Yes, buying one President requires fewer transactions then 535 Congressmen and Senators, but OTOH buying 535 used Schwins also requires fewer transactions then buying a Gulfstream 650.
As for your evidence, don't be stupid. You implied that it's common for dumb ideas to be implemented solely because somebody paid a President money for it. I can think of plenty of dumb ideas implemented, or almost implemented by Presidents over the past 20 years (about half of them from Dubya); and I can tell you about precisely zero cases where a) the President proposed the dumb thing partly because people with bribe-power supported it, or even b) Congress opposed the idea because Congress is smart.
Take Social Security Privatization. The plan was that part of your Social Security tax should go into a personal account. The problem is 100% of your Social Security tax is budgeted to pay for this year's retirees, so you need to either raise taxes or cut current benefits to have money for your personal account.
Bush pushed it because he's a business major who actually believes that finance-industry gobbledygook about personal responsibility being a cure for everything, not because the finance-industry-gobblegygook-crowd paid him to do it. Congress stopped him, not because they're super-genuises strongly interested in protecting the public from ridiculous MBA-style bullshit, but because they were too damn stupid to realize the Social Security money was going to current retirees until they read the actual proposal.
Many of the Asian countries hate China. And not just "they are spying on me!" hate, this is personal. They joined the TPP trade talks as protection against China, so there is little chance they will join with China any time soon.
Depends on how smart the Chinese are. If they're smart enough to adopt a carrot/stick method and give some of the Asian countries the disputed bits of the South China Sea in exchange for agreeing top bully the other Asian countries, then they can do quite well.
You probably don't realize this, but to get the Axis Hitler had to do precisely the same thing. He clearly wanted all ethnic German territory in Europe, particularly the bits in countries not dominated by ethnic Germans, and Italy has an ethnic German province called South Tyrol. Mussolini would only sign onto the alliance until Hitler agreed not to press that claim.
It was the middle of the Cold War.East Timor was de facto independent on November 25 of '75, but was not recognized as such by anyone when Indonesia invaded on December 7. During the two weeks it was de facto independent it was run by Communists. Nonetheless President Ford did not veto UN Security Council resolutions condemning the invasion. He did sell the Indonesians a lot of weapons (almost entirely small arms), and did not throw them outside of the US team.
During the Cold War it did not take a bribe for the largest Muslim nation on the Earth, with a strategic locations between Australia and our Allies on the Asian mainland, to buy our guns and use them on Commies. That was kinda the entire fucking point of the Cold War.
A President is virtually impossible to buy with money because he needs $1 Billion to get elected and if he loses he'll have a $200k pension for life, plus a six-figure office budget, plus speaking fees, etc. He's not gonna risk that for pocket change, and he's not gonna switch positions in a way that is obvious to the media because it would become a major headache politically. The easiest way to actually bribe a President is get to him while he's still a Congressman (because then switching his position back to the previous unbribed position becomes the political headache) and/or get to a bunch of sitting Congressman.
OTOH Congressmen need a couple hundred thousand a year to get re-elected, have no pensions (so they need to keep the job), and if a couple hundred of them are getting an average of $10k a year from your consortium of lobbyists/companies/top-level-employees they know the guy who gets $8k won't be the one raked through the coals on TV. For a couple million bucks you get the House, which means the President has to either agree with you or waste political capital fighting the House. Depending on how your issue plays in rural areas the Senate could actually be a lot cheaper per year. Senators have six years to build up their warchests, and media in rural states isn't that expensive (OTOH if your natural allies are guys from New York and Cali it would be more expensive). And with both houses the President has to veto your bill, which increases the political cost to him by an order of magnitude.
There is a national consensus. Free Trade has been official US Policy since Reagan.
And if you support free trade, then you can't support a strong role for Congress in the process because the only time Congress can be part of the process is after all the other country's have finalized the treaty. In this case that means that the Malaysians are likely to make major concessions to ensure their auto companies have access to the US Market, only to have that entire clause of the Treaty re-written by the Senate. Without any Malaysian input because the Malaysian Ambassador isn't going to be invited to the Committee meeting.
Americans really do not understand that if you set up a Constitutional system with Separation of Powers in the 18th century, it follows that at least some the separations you make will probably be fucking stupid in the 21st Century, which in turn means that either you have to rewrite the Constitution to allow for changed circumstances or you have to work around the obsolete separations.
In this case in 1795 Congress would have had significant say over who, precisely, was in the room doing the negotiating because there was no bureaucracy. Obama-1795 would be appointing people to a brand new diplomatic office of negotiating this treaty, and since the Senate would have time to give those guys a really good set of hearings the President's Ambassador would have needed to agree to a number of things Senators wanted to get the job, and while he'd formally be a creature of the White House, de facto he'd be representing the Senate as well. Nowadays we've got a lot more complicated government, and the negotiators are likely to be long-sevice members of the Executive Branch bureaucracy. They may be formally confirmed by the Senate, but that doesn't mean that a dozen Senators spent a could weeks on committee hearing before confirming them.
To get the 1795-level of Senatorial input into the process you'd need to amend the Constitution so that the Senate could appoint a couple guys to the diplomatic team, and specify that whatever those guys agreed to was the deal, take-it-or-leave-it.
Keep in mind that Singapore has the exact same racial majority as China, and they don't get these kind of stories.
What's happening is you've got a uniquely Chinese cultural and social systems that is adapting to (and in many case outright adopting) the Western business models that are the only way you can successfully run an economy. Historically the country has had huge problems because historically Han culture has emphasized getting the best one can out of the system with virtually no regard as to the health of the system, which is a fancy-ass way of saying that they like to milk the system, and their opinion of your argument that "if everyone did this that would suck" is that you're an idiot for not realizing that it already sucks.
I suspect that in the next few decades these stories will start to go away, as they get used to the ways you can milk a system based on Western business.
Keep in mind that specialist pay has further to fall. GPs are in the $150-200k range. Specialists start at $250kish and go up past a half mil. You reduce GP income by 10%, so a lot of GPs go over to Specialties, and you're probably reducing the income of the specialists by more then 50%. Your argument could come to pass, but none of the things you mention are particularly new. People have been trying to make Nurse Practitioners happen for literally decades. And the systems that use them don't switch. The problem historically is that insurers have not had the market power to force their payment preferences on Doctors, which is unlikely to change unless a lot of them go out of business.
Moreover we've moved far afield from the original topic, of who, precisely, will be replaced by computers. Like I said before, the computer replacing a specialist not only has an easier job (ie: it only analyze this biopsy, rather then do an entire check-up) it also saves more money because the specialist costs more then a GP. Particularly if non-computer-market factors you mention like pay-for-performance reduce GP pay. Why develop a system that saves a hospital $50k per GP when you can save $150k per heart surgeon?
Dude, in six months it will be illegal for them to rule on this because the program the Second Circuit ruled against will be replaced. The EFF/ACLU can't appeal to the Supremes because they won, so they have to ask the Second Circuit to amend it's ruling to include an Order. They can appeal that ruling to the Supremes. That's a three-step process. Each individual step would take six months unless some Judge was so worked up that he said "ok we'll rule next week." And you'd need that to happen three times. The last time it happened at the Supreme Court level the emergency requiring immediate action was the 2000 Presidential election.
BTW, the FISA Court run by John Roberts. Each member is personally handpicked by him. Their removal from their normal district court to the FISA Court is not subject to Senate Confirmation.
And you didn't pay very careful attention to my post.
I very carefully used the words "Court Order," because (as the summary points out) there is no Second Circuit order for him to disobey. There's a ruling, but rulings are where the Courts explains why it told you to do something, not where they tell you to do something. It is literally impossible to disobey a ruling that does not have an order attached because there's nothing in a ruling to disobey.
Why would the Second Circuit issue a ruling (likely to get a lot of press), but no order (rendering the ruling a prestigious op-ed)? Because they wanted to a) force Congress to act while b) putting Obama on notice that if something wasn't done they'd give him an order.
Since he and Congress did something they're not very likely to issue that order, and his request to the FISA Court for six more months is not a fuck you.
Genuinely curious here, what place do secret courts operated by secret police and underground judges have in a free, democratic society? Why are the Schutzstaffel enforcing secret laws in the "Land of the Free" and who gave them the right to trump everyone else's rights?
Your analogy is flawed.
The FISA Court does not convict anyone of crimes. Very little of what it does involves law enforcement. It it intended to ride herd on the Military's non-law enforcement data gathering so it can't do anything involving police.
That means there are no defendants. It's a military operation. It's designed to be extremely unfair to the targets because the ultimate goal is to kill the targets with as little loss of American life as physically possible.
Information can be turned over to the police, but then they have to do their own investigation (in many cases rediscovering the info that the NSA told them existed), and that entire investigation is fair game at trial.
Dude, it's six months. By the time the Supremes get around to hearing it there won't be a case anymore because the program will have ended.
Moreover there's no Court Order involved from the Second Circuit here. A ruling is analogous to the documentation a programmer writes explaining why his code is set up the way it is. The actual code would be analogous to an Order, and the Second Circuit decided not to write an Order because they figured Congress might do something, and if Congress failed to act they could always add the code later.
Which means the legal system only has one set of actual rules to follow, and that set comes from the FISA Court.
Court Rulings are symbolic unless they're also accompanied by orders. Which means they're almost all accompanied by a specific set of orders at the very end. Except this decision, which seems mostly intended to influence Congressional debate on the issue and put Obama on notice that if Congress failed to act he'd have a Second Circuit Order to deal with. Which, given that the Second Circuit rulings apply only within three states, would have brought up some interesting arguments about whether the decision applied in the other 47, whether the Second Circuit can overturn FISA decisions in those three states at all (the FISA Court does not have a level so it's clear the Supremes could over-rule it but not clear whether anyone else could), etc.
As for the rest, if you want to live in a country where a politician always keeps all his promises move to Canada. A system involving Checks and Balances, Separation of Powers, etc. is designed to be small-c conservative and thwart the plans of politicians great and small. That is the design of the system, and complaining that the guy you voted for only did some of what you thought he should do is exactly like claiming that the Space Shuttle was a failure because it could not go under water. The Canadians, OTOH have Responsible Government and Unity of Powers which mean that the PM is supposed to be allowed to try whatever he wants (within the Constitution), and then you hold him responsible for his actions at the next election.
Oh, was a magical third Bush term going to make this any better? Or a McCain or Romney administration?
Considering that R-Money recognized the difference between a state-run healthcare law and a federal-run healthcare law as a constitutional issue, I think he would have done much better in respecting the balance of power, rather than Barrack "Fuck the Constitution, Fuck the legislature, Fuck the courts, I'm in charge here, eat my shit in the form of Executive Orders" Obama.
When has he said fuck the courts?
As far as I can tell he's yet to disobey a single Court Order. He's certainly better then Bush. Most of the problems folks on Slashdot have with him come from him obeying the FISA Court, which is a real Court.
When he says "fuck the Legislature," it's typically after several years of Congress saying "We really need to get something done," but then failing to pass a bill.
Hersh's original article ("The Killing of Osama bin Laden") is plenty credible and the main points are backed up by numerous other sources. Some of the finer details have yet to be confirmed and I can't say about his later musings.
No, it really isn't.
It's based on one source. the source added one true fact to the story (there was apparently a walk-in involved), and the rest is all fanciful BS that only a Film Major would take seriously.
For example, let's say you're Pakistan. you control Osama because he's constantly surrounded by men with guns. Your men with guns. Why the fuck do you bother bringing in a SEAL team to kill his ass? You can shoot him and feed his corpse to the pigs. You can cart him to the mountains, give the CIA an "anonymous tip," and then slip him a sleeping pill while the SEALs are on thew way so your troops can get away. You do not actually need to create a major assassination operation five fucking minutes from your military Academy, which will convince the entire fucking world your military is dumber then two sacks of shit for not noticing Bin Laden.
Hell, why involve some poor Doctor whose just trying to vaccinate your kids against a deadly disease? Seriously, the scenario that played out was pretty much guaranteed to convince half the damn country not to vaccinate their kids for polio, which means that it sickened hundreds of Pakistani kids. And Hersh is claiming the whole damn thing Pakistan's idea.
If Pakistan were run by people who have the common sense of a goat, they would not have involved themselves in this operation. It made hundreds of innocent Pakistani children seriously ill, humiliated the Pakistani Defense Establishment is worthless, risked blowing up a huge section of a fairly important Pakistani City, and there's absolutely no pay-off for them.
Which in turn means that unless the source is impeccable no sane person will take it seriously. the source isn't impeccable. the source is a member of the aforementioned Pakistani Defense Establishment, and he benefits if people believe that it was all their idea because otherwise they're laughingstocks.
> It's more Mob rule on a national scale.
Yes, it's called government. This sentence conveys no useful information. Are you saying Pakistan is an ochlocracy?
Yes.
You wanna know what happened to the attempted assassins of Malala after they got sentenced to 25 years? Eight of the ten walked out of prison. The Pakistani Justice system claims the Prosecutor was lying when he said that all 10 had been convicted, and 8 got acquitted, but that's a rather odd thing for a Prosecutor to lie about. And it's quite strange that 8 Taliban gunmen, admitted members of a movement that seeks to overthrow the government by violence, got to walk out of Court.
Unless the government is too weak to a) admit that 80% of the defendants got off, b) keep all 10 in prison.
> If Pakistani Intelligence knew bin Laden was there then they can claim to be a real country.
Pakistan isn't a real country?
In the legal, formal sense? Yes.
In the sense that it actually controls it's territory? Hell no. There are active rebellions in most of it's landmass, residents of seven of the eight state-level government will identify themselves as Sindhi/Balochi/etc. before saying Pakistani, the supposedly secular government tries to support Islamist rebels in Kashmir (because part of Kashmir is run by India) while fighting an Islamist rebellion in it's Pashto areas, and appeasing Islamists in other regions by occasionally letting them lynch some random illiterate Christian whose equally illiterate Islamic neighbors swear he said bad things about Muhammed, etc.
It's a step above Somalia, but the step is damn short.
I wouldn't call it Pakistani-controlled. As far as I can tell nothing in Pakistan is actually Pakistani-controlled. It's more Mob rule on a national scale.
Seymour Hersh's recent article on the issue isn't terribly credible, for the same reason the intelligence that got us into the Iraq War was not credible: the people making the allegations benefit from them. If Pakistani Intelligence knew bin Laden was there then they can claim to be a real country.
Only if there's a specific clause in the law saying that.
Electoral term limits laws need that kind of thing or you could get interesting Court rulings about ex post facto laws. ie: if John Engler's first term didn't count towards a limit at the time, can you retroactively say it counts towards the limit after the fact?
Therefore they all include a clause explaining precisely which current (and former) office holders get grandfathered in.
Worms are actually complex little beasties. If you cut it in two "behind the clitellum" the head half will regrow a tail, but the tail half dies. If you cut in front of the clitellum both halves die.
You get elected in 1990 to a term that doesn't count for term limits because there are no term limits, then term limits get added and your 1994 election does count towards your limit.
In my home state of Michigan John Engler served three terms as Governor after enacting term limits in his first term. Harry Truman would have been eligible for infinite terms because the 22nd Amendment was passed during his tenure and "this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term."
But he was hideously unpopular in 1952 so he didn't run.
Moreover there's a huge language and cultural issue.
It's really hard for an English-speaking American to know when the Chinese are joking, exaggerating to make a point, or just trolling us. A major reason I refuse to pay attention to any English-language-media outlet on foreign affairs (except the BBC) is that they're all so easy for a foreign prankster to fool. CNN doesn't have a guy on the ground in Zambia, so they have literally nobody who can tell you whether the Zambian sense of humor is significantly different from the Zimbabwean, and if some Zambian plays a joke on CNN odds are they won't figure it out until after the stories aired. You see this the other way pretty frequently -- it's not unusual for non-Americans to not realize the Onion is a pack of lies.
This particular Doctor apparently worked in the US, which means he probably means what we think he means when he says "I transplanted a mouse's head," but how the fuck would a bunch of business journalists know they were being pranked by him? How would they know that he left the US due to major mental stability issues and his new Chinese employer is just catching on?
There was an 11 year hunt for Bin Laden, But your going to assign all the credit to the guy who happened to be there at the end ?
Your biases are just as bad.
The hunt for Bin Laden started in '98. He died in '11. That's a 13-year-hunt. But you don't like Clinton, so you don't want to credit him for being the only one who took Osama seriously before S11.
And yes, I'm going to give full credit to the guy who actually finished the job. The previous two guys can get some partial credit (especially Clinton, because at the time his hunt for Bin laden was widely derided by everyone on both sides as the equivalent of Ahab going after the White Whale), but trying and failing does not result in full credit.
Solved the wars
I love your use of the word solved. It's like solving power consumption issues with grenades.
Technically he solved the wars by pulling the grenade-throwers out.
It would be a very good line if you'd use'd drone strikes. He still does those.
Were you alive in September 2008? Because Bush made a pretty good start at forcing this one to collapse.
Iraq and Syria wer both his poor decisions catching up to us. It isn't Obama's fault that Bush fucked up in '06 and decided Maliki would be a great prime Minister. The man started wars t5hat killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Meddle East without managing to kill the one guy we were going for (Osama) This is Carter or LBJ-league in terms of foreign policy. Domestically he's Buchanan-league. His programs massively increased Federal spending (mostly by buying prescription drugs and paying for those wars), cut revenue, and the MBA fucked up financial regulation so badly that it's not an exaggeration to say that our economy did not survive his last four months in office.
Don't get me wrong. the man's a really nice guy, and apparently a wonderful father, and if a Pollster called me and asked me if I approved of him I'd almost certainly say yes. But objectively speaking his tenure was a disaster.
OTOH, Obama's solved the wars. He managed to kill that one guy we've been trying to knock off since Clinton. The economy is growing, and the deficit is shrinking. His major domestic policy accomplishment is working more or less as planned, despite the Obama Derangement Syndrome's insistence that some new data point nobody gives a shit about means that it's about to collapse on itself every six months. 10 years from now his "evolving" on gay marriage will be remembered as the brave stand that forced dead-enders to give up their Evil Opposition to the Civil Rights Issue of the Era.
If a computer fucks up it's memory allocation it doesn't destroy itself
Actually, yes, it does. Remember we're speaking of the OS, not just the hardware. Good management of the computer's resources is essential to the survival of anything running on the machine.
So your computer hasn't survived if you have to reinstall the software?
If you say it enough times it might start making sense.
because any robot that kills people is gonna expose it's owners to massive liability
Two obvious rebuttals: due diligence and the people making the decisions aren't necessarily the owners.
Due diligence doesn't work as an argument in Court with brand-new tech because the trial judge has no fucking clue what due diligence is. He understands legal cases, not technology, and he has no prior legal case to read on autonomous robots. He just knows that somebody died, and that whatever due diligence was done was probably not very good because it's really hard to do due diligence on brand new tech.
The people making decisions are always the ones liable. Which means in a case where leased equipment has malfunctioned killing someone the Courts spend a whole lot of time figuring out who, precisely, was responsible for the decision that killed the guy. In edge cases they'll tend to say "a pox on both you assholes" and order everyone involved to pay something.
Here's the problem. As insurers switch to pay for results and MDs can no longer make more money by running a test the ability to generate enough revenue to make a desired income will decrease. GP's will be competing with NPs and salaries will reflect that. This isn't about firing GPs but the impact computers and a changing way of reimbursing will impact the practice of medicine. A specialty will be even attractive because that is where the money will be.
So the supply of specialists will increase, but their salary won't decrease?
You can argue that insurers will force everyone to go to NP instead of GPs, thus reducing the salary of GPs and ultimately their numbers. You can't argue that process won;t involve an increase in the number of specialists, particularly specialists willing to work places far from the coasts, and thus reduce their salaries.
Let me put it to you this way, which Hospital do you think is will do better: A) Hospital A's business model is to fire three guys making $150k, replacing them with 3 NPs making $40k. This gives them $330k to buy a computer system that has to understand the entire human body.
B) Hospital B reduces is Surgical staff by two because it can out-source all data analysis in their specialties to a computer it will buy. It has saved $1 million. It can hire all 3 GPs A) just fired and it's computer budget is $550k. Which means not only does it have a better computer, that does less (remember: instead of understanding everything as a GP does it only has to understand a couple of specialties well enough that their specialists can cut analysis a few hours a week), it also poaches most of the patients those 3 GPs saw, and it's got a great marketing angle ("see a real Doctor").
First of all, the computer doesn't have to understand the whole body; rathe it needs to be able to treat symptoms not determine the underlying cause. When the symptom goes away you are cured, and the MD or NP's job is to determine what is the most likely course of treatment based on the symptoms, using the horses not zebras analogy. yes, they determine what you are most likely to have and act base don that, but it is very much a symptom -> action treatment based on pattern recognition; something computer can help with while relying on the MD or NP to recognize anomalies as well as validate the results.
The problem with your poaching model is your assuming insurers will continue to pay enough to cover a GP salary and make money. A more likely model is a number of NPs in practice with a GP so when they exceed their license they can turn to an MD or refer to a specialist. Small offices are already doing that because one MD often can't generate enough money to cover costs and make a living.
You're assuming insurers have the market power to deny their patients GPs. Historically this has not been the case.
Moreover you're assuming that the health market's price structure is not a byzantine, convoluted, pile of confusion. In this case you're positing an insurer with the market power to cut GP salaries by paying them the same as NPs. In America the most likely outcome of a GP setting up an office with a bunch of NPs, and giving himself a nice salary from the profit, would be that NP reimbursement rates get cut.
Most importantly, you're ignoring the fact that all these factors have been in operation for literally decades, and none of this has happened. The reason is simple: no insurer has the market power to force Medical personal to accept salaries similar to what their Canadian counterparts make (and Canadian Docs make tens of thousands less then ours do), because that requires near-monopoly power; and the new market under ObamaCare is actually designed to thwart potential monopolists.
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He lost the Speaking fees. If he hadn't resigned, and he;d forced them to impeach him, he would have lost the rest, too.
Yes, buying one President requires fewer transactions then 535 Congressmen and Senators, but OTOH buying 535 used Schwins also requires fewer transactions then buying a Gulfstream 650.
As for your evidence, don't be stupid. You implied that it's common for dumb ideas to be implemented solely because somebody paid a President money for it. I can think of plenty of dumb ideas implemented, or almost implemented by Presidents over the past 20 years (about half of them from Dubya); and I can tell you about precisely zero cases where a) the President proposed the dumb thing partly because people with bribe-power supported it, or even b) Congress opposed the idea because Congress is smart.
Take Social Security Privatization. The plan was that part of your Social Security tax should go into a personal account. The problem is 100% of your Social Security tax is budgeted to pay for this year's retirees, so you need to either raise taxes or cut current benefits to have money for your personal account.
Bush pushed it because he's a business major who actually believes that finance-industry gobbledygook about personal responsibility being a cure for everything, not because the finance-industry-gobblegygook-crowd paid him to do it. Congress stopped him, not because they're super-genuises strongly interested in protecting the public from ridiculous MBA-style bullshit, but because they were too damn stupid to realize the Social Security money was going to current retirees until they read the actual proposal.
Many of the Asian countries hate China. And not just "they are spying on me!" hate, this is personal. They joined the TPP trade talks as protection against China, so there is little chance they will join with China any time soon.
Depends on how smart the Chinese are. If they're smart enough to adopt a carrot/stick method and give some of the Asian countries the disputed bits of the South China Sea in exchange for agreeing top bully the other Asian countries, then they can do quite well.
You probably don't realize this, but to get the Axis Hitler had to do precisely the same thing. He clearly wanted all ethnic German territory in Europe, particularly the bits in countries not dominated by ethnic Germans, and Italy has an ethnic German province called South Tyrol. Mussolini would only sign onto the alliance until Hitler agreed not to press that claim.
No idea what you're talking about.
It was the middle of the Cold War.East Timor was de facto independent on November 25 of '75, but was not recognized as such by anyone when Indonesia invaded on December 7. During the two weeks it was de facto independent it was run by Communists. Nonetheless President Ford did not veto UN Security Council resolutions condemning the invasion. He did sell the Indonesians a lot of weapons (almost entirely small arms), and did not throw them outside of the US team.
During the Cold War it did not take a bribe for the largest Muslim nation on the Earth, with a strategic locations between Australia and our Allies on the Asian mainland, to buy our guns and use them on Commies. That was kinda the entire fucking point of the Cold War.
Are you on crack?
A President is virtually impossible to buy with money because he needs $1 Billion to get elected and if he loses he'll have a $200k pension for life, plus a six-figure office budget, plus speaking fees, etc. He's not gonna risk that for pocket change, and he's not gonna switch positions in a way that is obvious to the media because it would become a major headache politically. The easiest way to actually bribe a President is get to him while he's still a Congressman (because then switching his position back to the previous unbribed position becomes the political headache) and/or get to a bunch of sitting Congressman.
OTOH Congressmen need a couple hundred thousand a year to get re-elected, have no pensions (so they need to keep the job), and if a couple hundred of them are getting an average of $10k a year from your consortium of lobbyists/companies/top-level-employees they know the guy who gets $8k won't be the one raked through the coals on TV. For a couple million bucks you get the House, which means the President has to either agree with you or waste political capital fighting the House. Depending on how your issue plays in rural areas the Senate could actually be a lot cheaper per year. Senators have six years to build up their warchests, and media in rural states isn't that expensive (OTOH if your natural allies are guys from New York and Cali it would be more expensive). And with both houses the President has to veto your bill, which increases the political cost to him by an order of magnitude.
There is a national consensus. Free Trade has been official US Policy since Reagan.
And if you support free trade, then you can't support a strong role for Congress in the process because the only time Congress can be part of the process is after all the other country's have finalized the treaty. In this case that means that the Malaysians are likely to make major concessions to ensure their auto companies have access to the US Market, only to have that entire clause of the Treaty re-written by the Senate. Without any Malaysian input because the Malaysian Ambassador isn't going to be invited to the Committee meeting.
Americans really do not understand that if you set up a Constitutional system with Separation of Powers in the 18th century, it follows that at least some the separations you make will probably be fucking stupid in the 21st Century, which in turn means that either you have to rewrite the Constitution to allow for changed circumstances or you have to work around the obsolete separations.
In this case in 1795 Congress would have had significant say over who, precisely, was in the room doing the negotiating because there was no bureaucracy. Obama-1795 would be appointing people to a brand new diplomatic office of negotiating this treaty, and since the Senate would have time to give those guys a really good set of hearings the President's Ambassador would have needed to agree to a number of things Senators wanted to get the job, and while he'd formally be a creature of the White House, de facto he'd be representing the Senate as well. Nowadays we've got a lot more complicated government, and the negotiators are likely to be long-sevice members of the Executive Branch bureaucracy. They may be formally confirmed by the Senate, but that doesn't mean that a dozen Senators spent a could weeks on committee hearing before confirming them.
To get the 1795-level of Senatorial input into the process you'd need to amend the Constitution so that the Senate could appoint a couple guys to the diplomatic team, and specify that whatever those guys agreed to was the deal, take-it-or-leave-it.
Keep in mind that Singapore has the exact same racial majority as China, and they don't get these kind of stories.
What's happening is you've got a uniquely Chinese cultural and social systems that is adapting to (and in many case outright adopting) the Western business models that are the only way you can successfully run an economy. Historically the country has had huge problems because historically Han culture has emphasized getting the best one can out of the system with virtually no regard as to the health of the system, which is a fancy-ass way of saying that they like to milk the system, and their opinion of your argument that "if everyone did this that would suck" is that you're an idiot for not realizing that it already sucks.
I suspect that in the next few decades these stories will start to go away, as they get used to the ways you can milk a system based on Western business.
He picked the right Monty Python skit.
Solving Wars by threatening to gnaw people's legs off is the Bush doctrine, and it doesn't work very well.
Keep in mind that specialist pay has further to fall. GPs are in the $150-200k range. Specialists start at $250kish and go up past a half mil. You reduce GP income by 10%, so a lot of GPs go over to Specialties, and you're probably reducing the income of the specialists by more then 50%. Your argument could come to pass, but none of the things you mention are particularly new. People have been trying to make Nurse Practitioners happen for literally decades. And the systems that use them don't switch. The problem historically is that insurers have not had the market power to force their payment preferences on Doctors, which is unlikely to change unless a lot of them go out of business.
Moreover we've moved far afield from the original topic, of who, precisely, will be replaced by computers. Like I said before, the computer replacing a specialist not only has an easier job (ie: it only analyze this biopsy, rather then do an entire check-up) it also saves more money because the specialist costs more then a GP. Particularly if non-computer-market factors you mention like pay-for-performance reduce GP pay. Why develop a system that saves a hospital $50k per GP when you can save $150k per heart surgeon?
Dude, in six months it will be illegal for them to rule on this because the program the Second Circuit ruled against will be replaced. The EFF/ACLU can't appeal to the Supremes because they won, so they have to ask the Second Circuit to amend it's ruling to include an Order. They can appeal that ruling to the Supremes. That's a three-step process. Each individual step would take six months unless some Judge was so worked up that he said "ok we'll rule next week." And you'd need that to happen three times. The last time it happened at the Supreme Court level the emergency requiring immediate action was the 2000 Presidential election.
BTW, the FISA Court run by John Roberts. Each member is personally handpicked by him. Their removal from their normal district court to the FISA Court is not subject to Senate Confirmation.
And you didn't pay very careful attention to my post.
I very carefully used the words "Court Order," because (as the summary points out) there is no Second Circuit order for him to disobey. There's a ruling, but rulings are where the Courts explains why it told you to do something, not where they tell you to do something. It is literally impossible to disobey a ruling that does not have an order attached because there's nothing in a ruling to disobey.
Why would the Second Circuit issue a ruling (likely to get a lot of press), but no order (rendering the ruling a prestigious op-ed)? Because they wanted to a) force Congress to act while b) putting Obama on notice that if something wasn't done they'd give him an order.
Since he and Congress did something they're not very likely to issue that order, and his request to the FISA Court for six more months is not a fuck you.
Genuinely curious here, what place do secret courts operated by secret police and underground judges have in a free, democratic society? Why are the Schutzstaffel enforcing secret laws in the "Land of the Free" and who gave them the right to trump everyone else's rights?
Your analogy is flawed.
The FISA Court does not convict anyone of crimes. Very little of what it does involves law enforcement. It it intended to ride herd on the Military's non-law enforcement data gathering so it can't do anything involving police.
That means there are no defendants. It's a military operation. It's designed to be extremely unfair to the targets because the ultimate goal is to kill the targets with as little loss of American life as physically possible.
Information can be turned over to the police, but then they have to do their own investigation (in many cases rediscovering the info that the NSA told them existed), and that entire investigation is fair game at trial.
Dude, it's six months. By the time the Supremes get around to hearing it there won't be a case anymore because the program will have ended.
Moreover there's no Court Order involved from the Second Circuit here. A ruling is analogous to the documentation a programmer writes explaining why his code is set up the way it is. The actual code would be analogous to an Order, and the Second Circuit decided not to write an Order because they figured Congress might do something, and if Congress failed to act they could always add the code later.
Which means the legal system only has one set of actual rules to follow, and that set comes from the FISA Court.
Court Rulings are symbolic unless they're also accompanied by orders. Which means they're almost all accompanied by a specific set of orders at the very end. Except this decision, which seems mostly intended to influence Congressional debate on the issue and put Obama on notice that if Congress failed to act he'd have a Second Circuit Order to deal with. Which, given that the Second Circuit rulings apply only within three states, would have brought up some interesting arguments about whether the decision applied in the other 47, whether the Second Circuit can overturn FISA decisions in those three states at all (the FISA Court does not have a level so it's clear the Supremes could over-rule it but not clear whether anyone else could), etc.
As for the rest, if you want to live in a country where a politician always keeps all his promises move to Canada. A system involving Checks and Balances, Separation of Powers, etc. is designed to be small-c conservative and thwart the plans of politicians great and small. That is the design of the system, and complaining that the guy you voted for only did some of what you thought he should do is exactly like claiming that the Space Shuttle was a failure because it could not go under water. The Canadians, OTOH have Responsible Government and Unity of Powers which mean that the PM is supposed to be allowed to try whatever he wants (within the Constitution), and then you hold him responsible for his actions at the next election.
Oh, was a magical third Bush term going to make this any better? Or a McCain or Romney administration?
Considering that R-Money recognized the difference between a state-run healthcare law and a federal-run healthcare law as a constitutional issue, I think he would have done much better in respecting the balance of power, rather than Barrack "Fuck the Constitution, Fuck the legislature, Fuck the courts, I'm in charge here, eat my shit in the form of Executive Orders" Obama.
When has he said fuck the courts?
As far as I can tell he's yet to disobey a single Court Order. He's certainly better then Bush. Most of the problems folks on Slashdot have with him come from him obeying the FISA Court, which is a real Court.
When he says "fuck the Legislature," it's typically after several years of Congress saying "We really need to get something done," but then failing to pass a bill.
Hersh's original article ("The Killing of Osama bin Laden") is plenty credible and the main points are backed up by numerous other sources. Some of the finer details have yet to be confirmed and I can't say about his later musings.
No, it really isn't.
It's based on one source. the source added one true fact to the story (there was apparently a walk-in involved), and the rest is all fanciful BS that only a Film Major would take seriously.
For example, let's say you're Pakistan. you control Osama because he's constantly surrounded by men with guns. Your men with guns. Why the fuck do you bother bringing in a SEAL team to kill his ass? You can shoot him and feed his corpse to the pigs. You can cart him to the mountains, give the CIA an "anonymous tip," and then slip him a sleeping pill while the SEALs are on thew way so your troops can get away. You do not actually need to create a major assassination operation five fucking minutes from your military Academy, which will convince the entire fucking world your military is dumber then two sacks of shit for not noticing Bin Laden.
Hell, why involve some poor Doctor whose just trying to vaccinate your kids against a deadly disease? Seriously, the scenario that played out was pretty much guaranteed to convince half the damn country not to vaccinate their kids for polio, which means that it sickened hundreds of Pakistani kids. And Hersh is claiming the whole damn thing Pakistan's idea.
If Pakistan were run by people who have the common sense of a goat, they would not have involved themselves in this operation. It made hundreds of innocent Pakistani children seriously ill, humiliated the Pakistani Defense Establishment is worthless, risked blowing up a huge section of a fairly important Pakistani City, and there's absolutely no pay-off for them.
Which in turn means that unless the source is impeccable no sane person will take it seriously. the source isn't impeccable. the source is a member of the aforementioned Pakistani Defense Establishment, and he benefits if people believe that it was all their idea because otherwise they're laughingstocks.
> It's more Mob rule on a national scale.
Yes, it's called government. This sentence conveys no useful information. Are you saying Pakistan is an ochlocracy?
Yes.
You wanna know what happened to the attempted assassins of Malala after they got sentenced to 25 years? Eight of the ten walked out of prison. The Pakistani Justice system claims the Prosecutor was lying when he said that all 10 had been convicted, and 8 got acquitted, but that's a rather odd thing for a Prosecutor to lie about. And it's quite strange that 8 Taliban gunmen, admitted members of a movement that seeks to overthrow the government by violence, got to walk out of Court.
Unless the government is too weak to a) admit that 80% of the defendants got off, b) keep all 10 in prison.
> If Pakistani Intelligence knew bin Laden was there then they can claim to be a real country.
Pakistan isn't a real country?
In the legal, formal sense? Yes.
In the sense that it actually controls it's territory? Hell no. There are active rebellions in most of it's landmass, residents of seven of the eight state-level government will identify themselves as Sindhi/Balochi/etc. before saying Pakistani, the supposedly secular government tries to support Islamist rebels in Kashmir (because part of Kashmir is run by India) while fighting an Islamist rebellion in it's Pashto areas, and appeasing Islamists in other regions by occasionally letting them lynch some random illiterate Christian whose equally illiterate Islamic neighbors swear he said bad things about Muhammed, etc.
It's a step above Somalia, but the step is damn short.
I wouldn't call it Pakistani-controlled. As far as I can tell nothing in Pakistan is actually Pakistani-controlled. It's more Mob rule on a national scale.
Seymour Hersh's recent article on the issue isn't terribly credible, for the same reason the intelligence that got us into the Iraq War was not credible: the people making the allegations benefit from them. If Pakistani Intelligence knew bin Laden was there then they can claim to be a real country.
Only if there's a specific clause in the law saying that.
Electoral term limits laws need that kind of thing or you could get interesting Court rulings about ex post facto laws. ie: if John Engler's first term didn't count towards a limit at the time, can you retroactively say it counts towards the limit after the fact?
Therefore they all include a clause explaining precisely which current (and former) office holders get grandfathered in.
Worms are actually complex little beasties. If you cut it in two "behind the clitellum" the head half will regrow a tail, but the tail half dies. If you cut in front of the clitellum both halves die.
That's actually how term limits work.
You get elected in 1990 to a term that doesn't count for term limits because there are no term limits, then term limits get added and your 1994 election does count towards your limit.
In my home state of Michigan John Engler served three terms as Governor after enacting term limits in his first term. Harry Truman would have been eligible for infinite terms because the 22nd Amendment was passed during his tenure and "this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term."
But he was hideously unpopular in 1952 so he didn't run.
Moreover there's a huge language and cultural issue.
It's really hard for an English-speaking American to know when the Chinese are joking, exaggerating to make a point, or just trolling us. A major reason I refuse to pay attention to any English-language-media outlet on foreign affairs (except the BBC) is that they're all so easy for a foreign prankster to fool. CNN doesn't have a guy on the ground in Zambia, so they have literally nobody who can tell you whether the Zambian sense of humor is significantly different from the Zimbabwean, and if some Zambian plays a joke on CNN odds are they won't figure it out until after the stories aired. You see this the other way pretty frequently -- it's not unusual for non-Americans to not realize the Onion is a pack of lies.
This particular Doctor apparently worked in the US, which means he probably means what we think he means when he says "I transplanted a mouse's head," but how the fuck would a bunch of business journalists know they were being pranked by him? How would they know that he left the US due to major mental stability issues and his new Chinese employer is just catching on?
You really need to check your biases.
There was an 11 year hunt for Bin Laden, But your going to assign all the credit to the guy who happened to be there at the end ?
Your biases are just as bad.
The hunt for Bin Laden started in '98. He died in '11. That's a 13-year-hunt. But you don't like Clinton, so you don't want to credit him for being the only one who took Osama seriously before S11.
And yes, I'm going to give full credit to the guy who actually finished the job. The previous two guys can get some partial credit (especially Clinton, because at the time his hunt for Bin laden was widely derided by everyone on both sides as the equivalent of Ahab going after the White Whale), but trying and failing does not result in full credit.
Solved the wars
I love your use of the word solved. It's like solving power consumption issues with grenades.
Technically he solved the wars by pulling the grenade-throwers out.
It would be a very good line if you'd use'd drone strikes. He still does those.
Caused another country to collapse?
Were you alive in September 2008? Because Bush made a pretty good start at forcing this one to collapse.
Iraq and Syria wer both his poor decisions catching up to us. It isn't Obama's fault that Bush fucked up in '06 and decided Maliki would be a great prime Minister. The man started wars t5hat killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Meddle East without managing to kill the one guy we were going for (Osama) This is Carter or LBJ-league in terms of foreign policy. Domestically he's Buchanan-league. His programs massively increased Federal spending (mostly by buying prescription drugs and paying for those wars), cut revenue, and the MBA fucked up financial regulation so badly that it's not an exaggeration to say that our economy did not survive his last four months in office.
Don't get me wrong. the man's a really nice guy, and apparently a wonderful father, and if a Pollster called me and asked me if I approved of him I'd almost certainly say yes. But objectively speaking his tenure was a disaster.
OTOH, Obama's solved the wars. He managed to kill that one guy we've been trying to knock off since Clinton. The economy is growing, and the deficit is shrinking. His major domestic policy accomplishment is working more or less as planned, despite the Obama Derangement Syndrome's insistence that some new data point nobody gives a shit about means that it's about to collapse on itself every six months. 10 years from now his "evolving" on gay marriage will be remembered as the brave stand that forced dead-enders to give up their Evil Opposition to the Civil Rights Issue of the Era.
If a computer fucks up it's memory allocation it doesn't destroy itself
Actually, yes, it does. Remember we're speaking of the OS, not just the hardware. Good management of the computer's resources is essential to the survival of anything running on the machine.
So your computer hasn't survived if you have to reinstall the software?
If you say it enough times it might start making sense.
because any robot that kills people is gonna expose it's owners to massive liability
Two obvious rebuttals: due diligence and the people making the decisions aren't necessarily the owners.
Due diligence doesn't work as an argument in Court with brand-new tech because the trial judge has no fucking clue what due diligence is. He understands legal cases, not technology, and he has no prior legal case to read on autonomous robots. He just knows that somebody died, and that whatever due diligence was done was probably not very good because it's really hard to do due diligence on brand new tech.
The people making decisions are always the ones liable. Which means in a case where leased equipment has malfunctioned killing someone the Courts spend a whole lot of time figuring out who, precisely, was responsible for the decision that killed the guy. In edge cases they'll tend to say "a pox on both you assholes" and order everyone involved to pay something.
Here's the problem. As insurers switch to pay for results and MDs can no longer make more money by running a test the ability to generate enough revenue to make a desired income will decrease. GP's will be competing with NPs and salaries will reflect that. This isn't about firing GPs but the impact computers and a changing way of reimbursing will impact the practice of medicine. A specialty will be even attractive because that is where the money will be.
So the supply of specialists will increase, but their salary won't decrease?
You can argue that insurers will force everyone to go to NP instead of GPs, thus reducing the salary of GPs and ultimately their numbers. You can't argue that process won;t involve an increase in the number of specialists, particularly specialists willing to work places far from the coasts, and thus reduce their salaries.
Let me put it to you this way, which Hospital do you think is will do better:
A) Hospital A's business model is to fire three guys making $150k, replacing them with 3 NPs making $40k. This gives them $330k to buy a computer system that has to understand the entire human body.
B) Hospital B reduces is Surgical staff by two because it can out-source all data analysis in their specialties to a computer it will buy. It has saved $1 million. It can hire all 3 GPs A) just fired and it's computer budget is $550k. Which means not only does it have a better computer, that does less (remember: instead of understanding everything as a GP does it only has to understand a couple of specialties well enough that their specialists can cut analysis a few hours a week), it also poaches most of the patients those 3 GPs saw, and it's got a great marketing angle ("see a real Doctor").
First of all, the computer doesn't have to understand the whole body; rathe it needs to be able to treat symptoms not determine the underlying cause. When the symptom goes away you are cured, and the MD or NP's job is to determine what is the most likely course of treatment based on the symptoms, using the horses not zebras analogy. yes, they determine what you are most likely to have and act base don that, but it is very much a symptom -> action treatment based on pattern recognition; something computer can help with while relying on the MD or NP to recognize anomalies as well as validate the results.
The problem with your poaching model is your assuming insurers will continue to pay enough to cover a GP salary and make money. A more likely model is a number of NPs in practice with a GP so when they exceed their license they can turn to an MD or refer to a specialist. Small offices are already doing that because one MD often can't generate enough money to cover costs and make a living.
You're assuming insurers have the market power to deny their patients GPs. Historically this has not been the case.
Moreover you're assuming that the health market's price structure is not a byzantine, convoluted, pile of confusion. In this case you're positing an insurer with the market power to cut GP salaries by paying them the same as NPs. In America the most likely outcome of a GP setting up an office with a bunch of NPs, and giving himself a nice salary from the profit, would be that NP reimbursement rates get cut.
Most importantly, you're ignoring the fact that all these factors have been in operation for literally decades, and none of this has happened. The reason is simple: no insurer has the market power to force Medical personal to accept salaries similar to what their Canadian counterparts make (and Canadian Docs make tens of thousands less then ours do), because that requires near-monopoly power; and the new market under ObamaCare is actually designed to thwart potential monopolists.