Actually, the market can decide when surgery is a good idea. The problem is that the payer and the patient are different people. If you look at the history of healthcare costs, you will discover that the cost of healthcare began to rise significantly faster than inflation the year after Medicare began.
"And if you're not worried about that, consider WalMart! They have to power to force manufacturers to reduce prices."
Having seen this case earlier, the manufacturer will not be able to allow Walmart to sell the product for one price and insist that another retailer sell it for a higher price. While this ruling will drive up prices on things like Rolex watches, and Coach handbags, it will likely have no impact on most of the bargain electronics at Tiger Direct. If I'm a manufacturer of memory chips, I don't care what you sell them to the end-user for as long as you pay me the amount I need to make a profit. As a matter of fact, I want you to slice your margin as thin as you can, because the more you sell, the more you buy from me, the more you buy, the cheaper I can make them.
You have to remember,what's in it for the manufacturer to insist on a particular retail floor? That extra money is not going into the manufacturer's pocket. That is not to say that there are not a lot of companies that want to control the minimum price for their product, just that you need to think about what types of companies are going to do this.
"Castro lives in a shack compared to the average upper middle class in the US."
You do realize that Fidel Castro is one of the richest men in the world, with large deposits in Swiss and other non-Cuban banks?
This is true, unless they sign a contract with said garage bands to play the garage bands music. SoundExchange is collecting on behalf of all artists who have not made alternate arrangements with a particular "broadcaster". Personally, I think that if this goes through it will be the death knell of the music industry. If this goes as planned, those who want to broadcast music over the Internet will have to sign agreements with bands outside of the current structure. If you are signing broadcast deals with Internet Radio stations and you can distribute your music over the Internet, what do you need EMI, Sony, or the rest of the RIAA gang for anyway?
Yeah, but why does this apply to Internet radio and not broadcast radio? The principle you described is the model for broadcast radio, yet broadcast radio does not pay this way. This is about the record industry eliminating internet radio. The record industry controls what is played over broadcast radio, there are too many internet radio stations for them to get that kind of control over. The other problem is that the amount of the pay-per-listener fee exceeds what advertisers are willing to pay per listener.
A conservative who lost influence...Ted Haggard, Tom Foley (BTW, the Democrats knew about what he was doing for at least 6 months before bringing it out for the elections, and even then they wanted to wait another couple of months).
As for Al Gore, he buys his electric from the same electric company as everyone else in Tennessee. He "buys" "carbon offsets". I used quotes on "buys", because he doesn't actually pay anything for them, it is a benefit he receives from the "carbon offset" company he has partial ownership of and works for. Of course that brings into question the whole concept of "carbon offsets". Oh yes, I'm sure those "offices" really need that pool house and pool.
You demonstrate my point, Al Gore is rich, the rules don't apply to him. He can just spend more money and all his sins are forgiven.
Yes, but I was able to name two off the top of my head (actually, I could have named two or three more off the top of my head), and you could only name one (which was arguably a different case, but I would have been willing to give it to you for the sake of discussion).
My point was that conservatives generally stop listening to people who are demonstrated hypocrites, liberals seem to not care as long as the message is "right".
I asked for two, not one. I didn't hear the original quote,did you? in context? (I have a vague recollection of having come across the quote and that it seemed to be more aimed at users of drugs that are illegal than at people who misuse legal drugs, but that is a vague recollection, but that could be an incorrect recollection. He wasn't calling on me to change my behavior). More importantly has he been outspoken about all illegal drug users going to jail since he was caught abusing drugs? Al Gore still claims that greenhouse gases are the greatest threat to humanity and that all Americans must make great sacrifices to reduce them even after being shown to do more to generate greenhouse gases at ONE of his mansions each month than the average American does in a year (even going so far as to justify this behavior).
My point was in reply to a poster who said that conservatives say "Do as I say, not as I do." The fact of the matter is that I can name more liberal elites who express this attitude publicly than I can conservative elites.
I just named two prominent Democrats who said people should do one thing while they were doing another...and continued to preach the same message without changing their actions after being caught. Can you name two prominent Republicans who have done the same?
"The problem with you liberals is that you think everybody is equal, and that it should always be that way. Not so. GW Bush and his daughters are rich, because they are good, brave, and courageous. They are literally better people than poor people. They wouldn't be rich otherwise.
Wisdom is the skill of knowing what to overlook. Other rich people, who are similarly better people than poor people, know this skill of wisdom. This explains perfectly why rich people overlook other rich people's crimes. It's because they are WISE, you impoverished ignoramous!
The important thing to remember here is that rich people have NOTHING against poor people. If it weren't for the fact that poor people don't have any money, they could be enjoying the very same privileges that rich people enjoy."
That looks more like the attitude of liberal Democrats like Al Gore (You should sacrifice to reduce greenhouse gases, while I use more electricity in a month in one of my mansions than you do in a whole year). Or Barbara Streisand (When I said that people should dry their clothes outside rather than with an clothes drier, I didn't mean to include myself). I could go on and on listing high profile Democrats who say that people should do one thing, while they continue to do the exact opposite.
Now while it is true that rich Republicans often do the same thing, the major difference is that when Republicans get caught at it, the majority of their supporters usually stop being their supporters.
I suspect it has more to do with amount and type of parental attention. Having watched several of my friends raise their multiple children, I have noticed that parents(especially fathers) tend to spend more time teaching things to the eldest child than to succeeding children (although the oldest of either gender gets more attention, even if they aren't the firstborn).
I am the youngest of a large family and by every measure the smartest of them (including my siblings own statements). However, there is a gap between me and the next in age. My older siblings all spent a lot of time lavishing attention on me in ways that have been shown in studies to increase intelligence. I have observed that parents tend to lavish greater amounts of the same types of attention on their eldest sons.
I think you defined a good rule of thumb on privacy:
"Anything the police don't need a warrant for is something every single private citizen should be able to do with impunity."
Now there may be some exceptions, but they need to be carefully srutinized.
Have you noticed that Korea is a peninsula? North Korea has two land borders. One with China and one with South Korea. The border with South Korea is heavily fortified with large armies on both sides and mine fields. So, if you are starving to death, where are you going to go? Across the border that is almost certain death, or across the relatively more open border to China? and oh yeah, the Chinese send most of those they catch back. So, maybe you should pay attention to what is going on instead of recycling the Vietnam War protester rhetoric.
When my father was in high school in the late 40's his physics teacher "proved" that man could not possibly travel to the moon and back. As I recall, the proof had something to do with the heat from friction at the speeds involved. Personally, I think we need to think about developing colonies on the moon and in orbit. The technologies developed to do that and from that would provide an important jumping off point for developing technologies for interstellar travel/colonization. If interstellar travel/colonization is possible, we are at least two or three generations away and will continue to be until there are people who live most of their lives outside of Earth's atmosphere.
This is just one more reason we should have stuck with the paper ballot. Despite all the complaints about the 2000 election, there was a clear paper trail to follow. I do not believe that there is any way to make an electronic ballot that there is a way to make it so that the average person could be confident that the vote wasn't rigged. Even with open source software, unless you compiled the code yourself (or at least were present when it was compiled), how do you know that the "open" code is actually what they installed on the machine?
Have you seen what the Chinese government says. They have repeatedly made statements that indicate that they believe that the US is their enemy. Fortunately, by the time that China has sufficient military and economic muscle to openly confront the US they will be facing a serious demographic problem (too many old people, not enough women). BTW, the confrontation will be over the independence of countries such as Taiwan, Japan, South Korea (North Korea is already a puppet state of China).
In addition, I have read predictions every year since 2001 sometime in the late spring, that this years hurricane season would have an unusually large number of storms and hurricanes. Of those years, only in the year 2005 was it true. The only year I saw the press mention the previous years prediction was in 2006.
The problem I have with this is that it compares to.08 blood alcohol. The legal limit is.08 because an organization which gained respect for its early efforts to get communities to enforce drunk driving laws at all (MADD...I remember when police officers would often tell drunk drivers to be careful and let them go on their way) decided that was the most stringent level that the public would support. MADD's goal is to make.02 blood alcohol the legal drunk driving limit (I'm sorry I no longer have the link to the interview where the head of MADD said this). I am not convinced that there is any good reason for lowering the legal limit to.08 BAC, so comparing talking on a cellphone to.08 BAC doesn't convince me of anything. More importantly there are studies showing that adjusting the radio/cd player is far more distracting than talking on the cell phone.
As has been stated, if we think that cellphones in cars are a problem that needs a new law, then lets just increase the penalties for various moving violations greater if you were on the cell phone at the time.
The controls are worthless, because there is no independent standard by which a show is judged. What does TV14 mean? Well, Disney defines it one way and Viacom another. Heck, the same network isn't always consistent. I'm pretty sure I think this "decency" provision is a bad idea, but the cable channels have in part brought this on themselves. The people who care what their kids watch have trouble knowing if it meets their definition of appropriate.
I suspect that letting people choose what channels they want to pay for will go a long way to fixing the "problem".
Um...Stalin...10 million plus...atheist. Mao...20 to 100 million...atheist. There are several other figures who could be mentioned here. There are several others who could be mentioned here as well. I think you would be hard pressed to name one religious group whose violent death toll comes even close.
Actually, conservatives are technically resistant to change (although most self identified conservatives today are also in favor of minimal government). Opposition to "gay marriage" is opposition to change...that is marriage as currently defined (one man to one woman) works, why change it? If we need something like "gay marriage" why not create something new for that purpose instead of changing an existing social practice that works (BTW what I mean by "works" is a complex topic and defining that is completely off topic in this post)?
Abortion rights is a question of whose rights, the mother's or the child's? You either believe that the mother's rights trump the child's, or that it is not a child, not everyone shares that opinion. If someone believes that a fetus is a child then it is logically consistent for them to expect the government to protect its right to live. This is not necessarily a question of government interference in private lives...unless you think that laws against murder are interference in private lives. There are similar arguments about the Schiavo case.
One of the problems we have in this country is that many issues are couched to make one side or the other look bad instead of about the actual disagreement. "Abortion right" is not about government interference in private lives, it is about disagreement over when life becomes subject to government protection. For example, most people who think there should be no government regulation of abortion, think the government should regulate how a parent disciplines their child.
What is the point in trying to do anything about greenhouse gases if China and India get a pass? By the end of this year, China will be the country that is the number one source of greenhouse gases in the world. What good does it do if the EU and the US reduce their greenhouse gases if the difference is more than made up for by China and India?
Either Global Warming is a dire threat that must be addressed at whatever the cost, or its no big deal if greenhouse gases continue to increase. If the first is the case then China and India must be convinced to contribute to the solution, if the latter is the case, why must I (or anyone else) be forced to pay the price of controlling the increase in greenhouse gases? Unless of course the whole point of Global Warming is to redistribute wealth from the US and the EU to the rest of the world.
Well, by that standard, I don't know anyone who accuses Bush of killing anyone, in and of himself, all the people he is accused of killing were killed by the military or some other force. I have yet to hear someone claim that George W. Bush took a gun or a knife, or some other weapon and used it to directly kill someone. So the argument that Communism, in and of itself, didn't kill anyone is bs.
I don't understand. I have been perfectly happy with every cell phone I have had. I was less than happy with my service provider when I had cingular. I have a cell PHONE. I use it to make TELEPHONE calls, it works very well for that. I don't listen to music except when I am in my car...I don't need or want music on my cell phone. There is a market for multifunction devices, I just don't think it is a mass market.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the market can decide when surgery is a good idea. The problem is that the payer and the patient are different people. If you look at the history of healthcare costs, you will discover that the cost of healthcare began to rise significantly faster than inflation the year after Medicare began.
"And if you're not worried about that, consider WalMart! They have to power to force manufacturers to reduce prices." Having seen this case earlier, the manufacturer will not be able to allow Walmart to sell the product for one price and insist that another retailer sell it for a higher price. While this ruling will drive up prices on things like Rolex watches, and Coach handbags, it will likely have no impact on most of the bargain electronics at Tiger Direct. If I'm a manufacturer of memory chips, I don't care what you sell them to the end-user for as long as you pay me the amount I need to make a profit. As a matter of fact, I want you to slice your margin as thin as you can, because the more you sell, the more you buy from me, the more you buy, the cheaper I can make them. You have to remember,what's in it for the manufacturer to insist on a particular retail floor? That extra money is not going into the manufacturer's pocket. That is not to say that there are not a lot of companies that want to control the minimum price for their product, just that you need to think about what types of companies are going to do this.
"Castro lives in a shack compared to the average upper middle class in the US." You do realize that Fidel Castro is one of the richest men in the world, with large deposits in Swiss and other non-Cuban banks?
This is true, unless they sign a contract with said garage bands to play the garage bands music. SoundExchange is collecting on behalf of all artists who have not made alternate arrangements with a particular "broadcaster". Personally, I think that if this goes through it will be the death knell of the music industry. If this goes as planned, those who want to broadcast music over the Internet will have to sign agreements with bands outside of the current structure. If you are signing broadcast deals with Internet Radio stations and you can distribute your music over the Internet, what do you need EMI, Sony, or the rest of the RIAA gang for anyway?
Yeah, but why does this apply to Internet radio and not broadcast radio? The principle you described is the model for broadcast radio, yet broadcast radio does not pay this way. This is about the record industry eliminating internet radio. The record industry controls what is played over broadcast radio, there are too many internet radio stations for them to get that kind of control over. The other problem is that the amount of the pay-per-listener fee exceeds what advertisers are willing to pay per listener.
A conservative who lost influence...Ted Haggard, Tom Foley (BTW, the Democrats knew about what he was doing for at least 6 months before bringing it out for the elections, and even then they wanted to wait another couple of months). As for Al Gore, he buys his electric from the same electric company as everyone else in Tennessee. He "buys" "carbon offsets". I used quotes on "buys", because he doesn't actually pay anything for them, it is a benefit he receives from the "carbon offset" company he has partial ownership of and works for. Of course that brings into question the whole concept of "carbon offsets". Oh yes, I'm sure those "offices" really need that pool house and pool. You demonstrate my point, Al Gore is rich, the rules don't apply to him. He can just spend more money and all his sins are forgiven.
Yes, but I was able to name two off the top of my head (actually, I could have named two or three more off the top of my head), and you could only name one (which was arguably a different case, but I would have been willing to give it to you for the sake of discussion). My point was that conservatives generally stop listening to people who are demonstrated hypocrites, liberals seem to not care as long as the message is "right".
You mean like the ones who think this same government should decide who gets health care?
I asked for two, not one. I didn't hear the original quote,did you? in context? (I have a vague recollection of having come across the quote and that it seemed to be more aimed at users of drugs that are illegal than at people who misuse legal drugs, but that is a vague recollection, but that could be an incorrect recollection. He wasn't calling on me to change my behavior). More importantly has he been outspoken about all illegal drug users going to jail since he was caught abusing drugs? Al Gore still claims that greenhouse gases are the greatest threat to humanity and that all Americans must make great sacrifices to reduce them even after being shown to do more to generate greenhouse gases at ONE of his mansions each month than the average American does in a year (even going so far as to justify this behavior). My point was in reply to a poster who said that conservatives say "Do as I say, not as I do." The fact of the matter is that I can name more liberal elites who express this attitude publicly than I can conservative elites.
I just named two prominent Democrats who said people should do one thing while they were doing another...and continued to preach the same message without changing their actions after being caught. Can you name two prominent Republicans who have done the same?
"The problem with you liberals is that you think everybody is equal, and that it should always be that way. Not so. GW Bush and his daughters are rich, because they are good, brave, and courageous. They are literally better people than poor people. They wouldn't be rich otherwise. Wisdom is the skill of knowing what to overlook. Other rich people, who are similarly better people than poor people, know this skill of wisdom. This explains perfectly why rich people overlook other rich people's crimes. It's because they are WISE, you impoverished ignoramous! The important thing to remember here is that rich people have NOTHING against poor people. If it weren't for the fact that poor people don't have any money, they could be enjoying the very same privileges that rich people enjoy." That looks more like the attitude of liberal Democrats like Al Gore (You should sacrifice to reduce greenhouse gases, while I use more electricity in a month in one of my mansions than you do in a whole year). Or Barbara Streisand (When I said that people should dry their clothes outside rather than with an clothes drier, I didn't mean to include myself). I could go on and on listing high profile Democrats who say that people should do one thing, while they continue to do the exact opposite. Now while it is true that rich Republicans often do the same thing, the major difference is that when Republicans get caught at it, the majority of their supporters usually stop being their supporters.
I suspect it has more to do with amount and type of parental attention. Having watched several of my friends raise their multiple children, I have noticed that parents(especially fathers) tend to spend more time teaching things to the eldest child than to succeeding children (although the oldest of either gender gets more attention, even if they aren't the firstborn). I am the youngest of a large family and by every measure the smartest of them (including my siblings own statements). However, there is a gap between me and the next in age. My older siblings all spent a lot of time lavishing attention on me in ways that have been shown in studies to increase intelligence. I have observed that parents tend to lavish greater amounts of the same types of attention on their eldest sons.
I think you defined a good rule of thumb on privacy: "Anything the police don't need a warrant for is something every single private citizen should be able to do with impunity." Now there may be some exceptions, but they need to be carefully srutinized.
Have you noticed that Korea is a peninsula? North Korea has two land borders. One with China and one with South Korea. The border with South Korea is heavily fortified with large armies on both sides and mine fields. So, if you are starving to death, where are you going to go? Across the border that is almost certain death, or across the relatively more open border to China? and oh yeah, the Chinese send most of those they catch back. So, maybe you should pay attention to what is going on instead of recycling the Vietnam War protester rhetoric.
When my father was in high school in the late 40's his physics teacher "proved" that man could not possibly travel to the moon and back. As I recall, the proof had something to do with the heat from friction at the speeds involved. Personally, I think we need to think about developing colonies on the moon and in orbit. The technologies developed to do that and from that would provide an important jumping off point for developing technologies for interstellar travel/colonization. If interstellar travel/colonization is possible, we are at least two or three generations away and will continue to be until there are people who live most of their lives outside of Earth's atmosphere.
This is just one more reason we should have stuck with the paper ballot. Despite all the complaints about the 2000 election, there was a clear paper trail to follow. I do not believe that there is any way to make an electronic ballot that there is a way to make it so that the average person could be confident that the vote wasn't rigged. Even with open source software, unless you compiled the code yourself (or at least were present when it was compiled), how do you know that the "open" code is actually what they installed on the machine?
Have you seen what the Chinese government says. They have repeatedly made statements that indicate that they believe that the US is their enemy. Fortunately, by the time that China has sufficient military and economic muscle to openly confront the US they will be facing a serious demographic problem (too many old people, not enough women). BTW, the confrontation will be over the independence of countries such as Taiwan, Japan, South Korea (North Korea is already a puppet state of China).
In addition, I have read predictions every year since 2001 sometime in the late spring, that this years hurricane season would have an unusually large number of storms and hurricanes. Of those years, only in the year 2005 was it true. The only year I saw the press mention the previous years prediction was in 2006.
The problem I have with this is that it compares to .08 blood alcohol. The legal limit is .08 because an organization which gained respect for its early efforts to get communities to enforce drunk driving laws at all (MADD...I remember when police officers would often tell drunk drivers to be careful and let them go on their way) decided that was the most stringent level that the public would support. MADD's goal is to make .02 blood alcohol the legal drunk driving limit (I'm sorry I no longer have the link to the interview where the head of MADD said this). I am not convinced that there is any good reason for lowering the legal limit to .08 BAC, so comparing talking on a cellphone to .08 BAC doesn't convince me of anything. More importantly there are studies showing that adjusting the radio/cd player is far more distracting than talking on the cell phone.
As has been stated, if we think that cellphones in cars are a problem that needs a new law, then lets just increase the penalties for various moving violations greater if you were on the cell phone at the time.
The controls are worthless, because there is no independent standard by which a show is judged. What does TV14 mean? Well, Disney defines it one way and Viacom another. Heck, the same network isn't always consistent. I'm pretty sure I think this "decency" provision is a bad idea, but the cable channels have in part brought this on themselves. The people who care what their kids watch have trouble knowing if it meets their definition of appropriate. I suspect that letting people choose what channels they want to pay for will go a long way to fixing the "problem".
Um...Stalin...10 million plus...atheist. Mao...20 to 100 million...atheist. There are several other figures who could be mentioned here. There are several others who could be mentioned here as well. I think you would be hard pressed to name one religious group whose violent death toll comes even close.
Actually, conservatives are technically resistant to change (although most self identified conservatives today are also in favor of minimal government). Opposition to "gay marriage" is opposition to change...that is marriage as currently defined (one man to one woman) works, why change it? If we need something like "gay marriage" why not create something new for that purpose instead of changing an existing social practice that works (BTW what I mean by "works" is a complex topic and defining that is completely off topic in this post)? Abortion rights is a question of whose rights, the mother's or the child's? You either believe that the mother's rights trump the child's, or that it is not a child, not everyone shares that opinion. If someone believes that a fetus is a child then it is logically consistent for them to expect the government to protect its right to live. This is not necessarily a question of government interference in private lives...unless you think that laws against murder are interference in private lives. There are similar arguments about the Schiavo case. One of the problems we have in this country is that many issues are couched to make one side or the other look bad instead of about the actual disagreement. "Abortion right" is not about government interference in private lives, it is about disagreement over when life becomes subject to government protection. For example, most people who think there should be no government regulation of abortion, think the government should regulate how a parent disciplines their child.
What is the point in trying to do anything about greenhouse gases if China and India get a pass? By the end of this year, China will be the country that is the number one source of greenhouse gases in the world. What good does it do if the EU and the US reduce their greenhouse gases if the difference is more than made up for by China and India? Either Global Warming is a dire threat that must be addressed at whatever the cost, or its no big deal if greenhouse gases continue to increase. If the first is the case then China and India must be convinced to contribute to the solution, if the latter is the case, why must I (or anyone else) be forced to pay the price of controlling the increase in greenhouse gases? Unless of course the whole point of Global Warming is to redistribute wealth from the US and the EU to the rest of the world.
Well, by that standard, I don't know anyone who accuses Bush of killing anyone, in and of himself, all the people he is accused of killing were killed by the military or some other force. I have yet to hear someone claim that George W. Bush took a gun or a knife, or some other weapon and used it to directly kill someone. So the argument that Communism, in and of itself, didn't kill anyone is bs.
I don't understand. I have been perfectly happy with every cell phone I have had. I was less than happy with my service provider when I had cingular. I have a cell PHONE. I use it to make TELEPHONE calls, it works very well for that. I don't listen to music except when I am in my car...I don't need or want music on my cell phone. There is a market for multifunction devices, I just don't think it is a mass market.