Yup - we use "agile" but we still start with a requirements spec and all the requirements are written before the first line of code. In fact, even if we have multiple "sprints" we still write all the requirements before we start the first one.
The only thing agile about it is that we use the right buzzwords, and we do a chunk of requirements at a time (as if that wasn't what everybody always did), and we demo the software to customers and maybe refine the requirements from time to time (as if that wasn't what we always did anyway).
Yup. Java would be fine if it actually worked. It had some lousy APIs, and most of the VMs are REALLY slow and gobble RAM like nuts - or at least they are slow to start. My understanding is that Java apps aren't bad once they've been running for a while, but of course the typical website experience is to punch the monkey a few times and then click on the next link, which makes the startup time the only time that really matters.
I think that sandboxed platform-independent code running in a browser makes sense. It is the only way to create provider-based rich client apps without having to install clients on millions of PCs and a myriad of other devices and keep them all updated (just keeping the browsers updated is hard enough).
I think the problem is that we keep inventing languages when what we really need are APIs/ABIs. What we need is an ELF or EXE format and instruction set for the browser - not a language. There is nothing wrong with writing your code in C, or Java, or Python, or whatever you want. You run it through a compiler, and it outputs in the format required by the target instruction set and file formats.
Applets should run in VMs, and the VM should enforce its own boundaries. Memory is just an array of bytes. Go ahead and have some standard libraries that everybody can assume are there, and they can offer garbage collection or whatever. People are welcome to use languages that abstract away pointers. But, quit tying a high-level language to a platform.
In the end that is what the big companies do anyway. Ever look at the javascript for gmail? It is obvious that they code in something else and have a compiler that outputs to javascript much like gcc will output to x86/arm/etc. So, basically you just have a VM with a really lousy instruction set.
The issue is lowest-common-denominator APIs and GUIs.
A GUI that works great with a mouse and keyboard will probably be lousy on a touchscreen.
The world's nicest Android word processor is going to be seriously annoying if it doesn't have keyboard shortcuts if you want to run it on a desktop.
If your app has a built in schedule-DVR-recording function, it isn't going to be quite the same experience on a phone as on an actual TV.
The polish of Android/iOS/etc is in their high level of vertical integration. Once you go to cookie-cutter APIs you lose all that. Swing is the ultimate example of a least-common-denominator API.
Well, paying the Dane-geld almost always works out for the better of any individual. That's why the tactic works.
If you get in a lawsuit MS can play scorched earth and you end up not selling phones due to injunctions and all that. You lose even if you win. Since MS doesn't actually sell any phones and their desktop lead is unassailable you can't really retaliate.
The real fix is to get rid of the software patent nonsense, or heavily curtail it (make patents last two years or something).
Agreed that more is spent on advertising than R&D, and that is waste that would be eliminated in an NIH model.
I also agree that the reality is that drugs are priced at what the market will bear. That doesn't mean that the model works if everybody pays what the UK pays, but price and cost aren't directly coupled.
The colchicine situations is obviously a good example of how not to do things. If the FDA wanted data on an existing drug they should have just ran their own trial on it (or had the NIH do it or whatever). But, the reality is that no private company would pay for it unless they got exclusivity, even if it only cost a few million dollars. Unpatented drugs are the perfect example of the tragedy of the commons - they're the best bang for the buck for everybody, but they're worthless to any company in particular.
As far as new drugs being minor tweaks or worse than old drugs, what is the harm in that? If they aren't as good, then don't take them! At least in the private model when a company comes out with a lousy drug it doesn't cost you (as a taxpayer) a dime.
I actually think that "me-too" drugs are a good thing. I know somebody with serious health problems and in some cases the "best in class" drugs just don't work for them. However, they can still take the "me too" drug and get some benefit from it. Antibiotics are the perfect example of the "me too" drug - 95% of the time most of them are equivalent, but the 5% of the time that they aren't can mean the difference between life and death. This is also the reason why nobody develops new antibiotics - 95% of the time they have no market since older cheaper drugs work just as well. The NIH could solve this with a steady stream of new antibiotics developed to head off resistance without regard to profitability. One of my fears of an NIH takeover is the "good enough" mentality where we stop researching treatments for diseases when we have something that works moderately well, and when that one treatment doesn't work for somebody we just write them off.
Oh, and NIH-funded R&D doesn't need to mean the end of private industry either. First, they can still come up with their own novel patented drugs (which have to compete against cheap new publicly-funded ones). Second, they can always subcontract to the NIH - they have huge infrastructure for doing development and often do it reasonably well. The NIH simply would pay fee-for-service and would not award any kind of exclusivity or patents for work done. The industry has no risk so they can make do with low margins on this work, and it could help give them a baseline level of work/profit for when they are in dry cycles with their own R&D efforts.
Actually, the reason drugs are cheaper in the UK is similar to the phenomenon on aircraft where the guy sitting next to you can pay $100 for a seat you paid $3000 for.
Imagine a plane has 100 seats, and it costs $100k to operate the flight. It manages to sell 10 seats for $3k, and 50 seats for $2k. At this point it is making money. However, it still has 40 seats left. It could just fly them empty and still make money, but if they sold those extra seats for $100 each they'd make an extra $4k and it really wouldn't change the cost of the flight much. However, that doesn't mean that the true cost of those seats is only $100 each - if the airline sold every ticket for $100 it would lose money.
The situation is similar with drugs. Drugs have an odd pricing model. The first pill costs $100M to make, and every pill after that costs 10 cents. The problem is that nobody will pay $100M for the first pill, so instead they all sell for about $5 each for the first 10 years or so. Now, suppose the UK comes along and says that they won't pay more than 50 cents each. The manufacturer basically can take that price or leave it. They are still making 40 cents per pill at that price, so 40 cents is better than nothing. However, if EVERYBODY paid 40 cents for the pill they'd never make the $100M it cost to develop the pill in the first place.
If the NIH just funded R&D end-to-end and public domained the pills, then a bunch of companies would step in and sell the pills for 15 cents or whatever and would be perfectly happy, since they didn't have to come up with the $100M. Sure, the taxpayers are out that money instead, but we all end up paying that money one way or another. Drug discovery is just another form of knowledge advancement and so the model of publicly funded research tends to make sense.
The downside I see to having the NIH do the work is that you can end up with special interests taking over. Suppose the party in power thinks AIDS is a punishment for perverts - boom, there goes your AIDS research. Now, suppose the next party in power things that diabetes is what you get when you eat more than is good for you, boom, there goes diabetes research. The good thing about private investment is that as long as the money is green they really don't care what they research. That is also the bad thing about it - problems that impact poor people get under-represented in R&D.
In any case, there is no reason you can't have both models. Have the NIH fund R&D, and pills they come up with are patent free. Let private industry patent drugs they come up with. If the private drugs really demonstrate value then the medical system can pay for them, and if not they can stick with the cheap stuff. Either way the state of the art advances for the benefit of all.
Why would the DOD bother to de-orbit a civilian space station in a deniable way?
If they had any interest in doing that sort of thing they'd be doing it already on unmanned satellites. I doubt that they're going to start killing astronauts just to put a damper on space exploration.
And if they just wanted to destroy the thing they don't need some fancy spacecraft - a good old fashioned missile would do the trick.
They're not really a patent troll - they actually make the stuff they patent.
A patent troll is somebody whose main business model is collecting license fees from things that OTHERS do, largely because they filed a patent on something that is easy to put into words and hard to put into practice.
You don't have to agree with Terminator Genes and all that stuff, but the fact is that they actually do make that stuff and you can buy it from them if you want it.
No, a patent troll is the guy who sues you for playing video on your cell phone, when they've never made a phone, media player application, or video format in their life.
So, you have a bit of a mixed bag here and I won't go point by point. I will comment that socialized medicine and single payer healthcare are actually not the same thing - you can have either without the other. Some of the items you list have more to do with one than the other.
Drug patents seem to come up a lot in these conversations. I'm a proponent of moving the R&D (and the patent rights) to the NIH, but I'd prefer to see this actually start working in practice before dismantling the current system. I think that the reality is that it won't really change the cost of drugs much, although it will shift around how they are paid for (ie instead of $5/pill it will be more like 10cents/pill and a bunch of checks for $10M here and there). If you want drug development and trials than somebody has to pay for it one way or another. Having the NIH do the whole thing soup to nuts would at least help answer questions around established treatments that right now don't get much attention since they are unpatented. Right now the NIH funds very little of the expensive part of drug development (which is mainly the clinical trials).
I'm also a fan of getting rid of prescription drug access laws, but I doubt that I'll see this in my lifetime even if we have socialized medicine. This is really a separate issue.
I do agree that single-payer would clean up a TON of administrative overhead. The current system is an incredible mess.
As far as behavior control goes - this is actually one of the bigger problems with government-provided healthcare. Insurance can add some surcharges, but they're often powerless to detect or prevent certain behaviors. Government on the other hand can do stuff like ban particular foods, practices, business, and you name it. They also have more access to find out if people are doing banned activities, though this clearly will be about as successful (and tragic) as the war on drugs. I'm not under any illusions that the Constitution will do much to prevent anything like this - once Congress pays for treatments for lung cancer you can bet they'll take a hard look at smoking, and rightly so. If you want me to pay for your medical bills, then guess what, I'm now a part of your life choice decision making process whether you want me there or not.
I don't disagree with many of your points, otherwise.
Well, some carriers don't offer the ability to limit or stop services you don't want. Some do, and most of these charge you for this (yes, they charge you to NOT deliver you a service).
Well, I'm not sure how you find a loophole when the law says to cover everything, but that is really a separate issue which is that we make the law into some kind of game. The solution to somebody saying "but that technically isn't what you said!" is "tough luck - watch us take you to the cleaners anyway."
Yeah, but you just have to watch one episode of CSI to realize how tough key management is when you leave a copy of your private key on everything you touch...
I think you're missing the point. The stories of Abraham and Lot were written in a different culture, to communicate something to those cultures. They clearly don't communicate the same things to us.
The issue is that people like to hold the Bible up as some kind of standard to live by in the sense of almost literally doing whatever people in Biblical stories did.
Abraham and Lot lived in barbaric societies and did barbaric things. It isn't their contrast with us that matters so much as their contrast with the standards of their day, which is the point the people who bothered to spend thousands of years copying that story were trying to make. Most evidence suggests that it was written down around the same time that the Jewish laws forbidding child sacrifice in the first place were written, so it isn't like the people doing it didn't realize the irony in the story.
This is no different from studying the arguments of Darwin or Newton and valuing them for their huge contributions in the context of their eras, without discounting the fact that their work has been built upon and in some cases refuted.
I'll be the first to admit that these are not nuances commonly appreciated by vocal proponents of Christianity.
The job of a manager isn't to make a company succeed - it is to demonstrate that he did his part to make the company (or at least his boss) succeed.
If he issues a policy and people don't follow it he can point fingers and be blameless when things go south. He gets to keep his job. Ideally he'll have gotten himself promoted before it comes down to that, however.
Yup, I have FIOS and ended up switching to the Verizon-provided router for this reason. The biggest issue with it is the NAT table is limited, but I think I've mostly worked through that.
You can potentially put the router into more of a bridging mode and use your own router (which obviously has to be decent), but that is pretty tricky due to how the whole setup (internet+cable) works.
Yup, and that's why there is a requirement to buy insurance.
A big problem with heathcare is that we conflate insurance and socialism. You can have either, but they're not the same thing, and a big part of the problem is that people can't really agree on whether socialism is a desired outcome.
1. Insurance companies are forced to sell insurance to everybody whether they want to or not. 2. People are forced to buy insurance, whether they want to or not.
You can't really have the one without the other. Insurers would either go out of business, or policies would become far more unaffordable than they already are.
Yes you can. You can implement single payer socialized medicine.
You simply proposed solution #2. A single payer socialized insurance system forces everybody to buy insurance whether they want to or not. Now, the payment system typically is lumped in with taxes, and the premiums are usually not shared equally in that system. That is what makes it socialized. However, if you want pre-existing conditions to be covered, then you have to have universal coverage one way or another. How that coverage is paid for is really a separate matter, though they tend to get convoluted.
Insurance simply can not possibly address the issue of something everyone needs being unaffordable. It just means that now you get to pay that still unaffordable price PLUS an extra percentage for the insurance company.
Insurance does nothing to make something more or less affordable. All insurance does is evenly divide risk when individuals cannot predict their exposure to it except in a general sense. Auto insurance doesn't make owning a Bugatti any cheaper, but if you can generally afford to own one it prevents your car from being more expensive than your neighbor's if yours is stolen and theirs is not.
Socialism is about making things more affordable for people who couldn't otherwise afford it, whether you are talking about food, housing, cable TV, or healthcare.
Part of the mess of the healthcare debate is that people tend to mix up issues which really are separate (but related). The US healthcare system is messed up on numerous models, and that is why nobody has an easy fix. There are cost issues, insurance issues, legal issues, and as you point out, social justice issues. Individual changes can address some of these issues and yet leave others completely untouched.
If the courts do NOT strike it down, they negate their own legitimacy. The Constitution has no escape clause for expediency.
I guess Congress will just have to get off of their overpaid asses and do it right this time. That or squabble like exceptionally bratty children for a few more years.
Well, the constitution has no clause for universal healthcare either, really, unless you count the ICC, and if you're willing to go that route then forcing people to buy stuff is just more of the same.
In any case, the reality is that the healthcare system will not work if individuals can choose not to buy insurance, but private insurance companies are forced to sell it to them later and cover pre-existing conditions. What idiot would ever buy insurance in such a situation if they didn't have a stack of medical bills larger than the premium?
And, while my point wasn't to discuss socialized medicine, I do think it is inevitable eventually. The short-term driver is that people don't like to see people dying in the street, and if you're going to help somebody there are cheaper ways to do it than to stiff the ER with acute care bills but let people waste away chronically. The long-term driver is that I suspect that advances in genetics will make it possible to predict disease risk and insurance doesn't work in a world where there is little uncertainty (who would buy insurance if they won't get sick, and how could anybody afford insurance that ends up only covering very sick people?).
I've been thinking about just sticking some cameras on my property and creating a database of every face they see and when, and every license plate that drives by.
I figure everybody else is doing it, so why not private individuals.
Post it all in one big free database online, and now everybody knows where everybody lives and works and what they're doing. Maybe the solution to privacy is for nobody to have it. Since, right now the only thing I can be sure of is that ordinary people don't have it. Equality would keep everybody more honest. Social norms/etc would just have to change.
Funny that you mention the pre-existing conditions bit - that is what drove the requirement for everybody to have insurance or pay a tax.
It is a compromise:
1. Insurance companies are forced to sell insurance to everybody whether they want to or not. 2. People are forced to buy insurance, whether they want to or not.
You can't really have the one without the other. Insurers would either go out of business, or policies would become far more unaffordable than they already are.
There is no way the courts would strike this down. If they did insurers would just start denying pre-existing conditions again, and then fight that out in the courts for another 5 years while people die untreated in hospitals. One way or another they'd find a loophole since anything else would be financial suicide.
The reason this was made law was because it went hand-in-hand with another provision that was made law - insurance companies are now required to cover pre-existing conditions.
So, under the new law you can not buy health insurance for 60 years. Then you can get cancer and need a $300k/yr treatment regimen. At that point you can buy insurance for $1-2k/month or whatever and they have to pay for your treatment.
To keep people from waiting until they got sick to buy insurance (which would either bankrupt insurance companies, or force rates so high that nobody could afford it anyway), they required universal coverage.
You basically get a choice - universal coverage, or no coverage for pre-existing conditions. It just doesn't work out economically for it to be anything else. Either way can allow for the government to be the insurer or not - this is really an entirely separate issue (though government-provided insurance that doesn't have universal coverage is pretty unlikely to happen).
Personally I prefer doing things this way. The problem with denial of pre-existing conditions is that it is a HUGE loophole that companies would abuse (everybody did it - unless you had a more expensive plan). If you went two months of your life without insurance your insurer would try to argue that the problem arose during those two months even if it was 15 years ago, and good luck fighting that.
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Yup - we use "agile" but we still start with a requirements spec and all the requirements are written before the first line of code. In fact, even if we have multiple "sprints" we still write all the requirements before we start the first one.
The only thing agile about it is that we use the right buzzwords, and we do a chunk of requirements at a time (as if that wasn't what everybody always did), and we demo the software to customers and maybe refine the requirements from time to time (as if that wasn't what we always did anyway).
Yup. Java would be fine if it actually worked. It had some lousy APIs, and most of the VMs are REALLY slow and gobble RAM like nuts - or at least they are slow to start. My understanding is that Java apps aren't bad once they've been running for a while, but of course the typical website experience is to punch the monkey a few times and then click on the next link, which makes the startup time the only time that really matters.
Yes, but with an API that wasn't available on numerous platforms, and which didn't include a sandbox.
Yup, one of those lovely things about proprietary code is you get the experience the vendor thinks is good enough on the platform you are using...
I think that sandboxed platform-independent code running in a browser makes sense. It is the only way to create provider-based rich client apps without having to install clients on millions of PCs and a myriad of other devices and keep them all updated (just keeping the browsers updated is hard enough).
I think the problem is that we keep inventing languages when what we really need are APIs/ABIs. What we need is an ELF or EXE format and instruction set for the browser - not a language. There is nothing wrong with writing your code in C, or Java, or Python, or whatever you want. You run it through a compiler, and it outputs in the format required by the target instruction set and file formats.
Applets should run in VMs, and the VM should enforce its own boundaries. Memory is just an array of bytes. Go ahead and have some standard libraries that everybody can assume are there, and they can offer garbage collection or whatever. People are welcome to use languages that abstract away pointers. But, quit tying a high-level language to a platform.
In the end that is what the big companies do anyway. Ever look at the javascript for gmail? It is obvious that they code in something else and have a compiler that outputs to javascript much like gcc will output to x86/arm/etc. So, basically you just have a VM with a really lousy instruction set.
The issue is lowest-common-denominator APIs and GUIs.
A GUI that works great with a mouse and keyboard will probably be lousy on a touchscreen.
The world's nicest Android word processor is going to be seriously annoying if it doesn't have keyboard shortcuts if you want to run it on a desktop.
If your app has a built in schedule-DVR-recording function, it isn't going to be quite the same experience on a phone as on an actual TV.
The polish of Android/iOS/etc is in their high level of vertical integration. Once you go to cookie-cutter APIs you lose all that. Swing is the ultimate example of a least-common-denominator API.
Well, paying the Dane-geld almost always works out for the better of any individual. That's why the tactic works.
If you get in a lawsuit MS can play scorched earth and you end up not selling phones due to injunctions and all that. You lose even if you win. Since MS doesn't actually sell any phones and their desktop lead is unassailable you can't really retaliate.
The real fix is to get rid of the software patent nonsense, or heavily curtail it (make patents last two years or something).
Yes, but a missile that can reach space and a "X37b" are not the same thing.
Agreed that more is spent on advertising than R&D, and that is waste that would be eliminated in an NIH model.
I also agree that the reality is that drugs are priced at what the market will bear. That doesn't mean that the model works if everybody pays what the UK pays, but price and cost aren't directly coupled.
The colchicine situations is obviously a good example of how not to do things. If the FDA wanted data on an existing drug they should have just ran their own trial on it (or had the NIH do it or whatever). But, the reality is that no private company would pay for it unless they got exclusivity, even if it only cost a few million dollars. Unpatented drugs are the perfect example of the tragedy of the commons - they're the best bang for the buck for everybody, but they're worthless to any company in particular.
As far as new drugs being minor tweaks or worse than old drugs, what is the harm in that? If they aren't as good, then don't take them! At least in the private model when a company comes out with a lousy drug it doesn't cost you (as a taxpayer) a dime.
I actually think that "me-too" drugs are a good thing. I know somebody with serious health problems and in some cases the "best in class" drugs just don't work for them. However, they can still take the "me too" drug and get some benefit from it. Antibiotics are the perfect example of the "me too" drug - 95% of the time most of them are equivalent, but the 5% of the time that they aren't can mean the difference between life and death. This is also the reason why nobody develops new antibiotics - 95% of the time they have no market since older cheaper drugs work just as well. The NIH could solve this with a steady stream of new antibiotics developed to head off resistance without regard to profitability. One of my fears of an NIH takeover is the "good enough" mentality where we stop researching treatments for diseases when we have something that works moderately well, and when that one treatment doesn't work for somebody we just write them off.
Oh, and NIH-funded R&D doesn't need to mean the end of private industry either. First, they can still come up with their own novel patented drugs (which have to compete against cheap new publicly-funded ones). Second, they can always subcontract to the NIH - they have huge infrastructure for doing development and often do it reasonably well. The NIH simply would pay fee-for-service and would not award any kind of exclusivity or patents for work done. The industry has no risk so they can make do with low margins on this work, and it could help give them a baseline level of work/profit for when they are in dry cycles with their own R&D efforts.
Actually, the reason drugs are cheaper in the UK is similar to the phenomenon on aircraft where the guy sitting next to you can pay $100 for a seat you paid $3000 for.
Imagine a plane has 100 seats, and it costs $100k to operate the flight. It manages to sell 10 seats for $3k, and 50 seats for $2k. At this point it is making money. However, it still has 40 seats left. It could just fly them empty and still make money, but if they sold those extra seats for $100 each they'd make an extra $4k and it really wouldn't change the cost of the flight much. However, that doesn't mean that the true cost of those seats is only $100 each - if the airline sold every ticket for $100 it would lose money.
The situation is similar with drugs. Drugs have an odd pricing model. The first pill costs $100M to make, and every pill after that costs 10 cents. The problem is that nobody will pay $100M for the first pill, so instead they all sell for about $5 each for the first 10 years or so. Now, suppose the UK comes along and says that they won't pay more than 50 cents each. The manufacturer basically can take that price or leave it. They are still making 40 cents per pill at that price, so 40 cents is better than nothing. However, if EVERYBODY paid 40 cents for the pill they'd never make the $100M it cost to develop the pill in the first place.
If the NIH just funded R&D end-to-end and public domained the pills, then a bunch of companies would step in and sell the pills for 15 cents or whatever and would be perfectly happy, since they didn't have to come up with the $100M. Sure, the taxpayers are out that money instead, but we all end up paying that money one way or another. Drug discovery is just another form of knowledge advancement and so the model of publicly funded research tends to make sense.
The downside I see to having the NIH do the work is that you can end up with special interests taking over. Suppose the party in power thinks AIDS is a punishment for perverts - boom, there goes your AIDS research. Now, suppose the next party in power things that diabetes is what you get when you eat more than is good for you, boom, there goes diabetes research. The good thing about private investment is that as long as the money is green they really don't care what they research. That is also the bad thing about it - problems that impact poor people get under-represented in R&D.
In any case, there is no reason you can't have both models. Have the NIH fund R&D, and pills they come up with are patent free. Let private industry patent drugs they come up with. If the private drugs really demonstrate value then the medical system can pay for them, and if not they can stick with the cheap stuff. Either way the state of the art advances for the benefit of all.
Why would the DOD bother to de-orbit a civilian space station in a deniable way?
If they had any interest in doing that sort of thing they'd be doing it already on unmanned satellites. I doubt that they're going to start killing astronauts just to put a damper on space exploration.
And if they just wanted to destroy the thing they don't need some fancy spacecraft - a good old fashioned missile would do the trick.
They're not really a patent troll - they actually make the stuff they patent.
A patent troll is somebody whose main business model is collecting license fees from things that OTHERS do, largely because they filed a patent on something that is easy to put into words and hard to put into practice.
You don't have to agree with Terminator Genes and all that stuff, but the fact is that they actually do make that stuff and you can buy it from them if you want it.
No, a patent troll is the guy who sues you for playing video on your cell phone, when they've never made a phone, media player application, or video format in their life.
So, you have a bit of a mixed bag here and I won't go point by point. I will comment that socialized medicine and single payer healthcare are actually not the same thing - you can have either without the other. Some of the items you list have more to do with one than the other.
Drug patents seem to come up a lot in these conversations. I'm a proponent of moving the R&D (and the patent rights) to the NIH, but I'd prefer to see this actually start working in practice before dismantling the current system. I think that the reality is that it won't really change the cost of drugs much, although it will shift around how they are paid for (ie instead of $5/pill it will be more like 10cents/pill and a bunch of checks for $10M here and there). If you want drug development and trials than somebody has to pay for it one way or another. Having the NIH do the whole thing soup to nuts would at least help answer questions around established treatments that right now don't get much attention since they are unpatented. Right now the NIH funds very little of the expensive part of drug development (which is mainly the clinical trials).
I'm also a fan of getting rid of prescription drug access laws, but I doubt that I'll see this in my lifetime even if we have socialized medicine. This is really a separate issue.
I do agree that single-payer would clean up a TON of administrative overhead. The current system is an incredible mess.
As far as behavior control goes - this is actually one of the bigger problems with government-provided healthcare. Insurance can add some surcharges, but they're often powerless to detect or prevent certain behaviors. Government on the other hand can do stuff like ban particular foods, practices, business, and you name it. They also have more access to find out if people are doing banned activities, though this clearly will be about as successful (and tragic) as the war on drugs. I'm not under any illusions that the Constitution will do much to prevent anything like this - once Congress pays for treatments for lung cancer you can bet they'll take a hard look at smoking, and rightly so. If you want me to pay for your medical bills, then guess what, I'm now a part of your life choice decision making process whether you want me there or not.
I don't disagree with many of your points, otherwise.
Well, some carriers don't offer the ability to limit or stop services you don't want. Some do, and most of these charge you for this (yes, they charge you to NOT deliver you a service).
Well, I'm not sure how you find a loophole when the law says to cover everything, but that is really a separate issue which is that we make the law into some kind of game. The solution to somebody saying "but that technically isn't what you said!" is "tough luck - watch us take you to the cleaners anyway."
Yeah, but you just have to watch one episode of CSI to realize how tough key management is when you leave a copy of your private key on everything you touch...
I think you're missing the point. The stories of Abraham and Lot were written in a different culture, to communicate something to those cultures. They clearly don't communicate the same things to us.
The issue is that people like to hold the Bible up as some kind of standard to live by in the sense of almost literally doing whatever people in Biblical stories did.
Abraham and Lot lived in barbaric societies and did barbaric things. It isn't their contrast with us that matters so much as their contrast with the standards of their day, which is the point the people who bothered to spend thousands of years copying that story were trying to make. Most evidence suggests that it was written down around the same time that the Jewish laws forbidding child sacrifice in the first place were written, so it isn't like the people doing it didn't realize the irony in the story.
This is no different from studying the arguments of Darwin or Newton and valuing them for their huge contributions in the context of their eras, without discounting the fact that their work has been built upon and in some cases refuted.
I'll be the first to admit that these are not nuances commonly appreciated by vocal proponents of Christianity.
The job of a manager isn't to make a company succeed - it is to demonstrate that he did his part to make the company (or at least his boss) succeed.
If he issues a policy and people don't follow it he can point fingers and be blameless when things go south. He gets to keep his job. Ideally he'll have gotten himself promoted before it comes down to that, however.
Yup, I have FIOS and ended up switching to the Verizon-provided router for this reason. The biggest issue with it is the NAT table is limited, but I think I've mostly worked through that.
You can potentially put the router into more of a bridging mode and use your own router (which obviously has to be decent), but that is pretty tricky due to how the whole setup (internet+cable) works.
Yup, and that's why there is a requirement to buy insurance.
A big problem with heathcare is that we conflate insurance and socialism. You can have either, but they're not the same thing, and a big part of the problem is that people can't really agree on whether socialism is a desired outcome.
1. Insurance companies are forced to sell insurance to everybody whether they want to or not.
2. People are forced to buy insurance, whether they want to or not.
You can't really have the one without the other. Insurers would either go out of business, or policies would become far more unaffordable than they already are.
Yes you can. You can implement single payer socialized medicine.
You simply proposed solution #2. A single payer socialized insurance system forces everybody to buy insurance whether they want to or not. Now, the payment system typically is lumped in with taxes, and the premiums are usually not shared equally in that system. That is what makes it socialized. However, if you want pre-existing conditions to be covered, then you have to have universal coverage one way or another. How that coverage is paid for is really a separate matter, though they tend to get convoluted.
Insurance simply can not possibly address the issue of something everyone needs being unaffordable. It just means that now you get to pay that still unaffordable price PLUS an extra percentage for the insurance company.
Insurance does nothing to make something more or less affordable. All insurance does is evenly divide risk when individuals cannot predict their exposure to it except in a general sense. Auto insurance doesn't make owning a Bugatti any cheaper, but if you can generally afford to own one it prevents your car from being more expensive than your neighbor's if yours is stolen and theirs is not.
Socialism is about making things more affordable for people who couldn't otherwise afford it, whether you are talking about food, housing, cable TV, or healthcare.
Part of the mess of the healthcare debate is that people tend to mix up issues which really are separate (but related). The US healthcare system is messed up on numerous models, and that is why nobody has an easy fix. There are cost issues, insurance issues, legal issues, and as you point out, social justice issues. Individual changes can address some of these issues and yet leave others completely untouched.
If the courts do NOT strike it down, they negate their own legitimacy. The Constitution has no escape clause for expediency.
I guess Congress will just have to get off of their overpaid asses and do it right this time. That or squabble like exceptionally bratty children for a few more years.
Well, the constitution has no clause for universal healthcare either, really, unless you count the ICC, and if you're willing to go that route then forcing people to buy stuff is just more of the same.
In any case, the reality is that the healthcare system will not work if individuals can choose not to buy insurance, but private insurance companies are forced to sell it to them later and cover pre-existing conditions. What idiot would ever buy insurance in such a situation if they didn't have a stack of medical bills larger than the premium?
And, while my point wasn't to discuss socialized medicine, I do think it is inevitable eventually. The short-term driver is that people don't like to see people dying in the street, and if you're going to help somebody there are cheaper ways to do it than to stiff the ER with acute care bills but let people waste away chronically. The long-term driver is that I suspect that advances in genetics will make it possible to predict disease risk and insurance doesn't work in a world where there is little uncertainty (who would buy insurance if they won't get sick, and how could anybody afford insurance that ends up only covering very sick people?).
I've been thinking about just sticking some cameras on my property and creating a database of every face they see and when, and every license plate that drives by.
I figure everybody else is doing it, so why not private individuals.
Post it all in one big free database online, and now everybody knows where everybody lives and works and what they're doing. Maybe the solution to privacy is for nobody to have it. Since, right now the only thing I can be sure of is that ordinary people don't have it. Equality would keep everybody more honest. Social norms/etc would just have to change.
Funny that you mention the pre-existing conditions bit - that is what drove the requirement for everybody to have insurance or pay a tax.
It is a compromise:
1. Insurance companies are forced to sell insurance to everybody whether they want to or not.
2. People are forced to buy insurance, whether they want to or not.
You can't really have the one without the other. Insurers would either go out of business, or policies would become far more unaffordable than they already are.
There is no way the courts would strike this down. If they did insurers would just start denying pre-existing conditions again, and then fight that out in the courts for another 5 years while people die untreated in hospitals. One way or another they'd find a loophole since anything else would be financial suicide.
The reason this was made law was because it went hand-in-hand with another provision that was made law - insurance companies are now required to cover pre-existing conditions.
So, under the new law you can not buy health insurance for 60 years. Then you can get cancer and need a $300k/yr treatment regimen. At that point you can buy insurance for $1-2k/month or whatever and they have to pay for your treatment.
To keep people from waiting until they got sick to buy insurance (which would either bankrupt insurance companies, or force rates so high that nobody could afford it anyway), they required universal coverage.
You basically get a choice - universal coverage, or no coverage for pre-existing conditions. It just doesn't work out economically for it to be anything else. Either way can allow for the government to be the insurer or not - this is really an entirely separate issue (though government-provided insurance that doesn't have universal coverage is pretty unlikely to happen).
Personally I prefer doing things this way. The problem with denial of pre-existing conditions is that it is a HUGE loophole that companies would abuse (everybody did it - unless you had a more expensive plan). If you went two months of your life without insurance your insurer would try to argue that the problem arose during those two months even if it was 15 years ago, and good luck fighting that.
Whoops - I see it mentioned on the $100 models - not on the $80 one.