Matthew J. Miszewski wrote:
I will not re-quote and rehash the argument thus far. You do have a knack to ignore strong points (although admittedly not all) of your opponent in an argument. Additionally, I am not trying to show anyone that you are a "bad person". I was trying to carry-on civil discourse. I know you really feel that you had no part in disrupting the discourse we started out in, I disagree.
[snip]
My question was a real one. The basis of it comes from my work with the homeless in which they have a difficult time getting a job because they have no "home address" to put on the forms, some do not have or remember their SSNs, etc. This causes a cyclic problem for the homeless. My question to Tim was, in the real world, how is the protection of this data feasible.
I believe the above paragraph could be the key to why a lot of argument goes on unnecessarily - an economic model/theory may be a good one, but is muddied by existing practice/legislation, i.e., the homeless are dis- advantaged insofar as ID, address, credit and so on, which does not say so much about the economic model as it does that the model is perturbed by existing real-world compromises. [remainder snipped]