My point wasn't that insurance companies don't make too much money. My point was that their profits are only a tiny part of the problem.
If you magically made drugs profit-free, and insurance profit-free, US healthcare would probably be only a few percent cheaper overall, and it would be vastly more expensive than in almost any other first-world nation.
I have no qualms about reigning in some of the larger profits, but insurance profits have about as much to do with health care costs as oil industry profits had to do with the oil bubble before the stock market crash. They coincided, but the causal relationship actually ran the other way more than anything.
Glad to see that they know how to hand out punishment!
If I pulled a stunt like that at a business (inspecting female employee undergarments to ensure compliance with corporate dress code) you can bet that I wouldn't be facing a demotion to a job that pays a professional wage. I'd be lucky not to end up in prison, or with $30M in lawsuits, and I'd almost certainly never get a corporate job anytime in the next three lifetimes.
This greatly depends on the situation. In many markets there are large health provider networks that effectively control prices. If an insurer wants to drop a doctor they're told that they'll have to drop 75 others as well. Insurers don't have the level of control that some ascribe to them - again this does depend on the area/situation.
The whole billing thing is a mess. If somebody goes to the hospital without insurance they get a $50k bill, and then they have to throw themselves on the mercy of the hospital, just to get the bill reduced to something that is probably still higher than what any insurer will pay. The first law I'd pass if I were in charge is that all providers would have to publish a list of prices and everybody pays the same rate. I wouldn't dictate what those prices are, but Aetna can't get one rate, Blue Cross another, and Joe Smith gets a bill for 10x that and has to haggle it down like they were buying a used Pinto.
That certainly wouldn't be the only law I'd pass were I dictator-in-chief, but there is no magic bullet to the whole mess.
Insurance companies are comparing their individual company profits to the TOTAL amount spent on healthcare. This is totally absurd!
Yes and no. If your goal is to cut down the TOTAL amount spent on healthcare, then it is fair to say that simply getting rid of insurance profits won't really make much of a dent. That is really a separate issue from whether those profits still should be reduced.
Again, my point was that everybody likes to pick their favorite pet peeve and pretend that if we only took care of that one item everything would be fine. The reality is that there are many issues that individually contribute to the bigger problem, and there isn't really any one item that would cut costs by the order of magnitude that is probably necessary.
I agree with your frustration, although socialized medicine isn't actually the only solution to this (although it potentially is a good one).
The real issue in this PARTICULAR case is universal coverage. The fact that individuals in the US are free to buy insurance or not buy it means that you have situations where individuals have trouble getting plans. Look at it from the insurer's perspective:
1. The guy signing up for insurance claims they are healthy, but for all they know he was without insurance for 5 years and now they're signing up because they got some indication they have a serious problem. 2. Individuals are always a hassle to deal with anyway. 3. Individuals have no clout, so why not abuse them if nobody is threatening to punish you for doing so.
A law requiring all individuals to have insurance and requiring insurers to set a single rate regardless of risk factors and coverage for pre-existing conditions would completely solve this particular issue.
Now, there is the issue of people who can't afford insurance even at reasonable rates, and that is where socialism comes in.
I'm not trying to say that socialized medicine is a bad thing, and I actually tend to support it in certain ways, but it isn't the only solution to our problems, and it also doesn't solve all of our problems. In the case of this particular article, universal coverage is really what is needed, and socialized medicine tends to get brought up because most socialized health systems happen to also provide universal coverage.
In the US the insurance profits aren't actually all that much money. The real issue is that there is overhead EVERYWHERE.
Your doctor probably employs 1-2 people to do billing, because of the complexity of reimbursement. Your doctor nearly employs a lawyer as well with their malpractice premiums.
Your insurance company has 10x more people than it really needs - those don't count as profit, but they certainly bring cost.
Your hospital charges 10x what anything actually costs, because they have all the costs above and also have to provide "free" care to the indigent.
The tort and pay-for-service system guarantees that everybody is getting more treatment and especially more testing than they actually need.
Throw in another dozen issues similar to these and we can see why US health care is so expensive. Everybody likes to point at one thing and call it "the problem" but the whole system is one big mess. Most proposals to "fix" it amount to just shuffling money around so that people don't see the bills.
I see it this way. I have two choices with regard to http or WiFi encryption:
1. No encryption at all, which is vulnerable to passive and active attacks. 2. Fully authenticated encryption, which is not vulnerable to passive and active attacks.
I propose we should have a third choice:
3. Unauthenticated encryption, which is vulnerable to active attacks (MITM) but not passive attacks.
I just don't get arguments that call this "insecure" - sure it is less secure than #2, but it is more secure than #1 which is the de-facto standard because #2 is hard to implement in many cases.
Instead, all communications should use at least #3, and then use #2 whenever possible.
In rejecting the third option we instead end up accepting the first option, which is even less secure. The comparison between #2 and #3 is a false one, because in reality the choice ends up being between #1 and #3.
Yup - at significant speeds impacts are quite impressive.
That's why I was scratching my head at the Day the Earth Stood Still remake. In the beginning there is a ship detected flying towards earth. Somewhere in the dialog or on a display or something it was indicated that it was moving at some significant fraction of c - maybe 10-20% or something. Then they start talking about where it will land with the goal of sending in a science team to be there when it arrives. The science team is surprised that it apparently decelerated before landing so there was no big crater or anything.
Now, if I were in a science team and I found out that an object of significant size (in this case significant means bigger than a grain of sand) was flying towards the Earth at 20% of c, the last place I'd want to be is within 1000 miles of the impact point, and for that matter within 1000 miles of the point on the Earth opposite the impact point. To be honest, I'd probably prefer just to not be on the Earth at all. However, if I did decide to be at the spot where it would "land" then I wouldn't be shocked to find out it had decelerated - the fact that I was still alive would already confirm this.
How about the ability to operate freely without being a target of video software patent racketeering.
Nobody is suggesting that Mozilla should implement h.264. They should simply use a codec if you have it installed. If you don't have it installed then it won't support it. They can do the same for all the other video formats out there, and even just provide a general API for codecs to register themselves or use whatever the underlying OS uses.
If they don't distribute anything that violates the h.264 patents then they're in the clear. Let the user manage their own legal situation. Most users have an h.264 codec from someplace legit anyway, and the rest can look at their legal jurisdictions and follow the law as best as they can.
Well, all this is moot, as the FSF doesn't support "open" software, it supports free software. Neither VP8 nor H.264 is free, so their argument stands.
I just got a FIOS wireless router a few months ago, and I only see WEP in the configuration settings. I disabled it entirely and am using a separate access point running DD-WRT.
I'm just utterly amazed that in 2010 that EVERYTHING doesn't support WPA2.
Also - it is very annoying that there is no standard for providing secure WiFi connections that doesn't involve a shared secret. It is like http all over again (also no standard for secure connections that doesn't involve a trusted certificate). Even if you can't get authentication you should at least be able to secure a connection against passive listeners with either technology, and this should be the default.
Re:Can someone who understands the IRS explain?
on
Our Low-Tech Tax Code
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· Score: 4, Informative
Here is the deal - companies pay out money in a few different ways.
They can pay money to vendors for services rendered. Generally there is no tax on this, but it can't go to an individual directly, and it might be taxable by states/etc.
They can pay money to an employee - W-2 and all that. That is how 99% of the US population gets paid. The recipient pays income tax on that.
They can pay money to their shareholders in the form of dividends. The shareholders pay capital gains taxes on that money, which is a nice low percentage so that rich people don't have to pay taxes. There is also the issue of double-taxation, but most big corporations have so many tax shelters that they don't pay those anyway (just watch the Frontline episode on companies buying sewer systems in Europe and leasing them back to communities, and so on).
When you have a company of 1 you can elect to pay yourself in salary, or in dividends. The latter is FAR more beneficial tax-wise, although you first need to realize the money as corporate profits and pay corporate taxes on it. If you pay yourself as salary then chances are you won't have many corporate profits to speak of and so corporate taxes will be low (a salary counts as an expense on the balance sheet - a dividend does not).
The reason dividends are attractive is that before you pay them to yourself you can offset them with all kinds of expenses. Driving to your client pays for your car, any computer used mostly for work purposes is a deduction, lunch with the client is a deduction, and so on. Ordinary employees are expected to pay for their own commutes and pay taxes on that money at a much higher rate on top of that.
Hope that explains some of the nuances here. Disclaimer: I'm not a tax accountant, and I'm not an expert on this stuff in any way so a detail here or there might be off.
Considering that it is all likely encoded using standard codecs, he'll probably be able to play it on hardware manufactured 50 years from now, or if it really does become truly obsolete (as if mplayer would ever drop a codec), then it can all be transcoded. Mpeg-2 has been around since the late 80s and yet just about every video player out there will handle mpeg-1 just fine. You could probably rip a laserdisc and play it with VLC.
Even if you have to transcode, just double the bitrate and you'll have around zero-artifacts, and 50 years from now his 50 hard drives full of movies will probably fit on the head of a pin so it isn't like doubling his space requirements will matter...
Yup. Additionally, they could have a take-a-number system and only see one customer per day, and they could charge a 300% surcharge for in-person pickups. It isn't like any of their customers are going to be bothered by this - their entire real market is online.
The only real impact would be on companies that are 100% based out-of-country. However, those companies can still keep selling to the locals, and it will be up to the local government to try to intercept all the packages in the mail lest heaven forbid one of their citizens actually receive an item they have paid for. If the company has no local presence at all then there is nothing the government can do to touch it anyway.
I'm not sure that mines really kill any more people in peacetime than bombs kill in wartime. The only difference is that a dead civilian doesn't make the news in the middle of a war, but they do when the world is otherwise at peace.
When you think about the millions of people that were killed in WWII the odd farmer plowing up a bomb is just a footnote. Even modern wars are a footnote - the US hasn't run out of purple hearts ever since it mass-produced them for the invasion of Japan that never took place.
Don't get me wrong - I support efforts to get rid of landmines and avoid their use (or at least use mines that are designed with consideration to the post-war situation). However, when you're faced with losing 20k of your soliders tomorrow or maybe killing a few hundred civilians over the next 20 years, most commanders will accept the latter.
So at just 2 sigma, 1 in 20 times you will get it wrong/fail. I would hope that in medicine and biochemistry, where it matters, that they do use 3 sigma certainty.
I hate to burst your bubble, but in medicine you can't create cancer patients by blasting metals with cathode rays or however you make your particles in your accelerators. You also can store a sample of a quintillion patients in an ion trap. Sample sizes are just a tiny bit smaller in most clinical trials when compared to particle colliders.
Clinical trials (whether on drugs or other medical techniques) are very rudimentary techniques for determining the effectiveness of treatments, but they're the best we have, and many medical techniques don't even get this level of rigor. Usually their results are only significant at the 95% confidence level, which means that 1 out of every 20 things we "know" in medicine could be completely wrong. Additionally, a significant results often means that there is a barely measurable difference between a treatment and a placebo - the placebo might cure cancer 20% of the time, and the pill might cure it 30% of the time.
If we just lied to patients and gave them all sugar pills I doubt our standards of health care would drop enough to even be measured, which is pretty sad to think about.
It really does depend. Sometimes it really is just pollution-shifting, although you could argue that discharging aerosols in the middle of nowhere is better for human health than discharging them in the middle of the city. Either way they're diluted to parts-per-septillions in the atmosphere or whatever, but before that they exist in concentrated levels either around people or around trees.
The other factor, which is potentially large, is efficiency. Thermodynamics dictates that the efficiency of any heat engine is fundamentally limited by the temperates it operates across. A power plant can operate on very large temperature differences, while a mobile or locally-deployed generation device usually cannot. Also, a power plant can use exotic emissions-control equipment far more efficiently than a mobile device of some kind.
So, even after taking into account the coal/etc used to generate electricity, an electric car can still be more green than a gas-powered car (just looking at operational impact - manufacturing impact is a whole different kettle of fish).
Then factor in that there are a lot more practical green options for large-scale electricity generation than for portable generation, and you now have a pretty solid case for running more stuff from the grid. You're not going to find wind-powered cars, but you can charge a battery from wind power.
All that said, I agree that we need to be honest about true costs and impacts when we talk about "green technology" - otherwise we just end up having a movement hijacked by various interests (just look at corn-based ethanol fuel).
Ok, I can get how tech companies can relocate if they don't like your local taxes, but home contractors?
If you want a home built in California, you're going to have to have somebody do the work under California law. So, how would home contractors have any leverage, unless CA wanted to impose regulations on their activities out-of-state?
Sure, maybe some would choose not to do business there any longer, but I doubt that in a recession that anybody is going to have trouble finding somebody to take their money to build a house.
Perhaps burdened by ineffective management would be the better description.
If you want, let the engineers run things and you'll at least have a well-engineered solution.
Or, let the marketers run things and at least the product will be targeted at somebody with money to buy it.
Or, let Steve Jobs run the show and at least Steve and all his fanboys will buy it.
Or, let any CEO run it and at least you'll sell one unit.
Instead, many companies leave way too many decisions up to "general management consensus" and usually that means you might release a product someday, and maybe it might do something some of the time. In many companies, nobody is really in charge, and there isn't really any accountability for messing up short of the inevitable fire sale.
The DVR is like a VCR on steroids. People don't run applications on their VCRs, and they don't really run them on their DVRs either (maybe one or two, but it is the exception).
Ditto for the kindle - it was sold to read books, not to replace your computer.
A PC, on the other hand, is a general-purpose computing device. Consumers expect them to run apps, and a fairly wide variety of them.
I think the iPad doesn't have a niche, so I'm not convinced it will do well. The iphone, sure, and ditto for the Mac, but the iPad is a hybrid and that is always a risky area. Granted, the iphone also was a hybrid, but one who's time had come (and it had no serious competition at the time).
Yeah, good luck with that with the politics involved. There is a chance that everybody in the US might get a 75 cent coupon off of the next RIAA hit album (priced 75 cents higher - what a shock), and a bunch of lawyers will make out like bandits. Since this is a big collusion this will just be the cost of doing business and most likely after the lawyers make out well they'll agree to not have any injunctions or anything that would actually impair their ability to keep doing this stuff in the future.
Kind of like the big tobacco settlements back in the 90s - it isn't like the tobacco companies are hurting today or that anything has been done to diminish smoking. They took a one quarter hit and at the same time got legislation through to bar any new competition in their industry. A bunch of states got a big infusion of cash which got spent on pork barrel projects, despite the fact that the settlement could have probably paid half the costs of setting up a national health care system...
All that said, class action suits are in theory a good way to level the playing field - they just tend to be used for politically fashionable stuff and rarely accomplish much good in the end.
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My point wasn't that insurance companies don't make too much money. My point was that their profits are only a tiny part of the problem.
If you magically made drugs profit-free, and insurance profit-free, US healthcare would probably be only a few percent cheaper overall, and it would be vastly more expensive than in almost any other first-world nation.
I have no qualms about reigning in some of the larger profits, but insurance profits have about as much to do with health care costs as oil industry profits had to do with the oil bubble before the stock market crash. They coincided, but the causal relationship actually ran the other way more than anything.
Glad to see that they know how to hand out punishment!
If I pulled a stunt like that at a business (inspecting female employee undergarments to ensure compliance with corporate dress code) you can bet that I wouldn't be facing a demotion to a job that pays a professional wage. I'd be lucky not to end up in prison, or with $30M in lawsuits, and I'd almost certainly never get a corporate job anytime in the next three lifetimes.
This greatly depends on the situation. In many markets there are large health provider networks that effectively control prices. If an insurer wants to drop a doctor they're told that they'll have to drop 75 others as well. Insurers don't have the level of control that some ascribe to them - again this does depend on the area/situation.
The whole billing thing is a mess. If somebody goes to the hospital without insurance they get a $50k bill, and then they have to throw themselves on the mercy of the hospital, just to get the bill reduced to something that is probably still higher than what any insurer will pay. The first law I'd pass if I were in charge is that all providers would have to publish a list of prices and everybody pays the same rate. I wouldn't dictate what those prices are, but Aetna can't get one rate, Blue Cross another, and Joe Smith gets a bill for 10x that and has to haggle it down like they were buying a used Pinto.
That certainly wouldn't be the only law I'd pass were I dictator-in-chief, but there is no magic bullet to the whole mess.
Insurance companies are comparing their individual company profits to the TOTAL amount spent on healthcare. This is totally absurd!
Yes and no. If your goal is to cut down the TOTAL amount spent on healthcare, then it is fair to say that simply getting rid of insurance profits won't really make much of a dent. That is really a separate issue from whether those profits still should be reduced.
Again, my point was that everybody likes to pick their favorite pet peeve and pretend that if we only took care of that one item everything would be fine. The reality is that there are many issues that individually contribute to the bigger problem, and there isn't really any one item that would cut costs by the order of magnitude that is probably necessary.
I agree with your frustration, although socialized medicine isn't actually the only solution to this (although it potentially is a good one).
The real issue in this PARTICULAR case is universal coverage. The fact that individuals in the US are free to buy insurance or not buy it means that you have situations where individuals have trouble getting plans. Look at it from the insurer's perspective:
1. The guy signing up for insurance claims they are healthy, but for all they know he was without insurance for 5 years and now they're signing up because they got some indication they have a serious problem.
2. Individuals are always a hassle to deal with anyway.
3. Individuals have no clout, so why not abuse them if nobody is threatening to punish you for doing so.
A law requiring all individuals to have insurance and requiring insurers to set a single rate regardless of risk factors and coverage for pre-existing conditions would completely solve this particular issue.
Now, there is the issue of people who can't afford insurance even at reasonable rates, and that is where socialism comes in.
I'm not trying to say that socialized medicine is a bad thing, and I actually tend to support it in certain ways, but it isn't the only solution to our problems, and it also doesn't solve all of our problems. In the case of this particular article, universal coverage is really what is needed, and socialized medicine tends to get brought up because most socialized health systems happen to also provide universal coverage.
In the US the insurance profits aren't actually all that much money. The real issue is that there is overhead EVERYWHERE.
Your doctor probably employs 1-2 people to do billing, because of the complexity of reimbursement. Your doctor nearly employs a lawyer as well with their malpractice premiums.
Your insurance company has 10x more people than it really needs - those don't count as profit, but they certainly bring cost.
Your hospital charges 10x what anything actually costs, because they have all the costs above and also have to provide "free" care to the indigent.
The tort and pay-for-service system guarantees that everybody is getting more treatment and especially more testing than they actually need.
Throw in another dozen issues similar to these and we can see why US health care is so expensive. Everybody likes to point at one thing and call it "the problem" but the whole system is one big mess. Most proposals to "fix" it amount to just shuffling money around so that people don't see the bills.
I see it this way. I have two choices with regard to http or WiFi encryption:
1. No encryption at all, which is vulnerable to passive and active attacks.
2. Fully authenticated encryption, which is not vulnerable to passive and active attacks.
I propose we should have a third choice:
3. Unauthenticated encryption, which is vulnerable to active attacks (MITM) but not passive attacks.
I just don't get arguments that call this "insecure" - sure it is less secure than #2, but it is more secure than #1 which is the de-facto standard because #2 is hard to implement in many cases.
Instead, all communications should use at least #3, and then use #2 whenever possible.
In rejecting the third option we instead end up accepting the first option, which is even less secure. The comparison between #2 and #3 is a false one, because in reality the choice ends up being between #1 and #3.
Yup - at significant speeds impacts are quite impressive.
That's why I was scratching my head at the Day the Earth Stood Still remake. In the beginning there is a ship detected flying towards earth. Somewhere in the dialog or on a display or something it was indicated that it was moving at some significant fraction of c - maybe 10-20% or something. Then they start talking about where it will land with the goal of sending in a science team to be there when it arrives. The science team is surprised that it apparently decelerated before landing so there was no big crater or anything.
Now, if I were in a science team and I found out that an object of significant size (in this case significant means bigger than a grain of sand) was flying towards the Earth at 20% of c, the last place I'd want to be is within 1000 miles of the impact point, and for that matter within 1000 miles of the point on the Earth opposite the impact point. To be honest, I'd probably prefer just to not be on the Earth at all. However, if I did decide to be at the spot where it would "land" then I wouldn't be shocked to find out it had decelerated - the fact that I was still alive would already confirm this.
How about the ability to operate freely without being a target of video software patent racketeering.
Nobody is suggesting that Mozilla should implement h.264. They should simply use a codec if you have it installed. If you don't have it installed then it won't support it. They can do the same for all the other video formats out there, and even just provide a general API for codecs to register themselves or use whatever the underlying OS uses.
If they don't distribute anything that violates the h.264 patents then they're in the clear. Let the user manage their own legal situation. Most users have an h.264 codec from someplace legit anyway, and the rest can look at their legal jurisdictions and follow the law as best as they can.
Well, all this is moot, as the FSF doesn't support "open" software, it supports free software. Neither VP8 nor H.264 is free, so their argument stands.
I just got a FIOS wireless router a few months ago, and I only see WEP in the configuration settings. I disabled it entirely and am using a separate access point running DD-WRT.
I'm just utterly amazed that in 2010 that EVERYTHING doesn't support WPA2.
Also - it is very annoying that there is no standard for providing secure WiFi connections that doesn't involve a shared secret. It is like http all over again (also no standard for secure connections that doesn't involve a trusted certificate). Even if you can't get authentication you should at least be able to secure a connection against passive listeners with either technology, and this should be the default.
Here is the deal - companies pay out money in a few different ways.
They can pay money to vendors for services rendered. Generally there is no tax on this, but it can't go to an individual directly, and it might be taxable by states/etc.
They can pay money to an employee - W-2 and all that. That is how 99% of the US population gets paid. The recipient pays income tax on that.
They can pay money to their shareholders in the form of dividends. The shareholders pay capital gains taxes on that money, which is a nice low percentage so that rich people don't have to pay taxes. There is also the issue of double-taxation, but most big corporations have so many tax shelters that they don't pay those anyway (just watch the Frontline episode on companies buying sewer systems in Europe and leasing them back to communities, and so on).
When you have a company of 1 you can elect to pay yourself in salary, or in dividends. The latter is FAR more beneficial tax-wise, although you first need to realize the money as corporate profits and pay corporate taxes on it. If you pay yourself as salary then chances are you won't have many corporate profits to speak of and so corporate taxes will be low (a salary counts as an expense on the balance sheet - a dividend does not).
The reason dividends are attractive is that before you pay them to yourself you can offset them with all kinds of expenses. Driving to your client pays for your car, any computer used mostly for work purposes is a deduction, lunch with the client is a deduction, and so on. Ordinary employees are expected to pay for their own commutes and pay taxes on that money at a much higher rate on top of that.
Hope that explains some of the nuances here. Disclaimer: I'm not a tax accountant, and I'm not an expert on this stuff in any way so a detail here or there might be off.
What - 8 screenfuls of interesting content on some town in the middle of Norway? Send me the link so that I can get it fast-tracked for deletion!
Must exterminate all pages with fewer than 10k hits per month. Ster-i-lize!!!!
Considering that it is all likely encoded using standard codecs, he'll probably be able to play it on hardware manufactured 50 years from now, or if it really does become truly obsolete (as if mplayer would ever drop a codec), then it can all be transcoded. Mpeg-2 has been around since the late 80s and yet just about every video player out there will handle mpeg-1 just fine. You could probably rip a laserdisc and play it with VLC.
Even if you have to transcode, just double the bitrate and you'll have around zero-artifacts, and 50 years from now his 50 hard drives full of movies will probably fit on the head of a pin so it isn't like doubling his space requirements will matter...
Yup. Additionally, they could have a take-a-number system and only see one customer per day, and they could charge a 300% surcharge for in-person pickups. It isn't like any of their customers are going to be bothered by this - their entire real market is online.
The only real impact would be on companies that are 100% based out-of-country. However, those companies can still keep selling to the locals, and it will be up to the local government to try to intercept all the packages in the mail lest heaven forbid one of their citizens actually receive an item they have paid for. If the company has no local presence at all then there is nothing the government can do to touch it anyway.
I'm not sure that mines really kill any more people in peacetime than bombs kill in wartime. The only difference is that a dead civilian doesn't make the news in the middle of a war, but they do when the world is otherwise at peace.
When you think about the millions of people that were killed in WWII the odd farmer plowing up a bomb is just a footnote. Even modern wars are a footnote - the US hasn't run out of purple hearts ever since it mass-produced them for the invasion of Japan that never took place.
Don't get me wrong - I support efforts to get rid of landmines and avoid their use (or at least use mines that are designed with consideration to the post-war situation). However, when you're faced with losing 20k of your soliders tomorrow or maybe killing a few hundred civilians over the next 20 years, most commanders will accept the latter.
So at just 2 sigma, 1 in 20 times you will get it wrong/fail. I would hope that in medicine and biochemistry, where it matters, that they do use 3 sigma certainty.
I hate to burst your bubble, but in medicine you can't create cancer patients by blasting metals with cathode rays or however you make your particles in your accelerators. You also can store a sample of a quintillion patients in an ion trap. Sample sizes are just a tiny bit smaller in most clinical trials when compared to particle colliders.
Clinical trials (whether on drugs or other medical techniques) are very rudimentary techniques for determining the effectiveness of treatments, but they're the best we have, and many medical techniques don't even get this level of rigor. Usually their results are only significant at the 95% confidence level, which means that 1 out of every 20 things we "know" in medicine could be completely wrong. Additionally, a significant results often means that there is a barely measurable difference between a treatment and a placebo - the placebo might cure cancer 20% of the time, and the pill might cure it 30% of the time.
If we just lied to patients and gave them all sugar pills I doubt our standards of health care would drop enough to even be measured, which is pretty sad to think about.
It really does depend. Sometimes it really is just pollution-shifting, although you could argue that discharging aerosols in the middle of nowhere is better for human health than discharging them in the middle of the city. Either way they're diluted to parts-per-septillions in the atmosphere or whatever, but before that they exist in concentrated levels either around people or around trees.
The other factor, which is potentially large, is efficiency. Thermodynamics dictates that the efficiency of any heat engine is fundamentally limited by the temperates it operates across. A power plant can operate on very large temperature differences, while a mobile or locally-deployed generation device usually cannot. Also, a power plant can use exotic emissions-control equipment far more efficiently than a mobile device of some kind.
So, even after taking into account the coal/etc used to generate electricity, an electric car can still be more green than a gas-powered car (just looking at operational impact - manufacturing impact is a whole different kettle of fish).
Then factor in that there are a lot more practical green options for large-scale electricity generation than for portable generation, and you now have a pretty solid case for running more stuff from the grid. You're not going to find wind-powered cars, but you can charge a battery from wind power.
All that said, I agree that we need to be honest about true costs and impacts when we talk about "green technology" - otherwise we just end up having a movement hijacked by various interests (just look at corn-based ethanol fuel).
Ok, I can get how tech companies can relocate if they don't like your local taxes, but home contractors?
If you want a home built in California, you're going to have to have somebody do the work under California law. So, how would home contractors have any leverage, unless CA wanted to impose regulations on their activities out-of-state?
Sure, maybe some would choose not to do business there any longer, but I doubt that in a recession that anybody is going to have trouble finding somebody to take their money to build a house.
Uh, woosh!
Perhaps burdened by ineffective management would be the better description.
If you want, let the engineers run things and you'll at least have a well-engineered solution.
Or, let the marketers run things and at least the product will be targeted at somebody with money to buy it.
Or, let Steve Jobs run the show and at least Steve and all his fanboys will buy it.
Or, let any CEO run it and at least you'll sell one unit.
Instead, many companies leave way too many decisions up to "general management consensus" and usually that means you might release a product someday, and maybe it might do something some of the time. In many companies, nobody is really in charge, and there isn't really any accountability for messing up short of the inevitable fire sale.
Never use a big word when a diminutive one will do.
It just makes you wonder how they have that all wired up. It would be tempting to plug in a USB host and see what shows up on the network...
It depends on what your market is.
The DVR is like a VCR on steroids. People don't run applications on their VCRs, and they don't really run them on their DVRs either (maybe one or two, but it is the exception).
Ditto for the kindle - it was sold to read books, not to replace your computer.
A PC, on the other hand, is a general-purpose computing device. Consumers expect them to run apps, and a fairly wide variety of them.
I think the iPad doesn't have a niche, so I'm not convinced it will do well. The iphone, sure, and ditto for the Mac, but the iPad is a hybrid and that is always a risky area. Granted, the iphone also was a hybrid, but one who's time had come (and it had no serious competition at the time).
Yeah, good luck with that with the politics involved. There is a chance that everybody in the US might get a 75 cent coupon off of the next RIAA hit album (priced 75 cents higher - what a shock), and a bunch of lawyers will make out like bandits. Since this is a big collusion this will just be the cost of doing business and most likely after the lawyers make out well they'll agree to not have any injunctions or anything that would actually impair their ability to keep doing this stuff in the future.
Kind of like the big tobacco settlements back in the 90s - it isn't like the tobacco companies are hurting today or that anything has been done to diminish smoking. They took a one quarter hit and at the same time got legislation through to bar any new competition in their industry. A bunch of states got a big infusion of cash which got spent on pork barrel projects, despite the fact that the settlement could have probably paid half the costs of setting up a national health care system...
All that said, class action suits are in theory a good way to level the playing field - they just tend to be used for politically fashionable stuff and rarely accomplish much good in the end.