Do either of you realize that the entire point of publishing in an academic journal is to allow for other experts to review the research and either pound away at it or build on it?
This is a new discovery. It will take time for the reasearch to find all of the implications and work everything out. This is just the first paper on the topic. If the research is promissing, other people will extend or critique this work going foward.
OpenBSD (and probably Net) already work on ARM PDAs. Why would I put RISC OS on my Zaurus when i can have full copy of Unix? What does RISC OS do that is so special? It seems like YAOS (yet another OS) to me.
Re:All fun and games until...
on
Space Tourism?
·
· Score: 1
Many of the common technologies were fads for people with money to burn here are some I can think of:
personal computers
cars
steam engines
movies
X-ray machines
forks and spoons
In olden times, professional matchmaking was a skilled trade. The matchmaker was supposed to find your someone compatable who you could build a family with. I've seen some studies that showed that people matched by matchmakers tended to have happier marriages.
It seems that there is SOMETHING there. I think if a person can learn to "match" people with greater then average success, we ought to be able to program a computer to do the same. The real trick is explicitly figuring out what the matchmaker doesn't understand well enough to make verbal so that we can program a computer to do it.
The entire American medical delivery system is indeed broken,
Agreed
It has been conclusively shown multiple times that adding physicians does only one thing: increase total health care expenditures
That would be predicted by theory as well. Health care is inelastic, small changes in supply would lead to big changes in expenditure. (i.e. adding a few more doctors will decrease PER PATIENT costs but dramatically increase overall healthcare expenditures).
after 17 years working in the medical field, I know your simplistic, mildly delusional views on the AMA and physician supply are just not helpful.
The views of two nobel prize-winning (and many lesser) economists who have studied these issues are "simplistic" and "mildly delusional"? I think I'm going to trust the professionals who have thoroughly researched the issue over your anecdotal experiance.
Why does everyone use the ancient Greeks as being the best example of democracy?
Not best, far from it. The Athenians voted to kill people at one point. Greek thought is the basis of western civilization. That means that political thought has its roots in Greek writtings. I thought it was an interesting observation that letting everyone vote on decisions doesn't mean that everyone ends up ruling...
Meanwhile, we should tax doctors above the 50th percentile income with enough to offer complete scholarships to double the current med school enrollment
Won't do what you think it will. It would be much better to make it legal for med students to sell a portion of their prospective salary over a fixed number of years in return for a med school loan. This allows a private solution that will have lower overhead and no economic distortions.
Prioritize those with foreign certifications that meet American standards, with accelerated programs for "normalization" and certification
Encouraging foreign doctors to immigrate by lowering barriers and simplifying the process is an excelent idea.
Require every doctor to be recertified once a decade, with proceeds from significant fees on "retry" recertification attempts funding the scholarships
The government should be out of the cert business. Let the AMA still certify who ever it wants, and let other groups of doctors offer their own certification. Let any who wants, practice medicine. Then, make it criminal fraud to claim certification when you are not. This will more then adequately deal with the quality problem (this is how things were until we started granting government cartells).
And another program that offers more scholarships to med students who will accept assignment in doctor-poor areas (mostly rural) for their first few years. Which will not only increase the number of doctors who settle there, but also attract more people who otherwise avoid healthcare-poor areas, reinforcing the "health investment".
The reason doctors don't go to poor areas is because medicaid and medicare don't pay enough to recover the extra costs smaller practices have. In poorer areas, doctors have a harder time staying in business. HHS can fix the policies in the programs and solve this problem now.
the economic benefits of socialized healthcare insurance
There are no economic benefits. Other things constant, socialized insurance will make the situation worse. The reason people don't see this is because the countries that have socialied medicine or national insurance do other things better then the US by enough to offset it.
The evidence does not support your position. The Democratic party gets more soft money the the repulicans do. Businesses contribute to both parties, not just the republican. Furthermore, the Democrats are beholden to equally organized and powerful interests as the Republicans. I think you are doing something like this "business -> money -> bad -> republican". Which is not grounded in fact. You need to stop blindly supporting one party. Learn about the policies involved instead of listening to political rhetoric and make your own decision.
From the point of view of economics, both parties are bad picks. The republicans run up deficits and the democrats expand programs. Neither is good policy. BUT, the Republicans are no more the party of "business" then the democrats are. Both parties have groups in their coalition who could be called "business". If you can not see this, you need to stop drinking the kool-aid and start thinking for yourself.
As for your "republic" comment (Obviously the point was too subtle for you to get):
Republic refers to the type of institution. Democracy refers to the method of choice. America is supposed to be a Democratic Republic (a republic with representatives chosen democraticly). This has nothing to do with the point I was making.
The roots of the word democray implys that people DO NOT "rule", which may be why many of the greek philosophers believed that an isonomia was the best form of government.
This has nothing to do with "bad" doctors. It has to do with the government restrictions that limit the number of people who can study to become doctors. I don't know how you conclude that limiting the number of medical schools and medical school students improves the quality of health care.
Furthermore, the arguement that the government can improve quality is complete BS. Let us look at a similar case: The government decides it wants everyone to drive a car that has the quality and safety of a BMW, so they pass a law requiring all cars to have that level of quality.and safety Does everyone end up with a BMW-level car? No, instead everyone who had bought a car at the lower quality now ends up without one, because they cannot afford that level of quality. The government thought cars were important and wanted to improve the quality of car everyone drove, now there are fewer cars and many people who can't drive.
The same thing happens with all government "quality" controls. It is easy for a bunch of middle class voters to support manditory quality, they would buy it anyway and it makes finding a product easier. What you won't admit is that less fortunate people don't have that choice, for them the choice is cheep and low quality or none at all. Forcing them to choose none does not respect their rights.
Furthermore, what you can't account for is that before the government gave out these special privileges the number of deaths caused by malpractice and similar problems was LESS. There is absolutely no reason to expect the situation to be any different if we go back to how things were.
If you are interested in the effects of occupational licensure, a chapter by that name in Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom provides a reasonably good introduction.
More Doctors -> lower cost of healthcare -> lower insurance premiums & less need for insurance
The salaries of Doctors in the US are about 3.5x what they would be if the supply was not restricted. That's the single biggest source of cost reduction. That's why many poorer Americans see a nurse practitioner first and only go to a doctor when they must.
The cost of prescription drugs is the second biggest source of problems, but again the FDA has policies designed to raise the cost of drugs. Get rid of the policies and the higher cost americans pay will go down.
When I said 75-90% of the problems in this country are caused by bad economics, I wasn't kidding.
Here is a link that lists the top 40 books cited by the founders in their writting. Some of the texts that arn't available at the libertyfund's online library are available at Guetenburg...
It's a good thing that time isn't now. (although a moron might be able to do less damage...)
GWB just pretends to be an idiot so that people don't feel intimidated by him. It's all one big act that he does because it helps his poll numbers by making him more likable in the eyes of his key supporters.
No, I think most of the representatives are either stupid or confused. To back this up I'd like to point out that MOST of the legislation that benefits special interests ends up hurting the group it intended to help (along with everyone else). Furthermore, if you look at any pressure group that's getting special benefits from congress, and then look at how much extra they had to pay in taxes and higher costs because of benefits others would get, there is not a single pressure group that comes out ahead in either the short run or the long run.
You were right the first time: People are VERY stupid.
I wrote a journal article related to this a little while back:The Importance of Economics. Basically, my thought is that if more people understood basic economics, we'd have more intellegent (or at least less stupid) legislation because they would understand that some thing can't be accomplished.
If you are concerned about health care, why support socialization? Almost all of the higher cost of healthcare in the US is because the Government gives the AMA (American Medical Association) the power to limit the number of doctors. Ostensibly this is the control "quality"; realistically it is to drive the cost of healthcare up.
Nationalizing the healthcare (like in Canda) isn't going to fix the problem: that a pressure group has gotten special powers from the government and is using them to benefit it's supporters at the expense of the public. If we take away the special power, the problem would largely resolve itself.
Before someone mentions "tort reform":
While it is true that in SOME states, the loose tort laws have driven the cost of insurance so high that doctors can't get insurance (decreasing the supply further). This is neither a national problem, nor in and of itself can account for the high cost of health care. Real tort reform is a good idea, but GWB style tort reform is a waste of everyone's time.
Republicans give access almost exclusively to their corporate bribers. Democrats are forced to pick from among who's left.
Which is why Buffet and Soros are both Democrats, and why small business men and farmers tend to vote Republican.
Your statement is simplistic. The parties are coalitions of pressure groups. The "platforms" are just plans to benefit the groups in the coalitions at the expense of those outside. Some industries support the Republicans some support the Democrats. Some consumer groups support one, other groups support the other. The pressure groups vote for whoever promises to give them the most stuff.
Democracy (where the government represents the interest of the people) is essentially dead in this country. All we have now is pressure group warfare.
Incidentally, it is interesting to note that the greek roots of "democracy" mean "people" and "power" while the greek roots of "monarchy" mean "one" and "rule". The implication seems to be that while the people have "power" in a democracy they do not "rule". An interesting observation...
For all we know they could be running OpenBSD code to do this.
Actually, now that I say it, that makes me feel BETTER. I'd rather them use the tested OBSD code as a start rather then try to redo it and screw it up...
I didn't think Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics got into General Relativity(maybe we are talking about a different book?)
General Relativity requires LOTS of higher level math (which most/.'ers won't have). Feynman's lectures have a decent non-math description of it, and I think Penrose's book has an explaination.
Technically the light is also relative, but because the transform is non-linear (the lorenz transform) light has the same speed in all frames of reference.
Special Relativity was "just" a modification of Newton's equations to make them invariant under the lorenz trasform, instead of the galilean transform. This resolved the conflict between Maxwell's equations and Newton's equations. Out of Einstein's discoveries, this is by far and away the easiest to explain -- essentially he took into account that it took some finite(non-zero) amount of time between an event's occurance and the observer seeing it, something Newton's laws didn't do.
My current computer is a dell. It was substantially cheeper to buy it from them to to build it ($800). I suppose they get a discount of some of the higher-end stuff I needed/wanted.
When I upgrade, if they are cheeper then building, I'll buy from them again. If they are not, I will build.
Doesn't your two sentence imply the opposite conclusions?
I should have put a "however".
There's absolutely no evidence that China is going to turn back the clock.
I don't see any evidence either. In fact I consider this very promising. If hardliners had the upper hand you would have expected Hong Kong to have slipped.
But, Kissinger pointed out that if a hardline did not take over and quash the reforms, it would be a world first and that some in the CCP might resist the change that would erode their power. i.e. the situation is delicate and bad U.S. policy could screw it up. He knows a whole lot more about this than I do, so it seemed worth pointing out that an "expert" wasn't in total agreement.
Is he unbiased? Of course not! Chairman Mao said Kissinger was his favorate American. That doesn't necessarily speak well of him...although it indicates that he is very familiar with the Chineese.
I don't see how boycotting Sony's engineering products would help their engineers win that war.
If they can show that the DRM and related crap has hurt sales by more then the Content division believes it helps, they will win. If you do a total boycott, you'd have to be vocal about it.
I'd say we all send them a letter and ask them to stop doing stupid stuff as an entire company. If they don't we shouldn't buy from them at all. If we are public about why we arn't buying stuff, when the sales take a dive, it will give the anti-DRM guys more pull in the company and hopefully cause a change.
Does this mean you are boycotting Sony too? I havn't been buying anything of theirs for about two years now. I encourage EVERYONE on slashdot to stop supporting this company.
They have:
Supported the MPAA's shenanigans
Supported the RIAA's shenanigans
Heavily promoted DRM junk
To avoid confusion: I fully support any company that tries to protect its content against unauthorized commercial use, BUT I do not approve of extreme measures that inconveiniance me, the customer, abuse and pervert the US legal system, or damage innocent third parties.
We should ALL stop buying from companies that do not care about their customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Do either of you realize that the entire point of publishing in an academic journal is to allow for other experts to review the research and either pound away at it or build on it? This is a new discovery. It will take time for the reasearch to find all of the implications and work everything out. This is just the first paper on the topic. If the research is promissing, other people will extend or critique this work going foward.
OpenBSD (and probably Net) already work on ARM PDAs. Why would I put RISC OS on my Zaurus when i can have full copy of Unix? What does RISC OS do that is so special? It seems like YAOS (yet another OS) to me.
personal computers cars steam engines movies X-ray machines forks and spoons
War -> paid for by government spending -> comes from taxes -> would have been spent as consumer demand.
It seems that there is SOMETHING there. I think if a person can learn to "match" people with greater then average success, we ought to be able to program a computer to do the same. The real trick is explicitly figuring out what the matchmaker doesn't understand well enough to make verbal so that we can program a computer to do it.
Agreed
It has been conclusively shown multiple times that adding physicians does only one thing: increase total health care expenditures
That would be predicted by theory as well. Health care is inelastic, small changes in supply would lead to big changes in expenditure. (i.e. adding a few more doctors will decrease PER PATIENT costs but dramatically increase overall healthcare expenditures).after 17 years working in the medical field, I know your simplistic, mildly delusional views on the AMA and physician supply are just not helpful.
The views of two nobel prize-winning (and many lesser) economists who have studied these issues are "simplistic" and "mildly delusional"? I think I'm going to trust the professionals who have thoroughly researched the issue over your anecdotal experiance.
Not best, far from it. The Athenians voted to kill people at one point. Greek thought is the basis of western civilization. That means that political thought has its roots in Greek writtings. I thought it was an interesting observation that letting everyone vote on decisions doesn't mean that everyone ends up ruling...
Won't do what you think it will. It would be much better to make it legal for med students to sell a portion of their prospective salary over a fixed number of years in return for a med school loan. This allows a private solution that will have lower overhead and no economic distortions.
Prioritize those with foreign certifications that meet American standards, with accelerated programs for "normalization" and certification
Encouraging foreign doctors to immigrate by lowering barriers and simplifying the process is an excelent idea.
Require every doctor to be recertified once a decade, with proceeds from significant fees on "retry" recertification attempts funding the scholarships
The government should be out of the cert business. Let the AMA still certify who ever it wants, and let other groups of doctors offer their own certification. Let any who wants, practice medicine. Then, make it criminal fraud to claim certification when you are not. This will more then adequately deal with the quality problem (this is how things were until we started granting government cartells).
And another program that offers more scholarships to med students who will accept assignment in doctor-poor areas (mostly rural) for their first few years. Which will not only increase the number of doctors who settle there, but also attract more people who otherwise avoid healthcare-poor areas, reinforcing the "health investment".
The reason doctors don't go to poor areas is because medicaid and medicare don't pay enough to recover the extra costs smaller practices have. In poorer areas, doctors have a harder time staying in business. HHS can fix the policies in the programs and solve this problem now.
the economic benefits of socialized healthcare insurance
There are no economic benefits. Other things constant, socialized insurance will make the situation worse. The reason people don't see this is because the countries that have socialied medicine or national insurance do other things better then the US by enough to offset it.
From the point of view of economics, both parties are bad picks. The republicans run up deficits and the democrats expand programs. Neither is good policy. BUT, the Republicans are no more the party of "business" then the democrats are. Both parties have groups in their coalition who could be called "business". If you can not see this, you need to stop drinking the kool-aid and start thinking for yourself.
As for your "republic" comment (Obviously the point was too subtle for you to get):
Republic refers to the type of institution. Democracy refers to the method of choice. America is supposed to be a Democratic Republic (a republic with representatives chosen democraticly). This has nothing to do with the point I was making.
The roots of the word democray implys that people DO NOT "rule", which may be why many of the greek philosophers believed that an isonomia was the best form of government.
Furthermore, the arguement that the government can improve quality is complete BS. Let us look at a similar case: The government decides it wants everyone to drive a car that has the quality and safety of a BMW, so they pass a law requiring all cars to have that level of quality.and safety Does everyone end up with a BMW-level car? No, instead everyone who had bought a car at the lower quality now ends up without one, because they cannot afford that level of quality. The government thought cars were important and wanted to improve the quality of car everyone drove, now there are fewer cars and many people who can't drive.
The same thing happens with all government "quality" controls. It is easy for a bunch of middle class voters to support manditory quality, they would buy it anyway and it makes finding a product easier. What you won't admit is that less fortunate people don't have that choice, for them the choice is cheep and low quality or none at all. Forcing them to choose none does not respect their rights.
Furthermore, what you can't account for is that before the government gave out these special privileges the number of deaths caused by malpractice and similar problems was LESS. There is absolutely no reason to expect the situation to be any different if we go back to how things were.
If you are interested in the effects of occupational licensure, a chapter by that name in Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom provides a reasonably good introduction.
The salaries of Doctors in the US are about 3.5x what they would be if the supply was not restricted. That's the single biggest source of cost reduction. That's why many poorer Americans see a nurse practitioner first and only go to a doctor when they must.
The cost of prescription drugs is the second biggest source of problems, but again the FDA has policies designed to raise the cost of drugs. Get rid of the policies and the higher cost americans pay will go down.
When I said 75-90% of the problems in this country are caused by bad economics, I wasn't kidding.
Here is a link that lists the top 40 books cited by the founders in their writting. Some of the texts that arn't available at the libertyfund's online library are available at Guetenburg...
GWB just pretends to be an idiot so that people don't feel intimidated by him. It's all one big act that he does because it helps his poll numbers by making him more likable in the eyes of his key supporters.
You were right the first time: People are VERY stupid.
I wrote a journal article related to this a little while back:The Importance of Economics. Basically, my thought is that if more people understood basic economics, we'd have more intellegent (or at least less stupid) legislation because they would understand that some thing can't be accomplished.
Nationalizing the healthcare (like in Canda) isn't going to fix the problem: that a pressure group has gotten special powers from the government and is using them to benefit it's supporters at the expense of the public. If we take away the special power, the problem would largely resolve itself.
Before someone mentions "tort reform":
While it is true that in SOME states, the loose tort laws have driven the cost of insurance so high that doctors can't get insurance (decreasing the supply further). This is neither a national problem, nor in and of itself can account for the high cost of health care. Real tort reform is a good idea, but GWB style tort reform is a waste of everyone's time.
Which is why Buffet and Soros are both Democrats, and why small business men and farmers tend to vote Republican.
Your statement is simplistic. The parties are coalitions of pressure groups. The "platforms" are just plans to benefit the groups in the coalitions at the expense of those outside. Some industries support the Republicans some support the Democrats. Some consumer groups support one, other groups support the other. The pressure groups vote for whoever promises to give them the most stuff.
Democracy (where the government represents the interest of the people) is essentially dead in this country. All we have now is pressure group warfare.
Incidentally, it is interesting to note that the greek roots of "democracy" mean "people" and "power" while the greek roots of "monarchy" mean "one" and "rule". The implication seems to be that while the people have "power" in a democracy they do not "rule". An interesting observation...
For all we know they could be running OpenBSD code to do this.
Actually, now that I say it, that makes me feel BETTER. I'd rather them use the tested OBSD code as a start rather then try to redo it and screw it up...
It's been awhile but I though GR requried tensors and manifolds. Am I thinking of something else?
General Relativity requires LOTS of higher level math (which most /.'ers won't have). Feynman's lectures have a decent non-math description of it, and I think Penrose's book has an explaination.
Special Relativity was "just" a modification of Newton's equations to make them invariant under the lorenz trasform, instead of the galilean transform. This resolved the conflict between Maxwell's equations and Newton's equations. Out of Einstein's discoveries, this is by far and away the easiest to explain -- essentially he took into account that it took some finite(non-zero) amount of time between an event's occurance and the observer seeing it, something Newton's laws didn't do.
When I upgrade, if they are cheeper then building, I'll buy from them again. If they are not, I will build.
I should have put a "however".
There's absolutely no evidence that China is going to turn back the clock.
I don't see any evidence either. In fact I consider this very promising. If hardliners had the upper hand you would have expected Hong Kong to have slipped.
But, Kissinger pointed out that if a hardline did not take over and quash the reforms, it would be a world first and that some in the CCP might resist the change that would erode their power. i.e. the situation is delicate and bad U.S. policy could screw it up. He knows a whole lot more about this than I do, so it seemed worth pointing out that an "expert" wasn't in total agreement.
Is he unbiased? Of course not! Chairman Mao said Kissinger was his favorate American. That doesn't necessarily speak well of him...although it indicates that he is very familiar with the Chineese.
If they can show that the DRM and related crap has hurt sales by more then the Content division believes it helps, they will win. If you do a total boycott, you'd have to be vocal about it.
They have:
To avoid confusion: I fully support any company that tries to protect its content against unauthorized commercial use, BUT I do not approve of extreme measures that inconveiniance me, the customer, abuse and pervert the US legal system, or damage innocent third parties.
We should ALL stop buying from companies that do not care about their customers.