> I see this come up a lot but I've had a hard time verifying that this is actually the case.
Of course you did. It's just bullshit "media narrative". These people are like old women passing chain letters amongst themselves.
As much as they whine, you would think that these people had all been denied coverage for very expensive treatments for rare conditions.
When it's actually your butt on the line, it's much more important that these things exist at all. Frankly, I am amazed that the economic incentives actually work out for people with rare diseases.
Yes. Pretty much. Even the NIHs own paper on this subject indicates that the bulk of money spend on drug development comes from the private sector.
The money that the public spends only gets the ball rolling. It doesn't finish the process.
Plus this isn't your typical "one size fits" all pill kind of treatment. These kinds of treatments have to be custom made for each patient. The cost of that isn't trivial. It requires the employment of a large state of the art facility and staff that goes with.
> The "free market" doesn't take into account externalities, such as pollution, so I'm glad that it's NOT a "free market" decision.
What makes you think the externalities are dealt with? You're just kidding yourself that there are none. It's not in your face somewhere you can see it so you don't think it exists.
Besides, Europeans already tax the fuel like crazy. Even if you leave the car itself out of it, you still have a means to directly charge for the relevant "externality".
Except that's 15M people in places that have car ownership on par with places like New York City. It's not really much of an opportunity to drive demand.
It seems like they would be far better off working to wean people off of wood stoves. It seems like the biggest pollution problems would be the dense urban centers rather than the boonies. Managing what's going on in their bigger cities doesn't seem like it would be such an insurmountable problem.
If they don't have a car culture (like LA), then switching to electric isn't going to buy them much there.
Why doesn't the US do the same? For starters, it doesn't impose crushing taxes on the private ownership of vehicles. If you already own a vehicle in the US, it's because these kinds of policies didn't exist there in the past.
This is Norway choosing to loosen it's iron grip on the free market to favor one particular option and pick a winner.
"Norway loosens oppressive tax regime to benefit electric cars"
It sounds a lot less impressive all around when you acknowledge that Norway is actively sabotaging average citizens that might want a car.
This has a lot less to do with the qualities of electric cars and their ability to compete with conventional ones.
The US post was never supposed to be a private corporation. It doesn't matter if it turns a profit or not. It's one of the few things that the federal government is actually empowered to do.
The fact that a government service can't "compete" is no excuse to give Amazon corporate welfare.
The postal service doesn't need to be "relevant".
HELL, I wish there was a "no USPS" option on my own Amazon packages.
Sure we are. The recent distortion of the American left is a big part of this problem. It leaves those just to the right of Communist alienated as there isn't a "liberal - socialist" party any more.
Plus liberalism itself has gotten deranged. As society has improved, liberals have become desperate to stay relevant. They need to "make work" for themselves. So they have to pretend like they're needed and they come up with crazy nonsense to make themselves look relevant.
Even modern liberalism is alienating to people who are classical liberals.
Anyone that is a heretic of any kind gets attacked mercilessly.
The threat of organized racists is virtually non-existent. It is a bogeyman that the left and the liberal media need to prop up to justify itself. It's pure 1984 style nonsense.
The large number of people that declare that it's OK to engage in political violence just because of a label they choose to abuse is a FAR FAR FAR bigger problem.
It's a fundemental subversion of our founding values. It's even contrary to the work of our main civil liberties safeguard (namely the ACLU).
> What legitimizes violence against then is their continued active attempts to kill and/or subjugate everyone who isn't like them,
There are no such attempts.
The only people being violent are liberals.
You've reduced Nazis to "people who say mean things" and they were never just that. They were an unarmed gang that beat people up from the very beginning.
When someone actually "does" something rather than "say" something, then you have a cause of action. If you start with the violence before that, then you're the one acting like a Nazi.
> So, just like the far right Christians? Different identities, same attitudes.
I actually fear modern liberals MORE than fundie Xians when it comes to my sexual habits. At least fundies can distinguish between the sinner and the sin. Xian fundies seem to have far less real power. So me being a heretic from their point of view is far less dangerous for me.
That's not even getting into the current state of Islam.
If you had any real clue about this stuff you might know what a real Nazi rally looked like. You might even have been to the places where they held such rallies.
Charlottesville and what happened there looked nothing like that stuff.
The Soviet Union was socialist and was trying to move towards Communism. Between Socialism and Communism, Communism is actually the benign one. Communists are trying to strive for a utopia where people fend for themselves and take care of themselves without government.
Socialism is just a means to that end. Socialists are WORSE because they view granting government control over the economy to a end of it's own. They don't even have the pretense of trying to get to a better place.
Socialism features state ownership of the means of production.
That means that the government runs the monopoly you can't avoid.
If you don't like the provider of a certain good or service, YOU HAVE NO CHOICE and YOU HAVE NO RECOURSE. You can't switch to a better option. You can't play competitors off of each other to get a better deal. You also have to deal with incompetent management and budget cuts.
Nobody wants to pay taxes. Nobody wants to be the providers. Everyone wants to be the takers. You run out of other people's money.
What kind of deranged moron gives someone like Trump or May or Putin that kind of power?
More likely he is simply someone with non-trivial requirements and isn't a total blithering fanboy. It's not enough to slap the right logo on the thing. It actually has to be fit for purpose. Once you get away from the "big city", an EVs anemic range and lack of infastructure quickly becomes a likely show stopper. This is even more true for smaller non-cargo trucks that could end up in all sorts of interesting places.
> Would you want someone with a communicable disease in your back seat? Do you want to be the next passenger?
We have Measles outbreaks at Disneyworld and Noro outbreaks on cruise ships. International airports are an international germ exchange. You have annual flu season. If you think you only have to worry about people going to the hospital, you're really kidding yourself.
This has nothing to do with the GOP. This is how it was when a black democrat was still in the White House and even when he had a democrat house and senate.
This is how it's always been.
This is simply paying for what you use rather than turning it into a (underfunded) government monopoly that looks "free" but really isn't.
That leaves you with somewhat of a split though. You have cities where Taxi service is useful and those where it is not. Even for something that is not immediately life threatening, even a 45 minute wait for a Taxi may be perfectly acceptable.
It all depends on the nature of the "emergency".
For the use case where Uber or a Taxi works, the 45 minute wait is probably not a problem.
I would't expect the "Uber effect" to be as great in places like New York City or London. Also in some of those places, the Taxis have started to adapt and steal some of Uber's tricks.
Why? Because you aren't using a mobile ICU for something that's not an immediate matter of life and death? Resources like that should be reserved for people that actually need them.
This goes equally well for "civilized" countries with socialized medicine.
Just because something is free, it doesn't mean it's an open excuse for abuse.
...anyone that wants to push for socialized medicine. Although on the flip side, you see complaints in the UK press of ambulances being abused by patients and treated like Taxis.
An obvious question is "why Uber". Compared to the cost of an ambulance, a Taxi is still dirt cheap.
I'm also not sure I see the point in using an ambulance if you aren't actually dying before you make the call to 911. The last time I needed to go to the ER, I didn't really need a mobile ICU for the short trip there. My previous hospital stay before that also didn't require a mobile ICU while in transit.
You're also assuming that everyone who goes to the ER actually belongs there rather than "some geek with a back spasm" who should have gone to a chiropractor or his GP.
> A more interesting measurement would be how many of those that actually have a job earn enough to feed, cloth and shelter a family of 4.
Liberals want to pretend that things are worse in order to further their agenda that the government needs to be given more power. This is despite the fact that government has been failing to rid of us of poverty since about 1967.
They have hijacked the "Ozzie and Harriet" narrative of the social conservatives to get everyone to buy into the idea that the economy was better for poor people in the past. It may sell well to spoiled rich white suburbanites. To those of us from that kind of poor background it's pretty funny.
Slashdot Mirror
> They may but that doesn't mean they can afford it.
So you have no idea how health care actually works.
NO ONE can afford most of the expensive stuff. That's what insurance is for. If you're unlucky, that's also what socialized medicine is for.
Nobody pays the cash price for procedures like this. Procedures with official price tags like this are pretty common too actually.
Freaking out about Epipens is so amateur hour...
> I see this come up a lot but I've had a hard time verifying that this is actually the case.
Of course you did. It's just bullshit "media narrative". These people are like old women passing chain letters amongst themselves.
As much as they whine, you would think that these people had all been denied coverage for very expensive treatments for rare conditions.
When it's actually your butt on the line, it's much more important that these things exist at all. Frankly, I am amazed that the economic incentives actually work out for people with rare diseases.
> Not so much
Yes. Pretty much. Even the NIHs own paper on this subject indicates that the bulk of money spend on drug development comes from the private sector.
The money that the public spends only gets the ball rolling. It doesn't finish the process.
Plus this isn't your typical "one size fits" all pill kind of treatment. These kinds of treatments have to be custom made for each patient. The cost of that isn't trivial. It requires the employment of a large state of the art facility and staff that goes with.
Actual production costs are non-trivial here.
> If the US had not made "communism" and "Russia" the number one bad guy on the planet, why would need anyone a defense against them?
The US didn't do that. The Commintern did.
Also, it was Kruschev that started the cold war with Trump style blustering nonsense.
> The "free market" doesn't take into account externalities, such as pollution, so I'm glad that it's NOT a "free market" decision.
What makes you think the externalities are dealt with? You're just kidding yourself that there are none. It's not in your face somewhere you can see it so you don't think it exists.
Besides, Europeans already tax the fuel like crazy. Even if you leave the car itself out of it, you still have a means to directly charge for the relevant "externality".
Except that's 15M people in places that have car ownership on par with places like New York City. It's not really much of an opportunity to drive demand.
It seems like they would be far better off working to wean people off of wood stoves. It seems like the biggest pollution problems would be the dense urban centers rather than the boonies. Managing what's going on in their bigger cities doesn't seem like it would be such an insurmountable problem.
If they don't have a car culture (like LA), then switching to electric isn't going to buy them much there.
Why doesn't the US do the same? For starters, it doesn't impose crushing taxes on the private ownership of vehicles. If you already own a vehicle in the US, it's because these kinds of policies didn't exist there in the past.
This is Norway choosing to loosen it's iron grip on the free market to favor one particular option and pick a winner.
"Norway loosens oppressive tax regime to benefit electric cars"
It sounds a lot less impressive all around when you acknowledge that Norway is actively sabotaging average citizens that might want a car.
This has a lot less to do with the qualities of electric cars and their ability to compete with conventional ones.
The US post was never supposed to be a private corporation. It doesn't matter if it turns a profit or not. It's one of the few things that the federal government is actually empowered to do.
The fact that a government service can't "compete" is no excuse to give Amazon corporate welfare.
The postal service doesn't need to be "relevant".
HELL, I wish there was a "no USPS" option on my own Amazon packages.
> The original Nazis started out by playing dress-up and shouting racial slurs. They progressed to physical attacks.
No. They didn't "progress" to physical attacks. They started them immediately.
This is the problem with morons that think they know history abusing terms to suit their agenda.
Sure we are. The recent distortion of the American left is a big part of this problem. It leaves those just to the right of Communist alienated as there isn't a "liberal - socialist" party any more.
Plus liberalism itself has gotten deranged. As society has improved, liberals have become desperate to stay relevant. They need to "make work" for themselves. So they have to pretend like they're needed and they come up with crazy nonsense to make themselves look relevant.
Even modern liberalism is alienating to people who are classical liberals.
Anyone that is a heretic of any kind gets attacked mercilessly.
The threat of organized racists is virtually non-existent. It is a bogeyman that the left and the liberal media need to prop up to justify itself. It's pure 1984 style nonsense.
The large number of people that declare that it's OK to engage in political violence just because of a label they choose to abuse is a FAR FAR FAR bigger problem.
It's a fundemental subversion of our founding values. It's even contrary to the work of our main civil liberties safeguard (namely the ACLU).
> What legitimizes violence against then is their continued active attempts to kill and/or subjugate everyone who isn't like them,
There are no such attempts.
The only people being violent are liberals.
You've reduced Nazis to "people who say mean things" and they were never just that. They were an unarmed gang that beat people up from the very beginning.
When someone actually "does" something rather than "say" something, then you have a cause of action. If you start with the violence before that, then you're the one acting like a Nazi.
> So, just like the far right Christians? Different identities, same attitudes.
I actually fear modern liberals MORE than fundie Xians when it comes to my sexual habits. At least fundies can distinguish between the sinner and the sin. Xian fundies seem to have far less real power. So me being a heretic from their point of view is far less dangerous for me.
That's not even getting into the current state of Islam.
> Reasonable people use nazi as a generic insult too but not for "anyone who is not a leftist",
Reasonable liberals are far less common than genuine Nazis these days.
Hell, a reasonable liberal is more likely to get called a "Nazi" by the screeching retards.
> Many of the "white nationalists"
Not "many", just ONE.
If you had any real clue about this stuff you might know what a real Nazi rally looked like. You might even have been to the places where they held such rallies.
Charlottesville and what happened there looked nothing like that stuff.
The Soviet Union was socialist and was trying to move towards Communism. Between Socialism and Communism, Communism is actually the benign one. Communists are trying to strive for a utopia where people fend for themselves and take care of themselves without government.
Socialism is just a means to that end. Socialists are WORSE because they view granting government control over the economy to a end of it's own. They don't even have the pretense of trying to get to a better place.
Socialism features state ownership of the means of production.
That means that the government runs the monopoly you can't avoid.
If you don't like the provider of a certain good or service, YOU HAVE NO CHOICE and YOU HAVE NO RECOURSE. You can't switch to a better option. You can't play competitors off of each other to get a better deal. You also have to deal with incompetent management and budget cuts.
Nobody wants to pay taxes. Nobody wants to be the providers. Everyone wants to be the takers. You run out of other people's money.
What kind of deranged moron gives someone like Trump or May or Putin that kind of power?
More likely he is simply someone with non-trivial requirements and isn't a total blithering fanboy. It's not enough to slap the right logo on the thing. It actually has to be fit for purpose. Once you get away from the "big city", an EVs anemic range and lack of infastructure quickly becomes a likely show stopper. This is even more true for smaller non-cargo trucks that could end up in all sorts of interesting places.
> Would you want someone with a communicable disease in your back seat? Do you want to be the next passenger?
We have Measles outbreaks at Disneyworld and Noro outbreaks on cruise ships. International airports are an international germ exchange. You have annual flu season. If you think you only have to worry about people going to the hospital, you're really kidding yourself.
Your ambulance doesn't cost $45. That $45 is just your "copay". The price is much more and you are paying for it in some fashion.
You're just charged for it in a manner that makes it easier to kid yourself that it's free. You're the proverbial slowly boiled frog.
> Welcome to GOPcare
This has nothing to do with the GOP. This is how it was when a black democrat was still in the White House and even when he had a democrat house and senate.
This is how it's always been.
This is simply paying for what you use rather than turning it into a (underfunded) government monopoly that looks "free" but really isn't.
That leaves you with somewhat of a split though. You have cities where Taxi service is useful and those where it is not. Even for something that is not immediately life threatening, even a 45 minute wait for a Taxi may be perfectly acceptable.
It all depends on the nature of the "emergency".
For the use case where Uber or a Taxi works, the 45 minute wait is probably not a problem.
I would't expect the "Uber effect" to be as great in places like New York City or London. Also in some of those places, the Taxis have started to adapt and steal some of Uber's tricks.
Why? Because you aren't using a mobile ICU for something that's not an immediate matter of life and death? Resources like that should be reserved for people that actually need them.
This goes equally well for "civilized" countries with socialized medicine.
Just because something is free, it doesn't mean it's an open excuse for abuse.
...anyone that wants to push for socialized medicine. Although on the flip side, you see complaints in the UK press of ambulances being abused by patients and treated like Taxis.
An obvious question is "why Uber". Compared to the cost of an ambulance, a Taxi is still dirt cheap.
I'm also not sure I see the point in using an ambulance if you aren't actually dying before you make the call to 911. The last time I needed to go to the ER, I didn't really need a mobile ICU for the short trip there. My previous hospital stay before that also didn't require a mobile ICU while in transit.
You're also assuming that everyone who goes to the ER actually belongs there rather than "some geek with a back spasm" who should have gone to a chiropractor or his GP.
> A more interesting measurement would be how many of those that actually have a job earn enough to feed, cloth and shelter a family of 4.
Liberals want to pretend that things are worse in order to further their agenda that the government needs to be given more power. This is despite the fact that government has been failing to rid of us of poverty since about 1967.
They have hijacked the "Ozzie and Harriet" narrative of the social conservatives to get everyone to buy into the idea that the economy was better for poor people in the past. It may sell well to spoiled rich white suburbanites. To those of us from that kind of poor background it's pretty funny.