Anyway, there's nothing dumb about dropping out of school, _if_ it's done for the right reasons.
1. The North American school systems are garbage, they even fail at instilling basic discipline and respect.
2. These days you can't get shit with most college/uni degrees anyway. Experience trumps education every time.
3. Money, contrary to what many believe, is not the key to happiness. I would gladly take a pay cut to work a job that's more in-line with my own interests. The "fun" lost from not being about to buy as much crap, would be replaced and surpassed by fun on the job.
4. People with high IQ are always expected to be visionaries and change the world overnight. Sure, maybe if I dedicated 24 hours a day to finding the cure for Americanism, I might actually find it one day. Guess what ? I don't wanna. I'm way happier poking at computers all day long, using perhaps one-tenth of my mental capacity for work, another 1% for replying to AC trolls on/., and the remainder for my own enjoyment.
Y'know what ? Maybe the GP's daughter actually likes what she's doing, and thus the GameStop job gets her what she wants: money, and games. Hell, I used to run a computer store; it let me make money doing what I do, and gave me the time and resources to build the most ridiculous PCs for kicks. Plus I had plenty of time to flame people on/.
People who choose to be offended by anything and everything they see, should stay the fuck home and watch reruns. There was a time, not so long ago, when people had freakin' BALLS.
I know everyone's debated this topic before, but why wouldn't we (as a nation) buy out Bell and convert it into a federally-mandated non-profit ? It's precisely the kind of long-term asset that benefits society as a whole - a perfect candidate for socialization.
34 billion dollars, in the grand scheme of things, ain't all that much when 34 million citizens stand to benefit. That's $1000 per Canadian, but that 4 billion in annual profit would come back to us, which means the purchase pays for itself in 8-9 years. There's no finance minister that can squeeze that much money that quickly; certainly not the inbred albino monkeys we've had lately.
How often do I have to say it ? To hell with the Chinese government. They punish their own, then expect us to shake their hand and play nice ? They promised the IOC things would change for the better, then days after they secured the 2008 events, they turned around and bragged about how they were going to eliminate the Falun Gong movement, the Dalai Lama and the muslim separatists. So why the fuck are we still letting them host the olympics ? Does no one remember Moscow 1980 ?
I've boycotted Chinese IP ranges for years, and I'm boycotting the Beijing Olympics. What that country needs is a coup d'état, and the Chinese people need to know the rest of the world will take side with them when the walls fall.
Every nation is guilty of crimes against humanity, but at least the others have the decency to bow their heads and lie about it. The Chinese gov't parades around, flaunting their total disregard for equality. I don't see why we should tolerate it.
China, Russia, India and Brazil... is it a coincidence that those are the four main countries whose traffic I drop from my servers ? 99.44% of the traffic is spam, and the remainder is irrelevant to my business. If they love my snarky comments so much, they can use a proxy or VPN (yeah, right!)
Is Jupiter Research basically saying I need to unblock those folks ? Or are they really suggesting we'll have even more botnet slaves online by 2012 ?
CmdrTaco needs to raise the mod point cap to 50, because even at +5 you deserve to be modded up.
I started playing WoW a few years ago, at a time when I was depressed out of my skull, but I just didn't know it yet. I eventually reached a point where I was too depressed to haul my sorry ass to work in the morning, so I called in dead and played WoW 16 hours a day for months. I didn't code, I didn't hack, I barely left the apartment. Eventually the anti-depressant meds kicked in and I was wired into semi-sanity. By the time I got back to 90% normal and had found myself a new job, I stopped playing WoW, just quit cold turkey.
I fired it up again a few weeks ago, to try out a private server... I found it all extremely boring and quit after a few days. That tells me the WoW playing was a symptom of my depression, not the cause. It was the only thing easy enough to do, that didn't get shot down by my total lack of motivation.
I think the WoW mom needs to see her doctor, and a therapist.
If you buy a computer from Apple or Dell, the power supply needs to have enough capacity to handle not only what you're getting, plus power for extra I don't know about Apple, but I can tell you that Dell, IBM, HP and probably most other big-name vendors tend to use the smallest possible power supply that can keep the machine running, with just enough headroom to outlast the warranty (power supplies get weaker with age). The same is often true of local shops.
I've got an IBM P3 with a 100w power supply, from a decade ago when 250w was standard, and 300w was l33t. I've worked on countless P4 Dells where the power supply was either 150w or 220w. Just a few months ago, my buddy nearly fried his year-old MDG machine by adding a mid-range video card. Most vendors are bastards, plain and simple!
There are two main reasons for them to use these puny power supplies. #1 is cost, of course. #2 is repeat business, because when their shitty power supply blows up, there's a good chance the client will go back to the dealer and buy a new one. It's usually not covered by the warranty, because they lay fault on the client for adding hardware and overloading the lame-o PSU.
Well I've seen OEM power supplies sell anywhere from $40 to $150 plus labor, and it's 95% profit. Most OEM's garbage costs between $3 and $10 - I used to have a half-decent chinese 450w unit that cost me $6.50. The real junky ones were $3.50 and came with a flimsy ATX case, and I'd say one in 10 died on the first boot, often frying the board with it. Absolute garbage!
To put it all into perspective, I'll quote numbers from my own builds. For a low-end office desktop, my latest model draws 50-65w. It briefly peaks at 90w during POST, then goes back down. I still use a 380w Antec (Seasonic) power supply, which doesn't break a sweat, runs near-silent and gives my users the option to add a bitchin graphics card later on. The other great selling point for the Antec is the 3-year warranty.
At the other end of the spectrum, my bat-shit insane SLI design draws 450w at idle, 600w while gaming. It eats babies for breakfast, and rapes nuns for dessert. That one has 1200w via dual power supplies. It is also whisper quiet. I could shave $150 off the price and use a single 700w power supply, but it would likely die within a year, possibly taking out the board, Ram and/or graphics card with it.
Needless to say, I rarely sell replacement power supplies because the original units tend to outlive the remaining components. Maybe I'm leaving money on the table by not screwing my clients with shitty power supplies, but I'm just quirky like that.
Dan's Data was around back when Tom's Hardware was just a bunch of teenagers chipping at the Berlin wall with claw hammers.
He's got an odd personality at times, and is anything but objective, but the man tends to know his facts.
And yes, a power supply's efficiency and load capacity are adversely affected by temperature. That's partly why the better ones weigh a ton : big bad-ass heatsinks.
Actually, Dell uses the term "laptop" on official communication, including the front page of their web site.
The whole "don't call it a laptop" scare is pure nonsense dreamt up by some ignorant middle-manager or escalation expert. I didn't work there long, just long enough to realize I didn't want to be that escalation expert, so I turned down the promotion and left shortly thereafter. Like any call center, the rules are mostly made-up on-the-fly, and the people making the rules are usually the least technical in the building.
Yup... one cup of water after each tall draft (or two bottles) = no hangover (for me, at least). It's a bit trickier when spirits are involved, but it's the same idea.
Of course, I no longer work/live/sleep in bars, so I'm not quite as affected by the hangover of doom, but it's still nice to dodge them whenever you can. I'd much rather have a slightly buzzy morning, than to feel like I'm in a bad remake of Fear and Loathing.
WTF is it about the parent that warrants flamebait ?
Every day sees new ways to usurp our rights as citizens and as human beings. We are assumed guilty until proven innocent, if we even have a chance to defend ourselves. RFID tagging, while having its benefits, is far too easy to abuse, and abuse is the only constant in today's society.
If hospital staff can't be bothered to track their own equipment, how is RFID going to help ? There's is still a human somewhere that's going to screw it up out of sheer laziness.
Actually the rounded corners bit was a last-second addition while I waited for the stupid inter-post timer to count down. I was loosely basing it on the Intel Mac keynote...
But yes, I'm also irked that Firefox is the only modern browser with native rounded corners. Methinks the W3C is run by a bunch of squares *rimshot*
The problems, in my opinion, stem from the actual service providers being privatized. I believe, with careful planning and oversight, that a completely public health system could be most cost-effective while offering better service.
As you noted, the insurance is the socialized part, which does set ground rules and base rates (since it's the government's money), but it does lead to a lot of whining from the service providers, who claim they're underfunded and overburdened. I just think they need to streamline their operations. They get paid per-patient, per-incident for the most part, which leads to short-cut diagnosis and repeat visits.
I've dated a handful of nurses;) but I don't claim to know the whole story. I see quite a bit of lollygagging in clinics and hospitals. I also see a lot of slice-and-dice on the employment side, hospitals hiring agencies that ultimately hire the nurses and aides as independent contractors, possibly to dodge labor laws, benefits and unions. I say cut the middlemen, modernize and centralize HR (within a reasonable district).
I'm sure another part of the problem is the drugs. Long waiting lists for critical surgery leads to more people on costly suppressive drugs for longer periods. Some of those drugs cost upwards of $40 per dose... if the patient waits 18 months for surgery, the cost of drugs to keep them semi-stable may well exceed the cost of surgery itself - the cost, not the sale price, since the latter becomes irrelevant in a fully socialized setup.
I don't have all the answers, but I certainly think the current system is outdated and inflexible. As a Canadian, I think budgets should never get in the way of health, and the only way to achieve that ideal is by having a citizen-owned health system from top to bottom.
Most days I part with my money because I'm trapped between two evils, and I try to pick the lesser. Telecoms, overpriced food (even staples), services done to the lowest possible standards... Greed is spiraling out of control, because those who spend wisely are impossibly outnumbered by the ravenous fools of our society.
Wrong. More protection simply attracts bigger pirates, the kind with resources and connection who would actually pay for nuclear equipment. It also makes such ship very obvious targets. You know if there are military escorts, there's gotta be something valuable in there.
Business cares not what the people are concerned with, it only cares about what will part them with their money.
The difference between consumers and business, is the business will not suffer when we run out of fuel. It will repurpose itself to take advantage of the no-fuel situation, and we consumers will continue to be on the losing end of the equation.
If the oil prices were to drop one day, and Chinese manufacturing becomes profitable again, all these companies will close their American plants in a heartbeat. Long-term sustainability is irrelevant when shareholders are looking at the quarterly report.
IANAEE, so please if any of you are, I hope you can enlighten me here.
I'm just guessing, but BPL would require some sort of low-power modulation on the circuit, right ? Wouldn't that potentially cause added strain on electrical components ? I'm basing this on the vicious damage caused by DC ripples to computer equipment... my limited electrical knowledge tells me the broadband signal would appear as voltage noise to anything plugged on the same circuit, which means more wasted current, thus more heat. Given the dozens of cheap Chinese power bricks that come with every gadget these days, I fear a lot of them would pop prematurely.
They still sell "premium support", whatever that may be. It just seems pointless for them to still be making the Windows browser when the competition runs circles around them. I'd rather see them focused on the embedded platforms, where Opera actually is leaps and bounds ahead of the pack.
Clearly you have never been faced with anything serious that involved a multi-million dollar healthcare package. You're absolutely correct. I'm Canadian.
Say what you will, there is a fundamental difference in philosophy when you have socialized health care. It has many flaws, but at least I don't have to worry about filing bankruptcy if some idiot runs me over, or picks a nasty fight at the pub.
If we had socialized dental care, well I know a lot of dentists who would move to the USA so they could shaft you guys instead. The concept of paying $300/hr for some chickypoo to brush my teeth with a shiny iBrush is completely lost on me.
<keynote style="Steve"> Safari on OS XI is going to be 400% faster. It's going to look 700% rounder, and integrate seamlessly with your ego. It will make you 1500% more smug, no matter how smug you were before.
Firefox ? Not smug. IE8 ? *chuckles* next slide. Opera ? They still have square corners, what does that tell you about their priorities ?
It's so awesome we had to give it a new name: Snow Safari. (*applause*) </keynote>
But aren't Opera fans always upset over something ?
They're either berating the world for failing to adhere to the published standards, or bashing the competition for being too trendy.
Opera exists to sell product, which is their Achilles' heel. They're trying to charge money ofr something everyone else gives away for free, and with the latest browsers they're running out of legitimate advantages to boast.
Microsoft doesn't care, and the Firefox team doesn't care either; all they need to worry about is implementing the features people want, to increase market share. Opera doesn't have that luxury.
Insurance is protection against unforseen expenses, not a pool of free money. Insurance is an investment racket designed to artificially drive up inflation and never pay out dividends.
The fact that it pays for your dental is a side-effect, a means to an end. If we didn't have dental insurance, dentists would have to charge much saner prices for basic care, and we wouldn't need insurance in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate replying to ACs, they're all trolls!
Anyway, there's nothing dumb about dropping out of school, _if_ it's done for the right reasons.
1. The North American school systems are garbage, they even fail at instilling basic discipline and respect.
2. These days you can't get shit with most college/uni degrees anyway. Experience trumps education every time.
3. Money, contrary to what many believe, is not the key to happiness. I would gladly take a pay cut to work a job that's more in-line with my own interests. The "fun" lost from not being about to buy as much crap, would be replaced and surpassed by fun on the job.
4. People with high IQ are always expected to be visionaries and change the world overnight. Sure, maybe if I dedicated 24 hours a day to finding the cure for Americanism, I might actually find it one day. Guess what ? I don't wanna. I'm way happier poking at computers all day long, using perhaps one-tenth of my mental capacity for work, another 1% for replying to AC trolls on /., and the remainder for my own enjoyment.
Y'know what ? Maybe the GP's daughter actually likes what she's doing, and thus the GameStop job gets her what she wants: money, and games. Hell, I used to run a computer store; it let me make money doing what I do, and gave me the time and resources to build the most ridiculous PCs for kicks. Plus I had plenty of time to flame people on /.
It's a license plate. It's not supposed to mean anything. Here's a quaint list of potential license plates that mean NOTHING:
FUCK911
MILF101
TARD500
187C0PS
OJD1D1T
-and-
WTFPROF
People who choose to be offended by anything and everything they see, should stay the fuck home and watch reruns. There was a time, not so long ago, when people had freakin' BALLS.
I know everyone's debated this topic before, but why wouldn't we (as a nation) buy out Bell and convert it into a federally-mandated non-profit ? It's precisely the kind of long-term asset that benefits society as a whole - a perfect candidate for socialization.
34 billion dollars, in the grand scheme of things, ain't all that much when 34 million citizens stand to benefit. That's $1000 per Canadian, but that 4 billion in annual profit would come back to us, which means the purchase pays for itself in 8-9 years. There's no finance minister that can squeeze that much money that quickly; certainly not the inbred albino monkeys we've had lately.
How often do I have to say it ? To hell with the Chinese government. They punish their own, then expect us to shake their hand and play nice ? They promised the IOC things would change for the better, then days after they secured the 2008 events, they turned around and bragged about how they were going to eliminate the Falun Gong movement, the Dalai Lama and the muslim separatists. So why the fuck are we still letting them host the olympics ? Does no one remember Moscow 1980 ?
I've boycotted Chinese IP ranges for years, and I'm boycotting the Beijing Olympics. What that country needs is a coup d'état, and the Chinese people need to know the rest of the world will take side with them when the walls fall.
Every nation is guilty of crimes against humanity, but at least the others have the decency to bow their heads and lie about it. The Chinese gov't parades around, flaunting their total disregard for equality. I don't see why we should tolerate it.
China, Russia, India and Brazil... is it a coincidence that those are the four main countries whose traffic I drop from my servers ? 99.44% of the traffic is spam, and the remainder is irrelevant to my business. If they love my snarky comments so much, they can use a proxy or VPN (yeah, right!)
Is Jupiter Research basically saying I need to unblock those folks ? Or are they really suggesting we'll have even more botnet slaves online by 2012 ?
Fantastic! That's precisely the reply I was hoping for. Thank you!
Yeah, that's a bit too risqué for Dell... management is very "holier than thou", which I guess is a requirement when your business model revolves around hiring freshly landed unskilled immigrants while juggling the role of top PC vendor.
CmdrTaco needs to raise the mod point cap to 50, because even at +5 you deserve to be modded up.
I started playing WoW a few years ago, at a time when I was depressed out of my skull, but I just didn't know it yet. I eventually reached a point where I was too depressed to haul my sorry ass to work in the morning, so I called in dead and played WoW 16 hours a day for months. I didn't code, I didn't hack, I barely left the apartment. Eventually the anti-depressant meds kicked in and I was wired into semi-sanity. By the time I got back to 90% normal and had found myself a new job, I stopped playing WoW, just quit cold turkey.
I fired it up again a few weeks ago, to try out a private server... I found it all extremely boring and quit after a few days. That tells me the WoW playing was a symptom of my depression, not the cause. It was the only thing easy enough to do, that didn't get shot down by my total lack of motivation.
I think the WoW mom needs to see her doctor, and a therapist.
I've got an IBM P3 with a 100w power supply, from a decade ago when 250w was standard, and 300w was l33t. I've worked on countless P4 Dells where the power supply was either 150w or 220w. Just a few months ago, my buddy nearly fried his year-old MDG machine by adding a mid-range video card. Most vendors are bastards, plain and simple!
There are two main reasons for them to use these puny power supplies. #1 is cost, of course. #2 is repeat business, because when their shitty power supply blows up, there's a good chance the client will go back to the dealer and buy a new one. It's usually not covered by the warranty, because they lay fault on the client for adding hardware and overloading the lame-o PSU.
Well I've seen OEM power supplies sell anywhere from $40 to $150 plus labor, and it's 95% profit. Most OEM's garbage costs between $3 and $10 - I used to have a half-decent chinese 450w unit that cost me $6.50. The real junky ones were $3.50 and came with a flimsy ATX case, and I'd say one in 10 died on the first boot, often frying the board with it. Absolute garbage!
To put it all into perspective, I'll quote numbers from my own builds. For a low-end office desktop, my latest model draws 50-65w. It briefly peaks at 90w during POST, then goes back down. I still use a 380w Antec (Seasonic) power supply, which doesn't break a sweat, runs near-silent and gives my users the option to add a bitchin graphics card later on. The other great selling point for the Antec is the 3-year warranty.
At the other end of the spectrum, my bat-shit insane SLI design draws 450w at idle, 600w while gaming. It eats babies for breakfast, and rapes nuns for dessert. That one has 1200w via dual power supplies. It is also whisper quiet. I could shave $150 off the price and use a single 700w power supply, but it would likely die within a year, possibly taking out the board, Ram and/or graphics card with it.
Needless to say, I rarely sell replacement power supplies because the original units tend to outlive the remaining components. Maybe I'm leaving money on the table by not screwing my clients with shitty power supplies, but I'm just quirky like that.
Dan's Data was around back when Tom's Hardware was just a bunch of teenagers chipping at the Berlin wall with claw hammers.
He's got an odd personality at times, and is anything but objective, but the man tends to know his facts.
And yes, a power supply's efficiency and load capacity are adversely affected by temperature. That's partly why the better ones weigh a ton : big bad-ass heatsinks.
Actually, Dell uses the term "laptop" on official communication, including the front page of their web site.
The whole "don't call it a laptop" scare is pure nonsense dreamt up by some ignorant middle-manager or escalation expert. I didn't work there long, just long enough to realize I didn't want to be that escalation expert, so I turned down the promotion and left shortly thereafter. Like any call center, the rules are mostly made-up on-the-fly, and the people making the rules are usually the least technical in the building.
Yup... one cup of water after each tall draft (or two bottles) = no hangover (for me, at least). It's a bit trickier when spirits are involved, but it's the same idea.
Of course, I no longer work/live/sleep in bars, so I'm not quite as affected by the hangover of doom, but it's still nice to dodge them whenever you can. I'd much rather have a slightly buzzy morning, than to feel like I'm in a bad remake of Fear and Loathing.
WTF is it about the parent that warrants flamebait ?
Every day sees new ways to usurp our rights as citizens and as human beings. We are assumed guilty until proven innocent, if we even have a chance to defend ourselves. RFID tagging, while having its benefits, is far too easy to abuse, and abuse is the only constant in today's society.
If hospital staff can't be bothered to track their own equipment, how is RFID going to help ? There's is still a human somewhere that's going to screw it up out of sheer laziness.
Yes, and yes.
Actually the rounded corners bit was a last-second addition while I waited for the stupid inter-post timer to count down. I was loosely basing it on the Intel Mac keynote...
But yes, I'm also irked that Firefox is the only modern browser with native rounded corners. Methinks the W3C is run by a bunch of squares *rimshot*
The problems, in my opinion, stem from the actual service providers being privatized. I believe, with careful planning and oversight, that a completely public health system could be most cost-effective while offering better service.
As you noted, the insurance is the socialized part, which does set ground rules and base rates (since it's the government's money), but it does lead to a lot of whining from the service providers, who claim they're underfunded and overburdened. I just think they need to streamline their operations. They get paid per-patient, per-incident for the most part, which leads to short-cut diagnosis and repeat visits.
I've dated a handful of nurses ;) but I don't claim to know the whole story. I see quite a bit of lollygagging in clinics and hospitals. I also see a lot of slice-and-dice on the employment side, hospitals hiring agencies that ultimately hire the nurses and aides as independent contractors, possibly to dodge labor laws, benefits and unions. I say cut the middlemen, modernize and centralize HR (within a reasonable district).
I'm sure another part of the problem is the drugs. Long waiting lists for critical surgery leads to more people on costly suppressive drugs for longer periods. Some of those drugs cost upwards of $40 per dose... if the patient waits 18 months for surgery, the cost of drugs to keep them semi-stable may well exceed the cost of surgery itself - the cost, not the sale price, since the latter becomes irrelevant in a fully socialized setup.
I don't have all the answers, but I certainly think the current system is outdated and inflexible. As a Canadian, I think budgets should never get in the way of health, and the only way to achieve that ideal is by having a citizen-owned health system from top to bottom.
Really ?
Most days I part with my money because I'm trapped between two evils, and I try to pick the lesser. Telecoms, overpriced food (even staples), services done to the lowest possible standards... Greed is spiraling out of control, because those who spend wisely are impossibly outnumbered by the ravenous fools of our society.
Wrong. More protection simply attracts bigger pirates, the kind with resources and connection who would actually pay for nuclear equipment. It also makes such ship very obvious targets. You know if there are military escorts, there's gotta be something valuable in there.
Business cares not what the people are concerned with, it only cares about what will part them with their money.
The difference between consumers and business, is the business will not suffer when we run out of fuel. It will repurpose itself to take advantage of the no-fuel situation, and we consumers will continue to be on the losing end of the equation.
If the oil prices were to drop one day, and Chinese manufacturing becomes profitable again, all these companies will close their American plants in a heartbeat. Long-term sustainability is irrelevant when shareholders are looking at the quarterly report.
IANAEE, so please if any of you are, I hope you can enlighten me here.
I'm just guessing, but BPL would require some sort of low-power modulation on the circuit, right ? Wouldn't that potentially cause added strain on electrical components ? I'm basing this on the vicious damage caused by DC ripples to computer equipment... my limited electrical knowledge tells me the broadband signal would appear as voltage noise to anything plugged on the same circuit, which means more wasted current, thus more heat. Given the dozens of cheap Chinese power bricks that come with every gadget these days, I fear a lot of them would pop prematurely.
Am I completely out in left field here, or what ?
They still sell "premium support", whatever that may be. It just seems pointless for them to still be making the Windows browser when the competition runs circles around them. I'd rather see them focused on the embedded platforms, where Opera actually is leaps and bounds ahead of the pack.
Say what you will, there is a fundamental difference in philosophy when you have socialized health care. It has many flaws, but at least I don't have to worry about filing bankruptcy if some idiot runs me over, or picks a nasty fight at the pub.
If we had socialized dental care, well I know a lot of dentists who would move to the USA so they could shaft you guys instead. The concept of paying $300/hr for some chickypoo to brush my teeth with a shiny iBrush is completely lost on me.
For that money, I've come to expect a lapdance!
I'm guessing you got the E2180 ? Ya, that CPU is mad awesome for overclocking. It's a throwback to the old Celeron 300A.
I've been absolutely ape over the E7200 myself, I've yet to find one that can't do at least 3.3ghz at stock voltages, insane :)
<keynote style="Steve">
Safari on OS XI is going to be 400% faster. It's going to look 700% rounder, and integrate seamlessly with your ego. It will make you 1500% more smug, no matter how smug you were before.
Firefox ? Not smug.
IE8 ? *chuckles* next slide.
Opera ? They still have square corners, what does that tell you about their priorities ?
It's so awesome we had to give it a new name: Snow Safari.
(*applause*)
</keynote>
But aren't Opera fans always upset over something ?
They're either berating the world for failing to adhere to the published standards, or bashing the competition for being too trendy.
Opera exists to sell product, which is their Achilles' heel. They're trying to charge money ofr something everyone else gives away for free, and with the latest browsers they're running out of legitimate advantages to boast.
Microsoft doesn't care, and the Firefox team doesn't care either; all they need to worry about is implementing the features people want, to increase market share. Opera doesn't have that luxury.
The fact that it pays for your dental is a side-effect, a means to an end. If we didn't have dental insurance, dentists would have to charge much saner prices for basic care, and we wouldn't need insurance in the first place.