This is actually a step backward. The computers we had when I was your age were cooled by a proprietary oil. Of course, back then "proprietary" meant "whale" and "computer" meant "steam-powered abacus," but this isn't one lick different. Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat the whale-oil-cooled, steam-powered abacus, it seems.
I define unique in a way that is, tragically, probably unique: correctly. There is no such thing as "relatively unique." I catch myself saying such things at times, but usually feel guilty later.
At any rate, I think that the following sites are unique, at least insofar as no other site has done the same thing with even a comparable amount of success and therefore they stand alone: Slashdot, Woot, Wikipedia, Google, Babelfish, Cornell Law's LII, archive.org, packing.org (now dead but lacking appropriate replacement and thus still unique), and eBay.
I don't know of any place in the US where you can get punitive damages without at least gross negligence. Regardless of that, though, can you point to actual examples where an award of punitive damages has actually affected the quality or cost of health care?
In theory, punitive damages actually reduce the cost of health care because they deter severely bad medical treatment. Also, in some states it is unlawful for insurance to cover punitive damages. In a few other states punitive damages are only insurable if the conduct giving rise to them was not willful.
In reality, punitive damages pretty much come up only in two situations:
1. Where the defendant has no incentive not to hurt someone else again based on actual damages - if you profit $1 billion and have to pay out $1 million in verdicts and settlements, compared to only profiting $900 million without inflicting the harm giving rise to them, you are going to keep hurting people. As a matter of fact, it's probably a breach of your duty to your shareholders to stop.
2. Where the conduct was intentional, which in actual practice usually means that it was fraudulent. And if you do something like fudge the numbers on a person's surgery chart to cover up the fact that you left three sponges inside of his body, being punished for it beyond the actual damage you did is a good thing because it gives you incentive to tell the patient the truth earlier on.
Basically, punitive damages and the civil justice system as a whole are necessary components of a capitalist society. Without them, we have no economic reason to treat each other as anything less than a means to an end, and you can't force 100% of a country to have reasons other than economic behind their actions.
I meant wealthy, and the reason I said that is because they will not want health insurance in the US where their premiums are higher and where the quality of care suffers the problems that Canada has now. Canadians who actually want to see a doctor often come to the US, and wealthy Americans who actually want to see a doctor only stay in the US because that's where you go for prompt, quality medical treatment.
Dang - I forgot to ask this in my initial reply. Since you disagree that Obama's plan is a bad idea, how do you respond to the problems with it that I pointed out in this comment?
Define "tort reform." Depending on who uses the term, it can mean anything from requiring an expert witness opinion before you can file a malpractice lawsuit all the way up to eliminating the civil justice system.
Your conclusion is flawed. The reason we're the richest country on Earth is because our government stays at least a little bit out of non-governmental functions, such as health care. That said, I have no problem admitting that things are not perfect and could be improved, as I've said elsewhere. Just because I don't have time to come up with a good solution doesn't provide any reason to vote for a person whose platform is largely built upon a bad one.
You are transferring your risk to the insurance company and paying a premium (the insurance term derives from the normal meaning: a price above what something is worth) for the transfer. The fact that risk is pooled is why the economics of insurance work out, but your statement of the "whole point of insurance", that being "to avoid financial disaster", is only true as a corollary. Financial disaster is a risk and you transfer that risk to an insurer.
In reality, having written that, I see that we agree on what the whole point of insurance is, I am just stating it one way and you are stating it another. Financial disaster is a risk and to avoid it is to transfer it to someone else. We both agree, despite you saying that I only gave "part of" the point of insurance, that the "whole point" is to accomplish this transfer/avoidance of risk/financial disaster.
1. No regulation, allow health insurance companies to set premiums for each policyholder based on risk. The disadvantage here is that the poor can't get insurance and have to rely on the government to provide for their necessary health care outside of the insurance system.
2. The Canada plan, provide health insurance for every citizen but do a bad job of it. The disadvantage here is that the really wealthy will accept that their taxes are higher and that they get no benefit for it since they just go to another country to get prompt, quality health care services.
3. The Obama plan, force insurance companies to cover additional risks and thus to increase their premiums for all customers, provide tax credits to the poor so they can afford those increased premiums, and double-tax the rich by making them pay not only higher insurance premiums to cover pre-existing conditions but also increased taxes to cover all those tax credits to the poor.
The real disadvantage with Obama's plan is that, unlike the Canada plan, the wealthy people can opt out of having health insurance altogether, which will decrease the pool of risk and thus increase the risk to the insurance companies, which will further increase their rates. The wealthy will go to other countries to get their care, if needed, and American doctors will make less money and either go out of business or leave the country for greener pastures, just as many Canadian doctors come to the US. You end up with the same problems Canada has, except without the financial stability.
No, the point of insurance is to transfer risk. The reason that liability insurance on vehicles is required in most (all?) states is that the person whose risk is protected indirectly by the insurance is not the person paying for it.
That's what I do for eye and dental care, because I have healthy teeth and predictable eyes. Why pay someone else to bear a risk that I can already calculate, cutting out the middle man? Insurance isn't about paying for everything, it is about transfer of risk.
It was cleverly hidden in the second paragraph. "[T]he average patient waited more than 18 weeks in 2007 between seeing their family doctor and receiving the surgery or treatment they required[.]" To be fair, 'necessary' was not the actual word used - synonyms don't destroy the point. Do you know of any information that points to a conclusion different than the Fraser one cited in that CBC article?
Not to get side-tracked, but first off do you know of a jurisdiction within the United States that allows punitive damages for regular negligence? I am not aware of one, but I haven't exactly looked into all of them.
You do ask a lot of good questions. Do you know of a place in the world that has answered these questions? Do you know what Obama has actually proposed? It mostly consists of tax credits and requiring insurance companies to do things like cover preexisting conditions.
Do you know what that actually means? It means that, not only does the government increase taxes on the wealthy to pay for private health insurance for the poor, but the insurance companies can and will increase their rates for all people because of the increased risk they are bearing. The alternative to that result is that insurance is no longer a profitable business and companies will get out of it.
As to doctors not making enough in the primary care market, I know a lot of them who do just fine. As a matter of fact, quite a few have immigrated from Canada, where the government decides how much doctors should be paid and where that number is simply not high enough to motivate a good doctor to stay.
The health care system is not perfect. It could be improved. Forcing private businesses to engage in unprofitable activity and forcing both types of premium increases on wealthier taxpayers is indistinguishable from socialism and nobody has stood up with any convincing evidence that it will work in the long term.
It's a matter of degree. In Canada, the average waiting time for a necessary surgery is 18 weeks. Having your appointment happen an hour late isn't even close.
Slashdotters don't have a lot of motivation for curing STDs, or you would have got the Informative mod instead of just Funny. However, I did manage to cure my carpal tunnel syndrome with spare condoms and breath mints. And I'm probably not the only one here.
I want to punch every one of those assholes who buys products advertised by spam e-mail in his face. I've been saying for years that, if the supply of gullible idiots with credit cards dried up, the spammers would reduce their efforts drastically.
It is much more correct to say it the way you just did - "using unstable since 3.1 was current." The reason is that there is never an instant in time when the current snapshot of unstable will become a release. Individual packages (or versions of them) migrate from unstable into testing, and at some point testing is frozen for release and then becomes stable so that it can be unfrozen for new packages to come in from unstable. That's why unstable is always sid - it's constantly changing and never frozen. By contract, stable is a snapshot at a moment in time modulo security fixes or the occasional point-release update and testing works toward a freeze.
Debian used to release when they felt like the system was in a good enough state to release, with no set schedule. This is exactly why that's a good idea - now, they have to choose between being buggy or being behind schedule, whereas before they did not have to make that trade-off.
The overall point is that you should drive appropriately to the conditions you are driving in. There are many different possible attributes that the conditions may have: dry, rainy, snowing, icy; flat, uphill, downhill, long uphill, long downhill; concrete, asphalt, tar and gravel covered asphalt, gravel, dirt; etc. Engine braking has its time and place to be used - use it then, but not when it's inappropriate. The same applies to deliberately driving at higher RPM in a lower gear or lower RPM in a higher gear based on what effect you want to achieve, for instance. Driving is a complex skill with a lot of facets - car designs spend basically all of their time trying to simplify the skill so that idiots without it can still drive.
I just wish that new languages would get better names. It's hard enough to Google for C or C++ information because of their names, and now Microsoft is coming up with another language that can't be Googled.
Slashdot Mirror
This is actually a step backward. The computers we had when I was your age were cooled by a proprietary oil. Of course, back then "proprietary" meant "whale" and "computer" meant "steam-powered abacus," but this isn't one lick different. Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat the whale-oil-cooled, steam-powered abacus, it seems.
One time, I demoted a guy to Latrine Cleaner's Mate Second Class Obvious. He was inept as an officer.
I define unique in a way that is, tragically, probably unique: correctly. There is no such thing as "relatively unique." I catch myself saying such things at times, but usually feel guilty later.
At any rate, I think that the following sites are unique, at least insofar as no other site has done the same thing with even a comparable amount of success and therefore they stand alone: Slashdot, Woot, Wikipedia, Google, Babelfish, Cornell Law's LII, archive.org, packing.org (now dead but lacking appropriate replacement and thus still unique), and eBay.
I don't know of any place in the US where you can get punitive damages without at least gross negligence. Regardless of that, though, can you point to actual examples where an award of punitive damages has actually affected the quality or cost of health care?
In theory, punitive damages actually reduce the cost of health care because they deter severely bad medical treatment. Also, in some states it is unlawful for insurance to cover punitive damages. In a few other states punitive damages are only insurable if the conduct giving rise to them was not willful.
In reality, punitive damages pretty much come up only in two situations:
1. Where the defendant has no incentive not to hurt someone else again based on actual damages - if you profit $1 billion and have to pay out $1 million in verdicts and settlements, compared to only profiting $900 million without inflicting the harm giving rise to them, you are going to keep hurting people. As a matter of fact, it's probably a breach of your duty to your shareholders to stop.
2. Where the conduct was intentional, which in actual practice usually means that it was fraudulent. And if you do something like fudge the numbers on a person's surgery chart to cover up the fact that you left three sponges inside of his body, being punished for it beyond the actual damage you did is a good thing because it gives you incentive to tell the patient the truth earlier on.
Basically, punitive damages and the civil justice system as a whole are necessary components of a capitalist society. Without them, we have no economic reason to treat each other as anything less than a means to an end, and you can't force 100% of a country to have reasons other than economic behind their actions.
I meant wealthy, and the reason I said that is because they will not want health insurance in the US where their premiums are higher and where the quality of care suffers the problems that Canada has now. Canadians who actually want to see a doctor often come to the US, and wealthy Americans who actually want to see a doctor only stay in the US because that's where you go for prompt, quality medical treatment.
Enterprise Objective Malbolge# 2.0 needs to exist. Who wants to help create it?
Dang - I forgot to ask this in my initial reply. Since you disagree that Obama's plan is a bad idea, how do you respond to the problems with it that I pointed out in this comment?
Define "tort reform." Depending on who uses the term, it can mean anything from requiring an expert witness opinion before you can file a malpractice lawsuit all the way up to eliminating the civil justice system.
Your conclusion is flawed. The reason we're the richest country on Earth is because our government stays at least a little bit out of non-governmental functions, such as health care. That said, I have no problem admitting that things are not perfect and could be improved, as I've said elsewhere. Just because I don't have time to come up with a good solution doesn't provide any reason to vote for a person whose platform is largely built upon a bad one.
You are transferring your risk to the insurance company and paying a premium (the insurance term derives from the normal meaning: a price above what something is worth) for the transfer. The fact that risk is pooled is why the economics of insurance work out, but your statement of the "whole point of insurance", that being "to avoid financial disaster", is only true as a corollary. Financial disaster is a risk and you transfer that risk to an insurer.
In reality, having written that, I see that we agree on what the whole point of insurance is, I am just stating it one way and you are stating it another. Financial disaster is a risk and to avoid it is to transfer it to someone else. We both agree, despite you saying that I only gave "part of" the point of insurance, that the "whole point" is to accomplish this transfer/avoidance of risk/financial disaster.
There are basically three approaches:
1. No regulation, allow health insurance companies to set premiums for each policyholder based on risk. The disadvantage here is that the poor can't get insurance and have to rely on the government to provide for their necessary health care outside of the insurance system.
2. The Canada plan, provide health insurance for every citizen but do a bad job of it. The disadvantage here is that the really wealthy will accept that their taxes are higher and that they get no benefit for it since they just go to another country to get prompt, quality health care services.
3. The Obama plan, force insurance companies to cover additional risks and thus to increase their premiums for all customers, provide tax credits to the poor so they can afford those increased premiums, and double-tax the rich by making them pay not only higher insurance premiums to cover pre-existing conditions but also increased taxes to cover all those tax credits to the poor.
The real disadvantage with Obama's plan is that, unlike the Canada plan, the wealthy people can opt out of having health insurance altogether, which will decrease the pool of risk and thus increase the risk to the insurance companies, which will further increase their rates. The wealthy will go to other countries to get their care, if needed, and American doctors will make less money and either go out of business or leave the country for greener pastures, just as many Canadian doctors come to the US. You end up with the same problems Canada has, except without the financial stability.
No, the point of insurance is to transfer risk. The reason that liability insurance on vehicles is required in most (all?) states is that the person whose risk is protected indirectly by the insurance is not the person paying for it.
That's what I do for eye and dental care, because I have healthy teeth and predictable eyes. Why pay someone else to bear a risk that I can already calculate, cutting out the middle man? Insurance isn't about paying for everything, it is about transfer of risk.
It was cleverly hidden in the second paragraph. "[T]he average patient waited more than 18 weeks in 2007 between seeing their family doctor and receiving the surgery or treatment they required[.]" To be fair, 'necessary' was not the actual word used - synonyms don't destroy the point. Do you know of any information that points to a conclusion different than the Fraser one cited in that CBC article?
Not to get side-tracked, but first off do you know of a jurisdiction within the United States that allows punitive damages for regular negligence? I am not aware of one, but I haven't exactly looked into all of them.
You do ask a lot of good questions. Do you know of a place in the world that has answered these questions? Do you know what Obama has actually proposed? It mostly consists of tax credits and requiring insurance companies to do things like cover preexisting conditions.
Do you know what that actually means? It means that, not only does the government increase taxes on the wealthy to pay for private health insurance for the poor, but the insurance companies can and will increase their rates for all people because of the increased risk they are bearing. The alternative to that result is that insurance is no longer a profitable business and companies will get out of it.
As to doctors not making enough in the primary care market, I know a lot of them who do just fine. As a matter of fact, quite a few have immigrated from Canada, where the government decides how much doctors should be paid and where that number is simply not high enough to motivate a good doctor to stay.
The health care system is not perfect. It could be improved. Forcing private businesses to engage in unprofitable activity and forcing both types of premium increases on wealthier taxpayers is indistinguishable from socialism and nobody has stood up with any convincing evidence that it will work in the long term.
It's a matter of degree. In Canada, the average waiting time for a necessary surgery is 18 weeks. Having your appointment happen an hour late isn't even close.
And even if it doesn't work to reduce spam, it will clean the gene pool up a bit. It's win freakin' win.
Slashdotters don't have a lot of motivation for curing STDs, or you would have got the Informative mod instead of just Funny. However, I did manage to cure my carpal tunnel syndrome with spare condoms and breath mints. And I'm probably not the only one here.
I want to punch every one of those assholes who buys products advertised by spam e-mail in his face. I've been saying for years that, if the supply of gullible idiots with credit cards dried up, the spammers would reduce their efforts drastically.
It is much more correct to say it the way you just did - "using unstable since 3.1 was current." The reason is that there is never an instant in time when the current snapshot of unstable will become a release. Individual packages (or versions of them) migrate from unstable into testing, and at some point testing is frozen for release and then becomes stable so that it can be unfrozen for new packages to come in from unstable. That's why unstable is always sid - it's constantly changing and never frozen. By contract, stable is a snapshot at a moment in time modulo security fixes or the occasional point-release update and testing works toward a freeze.
Debian used to release when they felt like the system was in a good enough state to release, with no set schedule. This is exactly why that's a good idea - now, they have to choose between being buggy or being behind schedule, whereas before they did not have to make that trade-off.
Yes, people acting on purely financial motives are good at the core. You just realized that now?
The overall point is that you should drive appropriately to the conditions you are driving in. There are many different possible attributes that the conditions may have: dry, rainy, snowing, icy; flat, uphill, downhill, long uphill, long downhill; concrete, asphalt, tar and gravel covered asphalt, gravel, dirt; etc. Engine braking has its time and place to be used - use it then, but not when it's inappropriate. The same applies to deliberately driving at higher RPM in a lower gear or lower RPM in a higher gear based on what effect you want to achieve, for instance. Driving is a complex skill with a lot of facets - car designs spend basically all of their time trying to simplify the skill so that idiots without it can still drive.
I just wish that new languages would get better names. It's hard enough to Google for C or C++ information because of their names, and now Microsoft is coming up with another language that can't be Googled.
I was thinking Robocop.