Some of us like it when language designers make things easier for us.
for each(int i : some_container) {// do things }
vs:
for(std::container_type::iterator i = some_container.begin(); i != some_container.end(); i++) {// do things }
One of those is immediately obvious and one takes a second to think about. Who cares if you have to learn one new piece of syntax in a language you'll use for decades?
That said, I see the standard library improvements as more interesting (mainly multithreading and hash tables). Sure you could do those before, but now you have guaranteed portability to any platform that full supports C++, with no checks to see what's available.
I'm saying if you don't like the place, don't take your business there.
I gave four scenarios in which individuals can't opt to refuse taking their business there" - "anyone who is admitted to an ER, anyone living in a town with one hospital, and anyone whose doctor of choice or insurance carrier" - and you can't even address one.
I did address this somewhere. Here it is again:
There's more to a hospital than an emergency room.
Hospitals are expensive because of over-regulation, thus making them rare (only one in most places)
If you like a doctor but you don't like the hospital they work at, then talk to them about it. If they choose to continue working there, then either live with it or find a new doctor (don't give them your business). Where they work is their choice, not yours.
I see the problem with your insurance carrier not liking a specific hospital as a bigger problem. Specifically that you *need* health insurance for pretty much any medical treatment. I'd much prefer to lower the cost of treatment and make it actually possible to get health care based on what you want, not what the insurance companies want.
How sweet. Meanwhile, back in the real world competitors are eliminated by buying them out, colluding with some to eliminate others, using predatory pricing, leveraging a dominant position in a different market, infriging on their copyrights or patents, misleading advertizing...
How would less regulation help that?
Buying out all of your competitors is not a long-term strategy. It results in losing money. Predatory pricing is the same way. Dominance in one market may help to enter another, but it hardly guarantees a monopoly. Copyrights and patents are both government-created methods of forming a monopoly. Misleading advertising may be able to make a company dominant in a market, but won't destroy competition. See Coke/Pepsi (generic cola exists), Microsoft (OSX, BSDs, Linux, several Unixes), Apple (many many iPod competitors).
Collusion is an interesting case where I think an argument could be made for regulation. At the same time, collusion just puts many businesses in the same boat as one business trying to keep out competition. If a grocery store makes an agreement to only sell one brand of toothpaste, then they may make that toothpaste more popular, but they'll lose the business of people wanting a different brand.
I'm saying if you don't like the place, don't take your business there. You're saying if you don't like it leave the country. You don't see a difference?
Did you miss the first part of that sentence? When you force me to only go to the businesses you approve of (like hospitals in this case). Do you know understand how government works?
In fact if you look at many disruptive technologies [wikipedia.org] they are often inferior in many ways to the technologies they replace.
Looking at the list, I'm seeing improvements.
Cheaper floppy drives may not be "as good" as the more expensive ones, but they're available to more people. Lots of people with compatible computers is better than a few people with really good ones. Can you imagine a world where the government decided early on that the only computers you can build are ones with the very best technology?
P2P's popularity back when music files sucked just shows that people prefer cheap and easy over high quality sometimes. It's not bad, it's just a preference.
A lot of these seem to be the same way. The better product is cheaper. All it means is that sometimes people would rather have something that's not the best over nothing at all (which is my original argument).
Price, availability, service, control of a scarce resource such as a raw material or distribution channel, artificial monopolies in the form of patents, better sales people, better personal networks, trade barriers, market entry costs, economies of scale, marketing, and image are just a few of the tools that come into play.
Patents, trade barriers and market entry costs (sometimes) are government-caused. I can't think of any companies that have completely destroyed their competition through marketing.
A good example of how that doesn't work is Coke and Pepsi, which both have huge amazing marketing departments, but off-brand cola still exists. Microsoft is maybe a better example of a company that lives purely off of marketing, and they have lots of competitors. The fact that people prefer Windows doesn't mean that Linux, the BSDs, Mac OS, another others don't exist. The option is there, people just don't choose it.
If you start trying to abuse your monopoly position, new competition will come.
Not necessarily. You might get slapped down by the government but it's quite possible to establish a monopoly that cannot be dislodged by conventional market forces. DeBeers at one time owned the vast majority of the diamond mines in the world as well as had control of the primary distribution channel. They had a de-facto monopoly on diamond supply which could not be dislodged because there was little product available from anyone else. It would be hard to argue that they didn't abuse their position but the only thing that could really dislodge them was the discovery of new sources of diamonds.
I agree, natural resources are a complicated case. It's possible that breaking up a monopoly would be the right thing to do in that case.
Not that I expect the "free markets solve everything" types to ever believe that...(not that I'm accusing you of being one of those types).
I'm not convinced it'll solve everything, it just seems like all of the monopolies people complain about were obviously created by the government.
The main thing I'm not sure about is monopolies on a limit resource. In some cases, I don't see it as a big deal (oil is limited, so oil companies inflating prices just encourages research into alternatives), but there are cases where there really are no alternatives.
The barrier of entry issue comes up with things like internet access, but what seems to happen in a lot of cases is that the government pays some company a pile of money to provide mediocre service, and no one can compete because the upfront costs (which the monopoly didn't have to pay) are prohibitive.
If your product is so good that no one else can compete, then who cares?
Exactly! Because as we all know there is only one set of requirements a person can have, there is only one right way to do things, only one kind of taste or preference, and one size fits all.
Uh.. what does this have to do with what I said?
Fox News gets the best ratings, by far. Therefore it's clearly the best, most accurate news source and nobody has a need for anything else!
Of course. Fox News is the only possible reason someone would want a smaller government.
I don't push for laws to be made, I just give friendly suggestions and hope that fixes the problem. If not, I get over it. You should try it some time, it works really well.
Laws affect other people whether you're friendly about it or not. I'll agree to disagree when you agree to stop forcing your choices on me.
The ultimate goal of "competition" is to achieve monopoly status, by eliminating competitors. That is what "competition" means.
Once you eliminate your competitors, you can do whatever you want to the market.
Why would you want consumers to suffer through competition?
Assuming we're not talking about assasination, the way to "eliminate competitors" in a free market is to have a better product. If your product is so good that no one else can compete, then who cares? If you start trying to abuse your monopoly position, new competition will come.
Of course, there's always the modern definition of "competition", which means only compete with a couple other companies, and use your influence in the government to make competition either illegal (cell phone carriers with government issued monopolies, computer hardware companies with patents) or impossible (Walmart and Conagra with subsidies). I don't see how more government control would help that.
What's wrong with nVidia? They don't provide open source drivers, but they do provide the *best* drivers for Linux. While I'd rather have good and open source drivers, good is a higher priority to me. I guess ATI has been getting better, but I've never had bad experiences with nVidia drivers.
And it's worth noting that they don't provide open source Windows drivers either and likely never will. Complaining because they don't do more for Linux users than they do for Windows users seems strange to me.
It has nothing to do with "being smarter", it comes down to assessing cost vs. risk, and protecting the privacy of patients. Don't get all pissypants with me, just because you haven't been able to articulate why the costs will be just so overbearing, or how the risk is minimal. HIPAA and HITECH weren't enacted out of the blue: history had shown health care records as requiring protection that hospitals weren't providing on their own. If you're even a casual/. reader, you know full-damned well how insecure wireless networks can be; ensuring that hospitals protect these systems is the only means of ensuring HIPAA and HITECH compliance.
And because I know that insecure wireless networks are expensive, I should support government regulations on it? Maybe if our government was competent, but government regulation in the healthcare industry means insane prices on simple equipment ("this is a medical-grade router, only $100,000") and sticking with old technology because upgrading is expensive.
I was trying to talk about the problem in general though. All of these little regulations add up. Maybe spending 100x more for each router isn't a big deal, but when everything that any doctor uses is heavily regulated, the costs add up.
We're talking about hospital care. How can you possibly be presenting this as if we always have a choice of which hospital to go to? "I'm having a heart-attack, is there a doctor in the house?! Wait, wait, make sure you bring me to a hospital with a secure IT network!" Give me a break.
There's more to a hospital than the emergency room. Not to mention that the low number of hospitals is likely directly related to the high cost of running one.
It's like me saying I want the choice to go to a dirty, unsanitary restaurant or I want to go to a carnival with unsafe rides.
No it's like saying I'd rather eat dirty, unsanitary food than not eat. Or I'd rather live in an old run-down house with no running water than live on the street. Or work a low-paying job rather than none at all. Or I'd rather go to a hospital that's not the best than not have access to healthcare at all.
I'm trying to point out how the rich in society are perfectly happy screwing over the poor in the name of helping them without considering the consequences. When you require that all products be of the highest quality, you're cutting out the group of people who would rather have something worse than nothing at all.
How about you shut up because you make shitty arguments? I'd say that's a much better reason.
Of course. We've already established that you're so smart I shouldn't make my own decisions, so I guess it makes sense that I shouldn't argue with you. What confuses me is why that's not illegal yet. I mean, people can still do stupid things (disagreeing with you). You should really suggest a law to fix that.
The point is that I'm not forcing you to go to my hospital, but with these regulations, you want to force me to go to yours.
First off, it's not your hospital, it's not my hospital, it's the community's hospital.
Your mental calculus concludes that the cost of securing a network outweighs the risk of a network being compromised. My mental calculus concludes that not only does the degree of the risk necessitate the cost, it also has the benefit of potentially reducing costs associated with identity theft, law suits due to HIPAA violations, and of course, the reputation risk of the hospital and doctors associated with it.
Well clearly you're much smarter than me, so I guess you're right that I shouldn't have choices. I'll just shut up and let you make all of my decisions for me.
No, I'm saying that if it costs money to improve X, and you require that X be improved, then it will cost money. If Y uses X and isn't a charity, then Y will become more expensive to make up for it.
Because if the only way for me to load text onto a text reader is to buy it an inflated price from the company's book store, then I'm just not going to purchase the device..
Isn't that exactly what the publishing companies want? Ebooks are a threat to the publishers' bottom lines. They're easy to share, they don't get old or fall apart, and authors can self-publish for basically nothing. Anything they can do that make ebooks unpopular keeps them relevant a little longer.
The problem is that a heavily regulated system like this raises prices
It also tries to make arguments on blind assertions.
So you think things get improved for free then? More rules means more time spent making sure you're following them, and in the case of the healthcare industry, it means paying insane amounts of money for something that's cheap for everyone else (but the cheap version doesn't come with the right certifications).
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Because it's still just C++. C++0x is just one particular version, like C++98 or C++03. Java 1.6.23 doesn't exactly roll off the tongue either.
Er.. for the "for each" part, I mean just "for". I was confused by Microsoft extentions.
Some of us like it when language designers make things easier for us.
for each(int i : some_container) {
}
vs:
for(std::container_type::iterator i = some_container.begin(); i != some_container.end(); i++) {
}
One of those is immediately obvious and one takes a second to think about. Who cares if you have to learn one new piece of syntax in a language you'll use for decades?
That said, I see the standard library improvements as more interesting (mainly multithreading and hash tables). Sure you could do those before, but now you have guaranteed portability to any platform that full supports C++, with no checks to see what's available.
I'm saying if you don't like the place, don't take your business there.
I gave four scenarios in which individuals can't opt to refuse taking their business there" - "anyone who is admitted to an ER, anyone living in a town with one hospital, and anyone whose doctor of choice or insurance carrier" - and you can't even address one.
I did address this somewhere. Here it is again:
Oh and thanks for the patronizing. It really makes your argument more convincing.
How sweet. Meanwhile, back in the real world competitors are eliminated by buying them out, colluding with some to eliminate others, using predatory pricing, leveraging a dominant position in a different market, infriging on their copyrights or patents, misleading advertizing ...
How would less regulation help that?
Buying out all of your competitors is not a long-term strategy. It results in losing money. Predatory pricing is the same way. Dominance in one market may help to enter another, but it hardly guarantees a monopoly. Copyrights and patents are both government-created methods of forming a monopoly. Misleading advertising may be able to make a company dominant in a market, but won't destroy competition. See Coke/Pepsi (generic cola exists), Microsoft (OSX, BSDs, Linux, several Unixes), Apple (many many iPod competitors).
Collusion is an interesting case where I think an argument could be made for regulation. At the same time, collusion just puts many businesses in the same boat as one business trying to keep out competition. If a grocery store makes an agreement to only sell one brand of toothpaste, then they may make that toothpaste more popular, but they'll lose the business of people wanting a different brand.
Oh well in that case. *cry* I'm so sad. Your obviously flawed arguments have made me look bad. You win at trolling forever.
I'm saying if you don't like the place, don't take your business there. You're saying if you don't like it leave the country. You don't see a difference?
You can go ahead and research if you want.
We need to encourage more government control of the market to enable better products.
Copyrights and patents are great forms of government regulation that encourages innovation.
Without government regulation, society will end up being poorer, like Somalia.
Oh see, just trolling.
Did you miss the first part of that sentence? When you force me to only go to the businesses you approve of (like hospitals in this case). Do you know understand how government works?
Sorry I missed one:
In fact if you look at many disruptive technologies [wikipedia.org] they are often inferior in many ways to the technologies they replace.
Looking at the list, I'm seeing improvements.
Cheaper floppy drives may not be "as good" as the more expensive ones, but they're available to more people. Lots of people with compatible computers is better than a few people with really good ones. Can you imagine a world where the government decided early on that the only computers you can build are ones with the very best technology?
P2P's popularity back when music files sucked just shows that people prefer cheap and easy over high quality sometimes. It's not bad, it's just a preference.
A lot of these seem to be the same way. The better product is cheaper. All it means is that sometimes people would rather have something that's not the best over nothing at all (which is my original argument).
Since your statement "the way to eliminate competitors in a free market is to have a better product" is false.
You are under the false impression that the free market results in better products.
Am I? Is there an argument in there or should I just take your word for it?
Price, availability, service, control of a scarce resource such as a raw material or distribution channel, artificial monopolies in the form of patents, better sales people, better personal networks, trade barriers, market entry costs, economies of scale, marketing, and image are just a few of the tools that come into play.
Patents, trade barriers and market entry costs (sometimes) are government-caused. I can't think of any companies that have completely destroyed their competition through marketing.
A good example of how that doesn't work is Coke and Pepsi, which both have huge amazing marketing departments, but off-brand cola still exists. Microsoft is maybe a better example of a company that lives purely off of marketing, and they have lots of competitors. The fact that people prefer Windows doesn't mean that Linux, the BSDs, Mac OS, another others don't exist. The option is there, people just don't choose it.
If you start trying to abuse your monopoly position, new competition will come.
Not necessarily. You might get slapped down by the government but it's quite possible to establish a monopoly that cannot be dislodged by conventional market forces. DeBeers at one time owned the vast majority of the diamond mines in the world as well as had control of the primary distribution channel. They had a de-facto monopoly on diamond supply which could not be dislodged because there was little product available from anyone else. It would be hard to argue that they didn't abuse their position but the only thing that could really dislodge them was the discovery of new sources of diamonds.
I agree, natural resources are a complicated case. It's possible that breaking up a monopoly would be the right thing to do in that case.
Not that I expect the "free markets solve everything" types to ever believe that...(not that I'm accusing you of being one of those types).
I'm not convinced it'll solve everything, it just seems like all of the monopolies people complain about were obviously created by the government.
The main thing I'm not sure about is monopolies on a limit resource. In some cases, I don't see it as a big deal (oil is limited, so oil companies inflating prices just encourages research into alternatives), but there are cases where there really are no alternatives.
The barrier of entry issue comes up with things like internet access, but what seems to happen in a lot of cases is that the government pays some company a pile of money to provide mediocre service, and no one can compete because the upfront costs (which the monopoly didn't have to pay) are prohibitive.
If your product is so good that no one else can compete, then who cares?
Exactly! Because as we all know there is only one set of requirements a person can have, there is only one right way to do things, only one kind of taste or preference, and one size fits all.
Uh.. what does this have to do with what I said?
Fox News gets the best ratings, by far. Therefore it's clearly the best, most accurate news source and nobody has a need for anything else!
Of course. Fox News is the only possible reason someone would want a smaller government.
I don't push for laws to be made, I just give friendly suggestions and hope that fixes the problem. If not, I get over it. You should try it some time, it works really well.
Laws affect other people whether you're friendly about it or not. I'll agree to disagree when you agree to stop forcing your choices on me.
The ultimate goal of "competition" is to achieve monopoly status, by eliminating competitors. That is what "competition" means.
Once you eliminate your competitors, you can do whatever you want to the market.
Why would you want consumers to suffer through competition?
Assuming we're not talking about assasination, the way to "eliminate competitors" in a free market is to have a better product. If your product is so good that no one else can compete, then who cares? If you start trying to abuse your monopoly position, new competition will come.
Of course, there's always the modern definition of "competition", which means only compete with a couple other companies, and use your influence in the government to make competition either illegal (cell phone carriers with government issued monopolies, computer hardware companies with patents) or impossible (Walmart and Conagra with subsidies). I don't see how more government control would help that.
What's wrong with nVidia? They don't provide open source drivers, but they do provide the *best* drivers for Linux. While I'd rather have good and open source drivers, good is a higher priority to me. I guess ATI has been getting better, but I've never had bad experiences with nVidia drivers.
And it's worth noting that they don't provide open source Windows drivers either and likely never will. Complaining because they don't do more for Linux users than they do for Windows users seems strange to me.
It has nothing to do with "being smarter", it comes down to assessing cost vs. risk, and protecting the privacy of patients. Don't get all pissypants with me, just because you haven't been able to articulate why the costs will be just so overbearing, or how the risk is minimal. HIPAA and HITECH weren't enacted out of the blue: history had shown health care records as requiring protection that hospitals weren't providing on their own. If you're even a casual /. reader, you know full-damned well how insecure wireless networks can be; ensuring that hospitals protect these systems is the only means of ensuring HIPAA and HITECH compliance.
And because I know that insecure wireless networks are expensive, I should support government regulations on it? Maybe if our government was competent, but government regulation in the healthcare industry means insane prices on simple equipment ("this is a medical-grade router, only $100,000") and sticking with old technology because upgrading is expensive.
I was trying to talk about the problem in general though. All of these little regulations add up. Maybe spending 100x more for each router isn't a big deal, but when everything that any doctor uses is heavily regulated, the costs add up.
We're talking about hospital care. How can you possibly be presenting this as if we always have a choice of which hospital to go to? "I'm having a heart-attack, is there a doctor in the house?! Wait, wait, make sure you bring me to a hospital with a secure IT network!" Give me a break.
There's more to a hospital than the emergency room. Not to mention that the low number of hospitals is likely directly related to the high cost of running one.
It's like me saying I want the choice to go to a dirty, unsanitary restaurant or I want to go to a carnival with unsafe rides.
No it's like saying I'd rather eat dirty, unsanitary food than not eat. Or I'd rather live in an old run-down house with no running water than live on the street. Or work a low-paying job rather than none at all. Or I'd rather go to a hospital that's not the best than not have access to healthcare at all.
I'm trying to point out how the rich in society are perfectly happy screwing over the poor in the name of helping them without considering the consequences. When you require that all products be of the highest quality, you're cutting out the group of people who would rather have something worse than nothing at all.
How about you shut up because you make shitty arguments? I'd say that's a much better reason.
Of course. We've already established that you're so smart I shouldn't make my own decisions, so I guess it makes sense that I shouldn't argue with you. What confuses me is why that's not illegal yet. I mean, people can still do stupid things (disagreeing with you). You should really suggest a law to fix that.
The point is that I'm not forcing you to go to my hospital, but with these regulations, you want to force me to go to yours.
First off, it's not your hospital, it's not my hospital, it's the community's hospital.
Your mental calculus concludes that the cost of securing a network outweighs the risk of a network being compromised. My mental calculus concludes that not only does the degree of the risk necessitate the cost, it also has the benefit of potentially reducing costs associated with identity theft, law suits due to HIPAA violations, and of course, the reputation risk of the hospital and doctors associated with it.
Well clearly you're much smarter than me, so I guess you're right that I shouldn't have choices. I'll just shut up and let you make all of my decisions for me.
No, I'm saying that if it costs money to improve X, and you require that X be improved, then it will cost money. If Y uses X and isn't a charity, then Y will become more expensive to make up for it.
Because if the only way for me to load text onto a text reader is to buy it an inflated price from the company's book store, then I'm just not going to purchase the device..
Isn't that exactly what the publishing companies want? Ebooks are a threat to the publishers' bottom lines. They're easy to share, they don't get old or fall apart, and authors can self-publish for basically nothing. Anything they can do that make ebooks unpopular keeps them relevant a little longer.
The problem is that a heavily regulated system like this raises prices
It also tries to make arguments on blind assertions.
So you think things get improved for free then? More rules means more time spent making sure you're following them, and in the case of the healthcare industry, it means paying insane amounts of money for something that's cheap for everyone else (but the cheap version doesn't come with the right certifications).