I am for limited government, no taxes etc. But the GP was comparing the liberal's fraud while in office earlier to the money spent on this event and that was a direct response to him and to his agenda.
I don't care about your arguments at all, not for a second and the reason for that is obvious from your first post: comparing a fraud perpetrated by the liberals while in the office to this? Governments always waste money, that's my position, I am sure there is waste in this case as well and things could have been done better, as a libertarian I don't have an argument against that, but your point is that this is the same as fraud.
I don't care about your arguments, it's moderated quite high there, but all it deserves is a flamebaiting troll.
How much time in advance did the Canadians have to put this together in, was it enough to build a hotel or whatever? Besides, it is irrelevant what you build if you still have to secure it, and securing a totally new structure from scratch is probably much more difficult than an existing one.
I don't really know what went into the 1 Billion, I am interested to see, but to put a blank statement that the fraud perpetrated by the former government is the same thing as spending a billion or whatever on security for a meeting for a bunch of world-leaders, their stuff, to make it all work... it's not a fair comparison.
Whether there was any money wasted or not on this event (and government always wastes money) does NOT change the fact of the liberals' government behavior.
I am a conservative (from point of view of Canadian politics), I mean I never vote liberal or ndp or any other garbage, I vote libertarian or conservative and that's that.
Your argument is bullshit.
Just like in case of BP not spending the necessary money and not securing the Gulf of Mexico properly and now paying tens of billions for it + all that oil in the water, imagine if a representative of any country got hurt or killed, what that would do to the image of the country.
Sort of like that luge accident during the Vancouver Olympics that was totally avoidable had the organizers put some soft barriers, like nets in front of those metal posts that the poor 20y.o. Georgian dude killed himself against.
Should it be a billion or half of that or 2 billion, I don't know, but what is known is that a failure in this sort of thing would cost magnitudes more than this money spent.
I have only bad things to say about Flash to be honest, however unfortunately browsers are not yet ready to play movies (the only reason I use flash anyway).
However saying that browser with HTML5 will be enough to completely get rid of a Java applet is most likely misleading.
I have real reasons to disagree with this, primarily based on a couple of months of work I put into research and development trying all possibilities in a browser to have a truly desktop-like application developed. I started small, with a single screen developed that is the main app area, allows to add windows inside the main window and each window is split into 3 sections. Left and then the right is split into 2 more section: a table and a detail section.
The table is loaded with many rows, possibly into tens of thousands, sometimes over a 100K of rows.
To render this simple table with less than 10 columns of data in plain HTML takes an enormous amount of time (minutes). I tried using gwt, smart gwt, the incubator stuff, the coding is more complex than any GUI stuff I had to do before this, it the result is still a very slow rendering, whether with tables or with divs or with javascript, doesn't matter if I used the inner HTML string (the bulk table renderer in gwt) the result is always slow.
Some will say: you are putting too much data into the table, paginate it, but it's not practical for my business case.
Java applet loads half a million rows into a data table in seconds, browser with HTML/javascript/css just can't compete with that speed. Also the look and feel is exactly like a desktop application and HTML just can't do that, or it would take an extraordinary effort to achieve.
I gave it a bunch or tries and I decided it is not worth all of the complications in terms of coding and it is impossible to achieve the necessary speed of rendering and it is very difficult to get a real desktop experience in just HTML/css/javascript.
In HTML5 I probably would have to draw everything on a canvas to do exactly what I want, maybe that could be faster even than rendering an html table for example, haven't tried that yet, but then not everybody has HTML5 in their browser either.
So until all browsers have some standard implemented that allows me to write a desktop like application in terms of look and feel and speed of rendering, while not making it extraordinary complicated to code to achieve this, I just can't do much but use a Java applet (which also allows me to double it as a stand-alone application and that's a plus.)
I already replied explaining that if a government sets prices and not the medical establishment itself, then there is no difference, it is still not a private business.
Government sets the prices on medical procedures in UK, Canada, Japan, France etc., so your first comment about 0 research is stupid. I lived in USSR, then Israel, then in Canada for 15 years, used the US medical system by paying out of pocket while living in Canada due to doctor shortage and having to wait for months to see a specialist, currently in Germany, where I have good relationships with a few doctors who work here, in France and UK. Never been to Japan, but I know they also control the prices there. Once the government sets the prices it does not really matter whether the establishment is officially private or public.
So this explains while care is 'cheaper' in these places, simply because it cannot be more expensive by law. In US the government got into insurance but the prices are not controlled by the government, thus this this market imbalance allows the prices to skyrocket, and they do that since the government made it clear, it will foot the bill.
However before the government did this, the health insurance in US was actually cheaper, more effective than in UK, Japan, Canada or France... It was possible for an insurance company to provide insurance to a family of 4 for $25 a year, covering up to $50,000 with a $500 deductible and this was enough to cover 2.5 times the maximum possible cost of the most expensive treatment for cancer, that could run up to an incredible $20,000. The government meddled with this by Nixon doing what he did and prices skyrocketed.
Firefox should make it easier for the users and admins to provide encrypted connection. Also it looks like it is possible for a browser to do quite a bit more, than just show a stupid lock on top of the address bar. Allowing a secure connection over port 80 rather than 443 could be a start. Getting certificate from a site and then comparing the site address to the certificate to make sure that there is no discrepancy is another. I am sure more things can be thought of, but as was said in this thread just a little while ago FF should not make it super difficult for site admins to run self-signed certificates. Do not make it more difficult than it already is to run a site with ssl on and you'll see many sites implement encrypted connections with self signed certs. Then the sites could also publish their fingerprint on the main/home page and explain to the users how to check that the cert they are using is correct.
Browsers can do so much more to educate the public and help the Internet to become more secure through encryption but they chose to follow a bizarre pattern of making it look like a plain text connection is less of a problem than a connection with a self signed certificate it is not funny at all.
You think US can afford any entitlement programs at all, or the wars it is running, or the bank bailouts, or anything at all at this moment, when its production capacity is shrinking and jobs are disappearing while the debt is growing and the government is printing the dollar into oblivion? What do I have to prove? Soon enough there will be no USD to speak of, how will anything be paid? I know, with printed paper. Good luck with that theory.
I was born in the USSR, lived in Ukraine after the country fell apart, spent a year in Israel, 15 years in Canada and am living in Germany since October of last year. I spent enough time in USSR, which had a 'free' system and in Canada, which has a socialized system. I went to Buffalo to actually see professional doctors because in Canada I would wait for months to see them due to doctor shortages, since only public insurance is allowed and prices for medical care are fixed, which creates shortage of doctors, given that USA is right across the border.
So that's my background, now to your comment.
Inflation as the only tool for a government to regulate it's health care costs feels a bit simplistic. In fact, it's a ridiculous idea, given the abundance of other options our government seems to have.
- please show me where I said anything about using inflation to control prices, this is something you misunderstood from somewhere.
Also, you forgot an important aspect. In our system, there's more money available for prevention, simply because that will keep general health care costs lower.
- just like in Canada, you keep the costs lower by fixing prices, maybe one thing that you have to your advantage, is that you are surrounded by similarly ran countries and US is not there to take your doctors, who I am sure would prefer to get better pay than what your fixed prices allow. So this is a system that colluded on prices across nations, that's an interesting experiment.
There's hardly a place where prevention will fit in a true market driven system. (Yeah, your insurance company could have prevention programs, but an insurance company without these expensive programs would be cheaper, right? Exit prevention.)
- in US it used to be possible to have very cheap insurance for a family, between 15-25 dollars a year depending on family size. The deductibles were around 500 dollars, this is related to the price you pay for insurance premiums and coverage was about 50,000 dollars, which again, before Nixon destroyed the Free Market health insurance system and caused prices to skyrocket was more than enough for any critical problem, in fact it was 2.5 times more than any most expensive run-away problem you could have at that time.
I expect European countries to show about the same level of economic problems as US will show because the governments like in US and Europe have created an environment, that prefers and creates monopolies, who now are shifting all production capacity to much cheaper places, like China etc. This will cause imbalances in trade to increase, this will cause the debt of these countries to grow, who will increasingly borrow money they cannot repay due to the worsening trade imbalances. This will cause collapse of USD and probably of Euro eventually. This sort of socialism will fail eventually in the market that provides cheaper abundant work force, just like the fake capitalism of US will fail, because it is not based on Free Market principles.
So, the government, which is paying for services, has also said how much it's willing to pay for those services. That sounds awfully market-like to me, what with the customer stating explicitly the value of demand.
- sure, until you realize that for example in Canada you cannot have an alternative, you cannot opt-out of paying taxes and use private insurance, so there is NO price that is set by real market. There is a mandate, and mandate has noting to do with market.
Mandate creates different types of imbalances, again in case of Canada this means shortage of doctors, many of who live and start businesses elsewhere, especially in US.
Individual healthcare is an implicitly unfair market, because there is no price that I would not pay to live one day longer. The provider can ask any price at all and he will find consumers. Nor will a healthcare provider increase demand by lowering prices. Regardless of how inexpensive chemotherapy is, I will not buy it if I don't have cancer. A true market for medical services can exist only at the public level where the demand for particular treatments becomes predictable.
- this is why you buy insurance, which is not for everyday activities but for critical events.
This is why in US it used to be possible to pay 25 dollars a year for a family of 4 to get 50,000 dollars worth of coverage in a year with a 500 dollar deductible. Most problems would cost much less than 500 dollars, a day in a hospital cost around 100 dollars. This was before Nixon decided that government now will start paying for various procedures to various layers of population all while NOT controlling what the prices are.
I am a Canadian citizen, lived there for 15 years, for the past 7-8 months I live in Germany. While in Canada I used to go to Buffalo Medical Group in NY state to see professional doctors that would otherwise take me months and months to wait for in Canada, Ontario, Toronto. In Germany I find the prices to be much lower than in US though and quality much higher than that of Canada.
I said this:
"Any time a government is involved in giving out money, the costs for any services/products go up".
and it is true. In Canada, France, Germany and some other places though the prices are set by government so that IS what I mean when I say that the medical system is ran by government, not only the insurance.
So if the prices are set at some level and are not allowed to go up, then of-course, it is not going to be the price that goes up, the quality of service will suffer for a different reason. In case of Canada that reason is that Canada cannot compete on doctors' salaries, so in Canada there is a doctor shortage, they study and move to US.
There is always a trade-off. The government can provide 'free money' and create moral hazard and cause the prices to skyrocket, but it can also try and control the prices, in which case the country will have shortages. In Canada the shortages of doctors are directly linked to the government setting prices.
I am not incorrect in my statement, but I am not specifying the other part of it - whether government installs price controls.
The ONLY reason for Canadian/German/French/UK prices to be at their current levels is of-course government setting them, which is another way to screw with the market and to cause different types of imbalances.
Regarding the parent post moderation: Just because you don't like a point of view, it does not make that point of view a Flamebait, simply because you can't hold you flames to yourself:)
In US there is no more capitalism in the health care system than there is in France. France decided to set prices and to provide public health insurance while US decided to allow government to enter the health insurance business (bad) while not controlling the prices.
Right now the US is as far away from my idea of a working Free Market as France.
You think he's wrong despite what he says. I suspect strongly that you haven't even read it deeply.
- 'deeply' enough, at least for someone who was called an idiot by the responder.
If that is true, then why is health care so much cheaper everywhere else in the world - where the government really does guarantee to pay?
- because in places like Canada or France the insurance is public but the prices on medical procedures/drugs/hospital stays are controlled at government set levels, and trust me, I don't think it is a good thing, it's an indication of the overall disease of economy that is planned by a government.
What an awesome argument! Way to go brains! Did it ever occur to you that what you think you can "see" is just the play of neurones? It's not actually real.
- did you have some point to make?
If the government is such a huge moral hazard, then perhaps you should go live some place without a government - say like Somalia. No government there. Just pure economics. Paradise!
- I said multiple times on/., I believe government has a role to play: justice system, punishment for transgressions against individuals/public resources, minimum military presence to ensure no foreigners take over the country.
You buy civilisation with taxes,and that must be administered by government.
- non sequitur, the biggest improvement in quality of life of everybody on this planet was invention of capitalism, which allowed pooling together of enough resources to create a serious manufacturing base, it was not about government intervention.
Far from being a moral hazard, the collective spending and government administration is the basis of a functioning economy. It really is a question of what qualifies as efficient and worthwhile.
- your definition of a 'functioning economy' differs from mine. My definition is an economy that can go beyond 50 years and sustain its production capacity so that the trade with foreign nations is in balance and the money is sound and strong, your definition is about government spending for some reason.
If private industry cannot do better than a government institution, then why prop up an inefficient private solution? That is precisely why we have public fire fighters.
- as I mentioned in this thread, the private insurance was able to provide a family of 4 with enough coverage before Nixon came alone for only $25 a year, with a $500 deductible, which kept the people honest and the prices at bay. The maximum coverage was around $50,000 but the most expensive cancer treatments did not exceed $20,000. This was very efficient, since even at those prices the insurance companies made money.
Then came the government, provided the moral hazard with guarantees to pay and prices went up by factors of 10 to 100, which has nothing to do with inflation./. is an interesting place, there are so many single-minded, very collectively similar people here.
There is no recovery, I am the original poster, I am also a Canadian citizen but I haven't lived in Canada for the past 7 months or so.
What you think is a recovery is just a delay. Canada does regulate the banks much closer than many other countries, including the US, so Canadian banks mostly didn't get into the SIVs that were based on bad loans. However Canada loans money to other nations and some of those are going to default, Canada also is losing its manufacturing, while of-course becoming more dependent on selling raw materials mostly to US. When US dollar goes down, once the t-bills/bonds bubble bursts and US prints USD into hyper-inflation, Canada will suffer plenty and will continue to suffer until it finds new consumers for Canadian raw resources, this is probably going to be China, but I expect that before this US administration is done with their first term we will see a massive economic collapse, even worse than the one that burst the housing bubble and something that will probably destroy the value of USD and will severely undermine Canadian economy at least for a while.
Being with these very close ties to US is both a blessing and a curse.
while Enron was a scandal, it was nothing special, a company failed because it was fraudulent in its accounting practices, I don't see a problem with this, do you? Companies that do that should fail. Governments on the other hand, decided that they will from now on bail out failing companies, even if the failures are due to fraud - that is a problem.
However you are also missing the fact that Enron had a government granted monopoly on providing power in their geographic areas. Government set various price controls, trying to remove price fluctuations, which are an important free market tool. Government prevented construction of new power generating plants.
Then at some point, government lifted price restriction in 2 geographic areas, why? This is an interesting question in itself, but this is just the fact that matters here. So in 2 areas prices are not set, while they are everywhere else - an imbalance is created, prices skyrocket and what is also interesting, is that Californian government enters long term contracts on energy at those very high prices. The entire thing stinks of government collusion and corruption.
So while YOU do not realize that Enron was a government caused problem, some other people in fact do realize it.
When you talk about CDOs, I assume you are talking about the collapse of the housing bubble, do I understand you correctly that you do not realize that this is an entirely government caused issue?
Really, you don't realize it? Then why are you replying to me?
You have government running insurance schemes through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, you have government creating incentives for consumers to live on debt, you have government doling out free money to banks, you have government destroying small business while creating gigantic monopolies who move production out of the country because their size makes it profitable, you have artificially set insurance rates by the Fed and you don't realize what this bubble was caused by, just like the dot-com bubble before it? Just like the t-bills and bonds bubble that is going to burst soon and take down the US dollar with it?
1. The government is horribly inefficient, and always will be.
- correct.
2. The private sector is intrinsically efficient due to profit motive and competition.
- only if there are no external forces, like government messing with the outcomes.
3. Private insurance can't compete against the government.
- I never said that.
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Private insurance can't compete on cost and service against the organization that's bloated and can't find it's own ass with both hands and an electronic ass finding machine? If that's the case, how the fuck can private insurance even exist?
- I never said that.
I don't understand who you are replying to, must be some other commentator.
I said exactly the opposite: the private insurance could provide health insurance for 25 dollars a year to a family of 4 people, they would cover up to 50,000 dollars in claims in a year while only requiring $500 deductible.
This means that the insurance still found it profitable to do business in those conditions. People had to pay out of pocket for the first $500 worth of treatment, and before Nixon and before government got into health insurance, the prices for medical treatment that was not critical never exceeded 500. A stay in hospital could cost up to 110 dollars per day.
So you are putting weird words in my mouth that I never said. In fact, once government got into the insurance business, the medical professionals as well as drug manufacturers started raising prices to levels that are much higher than what the markets could really bear and they could do so knowing that government would foot the bill. Government created moral hazard of health insurance, of government funded medical procedures, of government paid medications.
--
It is true, that everything that relates to money and that government touches becomes a pyramid, whether you see it or acknowledge it or not is irrelevant. Social security became a pyramid, CHIP and medicare and veteran care etc. made the entire medical insurance/treatment fields into pyramids, the fiat money itself is a pyramid scheme, which is apparent and obvious to people who understand what inflation is, how government prints money and borrows money that it never intends to pay back.
I don't need you to acknowledge anything in my post, I don't need 'karma' provided by the moderators, I have gotten plenty over the last 10 years on/. I just want to leave these posts here for a record of different opinions, based on the comments, on replies, on moderation, it is all very telling.
The answer is obvious. France, Canada, Germany have not only provided publicly funded health insurance, they are also heavily regulating prices on medical procedures and probably on drugs, on hospital stays, etc. The kinds of procedures that can be done are also heavily regulated, probably to the detriment of certain people, but this is not important to my general point.
I see that people have neglected to note, that US had a very competitive health insurance system before Nixon appeared and killed off the competition by getting the government into the insurance game, which allowed the practitioners to raise the prices much above the levels that markets could or would bear otherwise. Based on the moderation done to this thread, I see that most people here do not understand that point.
It was possible for a family of 4 to pay 25 dollars a year for insurance, that covered all their costs for any single event with a 500 dollar deductible, and at the time 50,000 dollars was more than enough to cover almost 3 near or completely lethal problems in a year, the most expensive treatments did not go above 20,000 dollars.
The countries that run very socialized health insurance and also enforce price controls, like Canada, France, UK, will have a more stable health insurance/treatment systems until their general economy becomes too battered, at which point they will have to remove various procedures, they will have to try and reduce prices through reducing salaries. This is going to happen soon, as these countries have ran into debts that they cannot repay and their banks have given out loans to governments and companies, who cannot repay these money. These will lead either to defaults of governments/companies (not perfect, but better than the alternative), or it will lead to increased levels of inflation (more likely scenario), because governments try to solve their problems in about the same ways: print/borrow/give out tons of cash.
In a short term (a few decades), socialized systems would work, in the long term, these systems would kill their small/medium sized businesses, would create monopolies that would eventually move production into cheaper production areas and then they would suffer trade imbalances that would cause economic destruction to levels, at which entitlements can no longer be provided. Honest governments do not exist, so they will all print more and more money, which is why commodity prices are going up and will continue to do so, until the debasement of currencies will stop due to their complete destruction or some other terrible event, like taking over governments by dictators and/or military personnel/wars. Eventually the economies will rebalance, people will again forget or just not understand what happened and the whole thing will start again.
There is no such thing as free lunch. Nobody wants to work for free. There are prices markets can bear, then there are prices that are set due to government intervention, that markets cannot bear and then economy starts moving production into places, where prices are more in tune with the market requirements. This eventually causes economic implosion for those, who are left without production capacity but with excess of printed money. The economic powers then shift and change places for long time until the story repeats.
Well, I am back, had to go pick up some silverware we bought at an auction.
Your entire point is orthogonal to mine. I am talking how government intervention into private health insurance and creation of CHIP during Nixon administration pushed the prices up. You are talking about countries where it is ILLEGAL to run private medical centers in the first place.
In US there is a combination of private hospitals, private pharma corporations, private clinics and at the same time government provides guarantees to cover the costs of certain layers of population. This drives the costs up because they can be set at any arbitrary level and the government still pays.
You are talking about Canada or France, where there is basically no private health insurance and no private medical centers, it is all heavily regulated. This circus will last longer than what US had since Nixon, as long as the economy allows it, but the quality of these services correspond to their perceived costs. I am a Canadian who uses medical treatment in Buffalo, New York and in Germany at this point, so I can compare.
So if the US decided to completely control prices on medical procedures while providing public health insurance, then you could have a system that resembled that of Canada or France or partly of Germany (in Germany private and public coexist, depends on the income level.)
However, my point is as always that anything government gets into that relates to economics, to equalizing outcomes for people, the government will turn into giant pyramid schemes, which will eventually collapse. On the other hand, if the government seriously controls the prices, like what is happening in France, Germany, Canada, then there will be shortages of qualified medical professionals created over time, as they will move to places where there are no price controls. This does not happen overnight of-course, I expect this to be a long term thing, however it is readily obvious in Canada, where there are serious shortages of qualified doctors, who simply move to US to run their businesses.
In either case, those governments that create monopolies, eventually destroy the small/medium sized businesses, and then when monopolies move out of the countries for production, the trade imbalances increase, the governments of these countries end up borrowing more than they can afford to pay back, while printing currency into inflation and probably eventually into hyper inflation. I am only interested in long term prospects for such economies, as they look bleak, while providing clear direction of where the money can be made and how to make them best.
You called me an idiot, while you are staring right into the problems face and being totally blind about it.
You are saying: 50 years ago things were not as for profit as they are today.
My answer to you: 50 years ago the government was not providing a guarantee to pay for everything.
Once the government guarantees that it will pay, the incentives to keep prices at what the market can bear disappear. Government provides a gigantic moral hazard, you are looking at it and completely not seeing it. No wonder you immediately start with an ad-hominem, you have no intelligence to do otherwise.
Now. They US is spending all that money on health insurance and payments now.
Did you read my post?
Besides, the problems related to the socialist dream that Greece was are not only contained to Greece.
The public health insurance works when there is money for it, however look at UK, if you think Greece has problems, you just may be surprised to find out that UK has bigger problems with debt it cannot repay.
In fact everything I said relates to all governments that meddle with economy, not only the US. UK also has a government that kills competition and creates giant monopolies, and those giant monopolies move their production capacity out of UK, while UK is in wars and paying for all of the entitlements and their debt obligations are growing and with the falling production capacity this debt also cannot be repaid.
All government programs works to a point, at which they stop working because government is again, a machine that creates inflation, has politicians that want to stay in power by any means necessary, which include borrowing/printing money/taxing more. This works in a short term, and I consider anything under 50 years to be a short term.
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Hey, you, jackass, here is my comment older comment, I am sure you'll find it amusing, it's about MMS and BP etc.
I am for limited government, no taxes etc. But the GP was comparing the liberal's fraud while in office earlier to the money spent on this event and that was a direct response to him and to his agenda.
Go play with your moderator points now.
I don't care about your arguments at all, not for a second and the reason for that is obvious from your first post: comparing a fraud perpetrated by the liberals while in the office to this? Governments always waste money, that's my position, I am sure there is waste in this case as well and things could have been done better, as a libertarian I don't have an argument against that, but your point is that this is the same as fraud.
I don't care about your arguments, it's moderated quite high there, but all it deserves is a flamebaiting troll.
How much time in advance did the Canadians have to put this together in, was it enough to build a hotel or whatever? Besides, it is irrelevant what you build if you still have to secure it, and securing a totally new structure from scratch is probably much more difficult than an existing one.
I don't really know what went into the 1 Billion, I am interested to see, but to put a blank statement that the fraud perpetrated by the former government is the same thing as spending a billion or whatever on security for a meeting for a bunch of world-leaders, their stuff, to make it all work... it's not a fair comparison.
Whether there was any money wasted or not on this event (and government always wastes money) does NOT change the fact of the liberals' government behavior.
I am a conservative (from point of view of Canadian politics), I mean I never vote liberal or ndp or any other garbage, I vote libertarian or conservative and that's that.
Your argument is bullshit.
Just like in case of BP not spending the necessary money and not securing the Gulf of Mexico properly and now paying tens of billions for it + all that oil in the water, imagine if a representative of any country got hurt or killed, what that would do to the image of the country.
Sort of like that luge accident during the Vancouver Olympics that was totally avoidable had the organizers put some soft barriers, like nets in front of those metal posts that the poor 20y.o. Georgian dude killed himself against.
Should it be a billion or half of that or 2 billion, I don't know, but what is known is that a failure in this sort of thing would cost magnitudes more than this money spent.
So SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP.
I have only bad things to say about Flash to be honest, however unfortunately browsers are not yet ready to play movies (the only reason I use flash anyway).
However saying that browser with HTML5 will be enough to completely get rid of a Java applet is most likely misleading.
I have real reasons to disagree with this, primarily based on a couple of months of work I put into research and development trying all possibilities in a browser to have a truly desktop-like application developed. I started small, with a single screen developed that is the main app area, allows to add windows inside the main window and each window is split into 3 sections. Left and then the right is split into 2 more section: a table and a detail section.
The table is loaded with many rows, possibly into tens of thousands, sometimes over a 100K of rows.
To render this simple table with less than 10 columns of data in plain HTML takes an enormous amount of time (minutes). I tried using gwt, smart gwt, the incubator stuff, the coding is more complex than any GUI stuff I had to do before this, it the result is still a very slow rendering, whether with tables or with divs or with javascript, doesn't matter if I used the inner HTML string (the bulk table renderer in gwt) the result is always slow.
Some will say: you are putting too much data into the table, paginate it, but it's not practical for my business case.
Java applet loads half a million rows into a data table in seconds, browser with HTML/javascript/css just can't compete with that speed. Also the look and feel is exactly like a desktop application and HTML just can't do that, or it would take an extraordinary effort to achieve.
I gave it a bunch or tries and I decided it is not worth all of the complications in terms of coding and it is impossible to achieve the necessary speed of rendering and it is very difficult to get a real desktop experience in just HTML/css/javascript.
In HTML5 I probably would have to draw everything on a canvas to do exactly what I want, maybe that could be faster even than rendering an html table for example, haven't tried that yet, but then not everybody has HTML5 in their browser either.
So until all browsers have some standard implemented that allows me to write a desktop like application in terms of look and feel and speed of rendering, while not making it extraordinary complicated to code to achieve this, I just can't do much but use a Java applet (which also allows me to double it as a stand-alone application and that's a plus.)
I think what we all are waiting for is US taking on Russia or China or both at once just for laughs to see what's left after it's all over.
He really needs to watch his back because he is definitely a target for 'complete neutralization' by the US government.
I already replied explaining that if a government sets prices and not the medical establishment itself, then there is no difference, it is still not a private business.
Government sets the prices on medical procedures in UK, Canada, Japan, France etc., so your first comment about 0 research is stupid. I lived in USSR, then Israel, then in Canada for 15 years, used the US medical system by paying out of pocket while living in Canada due to doctor shortage and having to wait for months to see a specialist, currently in Germany, where I have good relationships with a few doctors who work here, in France and UK. Never been to Japan, but I know they also control the prices there. Once the government sets the prices it does not really matter whether the establishment is officially private or public.
So this explains while care is 'cheaper' in these places, simply because it cannot be more expensive by law. In US the government got into insurance but the prices are not controlled by the government, thus this this market imbalance allows the prices to skyrocket, and they do that since the government made it clear, it will foot the bill.
However before the government did this, the health insurance in US was actually cheaper, more effective than in UK, Japan, Canada or France... It was possible for an insurance company to provide insurance to a family of 4 for $25 a year, covering up to $50,000 with a $500 deductible and this was enough to cover 2.5 times the maximum possible cost of the most expensive treatment for cancer, that could run up to an incredible $20,000. The government meddled with this by Nixon doing what he did and prices skyrocketed.
This is empirical evidence here, it's real.
do you believe I care?
Firefox should make it easier for the users and admins to provide encrypted connection. Also it looks like it is possible for a browser to do quite a bit more, than just show a stupid lock on top of the address bar. Allowing a secure connection over port 80 rather than 443 could be a start. Getting certificate from a site and then comparing the site address to the certificate to make sure that there is no discrepancy is another. I am sure more things can be thought of, but as was said in this thread just a little while ago FF should not make it super difficult for site admins to run self-signed certificates. Do not make it more difficult than it already is to run a site with ssl on and you'll see many sites implement encrypted connections with self signed certs. Then the sites could also publish their fingerprint on the main/home page and explain to the users how to check that the cert they are using is correct.
Browsers can do so much more to educate the public and help the Internet to become more secure through encryption but they chose to follow a bizarre pattern of making it look like a plain text connection is less of a problem than a connection with a self signed certificate it is not funny at all.
You think US can afford any entitlement programs at all, or the wars it is running, or the bank bailouts, or anything at all at this moment, when its production capacity is shrinking and jobs are disappearing while the debt is growing and the government is printing the dollar into oblivion? What do I have to prove? Soon enough there will be no USD to speak of, how will anything be paid? I know, with printed paper. Good luck with that theory.
I was born in the USSR, lived in Ukraine after the country fell apart, spent a year in Israel, 15 years in Canada and am living in Germany since October of last year. I spent enough time in USSR, which had a 'free' system and in Canada, which has a socialized system. I went to Buffalo to actually see professional doctors because in Canada I would wait for months to see them due to doctor shortages, since only public insurance is allowed and prices for medical care are fixed, which creates shortage of doctors, given that USA is right across the border.
So that's my background, now to your comment.
Inflation as the only tool for a government to regulate it's health care costs feels a bit simplistic. In fact, it's a ridiculous idea, given the abundance of other options our government seems to have.
- please show me where I said anything about using inflation to control prices, this is something you misunderstood from somewhere.
Also, you forgot an important aspect. In our system, there's more money available for prevention, simply because that will keep general health care costs lower.
- just like in Canada, you keep the costs lower by fixing prices, maybe one thing that you have to your advantage, is that you are surrounded by similarly ran countries and US is not there to take your doctors, who I am sure would prefer to get better pay than what your fixed prices allow. So this is a system that colluded on prices across nations, that's an interesting experiment.
There's hardly a place where prevention will fit in a true market driven system. (Yeah, your insurance company could have prevention programs, but an insurance company without these expensive programs would be cheaper, right? Exit prevention.)
- in US it used to be possible to have very cheap insurance for a family, between 15-25 dollars a year depending on family size. The deductibles were around 500 dollars, this is related to the price you pay for insurance premiums and coverage was about 50,000 dollars, which again, before Nixon destroyed the Free Market health insurance system and caused prices to skyrocket was more than enough for any critical problem, in fact it was 2.5 times more than any most expensive run-away problem you could have at that time.
I expect European countries to show about the same level of economic problems as US will show because the governments like in US and Europe have created an environment, that prefers and creates monopolies, who now are shifting all production capacity to much cheaper places, like China etc. This will cause imbalances in trade to increase, this will cause the debt of these countries to grow, who will increasingly borrow money they cannot repay due to the worsening trade imbalances. This will cause collapse of USD and probably of Euro eventually. This sort of socialism will fail eventually in the market that provides cheaper abundant work force, just like the fake capitalism of US will fail, because it is not based on Free Market principles.
So, the government, which is paying for services, has also said how much it's willing to pay for those services. That sounds awfully market-like to me, what with the customer stating explicitly the value of demand.
- sure, until you realize that for example in Canada you cannot have an alternative, you cannot opt-out of paying taxes and use private insurance, so there is NO price that is set by real market. There is a mandate, and mandate has noting to do with market.
Mandate creates different types of imbalances, again in case of Canada this means shortage of doctors, many of who live and start businesses elsewhere, especially in US.
Individual healthcare is an implicitly unfair market, because there is no price that I would not pay to live one day longer. The provider can ask any price at all and he will find consumers. Nor will a healthcare provider increase demand by lowering prices. Regardless of how inexpensive chemotherapy is, I will not buy it if I don't have cancer. A true market for medical services can exist only at the public level where the demand for particular treatments becomes predictable.
- this is why you buy insurance, which is not for everyday activities but for critical events.
This is why in US it used to be possible to pay 25 dollars a year for a family of 4 to get 50,000 dollars worth of coverage in a year with a 500 dollar deductible. Most problems would cost much less than 500 dollars, a day in a hospital cost around 100 dollars. This was before Nixon decided that government now will start paying for various procedures to various layers of population all while NOT controlling what the prices are.
I am a Canadian citizen, lived there for 15 years, for the past 7-8 months I live in Germany. While in Canada I used to go to Buffalo Medical Group in NY state to see professional doctors that would otherwise take me months and months to wait for in Canada, Ontario, Toronto. In Germany I find the prices to be much lower than in US though and quality much higher than that of Canada.
I said this:
"Any time a government is involved in giving out money, the costs for any services/products go up".
and it is true. In Canada, France, Germany and some other places though the prices are set by government so that IS what I mean when I say that the medical system is ran by government, not only the insurance.
So if the prices are set at some level and are not allowed to go up, then of-course, it is not going to be the price that goes up, the quality of service will suffer for a different reason. In case of Canada that reason is that Canada cannot compete on doctors' salaries, so in Canada there is a doctor shortage, they study and move to US.
There is always a trade-off. The government can provide 'free money' and create moral hazard and cause the prices to skyrocket, but it can also try and control the prices, in which case the country will have shortages. In Canada the shortages of doctors are directly linked to the government setting prices.
I am not incorrect in my statement, but I am not specifying the other part of it - whether government installs price controls.
The ONLY reason for Canadian/German/French/UK prices to be at their current levels is of-course government setting them, which is another way to screw with the market and to cause different types of imbalances.
Regarding the parent post moderation: Just because you don't like a point of view, it does not make that point of view a Flamebait, simply because you can't hold you flames to yourself :)
In US there is no more capitalism in the health care system than there is in France. France decided to set prices and to provide public health insurance while US decided to allow government to enter the health insurance business (bad) while not controlling the prices.
Right now the US is as far away from my idea of a working Free Market as France.
You think he's wrong despite what he says. I suspect strongly that you haven't even read it deeply.
- 'deeply' enough, at least for someone who was called an idiot by the responder.
If that is true, then why is health care so much cheaper everywhere else in the world - where the government really does guarantee to pay?
- because in places like Canada or France the insurance is public but the prices on medical procedures/drugs/hospital stays are controlled at government set levels, and trust me, I don't think it is a good thing, it's an indication of the overall disease of economy that is planned by a government.
What an awesome argument! Way to go brains! Did it ever occur to you that what you think you can "see" is just the play of neurones? It's not actually real.
- did you have some point to make?
If the government is such a huge moral hazard, then perhaps you should go live some place without a government - say like Somalia. No government there. Just pure economics. Paradise!
- I said multiple times on /., I believe government has a role to play: justice system, punishment for transgressions against individuals/public resources, minimum military presence to ensure no foreigners take over the country.
You buy civilisation with taxes,and that must be administered by government.
- non sequitur, the biggest improvement in quality of life of everybody on this planet was invention of capitalism, which allowed pooling together of enough resources to create a serious manufacturing base, it was not about government intervention.
Far from being a moral hazard, the collective spending and government administration is the basis of a functioning economy. It really is a question of what qualifies as efficient and worthwhile.
- your definition of a 'functioning economy' differs from mine. My definition is an economy that can go beyond 50 years and sustain its production capacity so that the trade with foreign nations is in balance and the money is sound and strong, your definition is about government spending for some reason.
If private industry cannot do better than a government institution, then why prop up an inefficient private solution? That is precisely why we have public fire fighters.
- as I mentioned in this thread, the private insurance was able to provide a family of 4 with enough coverage before Nixon came alone for only $25 a year, with a $500 deductible, which kept the people honest and the prices at bay. The maximum coverage was around $50,000 but the most expensive cancer treatments did not exceed $20,000. This was very efficient, since even at those prices the insurance companies made money.
Then came the government, provided the moral hazard with guarantees to pay and prices went up by factors of 10 to 100, which has nothing to do with inflation. /. is an interesting place, there are so many single-minded, very collectively similar people here.
There is no recovery, I am the original poster, I am also a Canadian citizen but I haven't lived in Canada for the past 7 months or so.
What you think is a recovery is just a delay. Canada does regulate the banks much closer than many other countries, including the US, so Canadian banks mostly didn't get into the SIVs that were based on bad loans. However Canada loans money to other nations and some of those are going to default, Canada also is losing its manufacturing, while of-course becoming more dependent on selling raw materials mostly to US. When US dollar goes down, once the t-bills/bonds bubble bursts and US prints USD into hyper-inflation, Canada will suffer plenty and will continue to suffer until it finds new consumers for Canadian raw resources, this is probably going to be China, but I expect that before this US administration is done with their first term we will see a massive economic collapse, even worse than the one that burst the housing bubble and something that will probably destroy the value of USD and will severely undermine Canadian economy at least for a while.
Being with these very close ties to US is both a blessing and a curse.
while Enron was a scandal, it was nothing special, a company failed because it was fraudulent in its accounting practices, I don't see a problem with this, do you? Companies that do that should fail. Governments on the other hand, decided that they will from now on bail out failing companies, even if the failures are due to fraud - that is a problem.
However you are also missing the fact that Enron had a government granted monopoly on providing power in their geographic areas.
Government set various price controls, trying to remove price fluctuations, which are an important free market tool.
Government prevented construction of new power generating plants.
Then at some point, government lifted price restriction in 2 geographic areas, why? This is an interesting question in itself, but this is just the fact that matters here. So in 2 areas prices are not set, while they are everywhere else - an imbalance is created, prices skyrocket and what is also interesting, is that Californian government enters long term contracts on energy at those very high prices. The entire thing stinks of government collusion and corruption.
So while YOU do not realize that Enron was a government caused problem, some other people in fact do realize it.
When you talk about CDOs, I assume you are talking about the collapse of the housing bubble, do I understand you correctly that you do not realize that this is an entirely government caused issue?
Really, you don't realize it? Then why are you replying to me?
You have government running insurance schemes through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, you have government creating incentives for consumers to live on debt, you have government doling out free money to banks, you have government destroying small business while creating gigantic monopolies who move production out of the country because their size makes it profitable, you have artificially set insurance rates by the Fed and you don't realize what this bubble was caused by, just like the dot-com bubble before it? Just like the t-bills and bonds bubble that is going to burst soon and take down the US dollar with it?
Sorry dude, I can't help you.
1. The government is horribly inefficient, and always will be.
- correct.
2. The private sector is intrinsically efficient due to profit motive and competition.
- only if there are no external forces, like government messing with the outcomes.
3. Private insurance can't compete against the government.
- I never said that.
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Private insurance can't compete on cost and service against the organization that's bloated and can't find it's own ass with both hands and an electronic ass finding machine? If that's the case, how the fuck can private insurance even exist?
- I never said that.
I don't understand who you are replying to, must be some other commentator.
I said exactly the opposite: the private insurance could provide health insurance for 25 dollars a year to a family of 4 people, they would cover up to 50,000 dollars in claims in a year while only requiring $500 deductible.
This means that the insurance still found it profitable to do business in those conditions. People had to pay out of pocket for the first $500 worth of treatment, and before Nixon and before government got into health insurance, the prices for medical treatment that was not critical never exceeded 500. A stay in hospital could cost up to 110 dollars per day.
So you are putting weird words in my mouth that I never said. In fact, once government got into the insurance business, the medical professionals as well as drug manufacturers started raising prices to levels that are much higher than what the markets could really bear and they could do so knowing that government would foot the bill. Government created moral hazard of health insurance, of government funded medical procedures, of government paid medications.
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It is true, that everything that relates to money and that government touches becomes a pyramid, whether you see it or acknowledge it or not is irrelevant. Social security became a pyramid, CHIP and medicare and veteran care etc. made the entire medical insurance/treatment fields into pyramids, the fiat money itself is a pyramid scheme, which is apparent and obvious to people who understand what inflation is, how government prints money and borrows money that it never intends to pay back.
I don't need you to acknowledge anything in my post, I don't need 'karma' provided by the moderators, I have gotten plenty over the last 10 years on /. I just want to leave these posts here for a record of different opinions, based on the comments, on replies, on moderation, it is all very telling.
The answer is obvious. France, Canada, Germany have not only provided publicly funded health insurance, they are also heavily regulating prices on medical procedures and probably on drugs, on hospital stays, etc. The kinds of procedures that can be done are also heavily regulated, probably to the detriment of certain people, but this is not important to my general point.
I see that people have neglected to note, that US had a very competitive health insurance system before Nixon appeared and killed off the competition by getting the government into the insurance game, which allowed the practitioners to raise the prices much above the levels that markets could or would bear otherwise. Based on the moderation done to this thread, I see that most people here do not understand that point.
It was possible for a family of 4 to pay 25 dollars a year for insurance, that covered all their costs for any single event with a 500 dollar deductible, and at the time 50,000 dollars was more than enough to cover almost 3 near or completely lethal problems in a year, the most expensive treatments did not go above 20,000 dollars.
The countries that run very socialized health insurance and also enforce price controls, like Canada, France, UK, will have a more stable health insurance/treatment systems until their general economy becomes too battered, at which point they will have to remove various procedures, they will have to try and reduce prices through reducing salaries. This is going to happen soon, as these countries have ran into debts that they cannot repay and their banks have given out loans to governments and companies, who cannot repay these money. These will lead either to defaults of governments/companies (not perfect, but better than the alternative), or it will lead to increased levels of inflation (more likely scenario), because governments try to solve their problems in about the same ways: print/borrow/give out tons of cash.
In a short term (a few decades), socialized systems would work, in the long term, these systems would kill their small/medium sized businesses, would create monopolies that would eventually move production into cheaper production areas and then they would suffer trade imbalances that would cause economic destruction to levels, at which entitlements can no longer be provided. Honest governments do not exist, so they will all print more and more money, which is why commodity prices are going up and will continue to do so, until the debasement of currencies will stop due to their complete destruction or some other terrible event, like taking over governments by dictators and/or military personnel/wars. Eventually the economies will rebalance, people will again forget or just not understand what happened and the whole thing will start again.
There is no such thing as free lunch. Nobody wants to work for free. There are prices markets can bear, then there are prices that are set due to government intervention, that markets cannot bear and then economy starts moving production into places, where prices are more in tune with the market requirements. This eventually causes economic implosion for those, who are left without production capacity but with excess of printed money. The economic powers then shift and change places for long time until the story repeats.
Well, I am back, had to go pick up some silverware we bought at an auction.
Your entire point is orthogonal to mine. I am talking how government intervention into private health insurance and creation of CHIP during Nixon administration pushed the prices up. You are talking about countries where it is ILLEGAL to run private medical centers in the first place.
In US there is a combination of private hospitals, private pharma corporations, private clinics and at the same time government provides guarantees to cover the costs of certain layers of population. This drives the costs up because they can be set at any arbitrary level and the government still pays.
You are talking about Canada or France, where there is basically no private health insurance and no private medical centers, it is all heavily regulated. This circus will last longer than what US had since Nixon, as long as the economy allows it, but the quality of these services correspond to their perceived costs. I am a Canadian who uses medical treatment in Buffalo, New York and in Germany at this point, so I can compare.
So if the US decided to completely control prices on medical procedures while providing public health insurance, then you could have a system that resembled that of Canada or France or partly of Germany (in Germany private and public coexist, depends on the income level.)
However, my point is as always that anything government gets into that relates to economics, to equalizing outcomes for people, the government will turn into giant pyramid schemes, which will eventually collapse. On the other hand, if the government seriously controls the prices, like what is happening in France, Germany, Canada, then there will be shortages of qualified medical professionals created over time, as they will move to places where there are no price controls. This does not happen overnight of-course, I expect this to be a long term thing, however it is readily obvious in Canada, where there are serious shortages of qualified doctors, who simply move to US to run their businesses.
In either case, those governments that create monopolies, eventually destroy the small/medium sized businesses, and then when monopolies move out of the countries for production, the trade imbalances increase, the governments of these countries end up borrowing more than they can afford to pay back, while printing currency into inflation and probably eventually into hyper inflation. I am only interested in long term prospects for such economies, as they look bleak, while providing clear direction of where the money can be made and how to make them best.
I have to run, so I am sorry I cannot participate in this delightful conversation, I'll be back in about 8 hours, will reply then. Cheers.
You called me an idiot, while you are staring right into the problems face and being totally blind about it.
You are saying: 50 years ago things were not as for profit as they are today.
My answer to you: 50 years ago the government was not providing a guarantee to pay for everything.
Once the government guarantees that it will pay, the incentives to keep prices at what the market can bear disappear. Government provides a gigantic moral hazard, you are looking at it and completely not seeing it. No wonder you immediately start with an ad-hominem, you have no intelligence to do otherwise.
Now. They US is spending all that money on health insurance and payments now.
Did you read my post?
Besides, the problems related to the socialist dream that Greece was are not only contained to Greece.
The public health insurance works when there is money for it, however look at UK, if you think Greece has problems, you just may be surprised to find out that UK has bigger problems with debt it cannot repay.
In fact everything I said relates to all governments that meddle with economy, not only the US. UK also has a government that kills competition and creates giant monopolies, and those giant monopolies move their production capacity out of UK, while UK is in wars and paying for all of the entitlements and their debt obligations are growing and with the falling production capacity this debt also cannot be repaid.
All government programs works to a point, at which they stop working because government is again, a machine that creates inflation, has politicians that want to stay in power by any means necessary, which include borrowing/printing money/taxing more. This works in a short term, and I consider anything under 50 years to be a short term.