DrTodd13

I don't think you are right here. There's only one non-violent way to apportion scarce resources and that is pricing. There is no way to prevent a rationing situation from transitioning to pricing without the threat of violence. The sellers certainly don't have much if any reason to prefer rationing to pricing.

Lately, I've been finding these types of questions rather pointless. It is like asking someone for a suggestion of where to go to dinner but not telling them what kind of food you like. Unless you are going to provide a basis on which to make this value judgment then what you are going to get is each person using their own determination of the ultimate good. Why would you value anyone's opinion on right or wrong if it were based on an ultimate good with which you disagreed? All such ultimate goods must be accepted on faith. There is no way of objectively determining the ultimate good. So, if two people share the same ultimate good they can talk about the logical ramifications of that belief. If people don't share the same ultimate good then going beyond that point and arguing the ramifications of those beliefs will only lead to frustration. In some cases there may be coincidental agreement on right or wrong but unless you have agreement on the ultimate good you'll never get complete agreement. Moreover, if people don't agree on the same ultimate good then how can there be an argument about that. Person A tells person B they should stop believing one thing for no reason and start believing something else for no reason. Person B says the inverse. It is impossible to provide a reason for switching the ultimate good because ultimate goods must be axiomatic. Some people's "ultimate good" is provided by revelation (again faith) from a transcendent being. I suspect most people's ultimate good is some vague notion of maximizing human happiness. This ultimate good is so vague (and comparing one person's happiness to another so impossible) that very few logical truths can be derived from it. I think right or wrong opinions based on this ultimate good often boil down to mere personal gut reaction with zero underlying basis. So, one way to look at these morality questions is that you are asking people what they believe without any reason (axioms) and then asking them to draw conclusions from the ultimate good and in many cases doing so logically is impossible. Add on top of that that people hold logically inconsistent opinions simultaneously and I wonder what the point is. If I accepted a completely rational outlook on life then my answer would be that right and wrong don't exist. If I accepted on faith that human happiness is the ultimate good then right and wrong boils down to a democratic vote with each person voting on the basis of what makes them happy. (It may make them happy that women have choice or make them happy that life is maintained or make them happy that the sex ratio stays nearly equal...what makes them happy has no inherent meaningful basis...it is just cultural). If I accepted on faith that the Bible is God's instructional manual for life then I'd say that murder is wrong and so the question becomes when is abortion murder, the sex of the baby would be irrelevant. If I accepted on faith that all human interaction should be voluntary then from that I can derive that murder is wrong the question would again default to when is abortion murder. Again, the sex of the child would be irrelevant.

We already charge interest for overdue amounts and assign a $50 late fee every month that there is an unpaid balance.

A small number of people are delinquent in debt through essentially no fault of their own. I have no problem with them. What I have a problem with are people who live in an upper-middle class neighbor and don't plan for hard times and at the first missed paycheck they become delinquent on all their bills. Financial experts recommend a 6 month supply of emergency cash in case you lose your job or have some medical problem. Most people can't even go 2 weeks. I have the most disdain for those who already owe money and then go out and spend what they do have (or don't have....credit!) on something purely for their own enjoyment.

Yes, in foreclosure, other lien holders have priority (first mortgage has first priority, HOA second, 2nd mortgage has third priority). If the person was "upside-down" then we probably get nothing.

Well, we have a management company that deals with day-to-day stuff so it isn't a burden on me directly. I was largely bitching at what seems like a culture that is sliding daily toward hedonism. We have about all the mechanisms in place that we can have but that doesn't guarantee you get the money. We have a fund to draw from such that we're not strapped for cash but that needs to be replenished for required large expenditures in future years. So, temporary cash flow isn't so much the issue. The HOA is not first in line for money when the house with a lien is sold. Other creditors have higher priorities so some of this money will become uncollectable which means that everyone else has to pay more. It just makes me angry that a person's word used to be enough and now people have no respect for obligations even that they've signed their names to.

I think that shame is a good motivator. The problem is that they don't feel any shame. Our HOA works a bit differently, we have $50 late fees pegged on every month that you are late. This stuff builds up quickly and when it gets to $500 then a lien is placed on the house. When that happens then all sorts of other fees get attached to get the lien off your house. It should be sufficient motivation to keep up with your payments. I assume everyone want to maximize their amount of money. Racking up these fines is not the way to go about it. I don't want to assume that so many people are stupid but they don't even appear to be acting in their best interest. Perhaps they are addicted to instantaneous pleasure and can't think more than a few days in advance.

I'm the treasurer of my community's home-owner's association (HOA) so I get to see the list of people who are delinquent in paying their contractually obligated HOA assessments. I don't know most of the people on the list but a couple of the people on the list live close enough to me that I can observe some of their spending behaviors. For example, one guy that owes over $800 bought a huge inflatable pool, a top of the line grill, and spent a bunch of money on ripping out the garden the previous owner had planted and replacing it with something he liked. I'm pretty sure those three things combined totals more than $800 and that none of them were a necessary expense. To me, this is shameful. You know you owe someone money but won't change your lifestyle one bit in order to pay it back. I can almost guarantee that 90% of the people that owe money have $100+ monthly bills for TV+internet. The former especially in my book is a luxury. Stop those and stop eating out all the time and within 2 or 3 months your debt would be paid off. Instead, they let the debt languish, hang up on a representative calling to setup a payment plan, and let liens be placed on their homes instead. WTF is wrong with all these people!

Personally, about 20 times throughout Caprica I said to myself "Nobody would be doing this! They would be doing X or Y or Z." It is like they can't remember what they said 10 minutes before. They just learn of some fantastic technology and then something bad happens that you could fix with that technology but these supposed brilliant characters can't put 2 and 2 together. Billionaire computer genius gets some data that is super-important...has he ever heard of a FRAKKING BACKUP!?!?!?! In short, I see no reason to believe this will be better than BG or even close.

I'm not defending a bailout. The bailouts are immoral. Notice that I said "if" you want to keep the company from dying then you need to keep or recruit top people. These people no doubt put blinders on and got hyper-greedy but they aren't stupid. If anybody can salvage the company in its current form it is going to be smart people who understand the business. You can believe that merit was disregarded in favor of some other factor and therefore the best and the brightest somehow didn't rise within the ranks of AIG but in general, from my experience, that isn't how business works. The competent rise to the top and the incompetent don't. Lobo is just making my point. If you want AIG to fail then this is how you do it...you say we'll just confiscate your contractual income whenever we desire and no one good enough to actually save the company will choose to work there.

It seems to me that if you care about the survival of this company (too big to fail or so they say) that the last thing you would want to do is try to undo bonuses, especially contractually obligated ones. You can't (and definitely shouldn't try to) force people to work for a certain company and if these people don't get bonuses at this company then a great many of them are likely to leave for greener pastures. How will a company in such a predicament survive when its best and brightest and those who understand the most about the business leave?

She had 6 embryos implanted and two of them split for two sets of identical twins. She has said that she doesn't want a man because that would distract her from being with her children.

To me, symmetric is the general sense just means that several different starting points converge on identical or similar sequences with perhaps suits shifted around. In so doing, you minimize the memory load. Again, to me, symmetric doesn't have anything to do with the way you choose to divide and express hands but only speaks to converging on that methodology as often as possible. So, to me, citing one way of expressing balanced hands doesn't prove whether your system is symmetric or not. I you mean something else by parallel then I don't think I've seen a definition of it.

"Symmetry" is the word that is most often used for this.

Yes obviously that's why I posted here. To teach a bunch of people in California a thing or two. Adam, please go to everyone on your list who said it could mean "any purpose" and tell them that Dr Todd is very bad at analogies. That should teach 'em! Aside from the fact that "all purpose" is a different term rather than an extraneous word added onto something like "any meaning", "ever" on Mythbusters changes the TONE of the sentence, implying more serious consequences for failing to follow the advice than if "ever" hadn't been there. So your analogy wasn't only irrelevant, it was also incorrent. And you are still posting why? What you were saying is that "all purpose" doesn't mean "all purpose" unless they also add on "Yes...I'm really serious...any and every possible purpose...you can use it for anything...any shape...8+ disjoint ranges if you want." If all-purpose means any purpose then you don't need a single word extra. My argument was that just like the "ever," you don't need extra words...all purpose means all purpose and if you add a whole bunch of extra words that also mean also purpose you haven't changed the meaning one iota. Forget that we have information outside the GCC for a moment. What makes more sense? That all-purpose means any purpose (and therefore needs no clarification) or that all-purpose means some limited number of purposes out of the thousands of purposes that it could potentially have but then they didn't bother to tell us which of those possibilities were among the few that were allowed? Taking into account our extraneous knowledge, we do indeed know that they have done the ridiculous. They've used a word that effectively means..."you can use 1♣ or 1♦ for a variety of things" but then have spectacularly failed to in any way clarify what is or isn't allowed. On a side note, I would suggest that you read Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. It has some tips on how to have discussions with people without sounding like a pompous ass.

Adam, please go to everyone on your list who said it could mean "any purpose" and tell them that Josh Donn said that their interpretation is absurd. That should teach 'em! Look, language is not precise. There are multiple ways to say the same thing. Some people add qualifiers that don't add anything to the sentence like Mythbusters' "Don't try anything you're about to see us do at home....ever." "Ever" doesn't add anything. Your argument is like saying that if they hadn't said "ever" then what they really meant was that sometimes it is ok to try the stuff at home and that we need to divine their true intention about when it is ok. What is really going on is some people believe that the text of the rule is all that matters and others believe that the intent is what matters. The former would argue that we can't possibly divine intent and the latter would say that the rules would be too voluminous otherwise. For those in the former camp, several online dictionaries defined "all-purpose" as "useful for many purposes" OR "not limited in use or function." For our purposes, this definition is completely worthless. Pick the first part and we have no idea which of the many purposes are acceptable and which aren't. Pick the second part and there would be no restrictions. The word "all-purpose" is just a terrible word to use in a regulation. I bet if you asked those same people what they thought the intent of the C&C committee in using the word "all-purpose" that you would get different answers. I don't think they intended to allow those bids to be used for any possible meaning but the regulation itself gives me no idea what is allowed or not.

If you want to restrict GCC to "natural" bidding then, IMO, you can only allow 4 card majors. 5 card majors and 3 card minors may be extremely common and second nature for you but it takes a bit of brainwashing to truly believe that bidding a 3 card suit when you have a 4 card suit is "natural." Defining "natural" differently depending on the level of the opening and whether it is a minor or a major is nothing but designed to allow existing systems.

Don't make this Obama's issue - this was Exactly the same claims made by Bush, Paulson, and Bernanke in getting the first TARP shoved through Congress. Given that he is the one currently doing it, it is an Obama issue. Bush and the rest of them were just as wrong for what they did.

What drives me nuts is if the gov gives a company 10 million dollars then people go out and find 10 million dollars worth of what they consider ridiculous expenditures and then say "Look at what they spent our money on!" To be fair, if the company spent 1 billion that year, 10 million dollars of which was from the gov then only 1/100th of any ridiculous expensive could be said to have been paid by the gov. I don't know the exact text of this $500,000 limitation but if it says "salary" then the execs will just claim that bonuses relating to profit or revenue are not salary. The gov tried something like this ten years ago. They heavily taxed base salaries over 1 million. The result is that companies paid their execs a million in base salary but laid on the stock options. Then greed kicked in and execs did every manipulation possible to jack up the stock price so that they could cash in. Then their folly was realized and the dot com bubble burst. More unintended consequences of government action. Other than that, a lot of this disdain is simply covetousness which no one seems to think is a bad thing anymore. Finally, Obama is demagoging the hell out of this issue. Pass the stimulus now or the world will end! If you believe Keynes then what they are proposing is too small. If you believe the austrian school then like Hoover's and FDR's massive increase in spending this could lead to another depression. Don't say nobody ever predicted this because the austrian school has yet to be proven wrong. Ignore them at your own peril.

If you are saying you only would believe an explanation for our existance if a priori it were extremely likely to occur, then I strongly disagree! No, I believe that unlikely things have occurred but the more unlikely it is a priori the more evidence I would like to see before believing that it really happened.

Everybody is coming at this question with a pre-established worldview. Some hold to the materialist view and so they are forced to believe in whatever the most likely materialist explanation is even if that explanation was in absolute terms highly unlikely. At a micro level, calculations have been made on the probability of certain molecules forming by chance. Combine the probabilities of all the things that had to happen to get to where we are today including a universe whose fundamental constants appear tuned for life and, in my opinion, no sincere, educated person can claim that a universe with intelligent life is in any way likely to occur by chance. Physicists have struggled with this problem and have invented a variety of explanations which are only slight less preposterous than claiming that only one universe exists and it just so happens that it's fundamental constants are compatible with life (this isn't just like one in a billion...more like 1 in 10^120)...multiple universes with every possible set of values for the constants of nature or the universe existing in one giant quantum superposition whose wave function collapses once one of the uncountable possibilities results in an "intelligent" observer. If you a priori reject non-material agents then you have no choice but to believe the highly improbable has occurred. Don't get me wrong, I'm not faulting people for this belief because the other alternative (at least partial construction by an intelligence external to the universe) is also highly unlikely and without proof. If there were a statistician with no pre-conceptions I think they would find both explanations unappealing. A core part of darwinism is the belief that "random mutation" has helped produce genetic diversity. If mutation were instead not random but guided via the intelligent manipulation of non-deterministic quantum events then the two scenarios would be indistinguishable. Again, by doing this, you fix the problem of the sheer unlikelihood of random events getting us where we are today but replace it with God. So, in short I would say that evolution is possible but failure to have a better explanation is not proof of the truth of the current best conjecture particularly when the same science giving us this explanation says its likelihood is extremely low.

Whether a system works or not is dependent on the results it produces and whether humans judge those results to be good or bad. So, this question is effectively, "do you think the results socialism produces are good or bad." Given that people in general have no coherent system of good or bad but some hodge-podge of superficial instinctual feelings about it, it seems to me people should first figure out what is good and bad and only then ask if a certain system produces that result. The problem is that if your starting point for good and bad is rated in terms of human happiness then you wind up with the impossible task of trying to quantify how happy people are when they get stuff from government they didn't earn versus how unhappy people are when stuff they did earn (or their freedoms) is forcibly taken from them. In a world where people get enjoyment from merely have more than others (keeping up with the Jones') or get upset at having less than others even though they have adequate food, clothing and shelter you will never get agreement on some mythical ideal distribution of wealth.

Who says it is prohibited? I assume you mean the ACBL under the GCC. Ten seconds at the ACBL website under GCC shows this: 3. TWO CLUBS ARTIFICIAL OPENING BID indicating one of: a ) a strong hand. b ) a three-suiter with a minimum of 10 HCP. So, 2♣ showing strong or weak ♦ is not specifically allowed, therefore it is prohibited.

I don't think that that is 100% correct. On the piano, as a practical matter, it is correct that it is unneeded because the piano is even tempered and can therefore be written as some other note. However (and I don't completed understand this myself), on other instruments (particularly string instruments) there may be a small difference between the two due to the complexities of temperament (even, just, Pythagorean, etc.). The most important reason for the "x", as I understand it, is understanding the piece's theoretical composition. Again, my understanding is limited here, but a piece can be understood as a sequence of chordal progressions and if you replace the "x" with another note you can change or mask how that chordal progression appears. From a consonance point of view, strange things happen (again on instruments capable of infinite manipulation of tone like the strings) where certain notes are slightly different going up a scale as opposed to coming down a scale.

How about a system where pass is 0-3 and other 1 level bids are hyper-aggresive. Still not a forcing pass system but it sure would dominate your system. Look, this is a continuum. If opps regularly open 12 counts and then start opening 10 counts, they have to some degree stopped you from using your most constructive opening methods. The 12 to 10 reduction may represent a 5% reduction in your ability to open the bidding. Assuming that you use a defensive system to defend a forcing pass bid rather than your normal openings then forcing pass systems reduce your ability to open by 50%. So, please tell me exactly what your magic number is between 5% and 50% that represents too much for you. Getting the opps out of their constructive system should be one of your goals (what do you think preempts are?). In short, in bridge, there is no such thing as a right to get to use your own constructive system just because the opponents hands aren't very good.