It does get tiresome to see the "increased cost to business just gets passed on to consumers" argument. This bogus argument is seen everywhere, e.g. "all costs of shoplifting get passed on to consumers" or "all taxes to business get passed on to consumers".
You are correct of course that the increased cost does impact the developer. However, I did not claim that "all [costs] get passed on to the consumer." I said the people buying from the developer pays for it. Since all the revenue (and thus the profits) for the developer comes from their customers, their customers are still paying for it all.
In other words, this is a fixed minimum cost borne by the public. There is no magic way to make "someone else" pay for it. If a bridge costs $300 million, at least $300 million will eventually have to come from the people (whether at the local, state, or national level; whether via taxes or purchase prices). Certainly there are ways to structure it so a middleman has to take a smaller cut (so maybe we have to pay $350 million instead of $400 million). But even if you shrink the middleman's cut to zero, the minimum $300 million price will still remain and will need to be paid by the public. So the decision to build the bridge should be based on whether or not it's worth a cost of $300 million. Not based on, say, the government paying $50 million with a developer picking up $250 million of the tab. That was my point.
I see. And this second bridge, unlike the first, is a not a bridge to "nowhere" because it connects to a large area of...undeveloped, unoccupied land?
Infrastructure is generally the responsibility of government, not private enterprise. If a city feels that it is becoming overcrowded and needs to expand into adjacent lands, it will plan and fund infrastructure to support that expansion.
That said, it is common for developers to offer to pay for part or all of the infrastructure. They have a financial incentive for the development to proceed, and infrastructure costs are often the biggest disincentive for city governments. So developers do what they can to minimize or eliminate that cost for cities.
We wouldn't want the real estate developers to have to finance their own development. Nosiree! That's what hard working american men and women are for... to finance real estate development that they'd never be able to afford themselves.
While it may make one feel better to "stick it to the developers" by making them pay for the additional infrastructure, the truth is that they don't pay for it. The people buying the new housing or office space do. The costs just get passed onto them in the form of increased prices, home association fees, property taxes, and/or mello-roos.
So since the people are going to be paying for it anyway, the question then becomes how do you apportion the cost. One line of reasoning is that the people buying in the new development should pay for it since they are the primary beneficiaries. Another line of reasoning is that everyone should pay because the people in the currently existing city are secondary beneficiaries (less crowding, access to facilities in the new development, more choice in living/working area, etc). The fairest solution is probably a combination of the two. But the point is that making taxpayers pay for it isn't as ludicrous as you're making it out to be; taxpayers are the eventual beneficiaries and they end up paying for it in the end anyway. The logistics of how you make them pay for it is just a matter of shifting responsibility for obtaining the funding.
I think there are two separate issues going on here which is causing the majority of the difference in opinion.
First you have the increase in efficacy due to the scanning and database storage. Most people probably don't have a problem with the automatic scanning. It's basically what goes on when they put out an APB to be look the lookout for a certain car and individual; it's just being computer assisted so a policeman can handle thousands of APBs simultaneously. The database storage is a little more iffy; but as long as the database is treated as if it were the public, I don't see a problem with it. e.g. In order for police to search that database for a vehicle, they first need to obtain a warrant saying they can search it for a specific license plate. So restricted to scanning efficacy, I don't think most people would have a problem with this system.
The second issue is the one that's catching in the ACLU's and people's throats. The potential for abuse of this is just staggeringly huge. Querying a database is very easy, quick, and potentially leaves no traces. That's not true for a police action in the public. If the police search a house without a warrant, there are going to be witnesses, there's going to be physical evidence, multiple policemen will be involved. In short there's going to be lots of evidence that they did something they weren't supposed to. That's just not true for a database query, so it'd be much easier to hide an illegal warrantless search.
I won't object to it as long as I can recored the location and activities of the cops, and store that indefinitely
Most police patrol cars now have dashboard video cameras, which are required to be recording continuously while they're on patrol. When they were first introduced, there was some debate over the usefulness of having everything recorded vs. policemen being able to do their jobs without having everything recorded. But the overall usefulness of the recordings won out over policemen's individual rights (e.g. no better way to convince a jury that a suspect was acting belligerently / policeman was acting reasonably than showing them a video of the incident). The only potential problem for purposes of police misconduct is that the tapes are under the control of the police. But that's the whole 'nother issue of "who polices the police?"
Of course this resolves down to a case of the public being monitored vs. an agency serving the public being monitored, so they're not directly comparable. But you made the comparison, I didn't. I think a pretty good argument could be made that the police should be monitored in this way while the general public shouldn't.
They constantly tell my customers that it is the finest router money can buy, and my customers, being the idiots they are, listen to the minimum wage dumbass patrol at Best Buy instead of their ISP. Why people think a sales monkey knows more about networking than a networking guy, I'll never know. The end result is always the same, their service is fine, the router I told them not to buy locks up every damned day, and this is somehow my fault.
Even if Cisco releases the same router with a new brand name, there is a good chance that the sales drones won't recognize it, and I can stop saying, "I told you so," to my customers.
Sounds like you need to learn some salesmanship. From your "idiots they are" and "I told you so" comment, it sounds like you're taking a "I know what's better for you so listen up" attitude when speaking to your customers. This is condescending. When a sales chimp at Best Buy tells them, "I'm your friend, I'm like you, I know what you're going through, and this is what I did," of course they're going to listen to the chimp instead of you.
Try making your customers feel special. Tell them, "I could get in trouble for telling you this, so you have to promise to keep it secret. My friend who used to work here cross-referenced network complaints from our customers against the brand/model of router they used, and the one causing the least problems is XYZ. That's the one you should buy. The worst one was the Linksys WRT54G My friend was warning customers away from it. Linksys happens to be owned by Cisco, who provides most of our high-end network equipment. When Cisco found out, they threatened to cancel our discounts, so my friend got fired. Their high end equipment is great, but their low end Linksys stuff is crap. So avoid the Linksys. Remember, I never told you this." The better they feel about you and the information you gave them, the more likely they are to do what you say.
And I don't mean that the people in these countries want different things. I mean they have different expectations of what they can get for their money. The U.S., despite being in the forefront of analog cell phone development, was last with a digital cell phone network. Japan (and Asia) were first, then Europe, then the U.S. This had one major consequence with serious ramifications for the market here: providers knew in advance which features would sell.
The phone service providers in the U.S. took this advance knowledge, and attached hefty fees to everything that was popular in Asia and Europe - text, ringtones, photo uploads. When these features were first rolled out in Japan, they didn't know what people would find popular. So every phone manufacturer and service provider took the shotgun approach and bundled as many of these features as they could for as low a flat fee as they could. This was unbridled competition. By the time they figured out what was popular, they couldn't jack up the price because everyone expected it to be a flat fee, and raising the price would send your customers to your competitors.
When the digital cell network rolled out in the U.S., the providers here knew text messaging, ringtones, and photo sharing would be huge. So they attached a per-item fee to them to maximize profit on it. Every one of them did it, nobody broke ranks and offered a flat fee service (at least not without an additional fee). Kind of an implicit agreement to collude to fix prices to maximize everyone's profit.
Americans simply don't know that these things are free or a flat fee in the rest of the world. For them, a text message has always been 10-15 cents each. A ringtone has always been $1-$2. The cost per each one isn't that much, so they pay it. The same thing happened the other way around with landline telephone service in the U.S. vs. Europe. Most Americans (whose phone industry was deregulated in the 80s) pay a flat fee for unlimited calls. Most Europeans (with nationalized phone monopolies) pay per phone call. That's just the way "it's always been" and people don't know to ask for more.
Normally the market would correct this situation with a new company offering these services for less money. But the cell phone service market requires you to own bandwidth, which was auctioned off back in the early 1990s. There's no way for a new company to join the market (which is why the upcoming auction of the 700 MHz spectrum is so important, yes the one Google has been making noise about).
As far as I am aware there has been one farmer who claimed that the seed ended up on his land accidentally. He claimed this even though 95 to 98 percent of his 1,000 acres of canola crop was made up of Roundup Ready plants! The trial judge found that "none of the suggested sources [proposed by Schmeiser] could reasonably explain the concentration or extent of Roundup Ready canola of a commercial quality" ultimately present in Schmeiser's crop ((2001), 202 F.T.R. 78, at para. 118). That is, he was lying.
Let's get back to the fundamentals. What is needed for commission of a crime? Motive, method, and opportunity.
Opportunity: He found Monsanto's GM canola on his field, so yes he had the opportunity.
Method: He replanted canola from this batch, so yes there was a method.
Motive: Here's where the legal reasoning falls apart.
Schmeiser did not use Roundup. The sole benefit of Monsanto's GM Canola is that it is resistant to Roundup, so you can just spray the whole field and kill the weeds while sparing the Canola. Schmeiser did not do this, so he had no motive for deliberately converting so much of his crop to Monsanto's Roundup-resistant version.
Monsanto's legal reasoning was basically that, OK so he didn't use Roundup, but he could have if he needed to, and thus he was benefiting from Monsanto's patents. Unfortunately the Canadian Supreme Court sided with Monsanto ruled that Schmeiser did violate Monsanto's patents, but they also ruled that because he derived no benefit from violating those patents he didn't have to pay Monsanto anything. That still left him stuck with his own legal bills (but also relieved him from having to pay Monsanto's legal bills).
Why isn't it the responsibility of the non-GM crops to prevent their pollen from fertilizing the GM farmers crops? If I breed a new strain of corn using traditional techniques is it my responsibility to make sure that doesn't fertilize anyone else's corn as well?
Because your non-GM corn pollinating GM corn does not cause the GM farmer any harm. They're already locked into the subset that is the GM foods market, and they're required to buy new seed from Monsanto (or whomever) instead of replanting. So the pollination does not impact their sales nor their replanting.
OTOH, if GM crops fertilize my non-GM corn, I can no longer sell that corn to Europe, I can no longer sell that corn as organic, and (based on Monsanto's licensing enforcement) I can no longer replant seeds from my own corn for next year's crop. I initially had the entire corn market available to me, but now I've unwillingly been forced into the subset that is the GM market. You have caused me tremendous economic harm. So heck yeah it should be your responsibility to either recompense me for that harm, or prevent it from happening in the first place.
If GM crops nudge out the conventional ones, eventually we'll be in a position where a company can starve millions of people to death at will. Legally.
That's just silly. There are lots of different kinds of seeds and lots of different kinds of crops. The patents in this case would all expire by 2011 even if they are eventually found valid.
A Union of Concerned Scientists study found that of "non-GM" seed stock tested in the U.S., 50% of the corn, 50% of the soybeans, and 83% of the canola were already cross-contaminated with GM material. If Monsanto had their way, anyone using that cross-contaminated seed would have to be paying them for a license if the patent belonged them. When that number reaches 100%, it'd basically be pay Monsanto or you can't farm.
I am not against patents on an innovate breed of crop manufactured through genetic engineering per se. But the way Monsanto is pursuing farmers right now would be like if the RIAA demanded you pay for a copy of a CD whenever someone listening to a song simply drove by you in his car with his windows open. If Monsanto wants the benefit of patent-backed monopoly pricing on their product, then the onus should be on them to insure that people wishing to opt out of that monopoly have a clear means to do so.
Boeing offered in-flight Internet in a service called Connexion. Many European airlines bought it for their planes, but none of the U.S. airlines did. Boeing eventually discontinued it because of customer disinterest (customer = airlines).
I got to use it once (for free!) on Lufthansa before they shut it down. The speed was about on par with using my 3G cell phone as a modem, maybe a bit faster. I VPN'ed into my company's network and printed out a page saying I was typing and printing this from 33,000 feet over the middle of the Atlantic, just so I could say I've done it.;)
Consumer Reports has an editorial on freezing your credit report this month. They even include a list of states having such laws. Most of them require a small fee (~$10) to lock, then temporarily unlock your credit report; but this is generally much less than the "credit monitoring" service scams that creditors try to sell (these services only tell you when identity theft may be occurring, they don't prevent it).
Once it's locked, anyone trying to pull your credit report will be denied (unless you authorize unlocking it before they try to pull the report). Inability to pull your credit report should result in an automatic denial for things such as opening a bank account or credit card, stopping any identity theft before it happens.
Taps was composed by Daniel Butterfield in 1862 during the U.S. Civil War. He died in 1901, so under current copyright law it would've entered the public domain in 1971. If it was considered a work for hire, the copyright would've been valid for 120 years, which would mean it entered public domain in 1982. (This is just worst-case. It probably entered public domain before then.)
Either way, it's way too effing long, that something created around the time my great-great-grandparents were born should only come into the public domain during my lifetime.
According to the MPAA (PDF warning), theatrical sales brought in $25.82 billion worldwide in 2006 (page 5, includes the U.S.). Distributed over 607 films released (page 10) this works out to $42.5 million per film. But on average each film cost $65.8 million to make (PDF warning) (page 17, production and advertising costs).
In the same year, DVD sales numbered 1.3247 billion (page 28) in the U.S. alone, at an average price of $22.40 each (page 33). That works out to $29.7 billion in DVD revenue in the U.S. U.S. theatrical sales by comparison were $9.49 billion (page 4). DVD sales in the U.S. alone exceed worlwide theatrical sales.
Per film released (yeah I know they're not the same films, but we're doing an annual tally here) that works out to $48.9 million per film, for the U.S. alone. If the sale ratio of theatrical vs. DVD sales in the U.S. holds for the rest of the world (unlikely, but let's just say), then global DVD sales would be $80.8 billion, or $133 million per flim.
So to recap for 2006:
# of releases: 607
US theatrical sales: $9.49 billion
Global theatrical sales: $25.82 billion
US DVD sales: $29.7 billion
Global DVD sales (hypothetical): $80.8 billion
Average cost to make each film: $65.8 million
Average theatrical sales per film released: $42.5 million
Average DVD sales per film released (hypothetical): $133 million
I think it's safe to say that DVD sales are the lion's share of their revenue. The theater side of the industry could disappear entirely and there's probably still plenty of room for profit. Draw what conclusions you will from this about the RIAA's pricing. (Also note that the $10 DVD is a myth - yes some are sold for $10, but the average price is about the same as a music CD.)
Actually, yes it is. Advanced adaptive optics *might* correct for some or most of the atmospheric distortion, but they can't overcome the diffraction limit. A 3m lens at 300km altitude can only resolve down to about 9cm resolution. That's way way better than Google Maps, but you can't identify a face that only takes up 4 "pixels".
That's the line I've been giving people too. The Hubble Space Telescope with a 2.4 meter mirror was designed to maximize the mirror size for the Shuttle's cargo bay, and this is the same Shuttle which has launched a KH-12 for the NRO. So the KH-12 probably has a mirror about the same diameter as the HST.
But then it occurred to me. You only need a big mirror if you're looking at dim objects in space. Stuff on Earth is pretty well-lit, so the only real problem is resolution. If you want resolution, you don't need all that surface area. All you need are two or more smaller scopes separated by a large distance to create an interferometer. The design is tricky since the individual mirrors have to be aligned to within a wavelength of light. But it's been done many times here on Earth. When done successfully, you get a scope with the light-gathering power of just the sum of the mirrors, but the resolving power is that of a mirror whose diameter is the distance between the individual mirrors.
The Webb Space Telescope will have a 6.5 meter mirror by designing it in separate cells which will fold and stack for launch. Again, since astronomy is primarily concerned with light-gathering ability, and a circle represents the most surface area for a given perimeter, astronomical scopes tend to have roundish mirrors. But a spy satellite wouldn't need light-gathering ability. They could arrange the cells differently, creating a mirror which is wide but narrow. Like the interferometer, resolution along the wide axis would be much higher.
I am not the conspiracy theory type, but the publicity over HST / JWST strikes me as similar to Asimov's short story, The Dead Past. In that story, [spoiler] the government is covering up a chronoscope, a machine which can view the past, by publicizing it as studying ancient history - ancient Greeks, ancient Egyptians building the pyramids, etc. The deader the better. It turns out that the machine can't view more than several decades into the past. But what the public doesn't realize is that while the chronoscope is useless for studying ancient history, it is the perfect spying machine, able to remotely view events which happened just a few hours or even a few seconds ago.[/spoiler]
I suspect this is part of the reason for the success (and problems) of Hubble. How the mirror wasn't tested before launch resulting in a near-fatal flaw. (How many KH-11 and KH-12 mirrors were manufactured before Hubble? Surely someone who had overseen construction of those mirrors was given some sort of advisory role in Hubble's manufacture.) How the pictures from HST are released to the public, spruced up in color and saturation so they're beautiful. How we let the gyros die until it was one failure away from uselessness. All this drama and publicity keeps Hubble in the eye of the public, and solidifies the stereotype in everyone's mind that a space telescope has got a big round mirror. Even the final maintenance mission for the HST being canceled, then restored, then funding being lost, and then restored again, serves to put the JWST in the public's mind. It too is a roundish mirror design (hexagonal cells). They even have technically knowledgeable people like us ridiculing movies which show spy satellites with extraordinary zooming capability.
My hunch is the NRO probably has at
Re:Bad programmers need more than 80 columns
on
Are 80 Columns Enough?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
std::transform( left_operands.begin(), // Lining up arguments vertically makes it easier to left_operands.end(), // figure out which is the nth argument in a long list. right_operands.begin(), // And a long list of arguments is precisely when you back_insert_iterator(result),// risk exceeding 80 columns of text. binary_func() ); // So 80 columns promotes easier-to-read code?
Showing the recording of the movie to friends without an exchange of money or physical property should not be illegal.
Showing recordings of the movie to anyone for money or physical property to should be illegal.
This is the way copyright law needs to go.
How are people supposed to make money off their work if anyone is allowed to copy it and give it to their friends for free?
I'm as anti-*IAA as everyone else here, but what you've described is worse than no copyright. If I'm a distributor and a competitor has the rights to a successful movie, I just make copies of it and give them away for free to kill off their revenue. At least with no copyright, I have a motivation to sell my copies at a price, thus ensuring that the original creator can still sell his copies.
I personally think it is fair that a telco wants you to sign up for a 2 year contract when they give you a subsidized phone, especially when they want to give you an expensive phone at (what appears to be) a bargain.
If that's the case, then they should reduce my monthly bill after the 2-year contract expires. Right now they have me paying for the subsidy forever, meaning they're getting more money than if they had charged me up-front for the phone, on top of trapping me in a 2-year contract.
What if the degree of economic prosperity is tied to type of health care system?
You are guessing, aren't you, in a feeble attempt to justify an unjustifiable and downright evil system.
Quite the contrary, I am simply proposing that many factors go into life expectancy, not just health care system (or per capita GDP). I would hope that that's not too radical a proposition. I'm not trying to justify anything. I'm criticizing your reasoning. Since I haven't given my stance on the U.S. health care system, I find it disheartening that a simple criticism of your reasoning against it is automatically interpreted as support for the opposition. This sub-thread is supposed to be on critical thinking. How is it critical thinking if criticism of your argument is automatically assumed to be support for the opposing viewpoint?
Because your own link on GDP per capita contradicts your hypothesis. Luxembourg and Norway are even richer, per capita, than the USA, so by your reasoning their health care systems should be even more brutally Darwinian, right? Look again. Both Luxembourg and Norway have socialized health care, like any other reasonably wealthy advanced country -- with the notorious, singular exception of the US.
Here's a question for you: Why are you insisting that either of these (life expectancy or per capita GDP) are controlled by a single factor - type of health care system? I don't look at it that way. Lots of factors go into a country's economic output. Norway controls almost half the oil reserves in Western Europe. Luxembourg is a banking haven, which is an industry that generates oodles of money by doing nothing.
I'm theorizing that the fear in the U.S. is (rightly or wrongly) that switching to a universal health care system will cause a reduction in economic productivity which does not offset the increase in lifespan and quality of health. There are many good ways to argue against this fear. Some I've seen mentioned in this topic are: Administrative overhead is much lower in Canada than in the U.S., so the decrease in cost does not necessarily reflect a decrease in care. Canada is higher in the WHO's ranking of national health care. But arguing it based on life expectancy I see as untenable simply because there are so many other factors which contribute.
Why the hell do people think having to sign something ever made anything even remotely secure?
The banks and credit card companies have managed to offload all the financial risk associated with fraud onto the merchants. Merchants use signatures because when a charge is disputed, the first thing the credit card company asks for is a fax of the authorization slip with signature showing that their client did in fact authorize the charge. If the merchant can't provide that, they automatically lose the dispute and the charge is taken out of the merchant's account and refunded to the customer.
a, it only has to match whats on the back of the card anyway
b, noone ever checks
c, even if they do, if you have the card you can copy it from the back
d, if you clone the card, you can sign it yourself in any which way you please
Again, because the merchant bears all the risk associated with fraud, it is up to take responsibility for preventing it. If the merchant feels comfortable not getting or checking the signature, that's fine. It's up to them to determine who much risk they're willing to take for convenience. Where I work, the register clerks are taught to check the name and signature against the driver's license name, signature, and picture.
Businesses love to trot this argument out -- Fraud raises prices -- but unfortunately, it's just not true. Say it with me -- Prices are already as high as they can be, and the cost of materials doesn't enter into it. Prices reflect demand, not costs.
Read the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry on supply curves. It tells you right there that the primary reason for a shift in the supply curve is a change in cost. So yes prices reflect cost. Increased cost means less supply means higher prices.
This is not the way prices are set. Chairs are priced at What the Market Will Bear. I ask as much as I can get away with for my chairs, and I can even plot a curve between price and sales. There's a point on that curve where I maximize my profit, and that's where prices are set.
Right, except the supply / demand curve doesn't tell you where you maximize profit. It tells you where you maximize revenue. Profit is revenue minus cost. If the optimal price point is lower than the business' per-unit cost, they're just not going to sell the item because they'd be losing money with each sale. That'll reduce the supply, allowing the stores remaining in the market to raise their prices.
If the price of wood is higher than the market will bear, I don't raise the price of my chairs -- I stop making chairs.
Exactly, so now the supply of chairs has dropped, causing the supply curve to shift closer to zero, moving the intersection further up the demand curve, causing an increase in price. Once enough people like you stop making chairs, chairs have become so scarce that their price now exceeds the cost of wood. So the remaining chair makers are able to sell their chairs at the higher price, one that exceeds their cost of the wood.
If you compare the number of Soviet recon aircraft the US has shot down vs the number the US has lost
And how many soviet recon aircraft flew over US territory? (This is a serious question, I never heard about such incidents.)
I don't think there were many into U.S. territory. They did happen though (bottom of page 8). Most of the incursions were prolly into Canadian airspace. And a favorite Soviet flight path was from the Arctic down to Cuba, right along the U.S. coast (but in International waters).
I would agree though that the number of recon shootdowns by the Soviets doesn't actually mean anything. The Soviets really didn't need to do much aerial reconnaissance. Once they got a man into the U.S. (or Canada - the border is unfenced and unguarded), he could do a much more thorough job collecting intel just by driving around with a camera while "on vacation." That wasn't the case for the U.S. The U.S.S.R.'s closed and restrictive society left aerial reconnaissance as one of the only means of gathering intel on what was going on inside. And from the 1970s on, both sides shifted towards satellite recon.
Almost any system has a few good outcomes; I'm sure that even the Mafia has saved a life or two. The point is not whether there is any good but whether the good outweighs the bad. Americans spend twice as much on healthcare, relative to Canadians -- and despite all that lavish expenditure, Americans die sooner. This tells me that the bad outweighs the good, by far, in the U.S. system.
I don't understand why the existing system has so many supporters. Why do you want to die earlier than necessary? Do you all have a death wish?
That's a valid question. I don't have answers, but I do have some criticisms of your reasoning. Foremost, you are assuming correlation implies causation. That the reason Americans die sooner is due to the health care system. It's funny, but in another Moore-related movie topic, the hypothesis is put forth that a reason some Americans die sooner is due to a penchant for violence. So which is it? Excessive violence or a poor health care system? More than likely, there's a complex interaction between many different factors which all affect life expectancy.
Next, let's assume for the moment that you are correct and that the entirety of the correlation is due to differences in health care. The difference in life expectancy between Canada and the U.S. is 80.34 vs. 78 years, or a 3% difference. The difference in average annual purchasing power is $35,280 vs. $43,601, or a 23% difference. Arguably, those 2.34 fewer years of life are more than made up for by greater disposable income and higher standard of living. (My apologies for having to use mean rather than median, I was unable to find global median income stats in a quick Google search. The difference in median income is likely to be smaller due to the U.S.' disproportionately unequal wealth distribution, but the numbers should suffice to get the point across.)
Which brings me to a point I've been hinting at thus far but haven't stated. What if the degree of economic prosperity is tied to type of health care system? What if the lack of universal coverage in the U.S., as brutal as it is, has the darwinesque effect of tending to filter out those whose economic output is insufficient to counter their predisposition for disease and injury, whether from genetics or stupidity? Suddenly, you're faced with having to consider not just the primary effects of universal health care (which are all positive), but also the secondary and tertiary effects (which could be negative).
I really like the suggestion someone else put forth on this topic: The U.S. doesn't need to jump wholescale to a universal health care system. A few States can implement it on their own. This has the advantage of controlling for differences in economy, social standards like propensity for violence, genetic (ethnic) makeup, and the myriad of other factors we probably haven't even thought of. If it works well in those states, that'd be a solid argument to expand it nationwide. If it doesn't work well, then at least we'll be able to pick it apart to try to figure out why it's having problems, to reach a better decision about what to do next. (Incidentally, in this light, my anecdote supports universal health care since the reason the minimum-wage employee got his exemplary treatment was because California requires all businesses to carry worker's comp insurance.)
Do me a favor and go read a little bit about statistics. When you figure out how to best create randomized sample groups that are large enough to matter at all in any kind of discussion about this, please let us know. We are not amused by your sample sizes of 1.
I am well educated in statistics. As I mentioned in my other followup, the original assertion was that only the wealthy got good health care in the U.S. Disproving that type of assertion requires only a sample of one.
The rest of your post I actually agree with. Like I said, I recognize there are many flaws in the U.S. health care system. My dad is a doctor so I got quite an earful of the inanities perpetrated by insurance companies. What I am opposed to is the type of hyperbole which basically goes, "because I am opposed to it, there can be absolutely nothing good about it." I fear that those types of extremist sentiments actually harm the cause more than help it, by causing undecided people to conclude that if an extremist holds that point of view, that point of view must be extremist.
Critical thinking means considering both the positive and negative aspects of the current situation and possible alternatives, before deciding how to proceed. Someone who declares the U.S. health care system an unconditional failure is applying no more critical thinking than someone who declares it an unmitigated success.
People who scream 'Michael Moore hates America' are pathologically incapable of thinking critically or handling criticism, even when it is constructive criticism that is desperately needed. Accept Sicko for what it is: a searing and accurate indictment of our disgraceful healthcare system. Unless you are wealthy, our healthcare system is a catastrophic failure. It is complete and utter crap compared to the systems in other developed countries, and it is an embarrassment to our country.
This appears to be the implicit and unsubstantiated assumption put forth by everyone defending the movie. That the U.S. health care system as a matter of course, sucks.
A couple years ago, a minimum wage employee at my previous workplace severed his thumb on a power saw. He was taken to the local hospital, which determined that they couldn't help him. He was then airlifted to Loma Linda Medical Center. They examined him, and called one of the top finger reattachment surgeons in the country from Houston. He flew in, and our employee was in surgery for 5 hours.
Unfortunately, they weren't able to reattach the thumb. But they put him on a 3-month rehabilitation program including weekly therapy sessions to teach him how to function without the thumb, and psychiatric sessions to help him cope with the loss.
This was in California, where companies are required to have worker's comp insurance. So the entire thing was covered by worker's comp. It was later discovered that he was an illegal alien, but that didn't change anything with respect to the insurance and coverage.
Meanwhile, the company controller had recently moved from Canada. He was absolutely floored by the above sequence of events. His brother (in Canada) had been diagnosed with RSI and was scheduled to be seen by a specialist who would decide if it could be treated with therapy or would need surgery. The time between the diagnosis and the scheduled appointment was 13 months. The pain was making it impossible for his brother to continue to work, so he hopped across the border to the U.S. and paid to have a doctor look at it there. Contrast this to a minimum wage illegal immigrant getting airlifted, getting one of the top surgeons in the country flown in to treat him, and 5 hours of surgery, all in less than 12 hours.
I completely agree the U.S. health care system has a lot of problems, mostly centered around an emphasis on treatment rather than prevention. But if you're so blinded by your love of socialized medicine that you can't see the good aspects of our system, you really have no business saying who is or isn't capable of critical thought. The U.S. health care system is not a catastrophic failure, nor is it utter crap, nor is it an embarrassment. It is suboptimal, and moderately wasteful, with many aspects that could definitely be improved. But it is also one of the best (aside from cost) health care systems in the world.
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In other words, this is a fixed minimum cost borne by the public. There is no magic way to make "someone else" pay for it. If a bridge costs $300 million, at least $300 million will eventually have to come from the people (whether at the local, state, or national level; whether via taxes or purchase prices). Certainly there are ways to structure it so a middleman has to take a smaller cut (so maybe we have to pay $350 million instead of $400 million). But even if you shrink the middleman's cut to zero, the minimum $300 million price will still remain and will need to be paid by the public. So the decision to build the bridge should be based on whether or not it's worth a cost of $300 million. Not based on, say, the government paying $50 million with a developer picking up $250 million of the tab. That was my point.
That said, it is common for developers to offer to pay for part or all of the infrastructure. They have a financial incentive for the development to proceed, and infrastructure costs are often the biggest disincentive for city governments. So developers do what they can to minimize or eliminate that cost for cities.
While it may make one feel better to "stick it to the developers" by making them pay for the additional infrastructure, the truth is that they don't pay for it. The people buying the new housing or office space do. The costs just get passed onto them in the form of increased prices, home association fees, property taxes, and/or mello-roos.So since the people are going to be paying for it anyway, the question then becomes how do you apportion the cost. One line of reasoning is that the people buying in the new development should pay for it since they are the primary beneficiaries. Another line of reasoning is that everyone should pay because the people in the currently existing city are secondary beneficiaries (less crowding, access to facilities in the new development, more choice in living/working area, etc). The fairest solution is probably a combination of the two. But the point is that making taxpayers pay for it isn't as ludicrous as you're making it out to be; taxpayers are the eventual beneficiaries and they end up paying for it in the end anyway. The logistics of how you make them pay for it is just a matter of shifting responsibility for obtaining the funding.
First you have the increase in efficacy due to the scanning and database storage. Most people probably don't have a problem with the automatic scanning. It's basically what goes on when they put out an APB to be look the lookout for a certain car and individual; it's just being computer assisted so a policeman can handle thousands of APBs simultaneously. The database storage is a little more iffy; but as long as the database is treated as if it were the public, I don't see a problem with it. e.g. In order for police to search that database for a vehicle, they first need to obtain a warrant saying they can search it for a specific license plate. So restricted to scanning efficacy, I don't think most people would have a problem with this system.
The second issue is the one that's catching in the ACLU's and people's throats. The potential for abuse of this is just staggeringly huge. Querying a database is very easy, quick, and potentially leaves no traces. That's not true for a police action in the public. If the police search a house without a warrant, there are going to be witnesses, there's going to be physical evidence, multiple policemen will be involved. In short there's going to be lots of evidence that they did something they weren't supposed to. That's just not true for a database query, so it'd be much easier to hide an illegal warrantless search.
Of course this resolves down to a case of the public being monitored vs. an agency serving the public being monitored, so they're not directly comparable. But you made the comparison, I didn't. I think a pretty good argument could be made that the police should be monitored in this way while the general public shouldn't.
Try making your customers feel special. Tell them, "I could get in trouble for telling you this, so you have to promise to keep it secret. My friend who used to work here cross-referenced network complaints from our customers against the brand/model of router they used, and the one causing the least problems is XYZ. That's the one you should buy. The worst one was the Linksys WRT54G My friend was warning customers away from it. Linksys happens to be owned by Cisco, who provides most of our high-end network equipment. When Cisco found out, they threatened to cancel our discounts, so my friend got fired. Their high end equipment is great, but their low end Linksys stuff is crap. So avoid the Linksys. Remember, I never told you this." The better they feel about you and the information you gave them, the more likely they are to do what you say.
The phone service providers in the U.S. took this advance knowledge, and attached hefty fees to everything that was popular in Asia and Europe - text, ringtones, photo uploads. When these features were first rolled out in Japan, they didn't know what people would find popular. So every phone manufacturer and service provider took the shotgun approach and bundled as many of these features as they could for as low a flat fee as they could. This was unbridled competition. By the time they figured out what was popular, they couldn't jack up the price because everyone expected it to be a flat fee, and raising the price would send your customers to your competitors.
When the digital cell network rolled out in the U.S., the providers here knew text messaging, ringtones, and photo sharing would be huge. So they attached a per-item fee to them to maximize profit on it. Every one of them did it, nobody broke ranks and offered a flat fee service (at least not without an additional fee). Kind of an implicit agreement to collude to fix prices to maximize everyone's profit.
Americans simply don't know that these things are free or a flat fee in the rest of the world. For them, a text message has always been 10-15 cents each. A ringtone has always been $1-$2. The cost per each one isn't that much, so they pay it. The same thing happened the other way around with landline telephone service in the U.S. vs. Europe. Most Americans (whose phone industry was deregulated in the 80s) pay a flat fee for unlimited calls. Most Europeans (with nationalized phone monopolies) pay per phone call. That's just the way "it's always been" and people don't know to ask for more.
Normally the market would correct this situation with a new company offering these services for less money. But the cell phone service market requires you to own bandwidth, which was auctioned off back in the early 1990s. There's no way for a new company to join the market (which is why the upcoming auction of the 700 MHz spectrum is so important, yes the one Google has been making noise about).
Opportunity: He found Monsanto's GM canola on his field, so yes he had the opportunity.
Method: He replanted canola from this batch, so yes there was a method.
Motive: Here's where the legal reasoning falls apart.
Schmeiser did not use Roundup. The sole benefit of Monsanto's GM Canola is that it is resistant to Roundup, so you can just spray the whole field and kill the weeds while sparing the Canola. Schmeiser did not do this, so he had no motive for deliberately converting so much of his crop to Monsanto's Roundup-resistant version.
Monsanto's legal reasoning was basically that, OK so he didn't use Roundup, but he could have if he needed to, and thus he was benefiting from Monsanto's patents. Unfortunately the Canadian Supreme Court sided with Monsanto ruled that Schmeiser did violate Monsanto's patents, but they also ruled that because he derived no benefit from violating those patents he didn't have to pay Monsanto anything. That still left him stuck with his own legal bills (but also relieved him from having to pay Monsanto's legal bills).
OTOH, if GM crops fertilize my non-GM corn, I can no longer sell that corn to Europe, I can no longer sell that corn as organic, and (based on Monsanto's licensing enforcement) I can no longer replant seeds from my own corn for next year's crop. I initially had the entire corn market available to me, but now I've unwillingly been forced into the subset that is the GM market. You have caused me tremendous economic harm. So heck yeah it should be your responsibility to either recompense me for that harm, or prevent it from happening in the first place.
I am not against patents on an innovate breed of crop manufactured through genetic engineering per se. But the way Monsanto is pursuing farmers right now would be like if the RIAA demanded you pay for a copy of a CD whenever someone listening to a song simply drove by you in his car with his windows open. If Monsanto wants the benefit of patent-backed monopoly pricing on their product, then the onus should be on them to insure that people wishing to opt out of that monopoly have a clear means to do so.
I got to use it once (for free!) on Lufthansa before they shut it down. The speed was about on par with using my 3G cell phone as a modem, maybe a bit faster. I VPN'ed into my company's network and printed out a page saying I was typing and printing this from 33,000 feet over the middle of the Atlantic, just so I could say I've done it. ;)
Once it's locked, anyone trying to pull your credit report will be denied (unless you authorize unlocking it before they try to pull the report). Inability to pull your credit report should result in an automatic denial for things such as opening a bank account or credit card, stopping any identity theft before it happens.
Either way, it's way too effing long, that something created around the time my great-great-grandparents were born should only come into the public domain during my lifetime.
In the same year, DVD sales numbered 1.3247 billion (page 28) in the U.S. alone, at an average price of $22.40 each (page 33). That works out to $29.7 billion in DVD revenue in the U.S. U.S. theatrical sales by comparison were $9.49 billion (page 4). DVD sales in the U.S. alone exceed worlwide theatrical sales.
Per film released (yeah I know they're not the same films, but we're doing an annual tally here) that works out to $48.9 million per film, for the U.S. alone. If the sale ratio of theatrical vs. DVD sales in the U.S. holds for the rest of the world (unlikely, but let's just say), then global DVD sales would be $80.8 billion, or $133 million per flim.
So to recap for 2006:
# of releases: 607
US theatrical sales: $9.49 billion
Global theatrical sales: $25.82 billion
US DVD sales: $29.7 billion
Global DVD sales (hypothetical): $80.8 billion
Average cost to make each film: $65.8 million
Average theatrical sales per film released: $42.5 million
Average DVD sales per film released (hypothetical): $133 million
I think it's safe to say that DVD sales are the lion's share of their revenue. The theater side of the industry could disappear entirely and there's probably still plenty of room for profit. Draw what conclusions you will from this about the RIAA's pricing. (Also note that the $10 DVD is a myth - yes some are sold for $10, but the average price is about the same as a music CD.)
One final footnote. The MPAA only claims $6.1 billion in losses to piracy (PDF warning) in 2005. So they're claiming piracy only accounts for 6%-11% of their total sales (depending on what figure you use for DVD sales). The RIAA claims $4.5 billion in piracy losses in 2005 versus $12.3 billion in total retail music sales. A whopping 37%
That's the line I've been giving people too. The Hubble Space Telescope with a 2.4 meter mirror was designed to maximize the mirror size for the Shuttle's cargo bay, and this is the same Shuttle which has launched a KH-12 for the NRO. So the KH-12 probably has a mirror about the same diameter as the HST.
But then it occurred to me. You only need a big mirror if you're looking at dim objects in space. Stuff on Earth is pretty well-lit, so the only real problem is resolution. If you want resolution, you don't need all that surface area. All you need are two or more smaller scopes separated by a large distance to create an interferometer. The design is tricky since the individual mirrors have to be aligned to within a wavelength of light. But it's been done many times here on Earth. When done successfully, you get a scope with the light-gathering power of just the sum of the mirrors, but the resolving power is that of a mirror whose diameter is the distance between the individual mirrors.
The Webb Space Telescope will have a 6.5 meter mirror by designing it in separate cells which will fold and stack for launch. Again, since astronomy is primarily concerned with light-gathering ability, and a circle represents the most surface area for a given perimeter, astronomical scopes tend to have roundish mirrors. But a spy satellite wouldn't need light-gathering ability. They could arrange the cells differently, creating a mirror which is wide but narrow. Like the interferometer, resolution along the wide axis would be much higher.
I am not the conspiracy theory type, but the publicity over HST / JWST strikes me as similar to Asimov's short story, The Dead Past. In that story, [spoiler] the government is covering up a chronoscope, a machine which can view the past, by publicizing it as studying ancient history - ancient Greeks, ancient Egyptians building the pyramids, etc. The deader the better. It turns out that the machine can't view more than several decades into the past. But what the public doesn't realize is that while the chronoscope is useless for studying ancient history, it is the perfect spying machine, able to remotely view events which happened just a few hours or even a few seconds ago.[/spoiler]
I suspect this is part of the reason for the success (and problems) of Hubble. How the mirror wasn't tested before launch resulting in a near-fatal flaw. (How many KH-11 and KH-12 mirrors were manufactured before Hubble? Surely someone who had overseen construction of those mirrors was given some sort of advisory role in Hubble's manufacture.) How the pictures from HST are released to the public, spruced up in color and saturation so they're beautiful. How we let the gyros die until it was one failure away from uselessness. All this drama and publicity keeps Hubble in the eye of the public, and solidifies the stereotype in everyone's mind that a space telescope has got a big round mirror. Even the final maintenance mission for the HST being canceled, then restored, then funding being lost, and then restored again, serves to put the JWST in the public's mind. It too is a roundish mirror design (hexagonal cells). They even have technically knowledgeable people like us ridiculing movies which show spy satellites with extraordinary zooming capability.
My hunch is the NRO probably has at
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I'm as anti-*IAA as everyone else here, but what you've described is worse than no copyright. If I'm a distributor and a competitor has the rights to a successful movie, I just make copies of it and give them away for free to kill off their revenue. At least with no copyright, I have a motivation to sell my copies at a price, thus ensuring that the original creator can still sell his copies.
I'm theorizing that the fear in the U.S. is (rightly or wrongly) that switching to a universal health care system will cause a reduction in economic productivity which does not offset the increase in lifespan and quality of health. There are many good ways to argue against this fear. Some I've seen mentioned in this topic are: Administrative overhead is much lower in Canada than in the U.S., so the decrease in cost does not necessarily reflect a decrease in care. Canada is higher in the WHO's ranking of national health care. But arguing it based on life expectancy I see as untenable simply because there are so many other factors which contribute.
I would agree though that the number of recon shootdowns by the Soviets doesn't actually mean anything. The Soviets really didn't need to do much aerial reconnaissance. Once they got a man into the U.S. (or Canada - the border is unfenced and unguarded), he could do a much more thorough job collecting intel just by driving around with a camera while "on vacation." That wasn't the case for the U.S. The U.S.S.R.'s closed and restrictive society left aerial reconnaissance as one of the only means of gathering intel on what was going on inside. And from the 1970s on, both sides shifted towards satellite recon.
Next, let's assume for the moment that you are correct and that the entirety of the correlation is due to differences in health care. The difference in life expectancy between Canada and the U.S. is 80.34 vs. 78 years, or a 3% difference. The difference in average annual purchasing power is $35,280 vs. $43,601, or a 23% difference. Arguably, those 2.34 fewer years of life are more than made up for by greater disposable income and higher standard of living. (My apologies for having to use mean rather than median, I was unable to find global median income stats in a quick Google search. The difference in median income is likely to be smaller due to the U.S.' disproportionately unequal wealth distribution, but the numbers should suffice to get the point across.)
Which brings me to a point I've been hinting at thus far but haven't stated. What if the degree of economic prosperity is tied to type of health care system? What if the lack of universal coverage in the U.S., as brutal as it is, has the darwinesque effect of tending to filter out those whose economic output is insufficient to counter their predisposition for disease and injury, whether from genetics or stupidity? Suddenly, you're faced with having to consider not just the primary effects of universal health care (which are all positive), but also the secondary and tertiary effects (which could be negative).
I really like the suggestion someone else put forth on this topic: The U.S. doesn't need to jump wholescale to a universal health care system. A few States can implement it on their own. This has the advantage of controlling for differences in economy, social standards like propensity for violence, genetic (ethnic) makeup, and the myriad of other factors we probably haven't even thought of. If it works well in those states, that'd be a solid argument to expand it nationwide. If it doesn't work well, then at least we'll be able to pick it apart to try to figure out why it's having problems, to reach a better decision about what to do next. (Incidentally, in this light, my anecdote supports universal health care since the reason the minimum-wage employee got his exemplary treatment was because California requires all businesses to carry worker's comp insurance.)
The rest of your post I actually agree with. Like I said, I recognize there are many flaws in the U.S. health care system. My dad is a doctor so I got quite an earful of the inanities perpetrated by insurance companies. What I am opposed to is the type of hyperbole which basically goes, "because I am opposed to it, there can be absolutely nothing good about it." I fear that those types of extremist sentiments actually harm the cause more than help it, by causing undecided people to conclude that if an extremist holds that point of view, that point of view must be extremist.
Critical thinking means considering both the positive and negative aspects of the current situation and possible alternatives, before deciding how to proceed. Someone who declares the U.S. health care system an unconditional failure is applying no more critical thinking than someone who declares it an unmitigated success.
A couple years ago, a minimum wage employee at my previous workplace severed his thumb on a power saw. He was taken to the local hospital, which determined that they couldn't help him. He was then airlifted to Loma Linda Medical Center. They examined him, and called one of the top finger reattachment surgeons in the country from Houston. He flew in, and our employee was in surgery for 5 hours.
Unfortunately, they weren't able to reattach the thumb. But they put him on a 3-month rehabilitation program including weekly therapy sessions to teach him how to function without the thumb, and psychiatric sessions to help him cope with the loss.
This was in California, where companies are required to have worker's comp insurance. So the entire thing was covered by worker's comp. It was later discovered that he was an illegal alien, but that didn't change anything with respect to the insurance and coverage.
Meanwhile, the company controller had recently moved from Canada. He was absolutely floored by the above sequence of events. His brother (in Canada) had been diagnosed with RSI and was scheduled to be seen by a specialist who would decide if it could be treated with therapy or would need surgery. The time between the diagnosis and the scheduled appointment was 13 months. The pain was making it impossible for his brother to continue to work, so he hopped across the border to the U.S. and paid to have a doctor look at it there. Contrast this to a minimum wage illegal immigrant getting airlifted, getting one of the top surgeons in the country flown in to treat him, and 5 hours of surgery, all in less than 12 hours.
I completely agree the U.S. health care system has a lot of problems, mostly centered around an emphasis on treatment rather than prevention. But if you're so blinded by your love of socialized medicine that you can't see the good aspects of our system, you really have no business saying who is or isn't capable of critical thought. The U.S. health care system is not a catastrophic failure, nor is it utter crap, nor is it an embarrassment. It is suboptimal, and moderately wasteful, with many aspects that could definitely be improved. But it is also one of the best (aside from cost) health care systems in the world.