I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Fifteen rounds of bickering with engineers and state and municipal and possibly EPA people over some form of retention pond, or whether you've disposed of some stumps (I'm not kidding - improper disposal of tree stumps is a serious violation) properly, is nuts.

Ah, you mean building more suburbs. That should be made as difficult as possible.

[ThurgreedMarshall]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Who is anti-reg? No one. People are inherently anti-some-regs. Nobody wants all regs removed.

This isn't really a response is it? We both know exactly who we're talking about.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Different economies. I've seen many women paying in cash when I was getting my hair cut. It's probably 1/3 the price here as in the City.

So it's a cash business in certain areas and not others? Or is it a cash business because that's what you see?

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I don't think the majority of them work.

Oh. Well then I'm convinced. No need to dig any deeper than what you think.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Building soundness is of course acceptable. Fifteen rounds of bickering with engineers and state and municipal and possibly EPA people over some form of retention pond, or whether you've disposed of some stumps (I'm not kidding - improper disposal of tree stumps is a serious violation) properly, is nuts.

I have no clue about tree stump disposal. Please allow me to not base any conclusions on the most ridiculous example you can think of off of the top of your head.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

It isn't intended to be welfare, but it has that effect. "Embrace complexity."

Says the lawyer. Isn't that like 40% of our value? Navigating complexity for people? And yeah, sometimes it's unnecessary complexity. But rarely do I look at it as unintentional welfare.

But don't get me started on fucking CLE. That's the biggest fucking scam ever.

TM

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Adder

Ah, you mean building more suburbs. That should be made as difficult as possible.

I miss Atticus.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Incorrect. They emerge without govts all the time.

No, they don't, because almost all of the world has some sort of government almost all of the time. The normal state of affairs is that a government makes it possible to have markets. This is one of the basic reasons why people like governments. Finding the rare exception to this rule is one thing -- pretending it is normal is quite another.

That you cannot buy something you'd like to buy does not mean you are deprived of liberty.

The fundamental problem here is that you have a cramped notion of liberty, like a kind of colorblindness. If you are locked in a room, you lack liberty, no matter whether the government has imprisoned you or you've been kidnapped. In the latter case, you may have the right to be free, but if you are unable to escape, you still lack liberty. If the

The private market will always service maternity care.

This is the crux of it, the thing you are missing about how this particular market works and that you are not understanding from what I am trying to tell you. The private market will NOT always service maternity care. If insurers are free to make maternity care optional, the danger is that you will not be able to obtain maternity care unless you are part of a pool (e.g., buying coverage through your employer). If such coverage is optional, the people who will opt for it will be the people who are likely to to use it, and it will get prohibitively expensive. I have now said this to you in several posts and you show no signs of actually having read what I've said or of having the ideas penetrate your school, so I'm not sure why I'm trying again, but I'm an optimist I guess. The same thing is true with pre-existing conditions -- read the above and substitute pre-existing conditions for maternity care.

But yes, as to everything the market will not service, Medicare expansion. It's also administratively 100X simpler.

Just stop pretending to be a libertarian.

You're arguing with me against a single payer alternative?

No, I find it bizarre that you are professing to believe that there's so principled problem with the current healthcare system's infringement on your rights that goes away with single payer -- that you have a problem when the government forces you to buy something from one of many private parties, but no problem when you have to buy it from the government.

In favor of a precedent that could potentially be abused by corporations to compel people to purchase things in other areas?

I find your slippery slope arguments tedious and underwhelming, for the reasons I already said.

To defend Libertarianism, I'd have to be blunt about holding live and let die views that would trip the emotional triggers of a lot of people. That's not a conversation worth having.

I can't tell whether you're saying that you're not really a libertarian and don't want to pretend since you'd say odious things, or whether you're saying that you have odious views that you don't want to defend her because you'd upset people.

I think you do. You're exceptionally open minded and understand concepts at a level way above 99.9% of people. But you lean left. Not emotionally, but based on logic and compassion.

I agree that I lean left, but that's not an ideology. It means that the outcomes I favor for fairly pragmatic reasons put me left of center on the current political spectrum, perhaps because there are so many right-wing ideologues.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Read Graeber. Trust me. It's good. He's coming to it from a classical liberal perspective.

He wrote the highly amusing little piece, "Bullshit Jobs": http://www.economist.com/blogs/freee...bour-markets-0

I will not read Graeber, because I have seen him run into Brad Delong and Henry Farrell, among others, and look very, very foolish. Here is just one of Delong's posts. Here's one of Farrell's. Apple was not founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

I've yet to meet anyone who professes to be anti-reg who isn't completely full of shit and/or totally ignorant.

Matt Levine again:

I am working on a tentative theory of regulation. It goes like this:

1. There are two kinds of regulations: custom regulations and bulk regulations.
2. A custom regulation is designed to accomplish a particular goal. You want people to do something, so you write a rule mandating that they do it and punishing them if they don't. For instance, if you want U.S. companies to keep jobs in the U.S., you might write a rule to mandate that, and to "impose a 'very major' border tax on companies that move jobs outside the U.S." That is an example of a custom regulation, and it is good because it keeps jobs in the U.S.
3. Bulk regulations are the kind that you buy by the yard, ones that you measure by quantity rather than purpose. They don't have a purpose, really; they are just generic "red tape." These are the regulations that presidents frequently announce they will cut in half, or freeze with an executive order. They're the regulations that come not from a reasoned desire to achieve a particular goal, but from a pure impulse to regulate. Bulk regulations are bad because they prevent businesses from doing business-y things without accomplishing anything good.
4. All regulations are custom regulations.
5. All discussion of "regulation" is about bulk regulations, which do not exist.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Who is anti-reg? No one.

I don't mean to be difficult, and I apologize for reading your posts and responding to them as if you mean to sustain a point of view on specific subjects from day to day, but just a few days ago you expressed enthusiasm for Trump's notion of getting rid of regulations:

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

The only one I like is his professed desire to remove loads of regulations.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

If such coverage is optional, the people who will opt for it will be the people who are likely to to use it, and it will get prohibitively expensive.

I suspect that Sebby realizes this and just thinks that people should be paying out of pocket for their maternity care anyway.

[Pretty Little Flower]

Originally Posted by Adder

The tobacco version of this is "butt smuggling" . . . .

What??!?!

The Daily Dose is a churning Funkadelic groove bomb, the Tomahawk Missile of funk, "Loose Booty" from America Eats Its Young:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIDfp2c8BLk

[Tyrone Slothrop]

More on those diehard Trump supporters.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Adder

I suspect that Sebby realizes this and just thinks that people should be paying out of pocket for their maternity care anyway.

Yes. I expect so. People are better off when they cannot buy the insurance that most people want because freedom!

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower

What??!?!

Hey! For once I didn't even make the egregious typo!

(that was funny though)

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Yes. I expect so. People are better off when they cannot buy the insurance that most people want because freedom!

Also, it's better if the poors don't have babies, or have sick babies, or die giving birth. Freedom!

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I will not read Graeber, because I have seen him run into Brad Delong and Henry Farrell, among others, and look very, very foolish. Here is just one of Delong's posts. Here's one of Farrell's. Apple was not founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.

Well, cool, he even blames one of my favorite professors for his lack of understanding of Apple's founding.

Richard Wolff taught us about something really interesting back in his econ courses, something called "fact checking". That's part of why people now laugh when they hear the names Reinhart and Rogoff.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I don't mean to be difficult, and I apologize for reading your posts and responding to them as if you mean to sustain a point of view on specific subjects from day to day, but just a few days ago you expressed enthusiasm for Trump's notion of getting rid of regulations:

"Loads" is synonym of "all" where?