1. You seem to be making assumptions about what kinds of jokes i'm talking about.
2. You seem to be making assumptions about whether i think general sex jokes constitute harassment.
3. You don't know very many jokes.
4. You don't realize that I was the one who brought up dirty jokes, not you. And I specifically said 'jokes about sex' not 'jokes about how stupid women are'.
There are sexist clean jokes, there are sexist dirty jokes, there are sexist knock-knock jokes. By 'sexist' I mean, 'presents men or women as idiots'. (Yes, man or woman, there are a lot of sexist jokes about men also.)
There are plenty of non-sexist versions of all those things also. In fact, quite a lot of them have somewhat recently been changed. Much like the 'X walks into bar' jokes, which used to almost entirely be about racial stereotypes, but I think we can all agree 'Two men walk into a bar, the third one ducks.' isn't racist.
Telling jokes that slur whole genders is obviously as inappropriate as telling jokes that slur whole races or ethnicities or whatever, and is certainly 'sexist'. Telling a disgusting joke about mistaken identity, a cucumber, and a confessional booth where women can overhear it or even to women is not sexist, and is not sexual harassment, although it certainly doesn't belong in the workplace.
Dirty jokes are not about gender. The only jokes I know about gender would be 'dumb blonde' jokes, and no one tells those anymore. The class of sexist jokes is entirely orthogonal to the class of dirty jokes.
Dirty jokes, and cartoons and such, are about sex, one of the most absurd things that humanity does, and does things for. They, obviously, have different behaviors for men and women in them, but that is because men and women factually act different WRT sex, and men are the butt of the joke as much as women, probably moreso because they try harder and it's easier to make a punchline out of that.
Now, at some point in this whole process came the idea that references to sex, at all, were sexual harassment and discrimination, but that concept is simply idiotic. I'll go along with people who say they don't belong at work, but I'm with the article that the problem is actually lack of discrimination, namely, the lack of the ability to discriminate between places where those might be appropriate and places they are not.
And pretending it is 'harassment' of women in a workplace is doing a disservice to women who actually do get their butt grabbed or repeatedly invited into the copy room for a nooner or even threatened by their boss for a date. Those are truly hostile work environments.
Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)
I don't. I much, much prefer black hair. The author tries to make it seem like preference for blond hair is universal -- then argues that blond hair developed in northern Europe. Supposedly, blond hair evolved in that cold climate as an alternate means to advertise youth, but how would the men from the rest of the world know that?
No shit, this is stupid. Yes, women have been dying their hair blond forever...and dying it black, and red, and gray, and basically every single color ever. Hair dye has been around and used by almost every society in history, more often by females than men, but the coloring has always been semi-random...sometimes there's a standard color and the everyone dyes their hair to look 'more' that color, sometimes people just throw weird color things in their hair. (Something that, interestingly enough, has recently become popular again.)
Most suicide bombers are Muslim
This means in no way that Muslims have any sort of monopoly on violence -- they're just willing to take their own lives.
That's exactly what I thought when I read that too. The arguments make sense, but all it really means is that Islam tends to result in people willing to throw their life away. Which, incidentally, so does poverty, to a much larger extent, but they cleverly avoid that by just taking religious reasons.
What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals
This is just fear-mongering. How is it politically incorrect to state that the young are crazier than the mature? My car insurance company has no qualms making this distinction...
I think everyone knows that people of maybe a ten year span do something like 50% of the pushing forward in society, but their claim is that only men so such a large focus is interesting...it makes you wonder if the accomplishments of women get understated because they might, take, for example, twenty years to do what a man did in ten, ignoring the fact for the second ten years the man didn't really accomplish anything. I.e., we focus on 'superstars' who leap in accomplish a lot very very quickly, instead of caring about total accomplishments, and men are more likely to do that.
Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist
This is inapplicable because there is no way for men in all-men workplaces to hit on others in a blatant and disrespectful way. Enter women, and abuse alley opens up. This speaks more of the insensitivity of men than of anything else.
No, in a way, this is correct. As they said, there are two sorts of sexual harassment. I think we can all agree about the 'sleep with me or you're fired', and the constant hitting on women. But the other sort, the dirty jokes and the pictures and stuff, the 'hostile work environment'...that is, in a way, the opposite of discrimination.
Like it or not, many men constantly talk about sex. Many men enjoy jokes about it. They can either assume that women will not like these jokes, and not tell them around them, or they can assume that women like the jokes, like men do. (Or, at least, they assume men do.) The catch-22 there, of course, that doing the former is, indeed, actually sexist, whereas the latter is non-discriminatory, despite what people might like to believe.
Of course, the best solution would be to realize such jokes aren't appropriate at the workplace, but saying that a dirty joke told within earshot of a woman is somehow sexist is idiotic.
Last I checked, contempt of court was a crime, as was possessing (much less REPRODUCING) classified documents without proper clearance.
You are incorrect. The US has, and cannot have, an official state secrets act. Classified information is only protected by documents that are signed when you get security clearances. If I'm walking outside and I stumble upon classified information laying in a ditch, I can do whatever I want with it.
I understand insurance just fine. Like I said, I don't actually have a problem with car insurance, I was just saying that having the government provide car 'insurance' is possibly the most inane method of operation ever.
If I get into a crash and seriously injure someone else or damage their property, I'm on the hook for ~$100,000, which would be catastrophic to my lifestyle thereafter. Instead, I pay $300/year for the rest of my life, which is ~50 years -- only $15,000.
And if I pay the lottery everyday except Sunday, it costs a dollar a day, it costs about $300 a year, and if I win I get $1000000 dollars. That doesn't mean that the value of playing is worth the cost.
Likewise, statistically, you will get in less than $15,000 worth of accidents in your life. Much less, probably about $5000. If you wouldn't, or it becomes obvious you are going to rack up more, they would raise your rates.
Did you even try the health risk calculators? They'll give you an idea of how much your lifestyle really affects you. No sense debating about stuff that neither of us (ostensibly) are experts in.
Just because something is a health risk doesn't mean it's a preventable health risk. And just because it's a preventable health risk doesn't mean that it's going to cost a statistically significant amount.
I think health insurance premiums should depend on lifestyle choices. I'm a motorcyclist, so I should pay more. My health insurer can always sue the at-fault party to recover costs, like auto insurers do now.
You can think that, but insurance premiums will continue to be based on risk, which as medicine finds more and more risk factors, will increasingly be due to things entirely outside people's control, like genetics. (Because the things that are inside people's control, they will control.)
Exactly my point. They have been tapping for years and years and years. But what happens to the data? After 9/11 the data *can* be passed on to domestic law enforcement for them to follow up on.
If the tap was a law enforcement requested tap, they would pass it on to the law enforcement based organization that requested it. If it was an intelligence based tap, they would pass it on to the intelligence based organization that requested it.
I will repeat: THE NSA DOES NOT ORGINATE TAPS. It doesn't choose who to tap, it doesn't choose why, and it doesn't choose who to share them with.
Within the CIA and FBI, there were regulations about the sharing between intelligence and criminal information gathering, including but not limited to taps. This had nothing to do with the NSA. Organizations walk up the NSA, ask for a tap, produce documentation the tap is legal, the NSA does the tap, gives the information to the people who asked for it, and that's the entirely of the NSA's job. (Well, for wiretapping. It does other stuff also.)
Any failure to share information is a matter between the intelligence community and the investigative community, and the NSA is neither. The NSA does not try to figure things out, the NSA runs computers for those two sets of people, and others, it makes no decisions itself.
There are no restrictions on the NSA for tapping foreign signals. If the signal happens to terminate in the US they do not stop tapping. The problem previously is that they couldn't do anything with the data when this happened. In fact the NSA had connected dots pre-9/11, but they couldn't do anything with it. The data couldn't legally be used in court. This didn't stop them from doing what they always did. This has now changed. The FISA court is now more willing to work with this now, though some judges are "uncomfortable" with this approach.
They can't do anything with the data now. They do not 'do things' with data. They collect data and give it to others.
You have confused two things: The huge problems with the disconnect between intelligence gathering and criminal investigation, which actually does exist but has almost nothing to do with the NSA. Seriously, some of that has never entered the NSA at all, like when the CIA bugs places outside the country or the FBI executes search warrants and finds information linking people to terrorist organizations. The NSA and FBI are two separate departments of a company that don't share information, and the NSA is just the IT guys...blaming them because each group has had their servers made off-limits, by company policy, to the other is rather idiotic.
You've managed to confuse that with the fact the NSA, which has specific legal guidelines about who and when they can tap people at all, was operating outside those guidelines simply because the AG said so. We don't actually know who they were turning the information over to...the FBI, the CIA, or, hell, the VP himself.
The tap is not on US Nationals, it is on foreign communications. If you call a criminal, is your phone tapped or the suspected criminal? The answer, of course, is the criminal. Now if you said something that would implicate you, law enforcement could follow up on you and even go back to the court to tap your phone. This is how the NSA works. They do not hang up if the call happens to terminate in the US. The difference is now that can tell someone that something is up and get the ball rolling (further FISA warrants) to investigate the US side of the call. The domestic side can't do anything with your phone until they get a warrant (FISA or otherwise). This is how taps have worked for years and years.
No, the taps are on everyone over 6'2" inches tall that drive Ford cars.
What, you say I have no evidence of that? Well, you have no evidence of your claim. Without the taps being reviewed by courts, we have no idea who was being tapped.
If they have nothing to hide, why aren't they using the processes provided under the law that merely provide a minimal level of oversight?
I mean, with FISA, they basically can tap whoever they hell they want to, and then show up in court and argue it. If, for some reason, the court turns them down (Something that had never happened once in the entirely of the FISA courts at that point in time.), they can even appeal it to a higher court.
And, considering how much Congress was in their pocket at the time, they could have even changed the laws to make it easier to get a warrant. There was a frickin amendment to FISA during all this, and Congress actually asked if anything needed changing, and the Administration said no, they were perfectly happy with it. At the time, no one had figured out that the reason they were happy with it is that they were completely ignoring it.
The one thing they couldn't have done under the constitution, and the one thing they actually did, was operate without any judicial supervision at all. Someone needs to explain to me why that would even be attempted unless they know that what they were attempting wasn't just outside the bounds of the current law (Which they could have trivially had changed.) but entirely outside any reasonable bounds of law.
Like, oh, wiretapping political opponents.
'If you have nothing to hide, why do you care if they search you' is a dumb question when applied to people, because people have many secrets that are not illegal yet they do not want to get out. It doesn't really apply when the person is the executive branch, which has, in theory, no personal secrets, and it's being 'searched' by a special court that is designed to handle classified information. It is the government being searched by the government.
The only possible conclusion is that the executive branch does has secrets that are not the standard 'classified information' kind, and that it does not want shared with the other branches of government...like, oh, that it is breaking the law. Sadly for it, keeping those secrets also was breaking the law, in one of the neatest legal Catch-22 ever.
The problem isn't what can and can't be used in court. No one gives a shit about that except the courts. The reason the courts don't want the NSA's wiretapping-without-warrants used in courts is that it is illegal.
The problem is, in actual fact, that the NSA is operating wiretaps without any court oversight at all. Any court oversight.
And the NSA 'can't get a warrant' because THE NSA IS NOT A INVESTIGATIVE AGENCY, you nimrod. The NSA runs a bunch of computers and does other stuff like protect classified information. It does not hunt down terrorists, and it is not supposed to. It operates the wiretapping system, it does not initiate wiretaps. The NSA is not supposed to start a wiretap within the US without one of three things:
1) An actual, signed warrant, by a judge. (Technically, this can be for any reason, but in practice it's only issued because the court agrees that someone is probably committing a crime, and thus the wiretap will involve an investigating agency in some manner.)
2) The CIA or FBI operating within FISA guidelines that let it get a tap in an emergency and then get a warrant within 72 hours, signed by a judge.
3) A signed statement by the Attorney General that the wiretap does not include any US nationals. This is also subject to judicial review, and is designed for spying on, basically, embassies.
Instead, what actually happened is that the AG signed a statement saying that, in his opinion, the wiretapping he wanted the NSA to do was legal, because the President is Really Cool, so they set up wiretaps. (This was not even vaguely an attempt to follow (3), and in fact the government has never even suggested that as a defense, just to nip that argument in the bud. There are specific forms and whatnot for that.)
We don't actually know who was receiving these wiretaps, if it was the CIA, the FBI, or Dick Cheney himself. I believe it's been hinted at that it's the CIA, but I can't recall any specific proof of that. We also have absolutely no idea who was being tapped, despite claims by the White House that it was only tapping international calls made to and from suspected terrorists. Because there has been no judicial review of any of this, we don't actually know said wiretapping even exists except that the government has admitted to it.
Firstly, Bush's approval rating is around 1/3 and probably at about 28%. So, unless you're willing to admit that most US citizens are liberal and that conservatism is loud-mouthed minority, then please stop assuming that anti-Bush means "liberal."
Hey! Shhhh! You're screwing up the game.
The right has a new imaginary 'center' that's about where the right was in 1996, and a left where the right was in 1984 and the center was in 1996. They own the media, they loudly proclaim day in and down out that is the center, it is where 'Americans' are.
They say people on the whole don't care about torture, don't care about civil rights, don't care about the rule of law, don't care about anything except HULK SMASH TERRORIST. They certainly don't want a usable health care system or to help the poor in any manner or unions or clean air. In fact, people are usually against those things.
Some people on the left complain about those definitions., and, factually, they are correct. On the whole, if you were to plot out a people's political positions, it would be a bell curve, but one that peaks about 2/3rds the way to where the left is. The vast majority of people have no problem with abortions or gay people, even in conservative states. The vast majority of people like some sort of social security and would like some sort of universal health care. Yes, 'the left', politically, is about at the 85 percentile of the curve on the left, but the right is at the 99 percentile on the right.
Anyway, don't tell anyone this. Let the right get away with it. Let them move the definitions as far to the right as possible, as fast as possible, for as long as possible. Why?
Because this makes almost everyone 'left'. And people are not idiots forever, they'll look around, and notice they fall, according to the right itself, squarely in the 'left' camp.
Guess who they're going to vote for?
The right are, right now, destroying their own party, and they don't seem to grasp the idea. Moving the pretend center towards you, without moving the actual population, is a bad thing, because it makes more people on the other side!
You have no idea who Bush is wiretapping whatsoever. No one does.
Saying 'It's just oversea calls made to suspected terrorists' is just repeating what the government says, and, more to the point, it's almost certainly wrong. Whatever the administration is doing, it is doing something that would not be allowed under FISA, or they're be using FISA. And that sort of behavior certainly would be allowed unless they have an incredibly lax definition of 'suspected terrorists'.
The US government is almost certainly wiretapping people it would not be allowed to had it used the courts, otherwise it would use the courts.
You are not legally allowed to make backup copies of music as a matter of law. There is no law allowing it.
However, the courts have said that personal copies, for format shifting and/or backup, are in general legal. They decided that way back when tape players came out in cars and people starting copying their records to tape. (So, despite what the RIAA tried to claim about ripping mp3s being inherently, almost that exact issue was settled decades ago.)
This is often mistakenly called 'Fair Use', but is not what fair use actually refers to, which is the limited ability to copy parts of a work, even giving that to others.
However, ripping DVDs is still illegal under the DMCA.
Yeah, this is an interesting idea, and, unlike many of the MPAA's ideas, actually appears to be legal. The software could literally describe exactly what it was going to do, scan your computer for media files and share the list, and people would agree, because that's what P2P software does.
OTOH, I'm not entirely certain under what logic the user would be doing anything illegal, either.
Second, if you think insurance is a bad value for you, you can always demonstrate your ability to cover liability by buying a surety bond. If you are a good driver, you might get a good deal.
Insurance, is, by definition, a bad value for the purchaser. All transactions are something that the seller values for X and the purchaser values for X+n, so they trade it for cash somewhere in the middle, except that insurance is basically selling money for more money, and thus the only way it can possibly work is if the purchaser or seller misvalues it, and insurance companies spend an amazing amount of time calculating the value they assign. There are some circumstances where there are non-monetary benefits might raise the value enough make it a reasonable transaction, but obviously car insurance does not fall into the category or, duh, the government wouldn't have to require it.
I don't actually have that much a problem with car insurance, I was just point out that, while mandatory car insurance is indeed stupid, government car insurance is even dumber, and if the government is going to cover our car accidents we should stop looking at it as 'insurance' and find a more useful paradigm, like loans.
You have grossly underestimated the effect of lifestyle on these conditions -- look here, or here, for example.
To quickly summarize --
Heart disease: artheroscleroris is by far the most common cause of heart disease, and is largely preventable by reducing blood pressure and cholesterol through diet and exercise. Most other forms of heart disease share similar, preventable risk factors.
I think you need to follow that link and actually read the 'Physiologic factors that increase risk' section. The very last item is 'diet'. 'obesity', and the signifers to that, show up about halfway. The rest appear entirely genetic.
And perhaps you should read the line that says 'for about 65% of men and 47% of women, the first symptom of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease is heart attack or sudden cardiac death (death within one hour of onset of the symptom).'. Just because it's the most common form of heart disease doesn't mean that it's the most treated if half the people show up at the hospital dead. And even if it was the most treated, that doesn't mean that it's anywhere near the most expensive.
Cancer: diet, sun exposure and Vitamin D intake are very big factors as well.
For, um, skin cancer. Not a very big component of, say, prostate cancer or breast cancer (The two biggest ones) or leukemia or stomach cancer or brain cancer or pancreatic cancer or bone cancer or Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma or thyroid cancer do I need to continue?
So, congrats. You've tracked down two cancers that can be caused by outside risk factors. I would suggest adding colon cancer to that, which can be affected by a diet low in fiber. (Although I will point out that almost everyone's diet is 'too low in fiber', so blaming the.0001% who get the cancer seems rather random.)
And what about the two bigs cancers, prostate and breast cancer?
Hypertension: does have a genetic component, but controllable environmental factors are the leading risk factor.
So you don't want to...pay for doctors to tell people to reduce their salt intake? Because that's what I'm seeing here.
In reality, salt intake is the largest cause of hypertension, but it is also the easiest and cheapest to actually treat. Because 'hypertension' is expensive to treat, and 'most hypertension' is caused by too much salt, you have leaped to a totally inane conclusion.
We need people to go to doctors regularly. Some of them will have hypertension. More than half of that will be caused by a stupid diet, and they can modify their diet just fine. Assuming we're paying for regular checkups anyway, this costs nothing. The rest will be caused by other things like genetics and renal problems and will
The point of insurance is to protect one's self against catastrophic costs. I'm happy to pay $300/year into perpetuity in order to not have to pay $100,000 in damages in a bad accident, which of course is very unlikely to occur.
Good for you?
As for paying for bad drivers, I do pay for the payouts to others drivers who get into accidents -- obviously, that's how insurance works. But, an insurance company has no interest to keep on drivers who are high risks for future accidents (however their actuaries calculate it), because their competitors can drop them and charge lower rates while still making more money.
I have no problem with people having whatever insurance they want. I have a problem with the government requiring I purchase it from unaccountable and uncontrolled third parties merely to drive.
Hmmm... over half of the most expensive diseases [msn.com] have significant lifestyle components: obesity, smoking, poor diet and stress.
Um, what sort of math are you using?
Heart conditions - They explicitly say that that doesn't include many of the expenses for drugs to lower cholesterol or blood pressure. If you think someone having an arrhythmia or a weak wall in an artery is somehow preventable, you are vastly mistake. Heart condition doesn't mean 'their blood pressure is too high', it means 'Something has gone wrong with their heart'. (To be fair, this can be caused by smoking.)
Trauma - Entirely due to accidents of one type or another. If by 'lifestyle components' you mean 'existing in something other than a padded room without any other people', yes, otherwise, no.
Cancer - This is such a large category that it's impossible to say. But if you click in you see the top three are breast, prostate, and skin cancer, of which only one has external factors. Lung cancer also has, obviously, the external factor of smoking, accounting for 75% of all of it, but it's apparently less than skin cancer, which is only a third the cost of breast cancer. Some of these risk factors were not known at the time, and blaming the victim seems rather absurd.
Mental illness - No external risk factor that anyone knows of. No, drug use is not one of them, making barely a blip.
Respiratory ailments - That's basically infections, which no one can control. It's sheer luck who gets infected and who doesn't. And asthma, which has mostly uncontrollable risk factors (Being born premature and whatnot.)
Hypertension - A good deal of high blood pressure is genetic. And the cost is due to absurdly high drug costs, not anything inherently costly in the treatment.
Arthritis and joint disorders - The 'lifestyle component' here: Moving your joints for sixty years. A very small amount of these are preventable. And, no carpal tunnel isn't one of them...there's almost no corrolation between repetive movement and CTS. It's due, pure and simple, to movement, so unless you want to argue that people should not actually use their hands, there are no risk factors. People who use their hands a lot just get it sooner.
Diabetes - That one I'll give you, although I will note that a lot of that is children. Saying 'It's your fault you have diabetes' when they got it when they were 10 and their parents let them live on sugar is rather stupid.
Back problems - Sometimes, yes, sometimes no
So, to recap: We've got diabetes as a disease that is almost entirely due to lifestyle components, although you'll note that it's the last one in cost. We've got maybe some back problems and hypertension, as those things that have genetic components that may have been helped by behaviors.
We've got some kinds of cancer being caused by certain behaviors, some being causes by random environmental factors, some being caused by genetics, some by viruses, and some being caused, possibly, by the cancer fairy. But the chart does not break out lung cancer, which is the big one, 3/4ths caused by smoking.
Of course owners of the system don't mind the system.
As a customer, I take advantage of the competition.
No, you're just bad at math. Add up the amount you spend on insurance. Add up, roughly, the damages you've caused. (If you have comprehensive, ignore the damages to your own vehicle that your insurance paid for, because, like I said, this isn't a replacement for that, just the mandatory insurance.)
80% of the population will come out behind, having spent a lot more than the cost anyone. Maybe 15% are, at the moment, slightly ahead, because they've recently had accidents, but I assure you that their higher rates over the next few years will put them back behind. And there's the 5% that regularly get in accidents so often that they will actually stay ahead of the curve, until they fall out of the system, because insurance companies only charge so much.
In the US, at least, insurers aren't obligated to take on bad drivers -- this is what what the SR-22 surety bond provision is for. If a company wishes to, they can charge very high rates or offer bad service to high-risk drivers. So if you are insured, you aren't paying for bad drivers; if you don't like your rates, just move to a different company.
Except that you paid for them until they fell out of the system. Saying you're not paying for them is like asserting that you're not paying for shoplifters when you purchase things at a stop, because most shoplifters eventually get caught. The money doesn't magically get back into the system when they leave the system.
I see, so just have the liability underwriting done by the gov't instead of the insurance industry.
I'm not a fan of that. But the question needs to be asked, as it always needs to be asked about crime: Are we trying to punish, or make them pay back 'their debt to society', or deter more crime by them and others?
If the answer is 'deter' or 'punish', it doesn't make a lot of sense to have them pay the entire bill, but a set amount. We don't punish people for assaulting a rich person more than a poor person, why should we make someone pay more for hitting a rich person's car than a poor person's? And we don't want to deter them more from hitting rich people's cars...
OTOH, the car owner has to be made whole somehow, and if they're not doing it, the government is.
My reservations are that a) if the gov't decides I'm a bad driver for some reason, I won't have any recourse. Because the gov't is underwriting, they have an incentive to pull your license much faster than currently; b) it will probably end up costing the taxpayers in the long-run due to gov't inefficiency than a free market scheme.
You'll have the same recourse you always had: You can fight the 'finding of fault' of the accidents in court.
The courts already have methods of dealing with very bad drivers. I was just pointing out, in addition to those methods, there also will be 'You cannot drive and possibly cause accidents until you have some way of paying for the accidents you're already caused'.
If you're worried about that, you should be really worried under the present system, where insurance companies can stop insuring you even for accidents you don't cause and you actually don't have any legal recourse. At least with the government doing it you could show up in court and demonstrate that the accident was not your fault, which means you wouldn't have to pay for it. (Of course, you'd presumably be doing that anyway, even if you could pay for it.)
I don't want to pay for others' poor lifestyle choices that result in high healthcare costs. I think the easiest way to do this is let the market set insurance rates. In the US, the system is broken because of the tax incentives given to employers. Perhaps, there might also be a means-tested gov't entitlement for the destitute to get care, as it's unpalatable for people to
In short, I imagine the Democrats are happy to spend the remainder of the next year and a half feeding Bush as much rope as he would like. They know what he will do with it. The more Republican necks he slips in there before then, the happier the Dems are.
Which only works if he doesn't nonsensically invade Iran.
The advantage of my system is that we don't have companies making absurd amounts of money off mandatory insurance.
It's amazing that people seem to have a problem with the government paying for other people's health care, but don't have a problem with the government paying for bad drivers. Or, to be more exact, the government requiring we pay a third party for bad drivers.
The really funny joke is people saying 'I don't want to pay for other people's bad choices', when something like 90% of bad health is due to pure chance and nothing anyone could have changed it (Well, beside preventative medicine, but that's the fault of the health insurance system in the first place!), but have no problem paying for other people's bad driving, where the law already clearly says who is at fault.
If the government wants us to pay for third parties bad driving, it should be honest and actually pay for it itself, instead of making us going through third parties that skim off the top. I don't think that's a good idea, so I say the government should merely cover shortfalls in what people can afford and have them pay them back.
If people do think the government paying for that is a good idea (And, hey, it's debatable), than putting a cap on what people owe per accident would work, which could be covered entirely with a bond, and having the government pay the rest.
While in theory, under my system, people could buy insurance to cover themselves, I don't see that as a likely result, because there's not any logical need for that if you're a good driver, and if you're a bad driver you'd pay too much. Companies might have something like that for their own vehicles as part of the huge package of insurance they have, because having bonds for every single driver or vehicle would be crazy. For everyone else, it's sorta like insurance to cover breaking a window at your own house...95% of people don't need it, and those who are clumsy fools who keep breaking them couldn't actually afford it.
To list advantages and disadvantages:
The advantage of my system is that people pay for their own accidents, and we don't lose 50% of all money into the blackhole know as the auto insurance industry.
The disadvantage is that cars can cost a lot, so I wouldn't be adverse to putting some sort of total cap on the payment owed per-accident (Or maybe per-car. Maybe you must, at most, pay 5,000 per car you damage, regardless of the car's value.) and having the government cover the rest. Some people, I'm sure, would want the cap to, basically, be just the bond, getting rid of the loan altogether, but I don't think that's a good idea.(1)
Of course, the actual disadvantage is that the auto industry will no longer make their government mandated billions of dollars, and thus politicians that vote for my idea won't get paid.
1) Of course, this goes hand-in-hand with some sort of system of national health care, because once you get the medical expenses out of the system, paying for car accidents is a lot more affordable.
You can't be a 'high risk' driver, because there are actually no 'risks' involved, because I'm not talking about insurance. You've either in accidents or you are not in accidents. If you're in them, you pay for them. If you cannot pay for them with the bond you put up when you got your license, the government pays for them and you repay the government over the next few years. There is no difference in treatment between someone who gets in accidents all the time vs. someone who never has one, because no one except them is actually paying for anything.
Now, if you keep getting in accidents before you pay off previous ones, you're in trouble. At some point the government would revoke your license to drive because you cannot pay off the accidents you've already caused, and certainly couldn't handle causing more. (Of course, the government is still free to revoke your license for driving like an idiot even if you can pay for the accidents.)
Now, this doesn't remove the idea of private insurance, in addition to all this, just like a police force doesn't remove the idea of insurance against theft. Banks would probably make people get insurance for their own vehicles if said vehicles are not paid off, just like now, in case the owner drives it into a tree.
It's no more 'government entitlement' than normal car insurance is 'private entitlement'. The government issues loans all the time, and additionally has the ability to revoke your license if you can't pay the damages you've racked up while driving recklessly.
Frankly, I think the roads would be a lot safer if people actually paid for the damages they caused, but saying 'everyone should be bonded' is idiotic. That requires everyone, in essense, to purchase an extra car, the most expensive available, so they can be covered if they happened to wreck one of them, and completely ignores medical. Everyone should be bonded up to a certain point, and the government should cover them past that point until they can pay it back.
Yes, but that's an absurd amount. You should have to put up a bond human beings can actually afford, and the government should cover the rest and make you pay it back.
I can pull off the top of my (automatic) gear shift and take out the little plastic rod that, when you push the gear-shift button down, transmits the motion to the mechanism in the lower part of the gear shift. Then I can put the top back on. Without that rod, you physically can't shift gears.
It still looks the same, and, while the button to push to shift obviously doesn't behave correctly by springing back out when you release it, you probably wouldn't notice unless you actually drove that car regularly. The gear shift just inexplicably won't move.
Of course, if you knew anything about cars, you'd quickly realize what was wrong, and could yank the top off and shift gears with a pencil or something.
If I was really smart, I'd get a spring that was the right length, and could swap that in instead, so the button actually sprung back like it was supposed to, and had pressure when you pushed it, but it didn't do anything. Or, even funnier, I could get an entirely different top from a different model car, one without a button, and thus it wouldn't even be vaguely discernable what was wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
1. You seem to be making assumptions about what kinds of jokes i'm talking about.
2. You seem to be making assumptions about whether i think general sex jokes constitute harassment.
3. You don't know very many jokes.
4. You don't realize that I was the one who brought up dirty jokes, not you. And I specifically said 'jokes about sex' not 'jokes about how stupid women are'.
There are sexist clean jokes, there are sexist dirty jokes, there are sexist knock-knock jokes. By 'sexist' I mean, 'presents men or women as idiots'. (Yes, man or woman, there are a lot of sexist jokes about men also.)
There are plenty of non-sexist versions of all those things also. In fact, quite a lot of them have somewhat recently been changed. Much like the 'X walks into bar' jokes, which used to almost entirely be about racial stereotypes, but I think we can all agree 'Two men walk into a bar, the third one ducks.' isn't racist.
Telling jokes that slur whole genders is obviously as inappropriate as telling jokes that slur whole races or ethnicities or whatever, and is certainly 'sexist'. Telling a disgusting joke about mistaken identity, a cucumber, and a confessional booth where women can overhear it or even to women is not sexist, and is not sexual harassment, although it certainly doesn't belong in the workplace.
Dirty jokes are not about gender. The only jokes I know about gender would be 'dumb blonde' jokes, and no one tells those anymore. The class of sexist jokes is entirely orthogonal to the class of dirty jokes.
Dirty jokes, and cartoons and such, are about sex, one of the most absurd things that humanity does, and does things for. They, obviously, have different behaviors for men and women in them, but that is because men and women factually act different WRT sex, and men are the butt of the joke as much as women, probably moreso because they try harder and it's easier to make a punchline out of that.
Now, at some point in this whole process came the idea that references to sex, at all, were sexual harassment and discrimination, but that concept is simply idiotic. I'll go along with people who say they don't belong at work, but I'm with the article that the problem is actually lack of discrimination, namely, the lack of the ability to discriminate between places where those might be appropriate and places they are not.
And pretending it is 'harassment' of women in a workplace is doing a disservice to women who actually do get their butt grabbed or repeatedly invited into the copy room for a nooner or even threatened by their boss for a date. Those are truly hostile work environments.
Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)
I don't. I much, much prefer black hair. The author tries to make it seem like preference for blond hair is universal -- then argues that blond hair developed in northern Europe. Supposedly, blond hair evolved in that cold climate as an alternate means to advertise youth, but how would the men from the rest of the world know that?
No shit, this is stupid. Yes, women have been dying their hair blond forever...and dying it black, and red, and gray, and basically every single color ever. Hair dye has been around and used by almost every society in history, more often by females than men, but the coloring has always been semi-random...sometimes there's a standard color and the everyone dyes their hair to look 'more' that color, sometimes people just throw weird color things in their hair. (Something that, interestingly enough, has recently become popular again.)
Most suicide bombers are Muslim
This means in no way that Muslims have any sort of monopoly on violence -- they're just willing to take their own lives.
That's exactly what I thought when I read that too. The arguments make sense, but all it really means is that Islam tends to result in people willing to throw their life away. Which, incidentally, so does poverty, to a much larger extent, but they cleverly avoid that by just taking religious reasons.
What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals
This is just fear-mongering. How is it politically incorrect to state that the young are crazier than the mature? My car insurance company has no qualms making this distinction...
I think everyone knows that people of maybe a ten year span do something like 50% of the pushing forward in society, but their claim is that only men so such a large focus is interesting...it makes you wonder if the accomplishments of women get understated because they might, take, for example, twenty years to do what a man did in ten, ignoring the fact for the second ten years the man didn't really accomplish anything. I.e., we focus on 'superstars' who leap in accomplish a lot very very quickly, instead of caring about total accomplishments, and men are more likely to do that.
Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist
This is inapplicable because there is no way for men in all-men workplaces to hit on others in a blatant and disrespectful way. Enter women, and abuse alley opens up. This speaks more of the insensitivity of men than of anything else.
No, in a way, this is correct. As they said, there are two sorts of sexual harassment. I think we can all agree about the 'sleep with me or you're fired', and the constant hitting on women. But the other sort, the dirty jokes and the pictures and stuff, the 'hostile work environment'...that is, in a way, the opposite of discrimination.
Like it or not, many men constantly talk about sex. Many men enjoy jokes about it. They can either assume that women will not like these jokes, and not tell them around them, or they can assume that women like the jokes, like men do. (Or, at least, they assume men do.) The catch-22 there, of course, that doing the former is, indeed, actually sexist, whereas the latter is non-discriminatory, despite what people might like to believe.
Of course, the best solution would be to realize such jokes aren't appropriate at the workplace, but saying that a dirty joke told within earshot of a woman is somehow sexist is idiotic.
Last I checked, contempt of court was a crime, as was possessing (much less REPRODUCING) classified documents without proper clearance.
You are incorrect. The US has, and cannot have, an official state secrets act. Classified information is only protected by documents that are signed when you get security clearances. If I'm walking outside and I stumble upon classified information laying in a ditch, I can do whatever I want with it.
First of all, you don't understand insurance.
I understand insurance just fine. Like I said, I don't actually have a problem with car insurance, I was just saying that having the government provide car 'insurance' is possibly the most inane method of operation ever.
If I get into a crash and seriously injure someone else or damage their property, I'm on the hook for ~$100,000, which would be catastrophic to my lifestyle thereafter. Instead, I pay $300/year for the rest of my life, which is ~50 years -- only $15,000.
And if I pay the lottery everyday except Sunday, it costs a dollar a day, it costs about $300 a year, and if I win I get $1000000 dollars. That doesn't mean that the value of playing is worth the cost.
Likewise, statistically, you will get in less than $15,000 worth of accidents in your life. Much less, probably about $5000. If you wouldn't, or it becomes obvious you are going to rack up more, they would raise your rates.
Did you even try the health risk calculators? They'll give you an idea of how much your lifestyle really affects you. No sense debating about stuff that neither of us (ostensibly) are experts in.
Just because something is a health risk doesn't mean it's a preventable health risk. And just because it's a preventable health risk doesn't mean that it's going to cost a statistically significant amount.
I think health insurance premiums should depend on lifestyle choices. I'm a motorcyclist, so I should pay more. My health insurer can always sue the at-fault party to recover costs, like auto insurers do now.
You can think that, but insurance premiums will continue to be based on risk, which as medicine finds more and more risk factors, will increasingly be due to things entirely outside people's control, like genetics. (Because the things that are inside people's control, they will control.)
Exactly my point. They have been tapping for years and years and years. But what happens to the data? After 9/11 the data *can* be passed on to domestic law enforcement for them to follow up on.
If the tap was a law enforcement requested tap, they would pass it on to the law enforcement based organization that requested it. If it was an intelligence based tap, they would pass it on to the intelligence based organization that requested it.
I will repeat: THE NSA DOES NOT ORGINATE TAPS. It doesn't choose who to tap, it doesn't choose why, and it doesn't choose who to share them with.
Within the CIA and FBI, there were regulations about the sharing between intelligence and criminal information gathering, including but not limited to taps. This had nothing to do with the NSA. Organizations walk up the NSA, ask for a tap, produce documentation the tap is legal, the NSA does the tap, gives the information to the people who asked for it, and that's the entirely of the NSA's job. (Well, for wiretapping. It does other stuff also.)
Any failure to share information is a matter between the intelligence community and the investigative community, and the NSA is neither. The NSA does not try to figure things out, the NSA runs computers for those two sets of people, and others, it makes no decisions itself.
There are no restrictions on the NSA for tapping foreign signals. If the signal happens to terminate in the US they do not stop tapping. The problem previously is that they couldn't do anything with the data when this happened. In fact the NSA had connected dots pre-9/11, but they couldn't do anything with it. The data couldn't legally be used in court. This didn't stop them from doing what they always did. This has now changed. The FISA court is now more willing to work with this now, though some judges are "uncomfortable" with this approach.
They can't do anything with the data now. They do not 'do things' with data. They collect data and give it to others.
You have confused two things: The huge problems with the disconnect between intelligence gathering and criminal investigation, which actually does exist but has almost nothing to do with the NSA. Seriously, some of that has never entered the NSA at all, like when the CIA bugs places outside the country or the FBI executes search warrants and finds information linking people to terrorist organizations. The NSA and FBI are two separate departments of a company that don't share information, and the NSA is just the IT guys...blaming them because each group has had their servers made off-limits, by company policy, to the other is rather idiotic.
You've managed to confuse that with the fact the NSA, which has specific legal guidelines about who and when they can tap people at all, was operating outside those guidelines simply because the AG said so. We don't actually know who they were turning the information over to...the FBI, the CIA, or, hell, the VP himself.
The tap is not on US Nationals, it is on foreign communications. If you call a criminal, is your phone tapped or the suspected criminal? The answer, of course, is the criminal. Now if you said something that would implicate you, law enforcement could follow up on you and even go back to the court to tap your phone. This is how the NSA works. They do not hang up if the call happens to terminate in the US. The difference is now that can tell someone that something is up and get the ball rolling (further FISA warrants) to investigate the US side of the call. The domestic side can't do anything with your phone until they get a warrant (FISA or otherwise). This is how taps have worked for years and years.
No, the taps are on everyone over 6'2" inches tall that drive Ford cars.
What, you say I have no evidence of that? Well, you have no evidence of your claim. Without the taps being reviewed by courts, we have no idea who was being tapped.
And, you've gotten th
Ha, no kidding.
If they have nothing to hide, why aren't they using the processes provided under the law that merely provide a minimal level of oversight?
I mean, with FISA, they basically can tap whoever they hell they want to, and then show up in court and argue it. If, for some reason, the court turns them down (Something that had never happened once in the entirely of the FISA courts at that point in time.), they can even appeal it to a higher court.
And, considering how much Congress was in their pocket at the time, they could have even changed the laws to make it easier to get a warrant. There was a frickin amendment to FISA during all this, and Congress actually asked if anything needed changing, and the Administration said no, they were perfectly happy with it. At the time, no one had figured out that the reason they were happy with it is that they were completely ignoring it.
The one thing they couldn't have done under the constitution, and the one thing they actually did, was operate without any judicial supervision at all. Someone needs to explain to me why that would even be attempted unless they know that what they were attempting wasn't just outside the bounds of the current law (Which they could have trivially had changed.) but entirely outside any reasonable bounds of law.
Like, oh, wiretapping political opponents.
'If you have nothing to hide, why do you care if they search you' is a dumb question when applied to people, because people have many secrets that are not illegal yet they do not want to get out. It doesn't really apply when the person is the executive branch, which has, in theory, no personal secrets, and it's being 'searched' by a special court that is designed to handle classified information. It is the government being searched by the government.
The only possible conclusion is that the executive branch does has secrets that are not the standard 'classified information' kind, and that it does not want shared with the other branches of government...like, oh, that it is breaking the law. Sadly for it, keeping those secrets also was breaking the law, in one of the neatest legal Catch-22 ever.
I don't even have time to argue with someone who is unaware of one of the most common way of introducing shareholder lawsuits.
You're a moron, and you linked to a moron site.
The problem isn't what can and can't be used in court. No one gives a shit about that except the courts. The reason the courts don't want the NSA's wiretapping-without-warrants used in courts is that it is illegal.
The problem is, in actual fact, that the NSA is operating wiretaps without any court oversight at all. Any court oversight.
And the NSA 'can't get a warrant' because THE NSA IS NOT A INVESTIGATIVE AGENCY, you nimrod. The NSA runs a bunch of computers and does other stuff like protect classified information. It does not hunt down terrorists, and it is not supposed to. It operates the wiretapping system, it does not initiate wiretaps. The NSA is not supposed to start a wiretap within the US without one of three things:
1) An actual, signed warrant, by a judge. (Technically, this can be for any reason, but in practice it's only issued because the court agrees that someone is probably committing a crime, and thus the wiretap will involve an investigating agency in some manner.)
2) The CIA or FBI operating within FISA guidelines that let it get a tap in an emergency and then get a warrant within 72 hours, signed by a judge.
3) A signed statement by the Attorney General that the wiretap does not include any US nationals. This is also subject to judicial review, and is designed for spying on, basically, embassies.
Instead, what actually happened is that the AG signed a statement saying that, in his opinion, the wiretapping he wanted the NSA to do was legal, because the President is Really Cool, so they set up wiretaps. (This was not even vaguely an attempt to follow (3), and in fact the government has never even suggested that as a defense, just to nip that argument in the bud. There are specific forms and whatnot for that.)
We don't actually know who was receiving these wiretaps, if it was the CIA, the FBI, or Dick Cheney himself. I believe it's been hinted at that it's the CIA, but I can't recall any specific proof of that. We also have absolutely no idea who was being tapped, despite claims by the White House that it was only tapping international calls made to and from suspected terrorists. Because there has been no judicial review of any of this, we don't actually know said wiretapping even exists except that the government has admitted to it.
Firstly, Bush's approval rating is around 1/3 and probably at about 28%. So, unless you're willing to admit that most US citizens are liberal and that conservatism is loud-mouthed minority, then please stop assuming that anti-Bush means "liberal."
Hey! Shhhh! You're screwing up the game.
The right has a new imaginary 'center' that's about where the right was in 1996, and a left where the right was in 1984 and the center was in 1996. They own the media, they loudly proclaim day in and down out that is the center, it is where 'Americans' are.
They say people on the whole don't care about torture, don't care about civil rights, don't care about the rule of law, don't care about anything except HULK SMASH TERRORIST. They certainly don't want a usable health care system or to help the poor in any manner or unions or clean air. In fact, people are usually against those things.
Some people on the left complain about those definitions., and, factually, they are correct. On the whole, if you were to plot out a people's political positions, it would be a bell curve, but one that peaks about 2/3rds the way to where the left is. The vast majority of people have no problem with abortions or gay people, even in conservative states. The vast majority of people like some sort of social security and would like some sort of universal health care. Yes, 'the left', politically, is about at the 85 percentile of the curve on the left, but the right is at the 99 percentile on the right.
Anyway, don't tell anyone this. Let the right get away with it. Let them move the definitions as far to the right as possible, as fast as possible, for as long as possible. Why?
Because this makes almost everyone 'left'. And people are not idiots forever, they'll look around, and notice they fall, according to the right itself, squarely in the 'left' camp.
Guess who they're going to vote for?
The right are, right now, destroying their own party, and they don't seem to grasp the idea. Moving the pretend center towards you, without moving the actual population, is a bad thing, because it makes more people on the other side!
You mean, negotiate the release of people held secretly?
Yeah, good luck with that theory.
That is the stupidest example ever, because, um, owning a single share is enough to bring a shareholder lawsuit against a company.
And you know this how exactly?
You have no idea who Bush is wiretapping whatsoever. No one does.
Saying 'It's just oversea calls made to suspected terrorists' is just repeating what the government says, and, more to the point, it's almost certainly wrong. Whatever the administration is doing, it is doing something that would not be allowed under FISA, or they're be using FISA. And that sort of behavior certainly would be allowed unless they have an incredibly lax definition of 'suspected terrorists'.
The US government is almost certainly wiretapping people it would not be allowed to had it used the courts, otherwise it would use the courts.
You are not legally allowed to make backup copies of music as a matter of law. There is no law allowing it.
However, the courts have said that personal copies, for format shifting and/or backup, are in general legal. They decided that way back when tape players came out in cars and people starting copying their records to tape. (So, despite what the RIAA tried to claim about ripping mp3s being inherently, almost that exact issue was settled decades ago.)
This is often mistakenly called 'Fair Use', but is not what fair use actually refers to, which is the limited ability to copy parts of a work, even giving that to others.
However, ripping DVDs is still illegal under the DMCA.
Yeah, this is an interesting idea, and, unlike many of the MPAA's ideas, actually appears to be legal. The software could literally describe exactly what it was going to do, scan your computer for media files and share the list, and people would agree, because that's what P2P software does.
OTOH, I'm not entirely certain under what logic the user would be doing anything illegal, either.
Second, if you think insurance is a bad value for you, you can always demonstrate your ability to cover liability by buying a surety bond. If you are a good driver, you might get a good deal.
Insurance, is, by definition, a bad value for the purchaser. All transactions are something that the seller values for X and the purchaser values for X+n, so they trade it for cash somewhere in the middle, except that insurance is basically selling money for more money, and thus the only way it can possibly work is if the purchaser or seller misvalues it, and insurance companies spend an amazing amount of time calculating the value they assign. There are some circumstances where there are non-monetary benefits might raise the value enough make it a reasonable transaction, but obviously car insurance does not fall into the category or, duh, the government wouldn't have to require it.
I don't actually have that much a problem with car insurance, I was just point out that, while mandatory car insurance is indeed stupid, government car insurance is even dumber, and if the government is going to cover our car accidents we should stop looking at it as 'insurance' and find a more useful paradigm, like loans.
You have grossly underestimated the effect of lifestyle on these conditions -- look here, or here, for example.
To quickly summarize --
Heart disease: artheroscleroris is by far the most common cause of heart disease, and is largely preventable by reducing blood pressure and cholesterol through diet and exercise. Most other forms of heart disease share similar, preventable risk factors.
I think you need to follow that link and actually read the 'Physiologic factors that increase risk' section. The very last item is 'diet'. 'obesity', and the signifers to that, show up about halfway. The rest appear entirely genetic.
And perhaps you should read the line that says 'for about 65% of men and 47% of women, the first symptom of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease is heart attack or sudden cardiac death (death within one hour of onset of the symptom).'. Just because it's the most common form of heart disease doesn't mean that it's the most treated if half the people show up at the hospital dead. And even if it was the most treated, that doesn't mean that it's anywhere near the most expensive.
Cancer: diet, sun exposure and Vitamin D intake are very big factors as well.
For, um, skin cancer. Not a very big component of, say, prostate cancer or breast cancer (The two biggest ones) or leukemia or stomach cancer or brain cancer or pancreatic cancer or bone cancer or Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma or thyroid cancer do I need to continue?
So, congrats. You've tracked down two cancers that can be caused by outside risk factors. I would suggest adding colon cancer to that, which can be affected by a diet low in fiber. (Although I will point out that almost everyone's diet is 'too low in fiber', so blaming the .0001% who get the cancer seems rather random.)
And what about the two bigs cancers, prostate and breast cancer?
Hypertension: does have a genetic component, but controllable environmental factors are the leading risk factor.
So you don't want to...pay for doctors to tell people to reduce their salt intake? Because that's what I'm seeing here.
In reality, salt intake is the largest cause of hypertension, but it is also the easiest and cheapest to actually treat. Because 'hypertension' is expensive to treat, and 'most hypertension' is caused by too much salt, you have leaped to a totally inane conclusion.
We need people to go to doctors regularly. Some of them will have hypertension. More than half of that will be caused by a stupid diet, and they can modify their diet just fine. Assuming we're paying for regular checkups anyway, this costs nothing. The rest will be caused by other things like genetics and renal problems and will
The point of insurance is to protect one's self against catastrophic costs. I'm happy to pay $300/year into perpetuity in order to not have to pay $100,000 in damages in a bad accident, which of course is very unlikely to occur.
Good for you?
As for paying for bad drivers, I do pay for the payouts to others drivers who get into accidents -- obviously, that's how insurance works. But, an insurance company has no interest to keep on drivers who are high risks for future accidents (however their actuaries calculate it), because their competitors can drop them and charge lower rates while still making more money.
I have no problem with people having whatever insurance they want. I have a problem with the government requiring I purchase it from unaccountable and uncontrolled third parties merely to drive.
Hmmm ... over half of the most expensive diseases [msn.com] have significant lifestyle components: obesity, smoking, poor diet and stress.
Um, what sort of math are you using?
Heart conditions - They explicitly say that that doesn't include many of the expenses for drugs to lower cholesterol or blood pressure. If you think someone having an arrhythmia or a weak wall in an artery is somehow preventable, you are vastly mistake. Heart condition doesn't mean 'their blood pressure is too high', it means 'Something has gone wrong with their heart'. (To be fair, this can be caused by smoking.)
Trauma - Entirely due to accidents of one type or another. If by 'lifestyle components' you mean 'existing in something other than a padded room without any other people', yes, otherwise, no.
Cancer - This is such a large category that it's impossible to say. But if you click in you see the top three are breast, prostate, and skin cancer, of which only one has external factors. Lung cancer also has, obviously, the external factor of smoking, accounting for 75% of all of it, but it's apparently less than skin cancer, which is only a third the cost of breast cancer. Some of these risk factors were not known at the time, and blaming the victim seems rather absurd.
Mental illness - No external risk factor that anyone knows of. No, drug use is not one of them, making barely a blip.
Respiratory ailments - That's basically infections, which no one can control. It's sheer luck who gets infected and who doesn't. And asthma, which has mostly uncontrollable risk factors (Being born premature and whatnot.)
Hypertension - A good deal of high blood pressure is genetic. And the cost is due to absurdly high drug costs, not anything inherently costly in the treatment.
Arthritis and joint disorders - The 'lifestyle component' here: Moving your joints for sixty years. A very small amount of these are preventable. And, no carpal tunnel isn't one of them...there's almost no corrolation between repetive movement and CTS. It's due, pure and simple, to movement, so unless you want to argue that people should not actually use their hands, there are no risk factors. People who use their hands a lot just get it sooner.
Diabetes - That one I'll give you, although I will note that a lot of that is children. Saying 'It's your fault you have diabetes' when they got it when they were 10 and their parents let them live on sugar is rather stupid.
Back problems - Sometimes, yes, sometimes no
So, to recap: We've got diabetes as a disease that is almost entirely due to lifestyle components, although you'll note that it's the last one in cost. We've got maybe some back problems and hypertension, as those things that have genetic components that may have been helped by behaviors.
We've got some kinds of cancer being caused by certain behaviors, some being causes by random environmental factors, some being caused by genetics, some by viruses, and some being caused, possibly, by the cancer fairy. But the chart does not break out lung cancer, which is the big one, 3/4ths caused by smoking.
We
As an investor, I don't mind so much.
Of course owners of the system don't mind the system.
As a customer, I take advantage of the competition.
No, you're just bad at math. Add up the amount you spend on insurance. Add up, roughly, the damages you've caused. (If you have comprehensive, ignore the damages to your own vehicle that your insurance paid for, because, like I said, this isn't a replacement for that, just the mandatory insurance.)
80% of the population will come out behind, having spent a lot more than the cost anyone. Maybe 15% are, at the moment, slightly ahead, because they've recently had accidents, but I assure you that their higher rates over the next few years will put them back behind. And there's the 5% that regularly get in accidents so often that they will actually stay ahead of the curve, until they fall out of the system, because insurance companies only charge so much.
In the US, at least, insurers aren't obligated to take on bad drivers -- this is what what the SR-22 surety bond provision is for. If a company wishes to, they can charge very high rates or offer bad service to high-risk drivers. So if you are insured, you aren't paying for bad drivers; if you don't like your rates, just move to a different company.
Except that you paid for them until they fell out of the system. Saying you're not paying for them is like asserting that you're not paying for shoplifters when you purchase things at a stop, because most shoplifters eventually get caught. The money doesn't magically get back into the system when they leave the system.
I see, so just have the liability underwriting done by the gov't instead of the insurance industry.
I'm not a fan of that. But the question needs to be asked, as it always needs to be asked about crime: Are we trying to punish, or make them pay back 'their debt to society', or deter more crime by them and others?
If the answer is 'deter' or 'punish', it doesn't make a lot of sense to have them pay the entire bill, but a set amount. We don't punish people for assaulting a rich person more than a poor person, why should we make someone pay more for hitting a rich person's car than a poor person's? And we don't want to deter them more from hitting rich people's cars...
OTOH, the car owner has to be made whole somehow, and if they're not doing it, the government is.
My reservations are that a) if the gov't decides I'm a bad driver for some reason, I won't have any recourse. Because the gov't is underwriting, they have an incentive to pull your license much faster than currently; b) it will probably end up costing the taxpayers in the long-run due to gov't inefficiency than a free market scheme.
You'll have the same recourse you always had: You can fight the 'finding of fault' of the accidents in court.
The courts already have methods of dealing with very bad drivers. I was just pointing out, in addition to those methods, there also will be 'You cannot drive and possibly cause accidents until you have some way of paying for the accidents you're already caused'.
If you're worried about that, you should be really worried under the present system, where insurance companies can stop insuring you even for accidents you don't cause and you actually don't have any legal recourse. At least with the government doing it you could show up in court and demonstrate that the accident was not your fault, which means you wouldn't have to pay for it. (Of course, you'd presumably be doing that anyway, even if you could pay for it.)
I don't want to pay for others' poor lifestyle choices that result in high healthcare costs. I think the easiest way to do this is let the market set insurance rates. In the US, the system is broken because of the tax incentives given to employers. Perhaps, there might also be a means-tested gov't entitlement for the destitute to get care, as it's unpalatable for people to
Newt Gingrich, incidentally, was having an affair during that whole thing.
In short, I imagine the Democrats are happy to spend the remainder of the next year and a half feeding Bush as much rope as he would like. They know what he will do with it. The more Republican necks he slips in there before then, the happier the Dems are.
Which only works if he doesn't nonsensically invade Iran.
The advantage of my system is that we don't have companies making absurd amounts of money off mandatory insurance.
It's amazing that people seem to have a problem with the government paying for other people's health care, but don't have a problem with the government paying for bad drivers. Or, to be more exact, the government requiring we pay a third party for bad drivers.
The really funny joke is people saying 'I don't want to pay for other people's bad choices', when something like 90% of bad health is due to pure chance and nothing anyone could have changed it (Well, beside preventative medicine, but that's the fault of the health insurance system in the first place!), but have no problem paying for other people's bad driving, where the law already clearly says who is at fault.
If the government wants us to pay for third parties bad driving, it should be honest and actually pay for it itself, instead of making us going through third parties that skim off the top. I don't think that's a good idea, so I say the government should merely cover shortfalls in what people can afford and have them pay them back.
If people do think the government paying for that is a good idea (And, hey, it's debatable), than putting a cap on what people owe per accident would work, which could be covered entirely with a bond, and having the government pay the rest.
While in theory, under my system, people could buy insurance to cover themselves, I don't see that as a likely result, because there's not any logical need for that if you're a good driver, and if you're a bad driver you'd pay too much. Companies might have something like that for their own vehicles as part of the huge package of insurance they have, because having bonds for every single driver or vehicle would be crazy. For everyone else, it's sorta like insurance to cover breaking a window at your own house...95% of people don't need it, and those who are clumsy fools who keep breaking them couldn't actually afford it.
To list advantages and disadvantages:
The advantage of my system is that people pay for their own accidents, and we don't lose 50% of all money into the blackhole know as the auto insurance industry.
The disadvantage is that cars can cost a lot, so I wouldn't be adverse to putting some sort of total cap on the payment owed per-accident (Or maybe per-car. Maybe you must, at most, pay 5,000 per car you damage, regardless of the car's value.) and having the government cover the rest. Some people, I'm sure, would want the cap to, basically, be just the bond, getting rid of the loan altogether, but I don't think that's a good idea.(1)
Of course, the actual disadvantage is that the auto industry will no longer make their government mandated billions of dollars, and thus politicians that vote for my idea won't get paid.
1) Of course, this goes hand-in-hand with some sort of system of national health care, because once you get the medical expenses out of the system, paying for car accidents is a lot more affordable.
You can't be a 'high risk' driver, because there are actually no 'risks' involved, because I'm not talking about insurance. You've either in accidents or you are not in accidents. If you're in them, you pay for them. If you cannot pay for them with the bond you put up when you got your license, the government pays for them and you repay the government over the next few years. There is no difference in treatment between someone who gets in accidents all the time vs. someone who never has one, because no one except them is actually paying for anything.
Now, if you keep getting in accidents before you pay off previous ones, you're in trouble. At some point the government would revoke your license to drive because you cannot pay off the accidents you've already caused, and certainly couldn't handle causing more. (Of course, the government is still free to revoke your license for driving like an idiot even if you can pay for the accidents.)
Now, this doesn't remove the idea of private insurance, in addition to all this, just like a police force doesn't remove the idea of insurance against theft. Banks would probably make people get insurance for their own vehicles if said vehicles are not paid off, just like now, in case the owner drives it into a tree.
It's no more 'government entitlement' than normal car insurance is 'private entitlement'. The government issues loans all the time, and additionally has the ability to revoke your license if you can't pay the damages you've racked up while driving recklessly.
Frankly, I think the roads would be a lot safer if people actually paid for the damages they caused, but saying 'everyone should be bonded' is idiotic. That requires everyone, in essense, to purchase an extra car, the most expensive available, so they can be covered if they happened to wreck one of them, and completely ignores medical. Everyone should be bonded up to a certain point, and the government should cover them past that point until they can pay it back.
Yes, but that's an absurd amount. You should have to put up a bond human beings can actually afford, and the government should cover the rest and make you pay it back.
I can pull off the top of my (automatic) gear shift and take out the little plastic rod that, when you push the gear-shift button down, transmits the motion to the mechanism in the lower part of the gear shift. Then I can put the top back on. Without that rod, you physically can't shift gears.
It still looks the same, and, while the button to push to shift obviously doesn't behave correctly by springing back out when you release it, you probably wouldn't notice unless you actually drove that car regularly. The gear shift just inexplicably won't move.
Of course, if you knew anything about cars, you'd quickly realize what was wrong, and could yank the top off and shift gears with a pencil or something.
If I was really smart, I'd get a spring that was the right length, and could swap that in instead, so the button actually sprung back like it was supposed to, and had pressure when you pushed it, but it didn't do anything. Or, even funnier, I could get an entirely different top from a different model car, one without a button, and thus it wouldn't even be vaguely discernable what was wrong.