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mikejb's comments:
on RX: Containing Costs
I expect insurance companies will gradually get rid of themselves and get out of the business simply because you can't make profit on health care in the long run.
The insurance industry says they're getting only 3% profit. And it should be getting worse as medical costs go up and fewer people have insurance.
I think health care is like fire protection or national defense: we all want it, but it's too expensive for the private sector and it's just unprofittable.
posted 3 years, 1 month ago
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on What is Informed Consent?
darkstarr62:
You bring up a very interesting legal question: if society is going to require we see a doctor, shouldn't society help pay for it?
posted 3 years, 3 months ago
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on What is Informed Consent?
I doubt if "faith" will ever go away-- by prosecution, legislation or natural selection. When science, laws, morality, etc fail for some people, all they got left is "faith".
posted 3 years, 3 months ago
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on What is Informed Consent?
All this talk about a 16-year-old choosing to see a doctor: how does a 16-year-old have the money to see a doctor?
posted 3 years, 3 months ago
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on The "P" Word and Climate Change
David
I don't know how we should reduce the population, but we all can see (from the news media) how Nature does it: famine, disease, war. Those seem to be the default methods. And I, for one, don't like those methods!
As much as I fear China, I still have to applaud their foresightedness of "one child per family". Nobody likes it, but the Chinese government sees the Great Famine that has already begun.
posted 3 years, 4 months ago
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on The "P" Word and Climate Change
Concerning population and global warming:
I remember (40 or 50 years ago!) reading a science article on 'what is the ulimate limit on how many people could live on earth'. It assumed that ALL problems (famine, disease, etc) could be solved.
I don't remember the number of people, but it said that the whole earth (every square foot) would be covered by a multistory building. It would be filled with people, shoulder to shoulder (so there were no cars or anything else). Such a building could only be 50 stories tall, because the heat from so many bodies on the lower floors would make the 51st story too hot to sustain life. The earth simply could not radiate all the waste heat out into space fast enough!
The article concluded that, even though it assumed that ALL the problems of keeping so many people alive could be fixed, this basic problem of physics would be the ulitimate limit.
How about that for irony!
posted 3 years, 4 months ago
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on The "P" Word and Climate Change
May
I agree. childbearing is often a selfish act. Not too long ago, most people were farmers. Farming was labor intensive. Children were cheap labor.
But when it came time to divide up the farm among the children, each child got only a smaller farm-- maybe not enough to live on.
I very much agree that bringing a child into this world is no favor to that child. There are many days when I wish I wasn't born.
posted 3 years, 4 months ago
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on The "P" Word and Climate Change
ihnvipnv:
We weren't wrong about "starvation would be the ultimate conclusion of uncontrolled population growth". Starvation, disease, and war are Nature's way of balancing birth rate. Climate change will simply make those basic problems worse.
posted 3 years, 4 months ago
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on The "P" Word and Climate Change
Large populations benefit some, but punishes everyone. This is due to "supply and demand" (which is what our economy is just naturally based on). More people means that each one has less value.
I remember years ago, NPR had 2 stories. One story was about a conservation effort to save some nearly extinct birds in South America. The other was about a program to help poor kids in a ghetto. There was some millions of dollars for thousands of kids. There was thousands of dollars for a 100 birds. It calculated out that each bird was worth $thousands, but each child only $hundreds.
At first I thought how terrible to think a bird is more valuable than a child. But no one decided that, it was just the way it worked out. Supply and demand.
posted 3 years, 4 months ago
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on Faith in the Recession
It is surprising how little it takes to ruin a person's faith. I had great faith in the American judicial system. Freedom and justice for all! The policeman is your friend!
Then I got a $35 traffic citation in a little rural town. I attended their traffic court and watched what happened there. In a dozen cases no one was ever found not guilty. At my hearing the judge said "I find you guilty because you did not prove your innocence." So much for innocent til proven guilty.
Now I'm afraid of cops.
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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on Faith in the Recession
Throughout human history religions have been saying that god loves us. And yet the same rules have remained since the beginning of life: the strong eat the weak.
I grew up in the church. I continued trying to be religious thru high school and college and years of working life, with various churches.
Now I regard religions as just more corporations trying to maximize profit.
I am very discouraged.
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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on Up or Out?
The sad thing is that if we don't choose to limit growth (somehow) then Nature puts a limit on it with starvation, pandemics, people killing others to gain space to live.
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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on Up or Out?
I agree. The earth isn't supporting 7 billion people now (famine, disease, war are becoming normal).
As much as I fear Communist China, I have to applaud their foresightedness in seeing the coming famine in China and limiting growth by "one child per couple". It's a sad thing to do, but it's more sad when a couple has 10 kids and 5 of them starve to death.
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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on Up or Out?
I lived in high density for 30 years and hated every minute of it. Noisey neighbors, nasty managers, worrying every month about finding rent money or be homeless.
I don't like urban sprawl, but I don't like high density either. I feel like I'm between a rock and hard place!
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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on Up or Out?
Who benefits from growth? Mostly just a few: developers, businesses, banks, governments. They get more customers, cheaper labor. Who pays for the growth? All of us in the middle class and the lower middle class. We pay with taxes, inflation, health problems, unemployment, expensive housing, inconvenience.
Growth means the rich get richer (and move out to suburbs), and the poor get poorer (high density inner cities and ghetto neighborhoods).
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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on The Plan for Afghanistan
Whatever happened to the original mission: Get Osama Bin Laden?
posted 3 years, 5 months ago
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on Legislating from Home
Surrounding legislators by their voters sounds like a step back toward the true democracy that the ancient Greeks did. Back then every citizen could directly vote on every issue. Government by the people.
posted 3 years, 6 months ago
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on No Place to Call Home: Chronic Homelessness
In America we've all been brought up to believe that we're all free: everything is a matter of choice-- if you just choose to be "right", then you wouldn't have problems.
So, it's just a part of our culture. We don't want to believe that some people were born with mental or emotional illness.
posted 3 years, 7 months ago
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on No Place to Call Home: Chronic Homelessness
Capitalism is just a set of rules that we've made. We made the rules partly thru greed. Greed partly comes from the survival instrinct (if some keeps me alive, more will keep me more alive).
I think that any system would work, IF we had perfect people to run it. I think we've just allowed people to push capitalism to it's limit: where "greed is good". We allow multi-billionaires to "keep it all".
posted 3 years, 7 months ago
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on No Place to Call Home: Chronic Homelessness
Since human history began, people wanted to enslave other people-- maybe for economic reasons (cheap labor: you work for me) or for ego reasons (I speak, you jump). You can think of lots of other reasons.
For most of the history of civilization, this has been done with force of violence: do as I say or I'll kill you with my sword. In recent times civilized people reject the violence (Hitler, Stalin, World War 2). So now we do it with threat of homelessness: do as I say or we'll take away your home and you'll die when the weather gets cold.
We all seem to accept the "normal distribution" where there are some very wealthy at the top and some poor at the bottom. Most of us are "comfortable" in the middle.
I don't have a point, the above is just an observation.
posted 3 years, 7 months ago
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