You can't trust the referrer. It's completely voluntary. For example, no matter what link I just followed your server will see its own address in the referrer header, not the address of the previous page.
A better scheme is to include the original site's ID in the URL.
Broadband Internet Service Type (DSL, Cable, U-verse, FiOS, Satellite, Cellular Data, Non-Cellular Wireless (WISP), T1, T3, Other)
Type of Service if you specified 'Other' above (free-form)
Name of ISP (e.g. AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etc.) (free-form)
Maximum Download and Upload Speeds (in bits per second) for your service level as specified by your ISP (including any promised initial speed boosts - e.g. 'Powerboost'), also if your ISP has imposed a traffic or bandwidth cap on your service, please briefly describe it if possible (free-form)
City, State, Country (Zip or City code would also be appreciated) (free-form)
Contact Info (E-mail address preferred, plus your name and/or organization name would be appreciated - This info will only be used for statistical purposes or to contact you if we have questions - [optional] (free-form)
If you've tried the FCC Broadband Tests [link], please enter the results - Download and Upload Speeds, Latency, Jitter, and Test Type (M-Lab or Ookla) - Please also include the day of the week and approximate time of day (including Time Zone) that any tests were conducted - [optional] (free-form)
Overall - considering performance, cost, and any other factors - how would you rate your ISP? (Perfect, Excellent, Very Good, Good, Adequate, Neutral, Disappointing, Bad, Very Bad, Abysmal, Dial-up might be better, No Opinion)
In your opinion, is there sufficient ISP competition available to you at your location? (Yes, No, Maybe, I don't know)
Questions, Comments, etc. - [optional] (free-form)
How about we apply that opinion to everything else?
I do apply that opinion to everything else.
And you're wrong about the origin of the Internet. The residential and business markets were first served by numerous private networks, including both small BBSs and larger information brokers like CompuServe and AOL, which later migrated to TCP/IP as a common standard. These private organizations contributed just as much to the modern Internet as the DoD or the universities. ARPANET may have formed the kernel, a standard to rally around, but the end result—an integrated, world-wide digital communications network—was inevitable from the beginning.
Anyway, whatever its origins, you can hardly argue that the Internet isn't pretty much 100% privately-owned-and-operated today. Even if it was tainted by publicly-funded research in the past, there's no way to undo that now; we might as well make the best of it. The government didn't buy my PC, or pay my ISP bill; connectivity to the various servers I visit is provided courtesy of private transit agreements. Continuing to use the Internet does not impose an external cost on anyone else, so there's no moral reason to give it up.
The idea that every doctor, nurse, and hospital would willingly disregard the Hippocratic oath is so far flung that it can't even be humored as a possible route forward.
I never suggested that they would do so; only that they would not be required to perform free treatment as a matter of law. If they choose to treat others anyway they are donating their services, which they are perfectly free to do within the extend of their own resources.
Anyway, they don't all have to do it. If even a few refused free treatment, and charged correspondingly lower prices to paying patients, the rest would have no choice but to do the same or face bankruptcy. They can only get away with so much in forced donations, however good the cause.
Because really, how is a system that's funded directly out of paychecks ever going to go "insolvent"?
If you look at it as "they never committed to any particular level of payout, so they can just cut payouts as revenues decrease" then no, there is no threat of insolvency. However, what really matters to most people planning their retirement is whether SS will be enough to support them, and in that sense there is a minimum cost per retiree. SS isn't a savings program; the payments for current retirees come out of the paychecks of those working today. At first this worked well enough, because there were far more workers than retirees. In the near future that balance is going to be reversed, at which point something has to change if SS is to remain relevant. The government—not CATO or any other partisan organization—recently sent out a notice admitting as much. Simply put, if the current payouts per retiree and SS tax rates remain as they are today, SS will be bankrupt before I retire. They can either let the payouts drop, in which case SS becomes irrelevant[1] and everyone has to save for their own retirement anyway, or they can significantly raise taxes on today's workers.
[1] So far as I'm concerned it's irrelevant anyway; I never expected it to still be around when I retire, and even if it is I won't apply for it. That would be immorally passing my own retirement costs on to the next generation.
That clause is often misunderstood. It only grants Congress "the Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises"; the rest is just descriptive of why Congress has that power. The ways in which it is authorized to spend the money so collected are enumerated in the remaining clauses.
Some great topical quotes from James Madison, author of the Constitution:
With respect to the words "general welfare," I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character, which there is a host of proofs, was not contemplated by its creators.
I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents....
There is nothing more natural than to begin with a general statement and then qualify it with specifics. If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one.
If you do not have insurance and you have any medical procedure provided, the cost of that procedure is offset by those who do have insurance.
Which is exactly what's wrong with the current system, and one of the few things this new bill will not change. In fact, in many ways it makes things worse, since you can't even opt out of said insurance.
I know this isn't exactly a popular view, but in my opinion the only sane policy is that if you can't (or won't) afford a given medical treatment then you make do without it. This does not exclude private, non-subsidizing insurance programs or voluntary charity, but in the end every individual is responsible for funding their own medical care. Simply knowing that something can be done to treat your condition does not justify spending unlimited resources to effect a cure, particularly when those resources belong to others. After all, just about anything can be cured eventually if you're willing to spend enough on it, but only the owner(s) of those resources have the right to decide whether the cure is worth the cost.
It makes much more sense to start from a position of personal responsibility, extending limited charity to those who actually need it, than to turn insurance into a massive subsidy program with no responsibility whatsoever and later try to reign in the inevitable abuses. The former is manageable with a minimum of administrative overhead, the latter ensures a ponderous bureaucracy and heavy-handed regulation.
So, if you honestly believe that the government couldn't run a public plan well, there's no reason to oppose it.
You assume that:
a) Not only will the public option start out self-funded, but it will remain self-funded regardless of changing political conditions.
b) If the public option does go bankrupt, for whatever reason, it will fold the same way a bankrupt private company would and not be bailed out at the taxpayers' expense.
c) The government will not use its powers of regulation and taxation in ways which favor the public option at the expense of private insurance.
Competition requires a level legal "playing field" which cannot exist when one of the "competitors" is a branch of the government. Besides, if you think insurance-industry lobbyists have too much influence over Congress now, just wait until they've been merged into a single organization.
Anyone who really wants a "public option" is free to form a medical insurance co-op. The only reason to support government-provided insurance is because it *requires* the one thing only the government has: a license to employ coercion.
The part you quoted is just the purpose statement; it confers no powers on its own. It's especially not a blank check to do anything portrayed as promoting "the general Welfare". For an action to be Constitutional it must fall within one of the explicitly enumerated powers of the branch in question.
So far as that goes, "guaranteed healthcare"—even the idealized version too many people incorrectly think was just passed—does not necessarily "promote the general Welfare" of American citizens. You have to look at the costs, not just the supposed benefits, and the costs, monetary and otherwise, are just way too high. In the end the only ones who can decide whether their welfare has been promoted are those who will be affected by the changes, and at last count some 60% of them believe otherwise.
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 2, Insightful
People aren't looking to be compensated, they are looking for their coverage to not be dropped or denied because their health was already fucked when they signed up for insurance.
And the difference is...?
If you mean that insurance against other medical risks should not be dropped or denied due to some unrelated pre-existing condition, I completely agree. Insurance should pay to treat your broken bone regardless of your chronic immune disorder, for example, provided you didn't commit fraud by deceiving them about it.
However, if you have a known disorder which makes your bones weak and thus leads you have suffer from broken bones at an above-average rate, then you should expect to be asked about this when signing up for insurance, and should also expect either higher premiums or more limited coverage (or both) due to your heightened risk. If you chose to lie about the disorder the insurer would be perfectly justified in dropping your entire account upon learning the truth.
Regarding complete unknowns—conditions which you had before signing up, but didn't know about—that is a matter to be specified in the contract between you and the insurer. It would be unreasonable to terminate your coverage for other conditions when you didn't deliberately defraud them, but on the other hand there is nothing inherently reasonable about automatically covering treatment for conditions which existed before you signed up, known or otherwise.
Finally, once a risk has been realized the original insurer should be the one to cover the cost, possibly contingent on your continued co-pays or whatever the original terms were, even if you switch to another insurer. In no case should the new insurer be expected to pay for a condition which is no longer a matter of unrealized risk. This would naturally eliminate the most common justification for coverage of pre-existing conditions, which is a change in insurers (mostly due to poor policies encouraging employer-funded insurance).
I agree with everything else you said, but if you to be compensated for "pre-existing conditions" then you're looking for charity, not insurance. The purpose of insurance is to trade low-probability, high-cost risk for high-probability, low-cost premiums, and thus combat uncertainty. It's not meant to be a savings program or a handout. The efficiency of insurance is directly correlated with accurately assessing each client's risk and setting their premiums accordingly.
If you want to provide charity for those with pre-existing conditions that should be debated and operated as a separate program.
Human behavior isn't random, but it is chaotic in the context of competition. One can predict the result easily enough when there are no conflicting self-interests, as in your example, but that predictability disappears as soon as you try to influence the outcome in a way one or more of the individuals involved perceives as not being in their favor.
If all you want to do is model non-coerced and purely cooperative human behavior then that won't be an issue, but most behavioral economists find themselves employed in the development of political policies which are intended to change others' behavior. The chaotic nature of competition makes the long-term outcome of such measures impossible to predict; this phenomenon is observed all the time, and goes by the name "Law of Unintended Consequences".
By not using those automated services, we create demand for actual clerks and it creates jobs for others.
If you really believe that this is a good thing, please tell me you hire others to do all your remaining work: shopping, cooking, cleaning, driving, yard work, posting to Slashdot, etc.—everything but your own day job. If not, just think of all the jobs you're failing to create!
For that matter, just consider how much automation is involved in posting to Slashdot—and how many jobs "would be created" for the same task if society rejected that automation, vs. the number which have been created because of it.
Human labor has always been the most scarce resource in the entire economy, the limiting factor for all our production. Automation lets us do more with less, but there remains more than enough work to go around, and no risk whatsoever of automating anyone into unemployment. There are, of course, true sources of involuntary unemployment, including (but not limited to) a) the common-place, stubborn refusal to adapt to changing demand for a specific kind of labor; b) legal or social environments which set artificial price floors (monetary and otherwise), and thus prevent people from achieving gainful employment on their own voluntary terms; and c) taxes and tariffs which discourage employers from operating near one's comfort zone (consisting of familial home, family, culture, language, etc.).
The route from the community entrance to the driveway is presumably the HOA's property (as a "common area"). Permitting access to this property is a service which the HOA is within its rights to withhold. The means by which you and your guests approach your property is one of the things you have to think about before making a purchase. It's also something most people recklessly take for granted. If you don't have a clear property right (e.g. easement) in the ground you must cover to access your property, you'd best remain on good terms with those who do.
If you want to talk about the issues with HOAs, let's start with the way the terms supposedly attach to the property rather than the owner; i.e. the way that you—as the sole owner of the house and the land on which it's built—aren't permitted to sell your own property to anyone who doesn't also contract with the HOA. Of course, the new owner might end up needing a helicopter to get to their new home, but limited access shouldn't prevent you from selling it to them.
I think you'll find that "fair use" is far less well-defined than you're making it out to be. In particular, with some rare exceptions (like educational use), you can't be certain that a given use is legally "fair" until that particular use has been ruled on by a judge; until then it's anyone's guess whether "fair use" applies, although some uses are naturally more likely to be ruled "fair" than others. Personal copies remain a gray area, aside from some specific and limited rulings concerning "time shifting", "format shifting", and (single, offline) backups. So far as I know the concept of "space shifting"—making personal copies for use in e.g. a car's CD player—has not been legally confirmed as non-infringing, and various organizations have held this to be illegal regardless of the presence or absence of DRM. I know of no statue or precedence which would contradict (or affirm) their position.
The Audio Home Recording Act does make an explicit exception to copyright in regard to personal, non-commercial copying of copyrighted music, but only in circumstances which almost never attain in practice. (In particular, the copies must be made with dedicated digital audio recording equipment, and onto more expensive "music CD-Rs".) The fact that this Act was deemed necessary should be sufficient to show that personal, non-commercial copying is not automatically considered fair use.
The GGP and I mostly agree on what sort of uses should be permitted; the difference is that an "implied license" starts by assuming all uses are prohibited, and then makes exceptions here and there based on what a "reasonable" person might have intended. In this way it's much like the concept of "fair use", with all the same drawbacks. If personal and transient copies are taken out of the domain of copyright entirely, as I suggested, then there is no need for these licenses, express or implied, and no uncertainty as to one's legal rights regarding copyrighted material one has legally received.
They don't seem to relate to man's nature vis-a-vis the Universe.
First, the requirement was that the belief be "based on a theory of 'man's nature or his place in the Universe'", not necessarily both. (Or "nature vis-a-vis the Universe", which is really a third category.) Second, libertarianism and agorism share a system of ethics which carefully delineates the boundary between (effectively) free-willed, self-owning agents and property/land. If that doesn't count as being concerned with both "man's nature" and "his place in the Universe", what does?
It's clearly a political philosophy... where does it touch on anything to do with the nature of mankind?
In defining a system of ethics it touches on the nature of mankind much as any other religion does. The fact that it touches on politics as well—though more as an anti-political philosophy, since it rejects the use of political, i.e. coercive, means—does not prevent it from meeting the GP's criteria. Moreover, this is its sole political position. Most of the acknowledged religions have far more to say regarding political matters, since they stand to benefit from political action taken on their behalf.
The rest of the philosophy deals with voluntary actions between consenting individuals, a topic which has traditionally been the domain of religion. So why not classify it as such, and afford it the same protections?
The philosophies of classical liberalism / libertarianism (ref. For a New Liberty) and Agorism would seem to meet all three of these requirements. They're certainly based on theories "of man's nature", reasonably well organized, and perfectly sincere. Perhaps we should consider requesting protection as an organized "religion"?
What about Freethought? There might be some difficulty regarding its "institutional quality", but it's a bit more than just a "personal moral preference", and should qualify on the other two points.
Atheism doesn't assume that anything "created" the universe, any more than deism assumes that something "created" God. That the universe exists, yes; it's hard to get much of anywhere without assuming that. But there's no reason to assume the existence of any "creator".
In fact, one could say that there being no reason to believe in any ultimate, un-created Creator is the entire point of atheism.
This is the wrong approach. Rather than a maze of vague and inconsistent "implied licenses", it should simply be recognized that copyright restrictions cannot apply unless and until the copies are distributed to others who do not already possess an equivalent copy. If you already have a legal copy there can be no restrictions on making additional copies for your own use, provided all the copies remain in your possession. Anything less would be madness considering the current state of technology.
Anyway, the transient-copy issue has always existed, even before the digital revolution. Every time you shine light onto a page you make countless temporary[1] copies in the form of modulated photons—not to mention the semi-permanent copy in your own memory. Digital communication and storage technology is merely forcing us to recognize and deal with the issue.
[1] Or not-so-temporary; if not absorbed, those modulated photons will continue traveling pretty much forever.
When the word "reasonable" is applied to law, it means "What would most reasonable people consider to be the case."
In the context of the 4th Amendment, "unreasonable searches and seizures" pretty obviously refers to any search or seizure not accompanied by a warrant. Whether or not a "reasonable" person would expect the target of the search or seizure to be "private" is completely irrelevant.
Not harming anyone else isn't the same as not having consequences for anyone else.
True, but in this and all similar cases the consequences are not due to the act itself, but rather due to the action of some other party (usually a government). If you're upset about being made to pay someone's medical bills, blame those who would force you to do so. If you're instead upset about additional ER time and resulting cost increases, blame the hospitals for choosing to treat the "undeserving" with the same priority as the rest. (Unless they are forced to do so, that is, in which case you can once again blame the government for setting that particular policy.)
If someone were to credibly claim that they would steal $10 from you were I to step out my front door, and I stepped out anyway, it should be obvious that this third-party remains entirely responsible for your loss. I could have prevented it by remaining inside, but I have no obligation to do so, just as nothing I did forced the third-party to take $10 from you. Their decision, their action, their responsibility. The indirect effects on the tax-payer resulting from "risky" behavior are the same, just scaled up a bit. The behavior causes no direct harm to others, and any and all indirect consequences to the tax-payers are entirely the choice and responsibility of the tax-collectors.
The odds of two non-identical twin individuals sharing the same 26 marker genetic fingerprint are several billion to one.
That assumes that the markers are independent of each other, which isn't the case. For example, you are likely to share markers with your blood relatives, and to a lesser extent others of your race and ethnicity. Even if the odds were "several billion to one", however, that still leaves a significant chance of mistaken identity given 6.7 billion humans to choose from.
The other objections you list are also worth considering, of course. Any one of these reasons would be sufficient to oppose the measure.
It would be more accurate to say that you can't implement the QuickSort algorithm properly with immutable arrays; its performance relies on being able to sort the elements in-place, without allocating new memory at every step. Haskell does have mutable arrays, however: IOArray and STArray. (more info) There are also sorting algorithms better suited to immutable data.
Note that the introduction of mutable references makes the GC process much less efficient. The unboxed mutable array types (IOUArray, STUArray) do not have this drawback, but are limited to plain, fixed-size values.
but, it was a free market before those patent and copyright monopolies came into being.... and those patent and copyright monopolies came into being because the first groups to be able to garner more wealth than others used their wealth to corner the market and then to lobby politicians to put out rules in their favor.
If it were really a free market in the beginning there would have been no politicians to lobby. In a free market there is exactly one immutable law: the Non-Aggression Principle. There are no lawmakers, and no opportunity to lobby that the law be changed in anyone's favor.
The problem isn't any imbalance in wealth, but rather the imbalance in authority: the artificial division of naturally equal human beings into those who make the rules (politicians) and those required to follow them (civilians). You're trying to blame those offering the bribes when the responsibility for assuming this "right" to govern others and altering the law for their own benefit lies squarely with those accepting the bribes, i.e. the politicians. I'm not saying that those lobbying for the application of political power toward their own ends are blameless, of course, only that their influence is minor by comparison. Special-interest laws are the symptom; aggression, especially political aggression, is the disease.
It's still a free market, it just happens to be a market where part of the goods that are sold or bought are intellectual property.
Which, depending on the particular definition of "free market" you subscribe to, may or may not be a contradiction. The term is simply too watered down to be useful, in large part due to over-application of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy as demonstrated in your post. True, if your intent is to determine whether something/someone is or isn't a member of a particular group, you can't just redefine the group to suit your preferred conclusion. However, the AC was replying to this comment:
this is precisely capitalism, and precisely what you term as 'free market'. (Emphasis added.)
This clearly leaves the definition of "free market" up to the OP (ffreeloader), who just as clearly agreed that Obama's endorsement of "IP rights" was anti-free-market. This establishes that the term "free market" was meant to refer to the particular definition(s) which exclude the concept of "IP." Ergo, in the context of this thread the AC was making a perfectly sound argument, and the other potential definitions of "free market" have no place.
P.S. It would be nice if we could reserve a specific, concise term for "the libertarian form of free-market where all legitimate interaction between individuals is governed by the Non-Aggression Principle, where property rights take the form of absolute (but not inherently exclusive) rights to continue using said property in the manner in which it has previously been homesteaded from unowned land, and where such rights may be passed from owner to owner exclusively via contract." Unfortunately, every time this has been tried the new term has been similarly co-opted for incompatible uses—like "free market", which is often used where "market" alone would serve—to the point that we're running out of meaningful alternatives.
Dual license it under the MPL as well, giving up some freedoms
Exactly what freedoms do you think you're giving up? As the developer you have all the freedom in the world—nothing forces you to publish in the first place, just as nothing can force Mozilla to integrate and distribute your patch. So Mozilla wants you to license your code to them under the LGPL and MPL in addition to your preferred GPL in exchange for integration into their codebase. This is fair enough; they have the right to dictate terms regarding their own repository. As a result of this policy the end-user has the choice of all the freedoms granted by the GPL, plus any additional freedoms granted by the LGPL or MPL. How do you interpret this as "giving up some freedoms"?
Of course, since you referenced the GPL as your preferred license, you probably live in that peculiar dream-world where "freedom" is defined in terms of restrictions on how the source can be used. In that case I can see how lifting restrictions can be seen as "giving up some freedoms", for some twisted definition of "freedoms".
Slashdot Mirror
You can't trust the referrer. It's completely voluntary. For example, no matter what link I just followed your server will see its own address in the referrer header, not the address of the previous page.
A better scheme is to include the original site's ID in the URL.
Which of the questions did you consider loaded?
How about we apply that opinion to everything else?
I do apply that opinion to everything else.
And you're wrong about the origin of the Internet. The residential and business markets were first served by numerous private networks, including both small BBSs and larger information brokers like CompuServe and AOL, which later migrated to TCP/IP as a common standard. These private organizations contributed just as much to the modern Internet as the DoD or the universities. ARPANET may have formed the kernel, a standard to rally around, but the end result—an integrated, world-wide digital communications network—was inevitable from the beginning.
Anyway, whatever its origins, you can hardly argue that the Internet isn't pretty much 100% privately-owned-and-operated today. Even if it was tainted by publicly-funded research in the past, there's no way to undo that now; we might as well make the best of it. The government didn't buy my PC, or pay my ISP bill; connectivity to the various servers I visit is provided courtesy of private transit agreements. Continuing to use the Internet does not impose an external cost on anyone else, so there's no moral reason to give it up.
The idea that every doctor, nurse, and hospital would willingly disregard the Hippocratic oath is so far flung that it can't even be humored as a possible route forward.
I never suggested that they would do so; only that they would not be required to perform free treatment as a matter of law. If they choose to treat others anyway they are donating their services, which they are perfectly free to do within the extend of their own resources.
Anyway, they don't all have to do it. If even a few refused free treatment, and charged correspondingly lower prices to paying patients, the rest would have no choice but to do the same or face bankruptcy. They can only get away with so much in forced donations, however good the cause.
Because really, how is a system that's funded directly out of paychecks ever going to go "insolvent"?
If you look at it as "they never committed to any particular level of payout, so they can just cut payouts as revenues decrease" then no, there is no threat of insolvency. However, what really matters to most people planning their retirement is whether SS will be enough to support them, and in that sense there is a minimum cost per retiree. SS isn't a savings program; the payments for current retirees come out of the paychecks of those working today. At first this worked well enough, because there were far more workers than retirees. In the near future that balance is going to be reversed, at which point something has to change if SS is to remain relevant. The government—not CATO or any other partisan organization—recently sent out a notice admitting as much. Simply put, if the current payouts per retiree and SS tax rates remain as they are today, SS will be bankrupt before I retire. They can either let the payouts drop, in which case SS becomes irrelevant[1] and everyone has to save for their own retirement anyway, or they can significantly raise taxes on today's workers.
[1] So far as I'm concerned it's irrelevant anyway; I never expected it to still be around when I retire, and even if it is I won't apply for it. That would be immorally passing my own retirement costs on to the next generation.
That clause is often misunderstood. It only grants Congress "the Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises"; the rest is just descriptive of why Congress has that power. The ways in which it is authorized to spend the money so collected are enumerated in the remaining clauses.
Some great topical quotes from James Madison, author of the Constitution:
With respect to the words "general welfare," I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character, which there is a host of proofs, was not contemplated by its creators.
I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents....
There is nothing more natural than to begin with a general statement and then qualify it with specifics. If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one.
If you do not have insurance and you have any medical procedure provided, the cost of that procedure is offset by those who do have insurance.
Which is exactly what's wrong with the current system, and one of the few things this new bill will not change. In fact, in many ways it makes things worse, since you can't even opt out of said insurance.
I know this isn't exactly a popular view, but in my opinion the only sane policy is that if you can't (or won't) afford a given medical treatment then you make do without it. This does not exclude private, non-subsidizing insurance programs or voluntary charity, but in the end every individual is responsible for funding their own medical care. Simply knowing that something can be done to treat your condition does not justify spending unlimited resources to effect a cure, particularly when those resources belong to others. After all, just about anything can be cured eventually if you're willing to spend enough on it, but only the owner(s) of those resources have the right to decide whether the cure is worth the cost.
It makes much more sense to start from a position of personal responsibility, extending limited charity to those who actually need it, than to turn insurance into a massive subsidy program with no responsibility whatsoever and later try to reign in the inevitable abuses. The former is manageable with a minimum of administrative overhead, the latter ensures a ponderous bureaucracy and heavy-handed regulation.
So, if you honestly believe that the government couldn't run a public plan well, there's no reason to oppose it.
You assume that:
a) Not only will the public option start out self-funded, but it will remain self-funded regardless of changing political conditions.
b) If the public option does go bankrupt, for whatever reason, it will fold the same way a bankrupt private company would and not be bailed out at the taxpayers' expense.
c) The government will not use its powers of regulation and taxation in ways which favor the public option at the expense of private insurance.
Competition requires a level legal "playing field" which cannot exist when one of the "competitors" is a branch of the government. Besides, if you think insurance-industry lobbyists have too much influence over Congress now, just wait until they've been merged into a single organization.
Anyone who really wants a "public option" is free to form a medical insurance co-op. The only reason to support government-provided insurance is because it *requires* the one thing only the government has: a license to employ coercion.
The part you quoted is just the purpose statement; it confers no powers on its own. It's especially not a blank check to do anything portrayed as promoting "the general Welfare". For an action to be Constitutional it must fall within one of the explicitly enumerated powers of the branch in question.
So far as that goes, "guaranteed healthcare"—even the idealized version too many people incorrectly think was just passed—does not necessarily "promote the general Welfare" of American citizens. You have to look at the costs, not just the supposed benefits, and the costs, monetary and otherwise, are just way too high. In the end the only ones who can decide whether their welfare has been promoted are those who will be affected by the changes, and at last count some 60% of them believe otherwise.
People aren't looking to be compensated, they are looking for their coverage to not be dropped or denied because their health was already fucked when they signed up for insurance.
And the difference is...?
If you mean that insurance against other medical risks should not be dropped or denied due to some unrelated pre-existing condition, I completely agree. Insurance should pay to treat your broken bone regardless of your chronic immune disorder, for example, provided you didn't commit fraud by deceiving them about it.
However, if you have a known disorder which makes your bones weak and thus leads you have suffer from broken bones at an above-average rate, then you should expect to be asked about this when signing up for insurance, and should also expect either higher premiums or more limited coverage (or both) due to your heightened risk. If you chose to lie about the disorder the insurer would be perfectly justified in dropping your entire account upon learning the truth.
Regarding complete unknowns—conditions which you had before signing up, but didn't know about—that is a matter to be specified in the contract between you and the insurer. It would be unreasonable to terminate your coverage for other conditions when you didn't deliberately defraud them, but on the other hand there is nothing inherently reasonable about automatically covering treatment for conditions which existed before you signed up, known or otherwise.
Finally, once a risk has been realized the original insurer should be the one to cover the cost, possibly contingent on your continued co-pays or whatever the original terms were, even if you switch to another insurer. In no case should the new insurer be expected to pay for a condition which is no longer a matter of unrealized risk. This would naturally eliminate the most common justification for coverage of pre-existing conditions, which is a change in insurers (mostly due to poor policies encouraging employer-funded insurance).
No pre-existing conditions
I agree with everything else you said, but if you to be compensated for "pre-existing conditions" then you're looking for charity, not insurance. The purpose of insurance is to trade low-probability, high-cost risk for high-probability, low-cost premiums, and thus combat uncertainty. It's not meant to be a savings program or a handout. The efficiency of insurance is directly correlated with accurately assessing each client's risk and setting their premiums accordingly.
If you want to provide charity for those with pre-existing conditions that should be debated and operated as a separate program.
Human behavior isn't random, but it is chaotic in the context of competition. One can predict the result easily enough when there are no conflicting self-interests, as in your example, but that predictability disappears as soon as you try to influence the outcome in a way one or more of the individuals involved perceives as not being in their favor.
If all you want to do is model non-coerced and purely cooperative human behavior then that won't be an issue, but most behavioral economists find themselves employed in the development of political policies which are intended to change others' behavior. The chaotic nature of competition makes the long-term outcome of such measures impossible to predict; this phenomenon is observed all the time, and goes by the name "Law of Unintended Consequences".
By not using those automated services, we create demand for actual clerks and it creates jobs for others.
If you really believe that this is a good thing, please tell me you hire others to do all your remaining work: shopping, cooking, cleaning, driving, yard work, posting to Slashdot, etc.—everything but your own day job. If not, just think of all the jobs you're failing to create!
For that matter, just consider how much automation is involved in posting to Slashdot—and how many jobs "would be created" for the same task if society rejected that automation, vs. the number which have been created because of it.
Human labor has always been the most scarce resource in the entire economy, the limiting factor for all our production. Automation lets us do more with less, but there remains more than enough work to go around, and no risk whatsoever of automating anyone into unemployment. There are, of course, true sources of involuntary unemployment, including (but not limited to) a) the common-place, stubborn refusal to adapt to changing demand for a specific kind of labor; b) legal or social environments which set artificial price floors (monetary and otherwise), and thus prevent people from achieving gainful employment on their own voluntary terms; and c) taxes and tariffs which discourage employers from operating near one's comfort zone (consisting of familial home, family, culture, language, etc.).
The route from the community entrance to the driveway is presumably the HOA's property (as a "common area"). Permitting access to this property is a service which the HOA is within its rights to withhold. The means by which you and your guests approach your property is one of the things you have to think about before making a purchase. It's also something most people recklessly take for granted. If you don't have a clear property right (e.g. easement) in the ground you must cover to access your property, you'd best remain on good terms with those who do.
If you want to talk about the issues with HOAs, let's start with the way the terms supposedly attach to the property rather than the owner; i.e. the way that you—as the sole owner of the house and the land on which it's built—aren't permitted to sell your own property to anyone who doesn't also contract with the HOA. Of course, the new owner might end up needing a helicopter to get to their new home, but limited access shouldn't prevent you from selling it to them.
I think you'll find that "fair use" is far less well-defined than you're making it out to be. In particular, with some rare exceptions (like educational use), you can't be certain that a given use is legally "fair" until that particular use has been ruled on by a judge; until then it's anyone's guess whether "fair use" applies, although some uses are naturally more likely to be ruled "fair" than others. Personal copies remain a gray area, aside from some specific and limited rulings concerning "time shifting", "format shifting", and (single, offline) backups. So far as I know the concept of "space shifting"—making personal copies for use in e.g. a car's CD player—has not been legally confirmed as non-infringing, and various organizations have held this to be illegal regardless of the presence or absence of DRM. I know of no statue or precedence which would contradict (or affirm) their position.
The Audio Home Recording Act does make an explicit exception to copyright in regard to personal, non-commercial copying of copyrighted music, but only in circumstances which almost never attain in practice. (In particular, the copies must be made with dedicated digital audio recording equipment, and onto more expensive "music CD-Rs".) The fact that this Act was deemed necessary should be sufficient to show that personal, non-commercial copying is not automatically considered fair use.
The GGP and I mostly agree on what sort of uses should be permitted; the difference is that an "implied license" starts by assuming all uses are prohibited, and then makes exceptions here and there based on what a "reasonable" person might have intended. In this way it's much like the concept of "fair use", with all the same drawbacks. If personal and transient copies are taken out of the domain of copyright entirely, as I suggested, then there is no need for these licenses, express or implied, and no uncertainty as to one's legal rights regarding copyrighted material one has legally received.
They don't seem to relate to man's nature vis-a-vis the Universe.
First, the requirement was that the belief be "based on a theory of 'man's nature or his place in the Universe'", not necessarily both. (Or "nature vis-a-vis the Universe", which is really a third category.) Second, libertarianism and agorism share a system of ethics which carefully delineates the boundary between (effectively) free-willed, self-owning agents and property/land. If that doesn't count as being concerned with both "man's nature" and "his place in the Universe", what does?
It's clearly a political philosophy... where does it touch on anything to do with the nature of mankind?
In defining a system of ethics it touches on the nature of mankind much as any other religion does. The fact that it touches on politics as well—though more as an anti-political philosophy, since it rejects the use of political, i.e. coercive, means—does not prevent it from meeting the GP's criteria. Moreover, this is its sole political position. Most of the acknowledged religions have far more to say regarding political matters, since they stand to benefit from political action taken on their behalf.
The rest of the philosophy deals with voluntary actions between consenting individuals, a topic which has traditionally been the domain of religion. So why not classify it as such, and afford it the same protections?
The philosophies of classical liberalism / libertarianism (ref. For a New Liberty) and Agorism would seem to meet all three of these requirements. They're certainly based on theories "of man's nature", reasonably well organized, and perfectly sincere. Perhaps we should consider requesting protection as an organized "religion"?
What about Freethought? There might be some difficulty regarding its "institutional quality", but it's a bit more than just a "personal moral preference", and should qualify on the other two points.
Atheism doesn't assume that anything "created" the universe, any more than deism assumes that something "created" God. That the universe exists, yes; it's hard to get much of anywhere without assuming that. But there's no reason to assume the existence of any "creator".
In fact, one could say that there being no reason to believe in any ultimate, un-created Creator is the entire point of atheism.
This is the wrong approach. Rather than a maze of vague and inconsistent "implied licenses", it should simply be recognized that copyright restrictions cannot apply unless and until the copies are distributed to others who do not already possess an equivalent copy. If you already have a legal copy there can be no restrictions on making additional copies for your own use, provided all the copies remain in your possession. Anything less would be madness considering the current state of technology.
Anyway, the transient-copy issue has always existed, even before the digital revolution. Every time you shine light onto a page you make countless temporary[1] copies in the form of modulated photons—not to mention the semi-permanent copy in your own memory. Digital communication and storage technology is merely forcing us to recognize and deal with the issue.
[1] Or not-so-temporary; if not absorbed, those modulated photons will continue traveling pretty much forever.
When the word "reasonable" is applied to law, it means "What would most reasonable people consider to be the case."
In the context of the 4th Amendment, "unreasonable searches and seizures" pretty obviously refers to any search or seizure not accompanied by a warrant. Whether or not a "reasonable" person would expect the target of the search or seizure to be "private" is completely irrelevant.
Not harming anyone else isn't the same as not having consequences for anyone else.
True, but in this and all similar cases the consequences are not due to the act itself, but rather due to the action of some other party (usually a government). If you're upset about being made to pay someone's medical bills, blame those who would force you to do so. If you're instead upset about additional ER time and resulting cost increases, blame the hospitals for choosing to treat the "undeserving" with the same priority as the rest. (Unless they are forced to do so, that is, in which case you can once again blame the government for setting that particular policy.)
If someone were to credibly claim that they would steal $10 from you were I to step out my front door, and I stepped out anyway, it should be obvious that this third-party remains entirely responsible for your loss. I could have prevented it by remaining inside, but I have no obligation to do so, just as nothing I did forced the third-party to take $10 from you. Their decision, their action, their responsibility. The indirect effects on the tax-payer resulting from "risky" behavior are the same, just scaled up a bit. The behavior causes no direct harm to others, and any and all indirect consequences to the tax-payers are entirely the choice and responsibility of the tax-collectors.
The odds of two non-identical twin individuals sharing the same 26 marker genetic fingerprint are several billion to one.
That assumes that the markers are independent of each other, which isn't the case. For example, you are likely to share markers with your blood relatives, and to a lesser extent others of your race and ethnicity. Even if the odds were "several billion to one", however, that still leaves a significant chance of mistaken identity given 6.7 billion humans to choose from.
The other objections you list are also worth considering, of course. Any one of these reasons would be sufficient to oppose the measure.
Haskell makes quicksort run slow?
It would be more accurate to say that you can't implement the QuickSort algorithm properly with immutable arrays; its performance relies on being able to sort the elements in-place, without allocating new memory at every step. Haskell does have mutable arrays, however: IOArray and STArray. (more info) There are also sorting algorithms better suited to immutable data.
Note that the introduction of mutable references makes the GC process much less efficient. The unboxed mutable array types (IOUArray, STUArray) do not have this drawback, but are limited to plain, fixed-size values.
but, it was a free market before those patent and copyright monopolies came into being.... and those patent and copyright monopolies came into being because the first groups to be able to garner more wealth than others used their wealth to corner the market and then to lobby politicians to put out rules in their favor.
If it were really a free market in the beginning there would have been no politicians to lobby. In a free market there is exactly one immutable law: the Non-Aggression Principle. There are no lawmakers, and no opportunity to lobby that the law be changed in anyone's favor.
The problem isn't any imbalance in wealth, but rather the imbalance in authority: the artificial division of naturally equal human beings into those who make the rules (politicians) and those required to follow them (civilians). You're trying to blame those offering the bribes when the responsibility for assuming this "right" to govern others and altering the law for their own benefit lies squarely with those accepting the bribes, i.e. the politicians. I'm not saying that those lobbying for the application of political power toward their own ends are blameless, of course, only that their influence is minor by comparison. Special-interest laws are the symptom; aggression, especially political aggression, is the disease.
It's still a free market, it just happens to be a market where part of the goods that are sold or bought are intellectual property.
Which, depending on the particular definition of "free market" you subscribe to, may or may not be a contradiction. The term is simply too watered down to be useful, in large part due to over-application of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy as demonstrated in your post. True, if your intent is to determine whether something/someone is or isn't a member of a particular group, you can't just redefine the group to suit your preferred conclusion. However, the AC was replying to this comment:
this is precisely capitalism, and precisely what you term as 'free market'. (Emphasis added.)
This clearly leaves the definition of "free market" up to the OP (ffreeloader), who just as clearly agreed that Obama's endorsement of "IP rights" was anti-free-market. This establishes that the term "free market" was meant to refer to the particular definition(s) which exclude the concept of "IP." Ergo, in the context of this thread the AC was making a perfectly sound argument, and the other potential definitions of "free market" have no place.
P.S. It would be nice if we could reserve a specific, concise term for "the libertarian form of free-market where all legitimate interaction between individuals is governed by the Non-Aggression Principle, where property rights take the form of absolute (but not inherently exclusive) rights to continue using said property in the manner in which it has previously been homesteaded from unowned land, and where such rights may be passed from owner to owner exclusively via contract." Unfortunately, every time this has been tried the new term has been similarly co-opted for incompatible uses—like "free market", which is often used where "market" alone would serve—to the point that we're running out of meaningful alternatives.
Dual license it under the MPL as well, giving up some freedoms
Exactly what freedoms do you think you're giving up? As the developer you have all the freedom in the world—nothing forces you to publish in the first place, just as nothing can force Mozilla to integrate and distribute your patch. So Mozilla wants you to license your code to them under the LGPL and MPL in addition to your preferred GPL in exchange for integration into their codebase. This is fair enough; they have the right to dictate terms regarding their own repository. As a result of this policy the end-user has the choice of all the freedoms granted by the GPL, plus any additional freedoms granted by the LGPL or MPL. How do you interpret this as "giving up some freedoms"?
Of course, since you referenced the GPL as your preferred license, you probably live in that peculiar dream-world where "freedom" is defined in terms of restrictions on how the source can be used. In that case I can see how lifting restrictions can be seen as "giving up some freedoms", for some twisted definition of "freedoms".