a.) As several people have already posted, the article is in reference to a plugin to be developed by Sendmail and not by Microsoft.
b.) The article says that Sendmail's solution will be open source.
c.) ActiveX is a technology primarily suited for GUI components. Microsoft is even moving away from ActiveX and towards its new.net control technology.
If you want to write a GUI-less library using COM technologies (and in this case you don't need a GUI), you could use an IDispatch-derived interface. That could be fairly easy to port, depending on the actual implementation of that interface. After all, an IDispatch only has five pure virtual functions.
In short, under no probable set of assumptions would pine on Linux need to support ActiveX to get this functionality.
There are too many Marketing droids talking about the solution they visualize without ever clearly formulating the use case.
A lot of people can make feature suggestions. Without a clear picture of what the user actually wants to accomplish, the feature suggestions can't be evaluated for usefulness, nor can better suggestions be made to solve the user's problem. Varying solutions also can't be compared on their merits. And so it gets down to an "I have more contact with the customer so I must have some magical ability to divine the best solution is for his as-of-yet unspecified task" pissing contest.
If marketing departments would start doing their jobs -- gathering use cases to make requirements out of -- then software development groups would be able to make more high quality feature suggestions and would have more fun implementing them.
Imagine a case in which a hospital has one pint of blood left and two people who will die without that full pint of blood. How do you decide which one will receive it? There's no ethical way to make the choice, because you are being forced to decide who will die. So you might do a quick tally of weighted factors like age, number of dependents, societal usefulness of chosen career path, and then just choose. In other words, you would try to determine the relative utility of these two totally uncomparable lives.
Money is just a way of comparing otherwise incomparable things by measuring their societal or personal utility. It's not very good at it, because sometimes it measures a luxury as having more utility than a life. But there's currently nothing else which fills money's role better. If a luxury is measured to be of more value to someone than a life, the problem is not with money. That's just the measuring stick. The problem is with the value being measured: how much a life is worth to the person in question.
So please acknowledge that everything has a replacement value. I'd give up my one true love to save a life. Instead complain that the replacement values of somethings are incorrectly adjusted in our society.
3. Given your units of measure, I'm assuming
you're not American. Re: Commuting: We have a much bigger friggin country than any in Europe. Why not spread out a bit?:) Re: Our lack of good public transportation: We're too big. It's generally not feasible. And I, as a libertarian, don't want to pay what it would cost to make it feasible, thank you very much.
I agree with most of your post but this one bothered me a bit. In the US cities are spread out precisely because of the automobile. Back when the Europeans were building the core of most of the cities that are big today, they had more room too. They just didn't have any personal transportation faster than a horse.
In the US cities started this way too. Before the automobile was mass produced, there was also considerably more public transportation in the big cities.
But the automobile didn't kill public transportation through fair competition. Ford bought several public transportation networks and deliberately put them out of business. As a libertarian, this should bother you just the same as if the government were to force public transportation on you.
Fast forward to today, and the difficulties of public transportation are more of culture than of cost. Honestly, trains in Stuttgart are considerably more comfortable, more reliable, safer, faster, and cheaper (despite ever-dwindling government subventions) than sitting in your car in rush hour in Houston or LA today. But public transportation is either non-existant, or has the stigma of being for poor people in most US cities whereas it doesn't have that stigma in Europe.
What this leads to is really ugly cities in the US. People have to build things further apart so that they can put huge fields of tar between the buildings. I never noticed how ugly that is until I got back from Europe where I hadn't had to look at it for a long time. I think in general people in the US are poorer for their decisions -- they just don't realize it, because they never get out of the country to compare.
In rural America, you are just plain right and I don't feel the need to argue those points, but in many American cities public transportation would be useful above and beyond the resources currently invested in it.
I'm a US citizen who lives in Germany. My US state of residence is Texas. So when I went in to renew my driver's license while I was on vacation visiting my parents, the DMV insisted on fingerprints. I had to give up my fingerprints to get a freaking driver's license.
I'm not quite sure how that can harm me, but it really makes my skin crawl. If I had it to do over again without the surpise factor, I would have refused, and done without a US driver's license. I was in the process of getting my German license anyways.
On a related note: does anyone know if there are other states which require fingerprints for a driver's license? Does anyone know what happens if you actually refuse?
I use to be a gun-control advocate in the sense that I thought we should pass a constitutional ammendment. But then I looked up some of the statistics. The British "International Comparison of Criminal Justice Statistics 1999" discovered that the British and the Canadians both have more violent crime than the US in several categories. This despite the fact that both have gun control. The Swiss on the other hand have an infamously low rate of violent crime, despite the fact that every man in the country is *required* to own a gun (they're all part of Switzerland's reserve militia).
Another poster suggested that violent crime is caused by racial diversity. I personally suspect economic "diversity" as the culprit, which can easily become linked to racial diversity, when you don't deal with racism properly.
As an American living in Germany, I'm sick of seeing American culture belittled based on false premises. You at least don't try "Americans have no culture", but your statement is still blatantly false that our cultural history is only 300 years old.
Our history on this continent is only 300 years or so old. But our culture, just like that of the Europeans is thousands of years old. Just because our ancestors moved to a new continent doesn't mean they gave their culture up. We got our culture from our ancestors; the Europeans got their culture from their ancestors. We've changed that culture since then, the Europeans have changed that culture since then. Why should the Europeans somehow have more of a right to that culture just because they live on the same continent that our shared ancestors lived on?
Legitimate criticism (like criticisms of American consumerism) are justified as long as clear arguments are presented to show that those are indeed features of American culture and that they are indeed harmful. The yogurt joke* is just bigotry in one of its variety of forms.
Oh and by the way: my father spent 2 years with the Navajos and I have Cherokee indian ancestry. Native American culture has had a direct effect on the way I view the world. Stating that Native American culture has no effect on our culture today is just as inaccurate as stating that European culture isn't a part of our cultural heritage. Just as one example: did you know that the turkey, the potato, tobacco, the tomato, the pumpkin, the cranberry, corn, kidney beans, bell peppers, pecans, squash, and many other crops are American? Many dishes which are made from these foods still cannot be found in Germany today (cornbread, pumpkin pie, candy corn, sweet potato casserole, cranberry relish, pecan anything, etc.)
*(what's the difference between a cup of yoghurt and America? -- yoghurt will eventually develop a culture)
(end rant -- sorry. As you can imagine its an issue of some sensitivity for me.)
A similar idea occured to me: Maybe it didn't pass the tests at all and now they have to find a way to cover for it.
Make contract for expensive difficult piece of technology
Say it passed all of its tests whether it did or not
Let it disappear/sell it to the highest secret bidder/be "stolen"
Have the insurance pay out
Make double the price of the original contract on this, and claim bragging rights to a piece of technology you may or may not have ever successfully completed.
I rather doubt this is the way it happened, but it makes an interesting theory.
Let's not forget the Iroquois Confederacy, and the Pelleponesean and Delian Leagues. There are probably more in forgotten history and in recorded Asian history.
Political advertisers already do this on television. Those are just the ones we know about, because they have a tendency to get called on it. And there's plenty of evidence from psychology that this advertising technique has some effect.
I doubt it could cause overnight fundamental changes in the way a person thinks. Then again, sometimes a slight shift is all that's really wanted. And an accumulation of slight shifts can amount to a fundamental change in democratic opinion.
So I decided that I will throw my students a "textbook feast" at the end of the semester. I'm serious, I'll be able to buy quite a few large pizzas.
This discussion has made me quite angry (not at you). I literally went without food to pay for my time in university. Seriously: 2 weeks at the end of my third semester I skipped lunch, and "borrowed" breakfast. Dinner was pre-paid. In later semesters, I just ate less (and got out of the pre-paid scam which was another example of the university skimming its students) so that the money went further. And how hungry I was did have a measurable effect on my grades.
So rather than throw a pizza party, why not just give your students the money? I know that for the price of an ordered pizza for me, I could have made three or more meals for myself.
Your argument is excellent. I wanted to write something similar, but since you've already written, I'll just add a couple of points:
I once heard a representative of an insurance company say that they had abolutely no problem with not learning the results of genetic testing, as long as the customer also didn't have that information. The reason is obvious and follows from your arguments: If the customer knows that he's likely to get sick, he's going to take out more insurance, or insurance specifically for what he knows he's going to get. He'll be more inclined to do this if the insurance premiums don't exceed his expected expenses. The insurance company's wallet is not bottomless. This kind of rational behavior can put the company out of business.
Insurance works as long as both parties to the contract have a similar knowledge of the costs. Otherwise it's just plain not fair -- and it can be just as unfair to the insurance company as it can be to the individual customer.
For the same reason, people shouldn't be able to be forced to genetic testing and they certainly shouldn't be able to be genetically tested without their knowledge. This would also create an imbalance of information between the insurer and the customer.
Unfortunately that leaves us with an unsolved problem: What about cases where the poor health of one person reduces the quality of life for others? Vaccinations is an excellent example of this. If a deadly epidemic such as polio breaks out, scientists rush out to make a vaccine.
In a free market society, these scientists are paid by private companies because they wish to profit from selling that vaccine. But in order for the vaccine to stop the disease, everyone has to be vaccinated before the disease mutates. That means everyone including the people who can't afford the price of the vaccination. Thus it is in everyone's interest to pool their resources and make sure even the poor get their vaccination, because otherwise there is an increased risk that the middle class and rich will get sick.
This pooling of resources doesn't work in a free market system though. It won't happen voluntarily -- everyone will want to push the responsibility elsewhere. This is where the government becomes necessary. In this case, it is in everyone's best interest that the government force everyone who can to pay some portion of the cost of vaccinating everyone else.
Cases like vaccination exist and they are a justification for government intervention on a limited basis. They aren't a justification for government intervention in every case. The litmus test for whether or not government intervention is necessary is whether or not the free flow of information is working to inform everyone of their economic options and costs. Even if it is not, the government has to be careful that its actions do not create a new worse flaw in the flow of information.
Simply forbidding the use of genetic information in insurance decisions could make medical insurance economically impossible at some time in the future. As such, it seems likely that this is a government action which worsens the problem.
I was right with you up until the optimistic upturn at the end of your post.
Why do you think that a machine smarter than a human would have any interest in working for a human? It might not "help [us] get more done in the day", it would be at least able to do everything we could do.
I think a future in which machines are smarter than we are is very murky and hard to predict. It might even be a future we can't understand anymore.
This would only do it if you could also be sure your compiler doesn't have a backdoor of its own. Since I doubt their code builds anywhere other than in Visual Studio, even building the code yourself doesn't give you any guarantees.
Disclaimer: Although clever, the idea of using a compiler to insure security holes isn't my own...
Neither of us knows his entire story, but I had a different take on his capitalism rant. Basically he was complaining about an asymetric relationship. He gave a lot to his company, and thought that he could depend on them in return. But some companies don't realize the value of employee loyalty and don't choose to foster it, instead making brutal, but (hopefully at least) economically correct decisions which don't see any practical value in intangibles such as loyalty.
My answer to that not would be to pretend its not true. It is. Instead, it's time to realize that companies are this way and to plan around it. A few possibilities are:
Get together with others so that you can have the same kind of collective bargaining power as the monopsonists (ie create a labor monopoly, ie unionize).
Make sure that the company really can't live without you by performing a critical service no one else can.
Keep your skills and contacts up-to-date so that you can find another job, even while you perform consciencious work at the job you have. Don't let unpayed over-time at your current job suck away the time you need to do this.
In addition to retirement savings, save to bridge potential dead periods. Negotiate your salary with the need to do this in mind.
In short calculate all the costs and risks of employment into your decision making processes at all levels. Don't let optimism and the desire to like your employer corrupt your judgement.
Just because someone has recognized that capitalism can be brutal doesn't make him a bad employee. I'd say it could make him a better employee because he enters the contract with open eyes, and a clear understanding of his position.
The author of this article was simply saying that he didn't realize this before, and that now he does.
LOTF is just well-dressed propaganda, teaching youngsters that without the guiding adult hand they inevitably descend into primitive violence. No coincidence it's such a favorite of teachers.
I didn't see it that way. You see the adults who arrive on the island and make everything ok were involved in WW2. And no next-level authority figure was going to arrive and save them from the horrors of their own creation. LOTF was trying to make a statement about adult societies and human nature by creating a microcosm to show just how ridiculous some of our behavior is. The fact that it was children was just incidental -- probably a literary choice designed to emphasise how horrible that behavior is.
Heck even if this interpretation is wrong, the fact that my english teacher spent most of our class time analysing interpretations which go in this direction discredits your statement that english teachers choose to teach this book as propaganda. And that goes for both english teachers who taught this book to me. (I moved after my second year in high school, so had to endure this hideous book twice.)
I hated LOTF not because it was saying that children embody the naked evil, but because it was saying that human beings are fundamentally evil. That is a sentiment I whole-heartedly disagree with.
I'm sure anyone could think of ways to spend more than that... I mean think about it. Would you like a house on South Beach? Another one in Greece? Maids for both? A Delorian? A yacht? A yacht for your maids? A small fleet of luxury airplanes? A large reputable university? A President? A cure for AIDS? A solution to world hunger?
Any one can give out any amount of money. Because in fact money is not really paper bills, but rather power to do as you please.
I ordered and payed 100euros for something over ebay.de which never arrived. E-mails to this idiot didn't help. Fortunately, the e-mail address had a domain adwelt.de. Whois, gave me the info I needed to call this guy (Norman Potzsch) and threaten him verbally with reporting him to the police. After that I got the money back. Probably he wasn't a real scanner, just criminally disorganized.
(And don't tell me that his bank information would have been enough to get his contact information. The Sparkasse would never have given it to me. And no I don't buy things through e-bay any more.)
That's ridiculous. You base your entire argument on the erroneous idea that you are already selling everything at cost and not making a profit. If that were the case then you really would be forced to pass everything on to the customer. But that's not the case, so you are in fact forced to pass only part of that to your customers, and the other part of those costs to your investors. (If you're a sole-proprietor that means you alone).
If your argument were true, no investors would ever be effected by financial policy change. No stock price would ever change in response to changes in financial policy. But the market very vividly illustrates the opposite.
I would love to explain the mathematics to you myself, but for that I need graphics, so try checking out this page: Indirect Taxes and Subsidies If you don't understand basic economics 101 principles, then you have room to improve your business practices to greater benefit yourself *and* your customers. So I suggest you look into it.
Most of your post sounds plausible but I'd like to take issue with one (off-topic) point you made:
and we directly increased taxes to consumers by increasing taxes on the evil corporations, who only add that cost directly to their goods and services
When a tax on a good is increased, it is rarely the case that the full cost of that tax is passed on to the consumer. How much is passed on depends on the elasticity of demand (ie, taxes on cigarettes come primarily out of the consumers pocket. Taxes on little niceties nobody really needs come primarily out of the pockets of the producers. Elasticy of demand does have a mathematical representation, but I'm just trying to give you the general idea). More important: we don't tax corporations or anybody else for that matter just because they are evil. We tax them to fund projects and programs. Some projects are for the public good and wouldn't get paid for otherwise. Public education, public roads, a defensive military, and public vaccinations are all good examples of such projects.
My (very conservative) economics professor taught this to me, and supplied the supporting mathematics. Actually deciding which projects to fund, and what an appropriate tax policy is is a much better area in which to present your arguments.
Despite some of the over-simplified sound bytes coming out of the two parties, this is what the power struggle between them amounts to. But if we loose sight of this goal and the environment of facts through which we have to navigate to get there by repeating the sound bytes, then we aren't going to get there.
I'll give replying a try, even though you're an AC and unlikely to even read my reply. This is just for the record.
When I say the medical care is worse, I'm speaking from specific personal experience. I've made a post about this before, but I'm having trouble finding it.
The German hospital I have experience with is dirty and poorly organized. I walked in at 9pm and waited in line. By the time I got to the front of the line, I was in considerable pain, but the woman behind the counter just ignored me. She was sitting there stamping and organizing things on her desk. Probably critically important paperwork. I had to beg, and a doctor overheard me and helped me get through the process faster. Then I sat in the wait room for 2 hours. It's not like it was particularly busy. There were two other patients in the room in the entire 2 hours, both of whom came in after me and were treated before me. Finally the nurse who I had registered with came up to me and asked if a doctor had seen me yet (shouldn't she know). When I said no, she went and hunted him down. It was a guy I had seen putzing around doing nothing while I was sitting there. He saw me, gave me the diagnosis I knew I had. Prescribed an antibiotic and let me out of there. I immediately went the pharmacist, who informed me that the antibiotic the doctor had prescribed was no longer produced under that name. He gave me a substitute.
Contrast that to my experience in an American hospital. I walk in (well actually limp would be the better description), and see the doctor within a half an hour. With X-Ray, sprain wrapped, and perscription I'm in and out within an hour. The doctor was friendly and knowledgeable.
Add to that: In Germany the public health insurance doesn't pay for regular check-ups until I'm 35. In the US, regular check-ups are life-long in every normal employer-provided health insurance. In Germany health care is rationed at the level of the doctor. He only gets paid for each kind of procedure a limited number of times per year. Of course he still provides care even when he's not getting paid for it. That means if you come in in December with something that he's already treated x times, then he's treating you for free. Then there's the cost. I've heard it's reasonable to be able to cover a family in the US for $300 a month. I pay nearly 500 euros a month for just me. And the legally required level of coverage keeps getting cut back.
Oh and here's another experience. I tried to change insurance providers at the beginning of this year in Germany. I had a right to do so, but the insurance I was in fought to keep me for five months. For five months, I didn't know which insurance I could charge things too. I didn't know if getting sick would complicate the issue. In that time period, I self-treated a bladder infection with left-over antibiotics, and an in-grown toe-nail with a pair of scissors. I also have a problem with my teeth which isn't covered by the public health insurance, which causes me considerable pain, and which will cost 3500 euros to correct. So don't talk to me about universal coverage.
I could go on, but I hope you're getting the idea. It is probably true that poor people get worse care in the US than they do in Germany. I would get better care, and the care I would get is what I'm comparing. It is also my impression that the average care is better in the US.
I'm an American working in Germany. I've been at the company 3 years. I get 29 days of vacation a year, but my after tax, after health insurance net is about half of what I figure it would be in the States. Clothes, cars, and apartments are also all more expensive in Germany. Food is less expensive. My health care is more expensive and of a lower quality here than it would be in the states. On the other hand I get access to good public transportation, the streets are clean and in good condition. Violent crime rates are also low.
Worker happiness doesn't vary in response to one variable alone.
That being said, I really do enjoy my 29 days of vacation, and I can live reasonably comfortably on my pay.
Oh and by the way, allaboutsex didn't write the article. My searching on the web did reveal that the article is repeated in its entirety in a number of anti-Mormon sites. It's apparently also cited in the well-known anti-Mormon film "The Godmakers". Possibly allaboutsex posted it in a sincere desire to help people without knowing its flaws.
Slashdot Mirror
b.) The article says that Sendmail's solution will be open source.
c.) ActiveX is a technology primarily suited for GUI components. Microsoft is even moving away from ActiveX and towards its new .net control technology.
If you want to write a GUI-less library using COM technologies (and in this case you don't need a GUI), you could use an IDispatch-derived interface. That could be fairly easy to port, depending on the actual implementation of that interface. After all, an IDispatch only has five pure virtual functions.
In short, under no probable set of assumptions would pine on Linux need to support ActiveX to get this functionality.
There are too many Marketing droids talking about the solution they visualize without ever clearly formulating the use case.
A lot of people can make feature suggestions. Without a clear picture of what the user actually wants to accomplish, the feature suggestions can't be evaluated for usefulness, nor can better suggestions be made to solve the user's problem. Varying solutions also can't be compared on their merits. And so it gets down to an "I have more contact with the customer so I must have some magical ability to divine the best solution is for his as-of-yet unspecified task" pissing contest.
If marketing departments would start doing their jobs -- gathering use cases to make requirements out of -- then software development groups would be able to make more high quality feature suggestions and would have more fun implementing them.
Money is just a way of comparing otherwise incomparable things by measuring their societal or personal utility. It's not very good at it, because sometimes it measures a luxury as having more utility than a life. But there's currently nothing else which fills money's role better. If a luxury is measured to be of more value to someone than a life, the problem is not with money. That's just the measuring stick. The problem is with the value being measured: how much a life is worth to the person in question.
So please acknowledge that everything has a replacement value. I'd give up my one true love to save a life. Instead complain that the replacement values of somethings are incorrectly adjusted in our society.
I agree with most of your post but this one bothered me a bit. In the US cities are spread out precisely because of the automobile. Back when the Europeans were building the core of most of the cities that are big today, they had more room too. They just didn't have any personal transportation faster than a horse.
In the US cities started this way too. Before the automobile was mass produced, there was also considerably more public transportation in the big cities.
But the automobile didn't kill public transportation through fair competition. Ford bought several public transportation networks and deliberately put them out of business. As a libertarian, this should bother you just the same as if the government were to force public transportation on you.
Fast forward to today, and the difficulties of public transportation are more of culture than of cost. Honestly, trains in Stuttgart are considerably more comfortable, more reliable, safer, faster, and cheaper (despite ever-dwindling government subventions) than sitting in your car in rush hour in Houston or LA today. But public transportation is either non-existant, or has the stigma of being for poor people in most US cities whereas it doesn't have that stigma in Europe.
What this leads to is really ugly cities in the US. People have to build things further apart so that they can put huge fields of tar between the buildings. I never noticed how ugly that is until I got back from Europe where I hadn't had to look at it for a long time. I think in general people in the US are poorer for their decisions -- they just don't realize it, because they never get out of the country to compare.
In rural America, you are just plain right and I don't feel the need to argue those points, but in many American cities public transportation would be useful above and beyond the resources currently invested in it.
So you're pretending a choice exists which doesn't necessarily.
I'm a US citizen who lives in Germany. My US state of residence is Texas. So when I went in to renew my driver's license while I was on vacation visiting my parents, the DMV insisted on fingerprints. I had to give up my fingerprints to get a freaking driver's license.
I'm not quite sure how that can harm me, but it really makes my skin crawl. If I had it to do over again without the surpise factor, I would have refused, and done without a US driver's license. I was in the process of getting my German license anyways.
On a related note: does anyone know if there are other states which require fingerprints for a driver's license? Does anyone know what happens if you actually refuse?
Another poster suggested that violent crime is caused by racial diversity. I personally suspect economic "diversity" as the culprit, which can easily become linked to racial diversity, when you don't deal with racism properly.
Our history on this continent is only 300 years or so old. But our culture, just like that of the Europeans is thousands of years old. Just because our ancestors moved to a new continent doesn't mean they gave their culture up. We got our culture from our ancestors; the Europeans got their culture from their ancestors. We've changed that culture since then, the Europeans have changed that culture since then. Why should the Europeans somehow have more of a right to that culture just because they live on the same continent that our shared ancestors lived on?
Legitimate criticism (like criticisms of American consumerism) are justified as long as clear arguments are presented to show that those are indeed features of American culture and that they are indeed harmful. The yogurt joke* is just bigotry in one of its variety of forms.
Oh and by the way: my father spent 2 years with the Navajos and I have Cherokee indian ancestry. Native American culture has had a direct effect on the way I view the world. Stating that Native American culture has no effect on our culture today is just as inaccurate as stating that European culture isn't a part of our cultural heritage. Just as one example: did you know that the turkey, the potato, tobacco, the tomato, the pumpkin, the cranberry, corn, kidney beans, bell peppers, pecans, squash, and many other crops are American? Many dishes which are made from these foods still cannot be found in Germany today (cornbread, pumpkin pie, candy corn, sweet potato casserole, cranberry relish, pecan anything, etc.)
*(what's the difference between a cup of yoghurt and America? -- yoghurt will eventually develop a culture)
(end rant -- sorry. As you can imagine its an issue of some sensitivity for me.)
Never seen or even heard of that movie. I'd have been about seven when it came out. Care to tell us what it's about?
I rather doubt this is the way it happened, but it makes an interesting theory.
Let's not forget the Iroquois Confederacy, and the Pelleponesean and Delian Leagues. There are probably more in forgotten history and in recorded Asian history.
I doubt it could cause overnight fundamental changes in the way a person thinks. Then again, sometimes a slight shift is all that's really wanted. And an accumulation of slight shifts can amount to a fundamental change in democratic opinion.
This discussion has made me quite angry (not at you). I literally went without food to pay for my time in university. Seriously: 2 weeks at the end of my third semester I skipped lunch, and "borrowed" breakfast. Dinner was pre-paid. In later semesters, I just ate less (and got out of the pre-paid scam which was another example of the university skimming its students) so that the money went further. And how hungry I was did have a measurable effect on my grades.
So rather than throw a pizza party, why not just give your students the money? I know that for the price of an ordered pizza for me, I could have made three or more meals for myself.
I once heard a representative of an insurance company say that they had abolutely no problem with not learning the results of genetic testing, as long as the customer also didn't have that information. The reason is obvious and follows from your arguments: If the customer knows that he's likely to get sick, he's going to take out more insurance, or insurance specifically for what he knows he's going to get. He'll be more inclined to do this if the insurance premiums don't exceed his expected expenses. The insurance company's wallet is not bottomless. This kind of rational behavior can put the company out of business.
Insurance works as long as both parties to the contract have a similar knowledge of the costs. Otherwise it's just plain not fair -- and it can be just as unfair to the insurance company as it can be to the individual customer.
For the same reason, people shouldn't be able to be forced to genetic testing and they certainly shouldn't be able to be genetically tested without their knowledge. This would also create an imbalance of information between the insurer and the customer.
Unfortunately that leaves us with an unsolved problem: What about cases where the poor health of one person reduces the quality of life for others? Vaccinations is an excellent example of this. If a deadly epidemic such as polio breaks out, scientists rush out to make a vaccine.
In a free market society, these scientists are paid by private companies because they wish to profit from selling that vaccine. But in order for the vaccine to stop the disease, everyone has to be vaccinated before the disease mutates. That means everyone including the people who can't afford the price of the vaccination. Thus it is in everyone's interest to pool their resources and make sure even the poor get their vaccination, because otherwise there is an increased risk that the middle class and rich will get sick.
This pooling of resources doesn't work in a free market system though. It won't happen voluntarily -- everyone will want to push the responsibility elsewhere. This is where the government becomes necessary. In this case, it is in everyone's best interest that the government force everyone who can to pay some portion of the cost of vaccinating everyone else.
Cases like vaccination exist and they are a justification for government intervention on a limited basis. They aren't a justification for government intervention in every case. The litmus test for whether or not government intervention is necessary is whether or not the free flow of information is working to inform everyone of their economic options and costs. Even if it is not, the government has to be careful that its actions do not create a new worse flaw in the flow of information.
Simply forbidding the use of genetic information in insurance decisions could make medical insurance economically impossible at some time in the future. As such, it seems likely that this is a government action which worsens the problem.
Why do you think that a machine smarter than a human would have any interest in working for a human? It might not "help [us] get more done in the day", it would be at least able to do everything we could do.
I think a future in which machines are smarter than we are is very murky and hard to predict. It might even be a future we can't understand anymore.
Disclaimer: Although clever, the idea of using a compiler to insure security holes isn't my own...
My answer to that not would be to pretend its not true. It is. Instead, it's time to realize that companies are this way and to plan around it. A few possibilities are:
- Get together with others so that you can have the same kind of collective bargaining power as the monopsonists (ie create a labor monopoly, ie unionize).
- Make sure that the company really can't live without you by performing a critical service no one else can.
- Keep your skills and contacts up-to-date so that you can find another job, even while you perform consciencious work at the job you have. Don't let unpayed over-time at your current job suck away the time you need to do this.
- In addition to retirement savings, save to bridge potential dead periods. Negotiate your salary with the need to do this in mind.
- In short calculate all the costs and risks of employment into your decision making processes at all levels. Don't let optimism and the desire to like your employer corrupt your judgement.
Just because someone has recognized that capitalism can be brutal doesn't make him a bad employee. I'd say it could make him a better employee because he enters the contract with open eyes, and a clear understanding of his position.The author of this article was simply saying that he didn't realize this before, and that now he does.
I didn't see it that way. You see the adults who arrive on the island and make everything ok were involved in WW2. And no next-level authority figure was going to arrive and save them from the horrors of their own creation. LOTF was trying to make a statement about adult societies and human nature by creating a microcosm to show just how ridiculous some of our behavior is. The fact that it was children was just incidental -- probably a literary choice designed to emphasise how horrible that behavior is.
Heck even if this interpretation is wrong, the fact that my english teacher spent most of our class time analysing interpretations which go in this direction discredits your statement that english teachers choose to teach this book as propaganda. And that goes for both english teachers who taught this book to me. (I moved after my second year in high school, so had to endure this hideous book twice.)
I hated LOTF not because it was saying that children embody the naked evil, but because it was saying that human beings are fundamentally evil. That is a sentiment I whole-heartedly disagree with.
Any one can give out any amount of money. Because in fact money is not really paper bills, but rather power to do as you please.
(And don't tell me that his bank information would have been enough to get his contact information. The Sparkasse would never have given it to me. And no I don't buy things through e-bay any more.)
If your argument were true, no investors would ever be effected by financial policy change. No stock price would ever change in response to changes in financial policy. But the market very vividly illustrates the opposite.
I would love to explain the mathematics to you myself, but for that I need graphics, so try checking out this page: Indirect Taxes and Subsidies If you don't understand basic economics 101 principles, then you have room to improve your business practices to greater benefit yourself *and* your customers. So I suggest you look into it.
and we directly increased taxes to consumers by increasing taxes on the evil corporations, who only add that cost directly to their goods and services
When a tax on a good is increased, it is rarely the case that the full cost of that tax is passed on to the consumer. How much is passed on depends on the elasticity of demand (ie, taxes on cigarettes come primarily out of the consumers pocket. Taxes on little niceties nobody really needs come primarily out of the pockets of the producers. Elasticy of demand does have a mathematical representation, but I'm just trying to give you the general idea). More important: we don't tax corporations or anybody else for that matter just because they are evil. We tax them to fund projects and programs. Some projects are for the public good and wouldn't get paid for otherwise. Public education, public roads, a defensive military, and public vaccinations are all good examples of such projects.
My (very conservative) economics professor taught this to me, and supplied the supporting mathematics. Actually deciding which projects to fund, and what an appropriate tax policy is is a much better area in which to present your arguments.
Despite some of the over-simplified sound bytes coming out of the two parties, this is what the power struggle between them amounts to. But if we loose sight of this goal and the environment of facts through which we have to navigate to get there by repeating the sound bytes, then we aren't going to get there.
When I say the medical care is worse, I'm speaking from specific personal experience. I've made a post about this before, but I'm having trouble finding it.
The German hospital I have experience with is dirty and poorly organized. I walked in at 9pm and waited in line. By the time I got to the front of the line, I was in considerable pain, but the woman behind the counter just ignored me. She was sitting there stamping and organizing things on her desk. Probably critically important paperwork. I had to beg, and a doctor overheard me and helped me get through the process faster. Then I sat in the wait room for 2 hours. It's not like it was particularly busy. There were two other patients in the room in the entire 2 hours, both of whom came in after me and were treated before me. Finally the nurse who I had registered with came up to me and asked if a doctor had seen me yet (shouldn't she know). When I said no, she went and hunted him down. It was a guy I had seen putzing around doing nothing while I was sitting there. He saw me, gave me the diagnosis I knew I had. Prescribed an antibiotic and let me out of there. I immediately went the pharmacist, who informed me that the antibiotic the doctor had prescribed was no longer produced under that name. He gave me a substitute.
Contrast that to my experience in an American hospital. I walk in (well actually limp would be the better description), and see the doctor within a half an hour. With X-Ray, sprain wrapped, and perscription I'm in and out within an hour. The doctor was friendly and knowledgeable.
Add to that: In Germany the public health insurance doesn't pay for regular check-ups until I'm 35. In the US, regular check-ups are life-long in every normal employer-provided health insurance. In Germany health care is rationed at the level of the doctor. He only gets paid for each kind of procedure a limited number of times per year. Of course he still provides care even when he's not getting paid for it. That means if you come in in December with something that he's already treated x times, then he's treating you for free. Then there's the cost. I've heard it's reasonable to be able to cover a family in the US for $300 a month. I pay nearly 500 euros a month for just me. And the legally required level of coverage keeps getting cut back.
Oh and here's another experience. I tried to change insurance providers at the beginning of this year in Germany. I had a right to do so, but the insurance I was in fought to keep me for five months. For five months, I didn't know which insurance I could charge things too. I didn't know if getting sick would complicate the issue. In that time period, I self-treated a bladder infection with left-over antibiotics, and an in-grown toe-nail with a pair of scissors. I also have a problem with my teeth which isn't covered by the public health insurance, which causes me considerable pain, and which will cost 3500 euros to correct. So don't talk to me about universal coverage.
I could go on, but I hope you're getting the idea. It is probably true that poor people get worse care in the US than they do in Germany. I would get better care, and the care I would get is what I'm comparing. It is also my impression that the average care is better in the US.
Worker happiness doesn't vary in response to one variable alone.
That being said, I really do enjoy my 29 days of vacation, and I can live reasonably comfortably on my pay.
Oh and by the way, allaboutsex didn't write the article. My searching on the web did reveal that the article is repeated in its entirety in a number of anti-Mormon sites. It's apparently also cited in the well-known anti-Mormon film "The Godmakers". Possibly allaboutsex posted it in a sincere desire to help people without knowing its flaws.