Actually, Redbox used to do exactly that. In the beginning the studios hated them. I think Redbox ran on a franchise model where the local owner would run out to Walmart or whatever and buy umpteen copies of the latest release at 9AM and load them in their machine. Then they'd start paying people to buy just a few copies and load them in machines when Walmart decided to refuse to sell to them (basically adopting the same tactics as people buying pseudoephedrine).
Eventually they worked out a deal and I think they actually get delayed access to some titles, but probably a much simpler supply chain and lower costs. The studios were trying to prop up Blockbuster since a chain renting movies for $5 was more attractive to them than their competitor who typically rented them for $1-2.
The bottom line is that you can't get around first sale...
What you need is a reasonable set of zones, and in each zone a temperature/humidity sensor, an occupancy sensor, and buttons that say "too hot" and "too cold" with no numeric display of temperature.
If you are uncomfortable you hit the too hot or too cold buttons, and that is your only feedback mechanism. The system might take into account spamming the button, but certainly not linearly. The system then just needs to learn when zones are occupied and what kinds of conditions are "too hot" and "too cold" at various times.
Oh, and maybe have a central function for when the monthly bill comes in for "too much" that influences just how uncomfortable the system makes everybody. Maybe you tell the system what the bill should be and then the system figures out how to best allocate resources.
You are oversimplifying this a bit, but fundamentally I tend to agree on the single payer bit. The current system is incredibly inefficient, and the insurance company profits are just the tip of the iceburg.
There are a lot of other issues that need to be fixed like expectations around level of care (yup, the death panels), and also artificial restrictions on the supply of services (guilds, medical schools, etc). There is a ton of administrative overhead as well.
One thing we do need to find a solution to is how we get people to ration their own care. In most socialized system inconvenience and waiting are the tools that are employed. In most private systems money is. Neither tool is ideal, but I really dislike the waiting system since it causes people to suffer unnecessarily and it is especially hard on people who have something better to do with their time.
Even the present private system in the US has HUGE amounts of waiting which leads to all kinds of waste. I've spent plenty of time in hospitals caring for loved ones and my observation is that the typical workflow is doctor comes in, doctor gets idea, doctor orders tests/treatment, patient waits for tests/treatments, next day doctor comes in checks results, repeat. Most patients in hospitals spend most of their time just lying on their backs. Now, to some extent that is inevitable as most problems heal on their own with proper support, but I think we prolong problems a great deal because it takes so darn long to work out the treatment regimen and not just because of delays required by biology.
It is even worse outpatient - I've seen diabetics given a treatment change and told to come back in three months, and slowly over a few years they work out their treatment program. The huge delay in controlling their problems results in all kinds of long-term damage, all because the doctor can't just have the patient phone in their blood sugars a week after starting treatment and adjust the meds. Oh, and don't get me started on how expensive it is for patients to titrate medications with the way copays work. In theory a nationalized medical system could make better use of triage/clinics and escalation to give patients more attention at the right levels - you don't need the top endocrinologist in the USA to bump up the dose when the sugars are a little high, but maybe you do call him in when you max out the standard protocols and need to try something new, and the big expert doesn't need to grind lots of low-complexity cases just to pay his rent.
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Indeed, much of that money didn't even go into luxury homes, but in giving lots of money to the previous generation of homebuyers. When a young couple buys a home for $200k that the previous owners bought for $75k nothing of real value was created, but new new homeowners are saddled with far greater living costs.
Don't get me wrong - quite a few people do live in luxury homes (more than in the past), but that isn't the experience of the average homebuyer. I for one have a more modest home than my parents despite starting out the salary curve at a higher level (compared to when they started), and this is largely due to the rise in home prices.
Well, they are useful for beating up on countries that don't have the means to counter them - without having to beg for the use of airbases in neighboring countries. That does have some value.
However, their value is questionable indeed in any kind of serious war. I wouldn't count them out though with proper escorts - it is hard to attack a carrier if you don't know its general location, and that isn't as easy to work out in wartime as you might think. Radar is limited to the horizon and anything carrying an active radar will get shot down by whoever has air superiority (in the middle of the ocean that would be whoever owns the carrier). Visual/sonar detection by subs is possible, but they'd have to try to prosecute the attack on their own or radio in the contact, and firing off HF signals in a war is not a good move for a sub (and nothing else has range beyond the horizon unless you use satellites - read on).
In any kind of serious war things are going to get mighty scary. For starters kiss just about every satellite in space goodbye and all the modern amenities they bring - almost all of them have military use from GPS to communications to weather. Maybe a few stealth satellites will escape attack, but they'll have no civilian use (how else can they maintain stealth!).
So, if the carriers survive the first strikes (which would have satellite aid) they have a decent chance of surviving much longer. In a world limited to HF radio and horizon-limited detection carriers are a lot more useful - especially if augmented by good subs and escorts which the US has.
Sounds like a good war novel - what would an unrestricted non-nuclear modern naval war look like? Of course, keeping the nukes from flying would be a challenge. If you have enemy fighters coming in over your beaches you probably don't know the location of the carrier well enough for any kind of conventional attack, but if you have a fair number of nukes you could just launch quite a few in a grid at the ocean and see what happens. I'm not sure how survivable carriers are against untargeted nuclear strikes. If they can survive a blast from a few miles then carpet-bombing the ocean with nukes wouldn't be terribly effective. On the other hand, if a blast from 10 miles out were effective the number of nukes needed comes down a fair bit if you have any reasonable guesses around where the target might be. Of course, nuclear weapons with that kind of reach are limited to strategic weapons - the kinds of tactical nukes that you'd normally aim at a carrier group really do need decent targeting. And only the Americans and Russians really have those kinds of quantities of nukes - the Chinese don't have 100 big bombs to just toss into the ocean and many of their weapons are smaller.
I think the good thing about minimum wage is that it essentially puts some kind of value on human life. Maybe it becomes cheaper to have a robot do some of the work - I see no harm in that. Just pay social assistance to the unemployed (it isn't like they're gaining value experience working in jobs that a robot can replace). Pay for the social assistance by taxing the people who own the robots. In the end I see not much difference between Walmart paying 3 people $3/hr, and them paying $3*7*40*52 in taxes so that the government can just hand the 3 people more money, other than the fact that we free up 3 people to do something which the robot can't do, and maybe the Waltons can't buy an extra jet that year.
And how are those people the Walton's problem? Simple - when they get hungry we have the police keep them from raiding the Walton's pantry. I don't see throwing them a few bones as being too much to ask.
The problem is that most stable forms of employment simply require you to work 40+ hours per week - it is a culture thing (and a matter of economic efficiency). Nobody hires four computer programmers to each work 10 hours per week - they hire one and ask them to work "40."
You can get part time work if you want to make $10/hr or something, but that obviously isn't going to solve anybody's financial problems.
Another big issue is housing - while the cost of lots of things has come down in the past few decades housing is not among them. Many people have to work 10 hours per week just to cover their mortgage payment, and a fair percentage of that even if they just live in an apartment. The dream of working 10 hours per week total would only come about if housing prices crashed.
The only way I can see to make it happen is to act like the French and limit the work week. Since employment involves certain fixed costs there is no incentive to hire an army of people who occasionally show up to do the work of what is one person today. Just look at training costs. Oh, and unless we socialize healthcare that is a BIG fixed cost per person.
Well, I doubt it would ever be politically acceptable, but rethinking the concept that reproduction is a basic right would be a way to resolve this.
You'd need to develop a reversible way of sterilizing people, and systematically apply it to everybody before they hit puberty. Then you'd have to get a license to reproduce. Issue the licenses like fishing licenses or whatever and you've now controlled the population. Anybody who is alive can then be given various social guarantees and it would be sustainable. Good health (for the applicant AND their parents to select against diseases that affect you after child bearing) would be a requirement for reproduction, and so on. That would also lower social costs over time the population would likely become healthier.
To work you'd have to either enforce this worldwide, or greatly restrict immigration and turn a blind eye towards starvation in nations that don't participate in the plan. That would be a really hard sell. That isn't to say that you couldn't offer some aid when you can afford it, but as you've said it just perpetuates the problem. Offering free sterilization plus free food would be more sustainable.
Oh, and if there is a concern that all that selection will reduce diversity and have its own health problems you could have a "birthright lottery" system as proposed by Niven, where some slots are just randomly given without regard to merit. If you're worried about some disaster resulting in the loss of the technology needed to un-sterilize people you could use the lottery to simply not sterilize some people in the first place.
Sterilization also doesn't need to be surgical, but obviously it has to be impractical to defeat without government approval. A contraceptive implant that lasts 5-10 years would do the trick and you'd just have to systematically keep track of when people got their last dose to maintain enforcement. That would also solve the whole collapse of society scenario since then everybody just becomes fertile automatically.
And of course ultimately food is never infinite, so at some point we hit steady state no matter what we do - that's just physics. All social engineering does is manage what our lifestyle is like when that happens.
The health care reform should have been single-payer and passed within the first 100 days before the majorities were lost. Instead, we have welfare for the rich where it's a crime to not send money to private corporations.
Well, arguably the reason the majorities were lost was that people weren't all that happy with what was going on early-on.
Part of the problem with health care is that there are a lot of convoluted issues that people like to mix and match. There is single-payer vs a competitive system, with or without public options, and then then there is the question about mandatory participation, and also how it all gets paid for.
Usually single payer = progressive payment model, and competitive = regressive payment = non-mandatory, but you can have a single-payer system which is regressive (you tax poor people $10k/yr to participate or whatever), or private competitive systems that are progressive (you pick your insurer and the government writes them a check on your behalf and recovers it from income taxes or whatever). What we ended up was a competitive mandatory system with regressive payment models. It has the advantages of more choice, coverage of pre-existing conditions, and nobody has to pay for anybody else, and the disadvantages of paying a premium for that choice, mandatory participation, and nobody will pay for the poor.
All those aspects of models have pros and cons - while everybody argues that exactly one of those is the best nobody can agree on which one that is. I think that if we could actually get into rational dialog we could at least have some informed debate, but everybody is too busy with political ads to bother with that.
Every complicated problem has a simple solution, which is wrong.
Uh, nobody vets apps before they can be sold, well, except for console makers and Apple.
Frankly I would like it if Android took a little more control away from the app developers. Just because I want to run some app doesn't mean that I want it to be able to wake up the phone while it is in my pocket to do whatever it thinks is important. Android forces you to either abandon lousy apps or live with them. I'd prefer that it just contain them with reasonable defaults, and give the user the option to unshackle or extra-shackle them.
Yup, when all the blockbuster movies are making fun of a political party they find it a lot harder to get elected. So, political parties try not to tick off Hollywood/etc too much.
Oh, and the same basic circles own all the news media, and get to pick the questions asked during the presidential debates/etc. They have considerable influence on what people think.
Does amazon's content actually play on anything that is typically connected to a TV? Lots of services will stream TV to your browser, but Netflix managed to get their player bundled in all kinds of stuff.
I don't really see being able to play TV on a tablet as a game changer - people watch TV on, well, TVs.
This is probably because the content providers didn't insist on charging so much money for access to their content. There weren't that many networks either, so the near-monopoly on content was balanced by a near-monopsony on consumption.
And that's why Warner Brothers is going to shoot itself in the foot. Again.
The studios just don't get it - they think that the huge legal weapons they've managed to lobby for somehow will get people to send them money. However, to get people to spend money you have to sell them a PRODUCT that they're willing to pay for. People would be willing to pay for the movies, but the studios seem determined to make that so painful that people would rather buy it on a DVD or download it online or whatever.
Yeah, but what does it cost to store 10 miligrams of antimatter? I wouldn't be surprised if we've made a fair bit of antimatter over the years - the hard part is keeping it in one place.
Yeah, that will do wonders for the levels of radiation in the atmosphere.
If it works we all get to breathe in a few more nanocuries of fission products. If it doesn't work then the US will have to blow up a hundred more of the things to prove to everybody that we still know how to make nukes so that nobody messes with us, and we'll breathe in even more radiation.
If you're in a bunker a few hundred yards away you might get by unscathed, assuming you had an independent air supply. That is, if the weapon is used as an airburst - most of the energy travels along the surface of the ground and doesn't really dig it up much, and a bunker would be underground for this reason.
Now, a bomb that penetrates the earth of that size would certainly make a big hole, and the shock waves would travel much further still. However, in that case the above-ground damage would be far less.
Nuclear bombs are great for wiping out cities, but they're less effective than some might think at destroying hardened targets. Now, a direct hit will destroy virtually anything, but the whole r^3 thing adds up quick if you don't get a direct hit.
The Russians just did that as a PR stunt - they weren't serious about it either. In fact, I think I read that they were originally going to double the size but considered it a waste of fissionable material.
Once you get above a few MT you blast a big hole in the atmosphere and much of the extra energy just gets spent competing with the sun for the job of warming outer space. You get a lot more effect if you split your fuel into a bunch of smaller bombs.
The Russians still tended to build bigger bombs. As you suggest, this might be because the Americans were more confident that they could actually get direct hits on things like bunkers or whatever.
After a megaton or two the energy of the blast has basically punched a hole from the center of the explosion clear in to space, and almost all the energy above that amount tends to just get vented up into space. You can cause a lot more destruction with 100x100kT bombs than 1x10MT. Plus, you can aim those 100 bombs at 100 different targets over a wide area, instead of spending all your energy making the tundra surrounding some military base glow in the dark.
The smaller bombs are also easier to put on delivery systems like cruise missiles or SLBMs/etc.
100 smaller bombs are also much more survivable than one really big bomb - both on the ground and enroute to target. You can also target multiple warheads at a single target and have some redundancy in case a few don't get through. Smaller bombs also give you more political options - nukes aren't really surgical but if you have to use one it is nice to be able to wipe out areas smaller than Kansas.
You can read up on this stuff online - quite a bit of info is out there. The reason the military is getting rid of this stuff is that it makes for PR and isn't all that useful to them anyway.
That's not how it works. You can't get rich selling things to people with no money. That's why the banking system is tanking.
Yup, but I don't exactly see people in power lining up to fix the banking system. The people making the decisions are doing just fine. Lehman Brothers may have collapsed, but the executives who were running the place did just fine.
There is more to life than finding a job and working it to get rich. If someone truly enjoys doing something, they will do it without the need to be paid for it.
Only if they have access to food, clothing, and shelter. If they aren't employable, and nobody wants to give them a hand, then they'll starve to death, and they won't be doing much of anything whether for personal fulfillment or otherwise.
I wasn't suggesting that people will just sit around and do nothing when 90% of the population is unemployed. However, the current economic system just doesn't work in that situation. Now, throw in basic income or something like that and make it work, then there might not be a huge problem, and as you suggest people will do stuff because it beats watching TV all day. (Well, some people will - I've met a lot of people that would be very content to just sit on a sofa all day.)
No, but you still bought the phone and still have a load to pay it off.
Who says it isn't already paid for? You aren't still referring to that null-and-void contract are you? All I see is that I have a shiny phone, and nothing legally enforceable says otherwise.
If you want to make somebody make payments for something AFTER you give it to them, then you need them to sign an agreement to that effect. If you violate the terms of that agreement, then you've lost your ability to collect on it.
But, as I said, the reality is that big companies will just do what they can, and legally-right-or-not there isn't much you can do about it. This is like arguing about law with a guy with a gun pointed at your head - does it really matter if it is illegal for him to pull the trigger?
Obviously they aren't going to provide it at cost. What incentive would there be to develop a drug for ZERO profit?
And then when you get to costs, there are a lot of ways of measuring that. Marginal cost is relevant when you're copying somebody else's drug, but if you have to invent new drugs then the cost that matters is the sunk cost times the inverse of the success rate. So, if your drugs cost $50M to develop, and 1% of them are successful, then you need to recoup $5B per successful drug to break even. Now, the numbers aren't that easy since drugs can fail at different levels of investment, but the companies know how much they're spending.
Of course, lots of money gets spent on marketing, and I'm all for reigning that in within reason. However, I don't see anybody complaining about how much of the cost of an iPhone goes into "I'm a Mac" ads or whatever. My personal feelings are that drug advertisement should be somewhere in-between the current an-ad-in-every-commercial-break level and the "just take what your doctor thinks is good for you and like it" level that some propose.
Whether funded by the public or by private R&D, the fact is that drugs don't get discovered without a lot of money being spent. I think the issue with drug prices is the way the costs are borne, compared to other forms of R&D that are more progressive.
Don't forget quality of life - many people survive cancer but their lives are cut significantly short and often the quality of those years is much lower than it would otherwise be. Vaccines prevent disease entirely (when they are effective), so they are very effective.
I can't say that I've run the numbers, but insurers wouldn't be happy to pay for the vaccine if the numbers weren't there. They can pay for the treatment, or they can pay for the cure, and obviously they've figured out which is cheaper.
You'd have to factor in any reduction in quality of life with later treatment, and also the risk of not detecting it early enough.
Usually costs are worked out in terms of quality-adjusted years of life. Well, cancer treatments prolong life but usually with a big hit on quality. Vaccines are very effective because they prevent disease entirely, which means that potential victims live their full lives at a full quality of life. Of course you need to take into account people with rare reactions to the drug as well, etc.
While vaccines are considered controversial in some circles (not unlike the round earth) the medical profession almost universally supports them. That is because they're almost always a no-brainer when you look at the numbers.
The problem with your argument is that in this case (as in a few other cases) your choice doesn't ONLY impact you, but it also impacts public health.
Suppose everybody gets the vaccine except people who are allergic to a component of the vaccine. The unvaccinated benefit from herd immunity and are very unlikely to get infected.
Now, suppose lots of people choose to opt out. Now the person with an allergy is at a much higher risk of an infection, and they don't have any choice in the matter. Which is the greater wrong - to take away your right to choose to opt out of a vaccine that has been demonstrated to be very safe, or to subject somebody else to a much greater risk of harm because they can't benefit from your immunity.
Otherwise I'm generally a fan of not protecting people from themselves. If it were up to me I'd make all drugs except antibiotics over-the-counter. Antibiotics are also one of those things where abuse can put the public at risk.
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Actually, Redbox used to do exactly that. In the beginning the studios hated them. I think Redbox ran on a franchise model where the local owner would run out to Walmart or whatever and buy umpteen copies of the latest release at 9AM and load them in their machine. Then they'd start paying people to buy just a few copies and load them in machines when Walmart decided to refuse to sell to them (basically adopting the same tactics as people buying pseudoephedrine).
Eventually they worked out a deal and I think they actually get delayed access to some titles, but probably a much simpler supply chain and lower costs. The studios were trying to prop up Blockbuster since a chain renting movies for $5 was more attractive to them than their competitor who typically rented them for $1-2.
The bottom line is that you can't get around first sale...
What you need is a reasonable set of zones, and in each zone a temperature/humidity sensor, an occupancy sensor, and buttons that say "too hot" and "too cold" with no numeric display of temperature.
If you are uncomfortable you hit the too hot or too cold buttons, and that is your only feedback mechanism. The system might take into account spamming the button, but certainly not linearly. The system then just needs to learn when zones are occupied and what kinds of conditions are "too hot" and "too cold" at various times.
Oh, and maybe have a central function for when the monthly bill comes in for "too much" that influences just how uncomfortable the system makes everybody. Maybe you tell the system what the bill should be and then the system figures out how to best allocate resources.
You are oversimplifying this a bit, but fundamentally I tend to agree on the single payer bit. The current system is incredibly inefficient, and the insurance company profits are just the tip of the iceburg.
There are a lot of other issues that need to be fixed like expectations around level of care (yup, the death panels), and also artificial restrictions on the supply of services (guilds, medical schools, etc). There is a ton of administrative overhead as well.
One thing we do need to find a solution to is how we get people to ration their own care. In most socialized system inconvenience and waiting are the tools that are employed. In most private systems money is. Neither tool is ideal, but I really dislike the waiting system since it causes people to suffer unnecessarily and it is especially hard on people who have something better to do with their time.
Even the present private system in the US has HUGE amounts of waiting which leads to all kinds of waste. I've spent plenty of time in hospitals caring for loved ones and my observation is that the typical workflow is doctor comes in, doctor gets idea, doctor orders tests/treatment, patient waits for tests/treatments, next day doctor comes in checks results, repeat. Most patients in hospitals spend most of their time just lying on their backs. Now, to some extent that is inevitable as most problems heal on their own with proper support, but I think we prolong problems a great deal because it takes so darn long to work out the treatment regimen and not just because of delays required by biology.
It is even worse outpatient - I've seen diabetics given a treatment change and told to come back in three months, and slowly over a few years they work out their treatment program. The huge delay in controlling their problems results in all kinds of long-term damage, all because the doctor can't just have the patient phone in their blood sugars a week after starting treatment and adjust the meds. Oh, and don't get me started on how expensive it is for patients to titrate medications with the way copays work. In theory a nationalized medical system could make better use of triage/clinics and escalation to give patients more attention at the right levels - you don't need the top endocrinologist in the USA to bump up the dose when the sugars are a little high, but maybe you do call him in when you max out the standard protocols and need to try something new, and the big expert doesn't need to grind lots of low-complexity cases just to pay his rent.
Indeed, much of that money didn't even go into luxury homes, but in giving lots of money to the previous generation of homebuyers. When a young couple buys a home for $200k that the previous owners bought for $75k nothing of real value was created, but new new homeowners are saddled with far greater living costs.
Don't get me wrong - quite a few people do live in luxury homes (more than in the past), but that isn't the experience of the average homebuyer. I for one have a more modest home than my parents despite starting out the salary curve at a higher level (compared to when they started), and this is largely due to the rise in home prices.
Well, they are useful for beating up on countries that don't have the means to counter them - without having to beg for the use of airbases in neighboring countries. That does have some value.
However, their value is questionable indeed in any kind of serious war. I wouldn't count them out though with proper escorts - it is hard to attack a carrier if you don't know its general location, and that isn't as easy to work out in wartime as you might think. Radar is limited to the horizon and anything carrying an active radar will get shot down by whoever has air superiority (in the middle of the ocean that would be whoever owns the carrier). Visual/sonar detection by subs is possible, but they'd have to try to prosecute the attack on their own or radio in the contact, and firing off HF signals in a war is not a good move for a sub (and nothing else has range beyond the horizon unless you use satellites - read on).
In any kind of serious war things are going to get mighty scary. For starters kiss just about every satellite in space goodbye and all the modern amenities they bring - almost all of them have military use from GPS to communications to weather. Maybe a few stealth satellites will escape attack, but they'll have no civilian use (how else can they maintain stealth!).
So, if the carriers survive the first strikes (which would have satellite aid) they have a decent chance of surviving much longer. In a world limited to HF radio and horizon-limited detection carriers are a lot more useful - especially if augmented by good subs and escorts which the US has.
Sounds like a good war novel - what would an unrestricted non-nuclear modern naval war look like? Of course, keeping the nukes from flying would be a challenge. If you have enemy fighters coming in over your beaches you probably don't know the location of the carrier well enough for any kind of conventional attack, but if you have a fair number of nukes you could just launch quite a few in a grid at the ocean and see what happens. I'm not sure how survivable carriers are against untargeted nuclear strikes. If they can survive a blast from a few miles then carpet-bombing the ocean with nukes wouldn't be terribly effective. On the other hand, if a blast from 10 miles out were effective the number of nukes needed comes down a fair bit if you have any reasonable guesses around where the target might be. Of course, nuclear weapons with that kind of reach are limited to strategic weapons - the kinds of tactical nukes that you'd normally aim at a carrier group really do need decent targeting. And only the Americans and Russians really have those kinds of quantities of nukes - the Chinese don't have 100 big bombs to just toss into the ocean and many of their weapons are smaller.
I think the good thing about minimum wage is that it essentially puts some kind of value on human life. Maybe it becomes cheaper to have a robot do some of the work - I see no harm in that. Just pay social assistance to the unemployed (it isn't like they're gaining value experience working in jobs that a robot can replace). Pay for the social assistance by taxing the people who own the robots. In the end I see not much difference between Walmart paying 3 people $3/hr, and them paying $3*7*40*52 in taxes so that the government can just hand the 3 people more money, other than the fact that we free up 3 people to do something which the robot can't do, and maybe the Waltons can't buy an extra jet that year.
And how are those people the Walton's problem? Simple - when they get hungry we have the police keep them from raiding the Walton's pantry. I don't see throwing them a few bones as being too much to ask.
The problem is that most stable forms of employment simply require you to work 40+ hours per week - it is a culture thing (and a matter of economic efficiency). Nobody hires four computer programmers to each work 10 hours per week - they hire one and ask them to work "40."
You can get part time work if you want to make $10/hr or something, but that obviously isn't going to solve anybody's financial problems.
Another big issue is housing - while the cost of lots of things has come down in the past few decades housing is not among them. Many people have to work 10 hours per week just to cover their mortgage payment, and a fair percentage of that even if they just live in an apartment. The dream of working 10 hours per week total would only come about if housing prices crashed.
The only way I can see to make it happen is to act like the French and limit the work week. Since employment involves certain fixed costs there is no incentive to hire an army of people who occasionally show up to do the work of what is one person today. Just look at training costs. Oh, and unless we socialize healthcare that is a BIG fixed cost per person.
Well, I doubt it would ever be politically acceptable, but rethinking the concept that reproduction is a basic right would be a way to resolve this.
You'd need to develop a reversible way of sterilizing people, and systematically apply it to everybody before they hit puberty. Then you'd have to get a license to reproduce. Issue the licenses like fishing licenses or whatever and you've now controlled the population. Anybody who is alive can then be given various social guarantees and it would be sustainable. Good health (for the applicant AND their parents to select against diseases that affect you after child bearing) would be a requirement for reproduction, and so on. That would also lower social costs over time the population would likely become healthier.
To work you'd have to either enforce this worldwide, or greatly restrict immigration and turn a blind eye towards starvation in nations that don't participate in the plan. That would be a really hard sell. That isn't to say that you couldn't offer some aid when you can afford it, but as you've said it just perpetuates the problem. Offering free sterilization plus free food would be more sustainable.
Oh, and if there is a concern that all that selection will reduce diversity and have its own health problems you could have a "birthright lottery" system as proposed by Niven, where some slots are just randomly given without regard to merit. If you're worried about some disaster resulting in the loss of the technology needed to un-sterilize people you could use the lottery to simply not sterilize some people in the first place.
Sterilization also doesn't need to be surgical, but obviously it has to be impractical to defeat without government approval. A contraceptive implant that lasts 5-10 years would do the trick and you'd just have to systematically keep track of when people got their last dose to maintain enforcement. That would also solve the whole collapse of society scenario since then everybody just becomes fertile automatically.
And of course ultimately food is never infinite, so at some point we hit steady state no matter what we do - that's just physics. All social engineering does is manage what our lifestyle is like when that happens.
The health care reform should have been single-payer and passed within the first 100 days before the majorities were lost. Instead, we have welfare for the rich where it's a crime to not send money to private corporations.
Well, arguably the reason the majorities were lost was that people weren't all that happy with what was going on early-on.
Part of the problem with health care is that there are a lot of convoluted issues that people like to mix and match. There is single-payer vs a competitive system, with or without public options, and then then there is the question about mandatory participation, and also how it all gets paid for.
Usually single payer = progressive payment model, and competitive = regressive payment = non-mandatory, but you can have a single-payer system which is regressive (you tax poor people $10k/yr to participate or whatever), or private competitive systems that are progressive (you pick your insurer and the government writes them a check on your behalf and recovers it from income taxes or whatever). What we ended up was a competitive mandatory system with regressive payment models. It has the advantages of more choice, coverage of pre-existing conditions, and nobody has to pay for anybody else, and the disadvantages of paying a premium for that choice, mandatory participation, and nobody will pay for the poor.
All those aspects of models have pros and cons - while everybody argues that exactly one of those is the best nobody can agree on which one that is. I think that if we could actually get into rational dialog we could at least have some informed debate, but everybody is too busy with political ads to bother with that.
Every complicated problem has a simple solution, which is wrong.
Uh, nobody vets apps before they can be sold, well, except for console makers and Apple.
Frankly I would like it if Android took a little more control away from the app developers. Just because I want to run some app doesn't mean that I want it to be able to wake up the phone while it is in my pocket to do whatever it thinks is important. Android forces you to either abandon lousy apps or live with them. I'd prefer that it just contain them with reasonable defaults, and give the user the option to unshackle or extra-shackle them.
Yup, when all the blockbuster movies are making fun of a political party they find it a lot harder to get elected. So, political parties try not to tick off Hollywood/etc too much.
Oh, and the same basic circles own all the news media, and get to pick the questions asked during the presidential debates/etc. They have considerable influence on what people think.
Does amazon's content actually play on anything that is typically connected to a TV? Lots of services will stream TV to your browser, but Netflix managed to get their player bundled in all kinds of stuff.
I don't really see being able to play TV on a tablet as a game changer - people watch TV on, well, TVs.
This is probably because the content providers didn't insist on charging so much money for access to their content. There weren't that many networks either, so the near-monopoly on content was balanced by a near-monopsony on consumption.
And that's why Warner Brothers is going to shoot itself in the foot. Again.
The studios just don't get it - they think that the huge legal weapons they've managed to lobby for somehow will get people to send them money. However, to get people to spend money you have to sell them a PRODUCT that they're willing to pay for. People would be willing to pay for the movies, but the studios seem determined to make that so painful that people would rather buy it on a DVD or download it online or whatever.
Yeah, but what does it cost to store 10 miligrams of antimatter? I wouldn't be surprised if we've made a fair bit of antimatter over the years - the hard part is keeping it in one place.
Yeah, that will do wonders for the levels of radiation in the atmosphere.
If it works we all get to breathe in a few more nanocuries of fission products. If it doesn't work then the US will have to blow up a hundred more of the things to prove to everybody that we still know how to make nukes so that nobody messes with us, and we'll breathe in even more radiation.
If you're in a bunker a few hundred yards away you might get by unscathed, assuming you had an independent air supply. That is, if the weapon is used as an airburst - most of the energy travels along the surface of the ground and doesn't really dig it up much, and a bunker would be underground for this reason.
Now, a bomb that penetrates the earth of that size would certainly make a big hole, and the shock waves would travel much further still. However, in that case the above-ground damage would be far less.
Nuclear bombs are great for wiping out cities, but they're less effective than some might think at destroying hardened targets. Now, a direct hit will destroy virtually anything, but the whole r^3 thing adds up quick if you don't get a direct hit.
The Russians just did that as a PR stunt - they weren't serious about it either. In fact, I think I read that they were originally going to double the size but considered it a waste of fissionable material.
Once you get above a few MT you blast a big hole in the atmosphere and much of the extra energy just gets spent competing with the sun for the job of warming outer space. You get a lot more effect if you split your fuel into a bunch of smaller bombs.
The Russians still tended to build bigger bombs. As you suggest, this might be because the Americans were more confident that they could actually get direct hits on things like bunkers or whatever.
After a megaton or two the energy of the blast has basically punched a hole from the center of the explosion clear in to space, and almost all the energy above that amount tends to just get vented up into space. You can cause a lot more destruction with 100x100kT bombs than 1x10MT. Plus, you can aim those 100 bombs at 100 different targets over a wide area, instead of spending all your energy making the tundra surrounding some military base glow in the dark.
The smaller bombs are also easier to put on delivery systems like cruise missiles or SLBMs/etc.
100 smaller bombs are also much more survivable than one really big bomb - both on the ground and enroute to target. You can also target multiple warheads at a single target and have some redundancy in case a few don't get through. Smaller bombs also give you more political options - nukes aren't really surgical but if you have to use one it is nice to be able to wipe out areas smaller than Kansas.
You can read up on this stuff online - quite a bit of info is out there. The reason the military is getting rid of this stuff is that it makes for PR and isn't all that useful to them anyway.
That's not how it works. You can't get rich selling things to people with no money. That's why the banking system is tanking.
Yup, but I don't exactly see people in power lining up to fix the banking system. The people making the decisions are doing just fine. Lehman Brothers may have collapsed, but the executives who were running the place did just fine.
There is more to life than finding a job and working it to get rich. If someone truly enjoys doing something, they will do it without the need to be paid for it.
Only if they have access to food, clothing, and shelter. If they aren't employable, and nobody wants to give them a hand, then they'll starve to death, and they won't be doing much of anything whether for personal fulfillment or otherwise.
I wasn't suggesting that people will just sit around and do nothing when 90% of the population is unemployed. However, the current economic system just doesn't work in that situation. Now, throw in basic income or something like that and make it work, then there might not be a huge problem, and as you suggest people will do stuff because it beats watching TV all day. (Well, some people will - I've met a lot of people that would be very content to just sit on a sofa all day.)
No, but you still bought the phone and still have a load to pay it off.
Who says it isn't already paid for? You aren't still referring to that null-and-void contract are you? All I see is that I have a shiny phone, and nothing legally enforceable says otherwise.
If you want to make somebody make payments for something AFTER you give it to them, then you need them to sign an agreement to that effect. If you violate the terms of that agreement, then you've lost your ability to collect on it.
But, as I said, the reality is that big companies will just do what they can, and legally-right-or-not there isn't much you can do about it. This is like arguing about law with a guy with a gun pointed at your head - does it really matter if it is illegal for him to pull the trigger?
Obviously they aren't going to provide it at cost. What incentive would there be to develop a drug for ZERO profit?
And then when you get to costs, there are a lot of ways of measuring that. Marginal cost is relevant when you're copying somebody else's drug, but if you have to invent new drugs then the cost that matters is the sunk cost times the inverse of the success rate. So, if your drugs cost $50M to develop, and 1% of them are successful, then you need to recoup $5B per successful drug to break even. Now, the numbers aren't that easy since drugs can fail at different levels of investment, but the companies know how much they're spending.
Of course, lots of money gets spent on marketing, and I'm all for reigning that in within reason. However, I don't see anybody complaining about how much of the cost of an iPhone goes into "I'm a Mac" ads or whatever. My personal feelings are that drug advertisement should be somewhere in-between the current an-ad-in-every-commercial-break level and the "just take what your doctor thinks is good for you and like it" level that some propose.
Whether funded by the public or by private R&D, the fact is that drugs don't get discovered without a lot of money being spent. I think the issue with drug prices is the way the costs are borne, compared to other forms of R&D that are more progressive.
Don't forget quality of life - many people survive cancer but their lives are cut significantly short and often the quality of those years is much lower than it would otherwise be. Vaccines prevent disease entirely (when they are effective), so they are very effective.
I can't say that I've run the numbers, but insurers wouldn't be happy to pay for the vaccine if the numbers weren't there. They can pay for the treatment, or they can pay for the cure, and obviously they've figured out which is cheaper.
You'd have to factor in any reduction in quality of life with later treatment, and also the risk of not detecting it early enough.
Usually costs are worked out in terms of quality-adjusted years of life. Well, cancer treatments prolong life but usually with a big hit on quality. Vaccines are very effective because they prevent disease entirely, which means that potential victims live their full lives at a full quality of life. Of course you need to take into account people with rare reactions to the drug as well, etc.
While vaccines are considered controversial in some circles (not unlike the round earth) the medical profession almost universally supports them. That is because they're almost always a no-brainer when you look at the numbers.
The problem with your argument is that in this case (as in a few other cases) your choice doesn't ONLY impact you, but it also impacts public health.
Suppose everybody gets the vaccine except people who are allergic to a component of the vaccine. The unvaccinated benefit from herd immunity and are very unlikely to get infected.
Now, suppose lots of people choose to opt out. Now the person with an allergy is at a much higher risk of an infection, and they don't have any choice in the matter. Which is the greater wrong - to take away your right to choose to opt out of a vaccine that has been demonstrated to be very safe, or to subject somebody else to a much greater risk of harm because they can't benefit from your immunity.
Otherwise I'm generally a fan of not protecting people from themselves. If it were up to me I'd make all drugs except antibiotics over-the-counter. Antibiotics are also one of those things where abuse can put the public at risk.