1,650 karma · joined May 2, 2014
No, every popular book has been duplicated thousands of times. This is not the same thing as important. They're orthogonal. When an important book is popular, it is safe. When it is not, it is in danger. Only fools assume that important books are recognized often enough to become popular.
The 1860s?
Or do you meant he royal charter companies from centuries prior?
This goes back so far that you can't even understand it.
>A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't
Corporations only exist because your government (especially if you live in Delaware) blesses them into existence. The moment that courts and government offices stopped recognizing their existence, they'd wither away like a bad dream on a sunny morning. You get that right? And yet you've never once questioned what allows them to exist. You've never challenged the government's power to create them in this manner. It'd be one thing if you decided that they should exist, and you explicitly granted your government the power to create them...
But everyone here behaves as if they were some inevitable law of physics and there's nothing to be done. Or maybe, secretly, you love corporations, and just hope that your political faction will somehow manage to wrest control and use them to your own ends. Sometimes that's what it feels like.
Finland did something, but "eradicating homelessness" wasn't what they did. It has nothing to do with political will in the case of the United States, and everything to do with a grab-bag of leftist policies that are entirely incompatible. Even if we were to ignore those who are plainly unfit to live in a home from the score, the remainder can't be housed while you import millions of immigrants to compete with them for housing. You can have one or the other of those two things, but they are mutually incompatible. And that's before you even get to the people so broken that they complain that they want to be homeless, to be vagabonds, living out of tents in alleys and panhandling. Such people exist. Sometimes they even manage to show up online and say as much, so you can't claim perfect ignorance here.
The addicts and the mentally ill that used to be institutionalized and whatever else can be said about them, they had a roof over their heads, do you want to bring back the big thorazine zombie warehouses? We could eradicate that homelessness. Is that your plan? I'm not even necessarily against it, but I do get a big kick out of the left that can't even bring themselves to say the words out loud.
Finland is a dying nation with a fertility rate below 1.5. As they continue to shrink, they might manage to have so many surplus homes that homelessness is eliminated... or they might import a bunch of immigrants that put pressure on housing. They might decide that they can't forego military spending with Russia next door, in which case the social spending they're doing won't be necessarily as affordable. Especially if Trump screws NATO with finality. "Please educate yourself"... god, you people. No wonder you lose elections.
I'm used to this though.
If we had Finland's winters, I think we could eradicate homelessness by January.
That was absolutely free, $0?
>Like some housing that was built to be closer to "indestructible" than "nice" and was small, like 200 - 300 sq ft.
We already have those housing units. They have concrete "beds", toilet-sink combos made out of stainless steel, and a thick steel door that can't be burned by arson. Nothing flammable is allowed within them (save the non-homeless person). The technology exists, and the homeless are actually welcome there. People get mad when they are homed thus, though.
But if it's a team of nurses, doctors, and other healthcare specialists rushing around doing checklist work to make sure you get that aspirin, that's just evil.
The principle is only applicable to our industry and closely adjacent industries.
When patients are harmed by medical errors caused by non-quacks, that's just tough luck. Not everyone can be saved. Creating a gigantic medical malpractice insurance industry so that a few hundred surviving families per year can have lottery jackpot settlements isn't a solution in any way, and has done very little to incentivize fewer errors.
This is a hoot. There is an entire cohort of people who use the emergency room as their non-urgent clinic. This is not a small demographic, it must be at minimum tens of millions of people, if not going above the nine digit mark. They do this because their parents did it, and it's the only thing they know, and their parents did it because it's the only thing they knew, and they did it because their parents did the same. It is a culture that no amount of education and public service announcements will ever change.
Heaping one perverse incentive after another on top of this mess won't change it either, but will almost certainly make things worse for everyone.
>For "less fraudulent billing," a lot of people in the industry believe that Medicare has a large amount of undetected fraud.
My grandpa when he was still alive would have one new fraud story with every visit to the doctor, and he wasn't in great shape towards the end, so this was too many to count, every year for the last few. Diabetic, they ordered him compression socks at one point... a dozen show up instead of the two pair that was ordered. He'd come home and wait for a bill in the mail, and a few days later would see itemization for tests and procedures he never underwent. Over and over and over. He was sharp, argumentative, and as far as I could tell, less confused than most his own age. His experience, I think, wasn't atypical.
This is an impossible ask. Truly impossible. The medical care providers have spent the last 50 years or more honing the art of making costs inscrutable. Not really to make it harder for you or I to know the costs, but for the insurance companies to know the cost. 50 years is a long time, that's not just one set of workers who have done this, it's 4-6 career spans now... the first to learn it taught it to their underlings and coworkers, who invented new sophisticated techniques and bureaucracies and taught that to the third career generation, who did the same and so on.
Even if we had universal healthcare, you're not getting rid of that. It's now a culture. A transmissible, everlasting culture.
For any political ask you might come up with, absurd and difficult and even intractable as it might be, this is light years beyond that. God himself couldn't make these prices transparent.
If a species were (human level) intelligent, how would they have language first, if there is no need for an unintelligent species to have language (you know, other than bee booty-shaking tier language)?
It becomes chicken and egg. They don't need the language without intelligence, and can't become intelligent without the language (all so they can boot up the internal monologue that is apparently sitting there waiting on a 12,000 word vocabulary).
This is clear to me, because I don't rely on an internal monologue to think about such things. It is unimaginable to you, because you rely on an internal monologue.
Human (and animal minds to a lesser extent) do not think in a spoken language, but in an internal symbolic "language of thought". It is beneath the perception of an "internal monologue", but also tends to atrophy quite severely for people who rely on an internal monologue. Even in your brain though, there are so many different mental processes that you are unaware of for this reason. You can't even reliably sense cause-and-effect in your own mind... the internal monologue just makes up whatever plausible best guesses it can about why you made this decision or that decision, about why you did X or didn't do Y. The internal monologue doesn't have access to that other part of your brain.
There is also a growing group of redditoids who believe that if you don't have an internal monologue you "have no soul".
There is an older man, late 60s I think, with that name. I receive his email at least once a month. I have received sensitive emails, and I could no doubt perform some sort of computer fraud with those. He is not forgetting his email and putting a period in between the first letter of his name and the rest of it.
The Google ecosystem is vast. Somewhere within that ecosystem is one or more components that strips and/or ignores the dots, and for that split second his email and mine are identical.
The same impulses that make people search for religions (and when they can find none to their liking, invent them) is what leads to that particular brain disease. I have no need of the religion. I mean, it's already a dietary code, it just needs a prophet and it's complete. Animals are food.
What happens if you see Brown Jenkins?
It may be true that if they just put a little bit of fecal matter in the soup that they could give the soup away for free... but why would I want to eat shit soup? Even if you were to tell me that rationally there's so little shit in the soup that I couldn't notice the taste, and that there'd be no statistically significant health risks from it, why would I eat it? "Both rich and poor pay the same amount for this soup" doesn't sway me either.
And never mind that me, looking from the outside inward, I see them cranking up the shit percentage constantly.
If banning fecal matter in soup means the world has less soup, I've already made peace with that consequence.
>phone and video calls of unlimited duration,
Perhaps I'm so old now that I've lost the plot, but my phone calls (what few I make) are paid for explicitly and directly. Them being unmetered has nothing to do with advertisement revenue. Care to explain?
You've really lost the plot.
Anything that's so agreeable to abiogenesis that life might spontaneously manifest, is actually pretty tasty for things already alive. They swoop in and eat it before it gets started. So, I suspect that even what the article says isn't that they both arose in the same place, but in different places separated by distance, time, and/or environmental barriers.
Citizenship is the most absolute (though diluted) ownership possible. I own a car, but if I commit a crime heinous enough I can have that confiscated as a penalty. On the other hand, in the United States there is no crime for which my citizenship can be revoked. What about the other elements of ownership? Participating in the decision-making process of the disposition of the property for instance... that's called voting or representative democracy or whatever you want to call it. At times, the government, acting on behalf and with the consent of people, has bought more territory, or traded it away to other nations. We employ a policy of absolute defense against any belligerent encroachers.
Looks like ownership to me. Calling it a "trust" is just the weasel words.
Citizens do own their countries. In any meaningful sense of the word "own", they do own them. Legally, morally, and philosophically.
> And especially they do not "own" the culture
This is a strange non sequitur. Sure. No one owns culture. The immigrants can take their culture with them back home.
Apparently some of those profits now go to the studio too? Some of the deals being made sound borderline criminal to me.