that this should have been purely a contract matter between Omega and the people it directly deals with
I agree. I said right from the beginning that I found the court's apparent reasoning incorrect. (I say "apparent" because there isn't any in the decision. They upheld the lower court by a tie vote, so it doesn't set any precedent.)
It is a matter between Omega and its resellers, and I'm making the assumption that they said some variant of "don't sell this to somebody who's going to turn around and sell it to Americans." For all I know they didn't; I haven't seen the contract.
But I know that Costco was certainly violating the intent of that, if not the letter. Further, they did so in a place where the knew the courts weren't going to help, so even if it is in the letter of the contract there's little that can be done about it. I don't know what could be done in a US court: if the reseller broke the agreement that's between them and Omega. But encouraging the reseller to break a contract is probably illegal, and certainly unfair.
Costco going to the court saying, "Gosh, your honor, I was just so thrilled to discover these at a third their regular price, and I had no idea that it was intended only for sales in countries where they would sell far fewer at the American price" is disingenuous. Legal, maybe, but I don't feel at all bad about having them slapped down for it. At least as long as the bogus reasoning involved to achieve it doesn't start to apply in other cases.
There is already a legal distinction between wholesale and retail transactions. The latter is subject to sales tax; the former is not. I don't think that would require a novel legal theory. If you needed one, they'd write "one per customer per day" into the contract, or something like that. I don't think it would be difficult.
I'm all for the US military and believe it should be the biggest in the world. But we could cut it by half and still be several times bigger than anybody else's. And that alone would close the deficits that are projected for 2013.
It's not a bad analogy. But it's also important to realize that the geocentric model is a GOOD model. Navigators used it long after Copernicus and Galileo, and if it's going by the wayside there, it's only because GPS really is geocentric.
The key to heliocentrism isn't changing the center, but changing the shape of the orbit. If you think of the sun as the center of the universe but are still trying to force things into circular motion, you end up with as many correction factors as geocentrism does. Galileo and Copernicus were well aware of the mathematical difficulties. It wasn't until Kepler that they finally had a solution.
The problem with the analogy is that it's not string theory that's equivalent to geocentrism, it's quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and general relativity. These are excellent theories that still have problems in that they disagree with each other. String theory is the epicycle tacked on to try to account for the differences.
That's still not quite apt, since the failure modes are different. Geocentric theory failed because data contradicted it without awkward modifications. Quantum and relativistic theories agree with the data, but disagree with each other under circumstances that are difficult to produce experimentally. So string theory is useful theory with no data, and epicycles were a good way to deal with the data but with poor theoretical support.
Some scientists are aggrieved that a theory with no data, and none forthcoming, should receive so much attention. Disproving it would actually be a great advance, and would actually reflect well on the people studying it. Unfortunately, the import of the experiment in this article is exaggerated.
In prime time, it has 50% of all viewers of news channels, and MSNBC a paltry 20%. The top 9 programs are all Fox News programs; Olberman's and Maddow's one million viewers are a third of O'Reilly's and half of Beck's and Hannity's.
As you observer, Stewart does beat MSNBC with 1.3 million viewers, but it doesn't come near to Fox's top commentators:
The one thing that contradicts your conclusion: none of these numbers are a substantial fraction of all voters. However, those are only nightly numbers; the total number of occasional viewers is probably at least 2 to 3 times that. And even more importantly, each one is probably (mis)informing friends and family who don't otherwise watch TV news.
What exactly is a "progressive with strong constitutional tendencies"?
Every time I've heard "constitutional" brought into it, it's usually a selective reading of the Constitution to oppose some progressive policy. Not that progressives are above playing the vagueness of the Constitution to their favor, but it seems to be anti-progressive forces that have decided that their reading is "original" or "strict".
Everybody loves the Constitution when it agrees with them, and everybody loves an expansive reading when it doesn't. And when it gets literally ungrammatical (like the first part of the second amendment), everybody has a field day.
I know you're joking, but also recall that oil is fungible. If the Saudis were to cut off the US, we'd need to buy more from Canada, raising the price. If they cut off any US allies, it would raise the price further.
That happened during the 1970s oil shocks, and the US produced more of its own oil at the time.
Omega sells watches to a Chinese distributor (call them CD), presumably with a minimum price floor that they're allowed to resell at.
I assume there's also a requirement to sell them retail, not wholesale. If not, they'd add one quickly once they realized what was going on. That's the contract violation.
If Costco is sending people out to buy the watches one at a time, it's really pushing the limit. If it's being done at a wink from the distributor, it's still a violation of the contract.
For all I know that's what they're doing to mislead a scrupulous dealer, the way meth labs have networks of people to acquire sudafed despite legal restrictions. But I'd still call it a dick move, the sort of thing that gives us anti-sudafed laws in the first place.
"Cons" should also include that it's toxic (more so than gasoline).
As well as the fact that it's currently expensive to manufacture and distill, with low yields.
Neither of this is necessarily impossible to overcome, but it's dishonest to claim that the only thing wrong with it is that it doesn't have a lobby. In fact, it DOES have a lobby: BP and Dupont have both been working on it.
Dealing with these issues might be a great use of some of that $30 million. But it's not a miracle cure.
Well, I wouldn't call $30 million over 5 years "urgent". That's doughnut money to the Department of Defense, whose budget is 100,000 times more than that.
US domestic oil production peaked 40 years ago. We've been subject to nasty oil shocks ever since, as well as the unpleasant fact that many key oil exporters are avowed or tacit opponents of the US. We'd much rather be self-sufficient in oil, regardless of whether the rest of the world experiences Peak Oil or not.
The history of commerce also revolves around contracts, and having some mechanism of enforcing them. In the wide wide world of international trading, that doesn't always hold.
There is one kind of fairness in places where contracts are enforced, and another kind where they aren't. Commerce is generally a lot slower in the latter, but it's "fair" in its way.
Costco is trying to play both sides of that fence. As you say, that's just arbitrage, but in doing so they're taking the kind of fair that happens in contract-less countries and importing it into the ones where contracts are enforceable. It's not just arbitrage, but arbitrage to skirt the rules.
In other words, it's fair only in the sense that nothing is unfair when there are no rules. That's why I said it was unfair.
I was under the impression that social engineering was a security flaw in the user, not in the application.
It is, but you can't debug the user, so you have to compensate in software. I feel a lot better knowing that J. Random Grandma has something looking over her shoulder to tell her she really shouldn't be going to that site. Cuz once J. Random Grandma's computer is hacked, it starts sending spam to MY computer.
Heck... I'm a software developer, and I've been known to screw up. Humans are buggy.
So I really want software that does both. If IE is ahead in that area, good for them. Sending out a press release declaring themselves more secure *in general* is dirty pool, and Google should say so. But they should also start swiping some of what MS does for Chrome, because it does make things safer along one dimension. Lord knows Microsoft has done it enough times. Let them feel the back hand of it for once.
Thing is, being a tie, the ruling has no precedential value (as I understand it; IANAL). It applies only to this case, and it's hard to generalize from here to "copyright" or "first sale".
And while the copyright argument is frankly bizarre, it may not actually necessarily be unfair. Omega sold the watches to the Chinese distributor with the intent that they be sold cheaper overseas, since presumably they maximize profits there by selling 1,000 watches at $300 than 200 watches at $1,000. And presumably they made the Chinese distributor promise to sell them only to consumers, but being in China, they can't enforce that.
I see Costco as making a dick move by circumventing that, and probably illegal, just not in a place Omega could do anything about it.
Which means one could say that the Court decided fairly: Costco is punished, and "first sale" isn't really affected because of the way the case was decided. Two legal technicalities cancel each other out in a way that's not really unjust.
Of course the Circuit Court's opinion will be cited in other cases to make decisions that ARE unjust, until the Supreme Court decides to clarify permanently. And ultimately Omega is on the same losing side that the RIAA and MPAA are: information wants to be free, and freight is cheap enough that even information as manifested in manufactured objects like watches is not all that much more expensive than "free".
There will sooner or later be a clearer case where somebody is buying books printed overseas and selling them at a cut rate. Somebody will use first-sale on that, too. But the differences are smaller for books than for luxury items, where there's more room to charge premiums in rich countries than poor ones. Omega might eventually be forced to abandon the idea of trying to maximize profits with differential pricing.
It should be one of those self-correcting things. If you appoint somebody who will have to recuse themselves a lot, the one you're hurting is yourself.
The Court still functions. It just has one fewer voice. That leads to ties, but there's a default tie-breaking rule (not to overturn). The capability isn't reduced.
The worse transgression, IMHO, is that the lifetime appointment means that the court moves very, very slowly. Until late in Bush's term, the entire conservative wing of the court had been appointed by Reagan or even Nixon, decades earlier. A period of Republican Presidency from 1968 to 1992 (with one exception) was having major ramifications 15 years after it ended.
If it hadn't been for the fact that (Republican) Gerald Ford appointed the court's key liberal (John Paul Stevens) and Reagan appointed a key moderate (O'Connor), the court would have been massively tilted to the right the entire time. That's something neither party is ever going to allow again. The filibuster is supposed to force them to nominate a moderate with some appeal across the aisle, but since it's used universally, it's really just used to appoint non-entities with no track record.
Which is why non-justice Kagan got nominated in this case. She could plausibly deny having any opinions at all. Expect to see more like her, not less.
For a while, yes. But Kagan is only 50 years old. From a political standpoint, they may lose some cases that they didn't have to in the next few years, but they've gained somebody who will be in their court (heh heh) for decades.
Not making a value judgment on that; it's just political hardball same on both sides. I wish it were different. I would also like a pony.
So... a retailer purchasing a product from a (foreign) distributor/manufacturer is treated differently from an individual buying from a retailer?
From the point of view of a scientist/coder it seems like an arbitrary distinction, but businesses make a lot of such arbitrary distinctions (which then require other arbitrary distinctions). So I'd need to digest it a bit before deciding if it's a bad idea, or where this is the "original" bad idea or just a consequence of the original arbitrary distinction.
One might actually learn something from the actual arguments about what the decision means. The actual decision itself is uninformative: it just declares the circuit court's decision affirmed by a 4-4 vote. It doesn't even say who voted which way, though I bet you could infer it from looking at the transcript.
The third one was not absolutely awful. It's not great, but it's probably worth the three hours it would take for you to watch it, if you didn't have to pay for it.
Not on its own merits, but just cuz it's the immediate prequel to A New Hope. It scratches the itch just a little bit.
But there's no reason to see epsiode II. Better than Episode I, but not by much.
No one likes a screaming child, but they are soon forgot. A well mannered articulate child is remembered forever.
Just the opposite, I'm afraid. I have no idea how many well-behaved children were on the last plane I was in. Possibly dozens. But I can tell you not just how many screaming children there were, but the brick-throwing distance between me and them.
"Hacktivism" is an asymmetric warfare. (I'm not judging it good or bad, just pointing that out.) They CAN'T organize a boycott, not one that anybody would care about, for the same reason that the Founding Fathers couldn't have a country until they rounded up the serious resources for a revolution.
(You don't seriously imagine that the Boston Tea Party thing changed any minds anywhere, do you? It's a popular nationalist myth, like George Washington and the cherry tree.)
They couldn't organize a big enough boycott to be noticed, so they tried (and apparently failed) to use small but highly targeted force. If they couldn't even summon up the power to DOS a site, how can they arrange a large-scale boycott? Amazon just doesn't covet the basement-dwelling demographic that much.
Astute analysis. Just want to add that the numbers for North Korea are estimates. The life expectancy of nearly 64 sounds a bit dubious to me, given their perpetual food crises, but I suppose they're getting enough aid to bring it up to India-style poverty.
A Libertarian might forbid people to freely participate in the commercial act of buying health insurance, but I don't think a libertarian would. A libertarian would merely call for the government to stop encouraging people to participate in the current health insurance scheme with tax breaks.
I personally don't believe a better system would automatically arise in its place; that's a libertarian axiom which I don't believe holds. But it's without doubt true that the present system is deeply flawed. The optimal system is an ideological question, which creates the unfortunate paradox of a hybrid compromise solution that is worse than any of the competing ideological solutions.
Unfortunately, that's kinda the way it works. They're trying to find something with a very low probability of happening. You can't pronounce the pond devoid of fish just by dropping your hook in a few times. Even the most optimistic predictions for the Higgs expect it to send a clear signal only one time in a gazillion.
They may well have already detected Higgs events, but the signal will be just barely louder than noise. The only way to tell is to listen longer.
Slashdot Mirror
Again I say, "See the difference"?
And I wish you wouldn't. It's condescending.
that this should have been purely a contract matter between Omega and the people it directly deals with
I agree. I said right from the beginning that I found the court's apparent reasoning incorrect. (I say "apparent" because there isn't any in the decision. They upheld the lower court by a tie vote, so it doesn't set any precedent.)
It is a matter between Omega and its resellers, and I'm making the assumption that they said some variant of "don't sell this to somebody who's going to turn around and sell it to Americans." For all I know they didn't; I haven't seen the contract.
But I know that Costco was certainly violating the intent of that, if not the letter. Further, they did so in a place where the knew the courts weren't going to help, so even if it is in the letter of the contract there's little that can be done about it. I don't know what could be done in a US court: if the reseller broke the agreement that's between them and Omega. But encouraging the reseller to break a contract is probably illegal, and certainly unfair.
Costco going to the court saying, "Gosh, your honor, I was just so thrilled to discover these at a third their regular price, and I had no idea that it was intended only for sales in countries where they would sell far fewer at the American price" is disingenuous. Legal, maybe, but I don't feel at all bad about having them slapped down for it. At least as long as the bogus reasoning involved to achieve it doesn't start to apply in other cases.
There is already a legal distinction between wholesale and retail transactions. The latter is subject to sales tax; the former is not. I don't think that would require a novel legal theory. If you needed one, they'd write "one per customer per day" into the contract, or something like that. I don't think it would be difficult.
Spending about as much money on the military as the rest of the world combined? Yeah, that's fucked up.
http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending
I'm all for the US military and believe it should be the biggest in the world. But we could cut it by half and still be several times bigger than anybody else's. And that alone would close the deficits that are projected for 2013.
It's not a bad analogy. But it's also important to realize that the geocentric model is a GOOD model. Navigators used it long after Copernicus and Galileo, and if it's going by the wayside there, it's only because GPS really is geocentric.
The key to heliocentrism isn't changing the center, but changing the shape of the orbit. If you think of the sun as the center of the universe but are still trying to force things into circular motion, you end up with as many correction factors as geocentrism does. Galileo and Copernicus were well aware of the mathematical difficulties. It wasn't until Kepler that they finally had a solution.
The problem with the analogy is that it's not string theory that's equivalent to geocentrism, it's quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and general relativity. These are excellent theories that still have problems in that they disagree with each other. String theory is the epicycle tacked on to try to account for the differences.
That's still not quite apt, since the failure modes are different. Geocentric theory failed because data contradicted it without awkward modifications. Quantum and relativistic theories agree with the data, but disagree with each other under circumstances that are difficult to produce experimentally. So string theory is useful theory with no data, and epicycles were a good way to deal with the data but with poor theoretical support.
Some scientists are aggrieved that a theory with no data, and none forthcoming, should receive so much attention. Disproving it would actually be a great advance, and would actually reflect well on the people studying it. Unfortunately, the import of the experiment in this article is exaggerated.
To support that: Fox News has much better ratings than MSNBC.
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_tv_tvblog/2010/04/fox-news-channel-marks-100-months-as-most-watched-cable-news-channel-nbc-nightly-news-wins-weekly-race.html
In prime time, it has 50% of all viewers of news channels, and MSNBC a paltry 20%. The top 9 programs are all Fox News programs; Olberman's and Maddow's one million viewers are a third of O'Reilly's and half of Beck's and Hannity's.
As you observer, Stewart does beat MSNBC with 1.3 million viewers, but it doesn't come near to Fox's top commentators:
http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2010/11/04/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-1-in-late-night-with-adults-18-49-for-october-bests-the-tonight-show-late-night-with-david-letterman/70856
The one thing that contradicts your conclusion: none of these numbers are a substantial fraction of all voters. However, those are only nightly numbers; the total number of occasional viewers is probably at least 2 to 3 times that. And even more importantly, each one is probably (mis)informing friends and family who don't otherwise watch TV news.
What exactly is a "progressive with strong constitutional tendencies"?
Every time I've heard "constitutional" brought into it, it's usually a selective reading of the Constitution to oppose some progressive policy. Not that progressives are above playing the vagueness of the Constitution to their favor, but it seems to be anti-progressive forces that have decided that their reading is "original" or "strict".
Everybody loves the Constitution when it agrees with them, and everybody loves an expansive reading when it doesn't. And when it gets literally ungrammatical (like the first part of the second amendment), everybody has a field day.
I know you're joking, but also recall that oil is fungible. If the Saudis were to cut off the US, we'd need to buy more from Canada, raising the price. If they cut off any US allies, it would raise the price further.
That happened during the 1970s oil shocks, and the US produced more of its own oil at the time.
Omega sells watches to a Chinese distributor (call them CD), presumably with a minimum price floor that they're allowed to resell at.
I assume there's also a requirement to sell them retail, not wholesale. If not, they'd add one quickly once they realized what was going on. That's the contract violation.
If Costco is sending people out to buy the watches one at a time, it's really pushing the limit. If it's being done at a wink from the distributor, it's still a violation of the contract.
For all I know that's what they're doing to mislead a scrupulous dealer, the way meth labs have networks of people to acquire sudafed despite legal restrictions. But I'd still call it a dick move, the sort of thing that gives us anti-sudafed laws in the first place.
I know there's a wink at the end there, but seriously: the DoD budget yearly is $663 billion. This project is $7.5 million per year.
It's closer to 88,000; I originally miscalculated it as 5 years rather than 4.
"Cons" should also include that it's toxic (more so than gasoline).
As well as the fact that it's currently expensive to manufacture and distill, with low yields.
Neither of this is necessarily impossible to overcome, but it's dishonest to claim that the only thing wrong with it is that it doesn't have a lobby. In fact, it DOES have a lobby: BP and Dupont have both been working on it.
Dealing with these issues might be a great use of some of that $30 million. But it's not a miracle cure.
Well, I wouldn't call $30 million over 5 years "urgent". That's doughnut money to the Department of Defense, whose budget is 100,000 times more than that.
US domestic oil production peaked 40 years ago. We've been subject to nasty oil shocks ever since, as well as the unpleasant fact that many key oil exporters are avowed or tacit opponents of the US. We'd much rather be self-sufficient in oil, regardless of whether the rest of the world experiences Peak Oil or not.
The history of commerce also revolves around contracts, and having some mechanism of enforcing them. In the wide wide world of international trading, that doesn't always hold.
There is one kind of fairness in places where contracts are enforced, and another kind where they aren't. Commerce is generally a lot slower in the latter, but it's "fair" in its way.
Costco is trying to play both sides of that fence. As you say, that's just arbitrage, but in doing so they're taking the kind of fair that happens in contract-less countries and importing it into the ones where contracts are enforceable. It's not just arbitrage, but arbitrage to skirt the rules.
In other words, it's fair only in the sense that nothing is unfair when there are no rules. That's why I said it was unfair.
I was under the impression that social engineering was a security flaw in the user, not in the application.
It is, but you can't debug the user, so you have to compensate in software. I feel a lot better knowing that J. Random Grandma has something looking over her shoulder to tell her she really shouldn't be going to that site. Cuz once J. Random Grandma's computer is hacked, it starts sending spam to MY computer.
Heck... I'm a software developer, and I've been known to screw up. Humans are buggy.
So I really want software that does both. If IE is ahead in that area, good for them. Sending out a press release declaring themselves more secure *in general* is dirty pool, and Google should say so. But they should also start swiping some of what MS does for Chrome, because it does make things safer along one dimension. Lord knows Microsoft has done it enough times. Let them feel the back hand of it for once.
Thing is, being a tie, the ruling has no precedential value (as I understand it; IANAL). It applies only to this case, and it's hard to generalize from here to "copyright" or "first sale".
And while the copyright argument is frankly bizarre, it may not actually necessarily be unfair. Omega sold the watches to the Chinese distributor with the intent that they be sold cheaper overseas, since presumably they maximize profits there by selling 1,000 watches at $300 than 200 watches at $1,000. And presumably they made the Chinese distributor promise to sell them only to consumers, but being in China, they can't enforce that.
I see Costco as making a dick move by circumventing that, and probably illegal, just not in a place Omega could do anything about it.
Which means one could say that the Court decided fairly: Costco is punished, and "first sale" isn't really affected because of the way the case was decided. Two legal technicalities cancel each other out in a way that's not really unjust.
Of course the Circuit Court's opinion will be cited in other cases to make decisions that ARE unjust, until the Supreme Court decides to clarify permanently. And ultimately Omega is on the same losing side that the RIAA and MPAA are: information wants to be free, and freight is cheap enough that even information as manifested in manufactured objects like watches is not all that much more expensive than "free".
There will sooner or later be a clearer case where somebody is buying books printed overseas and selling them at a cut rate. Somebody will use first-sale on that, too. But the differences are smaller for books than for luxury items, where there's more room to charge premiums in rich countries than poor ones. Omega might eventually be forced to abandon the idea of trying to maximize profits with differential pricing.
It should be one of those self-correcting things. If you appoint somebody who will have to recuse themselves a lot, the one you're hurting is yourself.
The Court still functions. It just has one fewer voice. That leads to ties, but there's a default tie-breaking rule (not to overturn). The capability isn't reduced.
The worse transgression, IMHO, is that the lifetime appointment means that the court moves very, very slowly. Until late in Bush's term, the entire conservative wing of the court had been appointed by Reagan or even Nixon, decades earlier. A period of Republican Presidency from 1968 to 1992 (with one exception) was having major ramifications 15 years after it ended.
If it hadn't been for the fact that (Republican) Gerald Ford appointed the court's key liberal (John Paul Stevens) and Reagan appointed a key moderate (O'Connor), the court would have been massively tilted to the right the entire time. That's something neither party is ever going to allow again. The filibuster is supposed to force them to nominate a moderate with some appeal across the aisle, but since it's used universally, it's really just used to appoint non-entities with no track record.
Which is why non-justice Kagan got nominated in this case. She could plausibly deny having any opinions at all. Expect to see more like her, not less.
For a while, yes. But Kagan is only 50 years old. From a political standpoint, they may lose some cases that they didn't have to in the next few years, but they've gained somebody who will be in their court (heh heh) for decades.
Not making a value judgment on that; it's just political hardball same on both sides. I wish it were different. I would also like a pony.
So... a retailer purchasing a product from a (foreign) distributor/manufacturer is treated differently from an individual buying from a retailer?
From the point of view of a scientist/coder it seems like an arbitrary distinction, but businesses make a lot of such arbitrary distinctions (which then require other arbitrary distinctions). So I'd need to digest it a bit before deciding if it's a bad idea, or where this is the "original" bad idea or just a consequence of the original arbitrary distinction.
They've posted the audio and transcript of the oral argument online.
http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_audio_detail.aspx?argument=08-1423
http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/08-1423.pdf
One might actually learn something from the actual arguments about what the decision means. The actual decision itself is uninformative: it just declares the circuit court's decision affirmed by a 4-4 vote. It doesn't even say who voted which way, though I bet you could infer it from looking at the transcript.
The third one was not absolutely awful. It's not great, but it's probably worth the three hours it would take for you to watch it, if you didn't have to pay for it.
Not on its own merits, but just cuz it's the immediate prequel to A New Hope. It scratches the itch just a little bit.
But there's no reason to see epsiode II. Better than Episode I, but not by much.
Good point. Just what the poor North Koreans need: to have their malnourishment prolong their lives.
It's a testament to the human spirit that they keep on going. Amazing. Or something.
No one likes a screaming child, but they are soon forgot. A well mannered articulate child is remembered forever.
Just the opposite, I'm afraid. I have no idea how many well-behaved children were on the last plane I was in. Possibly dozens. But I can tell you not just how many screaming children there were, but the brick-throwing distance between me and them.
"Hacktivism" is an asymmetric warfare. (I'm not judging it good or bad, just pointing that out.) They CAN'T organize a boycott, not one that anybody would care about, for the same reason that the Founding Fathers couldn't have a country until they rounded up the serious resources for a revolution.
(You don't seriously imagine that the Boston Tea Party thing changed any minds anywhere, do you? It's a popular nationalist myth, like George Washington and the cherry tree.)
They couldn't organize a big enough boycott to be noticed, so they tried (and apparently failed) to use small but highly targeted force. If they couldn't even summon up the power to DOS a site, how can they arrange a large-scale boycott? Amazon just doesn't covet the basement-dwelling demographic that much.
You're almost certainly correct about that; I should have been clearer. Rosling wasn't gathering the data, just presenting it.
I was just surprised to hear North Korea's life expectancy estimated so high.
Astute analysis. Just want to add that the numbers for North Korea are estimates. The life expectancy of nearly 64 sounds a bit dubious to me, given their perpetual food crises, but I suppose they're getting enough aid to bring it up to India-style poverty.
A Libertarian might forbid people to freely participate in the commercial act of buying health insurance, but I don't think a libertarian would. A libertarian would merely call for the government to stop encouraging people to participate in the current health insurance scheme with tax breaks.
I personally don't believe a better system would automatically arise in its place; that's a libertarian axiom which I don't believe holds. But it's without doubt true that the present system is deeply flawed. The optimal system is an ideological question, which creates the unfortunate paradox of a hybrid compromise solution that is worse than any of the competing ideological solutions.
Unfortunately, that's kinda the way it works. They're trying to find something with a very low probability of happening. You can't pronounce the pond devoid of fish just by dropping your hook in a few times. Even the most optimistic predictions for the Higgs expect it to send a clear signal only one time in a gazillion.
They may well have already detected Higgs events, but the signal will be just barely louder than noise. The only way to tell is to listen longer.