The problem is that using the courts or California national guard to stabilize the energy supply would have been viewed as a left-wing assault on corporate freedom.
The problem is that a couple of simple legal things would have done the job. Either allow the two power companies, Consolidated Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric to charge their customers what the utilities actually have to pay for electricity. Or remove the obligation to buy on the spot market. These were not done.
One doesn't need to resort to illegal actions in order to fix this particular problem.
Delivery of power to a particular wall socket may be a natural monopoly, but power generation is not.
A lot of markets have a limited supply
All markets do. And that's the point of markets pretty much - to match that limited supply with the buyers that want the goods or services the most.
When Enron was allowed to add future sales to the balance sheet without adding future expenses, a demand bubble was created.
Nonsense. A "demand bubble" was created because the end customers in a large portion of California were completely insulated from the cost of the electricity they were purchasing.
In normal markets where the consumer pays most of the price of the good in question, price fixing can still work (the monopoly price is generally higher than the competitive price except in rare situations, such as having only one customer, the monopsopy), but demand goes down as a result of the increase in price. Not so, when the customer pays the same amount no matter what's happening on the market.
The problem of "melting down" is not that goods are scarce, but that certain market participants are under sufficient obligation that they can be forced to pay a lot for the market good. A portion of the demand is very inelastic in the cases above. If you can reduce supply to below that illelastic demand, then you will see a substantial rise in the cost of the good.
For example, European coal power generators can't renege on years-long power production contracts just because the next couple of months of power generation have unusually costly carbon credits attached. They can purchase and redistribute alternative supply (such as renewable power or nuclear), but that only becomes attractive, if the price of carbon credits go up a lot.
It's a lot of temporary turmoil that happens only because the markets sell a fixed number of carbon credits.
The accounting games you refer to have caused a lot of trouble in their own right, but they aren't responsible for the deregulation messes.
Deregulation has caused us nothing but trouble. Remember that Enron crisis a decade or so ago in CA?
I take it you don't realize that the state of California deliberately broke the electricity market in question? Electricity utilities were required to buy a portion of their electricity at any price on the spot market. It didn't take the so-called "smartest people in the room" (Enron) to see that was going to cause lucrative trouble.
And once this flaw was revealed in the summer of 2000, the then governor, Gray Davis let this flaw run on for about six to seven months, bankrupting one utility and almost nailing a second (there were three such businesses in addition to utilities on the public or non profit side).
Yes, Enron and other players manipulated the market. But we need to remember that the market was designed to reward such market manipulation.
Another group of markets with similar behavior are the carbon credit exchanges in Europe. Because of the hard cap on the credits allotted for emissions, there either are more credits than emissions or less. In the former case, emission credits are low value. In the latter case, the high inelasticity of supply drives up prices and encourages market manipulation.
After all, if you can buy a lot of credits early in the year for cheap and then sell them to desperate coal power generators and other industries near the end of the year, then you can make a bit of coin, even if you can't get rid of all the credits you bought.
Anyway, when that market melts down, you'll know why.
It's tiresome to see all these accusations against deregulation by the painfully ignorant. Deregulation can be done poorly, such as the California energy crisis or the firesale of Russian gas properties to Yeltsin cronies. Or it can be done well. One doesn't see such drama in telecommunications or passenger air travel, for example.
In our current world, there is no need to becoming a dolphin.
For you. You can't say the same for anyone else. As to the alleged confusion of want versus need, I think it's a simple matter of degree of desire, a need is just a want that someone really wants badly.
It simply means it encompasses the current level of standards.
Which in turn is an obfuscation for "we'll have a bureaucracy decide what you want or need". Having everyone pay for their own healthcare is just as much a "current level of standards" as that.
When you work a full-time job, it doesn't mean you work 24-hours a day. It means you work the complete standardized allotment of hours.
Which , given the semantics context of comparing it to "full medical care", you should wonder how that phrase, "full-time job" came about and who gets to change it. Currently, it's defined by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (and analogous institutions throughout the world) as working 35 or more hours. The recent medical bill, the PPACA or Obamacare defines it as 30 or more hours.
I think it'd be interesting to graph official uses of "full-time employment" by year. Especially, given the official shrinking of the full-time work week in Europe. Seems to me that "full" is gradually becoming less full over time.
I believe we will see similar degeneration of the "current level of standards" defined by "full medical care" for similar reasons. Just as people don't want to work more hours in a week, they want more medical care. And there are various forces in society willing to at least pretend to make that happen, no matter how impractical it turns out to be. So I think we'll see "full" become less full over time in medical care just as it is for work weeks.
This is where I will plug Plato's Allegory of the Cave, knowing full well that you won't read it.
I already have. Here, the idea is that everyone is in a cave looking at shadows on the wall. Someone realizes, "hey, we're looking at shadows on a cave wall." I guess he then goes strolling out of the cave into the sunlight. It's supposed to be an allegory for how knowledge can enlighten us.
But I see this story, as you use it now, as a fantasy to enforce your delusions. It also places more weight on the power of knowledge than it deserves. For the implementation of such knowledge is as important as the knowledge itself. For example, what would be the point of realizing you are in this allegorical cave, if say, you couldn't do anything about it? Watching shadows on the wall becomes the only game in town whether you're aware of it or not.
Your reaction exactly matches a statement in "The Allegory of the Cave" by the way.
You do realize that Plato was something of a dick, don't you? Of course, it's very similar because it's a response to the same sort of rhetorical games that are being played here. People get tired of these obsessed rants.
Here, I, being trapped in the "Cave", can't determine if you have some special perception or knowledge. But I can see that you can't argue your way out of a paper bag unless you get to pick the paper bag ahead of time (here, your rant about my "delusions" and imaginary double standards rather than a discussion of the actual post I made). That indicates to me that you probably don't have any special grasp of reality or knowledge to share with me.
Your words would sting, if you knew how to argue. When you start a discussion by making up stuff about what other people say and believe, you immediately become irrelevant
Of course, this ignores how just trying to establish a democracy is difficult without violence.
If you have to resort to violence, killing hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of people (to look at estimated body counts in Chinese revolutions) in the process, in order to change your society, then it is inherently a violent society (due both to the violent response to any desire for change and the obvious need behind such desires that caused revolutionaries to resort to such bloodshed).
For example, consider this quote from Wikipedia on a hairstyle known as the "queue".
The queue was a specific male hairstyle worn by the Manchus from central Manchuria and later imposed on the Han Chinese during the Qing dynasty.[1][2][3] The hairstyle consisted of the hair on the front of the head being shaved off above the temples every ten days and the rest of the hair braided into a long pigtail.
The hairstyle was compulsory on all males and the penalty for not having it was execution as it was considered treason. In the early 1910s, after the fall of the Qing dynasty, the Chinese no longer had to wear it. Some, such as Zhang Xun, still did as a tradition, but most of them abandoned it after the last Emperor of China, Puyi, cut his queue in 1922.
This is the sort of law peaceful Chinese cultures came up with in the absence of nasty European ideas.
Sure, and the allies they have available at the time were the Soviets/Europeans (the US was still trying to stay out of it at the time, this was before Pearl Harbor), who gave them European ideas, such as communism. So even if it wasn't Mao who ended up in power, the same violent influence from Europe would have crept into China.
What violent influence? There's no cause and effect. Even if Communism wasn't present, you'd still have a bitter and bloody struggle between warlords with extensive banditry in the background. This is a common pattern throughout Chinese history: brutal empires punctuated by periods of warring kingdoms.
And why didn't that work the same way with Gandhi in India? He was exposed to the same violent ideas and as I noted, he had European allies as well.
Well, I think it is. I think anyone who *ahem* ignores it are not particularly useful or relevant to talk to, so this will be my last response to you unless you demonstrate some other incentive for me to reply.
I think you'd be better served by understanding the flaw in implying an idea is violent because it is European. The flush toilet is as European an idea as Communism. It didn't result in the deaths of hundreds of millions.
I think you are being overly, how should I say generous, by interpreting "full medical care" to mean "we will do anything and everything we can to cure someone of any disease that they have at any time".
What other definition makes sense? It's not "full" if someone will stop giving care at some point. That becomes limited, not full, medical care.
You could argue that this is an economic decision, where they are making a call to not treat the individual because it will cost too much money for not enough return in quality of life. But it isn't a purely monetary decision. It doesn't revolve around money
And I would be right to do so. Why do you think that economics is merely about monetary decisions? Economics is the study of systems and processes for allocating resources to wants. Money-based markets are a large category of such things, but they aren't the only game in town. Any system of allocating health care, even if it's based on a touchie feelie consideration of "quality of life", inherently makes economic decisions.
But it seems as if you are claiming that we have unlimited needs for medical care and thus requires unlimited funds.
I merely state the obvious. We do have unlimited needs for medical care and I'll explain my reasoning below.
I disagree that we have unlimited needs. Ultimately, the biggest constraint is time. There are only so many health care professionals and only so much time that is available to treat and be treated. I could spend all my time going to doctors to get treated for whatever ailment-of-the-day I come up with it, but it comes at an opportunity cost of me working, sleeping, recreating, etc.
Constraints aren't needs or wants. And this sort of constraint is at odds with the label of "full medical care".
I find it interesting that when you actually have to explain what you think "full medical care" is, you immediately devolve into vague "quality of life" discussion without any consideration of how society is going to support that.
Then when you're trying to argue against the unlimited nature of the wants for health care, you finally start mentioning a few of those real world constraints, but in an erroneous context.
For example, do you really believe that we would want the so-called "return in quality of life" rather than permanently youthful and healthy bodies (with say, an honorable exit for those who do not wish to continue to live). The latter sounds a lot better to me than merely having a "good" health care trajectory that ends with my early demise.
Or if we were able to reach that rather huge goal, it wouldn't be the end. A large portion would want to look prettier, be stronger, smarter, etc than the next person. That's an arms race without limits. Others might have extreme health care goals, such as becoming a dolphin or being able to live in hard vacuum.
And of course, everyone would want to be able to recover from most accidental death, say by storing human memory on computer and downloading those memories into a clone body when the bad happens.
There's nothing "full" about your idea of medical care. It's one of those perverse euphemisms that taints modern thought.
"By your reasoning", invisible pink unicorns thrive on green moon cheese. Arguments are so much more interesting when you don't even remotely consider the other person's side of the argument.
For your information, that is not my reasoning. The rest of your post is a complete waste of your time.
I merely note that we would, even in Japan, see a similar number of deaths to what was observed even in the absence of a nuclear accident. I find this sort of claim to be rather dishonest because it is a particularly transparent form of confirmation bias.
I have seen a similar trend lately, where comments questioning or blaming our Government are modded troll or flamebait.
Let me guess. "Our government" is the US, right?
I'm surprised it's taken so long. There have been many articles about China or other relatively unpopular governments over the years and it seems to me that almost every one of those stories has in the comments an anti-US bash in it, often coupled with the claim that somehow the US is equivalent in behavior.
So you think this downmodding is a result of some insidious groupthink. I think rather that it's that enough moderators have gotten sick and tired of the pollution.
Philosophical Question: Do those 1000 deaths not count because they were not directly due to radiation poisoning?
How about a practical question? How many of those "attributed" 1000 deaths actually did happen as a result of the evacuation from the nuclear accident as opposed to other causes? I wager it's a lot closer to 0 than to 1000.
And let us not forget that a national-scale disaster, an earthquake and crippling tsunami happened during that time period.
About 90 per cent were people older than 66
In other words, people who probably would have died during the time period in question actually did die during the time period in question.
I mean, they wouldn't have happened if there had been no meltdown...
You know this how? What could have happened is one of the hardest things to observe in science, precisely because it didn't actually happen.
All nuclear accidents can be prevented with enough planning and prevention.
Sure. Don't have nuclear power. That's how you prevent most nuclear accidents. But if you want an industrial civilization, which most people do, then there are drawbacks, such as nuclear accidents or the variety of drawbacks to other choices for power generation.
I think it's a case of having blinders on to focus on one sort of risk while ignoring the rest. We can do the same for other sorts of risks, such as automobile traffic accidents. In order to completely prevent automobile accidents, simply don't have automobiles. But is society willing to go with the trade offs associated with the choice?
I think it would be educational, eye-opening, and yield a similar degree of propaganda benefit for the Israelis (perhaps you haven't heard of the variety of Holocaust museums which are just classier versions of this idea).
Maybe they could do that next. I do wonder why you think it'd somehow be sauce for the gander.
The context was about China's overall history, not just the recent few decades.
Any context that ignores what the Chinese society, culture, and government actually does now, is not a particularly useful or relevant context.
Missing the forest for the trees. Those bloody conflicts were revolutions. The tree of liberty has to be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants and martyrs. That doesn't make the culture violent.
Actually, yes, it does. For example, democracies as a rule don't require a bloody revolt in order to change the form of government.
But if you want to talk about Communist/today's China, it's worth noting that Communist started as an invention of Europe.
No, I don't think it's worth mentioning.
Mao might not have risen to power without help from Stalin. You could even say Stalin/USSR was the Big Brother (pun intended) in the relationship.
After the Long March, Stalin wasn't. Mao established sole leadership over the Chinese Communists after this point and Soviet influence in the Chinese civil war was greatly curtailed. And I would imagine that any competent military leader whether relatively peaceful or not will figure out how to obtain allies in a conflict.
So it's not particularly interesting that Mao had allies even European ones. Attila the Hun had European allies too. So did Gandhi.
The government's job in funding scientific research is to allocate money and get the fuck out of the way.
I think we should skip the "allocate money" and move on to "get the fuck out of the way". When you're allocating money without responsibility, you create moral hazard. Researchers and engineers, who could have done something productive for society, now are angling for public funds simply because it's easy money.
I think we will be, and are becoming, a poorer world for this. Perhaps the trend will turn back again.
So what does the government do in this area that is any better? I think we're a poorer world because a bunch of incompetents are deciding what to do with a large share of society's wealth.
I would assume you are alluding to serious, old age/end of life scenarios where people spend millions of dollars trying to prolong life six months because of some devastating form of cancer.
Of course, I am. That scenario rears its ugly head quite frequently and that is the sort of problem that one has to deal with and often write off in order to have a functioning health care system.
Ultimately, I think looking at some sort of ROI shrinks humans down to some sort of numbers game which you can't ever accurately measure
Compared to what? You need to play that "numbers game", what we traditionally call "economics", because you have limited resources and unlimited needs. No one can have "full medical care" because that is impossible to support.
So, you're in favor of it so long as you can make a profit.
I find that when others are telling me what to think, they tend to forget to be more descriptive. So what am I in favor of? And where's that profit I'm supposed to get?
Nevermind that it's the profit motive that drives the obscene cost of healthcare in the USA. Why should we fix the actual problem, anyway?
Whoa, let's not go crazy and actually discuss fixing the problem. The thread was doing fine until you brought that up. Of course, if you're actually going to fix health care and such for real, then things that can't be afforded like the fantastical "full medical care" have to go.
They also had a good culture that did not engage in much territorial expansion, like the Europeans did.
China's history is chock full of territorial expansion. That's how it was created in the first place and how most subsequent empires became established, for example. And it has modern military adventures such as the conquest of Tibet or the overthrow of French Indochina.
The big dispute was over Chinese trade with foreigners.
For a few brief decades. China has had many other disputes over the millennia.
The big question, is who won the Cultural Revolution?
The Culturan Revolution wasn't a "dispute", but rather the stamping of ants, 1984-style, to show who was in charge. The ants lost. The ones doing the stamping won.
Don't confuse "culture" with "capability". China in the past didn't have the capability to project its power very far. It was able to win wars in Sri Lanka for example at extraordinary cost. Today it like every other major country has global reach. I believe it will be different and the culture will turn out to be not all that different after all.
One of those things is not like the other. There's only so much you can eat. And only so many places you can live. But "full medical care" is a bottomless pit of need compared to those other two.
There's no way that the US or the world as a whole can provide "full medical care" for a single person, much less the entire population of the US. That's because no matter how much you spend or how much resources you commit, the person dies in the end. So why should we spend so much money on a service that is guaranteed to fail? This just sounds to me like theater not actual benefit to society.
I might be interested in limited medical care, but there, I'd limit it to things that have a substantial return on investment like vaccinations or treatments for curable medical conditions in young people.
Like I said, the new reality where grant givers are making larger but fewer grants.
The new reality is the same as the old reality. You claimed that large organizations have better overhead and accountability. The behavior of grant givers (especially, ones burning other peoples' money like governments) doesn't give us an indication of whether that statement is true or not. My take is that the statement is in error.
Instead, to me this centralization effect sounds like how in so much of R&D, public funding drove out private. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few decades, there are people arguing that charity needs public subsidy (beyond the current tax status of donations) because no one is willing to donate their time or money otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that using the courts or California national guard to stabilize the energy supply would have been viewed as a left-wing assault on corporate freedom.
The problem is that a couple of simple legal things would have done the job. Either allow the two power companies, Consolidated Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric to charge their customers what the utilities actually have to pay for electricity. Or remove the obligation to buy on the spot market. These were not done.
One doesn't need to resort to illegal actions in order to fix this particular problem.
A 'market' for a natural monopoly.
Delivery of power to a particular wall socket may be a natural monopoly, but power generation is not.
A lot of markets have a limited supply
All markets do. And that's the point of markets pretty much - to match that limited supply with the buyers that want the goods or services the most.
When Enron was allowed to add future sales to the balance sheet without adding future expenses, a demand bubble was created.
Nonsense. A "demand bubble" was created because the end customers in a large portion of California were completely insulated from the cost of the electricity they were purchasing.
In normal markets where the consumer pays most of the price of the good in question, price fixing can still work (the monopoly price is generally higher than the competitive price except in rare situations, such as having only one customer, the monopsopy), but demand goes down as a result of the increase in price. Not so, when the customer pays the same amount no matter what's happening on the market.
The problem of "melting down" is not that goods are scarce, but that certain market participants are under sufficient obligation that they can be forced to pay a lot for the market good. A portion of the demand is very inelastic in the cases above. If you can reduce supply to below that illelastic demand, then you will see a substantial rise in the cost of the good.
For example, European coal power generators can't renege on years-long power production contracts just because the next couple of months of power generation have unusually costly carbon credits attached. They can purchase and redistribute alternative supply (such as renewable power or nuclear), but that only becomes attractive, if the price of carbon credits go up a lot.
It's a lot of temporary turmoil that happens only because the markets sell a fixed number of carbon credits.
The accounting games you refer to have caused a lot of trouble in their own right, but they aren't responsible for the deregulation messes.
Deregulation has caused us nothing but trouble. Remember that Enron crisis a decade or so ago in CA?
I take it you don't realize that the state of California deliberately broke the electricity market in question? Electricity utilities were required to buy a portion of their electricity at any price on the spot market. It didn't take the so-called "smartest people in the room" (Enron) to see that was going to cause lucrative trouble.
And once this flaw was revealed in the summer of 2000, the then governor, Gray Davis let this flaw run on for about six to seven months, bankrupting one utility and almost nailing a second (there were three such businesses in addition to utilities on the public or non profit side).
Yes, Enron and other players manipulated the market. But we need to remember that the market was designed to reward such market manipulation.
Another group of markets with similar behavior are the carbon credit exchanges in Europe. Because of the hard cap on the credits allotted for emissions, there either are more credits than emissions or less. In the former case, emission credits are low value. In the latter case, the high inelasticity of supply drives up prices and encourages market manipulation.
After all, if you can buy a lot of credits early in the year for cheap and then sell them to desperate coal power generators and other industries near the end of the year, then you can make a bit of coin, even if you can't get rid of all the credits you bought.
Anyway, when that market melts down, you'll know why.
It's tiresome to see all these accusations against deregulation by the painfully ignorant. Deregulation can be done poorly, such as the California energy crisis or the firesale of Russian gas properties to Yeltsin cronies. Or it can be done well. One doesn't see such drama in telecommunications or passenger air travel, for example.
In our current world, there is no need to becoming a dolphin.
For you. You can't say the same for anyone else. As to the alleged confusion of want versus need, I think it's a simple matter of degree of desire, a need is just a want that someone really wants badly.
It simply means it encompasses the current level of standards.
Which in turn is an obfuscation for "we'll have a bureaucracy decide what you want or need". Having everyone pay for their own healthcare is just as much a "current level of standards" as that.
When you work a full-time job, it doesn't mean you work 24-hours a day. It means you work the complete standardized allotment of hours.
Which , given the semantics context of comparing it to "full medical care", you should wonder how that phrase, "full-time job" came about and who gets to change it. Currently, it's defined by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (and analogous institutions throughout the world) as working 35 or more hours. The recent medical bill, the PPACA or Obamacare defines it as 30 or more hours.
I think it'd be interesting to graph official uses of "full-time employment" by year. Especially, given the official shrinking of the full-time work week in Europe. Seems to me that "full" is gradually becoming less full over time.
I believe we will see similar degeneration of the "current level of standards" defined by "full medical care" for similar reasons. Just as people don't want to work more hours in a week, they want more medical care. And there are various forces in society willing to at least pretend to make that happen, no matter how impractical it turns out to be. So I think we'll see "full" become less full over time in medical care just as it is for work weeks.
This is where I will plug Plato's Allegory of the Cave, knowing full well that you won't read it.
I already have. Here, the idea is that everyone is in a cave looking at shadows on the wall. Someone realizes, "hey, we're looking at shadows on a cave wall." I guess he then goes strolling out of the cave into the sunlight. It's supposed to be an allegory for how knowledge can enlighten us.
But I see this story, as you use it now, as a fantasy to enforce your delusions. It also places more weight on the power of knowledge than it deserves. For the implementation of such knowledge is as important as the knowledge itself. For example, what would be the point of realizing you are in this allegorical cave, if say, you couldn't do anything about it? Watching shadows on the wall becomes the only game in town whether you're aware of it or not.
Your reaction exactly matches a statement in "The Allegory of the Cave" by the way.
You do realize that Plato was something of a dick, don't you? Of course, it's very similar because it's a response to the same sort of rhetorical games that are being played here. People get tired of these obsessed rants.
Here, I, being trapped in the "Cave", can't determine if you have some special perception or knowledge. But I can see that you can't argue your way out of a paper bag unless you get to pick the paper bag ahead of time (here, your rant about my "delusions" and imaginary double standards rather than a discussion of the actual post I made). That indicates to me that you probably don't have any special grasp of reality or knowledge to share with me.
Your words would sting, if you knew how to argue. When you start a discussion by making up stuff about what other people say and believe, you immediately become irrelevant
Of course, this ignores how just trying to establish a democracy is difficult without violence.
If you have to resort to violence, killing hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of people (to look at estimated body counts in Chinese revolutions) in the process, in order to change your society, then it is inherently a violent society (due both to the violent response to any desire for change and the obvious need behind such desires that caused revolutionaries to resort to such bloodshed).
For example, consider this quote from Wikipedia on a hairstyle known as the "queue".
The queue was a specific male hairstyle worn by the Manchus from central Manchuria and later imposed on the Han Chinese during the Qing dynasty.[1][2][3] The hairstyle consisted of the hair on the front of the head being shaved off above the temples every ten days and the rest of the hair braided into a long pigtail.
The hairstyle was compulsory on all males and the penalty for not having it was execution as it was considered treason. In the early 1910s, after the fall of the Qing dynasty, the Chinese no longer had to wear it. Some, such as Zhang Xun, still did as a tradition, but most of them abandoned it after the last Emperor of China, Puyi, cut his queue in 1922.
This is the sort of law peaceful Chinese cultures came up with in the absence of nasty European ideas .
Sure, and the allies they have available at the time were the Soviets/Europeans (the US was still trying to stay out of it at the time, this was before Pearl Harbor), who gave them European ideas, such as communism. So even if it wasn't Mao who ended up in power, the same violent influence from Europe would have crept into China.
What violent influence? There's no cause and effect. Even if Communism wasn't present, you'd still have a bitter and bloody struggle between warlords with extensive banditry in the background. This is a common pattern throughout Chinese history: brutal empires punctuated by periods of warring kingdoms.
And why didn't that work the same way with Gandhi in India? He was exposed to the same violent ideas and as I noted, he had European allies as well.
Well, I think it is. I think anyone who *ahem* ignores it are not particularly useful or relevant to talk to, so this will be my last response to you unless you demonstrate some other incentive for me to reply.
I think you'd be better served by understanding the flaw in implying an idea is violent because it is European. The flush toilet is as European an idea as Communism. It didn't result in the deaths of hundreds of millions.
I think you are being overly, how should I say generous, by interpreting "full medical care" to mean "we will do anything and everything we can to cure someone of any disease that they have at any time".
What other definition makes sense? It's not "full" if someone will stop giving care at some point. That becomes limited, not full, medical care.
You could argue that this is an economic decision, where they are making a call to not treat the individual because it will cost too much money for not enough return in quality of life. But it isn't a purely monetary decision. It doesn't revolve around money
And I would be right to do so. Why do you think that economics is merely about monetary decisions? Economics is the study of systems and processes for allocating resources to wants. Money-based markets are a large category of such things, but they aren't the only game in town. Any system of allocating health care, even if it's based on a touchie feelie consideration of "quality of life", inherently makes economic decisions.
But it seems as if you are claiming that we have unlimited needs for medical care and thus requires unlimited funds.
I merely state the obvious. We do have unlimited needs for medical care and I'll explain my reasoning below.
I disagree that we have unlimited needs. Ultimately, the biggest constraint is time. There are only so many health care professionals and only so much time that is available to treat and be treated. I could spend all my time going to doctors to get treated for whatever ailment-of-the-day I come up with it, but it comes at an opportunity cost of me working, sleeping, recreating, etc.
Constraints aren't needs or wants. And this sort of constraint is at odds with the label of "full medical care".
I find it interesting that when you actually have to explain what you think "full medical care" is, you immediately devolve into vague "quality of life" discussion without any consideration of how society is going to support that.
Then when you're trying to argue against the unlimited nature of the wants for health care, you finally start mentioning a few of those real world constraints, but in an erroneous context.
For example, do you really believe that we would want the so-called "return in quality of life" rather than permanently youthful and healthy bodies (with say, an honorable exit for those who do not wish to continue to live). The latter sounds a lot better to me than merely having a "good" health care trajectory that ends with my early demise.
Or if we were able to reach that rather huge goal, it wouldn't be the end. A large portion would want to look prettier, be stronger, smarter, etc than the next person. That's an arms race without limits. Others might have extreme health care goals, such as becoming a dolphin or being able to live in hard vacuum.
And of course, everyone would want to be able to recover from most accidental death, say by storing human memory on computer and downloading those memories into a clone body when the bad happens.
There's nothing "full" about your idea of medical care. It's one of those perverse euphemisms that taints modern thought.
By your reasoning
"By your reasoning", invisible pink unicorns thrive on green moon cheese. Arguments are so much more interesting when you don't even remotely consider the other person's side of the argument.
For your information, that is not my reasoning. The rest of your post is a complete waste of your time.
I merely note that we would, even in Japan, see a similar number of deaths to what was observed even in the absence of a nuclear accident. I find this sort of claim to be rather dishonest because it is a particularly transparent form of confirmation bias.
That has to be one of the most condescending posts I have ever seen in the last 15 years on Slashdot.
Sure, you have. I've been reading Slashdot for a tad bit less and I have read more condescending posts. It's just not that hard.
And anyone willing to get in a shooting war with China over espionage can manufacture whatever pretext they need.
I have seen a similar trend lately, where comments questioning or blaming our Government are modded troll or flamebait.
Let me guess. "Our government" is the US, right?
I'm surprised it's taken so long. There have been many articles about China or other relatively unpopular governments over the years and it seems to me that almost every one of those stories has in the comments an anti-US bash in it, often coupled with the claim that somehow the US is equivalent in behavior.
So you think this downmodding is a result of some insidious groupthink. I think rather that it's that enough moderators have gotten sick and tired of the pollution.
Philosophical Question: Do those 1000 deaths not count because they were not directly due to radiation poisoning?
How about a practical question? How many of those "attributed" 1000 deaths actually did happen as a result of the evacuation from the nuclear accident as opposed to other causes? I wager it's a lot closer to 0 than to 1000.
And let us not forget that a national-scale disaster, an earthquake and crippling tsunami happened during that time period.
About 90 per cent were people older than 66
In other words, people who probably would have died during the time period in question actually did die during the time period in question.
I mean, they wouldn't have happened if there had been no meltdown...
You know this how? What could have happened is one of the hardest things to observe in science, precisely because it didn't actually happen.
All nuclear accidents can be prevented with enough planning and prevention.
Sure. Don't have nuclear power. That's how you prevent most nuclear accidents. But if you want an industrial civilization, which most people do, then there are drawbacks, such as nuclear accidents or the variety of drawbacks to other choices for power generation.
I think it's a case of having blinders on to focus on one sort of risk while ignoring the rest. We can do the same for other sorts of risks, such as automobile traffic accidents. In order to completely prevent automobile accidents, simply don't have automobiles. But is society willing to go with the trade offs associated with the choice?
I think it would be educational, eye-opening, and yield a similar degree of propaganda benefit for the Israelis (perhaps you haven't heard of the variety of Holocaust museums which are just classier versions of this idea).
Maybe they could do that next. I do wonder why you think it'd somehow be sauce for the gander.
The context was about China's overall history, not just the recent few decades.
Any context that ignores what the Chinese society, culture, and government actually does now, is not a particularly useful or relevant context.
Missing the forest for the trees. Those bloody conflicts were revolutions. The tree of liberty has to be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants and martyrs. That doesn't make the culture violent.
Actually, yes, it does. For example, democracies as a rule don't require a bloody revolt in order to change the form of government.
But if you want to talk about Communist/today's China, it's worth noting that Communist started as an invention of Europe.
No, I don't think it's worth mentioning.
Mao might not have risen to power without help from Stalin. You could even say Stalin/USSR was the Big Brother (pun intended) in the relationship.
After the Long March, Stalin wasn't. Mao established sole leadership over the Chinese Communists after this point and Soviet influence in the Chinese civil war was greatly curtailed. And I would imagine that any competent military leader whether relatively peaceful or not will figure out how to obtain allies in a conflict.
So it's not particularly interesting that Mao had allies even European ones. Attila the Hun had European allies too. So did Gandhi.
The government's job in funding scientific research is to allocate money and get the fuck out of the way.
I think we should skip the "allocate money" and move on to "get the fuck out of the way". When you're allocating money without responsibility, you create moral hazard. Researchers and engineers, who could have done something productive for society, now are angling for public funds simply because it's easy money.
I think we will be, and are becoming, a poorer world for this. Perhaps the trend will turn back again.
So what does the government do in this area that is any better? I think we're a poorer world because a bunch of incompetents are deciding what to do with a large share of society's wealth.
I would assume you are alluding to serious, old age/end of life scenarios where people spend millions of dollars trying to prolong life six months because of some devastating form of cancer.
Of course, I am. That scenario rears its ugly head quite frequently and that is the sort of problem that one has to deal with and often write off in order to have a functioning health care system.
Ultimately, I think looking at some sort of ROI shrinks humans down to some sort of numbers game which you can't ever accurately measure
Compared to what? You need to play that "numbers game", what we traditionally call "economics", because you have limited resources and unlimited needs. No one can have "full medical care" because that is impossible to support.
So, you're in favor of it so long as you can make a profit.
I find that when others are telling me what to think, they tend to forget to be more descriptive. So what am I in favor of? And where's that profit I'm supposed to get?
Nevermind that it's the profit motive that drives the obscene cost of healthcare in the USA. Why should we fix the actual problem, anyway?
Whoa, let's not go crazy and actually discuss fixing the problem. The thread was doing fine until you brought that up. Of course, if you're actually going to fix health care and such for real, then things that can't be afforded like the fantastical "full medical care" have to go.
In my view, Chinese culture is indeed less violent, as the Mandate of Heaven can be revoked from the ruling emperor based on performance.
Look at the estimated body counts for such Chinese revolutions. They are among the bloodiest conflicts in history.
In other words, there's a greater separation of church (culture) and state.
The Communist party controls China. That's the religion of China today. So there isn't a separation of church and state.
Of course, the state can always try to be its own religion so it doesn't have to share with the church.
An approach that China is currently employing.
They also had a good culture that did not engage in much territorial expansion, like the Europeans did.
China's history is chock full of territorial expansion. That's how it was created in the first place and how most subsequent empires became established, for example. And it has modern military adventures such as the conquest of Tibet or the overthrow of French Indochina.
The big dispute was over Chinese trade with foreigners.
For a few brief decades. China has had many other disputes over the millennia.
The big question, is who won the Cultural Revolution?
The Culturan Revolution wasn't a "dispute", but rather the stamping of ants, 1984-style, to show who was in charge. The ants lost. The ones doing the stamping won.
Don't confuse "culture" with "capability". China in the past didn't have the capability to project its power very far. It was able to win wars in Sri Lanka for example at extraordinary cost. Today it like every other major country has global reach. I believe it will be different and the culture will turn out to be not all that different after all.
and provide full medical care
One of those things is not like the other. There's only so much you can eat. And only so many places you can live. But "full medical care" is a bottomless pit of need compared to those other two.
There's no way that the US or the world as a whole can provide "full medical care" for a single person, much less the entire population of the US. That's because no matter how much you spend or how much resources you commit, the person dies in the end. So why should we spend so much money on a service that is guaranteed to fail? This just sounds to me like theater not actual benefit to society.
I might be interested in limited medical care, but there, I'd limit it to things that have a substantial return on investment like vaccinations or treatments for curable medical conditions in young people.
Like I said, the new reality where grant givers are making larger but fewer grants.
The new reality is the same as the old reality. You claimed that large organizations have better overhead and accountability. The behavior of grant givers (especially, ones burning other peoples' money like governments) doesn't give us an indication of whether that statement is true or not. My take is that the statement is in error.
Instead, to me this centralization effect sounds like how in so much of R&D, public funding drove out private. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few decades, there are people arguing that charity needs public subsidy (beyond the current tax status of donations) because no one is willing to donate their time or money otherwise.