1) No gov't oversight + 2) Dismantling of public-funded education = Aristocracy within 2 or 3 generations because the concentration of wealth at the top will far exceed the paltry pittance at the bottom. People complain about wealth at the top today -- wait til the Gilded Age of Libertarianism takes over.
Did you know Libertarian arguments favor child labor?
1) It's the parent's right to force a child to work. This has been the case for pretty much ever. Parents force their kids to do chores. Parents regularly employ their children in TV and movies. It's a basic tenet of every culture and society that children do work for their parents.
2) Gov't should not deny parental rights to child earnings by telling them their kids have to go to school (assuming we have any since public education is Evil[tm]).
3) The poor will force their children to contribute to household income using basic labor rather than paying for an education and deferring earnings. Obviously, an uneducated child's overall wealth potential decreases dramatically.
4) So, the poor get poorer (and more ignorant) and the rich get richer.
5) The rich, knowing that strict Libertarianism does not favor them, will do what they have always done: change the laws to favor themselves.
Ergo, over time, a Libertarian system favors Aristocracy. -l
Without taxation salaries would rise since there would be larger money supply available to create more wealth.
Sure sounds good on paper, doesn't it? The Libertarians would have you believe that the government is responsible for corporate domination, yet, Libertarian policies are, in effect, an (accidental?) attempt to return us to the Age of Aristocracy. Aristocracy may make the country look wealthy, but there will be plenty of emptier pockets to go about.
I told my wife yesterday I think I want to become an astronomer after the kids are out of school. In that Wikipedia article there, they say that they're not sure if Andromeda will actually collide with us this time around since they don't know its tangential velocity. I wish I could just sit down and figure that stuff out.
I could use sub-16GB for work stuff, though I couldn't fit all my music on that, obviously. I would absolutely require 1GB of RAM so as to avoid any need for swap.
As for speech, I believe the learning curve for babies to talk depends on how they are spoken to. If you GooGoo and GaaGaa at them all day in gibberish baby talk, they aren't going to learn how to speak very easily. But if you talk to them as you would talk to a young child, they are more apt to speak early themselves.
I wish I had my Child Psych text from college with me. I used to think that, too, but there was a study noted in the text that showed that baby talk actually helped language acquisition. IIRC, the reason behind it was that gibberish exposed children to a wider variety of sounds than the every day objects babies are exposed to.
Sigh...very well let us walk through some of the points made in your linked comment:
I linked to an entire thread. Did you read the entire thread?
This is true, but it does not preclude you from making the best decision that you can with the information that is available to you.
Translation: "RTFM". Response: No one is or can be an expert in everything. Medical minutiae is no different and as the guy points out in the thread, shopping based on a few price variables (copay, deductible, etc.) doesn't even scratch the surface as to what good health insurance is.
You save up enough ahead of time to meet your high deductible and your insurance pays the rest in the case of catastrophic injury or unanticipated long term care.
As pointed out in the thread, the people who can pay for high deductibles, long-term disability, etc. are not the people anyone is concerned about. To put it in nerd terms, the set of people who can afford to save for an HSA and pay premiums for a family even for a high deductible does not overlap very much with the set of 44 million people without health insurance.
The insurance companies are not competing to provide you better health care directly, but rather to provide you with a more competitively priced risk premium. Competition among insurance agencies, as long as they can meet federal requirements for assets vs. ongoing expenses, is a good thing.
That's not precisely true. They do attempt to compete on large categories of health care service (e.g., vision, mental health, domestic partner benefits, etc.). The poster is correct though that they're no more efficient than Medicare and often have additional hoops for you to jump through for non-routine procedures.
Nothing in your linked post refutes my previous argument that third party payment for routine costs is the single most important factor in the rising cost of healthcare.
It was my mistake in that I thought you meant only "Medicare" by "third party".
While I agree with you to a certain extent -- e.g., the doctor-golf thing drives me nuts -- I think you'll find the increase in costs have more to do with both a greater amount of demand and demand for better and more intensive treatments. The nursing shortage is a direct result of this and the obesity/diabetes epidemic is one cause. Another is longer lifespan. Increasing higher education costs and malpractice suits also factor in there to some extent. Lastly, emergency room visits for otherwise preventable problems inflates billable rates for everyone.
Routine well visits absolutely do not have to be as expensive as they are right now. The problem is when they find something wrong and you're out for a battery of tests. I'm also sure the well exam visit costs help pad out for losses for those who can't pay.
HSAs + high deductibles + low premiums only make sense for largely healthy people and when you pull them from the general insurance pool, rates go up for everyone else. This, plus our inalienable right to Life as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, leaves me with no option but to support a government insurance program, as much as it pains me to say it.
2) Standard TV depends a lot on the quality of the source material. Stuff filmed with a 480i NTSC camera is a little blocky, and sometimes (like on animated shows like the Simpsons) you can see visible ringing. It's not horrible, but it is there.
I thought this was a problem with digital cable and satellite.
Long answer: I'm on Debian, so I'm not 100% sure if Ubuntu uses the same sysvinit package, but, I did check it out and 'telinit q' and its manpage both agree on rereading inittab. So, I'd look into filing a bug.
If the idea of the scheduler is that the system administrator has to hand-tune all their processes with 'nice' to balance interactivity, CPU-hogging, etc., then yes, the Linux scheduler does a terrible job. However, for an untuned workload of dozens of nice = 0 processes, it works great, though.
Having said that, I do nice down my "top" processes and set the delay to at least 5 seconds. This seems to give a better idea of what's running a lot as top then uses less resources.
That may work for classical music, but the RIAA has its fist clutched tight around Internet radio stations like my favorite, WOXY. They actually upped the rate Internet radio stations have to pay and it's both a global fee and a per-listener fee.
1) NPR isn't funded by the government, though they do apply and compete for the occasional grant.
2) That said, many local non-commercial radio stations which carry NPR content do qualify for and take government funding. Sometimes that funnels into NPR, sometimes it doesn't, but ultimately it's the radio station that makes the decision.
So, if you're so libertarian that you can't stand the idea of government-assisted community radio, I suggest that you call your local station and make the substantial pledge it will take to get them off the gubmint's teat.
Shredders are for bulk document destruction. I've got these things called "matches" that are simpler, cheaper, easier to use and can even be used in the dark when the power is out.
They work a treat. Not every task requires an expensive electrical gadget and hammers are still the right tool if the task at hand is driving a couple of nails.
If for some reason you're fire averse a pair of scissors properly applied for about 10 seconds will prove sufficient to defeat the roll of tape.
So, if you want to go back in time and reword your comment in such a way that does not suggest burning junk mail, I will happily permit you to adjust it thusly. Unlike some jerk-offs on the Internet, I could care less if people originally misstate themselves, change their minds, etc. I make mistakes, so do others. No biggie.
But, claiming that you did not suggest burning junk mail in lieu of shredding is careless at best and disingenuous at worst.
As far as the dangers of burning junk mail are concerned, from the first link in the EPA email:
Polychlorinated dibenzodioxins (dioxins)
...
Past generations burned their garbage, but that practice should be a thing of the past. Garbage back then didn't contain plastics, foils, batteries, paper (which is bleached with chlorine) and other materials. Even burning paper today can release dixions[sic] into the air.
From the second link in their email:
Dioxins
Backyard burning is of particular health concern because it produces significant quantities of dioxins. Dioxins and "dioxin like" compounds are a group of 30 highly toxic chlorinated organic chemicals. They are produced naturally in small quantities, but are primarily the result of human activity. They can be produced through industrial processes such as chlorinated chemical manufacturing and metal smelting. Currently, however, the largest quantified source of dioxin emissions is the uncontrolled burning of household trash (backyard burning). Studies have shown that only small amounts of chlorinated materials in waste are required to support dioxin formation when burning waste. This means that even when materials containing high levels of chlorine, such as PVC, are removed from household trash, burning the waste still creates dioxins because nearly all household waste contains trace amounts of chlorine.
Much of the dioxins created and released into the air through backyard burning settle on plants. These plants are, in turn, eaten by meat and dairy animals, which store the dioxins in their fatty tissue. People are exposed to dioxins primarily by eating meat, fish, and dairy products, especially those high in fat. Backyard burning occurs most commonly in rural farming areas where dioxin emissions can more easily be deposited on animal feed crops and grazing lands. These dioxins then accumulate in the fats of dairy cows, beef, poultry, and swine, making human consumption of these harmful chemicals difficult to avoid.
Dioxins are classified as persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic pollutants (PBTs). PBTs are highly toxic, long-lasting substances that can build up in the food chain to levels that are harmful to human and ecosystem health. Persistent means they remain in the environment for extended periods of time. Bioaccumulative means their concentration levels increase as they move up the food chain. As a consequence, animals at the top of the food chain (such as humans) tend to have the highest dioxin concentrations in their bodies.
Dioxins are potent toxicants with the potential to produce a broad spectrum of adverse effects in humans. Dioxins can alter the fundamental growth and development of cells in ways that have the potential to lead t
Sorry I misread you. I thought you were addressing the artificial scarcity of having just a handful of TLDs.
I'd like to see an independent international non-profit entity manage creation and maintenance of domain names. I'm hesitant to suggest the UN cause they might ban stuff that we accept in the U.S., like hate speech. It's fine if they do like ICANN and let people bid to become registrars, but I think you're right that it shouldn't be segmented by TLD... because there should be zillions of TLDs, IMO.
Here's what they sent [edited for privacy, anti-spam, make the URLs work, etc.]:
Thank you for your inquiry to the EPA Web site. Your request has been received by the Headquarters Information Resources Center Public Access Service, a contractor operated reference and referral service.
You asked if it is environmentally preferable to shred or burn junk mail.
We suggest you read the following quote from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation:
"Past generations burned their garbage, but that practice should be a thing of the past. Garbage back then didn't contain plastics, foils, batteries, paper (which is bleached with chlorine) and other materials. Even burning paper today can release dixions into the air."
http://www.dec.state.ny.us/website/dshm/redrecy/bu rn.html
In addition, burning of waste may be prohibited in certain areas.
For information on the pollutants released by burning paper and other trash, please see the following Web sites:
Businesses seeking to reduce waste may want to visit the following Web sites:
Wastewise: Preserving Resources, Preventing Waste:
http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/reduce/wstewise/index.htm WasteWise is a free, voluntary, EPA program helping U.S. organizations eliminate costly municipal solid waste, benefiting the bottom line and the environment.
Please contact us if we may be of further assistance.
External Links Disclaimer: Please be aware that links to non-EPA sites do not imply any official EPA endorsement. Furthermore, EPA does not accept any responsibility for the opinions, ideas, data or products presented at those locations, or guarantee the validity of the information provided. EPA does not guarantee the suitability of the information for any specific purpose.
*****************
Public Access Service, operated by ASRC Management Services
EPA Headquarters
Ariel Rios Building
1200 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. (3404T)
Washington, DC 20460
Fax: (202) 566-0574
*****************
I'll just let you read yourself about dioxins but it sounds like you should switch to scissors (or maybe just mark
Slashdot Mirror
1) No gov't oversight
+
2) Dismantling of public-funded education
=
Aristocracy within 2 or 3 generations because the concentration of wealth at the top will far exceed the paltry pittance at the bottom. People complain about wealth at the top today -- wait til the Gilded Age of Libertarianism takes over.
Did you know Libertarian arguments favor child labor?
1) It's the parent's right to force a child to work. This has been the case for pretty much ever. Parents force their kids to do chores. Parents regularly employ their children in TV and movies. It's a basic tenet of every culture and society that children do work for their parents.
2) Gov't should not deny parental rights to child earnings by telling them their kids have to go to school (assuming we have any since public education is Evil[tm]).
3) The poor will force their children to contribute to household income using basic labor rather than paying for an education and deferring earnings. Obviously, an uneducated child's overall wealth potential decreases dramatically.
4) So, the poor get poorer (and more ignorant) and the rich get richer.
5) The rich, knowing that strict Libertarianism does not favor them, will do what they have always done: change the laws to favor themselves.
Ergo, over time, a Libertarian system favors Aristocracy.
-l
Without taxation salaries would rise since there would be larger money supply available to create more wealth.
Sure sounds good on paper, doesn't it? The Libertarians would have you believe that the government is responsible for corporate domination, yet, Libertarian policies are, in effect, an (accidental?) attempt to return us to the Age of Aristocracy. Aristocracy may make the country look wealthy, but there will be plenty of emptier pockets to go about.
IMHO,
-l
I told my wife yesterday I think I want to become an astronomer after the kids are out of school. In that Wikipedia article there, they say that they're not sure if Andromeda will actually collide with us this time around since they don't know its tangential velocity. I wish I could just sit down and figure that stuff out.
Cheers,
-l
That's the funniest thing I've read in the last ten minutes.
Cheers,
-l
Sounds like a great idea for a stored proc, though.
-l
So, it is true that the falling tree makes a sound even when no one is listening!
Thanks for clearing that up!
-l
Depends on the Jew. A lot of the Ashkenazi are bred with so much Slavic and Eastern European, it's hard to pick out any Semitic traits.
:)
Like everything, it just depends.
-l
On your laptop??? Weirdo. :)
-l
I could use sub-16GB for work stuff, though I couldn't fit all my music on that, obviously. I would absolutely require 1GB of RAM so as to avoid any need for swap.
-l
I wish I had my Child Psych text from college with me. I used to think that, too, but there was a study noted in the text that showed that baby talk actually helped language acquisition. IIRC, the reason behind it was that gibberish exposed children to a wider variety of sounds than the every day objects babies are exposed to.
-l
I linked to an entire thread. Did you read the entire thread?
Translation: "RTFM". Response: No one is or can be an expert in everything. Medical minutiae is no different and as the guy points out in the thread, shopping based on a few price variables (copay, deductible, etc.) doesn't even scratch the surface as to what good health insurance is.
As pointed out in the thread, the people who can pay for high deductibles, long-term disability, etc. are not the people anyone is concerned about. To put it in nerd terms, the set of people who can afford to save for an HSA and pay premiums for a family even for a high deductible does not overlap very much with the set of 44 million people without health insurance.
That's not precisely true. They do attempt to compete on large categories of health care service (e.g., vision, mental health, domestic partner benefits, etc.). The poster is correct though that they're no more efficient than Medicare and often have additional hoops for you to jump through for non-routine procedures.
It was my mistake in that I thought you meant only "Medicare" by "third party".
While I agree with you to a certain extent -- e.g., the doctor-golf thing drives me nuts -- I think you'll find the increase in costs have more to do with both a greater amount of demand and demand for better and more intensive treatments. The nursing shortage is a direct result of this and the obesity/diabetes epidemic is one cause. Another is longer lifespan. Increasing higher education costs and malpractice suits also factor in there to some extent. Lastly, emergency room visits for otherwise preventable problems inflates billable rates for everyone.
Routine well visits absolutely do not have to be as expensive as they are right now. The problem is when they find something wrong and you're out for a battery of tests. I'm also sure the well exam visit costs help pad out for losses for those who can't pay.
HSAs + high deductibles + low premiums only make sense for largely healthy people and when you pull them from the general insurance pool, rates go up for everyone else. This, plus our inalienable right to Life as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, leaves me with no option but to support a government insurance program, as much as it pains me to say it.
-l
You're right.
For your enjoyment, here is NMerriam doing a fine job explaining health care.
-l
I thought this was a problem with digital cable and satellite.
-l
Short answer: File a bug.
Long answer: I'm on Debian, so I'm not 100% sure if Ubuntu uses the same sysvinit package, but, I did check it out and 'telinit q' and its manpage both agree on rereading inittab. So, I'd look into filing a bug.
-l
If the idea of the scheduler is that the system administrator has to hand-tune all their processes with 'nice' to balance interactivity, CPU-hogging, etc., then yes, the Linux scheduler does a terrible job. However, for an untuned workload of dozens of nice = 0 processes, it works great, though.
Having said that, I do nice down my "top" processes and set the delay to at least 5 seconds. This seems to give a better idea of what's running a lot as top then uses less resources.
$0.02USD,
-l
Cheers,
-l
Sucks to the RIAA's assmar
-l
OK, I'll bite, troll.
1) NPR isn't funded by the government, though they do apply and compete for the occasional grant.
2) That said, many local non-commercial radio stations which carry NPR content do qualify for and take government funding. Sometimes that funnels into NPR, sometimes it doesn't, but ultimately it's the radio station that makes the decision.
So, if you're so libertarian that you can't stand the idea of government-assisted community radio, I suggest that you call your local station and make the substantial pledge it will take to get them off the gubmint's teat.
$0.02USD,
-l
I wish I had your phone number so that every time I have this argument I can call on you to back me up.
Great posts, man.
-l
This is exactly why I haven't considered applying for the beta program.
-l
So, if you want to go back in time and reword your comment in such a way that does not suggest burning junk mail, I will happily permit you to adjust it thusly. Unlike some jerk-offs on the Internet, I could care less if people originally misstate themselves, change their minds, etc. I make mistakes, so do others. No biggie.
But, claiming that you did not suggest burning junk mail in lieu of shredding is careless at best and disingenuous at worst.
As far as the dangers of burning junk mail are concerned, from the first link in the EPA email:
From the second link in their email:
-l
That was their summary of my question. The actual question was longer and more precise.
I asked the EPA because I was interested to see what they thought and I thought you (and slashdot) might be interested, too.
-l
Sorry I misread you. I thought you were addressing the artificial scarcity of having just a handful of TLDs.
I'd like to see an independent international non-profit entity manage creation and maintenance of domain names. I'm hesitant to suggest the UN cause they might ban stuff that we accept in the U.S., like hate speech. It's fine if they do like ICANN and let people bid to become registrars, but I think you're right that it shouldn't be segmented by TLD... because there should be zillions of TLDs, IMO.
Cheers,
-l
I'll just let you read yourself about dioxins but it sounds like you should switch to scissors (or maybe just mark