Good point, now what are you going to do with your business degree?
Fire all my employees and shut down the company. Take a long vacation. Then get an easy job with moderate pay and a lot of vacation time.
A guy could work long hours and employ people and struggle and risk to try to make money. But what's the point if he only gets to keep a tiny part of it? Why not take the capital and invest it in a country that still allows people to succeed? Why not give up the extra work for the government's benefit and just enjoy some leisure? Sure it doesn't employ anyone or produce anything, but why should we want goods produced or people employed?
The practice of extra-billing, in which physicians charge patients a higher fee than that covered by provincial insurance, was common in some provinces. The patients then had to pay the difference between the cost of the service and the amount covered by provincial insurance. The federal government effectively abolished this practice in the Canada Health Act, a law that specifically prohibits extra-billing and penalizes any province that allows it.
So you lied about that. You lied about insurance companies overruling doctors on truly medically necessary treatments. If the doctors are correct, the insurance company loses these arguments. Show me the link to prove otherwise if you're not simply lying.
And if you don't want to pay taxes for health care, then fix Medicare and leave everyone else's health care alone.
What's the difference between government and an insurance company? I just don't get it. I'm not seeing how you could be any more bureacratic that Cigna, Aetna or Blue Cross.
For one thing, insurance companies don't ration using waiting lists. For another, insurance companies aren't a monopoly.
But ultimately, if the insurance company won't pay, I can pay out of pocket. The government plans will eventually eliminate this option. The government needs to lower the cost, and one of their tools to do this is to take away all the choices from doctors so the doctors are forced to accept below-market wages. If I can pay a doctor directly, a doctor can ask for extra money over and above the government reimbursement or he can refuse to work for below-market wages and accept cash only. The government plans must eventually prohibit this.
In the current system, doctors decide when something is medically necessary. The insurance companies can argue, but when the doctor is correct, the insurance companies lose the argument and end up paying the bill.
So in a free system, I have the final choice on my treatment and the discussion with the insurance company is about the bill, not the health care. In the government system, the bureaucrats have control over the health care itself.
Either way, its not your money. Your life or death decisions are making my health care more expensive, public or private.
That's false. See above. But even if it were true, you can take your financial arguments and cram them up your ass. We're free citizens in a free society. We won't just shuffle off to die on a waiting list. We won't allow ourselves to be made slaves to someone's need to control their health care budget. We won't surrender every decision about our health care and every decision about how we live our lives to the government and their need to cut health care costs.
I think it was someone who clicked on the links and read some of the articles. Just a guess though.
Here's a news article on the 60% tax rate, BTW. Were you to read it, you may be informed. Then perhaps you could understand how being informed and rating an article as "Informative" might somehow connect. Good luck on your journey of understanding.
Oh, and let me add: Your arguments are great. I am now completely persuaded. You won me over completely.
Please tell me when I can start letting life and death decisions for myself and my family be made by a government bureaucracy. It's such a great idea. Why didn't I see it before?
"The people who own insurance companies"? Who are they? Do they live in a cartoon mansion with their nephews and roll around on the cash in the vault?
Life isn't a cartoon. There are no "the people who own insurance companies". Teachers and plumbers own the insurance companies in their pension plan or 401K.
Which other countries were a better place than the US to start a company in the 1950s? It was just after WWII and most countries were rebuilding.
Which countries are a better place than the US to start a business in 2009? And in 2011 when the taxes start kicking in? And what about the years after that? There are lots of countries that won't be capping their carbon emissions, for example.
So fix Medicare and leave the rest of the health care system alone then.
The comprehensive plans are basically a huge organizational clusterfuck aimed at subsidizing Medicare using the taxes and premiums of healthy people, rationing care for everyone so you can ration it for Medicare recipients too, and forcing doctors and patients into low value/low physician-pay outcomes by denying all other choices. Some of us aren't willing to have our life-and-death choices subject to government bureaucratic decision trees. But none of the plans will ultimately allow us to opt out and pay for care in cash (a favorable alternative to dying or suffering on a waiting list in many cases) because that option will destroy the leverage that governments have to force physicians to work for below-market reimbursements. (Note how no one asks malpractice lawyers to work for below-market rates. Hmm. I wonder which party those lawyers give money to?)
My health-care costs aren't going up 8% per year. I'm not spending too much of my GDP on health care, because I don't have a GDP; I'm a person. The government can fuck off when it comes to my health care. And this is a matter of life and death for me and everyone else who uses health care. It's not like people are just going to acquiesce. This conflict on health care will continue to escalate and intensify until the ruling class backs down.
There will be very, very few new startups in the US. And many of the existing startups will shut down. There's just not much point in starting a business in the US any more.
- IPOs used to be plentiful, but that was before Sarbanes-Oxley made going public astronomically expensive. - The government is sucking up most of the country's available capital [to buy votes] for stimulus and other government spending, leaving less available for business growth. - The new stock option rules more-or-less preclude giving lower-level employees company stock so they share in the success of the company. - Even for those that do see success, the tax rate will be 60-70% in a few years, so they won't be able to keep much of what they make. They won't be able invest the money in new startups because the taxes will take too much and there will be none left over. - And don't forget that everyone knows businesses are villains and rich businessmen are hated. Why subject yourself to all that for such low after-tax gains?
It's not really the land of opportunity any more -- not unless you know just the right people in government or the environmental industrial complex to steer you an earmark. And even those will run out in a few years after all the money is spent and all the output from the country's slowly-declining future production is borrowed and spent.
They would lose most of their customers doing that. How is that a win for them?
If class action lawsuits had a loser-pays (at least some part of legal costs) provision, and if lawyers could only make a fee instead of hitting the jackpot, then it might be worthwhile.
As it is, consumers are losing the money anyway. The company collects it to pay their legal bills. It might not be the whole $5, but it's far, far too much. How much money is it worth to you for "insurance" against a company stealing $5 from you? You're already paying a lot more than that in legal bills that are passed on to you.
If the system were structured to accomplish something besides transferring money to lawyers, that would be a better point. Every other company besides AT&T has to pay legal bills too, regardless of whether they win or lose in court.
Class action lawsuits are almost always a complete abuse of the legal system. They deliver huge multi-million dollar profits to lawyers. The "class" of plaintiffs usually gets a coupon or something worth less than $5. And the rest of us innocent people who just want phone service (or whatever) are forced to pay an extra de facto "tax" to cover the costs of the huge payout to the lawyers -- lawyers who are essentially free riders, who produced exactly nothing of practical value in return for the money they've taken.
In theory, class-action lawsuits protect consumers. But the current system harms consumers much, much more than it helps us.
This whole idea sounds like some dumb-ass' PhD topic. Fascinating in theory, doesn't work in reality.
Yeah? And who do we have running the country? Is it a bunch of grizzled industry veterans who know how to take a "smart" idea and apply practical sense to it and make it work (or, more often, reject it)? No. We have a bunch of PhD academics who have never had an accountable job outside of government and university. And they just know they're right about everything.
Famous athletes are, more-or-less by definition, excellent. Athletes are also extremely valuable, because entertainment has some (small ?) value. And athletes can bring that entertainment value to millions of people at the same time. The cumulative value is enormous. That's why athletes get paid so well.
If we don't (over-) exalt scientists as being valued, then they'll only have their real, ordinary, self-evident value. Just like everyone else who goes to work and does his job -- serving, helping the sick, building a product for folks to buy when they value it, or whatever other job anyone does. Scientists are great. But so are nurses and plumbers and farmers and anyone else who produces more value for others than he consumes himself.
Science should be practical. It's good when it helps people. Any individual scientist who has done science to help people is worth looking up to. That also goes for anyone else of any profession.
You're asking for celebrities. Celebrities are not famous for helping people, they're famous for appearing on TV. Do you really think it's wise to teach your kids to look up to whoever the TV producers want to put on TV? Are TV producers wise?
Why not teach them to value practical virtue rather than vanity?
The only thing he can do that doesn't take extra time is eat less food. Everything else takes up time.
If you count calories (honestly -- no cheating) and always eat less in calories than the energy you use, you will lose weight over time. This is true regardless of the amount of exercise you do. It will make you very hungry if you don't exercise though because it's not much food. If you follow through with it, you may find it makes you so hungry that you find time to exercise more, using more calories, so you can finally eat.
How is any of those situations enough like a gay couple that you can imply that to discriminate against it requires discriminating against gays?
If discrimination is an option, which you seem to be implying it is, then why not? Because the law need not be changed then. Because gay marriages offer no evident benefit to society. (Can you cite a benefit to society?) Because the question can be closed and the debate resolved to the satisfaction of the vast majority of the people.
Yes, marriage is a civil liberty.
It's clearly not. If it were, it could not be denied to people. Marriage is denied to lots of different people for lots of different reasons.
Yes, their freedom to marry is more important than your freedom to discriminate.
Their prerogative to use government force against me trumps my freedom then? That's your argument to the 96% to ask them to agree to this? Because the 4% are the ruling class and they get to decide?
It's interesting how quickly this went from "civil liberties" to forcing people to do things against their will. It's fairly clear that you don't care about civil liberties at all and are just repeating leftist talking-points.
If all relationships are the same as a marriage, then incestuous relationships are the same as a marriage. If we can't discriminate against any two people, then we can't discriminate against any two people. That's why.
If we can discriminate against people, then "discrimination" doesn't argue for gay marriage at all.
So, since discrimination is not an issue, why should 4% or the population get to choose for the other 96% what a marriage is? It's still a question without a real answer.
What's the point though? Why should folks listen? How does gay marriage help society?
It seems pretty obvious how traditional marriage helps society: forming families and providing a structure for the raising of children. That's why there are hundreds of thousands of years of history of marriages, all more-or-less the same as today's unions.
But gay marriages don't seem to benefit society. And honestly, beyond the advancement of certain political goals, I don't see how they benefit gay folks either. That may be part of the reason you can look at the entire history of all cultures throughout the world and not find gay marriage.
So why should folks in a society grant you a benefit? Why should they listen? In what way is this change a good deal for society? And what's the downside to society of just leaving things the same?
Slashdot Mirror
I guess Michael S. Malone is stupid then?
Good point, now what are you going to do with your business degree?
Fire all my employees and shut down the company. Take a long vacation. Then get an easy job with moderate pay and a lot of vacation time.
A guy could work long hours and employ people and struggle and risk to try to make money. But what's the point if he only gets to keep a tiny part of it? Why not take the capital and invest it in a country that still allows people to succeed? Why not give up the extra work for the government's benefit and just enjoy some leisure? Sure it doesn't employ anyone or produce anything, but why should we want goods produced or people employed?
Read the Victor Davis Hanson article. It tells an easy-to-understand story about an electrician.
Every single statement you've made is false. You are a liar. You are lying.
Back up your statements with links. Show me the insurance company waiting list.
Canada specifically prohibits fee-for-service medicine:
The practice of extra-billing, in which physicians charge patients a higher fee than that covered by provincial insurance, was common in some provinces. The patients then had to pay the difference between the cost of the service and the amount covered by provincial insurance. The federal government effectively abolished this practice in the Canada Health Act, a law that specifically prohibits extra-billing and penalizes any province that allows it.
So you lied about that. You lied about insurance companies overruling doctors on truly medically necessary treatments. If the doctors are correct, the insurance company loses these arguments. Show me the link to prove otherwise if you're not simply lying.
And if you don't want to pay taxes for health care, then fix Medicare and leave everyone else's health care alone.
What's the difference between government and an insurance company? I just don't get it. I'm not seeing how you could be any more bureacratic that Cigna, Aetna or Blue Cross.
For one thing, insurance companies don't ration using waiting lists. For another, insurance companies aren't a monopoly.
But ultimately, if the insurance company won't pay, I can pay out of pocket. The government plans will eventually eliminate this option. The government needs to lower the cost, and one of their tools to do this is to take away all the choices from doctors so the doctors are forced to accept below-market wages. If I can pay a doctor directly, a doctor can ask for extra money over and above the government reimbursement or he can refuse to work for below-market wages and accept cash only. The government plans must eventually prohibit this.
In the current system, doctors decide when something is medically necessary. The insurance companies can argue, but when the doctor is correct, the insurance companies lose the argument and end up paying the bill.
So in a free system, I have the final choice on my treatment and the discussion with the insurance company is about the bill, not the health care. In the government system, the bureaucrats have control over the health care itself.
Either way, its not your money. Your life or death decisions are making my health care more expensive, public or private.
That's false. See above. But even if it were true, you can take your financial arguments and cram them up your ass. We're free citizens in a free society. We won't just shuffle off to die on a waiting list. We won't allow ourselves to be made slaves to someone's need to control their health care budget. We won't surrender every decision about our health care and every decision about how we live our lives to the government and their need to cut health care costs.
I think it was someone who clicked on the links and read some of the articles. Just a guess though.
Here's a news article on the 60% tax rate, BTW. Were you to read it, you may be informed. Then perhaps you could understand how being informed and rating an article as "Informative" might somehow connect. Good luck on your journey of understanding.
Oh, and let me add: Your arguments are great. I am now completely persuaded. You won me over completely.
Please tell me when I can start letting life and death decisions for myself and my family be made by a government bureaucracy. It's such a great idea. Why didn't I see it before?
"The people who own insurance companies"? Who are they? Do they live in a cartoon mansion with their nephews and roll around on the cash in the vault?
Life isn't a cartoon. There are no "the people who own insurance companies". Teachers and plumbers own the insurance companies in their pension plan or 401K.
Which other countries were a better place than the US to start a company in the 1950s? It was just after WWII and most countries were rebuilding.
Which countries are a better place than the US to start a business in 2009? And in 2011 when the taxes start kicking in? And what about the years after that? There are lots of countries that won't be capping their carbon emissions, for example.
Also, government as a percentage of GDP was about half as large in the 1950s. And the regulatory burden was much lower.
So fix Medicare and leave the rest of the health care system alone then.
The comprehensive plans are basically a huge organizational clusterfuck aimed at subsidizing Medicare using the taxes and premiums of healthy people, rationing care for everyone so you can ration it for Medicare recipients too, and forcing doctors and patients into low value/low physician-pay outcomes by denying all other choices. Some of us aren't willing to have our life-and-death choices subject to government bureaucratic decision trees. But none of the plans will ultimately allow us to opt out and pay for care in cash (a favorable alternative to dying or suffering on a waiting list in many cases) because that option will destroy the leverage that governments have to force physicians to work for below-market reimbursements. (Note how no one asks malpractice lawyers to work for below-market rates. Hmm. I wonder which party those lawyers give money to?)
My health-care costs aren't going up 8% per year. I'm not spending too much of my GDP on health care, because I don't have a GDP; I'm a person. The government can fuck off when it comes to my health care. And this is a matter of life and death for me and everyone else who uses health care. It's not like people are just going to acquiesce. This conflict on health care will continue to escalate and intensify until the ruling class backs down.
No, it won't be a problem.
There will be very, very few new startups in the US. And many of the existing startups will shut down. There's just not much point in starting a business in the US any more.
- IPOs used to be plentiful, but that was before Sarbanes-Oxley made going public astronomically expensive.
- The government is sucking up most of the country's available capital [to buy votes] for stimulus and other government spending, leaving less available for business growth.
- The new stock option rules more-or-less preclude giving lower-level employees company stock so they share in the success of the company.
- Even for those that do see success, the tax rate will be 60-70% in a few years, so they won't be able to keep much of what they make. They won't be able invest the money in new startups because the taxes will take too much and there will be none left over.
- And don't forget that everyone knows businesses are villains and rich businessmen are hated. Why subject yourself to all that for such low after-tax gains?
See this article by Victor Davis Hanson.
See this article by T. J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor.
See this article by Michael S. Malone.
It's not really the land of opportunity any more -- not unless you know just the right people in government or the environmental industrial complex to steer you an earmark. And even those will run out in a few years after all the money is spent and all the output from the country's slowly-declining future production is borrowed and spent.
There will be plenty of vacant data center space.
They would lose most of their customers doing that. How is that a win for them?
If class action lawsuits had a loser-pays (at least some part of legal costs) provision, and if lawyers could only make a fee instead of hitting the jackpot, then it might be worthwhile.
As it is, consumers are losing the money anyway. The company collects it to pay their legal bills. It might not be the whole $5, but it's far, far too much. How much money is it worth to you for "insurance" against a company stealing $5 from you? You're already paying a lot more than that in legal bills that are passed on to you.
If the system were structured to accomplish something besides transferring money to lawyers, that would be a better point. Every other company besides AT&T has to pay legal bills too, regardless of whether they win or lose in court.
The "value" is outweighed many times over by the cost.
The system, as it currently exists, is unjust for that reason (and for other reasons).
Class action lawsuits are almost always a complete abuse of the legal system. They deliver huge multi-million dollar profits to lawyers. The "class" of plaintiffs usually gets a coupon or something worth less than $5. And the rest of us innocent people who just want phone service (or whatever) are forced to pay an extra de facto "tax" to cover the costs of the huge payout to the lawyers -- lawyers who are essentially free riders, who produced exactly nothing of practical value in return for the money they've taken.
In theory, class-action lawsuits protect consumers. But the current system harms consumers much, much more than it helps us.
Then you won't have to listen to the cliche that an artificial brain will always be 10 years away. No one would use eleven years in a cliche.
You're right. Zelaya clearly has an immigration/residency claim. He should pursue that claim if he wants to. He doesn't have a claim to office.
You're basically arguing over procedure, not substance.
Also, the Supreme Court has said it ordered his arrest, not his exile. The court is saying the military exiled Zelaya on their own.
Maybe you should get more than that one plate and fork.
This whole idea sounds like some dumb-ass' PhD topic. Fascinating in theory, doesn't work in reality.
Yeah? And who do we have running the country? Is it a bunch of grizzled industry veterans who know how to take a "smart" idea and apply practical sense to it and make it work (or, more often, reject it)? No. We have a bunch of PhD academics who have never had an accountable job outside of government and university. And they just know they're right about everything.
I hope you like blackouts.
Famous athletes are, more-or-less by definition, excellent. Athletes are also extremely valuable, because entertainment has some (small ?) value. And athletes can bring that entertainment value to millions of people at the same time. The cumulative value is enormous. That's why athletes get paid so well.
If we don't (over-) exalt scientists as being valued, then they'll only have their real, ordinary, self-evident value. Just like everyone else who goes to work and does his job -- serving, helping the sick, building a product for folks to buy when they value it, or whatever other job anyone does. Scientists are great. But so are nurses and plumbers and farmers and anyone else who produces more value for others than he consumes himself.
I don't think anyone looks up to Paris Hilton.
Science should be practical. It's good when it helps people. Any individual scientist who has done science to help people is worth looking up to. That also goes for anyone else of any profession.
You're asking for celebrities. Celebrities are not famous for helping people, they're famous for appearing on TV. Do you really think it's wise to teach your kids to look up to whoever the TV producers want to put on TV? Are TV producers wise?
Why not teach them to value practical virtue rather than vanity?
The only thing he can do that doesn't take extra time is eat less food. Everything else takes up time.
If you count calories (honestly -- no cheating) and always eat less in calories than the energy you use, you will lose weight over time. This is true regardless of the amount of exercise you do. It will make you very hungry if you don't exercise though because it's not much food. If you follow through with it, you may find it makes you so hungry that you find time to exercise more, using more calories, so you can finally eat.
How is any of those situations enough like a gay couple that you can imply that to discriminate against it requires discriminating against gays?
If discrimination is an option, which you seem to be implying it is, then why not? Because the law need not be changed then. Because gay marriages offer no evident benefit to society. (Can you cite a benefit to society?) Because the question can be closed and the debate resolved to the satisfaction of the vast majority of the people.
Yes, marriage is a civil liberty.
It's clearly not. If it were, it could not be denied to people. Marriage is denied to lots of different people for lots of different reasons.
Yes, their freedom to marry is more important than your freedom to discriminate.
Their prerogative to use government force against me trumps my freedom then? That's your argument to the 96% to ask them to agree to this? Because the 4% are the ruling class and they get to decide?
It's interesting how quickly this went from "civil liberties" to forcing people to do things against their will. It's fairly clear that you don't care about civil liberties at all and are just repeating leftist talking-points.
Yeah. It's almost like there's no problem at all.
If all relationships are the same as a marriage, then incestuous relationships are the same as a marriage. If we can't discriminate against any two people, then we can't discriminate against any two people. That's why.
If we can discriminate against people, then "discrimination" doesn't argue for gay marriage at all.
So, since discrimination is not an issue, why should 4% or the population get to choose for the other 96% what a marriage is? It's still a question without a real answer.
What's the point though? Why should folks listen? How does gay marriage help society?
It seems pretty obvious how traditional marriage helps society: forming families and providing a structure for the raising of children. That's why there are hundreds of thousands of years of history of marriages, all more-or-less the same as today's unions.
But gay marriages don't seem to benefit society. And honestly, beyond the advancement of certain political goals, I don't see how they benefit gay folks either. That may be part of the reason you can look at the entire history of all cultures throughout the world and not find gay marriage.
So why should folks in a society grant you a benefit? Why should they listen? In what way is this change a good deal for society? And what's the downside to society of just leaving things the same?
"I want it" is not really a persuasive argument.