See - this problem goes away if voting is compulsory.
Fuck no. If you're not motivated enough to vote voluntarily, then I don't want you anywhere near a ballot box.
Seriously though - the US now has a law essentially making taking out health insurance mandatory (with caveats) but it won't pass a law making voting mandatory...?
That is a good point. What other sort of crap does this open up in the US now that there's a precedent?
So you're saying they'll need some sort of modest diesel infrastructure. Ok, we'll make that then, say draining the millions of vehicles strewn around the countryside, tapping a nearby oil well, or converting part of a crop to biodiesel. Where's a real problem?
While he could have been a little more diplomatic and helpful, I don't see anything inherently wrong with his strategy.
The fallacy with all of the survivor type groups is that they plan on surviving for a period of time. Maybe months, maybe even a few years. In a post apocalyptic world, the plan needs to be able to survive indefinitely. Just as early societies found out, that is easier to do in community than all alone.
Why is that a fallacy rather than good enough? The point of surviving for a set period of time is so that you have a time cushion to adapt to whatever just happened. You can't store an infinite amount of food forever anyway. So I just don't see the fallacy.
You can't quite reverse engineer machinery with your bare hands.
Of course not. You'd have a machine shop and a lot of other equipment. Past that, your argument is greatly overstated. Don't know the alloy that's being used in your espresso machine? Guess and see what happens. Try shit out and keep what gets close. Your goal isn't to exactly duplicate the machine, but to make a working espresso machine.
Exactly. It's pure arrogance on their part to assume that the expertise at John Deere will be simple to match. Those folks know what they're doing because they've been doing it for generations. Institutional knowledge is a precious thing.
Well, you can regain that knowledge by doing the same thing, that is running a successful tractor building business for a few generations. Getting to the starting point for that, a successful tractor building business, from collapse of civilization, is the gap they're really bridging here.
Its optimistic to think its even possible to bootstrap anymore.
Why? As the other replier noted, there's going to be vast amounts of usable debris out there. And renewable sources like plants and renewable power (hydro, water, solar, etc) will be sufficient to get a reboot going. Yes, they're "limited", but so is every resource out there today and we still managed to build an industrial society out of it.
but overall the goal is to reduce the costs of healthcare to the nation by making it available to all and more importantly by reducing the number of people that cannot make healthcare payments.
I'll just point out here that this is a non sequitur in more than one way. Higher availability doesn't make something cost less. Making something more expensive doesn't reduce the number of people who can't make payments.
Yes because the age of the robber barons, where we had poor in the streets, was soooo much better.
Well, it was. There was a remarkable transition from a colonial backwater to budding superpower during that time. I can't imagine the US of today repeating those remarkable feats.
And the big missing thing. Who was doing it better at the time? It's extremely disingenuous to compare a 19th century government at a challenging time with say a 21st century social democracy. A 21st century libertarian government wouldn't be some 19th century clone. Too much has happened since. People are wealthier and more knowledgeable. Technology more advanced.
Over and over again history has proven that the libertarian ideal benefits a handful while enslaving millions...no thanks.
No, history doesn't show that.
Hell I'd rather us become an old fashioned Soviet state than see the days of the robber barons return.
That pretty much confirms you are a clueless idiot. History has already shown that the Soviet state was a very lethal dead end while the robber barons transitioned to the remarkable era that we now live in.
That's highly irrational for someone on slashdot. It's been said (on slashdot) time and time again that the two major parties aren't really that different, and the people will get screwed either way (maybe a different orifice will be used, same difference)
I believe they are wrong in this case. And I usual vote third party for president.
over time, you will likely get something that insurance will not want to cover. today, they call it 'pre-existing' conditions but the concept is about selective coverage and trying to collect money from you, for years (decades, even) and when you dare ask for some benefit, you get canceled for 'PEC'.
That's illegal and violates their contract. The solution is to sue them for damages. But sure, I can see why they'd want to do that.
I hope it happens to you. I normally don't wish suffering on people but you seem heartless and cold, and so maybe a lesson to you would be justice for the world.
"Heartless and cold"? Look who's talking, Mr. "I-hope-something-bad-happens-to-you". I personally hope that someday you grow up without undue pain or tail-chasing.
Total refusal to compromise is acting like grownups.
Keep in mind that a number of these refusals to compromise are on unconstitutional proposals that harm our freedom (in Obamacare, for example, there's the forcing of health care significant costs onto the states and penalizing people taxwise for health care choices). One shouldn't compromise on freedom.
You mean like Republicans saying that they were going to make everything about jobs, and then not bothering with jobs and concentrating fully on women's uteruses and depriving women of the right to control their own bodies?
I see part of the problem right here. That didn't happen. There's a vocal portion of the Republican party that is single issue when it comes to abortion and such. But that's a minority of the party.
It's hard to negotiate with people who don't or won't grasp reality. I think before you start complaining about what some political group does, you actually find out first what they're doing.
It puzzles me how someone can confuse the recent health care law with "health care reform". It increases the stuff that insurance companies have to cover, it eliminates existing condition (a huge increase to insurer costs right there), it throws in a large, expensive subsidy (though probably not big enough to compensate for the its other boosts to health care costs), it's unconstitutional in at least two different ways, and there's a couple thousand pages of crap in a bill that probably should have been a tenth the size.
And afterward, the Obama administration handed out over a thousand waivers for Obamacare provisions that kick in now to Democrat allies.
My view is that this "reform" will make all of the negative parts of US health care (such as its high cost and lack of coverage issues) considerably worse. And those who still won't be able to afford coverage will get to pay an additional regressive tax. And most of these provisions kick in a couple years after this election, so Obama doesn't risk having his legislative masterpiece torpedo his campaign.
I will vote for Romney. He might be "hard to pin down". But compared to Obama? I'm willing to take that chance.
The polarization, name calling, and divisiveness in politics is at an obscene level in the USA right now and unfortunately Canada isn't far behind. Truth seems to have gone right out the window.
When we face tyranny, sometimes we get polarization and divisiveness from those who would take away our freedoms.
This again. Obama has been hamstrung by the gross incompetence of himself, his administration, and his allies in Congress. If you're within 2 votes for 2 years of overcoming the only serious obstacle to your legislative goals, then it's your fault not that of the opposition that you don't achieve those goals.
Whatever else you can say about the Republicans, at least they acted more like grownups than the Democrats have for the last four years.
Whilst the US system is pretty good, it can be really misused and this last 4 years is a textbook example of how to do that.
What misuse? I see no drawback to the fairly successful Republican filibuster efforts to block bad law. And there's a good chance the Democrats will get to try their hand at it as well following this election.
Every amendment makes that distinction. The whole constitution is about rights guaranteed to Americans within America. None of the laws of the United States including contract rights apply abroad.
As I noted, this is grossly incorrect. Read the amendments yourself. Sometimes a clause will specify "US citizens" or such. But most clearly do not.
You may not like the federal crime control acts but that does not make them unconstitutional.
Of course, I don't like them. But unlike you, I know what "unconstitutional" means. It means things that violate the law of the Constitution and its amendments, such as the drug seizure laws violate the fourth amendment.
From the perspective of the tax creator anything that might add value along the way (labour) is taxable. If that value is basically fictional (i.e. highly paid work no one wants to pay for), it doesn't really change how you calculate the tax being applied.
Except that you don't actually collect a tax as a result.
It's also worth noting that tax creators tend to tax everything. What sticks are taxes that someone is willing to pay to keep hold of something they value, be it a useful item, a job, a family, whatever.
Leaving aside the question of personal rights applying to nonnatural entities, the fourth and eighth amendments would only apply to US entities.
Those amendments don't make that distinction. And where in the US Constitution is a so-called "natural entity" defined? The US government has some leeway in cases like war, piracy on the seas, etc. But in the end, if you're encouraging crimes that steal or destroy property, even if it is in another country between non-US parties, you will run afoul of these amendments.
Great idea, asshole. Just let's eliminate all big science projects in America.
I didn't say we should eliminate big science projects. My view on that is that we should eliminate all public funding for big science projects. If you can't find private funding for your big science project, then it wasn't worth doing.
BTW, I know personally a number of scientists, engineers, and administrators who worked on the SSC; the slimy innuendos you made in your first post couldn't be farther from the truth.
They're bought. It's easy to look the other way and ignore the vast amounts squandered, when your livelihood depends on the con going through.
But that didn't kill the SSC. Poor execution did. All the SSC had to do to survive was stay close to budget and below the radar. Most of Congress didn't care. They get kickbacks and votes after all.
Also under current law criminal proceeds are not protected. The government can seize the profits from drug dealing today.
The government can seize property today that's just been involved by accident with drug dealing. Just because unconstitutional activities are allowed today, doesn't mean we should double down on the stupid.
The affordable care act was built with you in mind, my friend. It's actually less efficient for everyone else to let people like you go without insurance, so the affordable care act is going to (hopefully) make it cheaper for you to buy insurance from the exchange or at least require your employer to help
Or you can't afford the coverage even with the ample subsidy. An obvious effect here is that insurance costs and health care costs will go up a lot due to a big increase in demand for health care services and funneling of some health care costs into insurance costs.
I hope this plan gets overturned in the next couple of years, else we in the US will see the main fruits of this remarkably incompetent law.
*Unless they're trans-national corporations, courtesy of the Citizens United decision.
Following constitutional law can be such a pain. But whatever individuals can do, groups should be able to do as well. Else their rights are being violated. That's the core of the Citizens United ruling.
This conceptually makes sense if you consider the basic unit of value is labour
You can consider it that way, but it's not the basic unit of value. The basic unit of value isn't labor, it's what you can do with or how much you want the good or service. If you don't care for it, then it doesn't have much value to you no matter how many people toiled away on it.
A good example is in the health care sector. By any objective standard, the private US healthcare system is highly inefficient. Healthcare in the US costs more per person than almost anywhere else in the world. And yet broad spectrum health outcomes are very poor. In addition, US healthcare doesn't cover a shockingly large percentage of the population. Contrast this with countries with public healthcare systems. Norway and Canada are excellent examples. They manage to cover the vast majority of the population, while their costs per person are far lower than in the US. And broad spectrum health outcomes in these countries are far better than in the US.
US health care covers everyone. It's just that some people have to pay for their own health care directly rather than through insurance or a government program. The cost problem is due to the vast disengagement of the consumer of health care from the cost of their health care. The US is worse since demand is vastly encouraged with little restriction. If the US didn't exist, other countries would be complaining about their health care costs which have steadily grown over the decades just like they have in the US.
So what makes US health care so expensive and bureaucratic. Decades of some of the worst, most poorly thought out regulation possible continuing through to present day. I appreciate that sure, it can be hard to connect the dots. But this is a terrible example for what you're trying to show.
I find the ideological division and characterization of private efficiency and public inefficiency is intellectually lazy, and ignores the subtleties of the complex real world.
And this is a profound example of ignorance. And once again I see an appeal to complexity hiding a simplistic, failed argument. The world is complicated, so we can't observe painfully obvious phenomena or simple models that explain that phenomena very well.
Well, it can't fix everything. But it can fix a lot of the US's problems with its government. For example, getting rid of Social Security and public health care spending, in other words, privatizing those institutions would greatly reduce the expenditures that the US makes, something like 40% of overall spending right there.
Massive cuts in military spending in addition to that would completely eliminate the deficit and probably allow for some modest degree of tax reduction and/or debt reduction. The latter would reduce interest payments which are another few percent of federal spending.
Slashdot Mirror
See - this problem goes away if voting is compulsory.
Fuck no. If you're not motivated enough to vote voluntarily, then I don't want you anywhere near a ballot box.
Seriously though - the US now has a law essentially making taking out health insurance mandatory (with caveats) but it won't pass a law making voting mandatory...?
That is a good point. What other sort of crap does this open up in the US now that there's a precedent?
So you're saying they'll need some sort of modest diesel infrastructure. Ok, we'll make that then, say draining the millions of vehicles strewn around the countryside, tapping a nearby oil well, or converting part of a crop to biodiesel. Where's a real problem?
The fallacy with all of the survivor type groups is that they plan on surviving for a period of time. Maybe months, maybe even a few years. In a post apocalyptic world, the plan needs to be able to survive indefinitely. Just as early societies found out, that is easier to do in community than all alone.
Why is that a fallacy rather than good enough? The point of surviving for a set period of time is so that you have a time cushion to adapt to whatever just happened. You can't store an infinite amount of food forever anyway. So I just don't see the fallacy.
You can't quite reverse engineer machinery with your bare hands.
Of course not. You'd have a machine shop and a lot of other equipment. Past that, your argument is greatly overstated. Don't know the alloy that's being used in your espresso machine? Guess and see what happens. Try shit out and keep what gets close. Your goal isn't to exactly duplicate the machine, but to make a working espresso machine.
Exactly. It's pure arrogance on their part to assume that the expertise at John Deere will be simple to match. Those folks know what they're doing because they've been doing it for generations. Institutional knowledge is a precious thing.
Well, you can regain that knowledge by doing the same thing, that is running a successful tractor building business for a few generations. Getting to the starting point for that, a successful tractor building business, from collapse of civilization, is the gap they're really bridging here.
Its optimistic to think its even possible to bootstrap anymore.
Why? As the other replier noted, there's going to be vast amounts of usable debris out there. And renewable sources like plants and renewable power (hydro, water, solar, etc) will be sufficient to get a reboot going. Yes, they're "limited", but so is every resource out there today and we still managed to build an industrial society out of it.
but overall the goal is to reduce the costs of healthcare to the nation by making it available to all and more importantly by reducing the number of people that cannot make healthcare payments.
I'll just point out here that this is a non sequitur in more than one way. Higher availability doesn't make something cost less. Making something more expensive doesn't reduce the number of people who can't make payments.
Yes because the age of the robber barons, where we had poor in the streets, was soooo much better.
Well, it was. There was a remarkable transition from a colonial backwater to budding superpower during that time. I can't imagine the US of today repeating those remarkable feats.
And the big missing thing. Who was doing it better at the time? It's extremely disingenuous to compare a 19th century government at a challenging time with say a 21st century social democracy. A 21st century libertarian government wouldn't be some 19th century clone. Too much has happened since. People are wealthier and more knowledgeable. Technology more advanced.
Over and over again history has proven that the libertarian ideal benefits a handful while enslaving millions...no thanks.
No, history doesn't show that.
Hell I'd rather us become an old fashioned Soviet state than see the days of the robber barons return.
That pretty much confirms you are a clueless idiot. History has already shown that the Soviet state was a very lethal dead end while the robber barons transitioned to the remarkable era that we now live in.
That's highly irrational for someone on slashdot. It's been said (on slashdot) time and time again that the two major parties aren't really that different, and the people will get screwed either way (maybe a different orifice will be used, same difference)
I believe they are wrong in this case. And I usual vote third party for president.
over time, you will likely get something that insurance will not want to cover. today, they call it 'pre-existing' conditions but the concept is about selective coverage and trying to collect money from you, for years (decades, even) and when you dare ask for some benefit, you get canceled for 'PEC'.
That's illegal and violates their contract. The solution is to sue them for damages. But sure, I can see why they'd want to do that.
I hope it happens to you. I normally don't wish suffering on people but you seem heartless and cold, and so maybe a lesson to you would be justice for the world.
"Heartless and cold"? Look who's talking, Mr. "I-hope-something-bad-happens-to-you". I personally hope that someday you grow up without undue pain or tail-chasing.
Total refusal to compromise is acting like grownups.
Keep in mind that a number of these refusals to compromise are on unconstitutional proposals that harm our freedom (in Obamacare, for example, there's the forcing of health care significant costs onto the states and penalizing people taxwise for health care choices). One shouldn't compromise on freedom.
You mean like Republicans saying that they were going to make everything about jobs, and then not bothering with jobs and concentrating fully on women's uteruses and depriving women of the right to control their own bodies?
I see part of the problem right here. That didn't happen. There's a vocal portion of the Republican party that is single issue when it comes to abortion and such. But that's a minority of the party.
It's hard to negotiate with people who don't or won't grasp reality. I think before you start complaining about what some political group does, you actually find out first what they're doing.
And afterward, the Obama administration handed out over a thousand waivers for Obamacare provisions that kick in now to Democrat allies.
My view is that this "reform" will make all of the negative parts of US health care (such as its high cost and lack of coverage issues) considerably worse. And those who still won't be able to afford coverage will get to pay an additional regressive tax. And most of these provisions kick in a couple years after this election, so Obama doesn't risk having his legislative masterpiece torpedo his campaign.
I will vote for Romney. He might be "hard to pin down". But compared to Obama? I'm willing to take that chance.
The polarization, name calling, and divisiveness in politics is at an obscene level in the USA right now and unfortunately Canada isn't far behind. Truth seems to have gone right out the window.
When we face tyranny, sometimes we get polarization and divisiveness from those who would take away our freedoms.
Whatever else you can say about the Republicans, at least they acted more like grownups than the Democrats have for the last four years.
Whilst the US system is pretty good, it can be really misused and this last 4 years is a textbook example of how to do that.
What misuse? I see no drawback to the fairly successful Republican filibuster efforts to block bad law. And there's a good chance the Democrats will get to try their hand at it as well following this election.
And I've read fiction that had space whales. So what?
Every amendment makes that distinction. The whole constitution is about rights guaranteed to Americans within America. None of the laws of the United States including contract rights apply abroad.
As I noted, this is grossly incorrect. Read the amendments yourself. Sometimes a clause will specify "US citizens" or such. But most clearly do not.
You may not like the federal crime control acts but that does not make them unconstitutional.
Of course, I don't like them. But unlike you, I know what "unconstitutional" means. It means things that violate the law of the Constitution and its amendments, such as the drug seizure laws violate the fourth amendment.
From the perspective of the tax creator anything that might add value along the way (labour) is taxable. If that value is basically fictional (i.e. highly paid work no one wants to pay for), it doesn't really change how you calculate the tax being applied.
Except that you don't actually collect a tax as a result.
It's also worth noting that tax creators tend to tax everything. What sticks are taxes that someone is willing to pay to keep hold of something they value, be it a useful item, a job, a family, whatever.
Leaving aside the question of personal rights applying to nonnatural entities, the fourth and eighth amendments would only apply to US entities.
Those amendments don't make that distinction. And where in the US Constitution is a so-called "natural entity" defined? The US government has some leeway in cases like war, piracy on the seas, etc. But in the end, if you're encouraging crimes that steal or destroy property, even if it is in another country between non-US parties, you will run afoul of these amendments.
Great idea, asshole. Just let's eliminate all big science projects in America.
I didn't say we should eliminate big science projects. My view on that is that we should eliminate all public funding for big science projects. If you can't find private funding for your big science project, then it wasn't worth doing.
BTW, I know personally a number of scientists, engineers, and administrators who worked on the SSC; the slimy innuendos you made in your first post couldn't be farther from the truth.
They're bought. It's easy to look the other way and ignore the vast amounts squandered, when your livelihood depends on the con going through.
But that didn't kill the SSC. Poor execution did. All the SSC had to do to survive was stay close to budget and below the radar. Most of Congress didn't care. They get kickbacks and votes after all.
Also under current law criminal proceeds are not protected. The government can seize the profits from drug dealing today.
The government can seize property today that's just been involved by accident with drug dealing. Just because unconstitutional activities are allowed today, doesn't mean we should double down on the stupid.
The affordable care act was built with you in mind, my friend. It's actually less efficient for everyone else to let people like you go without insurance, so the affordable care act is going to (hopefully) make it cheaper for you to buy insurance from the exchange or at least require your employer to help
Or you can't afford the coverage even with the ample subsidy. An obvious effect here is that insurance costs and health care costs will go up a lot due to a big increase in demand for health care services and funneling of some health care costs into insurance costs.
I hope this plan gets overturned in the next couple of years, else we in the US will see the main fruits of this remarkably incompetent law.
*Unless they're trans-national corporations, courtesy of the Citizens United decision.
Following constitutional law can be such a pain. But whatever individuals can do, groups should be able to do as well. Else their rights are being violated. That's the core of the Citizens United ruling.
This conceptually makes sense if you consider the basic unit of value is labour
You can consider it that way, but it's not the basic unit of value. The basic unit of value isn't labor, it's what you can do with or how much you want the good or service. If you don't care for it, then it doesn't have much value to you no matter how many people toiled away on it.
A good example is in the health care sector. By any objective standard, the private US healthcare system is highly inefficient. Healthcare in the US costs more per person than almost anywhere else in the world. And yet broad spectrum health outcomes are very poor. In addition, US healthcare doesn't cover a shockingly large percentage of the population. Contrast this with countries with public healthcare systems. Norway and Canada are excellent examples. They manage to cover the vast majority of the population, while their costs per person are far lower than in the US. And broad spectrum health outcomes in these countries are far better than in the US.
US health care covers everyone. It's just that some people have to pay for their own health care directly rather than through insurance or a government program. The cost problem is due to the vast disengagement of the consumer of health care from the cost of their health care. The US is worse since demand is vastly encouraged with little restriction. If the US didn't exist, other countries would be complaining about their health care costs which have steadily grown over the decades just like they have in the US.
So what makes US health care so expensive and bureaucratic. Decades of some of the worst, most poorly thought out regulation possible continuing through to present day. I appreciate that sure, it can be hard to connect the dots. But this is a terrible example for what you're trying to show.
I find the ideological division and characterization of private efficiency and public inefficiency is intellectually lazy, and ignores the subtleties of the complex real world.
And this is a profound example of ignorance. And once again I see an appeal to complexity hiding a simplistic, failed argument. The world is complicated, so we can't observe painfully obvious phenomena or simple models that explain that phenomena very well.
Well, it can't fix everything. But it can fix a lot of the US's problems with its government. For example, getting rid of Social Security and public health care spending, in other words, privatizing those institutions would greatly reduce the expenditures that the US makes, something like 40% of overall spending right there.
Massive cuts in military spending in addition to that would completely eliminate the deficit and probably allow for some modest degree of tax reduction and/or debt reduction. The latter would reduce interest payments which are another few percent of federal spending.