Pay for Amazon Prime. Free two-day shipping on everything and it pays for itself with one heavy package that you want quick. Then you can buy the $2 item on Amazon and get it in two days and not feel bad.
The answer is to do none of your shopping in person and only compare prices on the Internet. This makes sure you get zero customer service and the lowest prices without having to drive around. This is the future of shopping because the Internet makes it possible to compare prices and nothing else - you don't care if the warehouse is dirty and you have nobody to complain to when things go wrong, but you get really low, low prices.
End result of this is Amazon and Walmart win, everyone else loses. Including the customer.
Yes, but if your phone (or browser) tells you the price is lower at Walmart, why wouldn't you go there? Why would you ever try to bring something subjective that your phone isn't telling you into the equation? Isn't the low price the only real quantative measurement that is possible?
And it is the only one that your phone is telling you.
The real result is no "local" merchants. Pre-sale customer service is non-existent from Internet merchants, so you are on your own. And, nobody but nobody can compete with Walmart.
So we are left with Walmart and Amazon. Period.
Lowest price isn't the only qualification for a happy customer, but it is the only criteria on the Internet. The end result of this is that your locally-owned store can't possibly compete with the national retailer and even the national retailer can't complete with Walmart. Amazon has lower prices than Walmart sometimes because they don't have the store overhead.
But anything "neighborhood" is gone.
One thing to keep in mind. Commercial real estate is going to crash shortly, within a couple of years at best. Nobody has high occupancy and the owners are stringing the lenders along with hope and promises. This will either accelerate the process with the closing of stores or it will be coming in right at the end to tip the strip mall and shopping center into being completely vacant.
Expect squatters to be living in the empty stores.
In case you didn't notice, there is no such thing as trust. You can't trust anyone anymore. Everyone wants to be famous and one way to be famous is to leak information that you have access to.
I am expecting Congresspeople's credit card records to start showing up. There are people that have access and they will use this to post this information. Unless Julian Assange and the leaker that gave him the information are both publically executed on the Capital Mall you can expect other people wanting this sort of fame. Heck, even if they were executed on the mall there are still people that would do it for the fame.
So pretty much you can assume that if someone has information about you that it will be disclosed. There is no power on Earth that can prevent this from happening.
It might be nice if we had some kind of information security, but unfortunately people aren't perfect. Therefore, your information is going to get out.
At least one of my credit cards is used fraudulently once a year. It is unavoidable because too many people have access to the information to possibly keep is secure. Also, you get paid for sending credit card info to certain folks, so there is a tremendous incentive to do so if you have access to 50-100 credit card numbers a day.
There is no security which will prevent this from happening. The incentives are just too high. And now we can relate everything to Wikileaks-style, which means it is just going to get worse and worse over time. No amount of security, enforcement or education is going to help.
Unless you want to pay for TV content on a pay-per-view basis, the ad revenue pretty much has to be protected. Take away the ad revenue and you are going to take away commercially produced content because there will be no revenue.
Happy with only amature content? Hope so, because if the revenue disappears there will be no commercially produced content.
You somehow are under the impression that taxpayers are supporting hospitals directly. I don't see that happening.
What does happen is cost shifting. Person A has no insurance and runs up $50,000 in bills but can't or doesn't pay. This $50,000 is spread out over all the other bills so instead of the cost for a room being $100 a day it is $120. Multiply by all the people that don't pay.
Then we have Medicare which pays like 60% of the hospitals prices. Not costs, prices. If the hospital jacks the prices up by 20% they are now getting reimbursed by Medicare at 72% instead of just 60%. Win for the hospital because everything was inflated anyway to cover non-paying patients.
Insurance companies also negotiate lower rates based on (a) getting paid in a timely manner (maybe) and (b) getting paid at all. So they get a discount but the other costs get shifted around to other patients. And factored into next year's prices
Would this work better if the hospitals got 100% from Medicare and insurance? Sure, but the system isn't that rich. There is no direct taxpayer funding of hospitals and doctors but there is Medicare and cost shifting.
I don't see anything changing any of that, even with the health half-plan that was passed. There will still be cost shifting and partial reimbursement by the government. So it isn't likely to get any better without something drastically changing things.
The single payer option doesn't fly because there isn't enough money to make it work for everyone. The way it can work - which is what Sarah Palin was alluding to - is if you change the dynamics of something more than 80% of health care spending being done in the last year of life. If you don't change that, there isn't anywhere near enough money for single payer to work.
And changing that leads to those death panels. Which might be OK for everyone under 30 but not so hot for the over-50 crowd.
Single payer wasn't going to fly because the financing made no sense. All that needs to happen is to figure out how to get the government on the "right" side of health care rationing so it is affordable.
Then stand back and watch the 100,000 or so high-net-worth individuals in the US run for the door because they can.
The problem with single payer is we don't have the tax structure to support it.
Canada has around 70% taxation. Even in New York City people aren't taxed that highly. If we had 70% taxation we might be able to afford to have single payer, but the chances of getting that kind of a tax increase put through are minimal to non-existent.
Under the current rules, employer-based health care is dead. All of the employers will simply opt out and choose to pay the fines. The fines max out at like $500 a year per employee whereas covering the employees will be more like $10,000 a year per employee or more. If the fines were actual fines with a bite more like $50,000 per employee you might see employer coverage continue. But WalMart and GM have already said no way and every other employer is just waiting until the mandate kicks in and the rates skyrocket.
Why are the rates going up? Mostly I think it is because of what is required to be covered. Every time you add something like covering Monastic Chanting the price just goes up and up. Now, we have one body in Washington deciding what has to be in every policy - the minimum standards for coverage. This used to be done at the state level with every state making independent decisions. This means that if you wanted Chiropractic coverage to be added in your state you had to lobby the state Insurance Board. Now, special interests have only a single nationwide body to lobby. And everything including the kitchen sink is going to be covered. Or it would be decreasing the coverage in the kitchin sink state - California. That means everyone gets California coverage which has some of the highest rates in the US already.
Absolutely what this plan is is the worst possible alternative with government regulation but not government accountability. Government mandates for coverage coming from a single body while all the payments are left to individuals. End result will be that nobody has anything with this and everyone is on some kind of government plan - which the government has already said they can't afford and were counting on employers and employees paying for their own insurance. Without that, it is doomed to fail sometime in 2014.
You might think about this for a minute or two. If the insurance companies have to insure high-risk people and they cannot do anything to mitigate this risk other than raise rates, I guess they might just have to raise the rates.
Health care in the US is expensive and the costs in the US are all loaded onto dying people. If someone could convince US citizens that dying people aren't worth trying to extend their lives by a few weeks or months then overall health care expenditures would go down. A lot, because somewhere between 80 and 95 percent of all health care spending takes place in the last year of life.
The one niggling point with that is what some folks have pointed out. Once the government starts down the road of qualifying who gets treated and who does not, well, there you have it - death panels. It also gets pretty plain that the way health care gets paid for is by killing grandma.
Now this dicussion never took place in Europe or anywhere else. They never had a history of people fighting to stay alive another month. Philosophically, it is much more "Well, it has been a good life and it is now over." That hasn't been the attitude in the US for a while now and health care spending is just one aspect of this.
The problem is, without everyone paying in there is no money to treat everyone that wants to be covered. With large employers (like WalMart and GM) already opting out of covering their employees, all of these people are going to be going to the government for coverage. This means the government can either take the whole thing over - Medicare for everyone - or they can step back and forget the whole thing.
I guessing they will step back and forget the whole thing. The costs the other way are very high and the tax revenues just aren't there. Would people pay 60% income taxes to have single payer universal coverage? No.
I've met lots (well, maybe not lots but enough) of people who have stolen code from past and present employers for their own gain or for use at their new job. Sometimes the new employer welcomes them in with this gift hoping that if anyone gets caught they can deny they knew what was going on.
All of these people have been incredibly arrogant to the point of knowing that they were never going to get caught because they were just smarter than anyone else. And, even if they did get caught that nothing would happen to THEM because again, they were smarter than everyone else.
This goes along with the idea that women should just fall at their feet because they were the embodiment of Adonis and could satisfy any number of women each night giving each the most pleasure they had ever experienced. Needless to say, reality often interfered and sometimes they had a rude awakening. Sometimes they were very surprised when a woman didn't feel quite that way about things and thought they should be charged with rape or something similar.
How can this be? Only our best and brightest peers get to sit in that stupid box for way too long listening to a bunch of nonsense about something they could give to shits about, then make a decision that's fair. All the peers you WOULD want to sit there (if you're the one in court) will get removed by your courtroom adversary, or themselves anyway. What's left are those that could not come up with a good excuse to get out of the duty, and have nothing but time to waste pretending to do a public service that would be better served from a pool of paid peers. Unless you have a shitload of money, then you get a good lawyer and he'll fight for some "good jurors" for you at least. Good justice is served to those that can afford it. If not, you're fucked. AND they have to keep the jurors off the Internet. Face it, it's broken, or borken.
If you have your entire future depending on a lawyer, do you not believe it might be the best idea you've ever had to actually find "a shitload of money" to pay someone so you have a future?
You see, in the US everyone is trained from birth to disrespect any sort of authority. So when a judge gives instructions to a jury a good percentage of the people just hear "yadda yadda yadda" and pay no attention to the ramblings of an old white man.
Threatening jurors with jail time if they don't follow the instructions is pointless - the reaction is "Instructions? What instructions?" because of the "yadda yadda yadda" problem. It also doesn't help that the old white man is, well, old. That immediately is a red flag that anything this person does or says is utterly irrelevant.
Now, if we had trials conducted by 17-year-old black gangbangers from the inner city things would be a lot simpler. Of course there would be a considerable amount of Red Queenish "Off with his head!" pronouncements, but trials would be more relevant to people and they would be over a lot quicker. Justice? I don't see any justice now so why would having younger, relevant judges make a difference?
Japan has been a culture built on respect for authority and respect for elders for the last 1,000 years at least. They aren't going to be able to discard that overnight.
Here in the USA we have a culture built on suspicion and distrust of authority. So why would anyone respect authority here?
The most basic point is a contract cannot circumvent law. So you can have a contract that says you don't have to comply with a subpoena but the contract is unenforcible and has no applicabily on your relationship with law enforcement, only with your customer. Law enforcement isn't a party to the contract either, so they don't care.
The relationship between a priest and confessor is legally recognized. While it might be nice to have that sort of relationship recognized between web site owner and browser, it isn't.
Policies that are legally binding are generally backed up by laws that are legally binding, making the policy really mean "we are following the applicable laws". That's it.
For example, if a company were to have a policy that states they will never, ever hire homosexuals and every employee was required to sign a statement that they accepted and would follow that policy - it wouldn't stand up in court for 30 seconds no matter what happened. Violating that policy would have zero impact.
Having a privacy policy at a medical clinic that says will not disclose your information to anyone, ever has no chance of being upheld because insurance companies require health care providers to disclose everything about a patient. Violating such a policy has no meaning. However, if they violate HIPPA rules, especially those which have the force of law, can result in jail time and huge fines.
Having a privacy policy on a web site is meaningless because there are no laws governing such privacy. You have no right to "privacy" concerning your online behavior or your credit card information. Now someone that obtains your credit card information and uses it fraudulently could be in trouble - except credit card fraud is not enforced in the US. I suspect it is the same everywhere.
So any policy which simply restates applicable laws can't be violated without legal repercussions. Violating a policy which does not have any law behind it is simply a violation of the policy which can be changed at any time.
Embryonic stem cell research is controversial because human embryos are destroyed in order to obtain the cells capable of developing into almost every tissue of the body.
rather interesting. I suspect if it is explained to most people adequately you find that there are two things people really have a problem with:
People being encouraged to produce embryos for use as a source for stem cells, either for research or treatments. Encouraged as in getting paid for it. If there is a market, there will be payments.
What is required for human embryonic stem cell treatment is either there are no treatments unless stem cells are somehow saved as in cord blood cells or you have human cloning. This is because embryonic stem cells are genotype specific - in order to treat you they need your DNA in the stem cells. If you can produce an embryo on demand with any required DNA in it, then you can clone people.
The problem with human cloning is that no matter what it takes, once it is possible and proven who will be the first? Does the world need another Kim Jong Il? How about Bill Gates or Larry Ellison? Do you think George H. W. Bush has enough money for the process? I don't see any way to sever the connection between embryonic stem cells and human cloning - once you can produce an embryo on demand, you can produce a baby from that embryo on demand with whatever DNA you would like.
Didn't some folks go to incredible lengths to preserve Lenin's DNA? Is there anything left of Hitler? How about Eva Peron? I am sure there is a group of people that would be able to gather enough money, however much it took, to "resurrect" one of these figures if it were possible.
Of course you have to reference the movie Looker as probably the first concept of how one might do this in a commercially successful manner.
Then there is the question how much more work it would have been if there were no actors in Avatar? Or Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow? No sets, so how far is it really to have no actors?
We have been the victims of market share building exercises since 1995. The concept of offering service to people at rates that are unsupportable doesn't work long term. Clearly.
The problem with IPTV is the physical capacity on both cable and DSL doesn't exist. You can't support a star configuration fed from the head end where the combined bandwidth at the "node" is higher than can be served with any reasonable physical connection. The way things have been built today doesn't support IPTV even at fairly low resolutions and high compression. What we have today is a few early adopters trying out HD resolutions. If this grows, and it probably will, nobody is going to have decent service until they dig up all of the cables and replace everything with dedicated fiber from the head end to every house. Which is silly and isn't going to happen anytime soon.
IPTV? Get it while you can, because it isn't going to last out of the early adopter period. There simply isn't the bandwidth available to every home. Or even half.
Somehow, I'd expect prices to skyrocket as this happens. Or demands for payment from anyone with a financial interest in delivering content to homes. Or both.
The US is clearly a Banana Republic according to your rules. The US has no such laws about censorship and discrimination in the marketplace.
The EU certainly does have these. The governments in the EU can certainly order companies to sell products that they do not wish to and to service people they do not wish to. A common sign in the US is "No shirt, no service" and this would clearly be illegal in the EU.
I am sure it is unimaginable to the civilized world but there are clubs in the US which forbid women. There are allowed to exist organizations which exist specifically for the exclusion of certain racial groups, such as whites (NACCP, for instance) and for the exclusion of religions (LDS - you will not be getting in with a standard Bible I assure you). The US is a place that has a lot of discrimination which would not be tolerated in the EU.
The problem is that we have the idea that everything on the web should be free. So the idea of "ad supported" has come about. Well, advertising brings along a host of evils because it has to be pervasive and intrusive in order to work to the best benefit for the advertiser.
Also, while you might think it is handy to not have to pay for anything, the web sites that are trying to be ad supported are finding the money a bit thin. Advertising rates are down and ad blocking is up. End result is the web sites are willing to do anything, anything at all to get more money. Whatever the advertiser wants to make their message more sticky and increase the ad rates.
I think advertising on the web is doomed in the end. Unfortunately we are going to see more and more pervasive, penetrating and invasive advertising strategies towards the end of this. The last thing we want is to have to solve ad puzzles to get to free content, but that is exactly where things are going.
Microsoft isn't going to be able to buck this very well. Sure, you can block tracking until it gets to the point where you have to sign in with a confirmed identity to access content, get search results and receive advertising.
There are companies that have virtually unlimited "sick" time off. These are pretty rare today but this does exist. When it does and people take "sick" days as vacation time there is indeed something to complain about, mostly because in theory their sick time policy is a short term disability plan. So if someone stays out for two weeks because of a supposed injury or sickness they are certainly going to be checked up on. It has been common for years (decades, really) to require a statement from the doctor when you come back. This isn't just for abuse prevention, although it works pretty well at that.
When there are no "sick days" but just paid time off (PTO) or "flex time" or whatever it happens to be called then there is clearly no issue and trying to find out if people are really sick is pointless.
Of course, both sorts of plans can be abused. If you are an unreliable employee that just doesn't show up some days it will certainly be noticed and recorded. You will be penalized for this either in lack of raises or lack of promotion. Or just canned. Any organization that doesn't do this is just fostering an environment where nobody cares and that will be noticed by everyone as well. So both management and the employees have to care about stuff getting done and not having a "What? Me care?" attitude about the work environment.
The problem with that thinking is clearly murder should be legal under those criteria. How many people are murdered every year? Most cities have hundreds of murders every year - some, like Juarez Mexico have hundreds every day. Clearly there are some people that think that given the right circumstances it is OK to kill people.
Then we have the government sanctioning killing people with both the military and capital punishment.
I'm sorry, if the government can't make up their mind that killing people is universally wrong then this is clearly a stupid law making it illegal for me to kill someone.
If the chef at your local restaurant had to pay royalties whenever he used a recipe published by a celebrity chef would you have a tastier and more enjoyable meal? What if he risked being sued into the ground if he created a derivative work by altering the recipe slightly without a license? or would you just have a more bland, unoriginal, uninspired and ultimately vastly more expensive meal?
If your hairdresser had to pay royalties whenever some kid comes in with a magazine picture and says they want their hair to "look like that". Would everyone have far more interesting hairstyles or would it just cost far more and see people getting sued for doing their own hair at home in a copyrighted style?
You are completely wrong. Copyright is not a patent. Copyright protects a single embodiment of something, not all embodiments. So there is no protection for a hairstyle or a recipe being used.
There can be protection for a recipe itself and the publication of it. But there is no protection for the dish that can be prepared following the recipe. Similarly, while a photograph of a hairstyle (and the celebrity with it) can have copyright protection the hairstyle itself does not.
You are confusing copyright and patents. If a recipe could be patented then someone could be sued for producing a dish by following the recipe. But recipes are not subject to patents. Nor are hairstyles.
Also, you need to understand the concept of a derivative work. If you can be sued for violating a copyright (making a copy of something) then you can be sued also for making a derivative work. However, there is nothing that allows making an identical copy but not making a derivative work. Again the concept of a license only applies with a patent and copyright is completely different than patents.
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Pay for Amazon Prime. Free two-day shipping on everything and it pays for itself with one heavy package that you want quick. Then you can buy the $2 item on Amazon and get it in two days and not feel bad.
The answer is to do none of your shopping in person and only compare prices on the Internet. This makes sure you get zero customer service and the lowest prices without having to drive around. This is the future of shopping because the Internet makes it possible to compare prices and nothing else - you don't care if the warehouse is dirty and you have nobody to complain to when things go wrong, but you get really low, low prices.
End result of this is Amazon and Walmart win, everyone else loses. Including the customer.
Yes, but if your phone (or browser) tells you the price is lower at Walmart, why wouldn't you go there? Why would you ever try to bring something subjective that your phone isn't telling you into the equation? Isn't the low price the only real quantative measurement that is possible?
And it is the only one that your phone is telling you.
The real result is no "local" merchants. Pre-sale customer service is non-existent from Internet merchants, so you are on your own. And, nobody but nobody can compete with Walmart.
So we are left with Walmart and Amazon. Period.
Lowest price isn't the only qualification for a happy customer, but it is the only criteria on the Internet. The end result of this is that your locally-owned store can't possibly compete with the national retailer and even the national retailer can't complete with Walmart. Amazon has lower prices than Walmart sometimes because they don't have the store overhead.
But anything "neighborhood" is gone.
One thing to keep in mind. Commercial real estate is going to crash shortly, within a couple of years at best. Nobody has high occupancy and the owners are stringing the lenders along with hope and promises. This will either accelerate the process with the closing of stores or it will be coming in right at the end to tip the strip mall and shopping center into being completely vacant.
Expect squatters to be living in the empty stores.
In case you didn't notice, there is no such thing as trust. You can't trust anyone anymore. Everyone wants to be famous and one way to be famous is to leak information that you have access to.
I am expecting Congresspeople's credit card records to start showing up. There are people that have access and they will use this to post this information. Unless Julian Assange and the leaker that gave him the information are both publically executed on the Capital Mall you can expect other people wanting this sort of fame. Heck, even if they were executed on the mall there are still people that would do it for the fame.
So pretty much you can assume that if someone has information about you that it will be disclosed. There is no power on Earth that can prevent this from happening.
It might be nice if we had some kind of information security, but unfortunately people aren't perfect. Therefore, your information is going to get out.
At least one of my credit cards is used fraudulently once a year. It is unavoidable because too many people have access to the information to possibly keep is secure. Also, you get paid for sending credit card info to certain folks, so there is a tremendous incentive to do so if you have access to 50-100 credit card numbers a day.
There is no security which will prevent this from happening. The incentives are just too high. And now we can relate everything to Wikileaks-style, which means it is just going to get worse and worse over time. No amount of security, enforcement or education is going to help.
Unless you want to pay for TV content on a pay-per-view basis, the ad revenue pretty much has to be protected. Take away the ad revenue and you are going to take away commercially produced content because there will be no revenue.
Happy with only amature content? Hope so, because if the revenue disappears there will be no commercially produced content.
You somehow are under the impression that taxpayers are supporting hospitals directly. I don't see that happening.
What does happen is cost shifting. Person A has no insurance and runs up $50,000 in bills but can't or doesn't pay. This $50,000 is spread out over all the other bills so instead of the cost for a room being $100 a day it is $120. Multiply by all the people that don't pay.
Then we have Medicare which pays like 60% of the hospitals prices. Not costs, prices. If the hospital jacks the prices up by 20% they are now getting reimbursed by Medicare at 72% instead of just 60%. Win for the hospital because everything was inflated anyway to cover non-paying patients.
Insurance companies also negotiate lower rates based on (a) getting paid in a timely manner (maybe) and (b) getting paid at all. So they get a discount but the other costs get shifted around to other patients. And factored into next year's prices
Would this work better if the hospitals got 100% from Medicare and insurance? Sure, but the system isn't that rich. There is no direct taxpayer funding of hospitals and doctors but there is Medicare and cost shifting.
I don't see anything changing any of that, even with the health half-plan that was passed. There will still be cost shifting and partial reimbursement by the government. So it isn't likely to get any better without something drastically changing things.
The single payer option doesn't fly because there isn't enough money to make it work for everyone. The way it can work - which is what Sarah Palin was alluding to - is if you change the dynamics of something more than 80% of health care spending being done in the last year of life. If you don't change that, there isn't anywhere near enough money for single payer to work.
And changing that leads to those death panels. Which might be OK for everyone under 30 but not so hot for the over-50 crowd.
Single payer wasn't going to fly because the financing made no sense. All that needs to happen is to figure out how to get the government on the "right" side of health care rationing so it is affordable.
Then stand back and watch the 100,000 or so high-net-worth individuals in the US run for the door because they can.
The problem with single payer is we don't have the tax structure to support it.
Canada has around 70% taxation. Even in New York City people aren't taxed that highly. If we had 70% taxation we might be able to afford to have single payer, but the chances of getting that kind of a tax increase put through are minimal to non-existent.
Under the current rules, employer-based health care is dead. All of the employers will simply opt out and choose to pay the fines. The fines max out at like $500 a year per employee whereas covering the employees will be more like $10,000 a year per employee or more. If the fines were actual fines with a bite more like $50,000 per employee you might see employer coverage continue. But WalMart and GM have already said no way and every other employer is just waiting until the mandate kicks in and the rates skyrocket.
Why are the rates going up? Mostly I think it is because of what is required to be covered. Every time you add something like covering Monastic Chanting the price just goes up and up. Now, we have one body in Washington deciding what has to be in every policy - the minimum standards for coverage. This used to be done at the state level with every state making independent decisions. This means that if you wanted Chiropractic coverage to be added in your state you had to lobby the state Insurance Board. Now, special interests have only a single nationwide body to lobby. And everything including the kitchen sink is going to be covered. Or it would be decreasing the coverage in the kitchin sink state - California. That means everyone gets California coverage which has some of the highest rates in the US already.
Absolutely what this plan is is the worst possible alternative with government regulation but not government accountability. Government mandates for coverage coming from a single body while all the payments are left to individuals. End result will be that nobody has anything with this and everyone is on some kind of government plan - which the government has already said they can't afford and were counting on employers and employees paying for their own insurance. Without that, it is doomed to fail sometime in 2014.
You might think about this for a minute or two. If the insurance companies have to insure high-risk people and they cannot do anything to mitigate this risk other than raise rates, I guess they might just have to raise the rates.
Health care in the US is expensive and the costs in the US are all loaded onto dying people. If someone could convince US citizens that dying people aren't worth trying to extend their lives by a few weeks or months then overall health care expenditures would go down. A lot, because somewhere between 80 and 95 percent of all health care spending takes place in the last year of life.
The one niggling point with that is what some folks have pointed out. Once the government starts down the road of qualifying who gets treated and who does not, well, there you have it - death panels. It also gets pretty plain that the way health care gets paid for is by killing grandma.
Now this dicussion never took place in Europe or anywhere else. They never had a history of people fighting to stay alive another month. Philosophically, it is much more "Well, it has been a good life and it is now over." That hasn't been the attitude in the US for a while now and health care spending is just one aspect of this.
The problem is, without everyone paying in there is no money to treat everyone that wants to be covered. With large employers (like WalMart and GM) already opting out of covering their employees, all of these people are going to be going to the government for coverage. This means the government can either take the whole thing over - Medicare for everyone - or they can step back and forget the whole thing.
I guessing they will step back and forget the whole thing. The costs the other way are very high and the tax revenues just aren't there. Would people pay 60% income taxes to have single payer universal coverage? No.
Perhaps because the guy is an arrogant criminal?
I've met lots (well, maybe not lots but enough) of people who have stolen code from past and present employers for their own gain or for use at their new job. Sometimes the new employer welcomes them in with this gift hoping that if anyone gets caught they can deny they knew what was going on.
All of these people have been incredibly arrogant to the point of knowing that they were never going to get caught because they were just smarter than anyone else. And, even if they did get caught that nothing would happen to THEM because again, they were smarter than everyone else.
This goes along with the idea that women should just fall at their feet because they were the embodiment of Adonis and could satisfy any number of women each night giving each the most pleasure they had ever experienced. Needless to say, reality often interfered and sometimes they had a rude awakening. Sometimes they were very surprised when a woman didn't feel quite that way about things and thought they should be charged with rape or something similar.
It all comes down to being an arrogant asswhole.
How can this be? Only our best and brightest peers get to sit in that stupid box for way too long listening to a bunch of nonsense about something they could give to shits about, then make a decision that's fair. All the peers you WOULD want to sit there (if you're the one in court) will get removed by your courtroom adversary, or themselves anyway. What's left are those that could not come up with a good excuse to get out of the duty, and have nothing but time to waste pretending to do a public service that would be better served from a pool of paid peers. Unless you have a shitload of money, then you get a good lawyer and he'll fight for some "good jurors" for you at least. Good justice is served to those that can afford it. If not, you're fucked.
AND they have to keep the jurors off the Internet. Face it, it's broken, or borken.
If you have your entire future depending on a lawyer, do you not believe it might be the best idea you've ever had to actually find "a shitload of money" to pay someone so you have a future?
How about it being a question of respect?
You see, in the US everyone is trained from birth to disrespect any sort of authority. So when a judge gives instructions to a jury a good percentage of the people just hear "yadda yadda yadda" and pay no attention to the ramblings of an old white man.
Threatening jurors with jail time if they don't follow the instructions is pointless - the reaction is "Instructions? What instructions?" because of the "yadda yadda yadda" problem. It also doesn't help that the old white man is, well, old. That immediately is a red flag that anything this person does or says is utterly irrelevant.
Now, if we had trials conducted by 17-year-old black gangbangers from the inner city things would be a lot simpler. Of course there would be a considerable amount of Red Queenish "Off with his head!" pronouncements, but trials would be more relevant to people and they would be over a lot quicker. Justice? I don't see any justice now so why would having younger, relevant judges make a difference?
Japan has been a culture built on respect for authority and respect for elders for the last 1,000 years at least. They aren't going to be able to discard that overnight.
Here in the USA we have a culture built on suspicion and distrust of authority. So why would anyone respect authority here?
Sorry, it won't fly.
The most basic point is a contract cannot circumvent law. So you can have a contract that says you don't have to comply with a subpoena but the contract is unenforcible and has no applicabily on your relationship with law enforcement, only with your customer. Law enforcement isn't a party to the contract either, so they don't care.
The relationship between a priest and confessor is legally recognized. While it might be nice to have that sort of relationship recognized between web site owner and browser, it isn't.
Policies that are legally binding are generally backed up by laws that are legally binding, making the policy really mean "we are following the applicable laws". That's it.
For example, if a company were to have a policy that states they will never, ever hire homosexuals and every employee was required to sign a statement that they accepted and would follow that policy - it wouldn't stand up in court for 30 seconds no matter what happened. Violating that policy would have zero impact.
Having a privacy policy at a medical clinic that says will not disclose your information to anyone, ever has no chance of being upheld because insurance companies require health care providers to disclose everything about a patient. Violating such a policy has no meaning. However, if they violate HIPPA rules, especially those which have the force of law, can result in jail time and huge fines.
Having a privacy policy on a web site is meaningless because there are no laws governing such privacy. You have no right to "privacy" concerning your online behavior or your credit card information. Now someone that obtains your credit card information and uses it fraudulently could be in trouble - except credit card fraud is not enforced in the US. I suspect it is the same everywhere.
So any policy which simply restates applicable laws can't be violated without legal repercussions. Violating a policy which does not have any law behind it is simply a violation of the policy which can be changed at any time.
I find the statement
Embryonic stem cell research is controversial because human embryos are destroyed in order to obtain the cells capable of developing into almost every tissue of the body.
rather interesting. I suspect if it is explained to most people adequately you find that there are two things people really have a problem with:
The problem with human cloning is that no matter what it takes, once it is possible and proven who will be the first? Does the world need another Kim Jong Il? How about Bill Gates or Larry Ellison? Do you think George H. W. Bush has enough money for the process? I don't see any way to sever the connection between embryonic stem cells and human cloning - once you can produce an embryo on demand, you can produce a baby from that embryo on demand with whatever DNA you would like.
Didn't some folks go to incredible lengths to preserve Lenin's DNA? Is there anything left of Hitler? How about Eva Peron? I am sure there is a group of people that would be able to gather enough money, however much it took, to "resurrect" one of these figures if it were possible.
Of course you have to reference the movie Looker as probably the first concept of how one might do this in a commercially successful manner.
Then there is the question how much more work it would have been if there were no actors in Avatar? Or Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow? No sets, so how far is it really to have no actors?
We have been the victims of market share building exercises since 1995. The concept of offering service to people at rates that are unsupportable doesn't work long term. Clearly.
The problem with IPTV is the physical capacity on both cable and DSL doesn't exist. You can't support a star configuration fed from the head end where the combined bandwidth at the "node" is higher than can be served with any reasonable physical connection. The way things have been built today doesn't support IPTV even at fairly low resolutions and high compression. What we have today is a few early adopters trying out HD resolutions. If this grows, and it probably will, nobody is going to have decent service until they dig up all of the cables and replace everything with dedicated fiber from the head end to every house. Which is silly and isn't going to happen anytime soon.
IPTV? Get it while you can, because it isn't going to last out of the early adopter period. There simply isn't the bandwidth available to every home. Or even half.
Somehow, I'd expect prices to skyrocket as this happens. Or demands for payment from anyone with a financial interest in delivering content to homes. Or both.
The US is clearly a Banana Republic according to your rules. The US has no such laws about censorship and discrimination in the marketplace.
The EU certainly does have these. The governments in the EU can certainly order companies to sell products that they do not wish to and to service people they do not wish to. A common sign in the US is "No shirt, no service" and this would clearly be illegal in the EU.
I am sure it is unimaginable to the civilized world but there are clubs in the US which forbid women. There are allowed to exist organizations which exist specifically for the exclusion of certain racial groups, such as whites (NACCP, for instance) and for the exclusion of religions (LDS - you will not be getting in with a standard Bible I assure you). The US is a place that has a lot of discrimination which would not be tolerated in the EU.
The problem is that we have the idea that everything on the web should be free. So the idea of "ad supported" has come about. Well, advertising brings along a host of evils because it has to be pervasive and intrusive in order to work to the best benefit for the advertiser.
Also, while you might think it is handy to not have to pay for anything, the web sites that are trying to be ad supported are finding the money a bit thin. Advertising rates are down and ad blocking is up. End result is the web sites are willing to do anything, anything at all to get more money. Whatever the advertiser wants to make their message more sticky and increase the ad rates.
I think advertising on the web is doomed in the end. Unfortunately we are going to see more and more pervasive, penetrating and invasive advertising strategies towards the end of this. The last thing we want is to have to solve ad puzzles to get to free content, but that is exactly where things are going.
Microsoft isn't going to be able to buck this very well. Sure, you can block tracking until it gets to the point where you have to sign in with a confirmed identity to access content, get search results and receive advertising.
There are companies that have virtually unlimited "sick" time off. These are pretty rare today but this does exist. When it does and people take "sick" days as vacation time there is indeed something to complain about, mostly because in theory their sick time policy is a short term disability plan. So if someone stays out for two weeks because of a supposed injury or sickness they are certainly going to be checked up on. It has been common for years (decades, really) to require a statement from the doctor when you come back. This isn't just for abuse prevention, although it works pretty well at that.
When there are no "sick days" but just paid time off (PTO) or "flex time" or whatever it happens to be called then there is clearly no issue and trying to find out if people are really sick is pointless.
Of course, both sorts of plans can be abused. If you are an unreliable employee that just doesn't show up some days it will certainly be noticed and recorded. You will be penalized for this either in lack of raises or lack of promotion. Or just canned. Any organization that doesn't do this is just fostering an environment where nobody cares and that will be noticed by everyone as well. So both management and the employees have to care about stuff getting done and not having a "What? Me care?" attitude about the work environment.
The problem with that thinking is clearly murder should be legal under those criteria. How many people are murdered every year? Most cities have hundreds of murders every year - some, like Juarez Mexico have hundreds every day. Clearly there are some people that think that given the right circumstances it is OK to kill people.
Then we have the government sanctioning killing people with both the military and capital punishment.
I'm sorry, if the government can't make up their mind that killing people is universally wrong then this is clearly a stupid law making it illegal for me to kill someone.
If the chef at your local restaurant had to pay royalties whenever he used a recipe published by a celebrity chef would you have a tastier and more enjoyable meal?
What if he risked being sued into the ground if he created a derivative work by altering the recipe slightly without a license?
or would you just have a more bland, unoriginal, uninspired and ultimately vastly more expensive meal?
If your hairdresser had to pay royalties whenever some kid comes in with a magazine picture and says they want their hair to "look like that".
Would everyone have far more interesting hairstyles or would it just cost far more and see people getting sued for doing their own hair at home in a copyrighted style?
You are completely wrong. Copyright is not a patent. Copyright protects a single embodiment of something, not all embodiments. So there is no protection for a hairstyle or a recipe being used.
There can be protection for a recipe itself and the publication of it. But there is no protection for the dish that can be prepared following the recipe. Similarly, while a photograph of a hairstyle (and the celebrity with it) can have copyright protection the hairstyle itself does not.
You are confusing copyright and patents. If a recipe could be patented then someone could be sued for producing a dish by following the recipe. But recipes are not subject to patents. Nor are hairstyles.
Also, you need to understand the concept of a derivative work. If you can be sued for violating a copyright (making a copy of something) then you can be sued also for making a derivative work. However, there is nothing that allows making an identical copy but not making a derivative work. Again the concept of a license only applies with a patent and copyright is completely different than patents.