Patriarchal bullshit.

Sorry, but you’ve got it backwards. Fairness says we should allow women to serve in combat until it’s proved they can’t handle it.

Unconstitutional.

A proposal to amend the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in both houses, or else a national convention requested by two-thirds of the state legislatures. After that, actually passing the amendment requires approval of three-fourths of the state legislatures or state ratifying conventions in three-fourths of the states.

Even worse, for your idea, is that there’s no provision for holding a national referendum in the US Constitution. To even hold one would require an amendment providing it.

I think you’re ignoring (or seriously undervaluing) some of the benefits in your implied cost-benefit analysis.

There’s no doubt, for example, that slavery came out positive on the financial balance for the antebellum South. It started with the cultivation of rice, which was hugely labor intensive and simply could not be done mechanically, so turning labor into capital (by declaring certain workers to be property), it made “economic sense”.

But economics isn’t (just) about money. The thing that economists are actually interested in optimizing is “utility”, and that’s a lot more complicated than mere money.

But an absence of money can be a serious obstacle to happiness.

If you have money, you can certainly improve lots of things about your life — you can be healthier, you have leisure to explore avocations, you can even buy a broader range of interactions with others, leading to love and family, if that’s your thing.

Money, well spent, is an enabler of happiness.

The issue should have been covered in the surrogacy contract.

In my mind, this constitutes grounds for the adoptive parents to terminate the contract which means the right to abort falls back on the mother — she can clearly choose to terminate if she wants, however the adoptive parents no longer have any obligation to adopt or otherwise care for it, so the hard question comes into play if she chooses not to abort.

The problem is that her alternatives suck. She can bear the child and take responsibility for raising it, or she can give it up for adoption, at which point the state must take responsibility for raising it. Neither bodes well for the child.

Why is that “significant”? Adding together married couples, unmarried straight couples, both straight and gay, there are around seventy million “domestic situations”. The police definition of “domestic violence” includes people who live together for any reason — not just sex, so any sort of roommate situation should count, too.

That’s less than two incidents per hundred thousand “domiciles”. I’d call that insignificant.

No. I’m saying that if domestic violence is your problem, gun control isn’t a solution. Homicide is quite rare in domestic violence, and there are many better ways to spend our efforts.

You miss the point. It’s not about making a decision about a particular situation. It’s essentially asking, after the woman has sustained twenty years of abuse, whether she wouldn’t have been better off having died a year into it.

You misunderstand the choice — it’s not between death and a miserable life with hope that it might get better. I’m not asking this from the perspective of someone making the decision in the moment, I’m asking this from the “omniscient” perspective where the outcomes are certain.

And you don’t get to make the call. It’s a legitimate open question that each person would have to decide for themselves.

And you need to factor in that a gun control law isn’t going to change much about the miserable condition these people find themselves in. Is a murder-suicide worse than another fifteen years of poverty and beatings? I wouldn’t think so.

Beyond that, virtually every case of domestic violence has warning signs. We’d be better off spending the money to train police to take these warning signs seriously and to train social workers to intervene.

Recent Wall Street Journal coverage¹ has revived interest in Dr. John Ioannidis’ 2005 PLoS article, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False."² Somehow, I missed it the first time around, but this time the paper got me to thinking. In short, I don’t buy his argument; I think the whole foundation is wrong.

Background

First, for those who haven’t read his paper, or don’t follow the math, let me outline what he’s saying.