I’m inherently worth no more than you, and you’re actually worth more than I since, as a female, you’re absolutely necessary to the continuance of the species. I and my group of males can be easily replaced in this regard by a single Eurostud with a tan. Please do not mention this to my wife.

We’re both chunks of carbon spinning around old Sol on this warm mudball, and if either of us cease to exist there’s three billion Chinese who won’t care less. Our ability to affect the lives of others adds value. The ditch-digger is no less a human being than the policeman or the doctor, but when you need a policeman or a doctor the ditch-digger is not a substitute, and when you need a ditch guess who is more valuable than the doctor? Value is relative to need.

Let me give you an thought to ponder. We all want to be safe while we motor around in our automobiles. We all want our kids to be safe, and we’ll spend nearly anything to do that. So why don’t school busses have seat belts?

The answer is purely economic. School busses are made to carry people, and to add the steel necessary to keep the chassis rigid enough to make seat belts effective would increase the weight and cost of the vehicle to the point nobody would purchase one and it would get 2mpg. It’s cheaper to add padding to the seats to protect against the most common traffic accidents and accept the fact that in case a bus falls off a bridge a few kids are going to die. We’ve saved most of the kids by making the school bus a viable means of getting them to and from school, but we’ve made that possible by not making it perfectly safe and accepting that statistically we’re going to have a few deaths that would have been prevented if cost were no object.

How I *feel* about designing a bus that I know will cost a few kids their lives is immaterial. My job is to make certain the most kids get to school and back while minimizing the number that die because safety was too costly. It’s an equation that must balance else I help fewer kids overall but save one or two extreme cases.

Ask Lex about ejection seats that would save a pilot, but only above the knees. That’s a harsh choice to make, re-design the airplane or admit the millions spent in re-design is less costly than a man’s legs. Yet those are the decisions we make every day. Empathy cannot enter into it, else we’ll squander time and treasure for the few and do so much less for the many.

And yes, at the end of the day many an engineer and doctor and medic has looked himself in the mirror, told himself he did the best he could and saved the most, then unscrewed the top of a bottle and flipped the lid away knowing it wasn’t going to be needed again. Empathy is for after the affair is done and you feel you could have done more. Somehow. Maybe…

– Max

The only comment I will make here is that I just don’t get how a peron can do this or even why they would want to:

“I just approach problems without empathy…

Seems to me that the only way to approach any problem is with a large dose of empathy. There should be no worry of the empathy clouding your judgment because I think real empathy just means recognizing that we’re all inter-connected. It isn’t about “handouts” or “something for nothing”, but it is about recognizing that to a point we all are “our brother’s keeper” and that there are certain basics we are all entitled to, again at least to a certain point. You’re not “worth more” than me just because you might have more money than I, no matter how hard you worked for it. And if I am wrong and you are, then our values are so screwed that we might as well just give up the game right now.
I hope I see you on the Flight Deck.

Personally I would rather pay a health insurance premium that allowed me to buy into the civil service health care plans, the kind that has been used by Congress than pay into SS. I don’t have that option and like TSP it would sure be nice if it came from my pre-tax income.

In Singapore they have a thing called the Central Provident fund. Its about 29% of your income and you have no choice-you have to pay into as does your employer. It funds health care, retirement savings and you are allowed to borrow against it to buy a house. (Apartment really-you have to be really rich to have a seperate house).

Like I said its not very democratic but it gets the job done.

Of course the Sings do their damndest to strictly control immigration-something the US probably needs to do.