What you really need is to deal with this anti-intellectualism that's so popular in the culture today, and replace it with genuine curiosity, a joy of discovery, and a delight at learning new things.

Do that, and the rest will naturally follow, and not just in software development.

This is only because the practice isn't well established. When you call around for car insurance and find that everybody's default rate is $5k/yr, but they all offer a $4500/yr discount if you accept monitoring, few people will stick with the default. I also wonder how many new Progressive customers don't accept the monitoring - I would imagine that the company would advertise it to anybody who asks for a quote since it lets them give out a lower number which makes them more competitive. Bottom line the consumer is given two rates and has to choose between them.

This will just result in either base prison sentences being shortened, or people being let out early all the same on some other pretense. You can call the label whatever you want, but for various reasons society wants people who behave well in prison for n duration, and people who don't behave well for n+m duration. It would take time for things to change - I don't suggest that prison sentencing is "economically efficient" (I realize I'm being very loose with that term, but I suspect you will get what I'm trying to say without going on about it). Actually, something like prison terms is a pretty poor analogy because there is so much politics involved - voters/officials/etc don't decide on how long to punish a murderer the way they decide on how much to pay for a new car.

To some extent they don't have much choice, unless insurance is compulsory and enforced.

Insurance only works in the absence of knowledge. If I had a magic machine that could predict the locations of every house fire the next day, the fire insurance industry would cease to exist, unless they were allowed to require coverage to be purchased two days in advance without an option to cancel without paying two days premium. Otherwise everybody would drop fire coverage and sign up the day before their house burns down, and insurance companies would basically have to charge the replacement cost of the house for their policy, making it pointless to buy in the first place.

You can't legislate around this sort of thing without mandating universal coverage. If you prevent insurers from discriminating against those purchasing insurance on some basis, then you also need to prevent people from being able to avoid buying insurance on the same basis.

Suppose life insurers can't charge people with diabetes a different rate. Diabetics have a much higher cost to insure, so on average the rate would have to be much higher. A non-diabetic would look at the risk of needing insurance vs the cost of buying it and conclude that insurance isn't worth buying. Now the risk pool changes so insurance companies are ONLY insuring diabetics so they have to REALLY increase the premiums. Previously diabetics were signing up in droves since the rates were cheap, but now there is no incentive for them to buy insurance since it actually reflects real costs. The result of preventing an insurer from charging more for a particular group is that they just charge more for everybody instead, and this is unavoidable as they'll end up there whether they start out that way or not.

Yup, this sounds a bit like Y2K in retrospective. Was money wasted on it because it turned out to be a non-event, or was it a non-event because so much was spent on it?

Always money to do it over, never money to do it right... :)

No argument with that, but in this case Qualcomm isn't publicly accusing anybody of anything. They mailed a private letter to a service provider, and that was it for their part.

Sure - Gentoo Linux. To my knowledge they've never paid a dime to any contributor, other than covering a fairly small number of expenses with the resulting assets owned by the Foundation. SleepyHead is another that I'm aware of - the author accepts donations, but they don't come close to covering his time. Until fairly recently projects like CyanogenMod were purely donation-based and those certainly didn't cover the time involved (and only a few of the contributors actually get donation money).

I have no doubt that people have contributed to many of those projects using time compensated by another employer, but we're talking a very minor share here compared to something like Fedora/etc.

I'd call volunteer projects the norm. Very few projects turn into Apache/Mozilla/etc. For every one of those there are a thousand gtklifes.

The problem with this kind of approach is that it basically punishes kids for the mistakes made by their parents.

It would make far more sense to take care of the people who are actually born and maybe try not to have so many that the state ends up having to pay for.

Maybe parents would be more involved in public education if you had to pre-pay 12 years of tuition in order to be allowed to have a child. :)

Yup - the beauty of actuarial tables is that they contain all those non-politically-correct correlations we're not supposed to talk about. We can hate what is in the tables, but they are cold hard statistics. Certainly they are open to over-interpretation, but the correlations are what they are.

There is no effective difference between the two. There is a rate for people with the monitoring and a rate for people without it, and the latter is higher. The only difference is what you call the "default."

If this takes off you'll see the difference in price grow, until the non-discounted rate represents the cost to insure a very-high-risk driver, and the discounted rate reflects the current rate minus whatever those drivers used to cost. It is just a form of the insurance death spiral. If you offered a discount on health insurance for people who don't have diabetes over time the cost for non-diabetics would go down, and the rate for "everybody else" aka diabetics would go WAY up. Since diabetics represent an incredible percentage of insurance costs the split would be fairly dramatic.

Very true. Ideally corporations would figure out that there are no demonstrated outcomes for diet composition, and thus it isn't in their interests to force their customers to adhere to one. In practice they may not do so, or there might be government pressure to pick whatever is the fad of the day.

I'd LOVE for there to be some decent clinical trials that study diet in a scientific manner. Just about all the data which exists is basically uncontrolled - no blinding, often no randomization, no actual outcomes, etc. Obviously doing a real trial is expensive, and nobody wants to foot the bill since you can't patent "eat less HFCS" or even "eat more HFCS."

The difference between a utility and a hospital is that the former is a natural monopoly. The latter may or may not be one.

If the utility needs to charge more money to survive, you don't really have a choice about paying it if the charges are unavoidable. You can change WHO pays them (taxes vs bills, public vs private, etc), but unless you want to ditch running water you're stuck.

Hospitals aren't quite as locked in. If a community has 3 hospitals (I realize that not all do), and as a result of cost containment they all are 1/3rd utilized, then you can continue to force reimbursements lower until one goes bankrupt. Now utilization goes up, and the lower costs become sustainable.

If a community has a population of 1000 and is 300 miles away from everybody else and you want a hospital, then you won't have any choice in paying a premium, though you can choose who pays for it (taxpayers vs sick people, or maybe taxpayers living someplace else). Undercapacity is the price of not being an hour flight from a hospital if you have a heart attack.