Then citation is needed for where the Constitution of the USA authorizes federal government interference in medicine.
I asked for citations, so here's my own. Western PA Coalition for Single-Payer Healthcare lists 5 polls taken this year. Of them the Kaiser Health Tracking Poll says 58% favor and 38% oppose single payer health care. A Time Magazine poll says 49% favor and 46% oppose single payer insurance. None of the 5 polls say 60% of the people polled prefer single payer health care.
What is needed to reduce the cost of medicine is not socialized medicine but competition. While normal or average health care costs have gone up in markets where there is competition cost have declined. Look at Lasik eye surgery, in "1999 the average price of LASIK was well over $2,000 per eye." By 2001 1 in 5 surgeons were offering Lasik for under $1000 per eye. Costs have also dropped for cosmetic surgery. Costs were driven down too because of Medical tourism.
When government picks winners, groups that get called "lobbyists" and "special interests" exercise their Constitutional RIGHTS to petition the government and try to affect the outcome of the government rule making.
Corporations have no right to lobby government, only people do. And I don't recall ever getting any sort of ballot, petition, or questionnaire from a corporation I owned stocks in asking me what government policies I support and what I don't support.
Don't like it?
Don't give the government the power that attracts those groups.
Who owns what part of the run from the central office or switch to the curb? One fiber for each person? Bundles of thousands of fibers would be expensive. And how would millions be handled? Where is the space for all that? And what if you don't want it?
I can see home owners owning the fiber from the curb to the home or other building but not from there to the office, switch, or whatever. Now what I can see working is the separation of the ownership of the infrastructure from the services it can provide. Say a coop or the local government builds, owns, and maintains the connection fibers and hardware to the curb but then sells access to Comcast and other providers who then maintain their own equipment and bill customers.
Too bad, the only choice you have is that provider or no provider.
Why is that I wonder? It wouldn't have anything to do with the practice of local governments granting monopolies, would it?
The local, state, and national governments have granted monopolies. It's being disingenuous in pointing out that only local governments granted monopolies.
I agree charging by the amount of bandwidth used may, just may, be better but for years broadband providers sold unlimited service. The contract I signed with Time Warner for my cable, now it's Comcast, did not have any sort of limits. Now it did say the speed would be up to, I think though I don't recall for sure, 1.5MB. There wasn't anything about traffic shaping, blocking, or redirecting though. If ISPs oversold capacity it's not the fault of the users, it's the ISPs own fault. When I go to an all-you-can-eat buffet I refuse to accept the restaurant from preventing me or anyone else from eating all we can.
A price-per-byte structure, if properly implemented, could result in reduced monthly payments for grandma and a higher portion for the guy with the strange habit of downloading "Linux ISOs" all the time.
The problem with this is that incumbent broadband providers try to prevent any competition that will offer more bandwidth. How many tymes has news articles been summarized and linked to on slashdot because some incumbent provider tried to stop competition whether cable, fiber, wireless, or any other broadband? An example was in northeastern Utah a few years back. A group of communities got together to build their own Broadband Utopia. Of course the incumbents did all they could to stop it and they were finally successful in having the state government pass a law barring local governments from selling access, instead they have to sell to other service providers. The 14 cities that make up the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency built an infrastructure that will provide "100 megabits per second" to start with. That infrastructure can be used to deliver cable TV, net access, phone services, or whatever a person could think of. Because of it Comcast was "forced" to bundle "broadband, digital cable, and VoIP service for $90 a month in all of Utopia's footprint" and I doubt they are losing money. I say "forced" because they only had to do it if they wanted to continue to provide services in the area otherwise people would not have been willing to pay the higher costs.
perhaps content directly delivered by the ISP would fall under this category. But I don't see why that is -inherently- wrong.
You don't see what's wrong? Try this, say only Company X provides broadband in your area, so you have no other choice for broadband, and you want to search the web. So you head over to Google and if you can connect it is slow because Google didn't pay your ISP. Or your ISP supports one political party and blocks traffic from all other parties? Do you still not see a problem?
You the customer and user shapes your traffic not your outside ISP. At least I hope your ISP doesn't. Without competition and net neutrality type regulations your ISP can do whatever it wants. Don't like it? Too bad, the only choice you have is that provider or no provider.
I don't understand the position of the equipment makers in this objection
They helped set up the Great Firewall by selling equipment to China now they want to sell the equipment to US ISPs as well. It's nothing more than the Corporate Aristocracy Thomas Jefferson warned of.
"When the government picks winners and losers in the marketplace, the incentive to invest disappears,"
By granting monopolies government has already picked winner and losers. There is no competition in broadband and the lucky few who have a choice in broadband providers has the choice between the cable company and the phone company. A duopoly isn't competition.
I wish the letter with the name of those 18 Republican senators had been linked to if nothing else, I bet these politicians don't believe in competition or free markets either.
is it's a much much better Address Book than anything else out there
It's not better for me than my address book, and I don't need a Facebook account to use it.
and they've built forums, messaging, invites, picture sharing, etc. on top of it.
I have those now, I'm using Slashdot right now. I used to use Yahoo! Messenger, I've shared photos, and done other things too. I don't need Facebook to do all those.
It's not valid from a business standpoint for any reasonably organized office structure. That's plain to see in multiple areas such as: searching; backups; organized storage structure; multi-user access; reduction of redundant storage; effective sharing; version control; audit trails; etc.
I have no problems doing any of the things you list as problems with email attachments. I have no problem problem searching my email, backing it up, or organizing it. My email is only for me so I don't have a problem with others accessing it, hell others accessing it would be a problem. Storage is plentiful and cheap so that's not a problem either.
I doubt large corporations have these problems either.
I'm all for anything that makes it impossible to keep attachments directly with the message!
And I'm the opposite, I want to be able to send and receive attachments. With your way for those who want attachments it's tough luck, with my way it's a personal matter.
What did they gain at the risk of look like Popular Mechanics who in 1951 speculated we would all have personal helicopters in our garage?
Reading this made me think of an article in a 1938 issue of "Popular Mechanics". The title called hemp the "New Billion Dollar Crop". Looking for a reference to it I found one on Facebook.
We should not get rid of E-mail so much as improve it. E-mail could be easily improved by adding ideas such as threading which would quite easily overcome the complicated mess that is quoting.
I much prefer quoting what I'm replying to messages, as I did above, it keeps messages shorter and easier to read. This is especially true when you've got replies to replies, to...
Businesses and spammers don't use Facebook? That's funny, Facebook has business accounts and people complain about spam on Facebook. Now I don't use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or many of the other services but reading what others posted above it took less than a minute to Google and find the two links above.
The main shortcoming of Facebook is archival. Other than that, it's far superior for personal communication that I might otherwise do over email.
email is superior to Facebook, all I need to communicate with others on the net is email. I do not have to sign up for anything proprietary that blocks me from communicating to those who do not use said proprietary vendor. Heck even Facebook uses email. With email all anyone needs to communicate is net access but to use Facebook, Twitter, and all the others you need an account with each one. Now from what I've read of Google's Wave, it's an open standard and any could setup their own Wave server. That's just another software bundle to use and I don't see any advantage, then again I just heard of it.
Say I'm out in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness I could upload some photos
If you can get a signal out there, then you're a fortunate person.
There maybe places wireless is available but for the most part I doubt wireless access is available without a satellite phone, which is slow and expensive. This is why I support expanding mobile broadband, whatever it be.
Also bear in mind that your upload speed may be orders of magnitude slower than your downstream speed, so you might be better off waiting until you get back home.
Notice I said "mobile broadband", when you're out in the field for weeks waiting may not be an option. While relatively large storage devices are available for digital cameras, that "large" is relative to most cameras. The DSLR cameras I'd like to get have 21 megapixel full-frame sensors. I'd also like to get a medium format camera, perhaps a 645 or 6x4.5mm, camera with a film and digital back. Hasselblad has digital backs 39 MP (5412 x 7212 pixels) and above in size. With 16 bit colour depths, that's a file size of 50MB and 117MB for raw and TIFF respectively.
Now using cable even transmitting files that big can take a while.
This is why I'm more protective of my time and privacy. Once you are leashed by today's technology, it become very hard to rid yourself of that shackle.
In your off tyme you decide when you're connected and what you will respond to. So far today I've gotten 2 phone calls, when I looked at caller ID I didn't know who made the calls so I didn't answer the phone. Now if the other party think s it's important they can leave a message, however in both cases today neither did leave a message so they mustn't have been important to them.
Our company does not allow IM for these exact reasons,
You don't need to collaborate with coworkers and supervisors much do you? As someone above said in the tyme it could take to arrange a conference call or meeting an IM session could be done. With collaboration tools you could all work on the same documents as well.
While I haven't done this myself I look at it like it says in the subject line, the right tool for the right job. I hope to start a photography business and I can see where IM would be terrific, I could use it to collaborate with a client and show them what I have and what I can do. That photo has too bright a red? Reduce the brightness and the client can give me immediate feedback. Client wants the top cropped a little lower, here goes.
Being able to do this may actually increase my income, I could get more work done and or ask for more.
What's more inherently professional about an email than a message on Facebook? If you're simply sending a message, you can make it precisely as professional over Facebook as an email. They're both just systems for sending text...
I've never used Facebook so I don't know if I can send a message to anyone else with Facebook whether I or they use Facebook? I have no problem sending email to anyone else who I have their email address whether they use the same ISP as I do or another.
I doubt I can, I bet in order for me to use Facebook to send a message to someone else we both have to use Facebook. I would not trust Facebook with important documents either.
Plus, all the data is online. Maybe one day we will have the internet EVERYWHERE we take our laptops, but until that day I'd rather keep a local copy.
I'm with you here but I'd add something. I want files stored and software run locally, but I also want to be able to access the net whenever I choose to. I don't have one now but as an example once I get a digital SLR I'd like to be able to upload my photos to my server while out in the field. The only way to do that and not have a long upload is mobile broadband. I'd also like to keep a blog updated which also would require mobile access. Say I'm out in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness I could upload some photos and an essay on my day of canoing and hiking. Apply that to the Amazon and Siberia as well.
How would you set up something like wikipedia to resist that kind of take-over?
Jimmy Wales controls Wikipedia. Google's Knol is similar but only experts are used, now how well does it rank compared to Wikipedia? I bet hardly anybody has even heard of Knol.
Slashdot Mirror
Single Payer
Citation needed.
Then citation is needed for where the Constitution of the USA authorizes federal government interference in medicine.
I asked for citations, so here's my own. Western PA Coalition for Single-Payer Healthcare lists 5 polls taken this year. Of them the Kaiser Health Tracking Poll says 58% favor and 38% oppose single payer health care. A Time Magazine poll says 49% favor and 46% oppose single payer insurance. None of the 5 polls say 60% of the people polled prefer single payer health care.
What is needed to reduce the cost of medicine is not socialized medicine but competition. While normal or average health care costs have gone up in markets where there is competition cost have declined. Look at Lasik eye surgery, in "1999 the average price of LASIK was well over $2,000 per eye." By 2001 1 in 5 surgeons were offering Lasik for under $1000 per eye. Costs have also dropped for cosmetic surgery. Costs were driven down too because of Medical tourism.
Falcon
When government picks winners, groups that get called "lobbyists" and "special interests" exercise their Constitutional RIGHTS to petition the government and try to affect the outcome of the government rule making.
Corporations have no right to lobby government, only people do. And I don't recall ever getting any sort of ballot, petition, or questionnaire from a corporation I owned stocks in asking me what government policies I support and what I don't support.
Don't like it?
Don't give the government the power that attracts those groups.
Now here I agree.
Falcon
I like the last mile proposal where you buy it and share it condominium style with your neighbors. Then ISPs plug into a shared community portal. http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/homes_tails
Who owns what part of the run from the central office or switch to the curb? One fiber for each person? Bundles of thousands of fibers would be expensive. And how would millions be handled? Where is the space for all that? And what if you don't want it?
I can see home owners owning the fiber from the curb to the home or other building but not from there to the office, switch, or whatever. Now what I can see working is the separation of the ownership of the infrastructure from the services it can provide. Say a coop or the local government builds, owns, and maintains the connection fibers and hardware to the curb but then sells access to Comcast and other providers who then maintain their own equipment and bill customers.
Falcon
Too bad, the only choice you have is that provider or no provider.
Why is that I wonder? It wouldn't have anything to do with the practice of local governments granting monopolies, would it?
The local, state, and national governments have granted monopolies. It's being disingenuous in pointing out that only local governments granted monopolies.
Falcon
I agree charging by the amount of bandwidth used may, just may, be better but for years broadband providers sold unlimited service. The contract I signed with Time Warner for my cable, now it's Comcast, did not have any sort of limits. Now it did say the speed would be up to, I think though I don't recall for sure, 1.5MB. There wasn't anything about traffic shaping, blocking, or redirecting though. If ISPs oversold capacity it's not the fault of the users, it's the ISPs own fault. When I go to an all-you-can-eat buffet I refuse to accept the restaurant from preventing me or anyone else from eating all we can.
A price-per-byte structure, if properly implemented, could result in reduced monthly payments for grandma and a higher portion for the guy with the strange habit of downloading "Linux ISOs" all the time.
The problem with this is that incumbent broadband providers try to prevent any competition that will offer more bandwidth. How many tymes has news articles been summarized and linked to on slashdot because some incumbent provider tried to stop competition whether cable, fiber, wireless, or any other broadband? An example was in northeastern Utah a few years back. A group of communities got together to build their own Broadband Utopia. Of course the incumbents did all they could to stop it and they were finally successful in having the state government pass a law barring local governments from selling access, instead they have to sell to other service providers. The 14 cities that make up the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency built an infrastructure that will provide "100 megabits per second" to start with. That infrastructure can be used to deliver cable TV, net access, phone services, or whatever a person could think of. Because of it Comcast was "forced" to bundle "broadband, digital cable, and VoIP service for $90 a month in all of Utopia's footprint" and I doubt they are losing money. I say "forced" because they only had to do it if they wanted to continue to provide services in the area otherwise people would not have been willing to pay the higher costs.
perhaps content directly delivered by the ISP would fall under this category. But I don't see why that is -inherently- wrong.
You don't see what's wrong? Try this, say only Company X provides broadband in your area, so you have no other choice for broadband, and you want to search the web. So you head over to Google and if you can connect it is slow because Google didn't pay your ISP. Or your ISP supports one political party and blocks traffic from all other parties? Do you still not see a problem?
Falcon
You the customer and user shapes your traffic not your outside ISP. At least I hope your ISP doesn't. Without competition and net neutrality type regulations your ISP can do whatever it wants. Don't like it? Too bad, the only choice you have is that provider or no provider.
Falcon
I don't understand the position of the equipment makers in this objection
They helped set up the Great Firewall by selling equipment to China now they want to sell the equipment to US ISPs as well. It's nothing more than the Corporate Aristocracy Thomas Jefferson warned of.
Falcon
"When the government picks winners and losers in the marketplace, the incentive to invest disappears,"
By granting monopolies government has already picked winner and losers. There is no competition in broadband and the lucky few who have a choice in broadband providers has the choice between the cable company and the phone company. A duopoly isn't competition.
I wish the letter with the name of those 18 Republican senators had been linked to if nothing else, I bet these politicians don't believe in competition or free markets either.
Falcon
is it's a much much better Address Book than anything else out there
It's not better for me than my address book, and I don't need a Facebook account to use it.
and they've built forums, messaging, invites, picture sharing, etc. on top of it.
I have those now, I'm using Slashdot right now. I used to use Yahoo! Messenger, I've shared photos, and done other things too. I don't need Facebook to do all those.
The lack of spam is a nice side effect too.
Lack of spam?
Falcon
It's not valid from a business standpoint for any reasonably organized office structure. That's plain to see in multiple areas such as: searching; backups; organized storage structure; multi-user access; reduction of redundant storage; effective sharing; version control; audit trails; etc.
I have no problems doing any of the things you list as problems with email attachments. I have no problem problem searching my email, backing it up, or organizing it. My email is only for me so I don't have a problem with others accessing it, hell others accessing it would be a problem. Storage is plentiful and cheap so that's not a problem either.
I doubt large corporations have these problems either.
Falcon
I'm all for anything that makes it impossible to keep attachments directly with the message!
And I'm the opposite, I want to be able to send and receive attachments. With your way for those who want attachments it's tough luck, with my way it's a personal matter.
Falcon
What did they gain at the risk of look like Popular Mechanics who in 1951 speculated we would all have personal helicopters in our garage?
Reading this made me think of an article in a 1938 issue of "Popular Mechanics". The title called hemp the "New Billion Dollar Crop". Looking for a reference to it I found one on Facebook.
Falcon
We should not get rid of E-mail so much as improve it. E-mail could be easily improved by adding ideas such as threading which would quite easily overcome the complicated mess that is quoting.
I much prefer quoting what I'm replying to messages, as I did above, it keeps messages shorter and easier to read. This is especially true when you've got replies to replies, to ...
Falcon
Businesses and spammers don't use Facebook? That's funny, Facebook has business accounts and people complain about spam on Facebook. Now I don't use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or many of the other services but reading what others posted above it took less than a minute to Google and find the two links above.
Falcon
The main shortcoming of Facebook is archival. Other than that, it's far superior for personal communication that I might otherwise do over email.
email is superior to Facebook, all I need to communicate with others on the net is email. I do not have to sign up for anything proprietary that blocks me from communicating to those who do not use said proprietary vendor. Heck even Facebook uses email. With email all anyone needs to communicate is net access but to use Facebook, Twitter, and all the others you need an account with each one. Now from what I've read of Google's Wave, it's an open standard and any could setup their own Wave server. That's just another software bundle to use and I don't see any advantage, then again I just heard of it.
Falcon
Or you just stick your head out the cube and say "Hey Bob, which file has the numbers I need again?"
Yea, that works if you're cubical neighbors, but not if you work in another building, city, or state never mind the same floor.
You can't share your ideas for photos over IM
Here's an article from 2004: "Exploring the potentials of combining photo annotating tasks with instant messaging fun". Sharing Photos With Yahoo! Messenger, now you can't exactly show each other how things can be done easily but you can annotate or make remarks. I knew a graphic artist who collaborated online, though not with YM.
Falcon
Say I'm out in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness I could upload some photos
If you can get a signal out there, then you're a fortunate person.
There maybe places wireless is available but for the most part I doubt wireless access is available without a satellite phone, which is slow and expensive. This is why I support expanding mobile broadband, whatever it be.
Also bear in mind that your upload speed may be orders of magnitude slower than your downstream speed, so you might be better off waiting until you get back home.
Notice I said "mobile broadband", when you're out in the field for weeks waiting may not be an option. While relatively large storage devices are available for digital cameras, that "large" is relative to most cameras. The DSLR cameras I'd like to get have 21 megapixel full-frame sensors. I'd also like to get a medium format camera, perhaps a 645 or 6x4.5mm, camera with a film and digital back. Hasselblad has digital backs 39 MP (5412 x 7212 pixels) and above in size. With 16 bit colour depths, that's a file size of 50MB and 117MB for raw and TIFF respectively.
Now using cable even transmitting files that big can take a while.
Falcon
I've asked questions of people on Twitter that I never would have if email was my only option.
The same can be said of email, there have been questions I've asked in email I'd never ask with twitter.
Falcon
On a trading floor your best communications route is your voice.
Falcon
This is why I'm more protective of my time and privacy. Once you are leashed by today's technology, it become very hard to rid yourself of that shackle.
In your off tyme you decide when you're connected and what you will respond to. So far today I've gotten 2 phone calls, when I looked at caller ID I didn't know who made the calls so I didn't answer the phone. Now if the other party think s it's important they can leave a message, however in both cases today neither did leave a message so they mustn't have been important to them.
Falcon
Our company does not allow IM for these exact reasons,
You don't need to collaborate with coworkers and supervisors much do you? As someone above said in the tyme it could take to arrange a conference call or meeting an IM session could be done. With collaboration tools you could all work on the same documents as well.
While I haven't done this myself I look at it like it says in the subject line, the right tool for the right job. I hope to start a photography business and I can see where IM would be terrific, I could use it to collaborate with a client and show them what I have and what I can do. That photo has too bright a red? Reduce the brightness and the client can give me immediate feedback. Client wants the top cropped a little lower, here goes.
Being able to do this may actually increase my income, I could get more work done and or ask for more.
Falcon
What's more inherently professional about an email than a message on Facebook? If you're simply sending a message, you can make it precisely as professional over Facebook as an email. They're both just systems for sending text...
I've never used Facebook so I don't know if I can send a message to anyone else with Facebook whether I or they use Facebook? I have no problem sending email to anyone else who I have their email address whether they use the same ISP as I do or another.
I doubt I can, I bet in order for me to use Facebook to send a message to someone else we both have to use Facebook. I would not trust Facebook with important documents either.
Falcon
Plus, all the data is online. Maybe one day we will have the internet EVERYWHERE we take our laptops, but until that day I'd rather keep a local copy.
I'm with you here but I'd add something. I want files stored and software run locally, but I also want to be able to access the net whenever I choose to. I don't have one now but as an example once I get a digital SLR I'd like to be able to upload my photos to my server while out in the field. The only way to do that and not have a long upload is mobile broadband. I'd also like to keep a blog updated which also would require mobile access. Say I'm out in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness I could upload some photos and an essay on my day of canoing and hiking. Apply that to the Amazon and Siberia as well.
Falcon
Vocation does make a difference, there were millions who had their ID's or credit card numbers stolen. What makes the FBI director any different?
If you don't, you really don't need to be in a position of authority.
So you wouldn't want doctors who had their ID stolen treating you either? How about a teacher teaching?
Falcon
How would you set up something like wikipedia to resist that kind of take-over?
Jimmy Wales controls Wikipedia. Google's Knol is similar but only experts are used, now how well does it rank compared to Wikipedia? I bet hardly anybody has even heard of Knol.
Falcon