So cancerous mutations represent a measurable delta-S that normal cellular processes do not?
Yes, it's not magic. There are more states that lead to broken cellular processes than there are states that lead to normal cellular process. That leads to a measurable delta-S.
It's just a simple numbers game that a 99.999% reliable process is going to fail 0.001% of the time.
And a 100% reliable process is going to fail 0% of the time. You don't even need that level. Just get the reliability high enough that heat death of the universe (which breaks the assumption that you have more energy to throw) is more likely to happen first.
I have to agree with the original AC. Don't worry about the motivation, worry about what is actually done. There's been too much hand wringing over the psychology of rich people. My view is that those rich people are just like you, psychologically, for good or ill. They just have money.
Imagine if Genghis Khan's life had been extended, or Stalin's.
So we have to kill a few tens of billions of people in order to kill off the Khans and Stalins? To damn the entirety of humanity for however long it exists to short, painful, ignorant lives? To create suffering on a scale orders of magnitude greater than anything these guys ever did or were capable of? If you were to actually do that, you would be even worse than those old terrors were.
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on strong AI before I'd put my money on a full cure for aging.
I guess you think strong AI isn't going to happen in your lifespan eh?
But a full "cure" for aging would require designing an entirely new species (presumably that looked and acted human) with all kinds of entirely new repair mechanisms and entirely redesigned developmental pathways.
Yep, sounds like a hard problem. Doesn't sound like an impossible problem any more than strong AI does.
Reread those statements. "Bend the cost curve" is jargon for reducing the double-digit increases we'd been experiencing every year. "Spend less on health care than if this bill doesn't pass" is also clearly a claim that costs would grow less under Obamacare.
You don't sound very stunned to me. Obama said "We agree on reforms that will finally reduce the costs of health care". And what evidence do we have of the modern reinterpretation you give that the "cost curve" has been bent by Obamacare rather than by the worst recession and worst recession recovery since the end of the Second World War?
Have you heard of the Federal Republic of Germany? Are you aware that the biggest difference between their system and Obamacare is that their insurers are non-profit?
No, and you aren't aware of this either. I think one of the more naive tendencies is the assumption that the US can just halfheartedly adopt minor commonalities with some other country's health care system and get a health care system that magically halves itself in cost or so.
If a subsidized private insurance market that shields consumers from most costs, and includes a risk-mitigation system, can survive in Germany why not here?
For how long? There's a reason I wrote:
You do realize that health care costs are climbing much faster than inflation in every developed world country?
Basically, we have a tradeoff in advantages and disadvantages between the choice of leaving a vote accountable or secret. If the vote is accountable, then there's a means to force the voter to vote a certain way. If the voter is not accountable, then one can assault the vote counting mechanism itself.
In the US, I gather we started with mostly public voting. That turned out to cause considerable problems due to widespread extortion, bribing voters, etc. That's the main impetus behind the argument to keep voting secret. OTOH, you don't have to worry as much about accountability for the same reason.
Over time, the present physical-based vote counting systems have evolved to keep votes secret. The problem with them is that they're klunky and slow with plenty of opportunity for miscounts and other honest mistakes. But not so much reason to care about accountability due to the considerable overhead of gaming these system without getting caught.
What has changed in recent decades is a move to electronic voting systems. While these have considerable advantages, they also have the huge disadvantage that they're easy to game by someone with sufficient access to just simply edit votes and vote tallies.
My view is that has already been done in the 2012 Republican primaries (in a considerable number of states, including all the early primaries, Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina) to select Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee for president and a different sort of electronic vote manipulation might have helped elect Bush in Ohio in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.
This sort of suspected vote manipulation is what I think drives the current push towards accountability. Did your vote really count or did someone just replace your vote?
My take on it is that being able to audit your vote does weaken vote secrecy, but it requires a lot more work to manipulate the vote this way than in the good old days of public voting. But what does concern me is that this might not actually do all that much to eliminate vote manipulation. If the computer says 80 people voted for candidate A and 100 for candiate B, then you'll need to come up with 81 people voting for candidate A or 101 people voting for candidate B to show that the tally doesn't match the vote.
If you can find a politician saying costs would actually be reduced in toto I'll be stunned. They argued people like my Mom would see reduced costs, due to the Individual Mandate, guaranteed issue, and subsidies.
"We agree on reforms that will finally reduce the costs of health care," Obama said. "Families will save on their premiums; businesses that will see their costs rise if we do nothing will save money now and in the future. This plan will strengthen Medicare and extend the life of that program. And because it gets rid of the waste and inefficiencies in our health care system, this will be the largest deficit reduction plan in over a decade.
"Now, I just want to repeat this because there's so much misinformation about the cost issue here. You talk to every health care economist out there and they will tell you that whatever ideas are -- whatever ideas exist in terms of bending the cost curve and starting to reduce costs for families, businesses, and government, those elements are in this bill."
From the same article:
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., said the report "shows that health reform will ensure both the federal government and the American people spend less on health care than if this bill doesn't pass, helping get a hold of America's debt and keep more money in people's pockets. This report is yet another clear indicator that we have to act - and act now."
Moving on:
As for the free market, all free markets encourage short-term decision-making.
Markets also encourage long term decision making for the same reasons. Instead, you should be asking what incentivizes short term decision making at the expense of long term decision making. The answer is "private profit, public risk". There's a host of government policies and activities that take away the costs of making bad private decisions. Similarly, there are a bunch of people and businesses who don't have to use their own money for gain.
All the risk-mitigation system does is ensure her insurance company does;t go bankrupt.
Until they have to drop the risk-mitigation system because it's not working and/or they can't pay for it. Then plenty of insurance companies will go bankrupt.
As for the sustainability, you have yet to mention a single problem with Obamacare sustainability that isn't present in numerous other countries.
You do realize that health care costs are climbing much faster than inflation in every developed world country? The problems with Obamacare are not unique to the US, they are merely further along the curve than the rest of the world.
If the Canadians can survive since the Great Doctor's Strike of '62 it's fairly silly to argue Obamacare is doomed.
Why? Obamacare has perverse dynamics that encourage people, insurers, doctors, and regulators to do all sorts of dumb things.
Sorry, but you are like the creationist who wants scientists t reprove everything every time a new creationist comes up to bat. You are saying "Prove that the speed of light isn't variable." "Prove that there was no great flood". Prove that your model that I won't accept anyhow is "wrong", or right or whatever.
What's the basis for your claim? Keep in mind that reality itself isn't fitting your models.
So if you cannot provide a model, then you have nothing to contribute
You can't provide a model that fits well enough either. You're still not paying me to do this, so I'm not doing it. Further, I just don't care that you think this isn't a contribution. You are simply wrong here.
In the end, you are not even the target audience oh my part of the discussion. You will never change your mind. There might be some others out there who will decide that perhaps scientists are better sources of science knowledge than politicians.
You are not even trying to convince me. You're just complaining that "I don't contribute". Why should I change my mind? I need actual reasons first not just some annoyed person who can't even start to make coherent arguments in support of their viewpoint.
For me, the problem is not that we have or don't have global warming. I believe we do and that it is in large part caused by humans. Where we diverge is in whether the situation is bad enough that we need to act right now on that.
What gets me is that we're seeing the classic signs of a scam. None of the alleged evidence is accessible to the layman. It's ambiguous data collected by a bunch of near anonymous researchers and then collected and interpreted by the gatekeepers, people like Michael Mann who clearly are acting in an adversarial role, like prosecutor or defender in a court trial. (Note that every bit of research and every public appearance that Mann makes are attempts to portray climate change in the worst possible light. He's not the only one doing this either.) That's fine, but I'm not going to make global economy changing decisions on that basis without something in the way of actual evidence and a sound, independent evaluation of the benefits and costs of the proposed change.
Then when that research is questioned, the critics are portrayed as anti-scientific. That collective, structural argument from authority/ad hominem attack when coupled with the growing disparity between predictive models and reality is a clear warning sign that the proponents of catastrophic AGW can't argue from actual facts, but have to resort to political power and influence to propagandize their side of the argument.
And you don't talk scientifically unless you have an alternative theory
It's not my job to fix your broken theories. You aren't paying me to do that. So when your theories don't work, that's it, I'm not paying any more attention to them. You can pile on as many absurd conditions on what it means to "talk scientifically", but I don't care. For example, your above quoted phrase is just a exercise of two fallacies: argument from accomplishment and shifting burden of proof.
Mann wasn't working on "a model". He was analyzing historical data of what has actually happened , and that work has been amply corroborated, and a lot of additional supporting data has since been uncovered by research.
And none of which is actual direct observation of what actually happened to the Earth's climate past the middle or so of the 19th century. I find what is most damning here to be the false certainty based on poor understanding of science. Mann was not working on "a model", but many models of how the data that is actually measured, such as tree rings, ice core temperatures and isotope concentrations, sediment layering, etc, correlate to actual climate variables that we care about today, particularly, global mean temperature.
Unless we get a breakthrough in our understanding of the past, we're stuck with a very limited knowledge of what happened, even for global scale climate parameters. But there is a way to confirm those models by continuing to gather our climate data in the future. Because if models are based on good estimates of past climate data and accurately model the climates of the past, then they will likely accurately model climates of the future.
But instead, we see collective near universal biases such as consistent overestimates of extrapolated global mean temperature. That's the sort of thing you'd expect to see, if the estimates of the past were consistently biased to further a particular ideological viewpoint today.
No, it doesn't. There are ways to turn costs or sudden losses into externalities via publicly provided or covered insurance, but that's not an consequence of all insurance.
It seems necessary because its existence over many decades has fucked up society enough to make it that way.
It's been no easier in the past to deal with sudden catastrophes than it is now.
For what? Just because a portion of your argument has a relatively solid scientific basis, doesn't mean the rest does. Sure, this is a reasonable argument for a human contribution to global warming, but it doesn't follow that reduction in carbon dioxide emissions are a good idea.
A credible threat is only a credible threat - no force has been employed at that point.
That is just wrong. Threats are instead the usual way that force and coercion exerted on others manifests. Do this or we'll make bad things happen to you.
I intend to listen to the accountants in charge of monitoring government expenditures, who say flat-out Obamacare is controlling costs.
If the US government were a private business or corporation, those accountants would be in jail. Federal government accounting is universally bad and frequently outright fraudulent. Obamacare projections are one place where both have occurred.
So you admit that the actual numbers so far so absolutely zero signs of the disaster you predict, and that your conclusion is based entirely on your anticipation of future events?
Never said that most of it was happening now. You are the one insisting that an easily foreseeable disaster has to start killing people before we can call it a disaster. But I'm ok with that. Obamacare is for the most part an imminent economic disaster and a realized legal disaster.
That latter bit is incidentally a number of signs of disaster, should you choose to look. There's also the borked implementation of the web interface. It's mostly a one time thing, but characteristic of the absence of thought and planning that went into this thing.
Then there's the bragging by Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare, who claims that the legislators had to lie a little to the public in order to pass this law for the public's own good.
It's worth noting that the "expected" outcome of Obamacare has grown far less optimistic than when it was being sold to the US public. Now, a modest slowing down of cost growth is considered "affordable" when before the claim was that costs would be outright reduced. Similarly, there was to be a vast reduction in the number of uninsured without crippling Medicaid in the process. That's not quite what's sold now.
So you're telling me that a) you support free-market principles, and b) you think a bunch of companies are going to fuck up by assuming too much risk and failing, and you are concluding c) that's a terrible thing?
You ignore the part where this law actively encourages these insurers to make the worst possible decisions that they can get away with. That sort of market distortion inherently rules out any mostly free market.
That's one of the reasons people like Obamacare. My Mom had skin cancer. She's 63. She is high risk. She works in retail. Any market-set price for her insurance policy would probably be greater then her income.
ObamaCare fixed that.
You're not going to win this particular utilitarianism argument by saying that it's good for you, damn everyone else.
But I don't buy that we had to pass this pile of shit just so your Mom could have health care, which incidentally, she may not actually get over the course of her life.
I find so much of the arguments for Obamacare boil down to "I got mine, screw the rest of you" without considering whether the system is actually sustainable. I think over the next few years, you'll get quite the education on this matter.
Just because R&D is Research and Development that does not mean it is *basic* research and development.
Well, normally, I'd just point out that the latter is a subset of the former. But I already did that.
R&D is usually more of taking existing areas of research and cobbling them together to develop something useful.
So research is part of R&D, if it's useful? And it is *besic* research which is not part of R&D, if it is not useful or even harmful?
My lab does both R&D and basic research, and I can tell you from personal experience, the two are quite different.
I have a quick suggestion based on what I've read so far, stop doing the useless and harmful research, and just focus on the useful research. Another weighty problem solved by the Slashdot hive mind.
I find it bizarre how time and time again, proponents of "basic research" emphasize the lack of accountability rather than utility of such research.
Slashdot Mirror
So cancerous mutations represent a measurable delta-S that normal cellular processes do not?
Yes, it's not magic. There are more states that lead to broken cellular processes than there are states that lead to normal cellular process. That leads to a measurable delta-S.
(people who don't age still eat).
Hence, the use of the phrase "keep throwing energy at the system".
It's just a simple numbers game that a 99.999% reliable process is going to fail 0.001% of the time.
And a 100% reliable process is going to fail 0% of the time. You don't even need that level. Just get the reliability high enough that heat death of the universe (which breaks the assumption that you have more energy to throw) is more likely to happen first.
I have to agree with the original AC. Don't worry about the motivation, worry about what is actually done. There's been too much hand wringing over the psychology of rich people. My view is that those rich people are just like you, psychologically, for good or ill. They just have money.
Imagine if Genghis Khan's life had been extended, or Stalin's.
So we have to kill a few tens of billions of people in order to kill off the Khans and Stalins? To damn the entirety of humanity for however long it exists to short, painful, ignorant lives? To create suffering on a scale orders of magnitude greater than anything these guys ever did or were capable of? If you were to actually do that, you would be even worse than those old terrors were.
If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on strong AI before I'd put my money on a full cure for aging.
I guess you think strong AI isn't going to happen in your lifespan eh?
But a full "cure" for aging would require designing an entirely new species (presumably that looked and acted human) with all kinds of entirely new repair mechanisms and entirely redesigned developmental pathways.
Yep, sounds like a hard problem. Doesn't sound like an impossible problem any more than strong AI does.
You sound like a one percenter, minus the assets. Maybe you could do something with your life instead of caring what Kim does.
Reread those statements. "Bend the cost curve" is jargon for reducing the double-digit increases we'd been experiencing every year. "Spend less on health care than if this bill doesn't pass" is also clearly a claim that costs would grow less under Obamacare.
You don't sound very stunned to me. Obama said "We agree on reforms that will finally reduce the costs of health care". And what evidence do we have of the modern reinterpretation you give that the "cost curve" has been bent by Obamacare rather than by the worst recession and worst recession recovery since the end of the Second World War?
Have you heard of the Federal Republic of Germany? Are you aware that the biggest difference between their system and Obamacare is that their insurers are non-profit?
No, and you aren't aware of this either. I think one of the more naive tendencies is the assumption that the US can just halfheartedly adopt minor commonalities with some other country's health care system and get a health care system that magically halves itself in cost or so.
If a subsidized private insurance market that shields consumers from most costs, and includes a risk-mitigation system, can survive in Germany why not here?
For how long? There's a reason I wrote:
You do realize that health care costs are climbing much faster than inflation in every developed world country?
Basically, we have a tradeoff in advantages and disadvantages between the choice of leaving a vote accountable or secret. If the vote is accountable, then there's a means to force the voter to vote a certain way. If the voter is not accountable, then one can assault the vote counting mechanism itself.
In the US, I gather we started with mostly public voting. That turned out to cause considerable problems due to widespread extortion, bribing voters, etc. That's the main impetus behind the argument to keep voting secret. OTOH, you don't have to worry as much about accountability for the same reason.
Over time, the present physical-based vote counting systems have evolved to keep votes secret. The problem with them is that they're klunky and slow with plenty of opportunity for miscounts and other honest mistakes. But not so much reason to care about accountability due to the considerable overhead of gaming these system without getting caught.
What has changed in recent decades is a move to electronic voting systems. While these have considerable advantages, they also have the huge disadvantage that they're easy to game by someone with sufficient access to just simply edit votes and vote tallies.
My view is that has already been done in the 2012 Republican primaries (in a considerable number of states, including all the early primaries, Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina) to select Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee for president and a different sort of electronic vote manipulation might have helped elect Bush in Ohio in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.
This sort of suspected vote manipulation is what I think drives the current push towards accountability. Did your vote really count or did someone just replace your vote?
My take on it is that being able to audit your vote does weaken vote secrecy, but it requires a lot more work to manipulate the vote this way than in the good old days of public voting. But what does concern me is that this might not actually do all that much to eliminate vote manipulation. If the computer says 80 people voted for candidate A and 100 for candiate B, then you'll need to come up with 81 people voting for candidate A or 101 people voting for candidate B to show that the tally doesn't match the vote.
And of course, they can show exactly when they discovered it. It's timestamped in the computer, right?
Ask the Spanish-speakers of the Western Hemisphere about the US commitment to anti-colonialism.
That's a joke right? Because nobody speaks Spanish any more.
If you can find a politician saying costs would actually be reduced in toto I'll be stunned. They argued people like my Mom would see reduced costs, due to the Individual Mandate, guaranteed issue, and subsidies.
President Obama stated in 2009:
"We agree on reforms that will finally reduce the costs of health care," Obama said. "Families will save on their premiums; businesses that will see their costs rise if we do nothing will save money now and in the future. This plan will strengthen Medicare and extend the life of that program. And because it gets rid of the waste and inefficiencies in our health care system, this will be the largest deficit reduction plan in over a decade.
"Now, I just want to repeat this because there's so much misinformation about the cost issue here. You talk to every health care economist out there and they will tell you that whatever ideas are -- whatever ideas exist in terms of bending the cost curve and starting to reduce costs for families, businesses, and government, those elements are in this bill."
From the same article:
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., said the report "shows that health reform will ensure both the federal government and the American people spend less on health care than if this bill doesn't pass, helping get a hold of America's debt and keep more money in people's pockets. This report is yet another clear indicator that we have to act - and act now."
Moving on:
As for the free market, all free markets encourage short-term decision-making.
Markets also encourage long term decision making for the same reasons. Instead, you should be asking what incentivizes short term decision making at the expense of long term decision making. The answer is "private profit, public risk". There's a host of government policies and activities that take away the costs of making bad private decisions. Similarly, there are a bunch of people and businesses who don't have to use their own money for gain.
All the risk-mitigation system does is ensure her insurance company does;t go bankrupt.
Until they have to drop the risk-mitigation system because it's not working and/or they can't pay for it. Then plenty of insurance companies will go bankrupt.
As for the sustainability, you have yet to mention a single problem with Obamacare sustainability that isn't present in numerous other countries.
You do realize that health care costs are climbing much faster than inflation in every developed world country? The problems with Obamacare are not unique to the US, they are merely further along the curve than the rest of the world.
If the Canadians can survive since the Great Doctor's Strike of '62 it's fairly silly to argue Obamacare is doomed.
Why? Obamacare has perverse dynamics that encourage people, insurers, doctors, and regulators to do all sorts of dumb things.
Sorry, but you are like the creationist who wants scientists t reprove everything every time a new creationist comes up to bat. You are saying "Prove that the speed of light isn't variable." "Prove that there was no great flood". Prove that your model that I won't accept anyhow is "wrong", or right or whatever.
What's the basis for your claim? Keep in mind that reality itself isn't fitting your models.
So if you cannot provide a model, then you have nothing to contribute
You can't provide a model that fits well enough either. You're still not paying me to do this, so I'm not doing it. Further, I just don't care that you think this isn't a contribution. You are simply wrong here.
In the end, you are not even the target audience oh my part of the discussion. You will never change your mind. There might be some others out there who will decide that perhaps scientists are better sources of science knowledge than politicians.
You are not even trying to convince me. You're just complaining that "I don't contribute". Why should I change my mind? I need actual reasons first not just some annoyed person who can't even start to make coherent arguments in support of their viewpoint.
For me, the problem is not that we have or don't have global warming. I believe we do and that it is in large part caused by humans. Where we diverge is in whether the situation is bad enough that we need to act right now on that.
What gets me is that we're seeing the classic signs of a scam. None of the alleged evidence is accessible to the layman. It's ambiguous data collected by a bunch of near anonymous researchers and then collected and interpreted by the gatekeepers, people like Michael Mann who clearly are acting in an adversarial role, like prosecutor or defender in a court trial. (Note that every bit of research and every public appearance that Mann makes are attempts to portray climate change in the worst possible light. He's not the only one doing this either.) That's fine, but I'm not going to make global economy changing decisions on that basis without something in the way of actual evidence and a sound, independent evaluation of the benefits and costs of the proposed change.
Then when that research is questioned, the critics are portrayed as anti-scientific. That collective, structural argument from authority/ad hominem attack when coupled with the growing disparity between predictive models and reality is a clear warning sign that the proponents of catastrophic AGW can't argue from actual facts, but have to resort to political power and influence to propagandize their side of the argument.
And you don't talk scientifically unless you have an alternative theory
It's not my job to fix your broken theories. You aren't paying me to do that. So when your theories don't work, that's it, I'm not paying any more attention to them. You can pile on as many absurd conditions on what it means to "talk scientifically", but I don't care. For example, your above quoted phrase is just a exercise of two fallacies: argument from accomplishment and shifting burden of proof.
Mann wasn't working on "a model". He was analyzing historical data of what has actually happened , and that work has been amply corroborated, and a lot of additional supporting data has since been uncovered by research.
And none of which is actual direct observation of what actually happened to the Earth's climate past the middle or so of the 19th century. I find what is most damning here to be the false certainty based on poor understanding of science. Mann was not working on "a model", but many models of how the data that is actually measured, such as tree rings, ice core temperatures and isotope concentrations, sediment layering, etc, correlate to actual climate variables that we care about today, particularly, global mean temperature.
Unless we get a breakthrough in our understanding of the past, we're stuck with a very limited knowledge of what happened, even for global scale climate parameters. But there is a way to confirm those models by continuing to gather our climate data in the future. Because if models are based on good estimates of past climate data and accurately model the climates of the past, then they will likely accurately model climates of the future.
But instead, we see collective near universal biases such as consistent overestimates of extrapolated global mean temperature. That's the sort of thing you'd expect to see, if the estimates of the past were consistently biased to further a particular ideological viewpoint today.
Insurance externalizes internalities.
No, it doesn't. There are ways to turn costs or sudden losses into externalities via publicly provided or covered insurance, but that's not an consequence of all insurance.
It seems necessary because its existence over many decades has fucked up society enough to make it that way.
It's been no easier in the past to deal with sudden catastrophes than it is now.
But you will not take away the justification to create black boxes in the first place, which is insurance, plain and simple.
Even if this were true, what makes it a "pile of dogshit that smells". Insurance does serve a very useful role in our society.
Threats are just attempts at gaining leverage
In other words, "attempts at gaining leverage" is a use. Semantics just isn't working for you today.
It's a slam dunk as far as I'm concerned.
For what? Just because a portion of your argument has a relatively solid scientific basis, doesn't mean the rest does. Sure, this is a reasonable argument for a human contribution to global warming, but it doesn't follow that reduction in carbon dioxide emissions are a good idea.
The sound of flint knapping. And someone already mentioned animal calls.
It's a slam dunk as far as I'm concerned.
For what? Just because a portion of your argument has a relatively solid scientific basis, doesn't mean the rest does.
A credible threat is only a credible threat - no force has been employed at that point.
That is just wrong. Threats are instead the usual way that force and coercion exerted on others manifests. Do this or we'll make bad things happen to you.
I intend to listen to the accountants in charge of monitoring government expenditures, who say flat-out Obamacare is controlling costs.
If the US government were a private business or corporation, those accountants would be in jail. Federal government accounting is universally bad and frequently outright fraudulent. Obamacare projections are one place where both have occurred.
So you admit that the actual numbers so far so absolutely zero signs of the disaster you predict, and that your conclusion is based entirely on your anticipation of future events?
Never said that most of it was happening now. You are the one insisting that an easily foreseeable disaster has to start killing people before we can call it a disaster. But I'm ok with that. Obamacare is for the most part an imminent economic disaster and a realized legal disaster.
That latter bit is incidentally a number of signs of disaster, should you choose to look. There's also the borked implementation of the web interface. It's mostly a one time thing, but characteristic of the absence of thought and planning that went into this thing.
Then there's the bragging by Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare, who claims that the legislators had to lie a little to the public in order to pass this law for the public's own good.
It's worth noting that the "expected" outcome of Obamacare has grown far less optimistic than when it was being sold to the US public. Now, a modest slowing down of cost growth is considered "affordable" when before the claim was that costs would be outright reduced. Similarly, there was to be a vast reduction in the number of uninsured without crippling Medicaid in the process. That's not quite what's sold now.
So you're telling me that a) you support free-market principles, and b) you think a bunch of companies are going to fuck up by assuming too much risk and failing, and you are concluding c) that's a terrible thing?
You ignore the part where this law actively encourages these insurers to make the worst possible decisions that they can get away with. That sort of market distortion inherently rules out any mostly free market.
That's one of the reasons people like Obamacare. My Mom had skin cancer. She's 63. She is high risk. She works in retail. Any market-set price for her insurance policy would probably be greater then her income.
ObamaCare fixed that.
You're not going to win this particular utilitarianism argument by saying that it's good for you, damn everyone else.
But I don't buy that we had to pass this pile of shit just so your Mom could have health care, which incidentally, she may not actually get over the course of her life.
I find so much of the arguments for Obamacare boil down to "I got mine, screw the rest of you" without considering whether the system is actually sustainable. I think over the next few years, you'll get quite the education on this matter.
Just because R&D is Research and Development that does not mean it is *basic* research and development.
Well, normally, I'd just point out that the latter is a subset of the former. But I already did that.
R&D is usually more of taking existing areas of research and cobbling them together to develop something useful.
So research is part of R&D, if it's useful? And it is *besic* research which is not part of R&D, if it is not useful or even harmful?
My lab does both R&D and basic research, and I can tell you from personal experience, the two are quite different.
I have a quick suggestion based on what I've read so far, stop doing the useless and harmful research, and just focus on the useful research. Another weighty problem solved by the Slashdot hive mind.
I find it bizarre how time and time again, proponents of "basic research" emphasize the lack of accountability rather than utility of such research.
The bank robber's words were a credible threat, a credible statement of intent to do harm. A credible threat is a use of force.