It's not really your "privacy" though. You sacrificed that the moment you got a mobile phone - they must periodically announce their presence in order for the local cell to be able to route calls to you. If you shouted "HELLO! I'M WATTOS!" every five minutes, you wouldn't contend that you were preserving your privacy. The telco has always been able to place the cell your phone is in, and if they make a special effort, much closer by triangulating cell towers.
I had a radio pager for a long while. I could still be reached, but because it had no transmitter, it couldn't be tracked and had a very long battery life (several weeks on an AA battery). The telco still knew exactly what messages were being sent to which pager.
That said, I still find this insidious and creepy. I'm shocked, but not surprised, to learn that this is already going on in the UK.
I think it's just a stand of umbrellas that are there to be of service to the community. Probably you gain some benefit because people will have to come back to your store, and will probably feel well-disposed to you and buy something.
The Japanese are very community minded. The reason you see so many people wearing surgical masks in Japan is not because of poor air quality or some kind of cultural germ phobia ; people with a respiratory illness will wear a mask to avoid transmitting it to others. I would love that to be the case in other countries. Whenever I'm forced to use public transport my chance of catching a respiratory illness is fairly high, not because I'm a weakling, but because the trains I have to travel on are overcrowded, and full of people spraying virus-saturated droplets of snot into the warm, moist air. No-one seems to cover their face when they cough or sneeze anymore. I've had people literally soak my face with a sneeze, and not apologize or even acknowledge my existence.
The penalty should be a MULTIPLE of the value of the goods, thus encouraging you to actually earn the price of the goods and not just steal them. This is, after all, the market-based way.
So for a $1 candy bar, $10 worth of penalty seems appropriate. For a $200 electronic device, $2000 dollars penalty, etc.
And the same for the top end of things. For $20,000,000 worth of environmental destruction, $200,000,000 fine.
Yeah, one of the most poignant lines in Kick Ass is where he's valiantly trying to fight off a bunch of guys kicking the shit out of someone (and him too). One of the assailants says "The fuck is wrong with you, man? You'd rather die for some piece of shit that you don't even fucking know?" and he replies "The three assholes, laying into one guy while everybody else watches? And you wanna know what's wrong with me?"
VNC will need you to walk grandma through a reboot, through configuring VNC, through configuring a port on her router, and then through turning VNC server off afterward to close the security hole.
Chro-mote will just need her to download and run a program, and then visit a particular URL, and maybe read a number to you over the phone. The lack of router config I think, is the biggest win here ; people are used to links, but not arcane looking network settings. She might not even know which IP address her router is on, or how to access it's management interface.
To be fair, I'm a programmer, a user of both Linux and Windows, capable of fixing minor kernel bugs, and have about 30 years of experience with various user interfaces, regularly confuse people because of how fast I use most interfaces, and it took me a short while to work out that the marble thing in Office was the menu. When you're used to the menu being in the... menu bar (who'dathunk!) when it suddenly vanishes and gets replaced by the ribbon, you're inclined to think that that's where all the menu items went.
I've yet to find anything that doesn't work on OpenJDK that works on the "Official" binaries, even things that warned me to use the Sun JDK seems to work just fine on OpenJDK.
It used to be that the key was just to prevent multiple simultaneous users of the same license key, which was eminently reasonable, until someone started using a duplicate of your key, locking you out of game servers...
More recently, the keys are bound to online accounts and are not transferrable.
The recent instances where there is bonus content enclosed with the original game with a 1-time key is actually an improvement on this ; you can still re-sell the game, something you cannot do for games that bind to your Steam account. Although I think we need some kind of escrow system for re-sale because there are still limited uses of those primary game keys. Having gone to the insane limits of DRM, EA are actually backing off somewhat. Perhaps they've even been paying attention to the gaming press. At least they aren't trying out the always-on-net DRM that Ubisoft have made such a bad name for themselves with.
Sony is forcing it on all their games, whereas on PC it's up to the publisher.
AFAIK, "first party" means "games published by Sony". So it's still up to the publisher.
To be honest, I'm happy for them to stick it to the second-hand traders. Games cost more to produce all the time, yet the prices change very little with respect to inflation. Second-hand trade contributes nothing to the funds of developers. While I'm not optimistic that all the gains here will find themselves funding new and exciting game concepts... it can't hurt. Even if it's just a case of "hey, our games bottom line is great, let's throw some R&D money their way".
If auto dealers did something like this they'd lose customers since people would lose resale value and lose confidence in the maker.
It's like saying that when you buy a used Ford, you don't get the manufacturers 3 year / 30,000 mile warranty.
At the moment, game servers are an open-ended cost - you have no idea how long your game is going to be popular for. Some (pay once) PC games continue for years past their initial release, and the publisher has to balance a potential loss of goodwill with the costs of running servers.
It doesn't seem unreasonable ; but really, I'd prefer it if the base game cost $10 less and *everyone* had to shell out the same to play the online game. But that isn't going to happen, because then you'd have the usual "hey, my game doesn't work" complaints.
The traffic and weather feeds were probably pertinent.
Traffic governs how fast people get home. The first thing people do when they get home is power up a whole bunch of stuff, some of it very hungry - like kettles, for making tea or coffee.
Weather affects how many lights you turn on, whether you use the dryer rather than the line, etc.
For the same reason electricity suppliers in the UK need to know the television schedules - historically, we have had fewer channels, and breaks in popular programmes coincide with large numbers of kettles being put on (at 1-3 kW each, this isn't a small thing).
Totally agree ; I loved my Palm III, even older than the m100 series, with the superior Graffiti 1 gesture recognition writing.
The same utility and integration in the applications, ported to a modern platform, would be great. I'm prepared to forgo the three-week battery life (from a pair of triple-As!), because I'm now used to charging my phone daily. And because my phone has a hardware keyboard, certain things would be much easier now.
But a porting of the app set would be super. It wasn't what you'd call "snappy" but it was plenty fast enough, which means that you could build an app set with the same features and really get very "snappy" on modern hardware.
I even looked briefly at Dragonball emulation on the DS - a DS with a Palm OS environment in it would rock. You could whip it out in meetings, book stylee, and take appointments on it. And then play Dr Kawashima.
If the price differential made it worthwhile, I'd have had an eReader ages ago.
So, let's have a case study ; perusing the Amazon.co.uk listings for Peter F Hamilton, one of my favoured authors (with enough titles to make it a reasonable sample size).
The price of the Kindle edition of a book appears to be slightly less than the hardback on initial release... then drops beneath the price of the paperback, after the paperback is released.
So ; firstly, the argument about the hardback costing more because it's a more durable product and more expensive to produce is revealed to be crap. The Kindle price is about £1 lower than the hardback price, for a book still only in hardback. The Kindle price when the book is in paperback edition is about £0.20 lower. The hardback edition is mostly about price differentiation (which we all knew anyway). A vanity publisher charges about £5 more per copy for hardbacks, so you figure the cost difference can't actually be more than £2
On the flipside ; a vanity publisher charges about £2.20 per copy for a 320 page paperback in bulk (2000 copies) (which is much smaller than most of Mr Hamilton's work - being a writer of chunky sci-fi epics). So we'll assume they are making a vast markup there and guess that it costs £1 to print and ship a paperback book of the appropriate size. So why does it cost only £0.20 less on Kindle? The advantages are all with Amazon - it's a less durable product, which can't be lent or re-sold, costs virtually nothing to ship, produce or store, never suffers from overstocking issues, etc.
The Kindle edition does lend itself to long-tail pricing schemes - the price should slowly drop until it's a few pennies, but this is never going to happen until paper books are dead and gone, because of that paperback price point anchoring it.
So ; at the moment, you'd have to buy about 4,500 novels in paperback print to make up for the £89 cost of the new Kindle in the UK, or about £20,000 worth of books. I dare say that the hardware isn't going to last that long - so it's never going to break even on cost unless the pricing model changes radically.
The only thing left to compete on is utility. Given the device tries it's best to mimic the paper experience on the screen, the only factors it competes on are immediacy and storage space. Whether these are worth trading for your first-sale rights and privacy are up to you... (I admit, I'm close - I don't resell or lend books, and if scrutinising my reading choices means more of what I like is available... so what?)
The innovative bit is the cobalt catalyst. A lot of other designs use toxic electrolytes (as you mention) or expensive rare metal catalysts. This one has the advantage that all the raw materials are relatively cheap, for a solar panel design - no expensive platinum, gadolinium, etc.
How would it be reasonable? You would effectively be punishing the success of those who made your app store a success. "Hey, screw you guys. You brought us more revenue than the rest of those schmucks, so we're gonna stick it to you real good."
It would actually be more reasonable to charge less (as a percentage) - a lot of the overhead of providing an app store is fixed cost and doesn't scale with the number of downloads you provide.
The UK is only semi-metric. Our packaging labels are metric courtesy of an EU directive, but most people over about 30 still think in imperial measures for many quantities, and many of our goods and services are still customarily measured in imperial.
Our customary beer order (and milk bottle) is the pint (a proper imperial pint of 20oz, not your pansy-arsed 16oz American pint). We discuss people's height in feet and inches, and their weight in stones and pounds. We're probably more likely to ask the greengrocer for 2 pounds of potatoes than a kilo.
And we get what a quarter pounder is. We don't have a "Monarch with Cheese".
Happily the more old fashioned imperial measures, like the chain, rood, rod and perch have all fallen out of common use. I think the most recent measure to bit the dust was the gill - spirit measures in pubs used to be 1/5th of a gill, but they were converted to ml. Not that anyone cares, because it's all "1 measure" anyway, and the 25ml increment that replaced it is marginally more than 1/5th of a gill.
PS : Converting mass to force depends entirely on the local gravity. Easier to convert pounds to kilos.
I blame political correctness to a certain degree as well. Apparently it's no longer acceptable to celebrate ability differences in school, and all children are praised relentlessly regardless of whether they sit there reproducing the works of Einstein or just barely managing to navigate the boogers to their mouth.
"The Incredibles" pins it right to the mat....
When everyone's super... no-one will be!
Why would you bother to succeed if you're getting the rewards (praise is like crack to a 7 year old) without any effort?
How's that? The unions, while they may have been overzealous about it, were all about the working man getting paid a fair wage for his work, emphasising that productive work has intrinsic value. And perhaps most of that overcompensation was just a response to the knowledge that the management was going to try and bargain them down as much as possible anyway.
Thatcher went out of her way to break the back of the unions. That should be a great sign that what they stood for runs counter to the rabid capitalism that has fucked over most of the Western world.
When you need to destroy the data, erase enough of the drive to destroy the key blocks. Destroy any key backups.
Et voila. You have destroyed the data (it's now just a random-looking byte stream that would take millions of years to decrypt), but left the hardware useful.
It's making the aluminium powder that's the tedious bit. You have to grind it slowly because it has a tendency to burn.
(Aluminium is actually quite reactive with oxygen - the reason it's "stainless" is because this means that it always has a thin coating of oxide on it, which is white).
Advertising. Bill Hicks was right on the mark when he told all people working in marketing to "go kill yourself".
People want the good life, and they want it easy, and cheap, and now. Corporations are only too happy to sell them that dream, and promote the idea that you're entitled to shit on who you like to get it.
The real dream should be a future like Star Trek (ludicrous physics notwithstanding). Sure, you see the elite working hard on starships, but imagine a future where technology has solved every material need of the human race - they're working hard because they love it, not because they are forced to by economic forces. I want a future where I get to do the job I love for the hours I want, see my friends a lot more, and spend more time with my daughter - because I don't have to worry about having to live on the street and eat garbage. And I'm fairly certain that it's possible within my lifetime, as long as the corporations don't continue to get their way - alas, they probably will.
The point is that resources are actually scarce, government systems make the treatments more expensive by putting government money there, and this ends up costing lives at the end, while in a free market the medical costs would be coming down, not going up all the time
The USA pays more than double per capita what the UK does for it's healthcare, for much worse outcomes (and far more inequity).
What you get with the system you have is a vast twisty apparatus designed not to provide as much healthcare as possible for the money it is given, but to provide as little healthcare as possible, and extract as much money as possible. And this has been the intention right from the outset.
One of the many reasons the UK NHS, is suffering is because technology tends to make the costs of healthcare increase, not decrease. New technology means that you save more lives that need more care. New technology costs more, because it's patented. And these costs increases are very much driven by the corporate side of the equation ; drug companies are not adverse to lobbying to get existing generic treatments off the market, simply so they can make a buck selling exactly the same medicine at 10x the price.
Quite aside from the ethics of making profits from healthcare, when those resources could be diverted into more healthcare instead ; if corporate involvement in healthcare was really operating to introduce competition and drive costs down, you'd expect a margin more like Wal-Mart. Instead they have margins closer to Gucci and Hermes.
Why are you paying for a luxury healthcare system and getting a Wal-Mart healthcare system?
So shouldn't it be protecting Americans against the HMOs?
The American healthcare system is demonstrably much more expensive, for worse outcomes, than healthcare systems in countries which have single payer or socialized healthcare systems.
Given the increasing cost of medical care, a single medical emergency can destroy most of those inalienable rights ; your liberty, because you are a slave to your debt, your happiness, because you're not happy about that, and your life, because your insurance company won't pay for your treatment.
And the insurance company will also refuse to insure you if it knows that you have particular healthcare issues (thus destroying your happiness as you fell insecure), or require premiums that essentially make you their slave, and thus you lose your liberty.
While your health is not under control of the government, surely allowing these predators to exist is against your inalienable rights. The only way to get rid of them, in a "free market" is to remove their market niche by providing a decent public healthcare system.
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It's not really your "privacy" though. You sacrificed that the moment you got a mobile phone - they must periodically announce their presence in order for the local cell to be able to route calls to you. If you shouted "HELLO! I'M WATTOS!" every five minutes, you wouldn't contend that you were preserving your privacy. The telco has always been able to place the cell your phone is in, and if they make a special effort, much closer by triangulating cell towers.
I had a radio pager for a long while. I could still be reached, but because it had no transmitter, it couldn't be tracked and had a very long battery life (several weeks on an AA battery). The telco still knew exactly what messages were being sent to which pager.
That said, I still find this insidious and creepy. I'm shocked, but not surprised, to learn that this is already going on in the UK.
I think it's just a stand of umbrellas that are there to be of service to the community. Probably you gain some benefit because people will have to come back to your store, and will probably feel well-disposed to you and buy something.
The Japanese are very community minded. The reason you see so many people wearing surgical masks in Japan is not because of poor air quality or some kind of cultural germ phobia ; people with a respiratory illness will wear a mask to avoid transmitting it to others. I would love that to be the case in other countries. Whenever I'm forced to use public transport my chance of catching a respiratory illness is fairly high, not because I'm a weakling, but because the trains I have to travel on are overcrowded, and full of people spraying virus-saturated droplets of snot into the warm, moist air. No-one seems to cover their face when they cough or sneeze anymore. I've had people literally soak my face with a sneeze, and not apologize or even acknowledge my existence.
The penalty should be a MULTIPLE of the value of the goods, thus encouraging you to actually earn the price of the goods and not just steal them. This is, after all, the market-based way.
So for a $1 candy bar, $10 worth of penalty seems appropriate. For a $200 electronic device, $2000 dollars penalty, etc.
And the same for the top end of things. For $20,000,000 worth of environmental destruction, $200,000,000 fine.
Yeah, one of the most poignant lines in Kick Ass is where he's valiantly trying to fight off a bunch of guys kicking the shit out of someone (and him too). One of the assailants says "The fuck is wrong with you, man? You'd rather die for some piece of shit that you don't even fucking know?" and he replies "The three assholes, laying into one guy while everybody else watches? And you wanna know what's wrong with me?"
VNC will need you to walk grandma through a reboot, through configuring VNC, through configuring a port on her router, and then through turning VNC server off afterward to close the security hole.
Chro-mote will just need her to download and run a program, and then visit a particular URL, and maybe read a number to you over the phone. The lack of router config I think, is the biggest win here ; people are used to links, but not arcane looking network settings. She might not even know which IP address her router is on, or how to access it's management interface.
To be fair, I'm a programmer, a user of both Linux and Windows, capable of fixing minor kernel bugs, and have about 30 years of experience with various user interfaces, regularly confuse people because of how fast I use most interfaces, and it took me a short while to work out that the marble thing in Office was the menu. When you're used to the menu being in the ... menu bar (who'dathunk!) when it suddenly vanishes and gets replaced by the ribbon, you're inclined to think that that's where all the menu items went.
I've yet to find anything that doesn't work on OpenJDK that works on the "Official" binaries, even things that warned me to use the Sun JDK seems to work just fine on OpenJDK.
It used to be that the key was just to prevent multiple simultaneous users of the same license key, which was eminently reasonable, until someone started using a duplicate of your key, locking you out of game servers...
More recently, the keys are bound to online accounts and are not transferrable.
The recent instances where there is bonus content enclosed with the original game with a 1-time key is actually an improvement on this ; you can still re-sell the game, something you cannot do for games that bind to your Steam account. Although I think we need some kind of escrow system for re-sale because there are still limited uses of those primary game keys. Having gone to the insane limits of DRM, EA are actually backing off somewhat. Perhaps they've even been paying attention to the gaming press. At least they aren't trying out the always-on-net DRM that Ubisoft have made such a bad name for themselves with.
Sony is forcing it on all their games, whereas on PC it's up to the publisher.
AFAIK, "first party" means "games published by Sony". So it's still up to the publisher.
To be honest, I'm happy for them to stick it to the second-hand traders. Games cost more to produce all the time, yet the prices change very little with respect to inflation. Second-hand trade contributes nothing to the funds of developers. While I'm not optimistic that all the gains here will find themselves funding new and exciting game concepts... it can't hurt. Even if it's just a case of "hey, our games bottom line is great, let's throw some R&D money their way".
If auto dealers did something like this they'd lose customers since people would lose resale value and lose confidence in the maker.
It's like saying that when you buy a used Ford, you don't get the manufacturers 3 year / 30,000 mile warranty.
At the moment, game servers are an open-ended cost - you have no idea how long your game is going to be popular for. Some (pay once) PC games continue for years past their initial release, and the publisher has to balance a potential loss of goodwill with the costs of running servers.
It doesn't seem unreasonable ; but really, I'd prefer it if the base game cost $10 less and *everyone* had to shell out the same to play the online game. But that isn't going to happen, because then you'd have the usual "hey, my game doesn't work" complaints.
Well, no. But 4.9 million at once? Stretching credence for paper.
The traffic and weather feeds were probably pertinent.
Traffic governs how fast people get home. The first thing people do when they get home is power up a whole bunch of stuff, some of it very hungry - like kettles, for making tea or coffee.
Weather affects how many lights you turn on, whether you use the dryer rather than the line, etc.
For the same reason electricity suppliers in the UK need to know the television schedules - historically, we have had fewer channels, and breaks in popular programmes coincide with large numbers of kettles being put on (at 1-3 kW each, this isn't a small thing).
Obligatory link to theory.
Totally agree ; I loved my Palm III, even older than the m100 series, with the superior Graffiti 1 gesture recognition writing.
The same utility and integration in the applications, ported to a modern platform, would be great. I'm prepared to forgo the three-week battery life (from a pair of triple-As!), because I'm now used to charging my phone daily. And because my phone has a hardware keyboard, certain things would be much easier now.
But a porting of the app set would be super. It wasn't what you'd call "snappy" but it was plenty fast enough, which means that you could build an app set with the same features and really get very "snappy" on modern hardware.
I even looked briefly at Dragonball emulation on the DS - a DS with a Palm OS environment in it would rock. You could whip it out in meetings, book stylee, and take appointments on it. And then play Dr Kawashima.
Where do you get eBooks?
If the price differential made it worthwhile, I'd have had an eReader ages ago.
So, let's have a case study ; perusing the Amazon.co.uk listings for Peter F Hamilton, one of my favoured authors (with enough titles to make it a reasonable sample size).
The price of the Kindle edition of a book appears to be slightly less than the hardback on initial release... then drops beneath the price of the paperback, after the paperback is released.
So ; firstly, the argument about the hardback costing more because it's a more durable product and more expensive to produce is revealed to be crap. The Kindle price is about £1 lower than the hardback price, for a book still only in hardback. The Kindle price when the book is in paperback edition is about £0.20 lower. The hardback edition is mostly about price differentiation (which we all knew anyway). A vanity publisher charges about £5 more per copy for hardbacks, so you figure the cost difference can't actually be more than £2
On the flipside ; a vanity publisher charges about £2.20 per copy for a 320 page paperback in bulk (2000 copies) (which is much smaller than most of Mr Hamilton's work - being a writer of chunky sci-fi epics). So we'll assume they are making a vast markup there and guess that it costs £1 to print and ship a paperback book of the appropriate size. So why does it cost only £0.20 less on Kindle? The advantages are all with Amazon - it's a less durable product, which can't be lent or re-sold, costs virtually nothing to ship, produce or store, never suffers from overstocking issues, etc.
The Kindle edition does lend itself to long-tail pricing schemes - the price should slowly drop until it's a few pennies, but this is never going to happen until paper books are dead and gone, because of that paperback price point anchoring it.
So ; at the moment, you'd have to buy about 4,500 novels in paperback print to make up for the £89 cost of the new Kindle in the UK, or about £20,000 worth of books. I dare say that the hardware isn't going to last that long - so it's never going to break even on cost unless the pricing model changes radically.
The only thing left to compete on is utility. Given the device tries it's best to mimic the paper experience on the screen, the only factors it competes on are immediacy and storage space. Whether these are worth trading for your first-sale rights and privacy are up to you... (I admit, I'm close - I don't resell or lend books, and if scrutinising my reading choices means more of what I like is available... so what?)
The innovative bit is the cobalt catalyst. A lot of other designs use toxic electrolytes (as you mention) or expensive rare metal catalysts. This one has the advantage that all the raw materials are relatively cheap, for a solar panel design - no expensive platinum, gadolinium, etc.
It's called "plants".
How would it be reasonable? You would effectively be punishing the success of those who made your app store a success. "Hey, screw you guys. You brought us more revenue than the rest of those schmucks, so we're gonna stick it to you real good."
It would actually be more reasonable to charge less (as a percentage) - a lot of the overhead of providing an app store is fixed cost and doesn't scale with the number of downloads you provide.
The UK is only semi-metric. Our packaging labels are metric courtesy of an EU directive, but most people over about 30 still think in imperial measures for many quantities, and many of our goods and services are still customarily measured in imperial.
Our customary beer order (and milk bottle) is the pint (a proper imperial pint of 20oz, not your pansy-arsed 16oz American pint). We discuss people's height in feet and inches, and their weight in stones and pounds. We're probably more likely to ask the greengrocer for 2 pounds of potatoes than a kilo.
And we get what a quarter pounder is. We don't have a "Monarch with Cheese".
Happily the more old fashioned imperial measures, like the chain, rood, rod and perch have all fallen out of common use. I think the most recent measure to bit the dust was the gill - spirit measures in pubs used to be 1/5th of a gill, but they were converted to ml. Not that anyone cares, because it's all "1 measure" anyway, and the 25ml increment that replaced it is marginally more than 1/5th of a gill.
PS : Converting mass to force depends entirely on the local gravity. Easier to convert pounds to kilos.
I blame political correctness to a certain degree as well. Apparently it's no longer acceptable to celebrate ability differences in school, and all children are praised relentlessly regardless of whether they sit there reproducing the works of Einstein or just barely managing to navigate the boogers to their mouth.
"The Incredibles" pins it right to the mat....
When everyone's super ... no-one will be!
Why would you bother to succeed if you're getting the rewards (praise is like crack to a 7 year old) without any effort?
How's that? The unions, while they may have been overzealous about it, were all about the working man getting paid a fair wage for his work, emphasising that productive work has intrinsic value. And perhaps most of that overcompensation was just a response to the knowledge that the management was going to try and bargain them down as much as possible anyway.
Thatcher went out of her way to break the back of the unions. That should be a great sign that what they stood for runs counter to the rabid capitalism that has fucked over most of the Western world.
Use full disk encryption.
When you need to destroy the data, erase enough of the drive to destroy the key blocks. Destroy any key backups.
Et voila. You have destroyed the data (it's now just a random-looking byte stream that would take millions of years to decrypt), but left the hardware useful.
Much faster than wiping the whole disk surface.
It's making the aluminium powder that's the tedious bit. You have to grind it slowly because it has a tendency to burn.
(Aluminium is actually quite reactive with oxygen - the reason it's "stainless" is because this means that it always has a thin coating of oxide on it, which is white).
Advertising. Bill Hicks was right on the mark when he told all people working in marketing to "go kill yourself".
People want the good life, and they want it easy, and cheap, and now. Corporations are only too happy to sell them that dream, and promote the idea that you're entitled to shit on who you like to get it.
The real dream should be a future like Star Trek (ludicrous physics notwithstanding). Sure, you see the elite working hard on starships, but imagine a future where technology has solved every material need of the human race - they're working hard because they love it, not because they are forced to by economic forces. I want a future where I get to do the job I love for the hours I want, see my friends a lot more, and spend more time with my daughter - because I don't have to worry about having to live on the street and eat garbage. And I'm fairly certain that it's possible within my lifetime, as long as the corporations don't continue to get their way - alas, they probably will.
The point is that resources are actually scarce, government systems make the treatments more expensive by putting government money there, and this ends up costing lives at the end, while in a free market the medical costs would be coming down, not going up all the time
The USA pays more than double per capita what the UK does for it's healthcare, for much worse outcomes (and far more inequity).
What you get with the system you have is a vast twisty apparatus designed not to provide as much healthcare as possible for the money it is given, but to provide as little healthcare as possible, and extract as much money as possible. And this has been the intention right from the outset.
One of the many reasons the UK NHS, is suffering is because technology tends to make the costs of healthcare increase, not decrease. New technology means that you save more lives that need more care. New technology costs more, because it's patented. And these costs increases are very much driven by the corporate side of the equation ; drug companies are not adverse to lobbying to get existing generic treatments off the market, simply so they can make a buck selling exactly the same medicine at 10x the price.
The medical sector considers 15% a low profit margin. Wal-Mart operates at a profit margin of around 3.8%
Quite aside from the ethics of making profits from healthcare, when those resources could be diverted into more healthcare instead ; if corporate involvement in healthcare was really operating to introduce competition and drive costs down, you'd expect a margin more like Wal-Mart. Instead they have margins closer to Gucci and Hermes.
Why are you paying for a luxury healthcare system and getting a Wal-Mart healthcare system?
So shouldn't it be protecting Americans against the HMOs?
The American healthcare system is demonstrably much more expensive, for worse outcomes, than healthcare systems in countries which have single payer or socialized healthcare systems.
Given the increasing cost of medical care, a single medical emergency can destroy most of those inalienable rights ; your liberty, because you are a slave to your debt, your happiness, because you're not happy about that, and your life, because your insurance company won't pay for your treatment.
And the insurance company will also refuse to insure you if it knows that you have particular healthcare issues (thus destroying your happiness as you fell insecure), or require premiums that essentially make you their slave, and thus you lose your liberty.
While your health is not under control of the government, surely allowing these predators to exist is against your inalienable rights. The only way to get rid of them, in a "free market" is to remove their market niche by providing a decent public healthcare system.