I agree - in the US for the most part insurance is just a buyer's club for healthcare. It has the same problems that you'd have if your employer paid your grocery bill and the list price of milk was $300/gallon (with $290 of that being written off, $1 being a copay, and $9 going to the dairy and the army of accountants processing the bills).
The whole reason for #1 on my list is to get rid of the need for buyer's clubs in healthcare. In the current US if you don't have insurance you have to haggle every transaction (usually after the fact - a major negotiating disadvantage). If everybody paid the same then list prices would be reasonable or doctors couldn't attract ANY clients.
It doesn't fix all the problems with healthcare - no single measure does. It does fix a lot of them.
You'll note that I did indicate that acute emergency care does need different handling. Most care does not actually fall into this category.
E.g. heart surgery should only be covered by private insurance, not government.
I'm not sold that preventative choices can really eliminate stuff like heart surgery. At least, not with current medical technology. I know people who eat fairly well and who have had good weights who have ended up with type 2 and cardiac issues. They might be anomolies, but they shouldn't have to pay through the nose for not winning the genetic lottery.
Sure, obesity is caused by eating too much, and in theory that is controllable. However, in practice it is a WHOLE lot easier for some of us to do that than it is for others. For some people asking them to get to a normal weight would be like asking somebody who is mentally retarded to concentrate harder.
In any case, I do agree that there needs to be ways to incent preventative care so that people don't just let it slide. It might be a cost-effective area to apply socialized medicine.
In general, however, I don't like the idea of socializing something that most people could just pay for most of the time if the system wasn't so broken. I feel that way for the same reason that I'd prefer to try changing my diet before I start popping statins. Like most drugs, socialized medicine probably has its place, but let's not use it to fix every problem out there.
I very much agree with the tenure of you arguments. Is there a thinktank, set of articles, or a blog that articulates you idea in greater detail?
No one place I can think of - just general opinion after lots of thinking and reading about this stuff. NPR had a really great two-part series on the healthcare crisis recently which I'd consider a must-listen for anybody interested in healthcare policy. It was fairly non-partisan and consumer-centric. It also had a lot of doctor perspectives from physicians who want to care for people and not have to care for some kind of system - there is plenty of money out there so nobody needs to starve.
Too maximize efficiency I would suggest 2 levels of physician:
I agree. Actually, what I'd probably do is open access to medical technology to consumers. Everybody should get a copy of their test results and records, and things like prescription drugs should be available with prescriptions in general except for stuff like antibiotics where there is a common welfare issue. Of course, people should be strongly encouraged to see a doctor, and insurance probably shouldn't have to pay for non-prescribed medication.
A triage system just makes a lot of sense from a cost standpoint. Recently I ended up going to an ER for a pretty minor problem because it was a holiday weekend and I didn't want to risk leaving it untreated until I could see my primary doctor. A simple cheap clinic would have been ideal for what I needed.
Most of your other comments were addressed at income disparity. I agree with most of what you suggest - my suggestions were mainly aimed at greatly lowering medical costs and improving access to medicine overall. Even if we just make it so that anybody who can afford a new car can afford to go with only catastrophic insurance then we've solved a big part of the problem. There are lots of people who can't afford new cars, and those people will need a more socialized system if they're going to have care. There are a lot of ways to do this, but they all benefit from a more efficient healthcare market.
The main thing is to help people act more like normal consumers where healthcare is involved. It still doesn't work 100% since health is an unlimited-demand market and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. However, right now there are some really huge problems in the market where people don't have any visibility into costs (often not even the doctors), and the current system isn't really all that good for just about anybody (even most of the special interests).
an effective health care system delivered by the free market. The free market doesn't work for health care
That depends on your definition of "effective."
The current health care system isn't a free-market system by any stretch of the imagination. A few reforms would make it much closer to one and it would greatly reduce costs. These reforms wouldn't socialize medicine, but you could add socialism a lot cheaper if you had these reforms:
1. Price lists - health providers MUST have and PUBLISH them, and MUST follow them ALL the time. No negotiated rates for anybody. If you want an operation done you can comparison shop from a catalog.
2. Up-front cost disclosures. If the patient's name isn't on a piece of paper disclosing the cost of a procedure, then the service provider doesn't get paid, in general. Acute emergency procedures can be handled differently, but should be the exception. They could probably be socialized as well with regulated prices (which would of course encourage providers to avoid calling everything an emergency).
Just those reforms alone would greatly lower the cost of healthcare by commoditizing much of it. Those without insurance would also get fair prices, and if this care was socialized then the taxpayers would save money as well.
I think that other changes could be made more opt-in, so that people can choose from a number of different insurance options. I think that catastrophic coverage is something to consider - there is no reason that people should need insurance for routine care unless they have a serious chronic problem. Wellness programs (almost HMO-like) are another option where providers can be paid based on outcomes rather than services. Healthcare savings accounts should have carryover and the ability to freely contribute at-will so that they are used whenever possible. Or, you could use other mechanisms to tax-deduct health expenses. The main issue with voluntary insurance coverage is that you need to avoid the pre-existing condition problem, and as genetic testing becomes more advanced that could be a big problem. Mandatory coverages of some kinds could be necessary.
I don't mind socialism in medicine, but I think that it should be the exception for those who truly cannot care for themselves. There are a number of reforms that could make a market-based system much more efficient, and that actually makes socialized medicine easier to deliver.
Yup. I remember when firefox came out. Its whole reason for being was that Mozilla was slow and WAAY too heavy.
Firefox came along and its modular design was a breath of fresh air!
Now firefox is pretty slow, and if I open a dozen tabs I find my PC swapping like nuts (lots of stuff installed so not much RAM to spare, and no, it isn't cheap unless you have free slots on your motherboard).
In comparison chromium is very fast and users very little memory, and it doesn't have locking issues if I have browser windows open on two different X11 displays at the same time from the same user account. That is another big firefox pain - if I leave a window on at home, good luck opening an NX session to the same account remotely.
Plus, a number of sites take forever to load on firefox (I hear their 32-bit code is faster), but they work just fine on chromium, 64-bit and all...
I have nothing against an app offering to add itself to the list, but it should ask first. Maybe I trust debian to patch an app more than I trust the guys writing the app?
My that logic my windows box with apps from 50 apps from 47 different companies should have 47 different background services running looking for updates, and that should be fine since at least it isn't 50?
Windows needs a package manager, which apps can register themselves with. On linux, apps shouldn't be downloading updates at all unless users OK it - that is the distro's job.
Google does the same thing with their android SDK now. Why is it that every application needs its own package manager now?
It amazes me just how much of a hack life seems to be at times. Stuff like this doesn't surprise me at all any more.
I began to realize how much of a hack life was when I first learned about HOK and SOK. It is a remarkably simple and brutally efficient way of keeping a plasmid around - if it weren't for the fact that the plasmid actually has some benefits it would be the ultimate selfish gene.:)
Can't say that I've used the latest version of it, but my only response is:
You' RW-ASTed...
Granted, my linux box has similar failures when mounts and things like that go away. Who builds OSes and starts with the functional requirement that external devices should never go offline?
However, as a company deploying (and for the most part not writing) applications, I don't have much of a say in how well-written the apps I buy are. Maybe I have a choice of two vendors to pick from, or I could go with some no-name product that doesn't fully meet my needs.
Chances are I'm already making tradeoffs when I select a software product to purchase.
The last thing I want to do is limit my already-too-small pool of possible solutions by imposing additional technical requirements on them, when virtualization can eliminate the problem at the cost of maybe spending 10% more on the hardware (which is by far the cheapest component of almost any large software deployment).
I dunno - maybe if we interrogated everybody with a supercomputer we might find out. For that matter, if we interrogated everybody we might figure out who has supercomputers.
If these guys are talking about this being something that a bunch of people can do with donated CPU/GPU time, then there is a good chance that somebody has a bunch of ASICs and a rainbow table already. They probably have had it for a number of years.
Keep in mind that the cracking of Enigma wasn't publicly disclosed until the 1970s I believe. At the time some people were actually still using the cipher - after all, why not since as far as anybody knew it was unbreakable? If you secretly spend millions or tens-hundreds of millions of dollars to crack a cipher, the last thing you do is tell the world about it so that people stop using the cipher that you can now read.
Yup. In particularly I'd really like to know what replaced the SR-71. A fairly advanced UAV could probably do it now.
I really can't see the DoD getting rid of something like the SR-71 without something to effectively replace it. Satellites are really a complementary technology.
Maybe this UAV was the reason - if they knew it was just around the corner. And who knows how long it has been flying around, and when it was supposed to enter service.
Yup, I run my own DNS - in part because I also want to have local hostnames and a bit more control over dhcp/etc.
It also is nice to be able to blackhole any domain I like and kill 80% of the ads and intrusive cookies out there. When I'm browsing on wi-fi from the cellphone I'm amused to see all the banner ads go away desipte it not having an ad blocker.
If that $100M contract is really just ten million $10 contracts, I don't think you do. If the movie turns out to suck, you're no worse off than if you got a bad haircut.
Unless you're the barber, who just spent the equivalent of 400 years giving haircuts and isn't paid a dime...:)
How do you propose to resolve that? Shall we take away the subsidy for people who choose the copyright-lottery model (i.e. require them to bear the true cost of maintaining their position as the sole supplier), or shall we impose a similar subsidy for people who choose mine (for example, require everyone to spend $X/year on artistic production whether they want to or not)?
I'm perfectly fine in considering the cost of copyright enforcement when evaluating how everything went. It isn't like the "free enforcement" really helps companies offer their product for less compared to the model you propose. It just makes sure they get paid after the fact.
Also, just how much money even gets spent on copyright enforcement? It is rare to hear news of the FBI doing almost anything regarding copyright, and most enforcement is civil in nature. I agree that the civil enforcement does cost society something in terms of court costs, but that also costs the plaintiff quite a bit of money as well, so it isn't like there is a huge financial handout going on. In any case, the most egregious use of that kind of enforcement has been the RIAA tactics and I'm all for banning that kind of stuff anyway.
If you can figure out how much the average taxpayer actually directly spends on copyright enforcement I'd probably be willing to concede that you can go ahead and have that money distributed in vouchers for everybody to spend on bounties for creative works. If you're lucky it might amount to a few dollars per taxpayer per year, or maybe a few tens of cents if you distribute it across people who don't pay taxes as well.
I still think the subsidy argument is a red herring - it isn't like that money goes towards actually making creative works for sale.
How do your friends know whether the movie is worth seeing? Ultimately, someone has to decide that the potential that it might be a good movie is worth the price of a ticket.... Bzzt. Sorry, that's not unique to artistic labor. How do you objectively define the value of a haircut, a clean house, or a well-run company? What algorithm can tell you how much to pay a CEO or even a barber without relying on market-based data?
Ok, here is the problem with your argument:
I questioned how you can decide whether to pay a studio the $100M for making a movie. You suggested that you'd have defined standards of quality. I said that you couldn't define your standards of quality sufficiently well to form the basis for a $100M contract. You say that this isn't a problem because people spend $12 on a haircut without any concrete definition of what the quality of that haircut will be. Unfortunately, you need more rigor for a $100M contract than for a $12 contract.
How do you award a bounty for a $100M movie? In the copyright-based solution you don't - somebody makes a movie and people get to decide whether they want to pay to see it. In your solution everybody who chips in has to agree on how the movie will be made, and how it will be decided whether the money gets paid or not. The guy making the movie has to know whether it is likely that they'll collect the money or not, or they won't do the work. We're not talking about a haircut - we're talking about a major business transaction.
If you can't define standards of quality BEFORE people contribute and BEFORE somebody does the work, then few people will contribute, and nobody will do the work. Initially you might get some people who are willing to give it a try, but I think your model is destined to fail. There is nothing in fact preventing you from using your model today - just get people to donate to a bucket to commission some movie or song and then make it a work-for-hire and release the copyright to the public domain. The problem is that nobody will give you 50 cents for a song they haven't heard when they can go to Amazon and spend $1 on a song they have heard.
In an idealistic world your solution might seem better. However, this world isn't an ideal one, and your solution will amount to the tragedy of the commons. You're still legally able to implement it right now, and the fact that nobody has done so indicates that it isn't likely to work. I'd be happy if you proved me wrong. If you start turning out hit movies or songs I'll be happy to make some contributions to the fund.
Of course. If you pull up your container ship and fill out 389 forms and submit them to the appropriate 37 agencies you could be offloading it in a mere 17 weeks.
Or, you could pay the guy supervising the dock $10k (with the supervisor distributing it as needed), and be unloaded and headed out to sea in a day or two.
There is ALWAYS a legitimate way to do business. The guys taking the bribes wouldn't have it any other way - so that they can point to the official process when people come in questioning the practice of taking bribes. However, unless you have connections (just another form of a bribe - the ability to grant favors), the official process tends to be ineffective.
Well, in this case they're selling us goods in exchange for IOUs. I'm not sure the US would need to mount an invasion to make that not pay off.
I think the bigger issue this exposes is the nature of an economy in the first place. To be honest, half of the purpose of an economy is to give people something to do. Imagine a world where 10 people and a fleet of robots could meet all the food, clothing, and shelter requirements of the planet. Everybody else could be unemployed, except for the fact that the people who own the robots would insist that they somehow pay for food. Obviously this is an extreme case to illustrate a point - however, I think that many issues with economic slumps come back to this sort of a problem.
In the case of a trade imbalance, the US workers have nothing to do since they're consuming but not producing. At least, not until they start their own businesses...
Well, in theory you could prevent cheating by not trusting the client at all. That isn't generally practical. You can't stop macros, but you could design your game to minimize the advantage of macros. You can't stop somebody from having something that enhances the GUI a little (spotting bad guys and rendering them in contrasty colors, or aimbotting). However, you could make that hard by not giving too much raw data to the client.
Imagine if the game just streamed mpeg2 and did all the rendering on the server - it would be VERY hard to design cheats that could spot bad guys and aimbot them or whatever. Now, it would also have high latency, and it would take a ton of bandwidth, and it would kill the server. So, the trick is figuring out the best balance between trusting the client and performance. If you can at least filter out data that isn't needed that is a big start (don't send position data for enemies that clearly can't be seen, for example).
Ultimately, however, any operation performed on the client can be subverted in a completely undetectable manner. It is just a matter of how hard it is to do.
Yup - I tend to agree. I use IMAP on my own server for the same reason - I can use any client I want locally or remotely but I KNOW where my email is.
I do use Amazon S3 for backups. I use a combination of sarab and some scripts to encrypt my backups and sync them to S3. It is pretty cheap and it is offsite. If I owned a server in more than one geographical location then I'd skip S3 and just use rsync to do the same thing. If S3 goes down I haven't lost anything since I have the originals. The backups are encrypted with gpg so I could care less about security.
The only trick with something like S3 for backups is that you do need to avoid having too many full backups, as they are expensive to transfer and to store. Careful use of differential and incremental backups will minimize storage and transfer while also making restoration reasonably simple.
If you trust others with your data in theory a backup solution that can keep sparse copies of redundant data across systems should be a lot cheaper to operate. I didn't see any commercial services that were competitive with S3 for reasonably small data sets. If the data is encrypted before upload then there is no redundant data and if there are 1000 copies of kernel.sys on the server they wouldn't know about it anyway. Backuppc is an example of a backup solution that keeps sparse copies, but you need a remote server to do it if you want offsite backup.
No one realized they wanted a film adaptation of one of the most popular fantasy epics of all time? You can't be serious.
I am serious. How many people who saw the movies actually read the books (BEFORE the movie trailers came out)? Keep in mind that movies don't do well because of the slashdot crowd - they do well because of people with "normal" tastes.
Hey, you're the one who's worried about getting something that doesn't meet your standards of quality. You tell me!
I can't define my standards of quality, but I know if I see a trailer and read reviews and talk to friends whether it is worth it to pay for a movie. You're the one who proposed having standards of quality to decide whether to pay a bounty or not - I'm just pointing out that they're so subjective that it would be very difficult to implement in a way that somebody would spend $100M to create a movie. When you sign a contract for $100M worth of work you want the terms to be fairly concrete. Quality as it pertains to movies is not a concrete criteria.
That's bad for the artist who spends a year making something and only earns $10,000. If he knew ahead of time he'd be making less than minimum wage, he would've done something else that year.
Well, if the artist is doing it on their own then they're taking that risk on themselves. Their other option is to sign with a label and get a $60k advance, and then most likely they'd never see another dime whether they do well or not. In that case the label is taking on the risk. And, by the way, I'm all for reforms that make that arrangement less abusive to the artist.
It wouldn't be a problem if artists dropped the per-copy price to zero after they'd been fairly compensated, but of course no one does that.
Hey, I said I'm all for reasonable durations of copyrights, and that is as close to this as you'll get. You can't base it on some percentage profit or anything like that otherwise you'll end up with the Bell Labs approach - spend as much as you can to justify a rate hike to the PUC (although it did get the US a couple of Nobel prizes and the transistor).
Why is it that you can't point to a single quality of artistic labor that sets it apart from other labor that people get paid directly to perform?
You haven't asked me to. Here is one: the inability to objectively define the value of an artistic work. Some paintings sell for millions of dollars, and others sell for $25. If you come up with an algorithm that figures out the value of a painting (without relying on market-based data), then perhaps you'll have a way to reward artists without copyright. Artistic works are priced based on what the market will bear, and it is almost impossible to predict what this will be based purely on the physical properties and attributes of the art.
The same kind of problem applies to most forms of IP. You can't sell it for scrap, and it doesn't cost money to reproduce. However, most people would agree that ideas and concepts are valuable. IP law is a very imperfect way to assign actual dollar value to information. Your only alternatives to current IP laws are reforms in those laws, some other system that assigns dollar value to information that people can agree with, or a system that assigns no dollar value to information. I argue that the middle option is hard to do, and the latter option just doesn't make sense, as the fact that you're so eager to copy information just proves that it has actual value, and if it has value then you want to reward people for creating it.
And if we want to encourage people to form new markets where they might be run over by competitors, we could just guarantee their debts: there's no need to block future innovation for years just to put money in someone's pocket.
However, to get a loan in the first place somebody needs to demonstrate that they're able to pay it back. How will the government decide which debts to guarantee, and which ones not to? Right now the approach is market-based - the lenders who get paid are the ones who back products that end up being successful in the market (granted, a market with an artificial imposition of monopoly pricing).
Will we have an innovation board that decides which inventions are innovate enough to get the reward? If you do that before loans are issued then there will be no problems securing the loans, but you probably would subsidize a lot of bad ideas (indeed, the guys making the invention get paid the same whether the idea pays off or not - since there won't be big bucks if it takes off without patents). If you issue the guarantees after a product is made then the loans will be much higher risk, and a product that ends up transforming the market could actually end up not getting a guarantee and being a loss to the inventors.
The only question is which costs society more - all those loan guarantees (and loss of entrepeneurial spirit), or the cost of patent licensing. I think that patent licensing costs aren't all that bad, when patents are limited to reasonable scopes and durations (which the current ones aren't).
I do agree that in many ways the current situation goes too far in favor of patent rights. You hit on a good point that some discoveries are inevitable, and we shouldn't make one guy rich and another guy poor just because the one came up with it two days before the other. However, I'm not convinced that the whole system needs to go away - you can dial IP laws up and down as much as needed. Indeed, if you really want to abolish copyright then I'd think that the first step would be to start shortening it and see how it goes.
So, all merchant seamen are going to be able to repel boarders like a well trained team of special forces? especially since most vessels have a crew of under 40 people and some of that crew will be sleeping at the time.
Uh, I'm sure the guys who are sleeping will wake up when the alarms are sounded. And it isn't like it takes a special forces crew to point guns at a skiff and pull the trigger. I'm not talking about being able to repel boarders hand-to-hand once they're on board.
The problem is that the patrol area is so massive by the time a naval vessel hears about an attack the pirates, the mother ship and the loot are long gone.
All the more reason to equip ships to defend themselves. The other option is to assemble ships into convoys and charge them a tax for the provided protection.
Besides the moment the pirates figure out that scared merchantmen will kill anyone who approaches them is the moment they fill the water with small boats of unarmed civilians.
Uh, they're not civilians if they're operating under the orders of pirates. They might or might not have guns, but they're part of a pirate operation. In any case, when the boats sink nobody will know whether they're armed or not. Pirates will lose the incentive to attempt piracy when they are not successful in their operations. I doubt they're going to start employing PLO tactics just to make merchants look bad.
So, you're OK with Yemeni, Saudi, and Venezuelan registered ships docking in US civilian ports with an undisclosed number of personal arms on board.
As long as we're talking about relatively low caliber weapons, and they stay on the ship, I don't have a problem with it. Also, there is no reason that they would have to be undisclosed. What are they going to do, take pot-shots at tourists by the waterfront? If they wanted to do that they could go into any US city and buy a suitably effective weapon on the streets, courtesy of the war on drugs. They'd also be far more likely to get away with using these weapons from the street than if they fire from a merchant ship that has one way off and does 20 knots.
The problem is a bit more involved then you think.
Did it occur to you that I didn't feel compelled to put EVERYTHING that I think in a slashdot comment?:) Any concept involves details in the implementation. That doesn't mean that the concept is bad.
I'm in a generous mood today so I'll be kind. You need to spend more time thinking about your ideas, don't just assume they'll work, try and think of the ways they will fail before you write them out in the future.
Thanks for the ad hominum. Perhaps the next time you post you might consider that being polite and kind are simply basic standards of behavior and not an act of generosity. You can save your anger for the guys taking hostages - I'm just pointing out that going up against those guys with nerfed weapons isn't the best way to handle the problem.
I thought the Geneva conventions were only binding on armed forces? Most countries armed forces employ weapons that would be illegal for the US army to use under the conventions.
Why would a merchant ship be bound by the Geneva Conventions?
In any case, I'm also fine with just using small arms to sink the boat. No Convention issues there...
If the pirates need to launch the equivalent of a SEAL operation to capture a ship then I think the problem will go away. It isn't like they're going to be able to keep their operations secret while fielding a force of 30 boats to capture a single ship, and it isn't like pirates are going to sign up for that duty if they suffer 50% casualties doing so. Also, when the navy captures a pirate ship they now get to nail a whole brigade of pirates instead of a dozen of them.
Even the Navy would struggle to launch such a large strike from an improvised vessel. It isn't like they're going to have lowering decks or anything like that.
All you need is a few gun stations and a couple of people trained to man the guns. It isn't like you need to man all of them at once 99% of the time. I also doubt that most of the crew has anything to do in these kinds of situations anyway - I imagine the crew is needed to keep the ship working in the long term, but when moving along at sea they probably tend to do stuff like maintenance which obviously can wait.
The ship's crew only needs to hold off the pirates until help arrives - it isn't like they need to pursue them or anything.
As far as intentions go - anybody approaching a merchant vessel in those areas at high speed in a small boat is going to be a suspect. They can fire a few rounds in the general direction and see what happens. I can't imagine that many fishing boats are going to make a suicide run through a hail of gunfire. Local boat owners will just have to apply common sense.
And by all means augment all of of this with non-lethal technologies as well. Even the US Navy does that. However, when push comes to shove you're better off having a few serious weapons on board.
The only thing that remains are the legal issues, and those are entirely a human-created problem. That could be sorted out via diplomacy and boycotts as necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree - in the US for the most part insurance is just a buyer's club for healthcare. It has the same problems that you'd have if your employer paid your grocery bill and the list price of milk was $300/gallon (with $290 of that being written off, $1 being a copay, and $9 going to the dairy and the army of accountants processing the bills).
The whole reason for #1 on my list is to get rid of the need for buyer's clubs in healthcare. In the current US if you don't have insurance you have to haggle every transaction (usually after the fact - a major negotiating disadvantage). If everybody paid the same then list prices would be reasonable or doctors couldn't attract ANY clients.
It doesn't fix all the problems with healthcare - no single measure does. It does fix a lot of them.
You'll note that I did indicate that acute emergency care does need different handling. Most care does not actually fall into this category.
E.g. heart surgery should only be covered by private insurance, not government.
I'm not sold that preventative choices can really eliminate stuff like heart surgery. At least, not with current medical technology. I know people who eat fairly well and who have had good weights who have ended up with type 2 and cardiac issues. They might be anomolies, but they shouldn't have to pay through the nose for not winning the genetic lottery.
Sure, obesity is caused by eating too much, and in theory that is controllable. However, in practice it is a WHOLE lot easier for some of us to do that than it is for others. For some people asking them to get to a normal weight would be like asking somebody who is mentally retarded to concentrate harder.
In any case, I do agree that there needs to be ways to incent preventative care so that people don't just let it slide. It might be a cost-effective area to apply socialized medicine.
In general, however, I don't like the idea of socializing something that most people could just pay for most of the time if the system wasn't so broken. I feel that way for the same reason that I'd prefer to try changing my diet before I start popping statins. Like most drugs, socialized medicine probably has its place, but let's not use it to fix every problem out there.
I very much agree with the tenure of you arguments. Is there a thinktank, set of articles, or a blog that articulates you idea in greater detail?
No one place I can think of - just general opinion after lots of thinking and reading about this stuff. NPR had a really great two-part series on the healthcare crisis recently which I'd consider a must-listen for anybody interested in healthcare policy. It was fairly non-partisan and consumer-centric. It also had a lot of doctor perspectives from physicians who want to care for people and not have to care for some kind of system - there is plenty of money out there so nobody needs to starve.
Too maximize efficiency I would suggest 2 levels of physician:
I agree. Actually, what I'd probably do is open access to medical technology to consumers. Everybody should get a copy of their test results and records, and things like prescription drugs should be available with prescriptions in general except for stuff like antibiotics where there is a common welfare issue. Of course, people should be strongly encouraged to see a doctor, and insurance probably shouldn't have to pay for non-prescribed medication.
A triage system just makes a lot of sense from a cost standpoint. Recently I ended up going to an ER for a pretty minor problem because it was a holiday weekend and I didn't want to risk leaving it untreated until I could see my primary doctor. A simple cheap clinic would have been ideal for what I needed.
Most of your other comments were addressed at income disparity. I agree with most of what you suggest - my suggestions were mainly aimed at greatly lowering medical costs and improving access to medicine overall. Even if we just make it so that anybody who can afford a new car can afford to go with only catastrophic insurance then we've solved a big part of the problem. There are lots of people who can't afford new cars, and those people will need a more socialized system if they're going to have care. There are a lot of ways to do this, but they all benefit from a more efficient healthcare market.
The main thing is to help people act more like normal consumers where healthcare is involved. It still doesn't work 100% since health is an unlimited-demand market and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. However, right now there are some really huge problems in the market where people don't have any visibility into costs (often not even the doctors), and the current system isn't really all that good for just about anybody (even most of the special interests).
an effective health care system delivered by the free market. The free market doesn't work for health care
That depends on your definition of "effective."
The current health care system isn't a free-market system by any stretch of the imagination. A few reforms would make it much closer to one and it would greatly reduce costs. These reforms wouldn't socialize medicine, but you could add socialism a lot cheaper if you had these reforms:
1. Price lists - health providers MUST have and PUBLISH them, and MUST follow them ALL the time. No negotiated rates for anybody. If you want an operation done you can comparison shop from a catalog.
2. Up-front cost disclosures. If the patient's name isn't on a piece of paper disclosing the cost of a procedure, then the service provider doesn't get paid, in general. Acute emergency procedures can be handled differently, but should be the exception. They could probably be socialized as well with regulated prices (which would of course encourage providers to avoid calling everything an emergency).
Just those reforms alone would greatly lower the cost of healthcare by commoditizing much of it. Those without insurance would also get fair prices, and if this care was socialized then the taxpayers would save money as well.
I think that other changes could be made more opt-in, so that people can choose from a number of different insurance options. I think that catastrophic coverage is something to consider - there is no reason that people should need insurance for routine care unless they have a serious chronic problem. Wellness programs (almost HMO-like) are another option where providers can be paid based on outcomes rather than services. Healthcare savings accounts should have carryover and the ability to freely contribute at-will so that they are used whenever possible. Or, you could use other mechanisms to tax-deduct health expenses. The main issue with voluntary insurance coverage is that you need to avoid the pre-existing condition problem, and as genetic testing becomes more advanced that could be a big problem. Mandatory coverages of some kinds could be necessary.
I don't mind socialism in medicine, but I think that it should be the exception for those who truly cannot care for themselves. There are a number of reforms that could make a market-based system much more efficient, and that actually makes socialized medicine easier to deliver.
Yup. I remember when firefox came out. Its whole reason for being was that Mozilla was slow and WAAY too heavy.
Firefox came along and its modular design was a breath of fresh air!
Now firefox is pretty slow, and if I open a dozen tabs I find my PC swapping like nuts (lots of stuff installed so not much RAM to spare, and no, it isn't cheap unless you have free slots on your motherboard).
In comparison chromium is very fast and users very little memory, and it doesn't have locking issues if I have browser windows open on two different X11 displays at the same time from the same user account. That is another big firefox pain - if I leave a window on at home, good luck opening an NX session to the same account remotely.
Plus, a number of sites take forever to load on firefox (I hear their 32-bit code is faster), but they work just fine on chromium, 64-bit and all...
LHC represents approximately zero percent of the energy consumption of Europe (to two significant figures).
Uh, the numbers 0, 0.00, and 0.00000000000 do not have any significant figures.
0.00000000000000001 only has one.
Yup - we order-of-magnitude guys aren't very significant...
I have nothing against an app offering to add itself to the list, but it should ask first. Maybe I trust debian to patch an app more than I trust the guys writing the app?
My that logic my windows box with apps from 50 apps from 47 different companies should have 47 different background services running looking for updates, and that should be fine since at least it isn't 50?
Windows needs a package manager, which apps can register themselves with. On linux, apps shouldn't be downloading updates at all unless users OK it - that is the distro's job.
Google does the same thing with their android SDK now. Why is it that every application needs its own package manager now?
It amazes me just how much of a hack life seems to be at times. Stuff like this doesn't surprise me at all any more.
I began to realize how much of a hack life was when I first learned about HOK and SOK. It is a remarkably simple and brutally efficient way of keeping a plasmid around - if it weren't for the fact that the plasmid actually has some benefits it would be the ultimate selfish gene. :)
Can't say that I've used the latest version of it, but my only response is:
You' RW-ASTed...
Granted, my linux box has similar failures when mounts and things like that go away. Who builds OSes and starts with the functional requirement that external devices should never go offline?
Sure.
However, as a company deploying (and for the most part not writing) applications, I don't have much of a say in how well-written the apps I buy are. Maybe I have a choice of two vendors to pick from, or I could go with some no-name product that doesn't fully meet my needs.
Chances are I'm already making tradeoffs when I select a software product to purchase.
The last thing I want to do is limit my already-too-small pool of possible solutions by imposing additional technical requirements on them, when virtualization can eliminate the problem at the cost of maybe spending 10% more on the hardware (which is by far the cheapest component of almost any large software deployment).
So which is it? Cracked or not?
I dunno - maybe if we interrogated everybody with a supercomputer we might find out. For that matter, if we interrogated everybody we might figure out who has supercomputers.
If these guys are talking about this being something that a bunch of people can do with donated CPU/GPU time, then there is a good chance that somebody has a bunch of ASICs and a rainbow table already. They probably have had it for a number of years.
Keep in mind that the cracking of Enigma wasn't publicly disclosed until the 1970s I believe. At the time some people were actually still using the cipher - after all, why not since as far as anybody knew it was unbreakable? If you secretly spend millions or tens-hundreds of millions of dollars to crack a cipher, the last thing you do is tell the world about it so that people stop using the cipher that you can now read.
Yup. In particularly I'd really like to know what replaced the SR-71. A fairly advanced UAV could probably do it now.
I really can't see the DoD getting rid of something like the SR-71 without something to effectively replace it. Satellites are really a complementary technology.
Maybe this UAV was the reason - if they knew it was just around the corner. And who knows how long it has been flying around, and when it was supposed to enter service.
Yup, I run my own DNS - in part because I also want to have local hostnames and a bit more control over dhcp/etc.
It also is nice to be able to blackhole any domain I like and kill 80% of the ads and intrusive cookies out there. When I'm browsing on wi-fi from the cellphone I'm amused to see all the banner ads go away desipte it not having an ad blocker.
If that $100M contract is really just ten million $10 contracts, I don't think you do. If the movie turns out to suck, you're no worse off than if you got a bad haircut.
Unless you're the barber, who just spent the equivalent of 400 years giving haircuts and isn't paid a dime... :)
How do you propose to resolve that? Shall we take away the subsidy for people who choose the copyright-lottery model (i.e. require them to bear the true cost of maintaining their position as the sole supplier), or shall we impose a similar subsidy for people who choose mine (for example, require everyone to spend $X/year on artistic production whether they want to or not)?
I'm perfectly fine in considering the cost of copyright enforcement when evaluating how everything went. It isn't like the "free enforcement" really helps companies offer their product for less compared to the model you propose. It just makes sure they get paid after the fact.
Also, just how much money even gets spent on copyright enforcement? It is rare to hear news of the FBI doing almost anything regarding copyright, and most enforcement is civil in nature. I agree that the civil enforcement does cost society something in terms of court costs, but that also costs the plaintiff quite a bit of money as well, so it isn't like there is a huge financial handout going on. In any case, the most egregious use of that kind of enforcement has been the RIAA tactics and I'm all for banning that kind of stuff anyway.
If you can figure out how much the average taxpayer actually directly spends on copyright enforcement I'd probably be willing to concede that you can go ahead and have that money distributed in vouchers for everybody to spend on bounties for creative works. If you're lucky it might amount to a few dollars per taxpayer per year, or maybe a few tens of cents if you distribute it across people who don't pay taxes as well.
I still think the subsidy argument is a red herring - it isn't like that money goes towards actually making creative works for sale.
How do your friends know whether the movie is worth seeing? Ultimately, someone has to decide that the potential that it might be a good movie is worth the price of a ticket. ...
Bzzt. Sorry, that's not unique to artistic labor. How do you objectively define the value of a haircut, a clean house, or a well-run company? What algorithm can tell you how much to pay a CEO or even a barber without relying on market-based data?
Ok, here is the problem with your argument:
I questioned how you can decide whether to pay a studio the $100M for making a movie. You suggested that you'd have defined standards of quality. I said that you couldn't define your standards of quality sufficiently well to form the basis for a $100M contract. You say that this isn't a problem because people spend $12 on a haircut without any concrete definition of what the quality of that haircut will be. Unfortunately, you need more rigor for a $100M contract than for a $12 contract.
How do you award a bounty for a $100M movie? In the copyright-based solution you don't - somebody makes a movie and people get to decide whether they want to pay to see it. In your solution everybody who chips in has to agree on how the movie will be made, and how it will be decided whether the money gets paid or not. The guy making the movie has to know whether it is likely that they'll collect the money or not, or they won't do the work. We're not talking about a haircut - we're talking about a major business transaction.
If you can't define standards of quality BEFORE people contribute and BEFORE somebody does the work, then few people will contribute, and nobody will do the work. Initially you might get some people who are willing to give it a try, but I think your model is destined to fail. There is nothing in fact preventing you from using your model today - just get people to donate to a bucket to commission some movie or song and then make it a work-for-hire and release the copyright to the public domain. The problem is that nobody will give you 50 cents for a song they haven't heard when they can go to Amazon and spend $1 on a song they have heard.
In an idealistic world your solution might seem better. However, this world isn't an ideal one, and your solution will amount to the tragedy of the commons. You're still legally able to implement it right now, and the fact that nobody has done so indicates that it isn't likely to work. I'd be happy if you proved me wrong. If you start turning out hit movies or songs I'll be happy to make some contributions to the fund.
Of course. If you pull up your container ship and fill out 389 forms and submit them to the appropriate 37 agencies you could be offloading it in a mere 17 weeks.
Or, you could pay the guy supervising the dock $10k (with the supervisor distributing it as needed), and be unloaded and headed out to sea in a day or two.
There is ALWAYS a legitimate way to do business. The guys taking the bribes wouldn't have it any other way - so that they can point to the official process when people come in questioning the practice of taking bribes. However, unless you have connections (just another form of a bribe - the ability to grant favors), the official process tends to be ineffective.
Well, in this case they're selling us goods in exchange for IOUs. I'm not sure the US would need to mount an invasion to make that not pay off.
I think the bigger issue this exposes is the nature of an economy in the first place. To be honest, half of the purpose of an economy is to give people something to do. Imagine a world where 10 people and a fleet of robots could meet all the food, clothing, and shelter requirements of the planet. Everybody else could be unemployed, except for the fact that the people who own the robots would insist that they somehow pay for food. Obviously this is an extreme case to illustrate a point - however, I think that many issues with economic slumps come back to this sort of a problem.
In the case of a trade imbalance, the US workers have nothing to do since they're consuming but not producing. At least, not until they start their own businesses...
Well, in theory you could prevent cheating by not trusting the client at all. That isn't generally practical. You can't stop macros, but you could design your game to minimize the advantage of macros. You can't stop somebody from having something that enhances the GUI a little (spotting bad guys and rendering them in contrasty colors, or aimbotting). However, you could make that hard by not giving too much raw data to the client.
Imagine if the game just streamed mpeg2 and did all the rendering on the server - it would be VERY hard to design cheats that could spot bad guys and aimbot them or whatever. Now, it would also have high latency, and it would take a ton of bandwidth, and it would kill the server. So, the trick is figuring out the best balance between trusting the client and performance. If you can at least filter out data that isn't needed that is a big start (don't send position data for enemies that clearly can't be seen, for example).
Ultimately, however, any operation performed on the client can be subverted in a completely undetectable manner. It is just a matter of how hard it is to do.
Yup - I tend to agree. I use IMAP on my own server for the same reason - I can use any client I want locally or remotely but I KNOW where my email is.
I do use Amazon S3 for backups. I use a combination of sarab and some scripts to encrypt my backups and sync them to S3. It is pretty cheap and it is offsite. If I owned a server in more than one geographical location then I'd skip S3 and just use rsync to do the same thing. If S3 goes down I haven't lost anything since I have the originals. The backups are encrypted with gpg so I could care less about security.
The only trick with something like S3 for backups is that you do need to avoid having too many full backups, as they are expensive to transfer and to store. Careful use of differential and incremental backups will minimize storage and transfer while also making restoration reasonably simple.
If you trust others with your data in theory a backup solution that can keep sparse copies of redundant data across systems should be a lot cheaper to operate. I didn't see any commercial services that were competitive with S3 for reasonably small data sets. If the data is encrypted before upload then there is no redundant data and if there are 1000 copies of kernel.sys on the server they wouldn't know about it anyway. Backuppc is an example of a backup solution that keeps sparse copies, but you need a remote server to do it if you want offsite backup.
No one realized they wanted a film adaptation of one of the most popular fantasy epics of all time? You can't be serious.
I am serious. How many people who saw the movies actually read the books (BEFORE the movie trailers came out)? Keep in mind that movies don't do well because of the slashdot crowd - they do well because of people with "normal" tastes.
Hey, you're the one who's worried about getting something that doesn't meet your standards of quality. You tell me!
I can't define my standards of quality, but I know if I see a trailer and read reviews and talk to friends whether it is worth it to pay for a movie. You're the one who proposed having standards of quality to decide whether to pay a bounty or not - I'm just pointing out that they're so subjective that it would be very difficult to implement in a way that somebody would spend $100M to create a movie. When you sign a contract for $100M worth of work you want the terms to be fairly concrete. Quality as it pertains to movies is not a concrete criteria.
That's bad for the artist who spends a year making something and only earns $10,000. If he knew ahead of time he'd be making less than minimum wage, he would've done something else that year.
Well, if the artist is doing it on their own then they're taking that risk on themselves. Their other option is to sign with a label and get a $60k advance, and then most likely they'd never see another dime whether they do well or not. In that case the label is taking on the risk. And, by the way, I'm all for reforms that make that arrangement less abusive to the artist.
It wouldn't be a problem if artists dropped the per-copy price to zero after they'd been fairly compensated, but of course no one does that.
Hey, I said I'm all for reasonable durations of copyrights, and that is as close to this as you'll get. You can't base it on some percentage profit or anything like that otherwise you'll end up with the Bell Labs approach - spend as much as you can to justify a rate hike to the PUC (although it did get the US a couple of Nobel prizes and the transistor).
Why is it that you can't point to a single quality of artistic labor that sets it apart from other labor that people get paid directly to perform?
You haven't asked me to. Here is one: the inability to objectively define the value of an artistic work. Some paintings sell for millions of dollars, and others sell for $25. If you come up with an algorithm that figures out the value of a painting (without relying on market-based data), then perhaps you'll have a way to reward artists without copyright. Artistic works are priced based on what the market will bear, and it is almost impossible to predict what this will be based purely on the physical properties and attributes of the art.
The same kind of problem applies to most forms of IP. You can't sell it for scrap, and it doesn't cost money to reproduce. However, most people would agree that ideas and concepts are valuable. IP law is a very imperfect way to assign actual dollar value to information. Your only alternatives to current IP laws are reforms in those laws, some other system that assigns dollar value to information that people can agree with, or a system that assigns no dollar value to information. I argue that the middle option is hard to do, and the latter option just doesn't make sense, as the fact that you're so eager to copy information just proves that it has actual value, and if it has value then you want to reward people for creating it.
And if we want to encourage people to form new markets where they might be run over by competitors, we could just guarantee their debts: there's no need to block future innovation for years just to put money in someone's pocket.
However, to get a loan in the first place somebody needs to demonstrate that they're able to pay it back. How will the government decide which debts to guarantee, and which ones not to? Right now the approach is market-based - the lenders who get paid are the ones who back products that end up being successful in the market (granted, a market with an artificial imposition of monopoly pricing).
Will we have an innovation board that decides which inventions are innovate enough to get the reward? If you do that before loans are issued then there will be no problems securing the loans, but you probably would subsidize a lot of bad ideas (indeed, the guys making the invention get paid the same whether the idea pays off or not - since there won't be big bucks if it takes off without patents). If you issue the guarantees after a product is made then the loans will be much higher risk, and a product that ends up transforming the market could actually end up not getting a guarantee and being a loss to the inventors.
The only question is which costs society more - all those loan guarantees (and loss of entrepeneurial spirit), or the cost of patent licensing. I think that patent licensing costs aren't all that bad, when patents are limited to reasonable scopes and durations (which the current ones aren't).
I do agree that in many ways the current situation goes too far in favor of patent rights. You hit on a good point that some discoveries are inevitable, and we shouldn't make one guy rich and another guy poor just because the one came up with it two days before the other. However, I'm not convinced that the whole system needs to go away - you can dial IP laws up and down as much as needed. Indeed, if you really want to abolish copyright then I'd think that the first step would be to start shortening it and see how it goes.
So, all merchant seamen are going to be able to repel boarders like a well trained team of special forces? especially since most vessels have a crew of under 40 people and some of that crew will be sleeping at the time.
Uh, I'm sure the guys who are sleeping will wake up when the alarms are sounded. And it isn't like it takes a special forces crew to point guns at a skiff and pull the trigger. I'm not talking about being able to repel boarders hand-to-hand once they're on board.
The problem is that the patrol area is so massive by the time a naval vessel hears about an attack the pirates, the mother ship and the loot are long gone.
All the more reason to equip ships to defend themselves. The other option is to assemble ships into convoys and charge them a tax for the provided protection.
Besides the moment the pirates figure out that scared merchantmen will kill anyone who approaches them is the moment they fill the water with small boats of unarmed civilians.
Uh, they're not civilians if they're operating under the orders of pirates. They might or might not have guns, but they're part of a pirate operation. In any case, when the boats sink nobody will know whether they're armed or not. Pirates will lose the incentive to attempt piracy when they are not successful in their operations. I doubt they're going to start employing PLO tactics just to make merchants look bad.
So, you're OK with Yemeni, Saudi, and Venezuelan registered ships docking in US civilian ports with an undisclosed number of personal arms on board.
As long as we're talking about relatively low caliber weapons, and they stay on the ship, I don't have a problem with it. Also, there is no reason that they would have to be undisclosed. What are they going to do, take pot-shots at tourists by the waterfront? If they wanted to do that they could go into any US city and buy a suitably effective weapon on the streets, courtesy of the war on drugs. They'd also be far more likely to get away with using these weapons from the street than if they fire from a merchant ship that has one way off and does 20 knots.
The problem is a bit more involved then you think.
Did it occur to you that I didn't feel compelled to put EVERYTHING that I think in a slashdot comment? :) Any concept involves details in the implementation. That doesn't mean that the concept is bad.
I'm in a generous mood today so I'll be kind. You need to spend more time thinking about your ideas, don't just assume they'll work, try and think of the ways they will fail before you write them out in the future.
Thanks for the ad hominum. Perhaps the next time you post you might consider that being polite and kind are simply basic standards of behavior and not an act of generosity. You can save your anger for the guys taking hostages - I'm just pointing out that going up against those guys with nerfed weapons isn't the best way to handle the problem.
I thought the Geneva conventions were only binding on armed forces? Most countries armed forces employ weapons that would be illegal for the US army to use under the conventions.
Why would a merchant ship be bound by the Geneva Conventions?
In any case, I'm also fine with just using small arms to sink the boat. No Convention issues there...
If the pirates need to launch the equivalent of a SEAL operation to capture a ship then I think the problem will go away. It isn't like they're going to be able to keep their operations secret while fielding a force of 30 boats to capture a single ship, and it isn't like pirates are going to sign up for that duty if they suffer 50% casualties doing so. Also, when the navy captures a pirate ship they now get to nail a whole brigade of pirates instead of a dozen of them.
Even the Navy would struggle to launch such a large strike from an improvised vessel. It isn't like they're going to have lowering decks or anything like that.
All you need is a few gun stations and a couple of people trained to man the guns. It isn't like you need to man all of them at once 99% of the time. I also doubt that most of the crew has anything to do in these kinds of situations anyway - I imagine the crew is needed to keep the ship working in the long term, but when moving along at sea they probably tend to do stuff like maintenance which obviously can wait.
The ship's crew only needs to hold off the pirates until help arrives - it isn't like they need to pursue them or anything.
As far as intentions go - anybody approaching a merchant vessel in those areas at high speed in a small boat is going to be a suspect. They can fire a few rounds in the general direction and see what happens. I can't imagine that many fishing boats are going to make a suicide run through a hail of gunfire. Local boat owners will just have to apply common sense.
And by all means augment all of of this with non-lethal technologies as well. Even the US Navy does that. However, when push comes to shove you're better off having a few serious weapons on board.
The only thing that remains are the legal issues, and those are entirely a human-created problem. That could be sorted out via diplomacy and boycotts as necessary.