That article mentions differences in definitions of live births, but also cites real (and incompletely understood) factors in infant mortality (such as ethnicity) that are meant to question infant mortality as a proxy for the quality of the health care system. Fair enough. I'm not seeing how differences in infant mortality rate explain years of difference in life expectancy between the U.S. and Canada, England, France, or Switzerland (none of which are mentioned in Dr. Healy's article, so it's not clear that the comparison isn't apples-to-apples). It also doesn't address the fact that the CIA factbook, a U.S. publication from an organization that (presumably) makes some effort to normalize numbers across countries, shows the same differences across almost all aggregate measures of population health.
Life expectancy, infant mortality, lost productivity due to illness... none of these are perfect indicators of the quality of a country's health care. But when most or all of those approximate indicators are against you, and you're spending almost double what all those other countries are spending per capita, it seems pretty clear that you're paying more and getting less for health care in the U.S.
The U.S. has comparable or lower rates of violent crime than Canada, England, or France, so that's not it. Lifestyle differences undoubtedly have an impact--Sweden is notoriously active, for example--but Canada has a province where a quarter of the country's population thinks a good meal is plate of fries covered in cheese curds and drowning in gravy, and also has more smokers, and fives time the number of doughnut shops per capita that the U.S. has (and England's not better). Rates of disease outbreak aren't worse in the U.S., and live expectancy as a measure of the country's health system is bolstered by comparable results (i.e., the UHC countries are significantly ahead of the U.S.) in other aggregate scores like time spent off work due to illness, or infant mortality rate.
And yet, even with all that rationing and those death panels working overtime, all of those countries have average life expectancies greater than the U.S., measured in years, while paying about 55% per capita of what Americans pay.
That's sort of damning with faint praise, isn't it?
FYI, in Canada, we have a province with a quarter of the country's population (Quebec) that thinks a good meal is a plate of fries covered in cheese curds and drowned in gravy. We also have five times the number of doughnut shops per capita that you have in the U.S. I'm jes sayin'...
After a discussion with an iPhone developer, I think it means "undocumented APIs". You're supposed to stick to the documented APIs as the stable interface to the platform; depending upon undocumented function calls is already grounds for rejection from the app store. Apparently the start of the whole Adobe/Apple schism was that Adobe was using 'private' memory-mapping functions for performance reasons. While this would be fine in a single tasking environment, OS 4.0 for the iPhone will have true multi-tasking, and memory mapping in that situation is apparently horrifically bad.
They're overpriced in the sense that an Audi is overpriced. On paper, the quality of some components is better, the overall design is better, and you're paying a bit more for a level of quality that you can't directly point to and say "that piece there is why it's $300 more." A Ford Escort will get you to and from work just like an Audi will.
That said, I've switched over to MacBooks from Dells and been totally happy with the change. There are ways to avoid that "premium product" price tag--buy a model behind from Apple's refurb store, for example. My Macbook is a bit lighter and thinner than a comparable Toshiba, it has OSX instead of Windows, and the keyboard and screen are superior. The magnetic power cord has saved me a couple times from yanking it off the coffee table. I'm happy to pay a couple hundred dollars more for those things, just like I paid a couple thousand more to buy a Honda Accord instead of a Civic.
TM Repository is officially the saddest, most pathetic website I've ever seen: A tiny community of people who get together just to snark at Linux propaganda. It's like setting up a site to mock the CPUSA.
This is the sort of "deep control" that you want me to believe one can achieve by pushing an AGW agenda?
If they could kill a citizen on a whim, then they didn't need the pretext of "you bought something on the black market!" Tyrannies don't survive by the exercise of tyrannical power, but because the threat of its exercise leads to willing compliance by the population. If they kill everyone, no one's left to staff the tractor factory, so they kill a few and the rest co-operate. The fact that black markets existed so fundamentally within the economy indicates the limits of tyrannical power, that the tyrannical control of the communist party was limited to a public facade of co-operation by the population. Had they stamped the black markets out, they'd have faced revolution--they knew this and feared it. They limited their tyranny to convincing people not to directly challenge the ruling party; This is how China operates today.
You're the one who doesn't know his history. To give you one example, the black markets that you dismiss as token outlets in communist countries were pervasive and necessary. As the only truly functioning part of those communist economies, they actually served to prolong the rule of the tyrants because their existence staved off total economic collapse. The Politburo wanted to squash them but couldn't, in part because they knew the economic consequences, and because they feared that systematic suppression of the black market would lead to a revolution.
None of those countries ever had "deep control" of their societies. They were tyrannies that were temporarily successful, through the very widespread application of brute force, at superficially controlling the people. China's Great Leap Forward ended with an economy in ruins and an internal coup. The Khmer Rouge dissolved into internal civil war until the Vietnamese put an end to the mess in 1979. The Soviet Union's attempt to loosen its grip on the people ended with an attempted coup by hardliners and two decades of totally corrupt capitalist excess.
An excellent book on the Soviet Union is "A History of Modern Russia" by Robert Service. Read it and you'll see how the people with guns were able to take and seize control, but then struggled for the rest of the USSR's life to stop the constant ratchet of oppressive power they needed to hang on to power. One example of the lack of "deep control" is that the black market in Russia was never stamped out. Another is the constant stream of samizdat from dissident writers. Two more examples are the revolutions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia that had to be put down by force. Communist governments never had full control of their societies, they just had guns always out, so the people were superficially compliant.
What the hell are you talking about? We can't even control society at a shallow level. "control society at a deep level" is a fantasy of supervillains and guys with bunkers in their back yard keeping their eyes open for black helicopters.
people who hates cars, fossil fuels, progress.
Ah, now I understand: you've constructed a cartoon villain for yourself of dirty hippies who want us to walk everywhere and grow our own hemp.
we had a story about James Lovelock suggesting democracy might need to be suspended
James Lovelock doesn't think democracy needs to be suspended. He's decided that we're already past the tipping point and the only thing that might make a difference is the sort of national effort we saw in WWII. Since that's absurdly unlikely, he thinks we need to prepare for radically different climate over the next century. He's also dismissed by mainstream environmentalists as a crank who's past his prime but is still treated respectfully for a lot of good science he did when he wasn't a crazy old uncle.
At least with terrorism, you have to first find someone who hates you enough to generate a pretext.
You don't even need a pretext when you've actually got large swaths of the world actually hating you enough to blow themselves up a couple times.
"Sure, it seems like we're driving towards a cliff. But we should wait until we actually go over the cliff to make sure we don't make hasty decisions."
Ok, the point here is to realize that either side of the AGW debate has its disingenuous supporters.
I understood your point. My point was that AGW is such a poor tool for pushing an agenda that it's absurd to think someone would actually use it. It's a topic that's hard to understand for non-scientists, it leads to very indirect payoffs for the few who receive anything directly, and it requires a lot of people to do something for which they see no immediate benefit. This is not a topic on which politicians can ride to power. Compare and contrast: "Terrorists are coming to kill your children!" with "we may see increasingly violent weather changes in the next decade or so that will be very disruptive!"
As Dubya showed, you don't need climate science to increase government power, you just sign an executive order or issue a signing statement. Really, this is "FEMA is responsible for the black helicopters" territory. And when has anyone in government power actually tried to a serve the interests of environmentalists and related ideologies?
Sure you can quit your country--just renounce your citizenship. Governments typically have a formal means of doing this because it comes up now and then in cases of dual-citizenship and taxes and the like.
However, once you've done that, you're no longer entitled to live in that country, usually, which means you need somewhere else to go. You can't shed your obligations as a citizen and keep the benefits, like a reasonably orderly and prosperous society, fire and police departments, etc.
By you claiming that someone forced her to do this
Show me where I claimed someone forced her to do this.
they should be punished just for not liking her
Show me where I claimed they should be punished just for not liking her.
From everything in the article, it does sound like she had it worse than most teenagers do, and guess what? Teenagers don't always make smart choices or have a mature understanding of how to handle bullies. Or perhaps when the people who are supposed to help them get that mature understanding utterly fail to help her, she draws the correct, from her perspective, message that there's no help available.
Congratulations on graduating from bully survivor to heartless prick. I guess that since the bullying had nothing to do with her suicide, then there was no reason for anyone in the school administration to actually stop the bullying. Certainly her tormentors have nothing to feel guilty about. It's high school, Sparta style.
You've been spewing this crap all over this thread. Cyberbullying was part of it. The larger part of it was constant harassment at school and after school, and the fact that the school administration did nothing to address it. She didn't kill herself because of the "cyber" part of it; that's just there to sex up the story for the readers of the newspaper. She killed herself because her daily environment had become too hostile for her to take it, and the people who should have helped, weren't.
Suicide wasn't a good answer to that situation, but if you honestly can't sympathize with her situation, then you've forgotten how difficult it can all seem to be, to a teenager.
Shakespeare certainly didn't write for art. If he were alive today he'd be Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay. Throughout his life he made a reasonable living producing plays that had large audiences from all levels of society. He wasn't writing for posterity, he was writing to sell tickets, and his plays reflect that: Kings and Queens, forbidden love and betrayal, lots of opportunities for swordfights to be staged, and comedy that still holds up today if performed well.
The only reason he seems like a God among writers is that, because he was popular, his plays survived. He wrote very little that was original in concept; he was constantly borrowing from other, earlier playwrights and from popular stories of the day. The (now) archaic English gives it a patina of high art, but that's our faulty perspective, not his intent.
If that depresses you, it's only because in 500 years, there will be revival companies performing Top Gun and Die Hard rather than Driving Miss Daisy.
If you clicked through to read the abstract of the paper I quoted, you'd see that their recommendation was to go to a single-payer system for this reason alone.
Will it reduce costs or balloon them? Who knows? On paper, 30 million new customers, the majority of whom were free riders (i.e., healthy young people relying on taxpayer funded emergency rooms for care, rather than paying for insurance) should reduce costs, as should the number of people who have greater access to preventative and routine health care (so they don't end up in the emergency room when the cancer is already raging). In practice, a lot can happen between now and 2014. But the example of other countries should give you some reason to believe that more affordable and more broadly available health care is possible, and works well. If other countries can do it, why can't the U.S.?
Our government is supposed to be a representative one.
"Representative" doesn't (or shouldn't) mean governing by opinion polls. While there was widespread (and somewhat incoherent) opposition to the bill, there was as little as six months ago majority support for the public option; there was and still is majority support for the individual features of the bill that passed. Just saying "opposition to the bill" doesn't capture even a fraction of the complexity of the issue, the bill, or public support for or against the bill. I expect my Member of Parliament to see past opinion polls, as you should expect your member of Congress to do.
Do you really think that the majority of opposition to HCR was informed opposition?
Would you accept this bill being overturned by 5 members of SCOTUS?
Yes, I would. You have a constitution, an extensive set of laws and precedents, and a system for putting experts in charge of untangling a lot of complex issues and making it all work. Every time I've heard of a ruling that makes me scratch my head and say "WTF were they thinking?", I've looked into the details of the case and found that, even if I still disagree with the ruling, I can understand how it was arrived at; how reasonable people working their way through the issue ended up where they did.
What's the point in having a judge if you're not going to let them judge?
As for denying treatment, if the only place you can go to get it is the government and they tell you "sucks to be you", what then? You can't even go spend the money yourself which Canadians used to be able to do in privately-owned clinics until the government outlawed them.
I don't know where you're getting this. There are private clinics in Canada; there are private insurance plans to supplement health care. If you have the money, you can get the procedure. What there aren't, are for-profit hospitals, which is a big part of the reason we pay far less for health care, and even that's changing now with the introduction of private surgical clinics.
As I said before, though, you have the exact parallel in HMOs denying treatments because they're too expensive for their effectiveness. If you have the money, you can always get the procedure--the exact problem is that most people don't have the money.
Slashdot Mirror
That article mentions differences in definitions of live births, but also cites real (and incompletely understood) factors in infant mortality (such as ethnicity) that are meant to question infant mortality as a proxy for the quality of the health care system. Fair enough. I'm not seeing how differences in infant mortality rate explain years of difference in life expectancy between the U.S. and Canada, England, France, or Switzerland (none of which are mentioned in Dr. Healy's article, so it's not clear that the comparison isn't apples-to-apples). It also doesn't address the fact that the CIA factbook, a U.S. publication from an organization that (presumably) makes some effort to normalize numbers across countries, shows the same differences across almost all aggregate measures of population health.
Life expectancy, infant mortality, lost productivity due to illness... none of these are perfect indicators of the quality of a country's health care. But when most or all of those approximate indicators are against you, and you're spending almost double what all those other countries are spending per capita, it seems pretty clear that you're paying more and getting less for health care in the U.S.
And you have some cite for this, or perhaps a ranking of countries by an adjusted method that evens out the methodological differences?
Your own CIA Factbook backs up what I'm saying, and I suspect they don't just call up the country's embassy and ask for the number.
The U.S. has comparable or lower rates of violent crime than Canada, England, or France, so that's not it. Lifestyle differences undoubtedly have an impact--Sweden is notoriously active, for example--but Canada has a province where a quarter of the country's population thinks a good meal is plate of fries covered in cheese curds and drowning in gravy, and also has more smokers, and fives time the number of doughnut shops per capita that the U.S. has (and England's not better). Rates of disease outbreak aren't worse in the U.S., and live expectancy as a measure of the country's health system is bolstered by comparable results (i.e., the UHC countries are significantly ahead of the U.S.) in other aggregate scores like time spent off work due to illness, or infant mortality rate.
And yet, even with all that rationing and those death panels working overtime, all of those countries have average life expectancies greater than the U.S., measured in years, while paying about 55% per capita of what Americans pay.
A slow motion train wreck of clowns.
That's sort of damning with faint praise, isn't it?
FYI, in Canada, we have a province with a quarter of the country's population (Quebec) that thinks a good meal is a plate of fries covered in cheese curds and drowned in gravy. We also have five times the number of doughnut shops per capita that you have in the U.S. I'm jes sayin'...
After a discussion with an iPhone developer, I think it means "undocumented APIs". You're supposed to stick to the documented APIs as the stable interface to the platform; depending upon undocumented function calls is already grounds for rejection from the app store. Apparently the start of the whole Adobe/Apple schism was that Adobe was using 'private' memory-mapping functions for performance reasons. While this would be fine in a single tasking environment, OS 4.0 for the iPhone will have true multi-tasking, and memory mapping in that situation is apparently horrifically bad.
He was happy for the first few days. Now he's just desperate for a good night's sleep.
Believing doesn't make it so.
They're overpriced in the sense that an Audi is overpriced. On paper, the quality of some components is better, the overall design is better, and you're paying a bit more for a level of quality that you can't directly point to and say "that piece there is why it's $300 more." A Ford Escort will get you to and from work just like an Audi will.
That said, I've switched over to MacBooks from Dells and been totally happy with the change. There are ways to avoid that "premium product" price tag--buy a model behind from Apple's refurb store, for example. My Macbook is a bit lighter and thinner than a comparable Toshiba, it has OSX instead of Windows, and the keyboard and screen are superior. The magnetic power cord has saved me a couple times from yanking it off the coffee table. I'm happy to pay a couple hundred dollars more for those things, just like I paid a couple thousand more to buy a Honda Accord instead of a Civic.
TM Repository is officially the saddest, most pathetic website I've ever seen: A tiny community of people who get together just to snark at Linux propaganda. It's like setting up a site to mock the CPUSA.
This is the sort of "deep control" that you want me to believe one can achieve by pushing an AGW agenda?
If they could kill a citizen on a whim, then they didn't need the pretext of "you bought something on the black market!" Tyrannies don't survive by the exercise of tyrannical power, but because the threat of its exercise leads to willing compliance by the population. If they kill everyone, no one's left to staff the tractor factory, so they kill a few and the rest co-operate. The fact that black markets existed so fundamentally within the economy indicates the limits of tyrannical power, that the tyrannical control of the communist party was limited to a public facade of co-operation by the population. Had they stamped the black markets out, they'd have faced revolution--they knew this and feared it. They limited their tyranny to convincing people not to directly challenge the ruling party; This is how China operates today.
You're the one who doesn't know his history. To give you one example, the black markets that you dismiss as token outlets in communist countries were pervasive and necessary. As the only truly functioning part of those communist economies, they actually served to prolong the rule of the tyrants because their existence staved off total economic collapse. The Politburo wanted to squash them but couldn't, in part because they knew the economic consequences, and because they feared that systematic suppression of the black market would lead to a revolution.
That doesn't sound like "deep control" to me.
Yeah, you're a paranoid fruitcake. I hope your bunker has nice wallpaper.
None of those countries ever had "deep control" of their societies. They were tyrannies that were temporarily successful, through the very widespread application of brute force, at superficially controlling the people. China's Great Leap Forward ended with an economy in ruins and an internal coup. The Khmer Rouge dissolved into internal civil war until the Vietnamese put an end to the mess in 1979. The Soviet Union's attempt to loosen its grip on the people ended with an attempted coup by hardliners and two decades of totally corrupt capitalist excess.
An excellent book on the Soviet Union is "A History of Modern Russia" by Robert Service. Read it and you'll see how the people with guns were able to take and seize control, but then struggled for the rest of the USSR's life to stop the constant ratchet of oppressive power they needed to hang on to power. One example of the lack of "deep control" is that the black market in Russia was never stamped out. Another is the constant stream of samizdat from dissident writers. Two more examples are the revolutions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia that had to be put down by force. Communist governments never had full control of their societies, they just had guns always out, so the people were superficially compliant.
What the hell are you talking about? We can't even control society at a shallow level. "control society at a deep level" is a fantasy of supervillains and guys with bunkers in their back yard keeping their eyes open for black helicopters.
Ah, now I understand: you've constructed a cartoon villain for yourself of dirty hippies who want us to walk everywhere and grow our own hemp.
James Lovelock doesn't think democracy needs to be suspended. He's decided that we're already past the tipping point and the only thing that might make a difference is the sort of national effort we saw in WWII. Since that's absurdly unlikely, he thinks we need to prepare for radically different climate over the next century. He's also dismissed by mainstream environmentalists as a crank who's past his prime but is still treated respectfully for a lot of good science he did when he wasn't a crazy old uncle.
You don't even need a pretext when you've actually got large swaths of the world actually hating you enough to blow themselves up a couple times.
"Sure, it seems like we're driving towards a cliff. But we should wait until we actually go over the cliff to make sure we don't make hasty decisions."
The truth is almost never in the middle.
I understood your point. My point was that AGW is such a poor tool for pushing an agenda that it's absurd to think someone would actually use it. It's a topic that's hard to understand for non-scientists, it leads to very indirect payoffs for the few who receive anything directly, and it requires a lot of people to do something for which they see no immediate benefit. This is not a topic on which politicians can ride to power. Compare and contrast: "Terrorists are coming to kill your children!" with "we may see increasingly violent weather changes in the next decade or so that will be very disruptive!"
As Dubya showed, you don't need climate science to increase government power, you just sign an executive order or issue a signing statement. Really, this is "FEMA is responsible for the black helicopters" territory. And when has anyone in government power actually tried to a serve the interests of environmentalists and related ideologies?
Sure you can quit your country--just renounce your citizenship. Governments typically have a formal means of doing this because it comes up now and then in cases of dual-citizenship and taxes and the like.
However, once you've done that, you're no longer entitled to live in that country, usually, which means you need somewhere else to go. You can't shed your obligations as a citizen and keep the benefits, like a reasonably orderly and prosperous society, fire and police departments, etc.
Show me where I claimed someone forced her to do this.
Show me where I claimed they should be punished just for not liking her.
From everything in the article, it does sound like she had it worse than most teenagers do, and guess what? Teenagers don't always make smart choices or have a mature understanding of how to handle bullies. Or perhaps when the people who are supposed to help them get that mature understanding utterly fail to help her, she draws the correct, from her perspective, message that there's no help available.
Congratulations on graduating from bully survivor to heartless prick. I guess that since the bullying had nothing to do with her suicide, then there was no reason for anyone in the school administration to actually stop the bullying. Certainly her tormentors have nothing to feel guilty about. It's high school, Sparta style.
You've been spewing this crap all over this thread. Cyberbullying was part of it. The larger part of it was constant harassment at school and after school, and the fact that the school administration did nothing to address it. She didn't kill herself because of the "cyber" part of it; that's just there to sex up the story for the readers of the newspaper. She killed herself because her daily environment had become too hostile for her to take it, and the people who should have helped, weren't.
Suicide wasn't a good answer to that situation, but if you honestly can't sympathize with her situation, then you've forgotten how difficult it can all seem to be, to a teenager.
Shakespeare certainly didn't write for art. If he were alive today he'd be Jerry Bruckheimer or Michael Bay. Throughout his life he made a reasonable living producing plays that had large audiences from all levels of society. He wasn't writing for posterity, he was writing to sell tickets, and his plays reflect that: Kings and Queens, forbidden love and betrayal, lots of opportunities for swordfights to be staged, and comedy that still holds up today if performed well.
The only reason he seems like a God among writers is that, because he was popular, his plays survived. He wrote very little that was original in concept; he was constantly borrowing from other, earlier playwrights and from popular stories of the day. The (now) archaic English gives it a patina of high art, but that's our faulty perspective, not his intent.
If that depresses you, it's only because in 500 years, there will be revival companies performing Top Gun and Die Hard rather than Driving Miss Daisy.
If you clicked through to read the abstract of the paper I quoted, you'd see that their recommendation was to go to a single-payer system for this reason alone.
Will it reduce costs or balloon them? Who knows? On paper, 30 million new customers, the majority of whom were free riders (i.e., healthy young people relying on taxpayer funded emergency rooms for care, rather than paying for insurance) should reduce costs, as should the number of people who have greater access to preventative and routine health care (so they don't end up in the emergency room when the cancer is already raging). In practice, a lot can happen between now and 2014. But the example of other countries should give you some reason to believe that more affordable and more broadly available health care is possible, and works well. If other countries can do it, why can't the U.S.?
Our government is supposed to be a representative one.
"Representative" doesn't (or shouldn't) mean governing by opinion polls. While there was widespread (and somewhat incoherent) opposition to the bill, there was as little as six months ago majority support for the public option; there was and still is majority support for the individual features of the bill that passed. Just saying "opposition to the bill" doesn't capture even a fraction of the complexity of the issue, the bill, or public support for or against the bill. I expect my Member of Parliament to see past opinion polls, as you should expect your member of Congress to do.
Do you really think that the majority of opposition to HCR was informed opposition?
Would you accept this bill being overturned by 5 members of SCOTUS?
Yes, I would. You have a constitution, an extensive set of laws and precedents, and a system for putting experts in charge of untangling a lot of complex issues and making it all work. Every time I've heard of a ruling that makes me scratch my head and say "WTF were they thinking?", I've looked into the details of the case and found that, even if I still disagree with the ruling, I can understand how it was arrived at; how reasonable people working their way through the issue ended up where they did.
What's the point in having a judge if you're not going to let them judge?
As for denying treatment, if the only place you can go to get it is the government and they tell you "sucks to be you", what then? You can't even go spend the money yourself which Canadians used to be able to do in privately-owned clinics until the government outlawed them.
I don't know where you're getting this. There are private clinics in Canada; there are private insurance plans to supplement health care. If you have the money, you can get the procedure. What there aren't, are for-profit hospitals, which is a big part of the reason we pay far less for health care, and even that's changing now with the introduction of private surgical clinics.
As I said before, though, you have the exact parallel in HMOs denying treatments because they're too expensive for their effectiveness. If you have the money, you can always get the procedure--the exact problem is that most people don't have the money.