Found another Marxist (even if you think you aren't, your ideas are borrowed directly from concepts created by Marx, which makes you one by definition, if not by your own identity.)
Perhaps it's because the rich most often obtain their wealth not from hard work but through pricing differences on stocks and the borrowing of money to others
Ah yes, it's another "I know how to become rich, it's easy, just do X. I just don't do it because it's immoral!"
If trading stocks makes you rich, then go do it, and then tell me how it works out for you. (Pro tip: Even the best actively managed funds underperform compared to index funds because their fund managers aren't oracles, and day traders are rarely rich, so keep that in mind before you toss your savings away once the trading bell rings tomorrow.) Even if you do the smart thing and go long on investments, your chances of being rich aren't that great either, unless you've already got a lot of knowledge behind you that you can use to tell you whether something is a good investment or a horrible one (pro tip: Most are horrible, even the ones that look really promising tend to be bad.)
If the lending money makes you rich, then I have to ask: Where on earth do you obtain this money that you can lend out? Furthermore, how do you know whether the borrower will pay you back? If the borrower refuses to pay, then how do you recover your losses (and yes, it WILL be a loss for you, even if you manage to get all the principal amount back from them.) And given you're supposed to get rich form this, then how long does it take for that to happen, and with what amount of money are you starting?
Don't bother answering though: Becoming rich is actually a property of the individual (hence why people who win hundreds of millions in the lottery typically end up poor within a decade) so people don't get rich this way. If they do, there's a lot more that has to occur well before then.
to avoid the wealth to merely horde their assets
And this is why you don't understand anything about what makes a rich person, and that what you're saying is just a collection of regurgitated talking points. If you don't understand what I mean by this, then consider my point proven.
because the earnings were not at all in proportion to the effort.
This is perhaps the most bullshit concept of our time. Why do I say this? Because people (yourself included) espouse this all the time, and yet wouldn't ever dare follow it (and yes, that includes you as well.) This is derived from Marx's labor theory of value, which is that all labor is worth exactly the same, no matter what it is for. So this means that performing brain surgery is worth the same hourly wage as digging a ditch with a pickax. Another interesting property is that Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei is worth far less than Mein Kampf if Marxists applied that theory objectively.
In fact, it's rarely in proportion to the economic good or social good either
...according to some rules you just made up...
I'm unaware of anyone who in the long-term has a negative tax rate even with tax credits
Actually this is pretty easy to do; your effective income just has to be at or below the lowest 35% of income earners, and your net tax burden is less than zero in pretty much every circumstance. If you don't know anybody who has been this way their whole life, then you've only seen and known affluence.
If you read more than talking points you would realize that communism is an economic system, not a political one.
Actually, if you read more than the talking points, you would realize that communism is both an economic system and a political one. So of course there hasn't ever been a communist state, in fact it describes itself as stateless, meaning it has no borders, meaning it has no jurisdiction, meaning it has no rules or laws (and yes, all three of these are properties explicitly described.) The idea behind all of this is that capitalism causes all of the ills of the world, so the moment the whole world is communist, then there will be no more crime (after all, there can't be crime against laws that don't exist) so nobody will want to murder, nobody will want to steal, etc.
Yes, this is what communists actually believe, and because this is all a big pipe dream to begin with, it only makes sense that communism hasn't ever existed. So when we hop back into the real world, what we have are those who followed all of Marx's steps and never made it to this mythical state of existence like he predicted they would. Because that is as close as it gets, that is what we can refer to as communism in the real world, and it has not, does not, and never will work. Instead, all that it ever does is enslave people.
Common sense should tell you that health and healthcare aren't the same thing, meanwhile you're gathering metrics on the first, ignoring the second, and then claiming to be debating the second. If you want the best possible health care for any given condition in the world, then you're going to find it within the United States, period. Whether or not it's available to you in particular is a separable topic.
1. Ability to charge more for a cure than a treatment. On average, it costs $8k per year to treat someone with diabetes. That isn't the cost of medication - it's the cost of medication, hospitalizations, tests, supplies, etc. Pharma only gets about 20% of that - $1500 per year. But a cure for diabetes could be priced at $70k and still be less expensive than 10 years of treatment. Which business would you rather be in? $1500 per patient per year for 10 years or $70k lump sum up front?
Of that $1500 per year, how much of that is actually profitable for pharma? As far as I know, a big expense is in the insulin, which is created by means of an e. coli bacteria that has been genetically modified to shit human insulin. Really, that's how it's made, before that they used to puree cow and pig pancreases. Probably not a cheap thing to not only harvest, but to sterilize, purify, and then store cold and ship cold. Besides, you're missing the bigger picture here: They patients are all spread across a sea of many competitors. Imagine a captive market of all of them coming to you, and only you, for a period of 5 years, and they pay that amount to you, and only you. That will pay off a LOT more than simply entering the diabetes supplies market.
Of course, diabetes is kind of an odd one. Almost every type-2 diabetes patient I've met kind of doesn't give a shit about having diabetes or managing it properly. The warning signs exist for years and years before any permanent damage occurs, and even after it does, they still tend to ignore it. If some treatment or cure did come around, I doubt most of them would even use it. If I wanted to make smaller profits off of diabetes over a long period of time, I'd target their commodities, since they also apply to broader markets than just diabetes patients.
That sounds like it's probably the case for designer drugs that ultimately don't do a whole lot beyond what existing medication does (and there is ongoing debate about whether they should be allowed to make the kinds of ads that they do, especially when targeted at the last remaining cable TV demographic: Old people.) However I'd be curious to see these numbers after those have been filtered out. I personally am seeking treatment for keratoconus that comes via a drug made by a company called Avedro. I don't know about you, but I aint ever seen any advertisements for it (the associated procedure is corneal crosslinking, which even few doctors have heard of.) The way I know about it is because it's such a common condition that results in blindness in the absence of intervention. People who have this have usually heard about it by now.
I'm not sure what the motivation for writing it was, but it seems to be more of a rhetorical question given that it already offers three solutions, the third of which is what growing businesses already do anyways:
"Solution 3: Constant innovation and portfolio expansion: There are hundreds of inherited retinal diseases (genetics forms of blindness) Pace of innovation will also play a role as future programs can offset the declining revenue trajectory of prior assets."
The reality is, you'll never run out of diseases that can be cured or at least managed with treatment. Even if you came up with a treatment for chronic disease that never gets cured, it still ends up being commoditized no matter what happens, so no matter what, there is no such thing as an endless treatment cash cow.
means that you are *at least* 6 generations removed,
That range would be about 5 to 9.
It certainly doesn't mean anything else...
Yeah, it does, and again you're being retarded. In fact there are many reasons why this might be, like one patriarch having multiple kids with multiple wives who then intermarried with the rest of the group, a town that was isolated for several generations, or a nomadic tribe that only occasionally married with outsiders, (if at all) or many other reasons. And yes, this is all possible without inbreeding: The scientific consensus seems to be that after second cousins, there isn't a strong enough relationship to cause any ill effects, and usually in communities like these you're going to see between 4th and 8th cousins interbreeding. And the reality is that everybody has gone through this at some point in their past history; if they hadn't, then the global human population had to start out with much larger numbers than the 7 billion we have today.
This is called pedigree collapse by the way, and it is inevitable, even though in your case it is far more pronounced than that of a healthy person.
This is the basic reason that a private healthcare system can never be an ethical or ideal system. Making a profit can only come at the expense of someone's health, life, or livelihood. It ultimately places the burden of providing that profit on society as a whole.
I've never heard of a pharma company that says it needs more sick people. The reality of that industry is that the big players in the US are by far and away at the forefront of finding new cures and new therapies. After their market exclusivity and/or patents expire, they move on. Do you know who takes over from there? Companies with much smaller margins that make generic medications that are the same from one manufacturer to the next, effectively making them commodities. TFS mentions Gilead Sciences cure for Hep C, so let's drive this point further home using them as an example:
Contrary to popular conspiracy theories, they had the opportunity to create a permanent cure for the disease, and they made no attempt at all to prevent it from being fully effective. The prior-existing pharmaceutical treatments for Hep-C (i.e. anti-viral drugs, treatments for cirrhosis) were already profitable, and they could have simply spent their resources coming up with drugs to treat those symptoms that apply to all people with liver disease, or even in the case of anti-viral drugs, they could have worked for more than just this. But no, they went after the cure, and it cost them a lot of money. Meanwhile, guess what? Other companies are already jumping into this market without waiting for any patents to expire by developing new formulas:
If a cure doesn't pay off, or if Big Pharma doesn't want it to happen, then why the fuck would they bother? Call it unethical all you want, but if any more ethical approaches work, they damn sure aren't delivering anywhere close to the results than the existing "unethical" system does.
So which do you prefer?
1. You pay money to motivate somebody to be interested in creating a cure, and you don't die 2. You say "paying money for a cure is unethical!", nothing ever gets done, and you die
Besides that, the rest of the world should be grateful that the US works the way that it does. The democrats and the rest of the world love to bash our health care and bash the "megacorps" that operate here, but the US private sector has been providing ALL of them the cures, treatments, and therapies to more diseases than anybody else for the past few decades. Cures like this come here for a reason: The political situation here allows cures that work to receive great returns. Meanwhile, the rest of the world (typically) only pays a fraction for these treatments compared to what US citizens do, which effectively means that the US private sector is subsidizing the "free" health care that other countries provide.
So please, try not to take it for granted. And no, this is not to say that our health care system is perfect (believe me, there are plenty of legitimate complaints against it.)
The US's worst problem is that C-levels of corporations can greatly profit when their companies are hacked. This will ensure that breaches, and egregious ones, will continue for a long time to come. The top company brass finds about the hack, short their stock, makes an announcement that their customers are hosed, and laugh all the way to the bank.
The companies with enough technology to even matter for that purpose are watched like a hawk by institutional investors. You're a total moron if you think both them, and financial institutions that are inevitably part of the shorting process, would allow that to happen, ESPECIALLY when they're the ones who were conned.
No, they won this round because businesses aren't people, and it's been well established that businesses can be regulated. This was done because, oddly enough, there's a lot of racist/religious assholes who want to ban blacks and Catholics from eating, working, living, etc in various locations. Today the fight is mostly homophobes. Is this discrimination? Sure. Is all discrimination immoral? Obviously not--discriminating against an active murder who wants to suffocate people with cake or something equally absurd. In this case, discrimination was just incredibly stupid.
In this particular instance, the owner is arguing that creating a gay wedding cake is a violation of his first amendment rights, which I think is why SCOTUS is interested in hearing this.
Yes, this is what the brochure says, but if it was really true, why is it acceptable for the government to restrict the rights of non-citizens?
Like GP said, the constitution doesn't enumerate rights. Among other things, non-citizens are not given the right to vote, and the right to hold political office. Good luck finding a country that does allow these things. Furthermore, SCOTUS has, on many occasions, denied i.e. 4th amendment rights to foreign nationals on foreign soil.
If rights truly are endowed by the Creator, and if "all men" are equal in the eyes of that Creator, then don't all men qualify equally?
Much of what is written in the declaration of independence isn't reflected in the constitution, furthermore, the declaration isn't written as a binding law, rather it's written more as the founding philosophy of the US itself. It's a bit complicated, but in general, the declaration is not enforceable, UNLESS it's being used to interpret verbiage in the constitution that might be unclear or difficult to apply to an unforeseen circumstance.
At some point, the origin myth of the United States of America falls apart and you realize the language of the Declaration was hype and the belief in the Constitution as some magical document is misplaced.
Nobody ever said the constitution was magical. It's simply a document that lays the framework for the federal government and the many states. The declaration of independence is more of a philosophical document (otherwise "the creator" would be part of our legal framework.)
Accept that it was just a tool to codify the aristocracy
No, but it did regulate (and effectively limit) their power, as well as commoditize religion. Even your buddy Karl Marx appreciated how the "bourgeoisie" accomplished that.
and slavery,
No, it didn't. At all. Sure, there was language permissive of it in the constitution, but it didn't codify it whatsoever, and furthermore, Article 1, 9 clause 1 even added language permissive of the slave trade to end. This was part of the great compromise to make sure that all 13 colonies ratified the constitution. Had this not been done, the southern states would have been allowed to hold on to slavery much longer than they did.
and the flowery language of "rights" was just to dazzle the yahoos.
No, it actually wasn't. If it was just meant to dazzle, then it was intended to dazzle the states. The bill of rights was meant for them, not for you. And in fact, they didn't apply to you, nor did they imply that they applied to you. The only thing the constitution gave you was the right to vote for your state government. SCOTUS once even ruled that your state can restrict your right to free speech. That all changed after the 14th amendment was ratified, and the south was forced to ratify it in order to regain representation.
And you know what else? I think that no matter the origins, the US has turned out alright. If we weren't here, then by all measures, you and your comrades would have enslaved the world after Europe destroyed itself in the 40's, and that's probably why you hate the US so much...which also makes me happy.
This is a false dichotomy. It is entirely possible, and reasonable, to set terms of use and enforce them opportunistically without necessarily being aware of, or responsible for, everything that users might post on the site.
Okay, look, as a business of public accommodation (a business open to the public), they are required to not discriminate against customers.
SCOTUS has yet to rule on that (they will do so later this year) but there are a few objections I have to this:
- The customer is giving their money to somebody who hates them and demanding that they take their money. Seriously, why would you do this? I'd boycott them if anything. - There is a word in the English language for forcing somebody to perform a service against their will.
Not for me. T-Mobile's call blocking feature (checks whether they're number is coming from a real carrier network) works quite well, only failing for calls from St. Jude. And yes, these guys spoof their caller ID, DO NOT DONATE TO THEM! THEY NEVER LEAVE YOU ALONE AFTER!
France is the land of protectionism, and has been for the last ~250 years. They have their own ideas about what their culture should forcibly be that is highly resistant to change at best, highly xenophobic in the middle, and forcibly destroying other cultures within its own country (i.e. Basque) at worst. This is probably also part of the culture war that France has been waging against the US in vain for the past decade.
French culture is the Eric Cartman of all of the world's cultures.
That number is rounded, but it doesn't matter because you're being retarded. You're never actually 50% of anything, let alone 25% or 12.5%. Sure, parent and child actually share 50% on *average*, but in reality, this is rarely the case. In reality, the further down in successive generations you go, the percentage of shared DNA diverges greater from simple math like that. So saying "you're 6 generations away at that amount" is a pretty dumb assumption to make. I understand why this wouldn't make any sense to you. After all, in your family the shared DNA percentage increases every successive generation, so it goes against your intuition.
Besides, I've actually figured out where it came from, so even if that exact number is wrong (which it probably is,) it still has a basis in fact.
It won't. I've seen video games ban the word "jew" simply because somebody decided that a word filter was needed because the word is often used pejoratively. I found out recently I'm 2% Ashkenazi jew, and I wouldn't be surprised if some AI caught the word "nazi jew" out of that. Worse, is that hate speech is a constantly evolving thing, and the words and double-speak deliberately change on a routine basis. This is why hate speech rules are so fucking stupid: Since they're going after a constantly moving target, it's impossible to legislate or filter without making deliberately vague rules, and you can easily break said rules without realizing it at all. And how can you be expected to know that something is illegal when there isn't even a written law against it?
This gives the government plenty of room to get away with abuse. If you don't already have a reason to arrest somebody, you can just create one on the spot. The UK already does this.
No, you should see Backpage.... Oh wait, they're gone, so now you'll have to buy some meth and put a sentence that includes the words "go fast" in a personal ad.
Idiot, that's by design. The first amendment specifically says that freedom of the press will not be abridged. So guess what? There basically is no regulation, nor has there ever been much to that end, especially after the incorporation doctrine. The one and only exception is public broadcasts (and no, cable TV doesn't fall under that umbrella) and that, IMO, is going too far, though it's kind of difficult to say that it's unconstitutional since they are leasing spectrum from the FCC. But I still think that it should be unconstitutional anyways since the FCC has a monopoly, and it is a direct part of the federal government, which is what the first amendment has always applied to, even before incorporation. And who gives a fuck if Timberlake and Jackson flash a titty? Besides, sponsors don't like it when they break a common set of decency rules, which is why basic cable channels shy away from this, and the premium channels don't.
Vague terms like "public interest value" are exactly why the EU has no freedom of speech. There is plenty of language like that which governs free speech, and it's already being abused by allowing the police to interpret it however they'd like. This means nobody can really know what type of speech is banned, and the police can (and do) pick which type of speech they want to prosecute, all they have to do is relate it to any one of these vague terms. I'm sure you'll probably be thinking "but...fake news!" true, that is a problem, but if you start censoring rumors, then you become the Chinese government, who uses that as a justification to censor anything, no matter how true it is.
In the US, you've got protection from anything unless you're a broadcaster, or your speech fails the clear and present danger litmus test (i.e. credible threats of violence, conspiracy to murder, etc.) Nothing else will see you get prosecuted.
Emojis are really gay, and so was that fucking movie. The last thing I want is people putting eggplants, hearts, kisses, and fucking pandas all over their posts. If they add unicode, drinkypoo will be all over that, and it will be damn annoying.
Freedom of expression is a human right. Governments may stop you from exercising that right, but it is still an intrinsic right of every human.
From an ideological perspective, I'm not in disagreement. However, EU wide this is not recognized. Sure, some of their language claims it is in Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, but in that same article, in the second section, it basically says "By the way, we're just kidding, so we're going to add a bunch of vague language to give us all kinds of loopholes to justify censoring you."
You seem to be confused. You talk as if state known as "Europe" with its own legislation exists.
Ok butt-hair splitter, let me be more specific: The EU. But actually this applies in even non-EU countries in Europe, like Norway, and furthermore, the root of all of this in the EU is written in a document that has the word "European" in its title.
Section 2 basically says "we were just kidding about section 1, you don't have any rights", especially with vague terms like "necessary in a democratic society" (aside from this having no specific meaning, the best way to do that is to permit free speech, not limit it) and "protecting morals" (usually fundamentalists use terms like that.)
You seem to be confused. In Europe, they only pretend to give you free speech, but in reality, it doesn't exist. Not only for this, but for the way they also define hate speech: Basically if somebody considers something you say to be offensive, then you go to jail. Police are given their own discretion to decide if what you say is hate speech, mainly because there is no actual definition of what qualifies as hate speech, just a list of protected categories.
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Found another Marxist (even if you think you aren't, your ideas are borrowed directly from concepts created by Marx, which makes you one by definition, if not by your own identity.)
Perhaps it's because the rich most often obtain their wealth not from hard work but through pricing differences on stocks and the borrowing of money to others
Ah yes, it's another "I know how to become rich, it's easy, just do X. I just don't do it because it's immoral!"
If trading stocks makes you rich, then go do it, and then tell me how it works out for you. (Pro tip: Even the best actively managed funds underperform compared to index funds because their fund managers aren't oracles, and day traders are rarely rich, so keep that in mind before you toss your savings away once the trading bell rings tomorrow.) Even if you do the smart thing and go long on investments, your chances of being rich aren't that great either, unless you've already got a lot of knowledge behind you that you can use to tell you whether something is a good investment or a horrible one (pro tip: Most are horrible, even the ones that look really promising tend to be bad.)
If the lending money makes you rich, then I have to ask: Where on earth do you obtain this money that you can lend out? Furthermore, how do you know whether the borrower will pay you back? If the borrower refuses to pay, then how do you recover your losses (and yes, it WILL be a loss for you, even if you manage to get all the principal amount back from them.) And given you're supposed to get rich form this, then how long does it take for that to happen, and with what amount of money are you starting?
Don't bother answering though: Becoming rich is actually a property of the individual (hence why people who win hundreds of millions in the lottery typically end up poor within a decade) so people don't get rich this way. If they do, there's a lot more that has to occur well before then.
to avoid the wealth to merely horde their assets
And this is why you don't understand anything about what makes a rich person, and that what you're saying is just a collection of regurgitated talking points. If you don't understand what I mean by this, then consider my point proven.
because the earnings were not at all in proportion to the effort.
This is perhaps the most bullshit concept of our time. Why do I say this? Because people (yourself included) espouse this all the time, and yet wouldn't ever dare follow it (and yes, that includes you as well.) This is derived from Marx's labor theory of value, which is that all labor is worth exactly the same, no matter what it is for. So this means that performing brain surgery is worth the same hourly wage as digging a ditch with a pickax. Another interesting property is that Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei is worth far less than Mein Kampf if Marxists applied that theory objectively.
In fact, it's rarely in proportion to the economic good or social good either
...according to some rules you just made up...
I'm unaware of anyone who in the long-term has a negative tax rate even with tax credits
Actually this is pretty easy to do; your effective income just has to be at or below the lowest 35% of income earners, and your net tax burden is less than zero in pretty much every circumstance. If you don't know anybody who has been this way their whole life, then you've only seen and known affluence.
If you read more than talking points you would realize that communism is an economic system, not a political one.
Actually, if you read more than the talking points, you would realize that communism is both an economic system and a political one. So of course there hasn't ever been a communist state, in fact it describes itself as stateless, meaning it has no borders, meaning it has no jurisdiction, meaning it has no rules or laws (and yes, all three of these are properties explicitly described.) The idea behind all of this is that capitalism causes all of the ills of the world, so the moment the whole world is communist, then there will be no more crime (after all, there can't be crime against laws that don't exist) so nobody will want to murder, nobody will want to steal, etc.
Yes, this is what communists actually believe, and because this is all a big pipe dream to begin with, it only makes sense that communism hasn't ever existed. So when we hop back into the real world, what we have are those who followed all of Marx's steps and never made it to this mythical state of existence like he predicted they would. Because that is as close as it gets, that is what we can refer to as communism in the real world, and it has not, does not, and never will work. Instead, all that it ever does is enslave people.
Pharma shill
And I would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for you meddling kids.
Common sense should tell you that health and healthcare aren't the same thing, meanwhile you're gathering metrics on the first, ignoring the second, and then claiming to be debating the second. If you want the best possible health care for any given condition in the world, then you're going to find it within the United States, period. Whether or not it's available to you in particular is a separable topic.
1. Ability to charge more for a cure than a treatment. On average, it costs $8k per year to treat someone with diabetes. That isn't the cost of medication - it's the cost of medication, hospitalizations, tests, supplies, etc. Pharma only gets about 20% of that - $1500 per year. But a cure for diabetes could be priced at $70k and still be less expensive than 10 years of treatment. Which business would you rather be in? $1500 per patient per year for 10 years or $70k lump sum up front?
Of that $1500 per year, how much of that is actually profitable for pharma? As far as I know, a big expense is in the insulin, which is created by means of an e. coli bacteria that has been genetically modified to shit human insulin. Really, that's how it's made, before that they used to puree cow and pig pancreases. Probably not a cheap thing to not only harvest, but to sterilize, purify, and then store cold and ship cold. Besides, you're missing the bigger picture here: They patients are all spread across a sea of many competitors. Imagine a captive market of all of them coming to you, and only you, for a period of 5 years, and they pay that amount to you, and only you. That will pay off a LOT more than simply entering the diabetes supplies market.
Of course, diabetes is kind of an odd one. Almost every type-2 diabetes patient I've met kind of doesn't give a shit about having diabetes or managing it properly. The warning signs exist for years and years before any permanent damage occurs, and even after it does, they still tend to ignore it. If some treatment or cure did come around, I doubt most of them would even use it. If I wanted to make smaller profits off of diabetes over a long period of time, I'd target their commodities, since they also apply to broader markets than just diabetes patients.
That sounds like it's probably the case for designer drugs that ultimately don't do a whole lot beyond what existing medication does (and there is ongoing debate about whether they should be allowed to make the kinds of ads that they do, especially when targeted at the last remaining cable TV demographic: Old people.) However I'd be curious to see these numbers after those have been filtered out. I personally am seeking treatment for keratoconus that comes via a drug made by a company called Avedro. I don't know about you, but I aint ever seen any advertisements for it (the associated procedure is corneal crosslinking, which even few doctors have heard of.) The way I know about it is because it's such a common condition that results in blindness in the absence of intervention. People who have this have usually heard about it by now.
I'm not sure what the motivation for writing it was, but it seems to be more of a rhetorical question given that it already offers three solutions, the third of which is what growing businesses already do anyways:
"Solution 3: Constant innovation and portfolio expansion: There are hundreds of inherited retinal diseases (genetics forms of blindness) Pace of innovation will also play a role as future programs can offset the declining revenue trajectory of prior assets."
The reality is, you'll never run out of diseases that can be cured or at least managed with treatment. Even if you came up with a treatment for chronic disease that never gets cured, it still ends up being commoditized no matter what happens, so no matter what, there is no such thing as an endless treatment cash cow.
means that you are *at least* 6 generations removed,
That range would be about 5 to 9.
It certainly doesn't mean anything else...
Yeah, it does, and again you're being retarded. In fact there are many reasons why this might be, like one patriarch having multiple kids with multiple wives who then intermarried with the rest of the group, a town that was isolated for several generations, or a nomadic tribe that only occasionally married with outsiders, (if at all) or many other reasons. And yes, this is all possible without inbreeding: The scientific consensus seems to be that after second cousins, there isn't a strong enough relationship to cause any ill effects, and usually in communities like these you're going to see between 4th and 8th cousins interbreeding. And the reality is that everybody has gone through this at some point in their past history; if they hadn't, then the global human population had to start out with much larger numbers than the 7 billion we have today.
This is called pedigree collapse by the way, and it is inevitable, even though in your case it is far more pronounced than that of a healthy person.
This is the basic reason that a private healthcare system can never be an ethical or ideal system. Making a profit can only come at the expense of someone's health, life, or livelihood. It ultimately places the burden of providing that profit on society as a whole.
I've never heard of a pharma company that says it needs more sick people. The reality of that industry is that the big players in the US are by far and away at the forefront of finding new cures and new therapies. After their market exclusivity and/or patents expire, they move on. Do you know who takes over from there? Companies with much smaller margins that make generic medications that are the same from one manufacturer to the next, effectively making them commodities. TFS mentions Gilead Sciences cure for Hep C, so let's drive this point further home using them as an example:
Contrary to popular conspiracy theories, they had the opportunity to create a permanent cure for the disease, and they made no attempt at all to prevent it from being fully effective. The prior-existing pharmaceutical treatments for Hep-C (i.e. anti-viral drugs, treatments for cirrhosis) were already profitable, and they could have simply spent their resources coming up with drugs to treat those symptoms that apply to all people with liver disease, or even in the case of anti-viral drugs, they could have worked for more than just this. But no, they went after the cure, and it cost them a lot of money. Meanwhile, guess what? Other companies are already jumping into this market without waiting for any patents to expire by developing new formulas:
https://www.npr.org/sections/h...
If a cure doesn't pay off, or if Big Pharma doesn't want it to happen, then why the fuck would they bother? Call it unethical all you want, but if any more ethical approaches work, they damn sure aren't delivering anywhere close to the results than the existing "unethical" system does.
So which do you prefer?
1. You pay money to motivate somebody to be interested in creating a cure, and you don't die
2. You say "paying money for a cure is unethical!", nothing ever gets done, and you die
Besides that, the rest of the world should be grateful that the US works the way that it does. The democrats and the rest of the world love to bash our health care and bash the "megacorps" that operate here, but the US private sector has been providing ALL of them the cures, treatments, and therapies to more diseases than anybody else for the past few decades. Cures like this come here for a reason: The political situation here allows cures that work to receive great returns. Meanwhile, the rest of the world (typically) only pays a fraction for these treatments compared to what US citizens do, which effectively means that the US private sector is subsidizing the "free" health care that other countries provide.
So please, try not to take it for granted. And no, this is not to say that our health care system is perfect (believe me, there are plenty of legitimate complaints against it.)
The US's worst problem is that C-levels of corporations can greatly profit when their companies are hacked. This will ensure that breaches, and egregious ones, will continue for a long time to come. The top company brass finds about the hack, short their stock, makes an announcement that their customers are hosed, and laugh all the way to the bank.
The companies with enough technology to even matter for that purpose are watched like a hawk by institutional investors. You're a total moron if you think both them, and financial institutions that are inevitably part of the shorting process, would allow that to happen, ESPECIALLY when they're the ones who were conned.
No, they won this round because businesses aren't people, and it's been well established that businesses can be regulated. This was done because, oddly enough, there's a lot of racist/religious assholes who want to ban blacks and Catholics from eating, working, living, etc in various locations. Today the fight is mostly homophobes. Is this discrimination? Sure. Is all discrimination immoral? Obviously not--discriminating against an active murder who wants to suffocate people with cake or something equally absurd. In this case, discrimination was just incredibly stupid.
In this particular instance, the owner is arguing that creating a gay wedding cake is a violation of his first amendment rights, which I think is why SCOTUS is interested in hearing this.
Yes, this is what the brochure says, but if it was really true, why is it acceptable for the government to restrict the rights of non-citizens?
Like GP said, the constitution doesn't enumerate rights. Among other things, non-citizens are not given the right to vote, and the right to hold political office. Good luck finding a country that does allow these things. Furthermore, SCOTUS has, on many occasions, denied i.e. 4th amendment rights to foreign nationals on foreign soil.
If rights truly are endowed by the Creator, and if "all men" are equal in the eyes of that Creator, then don't all men qualify equally?
Much of what is written in the declaration of independence isn't reflected in the constitution, furthermore, the declaration isn't written as a binding law, rather it's written more as the founding philosophy of the US itself. It's a bit complicated, but in general, the declaration is not enforceable, UNLESS it's being used to interpret verbiage in the constitution that might be unclear or difficult to apply to an unforeseen circumstance.
At some point, the origin myth of the United States of America falls apart and you realize the language of the Declaration was hype and the belief in the Constitution as some magical document is misplaced.
Nobody ever said the constitution was magical. It's simply a document that lays the framework for the federal government and the many states. The declaration of independence is more of a philosophical document (otherwise "the creator" would be part of our legal framework.)
Accept that it was just a tool to codify the aristocracy
No, but it did regulate (and effectively limit) their power, as well as commoditize religion. Even your buddy Karl Marx appreciated how the "bourgeoisie" accomplished that.
and slavery,
No, it didn't. At all. Sure, there was language permissive of it in the constitution, but it didn't codify it whatsoever, and furthermore, Article 1, 9 clause 1 even added language permissive of the slave trade to end. This was part of the great compromise to make sure that all 13 colonies ratified the constitution. Had this not been done, the southern states would have been allowed to hold on to slavery much longer than they did.
and the flowery language of "rights" was just to dazzle the yahoos.
No, it actually wasn't. If it was just meant to dazzle, then it was intended to dazzle the states. The bill of rights was meant for them, not for you. And in fact, they didn't apply to you, nor did they imply that they applied to you. The only thing the constitution gave you was the right to vote for your state government. SCOTUS once even ruled that your state can restrict your right to free speech. That all changed after the 14th amendment was ratified, and the south was forced to ratify it in order to regain representation.
And you know what else? I think that no matter the origins, the US has turned out alright. If we weren't here, then by all measures, you and your comrades would have enslaved the world after Europe destroyed itself in the 40's, and that's probably why you hate the US so much...which also makes me happy.
This is a false dichotomy. It is entirely possible, and reasonable, to set terms of use and enforce them opportunistically without necessarily being aware of, or responsible for, everything that users might post on the site.
The law says you're responsible anyways.
Okay, look, as a business of public accommodation (a business open to the public), they are required to not discriminate against customers.
SCOTUS has yet to rule on that (they will do so later this year) but there are a few objections I have to this:
- The customer is giving their money to somebody who hates them and demanding that they take their money. Seriously, why would you do this? I'd boycott them if anything.
- There is a word in the English language for forcing somebody to perform a service against their will.
Not for me. T-Mobile's call blocking feature (checks whether they're number is coming from a real carrier network) works quite well, only failing for calls from St. Jude. And yes, these guys spoof their caller ID, DO NOT DONATE TO THEM! THEY NEVER LEAVE YOU ALONE AFTER!
France is the land of protectionism, and has been for the last ~250 years. They have their own ideas about what their culture should forcibly be that is highly resistant to change at best, highly xenophobic in the middle, and forcibly destroying other cultures within its own country (i.e. Basque) at worst. This is probably also part of the culture war that France has been waging against the US in vain for the past decade.
French culture is the Eric Cartman of all of the world's cultures.
That number is rounded, but it doesn't matter because you're being retarded. You're never actually 50% of anything, let alone 25% or 12.5%. Sure, parent and child actually share 50% on *average*, but in reality, this is rarely the case. In reality, the further down in successive generations you go, the percentage of shared DNA diverges greater from simple math like that. So saying "you're 6 generations away at that amount" is a pretty dumb assumption to make. I understand why this wouldn't make any sense to you. After all, in your family the shared DNA percentage increases every successive generation, so it goes against your intuition.
Besides, I've actually figured out where it came from, so even if that exact number is wrong (which it probably is,) it still has a basis in fact.
Only on slashdot is pedantry a good excuse to invalidate the argument being made.
Well played.
It won't. I've seen video games ban the word "jew" simply because somebody decided that a word filter was needed because the word is often used pejoratively. I found out recently I'm 2% Ashkenazi jew, and I wouldn't be surprised if some AI caught the word "nazi jew" out of that. Worse, is that hate speech is a constantly evolving thing, and the words and double-speak deliberately change on a routine basis. This is why hate speech rules are so fucking stupid: Since they're going after a constantly moving target, it's impossible to legislate or filter without making deliberately vague rules, and you can easily break said rules without realizing it at all. And how can you be expected to know that something is illegal when there isn't even a written law against it?
This gives the government plenty of room to get away with abuse. If you don't already have a reason to arrest somebody, you can just create one on the spot. The UK already does this.
No, you should see Backpage.... Oh wait, they're gone, so now you'll have to buy some meth and put a sentence that includes the words "go fast" in a personal ad.
Idiot, that's by design. The first amendment specifically says that freedom of the press will not be abridged. So guess what? There basically is no regulation, nor has there ever been much to that end, especially after the incorporation doctrine. The one and only exception is public broadcasts (and no, cable TV doesn't fall under that umbrella) and that, IMO, is going too far, though it's kind of difficult to say that it's unconstitutional since they are leasing spectrum from the FCC. But I still think that it should be unconstitutional anyways since the FCC has a monopoly, and it is a direct part of the federal government, which is what the first amendment has always applied to, even before incorporation. And who gives a fuck if Timberlake and Jackson flash a titty? Besides, sponsors don't like it when they break a common set of decency rules, which is why basic cable channels shy away from this, and the premium channels don't.
Vague terms like "public interest value" are exactly why the EU has no freedom of speech. There is plenty of language like that which governs free speech, and it's already being abused by allowing the police to interpret it however they'd like. This means nobody can really know what type of speech is banned, and the police can (and do) pick which type of speech they want to prosecute, all they have to do is relate it to any one of these vague terms. I'm sure you'll probably be thinking "but...fake news!" true, that is a problem, but if you start censoring rumors, then you become the Chinese government, who uses that as a justification to censor anything, no matter how true it is.
In the US, you've got protection from anything unless you're a broadcaster, or your speech fails the clear and present danger litmus test (i.e. credible threats of violence, conspiracy to murder, etc.) Nothing else will see you get prosecuted.
I'm mostly glad that they don't allow unicode:
Emojis are really gay, and so was that fucking movie. The last thing I want is people putting eggplants, hearts, kisses, and fucking pandas all over their posts. If they add unicode, drinkypoo will be all over that, and it will be damn annoying.
Freedom of expression is a human right. Governments may stop you from exercising that right, but it is still an intrinsic right of every human.
From an ideological perspective, I'm not in disagreement. However, EU wide this is not recognized. Sure, some of their language claims it is in Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, but in that same article, in the second section, it basically says "By the way, we're just kidding, so we're going to add a bunch of vague language to give us all kinds of loopholes to justify censoring you."
You seem to be confused. You talk as if state known as "Europe" with its own legislation exists.
Ok butt-hair splitter, let me be more specific: The EU. But actually this applies in even non-EU countries in Europe, like Norway, and furthermore, the root of all of this in the EU is written in a document that has the word "European" in its title.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Section 2 basically says "we were just kidding about section 1, you don't have any rights", especially with vague terms like "necessary in a democratic society" (aside from this having no specific meaning, the best way to do that is to permit free speech, not limit it) and "protecting morals" (usually fundamentalists use terms like that.)
Happy? But it gets worse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You seem to be confused. In Europe, they only pretend to give you free speech, but in reality, it doesn't exist. Not only for this, but for the way they also define hate speech: Basically if somebody considers something you say to be offensive, then you go to jail. Police are given their own discretion to decide if what you say is hate speech, mainly because there is no actual definition of what qualifies as hate speech, just a list of protected categories.