The fact that a British intelligence officer's help was enlisted in swaying a US election seems like a clear admission of everything that the Russian would-be conspiracy is supposed to have done. It's enlisting of foreign agents to sway US elections.
Except it's not clear who is "us" and who is "them" here. The only thing that Russia has been realistically accused of was exposing criminal behavior by the operatives of the Criminal Democratic Party. I don't see why we should be anything but thankful that they did it if they did. But whoever exposed the Criminal Democratic Party deserves a medal.
CIA employees have every right to express opinions about US elections. BBC, however, is funded by the British government. NY TImes' largest shareholder is a Mexican national with close ties to the Mexican government.
BBC was actively opinionating on US elections. BBC is not registered as a foreign agent. BBC is funded by the British government. Great Britain is not part of the US nor is it a US territory. This is open foreign interference in US elections which has been happening for close to 100 years.
Reducing cost is the first step to increasing care.
No, that's literally putting the before the horse.
If the care is unaffordable, it tends to not happen.
No, if care is oversupplied it tends to get reduced in price. You are completely misunderstanding cause and effect.
Other countries with better life expectancy and quality of health care spend HALF what we spend in the U.S.
This stupid on so many levels that I don't if I am even talking to a human being. I hope you don't vote.
clinical diagnosis rather than a battery of tests
Don't worry, we do much less testing that is necessary to fully diagnose. So that's dumb.
You should also actually look up Romneycare. It's the very ACA like system implemented in Mass. under then governor Romney.
Why should I care? No one ever says "I wish I lived in MA for better healthcare." ACA is evil. People who support it are people in name only.
According to the WHO, the U.S. is currently in 37th place.
The bogus study in which only 25% of the score was based on the quality of the care? The one issued by the Communists to justify the campaign to destroy heathcare in the US after Hillarycare failed the 90's? In a just world, people who issued it would be treated like terrorists that they were.
We aren't just losing ground to a couple of countries, we have lost it.
Because of people like you. You are a monster. And what makes you worse is that you don't mean to be and so you don't think you are. But it's not your intentions that make you a monster. It's your thinking that your wishful thinking is enough to justify how you should be judged. But it's not. Your stupidity has consequences. And you want to not be subject to those consequences beause you think that you want things to work out well. And you and people like you are condeming the rest of us to hell.
Reducing costs is no way to increase care. Romney's plan (when he ran for President) was to create a lower tier of doctors for lower tier of care. Some states already allow RN's to act as partial doctors (including writing prescriptions). Introducing a nation system for RN licensing would increase the number of providers. Allowing RN's do the basic care while requiring MD to do specialist care would have been enough to increase the pool of providers. Instead of it they created a system specifically designed to hand out a large amount of money to the insurance companies to keep them afloat after dot com and housing investment losses. They shielded them from lawsuits, but not to short change the lawyers, they didn't shield the doctors (who are now required to buy insurance, giving insurance companies even more business, to get a partial shield from lawsuits). The whole scheme had a sole purpose: allowing the insurance companies to survive despite their poor risk management during dot com boom and subsequent housing bubble. All insurance companies miscalculated the timing on dot com. Some (but not all) misread the housing market. The actual administration of care was the best in the world before the whole system became more about insurance than about care. The cost of care was rising, but it was partially due to more care provided (because more procedures were developed and administered) and partially due to shortage of providers of basic care. But the actual treatment which was available was the best in in the US. We are now losing ground to Germany and (to a lesser extent) Switzerland. The whole thought pattern of "we'll let insurance companies have more business, but they'll have to cover more people" had the obvious drawback: there wasn't enough coverage to cover more people. At the same time reducing the "cost" of care meant reducing earning potential of providers (so there was no incentive to increase the pool of providers). ACA is evil. It's a sin if there ever was such a thing as sin.
Oh, and just so I am clear, it is my firm opinion that if no one goes to jail for this travesty of justice called Obamacare, than it will be the miscarriage of justice that this country will be most remembered for. Obamacare is a bigger injustice than slavery was. Having an immoral system (like slavery) because no better system has been devised is only tragic. Having a working system and destroying it deliberately is wicked and repugnant.
Record profits means only a fool would take their crying about ruinous regulations seriously.
No, it doesn't. If the profits come from investment income rather than operating income, then regulation is forcing them to cut down costs whether you like or not. They just happen to have an incidental windfall from the rising stock market. The moment it turns south, the investment income will drop to zero or even negative (depending on how good their hedging and risk management is). The law already prohibits them from paying out less than 80% of the money they take in. So rising values of those 20% would actually indicate that the 80% part is also growing.
They can't be all that ruinous if they're prospering so well.
No one said they were ruinous. Only that the behavior which the current system demands of them makes them de facto rationing mills. It doesn't do it by ruining them. It does it by restructuring their incentives.
Now, keep in mind, I would have preferred to cut insurance out of the picture entirely since that approach results in no billing headaches, no confusion, true universal coverage,
I was with you right up until "universal coverage". The best quality and the cheapest healthcare I got was when I paid cash. Yes, I end up paying less for health care when I don't use insurance (even though I elected to have it). And when I pay on the spot (without insurance) I get immediate care and no BS from the doctors. The whole idea of single payer is frankly disgusting. It's not just unworkable or unmanageable. It's disgusting. I've dealt with systems which were single-payer and forcing a working system into a single-payer system is tantamount to destroying it. I only wish there was a hell for the ACA authors to go to. Too bad there isn't.
Consider how closely Obamacare resembles Romneycare.
Why should I care? I mean, at all? I don't live in MA. And there are many reasons (besides its health insurance problems) why I wouldn't want to.
I don't know why you are still arguing. Obamacare fails on anecdotal evidence. Obamacare fails on moral basis (yes, it's immoral to destroy a healthcare system for 60% of the population to improve for 10%). Obamacare fails on statistical basis (2 years after its implementation life expectancy stopped increasing even after adjustment for aging population). I could go on, but I don't know on what basis it does succeed other than forcing more people to buy insurance and calling "providing insurance for more people" while not increasing the number of healthcare providers.
It's not just amoral. It's worse than immoral. It's wicked and evil. It will kill more people than all the wars this country fought combined.
It included such gems as rescission a process where they decide after an expensive medical event that your coverage was terminated the day before. Or somehow an expensive medication was declared to be "experimental" for (non)-coverage purposes.
Those were (a) rare cases, (b) something you could litigate in court. Because of ACA, you can't take insurance companies to court nearly as readily.
Finally, health insurers are making record profits this year.
So? ACA caps their profits at 20% of revenue. If their operating profits are growing that just means that their expenses are growing, too. Otherwise, they would not be able to collect higher premiums (and they have been). If their investments are growing, however, it has nothing to do with how they operate (stock market had quite a run, so there is that).
You may also have missed the way the industry as a whole colluded to insist that uninsured patients get charged far more than insured patients.That continues today.
That's actually silly. They collectively bargained to pay less, but they didn't pay less than the providers were willing to accept. Of course, the patients with no collectie bargaining power could not get deals as good. Calling this a collusion is a gross mischaracterization.
Nothing you have said changes the fact that there were additional requirements imposed on the insurance companies which squized them to act as gatekeepers to even the most basic care. This is consistent with "death panels" characterization (if you allow for a slight poetic license). If you try arguing purely on the semantics side, it will just be an indication that you deliberately misunderstand the point.
Take a hard look at yourself. You think you are on the side of the angels and that kind of thinking is what prevents people from critically examining their own thinking. It is this thinking that you are the "good guys" that makes you fall to corruption harder when you do fall.
They exist because insurance companies are forced to pay for care that most people don't need but still are forced to pay for. So they cannot afford to provide the care that people do need and do pay for. When the law restricts insurance companies in what they can charge and puts mandates on what care they must provide, the insurance companies cannot physically provide everything implied in the contracts they write. So they get into the position where they are forced to look for way to cut care. And since this situation is created by the law, it is the result of government actions. The fact it don't exist in the shape of the exact shape of the allegory used in a political debate does not detract from the fact that the practice has taken place.
You are joking. Insurance companies go through unseemly effort to deny care. They have adapted the practice of demanding pre-aproval for just about anything that may cost money, but not publishing (in advance) which treatments need pre-aproval and which do not. The effect is to delay care. And delaying care in a situatoin in which you pay for coverage per unit of covered time, is equivalent to denying care.
I think that fat fuck Ajit Pai just misses the good ol' telecom monopoly days.
Just because this is still Slashdot, I feel compelled to point out that, given that radio frequencies are used for consumer-grade equpment, packet-switched networks don't allow for a complete lock-in. The fact that the current commerical offerings are limited maybe more an indication of how the industry has evolved rather than what it is capable of. Connection sharing capabilities will become a huge market if there is a market for it.
Every connection to every website which is "secure" is encrypted. Any connection to a website that is not encrypted raises more red flags than an average consumer is willing to tolerate in today's world.
The consumer-grade peer-to-peer connection sharing devices have been all but stagnant for about a decade. Maybe it will finally pick up. Again, consumer grade -- not commercial grade. If we start having devices which allow non-professionals share their internet connections as easily (and as safely) as they share family pictures on the social networks, maybe the larger operators will be less compelled to distance their customers.
we have a situation where arbitrage, by your definition, is either illegal or unethical. Interesting.
Only if you believe lying is unethical. I didn't concede that. Certainly some forms of deception are unethical, but many aren't. And when the truth is too nuanced to be explained within the time frame available( and given the level of interest/comprehension level of the listener, etc.) lying may be perfectly acceptable. For example, most people who only took chemistry at high school level think that electron "orbits" are actual positions where electrons are to be found. Parents often tell their children that a dead pet didn't die, but was "sent to the farm". It's a way to address the issue without addressing it head on.
Perhaps a government agency should regulate this?
That's overarching conclusion that Stiglitz pushes in most of his advocacy. But this type of safety ends up costing higher (overall) than the dangerous situation it addresses. It's an insurance, of sorts. And as all insurance schemes, it's profitable for the insurers.
And that is another asymmetry of information, knowing you are taking a chance, and making your seller do more.
Or you could admit to yourself that you can't win everything. And then realize that, on average, you lose less if you don't surrender so much of control of your life to insurance schemes and only insure against situations from which you cannot recover and which have a high enough probability to be a concern. Insurance schemes do take care of injecting expertise into marketplace, but this wider knowledge also comes at a cost (which manifests as insurance providers' profits... and government regulators are part of the insurence class in this context). Price is a better information carrier than market-place regulation provided by the government. With the exception of extreme events, price (as information) removes arbitrage opportunities fairly quickly. Whereas regulators and insurers become institutionalized and, in the long run, only act as an additional cost on the system.
Stiglitz' Nobel Prize was for successfully demonstrating that profit is made through "assymetry of information". That's a euphemism for "lying". While his research on that topic is legitimate, that's not to say that he is even an expert in macro economics. His politics have always been very far left. Since Bitcoin, among other things, is an insurance against fiat currency destruction (due to bad policy) and he is the guy who believes that the only way the system works is through government putting its thumb on the scale off the resources management, this statement from Stiglitz is exactly what one would expect. I wouldn't necesserily tie any one economist's Nobel to their view on some particular issue. Those prizes are given for specific studies which explore important topics. But expertise in 1 topic does not translate into a valid opinion on any public policy involving economics. Especially since his Nobel was not for a problem directly responsible for public policy.
You dismissed someone's argument as being crap and disparaged it by comparing them to Pascal.
Yes, I did. They were trying to gin up hysteria over perceived overaccomplishment of Jews by trying to portray it as a result of a highly-probable neferious plot and likening such plot to highly-probable AGW. There is little doubt that they were trying to capitalize on hysteria over AGW (and demands for over-the-board actions to curtail it) in order to promote their pet-peeve view that suppression of equality of Jews in society is a survival imperative. This mode of erroneous thinking about dealing with threats (thought to be existential) is what allows for these types of whacky overreactions to seem normal.
I'm sure those people that live in denial of AGW actually won't die happy knowing they saved the richest few people a few more bucks.
That's really, really not the argument. The argument is that we should not dismantle the civilization we have today in order to prevent some of it from falling apart 100 years from today. The numbers make all the difference. Forcing 20%-30% of humanity to suffer 100 years from today is horrible, but forcing 80% of humanity to suffer today (and suffer far greater -- war and famine) is worse. And the whole idea that the rich consume most resources is a myth. Most of their money only gives them control over economic activity. Someone with billions of dollars does not have billions of dollars of personal luxury. They control (ie, direct) companies (work activities) of many other individuals. The quality of life difference between the richest and the poorest (in the West) is very unlikely to be more than 2 orders of magnitude apart (even though "wealth" differences are as much as 9 order of magnitude apart). I could use multiple examples of how technology is equalizing (and how destroying it to reduce potential future harm would exacerbate the differences), but they will all sound like platitudes because everyone has heard them many times over.
But let's not forget how we got here. You accused (and that's the correct verb) the Jews of nefarious group action at the expense of other groups. The only evidence you can claim for it is correlation between success and being Jewish. But if you are careless and don't consider the cost of taking your argument at its faith value, you risk accusing millions of nefarious activities which they not only do not actively participate in, but which they actively oppose. This callous "God will sort them out" attitude is what brings me to the point of risking invoking Godwin's law.
Pascal's wager assumes an infinite (or at least really-really-big) importance to the outcome (eternal damnation/eternal bliss) that basically overwhelms any non-zero probability of the bet "paying out".
A convinced atheist would see it otherwise. The importance of treating one's life as important (because it's all there is) would outweigh any fear mongering by the other "what if" would-be distractors.
For example, a 20% chance of AGW being accurate might be large enough to take action, due to the large negative consequences, whereas for lesser stakes one might not feel taking action is worthwhile.
Really? What if there is a 20% chance of 20% of civilization getting destroyed? And what if the only measure to combat the potential 20% destruction is to sacrifice 80% of the advances of the modern civilization? Will the turmoil which results be worth it? You are guilty of exactly what I said you would be guilty of if you were to buy into Pascal's-Wager-type argument. You fail to consider the significant cost of action.
In general there are 4 weights to consider and 2 probabilities. And then there will be 2 "expected values" of the outcomes based on whether the event occurs or not. The fallacy is to consider one of the 4 weights to be significantly larger than the other 3. When, in fact, 2 out of 4 weights are large. And the result skews the expected outcome significantly.
My analogy is one of refusing to apply the brakes until obtaining a degree of proof only available after actually driving over the upcoming edge of the proverbial cliff.
That's a Pascal's wager argument and it's only applicable in justifying faith. Which, in itself, means that you don't believe you have enough evidence to justify your gut feeling. If you need Pascal's wager to justify acting to curb AGW, then this would mean that the science is not settled. Pascal's wager is the last resort before a rigorous logical chain of reasoning fall by the wayside into rationalizing one's beliefs. This argument is always a logical fallacy because it always ignores the cost of accepting the desired point of view (that potential harm in nonbelief exists and must be guarded against).
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that a British intelligence officer's help was enlisted in swaying a US election seems like a clear admission of everything that the Russian would-be conspiracy is supposed to have done. It's enlisting of foreign agents to sway US elections.
Except it's not clear who is "us" and who is "them" here. The only thing that Russia has been realistically accused of was exposing criminal behavior by the operatives of the Criminal Democratic Party. I don't see why we should be anything but thankful that they did it if they did. But whoever exposed the Criminal Democratic Party deserves a medal.
CIA employees have every right to express opinions about US elections. BBC, however, is funded by the British government. NY TImes' largest shareholder is a Mexican national with close ties to the Mexican government.
BBC was actively opinionating on US elections. BBC is not registered as a foreign agent. BBC is funded by the British government. Great Britain is not part of the US nor is it a US territory. This is open foreign interference in US elections which has been happening for close to 100 years.
Reducing cost is the first step to increasing care.
No, that's literally putting the before the horse.
If the care is unaffordable, it tends to not happen.
No, if care is oversupplied it tends to get reduced in price. You are completely misunderstanding cause and effect.
Other countries with better life expectancy and quality of health care spend HALF what we spend in the U.S.
This stupid on so many levels that I don't if I am even talking to a human being. I hope you don't vote.
clinical diagnosis rather than a battery of tests
Don't worry, we do much less testing that is necessary to fully diagnose. So that's dumb.
You should also actually look up Romneycare. It's the very ACA like system implemented in Mass. under then governor Romney.
Why should I care? No one ever says "I wish I lived in MA for better healthcare." ACA is evil. People who support it are people in name only.
According to the WHO, the U.S. is currently in 37th place.
The bogus study in which only 25% of the score was based on the quality of the care? The one issued by the Communists to justify the campaign to destroy heathcare in the US after Hillarycare failed the 90's? In a just world, people who issued it would be treated like terrorists that they were.
We aren't just losing ground to a couple of countries, we have lost it.
Because of people like you. You are a monster. And what makes you worse is that you don't mean to be and so you don't think you are. But it's not your intentions that make you a monster. It's your thinking that your wishful thinking is enough to justify how you should be judged. But it's not. Your stupidity has consequences. And you want to not be subject to those consequences beause you think that you want things to work out well. And you and people like you are condeming the rest of us to hell.
Reducing costs is no way to increase care. Romney's plan (when he ran for President) was to create a lower tier of doctors for lower tier of care. Some states already allow RN's to act as partial doctors (including writing prescriptions). Introducing a nation system for RN licensing would increase the number of providers. Allowing RN's do the basic care while requiring MD to do specialist care would have been enough to increase the pool of providers. Instead of it they created a system specifically designed to hand out a large amount of money to the insurance companies to keep them afloat after dot com and housing investment losses. They shielded them from lawsuits, but not to short change the lawyers, they didn't shield the doctors (who are now required to buy insurance, giving insurance companies even more business, to get a partial shield from lawsuits). The whole scheme had a sole purpose: allowing the insurance companies to survive despite their poor risk management during dot com boom and subsequent housing bubble. All insurance companies miscalculated the timing on dot com. Some (but not all) misread the housing market. The actual administration of care was the best in the world before the whole system became more about insurance than about care. The cost of care was rising, but it was partially due to more care provided (because more procedures were developed and administered) and partially due to shortage of providers of basic care. But the actual treatment which was available was the best in in the US. We are now losing ground to Germany and (to a lesser extent) Switzerland. The whole thought pattern of "we'll let insurance companies have more business, but they'll have to cover more people" had the obvious drawback: there wasn't enough coverage to cover more people. At the same time reducing the "cost" of care meant reducing earning potential of providers (so there was no incentive to increase the pool of providers). ACA is evil. It's a sin if there ever was such a thing as sin.
Oh, and just so I am clear, it is my firm opinion that if no one goes to jail for this travesty of justice called Obamacare, than it will be the miscarriage of justice that this country will be most remembered for. Obamacare is a bigger injustice than slavery was. Having an immoral system (like slavery) because no better system has been devised is only tragic. Having a working system and destroying it deliberately is wicked and repugnant.
Record profits means only a fool would take their crying about ruinous regulations seriously.
No, it doesn't. If the profits come from investment income rather than operating income, then regulation is forcing them to cut down costs whether you like or not. They just happen to have an incidental windfall from the rising stock market. The moment it turns south, the investment income will drop to zero or even negative (depending on how good their hedging and risk management is). The law already prohibits them from paying out less than 80% of the money they take in. So rising values of those 20% would actually indicate that the 80% part is also growing.
They can't be all that ruinous if they're prospering so well.
No one said they were ruinous. Only that the behavior which the current system demands of them makes them de facto rationing mills. It doesn't do it by ruining them. It does it by restructuring their incentives.
Now, keep in mind, I would have preferred to cut insurance out of the picture entirely since that approach results in no billing headaches, no confusion, true universal coverage,
I was with you right up until "universal coverage". The best quality and the cheapest healthcare I got was when I paid cash. Yes, I end up paying less for health care when I don't use insurance (even though I elected to have it). And when I pay on the spot (without insurance) I get immediate care and no BS from the doctors. The whole idea of single payer is frankly disgusting. It's not just unworkable or unmanageable. It's disgusting. I've dealt with systems which were single-payer and forcing a working system into a single-payer system is tantamount to destroying it. I only wish there was a hell for the ACA authors to go to. Too bad there isn't.
Consider how closely Obamacare resembles Romneycare.
Why should I care? I mean, at all? I don't live in MA. And there are many reasons (besides its health insurance problems) why I wouldn't want to.
I don't know why you are still arguing. Obamacare fails on anecdotal evidence. Obamacare fails on moral basis (yes, it's immoral to destroy a healthcare system for 60% of the population to improve for 10%). Obamacare fails on statistical basis (2 years after its implementation life expectancy stopped increasing even after adjustment for aging population). I could go on, but I don't know on what basis it does succeed other than forcing more people to buy insurance and calling "providing insurance for more people" while not increasing the number of healthcare providers.
It's not just amoral. It's worse than immoral. It's wicked and evil. It will kill more people than all the wars this country fought combined.
You apparently don't remember pre-ACA insurance.
Don't be daft.
It included such gems as rescission a process where they decide after an expensive medical event that your coverage was terminated the day before. Or somehow an expensive medication was declared to be "experimental" for (non)-coverage purposes.
Those were (a) rare cases, (b) something you could litigate in court. Because of ACA, you can't take insurance companies to court nearly as readily.
Finally, health insurers are making record profits this year.
So? ACA caps their profits at 20% of revenue. If their operating profits are growing that just means that their expenses are growing, too. Otherwise, they would not be able to collect higher premiums (and they have been). If their investments are growing, however, it has nothing to do with how they operate (stock market had quite a run, so there is that).
You may also have missed the way the industry as a whole colluded to insist that uninsured patients get charged far more than insured patients.That continues today.
That's actually silly. They collectively bargained to pay less, but they didn't pay less than the providers were willing to accept. Of course, the patients with no collectie bargaining power could not get deals as good. Calling this a collusion is a gross mischaracterization.
Nothing you have said changes the fact that there were additional requirements imposed on the insurance companies which squized them to act as gatekeepers to even the most basic care. This is consistent with "death panels" characterization (if you allow for a slight poetic license). If you try arguing purely on the semantics side, it will just be an indication that you deliberately misunderstand the point.
Take a hard look at yourself. You think you are on the side of the angels and that kind of thinking is what prevents people from critically examining their own thinking. It is this thinking that you are the "good guys" that makes you fall to corruption harder when you do fall.
They exist because insurance companies are forced to pay for care that most people don't need but still are forced to pay for. So they cannot afford to provide the care that people do need and do pay for. When the law restricts insurance companies in what they can charge and puts mandates on what care they must provide, the insurance companies cannot physically provide everything implied in the contracts they write. So they get into the position where they are forced to look for way to cut care. And since this situation is created by the law, it is the result of government actions. The fact it don't exist in the shape of the exact shape of the allegory used in a political debate does not detract from the fact that the practice has taken place.
I kept my doctor. I see no death panels.
You are joking. Insurance companies go through unseemly effort to deny care. They have adapted the practice of demanding pre-aproval for just about anything that may cost money, but not publishing (in advance) which treatments need pre-aproval and which do not. The effect is to delay care. And delaying care in a situatoin in which you pay for coverage per unit of covered time, is equivalent to denying care.
I think that fat fuck Ajit Pai just misses the good ol' telecom monopoly days.
Just because this is still Slashdot, I feel compelled to point out that, given that radio frequencies are used for consumer-grade equpment, packet-switched networks don't allow for a complete lock-in. The fact that the current commerical offerings are limited maybe more an indication of how the industry has evolved rather than what it is capable of. Connection sharing capabilities will become a huge market if there is a market for it.
Every connection to every website which is "secure" is encrypted. Any connection to a website that is not encrypted raises more red flags than an average consumer is willing to tolerate in today's world.
The consumer-grade peer-to-peer connection sharing devices have been all but stagnant for about a decade. Maybe it will finally pick up. Again, consumer grade -- not commercial grade. If we start having devices which allow non-professionals share their internet connections as easily (and as safely) as they share family pictures on the social networks, maybe the larger operators will be less compelled to distance their customers.
we have a situation where arbitrage, by your definition, is either illegal or unethical. Interesting.
Only if you believe lying is unethical. I didn't concede that. Certainly some forms of deception are unethical, but many aren't. And when the truth is too nuanced to be explained within the time frame available( and given the level of interest/comprehension level of the listener, etc.) lying may be perfectly acceptable. For example, most people who only took chemistry at high school level think that electron "orbits" are actual positions where electrons are to be found. Parents often tell their children that a dead pet didn't die, but was "sent to the farm". It's a way to address the issue without addressing it head on.
Perhaps a government agency should regulate this?
That's overarching conclusion that Stiglitz pushes in most of his advocacy. But this type of safety ends up costing higher (overall) than the dangerous situation it addresses. It's an insurance, of sorts. And as all insurance schemes, it's profitable for the insurers.
And that is another asymmetry of information, knowing you are taking a chance, and making your seller do more.
Or you could admit to yourself that you can't win everything. And then realize that, on average, you lose less if you don't surrender so much of control of your life to insurance schemes and only insure against situations from which you cannot recover and which have a high enough probability to be a concern. Insurance schemes do take care of injecting expertise into marketplace, but this wider knowledge also comes at a cost (which manifests as insurance providers' profits... and government regulators are part of the insurence class in this context). Price is a better information carrier than market-place regulation provided by the government. With the exception of extreme events, price (as information) removes arbitrage opportunities fairly quickly. Whereas regulators and insurers become institutionalized and, in the long run, only act as an additional cost on the system.
Pretending it's something othan-than-what-it-is is lying.
Stiglitz' Nobel Prize was for successfully demonstrating that profit is made through "assymetry of information". That's a euphemism for "lying". While his research on that topic is legitimate, that's not to say that he is even an expert in macro economics. His politics have always been very far left. Since Bitcoin, among other things, is an insurance against fiat currency destruction (due to bad policy) and he is the guy who believes that the only way the system works is through government putting its thumb on the scale off the resources management, this statement from Stiglitz is exactly what one would expect. I wouldn't necesserily tie any one economist's Nobel to their view on some particular issue. Those prizes are given for specific studies which explore important topics. But expertise in 1 topic does not translate into a valid opinion on any public policy involving economics. Especially since his Nobel was not for a problem directly responsible for public policy.
And they are banned, I take it. If they have never been deployed, how is it known that they work? Was there a full test of the weapon?
Has any non-existing weapon ever been banned?
Are politicians and political organizations excluded from the requirement?
This is "news"? XP gains in video games was buggy? Is this the Onion?
You dismissed someone's argument as being crap and disparaged it by comparing them to Pascal.
Yes, I did. They were trying to gin up hysteria over perceived overaccomplishment of Jews by trying to portray it as a result of a highly-probable neferious plot and likening such plot to highly-probable AGW. There is little doubt that they were trying to capitalize on hysteria over AGW (and demands for over-the-board actions to curtail it) in order to promote their pet-peeve view that suppression of equality of Jews in society is a survival imperative. This mode of erroneous thinking about dealing with threats (thought to be existential) is what allows for these types of whacky overreactions to seem normal.
I'm sure those people that live in denial of AGW actually won't die happy knowing they saved the richest few people a few more bucks.
That's really, really not the argument. The argument is that we should not dismantle the civilization we have today in order to prevent some of it from falling apart 100 years from today. The numbers make all the difference. Forcing 20%-30% of humanity to suffer 100 years from today is horrible, but forcing 80% of humanity to suffer today (and suffer far greater -- war and famine) is worse. And the whole idea that the rich consume most resources is a myth. Most of their money only gives them control over economic activity. Someone with billions of dollars does not have billions of dollars of personal luxury. They control (ie, direct) companies (work activities) of many other individuals. The quality of life difference between the richest and the poorest (in the West) is very unlikely to be more than 2 orders of magnitude apart (even though "wealth" differences are as much as 9 order of magnitude apart). I could use multiple examples of how technology is equalizing (and how destroying it to reduce potential future harm would exacerbate the differences), but they will all sound like platitudes because everyone has heard them many times over.
But let's not forget how we got here. You accused (and that's the correct verb) the Jews of nefarious group action at the expense of other groups. The only evidence you can claim for it is correlation between success and being Jewish. But if you are careless and don't consider the cost of taking your argument at its faith value, you risk accusing millions of nefarious activities which they not only do not actively participate in, but which they actively oppose. This callous "God will sort them out" attitude is what brings me to the point of risking invoking Godwin's law.
Pascal's wager assumes an infinite (or at least really-really-big) importance to the outcome (eternal damnation/eternal bliss) that basically overwhelms any non-zero probability of the bet "paying out".
A convinced atheist would see it otherwise. The importance of treating one's life as important (because it's all there is) would outweigh any fear mongering by the other "what if" would-be distractors.
For example, a 20% chance of AGW being accurate might be large enough to take action, due to the large negative consequences, whereas for lesser stakes one might not feel taking action is worthwhile.
Really? What if there is a 20% chance of 20% of civilization getting destroyed? And what if the only measure to combat the potential 20% destruction is to sacrifice 80% of the advances of the modern civilization? Will the turmoil which results be worth it? You are guilty of exactly what I said you would be guilty of if you were to buy into Pascal's-Wager-type argument. You fail to consider the significant cost of action.
In general there are 4 weights to consider and 2 probabilities. And then there will be 2 "expected values" of the outcomes based on whether the event occurs or not. The fallacy is to consider one of the 4 weights to be significantly larger than the other 3. When, in fact, 2 out of 4 weights are large. And the result skews the expected outcome significantly.
My analogy is one of refusing to apply the brakes until obtaining a degree of proof only available after actually driving over the upcoming edge of the proverbial cliff.
That's a Pascal's wager argument and it's only applicable in justifying faith. Which, in itself, means that you don't believe you have enough evidence to justify your gut feeling. If you need Pascal's wager to justify acting to curb AGW, then this would mean that the science is not settled. Pascal's wager is the last resort before a rigorous logical chain of reasoning fall by the wayside into rationalizing one's beliefs. This argument is always a logical fallacy because it always ignores the cost of accepting the desired point of view (that potential harm in nonbelief exists and must be guarded against).