Wow. I'm glad a lot of people actually take accessibility as a practical problem that can be solved and got out of the way so that we can then move on to other things, instead of being concerned for me being their fount of charitable feelings towards the less fortunate...

This seems to be the exact problem with the ADA indeed. It feeds into this rhetoric of the disabled people being personally guilty of moral wrongs when the goal of the legislation is to enable them to function better in the world. If someone disagrees with the goal, then they do and I'm not sure they should try to sugar-coat it with the idea that they'd be in the chain to carry disabled people around when they go about their daily affairs.

Social policies such as these generally work like that; they move people away from the individual charity-games that they would have to constantly rely on otherwise and give them an assurance that they can, at their own choice, do certain things. The majority of people simply choose that they'd rather just deal with this effectively like that. You may disagree but the difference to Victorian England is quite remarkable, let me assure you. It's a valid choice to just enable people to go about their business instead of having to be bothered by the immediate carrying-around...

At what point would I then become an "asshole" for always feeling "entitled" to being carried around personally to places, say, to my customer meeting a couple of days ago that took place a couple of floors up? Sounds like something I hear about from my friends who are knowledgeable about these issues as they stand in Africa...

The whole point of policies such as these is to, believe it or not, allow for independent functioning. It appears that there is widespread support in society to choose that it happens like this instead of people carrying me around in a set of small morality plays that take place all the time. Your solution is not realistic and frankly I suspect you'd be fine with the end result being me actually not being able to function in society.

Your suggestion about government paying for the modifications is actually somewhat like what happens over here, although of course there are guidelines for new construction. It is interesting to note that you may at least be amenable to the idea that costs like these need to be "socialized" beyond competitive pressures, which would otherwise give a strong incentive for individual actors to do nothing.

... and if there is no access, there certainly is no disabled traffic to begin with. Win-win. So your argument now moves on to the idea that the customer base, serving which with access should just work, does not exist so there is no reason to serve them with access?

Carrying wheelchairs or people up stairs is incredibly dangerous. Ramps which have ridiculously steep grades are similarly dangerous when, say, a power wheelchair loses traction and/or tips over.

The idea of "necessary" is a bit of a slippery slope, although I admit it can go both ways. You have your idea of it, someone else might find that me living at home and having someone bring my groceries is what is sufficient. For me it is quite necessary that there is an accessible toilet at my office. Being a consultant who often needs to deal with clients at their premises, general accessibility is a great thing to have.

I sometimes even need to go shopping for toys, and I do even have hobbies. Whether my purchasing power is sufficient to encourage access on a purely individual business basis, is questionable in particular if my achievement of said purchasing power would be strongly limited by lack of access in ... uh, necessities.

Interestingly, I'm quite pro-market in most things and really like seeing it when a market is created to cater to in particular special needs, but when the market fails to provide for some people's general participation in the world at large, I see no problems in democracy making decisions that mandate "mindless commerce" especially in cases where competitive pressures would discourage individual actors from stuff like providing access, which in the long term and in aggregate is beneficial in the total costs incurred sense. Environmental protection is another case in point.

It's funny how I am probably the most understanding of the "you can't fix everything at once by legislating" kind of thinking of all the disabled people I know, but the sentiments expressed here that it's perfectly OK for me to ask for people to carry me around is what make me want to take a hard turn to the left...

Interestingly, you failed to get the point there is about parents providing room and board for eternity, though. Access is important for independent living, lest you be stored in institutions or live with your parents.

Do tell, what would you consider "neccesities" for me?

We already get to do it enough as it is, no need for you to be concerned for that. Getting to do things on your own without it turning to a constant exercise in dependence of random strangers is worth quite a bit. For one, you can't plan on anything on that basis.

What about the other person constantly having to be at the mercy of the random goodwill of strangers?

You may see me once in a lifetime, but I'd have to be "carried to stores" all the time, by the other people, and I'd have to be asking for it all the time... at what point can the other people just decide that "oh well, let's just do something about the root cause of the problem"? It's not as if a minority such as the disabled can force legislation through alone...

Thanks for the response. I am one of those fairly seriously disabled people for whom access is all-important to for example employment -- because the world is fairly accessible, I was able to get educated and to now work in software engineering, where I'm doing well for myself. I do need a couple of hours of outside help per week primarily in my own home for cleaning and and such things, but otherwise I'm self-sufficient.

If I couldn't get physically anywhere in the outside world, I'd be institutionalized at worst. And at that point, the logical next step is to start saying that I'm a useless ward of the state.

People criticising disability accommodations should consider whether they want to morally blame me for causing costs for being out there, applying myself to the maximum of my ability, or whether they want to blame me for causing costs being a "useless eater" -- although I'm sure minimizing the said costs by reducing me to the bare minimum of existence might feel easier that way. Mind you, while being employed, currently my income level is sufficient to cover a lot of the extras I need out of my own pocket. This helps create the hypothetical free market of services that disabled people are supposed to be using. But nothing of that sort would ever happen without accessibility in the first place.

I actually live in Europe which tends to be quite "socialist" about these things, and in the disability community over here, we're quite jealous of the ADA and accessibility in the USA in general. That's saying much, considering we rarely otherwise would want to live in the States.

I am not really sure I understand why special relativity wouldn't count as a revelation -- it was quite impressive how Einstein was willing to accept the speed of light being a constant regardless of observers' movement in relation to each other, and everything then just followed from there. I'd say the relationships between time and space, the idea that the Galilean perspective is fundamentally wrong and the mass-energy equivalence are not just a minor antecedent to something bigger and better.

GR is the application of similar kinds of thinking to gravity -- being inside an accelerated box is the same thing as being in a gravity field and so on.

I'm not sure I understand how this relates to the idea that the USSR sought to destroy national identities and replace that with the new "Soviet human"...

There really seems to be something going on about that comment, I don't know what it is. It's probably the "national suicide" formulation that is a negative trigger for some people who do not understand the background; but national suicide really was what the USSR about for its constituent peoples. If it wasn't forced relocation, it was branding anything "Fascist" that wasn't pro-Soviet enough.

There were certainly positives to our ability to keep the Soviets at bay and maintain our democracy during the Cold War; President Kekkonen in his younger days was a remarkable diplomat and statesman, and being overtly uppity would have just triggered "help" from Moscow. But I can well understand the deep frustrations of those people who just wanted to call a spade a spade when it came to our "friend" to the East.

The really bad part is that Finlandization works across generations in a culture; we're still sheep, scared of the displeasure of those we consider our superiors, and all too afraid of and eager to participate in the collective shoutings-down by people who believe they're superior because they're in the ideological in-crowd. The Stalinists won at least when it comes to that.