JayB

This is where the libertarian argument gets silly. Having a simple requirement to get vaccinated elimates the lawyer feeding frenzy. Don't like it? Too bad, so sad - you're out voted in a civilized society. Regarding WA pensions, we're not so bad actually: "First and foremost, all of Washington's ongoing pension systems are healthy and well funded, in fact they are among the best funded pension systems in the country," Treasurer Jim McIntire said in a statement. "But funding for two pension plans that were closed in 1977 - PERS1 and TRS 1 - pose large issues that can no longer be avoided...Over time, it has been easy for lawmakers of both parties to postpone payments to these funds in the face of tough budget decisions. We now face the consequences of those past deferrals." The ones that face issues are about 77% funded and something will need to change there - but not so much given that the folks receiving these benefits are dying off. The system for current employees is different and solvent for the foreseeable future. Your argument regarding some benefits has more merit. I hope so - good news if it's true, but most pension systems around the country are still basing their projections on consistent returns of ~8% or more, which many people think is quite optimistic, and will leave taxpayers on the hook for the difference. I am about as rabidly pro-vaccine as they come, but still think that the practical and philosophical arguments for persuading people to vaccinate voluntarily are much stronger than those behind forcible vaccinations. I'd be fine with a status quo where no one is forced to vaccinate, but they're required if you want to attend public schools, join the army, etc. I think that's basically what we have now, although anti-vaccine folks have proven adept at exploiting religious exemptions that I'd like to see eliminated. Whether or not people who's intentionally un-vaccinated kids contract preventable diseases and die should be subject to the same criminal penalties that apply when they intentionally withhold medical care is an interesting question. I think the answer is no, since the failure to prevent isn't the same as the failure to treat, but that question seems to come up in these discussions every now and then.

Also happening in real time. I'm not in favor of forced vaccination for a variety of practical and philosophical reasons, but I am in favor of allowing people to bring civil suits against unvaccinated people who transmit whatever disease they're the vector for when they transmit the disease to infants, the immunosuppresed, or any other people who either can't be vaccinated or can't be effectively protected by vaccines as a result of another medical condition.

It's clear that the "victim" in this story could have paid the $75, but didn't. He was counting on other people to foot the bill for fire services for him. Who, exactly, is the sociopath here?

Perhaps, some day JayB will go after someone other than the few workers on the gravy train, but I am not holding my breath. It's not like there are not more important fish to fry but his insistence on focusing on the piddling stuff shows that libertarianism is a convenient fig leaf for corporatists. If unfunded liabilities to the tune of ~$3 trillion that will crowd out funding for parks, social services, etc, etc, etc is piddling then...sure. This is happening in real time in WA.

Can you explain the advantages a little better. Maybe I don't understand the system well enough (I didn't read the long posts above if it's in there). How does a duplex owner end up paying less than someone with a mansion? The real beauty of my plan is that is has zero chance of being implemented anywhere, but as long as we're playing fantasy football here - I suspect that some kind of risk-based premium would determine how much each person paid, so one-bedroom shack constructed out of pure asbestos that's sited next door to a fire station would pay less than a super-rural McMansion surrounded by a few thousand acres of dry timber. Not sure how the formula would work in practice, but I suspect that the more resources it would take to actually save your structure from burning to the ground, the more you'd pay. Some of the more egregious cases of people with less valuable, less risky property subsidizing people with more valuable, more risky property are the various mechanisms that were created to transfer the financial risks associated with owning coastal properties onto those that don't. In my regressive fantasy world, you wanna live on the coast and savor the sunsets over a nice Shiraz on the back deck, you take all of the financial risk associated with building and owning a property there - and no one else.

Maybe - but enough of an outlier to be a minimal problem in reality for a few reasons. The first is that the actual incidence of home fires is so low these days, which is why firemen have found ways to keep busy by responding to medical calls. Then there's the fact that not paying would probably cost them more elsehwere, like on their homeowner's policy, banks would require it as a condition of extending a loan, etc. And finally - there's peer pressure from the neighbors. Wouldn't be perfect, but IMO it'd be better than someone in a duplex subsidizing the cost of fire suppression for someone living in a mansion, much less someone who doesn't own any property forking over money to protect someone else's.

I am only giving an opportunity to the sociopaths to explain how their societal model isn't a "fuck you, you are on your own". Were you talking to these guys? "San Diego Pension Scandal Called "Worse Than Bell"" http://www.sandiego6.com/news/local/story/San-Diego-Pension-Scandal-Called-Worse-Than-Bell/iVFlhMOZWECMOs8JWq0u_g.cspx How about the Seattle PD? "The cops' contract is so rich, with guaranteed 5 percent raises every year, that if they went along with a one-year freeze the savings would erase the need to lay off any cops at all. "I would give up my 5 percent raise to save the job of another deputy," said Sgt. John Urquhart, the sheriff's spokesman, whose pay is covered under the contract. "But then again I live in King County because I can afford to, my kids are grown and out of college, and my wife works. Most deputies don't have those luxuries." Except that last year, 330 of the roughly 750 members of the King County police force made more than $100,000, including overtime. Twenty-five made more than $140,000. Some of those are chiefs and high-rankers. But most are police out on the county beat. The highest paid was Deputy Mike Miner. He made $228,000 — $128,000 in overtime pay alone. I get they have demanding jobs, way tougher than most of us. But 27 percent raises are the stuff of bubbles that popped long ago. Would it kill to freeze these whopping pay levels for a year — especially if it meant protecting the public at full force, as is said to be so important? I called the union to ask, but haven't heard back (yet!). Jarrett said he thinks many of the unions still don't get it. "I would say, with some exceptions, that most seem more interested in maintaining their compensation packages than in saving jobs," he said. This was confessed, bluntly, by the head of the union for Metro bus drivers, Paul Bachtel. He recently told Times reporter Mike Lindblom: "They [drivers] don't expect to give up wages, benefits, working conditions, when the transit agency could cut some of its services, and not take away pay." http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2012959858_danny22.html I think it's much fairer and far more progressive to have a system where those that own private property pay the costs to protect it from fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, falling trees, lightning, etc, etc, etc, etc than to force everyone, including those who are far less well off, to fork over money to protect what other people own. I suspect that if there was actually anyone inside the house at the time that it was burning, the fire department would have done what they could to rescue them. Even if they were sociopaths that had no qualms about letting people burn to death, the people at the top would probably have the sense to realize that doing so would cost them their jobs, at the very least. IMO saving lives should be the primary focus of fire-fighting efforts, with saving private property being a priority only inasmuch as it's necessary to save lives. I'd be happy if we had a two-tier system where everyone paid in for the life saving services, and those who wanted protection for their private property would fork over risk-based premiums for that.

the major premise here is that media and especially news play a specific role in a plural democracy and to do so it has to reflect the needs of everyone, not just the needs of those concerned with making money. Therefore, government is the instrument through which the people make sure that media fulfill those needs. Is that too hard to understand? Yes - simply because there is no such thing as "the needs of everyone." I don't understand the claim because no such thing exists outside of a political partisan's fevered imagination. Not everyone is the same, and whatever needs they may or may not have vis-a-vis the media can't be aggregated into a gargantuan abstraction called "the needs of everyone." Much less one that could ever be legitimately used to justify having the government re-jigger the media to serve it - however "it" is understood or imagined by the folks who want to do the re-jiggering. The other irony here is that if we take your own claims about the power and influence of corporations, the wealthy, etc seriously - one can only conclude that if government were granted the powers you want to endow it with, the Koch brothers and the rest of the cabal would simply use their powers to re-define "the needs of everyone" in whatever way would serve their interests best, and the folks that you want to give a public megaphone to would be even more hosed.

This addresses exactly none of the issues raised or the remedies prescribed by the media reform advocates cited above. Feel free to keep jumping up and down like a monkey if you want though... So you mean I'm one more person that's not paying any attention to what they're saying? So here N = (3.5*10^8) + 1 ?

There you go again. Straw-dogging it. The general goal, was, and it worked moderately well, to get broad community viewpoints and news out to the community by using the public interest portion of the license provided by said public. Conservative, liberal, and middle all had access. Common sense tells you that some screening would be required to keep nut-jobs off; and yes, that would actually take some vetting and thinking - what a concept. What we have now is one voice - that of money. What evidence is there that it worked moderately well then? Much less that it would do anything other than entice Ron Jenkins to reach for the remote when the guy in yoga pants starts droning on about needle-point as a locus anti-colonial resistance or the hermeneutics of lummi-sticks and ear-candling? None of this works unless you are convinced that there's an objectively "correct" set of opinions that the public should hold and that we should use the law as muscle to nudge the like of Ron Jenkins towards whatever arbitrary standard he's deviated from. The major unstated premise here is that the government has both the right and the duty to concern itself with the opinions that free citizens form and the way they form them, and we should endow it with whatever powers are necessary for it do so. If the public's opinion differs from your own, or some pet cause is being neglected there are a zillion informal methods that you can avail yourself of as a private citizen, alone or in conjunction with a gaggle of like minded folks in order to move it it the "right" direction without bringing the government on board to try to rig the game in your favor. A free press is just that.

Even if you believe that the public benefit is best maximized by forcing local network affiliates to broadcast Chomsky lectures or a local bearded activist hectoring people into recycling with hand-puppetts - wasn't their impact in reality limited by the fact that the public wasn't terribly interested in watching the content that the networks were forced to broadcast for the public's benefit? Is there any objective standard that one can appeal to to prove that forcing Ron Jenkins to watch 1/2 hour of the local "Potlucks for Peace Poetry Slam" will benefit him more than watching a half hour of "Lost" and a series of ads for beer, Pop-Tarts and the new Humvee? Given current media trends why exclude youtube, bloggers, and every other website from spamming their users with content that satisfies whatever arbitrary definition of "public interest programming" emerges from the sausage-factory?

You mean like this kind of no coverage? "U.N. panel endorses report accusing Israel of executions aboard aid flotilla By Colum Lynch Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, September 30, 2010 UNITED NATIONS - The U.N. Human Rights Council voted Wednesday to endorse the report of a U.N. fact-finding mission that accused Israeli commandos of summarily executing six passengers on a Turkish aid flotilla in May, among them a 19-year-old Turkish American dual citizen who was shot five times, including once in the face. Upon its release last week, the 56-page report was dismissed by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's office as "biased" and "distorted." Israel's deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, characterized the report in a radio interview as "a big lie." The United States, the only country to vote against Wednesday's action, criticized the panel's findings as unbalanced. But a U.S. official said that Washington has asked Israel to thoroughly investigate the killing of the Turkish American, Furgan Dogan, and to share the findings with the U.S. government. After the vote, a senior U.S. official faulted the Human Rights Council for rushing the creation of the panel and failing to make adequate efforts to secure Israeli cooperation. "The report's language, tone and conclusions are..." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/29/AR2010092907110.html Anyone who can use Teh Google has immediate access to ~2K articles from all over the world. Much better than the days when you were effectively limited to network news coverage and whatever wire service article that may or may not have landed in your paper.

"Waiting for Superman."

BTW -at what point in history was the media landscape as close to perfection as it ever got before being hopelessly corrupted by corporate regressive shills and their handservant's in congress? I thought that pining away for some mythical and completely arbitrary point in the past when things were objectively better was the preferred vice/fantasy of political conservatives......

"The Market" in this and every other case is an aggregation of individual's choices and preferences. The counter argument is that the subset of individuals in some centralized body with coercive legal powers would give us a media landscape that's a better match whatever arbitrary standard for media excellence that you happen to believe in. That's certainly possible, but there's no objective standard of merit or utility that you could appeal to to prove that your preferred standard should be granted any more political weight than the next guy's who has a different vision. Even if everyone in the country could agree on what an ideal media would look like, there's no reason to believe that it would be possible to implement it in a politically neutral fashion. Again - I give you Corn Ethanol. Hell - take even more prosaic matters like bail bonding and red-light cameras. If the standard for determining which offenders should be released on their own recognizance instead of being incarcerated, or red-light enforcement can't be implemented without being significantly compromised by corruption and self-dealing, then the odds of using the getting some ideal media landscape in place without it being compromised by the same factors are indistinct from zero.

Summary: "Neither election funding nor public opinion trends are going our way at the moment, so we need to figure out a way to use legislation to rig the game in our favor while pretending to be neutral." What seems to be missing from this discussion is any recognition of the fact that...people in government are also inspired by and act on selfish motives. What portion of the Federal Budget gets spent in a way that's free of political patronage? How many bills get passed that would pass that bar? That's not "campaign money?" That's how we got the corn ethanol program? Impartial actors using public power in a way that's completely free from private motives? What's the evidence that any campaign finance legislation has accomplished anything more than inspiring people to find clever ways around the new restrictions? How likely is it that giving congress more power to regulate the content and delivery of media is going to give us something besides the electronic equivalent of corn ethanol? Finally - even if you're comfortable with Pelosi using the new powers in a perfectly fair, wise, and apolitical way - are you sure that Michelle Bachmann would be likely to do the same? In politics is it really wise to give your friends weapons that you'd never want to see in the hands of your enemies?

Looks pretty sweet, but unfortunately We're renting a ~1200sf 2B, 1 bath, 1920s hovel with crappy insulation, a leaky basement, and knob and tube wiring.* *And loving it because it's cheap and all of the tax, maintenance, and foregone maintenance liabilities are accruing on someone else's balance sheet.

I'm always amused by the fact that whenever the subject turns to things that are concrete and specific, like taxes and budgets, you invariably go "meta" and take refuge in a set tangential articles of faith. "What's 2 + 2?" "The very symbols that you're using to frame your question encapsulate a set of concretizing western intellectual constructs that have persistently subverted and undermined the...blah, blah, blah." My evil homonym shares your outlook but at least he coughs up a straight answer every once in a while. Well, the short answer is I simply find number-crunching with a serial data-mining cherry picker with a lousy track record for intellectual honesty boring as all hell. But don't kid yourself or anyone else, despite your appeals to "the data", anything you post is always rooted in ideological "articles of faith". It's simply more interesting looking at your unexamined premises and faulty assumptions than dig through your info-garbage to find the obfuscations, omissions, and distortions. j_b seems to do just fine on his own in that department, though sometimes you make it easy. Self-parody bordering on performance art. Bravo! Is this how you play chess, too? "Pawn E7 to E5" "Rather than demeaning myself by participating in a pre-formalized and decontextualized aggression ritual that simultaneously dramatizes and reinforces essentializing relics of feudal class hierarchies..." Yipes.

That seriously sucks. I'm very sorry for your friend. "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means." ~Oscar Wilde. I remember wishing that wasn't true when I first came across that quote a long time ago but life seems to favor Wilde's take on things. I don't know what their options are or what they've considered, but if they haven't looked into enrolling in experimental clinical trials (if there are any) and that's something that they'd be willing to consider - who knows, there might be a chance. A good friend of ours' father was dying of leukemia and was the very first person saved by a treatment he was given in a clinical trial, and it's now the standard therapy.

Anyone who suggests that it's possible for real people to exist in more than one household income quintile over the course of their life is a racist regressive neocon warmonger. Whatever abstract statistical category that you fall into when an academic sociologist plugs your data into his spreadsheet at a given point in time is your lot for life. Sorry.

Yeah, you folks would sure like that wouldn't you? Down the old memory-hole, eh? Nothing to see here. Back to the ol' tax-cuts, deregulation, privatization, union-busting, and the rest for us. Yep, for as much as you pretend can't abide Palin and the rest Jay, I'd say the Party of No (Fucking Idea) suits you just fine. Just a reminder: We're talking about state and local budget shortfalls. Nothing that anyone at the state and local has any discretion over is going to have any effect whatsoever on any of the macro trends that you'll go to your grave impotently railing on about. In order to deliver the current level of services, state and local officials have a menu consisting of three options. The can raise taxes, cut services, and/or cut compensation. That's all that they can influence, and that's really all that it makes sense to discuss in the context of funding state and local government. Thanks for the meta-analysis, though. Would have been better if you'd spiced it up with something about heternormative neoclassical class-imperialism, IMO. That's right folks, you heard it here first. Despite the fact that these "fiscal crises of the State" are happening simultaneously at the municipal and national level throughout the industrialized world as a result of the same failed policies, we're going to solve the problem right here in King County. And not only that, but we're going to intensify the dynamics generated by those same failed policies to fix the problem. Funny your provincial outlook didn't prevail when you were breathlessly cheerleading globalization. Yeah, "keeping it local" is a great way to help frame your argument in these either/or, black/white, good/bad terms while absolving your failed project of any responsibility for creating the mess. Thanks for not helping. Typical Republican... I'm always amused at the irony of these little quips in that if such an analysis did exist and you actually read it, it would probably go a lot further in explaining the real world than your cocktail napkin bullshit. I'm always amused by the fact that whenever the subject turns to things that are concrete and specific, like taxes and budgets, you invariably go "meta" and take refuge in a set tangential articles of faith. "What's 2 + 2?" "The very symbols that you're using to frame your question encapsulate a set of concretizing western intellectual constructs that have persistently subverted and undermined the...blah, blah, blah." My evil homonym shares your outlook but at least he coughs up a straight answer every once in a while.

Yeah, you folks would sure like that wouldn't you? Down the old memory-hole, eh? Nothing to see here. Back to the ol' tax-cuts, deregulation, privatization, union-busting, and the rest for us. Yep, for as much as you pretend can't abide Palin and the rest Jay, I'd say the Party of No (Fucking Idea) suits you just fine. Just a reminder: We're talking about state and local budget shortfalls. Nothing that anyone at the state and local has any discretion over is going to have any effect whatsoever on any of the macro trends that you'll go to your grave impotently railing on about. In order to deliver the current level of services, state and local officials have a menu consisting of three options. The can raise taxes, cut services, and/or cut compensation. That's all that they can influence, and that's really all that it makes sense to discuss in the context of funding state and local government. Thanks for the meta-analysis, though. Would have been better if you'd spiced it up with something about heternormative neoclassical class-imperialism, IMO. ...or pass reform legislation that reduces the need for services, then cut those service. Small but important omission. Guess its one that lives in 'rootcauseland'. Well within reach, however, IMO. But then, I'm not a 'conservative'. I'm not quite sure how legalizing drugs is going to reduce the demand for public transport but I'm all ears.

There's plenty of people that'd be more than happy to drive them at a pay-scale that would allow them to preserve current service levels. That's really all that matters if the reason we're spending public money on a bus system is to provide transport as efficiently as possible. If the primary objective it to provide a class of public sector workers with a secure, comfortable living, and transporting the public is a secondary consideration - then the sky's the limit. Why not cut services another ~30% and pay them $90K on average? Seriously.

Yeah, you folks would sure like that wouldn't you? Down the old memory-hole, eh? Nothing to see here. Back to the ol' tax-cuts, deregulation, privatization, union-busting, and the rest for us. Yep, for as much as you pretend can't abide Palin and the rest Jay, I'd say the Party of No (Fucking Idea) suits you just fine. Just a reminder: We're talking about state and local budget shortfalls. Nothing that anyone at the state and local has any discretion over is going to have any effect whatsoever on any of the macro trends that you'll go to your grave impotently railing on about. In order to deliver the current level of services, state and local officials have a menu consisting of three options. The can raise taxes, cut services, and/or cut compensation. That's all that they can influence, and that's really all that it makes sense to discuss in the context of funding state and local government. Thanks for the meta-analysis, though. Would have been better if you'd spiced it up with something about heternormative neoclassical class-imperialism, IMO.