This all depends on what happens to affirmative action now. Either:
1) Obama worked his way to become president under his own will and affirmative action is no longer necessary. or 2) Obama has been elected president due (at least in part) to the color of his skin and not the content of his character.
...But credit default swaps, for example, were completely unregulated...
Quite the opposite, they were regulated badly. They were being required to give loans to people that they would not normally give loans to for the obvious reason of "can't pay them back." Under premise that these people just needed to be given a chance.
Well there's a reason they weren't getting the loans in the first place and now we have to suffer the government involvement.
Is this because GNU wants to endorse the Create Commons license in stead of the GFDL? It seems a little strange that someone can throw a fit and get a provision in the next GFDL to re license under another license. Really kinda scares me with the suggested..or later version.. clause that is in a lot of software. What happens when Redhat sponsors GPLv4 with the clause to migrate to the RPL (Redhat Proprietary License)?
Umm, did someone try to fix the buggy whip? Or did you mean Wayland is a buggy WIP?
The buggy whip example is to illustrate the attempt to mandate halting progress by hindering it with government intervention. It therefore doesn't really apply here.
This is a good thing. Anything less reduces incentive to create more, anything more reduces desire to buy. It's called supply and demand.
Also, No selling 100 pills at $100 a piece is not better than selling 10,000 pills at $10 each. When after development they are only $.05 to manufacture. If you are near capacity for production though you can calculate how many you will sell in each location and set prices in free markets as to make up for prices in government controlled areas.
Perhaps it's different by state, but when I didn't have insurance in college I was in a motorcycle accident. I ended up with $46k in medical bills. I told them I didn't have insurance and the quickly dropped it down to just over $10K. This was for ambulance, emergency room, MRI, X-ray, surgery, and 5 days in the hospital.
Not at a loss. First you have to understand how a drug is made. First millions to billions are invested in research in creating the drug, then more millions to billions are invested into testing the drug. Then millions are spent in perfecting the manufacturing process. Only after all this are pills (or what ever distribution method) created at near nothing per individual pill. So where it may only cost $1 to make a bottle of drug X, the initial investment also needs to be recouped.
So while technically selling it for $20 in another country isn't a loss, (still making $19) it both isn't the market value and may be such a small amount that it will never recoup the investment costs. To make up for this they will charge $200 in places that they can. If it was mandated to $20 everywhere then it would just never get made. If it was allowed to run at market value it may be $100 or $50 or perhaps even $200. They put up the risk why shouldn't they also reap the benefits?
What a bizarre and twisted view you have on the world. A few corrupt rich people doesn't equate too all rich people being corrupt. You must be one of those typical poor shlubs who are not willing to work for anything and want the mommy-state to take care of you.
Actually they can only deny you if you lapse in coverage. If you shop around and get a new insurance policy then cancel your old one the next day they are required to cover you for everything the previous one would.
For dealing with the incompetent provider, make malpractice a criminal penalty, instead of a civil penalty. In other words, throw the incompetent ass in jail. That should weed out most of the incompetents that are only in it for the money.
Only possible way that this could be done is if malpractice was limited to willful intent to harm. Which I believe is illegal in most places. By having malpractice included everything from misdiagnosis to stitching up a sponge is ridicules. If negligence is involved then they should have to pay to fix it. If gorse negligence is involved then pain and suffering may be awarded as well. Perhaps we should put programmers in a criminal court room to answer for every bug found in software.
Umm, isn't that the Doctor that's the parasite on the insurance company? He can charge you less, but he'll take the max the insurance company will pay for a given office visit?
I'd like to see a truthful example of this from a reputable insurance company. I had an over $100k back and spinal surgery done on a pre-existing motorcycle accident, (broken L2 and L3) from 4 years before I got insurance. I payed the $10 co-pay for the first visit and that was it. I have no problems getting insurance even though I survived.
If car insurance companies were large enough and powerful enough that almost all car repair happened under their banner, letting them force repair shops into setting prices low for them and high for everyone else, you might have a point.
Except with health insurance it's the exact opposite. Prices are set high for the insurance company and often times much lower for cash payments. It depends on the Doctor of course. If an insurance company says it will reimburse $200 for procedure A then that's what a Doctor will bill the insurance company. Even if he can still make a good living charging $100. In fact, many Doctors will gladly take the $100 cash if you are uninsured.
With respect to the purchasing of medicines, it is a statement when I can go to a different country and buy the same med's, and it is cheaper to fly there, buy pills, and fly back; then it is to buy it here in the U.S.. FYI, the pills seem to work just as good as the pills here at home.
This is how other countries suck off the US economy to fund their social medicine programs. By artificially lowering the market value of the drugs in their country it requires drug companies to artificially raise the price in others to make up the difference.
Another statement is that the Insurance company's can discriminate who they can do business with. Any other business would be staring up at an angry judge if they practiced what the Insurance company's get away with.
Happens all the time. Some places even post it with a sign, "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."
Also, I remember a time when Doctors made house calls. Back then, you went to the Hospital because you were dieing.
It was also far more expensive then as well. They weren't making house calls to middle class families. Poor people would never get more than what ever Mom knew.
I guess I haven't wrapped my mind around the part where Insurance company's can make more money from dead people than from live people?! To my way of thinking, when a person dies, they stop paying into the system. The goal shouldn't be to cut off the client when they get sick, but to find ways to keep the client paying into the system; and without any payment gaps.
If you have an expensive individual health insurance plan of say $500 a month. That's $6,000 a year or from 18-75 $342,000. I know I've racked up over $100k already at 35 due to a motorcycle accident. At some point there has to be a line drawn. You can hope that people go their entire life with nothing but regular checkups then drop dead at the last minute and pronounced dead on the scene in order to only rack up a couple of $k in medical bills over a lifetime but how often is that going to happen.
I personally think that standard coverage should be reduced or removed completely. Insurance shouldn't be for minor annoyances. A $2-5k deductible per year is fine. Insurance is suppose to cover unplanned extreme situations. Not every little problem that comes up. You don't expect your car insurance to pay for your brake pads or burned out tail lights.
And even support from Canonical isn't that important. What businesses need to be able to use Ubuntu is to go to most any software vendors site, drop down their supported platforms list and see Ubuntu on the list. Redhat and SuSE have been working their way into this fairly well. Ubuntu is rarely ever mentioned.
"And I'm pretty much all for that. Who's the dumbshit that was allowing institutions to hand out loans to people without even checking their income level? Yeah, laissez faire is great and all but in its purest form idiots will ruin things. Need a happy middle ground."
This was regulation and strong arming, not dumbshittyness. No bank would ever lend money that it didn't expect to get back unless forced to. If they did they'd be out of business. No, it was the government telling the banks to loan money to people that would not be able to pay it back. It created a nice little short term bubble. Got a few politicians a pat on the back for doing so well, and is now crapped on our heads.
Democrats: We're going to do the wrong thing. (then they ignore that wrong thing and run off and do a different wrong thing)
Republicans: We're going to do the right thing. (then they ignore the right thing and run off with the Democrats and do the wrong thing they were doing)
I remember both Bush campaigns there were people from all over spouting, "If Bush is elected we'll lose our freedom of choice, and abortion will be illegal." Well he's on his way out and that never changed. I know some people that pulled the lever for Kerry almost sole because of that.
Here's a little help. Right now in the US if you are poor you pay no taxes. If you are anywhere in the range of middle class from nearly poor to nearly rich you pay a graduated amount form 10% to 28%. Once you get into the range of being rich you pay as much as 33% of everything you make or more in taxes. Giving the rich a 5% tax break means they still pay more than everybody else, yet feel happier because they pay less then they did. The poor have nothing to complain about but will anyway and the middle class are just upset because they didn't get a tax break, other than in the initial design of it being a break from the get go.
Slashdot Mirror
"I've had it with these mother fucking octopuses on this mother fucking plane!"
This all depends on what happens to affirmative action now. Either:
1) Obama worked his way to become president under his own will and affirmative action is no longer necessary.
or
2) Obama has been elected president due (at least in part) to the color of his skin and not the content of his character.
Trying to find something good about the election.
...But credit default swaps, for example, were completely unregulated...
Quite the opposite, they were regulated badly. They were being required to give loans to people that they would not normally give loans to for the obvious reason of "can't pay them back." Under premise that these people just needed to be given a chance.
Well there's a reason they weren't getting the loans in the first place and now we have to suffer the government involvement.
Is this because GNU wants to endorse the Create Commons license in stead of the GFDL? It seems a little strange that someone can throw a fit and get a provision in the next GFDL to re license under another license. Really kinda scares me with the suggested ..or later version.. clause that is in a lot of software. What happens when Redhat sponsors GPLv4 with the clause to migrate to the RPL (Redhat Proprietary License)?
http://maemo.org/maemo_training_material/maemo4.x/html/maemo_Getting_Started/images/captures/xephyr_empty.png
Umm, did someone try to fix the buggy whip? Or did you mean Wayland is a buggy WIP?
The buggy whip example is to illustrate the attempt to mandate halting progress by hindering it with government intervention. It therefore doesn't really apply here.
which is exactly what I had said.
"...whatever the market would bear."
This is a good thing. Anything less reduces incentive to create more, anything more reduces desire to buy. It's called supply and demand.
Also, No selling 100 pills at $100 a piece is not better than selling 10,000 pills at $10 each. When after development they are only $.05 to manufacture. If you are near capacity for production though you can calculate how many you will sell in each location and set prices in free markets as to make up for prices in government controlled areas.
Most hospitals are actually NPO (not for profit) organizations, and work mostly off donations.
Perhaps it's different by state, but when I didn't have insurance in college I was in a motorcycle accident. I ended up with $46k in medical bills. I told them I didn't have insurance and the quickly dropped it down to just over $10K. This was for ambulance, emergency room, MRI, X-ray, surgery, and 5 days in the hospital.
But that makes sense, that's the service they provide.
They are charging you to send mail but then say it's not safe to send mail unless you pay us some more to make it safe.
Not at a loss. First you have to understand how a drug is made. First millions to billions are invested in research in creating the drug, then more millions to billions are invested into testing the drug. Then millions are spent in perfecting the manufacturing process. Only after all this are pills (or what ever distribution method) created at near nothing per individual pill. So where it may only cost $1 to make a bottle of drug X, the initial investment also needs to be recouped.
So while technically selling it for $20 in another country isn't a loss, (still making $19) it both isn't the market value and may be such a small amount that it will never recoup the investment costs. To make up for this they will charge $200 in places that they can. If it was mandated to $20 everywhere then it would just never get made. If it was allowed to run at market value it may be $100 or $50 or perhaps even $200. They put up the risk why shouldn't they also reap the benefits?
What a bizarre and twisted view you have on the world. A few corrupt rich people doesn't equate too all rich people being corrupt. You must be one of those typical poor shlubs who are not willing to work for anything and want the mommy-state to take care of you.
Actually they can only deny you if you lapse in coverage. If you shop around and get a new insurance policy then cancel your old one the next day they are required to cover you for everything the previous one would.
For dealing with the incompetent provider, make malpractice a criminal penalty, instead of a civil penalty. In other words, throw the incompetent ass in jail. That should weed out most of the incompetents that are only in it for the money.
Only possible way that this could be done is if malpractice was limited to willful intent to harm. Which I believe is illegal in most places. By having malpractice included everything from misdiagnosis to stitching up a sponge is ridicules. If negligence is involved then they should have to pay to fix it. If gorse negligence is involved then pain and suffering may be awarded as well. Perhaps we should put programmers in a criminal court room to answer for every bug found in software.
Umm, isn't that the Doctor that's the parasite on the insurance company? He can charge you less, but he'll take the max the insurance company will pay for a given office visit?
I'd like to see a truthful example of this from a reputable insurance company. I had an over $100k back and spinal surgery done on a pre-existing motorcycle accident, (broken L2 and L3) from 4 years before I got insurance. I payed the $10 co-pay for the first visit and that was it. I have no problems getting insurance even though I survived.
If car insurance companies were large enough and powerful enough that almost all car repair happened under their banner, letting them force repair shops into setting prices low for them and high for everyone else, you might have a point.
Except with health insurance it's the exact opposite. Prices are set high for the insurance company and often times much lower for cash payments. It depends on the Doctor of course. If an insurance company says it will reimburse $200 for procedure A then that's what a Doctor will bill the insurance company. Even if he can still make a good living charging $100. In fact, many Doctors will gladly take the $100 cash if you are uninsured.
With respect to the purchasing of medicines, it is a statement when I can go to a different country and buy the same med's, and it is cheaper to fly there, buy pills, and fly back; then it is to buy it here in the U.S.. FYI, the pills seem to work just as good as the pills here at home.
This is how other countries suck off the US economy to fund their social medicine programs. By artificially lowering the market value of the drugs in their country it requires drug companies to artificially raise the price in others to make up the difference.
Another statement is that the Insurance company's can discriminate who they can do business with. Any other business would be staring up at an angry judge if they practiced what the Insurance company's get away with.
Happens all the time. Some places even post it with a sign, "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."
Also, I remember a time when Doctors made house calls. Back then, you went to the Hospital because you were dieing.
It was also far more expensive then as well. They weren't making house calls to middle class families. Poor people would never get more than what ever Mom knew.
I guess I haven't wrapped my mind around the part where Insurance company's can make more money from dead people than from live people?! To my way of thinking, when a person dies, they stop paying into the system. The goal shouldn't be to cut off the client when they get sick, but to find ways to keep the client paying into the system; and without any payment gaps.
If you have an expensive individual health insurance plan of say $500 a month. That's $6,000 a year or from 18-75 $342,000. I know I've racked up over $100k already at 35 due to a motorcycle accident. At some point there has to be a line drawn. You can hope that people go their entire life with nothing but regular checkups then drop dead at the last minute and pronounced dead on the scene in order to only rack up a couple of $k in medical bills over a lifetime but how often is that going to happen.
I personally think that standard coverage should be reduced or removed completely. Insurance shouldn't be for minor annoyances. A $2-5k deductible per year is fine. Insurance is suppose to cover unplanned extreme situations. Not every little problem that comes up. You don't expect your car insurance to pay for your brake pads or burned out tail lights.
...and they charge only a very nominal fee on top of it.
How convenient...
And even support from Canonical isn't that important. What businesses need to be able to use Ubuntu is to go to most any software vendors site, drop down their supported platforms list and see Ubuntu on the list. Redhat and SuSE have been working their way into this fairly well. Ubuntu is rarely ever mentioned.
Because the government felt bad about forcing banks to give out risky loans in the first place.
"And I'm pretty much all for that. Who's the dumbshit that was allowing institutions to hand out loans to people without even checking their income level? Yeah, laissez faire is great and all but in its purest form idiots will ruin things. Need a happy middle ground."
This was regulation and strong arming, not dumbshittyness. No bank would ever lend money that it didn't expect to get back unless forced to. If they did they'd be out of business. No, it was the government telling the banks to loan money to people that would not be able to pay it back. It created a nice little short term bubble. Got a few politicians a pat on the back for doing so well, and is now crapped on our heads.
Yea, I've always seen the two parties as:
Democrats: We're going to do the wrong thing. (then they ignore that wrong thing and run off and do a different wrong thing)
Republicans: We're going to do the right thing. (then they ignore the right thing and run off with the Democrats and do the wrong thing they were doing)
I remember both Bush campaigns there were people from all over spouting, "If Bush is elected we'll lose our freedom of choice, and abortion will be illegal." Well he's on his way out and that never changed. I know some people that pulled the lever for Kerry almost sole because of that.
Here's a little help. Right now in the US if you are poor you pay no taxes. If you are anywhere in the range of middle class from nearly poor to nearly rich you pay a graduated amount form 10% to 28%. Once you get into the range of being rich you pay as much as 33% of everything you make or more in taxes. Giving the rich a 5% tax break means they still pay more than everybody else, yet feel happier because they pay less then they did. The poor have nothing to complain about but will anyway and the middle class are just upset because they didn't get a tax break, other than in the initial design of it being a break from the get go.