More or less my attitude on it too.



Well, I salute you for saying 'no' on those grounds, though of course I can hardly blame the cops for taking a heightened interest, obviously field testing for a joint is excessive.

I would say, the counter to your comment in that context then isn't if someone drops their gun on the way to a robbery and gets arrested for it, but rather, from the police's eyes, an assumption someone just had a gun fall off their person is an indicator of criminal intent, this seems as flawed a reasoning as searching your car after be denied voluntary access. As a side note, slapping a ACLU bumper sticker or similar on your vehicle would probably reduce the odds of that re-occurring, as it becomes obvious your objection is based on general and not situational ethics.

I wouldn't want to guess if concealed weapons bans lower crime, minus that specific crime of course, but they may well do so, just as undoubtedly banning alcohol and drugs would lower the crime rate, not including those specific crimes, in none of these scenarios do I consider that concept a justification for a law. I'm pretty sure crime rates would drop if we put GPS monitors on to everyone too, I don't happen to favor the idea.

I'm gonna bypass the Iran-Contra references if you don't mind.



I do happen to think it rather inappropriate to vote in primaries of a party you're not in, no real way to stop that sort of thing, but I would not vote in a democrat primary, and I would say ethically speaking, unless you would actually be willing to vote for that person in the general election, you should not vote for them in the primary. It's one thing when third-party types jump ship on their candidate to vote for the lesser of two evils, quite another when people go from a shoo-in primary to vote in the other side's contested primary election. Legally unpreventable but ethically undemocratic, IMHO, I did not participate in Rush's Operation Chaos in Ohio in '08 for that reason, and at the very least that was in direct response to all the mods and libs who voted in the GOP primary earlier to boost McCain. I understand tit-for-tat responses, but I would say this is not the case here, and even when it is it's not exactly a shining moment of ethical behavior.



Catastrophic and minimum coverage is genuinely on the table and has been for some time, don't buy into leftist rhetoric they we aren't willing to compromise. Are major concern isn't the idea that there might be some minimum for everyone, but our legitimate fear that once established, the left will keep raising the bar using sob stories, and as you know, that will absolutely happen. It is not a secret that the left's ultimate goal on this is a socialist model, and the better part of a century's worth of New Deal gives us good reason to think giving any ground will just put us in a position where we have to fight off giving more ground each and every election cycle. A minimum universal coverage could only be espoused were genuine super-majorities needed to later increase it, essentially, an amendment defining healthcare to a certain level as a right.



Well, these things tend to be case-by-case, I would say when you can show that people are benefiting disproportionately from a road compared to average citizens using the rest of the highway system, a toll to make up that difference is legit. Then you have the normal 'why can't I cross the freeway' issues from a limited number overpasses, loose rule of thumb, I'd say if any distance of under five miles as the crow flies requires ten plus miles of driving to avoid tolls, you've got an issue, anything 5-20 miles being more than double you've got a problem, and anything adding more than 50% to travel time for longer distances, problem. If it's inside that zone, then practicality trumps, otherwise, no, it's unduly restrictive. Exceptions to that can be dealt with locally, getting the city to cough up money for an overpass if it seems appropriate, etc.



Probably.



Very true, but the tort refeorm reference is that most Pharm companies avoid vaccine R&D and often don't even bother marketing a vaccine already developed for fear of class-action lawsuits. This is a case where you can go the opposite direction too, reform doesn't have to limit awards just strictly limit grounds for suits. I think, morally speaking, if Merck develops a AIDS vaccine, and everyone takes it, then 20 years from now 1 in 100 fall over dead, I don't think there a grounds for a suit there, there needs to be proof of outright negligence or deliberate monkeying with test data to warrant lawsuits on a lot of these things, and I'm not sure juries are really in a position to decide that, the problem of civil versus criminal cases, you really have no system of junking BS cases in advance, no grand jury, no prosecutor who can be held responsible for trying utter nonsense cases, etc.



I've always believed you're better off teaching to understanding, not fear, when possible, so a lot of times I object to public ed on things like this because it uses fear, not real science and medicine, as it's grounds, kids figure this out, and they toss the bay out with the bathwater.







Yet, while I agree with this, it has a certain element of fear-mongering to it. Children need to know what the real risks are, statistically, otherwise all those foolish excuses make more sense. We need to instill a clean 'risk management' attitude into kids, then this, and many other things, disappear. Not 'STDs will get you if you have sex' but 'some actions have a much higher chance of having bad results, these should be avoided' because you get this mental barrier from fear that once broken is totally broken in most cases. Drugs are bad turns into 'drugs are fine, now I've smoked some weed I know what a lie this is' whereas an approach of 'Everytime I do one of these I have a cumulative chance of addiction' that while a bit less likely to prevent trying stuff I think wards off more of the real fear, massive quantities of addicts. Teaching on a false premise, that any of us really mind a kid trying a beer when they're 17, leaves fake milestones in the mind, kids see it's illogical, and have personal motives to look for an excuse to do it, they now have the legit grounds to say 'It is stupid to assume there are any greater consequences of me drinking a beer at 19 then at 22, physiologically' and none will be inclined to accept the emotional maturity concept since they regularly falsely rate themselves as more mature than the 'average'. Fear works where realistically true teaching is impossible - trying to explain to a ten year old why stopping at an intersection even when they can see there is no traffic - but is useless when consequence is removed. A teenager knows they will not be thrown into jail for years for smoking weed. As the tool is useless, your best bet is to logically explain the reasoning as you would to an adult, and hope for the best, instead of encouraging rebellious behavior by using logically flawed fear-based reasoning.



Well, frankly I enjoy our conversations in the void more because nobody is popping in every other post to insert their political talking points. I get a little exhausted having to rebut or cringe at support from people whose knowledge on a lot of issues feels like I've read the book and they read the cliff notes, or often just the dusk jacket, and now approach everything on the subject with a certain ideological blindness acquired after five minutes of actual study. Conversation that tends to be black and white where the other participant has an a prior assumption on it to begin with.



Well, it's invariable a tricky area, it's easy to say 'Roof damage, the bill is for 30k, guess what, we're awarding you 30k and some additional expenses, or we're treating it as depreciated since your roof was twenty years old already and you'd have had to buy a new one soon' hard to do that for lost limbs, pain and suffering, etc. At the very least, I'd like established guidelines that were given to the jury and the judge informing them that the to exceed those, the defense has to make the case that it's an exceptional circumstance. I don't believe that could be said to violate the seventh amendment.



It's a belief that complex systems tend to develop their own inertia, and that patches are fine but at a certain point you scrap it and redo base don what you know from experience. Bill X v1.1 is fine, Bill X, v 7.5 means write a whole new system, sunset the old one. We could do a much better job on Welfare, for instance, if we simply rewrote it from the ground up now that we have decades of experience with it.