gnarmis
Joined 15 years ago
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kilotau.com
@gnarmis in other places
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Comment · 2 years ago
In a recent case of someone living in TX learning that their fetus had trisomy 18, there was a whole legal case that had to be fought, and when Judge Gamble ruled that terminating the pregnancy could proceed in this case, TX AG Ken Paxton filed an emergency petition to ask the state supreme court to overturn the ruling, and that blocked Judge Gamble's ruling. Meantime, the woman's condition was deteriorating enough that she left the state to get her healthcare needs met.
So, what can we expect when TX is making it this perilous to provide basic healthcare for such a large percentage of its population? More of the same, I'd argue.
If you care about your sisters/daughters/spouses' access to healthcare, consider other states.
Comment · 7 years ago
On the second point, I think folks are rightly dubious about the effectiveness of incentives broadly[1]. There's also some hilarious historical examples of incentives backfiring or having unwanted side-effects (like the Cobra Effect [2].)
More broadly, I don't think it's that easy to think that private prisons can even work well as a solution, regardless of whether they should be allowed to exist as a matter of public policy and ethics. Consider one summative look at this issue provided in this evaluation[3] -- it's dubious whether they're even cost effective, one of the strongest pro-private-prison arguments there has been in public debate, and how there's much better alternatives than the kind of perverse incentives bundled with private prisons, like re-evaluating whether parolees should be allowed in public housing, and providing more transition housing so when sentences are complete, inmates aren't forced to spend even more time in prison because they don't have an address to go to.
[1] https://hbr.org/2009/03/when-economic-incentives-backfire [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect [3] https://publicpolicy.wharton.upenn.edu/live/news/2304-privat...
Comment · 8 years ago
I'm quite taken aback by the vitriol in those comments.
Programs are meant to be read by humans, and language/terminology has a huge impact. If there are cost-less replacements to words that are easy to adopt, why not adopt them? These changes are beneficial to the community, don't hurt the language, and are cheap to adopt in many cases anyway.