I don't think charging extra or penalizing annoying players will ever work--it's too easy to game that into an offensive weapon--and I do think manipulation of any new system should be expected as an eventuality. But that's no different from any other rules of the game.
The fundamental idea, to crowdsource who is a 'fun' player from other players and then give them discounts or incentives sounds great. (voice chat?) Good crowdsourcing models are out there, but the real trick is to figure out ways to enable true 'fun' players to to spread their influence that don't cut both ways. It does no good if it can be readily manipulated to empower and enable bad behavior.
Starting with the goal of making the game free to play for the most 'fun' players seems like a reasonable thing. Maybe WoW could not charge your next monthly fee if everybody thought you were among the awesomest 1% of users. Some would game the system, but bad in-game behavior would not be directly magnified, and users who are good influences would get public support.
We already have drones that take no fuel and never leave the sky. That's a satellite. By tracking missiles with radar and using a satellite based or local-to-that-continent weapons system to shoot them down, we get the same benefit as constantly buzzing drones without the need to pay for drones hovering around scouting. To use this type of system, all we need is to keep our eyes open using our best imaging tools (radar) and then get the imaging to talk to anti-missile weapons. Then we can use lasers, KE penetrators, or whatever else, pick your favorite tech. Or the cheapest one to put into space.
On a related note, ever wonder why North Korea rarely has successful missile tests?
There is no system like what you're asking for. You do your due diligence (maybe as simple as googling keywords) and call it good. Hopefully you're right. If anyone has a patent, they are the ones that have to find you and contact and/or sue you.
In the end it doesn't matter. If you make too much money and get noticed by the wrong folks, you can end up in court. It wouldn't matter if the patent bringing suit played a direct role in your invention, was a legitimate 'it was my innovative new idea before you had it' patent that you missed, or it was a pure troll patent optimized for legal battles. If you are brought to fight in court, you already lost time and money. And even if you flagrantly trespass a patent on purpose for gain, if nobody notices, you probably won't see any consequences.
That is just a small part of why the patent law system is broken. Not that I have a better answer.
So let me get this straight, the judge sees that the DCMA doesn't fix this grievance, so he decides to add a fundamentally new requirement to the law and enforce it?
The judge is right to point out the DCMA doesn't address the (perhaps legitimate) grievances brought to the court. That's exactly why the website should have won the case with no strings attached--from the sound of it, they comply with the requirements of the law. A judge has no more authority to 'fix' bad legislation than I do.
The prosecuting party should be trying to push congress to action, not judges. I hope the SCOTUS picks it up and throws the case out to make the point.
I hate occasions when both the new 'international' (read identical but guaranteed metric units) paperback and many used copies of the most recent edition of a textbook are available for ~$20 on amazon, but the electronic copy is priced at $60+, just under the new US hardcover price.
I'd prefer the electronic version, but not at 2-3 times the price and with zero resale value!
Seems to me the very best way to avoid doing that is to restrict the military to securing one's own border (and only one's own border) against unprovoked foreign attacks. Then you could also reduce expenditures until we're only 2-3 times more powerful than the second strongest military.
That's also why I would never make it in politics.
Agreed in concept. Today US aircraft fly the world's most advanced air weapons systems against no threat, so it's easy to argue US military power exceeds the needs of the nation. But that factor of 2-3 times is where the question comes in for everyone. The rapid and unexpected growth of the German war machine in the 1940s makes a very strong historical example to support the argument that 2-3 times is not sufficient. The boundary conditions of what worst case scenario to base the analysis on and what contribution from allies to assume makes for solid arguments that would support a very wide range of numbers.
The other side of the story is that the US military's R&D spurs and creates technological innovation in private industry, which adds to global wealth. Military R&D goals are different from market or academic goals, so it often will ask and fund very different research questions from academic and market channels. The research is done by firms that fully intend to make profit-producing products out of the research results, so a small percentage of the technology trickles down into major advances in commercial goods.
It's not the best way to do it, but this is very politically safe funding for basic research. It produces real fruits too. GPS is one, and the most important is probably ARPANET, a legitimate parent of the internet. I would hazard a guess that the work and funding from DARPA accelerated the development of the modern internet by ~10 years. Earlier development of the internet had huge positive implications on the genuine wealth of our world--not just the wealth of the US, and it came directly from military spending.
If the general category "military spending" were cut and we wanted those external benefits to not die with it, the US would need to simultaneously fund politically vulnerable organizations such as NASA and the National Labs to offset for the losses in research. They are very technically effective, but NASA's money could go on the political chopping block at any election cycle and not recover for decades--just where it is now--whereas defense funded research is politically secure.
Apparently, despite all of the people who are injured in road accidents, left over land mines, general mishaps that befall the population etc, the key to moving technology forward is to have 30 or 40 000 soldiers injured.
Compare that to workers comp and lawsuits from 30k-40k injuries at work in US private industry.
This has a much lower cost to the military and has a great external benefit to society. I don't think these soldiers are making out like bandits here, and I'm glad we'll have the technology for those few injured in road accidents and general mishaps.
Land mines aren't common on US soil, and it will take decades of improvement before these types of technologies can be extended to the many countries with those problems. And perhaps they need it the most; I don't know. But it must happen first somewhere, and this type of technology won't be developed by an impoverished nation that lacks advanced engineering skills.
That is true, the US model does a miserable job of giving preventative care. And that extends to the insured as well. Right now our society undervalues it. I agree with you completely on that. I suspect part of the issue is due to questions surrounding the limits of legal liability and how to pay for the self-inflicted cases of type II diabetes, which unfortunately are common in the US.
US medicine has huge issues IMO. We have very skilled medical staff and excellent technology. We have an awful payment model overall with insurance being the big player, and insurance is a big issue itself. We also make our doctors have a very high personal liability that effectively requires them to order testing and procedures to cover legal requirements, even if they are not needed. This can easily double the cost of an ER visit. As you mention, inequality of preventative care is an issue. Immediate care is always expected and is available for those with an emergency or with insurance; this is often not needed and increases the costs of the system. Palliative care... there are a lot of issues.
I think the government based systems and the US share one huge issue though. In general, a third party besides the patient and (a responsible) doctor decides what care gets paid for. In the US it's the insurance company or the criteria of 'emergency' unless you're filthy rich. In most other countries with government health care, the government makes or made that decision.
And I would have a reasonable amount of trust in the government in Finland to make that decision correctly, but I would not in the US--meaning the exact same model will not translate to our society. I think that's why the US is so slow to fix the issue--our government is rather poor at managing systems (typically very high overhead cost and low productivity relative to the private sector), and so far our society has preferred to accept the evils of the private sector and legislation rather than trust our government to fix it all.
The biggest weakness I see with the European systems though is that the funding for care and for research is the public's money, so it is hard to justify high spending to develop new technologies or to offer premium salaries. Our US system, which is really lousy in many many ways, shapes the market to reward skill and technological developments with lots of money, so many of the great advances can be financed by heavy venture capital. Thus a huge chunk of the US's GDP is spent in an attempt to catalyze innovation and improvements in the field of medicine. I always wonder how much the socialized systems benefit from the increase in innovation tied to the lucrative US market.
And he's abso-fucking-lutely right. Most EU countries (probably all) have universal healthcare, and apart from egregious exceptions like the UK, higher education is free or very close to free.
Compare that to the USA, where *millions* of children don't have healthcare coverage. All that charity doesn't amount to a hill of beans if you have children living without healthcare. You're just a fucking 3rd world country.
You obviously have no idea how it really works in the US.
If you need healthcare in the US, you go and get it. You get care that day, no waiting. Your doctor is damn good. You get a bill in the mail. If you're broke, you get the bill and don't pay it. Worst case, you end up declaring bankruptcy with your health restored. The hospital itself then eats the cost and raises their rates for everyone else by a percentage necessary to keep their profit target at whatever percent it is. Costs of doing business get passed on to the customer.
My buddy works in the surgery department and has a number of repeat customers that are gang members and meth addicts. The guy gets shot up or tries to kill himself and fails, then ends up in the hospital. $20k later, they've got him put back together. He's broke, so he doesn't pay a cent because he couldn't even if he wanted to. Six months later he has another bad day and repeats the story. The hospital fixes him again. I know a guy who was broke, had no insurance, got hurt, and had a $15k procedure. He sold his assets to a close friend for next to nothing, declared bankruptcy, moved, and started over with the stuff from his friend. Honestly, the move was the only real change for him.
Many that are truly in need get care and can't pay for it, and I agree with your idea--emergent care would be well worth the money of our society. But the idea that health care is not available to someone in an emergency is completely incorrect. The hospital pays for it and gives the care right away, and they try to recover some or all of their cost after the fact.
I don't think it's welfare. I think it's a class issue, and I say that in the way meant in the journalistic style book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell: some of the American lower socio-economic classes have a culture that actively (and perhaps unintentionally) discourages a move to a white collar (or better) lifestyle through traditional career paths. Dave Chappelle does skits on that topic--suggesting some subsets of black culture are averse to getting an advanced degree. I saw a lot of that growing up in the south.
That's something America does poorly, and I hope we can figure out how to resolve it in the coming decades. And our system is admittedly part of the problem. But welfare isn't the issue--it's a culture flaw. The opportunities are there, but some classes simply will not take them because of cultural barriers.
This seems to have some loose analogues to the Women's Rights movements.
I think it's entirely possible to have the "profit motive" (sacred words in the Cult of the Free Market) and not be completely fucking unethical. SEE: damn near every industrialized nation in Europe. Like, Idunno, maybe Germany where they don't treat their workers or citizens like shit. Unsurprisingly, they have one of the strongest economies in the world.
I agree that it's entirely possible. But I disagree with the follow on--Europe doesn't do it better--Europe simply does things differently because each country has a different set of goals, costs, and benefits shaped to the collective wills of their population and leaders. Most of the European countries foster systems with, relative to the US, less direct financial incentive/reward and less of the ugly that comes with it. A better distribution of wealth at a small expense to the total wealth (and in some cases innovation) produced with the nation's resources.
I know the statistics, and I feel some of them are misleading. I live in America and lived for several years in Finland. I learned the language exceptionally well for a foreigner, meaning I was fluent on a few subjects and proficient on most. (From my accent most Finns mistook me for a Swedish Finn rather than an American.) I say this to show that I was immersed in the culture rather than a passerby. The Scandinavian cultures are often viewed as halo cultures in these discussions. Finnish culture is a great culture, but it's not perfect, and I personally like America better. Some Finns do too; most still have a sour taste in their mouth from Bush's foreign policies. My old coworker moved to Norway because thought he would like it better, and power to him. I think he's enjoying it. My father who recently returned from an extended tour in Germany shares many of my own sentiments (with the word Germany in place of Finland).
European countries genuinely do some things much better than the US. And the US does other things much better. It's a set of trade-offs made by societies and its leaders rather than a simple issue of right or wrong.
If you honestly feel Europe does it better, I would recommend considering taking an overseas job and living there for a while. (Do learn the language if at all possible.) Either you'll enjoy it and happily stay there or you'll come back a broader person with a more diverse experience set. I would say that's a win-win.
America doesn't have any more greedy people than any other nation. The problem is that American socioeconomic arrangement discourages altruism and rewards greed - or at least the balance between the two is tilted towards greed more than in most other developed countries. Greedy people tend to be more successful, and hence both more visible and more influential, shaping the corporate culture you observe.
Unfortunately, it's also rare in that it can also reward effort commensurately. Often it won't, but you only have to make a few bright people very productive to bump the GNP way up.
My wife graduated top of her class in med school. After finishing her BS, so far she's been doing 60-110 hour weeks for 7 years. She'll finish just over a decade of that before she's free to practice. If the pay was under $100k/yr after all her effort, she would have quit a few years ago, cut her losses, and done interior design--low pay but she'd also find it fun and low stress. She loves medicine and her career, but it's just too much work to not have some kind of extra incentive.
Genuine business entrepeneurs often are required to make a similar sacrifice, but with a much higher risk of being broke at the end of the day, hence the ridiculously high earning potential. A 26 year old worth $30 million told me how he and his buddy finished their MS degrees in CS and wandered around for a year doing research, then worked another year or two at 80 hours a week before making a nickel. They had a great model, and it paid off big in the end. It's about 5 years later now. Many, many, many more fail, but his contribution produced many steady jobs and other economic benefits that are very real.
Were the financial incentive missing and nothing there to replace it, American society would lose many bright minds from some of its most economically productive workforces. We'd probably also get rid of 10 times as many greedy turds who ride the best and brightest. So the hard question is whether or not it's worth it. Americans seem to think so, and we have big SUVs and large new homes to show for it. Go Team.
There is a big challenge with implementing this approach for white collar knowledge work though. Sometimes my boss has no clue what I do all day for a week at a stretch, and often she has no idea what of it is hard and what of it is easy. Often the easy stuff is viewed as hard and vice versa.
It generally evens out right now, so I just get my work done and everybody goes home happy. It's really pretty task and company contract based, and the 40 hour week establishes a baseline level of production. If it's too much to get done on time, I tell my boss and she finds somebody else to help. If the boss gives me easy tasks for a stretch, at first I relax for a bit, then I get bored and start to find other tasks. Most of the time, there's some ebb and flow and I roll with things. And what's easy, hard, fun, and frustrating for me is different from many equally qualified (on paper) employees. That's what the boss needs to understand in detail, because that's where productivity can really be gained.
If they were to get genuinely task-based and do so fairly, my boss would have to really understand my tasks in detail. And that would be a problematic expectation--frequently, explicitly defining the task and a process to resolve it is more than half of the work and really requires the expertise that the company pays me to offer.
This isn't only a benefit at the ground level either. In the global warfare type scenarios, just having this capability would be worth a great deal.
If a first world enemy were to fight the US, taking out our satellites would be a very reasonable thing to do. Any systems that depend on satcom would be handicapped until we could get the systems restored, and while the really critical systems would have workarounds set up, many of the lower priority systems would lose some capability.
If the US demonstrates a backup satellite network is available anytime and at a (relative) low cost, that reduces the incentive to develop anti-satellite capability and reduces the risk of losing them. And honestly, putting something reasonably heavy into orbit for $500k sounds cheap to me.
Rather than holding on for dear life, they could try giving the guy an unsolicited big raise when he's worth more money. Then he wouldn't be inclined to jump ship.
Actually, an MBA and a JD are ways to get a lot more money... MBA+BS or MS in engineering --> PM (i.e. engineer's boss) with options to go up the VP train towards CTO. JD+BS in engineering --> patent lawyer, and they make a lot of money.
Problem is, both of those jobs sound boring to me. So I stick with Aerospace.
We have Pygmies today across Africa. They've endured a lot of human rights issues over the years, and theories are out suggesting Iodine deficiencies are related to their short stature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmies
Why do we see papers about recent human evolutionary theory only when it pertains to extinct peoples? Are the currently living pygmies less studied simply because anthropologists aren't interested in living people, and nobody else is into these fields of science?
"For me, some copyright violations are ethical and most aren't. My ethics probably also disagree with the law on finer details of what constitutes Fair Use. In general I try to follow the law though.
Ethics and Laws are fundamentally different though. Law simply implies somebody with authority made a rule for others to follow. Ethics implies a value judgment and will vary somewhat from person to person. The ethics here aren't a simple black and white case of right or wrong. If it were, our discussions on the topic would be short. But right or wrong, it's illegal to violate copyright, so long as the copyright laws are applicable to you. And that's the issue to both those who support and those who are against copyright as it stands today. Legal is not the same as Ethical and Illegal is not the same as Unethical unless the world is ideal.
For me, some copyright violations are ethical and most aren't. My ethics probably also disagree with the law on finer details of what constitutes Fair Use. In general I try to follow the though.
Ethics and Laws are fundamentally different though. Law simply implies somebody with authority made a rule for others to follow. Ethics implies a value judgment and will vary somewhat from person to person. The ethics here aren't a simple black and white case of right or wrong. If it were, our discussions on the topic would be short. But right or wrong, it's illegal to violate copyright, so long as the copyright laws are applicable to you. And that's the issue to both those who support and those who are against copyright as it stands today. Legal Ethical and Illegal Unethical unless the world is ideal.
Others said torrents throw in a few sprinkles of fake IP addresses. They should throw in a lot more! Maybe when we have a few more grannies 'downloading' The Hangover 3 and Eminem people will start to realize this IP address thing is garbage. I only hope the government isn't too dumb to figure out this list is worthless.
Their website says my home IP address downloaded two files I've never heard of:
Mobb Deep Black Cocaine - EP (45.02 MB)
30 Minutes or Less.2011.7... p.BRRip.Xvid.AC3-SiNiSTER (2.08 GB)
Mobb Deep Black Cocaine? Lol. I'm a fricking skinny white guy. I'd much rather listen to Pink Floyd or Foo Fighters than some heavy rap. But I just bought the CDs instead of downloading them. Maybe I'm actually funding the real root problem by giving the **IAA groups my money.
Slashdot Mirror
Bug bounty: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/
Granted it's external rather than internal pay for a bug, but at $20k a piece, it wouldn't take a sleazy employee like ratbert long to figure out...
I don't think charging extra or penalizing annoying players will ever work--it's too easy to game that into an offensive weapon--and I do think manipulation of any new system should be expected as an eventuality. But that's no different from any other rules of the game.
The fundamental idea, to crowdsource who is a 'fun' player from other players and then give them discounts or incentives sounds great. (voice chat?) Good crowdsourcing models are out there, but the real trick is to figure out ways to enable true 'fun' players to to spread their influence that don't cut both ways. It does no good if it can be readily manipulated to empower and enable bad behavior.
Starting with the goal of making the game free to play for the most 'fun' players seems like a reasonable thing. Maybe WoW could not charge your next monthly fee if everybody thought you were among the awesomest 1% of users. Some would game the system, but bad in-game behavior would not be directly magnified, and users who are good influences would get public support.
We already have drones that take no fuel and never leave the sky. That's a satellite. By tracking missiles with radar and using a satellite based or local-to-that-continent weapons system to shoot them down, we get the same benefit as constantly buzzing drones without the need to pay for drones hovering around scouting. To use this type of system, all we need is to keep our eyes open using our best imaging tools (radar) and then get the imaging to talk to anti-missile weapons. Then we can use lasers, KE penetrators, or whatever else, pick your favorite tech. Or the cheapest one to put into space.
On a related note, ever wonder why North Korea rarely has successful missile tests?
There is no system like what you're asking for. You do your due diligence (maybe as simple as googling keywords) and call it good. Hopefully you're right. If anyone has a patent, they are the ones that have to find you and contact and/or sue you.
In the end it doesn't matter. If you make too much money and get noticed by the wrong folks, you can end up in court. It wouldn't matter if the patent bringing suit played a direct role in your invention, was a legitimate 'it was my innovative new idea before you had it' patent that you missed, or it was a pure troll patent optimized for legal battles. If you are brought to fight in court, you already lost time and money. And even if you flagrantly trespass a patent on purpose for gain, if nobody notices, you probably won't see any consequences.
That is just a small part of why the patent law system is broken. Not that I have a better answer.
So let me get this straight, in the near future, the US government will pay people to play Unreal or derivative games?
WTF was I thinking getting a degree and a job? I should have stayed at home playing Xbox!
Lol you can tell what line of work I'm in! Yep, DMCA, ty.
So let me get this straight, the judge sees that the DCMA doesn't fix this grievance, so he decides to add a fundamentally new requirement to the law and enforce it?
The judge is right to point out the DCMA doesn't address the (perhaps legitimate) grievances brought to the court. That's exactly why the website should have won the case with no strings attached--from the sound of it, they comply with the requirements of the law. A judge has no more authority to 'fix' bad legislation than I do.
The prosecuting party should be trying to push congress to action, not judges. I hope the SCOTUS picks it up and throws the case out to make the point.
I hate occasions when both the new 'international' (read identical but guaranteed metric units) paperback and many used copies of the most recent edition of a textbook are available for ~$20 on amazon, but the electronic copy is priced at $60+, just under the new US hardcover price.
I'd prefer the electronic version, but not at 2-3 times the price and with zero resale value!
Seems to me the very best way to avoid doing that is to restrict the military to securing one's own border (and only one's own border) against unprovoked foreign attacks. Then you could also reduce expenditures until we're only 2-3 times more powerful than the second strongest military.
That's also why I would never make it in politics.
Agreed in concept. Today US aircraft fly the world's most advanced air weapons systems against no threat, so it's easy to argue US military power exceeds the needs of the nation. But that factor of 2-3 times is where the question comes in for everyone. The rapid and unexpected growth of the German war machine in the 1940s makes a very strong historical example to support the argument that 2-3 times is not sufficient. The boundary conditions of what worst case scenario to base the analysis on and what contribution from allies to assume makes for solid arguments that would support a very wide range of numbers.
The other side of the story is that the US military's R&D spurs and creates technological innovation in private industry, which adds to global wealth. Military R&D goals are different from market or academic goals, so it often will ask and fund very different research questions from academic and market channels. The research is done by firms that fully intend to make profit-producing products out of the research results, so a small percentage of the technology trickles down into major advances in commercial goods.
It's not the best way to do it, but this is very politically safe funding for basic research. It produces real fruits too. GPS is one, and the most important is probably ARPANET, a legitimate parent of the internet. I would hazard a guess that the work and funding from DARPA accelerated the development of the modern internet by ~10 years. Earlier development of the internet had huge positive implications on the genuine wealth of our world--not just the wealth of the US, and it came directly from military spending.
If the general category "military spending" were cut and we wanted those external benefits to not die with it, the US would need to simultaneously fund politically vulnerable organizations such as NASA and the National Labs to offset for the losses in research. They are very technically effective, but NASA's money could go on the political chopping block at any election cycle and not recover for decades--just where it is now--whereas defense funded research is politically secure.
Apparently, despite all of the people who are injured in road accidents, left over land mines, general mishaps that befall the population etc, the key to moving technology forward is to have 30 or 40 000 soldiers injured.
Compare that to workers comp and lawsuits from 30k-40k injuries at work in US private industry.
This has a much lower cost to the military and has a great external benefit to society. I don't think these soldiers are making out like bandits here, and I'm glad we'll have the technology for those few injured in road accidents and general mishaps.
Land mines aren't common on US soil, and it will take decades of improvement before these types of technologies can be extended to the many countries with those problems. And perhaps they need it the most; I don't know. But it must happen first somewhere, and this type of technology won't be developed by an impoverished nation that lacks advanced engineering skills.
I didn't read the article.
This is Slashdot--nobody does, so no need to state the obvious.
You have more faith than I do then! :)
My father did is career in the military, so military health care is the government health care I've become the most familiar with.
Admittedly it's not what the US is capable of. Perhaps my perspective is biased and needs to be refreshed.
That is true, the US model does a miserable job of giving preventative care. And that extends to the insured as well. Right now our society undervalues it. I agree with you completely on that. I suspect part of the issue is due to questions surrounding the limits of legal liability and how to pay for the self-inflicted cases of type II diabetes, which unfortunately are common in the US.
US medicine has huge issues IMO. We have very skilled medical staff and excellent technology. We have an awful payment model overall with insurance being the big player, and insurance is a big issue itself. We also make our doctors have a very high personal liability that effectively requires them to order testing and procedures to cover legal requirements, even if they are not needed. This can easily double the cost of an ER visit. As you mention, inequality of preventative care is an issue. Immediate care is always expected and is available for those with an emergency or with insurance; this is often not needed and increases the costs of the system. Palliative care... there are a lot of issues.
I think the government based systems and the US share one huge issue though. In general, a third party besides the patient and (a responsible) doctor decides what care gets paid for. In the US it's the insurance company or the criteria of 'emergency' unless you're filthy rich. In most other countries with government health care, the government makes or made that decision.
And I would have a reasonable amount of trust in the government in Finland to make that decision correctly, but I would not in the US--meaning the exact same model will not translate to our society. I think that's why the US is so slow to fix the issue--our government is rather poor at managing systems (typically very high overhead cost and low productivity relative to the private sector), and so far our society has preferred to accept the evils of the private sector and legislation rather than trust our government to fix it all.
The biggest weakness I see with the European systems though is that the funding for care and for research is the public's money, so it is hard to justify high spending to develop new technologies or to offer premium salaries. Our US system, which is really lousy in many many ways, shapes the market to reward skill and technological developments with lots of money, so many of the great advances can be financed by heavy venture capital. Thus a huge chunk of the US's GDP is spent in an attempt to catalyze innovation and improvements in the field of medicine. I always wonder how much the socialized systems benefit from the increase in innovation tied to the lucrative US market.
And he's abso-fucking-lutely right. Most EU countries (probably all) have universal healthcare, and apart from egregious exceptions like the UK, higher education is free or very close to free.
Compare that to the USA, where *millions* of children don't have healthcare coverage. All that charity doesn't amount to a hill of beans if you have children living without healthcare. You're just a fucking 3rd world country.
You obviously have no idea how it really works in the US.
If you need healthcare in the US, you go and get it. You get care that day, no waiting. Your doctor is damn good. You get a bill in the mail. If you're broke, you get the bill and don't pay it. Worst case, you end up declaring bankruptcy with your health restored. The hospital itself then eats the cost and raises their rates for everyone else by a percentage necessary to keep their profit target at whatever percent it is. Costs of doing business get passed on to the customer.
My buddy works in the surgery department and has a number of repeat customers that are gang members and meth addicts. The guy gets shot up or tries to kill himself and fails, then ends up in the hospital. $20k later, they've got him put back together. He's broke, so he doesn't pay a cent because he couldn't even if he wanted to. Six months later he has another bad day and repeats the story. The hospital fixes him again. I know a guy who was broke, had no insurance, got hurt, and had a $15k procedure. He sold his assets to a close friend for next to nothing, declared bankruptcy, moved, and started over with the stuff from his friend. Honestly, the move was the only real change for him.
Many that are truly in need get care and can't pay for it, and I agree with your idea--emergent care would be well worth the money of our society. But the idea that health care is not available to someone in an emergency is completely incorrect. The hospital pays for it and gives the care right away, and they try to recover some or all of their cost after the fact.
I don't think it's welfare. I think it's a class issue, and I say that in the way meant in the journalistic style book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell: some of the American lower socio-economic classes have a culture that actively (and perhaps unintentionally) discourages a move to a white collar (or better) lifestyle through traditional career paths. Dave Chappelle does skits on that topic--suggesting some subsets of black culture are averse to getting an advanced degree. I saw a lot of that growing up in the south.
That's something America does poorly, and I hope we can figure out how to resolve it in the coming decades. And our system is admittedly part of the problem. But welfare isn't the issue--it's a culture flaw. The opportunities are there, but some classes simply will not take them because of cultural barriers.
This seems to have some loose analogues to the Women's Rights movements.
I think it's entirely possible to have the "profit motive" (sacred words in the Cult of the Free Market) and not be completely fucking unethical. SEE: damn near every industrialized nation in Europe. Like, Idunno, maybe Germany where they don't treat their workers or citizens like shit. Unsurprisingly, they have one of the strongest economies in the world.
I agree that it's entirely possible. But I disagree with the follow on--Europe doesn't do it better--Europe simply does things differently because each country has a different set of goals, costs, and benefits shaped to the collective wills of their population and leaders. Most of the European countries foster systems with, relative to the US, less direct financial incentive/reward and less of the ugly that comes with it. A better distribution of wealth at a small expense to the total wealth (and in some cases innovation) produced with the nation's resources.
I know the statistics, and I feel some of them are misleading. I live in America and lived for several years in Finland. I learned the language exceptionally well for a foreigner, meaning I was fluent on a few subjects and proficient on most. (From my accent most Finns mistook me for a Swedish Finn rather than an American.) I say this to show that I was immersed in the culture rather than a passerby. The Scandinavian cultures are often viewed as halo cultures in these discussions. Finnish culture is a great culture, but it's not perfect, and I personally like America better. Some Finns do too; most still have a sour taste in their mouth from Bush's foreign policies. My old coworker moved to Norway because thought he would like it better, and power to him. I think he's enjoying it. My father who recently returned from an extended tour in Germany shares many of my own sentiments (with the word Germany in place of Finland).
European countries genuinely do some things much better than the US. And the US does other things much better. It's a set of trade-offs made by societies and its leaders rather than a simple issue of right or wrong.
If you honestly feel Europe does it better, I would recommend considering taking an overseas job and living there for a while. (Do learn the language if at all possible.) Either you'll enjoy it and happily stay there or you'll come back a broader person with a more diverse experience set. I would say that's a win-win.
America doesn't have any more greedy people than any other nation. The problem is that American socioeconomic arrangement discourages altruism and rewards greed - or at least the balance between the two is tilted towards greed more than in most other developed countries. Greedy people tend to be more successful, and hence both more visible and more influential, shaping the corporate culture you observe.
Unfortunately, it's also rare in that it can also reward effort commensurately. Often it won't, but you only have to make a few bright people very productive to bump the GNP way up.
My wife graduated top of her class in med school. After finishing her BS, so far she's been doing 60-110 hour weeks for 7 years. She'll finish just over a decade of that before she's free to practice. If the pay was under $100k/yr after all her effort, she would have quit a few years ago, cut her losses, and done interior design--low pay but she'd also find it fun and low stress. She loves medicine and her career, but it's just too much work to not have some kind of extra incentive.
Genuine business entrepeneurs often are required to make a similar sacrifice, but with a much higher risk of being broke at the end of the day, hence the ridiculously high earning potential. A 26 year old worth $30 million told me how he and his buddy finished their MS degrees in CS and wandered around for a year doing research, then worked another year or two at 80 hours a week before making a nickel. They had a great model, and it paid off big in the end. It's about 5 years later now. Many, many, many more fail, but his contribution produced many steady jobs and other economic benefits that are very real.
Were the financial incentive missing and nothing there to replace it, American society would lose many bright minds from some of its most economically productive workforces. We'd probably also get rid of 10 times as many greedy turds who ride the best and brightest. So the hard question is whether or not it's worth it. Americans seem to think so, and we have big SUVs and large new homes to show for it. Go Team.
There is a big challenge with implementing this approach for white collar knowledge work though. Sometimes my boss has no clue what I do all day for a week at a stretch, and often she has no idea what of it is hard and what of it is easy. Often the easy stuff is viewed as hard and vice versa.
It generally evens out right now, so I just get my work done and everybody goes home happy. It's really pretty task and company contract based, and the 40 hour week establishes a baseline level of production. If it's too much to get done on time, I tell my boss and she finds somebody else to help. If the boss gives me easy tasks for a stretch, at first I relax for a bit, then I get bored and start to find other tasks. Most of the time, there's some ebb and flow and I roll with things. And what's easy, hard, fun, and frustrating for me is different from many equally qualified (on paper) employees. That's what the boss needs to understand in detail, because that's where productivity can really be gained.
If they were to get genuinely task-based and do so fairly, my boss would have to really understand my tasks in detail. And that would be a problematic expectation--frequently, explicitly defining the task and a process to resolve it is more than half of the work and really requires the expertise that the company pays me to offer.
This isn't only a benefit at the ground level either. In the global warfare type scenarios, just having this capability would be worth a great deal.
If a first world enemy were to fight the US, taking out our satellites would be a very reasonable thing to do. Any systems that depend on satcom would be handicapped until we could get the systems restored, and while the really critical systems would have workarounds set up, many of the lower priority systems would lose some capability.
If the US demonstrates a backup satellite network is available anytime and at a (relative) low cost, that reduces the incentive to develop anti-satellite capability and reduces the risk of losing them. And honestly, putting something reasonably heavy into orbit for $500k sounds cheap to me.
Rather than holding on for dear life, they could try giving the guy an unsolicited big raise when he's worth more money. Then he wouldn't be inclined to jump ship.
Actually, an MBA and a JD are ways to get a lot more money...
MBA+BS or MS in engineering --> PM (i.e. engineer's boss) with options to go up the VP train towards CTO.
JD+BS in engineering --> patent lawyer, and they make a lot of money.
Problem is, both of those jobs sound boring to me. So I stick with Aerospace.
We have Pygmies today across Africa. They've endured a lot of human rights issues over the years, and theories are out suggesting Iodine deficiencies are related to their short stature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmies
Why do we see papers about recent human evolutionary theory only when it pertains to extinct peoples? Are the currently living pygmies less studied simply because anthropologists aren't interested in living people, and nobody else is into these fields of science?
Wow /. No unicode??
"For me, some copyright violations are ethical and most aren't. My ethics probably also disagree with the law on finer details of what constitutes Fair Use. In general I try to follow the law though.
Ethics and Laws are fundamentally different though. Law simply implies somebody with authority made a rule for others to follow. Ethics implies a value judgment and will vary somewhat from person to person. The ethics here aren't a simple black and white case of right or wrong. If it were, our discussions on the topic would be short. But right or wrong, it's illegal to violate copyright, so long as the copyright laws are applicable to you. And that's the issue to both those who support and those who are against copyright as it stands today. Legal is not the same as Ethical and Illegal is not the same as Unethical unless the world is ideal.
For me, some copyright violations are ethical and most aren't. My ethics probably also disagree with the law on finer details of what constitutes Fair Use. In general I try to follow the though.
Ethics and Laws are fundamentally different though. Law simply implies somebody with authority made a rule for others to follow. Ethics implies a value judgment and will vary somewhat from person to person. The ethics here aren't a simple black and white case of right or wrong. If it were, our discussions on the topic would be short. But right or wrong, it's illegal to violate copyright, so long as the copyright laws are applicable to you. And that's the issue to both those who support and those who are against copyright as it stands today. Legal Ethical and Illegal Unethical unless the world is ideal.
Others said torrents throw in a few sprinkles of fake IP addresses. They should throw in a lot more! Maybe when we have a few more grannies 'downloading' The Hangover 3 and Eminem people will start to realize this IP address thing is garbage. I only hope the government isn't too dumb to figure out this list is worthless.
Their website says my home IP address downloaded two files I've never heard of: ... p.BRRip.Xvid.AC3-SiNiSTER (2.08 GB)
Mobb Deep Black Cocaine - EP (45.02 MB)
30 Minutes or Less.2011.7
Mobb Deep Black Cocaine? Lol. I'm a fricking skinny white guy. I'd much rather listen to Pink Floyd or Foo Fighters than some heavy rap. But I just bought the CDs instead of downloading them. Maybe I'm actually funding the real root problem by giving the **IAA groups my money.