The problem is that this -isn't- what everyone else on the planet means by free. It is *sometimes* but not generally, and that's why it's ambigous in english. If someone says that Germany has free elections, nobody thinks they mean the elections do not cost money, they understand that it's free as in freedom.
What you claim; that in every other context on the planet, free means "for zero money" is simply not true. Free Willy ! Live Free, or die trying. You're free to publish any book you want.
It's sometimes about cost, but by no means always. The french (and scandinavians) got it right, we've got two -distinct- words for free as in freedom, and free as in no-cost. (gratis, and libre)
Uhm... No. Just no. Seriously. It's not "maybe you can adjust, but not really interactively", instead it's a single wheel that you turn to adjust shutter speed up or down. Assuming you're thinking of one of the Canon DSLRs from the last 5 years.
Not really that different from analogue at all, and most of the differences that exist are -advantages-, for example you can tell the camera to adjust exposure, and then adjust shutter-speed manually, and the camera will compensate with aperture, so you dial a shorter shutter, and it opens up more, rather than you having to adjust the two independently. (notice that you still -can- adjust them both independently if and when you want to)
recovery-shops can't for reasonable cost even read trough a -single- complete overwrite. Thing is, to even -attempt- doing more than that, you need to swap the electronics, and the costs add up quickly.
99% of the "recoveries" they do consist of recovering data that is on the disc already, but that has been marked as "deleted" in the filesystem. i.e. it's filesystem-recovery not data-block-recovery.
Yes, if there's data on the disc, that you've got reasons to suspect entities would want to pay 6 figures just for a -chance- at getting some of them, you might want to do more. But for average home-computers, a single overwrite is entirely adequate.
You can't trust the checksum, but you can't trust the data you get when you "read" from the file either, so either is about as good as the other, frankly.
There -is- such a thing as a bad investment. Investments that, if you understood them, you'd not buy them. Buy buying only investments you -do- understand, you significantly decrease your risk of ending up with such an investment.
Good point. There's an entire industry in USA that derives a lot of income from, basically, helping people file their taxes. Thus any initiative which makes that easier, to the point that less people require any kind of help, is going to be fought by the industry.
They'll lie, offcourse. They won't say "this initiative would mean less income for us". Instead they'll come up with spurious arguments.
Leverage is also a simple concept. It's my honest opinion that if you don't understand it, you should not do it.
Leverage is just buying stock for $100K with 50K of your own money, and 50K borrowed money. If the stock rice 10%, you've made 20% profit, on the flipside, if the stock falls 50%, you've lost 100% of your investment. There's an extra cost, offcourse, namely the fact that you need to pay interest on the money you borrow.
Everyone who has any kind of debt, yet still own stock, can be said to be leveraged: they're gambling that the stock will rise more than the interest on the debt. That's a really -dumb- gamble in two cases, first if the interest on the debt is high (i.e. credit-card-debt), and second if it's a gamble you can't afford to lose.
On the other hand I have a mortgage, at 3% interest, 2.3% interest after taxes, and also own stock. That's a reasonable gamble, because long-term average-returns on stock are significantly higher than 2.3%, AND (important AND), I can afford to lose the gamble, i.e. my finances are okay, even if the stock -don't- rise, or indeed even if they're wiped out.
I agree that there's privacy-implications. However, one can see it like this:
Certain numbers you are required by law to report to the government when filing your taxes. You could argue that having them not be informed of those numbers directly (from your employer or bank or whatever) is an improvement in privacy. But it's only an improvement for criminals, i.e. those who fail to comply with the legal requirement to truthfully disclose the same information to the same government.
Thus, if you're doing the legal thing today: reporting those numbers to the government. Then the government knows nothing more about you just because they get -exactly- the same information from a different source.
There's a third way, offcourse.
You could let your employer/bank/whatever OPTIONALLY report those numbers, i.e. let everyone -choose- if they want the numbers reported (and thus the tax-filings simplified) or the number not-reported. (like today)
Straight on about the superstition among corporate users. I've seen suggestions for $100K backup-systems for 3TB worth of data, when I've pointed out that actually I handle a larger amount of data at -home-, and I've spent about 1% of that cash for doing so, and yes that includes daily backups for the last week, weekly backups for the last month and monthly backups for the last year stored at two physically distinct locations (actually physically distinct continents:D) they are stunned.
$1000 is a lot of disc, in a world where disc is $70/TB.
Better yet: If you do not understand an investment, don't buy it.
Really. There's no shortage of investments that are *easy* to understand, and the lack of free lunches means that investments you -don't- understand, tend to come with drawbacks that are invisible to you, because you don't understand them.
What's wrong with: "Buy 100 shares of a company with a total of 1M shares, if the company pays a dividend, you get 100/1M of it, if the company goes broke, your investment is lost. There's a $5 fee for the purchase, but other than that no fees or associated costs whatsoever"
A fantastic idea ! Furthermore, have it online. Furthermore, put the data that the govt gets anyway into the forms so that they're partly pre-filled. Indeed, do what we've done in Norway for a decade.
By now it's progressed to the point where I can -literally- file my taxes from my mobile phone in 15 minutes. And it takes that long only because my investments are semi-complex (i.e. some of them are foreign so don't come pre-filled)
Oh, and yeah, it does mean you know how much taxes you owe instantly, after you fill in the forms, you press "calculate taxes", and up pops the answer, none of that file paperwork, wait months for the response.
Re:temp storage and important people
on
Life Recorder
·
· Score: 1
Actually, in a world where a large fraction of people are recording, it's reasonable to assume that -many- will do that, if it's a practical way of thwarting the recording. Recording locally on the device doesn't really help though, as the attacker can just steal the device.
But with work being done unsupervised and handed in, there -is- a method of cheating that is really easy to do, and really hard to detect: Have someone else who is competent do the assignments for you.
I had a pair of identical twins in my class, to this day, they claim that only one of them ever passed the driving-exam, but that he passed it twice. Nobody but them knows if it's true or not, and they decline to say -who- passed.
True enough, many of the people with decreased mobility, can blame themselves for it. True for overweight people, true for smokers with lung-cancer, true for people who're in a wheelchair because they voluntarily decided to have that 4th drink, then drive home anyway.
Despite this, though, you -really- can't tell with a glance if someones core problem is overweight, or something else. Yeah, you can easily tell they're overweight. But it's entirely possible to be disabled -and- overweight. Your legs are among the larger muscle-groups you have, if you can't use them (for whatever reason), the possibilities that you end up being overweight too (in addition to your original problem) is increased.
I can sense electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength between 400nm and 800nm, aproximately, using no devices or other assistance. Where do I apply for my million ?
I can also sense many other wavelengths, for example ir-radiation at a level above say 100W/sqm is detectible using my hand.
I bet I can detect microwaves too, if there's enough of them.
These "savings" are irrelevant and temporary at best. People should remember that the monopolists selling them their crack can set the prices however they please. You can feel perfectly sure that if there's a strong trend to replace a dozen dual-core machines with 4 more powerful machines, doing the same job at 1/3rd the software-licensing-cost, the vendors will simply change their licensing to per-core.
So yes, short-term you may be able to save some money by such trickery. Medium-term it's a zero-sum-game though, the price will fluctuate back to the same point it always was: that point where the vendor believes (rightly or not) that the maximum profit can be made.
Actually, how is a wife going to be a negative ? The oposite is true. Two people have (roughly) double income-earning-potential, whereas the costs of a two-person-household is NOT double that of a one-person-household.
A couple does not need two washing-machines, a double-sized apartment, or two showers. A hotel-room for two, does not cost double of the price for a single, and so on. Overall I estimate a couple need 1.5 times as much money as a single person, to get a comparable standard of living.
Why ? We've got a fibrebundle (around a dozen fibres), it's not owned by us, but we can rent a single fibre across town for around $500/month, yes that's expensive, but it's not out-of-range for most companies, not even smallish companies.
Not that we need 10Gbps for offsite-backup, we currently do it over 100Mbps, and that link isn't on the average even 5% full.
Nah. Since they wheren't panicky, we didn't hide it. The parents knew full well that we slept in the same bed when I came over in the weekend, they didn't explicitly -know- that we where having sex, but it's not as if -that- is a huge surprise at that point. Besides, they where only asking; she could've said "not needed yet".
The thing is, I'd have scored REGARDLESS. (and if not me, someone else would) Unless you're -physically- caging your teenager, she's going to have sex when she -wants- to have sex. Hell I've got unmarried penpals in Iran, whos had sex, even -that- level of control isn't sufficient.
It's just, if they'd been panicky, it'd have happened under stress. We'd have worried about being "discovered", and frankly might well have happened -earlier-.
You don't come out and say so, but it seems to me you'er implying that making kids have sex -later- is for some reason a good thing. And I wouldn't know why. Indeed, a healthy sex life is one of the most wonderful things in life, and that is true for teenagers as much as for older folks, indeed I'd even say that my sex-life was *more* important to me when I was 17 than it is today at double the age.
But you're right; the parents (mine and hers) had a huge impact. They let us experiment in safety and security, rather than stressed out and in hiding. They provided guidance and help, for example by reminding us to consider contraception, yes we would've anyway, but people *more* often end up having sex unprotected when it happens under stress. (for example having parents who'd panic if they accidentally stumbled upon a pack of condoms in your room, isn't conductive to keeping condoms there -- which is a smart thing to do otherwise)
Untrue. You have a choice: Do you want to actually, you know, PARENT your kid, or do you instead decide to panic, and thus leave that task to others. You can behave like a sane human being, and odds is, your kid will be able to talk to you, including about sex and issues surrounding it, such as pregnancy-avoidance. If you're real lucky, they might even consider your opinion borderline relevant.
OR you can run in circles, scream and shout, and thus ensure that your child will -not- ever opt to ask *you* about such issues. Instead, she'll get her information from whatever sources she has, be that the internet, films and movies, or friends.
The parents of my first girlfriend, refrained from panicking. And that was a good thing. It meant the first time she had sex, it was with a boy she knew well and trusted, someone who'd been her boyfriend for months (me), and not, say, in the backseat of some car, intoxicated after a party. It meant she took advantage of the condoms her parents had left in a drawer, and explicitly said they never count and would NOT notice if any went missing. It meant lateron she said "yes" when her mom asked if an appointment with the doctor to get a prescription for the pill would be a good thing. It meant not having to hide, being able to be who we -where-, and overall improved the entire experience for everyone involved.
Panicking is *very* rarely the best choice for a parent. Least of all about something as utterly normal as a teenager developing sexuality.
I think, actually, that your main problem is being too large, in every sense of the word. You're a behemoth, and in many senses the worlds only remaining superpower. (you know something is weird when the top military spender in the world, spend more than the following 5 countries on the list COMBINED)
You're right though. It's really hard to debate alternatives when one doesn't have even rudimentary knowledge of them.
It starts at the top: you're not a democracy, you're a two-party-state. "winner-takes-all" legislation efficiently prevents smaller parties from playing a significant role at all, and in practice you're forced to vote for, not who you prefer, but instead "the lesser of the two evils".
And I don't know if Americans have generally discovered it, but, you know, the cold war is -over-. Stamping "socialist" on a policy is -not- infact a sufficient argument to reject it, indeed it's not even an argument at all. The question isn't if the policy is "socialist", the question is if the benefits of that policy outweighs the disadvantages.
Spesifically to healthcare, there are -precisely- two conditions for qualifying for healthcare-coverage here in Norway. 1: You must be legally in norway 2: The period, actual or planned, must be longer than a year. (i.e. tourists from outside-eu still need travel-insurance)
There's many advantages, including ones most wouldn't stop to consider. The first, and simplest advantage to quantify is that it is, simply, cheaper. Having a large number of insurance-companies add overhead. Lots of people work for those companies, they all want to be paid, this money needs to come from somewhere. (470K people work directly for the insurers, at an average salary of 61K, you do the math!) It's the same in reverse for doctors and hospitals: relating to a large count of insurers, many of which with subtle and often-changing differences in policy, adds to administrative overhead. Second; it entirely avoids the problem of the uninsured. Another thing I wonder if Americans generally know is that today USA is -THE- only developed western country lacking a universal-healthcare for all citizens system. 6 out of 10 personal bankruptcies in USA have atleast some medical component, and many are nessecitated ONLY or CHIEFLY by uncovered medical costs. What is the societal and personal cost of that?
oh, it's a long story... I just wish for your own sake that more people would wake up, and have a real honest look at the alternatives, rather than just knee-jerk.
It is -true- that there is a large and thriving medical-research field in USA. It is also true that this is probably the most advanced medical research-field in the world, though there's a few other countries also making significant contributions.
But that's entirely unrelated to healthcare-financing. New medicines and treatments are researched sometimes with public money, but a large part of it, with private money, hoping to make a tidy profit selling the products. If you can invent some new medicine, and patents allow you to have an exclusive monopoly on it for a period, and sell it at a price high enough to recoup more than the devlopment-costs, you've got a winner. And that's really independent of how large a fraction of the population is lacking health-coverage, for example. For that matter, it's not as if these inventions are -not- sold to countries with socialized healthcare.
I agree. But interfere doesn't need to mean obstruct. Let's face it, people going bananas only results in the teenagers hiding the fact that they're having sex from the parents, at which point the parents lose all influence.
The parents of my first girlfriend sure as hell interfered. Several ways. They told her that there's condoms in a certain drawer, and that they've got no clue how many and would not notice if some of them went missing, not even if that should start happening regularily. Lateron, when we where an established couple, the mother asked if we'd considered getting the pill. You know. Parenting. Talk to your teenager. Provide guidance. Not panic and run in freaking circles like some kinda idiot. (or feel free to do that, but in that case, your teenager will stop discussing those issues with you alltogether)
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that this -isn't- what everyone else on the planet means by free. It is *sometimes* but not generally, and that's why it's ambigous in english. If someone says that Germany has free elections, nobody thinks they mean the elections do not cost money, they understand that it's free as in freedom.
What you claim; that in every other context on the planet, free means "for zero money" is simply not true. Free Willy ! Live Free, or die trying. You're free to publish any book you want.
It's sometimes about cost, but by no means always. The french (and scandinavians) got it right, we've got two -distinct- words for free as in freedom, and free as in no-cost. (gratis, and libre)
Uhm... No. Just no. Seriously. It's not "maybe you can adjust, but not really interactively", instead it's a single wheel that you turn to adjust shutter speed up or down. Assuming you're thinking of one of the Canon DSLRs from the last 5 years.
Not really that different from analogue at all, and most of the differences that exist are -advantages-, for example you can tell the camera to adjust exposure, and then adjust shutter-speed manually, and the camera will compensate with aperture, so you dial a shorter shutter, and it opens up more, rather than you having to adjust the two independently. (notice that you still -can- adjust them both independently if and when you want to)
recovery-shops can't for reasonable cost even read trough a -single- complete overwrite. Thing is, to even -attempt- doing more than that, you need to swap the electronics, and the costs add up quickly.
99% of the "recoveries" they do consist of recovering data that is on the disc already, but that has been marked as "deleted" in the filesystem. i.e. it's filesystem-recovery not data-block-recovery.
Yes, if there's data on the disc, that you've got reasons to suspect entities would want to pay 6 figures just for a -chance- at getting some of them, you might want to do more. But for average home-computers, a single overwrite is entirely adequate.
You can't trust the checksum, but you can't trust the data you get when you "read" from the file either, so either is about as good as the other, frankly.
No. That's precisely the point.
There -is- such a thing as a bad investment. Investments that, if you understood them, you'd not buy them. Buy buying only investments you -do- understand, you significantly decrease your risk of ending up with such an investment.
Good point. There's an entire industry in USA that derives a lot of income from, basically, helping people file their taxes. Thus any initiative which makes that easier, to the point that less people require any kind of help, is going to be fought by the industry.
They'll lie, offcourse. They won't say "this initiative would mean less income for us". Instead they'll come up with spurious arguments.
Leverage is also a simple concept. It's my honest opinion that if you don't understand it, you should not do it.
Leverage is just buying stock for $100K with 50K of your own money, and 50K borrowed money. If the stock rice 10%, you've made 20% profit, on the flipside, if the stock falls 50%, you've lost 100% of your investment. There's an extra cost, offcourse, namely the fact that you need to pay interest on the money you borrow.
Everyone who has any kind of debt, yet still own stock, can be said to be leveraged: they're gambling that the stock will rise more than the interest on the debt. That's a really -dumb- gamble in two cases, first if the interest on the debt is high (i.e. credit-card-debt), and second if it's a gamble you can't afford to lose.
On the other hand I have a mortgage, at 3% interest, 2.3% interest after taxes, and also own stock. That's a reasonable gamble, because long-term average-returns on stock are significantly higher than 2.3%, AND (important AND), I can afford to lose the gamble, i.e. my finances are okay, even if the stock -don't- rise, or indeed even if they're wiped out.
I agree that there's privacy-implications. However, one can see it like this:
Certain numbers you are required by law to report to the government when filing your taxes. You could argue that having them not be informed of those numbers directly (from your employer or bank or whatever) is an improvement in privacy. But it's only an improvement for criminals, i.e. those who fail to comply with the legal requirement to truthfully disclose the same information to the same government.
Thus, if you're doing the legal thing today: reporting those numbers to the government. Then the government knows nothing more about you just because they get -exactly- the same information from a different source.
There's a third way, offcourse.
You could let your employer/bank/whatever OPTIONALLY report those numbers, i.e. let everyone -choose- if they want the numbers reported (and thus the tax-filings simplified) or the number not-reported. (like today)
Straight on about the superstition among corporate users. I've seen suggestions for $100K backup-systems for 3TB worth of data, when I've pointed out that actually I handle a larger amount of data at -home-, and I've spent about 1% of that cash for doing so, and yes that includes daily backups for the last week, weekly backups for the last month and monthly backups for the last year stored at two physically distinct locations (actually physically distinct continents :D) they are stunned.
$1000 is a lot of disc, in a world where disc is $70/TB.
Better yet: If you do not understand an investment, don't buy it.
Really. There's no shortage of investments that are *easy* to understand, and the lack of free lunches means that investments you -don't- understand, tend to come with drawbacks that are invisible to you, because you don't understand them.
What's wrong with: "Buy 100 shares of a company with a total of 1M shares, if the company pays a dividend, you get 100/1M of it, if the company goes broke, your investment is lost. There's a $5 fee for the purchase, but other than that no fees or associated costs whatsoever"
Too simple ?
A fantastic idea ! Furthermore, have it online. Furthermore, put the data that the govt gets anyway into the forms so that they're partly pre-filled. Indeed, do what we've done in Norway for a decade.
By now it's progressed to the point where I can -literally- file my taxes from my mobile phone in 15 minutes. And it takes that long only because my investments are semi-complex (i.e. some of them are foreign so don't come pre-filled)
Oh, and yeah, it does mean you know how much taxes you owe instantly, after you fill in the forms, you press "calculate taxes", and up pops the answer, none of that file paperwork, wait months for the response.
Actually, in a world where a large fraction of people are recording, it's reasonable to assume that -many- will do that, if it's a practical way of thwarting the recording. Recording locally on the device doesn't really help though, as the attacker can just steal the device.
Sometimes.
But with work being done unsupervised and handed in, there -is- a method of cheating that is really easy to do, and really hard to detect: Have someone else who is competent do the assignments for you.
I had a pair of identical twins in my class, to this day, they claim that only one of them ever passed the driving-exam, but that he passed it twice. Nobody but them knows if it's true or not, and they decline to say -who- passed.
True enough, many of the people with decreased mobility, can blame themselves for it. True for overweight people, true for smokers with lung-cancer, true for people who're in a wheelchair because they voluntarily decided to have that 4th drink, then drive home anyway.
Despite this, though, you -really- can't tell with a glance if someones core problem is overweight, or something else. Yeah, you can easily tell they're overweight. But it's entirely possible to be disabled -and- overweight. Your legs are among the larger muscle-groups you have, if you can't use them (for whatever reason), the possibilities that you end up being overweight too (in addition to your original problem) is increased.
I can sense electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength between 400nm and 800nm, aproximately, using no devices or other assistance. Where do I apply for my million ?
I can also sense many other wavelengths, for example ir-radiation at a level above say 100W/sqm is detectible using my hand.
I bet I can detect microwaves too, if there's enough of them.
These "savings" are irrelevant and temporary at best. People should remember that the monopolists selling them their crack can set the prices however they please. You can feel perfectly sure that if there's a strong trend to replace a dozen dual-core machines with 4 more powerful machines, doing the same job at 1/3rd the software-licensing-cost, the vendors will simply change their licensing to per-core.
So yes, short-term you may be able to save some money by such trickery. Medium-term it's a zero-sum-game though, the price will fluctuate back to the same point it always was: that point where the vendor believes (rightly or not) that the maximum profit can be made.
Actually, how is a wife going to be a negative ? The oposite is true. Two people have (roughly) double income-earning-potential, whereas the costs of a two-person-household is NOT double that of a one-person-household.
A couple does not need two washing-machines, a double-sized apartment, or two showers. A hotel-room for two, does not cost double of the price for a single, and so on. Overall I estimate a couple need 1.5 times as much money as a single person, to get a comparable standard of living.
Children cost money, agreed. (I've got 3)
Why ? We've got a fibrebundle (around a dozen fibres), it's not owned by us, but we can rent a single fibre across town for around $500/month, yes that's expensive, but it's not out-of-range for most companies, not even smallish companies.
Not that we need 10Gbps for offsite-backup, we currently do it over 100Mbps, and that link isn't on the average even 5% full.
Nah. Since they wheren't panicky, we didn't hide it. The parents knew full well that we slept in the same bed when I came over in the weekend, they didn't explicitly -know- that we where having sex, but it's not as if -that- is a huge surprise at that point. Besides, they where only asking; she could've said "not needed yet".
The thing is, I'd have scored REGARDLESS. (and if not me, someone else would) Unless you're -physically- caging your teenager, she's going to have sex when she -wants- to have sex. Hell I've got unmarried penpals in Iran, whos had sex, even -that- level of control isn't sufficient.
It's just, if they'd been panicky, it'd have happened under stress. We'd have worried about being "discovered", and frankly might well have happened -earlier-.
You don't come out and say so, but it seems to me you'er implying that making kids have sex -later- is for some reason a good thing. And I wouldn't know why. Indeed, a healthy sex life is one of the most wonderful things in life, and that is true for teenagers as much as for older folks, indeed I'd even say that my sex-life was *more* important to me when I was 17 than it is today at double the age.
But you're right; the parents (mine and hers) had a huge impact. They let us experiment in safety and security, rather than stressed out and in hiding. They provided guidance and help, for example by reminding us to consider contraception, yes we would've anyway, but people *more* often end up having sex unprotected when it happens under stress. (for example having parents who'd panic if they accidentally stumbled upon a pack of condoms in your room, isn't conductive to keeping condoms there -- which is a smart thing to do otherwise)
Untrue. You have a choice: Do you want to actually, you know, PARENT your kid, or do you instead decide to panic, and thus leave that task to others. You can behave like a sane human being, and odds is, your kid will be able to talk to you, including about sex and issues surrounding it, such as pregnancy-avoidance. If you're real lucky, they might even consider your opinion borderline relevant.
OR you can run in circles, scream and shout, and thus ensure that your child will -not- ever opt to ask *you* about such issues. Instead, she'll get her information from whatever sources she has, be that the internet, films and movies, or friends.
The parents of my first girlfriend, refrained from panicking. And that was a good thing. It meant the first time she had sex, it was with a boy she knew well and trusted, someone who'd been her boyfriend for months (me), and not, say, in the backseat of some car, intoxicated after a party. It meant she took advantage of the condoms her parents had left in a drawer, and explicitly said they never count and would NOT notice if any went missing. It meant lateron she said "yes" when her mom asked if an appointment with the doctor to get a prescription for the pill would be a good thing. It meant not having to hide, being able to be who we -where-, and overall improved the entire experience for everyone involved.
Panicking is *very* rarely the best choice for a parent. Least of all about something as utterly normal as a teenager developing sexuality.
I think, actually, that your main problem is being too large, in every sense of the word. You're a behemoth, and in many senses the worlds only remaining superpower. (you know something is weird when the top military spender in the world, spend more than the following 5 countries on the list COMBINED)
You're right though. It's really hard to debate alternatives when one doesn't have even rudimentary knowledge of them.
It starts at the top: you're not a democracy, you're a two-party-state. "winner-takes-all" legislation efficiently prevents smaller parties from playing a significant role at all, and in practice you're forced to vote for, not who you prefer, but instead "the lesser of the two evils".
And I don't know if Americans have generally discovered it, but, you know, the cold war is -over-. Stamping "socialist" on a policy is -not- infact a sufficient argument to reject it, indeed it's not even an argument at all. The question isn't if the policy is "socialist", the question is if the benefits of that policy outweighs the disadvantages.
Spesifically to healthcare, there are -precisely- two conditions for qualifying for healthcare-coverage here in Norway. 1: You must be legally in norway 2: The period, actual or planned, must be longer than a year. (i.e. tourists from outside-eu still need travel-insurance)
There's many advantages, including ones most wouldn't stop to consider. The first, and simplest advantage to quantify is that it is, simply, cheaper. Having a large number of insurance-companies add overhead. Lots of people work for those companies, they all want to be paid, this money needs to come from somewhere. (470K people work directly for the insurers, at an average salary of 61K, you do the math!) It's the same in reverse for doctors and hospitals: relating to a large count of insurers, many of which with subtle and often-changing differences in policy, adds to administrative overhead. Second; it entirely avoids the problem of the uninsured. Another thing I wonder if Americans generally know is that today USA is -THE- only developed western country lacking a universal-healthcare for all citizens system. 6 out of 10 personal bankruptcies in USA have atleast some medical component, and many are nessecitated ONLY or CHIEFLY by uncovered medical costs. What is the societal and personal cost of that?
oh, it's a long story... I just wish for your own sake that more people would wake up, and have a real honest look at the alternatives, rather than just knee-jerk.
Nah. That's unrelated.
It is -true- that there is a large and thriving medical-research field in USA. It is also true that this is probably the most advanced medical research-field in the world, though there's a few other countries also making significant contributions.
But that's entirely unrelated to healthcare-financing. New medicines and treatments are researched sometimes with public money, but a large part of it, with private money, hoping to make a tidy profit selling the products. If you can invent some new medicine, and patents allow you to have an exclusive monopoly on it for a period, and sell it at a price high enough to recoup more than the devlopment-costs, you've got a winner. And that's really independent of how large a fraction of the population is lacking health-coverage, for example. For that matter, it's not as if these inventions are -not- sold to countries with socialized healthcare.
I agree. But interfere doesn't need to mean obstruct. Let's face it, people going bananas only results in the teenagers hiding the fact that they're having sex from the parents, at which point the parents lose all influence.
The parents of my first girlfriend sure as hell interfered. Several ways. They told her that there's condoms in a certain drawer, and that they've got no clue how many and would not notice if some of them went missing, not even if that should start happening regularily. Lateron, when we where an established couple, the mother asked if we'd considered getting the pill. You know. Parenting. Talk to your teenager. Provide guidance. Not panic and run in freaking circles like some kinda idiot. (or feel free to do that, but in that case, your teenager will stop discussing those issues with you alltogether)