padren

There is - churches are not public institutions and (iirc) there is a mountain of case law involving attempts to force churches into other practices that we do accept as their right despite constitutional discrimination. There isn't a mountain of court cases because they don't even make it to that point - they are thrown out before it gets there. Case in point: The Catholic church cannot be sued and forced to ordain a woman as a priest, even though that could be said to be gender discrimination. The case fails because being part of the catholic church is a choice, not a right. Getting married in a church is a choice, not a right. You could call it part of their EULA when joining the church. By the same argument, they do not have to marry people when marrying those people would be against their religion: divorce, gender, faith - all fair game to refuse marriage. I am pretty sure if you go to a church that is tied to KKK/White supremacist religious beliefs you'd be hard pressed to force them to conduct an interracial marriage. Legally you can't - the only way such a verdict could be issued is if the disfavor for supremacists biases judges enough to ignore case law. There is no difference in forcing a church to provide a SSM. If there was such an argument there may actually be a valid argument that SSM would impact the lives of people who disagree with it unfairly. But this isn't even a question - it's defacto dead on arrival, which I hope you can agree with.

Okay, that addresses the first part of the quote - but the second - how do you force these companies to cover everyone in a free market? To the less important first part - what causes (I assume you feel they are regulatory ones) prevent this from happening now? As of right now, all insurance companies avoid losses by avoiding coverage. I think everyone agrees with this, though we have a ton of other issues, and I can't say for sure that is the biggest problem. In addition to that, insurance companies do regionally break up their coverage to their advantage and use a customer's need to move as yet another opportunity to stop covering a customer. Blue Cross covers you in both AZ and CO, but when you make the move you get a list of things that will no longer be covered - and that is for personal plans, not employer based insurance. You can shop around, if you get tests that turn up nothing, they can claim you have an unknown condition if you change providers and exempt you from any procedures arising from that unknown cause. It happened to my ex wife, so I do have personal experience with this. That only works when there is at least one alternative on the market. Keep in mind if they don't dump you they loose a ton of money, or force everyone's premiums to go up until everyone drops them and they are really screwed - hence we don't see those alternatives on the market. The big issue I see is any insurance pool is going to be selective - you do have some responsible people that are paying more than they get out of their plans for the long term safety, but a lot of people that also just don't get coverage because they are healthy. The problem right now is the market has "run itself up a tree" and is stuck there - there is no simple way to get from here to where you are talking about without all companies making a change, as any one would go bankrupt. I will say this: 1) I do like the idea that routine care involves shopping around on part of the consumer. I am not sure how best to ensure this market force exists in a universal plan, but I think it should. HSA is one option, but I am not sure if it's the best. Having some sort of two-part premium (one for catastrophic/chronic coverage, and one for routine care) and have the routine care cost per policy flex with consumer savings may provide enough consumer pressure to keep this pressure on that side of the market. 2) I don't think you can apply that logic to catastrophic care - emergency procedures and such. You could be anywhere, anytime and suffer any injury, and be unable to shop or make decisions. Other pressures must exist to enforce market performance. 3) Universal coverage: This is one thing I still haven't heard any decent arguments on how to solve in a free market solution. Without it, we have selective insurance pools, ERs used where preventative care would be better, and all kinds of ethical, social, and secondary cost problems. Regarding the risk pool - I have one question: I heard we have 45m uninsured Americans, which implies we have about 255m insured Americans. How many of those 255m are under private policies (not medicaid or medicare) and thus, how large is the pool? My thinking is say, 200m are in policies, and 45m are not - if an average policy cost x than if we all paid for the uninsured the average cost would be 1.225x. That is not a huge increase to cover the cost of the uninsured's policies - considering the high costs in this country we should be able to save that much somewhere and still cover everyone. Of course, that pays for the policies of the uninsured, which would give the Health Insurance companies a non-selective pool. If the reason those people are uninsured is largely because they would cost more than their policies bring in - we have a much larger problem that a non-selective pool can solve. That would indicate the health insurance companies are overly selective in their attempts to compensate for the selective pool - and even a government mandate to ensure everyone is covered would lead to high increases, even if every one did pay in. Do we have any numbers on the health care costs of the uninsured?

When we say science shouldn't be limited it doesn't mean that I a scientist should be able to abduct the president and cut open his brain to learn something - it's the belief (I think) that there isn't scientific information out there that should not be known. Gathering that information may be hindered due to ethical concerns, and rightly so, but the information is just knowledge. That knowledge may be used in horrible ways, and it's capacities should be respected for their power to have a huge and possibly negative impact, but that has more to do with choices people make in how to use that knowledge, not the knowledge itself. And also: I don't think many scientists (especially in marine biology) are really all that "okay" with Japan's justification for whaling. It's pretty much condemned not for the type of science but the damage it does to whales.

How about we go with a definition of "Can a human brain's life be extended to the point where survive continuously in use barring external trauma and events?" Really the question is can someone escape the "life span" and just live until you fail to see a bus or something. Personally, I wonder if software could be a point of failure. After a 1000 yrs, would a brain have to forget information to learn new information? Does memory get fragmented over very long periods of time that evolution could not have prepared us for as those run-times were never encountered? The brain could be the hardest part of a human to keep going. At this point it's pretty heavy on speculation though - especially when we get into the question of what will be technologically possible by the time the sun burns out. Also: I'd be afraid of going stark raving mad if I was a brain in a jar. Talk about sensory deprivation. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged FTFY ...just so we could get back to the topic.* *Besides we all know 1 year is a definite and exact measure of time.** **We also know if you are "on leave indefinitely" it could be a year or it could be forever among other possibilities - so we'll skip what you said in favor of what you meant - onward!

How do you validate information in such research? Someone could easily just be messing with you, so you'll have to evaluate if they are, and all you have to go on is your own personal bias to determine if what they say seems factual or made up. That will naturally bias your research towards your own personal bias. A palm reader once told me this was my first life... but I also had an old soul apparently. If I had to suspect, I'd say I was a lemur for a long time.

The problem is while everyone is unhappy with the current mixed system, the other systems that have a mix that is lower in free market factors and higher in government interference consistently provide better service more equitably for less money. The only place where the US does well is in "luxury level" health services that cost far more than what average people could ever spend but attracts specifically the clients who have enough money to happily spend that for a four star hospital. (Those micro clinics look promising, I'd have to check them out, but that is also a very small facet of the medical industry) Except private insurance companies don't have to cover the rest. They make more money by finding more ways to get out of covering you. How in a free market do you get them to cover the rest? You get sick in one state - you become a surf to that state.... you want to move you can't - you have to hold onto your current provider or you'll get slammed with a ton of preexisting conditions. Even when one company exists in both states they'll "transfer" your policy for you and tell you it'll be "a very easy transition" but then they'll hit you with a whole list of things you can't be covered for - experienced that one personally. And if you are informed enough to catch that before you move? You have to choose between moving or protecting your health. I've never had employer insurance (only had 1 job for 2 years and it had no benefits, I've always been self employed otherwise) so I don't know how all the differences are - I understand they have to cover more - but you then get locked into a job. The thing too is you get slammed with huge bills for no reason. You go under anesthesia and right before you pass out to get cut open the anesthesiologist asks "Do you want the nerve numbed?" and if you nod, you get a separate $800 bill because they know insurance won't cover it. It is predatory and disgusting - how do you prevent that? When that happened to my ex-wife it's not like we could have sued him - we were dealing with medical bills and insurance bills and medical related downtime. So when you say "and the private insurance covers the rest." exactly how is this supposed to happen in a free market solution?

I don't think anyone is arguing that non-catastrophic out-of-pocket care does anything but excel in the free market. The market advantages are pretty obvious to me. I honestly agree with you about all of that - free market does a lot better there. But that's all beside the point at the end of the day: How do we cover everyone, how do we deal with catastrophic illness? For all the good the free market does (and it does do a lot of good) it fails to address these critical issues, without which it's benefits are largely moot when considering it as a singular solution.

Pure opinion. There are lots of people with an intense cross-section of beliefs, some religious heterosexuals believe atheists shouldn't be allowed to marry and some atheist heterosexuals believe homosexuals shouldn't be able to marry but any generalizations are pretty unfair. The phrase "degrading the meaning" should be wiped from our vocabularies in the manner that it's being used. When phrases like "degrading the meaning" are wiped from our vocabularies. And actually, all arguable value systems have always been up for grabs as far as I can tell. 1) There is a huge amount of evidence that genetics and/or conditions in the womb set orientation for life. 2) The GLBT crowd is right in the sense that it would be as unpleasant for them to "choose" to be straight as it would be for you to "choose" to be homosexual. Technically you could, but you'd have to deal with some (generally large) degree of constant biological revulsion to maintain that choice.

The mistake you make is you start with "I myself cannot" which is a fair personal sentiment but then apply it as "objective logic" to "seems only logical" when really that is also "seems only logical to me" and thus a personal sentiment. Many people share your view, and many people don't. Personally I don't have a problem with the universe originating from what I understand as nothing because even if you have a prior cause it doesn't solve the issue of first cause, which boils down to the highly contentious question of "start of time" where you measure a start within time to begin with reducing the question to a meaningless statement. All that means to me, is everything we know as casual reality (in which cause and effect exist over time in space) cannot have an origin that can be explained in causal reality. To me, this gives me the impression the answer to that question is unknowable from our vantage point from withincausal reality. To postulate that there may be a being that exists outside that is fine - perhaps even one that can create entire universes as we know them. Is that the most logical conclusion though? I'd say there must be some laws we don't understand and may not be able to understand that resulted in the universe, but whether those manifest as some sort of sentient being seems overly complicated considering the amazing things natural laws are capable of. But that's just me - I offer that as an alternative, as you stated you had trouble seeing other logical solutions than the "deity factor" to the issue. I believe it is considered possible and even the curvature of space is being measured to increasing degrees of accuracy to determine if it's concave-finite, convex-finite, or infinite plane. The results may be in but I don't recall seeing them. I personally have a hard time believing in infinite planes or anything infinite in a universe that (if we are going from the big bang) started with finite energy - but I am no expert so someone with a better handle on astrophysics would have a much better answer. Regarding "infinite universes" I think that applies to quantum probability and the idea that for each quantum superstate both possible collapsed states exist but in different probabilities in the universe. This would be "effectively infinite" in terms of anything we could comprehend, but there is a finite amount of matter and energy and thus a finite number of superstates and thus, ultimately, I would think a finite number of probabilities - so I don't think you'll find infinity there.

That concept is really trying to take our minds that work within the confines of causality and think out the "causality" behind something that created causality in the first place, which by definition would have to supersede it. For the first question, I would guess the answer is yes, since if something could create infinite space/time, it would probably appear finite from it's perspective in some way. Second question: rationally, no consciousness can be aware of itself completely because consciousness is a side effect of memory patterns that reflect data (among more complex factors) and to be conscious of that data, we cannot be conscious of the memory patterns that create that awareness. We have to "see" the meaning in the data, not the raw storage pattern of bits. If we want to be aware of the raw storage pattern, we need additional patterns of memory and processing power to abstract those, which increases our "extent" and thus gives us yet more "subconscious" - hence consciousness cannot exist without a subconscious aspect to the program. That said, you say "infinite-consciousness" which from our perspective in this little universe may be a total oxymoron and complete impossibility. If this universe is the result of factors in a greater, meta-universe that has the capacity to create entire infinite spaces and what we know as causality, chances are we couldn't comprehend what exists there, as it would each a point that no longer works with out understanding of causality... So I'd say that is "unknowable."

I have no problem with the premise, but the execution in at least one subset of Mormonism causes some concern for me. First being the marrying of girls as young as 12 to husbands in their 30s and 40s, and second our welfare system is really not calibrated to handle the size of families that come out of those relationships in that culture. Back when Tom Green (not that one, the one in Utah) was on 20/20 or some show many years back defending polygamy, and he was upset he had to legally divorce each wife before marrying the next, even though they all lived together. I have no problem with polygamy, but while he was defending the practice and what a great father he was - each but his most recent wife was literally collecting "deadbeat dad" welfare intended for women who are left by husbands and don't pay child support. I wholly support social services to help people when they get knocked off their feet, but not when they need it for their "business as usual" ideal of living. So I really have no problem with polygamy, but I do have concerns that in practice it could create unexpectedly high burdens on tax payers unless adjusted. Not saying I know that would happen, it's just a concern.

I don't generally say this but I'd be willing to eat some teargas to voice my disfavor on this. It's absolutely appalling in my opinion, not sure what else can be said.

What changes would solve this in your mind? I have a hard time trusting the free market to solve this specific issue - I am not sure there is enough incentive even if there was less regulation. Assuming that people don't choose to have no health coverage, in a competitive system you still have to attract consumers. I watched the full show to get the full perspective, which was interesting. On the commentary about Canada, it's worth noting that their procedural costs are lower, so the long waits seem more to do with how much they are willing to pay in total - they could pay more, which means more people will be paid needlessly during downtime, but increase the response time considerably. When comparing models it's worth noting that when either system is under stress, quality will be reduced if funds aren't raised. In a free market solution, these funds occur at "time of purchase" as it's demand driven, which creates more incentive for more sellers to enter the market. This puts minimal stress on the wealthy, and much more stress on the poor. Overall, this does seem to be questionable ethically when it comes to something as vital as health care. When a national system such as the Canadian one experiences stress, it effects everyone, and then either everyone can bite the bullet and pay more taxes, or apply pressure to reduce waste. When a reporter runs a story on gross cost waste in Canadian hospitals it has an impact on voters, and politicians can capitalize on that - if they are smart they can push solutions that increase efficiency, lower costs by taking on "preventative care" initiatives, or what have you. Not saying by any margin that the national system is ideal, but they are getting what they are willing to pay for just like everyone else. One thing I did find interesting was the low cost non-insurance clinics - that would be very appealing to me as I don't have insurance*, and I think there's a chance I could float a solution that combined that with something similar to aflac's "accident/catastrophic illness" type plan. As for how individual plans work - I think there is a lot of room for the free market to have a lot of say. If I could get a "20% flex rate" that took my "driving record" into account in terms of how smart I manage my health costs (not in avoiding going to a doctor, but keeping costs down by actually shopping around and asking smart questions... ie, cost per use instead of not using) I'd definitely have an incentive to shop around. I am sure that would be hell to administrate though.... I do find his analogy to "grocery insurance" to be quite over the top - and I don't think people have any interest in stacking up unnecessary surgeries, medicines and procedures just because they are "free" - doctor visits suck. A free stick in your rear is still a stick in your rear. The question is though: how do we cover everyone? How do we ensure that people with insurance are properly covered and won't have their coverage yanked when they need it? I can't for the life of me think of a good free market solution to that problem. All the other problems with government intervention can't make that issue go away for me. If that can be solved - I'm very much open to the possibilities. * I've been rather royally burned by insurance in the past and I have zero confidence that any costs I ever incur will ever be paid by any insurance company. The whole point of insurance is the peace of mind, and I can't bring myself to pay out large premiums for the "lucky lotto" shot at hopefully squeaking though the gauntlet and being covered. Edit: Regarding some of the medical bankruptcy statistics, this is the best link I could find evaluating the various claims: http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/what_is_the_percentage_of_total_personal.html Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedTrying to not spend all my time on this, but I found an interesting article on comparative health care costs: http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Content/Publications/Fund-Reports/2007/May/Mirror--Mirror-on-the-Wall--An-International-Update-on-the-Comparative-Performance-of-American-Healt.aspx This graph especially so: Based on those costs and the performance levels, even with the failings of say Canada, they could double their spending and still cost less per capita than Americans - I would like to think that all of John Stossel's complains could be largely remedied by doubling the amount paid in. So: If we are the closest to a free market solution, why does it appear we are the furthest from high quality care? All these nations with no competition, no market drives, etc etc, are all pantsing us right now. If key regulations are causing the free market to worsen our abilities to the point of being worse than socialized solutions, what guarantees do we have we'll lift the right ones, and not just make it worse? There has to be some regulation - so it'll always be there - but what kind of rocket science is it going to take to be sure we "free" the right parts of the "free market" to make things better and not worse?

To go a bit further on the visual point... imagine a piece of cardboard on the road. A human can quickly evaluate it and determine it is safer to drive over it than swerve around it - especially in moderate traffic. That cardboard could be half folded sitting on it's side - and look like a 3D large obstruction. It could be flat but still take a lot of data to process it's flat due to an odd shape. It could also be blowing across the road tumbling, and be visually interpreted as an animal or person - and critical to avoid. These things are easy for humans because not only are we good at processing visual data but we have usually processed just about everything we are liable to experience on the road for 16+ years before we even start driving. That's a long time to practice visual identification. And second point (at least in reference to Bill Gates or others researching it) that is important: Liability: It would have to be very demonstratively safe. The thing is even under ideal situations humans with exceptional driving ability do get into accidents, and at times are considered at fault for those accidents. What happens when a car does that due to: 1) a software flaw? 2) a "could have been better" algorithm? 3) a choice that was wrong but seemed right and would normally be right? (Sometimes you have to take the 60 in a 60/40 choice, but you'll still be wrong ~40% of the time) 4) a combination of the above and vehicle wear? A guidance system vendor couldn't guarantee perfect driving, but it could be hard to nail down the exact amount of risk the buyer is getting, with contentions on all sides when something goes wrong.

The problem is we already see in the medical insurance industry where people loose their coverage retroactively once they need it. We already have people who are as close to surfs as one can get because they need the employer's insurance to be guaranteed coverage. As a free market advocate, how can you look at the buyer/seller in any medical transaction and not see it as a negotiation under extreme duress? The only thing that separates it from a coercive negotiation is that the insurance company isn't saying "I'll kill you if you don't get this" they are saying "You will simply die if you don't get this" and even though they aren't the cause, there is just as much duress as if they were. Technically the uninsured person can shop around, but no insurance company to date apparently as decided to capitalize on all the dissatisfaction towards the status quo - why is that? The answer honestly: The consumer has to buy somewhere, and they do not have the traditional marketplace "buyer's power" to simply walk away. Due to that inequity relative to traditional free market transaction we have an insurance industry that fails to exploit the profits from improving their service in this regard - there is more profit to be made by not because it's such an inelastic expense for the buyer. A fundamental aspect of any free market solution involves some pretty intrinsic facets: 1) A person can choose to get health care, or not. If healthy people try to gamble on saving money by not getting insurance when they are healthy, you'll have a pool bias as a result - more sick people will sign up and skew the numbers towards the amount a person would pay out of pocket for their own health care when sick. That will cause more healthy people to drop out, as the expense gets higher, leading to even higher costs for those remaining. Is that a solvable problem, or an inherent flaw with free market solutions? 2) Policies outgrow their definitions: Children grow up and are no longer covered by family plans, marriages break up, companies go bankrupt and lay off all their employees. If you become "uninsureable" prior to one of those vulnerable transition dates, who in the free market is going to cover you?? If no one can make any money off insuring you because you've acquired a long-term illness - who's going to cover you? The balance sheet cannot be made positive there. Is that a solvable problem, or an inherent flaw with free market solutions? More importantly, every year we talk around this issue, people suffer and even die from the current model. Another year, means more suffering, more bankruptcies, more surfs, and more deaths. The main problem I have with the "free market" solution is it largely boils down to pulling off all the leashes and having faith that it will find a solution - which is pretty risky when you consider the stakes. If good, logical arguments can be made as to how the above problems can be solved within a free market solution - I'll be open to considering the various facets of that solution. The problem though, is in lieu of that all the while we hesitate - whether due to our disdain for social or market based solutions - we loose people. But, in the interest of being open to all possible solutions, if you have any idea how the free market can solve the above issues (there are many more, but those seem the most "intrinsic" to me) please feel free to offer them and I'll consider them quite honestly. What I dislike is hearing "free market" used as a solution when the very glaring caveats are not resolved.

Well if there's any single element capable of passing hidden costs on to involuntary third party victims that would be difficult for free markets to correct on... it would be uranium.

Actually, I mean more "Ideal government principles" which is not the same as principles for an ideal (ie, impossibly perfect) government. The US put a lot of emphasis on individual rights, considering the atmosphere it was born in, that is quite understandable, but there was a lot of subsequent debate on how everything from economics to defense should be handled. I believe Madison and Adams had some great conflicts over defense in particular, and there were many other areas of contention that made early republic politics pretty exciting. Essentially I think we have some pretty good original ideals for civil liberties, though I wonder how much the US currently leans too much toward "nanny laws" for my liking. When it comes to other aspects of government, it seems things get pretty gray pretty fast on what principles people feel should be the guiding values behind laws. Most agree we have a duty to protect our territories and states with a federally supported armed forces. Some feel we should protect people from the ravages of poverty in certain situations to varying degrees and in varying situations. Many feel we have a duty to protect our fellow citizens from threats to their health in addition to threats of hostile nations. The more you protect people, the more you have to inhibit liberties and the less people are responsible for their actions - which is why there's such a rub against the libertarian principles of individual liberties. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged This is definately nasty business. Some monopolies should not be broken up, yet others should be and often exist because of shifting government regulations. Subsidies and preventing cheap goods is also an issue, though it does disturb me to think of how vulnerable a nation this size is to the whims of foreign nations that produce goods we no longer produce ourselves. I also agree about special interest groups and lobbyists, but isn't that due to the abdication of our duty as citizens to remain informed and apply strong, organized pressure on government officials?

We have an interesting mix of views on the role of government, so I thought I'd start a thread on the topic, to try and better understand where (at a base) most people are coming from. A government seems responsible to govern conduct to protect people from each other and at times, themselves, and at times steer the "shape" of a society to protect the "moral integrity" of the whole or at least provide incentives/disincentives to things we consider generally beneficial. At it's loosest it seems to be that the guiding principle for new laws is "popular consent, without gross infraction to case law or constitutional rights" where there isn't a huge burden to prove the need for a law, unless it's strongly opposed by a large enough minority that can either point out unintended conflicts with existing laws or constitutional infractions. Of course some societies are very authoritarian and feel entirely entitled to restrict just about any conduct with the goal of having any desired effect. Overall though: what is everyone's thoughts on how a government should work when it comes to law? What aspects should be national, state, or simply private and what principles should guide the creation of laws? My personal view, is that laws governing conduct should have a pretty heavy burden in excess of popular appeal: if a law inhibits any liberty, there should be a demonstrable harm that it protects against to warrant the infringement. On the outside of what should be allowable would be say, DUI laws in which a driver has actually done no harm but is considered at risk of causing harm to the point that driving while impart is actually a form of reckless endangerment. To me it's a good example of what is a fringe case that can be considered acceptable. I say "can be" because "impaired" is such a subjective term - we go with "0.08 blood alcohol level" without any real derivation for individual capacity and have zero tolerance for actual literal level of impairment, and if we decided "0.02 could save more lives" it would be easy to slide towards that, without proving such drivers are genuinely reckless. At the same time I support DUI laws because there actually is a correlation there and there is a point when driving is reckless which should be legally restricted. I have less appreciation for laws that claim say, drug use can lead to some portion of the users becoming criminals, and since crime is harmful we should regulate all potentially "dangerous" drugs. I personally find that connection too loose and unfairly bunches all drug users into one group much the way "anti-gun" people may bunch irresponsible gun owners in with responsible ones. Those views are I guess generally considered libertarian, but I don't agree with all libertarian "small government" arguments so I tend to call myself a "social libertarian" to distinguish that those views apply to laws that govern social behavior. When it comes to the other side - execution of laws and their organization, I don't have much reservation about the government being involved and don't feel that the free market is always better. Fire, police, military, education, and in my case I even think government should be heavily involved in health care coverage, so I definitely believe in a much larger government than most libertarians. To me the health care issue is the hardest to deal with, because on the one hand I respect and even feel it's worth defending a person's right to self determination, even if it includes the belief that they have the right to gamble if they will live or die on the choice of having no coverage to cut costs in the short term to allow some opportunity they feel they could not otherwise shoot for. I say to myself, "who am I to tell that person that because they are born here, they don't have that freedom and will be forced to pay for a service they would choose not to?" I can't say health care is a right but it does seem to feel like a duty similar to being obligated to aid people in distress at sea - which is also a part of maritime law if I recall correctly. With the health care system the way it is, I genuinely feel though a lot of people end up at the short end who we should help, and that in the end the only way to help that vast majority of people that this freedom may have to be sacrificed. I don't like it and would prefer a better way, but I'd rather go to a "everyone pays" system within the next 5 years than have 5 more years exploring other options that all fail and continue the same harm that we've seen in the past. I am not too "scared" of government involvement in the processes we have to make life easier and generally think they are not much more than extensions of the way the military or police services aid the general welfare - and I trust the free market a little less in many ways when it comes to essential services that need to be very stable in times of extreme crisis. I am scared of any government involvement that does exceed the basic tenants I mentioned above regarding the infraction of liberties without demonstration of harm by inaction, but I think with those principles we can do quite well. We are pretty proud of our military among other government programs - so I don't feel too concerned as long as social engineering isn't part of the scheme. Anyway, those are my thoughts, but I am really curious what other people find to be "ideal government principles" and what range government should be allowed, and on what grounds that range should be warranted. I have my bias, but if someone feels that "morality" can be legislated I am genuinely interested in the basis and what general factors would govern that sort of authority. So whatever you believe - share your thoughts, and the basis of how you feel those ideals work.

Well, one huge issue that came out of this crisis is that unwilling third parties did get saddled with costs due to the behavior of other parties with no way to recoup them. I have no problem with a company giving tons of money to a CEO that runs it into the ground because business is a risky and often "fly by the moment" enterprise that only looks easy to figure out in hindsight. There will be some sort of Board of Directors to determine the CEO's pay and evaluates performance, and that board will be determined by the shareholders, which includes any employees that hold stock. It may be cruel to the employees that they work hard and the company they work for tanks due to bad choices above them that they (assuming they don't own stock, as most don't) have no say in - but that is exactly what they signed up for: A paycheck for hours put in as long as desirable, possibly with some sort of compensation plan under certain termination conditions. If they signed up for the option to influence the direction of that company - they'd have to be stock holders, and they can, but that requires they put the money in or negotiate it into their terms of employment. Now, if that CEO defrauds the company, there are already regulations in place to put that CEO in jail. They may need to be improved if legal loopholes make it too easy. Also, consider the timing: A train engineer may be fired after he runs a train off the tracks while over a bridge - and if you watched that in slow motion, you'd be looking at the train falling into a canyon thinking to yourself "and all this time every second that engineer is being paid more money while his train is in free-fall? This is insane!" The bonuses we hear about that make us angry were negotiated far in advance of the big collapse and in hindsight they do seem like a bad idea, but in terms of contract life-spans it's not that big of a deal. I had to pay for internet I wasn't using because my contract had an end date, and I moved. It was smart, then seemed bad - but I took that chance when I signed the contract, and it wasn't necessarily a bad risk, just one that ended up face down. We never have let people "just do what they want" because we've always been aware that often what people want to do is to directly interfere with what other people want to do - resulting in a "might makes right" society that is basically despotic. The thing is it's very hard to know what we should or should not limit, and be very reserved about imposing limits unless they are really justified. I think it's a good idea to have some new laws to prevent this sort of crisis from happening again but it is very important we do not make knee-jerk laws based on some of the more obvious results of the crisis. Right now giant bonuses seem horrible - but they weren't when things were rolling well. Should we put caps in place? The answer should not come from our current anger at this situation and the bonuses going out - but should be based on a simple course of evaluation: Take one issue: "Salaries and bonuses for destroying the economy seem unfair" 1) Were free market principles broken in the transaction: Did fraud, coercion, collusion, or "involuntary third party expense" take place in facilitating those contracts? 2) If so, are there regulations in place to prevent this that were violated but unreported? This tells us if existing laws need more teeth or enforcement, or if new laws are needed. 3) Is the issue being examined a result of some greater issue that should be examined first? Sometimes it's easy to make a mountain out of a molehill when there is a far larger cause that created an actual mountain. The bonuses anger us so much because of the much larger damage, and the fixing of those causes should be a priority. Also, it's important to see legislation as almost a surgical procedure: It's messy, creates unforeseen consequences, requires some time for observation to track it's effects and requires time to heal. Businesses adapted to one set of laws suffer trauma as they adjust to new ones - even the good guys. Too much too quick and you get a patient that looks like Frankenstein monster and bruised from head to toe. Regulation, being a very blunt instrument can't be thrown around like you are making god-like perfect incisions. On top of that as the surgeons, we feel hurt by the patient and are less empathic to it's suffering. We need to strive that much harder to remain objective... because even if we hate the cancer it's the whole patient that feels the knife.

Regulation is born out of two branches of thought, and take some form of one or the other: 1) Get closer to a perfect free market: A free market is based on the voluntary transfer of goods and services - for that to exist it must be free of coercion and fraud. So, there is naturally a body of regulations that protect consumers from being lied to as to the quality of what they buy, and protect them from being coerced into buying what they don't want via predatory tactics. This covers right down to accounting laws so a potential stockholder can evaluate the real value of what they are investing in. 2) Protect from the failings of a free market: It is technically an infringement on free market principles to stop a felon from buying a gun, an 18 year old from buying heroine, or dictating what drugs are deemed "safe" enough by the FDA for pharmaceutical companies to sell. To a degree, there is an argument that the need for these regulations are not because of the failings of a free market but the imperfections in it's execution - due to the fact that hidden costs are absorbed by non-consenting third parties. You can sell a gun or heroine for a low amount of money and some third party victim foots the cost in the increase of crime. If the true costs were always involved in the transaction the market could theoretically regulate itself in this regard, but that is arguably essentially impossible. Since we are stuck with these two forms of regulations, we rely on our political system to try and employ only the regulations that address these issues and be as honest as we can make them. That is hard to pick apart, I am sure others could give a lot more details. You may even consider it as several different "eras" that overlap the same timeframe, such the "Alan Greenspan era" overlaps with the "Clinton era" and "Bush era." The issue is how much regulation is politically motivated, and how much is economically motivated, and of the latter how smart the thinking is. Lobbies have a lot of power to get regulations added, changed, and removed that can harm the economy. It gets very sticky, and there is a ton of debate on every possible issue. Is the gun lobby too strong, or the drug companies, health insurance companies....etc - these all impact regulations towards their interests, not market interests specifically. I really don't know too much about regulations that are specifically cited as harmful to the economy - I hear about them but always in the generalized sense and not any specifics. As for fine tuning them, I think we can definitely improve our regulations. If you want to read a pretty straight forward article on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market It is pretty to the point and doesn't have a lot of specific bias. It can be hard to find "neutral" articles because most people who bother to write about economics have a "cause" they push as they see the system should be more one way or another.

Mandatory Bash reference: #244321 +(8400)- [X] <Cthon98> hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars <Cthon98> ********* see! <AzureDiamond> hunter2 <AzureDiamond> doesnt look like stars to me <Cthon98> <AzureDiamond> ******* <Cthon98> thats what I see <AzureDiamond> oh, really? <Cthon98> Absolutely <AzureDiamond> you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2 <AzureDiamond> haha, does that look funny to you? <Cthon98> lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as ******* <AzureDiamond> thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that <Cthon98> yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as ******* <AzureDiamond> awesome! <AzureDiamond> wait, how do you know my pw? <Cthon98> er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw <AzureDiamond> oh, ok.

It's actually very easy to follow logic - spend money to do repairs, so you don't waste money in the long run, like weather proofing your house to lower energy costs, or fixing your car so it doesn't leak oil. That's why we are revamping hardware for tracking medical records and all that. That is intuitive. So is the other side: the idea of spending money to get people to work - it's just a more aggressive form of "welfare to work" programs that have always existed and taken to a similar preemptive level that was done in the great depression. It's not hard to trust because it's counter intuitive - it's hard to trust because all the details are missing. Either it's too complex or they just aren't "tracking" or sharing how that money is fixing everything. Because we are left in the dark, trust is required. Maybe it's too complex for us to follow it all, or revealing all the details would require making private corporate operations public and hurt the competitive edge of the businesses we now own. Penn has a nice idea there but I think it's actually the wrong description for the current situation. The only people who find it counter-intuitive are those who think tax cuts are the universal tool to apply to all economic situations. To that crowd though, social spending is never intuitive, so it's inaccurate to say this situation involves a counter intuitive solution specifically.

I probably shouldn't have picked this apart but I couldn't help myself: According to whom? I've chosen to live without shelter and very little food for long stretches for the things I am passionate about because they mean more to me than shelter and food. I see no evidence to support that it is blinding humans to what they can achieve. Kindness comes from "ones free thinking self" so you can't really have one without the other. Again, people will be kind/not kind based on their nature, and society will always reflect that. God is an excuse for those who would find a way to see themselves as Superior regardless. God is also an excuse to be compassionate - it depends on the person, not the faith or lack thereof. Where are you getting this? That's like saying "Free will" is bad. What kind of society is immune to potential "perversions of reality" and how could it be free of corruption? Some people, not all people and not all capitalists. Far too much of a generalization. If we are capable of even asking if we are slaves to our emotions and nature then we are not. Survival is a mediocre goal, and you have no basis for that contention. We may in fact need the invention of money to manage a global trade system of this size with population levels growing on a planet facing climate change and other factors. Nature is a violent nightmare of perpetual pain fear and terror. Society and all rules we invent are a side effect of the fact we are social animals. We do need to make an effort to see our impacts on the natural world accurately, but I don't see how this tangent applies to the format of society in general. They are creations of humanity, and thus reflect all the weaknesses of humanity, as all our creations do. I want money. I find it a very usual tool to exchange for goods and services. As "equal" is a subjective term, the most equal society we can have that I know of is a socially libertarian semi-regulated free market society. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Very true, I just mean that is usually at least one source of political contention, which result in heated debate and the employ of our checks and balances. It's sort of what many republicans are calling the Obama plan right now (taxes + spending) even though I don't agree with them.

As much as I dislike the generalizations in your post, you may personally find this site rather interesting: http://www.thevenusproject.com/ As to your post, I have to at last pick some things apart in it: 1) We cannot all be equal as we cannot agree on what would be equal - different things are valued differently to different people. People don't all want to avoid suffering, many are more than willing to suffer for their passions. Food and shelter are good enough for livestock, but their guarantee is never worth the things you are passionate about. 2) Your litany against capitalism is not against capitalism at all - but the reflection of human weakness through the filter of capitalism. The same weaknesses are visible through any filter of any human created social structure. Greed, corruption, ego, derision... they all crop up no matter the model, and changing the model does not change humanity's nature - only humanity can change that over time. We can be as good as capitalists as we can be under any other form and I'd even argue we are more free to be that as capitalists. 3) No one has the right to "annex" my only years on this planet to some great morally self righteous cause of their own great social experiment, and I'll resist any such endeavor and work to actively undermine it. At least in a capitalist society we have less restrictions, so the "good" we do is honest and not just "moving" the human failings to an area out of sight to rot the society away from the inside out. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged It's a little more sticky than that when the majority says "lets go to that fancy restaurant" and overrules you, and then voting to have you pick up most of the tab, where the only way to skip going out to dinner at all with them is to move out of the country.

Try "Thisisreallysaf3" I use that for all my financial passwords, I highly recommend you change all your accounts to it. Out of curiosity, what online bank do you use? I only ask because I can let you know if it's a generally secure institution or not.