This is not health care. This is insurance. They are not the same. Insurance is a risk reduction strategy for preventing catastrophic loss of net worth.

They are the same thing at a national level. The healthcare provider/government must use the same risk management strategies as an insurance company does. They must have a predictable budget to pay out for all the flows. The budget is derived using the same mathematics an insurance company uses.

The government has several advantages over private insurance. The most important of which is that a competitive insurance industry raises costs for everyone involved, with mathematical force. The pool of risk is carved up, the pools' predictability declines, so they have to tie up more capital (at the cost of capital) to potentially pay claims, etc. And also, each company represents an administrative cost sink. In the limit, consider a world where everybody administers their own "competitive" health insurance plan. They would need to save up hundreds of thousands of dollars, just in case they get a 1 in 100,000 case of cancer.

Going off on a tangent, I am reminded of the phrase "There's no such thing as a free lunch." I find that people cling on to their first interpretation. Yes, we will pay for our lunch. But there is an important question to be answered: is the lunch deployment mechanism the cheapest one available for the quality of lunch we want? If the answer is no, we should find a new lunch deployment mechanism. Arguments for competition do not apply to insurance as it is currently structured, because the industry does not satisfy the competitive market axioms.

Read Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution.

Republicans like insurance, yes? And they like things to be as inexpensive as possible, yes?

Then Republicans ought to love nationalized health care, as it reduces costs with the power of economic force. Statistics (you know, what people are, from an insurance company's perspective) become more predictable and thus cheaper as the pool of risk grows. Competition is counter-productive in this sphere, because it carves up the pool of risk, and increases the administrative burden. Insurance is not and cannot be a competitive industry. The market just does not satisfy the competitive market axioms.

Somehow, this is lost on many Americans.

Anything that leaves more rampant tottie for us straight guys is a good thing.

Is it "wrong" that worker bees can't reproduce? Of course not.

No, you can prove anything if your postulates are contradictory. "False" and "True" are words that don't apply to postulates. Is Euclid's parallel postulate true? How about Zorn's Lemma?

Sneaky. Most people don't know what Zorn's Lemma is, or how it is equivalent to AC, or even what AC is.

Oh well, at least you are right. The claim that "logic has no semantics" is utterly false. The whole point of logic is to bridge the syntactic constructs of formal systems with the semantic constructs of models via "interpretation functions". Not that I need to tell you that. ;0)

Dare I say it?

slashdot = stagnated

Now, if you want legitimate arrogance, just look at those guys with their "string theory." It's been decades and they still haven't managed tho have a single testable hypothesis coincide with their ideas. A lot of things look good on paper as theory and then completely disintegrate when applied to the real world.

String theory is the mathematical/logical synthesis of theories. As such, it can only predict what the logical closure of its sub-theories predict.

String theory cannot make any new testable hypotheses, because any testable hypotheses will be a testable hypothesis of the old sub-theory. String theory is still falsifiable: it is as falsifiable as General Relativity, Quantum theory, and the rest. Because it is them, taken together, and expressed in a unified mathematical framework.

Nevermind, I'm wrong about red dwarves.

You're ignoring something important. The laws of conservation of matter and energy.

These are stars that went supernova, but for which the remaining gravitationally bound matter did not turn into a black hole. It takes a lot of matter for a star to nova, and it doesn't just disappear.

In short, they tripled the number of stars that were at one time on the order of 10 times more massive than average.

Is your every post
a topical haiku? Yes:
It's time to move on.

The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.

And all the government funded science in the world doesn't give you one piece of music that touches your soul, one piece of art which moves you, or one story you'll never forget.

And? I didn't say that the private entertainment industry should be abolished. All I said is that their rent seeking should be abolished. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking

Government funding certainly has its place, it allows for the creation of ideas which won't be profitable for decades if ever.

That is also the point of copyrights. But that is not what copyright represents, any longer. 70 years past the death of the author is clearly rent seeking. If you can't turn a profit on an investment by the time you are dead, you probably should not make that investment. There are exceptions to this general rule, but they are few and far between, and investing in them is potentially one of the government's roles.

Also note that government funding represents a fraction of what is spent on pure and applied science in America. Science suffers for the sake of a smaller (and less valuable, in real dollar terms -- the terms your Congressman will understand and care about) industry.

The internet would not exist if it had been left to private enterprise. That doesn't mean that science is everything that copyright is designed to promote, or that we'd be better off without it.

Rent seeking is bad, okay? Rent seekers don't want to have to work for a living. They want to recycle the same old movies, games, songs, books. And charge you through the nose for them. It was "bad enough", but tolerable, when they had a ~25 year monopoly. That gave them ~25 years to recoup their costs and turn a profit on a creative work. It is now 70 years after the death of the author. Or up to 120 years for works of "corporate authorship".

You see, in a competitive market, profits tend to zero. Which is why we all hate competitive markets. We all want the government to carve up the market so that it suits us. The entertainment industry has done this quite successfully. They have created a situation where they have a large amount of "scarcity rent". Without their scarcity rent, their profits would tend to zero in the long run, just like every competitive industry. Instead, they consistently post profits. This is a distortion of the market. I am willing to concede that some amount of scarcity rent is necessary to ensure that an entertainment business can remain solvent. But solvency is the most anybody should hope for in a competitive market.

Ouch, that sucks. I'd rather deal with a regulated monopoly than a natural monopoly with reselling rights.

Obviously, the natural monopoly will pass its costs to its resellers, who then add another administrative layer (with the associated costs). The natural monopoly gets to raise its prices even more than it naturally would since it is "competing" with firms with an extra layer of administrative overhead.

I agree that copyright law needs revising, but I have yet to see someone suggest a decent alternative that benefits both the consumer AND the producer of the consumed good.

A strong case can be made that copyright is just not working for its intended purpose.

Consider that the US Government alone spends 20+ billion dollars a year on pure science and scholarly research. And that copyright actually stifles the movement of the ideas these dollars are supposed to promote.

20+ billion dollars is worth 2000+ 100 million dollar movies. Hollywood doesn't make that many. If we're being generous, they spend about 3 billion on 300 "blockbusters".

17+ billion dollars is worth 17000 1M dollar (to produce!) albums. I only know of one "one million dollar album" (I'm sure there are a few out there...). But realistically, call it 170000 "100 thousand dollar albums". The music labels do not make 170000 albums in a year. Let's call it... 3000 albums a year. That's another billion dollars.

We have 14+ billion left. Television costs about 1000$ a minute to produce. That means that the remaining science budget is worth about 14000000 minutes of television. That's worth about 26.61 years of television, produced every year. How much of what is on cable is a re-run? How much is pretty much worthless after it first airs -- (Like the news)? The figures I've seen suggest that about 1.3 billion dollars were spent on producing new television in 2006. Lets call it 2 billion today.

We still have 12+ billion left. How many books is that worth? Writers are notoriously poorly paid, at about 5c a word. Lets triple that, to pay editors and publishers' administrative staff. That comes to 80 BILLION words a year. An average book is about 120,000 words, which means that the remaining science budget comes to 2 million books a year. Publishers don't put out anywhere near that many books, and a large number of the books they do put out is paid for out of the science budget anyway. Let's call it 100,000 books a year. That's 1.8 billion dollars a year.

We still have 10+ billion dollars left in the science budget. Of course, there are many other kinds of productions. And yet, these largest four or five dwarf them.

Clearly, science costs DWARF the entertainment industry's production costs. And yet we are tying the hands of the people we have chosen to promote for the sake of the minority, few of which have anything to do with "useful arts and sciences" anyway.

Copyright is rent seeking, and should be abolished (or at least curtailed) as such.

The most important lesson to learn from the rise of the Cloud is to virtualize. Even if they decide to keep their servers in house, they should virtualize to make full use of their hardware while providing some extra layers of security and ease of use. Of course, modern operating systems provide a time sharing model, but they are not so great with separation of concerns. Virtualization solves both issues at the same time, for a secure (assuming you don't leave any holes in the client operating system prototypes), modular, easy to test and deploy solution. Just make sure your prototype systems are closed up, up-to-date, etc.

For example, my "IT infrastructure" consists of a crappy little router, a desktop I built, and dozens of nearly identical virtual machines running the software I need. One is a mail server. Another is a DHCP server. Another is a software development machine. Another is an internal documentation/wiki server. I can migrate to better hardware when I need to. (I am taking care of backing up, just in case -- and I have made sure the backups work). I can clone machines by typing a "clone" command. I can script adding clones to my DHCP server by MAC address. And so on. The Cloud makes most of this easier, to be sure. But not all of it.

A moderate says "I'm reasonable. You must compromise. Put a .22 bullet through anyone who violates our arbitrary rules.

No, a moderate says, "I'm reasonable. Even people who trade honestly must bear all the costs they impose on the rest of us." Have you not heard of "externalities"?