As I explained above, they're saying that *now*. As recently as six months ago, they were saying that we needed to come up with a plan (note, that's come up with, not implement) in the next five years. Our fiscal outlook hasn't changed significantly in the past six months. The ratings agencies are reacting to political change, not economic change.

I'm no tax attorney (thank the heavens), but my understanding is that virtual items will be treated as assets, so the IRS would only get involved if a player cashes out those assets and realizes a gain. The upside is that, if I understand correctly, gamers making money off of playing Diablo would be treated like hedge fund managers and be taxed on that income at the 15% capital gains rate rather than ordinary income tax levels.

Adding on to what skids just said, Ezra Klein did a pretty good job of summarizing S&P's movement over the past year, so I'll let him do the work:

But what was it, precisely, that changed S&P’s view?

In [David Beers, director of Standard Poor’s sovereign-debt division]'s telling, it was primarily politics. The growth outlook wasn’t any better than it had been in April, but it wasn’t substantially worse. Nor had the debt burden increased with unexpected speed. It was Washington that had unsettled them. The update was clear about this. The title was “United States of America ‘AAA/A-1+’ Ratings Placed On CreditWatch Negative On Rising Risk Of Policy Stalemate” — italics mine.

“What we’re saying now,” explains Beers, “is we question whether despite all the discussions and intense negotiations, if they can’t reach this agreement, will they be able to reach it after the election?”

In short, our debt/GDP ratio is not what's driving the potential downgrade; rather, it's the concern that we won't be able to make the decisions necessary to eventually get our debt/GDP ratio stable. As I said, the amount the US owes has little to do with our credit rating (note: not "nothing," but "little"), since we are financially able to repay our obligations and any likely new obligations for the foreseeable future.

It reduces aggregate demand (just as increasing taxes in a bad economy would do). Given that we have persistent high unemployment as a result of insufficient demand, the correct policy response is to run deficits until the recovery is solidly under way (GDP growing faster than, say 2.5%, unemployment below 6%), then ease off of spending and ease on some higher taxes (not necessarily income taxes) to bring down the debt to sustainable debt/GDP levels,

The potential downgrade has little to do with the amount of debt owed - rather, it is a reflection of the rating agencies' assessment of how likely we are to repay our bonds. Originally, simply raising the debt ceiling would have been sufficient to satisfy the rating agencies. However, now that Republicans have made clear that raising the debt ceiling is an opportunity to extract concessions with the nation's credit rating on the line, some of the rating agencies wanted to see that Congress was capable of reaching agreements without blowing up the world economy.

Yes, it's possible that someone can be offended by requests not to offend others: a kind of second-ordered offense, if you will. However, such second-order offense is a result of an individual's self-defense against an offender, and under the framework I've discussed here and elsewhere is therefore justifiable.

Also, we're not talking censorship here, since no one's talking about government intervening to restrict the original offensive speech. We're not even talking about private censorship, because TFA doesn't even call on the community managers to ban the offensive speech. Rather, TFA is engaging in the classic anti-censorship response to harmful speech: more speech.

Finally, you didn't answer my question. Your prior posts take the position that there is nothing morally wrong with intentionally causing harm or discomfort to others (or perhaps even that you are morally entitled to do so) when there is an action those others could take that could protect them from you. Does your dodge indicate that you are backing away from that position?

Do I understand you correctly then, that you believe that there is nothing morally wrong in you directly and intentionally causing discomfort or harm to others if there is something those others could do to stop you?

Perhaps I've missed it, but is anyone talking about taking away the liberty of the douche in question to be a douche, or the freedom of the Python community to exile or not exile said douche from the community?

It seemed to me like the article was raising an issue, not calling for the particular remedy of censoring the name of the package. If any response was suggested in TFA, it seemed to me to be the thoroughly non-censorship response of more speech as a solution to bad speech.

You proposed the ass-stick analogy, so let's stick with it.

If you know someone else has a stick up their ass, and you go and intentionally wiggle it about, how are you not responsible for that person's resulting discomfort?

Quite the opposite: a slippery slope implies that, after taking an initial step, one will tumble helplessly down to the bottom of the hill without being able to stop one's self. The multitude of copyright extensions are far from a slippery slope, in as much as it took 218 Representatives, 51 Senators, and a President all deciding that extending copyrights was the right thing to do in order for it to happen, each time an extension was passed. That's not a slope, let alone a slippery one: that's a series of stairs.

This seems like sophistry: one can always identify "but-for" causes for an observable phenomenon, since events are largely influenced by causal factors only tangentially related to the phenomenon. To say that those tangential factors are "responsible" may be vacuously true, but it doesn't really mean much of anything.

If one accepts the premise that the state of being offended is a response to external stimuli as described above, it doesn't make much sense to view the offended as equally culpable for the offense as the offenders who caused the stimuli in the first place. It makes even less sense if one accepts that there are instances where it is reasonable for a person to feel offended and act accordingly.

If only there were some characteristic by which one might be aware of and sensitive to the thoughts, feelings, and expectations of others, then one could predict the reasonable effects of one's actions on others.

It seems to me that being offended is a reactive process, rather than an active one. While one can suppress that response (sometimes), that still implies a causal chain in which the offense is a reflex of the offensive stimulus, rather than an active decision to be offended.

Indeed, your discussion of an individual "deciding" whether or not to be offended seems more in line with my discussion above. The actual process of that decision is more likely first the subjective experience of being offended, following by differing degrees of self-analysis to determine whether the offended individual wants to suppress that feeling.

I'm not proposing new guidelines. I'm saying that if the maintainers decide that they want to avoid the offense by forcing a name change, they can mitigate the risks of a "slippery slope" by establishing guidelines for why the name change is justified, rather than doing it in an ad hoc way (that would then support further ad hoc policies).

in short, when it comes to policy, slippery slopes are only slippery if you let them become that way.

It's not really a great insight to point out that someone generally will dislike views that they find offensive.

Putting "responsibility" on the person who is offended by a statement implies that the offended has an obligation to avoid being offended, regardless of the nature of the offense. A framework which holds the offender as solely responsible for the offense, and then determining whether the offense is something about which one should be concerned, keeps culpability on the actor and then turns to the relevant question: whether we feel that the offense is something for which we want to judge the offender.