Kind of strange that it's the US's supposedly free-market healthcare system that has the reputation of being horrendously expensive, poor value for money and for tying people to jobs with large corporations- via their health plans- if they want anything like decent insurance at acceptable prices.
Except that it isn't a free-market health care system -- at least not 50% of it. About half the money spent in health care is Federal/State money.
And that's what drives up prices. You have the private sector competing with the public sector for finite health care resources.
Economics is about the study of the allocation of scarce resources. The wealthy are, by nature of this fact, wealthy at the expense of others.
Oh, bullshit. First, just because resources may be scarce, doesn't mean that, over time, they remain as scarce as they were in the past. Available resources can grow. Second, resources aren't necessarily the same as wealth. A lot of wealth consists not of resources, but of artifacts.
This "wealthy at the expense of others" crap is meant to drive a wedge between the classes and to create conflict were no conflict need exist.
Taxing the INCOME of the wealthy to build infrastructure actually compels the creation of MORE jobs than just the infrastructure itself.
That standard reaganomic bullcrap is responsible for thousands of startups and IT businesses that got their startup capital and money from the income of the wealthy.
And the argument that building more infrastructure compels the creation of more jobs doesn't just apply to infrastructure. How many jobs did Google create, for example?
Google got its money from the income of the wealthy. Under a high-tax policy, that money would have instead gone to fund bridge-building or road construction.
Do you really believe that our economy is in the dumps because we don't have enough roads or bridges?
If the $100 is spent now, and the multiplier effect takes place now then it's worth say, $100 x R.
If the $100 is simply saved, and spent at a future point then at that future point in time, $100 is still only worth $100.
The net effect of the future $100 would be delayed an additional time until it is actually utilized.
But even saved money gets spent by those that borrowed it from savers. There is very little money sitting idle.
All the government is doing here is diverting saved money that would be spent by borrowers in other parts of the economy and redirecting it to government projects.
The problem with your hero's argument is that he has no evidence to back up his claims. Show me that people work less when taxed at a certain rate.
My wife quit a part-time job simply because our combined income meant she'd be working at a miserable effective hourly rate after taxes. It just wasn't worth it to her.
Sure, it's a personal example, but she can't be the only one.
The insurance companies are for profit, and the way they maximize profit is to minimize payouts. Your assertion that they would find themselves out of business is interesting and only true because you set the bar at a ridiculously low amount (1%).
Oh, so you agree that they can't minimize payouts. That was my point. Payouts aren't at 1% because people can switch to other insurance companies.
You can't escape the fact that insurance companies provide a service that the public want and that's the source of their profit. They aren't parasites.
However, insurance companies have become too powerful and they now function as parasites on the system, making it less efficient and more expensive for the end user. Ask yourself: "what product do insurance companies offer in terms of health care?" What do they create? How do they contribute to health care? When it comes down to it, health insurance companies are not in business to provide health care or help you pay for health care. They are in business to provide insurance, collect money, minimize any payout and answer to their shareholders who expect the system to turn a healthy profit. Any reduction in what they have to pay out is money earned for them.
The proof that the industry provides a useful service can be seen in the fact that millions choose and demand to avail themselves of the services of health insurers. Some politicians even point to the lack of health insurance coverage as a problem needing state intervention.
How can insurance companies be parasites, providing no useful contribution, while having still having millions of willing subscribers? Are people just stupid? Are their governments that provide insurance for their employees stupid?
One can only reasonably conclude that indeed insurance companies provide some service that people want.
I'll give you an example of a service: they provide management of a conservative investment pool to help conserve and increase the money available to pay out claims. Depending on the investment climate, there are times when insurance companies actually payout more in claims than they collect in premiums and they still remain profitable. Now that doesn't happen all the time, but in general insurance companies are more skillful than most individuals at performing such a task.
And your statement that "any reduction in what they have to pay out is money earned for them", is certainly, in general, not true. A company reducing payouts to 1% of collect premiums would quickly find itself out of business.
Insurance companies' customers want maximum payouts, or they change companies. There is constant pressure to pay claims.
Of course the money available to pay claims is finite, so not every procedure can be covered. Indeed, another service provided by insurance companies is the difficult task of trying to maximize outcomes for the group of insured as a whole, while being constrained by finite funds. That takes skill, too.
Anyone that adheres to atheism is probably a liberal thinker. Ayn Rand, an atheist, was therefore a liberal thinker. She just wasn't a leftist. They aren't the same thing.
Right, keep on living in your freeper fantasy land.
Did you happen across the news today? We're going to spend $700 *billion* (on top of what we've already spent) on bailing out the big dogs *and* we're going to raise the debt ceiling another couple of trillion bucks.
"We're" going to? I doubt that. Maybe I will. But I doubt you make enough money to qualify.
And it's not the "big dogs" getting bailed out. It's people like my broke-ass-spend-every-dime-she-makes-mother-in-law. She called me today bitching about her $700/month Lexis SUV payment and asking if she should pull all her money out of her retirement because it's through AIG. She's a school teacher and that's where Florida put a lot of retirement dollars.
I told she was one of the people that the Federal Reserve bailed out.
THAT'S why these bailouts are happening. Because pensions and retirement systems had a bunch of money tied up in these mortgages.
You think a Democratic congress would give a shit if a bunch of rich folks wound up in the poor house? HAH! That would just close the gap between rich and poor, wouldn't it?
If they are never going to pay that money back, the mortgage companies should have never made the loans. When you make a loan, you take a risk.
No. When you make a loan to someone with bad credit, you're just following lending regulations.
Do you know what a LMI penetration rate is? It's the amount of screwing you take by being forced by regulations (Community Reinvestment Act) to lend to low and moderate income earners in order to satisfy regulatory requirements. Bank examiners use it as a performance metric. If you don't do the mandated amount of lending to deadbeats, the regulators fine you or won't let you do business.
Profits are held by private individuals, and losses are distributed among the general public via bailouts, etc.
Oh bullshit.
Profits are divided between the individual and the state. Losses are almost always suffered by the individual. How often does the state step in to help bailout any business? You think AMD is going to get a helping hand if they go under? Did Pets.com get any help? Mostly the government says "suck it" if you fail and "gimme" when you succeed.
As for the recent "bailouts", it's going to be the profitable and well-off being taxed to bailout institutions that gave money away (rich people's money, mostly) to that part of the general public that is never going to pay that money back.
Fuck. The might as well have just increased income taxes and handed the money directly to those with bad credit. They could have avoided the charade of mortgages, etc, and just called it welfare and subsidized housing.
I am opposed to the argument that poor people are poor because they are doing something wrong. People can be born wealthy, or they can be born poor. The simple fact is, you can only make use of what your environment offers, and in third world countries, that is not much.
What we're all advocating is restricting the rights of a business corporation to only those necessary to do business. For example, why should a business corporation have the right to free political speech?
Individuals don't lose their free speech rights just because they come together as shareholders to form a corporation.
Well electrics need to be measured in something other than MPG because that's just confusing and not correct. It should be like Miles per Amp Hours (MPAH).
Better yet, use Joules per whatever or whatevers per Joule for just about everything. Toss the Watt. Dump the AmpHour. Eject the kiloWatthour.
The public's understanding of energy would be greatly increased.
Neither Iran nor North Korea have waged wars of aggression in the past 50 years. If you're alleging that the US hasn't done so, you're being extremely naïf.
While there hasn't been a lot of fighting, North Korea is still at war with the south, so why would they need to initiate another war? They've been at war for 50 years!
And Iran invaded US territory when they took the US embassy in 1980. They've been fighting the US and Israel for 20+years since. Oh sure, there's been no official declaration of war. But you'd have to be extremely naif to believe they aren't actively participating, though indirectly, in a war against the US and Israel.
The easy way to defeat "packet shaping" sophistry is to point out that value comes from bandwith and nothing but.
I use a 13kbps 100ms wireless voice link (cell phone) that lets me talk with my brother in Florida. By your logic, we should be just as happy recording everything we have to say on CDs and mailing them back and forth to each other, since the available bandwidth is higher.
Currencies are adjusting to the prospect of a U.S. economic decline because of its non-competitiveness from the LACK of health care costs externalization through universal health care.
So, there's economic decline when companies spend their money on employees' health care, but not when the government takes that money and spends it on employees' health care.
Scheduling algorithms are very important for routers too. So there is an analogy. But the analogy isn't with a tiered internet. It's with protocol based QoS.
The analogy with a tiered internet is fine, provided you look back far enough in the history of computers.
Before personal computers became common, people got a lot of their work done by renting time on mainframes. People that wanted cheap CPU cycles had their jobs wait for spare cycles. Those that needed immediate answers paid more and their jobs got a higher priority.
In essence some people paid more for lower latency while others that could wait got a discount.
I don't know where all the anti-union rhetoric comes from, but I suspect it comes from unions having better contracts with better benefits, and then the general public getting pissed when unions fight to keep what they have.
Unions are labor monopolies and are compensated as such.
Of course there's resentment from the rest of us. You get to gouge consumers, just like other monopolists, while the rest of us are forced to compete with each other. You get the benefits of low prices due to labor competition without having to compete yourself!
It isn't fair that some workers in some industries get to screw the rest of us with higher prices.
Slashdot Mirror
The Democrats have near absolute power at this point.
Why are they still bothering with the Republicans?
Except that it isn't a free-market health care system -- at least not 50% of it. About half the money spent in health care is Federal/State money.
And that's what drives up prices. You have the private sector competing with the public sector for finite health care resources.
Economics is about the study of the allocation of scarce resources.
The wealthy are, by nature of this fact, wealthy at the expense of others.
Oh, bullshit. First, just because resources may be scarce, doesn't mean that, over time, they remain as scarce as they were in the past. Available resources can grow. Second, resources aren't necessarily the same as wealth. A lot of wealth consists not of resources, but of artifacts.
This "wealthy at the expense of others" crap is meant to drive a wedge between the classes and to create conflict were no conflict need exist.
That standard reaganomic bullcrap is responsible for thousands of startups and IT businesses that got their startup capital and money from the income of the wealthy.
And the argument that building more infrastructure compels the creation of more jobs doesn't just apply to infrastructure. How many jobs did Google create, for example?
Google got its money from the income of the wealthy. Under a high-tax policy, that money would have instead gone to fund bridge-building or road construction.
Do you really believe that our economy is in the dumps because we don't have enough roads or bridges?
But even saved money gets spent by those that borrowed it from savers. There is very little money sitting idle.
All the government is doing here is diverting saved money that would be spent by borrowers in other parts of the economy and redirecting it to government projects.
It doesn't create jobs. It reallocates jobs.
The problem with your hero's argument is that he has no evidence to back up his claims. Show me that people work less when taxed at a certain rate.
My wife quit a part-time job simply because our combined income meant she'd be working at a miserable effective hourly rate after taxes. It just wasn't worth it to her.
Sure, it's a personal example, but she can't be the only one.
The insurance companies are for profit, and the way they maximize profit is to minimize payouts. Your assertion that they would find themselves out of business is interesting and only true because you set the bar at a ridiculously low amount (1%).
Oh, so you agree that they can't minimize payouts. That was my point. Payouts aren't at 1% because people can switch to other insurance companies.
You can't escape the fact that insurance companies provide a service that the public want and that's the source of their profit. They aren't parasites.
The proof that the industry provides a useful service can be seen in the fact that millions choose and demand to avail themselves of the services of health insurers. Some politicians even point to the lack of health insurance coverage as a problem needing state intervention.
How can insurance companies be parasites, providing no useful contribution, while having still having millions of willing subscribers? Are people just stupid? Are their governments that provide insurance for their employees stupid?
One can only reasonably conclude that indeed insurance companies provide some service that people want.
I'll give you an example of a service: they provide management of a conservative investment pool to help conserve and increase the money available to pay out claims. Depending on the investment climate, there are times when insurance companies actually payout more in claims than they collect in premiums and they still remain profitable. Now that doesn't happen all the time, but in general insurance companies are more skillful than most individuals at performing such a task.
And your statement that "any reduction in what they have to pay out is money earned for them", is certainly, in general, not true. A company reducing payouts to 1% of collect premiums would quickly find itself out of business.
Insurance companies' customers want maximum payouts, or they change companies. There is constant pressure to pay claims.
Of course the money available to pay claims is finite, so not every procedure can be covered. Indeed, another service provided by insurance companies is the difficult task of trying to maximize outcomes for the group of insured as a whole, while being constrained by finite funds. That takes skill, too.
Anyone that adheres to atheism is probably a liberal thinker. Ayn Rand, an atheist, was therefore a liberal thinker. She just wasn't a leftist. They aren't the same thing.
Right, keep on living in your freeper fantasy land.
Did you happen across the news today? We're going to spend $700 *billion* (on top of what we've already spent) on bailing out the big dogs *and* we're going to raise the debt ceiling another couple of trillion bucks.
"We're" going to? I doubt that. Maybe I will. But I doubt you make enough money to qualify.
And it's not the "big dogs" getting bailed out. It's people like my broke-ass-spend-every-dime-she-makes-mother-in-law. She called me today bitching about her $700/month Lexis SUV payment and asking if she should pull all her money out of her retirement because it's through AIG. She's a school teacher and that's where Florida put a lot of retirement dollars.
I told she was one of the people that the Federal Reserve bailed out.
THAT'S why these bailouts are happening. Because pensions and retirement systems had a bunch of money tied up in these mortgages.
You think a Democratic congress would give a shit if a bunch of rich folks wound up in the poor house? HAH! That would just close the gap between rich and poor, wouldn't it?
No. These bailouts are to save "the workers".
If they are never going to pay that money back, the mortgage companies should have never made the loans. When you make a loan, you take a risk.
No. When you make a loan to someone with bad credit, you're just following lending regulations.
Do you know what a LMI penetration rate is? It's the amount of screwing you take by being forced by regulations (Community Reinvestment Act) to lend to low and moderate income earners in order to satisfy regulatory requirements. Bank examiners use it as a performance metric. If you don't do the mandated amount of lending to deadbeats, the regulators fine you or won't let you do business.
Profits are held by private individuals, and losses are distributed among the general public via bailouts, etc.
Oh bullshit.
Profits are divided between the individual and the state. Losses are almost always suffered by the individual. How often does the state step in to help bailout any business? You think AMD is going to get a helping hand if they go under? Did Pets.com get any help? Mostly the government says "suck it" if you fail and "gimme" when you succeed.
As for the recent "bailouts", it's going to be the profitable and well-off being taxed to bailout institutions that gave money away (rich people's money, mostly) to that part of the general public that is never going to pay that money back.
Fuck. The might as well have just increased income taxes and handed the money directly to those with bad credit. They could have avoided the charade of mortgages, etc, and just called it welfare and subsidized housing.
Which is why Japan is so poor, right?
What we're all advocating is restricting the rights of a business corporation to only those necessary to do business. For example, why should a business corporation have the right to free political speech?
Individuals don't lose their free speech rights just because they come together as shareholders to form a corporation.
You have just put your finger on the root of the problem -- "The corporate entity" is a construct which should never have been permitted.
People have a right to freely associate and operate collectively. A corporation is just a formal way of doing this.
The AARP, the AFL/CIO, the city of Seattle, and the Democratic Party are all formal corporations with bylaws and rules and recognized legally.
So should these "constructs" not be permitted?
Well electrics need to be measured in something other than MPG because that's just confusing and not correct. It should be like Miles per Amp Hours (MPAH).
Better yet, use Joules per whatever or whatevers per Joule for just about everything. Toss the Watt. Dump the AmpHour. Eject the kiloWatthour.
The public's understanding of energy would be greatly increased.
Neither Iran nor North Korea have waged wars of aggression in the past 50 years. If you're alleging that the US hasn't done so, you're being extremely naïf.
While there hasn't been a lot of fighting, North Korea is still at war with the south, so why would they need to initiate another war? They've been at war for 50 years!
And Iran invaded US territory when they took the US embassy in 1980. They've been fighting the US and Israel for 20+years since. Oh sure, there's been no official declaration of war. But you'd have to be extremely naif to believe they aren't actively participating, though indirectly, in a war against the US and Israel.
Good. I make my own damn plans. I'm a free person. I don't need a politician to make plans for me.
Yes, he designed it when baud rates were under 16k.
Someone that doesn't even know the difference between baud and bit rate really shouldn't be talking shit about people that do.
The easy way to defeat "packet shaping" sophistry is to point out that value comes from bandwith and nothing but.
I use a 13kbps 100ms wireless voice link (cell phone) that lets me talk with my brother in Florida. By your logic, we should be just as happy recording everything we have to say on CDs and mailing them back and forth to each other, since the available bandwidth is higher.
Currencies are adjusting to the prospect of a U.S. economic decline because of its non-competitiveness from the LACK of health care costs externalization through universal health care.
So, there's economic decline when companies spend their money on employees' health care, but not when the government takes that money and spends it on employees' health care.
Interesting.
This is the biggest load of bullshit I've heard in a long time.
Let's give credit where credit is due:
1) cheap 14.4/28.8 kbps modems
2) HTML
3)
4) cheap 15+bit color video cards
As far as I can see, MS had nothing to due with any of these things.
The analogy with a tiered internet is fine, provided you look back far enough in the history of computers.
Before personal computers became common, people got a lot of their work done by renting time on mainframes. People that wanted cheap CPU cycles had their jobs wait for spare cycles. Those that needed immediate answers paid more and their jobs got a higher priority.
In essence some people paid more for lower latency while others that could wait got a discount.
There is nothing in that article the describes the restriction of students' freedoms.
Instead, the FBI is advising these universities on how they can protect themselves from those that would steal important research.
As bad as the government might be, I don't see what good it does to distort the facts.
I don't know where all the anti-union rhetoric comes from, but I suspect it comes from unions having better contracts with better benefits, and then the general public getting pissed when unions fight to keep what they have.
Unions are labor monopolies and are compensated as such.
Of course there's resentment from the rest of us. You get to gouge consumers, just like other monopolists, while the rest of us are forced to compete with each other. You get the benefits of low prices due to labor competition without having to compete yourself!
It isn't fair that some workers in some industries get to screw the rest of us with higher prices.