you can't import socialism to America. To do so would be the death of the nation as all the welfare recipients would suck it dry
Of course. If we had UHC then people would run around getting sick or injured as much as possible so they could maximize their use of those government benefits.
How could health care get any more socialist than single-payer?
Socialize the entire health care industry, instead of just the insurance. The NHS is close to that. I'm not in favor of it, and I can't think of other developed countries that have it.
They are on a slippery slope though. Next thing you know they'll have socialized police departments, fire departments, school tuition, roads, military, etc.
Have Joseph Stalin personally give you your annual checkup?
I heard Uncle Joe wasn't always good for your health.
but the fact is that single-payer health care abolishes an entire industry-- even if it's one that many of us intensely dislike-- and turns it over to the state
If you don't like that, try the German or Swiss system, where highly regulated non-profit companies provide insurance. They are private sector.
As for "turning it over to the state", data from around the world says that they do it more efficiently that the for-profit companies in the US. Should we subsidize deadwood because it's in the private sector? Now that's socialism at its worst.
The discussion you commented on was not about Dell in particular, whose layoffs may be necessary. However those "temporary jobs" are also with successful, profitable companies in stable or growing industries. That's the part that's bull.
The real problem is that people think that there is a free lunch.
I don't know anybody who thinks there is a free lunch, but I do know people who ignore facts. For example, all those countries with their evil socialist healthcare pay at least 1/3 less (%/GDP) than the US for universal coverage and outcomes just as good. I'm not so much an evil socialist as a cheap bastard. I'm tired of getting ripped off.
Health care ended up being tied to employment because everybody worked.
You're ignorant of history. Health care ended up being tied to employment because there was a wage freeze during WWII, but a loophole let employers add benefits.
It was our grandparents who made this nation the greatest in the world.
And it was our grandparents who fought (sometimes literally) for better wages and working conditions, Social Security, and a host of other evil things. If it hadn't been for the employer based health insurance in WWII, we'd likely have gotten UHC in the late 40's. We also would have saved trillions of dollars because of it.
Universal Healthcare will be part of that after Obamacare fails
Let's hope we don't become a socialist hellhole like Canada, Australia or Japan.
Just join the Occupy Wallstreet crowd and stand in line for a government handout.
If you want a handout you'd be better off on Wall Street. The banks got handouts that are beyond the wildest dreams of anybody in the OWS crowd.
I was laid off a couple of years ago from an employer which had a high average age
A charming aspect of our for-profit health insurance system is that this is a concern for employers, which leads to age discrimination. Even under Obamacare you can have a 3:1 range depending on age. If we're going to have that kind of crap, why not go back to the old system where insurance would cost a fortune if you had existing health problems. How is that any more discriminatory? No other country does it this way. In Germany for example, where insurance is mostly handled by non-profit insurance companies, you can only vary premium costs depending on where you live. Like other countries, the per capita health care expenses are at least a third less than the US (as a %/GDP - the difference is greater if you use exchange rate or PPP).
Yes, I'm in my 50's. If I have to go back to COBRA or "open market", that will cream me. It's ok to screw me because of my age, but the fact that I'm in good health doesn't buy me anything. Basically I spent decades subsidizing the health care of those who were older or less healthy than me. I'd be fine with that, except now that I'm older it's a big "SCREW YOU".
The ACA is, to put it charitably, a day late and a dollar short. I honestly hope it's better having that piece of garbage than not, but the only way that will really be true is if it leads to further changes. The US is the only country to rely on for-profit companies as the source of basic health insurance.
Fuck getting used to it. You should deal with the reality of it, but "getting used to it" means thinking of it as something that's reasonable. That's bull. A few decades ago this was not the norm. Large successful companies didn't do it. IBM started a "no layoffs" policy during the Great Depression and IIRC they did okay afterwards. This "we are all temporary employees" has nothing to do with any essential new business requirements, and everything to do with politics and a shift back towards the Gilded Age.
I seem to recall the markets applauding big companies that "slashed costs" by layoffs, even though the long-term results might be disastrous.
Believe it or not, once upon a time layoffs would cause a company's stock price to fall. The markets figured, usually correctly, that layoffs meant the company was in trouble. In Dell's case I'm afraid the layoffs might be necessary, as the company is in serious trouble, but when profitable companies have needless layoffs, it's ridiculous. You can almost always make the company's finances look better in the short term with layoffs.
The best analogy I've heard (and this from a serious business analyst) is that many of these companies are like the participants in a body building contest. For those that don't know, they usually take lots of diuretics and what not for a few days before the contest to increase muscle definition. It also leaves them weak as hell. You could probably knock them over with a feather. That's the way a lot of companies are these days. Superficially they look great on the balance sheet, but they're actually quite weak when it comes to anything beyond the next quarter.
At least they get health coverage for the next 18 months.
If they can afford it. The charming thing about COBRA is that you get hit paying 100% of premiums when you can least afford it. Heaven forbid that we become a bunch of commies like those Canucks. I've heard that even the snow is red up there.
Even though I'm often skeptical of Java's performance, I'll play the devil's advocate here and point out that Emacs is written in elisp, which runs on a byte code interpreter and is garbage collected. Despite the jokes, it doesn't have as much stuff as Eclipse, but still it runs fast.
Thank you for that link, as it's probably quite useful.
However, addressing Eclipse rather than you, I've never used any other IDE that required a user adjustment in heap memory settings. There's something wrong with that.
I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that it's written in Java. Seriously, I don't know but I'm curious. This is not meant as flamebait (though I'm still glad I wore my Nomex undies today).
Whenever I see Java benchmarks, they let a program "warm up" (like it was made of vacuum tubes) before taking benchmark numbers. For things that run many times over, like server side stuff, that makes sense. But what about client side stuff like Eclipse? Does anybody have benchmarks for non-JIT'ed code? I understand you have to run the same piece of code many times (I've heard 10k) before it will be JIT'ed. A similar issue with memory. It seems that in order to run efficiently you need a heap that's much bigger than what you'd need if things were "manually" allocated/deallocated.
no positive effect on the number of engineering students
How do you know that? I believe Germany has had that system for a long time, so there is no basis for comparison to a situation where the education wasn't tuition free.
You do not study engineering if you do not want be an engineer.
Agreed, but what if you can't afford to study engineering? That does not happen in Germany, since there is no tuition. In the US the situation is awful, with students taking on enormous debt.
I only fear shoddy implementations similar to those in other industries
Not the GP, but you raise good points. The only way to deal with that is described by what some consider a dirty word: regulation. We have regulation of food and water quality, which especially in the former is far from perfect, but a helluva lot better than a completely unregulated situation. This seems like something that should be regulated in a similar way. The trick is to establish guidelines and regulations before this becomes a major industry.
You make a good point. IIRC it takes a lot more animal manure (in weight and volume) to fertilize a field than artificial fertilizer. That wasn't a problem when many or most farms raised both livestock and crops (I believe the Amish still do it that way). If they're far apart though transportation costs and energy become a problem, which I imagine is the same whether you're using livestock or human waste. I wonder if that's less of an issue with urine though? How much energy would be required to evaporate it down to where it's more concentrated? Could it be done with solar, for example? Also, if this works with human urine, how would it work with livestock urine?
Slashdot Mirror
*cough* Nokia *cough*
You'd exploit children that way? I thought that's what illegal aliens are for.
you can't import socialism to America. To do so would be the death of the nation as all the welfare recipients would suck it dry
Of course. If we had UHC then people would run around getting sick or injured as much as possible so they could maximize their use of those government benefits.
How could health care get any more socialist than single-payer?
Socialize the entire health care industry, instead of just the insurance. The NHS is close to that. I'm not in favor of it, and I can't think of other developed countries that have it.
They are on a slippery slope though. Next thing you know they'll have socialized police departments, fire departments, school tuition, roads, military, etc.
Have Joseph Stalin personally give you your annual checkup?
I heard Uncle Joe wasn't always good for your health.
but the fact is that single-payer health care abolishes an entire industry-- even if it's one that many of us intensely dislike-- and turns it over to the state
If you don't like that, try the German or Swiss system, where highly regulated non-profit companies provide insurance. They are private sector.
As for "turning it over to the state", data from around the world says that they do it more efficiently that the for-profit companies in the US. Should we subsidize deadwood because it's in the private sector? Now that's socialism at its worst.
The discussion you commented on was not about Dell in particular, whose layoffs may be necessary. However those "temporary jobs" are also with successful, profitable companies in stable or growing industries. That's the part that's bull.
We won't be competitive again until we go back to the days when children had to beg for food on the street.
We should make that illegal too. Go die quietly, without annoying your betters.
The real problem is that people think that there is a free lunch.
I don't know anybody who thinks there is a free lunch, but I do know people who ignore facts. For example, all those countries with their evil socialist healthcare pay at least 1/3 less (%/GDP) than the US for universal coverage and outcomes just as good. I'm not so much an evil socialist as a cheap bastard. I'm tired of getting ripped off.
True. Why don't you point out the insightful part?
Health care ended up being tied to employment because everybody worked.
You're ignorant of history. Health care ended up being tied to employment because there was a wage freeze during WWII, but a loophole let employers add benefits.
It was our grandparents who made this nation the greatest in the world.
And it was our grandparents who fought (sometimes literally) for better wages and working conditions, Social Security, and a host of other evil things. If it hadn't been for the employer based health insurance in WWII, we'd likely have gotten UHC in the late 40's. We also would have saved trillions of dollars because of it.
Universal Healthcare will be part of that after Obamacare fails
Let's hope we don't become a socialist hellhole like Canada, Australia or Japan.
Just join the Occupy Wallstreet crowd and stand in line for a government handout.
If you want a handout you'd be better off on Wall Street. The banks got handouts that are beyond the wildest dreams of anybody in the OWS crowd.
I was laid off a couple of years ago from an employer which had a high average age
A charming aspect of our for-profit health insurance system is that this is a concern for employers, which leads to age discrimination. Even under Obamacare you can have a 3:1 range depending on age. If we're going to have that kind of crap, why not go back to the old system where insurance would cost a fortune if you had existing health problems. How is that any more discriminatory? No other country does it this way. In Germany for example, where insurance is mostly handled by non-profit insurance companies, you can only vary premium costs depending on where you live. Like other countries, the per capita health care expenses are at least a third less than the US (as a %/GDP - the difference is greater if you use exchange rate or PPP).
Yes, I'm in my 50's. If I have to go back to COBRA or "open market", that will cream me. It's ok to screw me because of my age, but the fact that I'm in good health doesn't buy me anything. Basically I spent decades subsidizing the health care of those who were older or less healthy than me. I'd be fine with that, except now that I'm older it's a big "SCREW YOU".
It's better than (pre-ACA) open-market plans
The ACA is, to put it charitably, a day late and a dollar short. I honestly hope it's better having that piece of garbage than not, but the only way that will really be true is if it leads to further changes. The US is the only country to rely on for-profit companies as the source of basic health insurance.
Get used to it.
Fuck getting used to it. You should deal with the reality of it, but "getting used to it" means thinking of it as something that's reasonable. That's bull. A few decades ago this was not the norm. Large successful companies didn't do it. IBM started a "no layoffs" policy during the Great Depression and IIRC they did okay afterwards. This "we are all temporary employees" has nothing to do with any essential new business requirements, and everything to do with politics and a shift back towards the Gilded Age.
I give up, what do you mean by Torts? To me they're a matter of civil law, and we've got plenty of them.
I will however always refuse to say "about" funny.
I seem to recall the markets applauding big companies that "slashed costs" by layoffs, even though the long-term results might be disastrous.
Believe it or not, once upon a time layoffs would cause a company's stock price to fall. The markets figured, usually correctly, that layoffs meant the company was in trouble. In Dell's case I'm afraid the layoffs might be necessary, as the company is in serious trouble, but when profitable companies have needless layoffs, it's ridiculous. You can almost always make the company's finances look better in the short term with layoffs.
The best analogy I've heard (and this from a serious business analyst) is that many of these companies are like the participants in a body building contest. For those that don't know, they usually take lots of diuretics and what not for a few days before the contest to increase muscle definition. It also leaves them weak as hell. You could probably knock them over with a feather. That's the way a lot of companies are these days. Superficially they look great on the balance sheet, but they're actually quite weak when it comes to anything beyond the next quarter.
At least they get health coverage for the next 18 months.
If they can afford it. The charming thing about COBRA is that you get hit paying 100% of premiums when you can least afford it. Heaven forbid that we become a bunch of commies like those Canucks. I've heard that even the snow is red up there.
That makes sense, though it also helps explain Java's slow startup times.
I guess people are stuck with this "eclipse is slow" opinion
It makes sense to be stuck with it when it comes from recent personal observations.
There are Java applications that are far more complex and require far higher stability and performance than Eclipse that work just fine.
Can you name some "client side" (something you'd run on your PC) pieces of software like that? Serious question - no snark.
Even though I'm often skeptical of Java's performance, I'll play the devil's advocate here and point out that Emacs is written in elisp, which runs on a byte code interpreter and is garbage collected. Despite the jokes, it doesn't have as much stuff as Eclipse, but still it runs fast.
Thank you for that link, as it's probably quite useful.
However, addressing Eclipse rather than you, I've never used any other IDE that required a user adjustment in heap memory settings. There's something wrong with that.
It's still a sluggish bloated memory hog ...
I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that it's written in Java. Seriously, I don't know but I'm curious. This is not meant as flamebait (though I'm still glad I wore my Nomex undies today).
Whenever I see Java benchmarks, they let a program "warm up" (like it was made of vacuum tubes) before taking benchmark numbers. For things that run many times over, like server side stuff, that makes sense. But what about client side stuff like Eclipse? Does anybody have benchmarks for non-JIT'ed code? I understand you have to run the same piece of code many times (I've heard 10k) before it will be JIT'ed. A similar issue with memory. It seems that in order to run efficiently you need a heap that's much bigger than what you'd need if things were "manually" allocated/deallocated.
Welcome to Slashdot, where a joke gets you a -1. Some mod needs another cup of coffee.
no positive effect on the number of engineering students
How do you know that? I believe Germany has had that system for a long time, so there is no basis for comparison to a situation where the education wasn't tuition free.
You do not study engineering if you do not want be an engineer.
Agreed, but what if you can't afford to study engineering? That does not happen in Germany, since there is no tuition. In the US the situation is awful, with students taking on enormous debt.
I only fear shoddy implementations similar to those in other industries
Not the GP, but you raise good points. The only way to deal with that is described by what some consider a dirty word: regulation. We have regulation of food and water quality, which especially in the former is far from perfect, but a helluva lot better than a completely unregulated situation. This seems like something that should be regulated in a similar way. The trick is to establish guidelines and regulations before this becomes a major industry.
You make a good point. IIRC it takes a lot more animal manure (in weight and volume) to fertilize a field than artificial fertilizer. That wasn't a problem when many or most farms raised both livestock and crops (I believe the Amish still do it that way). If they're far apart though transportation costs and energy become a problem, which I imagine is the same whether you're using livestock or human waste. I wonder if that's less of an issue with urine though? How much energy would be required to evaporate it down to where it's more concentrated? Could it be done with solar, for example? Also, if this works with human urine, how would it work with livestock urine?