Interesting that you're voted Offtopic while the post that went offtopic was your parent. You are spreading misinformation, but it ought to be corrected instead of simply modded down.
The NPR program This American Life recently had two episodes (391 and 392, found here) on the health care system, and the problems with it are just not as simple as the Democrats or the Republicans are making them out to be.
For one thing, the hospitals are most certainly *not* fine. A big part of the insurance problem is that companies who serve a large area population use that influence to negotiate really low service rates with hospitals in their area. The hospitals want that customer base, so rather than standing firm at a reasonably profitable price, they lower prices for the big insurance company and jack up prices for the same procedures when dealing with smaller companies. The example given in the show was of one hospital in CA which charged one company $1600 for a procedure, and charged another $11,000.
There's a lot more where that came from in the shows. I highly recommend them to everyone who wants to open his mouth to talk about health care. Everyone knows it's broken, but too many people are looking solely at the broken parts their party claims will fix the whole thing.
Let's not neglect to look at why the senate started going downhill: in 1913, with the passage of the 17th Amendment providing for the election of senators by popular election instead of selection by each state's legislature.
The intent of the Senate was to represent the interests of each state, while the House represented the people. (House representation is also skewed, with each Congressman representing 21 times the populace intended.) The logic behind this is sound: the state does not always share the same interests of the people living in it, and since the US is a federation of sovereign states (hah!) there should be a place for state interests in the federal government. Election of senators by the state legislature ensures that the people are being represented, though twice removed, and lets senators make unpopular but necessary decisions in order to keep the states functioning.
Now, there's no way to say what kind of shape we'd be in without direct election of senators, but I bet that it would look pretty different from how it looks today. Senators wouldn't need tons of capital to plaster their ads all over the airwaves, since they would in essence be marketing themselves to much smaller groups of people, and I like to think that state legislatures are less sensational and more concerned with results than their federal counterparts, so they would make more informed decisions.
I can believe that you were goaded into it by GP's arrogance of declaring that a better way will never be discovered, but that strong insistence has little to do with conservatism and everything to do with lacking genius when it comes to economic systems, like most if not all of us. You, however, are doing conservatives a disservice.
The conservative viewpoint is that it is good to modify systems that have already been in use rather than to replace them entirely with new ones every time a problem crops up. When your pure ideology runs up against the inevitable complexities of reality, you're going to have problems. As existing systems moved from their platonic ideals into practical implementations, those problems were worked out (in good systems, anyway). So, generally speaking, when confronted with new problems in an existing system, the conservative says "let's keep the system and modify only what we need to to solve this problem" instead of the progressive's call to throw the whole thing out and put in some new system he dreamed up that will, naturally, solve Everything, Forever, in one fell swoop. Until it doesn't.
There is a vocal segment of Americans always yelling "stop," but they are a radical (and radically errant) subset of conservatives, and by painting all conservatives with that brush you do us a great disservice. It's akin to me calling you a hedonistic baby-killer because you (presumably) support a woman's right to choose abortion. You should use the qualifier "social conservatives" when discussing these people, because they are often behind the same governmental policies as the progressives, which is to say that they support big government and foreign intervention and a slew of other unconstitutional nonsense.
Tim Kreider is a troll. I'm amused that he claims that liberals are more about individual freedom. That's where they get their name, and that is indeed where their roots lie, but modern liberals are the ones who now want everything from banking to burgers regulated by a central authority, and are the main pushers of the nanny state paradigm. There are important social policies that they want to implement, but IMO as important as they are for those they affect and as much as I agree with them, they take a back seat to their loose monetary and military policies which are in danger of bankrupting the country (and may already have).
I am a small-government monetary conservative who supports socially liberal policies. I suffer no lack of imagination or empathy (especially the empathy, trust me), and I resent the fact that I am portrayed otherwise. I find it sad that things have shaken out in such a way that no mainstream political party is aligned with my views: both parties are rushing headlong into a police state, and the one with a greater chance of getting off that path is also the one that's pushing anti-gay marriage legislation.
Rail all you like against the social conservatives; I'll be mostly in agreement with you. Disagree all you like with the conservative mindset, too--in my opinion it takes all kinds of people to improve society. Just please don't conflate the two, and please gain an understanding of what the conservative mindset actually is.
There is a significant difference in that these modern terrorists appear* to be more willing to sacrifice civilians and hide amongst them. My very fuzzy understanding of American history shows the colonial upstarts camping mostly in woods and marshes, away from the civilians. Which is interesting, considering that support for the colonial upstarts is portrayed as being much more widespread than support for al Qaeda and friends, who often hide in towns. There are many other factors such as terrain and tech to take into account, too--Washington et.al. couldn't have hidden in small woods with Predator drones flying around watching with infrared eyes.
*How much of my understanding is spin to make our forefathers look good and the terrorists look bad, I do not know, since I have only media hearsay to go on in either case.
I love it when I read/. and can't tell if two people are having a real conversation about some obscure specialized tech or playing a forum version of Mornington Crescent.
Remember how there was that big deal about the first woman winning the Nobel prize for economics? It's a shame that the fact that she has a vag overshadowed her research, which showed that the people using a common resource can better manage that resource than a government.
The bar for entry for a Nobel prize is admittedly low these days, but Elinor Ostrom's findings warrant your own investigation, assuming you can get over your prior assumptions.
Apple's CoreOS team includes several of the lead engineers from the ZFS project (who fled the remnants of Sun in the Schwartz melt-down), and the architect of the BeFS.
If this (potentially) verifiable information is accurate, that along with the claim of sources are two things missing from most if not all of the other AC speculation. The scenario is plausible and credible, so it is reasonable in the absence of contrary evidence to lend more weight to the AC above.
How much more weight will of course vary amongst individuals, but it seems the mods have deemed it worthy. Wisdom of crowds and all that.
Remember, pipes and joints and even vaporizers spread hepatitis. Use a chillum when sharing.
How does using a chillum differ from using a pipe? Perhaps "chillum" means something different to you and me--I hear the term in reference to a straight pipe; that is, the bowl is not at all angled and is directly opposite the mouthpiece.
I would think a bong (properly used) would be the safest method of sharing, as at no point is any part of the piece in your mouth.
Perhaps it'd be easier for him to understand the question phrased:
Provided that my car achieves some regulated minimum standard of gas mileage, why should I care which methods are used to achieve that standard?
The basic idea being, if you are going to have regulation, it should be scoped so that you are setting a goal, not mandating every step of one particular method of achieving that goal. The former encourages innovation while the latter stifles it.
I would highly recommend Metroid: Zero Mission for the DS if you have one. It's an expanded remake of the original Metroid that plays like a dream. It's very much on par with Super Metriod in my opinion, and the gameplay is a little faster.
If you're a purist and want to beat the original original, that's on the cartridge too, though you may have to unlock it.
I'm jealous--I never managed to beat Dragon Warrior no matter how many times I tried. I think I always started getting impatient at about the time I could handle Stone Golems, so I'd venture further and get killed by Wyverns all the time.
That bill would allow the President to shut down the private internet in the event of an emergency--a phrase so broad as to allow any excuse he chooses--along with unrestricted access to data by the Secretary of Commerce under regular conditions. The EFF has an informative overview of the legislation. It's currently in a committee, but that doesn't mean it should be ignored. Thankfully, the EFF has done a good job of keeping an eye on things like this.
FWIW, I agree with your assesment, both the original post and your response to PeanutButterBreath. I was only having a bit of fun. I'll stop wasting our time now.
Not many military operations show such lopsided results: big impact at low cost, with results disproportional to the sacrifice, which fuels the insatiable hunger for UAVs and makes waging war even more abstract for everyone at home. People care less about what their government does when they are not asked to contribute. In World War II, one in ten Americans served in the military, and the war dead totaled nearly half a million. Today, fewer than one in a hundred serve in the military, and as the machines take over and that flesh-and-blood burden shrinks even more, the citizenry will disengage more and more.
This is why technology will never result in utopia. There is too much incentive for those in power to use it to increase their power, and too little cost to the populace to incite them to resist.
As for back-ups, I don't really think the Time Capsule is something I'd recommend to most users. Instead just use Time Machine with an external drive. I do think that Apple should be given lots of credit for Time Machine. It really makes back-ups so easy there is no excuse for anyone not to make back-ups.
Seconded. There's very little reason to pay the premium for a Time Capsule, especially given the power supply failures, when 500GB+ drives are a little over a hundred bucks. Time Machine itself is a phenomenal utility for home users: it's fully automated and hassle-free.
Now if only I could remember to plug the drive into my laptop overnight...
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Interesting that you're voted Offtopic while the post that went offtopic was your parent. You are spreading misinformation, but it ought to be corrected instead of simply modded down.
The NPR program This American Life recently had two episodes (391 and 392, found here) on the health care system, and the problems with it are just not as simple as the Democrats or the Republicans are making them out to be.
For one thing, the hospitals are most certainly *not* fine. A big part of the insurance problem is that companies who serve a large area population use that influence to negotiate really low service rates with hospitals in their area. The hospitals want that customer base, so rather than standing firm at a reasonably profitable price, they lower prices for the big insurance company and jack up prices for the same procedures when dealing with smaller companies. The example given in the show was of one hospital in CA which charged one company $1600 for a procedure, and charged another $11,000.
There's a lot more where that came from in the shows. I highly recommend them to everyone who wants to open his mouth to talk about health care. Everyone knows it's broken, but too many people are looking solely at the broken parts their party claims will fix the whole thing.
Let's not neglect to look at why the senate started going downhill: in 1913, with the passage of the 17th Amendment providing for the election of senators by popular election instead of selection by each state's legislature.
The intent of the Senate was to represent the interests of each state, while the House represented the people. (House representation is also skewed, with each Congressman representing 21 times the populace intended.) The logic behind this is sound: the state does not always share the same interests of the people living in it, and since the US is a federation of sovereign states (hah!) there should be a place for state interests in the federal government. Election of senators by the state legislature ensures that the people are being represented, though twice removed, and lets senators make unpopular but necessary decisions in order to keep the states functioning.
Now, there's no way to say what kind of shape we'd be in without direct election of senators, but I bet that it would look pretty different from how it looks today. Senators wouldn't need tons of capital to plaster their ads all over the airwaves, since they would in essence be marketing themselves to much smaller groups of people, and I like to think that state legislatures are less sensational and more concerned with results than their federal counterparts, so they would make more informed decisions.
But that wouldn't be Democracy, would it?
I can believe that you were goaded into it by GP's arrogance of declaring that a better way will never be discovered, but that strong insistence has little to do with conservatism and everything to do with lacking genius when it comes to economic systems, like most if not all of us. You, however, are doing conservatives a disservice.
The conservative viewpoint is that it is good to modify systems that have already been in use rather than to replace them entirely with new ones every time a problem crops up. When your pure ideology runs up against the inevitable complexities of reality, you're going to have problems. As existing systems moved from their platonic ideals into practical implementations, those problems were worked out (in good systems, anyway). So, generally speaking, when confronted with new problems in an existing system, the conservative says "let's keep the system and modify only what we need to to solve this problem" instead of the progressive's call to throw the whole thing out and put in some new system he dreamed up that will, naturally, solve Everything, Forever, in one fell swoop. Until it doesn't.
There is a vocal segment of Americans always yelling "stop," but they are a radical (and radically errant) subset of conservatives, and by painting all conservatives with that brush you do us a great disservice. It's akin to me calling you a hedonistic baby-killer because you (presumably) support a woman's right to choose abortion. You should use the qualifier "social conservatives" when discussing these people, because they are often behind the same governmental policies as the progressives, which is to say that they support big government and foreign intervention and a slew of other unconstitutional nonsense.
Tim Kreider is a troll. I'm amused that he claims that liberals are more about individual freedom. That's where they get their name, and that is indeed where their roots lie, but modern liberals are the ones who now want everything from banking to burgers regulated by a central authority, and are the main pushers of the nanny state paradigm. There are important social policies that they want to implement, but IMO as important as they are for those they affect and as much as I agree with them, they take a back seat to their loose monetary and military policies which are in danger of bankrupting the country (and may already have).
I am a small-government monetary conservative who supports socially liberal policies. I suffer no lack of imagination or empathy (especially the empathy, trust me), and I resent the fact that I am portrayed otherwise. I find it sad that things have shaken out in such a way that no mainstream political party is aligned with my views: both parties are rushing headlong into a police state, and the one with a greater chance of getting off that path is also the one that's pushing anti-gay marriage legislation.
Rail all you like against the social conservatives; I'll be mostly in agreement with you. Disagree all you like with the conservative mindset, too--in my opinion it takes all kinds of people to improve society. Just please don't conflate the two, and please gain an understanding of what the conservative mindset actually is.
Exactly. Everyone else should make their choices based on how YOU think they ought to behave.
There is a significant difference in that these modern terrorists appear* to be more willing to sacrifice civilians and hide amongst them. My very fuzzy understanding of American history shows the colonial upstarts camping mostly in woods and marshes, away from the civilians. Which is interesting, considering that support for the colonial upstarts is portrayed as being much more widespread than support for al Qaeda and friends, who often hide in towns. There are many other factors such as terrain and tech to take into account, too--Washington et.al. couldn't have hidden in small woods with Predator drones flying around watching with infrared eyes.
*How much of my understanding is spin to make our forefathers look good and the terrorists look bad, I do not know, since I have only media hearsay to go on in either case.
I love it when I read /. and can't tell if two people are having a real conversation about some obscure specialized tech or playing a forum version of Mornington Crescent.
They're almost as bad as the AC's ;)
Remember how there was that big deal about the first woman winning the Nobel prize for economics? It's a shame that the fact that she has a vag overshadowed her research, which showed that the people using a common resource can better manage that resource than a government.
The bar for entry for a Nobel prize is admittedly low these days, but Elinor Ostrom's findings warrant your own investigation, assuming you can get over your prior assumptions.
Apple's CoreOS team includes several of the lead engineers from the ZFS project (who fled the remnants of Sun in the Schwartz melt-down), and the architect of the BeFS.
If this (potentially) verifiable information is accurate, that along with the claim of sources are two things missing from most if not all of the other AC speculation. The scenario is plausible and credible, so it is reasonable in the absence of contrary evidence to lend more weight to the AC above.
How much more weight will of course vary amongst individuals, but it seems the mods have deemed it worthy. Wisdom of crowds and all that.
You're giving the AC too much credit. Probably raised on The Backstreet Boys and N'Sync.
Well I'll be damned. I had no idea they were intended to be used that way. Looks like I have some research to attend to. Thanks for the info.
Remember, pipes and joints and even vaporizers spread hepatitis. Use a chillum when sharing.
How does using a chillum differ from using a pipe? Perhaps "chillum" means something different to you and me--I hear the term in reference to a straight pipe; that is, the bowl is not at all angled and is directly opposite the mouthpiece.
I would think a bong (properly used) would be the safest method of sharing, as at no point is any part of the piece in your mouth.
I was getting tired of buying wheel/pedal add-ons for all my racing games. I'm glad to see they're starting to standardize.
Perhaps it'd be easier for him to understand the question phrased:
Provided that my car achieves some regulated minimum standard of gas mileage, why should I care which methods are used to achieve that standard?
The basic idea being, if you are going to have regulation, it should be scoped so that you are setting a goal, not mandating every step of one particular method of achieving that goal. The former encourages innovation while the latter stifles it.
Aah! Good call. I didn't pick it up until after I had a DS, hence the confusion.
I would highly recommend Metroid: Zero Mission for the DS if you have one. It's an expanded remake of the original Metroid that plays like a dream. It's very much on par with Super Metriod in my opinion, and the gameplay is a little faster.
If you're a purist and want to beat the original original, that's on the cartridge too, though you may have to unlock it.
I'm jealous--I never managed to beat Dragon Warrior no matter how many times I tried. I think I always started getting impatient at about the time I could handle Stone Golems, so I'd venture further and get killed by Wyverns all the time.
Man, I forgot how much that pissed me off.
That bill would allow the President to shut down the private internet in the event of an emergency--a phrase so broad as to allow any excuse he chooses--along with unrestricted access to data by the Secretary of Commerce under regular conditions. The EFF has an informative overview of the legislation. It's currently in a committee, but that doesn't mean it should be ignored. Thankfully, the EFF has done a good job of keeping an eye on things like this.
FWIW, I agree with your assesment, both the original post and your response to PeanutButterBreath. I was only having a bit of fun. I'll stop wasting our time now.
When you're criticizing someone, please use words you understand in the future, thanks kindly.
Thanks to you, he did use words that he understood in the future. =)
(I know, it's a stretch, but I work extra hard at being critical of posts that criticize a critic's criticism.)
How long before we see these things over U. S. skies?
Oh, they're already here. They happen to be controlled by the US Government, but that doesn't give me any warm fuzzies.
Not many military operations show such lopsided results: big impact at low cost, with results disproportional to the sacrifice, which fuels the insatiable hunger for UAVs and makes waging war even more abstract for everyone at home. People care less about what their government does when they are not asked to contribute. In World War II, one in ten Americans served in the military, and the war dead totaled nearly half a million. Today, fewer than one in a hundred serve in the military, and as the machines take over and that flesh-and-blood burden shrinks even more, the citizenry will disengage more and more.
This is why technology will never result in utopia. There is too much incentive for those in power to use it to increase their power, and too little cost to the populace to incite them to resist.
I try to keep an open mind, but not so wide open that the me-jelly leaks out. ;)
I made a joke about something like that here the other day. I don't put any stock in the belief, but it is interesting to think about.
As for back-ups, I don't really think the Time Capsule is something I'd recommend to most users. Instead just use Time Machine with an external drive. I do think that Apple should be given lots of credit for Time Machine. It really makes back-ups so easy there is no excuse for anyone not to make back-ups.
Seconded. There's very little reason to pay the premium for a Time Capsule, especially given the power supply failures, when 500GB+ drives are a little over a hundred bucks. Time Machine itself is a phenomenal utility for home users: it's fully automated and hassle-free.
Now if only I could remember to plug the drive into my laptop overnight...