so you really want the agriculture industry back in the US? I can't such low expectations for americans. the best world I can think of us a country almost completely filled with educate professionals rather than attracting americans to wasting time picking strawberries and oranges by inflating the wages. I really want those jobs exported to other countries because frankly, we should be striving for better. And if we import labor to do these menial jobs in exchange for educating their children and further strengthening the US, then it's pretty good as well.
granted, my view espouses people embracing trade and the competition it brings and then rising up to meet the challenges of other highly educated countries (S. Korea, Singapore, India, China, Japan, Finland) rather than wanting to wallow in mediocrity cashing in on royalty payments from when we used to be the economy with the strongest foundation in the world. silly me.
the vast majority of poor people (illegal or legal) on net receive money from the government. Illegals are far cheaper than legal poor people in that while they do no pay taxes (very similar situation) they don't receive transfers (which net make the legal poor receivers of money from the general population).
to name several very expensive programs that far outweight a minimum wager's contribution to fica and income taxes: child tax credit earned income tax credit medicaid chips
and on and on.
so actually, you shoudl be cheering the high illegal population because if you just replaced them with uneducated americans (you know, the ones who would take the jobs the illegals are doing now) you end up FAR WORSE OFF.
any particular reason you believe germany was uniquely defeated by the Russians? People say this over and over again and besides the fact that more Russians died, I've never heard a convincing argument as to this point. It is EQUALLY false to say Germany was defeated by the British or Americans as well. Your position assumes the marginal help given by the US or Britain was meaningless or not terribly meaningful. It was a 3 front strategy that overwhelmed a frankly under gunned Germany. There are valid arguments that Germany surrendered to the US and British forces because they were afraid of the barbary of the Russians, but that is different from saying the Russians primarily defeated them.
Now when it comes to Japan, the US defeated Japan almost unilaterally.
but to your broader point, equal rights and justice for all sound very nice, but in reconstruction of Europe, doing anything is charity , NOT an equal rights question. your position assumes that you violate ideas of justice or equal rights simply by not giving someone half of what you have.
as to the general issue of whether our wars are fundamentally unjust, that is harder to argue. it is easy to say "the US did this and supported that dictator" but without trying to understand the tradeoffs, you don't know if people were, on net, better off. every decision makes someone worse off at the expense of another. equivalently, look at the death rate on Iwo Jima for the Japanese. 20,000 soldiers almost totally fought to the last man and died. So while nuclear weapons sound terrible, are you sure we wouldn't have had to kill many, many, many more to achieve peace? More Japanese died or were injured in the taking of Okinawa, by a factor of 2 by some estimates, and that local population had almost NO LOYALTY TO JAPAN. So which was kinder given the fact the US and Japan were at war with each other? I figure 200,000 civilians dead in a shock and awe campaign is much more compassionate and just than the millions who would have died in an invasion given the record at each previous engagement. The truly depressing part was taht we didn't drop these bombs before Okinawa or the firebombing of Tokyo and that we didn't use one on Berlin to possibly shock the Nazis into a much earlier surrender. Instead of worrying about those that died in one attack though, I'm much more interested in reducing the total civilian casualty numbers.
you realize the judge addressed this already, only those clauses that depend directly on paragraph 1501 (or something like that) are rule unconstitutional and the rest of the law stands. but he will not put forward an inunction since that section doesn't start until 2014 and so, an injunction is pretty much meaningless.
if I'm not mistaken, he did talk about two major reforms that would address both of your points: forcing pricing of risk groups and transferability of insurance (i.e. making it not tied to a particular employee).
these two things together, implemented properly, correct for your issues. Then, we can talk about government subsidies to people born with conditions to make the risk group insurance less onerous. But let's address the issues at hand that you bring up and not thing that me paying for a person who has smoked for 20 years is somehow the best solution.
I read it as in his world, reform would address these two gaping issues.
you should read the law more carefully, it simply means you stop offering individual policies as an insurance company and only provide it to groups of a minimum size where statistics is back on your side. or premiums become unwieldy.
that isn't true, there is not always someone who will do it for less. and since when does someone have to offer you a job at a wage you prefer? In india where construction is a very unskilled job, but people are still paid a wage they can live on because there is a demand for that work. Now if you are saying there is an over abundance of unskilled labor in this country vs our need for it, then market forces would encourage people to get skills. You see this in abundance in India and China where development makes large demands on skilled labor today vs the case 30 years ago.
as an aside: I'm not sure why you think a junk bond trader should resort to panhandling. Is it because you don't value what they do? then you should not pay them for their work is all. But obviously a large chunk of society does. I don't value what apple produces at all, but to make the quantum leap from my beliefs to the value of what they produce in general is pretty self centered.
not true. this is why most people can't fathom how insurance works. take the counter example, why shouldn't sears change tires for poor elderly people for free some times? they should earn enough because they already have lots of full paying customers?
well if that is ok, why not just require they change tires for poor elderly people for a nominal fee of 10 dollars. That way they are getting paid and the full price paying group should make them whole in the end.
It is still a business with an acceptable profit margin given the risks you take (and let's not start an argument about "fair" profits, if you are willing to accept far less, you have pricing power to dominate the insurance market and should enter it).
If a healthy young person generates on average, 200 dollars of profit before tax and you have 100 of these people. you earn 20,000 dollars. if you insure someone with type II diabetes at the same price, you will probably take several thousand dollars in losses if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses due to an amputation or blindness. that 20,000 dollars of profit is now much smaller, to recover it, you raise premiums on all people (a group plan) or you simply make each person pay at their risk level. even a nonprofit finds itself squeezed in this way. many nonprofit insurance companies do NOT offer significantly lower rates, and I"m not sure why tehy wouldn't if they are non-profits unless the math is just against you. the math stops working, and that is why we are where we are.
the overall idea in economics is just marginal revenue vs marginal cost (or marginal decision making)
more completely, if you didnt' get a massive tax break going through the group rate, you would probably have a huge incentive to leave the group and get an individual policy at a cheaper rate. then again, since your company also lowers your wage and covers chunks of the premiums, maybe not unless you could negotiate a higher wage.
why are we required to have garbage collectors? that is patently false actually since for most of human history, we continued to exist and thrive without garbage collectors. in fact, hwen the vast majority of the populace lives doing agricultural work, it is highly unlikely you will have garbage collectors. while urban and suburban living would change, it would by no mean end or cause hte collapse of civilization.
on the other hand, I do beleive the OP is incorrect because being homosexual does not rule out sexual activity with the opposite sex for the purpose of procreation. in fact, as humans are one of the species that has sex for enjoyment, you could easily be homosexual for enjoyment and hetersexual for the few times a person must procreate in their lifetime.
why are we required to have garbage collectors? that is patently false actually since for most of human history, we continued to exist and thrive without garbage collectors. in fact, hwen the vast majority of the populace lives doing agricultural work, it is highly unlikely you will have garbage collectors. while urban and suburban living would change, it would by no mean end or cause hte collapse of civilization.
on the other hand, I do beleive the OP is incorrect because being homosexual does not rule out sexual activity with the opposite sex for the purpose of procreation. in fact, as humans are one of the species that has sex for enjoyment, you could easily be homosexual for enjoyment and hetersexual for the few times a person must procreate in their lifetime.
the question is, what is a fair wage. I'd say a fair wage is being paid for the value of what you produce. so if all I produce is crap, I get paid commensurately. So we will probably disagree on the definition of "fair".
so instead of using a loaded term like "fair", how about you say either someone should be compensated commensurate with the value of what they produce as governed by the market, or someone should be compensated at a level where they can live at a specified lifestyle regardless of the value of what they produce.
generally the first statement is what libertarians support, the second statement is much closer to what liberals mean when they say a "fair wage for an honest day's work". I'm not sure what your meaning is actually so I'm not trying to accuse you of being a liberal or be insulting, only of insinuating things about the previous poster without a clear statement.
wow, it doesn't sound like you read the judgment or followed the health care debate (I'm not trying to be insulting, but your views don't jive). the mandate was possibly the most desired thing by insurance companies, next to the federal government paying whatever price they charge for poor people.
with this section removed, the question is what other sections of the law directly refer to it (in the ruling it is those directly referred to sections that would also be trimmed since there isn't a severability clause, not the entire law). of course, seeing as how it is a monstrosity of a bill, I'm not sure anyone outside of the legal profession knows what has been invalidated.
you should be cheering if you want to see the profits of the insurance companies get crunched. well, that is until people realize insurance companies are trying to earn money adn therefore, will simply not offer policies rather than run afowl of the "no person gets left out".
The real question I think to be asked though is do you disagree with the interpretation of the constitution that the commerce clause does not give the federal government the right to require the purchase of health care insurance? If you disagree with that then you can disagree with the basis of this lawsuit but prevaricating and bringing up politics doesn't help foment rational discussion.
actually, why would you expect high end gadgets aimed at the upper income brackets to be hurt in this recession? If this recession has done anything, it has left behind in the dust about 20% of the US as the rest have prospered. In fact, research on this has shown that if you kept your job through this recession, you have gotten several RAISES over this period and are more in a position to buy apple products.
But if you have a reason to expect high end chains to do poorly when high end consumers continue to prosper, I'm wondering what it would be.
and keep in mind, people like Exxon are also experiencing rapid growth in this recession as are quite a few companies (google as well comes to mind).
Also, I'm not really sure why you think android isn't taking some sales from iphone. you have a new and growing market for consumer smart phones so EVERYONE is experiencing sales growth. I'm just assuming that some purchases must be coming at the iphone's expense, especially since so many android phones are aimed directly at the iphone and not at the blackberry. It would be hard to miss the mark by that much.
anyways, I didn't say this in your original post, but why do you think apple isn't in the race to the bottom of prices as much as everyone else? their computers are comparably priced (just you have to buy more features than you may want or need), their ipods are very competitively (if not more cheaply) priced, the iphone is as well. remember how fast the iPod and iPhone prices came down as they marched towards acceptance? iPhones for 400 dollars would be quite a bit more profitable, they just wouldn't sell anywhere near as much as iPhones for 100 and 200 dollars.
that's an amazing call to think it'll be the biggest market cap company. biggest tech company : already there. biggest everywhere means you have to compete with the likes of Exxon. If apple is ever expected to long term, be a better investment than exxon, there is an issue. one has an "easy" business of providing the entire globe something it needs and cannot be easily replaced. The other, if it ever sat on it's but for more than 2 or 3 years, would get wiped out as everyone and there mother comes out with better, more innovative consumer tech in the areas apple is excelling.
It's already amazing the market cap is at 288 bio while XOM is at 350 bio. Exxon makes about 75% more/quarter and again, has it a lot easier.
you have me wrong. my title of my post says it all. How can you consider pushing an upgraded version with larger margins and revenue streams to be internal cannibalization? my point is you can't. I'm not talking about their innovativeness with consumer products (though granted, as touch screen phones were around in Japan several years before the iPhone I could get into an argument about modular software upgrades to existing hardware ideas, but who cares?)
this is only a valid argument if the ipad is a lower margin product than a laptop they sell AND they control such a significant portion of the laptop market they could regularly cannibalize sales. as neither of these are true (or at least very iffy comparing the ipad with the lowest end macbook), it doesn't hold water. Only in the case of a household that is considering a second macbook pro (very high margin) and decides instead an ipad fits what they need (they why consider the pro?) does this follow easily. It's not that a few sales may be lost, but the vast majority won't.
compare this to google with the android OS and chrome OS. The chrome OS's stated purpose is to be the OS of the future which is invalidate all the work they did on android for a good mobile platform OS. that is attempted cannibalization and will become more so if android keeps growing to dominate the mobile market.
Why wouldn't you release the iPhone, a beefed up iPod + phone service, which gives you much larger profit margins, and having everyone who bought an iPod upgrade for a significant extra outlay? I'm confused.
Again, how does the iPad, which can't connect to a printer, run multiple apps at once, connect to most peripherals easily cannibalize your laptop sales? It's like saying when Sony introduces a new netbook or ultralight laptop model they are cannibalizing their other sales. This sounds like apple worship. Give credit where it is due, don't start acting like they are doing things no one else does with their business lines.
and where do they get 65 billion from? the market value is 250 billion+.
wow, so I'm glad your total reason for having a mac is because...... well, it keeps you sane and does what you "want". I was hoping for something real, tangible, and measurable.
no, I have trouble with my mac when I have 9 or 10 tabs open in a browser and open office up to write a document. forget playing music in itunes at the same time.
now, under similar circustances, I can have open several tabs, open office, windows movie maker, some music, and vlc running smoothly. I even add (gag!) internet explorer to access certain data for work. I know, it's nothing like compiling a massive program or rendering HD video, but under similar style usage, I get far more run out of my windows machine.
I wasn't complaining about the iPad because I'm trying to ding apple. I'm pointing out an example of a real drawback to using 1 system over another for a particular, advertised use. as I had said, I love the iPhone as a platform for getting to useful, powerful apps that are well built in a compact form.
I'm glad you had nothing you comment on that your mac does a windows machine can't/doesn't/is found wanting. I've heard good points before that come down to preferences in the UI. but I have yet to, and continue to be waiting for, a real performance/capability issue to be brought up that can be measured and weighed.
wow, it's funny, I am scared to just shut the lid on my mac book because sometimes it doesn't do things in a sane manner. instead I have to hold it's hand and wait for confirmation it's done what I expect.
my favorite: click shutdown, say yes, then close lid. When I open the lid 4 hours later, it wakes up and continues shutting down. now I'm not sure what good design is all the time, but I'm sure that isn't. It's pretty damn trivial to check of something like shutting down is in process when the lid is closed and just let that process finish. I call it lazy fucking programming and I'm not even a system's developer.
beyond 1 q/a session with the maker, I don't care to keep on with fixing a shitty interface. I'm guessing you feel quite similar though you seem to have followed up quite a bit.
on the other hand, I've never had any issues with sleep, shutdown, or other actions with my windows 7 machine. so uh, I guess your last line right back at you?
what, might I ask, do you struggle to do on a windows machine that your mac can? when was the last time you used windows? frankly, if there is anything you do on your mac that you can't do on your windows, you're either an idiot when it comes to windows or not caring to learn how different icons or menus work.
I know, you get paid to develop/work with computer/ etc but frankly, if your entire preference for mac is based on some ephemeral standards, I feel bad for you. not because you are locked into some reality distortion field, but because you are ignoring 90% of technology in the world for some random feeling of "ease".
But if you can come up with something your mac can do that you can't do in windows I'd love to hear it.
So far, my mac one 1 purpose: playing dvd's on my TV. why? because I find the entire design of the interface slow, clunky, and not worth the time dealing with. Worse, I find it a slow, unresponsive OS, comparable to the last windows 98 computer I had (and this mac is only 3.5 years old). My iphone on the other hand, is the best phone I've used. But the only thing that is good about it is the apps that have been made for it (news, cooking instructions, among my favorites).
And why the ipad isn't going to be added right now: a screen covered in my fingerprints isn't good for watching movies, especially darker movies which involve a lot of dark colors.
why waste money on a lawyer? do you have idea what it costs? why not mimic what the big guys do: check the obvious and if it isn't there, don't waste time going through every IP whore's portfolio.
given that you read slashdot, you should browse the home page and notice that MS just pulled office as it lost a patent suit. Any idea how much money MS has? how many lawyers are on their payroll? how ridiculous it is to expect someone to pay 10s of thousands of dollars for an in depth IP search across multiple markets? that is one heck of a brute force approach. I sure hope you aren't trying to run a small business that has anything to do with IP because I'd be worried as an investor that you are squandering money trying to turn over every stone rather than building a better product.
how about a creative approach? hire a lawyer to start a small corporation where he is the only investor and have that company publish the game. At that point, if he gets into trouble, he just loses the capital in the company. If he is smart and pays himself a salary as a hired employee, then (granted, his taxes get more complex) even with a lawsuit, he should have been able to drain enough of hte earnings out of the company in his salary to not be on the hook for his personal assets. A small business lawyer can do this for cheap (1k) and help him work through many of his questions quickly about how to separate the books properly. but it's sure a smarter idea than "hey lawyer guy, why don't you take this product and search every IP in every market and see if I'll run foul". oh, and while he is at it, I'm sure you are expecting him to get it right. we've seen how many well financed companies have no IP problems.
as to your two examples of preventative healthcare, there are 10's of millions of dollars spent every year on public education and work to reduce smoking and obesity. and I'm not sure you can say in the UK people are healthier (which is hard to measure when you consider only healthcare's impact on your health vs stress in life, etc).
In the UK, Obesity + overweight seem to hover around 63% for men while in teh US it is around 66%. Now, I will fully admit that 3% is a pretty big difference when conerted to pounds, but from a public perspective, it's not that much better of an outcome. And in the last decade, obesity rates have doubled in the UK (the US hasn't moved up nearly as fast, but then, it really couldn't without everyone becoming a complete cow).
so it is nice in theory that the NHS will help you, but as we see in the US, even when help is offered many people don't care to change their lifestyle to lose the weight.
these are all random factoids I searched for just now. nothing very interesting other than what I noticed when I was in London: the city didn't look thinner than what I've seen in the US.
now as to your point about perverse incentives and sharing the burden to take care of each other, because I took some time to think it through so I could respond in a coherent manner. To do this I am going to use the standard physicist mentality of extrapolating to the extremes and then doing the linear interp for my conclusions, which may seem harsh but I hope consistent:
In a system where everyone can receive 100% free care in the ER regardless of income level, insurance coverage, etc, an incentive is created for young professionals and those entering the middle class to forgo insurance simply because they know that they currently do not have the savings to pay a large medical bill, they do not want to reduce their standard of living to pay for this medical bill, and they know they can get the care they need in case of a major emergency.
These 3 points mean a large portion of the uninsured population is that way out of personal choice. There are those at my work that do not get health insurance even though the employer subsidizes the premiums massively. Many are earning more than enough to afford such a plan. A system which still offers these people good care for free means they are cashing a free option to get everyone else to pay for them. I have the absolute least compassion for those who act irresponsibly and am a firm believer of sleeping in the bed you make. Call this my theory on personal responsibility. And yes, I am saying if this person cannot either find a hospice to provide care for a reduced price or pay themselves, they are SOL.
An extension of this is my issue with universal publicly funded health care. The biggest problem (and this is exacerbated by what our current bill looks like) says that the person who acts the most irresponsibly will receive the most tax benefit.
Take two people. One man (yeah,I'm a guy, so everything is framed from the male perspective) works hard at a low paying job but saves what money he can, does not smoke or drink, drives safely, but simply can't afford insurance (yeah, I know a guy like this, a very close friend and if he needed help with medical bills I'd be there for him). The second man smokes and drinks constantly, does not hold down a full time job or work hard, and refuses to save rather squandering money away. worse yet, he eats fast food super sized meals 3 times a day and refuses to control his calorie intake to at elast have a fighting chance at health.
Our proposed system, for some unknown reason, has decided the second person is deserving of massive subsidies for health insurance while the first only deserves modest. And worse yet, we will reduce our help for this second man severely if he cleans up his life and begins to live right.
I'm sorry but I don't agree with that. I believe society should help those people who try to improve their lot but for whatever reaso
Sure, as long as your happy with reducing the life expectancy for the vast, vast majority of people then great. I'm glad you are happy to kill off 15% of your sick so that everyone can get mediocre care. I'd rather the system focuses on finding out why:
1. that 15% doesn't have health insurance. It is a choice for a large group. Even the illegal immigrants would have insurance if they were simply legal immigrants and poor (medicaid is then an option). These stats look a lot less ominous suddenly
2. improving the care for everyone.
Anyways, it isn't a significant statistic. It happens to be that those people who die of cancer because they never got care are still diagnosed as having died of cancer. Cancer isn't some silent killer. it has very obvious effects in late stage that these people end up going to the emergency room for and then getting counted.
What I would be interested to see is the difference in survival rates for just the poor to see if the US even treats it's poor to lower quality care.
The heart attack data comes directly from the UK Department of Health and the Journal of the American Medical Association. The cancer data was sourced here: http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba596
the problem is when faced with these stats, Europeans now can't raise their hand and say,"yes, we have worse care by a very wide margin in several important areas" but rather fall back on "the US in unfair because not everyone gets to have those great results". But at least we strive to do well enough for a large enough group that rates on average still trounce Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
so you really want the agriculture industry back in the US? I can't such low expectations for americans. the best world I can think of us a country almost completely filled with educate professionals rather than attracting americans to wasting time picking strawberries and oranges by inflating the wages. I really want those jobs exported to other countries because frankly, we should be striving for better. And if we import labor to do these menial jobs in exchange for educating their children and further strengthening the US, then it's pretty good as well.
granted, my view espouses people embracing trade and the competition it brings and then rising up to meet the challenges of other highly educated countries (S. Korea, Singapore, India, China, Japan, Finland) rather than wanting to wallow in mediocrity cashing in on royalty payments from when we used to be the economy with the strongest foundation in the world. silly me.
the vast majority of poor people (illegal or legal) on net receive money from the government. Illegals are far cheaper than legal poor people in that while they do no pay taxes (very similar situation) they don't receive transfers (which net make the legal poor receivers of money from the general population).
to name several very expensive programs that far outweight a minimum wager's contribution to fica and income taxes:
child tax credit
earned income tax credit
medicaid
chips
and on and on.
so actually, you shoudl be cheering the high illegal population because if you just replaced them with uneducated americans (you know, the ones who would take the jobs the illegals are doing now) you end up FAR WORSE OFF.
any particular reason you believe germany was uniquely defeated by the Russians? People say this over and over again and besides the fact that more Russians died, I've never heard a convincing argument as to this point. It is EQUALLY false to say Germany was defeated by the British or Americans as well. Your position assumes the marginal help given by the US or Britain was meaningless or not terribly meaningful. It was a 3 front strategy that overwhelmed a frankly under gunned Germany. There are valid arguments that Germany surrendered to the US and British forces because they were afraid of the barbary of the Russians, but that is different from saying the Russians primarily defeated them.
Now when it comes to Japan, the US defeated Japan almost unilaterally.
but to your broader point, equal rights and justice for all sound very nice, but in reconstruction of Europe, doing anything is charity , NOT an equal rights question. your position assumes that you violate ideas of justice or equal rights simply by not giving someone half of what you have.
as to the general issue of whether our wars are fundamentally unjust, that is harder to argue. it is easy to say "the US did this and supported that dictator" but without trying to understand the tradeoffs, you don't know if people were, on net, better off. every decision makes someone worse off at the expense of another. equivalently, look at the death rate on Iwo Jima for the Japanese. 20,000 soldiers almost totally fought to the last man and died. So while nuclear weapons sound terrible, are you sure we wouldn't have had to kill many, many, many more to achieve peace? More Japanese died or were injured in the taking of Okinawa, by a factor of 2 by some estimates, and that local population had almost NO LOYALTY TO JAPAN. So which was kinder given the fact the US and Japan were at war with each other? I figure 200,000 civilians dead in a shock and awe campaign is much more compassionate and just than the millions who would have died in an invasion given the record at each previous engagement. The truly depressing part was taht we didn't drop these bombs before Okinawa or the firebombing of Tokyo and that we didn't use one on Berlin to possibly shock the Nazis into a much earlier surrender. Instead of worrying about those that died in one attack though, I'm much more interested in reducing the total civilian casualty numbers.
you realize the judge addressed this already, only those clauses that depend directly on paragraph 1501 (or something like that) are rule unconstitutional and the rest of the law stands. but he will not put forward an inunction since that section doesn't start until 2014 and so, an injunction is pretty much meaningless.
if I'm not mistaken, he did talk about two major reforms that would address both of your points: forcing pricing of risk groups and transferability of insurance (i.e. making it not tied to a particular employee).
these two things together, implemented properly, correct for your issues. Then, we can talk about government subsidies to people born with conditions to make the risk group insurance less onerous. But let's address the issues at hand that you bring up and not thing that me paying for a person who has smoked for 20 years is somehow the best solution.
I read it as in his world, reform would address these two gaping issues.
you should read the law more carefully, it simply means you stop offering individual policies as an insurance company and only provide it to groups of a minimum size where statistics is back on your side. or premiums become unwieldy.
that isn't true, there is not always someone who will do it for less. and since when does someone have to offer you a job at a wage you prefer? In india where construction is a very unskilled job, but people are still paid a wage they can live on because there is a demand for that work. Now if you are saying there is an over abundance of unskilled labor in this country vs our need for it, then market forces would encourage people to get skills. You see this in abundance in India and China where development makes large demands on skilled labor today vs the case 30 years ago.
as an aside:
I'm not sure why you think a junk bond trader should resort to panhandling. Is it because you don't value what they do? then you should not pay them for their work is all. But obviously a large chunk of society does. I don't value what apple produces at all, but to make the quantum leap from my beliefs to the value of what they produce in general is pretty self centered.
not true. this is why most people can't fathom how insurance works. take the counter example, why shouldn't sears change tires for poor elderly people for free some times? they should earn enough because they already have lots of full paying customers?
well if that is ok, why not just require they change tires for poor elderly people for a nominal fee of 10 dollars. That way they are getting paid and the full price paying group should make them whole in the end.
It is still a business with an acceptable profit margin given the risks you take (and let's not start an argument about "fair" profits, if you are willing to accept far less, you have pricing power to dominate the insurance market and should enter it).
If a healthy young person generates on average, 200 dollars of profit before tax and you have 100 of these people. you earn 20,000 dollars. if you insure someone with type II diabetes at the same price, you will probably take several thousand dollars in losses if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses due to an amputation or blindness. that 20,000 dollars of profit is now much smaller, to recover it, you raise premiums on all people (a group plan) or you simply make each person pay at their risk level. even a nonprofit finds itself squeezed in this way. many nonprofit insurance companies do NOT offer significantly lower rates, and I"m not sure why tehy wouldn't if they are non-profits unless the math is just against you. the math stops working, and that is why we are where we are.
the overall idea in economics is just marginal revenue vs marginal cost (or marginal decision making)
more completely, if you didnt' get a massive tax break going through the group rate, you would probably have a huge incentive to leave the group and get an individual policy at a cheaper rate. then again, since your company also lowers your wage and covers chunks of the premiums, maybe not unless you could negotiate a higher wage.
why are we required to have garbage collectors? that is patently false actually since for most of human history, we continued to exist and thrive without garbage collectors. in fact, hwen the vast majority of the populace lives doing agricultural work, it is highly unlikely you will have garbage collectors. while urban and suburban living would change, it would by no mean end or cause hte collapse of civilization.
on the other hand, I do beleive the OP is incorrect because being homosexual does not rule out sexual activity with the opposite sex for the purpose of procreation. in fact, as humans are one of the species that has sex for enjoyment, you could easily be homosexual for enjoyment and hetersexual for the few times a person must procreate in their lifetime.
why are we required to have garbage collectors? that is patently false actually since for most of human history, we continued to exist and thrive without garbage collectors. in fact, hwen the vast majority of the populace lives doing agricultural work, it is highly unlikely you will have garbage collectors. while urban and suburban living would change, it would by no mean end or cause hte collapse of civilization.
on the other hand, I do beleive the OP is incorrect because being homosexual does not rule out sexual activity with the opposite sex for the purpose of procreation. in fact, as humans are one of the species that has sex for enjoyment, you could easily be homosexual for enjoyment and hetersexual for the few times a person must procreate in their lifetime.
the question is, what is a fair wage. I'd say a fair wage is being paid for the value of what you produce. so if all I produce is crap, I get paid commensurately. So we will probably disagree on the definition of "fair".
so instead of using a loaded term like "fair", how about you say either someone should be compensated commensurate with the value of what they produce as governed by the market, or someone should be compensated at a level where they can live at a specified lifestyle regardless of the value of what they produce.
generally the first statement is what libertarians support, the second statement is much closer to what liberals mean when they say a "fair wage for an honest day's work". I'm not sure what your meaning is actually so I'm not trying to accuse you of being a liberal or be insulting, only of insinuating things about the previous poster without a clear statement.
wow, it doesn't sound like you read the judgment or followed the health care debate (I'm not trying to be insulting, but your views don't jive). the mandate was possibly the most desired thing by insurance companies, next to the federal government paying whatever price they charge for poor people.
with this section removed, the question is what other sections of the law directly refer to it (in the ruling it is those directly referred to sections that would also be trimmed since there isn't a severability clause, not the entire law). of course, seeing as how it is a monstrosity of a bill, I'm not sure anyone outside of the legal profession knows what has been invalidated.
you should be cheering if you want to see the profits of the insurance companies get crunched. well, that is until people realize insurance companies are trying to earn money adn therefore, will simply not offer policies rather than run afowl of the "no person gets left out".
The real question I think to be asked though is do you disagree with the interpretation of the constitution that the commerce clause does not give the federal government the right to require the purchase of health care insurance? If you disagree with that then you can disagree with the basis of this lawsuit but prevaricating and bringing up politics doesn't help foment rational discussion.
actually, why would you expect high end gadgets aimed at the upper income brackets to be hurt in this recession? If this recession has done anything, it has left behind in the dust about 20% of the US as the rest have prospered. In fact, research on this has shown that if you kept your job through this recession, you have gotten several RAISES over this period and are more in a position to buy apple products.
But if you have a reason to expect high end chains to do poorly when high end consumers continue to prosper, I'm wondering what it would be.
and keep in mind, people like Exxon are also experiencing rapid growth in this recession as are quite a few companies (google as well comes to mind).
Also, I'm not really sure why you think android isn't taking some sales from iphone. you have a new and growing market for consumer smart phones so EVERYONE is experiencing sales growth. I'm just assuming that some purchases must be coming at the iphone's expense, especially since so many android phones are aimed directly at the iphone and not at the blackberry. It would be hard to miss the mark by that much.
anyways, I didn't say this in your original post, but why do you think apple isn't in the race to the bottom of prices as much as everyone else? their computers are comparably priced (just you have to buy more features than you may want or need), their ipods are very competitively (if not more cheaply) priced, the iphone is as well. remember how fast the iPod and iPhone prices came down as they marched towards acceptance? iPhones for 400 dollars would be quite a bit more profitable, they just wouldn't sell anywhere near as much as iPhones for 100 and 200 dollars.
that's an amazing call to think it'll be the biggest market cap company. biggest tech company : already there. biggest everywhere means you have to compete with the likes of Exxon. If apple is ever expected to long term, be a better investment than exxon, there is an issue. one has an "easy" business of providing the entire globe something it needs and cannot be easily replaced. The other, if it ever sat on it's but for more than 2 or 3 years, would get wiped out as everyone and there mother comes out with better, more innovative consumer tech in the areas apple is excelling.
It's already amazing the market cap is at 288 bio while XOM is at 350 bio. Exxon makes about 75% more/quarter and again, has it a lot easier.
you have me wrong. my title of my post says it all. How can you consider pushing an upgraded version with larger margins and revenue streams to be internal cannibalization? my point is you can't. I'm not talking about their innovativeness with consumer products (though granted, as touch screen phones were around in Japan several years before the iPhone I could get into an argument about modular software upgrades to existing hardware ideas, but who cares?)
this is only a valid argument if the ipad is a lower margin product than a laptop they sell AND they control such a significant portion of the laptop market they could regularly cannibalize sales. as neither of these are true (or at least very iffy comparing the ipad with the lowest end macbook), it doesn't hold water. Only in the case of a household that is considering a second macbook pro (very high margin) and decides instead an ipad fits what they need (they why consider the pro?) does this follow easily. It's not that a few sales may be lost, but the vast majority won't.
compare this to google with the android OS and chrome OS. The chrome OS's stated purpose is to be the OS of the future which is invalidate all the work they did on android for a good mobile platform OS. that is attempted cannibalization and will become more so if android keeps growing to dominate the mobile market.
Why wouldn't you release the iPhone, a beefed up iPod + phone service, which gives you much larger profit margins, and having everyone who bought an iPod upgrade for a significant extra outlay? I'm confused.
Again, how does the iPad, which can't connect to a printer, run multiple apps at once, connect to most peripherals easily cannibalize your laptop sales? It's like saying when Sony introduces a new netbook or ultralight laptop model they are cannibalizing their other sales. This sounds like apple worship. Give credit where it is due, don't start acting like they are doing things no one else does with their business lines.
and where do they get 65 billion from? the market value is 250 billion+.
wow, so I'm glad your total reason for having a mac is because...... well, it keeps you sane and does what you "want". I was hoping for something real, tangible, and measurable.
no, I have trouble with my mac when I have 9 or 10 tabs open in a browser and open office up to write a document. forget playing music in itunes at the same time.
now, under similar circustances, I can have open several tabs, open office, windows movie maker, some music, and vlc running smoothly. I even add (gag!) internet explorer to access certain data for work. I know, it's nothing like compiling a massive program or rendering HD video, but under similar style usage, I get far more run out of my windows machine.
I wasn't complaining about the iPad because I'm trying to ding apple. I'm pointing out an example of a real drawback to using 1 system over another for a particular, advertised use. as I had said, I love the iPhone as a platform for getting to useful, powerful apps that are well built in a compact form.
I'm glad you had nothing you comment on that your mac does a windows machine can't/doesn't/is found wanting. I've heard good points before that come down to preferences in the UI. but I have yet to, and continue to be waiting for, a real performance/capability issue to be brought up that can be measured and weighed.
wow, it's funny, I am scared to just shut the lid on my mac book because sometimes it doesn't do things in a sane manner. instead I have to hold it's hand and wait for confirmation it's done what I expect.
my favorite:
click shutdown, say yes, then close lid. When I open the lid 4 hours later, it wakes up and continues shutting down. now I'm not sure what good design is all the time, but I'm sure that isn't. It's pretty damn trivial to check of something like shutting down is in process when the lid is closed and just let that process finish. I call it lazy fucking programming and I'm not even a system's developer.
beyond 1 q/a session with the maker, I don't care to keep on with fixing a shitty interface. I'm guessing you feel quite similar though you seem to have followed up quite a bit.
on the other hand, I've never had any issues with sleep, shutdown, or other actions with my windows 7 machine. so uh, I guess your last line right back at you?
what, might I ask, do you struggle to do on a windows machine that your mac can? when was the last time you used windows? frankly, if there is anything you do on your mac that you can't do on your windows, you're either an idiot when it comes to windows or not caring to learn how different icons or menus work.
I know, you get paid to develop/work with computer/ etc but frankly, if your entire preference for mac is based on some ephemeral standards, I feel bad for you. not because you are locked into some reality distortion field, but because you are ignoring 90% of technology in the world for some random feeling of "ease".
But if you can come up with something your mac can do that you can't do in windows I'd love to hear it.
So far, my mac one 1 purpose: playing dvd's on my TV. why? because I find the entire design of the interface slow, clunky, and not worth the time dealing with. Worse, I find it a slow, unresponsive OS, comparable to the last windows 98 computer I had (and this mac is only 3.5 years old). My iphone on the other hand, is the best phone I've used. But the only thing that is good about it is the apps that have been made for it (news, cooking instructions, among my favorites).
And why the ipad isn't going to be added right now: a screen covered in my fingerprints isn't good for watching movies, especially darker movies which involve a lot of dark colors.
why waste money on a lawyer? do you have idea what it costs? why not mimic what the big guys do: check the obvious and if it isn't there, don't waste time going through every IP whore's portfolio.
given that you read slashdot, you should browse the home page and notice that MS just pulled office as it lost a patent suit. Any idea how much money MS has? how many lawyers are on their payroll? how ridiculous it is to expect someone to pay 10s of thousands of dollars for an in depth IP search across multiple markets? that is one heck of a brute force approach. I sure hope you aren't trying to run a small business that has anything to do with IP because I'd be worried as an investor that you are squandering money trying to turn over every stone rather than building a better product.
how about a creative approach? hire a lawyer to start a small corporation where he is the only investor and have that company publish the game. At that point, if he gets into trouble, he just loses the capital in the company. If he is smart and pays himself a salary as a hired employee, then (granted, his taxes get more complex) even with a lawsuit, he should have been able to drain enough of hte earnings out of the company in his salary to not be on the hook for his personal assets. A small business lawyer can do this for cheap (1k) and help him work through many of his questions quickly about how to separate the books properly. but it's sure a smarter idea than "hey lawyer guy, why don't you take this product and search every IP in every market and see if I'll run foul". oh, and while he is at it, I'm sure you are expecting him to get it right. we've seen how many well financed companies have no IP problems.
and I would love a reply if you are so inclined as you seem to be a reasonable person with a different outlook.
as to your two examples of preventative healthcare, there are 10's of millions of dollars spent every year on public education and work to reduce smoking and obesity. and I'm not sure you can say in the UK people are healthier (which is hard to measure when you consider only healthcare's impact on your health vs stress in life, etc).
In the UK, Obesity + overweight seem to hover around 63% for men while in teh US it is around 66%. Now, I will fully admit that 3% is a pretty big difference when conerted to pounds, but from a public perspective, it's not that much better of an outcome. And in the last decade, obesity rates have doubled in the UK (the US hasn't moved up nearly as fast, but then, it really couldn't without everyone becoming a complete cow).
so it is nice in theory that the NHS will help you, but as we see in the US, even when help is offered many people don't care to change their lifestyle to lose the weight.
these are all random factoids I searched for just now. nothing very interesting other than what I noticed when I was in London: the city didn't look thinner than what I've seen in the US.
now as to your point about perverse incentives and sharing the burden to take care of each other, because I took some time to think it through so I could respond in a coherent manner. To do this I am going to use the standard physicist mentality of extrapolating to the extremes and then doing the linear interp for my conclusions, which may seem harsh but I hope consistent:
In a system where everyone can receive 100% free care in the ER regardless of income level, insurance coverage, etc, an incentive is created for young professionals and those entering the middle class to forgo insurance simply because they know that they currently do not have the savings to pay a large medical bill, they do not want to reduce their standard of living to pay for this medical bill, and they know they can get the care they need in case of a major emergency.
These 3 points mean a large portion of the uninsured population is that way out of personal choice. There are those at my work that do not get health insurance even though the employer subsidizes the premiums massively. Many are earning more than enough to afford such a plan. A system which still offers these people good care for free means they are cashing a free option to get everyone else to pay for them. I have the absolute least compassion for those who act irresponsibly and am a firm believer of sleeping in the bed you make. Call this my theory on personal responsibility. And yes, I am saying if this person cannot either find a hospice to provide care for a reduced price or pay themselves, they are SOL.
An extension of this is my issue with universal publicly funded health care. The biggest problem (and this is exacerbated by what our current bill looks like) says that the person who acts the most irresponsibly will receive the most tax benefit.
Take two people. One man (yeah ,I'm a guy, so everything is framed from the male perspective) works hard at a low paying job but saves what money he can, does not smoke or drink, drives safely, but simply can't afford insurance (yeah, I know a guy like this, a very close friend and if he needed help with medical bills I'd be there for him). The second man smokes and drinks constantly, does not hold down a full time job or work hard, and refuses to save rather squandering money away. worse yet, he eats fast food super sized meals 3 times a day and refuses to control his calorie intake to at elast have a fighting chance at health.
Our proposed system, for some unknown reason, has decided the second person is deserving of massive subsidies for health insurance while the first only deserves modest. And worse yet, we will reduce our help for this second man severely if he cleans up his life and begins to live right.
I'm sorry but I don't agree with that. I believe society should help those people who try to improve their lot but for whatever reaso
Sure, as long as your happy with reducing the life expectancy for the vast, vast majority of people then great. I'm glad you are happy to kill off 15% of your sick so that everyone can get mediocre care. I'd rather the system focuses on finding out why:
1. that 15% doesn't have health insurance. It is a choice for a large group. Even the illegal immigrants would have insurance if they were simply legal immigrants and poor (medicaid is then an option). These stats look a lot less ominous suddenly
2. improving the care for everyone.
Anyways, it isn't a significant statistic. It happens to be that those people who die of cancer because they never got care are still diagnosed as having died of cancer. Cancer isn't some silent killer. it has very obvious effects in late stage that these people end up going to the emergency room for and then getting counted.
What I would be interested to see is the difference in survival rates for just the poor to see if the US even treats it's poor to lower quality care.
The heart attack data comes directly from the UK Department of Health and the Journal of the American Medical Association. The cancer data was sourced here: http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba596
the problem is when faced with these stats, Europeans now can't raise their hand and say,"yes, we have worse care by a very wide margin in several important areas" but rather fall back on "the US in unfair because not everyone gets to have those great results". But at least we strive to do well enough for a large enough group that rates on average still trounce Europe.