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Health Exchange Sites Crushed By Demand; Shutdown Blanks Other Gov't Sites
An anonymous reader writes "The launch of a national health exchange site was marred by overloaded servers in several states around the country. In a White House press conference, President Obama said that by 7 a.m., there were over a million users, and he likened the capacity problems to the glitches that Apple experienced after discovering bugs in their rlease of iOS 7. 'I don't remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads, or threatening to shut down company if they didn't,' the president argued."
Meanwhile, a number government websites went blank as a result of the shutdown, instead of simply lying dormant until personnel could return. The National Science Foundation, NASA, the FCC, and the Library of Congress are a few examples.
Seriously, simple typos and grammar mistakes get through now?
Huh, funny that, the IRS seems fully up and running their site during the 'shutdown'.
Maybe they should help Nasa out with theirs
Fewer government mandated healthcare sites means more porn sites for natural sexual healing!
Why are you electing a government consisting of greedy dumbasses? The world is laughing at you.
Snowden FTW. (A)
As someone who enrolled today, I beg to differ....
I have a simple litmus test for a person's belief system. I ask the following question:
"Does your system require that people suffer, not because they would have anyway, but because of the rules of the system?"
It obviously immediately eliminates American Capitalism and Soviet Communism as thoroughly immoral - though I can hear the ideologues right now prepare themselves to explain why some suffering MUST happen (although conveniently it won't much suffering for them, only for someone else in the system) - but it can also be applied to features of subsystems.
In this case, the NSA is immoral on several counts - one of which, as you rightly point out, is that merely because of this mindless obsession with data-gathering, resources must be taken away from other facilities which benefit people.
USA GO FUCK YOURSELF.
Thank you, sir or madam, I shall commence fucking myself immediately.
-- Uncle Sammy
Well actually that's quite spot on. "We know what you want... and its for the best! So eat it and shut up"
It was a glitch because it affects the peons. Besides if Apple had all the problems this system did they would of been crucified in the newspapers and everywhere else.
Things Americans do care about: sucking the entitlement teat.
And they won't stop until they get their hands on our Social Security and Medicare. Communists every last one of them,
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Slashtardism: The inability to use proper grammer or to deploy a spelling checker when posted 'news' stories.
Yumpin' geebus, hire me fer crissakes, and I'll make sure to check each top post!
The servers weren't overloaded because there was too many people checking them out, they just didn't create good websites. They probably didn't test them because they were behind schedule because that's how government always is, but they had to release on the deadline, ready or not. At least one site showed error messages that later changed into "busy" messages.
And it's pretty stupid to disable all these websites. They only would have saved money if they had actually powered down the machines, which they obviously didn't do. So, it was just pointless politicking.
What not of people realise is, at the moment, there is some tenuous control over Gov't shut-downs. The time is coming where the shut down is brought on by external factors, like being broke and incompetent, and is therefore not a choice!
Actually, they may have powered down many servers. For example, nsf.gov, fastlane.nsf.gov, and research.gov all point to the same host and serve the same generic page. Additionally, since the notice pages are static, then it is entirely possible, maybe probable, that the database servers for the Library of Congress, the FCC, the NASA sites may all have been shut down.
Just have to ask. Federal site or State site? Washington State seemed to be working well earlier today, but it is a state site.
The Federal Government shouldn't RUN anything! They couldn't even make money selling whores and alcohol when they took over the Mustang Ranch, so, naturally they will fuck this up too.
Maybe they should hire Rockstar. Once they get the GTA V rollout under control they will be experts at running a large popular site that gets swamped beyond their designs. Just as AOL, Blizzard, etc have in the past.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
"Washington State seemed to be working well earlier today, but it is a state site"
Wow, did I really just type that?!
This Golden oil is kickin' my ass!
Dept of Redundancy Dept, I am your new boss...
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
So you stole cable TV all your life but the people working for the government are the parasites? Interesting interpretation.
Yes. You can put it that way. But cable TV stole the free broadcast TV signal I once used. The power was decreased in large part due to the demands of cable TV companies. Digital TV helped and hurt because the signal power still sucks.
In any case, I won't pay for it ever and the cable company lost money because they didn't want to give it away for free as it should be.
'I don't remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads, or threatening to shut down company if they didn't,' the president argued."
And Apple can't put us in jail for not buying their product. Although I'm sure they'd like to.
"The Market" doesn't react to anything these days unless Federal Reserve and the big banks want it to react. It is all a HFT playground where bots controlled by big banks and the Fed run the market. Any actual "normal" investor cannot actually use it for investing - it is a glorified rigged casino. If you know how it works, it is possible to still extract money out of it but you have to understand the rules (one of them being that it is no longer in any way rational, or reacting to real world things)
Seems a little harsh from someone who admits that they used to be one of those parasites.
Black folks who used to be afraid of doctors and hospitals are willing to sign up for health care now because the Prez said everything will be OK. Heard on an all-black-all-the-time radio talk show.
(If you think an all-black-all-the-time radio show should be unusual in a free society, it just means the people really like voluntary segregation.)
But cable TV stole the free broadcast TV signal I once used.
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
If admins aren't allowed to check log files, what happens if you experience a hack? What if a new zero-day vulnerability is released during the shutdown? What if the server room AC goes out?
The only safe thing to do is shut it down until the Republicans stop trying to negotiate with a gun to everyone's head.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
But cable TV stole the free broadcast TV signal I once used.
Whatever helps you sleep at night.
Not only is it true, but who fucking cares? It costs the cable company nothing for you to get free cable. It's not theft, it's copyright infringement. I wouldn't pay for the wire to come into my house anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"The National Science Foundation, NASA, the FCC, and the Library of Congress are a few examples. "
Priorities, priorities. The senate barbershop, too?
Why should it be free? The infrastructure costs money and they have a right to make a profit on it. TV is not a necessity - if anything, its a vice - , so you can't even make an argument that it should be subsidized for the poor.
Nothing is free, ever! Even things that may look free... like say roads, schools and clean water, cost money. People like me pay for them. I pay a mountain of taxes; much more than I eve get back. I'd rather do that than live like a king in a third world shithole.
And I never tried to steal cable TV either.
If I don't like Apple's bugs or capacity problems, I have the option to never pay for another Apple product. I don't have the option to opt out of ObamaCare.
The Federal Government shouldn't RUN anything! They couldn't even make money selling whores and alcohol when they took over the Mustang Ranch, so, naturally they will fuck this up too.
plusgood duckspeak #11. minutrue approved.
So the Government can send a few billion on a server farm in Utah for the NSA, but heaven help they send money on servers to handle 3 million people trying to log in at once.
I am going to give the benefit of the doubt that there are smart people who set this up and even they could not anticipate the initial load factor. So the republicans tried everything in their power to make people afraid of the ACA and the result was overloaded systems. Perhaps that says something about the population as a whole. IT is easy to pull something down when you think you're not effected, but when you need it,real bad, then it becomes the most important thing to have.
Anyway, the DBAs and Admins will figure this all out, the process will continue and within a week this will fade as the debt limit looms next.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
They get paid advertising and gouge the customers mercilessly, too. You pay to have your ears, brain and soul pummelled by personality-shattering pavlovian induction advertisement.
Then, they fill the "base" programing with tacky pasteurized drooling braindead glitz, dozens of channels of it. Then, they charge "extra" per event and payperview. And extra for the interesting stuff. Exactly what cable was supposed to open up.
And use public property, services, and resources to get to the client. Not to mention priviledged loans, tax exemptions, public infrastructure use, and other gifts, if they're economically powerful enough. Which makes them politically powerful also, feeding them more economic power, which feeds them more polotical influence, which ...
Yes, the viewer is the totally evil party, here. There's no justification for what he did. He's the one ripping everybody off. What's wrong with the alternatives?
Good lord, on the one hand GP should be modded "+1 Troll" if it was available, but on the other hand, I feel it's my obligation to just say, "don't feed the trolls".
This post was generated by a Cadre of Uber Monkeys for Monkey-Man2000 (603495).
This must be exactly how "small government" feels like, exactly what they're always asking for. Only absolute essential government tasks (running wars in faraway countries and spying on civilians are notable examples) are still being performed.
The government is actually spending MORE money to close these resources than it is keeping them open.
An example is the closure of the memorials in DC. Normally there might be one parks officer roaming around them, but under the closure, there are dozens of park police manning the barricades to ensure nobody can go see them.
It's all political theater. The Administration (and don't get me wrong, I don't give a shit of an R or D is in the white house - they both would do the same thing) is doing today exactly what it did with the sequester - it's punishing the American people as much as it can.
Most of the sequester cuts were planned in a way to have the greatest negative effect on people, and these closures are being executed in the same way. Government is not happy that it has lost it's money source, and it figures the only way to get it back is to go around kicking people in the face to get them to scream at the people who control the purse strings.
It's despicable. Instead of doing their jobs and negotiating the best possible compromise between all interested parties, they've become a bunch of extremists (on both sides) who refuse to negotiate. It's "my way or the highway."
Obama in particular ought to be ashamed of himself. He campaigned on a platform of unity and leadership, and he has exemplified NONE of it. In fact he's the biggest one going on national TV proclaiming with pride that he refuses to negotiate.
Fire them all. Seriously. Every last despicable goddamn one of them.
demand? doubt it. how about piss poor government planing.
At least the DEA website is up, letting us know they are still operating. Gotta get those pot smokers.
http://www.justice.gov/dea/index.shtml
Meanwhile the USDA is down, but don't worry, there's no problem with our food supply.
http://www.usda.gov/
Makes sense to me. Going after the druggies is far more essential than the food we eat.
Incomprehensible.
BlameBillCosby.com
Last time this shutdown happened it was but a blip on the international News. You'd hear about someone not getting something done while traveling to the USA and you'd think 'Oh, they must have something similar to a general strike by goverment employees'.
But now, with the internet, the rest of the world hears your complaints about how the government itself is forcing the shut down. It's like the USA is screaming: "Oh look at poor us, our country is out of money we are almost as poor as North-Korea now. We are shutting down NASA maybe soon you will see dark spots on imaging satelites there where our cities used to be. We are now so poor you may claim the sovjet block has won the cold war in hindsight."
the gubberment!!!!...Wow
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
BLOW IT OUT YOUR ASS YOU FUCKING RETARD. (B)
How do you take yourself seriously with that shit?
They shouldn't run anything. Like the highway sysetm the military and the police force?
Or the super efficient health systems in every other developed country?
Also, as you point out in your own post, for profit companies in the tech sector struggle with this issue. Yet the fact that the government is struggling suggests that they shouldn't run this? So you're also saying Rockstar should not make games?
I have to wonder how much of the crush was due to the Randians, the Baggers, and Koch Whores trying to overwhelm the site and flood it with bogus accounts. Given the depth of their hatred of the working poor, it would not surpise in the least.
So you reject any system that's not a utopia?
Any real system is going to have tradeoffs; certainly they will all require that someone suffer who wouldn't in a Hobbesian state of nature. Take one example - the justice system. Prisons, even nice ones, cause suffering. Any system that attempts to deter, restrict or reform its criminals is going to create suffering. And that's hardly the only example.
The plural of anecdote is not data. I thought /. knew this.
Well over a million users and their site couldn't handle it? Mr President, call up Yahoo or Go-daddy... they could have your site up and running in a few minutes.
Most black people think he's white; one-drop rule and all that.
I think Congress has found a powerful new cyberattack vector. With very little technical knowledge, the 535 members have successfully launched a DDoS attack on the health exchange site and most of the other major websites of the United States Government. Imagine what they could do if they put their hacker skills to good purpose. Then again, as Mark Twain noted, "There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress."
One's not (now) compelled by law to own an iphone. Just sayin'.
-Styopa
Always done half assed by a contractor that barely has the skills to do the job. Honestly, who was the consultant because they were no talent n00bs in gauging the amount of traffic these sites would expect. Even if it is only an initial spike in traffic they could have EASILY paid for temporary increased infrastructure from places like rackspace to handle the first 3 months easily.
Plus the number of outright failures and nasty bugs being reported makes me even wonder if they tested the sites.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Frontend devs love their Ruby, but we server mongers know the truth. Ruby just doesn't scale well at mega load. Not even Akamai's CDN could save them from that self-inflicted wound.
The Healthcare devs made other sloppy mistakes too. Unminified jquery-ui... Unprocessed Ruby vars leaking into HTML... Enough unsettling comments to make Uncle Bob cry... Reading the HTML looks as if they threw the whole thing together over a weekend.
And yes, the Healthcare.gov site is indeed written in Ruby:
https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov
Trying for YEARS, eh?
Well, since Obamacare was passed in 2010 and Republicans tried to stop it then and ever since... sure... but 3-4 years isn't exactly YEARS. Dial down the emotion a little.
All external facing sites are contracted out. This is merely a political stunt.
I know people like to throw that phrase around, but making profit is not a right, at least not in the Constitution. You can check yourself if you don't believe me.
(From the NSF)
"In cases of imminent threat to life or property, please call the Office of the Inspector General at 1-800-428-2189."
WHAT? In cases of imminent threat to life, call 9-1-1!
The motivations are completely different.
The Reps are trying to delay it so that they can put through more bills to over turn it and other things to get rid of it.
But what they don't realize that if they did get their wish, that would give time to get more of the kinks out of Obama Care - make it better.
The trouble is that the Reps haven't figured out they lost this battle and they keep coming back and making themselves look like retarded asses.
When you have a Fox News pundit (O'Reilly) accuse the Republicans of being over the top in regards to Obama Care, I think they should give up and fight some other battles.
But now, that won't happen.
You're a victim of partisan nonsense that by the admission of those at its core is flawwed. Thanks for being a zombie.
You're are so right! It is Partisian non-sense - one the Republican's part - period. This is one of the very few times when it IS one party causing the problems - the Republicans. The debt ceiling is supposed to be a routine pass so that the government can pay its bills. Now because of the Republicans, it's this bullshit.
The health exchange site is crushed by the demand and can't keep up? Clearly, the American people don`t want Obamacare!!
This could all have been avoided with a single-payer, socialized system. It's time to get politics out of the healthcare arena. Healthcare is a basic, fundamental human right. End this nonsense of marketplaces and regulations. Everyone gets healthcare, paid for by taxes. A very reasonable 3% hike in taxes would cover everyone and for the average person, represents far less than they are paying now for "healthcare premiums", which are tantamount to actual theft.
It's simple... healthcare should be a non-profit venture. Doctors should never make what they make now. Yes, I'm advocating what it sounds like. People ALWAYS trump profit, and should, especially at the expense of the rich, who, despite it all, will remain rich.
I will now because of recent events, never give a dime to Pap John's Pizza or Dunkin Donuts. Both of these companies are against the Affordable Care Act and are doing their level best to not hire full-time workers to avoid paying for their care. My question is simple: How much profit do you need? You are already rich. It's your workers who earn the money by making what you sell. Set the example and pay for their healthcare until we can arrive at where we all should be. Single-payer system.
Highways are run by the states, funded by the federal government. Go drive down I-10 through Louisiana, and you'll see the difference the state makes. The military? That's not run well, we've gotten our asses kicked for the last decade by people with tech from the 60's and 70's, for a cost only slightly less than Social Security or Medicare. The police? You mean the mobile tax collection force that are run by the local governments and not the federal, which don't actually investigate property crime, and instead hope it falls into their laps? That police?
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
No, they have the right to attempt to make a profit. They have no right to get that profit.
But the stock market did react. The DJI dropped 100 points on Monday.
They shouldn't run anything.
I get your point here - "anything" is a bit extreme, but...
Like the highway sysetm
You mean the one that each state runs, for which they may receive funding from the feds?
the military
"...every State shall always keep up a well-regulated and disciplined militia..."
But this is too big a can of worms to get into with many legitimate views on the cost, scale, organization, etc.
and the police force?
When did this become a federal organization?
Or the super efficient health systems in every other developed country?
Like which ones? Canada maybe, with their entire population being only ~34.8 million, compared to 38 million in California alone, or 313.9 million in the US?
My vote is state run, with some federal laws to back it up, and that correlates well to your example, AFAICT.
What was your point again?
I love how most Twitter accounts are shutdown. Except the Whitehouse account. It's still running. Oh, and it's doing promoted tweets! That's essential.
They weren't overloaded, as is typical with ANY government project, it was half-baked, over-budget (with most going to incompetent pockets), and downright poorly implemented. My dead grandmother can do better than this government can at implementing a decent solution.
Not to mention the regs are, what, 20K pages long? Who the hell can properly implement that? Bloody idiots.
Pax Vobiscum
Are you sure it wasn't the government buying them up to donate them to certain Slavic-speaking countries?
Yeah, 3-4 years is only MONTHS, man. Get some perspective.
I thought you wanted them to cut "non-essential" services.
Tax revenue is essential.
Collecting tax is essential to doing that.
Advising you how to fill in your tax form is NOT essential to doing it.
So which is it? Close down non-essential services or keep the ones you use going?
As a pan-Korean eco-Socialist, I concur with the OP. The NSA is immoral, and there should be no compromise WRT global spying.
I'm not (A), but I stand in solidarity with my (A) comrades.
(A) +++.
3 years ago, they were given the requirement.
A fully functioning multi-million-user system does not come about instantly, however.
Moreover, that "billions" is just bullshit. You mean "A lot of money, how much I don't know, but it's a lot and billions is a lot, so I'll say billions and pretend it's really true".
That just means that no one can force you to subscribe to cable. It does not mean you have a right to get cable for free.
They may not have a right to make a profit, but they do have every right to protect their assets and to restrict access to their service.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
My last service call from my cable company indicates this isn't always true. I lost my paid cable signal (broadband) because a neighbor messed up some connections while attempting to get free cable.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Also an adherent to pan-Korean Eco-Socialism (actually a pan-Korean Eco-Leninist), and I concur with your opposition to invasive US global espionage against the proletariat. The NSA espionage is immoral and should be resisted at all levels.
One-drop rule (touch of the tar-brush) and all that.
Considering the fact that I was never paid for the pole in my front yard or their adding of wires to it. I tend to see it in a rather bleak light. They have too many rights already. I do not subscribe, nor do I steal it, but I can see where the poster is coming from. They did reduce transmitter power to let cable work better, they do have rights of way they should not, and they both charge for the service and show commercials.
They might have a right to protect their assets, but those assets are ill gotten gains.
Just a correction, in Canada, the health care systems are run by the province. It is not at the federal level. (I think) The federal government sets standards for who services must be provided, but each province manages their own health care system. Not sure how it works in Europe, but it's entirely possible than healthcare could be managed at the state level.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The USSR were even more diverse.
The USA is also smaller in GDP than the EU.
Investors saw the writing on the wall weeks ago and stocks have been flat or downward for those weeks. Believe it or not, investors don't wait until after the inevitable to react to it. Now, if they don't work something out soon you'll see stocks take another tumble, but that will be more related to the possible (probably? inevitable?) defaulting of the federal government when they can't agree on a debt ceiling hike.
Java . -> unable to handle the load, at least in my state. And not only was it not able to handle the load, it would not die gracefully, instead putting out messages to the end user useful at best only to a programmer. Why did they not use COBOL? I guess time tested and 'just works' means nothing anymore. Yes, java is the first thing I think of when it comes to high volume transaction processing. These sites are nothing more than airline reservation systems under a different name.
And no, I'm only half joking.
an example error:
Error 500: org.springframework.core.task.TaskRejectedException: Executor
[java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor@aee9ec22] did not accept task:
org.springframework.context.event.SimpleApplicationEventMulticaster$1@6ae3d673
And then zoomed right back up on Tuesday.
May they fired 9/10 of these guys too. You know. For security reason.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
But it doesn't give us the right to steal the service.
Now if they were somehow cheating to suck more money out of us, that would be another story... hey wait!
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
The government funds most of the cutting edge medical research in this country. New grants to advance medical research are not being given out. Pubmed is a indexing service for basically all biomedical publications, run by the NCBI which is part of the NIH, which is basically shut down. It's being operated on existing funds. Were it to shut down, biomedical research worldwide would be hindered in a very real way.
It's fun to talk about how we don't need government, we're independent, etc in general terms. Bonus points for pointing to specific porkbarrel spending. But people engaging in such bluster rarely talk about BIG specific cuts, the ones that are actually going to make a difference, both in terms of spending and in terms of affecting quality of life. We're delaying finding a cure to cancer, alzheimers, diabetes, paralysis... everything. A few days won't matter to you personally or anyone you know, sure. However, if you say we don't need what is shut down, you're either not looking very hard, you're thinking very short term, or you're not really thinking at all.
Yeah, you're a moron.
Making profit (at least in America) is a right derived from basic property rights under English common law. The fact that I own the furniture in my house even when I am not there, or a shopkeeper owns the inventory in their store is a concept that was a huge advance in civilization, which throughout most of biological history defined "your property" as merely whatever you could successfully guard against the imposition of others.
Once you have the concept of property that you can use, destroy, sell, lease, etc. as you see fit, the right to profit from acquiring something and disposing of it at a higher price (to and from a willing buyer and seller) is in fact well grounded in law (albeit limited in many ways). You don't (typically) have a right to force someone to buy your stuff under terms that they don't agree to, and he doesn't (typically) have a right to take it from you under terms that you don't agree to.
Obama was enthroned by foreign powers to undermine the US and that's exactly what's happened.
And political cronies made billions from it. Now you see what these "crises" are about?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Its really amazing it works at all.
I got 36 HTML errors on the front page running it through the wc3 validator. Its chuck full of misspelled attributes, duplicate attributes (aka two hrefs in an A tag, etc).
There is no doctype on the login page, and it throws another 61 warnings (mostly because without the doctype the validator turns errors into warnings).
Plus there were a fair number of jqeury errors.
Finally I stopped at the login because the security question AJAX URL literally returned a 500 line java/jboss exception pile of crap wrapped in JSON data.
You have got to wonder who is creating a site where they can't even get the markup correct.
Removing a website from the web during a shutdown "Protects" it from exploiters when there is no one to respond to threats from hackers, foreign governments that are not shutdown and anyone who would exploit the code on a webpage for distributing Malware or Viruses.
SQL Injection and Javascript Injections hi-jacking an End users website are quite common on the most hardened websites because they are always evolving systems and new exploits are discovered daily.
Shutting the website off in an orderely fashion is the most responsible thing the Government could possibly do.
Those branches still funded are online and monitoring their situations and protecting their customers.
The only ones trying to take advantage of the situation and proposing keeping them up on auto-pilot are probably the ones asking for a Vulnerable playing field in order to raid your bank account.
The ones suggesting leaving National Monuments are asking for people to be harmed accidentally or intentionally with no help in sight.. or who want an opportunity to deface a National Monument.
How can anyone propose "walking off the job and leaving things to disintegrate" is the right thing to do?
That is simply irresponsible.
And Apple can't put us in jail
You don't go to jail, you are levied a fine.
for not buying their product.
The product doesn't come from the government, it comes from a health insurance company. It isn't the government's product.
Although I'm sure they'd like to.
The jailed environment of iOS isn't sufficient?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Taking a page of Romney who likely illegally shipped away around $100 million of his retirement funds to a tax haven in the Caribbean, yet complains about the hungry laid-off single mom who dares use food stamps and calls her a moocher.
Slashdotters have become such sheep.
A government shutdown? What government shutdown?
Have all the wars stopped? Did the NSA stop collecting our communications? Did the TSA stop raping our kids? Did the CIA's proxy stop murdering Christians in Syria, Iraq and Egypt? Will you get your full paycheck this week?
No? Well it looks like there was no shutdown after all.
Just a correction, in Canada, the health care systems are run by the province. It is not at the federal level. (I think) The federal government sets standards for who services must be provided, but each province manages their own health care system. Not sure how it works in Europe, but it's entirely possible than healthcare could be managed at the state level.
The UK has just undergone a massive reorganisation - and different aspects of healthcare are run and funded at different government levels. Public health is locally (at the county level) funded and organised (but with some central funding contingent on meeting specific targets), primary care is centrally funded but locally organised (by areas that are not co-terminus with any local government region), and hospital services are nationally funded but hospitals run pretty much independently (i think - i don't know a lot about hospitals). There's still a central government department for health sort of setting the agenda, and the national institute for clinical excellence making guidelines that other groups are supposed to follow. So your healthcare can vary a lot depending on where you live, which I guess is a reasonable definition for something which is not nationally organised.
I have a simple litmus test for a person's belief system. I ask the following question:
"Does your system require that people suffer, not because they would have anyway, but because of the rules of the system?"
It obviously immediately eliminates American Capitalism and Soviet Communism as thoroughly immoral - though I can hear the ideologues right now prepare themselves to explain why some suffering MUST happen (although conveniently it won't much suffering for them, only for someone else in the system) - but it can also be applied to features of subsystems.
In this case, the NSA is immoral on several counts - one of which, as you rightly point out, is that merely because of this mindless obsession with data-gathering, resources must be taken away from other facilities which benefit people.
How do you distinguish suffering because of the rules from suffering that would have happened anyway? And what do you mean by 'suffer'? I think it has to be defined in terms of a deprivation or loss, but that could only really be a consequence of something that you had in the first place because of the social or economic system you were living in - so separating having whatever it is to losing whatever it is would be difficult.
I checked it today, was working fine. For fun I looked at insurance, they stuff they offer in Washington was worthless. Sure you can get insurance for 220$ a month, with a 6000$ deductible(yes not hundred), 60% payment (You pay the remaining 40%) and copays from 60$ (office visit) to 200$ (ER). For coverage you could actually use it's over $400 a month, I would not call that affordable.
My last service call from my cable company indicates this isn't always true. I lost my paid cable signal (broadband) because a neighbor messed up some connections while attempting to get free cable.
Well, that guy deserves a [metaphorical] foot in his ass, but it isn't inherently like that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Everyone should have free healthcare and no doctors should be paid. Stick it to the man.
- Posted from iPhone 5S @ Starbucks in Harvard Square.
If this turns out to be just a political stunt by Democrats to intentionally take the servers down to amplify the "shutdown" then they will look bad. If it turns out that the servers were simply overloaded and not up to the task then that feeds right into the Republican claims that Obamacare will be a disaster. I mean, if you can't even get to the website how confident are you in their ability to provide medical care? Didn't anyone think that maybe testing the whole thing before rolling it out to millions of Americans might be a good idea? If it wasn't ready then delay the launch or at least give a little forewarning that it might be a bit slow on the first day. Idiots.
The UK has just undergone a massive reorganisation
You've made the opposite of the usual Engerland/UK mistake.
The UK doesn't have a health system - it has 4.
England, Wales, Scotland and Norn Ireland all do it differently.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Considering the fact that I was never paid for the pole in my front yard or their adding of wires to it. I tend to see it in a rather bleak light. They have too many rights already.
That pole is almost certainly in the public Right of Way for your street. Most cities allow people to extend their yards well into the right of way up to the sidewalk or edge of the currently paved road; decorating it with grass or flowers does not make it your exclusive property.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
Things Americans do care about: sucking the entitlement teat.
As an American, I abhor the principal of the entitlement teat. Unfortunately, our government is more and more trying to make it look like the way to go. Just let Uncle Obama take care of you. Quit your job, live off the government. Otherwise, we will raise your taxes and lower your standard of living until the folks living off the government have nicer stuff than you.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
You know, I listened to that same broadcast. You didn't talk about the laughter and admission it was a joke afterward.
See how unsupported anecdote works?
Please cut it out. We all know now both parties serve the same masters, and none of us number among said masters. It's BS top to bottom. But rolling out the tired and demonstrably untrue "both parties are too extreme" defies common sense. There is no Left in American politics. There is only the corporate lackies vs. the corporate lackies, all of whom do whatever they can to disguise that fact from the average American while the corporations steal everything that isn't nailed down, and salt it away in some ridiculous tax shelter like the Isle of Mann or Switzerland.
We can't live 1st World lives, advance science, cure diseases, solve eminently solvable problems because we are betrayed at every, every turn by sociopaths and leeches who have turned our very system of supposed universal suffrage against us. And, most of us being mentally healthy, find it difficult to accept that a defective few really would consign us and our children to misery and death for their personal benefit, yet that's exactly what they do under this arrangement, every day.
We try to "give them the benefit of the doubt" and do a thousand things we might do to preserve equity among our fellow, non-ill citizens. Except those measures are precisely those which the ill have learned well to exploit. And now we find ourselves at a point where the accretion of dysfunction from the Ill represents a mortal threat to everyone, and we can choose to excuse them to our doom, or deal with them in a way that saves everyone.
So I plead with fellow citizens who have not yet taken leave of their senses, resist! The sociopaths know they're outnumbered, vastly. Many of them know in their hearts that they're sick, and they secretly yearn for others to recognize their illness and help them. If we don't, then they reflexively act out in ways that are even more lamentable.
We must stop them now.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
"It costs the cable company nothing for you to get free cable."
Please. Are you here because you're in IT or because you like trolling? That fallacy has been hashed to death right here many times. Material, staffing, electricity; to name a few variables.
Have you been diagnosed? It's clear that you're hallucinating.
In most western democracies there is a system of mandatory health insurance.
The reason is the same everywhere: we do not tolerate that in a civilized society people have to die just because of money. Any other society is barbaric in the eyes of most enlightened people.
You can either pay everything from the general budget (like the UK's NHS) or pay through some (often income-dependent) insurance premium, which has partially the character of a solidarity tax.
If it were not mandatory, you would have to fund it otherwise, like via income tax.
Do you really rather live in a society where people that have bad luck have to die so you have a bit more wealth?!?
I think 95% of all non-US citizens are appalled and shocked that this is even worth a discussion in the USA, and this is a sign of the extreme egoism and selfishness of parts of US society.
Not to mention the cable company pays a franchise fee to the city for right of way use and may pay a fee to your electric company for usage of the pole.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
You don't (typically) have a right to force someone to buy your stuff under terms that they don't agree to
That's not what the Supreme Court says. Buy health insurance or else!
And if you don't pay the fine, you do go to jail. The IRS is funny about that. Ask Wesley Snipes.
The only time I really care about people getting free cable is when they screw up my service by either messing up the physical connections or giving the cable company an excuse to scramble nonpremium channels forcing me to have a cable box in every room.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
And if you don't pay the fine, you do go to jail. The IRS is funny about that. Ask Wesley Snipes.
Wesley Snipes went to jail for not paying his taxes. This is not the same as not paying taxes.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I love this excuse. The US is large and has a big population, so therefore we can't even try to have universal health care.
Universal healthcare works in countries like Canada with a similar geographical area to the US, and in countries like Japan, which a similarly sized population. Furthermore, Canada's national government makes the individual provinces responsible for providing health care, which seems to work just fine for them. There's no reason we can't do it here, except for the fact that certain states are refusing to do it.
Note: The ACA is, of course, not universal healthcare, but it's at least a step in the right direction. Hopefully we can keep moving and expand Medicare to everyone.
Health care in Canada is the responsibility of the provinces, not federal (though the federal government does throw some money at it and sets the overall ground rules)
As for the population, that's irrelevant. Think of the economies of scale the USA could get in comparison. Run properly, almost anything should cost less per-capita if serving more people.
The Federal Government shouldn't RUN anything! They couldn't even make money selling whores and alcohol when they took over the Mustang Ranch, so, naturally they will fuck this up too.
To be fair, the only reason some states do not have their own exchanges is because they literally turned down the option to do so (I believe the ACA included some funding for states to get one set up). Some states refused to set up an exchange, typically because a Republican-dominated legislature voted it down to be as combative as possible.
Have they disabled government MX hosts, too? If they're going to disable web, they ought to disable email too.
This president is a total joke and no i did not vote for him and yes i did vote. When the president of the UNITED SATES OF AMERICA starts making excuses for bad planning and implementing of the so called obamacare comparing it to what Apple,Ms,adobe.and on and on and on does which by the way is to just get it out the door on time screw the bugs mentality is embarrassing. Apple,Ms and all the rest do this to get it out the door making users paying bug finders because it HAS to be out the door on launch day. I remember the day when games were put back months and months to fxg bugs to send out a great product. All this i have to have to now at all coast is not OK and should never be used as an Excuse by the President of the United States of America. That is MO and you cant change it so dont try :}
Jack of all trades,master of none
They have 4 weeks of cash reserves!
You are quite right. What I said only applies to 85% of the UK population.
I pay a mountain of taxes; much more than I eve get back.
Because a working society that allowed you to accrue your wealth is totally worth less than the taxes you pay. You silly cunt.
Note: The ACA is, of course, not universal healthcare, but it's at least a step in the right direction. Hopefully we can keep moving and expand Medicare to everyone.
It's a step in the wrong direction because it raises total health care costs. More expensive health care means a smaller chance of universal coverage.
The transmitters aren't owned by the cable companies, and transmit power has nothing to do with how the cable networks operate. The rebroadcasters simply don't see a return on upping the transmit power.
You can always push for Article the First to be ratified and finish ratifying the original 12 amendments. You'd have a representative for every 50,000 people so about 6000 representatives. Harder to bribe them all and more responsive to those who they represent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_the_first
http://www.thirty-thousand.org/
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Not only is it true
But it isn't. An antenna doesn't suck energy out of the air; an antenna is a passive device. It isn't like wifi or cell communications which have transmitters. The cable company pays the local stations for thier signals because retransmitting the signal is copyright infringement.
It costs the cable company nothing for you to get free cable. It's not theft, it's copyright infringement.
It doesn't cost the barber anything to give you a free haircut, either, and haircuts are no more necessary than cable (not at all). Walk out without paying for that haircut and the barber can and probably will have you arrested for theft of service. It isn't copyright infringement, to infringe copyright you have to supply the copyrighted work, not consume it. If I email you a Metallica song you haven't infringed copyright no matter how many times you listen -- I have.
I wouldn't pay for the wire to come into my house anyway.
Neither will I, which is why I use an antenna.
Free Martian Whores!
I'm personally surprised, living in a country which does have relatively high taxes and an extensive social welfare and universal healthcare system, that you people are so gullible as to somehow believe that welfare systems are inherently not in your best interests and a violation of your rights and somehow designed to make it so unemployed "bludgers" can get shinier things than you.
Honestly, how do you people believe that crap?
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Dealing with spike loads are always a difficult proiblem to deal with
Ive had to deal with such problems with provisioning University Enrollment systems. Often with such systems - enrollments open at a set time and you get the entire student body (or most of it at least) logging in at that instant - to get the preferredd subjects and tutorial times.
The problem is - how much do you spend on servers - for a load that will last about a few hours - 2 or 3 times a year -
If you have an unlimited budget - you buy hardware for all possible users and you do decent load testing
BUT good load testing tools are expensive and good load testing people arent cheap either actually (but they ARE worth the money BTW) .... but it assumes they were given a budget and time to do it right - and my experience with many governments around the world is that is rarely the case .....
and for a uni system at least - you know the peak loads will re-occur - with these systems the peak load will fade out over the next month or so as people sign up. I must admit this would have been an interesting case to budget and provision. A good case for renting servers capacity perhaps to deal with this initial load
Still load should drop - and hopefully the systems are sound and its just load related. The rest of the developed world are pleased to see the USA has joined civilisation in offering some form of healthcare to people.
Considering that health care costs twice as much here per capita as it does anywhere else in the world, I have no idea how you came up with that number.
Define suffering.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
Try various dictionaries, or even Wikipedia.
"If the rules were different, would this suffering still happen?"
Suffering is well defined in dictionaries,Wikipedia, etc. Trying to make a simplistic economic definition is missing the point entirely.
"If the rules were different, would this suffering still happen?"
Suffering is well defined in dictionaries,Wikipedia, etc. Trying to make a simplistic economic definition is missing the point entirely.
So are you saying that your rules have to minimize net suffering across people (a utilitarian perspective) or that any rule that creates suffering in an individual, however small, can't be acceptable despite how much suffering it might alleviate in others?
Also - does inaction that leads to suffering (ie not banning cigarette advertising) count as causing suffering?
The President repeatedly snaps back at the press with absurd analogies and I'm the one with mental problems?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Oh, so you're saying if Obama is crazy, then you aren't? I didn't know two different people's mental well being can be tied together like that... unless *gasp* you're the same person!
Please stop trolling the Internet and get back to work, Mr President.
Funny that no one can find anyone who actually signed upfor obamacare. Not even obama signed up for obamacare.
I'm personally surprised, living in a country which does have relatively high taxes and an extensive social welfare and universal healthcare system, that you people are so gullible as to somehow believe that welfare systems are inherently not in your best interests and a violation of your rights and somehow designed to make it so unemployed "bludgers" can get shinier things than you. Honestly, how do you people believe that crap?
By observation, of course.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Hmm I'm not sure what number you're referring to, I didn't mention any numbers...
Health care costs twice as much per capita here as it does elsewhere, and we do NOT have universal coverage.. it sounds like you're agreeing with me.
If the repubs continue to defund government and even worse fail to raise the debt limit, how long until President Obama decides to institute Presidential directive 51? It was dreamed up by Bush, but, is custom made for this scenario!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
Anybody else consider it likely that the anti-Obamacare fanatics launched Denial of Service attacks against the insurance exchange websites?
The federal government sets standards for who services must be provided, but each province manages their own health care system.
It should further be noted that the standards that are set by the feds in Canada are not binding on the provinces. They have to adhere to them to get federal funding for their healthcare systems, but if they don't like it they can always reject the money and run the system as they see fit (or not have one at all). The feds can do nothing about it because the Constitution Act explicitly assigned healthcare to the provinces.
Please. Are you here because you're in IT or because you like trolling? That fallacy has been hashed to death right here many times. Material, staffing, electricity; to name a few variables.
Material: They've already run the wire into my house.
Staffing: If I don't fuck anything up, they need no additional staff.
Electricity: It takes a vanishingly small amount of additional electricity to send me the signal when they're already sending it to my neighborhood, because they use RF propagation and not a current loop.
In short, unless you break something (already addressed in another comment) it doesn't cost anything additional for you to receive the cable signal. They already have the equipment to deliver it to the whole street installed and running. It's not a fallacy, and no amount of your lies will make it so.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
P.S. My lie is that any of this applies to me. It doesn't. The wire doesn't even run to my house. If it did, I would pay [Mediacom] for cable internet, because I would get a better deal than I get from my WISP. I would not have cable television at all unless it saved me money on my bill somehow. It's not worth stealing. This is how I have operated in the past. Thankyou.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What the hell man? I never said we can not have universal health care. The previous posts were comparing state run things to federal run things, and the post I replied to referred to "the super efficient health systems in every other developed country" as an example of a federal run thing that ran really well.
As you pointed out, "Canada's national government makes the individual provinces responsible for providing health care".
As I pointed out, "My vote is state run, with some federal laws to back it up".
I can't tell what point you are trying to make. Do you think the end goal is for the US to implement universal health care on the federal level? If so, where's the example of that working elsewhere in any place of similar geographical size and population? I'm not saying it can't be done, but I believe it would be better as a state run program, and I believe both history and other examples support that notion.
IMO, the federal government should be as limited as reasonably possible, delegating as much as possible to the state level. FWIW, that is a purposefully vague statement.
So in other words, you're quite firmly brainwashed by the Tea Party crowd into believing that we have a somehow worse standard of living than you?
You know what, I actually feel sorry for you.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
The pork-elephant in the room: Starting and persisting needless war.
It's expensive and had demonstrably made life in the US less safe and the world less safe for US Americans.