Kyoto expires in 2012, 5 years from now. Have you noticed how little enthusiasm there is for Kyoto II? There's a lot of lip service going on out there but most countries who signed onto Kyoto and have actual pollution reduction requirements are simply not going to make their numbers. And then what? Maybe we'll get to something better instead, like geoengineering a thermostat for the planet over the next half century. If we could get the luddite greens out of the way, we might find that creating a space elevator (dropping lift costs by 95%+) makes the simple solution of a satellite that provides variable shading cheaper than trying to put a stop to global cow farts, BBQ fires, and other minutiae.
A global thermostat would have the very salutory effect that it has almost zero lead time once it's put in place and you can turn the solar heat input back up if you make a mistake. So we could do nothing but R&D for 20 years, take another 5 to put up a beanstalk, and another 5 to put up a variable shade sufficient to cool the planet and 36 years from now drop the temperature back to what it was in 1765. There are exactly zero scenarios that allow us to do that using Kyoto type methodology.
As a bonus, you wouldn't have the argument over whether global warming is solar output based or anthropogenic. A global thermostat would cool us down to our collective desired temp level no matter what the source is. On the other hand, we *would* have an argument as to what was the optimal temperature, just like so many families do at home.
If you just had the interface and wifi along with a smart enough CPU, you'd have a really great wall terminal to put into every room. You could sell them to home builders in 10 packs and you'd end up with star trek (NG) wall communicators.
Cisco buy Apple? In its dreams, perhaps. I was an Apple fan boy since the '80s so I saw Apple at its worst in the '90s and even then there was a core of stockholders who simply had faith in the company. With Apple riding high and rising, there's no way that Cisco could muster the shares.
At worst, Cisco could buy Cingular and send checks to Apple for them to use their phone and then not use it. Oooh, that would have Steve Jobs quaking in his boots. He'd have to just keep his R&D boys going while the clock ran out on the Cingular exclusivity and then he'd enter the market with a gen3 iPhone (or whatever they'd call it) and offer it unlocked as well as bundled with a variety of carriers.
Boo hoo
Cisco would garner a ton of bad publicity and get, what? This scenario is highly unlikely but even if it does happen, Apple still comes out looking pretty good.
My hands can handle a regular form factor blackberry no problem but my wife wouldn't touch one until they came out with the Pearl. It's a real issue and I expect sometime around the 3rd or 4th generation a different form factor will come out that caters to the small hand set.
The revolutionary aspect is that a whole new list of competitors just got their standards raised on them. Jobs' anal retentive OCD warps the entire computer industry into a distorted reflected image. Something similar is likely to happen to phones if enough people buy one of these things and *that* is revolutionary.
The Blackberry Pearl lists @$499 and comes with a 1MP camera phone and little in the way of music ability. It also comes with less memory (though you can add memory via SD). If you compare Pearl list with iPhone list, the Apple product comes across to me as the better value for the majority of use cases where you would like to use either.
The major catch is that I believe you get an unlocked Pearl for $499 and you get a locked iPhone for the same price. If you're already a Cingular customer, it's not that big a deal, if not.
$500-$600 is not out of reach for Apple's target market which is 5-10% of the entire cell phone market, the most lucrative 5-10%. If they get 10-20% of that lucrative market, they've met their goals and can upgrade their R&D, engineering, and industrial designs to move into more verticals where they're going to repeat one of two strategies
1. Go after the most lucrative 5-10% of a major market where a large portion of the market consists of customers who are only marginally profitable.
2. Take away the whole vertical as it's been dominated by incumbents who are overcharging for a comparatively poor product. Offer a product that does 90-95% of the current market leader for 20% of the price and buy out key secondary participants to own the entire vertical. This is the Final Cut Pro model.
If your computing needs aren't in a market that fits strategy #2, you've got to be willing to be one of those lucrative 5-10% to carry Apple gear.
You shouldn't be typing large chunks of text directly in Quark. That's not what it's for. The advice I gave was for the use case of the grandparent. If you want to quick save in Quark, get a very fast storage subsystem (like, say, the new flash powered solid state drives that are just coming out) and use that for the work files on your present project. Frequent saves should become less painful then even for huge files.
A development project is not a test and it doesn't IMO make sense to use the same strategy for both. Most "do the hard part first" methodologies focus on correct scoping and quickly building prototypes of all the parts. That way you get the prototypes of the easy stuff done quick (a day or two) and the hard stuff taking a couple of weeks and in the end you have a very basic prototype and a very good understanding of which program sections are going to be the problem children. There is real progress, you have a basic prototype out the door after a couple of weeks but more importantly you have much less illusion about what's easy, what's hard, and you might just spot what's impossible before people have to get fired over the issue. Lather, rinse, repeat, you keep making more and more detailed prototypes until what you have starts looking like an alpha, then a beta, and then you ship.
No matter what your platform, it's important to acquire the habit to save often. Save twice per page and you're going to be "ok" in 99% of circumstances.
Actually, Mac OS X does this vis a vis Windows in the business space because OS X Server does not require CALs. This is the vast majority of the cost on most business installations. Try costing out Windows print and file services with mail for 100 people and compare it with a Mac OS X server solution. You need to pay money for each Windows CAL, an Exchange CAL and an Outlook CAL to get the full MS experience. Mac OS X requires none of that except if you are using Apple networking services at which point you have to pony up an extra $500 for the "unlimited" server license. That's peanuts. The CAL licenses in the above scenario might be $80 a seat for all three CALs. You can get a lot of OS X education for your admin for $8000.
What you're saying is that the Microsoft brand has zero effect. That's quite unlikely as that much of a colossal waste of Microsoft ad dollars would show up in the stock price and it doesn't. And if you think that people are too scared to try something new, you obviously haven't been around the block in the B to C computer space. Not everybody falls into these categories but it's simply not true that this doesn't happen at all.
It's a utilitarian thing. For the greatest number of people, having it off by default *is* the most helpful and easy to use setting. At some point, somebody's going to create an automator app that will go through the entire "advanced" corpus for Mac OS X, explaining what each is and asking whether it should be on or off. You run the survey, set as you like, and get an education at the same time. I expect it would take all of a week to sort out.
File extensions have a lookup table associated with them. I believe that the file extension lookup entry is being changed when you set use this application to open all documents like this. The creator/type codes predate the use of file extensions in Mac OS and would have to be accessed by individual disk writes for each file. Do you really want to incur the overhead for that?
Microsoft Windows, at least for me, is not a computer platform. It's a nexus of a computer platform and a legal department as are Linux and Apple's OS X. Microsoft's legal department is nearly always execrable and has shaded over into criminal often enough that all MS gear automatically gets points deducted from it, sight unseen, because of the high probability of legal skullduggery.
Were Microsoft's legal department not so awful, Linux would very likely come preinstalled on just about all PCs with the option to multiboot or replace Windows when you unpack your box. At that point, the software, especially the games, would be coming out on Linux because there would be enough of a base of installs to justify it for just about every title (the game developers want to avoid MS legal too).
So how much of a discount rate is appropriate for MS legal? You seem to assign it a zero rate. That's just masochistic in my view.
The MIME types complaint is a feature, not a bug. Apple permits the creator of a file to encode in the file what application it will be opened by. It always has. You can create an applescript to go through and have that information conform to what you want it to be but the behavior isn't going to change because a significant number of people like that.
If something may be legally copied, why is copying it a bad thing? One would think expending the resources to needlessly reinvent the wheel would be considered the bad thing, not copying public-domain IP.
Actually, the major source of the idea that stem cells will be coming from aborted fetuses that I've noticed has been pro-lifers waving around internal memos from inside the abortion industry. Secondary use of tissues from fetuses who have been killed is a big money maker for these clinics and the clinics apparently have been positioning themselves as "stem cell central" when the supply of excess embryos runs out. Some in the industry apparently believe that aborted fetuses can be a low cost supplier of these cells in the bulk quantitites needed for mass treatments.
Keeping the clinics financially viable has always been an important issue for the pro-choice faction while the pro-lifers are all in favor of tight regulation and closing as many secondary income streams as possible to limit clinic marketing and expansion. This is why you see the abortion wars refought by the same people in issue after issue after issue. If there's money to be made in the clinics, both coalitions will reform and clash over any issue irrespective of the merits.
So, yes, fetuses are not currently being harvested for their stem cells. That doesn't mean that abortion clinics have no involvement or financial interest in what goes on.
Now that is a somewhat narrow-minded and bigoted view. You're taking a christianity centered viewpoint, adopting a protestant Sola Scriptura spin on the thing and saying that those who do not conform to that Sola Scriptura spin (the majority of christians in the world, *all* the non-christians) are just making stuff up.
For the over 1 billion Catholics, I say "Tradition and Magisterium", for the 300 Million Orthodox I second "Tradition". The muslims also place numerous restrictions on abortion but in no way rely on the Bible.
Furthermore, there are biblical quotes that even Sola Scriptura protestants use to justify conception as the start of life.
There is a very good chance that adult stem cell research will cure parkinsons without brain tumors (which are a known problem of embryonic stem cells in general) long before the brain tumor problem goes away. The brain tumor problem may *never* go away. But you don't see a lot of lefties admit these basic scientific research realities. Their screaming point is built on the sand of an assumption, that embryonic stem cell research is just better. It's an unscientific bet that nobody knows whether it's right or wrong yet.
The right's screaming point that embryonic stem cells = baby-killing is a moral point and a practical marker on the broader question of when do humans acquire and lose their constitutional rights. They might be wrong but they're not making irresponsible bets and taking half the country to the barricades over their speculation.
There are a few hundred (or is it thousand these days) "snowflake babies" that would like to contest your assertion that those extra embryos have no chance to survive. Usually, an excess non-implanted embryo is destined for the freezer for a time because extracting eggs and fertilizing them is expensive, somewhat risky, and there's pain involved. There are people willing to help those children be born. It's a separate question whether an embryo has rights but rather fascinating in its own right, who gets an unwanted embryo? Why does the biological donor get to maintain property rights?
The non-religious point is that at some point you have to make a bright line of what gets constitutional protection, becoming a "who" and what does not. You have to do this both at the start and end of life and the rules that you adopt should not permit some sick bastard from manipulating things so that people can be driven down into "non-people" status and killed without triggering the murder statutes. It's harder than you think.
The religious point in a bunch of faiths is that it is murder because God said so.
Just because you don't belong to one of the faiths that hold it so does not mean you get to opt out of the first discussion.
Silly fellow. The entire point of natural selection is that one never knows what "evolution has" or has not equipped us for. Natural selection for other stressors may very well have equipped us to be able to handle all sorts of other stressors that have yet to arise. Or are you one of those fools that thinks evolution is some all purpose substitute diety for God?
I was talking to an anesthesiologist at a birthday party my son was attending. His observation was that 90% of pre-op tests are useless. People know the results before the test is done but if you don't have it and there's a bad outcome (which can happen with any patient) the lawyers will crucify you.
We just got medicare part D over 30 years after the pharma revolution made pills at least as important as surgery. For 30 years people were steered inappropriately towards surgery because the government couldn't politically align its funding to scientific progress. If you're comfortable with waiting for decades for proper medicine, go for it dude. I'll choose a different course.
Who was talking about robbery et al? The incidence of psychotic and destructive behavior is orders of magnitude above any antisocial tobacco or alcohol behavior but there's absolutely zero evidence that I can find on 2nd hand smoke damage for meth smokers. I'd suggest that the dosage for area effects is very likely much lower than for tobacco and that even getting rid of the drug war entirely would leave smoking meth vulnerable to the exact same restrictions as tobacco in terms of public smoking.
Regarding abortion, what jurisdiction are you in? The US permits 3rd trimester abortion without limit and we have only recently mandated that botched abortions that result in live births shall not be subject to infanticide by exposure/neglect. It's a US political story up top so it's reasonable to assume that if a country is not named, we're talking about the US.
On healthcare, I'd agree that it's a complex issue. Two of the big problems with unraveling the current state is that public provision via medicare up to now has completely ignored the pharma revolution of the past few decades. US policy has just been corrected so it no longer favors expensive surgery over inexpensive pills. That's one positive for the Reps and science based to boot. Another positive has been the progressive experimentation and enlargement of what are now called Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) which tie a high deductible policy to a tax deductible account. HSAs inject a population into the mix that actually demands price justification, negotiates discounts, and seeks the low cost reputable provider. This is all to the good and was passed as part of medicare reform.
As for Europe, it manifestly does not work as all the European systems are either scandalously decrepit and going broke (the eastern ones that came out of the Soviet system) or are just going broke (the EU systems like the FRG's krankenkasse system). It's the shame of Europe that Germany ended up retaining conscription when the military wanted rid of it because the cheap labor kept the hospitals going. The Germans are violating their own basic law and pretending that everything is OK. It is not OK and the US should certainly not follow down that dead end road.
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Kyoto expires in 2012, 5 years from now. Have you noticed how little enthusiasm there is for Kyoto II? There's a lot of lip service going on out there but most countries who signed onto Kyoto and have actual pollution reduction requirements are simply not going to make their numbers. And then what? Maybe we'll get to something better instead, like geoengineering a thermostat for the planet over the next half century. If we could get the luddite greens out of the way, we might find that creating a space elevator (dropping lift costs by 95%+) makes the simple solution of a satellite that provides variable shading cheaper than trying to put a stop to global cow farts, BBQ fires, and other minutiae.
A global thermostat would have the very salutory effect that it has almost zero lead time once it's put in place and you can turn the solar heat input back up if you make a mistake. So we could do nothing but R&D for 20 years, take another 5 to put up a beanstalk, and another 5 to put up a variable shade sufficient to cool the planet and 36 years from now drop the temperature back to what it was in 1765. There are exactly zero scenarios that allow us to do that using Kyoto type methodology.
As a bonus, you wouldn't have the argument over whether global warming is solar output based or anthropogenic. A global thermostat would cool us down to our collective desired temp level no matter what the source is. On the other hand, we *would* have an argument as to what was the optimal temperature, just like so many families do at home.
If you just had the interface and wifi along with a smart enough CPU, you'd have a really great wall terminal to put into every room. You could sell them to home builders in 10 packs and you'd end up with star trek (NG) wall communicators.
Cisco buy Apple? In its dreams, perhaps. I was an Apple fan boy since the '80s so I saw Apple at its worst in the '90s and even then there was a core of stockholders who simply had faith in the company. With Apple riding high and rising, there's no way that Cisco could muster the shares.
At worst, Cisco could buy Cingular and send checks to Apple for them to use their phone and then not use it. Oooh, that would have Steve Jobs quaking in his boots. He'd have to just keep his R&D boys going while the clock ran out on the Cingular exclusivity and then he'd enter the market with a gen3 iPhone (or whatever they'd call it) and offer it unlocked as well as bundled with a variety of carriers.
Boo hoo
Cisco would garner a ton of bad publicity and get, what? This scenario is highly unlikely but even if it does happen, Apple still comes out looking pretty good.
My hands can handle a regular form factor blackberry no problem but my wife wouldn't touch one until they came out with the Pearl. It's a real issue and I expect sometime around the 3rd or 4th generation a different form factor will come out that caters to the small hand set.
The revolutionary aspect is that a whole new list of competitors just got their standards raised on them. Jobs' anal retentive OCD warps the entire computer industry into a distorted reflected image. Something similar is likely to happen to phones if enough people buy one of these things and *that* is revolutionary.
The Blackberry Pearl lists @$499 and comes with a 1MP camera phone and little in the way of music ability. It also comes with less memory (though you can add memory via SD). If you compare Pearl list with iPhone list, the Apple product comes across to me as the better value for the majority of use cases where you would like to use either.
The major catch is that I believe you get an unlocked Pearl for $499 and you get a locked iPhone for the same price. If you're already a Cingular customer, it's not that big a deal, if not.
$500-$600 is not out of reach for Apple's target market which is 5-10% of the entire cell phone market, the most lucrative 5-10%. If they get 10-20% of that lucrative market, they've met their goals and can upgrade their R&D, engineering, and industrial designs to move into more verticals where they're going to repeat one of two strategies
1. Go after the most lucrative 5-10% of a major market where a large portion of the market consists of customers who are only marginally profitable.
2. Take away the whole vertical as it's been dominated by incumbents who are overcharging for a comparatively poor product. Offer a product that does 90-95% of the current market leader for 20% of the price and buy out key secondary participants to own the entire vertical. This is the Final Cut Pro model.
If your computing needs aren't in a market that fits strategy #2, you've got to be willing to be one of those lucrative 5-10% to carry Apple gear.
You shouldn't be typing large chunks of text directly in Quark. That's not what it's for. The advice I gave was for the use case of the grandparent. If you want to quick save in Quark, get a very fast storage subsystem (like, say, the new flash powered solid state drives that are just coming out) and use that for the work files on your present project. Frequent saves should become less painful then even for huge files.
A development project is not a test and it doesn't IMO make sense to use the same strategy for both. Most "do the hard part first" methodologies focus on correct scoping and quickly building prototypes of all the parts. That way you get the prototypes of the easy stuff done quick (a day or two) and the hard stuff taking a couple of weeks and in the end you have a very basic prototype and a very good understanding of which program sections are going to be the problem children. There is real progress, you have a basic prototype out the door after a couple of weeks but more importantly you have much less illusion about what's easy, what's hard, and you might just spot what's impossible before people have to get fired over the issue. Lather, rinse, repeat, you keep making more and more detailed prototypes until what you have starts looking like an alpha, then a beta, and then you ship.
No matter what your platform, it's important to acquire the habit to save often. Save twice per page and you're going to be "ok" in 99% of circumstances.
Actually, Mac OS X does this vis a vis Windows in the business space because OS X Server does not require CALs. This is the vast majority of the cost on most business installations. Try costing out Windows print and file services with mail for 100 people and compare it with a Mac OS X server solution. You need to pay money for each Windows CAL, an Exchange CAL and an Outlook CAL to get the full MS experience. Mac OS X requires none of that except if you are using Apple networking services at which point you have to pony up an extra $500 for the "unlimited" server license. That's peanuts. The CAL licenses in the above scenario might be $80 a seat for all three CALs. You can get a lot of OS X education for your admin for $8000.
What you're saying is that the Microsoft brand has zero effect. That's quite unlikely as that much of a colossal waste of Microsoft ad dollars would show up in the stock price and it doesn't. And if you think that people are too scared to try something new, you obviously haven't been around the block in the B to C computer space. Not everybody falls into these categories but it's simply not true that this doesn't happen at all.
It's a utilitarian thing. For the greatest number of people, having it off by default *is* the most helpful and easy to use setting. At some point, somebody's going to create an automator app that will go through the entire "advanced" corpus for Mac OS X, explaining what each is and asking whether it should be on or off. You run the survey, set as you like, and get an education at the same time. I expect it would take all of a week to sort out.
Big deal.
File extensions have a lookup table associated with them. I believe that the file extension lookup entry is being changed when you set use this application to open all documents like this. The creator/type codes predate the use of file extensions in Mac OS and would have to be accessed by individual disk writes for each file. Do you really want to incur the overhead for that?
Microsoft Windows, at least for me, is not a computer platform. It's a nexus of a computer platform and a legal department as are Linux and Apple's OS X. Microsoft's legal department is nearly always execrable and has shaded over into criminal often enough that all MS gear automatically gets points deducted from it, sight unseen, because of the high probability of legal skullduggery.
Were Microsoft's legal department not so awful, Linux would very likely come preinstalled on just about all PCs with the option to multiboot or replace Windows when you unpack your box. At that point, the software, especially the games, would be coming out on Linux because there would be enough of a base of installs to justify it for just about every title (the game developers want to avoid MS legal too).
So how much of a discount rate is appropriate for MS legal? You seem to assign it a zero rate. That's just masochistic in my view.
You, sir, are living a very sheltered life
The MIME types complaint is a feature, not a bug. Apple permits the creator of a file to encode in the file what application it will be opened by. It always has. You can create an applescript to go through and have that information conform to what you want it to be but the behavior isn't going to change because a significant number of people like that.
If something may be legally copied, why is copying it a bad thing? One would think expending the resources to needlessly reinvent the wheel would be considered the bad thing, not copying public-domain IP.
Actually, the major source of the idea that stem cells will be coming from aborted fetuses that I've noticed has been pro-lifers waving around internal memos from inside the abortion industry. Secondary use of tissues from fetuses who have been killed is a big money maker for these clinics and the clinics apparently have been positioning themselves as "stem cell central" when the supply of excess embryos runs out. Some in the industry apparently believe that aborted fetuses can be a low cost supplier of these cells in the bulk quantitites needed for mass treatments.
Keeping the clinics financially viable has always been an important issue for the pro-choice faction while the pro-lifers are all in favor of tight regulation and closing as many secondary income streams as possible to limit clinic marketing and expansion. This is why you see the abortion wars refought by the same people in issue after issue after issue. If there's money to be made in the clinics, both coalitions will reform and clash over any issue irrespective of the merits.
So, yes, fetuses are not currently being harvested for their stem cells. That doesn't mean that abortion clinics have no involvement or financial interest in what goes on.
Now that is a somewhat narrow-minded and bigoted view. You're taking a christianity centered viewpoint, adopting a protestant Sola Scriptura spin on the thing and saying that those who do not conform to that Sola Scriptura spin (the majority of christians in the world, *all* the non-christians) are just making stuff up.
For the over 1 billion Catholics, I say "Tradition and Magisterium", for the 300 Million Orthodox I second "Tradition". The muslims also place numerous restrictions on abortion but in no way rely on the Bible.
Furthermore, there are biblical quotes that even Sola Scriptura protestants use to justify conception as the start of life.
You haven't a clue.
There is a very good chance that adult stem cell research will cure parkinsons without brain tumors (which are a known problem of embryonic stem cells in general) long before the brain tumor problem goes away. The brain tumor problem may *never* go away. But you don't see a lot of lefties admit these basic scientific research realities. Their screaming point is built on the sand of an assumption, that embryonic stem cell research is just better. It's an unscientific bet that nobody knows whether it's right or wrong yet.
The right's screaming point that embryonic stem cells = baby-killing is a moral point and a practical marker on the broader question of when do humans acquire and lose their constitutional rights. They might be wrong but they're not making irresponsible bets and taking half the country to the barricades over their speculation.
The right has the better case.
There are a few hundred (or is it thousand these days) "snowflake babies" that would like to contest your assertion that those extra embryos have no chance to survive. Usually, an excess non-implanted embryo is destined for the freezer for a time because extracting eggs and fertilizing them is expensive, somewhat risky, and there's pain involved. There are people willing to help those children be born. It's a separate question whether an embryo has rights but rather fascinating in its own right, who gets an unwanted embryo? Why does the biological donor get to maintain property rights?
The non-religious point is that at some point you have to make a bright line of what gets constitutional protection, becoming a "who" and what does not. You have to do this both at the start and end of life and the rules that you adopt should not permit some sick bastard from manipulating things so that people can be driven down into "non-people" status and killed without triggering the murder statutes. It's harder than you think.
The religious point in a bunch of faiths is that it is murder because God said so.
Just because you don't belong to one of the faiths that hold it so does not mean you get to opt out of the first discussion.
Silly fellow. The entire point of natural selection is that one never knows what "evolution has" or has not equipped us for. Natural selection for other stressors may very well have equipped us to be able to handle all sorts of other stressors that have yet to arise. Or are you one of those fools that thinks evolution is some all purpose substitute diety for God?
I was talking to an anesthesiologist at a birthday party my son was attending. His observation was that 90% of pre-op tests are useless. People know the results before the test is done but if you don't have it and there's a bad outcome (which can happen with any patient) the lawyers will crucify you.
We just got medicare part D over 30 years after the pharma revolution made pills at least as important as surgery. For 30 years people were steered inappropriately towards surgery because the government couldn't politically align its funding to scientific progress. If you're comfortable with waiting for decades for proper medicine, go for it dude. I'll choose a different course.
Who was talking about robbery et al? The incidence of psychotic and destructive behavior is orders of magnitude above any antisocial tobacco or alcohol behavior but there's absolutely zero evidence that I can find on 2nd hand smoke damage for meth smokers. I'd suggest that the dosage for area effects is very likely much lower than for tobacco and that even getting rid of the drug war entirely would leave smoking meth vulnerable to the exact same restrictions as tobacco in terms of public smoking.
Regarding abortion, what jurisdiction are you in? The US permits 3rd trimester abortion without limit and we have only recently mandated that botched abortions that result in live births shall not be subject to infanticide by exposure/neglect. It's a US political story up top so it's reasonable to assume that if a country is not named, we're talking about the US.
On healthcare, I'd agree that it's a complex issue. Two of the big problems with unraveling the current state is that public provision via medicare up to now has completely ignored the pharma revolution of the past few decades. US policy has just been corrected so it no longer favors expensive surgery over inexpensive pills. That's one positive for the Reps and science based to boot. Another positive has been the progressive experimentation and enlargement of what are now called Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) which tie a high deductible policy to a tax deductible account. HSAs inject a population into the mix that actually demands price justification, negotiates discounts, and seeks the low cost reputable provider. This is all to the good and was passed as part of medicare reform.
As for Europe, it manifestly does not work as all the European systems are either scandalously decrepit and going broke (the eastern ones that came out of the Soviet system) or are just going broke (the EU systems like the FRG's krankenkasse system). It's the shame of Europe that Germany ended up retaining conscription when the military wanted rid of it because the cheap labor kept the hospitals going. The Germans are violating their own basic law and pretending that everything is OK. It is not OK and the US should certainly not follow down that dead end road.