However, when the cost seems to be borne by someone else, we suddenly become safety absolutists: no price is too great to pay.
A free puppy to the commenter who picks out the dumbest sentence
Government regulations prohibit giving live animals as prizes.
I used to get so much more entertained by being irate at McMegan being a big dope. Now it's just sort of grimly sad.
I rarely cross paths with her writing anymore, except I think I linked to her in the past few months. This time I blame Emerson.
You should probably give the winner a 48-hour cooling off period before handing over the puppy. Poor li'l thing.
Don't see her stuff much either, but know about this one because her friend and defender Mark Kleiman couldn't let this one pass.
Government can't instantly solve all our problems. We owe it to ourselves to try total anarchy.
Every once in a while I wonder, 'Are people being too hard on the McMegan?' And then I read something like the above-linked article, and I wonder why I even wondered in the first place. What a disingenuous, and utterly vile, piece of sophistry. What a steaming pile o' crap.
Also, what LB said in 3.
My "dumbest sentence" submission:
And he is certainly right about one thing: When it comes to many regulations, it is best to leave such calculations of benefit and cost to the market, rather than the government.
Er, "the market" does not often "calculate" benefits and costs beyond its profit-and-loss sheets, which is why we sometimes need rules and regulations that carry the force of law (so, legislated and administered and enforced by "the government," yes).
Where is the market for "not watching somebody drop a baby several dozen feet because the alternative is worse"?
Someone should ask her why she doesn't live in Somalia, well known libertarian paradise.
Someone should ask her why she doesn't live in Somalia, well known libertarian paradise.
Someone should ask her why she doesn't live in Somalia, well known libertarian paradise.
Someone should ask her why she doesn't live in Somalia, well known libertarian paradise.
Sorry about the multiple posts. I am an idiot.
Setting aside the odious lack of ethics and the sophomoric glibertarian logic, I was struck by how insulting it should be to the readers of Bloomberg to be instructed on the existence of this novel technique, the cost-benefit analysis, and the shocking idea that one can assign a monetary value to human lives to perform such calculations.
I actually had to listen to her voice spouting some nonsense a couple months ago, my FIL listens to Bloomberg radio min the car and she came on with some 60 second piece. Ever failing upwards.
||
"Neurology Screen 2017" or "A Stroke of Humor"
Picture shift change at the hospital. Outgoing nurse runs through the neuro exam with the incoming nurse.
"Can you tell me your first name? Do you know where you are?" Patient aces both questions.
Outgoing turns to incoming: "He doesn't like the question about who the current president is, so we just skip that one." Back to the patient: "What year is it? Do you know why you are here?..."
|>
20 is fantastic, and actually helped to lower my blood pressure from the rest of the thread.
I wish I had a sense of humor about that woman's writing, but what I actually have is a grim rage that her blithe, contemptuous view of other people's lives is published at all, much less paid for and listened to.
20 is fantastic. My dad's answer to that question was prefaced with, "I think it was a huge mistake but people voted for him."
Fortunately, words came back pretty quickly with treatment and prognosis is good. But I was tickled to an inappropriate degree that "fuck" and "bullshit" seem to be hardwired even more indelibly than his children's names. Also, after frustrating struggles to find various other words, "Don't get me started on that fucker...." came effortlessly.
I have a libertarian friend (he actually didn't vote for Shitgibbon, so there's that) who believes that Krugman et al's debunking of libertarian economics is unfair and beastly mean. Just mean. Heh. And then along comes McMegan, thinking that the market prices in all spillovers.
Teh stupid, it burns.
the shocking idea that one can assign a monetary value to human lives to perform such calculations.
Somehow she didn't mention that those calculations tend to be based on foregone earnings, so poor people really aren't worth as much as rich people.
9 and 21.2 are both taking this in the right spirit. At least this has disabused me forever of those twinges of "there but for the grace of God and my parents" that I used to get reading McMegan. Not in a million years, not in any known or imagined universe.
Sylvia, hope it continues to go well! (I also find it encouraging to believe, per 23, that I won't turn into McMegan after a neurological trauma either.)
25: An argument very much like that was explicitly made in the aftermath of the great Chicago fire, and used to determine how to distribute relief, as described in this book.
That argument about traffic safety is hilariously non-factual as well -- the US has much worse per capita road deaths as that notorious economic basket case, Sweden (and other starving European countries).
Tsk, tsk. "Dumb?" This is exactly the kind of contempt* for heartland, little-guy America for which us coastal elites are being punished with a Trump administration.
*There ought to be a word for the imaginary, more virtuous feeling we are supposed to have instead of contempt when facing contemptible stupidity, callousness, etc.
Yeah, damn us coastal elites who can't understand the down-home sensibilities of Bloomberg View.
28: To be fair to us, we're drunker and allow much shittier cars on the road.
Just a reminder that we have a picture of McMegan with devil horns in the Flickr pool.
3: There was a time when you could imagine that McMegan represented the worst tendencies of Republicans who might actually take power. Those were the good ol' days.
Yes. You could say, "They might be motivated solely by a desire to minimize the amount the wealthy contribute to the maintenance of the society that has allowed them to be wealthy, but they wouldn't deliberately destroy the social fabric just to keep a single seat on the Supreme Court."
Or, "I'm sure they wouldn't put a puppy in a sealed plastic bag if Fox convinced them liberals were trying to outlaw the practice."
JPJ already covered this territory in 8, but for pithy expressions of stupidity, it's possible that Brandon Lewis, the former housing minister quoted approvingly by McMegan, may take the prize:
"We believe that it is the responsibility of the fire industry, rather than the Government, to market fire sprinkler systems effectively and to encourage their wider installation.
The "you might think you don't like people burnt in tower blocks, but we all drive faster than the speed limit, am I right?!?" point is extra ridiculous, because she's describing a collective action problem and treating it like the heights of rational thinking. (That's actually a pretty fair summary of the problem with libertarians: the complete inability to see that collective action problems can have collective solutions.)
What I *want* is for the transportation infrastructure in North America to be radically different, since I think the cost/benefit trade-offs would be immense. But since I'm not God-- or even a transit planner-- I make driving decisions on the roads we've got, not the ones I want. And so I drive the speed of traffic, even though that contributes to overall unsafety, because *me driving slower won't fix anything* and might even make a collision more likely.
The idea that individual decisions to drive fast within the context of our broken traffic system represent anything like institutional level cost/benefit decisions is just so frustratingly clueless.
Yet if you hit people in the head with a copy of a Mancur Olson book, you're the criminal.
Of course, I'm very sure McMegan and her employers know exactly what a collective action problem is. It serves their interests to forget when only poor people bear the costs of a lack of collective action.
We believe that it is the responsibility of the fire industry
Yes. I shared this elsewhere, at least partly because I was struck by his use of "fire industry" rather than "fire prevention industry". The "fire industry" sounds as if its sales reps should call to say, "Nice apartment block you've got here. Shame if anything should happen to it."
41: As an American patriot, I can't tell you how gratifying it is when I occasionally discover that the US hasn't cornered the market on all the stupidest sons of bitches in the world.
Driving fast on highways isn't that unsafe. The average speed (actually 5 mph above the average speed) is the safest. If everyone is speeding then that is still the safest speed.
[this only works on highways where there is no pedestrian and bikes though.]