With universal coverage, every person in the US could obtain preventive, clinic based care (which is the least expensive way to receive care) rather than letting problem go unaddressed and eventually seeking care in an emergency room (the most expensive way to receive medical care).
This is the ONE spot that you really don't make sense. Americans WON'T go for preventative care without incentive. Simply providing universal care may even exacerbate the problem, and get people to thinking that they can do whatever they want with their health and go to the hospital when something goes wrong. It's the elephant in the room with universal health care in the USA - I REALLY don't want to have my money go further and pay for someone who is an unhealthy idiot who made poor decisions about their health and gets a free ride.
One problem with your argument is that you are already paying for this with your tax dollars (for county or municipality owned hospitals) and your health care dollars (providers pass those costs on to the paying customers). Another problem is that you are making an assumption- that Americans won't go for preventive care- and offering the assumption as proof.
The research has shown that the biggest barrier to obtaining preventive care is not having coverage for it, or if there is coverage having a high copayment or deductible. Certainly there are people who just won't get preventive care and who probably wouldn't under any health financing system. Ya can't fix everything.
I'm a health care provider. I've been in the field in various capacities since 1981 and as a licensed professional since 1990.
When we talk about the "health care system" in America we have to be very clear about what we are talking about. There are two halves to this system- health care providers and health care finance. The main problems in the US health care system are in health care finance, since this is what determines access to health care.
National health care insurance is an inevitability and IMHO will be driven from the Right not the Left. The driving force will be lobbying from large businesses (GM, for example) that will be rendered noncompetitive by health care costs; they will either go bust or leave the US for countries with a national health care plan. IIRC nearly $1500 of a GM auto's sticker price is health care costs for current and pensioned employees. The creation of a national health system would allow GM and other large companies to offload much of the cost of health care insurance for current employees but also for retirees. This would be a major gain in the bottom line for companies struggling under these costs and other market forces, and would put them on a more-equal footing with most European and some Asian competitors. It would also be a major gain for small businesses (like my Dad's, like the company I work for, etc.) as it would reduce payroll costs. The losers, of course, would be private insurance companies and their CEOs, employees and shareholders.
For the individual, national health care coverage would mean greater freedom to move between jobs to improve one's lot in life and greater flexibility in managing care for children or dependent adults (e.g., aging parents).
The creation of a national health care finance plan would be able to leverage economies of scale unavailable to private insurance companies. The removal of the profit motive would reduce overhead from an industry average of 10-30% to closer to Medicare's 2%- a savings of hundreds of billions of dollars per year right there. With universal coverage, every person in the US could obtain preventive, clinic based care (which is the least expensive way to receive care) rather than letting problem go unaddressed and eventually seeking care in an emergency room (the most expensive way to receive medical care). With universal coverage, health care providers would not face defaults on payments for services which would allow a reduction in the cost of care. Rationing of health care would be reduced through the elimination of provider networks and access restrictions imposed by insurance companies. And finally, authorizations for services would not be influenced by the need to protect the profit margin.
From the provider side, it costs money to get paid. Someone has to prepare a bill and send it out. For many of my patients, payment comes from two to four sources and I have to send a bill to each in turn according to an order of precedence. Each bill costs $3-5 to send, and then there are the costs of tracking reimbursement to collate all the payments, figuring out who gets money back if the bill gets overpaid (which happens frequently because the insurance companies don't understand their own systems very well). Being able to do single payer billing would save an average of $10 per patient in my clinic, which means either more profit or the ability to lower costs for services. Imagine the cumulative savings if the cost of every health care service in America could be reduced by an average of $10.
That all sounds like a panacea and of course no such thing exists. Every health care finance system would have problems. People worry about where the money would come from and the only possible answer is taxes, since that is the only source of government revenue. However, we already pay that tax and then some. Like most people, I get my insurance through my employer. I chose the cheapest plan, which is a high-deductible plan. It costs $512 per month, 50% out of my po
Just hang up the damned phone! What are you, an idiot?
If you don't want to be interrupted by a phone conversation during dinner, don't answer the phone. Turn off the ringer, let the answering machine get it. Delete the message as soon as you can tell it's not someone you want to talk to.
Jeez, people, it's simple! Stop pretending you're a victim.
Well, as the saying goes, "correlation is not causation" and it's quite possible that the "Colbert Bump" is just a myth. And besides that, the "elite demographic" is mainly Republicans- the top 5% of wealth holders in the US doesn't tend to vote blue.
Why are you wasting your time with this lame argument? There is no human field of study that has comprehensive knowledge about its subject. Acknowledging that fact does not excuse people from taking whatever steps are available to them to reduce, stop or reverse damaging the only environment they have in which to live. If you wait for conclusive knowledge before acting, you'll never get out of bed.
The law is not neutral. The law is not intended to be neutral. Laws permit or forbid certain forms of conduct according to legal, moral or ethical principles as the case may be. That's not neutral. If the law was neutral and did not side with either party, you would get a ruling based on the proclivity of the judge and not on the law.
The law frequently protects certain people, and one set of such people are the owners of copyrighted content. The law sides with them to prevent the unauthorized duplication of their content. Fair use allows you to make copies for private use, which is the primary exception. Fair use does not and never has provided a right to make copies for others and that includes posting copies of songs, videos, etc. to sites like YouTube. That is illegal and Viacom et al are within their rights to go after that illegal distribution of their content.
Slashdotters, otherwise generally intelligent, have a subset who are unable to see this for what it is and believe that copyright should not be respected. Consider that there are tens of thousands of illegal clips posted to YouTube, the cumulative financial effect of which could conceivably be millions of dollars. Viacom and other content owners are within their rights to get those taken down and to consider pursuing prosecution against the people who posted them.
The interesting thing is the issue of fining YouTube, eBay etc. is whether these Web sites are common carriers or not. The phone company is not held responsible for the content of phone calls nor is the Post Office held responsible for the contents of packages, because they are common carriers. Is eBay a common carrier? If so, they are not responsible for the sale of knockoffs on their Web sites. Ditto YouTube. This could conceivably end up in the Supreme Court for final adjudication because it is a critical, defining issue- and Google and eBay have the money to go there.
To take the case to the absurd and yet logical conclusion, let's imagine Louis Vitton suing the City of New York because it doesn't stop the same of cheap knockoffs in the subway system, or Viacom trying to get the names from the NYCPD of anyone who bought duped DVDs from the same hucksters. Both would be impossible and yet those are the brick-and-mortar equivalents. In these cases it's a matter of shooting at the easy targets because of the nature of the Internets and IP addresses reducing anonymity.
But then again, roughly one half of the Earth's population lives on $3 per day or less. I would imagine that their priorities aren't broadband and a laptop. Not dying today from malnutrition might rqank a little higher on their priorities.
But's that's because I think their music sucks. I didn't buy the NIN or Radiohead albums either for the same reason. I download very little music in large part because of the sonic limitations of MP3s being annoying. Digital audio is not yet a mature technology.
Great, here's a plan. Jack up my broadband costs by $5 per month to subsidize the incompetent music industry... BUT I DON'T DO P2P! I don't download music in general because MP3's suck to listen to. The only downloaded music I have is legal Dead shows, downloaded mostly in lossless formats. Every torrent application I have tried was pitifully slow, much slower than a simple download from a server, since there were usually more leechers than peers (not to mention all those Comcast users with throttled bandwidth). Who needs that bullshit?
It sort of reminds me of a few years back when I was an independent contractor and the business's worker's compensation company tried to charge me $50 a month to not be insured by them.
The idiots in the music business need to get a clue. And frankly, at this point, who the heck cares if the majors go belly up? It's not like it'd be a huge loss in terms of great art.
That and needing hundreds of liters of these crystals per hour to absorb the CO2 produced by a coal- or natural gas- fired powerplant. USG (United States Gypsum) was working on stuff like this to absorb acids out of smokestack emissions 20+ years ago and determined that, while it could be done, it just wasn't cost-reasonable.
Quite obviously there is some other motivation here, which appears to be the destruction of Novell and/or free Unix software. What does this new guy get out of it other than the opportunity to continue to lose millions of dollars in fruitless litigation?
Violating the laws to try to get them change- as some people promote- is a stupid strategy. All it does is harden the positions of copyright holders, lawmakers and courts against such actions.
Yeah, I think it was poor strategy for all those black people to try and register to vote, go to high school and university, ride buses, and sit at lunch counters to eat their sandwiches. They would have been much better off if they had just asked Governor George Wallace nicely, to end segregation. That way they wouldn't have pissed so many people off.
This got modded as "insightful?" Criminy, standards at Slashdot are slipping. This is nothing more than a variant of an invocation of Godwin's law.
It's simply outrageous to conflate the struggle for equal rights in the American South with being able to download music, movies, TV shows, etc. without paying for them. By expecting you to pay for works of art, Da Man ain't keeping you down. You don't want to pay for "Harry Potter?" Don't. But don't steal a copy either.
What an idiotic equation to make, comparing PirateBay to the civil rights movement.
Downloading copyrighted material without the copyright owner's permission is copyright infringement under the law. Though it was legal in Sweden until some 30 months ago. It is in no way theft, which is regulated by a completely different law.
A fair correction. However, if you take something that belongs to someone else without their permission and without paying for it, that is theft. It may not be legally classified as theft- that is purely a matter of how the relevant laws are written- but it is indeed theft in a practical and ethical sense. That was the perspective from which I was writing and I apologize for not being clear.
You realize you're throwing this challenge down to a group largely consisting of people who regularly write copyrighted works of computer code and contribute them freely to the world, right?
There is a difference between copyrighted works of art and copyrighted source code, as pointed out by Richard Stallman in his book and other writings. Software has practical utility that confers benefit in improving the lives of people, whereas art's value is primarily in entertainment; while that's also an improvement in people's lives, there's a significant difference qualitatively. There are practical and ethical considerations in favor of making software free-as-in-speech and making source code available. Those same considerations do not apply to music recordings, movies, TV shows or other works of art. Trying to equate them, as you seem to be doing, is not appropriate. It's conflating apples and oranges.
Downloading copyrighted material is theft under the law. Helping people to do this is being an accessory to a crime. As much as we like to bitch about how draconian current copyright laws are, they are still the laws. We should not be astonished when laws are enforced. Nobody has the legal right to download "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" without paying the copyright holders for it. But that's just what PirateBay and others help people to do.
Violating the laws to try to get them change- as some people promote- is a stupid strategy. All it does is harden the positions of copyright holders, lawmakers and courts against such actions. People like PirateBay are not freedom fighters.
Copyright law- particularly in the US- has been stretched out of all reasonable proportion with significant cost to the public wellbeing. Part of this is due to the prevailing right-wing belief that there are no public goods, only private goods, and a belief in the values of private opulence and public squalor as J Kenneth Galbraith put it. If we want to overcome this and get the laws changed to something reasonable, we're not going to do it by breaking the laws. We have to do what the copyright holders did: make our case in a clear and convincing fashion to the people who write the laws.
The "Wisdom Of Crowds" put George W Bush in power, twice.
The crowds put him in office only once. The Supreme Court put him in the office the first time. And in both instances there were indications of large scale voting fraud in his favor.
For those of us on the new side of the pond, it will be interesting to see how UK consumer protection laws compare with US consumer protection laws (such as they are). In the US, the consumer would have several options, including consulting the Better Business Bureau and also with the various state Attorneys General offices. Good luck!
Slashdot Mirror
One problem with your argument is that you are already paying for this with your tax dollars (for county or municipality owned hospitals) and your health care dollars (providers pass those costs on to the paying customers). Another problem is that you are making an assumption- that Americans won't go for preventive care- and offering the assumption as proof.
The research has shown that the biggest barrier to obtaining preventive care is not having coverage for it, or if there is coverage having a high copayment or deductible. Certainly there are people who just won't get preventive care and who probably wouldn't under any health financing system. Ya can't fix everything.
I'm a health care provider. I've been in the field in various capacities since 1981 and as a licensed professional since 1990.
When we talk about the "health care system" in America we have to be very clear about what we are talking about. There are two halves to this system- health care providers and health care finance. The main problems in the US health care system are in health care finance, since this is what determines access to health care.
National health care insurance is an inevitability and IMHO will be driven from the Right not the Left. The driving force will be lobbying from large businesses (GM, for example) that will be rendered noncompetitive by health care costs; they will either go bust or leave the US for countries with a national health care plan. IIRC nearly $1500 of a GM auto's sticker price is health care costs for current and pensioned employees. The creation of a national health system would allow GM and other large companies to offload much of the cost of health care insurance for current employees but also for retirees. This would be a major gain in the bottom line for companies struggling under these costs and other market forces, and would put them on a more-equal footing with most European and some Asian competitors. It would also be a major gain for small businesses (like my Dad's, like the company I work for, etc.) as it would reduce payroll costs. The losers, of course, would be private insurance companies and their CEOs, employees and shareholders.
For the individual, national health care coverage would mean greater freedom to move between jobs to improve one's lot in life and greater flexibility in managing care for children or dependent adults (e.g., aging parents).
The creation of a national health care finance plan would be able to leverage economies of scale unavailable to private insurance companies. The removal of the profit motive would reduce overhead from an industry average of 10-30% to closer to Medicare's 2%- a savings of hundreds of billions of dollars per year right there. With universal coverage, every person in the US could obtain preventive, clinic based care (which is the least expensive way to receive care) rather than letting problem go unaddressed and eventually seeking care in an emergency room (the most expensive way to receive medical care). With universal coverage, health care providers would not face defaults on payments for services which would allow a reduction in the cost of care. Rationing of health care would be reduced through the elimination of provider networks and access restrictions imposed by insurance companies. And finally, authorizations for services would not be influenced by the need to protect the profit margin.
From the provider side, it costs money to get paid. Someone has to prepare a bill and send it out. For many of my patients, payment comes from two to four sources and I have to send a bill to each in turn according to an order of precedence. Each bill costs $3-5 to send, and then there are the costs of tracking reimbursement to collate all the payments, figuring out who gets money back if the bill gets overpaid (which happens frequently because the insurance companies don't understand their own systems very well). Being able to do single payer billing would save an average of $10 per patient in my clinic, which means either more profit or the ability to lower costs for services. Imagine the cumulative savings if the cost of every health care service in America could be reduced by an average of $10.
That all sounds like a panacea and of course no such thing exists. Every health care finance system would have problems. People worry about where the money would come from and the only possible answer is taxes, since that is the only source of government revenue. However, we already pay that tax and then some. Like most people, I get my insurance through my employer. I chose the cheapest plan, which is a high-deductible plan. It costs $512 per month, 50% out of my po
"Max, put on the Helmet of Silence and get out there!"
Just hang up the damned phone! What are you, an idiot? If you don't want to be interrupted by a phone conversation during dinner, don't answer the phone. Turn off the ringer, let the answering machine get it. Delete the message as soon as you can tell it's not someone you want to talk to. Jeez, people, it's simple! Stop pretending you're a victim.
Well, as the saying goes, "correlation is not causation" and it's quite possible that the "Colbert Bump" is just a myth. And besides that, the "elite demographic" is mainly Republicans- the top 5% of wealth holders in the US doesn't tend to vote blue.
Why are you wasting your time with this lame argument? There is no human field of study that has comprehensive knowledge about its subject. Acknowledging that fact does not excuse people from taking whatever steps are available to them to reduce, stop or reverse damaging the only environment they have in which to live. If you wait for conclusive knowledge before acting, you'll never get out of bed.
Who the hell modded this as "insightful?"
The law is not neutral. The law is not intended to be neutral. Laws permit or forbid certain forms of conduct according to legal, moral or ethical principles as the case may be. That's not neutral. If the law was neutral and did not side with either party, you would get a ruling based on the proclivity of the judge and not on the law.
The law frequently protects certain people, and one set of such people are the owners of copyrighted content. The law sides with them to prevent the unauthorized duplication of their content. Fair use allows you to make copies for private use, which is the primary exception. Fair use does not and never has provided a right to make copies for others and that includes posting copies of songs, videos, etc. to sites like YouTube. That is illegal and Viacom et al are within their rights to go after that illegal distribution of their content.
Slashdotters, otherwise generally intelligent, have a subset who are unable to see this for what it is and believe that copyright should not be respected. Consider that there are tens of thousands of illegal clips posted to YouTube, the cumulative financial effect of which could conceivably be millions of dollars. Viacom and other content owners are within their rights to get those taken down and to consider pursuing prosecution against the people who posted them.
The interesting thing is the issue of fining YouTube, eBay etc. is whether these Web sites are common carriers or not. The phone company is not held responsible for the content of phone calls nor is the Post Office held responsible for the contents of packages, because they are common carriers. Is eBay a common carrier? If so, they are not responsible for the sale of knockoffs on their Web sites. Ditto YouTube. This could conceivably end up in the Supreme Court for final adjudication because it is a critical, defining issue- and Google and eBay have the money to go there.
To take the case to the absurd and yet logical conclusion, let's imagine Louis Vitton suing the City of New York because it doesn't stop the same of cheap knockoffs in the subway system, or Viacom trying to get the names from the NYCPD of anyone who bought duped DVDs from the same hucksters. Both would be impossible and yet those are the brick-and-mortar equivalents. In these cases it's a matter of shooting at the easy targets because of the nature of the Internets and IP addresses reducing anonymity.
But then again, roughly one half of the Earth's population lives on $3 per day or less. I would imagine that their priorities aren't broadband and a laptop. Not dying today from malnutrition might rqank a little higher on their priorities.
and jokers to the right.
On my Mac (1.4.11, PPC) it fails.
Car running on water
driving in a desert.
Which way do you go?
But's that's because I think their music sucks. I didn't buy the NIN or Radiohead albums either for the same reason. I download very little music in large part because of the sonic limitations of MP3s being annoying. Digital audio is not yet a mature technology.
Great, here's a plan. Jack up my broadband costs by $5 per month to subsidize the incompetent music industry... BUT I DON'T DO P2P! I don't download music in general because MP3's suck to listen to. The only downloaded music I have is legal Dead shows, downloaded mostly in lossless formats. Every torrent application I have tried was pitifully slow, much slower than a simple download from a server, since there were usually more leechers than peers (not to mention all those Comcast users with throttled bandwidth). Who needs that bullshit?
It sort of reminds me of a few years back when I was an independent contractor and the business's worker's compensation company tried to charge me $50 a month to not be insured by them.
The idiots in the music business need to get a clue. And frankly, at this point, who the heck cares if the majors go belly up? It's not like it'd be a huge loss in terms of great art.
That and needing hundreds of liters of these crystals per hour to absorb the CO2 produced by a coal- or natural gas- fired powerplant. USG (United States Gypsum) was working on stuff like this to absorb acids out of smokestack emissions 20+ years ago and determined that, while it could be done, it just wasn't cost-reasonable.
Quite obviously there is some other motivation here, which appears to be the destruction of Novell and/or free Unix software. What does this new guy get out of it other than the opportunity to continue to lose millions of dollars in fruitless litigation?
This got modded as "insightful?" Criminy, standards at Slashdot are slipping. This is nothing more than a variant of an invocation of Godwin's law.
It's simply outrageous to conflate the struggle for equal rights in the American South with being able to download music, movies, TV shows, etc. without paying for them. By expecting you to pay for works of art, Da Man ain't keeping you down. You don't want to pay for "Harry Potter?" Don't. But don't steal a copy either.
What an idiotic equation to make, comparing PirateBay to the civil rights movement.
Downloading copyrighted material without the copyright owner's permission is copyright infringement under the law. Though it was legal in Sweden until some 30 months ago. It is in no way theft, which is regulated by a completely different law.
A fair correction. However, if you take something that belongs to someone else without their permission and without paying for it, that is theft. It may not be legally classified as theft- that is purely a matter of how the relevant laws are written- but it is indeed theft in a practical and ethical sense. That was the perspective from which I was writing and I apologize for not being clear.You realize you're throwing this challenge down to a group largely consisting of people who regularly write copyrighted works of computer code and contribute them freely to the world, right?
There is a difference between copyrighted works of art and copyrighted source code, as pointed out by Richard Stallman in his book and other writings. Software has practical utility that confers benefit in improving the lives of people, whereas art's value is primarily in entertainment; while that's also an improvement in people's lives, there's a significant difference qualitatively. There are practical and ethical considerations in favor of making software free-as-in-speech and making source code available. Those same considerations do not apply to music recordings, movies, TV shows or other works of art. Trying to equate them, as you seem to be doing, is not appropriate. It's conflating apples and oranges.
Downloading copyrighted material is theft under the law. Helping people to do this is being an accessory to a crime. As much as we like to bitch about how draconian current copyright laws are, they are still the laws. We should not be astonished when laws are enforced. Nobody has the legal right to download "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" without paying the copyright holders for it. But that's just what PirateBay and others help people to do.
Violating the laws to try to get them change- as some people promote- is a stupid strategy. All it does is harden the positions of copyright holders, lawmakers and courts against such actions. People like PirateBay are not freedom fighters.
Copyright law- particularly in the US- has been stretched out of all reasonable proportion with significant cost to the public wellbeing. Part of this is due to the prevailing right-wing belief that there are no public goods, only private goods, and a belief in the values of private opulence and public squalor as J Kenneth Galbraith put it. If we want to overcome this and get the laws changed to something reasonable, we're not going to do it by breaking the laws. We have to do what the copyright holders did: make our case in a clear and convincing fashion to the people who write the laws.
Dude, you nailed it. Ewoks. Shark bait if ever there was.
How is advising - even demanding - people to make ethical decisions "preaching"?
That's pretty much the definition of preaching, dude. Check out a church some time.
... is 100%.
The "Wisdom Of Crowds" put George W Bush in power, twice.
The crowds put him in office only once. The Supreme Court put him in the office the first time. And in both instances there were indications of large scale voting fraud in his favor.
For those of us on the new side of the pond, it will be interesting to see how UK consumer protection laws compare with US consumer protection laws (such as they are). In the US, the consumer would have several options, including consulting the Better Business Bureau and also with the various state Attorneys General offices. Good luck!