Agree with your point, but I think an issue here is expectations as well.
Would you stick a laptop in your pocket and expect it to survive? Back when we had flip phones that were 3" long and 1.5" thick you could stick them in your pocket and not think twice about it (especially since the screen was not exposed to your keys/etc). Now people want to carry a 5" smartphone that is a few mm thick in a pants pocket - and we're not talking about cargo pants either.
Just use a belt-mounted pouch and be done with it.
And what do you want to do, reduce the 200,000 dollar income to 18,000, so that everybody only gets 18,000?
More like reduce billion dollar inheritances to million dollar inheritances (inheritance has to be the biggest entitlement out there), reduce billion dollar incomes to many million dollar incomes, reduce million dollar incomes to half-million dollar incomes, and reduce the $200k income to something like $100-150k. Then everybody can actually have food, clothing, shelter, and a level of medical care typical for the first world, though obviously nobody will be able to live forever.
The thing about trying to be "fair" with taxes is that it is impossible to do in practice with any kind of socialism because the bottom 80% of the country have very little to tax. Now, if you define "fair" as the bottom 80% go to work or die quietly if they can't contribute productively, then regressive tax structures work just fine.
You're seriously suggesting that we should both eliminate the earned income credit AND impose a 5% tax on people below the poverty line? That is a SIGNIFICANT change in taxes for many of them. Sure, "everybody paying their fair share" sounds nice on paper, but the problem is that the folks on the bottom can't even pay for necessities in the current system.
It would be far less regressive to just tax any financial transfer of any kind and all assets/property of any kind at a much lower rate, and mail everybody a check for $40k to make up for any hardships. In fact, most Americans probably would pay hardly any tax at all if you charged them a tax on their assets and issued a rebate on debts.
The IRS is raking in record income to the US federal government.
You aren't out of money because the IRS isn't taking it in... you're out of money because you're spending too much of it.
By all means... fix corruption... but while you're at it... balance the fucking budget.
Seems like the most sensible way to balance the budget is to cut waste, have a decent military that never gets used, increase spending on social programs, and increase taxes.
The US may very well be spending more than it has been in the past, but do we really want to return to the days of the robber barons? I suspect that a well-run government would probably spend a lot more than it does today.
This actually isn't a bad system at all. Since the poor become a very small part of the tax base in such a system it probably wouldn't be regressive compared to something like a use tax. If it turns out to be regressive, then just raise the rate a bit and have basic income to make up for it.
Yup. I think part of this is the whole surface-area vs volume relationship. Battery capacity is almost entirely a function of volume. When you have something like a phone which already has a considerable screen surface area just adding a fraction of a millimeter of thickness gives you a substantial amount of additional volume inside for more battery. On the other hand, when you're talking about a watch face that has to be the size of your wrist, adding a bit more thickness adds much less volume, and to really have a decent battery you start to get into something that looks like a cube that straps onto your wrist. If wrists were all the same size I guess you could start to have more of a wrap-around design. It would look super-ugly, but I guess another option would be a watch that adds an extra compartment on the other side of your wrist - no screen, just a big box for battery/components/etc. I guess you could stick a camera in there too if you wanted to and just hold you your wrist to shoot video out of the back of your wrist.
If anybody is wincing at these kinds of highly-utilitarian product descriptions, that would explain why the phone still contains all the smarts.
I just got a Oneplus One and wasn't quite sure how I'd like the screen size. I have to say that I really like the size, though it is definitely on the upper edge of usability. One thing I do like about it is that the keyboard doesn't feel like it is stealing so much screen real-estate, though it is perhaps getting to the upper-limit of swype-style keyboarding.
I also am tall with large hands, and I imagine that is a definite factor. One thing I do notice is that if I'm in a one-handed situation I have to manipulate the phone a bit to get from the bottom of the screen to the top. Usually, though, I have a second hand free so that isn't a problem at all.
I'm going to be interested in what impact the Apple move has on mid-sized tablets. I've seen even a lot of iOS users comment that they like tablets like the Nexus 7, while I never really saw a need for it and preferred the 10" format. I think that this may have been driven by the need for an intermediate size for people with really small phones like the past iPhones. My past Android phones were more in the 4" range but even so they were adequate enough for browsing/etc that I didn't feel the need to have another portable tablet that I could always have in a coat pocket/etc. Now that I have a 5.5" phone I REALLY don't need to carry around another tablet that is only 1.5" larger, and I'm wondering if the Apple move will take away another large segment of demand for this size.
I like my Nexus 10. I could never see myself owning a 7" tablet. What would I use it for? It would only be 1.5" larger than my phone anyway.
I can see why iPhone owners like the 7" tablet - it definitely fills a niche of still being portable but being much more functional than a phone. However, I think the solution to that is to just make the phone bigger since I carry it in a belt case anyway, and it doesn't hurt that I have long fingers.
I think the 10" tablet is also a potential replacement for a laptop if you add a bluetooth keyboard.
You lost me when you assigned an arbitrary number as your cutoff rather than defining the cutoff on reasonably definable measures of physical and mental health.
++
Also, what law of physics dictates that we can only extend life and not vigor? For all we know there will be breakthroughs that make us as lucide at the age of 300 as we are at the age of 30. It may not happen for us, but the complexity of the human body and mind are finite, so I think is just a matter of time.
If the space is expanding, I'd expect the objects to accelerate in time, and I'm not even sure how the speed of expansion changed over time, but I'm quite certain that merely dividing the current distance of two objects by the age of the Universe doesn't make much sense.
Well, relative to each other everything seems to be accelerating apart. Of course, that is a recent result - until recently the universe seemed to be nearly flat - that is the expansion of the earth was asymptotically slowing towards a static universe (which it would never actually reach).
I'm not an expert in such things, but there are a bunch of factors involved with relativistic motion. The relative passage of time slows, light becomes red-shifted (to the extent that an event that was incomprehensibly hot is redshifted to the temperature of something at 4K or so), and so on. We can actually "see" all the way to the beginning of the universe, simply because it was an incredibly brilliant flash of energy, but we can't see anything immediately afterwards because those objects are all red-shifted into undetectability (and there are also period of time where the universe was not transparent to light).
As opposed to, what, assuming that our galaxy is unique and special and doesn't follow the same rules as the other ones?
Well, you can only extrapolate from what you have, so it is a useful exercise, but there is no reason that the rules apply the same everywhere. Nobody really understands what kinds of fields might exist on a large scale across the cosmos so it may very well be that there are things that behave differently elsewhere.
It isn't about our galaxy being "special" per se, so much as the anthropic principle. There may very well be many galaxies in the exact same situation as ours, but that doesn't mean that all galaxies are, or even most.
But, again, you can only work with the data you have, so it does make sense to at least ask what the universe is like assuming that it is uniform in behavior.
Electing one person certainly won't do anything, but to the extent that any trend actually gets going the wheels of democracy turn one office at a time. Certainly I can't put people who advocate electing people into the same category as the nutjobs who advocate killing people.
The doctors made a final diagnosis with a blood test, then stuck a catheter up my groin to pull the clot out of the artery, stopping the heart attack. (Then, for the next couple of days, it seemed almost everybody coming into my room wanted to check my groin.)
That isn't such a bad thing. I know somebody who had stents placed and the doctor didn't wait long enough when removing the sheath (or whatever they call the thing they insert catheter through). She was lying in bed and felt damp and looked down and there was blood all over the place. Good thing she hadn't taken a nap - she was bleeding from her femoral artery - not exactly a minor vessel. When she finally managed to get the attention of a nurse there was quite the stir.
Depression is a collection of symptoms, normally diagnosed from the patient's self-reporting. I haven't seen or heard of any objective test. Serotonin level won't do it: you can be depressed with a high level or just fine at a low level, but it appears that increasing the serotonin level does reduce depression in quite a few cases. There could well be several physiological causes.
No argument there - I suspect that once they figure out the brain the whole DSM is going to need a MAJOR refactor...
Very bad examples here. In both cases of pharma and music, the up-front costs are vastly inflated because of the existence of "intellectual property" laws.
I'm talking about actual costs, not accounting games. It costs thousands of dollars to produce a record album, and I don't think anybody would really dispute this (maybe you can get people to work for free, but if you add up the hours and reasonable compensation it works out to something on that scale). If you factor in failed bands that were funded whose costs have to be recouped I'm sure the figure will be 10x higher.
With drugs the costs are in the tens to hundred of millions of dollars. Much of that goes to pay doctors to participate in clinical trials, but there are a lot of other costs as well. Hundreds of scientists are involved in the development and testing of a drug, and they are expensive to hire.
Now, some will argue if the cost is $100M, or $1B, or $10B. Few are going to argue that drugs are the sort of thing that a few people can develop in their kitchen (complete with supporting double-blind clinical trial data, and a robust manufacturing process that consistently turns out pills that work and are safe). If you don't want IP laws for drugs, then somebody has to spend that $100M+, and I think the real cost is closer to the $1B figure (factoring in the costs of drugs that are tested but turn out to not work - it isn't like somebody doing R&D can choose in advance to only research the stuff that works out).
First of all, universal health insurance is a scam. Insurance is a shared risk pool so putting people with preexisting conditions into that pool to be covered just hurts everyone else. If you want the government to treat people with preexisting conditions go ahead and do so, but don't bring in an additional layer of bureaucracy for no good reason.
Coverage of pre-existing conditions without universal coverage certainly can't work, because that isn't insurance. People have the incentive to not sign up until they're sick, and then drop coverage once they're healthy again, which bankrupts the insurance system.
However, with universal coverage there is no such thing as a "pre-existing condition" other than during a transition period. If somebody is insured from the moment they are conceived, then no condition can pre-exist conception.
Of course, universal coverage isn't really "insurance" as much as a socialized benefit. And I'll certainly agree that the ACA as it currently stands doesn't achieve universal coverage.
Furthermore, people seem to not understand healthcare is a scarce resource. That means not everyone can be treated for everything. The resources need to be divided amongst the population. Socialized medicine puts control of this decision into the hands of politicians.
No argument with any of that. However, EVERY insurance system puts control over coverage in the hands of somebody. For most in the US it basically resides with your employer, without a great deal of visibility into how decisions get made. One of the advantages of a government-run plan is that the decision logic can be subject to the democratic process. As you point out, that can also be a disadvantage. I have no illusions that the well-connected will get the same care as the average person under any system.
I don't have an objection to people with money paying for their own services. However, the way the US system really doesn't make this a real option for all but the most wealthy for any problem of any significance. From hospital bills I've seen the list prices for serious procedures often work out to upwards of $100k, with insurance companies paying 8-9% of that, and individuals paying 1-2% of that, and the hospital discounting the other 90%. If you pay cash they'll offer you a "nice" deal of maybe 50-70% off and then bankrupt you, and most people think they were getting a good deal when this happens.
There is no "right" or "wrong" answer here. Typically employers pay these costs, but not all do at all times. My own employer has paid for me to attend conferences, but has also had dry times where it has been very difficult for anybody to travel to anything that isn't local.
You have to look the whole package. If you're skilled you could probably find another employer who would pay for you to attend the conference. On the other hand, maybe there is some other benefit that you currently receive which you would not in another job, or maybe you would have to relocate to an area you might not prefer to live in.
I think employers should pay for development if they want to succeed, but there are lots of short-sighted companies out there.
You need to look at the big picture and decide what makes sense for you. If another employer will pay $2k for you to travel to a conference but will pay you $10k less per year, etc, you have to decide if that tradeoff makes sense vs just paying your own $2k and pocketing the other $8k, and then getting to pick any conference you want. And so on...
Movies and pharmaceuticals are similar in that regard - they have huge up-front costs (sure, those costs are often debated, but nobody disputes that what gets spend is huge no matter whose estimates you use), and low marginal production costs.
Music does have higher up-front than marginal costs, but the main "cost" is the creative serendipity that led to the work in the first place. You don't necessary need a lot of infrastructure for that to happen, even if it is something that should be rewarded in some way. Otherwise, producing a song does cost money, but not a very great deal of it (a few band members for a few days, a few engineers/etc for a few days, etc). The costs are real, but the fact is that a garage band could produce their own song that is competitive with a major label song if they had the talent, while a garage movie production simply couldn't compete with a first-line movie production on talent alone.
Now, one element of music that also involves large up-front costs is the concept of taking any song that appears half-decent, signing the artist, and then trying to market an album after the fact. I imagine most of the artists that get money up-front turn out to be bad investments. So, when an album sells, it is in part supporting unsuccessful artists as well as successful ones. Of course, it is supporting a lot of middle-managers and executives as well.
Yup. I recently bought a game on a steam sale. For as little as I paid for it, the hassle of pirating it would not have been worth it.
On the other hand, apparently many parts of the game aren't actually working now due to a bad update. Of course, the advantage of Steam is that I'll probably get that update automatically within a few days. On the other hand, if I had obtained it from TPB I probably would be playing it now instead of waiting, since the pirated version would be an older known-good one (though obviously missing whatever was in that update).
I also saw a "# activations remaining" message when registering my CD key with the game, which wasn't terribly comforting. I suspect that Valve would take care of any actual issues down the road, but who knows, maybe in 10 years I'll end up stopping by TPB to get a crack for the game that I just bought.
Something else I've wondered about is why do we have so many people on antidepressants. If anything I suspect that depression might actually be underdiagnosed, but we really have no idea what it actually is.
When you have substantial percentages of the population requiring a medical treatment you have to start asking why. Have so many people always been depressed, or is this something new? If it is new, what is the cause?
Sometimes I wonder if the brain has a natural feedback loop that leads to depression. I tend to find myself feeling down when I should probably feel the most comfortable. If something bad happens or something good happens I tend to snap out of it. However, if everything is going just fine and I'm in some kind of routine, I start to feel less and less satisfied with it. Perhaps there is some survival instinct that just makes us feel continuously uncomfortable if we aren't improving our living conditions/etc.
Interesting. A neurologist recommended that somebody I know take a low-dose SSRI for a period of time following a stroke as there was apparently some evidence that suggested that it might help with recovery.
But can you yourself be the judge -- pass the judgment, that "things seemed clearer"??
Obviously that is anecdotal. That is why double-blind clinical trials are how things like this are typically studied. It is of course especially difficult to test psychological conditions since even measuring the presence of the condition is so difficult.
People complain because it failed to meet any of it's goals
That is certainly false. One of its goals was to require coverage for pre-existing conditions. That goal was met.
Another goal was to provide an affordable insurance option to everybody, and I'd say that was met even if many didn't sign up. The reason for that was that the penalty for not signing up was lower than the cost of signing up, which is one of the reasons I think the law will have to be amended before nobody wants to participate in the exchanges any longer. You can't require coverage for pre-existing conditions without providing coverage to everybody - it just isn't sustainable. If they charged a penalty of $5k/yr for anybody without insurance then that problem would go away, since it is cheaper than that to just buy insurance. Of course, it would be far less regressive to just give everybody insurance for free, and then recover the costs in income taxes.
Yes, but the affordable care act affects far more than 12 million people, or it certainly is intended to do so. It really is just a stopgap measure - I never thought it would work in the long-term. However, I think people needed to be convinced that the current mess of the status quo just wasn't tenable before they'd be willing to move onto something more sane, like a single-payer system.
Those classified adds are in legal organs. Facebook is not a legal organ.
Uh, what makes a newspaper a legal organ? It is just a commercial means of broadcast that is as old as dirt. People don't use them, so publishing in them isn't helpful. People do use Facebook, though I do not.
Nobody is suggesting that Facebook should be the preferred way of serving legal notices.
The simplest solution would be to have a standardized government identification system, to which an address could be attached. Then the court could just notify the parties when they're involved in a conflict. But, people seem to not like the idea of having a government-issued ID, so instead we have about 47 different competing identification systems which results in far less privacy and reliability. The need for anybody doing commerce to know who they're doing commerce with doesn't magically go away.
Slashdot Mirror
Agree with your point, but I think an issue here is expectations as well.
Would you stick a laptop in your pocket and expect it to survive? Back when we had flip phones that were 3" long and 1.5" thick you could stick them in your pocket and not think twice about it (especially since the screen was not exposed to your keys/etc). Now people want to carry a 5" smartphone that is a few mm thick in a pants pocket - and we're not talking about cargo pants either.
Just use a belt-mounted pouch and be done with it.
And what do you want to do, reduce the 200,000 dollar income to 18,000, so that everybody only gets 18,000?
More like reduce billion dollar inheritances to million dollar inheritances (inheritance has to be the biggest entitlement out there), reduce billion dollar incomes to many million dollar incomes, reduce million dollar incomes to half-million dollar incomes, and reduce the $200k income to something like $100-150k. Then everybody can actually have food, clothing, shelter, and a level of medical care typical for the first world, though obviously nobody will be able to live forever.
The thing about trying to be "fair" with taxes is that it is impossible to do in practice with any kind of socialism because the bottom 80% of the country have very little to tax. Now, if you define "fair" as the bottom 80% go to work or die quietly if they can't contribute productively, then regressive tax structures work just fine.
You're seriously suggesting that we should both eliminate the earned income credit AND impose a 5% tax on people below the poverty line? That is a SIGNIFICANT change in taxes for many of them. Sure, "everybody paying their fair share" sounds nice on paper, but the problem is that the folks on the bottom can't even pay for necessities in the current system.
It would be far less regressive to just tax any financial transfer of any kind and all assets/property of any kind at a much lower rate, and mail everybody a check for $40k to make up for any hardships. In fact, most Americans probably would pay hardly any tax at all if you charged them a tax on their assets and issued a rebate on debts.
The IRS is raking in record income to the US federal government.
You aren't out of money because the IRS isn't taking it in... you're out of money because you're spending too much of it.
By all means... fix corruption... but while you're at it... balance the fucking budget.
Seems like the most sensible way to balance the budget is to cut waste, have a decent military that never gets used, increase spending on social programs, and increase taxes.
The US may very well be spending more than it has been in the past, but do we really want to return to the days of the robber barons? I suspect that a well-run government would probably spend a lot more than it does today.
This actually isn't a bad system at all. Since the poor become a very small part of the tax base in such a system it probably wouldn't be regressive compared to something like a use tax. If it turns out to be regressive, then just raise the rate a bit and have basic income to make up for it.
Yup. I think part of this is the whole surface-area vs volume relationship. Battery capacity is almost entirely a function of volume. When you have something like a phone which already has a considerable screen surface area just adding a fraction of a millimeter of thickness gives you a substantial amount of additional volume inside for more battery. On the other hand, when you're talking about a watch face that has to be the size of your wrist, adding a bit more thickness adds much less volume, and to really have a decent battery you start to get into something that looks like a cube that straps onto your wrist. If wrists were all the same size I guess you could start to have more of a wrap-around design. It would look super-ugly, but I guess another option would be a watch that adds an extra compartment on the other side of your wrist - no screen, just a big box for battery/components/etc. I guess you could stick a camera in there too if you wanted to and just hold you your wrist to shoot video out of the back of your wrist.
If anybody is wincing at these kinds of highly-utilitarian product descriptions, that would explain why the phone still contains all the smarts.
I just got a Oneplus One and wasn't quite sure how I'd like the screen size. I have to say that I really like the size, though it is definitely on the upper edge of usability. One thing I do like about it is that the keyboard doesn't feel like it is stealing so much screen real-estate, though it is perhaps getting to the upper-limit of swype-style keyboarding.
I also am tall with large hands, and I imagine that is a definite factor. One thing I do notice is that if I'm in a one-handed situation I have to manipulate the phone a bit to get from the bottom of the screen to the top. Usually, though, I have a second hand free so that isn't a problem at all.
I'm going to be interested in what impact the Apple move has on mid-sized tablets. I've seen even a lot of iOS users comment that they like tablets like the Nexus 7, while I never really saw a need for it and preferred the 10" format. I think that this may have been driven by the need for an intermediate size for people with really small phones like the past iPhones. My past Android phones were more in the 4" range but even so they were adequate enough for browsing/etc that I didn't feel the need to have another portable tablet that I could always have in a coat pocket/etc. Now that I have a 5.5" phone I REALLY don't need to carry around another tablet that is only 1.5" larger, and I'm wondering if the Apple move will take away another large segment of demand for this size.
I like my Nexus 10. I could never see myself owning a 7" tablet. What would I use it for? It would only be 1.5" larger than my phone anyway.
I can see why iPhone owners like the 7" tablet - it definitely fills a niche of still being portable but being much more functional than a phone. However, I think the solution to that is to just make the phone bigger since I carry it in a belt case anyway, and it doesn't hurt that I have long fingers.
I think the 10" tablet is also a potential replacement for a laptop if you add a bluetooth keyboard.
You lost me when you assigned an arbitrary number as your cutoff rather than defining the cutoff on reasonably definable measures of physical and mental health.
++
Also, what law of physics dictates that we can only extend life and not vigor? For all we know there will be breakthroughs that make us as lucide at the age of 300 as we are at the age of 30. It may not happen for us, but the complexity of the human body and mind are finite, so I think is just a matter of time.
If the space is expanding, I'd expect the objects to accelerate in time, and I'm not even sure how the speed of expansion changed over time, but I'm quite certain that merely dividing the current distance of two objects by the age of the Universe doesn't make much sense.
Well, relative to each other everything seems to be accelerating apart. Of course, that is a recent result - until recently the universe seemed to be nearly flat - that is the expansion of the earth was asymptotically slowing towards a static universe (which it would never actually reach).
I'm not an expert in such things, but there are a bunch of factors involved with relativistic motion. The relative passage of time slows, light becomes red-shifted (to the extent that an event that was incomprehensibly hot is redshifted to the temperature of something at 4K or so), and so on. We can actually "see" all the way to the beginning of the universe, simply because it was an incredibly brilliant flash of energy, but we can't see anything immediately afterwards because those objects are all red-shifted into undetectability (and there are also period of time where the universe was not transparent to light).
As opposed to, what, assuming that our galaxy is unique and special and doesn't follow the same rules as the other ones?
Well, you can only extrapolate from what you have, so it is a useful exercise, but there is no reason that the rules apply the same everywhere. Nobody really understands what kinds of fields might exist on a large scale across the cosmos so it may very well be that there are things that behave differently elsewhere.
It isn't about our galaxy being "special" per se, so much as the anthropic principle. There may very well be many galaxies in the exact same situation as ours, but that doesn't mean that all galaxies are, or even most.
But, again, you can only work with the data you have, so it does make sense to at least ask what the universe is like assuming that it is uniform in behavior.
Electing one person certainly won't do anything, but to the extent that any trend actually gets going the wheels of democracy turn one office at a time. Certainly I can't put people who advocate electing people into the same category as the nutjobs who advocate killing people.
The doctors made a final diagnosis with a blood test, then stuck a catheter up my groin to pull the clot out of the artery, stopping the heart attack. (Then, for the next couple of days, it seemed almost everybody coming into my room wanted to check my groin.)
That isn't such a bad thing. I know somebody who had stents placed and the doctor didn't wait long enough when removing the sheath (or whatever they call the thing they insert catheter through). She was lying in bed and felt damp and looked down and there was blood all over the place. Good thing she hadn't taken a nap - she was bleeding from her femoral artery - not exactly a minor vessel. When she finally managed to get the attention of a nurse there was quite the stir.
Depression is a collection of symptoms, normally diagnosed from the patient's self-reporting. I haven't seen or heard of any objective test. Serotonin level won't do it: you can be depressed with a high level or just fine at a low level, but it appears that increasing the serotonin level does reduce depression in quite a few cases. There could well be several physiological causes.
No argument there - I suspect that once they figure out the brain the whole DSM is going to need a MAJOR refactor...
Very bad examples here. In both cases of pharma and music, the up-front costs are vastly inflated because of the existence of "intellectual property" laws.
I'm talking about actual costs, not accounting games. It costs thousands of dollars to produce a record album, and I don't think anybody would really dispute this (maybe you can get people to work for free, but if you add up the hours and reasonable compensation it works out to something on that scale). If you factor in failed bands that were funded whose costs have to be recouped I'm sure the figure will be 10x higher.
With drugs the costs are in the tens to hundred of millions of dollars. Much of that goes to pay doctors to participate in clinical trials, but there are a lot of other costs as well. Hundreds of scientists are involved in the development and testing of a drug, and they are expensive to hire.
Now, some will argue if the cost is $100M, or $1B, or $10B. Few are going to argue that drugs are the sort of thing that a few people can develop in their kitchen (complete with supporting double-blind clinical trial data, and a robust manufacturing process that consistently turns out pills that work and are safe). If you don't want IP laws for drugs, then somebody has to spend that $100M+, and I think the real cost is closer to the $1B figure (factoring in the costs of drugs that are tested but turn out to not work - it isn't like somebody doing R&D can choose in advance to only research the stuff that works out).
First of all, universal health insurance is a scam. Insurance is a shared risk pool so putting people with preexisting conditions into that pool to be covered just hurts everyone else. If you want the government to treat people with preexisting conditions go ahead and do so, but don't bring in an additional layer of bureaucracy for no good reason.
Coverage of pre-existing conditions without universal coverage certainly can't work, because that isn't insurance. People have the incentive to not sign up until they're sick, and then drop coverage once they're healthy again, which bankrupts the insurance system.
However, with universal coverage there is no such thing as a "pre-existing condition" other than during a transition period. If somebody is insured from the moment they are conceived, then no condition can pre-exist conception.
Of course, universal coverage isn't really "insurance" as much as a socialized benefit. And I'll certainly agree that the ACA as it currently stands doesn't achieve universal coverage.
Furthermore, people seem to not understand healthcare is a scarce resource. That means not everyone can be treated for everything. The resources need to be divided amongst the population. Socialized medicine puts control of this decision into the hands of politicians.
No argument with any of that. However, EVERY insurance system puts control over coverage in the hands of somebody. For most in the US it basically resides with your employer, without a great deal of visibility into how decisions get made. One of the advantages of a government-run plan is that the decision logic can be subject to the democratic process. As you point out, that can also be a disadvantage. I have no illusions that the well-connected will get the same care as the average person under any system.
I don't have an objection to people with money paying for their own services. However, the way the US system really doesn't make this a real option for all but the most wealthy for any problem of any significance. From hospital bills I've seen the list prices for serious procedures often work out to upwards of $100k, with insurance companies paying 8-9% of that, and individuals paying 1-2% of that, and the hospital discounting the other 90%. If you pay cash they'll offer you a "nice" deal of maybe 50-70% off and then bankrupt you, and most people think they were getting a good deal when this happens.
There is no "right" or "wrong" answer here. Typically employers pay these costs, but not all do at all times. My own employer has paid for me to attend conferences, but has also had dry times where it has been very difficult for anybody to travel to anything that isn't local.
You have to look the whole package. If you're skilled you could probably find another employer who would pay for you to attend the conference. On the other hand, maybe there is some other benefit that you currently receive which you would not in another job, or maybe you would have to relocate to an area you might not prefer to live in.
I think employers should pay for development if they want to succeed, but there are lots of short-sighted companies out there.
You need to look at the big picture and decide what makes sense for you. If another employer will pay $2k for you to travel to a conference but will pay you $10k less per year, etc, you have to decide if that tradeoff makes sense vs just paying your own $2k and pocketing the other $8k, and then getting to pick any conference you want. And so on...
Movies and pharmaceuticals are similar in that regard - they have huge up-front costs (sure, those costs are often debated, but nobody disputes that what gets spend is huge no matter whose estimates you use), and low marginal production costs.
Music does have higher up-front than marginal costs, but the main "cost" is the creative serendipity that led to the work in the first place. You don't necessary need a lot of infrastructure for that to happen, even if it is something that should be rewarded in some way. Otherwise, producing a song does cost money, but not a very great deal of it (a few band members for a few days, a few engineers/etc for a few days, etc). The costs are real, but the fact is that a garage band could produce their own song that is competitive with a major label song if they had the talent, while a garage movie production simply couldn't compete with a first-line movie production on talent alone.
Now, one element of music that also involves large up-front costs is the concept of taking any song that appears half-decent, signing the artist, and then trying to market an album after the fact. I imagine most of the artists that get money up-front turn out to be bad investments. So, when an album sells, it is in part supporting unsuccessful artists as well as successful ones. Of course, it is supporting a lot of middle-managers and executives as well.
Yup. I recently bought a game on a steam sale. For as little as I paid for it, the hassle of pirating it would not have been worth it.
On the other hand, apparently many parts of the game aren't actually working now due to a bad update. Of course, the advantage of Steam is that I'll probably get that update automatically within a few days. On the other hand, if I had obtained it from TPB I probably would be playing it now instead of waiting, since the pirated version would be an older known-good one (though obviously missing whatever was in that update).
I also saw a "# activations remaining" message when registering my CD key with the game, which wasn't terribly comforting. I suspect that Valve would take care of any actual issues down the road, but who knows, maybe in 10 years I'll end up stopping by TPB to get a crack for the game that I just bought.
Stuff like this is why there is piracy.
I have to agree with you in general.
Something else I've wondered about is why do we have so many people on antidepressants. If anything I suspect that depression might actually be underdiagnosed, but we really have no idea what it actually is.
When you have substantial percentages of the population requiring a medical treatment you have to start asking why. Have so many people always been depressed, or is this something new? If it is new, what is the cause?
Sometimes I wonder if the brain has a natural feedback loop that leads to depression. I tend to find myself feeling down when I should probably feel the most comfortable. If something bad happens or something good happens I tend to snap out of it. However, if everything is going just fine and I'm in some kind of routine, I start to feel less and less satisfied with it. Perhaps there is some survival instinct that just makes us feel continuously uncomfortable if we aren't improving our living conditions/etc.
Interesting. A neurologist recommended that somebody I know take a low-dose SSRI for a period of time following a stroke as there was apparently some evidence that suggested that it might help with recovery.
But can you yourself be the judge -- pass the judgment, that "things seemed clearer"??
Obviously that is anecdotal. That is why double-blind clinical trials are how things like this are typically studied. It is of course especially difficult to test psychological conditions since even measuring the presence of the condition is so difficult.
People complain because it failed to meet any of it's goals
That is certainly false. One of its goals was to require coverage for pre-existing conditions. That goal was met.
Another goal was to provide an affordable insurance option to everybody, and I'd say that was met even if many didn't sign up. The reason for that was that the penalty for not signing up was lower than the cost of signing up, which is one of the reasons I think the law will have to be amended before nobody wants to participate in the exchanges any longer. You can't require coverage for pre-existing conditions without providing coverage to everybody - it just isn't sustainable. If they charged a penalty of $5k/yr for anybody without insurance then that problem would go away, since it is cheaper than that to just buy insurance. Of course, it would be far less regressive to just give everybody insurance for free, and then recover the costs in income taxes.
I didn't say that if you have the source that you understand the software.
I said that if you don't have the source, then you don't understand the software.
Logic 101...
Yes, but the affordable care act affects far more than 12 million people, or it certainly is intended to do so. It really is just a stopgap measure - I never thought it would work in the long-term. However, I think people needed to be convinced that the current mess of the status quo just wasn't tenable before they'd be willing to move onto something more sane, like a single-payer system.
Those classified adds are in legal organs.
Facebook is not a legal organ.
Uh, what makes a newspaper a legal organ? It is just a commercial means of broadcast that is as old as dirt. People don't use them, so publishing in them isn't helpful. People do use Facebook, though I do not.
Nobody is suggesting that Facebook should be the preferred way of serving legal notices.
The simplest solution would be to have a standardized government identification system, to which an address could be attached. Then the court could just notify the parties when they're involved in a conflict. But, people seem to not like the idea of having a government-issued ID, so instead we have about 47 different competing identification systems which results in far less privacy and reliability. The need for anybody doing commerce to know who they're doing commerce with doesn't magically go away.