Your plan would be ok except for the "huge risk-amortization pool managed by US government". Why should the government be used for managing it? Can you please show me the relevant section of the constitution that allows for that? If you can ensure that non members do not contribute one cent to the management of such a pool and that the government does not use its power to create an unfair competition to the alternative private options, then there is no difference at all between a government managed insurance and an equivalent privately managed non-profit organization. In other words, if the government does not use force at all to facilitate this system using money from non-members, then there is no advantage to the government insurance v. private non-profit org. except for the fact that if past experience with is anything to go by it will be mismanaged, mired in incompetence and corruption and eventually it will not be able to sustain itself and force will be used to keep it alive.
As for the silly comments such as "organ donations made to public system will not be available for private transplants" and "hard-core libertarians get to die on the road after a car accident" I am fine with that as long as it applies both ways. I am absolutely certain that in a competition on even terms (assuming government will be able to contain itself which is unlikely) the privately managed insurance will wipe the floor with the government managed insurance.
You had me until this bombshell: Healthcare often isn't an individual problem, but rather a societal one.
How do you reconcile a statement like that with the quote above? Apart from special cases, such as epidemics, I don't see how on earth can you justify interfering with the individual's liberty (i.e forcing us to pay for the healthcare of others, forcing us to take part in the government's system instead of setting up a different one or opting out altogether etc)? If I am sick, how is that your problem, and what right do I have to force you to pay for my doctor's bills so that I can get well?
We would be much better off if we abandoned that charade and, instead, let the state attend to state functions, the private sector attend to private sector functions
I don't think anybody would disagree with that, but the whole problem is the disagreement on which is which. If you ask a libertarian (such as Milton Friedman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PaN9M4WwHw) the government has no business being involved in just about anything except providing and enforcing law and order. If you ask a socialist, there is practically no limit to government control, in fact a central tenet of socialism is government ownership of all the means of production and therefore complete control of the society. Most people are somewhere in the middle.
I am not in favor of this bill of any further government regulation of health care but your statement is factually incorrect. A substantial portion of those 47 mil CANNOT get health insurance at any price, due to previous medical history. If you are not covered by a group plan (such as self employed, unemployed but not dead broke or over 60 or under whatever, and do not have a spouse or somebody to cover you) good luck getting private coverage. Even minor problems such as acid reflux are enough to make you not profitable enough for insurance companies to insure.
Also, there's really not anything that approaches the value of a good textbook available on line. Seriously, how much will you google around before you spend a few bucks and go out and buy Steven's books before doing some sockets works. Would you monkey around with Perl and a bunch of fanboi sites with terrible examples, or why not just go out and buy the Camel book. Or, if you were doing Windows SDK work, would you wade through MSDN and all the Microsoft fanboi sites, or would you just go and get the Petzold bible.
That's just a case of saying you'll get better information if you pay for it. There is no reason why those same books couldn't be available in a digital format on the internet (except lack of reliable DRM), but you'd still have to pay for them. Even libraries don't generally have enough material to cover any particular narrow subject area in enough detail, so in the end you will have to go to a book store and pay for a book (paper or digital). Not to mention the fact that unlike the Internet, the more popular libraries become, the less useful they are because the book you really need will more likely be checked out.
Lower taxes and less regulation, sure, but you cannot call a liberal (in the traditional US sense, or libertarian today) somebody who thinks that it's a matter for the government to decide what the work hours should be in private businesses.
Construction companies get hired to demolish the old buildings, which stimulates the economy
That's a common fallacy that just refuses to die. Taking money from taxpayers and passing it on to construction companies does not stimulate the economy. Its just the case of government deciding on our behalf how to spend our money. If we weren't paying for this we'd be spending it on other things, maybe things that, unlike bulldozing old buildings, actually generate wealth.
Do you stand by and watch innocent men, women and children be forced into state sponsored slavery and/or get slaughtered by the thousands or millions?
An impartial international body, if there was such a thing, should intervene. UN, as imperfect as it is (an understatement of the year?), is the closest thing we have to that. A foreign government should not intervene unilaterally without international approval. It cannot properly sacrifice the interests of its own people to whom it is responsible in order to help another country and therefore cannot act impartially. It's a matter of picking a lesser of two evils. Is it better to have police who arbitrarily pick sides in every dispute according to their own interests and whims or is it better to have no police at all?
So when you say no good comes of meddling in others' affairs, I'll ask you to tell that to a holocaust survivor, or Rwandan refugee.
When you say that for example USA should sacrifice its soldiers' lives and its people's wealth in order to help the people of another country I ask you to find any justification for that in the constitution. I'm sorry, but if you believe that US, Russia, Britain or any other allied country entered the WWII in order to liberate holocaust victims you don't know your history. I cannot think of a single war that any country entered from altruistic reasons. Even a very limited intervention by the US in Somalia was only done for the reasons of very minor US interests and even so was pulled out as soon as a handful of American soldiers were killed.
Quick, buy it, pretend that you lost a sense of smell (let me see them prove otherwise) and then wait for a nice settlement check. Just kidding, that would be dishonest.
Tell that to those who suffer and die from that injustice while the strategy of non-violence starts to work its magic. Gandhi may or may not have been right in using that strategy in that particular struggle, but I'd say any philosophy of strict non-violence in the presence of evil is inherently evil itself. I'd say the only moral response to injustice is to do whatever is necessary (violent or not) to stop that injustice in the shortest possible time and with the lowest amount of suffering.
Take a wider view of history is my suggestion to you, or some people might consider you an ignorant racist. European nations lived under tyrannical theocracy for many centuries as well until the enlightened few gradually recently managed to wrestle control away from the church and the hereditary nobility and sort of into the hands of the people (btw a process which is not easy and can easily reverse itself if we are not careful). Did European "culture" or it's "people" change so dramatically in the second half of the 20th century (compared to previous 19) or are there other forces that determine how history works itself out differently in different parts of the world? If you take a look at the entire history of human race, democracy is something that has never been known before 20th century (apart from a brief flicker in ancient Greece and the USA of course which started from scratch so it's a different problem). With that perspective it seems ignorant to say that European culture in some way more receptive to democracy than Iranian, it just so happened that Europeans got there in the 20th century and hopefully Iranians will get there in the 21st. People all over the world basically want the same things. I don't know exactly what is keeping them from making it happen, but I suspect it's the same things that kept Europe in the even worse darkness until recently.
I think it is bad enough that the Chinese government is forcing people to have censorship software installed on their computers which obviously will have to know what sites they are visiting and probably what else they are doing on their computers without having to engage in idle speculation on what else it can be used for. In any case, the idea that it will be used as a botnet is kind of weird and imho unlikely. You'd think that the Chinese government would have enough computing resources to do what it needs including waging cyberwar without having to resort to something as messy as this. Or it could commandeer an existing botnet, or, being a totalitarian government it could simply make it mandatory to install botnet software, or it could build one in "traditional" way using viruses etc.
No, the idea I find terrifying is that we should deliberately let millions of humans (presumably, if your aim is to make a noticeable dent in the world population) die from a preventable disease. If that's your aim then presumably you would support using gas chambers for the same purpose since it would achieve the same result but in a more humane way?
Yep and George Bush is being unfairly attacked as a war monger even through he clearly said: "I believe that human beings and fish can coexist peacefully"
I don't think it's really true that schools are a business (except private, for profit ones) but if they were that would be a good thing. Don't forget that schools compete for students not just by lying to get a higher ranking, but also by trying to obtain a higher ranking through legitimate means, better teaching staff, better facilities, better services etc. If anything, this story reflects a problem with a particular ranking system, not with competition between schools in principle.
Since we are off topic anyway, let me add my voice to the plea to stop screwing around with the site already. I used to be able to read slashdot on iphone, but now when I touch links such as Read More on a story on the front page half the time it selects the entire box instead of just the link and reloads the front page. On firefox I can't see the comment subjects on the pages with green title bg, the site feels slower than it used to be. What purpose is served by any of the recent changes apart from letting somebody show off his "web 2.0" skills? Can we have an option to "downgrade" to an old version that works?
You are right, I just have a passionate hatred for every single level of government seeing fit to impose licensing on every type of business out there so I don't like to see someone penalized because they don't have the stupid license. I personally have to have 5, from city, county and state, renewed annually with an accompanying exorbitant fee for no purpose other than to generate revenue for somebody. Part of my business includes photography so I have to put up with such things as health and safety related permits for photo lab chemicals even though it's 100% digital. But yes your point is entirely valid.
Slashdot Mirror
Your plan would be ok except for the "huge risk-amortization pool managed by US government". Why should the government be used for managing it? Can you please show me the relevant section of the constitution that allows for that? If you can ensure that non members do not contribute one cent to the management of such a pool and that the government does not use its power to create an unfair competition to the alternative private options, then there is no difference at all between a government managed insurance and an equivalent privately managed non-profit organization. In other words, if the government does not use force at all to facilitate this system using money from non-members, then there is no advantage to the government insurance v. private non-profit org. except for the fact that if past experience with is anything to go by it will be mismanaged, mired in incompetence and corruption and eventually it will not be able to sustain itself and force will be used to keep it alive.
As for the silly comments such as "organ donations made to public system will not be available for private transplants" and "hard-core libertarians get to die on the road after a car accident" I am fine with that as long as it applies both ways. I am absolutely certain that in a competition on even terms (assuming government will be able to contain itself which is unlikely) the privately managed insurance will wipe the floor with the government managed insurance.
You had me until this bombshell: Healthcare often isn't an individual problem, but rather a societal one.
How do you reconcile a statement like that with the quote above? Apart from special cases, such as epidemics, I don't see how on earth can you justify interfering with the individual's liberty (i.e forcing us to pay for the healthcare of others, forcing us to take part in the government's system instead of setting up a different one or opting out altogether etc)? If I am sick, how is that your problem, and what right do I have to force you to pay for my doctor's bills so that I can get well?
We would be much better off if we abandoned that charade and, instead, let the state attend to state functions, the private sector attend to private sector functions
I don't think anybody would disagree with that, but the whole problem is the disagreement on which is which. If you ask a libertarian (such as Milton Friedman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PaN9M4WwHw) the government has no business being involved in just about anything except providing and enforcing law and order. If you ask a socialist, there is practically no limit to government control, in fact a central tenet of socialism is government ownership of all the means of production and therefore complete control of the society. Most people are somewhere in the middle.
I am not in favor of this bill of any further government regulation of health care but your statement is factually incorrect. A substantial portion of those 47 mil CANNOT get health insurance at any price, due to previous medical history. If you are not covered by a group plan (such as self employed, unemployed but not dead broke or over 60 or under whatever, and do not have a spouse or somebody to cover you) good luck getting private coverage. Even minor problems such as acid reflux are enough to make you not profitable enough for insurance companies to insure.
Also, there's really not anything that approaches the value of a good textbook available on line. Seriously, how much will you google around before you spend a few bucks and go out and buy Steven's books before doing some sockets works. Would you monkey around with Perl and a bunch of fanboi sites with terrible examples, or why not just go out and buy the Camel book. Or, if you were doing Windows SDK work, would you wade through MSDN and all the Microsoft fanboi sites, or would you just go and get the Petzold bible.
That's just a case of saying you'll get better information if you pay for it. There is no reason why those same books couldn't be available in a digital format on the internet (except lack of reliable DRM), but you'd still have to pay for them. Even libraries don't generally have enough material to cover any particular narrow subject area in enough detail, so in the end you will have to go to a book store and pay for a book (paper or digital). Not to mention the fact that unlike the Internet, the more popular libraries become, the less useful they are because the book you really need will more likely be checked out.
Lower taxes and less regulation, sure, but you cannot call a liberal (in the traditional US sense, or libertarian today) somebody who thinks that it's a matter for the government to decide what the work hours should be in private businesses.
Also keep in mind that half of software projects in general fail; it's a very immature industry.
But it takes a special talent to fail when your funding is provided for you and you can give the game away for free.
Construction companies get hired to demolish the old buildings, which stimulates the economy
That's a common fallacy that just refuses to die. Taking money from taxpayers and passing it on to construction companies does not stimulate the economy. Its just the case of government deciding on our behalf how to spend our money. If we weren't paying for this we'd be spending it on other things, maybe things that, unlike bulldozing old buildings, actually generate wealth.
According to this: http://www.detnews.com/article/20090605/METRO/906050433/Detroit-s-homicide-rate-worst-in-nation?imw=Y it's actually 37 per 100,000, so 0.00037%. So it will take a while to get down to one survivor.
Rent them out to Israeli army for training purposes.
proposal in the recent Digital Britain report to set up tax breaks for developing video games that are culturally British.
The Sims - Football Hooligans
EA Sports Cricket 09
Age Of Former Empires
Tom Clancy's Surveillance Society
Do you stand by and watch innocent men, women and children be forced into state sponsored slavery and/or get slaughtered by the thousands or millions?
An impartial international body, if there was such a thing, should intervene. UN, as imperfect as it is (an understatement of the year?), is the closest thing we have to that. A foreign government should not intervene unilaterally without international approval. It cannot properly sacrifice the interests of its own people to whom it is responsible in order to help another country and therefore cannot act impartially. It's a matter of picking a lesser of two evils. Is it better to have police who arbitrarily pick sides in every dispute according to their own interests and whims or is it better to have no police at all?
So when you say no good comes of meddling in others' affairs, I'll ask you to tell that to a holocaust survivor, or Rwandan refugee.
When you say that for example USA should sacrifice its soldiers' lives and its people's wealth in order to help the people of another country I ask you to find any justification for that in the constitution. I'm sorry, but if you believe that US, Russia, Britain or any other allied country entered the WWII in order to liberate holocaust victims you don't know your history. I cannot think of a single war that any country entered from altruistic reasons. Even a very limited intervention by the US in Somalia was only done for the reasons of very minor US interests and even so was pulled out as soon as a handful of American soldiers were killed.
Yep, they should have said very few.
Even better:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYqQ_n2vOOI
It seems to be still on sale though:
http://www.google.com/products?q=zicam
Quick, buy it, pretend that you lost a sense of smell (let me see them prove otherwise) and then wait for a nice settlement check. Just kidding, that would be dishonest.
Tell that to those who suffer and die from that injustice while the strategy of non-violence starts to work its magic. Gandhi may or may not have been right in using that strategy in that particular struggle, but I'd say any philosophy of strict non-violence in the presence of evil is inherently evil itself. I'd say the only moral response to injustice is to do whatever is necessary (violent or not) to stop that injustice in the shortest possible time and with the lowest amount of suffering.
Take a wider view of history is my suggestion to you, or some people might consider you an ignorant racist. European nations lived under tyrannical theocracy for many centuries as well until the enlightened few gradually recently managed to wrestle control away from the church and the hereditary nobility and sort of into the hands of the people (btw a process which is not easy and can easily reverse itself if we are not careful). Did European "culture" or it's "people" change so dramatically in the second half of the 20th century (compared to previous 19) or are there other forces that determine how history works itself out differently in different parts of the world? If you take a look at the entire history of human race, democracy is something that has never been known before 20th century (apart from a brief flicker in ancient Greece and the USA of course which started from scratch so it's a different problem). With that perspective it seems ignorant to say that European culture in some way more receptive to democracy than Iranian, it just so happened that Europeans got there in the 20th century and hopefully Iranians will get there in the 21st. People all over the world basically want the same things. I don't know exactly what is keeping them from making it happen, but I suspect it's the same things that kept Europe in the even worse darkness until recently.
I think it is bad enough that the Chinese government is forcing people to have censorship software installed on their computers which obviously will have to know what sites they are visiting and probably what else they are doing on their computers without having to engage in idle speculation on what else it can be used for. In any case, the idea that it will be used as a botnet is kind of weird and imho unlikely. You'd think that the Chinese government would have enough computing resources to do what it needs including waging cyberwar without having to resort to something as messy as this. Or it could commandeer an existing botnet, or, being a totalitarian government it could simply make it mandatory to install botnet software, or it could build one in "traditional" way using viruses etc.
No, the idea I find terrifying is that we should deliberately let millions of humans (presumably, if your aim is to make a noticeable dent in the world population) die from a preventable disease. If that's your aim then presumably you would support using gas chambers for the same purpose since it would achieve the same result but in a more humane way?
Yep and George Bush is being unfairly attacked as a war monger even through he clearly said: "I believe that human beings and fish can coexist peacefully"
I don't think it's really true that schools are a business (except private, for profit ones) but if they were that would be a good thing. Don't forget that schools compete for students not just by lying to get a higher ranking, but also by trying to obtain a higher ranking through legitimate means, better teaching staff, better facilities, better services etc. If anything, this story reflects a problem with a particular ranking system, not with competition between schools in principle.
Since we are off topic anyway, let me add my voice to the plea to stop screwing around with the site already. I used to be able to read slashdot on iphone, but now when I touch links such as Read More on a story on the front page half the time it selects the entire box instead of just the link and reloads the front page. On firefox I can't see the comment subjects on the pages with green title bg, the site feels slower than it used to be. What purpose is served by any of the recent changes apart from letting somebody show off his "web 2.0" skills? Can we have an option to "downgrade" to an old version that works?
And it's easy for Google too; no complaints about privacy breach.
They are getting sued by SCO though, for violating their patent for sinking to the lowest depths possible.
I always find getting through a Corona refreshing.
You are right, I just have a passionate hatred for every single level of government seeing fit to impose licensing on every type of business out there so I don't like to see someone penalized because they don't have the stupid license. I personally have to have 5, from city, county and state, renewed annually with an accompanying exorbitant fee for no purpose other than to generate revenue for somebody. Part of my business includes photography so I have to put up with such things as health and safety related permits for photo lab chemicals even though it's 100% digital. But yes your point is entirely valid.