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johnnyFive  ·  1213 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Last Children of Down Syndrome

A Japanese bioethicist named Masahiro Morioka has done some interesting writing on this (one example). One of his arguments is what he calls "the fundamental sense of security," which is the inherent belief that we are loved and welcomed into the world unconditionally. He questions eugenicist practices to the extent that they demean existing disabled people by saying that, in essence, they shouldn't have been born. But the fundamental sense of security goes beyond that, in that he suggests that this kind of screening makes us all feel like our being welcomed into the world is conditional, and wouldn't have happened if we were too far out of some window of acceptability. In a society that regularly practices this kind of screening, he writes, "people talk about unconditional love; yet they know that they themselves were allowed to be born because they satisfied certain »explicit« conditions imposed by their parents."

I don't know to what extent this is right (and I don't know how firm on it Morioka is for that matter), but I think it's worth thinking about. In particular, the effect on those already-living people with congenital conditions seems much likelier to me. I also think, and this is another thing Morioka touches on in some of his writings, that we have to be careful in boxing ourselves in in terms of defining what "happiness" can and does look like.

    We analysed data on 414 societies from 30 world regions, using 51 measures of social complexity and four measures of supernatural enforcement of moral norms to get to the bottom of the matter.

This is where research of this ilk loses me. Looking at the measures of "social complexity," it's attempting to systematize specific aspects of a society. But it's not clear, even after checking out the study that it's based upon, how this actually works. They seem to be saying that certain things correlate with a more "complex" society, but it's more that they're defining what a complex society is and then saying that certain factors make this so.

That this never happened in all of the Americas, for example, makes me question how universal this truly is. They also do not sample any religions that cropped up in the southern 2/3s of Africa.

johnnyFive  ·  1476 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Joe Biden is in Rapid Cognitive Decline

If, as it is unfortunately looking more and more likely, Biden is the nominee, then the debate(s) between him and Trump are going to be the greatest dumpster fire in American political history.

johnnyFive  ·  1671 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Keeping Up Appearances - arguing the continuation of a nonpartisan Supreme Court

I think this is a good discussion, and it's sorely needed.

My impression is that the idea of court partisanship is largely a construction of everyone but the court. Don't get me wrong, the idea that judges are truly impartial is nonsense, but it's not really a case of partisan loyalty as it is the fact that we all have our biases.

For one, courts are often described as "allowing" the government to do something bad (or preventing the government from doing something good), but this is a somewhat misleading description. Sure, it's true in a literal sense, but it implies a much more policy-focused approach than is generally accurate. A good example is the case involving Amazon last year.

That case, Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk, was brought by employees (via a staffing agency) at an Amazon warehouse. They and all other warehouse employees were required to go through security after their shifts. They said that this could sometimes take a good 25 minutes, and argued that this was time that they should be paid under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). As relevant to this case, the FLSA says an employer does not have to compensate employees for any "activities which are preliminary or postliminary to [their] principal activity or activities, which occur either prior to the time on any particular workday at which such employee commences, or subsequent to the time on any particular workday at which he ceases, such principal activity or activities."

This idea of "principal activities," in turn, refers to both what someone's actual job duties are and anything that is required in order to get those things done. So for example, FLSA has been found to require a meat packer to compensate employees for the time they spend sharpening their knives, because dull knives would both affect the quality and quantity of the final product as well as be more likely to cause accidents. Mitchell v. King Packing Co., 350 U.S. 260 (1956). Another example comes from the Department of Labor's regulations, which is the case of an employee changing clothes prior to starting their actual work. If it's a requirement to do their job (such as an employee at a chemical plant putting on protective gear), that requires compensation. Otherwise, it doesn't.

With the Amazon workers, SCOTUS found that going through security screenings was not their primary job activity (which I don't think is controversial). Based on the law I quoted above, SCOTUS also found that the security screenings were not an integral part of the warehouse employees' jobs, since it wasn't something that they were required to do in order to be able to perform their work. After all, the screenings could've been done away with without any negative impact on employees' productivity.

That this is what the law was meant to do is obvious from its history. Back in 1946, the Supreme Court said that, in essence, employees had to be paid for "all time during which an employee is necessarily required to be on the employer's premises, on duty or at a prescribed workplace." Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680, 690-691 (1946). In the 6 months following the decision in Anderson, some 1,500 lawsuits were filed against employers seeking $6 billion in back pay and damages. Congress quickly amended the FLSA to include the language described above.

I should add that the SCOTUS decision (regarding Amazon) was unanimous.

I largely agree with many of the criticisms of this outcome from a policy standpoint (this story from before the decision discusses this). But there's a difference between bad policy and bad law.

Thus I think we need to draw a better distinction between partisan appointments and partisan judges. Appointments were supposed to be political, which is why the President and Congress is involved. But that's the end of their influence, and is why it's virtually impossible to remove someone from the bench. You're never going to have a perfect system, but I do think the fears about court partisanship are overblown. And what's worse, they risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Democrats or Republicans continue to criticize the court for making biased decisions, that will increasingly be its role in our society, since at the end of the day institutions are only valid insofar as we believe them to be.

johnnyFive  ·  1685 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: New details on Palantir, the commerical spying tool for law enforcement

I think it's a totally fair question, and something we tend to lose sight off. Not just in the more general sense of "asking if they could, but never if they should." Instead, "profitability" is seen as a moral good in and of itself.

I also think that it's a case sometimes of getting the job and then making post hoc rationalizations.

johnnyFive  ·  1699 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Who Is Left on Hubski? (Part II)

Name

johnnyFive (j5)

Location

SE USA

Age

36

Current Preoccupation

Trying to find some direction. I've bounced from interest to interest for as long as I can remember, but that leads nowhere interesting or fulfilling. But my brain is such that the parts responsible for weighing cost-benefit are wonky, meaning it's hard for me to define what "want" actually means sometimes.

What changes from Hubski?

I like what applewood said.

    good job

We apparently have very different definitions of what this means.

johnnyFive  ·  2121 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 6, 2018

    It's HOT. 23 Celsius outside,

I had to get Google to do the conversion, the result being

    73.4 Fahrenheit

As someone from the southern U.S., LOL

But on a more serious note, I do feel the pain of pale skin. The day my wife and I started dating, we had a conversation for about 45 minutes in our school's parking lot, which is surrounded my trees. We both got sunburn anyway. A couple of years later during a power outage, as an experiment my wife shone a flashlight on her bear stomach. The room got brighter.

johnnyFive  ·  2186 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Oklahoma, Kentucky public schools close as thousands of teachers strike

Chickens are finally coming home to roost in the red states.

johnnyFive  ·  2282 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: December 27, 2017

Christmas was pretty good. We spent it with my family, since we're not really in contact with my mother-in-law anymore, a fact that has improved our quality of life significantly. This was the first year my daughter's really been old enough to get it, and she had a ball. Watching her was probably the high point of the whole thing.

Holidays (or, more accurately, my grandparents during holidays) always exhaust my mom, which is a pity since those are also the only times we get to spend any sustained time with her. My grandmother must be the center of and most important thing wherever she is, but the rest of the family's tolerance is waning. My dad, brother, and I don't really go with her attempted narratives, and so she was very quiet during the evenings (we only see them for dinner on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day).

Definitely ate well: Christmas Eve dinner is a shrimp and scallops dish with a parmesan sauce of some kind, and of course tortière for Christmas evening. Much video games: I got an iTunes gift card for Christmas, so have been buying a few iOS games that I've had my eye on and that are on sale. Final Fantasy Tactics for $6? Yes. I also got Mario Kart 8, which was great fun, and even my wife enjoys. I also got her hooked on Kingdoms and Castles, which is worth the $7.50 already, and more is hopefully being added.

It's a good thing I stocked up, as my wife is back to work today, meaning I'm solo-parenting for the rest of the week. She's actually going to a show out of town on the 30th, so I'll be truly on my own for a couple of days then. Somehow I'll survive (I'm just glad my progeny got some new toys recently!). The plan is for an uneventful New Year's, then going to see Star Wars on the 2nd, since our daughter's school reopens by then.

johnnyFive  ·  2303 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: December 6, 2017

Abiding. Work is still a drag, but I'm trying to re-align my own expectations for myself. I still want to be doing something different, something more, but I'm trying to cut myself at least a small amount of slack.

I also bought a Switch earlier today as my Christmas present to myself. I need a little more pointless fun in my life. Meds mean I can do more Serious Thinking and what-not, but they don't mean I can't still tire myself out, and that signal is harder to read than it used to be. So I'm kind of giving myself a break for the rest of the year, trying to do more creative stuff (found an art tutor locally and am going to write more), and play some Zelda. (And Super Mario Odyssey once Amazon brings it to me.)

And that's about it. Books are still fun, TV is still fun. What can I say?

johnnyFive  ·  2380 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: September 20, 2017

First to the party for a change.

One of the wonderful things about my daughter starting daycare has been all the friends she's bringing home. And by "friends" I mean various plagues. I've been sick on-and-off for the last 3-4 weeks, with this past week being the worst. I woke up Sunday-before-last with what felt like the flu, which worsened on Monday (had a fever of 101 that night), and then was slightly less-bad on Tuesday. By Wednesday it had migrated to my lungs, and I was getting out of breath with a quickness. I then improved slightly but not a lot, and had a bad cough that just hung around. Finally went to the doctor Monday after work, and got diagnosed with bronchitis. I'm on antibiotics, which seems to be helping.

My mental health is doing okay, and I'm definitely making progress at figuring out some bad habits. I'm hoping to write more about this sooner or later, but I keep finding new stuff and refining things, so anything I write becomes obsolete pretty quickly.

Nothing else on the more prosaic side. Being sick has meant I haven't been especially productive, but I'm slowly trying to get back into the swing of things.

johnnyFive  ·  2380 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Maybe Women Won't Date You Because You're Awful

All you need to do is go on some parts of the 'net (thinking /r/redpill and /r/incels, for example), and this is something people really espouse.

There is of course a broader issue about how men really don't have a good idea of what our role in society is anymore (something I've written about before, but that's a reasonable conversation to have, which is not something we seem capable of anymore.

johnnyFive  ·  2404 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What's Hubski Reading?

Currently:

Heretics of Dune (book #5 in the Dune Chronicles).

Destination: Void, also by Frank Herbert (but a different series).

The Book of Mark from the New Testament.

johnnyFive  ·  2422 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What happened to ThatFanficGuy?

I knew as soon as I read your post who the other user involved would be.

johnnyFive  ·  2436 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: July 26, 2017

I'll be brief as I have to head to work in a moment. Shit with the mother-in-law went sideways this week, and my goal is to have a new daycare option in place within a few days. My wife is thankfully on board with moving our daughter elsewhere, although is in less of a hurry.

Kung fu is happening most of the weekend, and I definitely need the distraction. My mom is coming up tomorrow to help with the youngin, and to give my wife some sane family time.

My project to read the NT in Greek continues apace.

johnnyFive  ·  2483 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: A Stanford researcher is pioneering a dramatic shift in how we treat depression

CBT is great.

Woebot, however, is on Facebook's messenger. I for one would not be even remotely willing to trust that platform with this kind of information.

johnnyFive  ·  2488 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pesky whippersnappers are now destroying Applebees, apparently.

I can't remember if I've posted this on hubski anywhere, but I've been thinking about my lot in life, like you do. One of the dangerous things we inherited from our parents (or at least that I did) was an unspoken expectation in terms of financial independence. With an actual mortgage, a mortgage's worth of student loans (actually more, now), and a kid, that's not a realistic expectation.

I used to get kinda bummed out by this. Once I realized that it was a case of expectations, though, I got to starting to change them. I also realized that every refusal to be a consumer is itself an act of defiance. So fuck 'em.

Actually, I wanted to add too, that some of this stuff I get. Like, I understand a company firing you if you talk shit about them on Facebook.

One of my prior jobs was hearing cases for the unemployment system in my state. Basically I'd talk to both sides, try to figure out why the person quit or was fired, and then decide whether they should get unemployment based on that. We of course never dealt with non-compete clauses, since that was a private issue. Interestingly, every once in a blue moon we would see an employment contract requiring that the employee agree not to file for unemployment. This is illegal in my state (and it's actually a misdemeanor for the employer), so needless to say those didn't get the employer anywhere. But I do wonder how many people didn't apply for benefits at all because of one of those.

johnnyFive  ·  2494 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: We Need Memorial Day to Obscure the Unbearable Truth About War

I'm suspicious of any society where patriotism is easy.

Worst still if it's a commodity.

johnnyFive  ·  2558 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Rotten Tomatoes: is the semi-fresh aggregation site really destroying cinema?

I feel like this criticism is basically "Rotten Tomatoes does what Rotten Tomatoes intends to do."

    A range of critics with quite different styles, quite different viewpoints, quite different approaches and quite different prejudices cannot meaningfully be reduced to an average.

That's the whole point. If 73% of critics, all coming from different places, said a movie sucks (as they did with Batman v. Superman), chances are it's not very good. If I only read 1 review, how do I know that person just doesn't like superhero movies? And if that's the case, their review stops being meaningful. But by giving an aggregate, we get much more meaningful information. I don't find his analogy at the end to be compelling at all, and really isn't a good description of what Rotten Tomatoes does.

johnnyFive  ·  2559 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Teaching is Fulfilling: what TFG's been up to #3

My favorite example is "nimrod."

Nimrod in the Old Testament was a great hunter archetype. Fast forward to the 1960s, and Bugs Bunny uses it to insult Elmer Fudd--basically calling him a great hunter sarcastically. Too few people understood the reference, but gleaned the idea Bugs was going for, i.e. to make fun of Elmer. From this, nimrod came to mean "dummy."

johnnyFive  ·  2563 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Comey: FBI is investigating Russian election interference, Trump ties

    I guess I'm just bothered by the shit my country gets.

As an American, I understand :) It can be frustrating, but honestly that's only true to the extent that you feel any emotional connection to your country. I've never really been good at the whole "loyalty to abstractions" thing. As a character from a book by one of my favorite sci-fi authors put it:

    The way I see it, anyone who's proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn't read enough history yet.

The recommendation not to praise intelligence but work is a good one. I remember hearing about some other research awhile back that found that kids who were told about how smart certain scientists (like Newton or Einstein) were then did worse in science in math classes compared to those that were told how hard those same people worked.

I can say for my own part that this makes sense. I never valued work; I never had to work especially hard in school, so didn't really know how to study (even when I got to college). This meant i tended towards subjects that I was already good at, and means it was a lot harder to make myself well-rounded. It also meant that I was turned off of pursuing science as a career by a single worthless AP chemistry teacher in high school.

johnnyFive  ·  2620 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Jim O'Neill: The Best Trump Pick You've Never Heard Of | The Daily Caller

Yes, avoiding inconvenience is definitely worth giving a generation of factory workers black lung.