Makes sense, as long as you also reduce Medicare and Social Security taxes for smokers. They're puffing hard to use fewer of those benefits, so your principle of "charging people for the actual risk of insuring them" requires that they pay less for them.
I wouldn't have a problem with this, but I think it would be more symbolic than anything. The economic cost of smoking is currently slightly negative, but the social cost is probably fairly high. Smoking causes a lot of suffering in the family and friends of the smokers who need to watch them suffer. You can't really put a price tag on this, but I don't think smoking should be encouraged as a way to save society money. If so we would also encourage people to commit suicide once they stop paying taxes.
That said, I think it is quite possible for new advances in medical treatments to transform smoking related illnesses from cheap death sentences to really expensive procedures (e.g. growing new lungs for transplant from stem cells, etc). I think smoking's status as a net savings is temporary.
Yes but the government can refuse to pay contractors if they fail to live up to the terms of their contract. It's a lose lose scenario. The contractor wastes a bunch of time and doesn't paid enough to make a profit (if anything), and the government gets a shitty product they can't use and are forced to go with another contractor.
I'm not ok with unconditional job security for anyone. The job security of a particular job should be related to it's utility. If a job's only utility is that it helps mitigate the effects of flaws in the system, these jobs are (and should be) inherently insecure as it would seem that these flaws could (and should) be fixed. However, given the efficacy, intelligence, and motives of our politicians, and the apathy and intelligence of our voting public, I suspect lawyers and accounts have very secure jobs.
I am all for pareto optimizations, but I don;t consider forcing someone to get a job that is actually useful (i.e. not allowing them to remain in a useless job through subsidies etc, because it's what they are used to), to be "screwing them over". We already have a social safety net for these sorts of situations. If our social safety net is inadequate, then it should be improved, but we shouldn't enable people to be unproductive.
I would consider forcing someone to learn a new skill that is valuable in the world today (especially with safety net style assistance), to be not only empowering, but I think it is the best option. We seem to have a bunch of unemployed people and a bunch of jobs that are vacant because there are not enough qualified people to fill them.
Obamacare is a socialist policy. The idea of a government itself is a socialist institution. However, charging higher risk people higher taxes to pay for their healthcare is actually a step closer to free markets. It would be more socialist if they charged everyone the same price.
What does that have to do with socialism? That is a property of insurance in general. In fact, when these practices are absent, it is usually because of big government policies that prohibiting them.
Being a non-fan of big government solutions, I think charging people for the actual risk of insuring them is a step in the right direction, when it comes to risks that are a result of choices, because it can influence behavior.
When it comes to computer programmers, hiring the more experienced ones usually ends up being less expensive because they finish in less hours and the final product has lower upkeep and maintenance costs and fewer bugs that take 1 year to fix.
I don't see how Obamacare turns the IRS into any more of a law enforcement agency than it already was. There is a new tax (i.e. Obamacare) that the IRS is in charge of enforcing. Some people are exempt from this tax (i.e. the people who buy their own insurance) because they will not be using the services that are funded by this tax.
I don't know if you are a school voucher system supporter, but Obamacare basically works like that. It is mandated that everyone pay taxes to support schools. Under a voucher system you can decide which schools you go to and get the money.
Maybe you don't like taxes or the IRS. I know I don't. But I don't the reason for the outrage over Obamacare. Obamacare is one of the few taxes that actually has a decent chance of lowering other taxes. We already pay taxes for all the emergency room visits from people with no insurance. This will actually offset some of the costs onto the people that actually benefit.
I actually did not even support Obamacare. My outrage is that we had a chance for real healthcare reform and we blew it by keeping the insurance companies in a position to exploit the desperate. I would have preferred a system where individuals could simply visit a doctor of their choosing and the bill would be sent to the government. If the right limits were placed on the amount the government would pay out for various situations, this could preserve the free market by allowing people to find the lowest prices, which could help to keep medical costs down. People are much less likely to spend frivilously when it's their own money being spent.
I don't think you are wrong to be paranoid. I would only say that there is not a good reason to be more suspicious of democrats or the current administration.
1. Obama has not done anything to strengthen gun control, despite all the speculations form the right and to the dismay of the left.
2. Obama was the one who wanted to close gitmo, and it was the republicans who stopped him.
I sincerely hope you haven't been voting for any republicans if you want small government, freedom, and privacy.
I think the false sense of privacy is the real problem. We shouldn't be relying on the government to ignore the information it has access to. There is no privacy for things given to the government. We shouldn't have an expectation of privacy.
We should use private couriers who promise privacy for anything that needs to be private. And we should sue these companies when breaches of privacy come to light, as well as not financially supporting those couriers with bad track records with our business.
For private correspondence, we can use TOR and encryption to provide reasonable protection.
We have a lot of power when we aren't too lazy to care. We need to learn how to live in the 21st century, not try to legislate our way back to the 20th century.
It's not a disaster for me. I just click a few buttons to go to the desktop. It's a minor inconvenience.
It's a disaster for Microsoft. I'm sure they've lost millions of dollars over this minor mistake. They've got a ton of bad press, and a bunch of people buying windows 7 instead of windows 8 over it. Some people may have even been fired over this.
I am not a climate change denier, but science is not consensus. The reason to think the climate is changing is because of the evidence, not that most scientists believe it.
97% of scientists believing in global warming may be a compelling reason for a layperson who does not personally want to do any climate science to also believe it, but it is not a scientific reason to believe something.
For example, if I submitted a paper to nature claiming to prove climate change was real, and in the paper it said "I am 97% sure climate change is real and my evidence is that 07% of climate scientists believe it", it would be rejected (I hope). Why? Because that's not science. Science is the research those scientists are basing their opinion on. If you have not done any climate science yourself, or even know what the data is, then you have no business pretending to know anything, whether you are a believer of climate change or not.
I totally favor fixing things that aint broke. Sometimes people don't know things are broke until you show them a better way.
What I don't like is lack of options. I don;t even care if Metro is the default. I should be allowed to turn it off as an option. There is no reason to force me to use it if I don't like it. I don't think they should remove it either. I'm sure some people like it.
If windows 8 had the ability to turn off metro, it would be just like windows 7 with a few improvements, rather than a disaster.
That is a very broad definition of coercion. I am not saying it is a definition nobody uses, but it is one in which nearly everything can be considered coercion. It could include you're employer saying "Come to work on time or I will fire you". Whether the threat is justified does not affect it's coerciveness.
Even in the case of "Sleep with me or you're fired", being fired is not considered a life destroying phenomenon. It can be life destroying, but usually it takes more than firing someone to completely destroy their life. People get fired all the time. I've been fired twice. If you give someone a difficult choice, but it remains an actual choice rather than being so frightening as to cause people to make irrational decisions, then it is not what I would consider to be coercion.
If it is what you would call coercion, then I would at least try to have you acknowledge that there is a distinction between "Sleep with me or you're fired", and "sleep with me or I will slit your throat with this knife". In one of them you probably have much more freedom to make a rational decision. Maybe you decide to quit, or sleep with the guy to advance your career, or maybe you think reporting the incident is the best action. But you still get to decide things in a more free way than if there is a knife to your throat.
It's not necessarily made by coercion. If someone says, "Give me $1M or I will murder your children", then it is coercion. If someone says "Give me $1M or I will leak negative information about you", that is not coercion, especially if it is information that if leaked without the blackmail, would be legal. This kind of blackmail actually gives the person a choice (albeit not a very good one), where the alternative is no choice. The blackmailer is not forcing (i.e. coercing) the victim to give into the demands. It's not coercive, just manipulative.
In fact, in many cases, the winners in a incident of blackmail are both the blackmailer and blackmailee, and the losers are the general public. If someone discovers a politician is taking bribes, and blackmails him for money not to release the info, the blackmailer profits, the politician gets to keep his office, and the public is stuck with a douchebag politician.
Flipping out because of your privacy being violated is at least *something* like flipping out at the chance that you might die. You are flipping out because you feel threatened in both examples. One is a higher threat.
I am not claiming that they are the same magnitude. I am saying it's the same type of reaction at different levels. It's an analogy. It's supposed to be different in scale.
Bitcoin provides anonymity. Unfortunately like most computer security mechanisms, the weak link is the human being using them.
Even if this guy had the alleged information, and wasn't stupid enough to get caught, it makes no sense for Romney to pay him. If Romney paid the guy $1M in bitcoins, there is nothing stopping him from also selling the info to the democrats or a newspaper immediately afterwards for another $1M. It's not like you can sue the guy for breach of contract.
Cheap doesn't necessarily mean bad. I fully expect the price of education to drop dramatically in the next decade. You can watch lectures from MIT and Standford online for free. The internet is making it possible for more people to learn from the efforts of fewer teachers, similar to how farmers feed more people nowadays, which has lead to cheaper food.
I don't think educations will get much faster. They will get a little faster because of better teaching tools, but I don't think you can cram 4 years worth of information into much less than that any time soon. I guess you could cut out all general education requirements etc, but that technically is just learning less.
I think it will also become harder for employers to evaluate people's qualifications. It used to be that they could just rate people based on the quality of the university they graduated from. Now you might have some kid that watched a bunch of MIT youtube videos for free that knows just as much. They can stick to their old plan of only hiring real MIT graduates, but they would potentially be missing out on some great talent with such a crude strategy.
It is remotely the same. It is not exactly the same, because it's is an analogy. Yes people will freak out way more when a gun is pointed at them than when a camera is pointed at them, because the threat of harm is much higher.
My point was not that guns and cameras illicit the exact same behavior. My point was that someone actively pointing either of these at you will illicit more of a threat response than one that happens to be pointed at you. This is because there is more of an expectation of *intent* to harm when someone is actively pointing a camera/gun at you than when a camera/gun happens to be pointing at you.
With a CCTV there is an expectation that nobody is going to view or use the video unless something crazy happens (like a robbery). When someone is holding a camera and specifically recording you, there is an expectation of intent to view and use the video.
It's like the difference between walking passed the barrel of a gun in a gun store and having someone pointing an unloaded gun at you. They are both unloaded guns that, if they were loaded and fired, would hit you, but one is clearly lacking any intent while the other clearly has some kind of intent (whatever that may be).
I could go around pointing unloaded guns at people and say it's a social commentary on the irony of how people walk passed the barrels of guns all the time without caring, but they freak out when I point an unloaded gun at them.
I don't think it is irrational to feel more threatened by someone intentionally video taping you, than being recorded by a machine. Yes there can be people controlling the cameras and following people and watching them on CCTV, but that's like video taping people secretly. They don't freak out because they don't know they are being video taped.
Well let me phrase it a different way then. A COBOL app may work perfectly on particular hardware. If it turns out that this hardware is reaching end of life and it also turns out that it requires a great deal of effort to port this COBOL app to be compatible with newer hardware due to limitations of the initial design or limitations of the development environment, then I would say that this is a serious deficiency compared with modern alternatives.
I know all about this. I work at a company that is running an app on vxWorks (an old version) on PPC604 processors. We are already stuck porting software written in C to a new platform (linux x86) and it's already a giant pain. I can only imagine how much harder it would be if it were also written in an ancient language like COBOL.
At some point it makes sense to just bit the bullet and do a rewrite. Yes maintaining something can be cheaper than rewriting it, but you reach a point when you are spending more effort and money every year keeping obsolete hardware and software alive than it would cost to rewrite it.
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Makes sense, as long as you also reduce Medicare and Social Security taxes for smokers. They're puffing hard to use fewer of those benefits, so your principle of "charging people for the actual risk of insuring them" requires that they pay less for them.
I wouldn't have a problem with this, but I think it would be more symbolic than anything. The economic cost of smoking is currently slightly negative, but the social cost is probably fairly high. Smoking causes a lot of suffering in the family and friends of the smokers who need to watch them suffer. You can't really put a price tag on this, but I don't think smoking should be encouraged as a way to save society money. If so we would also encourage people to commit suicide once they stop paying taxes.
That said, I think it is quite possible for new advances in medical treatments to transform smoking related illnesses from cheap death sentences to really expensive procedures (e.g. growing new lungs for transplant from stem cells, etc). I think smoking's status as a net savings is temporary.
They should just trademark the letters of the alphabet, and therefore all combinations of those letter.
Iit would completely eliminate all confusion. Who owns this name? Well if it is made of letters, then Apple. Easy.
Yes but the government can refuse to pay contractors if they fail to live up to the terms of their contract. It's a lose lose scenario. The contractor wastes a bunch of time and doesn't paid enough to make a profit (if anything), and the government gets a shitty product they can't use and are forced to go with another contractor.
I'm not ok with unconditional job security for anyone. The job security of a particular job should be related to it's utility. If a job's only utility is that it helps mitigate the effects of flaws in the system, these jobs are (and should be) inherently insecure as it would seem that these flaws could (and should) be fixed. However, given the efficacy, intelligence, and motives of our politicians, and the apathy and intelligence of our voting public, I suspect lawyers and accounts have very secure jobs.
I am all for pareto optimizations, but I don;t consider forcing someone to get a job that is actually useful (i.e. not allowing them to remain in a useless job through subsidies etc, because it's what they are used to), to be "screwing them over". We already have a social safety net for these sorts of situations. If our social safety net is inadequate, then it should be improved, but we shouldn't enable people to be unproductive.
I would consider forcing someone to learn a new skill that is valuable in the world today (especially with safety net style assistance), to be not only empowering, but I think it is the best option. We seem to have a bunch of unemployed people and a bunch of jobs that are vacant because there are not enough qualified people to fill them.
Obamacare is a socialist policy. The idea of a government itself is a socialist institution. However, charging higher risk people higher taxes to pay for their healthcare is actually a step closer to free markets. It would be more socialist if they charged everyone the same price.
This could all change as soon as someone discovers a cure for COPD and lung cancer that costs $2 million to administer.
What does that have to do with socialism? That is a property of insurance in general. In fact, when these practices are absent, it is usually because of big government policies that prohibiting them.
Being a non-fan of big government solutions, I think charging people for the actual risk of insuring them is a step in the right direction, when it comes to risks that are a result of choices, because it can influence behavior.
When it comes to computer programmers, hiring the more experienced ones usually ends up being less expensive because they finish in less hours and the final product has lower upkeep and maintenance costs and fewer bugs that take 1 year to fix.
I don't see how Obamacare turns the IRS into any more of a law enforcement agency than it already was. There is a new tax (i.e. Obamacare) that the IRS is in charge of enforcing. Some people are exempt from this tax (i.e. the people who buy their own insurance) because they will not be using the services that are funded by this tax.
I don't know if you are a school voucher system supporter, but Obamacare basically works like that. It is mandated that everyone pay taxes to support schools. Under a voucher system you can decide which schools you go to and get the money.
Maybe you don't like taxes or the IRS. I know I don't. But I don't the reason for the outrage over Obamacare. Obamacare is one of the few taxes that actually has a decent chance of lowering other taxes. We already pay taxes for all the emergency room visits from people with no insurance. This will actually offset some of the costs onto the people that actually benefit.
I actually did not even support Obamacare. My outrage is that we had a chance for real healthcare reform and we blew it by keeping the insurance companies in a position to exploit the desperate. I would have preferred a system where individuals could simply visit a doctor of their choosing and the bill would be sent to the government. If the right limits were placed on the amount the government would pay out for various situations, this could preserve the free market by allowing people to find the lowest prices, which could help to keep medical costs down. People are much less likely to spend frivilously when it's their own money being spent.
1. Obama has not done anything to strengthen gun control, despite all the speculations form the right and to the dismay of the left.
2. Obama was the one who wanted to close gitmo, and it was the republicans who stopped him.
I sincerely hope you haven't been voting for any republicans if you want small government, freedom, and privacy.
I think the false sense of privacy is the real problem. We shouldn't be relying on the government to ignore the information it has access to. There is no privacy for things given to the government. We shouldn't have an expectation of privacy.
We should use private couriers who promise privacy for anything that needs to be private. And we should sue these companies when breaches of privacy come to light, as well as not financially supporting those couriers with bad track records with our business.
For private correspondence, we can use TOR and encryption to provide reasonable protection.
We have a lot of power when we aren't too lazy to care. We need to learn how to live in the 21st century, not try to legislate our way back to the 20th century.
It's not a disaster for me. I just click a few buttons to go to the desktop. It's a minor inconvenience. It's a disaster for Microsoft. I'm sure they've lost millions of dollars over this minor mistake. They've got a ton of bad press, and a bunch of people buying windows 7 instead of windows 8 over it. Some people may have even been fired over this.
I am not a climate change denier, but science is not consensus. The reason to think the climate is changing is because of the evidence, not that most scientists believe it.
97% of scientists believing in global warming may be a compelling reason for a layperson who does not personally want to do any climate science to also believe it, but it is not a scientific reason to believe something.
For example, if I submitted a paper to nature claiming to prove climate change was real, and in the paper it said "I am 97% sure climate change is real and my evidence is that 07% of climate scientists believe it", it would be rejected (I hope). Why? Because that's not science. Science is the research those scientists are basing their opinion on. If you have not done any climate science yourself, or even know what the data is, then you have no business pretending to know anything, whether you are a believer of climate change or not.
I totally favor fixing things that aint broke. Sometimes people don't know things are broke until you show them a better way.
What I don't like is lack of options. I don;t even care if Metro is the default. I should be allowed to turn it off as an option. There is no reason to force me to use it if I don't like it. I don't think they should remove it either. I'm sure some people like it.
If windows 8 had the ability to turn off metro, it would be just like windows 7 with a few improvements, rather than a disaster.
That is a very broad definition of coercion. I am not saying it is a definition nobody uses, but it is one in which nearly everything can be considered coercion. It could include you're employer saying "Come to work on time or I will fire you". Whether the threat is justified does not affect it's coerciveness.
Even in the case of "Sleep with me or you're fired", being fired is not considered a life destroying phenomenon. It can be life destroying, but usually it takes more than firing someone to completely destroy their life. People get fired all the time. I've been fired twice. If you give someone a difficult choice, but it remains an actual choice rather than being so frightening as to cause people to make irrational decisions, then it is not what I would consider to be coercion.
If it is what you would call coercion, then I would at least try to have you acknowledge that there is a distinction between "Sleep with me or you're fired", and "sleep with me or I will slit your throat with this knife". In one of them you probably have much more freedom to make a rational decision. Maybe you decide to quit, or sleep with the guy to advance your career, or maybe you think reporting the incident is the best action. But you still get to decide things in a more free way than if there is a knife to your throat.
It's not necessarily made by coercion. If someone says, "Give me $1M or I will murder your children", then it is coercion. If someone says "Give me $1M or I will leak negative information about you", that is not coercion, especially if it is information that if leaked without the blackmail, would be legal. This kind of blackmail actually gives the person a choice (albeit not a very good one), where the alternative is no choice. The blackmailer is not forcing (i.e. coercing) the victim to give into the demands. It's not coercive, just manipulative.
In fact, in many cases, the winners in a incident of blackmail are both the blackmailer and blackmailee, and the losers are the general public. If someone discovers a politician is taking bribes, and blackmails him for money not to release the info, the blackmailer profits, the politician gets to keep his office, and the public is stuck with a douchebag politician.
Well I see you've discovered how to be an asshole...
Flipping out because of your privacy being violated is at least *something* like flipping out at the chance that you might die. You are flipping out because you feel threatened in both examples. One is a higher threat.
I am not claiming that they are the same magnitude. I am saying it's the same type of reaction at different levels. It's an analogy. It's supposed to be different in scale.
Bitcoin provides anonymity. Unfortunately like most computer security mechanisms, the weak link is the human being using them.
Even if this guy had the alleged information, and wasn't stupid enough to get caught, it makes no sense for Romney to pay him. If Romney paid the guy $1M in bitcoins, there is nothing stopping him from also selling the info to the democrats or a newspaper immediately afterwards for another $1M. It's not like you can sue the guy for breach of contract.
Cheap doesn't necessarily mean bad. I fully expect the price of education to drop dramatically in the next decade. You can watch lectures from MIT and Standford online for free. The internet is making it possible for more people to learn from the efforts of fewer teachers, similar to how farmers feed more people nowadays, which has lead to cheaper food.
I don't think educations will get much faster. They will get a little faster because of better teaching tools, but I don't think you can cram 4 years worth of information into much less than that any time soon. I guess you could cut out all general education requirements etc, but that technically is just learning less.
I think it will also become harder for employers to evaluate people's qualifications. It used to be that they could just rate people based on the quality of the university they graduated from. Now you might have some kid that watched a bunch of MIT youtube videos for free that knows just as much. They can stick to their old plan of only hiring real MIT graduates, but they would potentially be missing out on some great talent with such a crude strategy.
It is remotely the same. It is not exactly the same, because it's is an analogy. Yes people will freak out way more when a gun is pointed at them than when a camera is pointed at them, because the threat of harm is much higher.
My point was not that guns and cameras illicit the exact same behavior. My point was that someone actively pointing either of these at you will illicit more of a threat response than one that happens to be pointed at you. This is because there is more of an expectation of *intent* to harm when someone is actively pointing a camera/gun at you than when a camera/gun happens to be pointing at you.
With a CCTV there is an expectation that nobody is going to view or use the video unless something crazy happens (like a robbery). When someone is holding a camera and specifically recording you, there is an expectation of intent to view and use the video.
It's like the difference between walking passed the barrel of a gun in a gun store and having someone pointing an unloaded gun at you. They are both unloaded guns that, if they were loaded and fired, would hit you, but one is clearly lacking any intent while the other clearly has some kind of intent (whatever that may be).
I could go around pointing unloaded guns at people and say it's a social commentary on the irony of how people walk passed the barrels of guns all the time without caring, but they freak out when I point an unloaded gun at them.
I don't think it is irrational to feel more threatened by someone intentionally video taping you, than being recorded by a machine. Yes there can be people controlling the cameras and following people and watching them on CCTV, but that's like video taping people secretly. They don't freak out because they don't know they are being video taped.
I am not sure cheap, fast, online diploma totally satisfies the "4-year diploma" qualification. I know it sure as hell doesn't at my company.
I am going to hack the shit out of him once I finish pwnzoring 127.0.0.1
Well let me phrase it a different way then. A COBOL app may work perfectly on particular hardware. If it turns out that this hardware is reaching end of life and it also turns out that it requires a great deal of effort to port this COBOL app to be compatible with newer hardware due to limitations of the initial design or limitations of the development environment, then I would say that this is a serious deficiency compared with modern alternatives.
I know all about this. I work at a company that is running an app on vxWorks (an old version) on PPC604 processors. We are already stuck porting software written in C to a new platform (linux x86) and it's already a giant pain. I can only imagine how much harder it would be if it were also written in an ancient language like COBOL.
At some point it makes sense to just bit the bullet and do a rewrite. Yes maintaining something can be cheaper than rewriting it, but you reach a point when you are spending more effort and money every year keeping obsolete hardware and software alive than it would cost to rewrite it.