Climate control doesn't need a digital display, and it's something that can be safely postponed until an opportune time. But it should have it's own display if it needs a display at all ( what ever happened to a knob, the control that is it's own display? ). If it has a digital display, odds are it's shared with umpteen other things that you'll have to scroll though so that the display is displaying the information you want it to. If there's a digital display, you'll be fiddling with it because it will be shared with umpteen other things.
The radio/music player is a non-safety device that can be safely ignored. But ease of use is very important even so because people will want to use it even when they maybe ought not to. Also, the ease of use of the device will factor into the decision about whether it is safe to use at any particular moment. Ease of use translates into availability even of the radio.
Sat navs -- eek - I've never owned a real one, but I do have one on my phone, and I guess they do take the stress level down about 3 notches since if you miss your turn you aren't hopelessly lost, so they do cut down on last minute swerving across three lanes of traffic because the exit was unexpectedly on the left, or across two lanes because you don't know what side of the road the exit is going to be on having been tricked before so you travel in the middle lane until you see the exit visually. But they REALLY need to be designed well to be safe to use by a driver without a human navigator using the device. Still, they are an electronic gizmo, that if it be part of your car, it will start to look sucky compared to the new ones just out after a couple of years. I'd rather get a commodity one that I can bring with me for now rather than having it integrated into the car.
The integration would have to be very well done. Car radios that play MP3s beat the heck out of plugging in a portable MP3 player because the buttons are big on the radio, and the little MP3 player is useless to someone trying to drive. Do integrated sat navs have such potential for big button improvements? I haven't used enough sat navs to comment on that... But drivers shouldn't be mousing around. If the destination is preset while parked, there should be a easy to hit 'Update directions from here' button. That's one big button. All sat navs for use in cars should have it, big and prominant. Even better, don't have it. Have the device just automatically do it without a button being pressed.
Thanks for an enlightening post. It clear up some confusion in my mind about AT vs Manual transmission.
I've never driven a truck of the sort you are talking about, but I can see how human intelligence can make the difference in alot of situations as you pointed out.
I got my license on an AT, and when I bought a car with a Manual transmission, I thought, hmm, I guess it's going to be harder to eat that Whopper now while I'm driving, other than that I didn't see any real advantages or disadvantages to it. Vaguely, I half remembered that race car drivers and car afficionados preferred manual transmissions, because they had more control over the car. I guess I agreed since starting off can be a little sluggish in an AT but then those times when you forget you are still in third and try to take off in third, and don't go anywhere that happen to me sometimes even after driving nothing but manual transmission vehicles for six years, sort of compensate for that.
Anyway, a couple of days ago on wired I read that all the new Ferrarris are coming out with AT. I don't know a damn thing about cars, but I was thinking HMM... I guess the afficionados have changed their collective minds.. I wonder why... I still don't know, supposedly the automatic transmissions were faster on some track tests, but I guess if you have a huge enough engine you'll take off just fine no matter what gear the transmission's electronics are in...
Then again, watching dang, I wonder the name of that show is where the celebrities try for the best time, Top Gear?, whatever, I always see them farting around with the electronics on even very expensive cars like ones that cost twice what my house does, and I'm thinking - WHAT A PIECE OF CRAP!
Electronics that you see, are a big minus. Note to electronic interface designers designing interfaces to computerized crap on cars - When accessed through the electronic interface, your car should respond like Mario does on SNES games. INSTANTLY, and without any thought. NOTHING of importance should require looking down at any controls. When controlling mario, you don't have ANY menus, you don't take your eyes off the screen. DRIVERS whose lives may depend on their cars responding to their input, and being able to see the road, DON'T want to be fracking around with electronics. Even stuff that ought to not be time sensitive ought not to take much time or thought. There should be no digital displays on a car. The radio's display can be digital and show the time, the station and the current mp3 track. AM/FM, Seek, favorites buttons, should be BIG. The volume and tuner should be the only two knobs. The tuner can double to select MP3 tracks read from a keyfob.
You are going to have your car for at least 5 years, and maybe 10. Any electronics you have are going to be obsolete after a two or at most three years. Any menus necessary to access features effectively subtract the feature as a selling point. Your car should be a car first and foremost, with electronics added only where absolutely necessary to make your car do it's car thing.
The only other exception to the no display except the clock radio rule is that the check engine light should have a display that is blank unless there is a problem. In that case it should display a human readable/understandable description of the problem with an error code. It might be too tempting for designers to use that display for something other than displaying error codes though. You DON'T want any displays you have to read to access funtionality of your car. accessing your car's functionality is otherwise known as driving, and that is dangerous when texting.
April fools joke stories in past years have taken a bit of thought to distinguish from the real ones. When they don't fool anyone, they pretty much suck as April Fools jokes.
I wonder if there is a way to have a room that is all magnetified so that people entering it become blithering idiots and fall to the floor in convulsions. Then you could decorate it with voodoo mumbo jumbo and call it the 'inner sanctum'. I'm sure someone could come up with a way to make money off of that.
I don't understand how Gonhorrea (sp) can have evolved resistance when the treatment is a single dose of antibiotics. One dose has no compliance issues. I'd expect this if the treatment were two weeks of pills, then people might miss a dose. Unless the antibiotic is being used without direction by a physician, or used on a doctor's orders at a lesser dose over a longer time for other infections.. Maybe then if someone also had ghonoroeha (sp) then they might breed a superbug in themselves...
Still what does hand sanitizer have to do with ghonhorheha (sp) ? They don't use the same antibiotic in those products do they?
Bug killers that are not injested ought to be poisonous. Amoxicillin solution can't be a better germ killer than Listerine, or Bleach.
Health records should be such that anyone can input data, but to read data should require a special hardware key code. This would be presented whenever health care was purchased. Optionally an implantable ( and erasable/rewriteable key code storage device could be used so that health information could be accessed in case of an accident ).
The ability to start anew with a blank medical record should be everyone's right. Also, it should be your right to roll back one's own medical record to any date and start from there.
With a freer health insurance rubric, we might be looking at lots of people who have been staying with traditional employers becoming self employed. Small business is usually the engine of growth in an economy right? With fines for not getting health insurance, and insurance companies not able to reject for pre-existing conditions, then the whole idea of an employer run risk pool kinda becomes moot. This means one less tie to 'the man' for would be entrepreneurs/independent contractors. And of course traditional employers might find themselves having to raise pay to compensate for the fact that health insurance is not such an attractive benefit anymore. Employees might want to buy their own health insurance on the open market because it will suddenly become competitively priced.
Will your employer stop offering health insurance as a benefit and give you a raise corresponding to their contribution, or will the benefit just be eliminated and replaced with cash only for the 'high performers'? The rest might do better in the pool of temps, though the pool might have more swimmers than before...
No. Insurance is cheaper through an employer because insurance purchased individually is subject to adverse selection where people who know they are apt to need to make claims will tend to buy insurance and people who expect to be healthy will not. Clauses in the coverage terms allowing for denial for 'pre-existing conditions' is an attempt to ameliorate this, but only the patient knows for sure what the pre-existing conditions that have been diagnosed are. It's possible they went to a doctor under an assumed name, and paid out of pocket to get a diagnosis of cancer, then bought insurance to cover treatment. ( not a bad idea by the way if you think you might have cancer, or some other possibly terminal disease, then you can load up on life insurance too before getting it diagnosed where it will go down on your permanent record.
If you don't have a job, or own your own small business, or are a private contractor, then your employer isn't making substantial contributions to paying for your health insurance that you would be stupid not to partake of. ( some employers give a small rebate if you choose not to partake of the company policy,but try purchasing a policy of your own on the open market with that money ). Purchasing as part of a risk pool is cheaper because there is less adverse selection, and the employer contribution is worth more than the rebate they give you precisely to create the incentives to enroll even if you're healthy necessary to create the risk pool in the first place.
When you are employed you enter a pool. If the company is large enough, they probably don't consider whether hiring you will increase the rate they pay per employee. When you attempt to buy insurance as an individual ( not though your employer ) then you will be denied because of pre-existing conditions. Also the rate you pay per month will = ( cost of hospital delivered pregnancy / 9 )
Re:dear libertarians and tea baggers:
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 1
1. the US currently runs a deficit of 1.5trillion dollars, don't think that such reform can be done without bankrupting the country, especially when economy is on life support now, even without that bill. How long can you pile up debts, no less than 1T every year? In pursue of universal happiness there will be universal downgrade of everything.
Other countries with universal health care spend half per capita what the US does per capita. Multiply per capita spending by the capita involved and you get the financial drain on the economy of paying for health care. If the US instituted a universal health care system that cost 3/4 what is currently spent per capita, then that would save 25% of the cost to the US economy currently incurred by the status quo way of paying for health care. With the US economy on the ropes, the US can't afford NOT to institute a more efficient way of paying for health care.
Re:sign everybody up for veterans' healthcare
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 1
The difference is that most people who vote aren't veterans. And most veterans don't use the VA because they now get private insurance through their jobs. The VA serves a tiny minority which in a democracy means they don't get served well.
Now if most everyone signed up for a national health care system, then deficiencies would become campaign issues for sure.
Re:Taking care of people is not wrong
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 1
By being inefficient, the status quo is FORCING me, at gunpoint if I attempted to steal health care a la John Q to pay more for health care than I would be paying if there existed if there were a single payer system as there is in other countries.
Seems like a pretty roundabout way of doing things. Why not just get the single payer system now rather than be the Democrat blamed for making things worse, so that the Republicans can swoop in and save us from socialized insurance?
That is why Obama was second choice for me after Hillary.
Single payer would cost more than medicare/medicaid. Higher taxes. However, it would save the economy of the united states money. That is the amount being paid to insurance companies together with the amount paid by individuals for their own healthcare, together with the amount currently being spent on medicare/medicaid far exceeds what would need to be spent on a single payer health care system. The economy is drained just the same whether it is taxes or spending on healthcare.
BECAUSE the economy sucks, the US can't afford NOT to have a single payer health care system. What we have now is like a leach sucking an already anemic economy dry.
Of course when you, the self insured pay your bill yourself, you are paying an inflated price, inflated by the stupid inefficiency around you. You are paying the same rate as anyone else which has those who don't pay, the constant fight with insurance companies who try not to pay, etc. Maybe you're a multi millionaire and your doctor knows it. Do you want that full body scan? Insurance companies know better than to cover that shit, but do you? Maybe you've heard of the stupidity of a full body scan. I'm sure your doctor can think of fifty scams like that to suggest to you that you DON'T know better than do.
Re:Capitalism and competition re health insurance
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 1
I think you may be right, since insurance companies were the only force against unrestained marginally useful care designed to cover doctor's liability asses and pad medical bills. If health insurance companies are forced to lay down and accept abusive billing practices, then rates will still rise until almost nobody can afford health insurance.
I hope a failed attempt at reform doesn't cause reversion to what we have now, or a hopeless mindset where we don't believe reform can work. Emperically a single payer limited budget pool works elsewhere much better than what the US has now. The alternative is eventually almost nobody is insured, and medical consumers ( without the benefit of MDs in their employ ) are faced with deciding whether to A) get angioplasty to lower the risk of a heart attack or B) keep their house. ( those without a house/money would presumably get the angioplasty and also a lien against their future income if any in the case of B).
Elsewhere, even if it's far from perfect, I believe they do better than that last alternative.
Re:Capitalism and competition re health insurance
on
Health Care Reform
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· Score: 1
Your points are good ones, but health insurance, even with competition is still going to be overly expensive.
This is because market forces do not primarily drive competing health insurance companies to control costs to the customer, but rather their own payout costs.
Insurance companies employ an army of bureaucrats whose main function is to avoid paying out. Doctors offices must employ their own bureaucratic warriors to fight their customer's insurance companies to get paid. A doctor's office who made the customer do this would find itself with no patients fast.
This pointless bureaucracy war is paid for in the price of insurance premiums.
If ever an insurance company tried to control costs by cutting bureaucracy, it would still find itself paying for the bureaucracy on the doctor's office side of things included in the price of care, and that bureaucracy would then saddle the insurance company with as large a bill as possible, negating any possible gain. Competition among insurance companies is competition to cut the cost of supplying insurance (via bureaucracy and dirty tricks) so as to be able to collect the going rate.
An insurance company that fights over every asprin raises the rate for medical care for everyone, even those that fight less, increasing their costs to the point where the insurance companies prices and what they deliver and how they behave is largely indistinguishable. This ever escalating an pointless bureaucracy war means prices for consumers tend toward infinity.
First of all, the point isn't to fight, but to win. If you aren't fighting but are winning, then GREAT!
Waiting till after initial sales are over deprives the games makers of CA$H MONEY which hurts them.
Anyway I just window shop new games when I first buy a computer. I buy em when they are sold in 'Complete' versions for the same price or even marked down 50% off the original game some time later. I get the game, any bugs fixed that are ever going to be fixed, the updates( maybe 2 or 3 which would have each cost as much as the original game itself ), less DRM crap, and an internet full of all the cheats and walkthroughs that are ever going to exist when I sit down to FIRST play the game on the era of PC it was designed for.
A few months later, the games that might have been good, and were designed to run on my PC start coming out on the $10 rack at Wal*Mart. I snap up the marginal titles that look interesting then.
What is the attraction of Facebook? My empathy circuits do not grok someone that spends significant time there. If my real face is somewhere, then it can only have links to my resume, and bland boring stuff that couldn't possibly offend anyone. Doesn't having your real face associated with your online activity sap every single ounce of fun out of using the internet? Or are people that naiive that they think being anything but Ned Flanders in public is a net win. I'm faced with the possibility that maybe *gasp* the world is populated by clones - of NED FLANDERS! I'm going to cry!
Demand for separated rare earths far outstrips supply. For instance the natural mix of U238/U235 is much less valuable than that same quantity of Uranium separated into piles of pure U238 and pure U235. ( Yes I know Uranium is not a rare earth. Lighter flints however are rare earths ( all mixed together and probably difficult/environmentally damaging to separate )
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Climate control doesn't need a digital display, and it's something that can be safely postponed until an opportune time. But it should have it's own display if it needs a display at all ( what ever happened to a knob, the control that is it's own display? ). If it has a digital display, odds are it's shared with umpteen other things that you'll have to scroll though so that the display is displaying the information you want it to. If there's a digital display, you'll be fiddling with it because it will be shared with umpteen other things.
The radio/music player is a non-safety device that can be safely ignored. But ease of use is very important even so because people will want to use it even when they maybe ought not to. Also, the ease of use of the device will factor into the decision about whether it is safe to use at any particular moment. Ease of use translates into availability even of the radio.
Sat navs -- eek - I've never owned a real one, but I do have one on my phone, and I guess they do take the stress level down about 3 notches since if you miss your turn you aren't hopelessly lost, so they do cut down on last minute swerving across three lanes of traffic because the exit was unexpectedly on the left, or across two lanes because you don't know what side of the road the exit is going to be on having been tricked before so you travel in the middle lane until you see the exit visually. But they REALLY need to be designed well to be safe to use by a driver without a human navigator using the device. Still, they are an electronic gizmo, that if it be part of your car, it will start to look sucky compared to the new ones just out after a couple of years. I'd rather get a commodity one that I can bring with me for now rather than having it integrated into the car.
The integration would have to be very well done. Car radios that play MP3s beat the heck out of plugging in a portable MP3 player because the buttons are big on the radio, and the little MP3 player is useless to someone trying to drive. Do integrated sat navs have such potential for big button improvements? I haven't used enough sat navs to comment on that... But drivers shouldn't be mousing around. If the destination is preset while parked, there should be a easy to hit 'Update directions from here' button. That's one big button. All sat navs for use in cars should have it, big and prominant. Even better, don't have it. Have the device just automatically do it without a button being pressed.
Thanks for an enlightening post. It clear up some confusion in my mind about AT vs Manual transmission.
I've never driven a truck of the sort you are talking about, but I can see how human intelligence can make the difference in alot of situations as you pointed out.
I got my license on an AT, and when I bought a car with a Manual transmission, I thought, hmm, I guess it's going to be harder to eat that Whopper now while I'm driving, other than that I didn't see any real advantages or disadvantages to it. Vaguely, I half remembered that race car drivers and car afficionados preferred manual transmissions, because they had more control over the car. I guess I agreed since starting off can be a little sluggish in an AT but then those times when you forget you are still in third and try to take off in third, and don't go anywhere that happen to me sometimes even after driving nothing but manual transmission vehicles for six years, sort of compensate for that.
Anyway, a couple of days ago on wired I read that all the new Ferrarris are coming out with AT. I don't know a damn thing about cars, but I was thinking HMM... I guess the afficionados have changed their collective minds.. I wonder why... I still don't know, supposedly the automatic transmissions were faster on some track tests, but I guess if you have a huge enough engine you'll take off just fine no matter what gear the transmission's electronics are in...
Then again, watching dang, I wonder the name of that show is where the celebrities try for the best time, Top Gear?, whatever, I always see them farting around with the electronics on even very expensive cars like ones that cost twice what my house does, and I'm thinking - WHAT A PIECE OF CRAP!
Electronics that you see, are a big minus. Note to electronic interface designers designing interfaces to computerized crap on cars - When accessed through the electronic interface, your car should respond like Mario does on SNES games. INSTANTLY, and without any thought. NOTHING of importance should require looking down at any controls. When controlling mario, you don't have ANY menus, you don't take your eyes off the screen. DRIVERS whose lives may depend on their cars responding to their input, and being able to see the road, DON'T want to be fracking around with electronics. Even stuff that ought to not be time sensitive ought not to take much time or thought. There should be no digital displays on a car. The radio's display can be digital and show the time, the station and the current mp3 track. AM/FM, Seek, favorites buttons, should be BIG. The volume and tuner should be the only two knobs. The tuner can double to select MP3 tracks read from a keyfob.
You are going to have your car for at least 5 years, and maybe 10. Any electronics you have are going to be obsolete after a two or at most three years. Any menus necessary to access features effectively subtract the feature as a selling point. Your car should be a car first and foremost, with electronics added only where absolutely necessary to make your car do it's car thing.
The only other exception to the no display except the clock radio rule is that the check engine light should have a display that is blank unless there is a problem. In that case it should display a human readable/understandable description of the problem with an error code. It might be too tempting for designers to use that display for something other than displaying error codes though. You DON'T want any displays you have to read to access funtionality of your car. accessing your car's functionality is otherwise known as driving, and that is dangerous when texting.
April fools joke stories in past years have taken a bit of thought to distinguish from the real ones. When they don't fool anyone, they pretty much suck as April Fools jokes.
I wonder if there is a way to have a room that is all magnetified so that people entering it become blithering idiots and fall to the floor in convulsions. Then you could decorate it with voodoo mumbo jumbo and call it the 'inner sanctum'. I'm sure someone could come up with a way to make money off of that.
I wanna see Hancock vs The Alien Armada.
I don't understand how Gonhorrea (sp) can have evolved resistance when the treatment is a single dose of antibiotics. One dose has no compliance issues. I'd expect this if the treatment were two weeks of pills, then people might miss a dose. Unless the antibiotic is being used without direction by a physician, or used on a doctor's orders at a lesser dose over a longer time for other infections.. Maybe then if someone also had ghonoroeha (sp) then they might breed a superbug in themselves...
Still what does hand sanitizer have to do with ghonhorheha (sp) ? They don't use the same antibiotic in those products do they?
Bug killers that are not injested ought to be poisonous. Amoxicillin solution can't be a better germ killer than Listerine, or Bleach.
Oh, I'm a little scared, hmm, I know, this democracy shit has got to go!
Last one to hit the panic button is a freetard!
Health records should be such that anyone can input data, but to read data should require a special hardware key code. This would be presented whenever health care was purchased. Optionally an implantable ( and erasable/rewriteable key code storage device could be used so that health information could be accessed in case of an accident ).
The ability to start anew with a blank medical record should be everyone's right. Also, it should be your right to roll back one's own medical record to any date and start from there.
With a freer health insurance rubric, we might be looking at lots of people who have been staying with traditional employers becoming self employed. Small business is usually the engine of growth in an economy right? With fines for not getting health insurance, and insurance companies not able to reject for pre-existing conditions, then the whole idea of an employer run risk pool kinda becomes moot. This means one less tie to 'the man' for would be entrepreneurs/independent contractors. And of course traditional employers might find themselves having to raise pay to compensate for the fact that health insurance is not such an attractive benefit anymore. Employees might want to buy their own health insurance on the open market because it will suddenly become competitively priced.
Will your employer stop offering health insurance as a benefit and give you a raise corresponding to their contribution, or will the benefit just be eliminated and replaced with cash only for the 'high performers'? The rest might do better in the pool of temps, though the pool might have more swimmers than before...
No. Insurance is cheaper through an employer because insurance purchased individually is subject to adverse selection where people who know they are apt to need to make claims will tend to buy insurance and people who expect to be healthy will not. Clauses in the coverage terms allowing for denial for 'pre-existing conditions' is an attempt to ameliorate this, but only the patient knows for sure what the pre-existing conditions that have been diagnosed are. It's possible they went to a doctor under an assumed name, and paid out of pocket to get a diagnosis of cancer, then bought insurance to cover treatment. ( not a bad idea by the way if you think you might have cancer, or some other possibly terminal disease, then you can load up on life insurance too before getting it diagnosed where it will go down on your permanent record.
If you don't have a job, or own your own small business, or are a private contractor, then your employer isn't making substantial contributions to paying for your health insurance that you would be stupid not to partake of. ( some employers give a small rebate if you choose not to partake of the company policy,but try purchasing a policy of your own on the open market with that money ). Purchasing as part of a risk pool is cheaper because there is less adverse selection, and the employer contribution is worth more than the rebate they give you precisely to create the incentives to enroll even if you're healthy necessary to create the risk pool in the first place.
When you are employed you enter a pool. If the company is large enough, they probably don't consider whether hiring you will increase the rate they pay per employee. When you attempt to buy insurance as an individual ( not though your employer ) then you will be denied because of pre-existing conditions. Also the rate you pay per month will = ( cost of hospital delivered pregnancy / 9 )
Other countries with universal health care spend half per capita what the US does per capita. Multiply per capita spending by the capita involved and you get the financial drain on the economy of paying for health care. If the US instituted a universal health care system that cost 3/4 what is currently spent per capita, then that would save 25% of the cost to the US economy currently incurred by the status quo way of paying for health care. With the US economy on the ropes, the US can't afford NOT to institute a more efficient way of paying for health care.
The difference is that most people who vote aren't veterans. And most veterans don't use the VA because they now get private insurance through their jobs. The VA serves a tiny minority which in a democracy means they don't get served well.
Now if most everyone signed up for a national health care system, then deficiencies would become campaign issues for sure.
By being inefficient, the status quo is FORCING me, at gunpoint if I attempted to steal health care a la John Q to pay more for health care than I would be paying if there existed if there were a single payer system as there is in other countries.
I would expect old people to use more than 50% of health care resources considering that they are much closer to death than others.
Seems like a pretty roundabout way of doing things. Why not just get the single payer system now rather than be the Democrat blamed for making things worse, so that the Republicans can swoop in and save us from socialized insurance?
That is why Obama was second choice for me after Hillary.
Single payer would cost more than medicare/medicaid. Higher taxes. However, it would save the economy of the united states money. That is the amount being paid to insurance companies together with the amount paid by individuals for their own healthcare, together with the amount currently being spent on medicare/medicaid far exceeds what would need to be spent on a single payer health care system. The economy is drained just the same whether it is taxes or spending on healthcare.
BECAUSE the economy sucks, the US can't afford NOT to have a single payer health care system. What we have now is like a leach sucking an already anemic economy dry.
Of course when you, the self insured pay your bill yourself, you are paying an inflated price, inflated by the stupid inefficiency around you. You are paying the same rate as anyone else which has those who don't pay, the constant fight with insurance companies who try not to pay, etc. Maybe you're a multi millionaire and your doctor knows it. Do you want that full body scan? Insurance companies know better than to cover that shit, but do you? Maybe you've heard of the stupidity of a full body scan. I'm sure your doctor can think of fifty scams like that to suggest to you that you DON'T know better than do.
I think you may be right, since insurance companies were the only force against unrestained marginally useful care designed to cover doctor's liability asses and pad medical bills. If health insurance companies are forced to lay down and accept abusive billing practices, then rates will still rise until almost nobody can afford health insurance.
I hope a failed attempt at reform doesn't cause reversion to what we have now, or a hopeless mindset where we don't believe reform can work. Emperically a single payer limited budget pool works elsewhere much better than what the US has now. The alternative is eventually almost nobody is insured, and medical consumers ( without the benefit of MDs in their employ ) are faced with deciding whether to A) get angioplasty to lower the risk of a heart attack or B) keep their house. ( those without a house/money would presumably get the angioplasty and also a lien against their future income if any in the case of B).
Elsewhere, even if it's far from perfect, I believe they do better than that last alternative.
Your points are good ones, but health insurance, even with competition is still going to be overly expensive.
This is because market forces do not primarily drive competing health insurance companies to control costs to the customer, but rather their own payout costs.
Insurance companies employ an army of bureaucrats whose main function is to avoid paying out. Doctors offices must employ their own bureaucratic warriors to fight their customer's insurance companies to get paid. A doctor's office who made the customer do this would find itself with no patients fast.
This pointless bureaucracy war is paid for in the price of insurance premiums.
If ever an insurance company tried to control costs by cutting bureaucracy, it would still find itself paying for the bureaucracy on the doctor's office side of things included in the price of care, and that bureaucracy would then saddle the insurance company with as large a bill as possible, negating any possible gain. Competition among insurance companies is competition to cut the cost of supplying insurance (via bureaucracy and dirty tricks) so as to be able to collect the going rate.
An insurance company that fights over every asprin raises the rate for medical care for everyone, even those that fight less, increasing their costs to the point where the insurance companies prices and what they deliver and how they behave is largely indistinguishable. This ever escalating an pointless bureaucracy war means prices for consumers tend toward infinity.
First of all, the point isn't to fight, but to win. If you aren't fighting but are winning, then GREAT!
Waiting till after initial sales are over deprives the games makers of CA$H MONEY which hurts them.
Anyway I just window shop new games when I first buy a computer. I buy em when they are sold in 'Complete' versions for the same price or even marked down 50% off the original game some time later. I get the game, any bugs fixed that are ever going to be fixed, the updates( maybe 2 or 3 which would have each cost as much as the original game itself ), less DRM crap, and an internet full of all the cheats and walkthroughs that are ever going to exist when I sit down to FIRST play the game on the era of PC it was designed for.
A few months later, the games that might have been good, and were designed to run on my PC start coming out on the $10 rack at Wal*Mart. I snap up the marginal titles that look interesting then.
I'm in games until I buy a new PC.
Suppose Google had all that stuff but not YouTube. It would be selling services to YouTube.
What is the attraction of Facebook? My empathy circuits do not grok someone that spends significant time there. If my real face is somewhere, then it can only have links to my resume, and bland boring stuff that couldn't possibly offend anyone. Doesn't having your real face associated with your online activity sap every single ounce of fun out of using the internet? Or are people that naiive that they think being anything but Ned Flanders in public is a net win. I'm faced with the possibility that maybe *gasp* the world is populated by clones - of NED FLANDERS! I'm going to cry!
Demand for separated rare earths far outstrips supply. For instance the natural mix of U238/U235 is much less valuable than that same quantity of Uranium separated into piles of pure U238 and pure U235. ( Yes I know Uranium is not a rare earth. Lighter flints however are rare earths ( all mixed together and probably difficult/environmentally damaging to separate )
That's not what happens. OUR resources run out and then we try to buy THEIR resources which works for a time until we're broke.