Re:The Improbability of Improbability
on
The Magicians
·
· Score: 1
>>Riiight. A single column in a mainstream paper means the BNP has no support, suuure. And the fact that an outright Neo-Nazi party even gets a few percent of the vote
Not a few percent. Less than 1%. And, as I said, I'm actually surprised it isn't higher, given the fact that they're a single-issue party with a strong draw right now.
>>you will find that most (note emphasis) 'problems' with Islam are various racists
As I said, talk to a Lebanese Christian some time. They allowed Palestinians to immigrate to their country, which upset the balance of power that had worked there keeping them at peace for the last couple thousand years, and kicked off the very nasty civil wars. And of course there's the whole terrorism and Sharia law things. The archbishop of Canterbury kicked off a firestorm when he talked about it + there's already Sharia law courts (technically binding arbitration offices) in England.
Immigration simply cannot be poo-pooed as the politically correct crowd tries to do, calling those who oppose immigration "nativists" or similarly derogatory things, when the simple fact of the matter immigration is not always good for the host country.
>>So we go thru life correctly seeing ourself as making decisions and thus apparently exercising free will, but the latter is an illusion since the decisions we associate with our responses were in fact proscribed!
Eh... sorta. The brain isn't synchronous, and so it will often retcon motivations onto our actions, almost invariably, even when action predated the thought. But you're making a logical fallacy by assuming action always predates thought. You can certainly think about something and then take action (and if not, you should try it some time).
Also, there are times when the brain does not retcon motivations onto actions, such as when you walk onto a stopped elevator and stumble and lose your balance. Your brain, running asynchronously as it does, constantly models the world about a half second in the future. So when you step on an elevator, your brain knows what an elevator is (recognizing it subconsciously), how elevators are supposed to work (taking you forward), and shifts your balance automatically to compensate. When you step on a stopped elevator, you experience that sense of vertigo, and some people will have to clutch onto a handrail to keep from falling, but I've never heard people say, "Oh, I just did that because I wanted to see how the handrail felt like" or some of the other excuses common to retcons. They say, "Huh, that was weird. I don't know why I lost my balance."
Replace soul with consciousness in your argument above, re-read it, and then realize how stupid you sound. You can certainly feel it (that's almost self-referential), and measure it to a certain extent. Yes, you can't see it under a microscope, which is why it's such an interesting issue.
P-zombies are about qualia and subjective consciousness, by the by, not about souls. Soulless zombies are your run of the mill undead. =)
>>You may not be able to. Douglas Hofstadter says that that and other awarenesses might be self-emergent. So attempts to block it might result in some spectacular bugs.
A more likely route to AI would be to do a neural simulation of a human.
So you just pick a guy who likes to work more than is healthy, is intelligent, is somewhat sociopathic so he doesn't care about being abused by his co-workers, hates his wife and family (if they exist) and... hmm, so yeah pretty much anyone on Slashdot.
>>However, the fact that 80% of the wine purchases on each day corresponded with the type of music being played seemed to contradict the customers' assertions.
And yet 20% didn't buy the wine in question (and I also kinda doubt your numbers are true, without a reference - 80% of people buying any single thing in a store would be revolutionary).
Nobody is saying that influence doesn't exist, or that people can't explain their own motivations - this is common sense. If you held a gun to the head of the shoppers you'd probably get higher than a 80% buy rate of a specific kind of wine, and most of our brain corresponds to subconscious activity - our conscious thought is a sort of executive process that deals with interrupts being flagged by the subconscious mind. Are you aware right now of the feel of your ass on your computer chair? If you're like most people, you weren't really aware of it until I called attention to it. Our brain operates by gating unimportant stimuli away from our consciousness so that we aren't overwhelmed by events.
As far as free will goes, I don't see how it is possible for either free will or determinism (including compatibilism) to be true. In fact, both are pretty much provable to be false. But until we understand how consciousness works (which is quite possibly never), the free will issue is moot. So James put it best - when confronted with no absolute proof either way, it's best to decide that free will is true, since it objectively improves the quality of your life.
>>You can't heat up humans to temperatures where newtonian physics break down and have them survive (you cannot create the "black body problem" in a live human being).
Whew!
And there I was, worried that humans had these "electron" things inside of them, which can only be explained by non-Newtonian methods.
>>If you have the swine flu, there's nothing your doctor can do for you
Tamiflu.
>>I work in a subset of the public health field, and we're really fucking annoyed
Canadian, eh?
Re:The Improbability of Improbability
on
The Magicians
·
· Score: 1
>>And outright racism still exists. In fact, thanks to phenomena as described above, it is in fact becoming more accepted, not less.
Go back and read what I said; I phrased it carefully. The battle over racism in the public arena has been won. You'll no longer see a mainstream senator like Byrd join the KKK, or a Strom Thurmond vote against various civil rights, or people blockading a school to stop black people from coming in. Socially, it was a complete revolution, with societal norms essentially being flipped on their head within a span of about 10 years, with MLK having a lot to do with it. Racism is condemned everywhere in popular culture these days. You mentioned the BNP, witness this response: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6824033.ece Even with the social pressure caused by the immigration of Muslims into the country, they still can't even count a percentage of voters in the country.
Which is why I said JK Rowling is 40 years too late with her message. If the massively powerful cultural norms we have today on race cannot end racism (and note I did not claim racism has ended), it's dubious that JKR's awkward condemnation of it will have any effect.
That also said, there are serious issues with Islam in the UK, mainly related to Sharia law and the culture conflict that stems from the large scale immigration of people from radically different backgrounds. Immigration isn't always good for the host country and can cause quite bad results - talk to a Christian Lebanese some time.
Re:The Improbability of Improbability
on
The Magicians
·
· Score: 1
>>But if everything in Rowling's world is as black-and-white as you say, why didn't the wizards just do the obvious, and get rid of Slytherin House?
She took pains to show that Slytherin wasn't necessarily evil, just preoccupied with power and status, not unlike a lot of people.
But as for why Rowling did a lot of things, I think because she just sort of wrote whatever came into her head... the rules for Quiddich are ridiculous, for example.
Re:The Improbability of Improbability
on
The Magicians
·
· Score: 1
>>And why is this 40 years behind the times? Are you really saying what you seem to be implying, that it is not a good thing to condemn this attitude?
MLK Jr., died in 1968. Since then, the notion that racism is acceptable has entirely evaporated in popular society. She's fighting a fight that has already been won, essentially.
Re:The Improbability of Improbability
on
The Magicians
·
· Score: 1
>>As for the Harry Potter series, I'd say there's as little or as much "point" to it as you want to read into it
The only real point was a sort of ham-handed, 40-years-behind-the-times message about racism. Bad people (Draco) judge good people (Hermoine) solely based on the circumstances of their birth ("Pureblood", "Halfblood" or "Mudblood"). Good people (Harry) don't care, and don't hang out with the racists (Voldemorte and his crew).
There's also the standard story tropes about hope and coming-of-age, neither of which JK Rowling does especially well. Her treatment of Harry's adolescence revealed she doesn't really know how to write teenagers at all.
I met Lev at Comicon this year, and talked with him briefly. He led a panel which covered, among other topics, Harry Potter and the impact it had on the fantasy genre. The Magicians is pretty upfront about borrowing from Harry Potter, with the students sarcastically saying, "Let's go put on our Quidditch Robes" when they are dragged outside to play the magical game that they all hate.
Essentially, it's a re-take on the entire notion of a magical sub-culture in our world, with a lot more "realism" (if that's the right word) instilled. There's no big bad. Wizards are by and large angsty, unmotivated (they can get anything they want with a snap of their fingers) and emotionally stunted. The main character is a depressing anti-hero (not in the cool and dangerous antihero vibe, but is just a character you end up hating by the end of the book since he's the polar opposite of a hero, though not a villain, so to speak.)
I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes Harry Potter and Narnia, but is looking for a more adult take on it. That said, I'd probably just give it a B+, since I hate angsty teens, and they never really develop past that point.
I saw this at Comicon - they had clips from the upcoming series running, and were taking photos of people as ID Badges for the Village. Had a nice retro-modern look to their largish booth.
I got my ID. I hope the series is good so that it'll be a fond collectable item some day (not like I'd sell it), rather than yet another tchotchke from some worthless failed project.
The clips they showed looks like it has promise, but you never really know until you actually watch it.
>>If I want I can set up two 4TB raids on my server at home (assuming I had more disk space), and issue the command dd if=/dev/mdx of=/dev/mdy bs=1M count=4000000. Then I could do a diff on the two volumes. I'd be shocked if they had any errors at all.
When your two 4TB drives are the size of a human gamete, let me know.
I wouldn't be surprised as we move into nanotech if we start accepting certain amount of error.
>>A mirror surface will harden the target, but even the best mirrors do not reflect all light and a combat laser can still burn a hole in it very fast.
In the future, all soldiers will wear shiny disco suits.
>>The key question here is how will Microsoft Monetise this new games to make more money for XBox Live via the subscriptions that people take out for these games.
Actually, the XBL guys recognize that if people are already paying monthlies to get access to an MMORPG, it's pretty dick to also charge them for gold access. So IIRC, you don't need gold access to play a hypothetical MMORPG on an Xbox. Also, they have special rules that allows MMORPGs to break their normal rules on digital downloads, patches, etc. I watched a talk on it once at some game development conference. You can probably find it online.
I'm not excusing the fact that the entire notion of Xbox Gold accounts is a travesty - if I own Gears of War, AND I have a gold account, I still can't have my wife sit down and play with me. Or, rather, I can. But I can't also play with my two other friends online at the same time. Unless I want to pop for a Gold account for someone who is a very, very occasional user of the system. I've started collecting those 3-day Gold account cards and just using them, but it's, well, just really annoying.
I buy any game I can for the PS3 over the Xbox for this reason.
Uh, my next door neighbor, who got a job at REMEC? Want to come over and talk to him or something? There's no news article about it. I can't recall the name of the other guy we used to work with, but I know he got money from CUBIC.
Asking for citations is well and good, but I think you might want to examine your unfounded belief that patents never favor the small guy first. As Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living.
I'm not saying there's plenty of other examples as well. A friend of the family (now a respected EE prof at USC) had this technology that was pretty neat. So SAIC hired him for a week, had him write his code or whatever for their project, and then fired him. Since he'd done it as part of a work for hire or whatever it's called, he just got one shitty paycheck and they got his technology. He recently passed the bar to become a lawyer because of that experience ("Never again...").
>>What planet are you living on? Can you site even one court case where patents, especially software patents, protected "the little guy"?
Smoke a little less of the Slashdot lotus root - the system does work some of the time. I personally know two engineers who developed technology, marketed it to larger companies, got ripped off, and they successfully sued. One was a neural network for creating a sort of image dictionary for image compression, the other was some sort of RF engineering thing that I don't understand. In both cases the guys ended up making about a million from their patents.
The whole thing is rather disconcerting as we seem to be developing better ways to kill just as quickly as all our other tech is advancing but I don't see leaps in our ability to live peacefully or get along keeping up with it all.
Patents have a good side: they keep large established companies from just stealing from the little guys. Let's say I develop a new way to extract gold from the ocean. 3M, instead of paying me for the idea, steals it, and then makes billions while I linger in obscurity, even though I was the guy that did the heavy lifting on the process.
In software patents, by contrast, the opposite is happening. You have people that are independently working on projects getting patents on essentially daily work, and then using them either defensively (to protect against lawsuits by people who have done similar stuff) or offensively (to sue people who will do similar stuff). Companies patent thousands of run-of-the-mill ideas every year, and hope they get lucky and do some task before someone else does, even if it is a perfectly obvious solution. A friend of mine works for Microsoft - at the end of every project, they review what they did and patent anything that seems relatively interesting. Which isn't an uncommon process, either, in large corporations.
So what happens is the opposite of what patents are good at (protecting small guys from being beaten up by big guys) - if you're just working on your own, not copying anyone else's work at all, you'll probably infringe hundreds of patents that other people did.
This is not a good situation for our industry to be in.
But we already have socialized medicine in America. Almost half our total spending on health this year was from gov't medical programs. I think that some people (mainly in Obama's camp) are perhaps leery of being branded socialists when (especially if you compare their agenda with, say, Mitterand's) they're similar. Just admit you want a national/nationalized/socialized health service and be honest about it, I say.
(It won't fix the problem, but then again, our current system won't fix the problem either. We need to look to reform elsewhere.)
Slashdot Mirror
>>Riiight. A single column in a mainstream paper means the BNP has no support, suuure. And the fact that an outright Neo-Nazi party even gets a few percent of the vote
Not a few percent. Less than 1%. And, as I said, I'm actually surprised it isn't higher, given the fact that they're a single-issue party with a strong draw right now.
>>you will find that most (note emphasis) 'problems' with Islam are various racists
As I said, talk to a Lebanese Christian some time. They allowed Palestinians to immigrate to their country, which upset the balance of power that had worked there keeping them at peace for the last couple thousand years, and kicked off the very nasty civil wars. And of course there's the whole terrorism and Sharia law things. The archbishop of Canterbury kicked off a firestorm when he talked about it + there's already Sharia law courts (technically binding arbitration offices) in England.
Immigration simply cannot be poo-pooed as the politically correct crowd tries to do, calling those who oppose immigration "nativists" or similarly derogatory things, when the simple fact of the matter immigration is not always good for the host country.
>>So we go thru life correctly seeing ourself as making decisions and thus apparently exercising free will, but the latter is an illusion since the decisions we associate with our responses were in fact proscribed!
Eh... sorta. The brain isn't synchronous, and so it will often retcon motivations onto our actions, almost invariably, even when action predated the thought. But you're making a logical fallacy by assuming action always predates thought. You can certainly think about something and then take action (and if not, you should try it some time).
Also, there are times when the brain does not retcon motivations onto actions, such as when you walk onto a stopped elevator and stumble and lose your balance. Your brain, running asynchronously as it does, constantly models the world about a half second in the future. So when you step on an elevator, your brain knows what an elevator is (recognizing it subconsciously), how elevators are supposed to work (taking you forward), and shifts your balance automatically to compensate. When you step on a stopped elevator, you experience that sense of vertigo, and some people will have to clutch onto a handrail to keep from falling, but I've never heard people say, "Oh, I just did that because I wanted to see how the handrail felt like" or some of the other excuses common to retcons. They say, "Huh, that was weird. I don't know why I lost my balance."
Replace soul with consciousness in your argument above, re-read it, and then realize how stupid you sound. You can certainly feel it (that's almost self-referential), and measure it to a certain extent. Yes, you can't see it under a microscope, which is why it's such an interesting issue.
P-zombies are about qualia and subjective consciousness, by the by, not about souls. Soulless zombies are your run of the mill undead. =)
>>You may not be able to. Douglas Hofstadter says that that and other awarenesses might be self-emergent. So attempts to block it might result in some spectacular bugs.
A more likely route to AI would be to do a neural simulation of a human.
So you just pick a guy who likes to work more than is healthy, is intelligent, is somewhat sociopathic so he doesn't care about being abused by his co-workers, hates his wife and family (if they exist) and... hmm, so yeah pretty much anyone on Slashdot.
>>However, the fact that 80% of the wine purchases on each day corresponded with the type of music being played seemed to contradict the customers' assertions.
And yet 20% didn't buy the wine in question (and I also kinda doubt your numbers are true, without a reference - 80% of people buying any single thing in a store would be revolutionary).
Nobody is saying that influence doesn't exist, or that people can't explain their own motivations - this is common sense. If you held a gun to the head of the shoppers you'd probably get higher than a 80% buy rate of a specific kind of wine, and most of our brain corresponds to subconscious activity - our conscious thought is a sort of executive process that deals with interrupts being flagged by the subconscious mind. Are you aware right now of the feel of your ass on your computer chair? If you're like most people, you weren't really aware of it until I called attention to it. Our brain operates by gating unimportant stimuli away from our consciousness so that we aren't overwhelmed by events.
As far as free will goes, I don't see how it is possible for either free will or determinism (including compatibilism) to be true. In fact, both are pretty much provable to be false. But until we understand how consciousness works (which is quite possibly never), the free will issue is moot. So James put it best - when confronted with no absolute proof either way, it's best to decide that free will is true, since it objectively improves the quality of your life.
>>You can't heat up humans to temperatures where newtonian physics break down and have them survive (you cannot create the "black body problem" in a live human being).
Whew!
And there I was, worried that humans had these "electron" things inside of them, which can only be explained by non-Newtonian methods.
Thank goodness you cleared that up for me.
Neat!
Now if Facebook doesn't pay up, a leaked copy of its source code will appear all over teh interwebs.
It's in your best interests to pay, see?
>>If you have the swine flu, there's nothing your doctor can do for you
Tamiflu.
>>I work in a subset of the public health field, and we're really fucking annoyed
Canadian, eh?
>>And outright racism still exists. In fact, thanks to phenomena as described above, it is in fact becoming more accepted, not less.
Go back and read what I said; I phrased it carefully. The battle over racism in the public arena has been won. You'll no longer see a mainstream senator like Byrd join the KKK, or a Strom Thurmond vote against various civil rights, or people blockading a school to stop black people from coming in. Socially, it was a complete revolution, with societal norms essentially being flipped on their head within a span of about 10 years, with MLK having a lot to do with it. Racism is condemned everywhere in popular culture these days. You mentioned the BNP, witness this response: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6824033.ece Even with the social pressure caused by the immigration of Muslims into the country, they still can't even count a percentage of voters in the country.
Which is why I said JK Rowling is 40 years too late with her message. If the massively powerful cultural norms we have today on race cannot end racism (and note I did not claim racism has ended), it's dubious that JKR's awkward condemnation of it will have any effect.
That also said, there are serious issues with Islam in the UK, mainly related to Sharia law and the culture conflict that stems from the large scale immigration of people from radically different backgrounds. Immigration isn't always good for the host country and can cause quite bad results - talk to a Christian Lebanese some time.
>>But if everything in Rowling's world is as black-and-white as you say, why didn't the wizards just do the obvious, and get rid of Slytherin House?
She took pains to show that Slytherin wasn't necessarily evil, just preoccupied with power and status, not unlike a lot of people.
But as for why Rowling did a lot of things, I think because she just sort of wrote whatever came into her head... the rules for Quiddich are ridiculous, for example.
>>And why is this 40 years behind the times? Are you really saying what you seem to be implying, that it is not a good thing to condemn this attitude?
MLK Jr., died in 1968. Since then, the notion that racism is acceptable has entirely evaporated in popular society. She's fighting a fight that has already been won, essentially.
>>As for the Harry Potter series, I'd say there's as little or as much "point" to it as you want to read into it
The only real point was a sort of ham-handed, 40-years-behind-the-times message about racism. Bad people (Draco) judge good people (Hermoine) solely based on the circumstances of their birth ("Pureblood", "Halfblood" or "Mudblood"). Good people (Harry) don't care, and don't hang out with the racists (Voldemorte and his crew).
There's also the standard story tropes about hope and coming-of-age, neither of which JK Rowling does especially well. Her treatment of Harry's adolescence revealed she doesn't really know how to write teenagers at all.
I met Lev at Comicon this year, and talked with him briefly. He led a panel which covered, among other topics, Harry Potter and the impact it had on the fantasy genre. The Magicians is pretty upfront about borrowing from Harry Potter, with the students sarcastically saying, "Let's go put on our Quidditch Robes" when they are dragged outside to play the magical game that they all hate.
Essentially, it's a re-take on the entire notion of a magical sub-culture in our world, with a lot more "realism" (if that's the right word) instilled. There's no big bad. Wizards are by and large angsty, unmotivated (they can get anything they want with a snap of their fingers) and emotionally stunted. The main character is a depressing anti-hero (not in the cool and dangerous antihero vibe, but is just a character you end up hating by the end of the book since he's the polar opposite of a hero, though not a villain, so to speak.)
I'd recommend this book to anyone who likes Harry Potter and Narnia, but is looking for a more adult take on it. That said, I'd probably just give it a B+, since I hate angsty teens, and they never really develop past that point.
Here's my Amazon review on it:
http://www.amazon.com/review/RPCO5K5YVAQ5I/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
Ditto. Sanderson is one of my favorite new authors. Elantris and Mistborn both rocked, and Warbreaker was pretty good as well.
Also, Tor published one of his short stories online for free, and it's quite good. Like Ender's Game, but in about 20 pages:
http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=story&id=10489
I saw this at Comicon - they had clips from the upcoming series running, and were taking photos of people as ID Badges for the Village. Had a nice retro-modern look to their largish booth.
I got my ID. I hope the series is good so that it'll be a fond collectable item some day (not like I'd sell it), rather than yet another tchotchke from some worthless failed project.
The clips they showed looks like it has promise, but you never really know until you actually watch it.
>>If I want I can set up two 4TB raids on my server at home (assuming I had more disk space), and issue the command dd if=/dev/mdx of=/dev/mdy bs=1M count=4000000. Then I could do a diff on the two volumes. I'd be shocked if they had any errors at all.
When your two 4TB drives are the size of a human gamete, let me know.
I wouldn't be surprised as we move into nanotech if we start accepting certain amount of error.
>>A mirror surface will harden the target, but even the best mirrors do not reflect all light and a combat laser can still burn a hole in it very fast.
In the future, all soldiers will wear shiny disco suits.
If you can't post explosives recipes online for 4" cannons, then the confederates have already won.
>>The key question here is how will Microsoft Monetise this new games to make more money for XBox Live via the subscriptions that people take out for these games.
Actually, the XBL guys recognize that if people are already paying monthlies to get access to an MMORPG, it's pretty dick to also charge them for gold access. So IIRC, you don't need gold access to play a hypothetical MMORPG on an Xbox. Also, they have special rules that allows MMORPGs to break their normal rules on digital downloads, patches, etc. I watched a talk on it once at some game development conference. You can probably find it online.
I'm not excusing the fact that the entire notion of Xbox Gold accounts is a travesty - if I own Gears of War, AND I have a gold account, I still can't have my wife sit down and play with me. Or, rather, I can. But I can't also play with my two other friends online at the same time. Unless I want to pop for a Gold account for someone who is a very, very occasional user of the system. I've started collecting those 3-day Gold account cards and just using them, but it's, well, just really annoying.
I buy any game I can for the PS3 over the Xbox for this reason.
Uh, my next door neighbor, who got a job at REMEC? Want to come over and talk to him or something? There's no news article about it. I can't recall the name of the other guy we used to work with, but I know he got money from CUBIC.
Asking for citations is well and good, but I think you might want to examine your unfounded belief that patents never favor the small guy first. As Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living.
I'm not saying there's plenty of other examples as well. A friend of the family (now a respected EE prof at USC) had this technology that was pretty neat. So SAIC hired him for a week, had him write his code or whatever for their project, and then fired him. Since he'd done it as part of a work for hire or whatever it's called, he just got one shitty paycheck and they got his technology. He recently passed the bar to become a lawyer because of that experience ("Never again...").
>>There's a cat that seems to be able to tell when someone is about to die.
Yeah. There's also a dog that can detect heart disease.
Together they're great fun at geriatric parties.
>>What planet are you living on? Can you site even one court case where patents, especially software patents, protected "the little guy"?
Smoke a little less of the Slashdot lotus root - the system does work some of the time. I personally know two engineers who developed technology, marketed it to larger companies, got ripped off, and they successfully sued. One was a neural network for creating a sort of image dictionary for image compression, the other was some sort of RF engineering thing that I don't understand. In both cases the guys ended up making about a million from their patents.
The whole thing is rather disconcerting as we seem to be developing better ways to kill just as quickly as all our other tech is advancing but I don't see leaps in our ability to live peacefully or get along keeping up with it all.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
>>I missed the part where that's a bad thing.
Patents have a good side: they keep large established companies from just stealing from the little guys. Let's say I develop a new way to extract gold from the ocean. 3M, instead of paying me for the idea, steals it, and then makes billions while I linger in obscurity, even though I was the guy that did the heavy lifting on the process.
In software patents, by contrast, the opposite is happening. You have people that are independently working on projects getting patents on essentially daily work, and then using them either defensively (to protect against lawsuits by people who have done similar stuff) or offensively (to sue people who will do similar stuff). Companies patent thousands of run-of-the-mill ideas every year, and hope they get lucky and do some task before someone else does, even if it is a perfectly obvious solution. A friend of mine works for Microsoft - at the end of every project, they review what they did and patent anything that seems relatively interesting. Which isn't an uncommon process, either, in large corporations.
So what happens is the opposite of what patents are good at (protecting small guys from being beaten up by big guys) - if you're just working on your own, not copying anyone else's work at all, you'll probably infringe hundreds of patents that other people did.
This is not a good situation for our industry to be in.
Fair enough, man.
But we already have socialized medicine in America. Almost half our total spending on health this year was from gov't medical programs. I think that some people (mainly in Obama's camp) are perhaps leery of being branded socialists when (especially if you compare their agenda with, say, Mitterand's) they're similar. Just admit you want a national/nationalized/socialized health service and be honest about it, I say.
(It won't fix the problem, but then again, our current system won't fix the problem either. We need to look to reform elsewhere.)