phd514

Eh, not necessarily. In my field (tech-related), I make substantially more than I would in the Netherlands and my tax burden is also substantially lower. I get 4 weeks of PTO plus 10 holidays every year and I never use it all. That is certainly not what everyone would prefer, but it suits me just fine.

That Wikipedia article is horrible and incorrectly states the common misconceptions about the Protestant work ethic. Worse still, it cites Leland Ryken in its second reference who makes precisely the same point about the common misunderstandings of the Protestant work ethic:

> The Puritans never conceived of work apart from a spiritual and moral context of service to God and man. Richard Nixon's much-quoted Labor Day message of 1971 probably summed up the popular conception of the "Puritan work ethic," but if so, it is an inaccurate picture:

>"The 'work ethic' holds that labor is good in itself; that a man or woman becomes a better person by virtue of the act of working. America's competitive spirit, the 'work ethic' of this people... the value of achievement, the morality of self-reliance-- none of these is going out of style. (Nixon)"

>I trust that I have shown that the Puritans would not have been content with such a theory of work. Their ideals were obedience to God, service to humanity, and reliance on God's grace. In the Puritan ethic, the virtue of work depended almost wholly on the motives with which people performed it.

From an economic perspective, the "Puritan work ethic" as coined by Max Weber and described as the impetus for economic development in post-Reformation cultures has been largely abandoned by economists. From a theological perspective, the "Protestant work ethic" refers to the idea that God does not favor clerical occupations over non-clerical occupations thus elevating the value of the work of the blacksmith, farmer, etc. to the same level as that of the priest, monk, etc. Neither support the idea that busyness or overwork are virtuous.

As a semi-related aside, Cornelius Van Til developed a lot of similar ideas about the logical necessity of the supernatural in the area of theological apologetics.

Admittedly, the American Red Cross has problems distributing humanitarian aid effectively, but the ICRC creates a separate set of problems for itself by departing from its founding mission as an impartial and neutral distributor of humanitarian aid. They risk losing their access to monitoring prisoners of war by advocating for certain interpretations of international law, something that's certainly important, but better left to organizations that don't need the same kind of cooperation from otherwise hostile regimes that the ICRC does.

Thomas Kuhn would disagree.

The opening paragraphs of this article are just another example of what appears to be an ongoing attempt to manufacture conflict between "religion" and "science". The books that were burned at Ephesus were explicitly identified in Acts 19:19 as sorcery books, not "books of nature". Stuff like this gets published in Nature and people wonder why "science" is losing its credibility?

Canada did. It's not that far-fetched.

This is disappointing, but not as much as Warren vs. District of Columbia.

It's a complicated topic and tough to do it justice in a brief post, but a couple brief thoughts anyway. I believe that I as an individual have a moral obligation to provide aid to the poor. I do not believe that government has that responsibility. Ultimately the government is funded via taxation backed by the threat of force. As such, taxing some citizens to provide aid to others is a form of legislating morality. I think the legislation of morality is warranted primarily in the negative, that is, to prohibit things such as murder, theft, assault, etc.

Secondly, I believe that aid to the poor is most effective and of greater benefit to both the giver and the recipient when it is done in a relational context (which is not to say that aid is given directly from the giver to the recipient, just that it's localized enough that the givers and recipients are in the same community). The giver can see the tangible effects of his generosity and the recipient can see the care shown by the giver. By its nature, government aid is impersonal and therefore less beneficial. The "givers" in that case, who are "giving" often only under compulsion, often feel exploited and resentful. Many recipients develop a sense of entitlement since there's no direct connection between the aid they receive and their fellow citizens who provided that aid.

I do agree with you that taking government out of the aid business would result in less uniform funding for aid, but I think that's a lesser problem than forcing it on everyone. I'm on the board of a local charity and I see the private donors who fund it, 95% of whom are are middle or upper-middle class, and I'm pretty amazed by their generosity. I wish awareness of those kinds of things were greater.

Pasadena is beautiful, but affordable houses? I have family there and the 7-figure prices they paid for their nondescript houses are eye-watering.

I'm not the GP, but I don't think that paying more taxes is the best way to improve society. I'm not rich, but as someone making above median wages and living in a low-COL area with no state income taxes, I put my money where my mouth is by contributing an amount roughly equal to my annual federal income tax to local charities that provide a variety of services to people in need.

I work remotely in a flyover state near family which is important with kids. The low cost of living doesn't hurt either. I lived in NYC and the Bay Area before kids, so I know they are like, but I prefer where I am now for my current stage of life.

I don't think it's fair to say that people who defaulted during the 2008 mortgage-backed securities crisis did so because they lacked sufficient macroeconomic knowledge to make prudent financial decisions. Some were offered loans (for a variety of bad reasons) that they could not repay if they encountered even the slightest setback in their current financial decisions. Those people should bear some responsibility for that poor choice as should those who offered them the loans for which they shouldn't really have qualified. Others exploited the process by strategically defaulting on mortgages after extracting money due to appreciation on the underlying property. IMO, that's unfair and borders on the fraudulent if they never intended to pay back the mortgages they took out.

There were other problems that contributed as well, but none of the causes are so easily characterized that anyone who lost money should expect to see someone jailed as a consequence of their misfortune.

Largely agree with your second two paragraphs, but even as someone who couldn't care less about football, I think it's hard to make the case that a predatory loan collector provides more benefit to society than a football coach.

According to recent studies, neither of those are really happening. "Secularization theory" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularization#Current_issues_...) is the current sociological term for (a) and it is pretty well established that while there may be regional fluctuation in the numbers of religious people, at a global level, religiosity is not in decline.

As for (b), at least in the US, it is the large mainline denominations that are in steep decline and the smaller, more theologically conservative denominations that are growing most rapidly. Mega-churches are a phenomenon, but not one that falls easily into either of the above categories because they can range all the way from progressive to prosperity gospel to theologically conservative and nearly anything in between.

Frankly, whatever "elite" was characterized by the MIT of the 20th century is the kind of elite that's good. There were far more kids with middle-class backgrounds at MIT than at your typical Ivy and they were there because they loved science and engineering. In general, they weren't the moneyed 1% or the politically-connected. That was generally reflected in the school's administration which was much less political and PC than at other universities. As such, "hacks" were treated in the spirit in which they were done as good-natured attempts to achieve the very difficult. As a notable example of that, the police car on the dome hack included detailed instructions for its disassembly and removal. Rumor has it that in the last decade or two, that spirit has been in decline at MIT. If so, that's truly sad.

> study after study shows that humans very much define happiness in relative terms

Whether or not the gap is widening, that definition of happiness is very problematic. There's something wrong when, as an example, someone is happy with a "rice-and-beans" lifestyle when all their neighbors have the same lifestyle but is unhappy with a better "chicken-in-every-pot" lifestyle because some of their neighbors have caviar and foie gras (insert your preferred luxury foods).

From a Christian perspective, the Parable of the Talents (or Minas from Luke's gospel) describes future reward based not on net worth but on one's faithfulness with the resources entrusted to one. No harp-playing or lamb-petting necessary.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A14... https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+19%3A11-27...

Much of what you say is true about Dallas proper, but it's a small part of the very large (4th largest MSA in the US) DFW metroplex. The large outer suburbs of DFW are still very conservative though perhaps not in all the ways you would expect. And cities in Texas can't preempt state gun laws, so Dallas's gun laws are no more restrictive than anywhere else in Texas.

The article (https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323689604578220...) said nothing of the sort. It said that while the bulk of the tax increases were at the high end of the income spectrum, many individuals and couples with incomes in the 180k-500k range could see significant tax increases, too. That was contrary to the general portrayal of the "American Taxpayer Relief Act" as retaining the Bush-era tax cuts on everyone with less than 400k in income.

I added my comp at one of the listed companies a couple weeks back and it never showed up in your list. I'm not sure if there are bugs in your front end or lots of false negatives in your spam filtering or what. I'm happy to contribute to such an effort but not to the point where I have to figure out how to game your submission process.

The former of your suggestions is already required for most political advertising: https://transition.fec.gov/pages/brochures/spec_notice_broch...

This video parody of those kinds of productions both pokes fun at them and raises some of the same kinds of questions about them that you do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ys4Nx0rNlAM

Hank Hill had another great set of lines at the end of that episode (S08E02, I believe) where he gets out a box of Bobby's old toys that he's lost interest in. Hank tells him that he doesn't want Jesus to become like one of those once-fashionable toys that quickly loses its appeal. I was quite surprised to find that much theological profundity in an episode of KoTH.

Edit: Also the bit with the rocker's dad about the fifth commandment.

I don't think you can make the historical case that the past was uniformly more brutal or unjust than the present. I think it would be more accurate to say that in our current place and time, our current evolution of moral standards and expectations looks unfavorably (and rightfully so!) on human slavery, but there's no guarantee that we or others aren't regressing on other issues. That's probably a cause for humility as future generations will almost certainly look back on us and wonder how we could have tolerated those things that they will consider injustices.

There's some impressive engineering involved in JRuby and some interesting possibilities with the Graal JIT. That said, I've had a net negative experience working on a product with a mix of Java and JRuby code. The JRuby LOC was in the high 5 to low 6-digit figures and while the interop with Java was good (so long as it was done carefully in performance-critical sections), the instability of the JRuby 9k releases was so bad that we spent an inordinate amount of time tracking down regressions. We also had a kind of chicken and egg problem keeping current with newer Java versions because that required newer JRuby releases but those introduced more regressions. Unfortunately, the net effect of all of this is that the product is languishing because of the development effort required just to keep it current let alone to develop new features. At least in our case, choosing JRuby as a platform proved to be a strategic mistake.

It doesn't make a lot of sense that Switzerland is the EU's version of MA or NY or that Zurich is the EU version of NYC or SF given that Switzerland is not in the EU and quite happy that way, too.

This is not surprising to me as I expect that the average pair of theology majors has more in common from the perspective of worldview and values, important things to share with a spouse, than the average pair of business majors.

That's a highly misleading statement. Homeless busing programs are common across the country and while not without their problems, they don't just send all homeless to a single location such as Texas to SF. Also, SF buses considerably more homeless out of its city every year than it receives via bus.