Like the joke about the drunk looking for a contact lens, people pay attention to stuff like test scores because it's easy to measure, not because it's relevant.
Now, for the social sciences, if you wanted to inflate grades, there's a lot of ways to do that for an english lit class. You can give easier essay questions, or you can just be more generous when marking papers and exams.
But with math/hard sciences, that's a lot harder to do. Your answer to a high-school physics problem in Newtonian dynamics is basically either right or wrong.
So, if you wanna "cook the books", the way to do that is to dumb down the content. And then you frame it in the context of making "learning more fun" or "getting more kids interested in science".
Furthermore, this is usually done by professional educators, i.e., people who couldn't pass first-year calculus if it meant the firing squad. My ex is a teacher, and the one common denominator between her and her education friends is that a lot of them picked their careers around not having to take anything harder than undergrad stats math in university.
Not that everybody should be a geek, but people that can't do math if their life depended on it shouldn't be making decisions about how to teach science.
Whenever I see people making the point that private industry will be more efficient, better managed, overall more competent than government providing the same service, I wonder what company they worked for that gave them that idea? Was it a magical company with elves and fairies?
Of course, the sad thing is, the biggest proponents of that point of view are right-wing academics and think-tank types.
Otherwise known as people who've never been exposed to market discipline or risk, or any other traditional capitalistic virtues.
People with tenure talking about competition and market forces and efficiency is like virgins critiquing the acting in a pr0n flick.
"The Biggest Lie of the MPAA (and RIAA) is that every download equates to a lost sale, or a percentage of a lost sale."
Here, here!
This is the basis of virtually everything unpleasant the MPAA does.
Personally, my objections to to drm have less to do with annoyances like difficulty making backups and anti-skip features, and more to do with my fear of an incremental slide towards Stallman's (loveable kook that he is!) story "The Right to Read".
Maybe start out with reading an abridged, "coles notes" version of that story, and ask him what he thinks of that outcome? Chances are he'd think it sounds like paradise, but I wonder if you could get him to admit that in public...
Actually, it's even worse. The US has a huge trade deficit AND a huge budget deficit.
That usually means that your currency value ends up in the shitter.
However, there's a few things going on here that keep that from happening. 1) Everybody wants access to the US consumers. Americans shop more than almost any other country, basically they buy crap that you couldn't sell (at least not in these quantities) to very many other people 2) Wealthy people all over the world see the US as the safest place to stash their cash. They see the US as the least likely to have an asian-flu type meltdown, or be taken over by maoists or something.
Now, the second one is kind of like the emperor's new clothes or something, as long as everybody plays along, then everybody's fine. But if some of the highly mobile capital were to leave the US (estimates around the tens-of-trillions range) then the US is going to be in for a world of hurt.
I don't see why you guys south of us can't come up with the solution to this in the same way the Ontario court did.
The problem is, the courts know that nobody reads these contracts. So what to do?
They found that, for contract of "adhesion" (IANAL, feel free to correct my terminology), I can only be held to the terms of said contract if, had I read it, it would be reasonable to assume that I would've accepted it.
A lawyer friend of mine described this as "you have to go before a judge, and it has to pass the 'giggle-test'."
So, sadly, the best thing you can do (at least in Canada) is to never read any contracts of adhesion, and if you have a problem with your cell phone or cable or whatever provider, then settle it in small claims court later.
Well, as far as the relationship between crime and punishment, the answer is, it depends.
For most people who aren't at the desperate margins of society, the _certainty_ of punishment, not the severity of punishment is what deters crime.
The sight of a cop on the highway is more likely to slow you down than the thought of a, for example, $500 fine.
That works for us "respectable members of society" who do neat things like worry about the consequences of our actions.
A guy looking to rob somebody so they can keep from going through heroin withdrawal, well, they're not really interested in the medium-to-long-term consequences of their actions. You can't deter people like this from committing crimes, because they don't care about consequences.
To cut down on that type of crime, you need to address root causes of crime.
"This "one size fits all" approach to education -- the idea that we must churn out "well-rounded" students no matter what an individual student's strengths and weaknesses may be -- is patently idiotic."
Let me give you another cranky quote: "Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house." -Robert Heinlein.
Look, math is the foundation of science education. If you want a functioning democracy, you need to have an educated population. At least one that's educated enough to have an informed opinion on the issues of the day.
Basically, the idea is that in classic economic theory (Adam Smith et. al.) you make money either through wealth creation (mining stuff that's useful, producing food, manufactured goods from raw material) or by trade (I buy tea in china and sell it for more in England).
When companies/individuals try to "game the system" and have the regulatory environment changed to suit their interests.
A simple example would be, say the US government was talking about legalizing drugs (I know, huge suspension of disbelief required), and a lobby group consisting of organized crime interests and central American cocaine producers came together to keep the current status quo in place.
It's a classic moral hazard, and when this behavior becomes common, it's probably a sign that things are seriously wrong with your economy.
"People who were popular in high school usually peaked then."
And it's all downhill after that.
And, when I look back on my graduating class (I'm 30 now, I was a bit nerdy in high school, but I was firmly in the middle - neither overachieving nor super popular, but still able to get a date for the prom etc.), I find that to almost universally be the rule. The people who, in high school, couldn't get laid in a morgue, are now biochemists and engineers and university professors, while the people who were the "A-list" of popular kids are by and large, leading uninteresting lives with crappier jobs.
OK, please, please, please, stop talking about intelligence.
I thought/. would be a place where people would know that IQ and scholastic achievement have a positive correlation, but only up to about the 120 IQ range. Above that, there's basically no correlation between IQ and grades.
Now, that aside, all this shows is that the top end and low end of scholastic achievement bell-curve distribution have less sex than the middle.
One thing I remember about high school was that you're terrified of breaking the social norms of your peer group. So when you do things (like, say, picking a girlfriend/boyfriend) that's largely going to be influenced by your own estimates of who your peer group will approve of. And the strongest predictor of whether or not a couple will have sex is what the girl wants.
Given this, we can probably assume that individuals in the tail end of the bell curve for scholastic achievement probably also have traits that make them stand out from the herd in other ways.
But, y'see, in high school, standing out from the herd (whatever particular herd you happen to be part of) doesn't exactly increase your odds of getting laid.
People can try and turn this into a discussion of intelligence and individual choices or whatever, but it comes down to the plain fact that being "abnormal" by whatever definition doesn't help your social life (and therefore your chances of having sex) in high school.
The best predictor of how far a date goes (first base, sex, etc) is what the girl's interested in doing. If you're alone with a girl you're interested in, how many guys would say no if she brings out the condoms? Let's say "effectively zero".
So, in general, women are still the "gatekeepers".
One thing you can say about people in high school, is they're mostly not interested in deviating from the norm of their peer group. So most girls probably will end up dating the guys who are basically pretty mainstream (by any individual girl's definition of "mainstream", which is largely shaped by the opinions of her peer group).
People with very high scholastic achievement are probably also "not mainstream" in some other way as well.
So the fact that on average, high-school girls select sexual partners that are "mostly pretty similar to themselves" should be no surprise. The idea of girls selecting people "in the middle" by whatever trait you want to manage should be pretty uncontroversial.
Which should lead to the conclusions of this study.
And please, can we forget about discussing "intelligence" or IQ here? This study only talked about grades. I know most/.-ers like to think that 'cause they got grades, and they're intelligent, you should be able to roughly equate "grades" and "IQ".
While there is a positive correlation between IQ and scholastic achievement, that correlation only exists for IQ scores in the range of ~120 or less. For IQ scores over 120, there's basically no correlation, positive or negative, between IQ and scholastic achievement.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the standard of what's referred to as "unconscionable" in Canada is lower than in the US.
IIRC (and IANAL here) but the Ontario court said basically said for "contracts of adhesion", (i.e., contracts like this where they know nobody reads it all) that, in order for a contract/clause to be enforceable, the test is, "if they had read it, is it reasonable to assume that this customer would've accepted it?".
So, it's a lesser hurdle to get over than "unconscionable = contract that no reasonable person would accept".
Ok, might be true. But the verified-by-visa "graphic" that should be a link makes me more nervous than anything else.
Also, I suppose that, like the korean website you mention, it could be that they don't want to post that info for various support/logistical reasons (and they don't want to be pestered/pay for LD from thousands of mouth-breathers asking asinine questions...).
But I tell ya, as somebody else pointed out, if it's not a scam, they're sure going out of their way to look like one...
I sent them an e-mail to "info@medisoncelebrity.com" from my work e-mail (we do network/server support etc) saying that I'd like to order at least a dozen of these for several of my clients, but that however, there are numerous rumors flying around the internet suggesting that this could be some sort of scam, but that I couldn't offer these laptops to my clients unless I could say to my clients "oh, those internet rumors? There's nothing to them, I've been in contact with the company, everything is above board".
Specifically I asked for additional contact info (mailing address, phone numbers, names of who I could contact on their end) and for them to address the "verified by VISA" picture, that should be a link to the verified by VISA program.
I got what looks to be an automated response, 2 minutes later, saying "thank you for your e-mail, we will answer as soon as possible.", but no sig, no names, no phone number or other contact info.
The "phones are temporarily closed" I could almost accept, but why no mailing address? Has anybody ever seen a commercial site you can order from, that doesn't offer a mailing address _somewhere_?
Oh, I see, this is all just intelligence gathering to fight terrorists.
And, you know this, how, exactly? 'Cause such honorable men as Bush and Co. say "trust us"? Like they said "Trust us, we KNOW that Iraq has WMD"?
Just for a standard of comparison, since 9/11, there have been more Americans killed by lightning than terrorism. So maybe terrorism isn't a threat worth shredding the constitution over, eh?
Just because nothing you're doing is illegal, that doesn't mean there's nothing that the government could learn about you that might be later used against you.
Maybe you're having an affair. Maybe you're secretly gay, and don't wanna be "outed" yet. Maybe you have an unusual sexual fetish. These are all things that could be used as leverage against you, though none of these activities is illegal.
But maybe the FBI wants you to wear a wire when you talk to a friend of yours, and they'll blackmail you using that info. Maybe an organization you're a member of now will, 10 years from now, be criminalized, like what happened during McCarthy years.
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." - Cardinal Richelieu
As someone who lives in Canada, let me just explain how this is NOT in the consumer's favor.
All our gas pumps say "temperature corrected to 15 degrees c" (which, btw, is ~60 degrees F).
The gas is sitting in a tank underground. Most of the time the gas in that tank is much colder than that, depending on the time of year, somewhere between 5 and 20 degrees less.
So, ok, sure, to be fair to dealers and consumers, you need to pick a common point (frankly I was amazed that they don't do temp correction in the US, don't you guys have laws about weights and measures?) for a standard. But picking a point that is almost always higher (but not THAT much higher) than the temperature of the gas in the tank means you get to bill me for a liter but you sold me slightly less than that volume of gas.
And, it's a small enough amount that most people won't get excited about it.
(In fact, there was an independent chain of gas stations when I used to live back in Halifax, called Wilson's Fuels, that deliberately did not do temperature correction, in an attempt to build their consumer-friendly reputation, but when they realized nobody cared about such a small amount, they eventually gave up and started doing temp. correction.)
Well, the thing is, a nationalized system has no incentives to not cover people for medical treatment, you just treat it like a civil right. And, did I mention, it's cheaper?
In the same way that you take for granted that, if your house is on fire, you can call the fire department to put it out, and they just show up (they don't bill you or anything! It's a slippery slope to communism!), when you get sick, you go see your doctor.
It amazes me how willing Americans are to see medical care as a commodity, even a luxury good, (as if it's a 50-inch TV or something), rather than in the same category as police/roads/sewage/defense.
In every single other non-third-world-country, this is how it's treated.
As long as Americans see medical care as a commodity and not a civil right, the medical industry and the insurance industry are gonna keep bending you guys over like a two-dollar whore. It's a shame you can't see that.
Look, it's not (at least by definition) about ideological concerns of "welfare state" or something.
It's about what is the best pragmatic solution to the problem of "how does one pay for medical care"?
Free market solutions don't work, because when you get shot, or in a car accident, you can't shop around for the hospital ER that'll give you the best price on stitching up a gunshot wound.
So what is to be done? Of the available options for how to provide affordable, necessary medical care, your current system leaves millions with no coverage, and even those like yourself who can afford insurance, how confident are you that your insurance company won't find a sleazy way to drop you if it turns out you develop multiple sclerosis or ALS or some other dread disease?
Surely you're not arguing that the status quo is acceptable?
"A publicly-funded, single-payer healthcare system would be an invitation for the government to start regulating all sorts of stuff. People would demand it -- they're not going to want their tax dollars used to pay for "some asshole's smoking habit," or somebody else who likes to drive without a seatbelt, or someone else who likes to go hang-gliding at night."
Well, when or if that happens, you guys can fight it then. You got a nice constitution and everything, (though it may be a bit battered and tarnished right now), should be pretty good protections against that.
The desire of puritans will always exist, like people who want creationism taught in schools, it's probably gonna be an ongoing problem that needs to be fought back from time to time.
Whether or not people would demand this seems debatable, too. Who would demand this, how many, and are they worth listening to?
Even if one concedes that a single-payer system would inevitably lead to calls to regulate smoking (or risky behavior in general), don't you basically have HMO's doing that now?
The risk of this happening seems like a middling concern, and one that could quite easily be dealt with if it happens, compared to the gigantic mess you have right now.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all about teaching to the test.
Like the joke about the drunk looking for a contact lens, people pay attention to stuff like test scores because it's easy to measure, not because it's relevant.
Now, for the social sciences, if you wanted to inflate grades, there's a lot of ways to do that for an english lit class. You can give easier essay questions, or you can just be more generous when marking papers and exams.
But with math/hard sciences, that's a lot harder to do. Your answer to a high-school physics problem in Newtonian dynamics is basically either right or wrong.
So, if you wanna "cook the books", the way to do that is to dumb down the content. And then you frame it in the context of making "learning more fun" or "getting more kids interested in science".
Furthermore, this is usually done by professional educators, i.e., people who couldn't pass first-year calculus if it meant the firing squad. My ex is a teacher, and the one common denominator between her and her education friends is that a lot of them picked their careers around not having to take anything harder than undergrad stats math in university.
Not that everybody should be a geek, but people that can't do math if their life depended on it shouldn't be making decisions about how to teach science.
Here, here!
Whenever I see people making the point that private industry will be more efficient, better managed, overall more competent than government providing the same service, I wonder what company they worked for that gave them that idea? Was it a magical company with elves and fairies?
Of course, the sad thing is, the biggest proponents of that point of view are right-wing academics and think-tank types.
Otherwise known as people who've never been exposed to market discipline or risk, or any other traditional capitalistic virtues.
People with tenure talking about competition and market forces and efficiency is like virgins critiquing the acting in a pr0n flick.
"The Biggest Lie of the MPAA (and RIAA) is that every download equates to a lost sale, or a percentage of a lost sale."
Here, here!
This is the basis of virtually everything unpleasant the MPAA does.
Personally, my objections to to drm have less to do with annoyances like difficulty making backups and anti-skip features, and more to do with my fear of an incremental slide towards Stallman's (loveable kook that he is!) story "The Right to Read".
Maybe start out with reading an abridged, "coles notes" version of that story, and ask him what he thinks of that outcome? Chances are he'd think it sounds like paradise, but I wonder if you could get him to admit that in public...
"I'd take Ashcroft back over Gonzales in a heartbeat."
For what? His singing voice?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_the_Eagle_Soar
OK, I admit it, ya got my number on that one...
Nope, first time nit-picker, long-time lurker.
(as you can see from the "comment history", BTW)
Yeah, slippery slope is a real piss off too.
After all, isn't well um, basically _everything_ a slippery slope?
"This begs the question: Since when did demos need copy protection?"
I think you mean, "poses the question", or "raises the question".
I think you confused "raising the question" with the well-known logical fallacy, "begging the question"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
*Sighs*
Actually, it's even worse. The US has a huge trade deficit AND a huge budget deficit.
That usually means that your currency value ends up in the shitter.
However, there's a few things going on here that keep that from happening.
1) Everybody wants access to the US consumers. Americans shop more than almost any other country, basically they buy crap that you couldn't sell (at least not in these quantities) to very many other people
2) Wealthy people all over the world see the US as the safest place to stash their cash. They see the US as the least likely to have an asian-flu type meltdown, or be taken over by maoists or something.
Now, the second one is kind of like the emperor's new clothes or something, as long as everybody plays along, then everybody's fine. But if some of the highly mobile capital were to leave the US (estimates around the tens-of-trillions range) then the US is going to be in for a world of hurt.
I don't see why you guys south of us can't come up with the solution to this in the same way the Ontario court did.
The problem is, the courts know that nobody reads these contracts. So what to do?
They found that, for contract of "adhesion" (IANAL, feel free to correct my terminology), I can only be held to the terms of said contract if, had I read it, it would be reasonable to assume that I would've accepted it.
A lawyer friend of mine described this as "you have to go before a judge, and it has to pass the 'giggle-test'."
So, sadly, the best thing you can do (at least in Canada) is to never read any contracts of adhesion, and if you have a problem with your cell phone or cable or whatever provider, then settle it in small claims court later.
Well, as far as the relationship between crime and punishment, the answer is, it depends.
For most people who aren't at the desperate margins of society, the _certainty_ of punishment, not the severity of punishment is what deters crime.
The sight of a cop on the highway is more likely to slow you down than the thought of a, for example, $500 fine.
That works for us "respectable members of society" who do neat things like worry about the consequences of our actions.
A guy looking to rob somebody so they can keep from going through heroin withdrawal, well, they're not really interested in the medium-to-long-term consequences of their actions. You can't deter people like this from committing crimes, because they don't care about consequences.
To cut down on that type of crime, you need to address root causes of crime.
"This "one size fits all" approach to education -- the idea that we must churn out "well-rounded" students no matter what an individual student's strengths and weaknesses may be -- is patently idiotic."
Let me give you another cranky quote:
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house."
-Robert Heinlein.
Look, math is the foundation of science education. If you want a functioning democracy, you need to have an educated population. At least one that's educated enough to have an informed opinion on the issues of the day.
Y'know, stuff like climate change. Or peak oil.
Anybody know the term?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking
Basically, the idea is that in classic economic theory (Adam Smith et. al.) you make money either through wealth creation (mining stuff that's useful, producing food, manufactured goods from raw material) or by trade (I buy tea in china and sell it for more in England).
When companies/individuals try to "game the system" and have the regulatory environment changed to suit their interests.
A simple example would be, say the US government was talking about legalizing drugs (I know, huge suspension of disbelief required), and a lobby group consisting of organized crime interests and central American cocaine producers came together to keep the current status quo in place.
It's a classic moral hazard, and when this behavior becomes common, it's probably a sign that things are seriously wrong with your economy.
The rule of thumb I read somewhere was:
"People who were popular in high school usually peaked then."
And it's all downhill after that.
And, when I look back on my graduating class (I'm 30 now, I was a bit nerdy in high school, but I was firmly in the middle - neither overachieving nor super popular, but still able to get a date for the prom etc.), I find that to almost universally be the rule. The people who, in high school, couldn't get laid in a morgue, are now biochemists and engineers and university professors, while the people who were the "A-list" of popular kids are by and large, leading uninteresting lives with crappier jobs.
OK, please, please, please, stop talking about intelligence.
/. would be a place where people would know that IQ and scholastic achievement have a positive correlation, but only up to about the 120 IQ range. Above that, there's basically no correlation between IQ and grades.
I thought
Now, that aside, all this shows is that the top end and low end of scholastic achievement bell-curve distribution have less sex than the middle.
One thing I remember about high school was that you're terrified of breaking the social norms of your peer group. So when you do things (like, say, picking a girlfriend/boyfriend) that's largely going to be influenced by your own estimates of who your peer group will approve of. And the strongest predictor of whether or not a couple will have sex is what the girl wants.
Given this, we can probably assume that individuals in the tail end of the bell curve for scholastic achievement probably also have traits that make them stand out from the herd in other ways.
But, y'see, in high school, standing out from the herd (whatever particular herd you happen to be part of) doesn't exactly increase your odds of getting laid.
People can try and turn this into a discussion of intelligence and individual choices or whatever, but it comes down to the plain fact that being "abnormal" by whatever definition doesn't help your social life (and therefore your chances of having sex) in high school.
Well, let's assume that the results are true.
/.-ers like to think that 'cause they got grades, and they're intelligent, you should be able to roughly equate "grades" and "IQ".
The best predictor of how far a date goes (first base, sex, etc) is what the girl's interested in doing. If you're alone with a girl you're interested in, how many guys would say no if she brings out the condoms? Let's say "effectively zero".
So, in general, women are still the "gatekeepers".
One thing you can say about people in high school, is they're mostly not interested in deviating from the norm of their peer group. So most girls probably will end up dating the guys who are basically pretty mainstream (by any individual girl's definition of "mainstream", which is largely shaped by the opinions of her peer group).
People with very high scholastic achievement are probably also "not mainstream" in some other way as well.
So the fact that on average, high-school girls select sexual partners that are "mostly pretty similar to themselves" should be no surprise. The idea of girls selecting people "in the middle" by whatever trait you want to manage should be pretty uncontroversial.
Which should lead to the conclusions of this study.
And please, can we forget about discussing "intelligence" or IQ here? This study only talked about grades. I know most
While there is a positive correlation between IQ and scholastic achievement, that correlation only exists for IQ scores in the range of ~120 or less. For IQ scores over 120, there's basically no correlation, positive or negative, between IQ and scholastic achievement.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the standard of what's referred to as "unconscionable" in Canada is lower than in the US.
IIRC (and IANAL here) but the Ontario court said basically said for "contracts of adhesion", (i.e., contracts like this where they know nobody reads it all) that, in order for a contract/clause to be enforceable, the test is, "if they had read it, is it reasonable to assume that this customer would've accepted it?".
So, it's a lesser hurdle to get over than "unconscionable = contract that no reasonable person would accept".
Ok, might be true. But the verified-by-visa "graphic" that should be a link makes me more nervous than anything else.
Also, I suppose that, like the korean website you mention, it could be that they don't want to post that info for various support/logistical reasons (and they don't want to be pestered/pay for LD from thousands of mouth-breathers asking asinine questions...).
But I tell ya, as somebody else pointed out, if it's not a scam, they're sure going out of their way to look like one...
I sent them an e-mail to "info@medisoncelebrity.com" from my work e-mail (we do network/server support etc) saying that I'd like to order at least a dozen of these for several of my clients, but that however, there are numerous rumors flying around the internet suggesting that this could be some sort of scam, but that I couldn't offer these laptops to my clients unless I could say to my clients "oh, those internet rumors? There's nothing to them, I've been in contact with the company, everything is above board".
Specifically I asked for additional contact info (mailing address, phone numbers, names of who I could contact on their end) and for them to address the "verified by VISA" picture, that should be a link to the verified by VISA program.
I got what looks to be an automated response, 2 minutes later, saying "thank you for your e-mail, we will answer as soon as possible.", but no sig, no names, no phone number or other contact info.
The "phones are temporarily closed" I could almost accept, but why no mailing address? Has anybody ever seen a commercial site you can order from, that doesn't offer a mailing address _somewhere_?
Oh, I see, this is all just intelligence gathering to fight terrorists.
And, you know this, how, exactly? 'Cause such honorable men as Bush and Co. say "trust us"? Like they said "Trust us, we KNOW that Iraq has WMD"?
Just for a standard of comparison, since 9/11, there have been more Americans killed by lightning than terrorism. So maybe terrorism isn't a threat worth shredding the constitution over, eh?
Just because nothing you're doing is illegal, that doesn't mean there's nothing that the government could learn about you that might be later used against you.
Maybe you're having an affair. Maybe you're secretly gay, and don't wanna be "outed" yet. Maybe you have an unusual sexual fetish. These are all things that could be used as leverage against you, though none of these activities is illegal.
But maybe the FBI wants you to wear a wire when you talk to a friend of yours, and they'll blackmail you using that info. Maybe an organization you're a member of now will, 10 years from now, be criminalized, like what happened during McCarthy years.
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
- Cardinal Richelieu
As someone who lives in Canada, let me just explain how this is NOT in the consumer's favor. All our gas pumps say "temperature corrected to 15 degrees c" (which, btw, is ~60 degrees F). The gas is sitting in a tank underground. Most of the time the gas in that tank is much colder than that, depending on the time of year, somewhere between 5 and 20 degrees less. So, ok, sure, to be fair to dealers and consumers, you need to pick a common point (frankly I was amazed that they don't do temp correction in the US, don't you guys have laws about weights and measures?) for a standard. But picking a point that is almost always higher (but not THAT much higher) than the temperature of the gas in the tank means you get to bill me for a liter but you sold me slightly less than that volume of gas. And, it's a small enough amount that most people won't get excited about it. (In fact, there was an independent chain of gas stations when I used to live back in Halifax, called Wilson's Fuels, that deliberately did not do temperature correction, in an attempt to build their consumer-friendly reputation, but when they realized nobody cared about such a small amount, they eventually gave up and started doing temp. correction.)
Well, the thing is, a nationalized system has no incentives to not cover people for medical treatment, you just treat it like a civil right. And, did I mention, it's cheaper?
In the same way that you take for granted that, if your house is on fire, you can call the fire department to put it out, and they just show up (they don't bill you or anything! It's a slippery slope to communism!), when you get sick, you go see your doctor.
It amazes me how willing Americans are to see medical care as a commodity, even a luxury good, (as if it's a 50-inch TV or something), rather than in the same category as police/roads/sewage/defense.
In every single other non-third-world-country, this is how it's treated.
As long as Americans see medical care as a commodity and not a civil right, the medical industry and the insurance industry are gonna keep bending you guys over like a two-dollar whore. It's a shame you can't see that.
Look, it's not (at least by definition) about ideological concerns of "welfare state" or something.
It's about what is the best pragmatic solution to the problem of "how does one pay for medical care"?
Free market solutions don't work, because when you get shot, or in a car accident, you can't shop around for the hospital ER that'll give you the best price on stitching up a gunshot wound.
So what is to be done? Of the available options for how to provide affordable, necessary medical care, your current system leaves millions with no coverage, and even those like yourself who can afford insurance, how confident are you that your insurance company won't find a sleazy way to drop you if it turns out you develop multiple sclerosis or ALS or some other dread disease?
Surely you're not arguing that the status quo is acceptable?
"A publicly-funded, single-payer healthcare system would be an invitation for the government to start regulating all sorts of stuff. People would demand it -- they're not going to want their tax dollars used to pay for "some asshole's smoking habit," or somebody else who likes to drive without a seatbelt, or someone else who likes to go hang-gliding at night."
Well, when or if that happens, you guys can fight it then. You got a nice constitution and everything, (though it may be a bit battered and tarnished right now), should be pretty good protections against that.
The desire of puritans will always exist, like people who want creationism taught in schools, it's probably gonna be an ongoing problem that needs to be fought back from time to time.
Whether or not people would demand this seems debatable, too. Who would demand this, how many, and are they worth listening to?
Even if one concedes that a single-payer system would inevitably lead to calls to regulate smoking (or risky behavior in general), don't you basically have HMO's doing that now?
The risk of this happening seems like a middling concern, and one that could quite easily be dealt with if it happens, compared to the gigantic mess you have right now.