US healthcare is expensive, and supply is high, but demand is low... and no waiting lists.
After a recent move, my wife was told by our "Gold-Plated, Big Expensive Best-of-Breed" insurance company that it was a 6-month wait to find a gynecologist in our new Major US City. We have friends in other places who have been told that there would be a one-year wait for an obstetrician.:-) Pediatricians are better, seeing as how they only asked for a three-month wait. I, being a middle-aged father, am of course invincible and have no need of medical care.
We've seen this trend replicated in three different cities across the US. Our family and friends are seeing the same trends. We are both fortunate and blessed and are what passes for "well-off" in the current economy, meaning we can afford to buy new clothes and school supplies at the end of August. If WE are having issues, I cringe to imagine what it's like for people in the same situation I grew up in.
My wife, who grew up in one of those Socialist Hellscapes Fox keeps warning us about, does not understand why any of this should be a problem. She likens living in the US to seeing a movie star in person. You're in love with the glamour until you meet the real person who dropped out of high school to indulge a drug addiction and eating disorder for a couple of decades.
Unfortunately, I don't think anyone's figured out where the curves meet, probably because it's considered a basic necessity for a functioning society
Healthcare, like the military, fire department, and the mail, is a classic market failure. Patients put their lives in the hands of their doctor. There is no time to haggle over price in an ambulance. Despite all the hoopla about "informed consent" and "patient responsibility," even doctors are discouraged from trying to treat their own illnesses, because people who are sick are by definition unable to make detached, clear-headed choices. Furthermore, patients haven't gone to medical school, didn't pass board specializations and haven't spent twenty years of their lives in a hospital. At some point, you have to trust your doctor, because Google and WebMD just doesn't cut it.
That dependence and need for trust totally guts any power the patient might have in a business negotiation.
I don't think anyone's figured out where the curves meet
Sure they have. Given time, Demand will pay any price Supply asks. I'm a middle-aged father. Statistically speaking, I'll die from a preventable but untreated medical condition because I want to spare my family the worry and expense of my healthcare. But my kids? I'll go all unhinged John Winchester over that. My kid gets sick with anything worse than the sniffles, and I'll hand over my wallet, bank accounts, 401k, mortgage, whatever. You want it, it's yours.
It gets worse. Even if YOU are able to negotiate in the marketplace for optimum services, what about those less fortunate than you? No, I'm not making a moral argument for charity. I've learned better than to try to argue for ethics or morality. I'm making an argument for YOUR health. We need a national healthcare system, and yes, you want to keep that alcoholic bum in the best health we possibly can -- and yeah, I'm including dental here -- because communicable diseases spread. Some random bum has a dental abscess that gives some bug a place to camp out, and suddenly he's literally spraying viruses every time he opens his mouth. Some poor busboy passes him on the way to work, and before you know it, your silverware's getting wiped down with that virus.
Now, I know that some people don't wanna pay for that bum's healthcare, but you have to ask yourself. Do you wanna pay some tiny fraction of a percent for a national healthcare system, or do you want to pay for your personal lengthy hospitalization?
Also FYI, be good at what you do and no financial crisis can hurt you.
Deep, classical hubris.
FInancial crises promote societal upheavals. They crash stock markets. They wipe out real estate values. They destroy savings accounts. They turn cities into war zones. If you're rich enough, you get to learn all about the wonderful world of K&R insurance, and the wonder of placing full-time bodyguards with your children. You get to live behind more walls than most Supermax inmates. Your spouse begins to take their frustration out on you, as do your kids.
You become acutely aware of how far away the panic room is, and you push down any thoughts that someone might not come when you call for help from inside. You hire people to carry guns for you, and you have to worry as much about them as you do any bad guys. You become a family under seige. Even your kid's puppy love has to be fiercely vetted and worried about as a potential gold-digger.
Your whole world becomes as much about fear and survival as any plane crash victim lost in the wilderness. Your doctor recommends anti-anxiety drugs, and THAT becomes something to worry about.
So there you are, as grim as any soldier in a losing battle. Your food is exquisite and tasteless. Your insomnia is at least wrapped in silk sheets. Spend as much money on hookers as you want. You'll never get close to what a woman who loves you can do for you.
And remember, this is what happens when you have enough money to try to insulate yourself from the upheaval. "Being good at what you do," means you're just another working stiff, and the functional difference between $100K and homeless isn't nearly as much as you might like to think...
Screw learning. With my new Sarah Palin Voyage of Self-Discovery and the Christian Buddha, you'll discover that you always knew the answers in your heart all along. Trying to become some so-called "expert" by doing things like "studying" just makes you an elite egghead who gets all wishy-washy when it comes to the truthiness of anything.
You already know the answer, and you know that you do! Don't let those gosh-darned experts tell you any different!
Act now, and we'll bonus you with the Anthony Robbins method "Solve Any Problem in Three Easy Steps!"
Step One: It's not a problem. It's a challenge! Step Two: You can Always Decide to Meet That Challenge! Step Three: Once you Decide to Meet that Challenge, It's Been Met! Problem Solved with nothing more than the Power of your Mind!
Get a 10-foot 4X4 piece of lumber. Drop it flat on the ground. Walk from one end to the other like a balance beam. I'll bet you can do it. I'll bet you can do it blindfolded, walking backward. I'll bet you can do it reciting the alphabet backward. I'll bet you could do it drunk.
Take that same 4X4, suspend it 20 stories in the air between a couple of cranes. Put a bunch of razor sharp, rotating propellers on the ground beneath it. Intersperse the propellers with oil drillbits pointed up, not down for once. Have a bunch of trained turkey vultures flying around to watch you fall. Take your wife, kids and your momma, put a gun in their mouths while the Joker cackles that when you fall, he's gonna blow their heads off. Bring in the television cameras and monitors so the whole World can watch and you can watch them watch. Have some intern read the tweets and comments sections about your plight over the loudspeakers.
Now, there are a few ice-blooded "Licensed to Kill" Double-O men who could keep it together and walk that beam under that kind of pressure. Mary Lou Retton and Nadia could, no doubt. I seriously doubt I could.
Is it a big deal to do a software upgrade under such tightly controlled conditions? Not really. But try doing that software upgrade when billions of dollars and your career is on the line, with the whole world watching. The guy who screws that up is gonna be a punchline and a byword for a few decades, a real Wilson if you've read that book.:-) You'll be known as the guy who screwed up Mars.
Tell me there wouldn't be maybe one or two drops of sweat on the keyboard...
with the full knowledge that there will be a complete 360 degree video of the accident with measurements of speed of both vehicles.
Only if YOU caused the accident. It's a pretty safe bet that if a glitch in their programming caused the accident, there'll be a tragic loss of data...:-)
Yes, your rights are being violated, but nobody is taking your property or your liberty...
The violation of the rights IS the Liberty being taken.
It gets better. The situation you're describing is the collapse of the Rule of Law. One definition of an illegitimate government is one that won't even play by its own rules. At this point, I'll let Jefferson speak for himself:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Any government that won't respect the rights of their citizenry is no government at all, by the very principles we hold most dear...
They Literally are. I actually attended so many English classes that I remember the entire flow of the argument short-handed as "The King is Above the Law.":-)
They're arguing that no one has the authority to call the Executive to account. They're about half a step short of "Divine Right of Kings," and they certainly have reached "Might Makes Right." Remember "If the president does it, it can't be illegal?" They've simply carried that thought to its logical conclusion, that the president and those who work for him are above the law.
That's a scary, scary argument coming from the man who can throw cruise missiles around on a whim.
It's one of Western Civilization's famous slogans, right up there with "Give me Liberty or Give me Death," "Remember the Alamo," "Coke Is It!" and "Use the Force, Luke.":-)
In fact the only time a federal court has prospectively used its injunctive power to prevent constitutional violations was in Brown v. Board of Education. And that's about to end, because Chief Justice Roberts has explicitly stated that he wants to end that and similar federal practices which arose out of the civil rights movement.
You're arguing that we have the Bill of Rights, but no one has the authority to enforce them, which for all practical purposes means we have no Bill of Rights.
Man, I don't want to go all ITG here, but seriously, too many members of my family have pledged to defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic to ever allow that to stand. Do you honestly believe Patrick Henry or Thomas Jefferson would agree with your stance, that we fought a Revolution for rights and liberties which don't exist in the application?
Again, I'm loathe to sound like some Tea Party nut, but we seem to have arrived at a Constitutional Crisis with an Executive branch that is on a power-mad three-day-drunk. At the local level, we have police departments claiming that merely documenting their activities is a criminal offense. We have the TSA telling a Federal Court that they don't have to do anything they don't wanna do. We have the DOJ telling another Federal Court they don't have to respect the 4th Amendment and "You're not the Boss of me!" We have a president who claims the right to order the execution of any American citizen without trial.
Clinton, Bush, Obama -- it doesn't seem to matter WHO holds the office, it's the office itself that's out of control. Personally, I think the writing's been on the wall since we let Nixon escape a jail term.
It is long, long past time we pull the Executive back into balance.
OK, just to clarify, I neither allow nor approve of either behavior and judge both attempts at feeding the baby brother a bug the same.:-) Perhaps I should have chosen my words more carefully.
For decades we have held that phone calls are private communications that require a warrant to intercept per the 4th Amendment. The Federal Government isn't arguing that they haven't violated the 4th. They're arguing that they're immune from any legal attempts to hold them accountable for violating the 4th.
That's terrifying. It's so bad it makes me think I've wandered into tin foil hat territory, until I read the article:
The San Francisco-based appeals court ruled that when Congress wrote the law regulating eavesdropping on Americans and spies, it never waived sovereign immunity in the section prohibiting targeting Americans without warrants. That means Congress did not allow for aggrieved Americans to sue the government, even if their constitutional rights were violated by the United States breaching its own wiretapping laws.
That's Terry Gilliam "Brazil" logic, right there. The government is literally arguing they're violating the 4th Amendment, but that no one has the authority to hold them accountable. Literally, that the King is above the law. This ruling is so bad that not only does it violate the Bill of Rights, it violates the Magna Carta.
I was there. EVERYONE foresaw the success of the IBM PC. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, remember? The IBM PC was long expected and highly anticipated. It was the closest thing to a sure bet as you ever get. The controversy wasn't over if the PC would be successful-- Apple had already demonstrated it was -- but over how much of IBM's mainframe business would be cannibalized by its introduction. When Apple took out a full-page ad welcoming IBM to the market, he pundits laughed, saying it was like the Christians welcoming the lions, and for once the pundits were right.
The success, the clones, all of it didn't exactly take the Amazing Kreskin to foresee. It was pretty much common knowledge. You have to understand how dominant IBM was at the time. It had more control over the computing market in its day than Microsoft ever dreamed of. Bill's Mom had intimate inside knowledge of the company.
Not only was none of this a dice roll, there weren't even dice on the board.
Gates' story is that Kildall "went flying" instead of meeting with IBM, and thus missed out on the opportunity due to sloth.
Kildall's story is that Gates ripped him off.
Hmm, truth is neither of us were in the room that day. We're left to decipher what happened in the context of history. Which story makes more sense? Was Gary Kildall a lazy, shiftless screw-up like Gates says? Have we ever seen other instances where Gates acted in a less-than-ethical manner? Which story fits better?
BTW, Apple had made the future clear. IBM's Boca Raton project was going to be massively disruptive, which is why they had to run it from relative secrecy. If anyone from the mainframe side had heard about what was going on down in the Florida swamps, there would have been open civil war within the company.
When Apple ran that full-page ad welcoming IBM to the market, the pundits said it was like the Christians welcoming the lions to the arena. The pundits were, for once, right. I was around at the time, and believe me, the IBM PC was long expected and about as risky a business proposition -- apart from the mainframe side that was about to get reamed -- as the only lemonade franchise in the desert.
We had all been expecting the IBM PC for a long, long time. It was the "iPhone/JesusPhone" of it's day. Personally, the only way I see Gary Kildall blowing off IBM and then selling out to Gates for a pittance is if Kildall had been non compos mentis at the time due to a massive infusion of drugs or severe head injury.
Gates, at the time, did NOT know how much DOS was going to be worth
OK, good, there's our problem and the source of our confusion. People have roundly condemned this deal because Gates knew EXACTLY how much DOS was going to be worth, down to the last dollar. What people have found so morally objectionable is that Gates already had the deal with IBM lined up by virtue of his mother's influence, and that he low-balled Kildall when Kildall did not know the entire story. Gates didn't look at Kildall's work and think, "Hmm, I bet I could sell this to someone," buy the program, take the risk, and then find a customer. People condemn this deal because Gates gave Kildall a haircut when there was NO risk, and by taking Kildall for a ride he would never have agreed to had everything been done aboveboard.
People pair this story with the Woz's "Breakout" story, where Steve Jobs got Wozniak to work four days straight to finish "Breakout," without telling him that Atari was offering a $5,000 bonus. Woz finished the work, Steve pocketed the money.
Neither story shows Gates or Jobs in a flattering light, and sometimes "being a sharp businessman" is just code for being a lousy human being.
We came up with the concept of a trust and passed laws against them (Sherman Anti-Trust Act, 1890) because we felt the behavior we were seeing, while not illegal in 1889, was wrong and should be prohibited. Enforcing the act had to wait for more than a decade until Roosevelt could get a court system that would act against the corporate interests. Indeed, the first application of the Act was to break Unions, not the trusts they were targeting.
There were no underhanded dealings going on.
OK, if you look up the definition and etymology of the word "underhanded," it means "something hidden" and "marked by secrecy." Literally, a hand under a table or cloak acting in a way not visible to all. This deal, where Gates had a hidden, secret agreement with IBM that Gary Kildall knew nothing about, was the walking definition of "underhanded."
Note "underhanded" does not necessarily mean "illegal," and what scares me to death are the number of people in this thread who seem to conflate the words "legal" and "ethical." Forclosing on a 98-year-old widow might be legal, but it's not ethical. Taking in foster kids and then giving them just enough to get by so you can pocket the government stipend might be legal, but it's not ethical.
The country-western singers have always argued that some men wear a mask when they rob, while other men wear a suit. They're not wrong.
If that were not the case, people inside the company could profit at the expense of the other shareholders.
Sure. Now why do we think that's wrong? What's the problem with allowing people inside the company to take advantage of the outsiders.? Couldn't the outsiders also get jobs within the company if they chose? Why is the asymmetric information considered a problem?
You're about to come back to me with some variation of the idea of fiduciary duty, which is simply restating the question. Why would they have a fiduciary duty to the stockholders? Why do we care if one group of people with superior information take advantage of another group of people? After all, anyone could get a job at the company. Anyone could -- in theory -- also become privy to the inside information. Why do we protect the shareholders from the reality of the market? What's the problem with asymmetric information in a capitalist market, and why do we feel the market distortions they cause to be evil?
When you get that answer, apply the principal to private dealings. Johnny Depp plays an evil man in "The Ninth Gate," a rare book dealer who visits bereaved families and buys rare books from the estate before the family realizes how valuable the books they sold are. The audience considers this to be evil behavior, and it sets up the moral corruption that a demon takes advantage of later in the script.
Why would we think those book sales are evil? After all, Depp is not doing aything illegal. He doesn't lie to them. He merely says "I can offer you this much for this book," and offers to get back to them later with offers on other books. Why do you think the audience boos and hisses at this behavior?
He had information that both IBM and Brock lacked,
OK, so explain to me why insider trading is considered illegal. In addition, when my macroeconomics professor railed against the market distortions caused by unequal information, why did he keep referring to that as "unethical behavior?"
Why do we insist on "transparency" in the markets, and why is "crony capitalism" considered a bad thing?
Did you have equal and fair access to the market without being an employee? Would the market have given both you and your employer a fair opportunity to sell that program, or can you not even get your foot in the door until you have capitulated and joined your employer's team?
Consider a real case from history. You're a farmer. Your produce is worth a great deal of money in the city. Knowing that the cities have need of food, you and the other farmers and people from the city paid taxes to a government to build the necessary infrastructure to keep our society going.
Now, railroad engineers need to eat too, and no one is saying the railroads shouln't get a fair cut. Unfortunately, the owners of the railroad somehow find their way into sweetheart deals with the government, and then form cartels with the distributors.
Suddenly, your corn, which would sell for $10/bushel in a fair and free market, is facing offers of 50 cents a bushel. Your choice is either take the 50 cents and pray you survive the winter, or let your corn rot at the depot and watch the bank forclose on your farm. Oddly enough, your buddy in the city says corn prices remain ridiculously high there no matter what happens at your end. The savings are definitely not getting passed on to him, since prices are always set at "what the market will bear," and not "what it cost to produce." Indeed, the difference between price and production cost is known as "profit," which the railroads say is their entire purpose in life.
Funny, you thought the entire purpose of the railroads was to move your corn to the cities so people don't starve.
Are you beginning to see how it's entirely possible to steal from people in an entirely legal, though not ethical, fashion?
One last footnote from our friends the psych majors. Apparently there is an aberration in human psychology that can produce monsters of varying degrees known as sociopaths. Sociopaths are people born without empathy or the ability to consider any other wants and needs other than their own. To these people, if it's legal, and therefore free from consequence, then they find it perfectly acceptable. They're UNABLE to consider questions of morality, fairness and ethics, because they literally cannot acknowledge the existence of anyone else in the world by themselves.
Two last things they note. One, sociopathy is definitely a pathology because they have found cases where physical brain damage causes the pathology to develop, and Two, in various surveys they've done, it seems we have a massive concentration of them among our captains of industry. Apparently, being willing to do ANYTHING for money is a behavior that is rewarded in business, while people who have moral reservations frequently find their careers stymied.
Past histories of Microsoft have said Mr. Allen's departure from the company was sparked by his first brush with cancer in 1982, when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease.
In that year, Mr. Allen says he eavesdropped on a discussion in the Microsoft offices in Bellevue, Wash., between Mr. Gates and Steve Ballmer, now the company's CEO, in which he heard the two men talking about Mr. Allen's recent lack of productivity and how they might dilute his equity in the company by issuing options to themselves and other shareholders. Mr. Allen said he burst into the room and confronted Messrs. Gates and Ballmer, both of whom later apologized to him and backed down from their plan.
"I had helped start the company and was still an active member of management, though limited by my illness, and now my partner and my colleague were scheming to rip me off," he says in the book. "It was mercenary opportunism, plain and simple." . A spokesman for Microsoft said Mr. Ballmer had no comment.
Earlier efforts by Mr. Gates to whittle down his partner's stake in Microsoft were successful though, according to Mr. Allen.
Speaking conservatively, Bill Gates had access to IBM through his mother's business connections. Gary Kildall did not. Can we really claim to live in a meritocracy when the difference between billions and obscurity is who you were born to?
Moreover, can we agree that both physical strength and mental acuity begin as genetic traits? If we condemn a strong man for taking advantage of a weaker one, is that any different than a smart man taking advantage of a slower one? As a father, I don't allow my older son to force his little brother to eat a bug. By the same taken, I don't approve of my older daughter tricking her little brother into eating that same bug.
Hmm, it's almost like we have a moral and ethical obligation to be fair in our business dealings...
Slashdot Mirror
US healthcare is expensive, and supply is high, but demand is low ... and no waiting lists.
After a recent move, my wife was told by our "Gold-Plated, Big Expensive Best-of-Breed" insurance company that it was a 6-month wait to find a gynecologist in our new Major US City. We have friends in other places who have been told that there would be a one-year wait for an obstetrician. :-) Pediatricians are better, seeing as how they only asked for a three-month wait. I, being a middle-aged father, am of course invincible and have no need of medical care.
We've seen this trend replicated in three different cities across the US. Our family and friends are seeing the same trends. We are both fortunate and blessed and are what passes for "well-off" in the current economy, meaning we can afford to buy new clothes and school supplies at the end of August. If WE are having issues, I cringe to imagine what it's like for people in the same situation I grew up in.
My wife, who grew up in one of those Socialist Hellscapes Fox keeps warning us about, does not understand why any of this should be a problem. She likens living in the US to seeing a movie star in person. You're in love with the glamour until you meet the real person who dropped out of high school to indulge a drug addiction and eating disorder for a couple of decades.
Unfortunately, I don't think anyone's figured out where the curves meet, probably because it's considered a basic necessity for a functioning society
Healthcare, like the military, fire department, and the mail, is a classic market failure. Patients put their lives in the hands of their doctor. There is no time to haggle over price in an ambulance. Despite all the hoopla about "informed consent" and "patient responsibility," even doctors are discouraged from trying to treat their own illnesses, because people who are sick are by definition unable to make detached, clear-headed choices. Furthermore, patients haven't gone to medical school, didn't pass board specializations and haven't spent twenty years of their lives in a hospital. At some point, you have to trust your doctor, because Google and WebMD just doesn't cut it.
That dependence and need for trust totally guts any power the patient might have in a business negotiation.
I don't think anyone's figured out where the curves meet
Sure they have. Given time, Demand will pay any price Supply asks. I'm a middle-aged father. Statistically speaking, I'll die from a preventable but untreated medical condition because I want to spare my family the worry and expense of my healthcare. But my kids? I'll go all unhinged John Winchester over that. My kid gets sick with anything worse than the sniffles, and I'll hand over my wallet, bank accounts, 401k, mortgage, whatever. You want it, it's yours.
It gets worse. Even if YOU are able to negotiate in the marketplace for optimum services, what about those less fortunate than you? No, I'm not making a moral argument for charity. I've learned better than to try to argue for ethics or morality. I'm making an argument for YOUR health. We need a national healthcare system, and yes, you want to keep that alcoholic bum in the best health we possibly can -- and yeah, I'm including dental here -- because communicable diseases spread. Some random bum has a dental abscess that gives some bug a place to camp out, and suddenly he's literally spraying viruses every time he opens his mouth. Some poor busboy passes him on the way to work, and before you know it, your silverware's getting wiped down with that virus.
Now, I know that some people don't wanna pay for that bum's healthcare, but you have to ask yourself. Do you wanna pay some tiny fraction of a percent for a national healthcare system, or do you want to pay for your personal lengthy hospitalization?
"crisis [krahy-sis] noun, plural crises [-seez]
Example Sentences:
1. Well, let's go back to history and think about the leading indicators of financial crises and what they are.
2. However, computers are still amateurs when it comes to thinking their way through unforeseen crises such as component failures.
3. Feedbacks in the economic network can turn local crises into global ones. "
the God of War
Sorry, Dude, it's Slashdot. :-) I meant Playstation, not politics.
Also FYI, be good at what you do and no financial crisis can hurt you.
Deep, classical hubris.
FInancial crises promote societal upheavals. They crash stock markets. They wipe out real estate values. They destroy savings accounts. They turn cities into war zones. If you're rich enough, you get to learn all about the wonderful world of K&R insurance, and the wonder of placing full-time bodyguards with your children. You get to live behind more walls than most Supermax inmates. Your spouse begins to take their frustration out on you, as do your kids.
You become acutely aware of how far away the panic room is, and you push down any thoughts that someone might not come when you call for help from inside. You hire people to carry guns for you, and you have to worry as much about them as you do any bad guys. You become a family under seige. Even your kid's puppy love has to be fiercely vetted and worried about as a potential gold-digger.
Your whole world becomes as much about fear and survival as any plane crash victim lost in the wilderness. Your doctor recommends anti-anxiety drugs, and THAT becomes something to worry about.
So there you are, as grim as any soldier in a losing battle. Your food is exquisite and tasteless. Your insomnia is at least wrapped in silk sheets. Spend as much money on hookers as you want. You'll never get close to what a woman who loves you can do for you.
And remember, this is what happens when you have enough money to try to insulate yourself from the upheaval. "Being good at what you do," means you're just another working stiff, and the functional difference between $100K and homeless isn't nearly as much as you might like to think...
I can promise you that the God of War has a huge following of mostly adolescent males...
"learn ... in ten easy minutes
Screw learning. With my new Sarah Palin Voyage of Self-Discovery and the Christian Buddha, you'll discover that you always knew the answers in your heart all along. Trying to become some so-called "expert" by doing things like "studying" just makes you an elite egghead who gets all wishy-washy when it comes to the truthiness of anything.
You already know the answer, and you know that you do! Don't let those gosh-darned experts tell you any different!
Act now, and we'll bonus you with the Anthony Robbins method "Solve Any Problem in Three Easy Steps!"
Step One: It's not a problem. It's a challenge!
Step Two: You can Always Decide to Meet That Challenge!
Step Three: Once you Decide to Meet that Challenge, It's Been Met! Problem Solved with nothing more than the Power of your Mind!
Amazing how people think things are so much easier and simpler when they've never done them before, isn't it?
Get a 10-foot 4X4 piece of lumber. Drop it flat on the ground. Walk from one end to the other like a balance beam. I'll bet you can do it. I'll bet you can do it blindfolded, walking backward. I'll bet you can do it reciting the alphabet backward. I'll bet you could do it drunk.
Take that same 4X4, suspend it 20 stories in the air between a couple of cranes. Put a bunch of razor sharp, rotating propellers on the ground beneath it. Intersperse the propellers with oil drillbits pointed up, not down for once. Have a bunch of trained turkey vultures flying around to watch you fall. Take your wife, kids and your momma, put a gun in their mouths while the Joker cackles that when you fall, he's gonna blow their heads off. Bring in the television cameras and monitors so the whole World can watch and you can watch them watch. Have some intern read the tweets and comments sections about your plight over the loudspeakers.
Now, there are a few ice-blooded "Licensed to Kill" Double-O men who could keep it together and walk that beam under that kind of pressure. Mary Lou Retton and Nadia could, no doubt. I seriously doubt I could.
Is it a big deal to do a software upgrade under such tightly controlled conditions? Not really. But try doing that software upgrade when billions of dollars and your career is on the line, with the whole world watching. The guy who screws that up is gonna be a punchline and a byword for a few decades, a real Wilson if you've read that book. :-) You'll be known as the guy who screwed up Mars.
Tell me there wouldn't be maybe one or two drops of sweat on the keyboard...
with the full knowledge that there will be a complete 360 degree video of the accident with measurements of speed of both vehicles.
Only if YOU caused the accident. It's a pretty safe bet that if a glitch in their programming caused the accident, there'll be a tragic loss of data... :-)
Yes, your rights are being violated, but nobody is taking your property or your liberty...
The violation of the rights IS the Liberty being taken.
It gets better. The situation you're describing is the collapse of the Rule of Law. One definition of an illegitimate government is one that won't even play by its own rules. At this point, I'll let Jefferson speak for himself:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Any government that won't respect the rights of their citizenry is no government at all, by the very principles we hold most dear...
They Literally are. I actually attended so many English classes that I remember the entire flow of the argument short-handed as "The King is Above the Law." :-)
They're arguing that no one has the authority to call the Executive to account. They're about half a step short of "Divine Right of Kings," and they certainly have reached "Might Makes Right." Remember "If the president does it, it can't be illegal?" They've simply carried that thought to its logical conclusion, that the president and those who work for him are above the law.
That's a scary, scary argument coming from the man who can throw cruise missiles around on a whim.
Not even the King is above the Law.
It's one of Western Civilization's famous slogans, right up there with "Give me Liberty or Give me Death," "Remember the Alamo," "Coke Is It!" and "Use the Force, Luke." :-)
In fact the only time a federal court has prospectively used its injunctive power to prevent constitutional violations was in Brown v. Board of Education. And that's about to end, because Chief Justice Roberts has explicitly stated that he wants to end that and similar federal practices which arose out of the civil rights movement.
You're arguing that we have the Bill of Rights, but no one has the authority to enforce them, which for all practical purposes means we have no Bill of Rights.
Man, I don't want to go all ITG here, but seriously, too many members of my family have pledged to defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic to ever allow that to stand. Do you honestly believe Patrick Henry or Thomas Jefferson would agree with your stance, that we fought a Revolution for rights and liberties which don't exist in the application?
Again, I'm loathe to sound like some Tea Party nut, but we seem to have arrived at a Constitutional Crisis with an Executive branch that is on a power-mad three-day-drunk. At the local level, we have police departments claiming that merely documenting their activities is a criminal offense. We have the TSA telling a Federal Court that they don't have to do anything they don't wanna do. We have the DOJ telling another Federal Court they don't have to respect the 4th Amendment and "You're not the Boss of me!" We have a president who claims the right to order the execution of any American citizen without trial.
Clinton, Bush, Obama -- it doesn't seem to matter WHO holds the office, it's the office itself that's out of control. Personally, I think the writing's been on the wall since we let Nixon escape a jail term.
It is long, long past time we pull the Executive back into balance.
Tongue in Cheek
OK, just to clarify, I neither allow nor approve of either behavior and judge both attempts at feeding the baby brother a bug the same. :-) Perhaps I should have chosen my words more carefully.
For decades we have held that phone calls are private communications that require a warrant to intercept per the 4th Amendment. The Federal Government isn't arguing that they haven't violated the 4th. They're arguing that they're immune from any legal attempts to hold them accountable for violating the 4th.
That's terrifying. It's so bad it makes me think I've wandered into tin foil hat territory, until I read the article:
The San Francisco-based appeals court ruled that when Congress wrote the law regulating eavesdropping on Americans and spies, it never waived sovereign immunity in the section prohibiting targeting Americans without warrants. That means Congress did not allow for aggrieved Americans to sue the government, even if their constitutional rights were violated by the United States breaching its own wiretapping laws.
That's Terry Gilliam "Brazil" logic, right there. The government is literally arguing they're violating the 4th Amendment, but that no one has the authority to hold them accountable. Literally, that the King is above the law. This ruling is so bad that not only does it violate the Bill of Rights, it violates the Magna Carta.
Gates not only forsaw the success of the IBM PC
I was there. EVERYONE foresaw the success of the IBM PC. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, remember? The IBM PC was long expected and highly anticipated. It was the closest thing to a sure bet as you ever get. The controversy wasn't over if the PC would be successful-- Apple had already demonstrated it was -- but over how much of IBM's mainframe business would be cannibalized by its introduction. When Apple took out a full-page ad welcoming IBM to the market, he pundits laughed, saying it was like the Christians welcoming the lions, and for once the pundits were right.
The success, the clones, all of it didn't exactly take the Amazing Kreskin to foresee. It was pretty much common knowledge. You have to understand how dominant IBM was at the time. It had more control over the computing market in its day than Microsoft ever dreamed of. Bill's Mom had intimate inside knowledge of the company.
Not only was none of this a dice roll, there weren't even dice on the board.
Gates' story is that Kildall "went flying" instead of meeting with IBM, and thus missed out on the opportunity due to sloth.
Kildall's story is that Gates ripped him off.
Hmm, truth is neither of us were in the room that day. We're left to decipher what happened in the context of history. Which story makes more sense? Was Gary Kildall a lazy, shiftless screw-up like Gates says? Have we ever seen other instances where Gates acted in a less-than-ethical manner? Which story fits better?
BTW, Apple had made the future clear. IBM's Boca Raton project was going to be massively disruptive, which is why they had to run it from relative secrecy. If anyone from the mainframe side had heard about what was going on down in the Florida swamps, there would have been open civil war within the company.
When Apple ran that full-page ad welcoming IBM to the market, the pundits said it was like the Christians welcoming the lions to the arena. The pundits were, for once, right. I was around at the time, and believe me, the IBM PC was long expected and about as risky a business proposition -- apart from the mainframe side that was about to get reamed -- as the only lemonade franchise in the desert.
We had all been expecting the IBM PC for a long, long time. It was the "iPhone/JesusPhone" of it's day. Personally, the only way I see Gary Kildall blowing off IBM and then selling out to Gates for a pittance is if Kildall had been non compos mentis at the time due to a massive infusion of drugs or severe head injury.
Gates, at the time, did NOT know how much DOS was going to be worth
OK, good, there's our problem and the source of our confusion. People have roundly condemned this deal because Gates knew EXACTLY how much DOS was going to be worth, down to the last dollar. What people have found so morally objectionable is that Gates already had the deal with IBM lined up by virtue of his mother's influence, and that he low-balled Kildall when Kildall did not know the entire story. Gates didn't look at Kildall's work and think, "Hmm, I bet I could sell this to someone," buy the program, take the risk, and then find a customer. People condemn this deal because Gates gave Kildall a haircut when there was NO risk, and by taking Kildall for a ride he would never have agreed to had everything been done aboveboard.
People pair this story with the Woz's "Breakout" story, where Steve Jobs got Wozniak to work four days straight to finish "Breakout," without telling him that Atari was offering a $5,000 bonus. Woz finished the work, Steve pocketed the money.
Neither story shows Gates or Jobs in a flattering light, and sometimes "being a sharp businessman" is just code for being a lousy human being.
We came up with the concept of a trust and passed laws against them (Sherman Anti-Trust Act, 1890) because we felt the behavior we were seeing, while not illegal in 1889, was wrong and should be prohibited. Enforcing the act had to wait for more than a decade until Roosevelt could get a court system that would act against the corporate interests. Indeed, the first application of the Act was to break Unions, not the trusts they were targeting.
There were no underhanded dealings going on.
OK, if you look up the definition and etymology of the word "underhanded," it means "something hidden" and "marked by secrecy." Literally, a hand under a table or cloak acting in a way not visible to all. This deal, where Gates had a hidden, secret agreement with IBM that Gary Kildall knew nothing about, was the walking definition of "underhanded."
Note "underhanded" does not necessarily mean "illegal," and what scares me to death are the number of people in this thread who seem to conflate the words "legal" and "ethical." Forclosing on a 98-year-old widow might be legal, but it's not ethical. Taking in foster kids and then giving them just enough to get by so you can pocket the government stipend might be legal, but it's not ethical.
The country-western singers have always argued that some men wear a mask when they rob, while other men wear a suit. They're not wrong.
If that were not the case, people inside the company could profit at the expense of the other shareholders.
Sure. Now why do we think that's wrong? What's the problem with allowing people inside the company to take advantage of the outsiders.? Couldn't the outsiders also get jobs within the company if they chose? Why is the asymmetric information considered a problem?
You're about to come back to me with some variation of the idea of fiduciary duty, which is simply restating the question. Why would they have a fiduciary duty to the stockholders? Why do we care if one group of people with superior information take advantage of another group of people? After all, anyone could get a job at the company. Anyone could -- in theory -- also become privy to the inside information. Why do we protect the shareholders from the reality of the market? What's the problem with asymmetric information in a capitalist market, and why do we feel the market distortions they cause to be evil?
When you get that answer, apply the principal to private dealings. Johnny Depp plays an evil man in "The Ninth Gate," a rare book dealer who visits bereaved families and buys rare books from the estate before the family realizes how valuable the books they sold are. The audience considers this to be evil behavior, and it sets up the moral corruption that a demon takes advantage of later in the script.
Why would we think those book sales are evil? After all, Depp is not doing aything illegal. He doesn't lie to them. He merely says "I can offer you this much for this book," and offers to get back to them later with offers on other books. Why do you think the audience boos and hisses at this behavior?
He had information that both IBM and Brock lacked,
OK, so explain to me why insider trading is considered illegal. In addition, when my macroeconomics professor railed against the market distortions caused by unequal information, why did he keep referring to that as "unethical behavior?"
Why do we insist on "transparency" in the markets, and why is "crony capitalism" considered a bad thing?
How did I get screwed?
Did you have equal and fair access to the market without being an employee? Would the market have given both you and your employer a fair opportunity to sell that program, or can you not even get your foot in the door until you have capitulated and joined your employer's team?
Consider a real case from history. You're a farmer. Your produce is worth a great deal of money in the city. Knowing that the cities have need of food, you and the other farmers and people from the city paid taxes to a government to build the necessary infrastructure to keep our society going.
Now, railroad engineers need to eat too, and no one is saying the railroads shouln't get a fair cut. Unfortunately, the owners of the railroad somehow find their way into sweetheart deals with the government, and then form cartels with the distributors.
Suddenly, your corn, which would sell for $10/bushel in a fair and free market, is facing offers of 50 cents a bushel. Your choice is either take the 50 cents and pray you survive the winter, or let your corn rot at the depot and watch the bank forclose on your farm. Oddly enough, your buddy in the city says corn prices remain ridiculously high there no matter what happens at your end. The savings are definitely not getting passed on to him, since prices are always set at "what the market will bear," and not "what it cost to produce." Indeed, the difference between price and production cost is known as "profit," which the railroads say is their entire purpose in life.
Funny, you thought the entire purpose of the railroads was to move your corn to the cities so people don't starve.
Are you beginning to see how it's entirely possible to steal from people in an entirely legal, though not ethical, fashion?
One last footnote from our friends the psych majors. Apparently there is an aberration in human psychology that can produce monsters of varying degrees known as sociopaths. Sociopaths are people born without empathy or the ability to consider any other wants and needs other than their own. To these people, if it's legal, and therefore free from consequence, then they find it perfectly acceptable. They're UNABLE to consider questions of morality, fairness and ethics, because they literally cannot acknowledge the existence of anyone else in the world by themselves.
Two last things they note. One, sociopathy is definitely a pathology because they have found cases where physical brain damage causes the pathology to develop, and Two, in various surveys they've done, it seems we have a massive concentration of them among our captains of industry. Apparently, being willing to do ANYTHING for money is a behavior that is rewarded in business, while people who have moral reservations frequently find their careers stymied.
From a WSJ review of Paul Allen's biography:
Past histories of Microsoft have said Mr. Allen's departure from the company was sparked by his first brush with cancer in 1982, when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease.
In that year, Mr. Allen says he eavesdropped on a discussion in the Microsoft offices in Bellevue, Wash., between Mr. Gates and Steve Ballmer, now the company's CEO, in which he heard the two men talking about Mr. Allen's recent lack of productivity and how they might dilute his equity in the company by issuing options to themselves and other shareholders. Mr. Allen said he burst into the room and confronted Messrs. Gates and Ballmer, both of whom later apologized to him and backed down from their plan.
"I had helped start the company and was still an active member of management, though limited by my illness, and now my partner and my colleague were scheming to rip me off," he says in the book. "It was mercenary opportunism, plain and simple."
.
A spokesman for Microsoft said Mr. Ballmer had no comment.
Earlier efforts by Mr. Gates to whittle down his partner's stake in Microsoft were successful though, according to Mr. Allen.
Speaking conservatively, Bill Gates had access to IBM through his mother's business connections. Gary Kildall did not. Can we really claim to live in a meritocracy when the difference between billions and obscurity is who you were born to?
Moreover, can we agree that both physical strength and mental acuity begin as genetic traits? If we condemn a strong man for taking advantage of a weaker one, is that any different than a smart man taking advantage of a slower one? As a father, I don't allow my older son to force his little brother to eat a bug. By the same taken, I don't approve of my older daughter tricking her little brother into eating that same bug.
Hmm, it's almost like we have a moral and ethical obligation to be fair in our business dealings...