The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

[NghtRppr]

Article 4.

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 25.

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

What do you call being forced to provide a standard of living adequate for blah, blah, blah? Slavery. Servitude.

While were at it though, I'd like to declare that cable TV (with HBO) and free beer are also rights. ME, ME, ME!!! MINE, MINE, MINE!!! WAHHHH!!!

[The Script]

Where did this declaration originate from? The UN?

[NghtRppr]

Where did this declaration originate from? The UN?

Yes.

Source: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/

[Hawker]

Article 4.

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 25.

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

What do you call being forced to provide a standard of living adequate for blah, blah, blah? Slavery. Servitude.

While were at it though, I'd like to declare that cable TV (with HBO) and free beer are also rights. ME, ME, ME!!! MINE, MINE, MINE!!! WAHHHH!!!

What do you call it when 1 guy comes along and insists everyone else give up their medical research, food safety and consumer brands?  Dictatorship.  And thats you!  No thanks.

[cryptobard]

There are no such things as "rights."

Discuss?

How can arguments be re-formulated without these quasi-metaphysical abstractions? Would such arguments be stronger?

Genuinely curious.

[NghtRppr]

What do you call it when 1 guy comes along and insists everyone else give up their medical research, food safety and consumer brands?

So you're saying that I want to outlaw medical research, food safety and consumer brands?

[Hawker]

What do you call it when 1 guy comes along and insists everyone else give up their medical research, food safety and consumer brands?

So you're saying that I want to outlaw medical research, food safety and consumer brands?

You want to remove the legal protection for the investment in medical research and consumer brands.  And you want to remove the legal authority of a food inspector to close down a food establishment.  I'm not sure "outlaw" is the right word though.  More like "abolish."

[AyeYo]

There are no such things as "rights."

/thread

You get what you defend, end of story.



And since when did moron2cash become Atlas?  He's now adopted the thread crapping post style, leaving these idiotic, increasingly angry and nutty threads all over the board.

[NghtRppr]

You want to remove the legal protection for the investment in medical research and consumer brands.

Medical research will always exist through charity. American citizens donated around $295 billion dollars to charity in 2006. People want to help each other and themselves. That's why we have those laws in the first place. It can exist in a free market.

Brand names can exist in a limited form. Fraud will always be illegal.

And you want to remove the legal authority of a food inspector to close down a food establishment.

Again, unless the establishment is committing fraud there's no issue. Most people won't jump out of a plane without a parachute. The ones that do, have that right. Most people won't eat food unless it's been inspected by some credible inspection company. The ones that do, have that right.

So, it's not the case that I want to abolish anything. That's your spin on it. I simply want it to be voluntary. Why is that wrong?

[Shortline]

There are no such things as "rights."

/thread

You get what you defend, end of story.



And since when did moron2cash become Atlas?  He's now adopted the thread crapping post style, leaving these idiotic, increasingly angry and nutty threads all over the board.

Just a heads up - use the ignore button, left side of screen under the username. It is the only effective defense against trolls and angry, shitty people.

[AyeYo]

There are no such things as "rights."

/thread

You get what you defend, end of story.



And since when did moron2cash become Atlas?  He's now adopted the thread crapping post style, leaving these idiotic, increasingly angry and nutty threads all over the board.

Just a heads up - use the ignore button, left side of screen under the username. It is the only effective defense against trolls and angry, shitty people.

But then the board would lose all it's fun.  This place is great for using a bunch of angry, misinformed teenagers as intellectual punching bags.

[Hawker]

You want to remove the legal protection for the investment in medical research and consumer brands.

Medical research will always exist through charity. American citizens donated around $295 billion dollars to charity in 2006. People want to help each other and themselves. That's why we have those laws in the first place. It can exist in a free market.

Brand names can exist in a limited form. Fraud will always be illegal.

And you want to remove the legal authority of a food inspector to close down a food establishment.

Again, unless the establishment is committing fraud there's no issue. Most people won't jump out of a plane without a parachute. The ones that do, have that right. Most people won't eat food unless it's been inspected by some credible inspection company. The ones that do, have that right.

So, it's not the case that I want to abolish anything. That's your spin on it. I simply want it to be voluntary. Why is that wrong?

You want us to take a tried and successful research system using patents and replace it with a hope that charity will step up and save us?  Really?  Charity would have created the x64 computer chip, the ARM that drives an iPhone and Viagra?  Given that we like these things and that we use patents to make sure we are supplied with a stream of such goodies, the benefits of restricting your liberty to make a copy of someone else's work are great. 

Brand names require trademarks.  If anyone can open a restaurant called Pizza Hut or McDonalds with the logos of companies that advertise to create Pizza Hut and McDonalds, then there will be no return on the advertising and thus no brand.  Thats a lot of good stuff we will miss out on - from Intel chips to Wendy burgers.  If the idea is that we are to be restricted from having trademarks because it will improve our lives, I don't see it.

Most people know nothing about food inspection and should not need to.  If there is a free market in inspections, there will be good and bad inspection companies and sadly a lot of people will die for no good reason.  Dying of salmonella is not a great way to advance freedom.

Your ideas are interesting but your ideology will take the good stuff we already have away. 

[NghtRppr]

You want us to take a tried and successful research system using patents and replace it with a hope that charity will step up and save us?

Slavery was tried and successful. It was also immoral.

Charity would have created the x64 computer chip, the ARM that drives an iPhone and Viagra?

Yes.

If anyone can open a restaurant called Pizza Hut or McDonalds with the logos of companies that advertise to create Pizza Hut and McDonalds, then there will be no return on the advertising and thus no brand.

They wouldn't call it "Pizza Hut". It would be "Pizza Hut*" and the asterisk would specify exactly who's Pizza Hut the advertisement was referring to. It would be impossible to freeride on someone else's reputation without committing fraud. Just like I can't say a product is endorsed by you personally when it's not.

Most people know nothing about food inspection and should not need to.

Most people know little about how the Internet works, how TV's work, how cars work, etc. The manage just fine.

If there is a free market in inspections, there will be good and bad inspection companies and sadly a lot of people will die for no good reason.

People don't ever get sick from foodborne illness already? Let's see what the CDC has to say.

CDC estimates that each year roughly 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.

Oh wow, only 1 in 6? That's a stellar track record.

The problem is, government food inspectors don't lose money and go out of business when they make mistakes. If a private company promises that food is safe and it isn't, people stop trusting it and they go out of business. The companies left are necessarily doing a better job. Market forces weed out incompetence. Government agencies don't.

[Hawker]

Our posts are getting too long so lets stick to one topic per post

You think that charity will provide all the consumer goodies we want?  Really, I can't see myself going door to door asking people to chip in so I can have an iPhone.  I can't see myself wanting to either when there is a perfectly reliable way to get them - the patent system.  Charity is there to cope with the normal vicissitudes of life - there is no way it can be expected to provide consumer goods and  industrial research as well.

We exist as a society and our rules are chosen in order to make the life better.  The patent laws which impose time limited restrictions on the copying of designed goods, are examples of such rules; I think you will find that for the overwhelming majority of people the trade-off is worth it. 

And please don't reply that its slavery if you can't copy someone else's design. Life is very good in Western societies - even our poor have access to luxury items like reliable cars, games consoles, the Internet, superb medical care and the like.  Here we are discussing how to improve things - not how to go back to the 1800s.

[onesalt]

You want us to take a tried and successful research system using patents and replace it with a hope that charity will step up and save us?

Slavery was tried and successful. It was also immoral.

Charity would have created the x64 computer chip, the ARM that drives an iPhone and Viagra?

Yes.

If anyone can open a restaurant called Pizza Hut or McDonalds with the logos of companies that advertise to create Pizza Hut and McDonalds, then there will be no return on the advertising and thus no brand.

They wouldn't call it "Pizza Hut". It would be "Pizza Hut*" and the asterisk would specify exactly who's Pizza Hut the advertisement was referring to. It would be impossible to freeride on someone else's reputation without committing fraud. Just like I can't say a product is endorsed by you personally when it's not.

Most people know nothing about food inspection and should not need to.

Most people know little about how the Internet works, how TV's work, how cars work, etc. The manage just fine.

If there is a free market in inspections, there will be good and bad inspection companies and sadly a lot of people will die for no good reason.

People don't ever get sick from foodborne illness already? Let's see what the CDC has to say.

CDC estimates that each year roughly 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.

Oh wow, only 1 in 6? That's a stellar track record.

The problem is, government food inspectors don't lose money and go out of business when they make mistakes. If a private company promises that food is safe and it isn't, people stop trusting it and they go out of business. The companies left are necessarily doing a better job. Market forces weed out incompetence. Government agencies don't.

[/quote]

No, the CDC and FDA ensure food is safe to eat if it is prepared as per the manufacturers instructions and an hygenic enviroment. As I recall most food poisoning and foodbourne illnesses comes from undercooking food or preparing it in an unhygenic enviroment as opposed to the food itself being contaminated (You can see this for yourself, if canned food was full of bacteria the cans rust and deform due to the bacteria producing acids and gasses). Saying that the CDC and FDA are useless becuase people are too fucking lazy or stupid to ensure chicken is properly cooked, or wiping and cleaning meat juices off their chopping board before preparing a salad is a completely false argument.

[NghtRppr]

No, the CDC and FDA ensure food is safe to eat if it is prepared as per the manufacturers instructions and an hygenic enviroment. As I recall most food poisoning and foodbourne illnesses comes from undercooking food or preparing it in an unhygenic enviroment as opposed to the food itself being contaminated (You can see this for yourself, if canned food was full of bacteria the cans rust and deform due to the bacteria producing acids and gasses). Saying that the CDC and FDA are useless becuase people are too fucking lazy or stupid to ensure chicken is properly cooked, or wiping and cleaning meat juices off their chopping board before preparing a salad is a completely false argument.

I have no way of separating which food-borne illnesses are caused from food prepared at home but here's a sample of cases that were caused by manufacturers.

The FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state officials have traced sources of Salmonella typhimurium contamination to a plant in Blakely, Ga., owned by Peanut Corp. of America, which makes peanut butter and peanut paste made of ground, roasted peanuts.

Those products are distributed to food manufacturers to be used as ingredients in such processed foods as cakes, cookies, crackers, candies, cereal and ice cream. Peanut butter from the plant also is shipped to institutions, including long-term care facilities and cafeterias.

The company has stopped production at the Blakely plant, the FDA said.

Over the weekend, the CDC interviewed 57 people who had become ill, as well as hundreds of healthy people, about what they had eaten, said Dr. Robert Tauxe of the CDC, who joined Sundlof in a telephone conference call with reporters.

Tauxe said information from the interviews led the agency to packaged peanut butter crackers. Additional investigation led to crackers that Kellogg Co. had recalled the day before those interviews took place.

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jan/22/science/sci-peanut22

It's been another tough week for food safety.

Another 30 people nationwide, including one who later died, were infected with the antibiotic-resistant strain of salmonella tied to ground turkey processed and later recalled by food giant Cargill. That brings the total to 107 people infected in this outbreak.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/08/12/139575236/regulators-grapple-with-outbreaks-as-salmonella-e-coli-illnesses-grow?ps=sh_sthdl

I'm not saying their worthless but they clearly aren't doing as good a job as they could be. Perhaps competing companies would have more incentive for this to never happen. As it stands, the FDA and CDC simply say "Aww shucks, we let a few people die. Oh well, business as usual."

[ansible adams]

We already have more than enough data about what happens in the absence of the FDA and its non-American equivalents. It's abundantly clear from pre-20th century history. The absence of government standards and inspection for food and beverages didn't give rise to competing private agencies safeguarding public health but with lower costs and more vigilance. It made fraud so easy and pervasive that some commodities were adulterated more often than not. Even when they weren't committing outright fraud, the absence of regulation made it regular practice for manufacturers to use compounds of arsenic, lead, and mercury as food colorants and additives. It wasn't that nobody knew eating lead was bad for you, or that nobody knew many commercial beverages and foods were tainted. The oldest reference to such problems I can quickly find on Google Books is from 1758, in Elements of the theory and practice of chymistry by Pierre Joseph Macquer and Andrew Reid:

The Salt of Lead hath a saccharine taste, which hath procured it the name also of Sugar of Lead. For this reason when Wine begins to turn sour, the sure way to cure it of that disagreeable taste is to substitute a sweet one which is not disagreeable, to the taste, by mixing therewith Litharge or some such preparation of Lead: for the Acid of the Wine dissolves the Lead, and therewith forms a Sugar of Lead, which remains mixed with the Wine, and hath a taste which, joined with that of the Wine, is not unpleasant. But, as Lead is one of the most dangerous poisons we know, this method ought never to be practised; and whoever ever uses such a pernicious drug deserves to be most severely punished. Yet some thing very like this happens every day, and must needs have very bad consequences...

All the retailers of Wine have a custom of filling their bottles on a counter covered with Lead, having a hole in the middle, into which a Leaden pipe is soldered. The Wine which they spill on the counter, in filling the bottles, runs through this pipe into a Leaden vessel below. In that it usually stands the whole day, or perhaps several days; after which it is taken out of the Leaden vessel, and mixed with other Wine, or put into the bottle of some petty customer. But, alas for the man to whose lot such Wine falls! He must feel the most fatal effects from it; and the danger to which he is exposed is so much the greater, the longer the Wine hath stood in the Leaden vessel, and thereby acquired a more noxious quality. We daily see cruel distempers, among the common people, occasioned by such causes, which are not sufficiently attended to.

In an environment with much less government control, the poor customer got the most poisonous wine. The poor customer also had the least leverage to demand pure food and drink, to contract private analytical services if he suspected the quality of a product, or to get restitution if a product was indeed unsafe.

This and other dangerous and/or fraudulent practices were not greatly curbed in Britain and the US until another ~150 years passed, when governments established and enforced standards for food and beverage purity, safety, and labeling.

[NghtRppr]

It's abundantly clear from pre-20th century history.

That was when information moved a lot slower and the average person knew a lot less.

[Hawker]

It's abundantly clear from pre-20th century history.

That was when information moved a lot slower and the average person knew a lot less.

Most people know little about how the Internet works, how TV's work, how cars work, etc. The manage just fine.

Lots of average people still get phished for credit cards on the Internet every day.  All they lose is a few nights sleep.  But if the same people make the same level of mistakes with food, their kids will die.  And without a food safety regulator, that will happen a lot.

You seem to object people having the right to trade a small freedom, namely the right to sell food in any old way they choose, with a big freedom, namely the right to eat safely anywhere.  Why?  Its a good trade.  Unless you explicitly want to sell unsafe food, you lose nothing.

[NghtRppr]

Lots of average people still get phished for credit cards on the Internet every day.  All they lose is a few nights sleep.  But if the same people make the same level of mistakes with food, their kids will die.  And without a food safety regulator, that will happen a lot.

Then they are unfit to be parents and their remaining kids should be taken away from them.

You seem to object people having the right to trade a small freedom, namely the right to sell food in any old way they choose, with a big freedom, namely the right to eat safely anywhere.  Why?  Its a good trade.  Unless you explicitly want to sell unsafe food, you lose nothing.

You can trade whatever you want. I object to you trading my freedom. It's not up to you to decide who I should trust. Personally, I'd rather trust my safety to free market businesses that have to compete with each other rather than a single bloated agency with a CYA-mentality that's allowed to stagnate.