Do nothing? Oh, you'd like constructive ideas on/.? Ok, have some.
The reason our healthcare system is fucked up price-wise is it does not fit the standard capitalism mode. It is effectively a monopoly because of patents on drugs and lack of any competing alternatives on services.
It seems to me that we already have ways on the books of dealing with monopolies though, so how about we do away with the artificial monopolies that are drug patents. Or even better, only allow drug patents on cure drugs rather than treatment drugs. There's your competition and capitalism working for drugs.
The costs of preforming the services are the main impediment to lower costs of services. Most of those can be broken down into insurance, lawsuits, equipment, and personnel.
Equipment and personnel are difficult but the first two can be solved by eliminating multi-million dollar awards (especially in the case of death. dead people do not have to pay for care because of the fuck-up) and raising the bar on what is considered negligence and malpractice. And if we're not going to take Shakespeare's advice on lawyers, we can at least make out-of-court settlements illegal in these kinds of suits and make the cases far less attractive to lawyers. They're currently far too willing to take weak and frivolous cases because they know they'll be settled without ever seeing a jury.
And yet, you're still saying that with less money they will employ the same number of people rather than lay a couple off and force those who are left to take up the slack. Do you have any experience at all with the private sector? That almost never happens.
That very desire to not lose money that you condemn them for will tell them to lay off or fire people rather than take a hit in their profits. Seriously, what the hell do you think is going to happen?
The less they want to give back? Ask a rich guy if he'd like to give back the same percentage of what he makes that you do some time. He'd do the fucking snoopy dance naked in the streets for that.
No, the rich give back more than your proletariat-loving ass by a long shot. They pay more taxes, they give more to charity, and they contribute more to the economy than you. What in the jumped up hell makes you think you're in any way possessing of moral high ground here? Hating someone for having more than you is not a virtue, it's a character flaw.
There is absolutely never money saved by introducing more bureaucrats into the mix. The money sink I was talking about wasn't the extra people being covered but the Washington Overhead.
Regarding the rest, I really don't disagree except to add this. Requiring that they take the safe bet is the antithesis of what made America great.
Not necessarily. I'm extremely fiscally conservative and small government conservative and I voted for Obama. Of course I voted for him because I really hoped he would do everything he said and fuck the nation up so bad that we wouldn't be stupid enough to elect another liberal for another thirty years. Just like with Carter. And it seems to be working out pretty well.
Corruption will always continue, regardless of what form of government is in. The idea behind the libertarian, capitalist society we were originally designed to be is that if you give the government less power over both individuals directly and via their money, you have less government. And if you have less government, you have less government to be corrupt. And that's pretty well worked out overall. Capitalist governments are overall the least corrupt on the planet. Yes, I'm aware that's like saying the least dirty pig in the mudhole.
I thought that was the primary goal of democracy; make sure everyone is as equally pissed off at the government as possible. I mean you can't even have more than three people deciding on pizza toppings without ending up with something everyone will hate.
That's why I like dictatorships. At least with a proper dictatorship you can get things your way for a little while after you've drug the previous administration's dead bodies through the street.
We want a free lunch too but as we all know, there's no such thing. What you're really saying is that you want someone else to pay for your lunch. Why exactly? What have you done that warrants your lunch being paid for by people you've never even met? I know your mother thinks you're special but I doubt anyone else does.
The other amazing thing is how people believe that if we give tax cuts to the wealthy then jobs will magically appear.
It's not a difficult concept. An employer with higher taxes has less money. An employer with less money is less able to keep employing current employees or hire new ones. It's not a 1:1 effect but it is still causative.
Mainstream media creates perceptions. Perceptions don't always reflect reality.
Also the US government always seem to do what is good for corporations and hardly anything good for consumers. They try to make it appear it was good for consumers. Take the current "Health Care Reforms" that the Democrats passed last year. It doesn't come close to making health care free, in fact it forces us to purchase health insurance. So on the surface it looks like the consumers are finally getting affordable healthcare, in reality the insurance corporations are getting customers who are forced to purchase insurance.
I agree with that premise completely if you're willing to include organized political movements or anyone with enough money to shovel money by the ton through lobbyists. It's just standard government corruption. They don't really care about corporations any more than anyone else, they just care about the money.
Free trade is another story entirely. It needs to happen across the globe, regardless of its effects on any one nation. With caveats. It needs to happen slowly so as not to destabilize anyone too badly. And it needs to only happen with capitalist nations where the government doesn't give unfair advantage to their own industries with public funds, preferential laws, or tax breaks/credits. Huh, I guess that second one would leave us out.
Interesting take on the matter but I don't tend to have the faith you do that the enormous money sink that socialized medicine would create would be made up by newly created startups. It's a hell of a lot better argument than "we deserve free shit" though.
Not exactly true. There are more immediate effects of deficit spending. The higher the deficit goes, the lower the value of the dollar goes. It's not a linear effect and there are plenty of other factors involved but it is causative rather than just correlative.
Also, debts can be paid just as easily by cutting spending as by raising taxes and the spending cuts have a less punitive effect on the economy overall..
Sarcasm duly noted and your points are valid but it currently simply is not fact. The kit a good percentage of people have at their homes is simply not IPV6-ready. The whole idea is that I don't have to do a shitpot of unpaid work for no actual gain to myself or the family that is doing just fine on NAT. If I have to A) research and procure IPV6 compatible routers and such and B) swap out said kit and make sure it's all configured properly to have essentially the same quality of service, it's a colossal waste of my time.
Grandma knows dick about statefully blocking incoming connections or even creating a single firewall rule. Even grandma can figure out how to plug in an ethernet cable and have IPV4+DHCP+NAT keep her at least minimally secure from that particular attack vector though.
I, for one, do not want to be called away from what I'm doing to admin firewalls for every last damned member of my rather large family.
No, it's really not easier than IPV4+DHCP+NAT. Even setting up an extremely basic firewall is harder than plugging in an ethernet cable and everything just working.
You're not, at least in the US. Here, it's currently impossible to release anything into the public domain. You'll take your automatic copyright and like it. Which is why I currently favor the Beerware license when going for freedom purposes.
My code remains mine but you're free to do whatever you like with it. Plus there's an outside possibility of free beer.
Hunt and peck? I don't even want to have to remember that many glyphs exist, much less where to find them. If it can't be expressed with a standard qwerty keyboard and one (shift) modifier key, it's too fucking complicated to bother with as general text entry.
No, what the GPL tries to give you is "what's set free, and any useful work anyone else ever does using it, will remain free". Take three hundred lines of code you really like from a GPL project, use them in your own, and you have to release your entire half-million line codebase or not be able to distribute it.
Part of freedom is giving people the right to be assholes, so pretty much every OSS license falls short. If that's the way the author wants it, fine, but don't get all holier-than-thou and preach about freedom while you restrict what someone can do with your code.
If I were assuming it were genetic, I'd also assume it were doubly recessive because of the steady 12% of the population it occurs in.
Honestly though, I don't think the gay and lesbian community would want it known whichever way it went. If it's genetic you run the risk of people screening for it like they do for things that are politically correct to call birth defects. If it's developmental it's nothing to avoid the causes during development.
Personally, I don't care. It's all a mental flight of fancy that I even put any thought into it at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Do nothing? Oh, you'd like constructive ideas on /.? Ok, have some.
The reason our healthcare system is fucked up price-wise is it does not fit the standard capitalism mode. It is effectively a monopoly because of patents on drugs and lack of any competing alternatives on services.
It seems to me that we already have ways on the books of dealing with monopolies though, so how about we do away with the artificial monopolies that are drug patents. Or even better, only allow drug patents on cure drugs rather than treatment drugs. There's your competition and capitalism working for drugs.
The costs of preforming the services are the main impediment to lower costs of services. Most of those can be broken down into insurance, lawsuits, equipment, and personnel.
Equipment and personnel are difficult but the first two can be solved by eliminating multi-million dollar awards (especially in the case of death. dead people do not have to pay for care because of the fuck-up) and raising the bar on what is considered negligence and malpractice. And if we're not going to take Shakespeare's advice on lawyers, we can at least make out-of-court settlements illegal in these kinds of suits and make the cases far less attractive to lawyers. They're currently far too willing to take weak and frivolous cases because they know they'll be settled without ever seeing a jury.
And yet, you're still saying that with less money they will employ the same number of people rather than lay a couple off and force those who are left to take up the slack. Do you have any experience at all with the private sector? That almost never happens.
That very desire to not lose money that you condemn them for will tell them to lay off or fire people rather than take a hit in their profits. Seriously, what the hell do you think is going to happen?
The less they want to give back? Ask a rich guy if he'd like to give back the same percentage of what he makes that you do some time. He'd do the fucking snoopy dance naked in the streets for that.
No, the rich give back more than your proletariat-loving ass by a long shot. They pay more taxes, they give more to charity, and they contribute more to the economy than you. What in the jumped up hell makes you think you're in any way possessing of moral high ground here? Hating someone for having more than you is not a virtue, it's a character flaw.
[citation needed]
Why we didn't kick the rich out of it is a mystery.
Absolutely. How dare those bastards have more than us.
There is absolutely never money saved by introducing more bureaucrats into the mix. The money sink I was talking about wasn't the extra people being covered but the Washington Overhead.
Regarding the rest, I really don't disagree except to add this. Requiring that they take the safe bet is the antithesis of what made America great.
Not necessarily. I'm extremely fiscally conservative and small government conservative and I voted for Obama. Of course I voted for him because I really hoped he would do everything he said and fuck the nation up so bad that we wouldn't be stupid enough to elect another liberal for another thirty years. Just like with Carter. And it seems to be working out pretty well.
Sort of my way of fiddling while Rome burned.
Corruption will always continue, regardless of what form of government is in. The idea behind the libertarian, capitalist society we were originally designed to be is that if you give the government less power over both individuals directly and via their money, you have less government. And if you have less government, you have less government to be corrupt. And that's pretty well worked out overall. Capitalist governments are overall the least corrupt on the planet. Yes, I'm aware that's like saying the least dirty pig in the mudhole.
I thought that was the primary goal of democracy; make sure everyone is as equally pissed off at the government as possible. I mean you can't even have more than three people deciding on pizza toppings without ending up with something everyone will hate.
That's why I like dictatorships. At least with a proper dictatorship you can get things your way for a little while after you've drug the previous administration's dead bodies through the street.
There is but people tend to get all panicky and arresty if you point out that that's why we have the second amendment.
It's a safe bet that anyone running for office has sacrificed at least five thousand babies to Cthulhu.
Anyone who likes what happens in Congress has been elected to it.
We want free healthcare.
We want a free lunch too but as we all know, there's no such thing. What you're really saying is that you want someone else to pay for your lunch. Why exactly? What have you done that warrants your lunch being paid for by people you've never even met? I know your mother thinks you're special but I doubt anyone else does.
The other amazing thing is how people believe that if we give tax cuts to the wealthy then jobs will magically appear.
It's not a difficult concept. An employer with higher taxes has less money. An employer with less money is less able to keep employing current employees or hire new ones. It's not a 1:1 effect but it is still causative.
Mainstream media creates perceptions. Perceptions don't always reflect reality.
Also the US government always seem to do what is good for corporations and hardly anything good for consumers. They try to make it appear it was good for consumers. Take the current "Health Care Reforms" that the Democrats passed last year. It doesn't come close to making health care free, in fact it forces us to purchase health insurance. So on the surface it looks like the consumers are finally getting affordable healthcare, in reality the insurance corporations are getting customers who are forced to purchase insurance.
I agree with that premise completely if you're willing to include organized political movements or anyone with enough money to shovel money by the ton through lobbyists. It's just standard government corruption. They don't really care about corporations any more than anyone else, they just care about the money.
Free trade is another story entirely. It needs to happen across the globe, regardless of its effects on any one nation. With caveats. It needs to happen slowly so as not to destabilize anyone too badly. And it needs to only happen with capitalist nations where the government doesn't give unfair advantage to their own industries with public funds, preferential laws, or tax breaks/credits. Huh, I guess that second one would leave us out.
Interesting take on the matter but I don't tend to have the faith you do that the enormous money sink that socialized medicine would create would be made up by newly created startups. It's a hell of a lot better argument than "we deserve free shit" though.
Not exactly true. There are more immediate effects of deficit spending. The higher the deficit goes, the lower the value of the dollar goes. It's not a linear effect and there are plenty of other factors involved but it is causative rather than just correlative.
Also, debts can be paid just as easily by cutting spending as by raising taxes and the spending cuts have a less punitive effect on the economy overall..
Sarcasm duly noted and your points are valid but it currently simply is not fact. The kit a good percentage of people have at their homes is simply not IPV6-ready. The whole idea is that I don't have to do a shitpot of unpaid work for no actual gain to myself or the family that is doing just fine on NAT. If I have to A) research and procure IPV6 compatible routers and such and B) swap out said kit and make sure it's all configured properly to have essentially the same quality of service, it's a colossal waste of my time.
Grandma knows dick about statefully blocking incoming connections or even creating a single firewall rule. Even grandma can figure out how to plug in an ethernet cable and have IPV4+DHCP+NAT keep her at least minimally secure from that particular attack vector though.
I, for one, do not want to be called away from what I'm doing to admin firewalls for every last damned member of my rather large family.
No, it's really not easier than IPV4+DHCP+NAT. Even setting up an extremely basic firewall is harder than plugging in an ethernet cable and everything just working.
Run a VPN server from a box behind your router and you only have to configure forwarding of one port on two routers.
I dare say you'd be wrong. Envisioning things way ahead of where they currently were was pretty much their job description.
I'll go one step further and say your own mind is always the absolute weakest link. If people don't like the truth, they will almost never believe it.
You're not, at least in the US. Here, it's currently impossible to release anything into the public domain. You'll take your automatic copyright and like it. Which is why I currently favor the Beerware license when going for freedom purposes.
My code remains mine but you're free to do whatever you like with it. Plus there's an outside possibility of free beer.
Hunt and peck? I don't even want to have to remember that many glyphs exist, much less where to find them. If it can't be expressed with a standard qwerty keyboard and one (shift) modifier key, it's too fucking complicated to bother with as general text entry.
No, what the GPL tries to give you is "what's set free, and any useful work anyone else ever does using it, will remain free". Take three hundred lines of code you really like from a GPL project, use them in your own, and you have to release your entire half-million line codebase or not be able to distribute it.
Part of freedom is giving people the right to be assholes, so pretty much every OSS license falls short. If that's the way the author wants it, fine, but don't get all holier-than-thou and preach about freedom while you restrict what someone can do with your code.
Free = public domain. Everything else, just pretenders to the crown.
If I were assuming it were genetic, I'd also assume it were doubly recessive because of the steady 12% of the population it occurs in.
Honestly though, I don't think the gay and lesbian community would want it known whichever way it went. If it's genetic you run the risk of people screening for it like they do for things that are politically correct to call birth defects. If it's developmental it's nothing to avoid the causes during development.
Personally, I don't care. It's all a mental flight of fancy that I even put any thought into it at all.