"Personally, I feel like health care is like police or another basic public service. You normally don't have it private, and if you are so rich that you have private vigilantes, you don't slip paying the taxes to maintain the ordinary police."
The legal system is publicly run for a specific economic and political reason. You can't, by definition, have "private" law enforcement since law is a PUBLIC function, it is in fact THE, function of government. Everything a government does is second to the law, the source of authority if you will. (You might have private mediation, but this is a subset or and enforced by the public legal system.) A government, by definition, is the supreme law of a land, thus it must be the ultimate legal authority.
I'm curious how you decide what is a "right" and what is meerly a priviledge.
You overlook that any "allied" journalists are citizens first and journalists second. They are subject to the same laws as everyone else. Free speech doesn't give you license to do what you just said. There really are SOME limits to it. "There is an exception to every rule and a rule for every exception."
The EU and the rest of the free world get to reap any of the benefits of US action, and bare none of the costs, either financially or politically. Basically the world gets to have it both ways, benefit without risk for them, so it's really easy to be critical. This is a factual observation about what is, not one of judgement about the EU. Or, for those that like it hot, it's easy not to commit "war crimes" when someone else does all your fighting for you.:P
I don't intend to excuse legitimate abuses, but let's be honest about just how "fair" the ICC would be. A trial involving the US on the ICC would be about as objective as a all white jury in the south during the jim-crow era trying a black defendant accused of, say, rape. Who makes the international law anyways?? The ICC is legislature, judge and jury. Why anyone would want to be under the jurisdiction of a kangaroo court like the ICC is beyond me.
Even if you don't agree with what's happening, it's fun to watch people walk a mile in "our" shoes. Now suddenly they don't like restrictive governement rules and regualtions.:D
Sun isn't hemmoraging market share because they can run linux apps though. They are hemmoraging because the "high end" keeps getting smaller and smaller. (High end being anything that you need "non-PC" style hardware to address effectively. Basically the market that cannot be served economically from "commodity hardware" is shrinking. And since Sun's advantage was "SPARC/Solaris" compatatiblity from workstation to megaserver, meaning it runs the same on the server as on the workstation, just much faster. That advantage kinda dies when the servers start to commoditize.
Well let me turn this one around on you. Most "evil rich western" countries are rich precisely because they DONT HAVE BOOMING POPULATIONS. Most of the "developed world" suffers from lower fertility and an aging population that barely replaces itself. It's not because they've all decided to embrace zero population growth, it's because there is an inverse relationship between standard of living and the size of a family. (Standard of living is related to other things to, but there is a definite correlation here).
IIRC apple updated the eMac more recently, which might be why.
I will say that the eMac is a much better deal than the lower end iMac. Frankly, the only iMac that makes sense is the 17in one. the eMac is better at the lower end. and if you want a 20in display then you probably would be a better candidate for the more expandible Power Macs.
Well that's not quite right. You might say that you are committing the snapshot falacy. It is true that raising the fixed costs of a drug that is already being sold (through a legal judgement for example) would not change the optimal price (unless there is some sort of regulatory game stategy going on). What it WOULD do is make the development of future drugs more risky and less profitable on average (since the upfront investment is higher). What you end up doing is encouraging companies to do less research and to become even more consolidated.
No reason to recruit outside the US?? Are you nuts. You know, not every undergraduate is cut out to be a grad student, and not everyone WANTS to be a grad student. Graduate school is all about quality, and about higher level contributions to the discipline. Some fields have more need of this skill than others. It's all about filling the demands of the world. In some fields don't need a lot of upper level degrees (one thinks of engineering usually), where as other fields tend to be entirely composed of graduate level people (law, medicine). Even at the graduate level there are differences. Masters degrees tend to be more of an applied degree than PhDs, but are still research oriented. Bascially, the demand for graduate students in industry depends on three things.
1. The total level of demand for people in a particular field.
2. The amount of work that is simply application of what is known vs. research.
3. The type of research (more applied or disciplinary).
If you know these things you can predict (somewhat) the demand for certain degrees/fields and how many of them will need undergrads versus and MS or PhD.
Yeah, I'll just hop on Lufthansa, Northwest, American or Quanta's Bombardier or Embraer. McDonadl-Douglas maybe, they still make the DC10 etc IIRC. Something a Commercial Airline might actually use.
That's why you have to be an adult to vote. Although, by law, people are prohibited from "voting with you" (meaning the poll workers aren't supposed to let people in the booth with you, even if you say it's ok). So even if the kid told the poll workers that it was ok, they still shouldn't let the parent in.
I would say that the push for incorporating christianity in the EU constitution probably has more to do with the addition of new members to the EU than a shift in attitudes. What exactly were they trying to get put in, I mean language wise? I've heard about it, but I haven't seen the exact language.
I don't think parent was advocating consumption taxes, I think they were advocating asset taxes (like property, inheritance, and estate taxes). There are some problems with asset taxes however.
Firstly you have to assess the value of the assets "fairly", plus it's just not worth the time to assess the value of low value assets, just major ones. Thus land + housing + financial asssets are the main tax targets under such a system, simply because it's not worth the governments time to evaluate the worth of our 6 yr old computer and kids toys.
Of course taxing only the big ticket assets is economically "suboptimal" since it encourages people to alter their behavior to avoid the tax. In this case by placing more of their wealth in the form of small ticket items that are not assessed property taxes. Some people, like farmers (since they own a great deal of land) would tend to have a large portion of their net worth tied up in land, and therefore would also be "unfairly" burdened by the system. Of course higher taxes rates would lower the value of their land too, so they would really suffer.
Windows 95 and 98 were still DOS based (even ME, though they ripped out the command shell so the end user couldn't use it).
Only the NT/2000/XP family isn't DOS based, strictly speaking.
Just one more thing, I don't mean to negate the idea that workers need to be paid too, just saying that it's not like the investors are just leeches stealing from the productive workers. Everyone has a part in this thing.
Workers only create wealth when paired with certain resources, which the company provides. Just like workers expect to be paid for their time, investors/owners expect to be paid for the employment of their cash and assets, as well as some sort of risk premium. That's what profit is, return on a (risky) investment.
Politics has always been (for the most part) a mean and nasty business (Anyone you tells you otherwise is either lying or trying to sell you something:). Though I never said anything like "you as you don't seem to have any conscience or ethics left to protect." or this delicious bit "You don't care about this country, all you care about is yourself. Self interest and victory at any cost. That wasn't the Republican party I was part of, but obviously it's yours. And you're right at home there."
But as I said, I don't hold any grudges against you for saying what you say, because I expected as much. And in doing so you also served to prove my point better than I ever could myself.
How deliciously ironic that you pour out your spiteful anger about Max Cleland "treatment" (you decline to cite specifics, claiming that his opponents "fabricated lies") and in doing so commit the very same ad hominem attack against me that you so claim to dispise. You are committing, in your post, the very thing you argue that the "other side" is so evil for doing.
But as you almost admit, your conversion wasn't about Max Cleland's treatment, if you were honest, you would just say your ideological viewpoints have shifted and thus your political loyalties. Instead you indignantly wrap yourself in vitriol and hate for anyone who doesn't agree with you, at least you did in your post.
The whole aguement, in short story form.
on
Robots in Hospitals
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· Score: 1
Stolen from http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/JokEc.html
Two stangers, a man and a woman, meet in a cafe, the man asks.
"My Dear, would you go to bed with me for a million dollars?"
"Well, yes, I guess I would."
"How about $100?"
"What kind of person do you think I am?"
"My Dear, we have already established that. We are merely haggling over the price!"
According to Ross Emmet, the story was told by George Bernard Shaw. The man and woman are Winston Churchill and Lady Astor and the incident allegedly did occur.
You know it's kinda funny. One century's "outragous excesses" seem very equally distributed by the relative to other centuries.
The problem with "leveling out the wealth" (aside from slowing down technological progress, (and yes it would, but that is a separate discussion) and slowing the general rise in our standard of living) is that the definition of "excess wealth" is entirely arbitrary and is redefined by the norms of the time.
Basically, what you describe is meerly creeping socialism/communism as each new generation "levels" out the wealth more and more until you arrive at absolute communism. The reason is simple, I'm not just arguing slippery slope here.
If you accept the premise that it's ok to redistribute wealth involuntarily through taxes (I'm not just talking about all government spending here, just things that would constitute transfer payments), then where is your logical stopping point?? Perfect equality, anywere in between those two points is simply not sustainable; since anyone that accepts the premise will always want marginally more redistribution of wealth than the current system provides. Of course this wouldn't likely work over a short period of time, as you need successive generations to be raised with ever higher expectations of wealth equality. It's a simple exercise of moving the goalposts, as it were, until an absolute limit is reached. Of course it would be difficult to make it to that point, since the larger the redistributional burden, the lower the overall level of productivity would fall. (as you admit you can't eliminate all incentives, but you seem to be willing to eliminate them for larger and larger groups).
Actually, this is a great parallel to Eldred vs Ashcroft. If congress can retroactively extend copyrights, then you can legitimately argue that the time period for copyrighted works in unlimited and unconstitiutional. (unfortunately the court didn't rule in this manner).
Well now it all depends, was the Hillary Clinton healthcare taskforce ok? Now I really don't care who was on her taskforce because ultimately the executive branch and congesss have to make the policy. They can get advice and have secret meetings with whomever they want to, as far as I'm concerned. As long as the actual content of the policy is open in the end, I really don't care. Now you can disagree with me on this issue, but you need to be logically consistent. You can't have it one way for one group and another way for another group. (Note that I'm not saying that both situations are directly analogous, but you should be intellectually honest about it.)
You know, assuming you are correct that's quite funny, that makes Both GWB and talk show host Rush Limbaugh both big Mac fans. The irony is that Apple is a very "PC" company and Steve Jobs is very much the typical Bay Area denizen when in comes to politics. Al Gore was even invited so be on Apple's Board of Directors. Interesting stuff.
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You mean in the US?? Where medicaid would end up paying for it?? Sorry, my bad for upsetting your preconcieved notions.
The legal system is publicly run for a specific economic and political reason. You can't, by definition, have "private" law enforcement since law is a PUBLIC function, it is in fact THE, function of government. Everything a government does is second to the law, the source of authority if you will. (You might have private mediation, but this is a subset or and enforced by the public legal system.) A government, by definition, is the supreme law of a land, thus it must be the ultimate legal authority.
I'm curious how you decide what is a "right" and what is meerly a priviledge.
Interesting, who decides what is "spurious?" Foor for thought. If they are willing to pay for it, then why should you care?
You overlook that any "allied" journalists are citizens first and journalists second. They are subject to the same laws as everyone else. Free speech doesn't give you license to do what you just said. There really are SOME limits to it. "There is an exception to every rule and a rule for every exception."
I don't intend to excuse legitimate abuses, but let's be honest about just how "fair" the ICC would be. A trial involving the US on the ICC would be about as objective as a all white jury in the south during the jim-crow era trying a black defendant accused of, say, rape. Who makes the international law anyways?? The ICC is legislature, judge and jury. Why anyone would want to be under the jurisdiction of a kangaroo court like the ICC is beyond me.
Even if you don't agree with what's happening, it's fun to watch people walk a mile in "our" shoes. Now suddenly they don't like restrictive governement rules and regualtions. :D
Sun isn't hemmoraging market share because they can run linux apps though. They are hemmoraging because the "high end" keeps getting smaller and smaller. (High end being anything that you need "non-PC" style hardware to address effectively. Basically the market that cannot be served economically from "commodity hardware" is shrinking. And since Sun's advantage was "SPARC/Solaris" compatatiblity from workstation to megaserver, meaning it runs the same on the server as on the workstation, just much faster. That advantage kinda dies when the servers start to commoditize.
Well let me turn this one around on you. Most "evil rich western" countries are rich precisely because they DONT HAVE BOOMING POPULATIONS. Most of the "developed world" suffers from lower fertility and an aging population that barely replaces itself. It's not because they've all decided to embrace zero population growth, it's because there is an inverse relationship between standard of living and the size of a family. (Standard of living is related to other things to, but there is a definite correlation here).
IIRC apple updated the eMac more recently, which might be why. I will say that the eMac is a much better deal than the lower end iMac. Frankly, the only iMac that makes sense is the 17in one. the eMac is better at the lower end. and if you want a 20in display then you probably would be a better candidate for the more expandible Power Macs.
Well that's not quite right. You might say that you are committing the snapshot falacy. It is true that raising the fixed costs of a drug that is already being sold (through a legal judgement for example) would not change the optimal price (unless there is some sort of regulatory game stategy going on). What it WOULD do is make the development of future drugs more risky and less profitable on average (since the upfront investment is higher). What you end up doing is encouraging companies to do less research and to become even more consolidated.
1. The total level of demand for people in a particular field.
2. The amount of work that is simply application of what is known vs. research.
3. The type of research (more applied or disciplinary).
If you know these things you can predict (somewhat) the demand for certain degrees/fields and how many of them will need undergrads versus and MS or PhD.
The iMac hardware is a little better (read faster) too. The eMac is not just an iMac with a CRT.
Yeah, I'll just hop on Lufthansa, Northwest, American or Quanta's Bombardier or Embraer. McDonadl-Douglas maybe, they still make the DC10 etc IIRC. Something a Commercial Airline might actually use.
I don't think parent was talking about that. I think he was asking about where exactly the FCC came from.
That's why you have to be an adult to vote. Although, by law, people are prohibited from "voting with you" (meaning the poll workers aren't supposed to let people in the booth with you, even if you say it's ok). So even if the kid told the poll workers that it was ok, they still shouldn't let the parent in.
I would say that the push for incorporating christianity in the EU constitution probably has more to do with the addition of new members to the EU than a shift in attitudes. What exactly were they trying to get put in, I mean language wise? I've heard about it, but I haven't seen the exact language.
Firstly you have to assess the value of the assets "fairly", plus it's just not worth the time to assess the value of low value assets, just major ones. Thus land + housing + financial asssets are the main tax targets under such a system, simply because it's not worth the governments time to evaluate the worth of our 6 yr old computer and kids toys. Of course taxing only the big ticket assets is economically "suboptimal" since it encourages people to alter their behavior to avoid the tax. In this case by placing more of their wealth in the form of small ticket items that are not assessed property taxes. Some people, like farmers (since they own a great deal of land) would tend to have a large portion of their net worth tied up in land, and therefore would also be "unfairly" burdened by the system. Of course higher taxes rates would lower the value of their land too, so they would really suffer.
Windows 95 and 98 were still DOS based (even ME, though they ripped out the command shell so the end user couldn't use it). Only the NT/2000/XP family isn't DOS based, strictly speaking.
Just one more thing, I don't mean to negate the idea that workers need to be paid too, just saying that it's not like the investors are just leeches stealing from the productive workers. Everyone has a part in this thing.
Workers only create wealth when paired with certain resources, which the company provides. Just like workers expect to be paid for their time, investors/owners expect to be paid for the employment of their cash and assets, as well as some sort of risk premium. That's what profit is, return on a (risky) investment.
But as I said, I don't hold any grudges against you for saying what you say, because I expected as much. And in doing so you also served to prove my point better than I ever could myself. How deliciously ironic that you pour out your spiteful anger about Max Cleland "treatment" (you decline to cite specifics, claiming that his opponents "fabricated lies") and in doing so commit the very same ad hominem attack against me that you so claim to dispise. You are committing, in your post, the very thing you argue that the "other side" is so evil for doing.
But as you almost admit, your conversion wasn't about Max Cleland's treatment, if you were honest, you would just say your ideological viewpoints have shifted and thus your political loyalties. Instead you indignantly wrap yourself in vitriol and hate for anyone who doesn't agree with you, at least you did in your post.
Stolen from http://netec.mcc.ac.uk/JokEc.html Two stangers, a man and a woman, meet in a cafe, the man asks. "My Dear, would you go to bed with me for a million dollars?" "Well, yes, I guess I would." "How about $100?" "What kind of person do you think I am?" "My Dear, we have already established that. We are merely haggling over the price!" According to Ross Emmet, the story was told by George Bernard Shaw. The man and woman are Winston Churchill and Lady Astor and the incident allegedly did occur.
Basically, what you describe is meerly creeping socialism/communism as each new generation "levels" out the wealth more and more until you arrive at absolute communism. The reason is simple, I'm not just arguing slippery slope here.
If you accept the premise that it's ok to redistribute wealth involuntarily through taxes (I'm not just talking about all government spending here, just things that would constitute transfer payments), then where is your logical stopping point?? Perfect equality, anywere in between those two points is simply not sustainable; since anyone that accepts the premise will always want marginally more redistribution of wealth than the current system provides. Of course this wouldn't likely work over a short period of time, as you need successive generations to be raised with ever higher expectations of wealth equality. It's a simple exercise of moving the goalposts, as it were, until an absolute limit is reached. Of course it would be difficult to make it to that point, since the larger the redistributional burden, the lower the overall level of productivity would fall. (as you admit you can't eliminate all incentives, but you seem to be willing to eliminate them for larger and larger groups).
Actually, this is a great parallel to Eldred vs Ashcroft. If congress can retroactively extend copyrights, then you can legitimately argue that the time period for copyrighted works in unlimited and unconstitiutional. (unfortunately the court didn't rule in this manner).
Well now it all depends, was the Hillary Clinton healthcare taskforce ok? Now I really don't care who was on her taskforce because ultimately the executive branch and congesss have to make the policy. They can get advice and have secret meetings with whomever they want to, as far as I'm concerned. As long as the actual content of the policy is open in the end, I really don't care. Now you can disagree with me on this issue, but you need to be logically consistent. You can't have it one way for one group and another way for another group. (Note that I'm not saying that both situations are directly analogous, but you should be intellectually honest about it.)
You know, assuming you are correct that's quite funny, that makes Both GWB and talk show host Rush Limbaugh both big Mac fans. The irony is that Apple is a very "PC" company and Steve Jobs is very much the typical Bay Area denizen when in comes to politics. Al Gore was even invited so be on Apple's Board of Directors. Interesting stuff.