Theophobia seems to gripping a significant portion of our nation, but we are doing nothing about it. In fact, it is hardly recognized as a problem at all. Theophobia is the fear of God or religion. Compared to homophobia, which is extremely rare, despite the fact that accusations of it are rampant in many political forums, theophobia is fairly common among some groups, and frankly it is much more subversive and dangerous. Instead, it is being summarily ignored and marginalized, as more vocal gay rights activist groups that are plagued with it preemptively accuse nearly anyone citing religion or religious freedom for anything of being homophobic.
Homophobia is a marginal problem for a few reasons. One is that only a tiny percentage of the population is actually homosexual or of any non-traditional sexual orientation. This certainly does not justify treating them poorly, but it does make the problem lower priority than problems that affect more of the population. In addition, homophobia is fairly rare. A vast majority of people who are accused of homophobia are not actually homophobic. They merely adhere to religious beliefs that a homosexual lifestyle is sinful (a very small portion actually believe that experiencing same sex attraction is also sinful). Yes, there are some bigots out there, and calling out bigotry, where it actually exists is totally appropriate. Technically calling these people homophobic is incorrect, because phobia is actually a mental illness, and bigotry is a conscious choice.
Theophobia is the the fear of God or religion. It is not marginal, for related reasons. It is not marginal, first, because at least 60% of the U.S. is religious. This means a majority of the population is targeted. In addition, theophobia seems to be significantly more common than homosexual or other non-traditional sexual orientation (this is based on the fact that protests and political movements on this topic tend to have a significant number of supporters that are not homosexual, in addition to those who are). In addition, theophobia is far more subversive, because a vast majority of people don't even realize that it exists. Of course, there are also plenty of bigots in this camp as well. In fact, it is entirely possible that there are more bigots against religion than there are bigots against people with alternative sexual orientations.
We need to start calling out bigotry and phobia against religion. Right now, we have a very one-sided battle, where religion is slowly losing ground, because accusations of homophobia and bigotry against homosexuals dominates the field. In the last decade, the U.S. has lost more religious freedom than any time in its history except, perhaps, during the mid 1800s, when it was made legal in some states to murder Mormons, and the Federal government redefined marriage for the first time, expressly to discriminate against Mormonism.
Our country is built on religious freedom. A significant portion of the colonists that are ancestors to most of us came here to escape religious persecution. While religion was not the only, or perhaps even the biggest reason people immigrated, it is one of the cornerstones of our nation. It is the foundation of all of our freedoms. It is the most important factor in equality, because if equality does not come from God, then it comes from people, and without a universal truth, the only law is that the people who are strong enough to control everyone else are the only people fit to rule. Whether God actually exists or not, freedom of religion is valuable to everyone, and that makes theophobia far more dangerous than any fear or bigotry against tiny minorities.
Religious freedom should trump most other civil rights. Of course, there do need to be some reasonable limitations on that. For example, a religion might believe in ritual human sacrifice, but that does not mean that murder by adherents of the religion should be tolerated. Likewise, slander of homosexuals, denying them essential services like food and shelter, and such should also not be tolerated. It is going too far, however, to legally require people to affirm homosexuality, in word or in action. For example, forcing a preacher, priest, or bishop to perform a same sex wedding is equivalent to forcing them to affirm the relationship as well as activities that are implicit in the relationship. This is a violation of freedom of conscience, which is the foundation of freedom of religion. Selling a wedding dress or other wedding services to a same sex couple may be less intimate than actually performing the wedding, but it still comes with a tacit affirmation of homosexual relationships, if the person providing the services is made aware of the situation. Even adoption is a very intimate service, and while I hold the opinion that same sex parents are better than an orphanage, forcing an adoption agency to place children with same sex couples is forcing them to affirm the moral validity of the relationship. When we start forcing people to act as if they believe something, we are expressly violating the word and spirit of religious freedom.
In my opinion, we should start with necessities and slowly advance from there. Discriminating against anyone when it comes to food, shelter, utilities, transportation, and communication should definitely be illegal, because these are all absolute necessities in our culture. Purchase of clothing should be protected, with an exception for garments with religious significance, including wedding dresses. Employment should also be protected, with exceptions for positions of religious significance. Emergency, home maintenance, and transportation maintenance services, as well as other services related to maintaining or obtaining necessities, should also be legally available to everyone. Anything beyond this is luxury. Luxury goods and services are not necessities. While discrimination in these may affect quality of life in some degree, it does not affect ability to survive, and it only affects convenience marginally.
The principle here is, "If it is not broken, don't fix it." A microwave is a luxury good (if you have an oven already), but it is one that is fairly important to most people. Should we legislate that it is illegal to discriminate against some group when selling a microwave? No, because there is no reason to clutter up our laws with things that are not a problem. Yeah, you might get discriminated against by some guy on Craig's List, but there are plenty of other options. Even in the worst case, you can buy pretty much anything online, even in very remote locations. Items that straddle the line between luxury and necessity might eventually need some legal anti-discrimination protections, but if they are readily available, there is no reason everyone should be forced to sell them to anyone that asks. If we let people who want to discriminate in these things do as they please, they will eventually run themselves out of business if it really makes a difference.
So, what about Hobby Lobby? The problem with Hobby Lobby is not religious freedom. If it was purely religious freedom, the service Hobby Lobby refused to provide is not a necessity (it may straddle the line though), and it is readily available elsewhere, which makes the Supreme Court ruling entirely justified. The fact, however, is that this is not even about a service or good offered by Hobby Lobby. It is about a failed attempt at universal healthcare, requiring businesses to offer services to their employees that are far outside the scope of the those businesses. The government has no business requiring for-profit companies to provide healthcare as part of their compensation. The best solution to universal healthcare is universal healthcare! Healthcare as mandatory compensation is just as bad as Obamacare and equally ineffective. The Hobby Lobby case should never have happened in the first place, and frankly, the government should have seen long ago that mandatory healthcare as compensation is prone to freedom of conscience and religion issues. The fact is, the Hobby Lobby case is not about discrimination at all. It is the consequence of the government trying to cut corners and force businesses to do things that are outside the scope of business.
What this all comes down to is, we need to treat the problems of theophobia and homophobia according to their impact. One problem is about treating a very small percentage of the population well, while the other is about maintaining the foundation of our most fundamental rights. Both problems are about rights, but one covers the rights of every single person in the country, while the other only covers the rights of a very small portion of the population. The priority here should be clear. I am not suggesting we should ignore discrimination based on sexual orientation, but when it comes to clashes between sexual orientation and religion, religion should always have the benefit of the doubt.
13 January 2017
The Labor Pool
I realized something the other day, while playing a video game. It is surprising what we can learn from games. In this case, what I learned was about economics. In the game, I can build houses for people. Each house I build increases the population of my city. Each time I improve a house, it increases the population it provides. Unlike traditional city sim games, this game just assumes that every space is taken. If a house can hold 8 people, then it does hold 8 people. I can put my population to work by building industrial buildings. At the top of the screen, there is an indicator showing my "available" population. This is the population of my city that are not currently working but can work. This is useful, because I can compare my available population to how much population will be employed by a building I want to build. This allows me to make sure I always have enough available population to build what I need to.
From a real world perspective, this is about unemployment. My houses provide living space for people, and every space is always filled. This provides me with a predictable labor pool. My industrial buildings use some amount of my labor pool. The remaining available population represents the people in my city who are unemployed. By definition, an unemployed person is a person who is not currently employed, but who is available for employment and desires employment. This describes my free population in this game perfectly.
Now, there are a few interesting things about my unemployed population (which is about 25% of my total population as I am writing this). The first is that I am strongly motivated to maintain a moderate level of unemployment. My unemployed population is an extremely valuable asset. Let's say I want my city to produce more wood or more steel. I might expand an existing facility or build a new one. In either case, I will need additional people to work at the new or improved facility to maintain an increased production. If I don't have sufficient free population, then I will first have to build a new residence or increase the size of an existing one. Now, consider this from a real world perspective. In the real world, there are a few more factors. For one city, those factors are sufficient housing, quality of living, cost of living, and a number of smaller factors. One big one is availability of work. Now we have a problem though. Before we can successfully increase the potential productivity of a city, we need more people, but before more people will come, we need to increase the potential productivity. Generally, in real life, there is enough flexibility that this is not a major problem, but the U.S. (especially the Eastern U.S. to the central states) is dotted with cities that were once industrial centers but ultimately failed, and this phenomenon seems to have played a significant role in their failure.
Back to the game now; the other interesting thing is that my unemployed citizens don't get kicked out of their houses; they don't starve to death; they don't even move out of my city. In fact, they are still paying rent to me for living in my houses. Now, I'll admit, there is a point where this starts to get unrealistic. The fact, however, is that my unemployed population is not suffering from their unemployment. They have shelter. They obviously have sufficient food to get by. They clearly have everything they need to survive. And, this is a really good thing. Economically, it means that I can maintain a big enough pool of unemployed laborers that if I suddenly need to expand my industries rapidly, I can do it without having to worry about whether or not enough people will immigrate to do the additional work that is necessary. If my citizens had to deal with the same consequences of unemployment that real live Americans do, the economy of my city would be much more weak and frail.
There are certainly some things about this game that are unrealistic. For example, the cost of living for my unemployed population is magically taken care of so that I never even have to think about it. That said though, there are some extremely valuable lessons to be learned despite that. The first is, unemployment is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps 25% is a bit extreme, at least, in the current state of our industries and economy, but 10% to 15% is not as bad as we often make it out to be. The reason unemployment is a target of criticism is that unemployed people in the U.S. cannot survive. This is not entirely true, but survival is a significant struggle for unemployed Americans. It does not have to be that way though. It is that way because we are too lazy, stubborn, greedy, or egotistical to let it be any other way. Unemployment would be a lot less bad if we made sure that the free portion of our labor pool was taken care of. This does not even have to be inefficient. Unemployed people just need enough to survive and maintain good health. The second valuable lesson is that low unemployment makes the economy more fragile and unstable, because it does not provide enough margin for sudden growth. Economic fluctuations are occurring constantly, but low unemployment limits potential increases. In short, low unemployment is actually bad for the economy. Of course, high unemployment comes with its own problems, but having a reasonable pool of available labor is good, because it allows for rapid expansion. Unfortunately, if we don't take care of our unemployed, they lose their labor value, either by immigrating or due to the negative health effects of poverty.
There is a business strategy very much like how this game works, that is successful. Utilities always maintain more capacity than their customers actually use. Power plants rarely run at full capacity, but they still carefully maintain all of their generators. Most power plants are only close to peak capacity during a few times each day. They might have peaks during meal times, as well as right when it starts getting dark, and nearly all of their customers are turning lights and maybe heaters on. During the rest of the day, they run well below capacity, and during the late night, they run at extremely low capacity. There are cities in the world with power plants that don't have enough generators to handle peak demand. Those cities tend to have brown outs in the early evening and some other times during the day, because more power is needed than the power plants are capable of producing. This is, of course, problematic, especially for businesses in those cities. In the U.S. and most of the more developed world though, power companies pay to maintain more generators than they need, so that they can handle sudden, unexpected spikes in demand. These companies are still in business, because despite the cost of maintaining "unemployed" generators, they are still profitable, and having a pool of available generators that are not being used allows them to consistently provide good service, even when unexpected situations arise.
Perhaps someday, I will make a city builder video game, where the microeconomics are a bit more realistic. I think this could be an excellent method of gathering data on the economics of unemployment. For now though, there are two things that I have learned: We need to make sure we maintain high enough unemployment to allow for economic growth, and to do this, we need to soften the penalties inherent in being unemployed.
From a real world perspective, this is about unemployment. My houses provide living space for people, and every space is always filled. This provides me with a predictable labor pool. My industrial buildings use some amount of my labor pool. The remaining available population represents the people in my city who are unemployed. By definition, an unemployed person is a person who is not currently employed, but who is available for employment and desires employment. This describes my free population in this game perfectly.
Now, there are a few interesting things about my unemployed population (which is about 25% of my total population as I am writing this). The first is that I am strongly motivated to maintain a moderate level of unemployment. My unemployed population is an extremely valuable asset. Let's say I want my city to produce more wood or more steel. I might expand an existing facility or build a new one. In either case, I will need additional people to work at the new or improved facility to maintain an increased production. If I don't have sufficient free population, then I will first have to build a new residence or increase the size of an existing one. Now, consider this from a real world perspective. In the real world, there are a few more factors. For one city, those factors are sufficient housing, quality of living, cost of living, and a number of smaller factors. One big one is availability of work. Now we have a problem though. Before we can successfully increase the potential productivity of a city, we need more people, but before more people will come, we need to increase the potential productivity. Generally, in real life, there is enough flexibility that this is not a major problem, but the U.S. (especially the Eastern U.S. to the central states) is dotted with cities that were once industrial centers but ultimately failed, and this phenomenon seems to have played a significant role in their failure.
Back to the game now; the other interesting thing is that my unemployed citizens don't get kicked out of their houses; they don't starve to death; they don't even move out of my city. In fact, they are still paying rent to me for living in my houses. Now, I'll admit, there is a point where this starts to get unrealistic. The fact, however, is that my unemployed population is not suffering from their unemployment. They have shelter. They obviously have sufficient food to get by. They clearly have everything they need to survive. And, this is a really good thing. Economically, it means that I can maintain a big enough pool of unemployed laborers that if I suddenly need to expand my industries rapidly, I can do it without having to worry about whether or not enough people will immigrate to do the additional work that is necessary. If my citizens had to deal with the same consequences of unemployment that real live Americans do, the economy of my city would be much more weak and frail.
There are certainly some things about this game that are unrealistic. For example, the cost of living for my unemployed population is magically taken care of so that I never even have to think about it. That said though, there are some extremely valuable lessons to be learned despite that. The first is, unemployment is not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps 25% is a bit extreme, at least, in the current state of our industries and economy, but 10% to 15% is not as bad as we often make it out to be. The reason unemployment is a target of criticism is that unemployed people in the U.S. cannot survive. This is not entirely true, but survival is a significant struggle for unemployed Americans. It does not have to be that way though. It is that way because we are too lazy, stubborn, greedy, or egotistical to let it be any other way. Unemployment would be a lot less bad if we made sure that the free portion of our labor pool was taken care of. This does not even have to be inefficient. Unemployed people just need enough to survive and maintain good health. The second valuable lesson is that low unemployment makes the economy more fragile and unstable, because it does not provide enough margin for sudden growth. Economic fluctuations are occurring constantly, but low unemployment limits potential increases. In short, low unemployment is actually bad for the economy. Of course, high unemployment comes with its own problems, but having a reasonable pool of available labor is good, because it allows for rapid expansion. Unfortunately, if we don't take care of our unemployed, they lose their labor value, either by immigrating or due to the negative health effects of poverty.
There is a business strategy very much like how this game works, that is successful. Utilities always maintain more capacity than their customers actually use. Power plants rarely run at full capacity, but they still carefully maintain all of their generators. Most power plants are only close to peak capacity during a few times each day. They might have peaks during meal times, as well as right when it starts getting dark, and nearly all of their customers are turning lights and maybe heaters on. During the rest of the day, they run well below capacity, and during the late night, they run at extremely low capacity. There are cities in the world with power plants that don't have enough generators to handle peak demand. Those cities tend to have brown outs in the early evening and some other times during the day, because more power is needed than the power plants are capable of producing. This is, of course, problematic, especially for businesses in those cities. In the U.S. and most of the more developed world though, power companies pay to maintain more generators than they need, so that they can handle sudden, unexpected spikes in demand. These companies are still in business, because despite the cost of maintaining "unemployed" generators, they are still profitable, and having a pool of available generators that are not being used allows them to consistently provide good service, even when unexpected situations arise.
Perhaps someday, I will make a city builder video game, where the microeconomics are a bit more realistic. I think this could be an excellent method of gathering data on the economics of unemployment. For now though, there are two things that I have learned: We need to make sure we maintain high enough unemployment to allow for economic growth, and to do this, we need to soften the penalties inherent in being unemployed.
09 January 2017
Preferably Organic
Several times a month I come across some article explaining how to make something, and one or more ingredients on the list says something like "preferably organic" or "organic, I am sure you know why." I am pretty sure I have shared my opinion about "organic" foods before, but just in case, I'll briefly go over it again.
Organic foods are, by definition, foods that are grown using outdated techniques. This is not entirely true, as there have been some recent advances unique to organic farming, but very few organic farmers actually use them. Organic farming contrasts with industrial farming in its refusal to use modern products or techniques that supposedly reduce the quality of the food. So far, I have seen no evidence that organic farming does actually improve the quality of crops. There are some potential benefits in the realm of sustainability when it comes to organic farming, but in practice, they are paid for by using much larger areas of land to grow the same amount of food. The only really compelling argument for buying "organic" foods is in who your money supports. If you buy industrially farmed foods, your money supports large food corporations that are using irresponsible farming techniques to increase yields and use less land. If you buy organically farmed foods you are giving significantly more money to smaller growers (but more and more large corporations are adding organic food product lines) who use outdated farming techniques that do less damage over much larger areas for the same amount of production. The fact is, there is no evidence suggesting that the food itself is any different, and in either case you are supporting what amounts to irresponsible growers. (Of course, techniques could be combined, if industrial farmers were not so resistant to change or if organic farmers were not such religious purists about their outdated farming techniques.) This is my opinion on organic foods, and it is based solidly in the science, research, and evidence behind different farming techniques.
Now, what this is really about: When I read someone's food recipe, and it says an ingredient should be organic, how does that reflect on the writer? Well, I'll tell you: My opinion drops. For food recipes, I might still use the recipe, but I will ignore the nonsensical suggestion that using organic ingredients is magically better. And when the writer adds something like, "I am sure you know why," when suggesting the use of organic ingredients, my mind says something like, "Yeah, because you are a superstitious, gullible person who believes whatever you hear, instead of actually doing research to make sure you are right, before risking looking like an idiot." No offense intended, but come on! If you are going to start publishing your opinion on the internet, at least make sure there is not solid evidence proving it wrong!
Of course, today, I came across a recipe for a sugar scrub. Supposedly it makes your skin feel smooth, but more importantly, it is supposed to reduce skin irritation caused by shaving. I read the claims at the beginning of the article. Sugar is cheap, so I had no reservations in just trying it. Then I got to the recipe, and it says "preferably organic" on the sugar, which is the very first ingredient. This was a red flag. My response is, "Wait a minute. Here I am looking at a recipe for a health care product. The claims sound good, but then the author says, 'preferably' organic, indicating that the author does not actually know anything about a common health claim. Should I really be trusting someone that so blatantly has no clue what she is talking about?" If you post recipes for stuff on the internet, read that last part again. Perhaps some of your readers see "preferably organic" and think, "go girl!" (Or perhaps "go guy!") But keep in mind that for every few readers that revel in your affirmation of their unsupported superstitious hocus pocus, you are losing someone who just came upon your article who now thinks you are some kind of quack witch doctor. Don't get me wrong, you might know exactly what you are doing when it comes to the product, but when you publish one totally wrong thing, it brings everything else you claim into question. I cannot gauge your qualifications based on anything but what you publish, and if you publish one thing that I know is total crock, I cannot trust any of the other things you say that I don't know about. So, am I going to try making the sugar scrub? Perhaps I will, as I know none of the ingredients are harmful, and the risk is very low. Will I ever visit that site again? Probably not. The sugar scrub might work, but even quacks get lucky some times, and I don't want to be the guinea pig that discovers some other recipe is dangerous.
I am not saying that people should not share their opinions online. Sharing opinions is an essential part of constructive dialog. Do your research though. The problem with common sense is that it is hardly ever actually sense. That organic foods are superior to "normal" foods seems like common knowledge on the internet. Everyone just knows it is true, and because everyone knows that it is true, everyone assumes it is true. The fact however is that it is not true. Just like milk and meat produced by cows with or without hormones, there is no difference! Organically farmed, industrially farmed, and GMO foods are all the same when it comes to health and nutrition. The only difference is price and sustainability, and currently, GMOs have the most promise when it comes to that. Please do share your opinions, but first, make sure you have the facts right. Look up research on the subjects you are going to discuss, especially when it comes to the health of your readers. Make sure the research you are reading is written by qualified authors. (I once had a conversation in the YouTube comments on GMOs. I asked one guy for scientific sources supporting his claims. He gave me the titles of two books, one written by a lawyer and another written my an economist and historian. Neither of these authors had any education in genetic engineering or even agriculture! These are not valid sources by any stretch of the imagination.)
Agreeing with your readers about things may help them to identify with you better, but if you are wrong, you will end up driving off a lot of people you might have been able to help. Think about this: Are you posting these things to get friends, or are you trying to legitimately help people? If you are trying to legitimately help people, being wrong will not only drive off people who need your help, you could end up actually harming people. And even if you are not willing to do the research so you can be right, would it be so bad to leave your unsupported personal opinions out of your recipes? Are your existing readers really so dumb that you have to explicitly say that they should use organic products in places where you would expect them to use them? Do you really think that specifying that a product should be organic will cause people who don't agree with you to do it? The fact is, the only value in saying an ingredient should be organic is in deliberately alienating people who have a different opinion from your own. Be a witch doctor if you want, but please don't pretend to be anything more. If your products really do work, and if your goal is legitimately to help people, please leave silly superstitions out of it, and stick to verified facts. Otherwise, there are a lot of us out there that are having a really hard time telling whether you are just superstitious about one small thing or a total quack that cannot be trusted to be right about anything.
Organic foods are, by definition, foods that are grown using outdated techniques. This is not entirely true, as there have been some recent advances unique to organic farming, but very few organic farmers actually use them. Organic farming contrasts with industrial farming in its refusal to use modern products or techniques that supposedly reduce the quality of the food. So far, I have seen no evidence that organic farming does actually improve the quality of crops. There are some potential benefits in the realm of sustainability when it comes to organic farming, but in practice, they are paid for by using much larger areas of land to grow the same amount of food. The only really compelling argument for buying "organic" foods is in who your money supports. If you buy industrially farmed foods, your money supports large food corporations that are using irresponsible farming techniques to increase yields and use less land. If you buy organically farmed foods you are giving significantly more money to smaller growers (but more and more large corporations are adding organic food product lines) who use outdated farming techniques that do less damage over much larger areas for the same amount of production. The fact is, there is no evidence suggesting that the food itself is any different, and in either case you are supporting what amounts to irresponsible growers. (Of course, techniques could be combined, if industrial farmers were not so resistant to change or if organic farmers were not such religious purists about their outdated farming techniques.) This is my opinion on organic foods, and it is based solidly in the science, research, and evidence behind different farming techniques.
Now, what this is really about: When I read someone's food recipe, and it says an ingredient should be organic, how does that reflect on the writer? Well, I'll tell you: My opinion drops. For food recipes, I might still use the recipe, but I will ignore the nonsensical suggestion that using organic ingredients is magically better. And when the writer adds something like, "I am sure you know why," when suggesting the use of organic ingredients, my mind says something like, "Yeah, because you are a superstitious, gullible person who believes whatever you hear, instead of actually doing research to make sure you are right, before risking looking like an idiot." No offense intended, but come on! If you are going to start publishing your opinion on the internet, at least make sure there is not solid evidence proving it wrong!
Of course, today, I came across a recipe for a sugar scrub. Supposedly it makes your skin feel smooth, but more importantly, it is supposed to reduce skin irritation caused by shaving. I read the claims at the beginning of the article. Sugar is cheap, so I had no reservations in just trying it. Then I got to the recipe, and it says "preferably organic" on the sugar, which is the very first ingredient. This was a red flag. My response is, "Wait a minute. Here I am looking at a recipe for a health care product. The claims sound good, but then the author says, 'preferably' organic, indicating that the author does not actually know anything about a common health claim. Should I really be trusting someone that so blatantly has no clue what she is talking about?" If you post recipes for stuff on the internet, read that last part again. Perhaps some of your readers see "preferably organic" and think, "go girl!" (Or perhaps "go guy!") But keep in mind that for every few readers that revel in your affirmation of their unsupported superstitious hocus pocus, you are losing someone who just came upon your article who now thinks you are some kind of quack witch doctor. Don't get me wrong, you might know exactly what you are doing when it comes to the product, but when you publish one totally wrong thing, it brings everything else you claim into question. I cannot gauge your qualifications based on anything but what you publish, and if you publish one thing that I know is total crock, I cannot trust any of the other things you say that I don't know about. So, am I going to try making the sugar scrub? Perhaps I will, as I know none of the ingredients are harmful, and the risk is very low. Will I ever visit that site again? Probably not. The sugar scrub might work, but even quacks get lucky some times, and I don't want to be the guinea pig that discovers some other recipe is dangerous.
I am not saying that people should not share their opinions online. Sharing opinions is an essential part of constructive dialog. Do your research though. The problem with common sense is that it is hardly ever actually sense. That organic foods are superior to "normal" foods seems like common knowledge on the internet. Everyone just knows it is true, and because everyone knows that it is true, everyone assumes it is true. The fact however is that it is not true. Just like milk and meat produced by cows with or without hormones, there is no difference! Organically farmed, industrially farmed, and GMO foods are all the same when it comes to health and nutrition. The only difference is price and sustainability, and currently, GMOs have the most promise when it comes to that. Please do share your opinions, but first, make sure you have the facts right. Look up research on the subjects you are going to discuss, especially when it comes to the health of your readers. Make sure the research you are reading is written by qualified authors. (I once had a conversation in the YouTube comments on GMOs. I asked one guy for scientific sources supporting his claims. He gave me the titles of two books, one written by a lawyer and another written my an economist and historian. Neither of these authors had any education in genetic engineering or even agriculture! These are not valid sources by any stretch of the imagination.)
Agreeing with your readers about things may help them to identify with you better, but if you are wrong, you will end up driving off a lot of people you might have been able to help. Think about this: Are you posting these things to get friends, or are you trying to legitimately help people? If you are trying to legitimately help people, being wrong will not only drive off people who need your help, you could end up actually harming people. And even if you are not willing to do the research so you can be right, would it be so bad to leave your unsupported personal opinions out of your recipes? Are your existing readers really so dumb that you have to explicitly say that they should use organic products in places where you would expect them to use them? Do you really think that specifying that a product should be organic will cause people who don't agree with you to do it? The fact is, the only value in saying an ingredient should be organic is in deliberately alienating people who have a different opinion from your own. Be a witch doctor if you want, but please don't pretend to be anything more. If your products really do work, and if your goal is legitimately to help people, please leave silly superstitions out of it, and stick to verified facts. Otherwise, there are a lot of us out there that are having a really hard time telling whether you are just superstitious about one small thing or a total quack that cannot be trusted to be right about anything.
05 January 2017
Sex Ed.
Sex Education has been a controversial and politically charged subject since its inception. The conservative Right argues that we should teach abstinence until marriage exclusively, arguing that teaching safe sexual practices will encourage teens to have sex. The liberal Left wants to encourage safe sexual practices, while ignoring the fact that the only truly safe sex is no sex. Both sides have good points, but they both have made a ton of mistakes.
The main reason there is a controversy with sex education is that the two major sides have different goals, and they seem to deliberately exclude the goal of the other side from their own platform. For example, it would be trivial to include a short "but if you do have sex, use protection" in a more conservative leaning sex ed class, and it would be equally easy to include a "but all protection has a chance of failure, so the only guarantee is complete abstinence" to a liberal sex ed curriculum. The main difference in goals is that for the Right, sex ed is all about morality. In fact, conservative sex ed activist groups appear to care exclusively about the morality issue, without any concern at all for the goal of the other side. For the left, the main goal is health. This is certainly as noble a goal as morality, but in their haste to entirely exclude any conversation on morality at all, they also miss a huge section of other issues, some very closely related to health. In their attempts to deliberately exclude the views of the other side, both sides are making our sexual education in the U.S. stink. Ironically, teen sex rates are actually dropping, so we are doing something right.
Morality and health are both essential issues when it comes to sex education. This is not just about whether or not it is appropriate to have sex with someone you are not marries to, and it is also not just about physical health, but this stupid argument has pushed out everything except these extremely narrow focuses. In fact, there may be a link between some of the sex related issues we are seeing a lot today and the extremely narrow scope of our sex education classes.
Morality is an essential issue in sex education on a number of levels. The surface issue is sex outside of marriage. Ignoring religious issues, there are a number of scientifically supported reasons for limiting sex to committed and legally binding relationships. Ironically, around half of these are health related. Many of these stem from the fact that people who have sex outside of marriage are many times more likely to get divorced. In addition, the younger a person becomes sexually active, the more likely they are to get divorced at some point. Failure of a committed relationship almost always results in mental health issues, and mental health issues are linked to shorter lifespans. Some people now days attempt to substitute legal marriage with non-binding verbal agreements. These do not make a suitable alternative, and they often result in significant long term stress for one or both people (women are far more likely to be affected by this than men). This kind of stress has been very strongly linked to significantly decreased lifespan. These are health issues! If the Left really cares so much about health, why do they leave this part out? It goes further though. The essential moral issues are not exclusively about health. What about rape? What about pretty much anything related to consent? Sex ed classes don't typically bother teaching about the law. The Right does not teach about the law, because abstinence should cover that, right? The truth is, the Left is right that some teens will have sex even if you teach abstinence, and if you don't teach them morals, it is partially your fault when they molest or rape someone! The Left is so caught up in avoiding anything that even looks like morals that they deliberately ignore this as well. There is also emotional science that shows that the oxytocin release during sex causes women to become emotionally attached to their partners, and this is linked to abusive relationships. Emotional attachment is the reason that battered women rarely leave their abusers. This is both a moral and health issue, and both sides are completely ignoring it. And the reason they are ignoring it is that it straddles the line between health and morality, and so neither side is willing to touch it. The mental and emotional effects of sex have been carefully studied, but we are just giving teens condoms or telling them sex is evil, and then walking away. Honestly, the mental and emotional effects of sex are probably more important than moral or health implications, and if we can help teens to understand them, the moral and health implications will be a lot less important.
Health is also a serious issue when it comes to sex. There are plenty of STDs going around. Unwanted pregnancy is, honestly, a travesty. Teen parents are also a serious problem. Again, there is plenty of scientific research showing that having two parents, and at the risk of being politically incorrect, two parents of different physical sex, has the best chances for raising mentally and emotionally healthy and stable children (before anyone starts throwing fruit, this is proven science, and further, the science shows that two parents of the same gender are still better than a single parent or no parents at all). Abortion is wasteful, and it is awfully hard to argue that it is not pretty close to murder without looking like a heartless jerk. Abstinence is the pinnacle of health, when it comes to sex (ignoring the fact that pregnancy actually increases lifespan...). There is no other birth control plan that is 100% effective, aside from removing certain sex organs entirely, and there is no other STD prevention plan that is 100% effective. Abstinence should be taught in every sex education class, ideally with plenty of data on failure rates of other options. That said, the Left is right about one thing: Some teens are going to have sex regardless of what they are taught. Look at the history of humanity. There have been many cultures where the penalty for pre-marital sex was death, and it still happened. History is rife with examples of young lovers having sex before they were married, with a huge variety of consequences, nearly all of which were far worse than getting an STD or getting pregnant. If the death penalty cannot prevent teen sex, how can anyone delude themselves into thinking an "abstinence only" program will be successful? And if the goal is to teach morality, is it really moral to think that it is better that these teens have babies or get STDs than use condoms? Of course, when it comes to health, it is also important to consider the above mentioned health related morality issues, otherwise you are shortchanging the students, not to mention lying to them about the safety of the various forms of birth control. If we really care about the health of our teens, we won't arbitrarily ignore issues merely because there is an element of morality in them. We will cover every health issue, without any concern for whether it treads on the feet of the other side or not.
The ideal sex education course should cover a lot more than what we currently cover. It should discuss things like privacy. It should discuss the concept of virtual, from the perspective of what society might think of a person who's nude image is posted all over the internet. It should discuss what is legal, what is not, and why, even if the why requires a conversation on morality. It should discuss birth control and STD control measures, as well as their failure rates. It should pointedly mention that no birth control and no STD control is more effective then abstinence. It should discuss the mental, emotional, and biological effects of sex, as well as the long term consequences and risks associated with them. This should include some discussion of how sexual relationships without legally binding long term commitment affect people, as well as some discussion on how pre-marital sex affects divorce rates and the emotional effects of divorce on parents and children. At least the Right and Left can agree that a sex education program like this covers things that none of them are comfortable teaching teenagers, but when it comes down to it, if we want to have informed teens who are armed with everything they should know about sex before they actually start doing it, this is what it is going to take.
This kind of sex ed course would cover a lot of inconvenient and uncomfortable truths. Perhaps some on the Left do not want to talk about morality because they are afraid it will condemn their own behavior. If that is the case get over it! This stuff is supported by science. You want to complain about global warming and anti-vax people? Accept science or don't it's not a potluck where you get to pick and choose. People on the Right are pretty clear that their agenda is to deliberately leave teens uninformed so that they will fear pre-marital sex (or, perhaps, just sex in general; there are actually people who have such severe anxiety about sex that even once they are married, they struggle with it, and every last one of these people is someone who was essentially taught that sex is morally wrong). Honestly, this is stupid. Read above and you will see that the truth is plenty scary as it is. If the death penalty is not scary enough to stop teens from having sex, nothing is. Get over, and recognize that the health of your children is at stake here. Leading into the next part, if you are worried that a sex ed class in a public school is going to give your kid ideas that he or she will then act upon, perhaps the problem is that you are not confident in your parenting skills?
Now that we have discussed sex ed in public schools, we should take a look at where sex ed is most effective: The home. Many on the Left claim that the morality of sex should be taught in the home, and they are right. What they are wrong about is when they follow that up with, "no in schools." This is a mistake that bit the business education field in rear end really bad a few decades ago. We had a series of serious ethics problems pop up in enormous businesses, including Enron. Business schools realized from this that ethics is an essential topic to cover in schools. A few decades later, most business schools include ethics classes. It is certainly true that parents should teach their children sexual morality at home, but the fact is it doesn't always work that way! Parents should definitely have the first say in what kind of morality they teach their children, but when it comes to such an important topic as sex, we need more than that. If we are going to have Sex Education classes in the first place, they should actually educate about sex, not just about a very narrow part of the topic. In addition, the relationship between health and morality is very strong with sex. It is literally impossible to do a good job of teaching about sexual health at the same time as avoiding all talk of morality. If we cannot teach sexual morality in the classroom, then maybe we are better off not having sex ed classes at all, because at least then parents won't feel like the school is relieving them of any responsibility for teaching about sex. The fact is, parents are not perfect, and when it comes to a topics as important as sex, this is a huge deal. The fact is someone needs to do it. For a civilized country, we have a lot of rapes and other sexual crimes happening in colleges and universities across the country. It is clear that leaving sexual morality exclusively to the parents is a bad idea. And worse, these problems are spreading STDs and causing unwanted pregnancies. Morality is a sexual health problem. You cannot educate people effectively on sexual health without bring morality into it. It is impossible.
We need the Left and the Right to wake up and take responsibility for the problems that their shortsightedness and narrow mindedness are causing. We need to start including real science in sexual education. We need people to get over their personal vices and teach the truth and the full truth, no matter how condemning they might feel it is to their own life choices. We need people to actually care about teens, instead of punishing them to excess for their indiscretions and allowing them to harm others. If you really care about these people teach them the full truth and let God deal with their punishment, if they so deserve it.
The main reason there is a controversy with sex education is that the two major sides have different goals, and they seem to deliberately exclude the goal of the other side from their own platform. For example, it would be trivial to include a short "but if you do have sex, use protection" in a more conservative leaning sex ed class, and it would be equally easy to include a "but all protection has a chance of failure, so the only guarantee is complete abstinence" to a liberal sex ed curriculum. The main difference in goals is that for the Right, sex ed is all about morality. In fact, conservative sex ed activist groups appear to care exclusively about the morality issue, without any concern at all for the goal of the other side. For the left, the main goal is health. This is certainly as noble a goal as morality, but in their haste to entirely exclude any conversation on morality at all, they also miss a huge section of other issues, some very closely related to health. In their attempts to deliberately exclude the views of the other side, both sides are making our sexual education in the U.S. stink. Ironically, teen sex rates are actually dropping, so we are doing something right.
Morality and health are both essential issues when it comes to sex education. This is not just about whether or not it is appropriate to have sex with someone you are not marries to, and it is also not just about physical health, but this stupid argument has pushed out everything except these extremely narrow focuses. In fact, there may be a link between some of the sex related issues we are seeing a lot today and the extremely narrow scope of our sex education classes.
Morality is an essential issue in sex education on a number of levels. The surface issue is sex outside of marriage. Ignoring religious issues, there are a number of scientifically supported reasons for limiting sex to committed and legally binding relationships. Ironically, around half of these are health related. Many of these stem from the fact that people who have sex outside of marriage are many times more likely to get divorced. In addition, the younger a person becomes sexually active, the more likely they are to get divorced at some point. Failure of a committed relationship almost always results in mental health issues, and mental health issues are linked to shorter lifespans. Some people now days attempt to substitute legal marriage with non-binding verbal agreements. These do not make a suitable alternative, and they often result in significant long term stress for one or both people (women are far more likely to be affected by this than men). This kind of stress has been very strongly linked to significantly decreased lifespan. These are health issues! If the Left really cares so much about health, why do they leave this part out? It goes further though. The essential moral issues are not exclusively about health. What about rape? What about pretty much anything related to consent? Sex ed classes don't typically bother teaching about the law. The Right does not teach about the law, because abstinence should cover that, right? The truth is, the Left is right that some teens will have sex even if you teach abstinence, and if you don't teach them morals, it is partially your fault when they molest or rape someone! The Left is so caught up in avoiding anything that even looks like morals that they deliberately ignore this as well. There is also emotional science that shows that the oxytocin release during sex causes women to become emotionally attached to their partners, and this is linked to abusive relationships. Emotional attachment is the reason that battered women rarely leave their abusers. This is both a moral and health issue, and both sides are completely ignoring it. And the reason they are ignoring it is that it straddles the line between health and morality, and so neither side is willing to touch it. The mental and emotional effects of sex have been carefully studied, but we are just giving teens condoms or telling them sex is evil, and then walking away. Honestly, the mental and emotional effects of sex are probably more important than moral or health implications, and if we can help teens to understand them, the moral and health implications will be a lot less important.
Health is also a serious issue when it comes to sex. There are plenty of STDs going around. Unwanted pregnancy is, honestly, a travesty. Teen parents are also a serious problem. Again, there is plenty of scientific research showing that having two parents, and at the risk of being politically incorrect, two parents of different physical sex, has the best chances for raising mentally and emotionally healthy and stable children (before anyone starts throwing fruit, this is proven science, and further, the science shows that two parents of the same gender are still better than a single parent or no parents at all). Abortion is wasteful, and it is awfully hard to argue that it is not pretty close to murder without looking like a heartless jerk. Abstinence is the pinnacle of health, when it comes to sex (ignoring the fact that pregnancy actually increases lifespan...). There is no other birth control plan that is 100% effective, aside from removing certain sex organs entirely, and there is no other STD prevention plan that is 100% effective. Abstinence should be taught in every sex education class, ideally with plenty of data on failure rates of other options. That said, the Left is right about one thing: Some teens are going to have sex regardless of what they are taught. Look at the history of humanity. There have been many cultures where the penalty for pre-marital sex was death, and it still happened. History is rife with examples of young lovers having sex before they were married, with a huge variety of consequences, nearly all of which were far worse than getting an STD or getting pregnant. If the death penalty cannot prevent teen sex, how can anyone delude themselves into thinking an "abstinence only" program will be successful? And if the goal is to teach morality, is it really moral to think that it is better that these teens have babies or get STDs than use condoms? Of course, when it comes to health, it is also important to consider the above mentioned health related morality issues, otherwise you are shortchanging the students, not to mention lying to them about the safety of the various forms of birth control. If we really care about the health of our teens, we won't arbitrarily ignore issues merely because there is an element of morality in them. We will cover every health issue, without any concern for whether it treads on the feet of the other side or not.
The ideal sex education course should cover a lot more than what we currently cover. It should discuss things like privacy. It should discuss the concept of virtual, from the perspective of what society might think of a person who's nude image is posted all over the internet. It should discuss what is legal, what is not, and why, even if the why requires a conversation on morality. It should discuss birth control and STD control measures, as well as their failure rates. It should pointedly mention that no birth control and no STD control is more effective then abstinence. It should discuss the mental, emotional, and biological effects of sex, as well as the long term consequences and risks associated with them. This should include some discussion of how sexual relationships without legally binding long term commitment affect people, as well as some discussion on how pre-marital sex affects divorce rates and the emotional effects of divorce on parents and children. At least the Right and Left can agree that a sex education program like this covers things that none of them are comfortable teaching teenagers, but when it comes down to it, if we want to have informed teens who are armed with everything they should know about sex before they actually start doing it, this is what it is going to take.
This kind of sex ed course would cover a lot of inconvenient and uncomfortable truths. Perhaps some on the Left do not want to talk about morality because they are afraid it will condemn their own behavior. If that is the case get over it! This stuff is supported by science. You want to complain about global warming and anti-vax people? Accept science or don't it's not a potluck where you get to pick and choose. People on the Right are pretty clear that their agenda is to deliberately leave teens uninformed so that they will fear pre-marital sex (or, perhaps, just sex in general; there are actually people who have such severe anxiety about sex that even once they are married, they struggle with it, and every last one of these people is someone who was essentially taught that sex is morally wrong). Honestly, this is stupid. Read above and you will see that the truth is plenty scary as it is. If the death penalty is not scary enough to stop teens from having sex, nothing is. Get over, and recognize that the health of your children is at stake here. Leading into the next part, if you are worried that a sex ed class in a public school is going to give your kid ideas that he or she will then act upon, perhaps the problem is that you are not confident in your parenting skills?
Now that we have discussed sex ed in public schools, we should take a look at where sex ed is most effective: The home. Many on the Left claim that the morality of sex should be taught in the home, and they are right. What they are wrong about is when they follow that up with, "no in schools." This is a mistake that bit the business education field in rear end really bad a few decades ago. We had a series of serious ethics problems pop up in enormous businesses, including Enron. Business schools realized from this that ethics is an essential topic to cover in schools. A few decades later, most business schools include ethics classes. It is certainly true that parents should teach their children sexual morality at home, but the fact is it doesn't always work that way! Parents should definitely have the first say in what kind of morality they teach their children, but when it comes to such an important topic as sex, we need more than that. If we are going to have Sex Education classes in the first place, they should actually educate about sex, not just about a very narrow part of the topic. In addition, the relationship between health and morality is very strong with sex. It is literally impossible to do a good job of teaching about sexual health at the same time as avoiding all talk of morality. If we cannot teach sexual morality in the classroom, then maybe we are better off not having sex ed classes at all, because at least then parents won't feel like the school is relieving them of any responsibility for teaching about sex. The fact is, parents are not perfect, and when it comes to a topics as important as sex, this is a huge deal. The fact is someone needs to do it. For a civilized country, we have a lot of rapes and other sexual crimes happening in colleges and universities across the country. It is clear that leaving sexual morality exclusively to the parents is a bad idea. And worse, these problems are spreading STDs and causing unwanted pregnancies. Morality is a sexual health problem. You cannot educate people effectively on sexual health without bring morality into it. It is impossible.
We need the Left and the Right to wake up and take responsibility for the problems that their shortsightedness and narrow mindedness are causing. We need to start including real science in sexual education. We need people to get over their personal vices and teach the truth and the full truth, no matter how condemning they might feel it is to their own life choices. We need people to actually care about teens, instead of punishing them to excess for their indiscretions and allowing them to harm others. If you really care about these people teach them the full truth and let God deal with their punishment, if they so deserve it.
17 December 2016
Dehumanizing 2.0
I have discussed why machines and automation are not dehumanizing several times now. What I have missed, until now, is what things are dehumanizing. The time has come...
Machines and automation are not dehumanizing, because they are one of the ultimate expressions of humanity. The ability to build tools that work entirely on their own is one of the most important things that make humans unique. So, if machines are not dehumanizing, what things are?
Something is dehumanizing when it rejects the things that make humans unique among the life found on Earth. A great example is any form of primitivism. The idea that we should abandon modern technology and go "back to the land" is a popular form of dehumanization in some places. This movement boils down to the idea that humans should be less like humans and more like animals, which is the very definition of dehumanizing. This is only the tip of the iceberg.
Another form of dehumanization that is especially popular is the attempt to define the "correct" role of humans in the food chain. This includes the vegan and vegetarian movements, but it also includes people who go around bragging that they are "carnivores." The uniqueness of humans includes an incredibly high level of adaptability. Claiming that humans should or should not eat certain classes of food rejects a valuable element of that adaptability. Keep in mind that ancient American natives often spent the winters eating nothing but meat, because nothing else was available. At the same time, poor populations throughout history often ate little or no meat during certain seasons and famines. Humans have the ability to survive on very wide range of diets, and attempting to define and enforce dietary categories qualifies as dehumanizing.
Humans are good at a wide variety of things. Most of the uniqueness of humans comes from our ability to innovate and adapt. We have made an enormous number of innovations to allow ourselves to adapt to a wide range of conditions. As the human population on Earth is continuously increasing, we are beginning to predict things like resource shortages. We are already doing many things to prepare for this, despite the fact that it is clear we are not much closer to serious overpopulation than we were during the scares of the '60s and '70s (and several much earlier ones as well). Our farming technology has advanced extremely rapidly over the last several centuries, and there is little sign of slowing. Our industrial farming techniques, while unsustainable and destructive, allow a tiny portion of the U.S. population to produce five times as much food as we eat. More sustainable hydroponics have become viable enough that you can find hydroponically grown fruits and vegetables in some grocery stores. Genetic engineering has allowed us to reduce crop losses to pests and weeds, and it is promising more flavorful, healthier fruits and vegetables within the next decade or so. This ability to adapt, all the way down to editing genes to improve our food, is very uniquely human. There are movements against all of these things though. We have the organic food movement attacking industrial farming and hydroponics. We have the anti-GMO crowd attacking directly improving foods by altering their genetics. This is what is dehumanizing. These movements are rejecting the very things that make us human.
Another serious effort at dehumanization is the anti-vax movement. Yes, in the past there have been potential problems with vaccines. For some very small groups even a subset of currently existing vaccines represent a potential for harm. The fact though, is that vaccines are not harmful in the least for a vast majority of people. Now, I generally recommend becoming informed (for real, not just reading anti-vax propaganda; informed means you learn from experts, not uneducated celebrities and quack journalists), and I am not rescinding that recommendation. Aside from these extremely small groups that vaccines pose potential risks for, the refusal of effective vaccines is another form of dehumanization.
In general, any "natural" movement is probably pushing an agenda that is dehumanizing. Yes, we should take responsibility for things like our health and keeping the Earth habitable for humans, but when someone says that something is better merely because it is natural, they are trying to dehumanize people. Artificial sweeteners might be unnatural, but a vast majority are less dangerous than excessive sugar intake. Artificial stimulants are often safer than natural ones. Nature has produced a very large number of deadly poisons, including some that can kill a person in anywhere from 30 seconds down to well under 1 second. In fact, even many of the worst illegal drugs come straight from plants, and most of those that don't are purer synthetic versions of the same substances from plants or very similar ones. Pushing "natural" products purely because they are natural is dehumanizing, because it rejects the ability of humans to transcend nature.
The fact is, humans are fantastically powerful beings, compared to the entire rest of Earth's population of living things. Our power lies in our ability to transcend the limitations of nature. When we question our ability to transcend nature, we deny our humanity. Humanity is at its most human when it is improving on nature. The further we deviate from nature, the more human and less natural we become, and this is a good thing, because it increases our ability to survive. When we arbitrarily reject the man made, that is what is dehumanizing.
Machines and automation are not dehumanizing, because they are one of the ultimate expressions of humanity. The ability to build tools that work entirely on their own is one of the most important things that make humans unique. So, if machines are not dehumanizing, what things are?
Something is dehumanizing when it rejects the things that make humans unique among the life found on Earth. A great example is any form of primitivism. The idea that we should abandon modern technology and go "back to the land" is a popular form of dehumanization in some places. This movement boils down to the idea that humans should be less like humans and more like animals, which is the very definition of dehumanizing. This is only the tip of the iceberg.
Another form of dehumanization that is especially popular is the attempt to define the "correct" role of humans in the food chain. This includes the vegan and vegetarian movements, but it also includes people who go around bragging that they are "carnivores." The uniqueness of humans includes an incredibly high level of adaptability. Claiming that humans should or should not eat certain classes of food rejects a valuable element of that adaptability. Keep in mind that ancient American natives often spent the winters eating nothing but meat, because nothing else was available. At the same time, poor populations throughout history often ate little or no meat during certain seasons and famines. Humans have the ability to survive on very wide range of diets, and attempting to define and enforce dietary categories qualifies as dehumanizing.
Humans are good at a wide variety of things. Most of the uniqueness of humans comes from our ability to innovate and adapt. We have made an enormous number of innovations to allow ourselves to adapt to a wide range of conditions. As the human population on Earth is continuously increasing, we are beginning to predict things like resource shortages. We are already doing many things to prepare for this, despite the fact that it is clear we are not much closer to serious overpopulation than we were during the scares of the '60s and '70s (and several much earlier ones as well). Our farming technology has advanced extremely rapidly over the last several centuries, and there is little sign of slowing. Our industrial farming techniques, while unsustainable and destructive, allow a tiny portion of the U.S. population to produce five times as much food as we eat. More sustainable hydroponics have become viable enough that you can find hydroponically grown fruits and vegetables in some grocery stores. Genetic engineering has allowed us to reduce crop losses to pests and weeds, and it is promising more flavorful, healthier fruits and vegetables within the next decade or so. This ability to adapt, all the way down to editing genes to improve our food, is very uniquely human. There are movements against all of these things though. We have the organic food movement attacking industrial farming and hydroponics. We have the anti-GMO crowd attacking directly improving foods by altering their genetics. This is what is dehumanizing. These movements are rejecting the very things that make us human.
Another serious effort at dehumanization is the anti-vax movement. Yes, in the past there have been potential problems with vaccines. For some very small groups even a subset of currently existing vaccines represent a potential for harm. The fact though, is that vaccines are not harmful in the least for a vast majority of people. Now, I generally recommend becoming informed (for real, not just reading anti-vax propaganda; informed means you learn from experts, not uneducated celebrities and quack journalists), and I am not rescinding that recommendation. Aside from these extremely small groups that vaccines pose potential risks for, the refusal of effective vaccines is another form of dehumanization.
In general, any "natural" movement is probably pushing an agenda that is dehumanizing. Yes, we should take responsibility for things like our health and keeping the Earth habitable for humans, but when someone says that something is better merely because it is natural, they are trying to dehumanize people. Artificial sweeteners might be unnatural, but a vast majority are less dangerous than excessive sugar intake. Artificial stimulants are often safer than natural ones. Nature has produced a very large number of deadly poisons, including some that can kill a person in anywhere from 30 seconds down to well under 1 second. In fact, even many of the worst illegal drugs come straight from plants, and most of those that don't are purer synthetic versions of the same substances from plants or very similar ones. Pushing "natural" products purely because they are natural is dehumanizing, because it rejects the ability of humans to transcend nature.
The fact is, humans are fantastically powerful beings, compared to the entire rest of Earth's population of living things. Our power lies in our ability to transcend the limitations of nature. When we question our ability to transcend nature, we deny our humanity. Humanity is at its most human when it is improving on nature. The further we deviate from nature, the more human and less natural we become, and this is a good thing, because it increases our ability to survive. When we arbitrarily reject the man made, that is what is dehumanizing.
12 December 2016
Why We Should Question Evolution
First, this is not a discussion on religious alternatives to evolution. For full disclosure, I am religious, however, I also do not believe that God goes about doing things by unnatural means, when there are viable natural alternatives. That said, I could be wrong, and God will do things however He sees fit.
This is a discussion on why scientists should continue looking for alternatives to large scale evolutionary theory, and it gets into an idea that I have discussed several times already. That idea is that when we settle on a weakly proven theory, we stop looking for alternatives. When we stop looking for alternatives we very often miss things. When we miss things, we halt the progress of science. In other words, because of the theory of evolution, we have entirely quit following some potentially useful lines of inquiry in the field of biology, and this is a bad thing. Even if the theory of evolution is 100% correct (which has not actually been conclusively proven), there may still be value in looking down other paths (see Alchemy for an example of this).
The first reason we should not quit looking for alternatives to evolution is lack of strong evidence supporting it. Charles Darwin discovered that organisms evolve on a small scale. This is proven fact. We see very small scale evolution, like changes in natural camouflage in response to environmental changes, all the time. We have managed to harness this, in the form of selective breeding, to create larger scale changes in organisms. We have also found fossils that appear to be ancestors of existing species, and we have identified similarities between existing species that hint at much larger scale evolution. What we have not managed to do is to trace even one species a significant evolutionary distance. Despite the fact that evolution on a large scale takes millions of years, and thus should have provided ample evidence, all we really have are a few points on the graph. We don't have continuous lines for anything. Now, this is certainly not proof against large scale evolution. Natural decay and decomposition can easily explain the lack of strong evidence, though it seems odd that it would have done so much damage, when we are constantly finding things that we believe should have been destroyed by time but have not been. The fact here is, we have found enough supporting evidence of large scale evolution that we cannot just write it off, but we have not found so much that it constitutes proof. While most of modern science seems to take the current, very weak evidence as sufficient proof, this is the only field willing to accept something as fact with so little evidence.
If this is not a religious discussion, what alternatives could there be? This is a valid question, and it is the question that is generally used to draw a solid conclusion from so little evidence. What other paths besides evolution are there? Leaving out the obvious religious ones (which honestly don't add anything to the conversation anyhow), it might seem like the theory of evolution is the only possibility. This is not true though. For example, certain structures are common throughout nature. Atoms tend to be attracted to specific other atoms. The result is that things like CO2 and a huge range of other oxides are very common. We don't find halogen gasses free in nature, because they bond strongly to other atoms. There are specific atomic structures that are common, because the nature of the different elements causes them to prefer certain configurations. On a larger scale, we see mineral deposits often taking the form of crystals. A great many compounds tend to form into very specific configurations under the right circumstances, which is why crystals are so common in nature. Because we have such a strong understanding of attractive forces on a molecular scale, we can see a crystal and easily conclude that it exists because the patterns of attraction between the molecules it is made of tend to form into specific kinds of lattices that form crystals on a large scale. It is possible that biology has some similarities. Scientists have found that evolution does not tend to happen in a continuous set of minute changes. For example, every living thing produces some amount of electrical current. Electric eels are unique, in that they can produce very large currents, while everything else produces very small ones. According to evolutionary theory, eels should have slowly, over millions of years, increased the current they produce, because it was somehow beneficial. The problem is, there is a threshold below which this trait is not useful at all. So, how did evolution go from extremely low current up to the smallest useful one? This is a huge gap, and the only way it makes sense is either that it happened purely by accident over thousands of years, which is extremely improbable, or that there was a huge jump in there from absolutely tiny to barely useful all in a single mutation. The thing is, by our current understanding, this is almost as improbable as the incremental increase over millions of year theory. We are also starting to see more and more traits that are common across multiple species but which clearly evolved independently. According to traditional evolutionary theory, this is incredibly unlikely. If you add in a naturally favored configuration aspect, however, this makes perfect sense.
So, the first alternative theory that should probably be explored is that biology tends to favor specific configurations, just like atoms and molecules do. If this is true, it would be a huge field, since biology is already so complex. On the other hand, discovering the mechanics of something like this would give us a huge jump in things like genetically engineering stable and safe organisms. It could also explain all of the gaps in our current understanding of evolution. What if the difference between human brains and monkey brains is not a million years of evolution? What if instead, it is the result of several jumps from one stable configuration to another, over a much shorter period of time? Not only would this explain why primates still exist as a separate species, it would also explain why we can only find points on the graph, instead of a continuous line. Scientists are only starting to realize that large scale evolution tends to work in jumps, but they still don't understand why. What if, a hundred years ago, around the time evolution started getting popular, some groups continued to explore other ideas, instead of just quitting the search? What if someone had thought of this idea of naturally stable configurations, much like crystal formations? Even if this idea turns out to be totally wrong, we could have known that large scale evolution tends to work in jumps instead of continuous incremental change, and we could have over 50 years of research and understanding of this process! Instead we wasted more than 100 years stuck researching the theory of evolution exclusively, because we settled too soon.
I am not going to try to come up with a bunch more alternative theories, but another recent discovery that might have been discovered much sooner if we had not settled is epigenetics. This is a mechanic through which genetic traits can be expressed or suppressed without the modification of DNA, and it is theoretically capable of making organisms of the same species manifest very different forms. An alternative theory to evolution could have revealed this mechanic half a century ago, if we had not been stuck on evolution.
This is not exclusively about evolution. This applies to all scientific theories that are not conclusively proven. This also reveals a serious flaw in how the various fields of science define "proof." Currently, proof is based primarily on consensus. The role of evidence in establishing proof is only secondary, in the fact that consensus tends to require a certain amount of evidence to convince people. The problem is, things like popularity, personal beliefs, convenience, political correctness, and many other factors play a much bigger role than evidence. Quantum physics was disbelieved (and often still is) by a large number of people, including those who actually came up with it, despite very solid math and a great deal of evidence. The theory of evolution is widely accepted despite the fact that it is currently nothing more than a reasonable explanation with very weak evidence that is full of holes. If we were using a standard burden of proof for both of these, the theory of evolution would still be widely regarded as a weakly supported theory. This would have been a very good thing, because then, perhaps, we would have a much stronger understanding of biology and genetics than we currently do. Likewise, we might also have a better understanding of general physics, if we were not spending so much effort on string theory.
What it comes down to is, scientific progress would advance much faster, if we treated science more like science and less like religion. Having personal religious beliefs about scientific things is fine, but we should not let that stop us from exploring alternatives. When we settle on something without very strong evidence, we short change ourselves by focusing too much effort on something that may not be completely correct. I hope we are beginning to see that this is actually slowing down scientific progress significantly, but I fear that our headlong rush into the coolest new things is blinding us to our mistakes.
So, I issue this challenge to scientists: Regularly come up with new theories that challenge accepted theories. Subject them to thought experiments. If they pass, then try to prove them right or wrong. Instead of exclusively trying to prove accepted theories right, come up with new ones that challenge existing ones, and test them. The best that can happen is that we discover we are wrong about some things and correct our understanding. The worst that happen is that we discover things that we missed in the process of successfully disproving alternative theories.
This is a discussion on why scientists should continue looking for alternatives to large scale evolutionary theory, and it gets into an idea that I have discussed several times already. That idea is that when we settle on a weakly proven theory, we stop looking for alternatives. When we stop looking for alternatives we very often miss things. When we miss things, we halt the progress of science. In other words, because of the theory of evolution, we have entirely quit following some potentially useful lines of inquiry in the field of biology, and this is a bad thing. Even if the theory of evolution is 100% correct (which has not actually been conclusively proven), there may still be value in looking down other paths (see Alchemy for an example of this).
The first reason we should not quit looking for alternatives to evolution is lack of strong evidence supporting it. Charles Darwin discovered that organisms evolve on a small scale. This is proven fact. We see very small scale evolution, like changes in natural camouflage in response to environmental changes, all the time. We have managed to harness this, in the form of selective breeding, to create larger scale changes in organisms. We have also found fossils that appear to be ancestors of existing species, and we have identified similarities between existing species that hint at much larger scale evolution. What we have not managed to do is to trace even one species a significant evolutionary distance. Despite the fact that evolution on a large scale takes millions of years, and thus should have provided ample evidence, all we really have are a few points on the graph. We don't have continuous lines for anything. Now, this is certainly not proof against large scale evolution. Natural decay and decomposition can easily explain the lack of strong evidence, though it seems odd that it would have done so much damage, when we are constantly finding things that we believe should have been destroyed by time but have not been. The fact here is, we have found enough supporting evidence of large scale evolution that we cannot just write it off, but we have not found so much that it constitutes proof. While most of modern science seems to take the current, very weak evidence as sufficient proof, this is the only field willing to accept something as fact with so little evidence.
If this is not a religious discussion, what alternatives could there be? This is a valid question, and it is the question that is generally used to draw a solid conclusion from so little evidence. What other paths besides evolution are there? Leaving out the obvious religious ones (which honestly don't add anything to the conversation anyhow), it might seem like the theory of evolution is the only possibility. This is not true though. For example, certain structures are common throughout nature. Atoms tend to be attracted to specific other atoms. The result is that things like CO2 and a huge range of other oxides are very common. We don't find halogen gasses free in nature, because they bond strongly to other atoms. There are specific atomic structures that are common, because the nature of the different elements causes them to prefer certain configurations. On a larger scale, we see mineral deposits often taking the form of crystals. A great many compounds tend to form into very specific configurations under the right circumstances, which is why crystals are so common in nature. Because we have such a strong understanding of attractive forces on a molecular scale, we can see a crystal and easily conclude that it exists because the patterns of attraction between the molecules it is made of tend to form into specific kinds of lattices that form crystals on a large scale. It is possible that biology has some similarities. Scientists have found that evolution does not tend to happen in a continuous set of minute changes. For example, every living thing produces some amount of electrical current. Electric eels are unique, in that they can produce very large currents, while everything else produces very small ones. According to evolutionary theory, eels should have slowly, over millions of years, increased the current they produce, because it was somehow beneficial. The problem is, there is a threshold below which this trait is not useful at all. So, how did evolution go from extremely low current up to the smallest useful one? This is a huge gap, and the only way it makes sense is either that it happened purely by accident over thousands of years, which is extremely improbable, or that there was a huge jump in there from absolutely tiny to barely useful all in a single mutation. The thing is, by our current understanding, this is almost as improbable as the incremental increase over millions of year theory. We are also starting to see more and more traits that are common across multiple species but which clearly evolved independently. According to traditional evolutionary theory, this is incredibly unlikely. If you add in a naturally favored configuration aspect, however, this makes perfect sense.
So, the first alternative theory that should probably be explored is that biology tends to favor specific configurations, just like atoms and molecules do. If this is true, it would be a huge field, since biology is already so complex. On the other hand, discovering the mechanics of something like this would give us a huge jump in things like genetically engineering stable and safe organisms. It could also explain all of the gaps in our current understanding of evolution. What if the difference between human brains and monkey brains is not a million years of evolution? What if instead, it is the result of several jumps from one stable configuration to another, over a much shorter period of time? Not only would this explain why primates still exist as a separate species, it would also explain why we can only find points on the graph, instead of a continuous line. Scientists are only starting to realize that large scale evolution tends to work in jumps, but they still don't understand why. What if, a hundred years ago, around the time evolution started getting popular, some groups continued to explore other ideas, instead of just quitting the search? What if someone had thought of this idea of naturally stable configurations, much like crystal formations? Even if this idea turns out to be totally wrong, we could have known that large scale evolution tends to work in jumps instead of continuous incremental change, and we could have over 50 years of research and understanding of this process! Instead we wasted more than 100 years stuck researching the theory of evolution exclusively, because we settled too soon.
I am not going to try to come up with a bunch more alternative theories, but another recent discovery that might have been discovered much sooner if we had not settled is epigenetics. This is a mechanic through which genetic traits can be expressed or suppressed without the modification of DNA, and it is theoretically capable of making organisms of the same species manifest very different forms. An alternative theory to evolution could have revealed this mechanic half a century ago, if we had not been stuck on evolution.
This is not exclusively about evolution. This applies to all scientific theories that are not conclusively proven. This also reveals a serious flaw in how the various fields of science define "proof." Currently, proof is based primarily on consensus. The role of evidence in establishing proof is only secondary, in the fact that consensus tends to require a certain amount of evidence to convince people. The problem is, things like popularity, personal beliefs, convenience, political correctness, and many other factors play a much bigger role than evidence. Quantum physics was disbelieved (and often still is) by a large number of people, including those who actually came up with it, despite very solid math and a great deal of evidence. The theory of evolution is widely accepted despite the fact that it is currently nothing more than a reasonable explanation with very weak evidence that is full of holes. If we were using a standard burden of proof for both of these, the theory of evolution would still be widely regarded as a weakly supported theory. This would have been a very good thing, because then, perhaps, we would have a much stronger understanding of biology and genetics than we currently do. Likewise, we might also have a better understanding of general physics, if we were not spending so much effort on string theory.
What it comes down to is, scientific progress would advance much faster, if we treated science more like science and less like religion. Having personal religious beliefs about scientific things is fine, but we should not let that stop us from exploring alternatives. When we settle on something without very strong evidence, we short change ourselves by focusing too much effort on something that may not be completely correct. I hope we are beginning to see that this is actually slowing down scientific progress significantly, but I fear that our headlong rush into the coolest new things is blinding us to our mistakes.
So, I issue this challenge to scientists: Regularly come up with new theories that challenge accepted theories. Subject them to thought experiments. If they pass, then try to prove them right or wrong. Instead of exclusively trying to prove accepted theories right, come up with new ones that challenge existing ones, and test them. The best that can happen is that we discover we are wrong about some things and correct our understanding. The worst that happen is that we discover things that we missed in the process of successfully disproving alternative theories.
15 November 2016
Why a Single Payer System is Better
There are a lot of problems with a single payer system. A single payer system is a healthcare system where the government pretty much just pays all medical bills. It's a popular government healthcare system in Europe, but it comes with a list of problems.
In the U.S., the biggest arguments against a single payer system include long wait lists for medical care, higher taxes, and death panels. These are certainly serious accusations, and most of them are even true. That does not mean that a single payer system is inherently bad though.
Comparatively, a single payer system is pretty good. The primary stated goal of Obamacare was to help poor people to afford healthcare better. In reality, it hardly helped anyone. Initially, it helped some people find existing affordable healthcare, but the primary group this helped was the lower middle class, a group that could already afford health insurance, but was paying more for it than necessary. Most of the poor who could not afford health insurance were not magically provided with options that fit their budgets, and the fine imposed for not buying health insurance does not apply to anyone below the middle class, because it is covered by standard deductions. Of course, the rich are who really paid for it, because many of the rich can already afford to pay medical bills out-of-pocket and wealthy people tend to be healthier in the first place, thus needing less medical care. This would not have been such a bad thing, if Obamacare had actually helped anyone in the first place, but it had a very bad start and it got worse from there. Even now, those in the small group that it may have made a slight difference for are getting priced out of the market, as Obamacare approved health insurance providers are starting to increase their prices. In short, nearly anything is better than Obamacare, even a single payer system.
Compared to Obamacare a single payer system starts off by actually helping poor people, who cannot afford their own healthcare or insurance. A single payer system will actually do the job Obamacare was supposedly designed to do. Because a single payer system automatically covers everyone, it will lose the overhead of medicare, medicaid, and any other system that has to hire a vast staff of administrators to make sure every single applicant meets the requirements for qualifying. This overhead is enormous for pretty much any form of government welfare restricted to low income individuals and families. We will discuss this more in a moment, but even the tax cost of a single payer system is less of an economic burden than Obamacare, which includes profit margins, administration, and shareholder benefits for the insurance companies. Given that much of the cost of Obamacare is on rich people who don't strictly need health insurance in the first place, it is possible that even the higher taxes won't cost as much to the rich as Obamacare does.
What we had before Obamacare was Medicaid and Medicare, which helped only very narrow portions of the population. These programs missed a huge swath of poor, who made too much money to qualify, but who still could not afford healthcare without help. It was pretty clear back then that something needed to be done, but the Republicans wouldn't touch government healthcare with a 10 foot pole, and the result was that a horribly bad Democratic "compromise" got put in place to plague us for the better part of a decade. Many Republicans and even some Democrats think that the previous system of approximately nothing is better than Obamacare, and they are probably right, but repealing Obamacare and stopping there still leaves us with a major problem. The reason anyone thought Obamacare might be a good idea is that we had (and still have) a serious healthcare problem in the U.S.
Sentencing people to death for poverty is wrong, and sins of omission are still sins. Somehow, the less religious left seems to understand this, but the highly religious right does not. Most religions, and especially Christianity, teach that the rich should help the poor. Many go so far as to assert that to withhold aid is to be responsible for whatever happens to the person. The interesting thing is that no religion teaches that aid should come exclusively from individuals, without any government involvement. As far as I am concerned, if people vote to be taxed more so that the government can provide for the poor, not only is this sufficient to meet the requirements of deity, it is also far more efficient than millions of people spending billions of hours looking for poor people to help. I am not going to bother trying to argue this point with a focus on less religious people, because I am pretty sure they already understand this. Anyhow, the fact is, we can't just let people die because they are poor! Poor people need healthcare too, and neither Obamacare nor what was there before are sufficient to meet this need.
Besides the fact that poor people need healthcare too, there are some practical considerations that make a single payer system better than what we currently have, with or without Obamacare. The first is that the government is already paying for some healthcare and hospitals are footing the bill for a lot more. As I mentioned before, Medicare and Medicaid have a great deal of administrative costs in making sure people who get it meet the requirements. Going through applicants bank records and doing background checks to make sure people are not trying to cheat the system is actually quite expensive, and some estimates suggest more than half of the money spent on these programs goes into this administration. A single payer system has minimal administrative costs comparatively. Second, there are Federal laws requiring hospitals to serve certain classes of patients whether they can pay or not, and often the hospitals end up footing the bill. What this means is that hospitals have to charge paying patients more to make up these costs. Costs for patients who cannot pay add up to a lot more than just the healthcare costs though. Hospitals often end up paying collections agencies to harass these people for up to several years, in an attempt to recover some of the costs. Often this is a losing battle, benefiting only the collections agency getting paid by the hospital. There are also losses in the form of interest (either potential interest on the money owed or business debt interest that the hospital has to pay, because it does not have the money to pay the debt off sooner). This costs pretty much everyone. The government loses, because it cannot tax money owed that is never paid. Poor people lose out, because hospitals are tempted to provide inferior service to get the poor patients out so they have more room for paying patients. Paying patients pay more, because someone has to pay for the care given to the poor. Health insurance companies also pay more, for the same reason paying patients do. In short, our current system is costing tons of overhead.
So how does a single payer system compare? A well designed single payer system covers most non-elective healthcare no-questions-asked. This means no administrative overhead for making sure people don't cheat. It also covered rich and poor equally. This means that it actually does help the poor. One worry with a single payer system is long waiting lists, and this has been a problem in the past. Almost three decades ago, it was common in many European countries to have waiting lists for visiting doctors up to three months long. It was a running joke in the U.K. that most people ended up in the emergency room before getting to the top the waiting list. This is no longer the case though. Waiting lists on the order of a week or two are not uncommon, but I have not heard of anyone having to wait much longer than that in almost a decade. The European single payer systems have gotten so fast and efficient that sometimes Americans visit Europe for an extended stay for the high quality state-paid health care, and their healthcare systems are efficient enough that they don't even mind this. I once told someone raving about socialized healthcare that if their claims that it worked well were right, we should do it immediately, but that their claims were not right, and that it did not work well enough to be worth doing. Well, that time has come. If we use successful systems as a model for our own, it will work significantly better than anything we have ever had.
The tax question comes down to the fact that even if it does end up costing more in taxes, taking the burden off of the hospitals will be beneficial enough to our economy to make up for it. And frankly, I am not entirely convinced that it will cost much more in taxes, given how much money eliminating the anti-cheating infrastructure will save.
That covers everything but death panels. I am pretty sure death panels was an idea thought up by people opposed to any kind of socialized healthcare. It was recognized by opponents early on that any kind of socialized health care must have limits, or we will end up keep tons of medically dead people physically alive at great cost without any benefits. These opponents took this idea, turned it into groups of people who decide how gets medical care and who does not and named them "death panels." The need for these is certainly a concern, but one look at the current system should make it obvious that it is less of a concern than the current situation. Currently, when a person is on the verge of death and only being kept alive by machines, the question of life or death belongs to the hospital and any relatives of the person. The decisions are made primarily on financial and emotional concerns. People are allowed to die in hospitals regularly, because their families can no longer afford the medical bills and don't want to get into huge amounts of debt. At the same time, people who are medically dead are regularly kept alive for days, weeks, or months because family members just cannot bear to let them go. It is a travesty that cost of healthcare is a dominating factor in live and death, and this is one thing that a single payer system would fix. With a single payer system removing the financial factor though, it is very reasonable to assume that a lot of people would want to keep their medically hopeless relatives alive indefinitely, holding out on some one in a million chance of miraculous recovery, and this would make the tax burden of a single payer system untenable. Government rules could be made to govern cases like this, but there are so many fringe cases that legislation is bound to fail in a great number of them. The best solution is to get panels of experts to objectively consider things like probability of recovery. Yeah, the idea of death panels sucks, but it is already better than how it currently works!
Besides the fact that death panels are a better system than deferring to financial concerns and emotions in making these decisions, they also don't have to be the final word. Death panels would not be deciding whether people live and die. They would only be deciding whether or not the government will continue paying for the care of a patient who seems unlikely to recover. Continued care would up to anyone who might be willing and capable of paying for it. Most single payer systems allow people to pay for their own healthcare out-of-pocket. This allows people who can afford it to circumvent government restrictions on healthcare, and while this might seem unfair, it is no less fair than our current system. In addition, this allows health insurance companies to remain relevant. In countries with single payer systems, customers that can pay out-of-pocket often have access to premium healthcare that is not available a normal government pay scales. Again, this may seem unfair, but the government paid healthcare is generally comparable, if not better than the average healthcare currently available in the U.S. (see Canada, where the free government healthcare is often considered significantly better than standard healthcare in the U.S.), so there is no loss of quality to people using government paid healthcare.
What it all comes down to is, a single payer system is more effective, cheaper, and better for the economy than anything we have had in the U.S. so far, including Obamacare and completely private healthcare, and even the scare tactic idea of death panels is both better than the current system and easy enough to circumvent for anyone that could afford it in the current system. As a national healthcare solution, the single payer system has been turned into a well oiled machine in Europe, and if we are smart enough to learn from their mistakes and successes, we can have a successful single payer system ourselves, that works properly right out of the gates (unlike Obamacare).
In the U.S., the biggest arguments against a single payer system include long wait lists for medical care, higher taxes, and death panels. These are certainly serious accusations, and most of them are even true. That does not mean that a single payer system is inherently bad though.
Comparatively, a single payer system is pretty good. The primary stated goal of Obamacare was to help poor people to afford healthcare better. In reality, it hardly helped anyone. Initially, it helped some people find existing affordable healthcare, but the primary group this helped was the lower middle class, a group that could already afford health insurance, but was paying more for it than necessary. Most of the poor who could not afford health insurance were not magically provided with options that fit their budgets, and the fine imposed for not buying health insurance does not apply to anyone below the middle class, because it is covered by standard deductions. Of course, the rich are who really paid for it, because many of the rich can already afford to pay medical bills out-of-pocket and wealthy people tend to be healthier in the first place, thus needing less medical care. This would not have been such a bad thing, if Obamacare had actually helped anyone in the first place, but it had a very bad start and it got worse from there. Even now, those in the small group that it may have made a slight difference for are getting priced out of the market, as Obamacare approved health insurance providers are starting to increase their prices. In short, nearly anything is better than Obamacare, even a single payer system.
Compared to Obamacare a single payer system starts off by actually helping poor people, who cannot afford their own healthcare or insurance. A single payer system will actually do the job Obamacare was supposedly designed to do. Because a single payer system automatically covers everyone, it will lose the overhead of medicare, medicaid, and any other system that has to hire a vast staff of administrators to make sure every single applicant meets the requirements for qualifying. This overhead is enormous for pretty much any form of government welfare restricted to low income individuals and families. We will discuss this more in a moment, but even the tax cost of a single payer system is less of an economic burden than Obamacare, which includes profit margins, administration, and shareholder benefits for the insurance companies. Given that much of the cost of Obamacare is on rich people who don't strictly need health insurance in the first place, it is possible that even the higher taxes won't cost as much to the rich as Obamacare does.
What we had before Obamacare was Medicaid and Medicare, which helped only very narrow portions of the population. These programs missed a huge swath of poor, who made too much money to qualify, but who still could not afford healthcare without help. It was pretty clear back then that something needed to be done, but the Republicans wouldn't touch government healthcare with a 10 foot pole, and the result was that a horribly bad Democratic "compromise" got put in place to plague us for the better part of a decade. Many Republicans and even some Democrats think that the previous system of approximately nothing is better than Obamacare, and they are probably right, but repealing Obamacare and stopping there still leaves us with a major problem. The reason anyone thought Obamacare might be a good idea is that we had (and still have) a serious healthcare problem in the U.S.
Sentencing people to death for poverty is wrong, and sins of omission are still sins. Somehow, the less religious left seems to understand this, but the highly religious right does not. Most religions, and especially Christianity, teach that the rich should help the poor. Many go so far as to assert that to withhold aid is to be responsible for whatever happens to the person. The interesting thing is that no religion teaches that aid should come exclusively from individuals, without any government involvement. As far as I am concerned, if people vote to be taxed more so that the government can provide for the poor, not only is this sufficient to meet the requirements of deity, it is also far more efficient than millions of people spending billions of hours looking for poor people to help. I am not going to bother trying to argue this point with a focus on less religious people, because I am pretty sure they already understand this. Anyhow, the fact is, we can't just let people die because they are poor! Poor people need healthcare too, and neither Obamacare nor what was there before are sufficient to meet this need.
Besides the fact that poor people need healthcare too, there are some practical considerations that make a single payer system better than what we currently have, with or without Obamacare. The first is that the government is already paying for some healthcare and hospitals are footing the bill for a lot more. As I mentioned before, Medicare and Medicaid have a great deal of administrative costs in making sure people who get it meet the requirements. Going through applicants bank records and doing background checks to make sure people are not trying to cheat the system is actually quite expensive, and some estimates suggest more than half of the money spent on these programs goes into this administration. A single payer system has minimal administrative costs comparatively. Second, there are Federal laws requiring hospitals to serve certain classes of patients whether they can pay or not, and often the hospitals end up footing the bill. What this means is that hospitals have to charge paying patients more to make up these costs. Costs for patients who cannot pay add up to a lot more than just the healthcare costs though. Hospitals often end up paying collections agencies to harass these people for up to several years, in an attempt to recover some of the costs. Often this is a losing battle, benefiting only the collections agency getting paid by the hospital. There are also losses in the form of interest (either potential interest on the money owed or business debt interest that the hospital has to pay, because it does not have the money to pay the debt off sooner). This costs pretty much everyone. The government loses, because it cannot tax money owed that is never paid. Poor people lose out, because hospitals are tempted to provide inferior service to get the poor patients out so they have more room for paying patients. Paying patients pay more, because someone has to pay for the care given to the poor. Health insurance companies also pay more, for the same reason paying patients do. In short, our current system is costing tons of overhead.
So how does a single payer system compare? A well designed single payer system covers most non-elective healthcare no-questions-asked. This means no administrative overhead for making sure people don't cheat. It also covered rich and poor equally. This means that it actually does help the poor. One worry with a single payer system is long waiting lists, and this has been a problem in the past. Almost three decades ago, it was common in many European countries to have waiting lists for visiting doctors up to three months long. It was a running joke in the U.K. that most people ended up in the emergency room before getting to the top the waiting list. This is no longer the case though. Waiting lists on the order of a week or two are not uncommon, but I have not heard of anyone having to wait much longer than that in almost a decade. The European single payer systems have gotten so fast and efficient that sometimes Americans visit Europe for an extended stay for the high quality state-paid health care, and their healthcare systems are efficient enough that they don't even mind this. I once told someone raving about socialized healthcare that if their claims that it worked well were right, we should do it immediately, but that their claims were not right, and that it did not work well enough to be worth doing. Well, that time has come. If we use successful systems as a model for our own, it will work significantly better than anything we have ever had.
The tax question comes down to the fact that even if it does end up costing more in taxes, taking the burden off of the hospitals will be beneficial enough to our economy to make up for it. And frankly, I am not entirely convinced that it will cost much more in taxes, given how much money eliminating the anti-cheating infrastructure will save.
That covers everything but death panels. I am pretty sure death panels was an idea thought up by people opposed to any kind of socialized healthcare. It was recognized by opponents early on that any kind of socialized health care must have limits, or we will end up keep tons of medically dead people physically alive at great cost without any benefits. These opponents took this idea, turned it into groups of people who decide how gets medical care and who does not and named them "death panels." The need for these is certainly a concern, but one look at the current system should make it obvious that it is less of a concern than the current situation. Currently, when a person is on the verge of death and only being kept alive by machines, the question of life or death belongs to the hospital and any relatives of the person. The decisions are made primarily on financial and emotional concerns. People are allowed to die in hospitals regularly, because their families can no longer afford the medical bills and don't want to get into huge amounts of debt. At the same time, people who are medically dead are regularly kept alive for days, weeks, or months because family members just cannot bear to let them go. It is a travesty that cost of healthcare is a dominating factor in live and death, and this is one thing that a single payer system would fix. With a single payer system removing the financial factor though, it is very reasonable to assume that a lot of people would want to keep their medically hopeless relatives alive indefinitely, holding out on some one in a million chance of miraculous recovery, and this would make the tax burden of a single payer system untenable. Government rules could be made to govern cases like this, but there are so many fringe cases that legislation is bound to fail in a great number of them. The best solution is to get panels of experts to objectively consider things like probability of recovery. Yeah, the idea of death panels sucks, but it is already better than how it currently works!
Besides the fact that death panels are a better system than deferring to financial concerns and emotions in making these decisions, they also don't have to be the final word. Death panels would not be deciding whether people live and die. They would only be deciding whether or not the government will continue paying for the care of a patient who seems unlikely to recover. Continued care would up to anyone who might be willing and capable of paying for it. Most single payer systems allow people to pay for their own healthcare out-of-pocket. This allows people who can afford it to circumvent government restrictions on healthcare, and while this might seem unfair, it is no less fair than our current system. In addition, this allows health insurance companies to remain relevant. In countries with single payer systems, customers that can pay out-of-pocket often have access to premium healthcare that is not available a normal government pay scales. Again, this may seem unfair, but the government paid healthcare is generally comparable, if not better than the average healthcare currently available in the U.S. (see Canada, where the free government healthcare is often considered significantly better than standard healthcare in the U.S.), so there is no loss of quality to people using government paid healthcare.
What it all comes down to is, a single payer system is more effective, cheaper, and better for the economy than anything we have had in the U.S. so far, including Obamacare and completely private healthcare, and even the scare tactic idea of death panels is both better than the current system and easy enough to circumvent for anyone that could afford it in the current system. As a national healthcare solution, the single payer system has been turned into a well oiled machine in Europe, and if we are smart enough to learn from their mistakes and successes, we can have a successful single payer system ourselves, that works properly right out of the gates (unlike Obamacare).
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