irresponsible and disabled adults (people who founded the country generally just let them die)
No they didn't. If disabled people were allowed to die without anyone helping them, then that was the fault of the their families, neighbors and generally people around them who weren't generous enough to help their fellow citizens in need. It is not one of the responsibilities of government to help them.
Here is a tip for future reference: when somebody makes an argument in favor of LIBERTY and you reply with an argument against ANARCHY you just show your ignorance of the subject. Having liberty requires having laws that prevent people from taking it away from you, and the enforcement of those laws. Without them you can't have it. The same does not apply to healthcare, housing, food, money or free sex toys for the poor. Those are things that responsible, able bodied, adults should provide for themselves and their family. People who founded this country and many generations since understood that very well and that's what made USA the greatest and most free country in history. Not sure how it got lost on people like you, poor government provided education is my guess.
Hmm, so what you are saying "we already have some IDs and use them for some things" THEREFORE "we need more IDs and we need to use them for more things". Great argument. Mods, congratulations, you win an "Ignorant Tool of the Day" award for modding that up.
Well they warned against IE and Firefox. On Windows that narrows it down to Chrome and Opera. I'm just waiting for one more announcement so I'll know which one is the winner.
(btw please don't show off your knowledge of esoteric browsers by listing them here. those are the four biggest ones by far)
Umm, space travel is about the experience of space flight, the weightlessness, the view of Earth from space as well as the view of space unobstructed by the atmosphere, and just the knowledge that you are one of the very few people to visit outer space. Is your point that it's kind of the same thing as being in a closet?
Pissed away into "jobs stimulus"? Why, just down the street from me the workers are receiving taxpayers money to dig holes in a perfectly good road and then fill them up again. It's a valuable training for when they have some real work.
That's not true, I could and did choose the doctor, the surgeon (I chose not to go with the one my GP referred me to and went with another one after doing some research) and the hospital (obviously limited by my choice of surgeon, but he did operate at two different hospitals so I choose the one closer to me). As for the lab, that was kind of silly bureaucratic thing. I could have told the doctor to make sure to use a lab that was covered by my insurance if I had thought of that and I will next time. Just because people don't generally use their freedom to choose, doesn't mean they don't have it.
I'd say this was the American crappy one, but really, a more correct description would be "individuals are treated as slaves whose money is for the insurance companies to plunder without returning anything in return".
What part of "voluntary transaction" sounds like slavery to you? Yes we have a stupid employer based insurance which should be abolished. There should be free competition between insurance companies which would quickly bring the price down. Take auto insurance. It seems like half the ads on tv here are from car insurance companies which are competing purely on price and without a great deal of regulation except to mandate 3rd party coverage. As a result, my comprehensive car insurance is something like $500 a year, how much is yours? I have full medical coverage (with high deductible which is how I want it, I don't mind paying out of pocket for small stuff) for $150/month, with access to probably the best health care in the world, no waiting lists. I live in a state with no state income taxes so my total federal taxes are in the region of 20-25% of my income including social security, how much are yours? 60%? Are you really so sure that your system would be better for me personally?
It might be better for those who are uninsurable and I'm all in favor of helping them but lets do that directlyg. Let the government pay for their care directly and bill the rest of us through taxes so that we know exactly how much we are paying. This new bill amounts to the same thing except that it obfuscates the true cost.
Yes I agree, the health care system in the US can be infuriatingly inefficient, especially if you are used to the simplicity of a single payer system. Couple of years ago I had a relatively minor surgery. I have private health insurance so I was fully covered. The care I received was fantastic, but the bills just kept arriving. From the GP, then from the surgeon, then from the anesthesiologist, then from the lab, then from the hospital. I am not exaggerating, 5 different bills. Each said something like you don't have to pay anything, this is just for your information. But then my insurance company wouldn't pay them fully, so the doctors/hospital would hassle me and I would have to call my insurance company and hassle them. It seems to be standard practice for doctors to massively overbill and then the insurance company negotiates the price down. The total cost billed was something like $15K, but in the end somehow the insurance company paid about $5 or $6K and that was it, I didn't owe anything! Then the insurance company refused to pay for the lab costs because the lab wasn't "in-network" (how the hell was I supposed to know that - the doctor sent over the samples without asking me which lab) so I had all kinds of hassle over that. This seems to be a typical experience.
Even so, the problem I have with the single payer system isn't to do with efficiency or with the cost or with the quality of care, but with fairness and, really, liberty. You can simplify all kinds of things by making the government take care of them, but it doesn't mean that its a good idea. To take an extreme example, why go through all the hassle of comparing the prices of groceries, clothes, electronics etc etc, each store having to bill you separately, why not just take whatever you need and the stores can send the bill to a single payer - the government. Feel free to apply to everything else. What we have is a system where you pay for the services you use and you don't expect other people to pay for you (well we don't really but that would be the ideal in my view). What you have is a system where every specific individual is forced to pay for the services that other people use regardless of where that individual is using them him/herself. It's a pretty fundamental difference: in one system the individual is sovereign, in the other system the collective is treated as the most important entity and individuals are treated as interchangeable parts. In case you are wondering why there is so much anger over the health care bill in the US, it is because we seem to going further down the road toward losing that concept and a lot of people consider it to be a very valuable thing.
Nothing personal either, but just curious why did they refuse to talk to him? Did they not think he was able to pay? Or they happened to be fully booked at the time or something? It doesn't sound like a typical case, usually if you are paying cash hospitals are only too happy to make all kinds of accommodations and discounts rather than deal with insurance companies.
There weren't resources in American hospitals to treat them even though they had "good" health insurance? What, the hospitals were all full or something? I happen to know that the cost of surgery in India is something between 30% and 50% less than in the USA (feel free to google it). Any moderately serious procedure is likely to cost in the region of several thousand, even in India. What was the deductible on their plan? $3K would be considered a bargain basement very high deductible plan in the US so you are saying that for less than $3K they were able to fly to India, and pay 100% of the cost of surgery, which was serious enough to cause permanent disability, and the treatment for which was not available in the USA? Without knowing the details, all I can say is that your story doesn't sound true.
And yet, the 'rationed' socialist healthcare here in Britain is still a metric fuckton better than what you get in the US.
It's not though, that's a myth. Survival rates for most major diseases are much higher in the US than in the UK. For example cancer: http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/00643/news-graphics-2007-_643378a.gif
For certain types of cancer the gap is much greater. For heart attack, 30 day survival is much higher in US as well, can't find a nice graph. It all depends on what you compare. Most generalized comparisons of health systems by country you see, such as WHO's, place a very high emphasis on access so a country with universal access can appear high on the list but in reality the health care may be very poor, just equally poor for everyone. So you get absurd things, such as Costa Rica or Morocco being above the USA. Btw, since you are such a big fan of NHS, would you go to for example Malta, Greece, Portugal or Oman for health care? They all rank above UK.
The system in the US is still crap, just not sure that moving towards NHS types system is going to improve it. Taking the government out and allowing real competition might.
It's hard to hide preexisting conditions anyway, as long as there is a record somewhere they'll dig it up. And if you lie they can and will cancel your entire policy when you need it the most
Not a slashdot poll but probably some sort of an online forum where people from around the world can vote on the questions to be asked would be a good start. Why does it have to be one person or a small group of people who speak for humanity when there is a way to let a large part of the humanity participate.
I think you've been watching too many movies where aliens land in the USA and act as if they don't even know that the rest of the world exists, i.e like Americans.
A company can only survive for so long making a loss of $200M on a gross revenue of $800M as Novell did last year. I don't know all the details of Novell's finances and maybe the management has a great plan to save it but in general there are cases where its better to put a moribund company out of it's misery sooner rather than later.
Hmm, what exactly are you talking about? Ayn Rand "disciples" are not exactly the first people to come to mind when it comes to concerns about privacy which is what GP was talking about. Not that they are not concerned with privacy, just that somebody like ACLU in the USA at least would come to mind first. And if you are right that this will not cause any expansion of government power, plus the fact that unions are bitching about loss of government jobs that this will entail, if anything Ayn Rand people would probably approve. And BTW, GP did not say that new information is being collected, just that it is easier to follow a trail of bits than a trail of paper which is true enough.
I think the problem lies in thinking of companies as if they are individual human beings with their own personalities. In reality, Google is an entity owned and controlled by it's shareholders and the executive staff that those shareholders hire, just like Viacom is. All those groups, shareholders, the board and the executives can and do change all the time. Google shareholders (the major ones at least) may have decided to place a higher emphasis on ethical behavior but those people could change literally tomorrow. I think the whole idea of "trusting" Google more than for example Microsoft, say with a ridiculous amount of your personal information, is wrong as you have no idea who will be running it tomorrow.
Is this what you are saying: artists make trash these days because that way they can make money, so let's make it impossible for them to make any money at all and they will have to switch back to making real art purely for the sake of art (and starving)?
What is preventing those same artists (all the Joyces, Mozarts and Shakespeares who, according to you, are wasting their talents in a movie studio somewhere) from making real art now, of the kind that you approve of and vast majority of people dislike (hence it doesn't sell)? Do you really think it is the corrupting power of dollar signs in their eyes that prevents them from taking even a little bit of time away from frantically making as much trash as they can and make some genuine masterpieces? Does it occur to you that this is completely ridiculous?
Even if it wasn't, what right do you think you have to manipulate the system in a way that you think will make those artists more valuable to you and to what you think "society" needs, even though the artists themselves will end up being worse off, not to mention that most people will be deprived of the "trash" that they actually like?
I think that you and people like you are misunderstanding the world around you and the great era of plenty (when it comes to just about everything, including art) that you live in in a pretty spectacular way.
I don't think that goes far enough. Here is my proposal:
1. remove all clothes and perform anal cavity search - he could be taking company property with him 2. place in a straight jacket and a muzzle before escorting out - he could try attacking or biting other employees 3. install a radio controlled explosive device inside the body, to go off if he ever gets within 100 feet of the office building
Slashdot Mirror
irresponsible and disabled adults (people who founded the country generally just let them die)
No they didn't. If disabled people were allowed to die without anyone helping them, then that was the fault of the their families, neighbors and generally people around them who weren't generous enough to help their fellow citizens in need. It is not one of the responsibilities of government to help them.
No but falling back on name calling when your arguments fail you IS sociopathic and immoral behavior.
Here is a tip for future reference: when somebody makes an argument in favor of LIBERTY and you reply with an argument against ANARCHY you just show your ignorance of the subject. Having liberty requires having laws that prevent people from taking it away from you, and the enforcement of those laws. Without them you can't have it. The same does not apply to healthcare, housing, food, money or free sex toys for the poor. Those are things that responsible, able bodied, adults should provide for themselves and their family. People who founded this country and many generations since understood that very well and that's what made USA the greatest and most free country in history. Not sure how it got lost on people like you, poor government provided education is my guess.
Hmm, so what you are saying "we already have some IDs and use them for some things" THEREFORE "we need more IDs and we need to use them for more things". Great argument. Mods, congratulations, you win an "Ignorant Tool of the Day" award for modding that up.
Space offers natural resources to exploit. Didn't you play Masters of Orion?
Well they warned against IE and Firefox. On Windows that narrows it down to Chrome and Opera. I'm just waiting for one more announcement so I'll know which one is the winner.
(btw please don't show off your knowledge of esoteric browsers by listing them here. those are the four biggest ones by far)
Umm, space travel is about the experience of space flight, the weightlessness, the view of Earth from space as well as the view of space unobstructed by the atmosphere, and just the knowledge that you are one of the very few people to visit outer space. Is your point that it's kind of the same thing as being in a closet?
Pissed away into "jobs stimulus"? Why, just down the street from me the workers are receiving taxpayers money to dig holes in a perfectly good road and then fill them up again. It's a valuable training for when they have some real work.
That's not true, I could and did choose the doctor, the surgeon (I chose not to go with the one my GP referred me to and went with another one after doing some research) and the hospital (obviously limited by my choice of surgeon, but he did operate at two different hospitals so I choose the one closer to me). As for the lab, that was kind of silly bureaucratic thing. I could have told the doctor to make sure to use a lab that was covered by my insurance if I had thought of that and I will next time. Just because people don't generally use their freedom to choose, doesn't mean they don't have it.
I'd say this was the American crappy one, but really, a more correct description would be "individuals are treated as slaves whose money is for the insurance companies to plunder without returning anything in return".
What part of "voluntary transaction" sounds like slavery to you? Yes we have a stupid employer based insurance which should be abolished. There should be free competition between insurance companies which would quickly bring the price down. Take auto insurance. It seems like half the ads on tv here are from car insurance companies which are competing purely on price and without a great deal of regulation except to mandate 3rd party coverage. As a result, my comprehensive car insurance is something like $500 a year, how much is yours? I have full medical coverage (with high deductible which is how I want it, I don't mind paying out of pocket for small stuff) for $150/month, with access to probably the best health care in the world, no waiting lists. I live in a state with no state income taxes so my total federal taxes are in the region of 20-25% of my income including social security, how much are yours? 60%? Are you really so sure that your system would be better for me personally?
It might be better for those who are uninsurable and I'm all in favor of helping them but lets do that directlyg. Let the government pay for their care directly and bill the rest of us through taxes so that we know exactly how much we are paying. This new bill amounts to the same thing except that it obfuscates the true cost.
Yes I agree, the health care system in the US can be infuriatingly inefficient, especially if you are used to the simplicity of a single payer system. Couple of years ago I had a relatively minor surgery. I have private health insurance so I was fully covered. The care I received was fantastic, but the bills just kept arriving. From the GP, then from the surgeon, then from the anesthesiologist, then from the lab, then from the hospital. I am not exaggerating, 5 different bills. Each said something like you don't have to pay anything, this is just for your information. But then my insurance company wouldn't pay them fully, so the doctors/hospital would hassle me and I would have to call my insurance company and hassle them. It seems to be standard practice for doctors to massively overbill and then the insurance company negotiates the price down. The total cost billed was something like $15K, but in the end somehow the insurance company paid about $5 or $6K and that was it, I didn't owe anything! Then the insurance company refused to pay for the lab costs because the lab wasn't "in-network" (how the hell was I supposed to know that - the doctor sent over the samples without asking me which lab) so I had all kinds of hassle over that. This seems to be a typical experience.
Even so, the problem I have with the single payer system isn't to do with efficiency or with the cost or with the quality of care, but with fairness and, really, liberty. You can simplify all kinds of things by making the government take care of them, but it doesn't mean that its a good idea. To take an extreme example, why go through all the hassle of comparing the prices of groceries, clothes, electronics etc etc, each store having to bill you separately, why not just take whatever you need and the stores can send the bill to a single payer - the government. Feel free to apply to everything else. What we have is a system where you pay for the services you use and you don't expect other people to pay for you (well we don't really but that would be the ideal in my view). What you have is a system where every specific individual is forced to pay for the services that other people use regardless of where that individual is using them him/herself. It's a pretty fundamental difference: in one system the individual is sovereign, in the other system the collective is treated as the most important entity and individuals are treated as interchangeable parts. In case you are wondering why there is so much anger over the health care bill in the US, it is because we seem to going further down the road toward losing that concept and a lot of people consider it to be a very valuable thing.
Nothing personal either, but just curious why did they refuse to talk to him? Did they not think he was able to pay? Or they happened to be fully booked at the time or something? It doesn't sound like a typical case, usually if you are paying cash hospitals are only too happy to make all kinds of accommodations and discounts rather than deal with insurance companies.
There weren't resources in American hospitals to treat them even though they had "good" health insurance? What, the hospitals were all full or something? I happen to know that the cost of surgery in India is something between 30% and 50% less than in the USA (feel free to google it). Any moderately serious procedure is likely to cost in the region of several thousand, even in India. What was the deductible on their plan? $3K would be considered a bargain basement very high deductible plan in the US so you are saying that for less than $3K they were able to fly to India, and pay 100% of the cost of surgery, which was serious enough to cause permanent disability, and the treatment for which was not available in the USA? Without knowing the details, all I can say is that your story doesn't sound true.
And yet, the 'rationed' socialist healthcare here in Britain is still a metric fuckton better than what you get in the US.
It's not though, that's a myth. Survival rates for most major diseases are much higher in the US than in the UK. For example cancer: http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/00643/news-graphics-2007-_643378a.gif For certain types of cancer the gap is much greater. For heart attack, 30 day survival is much higher in US as well, can't find a nice graph. It all depends on what you compare. Most generalized comparisons of health systems by country you see, such as WHO's, place a very high emphasis on access so a country with universal access can appear high on the list but in reality the health care may be very poor, just equally poor for everyone. So you get absurd things, such as Costa Rica or Morocco being above the USA. Btw, since you are such a big fan of NHS, would you go to for example Malta, Greece, Portugal or Oman for health care? They all rank above UK.
The system in the US is still crap, just not sure that moving towards NHS types system is going to improve it. Taking the government out and allowing real competition might.
It's hard to hide preexisting conditions anyway, as long as there is a record somewhere they'll dig it up. And if you lie they can and will cancel your entire policy when you need it the most
And if the management is a government committee, royally is an understatement.
Not a slashdot poll but probably some sort of an online forum where people from around the world can vote on the questions to be asked would be a good start. Why does it have to be one person or a small group of people who speak for humanity when there is a way to let a large part of the humanity participate.
I think you've been watching too many movies where aliens land in the USA and act as if they don't even know that the rest of the world exists, i.e like Americans.
A company can only survive for so long making a loss of $200M on a gross revenue of $800M as Novell did last year. I don't know all the details of Novell's finances and maybe the management has a great plan to save it but in general there are cases where its better to put a moribund company out of it's misery sooner rather than later.
My favorite is NETGEAR. It just seems more inviting with all uppercase letters.
Hmm, what exactly are you talking about? Ayn Rand "disciples" are not exactly the first people to come to mind when it comes to concerns about privacy which is what GP was talking about. Not that they are not concerned with privacy, just that somebody like ACLU in the USA at least would come to mind first. And if you are right that this will not cause any expansion of government power, plus the fact that unions are bitching about loss of government jobs that this will entail, if anything Ayn Rand people would probably approve. And BTW, GP did not say that new information is being collected, just that it is easier to follow a trail of bits than a trail of paper which is true enough.
I think the problem lies in thinking of companies as if they are individual human beings with their own personalities. In reality, Google is an entity owned and controlled by it's shareholders and the executive staff that those shareholders hire, just like Viacom is. All those groups, shareholders, the board and the executives can and do change all the time. Google shareholders (the major ones at least) may have decided to place a higher emphasis on ethical behavior but those people could change literally tomorrow. I think the whole idea of "trusting" Google more than for example Microsoft, say with a ridiculous amount of your personal information, is wrong as you have no idea who will be running it tomorrow.
See, even Yoda is disappointed by Obama
Is this what you are saying: artists make trash these days because that way they can make money, so let's make it impossible for them to make any money at all and they will have to switch back to making real art purely for the sake of art (and starving)?
What is preventing those same artists (all the Joyces, Mozarts and Shakespeares who, according to you, are wasting their talents in a movie studio somewhere) from making real art now, of the kind that you approve of and vast majority of people dislike (hence it doesn't sell)? Do you really think it is the corrupting power of dollar signs in their eyes that prevents them from taking even a little bit of time away from frantically making as much trash as they can and make some genuine masterpieces? Does it occur to you that this is completely ridiculous?
Even if it wasn't, what right do you think you have to manipulate the system in a way that you think will make those artists more valuable to you and to what you think "society" needs, even though the artists themselves will end up being worse off, not to mention that most people will be deprived of the "trash" that they actually like?
I think that you and people like you are misunderstanding the world around you and the great era of plenty (when it comes to just about everything, including art) that you live in in a pretty spectacular way.
I don't think that goes far enough. Here is my proposal:
1. remove all clothes and perform anal cavity search - he could be taking company property with him
2. place in a straight jacket and a muzzle before escorting out - he could try attacking or biting other employees
3. install a radio controlled explosive device inside the body, to go off if he ever gets within 100 feet of the office building
It's the only way to be sure.