Your "Logical and Reasonable"[1] principle ("no one should be forced to foot the bill for anyone else's treatment") is pretty much antithetical to the idea of insurance itself. If you believe we'd actually be better off in a world where every person's first economic priority was getting $100,000 in the bank to cover potentially catastrophic medical bills, then you're a fool. If you do accept the idea of insurance, then socialized medicine (or at least a socialized insurance system) makes perfect sense.
Medical care is a necessity for any sick person, and nobody knows for sure whether they'll get sick or not. Allowing people to opt out of health insurance raises premiums, because the healthiest people are less likely to obtain insurance. These are the low-cost customers who need to be participating to subsidize the high cost customers. At the same time, allowing corporations to refuse to insure pre-existing conditions (or refusing people with prior incidences) is guaranteed to be a disaster, because this means that life-threatening illnesses go untreated. Not only does this vastly increase human misery, suffering, pain, and death, but it also undermines the main point of insurance: to spread risk.
Let me put it another way: say that they invented a magic machine that could tell an insurer exactly how much risk you represented, and allowed insurers to charge the exact premium that would allow them to make a profit off you. Since you believe people should pay for their own treatments, and not anyone else's, this should be great for you. But at that point, everyone is basically shouldering their own risks. Since insurance is designed to spread risk around, there is no longer any point in having an insurance provider; people would do better just opening their own savings accounts. Oh, and those who didn't have the economic capacity to get enough money into that account would simply be allowed to die in the streets.
[1] If you choose a name like that, then utter inanities like these, you should expect some brutal mocking.
The term is called "moral hazard", and it's a problem that afflicts all insurance systems, not just nationalized medicine. By your own "Logic and Reason", auto insurers shouldn't provide broken window coverage, since it will tempt people to risk parking their cars in bad neighborhoods.
Another thing: the financial risks associated with an injury are far less compelling to most people than... I don't know... *getting your hand sliced open!* If you're willing to wander down a back alley where you might get stabbed, adding in the risk of hospital bills isn't going to change a person's mind. I sincerely doubt that "free" medical care would noticeably increase peoples' risky behavior, because even if the hospital stay is free, people pay dearly for their injuries.
Of course you're correct, but I don't think it adds to the debate as much as you think it does. Of course there are going to be trade-offs. Do we spend a billion dollars curing one person's life-threatening ailment, when it could otherwise be spent granting thousands of people years of additional life? That wouldn't make sense.
Further, few people actually value their lives infinitely. If you go up to most people and offer them a hypothetical procedure which would grant them a hundred years of healthy life, but requires the sacrifice of a hundred schoolkids, how many would take it?
So yes, we do ascribe finite value to our health. So what? That finite value is still very large in relation to the average person's earnings, to the point where it equals anything they are capable of paying (and often more). Health care providers are in the same enviable position as the oil industry: demand for their product is very inelastic, so they can charge a premium. People will simply cut back on everything else in their lives until they can afford little Suzie's cancer treatment.
Rationally, people should buy health insurance, even if the price is wildly inflated. But people aren't rational, and your plan is hopelessly naive because it assumes people will be. Individuals are notoriously bad at estimating the value of mitigating future risk. They tend to either assume that the future event will be worse than it actually would be (in which case they overpay) or believe that it can't possibly happen to them (in which case they're unwilling to pay). So we have this situation where the "peace of mind" being advertised by insurance providers on TV is just another product, jockeying for position against home ownership, cars, video rentals, sugary cereal, and advertisements for the latest generation of reality TV. Health insurance a fundamentally different product, and I believe socializing health care is the best way to deal with its fundamentally different nature.
Lastly, your glib advice about "mitigating risk" ignores the fact that health insurance providers cherry-pick the lowest-risk customers. If you get cancer, your insurer is going to look high and low for any excuse to deny you coverage (as aptly documented in Sicko), and once you've had cancer, no company is going to be willing to take you on as a customer. These people need to be taken care of as well, and the free market isn't getting it done.
People should not be allowed to go without coverage, regardless of their own personal conception of the risks and rewards of opting out. Insurers should be required to make a basic plan available to anybody who signs up, regardless of the risk a given customer represents. The government should step in and pay for the insurance of those who are deemed unable to afford it. Given those three constraints, I think the free market will do a fine job of providing a health care system that serves the needs of every American. Drop any of those, and we get the dysfunctional system we have today.
FairPlay is already hacked. I don't see how that would change if Apple started licensing it to other MP3 players. So it seems more likely that the refusal is all about customer lock-in.
So in your analogy, Alice is the movie studio, Bob is your television, and Jack is a guy who not only sits there, reading the message as Bob does, but also can hook Bob up to any device he likes to try and figure out the key Bob is using to crack the encryption.
In the end, what the media execs are doing is handing out millions upon millions of devices, each of which contains all the information needed to decrypt every single "secret message" that they're selling. A sufficiently technical and motivated person will find a way to extract the key. It only needs to happen once, and then all those millions of dollars spent developing the "bulletproof" DRM is for naught.
It will never work. You hand the ciphertext, the algorithm, and the keys to the same individual, millions of times over, you should have a window of a few weeks before bit-perfect copies of the message show up on the Tubes, and a window of a few hours for every message you send thereafter.
I'm getting some strange defensiveness from you. Your UID indicates that you can't be in solidarity with your fellow eleven-year olds. You would have had to join Slashdot when you were four. The writer doesn't seem to have intended to disparage the MMORPG'ing competence of any particular age group. It was more of a rumination on how identities and preconceptions can be totally demolished when you introduce voice into the mix.
If your primary goal is to accomplish in-game goals (levelin', killin', and pillagin') then nothing matters but the in-game skill of the people you're with. But if you're in Azeroth to relax, to hang out with friends, and who gives a rat if you never find the Vorpal Sword of Wenching, then maybe finding out you're hanging with a cussing eleventeener might present a problem for you.
I was questing earlier this week in a slightly too high-level area, and grouped with a very helpful orc who helped me fend off some mass gnollage. But the whole time he was offering polite but unsolicited advice about why my gear sucked, and how I could improve it, and how I needed to spend all the talent points I'd been hoarding. This seemed a bit immature to me; he couldn't imagine that my reasons for playing might be different from his. As soon as I'd collected my mushrooms, I thanked him and sprinted for the hills.
My point is, sometimes your enjoyment of the game depends heavily on your perception of the people you're playing with. Someone you might enjoy while texting might not give you the same satisfaction over voice. Nobody is trying to trash anybody else; it's just something to keep in mind.
Sorry, I have to disagree here. The "situations you encounter in a fantasy MMORPG" typically involve a great deal of teamwork, everyone working together and contributing their collective skills and natural strengths to achieve a common objective.
Simple. Treaties we sign with other nations (like the one that governs our participation in the U.N.) are passed by the Senate and signed by the President, just like any other legislation, and are every bit as much the law of the land as any other legislation. It was absolutely a violation of the U.N. charter to go to war in Iraq without the approval of the Security Council. Hence, by going to war in Iraq, we violated not only the "international law" that the Right so despises, but our own laws as well.
Why else do you think Bush had Colin Powell go to the U.N., publicly immolating his career and reputation? Because we wanted legitimacy for our war.
The fact that the Democrats were complicit in this lawbreaking (since they authorized the use of force, contravening our own treaties) troubles me greatly.
But the U.S. (and particularly the Right) thinks the U.N.'s function is to serve American interests, and only consider the U.N. legitimate when it's acting as a rubber stamp for the U.S. It's sadly ironic that one of our most frequently cited criticism of the Hussein regime was their refusal to bow to the obligations required of them under international law. We never have.
Show me the (recent) poll where Democrats have a worse approval rating than Republicans, much less President 28%.
Show me the poll that said a majority of Americans ever favored impeachment.
I'm willing to blame a lot on the talking head journalists (Glenn Greenwald's blog over at Salon.com makes some great arguments to that effect). But I have absolutely no confidence in your numbers.
I believe exactly the opposite. Simply standing by and letting demeaning, misogynistic comments go by merely lends credence to the idea that the comments are unexceptional and appropriate.
How were these women supposed to refute these stupidities to the potential employers who may or may not be aware of them? Am I expected to disclose all my Internet dust-ups to any potential employers, and offer compelling evidence that I was entirely in the right?
Or are they required to refute each and every accusation by potentially dozens of immature trolls, on a forum where they might have their accounts revoked at any time if the women behave as they like?
If they do nothing, these stupid forums will follow them for the rest of their careers. If they stand up for themselves inside the forum, they'll be drowned in a sea of trolling. Step back from all this condescending talk about "pretty little resumes", and recognize that the pubescent children on that forum were publishing lies about people that had the potential to materially harm their reputations. Libel laws are for exactly this sort of thing. The Internettiness of the communication doesn't affect that in any way. All it does is conceal the identity of the person that needs suing.
If I were to go around distributing flyers in your neighborhood and your employer, accusing you of all sorts of heinous things, no reasonable person would expect you to limit your response to either silence or printing your own leaflets. You'd be right to get a lawyer or three involved. I can't for the life of me why you wouldn't respect the womens' right to do the same, unless you honestly think that it's our manly right to say the sorts of things that were said about these women. Obviously, many of the guys on the forum think so.
It's a damned useful movie, because it takes aim at one the Right's most cherished myth, and opens fire: the myth that, whatever the drawbacks of the American system, we still have it better than anyone else in the world. Sure, we all know it's bad. If 'Sicko' was just about the badness of the American system, you're right, it would be an inexplicably pointless movie. But all the demonizing and bad-mouthing the Right dishes out about the evils of socialized medicine has managed to stall just about every useful reform that has come up.
This movie could help reframe the debate. Since Clinton's failed attempt at reform, the debate seems to have been "How can we fix the system without bringing on socialized medicine and dooming us all?" If Moore moves the debate to "What would happen if we adopted a system more similar to other countries?" then he's done the whole country a huge service.
Why "force people to get preventative care"? There are plenty of steps that could be taken far short of saying it's illegal to skip your yearly physical. For example, mandating that employers give people the time off that they need to obtain preventative care. How about making such care free? Or actually paying people for especially effective procedures?
If we got our heads on straight, and built a free, universal system that covered the basics (and especially preventative care), it would be a nice start.
As for "people make the choices they make," it's hardly that simple. Why do people buy diamond rings when they get engaged? Because of a concerted ad campaign by DeBeers early last century. Why have we been on such an SUV kick these last couple of decades? Because those were the cars American car companies could make the most money on, so that's what they kept insisting Americans really wanted. Why are Americans obese? Because businesses all up and down the food chain need to figure out how to "grow the market" for food. Everything reflects this, from larger portion sizes to incessant advertising for the tidal wave of junk/fast/crap food, to the overreliance on meat in our diets, to the weird and lucrative subsidies given to agriculture (legislation bought by industry lobbyists trying to improve their bottom lines).
Simply put, the market doesn't just reflect peoples' wants, it actively alters them. It twists the incentives around until we're doing what's best for the market, not the other way around. We need to fight back, to keep some reins on the free market so that it's a useful servant, not a dangerous master. If the free market can't convince people to get a yearly physical, why shouldn't government step in and pay people to get them? If the free market has us eating artery-clogging filth, why shouldn't they subsidize healthier food, limit junk food advertising, and force meat and dairy farms to pay the full costs of their activities? I don't see it as a battle between government power and the power of the people. I see it as a battle between the people and the corporations, with the government being the primary battleground.
That wouldn't be such a bad thing. Right now, if the wealthy are experiencing bad service in Canada, they can swing over the border and get the finest care their money can buy. If they're stuck with the same care they're happy to inflict on the poor, maybe they'll start working to make the system better.
When these women have to go head to head against several equally qualified (or even somewhat less qualified) candidates, these postings could really harm their chances. A potential employer who knew of them might recognize that it's completely unfair to judge them based on the posts, but their candidacy still has a lingering whiff of controversy. No need to go courting trouble, right? Just hire one of the other qualified, but less colorful candidates.
Judging the relative merits of a group of people isn't easy under the best circumstances. Saying that Candidate X only needs to be slightly more qualified than Candidate Y to overcome the negative pressure of some random Internet posts is naive. There is enough noise in the selection process that a well-meaning person can select and plausibly defend a wide variety of outcomes.
Personally, I don't feel threatened by the potential loss of my "civil right" to anonymously post lies about random individuals. If you do, you might want to spend some time thinking about why that's so.
Walking on eggshells? WTF? I wouldn't be afraid to work with any of these women.
Try this: If you find yourself in the position of working for a company which has just hired these women, here are the steps you can take to avoid a lawsuit:
1) Forget to start a thread on the internal company bulletin boards entitled "Stupid Bitch to join MegaDominationCorp."
There is no step two.
All these women have demonstrated is that there is a certain, very high threshold of career-ruining slander that they're not willing to take from racist, misogynist, juvenile fratboys. If these women have shown that they present a clear and present danger to your current corporate culture, then the sexual harassment suits are inevitable anyways.
More likely, your corporate culture isn't particularly bad, and you're simply choosing to see these women as litigation-happy harpies, rather than women with a legitimate grievance. I prefer to see them as the latter. If it weren't for the fact that they didn't know who to name in the suit, there would be nothing controversial about the lawsuit at all.
I think a lot would depend on what the software was intended to do. If it went through the board, figuring out which strings were online handles, and randomly selecting targets for abuse, it would be a whole different situation than if you'd preprogrammed it to attack and annoy a specific individual.
that comment doesn't bother me at all. because i am mature.
You know, I've been watching you for quite a while, and I'd be willing to apply a lot of adjectives to your online antics, some good, more bad. But "mature" and "secure" aren't remotely among them.
Little hint: following "that comment doesn't bother me at all" with a 500 word rant on why your opponent sucks... tends to undermine your assertion a bit.
That reasoning only works if you buy into the author's bogus thinking. You have to believe that the questions are all equally hard. If you've got a range of difficulties, and the test is designed for maximum sensitivity at about KC's level of knowledge, then it can distinguish very well indeed.
You also have to assume that the purpose of a given test is to strictly rank every single individual according to their relative knowledge. It isn't. It doesn't matter that the average six year old and the average fifteen year old would perform equally poorly on the MCAT, even though the fifteen year old knows vastly more than the six year old. The test performs its intended function: to identify the fact that neither is ready for medical school. Nor does it matter if all the "easily qualified" testers end up with the same score, even if there is a wide range in their actual understanding.
No, most well-designed tests are intended to discriminate between a fairly narrow range of performance, that range encompassing whatever the gatekeepers consider the cutoff for "hacking it" (whatever "it" may be).
So if KC and 1.1KC cannot be consistently distinguished by a multiple choice test, it's likely that both candidates are well outside the range that the designers consider important.
Anyhow, the difference between KC and 1.1KC isn't that big to begin with. If two peoples' knowledge bases are close enough that one has a good chance of beating the other just due to the noise introduced by guessing, then it's probably not all that important to distinguish between the two. Other factors like work ethic, creativity, and people skills are going to have a greater effect on the applicant's actual job performance.
The original author is railing against multiple-choice strawmen. Why you're getting caught up in his crusade is a mystery to me.
Sure he would. Since "freedom" means "freedom for businesses to make incredible sums of money", "software freedom" means "freedom for businesses to make money selling software."
Really, what other sort of freedom is worth pursuing?
I love Scrubs, too. But let's not go redesigning our medical qualifications system based on that one episode we saw that one time.:)
I can only suppose that there are times when doing nothing beats doing something. But you seem to be saying that, because such situations do occur, then it would be healthy to severely punish medical errors to the point where most doctors' first instinct is to do nothing, run another test, etc. Even though there may be times when that state of affairs would help certain patients, on the balance I think it would make medical care worse.
I remember once that the "series" questions on the math portion of the ACT (you know, the questions that went "1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16... what is the next number in the series?") were coming under fire because -- theoretically, anyhow -- there should be an infinite number of correct answers.
So, what you're basically saying is, take a well-designed course that unarguably gives 'A' grades for 'A' work and comprehension. Now add to that an impossible and meaningless assignment -- "draw a square circle. You have forty minutes." -- that is worth 50% of your final grade, on which everyone scores a zero. Suddenly, all the A students have become F students, with no changes to the effort put into the course or the knowledge derived from it.
You're basically asserting that, in such a situation, it is unfair, immoral, liberal, or whatever, to simply double everyone's course score and assign grades accordingly. That's not remotely reasonable.
It's hard enough to design course curricula and tests without forcing on teachers some bogus requirement about how you'll totally murder everyone's GPA if you write a harder final than you intended. Scaling allows for more flexibility and judgment by the teacher.
Unless the test is *on* statistics, the only fair thing is to describe the optimal guessing strategy to the class in advance (whatever that strategy may be).
Say you and another equal candidate were being tested on your knowledge of Victorian poetry. The teacher says "you're punished for guessing." You recognize that you're still better off guessing, so long as you can eliminate two of the answers. You'll very likely get a higher score than another person who knows just as much as you do, which undermines the validity of the test.
Slashdot Mirror
Your "Logical and Reasonable"[1] principle ("no one should be forced to foot the bill for anyone else's treatment") is pretty much antithetical to the idea of insurance itself. If you believe we'd actually be better off in a world where every person's first economic priority was getting $100,000 in the bank to cover potentially catastrophic medical bills, then you're a fool. If you do accept the idea of insurance, then socialized medicine (or at least a socialized insurance system) makes perfect sense.
Medical care is a necessity for any sick person, and nobody knows for sure whether they'll get sick or not. Allowing people to opt out of health insurance raises premiums, because the healthiest people are less likely to obtain insurance. These are the low-cost customers who need to be participating to subsidize the high cost customers. At the same time, allowing corporations to refuse to insure pre-existing conditions (or refusing people with prior incidences) is guaranteed to be a disaster, because this means that life-threatening illnesses go untreated. Not only does this vastly increase human misery, suffering, pain, and death, but it also undermines the main point of insurance: to spread risk.
Let me put it another way: say that they invented a magic machine that could tell an insurer exactly how much risk you represented, and allowed insurers to charge the exact premium that would allow them to make a profit off you. Since you believe people should pay for their own treatments, and not anyone else's, this should be great for you. But at that point, everyone is basically shouldering their own risks. Since insurance is designed to spread risk around, there is no longer any point in having an insurance provider; people would do better just opening their own savings accounts. Oh, and those who didn't have the economic capacity to get enough money into that account would simply be allowed to die in the streets.
[1] If you choose a name like that, then utter inanities like these, you should expect some brutal mocking.
The term is called "moral hazard", and it's a problem that afflicts all insurance systems, not just nationalized medicine. By your own "Logic and Reason", auto insurers shouldn't provide broken window coverage, since it will tempt people to risk parking their cars in bad neighborhoods.
Another thing: the financial risks associated with an injury are far less compelling to most people than... I don't know... *getting your hand sliced open!* If you're willing to wander down a back alley where you might get stabbed, adding in the risk of hospital bills isn't going to change a person's mind. I sincerely doubt that "free" medical care would noticeably increase peoples' risky behavior, because even if the hospital stay is free, people pay dearly for their injuries.
Of course you're correct, but I don't think it adds to the debate as much as you think it does. Of course there are going to be trade-offs. Do we spend a billion dollars curing one person's life-threatening ailment, when it could otherwise be spent granting thousands of people years of additional life? That wouldn't make sense.
Further, few people actually value their lives infinitely. If you go up to most people and offer them a hypothetical procedure which would grant them a hundred years of healthy life, but requires the sacrifice of a hundred schoolkids, how many would take it?
So yes, we do ascribe finite value to our health. So what? That finite value is still very large in relation to the average person's earnings, to the point where it equals anything they are capable of paying (and often more). Health care providers are in the same enviable position as the oil industry: demand for their product is very inelastic, so they can charge a premium. People will simply cut back on everything else in their lives until they can afford little Suzie's cancer treatment.
Rationally, people should buy health insurance, even if the price is wildly inflated. But people aren't rational, and your plan is hopelessly naive because it assumes people will be. Individuals are notoriously bad at estimating the value of mitigating future risk. They tend to either assume that the future event will be worse than it actually would be (in which case they overpay) or believe that it can't possibly happen to them (in which case they're unwilling to pay). So we have this situation where the "peace of mind" being advertised by insurance providers on TV is just another product, jockeying for position against home ownership, cars, video rentals, sugary cereal, and advertisements for the latest generation of reality TV. Health insurance a fundamentally different product, and I believe socializing health care is the best way to deal with its fundamentally different nature.
Lastly, your glib advice about "mitigating risk" ignores the fact that health insurance providers cherry-pick the lowest-risk customers. If you get cancer, your insurer is going to look high and low for any excuse to deny you coverage (as aptly documented in Sicko), and once you've had cancer, no company is going to be willing to take you on as a customer. These people need to be taken care of as well, and the free market isn't getting it done.
People should not be allowed to go without coverage, regardless of their own personal conception of the risks and rewards of opting out. Insurers should be required to make a basic plan available to anybody who signs up, regardless of the risk a given customer represents. The government should step in and pay for the insurance of those who are deemed unable to afford it. Given those three constraints, I think the free market will do a fine job of providing a health care system that serves the needs of every American. Drop any of those, and we get the dysfunctional system we have today.
FairPlay is already hacked. I don't see how that would change if Apple started licensing it to other MP3 players. So it seems more likely that the refusal is all about customer lock-in.
So in your analogy, Alice is the movie studio, Bob is your television, and Jack is a guy who not only sits there, reading the message as Bob does, but also can hook Bob up to any device he likes to try and figure out the key Bob is using to crack the encryption.
In the end, what the media execs are doing is handing out millions upon millions of devices, each of which contains all the information needed to decrypt every single "secret message" that they're selling. A sufficiently technical and motivated person will find a way to extract the key. It only needs to happen once, and then all those millions of dollars spent developing the "bulletproof" DRM is for naught.
It will never work. You hand the ciphertext, the algorithm, and the keys to the same individual, millions of times over, you should have a window of a few weeks before bit-perfect copies of the message show up on the Tubes, and a window of a few hours for every message you send thereafter.
I'm getting some strange defensiveness from you. Your UID indicates that you can't be in solidarity with your fellow eleven-year olds. You would have had to join Slashdot when you were four. The writer doesn't seem to have intended to disparage the MMORPG'ing competence of any particular age group. It was more of a rumination on how identities and preconceptions can be totally demolished when you introduce voice into the mix.
If your primary goal is to accomplish in-game goals (levelin', killin', and pillagin') then nothing matters but the in-game skill of the people you're with. But if you're in Azeroth to relax, to hang out with friends, and who gives a rat if you never find the Vorpal Sword of Wenching, then maybe finding out you're hanging with a cussing eleventeener might present a problem for you.
I was questing earlier this week in a slightly too high-level area, and grouped with a very helpful orc who helped me fend off some mass gnollage. But the whole time he was offering polite but unsolicited advice about why my gear sucked, and how I could improve it, and how I needed to spend all the talent points I'd been hoarding. This seemed a bit immature to me; he couldn't imagine that my reasons for playing might be different from his. As soon as I'd collected my mushrooms, I thanked him and sprinted for the hills.
My point is, sometimes your enjoyment of the game depends heavily on your perception of the people you're playing with. Someone you might enjoy while texting might not give you the same satisfaction over voice. Nobody is trying to trash anybody else; it's just something to keep in mind.
Simple. Treaties we sign with other nations (like the one that governs our participation in the U.N.) are passed by the Senate and signed by the President, just like any other legislation, and are every bit as much the law of the land as any other legislation. It was absolutely a violation of the U.N. charter to go to war in Iraq without the approval of the Security Council. Hence, by going to war in Iraq, we violated not only the "international law" that the Right so despises, but our own laws as well.
Why else do you think Bush had Colin Powell go to the U.N., publicly immolating his career and reputation? Because we wanted legitimacy for our war.
The fact that the Democrats were complicit in this lawbreaking (since they authorized the use of force, contravening our own treaties) troubles me greatly.
But the U.S. (and particularly the Right) thinks the U.N.'s function is to serve American interests, and only consider the U.N. legitimate when it's acting as a rubber stamp for the U.S. It's sadly ironic that one of our most frequently cited criticism of the Hussein regime was their refusal to bow to the obligations required of them under international law. We never have.
Where are your statistics coming from?
Show me the (recent) poll where Democrats have a worse approval rating than Republicans, much less President 28%.
Show me the poll that said a majority of Americans ever favored impeachment.
I'm willing to blame a lot on the talking head journalists (Glenn Greenwald's blog over at Salon.com makes some great arguments to that effect). But I have absolutely no confidence in your numbers.
I believe exactly the opposite. Simply standing by and letting demeaning, misogynistic comments go by merely lends credence to the idea that the comments are unexceptional and appropriate.
Well, you know what they say. Boys will be boys and all, har har.
How were these women supposed to refute these stupidities to the potential employers who may or may not be aware of them? Am I expected to disclose all my Internet dust-ups to any potential employers, and offer compelling evidence that I was entirely in the right?
Or are they required to refute each and every accusation by potentially dozens of immature trolls, on a forum where they might have their accounts revoked at any time if the women behave as they like?
If they do nothing, these stupid forums will follow them for the rest of their careers. If they stand up for themselves inside the forum, they'll be drowned in a sea of trolling. Step back from all this condescending talk about "pretty little resumes", and recognize that the pubescent children on that forum were publishing lies about people that had the potential to materially harm their reputations. Libel laws are for exactly this sort of thing. The Internettiness of the communication doesn't affect that in any way. All it does is conceal the identity of the person that needs suing.
If I were to go around distributing flyers in your neighborhood and your employer, accusing you of all sorts of heinous things, no reasonable person would expect you to limit your response to either silence or printing your own leaflets. You'd be right to get a lawyer or three involved. I can't for the life of me why you wouldn't respect the womens' right to do the same, unless you honestly think that it's our manly right to say the sorts of things that were said about these women. Obviously, many of the guys on the forum think so.
It's a damned useful movie, because it takes aim at one the Right's most cherished myth, and opens fire: the myth that, whatever the drawbacks of the American system, we still have it better than anyone else in the world. Sure, we all know it's bad. If 'Sicko' was just about the badness of the American system, you're right, it would be an inexplicably pointless movie. But all the demonizing and bad-mouthing the Right dishes out about the evils of socialized medicine has managed to stall just about every useful reform that has come up.
This movie could help reframe the debate. Since Clinton's failed attempt at reform, the debate seems to have been "How can we fix the system without bringing on socialized medicine and dooming us all?" If Moore moves the debate to "What would happen if we adopted a system more similar to other countries?" then he's done the whole country a huge service.
Why "force people to get preventative care"? There are plenty of steps that could be taken far short of saying it's illegal to skip your yearly physical. For example, mandating that employers give people the time off that they need to obtain preventative care. How about making such care free? Or actually paying people for especially effective procedures?
If we got our heads on straight, and built a free, universal system that covered the basics (and especially preventative care), it would be a nice start.
As for "people make the choices they make," it's hardly that simple. Why do people buy diamond rings when they get engaged? Because of a concerted ad campaign by DeBeers early last century. Why have we been on such an SUV kick these last couple of decades? Because those were the cars American car companies could make the most money on, so that's what they kept insisting Americans really wanted. Why are Americans obese? Because businesses all up and down the food chain need to figure out how to "grow the market" for food. Everything reflects this, from larger portion sizes to incessant advertising for the tidal wave of junk/fast/crap food, to the overreliance on meat in our diets, to the weird and lucrative subsidies given to agriculture (legislation bought by industry lobbyists trying to improve their bottom lines).
Simply put, the market doesn't just reflect peoples' wants, it actively alters them. It twists the incentives around until we're doing what's best for the market, not the other way around. We need to fight back, to keep some reins on the free market so that it's a useful servant, not a dangerous master. If the free market can't convince people to get a yearly physical, why shouldn't government step in and pay people to get them? If the free market has us eating artery-clogging filth, why shouldn't they subsidize healthier food, limit junk food advertising, and force meat and dairy farms to pay the full costs of their activities? I don't see it as a battle between government power and the power of the people. I see it as a battle between the people and the corporations, with the government being the primary battleground.
That wouldn't be such a bad thing. Right now, if the wealthy are experiencing bad service in Canada, they can swing over the border and get the finest care their money can buy. If they're stuck with the same care they're happy to inflict on the poor, maybe they'll start working to make the system better.
When these women have to go head to head against several equally qualified (or even somewhat less qualified) candidates, these postings could really harm their chances. A potential employer who knew of them might recognize that it's completely unfair to judge them based on the posts, but their candidacy still has a lingering whiff of controversy. No need to go courting trouble, right? Just hire one of the other qualified, but less colorful candidates.
Judging the relative merits of a group of people isn't easy under the best circumstances. Saying that Candidate X only needs to be slightly more qualified than Candidate Y to overcome the negative pressure of some random Internet posts is naive. There is enough noise in the selection process that a well-meaning person can select and plausibly defend a wide variety of outcomes.
Personally, I don't feel threatened by the potential loss of my "civil right" to anonymously post lies about random individuals. If you do, you might want to spend some time thinking about why that's so.
Walking on eggshells? WTF? I wouldn't be afraid to work with any of these women.
Try this: If you find yourself in the position of working for a company which has just hired these women, here are the steps you can take to avoid a lawsuit:
1) Forget to start a thread on the internal company bulletin boards entitled "Stupid Bitch to join MegaDominationCorp."
There is no step two.
All these women have demonstrated is that there is a certain, very high threshold of career-ruining slander that they're not willing to take from racist, misogynist, juvenile fratboys. If these women have shown that they present a clear and present danger to your current corporate culture, then the sexual harassment suits are inevitable anyways.
More likely, your corporate culture isn't particularly bad, and you're simply choosing to see these women as litigation-happy harpies, rather than women with a legitimate grievance. I prefer to see them as the latter. If it weren't for the fact that they didn't know who to name in the suit, there would be nothing controversial about the lawsuit at all.
I think a lot would depend on what the software was intended to do. If it went through the board, figuring out which strings were online handles, and randomly selecting targets for abuse, it would be a whole different situation than if you'd preprogrammed it to attack and annoy a specific individual.
Little hint: following "that comment doesn't bother me at all" with a 500 word rant on why your opponent sucks... tends to undermine your assertion a bit.
That reasoning only works if you buy into the author's bogus thinking. You have to believe that the questions are all equally hard. If you've got a range of difficulties, and the test is designed for maximum sensitivity at about KC's level of knowledge, then it can distinguish very well indeed.
You also have to assume that the purpose of a given test is to strictly rank every single individual according to their relative knowledge. It isn't. It doesn't matter that the average six year old and the average fifteen year old would perform equally poorly on the MCAT, even though the fifteen year old knows vastly more than the six year old. The test performs its intended function: to identify the fact that neither is ready for medical school. Nor does it matter if all the "easily qualified" testers end up with the same score, even if there is a wide range in their actual understanding.
No, most well-designed tests are intended to discriminate between a fairly narrow range of performance, that range encompassing whatever the gatekeepers consider the cutoff for "hacking it" (whatever "it" may be).
So if KC and 1.1KC cannot be consistently distinguished by a multiple choice test, it's likely that both candidates are well outside the range that the designers consider important.
Anyhow, the difference between KC and 1.1KC isn't that big to begin with. If two peoples' knowledge bases are close enough that one has a good chance of beating the other just due to the noise introduced by guessing, then it's probably not all that important to distinguish between the two. Other factors like work ethic, creativity, and people skills are going to have a greater effect on the applicant's actual job performance.
The original author is railing against multiple-choice strawmen. Why you're getting caught up in his crusade is a mystery to me.
Sure he would. Since "freedom" means "freedom for businesses to make incredible sums of money", "software freedom" means "freedom for businesses to make money selling software."
Really, what other sort of freedom is worth pursuing?
I love Scrubs, too. But let's not go redesigning our medical qualifications system based on that one episode we saw that one time. :)
I can only suppose that there are times when doing nothing beats doing something. But you seem to be saying that, because such situations do occur, then it would be healthy to severely punish medical errors to the point where most doctors' first instinct is to do nothing, run another test, etc. Even though there may be times when that state of affairs would help certain patients, on the balance I think it would make medical care worse.
I remember once that the "series" questions on the math portion of the ACT (you know, the questions that went "1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16... what is the next number in the series?") were coming under fire because -- theoretically, anyhow -- there should be an infinite number of correct answers.
So, what you're basically saying is, take a well-designed course that unarguably gives 'A' grades for 'A' work and comprehension. Now add to that an impossible and meaningless assignment -- "draw a square circle. You have forty minutes." -- that is worth 50% of your final grade, on which everyone scores a zero. Suddenly, all the A students have become F students, with no changes to the effort put into the course or the knowledge derived from it.
You're basically asserting that, in such a situation, it is unfair, immoral, liberal, or whatever, to simply double everyone's course score and assign grades accordingly. That's not remotely reasonable.
It's hard enough to design course curricula and tests without forcing on teachers some bogus requirement about how you'll totally murder everyone's GPA if you write a harder final than you intended. Scaling allows for more flexibility and judgment by the teacher.
Unless the test is *on* statistics, the only fair thing is to describe the optimal guessing strategy to the class in advance (whatever that strategy may be).
Say you and another equal candidate were being tested on your knowledge of Victorian poetry. The teacher says "you're punished for guessing." You recognize that you're still better off guessing, so long as you can eliminate two of the answers. You'll very likely get a higher score than another person who knows just as much as you do, which undermines the validity of the test.