When it comes to the commercial insurers, every time you say "efficiency" I hear "denial of coverage". You say "mergers" for competition, I see an oligopoly and collusion. I guess we can agree that the system now doesn't really function, just not how to fix it.
Right, depending on who you talk to, socialized medicine is either a complete disaster or a godsend. There's no consensus at all.
It seems apparent to me that if you know basic economics, you'd agree a single-payer system (not government administered, but government paid) would be more efficient overall.
We already pay for the health problems of the sick and poor. We pay for them in reduced productivity and early deaths. And more directly, we pay for them in our emergency medicine system. There are large numbers of people that cannot pay for health care and cannot be seen by a regular doc when their health problem is small. Because of the laws barring emergency rooms from refusing to treat, the people go there when their problem has escalated, resulting in less efficient emergency care. They can't pay the bill, and the hospital writes it off (paid for by taxpayers!) and raises prices elsewhere ($17 roll of gauze on your bill). The taxpayers / other patients foot the bill anyway, but we do it in the worst way. It would be far cheaper to just pay for preventative care on this person. That's why many insurers are now paying 100% on preventative care, because it's so much cheaper than paying for the problem after it escalates.
There is also the drain on doctors as far as staffing, many of them having to outsource the billing to insurance. And of course, the overhead costs of the insurance companies, which as I recall are far higher than medicaid's overhead.
I'm not for across-the-board fixed drug prices, but I'm not about to throw the pity party you're demanding for big pharma. I'm aware of their me-too drugs and profits.
Ah, but the devil is in the details, and it's the details that have me convinced that I couldn't support a Paul presidency. In a nutshell, freedom from is far more important to me than freedom to (yes, I know the more you have of one, the less of the other) and I think a single-payer health care system would work better and less expensively than the system we have now.
You see more government power as bad, I see it as necessary to balance corporate power.
I'm not sure I want to get into it here, but there are a large number of "freedom froms" that are supported by Kucinich but not Paul. In general Paul is all about "freedom to" which is why he is lauded by the white supremacists. Smoking is another "freedom to" which you just mentioned.
If that amendment is truly worded as you say, it's pointless. Students already have the freedom to pray or not without interference from administration.
If you like your "Freedom Froms" better, I am not sure why you'd prefer Paul over Kucinich. Kucinich is for a separation of church and state, whereas Paul has stated that he doesn't believe there's a constitutional basis for the separation of church and state.
Clearly you've never owned a Lexmark Z43 printer, because if you had, you'd know that even casual users get screwed by high ink prices. The cartridges in that printer dry out in 2-3 months whether you print anything or not. Every time I needed to print something, I had to drop $40-$70 on cartridges. And then I wouldn't print anything again for another few months, at which time I'd need cartridges again. Finally I realized that like an idiot, I was spending $30+ per page printed. And I chucked the printer and started going to Kinkos.
I probably spent far more than the printer was worth over 4 or 5 ink cartridge purchases... I printed near nothing, but I would've saved money under the "fair pricing for printer and cartridges" model.
No, at most it would be 14 times, as alt-shift-tab toggles through the windows in the opposite direction.
I do agree that Expose is better, but had to correct that.
I'm somewhat familiar with it - though I worked at a paper, we prepared some products which were printed by Hudson on glossy. There's definitely a difference in deadlines from magazine to newsprint, but the principles are the same. We would usually have a day or two to evaluate pretty accurate color proofs from magazine, and of course we had Hudson's CMYK profiles to tone our stuff by. With newsprint everthing is prepared less than 5 hours before it has to be running on press and less than 12 hours before it's on doorsteps.
It's a fun industry. I miss being there.
We do have one, but you can't use a densitometer until after you have printed results, and in the newspaper industry there is no time to start the press, evaluate, re-tone, re-make plates, start press again, etc.
Oh, I hear you on the zillion-dollar software. We were locked into using OS9 machines and Quark 4.0 because we were locked into a really old program for our classifieds layout, because upgrading that one program would require upgrading the mapping, accounting, classifieds, and page layout software, and would cost over a million dollars. OVER A MILLION. Which at a small paper with 150 employees, is just nuts.
It's sometimes done on the press's end, but for customers that really care about their output, we'll send a CMYK profile for our press and they'll convert themselves. An example when this would be necessary - The customer wants to set text in Indesign in an exact color which was sampled from the supplied image in Photoshop. This is best done post-conversion.
Actually, it's prudent to have only one person doing monitor calibrations, photo toning, color conversions anyway. Because everyone sees color differently, the more people toning, the more inconsistencies in your final product. If you're going to have 4 faces on the same page, it's imperative that all 4The original post brought up CMYK, as well as needing to teach these skills to several people in his company. Well, are toned by the same individual at the same time, so they can be evaluated in the context of the others.
So I agree, that it would be possible to have one copy of the expensive stuff and have everyone else use OSS. But this does not mean that OSS is a viable alternative to commercial print software.
I agree that resolution can be the biggest trip-up.
I worked in the newspaper industry until really recently. We either - built the ads FOR the customers - accepted their crappy MS-Publisher built ads and did the best we could with them - or worked with high-end clients who had their own graphic design dept and were capable of using our sourced CMYK profiles.
In the first case, we were handling the color profiles ourselves, and just had to reject the scanned-off-a-fax art the client wanted to use. In the second case, the ad was usually so crappy-looking that the color profile was the least of our worries. And in the third case, the client was sufficiently educated to understand the concept of calibrating and color profiles.
I don't know what the OP was asking about specifically, as he/she was REALLY vague, but I do stand on the importance of color profiles, especially in the newspaper industry, where printed output is DRASTICALLY different from what you see onscreen. (Typical newspaper dot-gain is around 30%..)
Most press houses will source the CMYK profiles for their specific press to the clients, so clients can convert their graphics before making a PDF of the final document. That's preferable to all the conversion happening on the print-house's end.
He probably means support for custom color management and custom CMYK profiles. In the print industry, it's common to do what's called a SNAP test, where the actual ink output from the press is measured and graded. The numbers from the snap test are then used to determine the CMYK profile in Photoshop, which has several variables:
DOT GAIN: Dot gain is the amount a dot of ink expands on paper (because paper is porous) which makes it appear larger. There is far more dot gain on, say, newsprint than on magazine paper, because of the porousness of the paper. There is a pretty good graphical representation of this here. The first gradient represents the information sent to a printer or press. The second gradient is the printed output from that printer or press. Since the dots expand on paper and appear bigger, or more densely packed, the output appears darker than intended. By inputting the actual dot gain from a particular press (which can be affected by dozens of variables), Photoshop is able to compensate, adjusting the values sent to the printer so that what we see onscreen more accurately matches what we see in print.
INK PROFILES: Cyan ink isn't always really Cyan ink...especially when it's printed on off-white paper. (In other words, nearly all paper.) There are several different ink manufacturers and their inks differ visually, and there are thousands of different papers each with their own color. The SNAP test will actually measure the color of the paper itself, and the values of 100%C, 50%C, 40%C-30%M-30%Y (a neutral gray) and Photoshop is able to use these numbers, again, to adjust the information sent to press to best compensate for the weaknesses of the ink and paper.
Now, I haven't used GIMP besides casually opening it and getting confused by the interface, but I just looked in Preferences and apparently you can't even use CMYK colorspace AT ALL, let alone the custom inks and paper settings that are completely NECESSARY for any serious designer / publisher. Just supporting CMYK colorspace is NOT good enough. Without support for custom profiles there is not a snowball's chance in hell that print professionals would use this program anytime soon.
Given Adobe CS's ability to coordinate these ink profiles throughout all their programs, IMO there is no other viable option for someone who will be sending their files to press. Not if they want accurate color output.
Given that your own intelligence/success in school correlates to your mother's education at the time of her first pregnancy (See Freakonomics), it's very likely that you would find lower IQ scores correlating to certain ethnicities. However, such a study would be very misleading, as you could make a case that the withheld education of members of certain ethnicities 150 years ago, is still a factor in the education of their descendents today.
People might see that study and think Ethnicity A = lower intelligence but it would be more accurate to see that the relationship is Ethnicity A = several hundred years of withheld education and cultural oppression = lower intelligence.
Well, there's still Archer Farms italian sodas, and Jones sodas (now HFCS free!!) at Target. And the other day I got some "sodas" there that are 100% juice with added carbonation. Called "The Switch". Their site is obnoxiously edgy, but if you want "soda" without as much crap in it, it's worth considering.
Good point- I had not considered it not being properly reconstituted. Most of the juice we drink around here is not-from-concentrate Florida OJ, but that is definitely a consideration with apple, cherry, grape, etc. And like you point out, most "100%" juices are 98% apple or white grape with 2% whatever flavor the bottle advertises. Cheating.
Oh yes, Kerns. I am ticked at them for that. Why can I not buy straight-up guava juice without added crap?
Them, and "Hansen's All Natural" which is loaded with HFCS. How fortunate for them that the FDA does not regulate the term "all natural" like they do, say, "organic", and thus Hansen's can slap it on anything they want.
I guess I do not see the scrutinizing as a big deal as we read the labels on every product we buy. Unfortunately most breads, ketchups, pickles, baked goods, and other products are full of HFCS, so I have to be careful. We have a few different ingredients that we simply will not eat. Thank goodness the gov'm't started requiring more labeling for trans-fats, because a lot of companies eliminated them. Nutella for example used to have something like 8 gm of trans-fats per serving. Now, less than.5 gm.
That's inaccurate - anything less than 100% juice cannot be labelled as "juice". It must be labelled as "juice cocktail", "juice punch", or "juice drink" depending on the percentage.
Also, it is really NOT that hard to find 100% juice once you know what to look for - usually a gigantic 100% JUICE!!!! label on the front.
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When it comes to the commercial insurers, every time you say "efficiency" I hear "denial of coverage". You say "mergers" for competition, I see an oligopoly and collusion. I guess we can agree that the system now doesn't really function, just not how to fix it.
I'm not sure you're seeing the distinction between socialized medicine and single-payer.
It seems apparent to me that if you know basic economics, you'd agree a single-payer system (not government administered, but government paid) would be more efficient overall.
We already pay for the health problems of the sick and poor. We pay for them in reduced productivity and early deaths. And more directly, we pay for them in our emergency medicine system. There are large numbers of people that cannot pay for health care and cannot be seen by a regular doc when their health problem is small. Because of the laws barring emergency rooms from refusing to treat, the people go there when their problem has escalated, resulting in less efficient emergency care. They can't pay the bill, and the hospital writes it off (paid for by taxpayers!) and raises prices elsewhere ($17 roll of gauze on your bill). The taxpayers / other patients foot the bill anyway, but we do it in the worst way. It would be far cheaper to just pay for preventative care on this person. That's why many insurers are now paying 100% on preventative care, because it's so much cheaper than paying for the problem after it escalates. There is also the drain on doctors as far as staffing, many of them having to outsource the billing to insurance. And of course, the overhead costs of the insurance companies, which as I recall are far higher than medicaid's overhead.
I'm not for across-the-board fixed drug prices, but I'm not about to throw the pity party you're demanding for big pharma. I'm aware of their me-too drugs and profits.
You see more government power as bad, I see it as necessary to balance corporate power.
If that amendment is truly worded as you say, it's pointless. Students already have the freedom to pray or not without interference from administration.
If you like your "Freedom Froms" better, I am not sure why you'd prefer Paul over Kucinich. Kucinich is for a separation of church and state, whereas Paul has stated that he doesn't believe there's a constitutional basis for the separation of church and state.
I probably spent far more than the printer was worth over 4 or 5 ink cartridge purchases... I printed near nothing, but I would've saved money under the "fair pricing for printer and cartridges" model.
Let alone that I've never known a single day to contain only 12 hours.
Just curious, how is it better not to have yearly safety inspections?
No, at most it would be 14 times, as alt-shift-tab toggles through the windows in the opposite direction. I do agree that Expose is better, but had to correct that.
I'm somewhat familiar with it - though I worked at a paper, we prepared some products which were printed by Hudson on glossy. There's definitely a difference in deadlines from magazine to newsprint, but the principles are the same. We would usually have a day or two to evaluate pretty accurate color proofs from magazine, and of course we had Hudson's CMYK profiles to tone our stuff by. With newsprint everthing is prepared less than 5 hours before it has to be running on press and less than 12 hours before it's on doorsteps.
It's a fun industry. I miss being there.
We do have one, but you can't use a densitometer until after you have printed results, and in the newspaper industry there is no time to start the press, evaluate, re-tone, re-make plates, start press again, etc.
Oh, I hear you on the zillion-dollar software. We were locked into using OS9 machines and Quark 4.0 because we were locked into a really old program for our classifieds layout, because upgrading that one program would require upgrading the mapping, accounting, classifieds, and page layout software, and would cost over a million dollars. OVER A MILLION. Which at a small paper with 150 employees, is just nuts.
Whoops sorry...is three eithers too many? I'm not a programmer.
Yup. I would've mentioned those, but I'm in Linux and didn't feel like restarting to see what the other options were. Had to go off memory.
It's sometimes done on the press's end, but for customers that really care about their output, we'll send a CMYK profile for our press and they'll convert themselves. An example when this would be necessary - The customer wants to set text in Indesign in an exact color which was sampled from the supplied image in Photoshop. This is best done post-conversion.
So I agree, that it would be possible to have one copy of the expensive stuff and have everyone else use OSS. But this does not mean that OSS is a viable alternative to commercial print software.
I worked in the newspaper industry until really recently. We either - built the ads FOR the customers - accepted their crappy MS-Publisher built ads and did the best we could with them - or worked with high-end clients who had their own graphic design dept and were capable of using our sourced CMYK profiles.
In the first case, we were handling the color profiles ourselves, and just had to reject the scanned-off-a-fax art the client wanted to use. In the second case, the ad was usually so crappy-looking that the color profile was the least of our worries. And in the third case, the client was sufficiently educated to understand the concept of calibrating and color profiles.
I don't know what the OP was asking about specifically, as he/she was REALLY vague, but I do stand on the importance of color profiles, especially in the newspaper industry, where printed output is DRASTICALLY different from what you see onscreen. (Typical newspaper dot-gain is around 30%..)
Most press houses will source the CMYK profiles for their specific press to the clients, so clients can convert their graphics before making a PDF of the final document. That's preferable to all the conversion happening on the print-house's end.
DOT GAIN: Dot gain is the amount a dot of ink expands on paper (because paper is porous) which makes it appear larger. There is far more dot gain on, say, newsprint than on magazine paper, because of the porousness of the paper. There is a pretty good graphical representation of this here. The first gradient represents the information sent to a printer or press. The second gradient is the printed output from that printer or press. Since the dots expand on paper and appear bigger, or more densely packed, the output appears darker than intended. By inputting the actual dot gain from a particular press (which can be affected by dozens of variables), Photoshop is able to compensate, adjusting the values sent to the printer so that what we see onscreen more accurately matches what we see in print.
INK PROFILES: Cyan ink isn't always really Cyan ink...especially when it's printed on off-white paper. (In other words, nearly all paper.) There are several different ink manufacturers and their inks differ visually, and there are thousands of different papers each with their own color. The SNAP test will actually measure the color of the paper itself, and the values of 100%C, 50%C, 40%C-30%M-30%Y (a neutral gray) and Photoshop is able to use these numbers, again, to adjust the information sent to press to best compensate for the weaknesses of the ink and paper.
Now, I haven't used GIMP besides casually opening it and getting confused by the interface, but I just looked in Preferences and apparently you can't even use CMYK colorspace AT ALL, let alone the custom inks and paper settings that are completely NECESSARY for any serious designer / publisher. Just supporting CMYK colorspace is NOT good enough. Without support for custom profiles there is not a snowball's chance in hell that print professionals would use this program anytime soon.
Given Adobe CS's ability to coordinate these ink profiles throughout all their programs, IMO there is no other viable option for someone who will be sending their files to press. Not if they want accurate color output.
People might see that study and think Ethnicity A = lower intelligence but it would be more accurate to see that the relationship is Ethnicity A = several hundred years of withheld education and cultural oppression = lower intelligence.
Well, there's still Archer Farms italian sodas, and Jones sodas (now HFCS free!!) at Target. And the other day I got some "sodas" there that are 100% juice with added carbonation. Called "The Switch". Their site is obnoxiously edgy, but if you want "soda" without as much crap in it, it's worth considering.
Good point- I had not considered it not being properly reconstituted. Most of the juice we drink around here is not-from-concentrate Florida OJ, but that is definitely a consideration with apple, cherry, grape, etc. And like you point out, most "100%" juices are 98% apple or white grape with 2% whatever flavor the bottle advertises. Cheating.
Them, and "Hansen's All Natural" which is loaded with HFCS. How fortunate for them that the FDA does not regulate the term "all natural" like they do, say, "organic", and thus Hansen's can slap it on anything they want.
I guess I do not see the scrutinizing as a big deal as we read the labels on every product we buy. Unfortunately most breads, ketchups, pickles, baked goods, and other products are full of HFCS, so I have to be careful. We have a few different ingredients that we simply will not eat. Thank goodness the gov'm't started requiring more labeling for trans-fats, because a lot of companies eliminated them. Nutella for example used to have something like 8 gm of trans-fats per serving. Now, less than .5 gm.
Also, it is really NOT that hard to find 100% juice once you know what to look for - usually a gigantic 100% JUICE!!!! label on the front.