Larry Niven's short story The Jigsaw Man extrapolated an organ donation slippery slope back in 1967, introducing the term "organlegging" to the world. The main story follows someone convicted for death and subsequent disassembly as they try to escape that fate. Interleaved with it is a future history of increasingly minor crimes that result in a death/donation sentence, as society's ability to use and therefore demand for organ transplants grows. The twist at the end involves how minor the convict's offense was, relative to current laws.
And it is notable how completely unprescient it proved to be. Nearly half a century later there is no sign of a trend in the direction he postulated.
Re:Kill this bullshit story, please
on
When Are You Dead?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
While you're right that the OP is probably a religious asshat trying to get his wacky agenda some air time, you can't deny the huge incentive hospitals have to declare someone "brain dead" who maybe is or maybe isn't or is maybe on the cusp, because they make $750K PER ORGAN harvested.
...
What nonsense. Organ transplants COST $750,000 to perform because they are difficult, elaborate, high-tech, risky procedures -- it can't be done for $5 grand by Dr. Nick. That money goes to a lot of expenses the hospital doing the transplant has pay for, large amounts of medical supplies, a lot of highly trained human labor, etc. And you realize, I hope, that this is not some profitable side-line a hospital adds on to fatten its bank balance. Transplants requires special certified, highly qualified teams that must pass rigorous certification. Many transplants are done in regional centers that specialize in doing them because it makes the transplants more successful (practice makes perfect) - these centers aren't medical casinos raking in dough.
Ooh... the letter "thorn", my favorite obsolete runic letter! I think we should bring it back to we can retire the "th" in English letters, and stop getting confused with foreign Latin script words and transliterations where "th" is actually an aspirated "t" that sounds nothing like either of the two English ways of sounding "th"!
Albert Einstein said: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
He also said that if he had known the Nazis would not make atomic bombs, he never would have worked on them....
Einstein didn't ever work on atomic bombs. Honest - he never, ever did. His only involvement was in signing the "Einstein letter" written by Leo Szilard to warn Roosevelt about the dangers of the Germans developing an atomic bomb. He was never involved in the Manhattan Project or any of its predecessor efforts in any way.
... Then surface to air missiles were invented and bombers became useless...
A claim for which there is no evidence. Conventional bombing was quite effective against North Vietnam, equipped with some of the USSRs best SAMs - it has been effective in every post-WWII conflict where it has been employed.
This is unlikely to go anywhere. Tax law has around a century's worth of precedent on only taxing assets at the time of disposal, or deemed disposal. Any transfer of ownership for instance.
...
Really? Then why do I pay property taxes each year. I didn't sell the property. I live in it, and thus do not use it for raising revenue in any way. It is an asset tax (even if I am upside down on my mortgage and thus actually have no net value in it). Why does the middle class pay an asset tax on its major asset, while billionaires can sit on tens of billions of assets and pay not tax at all?
I think some people are missing the mark on the taxes issue. Some people (myself being one of them) are simply not interested in raising government revenue. We want less government, less taxes, less handouts. For that belief, we are derided as bigoted, racist, and downright stupid, when it has nothing to do with race.
That's my 2 cents.
Nah. You are not a racist or bigoted for believing that. But if you don't want to cop to being stupid, then I have to say you are a "dine and dash conservative". Bush took a surplus, that was slated to pay off all of the national debt by 2009, and blew it up into a monstrous pile of debt with unpaid for tax cuts, give-aways to Big Pharma, and his wars. Now that orgy of red ink has to paid for - and that takes tax revenue.
Claiming stupidity is your best way out. Otherwise you are a dead-beat cheat.
...Bump capital gains to equal payroll, including taking cuts for social security and Medicare.
After all, that was good enough for Ronald Reagan. His big tax reform achievement, the 1986 Tax Reform Act, equalized treatment between capital gains and wage income.
because our tax system is based on the concept of "realization." Individuals are not taxed until they actually sell property and realize their gains
But if you win a non-monetary prize (like, say, a trip to space), you do have to pay taxes on it?
I guess you are assuming the reader will fill in the correct answer - which is: "Of course you do!". Many here will not the make the connection I fear.
Re:This is why a flat tax will not work.
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This has nothing to do with a flat tax. Or most other kinds.
So he doesn't pay income tax on things that aren't income. Big deal.
I don't pay income on my bank balance either. Just on my income.
But notice - your bank balance appreciates due to interest, and you don't take it out - you just leave it there. It is nonetheless taxed as income. It your wealth was in financial instruments like stock, and it appreciates, no tax on the increase.
The proposal is not to tax the value of the stock (which is the parallel to "taxing your bank balance") - just the increase.
It's hard to see this search for the Higgs as anything other than a net economic loss. No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology...
People receiving pion radiation therapy would disagree, I think. How about muon imaging of geological and man-made structures? Neutrino imaging of the Earth? There you have three particles (or more depending on how you count the neutrinos) being used for practical purposes that you leave out.
Reagan raised taxes 11 times during his presidency.
And yet they were still lower than when he took office. this is the stupidest quote I've ever heard trying to say he was against big government. He lowered taxes farther than he should then slowly raised them to help find the sweet spot, which is how it should be done.
And yet in today's Republican Party the vast majority of politicians have taken an explicit public oath never to raise taxes at all. Net rates can only ever go down, never up. How can you "find a sweet spot" when only a one-way ratchet is permitted to exist?
Oh, and Reagan equalized the treatment between capital gains and regular income in the 1986 Tax Reform Act.
The point is dead-on: today's Republicans's exhibit an ideological rigidity, and a preference for special treatment for the rich, that was absent with Ronald Reagan, who would be mocked as a RINO today if judged by his actual policies.
Anyone accessing any kind of sensitive information (like reading email) at an internet cafe is exposing themselves to the possibility of every type of electronic snooping by criminals, up to and including laptop theft. It would be folly not to employ strong security measures when accessing the net under such circumstances.
This is like claiming people who lock their front doors fit a criminal profile, because they are trying to keep people from seeing what they have or are doing in their houses.
High energy cosmic rays originate outside of the solar system, which has been known for many decades. Some of them are even intergalactic - having energies so high that the galactic magnetic field of the Milky Way cannot trap them.
I always found that to be a dumb comparison. They came back and plundered and eventually set up some colonies. However said colonies were in the tropics and already had flora and fauna (not to mention millions of humans already living there). This is so many orders of magnitude larger, it would be more akin to Columbus landing in Antarctica in a rowboat.
Good analogy. Note how many profitable, self-supporting commercial colonies have been set up in Antarctica since its discovery in 1820.*
*Zero. In fact there has never been a single permanent resident of Antarctica. It had no human population at all during the winter until 1956 when the first year-around base was set up. Permanent settlement of Antarctica and setting up a self-sustaining economy there is orders of magnitude easier than settling Mars.
...The USAF would probably have sizable manned space stations by now, equipped with missile defenses....
Why? The military accomplishes all of its space missions with automated satellites - by far the most cost-effective means of doing so, the same as with unmanned science missions.
Without Project Apollo we would have been spared decades of strained, lame "We can send a man to the moon, but we can't..." analogies. That would be a plus.
But Polaris is the BEST pole star! Of all the stars close to the polar precession circle, Polaris is the brightest star that is very close to the actual polar axis at the point of closest approach. There are only 4 or 5 naked eye stars that are closer to the precession circle, but they are a good bit dimmer than Polaris. The only one brighter is Vega, but it is never closer than about 5 degrees.
Polaris is currently getting closer and closer to the pole. It will reach its closest apparent declination on 24 March 2100 (only 0.45 degrees away) - which, thanks to the singularity we nearly all still be alive to witness (Kurzweil has never been wrong has he?).
America can't do it = stupid. America is still the largest manufacturing nation on the planet. And it uses only 8% of it's work force to do it.
True enough. Now if only U.S. corporations paid the same share of its profits to its workers, to match the rise in productivity that occurred over the last 40 years, instead of channeling all that newly created wealth produced by American workers into executive compensation.
The rich are rich because they know how to give people what they want, not because they are stealing anything.
Right. Because we can measure a person's worth, productivity and accomplishments by checking their bank account. And it the laws are rigged to make something legal, or at least impossible to prosecute, then it can't be theft, right?
It unjust taxation is indeed theft, then the rich are stealing from the middle class by pushing off a large part of its tax burden on to much less well off people. Advocates paid by the 0.1% have been demanding, and getting, increasingly regressive taxes imposed at every level of government, local, state and federal. The game is by always shining a full-funded spotlight only on taxes that inconvenience the rich especially. As a result the total real tax burden to support government actually peaks around the 95% percentile and then starts a steady decline (http://www.ctj.org/pdf/taxday2009.pdf) the higher up the income ladder you are. This sis a strictly, literally regressive tax system.
That peak rate is roughly 31.6%, and the overall tax structure is nearly flat (very little progressivity) for fully half of U.S. taxpayers (the top 50%). Only the very low income pay really reduced tax rates, even the bottom 20% (with an average income of just $12,400) pay 16%, more than half the max rate.
The U.S. needs a truly progressive tax system to halt this tax system redistribution of the middle classes wealth to the super-rich. If the middle class can handle paying 30% of its income as total taxes (not just Federal), the 1% can handle 50% just fine, and the billionaires can handle 60% (or more). At every level of government the well off need to take up their share of the burden.
You think the US workers have freedom?... You keep using that word freedom over there but I don't think it means what you think it means....
The corporations and super-rich, and particularly their most fervent servants on the right, have played a masterful Orwellian game of Newspeak for nigh upon two generations now. The appropriate positive words and use them as code for policies that have nothing to do with the genuine meaning of the words. "Free" and "freedom" are the most widely abused words in American English today --- anything that serves the interests of corporations, the super-rich (that 0.1%), and their political minions, is touted as being the very essence and soul of "freedom".
To have a free market, however, you need some level of regulation.
And the problem with that is that you have to have that level of regulation everywhere, otherwise regulation is simply an excuse to move the production to places that aren't regulated....
It nonetheless remains true -- regulation is required for a free market to function. The fact that labor and trade law that can be applied in the U.S. cannot be imposed directly elsewhere does not change this fact. European and Japanese labor law is similar to the U.S. (usually more generous to the worker in fact) so "move the production to places that aren't regulated" generally is code for "China" (both republics included). The solution to this is to have regulations of a different sort - ones that penalize in some fashion corporations for moving jobs to China for example, tariff laws to equalize the playing field, requiring companies using Chinese factories to maintain decent standards of treatment with real enforcement mechanisms, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Larry Niven's short story The Jigsaw Man extrapolated an organ donation slippery slope back in 1967, introducing the term "organlegging" to the world. The main story follows someone convicted for death and subsequent disassembly as they try to escape that fate. Interleaved with it is a future history of increasingly minor crimes that result in a death/donation sentence, as society's ability to use and therefore demand for organ transplants grows. The twist at the end involves how minor the convict's offense was, relative to current laws.
And it is notable how completely unprescient it proved to be. Nearly half a century later there is no sign of a trend in the direction he postulated.
While you're right that the OP is probably a religious asshat trying to get his wacky agenda some air time, you can't deny the huge incentive hospitals have to declare someone "brain dead" who maybe is or maybe isn't or is maybe on the cusp, because they make $750K PER ORGAN harvested.
...
What nonsense. Organ transplants COST $750,000 to perform because they are difficult, elaborate, high-tech, risky procedures -- it can't be done for $5 grand by Dr. Nick. That money goes to a lot of expenses the hospital doing the transplant has pay for, large amounts of medical supplies, a lot of highly trained human labor, etc. And you realize, I hope, that this is not some profitable side-line a hospital adds on to fatten its bank balance. Transplants requires special certified, highly qualified teams that must pass rigorous certification. Many transplants are done in regional centers that specialize in doing them because it makes the transplants more successful (practice makes perfect) - these centers aren't medical casinos raking in dough.
Ooh... the letter "thorn", my favorite obsolete runic letter! I think we should bring it back to we can retire the "th" in English letters, and stop getting confused with foreign Latin script words and transliterations where "th" is actually an aspirated "t" that sounds nothing like either of the two English ways of sounding "th"!
Albert Einstein said: "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking...the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
He also said that if he had known the Nazis would not make atomic bombs, he never would have worked on them. ...
Einstein didn't ever work on atomic bombs. Honest - he never, ever did. His only involvement was in signing the "Einstein letter" written by Leo Szilard to warn Roosevelt about the dangers of the Germans developing an atomic bomb. He was never involved in the Manhattan Project or any of its predecessor efforts in any way.
... Then surface to air missiles were invented and bombers became useless...
A claim for which there is no evidence. Conventional bombing was quite effective against North Vietnam, equipped with some of the USSRs best SAMs - it has been effective in every post-WWII conflict where it has been employed.
This is unlikely to go anywhere. Tax law has around a century's worth of precedent on only taxing assets at the time of disposal, or deemed disposal. Any transfer of ownership for instance.
...
Really? Then why do I pay property taxes each year. I didn't sell the property. I live in it, and thus do not use it for raising revenue in any way. It is an asset tax (even if I am upside down on my mortgage and thus actually have no net value in it). Why does the middle class pay an asset tax on its major asset, while billionaires can sit on tens of billions of assets and pay not tax at all?
I think some people are missing the mark on the taxes issue. Some people (myself being one of them) are simply not interested in raising government revenue. We want less government, less taxes, less handouts. For that belief, we are derided as bigoted, racist, and downright stupid, when it has nothing to do with race. That's my 2 cents.
Nah. You are not a racist or bigoted for believing that. But if you don't want to cop to being stupid, then I have to say you are a "dine and dash conservative". Bush took a surplus, that was slated to pay off all of the national debt by 2009, and blew it up into a monstrous pile of debt with unpaid for tax cuts, give-aways to Big Pharma, and his wars. Now that orgy of red ink has to paid for - and that takes tax revenue.
Claiming stupidity is your best way out. Otherwise you are a dead-beat cheat.
...Bump capital gains to equal payroll, including taking cuts for social security and Medicare.
After all, that was good enough for Ronald Reagan. His big tax reform achievement, the 1986 Tax Reform Act, equalized treatment between capital gains and wage income.
because our tax system is based on the concept of "realization." Individuals are not taxed until they actually sell property and realize their gains
But if you win a non-monetary prize (like, say, a trip to space), you do have to pay taxes on it?
I guess you are assuming the reader will fill in the correct answer - which is: "Of course you do!". Many here will not the make the connection I fear.
This has nothing to do with a flat tax. Or most other kinds.
So he doesn't pay income tax on things that aren't income. Big deal.
I don't pay income on my bank balance either. Just on my income.
But notice - your bank balance appreciates due to interest, and you don't take it out - you just leave it there. It is nonetheless taxed as income. It your wealth was in financial instruments like stock, and it appreciates, no tax on the increase.
The proposal is not to tax the value of the stock (which is the parallel to "taxing your bank balance") - just the increase.
It's hard to see this search for the Higgs as anything other than a net economic loss. No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology...
People receiving pion radiation therapy would disagree, I think. How about muon imaging of geological and man-made structures? Neutrino imaging of the Earth? There you have three particles (or more depending on how you count the neutrinos) being used for practical purposes that you leave out.
Reagan raised taxes 11 times during his presidency.
And yet they were still lower than when he took office. this is the stupidest quote I've ever heard trying to say he was against big government. He lowered taxes farther than he should then slowly raised them to help find the sweet spot, which is how it should be done.
And yet in today's Republican Party the vast majority of politicians have taken an explicit public oath never to raise taxes at all. Net rates can only ever go down, never up. How can you "find a sweet spot" when only a one-way ratchet is permitted to exist?
Oh, and Reagan equalized the treatment between capital gains and regular income in the 1986 Tax Reform Act.
The point is dead-on: today's Republicans's exhibit an ideological rigidity, and a preference for special treatment for the rich, that was absent with Ronald Reagan, who would be mocked as a RINO today if judged by his actual policies.
Anyone accessing any kind of sensitive information (like reading email) at an internet cafe is exposing themselves to the possibility of every type of electronic snooping by criminals, up to and including laptop theft. It would be folly not to employ strong security measures when accessing the net under such circumstances.
This is like claiming people who lock their front doors fit a criminal profile, because they are trying to keep people from seeing what they have or are doing in their houses.
... Many christians believe that the holy ghost, christ, and god are all different manifestations of the same being. Don't ask how. ...
Sort of like wave-particle duality?
High energy cosmic rays originate outside of the solar system, which has been known for many decades. Some of them are even intergalactic - having energies so high that the galactic magnetic field of the Milky Way cannot trap them.
I always found that to be a dumb comparison. They came back and plundered and eventually set up some colonies. However said colonies were in the tropics and already had flora and fauna (not to mention millions of humans already living there). This is so many orders of magnitude larger, it would be more akin to Columbus landing in Antarctica in a rowboat.
Good analogy. Note how many profitable, self-supporting commercial colonies have been set up in Antarctica since its discovery in 1820.*
*Zero. In fact there has never been a single permanent resident of Antarctica. It had no human population at all during the winter until 1956 when the first year-around base was set up. Permanent settlement of Antarctica and setting up a self-sustaining economy there is orders of magnitude easier than settling Mars.
Why? The military accomplishes all of its space missions with automated satellites - by far the most cost-effective means of doing so, the same as with unmanned science missions.
Without Project Apollo we would have been spared decades of strained, lame "We can send a man to the moon, but we can't..." analogies. That would be a plus.
But Polaris is the BEST pole star! Of all the stars close to the polar precession circle, Polaris is the brightest star that is very close to the actual polar axis at the point of closest approach. There are only 4 or 5 naked eye stars that are closer to the precession circle, but they are a good bit dimmer than Polaris. The only one brighter is Vega, but it is never closer than about 5 degrees.
Polaris is currently getting closer and closer to the pole. It will reach its closest apparent declination on 24 March 2100 (only 0.45 degrees away) - which, thanks to the singularity we nearly all still be alive to witness (Kurzweil has never been wrong has he?).
America can't do it = stupid. America is still the largest manufacturing nation on the planet. And it uses only 8% of it's work force to do it.
True enough. Now if only U.S. corporations paid the same share of its profits to its workers, to match the rise in productivity that occurred over the last 40 years, instead of channeling all that newly created wealth produced by American workers into executive compensation.
The rich are rich because they know how to give people what they want, not because they are stealing anything.
Right. Because we can measure a person's worth, productivity and accomplishments by checking their bank account. And it the laws are rigged to make something legal, or at least impossible to prosecute, then it can't be theft, right?
It unjust taxation is indeed theft, then the rich are stealing from the middle class by pushing off a large part of its tax burden on to much less well off people. Advocates paid by the 0.1% have been demanding, and getting, increasingly regressive taxes imposed at every level of government, local, state and federal. The game is by always shining a full-funded spotlight only on taxes that inconvenience the rich especially. As a result the total real tax burden to support government actually peaks around the 95% percentile and then starts a steady decline (http://www.ctj.org/pdf/taxday2009.pdf) the higher up the income ladder you are. This sis a strictly, literally regressive tax system.
That peak rate is roughly 31.6%, and the overall tax structure is nearly flat (very little progressivity) for fully half of U.S. taxpayers (the top 50%). Only the very low income pay really reduced tax rates, even the bottom 20% (with an average income of just $12,400) pay 16%, more than half the max rate.
The U.S. needs a truly progressive tax system to halt this tax system redistribution of the middle classes wealth to the super-rich. If the middle class can handle paying 30% of its income as total taxes (not just Federal), the 1% can handle 50% just fine, and the billionaires can handle 60% (or more). At every level of government the well off need to take up their share of the burden.
If the US prosecuted Apple, they would have to go after a large number of American companies.
Sounds like a plan. Lets get started.
"Our only obligation is making the best product possible.'"
Code for "Our only obligation is making the most profitable product possible."
You think the US workers have freedom? ... You keep using that word freedom over there but I don't think it means what you think it means....
The corporations and super-rich, and particularly their most fervent servants on the right, have played a masterful Orwellian game of Newspeak for nigh upon two generations now. The appropriate positive words and use them as code for policies that have nothing to do with the genuine meaning of the words. "Free" and "freedom" are the most widely abused words in American English today --- anything that serves the interests of corporations, the super-rich (that 0.1%), and their political minions, is touted as being the very essence and soul of "freedom".
To have a free market, however, you need some level of regulation.
And the problem with that is that you have to have that level of regulation everywhere, otherwise regulation is simply an excuse to move the production to places that aren't regulated....
It nonetheless remains true -- regulation is required for a free market to function. The fact that labor and trade law that can be applied in the U.S. cannot be imposed directly elsewhere does not change this fact. European and Japanese labor law is similar to the U.S. (usually more generous to the worker in fact) so "move the production to places that aren't regulated" generally is code for "China" (both republics included). The solution to this is to have regulations of a different sort - ones that penalize in some fashion corporations for moving jobs to China for example, tariff laws to equalize the playing field, requiring companies using Chinese factories to maintain decent standards of treatment with real enforcement mechanisms, etc.