since when there is a goal in real life? you think you won the real life game by having grand-children and a big family?
Yes. In terms of personal achievement, passing on your genes is the only thing that really matters.
/hyperbole
but seriously, passing on your genes is more than just a social imperative, you know. It's kinda the point of the whole evolution thing. One may of course have other goals, and even value those goals more, but for most of us having a family is a physical, not a social imperative.
I wonder if the daily Apple story isn't as much about the Haterz as about the fanbois? Slashdot posts an Apple story and the first thing that happens is that the Haters all pile into the thread and spew vitriol all over the place. Then the fanbois wade in and start bashing around with bats and mod points, and then before you know it: voila, 300 posts!
They don't post these stories just to soothe the fanbois, they post them because people, love it or hate it, are passionate about Apple. The haters need their Two Minute's Hate as much as the fanboys need their time of worship. As for myself, I'm getting pretty sick of it all. But hey, I guess I just can't help being drawn to the trainwreck.
First of all, let me apologise for not answering this promptly. An illness intervened.
Systemic injustices exist, and they are class-based. When this assumption (that all whites have easier paths to success) is not challenged, we do ALL humans an injustice. As we do ANY TIME we strengthen racist positions at all, and it is a racist position.
I agree that there are systemic class injustices, but they are not the only injustices. Aside from class injustice, black people (and to varying extents other ethnic minorities) face systematic and personal race prejudice as well.
A black woman doesn't see the world differently because she's somehow genetically different, she sees the world differently because she has to negotiate through a society that has set up subtle and gross barriers against her.
This systematic discrimination exists independent of the social class discrimination and barriers that you're talking about. Although it is very hard for anyone to come up out of the lower classes and rise to the middle class, it's harder for ethnic minorities to do so because they also face the systemic discrimination. And furthermore, the black person faces this discrimination no matter what social stratum they currently occupy. So for example the black youth whose parents are both doctors or lawyers, who drives a nice care is likely to get stopped by police more often than his white friend who drives the same car.
The black CEO of a Fortune 500 company (can you think of any? I can't.) is still likely to face difficulties because of his skin colour. They won't be the same difficulties that a poor black person faces, but they'll be difficulties just the same, and will make life harder for him than for his white colleagues.
Based on what, exactly?
Sorry, I'm not going to go dredge up the stacks of stats on disproportionate levels of incarceration, malnutrition, poor education, etc of black people or other ethnic minorities for you. They're out there, and they're real.
Oh, but it is, unfortunately. My perspective is one that is lost... mine and that of people like me.
Padre, you're preaching to the choir. I've made a similar journey up from poverty to the middle class (well, making would be more appropriate, as I'm still in law school) and I've seen much the same kind of thing you have on that journey. My point wasn't to devalue your experience, but to point out that for a black person, they have to all the hard work a white person does, and get past the systemic racism at the same time. This is what I meant when I was agreeing with Gibson's point, and I'm pretty sure that Gibson meant the same thing.
Anyhow, this thread is dying, so if you do want to debate me further or just discuss the issue more, my e-mail is exposed I believe. I'm sorry that I didn't make myself more clear in my earlier post.
Go look at the data from other countries, not just your own. Seriously, every single developed nation has a health care better than your own. Every single developed nation has a mixed public/private system or a public only system. Go look it up. If you like facts, there are lots out there. Or keep eating the shit your masters feed you. Makes no difference to me, I live in Canada.
I would say that the world does look different to middle class black people, and even middle class white women, at least in North America. To pretend otherwise to to assume that we've successfully removed all race and gender barriers from our society. But we haven't. You can pretend that everything is all sweetness and light if you like, and that all the injustices of the past have been righted and anyone who says otherwise is just a whiner, but the facts simply don't bear that out. Despite affirmative action, despite equal opportunities, life is still better for white guys in North America than it is for anyone else.
The fact that you came up from destitution isn't the point. The point is that it's easier for someone to pull themselves up from the gutter if they're white males than it is for anyone else. It's easier to stay out of the gutter if you're a white male, and it's easier to get from the middle class to the upper classes if you're a white male (which is not to say that it's easy, it's been getting harder for all of us to even maintain our financial positions over the last few decades).
That fact could work against Murdoch, not to his benefit. How many people loyally consuming Fox television are also googling for news online? I wonder if there's a demographic split between people who get their news from Fox News and people who get news from google's news aggregator.
I wonder if Microsoft isn't entering its "post-evil" phase. I have a personal hypothesis that large corporations that last long enough will eventually enter a phase where they've made all the money they can out of evil, and will then start to explore areas where doing good things can also make them money. My canonical example of this is IBM. A company that has lasted a good long time doing evil things (up to and including allegedly selling tabulating machines to the Nazis -- Microsoft's evil is small-time compared to that), but that found that its evil business was drying up and decided to start making money from good actions like throwing support behind Open Source. Kind of like Dr. Evil returning from his long sleep to find that his legitimate business interests are making more money than his evil schemes can.
Of course, it could be that since Gates handed the reins over to Ballmer, Microsoft has entered a "directionless wandering" phase, where much of their directionless wandering looks like "good things," more or less by accident.
The assumption that Murdoch doesn't understand robots.txt is untenable. When this issue has come up for discussion here on/. in the past, someone always reproduces a robots.txt file from one of the Fox sites, and that file demonstrates a full understanding of robots.txt, including setting up indexing maps for the Googlebot.
Google should do exactly what it's doing, and honour robots.txt without comment, and let MS and News Corp shoot themselves in the foot (or succeed wildly, if that's what's going to happen, but I doubt it). To unilaterally stop linking to News Corp would probably result in even more scrutiny from the DoJ.
Did you notice the words "somewhat stronger" that I used? I chose that for a reason. Specifically, I chose that because even if the 3-4 years pass and no change has occurred, there may be other factors, and the insurance company would have to investigate that, before dropping the claim (apparently this company just dropped her like a hot potato, and they'll be made to smart for it).
If my tone seems harsh, it's because I spent a few years working in the field, and I can tell you that it's by no means as simple as the "poor injured person vs the big bad insurance company", even when there isn't fakery going on. Quite often, a claimant with a long-term or chronic injury will be gently encouraged not to get better by their lawyers, or by their chiros or massage therapists. I know of one city in Ontario where there's a whole little industry built around insurance claims, and one of the key tenets of that industry is to never let the patient get better, at least not until she's got her settlement from the Insurance company. Patients, who learn to love the attention, painkillers, and weekly massage therapy, will often collude in this themselves.
When you throw in the insurance companies themselves, who are perhaps even more heartless than people think, you get a business that is very ugly, in which nobody comes out looking very good. If I sound cynical and harsh, that's why.
Now having said all that, very little of it applies to claimants who have depression, because as I've said elsewhere, claimants will go out of their way to avoid a depression diagnosis, because of the stigma society attaches to it. Although I saw a little fakery and a lot of exaggeration, none of it came from people who were diagnosed with depression, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen.
As for your hypothetical, don't get me started on chiropractors. Seriously, I have work to do.
You're hilarious. Are you the kind of libertarian who wants just enough government to protect the rich from everyone else? Good luck with that. Private health care works great in the US, don't it? Where you have the least efficient health care system in the developed world. By a factor of two. No really. Basically you have the private sector insurance companies who spend 40-60 percent of their revenues on denying claims. How is that a good thing? Insurance companies can get away with this because when it comes to their health, people get desperate. So basically, left without regulation, the insurance companies can deny you services that you've already paid for. How is even less regulation going to fix this?
The only part of your health care system that works reasonably well is Medicare. You know about Medicare, right? That government-funded insurance that pays for people who can't get insurance elsewhere?
The fact is, the numbers just don't bear out the libertarian position when it comes to health care. The US spends $6000/person/year on health care, and 45 Million people go uncovered by insurance. The next best developed nation spends $3000/person/year, and has coverage for everyone. And for this horrible value, the US has one of the sickest populations in the developed world. Not exactly getting your money's worth, are you?
Basically, your libertarian argument comes down to this: you want to live in a well-functioning, healthy society, but you don't want to pay for it. Well guess what, that doesn't work. When the poorest people get healthier, everyone benefits. That's why things like healthcare, education, public works, etc are worth paying taxes for, to make life better for everyone. But you guys are too selfish to see that.
Probably true, but not really germane to my point, which was that it's the scarcity of med school seats, not the universal health care system, that's causing a doctor shortage.
Keep talking out of your ass, and keep eating that shit. I don't have to prove anything to you, and it's clear you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Except that the doctor shortage is not a function of universal health care, it's a function of the self-regulated medical profession maintaining control over how many doctors are certified every year. They keep the numbers down, so everyone has to scramble for a doctor, and the doctors can pick and choose patients. If the gov stepped in and mandated more seats in medical schools, there would be more doctors and less of a shortage.
The Canadian system isn't perfect, hell it isn't even very good, but it covers everybody, and it's more than twice as efficient as the current US system. But hey, if you enjoy the taste of the shit that the insurance companies feed you, by all means, keep right on eating it.
Either there's more to this case than what is being reported, or this company needs to get nailed to the wall.
More likely the latter, as with most types of insurance (and by "most types" I mean "every type I've encountered") the company is at least required to give notice to the claimant, and there is usually an appeals process the claimant can follow.
Huh. Here the psychiatric care is covered by our government health care. Her meds are probably covered under a provincial plan too. The insurance the woman in the article was receiving was probably for income replacement and travel costs (or maybe mortgage payments) not treatment. There's no arbitrary limit to how much psych treatment a patient can receive, as far as I know, though there is some limit in terms of availability if you live in a rural area (the med schools keep sharp control over the number of doctors they graduate, so many parts of Ontario are under-serviced -- this may be different in Quebec).
Yes, Canadian law, sorry. And yes, I'm pretty sure it comes over from Britain. We haven't gone quite as crazy with municipal CCTV, but there are definite similarities in terms of where you do and do not have an expectation of privacy.
Yes and no. It really depends on the illness. Some people can be sick a long, long time before they die. Much better to get that person well and back paying premiums. Trust me, I worked in the field, with long-term chronic illness or non-fatal injuries, the rule is "get that person well, asap."
IANAL, but I did work as a clerk in a law firm that defended insurance companies, and I am a law student. Investigators may take surveillance of claimants from off the claimant's property. They may not pass on to the claimant's property, take images of the claimant inside their home, tap phone lines. When recording video they may not record audio of the claimant simultaneously. In fact audio recording in public is a no-no as well.
Basically, the law behind this is the notion that you have no expectation of privacy outside of your own home, but you do have a strong expectation of privacy inside that home. Keep in mind, this isn't a particularly new law, it seems to have roots in the common law and might predate large-scale insurance consumption by the masses (but I'm not going to do the research right now to back this up, so don't nit-pick me on this, mkay?).
Who does it benefit? It benefits insurance companies to some extent, Google Streetview teams, and other people with an interest in recording what's going on in public. It benefits shopkeepers who can put up CCTV cameras pointing outside their stores for security. But your implication is right, it doesn't benefit everybody. But don't make the mistake of thinking that the Insurance companies bought and paid for these laws, they didn't (though they may stump up good money if those laws get threatened).
DISCLAIMER: I'm not a lawyer, the above are not legal opinions, if you want a legal opinion please go talk to your lawyer!
Slashdot Mirror
since when there is a goal in real life? you think you won the real life game by having grand-children and a big family?
Yes. In terms of personal achievement, passing on your genes is the only thing that really matters.
/hyperbole
but seriously, passing on your genes is more than just a social imperative, you know. It's kinda the point of the whole evolution thing. One may of course have other goals, and even value those goals more, but for most of us having a family is a physical, not a social imperative.
I wonder if the daily Apple story isn't as much about the Haterz as about the fanbois? Slashdot posts an Apple story and the first thing that happens is that the Haters all pile into the thread and spew vitriol all over the place. Then the fanbois wade in and start bashing around with bats and mod points, and then before you know it: voila, 300 posts!
They don't post these stories just to soothe the fanbois, they post them because people, love it or hate it, are passionate about Apple. The haters need their Two Minute's Hate as much as the fanboys need their time of worship. As for myself, I'm getting pretty sick of it all. But hey, I guess I just can't help being drawn to the trainwreck.
First of all, let me apologise for not answering this promptly. An illness intervened.
Systemic injustices exist, and they are class-based. When this assumption (that all whites have easier paths to success) is not challenged, we do ALL humans an injustice. As we do ANY TIME we strengthen racist positions at all, and it is a racist position.
I agree that there are systemic class injustices, but they are not the only injustices. Aside from class injustice, black people (and to varying extents other ethnic minorities) face systematic and personal race prejudice as well.
A black woman doesn't see the world differently because she's somehow genetically different, she sees the world differently because she has to negotiate through a society that has set up subtle and gross barriers against her.
This systematic discrimination exists independent of the social class discrimination and barriers that you're talking about. Although it is very hard for anyone to come up out of the lower classes and rise to the middle class, it's harder for ethnic minorities to do so because they also face the systemic discrimination. And furthermore, the black person faces this discrimination no matter what social stratum they currently occupy. So for example the black youth whose parents are both doctors or lawyers, who drives a nice care is likely to get stopped by police more often than his white friend who drives the same car.
The black CEO of a Fortune 500 company (can you think of any? I can't.) is still likely to face difficulties because of his skin colour. They won't be the same difficulties that a poor black person faces, but they'll be difficulties just the same, and will make life harder for him than for his white colleagues.
Based on what, exactly?
Sorry, I'm not going to go dredge up the stacks of stats on disproportionate levels of incarceration, malnutrition, poor education, etc of black people or other ethnic minorities for you. They're out there, and they're real.
Oh, but it is, unfortunately. My perspective is one that is lost ... mine and that of people like me.
Padre, you're preaching to the choir. I've made a similar journey up from poverty to the middle class (well, making would be more appropriate, as I'm still in law school) and I've seen much the same kind of thing you have on that journey. My point wasn't to devalue your experience, but to point out that for a black person, they have to all the hard work a white person does, and get past the systemic racism at the same time. This is what I meant when I was agreeing with Gibson's point, and I'm pretty sure that Gibson meant the same thing.
Anyhow, this thread is dying, so if you do want to debate me further or just discuss the issue more, my e-mail is exposed I believe. I'm sorry that I didn't make myself more clear in my earlier post.
Your attention is worth $150 an hour, and you can't even focus it enough to ignore slashdot?
FTFY
I think you replied to the wrong post...I was merely noting that this particular thread had long ago lost any signal in the noise.
Go look at the data from other countries, not just your own. Seriously, every single developed nation has a health care better than your own. Every single developed nation has a mixed public/private system or a public only system. Go look it up. If you like facts, there are lots out there. Or keep eating the shit your masters feed you. Makes no difference to me, I live in Canada.
I would say that the world does look different to middle class black people, and even middle class white women, at least in North America. To pretend otherwise to to assume that we've successfully removed all race and gender barriers from our society. But we haven't. You can pretend that everything is all sweetness and light if you like, and that all the injustices of the past have been righted and anyone who says otherwise is just a whiner, but the facts simply don't bear that out. Despite affirmative action, despite equal opportunities, life is still better for white guys in North America than it is for anyone else.
The fact that you came up from destitution isn't the point. The point is that it's easier for someone to pull themselves up from the gutter if they're white males than it is for anyone else. It's easier to stay out of the gutter if you're a white male, and it's easier to get from the middle class to the upper classes if you're a white male (which is not to say that it's easy, it's been getting harder for all of us to even maintain our financial positions over the last few decades).
trolling trolls trolling trolls.
That fact could work against Murdoch, not to his benefit. How many people loyally consuming Fox television are also googling for news online? I wonder if there's a demographic split between people who get their news from Fox News and people who get news from google's news aggregator.
Only because Rupert Murdoch is anti-everyone else. /tongue-in-cheek
I wonder if Microsoft isn't entering its "post-evil" phase. I have a personal hypothesis that large corporations that last long enough will eventually enter a phase where they've made all the money they can out of evil, and will then start to explore areas where doing good things can also make them money. My canonical example of this is IBM. A company that has lasted a good long time doing evil things (up to and including allegedly selling tabulating machines to the Nazis -- Microsoft's evil is small-time compared to that), but that found that its evil business was drying up and decided to start making money from good actions like throwing support behind Open Source. Kind of like Dr. Evil returning from his long sleep to find that his legitimate business interests are making more money than his evil schemes can.
Of course, it could be that since Gates handed the reins over to Ballmer, Microsoft has entered a "directionless wandering" phase, where much of their directionless wandering looks like "good things," more or less by accident.
The assumption that Murdoch doesn't understand robots.txt is untenable. When this issue has come up for discussion here on /. in the past, someone always reproduces a robots.txt file from one of the Fox sites, and that file demonstrates a full understanding of robots.txt, including setting up indexing maps for the Googlebot.
Google should do exactly what it's doing, and honour robots.txt without comment, and let MS and News Corp shoot themselves in the foot (or succeed wildly, if that's what's going to happen, but I doubt it). To unilaterally stop linking to News Corp would probably result in even more scrutiny from the DoJ.
What Murdoch really wants is for Google to pay him for the privilege of linking to his paywall.
Did you notice the words "somewhat stronger" that I used? I chose that for a reason. Specifically, I chose that because even if the 3-4 years pass and no change has occurred, there may be other factors, and the insurance company would have to investigate that, before dropping the claim (apparently this company just dropped her like a hot potato, and they'll be made to smart for it).
If my tone seems harsh, it's because I spent a few years working in the field, and I can tell you that it's by no means as simple as the "poor injured person vs the big bad insurance company", even when there isn't fakery going on. Quite often, a claimant with a long-term or chronic injury will be gently encouraged not to get better by their lawyers, or by their chiros or massage therapists. I know of one city in Ontario where there's a whole little industry built around insurance claims, and one of the key tenets of that industry is to never let the patient get better, at least not until she's got her settlement from the Insurance company. Patients, who learn to love the attention, painkillers, and weekly massage therapy, will often collude in this themselves.
When you throw in the insurance companies themselves, who are perhaps even more heartless than people think, you get a business that is very ugly, in which nobody comes out looking very good. If I sound cynical and harsh, that's why.
Now having said all that, very little of it applies to claimants who have depression, because as I've said elsewhere, claimants will go out of their way to avoid a depression diagnosis, because of the stigma society attaches to it. Although I saw a little fakery and a lot of exaggeration, none of it came from people who were diagnosed with depression, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen.
As for your hypothetical, don't get me started on chiropractors. Seriously, I have work to do.
You're hilarious. Are you the kind of libertarian who wants just enough government to protect the rich from everyone else? Good luck with that.
Private health care works great in the US, don't it? Where you have the least efficient health care system in the developed world. By a factor of two. No really. Basically you have the private sector insurance companies who spend 40-60 percent of their revenues on denying claims. How is that a good thing? Insurance companies can get away with this because when it comes to their health, people get desperate. So basically, left without regulation, the insurance companies can deny you services that you've already paid for. How is even less regulation going to fix this?
The only part of your health care system that works reasonably well is Medicare. You know about Medicare, right? That government-funded insurance that pays for people who can't get insurance elsewhere?
The fact is, the numbers just don't bear out the libertarian position when it comes to health care. The US spends $6000/person/year on health care, and 45 Million people go uncovered by insurance. The next best developed nation spends $3000/person/year, and has coverage for everyone. And for this horrible value, the US has one of the sickest populations in the developed world. Not exactly getting your money's worth, are you?
Basically, your libertarian argument comes down to this: you want to live in a well-functioning, healthy society, but you don't want to pay for it. Well guess what, that doesn't work. When the poorest people get healthier, everyone benefits. That's why things like healthcare, education, public works, etc are worth paying taxes for, to make life better for everyone. But you guys are too selfish to see that.
Probably true, but not really germane to my point, which was that it's the scarcity of med school seats, not the universal health care system, that's causing a doctor shortage.
Keep talking out of your ass, and keep eating that shit. I don't have to prove anything to you, and it's clear you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Except that the doctor shortage is not a function of universal health care, it's a function of the self-regulated medical profession maintaining control over how many doctors are certified every year. They keep the numbers down, so everyone has to scramble for a doctor, and the doctors can pick and choose patients. If the gov stepped in and mandated more seats in medical schools, there would be more doctors and less of a shortage.
The Canadian system isn't perfect, hell it isn't even very good, but it covers everybody, and it's more than twice as efficient as the current US system. But hey, if you enjoy the taste of the shit that the insurance companies feed you, by all means, keep right on eating it.
So her husband's candidate didn't vote for himself? Was he running against a Bush?
Either there's more to this case than what is being reported, or this company needs to get nailed to the wall.
More likely the latter, as with most types of insurance (and by "most types" I mean "every type I've encountered") the company is at least required to give notice to the claimant, and there is usually an appeals process the claimant can follow.
Huh. Here the psychiatric care is covered by our government health care. Her meds are probably covered under a provincial plan too. The insurance the woman in the article was receiving was probably for income replacement and travel costs (or maybe mortgage payments) not treatment. There's no arbitrary limit to how much psych treatment a patient can receive, as far as I know, though there is some limit in terms of availability if you live in a rural area (the med schools keep sharp control over the number of doctors they graduate, so many parts of Ontario are under-serviced -- this may be different in Quebec).
Yes, Canadian law, sorry. And yes, I'm pretty sure it comes over from Britain. We haven't gone quite as crazy with municipal CCTV, but there are definite similarities in terms of where you do and do not have an expectation of privacy.
Yes and no. It really depends on the illness. Some people can be sick a long, long time before they die. Much better to get that person well and back paying premiums. Trust me, I worked in the field, with long-term chronic illness or non-fatal injuries, the rule is "get that person well, asap."
Normally nitpicking drives me up the wall, but given the subject, I must say only this.
Sorry, of course you are correct.
IANAL, but I did work as a clerk in a law firm that defended insurance companies, and I am a law student. Investigators may take surveillance of claimants from off the claimant's property. They may not pass on to the claimant's property, take images of the claimant inside their home, tap phone lines. When recording video they may not record audio of the claimant simultaneously. In fact audio recording in public is a no-no as well.
Basically, the law behind this is the notion that you have no expectation of privacy outside of your own home, but you do have a strong expectation of privacy inside that home. Keep in mind, this isn't a particularly new law, it seems to have roots in the common law and might predate large-scale insurance consumption by the masses (but I'm not going to do the research right now to back this up, so don't nit-pick me on this, mkay?).
Who does it benefit? It benefits insurance companies to some extent, Google Streetview teams, and other people with an interest in recording what's going on in public. It benefits shopkeepers who can put up CCTV cameras pointing outside their stores for security. But your implication is right, it doesn't benefit everybody. But don't make the mistake of thinking that the Insurance companies bought and paid for these laws, they didn't (though they may stump up good money if those laws get threatened).
DISCLAIMER: I'm not a lawyer, the above are not legal opinions, if you want a legal opinion please go talk to your lawyer!