Hollering "America, Fuck Yeah!" at the top of your lungs and expecting me to collapse at your Patriotic Fervor does not constitute debate. Come back when you can explain why 45 million Americans have no insurance coverage. Come back when you can explain why America's health care system costs about $6k/person, when Canada's health care system costs $3K/person (and covers everyone), and most universal health care nations do better than that. Until you can answer some of these questions, get back under your bridge.
Not bullshit. There is not an unlimited supply of health care in either public or private systems. Rationing *always* happens in one form or another.
That's not what the GGP was arguing. He implied that rationing is peculiar to socialized health care. That is bullshit.
I primarily blame the ridiculous concept we have that our employers should pay for our health insurance. This makes no sense whatsoever; it eliminates direct competition and routes people into one-size-fits-all plans, and it means if you lose your job you're doubly screwed. It makes no more sense for my employer to pay for my health insurance than it does for them to pay for my house or car.
Is that really it? I think it might be more complicated. I get really suspicious of the fact that insurance companies have so much control over what they cover, and get to deny coverage for strictly financial reasons. In the private health care transaction, the one who controls access to the treatment (insurance companies) has all the power. The health care consumer is stuck. They need the treatment, they have no choice. They either pay, or go without and get sicker or die. Any transaction with that much power imbalance between two of the parties is ripe for exploitation. You're certainly on the right track though, I think.
I just googled, and this site claims the figure is "nearly" 46 million Americans without health care in 2007. I don't know whether the National Coalition on Health Care is a lobby group or what, so take with a grain of salt, but 45 million people without health care is mind-boggling to me.
Sorry for replying twice, but on second thought I decided you deserve a more thorough answer.
2% of 300,000,000 is 6,000,000.
Six million people in the US don't have health care, by your figures. 6M people not covered is an absurd number of people to not have healthcare in the richest country on the planet.
Also, how many people are "covered" until of course the insurance company can find a way to weasel out of covering them? How many people are "covered", until they have a heart attack or develop diabetes, and the insurance company refuses to cover them? This just doesn't happen in a public health care system. Not the one here, anyway.
My other reply was slightly inaccurate. Some people do have to pay for their health care here. People who are not properly landed immigrants would probably have to pay for their health care. Of course, they probably pay less here than they would have to back home, in some cases a lot less.
All of which is dodging the main point of my post, which is, why is the American health care system so much less efficient than every other nation's system?
There are some sicknesses that socialized healthcare either will not cover or will not cover thoroughly enough to really cure.
Bullshit.
with socialized healthcare you get placed in "review hell" because A) the doctors get paid the same really no matter what they do
Also bullshit. In Ontario, doctors get paid per treatment/visit, more or less depending on what kind of treatment they do. No different than in the US.
and B) there are many other doctors/clinics.
I'm not even sure what the hell this has to do with anything.
If you say you need antibiotics for something, chances are in the US you can get them for whatever weak reason, with socialized healtcare if you have a non-common illness the answer will always be to wait longer.
Again, bullshit. If I need antibiotics for something, my doctor writes me a prescription for antibiotics, and I go get it filled. Of course, if I don't actually need antibiotics, my doctor doesn't have an incentive to feed me medication that I don't actually need. If you want to talk intelligently about universal or public health care, go learn something about the subject instead of repeating the lies you've been told. Here's an interesting fact for you. Of the top 40 or so countries in the world, the US has the most inefficient health care system. It's twice as inefficient as the next most inefficient health care system.
Universal public healthcare systems are operating right now, that are at least twice as efficient as the health care system in the US. Stop and think about that. This isn't theorizing about what a public health system might do, this is real actual performance in the real world. Of course, there are also many nations with fully private health care that are at least twice as efficient as your own system, which should be ringing bells in your head right about now. The problem isn't about public/private, the problem lies elsewhere. Many Americans will say that the discrepancy is caused by the "cheeseburger nation", but here in Canada we're just as obese as you are, and we do much better than you in terms of health care efficiency.
So what is the real problem? Why is it that in the US, you have absurdly high numbers of people with no coverage at all, and yet you spend more per person on health care than any other country? Follow the money....
Just because the CAPSLOCK key serves no good purpose for you doesn't mean it serves no good purpose for anybody. I use caps all the time when I'm preparing forms or other documents, saves me a lot of pain and grief from having to do the pinky-finger ballet (left-two-shift, right-two-shift). So, why should I suffer for your failure of imagination?
Ha. I guess I thought the subject of the thread was about what a cell phone company could do with your information. You know, like the rest of the discussion. I guess I was mistaken. I didn't realize we were all talking about third party credit attacks exclusively. Though really, all that's necessary for a third party to attack your credit with most of these methods is to have access to a POS terminal with those capabilities. Not every attacker is a script-kiddie or gangster.
No, it doesn't give access to my shopping habits. That's a record kept between me, my credit card vendor, and the individual shops, who know only what they sold me.
Err, that's not necessarily true, especially if you don't check the fine print in your cell phone contract. When I sold cellular there was a clause that allowed the company to provide your information to Third Party Companies for marketing purposes. If you miss that clause, then your credit card information can be provided to data miners who can track your shopping patterns. Of course laws about the legality of this practise vary by jurisdiction, but you can't just assume that you're protected.
It doesn't allow access to an unlimited line of credit,
Whoops, I never said "unlimited". If your contract has a clause that allows the company to charge your credit card when you miss a payment, then they can claw money out of your credit balance to pay what you owe them. Again, there is some variance by jurisdiction.
And the biggest bit: having access to my credit card will NOT allow you to get MORE credit cards in my name, or take out loans, or a myriad of other credit-destroying tasks that could cost me years and thousands of dollars to undo.
This is just not true. When I worked in retail, we had the ability (on in-store credit applications) to take your credit card, swipe it, and get automatic approval for more credit. This was as a convenience to the customer (takes about 5 minutes compared to 0.5 hours filling out forms), but it could easily be gamed by an attacker who has your credit card information and a card writer. The newer security features (requiring a pin as well as your card) will make this tougher, but not that much tougher, especially when people are punching their pins in front of the watchful eye of the clerk (who may be making shit wages and have a high incentive to steal your credit).
And another point to consider. Though we never saw the customer's credit information directly, presumably at some point, the company gets access to the actual credit report of a person. If you can read the credit report, you can probably read the SIN/SSN right off the report, giving you direct access to anything the credit card couldn't get you. Now I'm not %100 sure that this would work; as I said, I never saw a credit report of a customer to verify this, which is why I didn't mention it in my first post. But it sure does give you food for thought, doesn't it?
Well, probably, but it can be an expensive policy if enough people get pissed about it.
The true irony in all this is that giving out your credit card information is at least as dangerous as giving out your SSN, and maybe more so. People who think nothing of giving out their credit card number to a business for credit check purposes will wig at the suggestion that they hand over their SSN (I do it too), despite the fact that a credit card number gives access to essentially the same information, plus your shopping habits, plus an active credit line to tap into.
Sorry, a credit card is perfectly adequate for conducting a credit check, and has the added bonus of providing the company with a way to recover some of their losses if you stop paying your bills. A SSN is totally unnecessary to obtain a credit check. I worked for Radio Shack in Ontario a few years ago, selling Rogers cell service among other things, and at no time did we require a SIN for a credit check. Yes, I'm in Canada and not the US, but it's generally the same credit agencies, so their requirements should be the same in the US as in Canada.
At the end of the day, though, even if it were printed on the contract, it's still CREDIT, and they've got every right to demand an SSN to do a credit-check on you if they're extending you credit.
Except that a credit card is sufficient to do a credit check on you. If Sprint insisted on taking OP's SSN, and refused to do the check with a credit card, I suspect they have some other reason for wanting the SSN.
Yes, she had thousands of songs in her kazaa share folder. They just chose 24 specific examples in order to keep things manageable in court.
Tough shit. If they want damages for each and every song in her folder, they have to give her the chance to defend against that. If it's far to expensive to go for damages in all of them, maybe they should have stayed the hell out of court.
This whole idea of statutory damage awards just boggles my mind. Sue for the actual damages you suffered, and if you think that's not enough go after aggravated or punitive damages, but this artificial inflation of damages by statute is ridiculous.
Every paper in the US is the Sun or the Daily Mail. Actually, I retract that, they're not that bad, but very few people read them anymore. Everyone in the US get's their news from the TV. Every news broadcast is the Sun or the Daily Mail.
But if you want social spending, and haven't told me how you're doing it without chronic deficit spending, you haven't told me much.
This part's actually not that hard, my country (Soviet Canuckistan) had been deficit-free for several successive governments now. We're probably going to have a deficit this year, thanks to your country's free-market true believers deregulating the hell out of your banks (and other causes) since Reagan, and finally taking down the world economy, but we're expecting the return to deficit spending to be temporary. There's a good chance that the current government will fall, because the deficit is going to be bigger than projected (the PM's a Conservative, incidentally). But not to worry, Canadians in all demographic groups will continue to receive their universal health care.
The trick seems to be 1) don't deregulate the financial system, because greedy bastards will rob you blind if given a free hand. 2) turf out politicians who take too much pork (a little pork fat does keep the wheels turning), because the greedy bastards will rob you blind if they can and 3) turf out politicians who threaten to take away your most cherished social programs, because the greedy bastards would rather spend the money on pork (see 2).
Of course I'm being too glib, but if your basic requirements are social spending and no deficit (I suspect you'd rather see no social spending, given some of your sources), then it's been done, and done consistently (if not always done well).
I used to sell Rogers cellular way back when, and they were trying really hard to get people to buy pcmcia cellular cards for their laptops (with the pricey data plan to go with it). Rogers is banking that tethered laptops and whatnot will be the next big thing, and they'll be right there saying "see, we had it all along!" I suspect that there are people up high in Rogers who know that once mobile bandwidth reaches certain speed and portability tipping points, consumer interest in tethering technology and mobile internet service generally is going to explode. It's kinda shocking that other cell companies don't see this, as it seems like we're right on the cusp of that point now.
Nope, well sort of. In town the man-hole covers are in the middle of the road, but then you couldn't use that kind of machine in town anyway, I don't think. Roads between towns or cities tend not to have man-holes at all that I know of. That's where the all-in-one machine does its work, that I've ever seen.
For Chrissakes, you people (Americans) are nickel-and-diming each other to death while your politicians and Corporations are robbing you all blind. The problem in the US isn't bigger government, it's crooked government, in bed with the fat cats. If you lived in a country where the government was still afraid of the voters, and not the other way around, that government would be a lot more efficient than you think.
It would certainly make sense in terms of benefitting real people (to some extent, "low skilled" labour doesn't pay very well these days), to ease off on efficiency and spend more on labour, but it would also have a devastating effect on the profit margins of large corporations, who swear fealty only to the shareholders. Therefore, though your ideas are intriguing and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter, they're not likely to be implemented any time soon.
So what about trucks that are coming at you from the opposite direction? Our car had a gravel strike a few years ago, from a big cube van travelling in the direction opposite us. Don't ask me to explain how it happened, I don't know.
you laugh, but this is exactly how many people where I live (including myself, sometimes) deal with gravel roads that have gone to washboard. If the washboard is regular and there are no large potholes, you can get up on top of the ruts, with just a little extra gas (If you're not afraid to waggle your back end a bit, that is).
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Hollering "America, Fuck Yeah!" at the top of your lungs and expecting me to collapse at your Patriotic Fervor does not constitute debate. Come back when you can explain why 45 million Americans have no insurance coverage. Come back when you can explain why America's health care system costs about $6k/person, when Canada's health care system costs $3K/person (and covers everyone), and most universal health care nations do better than that. Until you can answer some of these questions, get back under your bridge.
Not bullshit. There is not an unlimited supply of health care in either public or private systems. Rationing *always* happens in one form or another.
That's not what the GGP was arguing. He implied that rationing is peculiar to socialized health care. That is bullshit.
I primarily blame the ridiculous concept we have that our employers should pay for our health insurance. This makes no sense whatsoever; it eliminates direct competition and routes people into one-size-fits-all plans, and it means if you lose your job you're doubly screwed. It makes no more sense for my employer to pay for my health insurance than it does for them to pay for my house or car.
Is that really it? I think it might be more complicated. I get really suspicious of the fact that insurance companies have so much control over what they cover, and get to deny coverage for strictly financial reasons. In the private health care transaction, the one who controls access to the treatment (insurance companies) has all the power. The health care consumer is stuck. They need the treatment, they have no choice. They either pay, or go without and get sicker or die. Any transaction with that much power imbalance between two of the parties is ripe for exploitation. You're certainly on the right track though, I think.
I just googled, and this site claims the figure is "nearly" 46 million Americans without health care in 2007. I don't know whether the National Coalition on Health Care is a lobby group or what, so take with a grain of salt, but 45 million people without health care is mind-boggling to me.
Sorry for replying twice, but on second thought I decided you deserve a more thorough answer.
2% of 300,000,000 is 6,000,000.
Six million people in the US don't have health care, by your figures. 6M people not covered is an absurd number of people to not have healthcare in the richest country on the planet.
Also, how many people are "covered" until of course the insurance company can find a way to weasel out of covering them? How many people are "covered", until they have a heart attack or develop diabetes, and the insurance company refuses to cover them? This just doesn't happen in a public health care system. Not the one here, anyway.
My other reply was slightly inaccurate. Some people do have to pay for their health care here. People who are not properly landed immigrants would probably have to pay for their health care. Of course, they probably pay less here than they would have to back home, in some cases a lot less.
All of which is dodging the main point of my post, which is, why is the American health care system so much less efficient than every other nation's system?
There are some sicknesses that socialized healthcare either will not cover or will not cover thoroughly enough to really cure.
Bullshit.
with socialized healthcare you get placed in "review hell" because A) the doctors get paid the same really no matter what they do
Also bullshit. In Ontario, doctors get paid per treatment/visit, more or less depending on what kind of treatment they do. No different than in the US.
and B) there are many other doctors/clinics.
I'm not even sure what the hell this has to do with anything.
If you say you need antibiotics for something, chances are in the US you can get them for whatever weak reason, with socialized healtcare if you have a non-common illness the answer will always be to wait longer.
Again, bullshit. If I need antibiotics for something, my doctor writes me a prescription for antibiotics, and I go get it filled. Of course, if I don't actually need antibiotics, my doctor doesn't have an incentive to feed me medication that I don't actually need. If you want to talk intelligently about universal or public health care, go learn something about the subject instead of repeating the lies you've been told. Here's an interesting fact for you. Of the top 40 or so countries in the world, the US has the most inefficient health care system. It's twice as inefficient as the next most inefficient health care system.
Universal public healthcare systems are operating right now, that are at least twice as efficient as the health care system in the US. Stop and think about that. This isn't theorizing about what a public health system might do, this is real actual performance in the real world. Of course, there are also many nations with fully private health care that are at least twice as efficient as your own system, which should be ringing bells in your head right about now. The problem isn't about public/private, the problem lies elsewhere. Many Americans will say that the discrepancy is caused by the "cheeseburger nation", but here in Canada we're just as obese as you are, and we do much better than you in terms of health care efficiency.
So what is the real problem? Why is it that in the US, you have absurdly high numbers of people with no coverage at all, and yet you spend more per person on health care than any other country? Follow the money....
Just because the CAPSLOCK key serves no good purpose for you doesn't mean it serves no good purpose for anybody. I use caps all the time when I'm preparing forms or other documents, saves me a lot of pain and grief from having to do the pinky-finger ballet (left-two-shift, right-two-shift). So, why should I suffer for your failure of imagination?
Ha. I guess I thought the subject of the thread was about what a cell phone company could do with your information. You know, like the rest of the discussion. I guess I was mistaken. I didn't realize we were all talking about third party credit attacks exclusively. Though really, all that's necessary for a third party to attack your credit with most of these methods is to have access to a POS terminal with those capabilities. Not every attacker is a script-kiddie or gangster.
Oh dude, you have no idea.
Don't feed the trolls, Anon.
No, it doesn't give access to my shopping habits. That's a record kept between me, my credit card vendor, and the individual shops, who know only what they sold me.
Err, that's not necessarily true, especially if you don't check the fine print in your cell phone contract. When I sold cellular there was a clause that allowed the company to provide your information to Third Party Companies for marketing purposes. If you miss that clause, then your credit card information can be provided to data miners who can track your shopping patterns. Of course laws about the legality of this practise vary by jurisdiction, but you can't just assume that you're protected.
It doesn't allow access to an unlimited line of credit,
Whoops, I never said "unlimited". If your contract has a clause that allows the company to charge your credit card when you miss a payment, then they can claw money out of your credit balance to pay what you owe them. Again, there is some variance by jurisdiction.
And the biggest bit: having access to my credit card will NOT allow you to get MORE credit cards in my name, or take out loans, or a myriad of other credit-destroying tasks that could cost me years and thousands of dollars to undo.
This is just not true. When I worked in retail, we had the ability (on in-store credit applications) to take your credit card, swipe it, and get automatic approval for more credit. This was as a convenience to the customer (takes about 5 minutes compared to 0.5 hours filling out forms), but it could easily be gamed by an attacker who has your credit card information and a card writer. The newer security features (requiring a pin as well as your card) will make this tougher, but not that much tougher, especially when people are punching their pins in front of the watchful eye of the clerk (who may be making shit wages and have a high incentive to steal your credit).
And another point to consider. Though we never saw the customer's credit information directly, presumably at some point, the company gets access to the actual credit report of a person. If you can read the credit report, you can probably read the SIN/SSN right off the report, giving you direct access to anything the credit card couldn't get you. Now I'm not %100 sure that this would work; as I said, I never saw a credit report of a customer to verify this, which is why I didn't mention it in my first post. But it sure does give you food for thought, doesn't it?
Well, probably, but it can be an expensive policy if enough people get pissed about it.
The true irony in all this is that giving out your credit card information is at least as dangerous as giving out your SSN, and maybe more so. People who think nothing of giving out their credit card number to a business for credit check purposes will wig at the suggestion that they hand over their SSN (I do it too), despite the fact that a credit card number gives access to essentially the same information, plus your shopping habits, plus an active credit line to tap into.
Sorry, a credit card is perfectly adequate for conducting a credit check, and has the added bonus of providing the company with a way to recover some of their losses if you stop paying your bills. A SSN is totally unnecessary to obtain a credit check. I worked for Radio Shack in Ontario a few years ago, selling Rogers cell service among other things, and at no time did we require a SIN for a credit check. Yes, I'm in Canada and not the US, but it's generally the same credit agencies, so their requirements should be the same in the US as in Canada.
At the end of the day, though, even if it were printed on the contract, it's still CREDIT, and they've got every right to demand an SSN to do a credit-check on you if they're extending you credit.
Except that a credit card is sufficient to do a credit check on you. If Sprint insisted on taking OP's SSN, and refused to do the check with a credit card, I suspect they have some other reason for wanting the SSN.
Yes, she had thousands of songs in her kazaa share folder. They just chose 24 specific examples in order to keep things manageable in court.
Tough shit. If they want damages for each and every song in her folder, they have to give her the chance to defend against that. If it's far to expensive to go for damages in all of them, maybe they should have stayed the hell out of court.
This whole idea of statutory damage awards just boggles my mind. Sue for the actual damages you suffered, and if you think that's not enough go after aggravated or punitive damages, but this artificial inflation of damages by statute is ridiculous.
Every paper in the US is the Sun or the Daily Mail. Actually, I retract that, they're not that bad, but very few people read them anymore. Everyone in the US get's their news from the TV. Every news broadcast is the Sun or the Daily Mail.
But if you want social spending, and haven't told me how you're doing it without chronic deficit spending, you haven't told me much.
This part's actually not that hard, my country (Soviet Canuckistan) had been deficit-free for several successive governments now. We're probably going to have a deficit this year, thanks to your country's free-market true believers deregulating the hell out of your banks (and other causes) since Reagan, and finally taking down the world economy, but we're expecting the return to deficit spending to be temporary. There's a good chance that the current government will fall, because the deficit is going to be bigger than projected (the PM's a Conservative, incidentally). But not to worry, Canadians in all demographic groups will continue to receive their universal health care.
The trick seems to be 1) don't deregulate the financial system, because greedy bastards will rob you blind if given a free hand. 2) turf out politicians who take too much pork (a little pork fat does keep the wheels turning), because the greedy bastards will rob you blind if they can and 3) turf out politicians who threaten to take away your most cherished social programs, because the greedy bastards would rather spend the money on pork (see 2).
Of course I'm being too glib, but if your basic requirements are social spending and no deficit (I suspect you'd rather see no social spending, given some of your sources), then it's been done, and done consistently (if not always done well).
I used to sell Rogers cellular way back when, and they were trying really hard to get people to buy pcmcia cellular cards for their laptops (with the pricey data plan to go with it). Rogers is banking that tethered laptops and whatnot will be the next big thing, and they'll be right there saying "see, we had it all along!" I suspect that there are people up high in Rogers who know that once mobile bandwidth reaches certain speed and portability tipping points, consumer interest in tethering technology and mobile internet service generally is going to explode. It's kinda shocking that other cell companies don't see this, as it seems like we're right on the cusp of that point now.
Nope, well sort of. In town the man-hole covers are in the middle of the road, but then you couldn't use that kind of machine in town anyway, I don't think. Roads between towns or cities tend not to have man-holes at all that I know of. That's where the all-in-one machine does its work, that I've ever seen.
...Because I'm a fiscally conservative nerd...the savings spent on developing mass transit options...
Now that's interesting, you usually don't see conservatives supporting increased mass transit options...I'm intrigued.
I've seen these machines in Ontario, Canada. They do indeed get through a lot of road in a very short amount of time.
It is when the Republicrats get their way.
For Chrissakes, you people (Americans) are nickel-and-diming each other to death while your politicians and Corporations are robbing you all blind. The problem in the US isn't bigger government, it's crooked government, in bed with the fat cats. If you lived in a country where the government was still afraid of the voters, and not the other way around, that government would be a lot more efficient than you think.
It would certainly make sense in terms of benefitting real people (to some extent, "low skilled" labour doesn't pay very well these days), to ease off on efficiency and spend more on labour, but it would also have a devastating effect on the profit margins of large corporations, who swear fealty only to the shareholders. Therefore, though your ideas are intriguing and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter, they're not likely to be implemented any time soon.
So what about trucks that are coming at you from the opposite direction? Our car had a gravel strike a few years ago, from a big cube van travelling in the direction opposite us. Don't ask me to explain how it happened, I don't know.
you laugh, but this is exactly how many people where I live (including myself, sometimes) deal with gravel roads that have gone to washboard. If the washboard is regular and there are no large potholes, you can get up on top of the ruts, with just a little extra gas (If you're not afraid to waggle your back end a bit, that is).