Yes, quite sure. My older sister used to bootleg; she did quite well at it for a while. Also, there's been a fair bit of it going on recently where I live (NE Montana), helped a bit by the price disparities between the reservation stores and the stores in non-reservation US space.
even without that, it's just a matter of economics: you create a margin large enough for someone to make a living at it, then someone *will* make a living at it. It's just that simple. So if they raise the price of [anything] by taxing it, that is, adding an artificial, non-production related cost to it, eventually you create that economic space for profit and you instantly have dealers, transport, etc.
It's a myth that ER treatment resolves medical issues as a bottom level (or any level) safety net mechanism for care of anything beyond a very restricted and simplistic set of issues. It's not a myth that you can go to the ER. You can certainly go. They'll be happy to see you. So will the collection agency, the judge, and the credit bureau. But you'll still be sick.
Here's how it's going to go. 1: congress will legislate the currency out of legallity. 2: as a means of exchange, it will then only be of value in fully obfuscated exchanges, meaning you won't be able to use it to buy anything isn't illegal or being illegally sold or being publicly sold. 3: Then they'll start catching people and jailing them (for a LONG time) for using a currency they don't permit in transactions they don't permit for items they don't permit. 4: the value will settle out at zero in the USA, inasmuch as there is no inherent value in the currency itself, and it will have no value as a unit of work exchange.
This includes transactions for drugs; because drug dealers won't have any way to spend the currency -- so the value will be zero there, too.
The idea that congress would let an untraceable currency minted by the public get going in any serious way... that's just delusional. They didn't even let EBay go unmolested. Game over.
No, you see, gems with subluxations are only valuable if, phrenologically speaking, you lump them together underneath a pyramid, where they can infuse your chi with healing and, um, inner serenity. And stuff.
Releasing the sex offenders in most states is the cruelest punishment of all.
This is primarily because the sex offender laws are almost uniformly ridiculous, basically a legislative expression of hysteria on the part of the media and those who drink the media kool-aid, and malfeasance and oath-breaking on the part of legislators.
While incarcerating them forever would solve the live-under-bridge and unemployable-class-membership problem, for most classed as sex offenders, it is wholly unjust -- and worse. Consequently, it is a very poor attempt at a solution.
RAII. That's a tremendously important idiom that simply cannot be expressed in C.
RAII is not important to me and does not implement anything I can't do myself, with extremely fine grained control. To "express" this functionality, I check my allocations, I check my return codes and states, I make sure I provide same, I only do new things based on the known state of things I've already done, and I set up state-testing, abort-capable monitors for operations that might conceivably go open-ended. I try really, really hard to never use other people's code for which I don't have control of the source. Then I test the living heck out of things. And this all leads to release-level programs that don't die by exception in the first place, therefore eliminating the need for a program level mechanism to "save" me due to exceptions.
Compilers are actually quite smart.
You know, I hear that a lot, but looking at the code the compilers actually generate... it's not evidently the case. Concrete example: I am presently in the middle of a very large image processing project which uses the GCC compiler for objc and c. I have had many occasions to look at the generated code for both idioms, and it is *terrible*. Constant reuse of single registers, as if the CPU only *had* one or two usable registers; thrashing variables on and off the stack, failure to optimize simple shifts and divides of integers... the kindest thing I can say about the GCC compiler is that the code works. It *certainly* doesn't produce good or "smart" code. Writing in assembly, I could run rings around it without ever breaking a sweat.
Recently, I had occasion to dissemble and patch a bug Apple had left around in the launchd code for Leopard (10.5.) Even if you assume I'm using GCC poorly, one would think that Apple might be a little better at it, yes? Well, the same thing was strongly evident there: register resuse / register wasting, stack thrashing, basically failure to optimize and failure to utilize.
So while I'll certainly grant you that theoretically speaking, compilers could do a good job than a competent assembly programmer, it's not clear, at all, that they actually do a better job than a competent assembly programmer. The evidence I've seen recently, after many years of compiler development, is entirely the other way.
I have no idea how you drew that conclusion. Certainly not from my Python remarks -- c++ syntax doesn't even vaguely resemble Python. Care to elaborate? Or just trolling?
I'm a libertarian and I am 100% in favor of universal health care in the taxes[healthcare[patient]]] model. Don't generalize. It just makes you look stupid. Thinking libertarians are considerably more interested in your rights and potential than they are in ignoring the fact that an educated and healthy populace provides the strongest basis for personal freedom. Libertarians are not anarchists. Stupid people are anarchists and some of them hide under every label.
meaning that the person with lung cancer is going to be covered every time he goes to the ER anyway
Well, what it *actually* means is that they'll get some aspirin, a steroid inhaler, a prescription they can't afford to fill, and advice to see a doctor they also can't afford. Followed closely by an ER bill they can't afford.
Turns out that in the US, the legal obligation of the ER is to stabilize the patient. Not to treat them and actually resolve the underlying problem. So if you walk in there with lung cancer, you're walking out too, and without chemo, without operation(s), without drugs beyond one dose, and pretty much without anything else you actually need, either. ER as a solution to anything beyond band-aid, splint, or aspirin level problems is a complete and utter myth. It's also worth keeping in mind that whatever treatment you get in the ER you still get billed for -- and it is very expensive. It's a very poor choice, and it is rarely a solution.
And you can solve the smoking problem by increasing the taxes on cigarettes
Just remember.... if taxes are too odious, the black market will take over. 100% guaranteed. Then the smoker pays nothing into healthcare.
The real answer is that there are outliers in both directions: really healthy people, and really sick people, self-caused or not. Aggregate the healthcare costs for everyone, and the outliers -- on both ends -- will be taken care of. It's the cost of a healthy nation, and well worth paying, even if it is annoying.
No. An insurance pool is skimmed for profit by the pollmakers. A tax-created pool isn't. That's the point. Remove the insurance companies and you reduce the skim, which in turn increases the amount available for care. Remove the parsing for the zillions of "uncovered" items and you remove more skim, and make MORE available for care.
It is long past time to make exclusionary health insurance a crime, and set up all-inclusive taxes[doctors[patients]]] as the working mechanism.
Whether it's the right path or not, universal healthcare will exacerbate the effects of that shortage.
UHC can easily be designed to incorporate the changes that need to be made, and therefore address the shortage. The money is there; we simply need to stop bombing camels. We also need to remove insurance companies from the equation, 100%.
With 20% of the population without healthcare, even the instant addition of them to the load of the current healthcare system would add two days to a ten day delay to see a doctor, or turn a 48-minute wait in the office into an hour's wait. It's not a legitimate reason to resist UHC. Those people need healthcare, and every excuse and delay is directly implicated in increased human suffering. It's morally bankrupt behavior.
Why do you refuse to accept that a national health care system will help solve the cost issue as well as the availability issue? Oh yea, libertarian..
Don't be an idiot. I'm a libertarian, I'm wealthy, enough so to afford any conceivable healthcare, and I *totally* support the idea of taxes[healthcare[patients]]] as the best possible, and the most needed, solution to all US healthcare issues. I don't mind in the least paying proportionally more money than a person with lesser wealth, as long as I'm not paying to bomb camels or support things like the government's current war against personal choice. As far as I'm concerned, insurance companies are state-sponsored predators and deserve to be punished for doing public harm with intent and foreknowledge. But I'm still a libertarian: I'm concerned about personal freedom. That doesn't mean that I don't recognize the value to the country and to the individual of an educated, healthy populace with assured basic levels of communications, sustenance, and a decent place to live.
Libertarians aren't generally anarchists, you know. Government has purpose; and building a worthy foundation for a prosperous nation is purpose #1. Real-world government requires a mix of techniques. What we're saying, or at least, what I'm saying as a libertarian, is that the current mix has turned out very poorly, and we should fix it. A lot of the fix requires that citizens get back the many, many rights and freedoms they have lost to the current system. That doesn't mean I want corporations to control government or that I think anything anyone does to anyone (read, insurance) is ok.
Wow, you forgot option 0, the one everybody who is not insured actually uses.
0) Go to the ER as they are legally not allowed to turn away anybody, even if you don't have a cent to your name.
The thing is, all they are obligated to do is stabilize you. So you can go in there suffering from a breakdown because your lung cancer has made it impossible for you to breathe, they'll give you a steroid inhaler, observe that you're now breathing on your own, and write you a note that says you should go see a doctor, which you, of course, get to pay for. They're *not* going to treat your lung cancer. You're NOT going to get chemo, anti-cancer drugs, or an operation. You're going to get the minimum care possible, and they'll get you out of there in the minimum possible time. They might give you a prescription to take to the drugstore, where you can pay out of pocket for it. They certainly won't give you a supply of drugs.
The ER is not an answer for *anything* that can't be fixed by a band-aid, a splint, or drugs administered on the spot.
Glasgow, MT: My best friend makes $18k/year in a local IT job. His wife makes $8k/year. No insurance at work. No kids at home. They're in their 50's. So the gross household income is about $26k -- that's before taxes or any other expense. He's got a hernia, eye trouble, tooth trouble and a surprisingly long list of other crap. She's 5 years out from an occurrence of breast cancer and is diabetic, though she takes excellent care of herself (more than I can say for him... he's seriously depressed and just doesn't care any more... says there's no hope, and if I told him differently to try and improve his outlook, I'd just be lying anyway.)
They can't get health insurance. Period. Absolutely uninsurable. The breast cancer was covered by a state program; but nothing else is. (I suspect this reflects the American obsession with breasts more than anything else... if she'd have had pancreatic cancer, there wouldn't have been any coverage, for instance.) So their health, both of them, is going steadily downhill. More and more of their income is taken up by drug costs. Less and less is available for day to day costs of living.
That's what happens with America's insurance based system. We need a national health care mechanism that collects the amount needed each year in taxes and pays the entire healthcare tab; it's long past time to put insurance-for-profit out of business and reduce the system to taxes[doctor[patient]]. The profiteers have had a lovely run, but it should be terminated. It's directly harmful to society.
The DA and prosecutor haves no motive to discourage this. They get a conviction, it helps their stats. The stats are what they are concerned with, and very little else. Even if they *did* have a motive to discourage it, they have no tools available to them: all they can do is threaten... jailtime. That's what this fellow wants. So he wins.
The judge, on the other hand, is concerned with his calender -- and again, very little else. His goal is a plea bargain to clear the calender. He'll get it; the "criminal" has the upper hand here, because the normal threat "we'll jail you" is what the prisoner wants. So he's going to hold out until he gets what he wants; in order for the judge to clear the calender, he'll have to arrange for jailtime. That's how it'll go.
Sure they have programs to let ex-cons re-enter the society
These are sops; ex-cons are flat-out unemployable. Heck, even if you're *not* a con it's tough to find a job for most people. But if you are... you're done. You're never, ever going to re-integrate with society unless you have resources of your own that make getting a job unnecessary.
The US is in the active process of creating a permanently unemployable underclass, consumed by rage and resentment, with a constantly increasing pool of criminal skills. The next "war" will be against this self-inflicted injury to society, and you can bet your last red cent it will consume the tattered rags of liberty remaining to non-felons today... felons are just a little ahead of the curve.
I don't think so. He's already in jail. The key issue is, he wants to stay in jail, so he'll plead not guilty, forcing them to schedule him for trial. Then he'll use every method he can to delay the trial, and to blow it up as large as possible, forcing it out of the small initial slot in the judge's calender. When they offer him a plea (and they will), he'll just make it clear that the plea needs to include jail time of the desired length, otherwise, it'll be a full-on trial. See, since he wants jail time, he's in the stronger bargaining position here. The only thing they can threaten him with if he won't take the plea is... jail time.
Since the only cost to the judge pays is trial time -- he doesn't bear the cost for incarceration or care -- the judge will likely negotiate the plea in order to clear the calender, his only significant concern. The prosecutor gets another notch on the old gunbelt, the judge gets a clear calender, the "criminal" gets his jailtime (and likely, some aspirin... I don't think this is a great plan on his part) and there you go.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, quite sure. My older sister used to bootleg; she did quite well at it for a while. Also, there's been a fair bit of it going on recently where I live (NE Montana), helped a bit by the price disparities between the reservation stores and the stores in non-reservation US space.
even without that, it's just a matter of economics: you create a margin large enough for someone to make a living at it, then someone *will* make a living at it. It's just that simple. So if they raise the price of [anything] by taxing it, that is, adding an artificial, non-production related cost to it, eventually you create that economic space for profit and you instantly have dealers, transport, etc.
It's a myth that ER treatment resolves medical issues as a bottom level (or any level) safety net mechanism for care of anything beyond a very restricted and simplistic set of issues. It's not a myth that you can go to the ER. You can certainly go. They'll be happy to see you. So will the collection agency, the judge, and the credit bureau. But you'll still be sick.
My spelling checker was perfectly fine with it. I think yours is illiterate. :^)
Here's how it's going to go. 1: congress will legislate the currency out of legallity. 2: as a means of exchange, it will then only be of value in fully obfuscated exchanges, meaning you won't be able to use it to buy anything isn't illegal or being illegally sold or being publicly sold. 3: Then they'll start catching people and jailing them (for a LONG time) for using a currency they don't permit in transactions they don't permit for items they don't permit. 4: the value will settle out at zero in the USA, inasmuch as there is no inherent value in the currency itself, and it will have no value as a unit of work exchange.
This includes transactions for drugs; because drug dealers won't have any way to spend the currency -- so the value will be zero there, too.
The idea that congress would let an untraceable currency minted by the public get going in any serious way... that's just delusional. They didn't even let EBay go unmolested. Game over.
Watt? Maui spell ink is purr fact. Yew justice two critic all, hat's awl. Bee nites two udders, wound and hew?
No, you see, gems with subluxations are only valuable if, phrenologically speaking, you lump them together underneath a pyramid, where they can infuse your chi with healing and, um, inner serenity. And stuff.
This is primarily because the sex offender laws are almost uniformly ridiculous, basically a legislative expression of hysteria on the part of the media and those who drink the media kool-aid, and malfeasance and oath-breaking on the part of legislators.
While incarcerating them forever would solve the live-under-bridge and unemployable-class-membership problem, for most classed as sex offenders, it is wholly unjust -- and worse. Consequently, it is a very poor attempt at a solution.
RAII is not important to me and does not implement anything I can't do myself, with extremely fine grained control. To "express" this functionality, I check my allocations, I check my return codes and states, I make sure I provide same, I only do new things based on the known state of things I've already done, and I set up state-testing, abort-capable monitors for operations that might conceivably go open-ended. I try really, really hard to never use other people's code for which I don't have control of the source. Then I test the living heck out of things. And this all leads to release-level programs that don't die by exception in the first place, therefore eliminating the need for a program level mechanism to "save" me due to exceptions.
You know, I hear that a lot, but looking at the code the compilers actually generate... it's not evidently the case. Concrete example: I am presently in the middle of a very large image processing project which uses the GCC compiler for objc and c. I have had many occasions to look at the generated code for both idioms, and it is *terrible*. Constant reuse of single registers, as if the CPU only *had* one or two usable registers; thrashing variables on and off the stack, failure to optimize simple shifts and divides of integers... the kindest thing I can say about the GCC compiler is that the code works. It *certainly* doesn't produce good or "smart" code. Writing in assembly, I could run rings around it without ever breaking a sweat.
Recently, I had occasion to dissemble and patch a bug Apple had left around in the launchd code for Leopard (10.5.) Even if you assume I'm using GCC poorly, one would think that Apple might be a little better at it, yes? Well, the same thing was strongly evident there: register resuse / register wasting, stack thrashing, basically failure to optimize and failure to utilize.
So while I'll certainly grant you that theoretically speaking, compilers could do a good job than a competent assembly programmer, it's not clear, at all, that they actually do a better job than a competent assembly programmer. The evidence I've seen recently, after many years of compiler development, is entirely the other way.
I have no idea how you drew that conclusion. Certainly not from my Python remarks -- c++ syntax doesn't even vaguely resemble Python. Care to elaborate? Or just trolling?
Microsoft doesn't talk to me. -->
Google it
And he can re-offend, up the ante, and be right back where he wants to be. Its *easy* to go to jail.
I'm a libertarian and I am 100% in favor of universal health care in the taxes[healthcare[patient]]] model. Don't generalize. It just makes you look stupid. Thinking libertarians are considerably more interested in your rights and potential than they are in ignoring the fact that an educated and healthy populace provides the strongest basis for personal freedom. Libertarians are not anarchists. Stupid people are anarchists and some of them hide under every label.
No, they won't. You'll bluster, you'll pay, and they will profit. End of story.
That's cool. Heaths are always getting blasted, and stuff. Glad to hear someone is looking out for them.
Fine. We have a right to free speech. We have a duty to contribute to an educated, healthy populace. An obvious duty, I might add.
Well, what it *actually* means is that they'll get some aspirin, a steroid inhaler, a prescription they can't afford to fill, and advice to see a doctor they also can't afford. Followed closely by an ER bill they can't afford.
Turns out that in the US, the legal obligation of the ER is to stabilize the patient. Not to treat them and actually resolve the underlying problem. So if you walk in there with lung cancer, you're walking out too, and without chemo, without operation(s), without drugs beyond one dose, and pretty much without anything else you actually need, either. ER as a solution to anything beyond band-aid, splint, or aspirin level problems is a complete and utter myth. It's also worth keeping in mind that whatever treatment you get in the ER you still get billed for -- and it is very expensive. It's a very poor choice, and it is rarely a solution.
Just remember.... if taxes are too odious, the black market will take over. 100% guaranteed. Then the smoker pays nothing into healthcare.
The real answer is that there are outliers in both directions: really healthy people, and really sick people, self-caused or not. Aggregate the healthcare costs for everyone, and the outliers -- on both ends -- will be taken care of. It's the cost of a healthy nation, and well worth paying, even if it is annoying.
No. An insurance pool is skimmed for profit by the pollmakers. A tax-created pool isn't. That's the point. Remove the insurance companies and you reduce the skim, which in turn increases the amount available for care. Remove the parsing for the zillions of "uncovered" items and you remove more skim, and make MORE available for care.
It is long past time to make exclusionary health insurance a crime, and set up all-inclusive taxes[doctors[patients]]] as the working mechanism.
UHC can easily be designed to incorporate the changes that need to be made, and therefore address the shortage. The money is there; we simply need to stop bombing camels. We also need to remove insurance companies from the equation, 100%.
With 20% of the population without healthcare, even the instant addition of them to the load of the current healthcare system would add two days to a ten day delay to see a doctor, or turn a 48-minute wait in the office into an hour's wait. It's not a legitimate reason to resist UHC. Those people need healthcare, and every excuse and delay is directly implicated in increased human suffering. It's morally bankrupt behavior.
Don't be an idiot. I'm a libertarian, I'm wealthy, enough so to afford any conceivable healthcare, and I *totally* support the idea of taxes[healthcare[patients]]] as the best possible, and the most needed, solution to all US healthcare issues. I don't mind in the least paying proportionally more money than a person with lesser wealth, as long as I'm not paying to bomb camels or support things like the government's current war against personal choice. As far as I'm concerned, insurance companies are state-sponsored predators and deserve to be punished for doing public harm with intent and foreknowledge. But I'm still a libertarian: I'm concerned about personal freedom. That doesn't mean that I don't recognize the value to the country and to the individual of an educated, healthy populace with assured basic levels of communications, sustenance, and a decent place to live.
Libertarians aren't generally anarchists, you know. Government has purpose; and building a worthy foundation for a prosperous nation is purpose #1. Real-world government requires a mix of techniques. What we're saying, or at least, what I'm saying as a libertarian, is that the current mix has turned out very poorly, and we should fix it. A lot of the fix requires that citizens get back the many, many rights and freedoms they have lost to the current system. That doesn't mean I want corporations to control government or that I think anything anyone does to anyone (read, insurance) is ok.
The thing is, all they are obligated to do is stabilize you. So you can go in there suffering from a breakdown because your lung cancer has made it impossible for you to breathe, they'll give you a steroid inhaler, observe that you're now breathing on your own, and write you a note that says you should go see a doctor, which you, of course, get to pay for. They're *not* going to treat your lung cancer. You're NOT going to get chemo, anti-cancer drugs, or an operation. You're going to get the minimum care possible, and they'll get you out of there in the minimum possible time. They might give you a prescription to take to the drugstore, where you can pay out of pocket for it. They certainly won't give you a supply of drugs.
The ER is not an answer for *anything* that can't be fixed by a band-aid, a splint, or drugs administered on the spot.
Glasgow, MT: My best friend makes $18k/year in a local IT job. His wife makes $8k/year. No insurance at work. No kids at home. They're in their 50's. So the gross household income is about $26k -- that's before taxes or any other expense. He's got a hernia, eye trouble, tooth trouble and a surprisingly long list of other crap. She's 5 years out from an occurrence of breast cancer and is diabetic, though she takes excellent care of herself (more than I can say for him... he's seriously depressed and just doesn't care any more... says there's no hope, and if I told him differently to try and improve his outlook, I'd just be lying anyway.)
They can't get health insurance. Period. Absolutely uninsurable. The breast cancer was covered by a state program; but nothing else is. (I suspect this reflects the American obsession with breasts more than anything else... if she'd have had pancreatic cancer, there wouldn't have been any coverage, for instance.) So their health, both of them, is going steadily downhill. More and more of their income is taken up by drug costs. Less and less is available for day to day costs of living.
That's what happens with America's insurance based system. We need a national health care mechanism that collects the amount needed each year in taxes and pays the entire healthcare tab; it's long past time to put insurance-for-profit out of business and reduce the system to taxes[doctor[patient]].
The profiteers have had a lovely run, but it should be terminated. It's directly harmful to society.
The DA and prosecutor haves no motive to discourage this. They get a conviction, it helps their stats. The stats are what they are concerned with, and very little else. Even if they *did* have a motive to discourage it, they have no tools available to them: all they can do is threaten... jailtime. That's what this fellow wants. So he wins.
The judge, on the other hand, is concerned with his calender -- and again, very little else. His goal is a plea bargain to clear the calender. He'll get it; the "criminal" has the upper hand here, because the normal threat "we'll jail you" is what the prisoner wants. So he's going to hold out until he gets what he wants; in order for the judge to clear the calender, he'll have to arrange for jailtime. That's how it'll go.
These are sops; ex-cons are flat-out unemployable. Heck, even if you're *not* a con it's tough to find a job for most people. But if you are... you're done. You're never, ever going to re-integrate with society unless you have resources of your own that make getting a job unnecessary.
The US is in the active process of creating a permanently unemployable underclass, consumed by rage and resentment, with a constantly increasing pool of criminal skills. The next "war" will be against this self-inflicted injury to society, and you can bet your last red cent it will consume the tattered rags of liberty remaining to non-felons today... felons are just a little ahead of the curve.
I don't think so. He's already in jail. The key issue is, he wants to stay in jail, so he'll plead not guilty, forcing them to schedule him for trial. Then he'll use every method he can to delay the trial, and to blow it up as large as possible, forcing it out of the small initial slot in the judge's calender. When they offer him a plea (and they will), he'll just make it clear that the plea needs to include jail time of the desired length, otherwise, it'll be a full-on trial. See, since he wants jail time, he's in the stronger bargaining position here. The only thing they can threaten him with if he won't take the plea is... jail time.
Since the only cost to the judge pays is trial time -- he doesn't bear the cost for incarceration or care -- the judge will likely negotiate the plea in order to clear the calender, his only significant concern. The prosecutor gets another notch on the old gunbelt, the judge gets a clear calender, the "criminal" gets his jailtime (and likely, some aspirin... I don't think this is a great plan on his part) and there you go.
Welcome to the US legal system.