Stephen

There is disincentivisation. It's just not as pronounced as some people think. If the marginal rate of working on the fifth day of the week works out to be significantly less than the other four and I have the opportunity to only work four days a week, then it could be better for me to only work 4 days a week. This is especially true when there are fixed costs associated with working each day, such as childcare.\

Remember "Coffee's not coffee, coffee is sex."

@AlexP it still is. Roughly 19% of the world's electrical demand is for lighting.

@TylerH A lot of costs are up-front development costs. So if you invest (for example) 100bn into a project, and 50bn is the development costs, you can manufacture 50bn worth of craft. If you have half the budget (say 51bn) and do the same amount of R&D you only get 1bn worth of craft manufactured. Economy of scale is a massive thing when you have huge upfront costs.

@JonathanReez A society that rejects those fleeing oppressors based upon their marginal value to the economy is precisely the same society that is most in need of those people. On what moral basis does a society speak if the only measure of worth is wealth?

@jpmc26 You have a very different way of viewing things and I don't follow your logic. The one thing nobody can do is return life to the dead. With imprisonment, there is always hope for release, or barring that, the hope that you can live out your days. I wonder how many criminals would actually prefer death to imprisonment. Not many I'd imagine. The desire to live is pretty strong. Giving the state the right to take the life of an individual is giving them ultimate power, regardless of the resources involved.

@jpmc26 And that someone else may have been someone more like Mugabe - an insane despot who given the opportunity would not have been so gracious and unifying. It's not even about the resources that it costs the state to hold the criminal (though it's generally more expensive to execute than to imprison due to legal fees). It's about the state holding absolute power over the individual. Imprisonment is not absolute power, execution is.

@NuclearWang There is a real difference between the threat of imprisonment and the threat of death. Everyone has an instinct to avoid and fear death and it's much stronger than the fear of capture with the possibility of being locked up. If you've committed manslaughter that you fear might be turned into a murder charge, you're far more likely to kill someone else to stay free if the penalty for murder is potentially death.

@jpmc26 And if Nelson Mandela had been executed in 1964 instead of sentenced to life imprisonment, how different would the world be today?

There is also the argument that the death penalty provides an incentive for worse crimes. If a person believes that they have committed a crime that will have them executed if caught, it then becomes advantageous for that individual to commit more crimes, even heinous crimes to avoid capture. Furthermore, there is another argument which states that any state which has a death sentence does so to entrench the powerful and their power over the weak. It is done not so much as an act of justice but as an act of oppression. Australian politicians have used this argument.

@Sarriesfan C.S. Lewis was Anglican, not Catholic.

@PeregrineRook The Last Battle was not about the rapture at all (at least not from the perspective of "our world"). It was about the deaths of the children and their fates.

And there are other proposals that haven't been closed (such as Stock Markets) which are wholely covered by other sites (money and personal finance).

I'm a bit annoyed that my proposal for Board and Card Game Design got closed within hours without so much as a discussion. I can find nowhere on the site where it says that proposals can be closed for no good reason (the site had a partial, but not complete overlap with another site). I'd have been far more satisfied if the user signup requirement or question requirement failed and it was closed due to that.