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By their own words, Obama care is merely the first step to single payer.

http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Statistics-Trends-and-Reports/NationalHealthExpendData/Downloads/ProjectionsRevisionAnalysis.pdf

http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/23/its-official-obamacare-will-increase-health-spending-by-7450-for-a-typical-family-of-four/

The IRS employees that have been furloughed are the ones who give you a refund. The ones who accept your taxes are still working.

Medicare is administered under the authority of the federal government but, for the most part, separately funded from it via trust funds that are segregated from general revenue. See medicare.gov: "How is Medicare funded?" So is Social Security: see ssa.gov: "Trust Fund FAQs." Not that there haven't been questions about whether the SS funds are really there or separate from the general revenue: it was convenient for the administration to terrify seniors by threatening to stop SS checks back in 2011 due to that year's debt limit debate, even though the money by law should be safely stored in the trusts (see Forbes: "What happened to the $2.6 Trillion Social Security Trust Fund?"). That's the sort of tactic that gets the elderly up in arms and screaming about keeping government out of their Medicare: it really is their Medicare and their Social Security, sourced from trust funds that the rest of the government should not be able to block, drain, or confiscate.

When you hear people saying "Keep the government out of my Medicare," they mean that they don't want Medicare's trust fund status to be breached to fund more imperial misadventures in godforsaken deserts.

Not that it matters much: Medicare and Social Security are fiscally unsustainable and the trusts will drain themselves, period. Social Security was designed for a population whose average lifespan was 63 (hence retirement at 65 -- only half the population would ever receive benefits) and Medicare can't keep up with the absurd rise in health care prices compounded with the longer lives of citizens (the later years are particularly unhealthy, and the elderly not surprisingly take up a huge chunk of overall health care spending). Eventually health care will have to be fully nationalized; you can't fight math, and this business of mandating private insurance isn't going to reduce prices or bloat, just enrich the insurers (insurance is just a casino anyway, and the house rigs the game so that it always makes a profit).

Again, they did not. They upheld it despite finding it unconstitutional.

No such thing. They found it constitutional. Sorry if you dislike that, but they did.

Funnily enough, its not even the first time its done so. In 1798 Congress required all active sailors to purchase private health insurance. That too was found constitutional.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2011/01/17/congress-passes-socialized-medicine-and-mandates-health-insurance-in-1798/

It's an obvious implied power.

So is overriding only a small part of a large law as unconstitutional. Finding they have 1 power without the other is ridiculous.

I welcome you to Earth, strange traveller. You obviously must be new here and may have not noticed yet that Apple dominates all other brands , and for a time was the world's largest company, only loosing its place to become 2nd earlier this year to Exxon.

ACA implementation is mandatory spending and is not tied to the annual appropriations bills (source).

Is that arbitrary? Perhaps, in the sense that the Democrats could have crafted the bill's funding mechanism differently (but were smart and/or lucky enough not to). But it's not like someone made that categorization decision of the top of his head just this week.

2-3 qualified people making about 2-3 times what the fresh off the street people in India make can resolve about 5 times the cases with better customer satisfaction

Dude, an Indian call center staff gets paid about $300/month or $3600/year. What kind of qualified staff do you expect to find in the US for <$10000/year? Not that it'd be legal to hire anyone at that wage anyway. I'd be surprised if you got anyone with any decent IT skills for less than ten times what an Indian costs and even then they're probably looking to get out of the helldesk and into software development/system administration/project management as soon as possible.

making welfare a more attractive option than work for many.

That just shows you how ludicrously, immorally low we have our minimum wage set to right now. However, I will admit that it is also pretty darn messed up that we have set up a system where only those here illegally (an thus unable to collect welfare) would take an actual minimum wage job, and then we yell and scream at the inevitable flood of illegal aliens who come here for all those jobs we reserved just for them. Like they are somehow more immoral for wanting a better life for their families, than are the rich folks who set up this system for them to have that role.

That depends on one question: Can we replace them with illegal aliens?

Because the political establishment, along with business interests, have decided that a permanent underclass of illegal alien workers is just fine with them. This in turn has depressed the wages on labor-intensive jobs while making welfare a more attractive option than work for many.

The unwillingness to enforce border controls has probably cost more Americans jobs in the last 20 years than any technological advance.

The House is gerrymandered. It does not accurately represent the will of the people, but rather represents the cumulative will of the parties in control of the states.

You act like there's some huge discrepancy, when in actuality the gerrymandering effect is far smaller (namely that it becomes the "will of the people" plus or minus a small number). At any rate, in 2010, the House took not only 63 House seats, but also 6 Senate seats (which are immune from the effects of gerrymandering). SO whereas you might be able to write off a 9% swing in the House, you can't write off a 5% swing in the Senate.

so clearly this can't be the will of the people, if half of them have no idea what the law is or will do.

Yet a majority of the populace disapproves of the bill, and polling shows it is MAJORLY partisan w/ 10% Republican support and 75% Democrat support: http://www.people-press.org/2013/09/16/as-health-care-law-proceeds-opposition-and-uncertainty-persist/

That's voter support, not politician. Compare that to a topic that actually was bipartisan, like background checks for guns (which carried strong support from both sides of the aisle): http://www.people-press.org/2013/05/23/broad-support-for-renewed-background-checks-bill-skepticism-about-its-chances/

The Democrats didn't give a flying fuck about the "will of the people" when they passed that bill. A plurality of people didn't want it and they passed it anyways.

I'm not sure how this could conceivably be seen as anything other than the political obsession of a minority of congress

Is that also how you viewed Obama's posturing on tax increases at the 250k+ line when we almost careened off the fiscal cliff in December? (http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/12/15/report-boehner-offers-millionaire-tax-hike-obama-stands-firm-at-250k/). Because I certainly don't see the difference. And that demand had even less support than Obamacare in its current form: http://www.factcheck.org/2010/11/tax-cuts-and-americans-its-complicated/ (that's 43% in favor of Obama, 49% in favor of other alternatives). Support for Obamacare as is or Obamacare++ is at 38% whereas support for altering or eliminating Obamacare is at 62%: http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/30/new-poll-only-one-third-of-americans-support-repealing-defunding-or-delaying-obamacare/

Is douchebag really the right adjective for their behavior?

A quick list of recent scandals:
Obama/Biden: kill list, not closing guantanamo bay, many more
You have Romney and Ryan: Romneys tax scandal, Ryans insane economic plan.
McCain/Palin: McCain political positions I'll just point out his support of the Iraq war/ resistence to minimum wage, her lack of experience.
Bush/Cheney Iraq War/torture/etc apparently it's quite a list
Kerry/Edwards Kerry's initial support of the Iraq war, although it can't be stressed enough that it was Bush's group that initiated this war Kerry, having actually been in Vietnam, and part of the antiwar protests afterwards surely was well aware the invasion of Iraq was unjustified (hell I was and I was 15 at the time).

Esteemed recent presidents:
Clinton/Gore Kosovo
Reagan/Bush Iran Contra

All of them have supported changes that did some good too, but these acts are inexcusable.
Looking at the consistency and scope of these scandals its clear, and I think all reasonable people would agree that structural change is needed to our government. Not just the next politician not just another party (its not like dems and GOP weren't third party at one point).

There needs to be some better way of electing representatives than our current two party system. The little I know of other governments suggest politics isn't fundamentally different in other countries, the variance seems more to do with the excessively unequal distribution of wealth in america. Since modern technology seems to have made communication essentially free and practical to anyone in the same culture I suspect alternative voting methods should be more seriously considered, apparently there are many well known already. I think these could (in theory) be applied in business (risky but useful data) or MMO games (much less risky, much less useful data).

If anyone else is interested I found the book "Governing the Firm: Workers' Control in Theory and Practice" to be interesting and very down to earth, it takes an economists approach to evaluating worker controlled vs traditional top down management of firms that have historically existed and essentially concludes they are about the same economically with each type being a bit more practical in certain industries.

Does anyone know of practical ideas that might bring some structural change to government more useful than ramming a car into a reinforced gate?

Six weeks ago, Forbes published a piece that was entirely too flattering of DPR Ulbricht: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/meet-the-dread-pirate-roberts-the-man-behind-booming-black-market-drug-website-silk-road/

> Or sell it off for legit cash and move somewhere offshore.

Previous interviews with Roberts indicate that, just like his namesake, he indeed was not the founder but a guy who became involved and later purchased it from the founder. If the stories are to be believed, he was the first person to break their security and then, played ethical hacker and told them how he broke in and helped them fix the problem.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/meet-the-dread-pirate-roberts-the-man-behind-booming-black-market-drug-website-silk-road/

From Forbes: "Agents found Ulbricht after Canadian border authorities routinely checked a package intended for his San Francisco home and discovered nine fake identification cards within, which Ulbricht allegedly was seeking to obtain to rent more servers to power Silk Road as it massively expanded." Link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2013/10/02/feds-shut-down-silk-road-owner-known-as-dread-pirate-roberts-arrested/

it appears that agents found Ulbricht after Canadian border authorities routinely checked a package intended for his San Francisco home and discovered nine fake identification cards within, which Ulbricht allegedly was seeking to obtain to rent more servers to power Silk Road as it massively expanded.

source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2013/10/02/feds-shut-down-silk-road-owner-known-as-dread-pirate-roberts-arrested/

Yup. Absolutely. Because the US not paying it's debts for the first time in history is going to have no ill effect at all.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2013/09/30/shutdown-and-debt-ceiling-debate-prove-u-s-doesnt-deserve-aaa-credit-rating-sp/

I'll refrain from trying to teach you what 'communist' actually means, because it's not like you're interested.

... the later books just seems bizarre - greens are terrorists?

Some of them, yes.

Domestic Eco-Terrorism Has Deep Pockets. And Many Enablers.

The combined damage in North America alone from eco-terrorism was estimated by the FBI to exceed $100 million.

These terrorists did not limit their actions to the destruction of property. They planted pipe bombs, mailed packages booby-trapped with razor blades, and physically assaulted scientists at public events. By 2001 the FBI had characterized them as the nation’s most active domestic terrorist group. One ELF member remains at large and on the FBI’s Most Wanted list today. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, these radical domestic acts of violence against agriculture slowed as public tolerance for these crimes wore thin, but the attacks continued overseas with the support of groups like Greenpeace.

I don't know if there are any viable products that you can buy right now, but there are several outfits attempting to do so [1] [2]. A home-sized fuel cell, operated off of natural gas, could provide combined heat and power (i.e., co-generation) for a home at modest cost and reduced emissions compared to many conventional alternatives. The tough part is the upfront cost - $20k - 40k - which makes it hard to recoup the investment in a reasonable timeframe.

There is likely to be a lot of variability in how the ACA plays out. It has resulted in many companies dropping health plans they had, forcing spouses off the plans if they could get coverage elsewhere, and dropping children completely. You've probably seen that many businesses have cut the hours for employees to 29 hours or less to keep below the ACA thresholds. Some businesses, such as restaurants, have closed locations to keep below the thresholds. In many places in the last year to two there have been significant increases in premiums due to the coming changes in regulations. Many polices have also increased in price due to the new minimum requirements for policies. An entire class of policy helpful to many people like yourself, high deductible catastrophic care policies, are pretty much going away. There have also been losses coverage for FCA spending, and other things. For many businesses it will be cheaper to pay the fine than to pay for healthcare coverage as it is now required to be under the law, so you can guess where that is going.

Maybe it really is better for you, but I doubt that is the case for everyone. I would suggest looking very carefully before you leap since there still seems to be a lot of unanswered questions in a lot of places. I would also note that not everything in the ACA is taking affect yet. It will be rolling out over the next couple of years. Then there is the funding - it has been prepaid for several years already. That money will temporarily hide some of the costs, but not forever. There are still plenty of prickly and ultimately expensive issues yet to come from this law.

Rate Shock: In California, Obamacare To Increase Individual Health Insurance Premiums By 64-146%

Citations:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.9748884.html

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/22/alcohol-obesity-and-smoking-do-not-cost-health-care-systems-money/

In the forbes study, here were the lifetime costs (in euros, the study was EU)

Healthy: 281,000

Obese: 250,000

Smokers: 220,000

Meh, it wasn't that big of a deal when I left corporate employ to buy private medical insurance.
Still have it today. I'm lumped in a category of similar size businesses for actuarial purposes.
And I will pay more under obamacare.

Its not the panacea you think. And its not going to be as cheap as you think.
Forbes says it will be almost $7500 per year for a family of four. Time pretty much concurs.

The only way this proves a boon to entrepreneurship is if they skates on the insurance (refuse to buy) and just pay the fine.
And why wouldn't they? The fine is 1/12th of the cost of an actual insurance policy.

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. He's stating the numbers for now and you are arguing for the numbers of all time? Even then, I'm pretty sure that all the nuclear related deaths ever, past, present and future, are not going to add up to the ravages of coal. I'll even throw you a bone and give you Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Upper range 246,000. Add on the other 5,000 or so radiation deaths. and that's like 250,000 people! To date!

In 2012 Forbes reported that over 300,000 people in China alone died from coal usage.

So yeah, if we had NOTHING but nuclear power, it might catch up to all the other dealths, but really you're being intellectually dishonest by citing vague 'think of the children' arguments and ignoring what the numbers look like right now.

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning. He's stating the numbers for now and you are arguing for the numbers of all time? Even then, I'm pretty sure that all the nuclear related deaths ever, past, present and future, are not going to add up to the ravages of coal. I'll even throw you a bone and give you Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Upper range 246,000. Add on the other 5,000 or so radiation deaths. and that's like 250,000 people! To date!

In 2012 Forbes reported that over 300,000 people in China alone died from coal usage.

So yeah, if we had NOTHING but nuclear power, it might catch up to all the other dealths, but really you're being intellectually dishonest by citing vague 'think of the children' arguments and ignoring what the numbers look like right now.

Afaik, testing for a hunting license consists of buying one at Wal-Mart.

A Powered Parachute, which I'm currently very interested in, requires one or two days training and no pilot's license.

The flaw in your solution lies in the fact that testing and licensing create artificial barriers to entry that the enterprising poor will circumvent by making low grade drugs or reusing needles or popping the first pill they're handed...

Hell, i've been poor enough to smoke butts from ashtrays to curb hunger.

I could follow up with a statement like "if crackheads could afford high quality drugs and a team of healthcare professionals to monitor their use, they'd choose to be safer in their use" but that will never be true.

The human condition will always allow people to drop, to isolate and to self abuse.. There will always be a low and, like has been mentioned here previously, there will always be a hideous new bottom.

Some of us should just just plain never be aware of those extremes... No need to be aware, we don't question, we're content, we'll never encounter it.. just.. a boundary we don't need to cross.

Some of us should use them as cautionary tales.. To make us aware of the path we're on and where it leads us. Of course, chances are that this class's primary concern is not education about the dangers of the methods we choose to escape. More likely we just... don't.. care... ..And some of us should use them as learning tools to council and support.. to get some grasp of what the people we deal with are capable of.

but..

In the end, the entire issue is rooted in a lost cause.. I have to think people that live in this realm are statistically written off... MAYBE there might be a success story or two.. a tale of faith for the other lost souls to latch on to.. the way the middle class uses those tales of that one kid from the neighborhood that became rich or famous and broke out. Most of us that get here will stay here. Most of us that start that road will die on it...

We need to see root causes.. isolated teens unable to relate to their peers looking to escape their anxiety.. abused kids unable to cope with their pain, battered wives desperate to keep their children safe in an abusive environment.. bored rich kids looking behind the wrong doors simple because they can..

Eh.. as with every argument/comment.. the answer is always "balance".. balance of helping ourselves enough so that we can help others, balance of managing our pain with experiencing joy..

Shock stories wake us up for brief moments, but at the end of the day we still livehere

yeah yeah.. preachy.. but any society that makes idols of people that play games for 12 year olds.. that builds their economy on them..

My soul hurts now... someone please pick up the argument and continue by explaining the correlation between prioritizing sports and abusing alcohol, why the latter fuels the salaries of the former, and how it only serves to exacerbate the problem of substance abuse.. how its far more "part of the problem" than it could ever be "part of the cure"

All my friends say it can't happen this way, but none can explain why not.

I can, and I'll do it using only three words: "The Lone Ranger"

"You have to pass the bill to know what's in it." - Nancy Pelosi

And this representative from California was re-elected. Huh. Well as Ron White says "You can't fix stupid."

If you wanted to fix the US Healthcare system by making care affordable for all and allowing people with pre-existing conditions to get insured, then it wouldn't take 2700 pages of other crap that's in the legislative package. What we didn't get was:

1) No direct influence over rising expenditures for Medical Care. You have a system which doesn't abide by market forces and hospital administrators get paid millions of dollars in salaries and benefits. When you're seriously ill, you don't usually have the time to shop around so whatever they charge you (or your insurance) is what's charged. Sure, there's negotiations and maximums that insurance companies negotiate but that drives further business through insurance companies, forcing you to deal with them.
2) There was no discussion on tort reform so thousands of ambulance chasers can still sue the doctors and hospitals when your scars comes out a little bit strange. A big component to care is the necessary malpractice insurance which can cost upwards of $200,000 in some high cost states. Add that to office staff, paying the Nurse, the building costs and the medical coder to bill the insurance companies correctly and you can see easily why it costs a lot to see a doctor over a routine sniffle.
3) The Drug companies were let largely intact. There are a few costs they'll have to put up with but they're still expected to rake in Billions in profits under the ACA. Ask yourself why that pill you're taking is $5 and why, if it was allowed, you could get it for $.25. Sure the drug industry will claim that "these are inferior" but really it's a smokescreen.
4) The Single Payer system died. Nobody wanted to go against the big Insurance Firms and their lobbyists so we love big business in this country, so why not throw a few billion dollars their way. Well, they do now have to spend more on direct costs for Insurance which is good but allowing interstate competition and other market driven forces into the process would have been much better. That's what the exchanges are supposed to do but here we have the US Government trying to create markets rather than creating incentives with appropriate regulatory oversight for markets to flourish. Oh wait, considering the Financial Collapse, the Regulatory Process failed, so DC can't be trusted with that.

To be honest, you could have taken this 2700 pages, cut out the BS, the Pork like the "Exchanges" which Deloitte is now merrily feeding upon it seems and done away with it and had legislation that was no more than 10 pages long. Starting next year you'll hear more pigs in DC all lining up because the Feds have just blessed one industry with unlimited monopoly powers and you have to pay what they want to charge you. You have no choice, so invest in big Pharma, Hostpital chains and big medical concerns because they'll be raking it in even more.

The idea of having affordable health care as opposed to being told sorry but you must just go die someplace as quietly as possible does tend to make it more than likely it will succeed.

Too bad for you 0bamacare's shaping up to be anything but affordable. Even that is assuming they can crunch the numbers, which isn't a valid assumption either.

On an anecdotal note, my employer switched from a PPO plan to an HMO plan to keep its costs somewhat under control. You have the option to stay in a PPOish plan, but it now costs about 4x what we had previously been paying. I switched to this plan to keep access to its better network in case my wife had to quit working and go onto my plan; her oncologist is available through the PPOish plan, but not the HMO. (She's since passed away. :-( Now that it's just me, I might suck it up and switch to the HMO to save some money. So much for "if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance.")

So essentially the same thing that happens at every large company over time with roots in creating stuff?

No. A great many large companies whose main charter is "creating stuff" manage to retain competent managers and remain responsive to competitive market pressures. They are amongst the largest and most successful companies on the planet. The ones who do not retain competent managers and are no longer responsive to competitive market pressures, we have a name for: Bankrupt.

The top 10 companies in the US, by founding year:
1. Walmart: 1962
2. Exxon Mobile: 1999 (Exxon: 1982, Mobile: 1911)*
3. Chevron: 1984*
4. Phillips 66: 1917*
5. Berkshire Hathaway: 1839
6. Apple: 1976
7. General Motors: 1908
8. General Electric: 1892
9. Valero Energy: 1980*
10. Ford Motor: 1903
--
* It is worth noting that almost all major oil companies can trace their roots back to Standard Oil. Very few oil companies have gone bankrupt since oil became a major commodity; They most usually either merge with other companies or are broken up by government regulators. Thus the 'founding' dates of these companies is not really good context for how long they've been around. On paper, they may be relatively new, but these companies typically have lineages over a hundred years back.

It seems like corporations more or less get to a point where they collapse under their own weight and cease to be able to actually do things.

At least in the United States, a curious statistic is that about 40% of the Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, despite making up around 10.5% of the population. To quote Forbes; The revenue generated by Fortune 500 companies founded by immigrants of children of immigrants is greater than the GDP (gross domestic product) of every country in the world outside the U.S., except China and Japan. To me, this is smoking-hot proof that complacency kills more companies than economics; How else do you explain how some of the poorest and least-advantaged on arrival here manage, within a generation, to control some of the largest assets in this country?

In my experience, that happens right around the time accountants start micro-managing everything, and when winning "buzzword bingo" happens in every company call.

Your experience is not objective. People tend to overvalue their own personal experience, emphasize negative events, and are total and complete crap when it comes to estimating risk and probability. We have spent trillions trying to prevent terrorism, but spend very little in comparison combating drunk driving. All of this is down to cognitive biases, of which you are engaged in one right here.

At some point, companies change from being places that create stuff and can get things done, and morph into an entity where you need huge reams of paperwork to get a new pen. At that point, everything you do starts to feel like a futile gesture.

Again, you're relating to your personal experience here, at the expense of objectivity. You are extrapolating from your own experiences and concluding that the entire world must run this way. And yet, if it did, civilization as we know it wouldn't exist; Economies would invariably self-destruct, having reached their use-by date, if everything tended to "morph into an entity where you need huge reams of paperwork to get a new pen".

The accountants won't let anything happen, and management is more focused on covering their own asses than building anything new.

I can see you feel very jilted about how the working class is routinely exploited by the wealthy. And frankly, if you live in the United States you have good reason to feel this way; the pay difference between CEOs and entry-level w

Pulled them out of wiki, and Forbes agrees, as do various review sites.

No consumer PV installations advertise 32% efficiency.

My experience with buying car insurance-- typically on ten-plus year old, japanese economy cars-- is that the agent always tries to convince me to jack my coverage, claiming that this model is actually a "popular car to steal".

They are popular to steal, because they are easy to strip down and sell the parts. In 2011 the top cars stolen were 1994 Honda Accord midsize and 1998 Honda Civic compact. New cars are much harder to sell.

more-common models like these â" especially older examples that lack the aforementioned key-code anti-theft technology â" are usually driven or towed away and immediately dismantled at so-called "chop shops."

I'm not saying you need theft insurance, but you've implied your agent is lying and that's not the case.

Every nation gets the government it deserves.

A government program that feels its duty is to review the contents of every American email, phone call, and SMS, regardless of such superficial things like 'warrants'? You own it, Americans. After decades of inviting the federal government to fix your problems, this is what you get. From the Midwest corn farmers enjoying their subsidies to the inner city food-stamp-reared-baby-machines, Americans have sold themselves for pennies on their liberty. Worse, you don't even get a good deal with your Faustian compromises. You awarded yourselves a universal healthcare program that is neither universal nor financially sound. Your social security program seizes your salary and barely beats inflation on returns (if you even get it back).

This is what you get. You've handed so much of your agency to your political class, they can't help but think they can make the best decisions for you. Perhaps that's why the wealthiest counties in America ring the capital. Perhaps that's why your representatives make 300% per capita GDP in salary and have an average net worth nearly 30x the average American family's. Perhaps that's why they see fit to exempt themselves from the laws they write.

You've fed the megalomaniacs. Good luck telling them you want your 'privacy' back.

That is outright false. I challenge you to provide a citation to a reasonably authoritative site saying that - basically anybody who isn't a kook. You can't.

Clearly you phrased it that way so you could reject any site I offered, based on your own myopic view point.

So here are the rules:
You don't get to reject any source! You have to invalidate every one of these and all of their claims.
After all, extraordinary claims of something being "outright false" require extraordinary proof.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/03/16/has-https-finally-been-cracked/
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/government-betrayed-internet-nsa-spying
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/05/nsa_gchq_ssl_reports/
http://www.zdnet.com/has-the-nsa-broken-ssl-tls-aes-7000020312/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/20/leaked-nsa-doc-says-it-can-collect-and-keep-your-encrypted-data-as-long-as-it-takes-to-crack-it/

I think DARE might be an indication of why this program might just backfire.

Honestly, has DARE even succeeded in any of its goals? The younger generations just seem to use drugs even more. I remember as a teenager it was generally just cool to do things just because you were told not to. So you're told not to pirate, and not pirating would be the goodie goodie thing to do...so, lets pirate!

One of those videos is full of shit though; it paints a narrative of somebody's mom being laid off because too many people pirated her game. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has ever been laid off due to piracy, especially game developers. It's always because of other issues like their title sucks or its release was botched (came out way late and over budget, buggy as hell, etc.)

That's Hollywood for you though. Got to admit they're pretty effective at what they do, I mean they practically own the current president, and they already have a sneaky little plan to get their way on SOPA.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/04/06/chris-dodd-confident-obama-administration-working-on-next-sopa/
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/19/exclusive-hollywood-lobbyist-threatens-to-cut-off-obama-2012-money-over-anti/

Every man and his dog seems to own one. If they're not in profit yet, where did the money go?! I know they lost a lot on the notoriously high failure rate of the early models, but was it really *that* bad?

Yes, it was. The RROD fiasco cost Microsoft well over a billion dollars to fix.

If you want to freeze your ass off, go right ahead and buy real estate in the Antarctic. Antarctic ice levels are at their highest recorded levels. That's something that's usually left out of the AGW debate. See: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/09/19/antarctic-sea-ice-sets-another-record/

That was my reaction when I saw the article. According to http://www.forbes.com/sites/jimpowell/2013/08/01/how-did-rich-connecticut-morph-into-one-of-americas-worst-performing-economies/ , Connecticut dug itself a cozy little fiscal hole. Now the proverbial chickens from a whole host of public welfare schemes and public-sector union bloat are coming home to roost.

About 2 minutes with physical access.

That's already happening.

Brazil is pulling away from doing business with US tech firms.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-19/nsa-spying-gives-advantage-to-brazil-s-local-tech-firms.html

Germany is pissed:
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/08/14/german-backlash-to-nsa-spying-gets-stronger/

EU in general is looking elsewhere for technology:
http://gigaom.com/2013/06/07/nsa-spying-scandal-fallout-expect-big-impact-in-europe-and-elsewhere/

Business world wide is starting to look elsewhere:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/09/10/how-the-nsa-revelations-are-hurting-businesses/

Cloud Computing was just sentenced to death by NSA
http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/04/spying-bad-for-business/

The NSA revelations will prove to be one of the biggest detriments to US computer technology business in decades.
 

The German economies capacity for goods and services is less because of their inefficient energy strategy than it otherwise would be.

So Germany's economic capacity is crippled by their energy costs - and Germany pays their workers twice as much as America does - and Germany still produces twice as many cars as the U.S. does?? And Germany serves as Europe's de facto banker?

Odd. Germany must not have the same caliber of investors, corporate executives, financial and stock market barons, and politicians that so burden America.

>Solar only works in Germany because it is heavily subsidized.

You think nuclear could exist without heavy subsidy?

Do you think anything exists without subsidy?

According to Forbes 2.2B of the sale price was for the patents. So it looks like MS can keep making money off the Android licensing business they have going. http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2013/09/03/microsoft-to-buy-nokias-mobile-business-for-5b-license-patents-for-2-2b/

The headline of the article you linked to is "Microsoft To Buy Nokia's Mobile Business For $5B, License Patents For $2.2B" (emphases mine)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/harrybinswanger/2013/09/17/give-back-yes-its-time-for-the-99-to-give-back-to-the-1/ I'm sure nobody needed to point out a fantastic example, but I'm going to anyway. This article honestly pissed me off. I thought I had wandered on to The Onion, but nope, its Forbes. And yup, that was a %100 percent serious article.

The new vision of the US free press can be seen via the “media shield” bill.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/06/19/we-dont-need-a-media-shield-law-for-fox-and-ap-we-already-have-the-first-amendment/

The global average temperature is still trending up.

Source 1
Source 2
Source 3

Many more available online.

I read your first sentence and stopped. When you begin with a lie the rest of what you say is probably crap. Is this a case that if you say it enough people will just refuse to look up the truth for themselves?

GM is delivering what customers want. SUV sales are booming: http://www.forbes.com/sites/dalebuss/2013/09/13/could-big-suv-boom-hint-at-fruits-of-energy-security/

Overall, in 2012 the macs experienced a 26% year over year growth.

*In Q4 2013 mac sales 2% drop, while the PC market dropped 4.9% - Apple gaining market share
In Q1 2013 mac sales 22% drop, while the PC market dropped 14% -- Apple losing market share
In Q2 2013 mac sales 5% drop while the PC market dropped 11.4% -- Apple gaining market share
In Q3 2013 mac sales 5% dropwhile the PC market dropped 8% -- Apple gaining market share

Also one must remember that worldwide Mac marketshare has risen steadily from less than 2% in 2004 to over 5%.
Doesn't sound like much, but one takes into account actual profits, Apples minute worldwide percentage of computers takes on more significance.
45% of worldwide PC profit doesn't sound so bad on a market dominating percentage like 5%.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/04/18/apples-mac-took-45-of-the-profits-in-the-pc-market/

Seems like Apple is doing ok, and I believe that as long as they are interested in producing macs they may even grow their overall percentage of the worldwide market a point or two more.

Was 2010 forgotten?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/velocity/2010/02/18/teachers-spy-on-student-via-webcam/
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/02/22/1814248/school-spying-scandal-gets-even-more-bizarre

Good points, along the lines of books like "Brave New World" and "Amusing Ourselves to Death". Although it seems lots of systems link together to support power, so there is probably not just one, even if one may be stronger at one time.

The movie "Elysium" features security robots, for example. I envisioned something related here with robots enforcing the "rules":
"The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA

Marshall Brain talks about robots enforcing things in "Manna":
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

But right now, the laws the human police (and legal bureaucracies) enforce are created through political means:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica
"Q: So, who does rule America?
A: The owners and managers of large income-producing properties; i.e., the owners of corporations, banks, other financial institutions, and agri-businesses. But they have plenty of help from the managers and experts they hire. ...
Q: Then how do they rule?
A: That's a complicated story, but the short answer is through lobbying, open and direct involvement in general policy planning on the big issues, participation (in large part through campaign donations) in political campaigns and elections, and through appointments to key decision-making positions in government."

That said, perhaps the world will always be run by the "1%" who are paying attention in any community? Even those who showed up at "Occupy Wall Street" were, in a sense, part of a "1%"?

OWS's "We are the 99%" was actually a divisive slogan. A focus on increasing egalitarianism might have been better:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

Maybe the main issue is whether those who are paying attention have an egalitarian mindset to some degree, at least as far as distributing most of what nature and industry produces? If you look at Western Europe, there is a somewhat different sense of political and moral accountability among leadership. Granted, that is driven by a more active and aware populace building upon ideas from the USA's past:
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010
" How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? ... The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."

Thus:
"How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much"
http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2011/12/21/germany-builds-twice-as-many-cars-as-the-u-s-while-paying-its-auto-workers-twice-as-much/
"In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germanyâ(TM)s big three car companies --- BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen -- are very profitable."

That comes down somewhat to culture and mythology and the stories we (including the "1%") tell ourselves about who we are and who we want to be (and why).

He doesn't understand. Here's a picture and bio of the guy who wrote the article. He's mainly focused on hardware, as in books about assembling PCs from parts, so it looks like his career path was PC-repair-guy-to-author. He's obviously never written any substantial cross-platform software. He was looking through new iPhone documentation (which is right here), and he saw a line that mentions it's easy to write code that is shared on iOS and OSX. He thought that was something new, he didn't realize that it's already easy, and has nothing to do with 64bit.

The grocery story already DOES charge companies to stock its products, and has been doing it for over a decade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee
http://articles.latimes.com/2000/jan/29/news/mn-58869
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/0415/130.html