1) I refuse to believe that any collection of docters and politicians, no matter how skilled they may be, are going to take decisions from 5000 km distance, about theoretical "classes" of patients that will outperform what a doctor, patient in front of him, lots of medical history available, will decide about a living, breathing human being in front of him. The govt. healthcare will be like mcDonalds : strong, central bureaucracy, resulting in -at the very best- bad, but edible food, or healthcare. Our current system is like the restaurants in cities - lots of quality differences - some good, some bad. One in a hundred is even worse than mcdonalds. On average, however, they are *much* better than the forced central bureaucracy.
(In Europe, this happens, one of the results is that doctors are forced to use certain approved medicines (at most 1 or 2 per disease), even when it has been established before that that patient is unresponsive -or worse- allergic. Thank God that in Belgium, you *are* allowed to violate the govt's prescriptions as a doctor, but it's very, very costly. So while people may get prescribed the other alternative medicine, this takes self-sacrifice from doctors. And in general, the older doctors do this without thinking, most younger ones don't often do this)
2) any mistakes by this central obama bureaucracy will affect everyone. A bad doctor, worst case, will affect a few dozen patients. A bad apple on the "death panels" will kill thousands.
3) People that make their own decisions, based on a realistic assesment of their own situation, can take responsability for what they do. If a patient dies (or simply does not do well) due to medical error under national healthcare, it's Obama's fault. It's not the patient's responsability since he could not possibly have done anything to improve it. A different doctor, using the same central bureaucracy's categories will take the same - potentially wrong - decision.
Now if a patient does bad, because of something that could be prevented, it is likely that going to several doctors could have prevented the calamity. Furthermore, the patient is presented with all choices, and then has to make his own decision, factoring in everything that matters : money, moral implications, chances of recovery,...
All these factors will still exist in Obama's "death panels", they will simply make a -potentially bad*- choice and force it on eveyone, and then in true government fashion, refuse to admit they made some mistakes when patients start doing bad, or even dying. This will happen, regardless of the fact that many doctors will in fact know better.
* you cannot make a one-size-fits-all decision in healthcare. Of course the whole point of Obama's system is that he does do that. People with types of diseases that are not well-known or in some way strange (the majority of serious diseases), will get suboptimal decisions forced upon them.
** the decisions of the "death panels" will be -partly- based on wrong science, so there's no question what will happen. Meanwhile the people in these panels never see a living patient, never mind that they see real patients for all the categories they decide about. Do you honestly believe they'll prefer reality over what their papers say ? We've established theory and practice could be very different in quite large classes of patients.
Oh yeah, anti-unions. That is sooooo left-wing policy. Of course both Fascism and Communism was against the free enterprise, but you ignore massive differences. Fascism was more like a modern corporate serfdom, workers were for the industry to use, and the industry was for the state to use. Those who were industry leaders before fascism continued to be industry leaders under fascism and made massive profits. It is true they made massive government pushes in science, technology, infrastructure and industry - not unlike the Apollo decade in the US, I think. But it has a lot more in common with modern communist China than old communist Soviet.
This is exactly leftist policy. Unions are, for the left, a path to power, nothing more. Like all "paths to power" once you are in power, they're a threat, not an asset.
Central control, the most central tenet of socialism, means exclusive state control, within a single organization ("the party"). Unions are the muscle to use against the non-leftist state when they're not in power. Once lefties are in power, anything that *might* oppose the power of the state obviously has to go. So every leftist dictator, every last one, from the proto communist states, the soviets, the nazis, right down to Mugabe turned on unions. Sometimes (like in the soviets) they kept existing, with party dictators as their sole management, becoming empty shells.
So yes, destroying unions is leftist policy. Just not when they're not (yet) in the position to force themselves on everyone else through police and army.
Fascism implies central control of the economy as the basis for all of the economy, combined with massive government intervention. Fascism taxed profits 100%, which made any and all private entities directly depended on government for every decision. What did the nazi government do with this money ? Well, fascism pioneered a lot of things in Western Europe, pensions, general study sponsorhips, national healthcare, massive government-sponsored "private" projects under direct government control (note that for example the design of a new car -Volkswagen something, I'd have to look up the exact model- was a project of the nazi government, but most weapons design was done like this).
How the hell is that compatible with the rightist side of the spectrum ? You have to admit - not exactly what the tea party would like to see in government, right ? All those policies are more the democrats cup of tea, no ?
Fascism is a slightly more modern form of communism. Just like most of today's leftist organizations don't advocate eradicating the private sector, just imposing huge taxes and then having the government do things with that money. The idea of fascism is simply to drive that to the extreme : one tax, 100% profit tax, every R&D project, expansion,... therefore has to go through the government as it needs sponsorship.
This has been a standard political tactic for thousands of years. If "real" communism can't make it through, can't be imposed on a state, then invent something that's basically equivalent and create a few "fights" between the "new" and the "old" communism, then claim how they are opposites somehow (all the while in reality helping eachother out : Hitler and Stalin were allies long before he took power, and he received... let's say "physical" help from the KGB with his election. In public, of course, Hitler and Stalin were enemies). Julius Caesar did the same thing : see military dictatorship (his, with his generals) is SO much better than... military dictatorship (of three military leaders)... isn't it ? Hundreds of thousands roman citizens believed this.
Have you ever looked at average open-source code ? While the kernel's code quality might be called "passable" (though it could adhere to stricter standards), the same cannot be said for most open source projects. It would not be hard, at all, to hide a backdoor in one of a dozen projects, especially GNOME and KDE are utter disasters when it comes to some of the code they run. For projects that are tested, a steady stream of exploits is available, from mozilla, the kernel, apache, tomcat, and gnome and kde (but these last 2 are barely tested at all, yet still quite a few exploits are found on a regular basis).
In commercial projects the NSA needs to infiltrate the company (I doubt anyone just lets this happen, and it would be better if they didn't for the NSA, no-one knows, that means no-one can betray you), and then commit something into it. Before outsourcing it was probably hard for the Chinese government to get backdoors into American software (though there have been incidents with japanese military vessels software suddenly refusing to target things when some Chinese boats were nearby and not behaving all that well). Today, there's little doubt the Chinese government has backdoors in many open and close source software projects.
So this is just a bogus argument. Let's get real : both commercial and open source projects are bugged and contain planted exploits. Both contain backdoors for multiple governments. Besides, software is vulnerable even without planted backdoors. The one attack that was probably government originated (though despite all sorts of predictions still no firm proof exactly which government did it, and since nobody likes Iran's govt, not even Iran's own scientists (ahmadinnerjacket had a few hundred of a run-ins with... well everybody... at pretty much every iranian university before becoming "there's no gays in Iran" laughing stock of the world), needless to say, the very people who would obviously be in the best possible position to pull this off)), Stuxnet, didn't need any unpublished holes. Not in the used closed-source software, not in the used open source software, not in the used hardware, not... It was so basic a commercial company could probably have written it, yet it was capable of introducing sabotage actions in what is arguably Iran's best guarded facility, it's nuclear weapons factory.
Could an equally basic process be used to subtly sabotage an American weapons production plant ? Good question.
Then there's the fact that the Chinese have been caught bugging hardware for espionage. What exactly do you hope to do about that ?
And, yes, the US spies. So does every other country on the planet. So would I if I controlled the government of any particular country. Inside and outside of the country. But the purpose of the American govt is to change the world into America. Great plan ! The purpose of the Chinese government is to change the world into China. Frankly I really, really don't like that plan. I hear the public buses are killers. Similar things go for just about any other government (except perhaps - perhaps western Europe - perhaps, maybe if the EU was anywhere near democratic)
How about I'm arguing for government to stay out of every decision it can reasonably stay out of ?
Which would of course mean that people choose for themselves which docter they believe - and NOT that the government decides for them.
The problem with that is that if you make government pay for healthcare, while giving people these options, you're heading into disaster. Unlimited spending "tends to go wrong". But no problem ! If government does not have anything to do with paying for it, the problem goes away.
And if you wish to provide healthcare for the poor, how about you... go out and do that ! Or donate money. Or... But how about you do not force others to do it in your stead, them start balking about how "moral" this is supposed to be.
So now the guy that couldn't figure out himself why his connection underperformed is going to tell me what "real network engineers" think ?
Great. If you think I'm going to argue this insanity, you're delusional.
And btw, it's low-quality ISPs that agree throwing away 40% of your bandwidth is a solution. GOOD ISPs will throw away 60% at least, sometimes more. (because if you want redundant paths to function you need to "throw away" at least 50% because the link might need to carry both it's own load and the traffic from it's redundant path, so a good isp doesn't just throw away 50%+ of link bandwidth, they throw it away TWICE)
One question is... why is this a "pharma business scam" ? This guy was a government employee when he committed his scam. He worked in the UK, where vaccines are not part of the private sector, then in Canada, where the same is true. This guy was scamming the government, while being part of that same government. Given that the vaccine was indeed shut down and another bought, for multiple countries' national health insurance, one would think that this scam made several million dollars change hands...
This guy had all the titles on could possibly ask for. You know, this was one of the guys that Obama has now given all medical decisions to, "to lower costs". Of course, he was found out. How many of this type of scams succeeded ?
The fraudulent research, for 12 years(1993-2005) , was about as evidence-based as you can get. It had been researched, published, peer-reviewed, re-published. Then replication was attempted, and this replication failed (and at this point he was not accused of fraud - for good reason - research fails to be replicated all the time and lots of research is never replicated. Maybe it's impractical, maybe there's no money, and 95% certainty limits that 5% of medical research will be outright wrong - with no fraud at all involved - and hopefully unreplicateable)
Even with these accusations, the 95% bound on "believability" means that 1 in 20 research papers - with correct statistics - is outright wrong, over all fields of study. Does it really need to be said that most non-exact disciplines do not see statistics as a core research subject to be taught to students ? Some studies have found that as many as 86% of medical research papers had insufficiently verified their conclusions - purely based on math. 36% had outright wrong math in them. Needless to say, this means that the correctness of 86% of medical research papers is in question.
But suppose Obama says (not that he does this, but hey) we'll only use "verified" science. That means 2 peer-reviewed publications. Let's see what happens. That means that 1 in 400 (20*20) decisions is flat-out-wrong in the theoretically optimum case.
In real life, based on the 86-30% research, about 1 in 9 or 12% of honestly taken medical decisions based on verified research will be wrong - at least (30% * 30%) and worst case 86% * 86% or 74% of decisions will be wrong.
If we take the reality of "evidence-based healthcare" - without replication, between 30% and 86% of decisions taken by an honest board (you know the "death panel") will be wrong.
This is BEFORE any fraud occurs on the part of these political appointees - which will control the medical spending of 300 million americans, and therefore will have a HUGE incentive for cheating.
No I'm saying that you're absolutely right, the US is under no obligations to "secure the world".
Of course, if the US doesn't do it, nobody else is even capable of doing it for the US.
Last time in history that this was not done - piracy made all non-direct-border trade impossible in a matter of years. So it seems a very reasonable bet that this situation will repeat itself, especially given a number of situations developing already even with the US securing things : the horn of africa, east-africa and east-malaysia...
That means that if the US does not secure the world, history will repeat itself, and all sea-based trade will cease in an astonishingly short timeframe. This means no oil, no trade with China, no...
Wrong. There are no buts. You do not have that responsibility. Period.
Fully agreed. Of course, *NOT* doing it would basically mean the end of international trade, except perhaps with Canada and Mexico (and even Mexico would become significantly harder if the gulf becomes unsafe).
So while your idea sounds good in theory, could you explain how we'd deal with :
-> a drop in oil supply, around, oh 70% less (meaning oil would go to, oh, say $15/gallon at least) -> no more trade with china (no more iphone, or android phones for that matter) -> only food that can be grown less than, say, 50km from where you live. Everything else is WAY too expensive -> federal government downsizing to at most it's size in the 1930's. No more medicare or medicaid, as without easy and cheap mobility it can't work. ->...
Are you seriously suggesting we do this ? Get real.
Great post... the relevant thing is, of course, whether they're improving or not, not the absolute level.
Furthermore, do not forget, your own ideology. Socialist hourly wage
$0.00000000000000000
Surely the wage that YOU DEMAND people work for is enough for everybody ? (except, of course, that you yourself wouldn't do shit for this wage, of course. Only for people like me, lowly peons with delusions and opium, who are to be forced to work for you, right ?)
Yes ! The US is evil. After all, just like all those leftist states, the evil, gun-loving, religion-clinging US is executing prisoners at a rate so high they don't need to produce dog food anymore. Rightist economics called this "efficient market-based use of excess meat resources".
Bush and Obama's dogs is are not fans though. They likes the fat prisoners better. Daddy says the sause is lead-based and is good for their bones.
So not it's not news. It's a "hey here's an idiot doing some US-bashing, let's give him free publicity !" story. Half the frontpage stories are these days.
It IS NOT FUNNY IF PEOPLE START PLAYING WITH YOUR LIFE FOR THEIR OWN FINANCIAL GAIN.
That is exactly my point, and why the "free market" approach to health care is such a disaster in the United States. There is a reason it is ranked so low among other developed nations (37th by the World Health Organization).
Governments work on money too. Doesn't that simple, obvious and utterly undeniable fact... invalidate your whole train of thought ? National healthcare is not a solution to greed-run doctors, it makes it worse and enlarges the scale.
Surely the only solution to greed in healthcare can be the elimination of that greed ? The elimination of budgets, the elimination of unfairness, nepotism, and all such things ?
I know someone who's been working in national healthcare 40 years, outside of the US, near Brussels. In 40 years the government saw thin years, but there were years were the government was swimming in money. 40 years. From a dozen years after WWII up to now.
In those 40 years. Do you think that government care budgets went up even once ? Do you think they invested into healthcare even once ?
Because she knows, she was there, and she says they never did.
Your "solution to greed" is, like most liberal policies, making things A LOT WORSE.
Until you answer Milton Friedman's question, what serious argument can there be in favor of national healthcare ?
Not that serious arguments are much used in today's politics, on either side. But that doesn't mean I'm going to just let the democrats blow up my future.
And frankly if you think that giving healthcare to government hands is going to bring "your" approach, whatever you'd like, for free into your hands... then you're beyond stupid. Sorry to state it like that, but it's the plain and simple truth.
Why not just summarize your reply ? "I haven't climbed mount everest... because I don't feel like it".
The response of any sane human being ? "Yeah right".
The funny thing is that you decry greed, but anyone can read into your post why. Why do you hate them ? (I really don't think that's too strong a word)
Because of your own greed.
I mean seriously. You just want more money, more toys, more for yourself, and that's why you want socialism. Does it really need explaining why that's... not going to work ? That such an attitude is, besides deeply dishonest, utterly stupid ?
I've lived in a number of countries with national healthcare. All of them were a LOT worse than "normal" US care. (unless you knew the right people, or the right procedure, or the right location to live, or...). The biggest difference in the US : nobody even knows what the government approved answer is. In Europe, it takes a LOT of convincing to even get the doctor to give you the correct answer instead of the government approved answer.
An example : I went, north of Brussels, to the doctor with my baby girl. She'd been ill. High fever for 3-4 days. We had called, and they prescribed an anti-fever drug. This didn't help (another medical professional told me afterwards that if it *had* dropped the fever, she could have died. Masking the symptoms does not make the problem go away, and all anti-fever drugs basically suppress the immune system. Getting a lung infection with a suppressed immune system is a quick way into a coffin). So we went down to the doctor. My mother works in medicine, so I had a reasonable idea what she had, a bacterial throat infection. So we went to the doctor, and he prescribed, again, the anti-fever drug.
I didn't understand at first. What the hell ? This drug HAS BEEN TRIED FOR 4 DAYS AND DIDN'T DO ANYTHING. So we had a discussion. Voices raised. And raised. And then the answer came : antibiotics are too expensive, so if the doctor prescribes too much of them, he risks a huge tax increase, or even the loss of his licence.
Frankly, I didn't give a shit. Fortunately, this was Belgium. People don't like the government. So we found out that these rules only applied to new doctors, not to older ones. It nearly took beating the first doctor up, but we found a doctor for which this rule didn't apply, and got the actual medicine.
The next day, she was better. Not giving someone with a throat infection antibiotics means risking lung infection. A bacterial lung infection with complications is one of the diseases that still has a high mortality rate, especially amongst children.
So, frankly, I see people pushing national health insurance as little more than deluded child-murderers. And just don't start with any argument that comes down to "but this time it will be different". It IS NOT FUNNY IF PEOPLE START PLAYING WITH YOUR LIFE FOR THEIR OWN FINANCIAL GAIN. Which is *exactly* what MUST happen in any form of national healthcare.
I *never* even heard anything remotely like this happen in the US.
I haven't lived in Canada though, so I don't know. I doubt it's different.
You expect me to rate-limit my upstream and downstream bandwidth to 60% of rated? That's ludicrous and totally unnecessary. Even if it were to fix the latency, that's an incredibly stupid "solution."
Well, have you ever asked yourself why you never moved up from that helpdesk position ? This sort of opinion would be a rather good explanation.
If you want to learn why this matters, study some "Queueing theory", buy a book. And, when you've informed yourself a bit, try it out on real networks, write a few drivers, or at least configure lartc a few (hundred) times, and THEN decide what is ludicrous and what is not.
Or forever remain at that helpdesk. Well, until you're replaced by voice recognition.
Well that's actually a really simple reason : because of profit. It is not wages that trickle down, counterintuitive as that may be, it's profit that trickles down. Wages can, at their theoretical optimum, maintain the status quo of wealth (in practice this never happens because of inefficiency). Profits, however, can increase wealth.
The problem is that money is not a totally artificial number, no matter how essential this point is to liberal politics. There are real actions behind the money, but here's the kicker : this is only the case in the private sector. Profit, in economic theory, represents some form of improvement in our lives (even if it's the profits of a company that doesn't pay me anything) Money, in the end, measures some form of value. You can print money, but that doesn't produce any value.
To clarify, let's take 2 scenario's, and assume (against our better judgment) that govt. and private sector are equally efficient (let's say 90%) : 1) Government hires 10000 people, and uses them to "redivide the wealth" of 1 billion dollars. Nothing of value is produced. Ignoring the fact that this act makes it more difficult for the private sector to produce anything, this means that you extracted 1 billion dollars out of the economy, and put 900 million back into it.
-> net result : -100 million dollars. 100 mil. gone from the economy (what does this represent in practice ? Things like 10000 people not producing anything, all sorts of resources, computers, printers, office buildings, furniture, all used to produce nothing, used, then discarded)
2) Company invests 1 billion dollars, buying lots of things, including the labor of 10000 people. With what it buys, the company produces something of value to others, and sells it for 1,1 billion dollars.
-> net result : 100 million dollars ADDED to the economy (what does it mean in practice ? E.g. 1 gigaton milk removed from the economy, which we're drowning in anyway, and things like yoghurt, butter, chocolate,... added into the economy, which otherwise wouldn't be there at all)
You see the difference ? Just think of the extreme cases : in (theoretical) communism, ALL value is extracted by government, which produces nothing of value at all. What happens ? (the system iterates, lowering total available resources for the population, until they starve and something happens). In total free capitalism, nothing at all can happen unless it increases value (granted, this has it's own problems, but we're talking absurd cases here). What happens ? (natural resources are extracted and used to produce maximum value, as fast as possible)
You keep hearing how bankers deserve their income but I can't help but think they aren't that bright.
So why hasn't your eminence, with obviously superior intellect and skill to these bankers, become one ? Surely it can't be that hard.
And, frankly, like most other posters we can summarize your argument for socialism simply as being greedy. Greed to have what others earn, and expecting the government to violently take it from them. You might know that the whole premise of socialism is that people are NOT motivated by greed, this is not because it makes a good opening line for that chapter in an economics book. If people were motivated (even partly) by greed, socialism can't work, not even in the idiotically utopian models of the most deluded communists. So if there are a lot of people like you, socialism (ie. taking the wealth of bankers, for example) will make the system collapse (just like it has done in Germany, Russia, Vietnam, Korea,...).
It's really, really sad. Now let's hear that it's not really about taking other's wealth, it's about those poor, poor people. Come on. Because what you are is simple : you're a greedy, selfish, immoral communist. And nothing else.
And what of the rest of his reply ? You're ignoring the entire post, merely pointing out what is essentially a (small) error (as nearly no country will let in a 50 year old unemployed man, not the US, not Canada, not Europe).
Just in case you're confused, here's the actually relevant portion:
yes, Americans work hard, especially compared to the work-life balance of the EU. The US wouldn't be what it is today if it wasn't for that work ethic, and i mean that statement as a positive one. From someone who has lived and worked for several years in both US and CA, DON'T LET THE GREEN GRASS FOOL YOU. The health care and cost of living here is pretty high, and remember, nothing in life is free. my personal opinion is that the health care that the average RESPONSIBLE US worker obtains is cheaper and of better quality (emphasis here) that what is obtained through the CA government. yeah, its great that everyone gets it but that includes wino down the street, and the freeloaders having 10 kids. we pay for those guys too. socialism at work. Canada isn't a bad place to live, don't get me wrong, but the government has its citizens under their thumb. take a look at the auto insurance rates in canada and who regulates them.
You might want to check the concept of "progressive" taxes :
E.g. you make 3000 euros. Wife and kid, mortgage, etc. net pay : ~1800 - 2000 euros 4000 euros : ~ 1850 - 2100 euros you make 5000 euros : ~ 2400 - 2600 euros
Those numbers do NOT include sales tax, living tax, personal tax, and VAT. So deduct another 25-30% at what you can do with that money, compared to the US. This is an absolute necessity, since for every working German, there are (close to) 2 non-working ones. Obviously, this means that, on average, total tax is 66% + whatever it costs to administer the whole thing. Other parts of europe, as you point out correctly, are worse.
Given those figures, do you still think the same way ? Incidentally, that number, 2 non-working ones, is very close to rising significantly to 4-5 in less than 10 years. The systems in Europe are going to fail miserably, and it won't take long for it to happen.
You talk as if German pensions for the older people are anything remotely resembling generous. You might want to check that.
For someone who "retires" at 59 by getting fired and not finding a new job before 65, they're barely enough to survive. If you don't own the place you live in before retirement, you're in serious trouble, even with a full pension, and there's no way out. At all.
What I'm telling you to do, technically, is never to fill your pipe (very bad practice). ISPs never fill their pipes more than 60%, if they can help it. Install something like DD-WRT and rate-limit both sides of the connection to 95% of the link bandwidth (60% is better, but I'm guessing you're not game). Allow it to buffer like crazy, but to prioritize new connections.
That'll solve your latency issues (of course, not 100%. SOME slowdown is unavoidable, regardless of algorithm used, if you are on a connection where transmitting a single packet takes 4 ms (typical dsl), please don't complain about any slowdown less than 8 ms, nothing can be done about it, except upgrading).
And frankly, we have lots of people complaining like you. Sometimes I feel like helping them. Guess what one finds 95% of the time when inspecting their traffic (often at their request, and often, even after the packet dumper removes all doubt, they STILL claim not to be running kazaa and/or bittorrent. Then we go "let's try blocking it, then. If you're not using it anyway", and *surprise* that solves the problem. Then they ask to turn the block off)
You forgot to RTFA. A single TCP connection that saturates your pipe will make latency skyrocket if you've got buffer bloat.
That won't happen for a lot of the time. Only while the buffer is filling up will this ever be a problem, which should be 3-4 secs tops. After that, the tcp connection will run slightly below the link bandwidth on a permanent basis, meaning latency will drop close to zero again.
Only lots of tcp connections will saturate a link, even with huge buffers.
I agree, but that's as likely to happen as IPv6. Eventually, but not yet, and it may always be "not yet".
Funny you should make this specific comparison. After all, in the last year just about every internet backbone implemented ipv6, and several "normal" access providers implemented it for their customers, including 6to4. Today, if you *want* to use the IPV6 internet, you can.
The same with intelligent algorithms. It *is* happening. Even cheap wireless routers can do this now. Got an old one ? Install DD-WRT and configure it correctly.
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Well my counterargument will be :
1) I refuse to believe that any collection of docters and politicians, no matter how skilled they may be, are going to take decisions from 5000 km distance, about theoretical "classes" of patients that will outperform what a doctor, patient in front of him, lots of medical history available, will decide about a living, breathing human being in front of him. The govt. healthcare will be like mcDonalds : strong, central bureaucracy, resulting in -at the very best- bad, but edible food, or healthcare. Our current system is like the restaurants in cities - lots of quality differences - some good, some bad. One in a hundred is even worse than mcdonalds. On average, however, they are *much* better than the forced central bureaucracy.
(In Europe, this happens, one of the results is that doctors are forced to use certain approved medicines (at most 1 or 2 per disease), even when it has been established before that that patient is unresponsive -or worse- allergic. Thank God that in Belgium, you *are* allowed to violate the govt's prescriptions as a doctor, but it's very, very costly. So while people may get prescribed the other alternative medicine, this takes self-sacrifice from doctors. And in general, the older doctors do this without thinking, most younger ones don't often do this)
2) any mistakes by this central obama bureaucracy will affect everyone. A bad doctor, worst case, will affect a few dozen patients. A bad apple on the "death panels" will kill thousands.
3) People that make their own decisions, based on a realistic assesment of their own situation, can take responsability for what they do. If a patient dies (or simply does not do well) due to medical error under national healthcare, it's Obama's fault. It's not the patient's responsability since he could not possibly have done anything to improve it. A different doctor, using the same central bureaucracy's categories will take the same - potentially wrong - decision.
Now if a patient does bad, because of something that could be prevented, it is likely that going to several doctors could have prevented the calamity. Furthermore, the patient is presented with all choices, and then has to make his own decision, factoring in everything that matters : money, moral implications, chances of recovery, ...
All these factors will still exist in Obama's "death panels", they will simply make a -potentially bad*- choice and force it on eveyone, and then in true government fashion, refuse to admit they made some mistakes when patients start doing bad, or even dying. This will happen, regardless of the fact that many doctors will in fact know better.
* you cannot make a one-size-fits-all decision in healthcare. Of course the whole point of Obama's system is that he does do that. People with types of diseases that are not well-known or in some way strange (the majority of serious diseases), will get suboptimal decisions forced upon them.
** the decisions of the "death panels" will be -partly- based on wrong science, so there's no question what will happen. Meanwhile the people in these panels never see a living patient, never mind that they see real patients for all the categories they decide about. Do you honestly believe they'll prefer reality over what their papers say ? We've established theory and practice could be very different in quite large classes of patients.
Oh yeah, anti-unions. That is sooooo left-wing policy. Of course both Fascism and Communism was against the free enterprise, but you ignore massive differences. Fascism was more like a modern corporate serfdom, workers were for the industry to use, and the industry was for the state to use. Those who were industry leaders before fascism continued to be industry leaders under fascism and made massive profits. It is true they made massive government pushes in science, technology, infrastructure and industry - not unlike the Apollo decade in the US, I think. But it has a lot more in common with modern communist China than old communist Soviet.
This is exactly leftist policy. Unions are, for the left, a path to power, nothing more. Like all "paths to power" once you are in power, they're a threat, not an asset.
Central control, the most central tenet of socialism, means exclusive state control, within a single organization ("the party"). Unions are the muscle to use against the non-leftist state when they're not in power. Once lefties are in power, anything that *might* oppose the power of the state obviously has to go. So every leftist dictator, every last one, from the proto communist states, the soviets, the nazis, right down to Mugabe turned on unions. Sometimes (like in the soviets) they kept existing, with party dictators as their sole management, becoming empty shells.
So yes, destroying unions is leftist policy. Just not when they're not (yet) in the position to force themselves on everyone else through police and army.
Fascism implies central control of the economy as the basis for all of the economy, combined with massive government intervention. Fascism taxed profits 100%, which made any and all private entities directly depended on government for every decision. What did the nazi government do with this money ? Well, fascism pioneered a lot of things in Western Europe, pensions, general study sponsorhips, national healthcare, massive government-sponsored "private" projects under direct government control (note that for example the design of a new car -Volkswagen something, I'd have to look up the exact model- was a project of the nazi government, but most weapons design was done like this).
How the hell is that compatible with the rightist side of the spectrum ? You have to admit - not exactly what the tea party would like to see in government, right ? All those policies are more the democrats cup of tea, no ?
Fascism is a slightly more modern form of communism. Just like most of today's leftist organizations don't advocate eradicating the private sector, just imposing huge taxes and then having the government do things with that money. The idea of fascism is simply to drive that to the extreme : one tax, 100% profit tax, every R&D project, expansion, ... therefore has to go through the government as it needs sponsorship.
This has been a standard political tactic for thousands of years. If "real" communism can't make it through, can't be imposed on a state, then invent something that's basically equivalent and create a few "fights" between the "new" and the "old" communism, then claim how they are opposites somehow (all the while in reality helping eachother out : Hitler and Stalin were allies long before he took power, and he received ... let's say "physical" help from the KGB with his election. In public, of course, Hitler and Stalin were enemies). Julius Caesar did the same thing : see military dictatorship (his, with his generals) is SO much better than ... military dictatorship (of three military leaders) ... isn't it ? Hundreds of thousands roman citizens believed this.
How about we just say that in both countries big corporations and the government are ... 2 names for the exact same group of people ?
So Obama's implementing fascism then ? Because that's kinda what you're saying.
I doubt it : He's not that much of a lefty.
Have you ever looked at average open-source code ? While the kernel's code quality might be called "passable" (though it could adhere to stricter standards), the same cannot be said for most open source projects. It would not be hard, at all, to hide a backdoor in one of a dozen projects, especially GNOME and KDE are utter disasters when it comes to some of the code they run. For projects that are tested, a steady stream of exploits is available, from mozilla, the kernel, apache, tomcat, and gnome and kde (but these last 2 are barely tested at all, yet still quite a few exploits are found on a regular basis).
In commercial projects the NSA needs to infiltrate the company (I doubt anyone just lets this happen, and it would be better if they didn't for the NSA, no-one knows, that means no-one can betray you), and then commit something into it. Before outsourcing it was probably hard for the Chinese government to get backdoors into American software (though there have been incidents with japanese military vessels software suddenly refusing to target things when some Chinese boats were nearby and not behaving all that well). Today, there's little doubt the Chinese government has backdoors in many open and close source software projects.
So this is just a bogus argument. Let's get real : both commercial and open source projects are bugged and contain planted exploits. Both contain backdoors for multiple governments. Besides, software is vulnerable even without planted backdoors. The one attack that was probably government originated (though despite all sorts of predictions still no firm proof exactly which government did it, and since nobody likes Iran's govt, not even Iran's own scientists (ahmadinnerjacket had a few hundred of a run-ins with ... well everybody ... at pretty much every iranian university before becoming "there's no gays in Iran" laughing stock of the world), needless to say, the very people who would obviously be in the best possible position to pull this off)), Stuxnet, didn't need any unpublished holes. Not in the used closed-source software, not in the used open source software, not in the used hardware, not ... It was so basic a commercial company could probably have written it, yet it was capable of introducing sabotage actions in what is arguably Iran's best guarded facility, it's nuclear weapons factory.
Could an equally basic process be used to subtly sabotage an American weapons production plant ? Good question.
Then there's the fact that the Chinese have been caught bugging hardware for espionage. What exactly do you hope to do about that ?
And, yes, the US spies. So does every other country on the planet. So would I if I controlled the government of any particular country. Inside and outside of the country. But the purpose of the American govt is to change the world into America. Great plan ! The purpose of the Chinese government is to change the world into China. Frankly I really, really don't like that plan. I hear the public buses are killers. Similar things go for just about any other government (except perhaps - perhaps western Europe - perhaps, maybe if the EU was anywhere near democratic)
How about I'm arguing for government to stay out of every decision it can reasonably stay out of ?
Which would of course mean that people choose for themselves which docter they believe - and NOT that the government decides for them.
The problem with that is that if you make government pay for healthcare, while giving people these options, you're heading into disaster. Unlimited spending "tends to go wrong". But no problem ! If government does not have anything to do with paying for it, the problem goes away.
And if you wish to provide healthcare for the poor, how about you ... go out and do that ! Or donate money. Or ... But how about you do not force others to do it in your stead, them start balking about how "moral" this is supposed to be.
So now the guy that couldn't figure out himself why his connection underperformed is going to tell me what "real network engineers" think ?
Great. If you think I'm going to argue this insanity, you're delusional.
And btw, it's low-quality ISPs that agree throwing away 40% of your bandwidth is a solution. GOOD ISPs will throw away 60% at least, sometimes more. (because if you want redundant paths to function you need to "throw away" at least 50% because the link might need to carry both it's own load and the traffic from it's redundant path, so a good isp doesn't just throw away 50%+ of link bandwidth, they throw it away TWICE)
e.g. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1159925
Idiot
One question is ... why is this a "pharma business scam" ? This guy was a government employee when he committed his scam. He worked in the UK, where vaccines are not part of the private sector, then in Canada, where the same is true. This guy was scamming the government, while being part of that same government. Given that the vaccine was indeed shut down and another bought, for multiple countries' national health insurance, one would think that this scam made several million dollars change hands ...
This guy had all the titles on could possibly ask for. You know, this was one of the guys that Obama has now given all medical decisions to, "to lower costs". Of course, he was found out. How many of this type of scams succeeded ?
The fraudulent research, for 12 years(1993-2005) , was about as evidence-based as you can get. It had been researched, published, peer-reviewed, re-published. Then replication was attempted, and this replication failed (and at this point he was not accused of fraud - for good reason - research fails to be replicated all the time and lots of research is never replicated. Maybe it's impractical, maybe there's no money, and 95% certainty limits that 5% of medical research will be outright wrong - with no fraud at all involved - and hopefully unreplicateable)
Even with these accusations, the 95% bound on "believability" means that 1 in 20 research papers - with correct statistics - is outright wrong, over all fields of study. Does it really need to be said that most non-exact disciplines do not see statistics as a core research subject to be taught to students ? Some studies have found that as many as 86% of medical research papers had insufficiently verified their conclusions - purely based on math. 36% had outright wrong math in them. Needless to say, this means that the correctness of 86% of medical research papers is in question.
But suppose Obama says (not that he does this, but hey) we'll only use "verified" science. That means 2 peer-reviewed publications. Let's see what happens. That means that 1 in 400 (20*20) decisions is flat-out-wrong in the theoretically optimum case.
In real life, based on the 86-30% research, about 1 in 9 or 12% of honestly taken medical decisions based on verified research will be wrong - at least (30% * 30%) and worst case 86% * 86% or 74% of decisions will be wrong.
If we take the reality of "evidence-based healthcare" - without replication, between 30% and 86% of decisions taken by an honest board (you know the "death panel") will be wrong.
This is BEFORE any fraud occurs on the part of these political appointees - which will control the medical spending of 300 million americans, and therefore will have a HUGE incentive for cheating.
How is this going to work again ?
No I'm saying that you're absolutely right, the US is under no obligations to "secure the world".
Of course, if the US doesn't do it, nobody else is even capable of doing it for the US.
Last time in history that this was not done - piracy made all non-direct-border trade impossible in a matter of years. So it seems a very reasonable bet that this situation will repeat itself, especially given a number of situations developing already even with the US securing things : the horn of africa, east-africa and east-malaysia ...
That means that if the US does not secure the world, history will repeat itself, and all sea-based trade will cease in an astonishingly short timeframe. This means no oil, no trade with China, no ...
Wrong. There are no buts. You do not have that responsibility. Period.
Fully agreed. Of course, *NOT* doing it would basically mean the end of international trade, except perhaps with Canada and Mexico (and even Mexico would become significantly harder if the gulf becomes unsafe).
So while your idea sounds good in theory, could you explain how we'd deal with :
-> a drop in oil supply, around, oh 70% less (meaning oil would go to, oh, say $15/gallon at least) ...
-> no more trade with china (no more iphone, or android phones for that matter)
-> only food that can be grown less than, say, 50km from where you live. Everything else is WAY too expensive
-> federal government downsizing to at most it's size in the 1930's. No more medicare or medicaid, as without easy and cheap mobility it can't work.
->
Are you seriously suggesting we do this ? Get real.
Great post ... the relevant thing is, of course, whether they're improving or not, not the absolute level.
Furthermore, do not forget, your own ideology. Socialist hourly wage
$0.00000000000000000
Surely the wage that YOU DEMAND people work for is enough for everybody ? (except, of course, that you yourself wouldn't do shit for this wage, of course. Only for people like me, lowly peons with delusions and opium, who are to be forced to work for you, right ?)
Hypocrite.
Perhaps duke nukem forever is written in C++0x. That would explain it's greatness after all.
Yes ! The US is evil. After all, just like all those leftist states, the evil, gun-loving, religion-clinging US is executing prisoners at a rate so high they don't need to produce dog food anymore. Rightist economics called this "efficient market-based use of excess meat resources".
Bush and Obama's dogs is are not fans though. They likes the fat prisoners better. Daddy says the sause is lead-based and is good for their bones.
So not it's not news. It's a "hey here's an idiot doing some US-bashing, let's give him free publicity !" story. Half the frontpage stories are these days.
It IS NOT FUNNY IF PEOPLE START PLAYING WITH YOUR LIFE FOR THEIR OWN FINANCIAL GAIN.
That is exactly my point, and why the "free market" approach to health care is such a disaster in the United States. There is a reason it is ranked so low among other developed nations (37th by the World Health Organization).
Governments work on money too. Doesn't that simple, obvious and utterly undeniable fact ... invalidate your whole train of thought ? National healthcare is not a solution to greed-run doctors, it makes it worse and enlarges the scale.
Surely the only solution to greed in healthcare can be the elimination of that greed ? The elimination of budgets, the elimination of unfairness, nepotism, and all such things ?
I know someone who's been working in national healthcare 40 years, outside of the US, near Brussels. In 40 years the government saw thin years, but there were years were the government was swimming in money. 40 years. From a dozen years after WWII up to now.
In those 40 years. Do you think that government care budgets went up even once ? Do you think they invested into healthcare even once ?
Because she knows, she was there, and she says they never did.
Your "solution to greed" is, like most liberal policies, making things A LOT WORSE.
I hate to point out cliche's, but :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A
Until you answer Milton Friedman's question, what serious argument can there be in favor of national healthcare ?
Not that serious arguments are much used in today's politics, on either side. But that doesn't mean I'm going to just let the democrats blow up my future.
And frankly if you think that giving healthcare to government hands is going to bring "your" approach, whatever you'd like, for free into your hands ... then you're beyond stupid. Sorry to state it like that, but it's the plain and simple truth.
Why not just summarize your reply ? "I haven't climbed mount everest ... because I don't feel like it".
The response of any sane human being ? "Yeah right".
The funny thing is that you decry greed, but anyone can read into your post why. Why do you hate them ? (I really don't think that's too strong a word)
Because of your own greed.
I mean seriously. You just want more money, more toys, more for yourself, and that's why you want socialism. Does it really need explaining why that's ... not going to work ? That such an attitude is, besides deeply dishonest, utterly stupid ?
I've lived in a number of countries with national healthcare. All of them were a LOT worse than "normal" US care. (unless you knew the right people, or the right procedure, or the right location to live, or ...). The biggest difference in the US : nobody even knows what the government approved answer is. In Europe, it takes a LOT of convincing to even get the doctor to give you the correct answer instead of the government approved answer.
An example : I went, north of Brussels, to the doctor with my baby girl. She'd been ill. High fever for 3-4 days. We had called, and they prescribed an anti-fever drug. This didn't help (another medical professional told me afterwards that if it *had* dropped the fever, she could have died. Masking the symptoms does not make the problem go away, and all anti-fever drugs basically suppress the immune system. Getting a lung infection with a suppressed immune system is a quick way into a coffin). So we went down to the doctor. My mother works in medicine, so I had a reasonable idea what she had, a bacterial throat infection. So we went to the doctor, and he prescribed, again, the anti-fever drug.
I didn't understand at first. What the hell ? This drug HAS BEEN TRIED FOR 4 DAYS AND DIDN'T DO ANYTHING. So we had a discussion. Voices raised. And raised. And then the answer came : antibiotics are too expensive, so if the doctor prescribes too much of them, he risks a huge tax increase, or even the loss of his licence.
Frankly, I didn't give a shit. Fortunately, this was Belgium. People don't like the government. So we found out that these rules only applied to new doctors, not to older ones. It nearly took beating the first doctor up, but we found a doctor for which this rule didn't apply, and got the actual medicine.
The next day, she was better. Not giving someone with a throat infection antibiotics means risking lung infection. A bacterial lung infection with complications is one of the diseases that still has a high mortality rate, especially amongst children.
So, frankly, I see people pushing national health insurance as little more than deluded child-murderers. And just don't start with any argument that comes down to "but this time it will be different". It IS NOT FUNNY IF PEOPLE START PLAYING WITH YOUR LIFE FOR THEIR OWN FINANCIAL GAIN. Which is *exactly* what MUST happen in any form of national healthcare.
I *never* even heard anything remotely like this happen in the US.
I haven't lived in Canada though, so I don't know. I doubt it's different.
You expect me to rate-limit my upstream and downstream bandwidth to 60% of rated? That's ludicrous and totally unnecessary. Even if it were to fix the latency, that's an incredibly stupid "solution."
Well, have you ever asked yourself why you never moved up from that helpdesk position ? This sort of opinion would be a rather good explanation.
If you want to learn why this matters, study some "Queueing theory", buy a book. And, when you've informed yourself a bit, try it out on real networks, write a few drivers, or at least configure lartc a few (hundred) times, and THEN decide what is ludicrous and what is not.
Or forever remain at that helpdesk. Well, until you're replaced by voice recognition.
Well that's actually a really simple reason : because of profit. It is not wages that trickle down, counterintuitive as that may be, it's profit that trickles down. Wages can, at their theoretical optimum, maintain the status quo of wealth (in practice this never happens because of inefficiency). Profits, however, can increase wealth.
The problem is that money is not a totally artificial number, no matter how essential this point is to liberal politics. There are real actions behind the money, but here's the kicker : this is only the case in the private sector. Profit, in economic theory, represents some form of improvement in our lives (even if it's the profits of a company that doesn't pay me anything) Money, in the end, measures some form of value. You can print money, but that doesn't produce any value.
To clarify, let's take 2 scenario's, and assume (against our better judgment) that govt. and private sector are equally efficient (let's say 90%) :
1) Government hires 10000 people, and uses them to "redivide the wealth" of 1 billion dollars. Nothing of value is produced. Ignoring the fact that this act makes it more difficult for the private sector to produce anything, this means that you extracted 1 billion dollars out of the economy, and put 900 million back into it.
-> net result : -100 million dollars. 100 mil. gone from the economy (what does this represent in practice ? Things like 10000 people not producing anything, all sorts of resources, computers, printers, office buildings, furniture, all used to produce nothing, used, then discarded)
2) Company invests 1 billion dollars, buying lots of things, including the labor of 10000 people. With what it buys, the company produces something of value to others, and sells it for 1,1 billion dollars.
-> net result : 100 million dollars ADDED to the economy (what does it mean in practice ? E.g. 1 gigaton milk removed from the economy, which we're drowning in anyway, and things like yoghurt, butter, chocolate, ... added into the economy, which otherwise wouldn't be there at all)
You see the difference ? Just think of the extreme cases : in (theoretical) communism, ALL value is extracted by government, which produces nothing of value at all. What happens ? (the system iterates, lowering total available resources for the population, until they starve and something happens). In total free capitalism, nothing at all can happen unless it increases value (granted, this has it's own problems, but we're talking absurd cases here). What happens ? (natural resources are extracted and used to produce maximum value, as fast as possible)
You keep hearing how bankers deserve their income but I can't help but think they aren't that bright.
So why hasn't your eminence, with obviously superior intellect and skill to these bankers, become one ? Surely it can't be that hard.
And, frankly, like most other posters we can summarize your argument for socialism simply as being greedy. Greed to have what others earn, and expecting the government to violently take it from them. You might know that the whole premise of socialism is that people are NOT motivated by greed, this is not because it makes a good opening line for that chapter in an economics book. If people were motivated (even partly) by greed, socialism can't work, not even in the idiotically utopian models of the most deluded communists. So if there are a lot of people like you, socialism (ie. taking the wealth of bankers, for example) will make the system collapse (just like it has done in Germany, Russia, Vietnam, Korea, ...).
It's really, really sad. Now let's hear that it's not really about taking other's wealth, it's about those poor, poor people. Come on. Because what you are is simple : you're a greedy, selfish, immoral communist. And nothing else.
And what of the rest of his reply ? You're ignoring the entire post, merely pointing out what is essentially a (small) error (as nearly no country will let in a 50 year old unemployed man, not the US, not Canada, not Europe).
Just in case you're confused, here's the actually relevant portion :
yes, Americans work hard, especially compared to the work-life balance of the EU. The US wouldn't be what it is today if it wasn't for that work ethic, and i mean that statement as a positive one. From someone who has lived and worked for several years in both US and CA, DON'T LET THE GREEN GRASS FOOL YOU. The health care and cost of living here is pretty high, and remember, nothing in life is free. my personal opinion is that the health care that the average RESPONSIBLE US worker obtains is cheaper and of better quality (emphasis here) that what is obtained through the CA government. yeah, its great that everyone gets it but that includes wino down the street, and the freeloaders having 10 kids. we pay for those guys too. socialism at work. Canada isn't a bad place to live, don't get me wrong, but the government has its citizens under their thumb. take a look at the auto insurance rates in canada and who regulates them.
You might want to check the concept of "progressive" taxes :
E.g.
you make 3000 euros. Wife and kid, mortgage, etc. net pay : ~1800 - 2000 euros
4000 euros : ~ 1850 - 2100 euros
you make 5000 euros : ~ 2400 - 2600 euros
Those numbers do NOT include sales tax, living tax, personal tax, and VAT. So deduct another 25-30% at what you can do with that money, compared to the US. This is an absolute necessity, since for every working German, there are (close to) 2 non-working ones. Obviously, this means that, on average, total tax is 66% + whatever it costs to administer the whole thing. Other parts of europe, as you point out correctly, are worse.
Given those figures, do you still think the same way ? Incidentally, that number, 2 non-working ones, is very close to rising significantly to 4-5 in less than 10 years. The systems in Europe are going to fail miserably, and it won't take long for it to happen.
You talk as if German pensions for the older people are anything remotely resembling generous. You might want to check that.
For someone who "retires" at 59 by getting fired and not finding a new job before 65, they're barely enough to survive. If you don't own the place you live in before retirement, you're in serious trouble, even with a full pension, and there's no way out. At all.
What I'm telling you to do, technically, is never to fill your pipe (very bad practice). ISPs never fill their pipes more than 60%, if they can help it. Install something like DD-WRT and rate-limit both sides of the connection to 95% of the link bandwidth (60% is better, but I'm guessing you're not game). Allow it to buffer like crazy, but to prioritize new connections.
That'll solve your latency issues (of course, not 100%. SOME slowdown is unavoidable, regardless of algorithm used, if you are on a connection where transmitting a single packet takes 4 ms (typical dsl), please don't complain about any slowdown less than 8 ms, nothing can be done about it, except upgrading).
Or you could just use a linux router : http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.qdisc.html
And frankly, we have lots of people complaining like you. Sometimes I feel like helping them. Guess what one finds 95% of the time when inspecting their traffic (often at their request, and often, even after the packet dumper removes all doubt, they STILL claim not to be running kazaa and/or bittorrent. Then we go "let's try blocking it, then. If you're not using it anyway", and *surprise* that solves the problem. Then they ask to turn the block off)
You forgot to RTFA. A single TCP connection that saturates your pipe will make latency skyrocket if you've got buffer bloat.
That won't happen for a lot of the time. Only while the buffer is filling up will this ever be a problem, which should be 3-4 secs tops. After that, the tcp connection will run slightly below the link bandwidth on a permanent basis, meaning latency will drop close to zero again.
Only lots of tcp connections will saturate a link, even with huge buffers.
I agree, but that's as likely to happen as IPv6. Eventually, but not yet, and it may always be "not yet".
Funny you should make this specific comparison. After all, in the last year just about every internet backbone implemented ipv6, and several "normal" access providers implemented it for their customers, including 6to4. Today, if you *want* to use the IPV6 internet, you can.
The same with intelligent algorithms. It *is* happening. Even cheap wireless routers can do this now. Got an old one ? Install DD-WRT and configure it correctly.