This kind of problems arise when people decide to change what Nature decided to be a Constant...
Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective
31–40 of 58 posts
Re: Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective
#32This kind of problems arise when people decide to change what Nature decided to be a Constant...
People are not part of nature?
Re: Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective
#33This kind of problems arise when people decide to change what Nature decided to be a Constant...
a hole is a hole...
Re: Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not against gay marriage, but after pattern-matching the particular story of your friend I don't see why he needs to marry. It's like getting a government-sponsored car that you don't want to drive. Is it for the tax breaks? Think of it like this: they're a way to lure the provider into marriage. If you don't buy the traditional view of marriage, you'll have a hard time justifying tax breaks. I don't believe you…
The argument is that a certain class of people ought to have the same rights as all others do unless there is a just reason to deny those rights. Surely you can think up an argument to support that notion. The exercise of those rights isn't important, i.e. I should not be denied the right to a fair trial simply because I don't intend to commit any crimes and thus don't "need" the right. Moreover, while the institutio…
It's like the science fiction cliche where humans puzzle over artifacts of ancient alien technology. A mind brought up on modern politics is bound to be often baffled by strange and archaic things seemingly created by nonhuman beings. What's common law? What's religion? What's marriage? Our only framework for understanding is the idea of democracy and human rights, but this stuff predates human rights by hundreds or thousands of years, and the shoehorning fails.
Slightly exaggerating, if you call marriage a "human right" today, you must also believe that free speech mandates taxpayer-sponsored newspapers to publish everyone's words :-) First make marriage totally non-binding on both partners and the government. Make divorce as easy as signing a paper. Abolish alimony and child support. Drop the tax breaks. Make hospital visitation rights, etc., a matter of civil contract. Those measures will change marriage from a state-sponsored targeted subsidy into a proper "human right".
Re: Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective
#35This kind of problems arise when people decide to change what Nature decided to be a Constant...
It seems I need to explain better:
Nature decided that so called "gays" (an artificial term, created in our modern times) can't procreate, so if you would make an island for them, good old Nature would answer with extinction...
(I think Nature is really discriminating here. Someone should sue It.)
Re: Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective
#36I find this article kind of silly as it pertains to Gay Marriage as a political issue. The politicians who are voting (or in most cases, not voting) on this issue care little and understand less about the data management side of things, and furthermore when has government EVER been efficient?
Interesting from a database POV, though.
Re: Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective
#37This kind of problems arise when people decide to change what Nature decided to be a Constant...
at some odd level, your post intrigues me, are you saying that gay relationships being "unnatural" is why design data around it is so tough?
Re: Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective
#38This article convinced me to write a blurb about why I like object databases:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=372935
Much cleaner than any of the models from the article, IMHO.
Re: Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective
#39I love Sam "sam512" Hughes, the owner of qntm.org. I first ran into his writing on Everything2, the old-but-not-dead collaborative writing site.
His science fiction is absolutely exemplary, especially the "Ed Stories" and the "Fine Structure" series. I would suggest that you all check it out, along with some of the other essays on qntm.org.
Re: Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it very interesting because the solution he came to is actually how it works in many cultures - i.e. binary marriages. Different cultures have different contexts when it comes to marriage. Some are monogamous, but even more are polygamous, where the husband marries the wives, or the wife marries the husbands... It all screams "graph", and I think in the end that's the only way we can represent it. Which is fun…
I think a graph is too static and either/or ish. Instead, there should be links defining the relationship between everyone and everyone, where the links' values are a function of something; such as time, or the values of other links, etc. But then this raises the question of how this maps to the legal/social realm? Well, first we have to chip everyone. Then, once we've extracted the global social network, we can defi…
There's a combinatorial explosion if you do that - the point is to focus on modeling relevant information. Note that the author throws out the fields for sex and gender identity, because they complicate things, and aren't really needed when just creating a database for who is married to whom for (presumably) tax purposes.