has helped several Davidson students score in the 96th percentile (or higher) in ESPN's bracket challenge
How hard is it to reach the 96th percentile? Let's say you teach this course for 3 yrs with 20 students per course. I think the odds are decent that one of those students would be in the 96th (odd number to choose, don't ya think?) percentile? I'm going with crappy journalism.
My presumption was that the 96th percentile stat was a simplified retcon from "greater than 2 sigma" on a normal distribution.
Trees are just skin and bones! (And plumbing. And really crazy hair. And roots. And sometimes genitals.)
You forgot the homunculi... tree reproduction is via proxy. Every spring I'm overwhelmed by billions of tree cumbots irritating my respiratory epithelium.
Let them take their filthy sperm tube forming function elsewhere.
I agree that nitrogen (or other inert gas) asphyxiation would be more humane. Due to a bug in our biology, the urge to breathe is due to a build up of CO2 rather than a lack of O2. As long as you can exhale CO2, everything will seem fine and there will be no feeling of suffocation even if there is no oxygen present.
That is to say, everything seems fine until you suddenly lose consciousness. About 10 years ago a young couple in Flordia were found dead inside a large helium advertisement balloon due to this very biological exploit. (Aside: this is also why hyperventilation to increase breath holding time while swimming is so dangerous, the result is called "shallow water blackout").
This method of execution would also be harder to fuck up. I read too many stories of incompetence regarding the three drug protocol: needles pointed the wrong way, needles not in veins, etc. Since physicians are ethically bound not to participate in executions then IV administration of lethal injection is always going to be dicey.
Pentobarbital WAS used in execution before the 3 drug replacement. Yes. It is replacement.
Guess what?! Phenobarbital and pentobarbital aren't the same drug! Furthermore, pentothal and sodium thiopental are synonymous, and *that* drug is not pentobarbital, either. Words mean things.
Since you made such a basic error while simultaneously being a dick, feel free to go ahead and cite your sources to indicate that the US protocol originally used any other anesthetic drug than thiopental. I'll wait, but I won't hold my breath.
PENTObarbital also would not be considered ethical to use for animal euthanasia either because it, like thiopental, is also a very short acting barbiturate. PHENObarbital is a long acting barbiturare. Obviously, during a goddamn execution you don't want the fucking drugs wearing off while the non-medically trained executioner techs are bumbling around with your other poorly chosen set of protocol drugs.
I am mostly irked because the choice of drugs in the classical three drug cocktail is so obviously retarded. It offends me in the same way that seeing an automobile design with square wheels would offend me, especially if everyone else in the world started copying the design because "these other people are doing it and so it must be a good choice!". It's just not fit for purpose.
the problem is the lethal injection. There are ways to kill someone without any pain (see assisted suicide), but the death penalty is executed with some very painful medicine. Why?
I recently did the research about this very question. I won't provide the many links I found, because all were trivially available on google.
1. An Oklahoma medical examiner came up with the three drug cocktail. He has no pharmacology background (btw, this is foreshadowing for what comes next).
2. A multi-drug cocktail was chosen in order to avoid comparison with animal euthanasia.
3. Ironically, the three drug cocktail would be considered unethical to use on animals. They use a reliable, long lasting barbiturate overdose (e.g. phenobarbital).
4. When asked "why these three drugs?", the protocol inventor's response was "Why not?"
5. "Why not"s include drug incompatibility that causes drugs to precipitate out of solution if saline flushes aren't used between drugs, the fact that some of these drugs ship in solid form and have to be turned into a solution by prison staff or a compounding pharmacy, and that the barbiturate used (pentothal) is extremely *short* acting.
6. The current alternative protocol that uses midazolam is far superior. It's a surgical anesthetic that causes anterograde amnesia. The other drug is hydromorphone (aka. Dilaudid). If it gives you any sense of what that is, ERs constantly have drug seekers coming in and faking injuries or kidney stones to try to get hydromorphone. The gasping the one executed guy had was likely due to the fact that his brainstem was dying. Basically, this protocol is like a junkie OD with tranqs. The three drug cocktail doesn't have gasping because drug #2 is pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the lungs.
7. No one will advocate improving the protocol because of the retarded politics that surround capital punishment. The anti death penalty camp will latch onto any suggestions of improvement as "proof" lethal injection is inhumane. The pro camp won't give them that opportunity, so we're stuck with a fucking achingly stupid drug cocktail invented by someone who was the equivalent of a stereotypical Slashdotter who suggests "improvements" for the Mars Rover. Why not just inject these prisoners with phenobarbital? Works great for animals. Peaceful death... but ZOMG! can't use the *animal* protocol on *humans*!
... as I read this at 1 AM when I have to be up at 6:30 tomorrow. Heh. "Tomorrow."
...as I read this at 4 AM when I have to be up at 6:30 tomorrow. At which point does one simply write off sleep for the night if solely because getting a small amount feels worse than no sleep at all?
I suspect dead winos cost the least money. Not my job to overrule somebodies 'party hard, die young' thought process.
You're probably correct, but then the next logical step is for you to hand out free rubbing alcohol dosed with acetaminophen infusions for them to drink. Or perhaps you could show them how to cook Krokodil?
It's a bathtub curve in terms of savings: dead winos are the cheapest for the makers of society, but if you don't want to actively cause their death then the next optimization is to keep them healthier.
If so, government is the cause of excessive health care costs.
Are you being facetious? Insurance company investments are tightly regulated by virtue of the industry they are in. Would you want your insurance company investing all your premiums in Enron stock only to become insolvent when the bottom falls out?
But what's the hospital's actual cost of doing an MRI, considering energy, other consumables, amortized value of the MRI machine, etc.?
Before or after the Hollywood accounting? Let's just say that it turns enough of a profit that people make decent money owning one. In fact many docs are interested in partnering with hospitals to set up or upgrade an MRI. As noted, the real money is in the technology fee not the radiologist fee. If you cut the hospital in on ownership then they are likely to agree to send all their inpatients to your co-owned MRI. No ?????, just profit.
I think the concept is consistent with pragmatic libertarianism. There are several factors at play.
1. Health care in the US is irrevocably socialized. The Overton Window is such that a free market will never happen in health care (a truly free market would entail leaving people to die outside ERs if they couldn't pay... it just will never be politically tenable to enact such policies). Ergo, the next best optimization is for the makers to pay less in health care for the takers. Healthier winos cost me less money.
2. What I am proposing is modifying an existing excise tax. Alcohol has been excise taxed since Washington (Whiskey Rebellion, anyone?). I'm not a fan of vice taxes in general, but in this case I am advocating for less vice tax on a form of alcohol that is likely to reduce public health care costs for the makers who are paying in to the system (the winos aren't, of course). The goal is to make the incentive for the cheapest forms of alcohol to be vitamin infused. No mandated inclusion, rather, altering the already-distorted market. Here are the present federal rates for reference.
3. The derelicts wouldn't take the vitamin pills even if you gave them away for free. You might be able to get them to accept a vitamin shot if you gave them money for booze (or just booze itself), but let's be reasonable: that's not politically tenable, either.
4. It's not like paying the present excise tax on the booze is making them an upstanding overall contributor to society. If it really matters, I guess I could support an increase in excise tax on *non-vitamin infused* forms of alcohol, but my predilection is to reduce overall taxation.
Personally, my experience is that waiting until the hangover sets in is too late, though I have never experimented with IV administration. I strongly prefer to dose while consuming, acknowledging that some will be lost in the filtrate. That issue can be compensated by dose.
I still think this would be a public health win, far more so than simply taxing alcohol more. As stated before, my opinion is that the flavor of the beverage is unaffected. I'm sure others may disagree, but at least I have tried this myself. I further admit normally I just take the single megadose capsules because it is easier than mixing powders.
Taxation and regulatory mandates are full of unintended consequences. I imagine that significantly dropping the excise tax rate on vitamin enhanced alcoholic beverages might be well calibrated correlate to delivery to the target market.
Don't let perfection be the enemy of good. Screw adding expiration dates, I doubt hobos are keeping their MD 20/20 in a cellar to let it age ("...I really prefer the 2008 vintage, don't you, Eustace?" said no derelict hobo ever). Even if the damn stuff ages and the vitamin strength is attenuated, some effect is better than none. So: no expiration dates.
Regardless, it's a good idea to supplement B vitamins whenever you plan to go on a bender, because it reduces hangover effects (cf. HangoverHeaven in Vegas that uses this as a remedy rather than a prophylactic).
If you really care about a discriminator function, then make it for malt liquor & fortified wine and be done with it. I however, don't taste any ill effects when the vitamins are added to a neutral spirit like vodka. In bulk I'm guessing the B vitamins would add less than a cent per bottle based on what I am paying *retail* for these.
This is something that would actually help rather than backdooring more vice tax on things that Meddlers Do Not Approve Of. If you are against this, I can only presume you are against iodizing salt, adding vitamin D to milk, etc.
There are 'do gooders' who want to fortify whino booze with all the water soluble vitamins.
This is a good plan, unless you truly are misanthropic. Adding B vitamins to alcohol would reduce the deleterious effects while not compromising the functionality of the alcohol. I doubt it would have a serious effect on the price or flavor.
I would, of course, mandate that the vitamin inclusion could not be construed as making alcohol safe for abuse (via suggestive marketing).
This is a better plan than the typical "let's increase taxes on it because we *care* (*cough*wantthemoney*cough*)" meddling public health initiatives.
Meh. I really doubt Netflix prefers to make a smaller library available, so the blame goes back to the content owners. Just like I can't pay for online access to HBO shows without paying for cable first (ie. HBO Go). Some content owners are unreasonable (there's no FRAND) or are using their library to try to get their own streaming system to have traction, or whatever addled plans these fuckers come up with this week. So, just because a show was syndicated on a Canadian channel doesn't mean Netflix could reasonably obtain a license to show it. In fact, that might be *why* Netflix couldn't get a license to stream it, thanks to the content owners. Just like there are no HBO channels on Netflix even though HBO is on US premium cable. HBO will likely never license to Netflix, ever, as long as they imagine HBO Go can work.
As for your series vanishing, again, that's the content owners fault for pulling the plug on their license to Netflix. Netflix does not have "tiers" of streaming content equivalent to cable company bundle packages, at least in the US. It's all or nothing: if Netflix has a license to stream it in your country, you have access.
I'm not saying that there aren't advantages in certain scenarios for a download rather than a stream. However, it's inappropriate to chalk up the vagaries of content owners as a strike against Netflix/streaming. For example, you can download a legitimate, DRM infested video file that won't play at all if the the content company shuts down the licensing server.
The pirates ultimately have a generally superior product, but Netflix is sufficiently frictionless for me that I rarely have to resort to Ye Olde Bay O'Torrents.
Marathon watching. At least once I've been half-way through a TV series when netflix decided to remove it from the line-up. Thanks alot for that one! This isn't even counting the rediculous number of movies trilogies where netflix only has movies 2 and 3 (seriously, WTF).
Internation watching. Live in the US and visit Canada? Get ready to not be able to watch your shows until you get home because Canada is not worthy of 90% of netflix movies.
...these are the fault of the fucking content owners and their greed. This is well documented. Fuck them.
I mean, why else would Netflix have these gaps in their service? Trying to save disk space in their server farms? Perhaps Netflix feels your filthy Canadian loonies aren't good enough tender for the other content and therefore refuses to allow your benighted population to glimpse the wonder of the sheer volume of sewage flowing forth from Hollywood?
IP law needs to be obliterated and rewritten. This "150 years plus the heat death of the universe, and I control everything about it and all derivative works forever" shit has got to stop. Mandatory copyright licensing with FRAND pricing schedules and a 15 year tern would be a good first step. And if the content creators want to take their ball and go home then fine... they won't be missed. Others will innovate in their place.
You do realize that the sustainable rate is around two kids/woman because the oldest generation dies off, right? If we were effectively immortal, the birth rate would have to drop to zero to be sustainable. Not a big deal if we live to be 150, it'll just cause a slightly longer delay but true immortality would really throw a monkey wrench in how society works.
Unless this is coupled with advanced resurrection technology, the rate of accidental death would eventually approach 1.
I decided to horribly abuse math and statistics for the thought experiment. I came up with a rough estimate of 0.1% chance of dying via accidental death per year in the US. Presuming this is a constant (ie. no benefit or detriment to being alive longer), then it looks like there is a 50% chance of death in approximately 700 years (0.999^700 ~= 0.5). Restated, a population of 7 billion with this 0.1% chance of death would represent a turnover of 7 million deaths per year.
Very small, but non-zero. Also doesn't take into account euthanasia/suicide for those who no longer wish to have life inflicted upon themself anymore.
I use Google voice exclusively. It allows me to have a phone number separated from my service provider which I probably won't have forever (so I don't have to worry whether I'll be able to port my number over). It allows me to make phone calls from my computer for phone interviews and the like (headset/mic so I can type). It also allows me to text people without paying Verizon a dime for bullshit reasons.
I use GV in exactly the same way for exactly the same reasons. I just seamlessly "ported" from one wireless provider to another a few months ago. Unlike "real porting" I could use both phones while I was getting things setup and switch my inbound call routing back and forth between the devices at will.
This article is just some hipster douchebag's whiny blog. I tagged this slashdot headline as troll.
Of course, you *do* have to worry that Google is planning to subsume Voice into Hangouts. That decision is so obviously retarded it can only have something to do with Google's attempt to make Plus get traction. Oh, and maybe someday GV will support MMS. It's annoying that those messages get blackholed.
I hope my just submitted "what if" about unicorns ruling the universe will make the front page as well. Given what they are posting these days I think I have a 50/50 chance of making it.
I'm in.
I'm *not*! I am so sick of these fascist unicorns, their damn rallies, forcing people to hang rainbow banners everywhere... and then there are the book burnings! They say that they are just protecting us from the insidious effects that horses have on our culture, but I don't believe them.
The time for peaceful protest is over! Who will join the resistance?
If hospitals are making such profits on overcharging patients and insurers, why aren't insurers taking an ownership interest in hospitals so that they can see some of these profits?
Uncertain, but perhaps it has to do with the legal restrictions on the investments insurance companies are allowed to hold.
Hospitals and insurers are certainly in collusion to wipe out private practice. Typically how that works is that the practice will have a contract with the hospital where they work as well as contracts with various insurers to establish billing rates. The insurance company will approach the practice and tell them that they are going to cut reimbursement 25% this year and 10% the following year. If the practice refuses this contract, they say, then the insurer will not pay for any services billed by the practice. The insurer turns around and secretly approaches the hospital and offers them half of the money they are cutting from the private practice's billing if they will go along with it. This ensures the practice has to accept the terms, because the practice's contract with the *hospital* has a provision that the practice will service *all* inpatients at the hospital. So, either take the cut or work for free because you have to service all the insurer's inpatient policyholders at the hospital.
In case you were wondering, the doc's reimbursement is usually far less than the hospital's "tech fee". Approximately $250 of your $3,000 MRI cost goes to the radiologist. The other $2750 goes to the hospital.
Oh, you haven't realized ACA doesn't do squat to reduce actual healthcare costs??
I think the idea is supposed to be that shared responsibility will reduce the cost of treating uninsured people at emergency rooms, which should reduce what hospitals have to mark up to recover said costs.
Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds, prima facie, to insinuate that this will reduce health care costs? The hospitals will simply treat that as a windfall. Trying to find out where the "expected savings" disappeared to will be like asking where water spilled on desert sand went.
People and payers have already become inured to tortuous and byzantine billing for healthcare. It's like something out of Kafka's nightmares. It will be trivial for hospitals to gerrymander away the savings. An $8 single pill of aspirin becomes $8.50, etc, etc.
If you want to know where the real waste is, it's in the administration/bureaucracy that forces docs to spend so much time documenting everything in order to prevent overcharging. The irony is that all this extra time is spent documenting, which reduces doctor efficiency, which drives up costs, and then we have to add more layers of bureaucracy to check and manage all these doctor TPS reports. Yes, fraudulent overbilling is a problem, but are we actually saving any money by systematically attempting to prevent it this way?
Anyway, point: the costs to hospitals may be reduced, but that will never be reflected in your insurance premiums.
Arguing that lies and deceit are acceptable in one instance simply because lies and deceit are perpetrated in another instance is a logical fallacy. It's wrong to sell something as unlimited when, in fact, it is intentionally limited. It's also wrong to mischaracterize a license as a a transfer of ownership.
I'm pleased to learn you are presently able to use your 3G connection without restriction. I also guarantee you that your network provider's ToS will allow them to limit your "unlimited" connection whenever they see fit. Nobody would complain if a provider sold a 500 GB plan and then never charged for any overages (i.e. decided not to limit a plan that was advertised as having limits); people become incensed when they see an unambiguous term like "unlimited" and subsequently find out that it was a bait and switch.
My friend would have never have paid for the JustCloud service if they had sold it honestly as a 500 GB cap plan. That would have been insufficient for his needs. They deceived him to get his business.
I'll bite. If it's unlimited (and not a lie) then why do you have the weasel words in your ToS that allow you to limit available backup storage for users and also unilaterally make such changes without notice?
Seems like you're leaving yourselves quite an "out". Why should people trust what your marketing "large print" trumpets ("trust us!") when your actual adhesion contract agreement "small print" reads just like every other typical sleazy lying provider's ToS?
Not when the product is advertised as unlimited storage capacity. If they hadn't been deceitful and had instead advertised a price for say, 500 GB, then he could have made an informed decision.
These "unlimited storage!" claims are deceitful and malicious. Companies don't want to give honest specifications in their marketing because they want to tweak that psychological sense of security that comes from knowing you don't have to be concerned about constraints. Selling "unlimited" plans gets them more money, but it's a damn lie.
I'm as libertarian as they come, but all libertarians agree about enforcing contract law. I argue that a corollary to contract law is that parties are not allowed to redefine plain language terms like "unlimited" to mean "very limited, and completely at our capricious unilateral undefined discretion, which we can redefine at any time without notice". I have no sympathy for a company that sells an 8 GB product but wants potential customers to think it is 800 GB.
tl;dr: Customers are not responsible for companies's shitty business plans that are built upon marketing deceit. Stop selling "unlimited" plans!
That's nice, but again, "unlimited" is always a lie. From your BackBlaze ToS:
Backblaze has the right at any time to change, modify, add to or discontinue or retire any aspect or feature of the Backblaze Products including, but not limited to, the software, hours of availability, equipment needed for access or use, the maximum disk space that will be allotted on Backblaze servers on your behalf, or the availability of Backblaze Products on any particular device or communications service. Backblaze has no obligation to provide you with notice of any such changes.
So, just like all these other providers throughout history, BackBlaze will try to make it seem unlimited until the moment they decide to fuck you over.
Marketing deceit like this makes me want to get an account and set up a "dd if=/dev/urandom" job to create low compressibility garbage to crapflood the storage on their servers until they hit me with their "fair use" policy. Which they would... it's only a question of degree.
So, where would they draw the line? 20 TB? 100 TB? I don't know, but dd can pull from urandom all day long...
These "unlimited" claims always turn out to be lies. When will we learn?
My friend paid for an "unlimited" account from JustCloud for backup. He stored 1.8 TB on it and then they "fair use"'d his ass and canceled his account. They didn't even give him a refund for the rest of the money he prepaid.
Slashdot Mirror
it's just about guaranteed to have a false- positive rate about 100x the true positive rate. OTOH, that works for the TSA...
Just wanted to let you know that there is a term for that: positive predictive value. In the TSA's case, the PPV would be effectively 0.
Thought I would share in the hope that others will return the favor for me in the future.
has helped several Davidson students score in the 96th percentile (or higher) in ESPN's bracket challenge
How hard is it to reach the 96th percentile? Let's say you teach this course for 3 yrs with 20 students per course. I think the odds are decent that one of those students would be in the 96th (odd number to choose, don't ya think?) percentile? I'm going with crappy journalism.
My presumption was that the 96th percentile stat was a simplified retcon from "greater than 2 sigma" on a normal distribution.
68-95-99.7 rule
This consideration is orthogonal to the "crappy journalism" assessment. That could still be true.
Trees are just skin and bones! (And plumbing. And really crazy hair. And roots. And sometimes genitals.)
You forgot the homunculi... tree reproduction is via proxy. Every spring I'm overwhelmed by billions of tree cumbots irritating my respiratory epithelium.
Let them take their filthy sperm tube forming function elsewhere.
I agree that nitrogen (or other inert gas) asphyxiation would be more humane. Due to a bug in our biology, the urge to breathe is due to a build up of CO2 rather than a lack of O2. As long as you can exhale CO2, everything will seem fine and there will be no feeling of suffocation even if there is no oxygen present.
That is to say, everything seems fine until you suddenly lose consciousness. About 10 years ago a young couple in Flordia were found dead inside a large helium advertisement balloon due to this very biological exploit. (Aside: this is also why hyperventilation to increase breath holding time while swimming is so dangerous, the result is called "shallow water blackout").
This method of execution would also be harder to fuck up. I read too many stories of incompetence regarding the three drug protocol: needles pointed the wrong way, needles not in veins, etc. Since physicians are ethically bound not to participate in executions then IV administration of lethal injection is always going to be dicey.
So much research but you still failed.
Pentobarbital WAS used in execution before the 3 drug replacement. Yes. It is replacement.
Guess what?! Phenobarbital and pentobarbital aren't the same drug! Furthermore, pentothal and sodium thiopental are synonymous, and *that* drug is not pentobarbital, either. Words mean things.
Since you made such a basic error while simultaneously being a dick, feel free to go ahead and cite your sources to indicate that the US protocol originally used any other anesthetic drug than thiopental. I'll wait, but I won't hold my breath.
PENTObarbital also would not be considered ethical to use for animal euthanasia either because it, like thiopental, is also a very short acting barbiturate. PHENObarbital is a long acting barbiturare. Obviously, during a goddamn execution you don't want the fucking drugs wearing off while the non-medically trained executioner techs are bumbling around with your other poorly chosen set of protocol drugs.
I am mostly irked because the choice of drugs in the classical three drug cocktail is so obviously retarded. It offends me in the same way that seeing an automobile design with square wheels would offend me, especially if everyone else in the world started copying the design because "these other people are doing it and so it must be a good choice!". It's just not fit for purpose.
the problem is the lethal injection. There are ways to kill someone without any pain (see assisted suicide), but the death penalty is executed with some very painful medicine. Why?
I recently did the research about this very question. I won't provide the many links I found, because all were trivially available on google.
1. An Oklahoma medical examiner came up with the three drug cocktail. He has no pharmacology background (btw, this is foreshadowing for what comes next).
2. A multi-drug cocktail was chosen in order to avoid comparison with animal euthanasia.
3. Ironically, the three drug cocktail would be considered unethical to use on animals. They use a reliable, long lasting barbiturate overdose (e.g. phenobarbital).
4. When asked "why these three drugs?", the protocol inventor's response was "Why not?"
5. "Why not"s include drug incompatibility that causes drugs to precipitate out of solution if saline flushes aren't used between drugs, the fact that some of these drugs ship in solid form and have to be turned into a solution by prison staff or a compounding pharmacy, and that the barbiturate used (pentothal) is extremely *short* acting.
6. The current alternative protocol that uses midazolam is far superior. It's a surgical anesthetic that causes anterograde amnesia. The other drug is hydromorphone (aka. Dilaudid). If it gives you any sense of what that is, ERs constantly have drug seekers coming in and faking injuries or kidney stones to try to get hydromorphone. The gasping the one executed guy had was likely due to the fact that his brainstem was dying. Basically, this protocol is like a junkie OD with tranqs. The three drug cocktail doesn't have gasping because drug #2 is pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the lungs.
7. No one will advocate improving the protocol because of the retarded politics that surround capital punishment. The anti death penalty camp will latch onto any suggestions of improvement as "proof" lethal injection is inhumane. The pro camp won't give them that opportunity, so we're stuck with a fucking achingly stupid drug cocktail invented by someone who was the equivalent of a stereotypical Slashdotter who suggests "improvements" for the Mars Rover. Why not just inject these prisoners with phenobarbital? Works great for animals. Peaceful death... but ZOMG! can't use the *animal* protocol on *humans*!
... as I read this at 1 AM when I have to be up at 6:30 tomorrow. Heh. "Tomorrow."
...as I read this at 4 AM when I have to be up at 6:30 tomorrow. At which point does one simply write off sleep for the night if solely because getting a small amount feels worse than no sleep at all?
I suspect dead winos cost the least money. Not my job to overrule somebodies 'party hard, die young' thought process.
You're probably correct, but then the next logical step is for you to hand out free rubbing alcohol dosed with acetaminophen infusions for them to drink. Or perhaps you could show them how to cook Krokodil?
It's a bathtub curve in terms of savings: dead winos are the cheapest for the makers of society, but if you don't want to actively cause their death then the next optimization is to keep them healthier.
They are frequent fliers in most ERs.
If so, government is the cause of excessive health care costs.
Are you being facetious? Insurance company investments are tightly regulated by virtue of the industry they are in. Would you want your insurance company investing all your premiums in Enron stock only to become insolvent when the bottom falls out?
But what's the hospital's actual cost of doing an MRI, considering energy, other consumables, amortized value of the MRI machine, etc.?
Before or after the Hollywood accounting? Let's just say that it turns enough of a profit that people make decent money owning one. In fact many docs are interested in partnering with hospitals to set up or upgrade an MRI. As noted, the real money is in the technology fee not the radiologist fee. If you cut the hospital in on ownership then they are likely to agree to send all their inpatients to your co-owned MRI. No ?????, just profit.
I think the concept is consistent with pragmatic libertarianism. There are several factors at play.
1. Health care in the US is irrevocably socialized. The Overton Window is such that a free market will never happen in health care (a truly free market would entail leaving people to die outside ERs if they couldn't pay... it just will never be politically tenable to enact such policies). Ergo, the next best optimization is for the makers to pay less in health care for the takers. Healthier winos cost me less money.
2. What I am proposing is modifying an existing excise tax. Alcohol has been excise taxed since Washington (Whiskey Rebellion, anyone?). I'm not a fan of vice taxes in general, but in this case I am advocating for less vice tax on a form of alcohol that is likely to reduce public health care costs for the makers who are paying in to the system (the winos aren't, of course). The goal is to make the incentive for the cheapest forms of alcohol to be vitamin infused. No mandated inclusion, rather, altering the already-distorted market. Here are the present federal rates for reference.
3. The derelicts wouldn't take the vitamin pills even if you gave them away for free. You might be able to get them to accept a vitamin shot if you gave them money for booze (or just booze itself), but let's be reasonable: that's not politically tenable, either.
4. It's not like paying the present excise tax on the booze is making them an upstanding overall contributor to society. If it really matters, I guess I could support an increase in excise tax on *non-vitamin infused* forms of alcohol, but my predilection is to reduce overall taxation.
Personally, my experience is that waiting until the hangover sets in is too late, though I have never experimented with IV administration. I strongly prefer to dose while consuming, acknowledging that some will be lost in the filtrate. That issue can be compensated by dose.
I still think this would be a public health win, far more so than simply taxing alcohol more. As stated before, my opinion is that the flavor of the beverage is unaffected. I'm sure others may disagree, but at least I have tried this myself. I further admit normally I just take the single megadose capsules because it is easier than mixing powders.
Taxation and regulatory mandates are full of unintended consequences. I imagine that significantly dropping the excise tax rate on vitamin enhanced alcoholic beverages might be well calibrated correlate to delivery to the target market.
Don't let perfection be the enemy of good. Screw adding expiration dates, I doubt hobos are keeping their MD 20/20 in a cellar to let it age ("...I really prefer the 2008 vintage, don't you, Eustace?" said no derelict hobo ever). Even if the damn stuff ages and the vitamin strength is attenuated, some effect is better than none. So: no expiration dates.
Regardless, it's a good idea to supplement B vitamins whenever you plan to go on a bender, because it reduces hangover effects (cf. HangoverHeaven in Vegas that uses this as a remedy rather than a prophylactic).
If you really care about a discriminator function, then make it for malt liquor & fortified wine and be done with it. I however, don't taste any ill effects when the vitamins are added to a neutral spirit like vodka. In bulk I'm guessing the B vitamins would add less than a cent per bottle based on what I am paying *retail* for these.
This is something that would actually help rather than backdooring more vice tax on things that Meddlers Do Not Approve Of. If you are against this, I can only presume you are against iodizing salt, adding vitamin D to milk, etc.
There are 'do gooders' who want to fortify whino booze with all the water soluble vitamins.
This is a good plan, unless you truly are misanthropic. Adding B vitamins to alcohol would reduce the deleterious effects while not compromising the functionality of the alcohol. I doubt it would have a serious effect on the price or flavor.
I would, of course, mandate that the vitamin inclusion could not be construed as making alcohol safe for abuse (via suggestive marketing).
This is a better plan than the typical "let's increase taxes on it because we *care* (*cough*wantthemoney*cough*)" meddling public health initiatives.
Meh. I really doubt Netflix prefers to make a smaller library available, so the blame goes back to the content owners. Just like I can't pay for online access to HBO shows without paying for cable first (ie. HBO Go). Some content owners are unreasonable (there's no FRAND) or are using their library to try to get their own streaming system to have traction, or whatever addled plans these fuckers come up with this week. So, just because a show was syndicated on a Canadian channel doesn't mean Netflix could reasonably obtain a license to show it. In fact, that might be *why* Netflix couldn't get a license to stream it, thanks to the content owners. Just like there are no HBO channels on Netflix even though HBO is on US premium cable. HBO will likely never license to Netflix, ever, as long as they imagine HBO Go can work.
As for your series vanishing, again, that's the content owners fault for pulling the plug on their license to Netflix. Netflix does not have "tiers" of streaming content equivalent to cable company bundle packages, at least in the US. It's all or nothing: if Netflix has a license to stream it in your country, you have access.
I'm not saying that there aren't advantages in certain scenarios for a download rather than a stream. However, it's inappropriate to chalk up the vagaries of content owners as a strike against Netflix/streaming. For example, you can download a legitimate, DRM infested video file that won't play at all if the the content company shuts down the licensing server.
The pirates ultimately have a generally superior product, but Netflix is sufficiently frictionless for me that I rarely have to resort to Ye Olde Bay O'Torrents.
Most of your points are well-taken, but these:
Marathon watching. At least once I've been half-way through a TV series when netflix decided to remove it from the line-up. Thanks alot for that one! This isn't even counting the rediculous number of movies trilogies where netflix only has movies 2 and 3 (seriously, WTF).
Internation watching. Live in the US and visit Canada? Get ready to not be able to watch your shows until you get home because Canada is not worthy of 90% of netflix movies.
...these are the fault of the fucking content owners and their greed. This is well documented. Fuck them.
I mean, why else would Netflix have these gaps in their service? Trying to save disk space in their server farms? Perhaps Netflix feels your filthy Canadian loonies aren't good enough tender for the other content and therefore refuses to allow your benighted population to glimpse the wonder of the sheer volume of sewage flowing forth from Hollywood?
IP law needs to be obliterated and rewritten. This "150 years plus the heat death of the universe, and I control everything about it and all derivative works forever" shit has got to stop. Mandatory copyright licensing with FRAND pricing schedules and a 15 year tern would be a good first step. And if the content creators want to take their ball and go home then fine... they won't be missed. Others will innovate in their place.
You do realize that the sustainable rate is around two kids/woman because the oldest generation dies off, right? If we were effectively immortal, the birth rate would have to drop to zero to be sustainable. Not a big deal if we live to be 150, it'll just cause a slightly longer delay but true immortality would really throw a monkey wrench in how society works.
Unless this is coupled with advanced resurrection technology, the rate of accidental death would eventually approach 1.
I decided to horribly abuse math and statistics for the thought experiment. I came up with a rough estimate of 0.1% chance of dying via accidental death per year in the US. Presuming this is a constant (ie. no benefit or detriment to being alive longer), then it looks like there is a 50% chance of death in approximately 700 years (0.999^700 ~= 0.5). Restated, a population of 7 billion with this 0.1% chance of death would represent a turnover of 7 million deaths per year.
Very small, but non-zero. Also doesn't take into account euthanasia/suicide for those who no longer wish to have life inflicted upon themself anymore.
I use Google voice exclusively. It allows me to have a phone number separated from my service provider which I probably won't have forever (so I don't have to worry whether I'll be able to port my number over). It allows me to make phone calls from my computer for phone interviews and the like (headset/mic so I can type). It also allows me to text people without paying Verizon a dime for bullshit reasons.
I use GV in exactly the same way for exactly the same reasons. I just seamlessly "ported" from one wireless provider to another a few months ago. Unlike "real porting" I could use both phones while I was getting things setup and switch my inbound call routing back and forth between the devices at will.
This article is just some hipster douchebag's whiny blog. I tagged this slashdot headline as troll.
Of course, you *do* have to worry that Google is planning to subsume Voice into Hangouts. That decision is so obviously retarded it can only have something to do with Google's attempt to make Plus get traction. Oh, and maybe someday GV will support MMS. It's annoying that those messages get blackholed.
I hope my just submitted "what if" about unicorns ruling the universe will make the front page as well. Given what they are posting these days I think I have a 50/50 chance of making it.
I'm in.
I'm *not*! I am so sick of these fascist unicorns, their damn rallies, forcing people to hang rainbow banners everywhere... and then there are the book burnings! They say that they are just protecting us from the insidious effects that horses have on our culture, but I don't believe them.
The time for peaceful protest is over! Who will join the resistance?
If hospitals are making such profits on overcharging patients and insurers, why aren't insurers taking an ownership interest in hospitals so that they can see some of these profits?
Uncertain, but perhaps it has to do with the legal restrictions on the investments insurance companies are allowed to hold.
Hospitals and insurers are certainly in collusion to wipe out private practice. Typically how that works is that the practice will have a contract with the hospital where they work as well as contracts with various insurers to establish billing rates. The insurance company will approach the practice and tell them that they are going to cut reimbursement 25% this year and 10% the following year. If the practice refuses this contract, they say, then the insurer will not pay for any services billed by the practice. The insurer turns around and secretly approaches the hospital and offers them half of the money they are cutting from the private practice's billing if they will go along with it. This ensures the practice has to accept the terms, because the practice's contract with the *hospital* has a provision that the practice will service *all* inpatients at the hospital. So, either take the cut or work for free because you have to service all the insurer's inpatient policyholders at the hospital.
In case you were wondering, the doc's reimbursement is usually far less than the hospital's "tech fee". Approximately $250 of your $3,000 MRI cost goes to the radiologist. The other $2750 goes to the hospital.
Oh, you haven't realized ACA doesn't do squat to reduce actual healthcare costs??
I think the idea is supposed to be that shared responsibility will reduce the cost of treating uninsured people at emergency rooms, which should reduce what hospitals have to mark up to recover said costs.
Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds, prima facie, to insinuate that this will reduce health care costs? The hospitals will simply treat that as a windfall. Trying to find out where the "expected savings" disappeared to will be like asking where water spilled on desert sand went.
People and payers have already become inured to tortuous and byzantine billing for healthcare. It's like something out of Kafka's nightmares. It will be trivial for hospitals to gerrymander away the savings. An $8 single pill of aspirin becomes $8.50, etc, etc.
If you want to know where the real waste is, it's in the administration/bureaucracy that forces docs to spend so much time documenting everything in order to prevent overcharging. The irony is that all this extra time is spent documenting, which reduces doctor efficiency, which drives up costs, and then we have to add more layers of bureaucracy to check and manage all these doctor TPS reports. Yes, fraudulent overbilling is a problem, but are we actually saving any money by systematically attempting to prevent it this way?
Anyway, point: the costs to hospitals may be reduced, but that will never be reflected in your insurance premiums.
All marketing is deceit. That's the point of it.
Arguing that lies and deceit are acceptable in one instance simply because lies and deceit are perpetrated in another instance is a logical fallacy. It's wrong to sell something as unlimited when, in fact, it is intentionally limited. It's also wrong to mischaracterize a license as a a transfer of ownership.
I'm pleased to learn you are presently able to use your 3G connection without restriction. I also guarantee you that your network provider's ToS will allow them to limit your "unlimited" connection whenever they see fit. Nobody would complain if a provider sold a 500 GB plan and then never charged for any overages (i.e. decided not to limit a plan that was advertised as having limits); people become incensed when they see an unambiguous term like "unlimited" and subsequently find out that it was a bait and switch.
My friend would have never have paid for the JustCloud service if they had sold it honestly as a 500 GB cap plan. That would have been insufficient for his needs. They deceived him to get his business.
I'll bite. If it's unlimited (and not a lie) then why do you have the weasel words in your ToS that allow you to limit available backup storage for users and also unilaterally make such changes without notice?
Seems like you're leaving yourselves quite an "out". Why should people trust what your marketing "large print" trumpets ("trust us!") when your actual adhesion contract agreement "small print" reads just like every other typical sleazy lying provider's ToS?
"Fair using his ass" is only fair!
Not when the product is advertised as unlimited storage capacity. If they hadn't been deceitful and had instead advertised a price for say, 500 GB, then he could have made an informed decision.
These "unlimited storage!" claims are deceitful and malicious. Companies don't want to give honest specifications in their marketing because they want to tweak that psychological sense of security that comes from knowing you don't have to be concerned about constraints. Selling "unlimited" plans gets them more money, but it's a damn lie.
I'm as libertarian as they come, but all libertarians agree about enforcing contract law. I argue that a corollary to contract law is that parties are not allowed to redefine plain language terms like "unlimited" to mean "very limited, and completely at our capricious unilateral undefined discretion, which we can redefine at any time without notice". I have no sympathy for a company that sells an 8 GB product but wants potential customers to think it is 800 GB.
tl;dr: Customers are not responsible for companies's shitty business plans that are built upon marketing deceit. Stop selling "unlimited" plans!
That's nice, but again, "unlimited" is always a lie. From your BackBlaze ToS:
Backblaze has the right at any time to change, modify, add to or discontinue or retire any aspect or feature of the Backblaze Products including, but not limited to, the software, hours of availability, equipment needed for access or use, the maximum disk space that will be allotted on Backblaze servers on your behalf, or the availability of Backblaze Products on any particular device or communications service. Backblaze has no obligation to provide you with notice of any such changes.
So, just like all these other providers throughout history, BackBlaze will try to make it seem unlimited until the moment they decide to fuck you over.
Marketing deceit like this makes me want to get an account and set up a "dd if=/dev/urandom" job to create low compressibility garbage to crapflood the storage on their servers until they hit me with their "fair use" policy. Which they would... it's only a question of degree.
So, where would they draw the line? 20 TB? 100 TB? I don't know, but dd can pull from urandom all day long...
These "unlimited" claims always turn out to be lies. When will we learn?
My friend paid for an "unlimited" account from JustCloud for backup. He stored 1.8 TB on it and then they "fair use"'d his ass and canceled his account. They didn't even give him a refund for the rest of the money he prepaid.