"What entity other than the state can provide universal health care?... I'm just not sure what you'd call any entity that provided universal health care other than "the state"."
During my Ayn Rand phase, I would have advocated that a corporation could do this much more efficiently than any government could. At this point, while I do believe that is true, I also do not trust any corporation to actually do that in a fair and ethical manner (you need only read news stories about companies filing false Medicare claims to realize why).
At this point, I prefer to ask a different question: Depending on what you mean by "the state," why is it necessary to think of the problem so globally? The entire nation doesn't have to enact such an ambitious program; what if small communities were to agree to providing universal health care for everyone who lived within the town or city?
Now, I'm not suggesting the city pay for it - in fact, why not let each community decide for themselves how they want to pay for it? Maybe some cities are already wealthy enough to provide it with existing income. Maybe some towns would be willing to pass a local health care tax to pay for it. Maybe some towns would find a way to create agreements between health care professionals and customers so that US dollars weren't necessarily the defacto method of payment (e.g., trade favor for favor or a cow for an arm brace, to take the farmer's approach, etc.)
The problem with our culture is that we only ever try to solve problems globally, for everyone, everywhere, for all of time to perpetuity. This is an inherently doomed approach, because people change, times change, the world changes, and yet we attempt to legislate every possible idea under the sun.
Some Native American cultures had a tradition where once a year, they would suspend their laws for a week and evaluate the usefulness of each one, stripping away the old, useless ones, and sometimes create new, more useful ones (don't be misled by my use of the word 'law' - they did not write their laws down; instead, they were tribal custom and knowledge, which is a much more effective method of governing than our draconian method of writing down laws and following them to the letter).
All I'm trying to say is, open your mind. There are thousands of possibilities you haven't considered, that I haven't considered, that nobody has considered, and that will never be open to us until we learn to think without taking the world as it is, as a given.
"At some point you are going to have to realize it isn't "idiotic" leaders who are making "idiotic" policies that are the problem... that our leaders are very very smart and competent..."
It goes both ways. While I disagree that our leaders are very smart and competent (I have personal experience that indicates otherwise, that they are just as ignorant and uninformed as the average Joe), I also think that we are responsible for the leaders we create.
At the end of the day, we will ALWAYS only have ourselves to blame; our leaders are just the convenient target of that blame. But we created them. We educated (or didn't educate) them. We elected them.
The world is what WE make of it - or if we prefer to do nothing, we will be subjected to the world that others would make for us.
You can accuse me of "missing the point completely" all you want, that still doesn't change the fact that what you're saying amounts to "guilty before proven innocent."
It is on YOU to prove I am hiding data, just because I am using a system capable of doing so. And it is further on YOU to prove that I am hiding data that is incriminating, a conclusion NOT guaranteed just because I'm using a system capable of hiding data.
In practice, I agree with you. In pure logic, I do not.
Using an encryption or data hiding scheme is not itself proof of hiding data, and further, is not proof of hiding incriminating data.
What if I'm using it because I might WANT to be able to hide my own data? And if I AM hiding it, does that immediately prove that it is incriminating?
We live in a world that has lost the ability to believe that someone might want to keep their life private, for no other reason than to simply keep it private, because god forbid it's THEIR LIFE.
"The fact that you use a stego file system is a proof that hidden data exist."
I call "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" on you.
Using an encryption or data hiding scheme is not itself proof of hiding data, and further, is not proof of hiding incriminating data.
Me wanting to protect my own privacy is not proof that I have done something wrong. It just means I don't want you to know I talked to my mom at 7:37 am unless there's a reason for you to know it.
"The RIAA is dying. Netcraft's list of top lawsuits proves it. "
I've sat and thought about that before. The RIAA's behavior is that of a company that knows it is becoming irrelevant and is taking everything it can get on the way down.
In that case, declare it a cartel and sue it under the RICO laws. Seriously, collusion and price fixing are the LEAST of their crimes, and even those are enough to get the "association" disbanded.
"So, then, how often are we seeing our military refusing orders?"
Not in the slightest my point. I would invoke the saying "All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing," but it seems redundant in this case. (eh? eh? I have a flair for the ridiculous..)
Whether they refuse them or not was not my point. My point is that they should.
I wonder, had more Generals, Lieutenants, and Captains spoken up that March 20, 2003, how would our history have been written differently.
I do not often use the vernacular of our times; having grown up on books like The Federalist Papers and The Prince, I generally prefer more intelligent discourse.
Every once in awhile however, someone so completely blows my mind with a position so clearly and powerfully written that I am forced to say...
Holy fucking shit that was a good post!
My hat's off to you. I'm keeping this one for posterity's sake, should I ever need these words again.
"Who decides what is a damaging secret, for that matter?"
There's a standing rule in the military that you don't carry out illegal orders from your commanding officer. No Western military tribunal will accept the excuse "I was just following orders." This is because morality can't be put down in a book as a list of numbered, sanctioned rules - we would always miss at least one (and more likely miss thousands).
Soldiers are not expected to be machines, contrary to popular belief; they have to morally evaluate the orders they are given, because it is their responsibility to stand up and say "NO!" if they are given an illegal order (like "Ok, let's take some embarassing pictures of some of our prisoners over there. Say cheese!").
Every American citizen has the same responsibility, ESPECIALLY those with security clearances. It is often only they that will ever be aware of abuses being carried out by our government. There are no hard and fast rules for recognizing unethical or immoral behavior; it is up to us, as moral, thinking beings, to figure it out.
"Divulging classified information is not "whistleblowing", no matter how you look at it."
If they're revealing evidence of corruption or illegal or unethical activity, it most definitely IS whistleblowing. It isn't legal, since it violates the security clearance they were granted, but it IS whisteblowing.
Seriously though, I won't extend that to people who are "whistleblowing" just because they're mad at their boss because they're not getting that promotion, but there are valid times when even classified data should be revealed. I don't trust my government enough to properly deal with that stuff internally.
"Honestly, people who who security clearance know better than this."
I have one. I am fully aware of what is ok for me to talk about with friends and love ones, and what isn't.
If I were to come upon information I thought needed to be shared, I would first share it with my boss, who has a higher clearance than I do. I would follow the chain of command.
If, at the end of the day, I was looking at an instance of massive corruption and found my superiors unwilling to do anything about it, you better believe I'm going to go share it with a reporter. Sure, I'll probably be jailed for it, but that is a small price to pay for serving the freedom of my country.
But then, the stuff I deal with is pretty insignificant. I don't expect to ever be in that situation. But it's something I've thought about.
You answered your own question. As blasphemous as it may sound, not all politicians are interested in expanding their own power and are, in fact, interested in doing the right thing (I think my congressman, for example, is one of these, though obviously there's the possibility I'm wrong).
Any politician interested in expanding their own power would absolutely LOVE a dictatorship - where they would hold absolute power.
Politicians not interested in such power would have no need for a dictatorship, and so would not be doing things they'd need to 'shield' the public from.
I recognize that is a rather simplistic evaluation of the situation, but as a human being I believe it to be true. And I think any moral human would agree.
"The point is not the technical ability to create the infrastructure, what is required is well known. "
Then I think the telecom's are just playing dumb. Which of course, works to their advantage, as they can con ignorant Congressmen into buying their extortion plan.
"The end user might have to pay $60-70 per month for a pipe that robust, but I think it is still better than having a tiered service."
I totally agree. I'm willing to pay for the ability to download faster; in fact when I got my first cable installation, I was very surprised I was quoted a flat price and told I could have "unlimited downloads at 6Mbps" - it just makes fundamental sense to me to charge for a faster, higher download-limit connection.
"So yes the internet will crash because of HD Video but only if no one dares to upgrade their equipment ever."
Well see, that's the thing. Companies hate spending money to upgrade equipment, even if it means it makes them more profitable. That would be spending money that should be buying the CEO his 17th house in the Bahamas, remember.
So they came up with a novel solution: Charge the CONTENT providers more, so we don't have to upgrade our equipment, AND we'll get richer so we can buy you that new Lamborgini you've been itching for!
It now costs $375/mo to play WoW online, because we have to pay AT&T, Comcast, Cox, BellSouth, Verizon, {fill in ISP name here} their monthly extortion fee.
We're sorry for the inconvenience, but now be assured that your queue time to enter a game will only be 30 minutes instead of 45, and your lag will be between 500-750 ms instead of 1500 ms!
Exactly. This is what every comment I have made on this article has summed to: Charge me for what I AM USING. If the companies have to go with a tiered fee structure so I can get a faster download than do it.
There's only one way to stem demand: Charge more. If you don't want customers saturating bandwidth you calculated your profit on, then charge them more and make them think twice about using it.
Simple as that. Routers, T1's, OC-48 blah blah blah nothing. It's simple. Just charge customers for the bandwidth they use, so they'll ask themselves if they really want to use it.
I don't know, that $120 cell phone bill certainly got me to pay alot more attention to the minutes I was using instead of thinking "Eh, I got plenty o' time left!"
"So yeah, there is NO WAY an ISP can afford to supply every one of their users the gobs of non-bursty bandwidth necessary to make HDTV downloads on a massive scale work."
Then charge ME more for the priviledge of expending massive amounts of bandwidth. I'm the one using it, I'm the one who should be forced to think twice before volunteering a $300/mo cable bill.
I simply don't understand why the telecom's don't understand that argument. They believe their business will fail if they raise the customer's prices, but apparently their business will fail if they don't - and it most certainly will fail if they start voluntarily censoring the internet (which is exactly what this extortion fee amounts to).
"The reporting in this article is either inept or corrupt."
I actually read this article yesterday when it came out on Yahoo. I sat there and just gawked at how one-sided, biased, and blatantly WRONG that article is about so many things. Tried to research the byline a little to figure out who might have bought the reporter, but to no avail.
Unfortunately, for your average Joe, this is what they will read, and then they'll go "Oh, ok, it's ok for them to do that." When in fact it's the worst possible thing they could do.
"But I can see where the telcos are coming from here, at least."
Unfortunately, I can't. If that were the problem, they should hike my bill to make me think twice about using that much bandwidth - not try to extort the content providers for providing content in the first place.
"You are going to pay for your bandwidth one way or the other. Get over it."
Ironically, if that were all this was about, I doubt any of us would have a problem with it.
The problem is, we've been promised something that the telecom's are now claiming they can't deliver - and they're claiming it's OUR fault and then, to twist the issue even more, it isn't US they want to charge for it - it's the websites we're using! That makes absolutely ZERO sense.
That's where the "net neutrality" phrase comes in - preferentially providing service to different websites is just one step away from outright censorship, not by the government (though it could be used by them) but by a corporation.
THAT is where the outroar is coming from.
I would more than gladly pay for the bandwidth I use if I wanted to sit there streaming TV all day. I am under no illusion I should get that for free. But I am the one who should pay for that, because I am the one who is USING it, not the content provider who is already paying out the ass for the fat pipe to provide that download to me.
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"What entity other than the state can provide universal health care? ... I'm just not sure what you'd call any entity that provided universal health care other than "the state"."
During my Ayn Rand phase, I would have advocated that a corporation could do this much more efficiently than any government could. At this point, while I do believe that is true, I also do not trust any corporation to actually do that in a fair and ethical manner (you need only read news stories about companies filing false Medicare claims to realize why).
At this point, I prefer to ask a different question: Depending on what you mean by "the state," why is it necessary to think of the problem so globally? The entire nation doesn't have to enact such an ambitious program; what if small communities were to agree to providing universal health care for everyone who lived within the town or city?
Now, I'm not suggesting the city pay for it - in fact, why not let each community decide for themselves how they want to pay for it? Maybe some cities are already wealthy enough to provide it with existing income. Maybe some towns would be willing to pass a local health care tax to pay for it. Maybe some towns would find a way to create agreements between health care professionals and customers so that US dollars weren't necessarily the defacto method of payment (e.g., trade favor for favor or a cow for an arm brace, to take the farmer's approach, etc.)
The problem with our culture is that we only ever try to solve problems globally, for everyone, everywhere, for all of time to perpetuity. This is an inherently doomed approach, because people change, times change, the world changes, and yet we attempt to legislate every possible idea under the sun.
Some Native American cultures had a tradition where once a year, they would suspend their laws for a week and evaluate the usefulness of each one, stripping away the old, useless ones, and sometimes create new, more useful ones (don't be misled by my use of the word 'law' - they did not write their laws down; instead, they were tribal custom and knowledge, which is a much more effective method of governing than our draconian method of writing down laws and following them to the letter).
All I'm trying to say is, open your mind. There are thousands of possibilities you haven't considered, that I haven't considered, that nobody has considered, and that will never be open to us until we learn to think without taking the world as it is, as a given.
"At some point you are going to have to realize it isn't "idiotic" leaders who are making "idiotic" policies that are the problem... that our leaders are very very smart and competent..."
It goes both ways. While I disagree that our leaders are very smart and competent (I have personal experience that indicates otherwise, that they are just as ignorant and uninformed as the average Joe), I also think that we are responsible for the leaders we create.
At the end of the day, we will ALWAYS only have ourselves to blame; our leaders are just the convenient target of that blame. But we created them. We educated (or didn't educate) them. We elected them.
The world is what WE make of it - or if we prefer to do nothing, we will be subjected to the world that others would make for us.
It is when you refuse to evaluate your own logical fallacies that a discussion ends. I won't be replying again.
You can accuse me of "missing the point completely" all you want, that still doesn't change the fact that what you're saying amounts to "guilty before proven innocent."
It is on YOU to prove I am hiding data, just because I am using a system capable of doing so. And it is further on YOU to prove that I am hiding data that is incriminating, a conclusion NOT guaranteed just because I'm using a system capable of hiding data.
In practice, I agree with you. In pure logic, I do not.
I will repeat my previous statement:
Using an encryption or data hiding scheme is not itself proof of hiding data, and further, is not proof of hiding incriminating data.
What if I'm using it because I might WANT to be able to hide my own data? And if I AM hiding it, does that immediately prove that it is incriminating?
We live in a world that has lost the ability to believe that someone might want to keep their life private, for no other reason than to simply keep it private, because god forbid it's THEIR LIFE.
And bread! We have bread.
At least we have bread...
"The fact that you use a stego file system is a proof that hidden data exist."
I call "post hoc, ergo propter hoc" on you.
Using an encryption or data hiding scheme is not itself proof of hiding data, and further, is not proof of hiding incriminating data.
Me wanting to protect my own privacy is not proof that I have done something wrong. It just means I don't want you to know I talked to my mom at 7:37 am unless there's a reason for you to know it.
"The RIAA is dying. Netcraft's list of top lawsuits proves it. "
I've sat and thought about that before. The RIAA's behavior is that of a company that knows it is becoming irrelevant and is taking everything it can get on the way down.
"So, fuck 'em gently with a chainsaw."
Forget the gently part.
In that case, declare it a cartel and sue it under the RICO laws. Seriously, collusion and price fixing are the LEAST of their crimes, and even those are enough to get the "association" disbanded.
"So, then, how often are we seeing our military refusing orders?"
Not in the slightest my point. I would invoke the saying "All that is necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing," but it seems redundant in this case. (eh? eh? I have a flair for the ridiculous..)
Whether they refuse them or not was not my point. My point is that they should.
I wonder, had more Generals, Lieutenants, and Captains spoken up that March 20, 2003, how would our history have been written differently.
My dear American AC in Paris,
I do not often use the vernacular of our times; having grown up on books like The Federalist Papers and The Prince, I generally prefer more intelligent discourse.
Every once in awhile however, someone so completely blows my mind with a position so clearly and powerfully written that I am forced to say...
Holy fucking shit that was a good post!
My hat's off to you. I'm keeping this one for posterity's sake, should I ever need these words again.
"Who decides what is a damaging secret, for that matter?"
There's a standing rule in the military that you don't carry out illegal orders from your commanding officer. No Western military tribunal will accept the excuse "I was just following orders." This is because morality can't be put down in a book as a list of numbered, sanctioned rules - we would always miss at least one (and more likely miss thousands).
Soldiers are not expected to be machines, contrary to popular belief; they have to morally evaluate the orders they are given, because it is their responsibility to stand up and say "NO!" if they are given an illegal order (like "Ok, let's take some embarassing pictures of some of our prisoners over there. Say cheese!").
Every American citizen has the same responsibility, ESPECIALLY those with security clearances. It is often only they that will ever be aware of abuses being carried out by our government. There are no hard and fast rules for recognizing unethical or immoral behavior; it is up to us, as moral, thinking beings, to figure it out.
"Divulging classified information is not "whistleblowing", no matter how you look at it."
If they're revealing evidence of corruption or illegal or unethical activity, it most definitely IS whistleblowing. It isn't legal, since it violates the security clearance they were granted, but it IS whisteblowing.
Seriously though, I won't extend that to people who are "whistleblowing" just because they're mad at their boss because they're not getting that promotion, but there are valid times when even classified data should be revealed. I don't trust my government enough to properly deal with that stuff internally.
"Honestly, people who who security clearance know better than this."
I have one. I am fully aware of what is ok for me to talk about with friends and love ones, and what isn't.
If I were to come upon information I thought needed to be shared, I would first share it with my boss, who has a higher clearance than I do. I would follow the chain of command.
If, at the end of the day, I was looking at an instance of massive corruption and found my superiors unwilling to do anything about it, you better believe I'm going to go share it with a reporter. Sure, I'll probably be jailed for it, but that is a small price to pay for serving the freedom of my country.
But then, the stuff I deal with is pretty insignificant. I don't expect to ever be in that situation. But it's something I've thought about.
"any politician intersted in expanding his power"
You answered your own question. As blasphemous as it may sound, not all politicians are interested in expanding their own power and are, in fact, interested in doing the right thing (I think my congressman, for example, is one of these, though obviously there's the possibility I'm wrong).
Any politician interested in expanding their own power would absolutely LOVE a dictatorship - where they would hold absolute power.
Politicians not interested in such power would have no need for a dictatorship, and so would not be doing things they'd need to 'shield' the public from.
I recognize that is a rather simplistic evaluation of the situation, but as a human being I believe it to be true. And I think any moral human would agree.
"The point is not the technical ability to create the infrastructure, what is required is well known. "
Then I think the telecom's are just playing dumb. Which of course, works to their advantage, as they can con ignorant Congressmen into buying their extortion plan.
"The end user might have to pay $60-70 per month for a pipe that robust, but I think it is still better than having a tiered service."
I totally agree. I'm willing to pay for the ability to download faster; in fact when I got my first cable installation, I was very surprised I was quoted a flat price and told I could have "unlimited downloads at 6Mbps" - it just makes fundamental sense to me to charge for a faster, higher download-limit connection.
"So yes the internet will crash because of HD Video but only if no one dares to upgrade their equipment ever."
Well see, that's the thing. Companies hate spending money to upgrade equipment, even if it means it makes them more profitable. That would be spending money that should be buying the CEO his 17th house in the Bahamas, remember.
So they came up with a novel solution: Charge the CONTENT providers more, so we don't have to upgrade our equipment, AND we'll get richer so we can buy you that new Lamborgini you've been itching for!
This just in:
It now costs $375/mo to play WoW online, because we have to pay AT&T, Comcast, Cox, BellSouth, Verizon, {fill in ISP name here} their monthly extortion fee.
We're sorry for the inconvenience, but now be assured that your queue time to enter a game will only be 30 minutes instead of 45, and your lag will be between 500-750 ms instead of 1500 ms!
Exactly. This is what every comment I have made on this article has summed to: Charge me for what I AM USING. If the companies have to go with a tiered fee structure so I can get a faster download than do it.
There's only one way to stem demand: Charge more. If you don't want customers saturating bandwidth you calculated your profit on, then charge them more and make them think twice about using it.
Simple as that. Routers, T1's, OC-48 blah blah blah nothing. It's simple. Just charge customers for the bandwidth they use, so they'll ask themselves if they really want to use it.
I don't know, that $120 cell phone bill certainly got me to pay alot more attention to the minutes I was using instead of thinking "Eh, I got plenty o' time left!"
"You May laugh now, but AT&T is going down."
More power to you.
Whoops, be careful.
You don't want to blow a telecom' CEO's mind, now, with big ideas like that.
"So yeah, there is NO WAY an ISP can afford to supply every one of their users the gobs of non-bursty bandwidth necessary to make HDTV downloads on a massive scale work."
Then charge ME more for the priviledge of expending massive amounts of bandwidth. I'm the one using it, I'm the one who should be forced to think twice before volunteering a $300/mo cable bill.
I simply don't understand why the telecom's don't understand that argument. They believe their business will fail if they raise the customer's prices, but apparently their business will fail if they don't - and it most certainly will fail if they start voluntarily censoring the internet (which is exactly what this extortion fee amounts to).
Damn straight.
"The reporting in this article is either inept or corrupt."
I actually read this article yesterday when it came out on Yahoo. I sat there and just gawked at how one-sided, biased, and blatantly WRONG that article is about so many things. Tried to research the byline a little to figure out who might have bought the reporter, but to no avail.
Unfortunately, for your average Joe, this is what they will read, and then they'll go "Oh, ok, it's ok for them to do that." When in fact it's the worst possible thing they could do.
Sigh, what is happening to our world?
"But I can see where the telcos are coming from here, at least."
Unfortunately, I can't. If that were the problem, they should hike my bill to make me think twice about using that much bandwidth - not try to extort the content providers for providing content in the first place.
"You are going to pay for your bandwidth one way or the other. Get over it."
Ironically, if that were all this was about, I doubt any of us would have a problem with it.
The problem is, we've been promised something that the telecom's are now claiming they can't deliver - and they're claiming it's OUR fault and then, to twist the issue even more, it isn't US they want to charge for it - it's the websites we're using! That makes absolutely ZERO sense.
That's where the "net neutrality" phrase comes in - preferentially providing service to different websites is just one step away from outright censorship, not by the government (though it could be used by them) but by a corporation.
THAT is where the outroar is coming from.
I would more than gladly pay for the bandwidth I use if I wanted to sit there streaming TV all day. I am under no illusion I should get that for free. But I am the one who should pay for that, because I am the one who is USING it, not the content provider who is already paying out the ass for the fat pipe to provide that download to me.