JayB

I agree with the decision on the grounds that the motive for restricting climbing at the site was "pursuant to a secular purpose - the preservation of a historic cultural area." When it comes to public lands, there are various places and resources that have a cultural, historical, or ethnographic significance that provides a secular basis for their preservation. Any time any group attempts to exclude others or restrict their activities on the basis of legal arguments that have their basis in the assertion of their "religious rights" is one that courts should dismiss out of hand. If Mormons asserted their "religious rights," and attempted to exclude the public from, or restrict the public's activities on public lands on this basis, then they'd also enjoy your enthusiastic support, would they?

When anyone with whom the central message of this image resonates argues on behalf of granting the government control over healthcare, the irony thus generated has a kind of sublime majesty and magnitude about it that humbles most mountain ranges. Amazing.

Atually, I'd be inclined to think it your own commuter vehicle of choice. I'm flattered, but actually I've commuted by bike or walked to school or work for all but three years in the interval from 1992 to the present.

This from memory, but I remember reading that the average welfare payment is less than $500 a month. This does not include subsidized housing or food stamps. Last year, during the picker shortage, pickers in E. Wa could make $150 a day...more in a week than you could make in a month on welfare. Plus, their dinero is worth even more south of the border. Part of the labor shortage stems from a lack of population 'willing' to work those jobs in rural areas. This creates a demand for a migratory labor force that the area could not support year round. Just thinking out loud on that one - but just to continue the exercise further, you'd probably have to find the pay-threshold at which working extremely hard in hot fields becomes more desirable than earning less pay for doing nothing. If X is the pay for doing nothing, and it's enough to live on, then I imagine that they pay for working hard in a field would have to be some multiple of X in order to persuade people to accept the trade-off. I can only imagine the response if someone suggested cutting off welfare payments - at least during harvest season - to able-bodied males and childless women who weren't in some kind of a training program, and who refused offers of employment from farmers at whatever wage rate was in effect at the time. Believe it or not, there are many people in the world who actually do have a work ethic and would be ashamed to accept money when they are able-bodied. Earning one's own way is not only an economic drive, it is also something instilled into us. I agree, but it seems like by definition these values are typically not quite as robust in the average multi-year or multi-generational welfare recipient that might otherwise make a good candidate for farm labor.

Your ideal equation may provide some insight on paper, but it still doesn't address this logistical problem: the majority of welfare recipients live in cities; too far from farms to provide a labor force. Rural areas with sparse populations can't support the large, migrant populations of workers they need during certain critical times of year. Like it or not, farming communities need a migrant labor force. I'm sure the farmers would spring for the tab for the Greyhounds they'd need to get the labor force to the farms. I think I recall something like this happening in places that were experiencing shortages of farm labor, and I vaguely recall that it wasn't terribly successful because the workers they got were so inferior - from the farmer's perspective - to the migrant laborers that they were accustomed to. I think the actual outcome of a "work on the farm or go hungry" policy would be an increase in crimes committed by people who conclude that boosting stereos provides a better effort-to-reward ratio than working on a farm.

Is that how he commutes to the office at the hedge-fund in the Caymans?

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This from memory, but I remember reading that the average welfare payment is less than $500 a month. This does not include subsidized housing or food stamps. Last year, during the picker shortage, pickers in E. Wa could make $150 a day...more in a week than you could make in a month on welfare. Plus, their dinero is worth even more south of the border. Part of the labor shortage stems from a lack of population 'willing' to work those jobs in rural areas. This creates a demand for a migratory labor force that the area could not support year round. Just thinking out loud on that one - but just to continue the exercise further, you'd probably have to find the pay-threshold at which working extremely hard in hot fields becomes more desirable than earning less pay for doing nothing. If X is the pay for doing nothing, and it's enough to live on, then I imagine that they pay for working hard in a field would have to be some multiple of X in order to persuade people to accept the trade-off. I can only imagine the response if someone suggested cutting off welfare payments - at least during harvest season - to able-bodied males and childless women who weren't in some kind of a training program, and who refused offers of employment from farmers at whatever wage rate was in effect at the time.

Mexbots. There'd be quite the cosmic econo ying/yang thing happening if this hypothetical class of harvesters were produced on Mexican assembly lines...

Yup - but if the only people who are willing to work for those rates under those conditions are illegal aliens who lack other options, then the odds are good that the rate that they are paying isn't the market rate. It would be kind of interesting to compare the total value of welfare payments (per recipient) to the total compensation of agricultural workers (per worker) in order to see if we have artificially contstrained the labor market for farm workers by creating a class of people who can earn a higher "wage" by doing nothing, rather than working in fields. If that's the case, then the farmers would be justified in claiming that labor market distortions created by the government are part of the reason why they can't attract labor at true market rates.

The small problem for that is climate.... Farmers already have moved abroad in order to supply fresh fruits and vegetables when those would normally be out of season. Their are strawberry fields in the middle of Baja that are being picked in January. The pickers and the season move north as the year progresses. One need only look where a majority of the subsidies end up - in the pockets of large corporate farmers - to see that subsidies should end and end soon. Then that's a problem for Mexico, and the corrupt and ineffectual administrative class that's kept the population mired in poverty for the past century will have to figure something out or contend with the angry, jobless young men that they've been exporting to El Norte on their home turf. I also think that reducing the de-facto labor subsidy will put quite a premium on developing machine-harvestable variants of crops that currently have to be picked by hand, and new machines to do the harvesting.

Yup. The greatest of all of the polite fictions that we nod and smile at when around people with children that they've never taught to behave properly. I'd wager that about 5% of hyperactive kids actually behave the way they do for purely biological reasons, and the rest comes down to parenting. Just not worth alienating the folks with the kids that they don't know how to raise, though. I take some comfort in the fact that they will ultimately suffer the most as a consequence of their child-rearing styles, though.

Not a snide comment - but did you discuss the economic reforms that the Irish have made over the past ~20 years with any Irish people, since it sounds like you have some connections there?

What will eventually happen if the borders are ever brought under control, and we decline to follow the Euro-model of creating a class of unassimilated guest workers - is that crops that can be harvested mechanically will continue to be grown in the US, while labor intensive crops will be grown where the labor is cheap. Growing labor intensive crops in Mexico instead of using the current de-facto labor subsidy for farmers would bring about important social and economic benefits for both the US and Mexico. Somehow factories found a way to get by without using child labor, and farmers will have to find a way to grow crops without paying below-market rates for their labor, or go out of business. Farmers are businessmen, and why they should be exempt from the rules that every other class of enterprise has to abide by is beyond me.

Beavers?

BeaverFest. l01dOVMd5vA

http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/26/pf/jobs_jeopardy/

IMO: it seems to be a selfish psychological drive to have kids in the first place. But hey, that's just me. You're saying that reproduction of the species is a selfish psychological drive? I would've thought it's more of an inherent evolutionary drive. I was gonna say hormonal, but maybe you pegged it. Without fail, once a society accepts birth control and becomes financially sound and fairly secure; people have fewer children--to the point where often there aren't enough kids being produced to replace the existing population. So I would think the "hormonal" drive seems to have a little merit, but not a whole hell of a lot. People often get control over their "hormones" when not having a litter of six is a viable option. Interestingly - the fertility rate for first and second generation Americans with Mexican ancestry is substantially higher than that of Mexicans. I think that the same is true for several North African populations living in Euroland, but I'd have to check to make sure. I suppose it comes down to how one defines "selfishness," but I don't know how, under any definition of the word, refusing to have children because it will interfere with your career goals, make it tougher to afford the dream-home, make travel and socializing more complicated, etc - could be construed as *less* selfish than having children. I also think that - imagine this coming from me - there are economic factors that heavily influence reproduction choices on a country-by-country level. One obviously selfish motive for having children is so that you'll have someone to look after you when you can no longer care for or provide for yourself. When the state assumes a legal obligation to provide for the elderly, the odds are good that this motive is no longer as forceful, and this factors into people's decisions about the way they'll live their lives. Ditto for the societies in which children add to, rather than ameliorate, the financial burdens on the parents. I'd also venture that the extent to which young people are taxed to support the elderly has an effect on their reproductive choices, whether consciously or not, as responsible people who are in households where both parties have to work full time to earn enough after-tax money to get by aren't as likely to have children, IMO. Complicated issue, to be sure.

I think there's already some research coming out showing that micro-managing kids lives down to the minute and engineering every ounce of physical out of their lives is hardly a foolproof method for producing a happy and productive adult. Seems like a significant amount of the changes in parenting over the past 50 years have been driven by the psychological needs of parents rather than any objective consideration of what's actually good for the children. When they canceled track and field day in favor of a bunch of gay-ass sharing games, and make us wear badges that said "I am lovable and capable" I new that things were going seriously awry, even as an eleven year old.

Making a fortune suing doctors over birth defects which they had no control over, then opposing legislation to create a state fund that would help families with children cope with the said defects since provisions of the said legislation would curtail the very lawsuits he'd made his fortune with, then investing a substantial portion of the profits in, and deriving fees from an offshore hedge fund that's foreclosing on homeowners in New Orleans as a consequence of sub-prime bets gone bad, all while lambasting offshoring, unscrupulous subprime lenders, etc every day on the campaign trail...the economic equivalent of Senator Craig's "wide stance" in the bathroom stall. The man is a sack, but thankfully he has zero chance of securing the Democratic nomination.

RE: your first paragraph, you of all people should know better. Price is set by what the market will bear, not by the cost of goods sold. People pay more for food produced sustainably and naturally (whether certified organic or not) because it is more nutritious, contains less unhealthy ingredients, and because many consumers want to patronize farmers that are good environmental stewards. whether or not overall inputs for organic farming are greater than for conventional. One thing has become clear, however: organic farmers make higher profits per unit of output than conventional ones. If consumers are willing to pay more per-unit for organic crops/produce, and organic production yields more profits per unit (and any loss in production per-acre that occurs is more than offset by increased profit-per-unit), then it's quite a mystery why all conventional corn/soy/wheat/citrus/vegetable/etc farmers haven't either converted, or undertaken efforts to convert their entire production to "organic" methods. If the difference between the price that the market will bear for organic produce and total production costs is $2 per unit, and the same difference comes to $1 per unit with conventional production, and the organic yield per acre is at least 51% of the conventional yield per acre, then the farmer who is still using conventional production methods is behaving irrationally. Even if you assume that there are costs associated with converting to organic production methods, farmers will be able to make some assumptions about the persistence of the price differential over time and determine whether or not it makes sense to make the investment. Factory farms and agribusiness may or may not care about any number of factors, but I have yet to hear anyone claim that they are not concerned with profits, so why they haven't adopted methods that are both less capital intensive and more profitable is another mystery. Presumably it's not because their own marketing materials have duped them into doing so. Still think there's reasons why farmers choose to use conventional production techniques, despite the price differentials. Other point is that the said differential will inevitably dwindle and eventually disappear as supply meets demand. This is good news for anyone who cares whether there's an organic label on the food that they purchase.

Nope. It's not in a realm of thought that I'm likely to dedicate much time to. If I read anything concerning Christianity, it's likely to be scholarly histories dealing with who wrote and modified the texts, under what circumstances, and for what purpose as opposed to anything that actually takes the contents of the text itself seriously in their own right. If it's a prolonged apology for the tale of Lot, it sounds as though it's something that should be fairly easy to summarize, though.

Is there a book of apologetics for just about every line in Deuteronomy as well?

You'd probably get hired in about 6 hours and qualify for a paid move if you decided to look in the greater Boston area. I could never live anywhere East of the rockies... don't know how you do it, Jay. Lots and lots of alcohol... In my case, the thing that complicated my "never live East of the Rockies" plan was marrying someone who had to move to Boston for a 3-year residency. If all goes according to plan, the 36-month-long nightmare will be over at 12:00AM on June 31st of next year. Having said all of that, and despite loathing Boston with a pathological intensity, I have to say that if someone put a gun to my head and forced me to live the rest of my life East of the Rockies, I'd probably choose New England - but I'd be in New Hampshire, Maine, or Vermont, or the Adirondacks instead.

Good to know. I'll have to start looking into this more closely before the planned unemployment commences next July.