But govts have done far more worse things for counter-productive reasons ( Iraq cough ).
I would hate to be one of the 9000 people ( even though the modern economical reality makes me move every couple of years ). But for the chinese govt 9000 people is not many, given that in the past they killed millions for no apparent reason.
The aliens must feel really special if we are ready to sacrifice 9000's people's lifestyle just to see them. Hope they are not doing something similar.
Journalists are not loosing their jobs due to automation. They are losing their jobs due to the greed of their corporate masters - who value profit over delivering news that can be trusted.
Being a real journalist is a far more creative work then being a programmer. Especially in fields like investigative journalism - you must be a 100,000X programmer if you think you can replace Glenn Greenwald with a bot.
> Being a real journalist is a far more creative work then being a programmer
At this point, there should be a name for "No True Scotsman" applied to creativity. I have a tough time seeing the comparison between someone reporting what actually went on to someone creating wholly new things. I actually don't want creativity in my journalists or historians. I want ethics and fact checking.
Reporting what actually went on is an act of creation. Any good story requires detective work, something that is based a lot on intuition, interpersonal communication, and lateral thinking. These skills are not easy to automate. Also, you'll never get the complete story, some guesswork and logic is required to fill in the holes and deliver a cohesive narrative. So in that sense you'd need quite the impressive program to uncover the truth behind, for example, watergate.
I am surely not one arguing robots, etc. can do a reporter's job better than a person. No, what I am arguing is this continued BS of who is creative is basically a "No True Scotsman" commentary.
On the other hand, I am very little impressed by the quality of what passes for journalism and am pretty confident that a computer could write much of what I see with better fact checking. Very much like CASE tools of old were used to write programs. At least a robot might be programmed with the courtesy to quote the whole thought and not make cuts that can be attacked or change the meaning.
As to the narrative, too many journalists write their articles as if they were pundits defending their beliefs and "trying to change the world". It is great to be engaging and write something that interests people, but leave the punditry for the political campaigns.
You say it's greed but worrying about profitability isn't optional, particularly when revenues decline as much as they have been in the newspaper industry.
When customers stop paying, fewer journalists have jobs.
Well, if you go into the job of selling information, and all you have for sale is a bunch of lies salted with a few low quality non-threatening truths, the weird thing is that anybody pays for it, not that you are getting out of job.
The greedy non-news model predates the internet for a long while. The internet just brought some competition.
Sure they are, it's just not their work being replaced - it's the printing press. Journalism used to be a loss leader for the real revenue making activities of the newspaper press, advertising. The most profitable were the classified ads and car ads. Well, Craigslist gutted classifieds, and a combination of services have supplanted car ads in newsprint.
This is an insufficient explanation. Canada's debt to GDP ratio is in the 60-70% range where that of the US is in the 90% range. Yet the situation in Vancouver is significantly more acute than those of New York and San Francisco.
Bernie never spoke about banning private healthcare.
I find it amusing you think there is a free market for healthcare in the US.
Bernie's main idea is to destroy all forms of monopoly in various industries in the US - banks,healthcare. It's no different than state capitalism ( in USSR ).
Bernie is not against the free market. He wants single payer to leverage the free market in healthcare which is dominated by big players on the supply side.
You as an individual are free to afford whatever you want. But the govt's concern is improve the standard of living for the average citizen. And all of the world it has been proven time and again that single payer is the best system - empirically. So any arguments you make without any data but on some notion of "choice" will not be as convincing - sorry.
Bernie's whole plan is predicated on eliminating private health insurance. In order to achieve the "savings" that he promises, he needs to be able to go to doctors and hospitals and say "take this, or you get nothing".
Without that bargaining power, he'll just push the entire health care industry private. That's already happening with Obamacare now (reference all of the health insurance companies stating they are considering withdrawing from the exchanges).
Not really. Private health insurance and fully private hospital care exists in most (all?) states with full state-sponsored medical coverage. Ultimately, if people don't have to pay for health insurance any more, a huge proportion won't. Which means the state becomes the single largest buyer of healthcare, probably bigger than all the other players put together, and so should be able to get better value for healthcare than the private companies ever did. Better cheap treatments than a half-empty hospital. And a state health insurer also doesn't need to advertise itself to consumers or pay shareholders, so it should come out ahead even if it's unable to pay any less per treatment than the private companies.
Of course, it's still dire for the health insurers because their customer base shrinks massively when private health insurance becomes a luxury to get people more expensive and faster specialist treatment as opposed to the only way to be able to afford to not die from expensively treatable ailments. But there's no reason to assume that some/most wouldn't continue to provide the option of more expensive and more exclusive healthcare for those that don't trust the publicly funded system or want to beat the queue.
My original comment wasn't about banning private healthcare, it was about a government forcing people to pay for a product or service that isn't acceptable, or actually damages people's lives because it is managed so poorly. The Citizens of Flint still have access to bottle water, thank goodness, but they still have to pay their city water bills unfortunately. The same would go for Bernie Sander's health plan whether or not the service provided was actually worth the price paid.
>>You as an individual are free to afford whatever you want.
That is not actually true. I'm spent the afternoon searching for health insurance for my wife, who is pregnant, and trying to immigrate to the U.S. Thanks to the 2,000 pages of ACA regulation, there is no clause or loophole that allows us to purchase insurance for her. Your argument using 'data' is not sympathetic nor persuasive to me.
Bernie's real expectation is that things will get better if people get off their butts and take action. I doubt he believes that government programs will be magically efficient and effective without the right people to make them that way.
Government jobs are available. You can't really complain about something being "managed so poorly" unless you're one of the people in that organization trying to make it better.
Currently the U.S. has a system where doctors' offices need SEVERAL full time staff just to deal with insurance companies, which is insane and nothing like what I have seen elsewhere.
>>Bernie's real expectation is that things will get better if people get off their butts and take action. I doubt he believes that government programs will be magically efficient and effective without the right people to make them that way.
The problem is, with a government program, we're all forced to pay into it, no matter how good or bad the program actually is. When you are forced to pay for services from an organization, you have every right to complain about how poor those services are if you suffer because of them. If you expect that a government program will be great because Bernie hires the right people, what about the next President, and the President after that? The capabilities of individuals is government statistically by a bell curve and normal distribution. Even if you can select the very best person to manage that program for 4 years, the law of regression to the mean dictates that some future hire will be less capable. So how to we prevent mediocre people from eventually filling these positions, and thus wasting the money we are forced to pay in taxes to fund them?
Well one thing to consider is that a great many countries have managed to do it so we aren't exactly charting scary new territory. We've essentially been told that this has succeeded so the real question is why haven’t we at least tried our own version of it?
Every single job or project has the risk of eventually being taken over by less competent people (or at least, people who didn't understand the entire original vision). Every taxpayer has to live with the fact that he or she won't agree with everything the government does with money. I would have personally loved to have contributed no tax money at all on the military wastes of the last decade, for example. Taxpayers don't really get to choose at a low granularity, otherwise everyone would find some way to cherry-pick to the point that nothing big could get done.
The way to fix it is to put skin in the game personally. Quit your job and apply to work for the government; or, write to a congressman and really press on them that you consider this important; or better yet, tell 50 of your friends and get some network effects; or join some larger group that petitions for change (as so many other groups do).
Your points are not completely unreasonable, but there is more to consider. I agree with you about wasting tax dollars on military affairs in foreign countries, but at least those expenditures are (theoretically) temporary.
Consider that many other countries, mainly in Europe, have managed to put in place a single-payer healthcare system over the last 20-30 years. In the time span of governments and the legal system, this is the blink of an eye. Again, consider statistically that eventually someone incompetent is going to be put in place running one of these systems. This happens in government, and it happens in the private sector (how many firms are in the S&P 500 from 20 years ago?). The difference in the private sector is, when failure happens, individuals are free to choose a competing option, and are not forced to continue to pay for the failing one. I'm sure you've heard the lines about how competition in free markets (truly free, not highly regulated insurance) drive down prices too.
Consider also that no benefit system has lasted longer than a generation and been successfully managed by a federal-level government. The closest we have is Social Security, which is well on it's way to bankruptcy here in the U.S.
Furthermore, the great majority of what are considered good single-payer healthcare systems have been implemented in countries with Parliamentary Style Governments. What this means is when the party in power is no longer doing it's job, the citizens or opposing party can vote them out, more or less ASAP. The difference with this and our Constitutional Style Government is that if we elect the wrong person, or they put the wrong person in charge of our healthcare, we have very little power to change the situation for 4 years. In this sense, those Parliamentary Style Governments operate closer to what an actual free-market operates, giving their Citizens much more power over who runs and manages their single-payer healthcare system than we could.
The reason we haven't tried our own version of it is, because once it is implemented, it is very, very hard to change or roll back. Furthermore, as is with all the data coming out about Obamacare, it is very hard to actually judge whether such a program is actually successful.
Yes, because before the ACA, there were at least options available, albeit expensive. Her situation is complicated, but now there is pretty much nothing available that she qualifies for. Or worse, if there is, I am unable to locate and communicate with those people who can help me, and the people in charge of helping me are not properly trained (another example of the situation above). I've talked to our State's Office for Insurance, and they're trying to help, but are also frustrated (and very sympathetic) with the situation.
India's problem was never socialism vs capitalism. India's fundamental problem is systemic corruption and heavy bureaucracy. Those things can arise under a capitalist or socialist system.
As an Indian who has lived in both majorly socialist and now a mixed economy India.
I can tell you corruption is way worse under a more capitalist society. Reason is simple, if people are making nice profits why not ask them to pay a little extra bribe.
Every one starting from the government to the private citizen is involved. Scams run in the tune lacs of crores, government servants think they are entitled to a bribe, you will be hard pressed to get a driving license without greasing some one's palms(I was asked by a license agent, why I was worked up about paying a bribe while I was getting paid well as a programmer), the postman thinks if he delivers a important document like a passport he deserves a bribe(because you are going to US, and will earn well anyway, why not pay me a bribe tip here), clerks in the income tax office rake up all kind of false flags when questioned they will tell you, they put it out if you pay a small bribe. The list is endless. Every single activity or a movement of a file, has a bribe fee on it. Every single one, no matter what activity you do.
Lastly this isn't just government corruption. Private companies have rampant corruption issues. Even in top MNC's managers routinely favor people from their states and people who speak their mother tongue. Promotions, raise, stock bonuses, salary bonuses, foreign travel and many such things are decided based on which state you come from, which language you talk, may be even caste and religion too. God save if you, if you don't have a match with your manager.
But surprisingly every body thinks, every one apart from them is corrupt. So corruption is somebody else's problem. The very same manager who cheats openly will complain why India isn't making progress because of corruption. Irony.
One guy even told me he was not cheating or doing anything wrong. He was simply "Helping" people from his state.
You have confused scale of corruption, definition of corruption with something that you think is wrong.
I remember we had to bribe a local fair price to get sugar and better quality rice. Those days are over long back.
Also I don't see private company managers favoring people from their state of region as a corruption. It all depends on company's internal policies and whether they can run profitably under those cases or not.
Everything that I wrote, right from the prime minister's office to ordinary man on the street is public knowledge.
>>definition of corruption with something that you think is wrong.
If you think corruption is only when a printed note is exchanged, I wouldn't be surprised to see why its so hard to eliminate corruption in India. Bulk of the corruption doesn't see any exchange in money. Its the favors and grants that are exchanged in way that facilitate further ease in earning money. Bargaining ministries, portfolios, license et al work this way. Heck bulk of the corruption in the Media in India doesn't even involve money.
>>I remember we had to bribe a local fair price to get sugar and better quality rice. Those days are over long back.
When did you leave India? This was the scenario circa pre 1995. I don't even know any one close, even my relatives who are poor who take rations from government fair price since more than a decade and a half. I think only BPL people get it these days.
>>Also I don't see private company managers favoring people from their state of region as a corruption.
So true, most beneficiaries of a scam rarely see the scam as a scam. They see this as an one time opportunity to get ahead, and others are supposed to lie down and co operate.
Like I said before, most managers who do this think they are just "helping" their pets.
>>It all depends on company's internal policies and whether they can run profitably under those cases or not.
A manager openly manipulates employee ratings, discriminates on the basis of language, geography, caste or religion. The person in full knowledge hands out rewards to people who don't deserve. And denies and discriminates against those who do. Not only do you see nothing wrong in it, you seem to be justifying it.
Hardly surprising, why its considered impossible to eliminate corruption in India.
Regardless of how you categorize the system, having more money flowing through an organization increases the incentive for the members of that system to do something unethical to take advantage of it.
> India's problem was never socialism vs capitalism. India's fundamental problem is systemic corruption and heavy bureaucracy.
Socialism, in the context of poverty, inherently leads to corruption. This is something that's hard to understand for people who've only ever seen socialism and communism in countries that are already quite wealthy (e.g. Western Europe).
I say this as someone who is from West Bengal, which has had the world's longest-serving, democratically-elected Communist government.
But govts have done far more worse things for counter-productive reasons ( Iraq cough ).
I would hate to be one of the 9000 people ( even though the modern economical reality makes me move every couple of years ). But for the chinese govt 9000 people is not many, given that in the past they killed millions for no apparent reason.
The aliens must feel really special if we are ready to sacrifice 9000's people's lifestyle just to see them. Hope they are not doing something similar.