Re:News for nerds. Stuff that matters
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 1
Funny, I don't remember any slashdot mod that caused giant mechanical arms to reach out of your keyboard and compel you to read every article....I mean, maybe it's part of that 2.0 thing everybody's talking about...?
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
First off, this isn't health care reform. It doesn't change all that much about the health care system. It's health insurance reform.
To that end, there are some small gains: insurance companies will be forbidden from doing some seriously awful things, like retroactively revoking the insurance of patients who get expensive illnesses, on the flimsiest of possible excuses (and in some cases based on faulty data that they refuse to investigate further). In exchange, there are a lot of parts that are a big giveaway to insurance companies: because we've focused on giving everyone insurance instead of giving everyone health care, individuals are forced to buy insurance, but with inadequate oversight to ensure that insurance companies don't just gouge prices. Further, there isn't any choice for an insurance plan governed by democracy instead of stockholders, so we can probably expect that the small number of insurance companies will behave oligopolistically and raise prices, as usually happens when a small number of huge players control the market.
There will be some savings relative to the current system -- on the government's part -- but nothing like what could be achieved by a system that allows everyone to buy in to Medicare (and couples that with Medicare reforms like more careful monitoring of doctors who prescribe medically needless tests & procedures to make more money, and allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prices for its prescription drug benefit). The present bill is probably slightly better than not having it, but only very slightly.
And it amazes me that a country full of people that supposedly care about their freedoms and whatnot, will gleefully hand over their rights to boards governed by petty backyard Napoleons just so they can buy in an area where someone else mows the grass.
Yeah this is fine when it's a bona fide relevant condition of the job. We don't insist on gender-blind hiring practices for the position of Female Locker Room Attendant, or that atheists be given equal consideration for positions as priests.
But for the majority of jobs in most churches, you're mopping the floors, keeping an appointment book, or making phone calls. It's not needful that you be a paragon of the community, or even subscribe to the values that the church holds, so long as you don't go having sapphic orgies during work hours.
Only if the church practices equally discriminatory hiring against, say, murderers and blasphemers. I'm not saying you should start hiring pedophiles as priests (er... sorry... bad example) atheists as priests, or make an adulterous Muslim the president of the Christian Values Association, but if you're just mopping the floor or something, your religious beliefs & habits outside work simply are not relevant to the job.
all the humanist values that you hold dear... the rights of man, civil liberty, universal suffrage, the civil rights movement... were first nurtured in churches
Umm... sorry, no. The Civil Rights Movement in the US was nurtured in churches, because that was the community that existed among African-Americans. But beyond that... the Rights of Man were championed in (fiercely anti-clerical) Revolutionary France. Civil Liberty was at least as much championed by deists/quasi-atheists, or secular liberals like JS Mill. Universal suffrage (do you mean of men? or race-blind universal male suffrage? and in which country?) had both religious and non-religious sides, but churches were certainly not at the forefront of supporting female suffrage in the US. (There was a strong religious abolitionist movement, as well as a non-religious one, and I suppose you might be right about that in terms of colorblind suffrage).
But humanism generally was not a belief endorsed by churches; the Papacy made use of humanist scholars of course, but also subjected some of them to Inquisition, and Luther didn't exactly go around encouraging Germans to learn Ciceronian Latin...
The problem is that, without these exceptions, you end up setting the disastrous precedent of the state defining what is an acceptable religious belief to hold.
I... suppose. I would prefer a state that makes minimal rules over arbitrary social practices, but then does not make exceptions to them solely on the grounds of religious belief. Not that there aren't plenty of relics of religious belief in, say, American public life (we wouldn't need an exception for Quakers if we didn't insist that people swear before God for public functions, etc.)
Being "really into" aviation is different from being gay. You can change the one, you can't change the other. And sometimes the best person for the job is gay, or a woman, and it isn't right for a church to exclude them from consideration solely on those criteria.
Having lived in and visited countries with largely state-run telecom industry
Which would those be? Because if you're talking Bolivia or something, I would humbly suggest that there might be some confounding variables other than private-vs-public.
You can not have a right to something that is non-free. Now I'm open to discussion on whether the state should pay for people to have a certain good...
Um, what about a right to fire-fighters? What about a right to the equal protection of the country's laws? Law enforcement is very much non-free, but it's assumed necessary in all but the most incoherent anti-government political positions.
There's an additional discussion to be had about the nature of rights, but I don't want to get too sidetracked right now.
the symbols have nothing to do with the pronunciation, they simply express the concept.
Not quite. There's actually considerable phonetic information encoded in Chinese characters. They've just kept their original shape as the phonetics of the language shifted -- the written language is separately conservative from the spoken one. It's a process which we Anglophones should be familiar with -- but then, *cough*, ploughing through these kinds of rough waters, one is often inclined to keep one's unconsidered beliefs...
In any event, Chinese characters are typically formed of combinations of smaller characters, which typically still have either semantic or phonetic meaning (or both). They are not arbitrary.
You don't expect a driver to be an automotive engineer or to know anything about cars except how to drive them Actually, I think that no one is qualified to operate an automobile who doesn't have at least a decent understanding of how most of the major systems work. Not to mention of the physics involved in the motion of automobiles....but then again, I expect more of people than they usually deliver. It might be why I'm so dissatisfied with most of humanity.
here people tend to give way too much information. 99.9% of the time what you need to do is collect as much as possible in the background, pop up a dialog box asking them what they were doing and a "send report" or "don't send report" buttons. Users aren't interested in SQL errors or stack traces or whatever else you like to pop up while developing/testing it.
In principle you are correct. But keep in mind that many companies do not have access to support for their vendor software, or the support staff is totally unresponsive, and providing information can allow a clueful local support person to figure out how to fix the problem, even when the company in question cannot or will not.
It's much easier to ignore information you don't want than to get ahold of information that the software "helpfully" hid from you. If users don't understand error messages, oh well, but at least it's something to google when things go wrong.
What's surprising is that it isn't possible to manufacture a hit book the way you can manufacture a hit pop band. Not that marketing can turn crap into gold in the music business; but that it can't in the book industry.
Oh, forgot to add -- why do you assume that volume will increase just because a book's being sold in ebook format? If people don't like the current price of books, they can just get them from the library. Price is not the limiting factor in sales for this market; actual demand is.
That's different from music, where you can consume as much as you could possibly want, even while you're doing other things. With books, you have to sit down and read it, and that time is a very limited resource.
You are mistaken here, and the outrage about digital media (at least as regards ebooks) is indeed unjustified. I know people who work at Macmillan who have verified that the per-unit manufacturing/shipping costs for a single hardcover are around $2/book. Less for mass markets. (I've seen online figures suggesting it's more like $3, e.g. here, but that's a different company.)
I suppose one could make the argument that ebooks should be discounted the warehousing costs, too, but that's only true if you expect that publishers will release ebook-only in the future. That is not the case now, because people who want to read ebooks in preference to regular books are a very, very small proportion of the market; but ebook sales at the date of release are lost hardcover sales. So long as you want to sell hardcovers, you're in trouble if you're selling an ebook for a greatly reduced price. IF you're willing to wait for ebooks to be released along with mass markets, then you can expect mass market prices; frankly that's the only point at which I'd be willing to take an ebook offering.
Keep in mind the relevant comparison is not with the $10 paperback but with the $30 hardcover. The paperback is a bit of gravy if the hardcover sells well; most fiction does not get a mass market release. And publishing is operating on a razor-thin margin already (maybe 10% on a book that sells pretty well -- and most don't). These aren't greedy fat-cats with swarms of lawyers (with the exception of specialty market segments, like textbooks, test prep, and medical, all of which I have worked in).
The vast majority of the cost difference between a mass market and a hardcover is that with the hardcover, the book's already been promoted, edited, marketed to booksellers (who've agreed to carry it), etc. The mass market release is just trying to squeeze those last drops out of the orange, and hopefully get you to buy the author's next book in hardcover.
Incidentally, most of that marketing budget is not for advertisements to the consumer, but to book-buyers, at book fairs, and such. Trying to market the book -- i.e. put it into the right market segment and get it onto the shelves in bookstores. That's work that has to be done regardless of the venue of sale (but has already been done for mass-market paperbacks). The only way ebooks would change that is if Amazon agreed to carry everything under the sun; and then you'd probably still have to spend more to help customers find out about books they want to read.
Oh, duh. Yes. Of course. It's about long-term setting of market expectations, not immediate profitability.
Amazon is selling ebooks at a loss in the hope of squelching all other e-readers. Macmillan isn't going to be profitable in a world where ebooks are a fraction of the cost of hardcovers, due to cannibalizing their own sales.
Outrunning inevitable infrastructure deterioration and the people who go with that
You mean the people who lack the economic means to escape decaying infrastructure. Just come out and say it, you can't be happy when you're living near the poor.
As to the preference for more personal space, at this point it is very difficult to extricate what is natural preference versus what's culturally encouraged by our received views of the importance of space and countryside. We've put the pastoral on a pedestal for so long, in large part *due* to the sprawl phenomenon that depends on automobiles, that we can't say if that preference is innate or learned.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, I don't remember any slashdot mod that caused giant mechanical arms to reach out of your keyboard and compel you to read every article. ...I mean, maybe it's part of that 2.0 thing everybody's talking about...?
First off, this isn't health care reform. It doesn't change all that much about the health care system. It's health insurance reform.
To that end, there are some small gains: insurance companies will be forbidden from doing some seriously awful things, like retroactively revoking the insurance of patients who get expensive illnesses, on the flimsiest of possible excuses (and in some cases based on faulty data that they refuse to investigate further).
In exchange, there are a lot of parts that are a big giveaway to insurance companies: because we've focused on giving everyone insurance instead of giving everyone health care, individuals are forced to buy insurance, but with inadequate oversight to ensure that insurance companies don't just gouge prices. Further, there isn't any choice for an insurance plan governed by democracy instead of stockholders, so we can probably expect that the small number of insurance companies will behave oligopolistically and raise prices, as usually happens when a small number of huge players control the market.
There will be some savings relative to the current system -- on the government's part -- but nothing like what could be achieved by a system that allows everyone to buy in to Medicare (and couples that with Medicare reforms like more careful monitoring of doctors who prescribe medically needless tests & procedures to make more money, and allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prices for its prescription drug benefit). The present bill is probably slightly better than not having it, but only very slightly.
HOAs are pure evil.
And it amazes me that a country full of people that supposedly care about their freedoms and whatnot, will gleefully hand over their rights to boards governed by petty backyard Napoleons just so they can buy in an area where someone else mows the grass.
Yeah this is fine when it's a bona fide relevant condition of the job. We don't insist on gender-blind hiring practices for the position of Female Locker Room Attendant, or that atheists be given equal consideration for positions as priests.
But for the majority of jobs in most churches, you're mopping the floors, keeping an appointment book, or making phone calls. It's not needful that you be a paragon of the community, or even subscribe to the values that the church holds, so long as you don't go having sapphic orgies during work hours.
Only if the church practices equally discriminatory hiring against, say, murderers and blasphemers. I'm not saying you should start hiring pedophiles as priests (er... sorry... bad example) atheists as priests, or make an adulterous Muslim the president of the Christian Values Association, but if you're just mopping the floor or something, your religious beliefs & habits outside work simply are not relevant to the job.
all the humanist values that you hold dear... the rights of man, civil liberty, universal suffrage, the civil rights movement... were first nurtured in churches
Umm... sorry, no. The Civil Rights Movement in the US was nurtured in churches, because that was the community that existed among African-Americans. But beyond that... the Rights of Man were championed in (fiercely anti-clerical) Revolutionary France. Civil Liberty was at least as much championed by deists/quasi-atheists, or secular liberals like JS Mill. Universal suffrage (do you mean of men? or race-blind universal male suffrage? and in which country?) had both religious and non-religious sides, but churches were certainly not at the forefront of supporting female suffrage in the US. (There was a strong religious abolitionist movement, as well as a non-religious one, and I suppose you might be right about that in terms of colorblind suffrage).
But humanism generally was not a belief endorsed by churches; the Papacy made use of humanist scholars of course, but also subjected some of them to Inquisition, and Luther didn't exactly go around encouraging Germans to learn Ciceronian Latin...
The problem is that, without these exceptions, you end up setting the disastrous precedent of the state defining what is an acceptable religious belief to hold.
I... suppose. I would prefer a state that makes minimal rules over arbitrary social practices, but then does not make exceptions to them solely on the grounds of religious belief. Not that there aren't plenty of relics of religious belief in, say, American public life (we wouldn't need an exception for Quakers if we didn't insist that people swear before God for public functions, etc.)
Being "really into" aviation is different from being gay. You can change the one, you can't change the other. And sometimes the best person for the job is gay, or a woman, and it isn't right for a church to exclude them from consideration solely on those criteria.
Which is why religious organizations should not be blanket exempt; entirely too many are run for the profit of the pastors or church hierarchy.
...yeah, not to mention that his take on it was essentially fact-free hectoring about how the report is light on figures. Mmmkay.
Having lived in and visited countries with largely state-run telecom industry
Which would those be? Because if you're talking Bolivia or something, I would humbly suggest that there might be some confounding variables other than private-vs-public.
You can not have a right to something that is non-free. Now I'm open to discussion on whether the state should pay for people to have a certain good...
Um, what about a right to fire-fighters? What about a right to the equal protection of the country's laws? Law enforcement is very much non-free, but it's assumed necessary in all but the most incoherent anti-government political positions.
There's an additional discussion to be had about the nature of rights, but I don't want to get too sidetracked right now.
The distinction being that Detroit is one of maybe three or four small parts of America where that level of caution might be kind of justified.
However, Pittsburgh probably is too, so okay, fair enough.
Really? From the sound of it I was thinking Detroit.
I actually quite enjoyed the novel...
I'm guessing "Correctly" isn't the answer you're looking for here?
: )
the symbols have nothing to do with the pronunciation, they simply express the concept.
Not quite. There's actually considerable phonetic information encoded in Chinese characters. They've just kept their original shape as the phonetics of the language shifted -- the written language is separately conservative from the spoken one. It's a process which we Anglophones should be familiar with -- but then, *cough*, ploughing through these kinds of rough waters, one is often inclined to keep one's unconsidered beliefs...
In any event, Chinese characters are typically formed of combinations of smaller characters, which typically still have either semantic or phonetic meaning (or both). They are not arbitrary.
You don't expect a driver to be an automotive engineer or to know anything about cars except how to drive them ...but then again, I expect more of people than they usually deliver. It might be why I'm so dissatisfied with most of humanity.
Actually, I think that no one is qualified to operate an automobile who doesn't have at least a decent understanding of how most of the major systems work. Not to mention of the physics involved in the motion of automobiles.
here people tend to give way too much information. 99.9% of the time what you need to do is collect as much as possible in the background, pop up a dialog box asking them what they were doing and a "send report" or "don't send report" buttons. Users aren't interested in SQL errors or stack traces or whatever else you like to pop up while developing/testing it.
In principle you are correct. But keep in mind that many companies do not have access to support for their vendor software, or the support staff is totally unresponsive, and providing information can allow a clueful local support person to figure out how to fix the problem, even when the company in question cannot or will not.
It's much easier to ignore information you don't want than to get ahold of information that the software "helpfully" hid from you. If users don't understand error messages, oh well, but at least it's something to google when things go wrong.
XMLHttpRequest?
specially-crafted power strip made of ebony hand-rubbed to a sheen by naked virgins.
I require a video of your manufacturing process to ensure its quality and authenticity.
In fact, better make it several.
The cactus' pricks are all on the outside?
What's surprising is that it isn't possible to manufacture a hit book the way you can manufacture a hit pop band. Not that marketing can turn crap into gold in the music business; but that it can't in the book industry.
Oh, forgot to add -- why do you assume that volume will increase just because a book's being sold in ebook format? If people don't like the current price of books, they can just get them from the library. Price is not the limiting factor in sales for this market; actual demand is.
That's different from music, where you can consume as much as you could possibly want, even while you're doing other things. With books, you have to sit down and read it, and that time is a very limited resource.
You are mistaken here, and the outrage about digital media (at least as regards ebooks) is indeed unjustified. I know people who work at Macmillan who have verified that the per-unit manufacturing/shipping costs for a single hardcover are around $2/book. Less for mass markets. (I've seen online figures suggesting it's more like $3, e.g. here, but that's a different company.)
I suppose one could make the argument that ebooks should be discounted the warehousing costs, too, but that's only true if you expect that publishers will release ebook-only in the future. That is not the case now, because people who want to read ebooks in preference to regular books are a very, very small proportion of the market; but ebook sales at the date of release are lost hardcover sales. So long as you want to sell hardcovers, you're in trouble if you're selling an ebook for a greatly reduced price. IF you're willing to wait for ebooks to be released along with mass markets, then you can expect mass market prices; frankly that's the only point at which I'd be willing to take an ebook offering.
Keep in mind the relevant comparison is not with the $10 paperback but with the $30 hardcover. The paperback is a bit of gravy if the hardcover sells well; most fiction does not get a mass market release. And publishing is operating on a razor-thin margin already (maybe 10% on a book that sells pretty well -- and most don't). These aren't greedy fat-cats with swarms of lawyers (with the exception of specialty market segments, like textbooks, test prep, and medical, all of which I have worked in).
The vast majority of the cost difference between a mass market and a hardcover is that with the hardcover, the book's already been promoted, edited, marketed to booksellers (who've agreed to carry it), etc. The mass market release is just trying to squeeze those last drops out of the orange, and hopefully get you to buy the author's next book in hardcover.
Incidentally, most of that marketing budget is not for advertisements to the consumer, but to book-buyers, at book fairs, and such. Trying to market the book -- i.e. put it into the right market segment and get it onto the shelves in bookstores. That's work that has to be done regardless of the venue of sale (but has already been done for mass-market paperbacks). The only way ebooks would change that is if Amazon agreed to carry everything under the sun; and then you'd probably still have to spend more to help customers find out about books they want to read.
Oh, duh. Yes. Of course. It's about long-term setting of market expectations, not immediate profitability.
Amazon is selling ebooks at a loss in the hope of squelching all other e-readers. Macmillan isn't going to be profitable in a world where ebooks are a fraction of the cost of hardcovers, due to cannibalizing their own sales.
I had that one wrong. Sorry!
Outrunning inevitable infrastructure deterioration and the people who go with that
You mean the people who lack the economic means to escape decaying infrastructure. Just come out and say it, you can't be happy when you're living near the poor.
As to the preference for more personal space, at this point it is very difficult to extricate what is natural preference versus what's culturally encouraged by our received views of the importance of space and countryside. We've put the pastoral on a pedestal for so long, in large part *due* to the sprawl phenomenon that depends on automobiles, that we can't say if that preference is innate or learned.