Some of the big bosses in the party have a lot of industries that they run. They're probably realizing that:
1) Intellectual Property and Copyright laws are becoming acceptable in most of the world
2) Pretty soon they won't be just manufacturing things, they will be designing and selling Chinese ideas on foreign soil.
Sorry, but hardly anyone America can compel anyone in China to do anything. They are in their second millennium of being a civilization. They are stockpiling oil, uranium, and millions of tons of other raw materials with all of the American dollars they have. They will be the major economy of the 21st Century, no matter what we do. They are probably looking into the future, and realizing they will have no legal pretext to sue or invade if we start pirating their technology, unless they start obeying the "law" now.
Whenever I receive a communique from their headquarters, I know I can trust it fully without hesitation or rational thought process. This is the beauty of being inside the One, True Market, where no company has ever lied about their activities before.
Seriously though, if Microsoft released a similar statement, your bullshit detector would have exploded. I don't trust any PR from anyone. Do you think they don't have closed door conversations about destroying competition on an hourly basis? Do you think they're dumb enough to have them on the record?
This is why we need the power to compel referendums for city or county wide issues, and make sure the heads of all departments can be kicked out at the next yearly election by direct democratic action.
Get 1% of the population to sign a petition, get your spot on the ballot, and voila! Government officials miraculously stop acting like they own the place. I know they have some similar policies out West, but know of none in the East.
This is spoken like someone who has never lived in a rough neighborhood.
First of all, the gun homicide rate in the United States is astronomical compared to any other western nation. That's simply a fact. Second, lack of health care does lead to huge health problems. Let's say I have bad teeth, I'm 14 years old, my parents are both addicts and have basically abandoned me, never taught me to brush my teeth (much less floss) and I have never held more than $100 in my two hands my entire life. Am I going to some how gather $50 and go see a dentist? Probably not. Am I going to walk up to school and suffer through the shame of asking my teacher if she can help? Probably not. So my teeth get worse. One day, I wake up in the middle of the night with pain shooting through the left side of my head. The ambulance is sent. The ER removes the ruptured tooth. Cost to society: 10k? 20k? Cost to me: $0.
Now, I'm not saying this situation couldn't have been overcome by a proactive school nurse, or a teacher, or a church leader. But I am saying that it's unlikely.
As far as obesity is concerned, when you can't go outside for fear of getting shot, and the only foods your parents buy are the cheapest processed foods and flavored sodas (that are cheaper than juice and sometimes even water) this is a predictable result. And once a child with no insurance gets diabetes, the cost of providing them with good nutrition will seem like a pittance.
We can do nothing. We can let the cycle continue, and wonder why poverty stricken areas can't just pick themselves up out of the ghetto. Or we can understand why, lend a helping hand to another member of our society, and save some money in the process.
The really grotesque and despicable undertone to all of this really is the most obvious: rich people do not want to be in line with poor people. It's as simple as that. They feel they deserve better everything, no matter how little they've worked for it, or how many people they've stepped on to arrive at their current situation. This again, is predictable, when solidarity and helping your fellow man matters far less than how many luxuries you are able to afford for yourself.
This is not unusual as most in the media, including Internet media, are liberal and will only allow their talking points to be heard. It's funny how the group that screams for equal treatment and equal rights is so quick to silence any that oppose them.
I hear this argument all of the time. The reason internet media seems liberal is because it's more likely to be run by individuals or smaller corporations. People who don't automatically take the side of corporate interest over themselves, as most media corporations do. And as far as "left" and "right" are concerned, America is far more conservative than any other country in the West. Our overseas caricature is holding a gun and a bible for good reason. In other countries, they actually have communist and socialist parties that join in the discussion, without some schmuck screaming bloody murder the whole time.
I don't consider Obama a savior or anything. He was simply the lesser of two evils. He's quickly discovering that it doesn't matter how many people support healthcare reform (70%, with 50% wanting a "major" overhaul), if the change in policy affects too many big players in the corporate world. Insurance companies don't just lie down and let you force them to start playing by rules and making less money. Money pours into propaganda campaigns, and are usually successful. They will lie through their teeth to keep the profits rolling in, truth and ethics be damned.
In a sense, this is no different than a Democratic representative, meek and mild, turning into a lunatic when you threaten the jobs of their constituents who happen to build fighter jets that simply aren't useful for defense as they used to be.
And as far as parodies are concerned, there was a sitcom called "That's My Bush" that was on air within months of his inauguration, because he was so laughably inept, even in the beginning. I don't hesitate to remind everyone that at this point in his first term, Bush had taken a lot of vacations, given the Taliban 40 million dollars for their help with the war on drugs, and was nearly assassinated by a pretzel. Obama may do just as poorly, but so far, he's still got a chance for my vote next go around.
There is no free market in any of those. Banks, if they are federally chartered need to follow Federal Reserve and FDIC regulations.
The reason they are federally regulated is because before the creation of the FDIC and the rules of the Great Depression, there were bank panics every ten years during the 19th Century. You can read about them - the panics of 1819, 1825, 1837, 1847, 1857, 1866, 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893. This was before the move to a fiat money system, so don't try scapegoating that.
Your comments about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not only factually incorrect, but entirely misleading. The sub-prime mortgages were popularized in the private market before Fannie and Freddie joined in the fun. This is not to say they were well run, but they were not any worse off than other participants in the whole mess. In fact, given the most recent data, Fannie and Freddie are faring better than private mortgage holders.
Your comments about health care are fine in theory, as is all economics, because it's based on the fairy tale of "all else being equal." There are dozens of western countries who have found a non-market solution to the health care problem, they are living just as long, they are paying less, and their people are happier with their care than we are with ours. In a vacuum, the free market can solve everything, just like communism. As learned elsewhere, if you can't disprove an argument in your own head, that means the argument is an extremely poor one.
Duplicating infrastructure is simply stupid. Even the founders understood this, so they gave government the power to make roads and manage interstate commerce. The main reason is because the amount of monopolies that would spring up would be tremendous, because you would then be asking the question of "How much are you willing to pay for running water and sewage?" versus "How much does it cost your local government to provide running water and sewage?" With the first question, if 20% of the society can afford $100 a day, and 80% of the society can only afford $1 a day, what is the incentive for the company to run sewage to the poorest members of society? What is the damage done to that society as a result? If a society next door provides all the same services to everyone for $1 a day, how long do you think it would take before they are far surpassing their stupid neighbors in life expectancy, education, and general health? The answers to these questions aren't hard to arrive at.
Ah, competition. If one insurer won't offer good insurance another will. People always complain about the competition of outsourcing but refuse to acknowledge the same thing can drive their own cost down too. To them competition is always bad.
If there were some mechanism to have a fall back private insurer, this might make sense, but as far as I'm aware insurance companies will not give you insurance if you have a pre-existing condition, meaning there's no way to get well once you are out of the loop. It's their goal, therefore, to throw you out of that loop once you get expensive, which is usually when you need insurance the most.
Again, you are only burdening your society if you make each generation relearn from the same mistakes. We evolve as a society not when everyone starts from zero, but from when you start with the lessons of the previous generation as a guide. There is no free market reason why Blue Cross couldn't bonus their top employees millions of dollars until the company was bankrupt, and then throw all of their customers into the street with no coverage and no refund of the money they've paid in. This means that your well-being is dependent on the lack of greed from a human being who never has to confront you face to face.
This is an important thing to remember about the free market theory. It depends on equality, which is why Adam
Before the institution of Medicare and Medicaid, health care costs rose at the same rate as inflation. Immediately after the institution of Medicare and Medicaid, health care costs bean rising much faster than inflation.
Do you have a citation for this? As far as I can tell, health care costs have doubled since 2000. Medicare and Medicaid were started in the 60s. Could it be that insurance companies were invested too heavily in the stock market to make extra profits, and were then forced to overcharge their customers and deny procedures in order to cover their ass? Sounds like a likely scenario to me.
And my question is, what are you going to do when the people making those decision are the government, so there is no longer anybody to turn to to challenge their decisions?
This of course depends on a healthy democracy, who are willing to participate in the governance of themselves. Right now, if you have coverage with BCBS, and they deny your coverage, you can sue and hopefully get treatment before it's too late, if you win the case at all. In every other country with a single payer system, you just go to a doctor and get treatment. In most countries you don't even have to fill out any paperwork. And they pay about half of what we do, and have the same life expectancy.
I fail to see how this helps your side of the argument.
The solution to bad government regulation is effective government regulation. Countries all over the world have effectively run networks that are under the control of the people through democratic action, not subject to the skew of the profit desires of some private entity.
There are some things that cannot operate in a totally free market, like banking, health care, and utilities. The reason is because modern societies require these things to operate, and they should not be left to the wild swings and herd mentality of the market. Nor should my ability to get health care be affected by someone else's incentive to deny me health care. Nor should a banker be allowed to repackage bad debt as good debt through collusion with another company and sell it to me. Nor should a private company be my only option for local utilities service.
Let me put it like this: if there's a free, unregulated market for MP3 players, that's fine. Duke it out. Screw your customers. Worst case scenario, they have a broken MP3 player and they don't have the money anymore.
If there's a free unregulated healthcare market, don't be surprised if you end up with corporations who don't care if children die of leukemia if they can get out of providing care on a technicality. They have no obligation to do the right thing, and their shareholders only know of a single value: profit. Worse case scenario: you are dead, or at least bankrupt for the rest of your life.
Internet access probably falls somewhere in the middle.
The FCC has no interest in protecting individual rights or promoting a competitive market. They are there to sell off public assets to private corporations, and enforce rules and fines to ensure societal conformity to the morals of politically important voting blocs.
If Comcast is prevented from acquiring someone due to federal interference, they will probably sue because they will claim that the free market is being tampered with. Just like any corporation, their definition of free market has nothing to do with the liberty of individuals to have access to a competitive market system. It has to do with the corporate right to be unbound by any rules and have the freedom to stifle competition and destroy the market for their own profit.
To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the publick; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens... It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it. --Adam Smith
You just need to change the way networks are built.
In my opinion, the best way to operate infrastructure is to move governance to a county level for what work gets done. The county government owns the line and the towers, and charges a base rate to any carrier that wants to provide service. At the county level, they can choose to subsidize infrastructure or charge the full cost to the carrier (which then would get paid for by the consumer).
You can have local shops provide local service, regional and national chains provide whiz-bang features for a premium, and of course the option of having extremely basic services for people who are under a certain income level provided directly by the county. But the point here is that you get a real ecosystem of competition, not a conglomerate that runs half the country because it has more financial resources.
This can work for all types of infrastructure too. Roads, banking systems, electricity, whatever. Keep the citizenry within reach of controlling the infrastructure, and I guarantee it will be reliable, accountable, and cheap.
Sure there will be corruption, but nothing on the scale of what's already happening inside the beltway today. It's tough to hide that new Cadillac when you live among people who will wonder where you got the money from. And you'll fix problems more quickly not only because you are doing good work for your neighbors, but also because you don't want to get harassed the next time you go to dinner about the lines being down last week.
That only gets you to a deist point of view. Theism is a huge leap from "I don't understand, so a Creator did it" to "I don't understand, but out of thousands of holy books, THIS one is correct."
To be a member of an Abrahamic religion and take their books literally, you have to believe:
1. You can cure leprosy by killing a bird on an alter, and dipping another bird in it's blood. (Judaism)
2. That if a man is mentally disturbed, one way to cure him is to drive the "demons" in him into a flock of pigs who then commit suicide by running off a cliff. (Christianity)
3. That ants can talk and there are evil spirits called djinns all around us at all times. (Islam)
All of these beliefs are frankly stupid. Evidenced by the fact that every religion has been dragged kicking and screaming into the future, because where there is free thought and true free will and the scientific method, religion offers very little.
PS Any responses that don't directly admit to believing in such petty parlor tricks as a literalist are simply white noise.
I didn't say anything about anyone pissing in their pants. 20% of returning Marines have serious mental health problems, whatever their performance was on the ground. Until now, they have been mostly recycled back into duty without treatment, since there aren't enough people signing up. So much so, Marines are still subject to stop loss. Doesn't sound like a volunteer force to me.
If there's any other propaganda you'd like to regurgitate, though, please feel free. I mean, as long as you have permission to do so.
And by the way, perhaps I would piss in my pants in that situation. I don't know, since I've never been in a war. But I also wouldn't sign up for any theater the US is engaged in, since it offers no benefit for our security or for anyone else's freedom.
This is more about controlling the message to the populace than protecting the troops. In order to keep public support, you have to present a nice rosy picture that has nothing to do with the realities on the ground. This is just another measure the Pentagon is taking to make sure they can lie about their progress and not get called on it.
If the American public read the diaries of combat troops, the war would end in a heartbeat. Having a general pointing at a map and rattling off statistics is an entirely different experience than reading about how a kid who's barely out of high school doesn't want to die, and is nearly cracking under the pressure of killing people in a country he couldn't point to on a map a year earlier.
The war on terrorism is a complete joke. It's like a war on blitzkrieg offensives or the war on shock and awe. You can't defeat a tactic. We will continue to lose it because there is no attainable mission. There is no end game. Only endless war.
Once you start legitimizing the insane ramblings of jihadists by referring to good and evil, you lose. They have millions of people they can convince to fight to the death, especially when you're a foreigner treading on someone else's soil. The cost of deploying a peasant to a part of his own country with a box of ammo and a Kalishnikov might as well be zero.
For a good talk on the subject, check this out. It's good, but any rhetoric watched thereafter will make your blood boil.
What is with this thread? The GP stated "The true indicator of Microsoft considering itself to have real competition is when it starts pricing its products competitively." I stated that Microsoft does have a competitive price point, even by Mac fanboy standards.
I have a MacBook Pro, and it is too fucking expensive. I could've bought a nice semi-rugged Dell, or a ridiculously quick Precision, but I have clients on Macs, Windows, and Linux, so I triple boot.
I was saying Microsoft does have products competitively priced. If you really want to think about it, using any other product but Microsoft is more expensive for the average person.
(I'm speaking about small business here, who cannot afford an IT department.)
Let's give Linux a mile lead and say it's $400 extra to have the licenses for a Windows box versus a Linux box. How much is your average office worker going to be paid? $20 an hour. So, if they lose 20 hours over the life of the machine, Linux loses the price benefit.
I have multiple clients on 2003/XP networks with sane anti-virus and backup systems who call with PEBKACs and little else. They've been up since 03 or 04. A five person setup was about 6k, plus $750 for anti-virus subscriptions for five years. That's $270 a year per employee, or $20 a month. With Linux, it would be $13.33 a month, under the assumption that they would never need a windows program. You'd also have to assume that they never had to fuss with any document compatibility, browser incompatibility, or extra work because they didn't have a good program for the job, like Visio or Adobe Photoshop.
Where's the value? Sure, get a company with a 100 or 1000 employees, and it starts to make more sense. But not for the vast majority of small businesses.
The Geobacter biofilm's "fortuitous" electron-transferring skill, the product of natural selection, suggested a pathway to Lovley - a way he might use selective pressure to increase its capacity to produce power. He and colleagues grew Geobacter as usual on a graphite electrode, providing acetate as food and allowing a colony to form the biologically active slime, or biofilm where electron transfer takes place across the nanowires. But for this new experiment they added a tiny, 400-millivolt "pushback" current in the electrode that forced Geobacter to press harder to get rid of its electrons.
The result of providing a more challenging environment, within five short months, Lovley notes, was evolution of a beefed-up microorganism that can press at least eight times more electric current across the electrode than the original strain. âoeI'm really happy with this outcome," the microbiologist notes. "It's exceptionally fast feedback to us and a very satisfying result." He adds, "I'm still a little amazed that they make electricity, but I'm happy to be exploring how to harness that ability. I'm sure there'll be applications developed in the future that we canâ(TM)t even envision right now."
That's halfway down in the article.
You should try reading things before you try to debunk them. The environment will be created to get the most electricity out of the little microbes, and probably sealed off and not thrown in the dirt. I imagine there may even be filters in place where the waste comes into make sure that any natural predators are weakened or killed to continue allowing the organisms to thrive.
And they have been studying this organism since 1987, and examining it for electrical production since 2002. I'm glad you're skeptical, but not glad that you're commenting on something you didn't even bother to read.
Electric vehicles are nearly twice as efficient as ICEs converting their energy store into forward motion. Even if electric energy was 50% more expensive than gasoline energy, it would still save you money.
But again - why choose 15mpg when you can choose 120mpg or much more than that if you're hooked up to a solar powered energy source? And why not choose the absolute reduction of going (almost) completely oil free, and moving power conversion to a central location where efficiency improvement are much more effective? Why not move to an electric engine which is 90% efficient and not 30 or 40% efficient at converting it's energy store into forward movement?
Why continue to drive around a V8 100% of the time when you only need it's hauling capacity 5 or 10% of the time?
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the big bosses in the party have a lot of industries that they run. They're probably realizing that:
1) Intellectual Property and Copyright laws are becoming acceptable in most of the world
2) Pretty soon they won't be just manufacturing things, they will be designing and selling Chinese ideas on foreign soil.
Sorry, but hardly anyone America can compel anyone in China to do anything. They are in their second millennium of being a civilization. They are stockpiling oil, uranium, and millions of tons of other raw materials with all of the American dollars they have. They will be the major economy of the 21st Century, no matter what we do. They are probably looking into the future, and realizing they will have no legal pretext to sue or invade if we start pirating their technology, unless they start obeying the "law" now.
Yes, Comrade!
Whenever I receive a communique from their headquarters, I know I can trust it fully without hesitation or rational thought process. This is the beauty of being inside the One, True Market, where no company has ever lied about their activities before.
Seriously though, if Microsoft released a similar statement, your bullshit detector would have exploded. I don't trust any PR from anyone. Do you think they don't have closed door conversations about destroying competition on an hourly basis? Do you think they're dumb enough to have them on the record?
Because posting snide and hollow comments has worked out great for your argument.
This is why we need the power to compel referendums for city or county wide issues, and make sure the heads of all departments can be kicked out at the next yearly election by direct democratic action.
Get 1% of the population to sign a petition, get your spot on the ballot, and voila! Government officials miraculously stop acting like they own the place. I know they have some similar policies out West, but know of none in the East.
This is spoken like someone who has never lived in a rough neighborhood.
First of all, the gun homicide rate in the United States is astronomical compared to any other western nation. That's simply a fact. Second, lack of health care does lead to huge health problems. Let's say I have bad teeth, I'm 14 years old, my parents are both addicts and have basically abandoned me, never taught me to brush my teeth (much less floss) and I have never held more than $100 in my two hands my entire life. Am I going to some how gather $50 and go see a dentist? Probably not. Am I going to walk up to school and suffer through the shame of asking my teacher if she can help? Probably not. So my teeth get worse. One day, I wake up in the middle of the night with pain shooting through the left side of my head. The ambulance is sent. The ER removes the ruptured tooth. Cost to society: 10k? 20k? Cost to me: $0.
Now, I'm not saying this situation couldn't have been overcome by a proactive school nurse, or a teacher, or a church leader. But I am saying that it's unlikely.
As far as obesity is concerned, when you can't go outside for fear of getting shot, and the only foods your parents buy are the cheapest processed foods and flavored sodas (that are cheaper than juice and sometimes even water) this is a predictable result. And once a child with no insurance gets diabetes, the cost of providing them with good nutrition will seem like a pittance.
We can do nothing. We can let the cycle continue, and wonder why poverty stricken areas can't just pick themselves up out of the ghetto. Or we can understand why, lend a helping hand to another member of our society, and save some money in the process.
The really grotesque and despicable undertone to all of this really is the most obvious: rich people do not want to be in line with poor people. It's as simple as that. They feel they deserve better everything, no matter how little they've worked for it, or how many people they've stepped on to arrive at their current situation. This again, is predictable, when solidarity and helping your fellow man matters far less than how many luxuries you are able to afford for yourself.
This is not unusual as most in the media, including Internet media, are liberal and will only allow their talking points to be heard. It's funny how the group that screams for equal treatment and equal rights is so quick to silence any that oppose them.
I hear this argument all of the time. The reason internet media seems liberal is because it's more likely to be run by individuals or smaller corporations. People who don't automatically take the side of corporate interest over themselves, as most media corporations do. And as far as "left" and "right" are concerned, America is far more conservative than any other country in the West. Our overseas caricature is holding a gun and a bible for good reason. In other countries, they actually have communist and socialist parties that join in the discussion, without some schmuck screaming bloody murder the whole time.
I don't consider Obama a savior or anything. He was simply the lesser of two evils. He's quickly discovering that it doesn't matter how many people support healthcare reform (70%, with 50% wanting a "major" overhaul), if the change in policy affects too many big players in the corporate world. Insurance companies don't just lie down and let you force them to start playing by rules and making less money. Money pours into propaganda campaigns, and are usually successful. They will lie through their teeth to keep the profits rolling in, truth and ethics be damned.
In a sense, this is no different than a Democratic representative, meek and mild, turning into a lunatic when you threaten the jobs of their constituents who happen to build fighter jets that simply aren't useful for defense as they used to be.
And as far as parodies are concerned, there was a sitcom called "That's My Bush" that was on air within months of his inauguration, because he was so laughably inept, even in the beginning. I don't hesitate to remind everyone that at this point in his first term, Bush had taken a lot of vacations, given the Taliban 40 million dollars for their help with the war on drugs, and was nearly assassinated by a pretzel. Obama may do just as poorly, but so far, he's still got a chance for my vote next go around.
There is no free market in any of those. Banks, if they are federally chartered need to follow Federal Reserve and FDIC regulations.
The reason they are federally regulated is because before the creation of the FDIC and the rules of the Great Depression, there were bank panics every ten years during the 19th Century. You can read about them - the panics of 1819, 1825, 1837, 1847, 1857, 1866, 1873, 1884, 1890, 1893. This was before the move to a fiat money system, so don't try scapegoating that.
Your comments about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not only factually incorrect, but entirely misleading. The sub-prime mortgages were popularized in the private market before Fannie and Freddie joined in the fun. This is not to say they were well run, but they were not any worse off than other participants in the whole mess. In fact, given the most recent data, Fannie and Freddie are faring better than private mortgage holders.
Your comments about health care are fine in theory, as is all economics, because it's based on the fairy tale of "all else being equal." There are dozens of western countries who have found a non-market solution to the health care problem, they are living just as long, they are paying less, and their people are happier with their care than we are with ours. In a vacuum, the free market can solve everything, just like communism. As learned elsewhere, if you can't disprove an argument in your own head, that means the argument is an extremely poor one.
Duplicating infrastructure is simply stupid. Even the founders understood this, so they gave government the power to make roads and manage interstate commerce. The main reason is because the amount of monopolies that would spring up would be tremendous, because you would then be asking the question of "How much are you willing to pay for running water and sewage?" versus "How much does it cost your local government to provide running water and sewage?" With the first question, if 20% of the society can afford $100 a day, and 80% of the society can only afford $1 a day, what is the incentive for the company to run sewage to the poorest members of society? What is the damage done to that society as a result? If a society next door provides all the same services to everyone for $1 a day, how long do you think it would take before they are far surpassing their stupid neighbors in life expectancy, education, and general health? The answers to these questions aren't hard to arrive at.
Ah, competition. If one insurer won't offer good insurance another will. People always complain about the competition of outsourcing but refuse to acknowledge the same thing can drive their own cost down too. To them competition is always bad.
If there were some mechanism to have a fall back private insurer, this might make sense, but as far as I'm aware insurance companies will not give you insurance if you have a pre-existing condition, meaning there's no way to get well once you are out of the loop. It's their goal, therefore, to throw you out of that loop once you get expensive, which is usually when you need insurance the most.
Again, you are only burdening your society if you make each generation relearn from the same mistakes. We evolve as a society not when everyone starts from zero, but from when you start with the lessons of the previous generation as a guide. There is no free market reason why Blue Cross couldn't bonus their top employees millions of dollars until the company was bankrupt, and then throw all of their customers into the street with no coverage and no refund of the money they've paid in. This means that your well-being is dependent on the lack of greed from a human being who never has to confront you face to face.
This is an important thing to remember about the free market theory. It depends on equality, which is why Adam
Before the institution of Medicare and Medicaid, health care costs rose at the same rate as inflation. Immediately after the institution of Medicare and Medicaid, health care costs bean rising much faster than inflation.
Do you have a citation for this? As far as I can tell, health care costs have doubled since 2000. Medicare and Medicaid were started in the 60s. Could it be that insurance companies were invested too heavily in the stock market to make extra profits, and were then forced to overcharge their customers and deny procedures in order to cover their ass? Sounds like a likely scenario to me.
And my question is, what are you going to do when the people making those decision are the government, so there is no longer anybody to turn to to challenge their decisions?
This of course depends on a healthy democracy, who are willing to participate in the governance of themselves. Right now, if you have coverage with BCBS, and they deny your coverage, you can sue and hopefully get treatment before it's too late, if you win the case at all. In every other country with a single payer system, you just go to a doctor and get treatment. In most countries you don't even have to fill out any paperwork. And they pay about half of what we do, and have the same life expectancy.
I fail to see how this helps your side of the argument.
This is nonsensical.
The solution to bad government regulation is effective government regulation. Countries all over the world have effectively run networks that are under the control of the people through democratic action, not subject to the skew of the profit desires of some private entity.
There are some things that cannot operate in a totally free market, like banking, health care, and utilities. The reason is because modern societies require these things to operate, and they should not be left to the wild swings and herd mentality of the market. Nor should my ability to get health care be affected by someone else's incentive to deny me health care. Nor should a banker be allowed to repackage bad debt as good debt through collusion with another company and sell it to me. Nor should a private company be my only option for local utilities service.
Let me put it like this: if there's a free, unregulated market for MP3 players, that's fine. Duke it out. Screw your customers. Worst case scenario, they have a broken MP3 player and they don't have the money anymore.
If there's a free unregulated healthcare market, don't be surprised if you end up with corporations who don't care if children die of leukemia if they can get out of providing care on a technicality. They have no obligation to do the right thing, and their shareholders only know of a single value: profit. Worse case scenario: you are dead, or at least bankrupt for the rest of your life.
Internet access probably falls somewhere in the middle.
Citation?
The FCC has no interest in protecting individual rights or promoting a competitive market. They are there to sell off public assets to private corporations, and enforce rules and fines to ensure societal conformity to the morals of politically important voting blocs.
If Comcast is prevented from acquiring someone due to federal interference, they will probably sue because they will claim that the free market is being tampered with. Just like any corporation, their definition of free market has nothing to do with the liberty of individuals to have access to a competitive market system. It has to do with the corporate right to be unbound by any rules and have the freedom to stifle competition and destroy the market for their own profit.
To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the publick; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens... It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it. --Adam Smith
As long as you can keep the people who lied about their own miracles away from the methodology that makes breakthrough science possible.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/star-wars-fake-fooled-the-world-1461979.html
I see a press release from the people who claim to have pulled it off... which doesn't mean a thing.
Everyone alive right now is going to seem dumb to any generation that follows as they discover new science.
You just have the added bonus of being a douchebag as well as an idiot.
You just need to change the way networks are built.
In my opinion, the best way to operate infrastructure is to move governance to a county level for what work gets done. The county government owns the line and the towers, and charges a base rate to any carrier that wants to provide service. At the county level, they can choose to subsidize infrastructure or charge the full cost to the carrier (which then would get paid for by the consumer).
You can have local shops provide local service, regional and national chains provide whiz-bang features for a premium, and of course the option of having extremely basic services for people who are under a certain income level provided directly by the county. But the point here is that you get a real ecosystem of competition, not a conglomerate that runs half the country because it has more financial resources.
This can work for all types of infrastructure too. Roads, banking systems, electricity, whatever. Keep the citizenry within reach of controlling the infrastructure, and I guarantee it will be reliable, accountable, and cheap.
Sure there will be corruption, but nothing on the scale of what's already happening inside the beltway today. It's tough to hide that new Cadillac when you live among people who will wonder where you got the money from. And you'll fix problems more quickly not only because you are doing good work for your neighbors, but also because you don't want to get harassed the next time you go to dinner about the lines being down last week.
That only gets you to a deist point of view. Theism is a huge leap from "I don't understand, so a Creator did it" to "I don't understand, but out of thousands of holy books, THIS one is correct."
To be a member of an Abrahamic religion and take their books literally, you have to believe:
1. You can cure leprosy by killing a bird on an alter, and dipping another bird in it's blood. (Judaism)
2. That if a man is mentally disturbed, one way to cure him is to drive the "demons" in him into a flock of pigs who then commit suicide by running off a cliff. (Christianity)
3. That ants can talk and there are evil spirits called djinns all around us at all times. (Islam)
All of these beliefs are frankly stupid. Evidenced by the fact that every religion has been dragged kicking and screaming into the future, because where there is free thought and true free will and the scientific method, religion offers very little.
PS Any responses that don't directly admit to believing in such petty parlor tricks as a literalist are simply white noise.
I didn't say anything about anyone pissing in their pants. 20% of returning Marines have serious mental health problems, whatever their performance was on the ground. Until now, they have been mostly recycled back into duty without treatment, since there aren't enough people signing up. So much so, Marines are still subject to stop loss. Doesn't sound like a volunteer force to me.
If there's any other propaganda you'd like to regurgitate, though, please feel free. I mean, as long as you have permission to do so.
And by the way, perhaps I would piss in my pants in that situation. I don't know, since I've never been in a war. But I also wouldn't sign up for any theater the US is engaged in, since it offers no benefit for our security or for anyone else's freedom.
This is more about controlling the message to the populace than protecting the troops. In order to keep public support, you have to present a nice rosy picture that has nothing to do with the realities on the ground. This is just another measure the Pentagon is taking to make sure they can lie about their progress and not get called on it.
If the American public read the diaries of combat troops, the war would end in a heartbeat. Having a general pointing at a map and rattling off statistics is an entirely different experience than reading about how a kid who's barely out of high school doesn't want to die, and is nearly cracking under the pressure of killing people in a country he couldn't point to on a map a year earlier.
The war on terrorism is a complete joke. It's like a war on blitzkrieg offensives or the war on shock and awe. You can't defeat a tactic. We will continue to lose it because there is no attainable mission. There is no end game. Only endless war.
Once you start legitimizing the insane ramblings of jihadists by referring to good and evil, you lose. They have millions of people they can convince to fight to the death, especially when you're a foreigner treading on someone else's soil. The cost of deploying a peasant to a part of his own country with a box of ammo and a Kalishnikov might as well be zero.
For a good talk on the subject, check this out. It's good, but any rhetoric watched thereafter will make your blood boil.
What is with this thread? The GP stated "The true indicator of Microsoft considering itself to have real competition is when it starts pricing its products competitively." I stated that Microsoft does have a competitive price point, even by Mac fanboy standards.
I have a MacBook Pro, and it is too fucking expensive. I could've bought a nice semi-rugged Dell, or a ridiculously quick Precision, but I have clients on Macs, Windows, and Linux, so I triple boot.
I was saying Microsoft does have products competitively priced. If you really want to think about it, using any other product but Microsoft is more expensive for the average person.
(I'm speaking about small business here, who cannot afford an IT department.)
Let's give Linux a mile lead and say it's $400 extra to have the licenses for a Windows box versus a Linux box. How much is your average office worker going to be paid? $20 an hour. So, if they lose 20 hours over the life of the machine, Linux loses the price benefit.
I have multiple clients on 2003/XP networks with sane anti-virus and backup systems who call with PEBKACs and little else. They've been up since 03 or 04. A five person setup was about 6k, plus $750 for anti-virus subscriptions for five years. That's $270 a year per employee, or $20 a month. With Linux, it would be $13.33 a month, under the assumption that they would never need a windows program. You'd also have to assume that they never had to fuss with any document compatibility, browser incompatibility, or extra work because they didn't have a good program for the job, like Visio or Adobe Photoshop.
Where's the value? Sure, get a company with a 100 or 1000 employees, and it starts to make more sense. But not for the vast majority of small businesses.
Hmm...
Cheapest Apple Laptop: $999
Similar Vista Laptop:
$600
+200 Full Office Suite
+ 99 Adobe Elements
+ 99 Anti-Virus
----
$998
Looks like they're competitively priced to me.
The Geobacter biofilm's "fortuitous" electron-transferring skill, the product of natural selection, suggested a pathway to Lovley - a way he might use selective pressure to increase its capacity to produce power. He and colleagues grew Geobacter as usual on a graphite electrode, providing acetate as food and allowing a colony to form the biologically active slime, or biofilm where electron transfer takes place across the nanowires. But for this new experiment they added a tiny, 400-millivolt "pushback" current in the electrode that forced Geobacter to press harder to get rid of its electrons.
The result of providing a more challenging environment, within five short months, Lovley notes, was evolution of a beefed-up microorganism that can press at least eight times more electric current across the electrode than the original strain. âoeI'm really happy with this outcome," the microbiologist notes. "It's exceptionally fast feedback to us and a very satisfying result." He adds, "I'm still a little amazed that they make electricity, but I'm happy to be exploring how to harness that ability. I'm sure there'll be applications developed in the future that we canâ(TM)t even envision right now."
That's halfway down in the article.
You should try reading things before you try to debunk them. The environment will be created to get the most electricity out of the little microbes, and probably sealed off and not thrown in the dirt. I imagine there may even be filters in place where the waste comes into make sure that any natural predators are weakened or killed to continue allowing the organisms to thrive.
And they have been studying this organism since 1987, and examining it for electrical production since 2002. I'm glad you're skeptical, but not glad that you're commenting on something you didn't even bother to read.
But not cheaper than renting the truck when you need it, and driving the efficient vehicle around the rest of the time.
Electric vehicles are nearly twice as efficient as ICEs converting their energy store into forward motion. Even if electric energy was 50% more expensive than gasoline energy, it would still save you money.
But again - why choose 15mpg when you can choose 120mpg or much more than that if you're hooked up to a solar powered energy source? And why not choose the absolute reduction of going (almost) completely oil free, and moving power conversion to a central location where efficiency improvement are much more effective? Why not move to an electric engine which is 90% efficient and not 30 or 40% efficient at converting it's energy store into forward movement?
Why continue to drive around a V8 100% of the time when you only need it's hauling capacity 5 or 10% of the time?