As long as the girls have equal opportunity to get in and aren't steered away for sexist reasons then or earlier in life, yes.

Of course, in the usual circular logic of liberals and progressives, if the outcome isn't equal, that is clear evidence for "sexist reasons". It just couldn't be that women make different choices from men for perfectly legitimate reasons.

The whole point of herd immunity is to protect those who, for health reasons, cannot receive a vaccination.

Herd immunity is simply a concept about whether a disease is likely to spread through an entire population or die out after infecting only part of a population. It's relevant if you look at animal herds and want to minimize the overall loss of life.

Human beings aren't cattle. Even if the assumptions of herd immunity apply to human populations (a big if), the measures to implement it don't. For example, in order to achieve herd immunity, you might well decide to slaughter animals that don't respond to the vaccine. Or you might preemptively restrict the movement of animals in a herd.

Treating humans as members of a "herd" or collective is wrong; human beings are individuals with individual rights, and those rights include not having the government inject substances into you that it deems beneficial for the rest of society. It doesn't matter how good the evidence is in any particular case. Vaccinations should be voluntary, period.

So, in effect, you want me to undergo a medical procedure to protect someone I have no connection with. What's next? Mandatory blood donations? Mandatory kidney transplants? I mean, blood donations and kidney transplants are much more clearly effective at saving lives than vaccinations.

Undergoing medical procedures to help other people should be voluntary.

If their unvaccinated kid gets an infection, that should not be covered by their insurance,

Why not leave this up to the insurance companies? Oh, right, because we mandate insurance for everybody. Once you do that, then you need to mandate specific coverage from the insurance companies. And then you need to mandate the vaccines people need to get. And then you need to figure out what rules to set up if people choose not to get vaccinated, or can't get vaccinated, or have religious objections, or were visited by unvaccinated relatives from Elbonia.

If we actually had private health insurance, health insurance companies would work this out themselves. It would probably come down to: you don't want to get vaccinated, you pay an extra $1/month.

The libertarian answer is pretty clear: nobody has a right to force you to inject stuff into your body. However, people of course have the right to exclude you from their private property (including schools, private roads, private developments, etc.) if you aren't vaccinated. That approach gets the government out of deciding which vaccines you should take and which you shouldn't.

So installing a free copy of an operating system will make you lose money or give you a disease?

Yes, it will make you lose money, because the time you invest in learning Windows and Windows programming gives you a poor return on your investment.

Didn't think so. Grow up.

You should take your own advice to heart.

I don't disagree. If I had my way, we would be inching toward states' rights instead of away from it.

States rights are certainly a good thing, as is restoration of the interstate commerce clause to its original purpose (unimpeded trade between the states), as is subsidiarity even below the state level.

For instance, I'm a big supporter of the Article V amendment process

I really can't think of much that I would want to amend the Constitution by. As written, it gives only a small and reasonable number of enumerated powers to the federal government. The problem we are having is that the federal government is simply ignoring the limits set by the US Constitution; how is amending the Constitution going to fix that?

Eventually, the highway bandits compete with each other, until one wins. The dominant winner doesn't hide. He and his group conspicuously controls the highways, to keep all the other highway bandits out. They wear uniforms. They streamline their collection. They create euphamisms, like "tolls", and "North Texas Transportation Authority" for their operations. We ultimately accept them, because they are us...

The error in your analysis is the assumption that there necessarily needs to be a single, centralized authority. That approach is characteristic of progressive, fascist, socialist, and communist states, mostly in the West, but it is hardly an essential part of government. Most societies historically have functioned perfectly well without it.

You can see where this is going.

Yes: into a false dichotomy.

You have a good reason to not want Windows on a Pi? Then don't put Windows on a Pi and you can live in peace and happiness

I also have good reason not to buy snake oil from snake oil salesmen, not to invest my money in pyramid schemes, and not to have sex with a disease ridden prostitute. And I have good reason to warn others against doing the same thing.

Did you honestly just claim that 742.5 million people all think the same way about government action?

No, I didn't. Do you have trouble understanding basic English?

Obama was left with no other choice than to embrace this steaming pile of failure. He knew that there was absolutely no chance of any other bill relating in the least to health care ever making it to his desk again.

Obama could simply not have signed it.

Perhaps you at least are aware of the contribution to writing that was made by the republicans,

So? What matters is the law in its entirety. You could turn perfectly reasonable legislation into a corrupt turd with the addition of a single sentence.

who subsequently protested against it only out of their

No, they voted against it because it is, as you said, a "steaming pile of shit".

desire to do everything possible to tarnish the legacy of the democrat at 1600 Pennsylvania?

Yes, because, of course, the job of the president isn't to serve the American people, it is to leave a shining legacy for himself!

In any case, they don't need to worry about that, the president is doing an excellent job at that himself. I used to be a Democrat and am ashamed to say that I actually voted for Obama.

You really should read into how the federal government budget works before you go and shove your foot in your mouth like that.

You fail to understand that money is fungible: increases in earmarked funding are simply offset by decreases in general funding.

Then I suggest you go try living in Somalia or Afghanistan

I'd settle for Switzerland, Hong Kong, or Singapore, all of which have substantially lower government spending than the US. Even just balancing our budget, like Germany, would be a good start.

The grown ups here would like to see America get better for the future.

Yes, we do. That's why infantile views like yours, namely that money is handed out like pocket money from an all powerful paternalistic government, need to stop.

The reality that slashdot couldn't be bothered to share is that the money would go to infrastructure

The reality is that money is fungible and that statements are meaningless: the money goes into a big pot, and infrastructure spending won't substantially increase as a result of this. Even if it did, that "infrastructure spending" would largely be wasted on pork spending and political favors.

We need to get our infrastructure up to snuff to keep our country relevant in the modern era.

Infrastructure spending is being crowded out by entitlement spending; if you don't fix entitlement spending, there simply won't be any money left for anything else.

The conservatives deny this, which makes it a liberal matter - just like climate change, health care, education, space exploration, scientific research, and diplomacy.

You're absolutely right, and I want the federal government to do next to nothing in any of those areas.

Obama did not propose this law. Congress wrote it and he signed it, but he did not propose it.

Are you kidding? "Passing the ACA" is considered one of the great accomplishments of this administration by its proponents. Trying to split hairs over whether he "proposed it" is irrelevant.

Actually, it's worse than that. It is the largest corporate handout in the history of government.

Yes, and it was endorsed, passed, signed, and implemented by President Obama and the Democrats, who evidently are in the pocket of big corporations.

If all of the large corporations are driven out of the US, that will leave room in the marketplace for small companies to get founded, and the US will end up with lots of small companies, with lots of CEO's, instead of a handful of CEO's with all of the money. Why is driving corporations out a bad thing?

It's not at all a bad thing if you don't mind paying much more for stuff as you do now (the equivalent to a reduction in income for everybody).

Obama keeps complaining about the stagnating middle class; the kinds of policies he advocates are the cause.