This article has a list of things government could do that Adam Smith advocated in the Wealth Of Nations, including regulation of institutions and markets, copyright, patents, education, restrictions on interest for borrowing, health care and export taxes. Adam Smith was not particularly laissez-faire in the libertarian sense at all.
And altruism isn't acknowledged in capitalist theory, despite the fact that reciprocal altruism is the basis for social behaviour. Both capitalism and communism suffer from incomplete views of human behaviour, just different ones; neither is practical in its purist form. All societies have some elements of both to try and balance each others' flaws.
People's satisfaction with what they own or make is based on how it compares to others, not any kind of absolute scale. In fact, pretty much all social perceptions are based on relative values. A lot of these things are hard-wired, and the idea of evolutionary biology and psychology didn't exist in Marx's time; I'd recommend looking into behavioural economics for a lot of fascinating research into people's economic behaviour.
Ha, they're called that because they eschewed real-world data and built their models on thought experiments. And the name is a complete misnomer, because their model of human behaviour is completely flawed - even the briefest knowledge of behavioural economics and all of the experiments performed into *actual* human economic behaviour would show that.
Really? IQ tests? Cranial size? That's your rebuttal? How does that address anything in GGS other than some of Diamond's remarks on intelligence? And what evidence is there for IQ tests or cranial size being a positive factor in evolutionary success anyway?
After starting off with GFA Basic on my Atari ST, the next language I learnt was Turbo Pascal, which I learnt entirely from the help files... as you say, they were amazingly useful, even for someone like me with minimal experience and none in compiled, statically-typed languages.
Read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond for a very convincing argument that Western civilisation benefited from a combination of geographical factors such as the ability to spread E-W within the same climate and a diversity of domesticable animals and crops that no other early civilisation matched. It's a question of geography and resources.
Try reading Predictably Irrational - it's about behavioural economics, and describes lots of very interesting experiments on things like cheating, evaluating options, how social norms affect behaviour and so on. Very interesting read if you're interested in either psychology or economics.
FB hasn't notified anyone about me adding them to a list in the three or four years since I started using it, nor have I ever received such a notification. G+ does only require 2 clicks to publish to a particular group rather than FB's 3 clicks though, although on FB you can use exclude friend lists and/or users when you publish as well as include, on G+ you can only include.
They're different models is all. With friends it's highly unlikely I'd want them to be able to see my updates but not see theirs, which is Facebook's model. The Twitter model is more like subscribing to a mailing list or RSS feed, for when I'm just interested in receiving "news" of some kind. You can do the same thing on FB by liking someone or something's page; you get updates in your news feed but don't broadcast your updates to that page.
There's not really much difference in terms of functionality between the two in terms of grouping; circles are more prominent on G+ than friend lists are on FB, but they're basically the same thing.
It's slightly easier to specify a subset of circles to restrict each post to on G+ than on FB, but the difference is a couple of clicks. And Facebook allows you to specify a combination of groups/users to both include and exclude, whereas G+ only allows including as far as I can tell. FB also allows you to specify a default subset to share to; G+ defaults to the last used subset on each new item posted, which seems confusing.
The other difference is that adding a friend on FB is two-way - one user requests, the other approves it or not. On G+ you can add another user to one of your circles without them doing anything; whether they add you to one of their circles is a completely independent process.
All of the above is based on a day or so's playing with G+ mind you:)
Last time I read about it Coventry was the first city projected to become majority non-white, around 2040 or so. As of the census before last, the UK was still 92% white, as hard as that is to believe in parts of the large cities.
Canada is just one example of socialised health care though. In the UK for instance, private health care will get you a bunch of extras, but doesn't cover primary care at all (see the list of what it doesn't cover), as these are provided by the NHS - and it's usually the same doctors in any case. Which is why it's generally very cheap, and not many people have it - it's a luxury, not a necessity.
I don't know if you've seen it, but the Frontline documentary Sick Around the World's website has overviews of different health care systems from the US, UK, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland, and talks about the costs, benefits and problems with each.
How do I know YOU specifically are a loser? You responded to his post. It struck a nerve with you. If it didn't feel personal to you, you wouldn't have bothered.
LOL. This from someone who has posted 27 comments in this article, most of which are vitriolic rants in response to people who say they find Facebook a positive thing. It seems that people talking about their social lives seems to touch a nerve with you, maybe if you ever get some real-life friends you'd have a broader perspective on the value of social media. Given the level of anger you display towards people just for using a website though, I can't imagine who'd want to be your friend.
100% of the population covered. And your point about tax is a bit of a red herring, given that in the US health care is already a larger proportion of the tax burden than in every other country, and that's before you consider the extra cost of private health insurance. Certainly the US has better outcomes for some types of medical issue, but it has worse in plenty of others... and again, there's a large percentage of the population with no coverage, and you only have to read the comments in this story to hear stories from plenty of people who have "actual, real coverage" that let them down. Medical bankruptcies account for over 60% of all bankruptcies in the US, and three-quarters of those people had health insurance.
It's rising because of demographics and the increasing number of new treatments; that's a global issue for healthcare. 100% coverage vs. 60% coverage for twice the price is still a win though.
Slashdot Mirror
This article has a list of things government could do that Adam Smith advocated in the Wealth Of Nations, including regulation of institutions and markets, copyright, patents, education, restrictions on interest for borrowing, health care and export taxes. Adam Smith was not particularly laissez-faire in the libertarian sense at all.
And altruism isn't acknowledged in capitalist theory, despite the fact that reciprocal altruism is the basis for social behaviour. Both capitalism and communism suffer from incomplete views of human behaviour, just different ones; neither is practical in its purist form. All societies have some elements of both to try and balance each others' flaws.
People's satisfaction with what they own or make is based on how it compares to others, not any kind of absolute scale. In fact, pretty much all social perceptions are based on relative values. A lot of these things are hard-wired, and the idea of evolutionary biology and psychology didn't exist in Marx's time; I'd recommend looking into behavioural economics for a lot of fascinating research into people's economic behaviour.
Ha, they're called that because they eschewed real-world data and built their models on thought experiments. And the name is a complete misnomer, because their model of human behaviour is completely flawed - even the briefest knowledge of behavioural economics and all of the experiments performed into *actual* human economic behaviour would show that.
It's not dead, initial results from the LHC are inconsistent with the simplest model of SUSY, but do not yet rule out other models which have higher energies for s-particles.
... "born on third base and thinks he hit a triple" libertarianism.
Can I just say I love that expression :) And I'm not even American lol.
Really? IQ tests? Cranial size? That's your rebuttal? How does that address anything in GGS other than some of Diamond's remarks on intelligence? And what evidence is there for IQ tests or cranial size being a positive factor in evolutionary success anyway?
After starting off with GFA Basic on my Atari ST, the next language I learnt was Turbo Pascal, which I learnt entirely from the help files... as you say, they were amazingly useful, even for someone like me with minimal experience and none in compiled, statically-typed languages.
Great comment, thanks.
Read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond for a very convincing argument that Western civilisation benefited from a combination of geographical factors such as the ability to spread E-W within the same climate and a diversity of domesticable animals and crops that no other early civilisation matched. It's a question of geography and resources.
Try reading Predictably Irrational - it's about behavioural economics, and describes lots of very interesting experiments on things like cheating, evaluating options, how social norms affect behaviour and so on. Very interesting read if you're interested in either psychology or economics.
FB hasn't notified anyone about me adding them to a list in the three or four years since I started using it, nor have I ever received such a notification. G+ does only require 2 clicks to publish to a particular group rather than FB's 3 clicks though, although on FB you can use exclude friend lists and/or users when you publish as well as include, on G+ you can only include.
They're different models is all. With friends it's highly unlikely I'd want them to be able to see my updates but not see theirs, which is Facebook's model. The Twitter model is more like subscribing to a mailing list or RSS feed, for when I'm just interested in receiving "news" of some kind. You can do the same thing on FB by liking someone or something's page; you get updates in your news feed but don't broadcast your updates to that page.
There's not really much difference in terms of functionality between the two in terms of grouping; circles are more prominent on G+ than friend lists are on FB, but they're basically the same thing.
It's slightly easier to specify a subset of circles to restrict each post to on G+ than on FB, but the difference is a couple of clicks. And Facebook allows you to specify a combination of groups/users to both include and exclude, whereas G+ only allows including as far as I can tell. FB also allows you to specify a default subset to share to; G+ defaults to the last used subset on each new item posted, which seems confusing.
The other difference is that adding a friend on FB is two-way - one user requests, the other approves it or not. On G+ you can add another user to one of your circles without them doing anything; whether they add you to one of their circles is a completely independent process.
All of the above is based on a day or so's playing with G+ mind you :)
No, you can include or exclude any combination of individual users and friend lists on anything you post.
Cats should be handled during a critical period between 2-7 weeks or else they never fully adapt to being around people.
I've never heard anyone say "the M1 motorway" in conversation, you'd just say the M1.
Last time I read about it Coventry was the first city projected to become majority non-white, around 2040 or so. As of the census before last, the UK was still 92% white, as hard as that is to believe in parts of the large cities.
Canada is just one example of socialised health care though. In the UK for instance, private health care will get you a bunch of extras, but doesn't cover primary care at all (see the list of what it doesn't cover), as these are provided by the NHS - and it's usually the same doctors in any case. Which is why it's generally very cheap, and not many people have it - it's a luxury, not a necessity.
I don't know if you've seen it, but the Frontline documentary Sick Around the World's website has overviews of different health care systems from the US, UK, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland, and talks about the costs, benefits and problems with each.
How do I know YOU specifically are a loser? You responded to his post. It struck a nerve with you. If it didn't feel personal to you, you wouldn't have bothered.
LOL. This from someone who has posted 27 comments in this article, most of which are vitriolic rants in response to people who say they find Facebook a positive thing. It seems that people talking about their social lives seems to touch a nerve with you, maybe if you ever get some real-life friends you'd have a broader perspective on the value of social media. Given the level of anger you display towards people just for using a website though, I can't imagine who'd want to be your friend.
100% of the population covered. And your point about tax is a bit of a red herring, given that in the US health care is already a larger proportion of the tax burden than in every other country, and that's before you consider the extra cost of private health insurance. Certainly the US has better outcomes for some types of medical issue, but it has worse in plenty of others... and again, there's a large percentage of the population with no coverage, and you only have to read the comments in this story to hear stories from plenty of people who have "actual, real coverage" that let them down. Medical bankruptcies account for over 60% of all bankruptcies in the US, and three-quarters of those people had health insurance.
It's rising because of demographics and the increasing number of new treatments; that's a global issue for healthcare. 100% coverage vs. 60% coverage for twice the price is still a win though.
What does population size have to do with the fact that the US pays more per person?
I love my universal health care, as do all the other people above talking about the NHS. So, you're wrong.
Still rising no faster than the cost of healthcare in the US though.