it is in the best interests of those above it to keep it that way
It's rather sad that people - both below and above - continue to believe and spread that particular fallacy.
The fallacy is in believing that the people who have the most wealth have more to gain by spreading it than they do by concentrating it. The goal of the wealthy is to get those less fortunate to live just beyond their own means, so that they are forever in debt and essentially left with zero mobility. Nearly every "charitable" deed that is done by the wealthiest Americans is done not to make better citizens, but rather to make (only slightly) better consumers.
Do you know what the word "household" means? If the median household income is $46k, and the median household size is 2, then the median income is $23k.
And most people would agree that indeed $23k is less than $40k.
I have completed all the course work, and am 30 pages into my MS thesis in bioinformatics.
I can't say I'm that impressed, really. Bioinformatics has been constantly moving more and more towards commoditization anyways, which may be why you are so jaded. Very few PIs manage to get their own grants for purely bioinformatics work, they generally have to sign on as co-PIs with the labs who are generating the original data (I say this from experience), and in some cases they end up signing on after the fact as contractors, which is even worse for the PIs and their research groups.
I don't really feel like revealing my locale
I don't really care where you are, and frankly I wouldn't expect you to be honest about your location anyways. I do know that there aren't all that many schools in the US currently offering MS work in bioinformatics, so it wouldn't be that hard to narrow down your possible location if I really wanted to try. Although of course that would require me to believe that anything you have said so far has some degree of truth to it, which I can't say is something I am inclined to believe currently.
My point is that biotech is booming in many parts of the country, and largely because of the federal funding that is available to the research that drives it.
my belief that government funded research is a rip-off to the tax payer.
If you hate your job that much, I don't understand why you would even want to finish. Because if government funded research goes away, so do 90% of the research jobs in this country (and the other 10% go away shortly afterwards). Hell there already are overseas groups doing bioinformatics in India and China; if you aren't aware of them and what they do then you really don't have any hope at finding work after you finish and you'd might as well give up now.
The university model should be privatized.
So apparently you despise academia from top to bottom then? You know, you could have done your undergrad at the University of Phoenix if you wanted to. You could then tell us how well that helps people to prepare for graduate studies.
Well, if I were to assume that your statement of having worked in academia is truthful, I should also consider that you said nothing about achieving an advanced degree while doing so. Which suggests that you lacked either understanding or initiative. Because if you had achieved an advanced degree, why wouldn't you have said so? It would, after all, lend value to your claims.
I understand that there are more PhDs than jobs in this biotech hub.
That is a pretty vacuous statement, and not at all indicative of biotech in general. Which "Biotech hub" are you referring to? I know plenty of labs that can't get enough post-docs in to do the work they have in front of them.
I don't disagree that universities serve as training grounds
Which contradicts your desire to strip researchers of grant funding. You can either support the university model or not; you can't support higher education by telling them they have to do their work with no resources at all.
but there are many labs with zero students.
That is another vacuous statement. A lab with zero students - depending on many factors including the field, the institution, the collaborators, the funding status - is not inherently bad. PIs with no students are not inherently bad advisers, either.
There can be value in government projects, but there is More Value in letting people keep their own money, and allowing industry to do the work.
That is known to be not true, especially if you want the basic research to be done in the US. Industry will not fund basic science work in this country, and if the basic science work is done overseas eventually the rest of the follow up work will go there, too.
How did the people you work under in industry get to where they are today? They earned their PhD is how. And most likely, if you are working in the US, the PhDs above you earned their degrees at schools in the US, with that graduate work supported at least in part by taxpayer funding.
In other words, we don't train scientists in this country without NIH/NSF/DOE funding. It simply doesn't happen, because it is too expensive to do any other way. If those three agencies were all terminated this afternoon, grad schools across the country would suffer immediately. Eventually the number of new degrees issued would plummet and employers looking for PhDs would have to hire from abroad.
In other words, congratulations you just expressed support for accelerating the brain drain.
The amount of truly useful work to come out of academia does not justify stealing from taxpayers.
Just because you don't understand the work - or the value thereof - coming from academia does not mean it has no value.
I seem to recall hearing quite a bit about how much the Texas conservatives hated her and were working to unseat her in the 2010 election cycle. Of course, losing your reelection (even to someone from your own party) doesn't mean you can't do anything in your last two months of your term, but if she lost she doesn't really represent much at this point.
Now they just need to do the same for economically relevant languages. The top developing countries currently are Brazil, India, and China (in no particular order) and none of them speak Spanish as a primary language.
Querying wolfram alpha, the most spoken languages in the world are:
Indeed a lot of people speak Spanish, I don't doubt that. However it is not as economically relevant as other languages, as it is not spoken much at all in the top emerging economies.
I can see why they went Spanish.
As can I. Spanish is pretty easy as far as languages for text translation go. And from Spanish it is a very short hop to Portuguese; and only a slightly longer hop to French or Italian.
I am not looking to discredit their work or say it is of no value. I'm just saying I hope that this was a good learning exercise for them on the way to more economically (and diplomatically!) critical languages.
Now they just need to do the same for economically relevant languages. The top developing countries currently are Brazil, India, and China (in no particular order) and none of them speak Spanish as a primary language.
Of course, I tried to use a similar argument decades ago in school when everyone told me I needed to learn Spanish (while living in a state that was dramatically closer to French Canada than to Mexico, but oh well), and I still ended up taking three years of a language that I almost never encounter in my regular existence.
Mandarin Chinese, on the other hand, I hear every day at work. In my work Espanol is marginally more valuable than Esperanto. But what do I know, really...
One of the world's most prolific spammers has hid out in Finland from time to time. While his hiding out there does not make an argument for Finland supporting his actions, it does suggest that it may be a place where computer criminals can hide out fairly effectively. Being as he was controlling a botnet from there to pump spam, it would not be hard to envision him using the same botnet to attack someone he views as an enemy - regardless of whether or not they have any negative affiliations with anything he does directly.
Of course if it really is Kuvayev - who makes most of his money selling counterfeit prescription drugs - he may actually be acting very short-sighted here. He may be concerned that radiation accident victims wouldn't want to buy his counterfeit viagra, while really he should be thinking of all the other drugs he could sell those people...
The drivers where I live are so monumentally bad that they manage to flip their cars over on roads marked 30 mph, because... I have no idea why really. They do this on clear days, cloudy days, warm days, cold days, dry days, rainy days, snow days, whatever. At lest they primarily harm only themselves when they are driving cars with less intelligence than a crippled hamster. If we allow them to fly aircraft...
Considering how little of slashdot is indexed well (if at all), I'm not sure those numbers have any value whatsoever. Unless they are describing the actual code that runs slashdot, in which case the numbers are total bullshit because we all know that slashdot is primarily coded by drunken monkeys.
A fair number of conservatives denounce Fox News anyways. Granted, some of those who declare that they don't get their news from Fox will in the same breath declare that all liberals get 130% of their news from MSNBC and NPR; but nonetheless, uninformed Fox News viewers are not indicative of all conservatives.
A more interesting question at this point would be to ask how relevant Fox News is. I didn't see any information on there as to what the actual market share is; has Fox News actually grown in terms of viewers over the past 5 or more years, or has it been retracting (as many have)? A lot of people now claim to get a large portion of their news from blogs and other online sources; if that is true than the correlation of poor information with Fox News viewership is not necessarily that significant with regards to the American public at large.
For one, I think they could pull in some money by working on regular "static" releases - probably on CD or DVD. They could even do these for specific levels; for example elementary school library releases might not have entries on anal sex. Something like that could be useful for establishments who either don't have good internet connectivity, or don't want to allow completely unfettered access to things like wikipedia in its current form.
I think they could also look into allowing companies to "sponsor" ads. This could be done intelligently if they try, so that sponsors can't change the message referring to their own entries. For example, they could allow McDonalds to sponsor entries on space exploration, but not on food or food-related matters. The sponsors could pay the professional editors directly for work on permitted entries and then be recognized at the end of the entry.
Just to underscore the "for worse" part of what the Time person is defined as: "for better or for worse,...has done the most to influence the events of the year."
Which only further discredits this selection. I cannot think of a single important event that happened in 2010 that would not have happened without facebook.
I still don't understand why we are heaping so much praise on someone who has driven us to waste so much time. And no, I'm not saying I could have done it better; I would not have attempted to program anything like facebook because I would have seen it as a waste of time from the beginning. Nonetheless, what is the big deal, really? I don't see how his work has in any way improved life for anyone other than himself, or how this is important enough to warrant such honors.
If the movie about his life wins an Oscar I might never watch another Oscar winner again.
Of course not. Just stick your fingers in your ears, and yell really loud. That ought to turn reality into something a bit more manageable!
Wow, that is the best you can do? I actually took the time to show you where your assumptions were baseless and incorrect for the situation, and you counter with that?
Frankly, I'm surprised that you actually bothered to log in to say that, and put your alias behind your comment. Because really, the degree of utter cowardice that you show is staggering to say the least. I will take this as indication that indeed you didn't bother following the link I sent you back to the original post I wrote in this thread; because if you had gone back and read it you would have realized just how twisted your assumptions were.
Your reading comprehension is atrocious. You seem preoccupied with pushing your own agenda, thoroughly ignoring what I say.
20 Articles posted in less than 24 hours, none of which have a "conservative" bias, or anything to do with conservative talking points.
That doesn't mean jack squat. I was earlier referring to the conservative voice and the conservative population of slashdot. The number of articles published in one narrow window of time does not do anything to refute it.
Out of 140 articles, that's about 7-14% - less than the 15% which I randomly threw out earlier.
Which again means nothing with regards to the political sway of the site or the people who frequent the same.
Although if you really want to try to use those numbers to somehow refute my statement of slashdot's conservative sway, you need to demonstrate that slashdot is instead somehow favoring liberals; which you conveniently have not done in any way, shape or form.
For that matter, this very topic is in the discussion of a pro-conservative front page article, which came right before an anti-Obama article. So if you want to use the front page articles to claim that slashdot doesn't have a conservative sway, you are already at a disadvantage.
In conclusion: you suck at Da Maths
Strange conclusion. But I guess that conclusion matches well with your demonstrated (lack of) reading comprehension.
you're pulling "facts" out of your ass so that you can accuse others of having "fact-free opinions"
I guess you somehow do better to simply ignore facts and counter with assumptions that neither support nor refute any argument you are trying to participate in?
You're also a blind ideologue and a blatant troll
As I recall, slashdot mentions that trolls waste people's time. Indeed, you excel at this. I don't plan to point out again how much you have failed at both countering my argument and presenting one of your own; if you can't find on your own where you dropped the ball then I probably can't help you find it.
You're swallowing the partisan drivel of your chosen political extreme
I was wondering if you would go for the classic "sucking the POTUS's (genitalia)"; is that the closest you'll go?
Either take off your blinders
If you somehow think you made or refuted a point that in any way connects with my original post in this thread (here's a courtesy link to it, so you won't have to click through all the "parent" links to find it), then you are the blind one here.
learn to think for yourself
I would not consider your posting to be a way of declaring your ability to "think for yourself". At best, you showed you can "think without the hindrance of reality".
He claims that all countries could end up "wealthy and healthy", but doesn't say how. He seems to be oblivious to the various factors at work that are specifically invested in preventing that from happening. While $40k/year isn't a ton of money by US standards, there are a lot more people (even in the US) who are below that mark than are above it, and it is in the best interests of those above it to keep it that way.
But this is, after all, slashdot. And with the new conservative bend on this site (notice how often townhall.com advertises here with various anti-Obama rhetoric) this is exactly what slashdot wants to have on the front page.
I know, eh? At this point, slashdot must be at least 15% conservative. Maybe even 20%. It's disgusting!
You clearly don't derive that opinion from reading the slashdot front page. Every week slashdot features at least 5-10 articles that specifically bash Obama and/or the democrats, and about that same number of articles that praise or defend conservatives. IN the same time frame there might be one article that praises a non-conservative or bashes a conservative.
Thankfully for slashdot the advertisers have taken notice, one of the more prolific advertisers (as I already pointed out) is a conservative site. I have yet to see a single liberal site advertise here, they realize they have almost no audience here.
But of course, you are free to hold on to your fact-free opinion if you so wish...
car insurance is mandatory in the USA. If you understand the logic behind that, you understand why health insurance should be mandatory
Car insurance is mandatory only if you drive a car. You can chose to walk or bike everywhere, or take a cab or public transportation, and you wouldn't need car insurance. Hell, if you are adept at mooching rides off of friends and family, you don't need car insurance because you aren't driving. There are plenty of places and situations in this country where you can live without owning and driving a car.
That said, I have been arguing for single-payer universal health care in this country for decades. It is a fucking crying shame that we don't have it, we don't deserve to call ourselves a civilized (or even first-world) country without it. But really, health insurance doesn't compare much to auto insurance with the exception of both are disgustingly profitable to all the wrong people. I have less respect for insurance companies than I have for used car salesmen.
Just the ability to buy insurance across state lines alone would improve things.
That is not entirely accurate.
First, you already can buy insurance across state lines. If a different state approved a plan that you envy, you can buy it. However, you might not be able to make use of it if it is not blessed by your own state.
Second, the application of which plans work where is dictated not by the federal government, but by the states themselves. Do you really want the federal government to strip that right from the states? I thought the republicans wanted to reduce the role of federal government in health care - removing the right of states to approve health insurance plans would do the opposite of that wish.
Third, more plans increases overhead at the level of the practitioner. As it is every health care office already devotes a significant amount of person-time to handling the billing and prerequisites of the health insurance plans they accept. If you force more plans into the system, you will be consuming more time at the doctor's offices as the total number of plans that they have to handle billing for increases.
So in short, the concept of somehow reducing health care costs by "selling across state lines" doesn't hold water. It strips states' rights, increases costs at the office level, and really doesn't get us anywhere that we aren't already.
increasing the number of Democrat voters by increasing the size of the insured pool
That statement makes no sense, whatsoever. Why would people suddenly want to vote democratic if they just purchased insurance? More likely they would be angry at the democrats for forcing them into a broken system...
all so Obama can declare to his supporters that he passed "the most meaningful healthcare reform in the country's history,"
That is crap. Amongst Obama voters nothing that he has done so far has been as monumentally disappointing as the health insurance bailout act. Have you actually looked at the polls? In most polls that ask people how they view the bill, half of the people who oppose it, oppose it for not going far enough - where do you think those people came from (politically)? The people who are the most disgusted with the current system are the lower income brackets of traditionally liberal voters, who recognize that this bill doesn't do shit to help them.
just in time for the 2012 reelection campaign
He would be an idiot to try to appeal to his voting base with the health insurance bailout act. He will call it a "bipartisan compromise" and nothing more congratulatory than that. He knows that the people who supported him most enthusiastically in 2008 are mad as hell about this bill, and he won't piss on them if he wants to be re-elected.
Why was big pharma left out of the dance?
Because the bill didn't solve anything else at all, so why bother going after something else to not correct?
How about tort reform?
That is a great boogey man, and the health insurance companies are happy to see you brought it up. It means that there are still plenty of people who think that the insurance companies are doing an adequate (enough) job that they don't have to worry about seeing anything done to their own business model.
If we're looking to cut costs, the drug makers and fucking lawyers would sure be at the top of my list.
The insurance companies (and their ad campaigns) thank you for your cooperation. They look forward to your higher premiums in the very near future - and ever increasing for the rest of your life.
you can't require private insurers to accept new customers with pre-existing conditions (which the health reform does -- and this is probably its most popular provision)
That is nowhere near as big of a problem for the insurance companies currently as some would like to make it out to be. While indeed the companies have to sell something to people with pre-existing conditions, it doesn't dictate what, or for how much. The companies can still set rates as exorbitantly high as they want; they could charge you 10 times more per month because you have asthma (for example) if they so choose.
And really, this isn't any different than the current situation. People with existing conditions can go through the phone book today and call every company they see listed asking for a quote, and they'll get quotes. But in the end they won't buy anything because every quote will be too damned expensive for them. Those same quotes will come in if the bill stands, there is nothing that will magically drive those prices down.
If this provision doesn't hold, you may get your single payer coverage sooner than you think.
Nah, the new congress will find a way to force us into the private system again because it rewards them better. We won't see single-payer in the US anytime soon for the public at large.
...ask yourself who this is actually a victory for. After all, this was only a ruling against a part of the law, not the entire thing. And this was really the part that was the biggest corporate hand-out of the bill - had a real liberal written it we would have seen a single-payer option instead of forcing people to give more money to large corporations.
So in other words, if this part goes, and the rest stays, what are we left with? A bunch of smaller corporate hand-outs that don't fix much of anything in a horrendously broken system. Most people will still have the shitty insurance they already have, and they will see their costs continue to rise the same way that they would have if nothing at all had happened.
So whether it goes away - in part or in entirety - or not, we still have a crappy broken system. Maybe, just maybe - if we are really truly fortunate - this will motive our politicians to actually write a bill that addresses some of the existing problems and then hold an honest discussion on that.
But I suspect at this rate I (and anyone currently reading this) will be dead before that happens in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
it is in the best interests of those above it to keep it that way
It's rather sad that people - both below and above - continue to believe and spread that particular fallacy.
The fallacy is in believing that the people who have the most wealth have more to gain by spreading it than they do by concentrating it. The goal of the wealthy is to get those less fortunate to live just beyond their own means, so that they are forever in debt and essentially left with zero mobility. Nearly every "charitable" deed that is done by the wealthiest Americans is done not to make better citizens, but rather to make (only slightly) better consumers.
Do you know what the word "household" means? If the median household income is $46k, and the median household size is 2, then the median income is $23k.
And most people would agree that indeed $23k is less than $40k.
I have completed all the course work, and am 30 pages into my MS thesis in bioinformatics.
I can't say I'm that impressed, really. Bioinformatics has been constantly moving more and more towards commoditization anyways, which may be why you are so jaded. Very few PIs manage to get their own grants for purely bioinformatics work, they generally have to sign on as co-PIs with the labs who are generating the original data (I say this from experience), and in some cases they end up signing on after the fact as contractors, which is even worse for the PIs and their research groups.
I don't really feel like revealing my locale
I don't really care where you are, and frankly I wouldn't expect you to be honest about your location anyways. I do know that there aren't all that many schools in the US currently offering MS work in bioinformatics, so it wouldn't be that hard to narrow down your possible location if I really wanted to try. Although of course that would require me to believe that anything you have said so far has some degree of truth to it, which I can't say is something I am inclined to believe currently.
My point is that biotech is booming in many parts of the country, and largely because of the federal funding that is available to the research that drives it.
my belief that government funded research is a rip-off to the tax payer.
If you hate your job that much, I don't understand why you would even want to finish. Because if government funded research goes away, so do 90% of the research jobs in this country (and the other 10% go away shortly afterwards). Hell there already are overseas groups doing bioinformatics in India and China; if you aren't aware of them and what they do then you really don't have any hope at finding work after you finish and you'd might as well give up now.
The university model should be privatized.
So apparently you despise academia from top to bottom then? You know, you could have done your undergrad at the University of Phoenix if you wanted to. You could then tell us how well that helps people to prepare for graduate studies.
haha... I don't understand my own research.
Well, if I were to assume that your statement of having worked in academia is truthful, I should also consider that you said nothing about achieving an advanced degree while doing so. Which suggests that you lacked either understanding or initiative. Because if you had achieved an advanced degree, why wouldn't you have said so? It would, after all, lend value to your claims.
I understand that there are more PhDs than jobs in this biotech hub.
That is a pretty vacuous statement, and not at all indicative of biotech in general. Which "Biotech hub" are you referring to? I know plenty of labs that can't get enough post-docs in to do the work they have in front of them.
I don't disagree that universities serve as training grounds
Which contradicts your desire to strip researchers of grant funding. You can either support the university model or not; you can't support higher education by telling them they have to do their work with no resources at all.
but there are many labs with zero students.
That is another vacuous statement. A lab with zero students - depending on many factors including the field, the institution, the collaborators, the funding status - is not inherently bad. PIs with no students are not inherently bad advisers, either.
There can be value in government projects, but there is More Value in letting people keep their own money, and allowing industry to do the work.
That is known to be not true, especially if you want the basic research to be done in the US. Industry will not fund basic science work in this country, and if the basic science work is done overseas eventually the rest of the follow up work will go there, too.
In other words, we don't train scientists in this country without NIH/NSF/DOE funding. It simply doesn't happen, because it is too expensive to do any other way. If those three agencies were all terminated this afternoon, grad schools across the country would suffer immediately. Eventually the number of new degrees issued would plummet and employers looking for PhDs would have to hire from abroad.
In other words, congratulations you just expressed support for accelerating the brain drain.
The amount of truly useful work to come out of academia does not justify stealing from taxpayers.
Just because you don't understand the work - or the value thereof - coming from academia does not mean it has no value.
I seem to recall hearing quite a bit about how much the Texas conservatives hated her and were working to unseat her in the 2010 election cycle. Of course, losing your reelection (even to someone from your own party) doesn't mean you can't do anything in your last two months of your term, but if she lost she doesn't really represent much at this point.
Now they just need to do the same for economically relevant languages. The top developing countries currently are Brazil, India, and China (in no particular order) and none of them speak Spanish as a primary language.
Querying wolfram alpha, the most spoken languages in the world are:
Indeed a lot of people speak Spanish, I don't doubt that. However it is not as economically relevant as other languages, as it is not spoken much at all in the top emerging economies.
I can see why they went Spanish.
As can I. Spanish is pretty easy as far as languages for text translation go. And from Spanish it is a very short hop to Portuguese; and only a slightly longer hop to French or Italian.
I am not looking to discredit their work or say it is of no value. I'm just saying I hope that this was a good learning exercise for them on the way to more economically (and diplomatically!) critical languages.
Now they just need to do the same for economically relevant languages. The top developing countries currently are Brazil, India, and China (in no particular order) and none of them speak Spanish as a primary language.
Of course, I tried to use a similar argument decades ago in school when everyone told me I needed to learn Spanish (while living in a state that was dramatically closer to French Canada than to Mexico, but oh well), and I still ended up taking three years of a language that I almost never encounter in my regular existence.
Mandarin Chinese, on the other hand, I hear every day at work. In my work Espanol is marginally more valuable than Esperanto. But what do I know, really...
One of the world's most prolific spammers has hid out in Finland from time to time. While his hiding out there does not make an argument for Finland supporting his actions, it does suggest that it may be a place where computer criminals can hide out fairly effectively. Being as he was controlling a botnet from there to pump spam, it would not be hard to envision him using the same botnet to attack someone he views as an enemy - regardless of whether or not they have any negative affiliations with anything he does directly.
Of course if it really is Kuvayev - who makes most of his money selling counterfeit prescription drugs - he may actually be acting very short-sighted here. He may be concerned that radiation accident victims wouldn't want to buy his counterfeit viagra, while really he should be thinking of all the other drugs he could sell those people...
The drivers where I live are so monumentally bad that they manage to flip their cars over on roads marked 30 mph, because ... I have no idea why really. They do this on clear days, cloudy days, warm days, cold days, dry days, rainy days, snow days, whatever. At lest they primarily harm only themselves when they are driving cars with less intelligence than a crippled hamster. If we allow them to fly aircraft...
Considering how little of slashdot is indexed well (if at all), I'm not sure those numbers have any value whatsoever. Unless they are describing the actual code that runs slashdot, in which case the numbers are total bullshit because we all know that slashdot is primarily coded by drunken monkeys.
A fair number of conservatives denounce Fox News anyways. Granted, some of those who declare that they don't get their news from Fox will in the same breath declare that all liberals get 130% of their news from MSNBC and NPR; but nonetheless, uninformed Fox News viewers are not indicative of all conservatives.
A more interesting question at this point would be to ask how relevant Fox News is. I didn't see any information on there as to what the actual market share is; has Fox News actually grown in terms of viewers over the past 5 or more years, or has it been retracting (as many have)? A lot of people now claim to get a large portion of their news from blogs and other online sources; if that is true than the correlation of poor information with Fox News viewership is not necessarily that significant with regards to the American public at large.
(professional you-get-what-you-pay-for like with Microsoft)
You mean I could pay more, and get a less stable product? Where do I sign up for that?
For one, I think they could pull in some money by working on regular "static" releases - probably on CD or DVD. They could even do these for specific levels; for example elementary school library releases might not have entries on anal sex. Something like that could be useful for establishments who either don't have good internet connectivity, or don't want to allow completely unfettered access to things like wikipedia in its current form.
I think they could also look into allowing companies to "sponsor" ads. This could be done intelligently if they try, so that sponsors can't change the message referring to their own entries. For example, they could allow McDonalds to sponsor entries on space exploration, but not on food or food-related matters. The sponsors could pay the professional editors directly for work on permitted entries and then be recognized at the end of the entry.
Just to underscore the "for worse" part of what the Time person is defined as: "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year."
Which only further discredits this selection. I cannot think of a single important event that happened in 2010 that would not have happened without facebook.
I still don't understand why we are heaping so much praise on someone who has driven us to waste so much time. And no, I'm not saying I could have done it better; I would not have attempted to program anything like facebook because I would have seen it as a waste of time from the beginning. Nonetheless, what is the big deal, really? I don't see how his work has in any way improved life for anyone other than himself, or how this is important enough to warrant such honors.
If the movie about his life wins an Oscar I might never watch another Oscar winner again.
That doesn't mean jack squat.
Of course not. Just stick your fingers in your ears, and yell really loud. That ought to turn reality into something a bit more manageable!
Wow, that is the best you can do? I actually took the time to show you where your assumptions were baseless and incorrect for the situation, and you counter with that?
Frankly, I'm surprised that you actually bothered to log in to say that, and put your alias behind your comment. Because really, the degree of utter cowardice that you show is staggering to say the least. I will take this as indication that indeed you didn't bother following the link I sent you back to the original post I wrote in this thread; because if you had gone back and read it you would have realized just how twisted your assumptions were.
20 Articles posted in less than 24 hours, none of which have a "conservative" bias, or anything to do with conservative talking points.
That doesn't mean jack squat. I was earlier referring to the conservative voice and the conservative population of slashdot. The number of articles published in one narrow window of time does not do anything to refute it.
Out of 140 articles, that's about 7-14% - less than the 15% which I randomly threw out earlier.
Which again means nothing with regards to the political sway of the site or the people who frequent the same.
Although if you really want to try to use those numbers to somehow refute my statement of slashdot's conservative sway, you need to demonstrate that slashdot is instead somehow favoring liberals; which you conveniently have not done in any way, shape or form.
For that matter, this very topic is in the discussion of a pro-conservative front page article, which came right before an anti-Obama article. So if you want to use the front page articles to claim that slashdot doesn't have a conservative sway, you are already at a disadvantage.
In conclusion: you suck at Da Maths
Strange conclusion. But I guess that conclusion matches well with your demonstrated (lack of) reading comprehension.
you're pulling "facts" out of your ass so that you can accuse others of having "fact-free opinions"
I guess you somehow do better to simply ignore facts and counter with assumptions that neither support nor refute any argument you are trying to participate in?
You're also a blind ideologue and a blatant troll
As I recall, slashdot mentions that trolls waste people's time. Indeed, you excel at this. I don't plan to point out again how much you have failed at both countering my argument and presenting one of your own; if you can't find on your own where you dropped the ball then I probably can't help you find it.
You're swallowing the partisan drivel of your chosen political extreme
I was wondering if you would go for the classic "sucking the POTUS's (genitalia)"; is that the closest you'll go?
Either take off your blinders
If you somehow think you made or refuted a point that in any way connects with my original post in this thread (here's a courtesy link to it, so you won't have to click through all the "parent" links to find it), then you are the blind one here.
learn to think for yourself
I would not consider your posting to be a way of declaring your ability to "think for yourself". At best, you showed you can "think without the hindrance of reality".
He claims that all countries could end up "wealthy and healthy", but doesn't say how. He seems to be oblivious to the various factors at work that are specifically invested in preventing that from happening. While $40k/year isn't a ton of money by US standards, there are a lot more people (even in the US) who are below that mark than are above it, and it is in the best interests of those above it to keep it that way.
But this is, after all, slashdot. And with the new conservative bend on this site (notice how often townhall.com advertises here with various anti-Obama rhetoric) this is exactly what slashdot wants to have on the front page.
I know, eh? At this point, slashdot must be at least 15% conservative. Maybe even 20%. It's disgusting!
You clearly don't derive that opinion from reading the slashdot front page. Every week slashdot features at least 5-10 articles that specifically bash Obama and/or the democrats, and about that same number of articles that praise or defend conservatives. IN the same time frame there might be one article that praises a non-conservative or bashes a conservative.
Thankfully for slashdot the advertisers have taken notice, one of the more prolific advertisers (as I already pointed out) is a conservative site. I have yet to see a single liberal site advertise here, they realize they have almost no audience here.
But of course, you are free to hold on to your fact-free opinion if you so wish...
car insurance is mandatory in the USA. If you understand the logic behind that, you understand why health insurance should be mandatory
Car insurance is mandatory only if you drive a car. You can chose to walk or bike everywhere, or take a cab or public transportation, and you wouldn't need car insurance. Hell, if you are adept at mooching rides off of friends and family, you don't need car insurance because you aren't driving. There are plenty of places and situations in this country where you can live without owning and driving a car.
That said, I have been arguing for single-payer universal health care in this country for decades. It is a fucking crying shame that we don't have it, we don't deserve to call ourselves a civilized (or even first-world) country without it. But really, health insurance doesn't compare much to auto insurance with the exception of both are disgustingly profitable to all the wrong people. I have less respect for insurance companies than I have for used car salesmen.
Just the ability to buy insurance across state lines alone would improve things.
That is not entirely accurate.
First, you already can buy insurance across state lines. If a different state approved a plan that you envy, you can buy it. However, you might not be able to make use of it if it is not blessed by your own state.
Second, the application of which plans work where is dictated not by the federal government, but by the states themselves. Do you really want the federal government to strip that right from the states? I thought the republicans wanted to reduce the role of federal government in health care - removing the right of states to approve health insurance plans would do the opposite of that wish.
Third, more plans increases overhead at the level of the practitioner. As it is every health care office already devotes a significant amount of person-time to handling the billing and prerequisites of the health insurance plans they accept. If you force more plans into the system, you will be consuming more time at the doctor's offices as the total number of plans that they have to handle billing for increases.
So in short, the concept of somehow reducing health care costs by "selling across state lines" doesn't hold water. It strips states' rights, increases costs at the office level, and really doesn't get us anywhere that we aren't already.
increasing the number of Democrat voters by increasing the size of the insured pool
That statement makes no sense, whatsoever. Why would people suddenly want to vote democratic if they just purchased insurance? More likely they would be angry at the democrats for forcing them into a broken system...
all so Obama can declare to his supporters that he passed "the most meaningful healthcare reform in the country's history,"
That is crap. Amongst Obama voters nothing that he has done so far has been as monumentally disappointing as the health insurance bailout act. Have you actually looked at the polls? In most polls that ask people how they view the bill, half of the people who oppose it, oppose it for not going far enough - where do you think those people came from (politically)? The people who are the most disgusted with the current system are the lower income brackets of traditionally liberal voters, who recognize that this bill doesn't do shit to help them.
just in time for the 2012 reelection campaign
He would be an idiot to try to appeal to his voting base with the health insurance bailout act. He will call it a "bipartisan compromise" and nothing more congratulatory than that. He knows that the people who supported him most enthusiastically in 2008 are mad as hell about this bill, and he won't piss on them if he wants to be re-elected.
Why was big pharma left out of the dance?
Because the bill didn't solve anything else at all, so why bother going after something else to not correct?
How about tort reform?
That is a great boogey man, and the health insurance companies are happy to see you brought it up. It means that there are still plenty of people who think that the insurance companies are doing an adequate (enough) job that they don't have to worry about seeing anything done to their own business model.
If we're looking to cut costs, the drug makers and fucking lawyers would sure be at the top of my list.
The insurance companies (and their ad campaigns) thank you for your cooperation. They look forward to your higher premiums in the very near future - and ever increasing for the rest of your life.
you can't require private insurers to accept new customers with pre-existing conditions (which the health reform does -- and this is probably its most popular provision)
That is nowhere near as big of a problem for the insurance companies currently as some would like to make it out to be. While indeed the companies have to sell something to people with pre-existing conditions, it doesn't dictate what, or for how much. The companies can still set rates as exorbitantly high as they want; they could charge you 10 times more per month because you have asthma (for example) if they so choose.
And really, this isn't any different than the current situation. People with existing conditions can go through the phone book today and call every company they see listed asking for a quote, and they'll get quotes. But in the end they won't buy anything because every quote will be too damned expensive for them. Those same quotes will come in if the bill stands, there is nothing that will magically drive those prices down.
If this provision doesn't hold, you may get your single payer coverage sooner than you think.
Nah, the new congress will find a way to force us into the private system again because it rewards them better. We won't see single-payer in the US anytime soon for the public at large.
...ask yourself who this is actually a victory for. After all, this was only a ruling against a part of the law, not the entire thing. And this was really the part that was the biggest corporate hand-out of the bill - had a real liberal written it we would have seen a single-payer option instead of forcing people to give more money to large corporations.
So in other words, if this part goes, and the rest stays, what are we left with? A bunch of smaller corporate hand-outs that don't fix much of anything in a horrendously broken system. Most people will still have the shitty insurance they already have, and they will see their costs continue to rise the same way that they would have if nothing at all had happened.
So whether it goes away - in part or in entirety - or not, we still have a crappy broken system. Maybe, just maybe - if we are really truly fortunate - this will motive our politicians to actually write a bill that addresses some of the existing problems and then hold an honest discussion on that.
But I suspect at this rate I (and anyone currently reading this) will be dead before that happens in the US.