You're both wrong. While patient lawsuits cause the need for malpractice insurance in the first place, they do not account for their current increase into the stratosphere: the number of judgments and the average judgment have not increased significantly in recent years.
Insurance companies do not make their money off of premiums. They make their money off of investing those premiums. This is important reason #1: when those investments start to lose value they have to make up for it with increased premiums. In addition, the government requires them to keep a certain amount of liquid collateral assets available in order to pay claims. A significant portion of this can be in stocks. So, insurance companies take a double hit when the market tanks: they lose profit, and a significant portion of their government-mandated reserve evaporates.
So, there are three reasons why malpractice insurance is so damned expensive and is getting moreso by the day: 1) Insurance companies are greedy, so they raise premiums as a habit 2) Not only are they greedy, but their profits have taken a hit from the stock market mini-crash after 9/11 and 3) not only are they greedy and "in the red," they also need immediate cash to cover their collateral reserves.
I'm surprised that Microsoft doesn't try charging you based on how many transistors the chip has. It makes as much sense as charging per core or CPU. Microsoft: taxing the march of progress for over 20 years.
His opponent is the same person that said that no one uses the internet. I doubt he even realizes that Jeff has a webpage, let alone how to go about messing with his poll. By the way, there was a nomination period for suggestions, which were then culled and added to a set of polls for the various time periods. They were for things like: "Go to plant between shifts and greet workers. Rest with family. Wave signs at street corner for visibility. Meet with college democrats." Etc. There were no "spit on Jesus statue" or "drop out of race" options.
Counterfeiters used to be executed, not because counterfeiting coin was so heinous a crime, but because the crown knew that if the public lost confidence in the currency the entire economic system would collapse. In the same vein, sentencing guidelines on crack-cocaine (a "black" drug) are so much higher than those for cocaine (a "white" drug) not because using crack was so much more heinous an offense than using coke, but because of the crippling death hold crack had on inner city black neighborhoods. It is feasible that if the "harmless" activity of emailing an advertisement to someone begins to cripple our society in some way that punishments which might be seen as disproportionate may be applied.
That's just not true. Bureaucracies are much more than the sum of the people that combine to form them. This is the "I was just following orders" phenomenon. There's a lot of sociological literature about how bureaucracies and corporations are not merely the culmination of the personalities of its constituent parts. Fact of the matter is that fairly good people, when part of such an organizational structure, can do very bad things. And, furthermore, the organization in this case exists to make money, so fairly good people can do very bad things in order to make money. The organization becomes a creature unto itself.
Holbrook came in, and immediately pissed off people by trying to curb our tailgating for football games - a huge tradition if you've ever been in the area. Then she does nothing to curb the ever-raising tuition rates, agrees to shut off funding to some agricultural programs (which are the traditional basis of this campus), and is only concerned with research funding rather than the enormous undergraduate population.
This is almost textbook MO, except for curbing tailgating. Of course she doesn't care about undergraduates and their education. That's the entire reason there are so many of them on one campus-- they're just an income source. The less the administration cares about them, the more money they have for their research programs. And, as for tuition, the higher tuition the more money for their research programs. At most of these large state universities undergraduate education is a profit-taking business that funds their research programs, and so there are three ways to increase the efficiency of the business: increase enrollment, increase tuition, or decrease money spent on undergraduate education. I know at my university enrollment has skyrocketed since the 60s, tuition has increased manyfold, and the quality of education has gone through the floor. It's undoubtedly the same at your school.
Curbing tailgating is interesting, as football and other "big time" high profile sports teams play a very important part as a substitute product to provide undergraduates in place of a real education. The fact of the matter is that you can't keep raising enrollment, raising tuition, and cutting the quality of your programs if you want to attract a decent student body. At some point you're dipping into the sort of student that hated high school and has no interest in school at all, and, as one would expect, does poorly in their educational endeavors. You, on the other hand, still want to attract a decent student body to maintain a veneer of selectivity. So, you shift the "point" of college onto sports teams, encourage the party/booster culture that grows up around the sports teams, and reduce the academic component to a mere diploma mill. So, in this sense, she is being a bad president, not because she's opposing "tradition," but because she's decreasing the efficiency of the system.
Finally, once you accept that the president's "basic duty" is to raise funds, then you've already lost, because that includes squeezing as much money out of you as possible.
That point rests on the moral equivalency of a corporation and a person. We don't even give all people the full personation in this country (children have many restrictions put on them by society, for their own good), so why should a corporation be considered the equal to you or me?
I'm waiting for the Lifetime Original Movie: Developers, Developers, Developers: The Steve Balmer Story. Starring a thoroughly soaked shirt, original score by Steve Balmer.
What I don't get is why people are pondering this as if "parody" and "satire" are opposite sides of the same coin. That's like debating if a pie is "cherry" or "delicious."
Now, "parody" is a defense against copyright infringement. Do parodies have to exist solely to make fun of the artwork it imitates to count? I doubt it. Parodies are almost always expressed as a medium to say something else entirely. That's the point of a parody.
"Satire," on the other hand, is a defense against libel. If, hypothetically, Bush sued jibjab for claiming he rode on a nuclear bomb as it fell, then satire would be a surefire defense (along with a million others).
There is no reason for the false dillema. Just as a pie can be both tasty and apple, something can be both a parody and a satire. We also suffer from some noun confusion as well. Imitating the song is the parody, not mocking the two candidates. Making fun of the two candidates in humorous and absurd situations is satire. Using as the medium an imitation of an artwork is parody. You parody an artwork, you don't "satire" an artwork.
"This land" is both a parody of this land and a satire of the current presidential campaign.
Whoa.. Whoa... Whoa... There is certainly NOT a University of New Jersey. There will have to be a LOT of dead bodies before that happens (over the dead bodies, you see).
I very much agree. It's amazing how many people have become so completely entranced with whatever notion of equality that's worked itself into their heads that they do become racists themselves.
For instance, I was going through the archives of my university's student newspaper, and came across an editorial claiming that an advocate of tougher academic standards at my school was racist. The implication? The writer of the editorial had to believe that minority students were intriniscally not able to meet higher academic standards.
Re:He's already knighted, but can't use Sir...
on
That's Sir Tim to You
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· Score: 1
Yes, and no journalist has ever passed along conventional wisdom without a source to back it up.
Like I've said, I've heard this alot (in every single article about an American being knighted) but have never found a real source (aristocracy-interest fluff pieces excluded).
Re:He's already knighted, but can't use Sir...
on
That's Sir Tim to You
·
· Score: 1
Can you provide sources or are you just repeating conventional wisdom? I'm not trolling, but I've heard this a lot, but I've never been able to find anything to back it up.
For one thing, they're all "honorary." Tim Berner-Lee's knighthood isn't anymore real than anyone else's, these days. And for another, what's the logic in making someone a Knight of the British Empire, but being particular over a thing like whether they can use the title or not?
Roman centurians were most certainly not law enforcement officers. They were even prohibited from entering the city armed (This was sacred, and it being violated was one of the foreshadowings of a collapsing empire). Rome, as a matter of fact, had no organized police force at all.
What about corporate sponsorship.... Pepsi presents "Electoral Math!"
The "problem" with politics is that, on a national level, they're more akin to those hardcore war games than anything that's really mainstream fun. Command and Conquer was a lot more popular than whatever the ultra realistic World War 2 battle simulation of its day was. Not that there's anything wrong with that, though. No one wants to need a degree from the Kennedy School of Government in order to do well in a game. The key is just to seek out the parts that ARE fun and discard the rest.
No. I think you're trying to suggest a logical relationship between him having lost the vote and then winning the presidency. There is no such logical relationship: he won the presidency in spite of losing the vote.
Furthermore, had he never run for office the odds of him being elected would have been nil. Being in the game doesn't guarentee that you'll win, but not being in the game will guarentee that you lose. Of course, American politics are pretty simplistic (in terms of the depth of the issues)... so your interests might coincide reasonably with someone who is "in the game" ("lower taxes"), so your odds aren't completely nil. In a more generalized political system, however, each individual has distinct interests that conflict with everyone else ("tax everyone else, give me the money").
In the end, politics are kind of like armament. Sure, the best way to win a war is not ever to fight one. But if the other guy is amassing tanks on your border...
Actually, that's about the surest way to lose. Remember: politics is the conflict over the distribution of values and burdens. If you're not in the game, that just means more of the former for the rest of us, and more of the latter for you.
Whoa... don't forget to turn on the FUD control, folks.
Socialist==retarded? If you define socialism as collective (governmental) control of the economy, then "socialism" has been the most wildly succesful system of economic management in the United States, ever. Remember, we were still in the depression going into World War 2, and after several years of complete government domination of our means of production the economy exploded following the end of the war. Not to mention the trillions of dollars piped through the Pentagon into developing new technologies (socialism without the social program). Putting aside knee jerk reactions, socialism is still alive and well in the United States (Ironically enough, communism itself was killed off by the bolsheviks in 1918).
The newspost on the Beastie Boys website also includes the denial that the CD installs any vaporware on the user's PC. This has clueless manager written allllll over it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, actually the Miami in Florida is the University of Miami, the Miami in Ohio is Miami University.
Man: The Most Dangerous Game.
You have a mirror of the internet? That must be the one that George Bush uses.
You're both wrong. While patient lawsuits cause the need for malpractice insurance in the first place, they do not account for their current increase into the stratosphere: the number of judgments and the average judgment have not increased significantly in recent years.
Insurance companies do not make their money off of premiums. They make their money off of investing those premiums. This is important reason #1: when those investments start to lose value they have to make up for it with increased premiums. In addition, the government requires them to keep a certain amount of liquid collateral assets available in order to pay claims. A significant portion of this can be in stocks. So, insurance companies take a double hit when the market tanks: they lose profit, and a significant portion of their government-mandated reserve evaporates.
So, there are three reasons why malpractice insurance is so damned expensive and is getting moreso by the day: 1) Insurance companies are greedy, so they raise premiums as a habit 2) Not only are they greedy, but their profits have taken a hit from the stock market mini-crash after 9/11 and 3) not only are they greedy and "in the red," they also need immediate cash to cover their collateral reserves.
I'm surprised that Microsoft doesn't try charging you based on how many transistors the chip has. It makes as much sense as charging per core or CPU. Microsoft: taxing the march of progress for over 20 years.
His opponent is the same person that said that no one uses the internet. I doubt he even realizes that Jeff has a webpage, let alone how to go about messing with his poll. By the way, there was a nomination period for suggestions, which were then culled and added to a set of polls for the various time periods. They were for things like: "Go to plant between shifts and greet workers. Rest with family. Wave signs at street corner for visibility. Meet with college democrats." Etc. There were no "spit on Jesus statue" or "drop out of race" options.
Counterfeiters used to be executed, not because counterfeiting coin was so heinous a crime, but because the crown knew that if the public lost confidence in the currency the entire economic system would collapse. In the same vein, sentencing guidelines on crack-cocaine (a "black" drug) are so much higher than those for cocaine (a "white" drug) not because using crack was so much more heinous an offense than using coke, but because of the crippling death hold crack had on inner city black neighborhoods. It is feasible that if the "harmless" activity of emailing an advertisement to someone begins to cripple our society in some way that punishments which might be seen as disproportionate may be applied.
That's just not true. Bureaucracies are much more than the sum of the people that combine to form them. This is the "I was just following orders" phenomenon. There's a lot of sociological literature about how bureaucracies and corporations are not merely the culmination of the personalities of its constituent parts. Fact of the matter is that fairly good people, when part of such an organizational structure, can do very bad things. And, furthermore, the organization in this case exists to make money, so fairly good people can do very bad things in order to make money. The organization becomes a creature unto itself.
Am I the only one that wants a bumper sticker that says "you word murder your children"?
I figured out the missing step: Marketing!
Holbrook came in, and immediately pissed off people by trying to curb our tailgating for football games - a huge tradition if you've ever been in the area. Then she does nothing to curb the ever-raising tuition rates, agrees to shut off funding to some agricultural programs (which are the traditional basis of this campus), and is only concerned with research funding rather than the enormous undergraduate population.
This is almost textbook MO, except for curbing tailgating. Of course she doesn't care about undergraduates and their education. That's the entire reason there are so many of them on one campus-- they're just an income source. The less the administration cares about them, the more money they have for their research programs. And, as for tuition, the higher tuition the more money for their research programs. At most of these large state universities undergraduate education is a profit-taking business that funds their research programs, and so there are three ways to increase the efficiency of the business: increase enrollment, increase tuition, or decrease money spent on undergraduate education. I know at my university enrollment has skyrocketed since the 60s, tuition has increased manyfold, and the quality of education has gone through the floor. It's undoubtedly the same at your school.
Curbing tailgating is interesting, as football and other "big time" high profile sports teams play a very important part as a substitute product to provide undergraduates in place of a real education. The fact of the matter is that you can't keep raising enrollment, raising tuition, and cutting the quality of your programs if you want to attract a decent student body. At some point you're dipping into the sort of student that hated high school and has no interest in school at all, and, as one would expect, does poorly in their educational endeavors. You, on the other hand, still want to attract a decent student body to maintain a veneer of selectivity. So, you shift the "point" of college onto sports teams, encourage the party/booster culture that grows up around the sports teams, and reduce the academic component to a mere diploma mill. So, in this sense, she is being a bad president, not because she's opposing "tradition," but because she's decreasing the efficiency of the system.
Finally, once you accept that the president's "basic duty" is to raise funds, then you've already lost, because that includes squeezing as much money out of you as possible.
That point rests on the moral equivalency of a corporation and a person. We don't even give all people the full personation in this country (children have many restrictions put on them by society, for their own good), so why should a corporation be considered the equal to you or me?
I'm waiting for the Lifetime Original Movie: Developers, Developers, Developers: The Steve Balmer Story. Starring a thoroughly soaked shirt, original score by Steve Balmer.
What I don't get is why people are pondering this as if "parody" and "satire" are opposite sides of the same coin. That's like debating if a pie is "cherry" or "delicious."
Now, "parody" is a defense against copyright infringement. Do parodies have to exist solely to make fun of the artwork it imitates to count? I doubt it. Parodies are almost always expressed as a medium to say something else entirely. That's the point of a parody.
"Satire," on the other hand, is a defense against libel. If, hypothetically, Bush sued jibjab for claiming he rode on a nuclear bomb as it fell, then satire would be a surefire defense (along with a million others).
There is no reason for the false dillema. Just as a pie can be both tasty and apple, something can be both a parody and a satire. We also suffer from some noun confusion as well. Imitating the song is the parody, not mocking the two candidates. Making fun of the two candidates in humorous and absurd situations is satire. Using as the medium an imitation of an artwork is parody. You parody an artwork, you don't "satire" an artwork.
"This land" is both a parody of this land and a satire of the current presidential campaign.
Whoa.. Whoa... Whoa... There is certainly NOT a University of New Jersey. There will have to be a LOT of dead bodies before that happens (over the dead bodies, you see).
I very much agree. It's amazing how many people have become so completely entranced with whatever notion of equality that's worked itself into their heads that they do become racists themselves.
For instance, I was going through the archives of my university's student newspaper, and came across an editorial claiming that an advocate of tougher academic standards at my school was racist. The implication? The writer of the editorial had to believe that minority students were intriniscally not able to meet higher academic standards.
Yes, and no journalist has ever passed along conventional wisdom without a source to back it up.
Like I've said, I've heard this alot (in every single article about an American being knighted) but have never found a real source (aristocracy-interest fluff pieces excluded).
Can you provide sources or are you just repeating conventional wisdom? I'm not trolling, but I've heard this a lot, but I've never been able to find anything to back it up.
For one thing, they're all "honorary." Tim Berner-Lee's knighthood isn't anymore real than anyone else's, these days. And for another, what's the logic in making someone a Knight of the British Empire, but being particular over a thing like whether they can use the title or not?
The best explanation that I've read, by the BBC, traced the "US citizens can't use the title 'sir'" claim back to Article 1, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution.
Roman centurians were most certainly not law enforcement officers. They were even prohibited from entering the city armed (This was sacred, and it being violated was one of the foreshadowings of a collapsing empire). Rome, as a matter of fact, had no organized police force at all.
What about corporate sponsorship.... Pepsi presents "Electoral Math!"
The "problem" with politics is that, on a national level, they're more akin to those hardcore war games than anything that's really mainstream fun. Command and Conquer was a lot more popular than whatever the ultra realistic World War 2 battle simulation of its day was. Not that there's anything wrong with that, though. No one wants to need a degree from the Kennedy School of Government in order to do well in a game. The key is just to seek out the parts that ARE fun and discard the rest.
No. I think you're trying to suggest a logical relationship between him having lost the vote and then winning the presidency. There is no such logical relationship: he won the presidency in spite of losing the vote.
Furthermore, had he never run for office the odds of him being elected would have been nil. Being in the game doesn't guarentee that you'll win, but not being in the game will guarentee that you lose. Of course, American politics are pretty simplistic (in terms of the depth of the issues)... so your interests might coincide reasonably with someone who is "in the game" ("lower taxes"), so your odds aren't completely nil. In a more generalized political system, however, each individual has distinct interests that conflict with everyone else ("tax everyone else, give me the money").
In the end, politics are kind of like armament. Sure, the best way to win a war is not ever to fight one. But if the other guy is amassing tanks on your border...
Actually, that's about the surest way to lose. Remember: politics is the conflict over the distribution of values and burdens. If you're not in the game, that just means more of the former for the rest of us, and more of the latter for you.
Whoa... don't forget to turn on the FUD control, folks.
Socialist==retarded? If you define socialism as collective (governmental) control of the economy, then "socialism" has been the most wildly succesful system of economic management in the United States, ever. Remember, we were still in the depression going into World War 2, and after several years of complete government domination of our means of production the economy exploded following the end of the war. Not to mention the trillions of dollars piped through the Pentagon into developing new technologies (socialism without the social program). Putting aside knee jerk reactions, socialism is still alive and well in the United States (Ironically enough, communism itself was killed off by the bolsheviks in 1918).
The newspost on the Beastie Boys website also includes the denial that the CD installs any vaporware on the user's PC. This has clueless manager written allllll over it.
It doesn't really matter, odds are they're not even plugged in.