Given that he raises the spectre of salmonella from uneven temperature in sous-vide cooking, it's pretty clear he knows fuck all about cooking. Hey Nathan? Sous vide is done in a precision-controlled water bath, you numpty. Not an oven.

Agreed. But it doesn't seem to contradict what I'm saying, it simply suggests some rules about implementation:
- regulating tends to be more effective and less harmful than outright banning
- bans tend to be more effective when aimed at providers rather than consumers
- legislation needs to fit broadly with the trends of the times. If you push too hard against the current, you create terrible problems.

My objection was to the blanket statement. I wasn't claiming a blanket statement in the other direction, nor suggesting it was easy to get things right.

But you seemed to be arguing with several of your questions that the employer should have some say in what the insurance covers because they've gone to some time and trouble to set it up. And my counterpoint was, maybe they should have some say, but (1) they shouldn't have unlimited say and (2) it doesn't seem to me that they should get the say because they write the checks, and that the time and effort it takes them is not a sufficient reason. Then the questions become, what is the distinction between "some say" and "unlimited say", and "on which side of the line would these contraceptives fall?"

I agree with you that "no say" is an untenable argument. I also agree with those who say "all this demonstrates that employers ought to be incentivised to move away from offering this benefit".

You don't have control over the absurdity of the entire debate, but you do have control over the absurdity of your contributions. I think the debate at hand ought not to be about "should governments override religious beliefs to deliver contraception" but instead "what obligations should an employer be required to assume by virtue of being an employer, and how does this balance against their rights?"

By partisan, I mean arguing in favour of a cause.

"Using laws to change social norms is stupid, because it doesn't work without having serious negative consequences which outweigh any possible good results."

The cause you are arguing for here is some version of libertarianism. You are saying that government ought not to legislate to change social norms. You advance an argument that to do so is ineffective in all circumstances. Because you do not allow for any circumstances in which such legislation could work, your statement can reasonably be characterised as partisan and non-pragmatic. You can choose to take issue with some of that if you wish, but it does seem like a perfectly reasonable interpretation of what you wrote, even if it goes against the way you like to think of yourself, as some uber-rational and even-handed individual.

Your response to my mentioning DUIs shows that *you* have missed the point. At the time DUI laws were introduced, there was a social norm that said "it's perfectly fine to drive home after having had a beer or two". Such attitudes still exist in some places, such as parts of the British countryside. The laws were introduced to shift social attitudes. The reason legislators wanted those attitudes to shift was, as you say, because drinking causes a clear and present danger. But to be blind to the fact that the laws were introduced in the teeth of opposition claiming this was Nanny Statism and saying that attempts to shift social norms should be resisted is, well, silly. (On clear and present danger, smoking laws are contested precisely because this isn't the case, but they remain attempts to legislate to change social norms" and they have been pretty successful and the benefits in my view clearly outweigh the harms.)

I say again: it is perfectly reasonable for a government to introduce a law to shift a social norm, and it is possible to do so in a way that results in more benefit than harm. There are many examples of where this has happened.

I'm not sure why any of your questions really matter. Employers provide buildings in which their employees work, as well. The fact that they provide those buildings, sign leases, negotiate rentals, install aircon, and undertake a huge range of other tasks, some quite onerous, in order to provide the workplace does not give them a free pass over all aspects of those buildings. Instead, the government requires the buildings to be safe and healthy workplace environments and has laws in place to make that happen.

How can this be modded informative?

In the real world, women are much more likely than men to have custody, and because they have custody, they pay the expenses. A significant minority of men then fail to contribute to those expenses.

But is there a definitional requirement for adherents to believe in all parts of the approved doctrine, or else not be able to call themselves Catholic? I'm not a Catholic, so I don't know.

Your three examples are beyond absurd. They fail very badly as analogies.
Taking each in turn:
1. No-one has a need for a particular foodstuff, such as bacon, whereas people do have a real need for contraception. A closer analogy would be an employer providing only bacon sandwiches for employees, without offering alternatives. There, the analogy would hold more closely because people do need to eat something, and while an observant Muslim employee could go and get their own lunch, they would miss out on a benefit offered to their colleagues. I'd certainly find that problematic, and see a need for intervention.
2. Forcing a Jewish-owned business to open on Shabbat would be government intervention on behalf of customers, not employees, an important distinction. And while I wouldn't want a Jewish-owned business to have to open on Shabbat, I would not want a hotel to be able to turn away a guest couple because they're gay and that offends the proprietor's religious sensibilities.
3. Your next analogy fails in exactly the same way as #2.

Excellent! Tax the poor more. That's not at all evil.

You are right about the rationale behind employer health insurance.

However, there is an obvious problem with FFS funding for medicine, which is that health costs can be catastrophically - unaffordably - high. In earlier eras, this wasn't a problem, because expensive interventions didn't exist. Now they do. And we all want them if we have a car accident or a stroke or a complex birth, etc.

No country has fully solved how to fund healthcare, and there are problems with every funding model. FFS is more broken than most, not least because there is a natural inflationary component (the more interventions I carry out, the more money I make as a doctor) and individuals frequently can't afford the care. That's why countries around the world are now experimenting with payment-for-outcomes instead. But it's a hard problem to solve.

Eh? This law was doing precisely what you implied should be done, i.e., placing a restriction on junk food companies who are, as you say, in bed with the government. It was not banning people from buying as much soda as they wanted, in the form of smaller amounts.

That said, I fundamentally disagree with this statement of yours, precisely because it is partisan and non-pragmatic: "Using laws to change social norms is stupid, because it doesn't work without having serious negative consequences which outweigh any possible good results." That's partisan and non-pragmatic because it ignores the many instances in which laws have been introduced that aimed at changing social norms where the benefits clearly outweigh the harms:
- seatbelt laws
- DUI laws
- domestic abuse laws
- laws restricting smoking
There used to be a social norm that it was OK to smoke on the London Underground. The Kings Cross fire of 1987 led to a ban on smoking on the Underground. I'm hard-pressed to think of *any* negative consequences of that ban, much less consequences that outweigh the obvious huge benefits of the removal of a significant fire risk and the improvement to people's health.

Actually, bike helmet studies also find that cyclists tend to take more risks and worse, motorists do as well -- eg they drive closer to helmeted than non-helmeted cyclists.

If you think that no-one besides the john or the gambler suffers harm from prostitution and gambling, you've gotta be kidding.

It might be nice if there were a country where prostitutes were universally economically free agents, acting of their own accord, working in safe and happy environments, but it's not exactly close to what we have today....

And gambling losses affect the family of the gambler.