I've heard this argument between the two testaments before, and it's bullshit. For instance, when engaging in animal sacrifices, the good lord instructs that you must make heave offerings forever (LV 10:15). I know of no Jews or Christians currently engaged in this practice. It also gives instructions for the worth of slaves, and demands that anyone who says Jehovah be stoned to death.
At what precise moment did these concepts become immoral, or did they at all? Jesus said, "until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished." So, why aren't we stoning blasphemers on every corner? Because we're more moral and more civilized than the bronze age goat herders of the ancient Levant.
He was the first guy claiming to be the Messiah that told his followers that he would die instead of defeating the Romans.
Now, why God suddenly gave up on defeating the Roman occupiers, I leave to your imagination. Of course, this is the same dude who considers shrimp an abomination, and thinks you can cure leprosy by killing a bird on an altar. Smokes a little too much product if you ask me. But what else would you do given an eternity to exist?
It's for your friends and relatives who drive you mad with tech support questions. Send them a $100 box, tell them to switch the cables out, and get on with your life.
We've effectively gone from a system that we could opt out of (for the most part) into one where the government forces you to give it up till you bleed. Tell me how much better things are again?
I see your point, but the idea you're missing is that much of technology moves from a luxury to a necessity very quickly. Ten years ago you could compete in the job market with no computer skills, and that's no longer the case. Shorter patent lifespans would allow companies to profit from good research, but not set back an entire society to profit a single corporation. Imagine if GE came out with a solar panel that was dirt cheap to manufacture, but charged 400 times more than it cost to make. China, India, and Russia could reverse engineer the product, and then we'd be competing with international companies that pay far less for electricity.
Furthermore, you have zero input on the actions of corporations who provide these necessary luxuries, like oil, electricity, information infrastructure, and so on. At some point, you have to assign a third party with more power to keep them in check, or we'll all be living in company towns, shopping at company stores, which isn't a hell of a lot better than soviet communism.
Markets are systems. Systems, if you care if they exist or not, must be regulated. The free market you're talking about is like supernova. Yes, eventually there will be some sort of equilibrium, but it's useless to everything it destroyed in order to reach that state. If you want to build a bomb, you don't throw random volatile elements into a mason jar and shake it up, unless you have a death wish.
Let me give you an example. You probably know Adam Smith's name. Due to your simplistic interpretation of "free" markets, I doubt you have any idea of what he wrote. He stated that a 5% cap on interest rates was necessary to force investment in "real" profits, not just interest profits, or else all capital would flood into financial sectors and destabilize the market. No one is going to build a car factory if they can make the same money by moving their money around.
Unless you are willing to watch sick people die outside of hospitals or shoot people in the head who cost society more to keep alive than to kill, you aren't going to have a libertarian market. It's not in our nature. A hundred years ago there were even discussions about whether making money without working, or working very little, should be considered moral. Imagine that.
All of the things those scaaaarrrry governments provide is called regulation. Regulation leads to standards. Standards are what allow infrastructure, market competitiveness, and a little thing I like to call civilization.
Again, ideals are just that. Goal posts for reality. Communist China is on your left. Somalia is on your right (no government to "ruin" their markets). I'd rather be leaning to the left if I can't shoot straight down the middle.
I think most people who are detailed oriented are considered eccentric. Good businesspeople, programmers, chefs, military strategists, and anyone who has to have things a certain way are considered weird.
Programmers just happen to be more detail oriented than most everyone else. One character in a program with hundreds of thousands is the difference between having something that compiles and something that doesn't. It takes a certain type of personality to accept this as part of the job description.
There are certain people who have it worse - civil engineers and doctors, for example. Once they have computed a load or prescribed a treatment, there is no way to edit and rebuild.
Is equal access to roads a right? How about waterways? Electricity? Water?
The internet is just the newest form of a utility. It's an information network that has become completely necessary to anyone in the modern world, just as telephones and televisions were before it.
When you guarantee that everyone has access to something, the costs per person go down. Way down. Because on many levels, socialization works very, very well, especially where infrastructure is concerned. Businesses have access to larger markets. Quality of life goes up. Everyone benefits, even after the additional costs of investment.
If you really dislike governments that much, move to somewhere where there isn't a powerful state. You'll also find that there isn't any cheap infrastructure, because there's no entity wealthy enough to provide the initial investment.
No, Eolas is a shit head. He just happens to live in a society where shit heads who are wealthy through immoral work are tolerated. I can and do absolutely condemn companies who violate the spirit but not the letter of laws for material gain. Patent laws do need to be changed, but so does our attitude towards companies that operate entirely in the grey area of legal loopholes.
Your moral reasoning in this situation is no different from the assholes who market overpriced pens to senior citizens, or con poor people out of their land with loans they don't understand. Just because something is technically legal doesn't make it right. And defending asswipes like Eolas and Skilling makes you part of the problem, not of the solution.
And you'll quickly see a problem developing for patent law. There need to be new laws established, because the speed at which technology has developed has made nearly all legal thought on the subject obsolete.
Certainly an inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time. It is equally certain it ought not to be perpetual; for to embarrass society with monopolies for every utensil existing, and in all the details of life, would be more injurious to them than had the supposed inventors never existed; because the natural understanding of its members would have suggested the same things or others as good. How long the term should be is the difficult question. Our legislators have copied the English estimate of the term, perhaps without sufficiently considering how much longer, in a country so much more sparsely settled, it takes for an invention to become known and used to an extent profitable to the inventor. Nobody wishes more than I do that ingenuity should receive a liberal encouragement." --Thomas Jefferson
The Life of Brian is especially worth a second view if you saw it when you were younger.
Matthias: Look, I don't think it should be a sin, just for saying "Jehovah". [Everyone gasps] Jewish Official: You're only making it worse for yourself! Matthias: Making it worse? How can it be worse? Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah! Jewish Official: I'm warning you! If you say "Jehovah" one more time (gets hit with rock) RIGHT! Who did that? Come on, who did it? Stoners: She did! She did! (suddenly speaking as men) He! He did! He! Jewish Official: Was it you? Stoner: Yes. Jewish Official: Right... Stoner: Well you did say "Jehovah. " [Crowd throws rocks at the stoner] Jewish Official: STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT RIGHT NOW! STOP IT! All right, no one is to stone _anyone_ until I blow this whistle. Even... and I want to make this absolutely clear... even if they do say, "Jehovah. " [Crowd stones the Jewish Official to death]
Crime requires an injured party. Who am I injuring when I'm carrying weed in my pocket? I mean, besides the hurt feelings of some person who believes they can tell me what I can or cannot do with my own person...
A DUI is something that carries the stigma of the high probability of the offender killing themselves or someone else. Having a joint is literally not a crime to anyone, and yet which one gets American nuts in a twist?
The disconnect in moral reasoning is getting ridiculous.
The unifying characteristic of birthers and deathers is hopeless credulity.
Whatever the man on the Fox channel says becomes their reality. And he's convinced them someone else is forming a cult of personality. The parade of irony continues.
America is quickly becoming the land of the dumb. Part of the reason is because people like you think there's no way we can't be number one. But, as a matter of fact, we are slipping in every measurable way behind the rest of the industrialized world.
More poverty. More prisoners per capita than even China. Least efficient transportation system. Least effective health care system. Worst income equality. And essentially, this is the result of a culture where intelligence does not matter. I'm not talking about anti-intellectualism, which has been part of our culture for some time, but a populace who cannot even name the branches of their own government, but can name the entire cast of Desperate Housewives. They can't solve simple math problems, or "become little calculators" as you like to say. Well, guess what. If you don't fundamentally understand what negative numbers are, how are you going to be able to comprehend anything having to do with math? If you can't look at a multiplication problem and know simply by looking at it that something is wrong, how will you ever know if the calculations you're receiving back are fatally flawed? Without a foundation of roughing out numbers in your mind, you can never use modern tools effectively, because you can't tell when the inputs or operations are incorrect. You simply won't know.
The focus solely on profits has lead to a nation of credulous, infantile football fans, who spend more time watching television than they do expanding their minds. This is because credulous people are more profitable. They are easier to take advantage of. As long as their basic needs are met, they are satisfied with whatever the TV tells them is the truth. There is a certain inevitable decline buried in this cultural norm, which cannot be addressed by pretending that it isn't a problem.
More schooling in our broken public education system will not help, but neither will privatizing them. Our society will have to arrive at the decision to make education a priority. The first step is admitting we have a problem, not sticking our head in the sand as you suggest.
It's a real time protocol with built in journaling, that is both free and open. Think of it as HTML written after the knowledge that connections will be mostly persistent and fast. Waves are going to replace damn near everything displayed live on web pages. It's basically an open and extensible combination of wikis, sharepoints, calendaring, and web forums.
Google OS + Waves + commodity hardware. If anything, at least the next version of windows will be much less expensive.
Al Qaeda and other extremist groups believe in the "cosmic" battle of good and evil. Iran is nationalist instead of cosmically religious, just as Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt are. Nationalists can be bargained with, because they want something that actually exists. They want a sovereign state where they can do as they wish. Reza Aslan gave a great talk on this.
Every argument against allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon can equally be applied to the United States, where very recently the President literally believed in the rapture, where a very huge portion of the population believes in hastening the return of Christ. Iran did express interest in a nuclear free middle east, but the US refused to even negotiate on the basis that Israel would have to give up it's nuclear arsenal.
The United States is digging itself into a grave with the one sided nature of it's foreign policy. As soon as we finish bankrupting ourselves with our empire, I don't doubt the calls from everyone to disarm the evangelicals with the thousands of nuclear warheads will seem fair to us. But it will happen.
Airships that are covered in solar panels could be extraordinarily efficient. Get a biomass burning generator to power the electrical system when the sunlight isn't enough. The gas provides passive buoyancy, or just make a majority of the surface absorb heat to keep the air hot. The "free" energy from the sun provides the thrust.
Never underestimate the power of a slow moving vehicle in travel for 24 hours straight. They had them at 60+ mph in the 1920s, so at 50mph average, you could go 1200 miles in 24 hours, which seems like the speed of slow rail travel without the required infrastructure.
It's not going to capture the LA-NY trips, but for regional pleasure travel, it could be a real winner. I know I'd rather spend a day reading a book or cruising around the internet than driving.
It could be argued that we are all immoral, because we are not interested in the consequences of our actions. The mafia crook dynamiting the ship with toxic waste isn't much different from an "waste resources" executive who bargains to send toxic waste to countries who need the money. One is exalted, one reviled, yet they both basically do the same thing. The executive simply pretends that the waste is properly disposed of in another country. The mafia crook doesn't kid himself. He knows the truth, and accepts it.
Which person is more immoral? Where does accountability figure into the equation? And where in a capitalist equation do you enter the morality quotient? Who enforces it?
These questions are simply not asked, because no one really wants the answer. For me, voluntary ignorance is immoral, and represents one of the great evils in the world today.
Do you think they can't match your credit cards with gas pumps already? Hell, when you book a domestic plane ticket, they know what IP address it was reserved from, the service you used, and so on.
The time for fighting for your privacy is already over. You lost.
Here's the funny thing. The central issue is that the American solution to health care means that doctors are incentivized to keep us sick, to over medicate us, and to avoid inexpensive solutions to our problems. Insurance companies are incentivized to not provide coverage, most especially to those who are sick. There is no market solution to this problem, because every other method provides less profit, which is an unacceptable model to all corporations.
From what I gather, in Canada and England and France, there are speech therapists that provide free services to anyone who has a disability. So your point is moot - there is probably no reason they would provide an iPhone. They provide you with professional care that has a long history of success, instead of some application that hit the market a few months ago.
This is central to why single payer is so effective. They don't go looking for expensive new solutions when they know how to solve problems already, because there's no incentive. The only criteria for single payer systems is the effectiveness of care. The only criteria for private health care is the profit that can be realized. I'll leave it to your imagination on what incentive structure provides the best care for the least amount of money to the greatest amount of people.
An interesting facet of American thought is that you aren't supposed to read original works. Just look at the proportion of Christians who fully embrace the Bible but have never read it.
I was "saved." Then I read the NKJV Bible, cover to cover. After I finished Revelations, I was no longer a Christian. I read a bunch of random works, and then I got into a little Chomsky. In his writing and talks I discovered a foundation of skepticism. One of my favorite quotes is still from Einstein: "Common sense is the set of prejudices one has acquired by age 18."
I read the Jefferson Bible, and his letters, and then the Federalist Papers. I read Paine. Then I read the Wealth of Nations, almost cover to cover. (It has a lot of very detailed information about the price of corn.) Then, I was no longer a believer in the free market, because one of their central documents could be called anti-capitalist, if capitalism had existed back then. I also got into Hume, Socrates, Zinn, Kierkegaard, Augustine, Aquinas, Occam, Plato, and on and on, and arrived at a worldview that is positively anti-American, in the modern sense.
This is because I accept nothing as fact until proven with evidence. I find no value in dogmatic political beliefs. I do not think America is "right" any more than France or Germany is "right." I ask the two unaskable questions:
Is America right for doing this? Is God right for doing that?
A "true" American would say the President has more information than I do, and that I shouldn't ever question my country. Or God possesses an intellect I cannot understand. I do not presuppose any of these ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard this argument between the two testaments before, and it's bullshit. For instance, when engaging in animal sacrifices, the good lord instructs that you must make heave offerings forever (LV 10:15). I know of no Jews or Christians currently engaged in this practice. It also gives instructions for the worth of slaves, and demands that anyone who says Jehovah be stoned to death.
At what precise moment did these concepts become immoral, or did they at all? Jesus said, "until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished." So, why aren't we stoning blasphemers on every corner? Because we're more moral and more civilized than the bronze age goat herders of the ancient Levant.
He was the first guy claiming to be the Messiah that told his followers that he would die instead of defeating the Romans.
Now, why God suddenly gave up on defeating the Roman occupiers, I leave to your imagination. Of course, this is the same dude who considers shrimp an abomination, and thinks you can cure leprosy by killing a bird on an altar. Smokes a little too much product if you ask me. But what else would you do given an eternity to exist?
It's for your friends and relatives who drive you mad with tech support questions. Send them a $100 box, tell them to switch the cables out, and get on with your life.
We've effectively gone from a system that we could opt out of (for the most part) into one where the government forces you to give it up till you bleed. Tell me how much better things are again?
I see your point, but the idea you're missing is that much of technology moves from a luxury to a necessity very quickly. Ten years ago you could compete in the job market with no computer skills, and that's no longer the case. Shorter patent lifespans would allow companies to profit from good research, but not set back an entire society to profit a single corporation. Imagine if GE came out with a solar panel that was dirt cheap to manufacture, but charged 400 times more than it cost to make. China, India, and Russia could reverse engineer the product, and then we'd be competing with international companies that pay far less for electricity.
Furthermore, you have zero input on the actions of corporations who provide these necessary luxuries, like oil, electricity, information infrastructure, and so on. At some point, you have to assign a third party with more power to keep them in check, or we'll all be living in company towns, shopping at company stores, which isn't a hell of a lot better than soviet communism.
Markets are systems. Systems, if you care if they exist or not, must be regulated. The free market you're talking about is like supernova. Yes, eventually there will be some sort of equilibrium, but it's useless to everything it destroyed in order to reach that state. If you want to build a bomb, you don't throw random volatile elements into a mason jar and shake it up, unless you have a death wish.
Let me give you an example. You probably know Adam Smith's name. Due to your simplistic interpretation of "free" markets, I doubt you have any idea of what he wrote. He stated that a 5% cap on interest rates was necessary to force investment in "real" profits, not just interest profits, or else all capital would flood into financial sectors and destabilize the market. No one is going to build a car factory if they can make the same money by moving their money around.
Unless you are willing to watch sick people die outside of hospitals or shoot people in the head who cost society more to keep alive than to kill, you aren't going to have a libertarian market. It's not in our nature. A hundred years ago there were even discussions about whether making money without working, or working very little, should be considered moral. Imagine that.
All of the things those scaaaarrrry governments provide is called regulation. Regulation leads to standards. Standards are what allow infrastructure, market competitiveness, and a little thing I like to call civilization.
Again, ideals are just that. Goal posts for reality. Communist China is on your left. Somalia is on your right (no government to "ruin" their markets). I'd rather be leaning to the left if I can't shoot straight down the middle.
What happens when I tell your mom that your room isn't clean? Time to look for a new basement!
I think most people who are detailed oriented are considered eccentric. Good businesspeople, programmers, chefs, military strategists, and anyone who has to have things a certain way are considered weird.
Programmers just happen to be more detail oriented than most everyone else. One character in a program with hundreds of thousands is the difference between having something that compiles and something that doesn't. It takes a certain type of personality to accept this as part of the job description.
There are certain people who have it worse - civil engineers and doctors, for example. Once they have computed a load or prescribed a treatment, there is no way to edit and rebuild.
Is equal access to roads a right? How about waterways? Electricity? Water?
The internet is just the newest form of a utility. It's an information network that has become completely necessary to anyone in the modern world, just as telephones and televisions were before it.
When you guarantee that everyone has access to something, the costs per person go down. Way down. Because on many levels, socialization works very, very well, especially where infrastructure is concerned. Businesses have access to larger markets. Quality of life goes up. Everyone benefits, even after the additional costs of investment.
If you really dislike governments that much, move to somewhere where there isn't a powerful state. You'll also find that there isn't any cheap infrastructure, because there's no entity wealthy enough to provide the initial investment.
Because their marketing department runs the rest of the company.
No, Eolas is a shit head. He just happens to live in a society where shit heads who are wealthy through immoral work are tolerated. I can and do absolutely condemn companies who violate the spirit but not the letter of laws for material gain. Patent laws do need to be changed, but so does our attitude towards companies that operate entirely in the grey area of legal loopholes.
Your moral reasoning in this situation is no different from the assholes who market overpriced pens to senior citizens, or con poor people out of their land with loans they don't understand. Just because something is technically legal doesn't make it right. And defending asswipes like Eolas and Skilling makes you part of the problem, not of the solution.
And you'll quickly see a problem developing for patent law. There need to be new laws established, because the speed at which technology has developed has made nearly all legal thought on the subject obsolete.
Certainly an inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time. It is equally certain it ought not to be perpetual; for to embarrass society with monopolies for every utensil existing, and in all the details of life, would be more injurious to them than had the supposed inventors never existed; because the natural understanding of its members would have suggested the same things or others as good. How long the term should be is the difficult question. Our legislators have copied the English estimate of the term, perhaps without sufficiently considering how much longer, in a country so much more sparsely settled, it takes for an invention to become known and used to an extent profitable to the inventor. Nobody wishes more than I do that ingenuity should receive a liberal encouragement." --Thomas Jefferson
The Life of Brian is especially worth a second view if you saw it when you were younger.
Matthias: Look, I don't think it should be a sin, just for saying "Jehovah".
[Everyone gasps]
Jewish Official: You're only making it worse for yourself!
Matthias: Making it worse? How can it be worse? Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah!
Jewish Official: I'm warning you! If you say "Jehovah" one more time (gets hit with rock) RIGHT! Who did that? Come on, who did it?
Stoners: She did! She did! (suddenly speaking as men) He! He did! He!
Jewish Official: Was it you?
Stoner: Yes.
Jewish Official: Right...
Stoner: Well you did say "Jehovah. "
[Crowd throws rocks at the stoner]
Jewish Official: STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT RIGHT NOW! STOP IT! All right, no one is to stone _anyone_ until I blow this whistle. Even... and I want to make this absolutely clear... even if they do say, "Jehovah. "
[Crowd stones the Jewish Official to death]
If cigarettes were illegal, you may have had a point. But they are legal. So I don't know what your point was.
Crime requires an injured party. Who am I injuring when I'm carrying weed in my pocket? I mean, besides the hurt feelings of some person who believes they can tell me what I can or cannot do with my own person...
A DUI is something that carries the stigma of the high probability of the offender killing themselves or someone else. Having a joint is literally not a crime to anyone, and yet which one gets American nuts in a twist?
The disconnect in moral reasoning is getting ridiculous.
The unifying characteristic of birthers and deathers is hopeless credulity.
Whatever the man on the Fox channel says becomes their reality. And he's convinced them someone else is forming a cult of personality. The parade of irony continues.
America is quickly becoming the land of the dumb. Part of the reason is because people like you think there's no way we can't be number one. But, as a matter of fact, we are slipping in every measurable way behind the rest of the industrialized world.
More poverty. More prisoners per capita than even China. Least efficient transportation system. Least effective health care system. Worst income equality. And essentially, this is the result of a culture where intelligence does not matter. I'm not talking about anti-intellectualism, which has been part of our culture for some time, but a populace who cannot even name the branches of their own government, but can name the entire cast of Desperate Housewives. They can't solve simple math problems, or "become little calculators" as you like to say. Well, guess what. If you don't fundamentally understand what negative numbers are, how are you going to be able to comprehend anything having to do with math? If you can't look at a multiplication problem and know simply by looking at it that something is wrong, how will you ever know if the calculations you're receiving back are fatally flawed? Without a foundation of roughing out numbers in your mind, you can never use modern tools effectively, because you can't tell when the inputs or operations are incorrect. You simply won't know.
The focus solely on profits has lead to a nation of credulous, infantile football fans, who spend more time watching television than they do expanding their minds. This is because credulous people are more profitable. They are easier to take advantage of. As long as their basic needs are met, they are satisfied with whatever the TV tells them is the truth. There is a certain inevitable decline buried in this cultural norm, which cannot be addressed by pretending that it isn't a problem.
More schooling in our broken public education system will not help, but neither will privatizing them. Our society will have to arrive at the decision to make education a priority. The first step is admitting we have a problem, not sticking our head in the sand as you suggest.
It's a real time protocol with built in journaling, that is both free and open. Think of it as HTML written after the knowledge that connections will be mostly persistent and fast. Waves are going to replace damn near everything displayed live on web pages. It's basically an open and extensible combination of wikis, sharepoints, calendaring, and web forums.
Google OS + Waves + commodity hardware. If anything, at least the next version of windows will be much less expensive.
How many nations has Iran invaded in the last fifty years? How many nations has the United States invaded in the last fifty years?
Rhetoric, in my opinion, is far less important than history.
Al Qaeda and other extremist groups believe in the "cosmic" battle of good and evil. Iran is nationalist instead of cosmically religious, just as Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt are. Nationalists can be bargained with, because they want something that actually exists. They want a sovereign state where they can do as they wish. Reza Aslan gave a great talk on this.
http://fora.tv/2009/05/15/Reza_Aslan_How_to_Win_a_Cosmic_War
Every argument against allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon can equally be applied to the United States, where very recently the President literally believed in the rapture, where a very huge portion of the population believes in hastening the return of Christ. Iran did express interest in a nuclear free middle east, but the US refused to even negotiate on the basis that Israel would have to give up it's nuclear arsenal.
The United States is digging itself into a grave with the one sided nature of it's foreign policy. As soon as we finish bankrupting ourselves with our empire, I don't doubt the calls from everyone to disarm the evangelicals with the thousands of nuclear warheads will seem fair to us. But it will happen.
Airships that are covered in solar panels could be extraordinarily efficient. Get a biomass burning generator to power the electrical system when the sunlight isn't enough. The gas provides passive buoyancy, or just make a majority of the surface absorb heat to keep the air hot. The "free" energy from the sun provides the thrust.
Never underestimate the power of a slow moving vehicle in travel for 24 hours straight. They had them at 60+ mph in the 1920s, so at 50mph average, you could go 1200 miles in 24 hours, which seems like the speed of slow rail travel without the required infrastructure.
It's not going to capture the LA-NY trips, but for regional pleasure travel, it could be a real winner. I know I'd rather spend a day reading a book or cruising around the internet than driving.
HEY SUPER FASTER WAS TAKEN. CARTOONS ARE ON
KTHXBYE
ROXXOR MARKETING INC
(brought to you by the lameness filter, which ruins every joke worth telling)
This is something I think about all the time.
It could be argued that we are all immoral, because we are not interested in the consequences of our actions. The mafia crook dynamiting the ship with toxic waste isn't much different from an "waste resources" executive who bargains to send toxic waste to countries who need the money. One is exalted, one reviled, yet they both basically do the same thing. The executive simply pretends that the waste is properly disposed of in another country. The mafia crook doesn't kid himself. He knows the truth, and accepts it.
Which person is more immoral? Where does accountability figure into the equation? And where in a capitalist equation do you enter the morality quotient? Who enforces it?
These questions are simply not asked, because no one really wants the answer. For me, voluntary ignorance is immoral, and represents one of the great evils in the world today.
Do you think they can't match your credit cards with gas pumps already? Hell, when you book a domestic plane ticket, they know what IP address it was reserved from, the service you used, and so on.
The time for fighting for your privacy is already over. You lost.
Here's the funny thing. The central issue is that the American solution to health care means that doctors are incentivized to keep us sick, to over medicate us, and to avoid inexpensive solutions to our problems. Insurance companies are incentivized to not provide coverage, most especially to those who are sick. There is no market solution to this problem, because every other method provides less profit, which is an unacceptable model to all corporations.
From what I gather, in Canada and England and France, there are speech therapists that provide free services to anyone who has a disability. So your point is moot - there is probably no reason they would provide an iPhone. They provide you with professional care that has a long history of success, instead of some application that hit the market a few months ago.
This is central to why single payer is so effective. They don't go looking for expensive new solutions when they know how to solve problems already, because there's no incentive. The only criteria for single payer systems is the effectiveness of care. The only criteria for private health care is the profit that can be realized. I'll leave it to your imagination on what incentive structure provides the best care for the least amount of money to the greatest amount of people.
An interesting facet of American thought is that you aren't supposed to read original works. Just look at the proportion of Christians who fully embrace the Bible but have never read it.
I was "saved." Then I read the NKJV Bible, cover to cover. After I finished Revelations, I was no longer a Christian. I read a bunch of random works, and then I got into a little Chomsky. In his writing and talks I discovered a foundation of skepticism. One of my favorite quotes is still from Einstein: "Common sense is the set of prejudices one has acquired by age 18."
I read the Jefferson Bible, and his letters, and then the Federalist Papers. I read Paine. Then I read the Wealth of Nations, almost cover to cover. (It has a lot of very detailed information about the price of corn.) Then, I was no longer a believer in the free market, because one of their central documents could be called anti-capitalist, if capitalism had existed back then. I also got into Hume, Socrates, Zinn, Kierkegaard, Augustine, Aquinas, Occam, Plato, and on and on, and arrived at a worldview that is positively anti-American, in the modern sense.
This is because I accept nothing as fact until proven with evidence. I find no value in dogmatic political beliefs. I do not think America is "right" any more than France or Germany is "right." I ask the two unaskable questions:
Is America right for doing this? Is God right for doing that?
A "true" American would say the President has more information than I do, and that I shouldn't ever question my country. Or God possesses an intellect I cannot understand. I do not presuppose any of these ideas.