Something I don't understand is why the socialized medicine discussion always seems to be divided into "fully for" and "fully against". The vast majority of medical expense is incurred in end-of-life medicine and fighting really serious problems - i.e. it benefits a tiny portion of the potentially productive population. We could socialize just the front-end at a tiny expense to get most of the social benefits - make initial diagnoses cheap/free (basic low-tech medication is already fairly cheap) and you get a major leg up on nipping pandemics in the bud, as well as catching many more serious problems while they're still in the early stages and relatively cheap to cure/mitigate if the patient can raise the money.
Ok. What benefits are there to this? All you are doing is looking for problems. And once you find problems, do the treatments for those problems fall under the "routine" healthcare that should be "accessible" or the "sucks to be you" healthcare that shouldn't be accessible to anyone not willing to pay (either directly or through insurance)?
My impression has been that state-paid medical check ups and tests are a prelude to state-paid medical care. Because these are procedures that find problems. And a person unable or unwilling to pay for their own routine medical check up, probably has a fair probability that they can't or won't pay for their own much more expensive medical care either.
And in the past, there's never been a problem with people holding out in a pandemic. Rather the problem has been that too many of them come in and overwhelm hospitals.
I think a better approach to this would be having passive sensors screen for infectious biological material wherever it is likely to appear (eg, sniffing air and surfaces at airports and mass transit terminals). That's the only thing that is likely to catch highly infectious diseases considerably faster than visits to doctors would.
"Actually, no." Sorry, I don't see why you bothered making that argument. if it is routine, then it is available enough to be accessible.
Kings and nobles "routinely" had nice clothes, travel between their numerous mansions, have servants, etc. Those things aren't exactly accessible to everyone.
And as a result, it wasn't "routine" for just anyone to have them.
It's better to argue that just because it's routine, doesn't mean it has to be accessible. Just tell the poor that they aren't entitled to anything, and you aren't gonna pay for them. Much more direct and honest
I didn't make that observation (of the last two sentences) because that was not the point of my post. I was just remarking on the inherent flaws of the single sentence I quoted.
Now, don't get me wrong, I think no one is entitled to health care. But I don't see the debate helped by claiming that routine, accessible care somehow is not, merely because someone charges for it.
In other words, they play the game better than you think they should. There's no such thing as "cheating", but there is such a thing as consequences. Things like public sanitation and plastic wrap just have at best minor negative consequences. Nothing is going to be put out because a few less parasites are feeding on humans. Growing as if one could physically grow exponentially forever, does have significant negative consequences.
Excuse me? The laws of reality are to our knowledge exactly the same in space as they are on Earth. So once someone demonstrates that you can refine metals on Earth, then that is sufficient to demonstrate that those metals can be refined elsewhere.
It may turn out to be a very long time before there is enough demand for refined metals to justify making them in space. The economics are harder here than the actual physics.
The merely moderately educated tend to confuse socialism with the welfare state. The historical fact that the modern welfare state was devised by conservatives (most notably by Bismarck) as an anti-socialist tool,
There is no confusion here. What you are saying is that the welfare state was an early win for socialists. Or does anyone believe that Bismarck and other "conservatives" would have spent even a bit of brain power contemplating the "welfare state", if it weren't for the pressure from socialist movements of the time?
Given how bitterly controversial the idea that Americans really ought to have access to boring old routine healthcare is, I wouldn't be optimistic about our level of preparedness...
Let's consider the flaws in this one sentence. First, if it isn't accessible, then it can't be routine. Second, just because you have to pay for something doesn't mean it's somehow not accessible. And third, there's not a correlation between the quibbling over who pays for personal healthcare and public sanitation/national defense needs. That annual state-paid mammogram isn't going to help you discover or defend against a bioengineered influenza virus.
I mean a billion smokers living today, certainly don't count in your warped world. But that's what the adults here, are talking about./quote>
As they shouldn't. Smoking is voluntary. There's a vast difference between selling goods that are used in a voluntary activity that happens to shorten your life a little and having someone kill you directly or by taking away something you really need (like food).
Saying "a corporation is not a person" is a tautology that is irrelevant. Corporations are people
Perhaps you ought to deal with this substantial confusion before wasting my time any more? I keep hearing the same thing. Corporations are people due to identical "treatment" under some "forum". But when I point out that corporations aren't actually treated as people in those "forums", my statement is a tautology that somehow never finds its way into your logic. Why say something is trivially true and then repeated assert its opposite?
They are treated as such. Splitting semantic hairs over a set legal precept, isn't convincing.
It doesn't have to be convincing, just merely correct. The idea of corporate personhood is widely acknowledged by the courts to be a legal fiction, a mechanism when dealing with corporations for resolving issues (such as who to sue in a breach of contract or whether certain speech is constitutionally protected) that would otherwise be unresolved.
You do. The fact the government directors are a proxy for seasonal corporate interests, doesn't change the nature of the mandates.
In a world with weaker government, there would be no such, so-called "proxies".
This libor scandal is the real deal. It's as dirty as it gets. The more you know, the more pissed off you will be about it. Instead of saying "oh yeah, well, this other imaginary stuff is worse" try a little research. This is the kind of cheating that makes even a libertarian like me say "maybe we should have some more government oversight of these fundamentally dishonest weasels."
I think the real question is who decided on using LIBOR in the first place? I'm sure there are other similar self-reported indices out there where the reporting entities can profit from tweaking their numbers (for example, governments' reporting of inflation, GDP, and employment). And I'm sure that the majority of such self-reported indices are indeed tweaked in a way that profits those reporting the numbers. It's just a pretty standard conflict of interest, resolved as these things usually are.
A true libertarian would understand those structural problems rather than attempt to slap the bandaid of "government oversight" on top. Reducing the conflicts of interest are a more effective solution than having corrupt government agencies watch harder.
The Fed has been given a tough job and they have been doing an honest job in an open fashion.
"Open". Then who was on the other side of these Fed bond purchases? There's no report out there that describes what the Fed buys and who they bought it from.
The Libor situation - that just greedy basters manipulating the market for their own pocket book. I am sadden so few people went to jail in the last crisis. I hope that is rectified here.
Given how LIBOR is set up with banks self-reporting their activities, only a fool would be surprised at what happened. I think the real crime was to rely on these indices so much.
How about you just stop being stupid? That's my response to reading your post. Sure, we need some degree of governance to prevent Somalia-like conditions. That doesn't excuse your "far from perfect" government.
What is your bank providing you?
A bank is a place to store wealth and ease my monetary transactions. It's made my life a lot simpler. But you surely have used banks at one time or another and should understand the point of the bank. Anyone living in a modern society who has handled any sort of money should be able to answer this question for themselves. This is just another reason I think your post is quite stupid.
The advocates of limited government can point out many historical examples of governments that went out of control (classic examples such as the Wiemar Republic under the Nazis). You on the other hand haven't pointed to one case of corporate overstep due to limited government, though I guess you do imply that somehow the LIBOR scandal is supposed to be such a case.
My view is that I'd love to live in a world where the greatest threat comes from business rather than government.
Don't forget, companies are people my friend.
They aren't. Not even in the US. Amazing how so many people fly off the deep end due to a single US Supreme Court decision.
At that point the greatest threat to our liberty would be those ungovernable companies. They are too big to jail. They can do anything they want and you can't do anything about it./quote?
You can't do anything about it other than the obvious solutions from the legal ones such as lawsuits and boycotts to the illegal, such as sabotage and targeted assassination of business leaders.
So the "mandate" is a bit different? And what is the Federal Reserve doing that is actually in the best interest of "America" and long-term financial stability? Last I checked, their big thing was buying up trillions of dollars in bonds from banks that should be going through bankruptcy court. Deed doesn't seem to be matching mandate.
The Soviets never really had any significant long range sealift or logistics capability*, or the aircraft carrier capability to provide the cover and support such an invasion would require.
They would have had to make it. That would take a few years. The real problem was that invading a nuclear power never made sense. For example, it'd take a few years to build all that capability above and a few minutes to complete vaporize it. That's not a good return on investment.
What makes it unbelievable? The last glacial period happened. Very similar climate changes happened which are comparable to what is forecast over many centuries in climate models now. The fertile lands of Saskatchewan and the Dakotas of the US, were both under ice and later transitioned through tundra. This was at one point completely unproductive due to having a huge layer of ice, perhaps as much as a kilometer thick, on top of it.
And most of the work to make it productive farm land happened in a few short years.
Now, Saskatchewan (as well as Manitoba) is just south of part of the Canadian Shield, a huge nearly monolithic block of geology.The parts of the Shield which run through Ontario and Quebec (which are much further south) tend to be quite fertile as well. So that "not-to-awful" soil chemistry is there.
You can choose not to believe my evidence, but I think it's silly to do so.
It will take hundreds of years to make the peat bogs fertile enough to replace even a part of what is lost by AGW.
That hasn't been true in practice. There have been similar bogs throughout the US, for example, and they were drained and farmed much quicker than that, usually well within a human lifetime.
Also, we actually have good farming practices in South Africa, in fact we have some of the most sophisticated agricultural systems in the world. Of course someone as ignorant as you wouldn't know that, would you?
You mean, you used to. The desertification problem you allude to is an indication that things have changed.
Our problem is that much of our farming is in or near semi arid areas which will grow. Wine farming is already being affected, areas that have provided some of the best wines in the world are now becoming too hot to produce quality, and the winelands are, in essence moving, towards the coastal areas with cool breezes. But even that won't last long. It's possible the 300 year old wine industry in our country will not last out the century.
It's also possible that your claims are based on a few decades of data that don't properly reflect how climate is actually going to change.
But let's suppose you're correct here. You've already mentioned the adaption-based solution. Move the vineyards to where they are still producing quality grapes. If that's no longer in South Africa for some reason, then grow something else.
Now take your sneering ignorance, and shove it.
Oops, guess I didn't follow orders this time. Maybe you'll have better luck making silly demands some other time.
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Something I don't understand is why the socialized medicine discussion always seems to be divided into "fully for" and "fully against". The vast majority of medical expense is incurred in end-of-life medicine and fighting really serious problems - i.e. it benefits a tiny portion of the potentially productive population. We could socialize just the front-end at a tiny expense to get most of the social benefits - make initial diagnoses cheap/free (basic low-tech medication is already fairly cheap) and you get a major leg up on nipping pandemics in the bud, as well as catching many more serious problems while they're still in the early stages and relatively cheap to cure/mitigate if the patient can raise the money.
Ok. What benefits are there to this? All you are doing is looking for problems. And once you find problems, do the treatments for those problems fall under the "routine" healthcare that should be "accessible" or the "sucks to be you" healthcare that shouldn't be accessible to anyone not willing to pay (either directly or through insurance)?
My impression has been that state-paid medical check ups and tests are a prelude to state-paid medical care. Because these are procedures that find problems. And a person unable or unwilling to pay for their own routine medical check up, probably has a fair probability that they can't or won't pay for their own much more expensive medical care either.
And in the past, there's never been a problem with people holding out in a pandemic. Rather the problem has been that too many of them come in and overwhelm hospitals.
I think a better approach to this would be having passive sensors screen for infectious biological material wherever it is likely to appear (eg, sniffing air and surfaces at airports and mass transit terminals). That's the only thing that is likely to catch highly infectious diseases considerably faster than visits to doctors would.
Kings and nobles "routinely" had nice clothes, travel between their numerous mansions, have servants, etc. Those things aren't exactly accessible to everyone.
And as a result, it wasn't "routine" for just anyone to have them.
It's better to argue that just because it's routine, doesn't mean it has to be accessible. Just tell the poor that they aren't entitled to anything, and you aren't gonna pay for them. Much more direct and honest
I didn't make that observation (of the last two sentences) because that was not the point of my post. I was just remarking on the inherent flaws of the single sentence I quoted.
Now, don't get me wrong, I think no one is entitled to health care. But I don't see the debate helped by claiming that routine, accessible care somehow is not, merely because someone charges for it.
Well, geostationary orbit is about 250,000 km in circumference
25,000 km. Something 250,000 km would barely be in orbit around Earth (the L1 point of the Earth-Moon system bounces around 320,000 km)
In other words, they play the game better than you think they should. There's no such thing as "cheating", but there is such a thing as consequences. Things like public sanitation and plastic wrap just have at best minor negative consequences. Nothing is going to be put out because a few less parasites are feeding on humans. Growing as if one could physically grow exponentially forever, does have significant negative consequences.
and believe metals can be refined in space
Excuse me? The laws of reality are to our knowledge exactly the same in space as they are on Earth. So once someone demonstrates that you can refine metals on Earth, then that is sufficient to demonstrate that those metals can be refined elsewhere.
It may turn out to be a very long time before there is enough demand for refined metals to justify making them in space. The economics are harder here than the actual physics.
The merely moderately educated tend to confuse socialism with the welfare state. The historical fact that the modern welfare state was devised by conservatives (most notably by Bismarck) as an anti-socialist tool,
There is no confusion here. What you are saying is that the welfare state was an early win for socialists. Or does anyone believe that Bismarck and other "conservatives" would have spent even a bit of brain power contemplating the "welfare state", if it weren't for the pressure from socialist movements of the time?
Given how bitterly controversial the idea that Americans really ought to have access to boring old routine healthcare is, I wouldn't be optimistic about our level of preparedness...
Let's consider the flaws in this one sentence. First, if it isn't accessible, then it can't be routine. Second, just because you have to pay for something doesn't mean it's somehow not accessible. And third, there's not a correlation between the quibbling over who pays for personal healthcare and public sanitation/national defense needs. That annual state-paid mammogram isn't going to help you discover or defend against a bioengineered influenza virus.
I don't see names and amounts purchased listed there. Where are these important questions answered?
I mean a billion smokers living today, certainly don't count in your warped world. But that's what the adults here, are talking about./quote> As they shouldn't. Smoking is voluntary. There's a vast difference between selling goods that are used in a voluntary activity that happens to shorten your life a little and having someone kill you directly or by taking away something you really need (like food).
Saying "a corporation is not a person" is a tautology that is irrelevant. Corporations are people
Perhaps you ought to deal with this substantial confusion before wasting my time any more? I keep hearing the same thing. Corporations are people due to identical "treatment" under some "forum". But when I point out that corporations aren't actually treated as people in those "forums", my statement is a tautology that somehow never finds its way into your logic. Why say something is trivially true and then repeated assert its opposite?
If I had my choice I would go back to burying my wealth in chests in the ground.
Why aren't you doing that then? Even if you have to use a bank occasionally, you don't need to have everything in it.
They are treated as such. Splitting semantic hairs over a set legal precept, isn't convincing.
It doesn't have to be convincing, just merely correct. The idea of corporate personhood is widely acknowledged by the courts to be a legal fiction, a mechanism when dealing with corporations for resolving issues (such as who to sue in a breach of contract or whether certain speech is constitutionally protected) that would otherwise be unresolved.
You do. The fact the government directors are a proxy for seasonal corporate interests, doesn't change the nature of the mandates.
In a world with weaker government, there would be no such, so-called "proxies".
This libor scandal is the real deal. It's as dirty as it gets. The more you know, the more pissed off you will be about it. Instead of saying "oh yeah, well, this other imaginary stuff is worse" try a little research. This is the kind of cheating that makes even a libertarian like me say "maybe we should have some more government oversight of these fundamentally dishonest weasels."
I think the real question is who decided on using LIBOR in the first place? I'm sure there are other similar self-reported indices out there where the reporting entities can profit from tweaking their numbers (for example, governments' reporting of inflation, GDP, and employment). And I'm sure that the majority of such self-reported indices are indeed tweaked in a way that profits those reporting the numbers. It's just a pretty standard conflict of interest, resolved as these things usually are.
A true libertarian would understand those structural problems rather than attempt to slap the bandaid of "government oversight" on top. Reducing the conflicts of interest are a more effective solution than having corrupt government agencies watch harder.
The Fed has been given a tough job and they have been doing an honest job in an open fashion.
"Open". Then who was on the other side of these Fed bond purchases? There's no report out there that describes what the Fed buys and who they bought it from.
The Libor situation - that just greedy basters manipulating the market for their own pocket book. I am sadden so few people went to jail in the last crisis. I hope that is rectified here.
Given how LIBOR is set up with banks self-reporting their activities, only a fool would be surprised at what happened. I think the real crime was to rely on these indices so much.
What is your bank providing you?
A bank is a place to store wealth and ease my monetary transactions. It's made my life a lot simpler. But you surely have used banks at one time or another and should understand the point of the bank. Anyone living in a modern society who has handled any sort of money should be able to answer this question for themselves. This is just another reason I think your post is quite stupid.
My view is that I'd love to live in a world where the greatest threat comes from business rather than government.
Don't forget, companies are people my friend.
They aren't. Not even in the US. Amazing how so many people fly off the deep end due to a single US Supreme Court decision.
At that point the greatest threat to our liberty would be those ungovernable companies. They are too big to jail. They can do anything they want and you can't do anything about it./quote? You can't do anything about it other than the obvious solutions from the legal ones such as lawsuits and boycotts to the illegal, such as sabotage and targeted assassination of business leaders.
So the "mandate" is a bit different? And what is the Federal Reserve doing that is actually in the best interest of "America" and long-term financial stability? Last I checked, their big thing was buying up trillions of dollars in bonds from banks that should be going through bankruptcy court. Deed doesn't seem to be matching mandate.
There are no rich beyond the leadership, so income disparity is a solved problem.
In other words, income disparity is about as unsolved as it can get and still have a living underclass.
The US was wide open to that sort of invasion prior to the 1920s. Somehow it survived.
The Soviets never really had any significant long range sealift or logistics capability*, or the aircraft carrier capability to provide the cover and support such an invasion would require.
They would have had to make it. That would take a few years. The real problem was that invading a nuclear power never made sense. For example, it'd take a few years to build all that capability above and a few minutes to complete vaporize it. That's not a good return on investment.
i also think its kind of a low blow
It's aerospace. Kneecapping and hotfooting is fair play.
What makes it unbelievable? The last glacial period happened. Very similar climate changes happened which are comparable to what is forecast over many centuries in climate models now. The fertile lands of Saskatchewan and the Dakotas of the US, were both under ice and later transitioned through tundra. This was at one point completely unproductive due to having a huge layer of ice, perhaps as much as a kilometer thick, on top of it.
And most of the work to make it productive farm land happened in a few short years.
Now, Saskatchewan (as well as Manitoba) is just south of part of the Canadian Shield, a huge nearly monolithic block of geology.The parts of the Shield which run through Ontario and Quebec (which are much further south) tend to be quite fertile as well. So that "not-to-awful" soil chemistry is there.
You can choose not to believe my evidence, but I think it's silly to do so.
but assuming modern technology is going to come down and wave itself like a wand, magically fixing all our problems sounds pretty naive to me.
That depends how hard the problem is. Most of the AGW problems just aren't that tough and happen over pretty long time frames.
I have evidence. That is sufficient.
It will take hundreds of years to make the peat bogs fertile enough to replace even a part of what is lost by AGW.
That hasn't been true in practice. There have been similar bogs throughout the US, for example, and they were drained and farmed much quicker than that, usually well within a human lifetime.
Also, we actually have good farming practices in South Africa, in fact we have some of the most sophisticated agricultural systems in the world. Of course someone as ignorant as you wouldn't know that, would you?
You mean, you used to. The desertification problem you allude to is an indication that things have changed.
Our problem is that much of our farming is in or near semi arid areas which will grow. Wine farming is already being affected, areas that have provided some of the best wines in the world are now becoming too hot to produce quality, and the winelands are, in essence moving, towards the coastal areas with cool breezes. But even that won't last long. It's possible the 300 year old wine industry in our country will not last out the century.
It's also possible that your claims are based on a few decades of data that don't properly reflect how climate is actually going to change.
But let's suppose you're correct here. You've already mentioned the adaption-based solution. Move the vineyards to where they are still producing quality grapes. If that's no longer in South Africa for some reason, then grow something else.
Now take your sneering ignorance, and shove it.
Oops, guess I didn't follow orders this time. Maybe you'll have better luck making silly demands some other time.