Okay this *is* baseball fans we're talking about here, people excited enough about it to watch ancient games on their little home computer. Not the folks who go to games and watch it on TV to be part of the in crowd, sort of social event; we're talking about the people who actually get intellectual stimulation from watching *baseball* games.
I'm willing to bet that somewhere in the user agreement, there's a provision that lets them do exactly this, and abusive hard-to-read* EULAs that no one really expects people will read, are just as much the problem.
*I'm not just talking about the legalese, but how such screens are inevitably different from reading text in the rest of the product, and how it's hard to scroll through or search through, and there's no standard EULA that it can stipulate a deviation from.
If the Computer Science department learned about KISS design they wouldn't be in that problem... I don't know if I would want to hire a CS Student from MIT if they don't teach the KISS Concept...
Newsflash: *Most* graduates of MIT have never learned how to kiss (though why you capitalize the term, I have no idea).
Wright and Van Der Rohe were supposed to be modernists, a school of architecture with an extreme emphasis on functionality, often at the expense of looks. (Wright was alleged to be the basis for ultra-principled "Everything must have a purpose" Howard Roark in The Fountainhead.)
Wouldn't they be the *opposite* of the kind of architect who would overlook something like this?
Ah OK, but I think that's different because a 1-year-old is pretty much just a passive recipient of what their parents feed them, so it's their parents deciding when and how much -- and nobody forces the parent to force-feed their kid 5 times a day. The laws that informally regulate how much and how often parents have to feed their kid, are motivated by a threshold of harm, just like the laws that regulate at what point you can force an adult to eat if they're in danger of starving themselves.
I don't think it's grounded in a specific threshold of harm, more like, "You are incapable of accurately deciding in this area, until you reach this age, irrespective of how much you turn out to use."
It seems this boils down to: The costs are less if you're rational enough to see them coming. (Or as you wrote later, "irrationality can amplify the negative consequences of an action whose consequences are time-delayed".) Well the costs of medical care, anti-addiction meds, etc. are not less on paper, whether or not you see them coming, so let's assume this refers to a more abstract notion of "cost" -- perhaps the stress of getting hit with surprise fees later on.
Well, first I don't think there is a non-abstract notion of cost -- cost is something perceived by an individual, subjective mind, so their subjective estimation necessarily influences the cost. Second, *net* costs most certainly are less, even on paper: in one case, I saved up (or took other precautions) for that cost; in another I did not. So at that later day, the *net* harm to me is (in a probabilistic sense) less.
And before you start tabulating those precautions: again, don't get caught up too much in the question of whether this or that precaution sufficiently mitigates the harm from smoking. The point is not that "Smoking is objectively rational if you also do X, Y, and Z." The point is that "An adult is better able to know what the results will be, even if we disagree about their definition of a 'harm'."
But even if you assume adults have greater foresight and foresight brings the costs down, there's still an inconsistency, because whatever harm is done by 1 cigarette to a minor without foresight, there is again some number N cigarettes that does an equivalent amount of harm to an adult with foresight... in which case, why don't we ban the adult from smoking that number. (And yes, it would be far less than the threshold you mentioned, where an adult smokes enough all at once to nearly kill themselves.) Also, note that this would justify letting kids smoke if they could prove that they were setting aside a trust fund for their future smoking-related health costs, not a position that you hear advocated a lot:)
Well, I was going to address this in the last response, but too many nuances started popping up, that I just scrapped it.
The shortest explanation is: what *improvement* (in policy) does your argument justify? Let's say that "smoking 80 cigs at once harms an adult as much as smoking *10* (however timewise allocated) before age 18 does to a minor". Does that mean you've proved that "all minors should be allowed ten freebies before prosecution attaches"? No, because the harm is only equal in a statistical sense. Some of the minor smokers will get hooked, giving the (previously discussed) problem of "a rational self saddled with addiction incurred as the irrational self". (And conversely, some will not get hooked at all.)
But then what if we were able to curb *this* problem too: say, you get 10 freebies in a "government smoking center" (to ensure the limit is not exceeded) if you pay a fee to a fund that treats smoking addiction in minors, canceling the harm to those who get hooked; and then police still pursue those smoking outside the centers?
Well, there's the rub: In democracies, it's typical for there to be policies that can easily be improved on, but voters won't vote for because they don't like what such a vote would express. Some
I'm sure that, on paper, that's exactly how it works here (Texas). It's just a matter of apathetic enforcement of the law. If you really wanted to be sure that no one can get on the road uninsured unless they steal a car, then police would have to show up the moment I pass the renewal deadline for my insurance policy without replacing it or transferring ownership of the car. Needless to say, this doesn't happen. I've seen ads where the police offer temporary "warrant amnesty", giving you a chance to turn yourself in for outstanding warrants. Now, if they have that big a problem following up on warrants (where there's actually a judcial order for arrest), what are the odds they're so vigilant about uninsured drivers?
And then of course, both B/C and Texas do nothing about the possibility that someone will buy a car (and they check you for insurance on the secondary market, right?) and then share it with illegals.
It's all nice and feel-good that uninsured driving is illegal, but all that means is more hassle for people who obey the law. Criminals and illegals can effectively evade it until an accident.
Coincidentally, about a month ago my cousin was hit by an uninsured illegal while driving. Due to quick thinking she avoided a direct hit that would have killed her.
However, I have no idea how that should influence my decision. I would prefer:
a) Illegals not drive.
If that's not viable, I'd prefer
b) illegals be insured
although considering how much they charge teenage drivers, I can't imagine how anyone could afford an actuarially accurate number. That would still be better than the current situation of:
Well, just because it doesn't work in America, doesn't mean it's failure in other countries. I remember when I was in Sweden, they had a truly amazing bike share program. Basically, at a bunch of depots throughout a city, there will be a bunch of bikes you can grab to get where you're going. And it's not a bunch of crappy bikes either, they're very stylish, customized, have intricate patterns, mods, you name it. The way it works is you just go up to one you like, break it's connector (you can use a rock or whatever) and ride wherever you need to go, and just drop it at the nearest depot when you're done.
The locals are also very concerned for your safety. Whenever I rode off in one, people would run after me, yelling frantically about something. I ignored them of course, because my Swedish is pretty weak.
-Time for a cold/allergy medicines to kick in would halve every 18 months. -Medicines would be cheap, but you'd have to buy them in five-year supplies at a time. -No one would be able to figure out what Mac molecules look like. -Pill would do anything you wanted, except for the 50% of the time that you vomit them.
And if computers had to follow pharma regs:
-Chipmakers would have to run extensive tests to ensure they were Turing complete. -Chips would be pulled off the market if they ran into any unpredicted infinite loops. -Every computer would come with a book full of warnings including such gems as "Not intended for use underwater." -Computer commercials would occasionally just mention the product in a positive light with no real information about functionality. (Oh wait, they already do that...)
OP, I'll get to you later today, but I wanted to address this:
As another example, an adult can be expected to know not to point a loaded gun at himself and pull the trigger. It would be foolish to expect the same understanding from a 2 year-old.
The problem, from the OP's perspective, is that the law does in fact prohibit adults from pointing loaded guns at themselves and pulling the trigger. (to the extent that suicide can be illegal in the first place -- police and others can forcibly prevent you.)
Or, in other words, if we accept that action X is prima facia evidence of irrationality, why allow anyone to do it, even adults?
Hmm, this is actually better than most of the responses that I paid $1 for. But anyway:
=-)
This would seem to support my point, not contradict it. i.e. you're applying my logic to the situation of an adult who isn't eating enough, to which most people agree that it's justified to force-feed them.
No, it contradicts your point: you (presumably!) can see why it's justified to force a 1-yr-old to eat five times a day, but not to force a grown-up to eat because he skipped breakfast. Or don't you?
This is subtle, but the problem is that since the costs and the "benefits" of smoking are about the same for adults and minors, you can't say that adults who smoke are being more rational about smoking, than minors are. If the two groups are making the same choice with the same costs and benefits, why is one more irrational?
No, the costs/benefits aren't the same once you accept differing rationality.
1) Rational person: After five years, he suffers the consequences of smoking *and has known they would happen all along and made other decisions with this in mind*. (e.g. budgeted more for health care, anti-addiction medicine, cosmetic surgery, etc.)
2) Irrational person: He underestimates the costs of smoking, and arrives at the future date, five years later, suffering consequences he hadn't planned on bearing.
Similarly, a rational person would be better at predicting what he would value at a later date, and at allocating resources robust across a broader range of personal values.
Actually I think there's still a contradiction, because if we were to be consistent, the number N of cigarettes than an adult was prohibited from smoking, would be whatever number causes the equivalent amount of harm that 1 cigarette causes to a minor. But for the actual ban that we have for adults, the number is much higher -- it's not the number of cigarettes that would cause the equivalent harm to 1 cigarette for a kid, it's the number of cigarettes that would induce enough toxicity to kill yourself.
This goes back to the newborn feeding thing. A newborn will not starve from skipping one meal (although he'll make you think he will...) Yet we accept forcing him to eat each meal just as we could accept forcing an adult to eat, but not until he's near starvation.
Also, once you accept that irrationality can amplify the negative consequences of an action whose consequences are time-delayed, you can see how an underage person giving himself an addiction can be equivalent to an adult injecting a significant amount of toxins into himself.
These were good points though.
Thanks, and I think I better understand your argument now.
OK, so how's this work, do you owe me a dollar now?
Nah, you still owe me one.;-) If you could multiply this fee ten times over, and I could get regular work, I'd make this my day job...
You imply that adults "weigh" the long-term consequences of smoking and then make a rational choice to continue smoking. As a former smoker, I'm not sure that's an accurate reflection of what's happening with smokers (adults or children) nor a compelling answer to why we ban underage smoking.
No, I said they're better *able* to weigh the consquences. (Please give more emphasis to my actual text than to how it makes you feel.) Whether they choose to sit down and write out a table is essentially irrelevant. The distinction is that they are able to make judgments better than minors. Ideally, we'd allow e.g. 16-year-olds to take some test to get rights early, but that's beyond the scope of this debate.
And course I should add that obviously, in real life, nothing magical happens at 18. There are shades of judgment capability that we get as we grow, and, in the absence of a cheap process to accurantely ascertain where someone is, we use heuristics, one of them being the age 18 cutoff.
A clearer explanation, in my opinion, would be that we expect adults to accept the consequences of their actions as a matter of personal responsibility.
Forest, trees. The reason we give them that personal resposibility is because we believe they are sufficiently capable of exercising it.
No offense, but your argument's not that good, or maybe I'm not understanding your point.
-You just "proved" that no paternalistic intervention is ever justified, *even by parents to newborns*. Hey, if you believe compelling someone to eat is okay if they're under 2 years old, obviously, there must be some insufficient amount of eating you can do when over 2 years old that would justify force-feeding. Er, yes, there is, it's just not encoded in any specific law that way.
-The "judgment" argument is completely unrelated to the "health results" argument (up to a limit). You seem to think the argument is that
"People under 18 shouldn't be allowed to smoke, because if they did, they would smoke a lot due to bad judgment, and people over 18 would not excessively smoke due to bad judgment."
It's not. It's more like,
"People under 18 shouldn't be allowed to smoke because their poor judgment makes them unable to accurately weigh long-term consequences of smoking. Therefore, they will smoke, and later regret the poor health and addiction. Adults may do it in the exact same amount, but then it would be with accurate judgment of the consequences. The rational self would not be victimized by the previous irrational self."
-You perform a reductio saying that banning smoking for minors would imply banning some amount of smoking (N) for adults. There is such a ban, so there's no contradiction. Namely, if you smoke so much at once as to nearly kill yourself, that can be considered a suicide attempt, and people can legally restrain you from doing it further until your body can cope.
(I'm not saying 18 is right age to ban smoking. I'm not saying there should be any one age. I'm just saying that this is a poor representation of the case for banning underage smoking, and a poor argument for a change in policy.)
I've seen people argue this a lot but I've never seen it competently substantiated. How are oil companies being "subsidized by our tax dollars"? If you mean that oil and coal have environmental externalities that producers don't currently have to pay, I'm actually on board with you, in the sense that "An uncompensated negative externality is a tax in everything but name." But you said "tax dollars". What subsidy is this referring to? And does it exceed all corporate and fuel taxes the government takes in?
To save us a few exchanges, let me get this out of the way:
-Some people are referring to the different depreciation schedule that oil wells get. However, this is to more accurately reflect a company's net book value, the change in which is the basis for the corporate tax, NOT to "encourage drilling".
-Some people are referring to the tax dollars spent on roads. However, that can't be called a fossile fuel subsidy since it doesn't differentiate based on how the vehicle is fueled. Second, these are already paid for with fuel taxes, and, to the extent there's a shortfall, it's because wasteful building coming from a political process. (Remember, bridges to nowhere are *typical*; they are just normally smaller.)
-Some people are referring to public payment for wars, but if anything, this hinders access to oil, and at best benefits specific oil companies, not oil companies as such.
In contrast, reweables actually get direct, unambiguous subsidies in the form of tax credits and farm programs.
You're correct about how market mechanisms integrate the information about the carbon externality, but that would imply that a more efficient way to go would be to tax the carbon directly. That way, new startups don't have to figure out the carbon-credit-buying process. Their environmental costs would already be accounted for in the cost of everything they buy.
Mandating efficiency (as a lot of people want to do) is completely the wrong way to go about it (compared to carbon taxation). For one thing, even when it does make a given process have the exact same functionality yet use less energy, that will free up more income for whoever made the switch, which they will then spend on goods, which themselves take energy to make. The net result is that people end up being throwing off the same externalities, but with each process being more energy effficient. These policies are based on a mindset that people won't otherwise adapt their behavior in response to policies, that if we just provide X units of energy/year, no one will ever want for more.
Second, efficiency mandates will always be "one step behind". You can mandate efficiency for today's technologies, but then even if you somehow found the "optimal" efficiency to mandate for literally everything we use, you won't have accounted for the newer ones.
A lot of policies out there seem more interested in "shutting down progress" than in actual concern for the environment...
Slashdot Mirror
Mall security guards: they're about the MERCHANTS' property rights, not yours.
Okay this *is* baseball fans we're talking about here, people excited enough about it to watch ancient games on their little home computer. Not the folks who go to games and watch it on TV to be part of the in crowd, sort of social event; we're talking about the people who actually get intellectual stimulation from watching *baseball* games.
Starting to make sense now?
I'm willing to bet that somewhere in the user agreement, there's a provision that lets them do exactly this, and abusive hard-to-read* EULAs that no one really expects people will read, are just as much the problem.
*I'm not just talking about the legalese, but how such screens are inevitably different from reading text in the rest of the product, and how it's hard to scroll through or search through, and there's no standard EULA that it can stipulate a deviation from.
Well don't worry, because we can always trust the judgment of a guy whose name Dutch for "Doctor of-the-dark".
Your complaint is invalid because that problem has since been fixed. [/what people always say to me when I complain about Ubuntu]
If the Computer Science department learned about KISS design they wouldn't be in that problem... I don't know if I would want to hire a CS Student from MIT if they don't teach the KISS Concept...
Newsflash: *Most* graduates of MIT have never learned how to kiss (though why you capitalize the term, I have no idea).
Hm, good point. Better not name a building after Steve Jobs if you ever want to renovate it!
IANAArchitecht, and now I'm just confused.
Wright and Van Der Rohe were supposed to be modernists, a school of architecture with an extreme emphasis on functionality, often at the expense of looks. (Wright was alleged to be the basis for ultra-principled "Everything must have a purpose" Howard Roark in The Fountainhead.)
Wouldn't they be the *opposite* of the kind of architect who would overlook something like this?
Ah OK, but I think that's different because a 1-year-old is pretty much just a passive recipient of what their parents feed them, so it's their parents deciding when and how much -- and nobody forces the parent to force-feed their kid 5 times a day. The laws that informally regulate how much and how often parents have to feed their kid, are motivated by a threshold of harm, just like the laws that regulate at what point you can force an adult to eat if they're in danger of starving themselves.
:)
I don't think it's grounded in a specific threshold of harm, more like, "You are incapable of accurately deciding in this area, until you reach this age, irrespective of how much you turn out to use."
It seems this boils down to: The costs are less if you're rational enough to see them coming. (Or as you wrote later, "irrationality can amplify the negative consequences of an action whose consequences are time-delayed".) Well the costs of medical care, anti-addiction meds, etc. are not less on paper, whether or not you see them coming, so let's assume this refers to a more abstract notion of "cost" -- perhaps the stress of getting hit with surprise fees later on.
Well, first I don't think there is a non-abstract notion of cost -- cost is something perceived by an individual, subjective mind, so their subjective estimation necessarily influences the cost. Second, *net* costs most certainly are less, even on paper: in one case, I saved up (or took other precautions) for that cost; in another I did not. So at that later day, the *net* harm to me is (in a probabilistic sense) less.
And before you start tabulating those precautions: again, don't get caught up too much in the question of whether this or that precaution sufficiently mitigates the harm from smoking. The point is not that "Smoking is objectively rational if you also do X, Y, and Z." The point is that "An adult is better able to know what the results will be, even if we disagree about their definition of a 'harm'."
But even if you assume adults have greater foresight and foresight brings the costs down, there's still an inconsistency, because whatever harm is done by 1 cigarette to a minor without foresight, there is again some number N cigarettes that does an equivalent amount of harm to an adult with foresight... in which case, why don't we ban the adult from smoking that number. (And yes, it would be far less than the threshold you mentioned, where an adult smokes enough all at once to nearly kill themselves.) Also, note that this would justify letting kids smoke if they could prove that they were setting aside a trust fund for their future smoking-related health costs, not a position that you hear advocated a lot
Well, I was going to address this in the last response, but too many nuances started popping up, that I just scrapped it.
The shortest explanation is: what *improvement* (in policy) does your argument justify? Let's say that "smoking 80 cigs at once harms an adult as much as smoking *10* (however timewise allocated) before age 18 does to a minor". Does that mean you've proved that "all minors should be allowed ten freebies before prosecution attaches"? No, because the harm is only equal in a statistical sense. Some of the minor smokers will get hooked, giving the (previously discussed) problem of "a rational self saddled with addiction incurred as the irrational self". (And conversely, some will not get hooked at all.)
But then what if we were able to curb *this* problem too: say, you get 10 freebies in a "government smoking center" (to ensure the limit is not exceeded) if you pay a fee to a fund that treats smoking addiction in minors, canceling the harm to those who get hooked; and then police still pursue those smoking outside the centers?
Well, there's the rub: In democracies, it's typical for there to be policies that can easily be improved on, but voters won't vote for because they don't like what such a vote would express. Some
Yeah, it's almost like:
..."
"Omg lol the magnets are afraid of each other, but when you turn one around, they're friends again!"
***
"Hi, my name is Lt. Cmdr. Data, and I was constructed by
"fake!"
I'm sure that, on paper, that's exactly how it works here (Texas). It's just a matter of apathetic enforcement of the law. If you really wanted to be sure that no one can get on the road uninsured unless they steal a car, then police would have to show up the moment I pass the renewal deadline for my insurance policy without replacing it or transferring ownership of the car. Needless to say, this doesn't happen. I've seen ads where the police offer temporary "warrant amnesty", giving you a chance to turn yourself in for outstanding warrants. Now, if they have that big a problem following up on warrants (where there's actually a judcial order for arrest), what are the odds they're so vigilant about uninsured drivers?
And then of course, both B/C and Texas do nothing about the possibility that someone will buy a car (and they check you for insurance on the secondary market, right?) and then share it with illegals.
It's all nice and feel-good that uninsured driving is illegal, but all that means is more hassle for people who obey the law. Criminals and illegals can effectively evade it until an accident.
Coincidentally, about a month ago my cousin was hit by an uninsured illegal while driving. Due to quick thinking she avoided a direct hit that would have killed her.
However, I have no idea how that should influence my decision. I would prefer:
a) Illegals not drive.
If that's not viable, I'd prefer
b) illegals be insured
although considering how much they charge teenage drivers, I can't imagine how anyone could afford an actuarially accurate number. That would still be better than the current situation of:
c) illegals do drive, without insurance.
Well, just because it doesn't work in America, doesn't mean it's failure in other countries. I remember when I was in Sweden, they had a truly amazing bike share program. Basically, at a bunch of depots throughout a city, there will be a bunch of bikes you can grab to get where you're going. And it's not a bunch of crappy bikes either, they're very stylish, customized, have intricate patterns, mods, you name it. The way it works is you just go up to one you like, break it's connector (you can use a rock or whatever) and ride wherever you need to go, and just drop it at the nearest depot when you're done.
The locals are also very concerned for your safety. Whenever I rode off in one, people would run after me, yelling frantically about something. I ignored them of course, because my Swedish is pretty weak.
So really, it just depends on the culture.
Alright, then let's compare like with like!
...)
If pharma advanced like processors:
-Time for a cold/allergy medicines to kick in would halve every 18 months.
-Medicines would be cheap, but you'd have to buy them in five-year supplies at a time.
-No one would be able to figure out what Mac molecules look like.
-Pill would do anything you wanted, except for the 50% of the time that you vomit them.
And if computers had to follow pharma regs:
-Chipmakers would have to run extensive tests to ensure they were Turing complete.
-Chips would be pulled off the market if they ran into any unpredicted infinite loops.
-Every computer would come with a book full of warnings including such gems as "Not intended for use underwater."
-Computer commercials would occasionally just mention the product in a positive light with no real information about functionality. (Oh wait, they already do that
Wait, the appropriate comparison would be between adults and children owning a gun, which was your point. n/m, carry on :-)
OP, I'll get to you later today, but I wanted to address this:
As another example, an adult can be expected to know not to point a loaded gun at himself and pull the trigger. It would be foolish to expect the same understanding from a 2 year-old.
The problem, from the OP's perspective, is that the law does in fact prohibit adults from pointing loaded guns at themselves and pulling the trigger. (to the extent that suicide can be illegal in the first place -- police and others can forcibly prevent you.)
Or, in other words, if we accept that action X is prima facia evidence of irrationality, why allow anyone to do it, even adults?
Hmm, this is actually better than most of the responses that I paid $1 for. But anyway:
;-) If you could multiply this fee ten times over, and I could get regular work, I'd make this my day job...
=-)
This would seem to support my point, not contradict it. i.e. you're applying my logic to the situation of an adult who isn't eating enough, to which most people agree that it's justified to force-feed them.
No, it contradicts your point: you (presumably!) can see why it's justified to force a 1-yr-old to eat five times a day, but not to force a grown-up to eat because he skipped breakfast. Or don't you?
This is subtle, but the problem is that since the costs and the "benefits" of smoking are about the same for adults and minors, you can't say that adults who smoke are being more rational about smoking, than minors are. If the two groups are making the same choice with the same costs and benefits, why is one more irrational?
No, the costs/benefits aren't the same once you accept differing rationality.
1) Rational person: After five years, he suffers the consequences of smoking *and has known they would happen all along and made other decisions with this in mind*. (e.g. budgeted more for health care, anti-addiction medicine, cosmetic surgery, etc.)
2) Irrational person: He underestimates the costs of smoking, and arrives at the future date, five years later, suffering consequences he hadn't planned on bearing.
Similarly, a rational person would be better at predicting what he would value at a later date, and at allocating resources robust across a broader range of personal values.
Actually I think there's still a contradiction, because if we were to be consistent, the number N of cigarettes than an adult was prohibited from smoking, would be whatever number causes the equivalent amount of harm that 1 cigarette causes to a minor. But for the actual ban that we have for adults, the number is much higher -- it's not the number of cigarettes that would cause the equivalent harm to 1 cigarette for a kid, it's the number of cigarettes that would induce enough toxicity to kill yourself.
This goes back to the newborn feeding thing. A newborn will not starve from skipping one meal (although he'll make you think he will...) Yet we accept forcing him to eat each meal just as we could accept forcing an adult to eat, but not until he's near starvation.
Also, once you accept that irrationality can amplify the negative consequences of an action whose consequences are time-delayed, you can see how an underage person giving himself an addiction can be equivalent to an adult injecting a significant amount of toxins into himself.
These were good points though.
Thanks, and I think I better understand your argument now.
OK, so how's this work, do you owe me a dollar now?
Nah, you still owe me one.
You imply that adults "weigh" the long-term consequences of smoking and then make a rational choice to continue smoking. As a former smoker, I'm not sure that's an accurate reflection of what's happening with smokers (adults or children) nor a compelling answer to why we ban underage smoking.
No, I said they're better *able* to weigh the consquences. (Please give more emphasis to my actual text than to how it makes you feel.) Whether they choose to sit down and write out a table is essentially irrelevant. The distinction is that they are able to make judgments better than minors. Ideally, we'd allow e.g. 16-year-olds to take some test to get rights early, but that's beyond the scope of this debate.
And course I should add that obviously, in real life, nothing magical happens at 18. There are shades of judgment capability that we get as we grow, and, in the absence of a cheap process to accurantely ascertain where someone is, we use heuristics, one of them being the age 18 cutoff.
A clearer explanation, in my opinion, would be that we expect adults to accept the consequences of their actions as a matter of personal responsibility.
Forest, trees. The reason we give them that personal resposibility is because we believe they are sufficiently capable of exercising it.
No offense, but your argument's not that good, or maybe I'm not understanding your point.
-You just "proved" that no paternalistic intervention is ever justified, *even by parents to newborns*. Hey, if you believe compelling someone to eat is okay if they're under 2 years old, obviously, there must be some insufficient amount of eating you can do when over 2 years old that would justify force-feeding. Er, yes, there is, it's just not encoded in any specific law that way.
-The "judgment" argument is completely unrelated to the "health results" argument (up to a limit). You seem to think the argument is that
"People under 18 shouldn't be allowed to smoke, because if they did, they would smoke a lot due to bad judgment, and people over 18 would not excessively smoke due to bad judgment."
It's not. It's more like,
"People under 18 shouldn't be allowed to smoke because their poor judgment makes them unable to accurately weigh long-term consequences of smoking. Therefore, they will smoke, and later regret the poor health and addiction. Adults may do it in the exact same amount, but then it would be with accurate judgment of the consequences. The rational self would not be victimized by the previous irrational self."
-You perform a reductio saying that banning smoking for minors would imply banning some amount of smoking (N) for adults. There is such a ban, so there's no contradiction. Namely, if you smoke so much at once as to nearly kill yourself, that can be considered a suicide attempt, and people can legally restrain you from doing it further until your body can cope.
(I'm not saying 18 is right age to ban smoking. I'm not saying there should be any one age. I'm just saying that this is a poor representation of the case for banning underage smoking, and a poor argument for a change in policy.)
Now, give me my $1.
That's not "fast-boot technology". It's "just another software program". One with a great purpose, but not worth distinguishing as "technology".
I've seen people argue this a lot but I've never seen it competently substantiated. How are oil companies being "subsidized by our tax dollars"? If you mean that oil and coal have environmental externalities that producers don't currently have to pay, I'm actually on board with you, in the sense that "An uncompensated negative externality is a tax in everything but name." But you said "tax dollars". What subsidy is this referring to? And does it exceed all corporate and fuel taxes the government takes in?
To save us a few exchanges, let me get this out of the way:
-Some people are referring to the different depreciation schedule that oil wells get. However, this is to more accurately reflect a company's net book value, the change in which is the basis for the corporate tax, NOT to "encourage drilling".
-Some people are referring to the tax dollars spent on roads. However, that can't be called a fossile fuel subsidy since it doesn't differentiate based on how the vehicle is fueled. Second, these are already paid for with fuel taxes, and, to the extent there's a shortfall, it's because wasteful building coming from a political process. (Remember, bridges to nowhere are *typical*; they are just normally smaller.)
-Some people are referring to public payment for wars, but if anything, this hinders access to oil, and at best benefits specific oil companies, not oil companies as such.
In contrast, reweables actually get direct, unambiguous subsidies in the form of tax credits and farm programs.
You're correct about how market mechanisms integrate the information about the carbon externality, but that would imply that a more efficient way to go would be to tax the carbon directly. That way, new startups don't have to figure out the carbon-credit-buying process. Their environmental costs would already be accounted for in the cost of everything they buy.
Mandating efficiency (as a lot of people want to do) is completely the wrong way to go about it (compared to carbon taxation). For one thing, even when it does make a given process have the exact same functionality yet use less energy, that will free up more income for whoever made the switch, which they will then spend on goods, which themselves take energy to make. The net result is that people end up being throwing off the same externalities, but with each process being more energy effficient. These policies are based on a mindset that people won't otherwise adapt their behavior in response to policies, that if we just provide X units of energy/year, no one will ever want for more.
Second, efficiency mandates will always be "one step behind". You can mandate efficiency for today's technologies, but then even if you somehow found the "optimal" efficiency to mandate for literally everything we use, you won't have accounted for the newer ones.
A lot of policies out there seem more interested in "shutting down progress" than in actual concern for the environment...
Nah, I think his original statement more accurately conveyed what he meant.
Did God comply?
Of course basic human urges can be punished. But should they be?
Yes, if they involuntarily involve unwilling participants.
And should prostitution be illegal?
No, provided they register and have regular medical exams.
Any other questions?