Right, but they have the option not to now. Instead of having to tell us what they'd do to smack the gays around, they can signal their cultural affiliation by tut-tutting the ruling and saying, "This is terrible and I agree with you, but my hands are tied." They can make as much or as little noise as they want and then as the electoral tables turn, they can taper off. Before the Supreme Court ruled on it, it was a very real issue for the legislature and the executive. There was going to be a critical mass that demanded gay marriage at some point, and the last people on board were going to have to go on record voting against it. Better to be able to blame the other guys and not be on record doing anything one way or another when you're on the wrong side of history.

how does life, liberty or property equal marriage? not just gay marriage. Marriage for anyone?

"...nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." You can't just arbitrarily treat a group of people differently under the law without a good reason to justify it. That's why you can't make a law that says that only white people get free public education but you can make a law that says that only poor people get food stamps. Free public education and food stamps may not be fundamental rights in the traditional sense, but the simple rule is if we're handing them out, we have to hand them out equally to everybody unless there's a very good reason not to.

Lastly, the words of the constitution do not grant unlimited flexibility. If we want to change the 14th amendment or any amendment to the Constitution then the people need to step up and work with their own states and legislatures (NOT THE GOVERNMENT) to do this. This is what the amendment process is for.

Point blank question: Was Loving v. Virgina wrongly decided?

What's to stop three people from wanting to marry? I don't mean to be a conspirator but according to the language that I see there is nothing that can stop it.

What's missing from this is a reason why we should be concerned that it doesn't "stop" three people from marrying. "Look! Three people getting married! We need to do something about this!" The main issue I can think of it is that it's structurally tought do with the way some of our laws are assumed to work. Other than that, meh.

I am waiting now for the first lawsuit to appear about a pastor at a church won't marry Jane and Sally because of the pastors firmly held beliefs and the core doctrine and tenants of the church's faith.

And you'll watch it get tossed out on its ass the moment it's brought. Churches have always had the right to decide the rules for their rituals. Interfaith marriage has been a right for a very long time, but nobody has yet forced a church to marry a couple in contravention of the religious rules of that church.

This ruling solves a very real problem for a lot of people and the problems people claim it cause are way out at the margins and frankly unrealistic for the most part.

Or re-interpreting a part of the constitution in a manner that would have mortified the people who actually wrote it?

People write laws that are interpreted and used in ways they don't expect all the time. That doesn't make them any less the law. If you write something that basically says, "The government will treat people equally," and privately assume that the people you're not treating equally will probably continue to be treated unequally, you'll probably be surprised to find that the rules you actually wrote down outlast the social norms of your time.

The first easy step would be to announce that the mortgage interest tax deduction will go away, reduced by 5% every year for the next 20 years. That's one that creates bizarre incentives and is basically just a transfer from taxpayers to banks. Tightening up the rules for the GSEs would definitely help. One idea that I particularly liked is to ensure that anybody selling a loan to the GSEs would have to keep a small percentage of it on its own books.

And before someone swoops in and says "well then all those currently renting and unable to buy will go homeless!": what do you think the people owning the rental properties are going to do with a bunch of excess property that's no longer of any use to them when they can't rent it out for profit? The only way they can benefit from it then is to sell it.

That would definitely drop the price of housing down to a point where more people could afford it. But I think you're missing a few nasty side effects.

1) There are a alot of people with no money. Net worth of zero or less. They have enough income that they could pay rent, but they literally don't have the cash to buy and nobody will loan them money.
2) A lot of people prefer to rent for a number of perfectly valid reasons.
3) The ability to build a building and rent the units in it for a certain price creates an incentive to create the building in the first place. With no rent option, that incentive is reduced. The plan to squeeze the properties out of the hands of the rich only works once the properties are built and in the hands of the rich. Once you've occupied all those, you'll want somebody to build more of them.

The step most people mess when they do this exercise is to weight the various goods by how much of your income you actually spend on them. When most people estimate inflation, they seem to assume that all they do all day is eat bread soaked in gasoline. People buy a really large variety of things over the course of a year (including, say, the fraction of the refrigerator that wears out during that year), and taking a sampling of a handful of goods to build a cost of living index usually produces unreliable results.

Developers are building new apartments as fast as they can--luxury apartments that charge higher than market rates, further inflating the market.

The additional luxury apartments create downward pressure on prices, not upward pressure. It's the demand for apartments in general that drives up the prices. If they weren't building the luxury apartments, the people who wanted those luxury apartments would likely just outbid less rich people for less luxurious apartments.

There are actually places that license pyschics. I have no idea what would have to happen to lose your license to practice.

One thing I tell everybody who fills out the SF86 is, KEEP A COPY OF YOUR SF86. You'll probably fill it out more than once in your career. Starting from scratch is a gigantic pain and errors creep in if you have to look up older stuff from primary sources.

Actually - yes I am. I watch people avoiding the police. I watch people saying "Yes sir" and "No sir" to the police. I watch people groveling in front of the police.

If there's one thing the data has shown us, it's that we're all much safer in an interaction with the police if they honestly believe we might shoot them.

I address police in one way, and one way only. I address them as equals. I am a free man. Cop says "Stop!" I say, "What for?"

Do you reach into your waistband, just to make sure they know that you're not going to take any crap?

This. We can solve our residential water problem using technology and a little bit of infrastuructre. Wastewater recycling would take care of it. Desal can put a dent in it. We can't solve the farming problem that way, but we're farming at an unsustainable rate here, so you can apply the "won't fix the farming problem" complaint to any solution. Unless farms become massively more efficient, there's no solution for it. We might as well make our cities self-sufficient and let the farmers fight each other for the remaining water.

Wow, that's dystopian. California has plenty of water to support its population. Its ag industry is just going to have to use less subsidized water. We'll let the price of water float and let residential users outbid farmers long before we evacuate California.

That's not totally true. There are other places where you can grow most of those crops. The advantage to CA is longer growing seasons, more consistent temperatures, and less stuff like frost and mold. These are nice things, but they come with a "not enough water" problem attached to them. But make no mistake, if we stopped growing those things, they'd grow elsewhere and be imported. I'd expect almond farms to be among the last to shut down because they get a lot of bang for their water buck in terms of actual crop value. Rice? Dump it. People grow rice all over the place and it's dead easy to ship. There's no reason for us to waste valuable CA water growing it.

It would be interesting seeing how we generate the level of economic activity of, say, New York City at a density that allows every person to live on a plot of land that keeps them 100% self-sufficient.

There's a good reason why there's a saying in economics that self sufficiency is the road to poverty.