside, but it's disingenuous to pretend that the government represents them the same way it represents those who are allowed to vote. I could write blog posts trying to influence the Japanese elections, too, but my opinion would only matter to the extent that it persuaded the Japanese citizens whose votes were actually counted.
There is no difference, or if there is you certainly haven't demonstrated it.
As a matter of fact, I have. But it sounds like you didn't understand the first time, so I'll demonstrate the difference once more:
Employees are there because they choose to be. They voluntarily submit to their employer's rules. If they don't like those rules, they can look for work elsewhere, or become self-employed.
Students, on the other hand, are forced to attend school. Rules are imposed on them against their will; they're given no input in those rules, and the people who write them aren't accountable to students. They have no alternative: up to a certain age, they're required to attend a school chosen by their parents and/or the state, and they will be arrested if they refuse.
It's unreasonable to expect the same blind obedience from someone who has rules imposed upon him, against his will, as you would from someone who chooses to live by those rules in exchange for payment.
Really? Have you got a copy of that schools code of conduct handy? Maybe you could e-mail it to me?
Is this supposed to be relevant to what I said? Surely you don't think violating a school's code of conduct is a crime, do you?
The law doesn't list what isn't illegal, it lists what's illegal. If you're claiming there's a law against texting during class, or requiring teachers to "do something" about students who text during class, perhaps you could cite it.
Untrue - minors have the same right to petition their government and carry out non-violent protests as anyone else, they just don't have the right to vote. There's plenty of cases where students have played a key role in changing laws - here is one random example from a 10 second google search.
Heh, I don't think you could've picked a worse example if you tried. The achievement in that article was to strike a part of the state constitution that had been found unconstitutional and hadn't been enforced for decades. It was uncontroversial and it affected no one; it certainly didn't give students any more rights.
But of course, petitioning the government and staging protests is no substitute for holding one's representatives directly accountable at the ballot box. You and I both know that minors have virtually no political power and virtually no influence on the law -- certainly not compared to enfranchised adults.
Well, you're an idiot for turning this into some anti-slavery anti-oppression Viva La Revolution! nonsense
And you're an idiot for calling names instead of recognizing the real, important differences between a student's position and an employee's. So nyah.
but, besides that, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing legality.
Incorrect. When the GP wrote "Students shouldn't be texting in class. If a student refuses to follow the rules, you have to do something", he wasn't discussing legality. "Students shouldn't be texting" and "you have to do something" are normative judgments, not legal facts: it's not illegal for students to text in class, nor for teachers to let them do it.
You don't like the law, fine, fight to change it. Meanwhile, behave yourself or face the consequences.
Ha! You seem to have forgotten that we're talking about a minor here, who had no say in the law in the first place. That's why she found herself in this situation, subjected to the arbitrary rules of a school she's forced to attend.
Minors are excluded from the democratic process. Telling them "if you don't like the law, change it" when the law specifically singles them out to prevent them from changing it is pure chutzpah.
If you were being insubordinate at work, you would be fired and they'd have security escort you from the building. If you refused, you would be arrested.
If you're at work, it's because you chose to be there. If you don't like your boss's policy on text messaging during work hours, you can quit and look for another job. Or you can go into business for yourself, set your own policies, and let your employees text whenever they want.
On the other hand, if you're at school, it's more likely because the law requires you to be there. And if you don't like your school's policy on text messaging... tough, you don't have any choice.
School is not a job, students are not employees, and members of a disenfranchised minority have no moral obligation to meekly submit to whatever arbitrary policies their overlords come up with.
If a student is _that_ disruptive, to the point of flat out refusing to cooperate or obey in any form or shape
What's "disruptive" about wanting to be left alone? Where's the evidence that this girl typing text messages on her phone was actually interfering with anyone else's education -- that is, before the teacher put class on hold to have her searched and arrested?
If you think kids have most of the rights of grown-ups, I want some of what you're smoking.
The reality is tipped the other way: kids have more "adult" responsibilities than "adult" rights. They're held responsible for violating laws passed by politicians who aren't accountable to them, and often tried as adults. In fact, the quickest route for a teenager to be treated like an adult is to commit a heinous crime: as soon as he pulls the trigger, society stops claiming we need to restrict his freedom because he can't comprehend the consequences of his actions (see: driving, drinking, voting, sexual consent, signing contracts...), and starts claiming he knew exactly what he was doing and needs to be held fully responsible for it.
At some level, citizens have to submit to authority figures.
That's only true when those authority figures have some legitimacy. A cop who pulls you over is enforcing the law that you ultimately bear some responsibility for: as a voting-age adult, the laws you live under are passed by the representatives you elect. If you travel to another country, you're willingly submitting to the laws there.
But when you're a student who doesn't get to choose whether or not to attend school (because you're subject to your parents' will and the state education laws you have absolutely no say in), a teacher has no moral standing to impose her will on you. I'd say learning to stand up to abuse of power is a more important lesson than learning to obey arbitrary rules without question or compensation.
In other words, citizens don't have to "submit" to authority figures. That's what subjects do. Citizens choose their own authority figures.
If a student is texting during class, she should stop when asked. Lying about it and causing a kerfluffle about it ought to be punishable.
Even accepting this for the sake of argument -- let's imagine she willingly chose to go to school and accept her teachers' authority -- a minor violation of school rules doesn't warrant being arrested. Whatever happened to detention? Suspension? Expulsion? There's no need to get the police involved in a dispute over text messaging during class, for god's sake.
The self-professed libertarians here who argue that she should be able to do whatever she wants are missing the fact that this is in class. The education of the class would be impossible if anyone could do whatever they wanted.
Let's leave the generalities aside. We're not talking about "if anyone could do whatever they wanted", we're talking about a girl who was using her cell phone to send text messages during class. As the other response pointed out, if she turned her ringer off, she wasn't disrupting class at all -- although I know school administrators love to call everything from texting to T-shirts "disruptive", regardless of whether it actually interferes with other students' education, simply so they can ban it.
Wrong: not all lies are fraud, and this one certainly wasn't. No one was harmed as a result of her lie (except the girl herself, and the taxpayers whose money has been wasted prosecuting her).
Exhibit C: Darwin [apple.com] is open source. That's right, the OS X operating system is open source and released by Apple. Granted, the window manager (quartz) is not, nor are a lot of the apps (like the Finder), but you can always use X11, which btw, apple provides also.
So, it's a little disingenuous to portray Apple as completely proprietary
It's more than a little disingenuous to claim "the OS X operating system is open source" when you're really only referring to Darwin. You can't run any Mac applications with what they give you. A system running Darwin behaves nothing like a system running a complete version of OS X.
Frankly, it'd be more honest to say "Windows is open source", because ReactOS and WINE come a lot closer to being Windows than Darwin does to being OS X.
You think its fair to pay for services you don't use. That's some kind of wild belief man.
Actually, it's a standard, normal, almost boringly commonplace belief. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but governments and taxes exist all around the world, and there's no significant opposition to those concepts.
For all except a few people on the fringes, the question of whether it's fair to tax people for services they end up not using has been settled long ago. The ship has sailed. Feel free to rant against the evils of taxation on your own, but I hope you know how silly you sound to the rest of us.
I really wish you were my neighbor. I'd ask you to pay my garbage bill because it keeps your home value high. Somehow I think you would balk at that.. and you would be just in doing so.
First, let me say I love how you're painting this as a strange belief of mine, when my beliefs here are actually in line with, well, nearly everyone except you. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Now then: if I were your neighbor, I wouldn't pay for your garbage bill because I don't really care how messy your yard is, or what effect that might have on my home's value. If it presented a safety hazard, I'd just report you.
On the other hand, I have no problem paying for firemen who put out other people's fires, police who solve crimes committed against other people and courts to try other people's cases, parks and lakes that I never visit myself, schools to which I have no children to send, food stamps and medical care for people who earn less than I do, and so on.
These are societal benefits, and I don't mind paying to live in a society where these things are available. As you may have noticed, most people don't mind paying for them: that's why they exist.
I don't know how things work in your neck of the woods, but around here, we vote on levies to fund things like schools and fire service -- and those levies pass without exception. That's democracy. Sorry if you don't like it, but that's how we do things in America.
Instant runoff is a crappy implementation of a decent idea.
Condorcet methods are a better implementation of the same idea: you rank your candidates in order, but the winner is decided all at once through some fancy math, instead of over several rounds of runoff simulations. The result is a more sensible outcome (IRV has some scenarios where third parties are just as spoilerish as they are today), less data to transport (IRV basically makes it impossible to count ballots locally and transmit the totals to a central location), and more control by the voter (you can give the same rank to two or more candidates if you want).
You can make your own rules with your own school and kid.
Thanks, I knew you'd come around. We, the voting public, make our own rules for our public schools, and one of those rules is that kids have to be vaccinated.
What is free education? I've never heard of that before. Where do you live?
Pardon me, I would've brought my scalpel if I knew we were going to be splitting hairs here.
As you know, public schools are "free" in the sense that there's no marginal cost: you pay for public school whether or not you send your kid there. The alternatives do have a marginal cost, either in private tuition or in time spent homeschooling.
People force me to pay property taxes so they can educate other peoples children around here. I don't think that's very fair. Do you?
Yes, I do.
I also think it's fair that I'm forced to pay taxes for services I don't use, because (1) I benefit in turn from services that other people pay for but don't use, and (2) I indirectly benefit from those services anyway. The availability of public schools, for example, results in a more productive economy and less crime, which I enjoy even though I don't have kids.
If you're unhappy with this system, might I suggest moving to an abandoned island? You won't have to put in a lick of work for anyone else's benefit, and you'll get to keep 100% of whatever you manage to gather or hunt. As long as it doesn't spoil before you eat it, that is.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, but I can't help but notice you ignored the second half of my comment.
Life expectancy, infant mortality, poverty rates, general reported happiness, leisure and vacation time, broadband availability... virtually any measure of "standards of living" one could come up with, except perhaps "number of dollars taken home in one's paycheck".
Now, Mr. Citation Needed, the ball is in your court. Where's all the destruction caused by the power to tax? What horrors in Europe or Canada are we avoiding by having lower taxes here in the US? What horrors in the US could we avoid by moving to a place without a functioning government to destroy us with taxes, like Somalia or Afghanistan?
Health care is never free. Whether you're talking government-run socialized medical systems (ala Germany or Canada) or those based upon private insurance like the U.S., the money comes from somewhere. The term "free health care" is a misnomer.
Well, if you want to be a stickler about it, nothing man-made is ever free. Someone had to invest time and money to produce it, even if the end user doesn't pay for it. Maybe they pass the cost on to you some other way, or to their other customers, or maybe they absorb the cost themselves, but the cost doesn't go away.
Therefore, in discussions like this, it makes sense to adopt a less pedantic definition of "free"; otherwise the word is simply wasted. National health care is marginally free, like public libraries -- it doesn't cost you anything extra to use them, you're paying the same taxes either way.
Believe me, there's plenty of "free" health care in the United States. Unfortunately, little to none of it is available to me as a gainfully-employed U.S. citizen who pays his taxes on time and in full, so it comes out of my salary instead.
There's another kind of "free" health care: the emergency room. When people aren't covered by Medicare but can't afford to pay for their own health care, they often wait until their problem gets bad enough that they can't wait any longer, and then they go to the ER, which can't refuse to treat them. The cost is passed on to everyone else who visits that hospital -- and overall, it costs us more than it would've cost to pay for an office visit when the problem first started.
So you'll forgive me if I'm a little bitter about the way my government(s) handle my money. They're not very good at it, and I really don't see that giving them even more of my hard-earned cash will help.
Countries with national health care systems spend less on health care overall, and achieve equal or better outcomes. Don't you think we could too, if we held our government to the same level of accountability?
Tax is not zero sum - it is a negative use of money. It should be kept to those minimal actions necessary for the survival of a society - like the Constitution envisioned.
This implies that nothing is worth doing unless it's either (1) profitable or (2) absolutely necessary for the survival of a society, by which you presumably mean defending the borders and not much else. I think most people would disagree with you on that.
Hmm, you mean we could have no social safety net? What a brilliant idea! We could save billions! I wonder why we haven't tried that before?
Oh yeah, we did. It wasn't pretty.
Let's put is this way: taxes are never fair.
Or, they're always fair, but "fair" doesn't mean "you get back exactly the amount of services that your taxes paid for".
I mean, as you say, one could argue that a tax on brick and mortar stores pays for such things as roads to get to the stores, police to watch the store, etc. But it's not like a $1000 piece of jewelry (for which you pay $80 in sales tax) costs that much more to transport and guard than a $10 package of steaks (for which you pay 80 cents in sales tax). And it's not like the money is earmarked to be spent only on things that directly apply to retail stores.
The fairness in taxes, or lack thereof, comes from how they're applied to people, not how the money is spent. Sales tax is arguably fair because everyone pays the same rate per purchased item. Income tax is arguably fair because the burden is highest for those who have the most disposable income. (Of course, these arguments are conflicting: if you like income tax because it's progressive, you ought to dislike sales tax because it's regressive.)
Robert Heinlein said it best, "The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys." ("The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress", 1966)
Hmm... judging from the fact that countries with far higher tax rates than ours are still around, facilitating higher standards of living rather than becoming dystopian hellholes of oppression, it looks like Heinlein was wrong.
Interesting, but there are some serious flaws there. First, correlation is not causation; it seems likely that people who hold certain attitudes about sex are likely to view porn more often as a result, rather than vice versa. Second, there's no mention of how these results compare to those of adults.
Oh, you're a psychic too? Wow! What other tricks have you got up your sleeve?
Heh. You think I need to be a psychic to know that 14-year-olds in Wisconsin have to attend a school chosen by their parents and/or the state? That's pretty funny.
Maybe this particular girl could've convinced her parents to put her in a different school, or maybe not. It seems that you're the one claiming psychic powers by suggesting she could have, though.
And you think every adult has the option of switching jobs?
Legally, yes, of course they do. (Unless they're in the military, but we don't have a draft anymore, so that's still a voluntary choice.)
The rest of the world has plenty of people who do the same job for their entire lives, simply because they feel that they have no other choice. Do the experience of those unfortunates mean that we live in an oppressive society in which nobody is able to switch careers or chose employers?
No, but you'd have to be retarded to think their situation is analogous.
There's a big difference between someone who's denied the legal right to choose which school to attend (or whether to attend school at all), and someone who has the right to change jobs but chooses not to exercise it (or is unable to exercise it because of personal circumstances).
If you ever rejoin the rest of the human race, let me know and we can try having a civilized discussion.
Oh, please. You've shown again and again that you're incapable of having a civilized discussion. I'm sure it makes you feel better to blame your own dishonesty on me, but you can't lie to yourself forever.
We ban R-rated films from minors without a parent accompanying the kids. The reason for this is the graphic nature of many films.
More specifically, the reason for this is a common belief that the graphic nature of many films makes them "inappropriate" to be viewed by minors. This belief, however, is based on ideology rather than evidence.
There's a reason these things should not be available to kids without guidance. The human brain does not develop its judgement part until between 18-22 years old
This is blatantly false: minors make judgments all the time. Perhaps you meant to say that minors make judgments you disagree with.
and the judgement of kids younger than 18 is notoriously horrible.
You could say the same thing about any other group: "the judgment of women is notoriously horrible". And it'd be just as inaccurate. You could even come up with five examples of women making bad judgments, but you'd have to overlook the countless examples of everyone else making their own bad judgments.
I love libertarian views, but this stuff is not meant for people who have no rational frame of reference.
Luckily, most minors do have a rational frame of reference, whether you care to admit it or not.
I do not want these people influenced by something they are physically incapable of understanding.
There's no rational reason to believe minors are "physically incapable of understanding" them in the first place. What makes you think there is?
We likewise can agree that certain subject matter such as sexually explicit material are inappropriate for people under a certain age.
Speak for yourself. There's no factual evidence that viewing sexually explicit material is harmful to anyone under any particular age. Calling it "inappropriate" is a matter of opinion, no different from calling political or religious material "inappropriate".
Really? Gee, I'm sure glad I didn't know that when I was in school. Might have stopped me from switching.
Since you're "NOT an American" according to your signature, and this article is about a 14 year old Wisconsin girl, I'm not sure how your experience is relevant.
If you live someplace where minors are allowed to choose their own school, rather than having that choice made for them by their parents or the state, then congratulations for living in such an enlightened place. I wish that sort of thing were more common. But around here, it isn't. The girl in the article did not have the ability to make that decision; it was made for her.
On the other hand, if what really happened is that you told your parents you wanted to switch schools and they made the decision for you, based on your input, then that's something else entirely: the choice was out of your hands, and you were just lucky enough that the folks with the power chose to listen to you. Not everyone can expect to be so lucky.
My comment had absolutely nothing to do with democracy. Children do not live in a democracy.
Yes, that's exactly the point. The rules we impose on minors are no more legitimate than the rules imposed by a dictator.
There's a world of difference between "not being responsible" and "having no say".
Once again, you'd rather play word games than have an honest discussion. Everyone who can speak has some amount of "say" on any issue they care to speak about, in a sense, but you and I both know that wasn't the sense I meant. And yet here you are, pretending it was, because you're incapable of responding to my argument head-on.
And, before you throw another feint at me, I just gotta ask ... what the fuck are you trying to prove, exactly? That minors should have the exact same rights and responsibilities as adults?
What I've proved is that the analogy between students and employees is invalid: we shouldn't expect students to follow arbitrary school rules the same way we expect employees to follow their employer's rules, and we shouldn't react to a rebellious student the same way we'd react to an insubordinate employee.
If so, you may as well end this conversation right now, since you're even more of a fool than I thought.
You, however, are exactly as much of a bigot as I thought. Denying rights based on an arbitrary age cutoff is no less reprehensible than denying them based on skin color or religion.
The teacher noticed and it annoyed her. Therefor it interrupted every single student's education.
It sounds like the teacher was the disruptive one, then. Maybe she should've reacted a little more professionally when she noticed this harmless annoyance.
A lot of kids have ONE job to do, and that's to go to school so they can do something besides sleep, eat, shit and text.
A job is something you take on voluntarily for compensation. Attending school against your will, under the threat of legal penalty, is more of a sentence.
Can find a different school?
No, they can't. Once again, that's the difference between students and employees!
The choice of which school to attend, or whether to attend school at all, is out of the student's hands. It's forced upon them by someone else, with the threat of fines, confinement, and other legal penalties if they refuse to comply. At best, they can offer an opinion on the matter, and it may or may not be taken into account by the person who actually makes the decision.
Sure, [school codes of conduct] don't fall into the categories of [any type of "law" or "legality" which would be germane to a thread about someone being arrested]. But that doesn't mean they're not laws - only that they're not in the category you're thinking of.
What it means is you'd rather play word games than have an honest discussion.
All of which is irrelevant, since you were arguing that minors cannot change laws, and I showed that you're full of shit.
All you showed is a poor understanding of democracy.
I was arguing that minors aren't responsible for the laws they're expected to follow. The government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and someone who's not allowed to participate in choosing that government -- that means voting, not making phone calls or holding signs -- cannot consent to it.
At least be honest enough to admit that you were wrong, before jogging your goalposts another hundred yards upfield.
Students don't get to vote on the rules they're expected to follow in school, or on the laws that require them to attend in the first place. They're subjects, not citizens. The goalposts are where they've always been; you're just hiding in the stands because it's safer there.
Sure, they can try to influence the process from outside, but it's disingenuous to pretend that the government represents them the same way it represents those who are allowed to vote. I could write blog posts trying to influence the Japanese elections, too, but my opinion would only matter to the extent that it persuaded the Japanese citizens whose votes were actually counted.
There is no difference, or if there is you certainly haven't demonstrated it.
As a matter of fact, I have. But it sounds like you didn't understand the first time, so I'll demonstrate the difference once more:
Employees are there because they choose to be. They voluntarily submit to their employer's rules. If they don't like those rules, they can look for work elsewhere, or become self-employed.
Students, on the other hand, are forced to attend school. Rules are imposed on them against their will; they're given no input in those rules, and the people who write them aren't accountable to students. They have no alternative: up to a certain age, they're required to attend a school chosen by their parents and/or the state, and they will be arrested if they refuse.
It's unreasonable to expect the same blind obedience from someone who has rules imposed upon him, against his will, as you would from someone who chooses to live by those rules in exchange for payment.
Really? Have you got a copy of that schools code of conduct handy? Maybe you could e-mail it to me?
Is this supposed to be relevant to what I said? Surely you don't think violating a school's code of conduct is a crime, do you?
The law doesn't list what isn't illegal, it lists what's illegal. If you're claiming there's a law against texting during class, or requiring teachers to "do something" about students who text during class, perhaps you could cite it.
Untrue - minors have the same right to petition their government and carry out non-violent protests as anyone else, they just don't have the right to vote. There's plenty of cases where students have played a key role in changing laws - here is one random example from a 10 second google search.
Heh, I don't think you could've picked a worse example if you tried. The achievement in that article was to strike a part of the state constitution that had been found unconstitutional and hadn't been enforced for decades. It was uncontroversial and it affected no one; it certainly didn't give students any more rights.
But of course, petitioning the government and staging protests is no substitute for holding one's representatives directly accountable at the ballot box. You and I both know that minors have virtually no political power and virtually no influence on the law -- certainly not compared to enfranchised adults.
Well, you're an idiot for turning this into some anti-slavery anti-oppression Viva La Revolution! nonsense
And you're an idiot for calling names instead of recognizing the real, important differences between a student's position and an employee's. So nyah.
but, besides that, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing legality.
Incorrect. When the GP wrote "Students shouldn't be texting in class. If a student refuses to follow the rules, you have to do something", he wasn't discussing legality. "Students shouldn't be texting" and "you have to do something" are normative judgments, not legal facts: it's not illegal for students to text in class, nor for teachers to let them do it.
You don't like the law, fine, fight to change it. Meanwhile, behave yourself or face the consequences.
Ha! You seem to have forgotten that we're talking about a minor here, who had no say in the law in the first place. That's why she found herself in this situation, subjected to the arbitrary rules of a school she's forced to attend.
Minors are excluded from the democratic process. Telling them "if you don't like the law, change it" when the law specifically singles them out to prevent them from changing it is pure chutzpah.
If you were being insubordinate at work, you would be fired and they'd have security escort you from the building. If you refused, you would be arrested.
If you're at work, it's because you chose to be there. If you don't like your boss's policy on text messaging during work hours, you can quit and look for another job. Or you can go into business for yourself, set your own policies, and let your employees text whenever they want.
On the other hand, if you're at school, it's more likely because the law requires you to be there. And if you don't like your school's policy on text messaging... tough, you don't have any choice.
School is not a job, students are not employees, and members of a disenfranchised minority have no moral obligation to meekly submit to whatever arbitrary policies their overlords come up with.
If a student is _that_ disruptive, to the point of flat out refusing to cooperate or obey in any form or shape
What's "disruptive" about wanting to be left alone? Where's the evidence that this girl typing text messages on her phone was actually interfering with anyone else's education -- that is, before the teacher put class on hold to have her searched and arrested?
If you think kids have most of the rights of grown-ups, I want some of what you're smoking.
The reality is tipped the other way: kids have more "adult" responsibilities than "adult" rights. They're held responsible for violating laws passed by politicians who aren't accountable to them, and often tried as adults. In fact, the quickest route for a teenager to be treated like an adult is to commit a heinous crime: as soon as he pulls the trigger, society stops claiming we need to restrict his freedom because he can't comprehend the consequences of his actions (see: driving, drinking, voting, sexual consent, signing contracts...), and starts claiming he knew exactly what he was doing and needs to be held fully responsible for it.
At some level, citizens have to submit to authority figures.
That's only true when those authority figures have some legitimacy. A cop who pulls you over is enforcing the law that you ultimately bear some responsibility for: as a voting-age adult, the laws you live under are passed by the representatives you elect. If you travel to another country, you're willingly submitting to the laws there.
But when you're a student who doesn't get to choose whether or not to attend school (because you're subject to your parents' will and the state education laws you have absolutely no say in), a teacher has no moral standing to impose her will on you. I'd say learning to stand up to abuse of power is a more important lesson than learning to obey arbitrary rules without question or compensation.
In other words, citizens don't have to "submit" to authority figures. That's what subjects do. Citizens choose their own authority figures.
If a student is texting during class, she should stop when asked. Lying about it and causing a kerfluffle about it ought to be punishable.
Even accepting this for the sake of argument -- let's imagine she willingly chose to go to school and accept her teachers' authority -- a minor violation of school rules doesn't warrant being arrested. Whatever happened to detention? Suspension? Expulsion? There's no need to get the police involved in a dispute over text messaging during class, for god's sake.
The self-professed libertarians here who argue that she should be able to do whatever she wants are missing the fact that this is in class. The education of the class would be impossible if anyone could do whatever they wanted.
Let's leave the generalities aside. We're not talking about "if anyone could do whatever they wanted", we're talking about a girl who was using her cell phone to send text messages during class. As the other response pointed out, if she turned her ringer off, she wasn't disrupting class at all -- although I know school administrators love to call everything from texting to T-shirts "disruptive", regardless of whether it actually interferes with other students' education, simply so they can ban it.
Wrong: not all lies are fraud, and this one certainly wasn't. No one was harmed as a result of her lie (except the girl herself, and the taxpayers whose money has been wasted prosecuting her).
Exhibit C: Darwin [apple.com] is open source. That's right, the OS X operating system is open source and released by Apple. Granted, the window manager (quartz) is not, nor are a lot of the apps (like the Finder), but you can always use X11, which btw, apple provides also.
So, it's a little disingenuous to portray Apple as completely proprietary
It's more than a little disingenuous to claim "the OS X operating system is open source" when you're really only referring to Darwin. You can't run any Mac applications with what they give you. A system running Darwin behaves nothing like a system running a complete version of OS X.
Frankly, it'd be more honest to say "Windows is open source", because ReactOS and WINE come a lot closer to being Windows than Darwin does to being OS X.
Can you apply the same solution to writing novels?
Yes, you can. Find someone who needs a novel written -- say, Oprah's book club. You write it for them, they pay you.
Remember, copyright applies to more than just music, movies and computer code.
And it should be abolished in every case: it's an unnecessary restriction of our right to communicate.
You think its fair to pay for services you don't use. That's some kind of wild belief man.
Actually, it's a standard, normal, almost boringly commonplace belief. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but governments and taxes exist all around the world, and there's no significant opposition to those concepts.
For all except a few people on the fringes, the question of whether it's fair to tax people for services they end up not using has been settled long ago. The ship has sailed. Feel free to rant against the evils of taxation on your own, but I hope you know how silly you sound to the rest of us.
I really wish you were my neighbor. I'd ask you to pay my garbage bill because it keeps your home value high. Somehow I think you would balk at that.. and you would be just in doing so.
First, let me say I love how you're painting this as a strange belief of mine, when my beliefs here are actually in line with, well, nearly everyone except you. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Now then: if I were your neighbor, I wouldn't pay for your garbage bill because I don't really care how messy your yard is, or what effect that might have on my home's value. If it presented a safety hazard, I'd just report you.
On the other hand, I have no problem paying for firemen who put out other people's fires, police who solve crimes committed against other people and courts to try other people's cases, parks and lakes that I never visit myself, schools to which I have no children to send, food stamps and medical care for people who earn less than I do, and so on.
These are societal benefits, and I don't mind paying to live in a society where these things are available. As you may have noticed, most people don't mind paying for them: that's why they exist.
I don't know how things work in your neck of the woods, but around here, we vote on levies to fund things like schools and fire service -- and those levies pass without exception. That's democracy. Sorry if you don't like it, but that's how we do things in America.
Instant runoff is a crappy implementation of a decent idea.
Condorcet methods are a better implementation of the same idea: you rank your candidates in order, but the winner is decided all at once through some fancy math, instead of over several rounds of runoff simulations. The result is a more sensible outcome (IRV has some scenarios where third parties are just as spoilerish as they are today), less data to transport (IRV basically makes it impossible to count ballots locally and transmit the totals to a central location), and more control by the voter (you can give the same rank to two or more candidates if you want).
You can make your own rules with your own school and kid.
Thanks, I knew you'd come around. We, the voting public, make our own rules for our public schools, and one of those rules is that kids have to be vaccinated.
What is free education? I've never heard of that before. Where do you live?
Pardon me, I would've brought my scalpel if I knew we were going to be splitting hairs here.
As you know, public schools are "free" in the sense that there's no marginal cost: you pay for public school whether or not you send your kid there. The alternatives do have a marginal cost, either in private tuition or in time spent homeschooling.
People force me to pay property taxes so they can educate other peoples children around here. I don't think that's very fair. Do you?
Yes, I do.
I also think it's fair that I'm forced to pay taxes for services I don't use, because (1) I benefit in turn from services that other people pay for but don't use, and (2) I indirectly benefit from those services anyway. The availability of public schools, for example, results in a more productive economy and less crime, which I enjoy even though I don't have kids.
If you're unhappy with this system, might I suggest moving to an abandoned island? You won't have to put in a lick of work for anyone else's benefit, and you'll get to keep 100% of whatever you manage to gather or hunt. As long as it doesn't spoil before you eat it, that is.