I'm not actually sure which bias direction you're accusing me of, but nothing in my post was intended to convey that I don't have an opinion on the election. Quite the opposite and mostly very negative toward the two currently leading candidates.
As far as the superdelegates... their purpose is widely suggested by party leaders to be for racial/minority diversity (So minorities don't have to compete with the elite party leaders for delegate spots anymore), but there are very few people who actually believe that.
WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (D) Congress: Unpledged delegates are our party leaders and elected officials who actually can make up their mind at any point and change their mind. We separate those so that we don’t have elected officials and party leaders running against the activists, but want to make sure are helping to diversify our convention. That is something we take great pride in. A Native-American cancer survivor. Those people should have an opportunity to be delegates, too. And they shouldn’t have to deal with very well-known officials and party leaders. And that’s why we separate them.
Kendra Cotton (D) political director: Democrats have quotas for gender and preferences for minorities to become pledged delegates, but they don’t give them too much power.
Hillary is probably the only candidate who could make someone like Trump able to win the election. She has even worse negatives and has just as many people who will never vote for her.
We've somehow ended up with the two candidates with the highest negatives from people in general. For the Dems, that's because of their "superdelegates" originally supposedly setup as a quota system for minorities, but which coincidentally turned into ensuring the (D) party elite continue to control everything. For the Reps, that's because the candidates not name Trump split the non-Trump votes for too long across too many states because some guys named Rubio and (especially) Kasich refused to face reality and there are enough populist/celebrity (R) primary voters to form a sizable minority for anyone who tells them what they want to hear while pissing off their enemies in the left.
Bottom line, I'm voting for who will select the next Supreme Court nominee. Trump will make a deal with a GOP Senate if he wins. Hillary will push another Obama-style appointee (albeit a rich one who can bribe her foundation?) through the Senate with her "mandate" if she wins.
You don't have to be a libertarian to be willing to consider the results of empirical studies about what FDA delays cost. Can you at least be a utilitarian and go with the libertarian solution when it's the most effective based on the available evidence?
The FDA delay in approving beta blockers, by the FDA's own numbers, cost about 100,000 lives. Three years of delay on interleukin-2 after it was available in Europe? 3,000 lives. Every year of the approval process, every millions of dollars spent on approval fees to the FDA, equals lives lost and people who could have benefited who don't. Even Thalidomide, the one big claim people always have for the FDA, wasn't blocked by the FDA because of it's impact on embryos. They weren't even investigating that, it took news reports. Total Thalidomide affected children in the U.S.? 17. The rest of the world, 5-10K. Does that help the 10x as many people who died from lack of beta blocker approvals? Does anyone notice that currently Thalidomide is approved by the FDA to treat leprosy and cancer?
Yes, health choices can be risky, but rather than add information and give advice on them, you seem to want to tell adults what they can and can't decide to do, despite them knowing their own situation better than you do and despite their ability to consult with a knowledgeable specialist in the area of their medical issue before making an informed decision. There's no empirical evidence the FDA saves lives, the evidence points to them costing lives overall. But that doesn't seem to be the point of their existence. The point seems to be control and having the power to tell people what they must do. Which is where this conversation started.
So to compensate for the FDA under regulating decades ago you accuse the FDA of over regulating now.
No, I accuse the FDA of doing the same thing now they did then, when large tobacco companies ultimately benefit from their actions at the expense of others. Ever heard of regulatory capture?
This idea that somehow government regulators are pure-minded defenders of the public and that they know better than everyone else what needs to happen is addressed in public choice economics.
UL started privately without regulations. You're missing the history. It's still private.
Someone who is massively on the hook if you harm your customers has a big incentive to make sure you don't harm them. That's one way liability insurance prevents harm in the first place. Read the previously linked studies rather than ignoring the science behind it.
The point is that if you care about the risk and you are a consumer, you don't have to have your own test lab, all you have to do is have a small minority of customers/activists see that a product has been UL certified for safety or not and if the store has legit liability coverage or not and then publicize that fact accordingly. Stores themselves, in order to gain a market advantage, have a huge incentive to publicize the proof they are safe and their competitor down the street isn't if consumers are worried at all about it.
Compared to all that, the FDA is ineffective at best, harmful at worst. In this specific case, they're a gift to big tobacco and could actually harm public health. I thought people stopped believing the lies from big tobacco 30-40 years ago. Why are you so insistent on helping them now? They don't need your crony capitalism/fascism, despite having apparently "influenced" the D's in power to assist them against their competition offering healthier alternatives for a nicotine addiction.
Liability Insurance and tort law creates incentives for the insurer to make sure the store doesn't poison its customers and does it much more efficiently and effectively.
Yeah, how about letting people (who presumably may occasionally know more about their own specific network bandwidth costs) adjust their settings for any situation. I can see creating default profiles for people who want Netflix to take care of it for them, but disabling the ability to go reconfigure/specify what you want for yourself is stupid and seems to be a product of the same mindset which results in menu choices in programs being replaced by some minimal set of graphical buttons.
When no one has the ingredients on the label or puts false ingredients on the label that is just fine.
If you care about the ingredients, it's a simple matter to only purchase from stores who label the ingredients on their products. If you're really worried about stores attempting to kill their customers by lying about the ingredients and hoping no one notices (not exactly something anyone with any business sense would do), its a simple matter to only shop at stores who have a 3rd party you trust validate and sign-off on the fact that their list is accurate. In what world is the FDA best equipped to know what's being sold? Are they going to visit stores and test the products before you actually purchase them? No, they'll just create a big show in the name of "doing something" and process paperwork submitted to them with fees while making it impractical for anyone except someone with deep pockets and big enough to own a centralized facility to be able to do business in the industry.
Regulations are there to protect people from companies putting people's health at risk just to lower costs and raise profits.
In this specific case, its obvious the regulations are there to ensure large companies (likely established tobacco companies) can create/maintain their hold on the industry they were losing to local shops, because they're the only ones who will be able to afford the lawyers and fees to go through the red tape.
So you would basically prefer unregulated capitalism that kills people.
No, we'd prefer unregulated capitalism which allows people to be responsible for their own choices and succeed rather than "crony" capitalism/fascism/socialist nationalism which the left appears to decry, but magically suddenly becomes in favor of when it actually comes down to supporting it or not, as long as the politicians or bureaucrats involved pretend to have a "good reason" for it. See also baptists and bootleggers.
People should regulate what they buy for themselves, under whatever arrangements they prefer and leave everyone else alone to do the same. We could call it being an adult and responsible for yourself, or something like that.
I don't vape (or smoke, for that matter), but you're crazy if you don't think this will negatively impact alternatives to smoking.
From the very article you're citing:
Meanwhile, there's a separate contingent of doctors and health advocates who see vaping as a good way to move people off regular cigarettes and think the new regulations might go too far. They have worried that if e-cigarettes are regulated too heavily, or become too expensive because of the cost of regulatory compliance, the public could miss out on a device that might save lives.
Some experts also think heavy (and expensive) regulation could halt innovation, deterring manufacturers from creating more advanced devices with better nicotine delivery systems that could help reduce smoking.
and your local shop is going to spend how much applying for approval on each style of vaping they create?
Jeff Stier, an e-cigarette advocate with the National Center for Public Policy, estimated that each FDA application will cost upwards of $1-million, according to USA today.
Mitch Zeller, director of the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products, had a more modest estimate. He says the cost of compliance to the new rule should run into the "hundreds of thousands of dollars" per application.
This is literally a power grab by the FDA which will end up rewarding large companies at the expense of small companies and people who want to be healthier by transitioning their nicotine addiction to something else are the ones who will ultimately pay. But it's "for the children", right?
Now explain again how the Obama Administration is in favor of personal freedom again, as opposed to crony capitalism for companies who kill people....
Ok, we'll switch to talking about starting at the other end.
Is it too difficult for you to imagine that people would only buy a house/store/whatever if it came with road rights? That it'd be simple when developing a subdivision (where you'll notice they typically build the roads already privately by the developers paying for them, the local government usually only maintains them later) to turn the road maintenance over to an organization owned/controlled/contracted to by the local property owners? Where do you think the property for the roads comes from in the first place? Oh right, the property owners around the roads, i.e. the people who normally use them and their guests.
So yeah, local suburban road networks are actually pretty obvious, when you think about it.
There are some private schools out there and lots of home schooling, so the word monopoly in the OP is too strong. However, It's economically difficult to compete when the government gives away a version of your product for free at 100% loss while taking your profits to pay for it. If the government gave everyone "Payless" level shoes for free, the market for shoes from Walmart would be nonexistent and the market for nicer shoes would also be much smaller... limited to people who really care about the quality of their shoes.
It's the same reason there isn't a big market in private fire protection, for example, because people are required to pay for the local government fire protection services regardless of if they'd prefer to purchase it from someone else, making the money to be spent for competing products redundant and thus virtually nonexistent.
Not forcibly preventing people from voluntarily contracting with each other isn't a government "hand out" to an industry. It's the default state which departures from have to be justified against for any changes.
Summary of the study's findings: The more likely you are to spend years of your life researching, writing and publishing a paper on global warming being caused by humans correlates very highly with a belief that humans are causing global warming.
Here's the main part: Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Federal Communications Commission may not regulate the rates charged for broadband Internet access service.
Here are the exceptions: Nothing in this Act shall be construed to affect the authority of the Commission to— (1) condition receipt of universal service support under section 254 of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 254) by a provider of broadband Internet access service on the regulation of the rates charged by such provider for the supported service; (2) enforce subpart Y of part 64 of title 47, Code of Federal Regulations (relating to truth-in-billing requirements); or (3) enforce section 8.9 of title 47, Code of Federal Regulations (relating to paid prioritization).
So basically, it ensures the FCC can't attack things like free service offerings and doesn't price-fix services to prevent competition.
Sounds like a great bill, whose only flaw is that is doesn't go far enough to prevent the FCC from regulating the internet, but it's a good start.
Other than an unsubstantiated opinion Reagan didn't understand mental illness and stating some funding was given to the States to spend as block grants, 90% of the article was about all the unrelated-to-Reagan causes, predating his election in both California and the USA. So your own article doesn't even agree with your position.
Look, I cited the ACLU and the NY Times on purpose, so that even a lefty couldn't say it was all according to some right-wing source. Try and find some facts, rather than someone's editorial opinion in Salon decades after it happened.
So go complain to the left-wing ACLU and the academic psychiatrists who influenced the courts and the bureaucracy in the 60s and 70s to get them all out of mental hospitals, rather than simply assigning blame to people you don't like something they weren't responsible for.
Next you'll be telling us about how the right-wing is governing San Francisco into the group, despite Democrat-led City, County, State and Federal administrations....
Sometimes I forget how much levels of technology literacy makes our experiences of the web differ.
I get that there are still people out there who don't run an adblock-like plugin for their browser. Some people even don't do it on purpose.
I do really wonder at how many people haven't already learned to just set their flash plugin to "Ask to activate" status, so they only see flash content on a page if they actively want to. Without that, I don't see how you can browse the web on a default version of Windows without at best being constantly annoyed, or at worst routinely infected with malware.
How many flash vulnerabilities does it take before someone learns to leave it turned off unless they actually want to see the flash content on a page?
I haven't studied the UK government in detail, but the U.S. government for at least the last 20-30 years has had more tax money (even adjusted for inflation) coming in than ever before, pretty much year after year.
They've just always managed to spend even more than they had come in every year. The government doesn't have a revenue problem, they have a spending problem. Specifically, a spending on lots of things that don't need to be spent on problem.
Don't even get me started on how they spend other people's money via regulations (as opposed to actual taxes and appropriations) more and more every year as well. The wonder is how the economy manages to function at all with the year after year ever increasing burden of government on it.
There's more to the story with a police arrest record which isn't mentioned in the news stories:
FEBRUARY 9–An Oklahoma man who has gained national exposure for his “video vigilante” campaign to expose street prostitution in his hometown was arrested yesterday for allegedly paying hookers to ensure that they serviced customers in an area where he could easily film the illicit trysts.
According to the below Oklahoma City Police Department report, Brian Bates, 34, orchestrated the public encounters so he could peddle the resulting videotape to media outlets (some of Bates’s surveillance tapes are offered for sale on his web site).
In his dealings with prostitutes, Bates was choosy, investigators contend.
For example, if a john was a “regular,” Bates asked prostitutes to give “specific signals” so he would know not to bother rolling tape. Investigators also noted that, like any good auteur, Bates “gave direction to the prostitutes on how to complete the act with a high probability of success,” as well as tips on how to spot an undercover cop.
Bates was hit with a felony pandering charge and a misdemeanor count of aiding in prostitution. The pandering rap, which is usually reserved for pimps, carries a minimum two-year jail term, and a maximum of 20 years in the stir.
The more you know about the true story behind a reported news story, the more you learn the "news" is typically at best clueless and at worst 100% in the wrong direction.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not actually sure which bias direction you're accusing me of, but nothing in my post was intended to convey that I don't have an opinion on the election. Quite the opposite and mostly very negative toward the two currently leading candidates.
As far as the superdelegates... their purpose is widely suggested by party leaders to be for racial/minority diversity (So minorities don't have to compete with the elite party leaders for delegate spots anymore), but there are very few people who actually believe that.
or
Google should just blacklist any positive mention of her name across all Google properties, then ignore her.
That's more of a proper response to a publicity stunt like this (which apparently worked).
Hillary is probably the only candidate who could make someone like Trump able to win the election. She has even worse negatives and has just as many people who will never vote for her.
We've somehow ended up with the two candidates with the highest negatives from people in general. For the Dems, that's because of their "superdelegates" originally supposedly setup as a quota system for minorities, but which coincidentally turned into ensuring the (D) party elite continue to control everything. For the Reps, that's because the candidates not name Trump split the non-Trump votes for too long across too many states because some guys named Rubio and (especially) Kasich refused to face reality and there are enough populist/celebrity (R) primary voters to form a sizable minority for anyone who tells them what they want to hear while pissing off their enemies in the left.
Bottom line, I'm voting for who will select the next Supreme Court nominee. Trump will make a deal with a GOP Senate if he wins. Hillary will push another Obama-style appointee (albeit a rich one who can bribe her foundation?) through the Senate with her "mandate" if she wins.
What's makes you think the FDA is a net benefit by regulating medical claims? How many people have to die for lack of FDA approval before you're willing to allow them to make their own decisions about their health? Why don't you want to allow customized medicine for things like cancer by making them prohibitively expensive via the FDA?
You don't have to be a libertarian to be willing to consider the results of empirical studies about what FDA delays cost. Can you at least be a utilitarian and go with the libertarian solution when it's the most effective based on the available evidence?
The FDA delay in approving beta blockers, by the FDA's own numbers, cost about 100,000 lives. Three years of delay on interleukin-2 after it was available in Europe? 3,000 lives. Every year of the approval process, every millions of dollars spent on approval fees to the FDA, equals lives lost and people who could have benefited who don't. Even Thalidomide, the one big claim people always have for the FDA, wasn't blocked by the FDA because of it's impact on embryos. They weren't even investigating that, it took news reports. Total Thalidomide affected children in the U.S.? 17. The rest of the world, 5-10K. Does that help the 10x as many people who died from lack of beta blocker approvals? Does anyone notice that currently Thalidomide is approved by the FDA to treat leprosy and cancer?
Yes, health choices can be risky, but rather than add information and give advice on them, you seem to want to tell adults what they can and can't decide to do, despite them knowing their own situation better than you do and despite their ability to consult with a knowledgeable specialist in the area of their medical issue before making an informed decision. There's no empirical evidence the FDA saves lives, the evidence points to them costing lives overall. But that doesn't seem to be the point of their existence. The point seems to be control and having the power to tell people what they must do. Which is where this conversation started.
You want pre-FDA history? Insulin was invented as a treatment and came to the market to treat diabetes in a couple of years when the FDA wasn't around. If the FDA was around, it would have taken at least 3-5 more years and might even have never made it to the market (or much, much later) because of the expense involved!
No, I accuse the FDA of doing the same thing now they did then, when large tobacco companies ultimately benefit from their actions at the expense of others. Ever heard of regulatory capture?
This idea that somehow government regulators are pure-minded defenders of the public and that they know better than everyone else what needs to happen is addressed in public choice economics.
UL started privately without regulations. You're missing the history. It's still private.
Someone who is massively on the hook if you harm your customers has a big incentive to make sure you don't harm them. That's one way liability insurance prevents harm in the first place. Read the previously linked studies rather than ignoring the science behind it.
The point is that if you care about the risk and you are a consumer, you don't have to have your own test lab, all you have to do is have a small minority of customers/activists see that a product has been UL certified for safety or not and if the store has legit liability coverage or not and then publicize that fact accordingly. Stores themselves, in order to gain a market advantage, have a huge incentive to publicize the proof they are safe and their competitor down the street isn't if consumers are worried at all about it.
Compared to all that, the FDA is ineffective at best, harmful at worst. In this specific case, they're a gift to big tobacco and could actually harm public health. I thought people stopped believing the lies from big tobacco 30-40 years ago. Why are you so insistent on helping them now? They don't need your crony capitalism/fascism, despite having apparently "influenced" the D's in power to assist them against their competition offering healthier alternatives for a nicotine addiction.
Here are the answers to your concerns:
Underwriter's Laboratory.
Liability Insurance and tort law creates incentives for the insurer to make sure the store doesn't poison its customers and does it much more efficiently and effectively.
Yeah, how about letting people (who presumably may occasionally know more about their own specific network bandwidth costs) adjust their settings for any situation. I can see creating default profiles for people who want Netflix to take care of it for them, but disabling the ability to go reconfigure/specify what you want for yourself is stupid and seems to be a product of the same mindset which results in menu choices in programs being replaced by some minimal set of graphical buttons.
If you care about the ingredients, it's a simple matter to only purchase from stores who label the ingredients on their products. If you're really worried about stores attempting to kill their customers by lying about the ingredients and hoping no one notices (not exactly something anyone with any business sense would do), its a simple matter to only shop at stores who have a 3rd party you trust validate and sign-off on the fact that their list is accurate. In what world is the FDA best equipped to know what's being sold? Are they going to visit stores and test the products before you actually purchase them? No, they'll just create a big show in the name of "doing something" and process paperwork submitted to them with fees while making it impractical for anyone except someone with deep pockets and big enough to own a centralized facility to be able to do business in the industry.
In this specific case, its obvious the regulations are there to ensure large companies (likely established tobacco companies) can create/maintain their hold on the industry they were losing to local shops, because they're the only ones who will be able to afford the lawyers and fees to go through the red tape.
No, we'd prefer unregulated capitalism which allows people to be responsible for their own choices and succeed rather than "crony" capitalism/fascism/socialist nationalism which the left appears to decry, but magically suddenly becomes in favor of when it actually comes down to supporting it or not, as long as the politicians or bureaucrats involved pretend to have a "good reason" for it. See also baptists and bootleggers.
People should regulate what they buy for themselves, under whatever arrangements they prefer and leave everyone else alone to do the same. We could call it being an adult and responsible for yourself, or something like that.
I don't vape (or smoke, for that matter), but you're crazy if you don't think this will negatively impact alternatives to smoking.
From the very article you're citing:
and your local shop is going to spend how much applying for approval on each style of vaping they create?
This is literally a power grab by the FDA which will end up rewarding large companies at the expense of small companies and people who want to be healthier by transitioning their nicotine addiction to something else are the ones who will ultimately pay. But it's "for the children", right?
Now explain again how the Obama Administration is in favor of personal freedom again, as opposed to crony capitalism for companies who kill people....
Ok, we'll switch to talking about starting at the other end.
Is it too difficult for you to imagine that people would only buy a house/store/whatever if it came with road rights? That it'd be simple when developing a subdivision (where you'll notice they typically build the roads already privately by the developers paying for them, the local government usually only maintains them later) to turn the road maintenance over to an organization owned/controlled/contracted to by the local property owners? Where do you think the property for the roads comes from in the first place? Oh right, the property owners around the roads, i.e. the people who normally use them and their guests.
So yeah, local suburban road networks are actually pretty obvious, when you think about it.
Yeah, no one has ever seen a privately funded road before, right?
I suppose if the government ran grocery stores, you'd complain no one has ever seen a private grocery store before, so how could that possibly work?
There are some private schools out there and lots of home schooling, so the word monopoly in the OP is too strong. However, It's economically difficult to compete when the government gives away a version of your product for free at 100% loss while taking your profits to pay for it. If the government gave everyone "Payless" level shoes for free, the market for shoes from Walmart would be nonexistent and the market for nicer shoes would also be much smaller... limited to people who really care about the quality of their shoes.
It's the same reason there isn't a big market in private fire protection, for example, because people are required to pay for the local government fire protection services regardless of if they'd prefer to purchase it from someone else, making the money to be spent for competing products redundant and thus virtually nonexistent.
But wait... these are being used as medical devices! You can't make them better and cheaper over time, the government regulators say so!!!
Who do you think is paying for all this, including the regulatory costs? Hint, it ain't coming from the Senator's salaries....
My sig is quite appropriate for this story.
Not forcibly preventing people from voluntarily contracting with each other isn't a government "hand out" to an industry. It's the default state which departures from have to be justified against for any changes.
Summary of the study's findings:
The more likely you are to spend years of your life researching, writing and publishing a paper on global warming being caused by humans correlates very highly with a belief that humans are causing global warming.
Unlike some monstrosities, the text of the bill is short enough that you can read it and form your own opinion.
Here's the main part:
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Federal Communications Commission may not regulate the rates charged for broadband Internet access service.
Here are the exceptions:
Nothing in this Act shall be construed to affect the authority of the Commission to—
(1) condition receipt of universal service support under section 254 of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 254) by a provider of broadband Internet access service on the regulation of the rates charged by such provider for the supported service;
(2) enforce subpart Y of part 64 of title 47, Code of Federal Regulations (relating to truth-in-billing requirements); or
(3) enforce section 8.9 of title 47, Code of Federal Regulations (relating to paid prioritization).
So basically, it ensures the FCC can't attack things like free service offerings and doesn't price-fix services to prevent competition.
Sounds like a great bill, whose only flaw is that is doesn't go far enough to prevent the FCC from regulating the internet, but it's a good start.
You didn't even read your own article, did you?
Other than an unsubstantiated opinion Reagan didn't understand mental illness and stating some funding was given to the States to spend as block grants, 90% of the article was about all the unrelated-to-Reagan causes, predating his election in both California and the USA. So your own article doesn't even agree with your position.
Look, I cited the ACLU and the NY Times on purpose, so that even a lefty couldn't say it was all according to some right-wing source. Try and find some facts, rather than someone's editorial opinion in Salon decades after it happened.
This is a relatively common left-wing urban myth. The ACLU is still proud of ensuring the involuntarily committed were released out of the "institutions". That was in the 60s and 70s, before Reagan was President. You can't blame him for being governor of CA, either, as the number of patients in State mental hospitals went from 37,500 to 22,000 in the years before he took office.
So go complain to the left-wing ACLU and the academic psychiatrists who influenced the courts and the bureaucracy in the 60s and 70s to get them all out of mental hospitals, rather than simply assigning blame to people you don't like something they weren't responsible for.
Next you'll be telling us about how the right-wing is governing San Francisco into the group, despite Democrat-led City, County, State and Federal administrations....
Sometimes I forget how much levels of technology literacy makes our experiences of the web differ.
I get that there are still people out there who don't run an adblock-like plugin for their browser. Some people even don't do it on purpose.
I do really wonder at how many people haven't already learned to just set their flash plugin to "Ask to activate" status, so they only see flash content on a page if they actively want to. Without that, I don't see how you can browse the web on a default version of Windows without at best being constantly annoyed, or at worst routinely infected with malware.
How many flash vulnerabilities does it take before someone learns to leave it turned off unless they actually want to see the flash content on a page?
I haven't studied the UK government in detail, but the U.S. government for at least the last 20-30 years has had more tax money (even adjusted for inflation) coming in than ever before, pretty much year after year.
They've just always managed to spend even more than they had come in every year. The government doesn't have a revenue problem, they have a spending problem. Specifically, a spending on lots of things that don't need to be spent on problem.
Don't even get me started on how they spend other people's money via regulations (as opposed to actual taxes and appropriations) more and more every year as well. The wonder is how the economy manages to function at all with the year after year ever increasing burden of government on it.
There's more to the story with a police arrest record which isn't mentioned in the news stories:
The more you know about the true story behind a reported news story, the more you learn the "news" is typically at best clueless and at worst 100% in the wrong direction.
Hey, at least we finally got an article today that wasn't just a slashvertisement!
Now if the editors could walk a mile in our shoes before posting stuff that's obviously advertising for something...