That’s a lot of trust in a system you admit to having “poor inspectors.” Can there also be poor microbiology techs? Is it possible for them to make mistakes?
Scientists don’t come up with the regulations, they come up with the proposal. Politicians come up with the regulations based on the recommendations of the scientists. Right now the “best available knowledge and evidence” says the war on drugs failed, speed limits cause more problems than they’re worth, and that same sex marriage won’t cause the world to explode.
Why then is there a spate of shitty regulations not based on the “best available knowledge and evidence?”
My point exactly. So why do you put some much trust in the results? As you’ve shown uninspected restaurants are dangerous, so there are regulations to have them inspected. But the regulators are “poor” and underfunded, so why would you assume restaurants are safe?
I’m sure you’ve been out to eat before, have you ever bothered to check to see if they have an up to date license? It has to be posted, but it seems you’re too busy to go look. A place without a license doesn’t get inspected. Have you ever bothered to check if they’ve even been inspected? Why would you make the assumption that it’s safe because of regulations?
The province of Nova Scotia started posting them online, do you think any checks before going to eat?
http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2008/10/28/health-reports-ns.html?ref=rss
I didn’t say that. But we admit it’s not 100%, so how efficient is it? What percentage is acceptable?
Now, it seems that people here are saying libertarian is 0%, but it’s not and I have no idea what level of efficiency either system has. So how are we supposed to compare?
I’m happily including the middle. It’s the thesis of this pit thread that excludes the middle.
And now you’re the one excluding the middle.
Wow, **emack **is still standing bravely alone, kicking ass of all and sundry, with his scathing wit, brilliant insight, and faultless logic!
Me? Tequila and bongwater, why do you ask?
What you’re not willing to admit much less recognize is that the same regulatory power that keep bosses from firing gays can also be used to keep gays from marrying. I could go on with a nice long list of regulations and government interference that you don’t like but what would be the point?
One question for you though: I presume that when driving in a state that requires seat belt use you’d comply. But if you drove across state lines to where it wasn’t required, would you unbuckle it?
Make sure you stock up, I wouldn’t want you to run out and be prohibited from purchasing more on Sunday. And if you ask me, bongwater is a lot more useful when you’re allowed to purchase premium BC bud instead of crappy American tobacco.
Although, based on your participation in the carbon blobs thread you probably consider the water just as important as the weed.
$10 per meal for restaurant inspection. 
:smack:
Some of us think the stupid trillion-dollar adventures in Central Asia, the Bailouts for corrupt Wall St., interest on the $14 trillion debt, tax cuts for the super-rich, the Medicare gift to Big Pharma, and, yes, demographic trends regarding programs for the elderly might be major sources for government deficits.
You, instead, seem to think that inspection of bridges and restaurants is why government is going in debt. And you want us to believe you are not stupid and deceived?
Those losing a debate love to distract with irrelevancies.
When I learned English, “man” in many usages (incl. “common man”) meant “human whatever gender.”
Is this a difference between American English and Canadian English?
Am I out-of-date on modern English usage?
Or is this just emacknight throwing out irrelevant bullshit as usual, and then changing the subject when his bullshit is challenged?
Cite? I can’t recall anyone of my “ilk” disparaging private employees (at any but the very highest levels where Greed is God). Your ilk loves to indulge a fantasy that government employees are all too unqualified to find work in the private sector.
I think this is just more irrelevant bullshit for distraction’s sake; if not, start a different thread.
But for the sake of argument, I’ll play along and pretend that you think (or pretend to think) that the point is topical. If so, and taxation implies the right to vote, then I suppose the untaxed poor should not vote? And those who are taxed at ten times the average should have ten times the average vote? No, I’m not not being facetious; this seems in accord with the Money is Everything and Greed is God philosophy you are so proud to espouse.
I read SDMB for information, and it takes a while for the personalities of individual Dopers to register. By now I’ve learned that Sam Stone probably knows quite a bit about economics but won’t condescend to join in this debate until we’ve taken his class for which watching videos of Lord Milton is a prerequisite. :smack: Frankly, I lost interest in Mr. Stone’s posts when he exaggerated a key figure by some hundreds of billions of dollars and accused me of “nitpicking” about “chump change” when I called him on it.
Very early in my SDMB adventures I noticed some intelligent-seeming posts from emacknight and was confused by a few that seemed to be obvious parody whooshes but lacked any smiley-face. Since he now admits his wife has more rational views than his, I’m guessing she posts sometimes using his account.
I think we learned what we needed to know about emacknight’s intellectual credentials when he led a long thread on “Resolved: capital at risk is capital that is at risk” and seemed to actually believe the question had synthetic content.
So what you’re saying is that you can’t address any of the points I made? But instead took time to pick and choose to find sentences that weren’t 100% on topic. That’s some good debating you got going on there.
I didn’t mention the debt or deficit once, unless you can show that I did. I asked you a question, and you dodge it. Here it is again:
How much are you personally willing to pay for restaurant health inspections? … If you had a choice of paying more to go to the inspected restaurant, or saving $10 by going to one that was uninspected, which do you think you’d choose?
Let’s see if you can come up with an answer that doesn’t involve attacking me personally or changing the subject.
What I am going to do (and you’re entitled to call it “dodging the question” if that tickles your fancy) is to assign you a homework problem.
Using Google determine how much is spent in the U.S.A. on government restaurant inspections, and how many meals are sold. Perform division. Report the result. Tell us whether your $10 was anything but the stupidest estimate ever posted in any SDMB thread ever.
On the other hand, if you think totally counterfactual questions like that have value, I’ll think of some for you.
Convicted felon, too?
Convicted? Don’t be silly, with his mad argument ninja skills, the jury would convict the judge and the prosecutor, and carry him out on their shoulders! I’m just glad he’s Canadian, if he were here, his genius would vault libertarianism into the double digits. Luckily for us, Canadians are too retarded to be susceptible to his brilliant rhetorical devices!
I was almost killed this morning. I stopped at a red light, waited for it to turn green, then proceeded into the intersection. A guy to my right either didn’t see the intersection, tried to run the yellow, or just didn’t care. He blew through the intersection missing me by inches.
In India, I saw few if any traffic lights, and even fewer stop signs. Sounds like it would be chaos leading to deaths, but oddly enough it works. Why? No one trusts intersections, before entering they take it upon themselves to make sure it’s safe. In areas of higher traffic volume they’ll use cops during rush hour.
We, as a society, recognize that traffic intersections are dangerous so we ask the government to regulate them for our protection. We license the drivers, then put up traffic lights, then fine people that fail to obey. Great, now we spend less of our busy lives checking intersections before entering.
Seems like a good plan, but the result is that people develop an undeserved trust. They think that having a red means other people will stop. So when they have a green they happily enter the intersection, confident in the regulatory process that keeps other cars out of their way.
But how safe are our intersections?
Eventually it got bad enough that many cities took action in the form of red light cameras*. Unfortunately these worked a little too well, because they caught people and forced them to pay.
Did people pay? Hell no, they fought them in court eventually finding that they were unconstitutional. So much for regulating intersections. We could easily stop people from exceeding the regulated speed limit, but why don’t we?
This is exactly my point. You have no idea what regulations cost and you can’t even be bothered to look it up. You think that the cost is government spending/meals sold, but you are so unbelievably wrong. You’re pitting libertarians for not understanding the implications, but you’re doing the same thing!
Regulations cost money, and if they are important to you then you should be willing to pay for them, right? So how much are restaurant inspections worth to you?
How much do you suppose that website cost to build and maintain? Think anyone uses it?
*Many people will point out that the cameras were a huge money maker, which goes to show how many people were running red lights.
My question still stands for anyone willing to answer: If you had a choice between going to an unlicensed/uninspected restaurant, or paying more for the licensed/inspected version, which would you choose?
If you want an even better example of libertarian utopia look at Craig’s List. Why on earth would anyone trust a posting on Craig’s List? Who the hell would show up in a dark neighbourhood, with a wad of cash in their pocket, to meet a stranger from the internet? Or better yet, why would you invite the to your home?
Private company reporting on the cleanliness of kitchens. Think anyone cares?
http://www.brooklyneagle.com/categories/category.php?category_id=4&id=43237
A former health inspector for the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Emile Nekhala, has been sentenced to two years in prison for accepting cash bribes in return for overlooking or reducing health violations in publicly funded day care centers in Brooklyn and Staten Island.
*Health Inspection Bribe Report Prompts Hotline
The county Board of Supervisors created a hotline Tuesday for restaurant owners to report improprieties by health inspectors.
The decision was made a day after a county health inspector was arrested over an allegation that he took a bribe from a restaurant owner in exchange for an “A” grade during an inspection.*
If you can’t trust the regulators, who can you trust?
I understand your point about traffic in India but (without bothering to Google) I am morally certain that the accident rate, measured comparably, is higher in India than in U.S.A. Would you like to bet real money? Google and prove me wrong? Or just snark that the people in this thread are too lazy to do your Googling for you.
Similarly, I do not know whether restaurant inspections have an average cost above or below 3 cents per meal. That you seem to think $10 might be a sane guess speaks very poorly of your common sense.
Now if we indulge your strange whim and pretend that in the real world I had the choice of a $6 meal or $16 meal with the only difference being inspection, I’d have a bit of a quandary! I’d see what the people whose judgment I respected were doing. I’d look the restaurants over. I’d try to understand why the price difference was so high. But most importantly I’d wonder why an impudent Doper could imagine such an inane hypothetical to be an interesting thought experiment.
hth
Here is the best of them
http://www.amny.com/urbanite-1.812039/city-steps-up-efforts-to-thwart-restaurant-inspection-bribes-1.2913503
The report is about how the city is increasing efforts to combat corruption in the health inspection process.
“In the November arrest, the manager of the East Manor Buffet in Elmhurst allegedly tried to give an undercover investigator posing as an inspector a $500 “gift.” This was after the restaurant was found to have insects crawling in the bakery section.”
Inspections happen roughly every six months, meaning that for 6 months people ate food from an infested bakery. And that assumes the manager didn’t successfully bribe the previous inspector.
And your point is that permanent infestation would be preferred to 6 months’ infestation? :dubious:
And BTW, bribery is the logical result of Greed is God thinking. Do you think bribes don’t exist in private-to-private deals? (I’ve seen such with my own eyes.)
Of course it’s higher:
India has 16.8 per 1000 population.
And from what I saw there was next to no regulation at all. You could build a truck from a water pump, overload it with hay, and drive anywhere you felt like (pics). A scooter is considered a family vehicle (pics). You should see the streets there, they have no lines, just made up lanes. The right right is for people walking, then people pulling carts, then animals pulling carts, then elephants, then rickshas (both powered and cycled), then you get cars, buses and trucks.
So let’s say that India represents 0 regulation, and has 16.8 fatalities per 1000 population. Where would you put the US on such a scale? This is a lot easier if you’ve ever lived in or visited another country. Just pick a number between 0 and 100 where 100 represents the highest possible regulation (government inspector in your car, a regulator on the throttle, etc. )
Now, what would you pick as the fatality rate in the US, given the amount of regulations we have?
United States of America 12.3
Seeing the two numbers, how effective are our regulations? Noting that if we got rid of them India represents the upper number, which just 16.8. Wanna know what it is in Bangladesh? 12.6
Uh, no, I didn’t think that. I asked if presented with the choice would you be willing to pay more for the inspected restaurant.
Because you just showed that you’d take personal responsibility before risking your health. Right now you blindly walk in, sit down, and eat what ever they serve you, completely unaware that the bakery if full of insects.
No, that’s the excluded middle I told you about earlier. My point is that with regulations you aren’t as safe as you think you are. Both with and without regulations there are insects in the bakery. But without the insects you have an incentive to go look.
Without regulations India’s traffic fatality rate is 16.8, with regulations the US can’t get it below 12. There are actually limits to how bad things can get without regulations, especially when people have their own self preservation in mind. Adding regulations reduces that incentive and makes act people less safe.
Seriously, who would let their kids wander the streets asking strangers for candie???
EXACTLY. Holy fuck that too you a long time to arrive at. Bribery is the logical result, it is unavoidable. So knowing this how are we supposed to trust the regulatory process? Add another layer of inspectors to inspect the health inspectors? Who is going to watch them?
And the more money at stake the more likely the bribe.
Actually, no, not really. In places (like Mexico, with la mordida, the “little bite”) where minor bribery for minor government services is considered the norm, you would be hard pressed to state with any authority that the likelihood of bribery increases with the value of the transaction. I only bring this up in the slim chance that you don’t already know that you’re talking out of your ass.
Still, I wouldn’t want this to interfere with your fact-free, improvisational style of argument. Rather refreshing in its shamelessness.