Aren't there maintenance requirements beyond annual inspections in aircraft?
I'll admit that I'm not super-knowledgable about such things, but I figured that the reason that aircraft rental was so expensive is that you're paying for all the maintenance/etc associated with owning an aircraft. That would make ownership only cheaper on paper.
What about mandatory maintenance? It costs a heck of a lot more per mile to meet FAA standards for airworthiness than to pass an auto safety inspection.
Our society has gotten lazy with law enforcement. Proving that somebody commented THE crime is hard, and making all really bad behavior is hard. So, we just make it a crime to do silly normal things and selectively enforce the laws. EVERYBODY in America is a criminal - do you think you go through a single day without violating SOMETHING in the Code of Federal Regulations, or any aw passed by any legislature in the last 200 years that hasn't been repealed, or anything contrary to common law? Plus, those laws make a convenient excuse for performing searches/etc (your honor, the grass looked taller than 2.3 inches so I knocked on the front door, and in plain sight it looked like there might have been an illegally-copied CD sitting on the table, and when I walked in to grab it I noticed some cigarette packages on the table in the other room so I went over to check their seals and then I noticed the lamp that could also be used to grow weed and so I called in SWAT to bust open every wall in the place...).
The job of the cops is to figure out who the bad guy is, and the job of the prosecutor is to figure out something in those aforementioned library-filling tomes to pin them with. Gotta love it!
As it is, I pay thousands every year for exactly zero coverage.
As I said, I'm all for reforming the current US system, but not scapping it (at least, not yet). The irony is that the situation you describe would only get worse under a socialist system - if you are paying thousands of dollars in medicate taxes every year you could surely afford health insurance - in which case you'd be paying only a little more (comparatively) and getting the best care available anywhere.
I hear all about R&D, but if those costs are so high, why does big pharma spend more on marketing than research and development?
As in any industry - money spent on advertsing tends to pay for itself up to a point. If less were spent on advertising a drug company would make less - not more.
In any case, the relative spending on ads vs R&D doesn't really make a difference in terms of the nature of the marginal vs total cost of making a drug. The R&D cost wouldn't get smaller if you eliminated advertising entirely - and the R&D cost on its own would make it prohibitive to develop new drugs if you couldn't command market exclusivity.
R&D isn't that big. Much of the R&D is done for free by the government already and given to big pharma to cash in on.
Government tends to do blue-sky research, which does tend to uncover targets for drug therapy. That tends to be about it. Government labs rarely identify compounds, or if they do they tend to identify compounds that work in a test tube but which are not suitable as drugs. Don't get me wrong - you could argue that identifying a potential target is 90% of the innovation involved in making a drug, but that other 10% is the part that costs a ton of money. The problem is that testing new drugs requires clinical trials, and those require paying doctors, and doctors like to make money. Also, the supply of subjects for trials is limited and hence commands a significant price (ironically - rarely paid to the participants themselves, but rather to their doctors).
I've posted on slashdot numerous times advocating experimenting with fully-government-developed drugs. Such drugs should be licensed non-exclusively and royalty-free giving people access to cheap medicines. However, the private drug industry should be allowed to compete with the government model essentially untouched. If the complete-public-funded model really does work out, then private companies will just disappear or turn into government contractors - they couldn't compete on price. If the public model doesn't work out then we'd at least have the status quo. What doesn't make sense is essentially treating a private company as if it were owned by the government (dictating their prices) and then being shocked if it turns out that they go out of business - with nothing else to take up the slack.
And I think you are quite confused about levels of care in other countries. You do have choices in care.
I'm sure it varies significantly across the globe. However, in general the customer is always right - and the customer is the person paying the bills. Even in the US the patient is somewhat-isolated from the bills and hence the decision-making, but in socialized nations this is much more pronounced. I know a guy in the UK who suffered with pneumonia for weeks before it was diagnosed. His primary doctor first tried treating him with aspirin or whatever for a week to see if that worked, and then he was sent for an X-ray, which took a few days to have done and a week to have read, and then a few days after that he could start on antibiotic. As a result he had all kinds of problems and was out of work for a month. In the US he'd have been in and out of an ER in a few hours with a prescription in hand - even if he were totally indigent (granted he would still get billed a few hundred dollars in that case).
In some other nations the situation is better due to a government decision to spend more on care, but choice is usually very limited. Cho
Then he should have included a disclaimer to remove all doubt.
I for one appreciate that the typical slashdot post spends more time talking about what a person thinks without needing 3 paragraphs of disclaimers about one doesn't think!:)
We spend as much per citizen on health care as countries with socialized medicine. Those dollars cover a small segment of the population, and with health care that could be considered the same or even worse than what the average care is in socialized medicine countries.
True enough - although this is not entirely due to an unjust system, and to some degree it depends on one's definition of justice. Some things to consider:
1. The cost of most things in the US tends to be higher than in most nations worldwide - so high per-capital health care costs doesn't in itself imply an unfair system. I don't claim this explains the disparity you're pointing at, but it does explain a part of it.
2. In the US the health benefits go to the people who pay the bills. In socialized nations the health benefits go to those who need them without regard to who is paying. Depending on one's viewpoint either could be considered a more just system.
It would be hard to make the system worse. We have a "socialized" system now, only it was designed by the for-profit medical industry. That's why we pay more and get less than anywhere else.
Well, the current system wasn't "designed" by anybody per se - it is free market so it just sort-of happened. In many cases the fact that the US is the only major free-market healthcare system in the world tends to lead to the US subsidizing care for other nations. For example, a drug that costs $120/month in the US might cost $20/month in Europe. The drug could not be profitably sold for $20/month everywhere (inclusive of R&D costs) - particularly with the reduced volume of sales in an environment where patients have less control over their care. Essentially the US consumer pays the costs of drug development for the entire world (regardless of where the development takes place).
Drugs are just one part of the picture. In the case of doctors poor regulation of the medical profession is at least partly to blame for high costs. In the US it is illegal to practice medicine without a license, but the US government has essentially granted the power to issue licenses in part to the AMA. Since that body is composed of doctors the supply of doctors is kept low to ensure high wages.
The bottom line is that it isn't as simple as dictating prices - that only works if somebody is willing to pick up the tab for fully-government-funded drug development or those in charge decide that the drug we have are good enough and progress isn't really needed.
And getting back to your disclaimer bit - I'll add a disclaimer. In the interests of the average slashdot reader I am not posting a 40 page thesis explaining the problems of the various counter-arguments to my points. You're welcome to raise them and I can respond a bit, but we're really drifting off-topic here.
Uh, did he say that? A criticism of one candidate's policies is not equivalent to an endorsement of another candidate's policies. Perhaps he also disagrees with the current president's tendency to spend money like water (which also involves confiscation of taxes) and the infringements upon personal liberty.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of either of the major parties, or of socialized healthcare. However, with future advances in technology I suspect that socialized healthcare will be inevitable - the availability of perfect information about future health problems will eventually make private voluntary insurance infeasible. Don't get me wrong - I like the idea of everybody being covered in the event of a health problem, and that the status quo needs some reformation. I'm just not convinced that a massive socialized health system is the best way to make this happen - there is just too little incentive for individuals to control costs, and too much incentive for politicians to do so. It also cuts out much of the incentive for private medical R&D - current socialized nations benefit from the US market's willingness to pay a premium for this R&D, and if the US gives it up I think everybody will suffer as a result.
Mod parent up. What is the point of paying taxes to fund law enforcement if anybody who is the victim of a crime has to mount their own investigation and civil prosecution. Maybe if cops spent less time enforcing laws that 95% of people disagree with (copyright enforcement, speed traps, etc) they'd have time to actually solve crimes that people thing ought to be solved...
At a substantial portion of the speed of light the blue-shifted background radiation would bake you in an instant - most of the mass/energy of the universe is tied up in very-low-energy photons floating around in the interstellar medium - if you speed up they suddenly aren't low-energy any longer.
If you picked a random point on the globe, and I picked a random point on the globe, then they would be within 200 miles of each other a few percent of the time. If the only logic used by the software was to determine whether or not any land was visible it could probably increase that probability significantly - the earth doesn't have that much dirt poking out of the oceans. 200 miles is a VERY large area of land.
Such a system may not have much utility in a serious war. There are a few good reasons:
1. At best they give you an idea of where a target is - they're not suitable for guiding missles towards a target and shotting it down. That requires continuous illumination, which is hard when the illuminator doesn't easily get any feedback as to whether it is on target or not, and a missile can't see the reflections reliably.
2. It still depends on RF transmission to illuminate a target, but instead it uses "civilian" transmitters instead of military ones. I use the term civilian very loosly since if your cell phone network is used to illuminate military aircraft it is no longer a civilian technology. In a war with serious stakes an enemy would just fire anti-radiation missiles or artillery at anything that emits RF.
3. Civilian transmitters don't tend to have much in the way of infrastructure redundancy like military ones do. Blow up all the local power stations and batteries should be dead within a day or two, and blow up the fuel depots and even diesel generators aren't going to be much help - cell towers don't typically have huge fuel reserves like a military base would.
The main advantage of this sort of technology would be the ability to use super-cheap transmitters in combination with super-expensive receivers. Since the two are not in proximity it would be much easier to conceal the expensive detection equipment, and transmitters could be made more disposable.
In a less serious war you could rely on the reluctance of an enemy to destroy infrastructure that is primarily civilian in nature. However, in a less-serious war the enemy will probably not be so dependant on defeating your radar system - the only reason wars aren't fought seriously is because the conclusion is evident from the start.
very few countries would extradite him for that charge
Which perhaps ought to be a reflection upon the NZ justice system.
As an aside - I've always found the Contempt of Court business to be unjust. Essentially a judge can imprison you indefinitely without the consent of a jury. Doesn't that effectively remove a man's right to a trial by a jury of his peers? It is bad enough that in the US they can sentence you to 100 consecutive 3 month sentences and skip the jury trial - in a contempt charge there isn't even a trial at all.
The whole point of the jury is to act as a check on judicial power. If you can't convince 12 ordinary people that a person is a menace to society, then he shouldn't have to sit in jail.
call me sentimental, but I don't like to think of a whole country going evil on the say-so of a few bastards.
You're sentimental.
Look up some footage of parades in Germany during that era. The symbolism and expressions of the crowd are unreal. You'd think that they were hauling the Pharaoh down the street and the citizens were worshiping his divinity.
It is truly frightening what entire populations are capable of doing - either actively or by looking the other way. This isn't a lesson on how evil the Germans were, but rather what all of us just might be capable of. Perhaps you can be forgiven for not wanting to believe that this is true...
As far as the general problem of insurance goes - you get what you pay for generally. However, I agree that it should be fraud to advertise coverage and then deny it.
In the case of health insurance I've heard horror stories about some of my insurers but I've never had a problem despite having a covered individual with extensive medical expenses. However, I suspect my employer (Fortune 500) is paying for decent coverage, while those who complain about the insurer probably have employers who pay the least they can get away with. Insurers are all-too-willing to sell different tiers of what otherwise looks like the exact same coverage, and the difference is how hard a time you get over your claims.
I think the solution needs to be more disclosure - regulate how insurers can advertise, and force them to advertise such details as the average percentage of payment against a claim at various cost levels (ie, if you ask for 100k and they pay 80k that is an 80% payment). Such disclosures should be both company-wide and product-specific.
The same goes with most other forms of insurance. A $100k homeowners policy from Nationwide is not the same as a $100k policy from Amica - but the cost isn't the same either. The terms of the policies might actually be nearly the same - but the companies practices in paying them is definitely not.
Bottom line is that when you buy bananas you can see and smell if it is a bad one. When you buy insurance you need to rely on regulators to make sure the advertised product meets its stated claims.
Of course, this shows one of the fundamental limitations of science. Suppose it really was a Ninja following you? If it was a really good Ninja it might even escape without notice. That doesn't necessarily mean that it never existed.
Science is a very reliable way of getting at the truth. That doesn't mean that it always yields the correct answer - particularly in situations that are not repeatable.
Science is great at answering "what typically causes these sorts of events?" - but it is bad at answering questions like "what caused this particular event?". Science shows that smokers generally live shorter lives than non-smokers. Science cannot generally be used to show that the reason that somebody died at age 40 is because they smoked - even if lung cancer was the cause, the cancer might not have arisen due to smoking.
The difficulty is that the big bang was a specific instance, which puts it in a realm that science is weak at handling. You can answer questions like "how do big bangs typically work?", but it is hard to answer "how did THE big bang work?". Indeed - you can't decisively prove that it happened at all (as opposed to, for example, the universe being a simulation that started out three years ago with all humans being created in-place with memories of a full life and books/artifacts suggesting that the Earth is much older).
It was not my intention to stereotype - only to point out how dramatically different this case has been viewed from various racial perspectives.
Watch the Frontline episode (Frontline is generally considered a very reputable news program - and if anything it has a slightly liberal lean but not much of one). Blacks were cheering in the streets when the news broke. I'm willing to admit that those who actually assembled to hear the verdict in front of cameras are probably not representative, but your circle of friends may not be either.
And the sheep mentality is hardly a racial thing. I'm sure that the current US president got most of his support from lighter-hued voters.
Keep in mind that beyond reasonable doubt does not imply mathematical certainty.
In one criminal trial I participated in as a juror the judge had a very good explanation. Reasonable doubt is the kind of doubt that would lead somebody to not make a serious decision, like purchasing a house or car, or starting a business, or whatever. When I bought my home I didn't have a $20k engineering report stating that the home was free of defects, but I did do due-diligence and wouldn't have gone through with the purchase if I had reason to suspect the sellers were dishonest or that there was a possible major flaw.
Hans is either guilty as sin, or he at least deserves a Darwin award for doing everything he could possibly do to make himself look guilty. His behavior after the crime was extremely suspicious, and his supplied reasons strained any level of credulity. The jurors probably felt that they'd have to be idiots to buy it, and the fact that they probably perceived that Hans considered them dumb enough to buy it didn't help.
oj simpson's case was skewered in this country by race. that is, more black people tended to think of oj as innocent, and more white people thought of him as guilty
That's a massive understatement. It was probably 95+% in both camps. And it wasn't just a matter of thinking he was guilty/not-guilty either.
Among whites, the sense was not only was he guilty but you'd have to be an idiot to think he wasn't. It was just SO obvious!
Among blacks, the sense was not only was he innocent, but you'd have to be a complete bigot to not realize he was framed. It was just SO obvious!
There is a good Frontline episode on the trial that goes beyond the actual trial itself and looks at the social issues surrounding it. It can be watched via flv on the pbs website...
Well, without terraforming, you won't do too well on the moon or mars then...:)
I think that this ist he most likely long-term outcome. We'll send bacteria/chemicals/machines/etc to other planets, wait 200 years, and then go ahead and inhabit them...
I suppose you could have other things like "mod points" but the current system seems to work well enough for science.
I dunno. How much money is wasted on journal subscriptions that could be put to better use in other ways? Many journals cost thousands of dollars per year to subscribe to.
There is also a matter of principle. Most academic research is paid for by taxpayers in some way. And yet, taxpayers are not permitted to read the fruits of this research without paying for it. As a matter of law any publication arising from public grants should be in the public domain.
I'm all for filtering, and peer review. Why can't an appropriate non-profit institution create an online forum for publication? This forum could have both reviewed and non-reviewed articles (with no limit on size). The forum would have lots of filtering/indexing available - users could view only reviewed publications, for example. Also, as part of the review process every article would get a notability score - which is both an overall indicator of importance and also an indicator of what fields an article is relevant to.
So, as a researcher doing my weekly reading, I might look at the list of the top-25 articles of the week (in any field), the top 1% of articles in my general discipline, all peer-reviewed articles reasonably close to my area of work, and maybe everything that is available in a very specific area (I can judge the quality of non-reviewed work on my own if it is in my area of specialization).
Lots of options become available when you ditch the paper-based world. You don't need to give up peer-review. And the cost savings would be huge. It wouldn't be free, but I think that public funding should be able to cover it - after all they're already doing that indirectly and if anything this will save them money. It also would make the results of research free for all to read.
Heaven on earth is on its way and technology is bringing it here. And the greedy rich are fighting its arrival tooth and nail. Their sense of entitlement and feelings that they are better than the rest of us is sickening.
Fair enough, but...
Just think of how different a society would need to be when labor of any kind is essentially cheap or free. Imagine when machines can do creative activities as well or better than a human. How would such a society operate?
Our current system is based around the concept of working to earn your pay. Imagine a utopia where nobody needs to work - but then how do you decide how to allocate resources (most likely some resources would still be scarce - such as living space)? Imagine a world with 100% unemployment...
Are you sure it wasn't a poor implementation? Citrix works pretty well, and I've seen it used in lots of places with thin client terminals (hospitals in particular). Now, if you're not using it in seamless mode than that IS a pain!
Where it shines the most is with client-server applications over high latency WANs. Most client-server apps aren't designed to handle latency - but Citrix is and it isolates the app from the link. I've seen client-server apps that took seconds to respond to entries that went to almost-normal responsiveness when Citrix was employed. That is what makes it fairly popular in global corporations.
I use shorewall on a linux-based router. Is it straightforward to implement QoS on such a setup? I've seen a few scripts out there and howtos, but they all assume that you start out with nothing in your filtering configuration. When you're running shorewall you end up with a bazillion rules and a very complex configuration and the linux packet filtering capabilities aren't exactly transparent to somebody who doesn't program routers for a living...
The issue is whether a contract would be disputed, and one party would be stuck as a result.
For example, with wire transfers there are all kinds of non-consumer-friendly bank laws out there. If the bank followed the appropriate processes and some identity thief gets the bank to send $1M of some customers money to some foreign bank, the bank probably could care less. Chances are that banking laws will make the customer liable and they weren't involved.
Now, imagine this scenario. You pay me $50k in untraceable cash as consideration for me privately providing you with some form of insurance (say a million dollars worth). You suffer a loss that I am liable for. I simply deny having ever signed the contract. If the contract were on paper you would have an expert witness testify that it could be forensically traced to me. If the contract were faxed you would point to all kinds of court precedents for faxed documents. If the contract were emailed there would not be much precedent - maybe I'd owe you, and may be not. Unless you like taking your chances (and who buys insurance when they like to take chances?), you're going to insist on some well-tested form of transmission.
Basically the issue comes down to repudiation. It is easy to repudiate a document transitted electronically unless crytographic safeguards are used. FAX should be easy to repudiate but for various reasons it has a perception of authority and it has been well-tested in court.
First of all, relating to our own war for independence, the colonists won against a world-class, superior fighting force.
I'm actually not convinced that the USA isn't a bit of an anomaly in this regard. There are a number of factors involved that tend to be overlooked:
1. The oppressor in this case was Britain - which was itself a democracy. I'd say the sentiment in parliament was paternalistic and looked at Americans as people who just needed some strong guidance. They didn't particularly want to give up their major trading partner, but on the other hand they weren't out to dominate them either.
2. The US revolution consisted almost entirely of military failures. Several blunders could have ended the whole thing if the British had properly exploited them (the Brits made several blunders of their own - but they were in such a strong position that it didn't cost them as much).
3. The effect of US resistance was basically to drive up the body count. Lexington and Concord were clear British victories, but the cost of those victories was so high as to challenge British resolve.
4. The British generally practiced the kinds of restrained warfare usually associated with Western democracies. Americans caught by the British were not treated in the same way as Chinese were in Japanese-occupied territory in WWII. The British people would not have tolerated atrocities.
5. The US victory at Yorktown was only possible with the aid of the French. In fact, the French contributed strongly to the success of the revolution. If Yorktown were not blockaded the British would simply have retreated and fought on at another place - British seapower was used to great effect when it was necessary to outmaneuver the Revolutionary Army.
6. Ultimately America wasn't THAT important to the British. Sure, it was important, but not so important that the British would sacrifice everything just to say that they owned it.
In the end, the US basically had more resolve to be independant than the British had to dominate them.
If, on the other hand, Britain were a true monarchy or other non-representative form of government I think we'd have seen several differences:
1. British power would have been employed much more freely. Revolutionary sympathizers would be killed outright and hunted down. Tories would have been encouraged to turn in anybody who was suspected of rebel sympathies. Nobody back home would be offended by such heavy-handed activities.
2. There would have been no ultimate surrender - the loss of a few thousand soldiers would result in just deploying a few thousand more.
3. The Americans could have killed as many Red Coats as they liked - they would just keep getting replaced. The democratic British government had to stay popular with the people and a million-man army that suffers a few tens of thousands of casualties is a major political defeat - even if militarily only a small loss. In order to defeat the occupying army the Revolutionaries would actually need to deplete it on a strategic level.
4. If America were a substantial part of a tyrant's power base they would be inclined to fight on until the very end - they would gain no benefit from surrender.
I think that the American Revolution is not a very good model of revolutions in general - I can't point to too many countries that have successfully employed it. It certainly hasn't turned out as well in other countries either - probably due to the nobility of the US Founding Fathers and their Western heritage. America was a western colony dominated by another western colony. India was fairly Westernized as well when it gained independence - again from a Western nation. You don't generally see these kinds of tactics successfully employed when one African nation wants to gain independence from another - and the results are generally far worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't there maintenance requirements beyond annual inspections in aircraft?
I'll admit that I'm not super-knowledgable about such things, but I figured that the reason that aircraft rental was so expensive is that you're paying for all the maintenance/etc associated with owning an aircraft. That would make ownership only cheaper on paper.
What about mandatory maintenance? It costs a heck of a lot more per mile to meet FAA standards for airworthiness than to pass an auto safety inspection.
Our society has gotten lazy with law enforcement. Proving that somebody commented THE crime is hard, and making all really bad behavior is hard. So, we just make it a crime to do silly normal things and selectively enforce the laws. EVERYBODY in America is a criminal - do you think you go through a single day without violating SOMETHING in the Code of Federal Regulations, or any aw passed by any legislature in the last 200 years that hasn't been repealed, or anything contrary to common law? Plus, those laws make a convenient excuse for performing searches/etc (your honor, the grass looked taller than 2.3 inches so I knocked on the front door, and in plain sight it looked like there might have been an illegally-copied CD sitting on the table, and when I walked in to grab it I noticed some cigarette packages on the table in the other room so I went over to check their seals and then I noticed the lamp that could also be used to grow weed and so I called in SWAT to bust open every wall in the place...).
The job of the cops is to figure out who the bad guy is, and the job of the prosecutor is to figure out something in those aforementioned library-filling tomes to pin them with. Gotta love it!
As it is, I pay thousands every year for exactly zero coverage.
As I said, I'm all for reforming the current US system, but not scapping it (at least, not yet). The irony is that the situation you describe would only get worse under a socialist system - if you are paying thousands of dollars in medicate taxes every year you could surely afford health insurance - in which case you'd be paying only a little more (comparatively) and getting the best care available anywhere.
I hear all about R&D, but if those costs are so high, why does big pharma spend more on marketing than research and development?
As in any industry - money spent on advertsing tends to pay for itself up to a point. If less were spent on advertising a drug company would make less - not more.
In any case, the relative spending on ads vs R&D doesn't really make a difference in terms of the nature of the marginal vs total cost of making a drug. The R&D cost wouldn't get smaller if you eliminated advertising entirely - and the R&D cost on its own would make it prohibitive to develop new drugs if you couldn't command market exclusivity.
R&D isn't that big. Much of the R&D is done for free by the government already and given to big pharma to cash in on.
Government tends to do blue-sky research, which does tend to uncover targets for drug therapy. That tends to be about it. Government labs rarely identify compounds, or if they do they tend to identify compounds that work in a test tube but which are not suitable as drugs. Don't get me wrong - you could argue that identifying a potential target is 90% of the innovation involved in making a drug, but that other 10% is the part that costs a ton of money. The problem is that testing new drugs requires clinical trials, and those require paying doctors, and doctors like to make money. Also, the supply of subjects for trials is limited and hence commands a significant price (ironically - rarely paid to the participants themselves, but rather to their doctors).
I've posted on slashdot numerous times advocating experimenting with fully-government-developed drugs. Such drugs should be licensed non-exclusively and royalty-free giving people access to cheap medicines. However, the private drug industry should be allowed to compete with the government model essentially untouched. If the complete-public-funded model really does work out, then private companies will just disappear or turn into government contractors - they couldn't compete on price. If the public model doesn't work out then we'd at least have the status quo. What doesn't make sense is essentially treating a private company as if it were owned by the government (dictating their prices) and then being shocked if it turns out that they go out of business - with nothing else to take up the slack.
And I think you are quite confused about levels of care in other countries. You do have choices in care.
I'm sure it varies significantly across the globe. However, in general the customer is always right - and the customer is the person paying the bills. Even in the US the patient is somewhat-isolated from the bills and hence the decision-making, but in socialized nations this is much more pronounced. I know a guy in the UK who suffered with pneumonia for weeks before it was diagnosed. His primary doctor first tried treating him with aspirin or whatever for a week to see if that worked, and then he was sent for an X-ray, which took a few days to have done and a week to have read, and then a few days after that he could start on antibiotic. As a result he had all kinds of problems and was out of work for a month. In the US he'd have been in and out of an ER in a few hours with a prescription in hand - even if he were totally indigent (granted he would still get billed a few hundred dollars in that case).
In some other nations the situation is better due to a government decision to spend more on care, but choice is usually very limited. Cho
Then he should have included a disclaimer to remove all doubt.
I for one appreciate that the typical slashdot post spends more time talking about what a person thinks without needing 3 paragraphs of disclaimers about one doesn't think! :)
We spend as much per citizen on health care as countries with socialized medicine. Those dollars cover a small segment of the population, and with health care that could be considered the same or even worse than what the average care is in socialized medicine countries.
True enough - although this is not entirely due to an unjust system, and to some degree it depends on one's definition of justice. Some things to consider:
1. The cost of most things in the US tends to be higher than in most nations worldwide - so high per-capital health care costs doesn't in itself imply an unfair system. I don't claim this explains the disparity you're pointing at, but it does explain a part of it.
2. In the US the health benefits go to the people who pay the bills. In socialized nations the health benefits go to those who need them without regard to who is paying. Depending on one's viewpoint either could be considered a more just system.
It would be hard to make the system worse. We have a "socialized" system now, only it was designed by the for-profit medical industry. That's why we pay more and get less than anywhere else.
Well, the current system wasn't "designed" by anybody per se - it is free market so it just sort-of happened. In many cases the fact that the US is the only major free-market healthcare system in the world tends to lead to the US subsidizing care for other nations. For example, a drug that costs $120/month in the US might cost $20/month in Europe. The drug could not be profitably sold for $20/month everywhere (inclusive of R&D costs) - particularly with the reduced volume of sales in an environment where patients have less control over their care. Essentially the US consumer pays the costs of drug development for the entire world (regardless of where the development takes place).
Drugs are just one part of the picture. In the case of doctors poor regulation of the medical profession is at least partly to blame for high costs. In the US it is illegal to practice medicine without a license, but the US government has essentially granted the power to issue licenses in part to the AMA. Since that body is composed of doctors the supply of doctors is kept low to ensure high wages.
The bottom line is that it isn't as simple as dictating prices - that only works if somebody is willing to pick up the tab for fully-government-funded drug development or those in charge decide that the drug we have are good enough and progress isn't really needed.
And getting back to your disclaimer bit - I'll add a disclaimer. In the interests of the average slashdot reader I am not posting a 40 page thesis explaining the problems of the various counter-arguments to my points. You're welcome to raise them and I can respond a bit, but we're really drifting off-topic here.
Uh, did he say that? A criticism of one candidate's policies is not equivalent to an endorsement of another candidate's policies. Perhaps he also disagrees with the current president's tendency to spend money like water (which also involves confiscation of taxes) and the infringements upon personal liberty.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of either of the major parties, or of socialized healthcare. However, with future advances in technology I suspect that socialized healthcare will be inevitable - the availability of perfect information about future health problems will eventually make private voluntary insurance infeasible. Don't get me wrong - I like the idea of everybody being covered in the event of a health problem, and that the status quo needs some reformation. I'm just not convinced that a massive socialized health system is the best way to make this happen - there is just too little incentive for individuals to control costs, and too much incentive for politicians to do so. It also cuts out much of the incentive for private medical R&D - current socialized nations benefit from the US market's willingness to pay a premium for this R&D, and if the US gives it up I think everybody will suffer as a result.
Mod parent up. What is the point of paying taxes to fund law enforcement if anybody who is the victim of a crime has to mount their own investigation and civil prosecution. Maybe if cops spent less time enforcing laws that 95% of people disagree with (copyright enforcement, speed traps, etc) they'd have time to actually solve crimes that people thing ought to be solved...
At a substantial portion of the speed of light the blue-shifted background radiation would bake you in an instant - most of the mass/energy of the universe is tied up in very-low-energy photons floating around in the interstellar medium - if you speed up they suddenly aren't low-energy any longer.
If you picked a random point on the globe, and I picked a random point on the globe, then they would be within 200 miles of each other a few percent of the time. If the only logic used by the software was to determine whether or not any land was visible it could probably increase that probability significantly - the earth doesn't have that much dirt poking out of the oceans. 200 miles is a VERY large area of land.
Such a system may not have much utility in a serious war. There are a few good reasons:
1. At best they give you an idea of where a target is - they're not suitable for guiding missles towards a target and shotting it down. That requires continuous illumination, which is hard when the illuminator doesn't easily get any feedback as to whether it is on target or not, and a missile can't see the reflections reliably.
2. It still depends on RF transmission to illuminate a target, but instead it uses "civilian" transmitters instead of military ones. I use the term civilian very loosly since if your cell phone network is used to illuminate military aircraft it is no longer a civilian technology. In a war with serious stakes an enemy would just fire anti-radiation missiles or artillery at anything that emits RF.
3. Civilian transmitters don't tend to have much in the way of infrastructure redundancy like military ones do. Blow up all the local power stations and batteries should be dead within a day or two, and blow up the fuel depots and even diesel generators aren't going to be much help - cell towers don't typically have huge fuel reserves like a military base would.
The main advantage of this sort of technology would be the ability to use super-cheap transmitters in combination with super-expensive receivers. Since the two are not in proximity it would be much easier to conceal the expensive detection equipment, and transmitters could be made more disposable.
In a less serious war you could rely on the reluctance of an enemy to destroy infrastructure that is primarily civilian in nature. However, in a less-serious war the enemy will probably not be so dependant on defeating your radar system - the only reason wars aren't fought seriously is because the conclusion is evident from the start.
very few countries would extradite him for that charge
Which perhaps ought to be a reflection upon the NZ justice system.
As an aside - I've always found the Contempt of Court business to be unjust. Essentially a judge can imprison you indefinitely without the consent of a jury. Doesn't that effectively remove a man's right to a trial by a jury of his peers? It is bad enough that in the US they can sentence you to 100 consecutive 3 month sentences and skip the jury trial - in a contempt charge there isn't even a trial at all.
The whole point of the jury is to act as a check on judicial power. If you can't convince 12 ordinary people that a person is a menace to society, then he shouldn't have to sit in jail.
call me sentimental, but I don't like to think of a whole country going evil on the say-so of a few bastards.
You're sentimental.
Look up some footage of parades in Germany during that era. The symbolism and expressions of the crowd are unreal. You'd think that they were hauling the Pharaoh down the street and the citizens were worshiping his divinity.
It is truly frightening what entire populations are capable of doing - either actively or by looking the other way. This isn't a lesson on how evil the Germans were, but rather what all of us just might be capable of. Perhaps you can be forgiven for not wanting to believe that this is true...
As far as the general problem of insurance goes - you get what you pay for generally. However, I agree that it should be fraud to advertise coverage and then deny it.
In the case of health insurance I've heard horror stories about some of my insurers but I've never had a problem despite having a covered individual with extensive medical expenses. However, I suspect my employer (Fortune 500) is paying for decent coverage, while those who complain about the insurer probably have employers who pay the least they can get away with. Insurers are all-too-willing to sell different tiers of what otherwise looks like the exact same coverage, and the difference is how hard a time you get over your claims.
I think the solution needs to be more disclosure - regulate how insurers can advertise, and force them to advertise such details as the average percentage of payment against a claim at various cost levels (ie, if you ask for 100k and they pay 80k that is an 80% payment). Such disclosures should be both company-wide and product-specific.
The same goes with most other forms of insurance. A $100k homeowners policy from Nationwide is not the same as a $100k policy from Amica - but the cost isn't the same either. The terms of the policies might actually be nearly the same - but the companies practices in paying them is definitely not.
Bottom line is that when you buy bananas you can see and smell if it is a bad one. When you buy insurance you need to rely on regulators to make sure the advertised product meets its stated claims.
Of course, this shows one of the fundamental limitations of science. Suppose it really was a Ninja following you? If it was a really good Ninja it might even escape without notice. That doesn't necessarily mean that it never existed.
Science is a very reliable way of getting at the truth. That doesn't mean that it always yields the correct answer - particularly in situations that are not repeatable.
Science is great at answering "what typically causes these sorts of events?" - but it is bad at answering questions like "what caused this particular event?". Science shows that smokers generally live shorter lives than non-smokers. Science cannot generally be used to show that the reason that somebody died at age 40 is because they smoked - even if lung cancer was the cause, the cancer might not have arisen due to smoking.
The difficulty is that the big bang was a specific instance, which puts it in a realm that science is weak at handling. You can answer questions like "how do big bangs typically work?", but it is hard to answer "how did THE big bang work?". Indeed - you can't decisively prove that it happened at all (as opposed to, for example, the universe being a simulation that started out three years ago with all humans being created in-place with memories of a full life and books/artifacts suggesting that the Earth is much older).
It was not my intention to stereotype - only to point out how dramatically different this case has been viewed from various racial perspectives.
Watch the Frontline episode (Frontline is generally considered a very reputable news program - and if anything it has a slightly liberal lean but not much of one). Blacks were cheering in the streets when the news broke. I'm willing to admit that those who actually assembled to hear the verdict in front of cameras are probably not representative, but your circle of friends may not be either.
And the sheep mentality is hardly a racial thing. I'm sure that the current US president got most of his support from lighter-hued voters.
Keep in mind that beyond reasonable doubt does not imply mathematical certainty.
In one criminal trial I participated in as a juror the judge had a very good explanation. Reasonable doubt is the kind of doubt that would lead somebody to not make a serious decision, like purchasing a house or car, or starting a business, or whatever. When I bought my home I didn't have a $20k engineering report stating that the home was free of defects, but I did do due-diligence and wouldn't have gone through with the purchase if I had reason to suspect the sellers were dishonest or that there was a possible major flaw.
Hans is either guilty as sin, or he at least deserves a Darwin award for doing everything he could possibly do to make himself look guilty. His behavior after the crime was extremely suspicious, and his supplied reasons strained any level of credulity. The jurors probably felt that they'd have to be idiots to buy it, and the fact that they probably perceived that Hans considered them dumb enough to buy it didn't help.
oj simpson's case was skewered in this country by race. that is, more black people tended to think of oj as innocent, and more white people thought of him as guilty
That's a massive understatement. It was probably 95+% in both camps. And it wasn't just a matter of thinking he was guilty/not-guilty either.
Among whites, the sense was not only was he guilty but you'd have to be an idiot to think he wasn't. It was just SO obvious!
Among blacks, the sense was not only was he innocent, but you'd have to be a complete bigot to not realize he was framed. It was just SO obvious!
There is a good Frontline episode on the trial that goes beyond the actual trial itself and looks at the social issues surrounding it. It can be watched via flv on the pbs website...
Well, without terraforming, you won't do too well on the moon or mars then... :)
I think that this ist he most likely long-term outcome. We'll send bacteria/chemicals/machines/etc to other planets, wait 200 years, and then go ahead and inhabit them...
I suppose you could have other things like "mod points" but the current system seems to work well enough for science.
I dunno. How much money is wasted on journal subscriptions that could be put to better use in other ways? Many journals cost thousands of dollars per year to subscribe to.
There is also a matter of principle. Most academic research is paid for by taxpayers in some way. And yet, taxpayers are not permitted to read the fruits of this research without paying for it. As a matter of law any publication arising from public grants should be in the public domain.
I'm all for filtering, and peer review. Why can't an appropriate non-profit institution create an online forum for publication? This forum could have both reviewed and non-reviewed articles (with no limit on size). The forum would have lots of filtering/indexing available - users could view only reviewed publications, for example. Also, as part of the review process every article would get a notability score - which is both an overall indicator of importance and also an indicator of what fields an article is relevant to.
So, as a researcher doing my weekly reading, I might look at the list of the top-25 articles of the week (in any field), the top 1% of articles in my general discipline, all peer-reviewed articles reasonably close to my area of work, and maybe everything that is available in a very specific area (I can judge the quality of non-reviewed work on my own if it is in my area of specialization).
Lots of options become available when you ditch the paper-based world. You don't need to give up peer-review. And the cost savings would be huge. It wouldn't be free, but I think that public funding should be able to cover it - after all they're already doing that indirectly and if anything this will save them money. It also would make the results of research free for all to read.
Heaven on earth is on its way and technology is bringing it here. And the greedy rich are fighting its arrival tooth and nail. Their sense of entitlement and feelings that they are better than the rest of us is sickening.
Fair enough, but...
Just think of how different a society would need to be when labor of any kind is essentially cheap or free. Imagine when machines can do creative activities as well or better than a human. How would such a society operate?
Our current system is based around the concept of working to earn your pay. Imagine a utopia where nobody needs to work - but then how do you decide how to allocate resources (most likely some resources would still be scarce - such as living space)? Imagine a world with 100% unemployment...
Are you sure it wasn't a poor implementation? Citrix works pretty well, and I've seen it used in lots of places with thin client terminals (hospitals in particular). Now, if you're not using it in seamless mode than that IS a pain!
Where it shines the most is with client-server applications over high latency WANs. Most client-server apps aren't designed to handle latency - but Citrix is and it isolates the app from the link. I've seen client-server apps that took seconds to respond to entries that went to almost-normal responsiveness when Citrix was employed. That is what makes it fairly popular in global corporations.
Well, in theory X11 has always worked that way. Just point your DISPLAY at your local terminal.
The main disadvantage of X11 is that it doesn't handle latency well, unlike Citrix. NX helps this a bit - a FOSS equivalent would be nice.
I use shorewall on a linux-based router. Is it straightforward to implement QoS on such a setup? I've seen a few scripts out there and howtos, but they all assume that you start out with nothing in your filtering configuration. When you're running shorewall you end up with a bazillion rules and a very complex configuration and the linux packet filtering capabilities aren't exactly transparent to somebody who doesn't program routers for a living...
The issue is whether a contract would be disputed, and one party would be stuck as a result.
For example, with wire transfers there are all kinds of non-consumer-friendly bank laws out there. If the bank followed the appropriate processes and some identity thief gets the bank to send $1M of some customers money to some foreign bank, the bank probably could care less. Chances are that banking laws will make the customer liable and they weren't involved.
Now, imagine this scenario. You pay me $50k in untraceable cash as consideration for me privately providing you with some form of insurance (say a million dollars worth). You suffer a loss that I am liable for. I simply deny having ever signed the contract. If the contract were on paper you would have an expert witness testify that it could be forensically traced to me. If the contract were faxed you would point to all kinds of court precedents for faxed documents. If the contract were emailed there would not be much precedent - maybe I'd owe you, and may be not. Unless you like taking your chances (and who buys insurance when they like to take chances?), you're going to insist on some well-tested form of transmission.
Basically the issue comes down to repudiation. It is easy to repudiate a document transitted electronically unless crytographic safeguards are used. FAX should be easy to repudiate but for various reasons it has a perception of authority and it has been well-tested in court.
First of all, relating to our own war for independence, the colonists won against a world-class, superior fighting force.
I'm actually not convinced that the USA isn't a bit of an anomaly in this regard. There are a number of factors involved that tend to be overlooked:
1. The oppressor in this case was Britain - which was itself a democracy. I'd say the sentiment in parliament was paternalistic and looked at Americans as people who just needed some strong guidance. They didn't particularly want to give up their major trading partner, but on the other hand they weren't out to dominate them either.
2. The US revolution consisted almost entirely of military failures. Several blunders could have ended the whole thing if the British had properly exploited them (the Brits made several blunders of their own - but they were in such a strong position that it didn't cost them as much).
3. The effect of US resistance was basically to drive up the body count. Lexington and Concord were clear British victories, but the cost of those victories was so high as to challenge British resolve.
4. The British generally practiced the kinds of restrained warfare usually associated with Western democracies. Americans caught by the British were not treated in the same way as Chinese were in Japanese-occupied territory in WWII. The British people would not have tolerated atrocities.
5. The US victory at Yorktown was only possible with the aid of the French. In fact, the French contributed strongly to the success of the revolution. If Yorktown were not blockaded the British would simply have retreated and fought on at another place - British seapower was used to great effect when it was necessary to outmaneuver the Revolutionary Army.
6. Ultimately America wasn't THAT important to the British. Sure, it was important, but not so important that the British would sacrifice everything just to say that they owned it.
In the end, the US basically had more resolve to be independant than the British had to dominate them.
If, on the other hand, Britain were a true monarchy or other non-representative form of government I think we'd have seen several differences:
1. British power would have been employed much more freely. Revolutionary sympathizers would be killed outright and hunted down. Tories would have been encouraged to turn in anybody who was suspected of rebel sympathies. Nobody back home would be offended by such heavy-handed activities.
2. There would have been no ultimate surrender - the loss of a few thousand soldiers would result in just deploying a few thousand more.
3. The Americans could have killed as many Red Coats as they liked - they would just keep getting replaced. The democratic British government had to stay popular with the people and a million-man army that suffers a few tens of thousands of casualties is a major political defeat - even if militarily only a small loss. In order to defeat the occupying army the Revolutionaries would actually need to deplete it on a strategic level.
4. If America were a substantial part of a tyrant's power base they would be inclined to fight on until the very end - they would gain no benefit from surrender.
I think that the American Revolution is not a very good model of revolutions in general - I can't point to too many countries that have successfully employed it. It certainly hasn't turned out as well in other countries either - probably due to the nobility of the US Founding Fathers and their Western heritage. America was a western colony dominated by another western colony. India was fairly Westernized as well when it gained independence - again from a Western nation. You don't generally see these kinds of tactics successfully employed when one African nation wants to gain independence from another - and the results are generally far worse.