My father bought a dining table (not for gaming) of similar quality and cost recently. He lives in a townhouse that cost about $300K when he bought it ten years ago. He drives a used Prius (formerly my own, which I sold to him when I moved to New York City). He was moderately embarrassed by the splurge, but he could afford it, it makes him happy, and it will last at least a hundred years. I'd hardly count him among the insane.
One of the secrets of the wealthy of old was that, while they bought expensive things, they bought things that were built to last. Yeah, that stone mansion might cost a lot, but it could hold multiple generations of the family and require little to no maintenance. Hardwood tables built so well they don't need glue means their lifespan is nearly indefinite; a cheaper, plywood-under-veneer table held together with glue and screws may cost a lot less, but it also needs to be replaced a lot more.
Agreed. My dad bought a non-gaming table of similar quality (some absurdly expensive very dark colored hardwood, 100% dry fitted, no glue or screws involved). He was kind of sheepish at the splurge; all I could get out of him is that it cost well over a thousand, but less than ten thousand. The additional complexity of building the Sultan to be stable while dry fitted despite the large number of parts, several of which are intended to move would require even tighter tolerances and justify a fairly high price.
I appreciate that they actually define what they mean by "Heirloom Quality". It's not a throwaway bit of marketing trash; solid hardwood instead of the usual veneer over plywood, plus construction that can hold together dry fitted isn't cheap. My father bought a table meeting the same specs (though not a gaming table, just a nice dining table) and it ran a few thousand dollars (not sure on exact price). The construction tolerances for dry fitted integrity would be even tighter for a table with this many connected and mobile parts. The cost of the "desirable" hardwoods that they use in the Sultan is *way* higher than you'd expect. They're probably overcharging a bit, but even mass produced I doubt you'd see something like the Sultan for less than $5K.
I'm curious how this is legitimately patentable. I can understand patenting an accelerometer, and even understand patenting the software techniques for motion sensing (even if I disagree with software patents), but how exactly do you take two technologies that already exist, tie them together in an ever so slightly different way, and call it patentable? The only difference between this and something like the WiiMote is that the input from the WiiMote's accelerometer is transmitted wirelessly to the console base station. How does putting the CPU in the WiiMote itself, connecting the accelerometers with a wire instead of a signal, and allowing it to make phone calls somehow make it original enough to warrant patent protection?
It's like would be like patenting sticking a compass in a car and connecting the needle to the GPS system so the car can determine orientation. When no one had done it, it was new, but it wasn't exactly novel; no one had done it because there was no GPS to connect to. Similarly, motion sensing has existed for quite a while, but no one connected it to a smartphone because:
Smartphones didn't exist in any usable form until the last decade
Consumer friendly smartphones that might use the technology are roughly five years old
Power and space requirements precluded unnecessary add-ons until relatively recently
Patenting the techniques used to miniaturize it and make it battery efficient would make sense, but patenting the mere combination of technologies seems ludicrous.
I neglected to specify: If they came all at once, it would be a problem. We're more than capable of handling a few hundred million additional people, but without time for services and infrastructure to expand to deal with the influx, the system would be overwhelmed fairly rapidly. I'm not arguing for closed borders, I'm arguing for managed growth.
You really ought to learn to argue this in a way that doesn't reek of xenophobia. There *are* legitimate criticisms of uncontrolled immigration, but when you argue it on the basis of "I've got mine" you turn people off. Immigration is still useful; this country, like most countries, is a Ponzi scheme of a sort. Without immigration our population would contract and the whole scheme would collapse. Limited, legal immigration maintains the necessary population growth while allowing time for services and infrastructure to expand to support the additional load. Unlimited immigration could mean overwhelming the existing systems before they have time to adapt. Striking a balance is important, but your xenophobia causes knee jerk opposition to your argument.
To be fair, if his ancestors came on a boat, they probably immigrated legally. Yes, I know you're trying to point out that it is a country of immigrants, but frankly, if everyone who wanted to come to the U.S. did come to the U.S., the whole thing would fall apart. Over a hundred years ago, it was difficult to get here, so we didn't really need quotas; if you were able to make the trip, we had room. Even from Mexico it was hard; the north of the country is a desert, and before cars were available, that was a damn difficult trip. Nowadays, it's really easy to get here (particularly from Latin America); while we still have room, we can't take everyone at once. Acknowledging that we need to establish a system for limited immigration that can be absorbed without causing problems isn't purely xenophobic (even if that is the primary motivation for much of the anti-immigrant movement); if we don't enforce the rules of said system then there is no system, and we end up experiencing all the problems the system is supposed to mitigate. We already have an issue where low and unskilled work doesn't pay enough to support a family; fifty years ago it could (hell, one low skill job could support a family, nowadays two low skilled jobs often aren't enough). Some of that is due to business friendly politicians, some of it is due to competition from immigrants. If we only had legal immigrants competing for the jobs, wages would not have fallen as steeply, simply because there would be 10 million or so less workers available to do the work.
Using this in computer games seems nifty, but I can see some definite issues that it would introduce. Lets say you use emotional feedback to adjust difficulty; you want them challenged but not frustrated. Problem is, if they pause the game, get a snack, and come back, you can't make them resume the same emotional state they had when they paused. When they come back refreshed, the game will assume it isn't challenging them anymore and unleash hell.
I'm not saying this can't be worked around (wait a couple minutes after a pause before allowing difficulty to adjust), but the fact that human emotional state can't be controlled as precisely as a game controller means that using it in a game means rethinking a lot of existing paradigms.
Well, the browser can lower its own privileges just fine. IE8 (and IE7 IIRC) run with lower privileges than a normal user for that reason. Even if you tell it to execute as admin, it programmatically lowers its privileges at runtime.
That said, even in these theoretically 100% testable scenarios things sometimes go wrong. Assuming Toyota's issues aren't purely mechanical, it will be an object lesson in how even extremely limited functionality software can have critical failures in edge conditions.
That's what EULAs are for. Software is much harder to do right than hardware, so people accept a certain amount of misbehavior in exchange for more powerful software that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. We could do bug free software, but it drastically limits the scope of the software and drastically increases the cost. The software used for aircraft control is usually subject to this level of testing, along with that used in a lot of embedded systems. But for a general purpose computer, you need to do things like conditional code, interacting processes, etc., that make it nearly impossible to do 100% thorough tests. Yeah, Adobe is doing worse than it should, but the only solution to that is to stop using it. And until everyone does, Adobe will continue to get away with it.
Well, AdBlock and Flashblock don't cause a problem for most people in my experience. NoScript drives them crazy though. And given that Flashblock (last I checked) doesn't provide real security (the Flash is loaded briefly before being replaced in the DOM, so the window of vulnerability remains), you're stuck with hoping the AdBlock filters are up to date. It's better than letting them browse on unprotected IE6, but without NoScript you're still vulnerable to exploits served from very new hosts (too new to show up in the AdBlock filters).
Last I checked, Flashblock isn't a security feature, it's a convenience feature. The Flash loads, but is quickly suspended and replaced in the DOM by the button. But it still has a brief window in which to do something malicious. If you want security, you need Adblock and/or NoScript (for blacklisting and whitelisting respectively). I personally run all three; untrusted sites are locked down by NoScript, and trusted sites are unlocked by NoScript, but have the Flash blocked for convenience/performance.
Ouch. The two news sites I browse most often. Good thing I run AdBlock and NoScript, and I wrote myself a Greasemonkey script to rewrite all the internal links to point to the print-friendly (read: ad-free) versions of the articles.
RTFA. The study wasn't done on people in power already, it was done by assigning people to leader and subordinate roles. Your point may or may not be valid, but it has nothing to do with this study.
My point is that I wouldn't want parents to be stuck in the position of bankrupting themselves or letting their child die. I implied that the reason for refusing treatment was financial, but I admit I wasn't explicit about it.
As for "voluntary charity", that's a load of horseshit. People's lives should not be at the mercy of the whims of the wealthy. If you disagree, I don't give a damn, because your libertarian utopia doesn't exist, and a legal system that assumes its existence in the real world is immoral.
And if you can't? Medical bills for unexpected and unpreventable ailments can cost as much as a new car, or even as much as a new house. If you can't pay, should they let you die? Enslave you to pay off your debt? What if you die before you pay off the debt? And since the surgery could not be prevented in any way (short of letting them die), you've just decided that anyone too poor for insurance (or between jobs) should be wiped out by an unexpected medical bill. I've got enough money in my bank account to cover a relatively small surgery, but if I need a bone marrow transplant tomorrow, the anticipated expense would be nearly $200,000 dollars. I've got good insurance, so I'd be fine, but it's simply not practical to "prepare" for a $200,000 expense on a low income. If you can't afford to pay for health insurance, you damn sure can't set aside $200,000. This bill isn't perfect, but it covers more of the poor, subsidizes the lower middle class, and requires a perfectly reasonable level of insurance that prevents the upper middle class from bankrupting themselves in the event of an unlucky break.
The point is that what you (and your insurance company) paid was subsidizing his care. If he (and everyone else) had insurance, then your premiums would be lower in the first place, and the cost per procedure would come down a bit since they aren't overcharging on everything to cover the cost of indigent care. I'm not saying the resulting bill is perfect, only that your scenario was made worse by the status quo at the time. Yes, every healthy person would be subsidizing every unhealthy person's care to a certain extent, but the burden on each healthy person would be less (since more of them are paying in), and both they and their local hospital would be less prone to financial shocks as a result of unexpected emergencies.
The fact that he had just lost his job and therefore was being paid some fraction of his former salary just made for a weird result from your point of view, but frankly, every second he spent in the hospital was costing him time searching for a new job, while presumably you had your graduate stipend to go back to when you got out (if you didn't, you should have been treated similarly when it came to the copays and deductibles, but I'll acknowledge that sometimes the world doesn't work the way it should). He may have been being paid more than you on an annual basis at that point in time, but if he didn't get a new job, he'd be in worse financial straits in the near future.
Up until the moment you're actually faced with such a scenario. Most people hold strong principles so long as they're never tested. And most of them abandon them when they are tested, particularly in cases like this where you're not sacrificing another person directly, just spending other people's money.
That said, who knows? Maybe you are one of the suicidally idealistic and would actually do what you say. But even if that's the case, we're not planning for you. We're planning for the 99% who hold strong convictions that break when faced with life or death.
Beyond that, I personally would feel ashamed of our country if they did let you die of an entirely treatable condition, thereby depriving you of who knows how many years of productive life. I had an appendectomy at age 4. While I was covered by my parent's insurance, the idea of letting someone in the same situation die because their parents lacked insurance and refused treatment is abhorrent.
Actually, in the Beltway Sniper case the states fought it out amongst themselves. Virginia won, because it argued (convincingly) that it could put them to death most efficiently. But you are correct that the feds occasionally involve themselves in cases like it. This page tallies the current inmates on federal death row, including a breakdown by state where the crime was committed and noting which states lack a death penalty. I believe the site is anti-death penalty, but for factual information they are a useful source.
I'd love to agree with you there, but it has been my understanding that smokers still end up costing the system more overall, because they don't just die earlier, they usually have long term care for years before dying that is much more expensive. That said, most of those figures are on health care alone; factoring in other forms of social insurance like social security and pensions it might be closer to the break even point.
That said, the taxes on smoking cover some of the costs; a "sin tax" to cover externalities makes sense in this case. If we let people do whatever they want to their bodies, but tax them in proportion to the costs they will eventually inflict on society then the end result is mostly equitable. It doesn't cover the case of people not exercising, but I don't think we want to become that intrusive. My socialist economic beliefs and my libertarian personal liberty beliefs reach an impasse at that point. A pure libertarian would argue that not providing (or at least not requiring) health care would achieve a similar result, and it would, but at the expense of the millions of people who get sick or injured through no fault of their own, and ignores the fact that the vast majority of people simply don't have the foresight to link heart attacks at age 60 with the hamburgers and inactivity at age 20.
Without the fine, they can't remove the pre-existing conditions clauses without immediately bankrupting insurance companies or making the system nearly pointless. If you can't be excluded for pre-existing conditions and there is no fine, then the only people with health insurance are the people who actively require treatment. So either all insurance companies would go bankrupt as the presently healthy drop out until they need care, or all insurance would do is average the cost of the on-going treatment among all people requiring treatment, which would still be a negligible percentage of the country at any given time. Bankrupting people to pay insurance premiums is not better than bankrupting them to pay medical bills.
Because when you decide you don't want to buy insurance and subsequently get a ruptured appendix (which there is no way of reducing your risk for aside from possibly exposing yourself regularly to cholera and other digestive diseases), you're not about to lay down and die on principle. You're going to demand that the ER save your life, then demand they swallow the tens of thousands of dollars it cost (which gets passed on to everyone else in the end). Imperfectly "socializing" the worst case scenarios has roughly the same net effect as requiring everyone to buy health insurance, except that the status quo meant a reverse lottery where specific unlucky individuals go bankrupt and their hospitals lose money disproportionately. Yeah, it subsidizes the lazy and those with unhealthy habits, but I somehow doubt people are choosing to smoke so as to take greater advantage of their health care. Demanding that the guy with the ruptured appendix or the type I diabetes must die so the guy with the pack a day habit or the type II diabetes isn't "rewarded" is inhuman.
That's a naive, if understandable way of looking at things. By that logic, the federal government couldn't have laws against murder that were enforced outside of D.C. The Constitution is a mess of clauses that inevitably conflict in the real world, and common law makes the situation even more muddled. Practically speaking, the 10th is interpreted very narrowly; i.e. the federal government has a lot of powers not specifically delegated, but rather granted through centuries of legal decisions. That's why I'm saying it's in legal limbo; until federal courts specify which side of the line it falls on, we don't know whether the law applies, but that doesn't usually stop the feds from acting on their own personal interpretation.
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My father bought a dining table (not for gaming) of similar quality and cost recently. He lives in a townhouse that cost about $300K when he bought it ten years ago. He drives a used Prius (formerly my own, which I sold to him when I moved to New York City). He was moderately embarrassed by the splurge, but he could afford it, it makes him happy, and it will last at least a hundred years. I'd hardly count him among the insane.
One of the secrets of the wealthy of old was that, while they bought expensive things, they bought things that were built to last. Yeah, that stone mansion might cost a lot, but it could hold multiple generations of the family and require little to no maintenance. Hardwood tables built so well they don't need glue means their lifespan is nearly indefinite; a cheaper, plywood-under-veneer table held together with glue and screws may cost a lot less, but it also needs to be replaced a lot more.
Agreed. My dad bought a non-gaming table of similar quality (some absurdly expensive very dark colored hardwood, 100% dry fitted, no glue or screws involved). He was kind of sheepish at the splurge; all I could get out of him is that it cost well over a thousand, but less than ten thousand. The additional complexity of building the Sultan to be stable while dry fitted despite the large number of parts, several of which are intended to move would require even tighter tolerances and justify a fairly high price.
I appreciate that they actually define what they mean by "Heirloom Quality". It's not a throwaway bit of marketing trash; solid hardwood instead of the usual veneer over plywood, plus construction that can hold together dry fitted isn't cheap. My father bought a table meeting the same specs (though not a gaming table, just a nice dining table) and it ran a few thousand dollars (not sure on exact price). The construction tolerances for dry fitted integrity would be even tighter for a table with this many connected and mobile parts. The cost of the "desirable" hardwoods that they use in the Sultan is *way* higher than you'd expect. They're probably overcharging a bit, but even mass produced I doubt you'd see something like the Sultan for less than $5K.
I'm curious how this is legitimately patentable. I can understand patenting an accelerometer, and even understand patenting the software techniques for motion sensing (even if I disagree with software patents), but how exactly do you take two technologies that already exist, tie them together in an ever so slightly different way, and call it patentable? The only difference between this and something like the WiiMote is that the input from the WiiMote's accelerometer is transmitted wirelessly to the console base station. How does putting the CPU in the WiiMote itself, connecting the accelerometers with a wire instead of a signal, and allowing it to make phone calls somehow make it original enough to warrant patent protection?
It's like would be like patenting sticking a compass in a car and connecting the needle to the GPS system so the car can determine orientation. When no one had done it, it was new, but it wasn't exactly novel; no one had done it because there was no GPS to connect to. Similarly, motion sensing has existed for quite a while, but no one connected it to a smartphone because:
Patenting the techniques used to miniaturize it and make it battery efficient would make sense, but patenting the mere combination of technologies seems ludicrous.
I neglected to specify: If they came all at once, it would be a problem. We're more than capable of handling a few hundred million additional people, but without time for services and infrastructure to expand to deal with the influx, the system would be overwhelmed fairly rapidly. I'm not arguing for closed borders, I'm arguing for managed growth.
You really ought to learn to argue this in a way that doesn't reek of xenophobia. There *are* legitimate criticisms of uncontrolled immigration, but when you argue it on the basis of "I've got mine" you turn people off. Immigration is still useful; this country, like most countries, is a Ponzi scheme of a sort. Without immigration our population would contract and the whole scheme would collapse. Limited, legal immigration maintains the necessary population growth while allowing time for services and infrastructure to expand to support the additional load. Unlimited immigration could mean overwhelming the existing systems before they have time to adapt. Striking a balance is important, but your xenophobia causes knee jerk opposition to your argument.
To be fair, if his ancestors came on a boat, they probably immigrated legally. Yes, I know you're trying to point out that it is a country of immigrants, but frankly, if everyone who wanted to come to the U.S. did come to the U.S., the whole thing would fall apart. Over a hundred years ago, it was difficult to get here, so we didn't really need quotas; if you were able to make the trip, we had room. Even from Mexico it was hard; the north of the country is a desert, and before cars were available, that was a damn difficult trip. Nowadays, it's really easy to get here (particularly from Latin America); while we still have room, we can't take everyone at once. Acknowledging that we need to establish a system for limited immigration that can be absorbed without causing problems isn't purely xenophobic (even if that is the primary motivation for much of the anti-immigrant movement); if we don't enforce the rules of said system then there is no system, and we end up experiencing all the problems the system is supposed to mitigate. We already have an issue where low and unskilled work doesn't pay enough to support a family; fifty years ago it could (hell, one low skill job could support a family, nowadays two low skilled jobs often aren't enough). Some of that is due to business friendly politicians, some of it is due to competition from immigrants. If we only had legal immigrants competing for the jobs, wages would not have fallen as steeply, simply because there would be 10 million or so less workers available to do the work.
You did? My experience here has been that for every gem, he posts ten posts ranging from subtly off-topic to subtle trolling.
Using this in computer games seems nifty, but I can see some definite issues that it would introduce. Lets say you use emotional feedback to adjust difficulty; you want them challenged but not frustrated. Problem is, if they pause the game, get a snack, and come back, you can't make them resume the same emotional state they had when they paused. When they come back refreshed, the game will assume it isn't challenging them anymore and unleash hell.
I'm not saying this can't be worked around (wait a couple minutes after a pause before allowing difficulty to adjust), but the fact that human emotional state can't be controlled as precisely as a game controller means that using it in a game means rethinking a lot of existing paradigms.
Well, the browser can lower its own privileges just fine. IE8 (and IE7 IIRC) run with lower privileges than a normal user for that reason. Even if you tell it to execute as admin, it programmatically lowers its privileges at runtime.
That said, even in these theoretically 100% testable scenarios things sometimes go wrong. Assuming Toyota's issues aren't purely mechanical, it will be an object lesson in how even extremely limited functionality software can have critical failures in edge conditions.
That's what EULAs are for. Software is much harder to do right than hardware, so people accept a certain amount of misbehavior in exchange for more powerful software that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. We could do bug free software, but it drastically limits the scope of the software and drastically increases the cost. The software used for aircraft control is usually subject to this level of testing, along with that used in a lot of embedded systems. But for a general purpose computer, you need to do things like conditional code, interacting processes, etc., that make it nearly impossible to do 100% thorough tests. Yeah, Adobe is doing worse than it should, but the only solution to that is to stop using it. And until everyone does, Adobe will continue to get away with it.
Well, AdBlock and Flashblock don't cause a problem for most people in my experience. NoScript drives them crazy though. And given that Flashblock (last I checked) doesn't provide real security (the Flash is loaded briefly before being replaced in the DOM, so the window of vulnerability remains), you're stuck with hoping the AdBlock filters are up to date. It's better than letting them browse on unprotected IE6, but without NoScript you're still vulnerable to exploits served from very new hosts (too new to show up in the AdBlock filters).
Last I checked, Flashblock isn't a security feature, it's a convenience feature. The Flash loads, but is quickly suspended and replaced in the DOM by the button. But it still has a brief window in which to do something malicious. If you want security, you need Adblock and/or NoScript (for blacklisting and whitelisting respectively). I personally run all three; untrusted sites are locked down by NoScript, and trusted sites are unlocked by NoScript, but have the Flash blocked for convenience/performance.
Ouch. The two news sites I browse most often. Good thing I run AdBlock and NoScript, and I wrote myself a Greasemonkey script to rewrite all the internal links to point to the print-friendly (read: ad-free) versions of the articles.
RTFA. The study wasn't done on people in power already, it was done by assigning people to leader and subordinate roles. Your point may or may not be valid, but it has nothing to do with this study.
My point is that I wouldn't want parents to be stuck in the position of bankrupting themselves or letting their child die. I implied that the reason for refusing treatment was financial, but I admit I wasn't explicit about it.
As for "voluntary charity", that's a load of horseshit. People's lives should not be at the mercy of the whims of the wealthy. If you disagree, I don't give a damn, because your libertarian utopia doesn't exist, and a legal system that assumes its existence in the real world is immoral.
And if you can't? Medical bills for unexpected and unpreventable ailments can cost as much as a new car, or even as much as a new house. If you can't pay, should they let you die? Enslave you to pay off your debt? What if you die before you pay off the debt? And since the surgery could not be prevented in any way (short of letting them die), you've just decided that anyone too poor for insurance (or between jobs) should be wiped out by an unexpected medical bill. I've got enough money in my bank account to cover a relatively small surgery, but if I need a bone marrow transplant tomorrow, the anticipated expense would be nearly $200,000 dollars. I've got good insurance, so I'd be fine, but it's simply not practical to "prepare" for a $200,000 expense on a low income. If you can't afford to pay for health insurance, you damn sure can't set aside $200,000. This bill isn't perfect, but it covers more of the poor, subsidizes the lower middle class, and requires a perfectly reasonable level of insurance that prevents the upper middle class from bankrupting themselves in the event of an unlucky break.
The point is that what you (and your insurance company) paid was subsidizing his care. If he (and everyone else) had insurance, then your premiums would be lower in the first place, and the cost per procedure would come down a bit since they aren't overcharging on everything to cover the cost of indigent care. I'm not saying the resulting bill is perfect, only that your scenario was made worse by the status quo at the time. Yes, every healthy person would be subsidizing every unhealthy person's care to a certain extent, but the burden on each healthy person would be less (since more of them are paying in), and both they and their local hospital would be less prone to financial shocks as a result of unexpected emergencies.
The fact that he had just lost his job and therefore was being paid some fraction of his former salary just made for a weird result from your point of view, but frankly, every second he spent in the hospital was costing him time searching for a new job, while presumably you had your graduate stipend to go back to when you got out (if you didn't, you should have been treated similarly when it came to the copays and deductibles, but I'll acknowledge that sometimes the world doesn't work the way it should). He may have been being paid more than you on an annual basis at that point in time, but if he didn't get a new job, he'd be in worse financial straits in the near future.
Up until the moment you're actually faced with such a scenario. Most people hold strong principles so long as they're never tested. And most of them abandon them when they are tested, particularly in cases like this where you're not sacrificing another person directly, just spending other people's money.
That said, who knows? Maybe you are one of the suicidally idealistic and would actually do what you say. But even if that's the case, we're not planning for you. We're planning for the 99% who hold strong convictions that break when faced with life or death.
Beyond that, I personally would feel ashamed of our country if they did let you die of an entirely treatable condition, thereby depriving you of who knows how many years of productive life. I had an appendectomy at age 4. While I was covered by my parent's insurance, the idea of letting someone in the same situation die because their parents lacked insurance and refused treatment is abhorrent.
Actually, in the Beltway Sniper case the states fought it out amongst themselves. Virginia won, because it argued (convincingly) that it could put them to death most efficiently. But you are correct that the feds occasionally involve themselves in cases like it. This page tallies the current inmates on federal death row, including a breakdown by state where the crime was committed and noting which states lack a death penalty. I believe the site is anti-death penalty, but for factual information they are a useful source.
I'd love to agree with you there, but it has been my understanding that smokers still end up costing the system more overall, because they don't just die earlier, they usually have long term care for years before dying that is much more expensive. That said, most of those figures are on health care alone; factoring in other forms of social insurance like social security and pensions it might be closer to the break even point.
That said, the taxes on smoking cover some of the costs; a "sin tax" to cover externalities makes sense in this case. If we let people do whatever they want to their bodies, but tax them in proportion to the costs they will eventually inflict on society then the end result is mostly equitable. It doesn't cover the case of people not exercising, but I don't think we want to become that intrusive. My socialist economic beliefs and my libertarian personal liberty beliefs reach an impasse at that point. A pure libertarian would argue that not providing (or at least not requiring) health care would achieve a similar result, and it would, but at the expense of the millions of people who get sick or injured through no fault of their own, and ignores the fact that the vast majority of people simply don't have the foresight to link heart attacks at age 60 with the hamburgers and inactivity at age 20.
Without the fine, they can't remove the pre-existing conditions clauses without immediately bankrupting insurance companies or making the system nearly pointless. If you can't be excluded for pre-existing conditions and there is no fine, then the only people with health insurance are the people who actively require treatment. So either all insurance companies would go bankrupt as the presently healthy drop out until they need care, or all insurance would do is average the cost of the on-going treatment among all people requiring treatment, which would still be a negligible percentage of the country at any given time. Bankrupting people to pay insurance premiums is not better than bankrupting them to pay medical bills.
Because when you decide you don't want to buy insurance and subsequently get a ruptured appendix (which there is no way of reducing your risk for aside from possibly exposing yourself regularly to cholera and other digestive diseases), you're not about to lay down and die on principle. You're going to demand that the ER save your life, then demand they swallow the tens of thousands of dollars it cost (which gets passed on to everyone else in the end). Imperfectly "socializing" the worst case scenarios has roughly the same net effect as requiring everyone to buy health insurance, except that the status quo meant a reverse lottery where specific unlucky individuals go bankrupt and their hospitals lose money disproportionately. Yeah, it subsidizes the lazy and those with unhealthy habits, but I somehow doubt people are choosing to smoke so as to take greater advantage of their health care. Demanding that the guy with the ruptured appendix or the type I diabetes must die so the guy with the pack a day habit or the type II diabetes isn't "rewarded" is inhuman.
That's a naive, if understandable way of looking at things. By that logic, the federal government couldn't have laws against murder that were enforced outside of D.C. The Constitution is a mess of clauses that inevitably conflict in the real world, and common law makes the situation even more muddled. Practically speaking, the 10th is interpreted very narrowly; i.e. the federal government has a lot of powers not specifically delegated, but rather granted through centuries of legal decisions. That's why I'm saying it's in legal limbo; until federal courts specify which side of the line it falls on, we don't know whether the law applies, but that doesn't usually stop the feds from acting on their own personal interpretation.