I'm sorry, but if you're too thick to see with the prompting that I gave that a uniformly formattted, electronic, authenticating ID trivializes the integration of transaction information from sources across the nation then I'm not inclined to take you seriously. This is/. try to have some technical reasoning skills.
also, the derisive "questions" were one word each. i replied tersely out of reciprocated contempt. but you take it a step further by allowing one side of an argument to merely ask one word questions as proof of their position while requiring researched doctoral theses from the other side. this does not make for a level debate forum. in fact it's a common tactic to unfairly discredit one side.
what you're describing is the "rolling downhill" thing that people who were against SSNs and federal involvement in the lives of everyone pointed out at the time and were laughed at and given various (worthless) assurances that the powers and data would never be abused. clearly this id law is just another increment in the "progress" towards federal (near) omniscience and exploitation of that knowledge in the name of political warfare (think Elliot Spitzer... sure he deserved to get caught, but we were told that the anti-terror surveillance powers that caught him would never be used except for terror cases.) I want instead to roll back and get rid of the SSN and all other repositories of federal knowledge of citizen transactions, lives, and whereabouts. the alternative is mass-scale, institutionalized McCarthyism. No thanks.
As an aside, I don't know why you feeel it is incumbent on me to present the entire history and every detailed and nuanced argument against this crap. I kind of considered them to be old hat and manifestly self-evident. Does your demagoguery extend to people on the other side of the debate?
the funny thing is that Americans and our politicians used to mock the Soviet Union for this practice and how it meant the Soviet population were no more than slaves... my how times and fashions have changed.
but if we admit that the government does wrong then how can we justify using it to extort for our progressive programs we want? we might actually have to face the idea that someone in government might actually do wrong to people using our programs. and that goes against the talking points saying how evil business always is and how the government is your savior.
i think part of the point is that these things are occurring today and this measure does nothing to address this state of affairs. thus making it yet another power grab / rights infringement that does not accomplish its alleged intended purpose.
through everything you buy or do that requires ID. Air travel, train travel, and i think even bus travel now. just add a spiffy new ID scanner to the TSA agent checking your ID and viola, yet another database that knows who everyone is and where they're going. no one would evar misuse that...
lifetime punishments for every crime
Huh?
notice how crimes these days aren't just one charge, they're like 8 at a minimum, and if the prosecutor thinks he can get away with it he throws terrorism on top to boost his resume? yeah. that. overly broad criminal statutes with redunculous sentences. not to mention 3 strikes laws.
silence anyone with an unfavorable opinion
What?
you know, like how it's not socially tolerable to question any of the measures that reduce freedom "for our own good". or suggest that some aren't effective. or suggest alternatives that don't destroy freedom. or how people who do these things are branded as kooks, kinda like when Ron Paul threw the 9/11 commission findings in Giulianni's face. which was particularly funny because Giulianni was listed as an author of the report. yeah. that.
Please stop being so paranoid. It's not healthy.
please wake the hell up and smell the fascism. it's not healthy.
it is not politically possible for elected officials (or those hired/firable by elected officials) to tell their constituents to do a better job raising their kids.
also, i ascribe the desire to blame the kids on two things: the truism that kids need to rebel in order to establish their own sense of self, and the adults' unwillingness to be introspective and assign the rest of the blame where it belongs: on themselves.
but doing it the right way front loads cost on the company that builds the correct system and places them at a competitive disadvantage with respect to shoddy software firms, say for example Microsoft and Apple.
besides, there is secure by design software. It just lacks features which makes it less competitive. Alternatively you can put a feature-rich OS on top of it, but then you've compartmentalized the problem, not eliminated it. Plus it's damned expensive. http://www.ghs.com/products/rtos/integrity_virtualization.html
Myself, I like freeBSD as a compromise. It's not provably correct, but it's 2-3 known exploitable bugs in 10+ years are a good empirical indication of security. And it's free.
while it's clearly tangential from the case at hand (textbooks, etc. which do require a lot of work on the part of the publisher), I find Knuth's writings on the avarice and economic insanity of remaining with Elsevier as a journal publisher to be particularly destructive to the sorts of arguments of alleged publisher value-add that are normally presented.
it still is kind of a problem, and as interconnected as our problems are, here's another example. Patent law is ridiculously out of control with respect to big pharma.
referenced and commented on by jay parkinson at this blog near the bottom of the second page (the one linked) or maybe further as new stuff pushes it further down. http://blog.jayparkinsonmd.com/page/2
The trial lawyers assn, major Democratic constituent will never let meaningful, loser pays reform pass. Every other industrialized nation has loser pays.
I think that the best way to reduce costs is to have insurance that works like car insurance and not like health insurance works now. Try going to your GP and asking for a price list or negotiating from their stated rate if you can get it. Try getting quotes for elective surgeries. It doesn't work because our society is so unused to skeptically consuming medical services that it is out of the norm to ask for prices. The providers do their best to shame you out of your request. "It's your health. It's priceless." BS.
Regarding doctors and salaries, while it's a good practice for Mayo, I don't like forcing people to do things against their will. Mayo doctors are free to practice elsewhere or on their own. Mayo attracts the best and convinces them to work for a salary by virtue of the doctor's association with Mayo's reputation. That association has a later value in terms of what a former Mayo doc can charge in private practice or demand from a hospital in salary/hourly negotiations. Take that away by making all docs work on uniform salaries and where is the motivation to be a doc or be a better doc? Humanitarianism only goes so far and it can't feed your family. Yes that's on the other end of the spectrum, but consider that West Va is facing a doc shortage crisis because the state's malpractice insurance impoverishes docs because of court precedents in favor of "the people".
why must so much personal data be available to the surveillance state?
why are those two things so central to the current and politically possible plans in the US?
and why do you refuse to answer the question about allowing new players into the market?
and what may be the best for you might not be the best for us. massachusetts has 98% coverage. it's not fully socialized. it's not federal. it works for them. and i don't have to live there. likewise, americans are (still) free to move there or get their state legislatures to make a publicish system.
and doctors are then likely to treat and treat and treat until our entire economy is divided between invading other countries and providing medical care. There's no incentive to only treat as necessary. That's not sustainable. Neither is our current corpratist system, but i think the current legislation does not much to disassemble that. what is being pushed is not true single payer anyways, which i'd have fewer problems with, especially if it were done at the state level (so when you get borked by the state you have a disinterested federal court system to resort to) and as few records of individual treatment as possible are kept (to avoid giving the next Bush / J. Edgar Hoover from abusing that data for perpetuating power. (i think Obama really is the next Bush, especially on civil liberties issues, but that's another conversation))
regarding improving courts: ok, first, there are two distinctions in court: criminal and civil.
for criminal: if you're charged precipitously and are worried that additional evidence will be manufactured you can exercise your right to a speedy trial. currently that speed improvement can be laughable at times. improving that speediness would go a long way for some people.
however, most of the time defendants try to drag out proceedings as long as possible for tactical reasons (hoping witnesses will forget / move to another state / die, etc.) These delaying tactics are less about true due process and more about trying to escape justice. Thus speeding up the general pace of criminal proceedings is probably a good thing on balance.
for civil: due process is much lighter by requirement, and the defendant is not entitled to the benefit of any reasonable doubt. it's a balance of evidence thing.
shortly, i think some subset of (what ought to be) common sorts of cases ought to be treated more like traffic court, wherein the template is declared by the plaintiff / prosecutor and the questions pertain to whether the defendant did the proscribed behavior. e.g. my neighbor dumps his waste motor oil on my lawn and i sue him under the template of toxic dumping. then one only has to establish that my neighbor actually did it. Because the toxicology of motor oil in soil is well documented, the court can refer to its impact and remediation costs and make a judgement for damages from there. templates can then also limit appeals. today this is done by referencing precedent, but it is highly variable because there are so many technicalities to appeal on and one must get lucky in searching lexis for case law to cite. each case is a test of which lawyer is the better researcher, which is completely wasteful and superfluous. Law should be knowable and accessible to all. Today i doubt a single person could have time in their life to read all the laws and the case law, much less know for certain that they were abiding by them all all the time.
just some ideas, clearly imperfect, possibly fatally flawed, posited in the spirit of an actual discussion.
1. actually, this is analogous to domestic wiretapping suits that forced congress to grant an unconstitutional retroactive immunity to the telecom companies for violating state and federal law against unwarranted wiretaps and disclosure of records. Those are laws that apply to all private companies with respect to personal data of certain varieties (though sadly not stringently enough to (e)mailing addresses.) Private insurers are criminally and civilly liable for illegal disclosures. And the telco immunity law is not applicable to them.
2. sure, you get to present your side of the argument free from the constraints of current reality, but I don't? that's intellectually honest... NOT.
3. private firms *are* regulated. and like all regulation regimes the regulators cater to the desires of the people in charge of the most money, namely the very entities allegedly regulated for the good of the average citizen. one of the many ways this plays out is to make it impossible for new competition to start up and provide a better value to the consumer, thus eating the older, asshat companies' lunch and forcing them to offer better deals. and no mention from you on the distinction between emergency care and preventative care and how it's more than possible to allow the market to address the latter effectively. becuase you're a dogmatic follower. you don't question your conclusions. you're not looking to discuss, but to coerce. this is why people seek out "customized" news. because they want to hear what they want to hear and they also don't want stuff shoved down their throats as you just did with me. so physician, heal thyself.
so if the claim is that one part of the government is inefficient, then why the faith that another part of government is the right place to vest responsibility for timely and correct care for our medical needs?
and wouldn't a less dramatic, and potentially more effective change be to fix the court system?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but if you're too thick to see with the prompting that I gave that a uniformly formattted, electronic, authenticating ID trivializes the integration of transaction information from sources across the nation then I'm not inclined to take you seriously. This is /. try to have some technical reasoning skills.
also, the derisive "questions" were one word each. i replied tersely out of reciprocated contempt. but you take it a step further by allowing one side of an argument to merely ask one word questions as proof of their position while requiring researched doctoral theses from the other side. this does not make for a level debate forum. in fact it's a common tactic to unfairly discredit one side.
what you're describing is the "rolling downhill" thing that people who were against SSNs and federal involvement in the lives of everyone pointed out at the time and were laughed at and given various (worthless) assurances that the powers and data would never be abused. clearly this id law is just another increment in the "progress" towards federal (near) omniscience and exploitation of that knowledge in the name of political warfare (think Elliot Spitzer... sure he deserved to get caught, but we were told that the anti-terror surveillance powers that caught him would never be used except for terror cases.) I want instead to roll back and get rid of the SSN and all other repositories of federal knowledge of citizen transactions, lives, and whereabouts. the alternative is mass-scale, institutionalized McCarthyism. No thanks.
As an aside, I don't know why you feeel it is incumbent on me to present the entire history and every detailed and nuanced argument against this crap. I kind of considered them to be old hat and manifestly self-evident. Does your demagoguery extend to people on the other side of the debate?
you very nearly resemble one of the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" monkeys. i'm not sure which one.
and i did answer the questions. you just didn't like the answers. apparently they didn't conform with your opinion on the matter.
While you were sleeping
a code was installed on everyone.
It was a brilliant idea by Dr. Cocteau. ...is sewn into the skin.
An organic microchip...
Sensors all over the city
can zero in on anyone at any time.
I can't even conceive of what
police officers did before it was developed.
We worked. This fascist crap
makes me want to puke.
What do you think you're scratching?
You really think we'd let you go
without control?
Your code was implanted
when you were thawed.
Why not just shove a leash up my ass?
the funny thing is that Americans and our politicians used to mock the Soviet Union for this practice and how it meant the Soviet population were no more than slaves... my how times and fashions have changed.
i hear previous implementations using IBM hardware had some negative side effects back in the 1930s and 40s.
i'd rather not help you find the remaining bugs, thanks.
http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/
trollish, possibly, but funny, definitely.
but if we admit that the government does wrong then how can we justify using it to extort for our progressive programs we want? we might actually have to face the idea that someone in government might actually do wrong to people using our programs. and that goes against the talking points saying how evil business always is and how the government is your savior.
the email address is asshole@uranus.com
i think part of the point is that these things are occurring today and this measure does nothing to address this state of affairs. thus making it yet another power grab / rights infringement that does not accomplish its alleged intended purpose.
i don't disagree with you, i was just revamping the old canard about robbing banks.
http://www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/famcases/sutton/sutton.htm
for laptop graphics card comparisons i like...
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html
it's pretty win. and is up to date.
because that's where the money is.
Back in the USSA!
through everything you buy or do that requires ID. Air travel, train travel, and i think even bus travel now. just add a spiffy new ID scanner to the TSA agent checking your ID and viola, yet another database that knows who everyone is and where they're going. no one would evar misuse that...
notice how crimes these days aren't just one charge, they're like 8 at a minimum, and if the prosecutor thinks he can get away with it he throws terrorism on top to boost his resume? yeah. that. overly broad criminal statutes with redunculous sentences. not to mention 3 strikes laws.
you know, like how it's not socially tolerable to question any of the measures that reduce freedom "for our own good". or suggest that some aren't effective. or suggest alternatives that don't destroy freedom. or how people who do these things are branded as kooks, kinda like when Ron Paul threw the 9/11 commission findings in Giulianni's face. which was particularly funny because Giulianni was listed as an author of the report. yeah. that.
please wake the hell up and smell the fascism. it's not healthy.
it is not politically possible for elected officials (or those hired/firable by elected officials) to tell their constituents to do a better job raising their kids.
also, i ascribe the desire to blame the kids on two things: the truism that kids need to rebel in order to establish their own sense of self, and the adults' unwillingness to be introspective and assign the rest of the blame where it belongs: on themselves.
but doing it the right way front loads cost on the company that builds the correct system and places them at a competitive disadvantage with respect to shoddy software firms, say for example Microsoft and Apple.
besides, there is secure by design software. It just lacks features which makes it less competitive. Alternatively you can put a feature-rich OS on top of it, but then you've compartmentalized the problem, not eliminated it. Plus it's damned expensive. http://www.ghs.com/products/rtos/integrity_virtualization.html
Myself, I like freeBSD as a compromise. It's not provably correct, but it's 2-3 known exploitable bugs in 10+ years are a good empirical indication of security. And it's free.
Spy Vs. Spy!
while it's clearly tangential from the case at hand (textbooks, etc. which do require a lot of work on the part of the publisher), I find Knuth's writings on the avarice and economic insanity of remaining with Elsevier as a journal publisher to be particularly destructive to the sorts of arguments of alleged publisher value-add that are normally presented.
http://boscoh.com/science/how-the-scientific-publishing-industry-began-to-eat-itself
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/joalet.pdf
i can't tell if this is nerd rage or roid rage...
given the subject is heading towards sports...
but this is /.
either way, lay off the roids.
it still is kind of a problem, and as interconnected as our problems are, here's another example. Patent law is ridiculously out of control with respect to big pharma.
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/01/05/fda-drug-approvals-in-2009-up-a-little-from-2008/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wsj%2Fhealth%2Ffeed+(WSJ.com%3A+Health+Blog)
referenced and commented on by jay parkinson at this blog near the bottom of the second page (the one linked) or maybe further as new stuff pushes it further down.
http://blog.jayparkinsonmd.com/page/2
The trial lawyers assn, major Democratic constituent will never let meaningful, loser pays reform pass. Every other industrialized nation has loser pays.
I think that the best way to reduce costs is to have insurance that works like car insurance and not like health insurance works now. Try going to your GP and asking for a price list or negotiating from their stated rate if you can get it. Try getting quotes for elective surgeries. It doesn't work because our society is so unused to skeptically consuming medical services that it is out of the norm to ask for prices. The providers do their best to shame you out of your request. "It's your health. It's priceless." BS.
Regarding doctors and salaries, while it's a good practice for Mayo, I don't like forcing people to do things against their will. Mayo doctors are free to practice elsewhere or on their own. Mayo attracts the best and convinces them to work for a salary by virtue of the doctor's association with Mayo's reputation. That association has a later value in terms of what a former Mayo doc can charge in private practice or demand from a hospital in salary/hourly negotiations. Take that away by making all docs work on uniform salaries and where is the motivation to be a doc or be a better doc? Humanitarianism only goes so far and it can't feed your family. Yes that's on the other end of the spectrum, but consider that West Va is facing a doc shortage crisis because the state's malpractice insurance impoverishes docs because of court precedents in favor of "the people".
so why must it be done at the federal level?
why must so much personal data be available to the surveillance state?
why are those two things so central to the current and politically possible plans in the US?
and why do you refuse to answer the question about allowing new players into the market?
and what may be the best for you might not be the best for us. massachusetts has 98% coverage. it's not fully socialized. it's not federal. it works for them. and i don't have to live there. likewise, americans are (still) free to move there or get their state legislatures to make a publicish system.
and doctors are then likely to treat and treat and treat until our entire economy is divided between invading other countries and providing medical care. There's no incentive to only treat as necessary. That's not sustainable. Neither is our current corpratist system, but i think the current legislation does not much to disassemble that. what is being pushed is not true single payer anyways, which i'd have fewer problems with, especially if it were done at the state level (so when you get borked by the state you have a disinterested federal court system to resort to) and as few records of individual treatment as possible are kept (to avoid giving the next Bush / J. Edgar Hoover from abusing that data for perpetuating power. (i think Obama really is the next Bush, especially on civil liberties issues, but that's another conversation))
regarding improving courts:
ok, first, there are two distinctions in court: criminal and civil.
for criminal:
if you're charged precipitously and are worried that additional evidence will be manufactured you can exercise your right to a speedy trial. currently that speed improvement can be laughable at times. improving that speediness would go a long way for some people.
however, most of the time defendants try to drag out proceedings as long as possible for tactical reasons (hoping witnesses will forget / move to another state / die, etc.) These delaying tactics are less about true due process and more about trying to escape justice. Thus speeding up the general pace of criminal proceedings is probably a good thing on balance.
for civil:
due process is much lighter by requirement, and the defendant is not entitled to the benefit of any reasonable doubt. it's a balance of evidence thing.
shortly, i think some subset of (what ought to be) common sorts of cases ought to be treated more like traffic court, wherein the template is declared by the plaintiff / prosecutor and the questions pertain to whether the defendant did the proscribed behavior. e.g. my neighbor dumps his waste motor oil on my lawn and i sue him under the template of toxic dumping. then one only has to establish that my neighbor actually did it. Because the toxicology of motor oil in soil is well documented, the court can refer to its impact and remediation costs and make a judgement for damages from there. templates can then also limit appeals. today this is done by referencing precedent, but it is highly variable because there are so many technicalities to appeal on and one must get lucky in searching lexis for case law to cite. each case is a test of which lawyer is the better researcher, which is completely wasteful and superfluous. Law should be knowable and accessible to all. Today i doubt a single person could have time in their life to read all the laws and the case law, much less know for certain that they were abiding by them all all the time.
just some ideas, clearly imperfect, possibly fatally flawed, posited in the spirit of an actual discussion.
1. actually, this is analogous to domestic wiretapping suits that forced congress to grant an unconstitutional retroactive immunity to the telecom companies for violating state and federal law against unwarranted wiretaps and disclosure of records. Those are laws that apply to all private companies with respect to personal data of certain varieties (though sadly not stringently enough to (e)mailing addresses.) Private insurers are criminally and civilly liable for illegal disclosures. And the telco immunity law is not applicable to them.
2. sure, you get to present your side of the argument free from the constraints of current reality, but I don't? that's intellectually honest... NOT.
3. private firms *are* regulated. and like all regulation regimes the regulators cater to the desires of the people in charge of the most money, namely the very entities allegedly regulated for the good of the average citizen. one of the many ways this plays out is to make it impossible for new competition to start up and provide a better value to the consumer, thus eating the older, asshat companies' lunch and forcing them to offer better deals. and no mention from you on the distinction between emergency care and preventative care and how it's more than possible to allow the market to address the latter effectively. becuase you're a dogmatic follower. you don't question your conclusions. you're not looking to discuss, but to coerce. this is why people seek out "customized" news. because they want to hear what they want to hear and they also don't want stuff shoved down their throats as you just did with me. so physician, heal thyself.
so if the claim is that one part of the government is inefficient, then why the faith that another part of government is the right place to vest responsibility for timely and correct care for our medical needs?
and wouldn't a less dramatic, and potentially more effective change be to fix the court system?