Excuse me if I find it hard to tell the differences when they all act and behave the same.
They don't. You're just focusing on the similarities and ignoring the differences.
I don't recall the conservatives raising taxes on the super-wealthy (while lowering them for everyone else), or allowing foreign aid funds to be used for family planning, or pushing universal health care, or setting a firm date for finally getting out of Iraq...
This reminds me a lot of some nonsense Charles Petzold wrote in an early edition of "Programming Windows". As you'd expect, he starts with a "hello world" example. One expects such a basic program to be maybe a half-dozen lines, with only a line or two of logic, and the rest syntactic sugar. But Petzold's example covers almost two pages and is extremely dense and complicated code. And while this example is a little less elegant than it could be, there's not actually a lot you can do to make it shorter.
Heh, I remember that example. That's the reason why I gave up on Windows programming until VB (and later Delphi and.NET) came out.
Free form learning doesn't seem to work out too well for most of these people, why do you think it will work for everyone?
I don't think it'll work for everyone, but I think the freedom to control one's own life outweighs the danger of using that freedom to make a choice one regrets later.
A 19-year-old female said of drop ping out, "I wouldn't make the same decision. I would stay in school." A female from Baltimore put it succinctly, "I think it's one of the worst regrets of my life."
You could find similar quotes from people who regret buying a car or a house, getting married, having kids, or making any other major life decisions. Any time anyone makes a choice, there's a chance that it'll end up being the wrong choice and they'll regret it later. That's just something you have to accept if you value freedom.
If someone wants to go to school because he's heard scary stories about dropouts being miserable later, that's fine. That's a voluntary choice.
If he chooses not to go to school, regrets his choice, and decides to finish his education later, that's great too. It sounds like the people you quoted didn't have an opportunity to do that, though, and that's what we should be worried about. The opportunity to go back to school and pick up new skills isn't just important for those who skip high school -- in an age of outsourcing, automation, and job loss in general, it's important for everyone.
Plus, no one (certainly not Pelosi, Reid, or Obama) is trying to reinstate the fairness doctrine anyway. Apparently it's not enough to misrepresent the fairness doctrine's purpose and effect; they have to misrepresent its status as a political issue, too.
I'm not sure how we made the leap from comparing two groups of people with sub-optimal decision making abilities to racism and misogyny
You think it's a leap because you're blind to your own bigotry. You think teenagers are a group of people with sub-optimal decision making abilities -- sub-optimal enough to justify robbing them of the power to control their own lives -- just like racists might think the same about blacks, and misogynists might think the same about women. You, like they, insist that this belief is based on facts, when in reality it's based on your own prejudice.
You neatly sidestepped the point I made about sweatshops. What, exactly, is your plan for keeping our sons out of ditches and our daughters off of poles?
Why would we need a special plan? What would you do if an adult friend wanted to become a stripper? Whatever the answer is, you could do the same thing for your daughter too.
Your computer analogy is flawed. All of your computers would presumably arrive at the same answer.
Yes, and that's why the analogy is valid. Teenagers can, and do, make the same decisions as adults, given the same set of priorities.
A more appropriate analogy would be to ask a computer with a math-co to add four numbers together and then ask a random number generator to do it.
No, that would be less appropriate. Teenagers don't make decisions at random, nor do they make decisions that are objectively "wrong".
If you really want to improve on the analogy, consider two computers using different rounding modes: the rounding modes are different, but neither is "better" than the other. After a series of operations, they might arrive at different answers, but both answers are correct; the difference follows from the different set of parameters.
Teenagers make decisions with an "I want now", immediate gratification slant.
Sometimes, sure. But sometimes we all do. I hope you're not planning to lock up every impulsive adult for 6 hours a day too!
Teenagers are certainly capable of planning for the future, and they do it all the time: studying for tests, saving up money for big purchases, working out strategies in games, etc. I'm amused at how little overlap there is between teenagers' ability in your mind and in reality.
Allowing kids to make all their own 'life' decisions would probably result in us losing that slot to the dolphins or possibly border collies.
Many, even most, minors are quite capable of making those decisions for themselves. At worst, what would happen is the ones who really aren't capable would die out and be replaced in the gene pool by the ones who are. It wouldn't be the end of the species. Watch out for the anthropic fallacy: the path our culture has taken isn't the only one that works, it's just the one we happen to have taken.
They'll be teenagers for less than 10 years. They'll be adults for 60 more. Teen-kid doesn't give a shit about adult-kid, so you have to watch out for adult-kid.
Here's an idea: let's let teen-kid decide whether or not to sacrifice his own happiness for a future adult-kid that may or may not ever exist (not everyone lives to old age) and may or may not feel the way you think he'll feel (not everyone spends the rest of their lives regretting the choices they made in their youth). Let's worry about people who actually exist, and suffering that actually exists and can be alleviated, not the hypothetical feelings of hypothetical people in a hypothetical future.
I mean, I know that as an ageist, you're predisposed to think an older person's happiness is inherently more important, and thus a young person ought to be prevented from doing anything that might conceivably upset his older self. But that's not the only way to see the world.
Should we fling the doors open on the mental institutions too?
Nope, but it's quite revealing that you think that's somehow equivalent.
I'm sure the bigots of past generations thought granting civil rights to blacks and women was no better than flinging open the doors to the loony bin too. And I'm sure they thought they were better than their forefathers, just like you think your bigotry is better than theirs: discriminating against the Irish or non-landowners or people with bumpy heads, that's crazy, but blacks^H^H^H^H^H^Hwomen^H^H^H^H^Hteenagers really are inferior, right?
There are plenty of studies that show the teenage brain isn't fully developed
A person's brain keeps changing through his entire life. It doesn't look the same at 15 as it will at 35 -- nor does it the same at 35 as it will at 85. Does that mean geriatric brains are the only ones that can make valid decisions? No, because decision-making is a process, not a lobe or a gland or an organ.
Since this is Slashdot, let me make a computer analogy. Say you want to add four real numbers together. Some computers have special vector hardware that can do it in one instruction; others have older floating-point hardware that can do it in several instructions; others have no floating-point hardware at all, so they do the calculation in software, using hundreds of instructions. But if you're certifying computers for their ability to arrive at the correct answer, it doesn't matter how they implement it.
Decision making can be, and is, "implemented" by a teenage brain. Maybe not the same way it will be when they get older, but it's there.
and the last thing that develops is decision making [thefreelibrary.com].
Interesting phrasing. It's not true that teenagers lack the ability to make decisions, and that's not what the linked article says.
What is true is that they tend to use a different set of priorities when making decisions: "when teens make choices in emotionally charged situations, those choices are often more weighted in feelings (the mature limbic system) over logic (the not-yet-mature prefrontal cortex)."
Of course, you could say the same about women compared to men, or about some individuals compared to others. Priorities are a matter of opinion, and there is no right answer. You and I probably won't have the same set of priorities in a few decades as we do today, either.
Except you want to emancipate every kid, even though they haven't demonstrated any kind of ability to deal with the responsibility that would be thrust upon them.
How exactly are they supposed to demonstrate it if you never allow them the opportunity?
And how are you unaware that we already emancipate every kid, even though they haven't demonstrated any kind of ability to deal with the responsibility that would be thrust upon them? We wait until their 18th birthday to do it, but we don't require them to demonstrate any maturity or responsibility whatsoever.
If you change from Provider A to Provider B, who both supply exactly the same benefits, just with a different premium, there should be no such concept as a 'pre-existing condition'. [...] But yet insurance companies are able to boot you off coverage for such a thing. That isn't the purpose of insurance.
Agreed. I'm not saying we have an optimal implementation of the concept of health insurance, only that the concept is a good one and there's no suitable replacement.
The example you discussed is perfectly covered by a FSA. Your employer is required to make the entirety of your contributions available on Jan 1 of that year, so it is in effect an interest-free loan.
But an FSA doesn't roll over to the next year. If you don't use it, the money's gone just like your insurance premiums would be gone... except your "coverage" from the FSA is capped at the amount you can afford to pay into it. It's no replacement for insurance unless you're sure your annual medical costs will be no more than what you can afford to sock away in a single year.
Insurance isn't just about amortizing your health care. That's what loans are for. Insurance is about paying to be relieved of risk.
Suppose you know that next year, you'll have to spend $1200 in medical bills: you could put $100 in the bank every month this year, and the money will be there when you need it, right?
But suppose you know your medical bills might possibly be up to $12,000. Can you afford to put $1000 in the bank every month, saving for a situation that may or may not occur? Maybe not. Maybe you could tighten your belt and compromise by saving $500 every month, which would probably still be more than you need, but you'd still be taking the risk of coming up short.
And even that assumes you know exactly when you'll get sick or injured and have to pay out. In reality, you don't know that. You might get slapped with a $12,000 bill the first month, when you've only managed to save $500. Whoops! Better hope the interest on that $11,500 loan doesn't outweigh what you saved by forgoing insurance.
Unless you're in your 80s or have chronic health problems, you're better off paying cash.
I think you forgot to add "or if there's any chance you might get sick or injured" to your list.
Sure, health insurance seems like a waste of money if you never end up using it. And on average, it will cost more than paying cash... but paying cash is often impractical.
Insurance is basically the opposite of an investment. When you invest money, you get paid to assume risk. When you buy insurance, you pay someone else to take risk off your hands. Most of us can't keep $100,000 on hand to pay for emergencies, so it's worth paying a little extra to know that our monthly expenses are capped.
Same goes for car insurance. Why spend $2000 a year ($20,000 a decade) insuring my car? If I wreck it, I can just go buy a used one for around $5000, or a cheap new Civic for $12,000.
Sounds like your insurer is trying to screw you. My car was $10,500 when I bought it used (the new model was around $16,000), but I only pay about $1100 a year for comprehensive insurance. And I'm not exactly in an "only drives to church on Sundays" demographic.
The real difference between more socialized countries is that the government takes your money and uses it to pay for cheap insurance. In the US, the government lets you keep your money, and you have to buy the cheap insurance yourself.
Close, but not quite. In a national healthcare system, the government takes everyone's money and uses it to pay for everyone's coverage. It's not the same as forcing you to pay insurance premiums with your own money: depending on how much you earn, you could be paying more or less than the true cost of your coverage. That's how they can cover everyone.
The results are socialized countries have less competition and less innovation and slightly worse overall care, but everyone gets it, because the government held everyone's hand and did it for them.
"Worse overall care"? I hope you have some evidence for that.
It seems in this case, Socialized = more people dead, but they have money after; Free Market = less people dead, but many have serious money problems after.
I hope you have some evidence for this too -- the claim that more people die from waiting lists there than from lack of coverage here -- and I hope it accounts for suicides that result from such massive debt.
On the other hand, with a more socialized market, most people's finances are not as strong as they could be, but if someone doesn't prioritize, there is a safety net.
It's disingenuous to call it purely a matter of priorities. If you don't have the money to pay for health insurance (or retirement savings, or anything else provided by a social safety net), changing your priorities won't help.
I've seen the different ways these places operate, and my overall stance is still that they all have different good points and problems, but the 'standard of living' is all pretty much the same.
Well, let's remember that this all started with a Heinlein quote: "The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys."
I don't really care to argue whether the standard of living across the pond is higher than in the US, or merely equal. But would you agree that Heinlein was wrong: the power to tax has not run amok and destroyed Europe or Canada (relative to the US), nor has it destroyed the US (relative to countries with even lower taxes)?
Please, don't you agree the statement "school is more like a sentence" is just a tinsy bit melodramatic?
No. It's blunt, but it's still accurate.
Imagine a country where one out of four people are rounded up on buses every weekday, usually against their will. They're made to spend their time performing work that has no value to anyone in the outside world, and they receive no compensation for it. They aren't allowed to speak to each other during most of that time, and they suffer humiliations like being strip-searched if they're suspected of possessing over-the-counter medication. Their rights and movement are restricted in ways that would be illegal for any employer to try on his employees. Oh, and if they refuse to be rounded up, or if they escape once they're there, they'll be arrested, and their family members may also be punished so that they'll pressure their stubborn relatives into compliance.
If it were anyone other than minors being affected by this, there would be no controversy in calling it a gross violation of human rights. But we let it happen, simply because the people subjected to this treatment haven't yet orbited the sun a full 18 times.
That's melodramatic, but again, it's accurate. Compulsory schooling is a travesty that only exists because minors have no political power -- and because so many other people have no problem with treating them as less than human.
Yes, I suppose I could have started my own business, but by the same token, there must be a school out there that doesn't crush the fragile flower of a students individuality too. So it's possible she has other choices as well.
No, she doesn't have other choices. Her parents might, but that's not the same. She has no power of her own to choose a school, or to choose not to attend school at all: it's not a voluntary choice on her part. The best she can hope to do is plead her case to the people who will eventually make the choice for her, and hope they're kind enough to take her preferences into consideration.
Maybe there's a cost associated with not being legally responsible for your actions, perhaps some rights are part of that cost.
It's the other way around: legal responsibility for your actions comes from having rights. Specifically, from having the right to vote, and thus participate in the process of deciding which actions are illegal. (This goes back to the American Revolution and "no taxation without representation": it was unacceptable to impose laws on the colonies without their input.)
On the other hand, it's not true that minors aren't legally responsible for their actions. There would be no story here if this girl hadn't been arrested! Minors are tried in juvenile court, usually, but in many cases they're tried as adults -- full responsibility without any of the corresponding rights.
If your school experience was truly horrific, Sorry about the boo-hoo. If it was pretty much average, I'll let it stand.
What, you think those options are mutually exclusive?;)
The difference between my school experience and most people's was in what happened afterward. I didn't just write it off as "something we all have to go through" and look forward to the day when I could inflict it on a new generation of unfortunate minors. It wasted my time, delayed my career, and trampled my rights back then; it wastes the current generation's time, delays their careers, and tramples their rights today.
You see, Hoover bungled it for three years, then FDR socialist policies stagnated us from 1933-1940. It wasn't until we started arming up and lending materials to the UK that things took off.
This revisionist version of history has been making the rounds lately, but it's false.
FDR's policies got us heading out of the depression, and they worked pretty well. What slowed them down was doing a half-assed job: cutting back and raising taxes in 1937 because he thought balancing the budget was more important than getting the economy back on its feet.
At least on GSM, the name of the network you're on comes up on the display so you have some obvious visual cue. On CDMA, only a small R icon in the corner will inform you about roaming, at least on all the phones I've had.
CDMA phones can do that too. I believe it's called Enhanced Roaming Indicator (ERI). My past two Verizon phones (LG and Samsung) have shown "Verizon Wireless" on the home network, or something else when roaming.
Classy! I hope someone repeats that to you, in an appropriately sarcastic voice, the next time your civil rights are trampled.
A job is something you take on voluntarily? I don't know anyone that wouldn't quit their job if they could still live in a house and feed their family without one.
That's still voluntary. Taking a job out of necessity, because you aren't able to live off investments or start your own business like many other people do, is just a bit different from going to school because the law says that's where you have to be and you'll be arrested if you refuse to comply. But you knew that already, right?
Say they try and expel her, what does the school say when the parents ask for proof?
Something like "Ms. Teachername saw your daughter texting on a cell phone and then she refused to put it away. Little Billy and Johnny saw it too." What's so hard about that?
I'm guessing here, but I'd say you're either still in, or freshly out of school. I'm sorry to say, as much as school sucks, real life sucks just as hard.
You guessed wrong.
I'm sorry your life sucks so hard. Mine, however, has gotten much better in the years since I left school. I guess I'm just one of those people who doesn't like being treated like livestock. Weird, huh?
In fact, people complain about a huge divide in treatment and that minorities get much worse care. But the minorities in the US HAD BETTER CHANCES OF SURVIVING CANCER THEN WHITE PEOPLE IN THE UK. This could be interpreted as: US's cancer care at its worst still beat UK's cancer care at its best.
It could also be interpreted as: many cancer victims in the US never become part of those statistics, because they never get diagnosed, because they can't afford to see a doctor in the first place.
There are stories of individuals hit with a disaster and unable to pay for the best treatment. But there are also stories of Canadian grandmothers dying while on waiting lists to get the care they need.
Surely you aren't suggesting that's an equally serious problem, are you?
There are stories of people being run over by cars, and there are also stories of people being struck by lightning. That doesn't mean lightning is as dangerous as auto accidents.
The point being, that many people that are complaining about the health care are people like this lady. They have sob stories, and they get a lot of people's attention, but when examined closely they're people that can't get their priorities straight. It's hard to cut through all of that to see what's really happening.
It's not that hard. All you have to do is look at the financial stats: medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US.
A wealth redistribution plan (social security) helps people who don't need help (like me). A safety net should be exactly that - a net. People who are successfully navigating the "highwire of life" don't need the net - they should not receive any handouts.
Well, you can do your part by refusing the Social Security payouts, leaving more money for everyone else. Social Security is a safety net for everyone who made an unfortunate retirement investment (say, in Bernie Madoff's fund) or simply didn't have the money to invest at all.
Slashdot Mirror
In C#, it'll blow up extra good because String has no method called "length()". ;)
Yawn. People have been trotting out this conspiracy theory since .NET was announced. It hasn't come to pass. How much do you want to bet it never will?
If your neighbor decided that lead toys from China were simply delicious, would you allow him to continue to eat them?
Excuse me if I find it hard to tell the differences when they all act and behave the same.
They don't. You're just focusing on the similarities and ignoring the differences.
I don't recall the conservatives raising taxes on the super-wealthy (while lowering them for everyone else), or allowing foreign aid funds to be used for family planning, or pushing universal health care, or setting a firm date for finally getting out of Iraq...
This reminds me a lot of some nonsense Charles Petzold wrote in an early edition of "Programming Windows". As you'd expect, he starts with a "hello world" example. One expects such a basic program to be maybe a half-dozen lines, with only a line or two of logic, and the rest syntactic sugar. But Petzold's example covers almost two pages and is extremely dense and complicated code. And while this example is a little less elegant than it could be, there's not actually a lot you can do to make it shorter.
Heh, I remember that example. That's the reason why I gave up on Windows programming until VB (and later Delphi and .NET) came out.
Imagine your OS as a bank of roms, and your PC as a fully integrated machine rather than a patchwork of PCI cards and third party drivers.
You mean, imagine your PC as a Mac? (Classic Macs had the OS in ROM, and the integration goes without saying.)
Free form learning doesn't seem to work out too well for most of these people, why do you think it will work for everyone?
I don't think it'll work for everyone, but I think the freedom to control one's own life outweighs the danger of using that freedom to make a choice one regrets later.
A 19-year-old female said of drop ping out, "I wouldn't make the same decision. I would stay in school." A female from Baltimore put it succinctly, "I think it's one of the worst regrets of my life."
You could find similar quotes from people who regret buying a car or a house, getting married, having kids, or making any other major life decisions. Any time anyone makes a choice, there's a chance that it'll end up being the wrong choice and they'll regret it later. That's just something you have to accept if you value freedom.
If someone wants to go to school because he's heard scary stories about dropouts being miserable later, that's fine. That's a voluntary choice.
If he chooses not to go to school, regrets his choice, and decides to finish his education later, that's great too. It sounds like the people you quoted didn't have an opportunity to do that, though, and that's what we should be worried about. The opportunity to go back to school and pick up new skills isn't just important for those who skip high school -- in an age of outsourcing, automation, and job loss in general, it's important for everyone.
Non-cable homes (such as myself) will no longer be able to watch ad-supported online shows like the Closer, Kyle XY, or Monk.
I guess you'll just have to get a torrent and watch them without ads. What a shame!
Plus, no one (certainly not Pelosi, Reid, or Obama) is trying to reinstate the fairness doctrine anyway. Apparently it's not enough to misrepresent the fairness doctrine's purpose and effect; they have to misrepresent its status as a political issue, too.
Neoliberals, socialliberals, modernliberals, moonbatliberals, hippieliberals, hard to tell them all apart these days.
Yes, I suppose a lot of things look the same to someone who's too lazy to learn what makes them different.
I'm not sure how we made the leap from comparing two groups of people with sub-optimal decision making abilities to racism and misogyny
You think it's a leap because you're blind to your own bigotry. You think teenagers are a group of people with sub-optimal decision making abilities -- sub-optimal enough to justify robbing them of the power to control their own lives -- just like racists might think the same about blacks, and misogynists might think the same about women. You, like they, insist that this belief is based on facts, when in reality it's based on your own prejudice.
You neatly sidestepped the point I made about sweatshops. What, exactly, is your plan for keeping our sons out of ditches and our daughters off of poles?
Why would we need a special plan? What would you do if an adult friend wanted to become a stripper? Whatever the answer is, you could do the same thing for your daughter too.
Your computer analogy is flawed. All of your computers would presumably arrive at the same answer.
Yes, and that's why the analogy is valid. Teenagers can, and do, make the same decisions as adults, given the same set of priorities.
A more appropriate analogy would be to ask a computer with a math-co to add four numbers together and then ask a random number generator to do it.
No, that would be less appropriate. Teenagers don't make decisions at random, nor do they make decisions that are objectively "wrong".
If you really want to improve on the analogy, consider two computers using different rounding modes: the rounding modes are different, but neither is "better" than the other. After a series of operations, they might arrive at different answers, but both answers are correct; the difference follows from the different set of parameters.
Teenagers make decisions with an "I want now", immediate gratification slant.
Sometimes, sure. But sometimes we all do. I hope you're not planning to lock up every impulsive adult for 6 hours a day too!
Teenagers are certainly capable of planning for the future, and they do it all the time: studying for tests, saving up money for big purchases, working out strategies in games, etc. I'm amused at how little overlap there is between teenagers' ability in your mind and in reality.
Allowing kids to make all their own 'life' decisions would probably result in us losing that slot to the dolphins or possibly border collies.
Many, even most, minors are quite capable of making those decisions for themselves. At worst, what would happen is the ones who really aren't capable would die out and be replaced in the gene pool by the ones who are. It wouldn't be the end of the species. Watch out for the anthropic fallacy: the path our culture has taken isn't the only one that works, it's just the one we happen to have taken.
They'll be teenagers for less than 10 years. They'll be adults for 60 more. Teen-kid doesn't give a shit about adult-kid, so you have to watch out for adult-kid.
Here's an idea: let's let teen-kid decide whether or not to sacrifice his own happiness for a future adult-kid that may or may not ever exist (not everyone lives to old age) and may or may not feel the way you think he'll feel (not everyone spends the rest of their lives regretting the choices they made in their youth). Let's worry about people who actually exist, and suffering that actually exists and can be alleviated, not the hypothetical feelings of hypothetical people in a hypothetical future.
I mean, I know that as an ageist, you're predisposed to think an older person's happiness is inherently more important, and thus a young person ought to be prevented from doing anything that might conceivably upset his older self. But that's not the only way to see the world.
I'm beginning to suspect you have a personal his
Neolibs? I don't think that's the word you want. No need to get cute; if you want to bash us mean ol' liberals, you can just say "liberals".
distort from centripetal force to the point of being unusable
That's one hell of a euphemism for "shatter".
So we shouldn't make kids go to school at all?
Nope.
Should we fling the doors open on the mental institutions too?
Nope, but it's quite revealing that you think that's somehow equivalent.
I'm sure the bigots of past generations thought granting civil rights to blacks and women was no better than flinging open the doors to the loony bin too. And I'm sure they thought they were better than their forefathers, just like you think your bigotry is better than theirs: discriminating against the Irish or non-landowners or people with bumpy heads, that's crazy, but blacks^H^H^H^H^H^Hwomen^H^H^H^H^Hteenagers really are inferior, right?
There are plenty of studies that show the teenage brain isn't fully developed
A person's brain keeps changing through his entire life. It doesn't look the same at 15 as it will at 35 -- nor does it the same at 35 as it will at 85. Does that mean geriatric brains are the only ones that can make valid decisions? No, because decision-making is a process, not a lobe or a gland or an organ.
Since this is Slashdot, let me make a computer analogy. Say you want to add four real numbers together. Some computers have special vector hardware that can do it in one instruction; others have older floating-point hardware that can do it in several instructions; others have no floating-point hardware at all, so they do the calculation in software, using hundreds of instructions. But if you're certifying computers for their ability to arrive at the correct answer, it doesn't matter how they implement it.
Decision making can be, and is, "implemented" by a teenage brain. Maybe not the same way it will be when they get older, but it's there.
and the last thing that develops is decision making [thefreelibrary.com] .
Interesting phrasing. It's not true that teenagers lack the ability to make decisions, and that's not what the linked article says.
What is true is that they tend to use a different set of priorities when making decisions: "when teens make choices in emotionally charged situations, those choices are often more weighted in feelings (the mature limbic system) over logic (the not-yet-mature prefrontal cortex)."
Of course, you could say the same about women compared to men, or about some individuals compared to others. Priorities are a matter of opinion, and there is no right answer. You and I probably won't have the same set of priorities in a few decades as we do today, either.
Except you want to emancipate every kid, even though they haven't demonstrated any kind of ability to deal with the responsibility that would be thrust upon them.
How exactly are they supposed to demonstrate it if you never allow them the opportunity?
And how are you unaware that we already emancipate every kid, even though they haven't demonstrated any kind of ability to deal with the responsibility that would be thrust upon them? We wait until their 18th birthday to do it, but we don't require them to demonstrate any maturity or responsibility whatsoever.
If you change from Provider A to Provider B, who both supply exactly the same benefits, just with a different premium, there should be no such concept as a 'pre-existing condition'. [...] But yet insurance companies are able to boot you off coverage for such a thing. That isn't the purpose of insurance.
Agreed. I'm not saying we have an optimal implementation of the concept of health insurance, only that the concept is a good one and there's no suitable replacement.
The example you discussed is perfectly covered by a FSA. Your employer is required to make the entirety of your contributions available on Jan 1 of that year, so it is in effect an interest-free loan.
But an FSA doesn't roll over to the next year. If you don't use it, the money's gone just like your insurance premiums would be gone... except your "coverage" from the FSA is capped at the amount you can afford to pay into it. It's no replacement for insurance unless you're sure your annual medical costs will be no more than what you can afford to sock away in a single year.
Insurance isn't just about amortizing your health care. That's what loans are for. Insurance is about paying to be relieved of risk.
Suppose you know that next year, you'll have to spend $1200 in medical bills: you could put $100 in the bank every month this year, and the money will be there when you need it, right?
But suppose you know your medical bills might possibly be up to $12,000. Can you afford to put $1000 in the bank every month, saving for a situation that may or may not occur? Maybe not. Maybe you could tighten your belt and compromise by saving $500 every month, which would probably still be more than you need, but you'd still be taking the risk of coming up short.
And even that assumes you know exactly when you'll get sick or injured and have to pay out. In reality, you don't know that. You might get slapped with a $12,000 bill the first month, when you've only managed to save $500. Whoops! Better hope the interest on that $11,500 loan doesn't outweigh what you saved by forgoing insurance.
Unless you're in your 80s or have chronic health problems, you're better off paying cash.
I think you forgot to add "or if there's any chance you might get sick or injured" to your list.
Sure, health insurance seems like a waste of money if you never end up using it. And on average, it will cost more than paying cash... but paying cash is often impractical.
Insurance is basically the opposite of an investment. When you invest money, you get paid to assume risk. When you buy insurance, you pay someone else to take risk off your hands. Most of us can't keep $100,000 on hand to pay for emergencies, so it's worth paying a little extra to know that our monthly expenses are capped.
Same goes for car insurance. Why spend $2000 a year ($20,000 a decade) insuring my car? If I wreck it, I can just go buy a used one for around $5000, or a cheap new Civic for $12,000.
Sounds like your insurer is trying to screw you. My car was $10,500 when I bought it used (the new model was around $16,000), but I only pay about $1100 a year for comprehensive insurance. And I'm not exactly in an "only drives to church on Sundays" demographic.
The real difference between more socialized countries is that the government takes your money and uses it to pay for cheap insurance. In the US, the government lets you keep your money, and you have to buy the cheap insurance yourself.
Close, but not quite. In a national healthcare system, the government takes everyone's money and uses it to pay for everyone's coverage. It's not the same as forcing you to pay insurance premiums with your own money: depending on how much you earn, you could be paying more or less than the true cost of your coverage. That's how they can cover everyone.
The results are socialized countries have less competition and less innovation and slightly worse overall care, but everyone gets it, because the government held everyone's hand and did it for them.
"Worse overall care"? I hope you have some evidence for that.
It seems in this case, Socialized = more people dead, but they have money after; Free Market = less people dead, but many have serious money problems after.
I hope you have some evidence for this too -- the claim that more people die from waiting lists there than from lack of coverage here -- and I hope it accounts for suicides that result from such massive debt.
On the other hand, with a more socialized market, most people's finances are not as strong as they could be, but if someone doesn't prioritize, there is a safety net.
It's disingenuous to call it purely a matter of priorities. If you don't have the money to pay for health insurance (or retirement savings, or anything else provided by a social safety net), changing your priorities won't help.
I've seen the different ways these places operate, and my overall stance is still that they all have different good points and problems, but the 'standard of living' is all pretty much the same.
Well, let's remember that this all started with a Heinlein quote: "The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys."
I don't really care to argue whether the standard of living across the pond is higher than in the US, or merely equal. But would you agree that Heinlein was wrong: the power to tax has not run amok and destroyed Europe or Canada (relative to the US), nor has it destroyed the US (relative to countries with even lower taxes)?
Please, don't you agree the statement "school is more like a sentence" is just a tinsy bit melodramatic?
No. It's blunt, but it's still accurate.
Imagine a country where one out of four people are rounded up on buses every weekday, usually against their will. They're made to spend their time performing work that has no value to anyone in the outside world, and they receive no compensation for it. They aren't allowed to speak to each other during most of that time, and they suffer humiliations like being strip-searched if they're suspected of possessing over-the-counter medication. Their rights and movement are restricted in ways that would be illegal for any employer to try on his employees. Oh, and if they refuse to be rounded up, or if they escape once they're there, they'll be arrested, and their family members may also be punished so that they'll pressure their stubborn relatives into compliance.
If it were anyone other than minors being affected by this, there would be no controversy in calling it a gross violation of human rights. But we let it happen, simply because the people subjected to this treatment haven't yet orbited the sun a full 18 times.
That's melodramatic, but again, it's accurate. Compulsory schooling is a travesty that only exists because minors have no political power -- and because so many other people have no problem with treating them as less than human.
Yes, I suppose I could have started my own business, but by the same token, there must be a school out there that doesn't crush the fragile flower of a students individuality too. So it's possible she has other choices as well.
No, she doesn't have other choices. Her parents might, but that's not the same. She has no power of her own to choose a school, or to choose not to attend school at all: it's not a voluntary choice on her part. The best she can hope to do is plead her case to the people who will eventually make the choice for her, and hope they're kind enough to take her preferences into consideration.
Maybe there's a cost associated with not being legally responsible for your actions, perhaps some rights are part of that cost.
It's the other way around: legal responsibility for your actions comes from having rights. Specifically, from having the right to vote, and thus participate in the process of deciding which actions are illegal. (This goes back to the American Revolution and "no taxation without representation": it was unacceptable to impose laws on the colonies without their input.)
On the other hand, it's not true that minors aren't legally responsible for their actions. There would be no story here if this girl hadn't been arrested! Minors are tried in juvenile court, usually, but in many cases they're tried as adults -- full responsibility without any of the corresponding rights.
If your school experience was truly horrific, Sorry about the boo-hoo. If it was pretty much average, I'll let it stand.
What, you think those options are mutually exclusive? ;)
The difference between my school experience and most people's was in what happened afterward. I didn't just write it off as "something we all have to go through" and look forward to the day when I could inflict it on a new generation of unfortunate minors. It wasted my time, delayed my career, and trampled my rights back then; it wastes the current generation's time, delays their careers, and tramples their rights today.
You see, Hoover bungled it for three years, then FDR socialist policies stagnated us from 1933-1940. It wasn't until we started arming up and lending materials to the UK that things took off.
This revisionist version of history has been making the rounds lately, but it's false.
FDR's policies got us heading out of the depression, and they worked pretty well. What slowed them down was doing a half-assed job: cutting back and raising taxes in 1937 because he thought balancing the budget was more important than getting the economy back on its feet.
China also uses CDMA. My folks received a "welcome to international roaming" text message upon turning their Verizon phones on in Beijing.
At least on GSM, the name of the network you're on comes up on the display so you have some obvious visual cue. On CDMA, only a small R icon in the corner will inform you about roaming, at least on all the phones I've had.
CDMA phones can do that too. I believe it's called Enhanced Roaming Indicator (ERI). My past two Verizon phones (LG and Samsung) have shown "Verizon Wireless" on the home network, or something else when roaming.
School is more like a sentence? B-o-o H-o-o.
Classy! I hope someone repeats that to you, in an appropriately sarcastic voice, the next time your civil rights are trampled.
A job is something you take on voluntarily? I don't know anyone that wouldn't quit their job if they could still live in a house and feed their family without one.
That's still voluntary. Taking a job out of necessity, because you aren't able to live off investments or start your own business like many other people do, is just a bit different from going to school because the law says that's where you have to be and you'll be arrested if you refuse to comply. But you knew that already, right?
Say they try and expel her, what does the school say when the parents ask for proof?
Something like "Ms. Teachername saw your daughter texting on a cell phone and then she refused to put it away. Little Billy and Johnny saw it too." What's so hard about that?
I'm guessing here, but I'd say you're either still in, or freshly out of school. I'm sorry to say, as much as school sucks, real life sucks just as hard.
You guessed wrong.
I'm sorry your life sucks so hard. Mine, however, has gotten much better in the years since I left school. I guess I'm just one of those people who doesn't like being treated like livestock. Weird, huh?
In fact, people complain about a huge divide in treatment and that minorities get much worse care. But the minorities in the US HAD BETTER CHANCES OF SURVIVING CANCER THEN WHITE PEOPLE IN THE UK. This could be interpreted as: US's cancer care at its worst still beat UK's cancer care at its best.
It could also be interpreted as: many cancer victims in the US never become part of those statistics, because they never get diagnosed, because they can't afford to see a doctor in the first place.
There are stories of individuals hit with a disaster and unable to pay for the best treatment. But there are also stories of Canadian grandmothers dying while on waiting lists to get the care they need.
Surely you aren't suggesting that's an equally serious problem, are you?
There are stories of people being run over by cars, and there are also stories of people being struck by lightning. That doesn't mean lightning is as dangerous as auto accidents.
The point being, that many people that are complaining about the health care are people like this lady. They have sob stories, and they get a lot of people's attention, but when examined closely they're people that can't get their priorities straight. It's hard to cut through all of that to see what's really happening.
It's not that hard. All you have to do is look at the financial stats: medical bills are the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US.
A wealth redistribution plan (social security) helps people who don't need help (like me). A safety net should be exactly that - a net. People who are successfully navigating the "highwire of life" don't need the net - they should not receive any handouts.
Well, you can do your part by refusing the Social Security payouts, leaving more money for everyone else. Social Security is a safety net for everyone who made an unfortunate retirement investment (say, in Bernie Madoff's fund) or simply didn't have the money to invest at all.