The question we all need to be asking is not 'where in the Constitution is it prohibited' but rather 'where is it *permitted*'? If it's not explicitly permitted in there somewhere, it's not legal for the federal government.
You could also argue that if she has a conscience, she wouldn't have been working that previous job unless she supported, in some way, the work they were doing. Therefore, she's more likely to think that when her former spy buddies come knocking asking for backdoors, it's the morally correct thing for her to say 'sure, no problem!'...
It has volume control...but I don't want audio going to it *at all*, because I want that audio going to the stereo instead. And at least on the devices I own, most are audio through HDMI *or* the analog audio output -- not both.
It is a cheap projector (cheapest 1080p I could find -- around $700 "retail", though I of course spent far less)...though it's a pretty decent Epson. Probably more expensive ones would have audio out that you could chain into the stereo system, but this one doesn't. Still, even devices with audio out usually only have 2-channel output, which doesn't help if you want to connect a 5.1 device to a 5.1 stereo receiver... and my receiver is freakin' ancient (20+ years old) so it has no HDMI ports at all...but those tend to last damn near forever so I doubt that's an uncommon problem.
This is a DOMAIN REGISTRAR, not the host of the content. They don't give you this information, they just tell you where to get it.
It's like someone walking around saying "JOHN DOE IS A RAPIST". Which in most places is perfectly legal as long as it's a factual statement. There's generally nothing illegal about telling people who is committing crimes.
If you want a more similar example -- there are entire websites whose sole purpose is to broadcast which neighborhoods in which cities you're most likely to find drug dealers -- yet nobody is shutting those down....
a) I've installed modern Linux distros on 15 year old hardware without issues. Christ, the desktop I use daily is eight years old (and not the latest hardware at the time -- sub-$100 everything; I think the graphics card was $30 at the time) and it's pretty bleeding-edge -- running Arch and updated every week or two; and it took less than an hour to get Arch installed and configured, without a single issue.
b) OF COURSE Windows XP works fine on a 10 year old system -- it's a 10 year old OS! Try installing Windows 8 on a 10 year old system and let me know how it runs.
Although even then...XP is painfully slow on my work laptop (Thinkpad) -- it takes up to twenty minutes from login to getting Outlook open -- and I dunno exactly how old it is but it's got a freakin' Windows Vista sticker on it, so it's well past the XP era. That could be due to horrific configuration though, they don't give me admin rights to fix this crap.
As far as I'm concerned, AMD is still the lesser evil here...Intel has been caught doing much worse (having software artificially handicap itself if running on AMD vs Intel processors); as has NVidia (Screwing over the open source community and such).
Of course, I'd personally consider this a *feature*. One of my biggest problems with HDMI is that I always have to screw with the settings to *prevent* audio from being transmitted. I don't want the audio coming out of my 5W mono projector speaker when I've got a 220W surround sound system right below it...
Seriously, if my theater system used an AMD card, I'd consider switching to the proprietary drivers just for this...
A friend of mine in my hometown of 13,000 once got accosted by not one, not two, but *three* patrol vehicles for walking downtown with a laptop under his coat (it was raining pretty heavily and he didn't have a case for it). No crime reported, no reason to suspect it was stolen, didn't even detain him for more than five minutes, but every cop in the downtown area was there in under a minute.
You'd think maybe it was because they've got nothing better to do...but then I gotta wonder why they never even showed up when my dad's car was broken into...
State police aren't too bad though, they'll usually let you off with a warning or at least a reduced ticket.
Not that I have a ton of experience, but I've never seen a modern smartphone display break just from being dropped. The glass, sure, it'll shatter and spiderweb and be wrecked to hell -- but usually the display underneath is still quite functional.
Not everyone has the same preferences as you. Not everyone has the same work habits as you. Not everyone has the same hardware as you.
I can't fit two windows side-by-side on my laptop if I want them to be readable. Usually I keep the browser below full-screen, so I can see at a glance where I'm getting new mail in Outlook, but I can't tolerate the browser being less than ~80% of the screen width. Personally, I find excessive height interferes with my ability to read more than excessive width. Even on my phone I lose my place between lines, so the longer the lines are the more continuous my reading experience. And scrolling is the biggest interference of all. On the existing layout I can read the article and the first few comments before scrolling. On the new one beta site I have to scroll to even finish the summary!
If I want to reference multiple documents, I use multiple tabs. If I *really* need to I'll break the tabs out and overlap the windows, but since I can only interact with one at a time I don't see much point in putting them side-by-side. In fact, right now this window is the *only* tab I have open, and the *only* window I've interacted with in the past hour (yeah, slow day at work;) I'm never reading from one while typing to another -- at worst I'm copying/pasting entire paragraphs, in which case I find it easier to put the new content where the old was, find what I want, then go back. I prefer to move the content rather than my focus.
Your comment reads like Jobs' infamous "you're holding it wrong." So you prefer vertically-oriented sites. Good for you. I prefer horizontal sites. Guess what? HTML is designed to be flexible and fit your display. I can view the current Slashdot on my phone (I don't use the mobile site because it never works); I can use it on my 1080p HD projector; I can use it on my 1600x1200 CRT...and I can full screen or window it on any of those and it still fills the available space and is perfectly readable.
Nobody here is saying you shouldn't be able to read it vertically if you want. What we're saying is that we don't want to, and telling what appears to be 95% of their users 'fuck you, you just don't work properly' is not a good way to improve your readership.
No. Somebody should make a Slashdot web proxy. One that restores the old formatting and strips out the ads (because Fuck You, Dice!)
Two bonuses there: First, it's easier; browser extensions suck. Secondly, Dice gets to see all of their traffic coming from a single host -- classicdot.com or whatever.
In fact...I may actually do that if this redesign moves forward as is. Shouldn't be too hard to modify PHPproxy accordingly...
You actually have a pretty decent point there with phpBB. Slashdot isn't really a news site, it's a news *forum*. The layout is far closer to any forum software than any traditional news website...and now some moron at Dice is trying to run that forum on Wordpress.
If this ends up the new face of Slashdot...I'll miss you guys. And I've *just* returned to reading regularly after a year or two of absence, so that'd be a real shame...
Awful. Absolutely awful. Stop it right now. This is Slashdot damnit, not Joe Smith's Tech Blog! The new design obliterates everything that makes this site what it is!
You are comparing a phone with a 4 inch screen, with a "phone" that has a 5.7 inch screen. You can't compare battery life when the screen is what uses up most of the power. If you want a huge screen you have to compromise on battery life (and many other things - seriously, the note is ridiculously big to use as an every-day phone).
Hah...not related to the main point you're making, but I've currently got a Galaxy SIII, and after seeing my coworker's Note recently I'm pretty sure that's going to be my next phone. Seems big when you're reading the spec sheets, but in person it feels great.
Of course, I *am* the kind of person who generally avoids using my phone as a phone. As long as it'll fit in my pocket, it's not too big.
You assume that people act independently within the system, rather than as a part of it. People make the decisions they do *because* of the system. Everything they do must take into account the existing system. They're raised within the existing system and it influences their very identity.
So you want to discount drug users for example. But addiction is a medical condition. And some drug users may use drug for pain relief or other reasons caused by inadequate healthcare. Perhaps there are less Swiss drug addicts (which I don't buy -- the reason they're a problem is our criminal justice system.) But perhaps there are less drug addicts because the nationalized healthcare system treats their addiction or because it provides the treatment they need.
So once again, you're only able to claim it's better by ignoring the potential negative consequences.
Yeah. I've heard that some ISPs sell crap like 50/0.75 packages, which can't be worth bothering with. I've had a single seeding torrent make Google.com impossible to load on upstream bandwidths like that. Even if you don't *think* you need upstream bandwidth...you still need some upstream bandwidth. 26 megs of it is quite fantastic.
Who the HELL said I supported the fascist democrats? Or mentioned them in any sense at all for that matter?
Nice to see you haven't bothered to address my point though, instead arguing against an entire ideology that you -- and you alone -- have decided I hold....
I am really curious what gigabit Internet means, in practice. At worst it could be like living on a 6-lane freeway that extends only the length of your driveway to a dirt road. Moreover the TOS restrictions against using it to run a "server" (whatever that means) really suck.
I have a 50/25 FiOS package. It usually tests at around 56Mbps down and 26Mbps up (Yeah, HIGHER than rated. I was shocked, but I ain't complaining!)
Well-seeded torrents are a blast. I can download an HD movie in five minutes flat. I downloaded two long (5 seasons or so) TV series and two movies yesterday in about four hours. Fantastic. Linux ISOs from decent mirrors aren't a ton better than a solid cable/DSL connection, downloaded a Debian image yesterday, I think it was 1.3GB, took around 20 minutes. YouTube videos still suck. At the HD levels I still frequently have to wait for buffering and outright freezes, which I suspect is more a fault of their player than my connection (or maybe the Linux flash plugin, though YouTube is the only site I ever see issues on.)
Generally, if you're doing peer-to-peer traffic with many peers, it's great. If you're downloading from a single server, I measure below 10Mbps even from what I'd expect to be the most well-equipped datacenters (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc). It seems that they just can't deliver content at such high speeds (or it's getting throttled somewhere else along the line).
So if you're not torrenting much I expect you wouldn't see much of a change at all moving to a gigabit network, unless you have a below-average connection to start.
As for the server restriction...there's always ways around it, and usually they don't care. I've never *not* run a server from my home network, and every such connection has a clause like that included. Unless you're running the next Slashdot from your basement, I doubt they'll care. And at that point, slap up some ads and it'll pay for hosting. I'm planning to soon be running everything from HTTP to DNS to Tor exit node servers from my FiOS connection, along with my existing public WiFi network (just in my apartment, but it's usually got a half dozen unknown devices connected) -- I'll let you know if they boot me;)
Well.....by definition (Websters and Google's 'Define:'), charity is a voluntary action, so taxes don't count. So by that definition I agree with GP, healthcare shouldn't be charity. I think it's morally wrong to allow people to be put in a position where they're forced to choose between food and insulin shots; or between their house and their cancer treatment. Or to look at it another way, it's morally wrong for society to be asking if Cigna's profit margin outweighs John Doe's broken leg. That's what is meant by "healthcare is not charity."
A lot of that cost is due to care providers needing to negotiate billing with every single provider they choose to accept. ACA will make that worse, as you'll have less cash providers and an increased market for a wider variety of plans.
It helps a couple problems; exacerbates a couple others...but in the end it's mostly just a handout to the insurance industry -- their lobbyists wouldn't have let it through any other way. They agreed to a couple restrictions (like preexisting conditions, which they can still charge an arm and a leg to cover) in exchange for being told that the uninsured public would be converted to paying customers at gunpoint.
Anyone who actually wants to *fix* the system is pushing to scrap this clusterfuck for single-payer.
Do you really think that a society that doesn't pay taxes, in other words without government, can't have roads, laws, food inspection and building codes? I would argue that all of these things could not only exist without a government but also be provided at better value.
'Value' is not an absolute quantity though, particularly in this context. For a democratic regulatory agency, *in theory* the "customers" are the taxpaying citizens. They have a monopoly, which sucks for the customer, but we're still the customer. Note that, once corporate powers seize control of these agencies (as I, and many others, would argue is largely the case in the US at least) they cease to be democratic.
For a free-market regulatory agency, the customers are *the corporations they are regulating*. We have numerous such agencies already, and in general it's been my experience that the majority tend to be failures.
So, in the first case where the customers are the general public, the greatest value is for the agencies to reject any suspicious products in order to protect the public health, saving these citizens money on healthcare costs and just general pain and suffering. When the customers are the corporations themselves, the greatest value lies in permitting as many low-level violations as possible to reduce the quality control costs to the corporation. Granted, they can't just scrap all quality control entirely or people will stop buying, but their maximum value is as many problems as you'll tolerate. And the harder an issue is for a private citizen to trace (if you got food poisoning, could you be 100% sure exactly where it came from?), the less incentive they have to look for it.
Now, you can set up independent regulatory agencies as well...but where's the benefit? Either they're independent and still paid by the corporations (in which case they become a form of advertising, and if the regulation is too strict the corporation may decide TV ads are a better value) or they're a sort of general membership club. If they're a membership club, either they allow their approval to be stamped directly on products (in which case, why pay the membership when I get the product anyway?) or they just give you a big list of approved products (in which case, I'm sure not gonna join because I don't have time for that crap -- who does?)
Wait, let me get this straight -- your argument is that if we ignore all the negative factors that our system causes, it comes out ahead!
Right. I've got a great strategy to make you rich too. Will pay you $50/day, every day! All you have to do to get this great strategy is subscribe to my service at the low lifetime membership rate of $60/day!
They just sold everyone else's souls. As I see it, everyone who brags here about how they're getting cheap health care due to this law at everyone else's expense is betraying the rest of their society.
No, you've got that backwards -- the rest of society is betraying *them* slightly less.
Why is some CEO's right to get a gold-plated cellphone or even your right to spend $20 at the movie theater worth more than their right to maybe live without being in constant pain -- or to live at all?
Not that I'm a fan of Obamacare...it's a corporate handout, nothing more; what we really need is a single-payer system...but saying you're being "betrayed" because someone doesn't want to have to choose between food and healthcare is frankly kind of disgusting.
Slashdot Mirror
I stand by my claim. the fourth amendment does not protect privacy, and for that matter, neither does the ninth.
You need to look up the definition of 'case law', and then read up on Griswold v. Connecticut (1965)
Read the Constitution again.
The question we all need to be asking is not 'where in the Constitution is it prohibited' but rather 'where is it *permitted*'? If it's not explicitly permitted in there somewhere, it's not legal for the federal government.
You could also argue that if she has a conscience, she wouldn't have been working that previous job unless she supported, in some way, the work they were doing. Therefore, she's more likely to think that when her former spy buddies come knocking asking for backdoors, it's the morally correct thing for her to say 'sure, no problem!'...
It has volume control...but I don't want audio going to it *at all*, because I want that audio going to the stereo instead. And at least on the devices I own, most are audio through HDMI *or* the analog audio output -- not both.
It is a cheap projector (cheapest 1080p I could find -- around $700 "retail", though I of course spent far less)...though it's a pretty decent Epson. Probably more expensive ones would have audio out that you could chain into the stereo system, but this one doesn't. Still, even devices with audio out usually only have 2-channel output, which doesn't help if you want to connect a 5.1 device to a 5.1 stereo receiver... and my receiver is freakin' ancient (20+ years old) so it has no HDMI ports at all...but those tend to last damn near forever so I doubt that's an uncommon problem.
Four if they refer it to US-based ICANN....
This is a DOMAIN REGISTRAR, not the host of the content. They don't give you this information, they just tell you where to get it.
It's like someone walking around saying "JOHN DOE IS A RAPIST". Which in most places is perfectly legal as long as it's a factual statement. There's generally nothing illegal about telling people who is committing crimes.
If you want a more similar example -- there are entire websites whose sole purpose is to broadcast which neighborhoods in which cities you're most likely to find drug dealers -- yet nobody is shutting those down....
a) I've installed modern Linux distros on 15 year old hardware without issues. Christ, the desktop I use daily is eight years old (and not the latest hardware at the time -- sub-$100 everything; I think the graphics card was $30 at the time) and it's pretty bleeding-edge -- running Arch and updated every week or two; and it took less than an hour to get Arch installed and configured, without a single issue.
b) OF COURSE Windows XP works fine on a 10 year old system -- it's a 10 year old OS! Try installing Windows 8 on a 10 year old system and let me know how it runs.
Although even then...XP is painfully slow on my work laptop (Thinkpad) -- it takes up to twenty minutes from login to getting Outlook open -- and I dunno exactly how old it is but it's got a freakin' Windows Vista sticker on it, so it's well past the XP era. That could be due to horrific configuration though, they don't give me admin rights to fix this crap.
As far as I'm concerned, AMD is still the lesser evil here...Intel has been caught doing much worse (having software artificially handicap itself if running on AMD vs Intel processors); as has NVidia (Screwing over the open source community and such).
Of course, I'd personally consider this a *feature*. One of my biggest problems with HDMI is that I always have to screw with the settings to *prevent* audio from being transmitted. I don't want the audio coming out of my 5W mono projector speaker when I've got a 220W surround sound system right below it...
Seriously, if my theater system used an AMD card, I'd consider switching to the proprietary drivers just for this...
Hah, in Pennsylvania, smaller = worse.
A friend of mine in my hometown of 13,000 once got accosted by not one, not two, but *three* patrol vehicles for walking downtown with a laptop under his coat (it was raining pretty heavily and he didn't have a case for it). No crime reported, no reason to suspect it was stolen, didn't even detain him for more than five minutes, but every cop in the downtown area was there in under a minute.
You'd think maybe it was because they've got nothing better to do...but then I gotta wonder why they never even showed up when my dad's car was broken into...
State police aren't too bad though, they'll usually let you off with a warning or at least a reduced ticket.
Not that I have a ton of experience, but I've never seen a modern smartphone display break just from being dropped. The glass, sure, it'll shatter and spiderweb and be wrecked to hell -- but usually the display underneath is still quite functional.
Stop.
Not everyone has the same preferences as you. Not everyone has the same work habits as you. Not everyone has the same hardware as you.
I can't fit two windows side-by-side on my laptop if I want them to be readable. Usually I keep the browser below full-screen, so I can see at a glance where I'm getting new mail in Outlook, but I can't tolerate the browser being less than ~80% of the screen width. Personally, I find excessive height interferes with my ability to read more than excessive width. Even on my phone I lose my place between lines, so the longer the lines are the more continuous my reading experience. And scrolling is the biggest interference of all. On the existing layout I can read the article and the first few comments before scrolling. On the new one beta site I have to scroll to even finish the summary!
If I want to reference multiple documents, I use multiple tabs. If I *really* need to I'll break the tabs out and overlap the windows, but since I can only interact with one at a time I don't see much point in putting them side-by-side. In fact, right now this window is the *only* tab I have open, and the *only* window I've interacted with in the past hour (yeah, slow day at work ;) I'm never reading from one while typing to another -- at worst I'm copying/pasting entire paragraphs, in which case I find it easier to put the new content where the old was, find what I want, then go back. I prefer to move the content rather than my focus.
Your comment reads like Jobs' infamous "you're holding it wrong." So you prefer vertically-oriented sites. Good for you. I prefer horizontal sites. Guess what? HTML is designed to be flexible and fit your display. I can view the current Slashdot on my phone (I don't use the mobile site because it never works); I can use it on my 1080p HD projector; I can use it on my 1600x1200 CRT...and I can full screen or window it on any of those and it still fills the available space and is perfectly readable.
Nobody here is saying you shouldn't be able to read it vertically if you want. What we're saying is that we don't want to, and telling what appears to be 95% of their users 'fuck you, you just don't work properly' is not a good way to improve your readership.
No. Somebody should make a Slashdot web proxy. One that restores the old formatting and strips out the ads (because Fuck You, Dice!)
Two bonuses there: First, it's easier; browser extensions suck. Secondly, Dice gets to see all of their traffic coming from a single host -- classicdot.com or whatever.
In fact...I may actually do that if this redesign moves forward as is. Shouldn't be too hard to modify PHPproxy accordingly...
But then Dice would have to admit they just wasted all this money on a new design that nobody ever actually uses.
You actually have a pretty decent point there with phpBB. Slashdot isn't really a news site, it's a news *forum*. The layout is far closer to any forum software than any traditional news website...and now some moron at Dice is trying to run that forum on Wordpress.
If this ends up the new face of Slashdot...I'll miss you guys. And I've *just* returned to reading regularly after a year or two of absence, so that'd be a real shame...
Awful. Absolutely awful. Stop it right now. This is Slashdot damnit, not Joe Smith's Tech Blog! The new design obliterates everything that makes this site what it is!
You are comparing a phone with a 4 inch screen, with a "phone" that has a 5.7 inch screen. You can't compare battery life when the screen is what uses up most of the power. If you want a huge screen you have to compromise on battery life (and many other things - seriously, the note is ridiculously big to use as an every-day phone).
Hah...not related to the main point you're making, but I've currently got a Galaxy SIII, and after seeing my coworker's Note recently I'm pretty sure that's going to be my next phone. Seems big when you're reading the spec sheets, but in person it feels great.
Of course, I *am* the kind of person who generally avoids using my phone as a phone. As long as it'll fit in my pocket, it's not too big.
What I *really* want though is the Archos 5 IMT, resurrected as a phone with a modern Android version:
http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/images/archos5ita/archos-5-imt-06.jpg
You assume that people act independently within the system, rather than as a part of it. People make the decisions they do *because* of the system. Everything they do must take into account the existing system. They're raised within the existing system and it influences their very identity.
So you want to discount drug users for example. But addiction is a medical condition. And some drug users may use drug for pain relief or other reasons caused by inadequate healthcare. Perhaps there are less Swiss drug addicts (which I don't buy -- the reason they're a problem is our criminal justice system.) But perhaps there are less drug addicts because the nationalized healthcare system treats their addiction or because it provides the treatment they need.
So once again, you're only able to claim it's better by ignoring the potential negative consequences.
Yeah. I've heard that some ISPs sell crap like 50/0.75 packages, which can't be worth bothering with. I've had a single seeding torrent make Google.com impossible to load on upstream bandwidths like that. Even if you don't *think* you need upstream bandwidth...you still need some upstream bandwidth. 26 megs of it is quite fantastic.
Who the HELL said I supported the fascist democrats? Or mentioned them in any sense at all for that matter?
Nice to see you haven't bothered to address my point though, instead arguing against an entire ideology that you -- and you alone -- have decided I hold....
I am really curious what gigabit Internet means, in practice. At worst it could be like living on a 6-lane freeway that extends only the length of your driveway to a dirt road. Moreover the TOS restrictions against using it to run a "server" (whatever that means) really suck.
I have a 50/25 FiOS package. It usually tests at around 56Mbps down and 26Mbps up (Yeah, HIGHER than rated. I was shocked, but I ain't complaining!)
Well-seeded torrents are a blast. I can download an HD movie in five minutes flat. I downloaded two long (5 seasons or so) TV series and two movies yesterday in about four hours. Fantastic. Linux ISOs from decent mirrors aren't a ton better than a solid cable/DSL connection, downloaded a Debian image yesterday, I think it was 1.3GB, took around 20 minutes. YouTube videos still suck. At the HD levels I still frequently have to wait for buffering and outright freezes, which I suspect is more a fault of their player than my connection (or maybe the Linux flash plugin, though YouTube is the only site I ever see issues on.)
Generally, if you're doing peer-to-peer traffic with many peers, it's great. If you're downloading from a single server, I measure below 10Mbps even from what I'd expect to be the most well-equipped datacenters (Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc). It seems that they just can't deliver content at such high speeds (or it's getting throttled somewhere else along the line).
So if you're not torrenting much I expect you wouldn't see much of a change at all moving to a gigabit network, unless you have a below-average connection to start.
As for the server restriction...there's always ways around it, and usually they don't care. I've never *not* run a server from my home network, and every such connection has a clause like that included. Unless you're running the next Slashdot from your basement, I doubt they'll care. And at that point, slap up some ads and it'll pay for hosting. I'm planning to soon be running everything from HTTP to DNS to Tor exit node servers from my FiOS connection, along with my existing public WiFi network (just in my apartment, but it's usually got a half dozen unknown devices connected) -- I'll let you know if they boot me ;)
Well.....by definition (Websters and Google's 'Define:'), charity is a voluntary action, so taxes don't count. So by that definition I agree with GP, healthcare shouldn't be charity. I think it's morally wrong to allow people to be put in a position where they're forced to choose between food and insulin shots; or between their house and their cancer treatment. Or to look at it another way, it's morally wrong for society to be asking if Cigna's profit margin outweighs John Doe's broken leg. That's what is meant by "healthcare is not charity."
A lot of that cost is due to care providers needing to negotiate billing with every single provider they choose to accept. ACA will make that worse, as you'll have less cash providers and an increased market for a wider variety of plans.
It helps a couple problems; exacerbates a couple others...but in the end it's mostly just a handout to the insurance industry -- their lobbyists wouldn't have let it through any other way. They agreed to a couple restrictions (like preexisting conditions, which they can still charge an arm and a leg to cover) in exchange for being told that the uninsured public would be converted to paying customers at gunpoint.
Anyone who actually wants to *fix* the system is pushing to scrap this clusterfuck for single-payer.
Do you really think that a society that doesn't pay taxes, in other words without government, can't have roads, laws, food inspection and building codes? I would argue that all of these things could not only exist without a government but also be provided at better value.
'Value' is not an absolute quantity though, particularly in this context. For a democratic regulatory agency, *in theory* the "customers" are the taxpaying citizens. They have a monopoly, which sucks for the customer, but we're still the customer. Note that, once corporate powers seize control of these agencies (as I, and many others, would argue is largely the case in the US at least) they cease to be democratic.
For a free-market regulatory agency, the customers are *the corporations they are regulating*. We have numerous such agencies already, and in general it's been my experience that the majority tend to be failures.
So, in the first case where the customers are the general public, the greatest value is for the agencies to reject any suspicious products in order to protect the public health, saving these citizens money on healthcare costs and just general pain and suffering. When the customers are the corporations themselves, the greatest value lies in permitting as many low-level violations as possible to reduce the quality control costs to the corporation. Granted, they can't just scrap all quality control entirely or people will stop buying, but their maximum value is as many problems as you'll tolerate. And the harder an issue is for a private citizen to trace (if you got food poisoning, could you be 100% sure exactly where it came from?), the less incentive they have to look for it.
Now, you can set up independent regulatory agencies as well...but where's the benefit? Either they're independent and still paid by the corporations (in which case they become a form of advertising, and if the regulation is too strict the corporation may decide TV ads are a better value) or they're a sort of general membership club. If they're a membership club, either they allow their approval to be stamped directly on products (in which case, why pay the membership when I get the product anyway?) or they just give you a big list of approved products (in which case, I'm sure not gonna join because I don't have time for that crap -- who does?)
Wait, let me get this straight -- your argument is that if we ignore all the negative factors that our system causes, it comes out ahead!
Right. I've got a great strategy to make you rich too. Will pay you $50/day, every day! All you have to do to get this great strategy is subscribe to my service at the low lifetime membership rate of $60/day!
They just sold everyone else's souls. As I see it, everyone who brags here about how they're getting cheap health care due to this law at everyone else's expense is betraying the rest of their society.
No, you've got that backwards -- the rest of society is betraying *them* slightly less.
Why is some CEO's right to get a gold-plated cellphone or even your right to spend $20 at the movie theater worth more than their right to maybe live without being in constant pain -- or to live at all?
Not that I'm a fan of Obamacare...it's a corporate handout, nothing more; what we really need is a single-payer system...but saying you're being "betrayed" because someone doesn't want to have to choose between food and healthcare is frankly kind of disgusting.