Input Junkie

Walk around naked in normal public settings. Buy my own free choice of currently-prescription meds, off the shelf, without needing anyone's permission. Wander from country to country without paperwork.

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Yeah, those. But I'd be more modest on the prescription things. Just put more of them on the non-prescribed list, and leave some of them there. Like blood pressure medication really needs a doctor. I've had a long hard struggle to get my medications right, and it needed the expertise of a doctor to get me through it. Some of the iterations had really bad effects, and I'd really hate to be doing that alone.

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I *wouldn't* be doing it alone. I just want to be able to. I spent last night in the ER with a manic episode that could've been handled at home with Ativan if I hadn't lost my prescription before filling it, and been unable to reach my doctor by phone.

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redbird

My first thought was, with regard to nudity, "me too," but then I realized that it's not just a legal issue.

Legally, I can walk around outside in nothing but a pair of underpants. I haven't done so yet, because I don't want to deal with strangers making rude remarks. I do fine in (private or semi-private) situations where nudity is expected, but being the only topless woman in the neighborhood park would probably be conspicuous and uncomfortable.

[More likely, it would be shorts and sandals--I like pockets, and I don't like broken glass.]

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That's a good point. I guess I'm sort of halfway in between it being a legal and a social issue for me. I would be willing (at least sometimes) to walk around naked in public even if very few people did so, so long as I was reasonably confident that the people who saw me would at least know I was legally permitted to and so I was unlikely to get hassled by police, or by people telling me I'd better get off the street or they'd call the cops. Whether I'd be willing to tolerate other sorts of hassle depends on the sort and on my mood that day... but there would probably be at least some days when, if I knew I was on firm legal ground and the people around me were aware they couldn't do anything about it, I'd probably say the hell with them and do it anyway.

Right now, there's a whole lot of confusion in most of the population about whether female toplessness is permitted in public places. Some of that confusion is in the minds of police officers, and I'd really rather not have to wait through a night or two in jail till a judge explains the matter to them. I suppose I was figuring that if public nudity *became* legal (as distinguished from our suddenly being in an alternate universe in which it always had been legal), there would be enough publicity surrounding the change as to get the point across. If the laws regarding full public nudity were treated the way the laws regarding toplessness are treated now, though, with just as many people erroneously convinced that it was against the law, I wouldn't try it.

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I looked at the thread. I was pretty disturbed by the reprehensible things some people wanted to be able to do. And then there were all these things people said they wanted to be able to do which aren't actually illegal. And what's up with the weird Canadian bashing?

I wish it wasn't illegal to keep roosters in town. But I don't personally want to keep a rooster. Also I wish the drug laws made more sense. But I don't personally use any interdicted drugs. Also I wish the age of consent laws made more sense. But I haven't been under eighteen in a long time.

I wish the intellectual property rights things made more sense. That affects me: I want to use the whole text of "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" as a frontispiece for my novel, and I can't get a response to my request for permission. If we had a decent fair-use climate, I'd be willing to use just the first verse and chorus. As it is, these days, I can't use any of it without explicit permission, which is dumb.

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mishalak.livejournal.com

I would no more want to allow keeping of roosters in cities than peacocks. The damn things are really, really loud. And they don't just crow at the crack of dawn, oh no. They crow all the fricking time. I think it is totally sensible to keep them out of areas with lots of people. Just like forbidding the use of leaf blowers before 9am.

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There are so many "normal" city noises which are so much louder and more stress-inducing, I think: not only the leaf blower, but the car alarm, the truck backing-up bleep, the siren, cumulative traffic . . .

Where I grew up there were truck farms and roosters just over a bit. You could hear those roosters, all right. But I never minded and still don't. But like I said I have no urge to keep roosters myself.

Though I'm in one of the most central neighborhoods in my small city, there are intermittent chickens somewhere in the neighborhood (cars and raccoons keep their numbers down). Once in a while the chicks have been sexed wrong and there's a rooster for a short time. I really don't mind.

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shagbark.livejournal.com

I spent a few weeks in a town in southwest China where it was legal to keep roosters, and many people did. Every morning, from about 5:30 to 6:30AM, those damn roosters would crow. They are very loud. Ban them, I say!

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redaxe.livejournal.com

Keep a ferret. (Not legal in NYC.) Ignore clothing restrictions (except those imposed for clear public-health reasons, e.g., hospital and kitchen settings). Grow and use various pharmacologically active substances. Purchase my diabetes meds (Avandia and metformin) sans prescription. While I have fantasies about eliminating various individuals, I know perfectly well that doing so would expose me and society to utter self-destruction, so it stays off the list.

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trinker.livejournal.com

You can't what are your local where?!

Wow.

In Southern California, where TJ originated, wine was one of the original stock items! In fact (and you probably know this), one of the most famous TJ's items is "two-buck Chuck" - a $2 bottle of Charles Shaw wine.

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avram

State alcohol laws are weird.

For their recently-opened NYC location, they split the store. There’s the regular Trader Joe’s, and the Trader Joe’s Wine Store next door.

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ckd

Massachusetts has a three-location limit per company or entity for liquor licenses, so my nearest TJs has wine, but the Back Bay store doesn't.

This year's election includes a ballot item to allow more licenses, for wine only, for grocery stores. The liquor stores are going nuts with FUD ("kids will get alcohol!" er, yeah, all those teenage chardonnay drinkers....) in an attempt to stop it.

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nancylebov.livejournal.com

Philadelphia has a state store system for alcoholic beverages.

What I want is cheap decent wine without needing to know anything about specifics. I can get that at Trader Joe's. I can't get it at a state store.

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madfilkentist

Send my tax form back to the IRS marked "refused," and keep more of the money I earn, and spend, save or give it as I choose.

Go through red lights in the middle of the night when there's a clear field of vision in all directions and no one in sight. (Sometimes I do, especially at the red left-turn light going into my condo.)

Drive over the speed limit. (I do that too, and probably everyone reading this does.)

Deal with non-licensed professionals who have a solid record of reliable work.

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xiphias.livejournal.com

When I was a teenager, my mother and I agreed that, if marijuana was legalized, we'd get baked together.

Since then, Mom and I have both developed alergies which, through extrapolation, would probably include cannabis.

We probably would do so, anyway.

I'd use the first floor of my house as a bar and private club.

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Give birth at home with any or no attendants, regardless of licensure, without fear of having my (hypothetical) child(ren) removed from the home by the state.

Carry large quantities of liquid onboard planes. Also knitting needles.

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Give birth at home with any or no attendants, regardless of licensure, without fear of having my (hypothetical) child(ren) removed from the home by the state.

What state do you live in? There's a lot of FUD on this one, due to pressure from the MDeity industry, but really...

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Sorry, what's FUD?

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Fear
Uncertainty
and
Doubt

(In other words, the Microsoft marketing mantra: make people nervous about choosing anything but the Industry Standard, by cultivating the three named factors.)

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sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com

Actually, FUD was coined by IBM, and fueled it with the slogan (no longer true) "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM products."

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Historically, of course, you are correct; but Microsoft in this, as in so many things, has taken ground first broken by IBM and on it built a Dark Fortress from it, one so deadly and menacing that it makes Barad-dûr look like a Sukkoth booth.

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Okay, I looked it up. I live in Indiana, but may not be there by the time it becomes practical for me to have kids. You're correct that the parents are unlikely to be charged with a crime--I believe if a crisis emerges they could possibly be charged with endangerment or something of that kind. The thing about DPS is that they have been known to take children without charging the parents, though I realize that in many cases they do this with good reason. The legal threat is generally more likely to be brought to bear on non-nurse midwives or other unlicensed attendants, who can be charged with practicing medicine without a license. It may amount more to FUD than real legal consequences, but no one really needs fear or uncertainty while in labor, you know?

I don't even know whether this is something I definitely want to do--it would depend on lots of medical factors--but it's something I actively want the option and right to do, should I choose it. So perhaps it doesn't quite fall within the purview of the question being asked.

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People have babies at home all the time in California, with or without licensed midwives. My stepmother used to be a lay midwife. She mostly attended at hospitals, but I think she did a home birth or two.

I briefly considered having my baby at home, but as it turned out I had to take advantage of pretty much everything modern technology had to offer just to be alive at the end of the process. Though I have to say that the thing my experience taught me is that modern medical technology is very good at dealing with crisis, and just being pretty near to it (modern technology, not crisis) is probably all that most people need from it in a normal pregnancy.

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As with what redbird said about my nudity point, this is more of a social issue than a legal one. As you point out, Child Welfare (or whatever name it goes under in your state) can take kids away based on whatever they think is unacceptable parental care -- it need not involve the parents doing anything which is inherently illegal. So whether or not there is, or was, a specific law against giving birth under these conditions wouldn't determine that particular question of security in deciding to do so... it would have to be an attitude change as well as, or instead of, a change in statute.

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You know, I meant CPS (Child Protective Services) and typed DPS (Department of Public Safety, the Texas version of the DMV). I have obviously moved one too many times to keep the acronyms straight. :)

I would point out that you could, however, pass a law affirming the right to do this and defining it specifically as not neglect or endangerment. Child Welfare in the US is a quasi-legal agent, not an extra-legal one, I think. Child abuse and neglect are certainly on-the-books crimes. There are court fights over things like parents' right to decline medical care for their kids all the time, so it doesn't seem to me that this would be impossible to deal with in a legal manner.

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Experiment with overclocking my metabolism. Only time I lost any serious weight was when I was taking speed under medical supervision; when I moved to a jurisdiction where that was taboo, I gained it all back and then some (about another 115 pounds of "and then some" by now).

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thette.livejournal.com

The only thing I can think of is publishing the full names of people online.

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thespian.livejournal.com

what's funny is the number of people who have said 'not pay taxes'. I've often wondered if that ties in with 'but in return, I won't drive on your streets and highways, mail things through your postal service, walk on your sidewalks, use your trash pickup, call your police, vote in your elections, avail myself of health warnings from the CDC or FDA, and if my house catches fire, I'll watch it burn to the ground rather than use the fire department I'm not paying for.'

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madfilkentist

May I take it you don't eat food, occupy a residence, or own a computer? After all, you aren't compelled by force to pay for those things, and your premise seems to be that people will not voluntarily pay for any service they aren't legally compelled to pay for.

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More like -- you'd never be able to afford those things if you paid for them out of your own pocket.

Near to me are areas where all the roads are privately maintained. It's easy to see income disparity in those areas. Where there's a road lived on by poor people, it's simply not maintained (people have this reckless habit of prefering to feed their children before they hire the pavers).

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thespian.livejournal.com

and also, this is why taxes started to begin with, because there were a whole bunch of services that everyone used, but no one wanted to pay for because of their own perceptions of how small a use of the services they used, or indeed, why services that they don't use are of benefit to themselves and the community. The idea of taxes in original American law was to pool resources to make the community better (and was defined so, to differentiate it from the taxes they were paying to England that had no direct benefit here), and too many 'I wish to live tax-free' types are completely blind about the benefits to community that aren't a benefit directly to them. People *didn't* in fact, pay for the services when they weren't compelled to.

Taxes are, in fact, the most efficient way of collection $20 for this and $10 a year for that, and there will be a lot of people with the idea of 'I never use that, so I shouldn't pay for it.' without realizing that it benefits them that people use public transit so there are less people driving and the less wealthy can get to work, or that no, you might never set foot on the sidewalk, but the guy who brings your mail daily does.

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sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com

Nonsense. Whatever they are now, taxes started as protection money, extortion by kings, priests, and other "nobles." Learn some history, dude.

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avram

Got a citation for this?

I mean, it sounds plausible, might even be true. But do we actually have records of the first taxes ever paid?

Wikipedia’s article on taxation suggests, as the earliest mention of taxes, Joseph’s plan for everyone in Egypt giving one fifth of their harvest to the Pharaoh for storage to get through the lean years (Genesis 47). That would be more of a social welfare plan than protection money, if the book of Genesis were an accurate and reliable account, which it isn’t.

Me, I’ve got a hard time believing that’s actually the earliest mention. There’s gotta be something earlier in some old Sumerian tablet somewhere.

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thespian.livejournal.com

actually, it was a minor of mine briefly, but you've made your mind up, and I don't bother with your type/'tude.

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shagbark.livejournal.com

People *didn't* in fact, pay for the services when they weren't compelled to.

You mean, people in America in the 18th century didn't pay for superhighways, welfare, research labs, public libraries, fire companies, police, and other things that hadn't been invented yet? How odd.

Notice that we have an air transportation system, and it's not tax-funded, except for the air traffic control? Hmm, how did that happen? Hmm, the billions of miles of Internet cable also weren't paid for by taxes. Hospitals also seem to be privately-funded.

I also note that one of the most important things to pay for, if the purpose of taxes is social benefit, is college education at a respected institution - and our US taxes don't pay for it!

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