Always be polite and considerate to the lower level administrative/service people. It costs you nothing and can make someone's day.
As Marty suggests, it can have big benefits for you, too. And not just admin folks. Perhaps the best thing I did, as someone (at least nominally) in Systems Programming, was to spend time with the computer operations people and listen to them.**
Operation folks get no respect. Even if the Systems Programmers are polite enough to them in passing, it's strictly superficial. But I found that they knew far more about the state of the systems than any monitor could tell me.
As an early warning system, they were unbeatable.
All it took was spending some time occasionally hanging out in Operations. Not only would they tell me, and show me, where things were deteriorating, after a while they would reach out when something didn't look right. Made my job a lot easier, and improved my performance too. I kept doing it, every place I ever worked.
It was helpful enough that my boss push the other members of our team to do the same. Pushed pretty hard. But they just couldn't be bothered to walk ten yards, go thru a door, and visit. I never understood it. I was willing to fly from San Francisco to Phoenix and spend a couple of days talking to all three shifts. But they just wouldn't budge.
** I still remember the first time that, as a very junior Systems Programmer at Bank of America in the mid-70s, I happened to be passing thru Operations and overheard somebody griping about something which was making their job difficult.
I did a little digging when I got back to my desk, found they were right, wrote it up, and got it fixed. Because, after all, I was in a position to get something done. Next time I was in Operations they were waiting for me. With lists! Because they'd found a channel where their problems would get addressed.
"Always be polite and considerate to the lower level administrative/service people. It costs you nothing and can make someone's day."
Being nice to lower level admin people somehow allowed me to have a career. As I needed emotional/environmental calm to function I somehow ended up lucky enough to get that support from the admin people. It was odd but they recognized how much I needed routine to deal with chaos and were always there to maintain it. I did, in turn, appreciate and respect them. And as I recently retired I find they are really all I miss about work.
Quite right. What are the other Cain's Laws?
"Always be polite and considerate to the lower level administrative/service people. It costs you nothing and can make someone's day." I once asked the waiter, when it was dessert time and based on a hint on the menu, if they had any single-barrel bourbons. She literally lit up, and started through the choices and their relative merits.
Quite right. What are the other Cain's Laws?
I suppose I should have written them down :^) They cover a wide range of topics, eg, "To the extent that the limits of technology and the budget will support, put the tricky parts in software." Following that one came close to getting me canned. What saved me was that it eventually got pushed high enough up the chain that my SVP could say to the other side's SVP, in front of the CEO, "But Mike's solution worked and we met the politically-sensitive goal. We're 18 months past the court-ordered deadline and your solution still doesn't work."
Since this is the recent open thread...
Mostly for wj, who purports to be an eventual user of what is currently a piece of toy software for dewarping images. After a small frenzy of coding today, here's a very simple-minded cut at color. I chose this image to see if it preserved the red-eye effect in the right eye. (After looking at the original Polaroid print under 5x magnification, this is surprisingly good.) Among the things on my mind as I kept cutting corners were: (a) how many serial color-space and gamma conversions am I ignoring here, and (b) how much information am I losing by forcing intermediate values back to eight-bit integers? Still, I'm not unhappy with the results. http://www.mcain6925.com/obsidian/dewarp/obsidian09.jpg
How high the floor and how to deliver it are open for discussion; anyone who argues against a floor is arguing for the pitchforks and torches to come out eventually.
Quite right. What are the other Cain's Laws?
Absolutist free-market ideology and anti-government rhetoric have poisoned the minds of too many. Ronald Reagan's trickle-down economics and his "nine most terrifying words" got "nice" people to buy into what it becoming a klepto-techno oligarchic feudalism.
I don't know how to convince people that they've been talked into becoming modern-day serfs when they blame everything on wokeness, immigrants, and what they think is socialism.
I distinctly remember GOP complaints (not just the WH imbecile*) that any insurance that is not a net win for the person insured is a scam (and those who pay more in than they get out are losers). In particular, if one does not get out (much) more out of social security/medicare/medicaid etc. than one has paid in, the system is a rip-off and thus needs to be abolished (iirc in favor of a private system that ideally guarantees that only those that run it get anything out of it, i.e. overhead should be at minimum 100%).
*I first mistyped that as imbevil ;-)
Interesting stuff. Thanks for the oblique correction on Revelation specifically, I'll try to take that on board.
I've ranted about libertarian shortsightedness in various comments, as well as discussing health care as well as the problems with the US system, but never combined the two. Reading stuff from Volokh about the ACA makes me wonder how a libertarian can imagine any system of provision of health care or insurance on any kind of general basis. Which then has me wonder how you could have any kind of compromise with someone who thinks that provision of care by society could never been taken as a positive right and that it was coercion to force people to take insurance.
We can afford, as a country, to simply give every person enough food to live on.
Hayek, writing in either the 1920s or 30s, said the US was so fabulously wealthy there was no reason anyone should want for adequate food, shelter, or medical attention. And that clearly the state had a role in providing those.
One of Cain's Laws™ says that modern societies need to establish a floor under outcomes, not just opportunities; not doing so will end badly. How high the floor and how to deliver it are open for discussion; anyone who argues against a floor is arguing for the pitchforks and torches to come out eventually.
Required disability insurance for seamen, too. But not farmers, or artisans, or merchants, or anyone else.
I'm sure a general public interest can be construed in there - most foreign trade was conducted by sea - but why just them?
Perhaps it was too difficult to assure an adequate number of people willing to be cod fishermen. That kind of insurance may have been seen as necessary to keep a major export industry going strong. No need for the carrot for other jobs.
Means testing requires an administrative state and the collection of a lot of very gameable data. I'm pretty sure it would cost less to mail the check to Bezos than it would to try to exclude him in order to keep the money only in the hands of the needy.
My personal take on what we typically call "welfare" programs - food stamps, Medicaid, etc. - is that they are best thought of as insurance.
Everybody pays in, but you generally only get a return if you need it. And needing it generally means you've come into some kind of bad luck. Or maybe done something stupid, but I'll leave it to a better mind than mine to try to define the fine line between whether bad luck and folly.
Most of pay for car insurance, health insurance, liability and fire insurance on our homes if we have them.
If you're lucky, you never get a dime back. But you're a dope if you complain, because sometimes you're not lucky.
And yeah, if sending Jeff Bezos a couple hundred bucks a month for groceries is somehow gonna make folks quite complaining about it all, I can live with that.
As long as he pays in at a rate comparable to his wealth and income. ;)
The tariff thing is idiotic. Not because tariffs are always or inevitably bad, but because they are being applied to correct a problem (trade imbalance) that is not necessarily a problem in the first place.
Not to mention that they are being used more to extort foreign policy goals (or, see Brazil, to benefit Trump's personal pals), rather than having anything to do with, you know, actual trade issues. Even if done by someone with a clue, that's a terrible use.
If you are going to give out food stamps, make sure that you cut some for Jeff Bezos.
That's actually not a bad idea. We have a hodgepodge of programs to support poor people, especially children, to attempt to get them enough to eat. They're better than nothing. But expensive to run, overlapping in places, and less than effective.
We can afford, as a country, to simply give every person enough food to live on. Maybe not prime rib every day, maybe not the junk food they love, but enough decent quality food for them to live on. Quite possibly for less money than we now spend, not least because we ditch the overhead of determining eligibility. If you're breathing, you're eligible.
Now most likely people like Bezos and Musk, or you and me for that matter, won't bother to collect the benefit. We can eat basically what we like without it. But still, it's worth doing.
Not that I'm optimistic about getting such a thing enacted. But the fact that it's not politically popular doesn't negate it's merits.
How the "general welfare" clause's interpretation has changed since the Constitution was written
It's interesting to consider the philosophical differences between, for example, Hamilton and Madison. Or between Jefferson and Adams. Etc.
But sometimes it's even more informative to look at what the early Congresses actually passed as law.
Before the US Code was compiled in 1926, laws passed by Congress were first published as a single document, then compiled into the United States Statutes at Large. They're available online at the Library of Congress (just follow the link). They're not as easily searchable as the US Code - the laws are just listed in chronological order as they were passed - but as casual reading they're really interesting. They give an insight into what the kinds of things that occupied the minds of Congress in the first 150 years of the nation.
A lot of the stuff is clearly in the general interest of the nation at large. And a lot of the stuff is of interest to, at best, only certain regions or industries.
The Second Congress, for example, seemed interested to a remarkable degree in the cod fisheries. Which was obviously of great interest to New England. And, which was a significant export industry at the time. But I'm not sure anyone south of Massachusetts got much out of it.
Required disability insurance for seamen, too. But not farmers, or artisans, or merchants, or anyone else.
I'm sure a general public interest can be construed in there - most foreign trade was conducted by sea - but why just them?
The difference between what people say and what they do can be illuminating.
"Academics are supposed to discover and promote counterintuitive, nonobvious ideas."
There's an old trope among (non-academic) lawyers that lawyering amounts to trying to prove that your ideas are NOT original. This may be outdated now, in light of the cavalier attitude toward precedent exhibited by the SCROTUS. (R for Roberts).
I am entirely with lj on this:
Jesus was mad at those who stayed in the middle, and on that point (and probably that point alone) am I Christ-like.
Y'all may have gathered as much from my rant on "deMAGAfication". No steroids involved there, BTW.
Wikipedia tells me this Ilya Somin character is a young (age 52) Jewish immigrant from the old USSR, which surely explains some of his views. But I gather he's not as opposed to Christianist fascism as I am. His lukewarm attitude toward "intuition" is, IMO, nothing but elitist arrogance.
Especially when it comes to justice (as opposed to The Law), intuition is all we have. Even if you intuit a deity whose edicts are not to be questioned or even interpreted, you -- a human being living among other human beings -- rely on "intuition" to define justice, or more specifically INjustice. Intuition is malleable, of course, and reshaping people's intuition is the overarching goal of the Vast Right-Wing Noise Machine.
This coming Saturday, August 23, there is planned a "March for Jesus" in Boston. Dollars to donuts, this is part of the VRWNM campaign to shape public intuition. If I had it in my power, I'd put up a huge billboard of my "What Color Is YOUR Jesus?" meme on the Common, just for the day. It would be interesting to see whether the marchers intuit a Scandinavian White, a Deportable Brown, or an Artificial Orange Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
--TP
PS: I am pleased to see that russell correctly calls it "Revelation" -- no "s".
Well, I suppose it all comes down again to the concept of purity. It would be great if everyone saw and agreed with the analysis of the underlying problem as laid out by russell - don't forget that I always said he should be ROTU.
But since this is unfortunately not the case, I believe the next best thing is to make aspects of the case to the greatest number of people, whether rich or poor, left or right, and hopefully among them some with power to influence the course of policy.
I know next to nothing about David Brooks, but he writes opinion pieces in the NYT, still one of the most influential media outlets in America, particularly I would have thought among the rich and powerful. If it takes such a piece from such a source to get part of the issue across to even a fraction of the currently unconvinced/unaware, this seems to me worthwhile.
Meanwhile, if Brooks is condescending, a narcissist, an adulterer, or the conscienceless discarder of a longtime wife for a younger woman, this seems to me irrelevant to the analysis of the problem of segregation, societal fragmentation and inequality. If we are quoting Jesus on this matter, didn't he also say Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?
How the "general welfare" clause's interpretation has changed since the Constitution was written, and the impacts those changes have had on the country. Evolution of "General Welfare" Clause
How the interpretation of the "general welfare" clause has changed since the Constitution was written, and how those changes have impacted the country. Evolution of "General Welfare" Clause
To piggy back on JanieM's criticism there: It has obviously not occurred to him -- or if it has, he declines to believe it -- that "benefitting someone in some way" might well benefit everyone else too, even if only indirectly. But then, some people don't seem to think that a happier, healthier populace could possibly be good for everyone. (For what definition of "good," he might ask...)
The general sense that I get of him and many other libertarianish folks is that every time they look at a public good, they start trying to convert it into smaller piles of private goods for which they can find deserving owners. It's the oft-quoted Thatcher bit about there being no such thing as society.
The power to spend money for the "general welfare" is a power to spend for purposes that benefit virtually everyone or implement other parts of the Constitution, not a power to spend on anything that Congress concludes might benefit someone in some way. The Supreme Court disagrees, and so do most legal scholars.
It has obviously not occurred to him -- or if it has, he declines to believe it -- that "benefitting someone in some way" might well benefit everyone else too, even if only indirectly. But then, some people don't seem to think that a happier, healthier populace could possibly be good for everyone. (For what definition of "good," he might ask...)
And then of course we get back to my longstanding question of: whose money (water, air, land, wealth of any sort) is it, anyhow? Does it belong to whoever grabs the most, or can the rest of us band together (as a government, perhaps) and insist on a relatively fair distribution?
On “David Brooks in Laodicea”
Always be polite and considerate to the lower level administrative/service people. It costs you nothing and can make someone's day.
As Marty suggests, it can have big benefits for you, too. And not just admin folks. Perhaps the best thing I did, as someone (at least nominally) in Systems Programming, was to spend time with the computer operations people and listen to them.**
Operation folks get no respect. Even if the Systems Programmers are polite enough to them in passing, it's strictly superficial. But I found that they knew far more about the state of the systems than any monitor could tell me.
As an early warning system, they were unbeatable.
All it took was spending some time occasionally hanging out in Operations. Not only would they tell me, and show me, where things were deteriorating, after a while they would reach out when something didn't look right. Made my job a lot easier, and improved my performance too. I kept doing it, every place I ever worked.
It was helpful enough that my boss push the other members of our team to do the same. Pushed pretty hard. But they just couldn't be bothered to walk ten yards, go thru a door, and visit. I never understood it. I was willing to fly from San Francisco to Phoenix and spend a couple of days talking to all three shifts. But they just wouldn't budge.
** I still remember the first time that, as a very junior Systems Programmer at Bank of America in the mid-70s, I happened to be passing thru Operations and overheard somebody griping about something which was making their job difficult.
I did a little digging when I got back to my desk, found they were right, wrote it up, and got it fixed. Because, after all, I was in a position to get something done. Next time I was in Operations they were waiting for me. With lists! Because they'd found a channel where their problems would get addressed.
"
"Always be polite and considerate to the lower level administrative/service people. It costs you nothing and can make someone's day."
Being nice to lower level admin people somehow allowed me to have a career. As I needed emotional/environmental calm to function I somehow ended up lucky enough to get that support from the admin people. It was odd but they recognized how much I needed routine to deal with chaos and were always there to maintain it. I did, in turn, appreciate and respect them. And as I recently retired I find they are really all I miss about work.
"
Quite right. What are the other Cain's Laws?
"Always be polite and considerate to the lower level administrative/service people. It costs you nothing and can make someone's day." I once asked the waiter, when it was dessert time and based on a hint on the menu, if they had any single-barrel bourbons. She literally lit up, and started through the choices and their relative merits.
"
Quite right. What are the other Cain's Laws?
I suppose I should have written them down :^) They cover a wide range of topics, eg, "To the extent that the limits of technology and the budget will support, put the tricky parts in software." Following that one came close to getting me canned. What saved me was that it eventually got pushed high enough up the chain that my SVP could say to the other side's SVP, in front of the CEO, "But Mike's solution worked and we met the politically-sensitive goal. We're 18 months past the court-ordered deadline and your solution still doesn't work."
On “Giving Away the Store”
Since this is the recent open thread...
Mostly for wj, who purports to be an eventual user of what is currently a piece of toy software for dewarping images. After a small frenzy of coding today, here's a very simple-minded cut at color. I chose this image to see if it preserved the red-eye effect in the right eye. (After looking at the original Polaroid print under 5x magnification, this is surprisingly good.) Among the things on my mind as I kept cutting corners were: (a) how many serial color-space and gamma conversions am I ignoring here, and (b) how much information am I losing by forcing intermediate values back to eight-bit integers? Still, I'm not unhappy with the results.
http://www.mcain6925.com/obsidian/dewarp/obsidian09.jpg
"
An interview with Netanyahu.
Asking Benjamin Netanyahu The Tough Questions
On “David Brooks in Laodicea”
How high the floor and how to deliver it are open for discussion; anyone who argues against a floor is arguing for the pitchforks and torches to come out eventually.
Quite right. What are the other Cain's Laws?
"
Absolutist free-market ideology and anti-government rhetoric have poisoned the minds of too many. Ronald Reagan's trickle-down economics and his "nine most terrifying words" got "nice" people to buy into what it becoming a klepto-techno oligarchic feudalism.
I don't know how to convince people that they've been talked into becoming modern-day serfs when they blame everything on wokeness, immigrants, and what they think is socialism.
"
I distinctly remember GOP complaints (not just the WH imbecile*) that any insurance that is not a net win for the person insured is a scam (and those who pay more in than they get out are losers). In particular, if one does not get out (much) more out of social security/medicare/medicaid etc. than one has paid in, the system is a rip-off and thus needs to be abolished (iirc in favor of a private system that ideally guarantees that only those that run it get anything out of it, i.e. overhead should be at minimum 100%).
*I first mistyped that as imbevil ;-)
"
Interesting stuff. Thanks for the oblique correction on Revelation specifically, I'll try to take that on board.
I've ranted about libertarian shortsightedness in various comments, as well as discussing health care as well as the problems with the US system, but never combined the two. Reading stuff from Volokh about the ACA makes me wonder how a libertarian can imagine any system of provision of health care or insurance on any kind of general basis. Which then has me wonder how you could have any kind of compromise with someone who thinks that provision of care by society could never been taken as a positive right and that it was coercion to force people to take insurance.
"
Hungry people don't stay hungry for long - RATM
"
We can afford, as a country, to simply give every person enough food to live on.
Hayek, writing in either the 1920s or 30s, said the US was so fabulously wealthy there was no reason anyone should want for adequate food, shelter, or medical attention. And that clearly the state had a role in providing those.
One of Cain's Laws™ says that modern societies need to establish a floor under outcomes, not just opportunities; not doing so will end badly. How high the floor and how to deliver it are open for discussion; anyone who argues against a floor is arguing for the pitchforks and torches to come out eventually.
"
Required disability insurance for seamen, too. But not farmers, or artisans, or merchants, or anyone else.
I'm sure a general public interest can be construed in there - most foreign trade was conducted by sea - but why just them?
Perhaps it was too difficult to assure an adequate number of people willing to be cod fishermen. That kind of insurance may have been seen as necessary to keep a major export industry going strong. No need for the carrot for other jobs.
"
Means testing requires an administrative state and the collection of a lot of very gameable data. I'm pretty sure it would cost less to mail the check to Bezos than it would to try to exclude him in order to keep the money only in the hands of the needy.
"
My personal take on what we typically call "welfare" programs - food stamps, Medicaid, etc. - is that they are best thought of as insurance.
Everybody pays in, but you generally only get a return if you need it. And needing it generally means you've come into some kind of bad luck. Or maybe done something stupid, but I'll leave it to a better mind than mine to try to define the fine line between whether bad luck and folly.
Most of pay for car insurance, health insurance, liability and fire insurance on our homes if we have them.
If you're lucky, you never get a dime back. But you're a dope if you complain, because sometimes you're not lucky.
And yeah, if sending Jeff Bezos a couple hundred bucks a month for groceries is somehow gonna make folks quite complaining about it all, I can live with that.
As long as he pays in at a rate comparable to his wealth and income. ;)
"
The tariff thing is idiotic. Not because tariffs are always or inevitably bad, but because they are being applied to correct a problem (trade imbalance) that is not necessarily a problem in the first place.
Not to mention that they are being used more to extort foreign policy goals (or, see Brazil, to benefit Trump's personal pals), rather than having anything to do with, you know, actual trade issues. Even if done by someone with a clue, that's a terrible use.
"
If you are going to give out food stamps, make sure that you cut some for Jeff Bezos.
That's actually not a bad idea. We have a hodgepodge of programs to support poor people, especially children, to attempt to get them enough to eat. They're better than nothing. But expensive to run, overlapping in places, and less than effective.
We can afford, as a country, to simply give every person enough food to live on. Maybe not prime rib every day, maybe not the junk food they love, but enough decent quality food for them to live on. Quite possibly for less money than we now spend, not least because we ditch the overhead of determining eligibility. If you're breathing, you're eligible.
Now most likely people like Bezos and Musk, or you and me for that matter, won't bother to collect the benefit. We can eat basically what we like without it. But still, it's worth doing.
Not that I'm optimistic about getting such a thing enacted. But the fact that it's not politically popular doesn't negate it's merits.
"
How the "general welfare" clause's interpretation has changed since the Constitution was written
It's interesting to consider the philosophical differences between, for example, Hamilton and Madison. Or between Jefferson and Adams. Etc.
But sometimes it's even more informative to look at what the early Congresses actually passed as law.
Before the US Code was compiled in 1926, laws passed by Congress were first published as a single document, then compiled into the United States Statutes at Large. They're available online at the Library of Congress (just follow the link). They're not as easily searchable as the US Code - the laws are just listed in chronological order as they were passed - but as casual reading they're really interesting. They give an insight into what the kinds of things that occupied the minds of Congress in the first 150 years of the nation.
A lot of the stuff is clearly in the general interest of the nation at large. And a lot of the stuff is of interest to, at best, only certain regions or industries.
The Second Congress, for example, seemed interested to a remarkable degree in the cod fisheries. Which was obviously of great interest to New England. And, which was a significant export industry at the time. But I'm not sure anyone south of Massachusetts got much out of it.
Required disability insurance for seamen, too. But not farmers, or artisans, or merchants, or anyone else.
I'm sure a general public interest can be construed in there - most foreign trade was conducted by sea - but why just them?
The difference between what people say and what they do can be illuminating.
"
"Academics are supposed to discover and promote counterintuitive, nonobvious ideas."
There's an old trope among (non-academic) lawyers that lawyering amounts to trying to prove that your ideas are NOT original. This may be outdated now, in light of the cavalier attitude toward precedent exhibited by the SCROTUS. (R for Roberts).
I am entirely with lj on this:
Y'all may have gathered as much from my rant on "deMAGAfication". No steroids involved there, BTW.
Wikipedia tells me this Ilya Somin character is a young (age 52) Jewish immigrant from the old USSR, which surely explains some of his views. But I gather he's not as opposed to Christianist fascism as I am. His lukewarm attitude toward "intuition" is, IMO, nothing but elitist arrogance.
Especially when it comes to justice (as opposed to The Law), intuition is all we have. Even if you intuit a deity whose edicts are not to be questioned or even interpreted, you -- a human being living among other human beings -- rely on "intuition" to define justice, or more specifically INjustice. Intuition is malleable, of course, and reshaping people's intuition is the overarching goal of the Vast Right-Wing Noise Machine.
This coming Saturday, August 23, there is planned a "March for Jesus" in Boston. Dollars to donuts, this is part of the VRWNM campaign to shape public intuition. If I had it in my power, I'd put up a huge billboard of my "What Color Is YOUR Jesus?" meme on the Common, just for the day. It would be interesting to see whether the marchers intuit a Scandinavian White, a Deportable Brown, or an Artificial Orange Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
--TP
PS: I am pleased to see that russell correctly calls it "Revelation" -- no "s".
"
Well, I suppose it all comes down again to the concept of purity. It would be great if everyone saw and agreed with the analysis of the underlying problem as laid out by russell - don't forget that I always said he should be ROTU.
But since this is unfortunately not the case, I believe the next best thing is to make aspects of the case to the greatest number of people, whether rich or poor, left or right, and hopefully among them some with power to influence the course of policy.
I know next to nothing about David Brooks, but he writes opinion pieces in the NYT, still one of the most influential media outlets in America, particularly I would have thought among the rich and powerful. If it takes such a piece from such a source to get part of the issue across to even a fraction of the currently unconvinced/unaware, this seems to me worthwhile.
Meanwhile, if Brooks is condescending, a narcissist, an adulterer, or the conscienceless discarder of a longtime wife for a younger woman, this seems to me irrelevant to the analysis of the problem of segregation, societal fragmentation and inequality. If we are quoting Jesus on this matter, didn't he also say Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?
"
How the "general welfare" clause's interpretation has changed since the Constitution was written, and the impacts those changes have had on the country.
Evolution of "General Welfare" Clause
"
How the interpretation of the "general welfare" clause has changed since the Constitution was written, and how those changes have impacted the country.
Evolution of "General Welfare" Clause
"
To piggy back on JanieM's criticism there: It has obviously not occurred to him -- or if it has, he declines to believe it -- that "benefitting someone in some way" might well benefit everyone else too, even if only indirectly. But then, some people don't seem to think that a happier, healthier populace could possibly be good for everyone. (For what definition of "good," he might ask...)
The general sense that I get of him and many other libertarianish folks is that every time they look at a public good, they start trying to convert it into smaller piles of private goods for which they can find deserving owners. It's the oft-quoted Thatcher bit about there being no such thing as society.
"
And as to this passage that lj quoted:
It has obviously not occurred to him -- or if it has, he declines to believe it -- that "benefitting someone in some way" might well benefit everyone else too, even if only indirectly. But then, some people don't seem to think that a happier, healthier populace could possibly be good for everyone. (For what definition of "good," he might ask...)
And then of course we get back to my longstanding question of: whose money (water, air, land, wealth of any sort) is it, anyhow? Does it belong to whoever grabs the most, or can the rest of us band together (as a government, perhaps) and insist on a relatively fair distribution?
"
Okay, I'll see what I can do about the archive link. Ugh.
(Fixed, I think.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.