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Does Even Amazing Partisan Tech Deserve Applause?
theodp writes "The press has been filled with wide-eyed articles about how Obama's tech team pulled out the stops in their race against the Republicans. But as exciting as some of the new techniques dreamed up may be, Tom Steinberg points out it's important to reflect on the difference between choosing to use tech skills to win a particular fight, versus trying to improve the workings of the democratic system, or helping people to self-organize and take some control of their own lives. 'I am still filled with an excitement about the prospects for non-partisan technologies that I can't muster for even the coolest uses of randomized control trial-driven political messaging,' writes Steinberg. 'The reason why all comes down to the fact that major partisan digital campaigns change the world, but they don't do it in the way that services like eBay, TripAdvisor and Match.com do. What all these sites have in common – helping people sell stuff they own, find a hotel, or a life partner – is that they represent a positive change in the lives of millions of people that is not directly opposed by a counter-shift.'"
I'd say it was a slashvertisement but the summary is practically incomprehensible.
I'm confused - What "exciting new techniques" did the candidates came up with? Using Twitter? Writing a blog? Campaigns and PACs soliciting donations or informing people of important dates through text messages, phone calls, emails or applications on phones?
Wow - What an age we live in...if you ignore that the underpinnings of these technologies have been around for years if not decades.
All they did was leverage what was there to spam everyone and rake in money for advertisements, travel, staff expenses and otherwise. The tools may be relatively new, but the "technique" is a century old.
Hyping marketing campaigns (of which political campaigns are a subset) has become more and more common. It's like the actual product doesn't matter anymore.
But all of the sites he mentioned are not in the business to "help" anyone. They're all in it to make money. The difference is that the Democratic party used the internet in a way that didn't involve Money. Now that's a neat trick!! I wonder if by next election someone will have thought of a way to make a business out of "getting out the vote" over the net.
Its a matter of who manages to leverage it to their advantage that makes a difference. At one point, the GOP and Karl Rove were ahead of the Democrats at using databases and software to rally support and gerrymander voting districts. But it appears that they have run out of steam.
One wonders why the Republicans haven't been the ones pushing publicly funded broadband. They are missing quite a bit of their base out in the trailer parks.
Have gnu, will travel.
That's not entirely fair: there's also the religious conservatives who believe that the government should run your private life!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Here in the US, the press has been fawning all over Michael Phelps, the gymnastics "Fab Five" and other athletes who won medals at the Olympics. But at the end of the day, they were just covering themselves with glory. These folks weren't affirming the life-changing power of playing video games like CoD Zombies, which I have had the foresight of integrating into my lifestyle along with fellow visionaires.
Here in the civilised world we laugh at the pitiful entitlements that you give your poor, while shaking our heads in disgust at the short-sighted greed of your rich. The "entitlements" that exist in the US, even under "communist" Obama, are laughably small.
What if neither is optimal? Maybe decision making at the highest levels shouldn't involve people at all. However poorly skynet ends up performing, can't be worse than what we currently see in both government and corporations.
The real story is that the Romney team didn't have the tiniest shred of competence. They proved themselves overly secretive (bordering on paranoid) and so arrogant that they didn't think standard practices in software development and delivery applied to their "special" campaign.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/11/romneys-fail-whale-orca-the-votetracker-149098.html
America really dodged a bullet not getting stuck with this kind of leadership.
Yeah, one party rule works great EVERYWHERE it's tried. The Soviets thought they were righteously correct too.
The Democrats in 2008 scared the hell out of me. They were spouting things like "we will rule for a generation". They scared everyone else too, when you look at what happened in 2010.
And as for libertarians, they happen to be the only poeple to have enough principle to be pissed about Bush's torture AND Obama's drone executions.
I need a foreign country that is more conservative than the US to move to.
I believe Afghanistan is like that. Iran as well. East Germany was as well. Be careful what you wish for.
But are there any religious libertarians who believe that the government should outsource the running of your private life to churches?
And as for libertarians, they happen to be the only poeple to have enough principle to be pissed about Bush's torture AND Obama's drone executions.
Yet, all the stupid Libertarians go apeshit about Obamacare, which was designed to cut back the 45,000 deaths annually due to lack of health insurance.
Sorry, but 45,000 American lives saved > Pakistani drone executions.
We liberals consider the drones to be the least important thing ever, because we worry about the 45,000 American lives due to lack of health insurance, which for some reason the libertarians ignore, probably because they can't process death that isn't scary.
We liberals only consider numbers, unlike the emotional libertarians that can't rationalize their beliefs.
The Democrats in 2008 scared the hell out of me. They were spouting things like "we will rule for a generation". They scared everyone else too, when you look at what happened in 2010.
Where they actually that different from the "permanent Republican majority" fantasists who they swept out of office in 2008? Hubristic interpretation of immediate political gains as portents of inevitable future victory is foolish; but seems extremely common.
. See how places like Venezuela or Cuba or China or Libya serve their citizens under that kind of democracy that you advocate.
LOL you've never actually talked with anyone from any of those countries, have you?
What is the difference [between advertising and propaganda]?
One is up front about trying to sell you something.
Iran works pretty well, but you might not like their social programs.
How about saudi arabia?
don't let the door hit you on the way out.
if you seriously think that our government or any government the democratic party would reasonbly instate represents public intrest, you gotta be shitting me.
The democratic party is just as corporate sponsored as the republican party, if only exceptions being to make government a private non-corporate entity that responds of a few with connections instead of money.
Where were they on SOPA and PIPA?
What about with monsanto's little debacle?
I am sure its "public intrest" where they completely ignored there campaign promises to stop the world wide war on civil liberties with the stated goal of fighting terrorism, and scale back domestic spying and unconstitutional policing.
By "popular intrest" you mean worship to whatever celebrities who normally tell people what products they should buy told them, so a few leaders can sit around paying $20 for drinks and not face consequences of insane social mores.
Or mabey you still believe in privlidege for a stated upper class.
"Obamacare", you mean when everyone is forced to buy insurance because if we all buy it, the companies should theoretically lower rates.(Supply side economics).
But its here to help people.
But if you really take the time to criticize it, its pointed out that its really an old republican plan from the 1990s.(which it is).
If your not going to vote third party stay home.(Rocky Anderson, Jill Stien, ftw).
Obamacare, which was designed to cut back the 45,000 deaths annually due to lack of health insurance.
If all government programs did what they were designed to do, the world would be a perfect place.
As a libertarian, and someone who can do something called math, and who understands at a moderate level this thing called economics, I can assure you that libertarians are in the right for having issues with obamacare. Answer this honestly, how is it going to improve health care? Making insurance mandatory, according to basics of economics means you've increased demand for insurance, and by making it required by law, created a very, very inelastic supply curve. According to economics 101, the only thing that can happen is that prices will sky rocket.
Then throw in the whole concept of health insurance. I'm pretty sure it's meant to cover extremely expensive, yet fairly unlikely disasters. Car accidents, house burning down, etc. I don't expect my car insurance to pay for regular maintenance for my car such as oil changes or putting gas in it. That's just adding an unneeded middle man which will do nothing but increase the price without need. Why not pay for maintenance straight up? Then rather then employer offered health insurance, that gets changed to employer offered health account, used to directly pay for care, doesn't go through middle men, and keeps everything cheaper. But NO. Libertarians are idiots for identifying that the real problem with our system is that everything is covered through insurance, rather than in any sane way everything else is handled. Leave health insurance for catastrophic care, and pay for basic care the same way you would for everything else in life.
You will undoubtedly counter that all health care should be run by government, well now all health care workers are government employees, now you're heading down the path of communism, and history has already told us how well that works.
Not really. There are many libertarians that have said views, but I'd not say that the Libertarian party embraces them. If anything, the problem the libertarians have is that they aren't in any way unified. There's a variety of people that vote libertarian: There's the freedom worshippers, that wouldn't even allow the state to set immigration laws. But in front of them are nativists, that hate immigrants. Some would leave a minimal army, and dismantle the rest of the state. Others would allow the state to do anything to foreign nationals to protect the freedom of US citizens. Unsurprisingly, when libertarians meet to come up with a program, they end up being unable to agree on much.
So to grow, they need a clear message, and to get a clear message, they will piss off a good chunk of their membership: Not a bad thing though, as being mostly a collection of white males will be as bad for their election choices as it will be for the Republicans.
Either way, no political party really stands against the torture and the executions. People do (like me, for instance), but this wars are won by public opinion, not by following a schizophrenic party.
Offer every rich one all the entitlements you can possibly give them, when they cannot be afforded. Talk about RMoney fiddling while the US burns.
Of course you can't find a more "Conservative" country to move to. Except maybe Somalia - oh, wait, too Black for Republicans.
Thanks for playing through your entire post, demonstrating how Republican parrots like you live entirely in a fantasy world. Where each of you is a dictator.
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3 seconds of googling confirmed that turnout in St. Lucie county was about 70%. Did you fact check this before you posted it?
I need a foreign country that is more conservative than the US to move to.
Somalia? Saudi Arabia? Send us a postcard and tell us how you like your new digs.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The idea that technology can be partisan is evidence that your side is relying on something besides science. Get with the program, or don't. Either way, we all win.
your just as stupid as he is.
No, they said nothing about everyone who disagrees with their politics. Nor did they say that single-party rule is best. Yours is the savory troll food known as a strawman argument.
What they said was that of the two parties we actually have, the Democratic Party does things to improve democracy. The Republican Party is blatantly anti-democratic, whether in funding by (and for) a few of the richest people, or in stopping people from voting if they're probably not voting Republican.
In reality, what they said is true. In Republican fallacyland, you're still just a savory troll.
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Optimal decision making about everyone's life is not graded on the content of the decision as much as on its acceptance by everyone. That's why democracy is the best system yet tried: it depends on the consent of the governed.
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So everyone who disagrees with your politics is dumb and the best way to support democracy is to have everyone fall in line and vote for the same party. That is some hot savoury troll food you are serving up there.
Maybe you should talk to some people fortunate enough to have been able to leave homelands that prescribe to such philosophies. See how places like Venezuela or Cuba or China or Libya serve their citizens under that kind of democracy that you advocate.
How the hell did you come up with that idea? How does the parent advocate Cuba, China or Lybia "kind of democracy." He said "governments that represent the public interest should rule the world." Sounds a bit pompous, yeah, but he's right. Dictatorships never represent the public interest.
Obamacare has already insured many more people, as it was designed to do.
Now show me where Obamacare has not done what it was designed to do. Or just stop posting purely ideological made-up propaganda.
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I completely agree, the pendulum swings both ways.
Because Obamacare does a lot more than just insure more people. Though for those newly insured, it has improved their healthcare by funding what couldn't be bought before, already proving you wrong.
Obamacare also requires insurers provide contraception for the price of insurance premiums, which is preventive medicine that reduces costs due to unexpected pregnancies and STDs.
You're pretty sure that health insurance is meant to cover only catastrophes, but it's not. It's to cover spikes in health care costs that come from occasional expensive events. It's just like car collision insurance: it's a financing strategy that allows people to keep moving through life in a way they can afford, based on statistics. In fact car insurance should pay for routine maintenance that prevents catastrophic costs like engines seizing or bald tires skidding into something.
The financing costs money to operate, plus salaries and profits to motivate people to dedicate the time it requires to do it properly. Though not as much as the insurers charge (up to 20% of premiums, even under Obamacare). What every one of our foreign competitors has chosen over the past several generations is a public health insurance system like unemployment insurance, which we already have for a lot of Americans in either Medicare, Medicaid, VA insurance and some others.
In fact you have called for public health insurance in what you have detailed. Except for some reason you want an "employer offered health account". Why should the employer have anything whatsoever to do with health? Why should an employer even know when you have drawn on payments for medicine? Why should you have to move it when you change employers? Why should employers spend one minute administering health financing when their business is totally unrelated? Obviously that "account" should be Medicare/Medicaid/VA insurance, paid by taxes, administered without profit by the government that already does so very well for many millions of Americans.
What's wrong with you libertarians is that you cannot accept that government is the people joined together to protect ourselves, at a great scale economy. You're obsessed with authoritarian private corporations that demonstrate daily the vast waste they layer atop most widespread services, especially those that are equally available to all. You reduce actual life experiences demonstrated everywhere to inane sloganeering like "heading down the path of communism, and history has already told us how well that works". No, you have merely cherrypicked history and called things names without regard to their meaning.
There's more to economics than economics 101. There's more to reality than the libertarian mayor of Sim City bothers to carp about.
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I think most people with a brain would agree, complete rule by any single party is asking for disaster.
Oh, I'm no friend of one-party rule; but my impression has been that the contemporary crowing from both democratic and republican sides on the subject has been shallow, vapid, and largely meaningless in relation to any serious risk of 'one party rule' in the sense practiced in places named "The people's democratic republic of somethingorother"... The republicans had Rove's oleaginous dreams of a 'permanent majority', which dissolved in the cruel face of reality about as fast as PNAC's theories of a Pax Americana in the middle east. The democrats had their optimism about getting turnout that doesn't suck from demographics that don't usually vote, which lasted a mere couple of years until the 2010 midterms. Then the tea party wing had their moment of optimism, because of the congressional upsets in 2010, which has since been evaporating in the face of Obama's re-election. And so the wheel grinds on.
Your search results are interesting. So there will be more insured, but it is looking like there won't be enough doctors to treat them.
East Germany?
You know, I understand that history can be a bit bewildering at times, but it is generally agreed upon that Communist regimes are left- rather than right-leaning. Probably not a place for a conservative of any stripe.
is complete rubbish. The corresponding negative counter-shift is the huge loss of individuals' privacy and the centralising of even more power in even fewer corporations.
Korma: Good
You actually sounded very lucid and correct until that last paragraph where you displayed your staggering ignorance about universal healthcare. Obamacare just furthers the agenda of crony capitalism (which is the only type of capitalism that ever has or ever CAN arise). A true UHC would put all aspects of healthcare back in the hands of the people who are getting that care, as evidenced by every civilized nation in the world with UHC that is vastly popular with said nation's citizenry.
Nobody should rule the rule world. The public is very reactionary and fickle, or have we completely forgotten the 30s...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Sure, but that sets up a false dichotomy where we only have the choice between the mostly sane party and the primary batshit-crazy opposition. In reality, a period of "one party rule" while a new opposition party forms that is not batshit crazy would not be that awful, especially given that our primary system allows us to hold elections within that party.
Someone had to do it.
Your proof is a USA Today opinion piece? Yes, 3.6 million people more had insurance - great for them. But the overall insured percent went from 83.7% to 84.3%. That's what we can expect? 0.6%? For laws that have effectively removed almost any limit on what the Federal government can and cannot tell you what to do, for billions of dollars spent, and for literally destroying private practice medicine, that's what we get?
Hey, don't get in the way of blink political hate...
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Anything that moves the tech forward is worthwhile.
NASA developed a lot of tech specifically to get us to the moon, and along the way everyone else (who isn't going to the moon) gets to benefit from the advances.
This is like that. The goal was to get Obama elected. But the breakthroughs are something that everyone else can benefit from now that they're here.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I'm not a big fan of downmoderation, but the parent is a blatant (and successful) troll. It should not be modded +5 Insightful.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Everyone is forced to buy insurance because everyone eventually needs health insurance.
The alternative is to deny care to those who can not prepay for their emergency care.
Forcing people to buy insurance is a free market solution.
Supply side economics is something completely different and not really related.
That's because Libertarians are about personal choice and freedom and everybody has different personal levels of importance... Not just what their leaders tell them to care about.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
That was the problem.
The GOP has far more then one problem. They should have cleaned up this election, but even back in the primaries it was evident that there were serious problems: only Huntsman and Romney stood a chance of winning. How did the GOP get itself into a situation where all the candidates traded popularity with electability?
And then the GOP lost all of those senate races that it should have won. Was that Romney's fault as well?
The kicker for me is that the RNC, Romney team, and conservative news complex were completely clueless about what was about to happen on election day. The polls were dead on if but a very slight conservative bias, and it seams almost the entire GOP was blindsided. That wasn't Romney's fault as well? Really??
You cannot make effective decisions when you are operating in an information black hole. So I would place the blame on the GOP leadership. Those guys should they *lead*, and not simply respond to incentive structures given to them.
If the GOP doesn't do some serious navel-gazing, and make accurate changes to its operations, then the next election will be another huge expensive failure.
It comes down to using information accurately. So you gotta ask, "what REALLY went wrong". Not just point at the fall guy and resume the posture of faultlessness.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
We already give away emergency care.
It's the non-emergency care that you don't get for free. Neither should you expect it. The idea that we need to shred the Constituion in order to manage costs is just assinine. The latter is by no stretch of the imagination more important than the former.
It's all a false dichotomy. Something like Obamacare doesn't need to be placed above the law. You can just implement it in a legal manner and tolerate the "scofflaws".
People understandably have a problem with ignoring rules because they seem inconvenient.
Indoctrinating people into thinking the government should take care of them is ultimately poor public policy that will just lead to abuse of a continually shrinking pool of resources. (See Greece and Spain)
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Speaking of which, XKCD pointed out a while back that no white candidate who's been mentioned on twitter has ever gone on to win a presidential election. Something to think about...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's cute how you think the horde of red-staters who make up the base of the Republican party are all about laissez-faire, as if that is also the defining characteristic of "conservatism".
Sealand is looking for a new ruler.
it depends on the INFORMED consent of the governed
Unfortunately, the current process is all about NOT informing you. It appears to, but for the important stuff, both sides have agreed that there is no need ti inform anybody else.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
" according to basics of economics means you've increased demand for insurance, and by making it required by law, created a very, very inelastic supply curve. "
do you think they mine insurance polices like they mine unobtanium?
And politicians since time immemorial have used any method they could conceive of to do it. I scanned the posts quickly to see if anyone had already stated this very, very, very basic fact about democracy.
Voter turnout among young and minority voters has been a big problem for the Democratic party for a long time. The GOP tried to make it an even bigger problem. The Democrats used technology to solve a real problem in one of the most basic realities of democracy: what voters think doesn't matter unless they actually vote. Romney was astonished that he lost only because he expected the Democratic voter turnout problem (along with dirty tricks) to win it for him. What a shock. Democracy won, and technology helped. Yes. That's news.
What every one of our foreign competitors has chosen over the past several generations is a public health insurance system like unemployment insurance, which we already have for a lot of Americans in either Medicare, Medicaid, VA insurance and some others.
I would count Germany, for example, as a competitor, but they don't have a fully-public health insurance system. However, it has a lot more "gummint interference" than I suspect would be acceptable to fans of the free market.
You still believe left-wing dictatures are different than right-wing dictatures, how cute.
And as for libertarians, they happen to be the only poeple to have enough principle to be pissed about Bush's torture AND Obama's drone executions.
Not too fond of Bush or Obama on civil liberties, and concerned that Social Security, Medicare, etc. will get cut. Unless you have a very unusual definition of "libertarian", or by "the only people" you don't literally mean "the only people", your claim appears to be untrue. Even if you argue that by "the only people" you meant "the only political party", there's another party that's opposed to torture, has at least some members opposed to drone attacks, and not exactly fans of free-market solutions for everything.
(Admittedly, what you actually said was "the only poeple", so maybe neither Glenn Greenwald nor anybody in the Green Party are "poeple". :-))
Communist regimes are left- rather than right-leaning.
Communism demonstrated itself to be highly authoritarian ironically under the ostensible goal of anarchy. In the western world, however, authoritarian personalities are almost universally associated with reactionary conservative politices.
Liberalism is starkly different to communism in that liberalism is strongly against government enterprise (which is different to public services), and authoritarianism. Two core beliefs of liberalisms -- going back to the 19thC, is to champion the rights of the individual (against the tyranny of the masses), and also advocated for lassiez-faire economic reforms.
Back then, Liberals advocated for universal health-care, a social safety net, and public education for all. None of these things are inconsistent with each other. Spending money on schools/emergency-services/heath-care/social-security is just a matter of priorities -- not a "statist" stance as the false narrative in the tea party goes.
This just demonstrates the inadequacies of left/right term.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
and for literally destroying private practice medicine
"Literally destroying private practice medicine"? Wow, I didn't know we even had enough drones to kill every single private medical practitioner in the US and destroy their offices.
But let's ignore the "literally", as literally nobody uses it correctly any more. :-)
It's been a couple of years since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed, but I went to my doctors' [sic - husband does internal medicine, wife is an endocrinologist, which is a bit of a jackpot for a type 1 diabetic...] office a couple of months ago and saw no signs that they had magically transformed into gummint employees. Heck, even in the UK, with a much more "gummint run" system than in many countries in socialist Continental Yerp, much less in the US, private practitioners still exist, although the private sector is significantly smaller than the public sector.
A Democratic system can be used to allow fascism to replace it. Fascism can only be replaced via use of the gun.
Quit worshiping stuff because it is 'cool technology'. I'm sure very 'cool' technological means of torturing people can be created. It would still be used for fskin' torture.
Literally destroying private practice medicine, not the practitioners themselves.
More and more doctors are having to sell their practice and become hospital (or management company) employees to stay afloat because of the changes this has brought about. We've dumped vast sums of money down the rathole of EMR without getting benefits anywhere close to what we should get in return for so large an investment.
You're pretty sure that health insurance is meant to cover only catastrophes, but it's not. It's to cover spikes in health care costs that come from occasional expensive events. It's just like car collision insurance: it's a financing strategy that allows people to keep moving through life in a way they can afford, based on statistics. In fact car insurance should pay for routine maintenance that prevents catastrophic costs like engines seizing or bald tires skidding into something.
Sorry, but no. Insurance, by definition, is there to cover events that are too expensive to be able to afford the immediate expense, and unlikely enough that you don't actually expect to need it very often.
Routine maintenance is by definition routine, and therefore shouldn't be covered by insurance. If you start using insurance for routine events, then the overall cost goes up because the insurance company will want to take a share of the profits.
So for example:
These are the sort of sites Tom Steinberg is talking about -- sites that change the balance between people and government at a grass roots level, by allowing people to work together and see what each other are doing.
I've used eg the FoI tool, and it works. Think of these as force-multipliers for the individual's voice and clout in society.
Steinberg is really thinking about the low-budget, non-commercial, very effective sites that his charity MySociety has set up over the last 10 years in the UK, which aim to help non-party democracy at a grass roots level, by helping make citizens more powerful against government at all levels, by creating systems that give them more information, help them work together, and track and share the outcomes of what happens when they tangle with power.
What Steinberg is saying is that systems like that, that make the citizen more powerful, are far more impressive to him than systems which make a particular political party more effective. It's a bit surprising that so far seemingly every poster here has missed Steinberg's point.
You're right in the pure academic sense of what insurance is, but insurance has evolved such that:
(1) Plans (at least employer-sponsored plans) pay for some routine things that aren't overly expensive as an added perk (obviously this still costs money to someone).
(1b) In the case of employer-sponsored plans, where you can't be kicked out (well unless you reach your lifetime maximum), it makes sense to encourage things like regular checkups and stuff, so they often cover those at 100%. Preventative maintenance now help catch things that would become much more costly down the road if not caught right away.
(2) Going through an insurer for routine medical stuff can theoretically save you money even if you're still paying for all or most of it because the insurer has negotiated special rates that you wouldn't have access to as an unaffiliated individual without a plan.
We already give away emergency care.
You mean "People who buy insurance already pay for everyone else's emergency care." That turns out to be a horrible system: very few people actually need significant healthcare at any time, so it is in almost everyone's personal interest not to buy insurance (on which they will generally see negative return), and to wait until any problems become an emergency to seek care. Let the flu turn into pneumonia. Let the cut turn into gangrene.
Meanwhile, from a society perspective, it's vastly cheaper to treat emerging conditions before they become emergencies. From a society perspective, all care gets paid for by someone, and we ought to try to make that care as effective and inexpensive as possible. So, make everybody pay and make service available to everyone, and both the total societal cost of care and the individual cost of care will be lower.
I think that was the plan behind Bush's "Compassionate Conservatism". Cut the social safety net, allowing non-profit religious organizations to take up the burden of care, but remove restrictions that prevent those organizations from proselytizing and imposing religious restrictions upon the recipients of their aid.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
That's only true when you presume that there is a for-profit insurance company involved in the process. My (largish) employer is self insured (with a big company paid a fixed cost to administer the plan), so our VP of HR cuts a check every week to pay to sum total of all employees' health care costs for that week.
Thus, the company is actively trying to encourage and incentivize us to better take care of routine maintenance. Engineers tend to ignore health issues, so the company put a full-time clinic on-site and encourage us to visit if we sneeze once. They want us to not get avoidable diseases so they ban smoking on their property and create lots of free physical activity programs where we can get exercise.
My insurance company, also known as my employer, wants my routine maintenance covered because it saves them money, pushing the overall costs down (not up).
While it's not the case in the U.S. right now, were you to replace "my employer" with "my government", the same arguments could apply.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
oh we know America can spend money, but can they put it to use.
But I know East Germany was a hell hole and people were literally dying trying to get out.
Did you know the west germans, english, and french governments all begged the east german government not to let the wall fall due to economic fears about a flood of immigrants into the west? Did you know that after the wall fell and their fears proved to be unfounded, those same democratic leaders did a 180 turn and declared that western democracy had brought down the wall in spite of those evil commies? Sure the west used to make instant heros out of the handfull of people who sucessfully climbed the wall every year, but the last thing they wanted was to remove the wall and let everyone through.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
were you to replace "my employer" with "my government", the same arguments could apply.
I disagree. There is an existing relationship between you and your employer which may serve to restrain you and your coworkers from going too far in the opposite direction of over-using the health care services paid for by your employer (actually paid for by you because your wages are lower than they otherwise would've been, but that's another conversation). If one employee was overusing the health care system or abusing privileges, it would be a simple matter to identify that employee and have a talk with them. However, this breaks down when "my employer" is replaced with "my government". The government cannot dismiss a citizen for breaking the rules or abusing the system. In fact, I challenge you to name one US Government program today that isn't plagued by waste, fraud and abuse. Indeed, one need only take a look at Medicare and Medicaid to see how wasteful the government is; it's like giving a credit card to your teenage daughter, it's a disaster. Most Americans are skeptical in the extreme, and rightly so, about the ability of the government to run an efficient health care system. They may like free stuff for themselves, provided that they don't have to pay personally though higher taxes, but only the most naive citizen believes that the US Government will reduce costs. Find someone who says with a straight face that Obamacare is going to cost less and I will show you either a fool or a liar.
crony capitalism (which is the only type of capitalism that ever has or ever CAN arise)
Powerful people have been abusing their powers to help their friends or dispense favors with expectation of repayment since the dawn of recorded history. This is nothing that's either unique to capitalism or new. Were some more equal than others in Mao's China or the Soviet Union or in Cuba? You'd better believe it. Did Louis XIV of France play favorites among his nobles? Absolutely. So, this cannot be a valid critique of capitalism because it's no less prevalent, and may even be more prevalent, in any of the alternative systems.
A true UHC would put all aspects of healthcare back in the hands of the people who are getting that care
Which is a sure fire recipe for cost overruns. I like to use the analogy of the all expenses paid vacation. Suppose that you buy an all expenses paid vacation at a private beach resort where everything is run by the resort. After paying to get in, what incentive do you have to restrain yourself at the buffet or the bar? Are you going to have only 2 beers when you could have had 5 instead? Are you going to limit yourself to one helping of lobster when you can just as easily have two? This is how people treat healthcare when they aren't paying for it directly Ala Carte. They've already paid their premiums and they want ten of everything, in order to get their "money's worth" from the insurance. At least at the resort the chefs cannot be sued because the buffet was lousy, but in healthcare doctors can be and often are sued because tests weren't run when an outcome was poor.
as evidenced by every civilized nation in the world with UHC that is vastly popular with said nation's citizenry.
Just because an idea or program is popular doesn't make it right or good. If more people were aware of just how much these systems cost, especially when compared to the quality of the services they deliver, they might reconsider. Fortunately, the nations of Europe are now receiving just that lesson. How much longer now before the youth of Greece, Spain, Portugal and France grow weary of stubbornly high unemployment and dim financial futures? Margaret Thatcher was right, eventually you run out of other people's money and that's precisely what's happening in Europe today.
No, because you made it up.
Just because the thing stopping them getting out was broken doesn't mean they had to let them in.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I joined match.com earlier this year and I'm currently going month to month. I sure wouldn't call it a positive use of technology as the main article states. It's not been a complete waste of my time and money but it has mostly been a waste of them both. My experiences might be interesting to other geeks so I'll describe how it really works.
Match requires both you and the person you contact to be paying members to be able to read and send email. Yes, you cannot even read email unless you are a paying member. The reality of this is that as most women do not pay (I cannot speak for male members as I am a guy looking for women), most of your attempts to contact women will never be read. Match won't even tell you who sent email unless you pay. Everything is about money. I've been on other dating websites that allowed some limited exchange of email if one party was a paying member, but Match doesn't do that. This is the number one impediment in trying to meet people on the site.
I cannot prove this, but based on my experience and what I've read online, I suspect that Match by default turns off IM for women members. Non paying members can communicate by IM if a paying member initiates it, but the interface is poor and many people don't notice IM notifications if they get them. And some women aren't tech savvy enough to ever turn on IM, so there's no hope of communicating with them either if they don't pay and don't ever turn on IM.
About half the profiles I see could be classified as "Barbie doll seeks Ken doll." Then you have a rather large number of women with insanely restrictive requirements and they won't even talk to anyone who is outside of them. I've seen short women who only want to date guys over a foot taller than them. I've seen women who only want to meet guys within 1 year either way of their age. I recently saw a profile from a woman who only wanted to meet guys who were 20-37 years younger. No kidding. I also have seen a ton of seriously pissed off women who write very negatively about their Match experience in their profiles. These woman may not have very restrictive requirements, but they don't get any contacts except from perverts it seems. One thing that people should keep in mind is that Match has a cutoff where if you don't login within 3 weeks, they put that your last login was "over 3 weeks ago". Once a woman drops into the "over 3 weeks ago" category, the odds are rather high that she got angry about her experience and she's not going to pay to re-join. Many women are gym rats and between their jobs and the 2 hours a day, 7 days a week, they spend in the gym, it's no wonder they can't meet anyone. But they always have such restrictive requirements anyway that if any guy does contact them, they'll probably never respond.
I am convinced that Match is being run deliberately to prevent most people from making meaningful connections because your failure keeps you renewing your membership, thinking "this month will be the one". In America in the past 15+ years there's been this crazy shift thanks to TV and movies where many people are convinced that there is one and only one perfect person for them. Many of these people are on Match. They never find anyone because they never meet their preconceived perfect person. A lot of women members are on there only rolling the dice that maybe Taylor Lautner will contact them and if he doesn't, they're simply not interested.
Match hasn't been a complete waste of my time and money, but it has been really frustrating. A lot of my female and male friends who joined in the past have nothing good to say about it. It's like having a part time sales job only you find out that you don't get paid until you hit a mystery quota of sales. That sales target might be $1000 or it could be $1 million. You don't know. And if you quit before you reach the target, you don't get paid. But as you have no way of knowing how close or far you are from the target, you might have to work a long time to g
Neither of your boys watch TV, yet they get their news from TV comedy shows? Ignoring all of the significant issues in that state of affairs, when is it TV?
Is it only TV if I use rabbit ears?
If it is live (ie. no pvr)?
Communism demonstrated itself to be highly authoritarian ironically under the ostensible goal of anarchy.
The problem with Communism is that it was most enthusiastically taken up in countries with authoritarian political backgrounds such as Russia and China, or in places with inadequate social/political systems generally, such as in newly independent African countries.
However, there was never any ostensible goal of anarchy: the ostensible goal was liberty, equality, and fraternity.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Venezuela luckily has oil wealth so it can stand up against the US better.
China, I find boring in its pursuit of economic growth over everything else, and Libya was just a boil waiting to be lanced.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"helping people sell stuff they own, find a hotel, or a life partner – is that they represent a positive change in the lives of millions of people "
Lots of people use these systems for negative change. How many married people are on dating sites, buying things they shouldn't, taking trips with money they don't have. They do a lot of good, but there is always bad in there somewhere.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Indoctrinating people into thinking the government should take care of them is ultimately poor public policy that will just lead to abuse of a continually shrinking pool of resources. (See Greece and Spain)
There is nothing wrong with the government taking care of people if they can afford to. And why does the pool of resources have to be continually shrinking? If the economy is doing well, and people are working and paying taxes, the amount available to government shold go up, not down.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You will undoubtedly counter that all health care should be run by government, well now all health care workers are government employees, now you're heading down the path of communism, and history has already told us how well that works.
Tripe, pure and simple. In Britain we (still) have the National Health Service, and the last I looked we weren't communist.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
As both a classical liberal (i.e., someone who believes in the high value personal liberty) and a progressive (someone who believes government serves an important role in providing a safety net, protecting the weakest, and keeping markets healthy), I've been disappointed in the poor job our political classes have done in packaging rational humanist values into a political platform that appeals to the broad middle of people who would be best served by a government that protects their interests (provides inexpensive basic health care and efficient basic education) and lets them do business in peace and live and let live.
The Republican party transformed itself in the 50s and 60s into a movement that punched well above its weight by seeming to do the impossible: convincing the weakest that government was their enemy, etc. It was a triumph of political imagination and movement-making... and it's come close at times to ruining this country.
I'd love to see how technology can help improve our political system, but what we really need to fix is the failure of political imagination on the part of and on behalf of this broad middle. If there is an app for that (genetic algorithms for creating political movements?), I'm game to see it.
The plan behind Bush's "Compassionate Conservatism" was to appeal as a softer figure then Gore was stiff. He didn't cut any safety nets and even added religious outreaches to increase the effectiveness.
That's a very optimistic outlook on Cuba that has little chance in reality. No other country supports the US embargo on Cuba. No country other then Russia who needed it for it's strategic importance relating to the location of the US would have invested in it because they took over all private enterprise.
Cuba would likley be little different then it is now.
Umm.. Obamacare has no provision in it to stop 45,000 Americans from dieing due to no insurance. In fact, that number is capricious and false to begin with. The only thing different with Obamacare is that instead of insurance companies determining what will be treated, the government will. The poor already had government coverage and absolutely no hospital was allowed to deny life saving care because of ability to pay.
You either have been lied to, or are generating your own lies to support your ideology.
They didn't deem it constitutional. They deemed the provision a tax not a penalty which means we have to wait until the tax kicks in before it can be challenged.
Attention to detail make a world of difference here.
But only one put your undies in a knot. Huh, interesting....and nevermind the fact that we're still waiting for that pendulum to swing back, as we're now entering the fourth Bush term on everything from economics to regulatory policy to climate change to taxation to shredding the Constitution.
There's a thousand and one ways to slam Obamacare based on the facts...but rather than do that, you guys make up stupid shit instead. Why is that? Will your teabagger merit badge be revoked if your complaint is based in reality rather than BS?
Apples to oranges. You're comparing "the old boys network" to an economic system that encourages corruption on the part of both elected officials and corporate operatives. The two are not one and the same.
You're comparing "the old boys network" to an economic system that encourages corruption on the part of both elected officials and corporate operatives. The two are not one and the same.
You're making a distinction without a difference. I remain unconvinced that capitalism is any more susceptible to corruption than say socialism or communism or any other system. The mechanisms may be different in different systems, but the results of corruption are always the same; the insiders benefit to the detriment of society at large. Thus, the simple fact that corruption exists cannot, by itself, form the basis of an argument against a particular system unless it can also be shown that the system being argued against is uniquely susceptible to corruption or produces greater amounts of corruption, relative to the size of the economy, than any of the alternatives. I don't believe that capitalism encourages corruption or at least it encourages no more, and probably less, than the alternatives. Indeed, it has been my experience that wherever corruption exists in any economy it's in no small part enabled, either intentionally or unintentionally (the results are what matter, not the intent), by the policies and actions of government. Ask yourself who enforces the monopolies or provides opportunities for rent seeking or limits competition? Does the market do these things or does the government enforce the rules, regulations and restrictions that result in those outcomes?
I'm sorry that you are not paying attention, but Obama himself made this claim when talking about the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute set up in the Obamacare. Of course he attempted to make it sound like the government doing it would be better but it's the same claim.
And you can claim it's a private entity, but it's funded by government, staffed by government appointees, and makes binding rules to be interpreted as law. For all intents and purposes, it is government.
Because we'd pay for you to be sick as a dog. And you'd die sooner, saving us your Social Security payments. If mental health care were properly covered, nobody would indulge in such self destructive behavior just because it's paid by the public.
Of course cigarettes carry extra taxes to cover the extra costs. Corn syrup should, too, and probably soon will. Indeed every high risk consumable ingredient should be taxed according to its extra risk, to pay its way. Health supplements should get proportional price subsidies. Freedom of choice with personal responsibility - costs internalized instead of externalized. That would be the Conservative platform, if they weren't totally corrupt.
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No, insurance is not defined as amortizing costs across time. It's defined by paying across time costs defined by risk, whether or not that risk actually materializes.
Some insurance is for low risk, and indeed designed to spread costs smoothly across time. It's addresses cash flow, and always costs more than paying only for the cost in the event. Other insurance is for high - catastrophic - risk, spread across a pool of risk takers, not all of whom see their risk materialize.
There is no reason that a profitmaking outfit must provide even the low risk maintenance insurance. Indeed, decades (centuries) of practical experience (across the globe) have demonstrated that model poorly finances proper maintenance, at higher cost and far more management by policyholders, than does widespread publicly funded insurance. The idea of competitive profitmakers finding efficiencies in a choosy market sounds great, but in practice it's undeniably a failure. Sick and old and young people are much more suited to being victims than to being savvy consumers, and giant private corps are more suited to exploiting their customers than to serving them.
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I love it when my boss hassles me to exercise and eat right. That asshole in HR who's always trying to "forget" my benefits should know that I need viagara, especially right before that birthday long weekend. The executive team's experience making widgets really qualifies them to design and administer the medical care that my family's health and life depend on - because it sells more widgets. I should change my healthcare based on the whims of my new employer, or stay stuck in one workplace because I depend on its benefits. Not.
Employers shouldn't have anything to do with administering healthcare. It's crazy, and perhaps the ultimate corporatist policy. They should mind their own business, literally.
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Private businesses are fare more wasteful, fraudulent and abusive than are Medicare, Medicaid and VA healthcare. Indeed the government is far better at catching these abuses than private business is: private insurance is defined by it; employers administering it are characterized by its incompetence version, gilded with plenty of scamming.
Public health financing in the US is far more effective per dollar than is private. Even apart from the profit collected by terrible insurers, even before considering the public finances far more unhealthy people.
Indeed all of the many Obamacare cost studies by qualified orgs say it's more cost effective. It's primarily designed to reduce public health budgets, though sold on many other benefits.
Everything you said is exactly backwards. Especially the part where the "existing relationship" with one's employer is somehow the correct way to get better compliance with healthcare policies. That relationship could also be used to insist your kids do their homework: your boss as your kids' boss - how about going over your spouse's credit card bills along with the monthly department budget, too?
You're talking from pure ideology, ignoring the actual well established facts. You're devoted to corporatism, though its practice rips apart all the values you likely insist your ideology enshrines. Try looking at the real world, not the one sponsored by your media chaperones.
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+1 Agree :)
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I thought you were going somewhere, then you degraded into an anti-government rant and I stopped reading. Sorry.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
It all depends on what you want to "conserve", if you wanted a conservative small minded military run conformist hell East Germany was "perfect" and not that different from for instance Franco's Spain...
What is absolutely bewildering for me is that anybody would paint him or herself as a "conservative" (unless you follow Mark Reynold's take on "conservative" being politically ecologist who want to "conserve" Earth in an usable state....)
The only thing one can say on "the good old times" is that they universally sucked, sometimes they "sucked somewhat less than the current state" (let's say Nazi Germany vs Weimar Republic, or (debatable) Current Iran vs Shah's Iran, but life for most people in the 20's in Germany was ghastly and if you where not rich during the Shah's time life was pretty bad too..
And in the US, you can choose any decade since the independence and find good reason not to go back there unless you get to be "the king"...
You have made "conservative" a word with a distinct, definitely pejorative meaning, and then applied it to everyone who disagrees with you. You are making a weak no-true-Scotsman argument that you can call authoritarians "conservative" regardless of the rest of their political philosophy. This is simply not true.
BTW, are you opposed to "conserving" the scientific method? The Pythagorean Theorem? Just because something is old does not mean that it is wrong, nor that it should be replaced.
I would suggest the proper comparison is not Germany, 1946, vs Germany, 1928, but either one vs Germany, 1910.
That's always your problem, dumass - I am paying attention.
From within one of his FEMA concentration camps in between plotting to take your guns away with UN death panels? Like I said, there's a thousand and one ways to criticize Obama's policies without making up stupid shit that has zero basis in reality.
In the western world, however, authoritarian personalities are almost universally associated with reactionary conservative politices.
That is utter rubbish. Eastern Europe was ruled for 50 years by a circus of "authoritarian personalities" in the form of Communist party leaders with their own cults of personality. I don't think you are going to find many takers to the idea that Communism is part of "reactionary conservative politics".
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell