that's 21 million people who are now able to get insurance who couldn't before
They could always have gotten Medicaid, after spending down their personal assets. Instead, they now get to keep their assets that they accumulated in part from not paying into a private insurance and now have their health care needs subsidized by everybody else. And because cost controls are ineffective and unpopular, they now have a large buffet of expensive medical tests and treatments to choose from.
That's a pretty dramatic positive benefit.
Sure, if you're the recipient of the forced subsidies from people who actually have paid insurance their entire lives. It's a great deal for them. It just sucks for everybody else.
Well, I'd love to drop things like huge subsidies for large businesses that result in them being in a better position to charge higher prices, but apparently the Republicans aren't ready to consider that.:)
The Democrats are at least as much at fault for that as Republicans: financial bailouts, car bailouts, mortgage support, agricultural subsidies, Obamacare, alternative energy funding, etc. Those are all subsidies for big businesses that distort the market, stifle innovation, and create monopolies and inefficiencies.
It's the job of an intelligent citizen to figure out which is which, not to cynically demonize government and shut it all down.
First of all, it's not about "government", it's about the federal government only.
Furthermore, it's not an all-or-nothing proposition with us, we'd just like the federal government to go back to the size it was decades ago and stick to those areas that are constitutionally mandated and allowed for it, instead of trying to run and determine everything for everybody.
You are not old enough to remember a time when you could go to a local government-funded university, like City College or U California, and get a college education basically free, without going $40,000 into debt.
Yes, and now you can't because California has been squandering its money left and right, and then started squandering federal funds.
Furthermore, I don't see why $40000 in debt is a big deal; if your university education doesn't yield ten times that in return, you really shouldn't be attending university in the first place.
What it's actually about is thinking you've got a God-given right to run a 'democracy' when your political philosophy is that "The proper role of government is to help the rich get richer faster than they would without it".
The proper role of government is to stay out of the business of deciding who gets rich and who stays poor. The proper role of government is to ensure that everybody has the same liberties, and people can't take each other's property or kill each other, nothing more.
"Non-essential" in this context means closing services that are intended to create a sense of panic and urgency with voters, without actually threatening the ability of government to intrude into your life.
By the way, the accompanying paper does claim that you can produce some visual response even beyond 700nm. I find those claims dubious at best given what we know about how color vision works, and they are likely more due to experimental error. Even if they were true, I don't see how that would help you cheat under realistic circumstances.
If you look at that, you'll see that the "IR goggles" they are building pass wavelengths between 650nm and 700nm. Even nominally, infrared begins at 700nm.
Ah, I see your problem. "Near IR" doesn't mean "visible light near IR", it means "IR near visible light". You can't see "near IR" any more than you can see "far IR".
Your speaking of individual value, I am not. As far as price determination, I trust you understand how supply vs demand works. The difference between value and price on each side is the economic incentive to engage in a transaction, aka profits. Without difference between value and price there is no incentive to exchange the good or service for money.
You are simply echoing a muddled version of the Marxist theory of "value". In fact, profits are simply the money people get paid for their capital investment, the risk they take, and their opportunity costs; it's really no different from wages or rent. If you don't pay people for making investments and taking risks, they won't engage in those activities.
I have stated several times that price doesn't inclued externalities,
You can state that until the cows come home, but that doesn't make it true. If there is a way of accounting for those externalities, then there will be legal mechanisms by which they are accounted for and prices will include them. If there is no way of accounting for those externalities, then it is meaningless to talk about their inclusion in the "value" of goods as well.
and that is one of the reasons that value, to the market, the true value of a good or service diverges from price.
Care to name some solid economic references (books, papers) that explain this muddled economic theory of externalities and values?
It seems to be like Das Kapital, but with a bunch of new economic concepts thrown in.
Further, with respect to the two parties engaged in a transaction price is below what te buyer values a good at and above what a seller values it at.
False. Price has no consideration to externalities.
First of all, that sentence makes little sense. But I don't see how that is any different for "value". You may value your diamond broach a great deal, and the fact that dozens of people died in digging up the diamonds that it is made from doesn't change the value you place on it. So what's your point?
But when there are legal prohibitions against creating externalities (as we usually have in place), then those certainly are accounted for in price.
Rand style selfishness means that the market rewards people based on what they ccntribute and penalizes them based on the errors they make. That is a good thing.
As for this case, Rand-style selfishness has nothing to do with it: these are a bunch of people sqaubbling over a prize that's arbitrarily awarded by a committee. If any of these people had a valuable idea, they wouldn't be making money from prizes, they'd be makig money from selling what they created.
Are you daft or something? You claim that borrowers are harmed by taking out loans they can't afford to take out. However, that harm is entirely under the borrower's control: either they choose to take the loan or they don't. If the bank chooses not to offer them a loan, they aren't harmed in that way. Therefore, any harm that comes to the borrower from a risky loan is the borrowers sole responsibility.
If you can't decide for yourself whether a loan is too risky for you and take it anyway, you deserve to lose all your money and go into bankruptcy. That's the penalty the market exacts for stupidity and imprudence.
Likewise, any harm that comes to the lender from offering a bad loan is the lender's sole responsibility. If the lender makes too many bad loans, he should go into bankruptcy. Again, that's how the market penalizes lenders who make bad decisions.
The problem is that the administration has absolved both borrowers and lenders from their responsibilities and is using everybody else's money to help people who made bad financial decisions. That means that these people, people are now continuing to make bad financial choices, harming everybody else in the process.
Get out of your idiotic partisan mindset. Nowhere did I say that the "current administration broke it".
What I am saying is that the system is corrupt and favors big businesses and has been for a long time. The current administration is particularly hypocritical, however, because they are claiming to help the little guy and fight against big businesses, when they are just as corrupt as previous administrations.
In addition, your scenario doesn't explain what happened: someone placed a big trade before they could have. Traders must have received the news before 2pm because making the trade involved manual intervention.
The Dutch are already below the sea level due to centuries of environmental mismanagement. Of course, they aren't happy about sea level rise because if you add sea level rise to their past mistakes, they do have a real problem. And, of course, even if you had to evacuate half of the Netherlands, it might cause a little unhappiness, but it wouldn't be a big problem.
But nations who are currently above sea level and haven't made the same stupid mistakes as the Dutch will be no worse off with future sea level rise than the Dutch are now without it..
Yes, and many of the same nations worry about growth. It's economically irrational and xenophobic. Europe and Asia are the same way, if not more so.
Hence my point: we should address xenophobia and opposition to migration and immigration, instead of engaging in futile and destructive attempts to slow climate change.
No, my point is that migration is such a universal that you can't prevent it; it has far too many causes.
I don't even think it's even desirable to prevent it. Humans migrate and adapt, it's what we're built for, it's how we always have coped with a changing planet.
The idea that we should aim for long term stable settlement patterns and closed borders is rooted in latent xenophobia and some kind of middle class dystopia. Snap out of it.
So what? That's been going on for thousands of years. Why do you think Europeans emigrated to the US? Why do you think modern Europeans came to Europe in the first place? What do you think is going on in the Middle East right now?
Removing one of the many causes of migration won't solve anything, because there are dozens others that we can't control. What we really need to do is deal better with the reality that we live on a planet that is constantly changing and a population that is constantly on the move. Those are economic and social issues. If we address those, then climate change is not an issue. If we don't address those, then dealing with climate change is pointless anyway.
I don't understand what you mean by "which are left". There are six billion humans, and we're multiplying rapidly. If global warming were to slow that growth, it wouldn't be such a bad thing.
As for the "rose-colored crystal ball", it's called an education.
Yes, the climate is changing, and the insurance industry is adjusting accordingly. That simply isn't the issue.
The issue is whether the changes are preventable through intervention, and what the cost/benefit tradeoffs are.
If the main conclusion is "don't buy beachfront property", that doesn't imply much of a need for action. Beachfront property has always been risky anyway, and that includes entire cities that are directly on the water.
Under no plausible scenario will greenhouse gas emissions cause humans to die out. At worst, rising temperatures will cause some short-term disruptions, migration, inconveniences, and costs.
Long term, even a complete melting of all ice caps (which would take a couple of thousand years), and global warming of several degrees Celsius, would result in a climate that's significant'y different from ours but is still quite nice (if not arguably nicer) for humans and mammals.
Slashdot Mirror
They could always have gotten Medicaid, after spending down their personal assets. Instead, they now get to keep their assets that they accumulated in part from not paying into a private insurance and now have their health care needs subsidized by everybody else. And because cost controls are ineffective and unpopular, they now have a large buffet of expensive medical tests and treatments to choose from.
Sure, if you're the recipient of the forced subsidies from people who actually have paid insurance their entire lives. It's a great deal for them. It just sucks for everybody else.
That's what health care reform should have been about: getting rid of employer-linked health care and creating an efficient private market.
Instead, Obamacare muddled that goal with exchanges, mandates, and gigantic handouts to the insurance industry.
The Democrats are at least as much at fault for that as Republicans: financial bailouts, car bailouts, mortgage support, agricultural subsidies, Obamacare, alternative energy funding, etc. Those are all subsidies for big businesses that distort the market, stifle innovation, and create monopolies and inefficiencies.
First of all, it's not about "government", it's about the federal government only.
Furthermore, it's not an all-or-nothing proposition with us, we'd just like the federal government to go back to the size it was decades ago and stick to those areas that are constitutionally mandated and allowed for it, instead of trying to run and determine everything for everybody.
Yes, and now you can't because California has been squandering its money left and right, and then started squandering federal funds.
Furthermore, I don't see why $40000 in debt is a big deal; if your university education doesn't yield ten times that in return, you really shouldn't be attending university in the first place.
The proper role of government is to stay out of the business of deciding who gets rich and who stays poor. The proper role of government is to ensure that everybody has the same liberties, and people can't take each other's property or kill each other, nothing more.
FTFY. It's blackmail.
Let's close non-essential services like the NSA, DEA, DHS, ED, HHS, and a bunch of others.
Next, let's not raise the debt ceiling.
By the way, the accompanying paper does claim that you can produce some visual response even beyond 700nm. I find those claims dubious at best given what we know about how color vision works, and they are likely more due to experimental error. Even if they were true, I don't see how that would help you cheat under realistic circumstances.
If you look at that, you'll see that the "IR goggles" they are building pass wavelengths between 650nm and 700nm. Even nominally, infrared begins at 700nm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared
Near infrared is about 750nm-1400nm
The concept you're looking for is "deep red"; that's the wavelength that's barely visible but not quite IR yet.
Ah, I see your problem. "Near IR" doesn't mean "visible light near IR", it means "IR near visible light". You can't see "near IR" any more than you can see "far IR".
You are simply echoing a muddled version of the Marxist theory of "value". In fact, profits are simply the money people get paid for their capital investment, the risk they take, and their opportunity costs; it's really no different from wages or rent. If you don't pay people for making investments and taking risks, they won't engage in those activities.
You can state that until the cows come home, but that doesn't make it true. If there is a way of accounting for those externalities, then there will be legal mechanisms by which they are accounted for and prices will include them. If there is no way of accounting for those externalities, then it is meaningless to talk about their inclusion in the "value" of goods as well.
Care to name some solid economic references (books, papers) that explain this muddled economic theory of externalities and values?
It seems to be like Das Kapital, but with a bunch of new economic concepts thrown in.
By definition, people can't see infrared. If they could, it would be "red".
If you don't understand how markets and governments account for externalities, you really understand neither economics nor government.
False. Price has no consideration to externalities.
First of all, that sentence makes little sense. But I don't see how that is any different for "value". You may value your diamond broach a great deal, and the fact that dozens of people died in digging up the diamonds that it is made from doesn't change the value you place on it. So what's your point?
But when there are legal prohibitions against creating externalities (as we usually have in place), then those certainly are accounted for in price.
Rand style selfishness means that the market rewards people based on what they ccntribute and penalizes them based on the errors they make. That is a good thing.
As for this case, Rand-style selfishness has nothing to do with it: these are a bunch of people sqaubbling over a prize that's arbitrarily awarded by a committee. If any of these people had a valuable idea, they wouldn't be making money from prizes, they'd be makig money from selling what they created.
Are you daft or something? You claim that borrowers are harmed by taking out loans they can't afford to take out. However, that harm is entirely under the borrower's control: either they choose to take the loan or they don't. If the bank chooses not to offer them a loan, they aren't harmed in that way. Therefore, any harm that comes to the borrower from a risky loan is the borrowers sole responsibility.
If you can't decide for yourself whether a loan is too risky for you and take it anyway, you deserve to lose all your money and go into bankruptcy. That's the penalty the market exacts for stupidity and imprudence.
Likewise, any harm that comes to the lender from offering a bad loan is the lender's sole responsibility. If the lender makes too many bad loans, he should go into bankruptcy. Again, that's how the market penalizes lenders who make bad decisions.
The problem is that the administration has absolved both borrowers and lenders from their responsibilities and is using everybody else's money to help people who made bad financial decisions. That means that these people, people are now continuing to make bad financial choices, harming everybody else in the process.
Get out of your idiotic partisan mindset. Nowhere did I say that the "current administration broke it".
What I am saying is that the system is corrupt and favors big businesses and has been for a long time. The current administration is particularly hypocritical, however, because they are claiming to help the little guy and fight against big businesses, when they are just as corrupt as previous administrations.
In addition, your scenario doesn't explain what happened: someone placed a big trade before they could have. Traders must have received the news before 2pm because making the trade involved manual intervention.
The Dutch are already below the sea level due to centuries of environmental mismanagement. Of course, they aren't happy about sea level rise because if you add sea level rise to their past mistakes, they do have a real problem. And, of course, even if you had to evacuate half of the Netherlands, it might cause a little unhappiness, but it wouldn't be a big problem.
But nations who are currently above sea level and haven't made the same stupid mistakes as the Dutch will be no worse off with future sea level rise than the Dutch are now without it..
Yes, and many of the same nations worry about growth. It's economically irrational and xenophobic. Europe and Asia are the same way, if not more so.
Hence my point: we should address xenophobia and opposition to migration and immigration, instead of engaging in futile and destructive attempts to slow climate change.
No, my point is that migration is such a universal that you can't prevent it; it has far too many causes.
I don't even think it's even desirable to prevent it. Humans migrate and adapt, it's what we're built for, it's how we always have coped with a changing planet.
The idea that we should aim for long term stable settlement patterns and closed borders is rooted in latent xenophobia and some kind of middle class dystopia. Snap out of it.
So what? That's been going on for thousands of years. Why do you think Europeans emigrated to the US? Why do you think modern Europeans came to Europe in the first place? What do you think is going on in the Middle East right now?
Removing one of the many causes of migration won't solve anything, because there are dozens others that we can't control. What we really need to do is deal better with the reality that we live on a planet that is constantly changing and a population that is constantly on the move. Those are economic and social issues. If we address those, then climate change is not an issue. If we don't address those, then dealing with climate change is pointless anyway.
I don't understand what you mean by "which are left". There are six billion humans, and we're multiplying rapidly. If global warming were to slow that growth, it wouldn't be such a bad thing.
As for the "rose-colored crystal ball", it's called an education.
Yes, the climate is changing, and the insurance industry is adjusting accordingly. That simply isn't the issue.
The issue is whether the changes are preventable through intervention, and what the cost/benefit tradeoffs are.
If the main conclusion is "don't buy beachfront property", that doesn't imply much of a need for action. Beachfront property has always been risky anyway, and that includes entire cities that are directly on the water.
Under no plausible scenario will greenhouse gas emissions cause humans to die out. At worst, rising temperatures will cause some short-term disruptions, migration, inconveniences, and costs.
Long term, even a complete melting of all ice caps (which would take a couple of thousand years), and global warming of several degrees Celsius, would result in a climate that's significant'y different from ours but is still quite nice (if not arguably nicer) for humans and mammals.