Rum, sodomy, and the lash are all legal now, right?
5: Speaking of Jaywalking, I learned today that (a) there are no Blue Jays in Cailfornia, and (b) they nonetheless call a particular bird "blue jay" and that bird is the Western Scrub Jay. Fascinating stuff, right?
Walking around with an apple in your pocket so's you can steal unattended horses.
I'd legalize turning right on red, assuming there is no visible traffic coming. It would probably turn into an utter zoo of people paying not enough attention and so on, though.
If we legalized hobo consultants, 13 wouldn't have to go nameless.
12: I got a tweet from Obama's state organization asking me to stand with the president on gay marriage. I guess I'm supposed to oppose it for four years just because.
There are places besides NYC with no right on red?
I'd legalize turning right on red
That's illegal in your state? Huh.
Virginia is for lovers. Maryland is for the oblivious.
Good lord, no right on red? Do you live in North Korea?
Right on red is okay only when it's marked as such, which is rarely. I'm sure you could get away with it anyway, but people do tend to obey the rules, and it's marked rarely enough that half the time people don't notice that they actually can do it at this or that particular intersection.
Raw milk so my hippier friends would shut up about their oppression at the hands of the homogenazis.
Wait, I think I got that backwards: you can go right on red as long as it's not marked that you can't. Which most of the time it is so marked. Kind of a backwards way of going about the marking.
30: That's every state in the U.S.A. except the ones where the communists took over during the years when Abby Hoffman was president.
I learned today that (a) there are no Blue Jays in Cailfornia, and (b) they nonetheless call a particular bird "blue jay" and that bird is the Western Scrub Jay. Fascinating stuff, right?
RTFA.
Burning, burning like some fabulous yellow roman candle.
34: Oh, man. I even commented in that thread. Well, there you go, everyone. RTFuckingA.
34: Everything is in the FA but the number of false positives is just too high.
I was going to say "Smoking in bars!" but, really, I love the ban. Let's step outside, folks.
32: Yes, sorry I messed that up. It's really stupid to put up a sign at every light saying "no right on red" though, like we're pretending that you can totally go right on red, it's totally legal, except for this majority of locations where it's not.
17: I was the hobo consultant slain
by the false allure of a railroad train.
40: West Virginia did that. Obama mostly won anyway.
Electronic devices during takeoff and landing.
Some of what counts as defamation.
Goal-line technology.
Unions for grad students (currently they're mostly limited to public colleges).
39: That is odd. Most intersections in places I've driven have allowed right on red. It sounds like what you'd really like to do is not legalize right on red per se, but expand the number of cases where it's legal.
I have a similar wish with regard to zoning. (Legalize multi-unit dwellings! Legalize mixed use!)
Trading with Cuba, marrying more than one man, but not vice versa, leaking goverment secrets.
I'm kinda okay with people urinating in public as long as they're discreet about it.
If apartments are outlawed, only outlaws will have to listen to people with clog dancing on top of their bedroom at 1:00 in the morning.
49: When I ran the 1/2 marathon, I was surprised by the number of people who just pissed off in the bushes.
I was even more surprised by the number of people who pissed in porta-potties. How hard it is to pee on waking and not pee again while running in the hot sun?
47.2 makes me realize I now have an irrational, automatic negative reaction to any mention of the word "zoning", thanks to Yglesias.
I'd legalize more free speech zones, for god's sake. (Trying to respect Stanley's direction that this is not a law thread, but it's unclear whether we'd have to legalize free speech zones or de-illegalize non-free speech zones, or what exactly.)
I suspect I messed up my triple negatives there in 55.last. De-illegalize free speech zones, I believe I meant. Something.
Left on red! First one I ever found was White Plains. There's one in Cambridge where they explicitly say "no turn on red" on the right lane then "no left turn on red" in the left lane.
I would overturn State v. Stanko, 974 P.2d 1132 (Mont. 1998)
58
What's your problem with this decision? It seems quite reasonable to me. Is there some reason Montana can't post speed limits like everybody else?
I don't think the basic rule is all that vague. I prefer personal responsibility to a stupid number.
Here's the text that was "too vague."
A person operating or driving a vehicle of any character on a public highway of this state shall drive the vehicle in a careful and prudent manner and at a rate of speed no greater than is reasonable and proper under the conditions existing at the point of operation, taking into account the amount and character of traffic, condition of brakes, weight of vehicle, grade and width of highway, condition of surface, and freedom of obstruction to the view ahead. The person operating or driving the vehicle shall drive the vehicle so as not to unduly or unreasonably endanger the life, limb, property, or other rights of a person entitled to the use of the street or highway.
Sounds pretty vague to me. This is also starting to sound suspiciously like a law thread.
60
It's completely subjective. Different juries could reach wildly varying conclusions even when there is no factual dispute at all. Which seems unacceptably vague to me. If there is no factual dispute it should be reasonably clear what is legal and what isn't. With this law it isn't.
And I don't see what big advantages there are for this law compared to the more usual bright line speed limits.
Point taken on the law thread business, teo. I'll quote a couple of New Jersey laws without comment and then drop on out (and return to watching an episode of Hogan's Heroes):
A person who drives a vehicle carelessly, or without due caution and circumspection, in a manner so as to endanger, or be likely to endanger, a person or property, shall be guilty of careless driving.
A person who drives a vehicle heedlessly, in willful or wanton disregard of the rights or safety of others, in a manner so as to endanger, or be likely to endanger, a person or property, shall be guilty of reckless driving
Informing a consultant with decades of seniority to you of an excruciatingly simple error he made, insinuating through a smiling face that you don't know how he pulls in a single dime as a specialized technical consultant if he can let this kind of thing through. (Jesus Christ on a bicycle, I feel like I just heard a taxonomist refer to Australopithecus sapiens.)
It's illegal to talk shit to a senior consultant?
The consulting firms quietly seized control of the state legislatures while no one was paying attention.
To the OP, I'd legalize weed, prostitution, smoking in parks, and punches to the face of any college student who drunkenly informs me he is "pre law and knows his rights".
It wouldn't even be an infraction (we don't work together, our paths just cross), but it's a very nicey-nice environment where everybody knows each other and I'm not even confident of my ability to talk shit veiledly.
Oh yeah, and booze in parks. In a park it should definitely be motherfucking booze time.
If that law is too vague, then surely most laws that involve negligence are pretty unsafe as well?
Personally, I would legalise gay marriage. And weed. But not prostitution, 'cause we already have. And some other stuff, I guess.
but it's a very nicey-nice environment where everybody knows each other and I'm not even confident of my ability to talk shit veiledly.
Man is that not the case at my job.
Oooh ooh, I would ensure the legality of acts that would, otherwise, be assaults in the context of consensual S&M!
54: Just remember, the opposite of something unreliable is -- also unreliable!
71: Well, yes, but you're kind of at one extreme of that particular spectrum.
but you're kind of at one extreme of that particular spectrum.
Definitely, but it sure is nice sometimes.
Oh sure, everyone's probably in bed, but I have Wed Thurs Fri off, which means yes, this Glenlivet is going great with some dry cured bacon and sweet potato fries.
I'm still up, but am actually just about to go to bed, since I have to work tomorrow. Enjoy your days off.
marrying more than one man, but not vice versa,
So it's still illegal for more than one man to marry you?
Also, turning right on red (or left, mutatis mutandis) is a hideous practice. Next you'll be advocating those French pedestrian crossings where a green light for pedestrians doesn't actually mean that all the traffic has been signalled to stop. STOP MEANS STOP.
Also, turning right on red (or left, mutatis mutandis) is a hideous practice.
Yeah, this. I haven't seen statistics, admittedly, but turning right on red seems like a recipe for pedestrian fatalities. Presumably in practice it's banned in urban areas.
I got caught out a few times by people turning when I was crossing (in US a few weeks back). It does seem a bit daft/dangerous.
You were in Boston, where the drivers are notoriously homicidal.
Cambridge, was where I noticed it, but yeah. Crossing, at a marked crossing point, with a red light for the traffic and 'go' for me. Arseholes still drove right round the corner.
That actually isn't legal most places isn't Cambridge. Doesn't necessarily stop people.
Laws that make every traffic law for cars apply equally to bikes. I stop at almost all red lights while other bikers are blowing through, but there really are cases where it's pointless to have bikes act exactly the same as cars- red light across the top of a T intersection, no reason for bikes to stop unless there are pedestrians.
Oh, and here's my billion dollar idea- make a sensor that tells you when a person is in the driver seat of a car, and a little LED on top of the driver side mirror that lights up to let bikers know to stay wide of that car to avoid getting doored. Then lobby Congress to require them in all cars.
I'm not buying a new car just for that.
84 is great.
My billion-dollar idea (not a law thing): networked car horns, so the external horn can be at a normal human volume and yet still heard (over the stereo) in all nearby cars (would also need to be mandated).
re: 83
Is chasing people down after they do it and then beating them legal?
That actually isn't legal most places isn't Cambridge.
No they isn't.
Just yesterday I saw a guy slap the hood of an SUV that turned the corner without waiting for him to cross the street. She was taking a left and there was no light. Then he started to reach through her window and she drove away.
89: I was rooting for him until the last sentence.
Cocaine, prostitution, and casino gambling, but only when all three are done at the same time.
Maybe he was a huge asshole who just happened to be right this time. Or maybe a man pushed beyond reason by failure to yield. Either way, he wasn't taking an apology and I was glad to see her drive off when she did.
40: Voting for prisoners. We used to have that in MA, pre Mitt.
63
Sometimes a subjective standard is unavoidable but it is better to have a bright line rule when feasible.
Of course, once our Google overlords are driving our cars for us, 84 and 86 will be obsolete. Presumably the car won't let you open the door if it sees a biker coming.
"Open the driver side door, car."
"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't do that."
I think we should set the DUI limit back to .1, but only after 10 p.m. and only if you're driving a golf cart.
You expect me to read, like, 90 comments?
90 comments and every dissertation ever written in Black Studies.
The title of this thread proves that unfogged is a waste of time.
Laws that make every traffic law for cars apply equally to bikes.
They do, generally - the problem is that cyclists don't always obey them. But it's not actually legal to go through a red light if you're on a bike.
I'd ban taxis from bus lanes, as I may have mentioned before.
On an unrelated topic, can there be a more unhealthy meal than Glenlivet, bacon and fried sweet potatoes? Maybe if you add some whipped cream?
Thunderbird, Spam, and fried regular potatoes?
I meant they should make it legal for bikes to behave differently.
Legalize all drugs, lower the drinking age to sixteen, legalize smoking in all outdoor areas, also in those indoor areas where you can create a separately ventilated room and where any employees working in the place don't need to continuously be present (e.g. you couldn't do it in a sit down restaurant, but you could do it in a bar without table service with the customers required to go to the non-smoking area to order and pick up drinks, ditto for separate smoking cars on trains and smoking rooms in airports). I lean towards legalizing prostitution, but I have some hesitation.
I think we should set the DUI limit back to .1, but only after 10 p.m. and only if you're driving a golf cart.
I think we should ban proper cars after 10pm and give drunk people golf carts
Oh, and I second voting for all prisoners. Either ban voter-id laws or create a mandatory national id along Euro lines.
107 sounds like a great deal of pain-in-the-ass stuff so that people can carry out their bad habits in greater ease.
I lean towards legalizing prostitution, but I have some hesitation.
I can recommend you a therapist.
I don't want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.
Hunting (bow, crossbow, rifle, shotgun, handgun, spear, throwing stick, trap/snare, knife, club, bare hands) present and former Penn State Athletic Department officials and university administrators.
Every proposal I have seen for a national ID in the US would make things more difficult for immigrants and the poor in voting, employment and a host of other things.
Most drugs, prostitution, euthanasia.
Lessig's voucher-based proposal for campaign finance reform, drop the requirement for phase III clinical trials for pharmaceuticals, repeal statehood for the former confederacy and have those territories administered by Puerto Rico.
drop the requirement for phase III clinical trials for pharmaceuticals
You mean stop doing the phase where you can actually see if the medication works and just approve everything that doesn't poison people?
Yes, exactly. This requirement is responsible for the high cost of new medicine in the US.
116: shoot, a fella could have himself a pretty good weekend in VegasAmsterdam with that.
Actually doing science is more expensive than not doing science. That's true.
Also, isn't Phase I "will this make healthy people swell up and die?" and Phase II "No? Great! Will it do sick people any good?" Phase III is a larger-scale "will it help sick people predictably at the suggested dose", IIRC.
Phase I is will a small bit of this make healthy people die. Phase II is will enough of this to actually have the intended effect make healthy people die.
123: Are we talking about drugs for administering capital punishment?
If the drug is intended to be a deadly poison, you can stop after Stage II.
67: punches to the face of any college student who drunkenly informs me he is "pre law and knows his rights".
I'll go for this one. Too many law students (or full-fledged lawyers) email to say, after we've had to cancel their order for a law book because it was just sold to someone else, that their order constituted a legally binding contract, so we're in breach of contract, and what do we intend to do about it?
Per wikipedia, some phase II trials are as ajay mentions.
If we're allowed to make things illegal: All drug company gifts and premiums to doctors. The only thing they should be able to give away is copies of peer reviewed literature or summaries of peer reviewed research. I'm willing to bet that would have a bigger effect than doing away with phase III trials.
Also I'd have a government funded non-profit whose job it is to promote medicines and treatments that have lost patent protection.
Also I'd have a government funded non-profit whose job it is to promote medicines and treatments that have lost patent protection.
This. It's off topic in this thread, but some kind of government office of Best Medical Practices that would do things like test new medicines against generics, and research new and different uses of off-patent drugs, and then publish treatment guidelines.
The government does do that type of stuff, but not enough of it. Also, not directly. The mechanism is grants to university researchers.
Yeah, what I'm thinking would incorporate putting the resulting data out in some kind of official publication, possibly including a Wall of Shame for expensive new drugs not significantly preferable to cheap old drugs.
Particular treatments being voted up or down often have well-known proponents or detractors with considerable egos and political skill. The boundary between turf battle among people who dislike each other and assessment of the best treatment is not a bright line.
Single hidden decision points make me nervous,
basically. These now exist inside the pharmaceutical companies, often because a compund only works for a subpopulation, which can be identified, but not in a way that works with phase III. Also common is that there's a fantastic cure that kills people carrying an identifiable allele. Currently, these compounds are lost forever.
Not quite addressing off-patent, but there's the Orphan Drug Act
Isn't that basically what the ACA was supposed to do, but death panels?
"government office of Best Medical Practices"
I believe a certain Muslim president proposed that and it's been referred to as socialism, death panels, and bureaucrats want to eat your granny.
I've always said there should be a journal of failed results- not shoddy science, but where you had a reasonable hypothesis, tested it rigorously, and it didn't work. Would save a lot of people the time and money of testing it on their own.
Also common is that there's a fantastic cure that kills people carrying an identifiable allele.
Do you have a citation on that? Especially the "common".
some kind of government office of Best Medical Practices that would do things like test new medicines against generics, and research new and different uses of off-patent drugs, and then publish treatment guidelines.
Wouldn't that be NICE?
These now exist inside the pharmaceutical companies, often because a compund only works for a subpopulation, which can be identified, but not in a way that works with phase III. Also common is that there's a fantastic cure that kills people carrying an identifiable allele. Currently, these compounds are lost forever.
These are both arguments for reforming the process, not scrapping it.
often because a compund only works for a subpopulation,
This is what I spend half of my time working on these days.
Cancer does seem to call for different ways to study and approve medications. I wasn't thinking of that before. I still don't see what that has to do with removing the need for Phase III testing in general.
As I understand it, NICE doesn't actually do or fund research in the sense of new trials. It looks at existing research and makes (binding?) recommendations. Sort of like Cochrane reviews, but more normative and more politicised.
I would love to know if whoever came up with the NICE acronym intentionally meant it as a fuck you to CS Lewis.
126
I'll go for this one. Too many law students (or full-fledged lawyers) email to say, after we've had to cancel their order for a law book because it was just sold to someone else, that their order constituted a legally binding contract, so we're in breach of contract, and what do we intend to do about it?
Does your store have some kind of a Web site? I'd put up some side page there with exhaustive legalese in a small font explaining why orders aren't contracts, and respond to such e-mails with links to it. I mean, I assume we're talking about cases where either you have to get it from a third party, or you had the book but someone else bought it so recently that your inventory hasn't been updated yet, but either way situations where no sane, reasonable adult could possibly call it "breach of contract", right? If so, some canned legalese would hopefully shut them up.
136
Also common is that there's a fantastic cure that kills people carrying an identifiable allele.
Do you have a citation on that? Especially the "common".
I don't have a cite for the "common" part, but I know of at least one example: chloramphenicol. Man, that 1632 series is so educational, it should be required in schools.
Unless the wikipedia piece is out of date, they have not identified an allele. Or so I take "This effect is rare and is generally fatal: there is no treatment and no way of predicting who may or may not get this side effect."
145: I didn't mean it about genetics specifically. It's a fantastic antibiotic in general, but unpredictably kills a small percentage of people who take it, regardless of the mechanism. So it's not relevant to the "identifiable" part, no, but the point remains that just because it works doesn't mean you could use it in the general population.
||
This may not be a law thread, but when the cops are marching and the wardens are walking out, lawmakers need to realise they have a problem.
100,000 civil servants on strike: about 1 in 4.
144.1: Right, that's what we do. I wrote our terms of sale in such a way that "subject to prior sale" and such things are clearly spelled out. I'd dearly love to hear back from some of the belligerent, threatening people who receive my response linking to our terms of sale, but we never do. My work partner would write more strongly worded email replies than I do, and occasionally does.
136.
Cytochrome p450 variants affect metabolism and hypersensitivity between individuals, here are two descriptions:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20485159
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21171195
One compound I was thinking of is terrible for carriers of a rare allele in some neurotransmitter receptor, otherwise a promising treatment. This looks maybe similar:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19669131
Autoimmune disorders and HLA definitely fit the bill, but I don't understand immunology well enough to know if rare allele effects are a rounding error here or whether this is a dominant effect.
If I didn't know lw, I'd say 449 was comment spam for sure.
126: Have you tried a one word response?
"Nothing."
I don't understand how there is an appreciable number of unapproved medications with a known interaction with an allele such that one genotype is helped and one is hurt or killed. Aside from cases where the allele is the cause of the condition for which treatment is sought, I don't understand how they could be found in large numbers. Clinical trials are not cheap, not even the early phases, and genotyping has only recently come down in cost to the point where they can be used routinely. The number of cases you'd need to examine to find something like this would have to be nontrivial even if you have a specific reason to test that hypothesis. If you don't have a specific reason, you've got to be extremely lucky to find something or a great number of people have to have tried the medication (which means that it wasn't being kept from use by the FDA).
151: That's the internal response, certainly. But everybody says customer service is really important.
But if you're not actually selling them a book they're not really a customer. Problem solved!
I don't know the detailed clinical trial history of many compounds, no.
I've heard the detailed story for two compounds, one got dinged by adverse reactions for a neuroreceptor in some patients; later, the SNPs with population frequencies for this receptor were genotyped. The other story, a CP450 polymorphism meant that some patients were very slow to metabolize the drug. If the problem allele is rare, the adverse reaction may not be detected in phase I. The alleles causing such problems are known now, weren't in the past. I'm speculating some about what's going on, but immune system excepted, where I just don't know, I don't think so.
The extremely high cost of and long development time for many cancer drugs is what I was basically thinking of. Gleevec was an exception in many ways.
153: How would "I'm afraid that's not accurate under our terms of sale. If you'd like a fuller explanation of our policies, I will be happy to oblige," work?
Polite, but points them to the answer.
I do understand that genotyping can allow more specifically targeted medications. And I think that the FDA should allow more people with otherwise untreatable diseases to take risks. But I would want to see that happen before the medication goes out to market.
156: I don't understand. The response outlined in 148 and 144.1 works fine.
154: I don't really need to natter on about this, but the general idea these days is that you have to cater to all persons who might patronize your establishment, even when they're oppositional and suspicious of you from the get-go. Oh well. I blame capitalism!
the general idea these days is that you have to cater to all persons who might patronize your establishment, even when they're oppositional and suspicious of you from the get-go
How is this different than it has ever been? Customer is always right, etc etc.
They should make thinking illegal, so that the people who have the "Think while it's still legal" t-shirts feel vindicated.
I meant they should make it legal for bikes to behave differently.
This is very true. It's made difficult by the fact that, because biking in US cities is kinda scary, the biker population tends to be young reckless folks, who are genuinely biking in an unsafe and irresponsible manner, which then enrages motorists. But it's just insane to think that the same considerations that counsel a complete stop at intersection X for a person piloting an SUV with a momentum of 75,000 lb*miles/hr apply equally to someone piloting a bike with a momentum of 3,000 lb*miles/hr. (And yes I know that's not a normal unit of momentum, but I don't feel like converting, and the ratios will hold.)
but the general idea these days is that you have to cater to all persons who might patronize your establishment, even when they're oppositional and suspicious of you from the get-go. Oh well. I blame capitalism!
Actually, I think capitalism's moving beyond this model, and not in a good way. Wasn't part of what was so disturbing about that Klout article the revelation that now, for example, hotels can make a good guess whether you're somebody whose complaints about bad service will be heard beyond your immediate circle, and dedicate resources to treating you well if and only if that's the case?
159 I guess you haven't spent much time in Switzerland or Poland. To be fair, things have been changing for the better, but from what I could tell the old approach was 'the customer is always wrong, and making sure he/she knows that is an essential part of customer service'.
I didn't read the Klout article, so this is one of those annoyingly uninformed comments, but it seems to me that the model in 162 runs the risk of alienating people who make decisions about how money is spent, but don't tweet or rant on FB or whatever. Say I'm some sort of decision maker at a company. I stay at your hotel and get crappy service, but I don't then tweet about it, I just decide that we won't be putting up our reps at that chain in the future.
True, and this will hopefully limit the extent to which this is used, but in general, extra resources devoted to those perceived as influential means less for the rest of us. (As a first approximation, anyway.)
I would just like to pipe up and say i am in favor of legalizing most things, but NAY to it being legal for people to piss in public. As someone who lives in an alley into which people constantly duck to take a piss, places where people feel free to urinate in public really smell horrific. It greatly decreases my enjoyment of outside.
What we SHOULD do is have a decent number of public places where people can piss, so homeless people can have a fucking place to do their business. Drunk hipsters should just wait until they get home.
158.2 is not applicable to all businesses. It might be that your worst customers are more trouble than they're worth to you.
The more energy you spend on the angry ones, the less you have left to spend on the nice ones.
You know what smells horrific? A decomposing rat. I found one in my back hallway, probably 3-4 days gone, and can't get rid of the smell, although sauteing some garlic and leaving the pan out there helped.
I'm not sure if I should be more concerned that a rat got into our house and came upstairs, or that it died for some unknown reason- I have some neurotoxin mouse traps in the basement two floors down but I'm not sure if it ate the poison.
I have decomposing rats in my alley too. Those smell bad. But they decompose really fast. The piss smell lingers, because it's constantly getting refreshed.
You could refresh the dead rats more regularly.
One of the weirder things about the half marathon was the people stopping to piss in the bushes. Nobody was near any houses, so I didn't think it a big deal and there were huge lines at the portable toilets. Still, I was making 11 minute miles so the people I saw couldn't have been worried about winning. Also, I was sweating so much that urine wasn't happening.
166: If they were free to piss in public, they wouldn't concentrate their urine in convenient alleys and would spread it around more. Dogs piss everywhere, and you never smell it.
172 must be expanded to 800 words and sent to Slate.
Dogs piss everywhere, and you never smell it.
Maybe you don't, but, with my Wolverine-like sense of smell, I do, just as I smell the neighborhood hipster smoking his goddamned meerschaum pipe and Patchouli Guy at the gym. Scent pollution is a real issue.* Or it will be, after I get some sort of 501(c)(3) and a website started. Maybe a SuperPAC in time for 2016.
* Scent pollution is not a real issue.
N.B.: I smell terrific, thank you.
I once met a marathon runner with a wooden leg named 'Smith', and he also didn't have a nose.
I can't imagine how different life would be if I could detect scents as subtle as patchouli.
A marathon runner named Smith,
Had a wooden leg worn to the pith,
And could not smell a rose,
For he hadn't a nose,
And the punchline was only a myth.
178: A living hell. Many people* smell wretched, a lot of restaurants excrete bales of reeking toxicity and New York is, in spring and summer, full of hot and odious odoriferousnesses, human and animal.
* Smokers, worst.
Can you smell the fear on people? If so, do you attack them when you do?
Have you ever had your victim play possum on you, so you fake like you're walking away, only to be hovering right above them when they cautiously open one eye?
Does Lunchy know you hunt fearful people?
Get back to us, then. And have fun, you crazy kids.
heebie is funny.
OT: Jesus christ, I dug myself a hole over at Balko's place that I can't think how to get out of, if I should even try. All I was doing was trying to say that Obama's gay marriage statement was good, you see, and you should vote for him over Romney. But nooo, I had to get all caught up.
You're a small business owner. I thought they respected that.
They basically sound like Bob: Obama is the worst president ever, any infinitesimal amount of good he's done is far outweighed by the bad, there is no difference between Obama and Romney that anyone should care about, and, for good measure, voting is for suckers.
I have no idea to respond to either that or the more substantive objections.
I would, I admit, like to have at my fingertips a response to the charge that the stimulus package has cost nearly a million bucks per job gained. But it's too exhausting to unpack the whole thing.
174: Facebook already knows this, but I'm 99% sure Mara has no sense of smell and I've suddenly started thinking about what this will mean for her, not so much the stereotypical not being able to smell whatever it is that gets added to gas but how she'll learn to cook and how we'll handle mandator deodorant and so on. Some people's sense of smell shows back up again and I haven't actually taken her to a specialist, so maybe she'll end up flippanteresque eventually, but I tested tonight and she couldn't notice a difference between grilled cheese with mustard and without, so I've finally actually tested her.
194: I like mustard with cheddar and I was the one who'd be eating her leftovers, so I figured why not?
I've never thought of that, but I do like mustard. I suppose a German-style mustard would be best.
191: and, for good measure, voting is for suckers
I've voted a bunch of times and I never got a sucker. Maybe I'd have better luck in Chicago?
180: I'm not as badly off as all that, but I am far more sensitive to smells than most people. The number of people who ride the bus with unwashed feet is truly disgusting. I do get a lot of reverie and synaesthesia with smells though, so that's good. I need to figure out what brand(s) of coffin nails my grandparents smoked. Whenever I get a whiff of some place that smells like their house it immediately puts me back there, 20 years ago, when the world was young and men and seals were fiercer.
192- Does that $1M ignore the stuff that the stimulus made or fixed, like bridges and roads and stuff? I mean, when I bought a car I didn't say that the CD player cost $30k oh and it came with an engine and wheels for free.
Parsimon, you should look for some estimates of the "multiplier" from the stimulus that you can quote -- the amount of economic activity created for every dollar spent in stimulus.
Also, while the federal government was doing the stimulus, the state governments were working hard to undercut it by reducing their own spending, because of idiot balanced-budget provisions put in place by idiots. So the correct comparison to use is not "created more jobs than zero" but "created more jobs than the millions lost at state level because of idiots".
And you also have to be very careful to distinguish between "money announced" and the rather smaller figure of "money actually paid out".
199
Does that $1M ignore the stuff that the stimulus made or fixed, like bridges and roads and stuff? ...
Bringing this up would probably just produce tirades on the money wasted on electric cars that don't work, bankrupt solar cell companies, high speed trains to nowhere and the like.
And in fact much of the stimulus spending was on things like tax cuts and extended unemployment insurance that didn't produce anything specific.
200
Parsimon, you should look for some estimates of the "multiplier" from the stimulus that you can quote -- the amount of economic activity created for every dollar spent in stimulus.
Aren't current estimates of the multiplier pretty low? I seem to recall figures like 1.5 which isn't too impressive.
When I quit my three-pack-a-day smoking habit, it took awhile to get accustomed to how bad the world smells. An acquaintance remarked that her father, upon quitting smoking, exclaimed with delight, "I can smell dirt!" Apparently, he thought that this was a good thing.
It probably depends on the type of dirt.
203: Ezra covers that in his review article, which is short and readable. The multiplier varies wildly from sector to sector and from study to study. Anything from 0.45 to 25.
203: I seem to recall figures like 1.5 which isn't too impressive
A 50% return on an investment isn't impressive? I guess you must not talk to a lot of financial advisers.
207: Too close to 1 or below and you have to start worrying about expected future drag due to debt service.*
The real reason for stimulus is that the economy is below capacity, the government can print money with negligible cost, and the dollar's credibility is stronger (in relative terms) than it's ever been, so we can get real wealth for nothing. Under those circumstances, even a multiplier of
*Under "normal" circumstances, which may not apply for quite a while.
Ron Paul got Benquo before he could finish.
Under those circumstances, even a multiplier of LESS THAN 1 is a good deal.
201: Thanks for the link to Ezra's piece, Ajay.