Yup, the real spies probably post pro-government spam with embedded code on common websites if they need to use the web at all. They're more likely to avoid any channel that passes through government control - a dead drop picked up by some guy who hands off to a foreign diplomat is going to be hard to spot. Once the data is in an embassy it can leave the country in any number of ways that are just about impossible to intercept.
They're not going to do anything that makes themselves stand out, like visit some website that nobody else uses, or post all kinds of anti-government stuff.
Well, I don't know what the masses of these stars are, but if they're high enough they'll eventually "nuke" themselves. When one star gains enough mass - either by pulling it out of the other or from the eventual collision when their orbits collapse - if that star has sufficient mass it will trigger a supernova as the core collapses into a black hole.
That would be fine, if the professor wasn't required to pass most of the class, which means they either need to water down the material for the benefit of those who can't be bothered to pay attention, or keep going over it, wasting MY time.
I'm fine with just leaving each to his own - as long as laptop displays do not contain animations/movement of any kind beyond scrolling, mouse cursors, etc, and as long as the quality of my own education isn't brought down to everybody else's level.
A recent Frontline actually dealt with this issue.
There is a lot of politics involved in grading. A professor can't simply fail half their class if they aren't paying attention. Some subjects are hard to learn even if you're 100% focused on the class, even with a good professor.
The interviewed professors felt that they were compelled to simplify the material so that the class could pass tests, which lowers the quality of the educational experience. That lowers the value of the degree for anybody who actually was paying in class as well.
Personally I'm fine with letting people use laptops all they want in class, but I'd have a hard rule on no distracting imagines on the laptop, which includes anything involving on-screen motion. As somebody else pointed out, human brains are hard-wired to detect motion - most people just aren't mentally capable of ignoring it and I'm not sure they should be required to. I'd also set policy that classes are to cover a set curriculum and if some can't keep up that is too bad for them.
However, you'll never see this happen, because like most modern institutions colleges are designed to maximize income and self-perpetuate, and you don't accomplish that normally by kicking people out.
Uh, when I've been on flights listening to my mp3 player and then used the mp3 player the next day I've nearly blasted my eardrums out since the volume had been left REALLY LOUD. It didn't seem so loud on the plane since the whole cabin was filled with the sound of air molecules bouncing off the fuselage.
If you can hear a typical laptop keyboard while in cruise then you have some REALLY interesting hearing...
Yup - I'd much rather see stimulus spending going into roads, bridges, and power lines than being paid to megacorporations that made poor investments/etc.
That megacorporation probably outsources all kinds of stuff overseas and looks to dodge taxes any time it can.
On the other hand, infrastructure lowers the cost of doing business for everybody in the US, which makes the value of local labor higher. Small businesses benefit as well, and they don't even have to fill out a single form to try to claim these benefits. The immediate jobs benefit those who tend to have trouble obtaining high-skill employment, and not everybody is suited to be a computer programmer. Why not pay a living wage to the construction industry and then there will be somebody out there to buy the IT products that are created by half of the/. crew.
Plus, this is all stuff the government is supposed to be doing anyway. Ok, some of the most hardened ultra-libertarians might squirm at that suggestion, but if you're among them at least admit that this is a better idea than just writing checks to banks.
1. In the US, people who pay the most for healthcare are healthier than they would be in Europe. 2. In Europe, people who pay the least for healthcare are healthier than they would be in the US.
Some argue #1 is morally superior, and some argue that #2 is morally superior. Most likely this will have a great deal to do with one's opinion of socialism in general. Of course, the correct answer is so obvious to everybody that I won't bother to state it here.;)
The US system also has the additional attribute of being wildly inefficient, so potentially either the poor or the rich or both could do better if that were fixed. We of course don't bother to fix this, as fixing the cost problem is difficult to divorce from fixing the socialism problem, and since nobody can agree on the latter the industry in general cashes in on the former.
Well, I'm sure the sendmail configuration file doesn't really need to be Turing complete, but I heard that it is.
Keep in mind a Turing machine just has access to two bits of memory at a time, and follows the simplest of rules. It isn't hard to make something with this level of complexity almost accidentally.
I couldn't agree more, however, that there is no reason that things like brakes can't have completely manual failsafes. All you need to do is have the throttle give completely electronic commands until it hits 80% of full scale, and then in the last 20% it hits a completely mechanical stop and begins to apply direct braking.
Personally I think that a large proportion of those costs were artificially inflated for completely non-medical reasons.
Well, anybody who knows anything about medicine can tell you that.
"Medical devices" are highly regulated, which means low competition and very high prices (even where there is competition a lot of non-value-add money gets spent to satisfy lawyers/regulators). I saw an article that indicated that stroke patients had better outcomes regaining balance with a $100 Wii balance board as compared to a $18k medical device. Sure, maybe 1/100k Wii controllers ships defective, but what is the impact of that? (I'm sure if somebody falls off of one the doctor that suggested using will be sued, however.)
There is overhead at every part of the process. Half of it amounts to "don't buck the system" since those who do tend to get sued.
Then throw in consumers who are all too happy to spend money if somebody suggests that a procedure will help them.
If you can try to dig up a copy of an NPR show from last year I think that talked about medical costs. It was amazing how much the whole system is biased towards spending money without much regard to whether doing so is likely to actually provide real benefit.
Most people would want to spend some money, both as a token of respect to the dead, and also to provide a nice funeral for those still living. But spending twice the money does not give twice the benefit.
Agreed in general, but let's think about what motivates people.
Why is it that somebody would consider it too little to just bury the body in a wooden cask and have a brief ceremony at the grave site? Why is it that somebody would consider a 3-week vacation in Maui excessive?
I think the answer is general community expectations. Most people hold funerals in the same way that everybody else does, just as they do with weddings. 100 years ago both weddings and funerals were much simpler affairs than they are today.
The year after those $15k checks were mailed the cost of funerals would only rise a little. However, year after year the complexity of funerals would rise, and costs would rise with them. Eventually people will be having funerals in 5-star hotels because "that's just what you do."
Do we also apply this rationale to auto mechanics, window cleaners, lawyers and all other corners of our economy?
Nope, and we don't have to. Those industries all have fairly efficient markets where prices are very transparent and people are able to effectively shop around and compare prices and services. Also, almost all of those items are bought by individuals, which means that the market treats individuals fairly.
Hospitals are a VERY different beast. In most areas you can't comparison shop 25 different hospitals the way you can shop 25 different garages for an oil change. You have very little leverage. Also, 99% of the paying market is represented by insurers, which makes the 1% almost powerless to negotiate. While I'm sure the individual caregivers do care about the uninsured as a business most hospitals would probably prefer they just went away - they create FAR more work than they are worth.
You do make a good argument in general about being able to plan and save money, but the fact is that all kinds of industries manage to do business with individuals where they have to try to predict how much business they'll have. I'm also fine with having fees based on notice/etc - so 4 weeks notice for a procedure gets you a discount compared to emergency walk-ins, and so on.
I think the benefits will greatly outweigh the downside. One way or another there will be measures put in place to control costs - fixed but freely set pricing has to be preferable to a single payer system where you're told what you'll collect and your 4-bed clinic has to compete at the same price with the 1000 bed megahospital across town under all the same constraints you listed.
Personally, I'd rather take small steps towards a solution than to go to a command economy. I'd hope that most providers would tend to agree.
Couldn't agree with you more on all of your points.
However, everything I've read about the current health proposals in the US is really a worst of both worlds system. Sure, it will lead to universal coverage, which I think is a good thing. However, in the desire to not tick anybody off they're basically going to be printing money to propagate the current mess as long as they can. NOBODY wants to tell ANYBODY that they might make a little less money in the future as a result of the changes.
Well, being hit by lightning probably counts - I doubt the government will do anything to save your life in that case since 99% of the time you're fried to a crisp.
Having a massive heart attack probably counts - again, while most would actually consider intervention in this case cost effective it probably is not possible.
There are TONS of things that could kill you that the government isn't able to do something about.
Most socialized nations set a standard cost per year of life at some level of quality - if treatment costs more than this amount then you are written off. It sounds bad, and I'd hate to be the guy making the calls. However, any other choice actually costs more lives than it saves.
Why is this? Simple - opportunity cost. A hospital has $x to spend. If they spend it all on terminal patients, then there is that much less to spend on other things, like people with a much better prognosis, or on preventative care. Oh, you can argue that the health care budget should just be raised. Ok, where do you draw the line? If you taxed everybody at 90% and put every dollar into health care the fact is that there would STILL be people that you could save if you only spent a little more.
Ultimately, duration of life is not the only thing that matters in this world. At some point most people would be willing to trade some duration of life for quality of life. Now. that isn't a decision that most would make on their death bed, but it is a decision that most would make when they are healthy.
Just ask anybody on the street what they think the government should spend to keep them alive for an extra year when they are 85 and in the hospital. Let's say they come up with $10M. Then, ask them whether they'd rather just have that money now, but at the cost of not receiving heroic care when they are older. I bet you 95% of anybody actually offered that kind of cash would take it now, and they wouldn't just sock it away until they're on their death bed.
Sure, you can say that people are short-sighted, but that applies no less than somebody spending the money now as spending the money on their deathbed. Ultimately the question of whether a year of life in one's elderly years is worth more or less than a WHOLE lot of fun today is a question that has no clear absolute answer. We have to choose as a society which we value more - the prosperity of the living, or the dying.
The prices could be changed at any time for any reason, but would require some kind of advance disclosure so that insurers/etc can decide whether to drop the hospital.
So, hospitals could negotiate higher or lower prices any time they want to. All they need to do is publish a new price.
Um... did this guy ever heard of formal verification? Or is math proof not good enough for him?
How about this reformulation, then:
"It is well-known in our community that there is no scientific, firm way of actually completely verifying and validating a system that is Turing-complete."
And yes, there is a math proof for that.:)
Well, there is brute-force - just run the program start to finish for every possible combination of branch conditions. Just take 2 to the power of the number of if statements in the program and that's the number of tests you need to perform. Good luck doing that for anything more complicated than a thermostat, however...
Don't underestimate the complexity of these kinds of systems. Rigorously testing them is actually incredibly difficult and expensive. Yes, there are formalized methods that help, and I'd be shocked if something like a car's braking system didn't use them extensively.
How many spacecraft have been lost so far? Consider that every part and system in them has been subjected to the most rigorous quality control systems in the world, with exactly the kinds of testing methodologies you referred to. The problem is that there is ALWAYS a variable you don't account for, and that means the possibility of failure.
Even formal risk assessments only take into the account the risk factors they examine. The problem isn't the things you think about - it is the thing that nobody thought of.
Generally when comparing countries you compare *all* the people.
Hence the reason I said those statistics are misleading. After all, if you live in the US and have insurance which matters more to you - the healthcare of all people who live in the US or the healthcare of all people who live in the US and have insurance?
I did clearly state that there is a legitimate moral question around whether such a have/have-not system is acceptable.
I think that a move towards universal care in the US is inevitable. That will invariably raise the overall life expectancy figures. Whether it improves care at all for those who already have good care is a very open question.
I am sure that I might feel differently if I were personally involved in such a decision. Perhaps this is why I feel that the time for such decisions to be made is when we aren't personally involved in them.
If we leave the size of the national health care budget up to only those who have loved ones with terminal illnesses, we won't be able to afford anything but medicine.
Resources are finite. I don't like it, but that's just the way it is...
Actually, from what I've been able to glean, the uninsured pay much more.
Here is the problem - you don't get the bill until AFTER services are rendered. For kicks, go ahead and ask your doctor what a procedure he is recommending will cost. He'll look at you like you're an alien.
So, you get a bill. The problem is that now you've already incurred the service, so you can't decide to shop around. You can try to barter, but bartering after the sale is not very effective. You're relying purely on the hospital's generosity. However, if the hospital really were generous, why would they be mailing you a bill for $100k knowing that most insurance companies would only give them $20k?
Most likely you'll talk that $100k bill down to $30k and then talk to your friends about how nice the hospital was to you. What you don't realize is that they give a better deal to every insurance company on the planet. Nobody pays sticker price.
If I were running US healthcare one of the first laws I'd pass was that hospitals would need to publicize a full price list, and that EVERYBODY pays the same price. Since the hospital doesn't want to be dropped from every insurance plan in the country they'll publish a fair price, and then there is no penalty for not having insurance, or for having an insurance company without a lot of patients in the local area. Note, I am under no illusions that this would fix US healthcare entirely - it is a huge mess that needs MANY changes. This would just be one of the first I'd pass, since it saves money regardless of whether taxpayers or private insurers are paying for care.
Doctors and care providers should be the ones responsible for determining the best methods of care for their patients.
Why is it then that the nation that you live in sets guidelines about what kinds of care that doctors can provide? Why is it that in your nation the legislature decides how many doctors will be hired, and not the doctors themselves? Why is it that in your nation the government decides how much to pay doctors, and the doctors don't just set their own wages? I can say this having no idea where you live, as in EVERY nation on earth the people paying for healthcare set these kinds of guidelines, whether we're talking about private insurers in the US or nationalized health systems in Europe.
The fact is that your government has decided that it is NOT only the job of a doctor or care provider to decide what the best methods of care are for patients. They have placed a price on life.
And this is a good thing!
A population with adequate healthcare at reasonable cost (much less than in the US currently) is much less expensive over time than the current healthcare system in the US.
This is absolutely true. The US has a horribly inefficient healthcare system. However, make no mistake in thinking that in making the system much more effective and efficient that a price on life will not be set.
Any healthcare system can trade more money for increased health outcomes. Now, in the case of efficient systems like in Europe we could be talking about a LOT of money in exchange for a tiny amount of additional health. However, the fact that 100% of a nation's GDP doesn't go towards healthcare and yet people are still dying indicates that at some point every nation is willing to draw a line.
The only difference is how openly people are willing to talk about it.
Since it's less than the price of Carly Flonina's stupid Devil Sheep advertisement who are we to say it's more of a waste of money?
Well, as a taxpayer being asked to potentially foot the bill for socialized medicine, I certainly get a say in this. I didn't pay a dime for that ad, so I could care less how much it cost. When I buy a product I pick the best product I can get for the money I'm spending, and as a result I could care less whether it might have cost 0.1 cents less if some particular corporate decision were made differently.
There's a vast industry and only a tiny proportion of it is focused on health care, most of it is about carving out monopolies to maximise profit.
I'll certainly agree that quite a bit of money goes into satellite industries, although the majority are focused to some extent on providing care. They all have overhead, but that is true of all industries.
When you look at healthcare there really isn't any single "evil" industry or factor you can point to as being responsible for all the cost. Insurers do create overhead and take profits, but they are only a component of the cost. Tort law certainly creates overhead and takes profits, but they're only a component as well. Doctors create overhead and take profit, and they're a component of the costs (and if doctors were perfect you wouldn't need all the overhead in the insurers and lawyers to catch them when they make mistakes or try to overcharge). Patients crave treatments that aren't cost-effective, and that drives up costs. There are a ton of factors that drive up healthcare costs.
you can forget about the "free market" because it does not apply
On that, we can agree. I'd go further and say that healthcare will NEVER be a truly free market, due to the nature of the bargaining positions of providers, payers, and patients. However, I do think that regardless of whether care is socialized or not that some reforms should be enacted to at least make the market a little more functional. There will always be a need for heavy regulation in this area, but the more effective the market can be made the more money whoever is paying for care can save, whether that ends up being patients or taxpayers.
Because Sweden's health system is ranked much higher [photius.com], life expectancy is much higher [photius.com], and preventable deaths are much fewer [allcountries.org]
It all depends on how you make your measurements.
If you look only at people with insurance in both nations I bet the US patients would do a LOT better. However, US stats are skewed by large numbers of people with very little care at all.
Now, whether that is morally acceptable is certainly open to debate. However, simply looking at averages doesn't really tell the whole story. Why do you think that so many Americans opposed some of the recent healthcare legislation? The fact is that many Americans actually receive fairly good care (at exorbitant cost), and so the issue is how to not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
True, but if everybody made these kinds of decisions then insurance premiums would be that much lower, and then everybody gets to decide how to spend that money. Maybe they just spend it on vacations. Maybe they spend it on building hospitals in Uganda.
Is it immoral for anybody on the planet to own a TV when one child is staving anywhere else on the planet?
If not, then we're just haggling over the price of life. How many children need to starve before we consider selling our TV sets? Every human being makes these kinds of decisions every day without thinking about it. The same people are the first to line up and condemn anybody who actually wants to talk about putting a price on life. It is the epitome of hypocrisy.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, the real spies probably post pro-government spam with embedded code on common websites if they need to use the web at all. They're more likely to avoid any channel that passes through government control - a dead drop picked up by some guy who hands off to a foreign diplomat is going to be hard to spot. Once the data is in an embassy it can leave the country in any number of ways that are just about impossible to intercept.
They're not going to do anything that makes themselves stand out, like visit some website that nobody else uses, or post all kinds of anti-government stuff.
Agreed. How about running a different benchmark instead:
Flash vs open source html5 implementations on sparc, mips, netbsd, or any of 45,000 platforms that doesn't have a flash player?
Flash will render a "you need to install a plugin to display this content" box, and html5 will render at least something.
Maybe if adobe actually supported anything other than windows and OSX I might care how well their solution performs.
Well, I don't know what the masses of these stars are, but if they're high enough they'll eventually "nuke" themselves. When one star gains enough mass - either by pulling it out of the other or from the eventual collision when their orbits collapse - if that star has sufficient mass it will trigger a supernova as the core collapses into a black hole.
That would be fine, if the professor wasn't required to pass most of the class, which means they either need to water down the material for the benefit of those who can't be bothered to pay attention, or keep going over it, wasting MY time.
I'm fine with just leaving each to his own - as long as laptop displays do not contain animations/movement of any kind beyond scrolling, mouse cursors, etc, and as long as the quality of my own education isn't brought down to everybody else's level.
A recent Frontline actually dealt with this issue.
There is a lot of politics involved in grading. A professor can't simply fail half their class if they aren't paying attention. Some subjects are hard to learn even if you're 100% focused on the class, even with a good professor.
The interviewed professors felt that they were compelled to simplify the material so that the class could pass tests, which lowers the quality of the educational experience. That lowers the value of the degree for anybody who actually was paying in class as well.
Personally I'm fine with letting people use laptops all they want in class, but I'd have a hard rule on no distracting imagines on the laptop, which includes anything involving on-screen motion. As somebody else pointed out, human brains are hard-wired to detect motion - most people just aren't mentally capable of ignoring it and I'm not sure they should be required to. I'd also set policy that classes are to cover a set curriculum and if some can't keep up that is too bad for them.
However, you'll never see this happen, because like most modern institutions colleges are designed to maximize income and self-perpetuate, and you don't accomplish that normally by kicking people out.
Uh, when I've been on flights listening to my mp3 player and then used the mp3 player the next day I've nearly blasted my eardrums out since the volume had been left REALLY LOUD. It didn't seem so loud on the plane since the whole cabin was filled with the sound of air molecules bouncing off the fuselage.
If you can hear a typical laptop keyboard while in cruise then you have some REALLY interesting hearing...
Yup - I'd much rather see stimulus spending going into roads, bridges, and power lines than being paid to megacorporations that made poor investments/etc.
That megacorporation probably outsources all kinds of stuff overseas and looks to dodge taxes any time it can.
On the other hand, infrastructure lowers the cost of doing business for everybody in the US, which makes the value of local labor higher. Small businesses benefit as well, and they don't even have to fill out a single form to try to claim these benefits. The immediate jobs benefit those who tend to have trouble obtaining high-skill employment, and not everybody is suited to be a computer programmer. Why not pay a living wage to the construction industry and then there will be somebody out there to buy the IT products that are created by half of the /. crew.
Plus, this is all stuff the government is supposed to be doing anyway. Ok, some of the most hardened ultra-libertarians might squirm at that suggestion, but if you're among them at least admit that this is a better idea than just writing checks to banks.
That is kind of the frigging point Batman...
Yes, that was my point. What is yours? :)
Here is a another way of putting it:
1. In the US, people who pay the most for healthcare are healthier than they would be in Europe.
2. In Europe, people who pay the least for healthcare are healthier than they would be in the US.
Some argue #1 is morally superior, and some argue that #2 is morally superior. Most likely this will have a great deal to do with one's opinion of socialism in general. Of course, the correct answer is so obvious to everybody that I won't bother to state it here. ;)
The US system also has the additional attribute of being wildly inefficient, so potentially either the poor or the rich or both could do better if that were fixed. We of course don't bother to fix this, as fixing the cost problem is difficult to divorce from fixing the socialism problem, and since nobody can agree on the latter the industry in general cashes in on the former.
Well, I'm sure the sendmail configuration file doesn't really need to be Turing complete, but I heard that it is.
Keep in mind a Turing machine just has access to two bits of memory at a time, and follows the simplest of rules. It isn't hard to make something with this level of complexity almost accidentally.
I couldn't agree more, however, that there is no reason that things like brakes can't have completely manual failsafes. All you need to do is have the throttle give completely electronic commands until it hits 80% of full scale, and then in the last 20% it hits a completely mechanical stop and begins to apply direct braking.
Personally I think that a large proportion of those costs were artificially inflated for completely non-medical reasons.
Well, anybody who knows anything about medicine can tell you that.
"Medical devices" are highly regulated, which means low competition and very high prices (even where there is competition a lot of non-value-add money gets spent to satisfy lawyers/regulators). I saw an article that indicated that stroke patients had better outcomes regaining balance with a $100 Wii balance board as compared to a $18k medical device. Sure, maybe 1/100k Wii controllers ships defective, but what is the impact of that? (I'm sure if somebody falls off of one the doctor that suggested using will be sued, however.)
There is overhead at every part of the process. Half of it amounts to "don't buck the system" since those who do tend to get sued.
Then throw in consumers who are all too happy to spend money if somebody suggests that a procedure will help them.
If you can try to dig up a copy of an NPR show from last year I think that talked about medical costs. It was amazing how much the whole system is biased towards spending money without much regard to whether doing so is likely to actually provide real benefit.
Most people would want to spend some money, both as a token of respect to the dead, and also to provide a nice funeral for those still living. But spending twice the money does not give twice the benefit.
Agreed in general, but let's think about what motivates people.
Why is it that somebody would consider it too little to just bury the body in a wooden cask and have a brief ceremony at the grave site? Why is it that somebody would consider a 3-week vacation in Maui excessive?
I think the answer is general community expectations. Most people hold funerals in the same way that everybody else does, just as they do with weddings. 100 years ago both weddings and funerals were much simpler affairs than they are today.
The year after those $15k checks were mailed the cost of funerals would only rise a little. However, year after year the complexity of funerals would rise, and costs would rise with them. Eventually people will be having funerals in 5-star hotels because "that's just what you do."
Do we also apply this rationale to auto mechanics, window cleaners, lawyers and all other corners of our economy?
Nope, and we don't have to. Those industries all have fairly efficient markets where prices are very transparent and people are able to effectively shop around and compare prices and services. Also, almost all of those items are bought by individuals, which means that the market treats individuals fairly.
Hospitals are a VERY different beast. In most areas you can't comparison shop 25 different hospitals the way you can shop 25 different garages for an oil change. You have very little leverage. Also, 99% of the paying market is represented by insurers, which makes the 1% almost powerless to negotiate. While I'm sure the individual caregivers do care about the uninsured as a business most hospitals would probably prefer they just went away - they create FAR more work than they are worth.
You do make a good argument in general about being able to plan and save money, but the fact is that all kinds of industries manage to do business with individuals where they have to try to predict how much business they'll have. I'm also fine with having fees based on notice/etc - so 4 weeks notice for a procedure gets you a discount compared to emergency walk-ins, and so on.
I think the benefits will greatly outweigh the downside. One way or another there will be measures put in place to control costs - fixed but freely set pricing has to be preferable to a single payer system where you're told what you'll collect and your 4-bed clinic has to compete at the same price with the 1000 bed megahospital across town under all the same constraints you listed.
Personally, I'd rather take small steps towards a solution than to go to a command economy. I'd hope that most providers would tend to agree.
Couldn't agree with you more on all of your points.
However, everything I've read about the current health proposals in the US is really a worst of both worlds system. Sure, it will lead to universal coverage, which I think is a good thing. However, in the desire to not tick anybody off they're basically going to be printing money to propagate the current mess as long as they can. NOBODY wants to tell ANYBODY that they might make a little less money in the future as a result of the changes.
Well, being hit by lightning probably counts - I doubt the government will do anything to save your life in that case since 99% of the time you're fried to a crisp.
Having a massive heart attack probably counts - again, while most would actually consider intervention in this case cost effective it probably is not possible.
There are TONS of things that could kill you that the government isn't able to do something about.
Most socialized nations set a standard cost per year of life at some level of quality - if treatment costs more than this amount then you are written off. It sounds bad, and I'd hate to be the guy making the calls. However, any other choice actually costs more lives than it saves.
Why is this? Simple - opportunity cost. A hospital has $x to spend. If they spend it all on terminal patients, then there is that much less to spend on other things, like people with a much better prognosis, or on preventative care. Oh, you can argue that the health care budget should just be raised. Ok, where do you draw the line? If you taxed everybody at 90% and put every dollar into health care the fact is that there would STILL be people that you could save if you only spent a little more.
Ultimately, duration of life is not the only thing that matters in this world. At some point most people would be willing to trade some duration of life for quality of life. Now. that isn't a decision that most would make on their death bed, but it is a decision that most would make when they are healthy.
Just ask anybody on the street what they think the government should spend to keep them alive for an extra year when they are 85 and in the hospital. Let's say they come up with $10M. Then, ask them whether they'd rather just have that money now, but at the cost of not receiving heroic care when they are older. I bet you 95% of anybody actually offered that kind of cash would take it now, and they wouldn't just sock it away until they're on their death bed.
Sure, you can say that people are short-sighted, but that applies no less than somebody spending the money now as spending the money on their deathbed. Ultimately the question of whether a year of life in one's elderly years is worth more or less than a WHOLE lot of fun today is a question that has no clear absolute answer. We have to choose as a society which we value more - the prosperity of the living, or the dying.
The prices could be changed at any time for any reason, but would require some kind of advance disclosure so that insurers/etc can decide whether to drop the hospital.
So, hospitals could negotiate higher or lower prices any time they want to. All they need to do is publish a new price.
And yes, whatever the price is, everybody pays...
Um ... did this guy ever heard of formal verification? Or is math proof not good enough for him?
How about this reformulation, then:
"It is well-known in our community that there is no scientific, firm way of actually completely verifying and validating a system that is Turing-complete."
And yes, there is a math proof for that. :)
Well, there is brute-force - just run the program start to finish for every possible combination of branch conditions. Just take 2 to the power of the number of if statements in the program and that's the number of tests you need to perform. Good luck doing that for anything more complicated than a thermostat, however...
Humans are fallible. You can't dismiss user reports. You can review them skeptically, or examine them for trends.
EVERYBODY knows that cell phones cause cancer. So, why hasn't somebody fixed that?
EVERYBODY knows that vaccines cause autism. So, why hasn't somebody fixed that?
EVERYBODY knows that they're smarter than average. So, how did the last few presidents get elected? :)
Don't underestimate the complexity of these kinds of systems. Rigorously testing them is actually incredibly difficult and expensive. Yes, there are formalized methods that help, and I'd be shocked if something like a car's braking system didn't use them extensively.
How many spacecraft have been lost so far? Consider that every part and system in them has been subjected to the most rigorous quality control systems in the world, with exactly the kinds of testing methodologies you referred to. The problem is that there is ALWAYS a variable you don't account for, and that means the possibility of failure.
Even formal risk assessments only take into the account the risk factors they examine. The problem isn't the things you think about - it is the thing that nobody thought of.
Generally when comparing countries you compare *all* the people.
Hence the reason I said those statistics are misleading. After all, if you live in the US and have insurance which matters more to you - the healthcare of all people who live in the US or the healthcare of all people who live in the US and have insurance?
I did clearly state that there is a legitimate moral question around whether such a have/have-not system is acceptable.
I think that a move towards universal care in the US is inevitable. That will invariably raise the overall life expectancy figures. Whether it improves care at all for those who already have good care is a very open question.
I am sure that I might feel differently if I were personally involved in such a decision. Perhaps this is why I feel that the time for such decisions to be made is when we aren't personally involved in them.
If we leave the size of the national health care budget up to only those who have loved ones with terminal illnesses, we won't be able to afford anything but medicine.
Resources are finite. I don't like it, but that's just the way it is...
Actually, from what I've been able to glean, the uninsured pay much more.
Here is the problem - you don't get the bill until AFTER services are rendered. For kicks, go ahead and ask your doctor what a procedure he is recommending will cost. He'll look at you like you're an alien.
So, you get a bill. The problem is that now you've already incurred the service, so you can't decide to shop around. You can try to barter, but bartering after the sale is not very effective. You're relying purely on the hospital's generosity. However, if the hospital really were generous, why would they be mailing you a bill for $100k knowing that most insurance companies would only give them $20k?
Most likely you'll talk that $100k bill down to $30k and then talk to your friends about how nice the hospital was to you. What you don't realize is that they give a better deal to every insurance company on the planet. Nobody pays sticker price.
If I were running US healthcare one of the first laws I'd pass was that hospitals would need to publicize a full price list, and that EVERYBODY pays the same price. Since the hospital doesn't want to be dropped from every insurance plan in the country they'll publish a fair price, and then there is no penalty for not having insurance, or for having an insurance company without a lot of patients in the local area. Note, I am under no illusions that this would fix US healthcare entirely - it is a huge mess that needs MANY changes. This would just be one of the first I'd pass, since it saves money regardless of whether taxpayers or private insurers are paying for care.
Doctors and care providers should be the ones responsible for determining the best methods of care for their patients.
Why is it then that the nation that you live in sets guidelines about what kinds of care that doctors can provide? Why is it that in your nation the legislature decides how many doctors will be hired, and not the doctors themselves? Why is it that in your nation the government decides how much to pay doctors, and the doctors don't just set their own wages? I can say this having no idea where you live, as in EVERY nation on earth the people paying for healthcare set these kinds of guidelines, whether we're talking about private insurers in the US or nationalized health systems in Europe.
The fact is that your government has decided that it is NOT only the job of a doctor or care provider to decide what the best methods of care are for patients. They have placed a price on life.
And this is a good thing!
A population with adequate healthcare at reasonable cost (much less than in the US currently) is much less expensive over time than the current healthcare system in the US.
This is absolutely true. The US has a horribly inefficient healthcare system. However, make no mistake in thinking that in making the system much more effective and efficient that a price on life will not be set.
Any healthcare system can trade more money for increased health outcomes. Now, in the case of efficient systems like in Europe we could be talking about a LOT of money in exchange for a tiny amount of additional health. However, the fact that 100% of a nation's GDP doesn't go towards healthcare and yet people are still dying indicates that at some point every nation is willing to draw a line.
The only difference is how openly people are willing to talk about it.
Since it's less than the price of Carly Flonina's stupid Devil Sheep advertisement who are we to say it's more of a waste of money?
Well, as a taxpayer being asked to potentially foot the bill for socialized medicine, I certainly get a say in this. I didn't pay a dime for that ad, so I could care less how much it cost. When I buy a product I pick the best product I can get for the money I'm spending, and as a result I could care less whether it might have cost 0.1 cents less if some particular corporate decision were made differently.
There's a vast industry and only a tiny proportion of it is focused on health care, most of it is about carving out monopolies to maximise profit.
I'll certainly agree that quite a bit of money goes into satellite industries, although the majority are focused to some extent on providing care. They all have overhead, but that is true of all industries.
When you look at healthcare there really isn't any single "evil" industry or factor you can point to as being responsible for all the cost. Insurers do create overhead and take profits, but they are only a component of the cost. Tort law certainly creates overhead and takes profits, but they're only a component as well. Doctors create overhead and take profit, and they're a component of the costs (and if doctors were perfect you wouldn't need all the overhead in the insurers and lawyers to catch them when they make mistakes or try to overcharge). Patients crave treatments that aren't cost-effective, and that drives up costs. There are a ton of factors that drive up healthcare costs.
you can forget about the "free market" because it does not apply
On that, we can agree. I'd go further and say that healthcare will NEVER be a truly free market, due to the nature of the bargaining positions of providers, payers, and patients. However, I do think that regardless of whether care is socialized or not that some reforms should be enacted to at least make the market a little more functional. There will always be a need for heavy regulation in this area, but the more effective the market can be made the more money whoever is paying for care can save, whether that ends up being patients or taxpayers.
Because Sweden's health system is ranked much higher [photius.com], life expectancy is much higher [photius.com], and preventable deaths are much fewer [allcountries.org]
It all depends on how you make your measurements.
If you look only at people with insurance in both nations I bet the US patients would do a LOT better. However, US stats are skewed by large numbers of people with very little care at all.
Now, whether that is morally acceptable is certainly open to debate. However, simply looking at averages doesn't really tell the whole story. Why do you think that so many Americans opposed some of the recent healthcare legislation? The fact is that many Americans actually receive fairly good care (at exorbitant cost), and so the issue is how to not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
True, but if everybody made these kinds of decisions then insurance premiums would be that much lower, and then everybody gets to decide how to spend that money. Maybe they just spend it on vacations. Maybe they spend it on building hospitals in Uganda.
Is it immoral for anybody on the planet to own a TV when one child is staving anywhere else on the planet?
If not, then we're just haggling over the price of life. How many children need to starve before we consider selling our TV sets? Every human being makes these kinds of decisions every day without thinking about it. The same people are the first to line up and condemn anybody who actually wants to talk about putting a price on life. It is the epitome of hypocrisy.