I'd mod you insightful, (and I hope someone does) but you missed a really crucial part: an actual business plan.
It's true that without sales and marketing, nobody will know about your kick-ass product. Marketing is important, not least because the sales force can report back what the customer really wants. But, having worked at a few tech startups, let me say this: you can have cool technology, you can have a good sales force, but if you don't have any kind of road map for how you're going to run the business (who's the customer, what problem are you solving, how does each iteration of your product line solve the problem, where does revenue come from, how and when do you expect to meet expenses, et bleeding cetera) then your kick-ass technology and super sales force won't keep you afloat.
...why bother, your type obsesses over lint like this.
...and with the ad hominem attack, Performer Guy concedes. He failed to mention the Nazis or Hitler, although he gets partial credit for bringing up Churchill. Introducing sources which have no bearing on the original debate (Churchill, the U.S. Constitution) got a few extra B.T.U.s, but this was still only medium heat at best.
Resolved: spelling and grammar errors in a news story reduce that story's credibility, since they cast suspicion on the care and attention to detail of the author.
You've gotta be kidding me. Thomas "Don'ttouchmeI'maleper" Covenant is a Christ figure? Thomas "Selfpitymakesmenoble" Covenant is a Christ figure? What confirmation class did you go to?
The way I heard it, Jesus went around healing lepers, raising the dead, feeding people, and telling people that they ought to honor God and respect and love one another. Last time I checked, Jesus spent a night of self-pity and then a couple days of anguish and torture.
Or, wait, did it go like, "Jesus, there are all these people who came here to listen to you rap, but they're hungry!" "Well, tell 'em that's not my problem. I'm the Son of God and I don't do catering."
Sure, sure, Covenant winds up being some kind of redeemer, and if the only other redemption you're familiar with is the Christian one, then you are stuck with saying that Covenant is a Christ figure. But don't kid yourself: you're not doing Christ any favors with the comparison. Covenant is a whiny, self-absorbed bastard.
The main reason I didn't like it was because the narrative was so scattershot.
And then some. But then, you're gonna get scattershot narrative when your movie consists entirely of scenes and dialoge ripped off from other movies. I loved the scene they ripped off from the first Matrix -- that was postmodern wankage of excellence.
Here are some more things that were dumb:
The kid lived. How utterly bogus. The kid should've gotten it in the neck from a squid, and then gurgled out "Neo..." as he fired the shot to open the door and died.
People believed this shmuck of a kid who came running in from the battle yelling, "The war is over!" Who the fuck was this guy? Machines busting in on Zion and the populace believes the war's over on the say-so of some nobody? They don't even wait for confirmation!
In the future, humans can make amazingly high-tech gear (like the ships) and they can make fibers for cloth, but nobody can knit worth a damn.
The distinguishing mark of rank in the future army of humanity is the color of your ratty-ass piece of shit sweater.
The machine city looks really cool -- if you're H.R. Giger. What the fuck? Why do all the machines have tentacles and claws and look like a cross between Cthulhu and a facehugger? Neo shows up at the machine city (why the hell do machines need a city?) and there are flying machines all over the place -- but there are walkways for people. WTF? And there's this spiky thing with a swarm of bees for a face. Wow, that looks cool, but why the hell would machines ever build something like that? And what was all the lightning all over that thing? The machines made no sense!
And okay, so back in The Matrix we found out that most of the people in the matrix were humans that were providing power to the machines. Never mind that babies need to be touched and loved (or else they die -- feed a baby and keep it clean, and it'll still die if you don't touch it) and that the whole farm idea is dumb pseudoscience (why would they need humans if they've got fusion? oh, never mind), but now Neo and Smith have just whacked everybody in the matrix. So, the Architect says that those who want out can stay out, and the ones who're happier in the matrix will keep on being in there...what about all the people that died? We're supposed to be happy with this? And the baby farms -- those are going to keep on keeping on, right? So we're supposed to be happy about that?
Oh yeah, and when Trinity gets it, that whole "kiss me one last time so you can feel what it's like to kiss a dead person" scene -- that's ripped off practically word-for-word from a Farscape episode...dude, how embarrassing is it that every episode of Farscape, a television show, was better-written and better-acted than any of the Matrix movies?
The whole battle sequence was stupid. So, the squids break in and come in in dribs and drabs, and then just swarm around and around and around, letting the Aliens freight handlers that wanna be BattleMechs shoot at them...and then when we've seen that effect a lot, a whole bunch more squids come in and just swarm all over the 'mechs and kill all the guys. Why didn't that happen in the first place? We've already established that the machines aren't stupid and they have a pretty good grasp of history.
Oh yeah, that's why: because the Brothers Wankovsky wanted to rip off every cheesy, trite, overblown war movie moment ever spewed out of Hollywood.
That's probably the same reason that the squids don't use their lasers in the attack -- it'd be too short.
Now what about having the music store make CD-Rs of the 10 singles for you in the store?
You know, The Wherehouse tried doing that back in the 1980s, with audio tapes. That didn't work too well -- I only saw those mix stations for about three years and then they were gone. I'd guess that there were enough people who thought it was cool that they only lost money on them slowly. But, given the failure then, I wouldn't be too hopeful for the MegaCorps to try again.
And gosh, if I lived closer to my office (16.5 miles away, and I'm unusually close for the Bay Area) then I wouldn't have to worry about the fact that there is no shower and no bicycle storage at the building.
The whole smug approach of the bicycling advocates ignores the huge infrastructural change that increased bicycle use would require, as well as the staggering cost of it all. "Just ride your bike to work," ignores the fact that for most of the people working in your office building (wherever that office building is, so long as it's in the U.S.) riding a bike to work is just plain impractical. If you are rich enough to live downtown or just a couple miles away from your work, then swell. But don't presume that everyone is in your fortunate position.
The result was bloodshed, as the Jewish militias ehnically cleansed large parts of Palestine. Pretty ironic considering the background to the Jewish desire for a nation state.
Well, sort of. I mean, yeah, I appreciate the irony in the short time context of, say, a couple hundred years. On the other hand, I look at all the books in the Old Testament that documented the wanderings of the tribes of Israel and their S.O.P. when they came into an area (Exodus, Joshua, Judges,...) which pretty much involved killing off or driving out everyone who wasn't in the club. "Ethnic cleansing" is just the modern term for "the way you take territory" in the old, old school.
This is not to say that I think it's a good idea. I just appreciate the irony of the karmic rebound. That is to say, yup, you're absolutely right about the whole fucked-up situation, and it's even funnier in a grim sort of way than you'd originally pointed out. Because there's nothing funny about dead civilians spread in chunks all over the street, but there's poetic injustice enough to go around.
Oh yeah? What do you study? How do you collect your data, and how do you perform analysis? Are all of your reference materials online, or is it just that the dead tree stuff you need (mathematics, algorithms, procedures) are already on your office shelf?
My dad's a mathematician, and he told me a story about being in a meeting with a bunch of EEs where they were designing a missile guidance control system. Their math looked weird to him, so he went back to his office, looked up some integrals in his 30 year old reference book, and came back to them saying, "Nope, you can't do it that way -- it won't work, and here's the math to prove it."
Restrict yourself to online materials and you're going to run into some situation where you're working way harder than you need to.
Another example: last night, my older girl had to add up 6 integers, each less than 300. She wanted to use a calculator because her teacher said she could. She spent more time turning on the computer and looking for the calculator accessory than she took doing the addition when I made her just add them up on the whiteboard. Not quite the same thing, but one more instance where offline is worth paying attention to. You might be able to find all your integrals and statistical analysis methodology online, but it's probably faster just to grab the right book.
On the other hand, there is the occasional person who'd appreciate knowing how to stem the tide. On my home machine, I had junkbuster running but allowing connections from anywhere, so that I didn't have to maintain many blocklists -- but it turns out that that's a big spam loophole.
For months, that machine was listed as being a spam relay, but every relay tester I found reported that no, the host was fine. Finally, somebody (I forget which blacklist it was) added a junkbuster test to their relay tester, and I found out how spam was getting out through my machine. I then plugged that hole.
It's way more helpful to offer links or information on "how to harden your server against spammers" than it is to bitch about open relays. I certainly appreciated the information -- and as soon as I got it, I fixed the problem. The same must be true for other people (although probably not all).
Monkeys listed my server and, once I fixed the proxy that got the server listed, I was completely unable to get unlisted because of upstream DNS fubars that are out of my control. Oh well, they didn't care about me; I find it hard to care much more about them.
Dude! I remember seeing them at the Roxy in L.A. back in the day. Didn't they also do some sort of collaboration with Blondie, which gave us the song, "Fade Away and Radiate"?
No, you fail to understand what the word means. "Progressive", when applied to tax, means simply that the taxation rate increases as the income rate increases. "Flat" means that it remains constant across the range. "Regressive" means that the rate decreases as the income increases. Labeling any of these things "socialist" is unnecessary. The fact is, the United States income tax is a progressive tax. There have been several movements to try to make it a flat tax over the past decade, and none of them have come close to succeeding.
Either way, your standard of living doesn't improve just because they're taking the money out of your left pocket instead of your right pocket.
No doubt. I always see discussions of health care quickly devolving into flame wars and indoctrination cheerleading sessions; rarely have I seen someone explain the whole argument in a rational and clear way. I'd certainly be interested in hearing such an explanation.
In the present U.S. system, company A provides a benefit to its employees: it pays 100% of their health insurance premiums. Company B provides a similar benefit, but only pays 50% of those premiums. Company C does not provide that benefit. Now, since these companies all have workers who perform similar tasks, they are competing with each other in the labor market, so company C has to pay its workers more than the others do (otherwise, the workers would not work for C, since they require health insurance and they'd need to pay for it themselves, resulting in an effective salary at C that is much lower than the effective salaries of B and A employees). Great, we all understand this from basic economics.
Now, suppose there's some kind of socialized medicine, where the society (via the elected government) declares that it is a social good for everyone to have access to subsidized medical care. This means that companies A, B, and C can all cut the effective wages they pay their workers, since the companies and the workers no longer have a "health insurance" line item they need to pay. As El points out, though, somebody somewhere has to pay that line item, and that's where things get murky.
We've heard that the biggest providers of health care insurance wind up being able to dictate costs, practices, and procedures to various health care providers. The idea here is that the big customers can cut costs for their clients, eliminating some waste and shifting the remainder of what they declare to be excess over to people who are not clients of theirs. What happens to costs when there is only one giant in the market? Intuitively, one would tend to expect monopolistic pricing, where the clients (the patients) and the providers both get gouged -- but if the monopoly is the government, there's not a clear profit motive. So, I wonder.
The money does, indeed, have to come from somewhere; presumably, it'd be some kind of tax. Ultimately, the tax is going to be income-related, and will probably be progressive in some form (God help us if somebody wants to conflate the flat-tax argument with the universal health care argument). So, wealthier people will be paying more into the system than they get out, and poor people will be getting out more than they put in. Some people will claim that this is not fair. Others will think that but not want to say it out loud. Others will say that it is eminently fair. Nobody will just come out and say what they think, though, but will instead argue about what "wealthy" and "poor" mean. The problem, as I see it, really lies in deciding whether or not it is a social good to provide basic medical care to everyone. If we stipulate that, then it's simply a problem of arithmetic; if we don't, then there's no point in arguing the math. So really, does society benefit if anybody can get medical treatment? Does society benefit if only those with jobs or huge piles of cash can get medical treatment? If the answers to both of those questions are affirmative, then which scenario benefits society more?
A while ago (2001? maybe 2002...) there was a column in the San Jose Mercury News where the columnist was saying that she regularly drives solo in the HOV lane. She figured that the cost of the ticket amortized out to a couple of bucks per day as a toll for getting to her office faster.
The problem with her math is that, at least in California, that's a moving violation. Now, you can get a hundred parking tickets per year and so long as you pay them, that's no big deal. However, as you get more moving violations, your insurance rates increase and at a certain point, you will lose your driving license. You'll also find it very difficult to get insurance again, if you've had your license suspended or revoked.
So, when choosing whether to run the risk of accepting a consequence for breaking the law, it's very, very important to understand the full extent of those consequences.
My wife tells the story of how her brother made a flaming balloon once when they were kids. Instead of using a candle, he used a can of Sterno. Well, it turned out that the balloon didn't quite have enough lift to get the can over the wooden fence at the side of their yard, so the balloon tipped the can on its side and dragged along the fence, spilling flaming jelly all over the tinder-dry fence. Their mom came home to find the fire department putting out the fence and yard. Man, that sounds like it was fun.
I hear you, man. Use the right tool for the job. I just wish I had enough dough to have all the right tools.
I live in a suburban sprawl (San Jose, CA). I commute 17 miles to work, and I do that on a motorcycle (36MPG -- not the greatest, but not terrible). The same motorcycle is what I use for recreational touring -- going camping for the weekend involves some bungee cords, and then I'm off.
But, I've also got a pair of girls, one of whom is too small to ride on the back of a motorcycle. Moreover, we are constantly having to haul large amounts of stuff from place to place -- furniture, building materials, huge shopping, etc. So, we have a truck which gets lousy mileage (16MPG) but can move four people and a lot of stuff -- which works out to 64 passenger miles per gallon, and that's better than my motorcyle or my wife's!
Now, what I really want is a swell little hybrid for running little around-town errands like taking the baby to day care and picking up the dry cleaning. It'd be like having many different blades for a rotary saw for ripping, cross-cutting, cutting plywood, cutting particle board...
Damn! I remember when Ricochet first rolled out in San Jose (as Metricom, I think) back in the early 90s. In 1999, I had a Ricochet modem for my laptop, and it was great -- sending email from Caltrain at the station stops, working from the middle of Golden Gate Park...
And then, what, just a couple years ago, they went tits up. Poof! They had rolled out infrastructure in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and were working on spreading all over Los Angeles. They had money trouble and disappeared. And now, they're back, in San Diego and Denver?!
I wouldn't get too excited about Ricochet, man. They'll hose ya.
Well, it's not quite so simple. Here's some info about ozone (O3).
When sunlight hits oxygen (O2), ozone (O3) gets created. The light boosts up the energy of the oxygen molecules enough to turn 3O2 into 2O3. This is what makes up the Earth's ozone layer: sunlight hitting the atmosphere. Ozone also tends to absorb ultraviolet light, which is why we even care about there being lots of ozone up at the top of the atmosphere -- human cells tend to develop cancer when they're bombarded by UV light.
Ozone is dense, so it sinks in the atmosphere. It's also unstable, tending to revert to O2 plus an oxygen atom...which would like to combine with something! So, the ozone layer is constantly raining little ozone molecules down, which burn CO into CO2 (for example).
Ozone gets produced anywhere you shoot lots of the right kinds of energy through oxygen. Notably, around lightning bolts or other electrical discharges, but also in automobile engines. At the ground level, ozone doesn't have anywhere to sink to, so it just sort of hangs around until it collapses back to oxygen and an oxygen atom. This oxygen atom, if it comes into contact with a human's mucous membranes, will irritate said membrane. This is why ozone is considered a critical part of smog. There's photochemical smog (oxides of nitrogen which give that lovely brown tint to the sky) which combines with water to make nitric acid, and then there's ozone which is colorless but will cause asthma attacks.
One of my grandfathers used to sell ozone makers back in the 1970s, for use in pollution reduction. (Bubble ozone through whatever, it'll oxidize a lot of things.) The problem, of course, is twofold: it takes a lot of energy to make ozone, when you could just pipe chlorine through the water (or air) and do pretty much the same thing, and having all that ozone around at ground level requires people working in the area to wear protective gear (or suffer burns). If you want to boost the thickness of the ozone layer (and consequently increase the SPF of the atmosphere), the thing to do is to generate ozone way up at the top of the atmosphere, not down at the bottom.
Corrections and additions from actual chemists and environmental scientists are absolutely welcome, as I'm just working from a layman's knowledge here.
Heh. The biggest enemy of capitalism is successful capitalists. I forget whom I'm quoting, here, so I'll welcome any citations.
The point, though, is that an economic juggernaut like Wal-Mart has the ability to erect such significant barriers to entry once it achieves market dominance that no future competition can exist. Capitalism and the free market are nice models, but they are ultimately unbalanced. As soon as some entity has accumulated a huge portion of any given market, then that market is no longer free.
Your point about taking the market for granted is well-made, but it is a separate issue. There you're not talking about capitalism or free market economics, you're talking about business practices and inertia -- dangers which lurk for companies of all sizes.
Welll....in all the software licenses I've read, there's a big "Disclaimer" section that states that the only guarantee about the software is that it's going to take up space on your hard drive (actually, not even that for some things).
In the rest of the world, where we use postal codes, there's no way you can mess that up, it goes X#X #X#. like, V5J 4T0 and the last character's the number 0 because it's in the right place for it
Unless if, by "the rest of the world," you mean to include the United Kingdom. I know somebody who lives in Oxford whose postal code is OX4 1XP -- this pattern is XX# #XX. I don't know if that pattern is the same all over the U.K., but it sure ain't X#X #X#.
Nope. That's only for species. Two critters are said to be in the same species if they can breed and have fertile offspring.
Re:Usefulness of a gun in the house
on
DVRs for Cop Cars
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· Score: 1
Oh, I take your point completely, and I actually agree that it's a silly idea to make firing the weapon dependent upon the weapon being "unlocked" by some proximity sensor -- it makes the whole system far too prone to failure.
Out of curiosity, though, I wonder how often you've ever needed those guns around the house. I'm only 35, and my home was only burglarized once -- when I was 4 and no-one was home. That time, we lost a stereo, a TV, and my piggy bank was broken (garnering the thieves maybe as much as $2). So my experience leads me to believe that having one or more weapons ready to hand in the house would serve only to provide my kids with opportunities to get into trouble. I wonder if you'd care to contrast your own experience. Have you had many break-ins, and have you successfully defended your life and possessions with your many to hand weapons?
Hey, oops...wait, lemme find my watch, I took it off when I had a shower...just a minute...got my gun[...]
Yeah, as opposed to now, with your completely mechanical gun in your house, when the scenario goes something like this:
Burglar enters your home at night, pulls gun on you
YOU: Hey, whoa, why'd you wake me up and pull a gun on me? Wait a minute, you've got the drop on me and it ain't fair -- I was sleeping. Hang on, lemme go get my gun and we'll try that again.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd mod you insightful, (and I hope someone does) but you missed a really crucial part: an actual business plan.
It's true that without sales and marketing, nobody will know about your kick-ass product. Marketing is important, not least because the sales force can report back what the customer really wants. But, having worked at a few tech startups, let me say this: you can have cool technology, you can have a good sales force, but if you don't have any kind of road map for how you're going to run the business (who's the customer, what problem are you solving, how does each iteration of your product line solve the problem, where does revenue come from, how and when do you expect to meet expenses, et bleeding cetera) then your kick-ass technology and super sales force won't keep you afloat.
You need a business plan.
...why bother, your type obsesses over lint like this.
...and with the ad hominem attack, Performer Guy concedes. He failed to mention the Nazis or Hitler, although he gets partial credit for bringing up Churchill. Introducing sources which have no bearing on the original debate (Churchill, the U.S. Constitution) got a few extra B.T.U.s, but this was still only medium heat at best.
Resolved: spelling and grammar errors in a news story reduce that story's credibility, since they cast suspicion on the care and attention to detail of the author.
You've gotta be kidding me. Thomas "Don'ttouchmeI'maleper" Covenant is a Christ figure? Thomas "Selfpitymakesmenoble" Covenant is a Christ figure? What confirmation class did you go to?
The way I heard it, Jesus went around healing lepers, raising the dead, feeding people, and telling people that they ought to honor God and respect and love one another. Last time I checked, Jesus spent a night of self-pity and then a couple days of anguish and torture.
Or, wait, did it go like, "Jesus, there are all these people who came here to listen to you rap, but they're hungry!" "Well, tell 'em that's not my problem. I'm the Son of God and I don't do catering."
Sure, sure, Covenant winds up being some kind of redeemer, and if the only other redemption you're familiar with is the Christian one, then you are stuck with saying that Covenant is a Christ figure. But don't kid yourself: you're not doing Christ any favors with the comparison. Covenant is a whiny, self-absorbed bastard.
And then some. But then, you're gonna get scattershot narrative when your movie consists entirely of scenes and dialoge ripped off from other movies. I loved the scene they ripped off from the first Matrix -- that was postmodern wankage of excellence.
Here are some more things that were dumb:
Now what about having the music store make CD-Rs of the 10 singles for you in the store?
You know, The Wherehouse tried doing that back in the 1980s, with audio tapes. That didn't work too well -- I only saw those mix stations for about three years and then they were gone. I'd guess that there were enough people who thought it was cool that they only lost money on them slowly. But, given the failure then, I wouldn't be too hopeful for the MegaCorps to try again.
The whole smug approach of the bicycling advocates ignores the huge infrastructural change that increased bicycle use would require, as well as the staggering cost of it all. "Just ride your bike to work," ignores the fact that for most of the people working in your office building (wherever that office building is, so long as it's in the U.S.) riding a bike to work is just plain impractical. If you are rich enough to live downtown or just a couple miles away from your work, then swell. But don't presume that everyone is in your fortunate position.
The result was bloodshed, as the Jewish militias ehnically cleansed large parts of Palestine. Pretty ironic considering the background to the Jewish desire for a nation state.
Well, sort of. I mean, yeah, I appreciate the irony in the short time context of, say, a couple hundred years. On the other hand, I look at all the books in the Old Testament that documented the wanderings of the tribes of Israel and their S.O.P. when they came into an area (Exodus, Joshua, Judges,...) which pretty much involved killing off or driving out everyone who wasn't in the club. "Ethnic cleansing" is just the modern term for "the way you take territory" in the old, old school.
This is not to say that I think it's a good idea. I just appreciate the irony of the karmic rebound. That is to say, yup, you're absolutely right about the whole fucked-up situation, and it's even funnier in a grim sort of way than you'd originally pointed out. Because there's nothing funny about dead civilians spread in chunks all over the street, but there's poetic injustice enough to go around.
My dad's a mathematician, and he told me a story about being in a meeting with a bunch of EEs where they were designing a missile guidance control system. Their math looked weird to him, so he went back to his office, looked up some integrals in his 30 year old reference book, and came back to them saying, "Nope, you can't do it that way -- it won't work, and here's the math to prove it."
Restrict yourself to online materials and you're going to run into some situation where you're working way harder than you need to.
Another example: last night, my older girl had to add up 6 integers, each less than 300. She wanted to use a calculator because her teacher said she could. She spent more time turning on the computer and looking for the calculator accessory than she took doing the addition when I made her just add them up on the whiteboard. Not quite the same thing, but one more instance where offline is worth paying attention to. You might be able to find all your integrals and statistical analysis methodology online, but it's probably faster just to grab the right book.
For months, that machine was listed as being a spam relay, but every relay tester I found reported that no, the host was fine. Finally, somebody (I forget which blacklist it was) added a junkbuster test to their relay tester, and I found out how spam was getting out through my machine. I then plugged that hole.
It's way more helpful to offer links or information on "how to harden your server against spammers" than it is to bitch about open relays. I certainly appreciated the information -- and as soon as I got it, I fixed the problem. The same must be true for other people (although probably not all).
Monkeys listed my server and, once I fixed the proxy that got the server listed, I was completely unable to get unlisted because of upstream DNS fubars that are out of my control. Oh well, they didn't care about me; I find it hard to care much more about them.
Dude! I remember seeing them at the Roxy in L.A. back in the day. Didn't they also do some sort of collaboration with Blondie, which gave us the song, "Fade Away and Radiate"?
Absolutely! And hey, where else can you play TROGDOR?
No, you fail to understand what the word means. "Progressive", when applied to tax, means simply that the taxation rate increases as the income rate increases. "Flat" means that it remains constant across the range. "Regressive" means that the rate decreases as the income increases. Labeling any of these things "socialist" is unnecessary. The fact is, the United States income tax is a progressive tax. There have been several movements to try to make it a flat tax over the past decade, and none of them have come close to succeeding.
No doubt. I always see discussions of health care quickly devolving into flame wars and indoctrination cheerleading sessions; rarely have I seen someone explain the whole argument in a rational and clear way. I'd certainly be interested in hearing such an explanation.
In the present U.S. system, company A provides a benefit to its employees: it pays 100% of their health insurance premiums. Company B provides a similar benefit, but only pays 50% of those premiums. Company C does not provide that benefit. Now, since these companies all have workers who perform similar tasks, they are competing with each other in the labor market, so company C has to pay its workers more than the others do (otherwise, the workers would not work for C, since they require health insurance and they'd need to pay for it themselves, resulting in an effective salary at C that is much lower than the effective salaries of B and A employees). Great, we all understand this from basic economics.
Now, suppose there's some kind of socialized medicine, where the society (via the elected government) declares that it is a social good for everyone to have access to subsidized medical care. This means that companies A, B, and C can all cut the effective wages they pay their workers, since the companies and the workers no longer have a "health insurance" line item they need to pay. As El points out, though, somebody somewhere has to pay that line item, and that's where things get murky.
We've heard that the biggest providers of health care insurance wind up being able to dictate costs, practices, and procedures to various health care providers. The idea here is that the big customers can cut costs for their clients, eliminating some waste and shifting the remainder of what they declare to be excess over to people who are not clients of theirs. What happens to costs when there is only one giant in the market? Intuitively, one would tend to expect monopolistic pricing, where the clients (the patients) and the providers both get gouged -- but if the monopoly is the government, there's not a clear profit motive. So, I wonder.
The money does, indeed, have to come from somewhere; presumably, it'd be some kind of tax. Ultimately, the tax is going to be income-related, and will probably be progressive in some form (God help us if somebody wants to conflate the flat-tax argument with the universal health care argument). So, wealthier people will be paying more into the system than they get out, and poor people will be getting out more than they put in. Some people will claim that this is not fair. Others will think that but not want to say it out loud. Others will say that it is eminently fair. Nobody will just come out and say what they think, though, but will instead argue about what "wealthy" and "poor" mean. The problem, as I see it, really lies in deciding whether or not it is a social good to provide basic medical care to everyone. If we stipulate that, then it's simply a problem of arithmetic; if we don't, then there's no point in arguing the math. So really, does society benefit if anybody can get medical treatment? Does society benefit if only those with jobs or huge piles of cash can get medical treatment? If the answers to both of those questions are affirmative, then which scenario benefits society more?
A while ago (2001? maybe 2002...) there was a column in the San Jose Mercury News where the columnist was saying that she regularly drives solo in the HOV lane. She figured that the cost of the ticket amortized out to a couple of bucks per day as a toll for getting to her office faster.
The problem with her math is that, at least in California, that's a moving violation. Now, you can get a hundred parking tickets per year and so long as you pay them, that's no big deal. However, as you get more moving violations, your insurance rates increase and at a certain point, you will lose your driving license. You'll also find it very difficult to get insurance again, if you've had your license suspended or revoked.
So, when choosing whether to run the risk of accepting a consequence for breaking the law, it's very, very important to understand the full extent of those consequences.
My wife tells the story of how her brother made a flaming balloon once when they were kids. Instead of using a candle, he used a can of Sterno. Well, it turned out that the balloon didn't quite have enough lift to get the can over the wooden fence at the side of their yard, so the balloon tipped the can on its side and dragged along the fence, spilling flaming jelly all over the tinder-dry fence. Their mom came home to find the fire department putting out the fence and yard. Man, that sounds like it was fun.
I hear you, man. Use the right tool for the job. I just wish I had enough dough to have all the right tools.
I live in a suburban sprawl (San Jose, CA). I commute 17 miles to work, and I do that on a motorcycle (36MPG -- not the greatest, but not terrible). The same motorcycle is what I use for recreational touring -- going camping for the weekend involves some bungee cords, and then I'm off.
But, I've also got a pair of girls, one of whom is too small to ride on the back of a motorcycle. Moreover, we are constantly having to haul large amounts of stuff from place to place -- furniture, building materials, huge shopping, etc. So, we have a truck which gets lousy mileage (16MPG) but can move four people and a lot of stuff -- which works out to 64 passenger miles per gallon, and that's better than my motorcyle or my wife's!
Now, what I really want is a swell little hybrid for running little around-town errands like taking the baby to day care and picking up the dry cleaning. It'd be like having many different blades for a rotary saw for ripping, cross-cutting, cutting plywood, cutting particle board...
Damn! I remember when Ricochet first rolled out in San Jose (as Metricom, I think) back in the early 90s. In 1999, I had a Ricochet modem for my laptop, and it was great -- sending email from Caltrain at the station stops, working from the middle of Golden Gate Park...
And then, what, just a couple years ago, they went tits up. Poof! They had rolled out infrastructure in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and were working on spreading all over Los Angeles. They had money trouble and disappeared. And now, they're back, in San Diego and Denver?!
I wouldn't get too excited about Ricochet, man. They'll hose ya.
One of my grandfathers used to sell ozone makers back in the 1970s, for use in pollution reduction. (Bubble ozone through whatever, it'll oxidize a lot of things.) The problem, of course, is twofold: it takes a lot of energy to make ozone, when you could just pipe chlorine through the water (or air) and do pretty much the same thing, and having all that ozone around at ground level requires people working in the area to wear protective gear (or suffer burns). If you want to boost the thickness of the ozone layer (and consequently increase the SPF of the atmosphere), the thing to do is to generate ozone way up at the top of the atmosphere, not down at the bottom.
Corrections and additions from actual chemists and environmental scientists are absolutely welcome, as I'm just working from a layman's knowledge here.
Heh. The biggest enemy of capitalism is successful capitalists. I forget whom I'm quoting, here, so I'll welcome any citations.
The point, though, is that an economic juggernaut like Wal-Mart has the ability to erect such significant barriers to entry once it achieves market dominance that no future competition can exist. Capitalism and the free market are nice models, but they are ultimately unbalanced. As soon as some entity has accumulated a huge portion of any given market, then that market is no longer free.
Your point about taking the market for granted is well-made, but it is a separate issue. There you're not talking about capitalism or free market economics, you're talking about business practices and inertia -- dangers which lurk for companies of all sizes.
Welll....in all the software licenses I've read, there's a big "Disclaimer" section that states that the only guarantee about the software is that it's going to take up space on your hard drive (actually, not even that for some things).
In the rest of the world, where we use postal codes, there's no way you can mess that up, it goes X#X #X#. like, V5J 4T0 and the last character's the number 0 because it's in the right place for it
Unless if, by "the rest of the world," you mean to include the United Kingdom. I know somebody who lives in Oxford whose postal code is OX4 1XP -- this pattern is XX# #XX. I don't know if that pattern is the same all over the U.K., but it sure ain't X#X #X#.
Nope. That's only for species. Two critters are said to be in the same species if they can breed and have fertile offspring.
Oh, I take your point completely, and I actually agree that it's a silly idea to make firing the weapon dependent upon the weapon being "unlocked" by some proximity sensor -- it makes the whole system far too prone to failure.
Out of curiosity, though, I wonder how often you've ever needed those guns around the house. I'm only 35, and my home was only burglarized once -- when I was 4 and no-one was home. That time, we lost a stereo, a TV, and my piggy bank was broken (garnering the thieves maybe as much as $2). So my experience leads me to believe that having one or more weapons ready to hand in the house would serve only to provide my kids with opportunities to get into trouble. I wonder if you'd care to contrast your own experience. Have you had many break-ins, and have you successfully defended your life and possessions with your many to hand weapons?
Hey, oops...wait, lemme find my watch, I took it off when I had a shower...just a minute...got my gun[...]
Yeah, as opposed to now, with your completely mechanical gun in your house, when the scenario goes something like this:
Burglar enters your home at night, pulls gun on you
YOU: Hey, whoa, why'd you wake me up and pull a gun on me? Wait a minute, you've got the drop on me and it ain't fair -- I was sleeping. Hang on, lemme go get my gun and we'll try that again.