derleth

> Don't worry, the bankruptcy system will catch up and find a way to make medical debts non-discharge-able just like it did for student debts.

Inheritable, too, what with all the old people dying with medical debts their whole estate can't cover.

(The way it works now is this: When someone dies, their estate is responsible for paying their debts. Once their estate is gone, however, that's it. The creditors can try to convince the heirs to pay the debts, but they have no legal leverage to force them to. Lying about having such leverage is apparently fair game, however.)

By "everyone" I meant "in a company", and "losing" to mean "down for a whole week, at least". I should have worded that a lot better. My apologies.

If you're paying someone minimum wage, and they're a profit center for the company, their productivity over the week a flu would take them down is worth a lot more to you than a single flu shot. Extrapolate that to a whole department, which is likely to be lost because the flu is so contagious, and you're looking at a potential loss which is a lot more expensive than a department's worth of flu shots.

Does it still phone home by default?

> As an aside, is there not some elasticity to medical care?

Trivially true if you define 'medical care' to include cosmetic procedures, which then gets you into case-by-case debates on whether this or that orthodontic or dermatological procedure is 'cosmetic' or required to live a normal life. Which then gets into debates about what pressures society places on people to have a certain look, and just how much social damage is done to someone who has a visible port wine stain, for example.

There's also a certain elasticity of demand for preventative care and palliative care as well. For example, flu shots and pseudoephedrine: Most of us here are not going to die of the flu, and most of us aren't around people who can die of the flu and cannot get vaccinated. Similarly, most of us here can get through a cold without taking symptomatic treatment for it. So there's a certain elasticity there, depending on the person.

But giving flu shots to everyone is likely a lot less expensive than losing even a single person to a serious flu infection. A similar case can be made regarding cheap pseudoephedrine versus losing some productivity to feeling like crap without the pills.

> Until Soylent is proved unsafe, there is no basis for calling it unsafe.

This is exactly backwards, and is precisely the reasoning scammers use to sell worthless treatments.

> the completely artificial hamburger people get at McDonalds

Define 'completely artificial' here. It's meat, it's bread, it's vegetables and condiments.

Bill Gates is an aggressive man. When turned to business, this aggression leads to the creation and abuse of monopoly powers, especially if there's an IBM to abuse in the early days. When turned to Public Good, it is just as fearsome in a more positive direction. It is, fundamentally, the same tool in both instances.

This reminds me of an old Orwell essay, "A Good Word For The Vicar Of Bray":

http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/vicar/english/e_vicar

> Thibaw, the last King of Burma, was also far from being a good man. He was a drunkard, he had five hundred wives — he seems to have kept them chiefly for show, however — and when he came to the throne his first act was to decapitate seventy or eighty of his brothers. Yet he did posterity a good turn by planting the dusty streets of Mandalay with tamarind trees which cast a pleasant shade until the Japanese incendiary bombs burned them down in 1942.

> The poet, James Shirley, seems to have generalised too freely when he said that “Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in their dust”. Sometimes the actions of the unjust make quite a good showing after the appropriate lapse of time.

I wonder how much Tesla paid the author to write this.

The State goes after unregulated monopolies which abuse their powers.

> they are required to deliver first-class mail to every mailing address in the United States (including very remote areas)

Not even close. If you live out of town, you don't get a mailbox. You get a PO Box in the post office in the closest town.

> * A box for its use at every residence in the United States

Not even close. I've lived many places without a box. If you're too expensive to deliver to, you don't get a box and you have to drive to the nearest post office and pick up your mail yourself. That's what a PO Box is.

> What if we start having well known brand logos like the ubiquitous golden arches as codepoints.

I think trademark laws would stop that. I'm not sure, but I don't think anyone else is, either, so the uncertainty would prevent it from happening.

I do see what you're saying, and it would be a slap in the face if a script for a fictional language were standardized before every script for every living language made it in to the standard. However, and this is where you and I differ, I don't really see that much difference between emoticons and other little-used typographical marks living languages sometimes use. Face it: The smiley face is typed a lot more often than the per mil mark (like the percent mark, except 'per thousand' instead of 'per hundred'):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_mil

So the middle finger is rude. People are rude sometimes, and the middle finger is a well-established way of showing that, myths about its origin aside:

http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/pluckyew.asp

Unless you're blind, or trying to render the page on a different-sized browser and the tables are fixed size (because 640x480 is a Law Of Physics).

That wasn't a technical commentary.

Unicode should be easy to standardize. It's never going to be, but making arbitrary decisions on what's 'useful' or not just makes the process harder by making everyone's blood pressure go up every single time that kind of decision has to be made.

Frankly, one of the biggest advantages of having so many codepoints is being able to burn some of them on less-useful shit simply so the standards folk can move on.

Because their freedoms don't extend to harming others, and never have.

The Gilded Age.

Not in my experience: The lack of versioned libraries is still a problem and trying to dismiss it by calling me a fanboy is not logically sound.

I'm saying that the Internet is defined by being an internet. An internet is a network composed of multiple independent networks with independent low-level protocols which share data using a higher-level protocol suite. The higher-level protocol suite for the Internet is TCP/IP, so, yes, TCP/IP defines the Internet.

Pollution happens just fine when there isn't a government to allow it; mostly, it happens when there isn't a government to stop it.

The market place cannot stop pollution, because the damage done by pollution is very often too large for the polluting company to ever pay to fix, assuming the company even still exists when the damage is found. If the company is long gone, there's nobody on the hook and the damage can't be fixed without using laws and taxes to do so.

And that's assuming we magically know who did the damage in the first place, and that it's something other than 'everyone'.

Every business requires public resources to maintain. The police, to guard their warehouses? The trained fire department, to reduce their insurance rates to something manageable? The roads and water and power infrastructure? They didn't build that. The amount of taxes they paid didn't fund even a hundredth of what that cost.

So why should my taxes go to help fund their bigotry?

> The central premise of geneticism is that these things are wrong

Then I deny the existence of 'geneticism' as you apparently define it, and say it's a strawman argument against the notion that anything is determined or influenced by genetics.

Hacker News is only 'news' in the Usenet news sense of the term.

> Is TCP/IP really what makes the internet the internet

Yes, because the Internet is the Internet because it's a network of networks, all sharing the same protocols, all routing data among each other via gateways using packets. Networks existed before Arpanet, before PLATO, but it wasn't possible to cheaply interconnect networks and send messages end-to-end before TCP/IP.

Removing TCP/IP and the concept of the gateway from what it means to be the Internet doesn't mean PLATO is first. It means some even earlier computer network is first, and PLATO is still a footnote in the history of the Internet.

That's what a halfway house is for.

Actually, no: I've had a lot more luck getting old Linux software working than old Windows software, as the Windows software inevitably has DLL Hell written all over it.

This is a lot more involved than magic numbers, and magic numbers are configurable.

So it isn't a shell. It's more like xterm, then, right?

> criticize your ideological opponents (who don't disagree with you on this matter)

Yes, they do. The ones screaming about Socialism damned well do disagree with me on this issue.