An interesting theory, and one I hadn't considered, but I'd hesitate to accept it unless there's some evidence beyond "It could have happened". If they were lying about his death (and in that case, presumably, going so far as to make the "He was armed. Oh, wait, no he wasn't." claims as a double bluff) I don't see why they wouldn't have faked a photo - it's absence doesn't give any direct credibility to the theory he's alive, IMO.
Games often clock in at many GB, and a moderately enthusiastic gamer might well be buying more than one each month, especially with the big flashy promos that Steam tends to do - it's not going to use your full allowance unless you're reinstalling on a new system (a valid use in itself), but I can quite see that it'd make a dent. A few people in the house with both Steam and Netflix accounts adds up pretty quickly, even if not all of them are buying games every month.
As for updates - if you're forced to play on a limited subset of servers because your ISP doesn't give you enough bandwidth to download patches, I'd say that's a prime example of bandwidth limits hurting the legitimate consumer.
I think the interesting thing here is that they aren't quite Walmart - it's a decent analogy, but as always, subtleties are lost - the fact that they have technical limitations as well as free-market leverage could prove to be their downfall if it goes to court as an anti-trust issue.
In the mean time, I would absolutely love to see MS start charging a 30% commission on every sale made through the Windows version of iTunes.
Although I don't doubt that Apple's terms of service did screw them, I have severe doubts about the business acumen of a team that spends 18 months and a million dollars on what looks to be, at best, a mildly innovative eBook reader. Unless I've missed something big, it looks more like "three students, a case of mountain dew and a few all-nighters" territory to me, albeit a fairly well polished example.
You mean like the trains, the roads, the airplanes, the military, the police, the schools and universities, the hospitals, electricity, social security, health care, houses, firefighters? But you are right, besides that what ever have the government ever done useful with our taxes?
I didn't say 'all taxes are wasted', I said that a lot of things that your taxes are funding are unhelpful and/or harmful. Yes, we need police, but I think it's unproductive, hugely wasteful, and damaging to civil liberties the way they currently operate (particularly the 'war on drugs' and massively overused 'anti-terror' legislation). Military funding is through the roof, public funding for hospitals goes towards private industry profits while people are left without care, and the figures say that the education system doesn't come close to that of many other developed countries. It's not all bad, I readily admit, but the existence of services that barely fulfil their remit and/or cost far, far more than they should does not imply that your taxes are being well handled.
I'd say mistrust of the government is quite reasonable given their track record! Oddly, the FCC page doesn't mention any chip - it talks about carriers sending out the messages, in which case I don't see why they wouldn't be received by the normal radio in the phone, and simply tagged in such a way that the firmware would display them differently to normal messages. The Boston Globe seems pretty distinct about the fact that it's done in a combination of hardware and software, but I can't possibly work out why; maybe they didn't check their facts, maybe I've missed something, maybe there is something nefarious going on. Any one of the three is plausible, I would think.
The limited range of cell towers neatly fulfils the localisation requirement without any need for tracking. Just tell the towers in the affected region to broadcast to all devices in range - if your phone isn't within the coverage area of those towers, you won't get the message.
So buy a basic phone, opt out from the alert messages, and you're done. Sure, it sounds a bit unnecessary, but it does no harm if unused and is potentially helpful if it is used - that's better than can be said for a lot of things your taxes are funding. If the 'presidential warning' system gets overused (and I'd estimate more than once every decade is overuse) then you've got a legitimate complaint. Emergency warnings seem to be one of the few areas that the government don't have a history of screwing up, so I'll grudgingly give them the benefit of the doubt here.
On the off chance that you weren't being sarcastic: warrants are handed out pretty freely to law enforcement when they can show any semblance of a reason to suspect someone. If it's an emergency, they can be issued retroactively. If the FBI claims the need to track without a warrant, the logical conclusion to draw is that they are tracking at least some people without good reason - if they had good reason, they could get a warrant, after all.
"Particularly hairy" is a fairly apt description of the Nürburgring, actually, and I believe these figures are from realistic production models rather than something designed purely for ten minutes on the track. Sure, it's mainly marketing, but they are making a more-or-less fair comparison between the EV and its internal combustion counterpart - if they were just chasing impressive figures they could take any old piece of crap, give it far more batteries than it's rated for, and show off the straight line speed.
If the Groupon model fails, I wouldn't be surprised if it's down to their own greed. Their running costs are basically a few servers and little else, yet they're taking a full 50% of every sale - combine that with a 50%+ discount on the sticker price, and the seller is only taking home a quarter of their normal sale price. Even with relatively low redemption rates it's hard to turn a profit on that, so a listing on Groupon becomes a one-off advertising expense.
If Groupon took 15%, on the other hand, there would be far more chance that the seller could offer a 50% discount and still make a small profit, maybe even before non-redeemed coupons were taken into account. As soon as you're above break-even, the extra volume brought in has real value of its own, beyond just good marketing - it becomes a (admittedly probably small) source of income as well as a marketing tool. And that allows more companies to use Groupon, making everyone more money in the long run.
Essentially, they need to take their own advice: knock down the costs and make it up in volume.
You're absolutely right, and he may just have been an idiot, but that's not necessarily the case. The only real surprise is that they take a full 50% - I would've guessed somewhere between 10% and 30%, and I'd find it hard to justify any reasonable offer when their cut is that high. Either way, though, this guy's story doesn't invalidate Groupon's premise entirely, and it might actually even strengthen the case for using them.
I've always assumed one of the advantages of Groupon (from a seller's perspective) is that the redemption rate is likely to be less than 100%; I'm sure a large amount of the business is based around people buying things they wouldn't have otherwise paid for, on the basis that "it's so cheap we'd be stupid not to buy it..." - it's not likely that all of these people will ever get around to actually using their coupons. Of course, planning for the worst case is a sensible precaution on the part of the business owner, and that's the second place that the article comes in with an unlikely assumption: even if everyone does redeem, why would the guy spend all of his time fulfilling Groupon orders? I imagine he's about to have a lot of conversations along the lines of "Discount portrait photos? Oh, yes, we offer bookings for them every Friday. It's an extremely popular service, so I'm afraid the next available slot is November 18th.". The customers may be somewhat displeased, but you can hardly kick up a fuss about a guy being too popular; it carries the connotation that he must be good, after all (at least for those who haven't read this article) - the only other places with a waiting list like that are world class restaurants. There's the added bonus that a several month wait is likely to further lower the number of people who actually get around to using the service they paid for.
If he plays his cards right, he's now got a few grand up front to pay for nice equipment, a reputation for being so good that there's a six month wait just to see him, and a very reasonable chance that some people have paid him up-front for work he'll never actually have to do. It's risky, but by no means impossible to pull off. Maybe he won't play his cards right, maybe he really is going to spend the next year running himself ragged for no income, but the numbers alone don't necessarily imply that.
These apps aren't breakthroughs in any sense of the word. It's ridiculous how people can make money from doing nothing groundbreaking. The clueless public buy into it. I have never understood how internet media/web design/app companies can be started by students with bigger egos than ability and what they make is so painfully trivial, why are they being rewarded?
People are generally rewarded for being good at exploiting the market, and not much more. A good product makes that much easier to do, but there are plenty of examples all throughout history of the inventor being screwed because they did a poor job of commercialisation. Conversely, you don't need a particularly inventive or even functional product if your marketing is good enough. If you judge success as "making lots of cash" then purity and quality often have nothing to do with it; it's also worth questioning who's really smarter - the guy who slaves away in a forgotten office for 40 years to make something amazing, or the guy who makes a few million on some inane crap, then spends the next few years working in comfort (and with plenty of resources) on something amazing while the money rolls in from the well-marketed crap.
A guy at my university put together a (fairly basic) interactive website with a slightly inventive concept a year or so ago - it got some good publicity, then was taken down by the university, causing a controversy that netted him much, much more publicity. Just to make the point to a few of my friends that it wasn't really anything that special, I had a clone working the day after the original was taken down - I literally coded it over night, and I'm by no means a great developer. The guy who made the original got a £200k investment in his 'concept'; my copy got all of a few thousand hits. Honestly, I say fair play to the guy - all I really succeeded in demonstrating was that the technical skill wasn't all that valuable, and that the associated marketing and media-wrangling was what actually netted him a good chunk of cash.
I think the point was more the benefit of easily seeing a doctor (with no question about cost) when a minor symptom presents itself. A trained professional then examines that specific symptom and potentially spots/treats an issue that could otherwise have led to costly emergency measures six months down the line. If it costs $150 just to see a doctor, most people won't bother until there's something serious going on, and by then treatment might have become a much more difficult prospect.
The whole 'annual checkup' thing is apparently of limited value, but that doesn't mean it's the standard by which to judge preventative medicine in general.
I think it varies a lot by country as well as by medical system. You can have 'free' healthcare in two countries that provides a very different style of care - this is a good example of the phenomenon.
Personally, I'll avoid seeing a doctor unless absolutely necessary simply because it's not an especially pleasant experience. I can't understand why anyone would want to sit in a waiting room with a bunch of sick people, only to then get poked and prodded at by a stranger, unless they had a problem that really required it.
Or those with the cash will abuse the system just as much (perhaps even more, on the 'I paid for it, I demand you do something' logic) while those without the money will hesitate to get a check up until a minor but worrying symptom has become a major one that's much more difficult to treat. Nothing is really gained - if the US example is anything to go by, the income from the copays would largely end up supporting the infrastructure to collect those same payments. For all its faults, I'd take the NHS as it stands over the US system without hesitation.
To be honest, sitting around in a hospital with a bunch of sick people for several hours waiting to be seen (since those with an actual emergency issue rightly take priority) should surely be disincentive enough for most people anyway.
This is why the public/private hybrid system in the US confuses me. Public systems are prone to bloat and wastefulness because there's an essentially unlimited budget, and because there's no real competition or risk of failure. Private systems tend to be (but are by no means always) more efficient because of the market pressure, but are also much more willing to screw over or ignore patients because their goal is profit, not good service.
Most people won't accept leaving poor people to die in the streets, so the government steps in. Suddenly the private system has many of the factors that lead to inefficiency in the public system, and they still need to syphon money off the top to make a profit. I honestly fail to see how that would ever be expected to work out for the best.
I knew that malpractice insurance was significant, but I didn't realise the figures were that high. I'd still hesitate to take my data from companies whose interests are directly served by inflating the problem, but it certainly does suggest the risks are non-negligible. I don't know, maybe legal reform is the only option.
As I mentioned in a post further down, this seems plausible, but the one thing I haven't seen is actual figures on the risk of litigation. I'm not saying I have any reason to doubt your premise, but I also don't have anything to support it beyond anecdotal evidence about all the lawsuits that are apparently being brought against doctors.
The evidence does seem to suggest that doctors are behaving in this manner, and it also implies that the reasoning is fear of litigation; what's the actual chance of a hospital being successfully sued, though? Could it be the case that doctors are behaving in this manner not because there is a significant chance of them being sued, but because of a (statistically unfounded) fear of being sued?
Why label him as a "gout" sufferer and even worse, treat him for it, if he doesn't actually manifest the disease? Doctors must remember that the way we determine what "normal" values are is by fitting large samples to a bell curve, chopping off the ends at 1 or 2 standard deviations, and calling the middle "normal". There are perfectly healthy people on either end of the curve, however. We need to use our clinical skills to figure out who needs treatment and who doesn't, otherwise you might as well not have doctors at all and leave medicine to some giant, complex algorithm.
Using your discretion necessitates taking responsibility for the diagnosis. The eight people you saved from unnecessary and potentially damaging medication will be better off, as will the ninth who you gave a valid prescription to, but the family of tenth guy who died without being medicated might sue.
If you just followed the guidelines, you might end up unnecessarily medicating six of those ten, and one or more of them may still die, but if it goes to court you just need to compare the numbers on the patient records to those on the guidelines and that's that - you have proof that you "did the best you could".
The whole issue is based on the fear of litigation. That's been said before. The thing I haven't seen any analysis on, though, is whether that fear is founded. We all have some anecdote about an unjust lawsuit that we read about in the news, but I haven't seen any real figures on whether it's the actual risk of litigation that's prohibiting doctors from taking (necessary) risks, or whether it's the unfounded fear of litigation that almost certainly won't actually happen. An interesting Ph.D thesis for someone, perhaps...
Second, YOU ADMITTED THE JUDGE WAS RIGHT about the car rental liability case. You explicitly said that there are circumstances where the rental agency may be a legitimate potential defendant, yet you just cast that aside and ignored it for the rest of your argument. THIS is a logical error: You have certain premises, and you ignore them to the effect that your conclusion does not necessarily follow from your premises.
I haven't even finished reading the article yet, but that was the first thing that struck me. Saying "Obviously if the rental car agency was negligent in the maintenance of one of its vehicles and that negligence led to the accident, they might be liable" implies quite clearly that they are a "legitimate potential defendant". The word "potential" is key: nobody's saying that they are guaranteed to be a defendant in the case, only that the may be in certain circumstances - the very same circumstances outlined in the post attempting to refute that line of argument.
I'll read the rest when I have a chance, but a start like that doesn't bode well for the validity of the remainder.
‘Odd,’ said Arthur, ‘I thought you said it was a democracy?’
‘I did,’ said Ford, ‘It is.’
‘So,’ said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, ‘why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?’
‘It honestly doesn’t occur to them,’ said Ford. ‘They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.’
‘You mean they actually vote for the lizards?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Ford with a shrug, ‘of course.’
‘But,’ said Arthur, going for the big one again, ‘why?’
‘Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,’ said Ford, ‘the wrong lizard might get in.’
Basically, I think you're overestimating the number of people who actually genuinely support either party. 'Voting for' isn't the same as 'supporting', or even 'agreeing with'.
I'm not necessarily saying I agree, but the logic behind granting government/law enforcement relevant and specific increased powers in times of emergency is not necessarily faulty. The actual problem is that we can't trust them not to say "Yup, potential terrorists everywhere. War going on, too. Sounds like an emergency to me; go get the cavity searchin' gloves, Gary."
Absolutely. I was particularly glad to see, in the full list of questions asked, that they question the seizure program itself, not just the dubious claims about the plug-in. The list is as follows (the source linked above is apparently a copy of the official email):
April 19, 2011 email from Mozilla to US Department of Homeland Security Special Agent To help us evaluate the Department of Homeland Security's request to take-down/remove the MAFIAAfire.com add-on from Mozilla's websites, can you please provide the following additional information: 1. Have any courts determined that MAFIAAfire.com is unlawful or illegal in any way? If so, on what basis? (Please provide any relevant rulings) 2. Have any courts determined that the seized domains related to MAFIAAfire.com are unlawful, illegal or liable for infringement in any way? (please provide relevant rulings) 3. Is Mozilla legally obligated to disable the add-on or is this request based on other reasons? If other reasons, can you please specify. 4. Has DHS, or any copyright owners involved in this matter, taken any legal action against MAFIAAfire.com or the seized domains, including DMCA requests? 5. What protections are in place for MAFIAAfire.com or the seized domain owners if eventually a court decides they were not unlawful? 6. Can you please provide copies of any briefs that accompanied the affidavit considered by the court that issued the relevant seizure orders? 7. Can you please provide a copy of the relevant seizure order upon which your request to Mozilla to take down MAFIAAfire.com is based? 8. Please identify exactly what the infringements by the owners of the domains consisted of, with reference to the substantive standards of Section 106 and to any case law establishing that the actions of the seized domain owners consti tuted civil or criminal copyright infringement. 9. Did any copyright owners furnish affidavits in connection with the domain seizures? Had any copyright owners served DMCA takedown notices on the seized domains or MAFIAAfire.com? (if so please provide us with a copy) 10. Has the Government furnished the domain owners with formal notice of the seizures, triggering the time period for a response by the owners? If so, when, and have there been any responses yet by owners? 11. Has the Government communicated its concerns directly with MAFIAAfire.com? If so, what response, if any, did MAFIAAfire.com make?
Slashdot Mirror
An interesting theory, and one I hadn't considered, but I'd hesitate to accept it unless there's some evidence beyond "It could have happened". If they were lying about his death (and in that case, presumably, going so far as to make the "He was armed. Oh, wait, no he wasn't." claims as a double bluff) I don't see why they wouldn't have faked a photo - it's absence doesn't give any direct credibility to the theory he's alive, IMO.
Games often clock in at many GB, and a moderately enthusiastic gamer might well be buying more than one each month, especially with the big flashy promos that Steam tends to do - it's not going to use your full allowance unless you're reinstalling on a new system (a valid use in itself), but I can quite see that it'd make a dent. A few people in the house with both Steam and Netflix accounts adds up pretty quickly, even if not all of them are buying games every month.
As for updates - if you're forced to play on a limited subset of servers because your ISP doesn't give you enough bandwidth to download patches, I'd say that's a prime example of bandwidth limits hurting the legitimate consumer.
I think the interesting thing here is that they aren't quite Walmart - it's a decent analogy, but as always, subtleties are lost - the fact that they have technical limitations as well as free-market leverage could prove to be their downfall if it goes to court as an anti-trust issue.
In the mean time, I would absolutely love to see MS start charging a 30% commission on every sale made through the Windows version of iTunes.
Although I don't doubt that Apple's terms of service did screw them, I have severe doubts about the business acumen of a team that spends 18 months and a million dollars on what looks to be, at best, a mildly innovative eBook reader. Unless I've missed something big, it looks more like "three students, a case of mountain dew and a few all-nighters" territory to me, albeit a fairly well polished example.
You mean like the trains, the roads, the airplanes, the military, the police, the schools and universities, the hospitals, electricity, social security, health care, houses, firefighters? But you are right, besides that what ever have the government ever done useful with our taxes?
I didn't say 'all taxes are wasted', I said that a lot of things that your taxes are funding are unhelpful and/or harmful. Yes, we need police, but I think it's unproductive, hugely wasteful, and damaging to civil liberties the way they currently operate (particularly the 'war on drugs' and massively overused 'anti-terror' legislation). Military funding is through the roof, public funding for hospitals goes towards private industry profits while people are left without care, and the figures say that the education system doesn't come close to that of many other developed countries. It's not all bad, I readily admit, but the existence of services that barely fulfil their remit and/or cost far, far more than they should does not imply that your taxes are being well handled.
I'd say mistrust of the government is quite reasonable given their track record! Oddly, the FCC page doesn't mention any chip - it talks about carriers sending out the messages, in which case I don't see why they wouldn't be received by the normal radio in the phone, and simply tagged in such a way that the firmware would display them differently to normal messages. The Boston Globe seems pretty distinct about the fact that it's done in a combination of hardware and software, but I can't possibly work out why; maybe they didn't check their facts, maybe I've missed something, maybe there is something nefarious going on. Any one of the three is plausible, I would think.
The limited range of cell towers neatly fulfils the localisation requirement without any need for tracking. Just tell the towers in the affected region to broadcast to all devices in range - if your phone isn't within the coverage area of those towers, you won't get the message.
So buy a basic phone, opt out from the alert messages, and you're done. Sure, it sounds a bit unnecessary, but it does no harm if unused and is potentially helpful if it is used - that's better than can be said for a lot of things your taxes are funding. If the 'presidential warning' system gets overused (and I'd estimate more than once every decade is overuse) then you've got a legitimate complaint. Emergency warnings seem to be one of the few areas that the government don't have a history of screwing up, so I'll grudgingly give them the benefit of the doubt here.
On the off chance that you weren't being sarcastic: warrants are handed out pretty freely to law enforcement when they can show any semblance of a reason to suspect someone. If it's an emergency, they can be issued retroactively. If the FBI claims the need to track without a warrant, the logical conclusion to draw is that they are tracking at least some people without good reason - if they had good reason, they could get a warrant, after all.
"Particularly hairy" is a fairly apt description of the Nürburgring, actually, and I believe these figures are from realistic production models rather than something designed purely for ten minutes on the track. Sure, it's mainly marketing, but they are making a more-or-less fair comparison between the EV and its internal combustion counterpart - if they were just chasing impressive figures they could take any old piece of crap, give it far more batteries than it's rated for, and show off the straight line speed.
They are in the same industry, but certainly not in the same area.
If the Groupon model fails, I wouldn't be surprised if it's down to their own greed. Their running costs are basically a few servers and little else, yet they're taking a full 50% of every sale - combine that with a 50%+ discount on the sticker price, and the seller is only taking home a quarter of their normal sale price. Even with relatively low redemption rates it's hard to turn a profit on that, so a listing on Groupon becomes a one-off advertising expense.
If Groupon took 15%, on the other hand, there would be far more chance that the seller could offer a 50% discount and still make a small profit, maybe even before non-redeemed coupons were taken into account. As soon as you're above break-even, the extra volume brought in has real value of its own, beyond just good marketing - it becomes a (admittedly probably small) source of income as well as a marketing tool. And that allows more companies to use Groupon, making everyone more money in the long run.
Essentially, they need to take their own advice: knock down the costs and make it up in volume.
You're absolutely right, and he may just have been an idiot, but that's not necessarily the case. The only real surprise is that they take a full 50% - I would've guessed somewhere between 10% and 30%, and I'd find it hard to justify any reasonable offer when their cut is that high. Either way, though, this guy's story doesn't invalidate Groupon's premise entirely, and it might actually even strengthen the case for using them.
I've always assumed one of the advantages of Groupon (from a seller's perspective) is that the redemption rate is likely to be less than 100%; I'm sure a large amount of the business is based around people buying things they wouldn't have otherwise paid for, on the basis that "it's so cheap we'd be stupid not to buy it..." - it's not likely that all of these people will ever get around to actually using their coupons. Of course, planning for the worst case is a sensible precaution on the part of the business owner, and that's the second place that the article comes in with an unlikely assumption: even if everyone does redeem, why would the guy spend all of his time fulfilling Groupon orders? I imagine he's about to have a lot of conversations along the lines of "Discount portrait photos? Oh, yes, we offer bookings for them every Friday. It's an extremely popular service, so I'm afraid the next available slot is November 18th.". The customers may be somewhat displeased, but you can hardly kick up a fuss about a guy being too popular; it carries the connotation that he must be good, after all (at least for those who haven't read this article) - the only other places with a waiting list like that are world class restaurants. There's the added bonus that a several month wait is likely to further lower the number of people who actually get around to using the service they paid for.
If he plays his cards right, he's now got a few grand up front to pay for nice equipment, a reputation for being so good that there's a six month wait just to see him, and a very reasonable chance that some people have paid him up-front for work he'll never actually have to do. It's risky, but by no means impossible to pull off. Maybe he won't play his cards right, maybe he really is going to spend the next year running himself ragged for no income, but the numbers alone don't necessarily imply that.
These apps aren't breakthroughs in any sense of the word. It's ridiculous how people can make money from doing nothing groundbreaking. The clueless public buy into it. I have never understood how internet media/web design/app companies can be started by students with bigger egos than ability and what they make is so painfully trivial, why are they being rewarded?
People are generally rewarded for being good at exploiting the market, and not much more. A good product makes that much easier to do, but there are plenty of examples all throughout history of the inventor being screwed because they did a poor job of commercialisation. Conversely, you don't need a particularly inventive or even functional product if your marketing is good enough. If you judge success as "making lots of cash" then purity and quality often have nothing to do with it; it's also worth questioning who's really smarter - the guy who slaves away in a forgotten office for 40 years to make something amazing, or the guy who makes a few million on some inane crap, then spends the next few years working in comfort (and with plenty of resources) on something amazing while the money rolls in from the well-marketed crap.
A guy at my university put together a (fairly basic) interactive website with a slightly inventive concept a year or so ago - it got some good publicity, then was taken down by the university, causing a controversy that netted him much, much more publicity. Just to make the point to a few of my friends that it wasn't really anything that special, I had a clone working the day after the original was taken down - I literally coded it over night, and I'm by no means a great developer. The guy who made the original got a £200k investment in his 'concept'; my copy got all of a few thousand hits. Honestly, I say fair play to the guy - all I really succeeded in demonstrating was that the technical skill wasn't all that valuable, and that the associated marketing and media-wrangling was what actually netted him a good chunk of cash.
I think the point was more the benefit of easily seeing a doctor (with no question about cost) when a minor symptom presents itself. A trained professional then examines that specific symptom and potentially spots/treats an issue that could otherwise have led to costly emergency measures six months down the line. If it costs $150 just to see a doctor, most people won't bother until there's something serious going on, and by then treatment might have become a much more difficult prospect.
The whole 'annual checkup' thing is apparently of limited value, but that doesn't mean it's the standard by which to judge preventative medicine in general.
I think it varies a lot by country as well as by medical system. You can have 'free' healthcare in two countries that provides a very different style of care - this is a good example of the phenomenon.
Personally, I'll avoid seeing a doctor unless absolutely necessary simply because it's not an especially pleasant experience. I can't understand why anyone would want to sit in a waiting room with a bunch of sick people, only to then get poked and prodded at by a stranger, unless they had a problem that really required it.
Or those with the cash will abuse the system just as much (perhaps even more, on the 'I paid for it, I demand you do something' logic) while those without the money will hesitate to get a check up until a minor but worrying symptom has become a major one that's much more difficult to treat. Nothing is really gained - if the US example is anything to go by, the income from the copays would largely end up supporting the infrastructure to collect those same payments. For all its faults, I'd take the NHS as it stands over the US system without hesitation.
To be honest, sitting around in a hospital with a bunch of sick people for several hours waiting to be seen (since those with an actual emergency issue rightly take priority) should surely be disincentive enough for most people anyway.
This is why the public/private hybrid system in the US confuses me. Public systems are prone to bloat and wastefulness because there's an essentially unlimited budget, and because there's no real competition or risk of failure. Private systems tend to be (but are by no means always) more efficient because of the market pressure, but are also much more willing to screw over or ignore patients because their goal is profit, not good service.
Most people won't accept leaving poor people to die in the streets, so the government steps in. Suddenly the private system has many of the factors that lead to inefficiency in the public system, and they still need to syphon money off the top to make a profit. I honestly fail to see how that would ever be expected to work out for the best.
I knew that malpractice insurance was significant, but I didn't realise the figures were that high. I'd still hesitate to take my data from companies whose interests are directly served by inflating the problem, but it certainly does suggest the risks are non-negligible. I don't know, maybe legal reform is the only option.
As I mentioned in a post further down, this seems plausible, but the one thing I haven't seen is actual figures on the risk of litigation. I'm not saying I have any reason to doubt your premise, but I also don't have anything to support it beyond anecdotal evidence about all the lawsuits that are apparently being brought against doctors.
The evidence does seem to suggest that doctors are behaving in this manner, and it also implies that the reasoning is fear of litigation; what's the actual chance of a hospital being successfully sued, though? Could it be the case that doctors are behaving in this manner not because there is a significant chance of them being sued, but because of a (statistically unfounded) fear of being sued?
Why label him as a "gout" sufferer and even worse, treat him for it, if he doesn't actually manifest the disease? Doctors must remember that the way we determine what "normal" values are is by fitting large samples to a bell curve, chopping off the ends at 1 or 2 standard deviations, and calling the middle "normal". There are perfectly healthy people on either end of the curve, however. We need to use our clinical skills to figure out who needs treatment and who doesn't, otherwise you might as well not have doctors at all and leave medicine to some giant, complex algorithm.
Using your discretion necessitates taking responsibility for the diagnosis. The eight people you saved from unnecessary and potentially damaging medication will be better off, as will the ninth who you gave a valid prescription to, but the family of tenth guy who died without being medicated might sue.
If you just followed the guidelines, you might end up unnecessarily medicating six of those ten, and one or more of them may still die, but if it goes to court you just need to compare the numbers on the patient records to those on the guidelines and that's that - you have proof that you "did the best you could".
The whole issue is based on the fear of litigation. That's been said before. The thing I haven't seen any analysis on, though, is whether that fear is founded. We all have some anecdote about an unjust lawsuit that we read about in the news, but I haven't seen any real figures on whether it's the actual risk of litigation that's prohibiting doctors from taking (necessary) risks, or whether it's the unfounded fear of litigation that almost certainly won't actually happen. An interesting Ph.D thesis for someone, perhaps...
Second, YOU ADMITTED THE JUDGE WAS RIGHT about the car rental liability case. You explicitly said that there are circumstances where the rental agency may be a legitimate potential defendant, yet you just cast that aside and ignored it for the rest of your argument. THIS is a logical error: You have certain premises, and you ignore them to the effect that your conclusion does not necessarily follow from your premises.
I haven't even finished reading the article yet, but that was the first thing that struck me. Saying "Obviously if the rental car agency was negligent in the maintenance of one of its vehicles and that negligence led to the accident, they might be liable" implies quite clearly that they are a "legitimate potential defendant". The word "potential" is key: nobody's saying that they are guaranteed to be a defendant in the case, only that the may be in certain circumstances - the very same circumstances outlined in the post attempting to refute that line of argument.
I'll read the rest when I have a chance, but a start like that doesn't bode well for the validity of the remainder.
‘Odd,’ said Arthur, ‘I thought you said it was a democracy?’
‘I did,’ said Ford, ‘It is.’
‘So,’ said Arthur, hoping he wasn’t sounding ridiculously obtuse, ‘why don’t the people get rid of the lizards?’
‘It honestly doesn’t occur to them,’ said Ford. ‘They’ve all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they’ve voted in more or less approximates to the government they want.’
‘You mean they actually vote for the lizards?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Ford with a shrug, ‘of course.’
‘But,’ said Arthur, going for the big one again, ‘why?’
‘Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,’ said Ford, ‘the wrong lizard might get in.’
Basically, I think you're overestimating the number of people who actually genuinely support either party. 'Voting for' isn't the same as 'supporting', or even 'agreeing with'.
I'm not necessarily saying I agree, but the logic behind granting government/law enforcement relevant and specific increased powers in times of emergency is not necessarily faulty. The actual problem is that we can't trust them not to say "Yup, potential terrorists everywhere. War going on, too. Sounds like an emergency to me; go get the cavity searchin' gloves, Gary."
Absolutely. I was particularly glad to see, in the full list of questions asked, that they question the seizure program itself, not just the dubious claims about the plug-in. The list is as follows (the source linked above is apparently a copy of the official email):
April 19, 2011 email from Mozilla to US Department of Homeland Security Special Agent
To help us evaluate the Department of Homeland Security's request to take-down/remove the MAFIAAfire.com add-on from Mozilla's websites, can you please provide the following additional information:
1. Have any courts determined that MAFIAAfire.com is unlawful or illegal in any way? If so, on what basis? (Please provide any relevant rulings)
2. Have any courts determined that the seized domains related to MAFIAAfire.com are unlawful, illegal or liable for infringement in any way? (please provide relevant rulings)
3. Is Mozilla legally obligated to disable the add-on or is this request based on other reasons? If other reasons, can you please specify.
4. Has DHS, or any copyright owners involved in this matter, taken any legal action against MAFIAAfire.com or the seized domains, including DMCA requests?
5. What protections are in place for MAFIAAfire.com or the seized domain owners if eventually a court decides they were not unlawful?
6. Can you please provide copies of any briefs that accompanied the affidavit considered by the court that issued the relevant seizure orders?
7. Can you please provide a copy of the relevant seizure order upon which your request to Mozilla to take down MAFIAAfire.com is based?
8. Please identify exactly what the infringements by the owners of the domains consisted of, with reference to the substantive standards of Section 106 and to any case law establishing that the actions of the seized domain owners consti tuted civil or criminal copyright infringement.
9. Did any copyright owners furnish affidavits in connection with the domain seizures? Had any copyright owners served DMCA takedown notices on the seized
domains or MAFIAAfire.com? (if so please provide us with a copy)
10. Has the Government furnished the domain owners with formal notice of the seizures, triggering the time period for a response by the owners? If so, when, and have there been any responses yet by owners?
11. Has the Government communicated its concerns directly with MAFIAAfire.com? If so, what response, if any, did MAFIAAfire.com make?