Let's say only a handful of people own the property. I'm not assuming everyone is equal, I'm asking how distribution of profits is decided -- and by whom. — Mikie

That's defined in the statutes of the company and usually lies with the executive board members. But they are voted in by the shareholders, so any shareholder with sufficient voting rights will effectively decide on the board members, so board members are incentivised to make shareholders happy. Shareholders generally only want profit to the exclusion of all else. Legislation can curb the profit motive through legal requirements. So indirectly governments will have a say on how profit is distributed. In a globalised economy, however, the ability of governments to set requirements is limited by companies' ability to relocate abroad.

Under all this lies a legal framework that allows incorporation of for-profit entities in the first place and assumptions about the efficacy of capitalist and market organisation to the extent that it affects moral valuation. It's the economy, stupid.

I'm contrasting that with equity.

You could do that with a loan too, which will have a pre-defined interest and end date instead of giving the right to perpetually earn whatever executives feel they have to promise in dividends to shareholders, to ensure they get insanely high wages in return for their class treason.

It's on the previous page of this thread...

Yes. That genius truly shines through when you're silent.

Such politicians are a product of culture. We lack leadership and fidelity towards others. Not in the sense of vision but someone that can bind society together and respect for others. Moral behaviour is minimalism in western society. It's let me do everything I like as long as I don't harm another (too much because everybody should be tolerant so mostly it's others not being tolerant that's the problem, according to them). You get that sort of individualism married to toxic (monetary) value systems. We even see outgrowths of that in philosophy, specifically free speech absolutism and anti-natalism, which is just me-me-me.

It reminds me of the universe 25 experiments with mice basically.

Actually, I think Spain is less corrupt in some areas. It's for instance much more open about what it pays for public procurement. Over 80% is published, which is about 45% for the Netherlands. If you're not transparent, you're more likely to act corrupt.

Edit; correction, 85% and 52%, more or less.

The Netherlands is every bit as corrupt as Spain and Mark Rutte is one of the most unethical prime ministers we've ever had. His opinion on ethical issues should be disregarded on principle. I wish he'd keel over and die.

I understand from your post though that taxes aren't the issue but how the government spends its money. I think I already stated early on in this thread that the really relevant question is: what should governments do? And then in a democracy we say that's whatever people vote for. Resulting in a situation where nobody gets what they want nor believes the government does what it should and everybody complains (even the filthy rich!). The alternatives are living in authoritarian regimes, where an elite gets what they want, one way or the other but not likely either of us will be in the winning side. Long live democracy I suppose...

Simply not true: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Spain&country2=Japan&city1=Madrid&city2=Tokyo&tracking=getDispatchComparison

You are grossly overestimating the cost of living in Tokyo compared to say Madrid (and Barcelona is pretty close to that). That's, as far as I know, the most expensive city in Spain.

On 65k EUR I could comfortably live in Amsterdam and support 2 kids and a wife, which is more expensive than Tokyo (and Madrid) but not stay in the best neighbourhood. Median income in the Netherlands is about 40k (pre-tax) in the Netherlands. So yes, 65k EUR is "rich" - especially if you move to the suburbs or away from the most expensive parts of the biggest cities. I think you're spending too much time on Instagram and have a skewed idea of what rich is. Rich is being able to provide comfortably for a family. It's not having a second home, a yacht and a bugatti.

The 1 million yen per child offered by the Japanese government is not to meet cost of living but a one-off incentive for families to move out of Tokyo to less populated and ageing areas. It's not comparable to rent support at all.

Holy fuck. 200k earning per year is really rich. That's C-level pay. Especially in Spain. How are you not considering this as rich?

I'm not sure what the benefits are of comparing which attrocities were worse. At some point the difference aren't meaningful and I think slavery, whether you die quick or slow, it's one of them. It's also a bit of a tangent from the subject of this thread.

For instance, does anyone know to what extent Bolsonaro was involved? Did he rile up the mob?

How about I don't spit in your popcorn?

No snow in the Alps. Watch what that will do to the Rhine come spring and summer. This is fucking up groundwater levels because we're the goddamn stars in making water run the fuck off to the sea instead of living in the bog that was the river delta of the Maas, Waal and Rhine. Only way to save that is creating bogs again but oops it's built up to capacity (actually over if we take environmental measures).

But hey, at least I can have a beer on a terrace during winter!

Hand me some or close the thread.

I don't understand your apparent need to interpret my statement differently than as stated. I said:

I think you don't become an elected official in Brasil without being corrupt. — Benkei

That fantasy is all yours...

I think you don't become an elected official in Brasil without being corrupt.

https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-49847851

Plus, it's not as if it's the first time a corrupt politician is voted into office. It's not a disqualifiying trait unfortunately, as much as we would like it to be.

Thanks! So why aren't the Dems making a deal? Seems they benefit from a split GOP instead of letting them reach a deal where concessions are made on who campaigns where.

This is going to take while.

Ah, I think there are some tangential benefits so I'd mostly just leave it be. It raises awareness, creates more room for people struggling with these issues to open up about it. All in all, I don't think it's bad, just misplaced, as long as doctors stick to agreed ethical standards.

includes psychological and behavior differences. — Athena

There are cognitive differences. Behaviour is learned. So no.

So why doesn't Hakeem Jeffries get it if he consistently gets the most votes?

On what grounds? — Isaac

Personal freedom usually. My body, my choice, kind of thing.

Puberty blockers were, until very recently, alarmingly easy to get here in the UK, and the campaign groups are not saying "phew, that was a narrow escape, thanks for shutting Tavistock", they're saying they want more drugs, more easily available. — Isaac

Subsidiarity precludes it becoming more readily available in the Netherlands. They can campaign but it's not going to change the ethical rules doctors have to abide by. First stop is therapy, if that doesn't help then a second psychiatrist will do an assessment on whether it really is gender dysphoria and if there aren't other insufficiently treated or untreated mental illnesses. If that's yes and none (or if the latter are a consequence of the dysphoria), then I suspect puberty blockers are less problematic than other drugs (anti-depressants, if that would make sense) and therefore would be available.

I have to say the movement isn't really vocal in the Netherlands or I haven't been paying attention.

There is a difference, yes. But even within the 'offer' camp (into which I also fall) there are degrees of enthusiasm behind that offer which matter, I think, considering that, as I said, the mainstream position is not merely a reluctant offer. — Isaac

I think the mainstream position is concerned with that if a person has gender affirming surgery then people should accept it. About the question whether persons with gender dysphoria should have gender affirming surgery, I think opinions are much more qualified. But maybe things are simply different here than in the UK.

The Royal Dutch Association for the promotion of the Medical Arts, a.k.a. the Doctor's Association writes the ethical code for practitioners in the Netherlands. One of the ethical pillars is the subsidiarity principle that requires practitioners to employ the means that have the least impact to reach a specific goal. So a gender affirming operation is only on the table if other less impactful measures have failed.

That doesn't rise to the level of promotion in my view but, since it's the most impactful measure available, as an ultimum remedium.

I don't see how. — Isaac

Precisely for the reason I stated. We can be in favour of both social change and gender affirming surgery. The latter is therefore not antithetical to the former.

I'm not sure what you 'seem' to be capable of is a very good measure for appropriate public policy. I seem to be capable of owning a gun and not shooting anyone with it. Does that lead to the conclusion that we ought allow everyone to own a gun without restriction? — Isaac

I don't think that analogy works. If you want an analogy: It's better to teach people to cope with the underlying causes of potential criminal behaviour than to lock criminals up but I'm still in favour of locking up criminals.

No one is talking about not treating those with gender dysphoria. — Isaac

Then I'm having trouble placing your comments when you call it "antithetical". That sounds to me like you disapprove. Or is there a difference between offering the option (which I'm advocating) and your idea of "promoting" gender affirming surgery, which you claim is currently happening?

The point is that it's currently actively antithetical to that progress ever being made. Promoting an intervention which continues to treat intolerance as a fault of some individual's biology just further embeds the intolerance, it doesn't just fail to tackle it, it actively makes it worse. — Isaac

That's a false dichotomy though. And we started out with a theory anyway so let's not get carried away with the qualifications shall we?

It doesn't actively make it worse at all. I seem to be quite capable of holding both views simultaneously because I theorise some reasons for gender dysphoria have to do with one's surroundings. If surgery helps them, then by all means let them have it. A lot of depression and anxiety in younger people is due to worry about climate change, shall we not treat that depression (hopefully through cognitive therapy only) because it's not their fault? That doesn't sit right with me.

https://www.nice.org.uk/guidance in my country to consider social impacts. It already considers economic impacts. I accept it'll never cover everything, but I don't accept it's thereby under no obligation to even try. — Isaac

Can you share a guidance where you think they're doing this because I just tried to randomly and after spending 30 minutes reading, I couldn't find what you're referring to.

Not that it much matters for the point your making and the one I'm trying to make. I don't know about the UK but in our healthcare landscape we're currently spending over 1,5 billion EUR on healthcare policy with a multitude of advisory organs at various levels, continuously pouring out advice and reinforcing each other's opinions (but they never advise getting rid of the overhead they're a part of, how surprising!). That's definitely compartementalisation taken too far and with ridiculous (and expensive) consequences.

As a result, I'm not so optimistic given this is often the state of "modern" government. I do think we could have afforable healthcare not through policy but healthcare worker autonomy - they decide what care their patient should get. I'd suspect a significant 1 billion EUR saving in not dictating policy and an uptick in people actually helped because their care becomes central instead of following policy and procedures. But then, this leads to maximum compartimentalisation because every patient becomes unique and the socio-economic issues cannot be taken onboard (because healthcare workers are working one-on-one with their patients). And to change social issues, we need to aggregate, so we need policy and procedures again. And we're back at square one. :-)

Meanwhile, what to do with people with gender dysphoria? "Yeah, it really sucks you're depressed but it only took us over 50 years to get gay people accepted and then maybe in 50 years you'll feel comfortable with your gender expression and the dysphoria will change, so have a bit of patience, ok?" Except of course, identity is already formed by then and the social change won't resolve the problem for them. So yes, allow gender affirming operations, it will save lives while society tries to catch up with not being dicks about other people's gender expressions.

I find this hard to accept. I would take issue with it on its face - junk food, for example, is as much a social issue as a medical one and public health policy acknowledges that. But I would also take issue with it from the position of a citizen. If it is, as I believe, our duty as citizens to hold our authorities to account, then we needn't (nor ought to) limit our assessments to artificially narrow concerns.

If the social impact of a public health policy is negative, then the personal benefits to individuals need not outweigh that as far as we're concerned. The authority itself might have a narrow remit, but we don't. — Isaac

I think we should differentiate with the ideal world and the complex, large nation states we live in. In an ideal world, we have a holistic approach and public health policy is embedded in other socio-economic policy and they move and change in tandem and a cross-specialist interaction leads to (far more) optimal solutions. The reality is they are only tenuously related. It's public health policy to highlight the problem of junk food but individual choice trumps prohibitions in this area. And this is an issue; food safety doesn't deal with whether it's healthy. So we see small changes, where nutritional values and scores are given to food so people can make more informed choices. And we see people don't care. Well, actually, that's not fair. People with enough money to worry about their health do care, for too many people it's just a matter of what they can pay for and with the need for both persons in most relationships to work to even make ends meet, who has time to cook? So really, economic circumstances are making it much harder to have a healthy lifestyle. In the Netherlands that's mostly driven by stagnant wages and insane increases in house prices. Which in turn is driven by macro-economic policy choices, foreign direct investments and market liberalisation.

Yes, it's all connected but no we're not capable of untangling that web and I don't think anybody is. So we have to compartimentalise out of necessity.

I agree, but there are solutions to gender dysphoria which do not involve promoting the idea that it's the individual who needs 'fixing'. As unenlightened has alluded to, there are mental health approaches which focus on acceptance (society's, not the client's), and strategies to deal with the lack of it. Therapies which focus the blame where it belongs and provide mechanisms for change on both sides of the individual's relationship with their community. — Isaac

I don't consider this realistic though and I don't find it helpful to build hypothetical solutions to actual problems. Maybe in relation to family members yes but the wider community is not in therapy - it doesn't resolve bigotry in every day life and on social media, it doesn't get you a job because people don't hire you because they think you're offputting or they don't want to create a scene with the high performing alpha male Jake they don't want to lose.

Basically, I don't disagree with anything you say, I just don't think it's in any way practical.

As such, your argument, applied to public health policy, could be used equally to design policies which place barriers (or further barriers) in the way of pharmaceutical and surgical responses to gender dysphoria using exactly the same argument as is being used to design policies which remove or lessen those barriers. — Isaac

I don't think so because public health policy isn't in the business of resolving social issues. It has to work with the constraints it has and that's societies with gender stereotypes that are so stringently prescriptive @Andrew4Handel can't even imagine how a man can act feminine.

That said, even from a holistic point of view, doing away with gender stereotypes will not resolve all gender dysphoria (although I guess that won't be gender dysphoria anymore but something else, body dysphoria?) and I'd advocate the option because more choice is more freedom.

Edit: wait, I might be misunderstanding, are you saying currently policy promotes having gender affirming surgery?

If we have two options (simplistically - promote gender altering surgery or don't), and each has it's potential flaws, but we accept suboptimal solutions all the time... does that lead us to either option? It reads to me as an argument for either. — Isaac

I'm not promoting either. I'm promoting having the choice and respecting such choice when it's been made one way or the other. What I don't accept, not that that is what you're doing but what I consider other posters to be guilty of, is trying to rile up disgust and deciding once and for all for everybody in every situation what that choice should be. It's not as if people are picking out a dress when they decide to have gender affirming surgery. At least in the Netherlands it takes years and surgeons are reluctant to perform these operations because they take their hypocratic oath seriously. Patients really should have a high likelihood to be better off with the surgery than without. Especially since comorbidity of other mental health issues are common.

I don't see why we need to escape gender stereotypes. — Andrew4Handel

Because they're harmful.



Love how you are now confusing lesbians with gender dysphoria.

I hate your parents for fucking up your upbringing.

I agree and at the same time don't. :smile: I do think it is a fix, given the constraints of social circumstances. Not having the option would lead to other mental health issues, in particular depression with significant increased risk in suicide. I don't think that's a problem though. We deal with suboptimal solutions all the time. We incarcerate people instead of resolving the underlying causes for instance.

Even in this thread we see people cannot escape gender stereotypes and put horses behind carriages to justify their own biases. And I like to think I have a decent rational grasp on these sort of biases and I still reinforce them without thinking through jokes, expressions, how I treat women as opposed to men etc. in everyday life. It's not something we're likely to escape any time soon.

If transsexual regret is a measure for how bad transitioning would be, then the opposite should be true. Since only 8% regret transitioning, transitioning is a good thing. From those 8% the majority regret it because of parents, social reactions and inability to get a job. It's not transsexuals that are the problem, it's the societies they live in.

That said, I have a theory that societies that are less hung up on gender stereotypes, will see a significant decrease in transitioning because there's a wider gamut available for gender expression so the dysphoria will probably lessen because gender roles will be less pronounced. For starters, men should be able to wear dresses instead of boring suits.

High heels, stockings and a wig:



And more of this please:

Disgust is sometimes an appropriate emotion. It can be a sign of rationality, ethical sense and confronting dysfunction and injustice. — Andrew4Handel

I'm disgusted with your bigotry. Happy? It's tiresome to read posts from someone who doesn't grasp the concepts of proof and evidence. When you're confronted with the fact the studies you cite don't say what you think they say, you ignore it and post anecdotal evidence. When you're confronted with evidence contrary to your position, your go to reaction is to ignore it. And then we get even more anecdotal evidence, which, in case you've missed that note, isn't evidence. If you don't understand what evidence is or logical proof, then you should begin with a course in logic.

Are you going to spam anecdotal evidence because you realise your arguments are crap?

I see your ability to read hasn't improved. You misrepresent your own research and when I point out biological positivism has been waylaid and that socialisation and psychological theories point to other reasons, I get "but men commit 95% of crime" as if you're explaining anything. Maybe stop starting threads about issues you can't wrap your tiny brain around.

There's people actually studying this, called "criminology" and they've debunked biological positivism a long time ago.The most accepted theories currently all focus on socialisation and psychology, namely:

1. social learning theory
2. the theory key life experiences shape criminal behaviour
3. strain theory
4. edgework theory
5. gender role theory

Reality doesn't care about your outdated, ill-informed, bigoted feelings and hypotheses indeed.

No, it wouldn't because it distracts from the point that this is an irrelevancy.