The majority of people who get married or want to get married do not have a clue about the legal implications of marriage, and in fact getting married is merely the less expensive way to achieve the same legal results.

Part of the problem is that marriage law currently is an entrenched piece of bad code--if it was a program, it would be a piece of crufty, wrongly-documented COBOL woven together of crocks and kluges which properly ought to not work at all--and the most reasonable fix of scrapping it entirely & rewriting from the ground up is going to get anger from all sides.

Civil unions don't have this problem. I doubt you'd even have many people knowing to complain if you enacted the reformed version of marriage codes using 'civil union' in place of 'marriage,' and once you were done...announce that civil unions will now be required for legal recognition. (Basically it'd ultimately be a terminology switch, but one which permits actual useful and practical reforms, especially if you want to also allow polyamorous relationships to have legal recognition.)

I'd honestly be all for year-round calendars if it wasn't for the fact that I suspect that the primary reason they're getting pushed is that the switch would be used to hide increasing the number of days of school. It's one thing if you're just redistributing the number of days in the breaks--and another entirely if you're decreasing them.

This is especially important, since one of the advantages of a year-round schedule is that you should be able to actually give more days off, since shorter breaks mean less time wasted covering again the material you did before the break. In fact, this is really the only justification for the change: if there isn't research backing up the assertion that something, anything, will improve educational outcomes, it is a waste of time & money and abusive to the kids.

Switching how the money is given out to 'educational outcomes' from 'time spent warming seats with asses' would do the trick wonderfully, and a lot of the objections can be solved by having the outcome be defined in terms of improvement with only critical milestones needing to be met on schedule. (The latter may only be penalized if you promote the child to the next grade before they've met the particular milestone: Little Johnny will have mastered basic literacy by the time he enters Nth grade, but he can spend as long as needed in N-1th grade.)

You do, however, need funding, and which means that you have to pick a something that people will fund you looking for. Securing the money necessary to do basic research is amazingly difficult, especially when the honest answer is that your work is not expected to be of practical use to anybody but fellow researchers for whom it will lower the costs of doing their research.

Thus, it needs to have a good perceived value, and people need to believe there is a good chance it will be found. Getting money to search for polar bears in Honolulu is highly unlikely to happen.

There probably is very little expectation of actually finding the downed plane at this point, but people currently will fund any search that looks to be in the right area & actually finding it would prove we've gotten to the point where we can find such things.

You forget to factor in that sometimes the point of the search will (has, likely, already) become more than anything else a way to improve and prove the techniques used to search, and hopefully they're keeping good records.

There will, I assure you, be scientists waiting patiently to mine the data for things useful to their own research, that they would have been unable to justify the costs of doing themselves. It's like basic research that way.

I am overall a consequentialist, but I am one who is fully aware of how people work. One of the things you can rely on is people denying responsibility for their choices as much as possible, and consequentialism leaves a big one called "But I meant well!" even when the only person they meant well towards was themselves.

This could be simply avoided by requiring the ends must justify the means, and not the ends you intended but the ends you actually reached.

The test with consequentialist systems, therefore, is how it places your obligations should you discover that a choice you made was not the right one? Are you obligated to act to minimize harm? Are you not morally responsible simply because you had good intentions?

Oh, and how do we define what is a good consequence and to whom? Can I trust you to care about my own opinions when you say you're acting in my benefit?

Or are you going to just be another in a long line of people who mean well but did great wrongs in pursuit of an unattainable good end?

Ultimately, it's not that the ends justify the means, but that they must ultimately do so. This is a lot easier when you don't have too much needing justifying...

No, it can apply to a GM too: I do want to go for the story, but I would prefer the transparency of unrolled dice--I want to be able to tell when it's the dice or the GM if things do end up facing too little or overwhelming danger, as you put it. If it's the dice I can live with it, particularly since I am fine with tormenting my PCs; if it's the GM I will be Not Amused.

It's hard to tell with a GM who isn't open which it is.

When I GM, I sometimes will flat-out skip rolling because there's no point other than to buy time--if the player's roll hits outside of a given window in some of the systems I'll run, there's no chance my roll will change the outcome significantly...and I can figure out what this window is on the fly. A few times, when it's getting a bit absurdly difficult, I will just flat-out give them it and say as much. (Sometimes this required waiting until the laughter died down, though.)

The harm is, you will have people less willing to play with you once they find out that you will lie about die rolls.

The problem and fundamental error of consequentialism is that it ultimately assumes that you can know the harm your choices shall/have caused. It presumes omniscience--in fact, arguably it imposes upon a moral actor who wishes to remain ethical an obligation to know absolutely everything.

Of course, if you're simply looking for a way to self-justify actions which in virtue or deontology ethics are wrong, claiming consequentialism as your school is a pretty good tactic...

Some schools of consequentialism solve this problem simply by having a positive obligation to avoid/minimize harm: Using your example... If I'm going to steal something because it's going to be wasted, first I need to make sure it really is. This means I may even have the supermarket opt to give me the food products, because this is a win-win situation--I can arrange it so the situation benefits all of us, especially if I pitch my request as "Donate the food, it'll get you good will & the goods removed, and we both know you would have to write it off anyway."

My guess is Earth, so the question really is where you are.

Communistic and socialistic groups that are completely voluntary lack most of the problems, and certainly are not automatically feudalistic (all feudalistic aspects actually come from feudalism being an attempt to scale up the family) or 'cults with charismatic leaders fleecing flocks' as you seem to believe. All it really takes is the entire group being in agreement to pool resources, and it being voluntary can actually be quite an effective incentive to keep getting along.

It may fall apart, but to some extent this is both natural and desirable, especially when it was originally formed as an ad hoc group anyway.

(Incidentally: Many monastic sects--Christian and otherwise--are communist, especially when they actually do follow the rules of their order. An individual monastic might not own anything more than their clothes, with the group itself owning everything else.)

Look on the bright side, we might finally be able to prove the whole cycle of silence theory via having a way of tracking the dropping reputation of somebody who dares commit such heresies of daring question the group's dogmas, like doubting the One True Holy Solution to life's ills or daring point out internal inconsistencies.

And all without the ethical problems caused by being the ones to set up the experiment, since all we're doing is just observing.

You mean back in the era when you did not have to call it an herbal supplement to make outrageous claims about what your miracle drug did?

The two are related, actually: the sellers of patent medicine were the original drug dealers and operated when there was no such thing as an illegal drug. A lot of them were perfectly happy to add cocaine or opiates as they were discovered, so their 'medicines' had more than the placebo effect going to them, and patent medicine formulas were like the Coca-Cola formula--industry secrets.

End result was that a lot of people ended up addicts without knowing.

This, of course, made the patent medicine sellers quite happy. Addicted customers who don't even know what in the formula they're addicted to can't switch brands: you've basically got captive customers.

The thing is? When I say 'a lot,' I mean that by modern standards--patent medicines were sold cheap, typically, were widely available, and all classes of society used them.

The laws got made roughly when it hit critical mass, and there were enough addicts suffering the bad effects of addiction that it was the dead, rotting elephant in the room...

My problem is that at least in the US, the disease model of addiction is used like a get-out-of-jail-free card: "I'm sick so you can't be mean to me by saying I should be responsible and seek treatment!" You see it used a lot for anything that would require lifestyle changes.

I'd go for the middle ground: Decriminalize drug use, up the penalties if your drug use causes you to break laws and put a permanent end to the ability to claim 'intoxication' as a defense when it was a voluntarily obtained state.

The other, probably easier option is to actually make it very, very clear that seeking treatment is safe--because it seems that actually we're doing every part of that except the publicity. This may be more a job for an ad firm than politicians, unless we do need to make it very explicit within the law that this can't be used against somebody.

In this case: Financial efficiency=less expensive books=greater ability for those on small or limited funds to buy books.

Of course, if you want to prevent Europe from becoming a cultural wasteland, what should matter most is optimizing the financial efficiency of the government itself--either to lower costs of living so people have more money to spend on such activities, or increase the funds that can actually be used for something desirable, such as sponsoring operas.