Probably impractical, but imagine if more things in government were funded at-will. Then the projects the people truly care about would receive funding. People could point to the things they helped accomplish rather than feeling like they're pissing their money away into pork projects and padding the wallets of the well connected puppet masters. A space suit today, maybe Mars tomorrow.

The ER isn't going to treat someone for a non-emergent issue unless it's something quick. They're going to point the person to urgent care or a public health clinic or whatever the equivalent is for the area. If it actually is an emergency, guess what? The ER treats them. You seem to think you can go to the ER for a flu shot and they're required to give it to you. Go try that sometime, tell us how it goes. If the person needs to be stabilized (by your words), then that sure sounds like an emergency to me. If they didn't seek out care before it became an emergency, that's their own damn fault. Like I said, there are services available. You just have to look for them. That requires effort though and this being America, I know that's a lot to ask.

What the "right-wing" doesn't want is to have clueless people like you destroying health care for those of us who realize that it is not actually broken.

I don't know where you live, but even my smallish town has a public health clinic. Many area hospitals also have walk in care for people that can't pay. These things are possible without overreaching federal legislation or abusing the ER. There's also the more recent trend of having urgent care clinics for things that are not life or death emergencies.

Humans being humans. I believe that some of this at its core is behavior hardwired into us from the earlier days of our evolution. Someone is always going to want more than someone else. Some of them will be entirely willing to accomplish that through the use of force or through thievery. That certainly happens in the animal kingdom, and we are animals ourselves. Yes, we could probably provide an equivalent existence for the entire population, but people in the developed nations are not going to lower their own quality of life by any significant amount therefore it's not going to happen. Not now anyway. If we get to the point where we can elevate everyone, then maybe.

A lot of us are doing what is basically busy work. It's not necessary, but as a people, we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves outside of work. Look at the sad lives of people who win large lottery prizes. Some end up worse off than before. I know of people that would qualify for disability, as an example, but they don't for the same reason. Look at areas where a lot of people live on entitlements. They tend to be high crime areas, do they not?

We could get there maybe, but we're not ready for it now.

If the open source projects were not available, then a business needing that functionality would have to employ resources in house to do it or contract the work to some other business. I think the analogy works just fine. There is a giant pool of work that needs to be done with regards to software, but it is certainly not infinite. For an individual business, that pool of work is not likely to be all that large.

Part of the role of the navy for any country is to protect the shipping routes.

If coders contribute code in their free time to an open source project is that bad because it takes that opportunity away from corporate coders who make their living off that kind of work? Is the corporate coder disadvantaged by the open source contributors that are doing it for fun? They don't have to consider having an office, benefits, or any of that.

I might buy that if these companies revealed the basis for their policy pricing. I'm more pessimistic. Risk assessment is probably less of a priority to them than trying to figure out how much they can charge a customer before the customer flees to another insurer. As for these analytics, I'm not sure what their motivation is, but I'm not taking their word for it that safer drivers will pay less. If that's true, they can disclose what qualifies one as safe based on the data retrieved from the vehicle. "Trust us" doesn't work here. The real motivation might be raw data harvesting with an eye towards selling that data to other parties later on.

That sounds great until you realize that people are weaving in and out of lanes because of potholes, sunken manhole covers and the like. These types of analytics are not going to take real world driving into account, they're just going to drive up the costs of insurance because what other motivation do insurance companies have? It's like internet service. If all the providers suck, there's no pressure to offer anything better.

Already there. Only the very basic stuff is documented and open to OBD-II. It may come over the same connector in this case, but the data itself and how it's laid out is the domain of the manufacturer.

I get your point, but middle income America does love its ability to deduct mortgage interest and a number of other things. One could argue that we love to find ways to lower our tax obligations just as much as business does. If not, why not just let Uncle Sam keep all the withholding and not ask for a refund at all?

As for ethics vs law, ultimately it's the public that's at fault for not holding our representatives responsible for their actions. If our reps get bought out by corporations, it's up to their constituents to vote the person out, recall them, make a stink to get the problem fixed, etc. So long as people base their votes on one party or by TV ads, things won't get any better for us. Why waste effort blaming the corporations when they're doing exactly what would be expected of a for-profit entity?

If you're unwilling to voluntarily pay more out of your own pocket, you are hypocritical in suggesting that others should pay more. How difficult a concept is this? You want others to do what you will not do yourself. What ever happened to the days of "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country"?

This comes up in Massachusetts every so often. They have the normal rate for income tax but they also have an optional higher rate if people want to contribute more to the state government. So what happens? When people start calling out for people to pay more to support the schools or other issue of the day, the media starts pulling tax records and pointing out that those same people did not elect to pay more themselves.

Or even more hypocritical, someone took a picture of a state legislator license plate from Massachusetts at a New Hampshire liquor store. The legislator had just voted to up the tax on alcohol in MA and was evading it by buying in NH. So it's okay for others to pay more, but it's not okay for the people complaining the most to voluntarily pay on their own.

That's a state thing and not all states have them, and you're assuming the call centers are making any effort at all to stay within the law. Most still don't even send proper caller id information. Plus there's always the cute trick of using a call center outside the US.

Yea, those users that left because of that incident aren't going to be won back. You either support an open Internet, or you don't. A browser org can't become the thought crime police.