"Eat less" often has repercussions as well. Your body needs vitamins, minerals, and certain complex proteins (and yes, and even cholesterol and fat!) to function properly.
Supplements solve most of those concerns.
I have HHC (and "bronze diabetes" as a result).
But you're an exception, not the norm. "Bronze diabetes" is rare (1 in 200 says most of the internet cites). Obesity is _far_ more common than that (about 1 in 3 in the US). If 1 in 200 people can't do anything about their obesity, but the other 199 can, people still have a valid complaint when they say "just eat less". Whereas I sympathize for your situation, using an outlier to attempt to forgive rampant irresponsible behavior of far larger masses of people (pun not intended) is a foolish approach.
Or you get 6-7 years of super expensive cancer treatments from "healthy" people whereas the obese patient just dies cost-efficiently of his heart condition.
If that were true, that cancer cost would already be factored into the aforementioned 281,000 Euro lifetime cost of the healthy person from the study.
She is not in a position to negotiate. That is the antithesis of the free market. She needs what they are selling in a way that makes rational cost analysis impossible. How much is your life worth to you?
And that's the straw man. Because you act like every health care provider out there is going to illegally collude to get you to pay any price. Except that price fixing is against the law in all industries, including medicine. If one hospital tells you "give me all your money or I let you die", you go to the next doctor who is is willing to be reasonable. By the same straw man, why don't plumbers let your entire house flood when a pipe bursts? They certainly have you by the balls there. Or what if your AC dies in mid July in sweltering 110 degree weather? Are the HVAC people going to say "give me every penny you have or I let you suffer heat stroke?". Services are trying to make money -- they're not all teaming up to dick you over.
What is the value of your life? Not an easy number
I disagree. For one, you're phrasing the question wrong. It's "what is your healthcare worth"? And those are numbers that are finite and can be determined using statistics, labor rates, and drug costs. Even for the unforeseen emergency case, probability and cost-analysis will give us a weighted average cost of a given event that might occur in your lifetime. The entire field of insurance is devoted to running those kinds of analyses. To pretend those numbers are mystical and out of reach is silly -- we have databases and databases of historical medical records, pricing histories decades long. Those numbers are accessible.
Why is it cheaper? No company profits. No shareholders to pay. And a single organisation has massive bargaining power when it comes to getting prices from suppliers.
Those are still assumptions though. You don't have proof that any of those things you speak of are in fact the reason your healthcare is cheaper.
Basically, it's completely arbitrary pricing. And the speculated cause is lack of transparency and consumer choice due to the layers of middle men in between the service provider and the consumer:
Experts attribute the disparities to a health system that can set prices with impunity because consumers rarely see them â" and rarely shop for discounts. Although the government has collected this information for years, it was housed in a bulky database that researchers had to pay to access.
The hospital charges being released Wednesday â" all from 2011 â" show the hospitalsâ(TM) average list prices. Adding another layer of opacity, Medicare and private insurance companies typically negotiate lower charges with hospitals. But the data shed light on fees that the uninsured could pay.
If you had a nationalised health service, supplied to all paid through general taxation, you wouldn't be having that problem.
How do you figure? If a chargemaster is determining prices by randomly throwing darts, and you move the expense from the consumer to the taxpayer, all that does is relocate the problem. It doesn't fix it. Moreover, if you fix the _actual_ problem (unassociated and arbitrary/negotiated costs), you then don't need socialized healthcare.
doesn't matter whose doing it it is, the reality stands as evidence that socialized healthcare can be cheaper than the american system.
No it doesn't. The reality is that there is no evidence of anything concrete. It's correlation/coincidence in the worst way. For all you know, our high costs are due to the fact that Americans are far more unhealthy/unfit than the rest of the world and therefore more expensive. Or it could be because of the arbitrary nature of and lack of transparency w/ regards to the hospital chargemaster. Or it could be any number of reasons completely unrelated to socialized healthcare. You choose to beleive what you believe because it fits your dogma, not because it has been proven in any substantial or scientific fashion.
That's what the "free market" does; it coalesces into oligopolies.
Except that the free market didn't get us here. Government did. Do you know where the concept of "insurance tied to job" came from? It wasn't a free market concept. It was a government incentive. You think Medicare "price negotiation" is a free market concept? Or EMTALA? Or the forced electronic modernization initiative? Think of the problems in the healthcare market, things like overuse of the emergency room, doctors being shafted by Medicare patients, small doctors being put out of business by modernization expenses, the concept of "lose your job, lose your insurance"...these things all have their roots in the government, not the free market.
The free market can't exist in healthcare. It has all the characteristics of a public utility
Bull. The free market exists in utilities (I buy my gas and electric from a different provider than my supplier). Comcast and Verizon compete for my TV/phone/internet. Railroads/buses/public transportation competes. Mail/Delivery services (FedEx/UPS) compete. I can look up prices for plumbers, electricians, HVAC specialists, carpenters -- all manner of trades. I can contact multiple services and ask them for estimates. Yet I can't contact several hospitals and say "give me an estimate for an upper endoscopy" or "what would it cost for a triple bypass?" You're gonna tell me those costs can't be estimated? Why is it with _every other service industry_, labor costs and material costs can be determined and a rough estimate of cost provided? Yet with the health care industry, this is somehow impossible??? Not every case is an emergency case, you know.
And to top it off it its often purchased under duress.
Except that that's a red herring because it's far from the majority of cases. Emergency cases where you literally have no time to shop around are a _very_ small portion of the total healthcare you receive over the course of your life. And those are the cases that insurance should be for (the exact way _all_ other insurance works).
health care isn't something you are necessarily in a position to make a "rational, informed cost analysis"
Simply not true. My mother had brain surgery to have a tumor removed. The surgery date was scheduled nearly 3 months out from the discovery of the actual tumor. Even in many reasonably dire situations, you're frequently delayed a fair length of time before an actual remedy is applied.
It isn't efficient to cure a poor person who can't even cover the cost of their procedure, never mind allow the seller turn a profit on it. The free market abhors that situation.
Yet poor people own houses despite the fact they couldn't absorb the cost of the house burning down. And poor people own cars, despite the fact they couldn't absorb the cost of their car being totaled. You're once again conflating healthcare with health insurance. The fact the two are synonymous in this nation is appalling.
Canada, UK, and other 'socialized medicine countries" pay less per capita for healthcare than American's do.
I'll never understand how that's relevant or how you seem to think that's the government's doing.
It baffles me that anyone would argue for privatized health care.
And it baffles me that anyone would argue for anything but. We have one of the least "free market" healthcare systems in the world: consumers have little freedoms, competitiveness is non-existant, costs aren't determined by actual market forces but instead by some secret negotiating coalition of "government cronies in medicare", "insurance cronies in the private sector", and "a chargemaster hospital crony in the service industry". We desperately need free market mechanics introduced into our healthcare system.
But I can't figure out why the other 99% wants private for profit insurance companies managing their healthcare
We don't. We don't want ANY insurance company managing our healthcare. We, the consumer, should be able to make an informed cost analysis when purchasing any product or service. The middlemen (insurance companies AND government) rob us of that opportunity.
British healthcare is run by the government. The vast majority of services are "zero cost".
Americans spend 2.5 times as much on healthcare as the British.
And American hospitals determine prices using a chargemaster that practically throws darts at a dartboard. What's your point? If prices were exposed, consumers given choice, and the healthcare sector were allowed to be a competitive free market, we wouldn't have this problem.
But on Mythbusters, they've done a number of driving myths at.07999% BAC, and the results are pretty dramatic. You are definitely impaired at.08%.
Their test is far from scientific in this particular instance. They have a small sample size (Kary, Grant, and Tory), and practically no repeatability. I'm always agitated when they claim they "prove" human-based myths by their own ancedotal testing. Especially considering the fact that they're normally very thorough and scientific with other types of myths.
I think the US is currently around 10th, and China is probably somewhere in the 50s or 60s. Most importantly, the US continues to decline in emissions whereas China continues to rise.
So what do you do when you kill a monster and it's time to determine the drop? Do you ask the server what dropped, or do you let the client pick and have the server trust the result once the client connects to the auction house?
If in single-player, client. If in multi, server. I still don't see why this can't be easily handled without requiring "multiplayer only" implementations. Just because the client can randomly produce its own loot doesn't mean the server has to believe it.
Please show where I mentioned either political party above as the cause of or saviour from income redistribution. That's right, you can't.
It certainly seemed implied. Otherwise it seems rather dumb that you're advocating redistribution and bashing it at the exact same time (whereas advocating Democrats redistributing to the poor to offset Republicans redistributing to the rich is actually a valid argument). So I ask you -- if this isn't a political party issue, and you clearly stand against the income redistribution that took place in the bank bailouts, why is it that you support redistribution?
As for bailing out the banks, we would all be in a much worse postion had the banks not been bailed out. T
We'll never know. We let the banks go under during the Savings & Loan crisis and the resulting aftermath was far less painful than what we've had to deal with during this one. And there were other ways to deal with the problem that didn't result in a gigantic handout to millionaires (rather than just "do nothing" or "bailout"). For example, the "too big to fail" banks could have been nationalized, the Iceland way, and then liquidated and cast off after the crisis was over.
the issue is the generous terms on which they were bailed out
The issue is that they were allowed to continue existing in the first place. Those banks should have ceased to exist as private entities the day they should have gone bankrupt. They should have been at best shell puppets of the government, with some exit plan for the government down the road post-crisis.
Do you really think it would have been better under a Republican administration?
Depends on what you mean by "better". If there's anything Republicans are gungho about (to a fault), it's personal responsibility. Those banks wouldn't be the entities they are now if Republicans were at the wheel. They'd either be bankrupt, or auctioned off piecewise to other private entities, or they'd still be repaying massive loans to the government. The country as a whole may or may not be better now -- that's a different question, and a harder one to answer. But I guarantee those fatcats at the banks would be suffering far more under a Republican administration.
No, I'm informed, which is what you would have been if you knew how to use google.
Did you read your own link? Both of these companies would love to use this tech. They're fighting over who has the business rights to it. This isn't some shell company purposely creating red tape to prevent the deployment of this tech This is two companies who see an immensely valuable up-and-coming market that they both want a monopoly on. Those aren't even remotely the same. This is a genuine patent dispute, with a bunch of rich assholes trying to be first to market. It's Dish vs Tivo, in biofuels. Whether or not the result of such bickering is good or bad for the environment is a different argument. But you specifically claimed this was some engineered attempt by Big Oil to make sure this tech doesn't see the light of day. And I correctly labeled you a tinfoil nutter.
And that's why MMOs are always online as well. In Diablo what mattered were item drops. How can you prevent the player from getting better drops then he 'should', if you let the client determine the items they get? You can make your auction house as secure as you want, if the items that are sold in it can be duped or created at will, it's not going to make one bit of difference.
It's actually very easy. The server acts as a moderator, an auditor, a go-between. Your client can tell the server whatever the hell it wants as to what items it actually "Has" or actions it is performing, but if the server says "nuh-uh, you don't have that" or "nuh-uh, you can't do that". If it doesn't make it past the smell test, the client gets ban hammered. This is the exact same way cheating has been handled in the past, and there's literally no reason why it can't continue to be handled this way. Now there are some forms of cheating that are virtually impossible to stop even with an online only game (such as fog-of-war/map hacks in RTSes), simply because the client is required to have some level of knowledge of game state, and there's no way to prevent someone from reversing and then looking at that information in memory during a game.
The bank bailout, for example, effected a massive redistribution of wealth towards wealthy bankers. It's ongoing, with large banks benefitting from very low cost loans from the Fed, which they use to buy government bonds, which return a higher interest rate.
You do realize that bank bailout was majority-backed by Democrats and majority-opposed by Republicans, right? Perhaps governing should be less about rewarding failure (which would have the side effect of being less about redistributing to the unworthy, rich and poor alike). Instead, intelligent honest hard-working Americans who did not engage in a house-flipping bubble are now paying off the toxic debt of the assholes that did. I'm not interested in that kind of redistribution anymore than I'm interested in rewarding failing banks for incompetence.
Taxpayer money was also used to develop the patent being used to prevent production of Butanol fuel for sale to the public. The company suing to prevent is is Butamax, a shell company for GE and DuPont. The patent is also blatantly obvious and should never have been granted on that basis.
"Several companies are leading the push for butanol, including Gevo of Englewood, Colo., and Butamax Advanced Biofuels, a joint venture of BP and DuPont based in Wilmington, Del."
"Butamax is producing butanol at a demonstration plant in Hull, England. And in the United States, it has organized an alliance of ethanol producers who are considering making the shift. "
These don't seem like people gungho on preventing the release of this technology...are you tinfoil-hatting?
Like I said, typical American freeway speed limits are quite a bit higher than 55 MPH and have been for a good while. If you're talking about PA, MD, and DC, but not I-95
A very large portion of I-95 in Maryland is 55 MPH (from exit 67 through exit 47). That's something like 20 miles, all of which is interstate. Seeing as how it's also the central portion of I-95 in Maryland and the region most populous and most frequently traveled, I'd say it's fair to make the claim Maryland minimum speed limit is 55 on highways. It's ridiculous too. The portion of the road at 55 MPH is literally no different than the portion at 65. In fact, there's even an additional lane.
In addition, the entire portion of I-95 that travels through Delaware is 55 MPH, as are some portions of the NJ Turnpike. Driving in the Northeast really is a horrendous experience in general.
Not in the way SC5 has it. The cities interact with each other in a way greater than dumb road and pipe connections with neighbors that may or may not exist.
But that's not a requirement. If the existence of other cities was a requirement of the game functioning, no one would be able to start a city because no other cities would exist. Do you see the paradox? The "shared economy" thing may be a feature that adds to what is essentially a single-player game masquerading as a multi-player game. But those other cities aren't requirements anymore than the SimCity 4 neighboring regions were. And even if they did build it in such a way where the game was useless unless other people were around, there's literally no reason they had to. Faking that kind of thing with a simulated AI is a trivial addition to the game.
Problem is, the American people don't want either; we want to keep current spending and also have tax cuts.
That is not even vaguely close to the truth, and at best you have grossly misunderstood the basic situation
Except it is true, as polls show. No one wants their own taxes raised. No one wants their own benefits/programs/handouts cut. That's why the only popular support is for hiking taxes on the highest tier rich (who don't have the number to support themselves at the polls). And the only popular spending cuts are... well.. almost nothing.
1) You're out of your mind -- the "captive audience" in America is consumers who can't make any decisions about their healthcare because the government has practically mandated that insurance companies (via employers) handle all healthcare claims. The fact that your definition of a "free market" starts with a government entity performing negotiations is whacked out enough.
2) The GOP tried, Obama preferred hiking taxes on people earning 250k+ while ignoring the real problem.
3) The defense budget has been shrinking for decades and is historically at its lowest point ever.
I mostly hate the attitude that entitlements, which may as well be called "earned benefits" since they didn't drop out of the sky and are generally funded by the people who will eventually use them, are responsible for the crisis
Except that they are, and you're an idiot. If you don't want to look up the historical budget numbers, that's your own problem. And I don't want the government poorly investing my future retirement for 40 years, just to have to beg for them not to change it when the day comes that I do need the money. If you're going to base your entire future on nothing more than a promise, with no ownership rights of the assets, you deserve what's coming.
There is no successful health care system in the world with a free market, by any of their definitions.
lol, well that's an easy metric to hit, considering there are very few, if any, health care systems in the world that operate as a free market. Lack of a counter example is not proof of failure. For example, how many countries do you know that separate their healthcare market from their health insurance market? Even Switzerland, which is the highly touted example of free market at work, has a mandate with all care handled via insurance entities. I challenge you to name me a single country where the consumer is exposed to direct costs, where it's not simply a game of "which insurance package do I want? what deductible am I going to pay?" But relatively, the systems out there that are more "free market"-based are doing just fine. Take Canada for instance. The federal government is mostly hands-off, with healthcare handled at the state level (provinces over there). That includes Medicare. The bulk of their services are provided by private entities and the bulk of their citizens have supplemental private insurance. Hell, if it weren't for the single-payer element of their system, I'd say they're more free market than we are. They're certainly more decentralized than we are. The US has miles and miles of regulations and programs at the federal level (Obamacare, Medicare, HMO Act, so on and so forth).
This is what happens when you let anti-government conservatives run the government.
They say, "Contract? What contract?" and they take handfulls out of your Social Security and Medicare.
You think conservatives are the only ones that have raided the Social Security/Medicare funds? HA. Think again. What do you think Obama was doing when he was cutting payroll taxes?
You (or anyone else) would be outright daft to give the government full control of their life. Why should your entire retirement fund be a promise from the government? (rather than an actual asset in an account owned by you). You honestly think that's better for the populace? To have to trust that the government will keep their money safe and hope no one changes the rules on them?
When has Obama ever talked about "eviscerating" defense?
How about the 10% cuts defense has taken in the past 4 years? Or the additional 10% cut it will take when the sequester occurs? And the fact he wants additional cuts on top of that? (as his proposed alternative to a sequester is a defense cut...)
20% isn't an evisceration to you? I guess we can just shave 20% off of Medicare and Social Security then.
Slashdot Mirror
Supplements solve most of those concerns.
But you're an exception, not the norm. "Bronze diabetes" is rare (1 in 200 says most of the internet cites). Obesity is _far_ more common than that (about 1 in 3 in the US). If 1 in 200 people can't do anything about their obesity, but the other 199 can, people still have a valid complaint when they say "just eat less". Whereas I sympathize for your situation, using an outlier to attempt to forgive rampant irresponsible behavior of far larger masses of people (pun not intended) is a foolish approach.
If that were true, that cancer cost would already be factored into the aforementioned 281,000 Euro lifetime cost of the healthy person from the study.
Ah, the best kind of proof: "Nuh uh, I told you so."
Cite? The studies I've seen show no rhyme or reason in determining the manner in which procedures are priced: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/08/one-hospital-charges-8000-another-38000/
Heavily regulated? Fedex? Comcast? I assure you the healthcare & health insurance industry is regulated far more heavily than any of those companies. Do you know how many pages long the HIPAA regulation is? Or Obamacare? Healthcare is a red tape nightmare. Hell, just look at the original application paperwork: http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottgottlieb/2013/04/03/to-sign-up-for-obamacare-start-filling-out-the-forms-now-and-hire-a-good-accountant/
And that's the straw man. Because you act like every health care provider out there is going to illegally collude to get you to pay any price. Except that price fixing is against the law in all industries, including medicine. If one hospital tells you "give me all your money or I let you die", you go to the next doctor who is is willing to be reasonable. By the same straw man, why don't plumbers let your entire house flood when a pipe bursts? They certainly have you by the balls there. Or what if your AC dies in mid July in sweltering 110 degree weather? Are the HVAC people going to say "give me every penny you have or I let you suffer heat stroke?". Services are trying to make money -- they're not all teaming up to dick you over.
I disagree. For one, you're phrasing the question wrong. It's "what is your healthcare worth"? And those are numbers that are finite and can be determined using statistics, labor rates, and drug costs. Even for the unforeseen emergency case, probability and cost-analysis will give us a weighted average cost of a given event that might occur in your lifetime. The entire field of insurance is devoted to running those kinds of analyses. To pretend those numbers are mystical and out of reach is silly -- we have databases and databases of historical medical records, pricing histories decades long. Those numbers are accessible.
Those are still assumptions though. You don't have proof that any of those things you speak of are in fact the reason your healthcare is cheaper.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/08/one-hospital-charges-8000-another-38000/
Basically, it's completely arbitrary pricing. And the speculated cause is lack of transparency and consumer choice due to the layers of middle men in between the service provider and the consumer:
Experts attribute the disparities to a health system that can set prices with impunity because consumers rarely see them â" and rarely shop for discounts. Although the government has collected this information for years, it was housed in a bulky database that researchers had to pay to access. The hospital charges being released Wednesday â" all from 2011 â" show the hospitalsâ(TM) average list prices. Adding another layer of opacity, Medicare and private insurance companies typically negotiate lower charges with hospitals. But the data shed light on fees that the uninsured could pay.
How do you figure? If a chargemaster is determining prices by randomly throwing darts, and you move the expense from the consumer to the taxpayer, all that does is relocate the problem. It doesn't fix it. Moreover, if you fix the _actual_ problem (unassociated and arbitrary/negotiated costs), you then don't need socialized healthcare.
No it doesn't. The reality is that there is no evidence of anything concrete. It's correlation/coincidence in the worst way. For all you know, our high costs are due to the fact that Americans are far more unhealthy/unfit than the rest of the world and therefore more expensive. Or it could be because of the arbitrary nature of and lack of transparency w/ regards to the hospital chargemaster. Or it could be any number of reasons completely unrelated to socialized healthcare. You choose to beleive what you believe because it fits your dogma, not because it has been proven in any substantial or scientific fashion.
Except that the free market didn't get us here. Government did. Do you know where the concept of "insurance tied to job" came from? It wasn't a free market concept. It was a government incentive. You think Medicare "price negotiation" is a free market concept? Or EMTALA? Or the forced electronic modernization initiative? Think of the problems in the healthcare market, things like overuse of the emergency room, doctors being shafted by Medicare patients, small doctors being put out of business by modernization expenses, the concept of "lose your job, lose your insurance"...these things all have their roots in the government, not the free market.
Bull. The free market exists in utilities (I buy my gas and electric from a different provider than my supplier). Comcast and Verizon compete for my TV/phone/internet. Railroads/buses/public transportation competes. Mail/Delivery services (FedEx/UPS) compete. I can look up prices for plumbers, electricians, HVAC specialists, carpenters -- all manner of trades. I can contact multiple services and ask them for estimates. Yet I can't contact several hospitals and say "give me an estimate for an upper endoscopy" or "what would it cost for a triple bypass?" You're gonna tell me those costs can't be estimated? Why is it with _every other service industry_, labor costs and material costs can be determined and a rough estimate of cost provided? Yet with the health care industry, this is somehow impossible??? Not every case is an emergency case, you know.
Except that that's a red herring because it's far from the majority of cases. Emergency cases where you literally have no time to shop around are a _very_ small portion of the total healthcare you receive over the course of your life. And those are the cases that insurance should be for (the exact way _all_ other insurance works).
Simply not true. My mother had brain surgery to have a tumor removed. The surgery date was scheduled nearly 3 months out from the discovery of the actual tumor. Even in many reasonably dire situations, you're frequently delayed a fair length of time before an actual remedy is applied.
Yet poor people own houses despite the fact they couldn't absorb the cost of the house burning down. And poor people own cars, despite the fact they couldn't absorb the cost of their car being totaled. You're once again conflating healthcare with health insurance. The fact the two are synonymous in this nation is appalling.
I'll never understand how that's relevant or how you seem to think that's the government's doing.
And it baffles me that anyone would argue for anything but. We have one of the least "free market" healthcare systems in the world: consumers have little freedoms, competitiveness is non-existant, costs aren't determined by actual market forces but instead by some secret negotiating coalition of "government cronies in medicare", "insurance cronies in the private sector", and "a chargemaster hospital crony in the service industry". We desperately need free market mechanics introduced into our healthcare system.
We don't. We don't want ANY insurance company managing our healthcare. We, the consumer, should be able to make an informed cost analysis when purchasing any product or service. The middlemen (insurance companies AND government) rob us of that opportunity.
And American hospitals determine prices using a chargemaster that practically throws darts at a dartboard. What's your point? If prices were exposed, consumers given choice, and the healthcare sector were allowed to be a competitive free market, we wouldn't have this problem.
Their test is far from scientific in this particular instance. They have a small sample size (Kary, Grant, and Tory), and practically no repeatability. I'm always agitated when they claim they "prove" human-based myths by their own ancedotal testing. Especially considering the fact that they're normally very thorough and scientific with other types of myths.
You're looking at old data: http://www.enn.com/pollution/article/43332
I think the US is currently around 10th, and China is probably somewhere in the 50s or 60s. Most importantly, the US continues to decline in emissions whereas China continues to rise.
If in single-player, client. If in multi, server. I still don't see why this can't be easily handled without requiring "multiplayer only" implementations. Just because the client can randomly produce its own loot doesn't mean the server has to believe it.
It certainly seemed implied. Otherwise it seems rather dumb that you're advocating redistribution and bashing it at the exact same time (whereas advocating Democrats redistributing to the poor to offset Republicans redistributing to the rich is actually a valid argument). So I ask you -- if this isn't a political party issue, and you clearly stand against the income redistribution that took place in the bank bailouts, why is it that you support redistribution?
We'll never know. We let the banks go under during the Savings & Loan crisis and the resulting aftermath was far less painful than what we've had to deal with during this one. And there were other ways to deal with the problem that didn't result in a gigantic handout to millionaires (rather than just "do nothing" or "bailout"). For example, the "too big to fail" banks could have been nationalized, the Iceland way, and then liquidated and cast off after the crisis was over.
The issue is that they were allowed to continue existing in the first place. Those banks should have ceased to exist as private entities the day they should have gone bankrupt. They should have been at best shell puppets of the government, with some exit plan for the government down the road post-crisis.
Depends on what you mean by "better". If there's anything Republicans are gungho about (to a fault), it's personal responsibility. Those banks wouldn't be the entities they are now if Republicans were at the wheel. They'd either be bankrupt, or auctioned off piecewise to other private entities, or they'd still be repaying massive loans to the government. The country as a whole may or may not be better now -- that's a different question, and a harder one to answer. But I guarantee those fatcats at the banks would be suffering far more under a Republican administration.
Did you read your own link? Both of these companies would love to use this tech. They're fighting over who has the business rights to it. This isn't some shell company purposely creating red tape to prevent the deployment of this tech This is two companies who see an immensely valuable up-and-coming market that they both want a monopoly on. Those aren't even remotely the same. This is a genuine patent dispute, with a bunch of rich assholes trying to be first to market. It's Dish vs Tivo, in biofuels. Whether or not the result of such bickering is good or bad for the environment is a different argument. But you specifically claimed this was some engineered attempt by Big Oil to make sure this tech doesn't see the light of day. And I correctly labeled you a tinfoil nutter.
It's actually very easy. The server acts as a moderator, an auditor, a go-between. Your client can tell the server whatever the hell it wants as to what items it actually "Has" or actions it is performing, but if the server says "nuh-uh, you don't have that" or "nuh-uh, you can't do that". If it doesn't make it past the smell test, the client gets ban hammered. This is the exact same way cheating has been handled in the past, and there's literally no reason why it can't continue to be handled this way. Now there are some forms of cheating that are virtually impossible to stop even with an online only game (such as fog-of-war/map hacks in RTSes), simply because the client is required to have some level of knowledge of game state, and there's no way to prevent someone from reversing and then looking at that information in memory during a game.
You do realize that bank bailout was majority-backed by Democrats and majority-opposed by Republicans, right? Perhaps governing should be less about rewarding failure (which would have the side effect of being less about redistributing to the unworthy, rich and poor alike). Instead, intelligent honest hard-working Americans who did not engage in a house-flipping bubble are now paying off the toxic debt of the assholes that did. I'm not interested in that kind of redistribution anymore than I'm interested in rewarding failing banks for incompetence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/business/energy-environment/weighing-butanol-as-an-alternative-to-ethanol.html?_r=0
"Several companies are leading the push for butanol, including Gevo of Englewood, Colo., and Butamax Advanced Biofuels, a joint venture of BP and DuPont based in Wilmington, Del."
"Butamax is producing butanol at a demonstration plant in Hull, England. And in the United States, it has organized an alliance of ethanol producers who are considering making the shift. "
These don't seem like people gungho on preventing the release of this technology...are you tinfoil-hatting?
A very large portion of I-95 in Maryland is 55 MPH (from exit 67 through exit 47). That's something like 20 miles, all of which is interstate. Seeing as how it's also the central portion of I-95 in Maryland and the region most populous and most frequently traveled, I'd say it's fair to make the claim Maryland minimum speed limit is 55 on highways. It's ridiculous too. The portion of the road at 55 MPH is literally no different than the portion at 65. In fact, there's even an additional lane.
In addition, the entire portion of I-95 that travels through Delaware is 55 MPH, as are some portions of the NJ Turnpike. Driving in the Northeast really is a horrendous experience in general.
But that's not a requirement. If the existence of other cities was a requirement of the game functioning, no one would be able to start a city because no other cities would exist . Do you see the paradox? The "shared economy" thing may be a feature that adds to what is essentially a single-player game masquerading as a multi-player game. But those other cities aren't requirements anymore than the SimCity 4 neighboring regions were. And even if they did build it in such a way where the game was useless unless other people were around, there's literally no reason they had to. Faking that kind of thing with a simulated AI is a trivial addition to the game.
Except it is true, as polls show. No one wants their own taxes raised. No one wants their own benefits/programs/handouts cut. That's why the only popular support is for hiking taxes on the highest tier rich (who don't have the number to support themselves at the polls). And the only popular spending cuts are ... well .. almost nothing.
2) The GOP tried, Obama preferred hiking taxes on people earning 250k+ while ignoring the real problem.
3) The defense budget has been shrinking for decades and is historically at its lowest point ever.
Except that they are, and you're an idiot. If you don't want to look up the historical budget numbers, that's your own problem. And I don't want the government poorly investing my future retirement for 40 years, just to have to beg for them not to change it when the day comes that I do need the money. If you're going to base your entire future on nothing more than a promise, with no ownership rights of the assets, you deserve what's coming.
lol, well that's an easy metric to hit, considering there are very few, if any, health care systems in the world that operate as a free market. Lack of a counter example is not proof of failure. For example, how many countries do you know that separate their healthcare market from their health insurance market? Even Switzerland, which is the highly touted example of free market at work, has a mandate with all care handled via insurance entities. I challenge you to name me a single country where the consumer is exposed to direct costs, where it's not simply a game of "which insurance package do I want? what deductible am I going to pay?" But relatively, the systems out there that are more "free market"-based are doing just fine. Take Canada for instance. The federal government is mostly hands-off, with healthcare handled at the state level (provinces over there). That includes Medicare. The bulk of their services are provided by private entities and the bulk of their citizens have supplemental private insurance. Hell, if it weren't for the single-payer element of their system, I'd say they're more free market than we are. They're certainly more decentralized than we are. The US has miles and miles of regulations and programs at the federal level (Obamacare, Medicare, HMO Act, so on and so forth).
You think conservatives are the only ones that have raided the Social Security/Medicare funds? HA. Think again. What do you think Obama was doing when he was cutting payroll taxes?
You (or anyone else) would be outright daft to give the government full control of their life. Why should your entire retirement fund be a promise from the government? (rather than an actual asset in an account owned by you). You honestly think that's better for the populace? To have to trust that the government will keep their money safe and hope no one changes the rules on them?
I'm sorry you don't know what a free market is. Believe it or not, there are possibilities other than "single payer" or "free market".
How about the 10% cuts defense has taken in the past 4 years? Or the additional 10% cut it will take when the sequester occurs? And the fact he wants additional cuts on top of that? (as his proposed alternative to a sequester is a defense cut...)
20% isn't an evisceration to you? I guess we can just shave 20% off of Medicare and Social Security then.