Minimum wage

It’s partly a numbers game

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

Let’s do some math, but first, we need to define some terms.

Expenses and expenditures are two words that can be used interchangeably, and basically it’s money that a company spends. Wages and salaries are expenses. For the sake of simplicity, I’m not going to differentiate between (tax)deductible and non-deductible expenses. Income and revenue are two words that can also be used interchangeably, though revenue typically applies to business income, and that’s the word I’ll be using from here on out.

Profit is all revenue minus all expenses.

According to CNN Money, Wal-Mart posted a total annual profit of approximately $15.7 billion at the end of 2012 on revenues of shy of $447 billion. Wal-Mart employs approximately 1.2 million people. Wal-Mart’s profit per US employee is a little over $13,000. Note: for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to operate on the presumption all numbers are US only.

Wal-Mart is currently the largest target of the calls for a $15/hour minimum wage, the equivalent of $31,200 per year at full time (40 hours per week).

Now a lot of people could live well with an extra $13,000 a year. But if Wal-Mart were to give every employee that kind of raise, it wouldn’t have any profit to roll over into the next year.

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that profit = cash in the bank, that if you take the sum total of all profits and losses year over year that you have an idea of a company’s bank account balance. Not so. Part of that profit is set aside and used to cover expenses ahead of future revenues, and this includes employment expenses such as salaries and wages. A company’s profitability ensures they have the liquidity necessary to cover expenses when those happen to overtake revenues. For the first quarter or half of a year, that could mean the difference between staying in business and going under.

Plus the profit is typically re-invested into the company across the next year or several years as the company seeks out new markets or areas for business, new ventures to take, expansions of current ventures or within current markets, etc. So stripping away their profit would hurt the company’s ability to do this. Now while many believe Wal-Mart is a market predator, there will always be places where they cannot reliably compete. As an example, while they do have automotive centers, they’re worthless if you need anything more than basic maintenance or small repairs, and you can always get better tires either through your dealer or through one of the many established tire sellers such as Firestone and Goodyear.

But Wal-Mart wouldn’t have been able to venture into basic automotive services without actually having the cash in the bank to venture into that arena. That required remodeling existing stores, to begin with, along with increasing the costs for building and maintaining new stores capable of handling automotive. I assisted in the construction of one such store as a contractor back in 2005.

And their selections on other things tends to be toward the lower-end, to cater to the affordability of those who most shop there. Their most expensive items tend to be electronics, but even those aren’t considered high-end compared to what stores like Best Buy offer.

Wal-Mart takes a lot of flak because they have high profit numbers, again about $13,000 per employee, despite having a modest profit margin, only about 3.5% at the end of 2012.

Let’s do some more math: to pay all of their employees at a minimum $15/hour and employ them at 40 hours each week would cost the company almost $37.5 billion per year, just in wages and salaries – 1.2 million employees * $15/hour * 2080 hours/year = $37,440,000,000 or almost $37.5 billion.

So what if we instead cut the pay of the highest paid in the company? To raise the pay of the employees by just $1 per year – make sure you read that correctly, I said $1 per year – would require reducing the pay of an executive by over $1 million per year. How many people actually think about the numbers before spouting out these ideas. To get an extra $1,000 per employee you’d need to cut $1 billion out of executive pay, presuming they’d be able to retain their executives after doing that, and presuming there is actually that much to cut.

So what if Wal-Mart forgoes the dividend on its common stock and gives that to the employees instead? Wal-Mart would actually lose shareholders and its stock price would plummet. This could actually be good for the corporation itself as it could convert common stock into treasury stock (i.e. common-stock buybacks) at a much lower rate, but that would take cash out of the coffers as well until they decided to turn around and re-issue that stock publicly.

The situation isn’t easy to solve. You can sink Wal-Mart to give their employees a "living wage", thereby risking all of their employees, or force Wal-Mart to cut employees, possibly close stores, to give the remaining employees a "living wage". These are the unintended consequences constantly pointed out to the "living wage" crowd that seems to continually fall on deaf ears (just look at the comments section to any article pointing this out). Prices will go up to offset, at least in part, the increased employment costs. This will cut into the purchasing ability not only of the Wal-Mart customers, but also the Wal-Mart employees, who likely have an employee discount they can exercise as a means of helping get still more of what they need.

The one thing everyone forgets is that the cost of business falls on its customers. And as part of Wal-Mart’s customer base is its employees, it’s a delicate balancing act that can be easily disrupted. But often looking at just the numbers and just saying "they can afford to give up some of that" often is shortcut for "wow that’s a lot of money" without many more brain cells going into thinking it through.

But what seems to take still fewer brain cells to conjure, simply because it sounds good, is the idea that employers must provide their employees with a particular living standard as opposed to merely providing a job.

Animals and pets/Religion

Putting a value on life

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

It is a universal law that actions beget reactions, that every action has a consequence of some kind. To say that any life is without any kind of value, or that life itself is without value, is to say that an action can occur without a consequence. It is how we interpret the consequences of actions that determines the value those actions have, even if those consequences are unforeseen or, in large part, unforeseeable.

Atheism says nothing of the value of life, because to say anything of the value of life is to say we have the ability to ascribe value to life. But to say nothing of the value of life is not to say life is without value. Yet that how many Christians appear to interpret that point of view. When atheists say there is no afterlife, we are not saying it is okay to rape, steal, pillage and kill, yet that is how Christians interpret our words, using Christianity itself to twist those words into such an abhorrent notion.

While some atheists take the absolute position – inappropriately dubbed the “strong atheist” position – that there is no supreme being or deity, most atheists likely do not take such an absolute position. I certainly do not. Instead many take the agnostic position that if there is a deity, it is impossible to really know anything about that deity, and any proclamations of knowledge regarding that deity are to be dismissed if nothing concrete is presented affirming that claim.

As such atheism means not possessing any belief in a supreme being, and all the trimmings that seem to come with it, because of no reason to possess such belief.

If there is a deity, there isn’t anything concretely known about it. There’s a lot that has been assumed and proclaimed as true, but nothing concretely known and demonstrable. If a being exists that we can properly refer to as a deity, or if even multiple such beings exist, and they are interacting with our world and our lives, they are not doing so in such a way that is easily detectable, nor are they doing so in such a way that gives our lives or any particular person’s life any discernably additional value or meaning.

To say that life is without value unless there is a deity, to say that life is without value unless there is a specific deity, most typically the God of Abraham, is to say plainly that life is without value. Life either has meaning and value unconditionally, or it has no value or meaning because of the conditions applied.

You will be hard-pressed to find a person, atheist or otherwise, who genuinely holds the claim that life does not have meaning or value. No atheist says such. In fact, we say the exact opposite: that the idea of an afterlife actually degrades and devalues the life and time that we actually have. This is especially true given that it appears to be the typical Christian point of view that the afterlife is reserved just for us, the species Homo sapiens sapiens, and is not for our companion pets, or any of the other animals in the world.

* * * * *

Ashley Paramore said, “The universe is absolutely massive, and we are virtually insignificant in it.” Contrary to the common belief, this universe was not created for us. It is supremely arrogant to assert such. But to say we are insignificant within the totality of the universe is to not say we cannot be significant in some other way. But we do not need validation from anyone else, not from any person or even any deity, for our lives to be significant or to have meaning.

And saying we were not specially created by a deity in his image is not to say we are utterly worthless, that the time we do have is without value or meaning. But that again seems to be the point of view of many Christians, and if you don’t believe as they do, then you must believe that life is meaningless and worthless.

But there’s one problem: your life does not have value or meaning simply because someone else says it does, regardless of whether that person opining on the matter is another person or a deity. Your life only has whatever meaning you can and do give it, through your interactions with others and society at large. Your life could be significant in ways you don’t immediately realize, but not immediately realizing your significance is not to say you are without significance.

What does not seem meaningful or valuable to one person may be meaningful or valuable to someone else. An example of this comes from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, chapter 23 called “Christmas on the Closed Ward”, toward the end of the chapter:

[Neville’s mother] did not seem to want to speak, or perhaps she was not able to, but she made timid motions toward Neville, holding something in her outstretched hand.

“Again?” said Mrs Longbottom, sounding slightly weary. “Very well, Alice dear, very well – Neville, take it, whatever it is…”

But Neville had already stretched out his hand, into which his mother dropped an empty Droobles Blowing Gum wrapper.

“Very nice, dear,” said Neville’s grandmother in a falsely cheery voice, patting his mother on the shoulder. But Neville said quietly, “Thanks Mum.”

His mother tottered away, back up the ward, humming to herself. Neville looked around at the others, his expression defiant, as though daring them to laugh, but Harry did not think he’d ever found anything less funny in his life.

“Well, we’d better get back,” sighed Mrs Longbottom, drawing on long green gloves. “Very nice to have met you all. Neville put that wrapper in the bin, she must have given you enough of them to paper your bedroom by now…”

But as they left, Harry was sure he saw Neville slip the wrapper into his pocket.

Where Neville’s grandmother saw a practically worthless gum wrapper, Neville saw something else. And as Neville’s grandmother’s comment as they left noted, that wasn’t the first time he’d been given a gum wrapper by his mother. But each time he likely treated it as the first, and valued it because it was his mother giving it to him, even if to the rest of us it just looked like a piece of refuse.

* * * * *

In some respects we never die. Our lives are entangled with those who come after us, just as our lives are entangled with those who came before us. I mean there is scarcely a living soul on this planet that doesn’t go to bed at night without their lives in some way being effected by the work of the hands and minds of folks like Faraday, Newton and Pasteur.

But these entanglements go way beyond the vulgarly obvious main ones, for similarly almost everyone’s life is intertwined with the people who grew the grain and made the bread that these men ate.

So it becomes clear that death is not “the end”. We are intertwined with both lesser and greater things.

– Phil Mason, PhD, a.k.a. “Thuderf00t”

This past Thursday morning, Thanksgiving morning, a short time after the clock passed 8am, one of my two beloved feline companions died in my arms at just 8 years old. While we don’t entirely know what caused his end, his life had great significance, great value and great meaning.

His life was intertwined with mine in ways that at first did not seem significant. Now that he is gone, I am aware in great detail how significant those entanglements actually are and were.

When we all inevitably meet our end, there will not be a heaven or hell waiting, no eternal reward or punishment. Instead it’ll be just like flipping a switch on your consciousness, and the lights will just go out. That is what I saw with Charlie as I watched him die, felt his body go silent while he was in my arms. There is no heaven that welcomed him, no “rainbow bridge” on which he’ll be waiting the decades it’ll hopefully be until I and my wife pass on.

But does that mean Charlie’s life was somehow worthless, his existence meaningless? Absolutely not.

His life had meaning, his life had value because of the impact his life had on me, my wife, his surviving brother, and my parents for the several months they cared for him after he was born. His life likely also had an impact on the veterinarians and veterinary technicians that assisted in his care during his brief years.

Even in death his life will continue to have value and meaning as my wife and I look back at the pictures we have of him and remember the time we had with him – all the little things he used to do that seemed insignificant at the time, but we now realize were very significant parts of our day as we’ve looked around expecting Charlie to be there.

His life most certainly had value and meaning, regardless of whether there actually is a deity or not.

Feminism/Life

An act of war? Really?

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

I’m really starting to wonder how uptight women have become today when a woman posting a picture of herself several days after giving birth is called “an act of war“.

I’m referring to Caroline Berg Eriksen and the picture she posted last week, a mirror self picture (i.e. “selfie”) of her wearing only a bra and panties showing her athletic figure and the caption “I feel so empty, and still not 4 days after birth”. Many of the comments on the Instagram picture are, thankfully, quite positive, and many have instead taken to other venues to express their animosity regarding this.

And it’s rage that I don’t understand. It’s almost as if women are no longer allowed to be thin post-partum.

And if that’s the case, then someone needs to tell my sister-in-law. After her first child, a son, several years ago, she bounced back to her normal thinner figure in less than a month, likely in less than a couple weeks. When I first saw her after giving birth, you could hardly tell she had even been pregnant. She’s recently given birth to a second child, a daughter this time, and I’ve yet to see her so I don’t know if that still holds true.

So the question then is whether all this animosity is over the fact that Eriksen and other women like her have achieved their pre-pregnancy weight (or pretty close to it), or that they have the audacity to show it off.

Claire Mysko chimed in for Yahoo! Shine:

While I don’t think it’s helpful to shame the individual mothers who choose to post pictures of themselves, I do think the pushback signals a healthy reaction to some very unhealthy and unrealistic cultural expectations.

Cultural expectations? Since when are women expected to have Olympiad bodies not long after giving birth? Did I miss a memo?

Here’s the thing: if you’re intimidated by other women posting pictures of themselves post-partum looking thin and fit, it is you who has the problem. Evidence of that fact is the animosity you display in response to it. That is what is unhealthy, because it implies you have a need to prop yourself up by bringing down someone who you perceive as being superior to you. Perhaps discussing with someone whatever inferiority complex you might have would be well worth your time.

I mean I thought the whole idea is to accept what you have while not feeling intimidated, envious or jealous of what someone else has. Apparently I’ve missed something.

A couple years ago, in response to Glenn Beck’s disgusting on-air response to Meghan McCain’s appearance in a skin cancer PSA television ad, I said (from “Nudity and Prudery“) “Sometimes the best response to something you dislike is just walking away from it.” In this instance, I think that would have been the best response to this image and the seemingly ongoing controversy over this whole exercise.

Term limits

Rebuttal to Jonathan Zimmerman, "End presidential term limits"

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University who recently penned an op-ed for the Washington Post regarding the 22nd Amendment, the Amendment that establishes the two-term limit on the President (and 10-year limit on a person who succeeds to the office), and why it should be repealed.

On principle I agree with Zimmerman, that the term limits are not, in general, a good idea. But I think his efforts are misplaced. Amending the Constitution to limit the presidency in such a manner is an implicit message to the executive as to whom he answers: Congress and the States. It is not Congress and the States who answer to the President, as many seem to think and Zimmerman seems to imply in his piece:

Democratic lawmakers would worry about provoking the wrath of a president who could be reelected. Thanks to term limits, though, they’ve got little to fear.

Congress should never fear any "wrath" from the president. It is the president who should always fear the wrath of the legislature. After all it is the legislature who has the power to remove him for really any reason they happen to declare a "high crime or misdemeanor", so long as the House of Representatives can get two-thirds of the Senate to agree with them on the charges.

All power of the Federal government originates with the House of Representatives and the Senate. The smallest branch of the Federal government is defined by the longest article in the main body of the Constitution of the United States. Make no mistake that the drafters of the Constitution did this with a clear reason: to ensure all power of the Federal government originated with and was checked by the proxies for the People and States that comprise the United States.

As such to say legislators should fear any wrath from the President is absurd as the legislators should never fear the president. It should always be the president who fears the legislators.

Nor does Obama have to fear the voters, which might be the scariest problem of all. If he chooses, he could simply ignore their will.

Zimmerman is correct to say that the President no longer fears the voters. We saw this very clearly following his re-election, which coincided actually quite coincidentally with the Sandy Hook tragedy.

In the first term he was mute about gun legislation – likely out of fear of Democrat voters who are friendly to gun rights – but immediately went full-tilt in favor of gun control after the election had already passed and the electoral votes counted. He no longer feared the People on that.

But the Senate still did. It is why Senators overwhelmingly rejected key aspects of Reid’s latest attempt at gun legislation: expanded background checks that would’ve required obtaining a certified background check for even private sales, renewing the assault weapons ban (rejected by the largest margin with 60 Senators rejecting it), and renewing the magazine capacity limitation.

It is odd how people thought the Senate would readily ratify Feinstein’s proposed measures simply because the Democrats had control of the Senate. Instead it became similar to trying to pass the Affordable Care Act in that the Democrat leadership in the Senate needed to appease other Democrats. They failed miserably when fifteen (15) Democrats joining Republicans to vote down renewing the assault weapons ban.

The House of Representatives also still fears the People. And so long as the branches from which all Federal power originates can still be periodically checked by the People, I think we’ll otherwise be fine with a presidential term limitation.

The first president to openly challenge the two-term tradition was Theodore Roosevelt, who ran for a third term as president in 1912 on the Bull Moose ticket. When he stepped down in 1908, Roosevelt pledged not to seek a third term; reminded of this promise in 1912, he said that he had meant he would not seek a "third consecutive term." The New York Times called Roosevelt’s explanation a "pitiful sophistication," and the voters sent Woodrow Wilson to the White House.

Not quite.

Wilson’s election had little to do with Roosevelt seeking a second full term as President and more to do with the schism in the Republican party that started in 1910.

Roosevelt challenged William Howard Taft, who was seeking a second term as President in 1912. Taft had actually been selected by Roosevelt to be his successor on the Republican ticket, but Taft’s performance as President disappointed him, as Taft’s politics were becoming more conservative while Roosevelt and a good size of the Republican Party were becoming more "progressive".

So for the 1912 election, Roosevelt challenged Taft initially in the Republican primaries, where he failed, and then by running as a third party under the Progressive Party banner.

His presence on the ballot split the Republican party base, ensuring that Wilson won the plurality vote, and the Electoral College with it. Had Roosevelt never challenged Taft for his election, Taft likely would have been re-elected to a second term, but probably only just as the Democrats controlled about 45% of the popular vote at that time, making the schism in the Republican Party fatal with regard to the presidential run.

A cursory glance at Wikipedia would have prevented this glaring history inaccuracy from a professor of history.

Only in 1940, amid what George Washington might have called a "great emergency," did a president successfully stand for a third term. Citing the outbreak of war overseas and the Depression at home, Democrats renominated Franklin D. Roosevelt. They pegged him for a fourth time in 1944 despite his health problems, which were serious enough to send him to his grave the following year.

To Republicans, these developments echoed the fascist trends enveloping Europe. "You will be serving under an American totalitarian government before the long third term is finished," warned Wendell Wilkie, Roosevelt’s opponent in 1940. Once the two-term tradition was broken, Wilkie added, nobody could put it back together. "If this principle dies, it will be dead forever," he said.

In 1933 talk of FDR assuming dictator-like powers was being thrown around Washington. Take that notion, memories of it likely still floating in heads in Washington , along with the fact that FDR successfully broke the ceremonial two-term limit that Jefferson started, and you’ve got a good reason for a paranoid Congress and a paranoid country.

And as difficult as it might be to believe, the word "dictator" was being thrown around as if it was a good thing, and Walter Lippman said to NPR, "The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers." The idea even appealed to FDR’s wife.

The situation to which Lippman is referring, of course, is the Great Depression.

Ratified by the states in 1951, the 22nd Amendment was an “undisguised slap at the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” wrote Clinton Rossiter, one of the era’s leading political scientists. It also reflected “a shocking lack of faith in the common sense and good judgment of the people,” Rossiter said.

Common sense and good judgment? I’ll just quote what I said in a previous article (from "Advice and consent"):

The People do not have nearly as much ability, especially given how easily we can be reduced into pesky, pestilent, squandering, argumentative and belligerent mobs, often at the mention of only a few words. In other words the People tend to act in a democratic fashion, as history has shown, and that is the fastest way to erode a republic.

The Founders knew this. This is why prior to the Seventeenth Amendment the more powerful chamber of Congress was left to the selection and safeguard of the State governments. This is why the power of advice and consent was left solely with the Senate and not with the House of Representatives. The Federal government was intended to be insulated from the People for reasons we have been witnessing since about the time of the Civil War.

Sorry but the people tend to not have or act with common sense and good judgment. This is why the drafters of the Constitution put so many barriers between the People and the Federal government as possible, preferring instead to have the State governments have more direct involvement with the Federal government than the People.

When they succeeded in limiting the presidency to two terms, they limited democracy itself.

"I think our people are to be safely trusted with their own destiny," Sen. Claude Pepper (D-Fla.) argued in 1947. "We do not need to protect the American people with a prohibition against a president whom they do not wish to elect; and if they wanted to elect him, have we the right to deny them the power?"

Again the President was not intended to be directly electable by the People, so there was no limitation on democracy. Instead the limitation lies with the temptation of power. Just look at all the kind of messianic and imperialist displays that were made in 2009 and 2010 not long into Obama’s first term. They treated him as if he was, as Sean Hannity rightly observed, an "anointed one", as if he was the savior of America.

Given all of this, given how trumped up the perspective of Obama was during his first term, early in his first term, how can we trust a man to limit himself with power? On the campaign trail he said he would "fundamentally transform America" while calling for a "civilian national security force" that is "just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the Department of Defense. This is similar to the call for "storm troopers" during FDR’s first term in office.

The only reason Obama was elected to a second term is his opponent was Mitt Romney. We would be insane to hand him a third term in office.

Given that not even the people can be completely trusted with even the legitimate power that rests with the Federal government, let alone the illegitimate power it has seized over the last century and a half, how can we trust one person with the presiding office of the Federal government?

Clearly as FDR showed, we cannot, especially when that person is seeking to maintain power in the middle of a crisis. FDR’s policies only perpetuated the Great Depression and, with it, his hold on the highest executive office in the country. With people initially talking dictatorial powers for him, about him acting under some kind of martial law to stem the chaos as best as possible, and looking at the entirety of FDRs term and what he did, it should be no surprise that not only were the Republicans handed power in 1946, but they used that power to limit the presidency.

While some called it a slap on FDR’s legacy, it was most certainly a reassertion of power by Congress and the States on the president, a reassertion to the executive as to whom he answers.

As such, it is not "time to put that power back where it belongs", because history shows time and again what people do. We don’t act rationally and responsibly when it comes to exercising our voting authority. We devolve into bickering mobs and factions, and such devolution operates on a hair trigger. The very things the Founders warned of in the Federalist Papers can be seen today.

As such, the more safeguard we have on the Federal government, the better. The 22nd Amendment should remain in force. And so long as it takes a full amendment process to accomplish, such will be the case.

Anything less diminishes our leaders and ourselves.

Except President Obama is not our leader. He is the presiding officer of the Federal government and the commander-in-chief of the military. He is not to lead us at all. Instead he answers to us. He answers to the Senate and the House of Representatives. He answers to the Federal judiciary.

And it’s about time he remembers and acknowledges that.

Children/Health/Health care/Law/Vaccines

Codifying child care

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

When you send your kids to a public school or private school, you have to abide by the rules of the game. It’s as plain as that. Public schools are owned and operated by the local or state government. As such, the government sets rules about attendance and those who attend.

An obvious example of this is the vaccination schedule. For decades, public schools have required that students be vaccinated in accordance with a recommended schedule codified in their regulations. For the most part these schedules follow the CDC recommendations. If you do not keep your child’s vaccines up to date, you will be notified of the noncompliance. If you refuse to bring your child’s vaccinations back into compliance, your child will be removed from the school, and other repercussions could arise as well.

It is very well known, very well documented what happens when vaccination coverage lapses. Varicella (chicken pox) outbreaks were once routinely accepted as a part of school attendance when I was growing up. Today they’re exceedingly rare thanks to a varicella vaccine and almost 20 years of active vaccination.

Measles outbreaks also used to be a frequent occurrence when my parents were young and my grandparents were growing up. Thanks to the measles vaccine developed and propagated in the late 1950s and early 1960s, measles is very rare in the United States. And the same can be said with numerous other diseases, including polio of which the most famous victim is arguably President Franklin Roosevelt.

One thing that a lot of parents forget is that when a child is attending school, that school becomes responsible for the child’s welfare. As such laws, rules and regulations have been stipulated as part of that attendance. Vaccines are one part of it, but some States even stipulate that a child must also receive routine medical and dental exams as well.

A lot of this, I feel, arises from a "cover your ass" perspective in which rules and regulations arise as a means of preventing lawsuits, which can be extremely costly to a school district, especially if they lose. This is despite the fact parents may often be required to sign releases of liability when enrolling their children into the public school system or at a private school.

Now the question being asked on this is whether this is all somehow a violation of a parent’s rights.

That question is mostly being asked by a lot of "liberty-minded" conservatives who see this as somehow being a violation of their parental rights. These individuals also tend to be hardcore pro-life, which is the position wherein a woman’s rights take a back seat when she’s pregnant. And then when she gives birth, suddenly she has full dominion over the child. They declare the unborn child to be fully-human with all the rights and privileges of the born, then promptly forget that or set it aside once the child is born.

The proper question on this situation must come from two other sides: the school, whether public or private is immaterial, and the student, a minor who is wholly dependent upon his or her parents/guardians for his or her livelihood. As such, what is the role and responsibility of a school when it comes to their students, and to what is a child entitled from his or her parents under the dependency to which they are all subject while minors?

In examining the questions within the proper scope, you will notice one thing is missing: parent’s don’t actually have "rights". Instead they have only responsibilities and duties to their children. They have some discretion in making decisions over how to care for their children, such as in determining meals and clothing styles, but only to the extent that it does not come into conflict with their duty to provide an adequate level of care for their children.

An adequate level of care is typically defined as ensuring the child is not starving – starving being defined as chronically hungry, not the acute hunger we’ve all experienced in our lives – and is otherwise in good health and has adequate and appropriate clothing for the given weather and circumstances. In any area of this where a parent may fall short due to inadequate income or circumstances, help is available through government agencies and various charities.

One thing that has a lot of parents upset over this whole thing is the existence of regulations and rules for school attendance that basically forces it upon parents, despite the fact that in many States these rules and regulations have existed for years.

It is no secret that most adults would rather avoid the dentist and doctor, likely until necessary. I’ll admit that I’m like that. And even then we probably procrastinate. It would not surprise me if most adults do not have a regular physician or a regular dentist, and do not get regular health exams as a result. Now while it is debatable whether getting an annual medical exam is cost-effective, especially if you’re young and healthy, having one every couple years has its benefits – it’s one of the reasons the Affordable Care Act requires this to be covered by insurance with no out-of-pocket expense.

Dental exams, however, are a bit different. Bi-annual exams are beneficial and cost-effective – and something I’ve been putting off for a long time, as the last time I saw a dentist was when a wisdom tooth exploded when I brushed it a little too hard, as that’s how badly it had decayed.

So why are routine dental and medical exams being required in some States in the same fashion as vaccines? Let’s look at yet another angle to see why such ideas are actually justified.

I have two cats, and as a pet owner I have certain duties under the law. The law recognizes in part that these two cats are autonomous with certain rights that are derived from their dependency on me for their care and livelihood. Like parents are required to get their children vaccinated to attend school, I’m required by law to have my pets vaccinated against, at the least, rabies. My veterinarian recommends other vaccines as well, which I do get, to ensure adequate protection, while kennels may require other vaccines as well to squelch the possibility of an outbreak. The veterinary clinic that cared for my two while we were living in West Des Moines required a particular vaccine (I want to say feline leukemia) to house a cat in their kennel, and I’ve always presumed the requirement came in response to an outbreak.

Along with this, I also have the duty to ensure they are not starving. And even though every morning they like to make me think they are, they most certainly are not. I also have to ensure they have adequate clean water and a clean litter box. If I do not provide these things and it becomes noticeable to someone else, the city may seize my cats from me, charge me for any veterinary care necessary to bring them back to health, and then adopt them out.

And I could also be arrested to face charges of animal neglect.

Along this line they have had a health exam every year along with receiving their annual vaccines. Medically speaking, I take care of my cats better than I take care of myself. Both are eight years old, and while one is overweight but otherwise healthy, the other is a textbook example of a healthy feline.

Now though the law codifies various requirements of pet ownership, are these requirements a violation of my liberties as a pet owner? Not really.

If you have an adequate understanding of the dependency relationship and a healthy understanding of the non-aggression principle, you recognize a couple things: 1. like a child to his or her natural parents, my cats did not choose their dependency to me, and 2. because they did not choose it, I actually have a greater responsibility to them to ensure their care and comfort. And if I cannot provide it, I should seek out help to that effect or be willing to give them up to someone who can.

And so the same applies to a parent as to their child.

Codifying a requirement for school attendance that parents take their children in for routine dental exams and periodic medical exams is not a violation of parental "rights" any more than the legal requirements surrounding the care of my pets. Instead what the codifying of that requirement provides is a punishment for dereliction. As I can lose my cats and face arrest, fines and possible imprisonment for neglecting them, so too parents can face the same with regard to their children.

And screaming "parental rights" or something to that effect won’t change that fact.

Those who scream that their parental rights are being violated when these requirements come to light tend to be ones who feel that their personal beliefs come first. They scream when laws or regulations differ from their "beliefs". It all comes down to merely believing that one’s beliefs trump the rights of their children.

Anti-vaccine parents don’t like that children must be vaccinated in accordance to a particular schedule and hold beliefs contrary to two centuries of scientific evidence. Anti-medicine parents eschew modern medicine in favor of homeopathy, naturopathy, chiropractic, or any other kind of care that doesn’t require seeing a physician carrying the letters MD after their name.

And worst still are the parents who eschew all of this in favor of only prayer.

Keep in mind that how you raise your child affects everyone in your community and beyond. Homeschooling your child does not escape you from that reality. Homeschooling your child does not alleviate you from your responsibility to ensure your child is healthy and remains such, and that includes routine medical and dental exams and vaccinating on time (unless you have a justifiable medical reason for not doing so).

The only thing that homeschooling provides is a larger buffer to discovering any potential neglect.

Again the codified rules that children receive routine dental and medical exams do not violate parental rights, because you do not have a right to be derelict in ensuring your child is healthy. And in actuality, parents don’t really have rights anyway. They have duties and responsibilities, not just to their children, such as in ensuring the child is healthy, but in how they teach their children to interact with the rest of the world.

Marriage and Relationships

Lessons on marriage

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

It seems reasonable to say that most people who talk about marriage do so under a choice-supportive bias, saying all kinds of things in support of marriage and getting married simply because it sounds good, regardless of whether it is actually true. So it’s no surprise that someone would pen an entire article on the matter and perpetuate still longer the cutesy ideas.

About the only thing that Seth Adam Smith gets right about marriage is that it’s not about you. Marriage isn’t really "about" anything. Marriage just is. Why do people feel the need to continually manufacture all kinds of crap to say about marriage? Has no one outgrown all the lovey-dovey fairy tales of marriage that we hear when we’re little and that only get perpetuated when we’re adults?

Seriously, let’s take a step back and just look at things with a clear mind.

In determining whether to propose to his then-girlfriend, Seth had a conversation with his father about whether he’d be making the right decision. How he remembers exactly what his father told him is beyond me, given the paragraph he reproduced, but allegedly his father started with this:

Seth, you’re being totally selfish. So I’m going to make this really simple: marriage isn’t for you. You don’t marry to make yourself happy, you marry to make someone else happy.

While true that you don’t marry to make yourself happy, you don’t marry to make someone else happy either. Isn’t it amazing the kinds of things people say about marriage simply because it sounds good? And the idea that marriage has anything to do with happiness is one that’s been getting tossed around a lot.

Let’s look at reality. Life is full of ups and downs, meetings and partings, being able to fulfill long-held wishes and nearly losing everything. Marriage is just a part of life. You can experience all of this whether you are married or not. And within the years before getting officially married, my wife and I went through all of this. It tested our relationship like nothing.

My wife and I met while in college. She was the roommate of an ex-girlfriend, and we met formally while I was in a relationship with another woman. We would get together after another breakup and be together for a short time before I graduated from college. That turned our relationship long distance until she moved in with me in early 2006, a few months after I proposed to her, as she chose to leave school so she could re-evaluate what she really wanted to do.

The summer of that year, I would take her back to meet my family on the east coast. It was the first time in nearly eight years I’d seen any of my extended family. It would be the only time my wife would meet my grandfather, as he died several weeks later.

The next year my wife and I would take another vacation back to the east coast, but one purely for us. The spring following that vacation, I lost my job, putting us on a financial rollercoaster on an increasingly downward trend until I got my current job approaching five years ago. We’re still digging out of that hole, and we’d probably be out of it by now if we opted for financially castrating ourselves and cutting of any and all luxuries until we were out of debt, but then we would also have been miserable during that time, too.

Thanksgiving in 2010 saw the loss of my wife’s cousin at the age of 23. She was to be one of my wife’s bridesmaids had we kept with our original thoughts of having a more traditional wedding, an idea we would scrap in favor of eloping a little over a week before Christmas in 2011. In July 2010 my wife’s grandfather would pass away in his late 70s a week after I met him for the only time, while he was in the hospital.

Our life together has been a rollercoaster. And people wonder why I take a cynical point of view whenever someone says marriage and happiness in the same sentence. It sounds good to say that marriage is about making someone happy, and that you marry to make someone else happy, as Seth’s father allegedly did.

But it isn’t true.

You don’t marry to make someone else happy. If anything you marry because you already are happy, just like you don’t marry to commit but marry because you already are committed. Once you get married, it’s very difficult to untie that legal bind, which is something you need to consider before you get married. So if you’re married or getting married, or considering proposing to your significant other, ask yourself this: could you go through all of what my wife and I have experienced, and more, go through the trials and tribulations that would come with it, and still want your spouse or significant other to still be standing there with you at the end of it?

Most won’t know the answer to this question until they actually experience what is necessary to answer it.

I know a couple who has been through arguably worse than what my wife and I, and they went through much of it before they got married as well. And my parents have been through significantly worse as well. And in the case of both couples, they’ve so far lived to tell the tales.

Now could you? And more importantly, could your relationship survive such tribulations? This is what you need to consider, and if you haven’t yet, then you need to start putting some serious thought into it.

* * * * *

Seth’s father continued:

More than that, your marriage isn’t for yourself,you’re marrying for a family. Not just for the in-laws and all of that nonsense, but for your future children. Who do you want to help you raise them? Who do you want to influence them? Marriage isn’t for you. It’s not about you. Marriage is about the person you married.

It’s almost as if Seth’s father is justifying to his son why he got married decades after the fact, a kind of choice-supportive bias like I mentioned earlier. That is something I’ve seen numerous, numerous times in articles discussing marriage. It seems to be the grand delusion.

Marriage is about family. Marriage is about children. Marriage is sanctioned and licensed by the State because society wants people to procreate… These all sound great, don’t they? Why do people keep perpetuating such nonsense?

You can get a family without being married. My wife’s family got to know me quite well for the several years before we got officially married. I mourned with them when we were burying the aforementioned 23 year-old woman who died much, much too young. I celebrated with them the following summer when that young woman’s sister married, and again this past summer when that same sister received her PhD.

Sounds a lot like family, right? And my parents considered my wife their daughter-in-law a long while before it was official.

Again, marriage just is. You don’t marry for a family. You don’t marry to make someone else happy. You don’t marry so someone else can make you happy. Because you don’t need marriage for any of that. And to hedge off another common, fallacious argument I’ve seen made countless times, I’ll repeat a notion I said earlier: you don’t marry for commitment either, but because you already are committed.

Marriage is more individual than anything else. Why paint it with a wide brush? Why speak of something that is unique to every couple as if every occurrence of it is the same?

About the only thing that is universal across every marriage is the continuance of mutual gain.

Marriage should be a win-win situation. Individuals do things in the hope of gaining something or, at the very least, to avoid losing something. The same is true with marriage. So what do you hope to gain with marriage? And I mean more than just a spouse and a sex partner. I also mean more than the lovey-dovey notions of "I want someone to grow old with" and "I want him/her to be the father/mother of my children". What are you hoping to gain by marrying or being married to your significant other that you cannot get anywhere else, or at least not anywhere else that is convenient and/or desirable?

Your marriage should always be for mutual gain. And not just in the beginning, but throughout. And keeping it about mutual gain requires becoming good at compromise and negotiation. It also requires one other thing that always seems strangely absent in articles discussing marriage, and is also absent in Seth’s article.

What is that one thing? I really hope this doesn’t come as a surprise.

Communication.

* * * * *

It was in that very moment that I knew that Kim was the right person to marry. I realized that I wanted to make her happy; to see her smile every day, to make her laugh every day. I wanted to be a part of her family, and my family wanted her to be a part of ours. And thinking back on all the times I had seen her play with my nieces, I knew that she was the one with whom I wanted to build our own family.

It’s great that you want to make her happy and see her smile every day and make her laugh every day. You don’t need to get married to do that. These sound like great reasons to get married, but they should not be all on which you focus. And if you and I were having a conversation where you were saying these things, I’d be saying right back, "Well that’s all well and good, but why do you want to get married?"

And I have a feeling, given the nature of the article, that I’d be saying that a lot.

Again, marriage is for mutual gain. Virtually every relationship should be for mutual gain to some degree. What are you hoping to gain by marrying your significant other that you cannot gain in any other way or with any other person? It is in the examination of limiting questions such as that where you will talk yourself either into or out of marriage. It is in the examination of such limiting questions that force you to confront the negatives as well as the positives and determine whether you can put up with the negatives.

Because there are negatives. Guaranteed. As much as we try to bullshit ourselves into thinking there aren’t, they’re there. And if you try to tell me there are no negatives to being married, I’ve got to wonder what kind of fantasy occupies our perceptions.

* * * * *

My father’s advice was both shocking and revelatory. It went against the grain of today’s “Walmart philosophy”, which is if it doesn’t make you happy, you can take it back and get a new one.

Not quite, Seth.

Again, a lot of people have very lofty ideas of marriage and how it should be, as opposed to what it actually is. The ideas of "happily ever after", "two kids and a picket fence", and the like still permeate our society, and they’re still fed to little kids from a young age. It’s how the government was able to buy the American people and society on the idea of home ownership and trash our economy at the same time.

Today people still want all of the lofty dreams that come along with the idea of being married. They just don’t want to work for it.

And with life, marriage included, you’re working more to maintain what you’ve gained and accomplished as opposed to conquering new territory. In marriage you’re working to keep it working for mutual gain, knowing at times you will fall short. And when marriage starts getting difficult is when you’ll find out just how much effort you’re willing to expend to maintain what you have. But then you don’t need to be married to experience difficulties as they can arise in any relationship, even a committed, exclusive relationship that just isn’t legally called a marriage.

It goes back to the idea of marriage and happiness. Marriage is not perpetual happiness, but it seems many expect it to be. You will piss off your spouse at times, and your spouse will piss you off at times. It’s how you react that matters. There will also be some rather trying difficulties as well. What will you do when when those difficulties arise? And yes, I do mean when, not if.

* * * * *

No, a true marriage (and true love) is never about you. It’s about the person you love—their wants, their needs, their hopes, and their dreams.

This is only partly true.

In a marriage you need to align your dreams, hopes, wants and needs into a similar path. All of your dreams, hopes, wants and needs still come into play. They have to, otherwise things are going to seem purely one-sided. Again, the marriage should be for mutual gain, and setting aside your wants, needs, hopes and dreams will not accomplish this.

Compromise and negotiation are necessary as well. Both of you must be willing to compromise on things. But more importantly you must also recognize when compromise is not an option. A question to ask is whether your needs are true needs or a combination of true needs and wants you misinterpret as needs? True needs aren’t up for negotiation, while wants and desires are.

Beyond that, you need to keep an eye on whether you’re bending over backwards as opposed to just compromising.

But again, this requires communication.

* * * * *

For many months, my heart had been hardening with a mixture of fear and resentment. Then, after the pressure had built up to where neither of us could stand it, emotions erupted. I was callous. I was selfish.

Fear and resentment? Fear I can understand, given that you’ve been married for only a year and a half according to the article. Society puts a lot of pressure on people to get married, and once they are married, they put more pressure still on them to meet some standard of being a "good husband". Isn’t it odd how we always seem to be chasing compliance with unspoken societal "standards" but always seem to fall short while also always being judged by others on how well we are complying with those "standards"?

And something tells me you’ve questioned whether you’re living up to that standard. Congratulations, that means you’re human. And expectedly this can lead to feelings of fear – if you let it. People will judge you and your marriage in an attempt to make themselves look better in comparison. Just ignore those attempts and live your life.

But, resentment? In a discussion with NBC’s Today, you apparently elaborated on this:

As Smith explained to TODAY.com, he began to struggle as Kim became ever more dedicated to her graduate studies in theater, which led the couple to relocate to Florida. Feeling isolated, Smith said he began to push Kim away.

Looking back, Smith knows his behavior was defensive, but he couldn’t help it when the tension culminated in an argument. Smith had been expecting this "ticking time bomb," anticipating a blowout with Kim mustering just as much anger and frustration as he felt.

Question: how often do you actually communicate with your wife? I mean long, back and forth conversations where you talk about a lot of different things including your own feelings. And how many such conversations have you had since you got married? And before you got married?

Remember how I said that marriage is for mutual gain? About the only way you can keep it that way, along with being able to properly negotiate and compromise, is by regularly communicating.

And by regularly I mean however often is practical.

Given the summarization above, it sounds like there was a communication breakdown. A major communication breakdown.

My wife and I have never had an argument. Even when I was unemployed, losing hope with each passing week about whether I’d be able to find something, and arguably escaping more and more into side work, hobbies and games, we never had an argument. We’ve never had a fight. And that is due to how well my wife and I know each other, and that is due to how often we communicate: whenever practical.

* * * * *

I realized that I had forgotten my dad’s advice. While Kim’s side of the marriage had been to love me, my side of the marriage had become all about me.

If the summarization above is accurate, you didn’t become selfish. Your "side" of the marriage didn’t become all about you – setting aside the fact that even using the word "sides" in describing marriage gives the impression that you see marriage as adversarial, at least subconsciously.

You did, however, react to your feelings of isolation only by making yourself more isolated. Instead of reaching out to your wife to see if you can resolve or at least reconcile what was going on, you chose to do the opposite. Is it no surprise then that your feelings of isolation evolved into fear and resentment, and that the cauldron continued to boil until the brew steaming within erupted into a fight? I’d call it predictable. And you cannot solve a problem until you first acknowledge it, preferably under peaceful circumstances.

You need to be communicating with your wife. Not just talking, as any couple can just talk. You need to communicate. That is the key to determining whether your marriage is viable and remaining so.

And given what you’d been saying in your article and to NBC Today, you cannot have been doing a very good job of communicating. You’re coming up on your second anniversary, so make that a resolution for your third year of marriage, or a resolution for 2014 – to become a better communicator with your wife. But your wife also needs to be a good communicator with you. So make it a mutual resolution.

A solid foundation of trust is what is necessary to keep really any relationship going, marriage or not, and trust requires communication and honesty. Sounds like you’ve been a little deficient on both. But, don’t despair, as most couples are.

In becoming a better and more honest communicator, and with that a better and more honest husband, some things will likely come out that will be offensive and/or angering to one or both of you. The truth at times hurts. But sometimes the pain is necessary to excise the negatives from your relationship.

Life

Black Friday

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

It always amuses me when people complain about black Friday. I’ll admit that I’ve done it, but then I’ve also worked it, along with Christmas Eve and the days in between.

I worked at the K-Mart (store #3447) in Clive, Iowa, from November 1998 to August 1999. On Black Friday 1998 I had to clock in at 5:30am. And when I arrived, there was already a long, long line of people waiting to get in. My brother worked at the nearby Target on the corner of 35th and University in West Des Moines, Iowa, and had a similar report time that morning.

My lucky parents got to sleep in that day.

Interestingly that day we had a computer glitch as well. The “door buster discounts” were supposed to end at 11am, but a computer glitch meant those prices didn’t expire, so the customers kept getting the discounts for, I think, about two hours beyond where they were supposed to. We didn’t inform the customers of the glitch, obviously, so those who got the discount were surprised and pleased while those who did not get the discounts after the glitch was finally repaired didn’t seem to notice it, from my perspective at least.

At the same time, working Black Friday and Christmas Eve (reporting at 6:00am), working mostly late evenings in between (the store was open till midnight for the two weeks preceding Christmas) gave me one hell of a sense of humility. I empathize greatly with those who are being scheduled to work those days. My work in retail allows me to empathize with cashiers in general and gives me an enormous amount of patience with the cashiers at retail outlets.

Because I’ve been there.

So setting that aside for now, I wonder why people, most of whom I’m sure don’t work retail (and probably haven’t at the large big-box stores or a shopping mall), complain about Black Friday while showing up on Black Friday. If you want to end the Black Friday madness, stay home. But the problem is you need to convince everyone else to do the same. The retailers know customers will show up. And they try to give sweeter deals than their competitors to ensure they’ll show up.

At the same time, to ensure their employees show up, the larger outlets likely also provide overtime pay for working those days or something similar – this could be on a location-by-location basis and varies from company to company. They are not required to do so under Federal labor laws. I don’t recall if I received an overtime rate for my time – we’re talking 15 years ago – but I have heard of retailers doing so.

Trust me when I say that the employees don’t really want to be there. Would you want to be stuck behind a cash register on Black Friday while thousands of screaming, annoyed, impatient customers push through your line, berating the cashiers for every little thing, eyeing the register display like a hawk, ready to pounce on any little perceived discrepancy, knowing the discrepancy will cause at least a 2 minute delay in everyone behind that person getting checked out, especially with the discount cutoff time approaching? Of course not.

But if they’re getting an overtime rate, or an even sweeter deal than that, they’ll put up with it while wishing time could go by faster so their next break time will approach sooner. But that’s presuming they even get their full break as most retailers require employees to assist customers on the floor, because saying “I’m on break” or “I’m off my shift” is not an excuse to not help a customer. And helping that customer could lead to being required to help another, and soon half of what should’ve been a half-hour break could be gone, because the up-front supervisor expects that when they send you on a half-hour break, you’re back on your register in a half-hour, regardless of what happens between the moment you leave and the moment you get back.

There’ve been days where my 15-minute breaks were cut down to just 5 minutes due to this, and my half-hour lunch breaks were less than 15 minutes. And on busy days like Black Friday, they’ll be watching your time away like a hawk as well. The only excuse I could make for not getting back to my register when I was supposed to is helping a customer on my way back up to the register.

But then when you’re a cashier during a busy time like Black Friday, time actually does fly by pretty quickly. Your eyes gloss over in the middle of it, but your breaks and the end of the shift come quicker than you realize, even if you’re not able to get out the door when you want because customers will intercept you on the way to clock out, and might even intercept you on the way out the door after you’ve clocked out if they can recognize that you’re an associate. Because, again, saying “I’m on break” or “I’m off my shift” isn’t an excuse to not help a customer.

So to everyone complaining about Black Friday, I propose two options.

1. Shut up about it. All of the complaining isn’t going anywhere. About all you can do to affect the problem is just not show up on Black Friday, but with millions of other customers actually showing up, the retailers have no incentive to change course. Instead knowing what does get the customers showing up, they actually have more incentive to keep going on present course.

2. Work it. That’s right, I said work it. If you are so concerned about the employees who have to work Black Friday instead of spending time with their families, take their place. Apply to work at these retailers for the holiday season so you can take their place behind a register and on the floor during the holiday shopping season.

After all, the holidays are supposed to be about giving and charity, so sacrifice your time and energy so someone else can have theirs.

Unless you’re actually going enter into some kind of major marketing campaign to convince millions of Black Friday shoppers to stay home Thanksgiving night and Black Friday morning, all you’re doing is wasting energy and producing more carbon dioxide by complaining. So expend energy in a productive direction. Either shut up about it, convince millions of holiday shoppers to stay home over Thanksgiving weekend, or apply to work at those retail outlets so others can have their holiday weekend.

And if you’re not willing to do the latter, if you balk at the idea, then, please, just shut up and get back into the checkout line.

Feminism/Law/Sex

Drunk sex

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

Capability to understand. That is "capacity" in a nutshell when it comes to the law regarding contracts, and it applies to sex as well.

With a contract the concern is whether you are capable of understanding the terms of the contract and what you are doing when you agree to the contract.1FindLaw.com. "Will Your Contract Be Enforced Under the Law?" If not the contract is void or voidable. Not understanding the terms of the contract, for instance because you didn’t read it, is not contractual incapacity.

Now what if you enter into a contract while intoxicated?2FindLaw.com. "Will Your Contract Be Enforced Under the Law?"

Courts are usually not very sympathetic to people who claim they were intoxicated when they signed a contract.  Generally a court will only allow the contract to be avoided if the other party to the contract knew about the intoxication and took advantage of the intoxicated person, or if the person was somehow involuntarily intoxicated (e.g. someone spiked the punch).

Every contract has two parties. In this example, we’ll use the typical Alice and Bob names, but we’ll make Bob the guy who had a little much at the bar before signing a sales agreement. If Alice can easily discern or have adequate reason to believe Bob is intoxicated, yet allows Bob to sign the sales agreement anyway, the contract may be voidable. If Bob takes Alice to Court over the contract, he may be able to get the contract nullified.

Alice would actually have some level of responsibility to ensure that Bob is capable of understanding the contract, and being intoxicated can impair that ability, especially given how complex contracts can be. If she doesn’t exercise that responsibility, she may find herself without the contract she wanted. Plus she could take on the reputation of taking advantage of potential clients. Neither would be good for her business.

Now if Bob is unable to hold the pen or a coherent conversation, there’s no doubt that contractual capacity is severely compromised.

But let’s talk sex, sexual consent, and, by extension, rape.

There is a growing segment within feminist culture in the US that can be summarized as "if she has one drink, she cannot consent to sex", or "If they aren’t sober, they can’t consent" (image at right). So one drink makes a person legally incapacitated, legally incapable of consenting to sex. Forget the "one drop rule", apparently now we have the "one drink rule". Or is this also the "one drop rule", as in one drop of a drink and suddenly she loses her capability to consent to sex?

To believe this extreme, one must believe that one drink can strip a person’s capacity under the law. No Court in the United States has ever accepted such a claim, to the best of my knowledge.One beer or one shot of liquor cannot do that and does not do that. I don’t even think there’s a mixed drink capable of getting a person drunk in one go.

If you were to have a beer with a sales representative before signing a purchasing agreement, then try to challenge it under diminished capacity after seeing some details in the agreement that you didn’t like, no Court will side with you.

If you were to have one drink and have sex, then try to claim it was rape because that one drink made you incapable of consenting, no prosecutor would take you seriously. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and even in cases of rape, the burden is still on the accuser. And for the accuser to argue legal incapacitation after only one drink requires that to be a very extraordinary drink, meaning there had better be a blood analysis to go along with the claim.

Now in the earlier example, I said that if Alice allows Bob to sign a contract while Bob is intoxicated, the contract could be voidable if Bob takes Alice to Court over the matter. But that is also because of how complex contracts can be, and the contract itself will come into play in any Court proceeding. A complicated contract signed while one party is clearly intoxicated could be grounds for having the contract voided.

Sex is not that complicated.

Are there people for whom one ordinary drink could be enough for legal incapacitation, even with sex? Sure, but typically those individuals are already legally incapable of consenting to sex on a matter of their age.

In a 90 lb woman, 1/2 oz of actual alcohol (equivalent to 1 standard serving of alcohol) can provide a .05 BAC, enough for mild impairment. To say that is enough to eliminate legal capacity with regard to sexual consent is one hell of a leap. But even two drinks, impaired enough to be legally barred from driving, may still not be enough to constitute legal incapacitation when it comes to sex. Again it comes down to whether she can understand what is going on around her.

Yet women like Rebecca Watson have said3Rebecca Watson, 2012-12-17, "If you have sex w/ someone who is drunk, they are unable to consent & that is rape." (Image capture), to paraphrase, that if she’s drunk and you have sex with her, it’s rape, even if she initiates.

The context of Watson’s incarnation of the idea comes from the show The Big Bang Theory, specifically the episode where Penny shows up at Leonard’s apartment obviously drunk4Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DATlxa7PwWE, berates him for a brief period before taking his hand and walking him to his bedroom, announcing in the process that they’re going to have sex. The question arising from this is whether that is rape, specifically if Leonard is the rapist, and comes down to whether Penny had the capability to consent to sex, despite showing quite clearly that she knew what she was doing, even if she may have regretted it in the morning.

The problem with declaring all drunk sex as "rape" is the varying levels of intoxication under the "drunk" banner, from the legal BAC levels recognized for driving (.08% is the typical rule in the US) to the levels needed for alcohol poisoning. One needs to be a little more specific on at what point alcohol does eliminate one’s capacity to consent to sex. Sobriety is a sliding scale and dependent on the level of alcohol consumption and the individual. But there are some clear indicators.

For example, if a person’s motor and/or speech functions have become impaired by their alcohol intake (having difficulty standing or walking upright, slurred speech), along with presenting an obvious inability to control one’s urination and/or defaecation, then any consent to sex or attempt to initiate sex should not be considered to have genuine consent behind it – setting aside for the moment why one would even want to have sex with such a person.

In Watson’s cited example with Penny and Leonard, Penny was not impaired to such a degree. She was drunk, but not to such a degree she could not speak coherently and presented only a slight degradation in her motor skills, though she was beyond the point of being able to legally drive.

So if she is intoxicated but otherwise functional, is she still capable of consenting to sex? That is something that would need to be evaluated on a case by case, person by person basis, but in general, I would say yes, she is still capable of giving genuine consent. Now if the alcohol caused the woman to go from emphatically not wanting to have sex with a guy to fawning all over him, then the authenticity of her consent should certainly be called into question.

However, in no instance is it presumed that one drink eliminates a woman’s capacity to consent to sex. And a woman who is intoxicated can still give genuine consent to sex, but whether a particular intoxicated woman in a specific instance is actually giving genuine consent is something that is to be evaluated on a case by case, person by person basis, and any blanket statements should be dismissed outright.

References[+]

Pledge of Allegiance

Getting them young

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

Let’s ask an honest question: does a typical 4 year-old understand what a pledge means? Does a 4 year-old understand allegiance, indivisibility, liberty and justice? I’m pretty sure no 4 year-old understands the concept of a republic, let alone the other concepts just mentioned.

So why are preschools teaching 4 year-olds the pledge of allegiance?

When a 4 year-old recites the pledge of allegiance, are they merely reciting words or do they actually understand the words they are saying? I highly, highly doubt it’s the latter. And if you were to ask a 4 year-old why they are reciting the pledge, they’d likely respond with whatever their teacher told them to say.

Good God, the indoctrination runs deep in this country. Do we no longer have any freedom of thought? Seriously, is no one allowed to think on their own?

And yet parents feel pride in the recited indoctrination of their children. Seeing a video tonight of one such 4 year-old reciting the pledge, I could only feel lividity and disgust.

What have we become?

Life/Politics/Taxes

3 tax breaks to think about

Posted on by Kenneth Ballard / 0 Comment

A lot of people focus a lot of time and effort on giving as little money as possible to the Federal government. I can understand why, but much of this time and effort appears to be expended on things with very little gain for the average individual. Now that we’re in November, chances are you’re in an open-enrollment period for your company benefits. MarketWatch recently delved into three options that may be available that may reduce your tax burden, but without discussing the drawbacks.

It seems one thing that people often forget to discuss is that everything in life is a tradeoff on something else. Buying something means taking on more debt or having less money. The same with taxes. Taxes are always going to be a financial catch-22, because reducing your tax burden almost always requires you taking on a major expense or reducing your take-home pay – i.e. the only realistic and legal means of reducing your tax burden involves you giving up money.

With that, let’s get into MarketWatch’s three options.

Health care flexible spending account (FSA)

Under the law you can set aside up to $2,500 of your pre-tax salary or wage into a designated tax-free account to be used for certain health care expenses, such as deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses. This reduction means you also reduce your tax burden to the Federal government.

Here’s the catch: what you don’t spend you lose. So to avoid really losing out on this deal, you’d better be pretty good at approximating what you’ll be spending, unless your employer allows for a rollover of whatever is left or a grace period that extends into the new year, both which should still be accounted.

Where the FSA really shines is for the routine out-of-pocket expenses that you can reasonably expect. As an example, my wife goes to the eye doctor every year and wears contacts. The out of pocket expenses and cost of her contacts could be covered through an FSA. Instead I opted to bring her under a better vision plan that’ll reduce our out-of-pocket expenses without a significant reduction in my paycheck – i.e. she’s on the vision plan I get through work.

In short, her next vision appointment will have a reduced out-of-pocket expense attached to it without having to take a reduced income to offset it.

So the health care FSA is better than merely having an account into which you periodically put money to save up for known upcoming expenses because of the tax exempt status. Now only if they’d have something similar for veterinary expenses.

Dependent care flexible spending account

The only drawback of this option is just the "use it or lose it rule". But otherwise, this one seems to be virtually all gain if you have kids and pay for child care. You reduce your tax burden without increasing your out-of-pocket expenses, right?

Well, technically, you don’t increase your out-of-pocket expenses, but you may not be decreasing them either. Most dependent care FSAs requires you to seek reimbursement for what you spend. This basically means that you’re still using after-tax dollars to pay for care, then seeking reimbursement for what you’ve already spent out of your pre-tax dollars. The alternative to the dependent care FSA is the dependent care tax credit.

Many health care FSAs provide a card similar to a debit card that allows you to spend your health care FSA money when you need to without having to seek reimbursement later. So far such an option for dependent care FSAs is not wide spread, and may not even be an accepted form of payment. For example if you hire your neighbor to watch your under 13 child while you and your spouse go out for the night, you may not be able to pay him or her with your FSA debit card and will likely, instead, have to pay with cash or a check and seek reimbursement.

That’s provided you have enough in your FSA at the time you file for reimbursement to be reimbursed. Most dependent care FSAs are not "front loaded", meaning, like a bank account, you can only receive as much as is currently sitting in your FSA and no more. Many health care FSAs are "front loaded", meaning you can spend as much as you need when you need it, so long as you don’t go over your annual allotment.

Transportation expenses

Apparently there are flexible spending accounts for transportation expenses. Interesting. But it only covers expenses related to public transportation, van pooling, and public parking. Damn.

So if I worked in downtown Kansas City and had to park at a parking garage, then I could set aside pre-tax dollars to cover those expenses. Wait, no. I’d have to pay cash or with a credit card at the garage exit, then seek reimbursement later. So if you drive yourself to work, you’re out of luck on this option unless you routinely park in a parking garage where you are charged for parking, but even then, unless you’re given a debit card for this, you still pay out of pocket and then seek reimbursement later.

Now you could switch to taking public transportation, but chances are that’s going to be something extremely inconvenient to you. I’ll use myself as an example. Currently it takes me about a half hour to get to work and to get home, about an hour out of my day. Mapping the same route through Google Maps to take the bus will take two hours each way, an additional three hours out of my day lost while I sit on the bus. No thanks.

If you’re already taking public transportation to get to and from work, then take advantage of this, but read your benefits package first to find out what is involved. Because what could be involved is a $130 maximum reduction each month in your gross pay, meaning a reduction in what you take home, while still paying the same price for public transportation (or more if fares have gone up), and having to live on less money until you seek reimbursement and are reimbursed for your transportation expenses. And if you’re already strapped for cash, it may be too costly to take advantage of this option depending on how long it takes to be reimbursed, with the reimbursements basically covering the next cycle of transportation costs.

The secret to reducing your tax burden: less money

The common denominator to these programs should be obvious: they reduce your income. Paying less in income taxes almost always requires you to reduce your take-home pay. Whether it is through 401(k) deductions, deductions for flexible spending accounts, or the like, they all require you to reduce your take-home pay. And that’s all pre-tax stuff. Even the after-tax allowable deductions require expenditures to go along with them.

So reducing your tax burden requires expending cash in certain directions or taking on payroll deductions that reduce your take-home pay. How many people actually actively realize this?

Reimbursement accounts – i.e. the FSA options that do not provide for a debit card – also still require you to spend out of pocket up front. This means that you are taking a reduced income without a congruent reduction in expenses, meaning your discretionary income is less until you get reimbursed, and how long that takes will depend on the benefits provider, and it’s additional time out of your day along with additional record keeping for the benefits provider. Now if you’re transitioning to a dependent care FSA where previously you took advantage of the dependent care tax credit, you should already have been doing some meticulous record keeping anyway, as you’d be needing it in case of an audit.

So in the end, rather than looking at these "tax breaks" and thinking you’re reducing your tax burden, you might be taking on even more. A reduced income, overhead and bureaucracy to take advantage of the option, no congruent reduction in out-of-pocket expenses. What are the gains and what are the trade-offs?

Do the math to determine how affordable it will be and what the best option will be. And this starts with knowing what the benefits plan provides and how to take advantage of it.