We are all at the mercy of the bottom quintile. The rules you follow (or are expected to follow) are based on the behavior of the bottom quintile, the taxes you pay are to support the bottom quintile, the greatest risks to your life and property come from the bottom quintile, the dearth of comfortable public spaces is because you have to allow the bottom quintile to be there, and our zoning laws (in the US) are developed for fear of the bottom quintile.
Sometimes I wonder what fraction of America's economic dynamism is based simply on people's desperate desire to make enough money to not have to live around street violence and other kinds of in-your-face social unpleasantness.
Much the biggest chunk of US federal spending is Social Security, the great majority of which is pensions. Pensioners are very variable but they're mostly not in the bottom quintile. Then "nondefense discretionary" spending which is a mixed bag but again is mostly not bottom quintile. After that comes Medicare which again is mostly pensioners. Then defense, which isn't really "to support" any particular subset of the population. Then Medicaid, a lot of which is for poorer people, so I'll give you that one. Then "other" which from the description in the chart is mostly not bottom quintile. Then income security programs, which is probably mostly bottom quintile. If we say that all of Medicaid and income security are "bottom quintile", 10% each of Social Security and Medicare, and 20% each of "nondefense discretionary" and "other", go to support the bottom quintile -- which I think is probably all on the generous side -- then that comes to about $1.56T out of $6.1T of spending, or out of $5.5T if you prefer not to count debt servicing.
The greatest risks to my life and property are from disease (for my life), wear and tear plus accident (for my physical property), and stock market instability (for my investments). None of those things has much to do with the bottom quintile.
In the US, homicides are about 0.02% of deaths, and most of those happen to people within that bottom quintile you evidently resent so much.
The dearth of comfortable public spaces is because you have to allow the bottom quintile to be there and not-bottom-quintile people like you want to make those spaces as unwelcoming to them as possible even at the cost of making them less comfortable for everyone. And also because your society has failed to provide the bottom quintile with better places for the things you don't like them doing than those public spaces.
It may well be true that zoning laws are developed for fear of the bottom quintile. You might want to consider the possibility that the fear is as much of a problem there as the bottom quintile itself.
> The rules I'm expected to follow based on the bottom quintile are generally rules that are no trouble for me to follow.
This is not just laws, but stores putting everything behind plastic barriers to stop theft. Or "customer only" rules for bathrooms. Literally the article in question is discussing this type of rule.
As someone else described, the bottom quintile decides the overall level of trust in a society.
> I think bottom quintile refers to the worst people not necessarily the poor or whatever.
Yes. In the UK the rate of incest is increasing due to migration from Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan. An NHS Genomics Education Programme blog in Sept 2025 acknowledged the risk of birth defects doubling, but cited the benefits of 'stronger family support', 'economic advantages' and argued against a ban in favour of 'counselling and education'.
Despite the vast majority of the British public not participating in incest, the NHS seemed to think it is right that they pay for the care of the people that do.
A common shared resource - the NHS - is exploited by the worst people (who value economic advantages over their child's health) and everyone suffers.
Honestly one of the most egregious things I've read about the NHS - actively promoting behavior that makes the lives of innocent children unnecessarily harder, and forcing everyone to contribute to supporting frankly disgusting behavior.
Readers may judge for themselves how accurate the description above is.
A few further remarks.
--1-- Many many many things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources are not illegal.
You have the right to try to fix a broken tile on your roof by climbing out of your window without any sort of safety equipment, even though you might fall and need medical treatment, even in countries where the government will pay some or all of your hospital bills.
You have the right to eat too much or too little, or to drink a lot of alcohol or smoke a lot of cigarettes, even though in the long run these things will be bad for your health, which as well as possibly requiring expensive medical care will also make you a less economically productive member of society.
You have the right (in most places, including the UK and the US) to agitate for fascism or communism, even though if your agitation succeeds the resulting government will probably be very bad on net.
--2-- "Some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost saying that X should maybe not be made illegal" is quite a long way from "the NHS thinks [any particular thing]".
--3-- The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do". Indeed, the people who might need extra care as a result of first-cousin marriage are not the people who enter into those marriages, but some of their children.
If your preference is for such children not to receive NHS healthcare, you're punishing the children for the actions of their parents. I think this is generally considered bad policy.
Thanks, I wasn't able to find an archive. I'm sure you noticed the quotes were accurate and I thank you for the support.
> Many many many things that are unwise and can increase pressure on communities' resources are not illegal.
Nobody said they were. The argument was that cousin marriage should be illegal since it which doubles the rate of birth defects as the genomics article mentions.
> "Some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost saying that X should maybe not be made illegal" is quite a long way from "the NHS thinks [any particular thing]".
But the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal is very far from "some guy working for the NHS wrote a blogpost", as I'm sure you're aware.
> The article wasn't at all about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do"
Yes, it was. Not banning incest marriages increases the risk of birth defects.
> the actual thing they published (and unpublished shortly after, after backlash stoked by the right-wing press):
I'm sure you're as thankful for the right wing press for raising awareness of the matter, and likewise am disappointed about the left wing press for ignoring it.
No. But what the NHS blog thing said was that this particular thing shouldn't be illegal, and you appear to be arguing that that's bad because it's unwise and can increase pressure on the community's resources. And I am pointing out that in general the bar for making things illegal is, and should be, higher than that.
> the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal
That is not what happened. Someone wrote a blogpost saying "here's a thing that isn't illegal; some people are saying it should be illegal; here are some arguments for and against". That differs from "proposing that incest not be illegal" in the following three ways: (1) "proposing that X not be illegal" gives the strong impression that X is currently illegal, whereas in fact the thing in question is currently legal; (2) the relevant proposition is not "that incest not be illegal" but "that first-cousin marriage not be illegal"; first-cousin marriage is not incest in UK law, nor in many other jurisdictions' law, and no one[1] is even slightly proposing that incest in general should be legalized; (3) the blog post does not take the position that first-cousin marriage should definitely be legal. It does quote some other people and organizations that think it shouldn't be made illegal.
[1] Well, I bet someone somewhere is. "All universal generalizations are false". But no such proposal is made or discussed in the blog post in question.
I do agree that it seems likely that the author of the blogpost thinks that it wouldn't be a good idea to illegalize first-cousin marriage; but there is an important distinction between "putting up a blog post that seems on the whole not favourable to doing X" and "proposing that X not be done".
> Yes it was. Not banning incest marriages increases the risk of birth defects.
It probably does. (Though you might recall, having now read the article, that it points out an expert's opinion that most of the increase in birth-defect risks in these communities comes not from the existence of first-cousin marriages in particular but from the general practice of marriages between somewhat-related people, which banning first-cousin marriages would not change.)
But that's an entirely separate matter from whether the blogpost was about whether the NHS should pay for the resulting birth defects. Suppose the UK bans first-cousin marriages, and some people have children with their first cousins anyway, and some of the resulting children have birth defects. Should the NHS treat those children? I say: of course it should. Perhaps you would prefer to let the children suffer or die without whatever help the healthcare system could have offered them. But the blogpost doesn't address that at all. It isn't even slightly about who the NHS should treat.
> I'm sure you're as thankful [...]
Nope. The blogpost in question seems pretty sensible to me, and in any case its presence or absence surely makes zero difference to whether first-cousin marriages actually get made illegal or not, and to whether any given pair of first cousins actually get into one or not. I doubt the right-wing media feeding frenzy did either very much good or very much harm directly, but I bet it helped to stoke the widespread hate and fear of immigrants which seems like it might lead to the next government being run by Reform, who I firmly expect to be incompetent buffoons who will do a great deal of harm to the UK whether or not their positions on social wedge-issues like immigration, transgender people, etc., have any merit.
As for the left-wing press, there isn't much of a left-wing press in this country; I suppose there's the Guardian and the Mirror but both are pretty milquetoast (which on the whole I am glad of; I think the more extreme forms of leftism are mostly misguided).
> The blogpost in question seems pretty sensible to me
Why do you think allowing incest and increasing birth defects among children is sensible?
I personally imagine it is things like widespread organised rape that was ignored by the police for many years, and a steady increase in Islamic terrorist attacks, that has led to people not disliking the immigration system that allowed the rape and terrorism. But perhaps you are right, people that disagree with incest are at fault.
> Why do you think allowing incest and increasing birth defects among children is sensible?
Well, first of all, that isn't in fact what I said. I'll come back to that later. Anyway:
As I said in an earlier comment, not everything bad should be illegal. First-cousin marriage is (or at least seems to me) a bad idea; it seems very unlikely to me that its benefits outweigh its costs. But in something that's trying to be a free society we very frequently allow people to do things that are bad ideas.
Do you think it should be illegal to have children when over the age of 35? That causes increased birth defects, I think about as many per instance as first-cousin marriage does. Do you think it should be illegal to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol while pregnant? Ashkenazi Jewish people have a very substantially increased risk of some genetic problems; should they be forbidden to have children?
I dunno, maybe you do think all those things should be illegal, in which case there's no inconsistency in calling for first-cousin marriage also to be illegal. But I'm guessing you don't, for reasons along the lines of "it's usually better to allow people to do things they want rather than having the government intervene heavy-handedly in their lives". That is also the main reason why it might be a bad idea to make first-cousin marriage illegal.
With that said: I repeat, I did not in fact say that "allowing incest and increasing birth defects among children is sensible". I said that the blogpost is sensible. There is not a valid inference from "document X is sensible" to "everything that document X, overall, seems to be in favour of is sensible".
The blogpost looks at arguments for and against banning first-cousin marriage. It doesn't, explicitly, take a definite position on that question, though it does seem like its author thinks that first-cousin marriage shouldn't be made illegal. I think it's a sensible blogpost; I would think the same if its author had the opposite apparent leaning, if it had the same overall shape of presenting reasonable arguments on both sides. If I think about the matter some more and decide that actually banning first-cousin marriage would on net be a good idea, I expect I will still think the blogpost is pretty sensible.
> I personally imagine it is things like widespread organised rape that was ignored by the police for many years
The Rotherham scandal was scandalous, I agree, and it seems likely that the police deliberately avoided investigating properly because they were afraid of being called racists, and all of that is very bad. But I don't see how you get from there to "therefore the British immigration system is bad". Consider another scandal involving a lot of sexual abuse of minors: the one around Jeffrey Epstein. The people involved in that were mostly (not exclusively, but mostly) rich middle-aged white men. Do we conclude that we should be trying to keep rich middle-aged white men out of the country? Most people don't. Rather, we say: here was a particular network of people, most of whom happened to be rich middle-aged white men, doing Very Bad Things; we should deal with those particular people, and we should improve our systems for spotting Very Bad Things, and if some of those got overlooked because bits of those systems are too generous to rich middle-aged white men then we should change that.
Likewise, in Rotherham there was a particular network of people, most of whom happened to be Pakistani immigrants or children thereof, doing Very Bad Things; we should deal with those particular people, and we should improve our systems for spotting Very Bad Things, and if some of those got overlooked because bits of those systems are too generous to Pakistani immigrants and their children then we should change that.
But being a rich white middle-aged man, or a poor Pakistani young man, isn't some kind of guarantee of being a sexual abuser, and we would do no one any favours by attaching the crimes of the individuals to the whole group and saying: let's get all the rich white middle-aged men out of the country. Or all the poor Pakistani young men.
(In both cases you could make an argument that it wasn't all coincidence that the people came from those particular demographics. E.g., if your mode of sexual abuse involves sequestering the victims on a private island then it's much easier to do if you're a billionaire; some Pakistani communities have traditionally had very high rates of child-marriage and maybe those traditions make men from those communities more likely to become child abusers or something. But in both cases we can also observe that there are an awful lot of rich white middle-aged men and poor Pakistani young men who somehow manage not to abuse any children at all, and conclude that it's probably better to target the crime itself rather than some broad demographic within which we found a bunch of criminals.)
> a steady increase in Islamic terrorist attacks
Yeah, maybe getting up to an average of one event a year, with a total (coming mostly from a couple of particularly severe cases) of something like 100 deaths from terrorism in the last 25 years. Four deaths a year! That's almost one third as many as people dying from having their clothes catch fire, and almost a quarter as many as people drowning in their bathtubs!
Obviously 100 deaths from terrorism is 100 too many. (And 100 deaths from people drowning in their bathtubs is 100 too many.) But, with terrorism as with bathtubs, the number is actually not all that large, and it doesn't make a great justification for large-scale social change such as radical overhaul of the immigration system.
(It does make a great tool for stirring up xenophobia, though.)
> Well, first of all, that isn't in fact what I said
Yes it was. You said a blog post the advocated incest being illegal was sensible. It was the only actual point you made, amid a long rant about:
- how the law doesn’t define cousin incest as incest (this has no bearing on whether cousin incest should be illegal)
- that cousin incest is legal right now (which has no bearing on whether it should be illegal in the future)
- that it was the political right that pointed out the horrifying article (which is apparently a complaint for some unstated reason and also has no bearing on whether cousin incest should be illegal)
I explained in some detail why "I think the blogpost is sensible" is not the same thing as "I think this particular thing that the blogpost argues might be a good idea is a sensible thing".
Your response is to ignore all of that and just reiterate "you said the blogpost was sensible, therefore you think this particular thing is sensible". The very thing I had just been explaining that I think is an error.
I am not sure whether you're not reading what I write, or unable to understand what I write (presumably, if so, not out of sheer mental incapacity but because politics makes idiots of us all), or deliberately misrepresenting what I write, but whether it's any of those or some other thing I haven't thought of it's making it seem increasingly unlikely that any actual fruitful discussion is possible.
> It was the only actual point you made
Of course this is utterly false, not least because your description of my "long rant" (a characterization that obviously I dispute, but no matter) you mention several other points I made. I assume you mean something like "the only point you made that I consider relevant", in which case we have different views of what is relevant.
> how the law doesn't define cousin incest as incest (this has no bearing on whether cousin incest should be illegal)
It has bearing on whether or not it is reasonable to do as you have been doing and simply call it "incest" on every occasion, thus turning "I think a blogpost arguing that first-cousin marriage should not necessarily be made illegal was, on the whole quite sensible" into "you think allowing incest is sensible".
> that cousin incest is legal right now (which has no bearing on whether it should be illegal in the future)
It has bearing on whether or not it is reasonable to do as you have been doing and write about suggestions that the thing not be made illegal as if they were suggesting that the thing be made legal. Those are quite different things: just as we don't try to make every bad thing illegal because making things illegal has costs, we also don't try to reverse every bad law because changing the law has costs.
> that it was the political right that pointed out the horrifying article
Oh, come on. I mentioned that the article was retracted soon after it was published (which is obviously relevant since you were trying to cite it as somehow representative of official attitudes in the UK). It seemed relevant why it was retracted, so I gave an eight-word summary of why. And now you purport to list the topics of my "long rant", and one of the three things you mention is the fact that that incidental eight-word summary included the words "right-wing".
If you don't like it that my comments are devoting space to complaining about your dishonest rhetoric, then perhaps you should use less dishonest rhetoric. If instead of "the NHS Genomic Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal" you had written "a post on the NHS Genomic Education Programme's blog exploring arguments for and against making first-cousin marriage illegal, and evidently leaning toward not making it illegal" -- which is the nearest not-actively-misleading thing I can come up with to what you wrote -- then I wouldn't have had to say any of those things you complained about.
Of course, if you'd written the honest version rather than the dishonest version then it would have been obvious that it didn't give much support for your attempt to represent immigrants in the UK as "the worst people", so I guess that was never really an option.
> I explained in some detail why "I think the blogpost is sensible" is not the same thing as "I think this particular thing that the blogpost argues might be a good idea is a sensible thing".
Stating that a blog post with an argument is sensible normally indicates you feel the argument itself is sensible. If you feel otherwise, communicate better.
> your description of my "long rant" (a characterization that obviously I dispute, but no matter) you mention several other points I made.
But they weren't points, they were irrelevant offtopic facts as discussed.
> whether or not it is reasonable to do as you have been doing and simply call it "incest"
Fucking your cousin is incest. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.
> incidental eight-word summary included the words "right-wing"
You didn't mention the public furore, or the press in general. You specifically mentioned the right wing press. Obviously you thought it was relevant. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.
> we don't try to make every bad thing illegal because making things illegal has costs
Yes, but making choices that cause birth defects to double obviously has a massive cost that outweighs the incredible benefits of cousin fucking. Which you know.
> you were trying to cite it as somehow representative of official attitudes in the UK
It was representive of government attitudes: the NHS Genomics Education Programme is part of the government. You're intelligent enough to know that too so I'll go back to the point made in the other thread you replied on and leave it there: https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918
> Stating that a blog post with an argument is sensible normally indicates you feel the argument itself is sensible.
Yup. I feel that the argument in the blogpost is sensible. That is not the same thing as thinking that a particular policy that the blogpost leans toward is a sensible policy.
> If you feel otherwise, communicate better.
Good idea! I might try writing a couple of paragraphs distinguishing what I actually said and meant from the similar-sounding but very different thing you said I said. Oh, wait. I did, and you proceeded to ignore it.
> Fucking your cousin is incest. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.
There are two separate points here. Let's begin with the one you're presenting as if it's the only one, namely whether first-cousin marriage is incest. That's a question of definitions; let's see what the dictionaries say. The Oxford English Dictionary: "The crime of sexual intercourse or cohabitation between persons related within the degrees within which marriage is prohibited; sexual commerce of near kindred." Marrying, or having sex with, your first cousin in the UK is not the first of those things; whether it's the second depends on what counts as "near". (I think it's very reasonable of the OED to leave that unresolved; the point is that what counts as "incest" for a given person will depend on what feels to them like "near kindred".) Chambers says: sex between people closely enough related that marriage is prohibited, so fucking your cousin in the UK is not incest by that definition. Merriam-Webster says the same. Wiktionary: "between close relatives, especially immediate family members and sometimes first cousins", so they're on the fence.
So: no, actually, there is nothing like general agreement that fucking your cousin is incest.
However, that isn't actually the key point here; my own inclination is to define incest (outside specifically legal contexts) broadly enough that it does include first cousins. The reason I object to the way you've been wording things isn't that I think the thing in question isn't incest, it's that there's a difference between claiming something about incest and claiming something about a particular variety of incest.
Specifically, you'd talked about "the NHS Genomics Education Programme proposing that incest not be illegal" and one of the many things I found misleading about that was that the blogpost in question was not talking about incest in general but about one particular case of it.
A proposal "that incest not be illegal" would mean, e.g., permitting marriage between brothers and sisters, or fathers and daughters. No such proposal was made, or considered, or so much as gestured at in the blogpost we are discussing.
> Obviously you thought it was relevant. You know that. Don't pretend otherwise.
Of course I thought it was relevant, otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned it. I'm not pretending anything, and I'm getting very bored of your baseless accusations of dishonesty.
You called my comment "a long rant about" three things. One of those things was represented in that "long rant" by, in total, one word in a throwaway remark. Yes, I thought that word was relevant. No, it was not in any way one of the main topics of what I wrote.
> Yes, but making choices that cause birth defects to double obviously has a massive cost
Like the cost of allowing people to have children when over the age of 35. Do you want that to be illegal? (I have asked you this question before. Of course you have ignored it.)
> that outweighs the incredible benefits of cousin fucking.
Here is a complete list of things I have said in this discussion or elsewhere about benefits of cousin fucking.
(That was the list.)
> It was representative of government attitudes [...]
It was a blogpost. The full extent of what anything in it tells us about government attitudes is: there's someone, working for the government, who thinks X and doesn't mind saying so on a blog with the NHS's name attached to it.
That's not nothing. The opinions of people who work for an entity have some connection with the entity's own opinions, in so far as it has them. But they're not the same thing. You can get a sense of where they agree and disagree if, for instance, some sort of public outcry draws attention to the thing that someone wrote so that the institution has to decide whether to stand by it or not. In this case, the institution decided not to stand by it.
No two of the following things are the same. (1) The opinions of some random staffer at the NHS Genomics Education Programme. (2) The opinions that that staffer thinks worthy of inclusion in a blogpost. (3) The opinions of the NHS Genomics Education Programme. (4) The opinions of the NHS. (5) The opinions of the UK government.
In this case, it seems clear that the random staffer was not in favour of making first-cousin marriage illegal. (That's #1.) The blogpost they wrote didn't actually say "first-cousin marriage should not be made illegal", though it also didn't go out of its way to hide its author's opinion. So #2 is already a bit ambiguous. Once the attention of the NHSGEP's management was drawn to the thing, they retracted the blogpost. (That's #3. Of course you can argue about how far they retracted it because it really didn't match the NHSGEP's collective opinion, and how far they just wanted that opinion not to be visible.) #4 and #5 aren't even in the picture.
For the benefit of anyone who prefers not to follow that link: it complains that a lot of "leftist discourse" consists of people pretending not to understand things.
At no point in this discussion have I pretended not to understand you or the points you're making. For that matter, I'm not sure I've ever suggested or implied that I don't understand you or the points you're making. I just don't agree with them.
There absolutely is a rhetorical pattern where someone acts like they don't understand something, perhaps in order to make the person they're talking to have to make explicit something that they would rather not say in so many words. Sometimes it's a reasonable thing to do. Sometimes it's just being a dick. But I don't think I've done anything of the sort anywhere in this discussion.
There is, unfortunately, also a rhetorical pattern where someone insists that obviously the person they're talking to knows that they're right and is just pretending otherwise. That one's pretty much always just being a dick, and I'm afraid it's what you've done a lot of in the comment I'm replying to right now.
> no point in this discussion have I pretended not to understand you or the points you're making
You pretended that whether the law allows incest right now is relevant about whether incest marriages should be illegal, you pretended that the legal definition of incest was relevant to whether cousin marriage should be illegal, and you pretended you didn't know if a government agency publishing something is a government opinion. You pretended that there was a cost of making incest illegal as if there was no cost of doing otherwise and pretended in your most recent mesage that you didn't do that.
> For the benefit of anyone who prefers not to follow that link
You need to read a wider set of media. This isn't helping.
> You pretended that whether the law allows incest right now is relevant about whether incest marriages should be illegal,
I did not. I already explained why I brought that up, and it was not because it makes a difference to whether such marriages should be illegal.
(Well, almost. As I mentioned elsewhere, there are costs to changing a law, so actually whether something is legal now does have some effect on whether it should be legal next year as well. But that wasn't my point.)
> you pretended that the legal definition of incest was relevant to whether cousin marriage should be illegal,
I did not. I already explained why I brought that up, and it was not because it makes a difference to whether such marriages should be illegal.
(General point: there may be only one thing that you want to talk about, but that doesn't oblige your interlocutor to talk about only that thing. And, more specifically, if in talking about that one thing you say things that are misleading, it's reasonable for the other guy to point out that you did so.)
> and you pretended you didn't know if a government agency publishing something is a government opinion.
I did not. I disagree with you about whether everything posted on a blog belonging to a government department "is a government opinion". There is no pretence involved.
> You pretended that there was a cost of making incest illegal
(There is, obviously. Also, I remark once again that "making incest illegal" is not an accurate characterization.)
> as if there was no cost of doing otherwise
I absolutely did not; I acknowledged that first-cousin marriage is a bad idea and that it would be better if people didn't do it and that it increases the frequency of genetic problems in resulting children. Saying "doing X has costs" is not remotely the same thing as saying "not doing X has no costs". It's a tradeoff, like everything else in life.
> and pretended in your most recent message that you didn't do that.
I did not.
> You need to read a wider set of media.
Maybe I do, maybe not, but you have absolutely no information about what set of media I read.
You need to stop translating everything you read into the stupidest possible one-bit black-and-white "everything about X is good" / "everything about X is bad" version of itself.
You are (and perhaps the other person also is) mixing up three questions.
1. Does doing X have costs? 2. If so, and if X is done, who should pay those costs? 3. Should we make X illegal?
In the present case, first-cousin marriage does have costs, one of which is that it increases the number of children born with genetic problems that make their lives worse and (if the government pays for medical treatment to mitigate them) costs money. So the answer to the first question is yes, and so far as I can tell no one disagrees.
If some pairs of first cousins marry, and their children have genetic problems, then some of the costs are paid by those children. In a country with socialized healthcare like the UK, the default is that some other costs -- those of helping the children to have longer and/or better lives -- are paid by the government, and hence by everyone's taxes.
You might want to argue that those costs are the fault of the particular people who entered into those marriages and they should have to pay them. Unfortunately, in many cases they probably can't afford to do that. You might want to identify some community that they belong to and somehow make them pay, but that's pretty difficult to do; the UK isn't set up to levy different taxes on (say) Muslims or people whose ancestors lived in Bangladesh or whatever, and on the whole that seems obviously a good thing.
You might want to argue that in any case the nation shouldn't be paying, and that the NHS should refuse to treat whatever problems those children might have. In that case it will be the children who suffer; I personally am not a fan of making children suffer for their parents' bad decisions, but some people are.
So the second question is certainly one that we could argue about. But the blogpost we are discussing never touches on that question.
What the blogpost is about is the third question. Answering that is a matter of weighing the costs of X against the costs of making X illegal (loss of personal freedoms every time anything is made illegal; making some communities feel persecuted; loss of whatever benefits, if any, communities in which first-cousin marriage is practised get from it; making X happen illegally rather than legally, as opposed to making X not happen).
That again is something that could reasonably be argued about, and the blogpost does argue about it. But, I repeat, it's an entirely separate question from the second one.
So I continue to assert that the article wasn't about whether "they should pay for the care of the people that do". It didn't discuss that question at all. It discussed the entirely separate question of what measures if any should be taken to make there be fewer "people that do".
> You might want to argue that those costs are the fault of the particular people who entered into those marriages
Yes, hence wanting to ban incest marriages.
> and they should have to pay them. Unfortunately, in many cases they probably can't afford to do that.
No, I and the other commenter are not arguing that. Make incest marriages illegal in the UK, make incest married people ineligible to migrate to the UK. It's very simple. This thread is begininning to resemble the "left wing discourse" quote so I'll stop here.
My impression was that OP was using it rather fuzzily, conflating "poor" and "bad" and "unpleasant to be around" and whatever other notions of "bottom" might be floating in the air, in the service of a general air of contempt toward Those People. I took it to mean wealth when talking about taxes, to mean behaviour when talking about laws and risks to life and property, and to be deliberately ambiguous when talking about public spaces and zoning laws.
In any case, neither the factual veracity of the claims nor their support for whatever policies OP could plausibly have had in mind seem to improve on taking "bottom quintile" to mean specifically "worst-behaved quintile". Notably, "the taxes you pay are to support the bottom quintile" is even more false if it means "the worst people" rather than "the poorest people".
Incidentally, my comment above is currently sitting at -1. I vigorously endorse everyone's right to downvote things they think are bad, but if anyone reading this downvoted my comment because they thought it was wrong rather than because they disliked it politically or because they didn't want to see this sort of argument on HN, I would be interested to know what they think I was incorrect about. (The trouble with downvotes as a signal for improvement for authors is that it's often very unclear what specific problems they are trying to point at.)
> My impression was that OP was using it rather fuzzily, conflating "poor" and "bad" and "unpleasant to be around" and whatever other notions of "bottom" might be floating in the air, in the service of a general air of contempt toward Those People.
That assumption says a lot more about you that it does the person you were responding to.
It's a guess rather than an assumption -- I wouldn't be astonished if it turned out to be a wrong guess -- but there was a reason for it: some of the comment seemed to require "bottom" to be about wealth, and other bits seemed to require it to be about behaviour. But, again, I could very well be wrong.
Would you care to suggest a concrete definition of "bottom quintile" according to which the claims made by black6 are true?
Software engineers have to understand that they aren't the only flavor of engineer, and even if "everyone is a [software] engineer" was the intended statement, it demonstrates excessive hubris. Many real engineers do work on systems with failure modes that kill people.
Sorry... It's the corporation at the end of Marshall Brain's story Manna that runs a society where no ones actions are private. Everything is surveilled.
We were on our way to Annual Training for the National Guard on a charter bus. I was seated close to the front and could see where we were heading, and knew that we were leaving the small town where the garrison was, getting on the interstate, and heading to the post across the state. I saw the sign on the side of the road pointing straight ahead to the interstate entrance/exit. The bus driver's GPS said "Turn right," and he turned right without thought, right into a neighborhood with narrow streets and deep ditches on either side. He couldn't navigate the turns in the bus to get us back out, and eventually had to back out the way he came. Thanks, Tom Tom.
Amusingly both this and the opposite happen semi-frequently to us. Sometimes the maps apps have the location where people most often get dropped off and that’s superior because the signs are mechanically true but also useless (next 3 exits to the XYZ museum, but the first two lead to the one that’s closed most days which isn’t mentioned on the exit sign).
They shouldn't be connected is the point of the article. All PLC and DCS manufacturers are constantly working on threat mitigation and pushing out updates to address vulnerabilities. It's on the Process Controls team to decide what is an actual threat that requires patching.
"I don't know" could also mean they couldn't be bothered. It can't possibly be better than getting a response from someone who lifted a finger to help find an answer for you.
> "I don't know" could also mean they couldn't be bothered
That's exactly what asking an LLM means, except admitting you don't know something is respectful. If you think someone should know something that they don't, then that's a totally separate issue between you and them (and/or their manager).
> It can't possibly be better than getting a response from someone who lifted a finger to help find an answer for you.
Someone lifting a finger for their colleague, when working with them is literally their job? Wow, what a sacrifice, like sending a link to lmgtfy. So helpful! Will the result actually be an "answer", or just hallucinated AI slop? Who cares!
I seem to remember something about the scientist being distraught because physics didn't make sense, not because she was having trouble getting clean data.
That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken.
As someone who has looked for inconsistencies with the Standard Model for a while now, and seen every measurement land bang-on the prediction, I can say that I would love any deviation that said our existing theories are broken.
And sure, crank up the detector noise and we'd be sad, but ask any grad student: having your apparatus suddenly spit out garbage data is just an average day. I've known plenty of scientists with psychological problems but it's never coming from their data.
>That also stuck with me as weird: there are any number of places you could sabotage a precision physics experiment by injecting tiny amounts of noise, which would drive the scientists to think they were bad scientists. Instead they thought science was broken.
I think in the context of the book, the specific means of sabotage was something close to impossible to figure out, so I can see the despair of checking every conceivable explanation, coming up empty, and making an inference about reality itself. And it wasn't a kind of peripheral, controllable amount of noise, it was a complete global sabotage of all particle physics, on a scale that amounted to a global catastrophe rather than just another blip in the daily grind.
I think one thing that really hooked me on the book series in the beginning was being able to appreciate the kind of cosmic despair one scientist was sharing during the pool table conversation, because thinking big about meaning and order in the universe, and how important the universes' intelligibility is to our relationship with it, informed by data, is a synthesis of things that really matter to me as a reader - taking the intersection of science and meaning seriously.
I don't think that would be enough for plausibly explaining particular scientists offing themselves, but the psychology of someone to whom that kind of question matters that much, which is very much the heart and soul of what drives my interest in non-fiction reading, seems tragically underrepresented as a driving motivation in fiction which I think is terribly unfortunate. But sci-fi sometimes cares about it, and sometimes a lot.
