#cuz EVEN IF IT'S NOT ACTUALLY TRUE higher class members of our society have a subconscious idea that price often = quality for services

[healingheartdogs]

I know it's been a few years since I've run my own dog training business instead of working for someone else for exploitation wages and that previously I was working in the rural south where prices are a bit different in general, but out of curiosity I decided to look at some dog training services in my area in upstate NY today and got hit with sticker shock ngl.

Most places don't post their prices so I could only compare a few (which... I sort of get since they want to avoid competition doing what I'm doing right now lol but as someone who has run a dog training business and had business marketing included in my education it's something I see as an... *interesting* choice, because most clients want to know price up front without having to contact you and wait for a response because they probably already have a budget in mind and just want to be able to quickly see if you fit into it or not, which means not having prices posted will make some potential clients immediately look elsewhere and if you don't even have some sort of price range for services posted somewhere then most of your calls and emails will just be people asking for pricing and a majority of those calls and emails will not lead to services purchased so it ends up wasting a lot of unpaid time on office work BUT THATS AN UNRELATED TOPIC, I DIGRESS) but WOWZA the ones that did have prices posted really made me realize I do NOT live in a low cost of living place anymore.

One of the popular places here that I looked at charges $150+ for ONE training session with one of their APPRENTICE trainers. It's double that price to train with one of their more experienced dog trainers for just one session.

I looked back at some of the trainers I was competing with back in FL and NC to compare as well as the dog training school I went to just to check and see if prices were getting that high in other rural areas, and nope. Most places $300 would still get you at least three - maybe up to six - private lessons spread out over three (or six, or whatever) weeks, which is the pricing range I'm used to seeing dog trainers in the rural south suffer with because of places like Petsmart setting the pricing bar so low.

I'm pretty sure I have more formal dog training education and certification than most of the employees at this place too since even their main "behaviorist" (not a protected title in the USA so anyone can call themselves that) has no certifications listed at all that I can find, so... I guess now that I live here if I ever start training again I'm going to have to rethink my pricing lol even if I don't charge those kinds of prices I clearly still need to bump them up in this area from what I used to charge in order to be competitive with these other training businesses.

[theredpharaoah]

Extrapolating someone killing a man who just shot their best friend and killed their girlfriend, to killing someone cuz you don’t like them is quite the leap. Giles killed Ben and he didn’t go on a murder spree. Even Faith in her darkest moment wasn’t killing people just because she didn’t like them. Buffy does decide who lives and who doesn’t. Her rule of not killing humans is a self-imposed one. Unless you’re a psychopath(said here without any stigma or negative connotation. The literal meaning of the term), most people who kill someone(veterans) don’t suffer some kind of break that makes them a mass killer all of a sudden. They tend to have the same symptoms as people who are victims of trauma: PTSD. They’ll see their faces over and over again in their head, constantly see them in nightmares, and tend to end up self medicating with drugs and alcohol.

Sidebar: this does NOT include the veterans/soldiers who did and do heinous things in foreign lands or in military bases. I’m talking about the people who actually believe(“believe” being the operative word) they’re defending their country.

And there are plenty of people who kill in self defense. They’re not suddenly loose cannons who are a danger to everyone in society. They tend to exhibit PTSD symptoms as well.

There is no law and order in the Buffyverse. The Slayer is the law and order - as Buffy states multiple times throughout the series in various ways. This is one of the reasons Faith’s character is introduced - to illustrate that the only true laws for a Slayer are the ones they make. That’s what makes Buffy special; she decides to do what many of us would consider to be the right thing. “Once someone does it, next day everyone does it” is not true and sounds like an idea stemming from some police-state propaganda. People are not intrinsically bad and research actually suggests the opposite- we’re literally hardwired for empathy. Most people do bad things because of the situations they find themselves in making them feel as if they’re forced to do so.

Everyone is already their own Law and Order. Everyone has their own reason for why they do what they do. The vast majority of crimes committed go unreported and unpunished. We already live in a lawless world. We don’t have a body of laws created through a democratic process(like deliberative democracy as described by Rawls, Dewey, Misak, etc). All of our laws are ones imposed upon us with their basis in religion or a body of laws that some ruler came up with forever ago. Roman law was heavily based on Greek philosophy and then developed further by their jurists(who used Greek philosophy and legal science). This was lost to the west and then rediscovered in the Middle Ages where it was then adapted to canon law(church) and then we get things like common law which stems from precedents. At every moment in history there’s been a hierarchy and self interest which influences every part of the lawmaking process; who writes the laws, who studies law and what they study about law, which laws are made, who is considered the victim and owed something, etc. Humans don’t create we innovate; we’ve innovated these old laws to suit our needs and they’re the foundation of our laws today. We innovated those old laws in ways that mostly benefit those of the higher class, along with creating new laws to the same effect. The way new laws are introduced(in the US) is through a Bill. A bill can only be introduced by a member of congress. If you want a new law made you have to convince this member to take up your idea and introduce it. Pretty much the only way to get a rep to do that is to make a huge campaign contribution. And they’ve devised all sorts of ways to do that without breaking the law around campaign donations. Who in our society has the money to make the type of campaign contributions needed to make their voices heard? Not me and presumably not you either. Ordinary citizens don’t have the means of swaying our own reps to introduce bills. And most ordinary citizens don’t even know you can introduce proposals for new laws as bills. But that’s not all, as introducing a bill doesn’t really mean anything. It just gets dropped off with a clerk who inputs it into the committee system. There won’t be any hearings for this random bill and so it won’t be voted on. If you really want to get your bill passed then you have to be very wealthy and you use a lobbying firm to help you so that. The best bet an individual citizen has of getting laws passed is by joining an organization so you can all combine resources. But organizations need clear and simple messages and a lot of the nuance and specificities of a minority group’s experience will get lost in this monolith. You’ll find yourself fighting for things that aren’t even gonna benefit you in the end.

Laws are not an objective set of rules, there’s no rule that they must include an intrinsic moral value. That’s how people can get off on things like a technicality. Technicality’s mean guilt or innocence is irrelevant because of a technical legal or constitutional issue; warrantless search, or even failed hangings in the medieval period. Furthermore, morals and ethics aren’t objective either. We have a whole moral and ethical philosophy. For instance Kant’s retributivism would probably support Willow’s endeavor. Utilitarianism would’ve supported killing Dawn if it meant it stopped Glory from being able to use her as the key and destroy everything.

I think Buffy was being ridiculous with the whole “don’t kill Warren thing”. Faith killed a man in accident. Warren had been terrorizing the Scoobies and Sunnydale all season. Then he shot Buffy and murdered Tara. He’s not innocent. And MAYBE she’d have an excuse if he was using human means(she’s beat tf out of many humans before though), but he lost his human immunity card when he and his lil Geek Squad started using all sorts of magics and whatnot. Tbh, it’s a dumb rule because it assumes Humans can’t defend themselves against supernatural beings which isn’t necessary the case. It was human magicians who evicted demons from the earth and sealed the old ones in the Deeper Well originally. That proves that humans can go toe to toe with the best of them. And I mean Willow is right there. She went from geek getting bullied by Cordelia to Witch who fights gods and resurrects the dead.