I can't answer the question framed that way but what i would say is that the key for me is sentient brain activity. A brain developed enough to have some sense of self or basic awareness and not just reaction to stimuli.

I look at similarly with people in vegetative States and where the family and hospital can opt to terminate that persons life.


"life" to me means more than a meat bag with potential, if left alone, one day.

BTW I consider my pro life personally, outside some extreme circumstances, but fully pro choice policy wise for others.

I'm not sure I would say babies have a "sense of self". When very young they seem to think if something doesn't hurt them, it doesn't hurt anyone else. If they have a sense of self, it seems to include more than just themselves. They don't recognize themselves in a mirror until age 2.

"Ethicist" Peter Singer is fine with infanticide in some extreme cases.

That is Step 2 of the Master Race Program. (Step 1 is abortion-on-demand.)

Margaret Sanger promoted eugenics as a means to help rid society of "undesireables" like "colored people."

I do not think you are defining sentience or sense of self in the correct way as it does not mean reasoning skills.

Quote:

Sentience means having the capacity to have feelings. This requires a level of awareness and cognitive ability. There is evidence for sophisticated cognitive concepts and for both positive and negative feelings in a wide range of nonhuman animals. The abilities necessary for sentience appear at a certain stage in humans, as in other species, and brain damage can result in those abilities being lost so not all humans are sentient. Sentient animals include fish and other vertebrates, as well as some molluscs and decapod crustaceans...

cite

That would be okay and we would be very foolish to expect anyhting different. The problem is that the rating agencies didn't care if their models capture the risk

Oh, I definitely wasn't trying to talk about sentience, that just means the ability to feel; I believe all animals have that. But I think babies have less of a sense of self than adult chimps, dolphins, elephants, etc.

Before conception.

Hmm, even I don't think that gametes count as human life. If they do, I've sure lost a lot of people.

There is no scientific answer. All that counts is when we consider there is something worth caring about.

It's different for people who believe in souls.

It's tough to even get an answer to "when do you consider there is something worth caring about" from most pro-choice people. I don't have an answer for that myself; I think that's a much tougher question than when human life begins. The Roe V Wade fetal viability standard is too tough to judge to serve as good law.

My view of 'sentience' as applied to the abortion question is my same view as applied to 'end of life questions'.

I think most agree, outside the most radical extremists that life continuing measures (life support machines) can be removed from a person who is brain dead. They have a body and brain there, but the brain has no real function any more and the body cannot survive without the machines and thus it is OK to remove the machines and allow what is left of the person to die.


When it comes to abortion I am looking at the same conditions. The brain is there but has no function yet, and the body cannot survive without the host (mother) and as such it is ok, via my timeline to allow for abortion.


And while the science is not absolutely perfect on either end of this life spectrum i am just providing what i see as MY logic in how you try to give justification for my time frame choice.

^ makes sense, although in practice that's tougher to judge for a fetus than it is for a brain dead adult.

I'm more skeptical on this point. Rating agencies are a financial backwater. If you asked newly minted MBAs from Harvard, Wharton, etc., how many of them would like to work at a place like Moody's or Standard & Poor's some day, not a single hand would go up. Compared to Wall Street banks, PE shops, hedge funds, etc., the pay at rating agencies is terrible and bonuses are far less variable.

Put another way, historically, the structural incentives for Wall Street employees to underweight or ignore long term risk in favor of short term opportunity have been significant.

The structural incentives for the people who worked on RMBS models at rating agencies were very different. That's why I lean more in the direction of incompetence when it comes to the rating agencies.

How do you factor that in fact the best path for many who were not at the top of their class and thus not getting those top desired Wall Street jobs but to enjoy the perks and wealth levels of those working in Wall Street and to eventually get a job there was to work at a Ratings Agency and just give the Wall Street banks exactly what they wanted knowing benefits and bribes and eventually job offers, far surpassing you Rating Agency pay and status would flow?


A relationship with the same type of incestuousness that many Congress people enjoy with their favoured Lobby Groups, where they know 'vote to enrich them for X years' and the perks and riches will flow back to them later along with job offers paying many times what they will make while in Congress.

I dont disagree with that at all but it wasn't an unknown factor (and it still isn't) It's part and parcel of the lack of care.

Re my last point above I will elaborate.

I had the misfortune (lol) of my second 'career' job out of University being hired as Purchasing and Logistic Manager of a major Food co, right at a time when major reform was being pushed across the board for that position and others.

Prior, it was very common and understood the Purchasing Manager would often get a boat load of perks from the Companies whom he gave their business too. Paid vacations, use of vacation homes, even vehicles paid for where not uncommon for the Sales person of a company to provide to the Purchasing Manager who selected their company to give their business too. in our case I controlled a few 10's of Millions of buying power, and in bigger corporations that would be significantly more. So providing the Purchasing Manager a paid for Car Lease or a Vacation home was a rounding error for them to build good will in an attempt to secure and hold the business.

The conflict being pretty clear even if the Purchasing Managers would argue those bonuses did not impact their decision as they were available pretty much from all suppliers.

My new boss on first day made it clear to me, and I agreed, that any and all such offered perks, if accepted would go into an Company pool lottery and that is what I would tell suppliers and we did. They still sent in lots of perks, such as weeks at vacation homes, etc as old habits die hard and that is how they felt they were ingratiating themselves, and we would just raffle them off.


This is a similar dynamic with how Wall Street banks dealt with Ratings Agencies generally. Throw tons of perks and future job potential at them, as long as they are willing to see things Wall Street way, more often than not. Up and down the chain people knew this was a dangling path to a better life (better job) even if they were not getting it today. You, as an analyst, write what Wall Street wants and your boss enjoys great perks, ...well when he retires or goes off to work at Wall Street, maybe he remembers you playing ball and pushes for you to get his job and be next in the perk line. Maybe with him now on Wall Street giving you the perks.

I think it is fair to say Wall Street had 'captured the Rating Agencies', in that you could have so many turn a blind eye to 2008/9 as a way to not rock the boat with Wall Street and keep the perks rolling.

I don't think there is much of a revolving door between rating agencies and Wall Street banks. I have never met a Wall Street employee who got his or her job off the back of working first at a rating agency. I'm sure that such a person exists, but almost no one goes to work at a rating agency on the theory that it will eventually open the door to a much more lucrative Wall Street job.

As for the other stuff, I know that you think that employees who worked on models at rating agencies were being showered with gifts and the like from Wall Street bankers, but I am unaware of any evidence of that happening, much less happening at scale. It simply wasn't necessary in order to get the desired ratings for RMBS.

Perhaps this should all go in a new thread as it has no relevance to the supreme court.

Well we would need to define what threshold you are using for 'much', when it comes to a revolving door as I am not saying anything nearing a majority but I would say the number is sufficient enough that it should certainly be of concern to regulators and something they need to keep their eye and always tightening ethical obligations to try and minimize the impact. We likely can only agree to disagree here as agia some definitions would need to be agreed upon.

Re the 'showered with gifts', that was not just a Wall Street thing and I am certain Wall Street was not immune. That was regular practice throughout most of business that personal perks were thrown at individuals who benefited the Corporation. If i am trying to win $1B worth of business, shaving my rate by 1% can cost my firm $10MM dollars. Maybe I can get the decision maker to prioritize something other than cutting another 1% by building good will and providing him a car lease and vacation property that instead cost the company less than $100k. That is a good trade for the company.

Might as well just move on. It isn't worth a separate topic.

Nothing wrong with slight tangential spin off discussions in threads that are super low volume and no active discussions are being buried.

You cannot create new threads for every tangential thought and we should not be trying to stop every tangential thought. If it has enough legs Tame will split it out and if not it will die, as it should. Most of our new threads are actually generated in this exact way. These little tangential thought incubator discussions that either die quickly or get enough legs to have a life and thread of their own.

Oh and to this point below, I went looking for a podcast or article I mildly recall from more than a decade ago on the relationships between the Rating Agencies and Wall Street big banks but could not find it but think the below suffices.

And again any tension here is in the definitions as Rococo's "much" and Harvard analysts "frequently" can both be accurate terms depending on what threshold they think is adequate to define those terms. It is subjective.

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I agree that this tangent isn't mucking-up the thread. Carry on, soldiers!

Neither does every thread need to provide Cupid a canvas to provide us his ****-stained opinions and antidotal reasons.

Conservative Judges take first steps to stop kids being able to access contraception without Parent conscent.

I don't blame this judge for allowing the case to proceed despite the lack of 'standing' for the litigant as this current Supreme Court itself has now created new precedent that standing does not matter for cases as I mentioned up thread with them granting a hearing to the 303 Creative case of the woman suing, despite having no functional business because of the potential that one day a gay couple might ask her not yet operating company, for service.

By every definitional requirement for 'standing' this woman's case should have been denied but the activist SC was eager to get that type of case so precedent and requirements went out the door. She was not claiming that she was "...injured in a manner that (was) “actual or imminent” and (was arguing that it was ) “conjectural” or “hypothetical.”