For people claiming that "Fox News is biased" because they have Hannity and O'Reilly, and the "media" are balanced, because they include Rush Limbaugh.
*burying face in hands*
When people allege liberal bias, they're talking about news reporting, not commentary.
This is so important that I will say it again.
When people allege liberal bias, they're talking about news reporting, not commentary.
If anyone cites an opinion piece as evidence of bias or the lack thereof, they have revealed their analysis is not worth listening to.
I was planning on not responding any more to people on this incredibly hostile thread (which as already earned me two dubious "overrated" overmoddings), but some things, I just have an obligation to correct:
Like many econometric models, this is pretty terrible. It essentially says that the cognitive cost of "preferences" is identically zero, while the cognitive cost of "constraints" is more than is available to spend (infinity). This is unrealistic, since any given mental characteristic in a large population varies smoothly over wide range. An arbitrary good-bad threshold is just that: arbitrary.
First, let's get our basic terminology correct: it wasn't an econometric model; it was an economic model. There's a huge difference. Econometrics is economics analyzed through real-world observable data. Many economists are violently opposed to econometric analysis. Since the theoretical separation I described didn't even hint at measurables you would go and do an experiment on, this is not an econometric model. I know, I know, you were just being careless, so it's "no big deal" but it betrays a poor underlying understanding of the issues, and I wanted to help you get it right.
The rest of that passage... I don't even know where you got it. First of all, it doesn't make any good-bad distinction; that's a value judgment, which I specifically warned against using and avoided using in the analysis. Second, you don't even explain how they imply what you say they imply about costs, or even what a cognitive cost is. (Sounds like a buzzword you probably wouldn't be able to define if asked.) Third, in no way does the model contradict the idea of varying traits among the population; it fact, it affirms it. If you have a reason why it would contradict, you didn't give it, and frankly, I don't make people's arguments for them. Just not how I work.
The rest of your post revealed you did not even read what I posted. For example, what is your psychopath example supposed to prove? It affirmed my post. The "psychopath" has different preferences than you would like. He passes the gun-to-the-head just, just like my post would expect him too.
Much as I'd love to hold your hand through the rest of your pseudo-intellectual post, I'm really at a point of diminishing returns here. So I'm just going to say this: read my post again, and this time, try not to treat it like a wiki - I said what I said, not what you added.
Wow, this is depressing. Is it just me here? Normally mods only invoke "overrated" when something gets to +5 but really isn't an intelligent comment. I've just gotten modded down to 0 as "overrated". Similar thing happened in this thread:
This is like Rolls-Royce being "in talks" with Ford to see if they can send each other customers. But it's stupid: Rolls-Royces are bought by a more sophisticated kind of customer, while Ford goes for broader appeal. It's really pointless to think there's significant overlap.
And I don't follow or much care for what car company owns which other ones, so if Rolls-Royce is already owned by Ford or vice versa, I'd really rather not hear about it right now.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but you're being kind of glib in your dismissal of real issues, no offense. What if someone tells a cop "This Middle Eastern guy told me he was going to blow up a building and I recognized him from before". Then the cop says, "Who is this person?" and then he says "Whoa, whoa, confidential source, can't reveal, I consider myself a journalist." Then the cop says, "Oh, sorry, don't mean to intrude. Good day."
And most cases of revealing confidential sources does not involve 5th amendment issues; you're testifying about other people.
This actually came up as a debate topic when I was in high school. The topic was something along the lines of "Resolved: that the First Amendment ought to protect journalists from revealing confidential sources." One clever guy on the debate though of a cool argument that if the government really protected "journalists" from revealing confidential sources, that would mean it would have to, at some point, define journalist. Now, however it defines a journalist, it will also have to be the one interpreting it, which effectively means state regulation of journalism: you meet their (self-serving) standards, or you don't get to shield sources. This means the government has three options:
1) Allow anyone to refuse to reveal where they got info, all the time (bad).
2) Allow no one to refuse to reveal where the got info, ever (bad).
3) Arbitrarily pick and choose who counts as a "journalist" and thus must reveal info (bad).
I don't think the right to shield a source should have anything to do with who you are (journalist or not), but some other standard weighing public interest concerns against the need for confidential sources to feel safe.
No, a good history will just make it only go up a little from year to year. A bad history will make it go up a lot from year to year. Interesting also, that the best case scenario is that your insurance rate does not go up at all at renewal. However, the valuation of your car will have gone down during that year. So effectively, you are STILL paying higher insurance.
I agree, inflation exists. I was talking in real terms (and assuming no surge in accident rates).
I think it would be a tremendous blow to software development if every developer suddenly had to start carrying this insurance,
Nobody would have to carry insurance. It's just that the client would have no guarantee if something went wrong. If he's cool with that, great, just as long as he agrees not to sue you.
which 1.) is very expensive. About $5,000 for my small company.
Hiring software writers is expensive. Does that mean software development doesn't happen?
Because you didn't understand that analogy, let me make the point explicit: yes, it is "expensive"... but it adds value to the product. That's why people buy it. If it doesn't add value, you know, don't buy it, and accept the lower payments from clients.
And 2.) Is nearly impossible to obtain without an established track record. At the very least it could cost 2 or 3 times as much for someone with no experience.
Not really. They just have to include a clause that says "for this insurance to apply, someone with experience must review your work". Problem solved.
Actually, $5,000 is reasonably cheap compared with medical malpractice. But the only reason it is relatively cheap is because no one ever actually sues over it. It is just free money for the insurance companies. If people/companies do ever start suing over professional liability, the premiums will undoubtedly skyrocket.
Important things first: there is no free money for insurance companies. Like I said to the other poster, if you really believe insurance companies get free, riskless money, buy their stock. Or share you insight with investors and start another one to get some of that lovin'. Your point is either absurd or poorly stated, and I hope it's the latter.
Now, it may be that your insurance is cheap relative to medical malpractice insurance because "no one ever sues over it" but if that's the reason for it, it's only because of the more fundamently underlying reason, that there's little to be made in suing in your field. In your field, damages are easily quantifiable and/or agreed to in advance. Like I said in my original post, that does not hold in the medical field, where juries must ponder over how much a life or limb is worth, which guarantees you wide variance, high risk, overcompensation, and envy-based verdicts. John Edwards can't parade a crippled child in front of a jury and make them rule with their hearts instead of their heads.
If the "no liability" clauses meant anything, it would be hard to explain software vendors and developers getting sued. What I thought the ex-White House dude was proposing as a solution to the principal agent problem (look up on Wikipedia) was that development contracts include liability for damages. That is, he was proposing a new model of development whereby developers might charge more, but they would hold some responsibility when things go wrong. I really don't think he was proposing to retroactively void contracts that specify no liability. Come on, let's try not to put obviously wrong positions in people's mouths.
You don't need a large wad of cash to buy an insurance company's stock. If you have a retirement account or a mutual fund, you probably own part of one. It's not free money. The only way to get free money from money is with a risk-free interest bearing account. Now, if you're one of those idiots that denounces interest as "something for nothing", you'd have a case against that, but running an insurance company is most certainly not risk-free money.
The problem is that for popular end-user apps, the potential real damages could run into the $Billions in the event that the app has remote vulnerability that enables a destructive Internet worm.
True: that's why, as I recommended, they should all specify who's liable for what and what the caps are.
It's long been a well-known fact that you can't positively prove that a piece of software is totally free of bugs, so this risk will always exist.
Just like you can't positively prove any specific driver will not collide with anyone. You can still insure in the aggregate.
Only mega corporations will be able to afford the premiums to insure for such huge potential risks, so innovation in network-connected user applications could just about grind to a halt.
No, smaller firms can compete on other dimensions: "We can't pay out in the event of a crisis, but we charge a lot less and have a good track record."
Most likely all of the liability will be assigned to the application developer by the legal process....
Not if they specify in advance who will pay for what if what happens. Which is really what they should be doing all along, rather than waiting until something does go wrong and then suing the pants off each other.
This is only a good idea if you're an insurance company, since they are the only ones guaranteed to make a profit on this.
False. Insurance companies can and do suffer losses just like everyone else. They can easily end up paying more than they collected in premiums. If insurance was a risk-free way of making money, everyone would be doing it.
I don't know how it works where you are, but 'round here people pay car insurance based on how everyone else drives (factors like age, gender etc can play an enormous role in the rate, regardless of the drivers own record)
That's true, because it's hard to assess an individual's driving potential, so they have to look to class probability. But accidents will drive up your rates, and a good history can bring it down. The effect is more pronounced with medicine where you can get certification, etc.
me:The liability insurance problem with doctors is a problem of the legal system, not with insurance itself. you:...and that very same legal system will preside over these claims.
I specifically explained the aspects of the legal system that make the medical system suck: it's because courts don't recognize advance agreements about how much a doctor should pay for each kind of accident, so there's no prior basis for assessing damage. Then in the post of mine that you did read, I explained how software writing agreements circumvent this problem avoiding the problems of the legal system that attach to medicine.
I went into quite a bit of detail why better doctors don't have lower malpractice rates and why malpractice insurance premiums are higher. Kindly read the post again. I'm not saying you're wrong, it's just that you need to respond to the precise reasons I gave.
Btw, better drivers do pay lower premiums. But since in the aggregate there is no "safe class" of drivers, the premiums will never be driven to zero.
Hold on - insurance is actually a good idea. That way, clients get compensated for bad product, and developers pay premiums based on their history. The liability insurance problem with doctors is a problem of the legal system, not with insurance itself. Payments are so widely varying, and probably partially due to jury's emotionalism, but more likely due to the fac that they have nothing to compare it to. If you break a vase for $10,000, they award $10,000 + admin. costs. It's really simple. But people are not allowed to negotiate with doctors before operations: "I will pay you for surgery, but only if you agree to pay $X to my family if you kill me, $Y if you lob off a limb, etc." so juries can never know what a "reasonable" payment is.
If payments are widely varying, and, as is the case, dependent on a doctor's wealth, NOT actual harm done (rich doctors pay more) it's extremely difficult to insure, and, even worse, becoming a better doctor won't lower insurance premiums! (This is because everyone will make some mistake at some point, and at that point, the jury will award an amount closer to the doctor's net worth, meaning over time, bad doctors pay the same as good.)
The way to solve this is to agree to a specific schedule of payments if there are bugs as part of a contract to develop code. This avoids all the problems you describe above (like trying to get out of liability) and keeps down insurance costs for good coders.
Thanks for admitting that at best it was "a guy in a hospital who had nothing better to do" who invented fractals, not "IBM". I'm working on a machine translator program in my spare time. But I guess if I succeed, Slashdot will have an article many years later that "[LeonGeeste's employer] invented many things like machine translation (2007)...". (yes, that is an accurate analogy because in both cases, some version of the technology preceded the "invention" date)
Also, let's not forget that the summary says that IBM invented fractals. Not "took and ran with", not "really did some cool stuff with", not "developed"... invented.
I know it's fashionable to inflate the importance of whomever or whatever you're trying to laud, but this is just a little over-reaching. Anyone catch any of the other discoveries?
Look, I'd love to respond to your post, but frankly, I've lost too much faith in slashdotters, at least in this thread. I made a reasoned argument, and in respond, I got modded down at least six times. It's just not worth it for me anymore. Sorry.
Another Slashdot NP-hard problem: how to reconcile the rights of content purchasers to be free from harassment and DRM with the need for content producers to earn a profit, which is diminished the easier it is to flout copyright laws. This topic comes up all the time. I believe I have a solution for the problem and in fact a general method for how to profit from content creation without copyright laws or "charity purchases". See my journal. (Yes, I know this part of my post is off-topic, but I have a point.)
I think the first thing that needs to be done is for each side to stop demonizing each other. You're not evil for wanting one body to control the root nodes, and you're not evil for wanting to diminish the US's role.
No, I said it was explainable in terms of preferences, rather than constraints, as is the case with all normal illnesses, and that mental health diagnoses are ultimately moral judgments, not objectively discernable states. I pointed out that while you can correlate some behaviors with chemical levels, that doesn't not prove anything, since if we did the same thing with religions or sexual preferences, people would not call them illnesses.
My point was that there's a fundamental difference between conventional medical illnesses and mentall illnesses. The former are constraints; the latter are preferences. We only label mental illnesses as illnesses because they are "bad" preferences. People should change their bad preferences; buy they are not "illnesses" in the usual sense of the work.
That's basically all I'm saying.
And it's not my lexicon; it's the well-understood lexicon of economics. Here's a professor who argues basically what I argued here:
Sorry, that doesn't work on me. I too have been diagnosed with the exact same thing. I'll fax you the medical records if you ask.
Let me clarify what I'm saying: I'm not denying you have different preferences. I feel the same way. But these are different preferences we have been endowed with. I would like to change my preferences. But they are not illnesses; they are different preferences. If someone put a gun to my head, I could change my actions. Remember that there are people like you and me who don't like their preferences either, but don't have the political clout to get it labeled as a disease... or removed, in the case of homosexuality.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course not.
When someone has a monopoly on steel, steel consumers suffer.
When someone has a monopoly on OS's, computer users suffer.
When someone has a monopoly on retail in a community, that community suffers.
But when education is monopolized, that does absolutely nothing to the quality and cost of education.
For people claiming that "Fox News is biased" because they have Hannity and O'Reilly, and the "media" are balanced, because they include Rush Limbaugh.
*burying face in hands*
When people allege liberal bias, they're talking about news reporting, not commentary.
This is so important that I will say it again.
When people allege liberal bias, they're talking about news reporting, not commentary.
If anyone cites an opinion piece as evidence of bias or the lack thereof, they have revealed their analysis is not worth listening to.
I was planning on not responding any more to people on this incredibly hostile thread (which as already earned me two dubious "overrated" overmoddings), but some things, I just have an obligation to correct:
Like many econometric models, this is pretty terrible. It essentially says that the cognitive cost of "preferences" is identically zero, while the cognitive cost of "constraints" is more than is available to spend (infinity). This is unrealistic, since any given mental characteristic in a large population varies smoothly over wide range. An arbitrary good-bad threshold is just that: arbitrary.
First, let's get our basic terminology correct: it wasn't an econometric model; it was an economic model. There's a huge difference. Econometrics is economics analyzed through real-world observable data. Many economists are violently opposed to econometric analysis. Since the theoretical separation I described didn't even hint at measurables you would go and do an experiment on, this is not an econometric model. I know, I know, you were just being careless, so it's "no big deal" but it betrays a poor underlying understanding of the issues, and I wanted to help you get it right.
The rest of that passage... I don't even know where you got it. First of all, it doesn't make any good-bad distinction; that's a value judgment, which I specifically warned against using and avoided using in the analysis. Second, you don't even explain how they imply what you say they imply about costs, or even what a cognitive cost is. (Sounds like a buzzword you probably wouldn't be able to define if asked.) Third, in no way does the model contradict the idea of varying traits among the population; it fact, it affirms it. If you have a reason why it would contradict, you didn't give it, and frankly, I don't make people's arguments for them. Just not how I work.
The rest of your post revealed you did not even read what I posted. For example, what is your psychopath example supposed to prove? It affirmed my post. The "psychopath" has different preferences than you would like. He passes the gun-to-the-head just, just like my post would expect him too.
Much as I'd love to hold your hand through the rest of your pseudo-intellectual post, I'm really at a point of diminishing returns here. So I'm just going to say this: read my post again, and this time, try not to treat it like a wiki - I said what I said, not what you added.
Wow, this is depressing. Is it just me here? Normally mods only invoke "overrated" when something gets to +5 but really isn't an intelligent comment. I've just gotten modded down to 0 as "overrated". Similar thing happened in this thread:
7 72718
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=165050&cid=13
Would I be paranoid to think people are still mad at me about the mental illness thread?
This is like Rolls-Royce being "in talks" with Ford to see if they can send each other customers. But it's stupid: Rolls-Royces are bought by a more sophisticated kind of customer, while Ford goes for broader appeal. It's really pointless to think there's significant overlap.
And I don't follow or much care for what car company owns which other ones, so if Rolls-Royce is already owned by Ford or vice versa, I'd really rather not hear about it right now.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but you're being kind of glib in your dismissal of real issues, no offense. What if someone tells a cop "This Middle Eastern guy told me he was going to blow up a building and I recognized him from before". Then the cop says, "Who is this person?" and then he says "Whoa, whoa, confidential source, can't reveal, I consider myself a journalist." Then the cop says, "Oh, sorry, don't mean to intrude. Good day."
And most cases of revealing confidential sources does not involve 5th amendment issues; you're testifying about other people.
This actually came up as a debate topic when I was in high school. The topic was something along the lines of "Resolved: that the First Amendment ought to protect journalists from revealing confidential sources." One clever guy on the debate though of a cool argument that if the government really protected "journalists" from revealing confidential sources, that would mean it would have to, at some point, define journalist. Now, however it defines a journalist, it will also have to be the one interpreting it, which effectively means state regulation of journalism: you meet their (self-serving) standards, or you don't get to shield sources. This means the government has three options:
1) Allow anyone to refuse to reveal where they got info, all the time (bad).
2) Allow no one to refuse to reveal where the got info, ever (bad).
3) Arbitrarily pick and choose who counts as a "journalist" and thus must reveal info (bad).
I don't think the right to shield a source should have anything to do with who you are (journalist or not), but some other standard weighing public interest concerns against the need for confidential sources to feel safe.
No, a good history will just make it only go up a little from year to year. A bad history will make it go up a lot from year to year.
Interesting also, that the best case scenario is that your insurance rate does not go up at all at renewal. However, the valuation of your car will have gone down during that year. So effectively, you are STILL paying higher insurance.
I agree, inflation exists. I was talking in real terms (and assuming no surge in accident rates).
I think it would be a tremendous blow to software development if every developer suddenly had to start carrying this insurance,
Nobody would have to carry insurance. It's just that the client would have no guarantee if something went wrong. If he's cool with that, great, just as long as he agrees not to sue you.
which 1.) is very expensive. About $5,000 for my small company.
Hiring software writers is expensive. Does that mean software development doesn't happen?
Because you didn't understand that analogy, let me make the point explicit: yes, it is "expensive"... but it adds value to the product. That's why people buy it. If it doesn't add value, you know, don't buy it, and accept the lower payments from clients.
And 2.) Is nearly impossible to obtain without an established track record. At the very least it could cost 2 or 3 times as much for someone with no experience.
Not really. They just have to include a clause that says "for this insurance to apply, someone with experience must review your work". Problem solved.
Actually, $5,000 is reasonably cheap compared with medical malpractice. But the only reason it is relatively cheap is because no one ever actually sues over it. It is just free money for the insurance companies. If people/companies do ever start suing over professional liability, the premiums will undoubtedly skyrocket.
Important things first: there is no free money for insurance companies. Like I said to the other poster, if you really believe insurance companies get free, riskless money, buy their stock. Or share you insight with investors and start another one to get some of that lovin'. Your point is either absurd or poorly stated, and I hope it's the latter.
Now, it may be that your insurance is cheap relative to medical malpractice insurance because "no one ever sues over it" but if that's the reason for it, it's only because of the more fundamently underlying reason, that there's little to be made in suing in your field. In your field, damages are easily quantifiable and/or agreed to in advance. Like I said in my original post, that does not hold in the medical field, where juries must ponder over how much a life or limb is worth, which guarantees you wide variance, high risk, overcompensation, and envy-based verdicts. John Edwards can't parade a crippled child in front of a jury and make them rule with their hearts instead of their heads.
If the "no liability" clauses meant anything, it would be hard to explain software vendors and developers getting sued. What I thought the ex-White House dude was proposing as a solution to the principal agent problem (look up on Wikipedia) was that development contracts include liability for damages. That is, he was proposing a new model of development whereby developers might charge more, but they would hold some responsibility when things go wrong. I really don't think he was proposing to retroactively void contracts that specify no liability. Come on, let's try not to put obviously wrong positions in people's mouths.
You don't need a large wad of cash to buy an insurance company's stock. If you have a retirement account or a mutual fund, you probably own part of one. It's not free money. The only way to get free money from money is with a risk-free interest bearing account. Now, if you're one of those idiots that denounces interest as "something for nothing", you'd have a case against that, but running an insurance company is most certainly not risk-free money.
Mutually consensual arrangements are arbitrary?
The problem is that for popular end-user apps, the potential real damages could run into the $Billions in the event that the app has remote vulnerability that enables a destructive Internet worm.
...
True: that's why, as I recommended, they should all specify who's liable for what and what the caps are.
It's long been a well-known fact that you can't positively prove that a piece of software is totally free of bugs, so this risk will always exist.
Just like you can't positively prove any specific driver will not collide with anyone. You can still insure in the aggregate.
Only mega corporations will be able to afford the premiums to insure for such huge potential risks, so innovation in network-connected user applications could just about grind to a halt.
No, smaller firms can compete on other dimensions: "We can't pay out in the event of a crisis, but we charge a lot less and have a good track record."
Most likely all of the liability will be assigned to the application developer by the legal process.
Not if they specify in advance who will pay for what if what happens. Which is really what they should be doing all along, rather than waiting until something does go wrong and then suing the pants off each other.
This is only a good idea if you're an insurance company, since they are the only ones guaranteed to make a profit on this.
False. Insurance companies can and do suffer losses just like everyone else. They can easily end up paying more than they collected in premiums. If insurance was a risk-free way of making money, everyone would be doing it.
I don't know how it works where you are, but 'round here people pay car insurance based on how everyone else drives (factors like age, gender etc can play an enormous role in the rate, regardless of the drivers own record)
That's true, because it's hard to assess an individual's driving potential, so they have to look to class probability. But accidents will drive up your rates, and a good history can bring it down. The effect is more pronounced with medicine where you can get certification, etc.
me:The liability insurance problem with doctors is a problem of the legal system, not with insurance itself.
you:...and that very same legal system will preside over these claims.
I specifically explained the aspects of the legal system that make the medical system suck: it's because courts don't recognize advance agreements about how much a doctor should pay for each kind of accident, so there's no prior basis for assessing damage. Then in the post of mine that you did read, I explained how software writing agreements circumvent this problem avoiding the problems of the legal system that attach to medicine.
I went into quite a bit of detail why better doctors don't have lower malpractice rates and why malpractice insurance premiums are higher. Kindly read the post again. I'm not saying you're wrong, it's just that you need to respond to the precise reasons I gave.
Btw, better drivers do pay lower premiums. But since in the aggregate there is no "safe class" of drivers, the premiums will never be driven to zero.
Hold on - insurance is actually a good idea. That way, clients get compensated for bad product, and developers pay premiums based on their history. The liability insurance problem with doctors is a problem of the legal system, not with insurance itself. Payments are so widely varying, and probably partially due to jury's emotionalism, but more likely due to the fac that they have nothing to compare it to. If you break a vase for $10,000, they award $10,000 + admin. costs. It's really simple. But people are not allowed to negotiate with doctors before operations: "I will pay you for surgery, but only if you agree to pay $X to my family if you kill me, $Y if you lob off a limb, etc." so juries can never know what a "reasonable" payment is.
If payments are widely varying, and, as is the case, dependent on a doctor's wealth, NOT actual harm done (rich doctors pay more) it's extremely difficult to insure, and, even worse, becoming a better doctor won't lower insurance premiums! (This is because everyone will make some mistake at some point, and at that point, the jury will award an amount closer to the doctor's net worth, meaning over time, bad doctors pay the same as good.)
The way to solve this is to agree to a specific schedule of payments if there are bugs as part of a contract to develop code. This avoids all the problems you describe above (like trying to get out of liability) and keeps down insurance costs for good coders.
Thanks for admitting that at best it was "a guy in a hospital who had nothing better to do" who invented fractals, not "IBM". I'm working on a machine translator program in my spare time. But I guess if I succeed, Slashdot will have an article many years later that "[LeonGeeste's employer] invented many things like machine translation (2007)...". (yes, that is an accurate analogy because in both cases, some version of the technology preceded the "invention" date)
Also, let's not forget that the summary says that IBM invented fractals. Not "took and ran with", not "really did some cool stuff with", not "developed"... invented.
And they didn't coin the term in that year, according to Wikipedia.
n s_from_classical_analysis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractals#Contributio
I know it's fashionable to inflate the importance of whomever or whatever you're trying to laud, but this is just a little over-reaching. Anyone catch any of the other discoveries?
*sigh*
Another person who misses the point completely.
Look, I'd love to respond to your post, but frankly, I've lost too much faith in slashdotters, at least in this thread. I made a reasoned argument, and in respond, I got modded down at least six times. It's just not worth it for me anymore. Sorry.
Another Slashdot NP-hard problem: how to reconcile the rights of content purchasers to be free from harassment and DRM with the need for content producers to earn a profit, which is diminished the easier it is to flout copyright laws. This topic comes up all the time. I believe I have a solution for the problem and in fact a general method for how to profit from content creation without copyright laws or "charity purchases". See my journal. (Yes, I know this part of my post is off-topic, but I have a point.)
I think the first thing that needs to be done is for each side to stop demonizing each other. You're not evil for wanting one body to control the root nodes, and you're not evil for wanting to diminish the US's role.
No, I said it was explainable in terms of preferences, rather than constraints, as is the case with all normal illnesses, and that mental health diagnoses are ultimately moral judgments, not objectively discernable states. I pointed out that while you can correlate some behaviors with chemical levels, that doesn't not prove anything, since if we did the same thing with religions or sexual preferences, people would not call them illnesses.
just yesterday I got modded down for saying in this thread:
7 59610
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=164875&cid=13
that mental "illness" easily morphs into a flimsy excuse for social control.
Too bad I had to get modded down six times to say it.
My point was that there's a fundamental difference between conventional medical illnesses and mentall illnesses. The former are constraints; the latter are preferences. We only label mental illnesses as illnesses because they are "bad" preferences. People should change their bad preferences; buy they are not "illnesses" in the usual sense of the work.
s zaszjhe.doc
That's basically all I'm saying.
And it's not my lexicon; it's the well-understood lexicon of economics. Here's a professor who argues basically what I argued here:
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/
Read the paragraph after the part you quoted.
...and you haven't noticed my response to your other post yet.
Sorry, that doesn't work on me. I too have been diagnosed with the exact same thing. I'll fax you the medical records if you ask.
Let me clarify what I'm saying: I'm not denying you have different preferences. I feel the same way. But these are different preferences we have been endowed with. I would like to change my preferences. But they are not illnesses; they are different preferences. If someone put a gun to my head, I could change my actions. Remember that there are people like you and me who don't like their preferences either, but don't have the political clout to get it labeled as a disease... or removed, in the case of homosexuality.