tigertoy

Whenever you make an old fashioned snail mail contribution to almost any charity, you get put on a list where you will receive several more requests for more money from that charity. Thank you gifts, membership renewal requests, emergency donation requests, and reminders that you haven't contributed in a while years later. Worse, many legitimate-seeming charities will sell your name on to other charities and you can get dozens. The larger the contribution the more further appeals you receive. It's just the way the fundraising business works.

This is a terrible waste of the charity's resources, the donor's time and attention, and the environment that has to be burdened with all that trash. The last one is particularly ironic in the case of environmental causes.

I believe I have a solution to this problem. Imagine there was a service you could send your donations to. You would specify what charity the donation was for, and they would collect all the donations to that charity that had come in every couple of months and send it on anonymously. The charity would pay a very small surcharge, which would be far less than what it costs them to send out all that follow-up spam.

The donor could easily set up a recurring donation, and in any case could opt in to a single annual statement listing the charities they had donated to.

The main question I have about this would be whether the tax laws would allow it. I have heard that a 501(c)3 can make donations to other 501(c)3 organizations. This would allow the donor to retain the tax benefits and make it easy to account for them with the IRS. Even if the aggregator were a 501(c)4, the current tax law means there is no benefit for most taxpayers to donate to a 501(c)3, but I suspect that if the aggregator had to operate as a regular company it wouldn't work financially.

I would be interested to have someone with more knowledge than I comment on how far this could fly legally. Ideally such a person would be a lawyer, but I'm in no position to pay a lawyer for official legal advice.

It's National SAD Day, the day we switch to Daylight Wasting Time. Because nothing says "we love you" to people with Seasonal Affective Disorder like throwing away an hour of daylight just when the axial tilt is making it so precious.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what's wrong with our economy and what might be done to fix it. Of course, the rich and powerful would never allow things to upset their happy apple cart, so pretty much the only way they could happen would be if they put me in charge.

I dashed off some of my thoughts in a chat group I'm in and I thought I'd record them here, for my own interest if nothing more.

( stuff in here )

I have a philosophical question that I'd like to pose as a hypothetical. This is strictly a thought experiment and it's not intended to refer to any real person and certainly not to any identifiable group of real Americans.

Suppose there is an able bodied person. They have no physical limitations and no diagnosable mental health issues. They have no kids. They don't do unpaid work (such as assisting family or volunteering). They are simply unwilling to work in any way.

What obligation does society have to that person? Is it ethically appropriate to leave them to starve in the gutter? If not, what level of support must society provide? If the answer is "it depends", how would you define what it depends on how the obligation varies with that?

In particular, what is the obligation in a prosperous modern Western democracy?

When you are holding a gun, everything looks like a target. Responsible gun ownership means recognizing this tendency and controlling it.

I mean this seriously, not humorously. I do not mean no one should have guns. Everyone I know who has guns is responsible by this metric. Responsible owners are still human and can make mistakes, but I assert that most of the gun crime we hear about is caused by irresponsible owners who should not have guns. The real issue of gun control is how to keep the irresponsible from having guns without taking away the rights of the responsible.

So, after months, no, years of increasingly vitriolic rhetoric and weeks of a feeling of impending doom, the Supreme Court finally ruled on the Affordable Care Act.  I've never been very enthusiastic about the ACA; instead of really fixing the health care problem by really breaking the health insurance money machine in favor of a public system, the Democrats adopted a pure Republican plan, apparently assuming that they would get Republican support.  The Republicans, of course, being far more concerned with opposing anything Democrats try to accomplish, immediately decided that their basic concept of health care reform was horrible, un-American, and evil.  But as poor as the ACA is, it is the biggest improvement in the mess we call a health care system in my lifetime.

I find that the main points of the ruling -- that the Commerce Clause does not give Congress the power to mandate that individuals purchase a product, but that the power to tax does give them the authority to impose a tax on people who don't -- to be about the best solution that could be found in this mess.  I do think the individual mandate is quite a stretch of the Commerce Clause, but I do think it passes muster under the taxing authority.  I would be happier about it if the politicians had just called it a tax from the beginning -- but then, I believe that we do have to have taxes, and that it is not only allowable, but fundamentally absolutely essential, for taxes to be used with intent to encourage behavior that benefits society as a whole.

I have to praise Chief Justice Roberts for a decision that I actually think is right, in spite of the expectations of the right wing.  I'm concerned about the commentary that says that he did it to protect the integrity of the Court, rather than to make the right decision in this case -- if the Court does not make right decisions, it has no integrity to protect.

Seanan says so, and that's plenty good enough for me!

So I say to those who read this: Happy Valentine's Day to each and every
one of you, and if you don't celebrate Valentine's Day, happy Horny
Werewolf Day.

Today's XKCD is an amusing poke at the quirks of us humans.  But one of the best things about XKCD is the mouse overs -- they're often better than the comic itself.  Today's is that way with a twist -- the alt text isn't funny, it's true and I wholeheartedly agree.

"I just noticed CVS has started stocking homeopathic pills on the same shelves with--and labeled similarly to--their actual medicine. Telling someone who trusts you that you're giving them medicine, when you know you’re not, because you want their money, isn’t just lying--it’s like an example you’d make up if you had to illustrate for a child why lying is wrong."

filkertom has a discussion on his LJ about a new evil corporate tactic being tried by some doctors.  I made this comment there, which I'd like to preserve for my own amusement.

I'm not a lawyer, but I've spent a few decades watching the impenetrable antics of the legal system.  In general, I see that the courts can find a way to argue that any proposition, no matter how perverse it may seem to some of us, is unassailably anchored in the Constitution, precedent, and existing law.  It comes down to what they want the law to be.  This is why we make such a fuss about who gets to be judges, even though if the system worked the way we tell our children in school that it's supposed to, it wouldn't matter that much.

From a liberal prospective, individual rights matter, and a contract that gives up indefinite rights is repugnant and in some cases invalid on its face.

From a libertarian prospective, contracts matter, and any contract entered into legitimately is valid and supersedes the rules that would otherwise apply.

From a conservative^* prospective, the rights of the rich matter, so a case would tend to come down to whether the individual getting bad treatment has more money than the medical establishment.

How the dispute is settled depends on which prospective is in control.

^*The original definition of conservative is seeking to conserve the rights of the aristocracy.  We don't have a hereditary aristocracy in America, but we do have a privileged rich class which is functionally equivalent, and if we try to explain what conservative means today in terms of advancing the interests of that rich class, we get a very good match of what they actually do -- certainly better than the definitions they tend to espouse in their propaganda.

In reaction to the froofraw about That Idiot In Florida, the wise and wonderful catsittingstill proposed that we mark today by posting in favor of religious tolerance.  TIIF seems to have backed down and will hopefully start receiving the attention he deserves (that would be absolutely none, for those of you who've watched too much television), but it still seems like a topic worth discussing.

I have personally struggled with my feelings about religion for all of my life as far back as I can remember having any sort of philosophical thoughts.  My mother came from a fundamentalist family, a faith that practices adult baptism -- they believe you have to be old enough to actually choose to join the religion for it to count -- and by the time she was old enough, she had decided she did not believe.  My father was raised Episcopalian, but he wasn't very devout.  When I was pretty young, he converted to Catholicism, and for a few years he went through the motions of being devout.  I was old enough to have an ingrained habit of not wanting to go to church when he decided that he'd like me to go with him.  My father was not a violent, forceful man who would drag me, especially since my mother would have taken my side.  Instead, he bribed me; if I would go to church with him (and behave reasonably well), he would give me some money -- rather more than my regular allowance at that time.  So I went, even though it made me uncomfortable.  I don't recall my thoughts in detail, but I know that I felt something wrong about pretending to believe when I didn't.  I can't recall just how long this went on, but after some amount of time, I decided it wasn't worth it and I stopped going.  After that, I might have been pressured into attending a holiday service or two, but otherwise, I've not been to a church service other than a wedding or a funeral.

During that period where I was attending Mass, I did absorb some of the doctrine and ritual, and just going through my life paying attention to stuff in the background, I've learned some things about the Bible and Christianity, but I haven't studied them in detail, either academically or religiously.  Most of the exposure I get to religion is what gets echoed back to me through the media, and most of that is the bad stuff.  I developed some strong feelings -- let's not mince words, I developed a blind, foaming hatred -- of fundamentalists and of preachers and politicians who use religion to whip up their supporters so they gain personal power.  Those feelings were so strong that I'd decided that organized religion was itself an evil that society should seek to root out.  My motto was that religion should be strictly limited to being practiced in private among consenting adults.

More recently, my thinking has become more complex.  I haven't exactly mellowed out; I can still get screaming mad when I hear a news story about people ruining other people's lives in the name of religious beliefs, whether it be a doctor in Afghanistan shot by Taliban who claim he was trying to convert people to Christianity, or a teacher in the US fired for not being anti-gay enough.  But I've also come to some realization that most people who are religious are basically good people, they believe a lot of the same things I do, and that their religion helps them.  I still see some strains of religion that seek to wipe out all trace of rational thought in their followers in place of blind obedience to the holy message, and some believers who hate the burden of thinking so much that they want to go along with it.  But there are a lot more people who are reasonable about it; who believe in a religion, but are still capable of looking at an individual situation thoughtfully and compassionately.

I got about this far writing and realized that I've lost track of what I was trying to say.  That happens to me a lot.  Where were we again?  Oh, right.  Religious tolerance.  I've spent a lot of my life having little tolerance for religion myself, but I'm learning better.  I hope we can all learn to recognize that most religions are much more complex and worthy than the evil caricatures we see sensationalized in the media, that most people, whatever religion they may practice, have both good and bad in them, and that we can all be better people and have better lives if we stop feeling the need to hate everyone who's different.