141–150 of 150 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://nextdoor.com/ seems to filling that niche pretty well in my neighborhood; almost all my co-workers who own a house use it as well.
It's definitely a step in the right direction and fulfills the neighborhood aspect. I have a different idea in mind for what I'm building; I want to see a participative economy built from the ground up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But Washington has been taking more power away from the states for the last ~100 years or so. Yes, and there are very good reasons for that, beginning with us having to fight a Civil War because the South felt the need to keep slavery and continuing on to us having to fight the South to get it to enforce the laws preserving Civil Rights for black people and other minority groups. Shifting power back to local govern…
Ah yes, the old "states' rights are bad because slavery" chestnut. So should we repeal the 9th and 10th Amendments?
And, just to make it clear to everyone else, slavery isn't the only problem the Feds had to step in to solve. The KKK, Jim Crow, company stores, and pretty much every other type of institutionalized bigotry had to be handled at the Federal level because the local governments weren't even trying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is buying a second home and renting out the first one different from buying a second home and renting out the second one?
Oh, I can't prove anything, but to explain what I mean a little better, renting the first is a much more natural progression. Like a hermit crab moving up in shell sizes. You rent the first property as a consequence of buying a new house, rather than as the entire purpose of the second purchase.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm far from an expert on the topic, but from what I read, a causal relationship is at the least very strongly implied. Scientists don't imply cause-effect relationships, they demonstrate them, using evidence, to the exclusion of alternatives. Then they offer an explanation -- a theory about the evidence. These properties are rarely present in psychological studies, especially the explanation requirement. Here's an…
> Scientists don't imply cause-effect relationships, they demonstrate them, using evidence, to the exclusion of alternatives. You mean like Einstein did with the theory of relativity? Oh. Wait. That was only proven 30+ years later by Ives–Stilwell. You mean like String Theory is completely proven to the exclusion of alternatives? Oh. Wait. It isn't. Science observes, formulates hypotheses, and then falsifies or shows…
You're registering agreement with my point. Or didn't you notice? No one accepted relativity until it was confirmed by experiment.
> You mean like String Theory is completely proven to the exclusion of alternatives? Oh. Wait. It isn't.
Notwithstanding its popular name, string theory is not a scientific theory, it's a conjecture without an empirical basis.
> Science observes, formulates hypotheses, and then falsifies or shows them to be true.
Yes to the first, no to the second. Science never proves anything true, only false. This idea was perhaps best expressed by philosopher David Hume, who said, "No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion."
> The "linked artice" is journalism, not science.
So science journalism is free from the responsibilities of science itself? If that were true, it wouldn't be either possible or responsible to call it science journalism.
> Ah. You digested 35 years of research, and found no evidence? Or you skimmed the overview I provided, and chose to not further investigate?
There is no demonstrated cause-effect relationship, it's a correlation. If there were evidence for a cause-effect relaitonship, it would have been included even in the popular accounts.
> You didn't read any of the papers, did you?
This is what you think constitutes scientific debate? If the evidence existed, you would be linking to it rather than arguing in bad faith.
> Yes, there is no clear mechanism, yet. That's because we don't understand psychology well enough to always define clear mechanisms. That's what science is about - furthering our understanding.
Psychology isn't science, and until it tries to explain what it has until now merely described, that status won't change.
> The metastudies indicate that research is doing a decent job to control for other factors, and still reproduces nicely.
If reproducing unexplained results constituted science, astrology would be a science.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The economic middle road is to penalize the externality. If a community is concerned about non-resident property owners, they might consider taxing them at a higher rate and longer-term full-time residents at a lower rate. I don't know if there's anywhere that actually does this, however.
In the US, the government already heavily subsidizes home ownership via the mortgage-interest tax deduction[0]. From Wikipedia, it seems that similar programs exist worldwide as well[1] [0] http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/06/14/154344781/why-does... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_mortgage_interest_deductio...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still think one of the causes of the federal over-expansion was to make Senators popularly elected rather than appointed by state legislatures. The point of the Senate was to create a check by the states on federal power. Now it's just an incentive for lower population states to expand the federal government since they have disproportionate representation in directing who the expansion benefits.
> Now it's just an incentive for lower population states to expand the federal government since they have disproportionate representation in directing who the expansion benefits. Wouldn't they have the same incentive then?
The incentive was tempered by the fact that state legislators don't like expanding federal power since it interferes with the exercise of their own power.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still think one of the causes of the federal over-expansion was to make Senators popularly elected rather than appointed by state legislatures. The point of the Senate was to create a check by the states on federal power. Now it's just an incentive for lower population states to expand the federal government since they have disproportionate representation in directing who the expansion benefits.
I think there are a few other reasons: 1. National businesses in many cases (though not all) want uniform regulations to ease doing business. So they lobby for federal preemption of state regulations. For example, car manufacturers don't want to have to meet 50 separate safety codes in order to sell cars nationwide, so they successfully lobbied for a federal code with express state preemption. Advocates of tort refor…
Very few of the regulations in that nature are the ones people are complaining about. The objectionable things largely fall into the categories of things that cost a lot in blood and treasure, put poor and middle class people in prison or erect regulatory barriers to competition and entrepreneurship.
> The last time state vs. federal power came to the point of an outright test of strength, the federal government won.
The federal government always wins. They have more soldiers than anyone else. Winning and being right are not the same thing and being right sometimes is not an excuse to claim unchecked power.
> People move around a lot, which makes it increasingly impractical to deal with things like social security or Medicare at the state level, when you might be born in one state, work in three others, and retire in a fifth.
Problem solved by internet. There is no reason that four states can't deposit the retirement income you're due into your bank account in a fifth. And people retiring in a place far from where than they've lived is something to be discouraged from a social welfare standpoint in any event.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's definitely a step in the right direction and fulfills the neighborhood aspect. I have a different idea in mind for what I'm building; I want to see a participative economy built from the ground up.
Something like http://timebanks.org/ ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there are a few other reasons: 1. National businesses in many cases (though not all) want uniform regulations to ease doing business. So they lobby for federal preemption of state regulations. For example, car manufacturers don't want to have to meet 50 separate safety codes in order to sell cars nationwide, so they successfully lobbied for a federal code with express state preemption. Advocates of tort refor…
> National businesses in many cases (though not all) want uniform regulations to ease doing business. So they lobby for federal preemption of state regulations. Very few of the regulations in that nature are the ones people are complaining about. The objectionable things largely fall into the categories of things that cost a lot in blood and treasure, put poor and middle class people in prison or erect regulatory bar…
Ah, so federal preemption is okay when it's good for businesses' profits (e.g. overriding state environmental and product-safety laws), but bad when it's bad or businesses' profits (e.g. imposing environmental or product-safety laws)? Sounds like policy-biased "federalism", not principled federalism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> National businesses in many cases (though not all) want uniform regulations to ease doing business. So they lobby for federal preemption of state regulations. Very few of the regulations in that nature are the ones people are complaining about. The objectionable things largely fall into the categories of things that cost a lot in blood and treasure, put poor and middle class people in prison or erect regulatory bar…
> erect regulatory barriers to competition and entrepreneurship Ah, so federal preemption is okay when it's good for businesses' profits (e.g. overriding state environmental and product-safety laws), but bad when it's bad or businesses' profits (e.g. imposing environmental or product-safety laws)? Sounds like policy-biased "federalism", not principled federalism.
Allow me to make an important distinction. Environmental regulations can be expensive, because you might have to pay more for energy if you can't burn dirty fuels. Environmental regulations can be expensive, because a small business may need to hire a team of lawyers they can't afford, or fulfill bureaucratic requirements that make no logical sense. The first cost may be inevitable if we want to be able to breathe clean air. The second cost is totally inexcusable and is to be exterminated whenever discovered.