Well, this should be kept in mind every time someone says "we've eradicated disease X, lets destroy the lab samples".

http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/artic...

Actually, some supported schools quite a bit. Schools trained their employees. Factories had a problem with farm kids just wondering off and doing other things like they would on the farm. This was a big set back for industrialization so schools were opened in order to teach the children how to pay attention, follow direction, add and subtract and so on to be ready for the factories.

Perhaps after they were "trained", they decried their further education but initially, it was for their benefit for the most part.

http://www.geopolitics.us/why-...

IQ tests would pretty much fall under aptitude tests which under tort law seems to have been banned. It's also why a high school diplomas became necessary for trivial jobs- if someone had a high school diploma they met certain minimum job requirements. This also led to the schools becoming training camps for local employment opportunities also.

Employers used to give aptitude tests before everyone graduated high school or even before schools had real standards for a diploma. Eventually, these aptitude tests were applied to discriminate against people based on race or sex and so on and there were quite a few lawsuits over it that with employers losing. I believe the big one was Griggs v. Duke Power Co 1971 and there is a history after that including addressing a ruling in the 1991 civil rights act.

It's not specifically barred- but there is a high risk of being sued over their use- especially if the employment space is not diverse enough to "prove" they are unbiased (quotas).

Why is that relevant in any discussion about whether the rich should pay their fair share for the pollution they cause?

Because you specifically brought up helping the poor as if it somehow secured your position. I can see you are abandoning that now I guess.

Again, not relevant, unless you are arguing that welfare should pay the poor's medical bills and not those who injure the poor.

Again, you brought this up as a benefit to the poor. welfare already pays the poor's medical bills so should is not an operative term.

Or they spend the day at the mall or the library on hot days. Back in the first half of the 20th century before residential air conditioners, air conditioning was a big selling point for movie theaters.

Yes, in their diminished capacity, the poor are free to do as you say all day long and to hell with whatever they might actually want to do.

In your neighborhood, can you buy a gallon of milk without driving to the store in a car? Have you ever done so? If not, you are a slave to your car, not the other way around.

I can walk and/or ride a bike to get a gallon of milk. It's not practical or efficient to make a trip to the store for single items but I guess you have more free time then I do.

Why drive at all when you can bike everywhere? Oh that's right, because we've made the streets faster for cars and more dangerous for bicyclists, and pushed destinations farther apart and harder to get there by bicycle in order to make room for parking. We've taken away our freedom in order to give ourselves the perception of freedom. Isn't that ironic?

There is no loss of freedom for a perception of freedom. It's called efficiency and availability. But why are you talking about freedom as if only people who think like you have it?

I don't think paying the poor's medical bills and lost work days will make them poorer. Nor will keeping schoolchildren healthy and able to attend classes keep them from achieving their full potential.

I sure you don't think. You see, if you make everything more expensive, you are also making food more expensive, clothing more expensive, toiletries more expensive, electricity more expensive, just about everything will be more expensive including taxes for government services. Or do you somehow magically expect schools, fire and police departments, town halls and so on to not be hit by the carbon taxes in their electric bills and transportation costs for materials and so forth?

Or it would be online right now if externalities and other market failures were corrected.

No it would not. It doesn't exist, the capabilities do not exist. Nowhere does it exist. Not even in Germany where they are singing their own praises does it exist. It simply does not exist.

Why? You want something, is it not fair for there to be SOME conditions on that?

Fair? ITs freaking constitutionally barred. Should kids give up their rights to not have to pray in order to go to public school? It's the same concept or principle here- they can be home schooled or go to a private school if they don't want to pray to my God right. The government cannot say forget the constitution if you want to do X that we provide. If they did, X would be unconstitutional as well as the violations of the constitutionally protected rights.

Can the government say no one can ever vote democrat again and have a bank account because the government regulates banks? Secret ballots aren't in the US constitution so the mechanism can be created. And of course the answer is no- because your freedom of speech, freedom of association, cannot be limited by the government.

But why not? Clearly, if a robot can do hard labor instead of a human, that should be preferable on humanitarian grounds. If it can also do it for cheaper, then, as you rightly note, it should also be preferable on economic grounds. The only argument to the contrary is that people who are pushed out of jobs by robots (and this will clearly keep encroaching, so a laborer can only "retreat" by re-qualifying etc so far) are out of their source of income. But if the sole reason why we give them jobs is to provide them with income, then it's basically just a thinly veiled form of the broken window fallacy.

I'm not advocating it because I personally do not care about it. It's not my decision to make and my job will not be replaced in my lifetime. For those who will suffer this either in reality or by fear of it becoming reality, I feel for them. But it is not my decision.

And no, the reason we give them jobs is to trade labor for value. They provide value in creating wealth in which they get compensated.

That was the point that I was trying to make. Automation is inevitably going to drive down the cost of labor so much that selling it to obtain basic income will cease to be a realistic proposition for a significant part (long term, probably the vast majority) of the population. At that point we'll need to come up with some other arrangement.

agreed.

Note though that the long-term proposition is not "some people supported by the public". It's the reverse - "the public" supported by a few people (those who would still have jobs - like programming the robots). In fact, it's not even clear what "support" would mean, since, if most of society is basically on free welfare, then money is not really a universal medium of exchange anymore... the few people who still work - whom would they get the money for their work for, and what would they spend it on?

Hell, get that proportion high enough, and you'd probably have people competing to get a chance to do "real work" - for free.

It may sound silly, but a moneyless society like in Star Trek might be something we are eventually forced to evolve to. OF course when you have a machine that can pretty much make anything you want, it's a lot easier forgetting about the means to get what you want and need.

You are not disallowed. You just cannot require hobby lobby to pay for the procedure.

That's the biggest lie of this. No one is disallowed anything. All it means if that either you have to pay for it yourself or seek funding from a different source.

But I know what you are doing- parasite.. The problem is the entire concept is so out of whack with reality that no one will be inflamed by your choice of wording.

BTW, Roe V. Wade, the landmark ruling that prohibits government from banning abortions relied primarily on the fact that the government had no business knowing if you had an abortion or not or what kind of medical treatment you had and you were entitled to due process before they could violate your privacy. The PPACA or Obamacare for short, actually removes a lot of those impediments Roe relied on and I doubt it would still prevent government from banning abortions if they tried now. The problem is that the government now has a right to infringe on the privacy which forbade them earlier (at least on a federal level).

So, can you lose your 4th amendment rights, your right to free speech and your right to due process when the government gives you a license to drive a car? How about for fishing or hunting? Or a permit for installing a pool or addition to your home?

Those are all specific grants of public privilege. Partaking in anything the government offers or provides should in no way result in your loss of constitutionally protected rights or laws on the books. As a libertarian you should be firmly against having to surrender rights to participate in commerce or any interaction with it through a government created process (incorporating).

Paying taxes is a little different than paying a third party insurance company isn't it?

So why can't the government make you pay for health care that you don't agree with?

Well, in this specific situation, there is a constitutional amendment that bars congress from making any law prohibiting the free exercise of an establishment of religion. This has been narrowed down a bit over the years so the democrats along with the republicans passed a law that said all rules (and yes, the birth control mandate is a regulation created by the DHHS not the actual law passed by congress which is why the mandate doesn't override previous laws when in conflict) need to have a good reason to overcome someone's religious rights. It sets a criteria of (1) is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest; and
(2) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

We can assume 1 is true as otherwise, they wouldn't have made the rule. What the court did is find that 2 wasn't satisfied because the government already exempted other groups and people for the same objections.

So why, because not only is there a constitutional prohibition that the government likes to ignore, but there is a law that supersedes a rule made and that law passed almost unanimously by congress.

This immediately led to companies saying they also want to claim the right to not hire LGBT people, against Federal laws, because they say so.

Which companies and what law? As far as I am aware, the federal civil rights laws do not cover LGBT as a protected class (race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.).

  And I'm not aware of any companies publicly stating those reasons outside a photographer and a bakery not wanting to participate in a gay wedding.

The rest of your rant seems baseless also. The ruling specifically said it doesn't include those other things.

At the end of the day you need to realize that jobs that cant justify a living wage shouldnt exist.

Wrong.. Jobs that are getting the headlines should not be jobs people are making careers out of. They are the type of jobs kids get to have some work experience before going on to a real job. Fast food workers should not be trying to live off their job. The bagger boy at the grocery mart should not expect to be a bagger the rest of his life and retire from that job.

There is a serious problem in this country when the job prospect is so bad due to whatever and government that people have turned to these jobs as careers instead of experience launchpads or extra money devices as they traditionally have been. When countries like those in Europe are counting illegal activities like drug dealing and prostitution as part of their GDP in order to pad their numbers, we can assume this problem is not just in the USA too.

But lets not pretend fast food service jobs are in that category yet. Fast food chains make massive wads of cash off these people's labor. The issue isn't that their jobs arent productive enough, its that the corporation that hires them is exploiting their labor and not paying them a fair wage, and since the entire market is distorted due to labor having a do or die requirement to be employed, there is no where for them to turn aside from unionization (which is brutally demonized by the establishment for exactly that reason).

Well, it looks like they might be turning to the unemployment line if robots/automation really can do their jobs. But the problem is not companies taking advantage of these people, it is that they have little to no where else to turn. In my day, if you showed you have held a job for 1 years time, you were almost a sure hire for whatever job you applied for (assuming you were qualified). Employers looked for gaps in employment that weren't explained (FMLA or school or something) and over looked your applications for people who prove they will stick with a job. You then got hired and received raises and promotions based on your performance and if you weren't happy with what you received, you looked for another job. Of course in my time, unemployment was low. We had several presidents that didn't overly burden business and jobs were growing. Of course it took a while to get going under Reagan and soared under Clinton.

Hell, I can still make $1000 or better per week if I wanted to driving a truck. Why can I do that? Because I didn't flip whoppers for a career, because I wanted more and more was actually available. We don't need to fix this by inflating salaries, we need to fix this by inflating opportunities and get these jobs back to being stepping stones for children while the adults do real work for real pay.

They are likely going to have to work more jobs for less pay or find something that makes them worth more than a robot.

I'm not advocating the replacement of workers with robots and I do not think the GP was either. It's just an economic truth that if I can get the same performance and quality from two different sources, the cheapest of the sources is the most profitable one. If a robot costs $30,000 to purchase and $30,000 to instal and maintain over three years, that's $60,000 over three years or $20,000 a year on average. So an employee making around $10.50 an hour and not counting taxes the employer has to pay,- like their portion of the payroll tax or medical insurance or workers comp and unemployment insurance, they more or less break even with the robot (about 20k a year working 38 hour weeks 50 weeks a year) assuming the robot can do the job just as well.

We may have to reign ourselves to the fact that if robots can replace unskilled workers, some people will need to be supported by the public somehow.

I think this might be of help to you.

http://www.suburbancomputer.co...

I did it for two different states and got an answer of around $361/week take home assuming 40 hours a week. The differences between the two states I checked is about 1 dollar so I didn't bother doing a comparison.

Those death rates for coal contain illnesses from mining and transporting coal which is a bit unconnected to burning it for energy. In most situations, those outside related deaths or illnesses can be attributed to improperly following MSHA regulations.

Needless to say, neither your article or you have provided any evidence that coal is super toxic. It simply isn't. More people die and need health care related to car accidents per year than from coal. But lets look at the real numbers for a minute. According to Wikipedia, in 2006, we generated 1.991 trillionkwh a year in the US from coal. According to your article, we experience 15,000 deaths per trillionkwh a year from coal generation (mind you, it includes mining, transportation, and everything else involved). So 1.991*15000 comes out to 29,865 deaths a year attributed to our coal usage for electricity. According to the CDC, there were over 10k more suicides in 2011 (38,364) than deaths attributed to using coal as electricity. There were 4 times the amount of accidental deaths than coal (120,859 accidental deaths). More than double the number of deaths from Diabetes that from using coal to generate electricity (69,071). But lets assume every single coal death in the US is from heart disease which is the number one killer listed by the CDC (597,689). Deaths from coal would be only 4% of the total (29865/597,689) .

Again, coal is not some super toxic material and neither is the byproducts. You can check the math, and please feel free to do so.

Lol... and everyone who has ever seen a coal power plant has died. Coal is not some super goxic material and neither is the byproducts.

I could think of it your way, i could also think the moon is made of green cheese and be just as wrong. Your solution, despite being largely fictional will disproportionately harm the poor and make middle class poor.

Some of you people just seem to not care about the poor and don't mind tge poor getting poorer as long as yoh can make the rich less rich.