AFAIK, a pardon can be worded as "I pardon [name] for any crime he has committed between [date] and [date]"
This is how Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon. Nixon was never charged for anything, and thanks to good old Jerry Ford, he never would be.
Later in his administration, Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts, tripped when disembarking from Air Force One, and exhorted the public to "Whip Inflation Now". Truly the most underappreciated president of the late 20th century.
By informing people about their plight without being dismissed as self-important prigs or political agitators. It's kind of like the NSA jokes we like to make, or the KGB jokes that were told in Soviet Russia. Hell, even the In Soviet Russia joke was originally a jab at tyranny.
It's not like there's a limited number of pardons. A particularly anarchist president could pardon literally everyone if he had time to sign everything.
The fact that you even make that comparison proves that you don't know the first thing about software development--unless you were intending to demonstrate the flawed thinking of managers.
Well, we have treaty obligations to Canada and Europe because of NATO. Iceland is a special case--they have no military of their own, so we have a specific treaty obligation to them. Japan similarly has only a "self-defense force", while South Korea's military is vastly outnumbered by North Korea, whom they are technically still at war with. The rest of the Americas (other than Canada) are protected by the Monroe Doctrine, which, while unilateral, dates back to the time when America was only aspiring to be a regional power.
Your comment is insightful and intelligent enough, I'm not surprised it's moderated -1 from the outset. Another victory for the Slashdot moderation system. (Yes, I realize this is probably due to some poor decisions by you prior to this and has absolutely nothing to do with this post in particular, but even so...another victory for the Slashdot moderation system.)
That depends on what you mean by "good for the environment". If "good for the environment" means "less impact from human beings", dumping human waste into the water isn't good for the environment. If "good for the environment" means "making the environment better inhabitable by human beings", dumping untreated human waste in the water isn't good for the environment. I'm sure someone (algae?) will benefit from having human waste dumped into the sea, though. "Good for the environment" is kind of a vague and meaningless term by itself.
The Geneva Conventions say nothing about "unlawful combatants". They do allow for the summary executions of spies, but if people shoot at you in the broad daylight they're not exactly spies, either...
The US is also supposed to help repel military invasions of all of Europe, all of North America, all of South America, Japan, South Korea...I'd say when you have to defend 40% of the Earth, you can have 40% of the world's defense expenditure.
I don't think that's been true since the 90's. Or, ever. Some top-selling artists are bands that came to fame as bands, some are solo acts that split off from groups, and a very few are people with previous experience in the entertainment industry being developed--but the specific formula you're describing is an exaggeration that never even applied to the worst of the pop acts from the late 90's.
What the hell is wrong with having insurance paying for preventive care?
It's not insurance at all--it's a proxy payment. You're paying your insurance company $x+c to pay the care provider $x, where c is the overhead of the insurance company. It's pure waste and allows for collusion between insurance and care providers (the status quo today).
"Efficient", "profitable". This means that it dumps heavy cases
Some insurance companies will do this. Some insurance companies will simply charge them more. This is the exact same situation that unsafe drivers are in--companies like State Farm won't insure them, and companies like GEICO will charge them more. And if no insurer will cover them at all, then the government can step in there as well.
Go try insure a house against hurricanes on the Gulf Coast. Go, I dare you.
Places like Florida have government programs for this. Of course, maybe you shouldn't be building houses in hurricane zones in the first place...
There is absolutely no talk of nationalizing everything except the problem area: THE INSURANCE. Everything else can be provided as it is now.
But if you nationalize health insurance without nationalizing health care providers and pharmaceuticals, the system will degenerate into health care providers and pharmaceuticals overcharging the nationalized health insurance, and getting rich off of tax money. This is the inevitable result of nationalizing health insurance in the United States, because of the way our political system is set up. That's why it's unworkable.
No one in his right mind in Canada would want a US-style system.
Well that's a clever way to say nothing at all. I don't want a US-style system either, if you haven't noticed. Although plenty of Canadians do, in fact, use the US system that already exists...
If it works well for Canada (which is 75% as anglo-saxon as the US is), why wouldn't it work for the US?
Canada's system only works for Canada because the US system exists as a second tier for Canadians who can afford it. 80% of Canadians live within a couple hours of the US border, and the Canadian system is protected from backlog by having wealthier Canadians (and not just the super-rich) drive those couple hours to get care in America. So, in effect, Canada has the type of two-tier system I'm describing, just like most of Europe. The one-tier, monopolistic system you're proposing has never been proven to work without the ability to easily cross the border into a country with private care.
I would disguise myself and my crew as Jesus, the Twelfth Imam, the Jewish Messiah, the returning King Arthur, Quetzalcoatl, and Haile Selassie. Then I'd be listened to. Either that, or land in Switzerland, or the Atlantic Ocean, or atop the UN building.
Exactly! We'll have a new enemy that finally unites us all as a human race. Even Reagan said a few times it would be awesome if aliens from outerspace started a war with us because then the Cold War would be over instantly.
Actually, the usual source reports that the Sidewinder was developed in the 50's. The Chinese Nationalists were supplied Sidewinders in the late 50's, when the Communists were having aerial dogfights with them over the Taiwan Straits--this was the aftermath of the vast civil war that resulted in the Communists getting most of China and the Nationalists getting Taiwan. Although this was intended to test the Sidewinder while providing aid to an ally, it ended up stopping the dogfights pretty quickly.
What? Only an idiot would say that. But "according to current theories, if all our observations are correct, and not accounting for things that we don't know and/or don't understand, we put a date of 4 billion years on the age of the Universe" doesn't really sync with how NOVA likes the TV show to flow.
That's pretty much implicit for everything we claim to know. You could just as well say, "according to current theories, if all observations are correct, and not accounting for things that we don't know and/or don't understand, force is the derivative of momentum with respect to time, while momentum is mass times velocity divided by a factor that converges to 1 unless you are traveling at very high rates of speed." Or, "according to current theories, if all observations are correct, and not accounting for things that we don't know and/or don't understand, energy cannot be created nor destroyed." Or, "according to current theories, if all observations are correct, and not accounting for things that we don't know and/or don't understand, this comment will appear on Slashdot if I click 'submit'."
Treatment is expensive specifically because insurance pays for routine care. Unless you nationalized all the hospitals and pharmaceuticals (which is a guaranteed failure), you're going to just change from a "bilking the insurance companies, who in turn bilk the consumer" system to a "bilking the federal government" system. We're trying to get away from solutions that involve vast amounts of tax money enriching politically powerful corporations, remember?
The very idea of insurance is to spread the risk; the larger the people who contribute the insurance pool, the cheaper everyone will pay.
This works great until you start using insurance to pay for the predictable costs of routine care. Insurance is not a magical genie that automatically gives you more money than you put into it. If you pay the insurance company insurance premiums and expect the insurance company to pay for a routine checkup, not only do you have the overhead of billing the insurance company, but you're expecting to pay the insurance company $20 so they can pay the doctor $200 for a $50 appointment. This is absurd--why can't you just pay the doctor $50--even better, from a reserved tax-free account, and save a bunch of waste in the process? And if you can't pay the doctor $50, this is where government assistance steps in.
The idea of insurance only makes sense for emergencies. If you have 200 people with a 1 in 100 chance of getting into an accident that'll cost them $50,000 to recover from every 24 months. Then the insurance company has to pay out $100,000 in aggregate, so it has to collect that $100,000 (plus overhead and profit, so $125,000, $150,000) from 200 people over the course of 24 months. In other words, each person pays $30 a month to avoid the risk of having to pay $50,000 that they don't have. Do some more complex probability calculations and you're the actuary who sets these rates and makes an efficient, profitable insurance company.
This is the same principle for homeowner's insurance, auto insurance, liability insurance--everything except medical insurance, which has somehow turned into a magical genie thanks to bad laws--not to mention the regulations, which only serve as a barrier to entry, leading to an oligopoly. And this model works, with a regulated but profitable market, for every other form of insurance that exists--so well, in fact, that liability insurance is required by law for motorists. There's no reason it wouldn't work for medicine if bad laws and bad policies didn't get in the way.
If you can afford it, the United States has spectacular health care. The only problem is making this care available to more people more economically. Nationalizing everything (which is the only way to keep your "universal health insurance" from turning into "more tax money for corporations") would destroy the very thing we're trying to improve.
Well, that's the problem. Good job pointing it out.
Now, if you have the government insure the uninsurable, you have a recipe for financial disaster; not being sustainable, you will run in the wall sooner or later.
As opposed to, for instance, the government nationalizing all the medical insurance and providing generous plans to everyone for free. That's not a recipe for financial disaster at all.
The idea with universal government health-insurance is that everyone is covered and everyone pays.
The idea with my idea, is that everyone is covered, everyone who can afford to pay pays, and everyone who can't afford to pay is covered by the public because we are a benevolent society.
And since there is no red-tape (everyone gets the same coverage), the efficiency is as high as 97% (compare this to the 30-35% overhead of private US insurers).
"No red-tape" is a too-sunny appraisal of nationalized medicine. Although, in reality, the only difference between my idea and (for instance) a two-tier, universal health insurance system is that there's a means test to get public assistance. This can further be contrasted with a Canada-style single-tier system, in which the entire government health service is a monopoly, and the wealthy cross the border to get decent care when that monopoly falls short.
For those willing and able to pay, the US health care system is the best money can buy. I don't want to throw that away in the name of making sure everyone gets coverage, and a nationalized single-payer system would absolutely do that. There are better ways of ensuring everyone gets health coverage.
Slashdot Mirror
This is how Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon. Nixon was never charged for anything, and thanks to good old Jerry Ford, he never would be.
Later in his administration, Gerald Ford survived two assassination attempts, tripped when disembarking from Air Force One, and exhorted the public to "Whip Inflation Now". Truly the most underappreciated president of the late 20th century.
By informing people about their plight without being dismissed as self-important prigs or political agitators. It's kind of like the NSA jokes we like to make, or the KGB jokes that were told in Soviet Russia. Hell, even the In Soviet Russia joke was originally a jab at tyranny.
You misspelled: " How DARE people disagree with ME!". I can only trust that you were wearing the proper monocle and bowler hat to befit your attitude.
It's not like there's a limited number of pardons. A particularly anarchist president could pardon literally everyone if he had time to sign everything.
Because Ron Paul believes in you. Ron Paul! The only candidate with two first names!
Dude, he thinks for a LIVING. You think he's gonna come home and post on Slashdot and think for free after that?
The fact that you even make that comparison proves that you don't know the first thing about software development--unless you were intending to demonstrate the flawed thinking of managers.
Or:
Well, we have treaty obligations to Canada and Europe because of NATO. Iceland is a special case--they have no military of their own, so we have a specific treaty obligation to them. Japan similarly has only a "self-defense force", while South Korea's military is vastly outnumbered by North Korea, whom they are technically still at war with. The rest of the Americas (other than Canada) are protected by the Monroe Doctrine, which, while unilateral, dates back to the time when America was only aspiring to be a regional power.
Your comment is insightful and intelligent enough, I'm not surprised it's moderated -1 from the outset. Another victory for the Slashdot moderation system. (Yes, I realize this is probably due to some poor decisions by you prior to this and has absolutely nothing to do with this post in particular, but even so...another victory for the Slashdot moderation system.)
So you're satisfied to drag down the quality of care for others just so it matches your own? You are a very bitter, sad, petty man.
That depends on what you mean by "good for the environment". If "good for the environment" means "less impact from human beings", dumping human waste into the water isn't good for the environment. If "good for the environment" means "making the environment better inhabitable by human beings", dumping untreated human waste in the water isn't good for the environment. I'm sure someone (algae?) will benefit from having human waste dumped into the sea, though. "Good for the environment" is kind of a vague and meaningless term by itself.
That was their first attempt. Their second attempt was, "Two peanuts were walking down the Strasse, and one was assaulted...peanut...".
The Geneva Conventions say nothing about "unlawful combatants". They do allow for the summary executions of spies, but if people shoot at you in the broad daylight they're not exactly spies, either...
The US is also supposed to help repel military invasions of all of Europe, all of North America, all of South America, Japan, South Korea...I'd say when you have to defend 40% of the Earth, you can have 40% of the world's defense expenditure.
I don't think that's been true since the 90's. Or, ever. Some top-selling artists are bands that came to fame as bands, some are solo acts that split off from groups, and a very few are people with previous experience in the entertainment industry being developed--but the specific formula you're describing is an exaggeration that never even applied to the worst of the pop acts from the late 90's.
Especially if future civilizations have no concept of a practical joke.
It's not insurance at all--it's a proxy payment. You're paying your insurance company $x+c to pay the care provider $x, where c is the overhead of the insurance company. It's pure waste and allows for collusion between insurance and care providers (the status quo today).
Some insurance companies will do this. Some insurance companies will simply charge them more. This is the exact same situation that unsafe drivers are in--companies like State Farm won't insure them, and companies like GEICO will charge them more. And if no insurer will cover them at all, then the government can step in there as well.
Places like Florida have government programs for this. Of course, maybe you shouldn't be building houses in hurricane zones in the first place...
But if you nationalize health insurance without nationalizing health care providers and pharmaceuticals, the system will degenerate into health care providers and pharmaceuticals overcharging the nationalized health insurance, and getting rich off of tax money. This is the inevitable result of nationalizing health insurance in the United States, because of the way our political system is set up. That's why it's unworkable.
Well that's a clever way to say nothing at all. I don't want a US-style system either, if you haven't noticed. Although plenty of Canadians do, in fact, use the US system that already exists...
Canada's system only works for Canada because the US system exists as a second tier for Canadians who can afford it. 80% of Canadians live within a couple hours of the US border, and the Canadian system is protected from backlog by having wealthier Canadians (and not just the super-rich) drive those couple hours to get care in America. So, in effect, Canada has the type of two-tier system I'm describing, just like most of Europe. The one-tier, monopolistic system you're proposing has never been proven to work without the ability to easily cross the border into a country with private care.
I would disguise myself and my crew as Jesus, the Twelfth Imam, the Jewish Messiah, the returning King Arthur, Quetzalcoatl, and Haile Selassie. Then I'd be listened to. Either that, or land in Switzerland, or the Atlantic Ocean, or atop the UN building.
Erich von Daniken? Is that you?
Exactly! We'll have a new enemy that finally unites us all as a human race. Even Reagan said a few times it would be awesome if aliens from outerspace started a war with us because then the Cold War would be over instantly.
Actually, the usual source reports that the Sidewinder was developed in the 50's. The Chinese Nationalists were supplied Sidewinders in the late 50's, when the Communists were having aerial dogfights with them over the Taiwan Straits--this was the aftermath of the vast civil war that resulted in the Communists getting most of China and the Nationalists getting Taiwan. Although this was intended to test the Sidewinder while providing aid to an ally, it ended up stopping the dogfights pretty quickly.
That's pretty much implicit for everything we claim to know. You could just as well say, "according to current theories, if all observations are correct, and not accounting for things that we don't know and/or don't understand, force is the derivative of momentum with respect to time, while momentum is mass times velocity divided by a factor that converges to 1 unless you are traveling at very high rates of speed." Or, "according to current theories, if all observations are correct, and not accounting for things that we don't know and/or don't understand, energy cannot be created nor destroyed." Or, "according to current theories, if all observations are correct, and not accounting for things that we don't know and/or don't understand, this comment will appear on Slashdot if I click 'submit'."
Treatment is expensive specifically because insurance pays for routine care. Unless you nationalized all the hospitals and pharmaceuticals (which is a guaranteed failure), you're going to just change from a "bilking the insurance companies, who in turn bilk the consumer" system to a "bilking the federal government" system. We're trying to get away from solutions that involve vast amounts of tax money enriching politically powerful corporations, remember?
This works great until you start using insurance to pay for the predictable costs of routine care. Insurance is not a magical genie that automatically gives you more money than you put into it. If you pay the insurance company insurance premiums and expect the insurance company to pay for a routine checkup, not only do you have the overhead of billing the insurance company, but you're expecting to pay the insurance company $20 so they can pay the doctor $200 for a $50 appointment. This is absurd--why can't you just pay the doctor $50--even better, from a reserved tax-free account, and save a bunch of waste in the process? And if you can't pay the doctor $50, this is where government assistance steps in.
The idea of insurance only makes sense for emergencies. If you have 200 people with a 1 in 100 chance of getting into an accident that'll cost them $50,000 to recover from every 24 months. Then the insurance company has to pay out $100,000 in aggregate, so it has to collect that $100,000 (plus overhead and profit, so $125,000, $150,000) from 200 people over the course of 24 months. In other words, each person pays $30 a month to avoid the risk of having to pay $50,000 that they don't have. Do some more complex probability calculations and you're the actuary who sets these rates and makes an efficient, profitable insurance company.
This is the same principle for homeowner's insurance, auto insurance, liability insurance--everything except medical insurance, which has somehow turned into a magical genie thanks to bad laws--not to mention the regulations, which only serve as a barrier to entry, leading to an oligopoly. And this model works, with a regulated but profitable market, for every other form of insurance that exists--so well, in fact, that liability insurance is required by law for motorists. There's no reason it wouldn't work for medicine if bad laws and bad policies didn't get in the way.
If you can afford it, the United States has spectacular health care. The only problem is making this care available to more people more economically. Nationalizing everything (which is the only way to keep your "universal health insurance" from turning into "more tax money for corporations") would destroy the very thing we're trying to improve.
Well, that's the problem. Good job pointing it out.
As opposed to, for instance, the government nationalizing all the medical insurance and providing generous plans to everyone for free. That's not a recipe for financial disaster at all.
The idea with my idea, is that everyone is covered, everyone who can afford to pay pays, and everyone who can't afford to pay is covered by the public because we are a benevolent society.
"No red-tape" is a too-sunny appraisal of nationalized medicine. Although, in reality, the only difference between my idea and (for instance) a two-tier, universal health insurance system is that there's a means test to get public assistance. This can further be contrasted with a Canada-style single-tier system, in which the entire government health service is a monopoly, and the wealthy cross the border to get decent care when that monopoly falls short.
For those willing and able to pay, the US health care system is the best money can buy. I don't want to throw that away in the name of making sure everyone gets coverage, and a nationalized single-payer system would absolutely do that. There are better ways of ensuring everyone gets health coverage.