Grrl Power #939 – I double dog promise to be good
Jeeze, I hope no one walks out the door to the pool right then. Maybe jump a little to the side there, Anvil.
So I was like, Dabbler is kind of a pain in the butt to draw, what with all the stripes and extra limbs, so why don’t I have her wear her blonde and pink haired glamor from around pages 100-215? And then I thought, why not put her in a scale mail bikini? That’d be easy to draw. Eh. Shading each individual scale was a little tedious. If I ever draw purple stripey armey Dabbler in a scale mail bikini it may wind up being a one-panel comic.
For a moment, I thought that was the last time I’d drawn that variant, but she also used it for a public appearance right before they met with The Twilight Council. Still, it’s been about 500 pages so I thought I’d break it out again.
As to why I decided to make her so tan she’s almost darker than Anvil? I guess she’s experimenting with her luminosity slider. Seriously though, you know how any time you play a game with character customization, it takes you like an hour to mess with all the sliders before you get the chin and the nose width and all the bits and bobs just right? (Only then to don a helmet and never see your character’s face again?) By “you” I mean me, but also probably a lot of you guys as well. Well, if you could illusorily disguise yourself, I think quickly popping into a disguise would be a non starter. Heck, by the time I finalized all the tweaks, the spell would have long since expired.
So, okay, about the “revenge based justice system.” Yeesh, I hope the comments don’t turn into a shitstorm, but, ug. Just try and keep it civil, please? And before you spend an hour typing up your slam-dunk magnum opus inflammatory comment, just remember that no one has ever won an argument on the internet or convinced anyone of anything. It’s just not how human brains work.
I think most people would agree that America is way more into punishing criminals than they are into reforming criminal behavior or even addressing underlying motivators. For instance, states fighting against clean needle programs aimed at curtailing the spread of HIV because giving people clean needles will somehow make them do more drugs? Also, laws making drugs illegal in the first place, when every country that’s ever relaxed laws regarding recreational drug use sees massive drops in rates of addiction and overdose? Whatever your stance is on those particular issues, it’s hard to argue about America’s approach to law enforcement when we have more people in jail than any other country, both by absolute numbers and per capita.
ANYWAY, Detla is just repeating what Cora told her, which is especially rich considering Cora’s lethal ordnance approach to law enforcement. Dabbler obviously agrees though. Both of them are very okay with… eh, proactive self-defense, but they also think that once someone is in custody, throwing them in a wildly overcrowded for-profit prison is less than optimal.
Book news! Star Justice 13 is out! I haven’t even finished it yet, and it’s really good! I mean, it’s hard to beat book 6 or 7, or 10, or 3. But it’s still pretty good.
The new vote incentive is up! I tried something different this month – instead of doing one well painted picture with a bunch of dress variants, I wanted to tell a bit of a story. Hopefully it makes sense without any dialog or sound effects. So, instead of one picture, you guys are getting nine. Well, you are over at Patreon. The vote incentive is just the first one. And yes, Pixel is bendy enough to do a full on T&A pose.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!
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"Mature"Mature subject matter and occasionally something explicit but usually safe. Can't guarantee the ads are safe though.
Dongs Ahoy!Full frontal and backal. Lots of skin, sex on some or all pages, explicit or otherwise.
A one-panel comic with “natural” Dabbler in that scale bikini? Sounds like a vote incentive in the making!
Actually, I’m thinking of Dabbler (unglamoured) in front of a couple of full body mirrors with the reflections showing the glamoured forms…
Sounds like an efficient means of preparing multiple glams all at once.
…
…and making Dave even more nuts for our collective, petty, amusement.=D
It is petty amusing.
Is that a nomination for an upcoming Vote and/or Patreon incentive?
She DID scream all the way down….
So far…
Now now, we’ve covered this. This is just how she flies. Guess she didn’t trust Anvil enough and decided to carry her down.
That’s not flying, that’s falling with style.
Hope she tucks that arm back in from the roller-coaster ride before the orbs catch up and smack into her hand.
Truth in advertising.
Joe Guy – that’s what He said.
Oooooooooo – that makes me wonder if Anvil could absorb any kinetic energy from the stopping power of trying to pry one of the orbs away from Sydney….
Yeaaaah, I’ll never understand for-profit prisons. Or for-profit healthcare. Or for-profit education.
Oh well.
If you find it hard to predict when you will next fall ill, then for-prophet healthcare is not for you.
But a for-prophet prison would likely be empty, eh? And therefore also not making any profit on the distinct lack of prophets.
I would be most worried about institutions that profit from incarceration and have the power to extend inmates incarceration period :/
I think the underlying idea is ‘competition breeds innovation’ or something like that, but that is just not how it works in reality, and services like that should not be be for profit, or should have a baseline tax-funded version existing besides it at the very least.
Unfortunately we (in the UK anyway) don’t then promote the system with the best results.
So for example, as much as I don’t like the idea of holidays for imates, sending young criminals to youth camps is both much cheaper than prison and has much much lower reoffending rates. But we don’t do it on a large scale because it doesn’t look good in tabloid headline :(
Crazy idea: maybe it’s time to burn the scream sheets.
What are scream sheets? Every time I google it, I get something dealing with Cyberpunk 2077.
Tabloids. Rags.
I swear I learn all sorts of new slang from you. :)
Naff.
One of the many services I provide.
UK doesn’t have juvie?
Unfortunately it does.
We don’t have “competition” in health care. The basic concept of “networks” and “not showing prices” is totally again the idea of markets. Imagine walking into a WalMart where they give a different price to everyone based on your ability to pay and every transaction becomes a fight between them and your credit card company.
You raise some fair points, but let’s don’t forget that, in addition to these issues, there’s the fact that healthcare decisions often require a degree of actual expertise that only a doctor will have (making the whole idea of being an ‘informed consumer laughable), and it’s tricky to price shop when having a heart attack.
I think there’s a separate issue between emergency medical care and normal maintenance though.
With emergency medical care (ie, you have a heart attack and are sent to the hospital), hospitals actually can be forced to swallow the cost until the patient is no longer in danger of dying, regardless of the patient’s ability to pay. No hospital is allowed to turn away a patient requiring emergency care, regardless of where they live and regardless of whether they can pay the bill. This is covered by something called the Emergency Treatement and Labor Act (aka, EMTALA) which was created under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA).
Basically, a hospital cannot turn you away, or even charge you if you cannot afford it, for ‘stabilizing care’ if you have an emergency medical condition. ie, heart attacks, strokes, injury from a car crash, pregnancy, etc.
Most of the arguments about competition in health care that get argued about in politics are about non-emergency care once the patient is already stabilized, where removing him or her will not resume an emergency medical situation.
No one has to price shop while having a heart attack, and if you can’t pay for the hospital to save your life, that’s not going to affect the hospital trying to save your life. Honestly they can be sued if they don’t try to. Hospitals get a rather a massive amount of funds from both state and federal governments (US Department of Health and Human Services mainly) which cover those costs in the first place, and they will lose those funds if they did (on top of getting sued by the patients or the patient’s family).
What Dark Matter said about the basic concept of networks and not showing prices being totally against the concept of normal market economies I totally agree with, though. In any other situation, you get told how much something is going to cost before you get the service. Medical care in the US is screwy because you don’t get to do that.
Notice you’re aren’t saying anything about the fact that it’s basically impossible to be an “informed consumer” when it comes to the practice of medicine.
Oh I definitely notice that I’m not saying anything about that.:)
Mainly because I’m not talking about non-emergency situations, which was the example you were giving (ie, a heart attack). In an emergency situation, there’s no real need to be an ‘informed consumer’ because of EMTALA. It’s after the emergency is over and you’re stabilized, or when it’s a non-emergency situation that US medical billing is completely messed up and ridiculous.
And even that’s largely because of how health insurance works, which actually creates a disincentive to be able to even know how much any medical practice will cost the patient until after it’s done and after the hospital has haggled it out with the insurance company.
I’m all for a more free market system when it comes to the practice of medicine, at least in a non-emergency situation, where you get to actually know how much something will cost first, then get to check other states and even other countries to see if they have a better price, before you go through with the medical service. In other words, I’m all for being able to let the patient price shop.
Like I said with Dark Matter – medical care in the US is screwy (and in general idiotic in its payment system) because they don’t give you a price (in fact they usually CANT give you a price) until after it’s done.
“Imagine walking into a WalMart where they give a different price to everyone based on your ability to pay”
– You are describing the future of online shopping.
This is not exactly new.
It’s called haggling. :)
I think Jagged is referring to companies like Amazon building profiles that determine your ability to pay and if it’s high enough, you will be presented with product A at 112% the price that bob over there is presented with because he’s “average”, when the exact same product page is visited at the exact same time, from the same location and using an “identical” device – it would be based on your purchase history or some divined knowledge of you that follows you around in the digital, and eventually probably the real world as well.
Haggling is where the person doesn’t have pre-knowledge of you, and might try to sell you at a higher price point based on how you’re dressed, but haggling would require interaction that is not generally possible online
Free-market competition will deter this to some degree, where someone that is more able to pay a higher price, and also knows a URL other than amazon.com could go and find that same product on jerry’s-widgets.com for a more “avergae” price,but I would wager that would be factored into your pricing profile – how smart is this person? will they just buy here or will they look elsewhere? does 20-minute drone delivery with us sway them to pay more and how much? (not every business will have that delivery capability for some time) – that sort of other info.
I’m not sure this is a bad thing in a free market, because you can always go elsewhere, but once/if there is no free market – whether internet does not give you the information, government controls amazon, whether amazon’s market dominance makes competitors next to impossible even without explicit government approval, etc… it’s all a game. Lots of winner and lots of losers – you know, free market
Life isn’t a game. Do you know what fuels those markets, what is consumed by them in order to find prices for goods and services? People’s lives. Treating people as disposable inputs to the system, in which it is intended that some people are discarded for losing the game, is a horrifying system. It’s Darwinism as a moral philosophy.
Capitalism might be reasonable as a system of optimizing the use of excess resources, but people’s survival shouldn’t depend on it.
“I think Jagged is referring to companies like Amazon building profiles that determine your ability to pay and if it’s high enough, you will be presented with product A at 112% the price that bob over there is presented with because he’s “average”
Ahhh okay. Well yes that does sound potentially terrifyingly illegal, then. ;)
Yeah, its a case of finding a way to be competitive about reforming as opposed to incarcerating… or at least a way to encourage competitive behaviour towards reforming and discouraging continued incarceration. Otherwise the institutions are actually inclined to free the problem inmates that take more effort and guards to keep in order while holding the inmates keeping to order back. I guess it arguably works for inmates sentenced to life long incarceration periods.
Competition does breed innovation!
Unfortunately the system has developed such that there is precious little in the way of actual true proper competition. There’s plenty of effective monopolies, duopolies, and triopolies, and even when there’s a lot more competition, they tend to be fairly uniform with most of them offering basically the exact same thing, with very little to truly stand out.
While there’s some areas that do have proper competition, in most areas there’s just complacency because there is no TRUE competition to be had. There’s either no alternatives or no meaningful alternatives so companies are incentivized to do the bare minimum. Keep just enough customers, keep just enough rules, keep things as low-bar as they possibly can be while still keeping the company out of serious trouble.
And they get away with it, because we don’t have an actual choice to not let them do so. The system has ‘evolved’/warped/shifted/changed in such a way where we don’t truly have an option. We can’t, for instance, en masse boycott a company/product, because the company/product is so widespread and so necessary that to not use it is either a luxury or outright impossible or their competitor is just as bad and not any better and they know it and even if some people don’t use them they get enough who in desperation are forced to use it that they still make enough money they’ve no incentive to bend to the will of a boycott.
I’ve heard an apt description of “there’s no ethical buying under capitalism”, and it holds true. Unless you’re ridiculously rich (and maybe even then), you cannot in *every* aspect of your life choose alternatives to the big companies that don’t have the consumers’ interests at heart. You’re forced to use services like Amazon, internet companies that’re notoriously shitty like Spectrum, shop at places like Wal-Mart, and so on and so forth. The less money you have, the less options you have, the less alternatives you can find/use.
And because there’s no true competition in most areas, there’s no true innovation.
You can look at history in key areas like the console wars of the 80s-2000s for examples of true competition breeding true innovation. (To give an example, back then, anyone could in theory have gotten into the console game and succeeded; Sony was a late late latecomer to the video game market. So, too, was Microsoft. Yet the playstation was a massive hit and the XBox was a massive hit. Contrast to now, where if you see anything other than Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, you know it’s going to be incredibly niche and likely to peter out and die. Because the three have a triopoly on the console market.)
But compare the competition/innovation of then to the ‘competition’/”innovation” of now and you can see the stark contrast since nowadays there’s basically zero competition and as a consequence…virtually zero innovation. Over the years the amount of differences between consoles has, overall, shrunk considerably with them having greater and greater overlap, but if you were around in the 80s-2000s period you would be able to see how there was an actual need to innovate and pioneer the next generation of gaming. But now there’s…there basically isn’t any next generation of gaming, the next generation of gaming is identical to the current generation of gaming for all intents and purposes.
That’s just the example to pop into my head immediately, but I’m sure it holds true across other aspects of our lives from internet companies to beverages to films to food to shops we shop at and yes, to things like insurance and health.
For real competition, I should be able to form my own, in home prison corporation, and basically get paid to adopt a couple of gang-bangers. If you cannot get involved as a cottage industry, then it is actually a corporate welfare handout.
Take a break from Twitter for a bit, eh?
Have you heard of halfway houses? For a certain segment of orphans that are juvenile delinquents, a fostering situation could be roughly what you’re talking about
but point taken
It is the case that competition breeding innovation is not always a good thing.
Sometimes businesses innovate in finding new ways to influence legislators in order to get laws passed that allow them to make more money. Or in finding new ways to force people to pay for things that, save for their interference, would be free.
And criminals innovate when in competition just as much as anyone else. We have a commercial slander industry now. There are people whose business model is taking whatever horrible thing they can find about someone, regardless of whether it’s true, and put it on a heavily promoted website and advertise it with clickbait and drive people to the site…. and then turn around and offer that person their services as ‘reputation management companies.’ Reputation management is a legit business. So are sleazy tabloid-type websites. But was this particular innovation actually a good thing? On reflection I guess the business model was pioneered by the National Enquirer.
Just sayin’ Innovation to be more efficient isn’t a good thing, unless people are trying to innovate in finding ways to be more efficient at doing something which is actually good.
Ah yes, the question of what the system is actually optimising for. The basic false assumptions underlying capitalism, evolution, democracy, and doubtless countless other similar systems: that whatever measure is used for ‘success’ actually has any meaning beyond ‘ability to game the system in the short term’, and/or that a sufficient proportion of participants will favour the common good over their own selfish gain to override those who do the opposite.
“The basic false assumptions underlying capitalism, evolution, democracy, and doubtless countless other similar systems”
Yikes, finally found a definition where “socialism” and “capitalism” count as “similar systems”.
“Don’t blame the player for the game” is what you’re talking about, and it is a human failing, applicable to every system I know of.
There’s not much incentive to compete, so the primary innovations are in finding ways to avoid competing directly. Advantage comes not from having a better product at a better price, but in being better at manipulating the game, whether that be through advertising, leveraging data, or legislation.
“innovation” is not the direct goal of competition, more of a side effect.
“Efficiency” is the goal, as measured in cost and quality of service.
Every example we have in America of a government monopoly ends up looking like the post office, the DMV, AT&T pre-breakup, and so on.
Many people fail to recognize that yes, the free market can do many things well…but not everything is a free market. There need to be price transparency, information equality, elasticity of demand, and other requirements. Health care has none of those things, education lacks most of them, etc etc.
“Health care has none of those things”
Most of them, it lacks due to government regulation. Price transparency, in particular, but much of the rest.
Education does not need to lack any of them. The only reason for it to lack any of them is the government-run public school system.
Your larger point is correct, just your examples are lousy. Local utilities are the best example of what you’re talking about (hence the strong local controls in nearly every case), but there are a few others.
Oh it breeds innovation
The innovation in question just happens to be aimed at extracting maximum profit in the very short term (while it matters for someone’s bonus)
Basically an outdated belief that raw capitalism is good and cannot be in any way shape or form obsolete with humanity “needing” capitalism at every level to function, combined with beliefs about freedom and separation of the government and goods produced (in short, that the government shouldn’t be in of itself a monopoly with total dictatorship over essential things), with a healthy dosage of “this worked in the past so why change it now” and belief in superiority of the American way with the arrogance to think that, flawed as it may be, there can’t be a better way.
More or less, anyway. (This is a bit of an oversimplification of course, but basically things developed in a way that was the best that we could think of at the time which had good, justified, reasons for having developed that way, but which in the modern era are obsolete relics that are embedded deep in a fairly corrupt system that actively fights changes to it because of sheer raw human greed and sheer raw human arrogance and sheer raw human ignorance with the people having the most power being out of touch with the masses and easily swayed by companies’ pocket books when the companies are incentivized for the system to remain unchanged.)
There is no “raw capitalism” on the planet at the moment, so your adjective is gratuitous to the point of being silly. Which goes with the rest of your comment and its naive judginess.
They didn’t say there was any raw capitalism on the moment. They said some people believe that raw capitalism is good.
Name checks out.
we don’t have ‘Raw’ capitalism now. We’re under crony capitalism in the US – the worst possible kind. It is corrupt, evil, and destructive. But that doesn’t discredit “raw capitalism” in the least. All you’ve really accomplished is saying that some people are “bad” and that they happen to be in control of government and large corporations. No argument there.
But claiming that crony capitalism proves the capitalist system wrong and evil is akin to pointing at Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and using it to condemn socialized healthcare or humanitarian aid. The closest we’ve been to true capitalism in the modern world was under Calvin Coolidge and it resulted in what you know as “the roaring 20’s” – which was responsible for providing electricity, running water, vehicles, home appliances, etc. to normal Americans. It was a time of unbridled prosperity and arguably pulled the US general populace out of poverty. I could talk about the real reasons for black friday and the end of the roaring 20’s, but we’d all gouge our eyes out before I started.
The capitalism we have now is the result of a hundred years of voter indifference, political lies, and degradation of national morals. In other worlds, we’ve let it happen. If the voters paid attention and wouldn’t allow for-profit prisons, they wouldn’t be here. Same for corporate control/collusion of government, (the definition of fascism, btw), which has come slowly through lobbyists and consolidation of monopolies/trusts. In short, what you’re really mad at isn’t the system, it’s that people aren’t what you want them to be. Welcome to the world.
None of this matters to your knee-jerk comment, however. In your race to discredit “capitalism” as obsolete and outdated, you failed to provide a single suggestion for something better. In reality, capitalism has proved itself to be the most resilient to the vices of mankind – provided that the rest of us pays attention. If we’d followed our own rules and enforced our own laws across the board we wouldn’t have the monopolies / trusts / bribed politicians / situation we’re currently in. It’s us that failed, not the system.
The ‘Roaring Twenties’ had the inestimable advantage of starting from a very low base, in a worldwide economy where all the other major players had just been hobbled by the largest war to date while the USA (for most of it) sat out and bought up their debts. In addition, several key technologies that were previously at the stage of barely-prototype rich-men’s-toys had been driven to be far more capable, robust, and widespread by the demands of the War – in many cases, fuelled by Government money and demands.
In effect, it barely mattered what system the USA was running in the 1920s. The conditions for its economy’s meteoric rise in that decade had been created over the previous half-century or so, and then loaded up to launch in the preceding decade. It would have taken a special kind of genius not to have an ‘economic miracle’ in those circumstances.
Raw capitalism is Social Darwinism , but capitalism is enforced by the actual ruling class.
We echanged our masters royalty for ploutocracy…
During the french revolution and restauration – before 1848 – Householder Franchise existed in France , until 1894 in Belgium and in Prussia and Germany until Weimar Republic.
In US being colored and voting in the south was a pure utopia.
Inovation was actualy more for marketing than usefullness…
US patents office is a patent troll hive.
And about healcare to devlop the spending of French govenement is 59,19 billions US $ ( 49 billions euros) for 68 millions of citizen with a better healtcare triage than US.
It’s less than 2% of France Government budget…
The praised capitalism is Invisible Hand theory and the the standard macroeconomic model in the developed nations during the later part of the Great Depression, World War II, and the post-war economic expansion (1945–1973) is Keynesian economics.
But Breton woods lasted as long as US made above 50% of world trade , and in 1973 the situation was not longer viable.
They opened the pandora’s box and economic crisis andspeculation become rampant.
The reganomics began enforcing inequalities and pomoving avidity, and the race to all-rigth of the republicans.
In europe Thatcherism was the equivalent.
The actual econmic model was an oligopolistic one and power wher concentrated like in the begining in the 1930’s in the hand of an happy few.
Non neoclassic economy dosen’t exist sin 1980 and the consequences are inequality rise.
We play in a casino and the bank takes all, making citizen paying for their scams – 2008 dosen’t ring the bell –
I didn’t say we had raw capitalism; I said that the belief in the power of capitalism as the one true good way that cannot be bested or bettered is a flawed one, basically. That pretending that the US way of capitalism isn’t flawed and isn’t outdated to the modern world when it is a system that was developed in a previous age that we can do better than now, has led to a lot of problems.
There are definite advantages capitalism can offer, especially the theory behind capitalism. In times past, most of these advantages manifested in more than just theory.
But capitalism also carries with it flaws, especially in reality where the theoretical advantages of capitalism can fail to manifest. More and moreso in the modern day, in fact; the advantages of capitalism seem to manifest less and less. Pretending capitalism doesn’t have those flaws and pretending that the theoretical advantages of capitalism can fail to manifest in reality, does nothing but a disservice to everyone.
Capitalism as a system is not fundamentally ‘wrong’ or ‘evil’. It is, however, imperfect and in the modern era, has rampant corruption within. And the corruption in modern capitalism isn’t getting better with time; if anything, the corruption of capitalism keeps on getting worse and worse.
The flaws of capitalism and refusal of acknowledgement of those flaws is a problem.
As for what’s there to replace capitalism. Loosely, I’ve been resonating with more socialist ideals. Not “socialist ideals as seen through the eyes of people who don’t bother to research socialism and think they know what the definition of socialism is”. Not stereotypes about socialism or misunderstandings about it or thinking that it is synonymous with communism or thinking that socialism is represented by a single political party. Looking at actual proposed systems of socialism and having them resonate.
For instance, socialism doesn’t inherently mean abolishing currency. There’s versions of socialism that’re, so to speak, taking the existing system of capitalism and shifting/changing it to include socialism aspects that preserve the majority of advantages of capitalism while removing the main shortcomings of the system. (Yes, there are versions of socialism that basically hybridize capitalism with socialism.)
There’s a huge stigma about the word ‘socialist’ and ‘socialism’, but if you actually do research on what actual proposed systems of socialism are rather than assume you know what they are, you will find that many of the proposed systems are surprisingly pragmatic, realistic, with an actual way of transitioning into them from the model of capitalism, with multiple strengths capitalism lacks and relatively few weaknesses.
These systems would, themselves, not be perfect, but they would be better than what we have now.
The truth of the matter is, thinking “mass complacency is the issue, capitalism would work if we weren’t complacent” is itself complacency. Because the system is so widely established and rooted in its current way that the masses don’t have the power to fix it, because the system as-is isn’t something we have the power to tear down. The problems are too deep-rooted; the issues lie in the fact that the people with the power and money have the influence to keep that power and money and those with neither the power nor the money have little they can do to change the system because they are by and large…outside of the system.
(Easy demonstration of this: if there’s a vote between two candidates with neither candidate being who the voters actually want, then no matter who wins the election, the voters aren’t getting who they want into the position being voted for. What can a voter do to fix that? Not much. It also applies to products; if your choice is between one corrupt corporation and a different corrupt corporation then no matter who you choose, you aren’t getting the company you want.)
It is corrupt.
So we need a new system. We don’t have the power to fundamentally shift systems overnight, but we can make progressive changes over time. Changes away from traditionally capitalistic viewpoints/systems towards things that are more socialistic in nature. Done smartly, intelligently, and gradually, it’s doable even given the strong pushback from the corrupt who have the power and don’t want to lose that power, but it requires acceptance that capitalism is in the modern age, outdated in practice and not serving the masses.
If the belief that capitalism is the best we can get and that its issues are due to the masses persists, then we will never get better because that belief is fundamentally part of the problem. You can propose changes to capitalism as a system in the modern age if you believe in it as a system, but most of the ways that you’re likely to think of are in fact…actually more in line with socialism.
The measure of any system is not in how effective it is with cooperative players, but in how well it resists corruption by uncooperative players. The claim of capitalism is that it leverages people’s own greed against them, for the benefit of society, but that’s dependent on certain restraints that turned out not to hold. Crony capitalism is the natural result of unrestrained capitalism. For a positive form of capitalism to endure, those restraints would have to be incorporated into the system, rather than just assumed.
“The claim of capitalism is that it leverages people’s own greed against them, for the benefit of society,”
That really IS the main saving grace of capitalism. It directs human greed into achieving something beneficial for both parties and for the society as a whole, because it accepts that you can’t eliminate human greed/avarice. It’s a philosophy for a non-utopian society, because utopia does not exist and cannot exist, since people are inherently not going to be perfect moral characters (not to mention the definition of morality shifts).
“Crony capitalism is the natural result of unrestrained capitalism. For a positive form of capitalism to endure,”
I would actually argue that cronyism isnt just an element of capitalism, but is an element of almost any system that uses hierarchies – which is ALL of them after you get to any notable population size, including communism and socialism. There’s crony socialism, crony feudalism, etc. Unless you think Kim Jong Un’s inner sanctum and friends are going to be treated the same way as your average North Korean. Or if you think Castro’s family and friends were treated the same way as Joe Public in Cuba.
I think you’re mistaking cronyism with corporatism, which is more in line with the problem of ‘unrestrained capitalism’ (think OCP from Robocop or the Men-Tel Corporation in Fortress… which just happens to also run private prisons) – usually what would happen if anarchocapitalistic philosophy was brought to it’s ultimate conclusion. Corporatism is just as unworkable as socialism for any suitably large society, and is in fact the ‘capitalist version of socialism’ in that it puts all the authority in a quasi governmental organization who is supposed to know what is best for the individual. And this is just as flawed and unworkable for a society because you’re just trading an authoritarian government for an authoritarian corporation.
Ie, there needs to be some level of regulation, but not so much as that it would stifle individualism. Generally the less regulations there are, the better, but less does not mean none. Which is why people who believe in philosophies like libertarianism or minarchism tend to place the Non-Aggression Principle as the center of where regulations ARE needed. It tends to be all about having a balance of ‘enough regulations to prevent too much systemic unfairness and oppression by other individuals, but not so many regulations as to create systematic unfairness and oppression by a government or unrestrained business with quasi-government authority (ie, corporations, etc). Which is why a lot of libertarians probably accept the Sherman Antitrust Act, which tries to prevent monopolies or oligopolies from having an unfair advantage that can lead to authoritarian victimizing of the consumer, while a pure anarchocapitalist would want to do away with that law as well.
“capitalism […] directs human greed into achieving something beneficial for both parties and for the society as a whole – Pander
Citation very much needed.
It encourages its players to pick whatever course of action they believe will most benefit themselves; usually in the short-to-immediate term, occasionally in the medium-to-long term. It assumes that they are essentially rational actors working with essentially complete knowledge in an essentially level arena. It assumes that summing these myriad local maxima will give a global maximum. Both those assumptions are highly questionable at best.
There’s also the aspect of what is being optimised for, when the measure of progress is simply defined as ‘how many points one has’ (whether you measure them in dollars, pounds, roubles, etc.). Anything that isn’t easily interpreted as a personal points value tends to be ignored, anything that is tends to be treated as interconvertible. All very efficient in terms of maximising points, but increasingly divorced from the actual requirements that the points are supposed to mediate.
Chronocidal wins as an ID. Time killer. Perfect.
So about the for profit bullshit. How long is it going to take people to realize that freedom is a bullshit excuse given by the oligarchs who really have negative interest in actual freedom? Freedoms are so limited and constricted and even punished, that to anyone that looks, it is obvious how carefully controlled, managed, and restricted people are, in order to keep us as slaves.
They never freed the slaves, they just removed the restrictions on who could be enslaved and convinced the masses to volunteer for enslavement.
I am not saying that this world is entirely evil. There are honest employers, who treat their work force like one of their most critical partners, but I doubt any of you would dispute that those are the exception.
So the biggest evil in the world is socialism. The system could be set up so that instead of taxing the middle class out of existence, the middle class is tax neutral, and a small tax on the wealthy, provides a basic guaranteed income that helps 90% of the population.
“Why should I pay anything to help some jerks that doesn’t have the ambition or capacity to earn their own way?”
You are that jerk is where that complaint breaks down. Are some of the people who take advantage going to be lazy assholes, who are just taking whatever they can get without effort? Yes. Most are more like you than you want to admit. You can actually find lazy incompetent entitlement just as easily among any bureaucratic workforce as you can on welfare roles.
You get a range of responses from the stability of income redistribution. Some of it is pretty awful. You get a lot more artists, because some people just want to sit around and play their guitar, or draw comics. You get many more people taking advantage of advanced educational opportunities. You get more transients, because more people decide they are tired of being stuck in this slum, and moving to somewhere better. You get a lot more people taking chances to make an extra buck. This is a hilarious result of social support. It promotes small business with the result that it fuels growth and dynamism in the economy.
I will let this rant end here.
Wow, that was a big logic jump! “Socialism” is not even evil, let alone the biggest.
I have no idea how that leap of “logic” was made. Seemed more like a leap of faith to me.
I think this is one of those cases where the Internet needs a ‘tone of voice’ filter to denote when one is quoting one’s opponents’ claims.
The biggest free riders are those most concerned about the free rider problem. The people benefiting most are already those contributing the least to society.
Oh, I _understand_ all the for-profit “public” services stuff… Just as I _understand_ that the bulk of our “public servant” politicians are equally for-profit. Lobbying is really legalized bribery, pure and simple.
“Lobbying” is the people executing their right peacefully to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances.
Each industry or interest group has the same right as each other. People who like guns and want to keep them for defense and sport, people who believe they are the other gender from the one they physically are, people who want to limit alcohol consumption, people who want to preserve historical monuments or natural environments… all these groups are lobbying for what they want out of life.
That’s all.
And, by the way, large businesses MUST have lobbyists up there, because bad laws can risk putting them out of business and making their personnel unemployed at a moment’s notice.
” who believe they are the other gender” it’s not belief, it is science FACT!
Darn bad law, not letting me pay my serfs….independent contractors…in company scrip.
You haul 16 tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go.
Cause I owe my soul to the company store.
Unfortunately, those most effective at lobbying also tend to be those most interested in using the law to exploit everyone else.
State-run everything sounds swell…until you start looking into what a cock-up various Nations have made of various state-run programs. National Health systems range from creaky to absolute disaster, weighted towards disaster. Even when they work as advertised, you get ONE chance to qualify for timely treatment, and the bureaucrat who decides and the bureaucrat you appeal the decision to belong to the same clubs. With for-profit, all you have to do is come up with money, not make a bureaucracy admit it was wrong.
There are some things that the state should manage for reasons other than effectiveness. While state-run militaries are sometimes hard to control, mercenary ones are worse, as the 30-years-war demonstrates.
When considering state-run vs for-profit it is always wise to remember that politicians love new toys and ribbon-cutting ceremonies, but hate to pay for day-to-day upkeep.
Well, let’s dig just a smidge deeper, hmm?
_Why_ do they “hate to pay,” I wonder. Could it be that that the wealthy interests lining their pockets & paying for their campaigns don’t like paying taxes?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….
*sigh*
In any event, it isn’t a feckin’ binary between “capitalist hellscape” and “statist dystopia.” Trying paint it that way, with your immediate jump to “state-run everything,” is at best ridiculous and at worst outright manipulative.
I’m going by, among other things, the miserable record of state controlled transportation in the US. I’ve lived in multiple cities (and read about others) with expensive light-rail systems that are forced to skimp on maintenance. The DC Metro is a particularly egregious example; government mandated, subsidized, ostensibly independent but actually subject to constant meddling. It never approached predicted ridership levels (these projects seldom do), was only economic to ride for commuters if they took advantage of absolutely every trick and tax break, and rapidly fell behind on maintenance, and never caught up. Then some big-heads decided to introduce two additional lines to the system without doing the necessary (and expensive) reinforcement of the portions those lines would share. Result? Multiple dangerous electrical fires caused by overloading the system. The last time I was in DC (medical trip) the Metro was borderline unusable; long delays, and often outright stoppages.
Yet politicians LOVE them some Light Rail. It’s showy. It’s also hard to put into an existing cityscape, and next to impossible to shift routes. Bus networks are almost always a better option, but opening ceremonies for bus stops are low rent.
And naturally you’re ignoring inconvenient little details, such as California’s once very, very good public transit system being bought up & gutted by the Ford Motor Corporation, to encourage everyone to buy a car.
L.A. traffic was born in that decision. So was L.A. smog.
Yaaaaaay capitalism…..
I’m just going to say it. Markets are not a universal solution for all things. Capitalism, specifically, is bad, by which I have I mean that it is both bad in the moral & ethical sense, and specifically bad at it’s supposed purpose. Infrastructure must always, ALWAYS, _A L W A Y S_ be public, period, full stop, end of sentence.
Private parties can not ever, ever, under any circumstances at all, EVER be trusted to serve the public interest before themselves.
Private prisons, private schools, private hospitals, private roadways, private (as opposed to personal, yes there is a difference) property altogether should be outright banned.
Putting something under state control hardly insures that it will be run in the best interests of the public; it will be run in the best interests of the functionaries in charge and the officials who are publicly associated with it. And since state run enterprises cannot be allowed to fail, lest those people suffer opprobrium, they can limp along for decades, in desperate need of huge overhauls…or a fire sale. Socialism sells itself as a system that runs on altruism, but while altruism exists it is not consistent. Thus Socialist States come, over time to be run on fear and coercion. Capitalism runs on greed, while allowing room for altruism.
The history of the last century and a half (or even longer) shows that government is good at brute force and bean counting…and oddly at fostering, but not (FOR THE MOST PART!) running networks; the late 19th Century railroads, the telephone system in the US, rural electrification.
Local governments of the Victorian era did good work on sanitation networks, though the worst water and sewage systems I’ve experienced have been wholly government owned (the storm sewers in DC have sections that have not been upgraded since the Civil War, and during the hot DC summers they smell like it.)
Basically I support the free market to whatever degree it is possible, because I prefer a system based on greed to one based on fear.
And the fact that you think “greed or fear” are the only options tells everything anyone will ever need to know about you.
I think we need to pointedly remind people that greed is the acquisition of ‘money’ by unethical means. if you want to talk about using peoples need to acquire in a positive light- the word is industry. the ‘greed’ speech is supposed to be sarcasm!
Ownership is not industry, as pertains to to capitalism.
It is leeching.
The fact that you can look at the history of Socialism and NOT see that it runs on fear tells volumes about you also. I may be a cynic but you are a freaked.
The history of human society is a history of various self-selected elites proposing various (largely spurious) theories as to why everyone else should do as the elite says. And the history of human progress (if any) can be measured in the degree to which the common man can tell the elite to go climb a tree and make it stick. Socialism is no worse an excuse for its elite than Divine Right Of Kings, but it is no better, either.
“the miserable record of state controlled transportation in the US” – C. S. P. Schofield
Try comparing it against the record of nationalised and privatised transportation in other countries. Most of Europe has nationalised train services, either as sole supplier on nationally-owned infrastructure or with private-sector operators also running on that shared infrastructure. Prices are low, standards are high, and profits made can be reinvested directly into the services. To the point that several cities, or even entire small countries, are able to make public transport entirely free at the point of use to their residents, because the increased economic activity that it catalyses brings in more money in normal taxes than they were getting in fares.
Contrast that with the British network, where a similar nationalised operation was deliberately run down before being fragmented and sold off – regional franchises for operations, separate companies to own the rolling stock that the franchisees lease, separate companies to own the network and do the maintenance… We’re now putting more money into subsidies than we ever did into British Rail, on top of having some of the highest prices and worst service in Europe. Most of that money goes nowhere near being useful to the customer, it just gets siphoned off into the franchisees’ pockets or used to fuel the arguments at all those interfaces about who is responsible for what. There’s no real competition on price, as nearly all routes are only served by one operator (and on those that are, their prices are suspiciously similar); the competition is only for which fragment gets to claim more money from the others. There’s no incentive for long-term investment, as there’s a chance that someone else will win the franchise before it starts paying off. There’s no real incentive to improve efficiency – there are even cases of a franchisee suing the network provider because they did not cause enough disruptions, and the franchisee’s profits relied on the compensation the network would have paid.
And you know the final, delicious irony? Most of our ‘privatised’ franchisees are at least partly owned by the nationalised rail services of our continental neighbours.
Comparing the State-run (for now) British NHS against the USA’s system, there’s only one of those I’d describe as a disaster. And it’s not the one with ‘National’ in its name.
And the UK spend on healthcare is slightly over half of what the US spends (as % of GDP).
The NHS is definitely creaking though, it’s really not funded sufficiently for the increasing demand of an aging population. Still, a relatively modest increase up to other Northern European nations would be sufficient, and still vastly less than what is spent on the US.
The NHS is currently going the same way as many other Nationalised institutions before it: asset-stripped via dodgy financial engineering to plug short-term underfunding, ‘competition’ used as a figleaf to let the privateers take any profitable elective procedures while sticking the public purse with the complex and expensive stuff, and the resulting underperformance used as pretext to flog it off piecemeal at a discount. Hooray for the profit motive!
“National Health systems range from creaky to absolute disaster, weighted towards disaster.”
Which ones are you talking about here? Most countries with a National Health Service perform much much much better than those with a private service.
France is consistantly rated the world best health service … a national health service.
Italy is consistantly top 5 … a national health service.
Basically, the ones with the best rating … a national health service.
No, no, no…don’t you know you’re not allowed to talk about successes that don’t frame capitalism as the cause?
No one said that. Google “straw man argument” to learn more about the sleazy tactic you just employed here. Then try to do better.
Sarcasm is not your strong point is it?
/)
Most countries with National healthcare perform reasonably…until their population starts to age. But everything I feel I need to know about Britain’s National Health is summed up by the following.
Carl Giles was a cartoonist. His cartoons were a British institution from WWII until his passing in (I believe) 1994, and Giles annuals are still published every year (of re-runs, obviously). Giles was a Socialist. Yet by the mid-1950’s he was mocking the shortcomings of the National Health system.
Or, in another case, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that the law that prevented Canadians from getting private health care in-country was unconstitutional because the Canadian Health Service was consistently failing to provide needed care.
When looking at lauded National Health systems, keep in mind that many idiots consider CUBA’s to be worthy of emulation, and they can’t even keep up with the demand for clean bedding.
Yet somehow, they have managed longer life expectancy.
What was your source, again?
For-profit prison does set up the wrong incentives in the system as a whole.
On the others, the only thing worse than “for profit” is “not for profit”. If you’re like most people I’ve discussed this with, you’re not wrong in your critique of the existing system… but you’re leaving out the known problems that the existing system prevents/avoids/fixes.
It’s like saying that chemo is horrible. Well, yes. But we do it because the alternative is worse (death by cancer).
The failure point is in how a system deals with human beings not acting in good faith (because, far too often, they don’t).
A “for-profit” system, where there is sufficient competition, has the right overall incentives (though they tend to over-compensate the very top few employees because those are the guys with the most power), so the companies FIND ways to deal the issues, or they lose out to other companies that do.
A “non-profit” system has no such incentives. They tend to overcompensate a larger chunk of the people at the top, instead of concentrating in the top few – that makes it stand out less, but the basic problem remains (the people who choose how much people are paid choose to pay themselves the most). And a WHOLE LOT of other problems come along for the ride (see the problems in the VA for a relatively recent, high-profile example).
Now, the pre-Obamacare health care system in the US was… well, *extremely* regulated, to the point that many of that the benefits of a for-profit system were being noticeably reduced. Obamacare moved the needle *very much* in the wrong direction on that, resulting in *LESS ACTUAL CARE* for a *huge* amount more money. Utter fail, by every reasonable measure.
(On the “opportunities for graft” and “power to the politicians” scales, though, it was a huge success!)
+1
I not sure you should use the American healhcare system as a positive model for “for-profit” systems when it is the most expensive in the world, by some margin, and prett bad rated by outcomes as well.
“prett bad rated by outcomes as well.”
That is actually a much, MUCH more complicated claim than you imagine, and very interesting, too.
But the summary isn’t too hard, and the easiest example is “infant mortality”, which is often trotted out as an example of the horrors of American medicine.
In many countries, a baby that is born premature or with any of a rash of serious problems is simple counted as stillborn and allowed to die. In the US, we count them as live births, and we make *heroic* efforts to save every baby we can.
I know which one of those systems I want to live in.
In the areas with the firmest measurements (usually, the ones with the least wiggle-room in the definition, like 5-year cancer survival rates), the US does very, very well.
But in areas having to do with lifestyle, most directly areas affected by obesity, we do poorly. We are so wealthy that even our POOR are fat, and it shows in the stats in those areas. Solution: don’t be fat.
Now, as I said, that’s a summary. The basic idea is that comparisons between countries are actually quite difficult. (For instance, that’s why so much of the discussion about crime rates country-to-country focus on murder, because there’s an actual *body*, so it’s a lot more likely to be reported at least in a very similar fashion.)
One other significant portion of the expense is that the entire world is piggy-backing on us in terms of paying for drug development – the US is where the actual profit comes from on drugs, with the rest of the world providing volume but very little in the way of actual money above cost of production. That is to say, the US pays the overwhelming lion’s share of drug R&D.
Its not that hard to compared, there are plenty of long establish statistical models that take this into account. Yes, America does come out top on Cancer, but I am afrain that is a well known outlier in its otherwise poor showing compared to other developed nations.
Unless you have some kind of new study on it, no, that’s not how that shakes out when you dig into things.
It’s quite a mixed bag. In areas like cancer, where the primary issue is medical competence and access to the newest and best technology, drugs, and treatments, the US is amazing.
In areas with significant “lifestyle” influence (obesity being the most obvious, in that is raises risk on many things), yes, the US does poorly. That’s not really a problem with the medical system, so much as human laziness combining badly with our wealth.
I’ve been to several other countries, experienced their healthcare. If you have a broken bone, yes, it’s cheap (or free). If you have something more interesting, the US is generally where you want to be.
Well, that, or certain third world countries with good exchange rates, a good medical community, and no government regulation requiring treatment of the poor. Horrible for the poor, of course, but great for those who can afford it. See “medical tourism”.
Long way to go for “we’ve never had _REAL_ capitalism,” mate.
Haven’t you got a slightly less dull & useless idea you could pitch instead?
I do have a problem with for-profit health-care systems though; profit is maximized by optimizing for the steady state. The healthcare provider makes the most money in the case where every patient is served, every doctor sees the greatest possible number of patients per day, every hospital bed is filled, every surgical room is fully scheduled, and every ventilator and every MRI is in constant use. It is in their favor to maintain only very slight overcapacity, because the need for these services can be expected to fluctuate a few percent from month to month and year to year.
And that maximizes profit because that meets society’s needs … most of the time.
But then there is a big disaster – like the COVID pandemic. Our need for beds and doctors and facilities, in most of the country, suddenly doubled, and stayed doubled for a year. For-profit healthcare was not ready. People were putting up temporary hospitals in parking structures and abandoned hotels, and packing patients into shared spaces even when some of them were contagious, and turning patients away at the door. Big damn refrigerator trucks were repurposed as temporary morgues. And on and on and on.
The COVID pandemic is an extreme example, but it certainly makes the point that the profit motive does not justify maintaining emergency capacity. Lesser examples are usually more temporary and limited in area, like people who are injured in a big disaster, or are subject to a local epidemic, or who all listened to the same bullshit and injected themselves with bleach on the same day…. a lot of these things are correlated in that they happen to a lot of people at the same time, and in a system without capacity significantly in excess of what maximizes profit, they can’t be dealt with.
What about this “we refuse to release vaccine formulation” nonsense?
You can’t separate medicine & vaccine production from the over-all healthcare system, and quite frankly, this move is literally demanding money in exchange for peoples’ lives. And the only system which permits it – wait for it – capitalism!
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy………….
I don’t know where you are, but I finally got the first half of my vaccination last week and nobody asked to get paid. They wanted ID and checked it against a list to make sure I hadn’t got the first dose yet, and they wanted to notify my primary physician. But that was it. I’m in California. I thought it was the same across the US.
Start here: https://twitter.com/Salon/status/1386637199593152518?s=20
Hmmm. Now I have to go look and see what Gates actually said. Salon has an iffy history with handling truth.
But I’m no apologist for the guy. It is in the best interests of MY health to have everybody ELSE vaccinated. Including people overseas, people in jail, and everybody else. Whoever is standing in the way, Whether Gates or anyone else, I’m in favor of society at large rolling over them.
I’d focus less on what a billionaire says, and more on what they actually do.
True. It looks like the approach he favors is “export vaccines cheap or free, but don’t give out the methods for making them.”
Which is… chintzy and petty, but at least doesn’t stand in the way of addressing the current problem. And the Gates foundation is in fact giving out vaccines in several places, so… I’m going with “petty but not outright evil at this time.”
Gates used to be one of the most horrible people on the planet. And then he got married. Melinda Gates, whatever else she’s been, has been an amazingly good influence on him. He did *ZERO* philanthropy or charity before she was in his life, and *EVERY* input he had into the world was driven by greed. And now it’s not, and in addition to not stomping on people for the sake of greed nearly as much, he seems much happier.
That’s no satisfaction for those of us who really wanted to see him punished for the crap he did in the 80’s and 90’s, but at this point he’s nowhere near as evil as, for example, Mark Zuckerberg. And as time has passed, I don’t feel a psychological need to see him punished as much; it looks like he really has turned a corner and tries to make the world better.
But I still want to smack his face for two decades of stomping on thousands of other people who had good ideas that could have made the world better. It’s complicated.
Now people are talking about giving him awards for the “Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation” work. But IMO, that really misses the point. *She* is the one who deserves that award.
He’s 100% as evil as ever, arguably more so.
What Melinda did was reform his image, not his character.
But money is speech, so aren’t those generally the same thing for a billionaire? /s
*bonk*
Smart-Alec. X’D
For-profit prisons are motivated to keep prisoners as long as possible and ensure that they continue to be maladjusted rather than reforming them.
For-profit medicine is motivated to ensure their patients are chronically ill rather than healthy.
I actually fail to see any inherent problems with for-profit education as a concept. They should be motivated to provide the highest quality education possible along with programs to ensure their students have jobs waiting upon graduation to attract students. But in practice an awful lot of for-profit schools seem to be just scams. I’m not sure why.
Well, what’s the motivation for a for-profit school to give their students employment? By the time the students have graduated, the school has already gotten what they want: that student’s money. They’ve no incentive to give the student anything more.
If anything for-profit schools encourage NOT giving the education and access to jobs, because of the culture of “if the education you got wasn’t enough, the answer is that you need MORE of an education!!!”.
And by and large, this practice isn’t punished. People won’t stop going to these places just because those who graduated didn’t get jobs after graduating.
As long as businesses demand the higher education, there will be the culture of seeing higher education as necessary. Even if in actuality, the higher education doesn’t actually mean the business will give you the job.
The problem with for-profit prisons is that the people who consume their “services” (prisoners) and those who pay for them (taxpayers) have interests that don’t necessarily align. Throw in the politicians and bureaucracy, and neither of those two groups have much choice, either, so there is no market, only lobbying. I have thought of one idea that might improve this: have the state pay a fixed rate for each prisoner incarcerated, but let the prisoners choose where to do their time. Prison operators still wouldn’t exactly provide a “luxurious” environment, but they would have some incentive to at least provide the most humane environment their budget could buy. Of course, to work, this system would have to extend to publicly-run prisons as well. (I’m sure there are plenty of objections and limitations to this idea, but I really do think it could be an improvement over the current system.)
As a footnote, for-profit prisons are an effect of over-incarceration, not a cause. They account for less than ten percent of prisoners in the US. And while private prison operators do lobby, their campaign contributions are only a small fraction of those made by public sector guards’ unions. I personally favor continuing to phase them out because of the perverse incentives they create, but they’re a relatively small piece of the problem.
As for healthcare, the problem is once again the misalignment of interests between those consuming services, and those paying for them. Widespread market distortions encourage over-consumption by some, while placing services out of reach for others. Because so much medical care is paid for through intermediaries such as insurance companies and the government, most people have no idea how much they’re actually paying for care. Insurance should be reserved for large, unpredictable expenses, not routine care. (If auto insurance worked like health insurance, your insurance company would pay for car washes. And a basic wash would cost $200.) If you want to argue in favor of subsidies for poor people who genuinely can’t afford basic care, that’s fine. A good case can be made for that. But don’t call it “insurance”, because it isn’t.
As for the role of profit, just look at cosmetic surgery. Most cosmetic surgery is considered elective, so insurance doesn’t pay. If you want a tummy tuck or a boob job, you have to pay for it out of pocket. As a result, people have every incentive to shop around for the best value. The result is that quality of care has improved, even as prices have fallen. That’s what usually happens when the market is allowed to function. In the larger healthcare picture, it’s ludicrous to claim that the free market has failed, since it’s been a century or so since we’ve had anything resembling an actual free market.
Really long post for the “we’ve never had _REAL_ capitalism before,” trope.
Spoiler:Markets are useful tools for matching supply with demand, not miracle formulae that can do everything. Even Adam Smith understood that.
“Really long post for the “we’ve never had _REAL_ capitalism before,” trope.”
In healthcare, it’s not a trope. We have not had anything approaching a free market in healthcare in many decades. It is among the most regulated aspects of our society.
And the example of cosmetic surgery is a *great* example of how true that is.
But you could also look at countries that have no significant government involvement in healthcare, and you’ll see a *very* similar dynamic.
Now, on the flip side, those countries will also have a poor underclass that gets essentially no healthcare at all. We want to avoid that.
So the question is, “How do we get as many of the amazing benefits as possible of an actual free market healthcare system without watching the poor die from easy-to-cure maladies?”
No one has a nice answer to that. It’s a balancing problem, and people generally suck at those. The system we had before the Affordable (sic) Care Act was at least among the best ever seen for balancing that (sure, go ahead and lie to me that I didn’t see that stuff in action, of people people getting service for free and such). It sucked the least of any system yet attempted, or least had a very good claim to that title.
And what we’ve gone to instead, being a large step towards fascism (private companies that only do what the government tells them), has turned out exactly as one might expect … higher costs, less actual care. That’s not a win, that’s a loss.
It’s cute that you bring up the ACA, as if I (or anyone with half a brain) would defend that massive corporate handjob.
Alright, you want to play the “consumer choice” angle. Cool.
How much of the vastly technical schooling needed does the average consumer have, when making medical choices? The answer is “so close to zero as makes no odds.” There is a reason medical school takes years.
Next question, who easy is it to shop around for prices when having a feckin’ heart attack? The answer is oops, too late, you’re dead.
Last question. How does someone with a permanent disability that keeps them out of the workforce pay for private healthcare, and still manage to afford housing, in a sufficiently developed area that can providing the care &service they need? The answer is THEY CAN’T.
But yes, please, let’s continue with the capitalist extraction of wealth from the poor. I’m sure that more of that will fix things. We just don’t have enough capitalism yet.
Oh! I know! What if we started charging people for air?
Yay, more ad hominem and sphistry from Bharda.
“Alright, you want to play the “consumer choice” angle. Cool.”
Alright, so you want to ignore any real-world examples of any kind. Cool.
“How much of the vastly technical schooling needed does the average consumer have, when making medical choices?”
Oh, right, because people never ask doctors about what they need in your world, eh?
When you need X procedure, *as told to you by your doctor*, where should you go get it? The place that charges some-unknown-in-advance amount, or the place that charges some-unknown-in-advance amount, or the place that charges some-unknown-in-advance amount, or the place that charges some-unknown-in-advance amount?
It varies *tremendously*, and is nigh-impossible to know in advance*, almost exclusively because of the incentive structure put in place by government regulation.
* Unless you are paying in full up front. Why? Because that let’s them… NOT have to deal with a huge number of government regulations! I’m sensing a theme, here. And it’s “you have no experience with the real world”.
“who easy is it to shop around for prices when having a feckin’ heart attack? ”
Yes, yes, because that is so representative of all the medical care people get. Yep. Totally.
There are *several* possible ways to solve this, actually, but even if you don’t like any of them, that doesn’t mean we trash the whole system for that one portion. That would be stupid.
“Last question.”
Do you promise? Because your bad faith questions are beyond tiresome.
“How does someone with a permanent disability…”
Get food? Get housing? Get medical care? Get clothing? Get ANYTHING?
Oh, look, that’s not actually related to “medical care” in any significant way at all. That question is “how do we provide for the disabled if they didn’t properly take care of themselves in advance?”
And your answer is, apparently, “wreck healthcare for everyone, derp derp derp!”
“Oh! I know! What if we started charging people for air?”
You know, there actually have been some proposals that were only very slightly removed from this, but they didn’t come from capitalists….. not that I would expect you to be willing to acknowledge such a thing, of course.
No essential service should ever be for profit.
Um… I respectfully disagree, and I think you do too.
No essential service should ever *cost more than a person can afford*.
“Never for a profit” still leaves people without water/clothes/food/shelter.
Now, if you find a better way to incentivize lower prices other than healthy competition, (and the ability of the providers to benefit from that), I’m on board. (This does not excuse profiteering on essentials, for instance: the price of insulin, Epipen, current price of wood, etc. for some current examples of stupid greed.)
You’re wrong.
I know you don’t believe that, and you are, of course, entitled to believe whatever you like, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are, objectively, wrong.
Take water for example, since you mentioned it.
Let us assume a world wherein we assume that it is no longer possible to get clean, drinkable water, without someone making a profit off of it. First, examine what profit is: the surplus value of labor, which in the current system is siphoned off by a parasite. Let me be clear about that.
A parasite.
Not a person.
A. Parasite.
Now then, secondly, consider the fact that said clean, drinkable water is a requirement for being alive. It resides at the base of Mazlow’s pyramid. It is completely nonnegotiable, and lacking it will result in death, every time, in approximately 84 hours, sometimes much less, for a human being.
Taken together, under your very, very wrong (both ethically & morally) assertion that ‘essential services” should be managed for a profit, these two facts set the following condition:
“Human lives should be entirely contingent on whether or not a parasite can sustain itself off of them.”
Now, I suppose this seems just fine, to a parasite, but to a human being, it is just wrong.
You see why I made the point of telling you that you are wrong, point blank? It was I could extend you the benefit of the doubt, regarding whether you are a human…
Or a parasite.
He is objectively correct, Bharda, and you are objectively wrong – for profit systems result in fewer people doing without that non-profit systems. That has been proven repeatedly, time after time after time after time after time.
In terms of the logic of your post, you are missing an extremely simple thing. The “parasite” you are talking about is *also* a person, and if they don’t get payment of some kind for their work, *they will stop doing that work*.
The reason clean water is available is so many places is because the people providing are being paid to do so. If they are not being paid to do so, then they will stop doing so, and then, the water will not be available so many places.
They are not a parasite. They are a person, doing a job, and getting paid for it. And people doing a job to get paid have provided ***VASTLY*** more of those “essential services” (and at *VASTLY* reduced prices over the years) than any non-profit.
And that is the real issue. I want people to have what they need, and we know from experience that “non-profits” are a *HORRIBLE* way to go about actually accomplishing that.
Corporations are not people.
It is very telling, though, that you immediately jumped to the image of a “somebody,” a singular, presumably hard-working, and therefore valid, “person” who is, in your hypothetical, “doing the thing to get paid.”
Very well. Tell me something: is privatization – or to use the older, nastier word, enclosure – a necessary precondition of paying wages?
Whilst you contemplate that one, consider this: who is doing the actual work, and where is the profit being siphoned away to?
Let me tell you where “private everything” ends up.
Flint, MI, and it’s years (YEARS!) of poisoned water. Because “the private sector can do it so much better.”
Feel free to continuing groveling at the altar of capitalism, tho.
“May your chains rest lightly upon your neck.”
“Flint, MI, and it’s years (YEARS!) of poisoned water. Because “the private sector can do it so much better.””
Wow, tell me you’re not THAT stupid, eh? Utilities are incredibly regulated and controlled – the local government is the source of the problem in Flint. Give them a billion dollars to solve the problem, and it will still be a problem for years to come.
Your ridiculous sneering is pathetic, especially in service to something so thoroughly discredited.
Stop talking about all the silliness, and look at what people actually GET. Look at actual RESULTS. And results are not close.
But sure, I’ll answer some of your questions, since you obviously don’t understand so many concepts.
“Corporations are not people.”
You’re right. They are *groups* of people, often with some form of governing body. They are an abstraction. But at the root, there is some PERSON getting the results. Somebody owns them. In the majority of businesses, there is literally a “somebody” at the beginning, and that grows into a group of other people investing money later, when the business has been proven to work.
Of course, in many cases today, that ownership is abstracted similarly, with some kind of “fund” holding the actual shares. Makes actual voting become a bit odd, and allows for some shenanigans from the apparatchiks involved… why, it makes the whole thing work more like how non-profits work *all the time*.
“Very well. Tell me something: is privatization – or to use the older, nastier word, enclosure – a necessary precondition of paying wages?”
For paying GOOD wages, there are two choices: be part of entity that prints the money (or is supported by the entity that prints the money), or work for a “for profit”. Non-profits that aren’t suckling at the government teat generally pay *VERY* poorly, depending on people who can afford to work for nearly nothing to accomplish something they believe in.
“who is doing the actual work, and where is the profit being siphoned away to?”
If you check the actual books of most “for profit” companies, “wages” are their single largest expense. That’s where most of the money is “siphoned away to” – paying people for work.
And the second one is most commonly some form of “capital expense” – equipment, facilities, large expensive, long-lasting things of various kinds. One of the kinds of “work” that company ends up paying for is “buying the equipment”. Where does the money come from to get started?
And the person or people who do that work want to get paid, too. At some point in the past, MOST of those people EARNED that money through their own work (check the stats on generational turnover of wealth in the US – there are *exceedingly* few fourth generation wealthy, and not just a whole lot of third generation ones).
Let me tell you where “private nothing” ends up: Venuzuela. Russia. China. And so many more. Poverty and ruin. Places like Flint, MI, where there is no accountability for years of poisonous water.
Heck, even the EU is a pretty good example. Have you every looked at the actual standards of living there? Think “Mississippi” for most of it.
You are the one groveling at an altar, believing in something with no evidence. I’m following what has been shown to work, time after time. Not perfectly, indeed, not even all that well sometimes… but still so much better than abject failure.
Oh, and that last quote? The “chains” were explicitly government chains, which is right where what you are advocating for ends up.
The way you get “profit” is to be *efficient* – do more with less, and get to keep a portion of the extra. That’s why free markets produce so much more for so much less – the right incentives.
For non-profits, people work towards other things, and the actual supposed goal is not given much attention, because there is no reward for doing a better job. Little is produced. The result is LESS stuff for MORE. That’s bad for everyone!
To mix your example with another one you might recognize, the water ration gets increased from 30 liters to 20.
For-profit systems result in the problem the poor have being that they are FAT, not that they are starving. That’s a great trade. By the very standards you claim to be caring about, you should be the most gung-ho free-market guy around, because it does a better job of *actually delivering* the things for the people.
“Venezuela.”
Drink.
“China.”
Drink.
“Russia.”
Drink.
More than anything, you’re boring.
Because you’re predictable.
You act like it’s a binary between capitalism, and statism. Chains of gold, or chains of iron.
You legitimately talk like a major public health crisis, obesity, which has emerged from Argo-corps pushing cheap starch & HFCS on the population since the end of WWII & rationing, is someone a “good thing,” as if it was evidence for how great capitalism is.
Oh, but let me guess, it’s “muh freeeeeeedooooooooom,” right? No food product company used bribes or manipulative advertising towards children, it was just perfectly rational consumers making detached decisions with zero input or manipulation, right? Of course it is.
Oh, and naturally, in your cult of capitalism, “owning” something is really work, isn’t it? That’s why some pink bottomed MBA in Managattan gets the lion’s share of the value created by a steel worker in Colorado. The did the arduous, back break labor of…owning.
And spare us the quality of life whataboutism nonsense, at least until there aren’t 40 million people in the US literally living in third world conditions, or worse.
But hey, maybe I’m being unfair, ja? Maybe you don’t actually understand what “profits” actually are.
“But hey, maybe I’m being unfair, ja? Maybe you don’t actually understand what “profits” actually are.”
Clearly, you don’t.
“Profits” are what is left (IF ANYTHING) after all the expenses have been paid from the income of the company. Conceptually, it’s very, very, very simple.
If a child is sitting at a table, running a lemonade stand, and they are *actually* running it as a business, then they must purchase the lemons, the sugar, the water, the cups, the pitcher, the table, and the chair. Also, they would have to purchase the land they sit on, or rent it.
After they have sold the lemonade, they get money… but it COST money to provide that lemonade, so it’s not all profit. If they spent $20 for all the stuff they needed and sold all the lemonade for $21, they made $1 dollar in profit… well, $1, and a table, a chair, and pitcher. Tomorrow, when they want to do this again, they won’t have to spend as much on start up cost.
Now, tomorrow, it only costs them $5 to get water, sugar, and lemons, but man, sitting out in the hot sun all afternoon… that was no fun. So, the child gets a friend to do it instead, and offers that friend $5 to do it.
Assuming a similar day of selling lemonade, the OWNER ends up with $11, the worker with $5, and you’ll complain about that evil, evil owner.
But here’s the thing you are leaving out. Where did the OWNER get the $20 to start with? The other kid doesn’t have the $20, or they wouldn’t take the $5 to sit there and do the work.
In fact, if the worker is smart and saves the $5, in 4 days, that worker can go spend $20 and start their own lemonade business. The worker is GETTING money every day, because of the opportunity to work and get paid provided by the OWNER.
Without the owner, who put in the time, work, and money to start the thing, the worker would have no job and get paid NOTHING.
“You legitimately talk like a major public health crisis, obesity, which has emerged from Argo-corps pushing cheap starch & HFCS on the population since the end of WWII & rationing, is someone a “good thing,” as if it was evidence for how great capitalism is.”
Again with the dishonest vilification of private business.
Obesity is a larger issue than just the carbs thing, though that certainly plays in. But if you look into the history of that, basically at all, you’ll find government fingers all over that, not private industry.
Why are carbs so cheap? Why is corn-syrup practically free? Government subsidy. Government distortions of the market.
“No food product company used bribes or manipulative advertising towards children, it was just perfectly rational consumers making detached decisions with zero input or manipulation, right?”
I made exactly zero such claims. Indeed, dishonest and manipulative messaging are common, everywhere humans beings exist, in every system.
But I’ll take private dishonest speech and attempts at manipulation over government versions of the same, every day of the week and twice on Sunday. The “solutions” to the problem are orders of magnitude worse than the disease.
“Oh, and naturally, in your cult of capitalism, “owning” something is really work, isn’t it?”
The actual owning itself? Not generally, no. And yet, TO OWN something requires paying someone else for it, and the money to pay them for it generally does indeed require work.
As I pointed out, “family money” is simply not a big thing in the US – most people who have the money to own stuff did work to have that money. It’s like you don’t understand the concept of money as a medium of exchange.
“That’s why some pink bottomed MBA in Managattan gets the lion’s share of the value created by a steel worker in Colorado.”
That’s simply not what happens, as I already pointed out to you. “Wages” are the primary expense of most businesses, FAR larger than profits. Where does the money come from to pay those wages? *From the value created by the workers.* The workers ALREADY get the lion’s share of the value created.
And no, there are not remotely 40 million people in “literally third world conditions”. You obviously have not been to a third world country.
Are you a high schooler? First or second-year college student in the liberal arts? Because you sound like that – ZERO actual experience, but oh-so-sure that the BS some book or professor poured into your empty head would solve everything.
Detoxy, do you charge your children for lemons and sugar and make them rent part of your front yard if they want to set up a lemonade stand? Most parents I’m aware of would float their kids the upfront costs, because, you know, lemons and sugar are pretty inexpensive and they think it’s cute watching their kids “play business” for half an afternoon.
Or are you cosplaying as a Ferengi for the purposes of your argument? If your kids don’t recoup their outstanding debt to you, do you charge them outrageous interest until they do, or do you force them to file for bankruptcy? Maybe make them reorganize their debts and have a yardsale and make them sell off all their toys? I assume you again charge them for the use of the yard.
“Heck, even the EU is a pretty good example. Have you every looked at the actual standards of living there?”
Yes and they are pretty good thank you.
The claim that Americans have a higher standard of living is based on the U.S. having a higher ‘average income’ than most European countries. Cut out the top 1% and its a very different story.
In the United States nearly 14% of Americans live in poverty compared to 6% in France, 8% in Britain, and 5% or less in Germany, Sweden and Belgium. Twenty percent of American children live below the poverty line, as do nearly 23% of the elderly, the highest figure by far in the west with the exceptions of Russia and Mexico.
“The claim that Americans have a higher standard of living is based on the U.S. having a higher ‘average income’ than most European countries. Cut out the top 1% and its a very different story.”
No, it’s based on lots of things.
Median income, for instance, not average. Standard of living uses a lot of things like that, too – ever BEEN to Europe? Seen the sizes of the apartments?
“In the United States nearly 14% of Americans live in poverty compared to 6% in France, 8% in Britain, and 5% or less in Germany, Sweden and Belgium.”
Yay, sophistry.
“Poverty”. Ever looked into what “poverty” looks like, is legally defined as in different places? It varies *WIDELY*.
The way we define poverty, we will have somewhere right near 15% poverty, ALWAYS. It’s basically “the lowest 15% of people by income”. It varies a little over time, but not by much.
And if you stop to think about that definition JUST A LITTLE, you’ll realize that it will *always* overinclude the elderly, as so many of them live on a “fixed income” but have much lower expenses in so many cases (house already paid for, for instance).
In other words, you need to actually look under the covers and see what those words you’re using mean in actual practice. Clearly, you would be surprised.
I’m thirsty. Go get me a drink. What? No, I’m not paying you for it. Water is a necessity! Therefore, you are obligated to bring it to me whenever I ask. Get it myself? Pff. Why should I? I’m entitled to it, never mind what it costs others to bring it to me.
Yes, people should be entitled to basic necessities. This does NOT give them the right to force others to do the work to obtain those basic necessities without some kind of compensation.
An individual or group of individuals who set up and operate the system by which necessities get to where they need to be are not parasites for asking to be reimbursed for their work. How much reimbursement is reasonable is a completely separate topic – but what constitutes parasitic siphoning? How much is reasonable to pay the workers who maintain our waterways? Since it’s a necessity, does this mean that we must pay them the most minimum of minimum wages, just enough to keep them alive, because any extra is parasitic siphoning? Does this mean that we get only the most desperate and incompetent doing the work, because anyone with marketable skills will go work elsewhere?
Perhaps you’re referring only to upper management as the parasites, but where is the line drawn?
The water is a necessity.
You can walk to the faucet yourself.
You are entitled to water, not a waiter.
It amuses me no end that you…people keep jumping to the conclusion that public anything must somehow result from uncompensated labor. The rank dishonesty of it is nauseating, if not surprising. And don’t bother claiming “that isn’t what I meant,” because you spelled it out pretty damn clearly.
If you can’t be bothered to argue in good faith, kindly refrain from wasting someoneelse’s time.
“You can walk to the faucet yourself.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAaaaaaaa…..
That’s right up there with “Why would you kill an animal for meat when you can just buy meat at the store?” or “Why would they put the deer crossing there? They should put it somewhere else.”
Oh man, that explains so much about you. And you think WE are amusing? If you weren’t poisoning the minds of other people who haven’t really thought about these things, I would love to just watch you go. It’s hilarious, in a train wreck sort of way.
Yes, it’s exactly what we mean, because it is exactly what you are supporting. That’s how “positive rights” work out, every time.
Only a capitalist would think publicly, owned utilities, and specifically water, are “a joke.”
Here’s a favorite punchline of mine, regarding “negative rights” moronitude.
“Those who define freedom only as being able to criticize the government, have never been hungry.”
If it wasn’t for all the people it would hurt, I’d love to watch you get your wish of totally privatization.
I wonder how much you’d be willing to pay for air?
“Only a capitalist would think publicly, owned utilities, and specifically water, are “a joke.””
Nothing would go over your head. Your reflexes are too fast – you would catch it.
Go look at what I compared you to, then realize that those aren’t just jokes – people have *literally* said those things and meant them. And you just did something right in line with that. See if you can figure out what.
Make up your mind on water. Are you going to blame the private utility for Flint, or are you going to treat them as public and effectively free? You can’t have the good parts of both.
Unfortunately, we know from experience that you CAN have the bad parts of both, at least for a while. Public risk, private profit. All the bad things from both systems. Completely unethical, of course, but since when has that stopped certain people?
And yes, capitalism and private ownership do indeed have some bad things. Life isn’t all rainbows and unicorns. But it at least does have some good things, like producing so much more from so much less that the poor are now fat instead of starving.
I don’t know how much I’d be willing to pay for air. At the moment, as I pointed out, the best way to not find out is to keep the capitalists in charge. They aren’t the ones who have been pushing for things 2 steps (at most) removed from that.
You know who knows a LOT about hunger? Places run entirely by “non-profits”. Go ask the people who have fled from those places.
You do not have a right to my work, and I have no right to yours. Anything else is slavery. And taking my stuff, that I worked for, is the same.
“Positive rights” violates that. It inherently involves taking from some people to give to others.
The more you take stuff, the less people make stuff (since it’s just going to get taken, anyway), resulting in less total stuff, up to and including the “necessities”.
To keep such a system going, more stuff has to be taken from people, making the problem worse. This has played out time after time after time.
That’s where “positive rights” goes, and eventually, it fails, because there simply isn’t enough stuff to take to keep all the promises.
Good intentions feed no one. If it will make him money, the most evil capitalist ever will happily feed the masses. Incentives MATTER.
A service costs what it costs. It ALWAYS costs what it costs. You may not be paying for it yourself, but SOMEBODY is.
Negative rights – the right to not be interfered with, in essence – can be free. Positive rights – health care, food, housing – must be paid for. Either the government pays for them, or the government effectively enslaves somebody to provide them.
Hmm, sounds like this might be a fellow Canadian.
What’s not to understand?
Private prisons are warehouses for humans that do not, for whatever reason, conform sufficiently to the demands of our capitalist society, where said humans are imprisoned until such time as they are converted into “productive” members of said capitalist society. A telling choice of words, no? These warehouses convert humans into profit centers, by collecting our tax money from the State, according to headcount, and are thusly incentivized to find ways to increase the number of humans they hold as prisoners. This usually takes the form of providing legalized bribes to politicians, to pursue stricter sentencing laws, prison sentencing for progressively less and serious crimes, stricter policing, combating decriminalization efforts, and decreasing funding for public services that tend to prevent criminal behavior from emerging in the first place. It’s simple enough. More prisoners means more profit.
For profit healthcare is similarly motivated. The goal is making more and more money…and so it becomes necessary to pursue “treatments,” which can always be prolonged, rather than “cures,” which eliminate your customer base. The exception to this being, of course, old people, who’s demand for medical treatment eventually outstrips their profitability. These people have be ignored as much as possible, so that they will die, and stop being a drain.
I’m honestly surprised we haven’t criminalized old age, thereby combining the two industries, and guaranteeing ever more profit for both.
For profit education is simple too. American K-12 schools aren’t there to educate children, they’re there to provide daily storage, so that parents can focus on generating corporate profits, combined with social indoctrination, to help ensure that said pre-adults are suitable to be installed into the corporate profit generators once they reach the age of no longer being cared about. For profit K-12 has just streamlined the process. Meanwhile, for profit schools for adults follow one of two models: labeling, and manufacturing. The former take in large sums of money in exchange for a piece of paper that labels the bearer as sufficiently compliant to be used in administrative capacities, while the latter take a human and convert them into a production unit that can perform specific technical operations for their lease-holder. Some overlap exists in these groups, but they are, generally, well separated. There’s even a convenient color code convention built in: white collars, and blue collars.
You’ve missed a few things, such as prisoner labor – the largest single labor pool in the USA AFAIK.
A certain congressman denies vehemently (so almost certainly DID) tell a business thinking of moving to China, “Come to Alabama, we’ve got prisoners!”
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2017/oct/10/prisoner-labor-focus-controversy-texas-alabama/
Kindly take note that the US Constitution currently makes one exception for forced labor, prisons.
Very true, very true…but you’ll note, this is, still, converting them into “productive units” for purposes of capitalism.
“Private prisons are warehouses for humans that do not, for whatever reason, conform sufficiently to the demands of our capitalist society, where said humans are imprisoned until such time as they are converted into “productive” members of said capitalist society.”
“for whatever reason”, like murder, theft, assault, you know, “whatever” reasons like that.
Yes, I do know the edge cases are handled poorly, and yes, I absolutely agree that there are some obvious improvements to our “justice” system. And I even agree that “for profit” prisons are far too much risk for far too little reward, compared to most areas of privatization.
But the result on the healthcare side has been *utterly astounding*, with nearly every part of your complaint being government action or requirement, not the private companies.
For instance, “old people” are a drain on… the government. If there was no way to soak the government for the costs, the primarily impetus would be *keeping old people alive*, as long as they could afford it!
And don’t get me started on education. The “non-profit” public school system is a cross between a glorified daycare and a propaganda mill. You blame the “for profit” areas outside of schools, because “profit” is your version of “sin”, I guess, but the better explanation is that, like nearly every “non-profit”, when there’s no profit/loss to manage, the “profit” that people work towards is “position” and “perks”, and the actual mission of the institution is forgotten, because there’s no penalty for forgetting it.
And that is the “why” behind which areas work well as “for profit” and which few don’t. In prisons, the people you are trying to satisfy are the ones who aren’t there, who aren’t your “customers”, as it were. In education, as long as the public schools have no real competition of any kind for anyone but the wealthy, the only people they have to satisfy are the politicians and bureaucrats above them.
Even the medical system is, in many respects, a better example of the problems of government involvement than the problems of “for profit”. Indeed, government intervention and regulation is the *why* behind the ridiculous and opaque pricing structures that are one of the most obvious problems in the system!
You keep referring to carceral slaves as customers.
That really is just precious.
I was, in fact refering to US schools generally, in my description. I just pointed out that the privatized ones streamline themselves as overglorified daycare & indoctrination centers. Less worry about public oversight, and all.
Oh! And you even blamed teh gummint for the pricing practices of private healthcare systems…I knew you could!
*headpats*
“You keep referring to carceral slaves as customers.”
No, as “‘customers’, at it were” (with scare quotes around “customer”). That is, the people who are there being “served” (note the same mechanic) are not the actual people that are being served. That was… exactly my point.
“I just pointed out that the privatized ones streamline themselves as overglorified daycare & indoctrination centers.”
Another area where you are ignorant and blame others as the ignorant. The public ones are that. The private ones vary, with some being just a safer, “keep out the riffraff” version of that but many being actual places of learning. That’s the beauty of a private system – *choices*, where the one paying gets to do the choosing.
And the “public oversight” part is the problem. The “customers” (there it is again!) are not actually the ones being served, so their opinions don’t matter. The bureaucrats and politicians are the primary ones whose input matters, who desires are served. “*headpats*” – heh. Bless your heart!
Well, and the workers themselves, as in most non-profits.
And yes, I absolutely did blame the government for that. Have you actually done *ANY* looking into the regulations (that would “rules made and enforced by the government”) that health care entities must follow?
It is *incredibly extensive*. It is the least-free-market portion of our entire society, possibly barring local utilities, but those are at least under local control, so you could just move somewhere else to get away from bad governance.
Your arrogance would be annoying it it weren’t so funny. Like an elementary student lecturing a professional physicist on how atoms work using made up BS as revealed truth, or something.
“Public oversight is the problem.”
Oh god….you’re an AnCap. Done now. Bye.
…or I guess “buy,” in your case. W/e.
Huh. Don’t even know what an “AnCap” is. Much be something horrible. Evil incarnate, I guess, like those evil, evil “profits” he’s always vilifying.
But in the case of schools, yes, the *public oversight* truly is the problem. The *PARENTS* should be the ones with oversight – you know, the ones with an actual, vested interest in the outcome?
It’s like you think being a “public servant” or “working for a non-profit” magically removes all the human flaws that produce the evil “capitalists” and “parasites” that you rail against.
All the same flaws are still present, and the same kinds of people rise to the top as rise to CEO positions. What’s different is the mechanisms the people have to deal with and correct the problems those kinds of people produce – with a private company, I can simply choose to not do business with them. Good luck on that with the government.
And then, you’ll respond that private companies bribe the government…. yes, which is why the government shouldn’t have power or authority over nearly so many things. Bribery is as old as prostitution, and won’t be going away any time soon.
But more importantly, why bribe the government? Why not just… go be the guy in government getting bribed, instead, and keep your money? Get what you want for free?
I don’t blame the private companies for bribing the government – yes, they should go to prison for it, of course, but that’s not the point. The point is that the corrupt government officials are the problem in that case, and they could just as easily be corrupt for their own benefit directly, not just for someone else’s benefit for money. The problem isn’t those offering the bribe, it’s those TAKING them.
AnCap is ‘anarchocapitalist.’ ie, no laws except corporatism. Sort of like OCP in Robocop, or the megacorps in Johnny Mnemonic.
(just so you know, you don’t sound AnCap to me – your arguments seem to be a lot more based on libertarianism or minarchism, which is sort of related to libertarianism but more restrictive against governmental power)
Minarchism – a model of a state that is limited and minimal, whose ONLY functions are to act as an enforcer of the non-aggression principle (NAP) by providing citizens with the military, the police and courts, thereby protecting them from aggression, theft, breach of contract, fraud and enforcing.
It’s pretty easy to understand. Rich people own the businesses, rich people buy… er, bribe… er, finance… yeah, sure, let’s go with finance… the politicians who will pass the laws they want, and the laws they want are that their businesses get to profit from everything.
…. or do you don’t understand how it works society in general, for achieving the STATED goals of these systems, or for the typical person? Again, simple: It doesn’t and it was never meant to.
“Seriously though, you know how any time you play a game with character customization, it takes you like an hour to mess with all the sliders before you get the chin and the nose width and all the bits and bobs just right? (Only then to don a helmet and never see your character’s face again?) By “you” I mean me, but also probably a lot of you guys as well”
– I play City of Heroes, so I know this only too well. Character gen is at least half the game right?
Even with some RPG on pen n paper. I’d love the system and concept and just make characters when I was bored and had no muse to write. eventually wring descriptions, cyber/gearing up I’d get a character and start writing again. Came time for a Con and I was invited to play an “After Dark” version of the RPG (guest list you wouldn’t believe and I got invited) my folder w/over 200 characters to pick from sped things up a lot. Game play lasted 2-3 hrs. Hosts were satisfied and the players were hooked. Fans had fun watching.
THen I offered to run things even more NSFW – From the Gutter first gameplay happened. Set up 4 teams each at a table. Picked players at random to fill in and ran the game until 5 am sunday. some 8 hrs off the cuff. I got invited back to the next two cons (should navy service allow) as a guest GM. Room paid for and 3 meal tickets, that’s it, but a lot more than other locals got.
City of Heroes? That game still exists?
It has been revived by fans, I believe. I won’t tell you what it’s called as I’m not sure about the rules regarding doing so. But it’s pretty easy to google, considering it shares a name with the first MCU Spider-Man movie.
*makes sad Defender noises*
Discord link to where I play: https://discord.gg/rjteUUAT
May not be ‘CoH’, but use to play ‘Champions Online’
Oh yes, CoH character gen is easily half the game, if you’re not just looking to game the game and “win” by making the most number of level 50’s the fastest with the most amount of influence (money). Spent hours tweaking some of my toons, especially with the extra costume slots.
It is fine to advertise the fact that multiple CoH servers exist; the fact’s been published in multiple news sources over the last two years. I think Homecoming is the biggest one, population-wise? and there’s a solid handful of other ones. Each one has a different slant; Homecoming is probably best described as making the game “easier” (aka less grindy), one of the others is set on keeping things pretty much just like the original game as it was when it shut down, other have other things going on. Look around, check them out, find out which one is best for you.
Personally I usually look for mods for whatever game I’m playing that make the helmets invisible for exactly this reason.
Well, being a succubus does have some fashion advantages. If you want to change your appearance just change your glamor and Tah Dah! A whole new look! And I do have to agree with the assessment of the criminal injustice system.
Hey, if anyone knows who made this https://jcc10.gitlab.io/GrrlPowerSkilltree/ and contact that person to, well, first of all praise that person, but also to make sure it will be updated?
Who is Captain Zylstra?
She means Cora. Her full name was mentioned here.
Thank you
Also: hardly think Cora should be making comments about Revenge vs Education :/
It’s an Old West type of approach to law enforcement, I suppose. If what you did was bad enough, like planning to just murder someone to something they owned, well, no one was going to to shed too many tears if you went down in a blaze of glory. On the other hand, petty thievery didn’t warrant an extended stay in jail. And until the 20th Century there weren’t as many prisons and certainly weren’t as many laws. So law and punishment was kind of an all or nothing proposition. Either what you did was so heinous that if you weren’t gunned down while being apprehended, you likely ended up dangling from a rope, or you crime warranted a few days or weeks in jail and a fine. Admittedly some crimes that warranted a death sentence then seem incredibly harsh, like death for horse thievery, but keep in mind people lived much closer to the edge and had far fewer resources than we do now. The theft of a horse or cow might mean a death sentence for the victim during a harsh winter.
Not true. Theft could get your several years in prison, and the chance of living through a five year prison sentence with those prisons was not great. (As per Louis L’Amour, whose historical accuracy is excellent to the point where if a character arrives to a place to find water, the place was there, and the water was good to drink.)
Oh, I think she’s perfectly qualified to make comments. You can comment without making judgements after all, and “America’s criminal justice system is focused on revenge” is a factual statement.
This is a really interesting conversation on the definitions of ‘Justice’ vs. ‘Revenge’. I’d type my mental conversation out for you, but you’d sentence me to hanging/disembowelment/drawn and quartering in a for-profit prison if I did.
Everyone who is puzzled by Cora making comments about Revenge vs. Education is making the assumption that she did not intend to pay the system a compliment.
It sounds as though Detla doesn’t approve of that, but I can picture Cora boasting to Detla about her species’ homeworld with a broad grin, relishing the intimidation factor.
So Cora has dutch or belgian origins
It’s called “deterrence”, the idea is that would be criminals decide to go straight to avoid any further revenge.
And revenge IS an inherent part of law enforcement, to convince victims that they don’t need to take it into their own hands, the state has it covered.
I do agree, though, that it’s very, very badly executed, and in practice ends up turning prisons into schools on how to be more effective criminals.
That aside, yeah, jumping from a great altitude into an area where there are people is always a risky thing, if you don’t have any sort of capacity for course correction. Here, though? If that were a 200 foot fall? It would take about 3.5 seconds to reach the ground, all she really had to do was aim for someplace presently empty.
Deterrent’s kinda bullshit though. We don’t have any indication that a harsh justice system actually works as a deterrent to crime. If we wanted to deter crime, we would be addressing poverty and things like institutionalized racism.
You mean… rewarding criminals?
Only 99% confident that you’re joking, so: Addressing poverty would not remove all crime but it would (IMHO) remove all the crimes that get done out of desperation.
And what about all those ‘born or living in poverty’ who have managed to make a success out of their lives without resorting to crime?
And what about those who commit crime who aren’t poor nor ‘oppressed’?
What about them? Just because one guy can do it doesn’t mean everyone can do it.
Or that could be stated: Just because one guy can do it doesn’t mean everyone would do it.
So you were not joking?
1. You mean beggars and homeless people who die the first time they become seriously sick? Or what kind of success do you mean that includes still being poor? And by “poor” I mean so poor that they don’t know how to feed themselves during the next day.
If there is someone who falls into poverty or is born poor and manages to get out of it by their own means and without committing crimes, all praise to ’em. But how many of the poor can do that. The word “poverty” would have a different meaning if the vast majority of poor people could get out of it on their own within a short time. I’m not denying that there are success stories, I deny that there is a somewhat remarkable number of success stories, say, 20%.
2. Those are the ones to which “addressing poverty” wouldn’t apply anyway. But with the others (who commit crimes out of desperation) “removed” from committing crimes, you can concentrate on those better.
“Crimes of desperation” – there are exceedingly few of those in the US. People aren’t stealing to get food – that is not a statistically significant portion of crime in the US.
If it were, you might have a point. It’s not.
And yes, deterrence works. The guys in prison are being deterred while they are there.
You’re not wrong that SOME people do use a stint in prison to learn to be better criminals – learning from the more experiences criminals there. There is indeed room for improvement.
But for a significant number of criminals, simply locking them up until they are late 30s to mid 40s is the single most effective way to reduce crime – they aren’t interested in change, but crime is primarily a young man’s sport.
Yes, that’s horrible. I don’t like it. But reality doesn’t care if I like it or not.
Except where “I’m desperate because I need to steal something to sell for drug money.” There’s a bit of that kind of desperation.
That’s simply wrong. No other developed country has our prison population, and yet their crime rates are on average the same or lower. So unless Americans are somehow genetically predisposed to commit more crimes, deterrence is demonstrably not the solution you think it is. If it were, everyone else would need to use it the way we do.
I’m not arguing that we don’t have problems… but you’re dangerously close to conflating culture with government systems when you compare different nations. You can’t compare everything across the board. Area, culture, lifestyle, and media all play a massive role. Reduce the variables: compare poverty and crime rates from the Ozarks to Detroit, or backwoods Alabama to LA and you’ll start to see the role culture plays. For instance, you remove crime/murder stats from the top 10 offending US cities and all of a sudden the US is one of the safest places in the world.
I wish Dave’s comment on no one changing a mind on the internet was less true than it is. I hope that people on this board see that we’re all pretty much arguing to help make things better. The US’s national issues mainly result from the idea that we’re all out to swindle/oppress/kill each other – but we’re not. However, that idea is being promoted by the people who actually are; divide and conquer.
Government systems are a product of culture. Our massive prison population is a direct result of lots of American wanting a “tough on crime” government. I mean, just scroll through this comment section.
Speaking of comparisons, it’s not really true that the US is particularly safer outside cities. There are fewer rural violent crimes in absolute terms, obviously, but the drop when you look at it per capita is not all that large. In 2018, by way of example, the rural violent crime rate actually rose ABOVE the national average.
I would say our problems primarily stem from prioritizing making sure that other people don’t get anything more than they deserve, over making sure that everyone gets their needs met. Fear of free riders leads to a loss of efficiency, and you end up with free riders anyway as people manipulate and exploit the accounting system.
Yes, G, that’s totally exactly what is being said. The only possible alternative to the current model is rewarding criminals.
Uh, no, it isn’t. What on Earth gave you such a silly idea?
Oh, wait, my bad, you were being sarcastic. So hard to tell these days…
S’alright.
You’re not wrong. The Poms tried it in the late 1600s and late 1800s with transportation to America and Australia. (We need to note that simply stealing a loaf of bread just didn’t cut the mustard, all that got you was a day in the stocks.) The transportees were serial offenders, ranging from habitual aggro through massive poaching, highway robbery and the like. Any capital crime got you a vist to the hangman.
Transportation utterly failed to reduce crime in those days, but better employment and rising living standards were brilliantly successful.
So, what did you do to statistically remove the many effects of transportation of habitual offenders on improving employment and living standards?
Removing habitual offenders from the population has multiple effects that would improve the average ability of the remainder to hold better jobs, and lack of theft and property destruction by itself improves the standard of living and allows for a virtual cycle, relative to non-transportation.
Since we only have one past to describe, arguing in either direction is largely a matter of deciding what you want to be true, and then proceeding post-hoc.
Ahem… That should be “late 1600s TO THE late 1800s”.
My comment was a very condensed flyover of a complex social problem. In perspective, the population of England and Wales in 1600 was about 4 million. By 1800 the population of Britain was 9 million. By 1850 it was around 20 million. About 15 million people left Britain between 1815 and 1914.
English justice through the ages was complex and uneven. However, government spending was as chaotic then as it is now, and prisons were never high on the list. Every person transported was one less burden on the penal system.
We need to understand that during this time period England (and then Britain) was entering the Industrial Age, becoming the first industrialised country in the world. It was this fetid society that generated the employment and wealth that led to the largest empire the world has ever seen, or ever will see. The number of people transported was surprisingly small compared to the growth of the nation. North America received about 50,000, while Australia got about 162,000.
Does explain a few things about America & Australia, though.
(Said the American, tongue planted firmly in her cheek)
Want to address poverty? Outlaw the teachers’ unions that have turned the inner-city school into sinkholes of ignorance.
So the solution to poverty is further weakening workers.
Drink your gin.
Give control of the schools and the curriculum back to the parents. The move away from local control, from the 1930’s on, produced SOME good, but from the 1970’s it began to calcify. The Teachers’ Unions promote making things easier for mediocre teachers — making them hard to fire, hard to hold accountable – and fight like hell to obstruct any alternatives to the core public school system. Frankly, the difference between the teachers’ unions and a criminal conspiracy to defraud the public is largely cosmetic.
I, personally, would favor a voucher system. It wouldn’t be perfect, and over time it would calcify just as badly as the current system has. That’s pretty much the nature of human social systems. But it would be an improvement for decades.
Not bloody likely :[ In Oz the only good thing parents achieved was to get corporal punishment removed. (The preferred version of corporal punishment was to cane the palm of the hand, which resulted in long-term crippling injuries with late complications like arthritis.)
The total lack of political and religious education in Oz schools was due to uneducated parents deeply suspicious of the government “brainwashing” the pupils. One aspect of US schooling I always admire is the ritual of standing up in class and singing the National Anthem every morning, and the pupils’ involvement in electing class representatives to the School Council.
But at least Oz pays teachers properly, a good living salary.
“So the solution to poverty is further weakening workers.”
No, Bharda, the solution to a “non-profit” serving themselves using the the “workers” you supposedly care about as disposable props to get more money is to remove the power from the non-profit that is doing that horrible thing.
The inner city students are getting a HORRIBLE education (if any at all), and the self-serving teachers’ unions are a big part of the problem. They have no penalty for failing at the supposed primary goal.
And as long as there is no penalty for that failure, they will keep failing, as failing provides them better opportunity to ask for more money than success.
Any human social system calcifies over time. Where local school boards had the power to shake things up, the public schools did ok for a long time. But from the late 1960’s on, more and more decisions were imposed from farther away. One could make a case that the Liberal Progressives (who here at their roots racists and snobs; read up on that great Progressive icon Woodrow Wilson if you don’t believe me) wrecked the lower level public schools deliberately, but I am reluctant to ascribe to malice what is adequately explained by the confluence of stupidity and good intentions. The fact remains that multiple examples of small, charity based schools show that inner city children from bad areas can be better educated for less money than the public schools manage.
A universal voucher system won’t work as well; the parents (or the students) must be motivated for any educational system to work well, and many just aren’t. But the current system of public education thwarts all but the MOST motivated, and that must be stopped.
Deterrence is as much about deterring the victim of one crime (say, theft) from becoming the perpetrator of the next (say, revenge murder) as it is about deterring some third party from committing more theft.
If we didn’t lock up the thieves, we’d have more assaults and murders – and the fact that the thieves would be the victims does not make that okay, because people do not reliably limit themselves to anything like proportionate justice. The judicial system is there to keep people from taking personal revenge, because personal revenge tends to continue indefinitely and escalate and that’s more harmful over time.
*looks at the numbers*
So….. how’s deterrence working out for ya?
Better than if we didn’t.
You can look at the “catch and release” due to COVID to see that directly, unless you want to stick your fingers in your ears, close your eyes and sing “loolooloolooloo”.
What we do now deters crime a lot. Is it the best possibly? Of course not; we live on planet Earth.
That is demonstrably untrue. Every other developed country on the planet has a VASTLY lower prison population per capita than the US, and yet somehow they’re not drowning in high crime rates.
China.
How in the fuck do we have higher incarceration rates, and also higher crime rates, than the big brother bogey man country?
“China.
How in the fuck do we have higher incarceration rates, and also higher crime rates, than the big brother bogey man country?”
1) China lies its ever-loving butt off. Believing their claims on anything is even dumber than believing the US government, and that’s D-U-M dumb! (Just kidding, I know there’s another M.)
2) A bullet to the head is cheaper than incarceration. There’s some serious “deterrence” for you.
Most developed countries are mono-cultural. Culture does a lot of heavy lifting for controlling crime. The US is both multi-cultural and we have conflicting ideas on all sorts of things.
As an international traveler who has witnessed a lot of crime and even a murder, then checked to see if those were reflected in the stats let me just say, Samuel Clements was right: the stats are a lie.
Regardless, your comment is non-sequitur to recidivism and criminal deterrence. We flushed out convicts, released those we did catch, and crime went up. There may be a better way; but keeping the convicts in prison does help deterrence. Both things can be true at the same time. …that was Dal’s entire point.
You want to push the idea that other nations do it better… So, what’s the better way?
*Jagged* below has got most of it.
There’s no point in having savge “deterrent” penalties if you can’t catch the perpetrator; and the value of harsh deterrence falls rapidly if certain privileged classes can afford better (or any) representation in court; and if the police are biased against the physical appearance of certaing classes.
the only thing that works is the absolute certainty of being righteously pinged by the police and very pronmptly tried in court. When those two things are in alignment, crime rates fall.
Unfortunately, Oz is nearly as bad as the US, the only difference being that we have only 7 police services: each of 6 States, and the Feds who (mostly) look after Commonwealth crimes and the 2 Territories. The Feds are in no way comparable to the FBI, as the State Police services share a lot of information and work together.
I’ve always an especially cynical chuckle at the notion that, “the law forbids equally the rich man and the poor from sleeping under bridges.”
Deterrence doesn’t work because no one expects to get caught and just causes an escallation of violence.
If you define “punishment” as “revenge”, then it’s a tautology.
The difference is that punishment is designed to deter the event from happening again, whereas revenge is primarily for the feelings of those who were harmed.
Both of which are completely valid functions of society.
If the purpose of punishment is to deter the behavior, then what we have in America is DEFINITELY revenge rather than punishment.
Seriously, we don’t do anything decrease recidivism. We don’t even try. We KNOW that our prisons do nothing to discourage reoffense and practically guarantee that an prisoner is going to return to a life of crime, and the powers that be mostly don’t seem at all interested in changing that. That’s doubly true for the “tough on crime” folks.
Seriously, how do you think we ended up with a 95% recidivism rate on the highest per-capita prison population in the world? It’s because our criminal justice system cares only about revenge, not deterrence.
And profit.
Seriously… no one has commented on the prison bit yet?
Actually Dave, you’re right on the money. That is how the system works. Some states/countries like Texas, Norway, Sweden have been working really hard to get their reform up to snuff but it’s a really hard fought battle. People would sooner see people punished and let out at the end of their sentence rather than preventing them from doing it again.
I think this is one of the least controversial statements you’ve made and calling out the state of prison reform not just in the US but around the world, imho, is a good move.
Is there any chance you can do a few cartoony spoofs? I miss them ;_;
Ah… but Justice isn’t reform, nor is it deterrence. Justice is paying for what you did. If you’re happy to pay the price, you do it again.
Revenge… that’s a whole different animal. That’s hurting/punishing beyond the fair call of justice. All these comments are talking about at least 4 different things: justice, revenge, deterrence, and Profit. When you add in recidivism, freedom, public perception and our government’s corruption it’s amazing we’re even able to communicate with each other.
Most people are arguing the same point without knowing it. Yes, our system is screwed-up. Honestly, I don’t believe we can change it until we give up the idea of full justice and revenge when looking at crime. You can’t truly reform without offering mercy, and Profit and revenge are out of the picture completely. Deterrence? Simple: you have to enforce all the laws, all the time, on all the people. Saldy, this means that all public figures, (politicians, celebrities, rich, etc.), must be seen not just being caught, but paying for their crime.
The problem with the plan for the state to be lenient/merciful to criminals (especially violent offenders – rapists, murders and the like) is that the Justice System ceases to work as a deterrent to vigilantism if it is not seen to offer credible consequences for crimes. An example to illustrate – hypothetically, if someone kills my kid and is sentenced to 2 years of all-expenses-paid on-the-job training and counseling? I’m going to wait those 2 years until the killer gets out, for my turn to pay that same price.
The Justice System is an awful system, and awful to try and run. But vigilante justice is so much worse.
I’m not sure any country has sentences as little as 2 years for murdering a child. That’s just a straw man.
What you don’t want to be doing is turning petty criminals into a recruitment system for serious organised crime. Part of that is having a focus on reform, part is the old saying that prevention is better than the cure.
This is something the Tories have very much gone backwards on in the UK, cut all the various youth support services in deprived areas and then wonder why the crime rates have gone up. Funny thing is they’re even rubbish at the flog em and hang em part having already ‘defunded’ the police to the tune of about 30% since 2010 and the justice system even more so, result being it can take 3 years or more for a case to actually get to court. Or they’re not rubbish and they’ve actually worked out that all they need to do to keep their voters happy is to claim they’re being tough on crime, increase a few maximums for sentences, get the compliant, mostly Murdoch owned press to parrot it out, the toothless BBC to gloss over it and job done.
It was not a straw man as I was not claiming that anyone has laws that lax. I was employing Reductio ad absurdum to illustrate the fine line that a justice system has to walk – there are negative consequences for being either too lenient or too strict.
That’s more of an argument to make sure that, whether punitive or reform based, prison lengths should be based on “has this person learned their lesson” rather than an arbitrary length. As is, we have the worst of both situations. Ridiculously lenient for advantaged (emblematic example being the couple who gave their baby cocaine and didnt get any prison) and ridiculously overboard for the disadvantaged (three strikes giving life for stealing gum, mandatory minimums being slanted up for weed and “black” drugs, and down for cocaine and “white” drugs)
Prison never works as a deterrent. This also nullifies Stodgy Codger’s point about being prepared to pay the cost. That’s just naive and wishful thinking. Criminals don’t care about the sentence that they’re likely to get, they care about how likely they are to get caught… or frankly don’t care at all. America… in some states… has some of the highest sentences in the world… they also have some of the harshest punishments, yet crime has hardly been higher. Instead of calling for rehabilitation they call for harsher prison sentences. In many places the length of prison sentences is far in excess of what should be needed, top off with compensation claims and we have revenge.
What you’re arguing is about whether justice is actually used or not. Usually where we see vigilantism, it comes from two angles. People who don’t think that a person suffered enough (Revenge) or People who think that the person remains a criminal rather that not being a criminal. You can see this with how people used to treat homosexuals. That was a crime and it was also considered morally repugnant. What justice needs to do is have a process for taking criminals and turning them into better people. Vigilantism rarely if ever manages this and neither does justice, because they use the same tool: revenge, fear, pain, loss. From oodles of research we know that all of these things are very poor teachers and can often lead to unexpected outcomes (better criminals).
In a follow up comment to Steve K, you make reference to having a balanced idea of justice, not too lenient and not too strict. I agree with you wholly on this point, but idea is only useful if we work at rehabilitation and maximum sentences not minimum sentences. The law should only do as much as is necessary to rehabilitate the individual and return them to society. That’s how I’d like to be treated… as if someone were offering a second chance to do better.
“… until we give up the idea of full justice …”
At least one judge has been recorded telling a plaintiff “Do not ask for justice here. You may get it.”
Ah yes, one of the famous Backhanded Blessings: “May you be treated as you truly deserve.” Ranking alongside “May you come to the notice of those in authority” and “May you be given exactly what you ask”, but still a way behind “May you live in interesting times” in terms of widespread recognition.
“Revenge based justice system.”
.
.
No, that sounds accurate. And when you factor in the fact that all you really need to stay out of prison is lots of money – you could even say it’s an ‘oppression based justice system.’
Notice that when Dabbler says “Come on, Max. Seriously?”, Maxima in the next panel without saying a word had her face saying “She’s not exactly wrong.”
Replace “Revenge” by “Punishment” and it’ll become much easier to recognize.
Exactly. Where public revenge acts as a deterrent against others and punishment acts as a deterrent against the same miscreant.
While I do think Americas for profit prison system is insane, I think the “revenge” system is a better system then going “oh you promise to not try and kidnap any of our people any more, guess you go free then”
We could risk having a bunch Stygans coming to earth, wrecking havoc and then saying sorry before leaving because they wanted to fight someone strong.
It’s just as much preventing others from doing the crime as it is stopping the same person doing it twice.
Spaces however seems to chose the “If you risk swift and immediate death, then there is less chance you start something” option, so really Pot meet Kettle.
Yeah, the main place Xuriel (and Cora and Detla) have to stand on in this regard is that if you do like they do and just kill people who transgress, without going through all that trial and jury stuff, the recidivism rate drops a whole lot compared to our system.
Well thats really easy to overlook, the legal system really needs some tweaking because just throwing someone in the jail for some time never really solve anything
Also: I take several minutes to Ours in customize you character screen… the more sliders it has the more time i take
Sadly, there are those who will never conform to the requirements of a peaceful society and will always see others as being only there to provide things for them to take.
They have no consideration for others or their property and your life is meaningless to them.
In the ‘pre-whiteman’ societies people strain to compare today’s to, they would have been executed or banished to live by themselves on a remote island or in the wilderness.
It’s unfortunate but there are some who simply cannot and will not be ‘rehabilitated’ and none of them will change their ways until they themselves decide it’s in their best interests, and many times not even then.
I think that on this topic when people offer their learned opinions they should also state how much hands-on experience they have working with actual criminals (not something you read somewhere) on a day-to-day basis before professing to ‘understand’ them and say why protecting society from predation is such a bad thing and ‘being held accountable for your actions is wrong’.
25 years
Punishing millions to keep the very few Hannibals that exist in the world under lock and key (which is patently ineffective, btw; most of these monsters are just CEOs and politicians who do their inhumane acts on small islands they can afford to fly to whenever the urge hits, ala Epstein) seems like just a TERRIBLY designed system, especially when it’s profit-driven.
Your pretense that the “millions” did nothing to be there, and that the only people who should be locked up are “Hannibals”, is quaint.
How many cannibal humans and rampant CEOs do you think there are in Baltimore, to rack up that body count?
If you mean Baltimore, Maryland, then there were 348 homicides in 2019. Compare that to these examples of “holy crap these corporations actually hired mercenaries to murder people, and destroyed the lives of children”
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/occidental-lawsuit-re-colombia/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8090493.stm
https://www.mic.com/articles/89447/a-huge-corporation-just-got-away-with-murder-and-it-sets-a-scary-precedent
https://sustainablepulse.com/2015/05/25/sri-lankas-new-president-puts-immediate-ban-on-glyphosate-herbicides/#.VWTdf0aJjBX
If you mean Baltimore, Maryland, there were 348 homicides in 2019. I just made a post that seems to have disappeared with links to articles about corporations murdering a LOT more than that (possibly removed because of the number of links, or because of one of the links was flagged for some reason). Including examples of corporations hiring mercenaries to kill people. A quick internet search will bring all that up.
Zero experience working with criminals, unless you count counseling (and protecting self from) addicts.
Naive folks who think there’s no value in locking anyone up should be “encouraged” to host addicts in their home and/or neighborhood for a couple of years. I give them 3 months, tops, before they adjust their views closer to reality.
Same with a couple of other criminal segments.
Well you do know that in the 19th Century you could literally buy Coffee laced with Opium for medical reasons. A British PM used to drink it.
This changed because of the Cotton growers in the U.S. in the early 20th century.
They saw hemp as competition so lobbied to get Marijuana outlawed, which got hemp outlawed as well as they’re the same/similar plants.
That led to Opioids and other recreational drugs being outlawed, an explosion in drug related crimes, and the current situation.
To be fair, in the 19th century you could also beat and rape your wife and they had Jim Crow laws.
Not to knock the idea that recreational drugs being outlawed should have been met with equal or more resistance as alcohol being banned, but I rarely think the argument “we used to do it” is ever a good one on its own.
“We used to do it” isn’t a good reason, by itself, but “it used to work” is.
Actually, outlawing marijuana in the US didn’t happen until Prohibition was winding down, and there’s an argument that it was done as a covert ‘full employment for out-of-work prohibition agents’ measure. Also, it was pass amidst a blizzard of some of the nastiest ‘we gotta keep them goddamned niggers in line’ drivel. Stuff you’d expect to pick up off a folding table full of Klan crap at a seedy county fair.
I believe the Congressman who led that fight had a son die from OD on heroin.
Never heard that before. Not surprised. Personal tragedy tends to produce odd politics.
I couldn’t find it when I looked. My memory said that was in the twenties, and it looks like the first bill preventing “smoking opium” was in the oughts… but there’s so much history there with the opening of Japan, the China Opium wars of a half century before, and so on, that I don’t have time to track it down and put it in context again. When I read about it, several decades ago, I would not have been putting it in a world macro-historical and macro-economic context.
Look up Harry J. Anslinger on Wikipedia to get a good sense of why Cannabis was outlawed (hint: it’s a combination of racism and creating a problem to profit by solving it)
To be fair, the aliens probably have some kind of specialised technology to “re-educate” individuals.
I remember Demolition man where they put them on ice and had computers feed them training programs for more mundane jobs… imagine if you could not only train people in mundane jobs but also remove any training useful for, say, bounty hunter work.
Seriously, just with a gunshot, Cora was able to tap into some criminal’s brains and get feeds from their hearing and signt.
Actually, if someone DOES walk out of the door, not a problem. She’s absorbing kinetic energy, right? So she lands atop someone with the strength of a bubblegum-scented gnat fart.
Of course, she’s still heavy and standing on their head, so that might be a problem unless it’s one of the strong supers.
Mmff. Yep. Def needed more GlamourXuriel in my life. Who knew?
Umm quick question? How does Detla know Dabbler’s “real name” I know it is not her *real name* (that is completely different).
Actually, Xuriel is her real ‘real name’, and didn’t she say that during the press conference?
Before we cut to this scene, Dabbler said “Hi, I’m Xuriel.”
:)
Retconning at its finest
We’ve only seen the slice of Xuriel’s life that happens to intersect (more or less) with Sydney’s. For all we know, she’s a minor celebrity in the Gamma Quadrant.
She was intentionally vague about being a space princess, and thus, by Sydney’s logic, probably is one.
Sure, we can argue about prison systems, but what’s up with Maxima’s hat?
I know. She covers up more when swimming that when walking through the office!
Feminine vanity. She looks bloody good in it.
actually, the hat is to cut down on the reflections. She mentioned that the first time we were seeing them at the pool. “Trust me, in direct sunlight, your retinas should give thanks for my modest swim attire.“
I’m sorry, i only remember xuriel’s suit from that page ;)
…uuummmm, someone on the prior page mentioned that outsiders like Detla here are NOT supposed to see Sydney’s orbs in upgrade mode. Tension intensifies… Unless Detla’s mask works indeed like an AR visor and thus hides the skilltree from sight, stuff’s gonna BOIL.
What? Everyone at the press conference saw Sydney’s balls start to wildly spin and display their glory to the world, so doubt that’s news to anyone
Nope! Remember, at the restaurant Max brought up that very fact & dabbler revealed that it cannot be seen on camera since her cyber eye couldn’t see it.
The difference here is, it’s highly unlikely that someone back at the press conference would give a crap about the grid both at the moment and afterwards, and Detla is NOT an Earth resident. Remember how Cora said that Sydney could very much trigger an interstellar war if her baubles were actual Nth tech?
Agree that Detla is a higher risk than reporters, but I can’t imagine any of the humans reporting on the world’s first supers not being extremely interested in Halo’s skill tree. More than a passing interest to even the traditional news folks, but any celebrity / nerd channels would be clamoring for every detail no matter how small.
Knowing of the existence of the Skill Tree is one thing. Being privy to the discussions about what they think each point might do and which one to choose is quite another. Arguably the entire press corps has already been accidentally read in to ‘existence-level’ clearance. But the ‘analysis-level’ discussion can be delayed until Sydney can get Maxima, Zephan, Krona, Xuriel, Spex, and potentially anyone else relevant in a secure venue.
It’s obvious that prison doesn’t stop crime. That’s a myth. It’s part of the same myth that makes some drugs illegal.
The revenge system does not deter criminals. Revenge just makes our animal side feel good. and gets votes for dishonest politicians. All the evidence is that it makes criminals worse people and better at being criminal. Prisons are training grounds for crime, and destroy moral values by surrounding people with psychopaths.
If you actually want to cut down crime, you have do some real work. You have to work out why kids commit crimes and why adults do. Then you have to think through what would stop them doing it again. And what would stop other people from copying them.
There are thousands of well drafted reports which answer these questions. They rarely allow for revenge, and their recommendations rarely make sense to people who don’t like reading hard words. Unfortunately, those people vote for certain kinds of politician, and those politicians refuse to implement the reports.
And crime gets worse, and jails get more full.
Oh yes, because everyone knows that criminals aren’t bad people and they don’t want to steal your things that you worked for, “The Man” held a gun to their heads and forced them to commit crimes
More like they had every other avenue cut off by systemic issues until they feel they only have one option left, and that’s not even getting into the overwhelming number of cases where it’s a racist and greedy cop making bank on overtime filing the paperwork.
I’ve known several career criminals. I suspect you don’t. In every case, “they felt they only have one option left” had absolutely nothing to do with it. They’d keep doing it even if you gave them a winning lottery ticket.
Watch the film “Goodfellas” for some insights. “As long as I can remember, I wanted to be a gangster.” Remember that it’s based on the memoirs of a real-life mobster (Nicholas Pileggi).
Most criminals are far more like Pileggi than they are Jean Valjean. They’re driven by an arrogant entitlement and callous disregard for others, not angelic desperation.
I mean there are definitely some people who are just bad. Your Jeffrey Dahmers, etc.
But higher rates of education and income are statistically linked to lower rates of crime, and there’s strong evidence that improving education, as well as addressing issues like poverty and mental health, reduce crime rates.
There are also prison systems in other countries that focus on rehabilitation rather than simple punishment/isolation, which have very low rates of recidivism.
Educated people who aren’t worried about money don’t generally commit crimes. In this day and age, it seems almost silly to try to deny that.
Less that there’s any kind of idea that the system forces it and more that there are many reports out there with excellent research and recommendations on how the system can more effectively and efficiently discourage or avoid crime. but they’re difficult reading and complicated answers.
Everyone can easily understand “we set punishments to discourage crime and enforce them, if you want to discourage more crime, set harsher punishments”. It’s an easy sell to the greater populace and for politicians. And to be fair it does work to SOME extent.
But look under the hood and you realise its about $100,000 of tax payer dollars, per year to keep an inmate locked up. They try to save money by reducing investment in rehabilitation activities and push to release criminals to get released early to save more money, because people notice the crime, the arrest, the trial and the sentence but only pay attention to reduced sentences and early releases for the biggest cases.
Compare that to just ONE research program and report that gave some government paid daycare to poor, single mothers and saw nearly a 650% return on investment over 30 years when accounting for less crime, impact from crime, cost to police, convict and incarcerate, less reliance on government funding in future and greater income to pay more tax.
…Except it’s too complicated to sell, people storm about government handouts and no-one wants to wait 20-30 years to see the full benefits mature when elections only turn over every 3-5 years.
Return on investment is a difficult concept for most people, whether it’s about money or something else. Any strategy based on minimizing investment without considering return is almost certainly a death spiral.
So much bullshit is spouted by both sides of this debate that it’s really hard to pin down much. It APPEARS that in the 90’s to fairly recently while prisons were filling up, crime was dropping. No agreement whatsoever on degree of connection.
But when it is perceived that crime is not punished, IN THE US (where civilian ownership of guns is not outlawed), vigilantism rises. If the state does not punish perceived criminals, the citizenry will/
Just a thought.
C. S. P. Schofield – Can you point to the evidence for this?
All the evidence collected seems to point the other way. It always has. Jailing people has does not create a drop in routine crime over a long term period. People who offend many times are not deterred by prison.
For some of them, prison is a good place to be, with a dry bed, guaranteed food and a higher level of safety. They even meet and make friends there. (These people may commit crimes to get to jail.)
For some it’s a badge of adulthood. They think real men do time. They learn their trade from those “real men”, and learn the values which will send them back again and again.
For some it’s irrelevant. They need cash right now for food, for drugs, or just to meet the rent so their kids stay off the street. The threat of prison is later. The emergency is now, and has to be dealt with.
And so on. You need to read real research, not political propaganda.
“Jailing people has does not create a drop in routine crime over a long term period. People who offend many times are not deterred by prison. ”
They are deterred by BEING IN prison.
Sadly, that’s single most effective means of preventing recidivism is simply locking the offender up until they are late 40s or so. Violent crime is a very much a young man’s sport, and few others.
Huge amounts of crime are driven by repeat offenders. Lock them up, throw away the key, crime goes down. Let them back out, crime goes up. This kind of experiment has been tried several times by our society just in my lifetime, and I’m not just incredibly old.
You hear it both in anecdotes, repeated far past the point of becoming data (“that rash of house break-ins we’ve had for the last 2 years? We caught one guy, and they just quit.”) and in actual stats of prison numbers compared to crime rates.
Rehabilitation indeed WOULD be better, and cutting the rehab programs is unfortunately an early-and-often budget cut target (because that money is needed NOW for politically-useful-but-completely-wasteful things, and that rehabilitation program will only help several years from now).
But your last line… yeah, go look in the mirror. The amount of crime for food is *minuscule* in this country, and the amount for “rent” (even with a fairly generous definition) is only very slightly higher. That is not remotely what drives the career criminals who drive our crime stats.
Deterrence is the removal of motive, or rather the substitution of a stronger counter-motive. Incarceration is simply the removal of opportunity, and of itself does nothing to address the underlying motives. It may serve as a deterrent to some who see the prison time as too high a cost (counter-motive) to justify following their motive, but it is evidently no deterrent to those who followed the motive despite that cost. And if it wasn’t a deterrent the first time, and nothing’s changed by the time they get out, then it won’t be a deterrent the next time.
Removal of opportunity is really effective deterrence.
He can want to do it all he likes. I don’t care. I can that he DOESN’T do it. And for career criminals, the way to do that is to lock them up.
When “the next time” is far enough in the future, well, deterrence successful.
“Lock them up, throw away the key, crime goes down.”
Lol, yeah, just give everyone a life sentence. That totally won’t cause major social and economic damage that’ll have the crime rate skyrocket.
It’s genuinely amazing to see people look at America and come to conclusion that we don’t jail people long enough as it is.
“That is not remotely what drives the career criminals who drive our crime stats.”
My man, the most common crimes in America are traffic violations, petty theft, and drug possession. Hardened, career criminals these be not.
“Lol, yeah, just give everyone a life sentence.”
That’s not what I said. I was rather specifically talking about “career criminals”, who are responsible for the lion’s share of the crime.
Now, *identifying* those “career criminals” as opposed to a young man who was raised poorly and has a good chance at rehabilitation as a good citizen… that is legitimately difficult.
“My man, the most common crimes in America are traffic violations, petty theft, and drug possession.”
And I’m not talking about those, and generally, neither is anyone else in this debate.
The “crime stats” we are talking about and caring about are generally “violent crimes” and home burglaries. Those are the “crime stats” we are talking about.
>I was rather specifically talking about “career criminals”, who are responsible for the lion’s share of the crime.
Do you have any evidence of this, whatsoever?
Because all the crimes I mentioned are often committed *again* several times after someone’s been arrested, making the people who do so repeat offenders. Is that what you would call a career criminal?
I suspect it’s the “law-abiding citizen” / “criminal” system of categorization at work here.
Crime stats, outside of a few nasty urban areas and overall, started dropping from (I believe) the mid-1980’s, and by 2016 were reaching lows not seen since the 1960’s.
Now, there are HUGE arguments as to why. One of the most persuasive arguments I’ve seen puts it on the aging population. Nobody has proof.
>ANYWAY, Detla is just repeating what Cora told her, which is especially rich considering Cora’s lethal ordnance approach to law enforcement. Dabbler obviously agrees though. Both of them are very okay with… eh, proactive self-defense, but they also think that once someone is in custody, throwing them in a wildly overcrowded for-profit prison is less than optimal
Hey now, I’m only here for the hot characters. How dare you introduce morally diverse and complex characters that make me think?
*shakes fist*
‘Double dog promise’ sounds infallible to me.
Indeed, and pushing her further by asking for a triple-dog promise immediately would’ve been a slight breech of protocol.
Poor human!
*ears droop and eyes mist up*
LOL. Ok.
Prison reform isn’t really reform based, in the US.
Sentencing isn’t fair if adjusted for race. Far more blacks are sentenced to prison for pot related offenses than whites despite the offense stats being about the same across racial lines.
(I.E. blacks and whites both enjoy the sticky icky. But blacks are imprisoned for enjoying a puff far more than whites are.)
Change my mind, if you want to lose to facts.
Oh, hell, so much bushwha has been spouted about illegal drugs off all kinds (by both sides; the ‘legalizing pot will solve all our problems’ people are deranged or lying, too)that I’m in favor of legalizing everything, and then waiting ten years to see what happens. The great unlearned lesson of Prohibition is that we can CHANGE laws that don’t work.
It has been proven to work, in places outside the United States.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-that-have-decriminalized-drugs.html
The main thing the Prohibition has proven is, if we were to outlaw education, we’d be able to colonise other star systems within the next 50 years. There hasn’t been as much blatant drunkeness and alcohol consumption in human history as during the Prohibition. Outlaw something and you both increase the problem exponentially and drive it into hiding where it can’t be assessed, let alone policed. And you’re lining the pockets of criminals in the process. Get rid of prohibition, legalise it with guidelines and regulations on purity control, location and limits and you are defunding criminal organisations while reducing consumption and preventing users getting killed by rat poison and other shit getting “cut” into the product. Win-win for everybody except criminal cartels.
I kind of doubt that there was a great deal more consumption during Prophibition (though there probably wasn’t a lot less either); data on black markets is ALWAYS highly suspect, either way. What Prohibition DID do was create the archetype of the Charming And Intelligent Drunk (Think Nick Charles for the THIN MAN films), which didn’t start to break down for decades.
Not at all sure that would translate to education. Getting drunk is easy. Becoming an autodidact is hard.
“Change my mind, if you want to lose to facts.”
Eh, it’s not nearly as simple as you make it out to be. How likely one is to be *caught* changes in multiple ways due to behaviours of the people, not just “the system”.
Really, the only part of the “the system” that definitely has a problem by race is in *sentencing* for crimes. You’re right on that part…
… but at the same time, the SEX disparity there is actually quite a bit worse, with men (the supposed “oppressors”) getting a FAR FAR FAR worse treatment than women for exactly the same crimes. So we obviously don’t do that part of the system well at all.
I will completely agree that the “war on drugs” has been an abysmal failure, as most attempts to outlaw things are (especially *very easy to make* things). At the same time, we have a legitimate desire and need to keep people in public mentally functional – a free society depends on that kind of thing. (And yes, that’s a pretty-dang-loose definition of “free”, which we still fit quite well thus far.)
Some form of “drug hotel” solution is the one that strikes me as potentially the least-bad option – subsidize the prices, even! Show up, check in, place your order, have it administered by a professional with clean equipment, enjoy! And then, we lock the door for X hours (depending on what you ordered), and you are free to go afterwards.
Everybody* can have what they want, and nobody* high in public. Win-win.
* for sufficiently generous definitions of those two words. It would, of course, not be remotely perfect. Welcome to humanity.
Heh, checking other posts before I post this, I see Kilravok posted a “win-win” line already… and yes, except for the cartels. Well, and certain politicians.
Cartel…politicians…what’s the difference? The only real difference between organised crime and government is, Government has more armed enforcers. The laws are made by whatever group can enforce them best. Voting between Democrats and Conservatised is about as free and democratic as voting between paying your extortion money to Scarface or Al Capone.
Bullshit. When statistics prove that an equal number of whites and blacks on the streets of NY city (just an example location) will be carrying a small quantity of pot, but the cops select to frisk the blacks at a higher rate, and then the courts select to convict at a higher rate, the “behavior of the people” you’re talking about isn’t the behavior of the populace. It is the behavior of the broken system that the populace has to deal with.
There’s a reason that “walking while black” (driving while black, whatevering while black) is a meme.
Even the “how often do members of group X get harsher sentences than members of group Y for offense Z” statistics aren’t nearly as simple as the people throwing them around try to make them out to be when trying to do a facile “therefore bias, QED” conclusion…
Things like “pot possession” sentences are highly dependent upon situations (e.g. when/where, how much, how discovered, under what circumstances, while doing what else, etc. etc. etc.), and these situational considerations are unlikely to be exactly the same for any group X vs group Y statistical groupings.
To confuse the matters even further, lesser offenses like pot possession are often plea bargain deals to take other offense(s) off the table and skip going to trial, so you’re not just asking “does group X get differential sentencing for the same single offense of pot possession”, you’re trying to draw (tenuous) conclusions about “does group X tend to get caught with pot while enaged in some *other* crime(s) more often than group Y…”
And so on.
Detla isn’t authorized to see TMH’s skill tree.
If she were to recognize something though that might be useful.
“… when every country that’s ever relaxed laws regarding recreational drug use sees massive drops in rates of addiction and overdose?”
Bwahahaha… Dave’s such a kidder.
Pretty much true. I assume you are making some kind of joke but I don’t get it. Even alcoholism was reduced post prohibition I believe. When you make being stupid illegal, you are basically advertising it as “This is what you do if you want to be really stup!!” Because of psychology involved, that is a choice that will be taken with some frequency, and add to the numbers who just feel a need to get wasted. Basically if you say, do this and we as a nation will take a personal interest in how you behave, then people will call you on it and say bet you won’t. It is a lie telling people you actually care. Better just to tell them Get as messed up as you want. We are not your mom and dad. Live your life and have chemical enhanced fun if that is enough to make you happy.
… the comic footnote could maybe not contain a trigger word as part of a joke?
Maybe “Beta Theta Pi” just didn’t seem as obvious.
Mr. Dave, the “Email me when new comments are added to this thread” plugin is broken. I can’t unsub via the enclosed link, the emails for this page just keep flooding in.
the rape factory bit at the bottom seems rather poor taste to me.
Poor taste or not, it is a common perception regarding prison. It may not be entirely accurate but I seldom hear a conversation about going to prison that doesn’t involve that idea.
Putting people in prison while making jokes about “their new cellmate Bubba” seems rather poor taste to me. Everyone takes it for granted that “Bubba” will be there, and what “Bubba” will do. Nobody ever questions the fact that we’re actually treating sexual assault as a legal punishment. Or the fact that maybe “Bubba” got that way because we MADE him by putting him in a cell with “Fleece.”
Target-based morality: in which right and wrong are determined by who an action is performed on, rather than the action being performed.
This is the exact reason why you’ll always see right wing sources ‘reporting’ on any run ins with the law that the latest victim of death by cop has ever had. It’s to foster the feeling that “Well, if that unarmed black kid was once caught shoplifting, then of course he deserved to be gunned down during that traffic stop by a cop who had no idea about that shoplifting record. We don’t tolerate criminals around here, no sir!”
From The Wizard of Id:
King: Any last words?
Condemned prisoner: Capital punishment doesn’t deter crime!
King (Walking away): I’ll believe that when I see YOU again!
Nice to see Dabbler in her human guise,also is the “good captain” Ray Cosmos!?
Cora, her last name is Zylstra. https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-754-and-your-race-smells-of-elderberries/
“Jeeze, I hope no one walks out the door to the pool right then. Maybe jump a little to the side there, Anvil.” If she has no kinetic energy when she is landing wouldnt that mean she falls as graceful as a feather anyway?
Am I weird for wanting a reference page that shows the orbs and their level-up diagram with all of the “already activated” nodes in one color, and all of the nodes Sydney activated since comic inception in another color…maybe even with the nodes being clickable links to the page where that node activation occurred? Because I definitely think that would help me keep track of what has happened and when. This comic is kind of long and my brain is kind of…SQUIRREL!…what was I saying?
Also, in the brief-but-still-took-too-long archives dive I just did to remember all of her previous level ups, it looks like she earned 5 points before this. One was spent on the lonely node on the comm ball, one was spent upgrading the energy blast to machine gun settings (that node wasn’t colored in on the last few pages though), one was spent leveling up flight, and one was thrown into the middle. However, the way things were worded in that last upgrade sequence, it sounded like she got two points to spend instead of the normal one, and she was going to spend the first on flight and the second was that middle segment…so does that mean she should have more flight nodes lit up? Or did I misread the whole alien world fight segment?
Based on your description, I think you missed one of the upgrades on Alar. Sydney got one pip while she was hiding from the first ‘Squidward’ Kaiju, which she spent on upgrading her ‘realspace’ flight speed and opening access to the suspected ‘stardrive’ branch. She then went back for round two, before deciding that discretion was the better part of valour when Squidward’s three friends turned up, and legged it a good way round the planet. At which point she discovered that she’d gained two more pips. The first was spent on unlocking the Causeways as a “(hopefully probably) warp drive”, and the second went on a speculation into the middle that hasn’t yet paid off (as far as we know).
There is a fan-made sitelet that maps out the Skill Tree, complete with popup/sidebar notes where known, but I’ve mislaid the link to it. If any subsequent readers have it, please share!
YES!! I WANT THE FAN-MADE THING!! Someone please gimme??
Also, I did catch those upgrades, but I was confused about how the two points were spent after the speed upgrade. So the “hopefully warp drive” was a second flight point spent in that sequence followed by the speculative middle point. Got it! Thanks for the explanation!
Also also, I still feel like this all means there should be more nodes lit up on her skill tree than what we’re seeing. No hate intended towards Dave with this (especially seeing as how he knocks himself on the most recent page for his struggles with consistency, so it’s not like he thinks he’s perfect at this stuff). This is just me trying to make sense of what’s going on.
I firmly believe that someone somewhere DID win an argument on the Internet.
Certainly a great many people THINK they did.
*grin*
It does happen.
I spent several years engaging in debate on a couple of polarizing-issue discussion forums. The regulars kept a running list of the people who had made a post along the lines of, “I used to be on side P, but after seeing the debates here for [long time] I’ve ended up switching to side Q.” Such posts averaged about one a month on each topic.
Interestingly, on both issues all the admitted converts were heading in one direction, no one admitted to switching the opposite directions. They happened to switch to the sides I was already on, so I took that as confirmation I was on the side with the better arguments and evidence.
Hey DaveB, any chance we could get a close-up of Sydney’s face as she’s screaming in Anvil’s arms?
Pretty sure we need that on a T-shirt.
#MoreGRRLMerch
The US justice system isn’t just about revenge, it’s also about profit. Not only do private prisons make money from the government by handling incarceration(and thus have a profit motive to lobby and bribe to ensure more people are locked up for longer; iirc they actually like getting the non-violent offenders in for as long as possible; turns out violent offeders are more of a headache and less profitible, so profit motive to get them back on the street. And you can forget about effective rehabilitation; re-offenders are good for profits), but prison labor – often *mandatory* – pays between a few dollars a day and NOTHING, while making big bucks for their modern day slave masters under the pretext of ‘rehabilitation” – how much of a farce this is can be shown by California’s prison firefighters, who until very, very recently(like this year or last I think?) were banned from working as firefighters upon release because criminal record, and even then probably only because of the state’s ever-worsening wildfire seasons.
Remember, the 13th amendment might ban slavery, but it specifically excludes convicts from that protection.
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
It’s not SLAVERY of convicts it condones, but INVOLUNTARY SERVITUDE, which is a distinction the 13th amendment makes. They can be forced to work, but they are not SLAVES.
“No involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime” — or, you know, tax day.
(Even if one wishes to quibble about whether taxation itself is equivalent to making you work for the government until “tax freedom day”, the record-keeping and form-filing requirements are required labor.)
“Taxation Is Theft”
Drink.
One could argue that while the declared tax rate is defined by bands of working and/or investment income, rebates, etc., the effective tax rate is defined as ‘all that, plus the working hours to assemble it’, so it’s already included.
Which would put some unintentional poetic justice into the tax-evasion industry. If your employer uses PAYE (so that your income tax is automatically paid in installments with each payslip) and you don’t have anything else significant to declare or claim, you don’t need to ‘pay’ much if any administrative time. If you want to reduce the amount you pay in explicit taxes, the amount you ‘pay’ in working hours increases.
I would argue that taxation itself isn’t so much “making you work for the government”, more like “paying your subscription for public services”. But that’s a tangent on your tangent which you’ve already characterised as a mere quibble, and this deep in a reply chain isn’t the place to start chasing it!
And the material difference is…what, exactly?
When slavery was legal, slaves were “Property” for life – The prisoners on a chain gang are only prisoners. Once they serve their sentences, they can go free. Do you really not see a difference?
No.
I really do not.
There are a number of reasons, but allow me to give you just one.
Carceral slavery is used to provide labor to private businesses, in a tremendous number of cases. Why should a private entity derive profit from prisoners? You can’t argue it’s about restorative justice, as the victim (assuming there is one) is not, usually, the one receiving the value of the coerced labor.
So to you, “I can do anything I want to you without repercussions” is the same as “You have to stay here and clean up trash on the side of the road”, and “a couple of years” is the same as “For life?” Weird.
*michael jackson popcorn gif*
Love me a good comment section brawl.
No you don’t.
Honestly, the aliens are probably showing restraint here, because they could comment on how much of the justice system is revenge against whole races and classes of people. But we humans are touchy on that subject, so…
If you want access to the shiny gold woman that can obliterate the capitol ships of the horrible radioactive space zealot hordes, you kinda hafta play nice-nice…
“…considering Cora’s lethal ordnance approach to law enforcement. Dabbler obviously agrees though. Both of them are very okay with… eh, proactive self-defense, but they also think that once someone is in custody, throwing them in a wildly overcrowded for-profit prison is less than optimal.”
This makes sense to me. I also think it would make sense to one of my favorite Machiavellian a$$holes:
“when your enemies defy you, you must serve them steel and fire. When they go to their knees, however, you must help them back to their feet.” -Tywin Lannister