TomAiello

I'm going to try to take the two very similar questions at once. First, you need to understand a concept called Marginal Utility. Here's how it works: Each additional unit of something you gain is worth slightly less than the last unit you had of it. So, for (greatly simplified) example, if you have no bread, you may value a loaf of bread at $5. But if you have one load already, it's unlikely you're going to value the second load at $5 (although it's possible, if you're really hungry, that you'll assign it exactly the same value). But what if you have 100 loaves of bread? The next one isn't worth much to you, because you're already pretty stuffed with bread. Another example, that might be easier to follow for us here, is the value of a skydive. The first skydive of the day, you're very excited about jumping, the $20 or so for the jump is easy to part with. But by the end of the day, you've got 12 jumps in, and that 13th jump isn't looking all that appealing to most folks. Even more pronounced is the difference between your 11th jump overall, very early off student status, and your 11,000th. Now turn this around to talk about family time. If you haven't seen your family for a month, that first hour is pretty darn valuable. But if you've just spent a month straight on vacation with them, you're probably willing to sell an hour of your time to your employer for a reasonable sum. Follow this out to infinity and you get a pretty big value at either end. If you are talking about giving up one hour today with your family, that's not too large. But if you're talking about giving up all the hours, forever, you're likely to approach a sum that is worth more than every material thing in the world. So, to answer the question about my specific case: When I'm working, I'll typically make somewhere around 50 bucks per hour. So, we can say that at my current work/family balance, it costs about 50 bucks per hour to get me away from my family. If I had a lot less family time, then it would go up. If I had a lot more (which would be pretty hard, actually, since most of my time is family time) then it might go down a bit. In my specific case, since I am turning down work with regularity, we can say that I've probably hit the balance point. I won't take more work at my current rate, which means that I probably value my time with my family at about 50 bucks an hour. Give me more family time, I might work or less. Give me less family time, you're going to have to pay me more. Odds are that, right now today, if you walked into my house and offered me a hundred bucks an hour to help you move your refrigerator, I'd take the hundred bucks and leave my family for an hour. Offer me twenty bucks, and I probably won't take the cash (although I bet I'd help you move the fridge just because you asked). Remember that the rate goes up or down depending on how much I have, so to answer that second question, I'd have to say "a lot," because I've never been in the situation of pricing the first hour of family time. I'm not sure how much "a lot" is, but I can say for sure that it would at least have to be enough to set my family up with everything they'd ever need in life, and then some. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

A huge example we are always exposed to would be newbies just discovering skydiving and they won't shut up about it to their friends and family. Even better, and more relevant to the latter part of your post, is when they then decide that "everyone should skydive." -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

The Executive branch of the federal government, which includes the Justice Department, lacks the authority to do any of that. Perhaps in theory. And I agree that in practice they should not. However, in reality, they do it all the time. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

No, that's not what I said at all. If I value my family, I'm likely to sell some of my time in order to provide things for them (such as family time). -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Do you value your wife? What would you pay her to love you? @TomAiello: Clearly, by your standards, if you have a job outside the home, your family has a finite monetary value to you. For what price would you sell them? Not at all. But my time, at an hourly rate, can be sold, by me, in order to provide other things, such as time with my family. Everyone makes trade offs. People who proclaim that this or that thing they value is worth "more than anything" often do not behave in a manner that displays such a valuation. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Do you value your wife? What would you pay her to love you? The question really is: Do I value time spent with my wife? The answer is yes. The next question is: how much? Well, if I can spend the next hour with my wife, or you'll pay me $10 million to do something else for the next hour, I'm going to take the 10 million. Does that mean I don't love my wife? I don't think so. It means that I have made a decision about value, and decided that spending an hour making ten million dollars will give me greater future happiness than spending that hour with my wife. In fact, I can do lots of wonderful things with my wife, using that 10 million dollars, so I think I've gotten a pretty good deal. In reality, most people make decisions somewhere between those extremes, selling their time to their employers at rates quite a bit less than 10 million dollars an hour. Does that mean they don't love their families? No, of course not. It means that they have decided they can do better things for their families, and enjoy their lives (with their families) more if they sell off some of their time in order to have more money to add other things to their lives (for themselves or their families). -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Money is a tool. It allows us to prioritize our wants and needs, and determine how much we value things by assigning them monetary values. Do you value time with your children? How much? Well, most people sell their time to their employer at a certain rate per hour. That tells us how much they value their time, overall. If they valued their time with their children more, they'd work less, and vice versa. How much is a skydive worth to you? If that's more than the jump ticket price at your local DZ, you're off to jump. If not, then you're doing something else. Using a tool to assign value to things makes decisions easier, and helps us to clearly define our priorities. It does not mean we are making poor decisions--most people choose to spend time with the family rather than going to work every weekend. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I sat and thought about this for a while, and you know, I couldn't come up with anything I'd change from just what I'm doing today. Not sure if that's good or bad. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

So, monetary worth is the only indicator of value, is it? That's the definition of value, isn't it? I'm not saying the information has no value. I'm saying that if we properly value it (meaning we're willing to pay some amount for it), then we ought to be willing to pay less than that amount. Which means that if we put the gathering of the information to a competitive process, rather than awarding all contracts to one government owned entity, we ought to be able to get more of the information for the same cost. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Two thoughts: 1) If the government simply put out contracts for the data, that would create a demand that could be filled by private industry. I'd bet that the reason we don't see too much private space exploration going on is because the private companies can't compete with a totally subsidized (government) competitor, who, just to make things more difficult, has a 100% lock on all contracts. 2) If the information isn't worth that much money, why are we buying it, again? -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Can you explain why you think this? Profit is a good motivator for many things. I bet that if profit was an incentive, we'd have a much cheaper, faster moving space program. I've also seen the inside of the US healthcare system enough to know that it is largely a government run monopoly, with a huge government program basically setting all the rules that everyone else must play by. Pointing to it as a failure of the market system is like pointing to Stalinism as a failure of democracy. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Seriously, dude. I am of the opinion that waterboarding is torture. I still don't think simply proclaiming it to be so is terribly productive. And proclaiming that those who disagree with you are "blowhards" or whatever other name you want to call them is hardly a convincing argument. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

That's really the issue under debate, isn't it? Simply proclaiming "my view is right, despite what anyone else thinks" is fairly silly. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I guarantee you cannot find a counter-example where a private corporation paid out millions of dollars on fraudulent shipping charges and then caught the perpetrators. Clearly, people perpetrate shipping fraud of this magnitude on private parties all the time, and the private parties never catch them. Ergo, government procurement processes are more efficient than private ones! -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

One of my friends, who was a marine captain, summarized it like this: "It's not that I want to go to war. But imagine if you spent your whole life training to drive race cars, and the Indy 500 was going on, but you weren't there." He actually left the marines (he was in a counter-terrorism unit that wasn't deployed to the middle east because it was considered vital to national security that it stay in the USA) and joined the FBI several years ago. When the marines started calling up reserves, he volunteered to go back on active duty and serve a tour in the middle east--but the FBI decided that keeping it's trained counter-terrorism staff was vital to national security, and refused to release him to the marine corp. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Oh, ok, thanks. I had thought you were trying to say something about relative efficiency in the private and public sectors, and somehow relating a huge fraud perpetrated upon a public sector procurer to an argument that this somehow made the public sector more efficient. Thanks for clearing that up. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Honestly, I'd read piper17's post as hyperbole, meaning that he had exaggerated his response in an obviously ridiculous way (by referring to people hanging themselves) in order to make a point. It appeared to me that he was saying that wishing for people to commit suicide, or even rejoicing in it, was absurd, and he was illustrating that point by switching the target to people who another poster might be more likely to empathize with (presumably because they shared some political viewpoints--although in this case it's not exactly clear what the deceased's political affiliation or views were). But I dunno, it is the internet. People miss sarcasm and hyperbole all the time here, so maybe I just read some in where it wasn't intended. Also, I'll go a bit further than what I read into his post: Rejoicing in a person's suicide is morally reprehensible, and I greatly hope that those who express such sentiments are, themselves, engaged in exaggeration for the sake of internet argument, and in person are better human beings than the appearance they present here. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

The jurors; (a) did not have any responsibility to supervise OJ (b) had no knowledge of any activities that were actually taking place (only knowledge of things that happened in the past) (c) had no way of exercising influence over any actions at the time they were occurring Members of Congress have an affirmative responsibility to supervise government agencies over which they provide oversight (pretty sure that's why the call it "Congressional Oversight"). They have powers to engage in supervision and (in some cases) knowledge of the activities. It is their duty to exercise oversight especially when matters take place outside of the public view, as we (the people) have entrusted them as our representatives to deal with matters that we are not privy to. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Do you think that people with a supervisory responsibility who perceive a problem but do nothing are without any culpability? Sounds to me like there are so many murky, fuzzy grey areas here that we ought to just turn the page and move on. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

There are none so blind as those who will not see. I guess I'm still curious. Can you please explain, in plain english, your meaning? Thanks. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I'm sure we can find comfort in the "fact" that private industry is always more efficient than government agencies. Surely you don't believe that USPS would have charged less than $1 million to ship two 19¢ washers from South Carolina to Texas, do you? I'm curious how a couple of criminals defrauding the government by taking advantage of loopholes in government payment schemes says anything about efficiency in the private sector? -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I feel for you. And I'm sure that in another year or two, I'll feel for me, too. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

I wouldn't. Have they? -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

If it was energy and water independent, I'd probably go more than 20%. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com

Remember that in our hypothetical we are sure, without error, that we've got the right guy. To make it easier, we'd have to be torturing him, or else we'd have to make the wife also be an error-free terrorist. Besides, if we've got Kaiser Szoze there, he's going to kill the wife himself. -- Tom Aiello Tom@SnakeRiverBASE.com SnakeRiverBASE.com