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David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

theguardian.com

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Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#241

Post by saraid216 »

bmelton wrote: post #238
saraid216 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Justices sitting on the Supreme Court agree, though not all of them. Are you the person I previously had a discussion about originalism with on here? I linked Posner for someone a month or two ago; might have been you. /does search Yeah. We didn't come to any agreement. :P

Was it me? Link me. I don't remember it. Just so it's said, neither of us has to be right for our opinions to be equally valid. And regardless of whether or not we agree, originalism certainly has validity in arguments of law, we're just disagreeing with whether or not it should be the standard we hold highest. I'm not saying that necessarily we should.

The thread is back here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6662163

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#242

Post by saraid216 »

bmelton wrote: post #236
saraid216 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Constitution, in theory at least, should work as a bulwark ensuring that minority opinions are upheld. That's not what pluralism is. The key is in ensuring that minority opinions are heard and reasonably considered , not "upheld". > They have equal rights because they are people, and deserving of equal rights, regardless of their or others' morals. And yet, that's not actually what the Constitution says. Nothin…

> That's not what pluralism is. The key is in ensuring that minority opinions are heard and reasonably considered, not "upheld". I disagree, but only slightly. Civil liberties are upheld on Constitutionality, on strict (or in today's society, intermediate) scrutiny. This means that the rights of minorities are to be upheld, unless there's a really damn good reason why they shouldn't be. Religious freedom is held fair…

> The fourteenth amendment says exactly that, actually.

Depressingly, I actually checked. And I somehow kept skipping over the Fourteenth and reading the Fifteenth, even after I didn't believe it and double checked.

Welp, that kinda fractures my response. :P

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#243

Post by twister »

jerf wrote: post #114
abalone wrote: post #61

Very good speech and an important national dialog to spark. I'd like to call attention to one thing though: "I don't believe that a state-run economy can be as viable as market capitalism in producing mass wealth." This demonstrates a basic confusion that we Americans have about ourselves, even most "lefties" and "libertarians": The false belief that we live in a free market economy. The truth is, the state plays a m…

The 2012 US GDP was 15.68 trillion. The 2012 Federal government expenditures were 3.54 trillion. Right off the top, the Federal government accounts for 22.6% of the economic activity in the country. Depending on how you measure, you can quibble with this exact choice of numbers, but no matter how you fiddle you're not getting out of the Federal government being a huge part of the economy directly. State and local gov…

As a socially-dependent, freedom-hating, hippie-loving liberal I pay good money for my cleaning service to clean my house, for my gardener to clean my yard and I pay good taxes for my government to pick up dog shit from the street. I have no problem with people wanting to live off of the land, hunt their own food and sleep in tents, but I kind of like the luxuries I have and work hard to keep.

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#245

Post by dnautics »

jjoonathan wrote: post #202
dnautics wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, inflation is most damaging to people whose spending is close to their salary. To simplify the math, I will use 'easy numbers', obviously the magnitudes are off, but you should plug your own numbers to verify that this is still true: if a poor family is spending 90% of their income on day to day expenses, and a rich family is spending 20%, and there is 10% inflation, then the poor family will then be spending 99%,…

You can exploit the fact that the utility of money has an asymptote (steep rise, in real systems) near the threshold of survivability to justify welfare policies too. Libertarians whine about arbitrary confiscation of wealth by the government, but they have no problem when competition drives the price of labor down to (or below!) the price of survivability, even though from the point of view of the poor person both j…

There are two reasons to believe that the market is better. One, market transactions are voluntary, so they are generally speaking "positive-sum games". Government transactions are not necessarily so (think Kelo vs. City of New London). Secondly. In order to wield economic power, you have to be willing to give some of it up. This is not necessarily true of political power. For these reasons, government tends to vectorize power in the upward direction; markets tend to flatten them out in the long run.

Again, it is worth also considering that the nordic countries, which have favorable income distributions, have had extremely low headline inflation rates over the last 50 years.

You make an false analogy: The government promises to use the money to help people (translation: to fill rich peoples' pockets). The market promises to use the money to increase efficiency (translation: to fill rich peoples' pockets)

But consider: Who is the market? It's everyone. Who is the government? A select few. So let's say indeed both systems are not "great" at delivering on their part of the bargain. Given that the market is everyone and the government is a select few, which one do you suppose will be a bigger failure at serving society's needs in a just fashion?

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#246

Post by gress »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #130
majika wrote: post #6

This is a remarkably sensible speech. The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenil…

The question - and only question - should be what David Simon asks: are we all in this together or are we not? I think this question is frankly naïve. Humans have functional limitations on how much we can care about other people, aka Dunbar's number. This is not something you can improve (maybe by .0001%) or create policy around, it's a hard limit. The fact that, at least in the United States, virtually everyone live…

Dubar's number not remotely established as a factual 'functional limitation on how much we care about other people'.

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#247

Post by anoncowherd »

drakeandrews wrote: post #224
anoncowherd wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I'm torn here That's good. You're sensing that something is wrong. >> If you insist everyone make every moral choice for themselves, then we will be unable to maximize the "right" choices Why would "we" need to "maximize" the right choices? Who's we anyway? Aren't we all just individuals, with our own goals and desires that are constantly changing anyway? Who's anyone to "maximize" the "rightness" of your choices,…

How about when someone doesn't support treating animals well. Or values your apple more than your life? Or decides they have this million tonnes of toxic gunk and decides that instead of paying someone who knows how to deal with it he's just going to dump it all in your lake? Or when someone realises that you value organic produce more, and decides to lie and say that their produce is in fact organic? What happens wh…

>> What happens when one person pays another to kill you? It's a free and voluntary exchange. And you're dead. Everyone is better off, right? Right?

I'm sensing a reluctance to process ideas here. Bad stuff is going to happen regardless of how our societies are organized. That doesn't mean it's alright to take someone's property by force, nor that voluntary, "market solutions" to real problems would not emerge.

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#248

Post by bmelton »

saraid216 wrote: post #242
bmelton wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not what pluralism is. The key is in ensuring that minority opinions are heard and reasonably considered, not "upheld". I disagree, but only slightly. Civil liberties are upheld on Constitutionality, on strict (or in today's society, intermediate) scrutiny. This means that the rights of minorities are to be upheld, unless there's a really damn good reason why they shouldn't be. Religious freedom is held fair…

> The fourteenth amendment says exactly that, actually. Depressingly, I actually checked . And I somehow kept skipping over the Fourteenth and reading the Fifteenth, even after I didn't believe it and double checked. Welp, that kinda fractures my response. :P

There's a lot to be said that the fourteenth wasn't included in either the original Constitution or the original bill of rights, so your point isn't entirely without merit, nor does it go unheard.

There's no person alive who could seriously suggest that the Constitution, either as originally written or as it currently exists, is a perfect document. Anybody suggesting otherwise should be immediately disregarded, IMO, but as I said, it prescribes its own medicine, so where it does fail, the remedy has, at least historically, been fairly straightforward.

It is precisely because it has been amended so well in the past, and that amendments like the federal marriage act have failed, that I hold so much faith in it is a document that can persist.

That said, I think it speaks well of the validity to the Constitution's "living document" mantra that it was indeed added when it needed to be.

It's also another point on original intent, because if you look at other documents of the era, it gives the impression that it was tacitly included, if not explicitly. My (entirely baseless) suspicion is that it was either accidentally omitted, or withheld due to the conflict of slavery its express declaration would have posed.

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#249

Post by mogrim »

sseveran wrote: post #41
touzen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Sweden private for profit schools and schools run by the municipalities compete with each other. All of them are funded by the tax payers and they get a certain amount of money for every student. The system is a disaster, with a lot of for profit schools slashing costs to maximize profits regardless of what the consequences are for the students. And that's just one of the many failures of the system. Basically, th…

If you stop chasing profits then there is no incentive to produce a quality product. The US public schools are a great example of that.

Other incentives are available. Public pressure, for example.

Re: David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show'

#250

Post by wrongc0ntinent »

robomartin wrote: post #203
wrongc0ntinent wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument only addresses money/economy. Your conclusion is not warranted.

Really? Without money/economy you have, I don't know, Afganistan? Like it or not prosperity isn't driven by government programs. It is driven by private sector economic activity. Unless we are talking Start Trek utopia this is how the world turns today and will continue to do so for quite some time. My conclusion is supported by fact, data and experience beyond what could be covered in a twenty line HN post. Governme…

Afghanistan's poppy production amounted to $4 billion in exports in 2007[0].

[0]http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanist...

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