By contrast in socialist medicine for instance EVERYONE is mandated to buy health care...or the more politically correct phrasing "compulsory health insurance",... thus subsidizing everyone else. No choices involved. In conclusion I don't really see the similarities.
It's pretty hard to draw parallels between insurance and voluntary luxury, since health care services -must- treat someone who is sick, even if they can't pay. Cable companies won't care if you HAVE to watch Queer Eye, if you're not paying, you won't see it (from them).
Mandatory health insurance is the only way a system that bans denying people for pre-existing conditions can work. Allow insurance companies to deny people for their pre-existing conditions, then health insurance doesn't -need- to be mandatory, though it's still an inferior system compared to the alternative.
But you can't have a health care system where it's possible for people to pay for insurance only when they need it. That is impossible to sustain.
And you want the people who do watch ESPN-9 to help you pay for whatever it is you watch.
No I don't - I want to pay a la carte and let the market decide what lives and dies.
These days I want to pay a la carte by -show- instead of by network. 15-20 years ago I would have been happy to pay by network, but then Network Decay happened, and SyFy has little to do with Sci-Fi, MTV has nothing to do with music, the History Channel has almost no history-related shows, A&E dropped all pretence at being Artsy, etc. Every channel is trying to show the same shows as every other channel now. What station still tries to serve its core mission? Comedy Central?
I remember someone commenting on why sports figures get paid in the tens of millions, and it was 'because people are willing to pay to see them"
It's three-fold, actually, it's because 1) People are willing to see them. 2) People are willing to buy their products (jerseys, logos, etc) 3) There is a small number of people with talent at the level that MLB, NBA, NFL, et all require. So scarcity drives up prices because most people want to watch the best available players. If you have tens of thousands of players able to compete at that level, salaries would likely go down since players would be more replaceable.
Now, they wouldn't go down all the way because players want a certain cut of what teams bring in, and teams are able to (and so will try their best to) bring a lot of money in, but some of the astronomical salaries we see for the highest-paid players would come down.
They got stupid sized funding and didn't spend it on $1000 office chairs for everyone they knew and their pets.
That and they had decent ideas to start with.
My regret for ten years ago is that I didn't get the chance to work at any of the extravagant perk-crazy dot-coms. No, instead I worked at the reasonable dot-coms, the ones who looked at costs (mostly) and didn't spend like crazy on employees because really, that was stupid.
Sadly, they didn't have decent ideas anyway so they busted as well. It would have been nice to have worked at a company that ended with a bang instead of a whimper.
No, originally copyright was 14 years. Then we felt sorry for artists with popular songs still being played while they were broke. Then we felt sorry for their spouses and kids they were supporting... Now what?
Then we started saying that copywritten works were "intellectual property" and that 'property' should exist in the same family (or corporation) forever, because.. well, it's their property.
Oh please! Have you heard the fingernails on a chalkboard screeching that Yoko calls "singing"? Nuking her from orbit is the ONLY way to be sure pal, as you sure as hell wouldn't want to get within earshot to make sure she was down.....shudder.
Moderators, please mod the parent post up to a billion (or a billion + 1). It's always refreshing when someone looks at a story of a study and is able to peel back the sensationalist bullshit covering it to reveal what conclusions could actually be drawn.
Krugman's got a point - the real value of bitcoin is that it's a lottery ticket. To buy one bitcoin, you pay about the price of a fast food meal. Then you back it up and forget about it for a few years. In the one-in-a-billion chance that 20 years from now the entire world's economy is being transacted in bitcoins, you'll be a multibillionaire.
Safe working conditions (OSHA) and minimum pay for example. To say that without unions those would go away which many pro union people say is totally wrong. Unions could disappear today and those laws will still be here
It's totally wrong? Laws can be repealed either by courts or by Congress writing a superceding law. Conservatives are often trying to roll back these laws in the name of 'reducing regulation' when it comes to government oversight. Minimum wage is hardly a settled issue, and what that minimum should be is very actively debated. (Common arguments are there are far more effective poverty reducers and it hurts businesses.)
2. Ron believes that an act that forces every movie to hire a so called "Excuse nigger" is not exactly making the industry willing to improve harmoney and instead make a black action hero movie. Let's face it; how many ideal war propaganda black action hero movies are there, appart from a vampire slayer trilogy? Ron's only calling for a better thing like making sure the government actually inproves harmony instead of forcing it down racist bosses throats, that still make the racist bosses racist.
I don't get this. Excuse nigger? What on earth is that? Are you implying that the government will take action against a movie studio that isn't completely multicultural? There's no reason to think that would be the case. What the studios do is hire people so that they are not the target of protests by interest groups (like the NAACP or other such groups) and private citizens, because being known as the racist movie studio would be extremely bad for business. People are free to associate and free to disassociate with Movie Studio X, and that has economic consequences. The current system is the direct result of capitalism.
In this case, the system works fine, especially from a Libertarian perspective.
Look at Sadam for example... He did do what he thought was good to a certain extent; you can't deny that he kept people from waging wars with eachother.
You can't? I think the Kurds and even the Sunnis might disagree with you on that. It's still a war if it's the government actively waging war on its own population.
Only a few cases (e.g. the American Revolution) are the exceptions. I'm no expert but I think the American Revolution was quite different when compared to most "communist revolutions". Seems to me that much of each state's structure was maintained rather than overthrown.
Part of our foreign policy messes is that Americans often think that revolutions in other countries will result in similar results to the American Revolution. Then, when it doesn't quite happen that way (and it never does), we have quite a mess to clean up.
You haven't purchased a house in the last 10 years, have you?
Signing a contract like that usually requires you to sign your initials on dozens of sheets throughout the contract (usually every single page), and then sign in several different pages (the main contract, different addenda, etc.).
So sending a copy of the signed contract usually requires scanning in the entire thing. You can't just sign the last page and be done with it, because then you could argue that you never got a chance to read all the pages in between, or that someone inserted a page there that you didn't agree to. Your initials on every page are insurance against this.
I could not believe the amount of bullshit I had to fax when I bought my house. Initializing every damn page, signing this and that, all with fax machines (no exception).
I've never seen anything like it in any other field I've worked in.
"DPI? Compression quality? What are you talking about?! I just want to send this document. I never had to worry about this technobabble when we had a fax machine. Get rid of this scanner and get me my fax back."
Faxes just work.
No, they just have sensible DPI and compression settings already. When I had to do a ton of faxing, I made sure that the fax machine was set to image, not text, and selected a high DPI setting. If I selected monochrome, especially monochrome text, there was serious degradation of the image that was printed out on the other side. I received enough of those sorts of faxes myself to be able to tell when the sender didn't appropriately set the fax scan settings.
Anytime you scan something, you need to worry about DPI settings, whether to use greyscale or black-and-white, decisions like that. Faxes included.
Unfortunately the Tea Party was conquered by the Republican Party by the end of the last decade, so that all you have there now are "traditional Republican + some small amount of fiscal discipline."
I don't think they're against black presidents. They're most definitely against liberal presidents, black or not. What's going on with Obama is pretty much an extension of what they were trying to do to Clinton.
I don't think they'd have that big a problem with a Presidential Candidate Condalezza Rice, or Presidential Candidate Ward Connelly.
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By contrast in socialist medicine for instance EVERYONE is mandated to buy health care...or the more politically correct phrasing "compulsory health insurance", ... thus subsidizing everyone else. No choices involved. In conclusion I don't really see the similarities.
It's pretty hard to draw parallels between insurance and voluntary luxury, since health care services -must- treat someone who is sick, even if they can't pay. Cable companies won't care if you HAVE to watch Queer Eye, if you're not paying, you won't see it (from them).
Mandatory health insurance is the only way a system that bans denying people for pre-existing conditions can work. Allow insurance companies to deny people for their pre-existing conditions, then health insurance doesn't -need- to be mandatory, though it's still an inferior system compared to the alternative.
But you can't have a health care system where it's possible for people to pay for insurance only when they need it. That is impossible to sustain.
And you want the people who do watch ESPN-9 to help you pay for whatever it is you watch.
No I don't - I want to pay a la carte and let the market decide what lives and dies.
These days I want to pay a la carte by -show- instead of by network. 15-20 years ago I would have been happy to pay by network, but then Network Decay happened, and SyFy has little to do with Sci-Fi, MTV has nothing to do with music, the History Channel has almost no history-related shows, A&E dropped all pretence at being Artsy, etc. Every channel is trying to show the same shows as every other channel now. What station still tries to serve its core mission? Comedy Central?
I remember someone commenting on why sports figures get paid in the tens of millions, and it was 'because people are willing to pay to see them"
It's three-fold, actually, it's because
1) People are willing to see them.
2) People are willing to buy their products (jerseys, logos, etc)
3) There is a small number of people with talent at the level that MLB, NBA, NFL, et all require. So scarcity drives up prices because most people want to watch the best available players. If you have tens of thousands of players able to compete at that level, salaries would likely go down since players would be more replaceable.
Now, they wouldn't go down all the way because players want a certain cut of what teams bring in, and teams are able to (and so will try their best to) bring a lot of money in, but some of the astronomical salaries we see for the highest-paid players would come down.
Although, if this were true, it would explain MSNBC's ratings.
MSNBC explains MSNBC's ratings.
The concern is the OEMs like Dell, HP, etc
Don't you mean "OEMs like Dell. ..." *grin*
They got stupid sized funding and didn't spend it on $1000 office chairs for everyone they knew and their pets.
That and they had decent ideas to start with.
My regret for ten years ago is that I didn't get the chance to work at any of the extravagant perk-crazy dot-coms. No, instead I worked at the reasonable dot-coms, the ones who looked at costs (mostly) and didn't spend like crazy on employees because really, that was stupid.
Sadly, they didn't have decent ideas anyway so they busted as well. It would have been nice to have worked at a company that ended with a bang instead of a whimper.
Oh well, at least I was paid in cash!
Yes, but if you look at the budget, typically military/defense spending is going to be one of the top 3 categories.
That's fine, but the total Federal budget is vastly different in terms of size than the GDP. They're two completely different things.
No, originally copyright was 14 years. Then we felt sorry for artists with popular songs still being played while they were broke. Then we felt sorry for their spouses and kids they were supporting... Now what?
Then we started saying that copywritten works were "intellectual property" and that 'property' should exist in the same family (or corporation) forever, because.. well, it's their property.
...or Swedish rock bands, cause there is no such thing as the "Republic of Europe".
Ah but there is the European Union. I don't know if the EU has any rules specifically governing retirement plans though.
and their taxes are an accounting trick because the money was going from the government to them and back to the government
That's not an "accounting trick," just about any other system would probably be less honest.
I think the other points are sound though.
Oh please! Have you heard the fingernails on a chalkboard screeching that Yoko calls "singing"? Nuking her from orbit is the ONLY way to be sure pal, as you sure as hell wouldn't want to get within earshot to make sure she was down.....shudder.
Married With Children got it exactly right:
Yoko Ono becomes Girly Girl Beer's new spokeshuman.
Moderators, please mod the parent post up to a billion (or a billion + 1).
It's always refreshing when someone looks at a story of a study and is able to peel back the sensationalist bullshit covering it to reveal what conclusions could actually be drawn.
Krugman's got a point - the real value of bitcoin is that it's a lottery ticket. To buy one bitcoin, you pay about the price of a fast food meal. Then you back it up and forget about it for a few years. In the one-in-a-billion chance that 20 years from now the entire world's economy is being transacted in bitcoins, you'll be a multibillionaire.
Oh, so it's a Ponzi Scheme?
Safe working conditions (OSHA) and minimum pay for example. To say that without unions those would go away which many pro union people say is totally wrong. Unions could disappear today and those laws will still be here
It's totally wrong? Laws can be repealed either by courts or by Congress writing a superceding law. Conservatives are often trying to roll back these laws in the name of 'reducing regulation' when it comes to government oversight. Minimum wage is hardly a settled issue, and what that minimum should be is very actively debated. (Common arguments are there are far more effective poverty reducers and it hurts businesses.)
Oy vey! Wing wings wings! Can I move to Moonbase Alpha yet?
Not if they're still storing nuclear waste up there.
2. Ron believes that an act that forces every movie to hire a so called "Excuse nigger" is not exactly making the industry willing to improve harmoney and instead make a black action hero movie. Let's face it; how many ideal war propaganda black action hero movies are there, appart from a vampire slayer trilogy? Ron's only calling for a better thing like making sure the government actually inproves harmony instead of forcing it down racist bosses throats, that still make the racist bosses racist.
I don't get this. Excuse nigger? What on earth is that? Are you implying that the government will take action against a movie studio that isn't completely multicultural? There's no reason to think that would be the case. What the studios do is hire people so that they are not the target of protests by interest groups (like the NAACP or other such groups) and private citizens, because being known as the racist movie studio would be extremely bad for business. People are free to associate and free to disassociate with Movie Studio X, and that has economic consequences. The current system is the direct result of capitalism.
In this case, the system works fine, especially from a Libertarian perspective.
Look at Sadam for example... He did do what he thought was good to a certain extent; you can't deny that he kept people from waging wars with eachother.
You can't? I think the Kurds and even the Sunnis might disagree with you on that. It's still a war if it's the government actively waging war on its own population.
Only a few cases (e.g. the American Revolution) are the exceptions. I'm no expert but I think the American Revolution was quite different when compared to most "communist revolutions". Seems to me that much of each state's structure was maintained rather than overthrown.
Part of our foreign policy messes is that Americans often think that revolutions in other countries will result in similar results to the American Revolution. Then, when it doesn't quite happen that way (and it never does), we have quite a mess to clean up.
It's lazy ignorant nonsense.
And also an advertisement for gold. There are a lot of people invested in it that want to drive the price up.
Ugh. Good catch. You have to take just about anything from that crowd with a grain of a salt -- they're actively growing the next bubble to burst.
If we can get the Adult Industry to sell their .COMs
They won't.
From day 1, the .XXX domain was all about revenue generation for the registrars and domain name squatters.
You haven't purchased a house in the last 10 years, have you?
Signing a contract like that usually requires you to sign your initials on dozens of sheets throughout the contract (usually every single page), and then sign in several different pages (the main contract, different addenda, etc.).
So sending a copy of the signed contract usually requires scanning in the entire thing. You can't just sign the last page and be done with it, because then you could argue that you never got a chance to read all the pages in between, or that someone inserted a page there that you didn't agree to. Your initials on every page are insurance against this.
I could not believe the amount of bullshit I had to fax when I bought my house.
Initializing every damn page, signing this and that, all with fax machines (no exception).
I've never seen anything like it in any other field I've worked in.
"DPI? Compression quality? What are you talking about?! I just want to send this document. I never had to worry about this technobabble when we had a fax machine. Get rid of this scanner and get me my fax back."
Faxes just work.
No, they just have sensible DPI and compression settings already.
When I had to do a ton of faxing, I made sure that the fax machine was set to image, not text, and selected a high DPI setting. If I selected monochrome, especially monochrome text, there was serious degradation of the image that was printed out on the other side. I received enough of those sorts of faxes myself to be able to tell when the sender didn't appropriately set the fax scan settings.
Anytime you scan something, you need to worry about DPI settings, whether to use greyscale or black-and-white, decisions like that. Faxes included.
Unfortunately the Tea Party was conquered by the Republican Party by the end of the last decade, so that all you have there now are "traditional Republican + some small amount of fiscal discipline."
3. Black Presidents
I don't think they're against black presidents. They're most definitely against liberal presidents, black or not.
What's going on with Obama is pretty much an extension of what they were trying to do to Clinton.
I don't think they'd have that big a problem with a Presidential Candidate Condalezza Rice, or Presidential Candidate Ward Connelly.
So you're "pro-Life", but you support the Death penalty? Interesting.
Generally, pro-lifers are against the taking of "innocent" life. The death penalty for criminals is totally fine with them.