Ah yes.. the gmail user didn't respond.. because nobody anywhere has a gmail account and fails to check it every hour. It couldn't possibly be that the account just wasn't checked at all hence no response. If you are going to assume malign intent on the part of the gmail user, there still isn't much cause for deactivating the account.
If you assume the user is going to do something criminal, and hence the lack of response, the financial information is in the wild and needs to be changed immediately. If it is possible, credit deposits targeted at the old numbers to the new accounts, but withdrawals only from the new account numbers. Deactivation doesn't solve anything, because POP/IMAP copies, forwards/bounces, or just a simple copy/paste has already put the information outside the account.
Assuming that the gmail user wouldn't do anything untoward with the information is dangerous, of course, but going after the gmail account is.. odd. It is an action that can only hurt an innocent user. It won't hinder the user if he isn't innocent. None of the affected account holders gain security. If their information is out, its out and needs to change. If it isn't out, they can't know it isn't and need to change.
I'm very aware that corporations are fictional people as far as the law is concerned. But to act as if the corporation is actually a person by comparing it to the behavior of individual people, facing non-corporate tax codes, is absurd. Because corporations aren't people. I can't slice off a finger and leave it in Alaska for tax purposes. Corporations can slice off a department and drop it in what ever state they please for tax purposes.
Well.. not only is working in one state, residing in another, and claiming taxes in your state of residence not "pretty blatantly illegal"*.. but you're treating a corporate entity like it was a person. Which it isn't.
There are none of Washington State's resources utilized in the production of licenses. None. How do I know? Because the license key is a number. The software package that makes the license valuable, well now, thats all done by employees in Washington state, in facilities in Washington (and elsewhere, I'd imagine), using equipment put in service and accounted for and depreciated under federal and Washington tax codes. For which, Microsoft pays taxes. Income, property, sales, fuel, whatever. So, while you may claim that the license revenue should be Washington state's tax jurisdiction, I'd be pretty careful about making such a claim. Yes, the license is pretty worthless without the software. But the software is pretty useless to the license holder without an install disk. Which, I can't be certain of, but probably isn't pressed, boxed, and wrapped in Washington. Also, the software works (mostly) without a legit license. So the license revenue is, logically, the cost of staying legit. Which, as I said, has nothing to do with any usage of Washington state resources. So how much of this lovely revenue should be taxable by which states again? See, when states start taxing a bunch of activities, self-interested entities shift those activities as best they can to eliminate tax burden.
Too bad, so sad, Washington. They want to tax an activity that is incredibly easy to relocate and difficult to apportion value to all the locales that support it.
*I'm aware that it isn't quite that simple. Nothing is, with the tax code.
I don't think you are talking about efficiency accurately. By your reasoning, every competitive activity, anywhere, should be done away with since the participants could have been of more value to society by doing any productive job. And yet, how much would you have to pay those people in order to do the janitorial work or burger flipping instead of whichever competitive activity they would choose to do voluntarily? That is the measure of the inefficiency of your argument.
Any time participants in any activity have real choices whether or not to participate, you cannot get inefficient outcomes. There are any number of activities where participants do not have real choices about whether or not to participate, and those activities tend to not have efficient outcomes. But people and teams who have been working for years, making submissions to Netflix, and getting visible feedback as to how they are progressing can certainly make efficient decisions. Those people know exactly how much effort they are putting into the submissions. They have a really good idea as to how their algorithm is doing. They have at least a fair idea as to the number of competitors. In fact, if you raise a barrier to entry, you're more likely to get inefficient outcomes. Human beings are largely risk-adverse in their decision making. In order for them to compete at all, they must feel that they are getting something out of the competition. Start charging to enter (even small amounts), and competitors that would do well won't enter. They'll go on to regular jobs where the pay isn't anywhere near a million dollars for success, but the risk of receiving nothing is pretty close to zero. The whole point of contests such as these are to let various people who think they have a good idea to test their ideas. If Netflix knew what was going to make for a good idea, they wouldn't have the contest. They'd put the good idea in code and let it play out.
Competitors value competition in and of itself, in a way that most employees don't value employment for itself. Employees value getting paid. Being employed is a means to that end.
Your brother is a producer and an engineer. No kidding he can't sell tshirts to fans. He isn't the musician. Musicians market to fans. Or they would, if the record label they signed with didn't agree to do that part for them. Your brother, as a recording engineer, markets himself to musicians, not fans. The fact that he can't make money from fans is entirely pointless. He isn't supposed to make money from fans. His work is done for the artists, and his pay should be negotiated with the artists. Artists can opt to either pay people like your brother for their specialty and expertise, or they learn to do it themselves. Or, they're cute girls, and they talk some recording geek into doing it.
If they're a new band, they can sacrifice and save to be able to afford a quality professional. They can find/develop their own sound engineers. They can become their own engineers. Pretty much the options that bands have always had. Only now its easier to do an adequate job with some software you can run on your home machine. Will it be Reznor level of quality? Well.. no. But new bands aren't likely to hit that mark, anyway. And it won't have anything to do with the recording engineer they choose, if you catch my meaning.
ESPN360 isn't free to the end user. The cost of the service is merely distributed to all the ISP's customers. Even if you couldn't care less about sports, you pay. If you want to go that route, you can start paying me for.. well.. nothing that you'd want, I'd imagine. But since you're not concerned with that sort of requirement for a business transaction, I'm okay with it too. We'll even bury it in the fees for your ISP. Or your property taxes. Or whatever. Something you already pay for, so that it'll be "free to you" too.
Well no. You'd tax property for sewer maintenance. Its difficult to use sewers without having a connection to them. So hotels would pay them, and the out of state residents staying in them would provide the revenues to service the tax liability.
You should be very careful about making an argument based on "paying fair shares" of tax burdens. Given that some states pay out to the federal government more than they receive in benefits is.. paying more than their fair share. I'm pretty sure that even in those states, there are counties which pay out more (to both state and federal levels) than they receive. Again..
If we are all paying our "fair share" of tax burdens that we create, we wouldn't need a system of taxation. Governments would be able to survive on fees alone, since we're all bearing our fair share of the tax burden. Not to mention that the laws passed in NC and RI have nothing to do with shifting burdens from those who bear it to those who deserve to bear it. The buyer need not be in NC or RI, yet these laws would impose those states' sales taxes on people who do not reside in, nor will be shipping to, those states just because the referrer is in those states.
If a brick and mortar presence is not of value to you, why do you operate one? Close up shop, run an online store and roll in the competitive advantage that such an option, according to you, enjoys. If it is of value, and you are enjoying both forms of revenue generation, what are you complaining about, again?
All of which is completely besides the point of my question and the post I was responding to.. drawing conclusions about the quality of medicine from the life expectancy numbers is pretty much like me making a claim that my LCD screen has better picture quality than yours because my model's mean time between failure is higher than yours.
I don't know what the japanese airports have, but all I had to do was drop my soft drink onto a scanner and pick it up a couple seconds later. I assume it was some sort of chemical sniffer. Although it could certainly just been a bit of security theatre. I don't know. Slightly difficult to ask, too, when one doesn't speak the language.
Walk through the security check point enjoying my drink, not being hassled, not throwing away a perfectly fine refreshment, not having to take my shoes off to be scanned. And the lines at Haneda for security/check-in.. far better than the ridiculous times at Newark.
Why would the life expectancy numbers tell you anything about the quality of any country's medicine?
If Americans are eating a lot of horrid, nutritionally speaking, foods (and we are) while measuring our exercise in number of times we walked to the fridge to get a beer, the life expectancy numbers in the US will suffer. And yet neither of those issues speak to the quality of medical care in the US.
Uh.. no. Including the ability to match difficulty to player ability dynamically is a beautiful thing. This.. is one step removed from that. Presenting a difficult challenge for highly skilled players will alienate everyone else. Presenting an easy challenge for players who are not, and are not interested in becoming, hardcore players will alienate lots of other players due to boredom. Not to mention that if I select expert difficulty for some games, I just wouldn't be able to complete the campaign. If I step it down to hard, the campaign is almost boring. Because, while I am more than skilled enough at most aspects of gameplay, some aspects are just beyond my reach. I'm okay with that. And if game publishers/developers are okay with me not playing their game because the difficulty doesn't match my ability, okay. Sometimes that means they don't get my money. Sometimes it means someone else picks up a used copy because I can't be bothered to keep it.
I'm not a Mets fan.. but a couple days ago, the Mets (second baseman?) dropped an easy pop fly from Alex Rodriguez. Think they would've won, too. Instead, the Yankees won. So.. popfly isn't a guaranteed out. Although the Cubs outfielder's two errors a few days ago was pretty special too.
Right.. because those are the only procedures in health care. Those are the only reasons you'd ever go visit an MD. Never any wasteful, trivial visits. Oh wait..
I'm not an actuary for health care provider, so I don't know if they have access to family histories, targeted life expectancies or any of that. So, I can't answer that question. Although knowing the answer would be useful. Since, I agree that at least some of the information from genetic testing can be replicated/approximated from other information sources. And if such information is already used, there is less risk to genetic testing because of it.
If you suspect that you currently have a condition, get tested. Different question than examining the probabilities of suffering from a condition in the future (especially with the variation in the results noted from the article as well as subjective language like 'low' 'moderate' or 'high' risk for a condition), based on genetics. Ideally, I'd like to know. But health care here certainly isn't ideal. I'm not certain I want to know, given the imperfect conditions, currently. Isn't ideal in your country either, it would seem. The imperfections are different, but present.
I am not in favor of nationalized health care because political solutions tend to be horribly crafted, at least here. And they also tend not to go away, even when they deteriorate and perform ever more poorly. I dislike the current state of health care in the US because it tends to be inefficient for many of the same reasons that nationalized health care isn't. When consumers don't bear the whole costs of their choices, they overconsume. And yet, as they overconsume, costs rise, calculations change and premiums rise. So what you don't pay directly to the care provider, you (more than) make up in periodic payments to your insurer. And that causes the consumer to think things like "I pay so much already, I may as well go consume even more health care".. it is a.. not optimal cycle. I can think of some alternative systems. But there are glaring issues with them, too, and I can't really figure out a good way to transition anyway. If I could, I'd make a case to someone somewhere. And I'd even forego paying taxes, so I, too, could be a cabinet member!
Uh.. they probably figure (and probably correctly, too) that people who own Blackberries, iPhones, G1s, and such transfer more data than those on regular handsets. Hence, "unlimited" data service on a handset, where entering a url with a numeric pad is a pain, get cheaper prices than phones that are designed and marketed for data use.
I know its tempting to think of hypotheticals such as your cancer sufferer. Unfortunately in the current climate, it isn't a choice between "hmm, I know I'm prone to x disease let me take y preventative action" and "let me blow off knowing anything about my genetics." If I look at it from the position of your example, testing won't do any good whatsoever. He already has the condition. I might wish to have the option to swap money for having this information in the past. Fantasies are nice, sometimes very nice, but they are by definition not reality.
The gp is being pragmatic, not idealistic. The question you must ask, given the current climate and behavior of the healthcare industry, would I want to know about my dna if that information is also likely to land in the hands of others. It is somewhat similar to playing the lottery, hitting the roulette tables, or dropping some coins into a slot machine. Gambling. Yes, you can learn something about yourself. But you do so at the risk of letting other people learn the same information. The healthcare industry can take two routes, basically, to pay for the cases that come up. A) Healthy people overpay to cover the costs of the sick people or B) the company can charge you more when you're healthy to cover the costs of when you're sick. In the absence of information as to the at-risk, A is the only viable option. Start digging up such information and B suddenly becomes possible.
Yes, I know those cases aren't spot on. But I'm not writing a detailed analysis of any particular industry here.
Its dangerous, certainly. But.. people unwilling to assume risk probably shouldn't be protesting, let alone fighting, against an oppressive government.
I think that, if your goal is the overthrow of a government, it is safe (I use that world in a relative fashion) to ignore that government's laws concerning radio usage. Also, I'd avoid a license if I was a radio operator for a rebellion. Maybe its just me, but I'd rather not have any information about me, whatsoever, that basically points me out as a rebel as soon as the government figures out that the rebellion is using such technology.
No, in fact, we don't need to calculate the cost of education into the cost of nuclear power. You could, certainly, but it wouldn't mean much of anything. You'd also have to go in and do the same for the engineers operating the wind turbine network. Since we're looking at big, pointless numbers why don't we throw in the cost of the design teams for both sides. And where do you stop this line of thought anyway? Include the cost of books? Housing? Food? We could get really recursive, including in the cost of educating the nuclear engineers the cost of educating the professors that educated them. Or the cost of educating the architechs that built the universities they were educated in. We don't need to know the costs of education because we pay the engineers. If the education really is burdensome, then the pay will be higher for those positions. If you counted both the salary and the education costs, you'd be double counting part of the costs.
Eh.. I'd rather just break one of the broadcast power meters that would have to be around. Less effort, probably, to break it than to build something to siphon off the power. Also, locator services not needed. The company knows where it is and has cause to send someone out to fix it. I'm a lazy survivalist.
Why do you care who another player is playing for? Unless that player's contributions to the pot are not honored when you win, what difference does it make where his money comes from? What difference does it make where the money you throw in the pot goes, if it isn't going to you after you lose?
If the dealer can be made to unfairly favor the house's agents, then you should care. But I'm fairly confident that such behavior would be discovered. I say this because players of video games have determined detailed formulas for damage, stat growth, encounter rates, and the like. And those people only had ego, wit, and a bit of recognition on the line. Poker players have all that and money on the line.
Uhh.. you can be justifiably afraid of something and still not panic. You can be not be a coward and still be afraid of something. That said, I'm not terribly afraid of terrorist attacks in the US. They don't happen with the frequency and devestation to spark fear. I am more.. concerned. I am also troubled by the security theatre being put on by US law enforcement.
When talking sums such as Microsoft on hand, and markets such as what we have currently.. Microsoft can get the best of both worlds. The cash they have on hand is invested and earning them interest income. The debt they are issuing is low interest. Lower than they are earning from their cash on hand. So, borrowing money leaves them the full amount of their cash on hand to earn for them, from which they can pay off the bonds and keep the difference.
So, for you, operating out of cash reserves may be the cheapest. For Microsoft, it probably isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah yes.. the gmail user didn't respond.. because nobody anywhere has a gmail account and fails to check it every hour. It couldn't possibly be that the account just wasn't checked at all hence no response. If you are going to assume malign intent on the part of the gmail user, there still isn't much cause for deactivating the account.
If you assume the user is going to do something criminal, and hence the lack of response, the financial information is in the wild and needs to be changed immediately. If it is possible, credit deposits targeted at the old numbers to the new accounts, but withdrawals only from the new account numbers. Deactivation doesn't solve anything, because POP/IMAP copies, forwards/bounces, or just a simple copy/paste has already put the information outside the account.
Assuming that the gmail user wouldn't do anything untoward with the information is dangerous, of course, but going after the gmail account is .. odd. It is an action that can only hurt an innocent user. It won't hinder the user if he isn't innocent. None of the affected account holders gain security. If their information is out, its out and needs to change. If it isn't out, they can't know it isn't and need to change.
I'm very aware that corporations are fictional people as far as the law is concerned. But to act as if the corporation is actually a person by comparing it to the behavior of individual people, facing non-corporate tax codes, is absurd. Because corporations aren't people. I can't slice off a finger and leave it in Alaska for tax purposes. Corporations can slice off a department and drop it in what ever state they please for tax purposes.
Well.. not only is working in one state, residing in another, and claiming taxes in your state of residence not "pretty blatantly illegal"* .. but you're treating a corporate entity like it was a person. Which it isn't.
There are none of Washington State's resources utilized in the production of licenses. None. How do I know? Because the license key is a number. The software package that makes the license valuable, well now, thats all done by employees in Washington state, in facilities in Washington (and elsewhere, I'd imagine), using equipment put in service and accounted for and depreciated under federal and Washington tax codes. For which, Microsoft pays taxes. Income, property, sales, fuel, whatever. So, while you may claim that the license revenue should be Washington state's tax jurisdiction, I'd be pretty careful about making such a claim. Yes, the license is pretty worthless without the software. But the software is pretty useless to the license holder without an install disk. Which, I can't be certain of, but probably isn't pressed, boxed, and wrapped in Washington. Also, the software works (mostly) without a legit license. So the license revenue is, logically, the cost of staying legit. Which, as I said, has nothing to do with any usage of Washington state resources. So how much of this lovely revenue should be taxable by which states again? See, when states start taxing a bunch of activities, self-interested entities shift those activities as best they can to eliminate tax burden.
Too bad, so sad, Washington. They want to tax an activity that is incredibly easy to relocate and difficult to apportion value to all the locales that support it.
*I'm aware that it isn't quite that simple. Nothing is, with the tax code.
I don't think you are talking about efficiency accurately. By your reasoning, every competitive activity, anywhere, should be done away with since the participants could have been of more value to society by doing any productive job. And yet, how much would you have to pay those people in order to do the janitorial work or burger flipping instead of whichever competitive activity they would choose to do voluntarily? That is the measure of the inefficiency of your argument.
Any time participants in any activity have real choices whether or not to participate, you cannot get inefficient outcomes. There are any number of activities where participants do not have real choices about whether or not to participate, and those activities tend to not have efficient outcomes. But people and teams who have been working for years, making submissions to Netflix, and getting visible feedback as to how they are progressing can certainly make efficient decisions. Those people know exactly how much effort they are putting into the submissions. They have a really good idea as to how their algorithm is doing. They have at least a fair idea as to the number of competitors. In fact, if you raise a barrier to entry, you're more likely to get inefficient outcomes. Human beings are largely risk-adverse in their decision making. In order for them to compete at all, they must feel that they are getting something out of the competition. Start charging to enter (even small amounts), and competitors that would do well won't enter. They'll go on to regular jobs where the pay isn't anywhere near a million dollars for success, but the risk of receiving nothing is pretty close to zero. The whole point of contests such as these are to let various people who think they have a good idea to test their ideas. If Netflix knew what was going to make for a good idea, they wouldn't have the contest. They'd put the good idea in code and let it play out.
Competitors value competition in and of itself, in a way that most employees don't value employment for itself. Employees value getting paid. Being employed is a means to that end.
Your brother is a producer and an engineer. No kidding he can't sell tshirts to fans. He isn't the musician. Musicians market to fans. Or they would, if the record label they signed with didn't agree to do that part for them. Your brother, as a recording engineer, markets himself to musicians, not fans. The fact that he can't make money from fans is entirely pointless. He isn't supposed to make money from fans. His work is done for the artists, and his pay should be negotiated with the artists. Artists can opt to either pay people like your brother for their specialty and expertise, or they learn to do it themselves. Or, they're cute girls, and they talk some recording geek into doing it.
If they're a new band, they can sacrifice and save to be able to afford a quality professional. They can find/develop their own sound engineers. They can become their own engineers. Pretty much the options that bands have always had. Only now its easier to do an adequate job with some software you can run on your home machine. Will it be Reznor level of quality? Well .. no. But new bands aren't likely to hit that mark, anyway. And it won't have anything to do with the recording engineer they choose, if you catch my meaning.
ESPN360 isn't free to the end user. The cost of the service is merely distributed to all the ISP's customers. Even if you couldn't care less about sports, you pay. If you want to go that route, you can start paying me for .. well .. nothing that you'd want, I'd imagine. But since you're not concerned with that sort of requirement for a business transaction, I'm okay with it too. We'll even bury it in the fees for your ISP. Or your property taxes. Or whatever. Something you already pay for, so that it'll be "free to you" too.
I find it odd that you believe that people would be equally powerful in this one fashion.
Well no. You'd tax property for sewer maintenance. Its difficult to use sewers without having a connection to them. So hotels would pay them, and the out of state residents staying in them would provide the revenues to service the tax liability.
You should be very careful about making an argument based on "paying fair shares" of tax burdens. Given that some states pay out to the federal government more than they receive in benefits is.. paying more than their fair share. I'm pretty sure that even in those states, there are counties which pay out more (to both state and federal levels) than they receive. Again..
If we are all paying our "fair share" of tax burdens that we create, we wouldn't need a system of taxation. Governments would be able to survive on fees alone, since we're all bearing our fair share of the tax burden. Not to mention that the laws passed in NC and RI have nothing to do with shifting burdens from those who bear it to those who deserve to bear it. The buyer need not be in NC or RI, yet these laws would impose those states' sales taxes on people who do not reside in, nor will be shipping to, those states just because the referrer is in those states.
If a brick and mortar presence is not of value to you, why do you operate one? Close up shop, run an online store and roll in the competitive advantage that such an option, according to you, enjoys. If it is of value, and you are enjoying both forms of revenue generation, what are you complaining about, again?
All of which is completely besides the point of my question and the post I was responding to.. drawing conclusions about the quality of medicine from the life expectancy numbers is pretty much like me making a claim that my LCD screen has better picture quality than yours because my model's mean time between failure is higher than yours.
I don't know what the japanese airports have, but all I had to do was drop my soft drink onto a scanner and pick it up a couple seconds later. I assume it was some sort of chemical sniffer. Although it could certainly just been a bit of security theatre. I don't know. Slightly difficult to ask, too, when one doesn't speak the language.
Walk through the security check point enjoying my drink, not being hassled, not throwing away a perfectly fine refreshment, not having to take my shoes off to be scanned. And the lines at Haneda for security/check-in.. far better than the ridiculous times at Newark.
Why would the life expectancy numbers tell you anything about the quality of any country's medicine?
If Americans are eating a lot of horrid, nutritionally speaking, foods (and we are) while measuring our exercise in number of times we walked to the fridge to get a beer, the life expectancy numbers in the US will suffer. And yet neither of those issues speak to the quality of medical care in the US.
Uh.. no. Including the ability to match difficulty to player ability dynamically is a beautiful thing. This.. is one step removed from that. Presenting a difficult challenge for highly skilled players will alienate everyone else. Presenting an easy challenge for players who are not, and are not interested in becoming, hardcore players will alienate lots of other players due to boredom. Not to mention that if I select expert difficulty for some games, I just wouldn't be able to complete the campaign. If I step it down to hard, the campaign is almost boring. Because, while I am more than skilled enough at most aspects of gameplay, some aspects are just beyond my reach. I'm okay with that. And if game publishers/developers are okay with me not playing their game because the difficulty doesn't match my ability, okay. Sometimes that means they don't get my money. Sometimes it means someone else picks up a used copy because I can't be bothered to keep it.
I'm not a Mets fan.. but a couple days ago, the Mets (second baseman?) dropped an easy pop fly from Alex Rodriguez. Think they would've won, too. Instead, the Yankees won. So.. popfly isn't a guaranteed out. Although the Cubs outfielder's two errors a few days ago was pretty special too.
Right.. because those are the only procedures in health care. Those are the only reasons you'd ever go visit an MD. Never any wasteful, trivial visits. Oh wait..
I'm not an actuary for health care provider, so I don't know if they have access to family histories, targeted life expectancies or any of that. So, I can't answer that question. Although knowing the answer would be useful. Since, I agree that at least some of the information from genetic testing can be replicated/approximated from other information sources. And if such information is already used, there is less risk to genetic testing because of it.
If you suspect that you currently have a condition, get tested. Different question than examining the probabilities of suffering from a condition in the future (especially with the variation in the results noted from the article as well as subjective language like 'low' 'moderate' or 'high' risk for a condition), based on genetics. Ideally, I'd like to know. But health care here certainly isn't ideal. I'm not certain I want to know, given the imperfect conditions, currently. Isn't ideal in your country either, it would seem. The imperfections are different, but present.
I am not in favor of nationalized health care because political solutions tend to be horribly crafted, at least here. And they also tend not to go away, even when they deteriorate and perform ever more poorly. I dislike the current state of health care in the US because it tends to be inefficient for many of the same reasons that nationalized health care isn't. When consumers don't bear the whole costs of their choices, they overconsume. And yet, as they overconsume, costs rise, calculations change and premiums rise. So what you don't pay directly to the care provider, you (more than) make up in periodic payments to your insurer. And that causes the consumer to think things like "I pay so much already, I may as well go consume even more health care" .. it is a .. not optimal cycle. I can think of some alternative systems. But there are glaring issues with them, too, and I can't really figure out a good way to transition anyway. If I could, I'd make a case to someone somewhere. And I'd even forego paying taxes, so I, too, could be a cabinet member!
Not for the Mets...
Uh.. they probably figure (and probably correctly, too) that people who own Blackberries, iPhones, G1s, and such transfer more data than those on regular handsets. Hence, "unlimited" data service on a handset, where entering a url with a numeric pad is a pain, get cheaper prices than phones that are designed and marketed for data use.
I know its tempting to think of hypotheticals such as your cancer sufferer. Unfortunately in the current climate, it isn't a choice between "hmm, I know I'm prone to x disease let me take y preventative action" and "let me blow off knowing anything about my genetics." If I look at it from the position of your example, testing won't do any good whatsoever. He already has the condition. I might wish to have the option to swap money for having this information in the past. Fantasies are nice, sometimes very nice, but they are by definition not reality.
The gp is being pragmatic, not idealistic. The question you must ask, given the current climate and behavior of the healthcare industry, would I want to know about my dna if that information is also likely to land in the hands of others. It is somewhat similar to playing the lottery, hitting the roulette tables, or dropping some coins into a slot machine. Gambling. Yes, you can learn something about yourself. But you do so at the risk of letting other people learn the same information. The healthcare industry can take two routes, basically, to pay for the cases that come up. A) Healthy people overpay to cover the costs of the sick people or B) the company can charge you more when you're healthy to cover the costs of when you're sick. In the absence of information as to the at-risk, A is the only viable option. Start digging up such information and B suddenly becomes possible.
Yes, I know those cases aren't spot on. But I'm not writing a detailed analysis of any particular industry here.
Its dangerous, certainly. But.. people unwilling to assume risk probably shouldn't be protesting, let alone fighting, against an oppressive government.
I think that, if your goal is the overthrow of a government, it is safe (I use that world in a relative fashion) to ignore that government's laws concerning radio usage. Also, I'd avoid a license if I was a radio operator for a rebellion. Maybe its just me, but I'd rather not have any information about me, whatsoever, that basically points me out as a rebel as soon as the government figures out that the rebellion is using such technology.
No, in fact, we don't need to calculate the cost of education into the cost of nuclear power. You could, certainly, but it wouldn't mean much of anything. You'd also have to go in and do the same for the engineers operating the wind turbine network. Since we're looking at big, pointless numbers why don't we throw in the cost of the design teams for both sides. And where do you stop this line of thought anyway? Include the cost of books? Housing? Food? We could get really recursive, including in the cost of educating the nuclear engineers the cost of educating the professors that educated them. Or the cost of educating the architechs that built the universities they were educated in. We don't need to know the costs of education because we pay the engineers. If the education really is burdensome, then the pay will be higher for those positions. If you counted both the salary and the education costs, you'd be double counting part of the costs.
Eh.. I'd rather just break one of the broadcast power meters that would have to be around. Less effort, probably, to break it than to build something to siphon off the power. Also, locator services not needed. The company knows where it is and has cause to send someone out to fix it. I'm a lazy survivalist.
Why do you care who another player is playing for? Unless that player's contributions to the pot are not honored when you win, what difference does it make where his money comes from? What difference does it make where the money you throw in the pot goes, if it isn't going to you after you lose?
If the dealer can be made to unfairly favor the house's agents, then you should care. But I'm fairly confident that such behavior would be discovered. I say this because players of video games have determined detailed formulas for damage, stat growth, encounter rates, and the like. And those people only had ego, wit, and a bit of recognition on the line. Poker players have all that and money on the line.
Uhh.. you can be justifiably afraid of something and still not panic. You can be not be a coward and still be afraid of something. That said, I'm not terribly afraid of terrorist attacks in the US. They don't happen with the frequency and devestation to spark fear. I am more.. concerned. I am also troubled by the security theatre being put on by US law enforcement.
When talking sums such as Microsoft on hand, and markets such as what we have currently.. Microsoft can get the best of both worlds. The cash they have on hand is invested and earning them interest income. The debt they are issuing is low interest. Lower than they are earning from their cash on hand. So, borrowing money leaves them the full amount of their cash on hand to earn for them, from which they can pay off the bonds and keep the difference.
So, for you, operating out of cash reserves may be the cheapest. For Microsoft, it probably isn't.