Who's supposed to fund the FDA's regulation of meds? It sounds like they're getting user fees, which seems reasonable to me. My friend in the FDA said the FDA would not hesitate to pull approval if they had a reason. (The FDA recognizes darn few things as safe. They recognize a lot of things as safe enough unless and until they get a reason to think otherwise.)
Medicare costs apply to those over 65, and providers are free to charge differently for those of us still under that age. A friend of mine was complaining that she lost money on Medicare patients, because what Medicare would allow her to charge was less than her overhead for the appointments. (She's a good surgeon, but I have doubts about her as a businesswoman.)
There's an increasing tendency for the minor stuff to be handled by nurses, not doctors, to cut costs. The number of doctors is limited, but I don't think the number of nurse practitioners is.
The reason for superdelegates is McGovern, and I am old enough to remember 1972 vividly*. The Democrats then were having a mass movement that demanded ideological purity (sound familiar?) and they wanted to make sure that such mass movements couldn't totally disregard electability. The superdelegates provide some common sense, so that an ideological movement would have to work to get a nomination. They don't stop a popular candidate from getting nominated, but that's not what they're there for.
The parties are private clubs and do make their own rules. Should they be regulated by the Federal government, and forced to pick candidates in a certain way?
Good grief. Do you think Stalin et al. wanted to maximize liberty for everyone? Mao? Communism as more-or-less practiced was a collectivist ideology, and the class was more important than the individual. You could accuse some Communists of wanting to make things better for everyone at gunpoint (there was some idealism among the early Soviet Communists), but not Stalin.
Apple has a practice of telling you you can get along without features that they aren't ready to release yet. I'd say that was a large part of Jobs talking about how the iPhone could use web apps.
The other reason this doesn't come up often is that the government doesn't necessarily provide the ability. If I mail-order something from the next county, I owe use tax on it, and last I looked I simply couldn't find a way to file the tax. I can file for out-of-state purchases, but there's no form for in-state, or a spot on the out-of-state form that allows me to specify that I owe only county and city use taxes.
If you've got a large brick and mortar store somewhere, you can have someone keep track of the taxes for that specific location. This scales well, because it's a relatively small fixed cost for each location. You don't have to know things like tax zone boundaries, because sales tax is calculated at the store and ignores where the customer's from. Your store can keep track of all the odd categories, tax holidays, etc. that apply to that one specific location.
Calculating the sales tax owed at a customer location is a far harder problem. It requires determining the tax zone and knowing all of the oddities of all the sales tax laws all over the country.
A. Stores have existed for centuries, sure. In general, they have had a physical location that was the same for the buyer and the seller, making things much simpler. When I'm buying something at a store, the store can keep track of tax rules and can send the money to places specified for one location.
B. You are assuming that the cost of collecting and remitting taxes would be small. Given the extreme complexity of determining tax districts and exactly what is taxed what there, I'd expect it to be higher, assuming someone did offer a service that would cover all of this.
C. In the first place, I don't like asking if there's a really good reason why someone should be permitted to do something. I'd like to ask if there's a good reason why they shouldn't. In the second place, I have a niche hobby I'm very fond of that pretty much depends on hobby enthusiasts doing low-volume sales across the country, and it would be seriously hurt by significant additional overhead.
D. I don't care about Amazon. They'll be fine either way. I care about people running very small businesses out of their garages because they like being part of the hobby.
Last time this was a real problem, the police officer showed up pretty fast and was very helpful. (The idiot parked in my driveway turned out to be sitting on overdue parking tickets, so he got taken to the police station after moving his car.)
I have no idea about "most cases", but where I live we don't even legally own to the sidewalk. That isn't true where you live, but I don't know which of us is more typical.
There are things that are illegal that aren't actually crimes. Around here, if you get ticketed for something and just have to pay a fixed fine, it apparently isn't considered a crime.
I don't even own down to the sidewalk where I live. I maintain the ground from property line to street, but it isn't legally mine. In my neighborhood, the road is public in all senses, and so is the sidewalk.
I don't find it odd at all. Burning sequestered carbon is having some very bad effects, which will become even more evident over time. We're past the point where we can avoid catastrophe, but we can still to some extent control how catastrophic. Moving to non-fossil-fuel power ASAP will reduce much of the effect. We're still screwed, but not as screwed as if we keep burning coal until we run out of economically recoverable deposits (and that's not just deposits we know of that are economically recoverable with current technology).
I really don't think we, as a species, will be destroyed by climate change. I don't think it will even be the end of civilization. Humans are very resourceful, after all, and we can deal with die-offs in the hundreds of millions and costs of several trillion dollars a year.
In the long, long run, there isn't any choice about it. There's only so much coal and oil and natural gas in the crust, and at some point the energy cost of extracting coal will make it uneconomical. (Oil has other desirable properties, so it would be still worth extracting even at an energy deficit.)
Except if their good faith safety efforts aren't adequate to the task, or they're adequate for a few months or so. The problem with demonstrating adequate safety precautions in practice is what happens if the demonstration happens to fail.
Consenting to marry is typically consenting to have sex in general. It isn't consent for any particular time or place. If your spouse isn't as interested as you, talk about it sometime.
I've been paying attention. I've seen a lot of people decide for stupid reasons that global warming can't be happening, and since climate scientists say that it is they need to come up with inane reasons why climate scientists don't have credibility. Maligning climate science and climate scientists is the hallmark of the denier. (Skeptics may be dubious of climate science, but won't make up ludicrous stories about a massive conspiracy or a whole field of scientists clinging to a false orthodoxy.)
You're referring to powerful states in periods where there were large populations of nomads, expert in mounted archery, and fearsome barbarians, so there were the awesome invaders vs. the terrified natives. That hasn't applied in centuries.
Nowadays, the natives have well-organized, well-trained, and well-equipped armies, capable of dealing with many times their number of brave but less organized invaders.
Ecologically speaking, humanity is an extinction-level event.
Diseases, however tailored, aren't going to wipe out the species. Nobody wants to engineer a biological weapon that will kill 90% of the population, because it's impossible to target those things precisely, and governments want to keep their own population more or less intact.
Global warming is going to cause a lot of problems. It isn't going to wipe out the species or destroy civilization. It could wipe out large numbers of people and be really expensive, but humans are good at adapting (themselves and their environment, doesn't really matter).
Really? There's a lot of things that my ancestors used to do that we no longer do. My grandmother was very adept with a sewing machine, and used to make her family's clothes (including some of mine when I was a kid). We don't grow our own food (with some minor exceptions). There's no difference between what you're saying and claiming that sewing my own clothes isn't an intolerable annoyance.
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Who's supposed to fund the FDA's regulation of meds? It sounds like they're getting user fees, which seems reasonable to me. My friend in the FDA said the FDA would not hesitate to pull approval if they had a reason. (The FDA recognizes darn few things as safe. They recognize a lot of things as safe enough unless and until they get a reason to think otherwise.)
Medicare costs apply to those over 65, and providers are free to charge differently for those of us still under that age. A friend of mine was complaining that she lost money on Medicare patients, because what Medicare would allow her to charge was less than her overhead for the appointments. (She's a good surgeon, but I have doubts about her as a businesswoman.)
There's an increasing tendency for the minor stuff to be handled by nurses, not doctors, to cut costs. The number of doctors is limited, but I don't think the number of nurse practitioners is.
The reason for superdelegates is McGovern, and I am old enough to remember 1972 vividly*. The Democrats then were having a mass movement that demanded ideological purity (sound familiar?) and they wanted to make sure that such mass movements couldn't totally disregard electability. The superdelegates provide some common sense, so that an ideological movement would have to work to get a nomination. They don't stop a popular candidate from getting nominated, but that's not what they're there for.
The parties are private clubs and do make their own rules. Should they be regulated by the Federal government, and forced to pick candidates in a certain way?
Good grief. Do you think Stalin et al. wanted to maximize liberty for everyone? Mao? Communism as more-or-less practiced was a collectivist ideology, and the class was more important than the individual. You could accuse some Communists of wanting to make things better for everyone at gunpoint (there was some idealism among the early Soviet Communists), but not Stalin.
Apple has a practice of telling you you can get along without features that they aren't ready to release yet. I'd say that was a large part of Jobs talking about how the iPhone could use web apps.
When my wife asked her great-grandfather, he said "the light bulb". I'd say that's worth including.
The other reason this doesn't come up often is that the government doesn't necessarily provide the ability. If I mail-order something from the next county, I owe use tax on it, and last I looked I simply couldn't find a way to file the tax. I can file for out-of-state purchases, but there's no form for in-state, or a spot on the out-of-state form that allows me to specify that I owe only county and city use taxes.
If you've got a large brick and mortar store somewhere, you can have someone keep track of the taxes for that specific location. This scales well, because it's a relatively small fixed cost for each location. You don't have to know things like tax zone boundaries, because sales tax is calculated at the store and ignores where the customer's from. Your store can keep track of all the odd categories, tax holidays, etc. that apply to that one specific location.
Calculating the sales tax owed at a customer location is a far harder problem. It requires determining the tax zone and knowing all of the oddities of all the sales tax laws all over the country.
A. Stores have existed for centuries, sure. In general, they have had a physical location that was the same for the buyer and the seller, making things much simpler. When I'm buying something at a store, the store can keep track of tax rules and can send the money to places specified for one location.
B. You are assuming that the cost of collecting and remitting taxes would be small. Given the extreme complexity of determining tax districts and exactly what is taxed what there, I'd expect it to be higher, assuming someone did offer a service that would cover all of this.
C. In the first place, I don't like asking if there's a really good reason why someone should be permitted to do something. I'd like to ask if there's a good reason why they shouldn't. In the second place, I have a niche hobby I'm very fond of that pretty much depends on hobby enthusiasts doing low-volume sales across the country, and it would be seriously hurt by significant additional overhead.
D. I don't care about Amazon. They'll be fine either way. I care about people running very small businesses out of their garages because they like being part of the hobby.
Last time this was a real problem, the police officer showed up pretty fast and was very helpful. (The idiot parked in my driveway turned out to be sitting on overdue parking tickets, so he got taken to the police station after moving his car.)
I have no idea about "most cases", but where I live we don't even legally own to the sidewalk. That isn't true where you live, but I don't know which of us is more typical.
There are things that are illegal that aren't actually crimes. Around here, if you get ticketed for something and just have to pay a fixed fine, it apparently isn't considered a crime.
I don't even own down to the sidewalk where I live. I maintain the ground from property line to street, but it isn't legally mine. In my neighborhood, the road is public in all senses, and so is the sidewalk.
I don't find it odd at all. Burning sequestered carbon is having some very bad effects, which will become even more evident over time. We're past the point where we can avoid catastrophe, but we can still to some extent control how catastrophic. Moving to non-fossil-fuel power ASAP will reduce much of the effect. We're still screwed, but not as screwed as if we keep burning coal until we run out of economically recoverable deposits (and that's not just deposits we know of that are economically recoverable with current technology).
I really don't think we, as a species, will be destroyed by climate change. I don't think it will even be the end of civilization. Humans are very resourceful, after all, and we can deal with die-offs in the hundreds of millions and costs of several trillion dollars a year.
In the long, long run, there isn't any choice about it. There's only so much coal and oil and natural gas in the crust, and at some point the energy cost of extracting coal will make it uneconomical. (Oil has other desirable properties, so it would be still worth extracting even at an energy deficit.)
If zero is the exponent for your love life, then you do have one. Exactly one.
Except if their good faith safety efforts aren't adequate to the task, or they're adequate for a few months or so. The problem with demonstrating adequate safety precautions in practice is what happens if the demonstration happens to fail.
Speaking as a human driver, how do I tell if there's a patch of ice 100m ahead? I'm hardly perfect at it.
Consenting to marry is typically consenting to have sex in general. It isn't consent for any particular time or place. If your spouse isn't as interested as you, talk about it sometime.
I've been paying attention. I've seen a lot of people decide for stupid reasons that global warming can't be happening, and since climate scientists say that it is they need to come up with inane reasons why climate scientists don't have credibility. Maligning climate science and climate scientists is the hallmark of the denier. (Skeptics may be dubious of climate science, but won't make up ludicrous stories about a massive conspiracy or a whole field of scientists clinging to a false orthodoxy.)
You're referring to powerful states in periods where there were large populations of nomads, expert in mounted archery, and fearsome barbarians, so there were the awesome invaders vs. the terrified natives. That hasn't applied in centuries.
Nowadays, the natives have well-organized, well-trained, and well-equipped armies, capable of dealing with many times their number of brave but less organized invaders.
Yeah. All those people who promised to move out of the country if Obama was elected.... I'm still waiting, guys.
Ecologically speaking, humanity is an extinction-level event.
Diseases, however tailored, aren't going to wipe out the species. Nobody wants to engineer a biological weapon that will kill 90% of the population, because it's impossible to target those things precisely, and governments want to keep their own population more or less intact.
Global warming is going to cause a lot of problems. It isn't going to wipe out the species or destroy civilization. It could wipe out large numbers of people and be really expensive, but humans are good at adapting (themselves and their environment, doesn't really matter).
I live in Minnesota, I pump my own gas, and I'm rather clumsy. It's been years since I got gasoline on me.
Really? There's a lot of things that my ancestors used to do that we no longer do. My grandmother was very adept with a sewing machine, and used to make her family's clothes (including some of mine when I was a kid). We don't grow our own food (with some minor exceptions). There's no difference between what you're saying and claiming that sewing my own clothes isn't an intolerable annoyance.