sets13

Just because you wouldn't personally enjoy that life doesn't make it inherently wrong. Perhaps he enjoys his work and the people he works with, and finds his start up work at night very fulfilling who are you or I to decide that he is wrong or missing out?

Number 1:

I would love a tool that would let me set a breakpoint on an element and then show me a stack trace any time that element is modified. This would make locating a broken piece of JS in an unfamiliar code base so much easier.

Ahh, "Soviet Union", the answer to every question about the evils of government. I take it that means you don't really want to discuss that point, as "Soviet Union" is hardly and answer, and as I pointed out nearly every other first world country has a "larger" government that the USA, and they are almost all in better financial shape too.

But we have come full circle, and as I mentioned in my first response free markets are not meant to create a solution for problems whose success is not defined by finding the "fair price" for something. In my books, solution that prevents people from being able to obtain/afford healthcare (and lets be clear, no matter how many "inefficiencies" you might eliminate through deregulation, there will always be a segment of the population that cannot afford to pay for healthcare, just like they cannot afford to pay for housing or food) will never be a success.

But this is all a moot discussion. The likelihood of the United States moving further to the left on healthcare is exponentially higher than the likelihood of the industry being deregulated to the point where you scenario starts to be able to realize real benefits. As-such, if a true "free market" healthcare system is not politically palatable for the country, then I think both of us, and the facts, are all in agreement that a single payer or public system would do a much better job than our current "bastardized part-government part-private" system.

I don't see any facts supporting your assertion that the countries will spontaneously collapse due to the size or spending of their governments... What I do see are a long list of countries with higher tax rates, budget surpluses or much smaller deficits than the USA, and much higher ranked healthcare systems (You point at Greece, I will point at Germany, Norway and Sweden. Let's just get that out of the way).

Let's leave it at this, I am not going to say that a public healthcare system (or a single payer system) is the only right way of doing things. What I will say is there are a lot of other countries out there that are able to provide a better health care system through that route while still remaining financially stable.

Maybe that is just not something that is in the cards for the USA though, maybe the trade off is that you have lower taxes, but a lower life expectancy if you are not wealthy.

I certainly am not going to pretend to know all the answers, but I do think refusing to learn from other countries because they are not doing it the "American" way (read: with a free market) would be a silly reason to accept having one of the worst healthcare systems in the first world.

I guess I would disagree with you on that. Given that the U.S. is basically the only first world country that still has private healthcare and it is typically rated somewhere between 15 and 40 world wide on most healthcare metrics, it seems like a number of countries have figured out a way to do public healthcare better... (and more cheaply)

http://www.businessinsider.com/best-healthcare-systems-in-th... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization_ranki... http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/06/23/us-usa-healthcare-...

I don't think you are advocating anything, so there is nothing personal here, just for the record.

I think that we need to divorce ourselves from the specific procedures, and just talk about life saving health care. If we were to adopt public healthcare, the public would pay for life saving health care that is legally allowed. Then we can apply that framework to specific procedures, which for both your examples means yes, it would be done.

You would not be paying specifically for the girl down the street to have an abortion. You would be paying your taxes, some small part of which may be applied to save her life in the event it is necessary, using whatever legal procedures are required.

While you are right, that this is in part about who foots the bill, the other thing it is about is helping people live healthy lives without going bankrupt, which is a uniquely American problem in the first world.

I wont respond to the rest of your response, but it has been pretty clearly demonstrated by people smarter than you or I (at least in their respective professions) that free markets aren't always the most efficient solution to a problem, particularly when the desired solution is not just to come up with a price that is profitable for for the seller.

http://www.basiceconomics.info/market-failures-and-externali...

I think those are an interesting set of questions, but for the most part easily answered by "What does the law currently say?"

- Public health care has absolutely no say on the speed with which a doctor can decide whether life saving surgery is required. In fact I would imagine that knowing that the surgery will be paid for regardless of whether the patient has a job or not might make this decision faster.

- The government pays for top end mathematical talent in other sectors (security) so it stands to reason that if it were necessary, they could in health care as well. Again though, removing the private insurance part of the equation would probably remove the need.

- Obviously yes, just like any other person who requires surgery to live.

- Again, obviously yes. Current laws allowing abortions make this a non-issue. I understand some people are morally or religiously opposed to abortion, but we are governed by the laws of the society we live in. If that is a problem the answer is to change those laws, not to ignore them.

-There are any number of taxing schemes that could subsidize public healthcare but I have never seen one that introduced a progressive tax based on health history (kinda defeats the point?). I would imagine that if the majority of the other countries in the first world can figure this one out, the US probably could too.

I think questions like these are intentionally meant to bring up emotional responses and generate controversy around what could be a really simple decision (either way).

At the end of the day it was not google who is making this choice but Facebook. There is still a functioning API that would allow Facebook to continue allowing users to import their contacts. The problem is that they are no longer in compliance with the usage terms of this API. If it is such a problem for the customer all Facebook needs to do is move into compliance with the usage terms of this API (by allowing users to export their data from facebook) and then they can begin using the API again. All in all I agree with Google's modification to the API usage license and really think that the ball is in Facebook's court.