What I want to know is, what is the value versus risk of these things? How much profit do they make, really? If they're seriously overcharging, isn't that simply an opportunity for a competitor to substantially underprice them? And, if their margins aren't all that, then are they really exploitation?

I guess, in some cases, that's a lot like asking if selling an addictive drug is an exploit. To what degree do we allow people's worse instincts to screw them over? Freedom, or government?

Hmm.

I think women's unwillingness to date down far, far outstrips any reluctance on the male side. With that in mind, I'm vaguely curious if Hillary's election would be bad for the Clinton marriage.

Does anyone really think a Republican primary candidate is worried that "he will be accused of exploiting racial and class stereotypes"? That's practically the point.

Well, at least you're consistently against IP, Mr. Manjoo.

I don't see this as being any different from, say, Rowling not making anything from the movies. That's exactly where it would lead, of course. If she doesn't have the right to license her own work, then why would the studios bother giving her a chunk of the profits?

Curious, though, isn't it, how common-sense ideas like conservation, reducing consumption (yes, that means buying less stuff), and the big bugaboo - population control - languish?

I would hardly say that conservation and reducing consumption are languishing ideas. Population control relatively languishes because the U.S. under Bush is fundamentally against promoting birth control and women's rights in under-developed countries (and, indeed, in the U.S. itself), which is the only meaningful avenue of world population control.

I wonder what kind of carbon footprint his personal fortune has?

Zero. He's rich enough to purchase green power where its available and carbon offsets for the rest, and does.

His critics like to point out how much he spends on energy, but of course he spends so much precisely because he insists on doing so as greenly as possible.

But you're not, like, bitter or anything. ;)

Seriously, is there a transcript available? More to the point, if you're going to go in this direction, please provide text as well for those of us who can't and/or won't listen literally.

Seriously, all that over the A380's little forehead? The A380 may have evidence of a braincase, but the B747 is a hideously deformed mutant which should never have survived the intense radiation that must have corrupted it in the womb.

No offense, but I can't see anything in your statements that looks like reality rather than some sort of weird, twisted nostalgia tinged by anger at the very existence of a new kid on the block.

...Then, 48, then a week, and before you know it, they'll pass a nine-month waiting period. They're just trying to run out the clock.

Off-hand, I'd guess you learned more from your childhood than just how to be meek. You also learned (from watching your father) how to be abusive. These are two things you learned from your childhood, so they're deeply buried in your instincts - upon overcoming the one, of course it's the other that comes out of you next.

It is quite possible to be assertive without exploding, screaming, and/or otherwise carrying on and losing control. In fact, it's almost always more effective to be calm and firm.

I'm highly dubious that LW has any place telling his girlfriend's high school senior daughter what not to do, especially given that the mom in question doesn't have a problem with it.

...why do you delete polite letters that disagree with you?

When you write in to a comments section with nothing to do with what you're supposedly commenting on, and instead promote a separate blog, you are nothing but a spammer. Frankly, I think you're lucky your stuff isn't routinely deleted out of hand.

Thank you for your reply, melthough. I absolutely agree that the hardcore religious right is never going to be convinced by the sort of nuance we're discussing here; they'll simply change the goalposts, and like you said they're already arguing that normal embryonic death is natural and therefore there's nothing wrong with it.

However, I'm perfectly willing to hammer that point and force them to engage on those terms.

Right now, as we've seen right here, they're making fundamentally false claims that NFP is superior to the pill in that the pill causes embryos to die and NFP doesn't. There are people (possibly LOTS of people, some of them even atheists) that are far more likely to buy that argument than to buy into the hair-splitting of: "well, when we kill embryos the old way it's okay but if we kill fewer embryos with 'unnatural' technology that's NOT okay".

I think it's better if the discourse includes the fact that embryo death is a common, natural occurrence that can frequently occur without ever being noticed. Then, the religious folks are left arguing not that technology is wrong because of its consequences, but that technology is wrong simply for being technology (this is, of course, exactly what they believe deep down). That's an argument they'll lose most of their adherents with. Their followers can relatively easily be convinced that "murder" is wrong (not exactly a stretch, right?), but aren't going to so easily accept that progress itself is inherently wrong.

Would Glenn Sacks and/or his PR person please stop spamming the comments with unrelated plugs?

A better treatment than I could give:

http://jme.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/32/6/355

What on earth are you talking about, Pyrian?

There's only a relatively brief window of time after ovulation during which the uterine wall will accept implantation of the embryo. The embryo can still fertilize after that window, but you can't get pregnant. NFP as now practiced is likely to routinely result in embryo death due to failure to implant.