I hate to tell you this, but only "bureaucrats," meaning a centralized comittee such as the one in this story, could ever access enough statistics and have a regimented enough procedures to even determine something like this. A physician practicing on the basis of his personal experience would never have a clue whether one class of accidents turns out to have a few more or less deaths than another when averaged over thousands and thousands of cases.
The US medical system isn't really even in a position to care about matters of fine degree like this, since we already know tens of thousands of people are grossly under-treated for known, curable ailments.
Is it just me or is the entire world going into a period of reduced freedom and increased state control? Every developed nation appears to be banning violent games, porn and free speech in general and they're doing it for no logical reasons.
No they aren't. If you get that impression, it's from reading one-sided alarmist news items like this one. Go back and read it, what does it actually saw? Hardly anything.
Modern Warfare 2 sold 6.4million copies in the first week in the US and UK alone and yet there weren't 6.4million new mass murders on the streets. This is more than sufficient evidence to prove that violent games don't turn people into killers
Your statement is so absurd it's hard to understand how you could believe it, or why people are responding in agreement to you. Nobody has ever claimed every person who plays a violent video game will go out and kill somebody.
...to know how much "hush money" they actually received? Madoff made billions from this. I'll bet anything these guys were paid less than the average Goldman Sachs annual bonus.
I hope I would say "no" to something like this. As engineers and software developers, we generally feel obliged to do what we are told.
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Now, let's get back to a real discussion regarding the pros and cons of health care reform!
This thread, and news coverage at large, are incredibly sparse on what the plan actually is! So here it is:
INSURANCE MARKET REFORM
The legislation would require substantial insurance market reforms that would bar insurers from excluding people for pre-existing conditions and prevent them from arbitrarily dropping policy holders.
Insurance exchanges would be created where small businesses and individuals without employer-sponsored coverage would be able to shop for coverage. Plans offered on the exchange would have to meet minimum benefit requirements.
The proposed changes would allow dependent children to remain on their parents' health policies until age 26.
The Senate bill requires insurers to spend at least 85 cents of every premium dollar on medical care in small group markets and 80 cents in large group markets. The proposed changes also would require Medicare Advantage insurers to spend at least 85 percent of revenues on medical care.
COVERAGE MANDATES, SUBSIDIES AND MEDICAID
Individuals would be required to obtain health insurance. Those who fail to purchase coverage would face fines of up to 2.5 percent of income by 2016.
Firms with more than 50 workers who do not offer medical coverage could face fines of $2,000 per full-time employee.
Federal subsidies would be provided to help people with incomes up to 400 percent of the poverty level purchase coverage on the exchange. Proposed changes would sweeten those subsidies for lower income people.
Medicaid, the government healthcare program for the poor, would be available to everyone with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty level, which stood at $10,830 for an individual and $22,050, for a family of four. Many states have eligibility requirements below those levels.
The proposed changes would get rid of a special deal to help Nebraska pay for the expanded coverage and boost aid to all states.
FINANCING
The final proposal makes some adjustments to the revenue measures in the Senate-passed bill.
The Senate bill included a 40 percent excise tax on high-cost health insurance plans. The proposed changes would delay implementation of the tax until 2018 instead of 2013. The tax would kick in on plans costing $10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for family coverage. A higher threshold is allowed for plans covering mostly women, older workers and retirees as well as those in high-risk professions.
The bill calls for raising the payroll taxes for Medicare, the government health insurance plan for the elderly, to 2.35 percent from the current 1.45 percent for individuals earning $200,000 or more and for couples earning $250,000 or more. The proposed changes would apply the tax to some investment income as well for those high-income groups.
The bill would impose fees on medical device manufacturers, insurance providers and brand name pharmaceuticals. The proposed changes would delay implementation of those fees.
MEDICARE
The legislation would freeze payments to insurers that provide coverage to Medicare patients in 2011 and begin reducing the subsidy in 2012.
It would also gradually close the gap in drug coverage for Medicare beneficiaries by 2020. Those who enter the coverage gap, the so-called doughnut hole, in 2010 will get a $250 rebate. In 2011 they would get a 50 percent discount on brand-name drugs.
Of course electric cars (including hydrogen-to-electric cars) are MUCH quieter than internal combustion. That's the only problem with being efficient, there's less wasted energy to recover:)
Eliminating environmental and labor and safety regulation will allow you to continue to work and feed your family right here in the USA, and if you are smart and innovative enough, you will be able to succeed beyond your wildest dreams!
You're hilarious. There are already many places with no environmental, labor, or safety regulations in the world, why don't you just go there instead of trying to make the US one of them? I know why, because those places are shitholes. Ayn Rand is precisely the same thing a communist worker's paradise - both are illogical fantasies; beyond that the differences between them hardly matter.
You know who is internationally competitive? Germany. They export more than the US does on about 1/4 the population. All by doing the opposite of everything you advocate.
If this is being implemented properly, everything is rigorously documented, stored centrally, backed up and moved to several other countries every night.
Seizure of intellectual property doesn't mean you don't have it any more, it means so does your competition, thus greatly reducing its value.
But then again, it's a two-way street, since the risk of hitting IP roadblocks by others is less, in fact you can profit from their IP.
I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out - whether vigorous IP enforcement helps or hurts the economy overall.
it's the people running the show (or "running" the show) that do things. Blame where blame is due.
How ironic, since the point of a corporation is to shield those exact people from liability for their actions. So much for putting blame where it's due.
(I'm not saying that's entirely bad; I don't want to be sued for everything I own because I buy into an index fund that owns some Toyota stock and somebody sues them.)
But corporations are created by laws that give people strong incentives to act in certain ways. If some of those behaviors are harmful, of course the laws should be questioned.
Well, the credit card companies are one step ahead of you. Some have been caught delaying the deposit of payments so they can charge late fees, or changing the due date to catch people off-guard.
Go ahead and try to fight the $39 late fee in court if you're so inclined...
It was also about terrorism fears. And you must admit, it's weird how we've sealed up air travel right down to the smallest bodily crevice... OR you can simply walk into the country with usually no questions asked. What's even weirder is cases like the shoe bomber, and more recent underwear bomber - they keep trying and failing to hit us right where our security is strongest. Why?
Read the article - the administration was under intense political pressure to "solve" illegal immigration and secure the border against terrorism, so they hurried the project along by cutting all that "red tape" and handing the problem over the private sector wholesale.
abundance of unemployed people means that in general minimum wage is set too high.
Economics 101: big supply + low demand = downward pressure on prices.
Yes, according to econ 101 conventional wisdom the only cause of unemployment is the minimum wage. Slight problem: until 1938 there was no federal minimum wage, yet unemployment somehow hit 23% anyways (i.e. the Great Depression). Looking at the data there is little support for econ 101 conventional wisdom.
In terms of historical oil production, google came up with this chart which I was going to link to initially and shows a rather steep decline. But it contradicts the DOE's own chart even though it cites the DOE as a source. So I'm guessing the wiki chart is wrong and uses figures massaged by a peak oil advocate.
No, you are mixing up charts for "total oil production" and "crude oil production" - see both side-by-side, and "crude oil" is the smaller amounts with the steeper decline. Click the "i" button next to "total oil" - I guess the extra is due mainly to "natural gas plant liquids." Crude oil production has indeed fallen (pp 166) from 9.64 million barrels in 1970 to 5 million by 2008 - nearly a 50% drop. There is no peak oil trickery going on here, just a rather stark example of it.
Right, the new word for "digital camera" is "camera." If you mention to a friend that your camera battery is dead, would they still ask whether you can advance the film manually? No. The vast majority of cameras made, sold, and used today are digital cameras, so that is what the word has come to mean.
The most computationally demanding onboard processing I've noticed (aside from video encoding, which surely uses a dedicated chip) is recognizing multiple faces in real-time, or tracking a moving object, to maintain focus. Far from the gimmicks you mention, these are very useful functions that just happen to require what amounts to video processing.
Reminds me of a federal election debate here in.au when the TV network gave each studio audience member a control box so they could indicate "like" or "don't like" for what they were hearing.
First, have you SEEN the line at fuel stations? How many batteries do you need to stock to "refuel" all of the cars in a given day?
The vast majority of car trips are short distances, so most of the fillups would use the "recharge at home" option, reducing crowding at battery swap stations.
With a built-in battery, you can install it right in the middle of the car, down low, where it keeps your center of gravity nice and low and is protected against most impacts.
So, put the replaceable batteries in the undercarriage, too. That makes it easy for standardized robotic jacks to see and lower out the old batteries, and raise in the new ones.
Third, batteries lose capacity over time.
Cars use a large number of cells, the total number of which should be split into several batteries. (This also creates the option of driving around with a partial battery load to reduce weight and increase efficiency, which makes a lot of sense for most cars which only travel e.g. 30 miles most days. It also makes it possible for the standard battery size to be lifted by hand, say 50 lbs, which just seems like a good idea for a variety of reasons). The batteries should be recycled when capacity dwindles to 80%. By keeping some inventory of batteries, the swap station could closely approximate an industry standard of, say, 90% capacity by mixing new and old batteries. (For a car that takes 3, you might get one 90%, one 95%, and one 85%). (Feasibly the batteries could be hacked to lie about their capacity, but you could say the same about fuel pumps at filling stations today).
Finally, different vehicles will require different battery standards. An SUV is going to differ from a 4-seat sedan which will differ from a 1-seat commuter car.
They only need to differ in the number of batteries they hold - 2 batteries for a little car, 5 for a big one.
A lot of people said that about the USSR, but they were wrong
I disagree. Centralized planning really does lend itself to grand, long-term ambitions; the problem is, all too often the plans are misguided! Just as in our economy, where most new businesses fail after a short while, except without the economic mechanism to weed them out.
Look at Stalin's railway plans for Northern Siberia. Of course, the analogy with China's new plan fails unless you can equate Europe with Northern Siberia, but still there's no guarantee China's new East-to-West trade route will be economically viable given the alternatives already in place.
This isn't about trade... China has been doing a lot of this bartering lately - avoiding paying cash for things in exchange for construction, trade contracts, or goods.
How is that not trade? Currency is a handy intermediary for trade, but it's not always necessary.
Yup, I just meant regular joysticks. Few computers come with them, yet many games are compatible with them. Yet they used to be ubiquitous for gaming. Granted, not as much any more.
Really, in 1969 who would have guessed the old saying about buggy whip manufacturers fighting to preserve their dying industry would apply to moon-walking astronauts in their own lifetimes!
That's hardly fair to the driver, as being stuck in a traffic jam costs them more - and there are plenty of unforeseen events, such as detours for construction work or accidents.
How is pushing the costs of unforeseen events onto the rider any more fair? I certainly wouldn't expect UPS to charge me more for sending a package depending on whether their driver hit traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
The US medical system isn't really even in a position to care about matters of fine degree like this, since we already know tens of thousands of people are grossly under-treated for known, curable ailments.
No they aren't. If you get that impression, it's from reading one-sided alarmist news items like this one. Go back and read it, what does it actually saw? Hardly anything.
Your statement is so absurd it's hard to understand how you could believe it, or why people are responding in agreement to you. Nobody has ever claimed every person who plays a violent video game will go out and kill somebody.
I hope I would say "no" to something like this. As engineers and software developers, we generally feel obliged to do what we are told.
This thread, and news coverage at large, are incredibly sparse on what the plan actually is! So here it is:
INSURANCE MARKET REFORM
COVERAGE MANDATES, SUBSIDIES AND MEDICAID
FINANCING
MEDICARE
Of course electric cars (including hydrogen-to-electric cars) are MUCH quieter than internal combustion. That's the only problem with being efficient, there's less wasted energy to recover :)
You're hilarious. There are already many places with no environmental, labor, or safety regulations in the world, why don't you just go there instead of trying to make the US one of them? I know why, because those places are shitholes. Ayn Rand is precisely the same thing a communist worker's paradise - both are illogical fantasies; beyond that the differences between them hardly matter.
You know who is internationally competitive? Germany. They export more than the US does on about 1/4 the population. All by doing the opposite of everything you advocate.
Seizure of intellectual property doesn't mean you don't have it any more, it means so does your competition, thus greatly reducing its value.
But then again, it's a two-way street, since the risk of hitting IP roadblocks by others is less, in fact you can profit from their IP.
I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out - whether vigorous IP enforcement helps or hurts the economy overall.
Would you advocate putting blinders on cars to obscure vision under good conditions to encourage people to slow down?
Having technology to augment vision in adverse conditions and choosing not to use it due to luddite impulses is exactly the same thing.
How ironic, since the point of a corporation is to shield those exact people from liability for their actions. So much for putting blame where it's due.
(I'm not saying that's entirely bad; I don't want to be sued for everything I own because I buy into an index fund that owns some Toyota stock and somebody sues them.)
But corporations are created by laws that give people strong incentives to act in certain ways. If some of those behaviors are harmful, of course the laws should be questioned.
Go ahead and try to fight the $39 late fee in court if you're so inclined...
Congress actually had to pass a law to stop it.
I don't mind if somebody says digicam, I just think it sounds a little old-fashioned, like "surfing the web."
It was also about terrorism fears. And you must admit, it's weird how we've sealed up air travel right down to the smallest bodily crevice... OR you can simply walk into the country with usually no questions asked. What's even weirder is cases like the shoe bomber, and more recent underwear bomber - they keep trying and failing to hit us right where our security is strongest. Why?
Read the article - the administration was under intense political pressure to "solve" illegal immigration and secure the border against terrorism, so they hurried the project along by cutting all that "red tape" and handing the problem over the private sector wholesale.
Yes, according to econ 101 conventional wisdom the only cause of unemployment is the minimum wage. Slight problem: until 1938 there was no federal minimum wage, yet unemployment somehow hit 23% anyways (i.e. the Great Depression). Looking at the data there is little support for econ 101 conventional wisdom.
No, you are mixing up charts for "total oil production" and "crude oil production" - see both side-by-side, and "crude oil" is the smaller amounts with the steeper decline. Click the "i" button next to "total oil" - I guess the extra is due mainly to "natural gas plant liquids." Crude oil production has indeed fallen (pp 166) from 9.64 million barrels in 1970 to 5 million by 2008 - nearly a 50% drop. There is no peak oil trickery going on here, just a rather stark example of it.
Right, the new word for "digital camera" is "camera." If you mention to a friend that your camera battery is dead, would they still ask whether you can advance the film manually? No. The vast majority of cameras made, sold, and used today are digital cameras, so that is what the word has come to mean.
The most computationally demanding onboard processing I've noticed (aside from video encoding, which surely uses a dedicated chip) is recognizing multiple faces in real-time, or tracking a moving object, to maintain focus. Far from the gimmicks you mention, these are very useful functions that just happen to require what amounts to video processing.
Oblig. Onion
The vast majority of car trips are short distances, so most of the fillups would use the "recharge at home" option, reducing crowding at battery swap stations.
So, put the replaceable batteries in the undercarriage, too. That makes it easy for standardized robotic jacks to see and lower out the old batteries, and raise in the new ones.
Cars use a large number of cells, the total number of which should be split into several batteries. (This also creates the option of driving around with a partial battery load to reduce weight and increase efficiency, which makes a lot of sense for most cars which only travel e.g. 30 miles most days. It also makes it possible for the standard battery size to be lifted by hand, say 50 lbs, which just seems like a good idea for a variety of reasons). The batteries should be recycled when capacity dwindles to 80%. By keeping some inventory of batteries, the swap station could closely approximate an industry standard of, say, 90% capacity by mixing new and old batteries. (For a car that takes 3, you might get one 90%, one 95%, and one 85%). (Feasibly the batteries could be hacked to lie about their capacity, but you could say the same about fuel pumps at filling stations today).
They only need to differ in the number of batteries they hold - 2 batteries for a little car, 5 for a big one.
I disagree. Centralized planning really does lend itself to grand, long-term ambitions; the problem is, all too often the plans are misguided! Just as in our economy, where most new businesses fail after a short while, except without the economic mechanism to weed them out.
Look at Stalin's railway plans for Northern Siberia. Of course, the analogy with China's new plan fails unless you can equate Europe with Northern Siberia, but still there's no guarantee China's new East-to-West trade route will be economically viable given the alternatives already in place.
How is that not trade? Currency is a handy intermediary for trade, but it's not always necessary.
Yup, I just meant regular joysticks. Few computers come with them, yet many games are compatible with them. Yet they used to be ubiquitous for gaming. Granted, not as much any more.
Other examples of aftermarket controls that caught on are guitars and also joysticks for PCs :)
Really, in 1969 who would have guessed the old saying about buggy whip manufacturers fighting to preserve their dying industry would apply to moon-walking astronauts in their own lifetimes!
How is pushing the costs of unforeseen events onto the rider any more fair? I certainly wouldn't expect UPS to charge me more for sending a package depending on whether their driver hit traffic.