Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
This entire argument is a total fallacy. It starts with the assumption that health insurance and single payer regulation will somehow control costs. The only way that will work is through rationing, and that's not really controlling costs - it's lowering services.
The way to control costs is to get consumers to... watch costs. The reason health care costs have gotten so out of control in the first place is because patients never look at the costs, because the vast majority of health care is paid for by third parties. So patients demand all the best care and all the tests they want and costs be damned. Then they complain when insurance companies want to deny some services that seem unnecessary or reduce coverage.
So to reduce costs, you force consumers to pay out of pocket for lots of services, and relegate insurance back to just catastrophic coverage, like it used to be. Another useful reform is to un-tie insurance from employment. It's irrational the way the system now is mostly controlled by employer-based insurance, with no reasonable way for individuals to shop for insurance on their own, or to be able to buy it at reasonable costs when then change jobs.
If you look at the market for the typical services that insurance generally does not cover, like cosmetic surgery, lasic eye surgery, etc. you can see how costs for health services can be greatly reduced when people have to pay the bill themselves. If I had a monthly bill for all my food regardless of what I ate, I'd be demanding steak and lobster all the time. And guess what? If lots of other people had it too, food prices would skyrocket. What then? Government-based, single-payer food?
Diabetes (along with many serious conditions) is buggery expensive to treat. In the real world, many sufferer's options are realistically:
Live in a country which provides at least basic healthcare without you having to sacrifice your first born (or at least regulates insurance companies such that they can't say "Oh, you've got something expensive? Sucks to be you, then.").
Be rich.
Die.
Most civilised countries decided that the final option on that list wasn't a particularly desirable one some years ago.
Who builds the courtrooms you idiot? Who pays the salaries of the judges? Are you really that retarded? "Thievery"? Get off your high horse and look at the world around you, my god.
Apparently, you're convinced that it should be "somebody else".
There is an intrinsic difference between inherent rights that may have costs associated with defending them, and manufactured "rights" that have costs associated with providing them.
Alright, so we'll start with your premises:
A. Inherent rights are things like being able to walk down a public street without getting punched in the face.
B. Government exists solely to enforce these rights.
So let's say Alice (a citizen of this country) accuses Bob (another citizen) of punching her in the face on the street. Now, perfectly reasonably, we want our government to enforce Alice's right by restricting Bob's rights (say, fining him - reducing his right to property, or confining him - restricting his right to travel freely). However, we can't just do what we want to do Bob - Alice's accusation might be completely false. So we therefor need some kind of court system to determine whether Bob did punch Alice, and if so what the government can do about it.
No, all we need is a jury.
Alice: "Did you see that?"
Joe: "I did."
Fred: "Me too."
Sam: "Okay, we need 9 volunteers..."
Sam puts grabs 9 people off the street, jury is duly sworn, witnesses confirm events.
10 minutes later, Bob is summarily executed for punching Alice and disturbing the peace.
Cost to save Alice and countless others from Bob's unreasonable imposition on others' rights: the cost of 1 bullet (happily donated by active citizen), and 10 minutes time of responsible members of a well-functioning society.
Your way just produces a bunch of bureaucratic bullshit with the only end being tyranny and despotism and people hiring other people to pick the pockets of unsuspecting citizenry, justified by some perceived lack of funding for "reasonable cost of government" that nobody needed in the first place, just because nobody had the guts to take care of the real problem. To wit: Bob.
Nice try, though. Next time, try considering other people, instead of just making up excuses to justify thievery.
You can not have a right to something that is non-free.
Sure you can. Public defense attorneys, jury trials, and other requirements of the Constitution definitely aren't free.
Neither is jail. But those are all costs borne by government to TAKE AWAY inherent rights of one of its citizens. The only real justification for doing that is to protect the rights of other citizens. Which is the only reason for the necessary evil of government to exist at all.
So the costs you are attributing to these things are inherent costs of GOVERNMENT, not of individual RIGHTS.
Like England is? Last I looked, they were a pretty secular, post-xian society
I agree that the OP is an idiot (substituting one set of religious rulers for another set is hardly an improvement),
WTF are you kids learning in the public schools these days? You did learn the part about religious freedom, right? How the US was founded on the idea that the government should not be allowed to dictate religion to the people? Or are they now claiming that the founding fathers were nothing but a bunch of fundamentalist religious authoritarians? Because that would just be a lie.
Wow - modded "Flamebait". Really? Seems pretty insightful to me. Amazing how many people don't get this.
It doesn't really matter what you think about the founders when viewed through the prism of today's social norms - the point is that history should be taught as it actually happened, not revised according to some new standard of belief.
"Or perhaps it would be just a different kind of crap?"
Yep. Source code is like shit, you can't smell your own but if it comes out of someone else then it stinks.
The only reason you think this is because you've never had to go back and do some major modifications to you own code from three or five years ago.
If you really think your own shit doesn't stink, you've done a piss-poor job of learning from your mistakes. I pity the programmers that have had to maintain the code you left them.
Exactly right. I was going to make a similar statement.
It seems that every weather event has some AGW proponent coming out talking about how this is further evidence to support their climate models. And anyone that claims some weather event might cause a problem for the theories, they are called ignorant for looking at minor data points because it doesn't affect the overall trend.
The whole anthropogenic climate change culture keeps looking more and more like a religion all the time.
Well there is science, and then there is historical accuracy.
Recently SS and American History textbooks from Texas excluded any mention of Christopher Columbus (really), and removed any mention of a Christmas holiday, while including Ramadan, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Vaisakhi, Diwali, and the annual hajj.
Political correctness is one thing, but trying to completely demolish the culture of a generation via government school-based indoctrination should not be allowed. The worst mistake ever was to completely remove the Bible from public schools as a way to appear neutral on religion. It means phrases like "the patience of Job" or "don't know you from Adam" start to disappear from the language because kids don't know what you're talking about. They teach all kinds of religions (except Christianity) from a historical perspective, as they should. Religious texts could also be introduced as literature, without any comment on the efficacy of the source. A rich culture of stories with profound lessons for all of humanity is being lost. There's no reason literature must abandon these texts, it makes our children poorer.
Its doesn't produce fusion either. Considering pB fusion is 2000 harder *at least* and needs 10x the heat. The system that can produce 1 watt with pB fusion could produce 2kW with DT fusion without breaking a sweat. In fact it would work wonderfully with DD fusion. You also need to believe quite a bit of BS from the founder with regards to Mega Tesla magnetic fields....and never mind that all the other dense plasma focus produce very very low yields of DD fusion thats 1000x easer than pB.
Considering the fact that a complete FF reactor would cost less than 1% the cost of a functional tokamak reactor, I think FF is still a clear winner. Both techniques have challenges and neither have managed to produce sustainable fusion. But so much time and money have been put into solving problems with the conventional fusion that maybe it's time to take at least a tiny fraction of those resources away from them to explore some other ideas.
If FF can be made to work, it will produce much greater benefits than the (still not working) traditional methods that are still getting all the funding and attention.
Some of the major differences with this technique is that it doesn't produce neutrons as a by-product (which makes it much cleaner - no deadly neutron radiation requiring expensive shielding and disposal), and it produces electricity directly from the reaction, rather than the traditional method of producing heat for steam for a turbine generator.
I'm not a lawyer, but I did study constitutional law. I don't mean to be critical, but people should drop the concept that the Bill of Rights applies to private and/or corporate entities. They are applicable to the FEDERAL government. There is still debate on which amendments should apply to the states - e.g. the recent 2nd amendment lawsuits against state governments and D.C.
Pretty sure there are a lot of people that don't think it applies to the federal government anymore, either. And they have a point.
So you want more powerful government because you're afraid of corporations, yet admit that you will never have as much influence over government as the lobbyists that those corporations can hire.
Makes perfect sense to me. (/s)
If you want to see how this really works, check out the toy testing legislation that killed small companies and secondary markets (even the Good Will stores). Mattel wrote that legislation. How's that for protection for the little guy?
You might also want to look into how Serious Materials is getting favorable treatment from government. Treatment not only allows them an advantage over the competition, but also makes them the only window maker awarded money under the stimulus bill.
The reason there is no real competition is because of government regulations that favor companies with the most money for lobbyists and politician's campaigns. How is the RIAA so powerful? Government regulations, like extended copyright and favoritism for corporate protections over independent artist. The government you love has created the problem.
There is so much cronyism in government that capitalism is basically gone. What we are left with is crony capitalism.
And the more authority you're willing to hand over to the money masters in Washington the worse it gets.
Get rid of the corporate influence in Washington and you would solve this problem overnight. Unfortunately, the only way to do that is to get rid Washington's power to select winners and losers in the marketplace. But people like you want them to have more power instead, because they keep saying they are going to protect you from evil corporations. So the congress claims they are going to do something to protect you, then the corporate lobbyists come in an write the laws. The losers are the companies that didn't spend enough on lobbyists, and the consumers since they will be paying taxes to support the new regulations and higher prices for everything because corporations have written legislation that bludgeons their competition into insolvency.
I think you're missing the irony of the situation. If you're spending billions of dollars on "job stimulus" and more billions of dollars supporting unemployment benefits, how does it make sense to use money to hire off-shore labor from that same pot of money. I mean, it's great that the cost of living in other countries allows you to leverage dollars better, but when you're also spending billions to support workers in your own country that are just sitting around without jobs to do, it seems exceedingly wasteful.
Very insightful. I used to be very critical of Charlotte Iserbyt (author of "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America"), because I thought her title and viewpoint were overly inflammatory, that, yes, there was too much incompetence and bad ideas in the educational system and our outcomes were falling behind those of other countries. But I've changed my mind lately. I'm convinced that it is deliberate. So my apologies for statements I made about Charlotte Iserbyt in the past.
The thing about the "conspiracy nuts" is that their ideas would never get so much traction if 100% of what they say is false. There is an absence of clear and credible answers, too many inconsistencies in the official stories, and not enough real information. So all kinds of crazy ideas spring out of that.
The problem with Sunstein's plan is that he wants to create infiltrators that parrot the official story, not just to shut down the crazy theories, but to get rid of the questions. And questioning government is vital to a democracy. When government has control of every side of the message, then, yes, all conspiracy theories go away, but so do any questions about what they are doing. And that's bad.
Thanks P and GP. I've been relying on EveryDNS for about 5 years now. They have a great service and I've happily donated to keep it running. My little home server doesn't do much, but it wouldn't do anything useful without this service. It's something I never have to think about because a little script on the server detects whenever my ISP decides to change my IP address, and updates the EveryDNS host automatically.
Good to know there are alternatives when/if DynDNS starts trying to gouge me. I hope they are as useful and easy to work with.
You forgot "the universe is just a figment of my imagination"...
I don't think that would apply here, since it's not an argument against this theory. TFA describes a theory based on "the universe is just a hologram", which is just a derivative of "the universe is a figment of my imagination".
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This entire argument is a total fallacy. It starts with the assumption that health insurance and single payer regulation will somehow control costs. The only way that will work is through rationing, and that's not really controlling costs - it's lowering services.
The way to control costs is to get consumers to ... watch costs. The reason health care costs have gotten so out of control in the first place is because patients never look at the costs, because the vast majority of health care is paid for by third parties. So patients demand all the best care and all the tests they want and costs be damned. Then they complain when insurance companies want to deny some services that seem unnecessary or reduce coverage.
So to reduce costs, you force consumers to pay out of pocket for lots of services, and relegate insurance back to just catastrophic coverage, like it used to be. Another useful reform is to un-tie insurance from employment. It's irrational the way the system now is mostly controlled by employer-based insurance, with no reasonable way for individuals to shop for insurance on their own, or to be able to buy it at reasonable costs when then change jobs.
If you look at the market for the typical services that insurance generally does not cover, like cosmetic surgery, lasic eye surgery, etc. you can see how costs for health services can be greatly reduced when people have to pay the bill themselves. If I had a monthly bill for all my food regardless of what I ate, I'd be demanding steak and lobster all the time. And guess what? If lots of other people had it too, food prices would skyrocket. What then? Government-based, single-payer food?
Diabetes (along with many serious conditions) is buggery expensive to treat. In the real world, many sufferer's options are realistically:
Most civilised countries decided that the final option on that list wasn't a particularly desirable one some years ago.
Or... You could live in a country with programs to help people or you could live in one of the 46 states that require insurance companies to cover diabetes , existing condition or not.
Why do we need this debt-accelerating new federal bureaucratic boondoggle again?
Wow. You complain about skewed information from Fox News, then post links to a satire site and ... Media Matters!
Hey, pot, kettle says you're black!
Who builds the courtrooms you idiot? Who pays the salaries of the judges? Are you really that retarded? "Thievery"? Get off your high horse and look at the world around you, my god.
Apparently, you're convinced that it should be "somebody else".
There is an intrinsic difference between inherent rights that may have costs associated with defending them, and manufactured "rights" that have costs associated with providing them.
Alright, so we'll start with your premises: A. Inherent rights are things like being able to walk down a public street without getting punched in the face. B. Government exists solely to enforce these rights.
So let's say Alice (a citizen of this country) accuses Bob (another citizen) of punching her in the face on the street. Now, perfectly reasonably, we want our government to enforce Alice's right by restricting Bob's rights (say, fining him - reducing his right to property, or confining him - restricting his right to travel freely). However, we can't just do what we want to do Bob - Alice's accusation might be completely false. So we therefor need some kind of court system to determine whether Bob did punch Alice, and if so what the government can do about it.
No, all we need is a jury.
Alice: "Did you see that?"
Joe: "I did."
Fred: "Me too."
Sam: "Okay, we need 9 volunteers ..."
Sam puts grabs 9 people off the street, jury is duly sworn, witnesses confirm events.
10 minutes later, Bob is summarily executed for punching Alice and disturbing the peace.
Cost to save Alice and countless others from Bob's unreasonable imposition on others' rights: the cost of 1 bullet (happily donated by active citizen), and 10 minutes time of responsible members of a well-functioning society.
Your way just produces a bunch of bureaucratic bullshit with the only end being tyranny and despotism and people hiring other people to pick the pockets of unsuspecting citizenry, justified by some perceived lack of funding for "reasonable cost of government" that nobody needed in the first place, just because nobody had the guts to take care of the real problem. To wit: Bob.
Nice try, though. Next time, try considering other people, instead of just making up excuses to justify thievery.
You can not have a right to something that is non-free.
Sure you can. Public defense attorneys, jury trials, and other requirements of the Constitution definitely aren't free.
Neither is jail. But those are all costs borne by government to TAKE AWAY inherent rights of one of its citizens. The only real justification for doing that is to protect the rights of other citizens. Which is the only reason for the necessary evil of government to exist at all.
So the costs you are attributing to these things are inherent costs of GOVERNMENT, not of individual RIGHTS.
Britain fell sucker to the whole "we can use technology to assist the police" thing and save money.
The US fell into the same trap.
So they both think that what's needed is more tech ....
What's really needed is stronger privacy laws and more beat cops working WITH the community, not "policing it."
Quite true. If more of the cops were beat soundly by their community, they wouldn't be so quick to fuck with people.
Like England is? Last I looked, they were a pretty secular, post-xian society
I agree that the OP is an idiot (substituting one set of religious rulers for another set is hardly an improvement),
WTF are you kids learning in the public schools these days? You did learn the part about religious freedom, right? How the US was founded on the idea that the government should not be allowed to dictate religion to the people? Or are they now claiming that the founding fathers were nothing but a bunch of fundamentalist religious authoritarians? Because that would just be a lie.
Wow - modded "Flamebait". Really? Seems pretty insightful to me. Amazing how many people don't get this.
It doesn't really matter what you think about the founders when viewed through the prism of today's social norms - the point is that history should be taught as it actually happened, not revised according to some new standard of belief.
"Or perhaps it would be just a different kind of crap?" Yep. Source code is like shit, you can't smell your own but if it comes out of someone else then it stinks.
The only reason you think this is because you've never had to go back and do some major modifications to you own code from three or five years ago.
If you really think your own shit doesn't stink, you've done a piss-poor job of learning from your mistakes. I pity the programmers that have had to maintain the code you left them.
Exactly right. I was going to make a similar statement.
It seems that every weather event has some AGW proponent coming out talking about how this is further evidence to support their climate models. And anyone that claims some weather event might cause a problem for the theories, they are called ignorant for looking at minor data points because it doesn't affect the overall trend.
The whole anthropogenic climate change culture keeps looking more and more like a religion all the time.
Well there is science, and then there is historical accuracy.
Recently SS and American History textbooks from Texas excluded any mention of Christopher Columbus (really), and removed any mention of a Christmas holiday, while including Ramadan, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Vaisakhi, Diwali, and the annual hajj.
Political correctness is one thing, but trying to completely demolish the culture of a generation via government school-based indoctrination should not be allowed. The worst mistake ever was to completely remove the Bible from public schools as a way to appear neutral on religion. It means phrases like "the patience of Job" or "don't know you from Adam" start to disappear from the language because kids don't know what you're talking about. They teach all kinds of religions (except Christianity) from a historical perspective, as they should. Religious texts could also be introduced as literature, without any comment on the efficacy of the source. A rich culture of stories with profound lessons for all of humanity is being lost. There's no reason literature must abandon these texts, it makes our children poorer.
Its doesn't produce fusion either. Considering pB fusion is 2000 harder *at least* and needs 10x the heat. The system that can produce 1 watt with pB fusion could produce 2kW with DT fusion without breaking a sweat. In fact it would work wonderfully with DD fusion. You also need to believe quite a bit of BS from the founder with regards to Mega Tesla magnetic fields....and never mind that all the other dense plasma focus produce very very low yields of DD fusion thats 1000x easer than pB.
Considering the fact that a complete FF reactor would cost less than 1% the cost of a functional tokamak reactor, I think FF is still a clear winner. Both techniques have challenges and neither have managed to produce sustainable fusion. But so much time and money have been put into solving problems with the conventional fusion that maybe it's time to take at least a tiny fraction of those resources away from them to explore some other ideas.
If FF can be made to work, it will produce much greater benefits than the (still not working) traditional methods that are still getting all the funding and attention.
I find this incredibly sad. Aren't there any better, new ideas in fusion research to invest money and time into for experimental purposes?
How about Focus Fusion?
Some of the major differences with this technique is that it doesn't produce neutrons as a by-product (which makes it much cleaner - no deadly neutron radiation requiring expensive shielding and disposal), and it produces electricity directly from the reaction, rather than the traditional method of producing heat for steam for a turbine generator.
Why the hell would they recommend counseling for a non-violent and non-criminal act?
Is there a better link regarding this article?
I can only assume it would be to deal with the trauma caused by school officials, police, firemen bomb squad personnel?
I'm not a lawyer, but I did study constitutional law. I don't mean to be critical, but people should drop the concept that the Bill of Rights applies to private and/or corporate entities. They are applicable to the FEDERAL government. There is still debate on which amendments should apply to the states - e.g. the recent 2nd amendment lawsuits against state governments and D.C.
Pretty sure there are a lot of people that don't think it applies to the federal government anymore, either. And they have a point.
So you want more powerful government because you're afraid of corporations, yet admit that you will never have as much influence over government as the lobbyists that those corporations can hire.
Makes perfect sense to me. (/s)
If you want to see how this really works, check out the toy testing legislation that killed small companies and secondary markets (even the Good Will stores). Mattel wrote that legislation. How's that for protection for the little guy?
You might also want to look into how Serious Materials is getting favorable treatment from government. Treatment not only allows them an advantage over the competition, but also makes them the only window maker awarded money under the stimulus bill.
The reason there is no real competition is because of government regulations that favor companies with the most money for lobbyists and politician's campaigns. How is the RIAA so powerful? Government regulations, like extended copyright and favoritism for corporate protections over independent artist. The government you love has created the problem.
There is so much cronyism in government that capitalism is basically gone. What we are left with is crony capitalism.
And the more authority you're willing to hand over to the money masters in Washington the worse it gets.
Get rid of the corporate influence in Washington and you would solve this problem overnight. Unfortunately, the only way to do that is to get rid Washington's power to select winners and losers in the marketplace. But people like you want them to have more power instead, because they keep saying they are going to protect you from evil corporations. So the congress claims they are going to do something to protect you, then the corporate lobbyists come in an write the laws. The losers are the companies that didn't spend enough on lobbyists, and the consumers since they will be paying taxes to support the new regulations and higher prices for everything because corporations have written legislation that bludgeons their competition into insolvency.
I've never heard anyone who wasn't a pothead singing the praises of Hemp before. I've always felt their judgement in that area suspect.
So you think the entire U.S. Department of Agriculture is made up of nothing but "potheads"?
I think you're missing the irony of the situation. If you're spending billions of dollars on "job stimulus" and more billions of dollars supporting unemployment benefits, how does it make sense to use money to hire off-shore labor from that same pot of money. I mean, it's great that the cost of living in other countries allows you to leverage dollars better, but when you're also spending billions to support workers in your own country that are just sitting around without jobs to do, it seems exceedingly wasteful.
As I recall, the MSM reported the controversy as stemming from Van Jones statement that "Republicans are assholes" .
MOD PARENT UP!
Very insightful. I used to be very critical of Charlotte Iserbyt (author of "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America"), because I thought her title and viewpoint were overly inflammatory, that, yes, there was too much incompetence and bad ideas in the educational system and our outcomes were falling behind those of other countries. But I've changed my mind lately. I'm convinced that it is deliberate. So my apologies for statements I made about Charlotte Iserbyt in the past.
The thing about the "conspiracy nuts" is that their ideas would never get so much traction if 100% of what they say is false. There is an absence of clear and credible answers, too many inconsistencies in the official stories, and not enough real information. So all kinds of crazy ideas spring out of that.
The problem with Sunstein's plan is that he wants to create infiltrators that parrot the official story, not just to shut down the crazy theories, but to get rid of the questions. And questioning government is vital to a democracy. When government has control of every side of the message, then, yes, all conspiracy theories go away, but so do any questions about what they are doing. And that's bad.
Complete transparency is great for financial workings, policy making, and driving.
It's not so great when dealing with radical groups who are already convinced that anything 'the man' says is a load of bullshit.
But anything 'the man' says is a load of bullshit. That's why we call him 'the man'.
Thanks P and GP. I've been relying on EveryDNS for about 5 years now. They have a great service and I've happily donated to keep it running. My little home server doesn't do much, but it wouldn't do anything useful without this service. It's something I never have to think about because a little script on the server detects whenever my ISP decides to change my IP address, and updates the EveryDNS host automatically.
Good to know there are alternatives when/if DynDNS starts trying to gouge me. I hope they are as useful and easy to work with.
You forgot "the universe is just a figment of my imagination"...
I don't think that would apply here, since it's not an argument against this theory. TFA describes a theory based on "the universe is just a hologram", which is just a derivative of "the universe is a figment of my imagination".