"May contain traces of Buddha-Nature" polos

I have 1 size L and 2 size XL left I am selling for $5.00 + postage, since they didn't work out so well.




Otherwise look HERE ON EBAY.

ZeiTgeist

Following some advice form Lexifab, and Anotherblog (and another etc..), I am starting a new line in trendy young person's shirts with witty quips. Just to start with, I'm just going to put them straight up onto Ebay, and let the market set the price. I have just put in the order to print 5 polos with "May Contain Traces of Buddha nature", which, with luck should be ready within a week. They are 3 size Large and 2 size XLarge. If there are any particular size requests I will put them in the next order.

Why Unfair dismissal laws increase unemployment

I have been asked "How in God's green Earth would removing the protection against unfair dismissals possibly reduce unemployment?", by left leaning family members. What counts, to me is not the logic, but that it is statistically verifiable, which it is. The logic is that employers, not having perfect information, don't know exactly the level of employees they should have to make the most money. If they 1) underestimate, they may lose significant opportunities due to lack of staff. If they 2) overestimate, they will lose money due to having redundant employees on their payroll. Given that they are very unlikely to actually make a loss choosing 1), and that terminations are quite expensive anyway, the added fear of an unfair dismissal lawsuit is the clinching factor making employers invest in capital over investing in extra staff. A followup question is "Why are employers afraid?" implying that it is only "unfair" dismissals which warrant payouts and that employers are allowed to dismiss where it is fair to do so. The real problem is that the burden of proof is entirely on the employer: legal precedents usually favour the employee, and particular test cases scare the death out of even me. However, as an employer, therefore, it is an advantage for our business for there to be unfair dismissal protections. This is because all our competitors are disproportionately conservative, giving us real opportunities for growth. There are also a reasonable number of qualified unemployed, with other employers being this cautious. However, as a citizen of this country, it is a disadvantage to have such protections. Having overly cautious employers puts our whole country at a competitive disadvantage, and increases unemployment.

Ebay good - Happy tenth birthday

I am selling this on ebay 

Click on this link here to place a bid - come on, I dare you to!

This is a spare rugby jersey manufactured in Townsville, Australia. It is made from very tough Polyester cotton blend used for players of Rugby union. The colours are knitted stripes of Dark blue, mid blue and white. It was made originally for seniors of Pimlico State High School and has their school logo embroidered on the left breast. It is a size XL (Cueldee sizing 22) and is designed to be worn as a jumper over other clothing. It has long sleeves with knitted rib cuffs. The collar is made from cotton drill.

I'm a Rice Expert, Apparently

Ever since I read a background to some "Study of Rice Starch Structure" research at UNE, I have been extremely sensitive to the type of rice that is used for various home cooking dishes. I will no longer tolerate long grain rice in my risotto (nor my rice pudding for that matter); I will complain at arborio rice being used in fried rice etc. etc. Today, I was asked (because apparently I am now a rice authority) if one should wash the rice before or after cooking. Quite clearly the answer is that one should do neither. The whole point of cooking it in the first place is to kill any remaining organisms in it, and otherwise make it edible and delicious.
The result of my oversensitivity to rice type usage is that whenever I eat a dish with rice in it that someone else has prepared, everyone looks expectantly at me for a reaction.

Australia and Nuclear power

I feel compelled to talk about this issue because for some reason this entry regarding the subject is the one that had been cached by Google. The issue had also been raised (perhaps half jokingly) by Dr. Clam as a possibly left wing assertion that we should build lots of Nuclear reactors to avoid the horrible environmental desecration of our environment by Hydro-electric schemes. Of course the failure of the Gordon/Franklin Hydro power project back in the eighties completely convinced me that the environmental movement and their casual supporters had lost all sense of priority.

As far as it goes, Australia is already the worlds largest supplier, and has the worlds largest reserves of Uranium. Now I don’t think that Uranium can be treated like any other mineral, in the sense that we should allow for the fact that it is an important ingredient in making the worst weapons imaginable. However most of the consumption of Uranium has to be assumed to be for electricity generation. The Uranium that goes into making bombs will hopefully never be used, such that it can be a nuisance for the stupid country that thought it was a good idea to have these weapons lying around for “deterrence”. The reality is that much less a deterrent than an encouragement for an enemy country to use theirs against you, or organise a nasty accident with your own using a few suicide agents. Like buying guns for protection (statistics show that they are a hundred times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder), nuclear weapons are only good for risking ones own citizens.

It would seem silly to start generating loads of electricity using Uranium when prices are at an all time high, so I don’t see any reason to build lots of them. It would be a shame to waste the fact that we’ve got so much of the stuff, however. If only we could show the rest of the world really responsible ways to use Uranium as a resource! I think we should import a huge amount of nuclear expertise from USA, add in a large dollop of our own research, and develop a prototype nuclear electricity generator. It would be failsafe, could not be used for bomb making, and include a full lifecycle disposal system so that the end products could be buried and be no worse for the environment than the stuff that was dug up in the first place. I believe that technology (in this case) can come up with a clean, green and economical (when including the full lifecycle) electricity generation system. Once this technology is perfected, we could be exporting the design of the system. Hopefully, technology could find a way to export the Uranium such that it could only be used in these kinds of generators, and could not be made weapons useable.

What we agreed upon - what we didn't.

Not having heard from Dr. Clam for a long time, and nevertheless changing my mission statement, I have decided to summarise a few conclusions boldly about abortion.

* Although we believe in an absolute good & evil, any action should be considered in the context of the various options at hand.
* As humans we should think of all killing as essentially evil.
* By any reasonable scientific definition of life, the typical abortion is killing.
* The future looks hopeful, in that we agree there is hope in a future where abortion is rare.
* We strive, in everything that we have influence on, to strive for the aformentioned hope, in various ways we both mentioned.

We also vaguely agreed on the following:
* Prohibition in this country or USA however it is implemented would at first greatly reduce overall abortion numbers, but make them much harder to measure, and we would have to assume a certain level of illegal abortions.
* There is a great democratic resistance (presently) towards even minor restrictions on abortion, especially in Aus, but to some extent also in USA.
* There are costs (short term and long term) with prohibition - hard to calculate, easy to argue about. The benefits of prohibition flow mainly to the individuals involved whose lives are "saved".
* We have both brought up the analysis of costs and benefits overall as a guide to specific policy, but could not agree on a baseline to make rough judgements that could be agreed upon case by case. e.g. What level of disability is insufferable or too expensive to keep alive.

These things we disagreed upon:
* The technologies that would make abortion rare: I believe that better contraception, education etc. and other factors mentioned at this link, for instance:
Making Abortion Rare will tip the balance.
* Dr. Clam believes womb replacement technologies will make abortion obsolete.
* I believe womb replacement technologies, even if they become available will not in themselves affect abortion rates *at all*
* Dr. Clam cited Demographic movement of immigrants from populations where abortion is rare/illegal as a hope for the future.
* I believe that, since immigrants tend to be relatively poorer than the rest of the population, economic pressures to abort will be higher for them, therefore it is likely their abortion rates won't be much different.

New Mission Statement

To account for my changing priorities in this blog, I changed my mission statement as you can see. It might seem at a minimum optimistic/ambitious/kidding myself, but I believe that ideas disseminated on the web can change the world - especially original ideas. And an easy way to check if a train of thought or idea is original, just Google it (or Yahoo, whatever) first.

Schapelle Corby redirect

This link is where I'm posting further comments regarding Schapelle, because a greater number of people are stating their opinions there.

Licensing to control Irresponsible sexual behaviour

As one of the number of factors in society that will collude in reducing the abortion rate without making abortion illegal, I have suggested, without any detail whatsoever, that some kind of licensing/registering regulatory system is a likely trend, and one that as constituents we can influence its direction in a positive way. I will refer to marriage licenses, driving licenses, "blue" card for working with children, Apprehended violence orders, and student cards. The license I am proposing, I would envisage being just another card to carry like these. It would be called something like a dating license to start with. You wouldn't necessarily have to pass any tests or anything, but just have your details registered and police checked (as with the blue card). I would consider it an important form of ID for adolescents and young adults (as would a student card). It would be required to be shown to, say, go to a movie, restaurant, or disco in certain situations. Where it would shine would be with certain infringements. Convictions on date rape (or any kind) would disqualify you from having a date license. Lesser infringements such as inappropriate behaviour as registered by a complainant or by a third party would be registered as infringements (as speeding, parking infringements are) and wouldn't necessarily disqualify your license until you got a number of them. Complainants that make a number of complaints against different people may also be cautioned for vexatious behaviour. Teenage (or any unwanted) pregnancies caused or had can then be easily factored in the equation, and used as evidence of irresponsible behaviour as far as the dating license is concerned. I see this as primarily reducing the incidence of date rape and other hard to prove indiscretions/crimes, such as statutory rape. The reduced incidence of unwanted pregnancies will just be a side effect.

Schapelle - a statistical analysis

Now I have heard this statement a few times with respect to Indonesia's legal system. "Only facts relevant to the case should be considered" implying that things such as the relative percentages of people carrying drugs from Indonesia to Australia and visa versa, the prevalence of drugs in luggage in domestic Australian flights, unrelated cases of drugs mysteriously appearing in peoples luggage are completely irrelevant. This reminds me of a tragic case of a young male getting a screening for HIV. His initial screening came back positive, and his doctor told him that the test had a 4% false positive rate. Because this young individual only took into account facts relevant to the test, he calculated that he had a 96% chance of having AIDS. He committed suicide, not realising that the actual probability was only 1% that he had HIV. Anyone who knows statistics knows that in situations of imperfect information, a strictly statistical approach including (even highly approximate) data about the population in general will give a much better idea of probability of guilt. By the percentage of drug cases that the judge has found innocent, it seems that he is just rubberstamping the prosecution's cases. The Indonesians don't seem to agree with the adage that it is better for 99 guilty to be set free than for 1 innocent to be found guilty.

So many things to write about

I feel I need to make (or retract) my case for licensing to control irresponsible sexual behaviour. I feel I need to respond to an anonymous comment regarding (S)chapelle Corby(late April/early may entry). I feel that I would probably like some answers to the other questions I posed to Dr. Clam. I would probably like at least a G'Day style comment from anybody who reads this (yes you know who I'm talking about, it's you, and I haven't got a single comment out of you, but I know you read this blog!). I will get to some of that!

Pie in the sky technology vs pie in the sky legislation

Dr. Clam said:
The idea that children raised by parents who suck will do better than ones raised by a benevolent state or NGO is one that has too many historical counter-examples to bother refuting.

Humour me, how, in history have children been raised by the state? And is that from birth?

Then:
I find your 'licensing' system infinitely more terrifying than putting drugs in the water. Beyond the obvious axiom that legislative solutions are bad and fail, while technological solutions are good and succeed, it will have absoluely ruinous compliance costs except in the limit of the Global Village, where it will be superfluous.

Is having to have a driving license terrifying? Would it be better to just take cars away from people who have caused accidents and never let them drive again? Would it be better to think of the desire to drive as a mental illness? Maybe you should clarify your "obvious" axiom - at the moment it sounds like a gross exaggeration. Legislative moves such as making the wearing of seatbelts compulsory is much more cost-effective at saving lives than technological air-bags. Technological solutions such as shipping everyone to Mars to solve our population problems is not a helpful vision, because it isn't realistically feasible. The compliance costs of licensing can be quite low also. The "Blue card" system for suitability to work with children, for instance is not expensive and is a useful tool to police regarding paedophiles.


Also when you say:

I envision technology that would take the children away from unwanted parents at a very early age and raise them in tanks, so they would not be forced to bring them to term and would not be likely to form an emotional bond.

You ignore your own arguments with regards to legislation. Clearly, you need legislation to allow this technology. Even technology needs basic tweaking of legislation to develop properly. There was a policy of taking away children who were deemed to be in doubful circumstances in Australia. The children are invariably called the stolen generation. They weren't brought up by the state, but were moved in to well-adjusted families. I don't think they ended up any better than those that were left with their parents.

Future Caliphate

Dr. Clam said
Just one comment for now- you mentioned my hypothetical caliphate before (probably far from the most unlikely way for prohibiton to occur) and under such a regime unwanted children would be raised by the state to form a quasi-military caste, not left to fester with their unwanted parents.

The advantage I see with a caliphate system over a nation state system with full moral leeway for each state, is that people wouldn't be able to move from a strict nation to a more liberal one to avoid restrictions to their "choice". If a caliphate was broad enough , the rules would be consistent across national boundaries, and if the economy suffered as a "cost" of the moral rules, other countries couldn't take advantage of that (competitively). This was the main failing with communism in which there was the success of non-communist systems to compare with, so that communism was not so much a failing as an evolutionary dead-end. I don't believe that under even the most favourable conditions, children raised by the state could do any better than unwanting parents, even ignoring the fact that most unwanting parents will still want to do their best for "their" child, and would not give them up for adoption willingly, even if they had wished them dead at some stage.

Having read the preamble to Afghanistan's constitution back when we were talking about separation of church and state, it seems that newly democratising Islamic middle eastern countries would make their country's laws secondary to Islamic law - caliphate style. However with no central basis for Islamic churches, it is difficult to see how an Islamic caliphate woud be structured.

This, to me is all a little bit moot, because I believe a global caliphate highly unlikely to ever happen, barring a really huge Earth-changing "Act of God". As you, however, I believe structural change to be inevitable (in first world countries) but it will not involve womb replacing incubators, and demographic change will not be a big factor. I believe the change to be influenced by a convergence of many factors which make the life of the unborn more valuable to society. Better education (sex, child upbringing), better contraception technologies, better 4-dimensional ultrasound technology such that the life of the unborn is more visible, Stable popuation (more resources able to be allocated for the future generation), stricter regulation with the youth with a view to reducing date rape and other problematic situations. The future provision of "date licences" or "unprotected sex licenses", as well as parenting licenses also. The separation of sex and pregnancy seems to be a logical progression, and will reduce abortion rates.

A little bit of cost-benefit analysis

I am going to make a lot of dead reckoning judgements, on my way through this analysis, but I feel that the figures are accurate enough to make some broad observations. I am going to use Dr. Clam's figure of $100k as a reference value for the value of the life of the unborn at the stage they are typically aborted. I'm asserting that this value is well below the "market" value of the life of a born baby in our country, and well above the "market" value of said unborn at said stage. Based on the rough figures from the pre-Rowe vs Wade and post comparisons, it is clear that the actual numbers of illegal abortions was at least an order of magnitude lower with abortions illegal than legal. Because they can no longer be reliably counted when they are illegal, it's like the deaths in Iraq - applied best guess-work. But say that Australia's rate is reduced from 90k a year to 9k a year, we are talking about a "moral" gain of 81k*100k = 8.1 Billion dollars a year equivalent. Thats on the plus side of the ledger as far as I'm concerned. On the minus side of the ledger, the calculations get a lot trickier. There are clear indications that there is a considerable influence in demographics as the studies of the relationship of abortion law with crime in the US post Rowe vs Wade. Is 8.1 Billion dollars extra in todays terms enough to bring future crime down to the level of today? I would contend that it is by no means certain that it is possible to do that with 8.1 Billion a year. Is the level of unavoidable increase in crime a "cost" greater than 8.1 Billion? Is that cost going to include a large increase in illegal abortions? My reckoning would say yes - illegal abortions, starting from a very low base, would increase with the new generation, with criminals getting smarter at the same rate as the institutions put there to stop them - with technology to do so improving in line with the technology to stop them. Policing abortions would gradually become as tricky as policing any murder, once things reach equilibrium. I am contending that a policy of gradualism is better, where the "market" value of the unborn steadily increases year after year, pushed along with monetary incentives, until the value of the unborn reaches an equilibrium with their born peers. Then the push for prohibition will be more universal and satisfyingly less disruptive to demographics and society in general.

Axioms are the mother of all logical arguments

Dr. Clam asked
Gosh! Well, if you go back and read what I actually wrote, instead of what you thought I was saying, is there anything that you disagree with? :)

Well actually no - Axiom 2 pretty much stands. My main issue with good and bad is entirely to do with context. It maddens me when someone generalises by saying say "killing is bad" and comes to the conclusion that whatever the context, killing cannot be the most moral thing to do in any given situation. This is where I thought it must mean that good and bad are relative. I do think that societies with disparate moral laws can be reconciled by logical discourse and a developed moral sense - however in practical terms, this must meet certain cost-benefit criteria, which unfortunately has to be converted to dollar terms to be able to logically argue whether it is worth changing a law. Democracy is also an important process to reconcile disparities in moral sense across a population.

Life Brokers

No, I'm not talking about life insurance salesmen. Life has inherent resistance to being converted to a dollar term. However, my belief is that depending on the context, we do it quite often. Doctors are the main ones I am talking about because every day they have to make decisions about life and death, and how much money to spend on saving one life. However, it isn't the amount of money we spend on saving the life that determines how much we value a life, but how it compares to us saving a non-living but valuable item. For instance, if a fireman knew that there was a child inside a burning house, and also a box of jewellery worth $2.5 million dollars, and he could save only one or the other - which would he choose, or to put it another way, what value of object would we take the same effort to save as we would a human life. Homicide detectives are also life brokers - ie. a crime of what value of money would be given the same priority and resources as a murder investigation. This is extremely relevant to abortion debate, as with any crime, the better it is policed, the higher the black-market value becomes ie. the price to reliably get an abortion performed in a country in which it is illegal will give you a ballpark estimate of the nominal dollar value of the life of a fetus. If society does ever accept that most of our police resources should be split up between suspicious deaths of all descriptions evenly, it would mean that most of taxpayer-funded police money would be going to investigating pre-birth deaths. Not doing this would basically be saying that we should not equivalently value pre-birth life. Dr. Clam seems to think we can have it both ways - ie. illegal but low priority for police.

HuH??? I'm not a moral relativist after all!

After 27 years of thinking that I didn't believe in absolute good or bad, I decided to actually look up moral relativism in google. I read what the philosophers had to say about it all, and I realised that I wasn't a moral relativist at all, as they'd explained it. I seem to be just excessively skeptical, as in the environmental skeptic is skeptic. This would indicate to me that deep down its not that I don't believe there is an absolute right or wrong, I just don't believe anyone who tries to lecture me about it, and I feel I must contradict them somehow. To think I had it backwards all this time jumping to conclusions as to what I thought moral relativism was all about.

Changing Hats

For the remainder of the abortion discussion I'm going to take off my hat of relativism and place my hat of righteousness. As far as that goes I agree with the formula for calculating cost benefit analysis as a goal for humanity, as Dr. Clam replied. However, I came up with a figure of $2.5 Million as a value that in developed countries is used for cost/benefit analysis. Dr. Clam seems to have rejected this value as at least an order of magnitude too high - However, in a number of different ways I can demonstrate this to be the value we use and voters vote in a way which backs up this value. I am not sure if he is contending that we value life too highly in the western world, or whether my value is not the relevant one.

Theory of Relativism

Relativism to me is a philosophy with a number of implications. For instance, there are ways at looking at things that have nothing to do with morals in a relative or absolute way. A relativist, to a food which he did not like the taste of, would say "this doesn't taste nice to me"; an absolutist would often say "this food is bad". An absolutist would see a woman and say "she is beautiful", a relativist would say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Similarly, an absolutist looking to buy a product would ask their peers what they thought of particular "brands" being good or bad, while a relativist tends not to look at the brand at all and concentrate on price/feature signals. A relativist believes the judgement of creative works such as movies/books to be completely subjective, while an absolutist does believe movies/books to be good or bad in an absolute sense. When picking who to vote for, an absolutist would tend to view parties as good or bad, while a relativist would look at the policies and predictable results thereof that would most closely meet the ends they are looking for whether they are selfish ends or selfless. In other words, I would expect Dr. Clam to preference coalition parties because they are most likely to mention abortion. However, to more thoroughly explain my argument, there is a block which will vote labor, a block which will vote coalition, the swingers I divide up into selfishists, which will tend to cancel each other out (because the parties have an equal amount of money they can convincingly promise), and thinkers, which will be looking at policies for the betterment of the country. My argument is that that gives the thinkers a lot more power than in other countries.