Slashdot Mirror
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.
Wht are you tlking about? Vowls are for chumps.
Monstar L
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.
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"
Seriously, simple typos and grammar mistakes get through now?
Obviously, Slashdot is also affected by the US government shutdown . . . I didn't know the government runs it . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
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.
'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)
Oh yeah because extreme load on a new website never manifests as error messages
Which is more likely, your unsubstantiated shit or the website / IT system not able to create like a quarter million user accounts in one hour? I assume there's that kind of burst load or even worse - what do the worst 10 minutes look like?
It's obviously hard to bring up a completely new service which experiences that kind of load on day 1 hour 1, just give them time to tune their system, add more servers, tune or upgrade their mainframes if they're using that. People are sweaty busy scrambling to fix the situation.
What's funny is the american sense of entitlement to have some web or gizmo shit work instantly no matter what, whether they pay for it or not, and then they'll all butthurt because of very meeble welfare (food stamps are very low) or because of a new system that helps the working class buy overpriced and weak healthcare.
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.
Showing a static html "This site is closed blah blah blah" is congruent with powering down the machines, a PC in a basement can serve that. Importantly the IT staff isn't paid and is out of work.
Seems a little harsh from someone who admits that they used to be one of those parasites.
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.
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
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
the gubberment!!!!...Wow
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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?
Essential employees are staying on the job. You are essential if your job protects life or property, i.e. the server room.
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.
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.
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.
Damn Wheel of Fortune buying them all up so no one else can use them!
If they're contracted out and they can't pay the contractors, then it's not a stunt.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
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.
This happens every time there is a major video game release. The login/download servers can't handle everyone all logging on day 1 and so it takes you 8 hours to download the game and create your account...
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.
They have had 3 fucking years and billions of dollars to prepare for this. But thanks for the positive side of getting shit for massive amounts of tax dollars Mr. Brightside.
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?
You sent them to not negotiate?
You sent them to hold the government hostage?
Next time vote for reasonable people. They refused to even attempt to compromise.
I knew we were in trouble when the GOP candidates for President in the last election all turned down any increase in taxes even if spending was cut 10 times as much as any raise.
Then that answer would be yes. Because if they were openly planning it, and got elected, then that's the job they were elected to do. Same logic that was applied to the people approving of Obamacare because they re-elected Obama.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
Sysadmins are seen more like janitors by most management than police. You're not protecting it, you're cleaning it up. They'll pay more people to guard it and keep people out than they would have to keep it open and cleaned if it means that they can follow the letter of the law instead of the spirit.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
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.
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...
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.
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
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
As I recall, the security audit wasn't planned till the day before Go-Live date; because you know, server security the least priority.
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 reason businesses are against the ACA is because in order to lower the cost for people, it raises the cost for business. That's a big reason so many businesses are against it. The real solution to all this, of course, is a single-payer system.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
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.
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.
I looked at that code (which hasn't been updated in a while) assuming I might be able to fix some of the glaring HTML errors (I mean, who is allowed to check in HTML code with validator errors?), but gave up after realizing it wasn't complete.
There is java wrapped into the back-end server infrastructure too. That was evidenced by the 3 page long java exceptions wrapped in JSON it was returning yesterday.
Obviously, Slashdot is also affected by the US government shutdown . . . I didn't know the government runs it . . .
No, that can't be. Even the US Government, while temporarily shut down, makes more usable sites than this one.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Then you simply don't want to live in a first world nation. I would prefer too. Not negotiating is what terrorists and ideologues do.
The real solution to all this, of course, is a single-payer system.
Ding ding! You win a cookie! I've only been saying this for a couple decades now myself (as well as millions of other Americans). Yet every time someone even considers proposing it in government they are shouted down as "Un-American" and "communists". Somehow this is what counts for political discourse in this country now. It is far more important to protect corporate profit than it could ever be to protect human life.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If you intentionally sent wingnuts to congress to screw up the government, you're a big part of the problem. They're currently trying to change how government works, making it completely dysfunctional when an extremist subgroup of a minority party can hold the country hostage. The remaining sane Republicans need to slap these morons into line before their ignorance and arrogance destroys the economy.
To help a wingnut understand, imagine if the Republican theocrats managed to ban abortion and controlled the presidency, senate, and nearly half the house. The Democrats then refuse to fund the government until women's reproductive rights are reinstated, completely bypassing the legislative process like the teabaggers are trying to do now. Someone like you would go completely bonkers, and in that case, unlike all the wingnut fake controversies, you'd actually be right to go berserk.
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.
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.
So you are saying the contractors get paid for their services daily? It most certainly is a political stunt.
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.
"This happens every time there is a major video game release. "
At least, there is not half the developers insisting it's vaporware, bug-riddled and will never see the light of day, until the publishing date and even beyond.
It depends on the site and who holds the contracts. Some of our contracts are still running (such as the ones at HHS), while some of our contracts are not open for a variety of reasons. Where I work, all of the websites that we handle (design/development/content creation/content update) are run on servers out of our complete control and then are copied to a load balancing server. The public only hits the load balancing servers, not the servers that feed the load balancing servers.
Duh, the U.S. Department of Editing is shut down.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Hey, an Anonymous Coward is cognizant of the length of time it takes to set up that massive of service and I agree, by the way.
Now, please explain why they set the deadline as they did? You understand it was part of that "We'll see once it's law." crap, right? They deserve ridicule just as much as any PHB that makes obscenely stupid decisions as to roll out.
Or maybe they should have "just worked smarter"?
It's sort of like what happens if MERS-COV breaks out while the CDC is shut down I guess...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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!
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.
Hard the Hawaiians invaded Wales and took all the vowels.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Obama: "I will not negotiate."
Sounds like par for the course for every project I have ever worked on. Same thing for performance testing.
Time to offend someone
Single payer would require that a lot more sane people start voting to offset the effects of the right-wing-extremists, and either vote in sane Republicans, or sweep the Republicans out of office. It hasn't happened yet, but the crazy is more and more in our faces, so maybe...
I used to think that the Republicans just lagged 50-100 years behind the rest of us, and would eventually get up to speed, but they seem to be becoming increasingly paranoid, superstitious, and antisocial as sane people are driven out of the party by the far-right nutjobs.
I thought they were bad when they wanted to roll back every bit of social progress we've made in the US, but that was before the Internet exposed me to the Republicans that wan't to roll back the whole Enlightenment, including the scientific method, and have superstition rule the country.
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...
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.
If North Korea sent us a list of demands to be met or they would nuke Seoul, that would still be the correct response. If he caved, it would set a precedent that NK could get concessions any time it wanted just by threatening catastrophe. The right response is to refuse any concessions at all, tell them exactly what will happen if they go forward, and then cross your fingers and pray that they aren't that stupid.
The debt ceiling is the same game. Both sides agree that it must be raised, but one side thinks it should receive "concessions" in order to do it. That's not negotiation. Negotiation is where one side gets something they want in exchange for giving the other side something they want. The debt ceiling is unilateral blackmail at best, hostage taking at worst.
I'm generally OK with government shutdowns as part of the negotiation process because it makes cuts and funding "real" and we see who really cares. But the reason Obama can't negotiate on this one is because if he caves, the Republicans will think they have carte blanche to demand whatever they want when the debt ceiling debate hapens. That can't be allowed, ever. The debt ceiling just needs to be raised. Neither side should get a ransom for doing it.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
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.
But the reason Obama can't negotiate on this one is because if he caves, the Republicans will think they have carte blanche to demand whatever they want when the debt ceiling debate hapens.
Obama and the Democrats wouldn't be in this situation in the first place if they had merely refrained from spending money which they hadn't even legally been approved to borrow yet. If the debt ceiling has to be raised to meet appropriations, that should happen before the appropriations are passed, not after they've already committed to spending the money. You don't max out your credit card, and then contract for some expensive service which you plan to put on your card before you've even called the bank to see about raising your credit limit.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
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
Considering many of his actions, I don't think you're helping the point...
Fact is, BOTH sides are idiots behaving like 4 year olds throwing temper tantrums when they don't get their way. The government in my country is often seen as dysfunctional, and the politicians as ego-centric jerks, but they have nothing on US politics!
They have 4 weeks of cash reserves!
You are quite right. What I said only applies to 85% of the UK population.
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.
The real solution is bringing down costs. Single-payer is one way to do so, but trying to control costs top-down like that can lead to problems like shortages and poor quality. Not to mention it's against the American way. (I mean why not have a single bank, a single phone company, a single car maker, etc. Well, because we don't want to live in that kind of country.. most of us anyway.)
Errr, that's kind of the job of Congress. They set taxes and spending. That means that they also set the deficit. The debt ceiling is just Congress asserting that it also has the right to legisliate the running sum of the deficits it has already incurred. Doesn't work that way. It's like saying that I plan to lose weight by not having eaten potato chips for the past few years. Sure, I've actually eaten them, but if I insist on not having eaten them, my problem is fixed.
The debt ceiling is basically a ceremony that allows minority members of Congress to bitch and moan and grandstand and blame the majority for fecklessness (see Obama's opposition to it when he was a Senator). It's not actually a policy tool because it tries to do something that's mathematically impossible. But they've been putting on this show for the rubes long enough that the rubes are starting to get agitated and get themselves elected to Congress. They don't seem to realize that the debt ceiling is a pretty light show for their amusement and not an actual lever that you can push and make somthing worthwhile happen. It's time to repeal it.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
The real solution is bringing down costs.
Except that nothing else is effective at it - at least nothing that has yet been tried or proposed - in comparison to what a single payer system can do.
Single-payer is one way to do so
The rest of the world can tell us that there is no more effective way to do it.
Not to mention it's against the American way.
Does the American way have to be in favor of debt and death? We are the only industrialized country where people can go bankrupt over health care costs. We are the only country where people can be denied health care because they don't have adequate funds.
I mean why not have a single bank, a single phone company, a single car maker, etc.
Because none of those are comparable to health care. The rest of the world realizes the vaporous nature of that argument and sees right through it. Health care is fundamentally different from cars, phones, and banks. You can live your life without interacting with cars, phones, or banks and get by just fine; you will need to interact with the health care system at some point in your life if you want to have a reasonable life expectancy. Furthermore in the other cases you try to compare to, competition between companies results in a better product at a lower cost to the consumer (generally). However as we have seen in the American market having multiple insurance companies only results in degradation of service, denial of claims, and enormous profits for doing those deeds; all while the companies are effectively colluding together to make it increasingly more difficult for people to get by without them (see the Health Insurance Company Bailout Act of 2010 - sometimes erroneously called "ObamaCare" - for an example).
because we don't want to live in that kind of country.. most of us anyway
What gives you the right to say what "most" of us want? There are millions of people in the US who have been asking for single payer for years, even decades. There is no accurate assesment available right now that shows what "most of us" want. Being as we can't get even the slightest bit of momentum going towrads single payer in congress, and hence never end up having a serious discussion of it on the national level, it is impossible to say whether people want it or not. The closest we have to a consensus right now is that the current system is broken, the big question though is how many people actually want to do anything about it for real.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
That analogy isn't quite right. They aren't rewriting history; they're passing conflicting laws. They authorize deficit spending, but they don't authorize borrowing any more money. The problem is that by the time they reach the point where they need to borrow money to pay their bills, they've already gone into debt by promising later payment in exchange for goods and services received. The actual borrowing is just trading one type of debt for another. Even though they were covered by the appropriations, the Executive branch shouldn't have risked default by entered into those contracts before the debt was authorized by Congress.
The analogy aside, I mostly agree with you. The debt ceiling should be repealed—and replaced with a balanced-budget amendment. That wouldn't necessarily prevent deficit spending; Congress would just have to approve the debt before the extra appropriations, ensuring they have the money in hand before they spend it.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
You're suggesting impoundment, which the President hasn't been able to do for 40 years or so. If it's appropriated, it must be spent unless the President has permission from Congress not to spend it. It keeps the President from having a practical line item veto by simply not opting to spend certain appropriated funds. The fundamental problem is the same--Congress has appropriated money and not raised the revenue, so the idea that the President has the duty (or power) to fix that is silly. The debt is simply an unavoidable result of accounting. It can't be legislated away, and Congress has no choice but to raise the limit sooner or later.
There are very good economic reasons to avoid balanced budget amendments as they're usually written (many of them being very similar to why the debt ceiling is a catastrophically bad idea), but something requiring Congress to approve debt at appropriation time would make good sense. Of course, that's typically how it was done until some geniuses realized that they could split the process so they could grandstand and then some even bigger geniuses realized that they could use the process to create an artificial crisis and then demand payment for "fixing" it.
If they get their way and learn that they can extract arbitrary concessions for as payment for creating and then fixing an artificial financial crisis, we're just going to make financial panics a regular part of our political process. A line has to be drawn somewhere. I'm sick of hearing what amounts to, "Well, he shouldn't have blown all of those people up, but the bank really should have been better about listening to his ransom requests." You're not supposed to blow people up. We should all just agree on that and move forward negotating things we actually disagree on.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
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".
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.
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.
Except that nothing else is effective at it - at least nothing that has yet been tried or proposed - in comparison to what a single payer system can do.
I don't know about that -- other countries that have single-payer systems ALSO have a host of other things that are making health care cheaper. It's demonstrable and makes perfect intuitive sense. One example is that in America you get an undergrad degree before going to medical school. In many countries, you don't -- there's a single extra year of medical school (at most) that replaces 4 years of undergrad. That's going to save doctors a lot of loans, plus get them earning faster, which means they can make less money, which means cheaper health care.
Now you might say "Well stdarg that's peanuts, that just won't make a dent at all!" and that's true, but again, it's just one of a host of other things that countries do to keep costs down. We could adopt many of those things ourselves and start to see cost savings WITHOUT completely revamping our system. Making med school cheaper and faster does not require single-payer.
Does the American way have to be in favor of debt and death?
Yes because the American way is antithetical to the nanny state -- you're going to have more debt and death because you have more freedom. It's a tradeoff, just like the freedom to go 75 mph on the highway leads to more deaths than if cars were universally limited to 15 mph.
We are the only industrialized country where people can go bankrupt over health care costs.
Well now I'm not sure how to take that because that may be a good thing or a bad thing. You know that when you "go bankrupt" that means you're not responsible for your debts anymore right? So that's actually a good thing that came as a reaction to crazy stuff like debtor's prison that was going on back in England. Even today many countries have weaker bankruptcy protection than the US. Here, education loans are some of the only things you can't "go bankrupt" over and be excused from. But I recall reading about the effect of the housing collapse in Spain and apparently, if I'm recalling correctly, you cannot discharge housing debt in bankruptcy there, which means all the people who were underwater on their mortgage were basically trapped. They couldn't even move to a new area to get a job, they had to keep their old house and keep paying on it. It's pretty bad.
But of course that's not what you meant, you meant that people go bankrupt over health care costs as a code that health care costs are too high, which I fully agree with and that's what I'm talking about. We need to bring those costs down as a first step!
We are the only country where people can be denied health care because they don't have adequate funds.
Well in some countries you can be denied health care because you're too old or not healthy enough (e.g. organ transplants). So? There is going to be rationing no matter what system you adopt and it generally comes down to some kind of moral judgment (you didn't take care of yourself, so we're not going to help you) or financial (we don't care if you're nervous, you've had your allotted ultrasound for this trimester, we can't give everybody what they want).
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.
Which I only believe if they pay for hosting by the day. Since it's more likely an annual contract...
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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.
One example is that in America you get an undergrad degree before going to medical school. In many countries, you don't -- there's a single extra year of medical school (at most) that replaces 4 years of undergrad
There are a few important things to consider on this.
For one, there are schools in the US that do combined BS-MD programs that tend to shorten the total length of time to go from high school graduate to med school graduate; some do it in 6 years instead of the traditional 8. That does save a student on average about $60k in loans at $30k/year.
More so, there is a reason why many other countries (particularly in western Europe) can do the course you describe, and it is because their secondary education is more comprehensive than what we have in the US. Students who graduate from a high school in many European countries are as well educated as a lot of students who just finished their BS in the US. Hence they don't need as much new scientific and philosophical background for medicine, they already covered it in high school.
I would also like to point out that education in most of Western Europe is heavily subsidized by the state, in some cases free all the way through. So while the physicians graduate with less debt, someone is shouldering it. Physicians in many of those countries are also willing to work for lower salaries than what they are paid for the same position in the states.
Making med school cheaper and faster does not require single-payer.
You're correct on that. However if you want the same quality of physicians you need to look to the high school systems in this country. Our students graduate without enough solid background to shorten the amount of time they need to cover what they need to know to be physicians.
Now, on the other hand, if you just want health care practitioners, and you don't need the same depth of knowledge - which in many cases is fine - you can encourage more to go to PA or NP programs. They can get into practice sooner that way for less investment, and we can pay them less.
Yes because the American way is antithetical to the nanny state -- you're going to have more debt and death because you have more freedom
I don't recall the American way being so in favor of social Darwinism though. Why do we no longer believe in all people created equal?
You know that when you "go bankrupt" that means you're not responsible for your debts anymore right? So that's actually a good thing that came as a reaction to crazy stuff like debtor's prison that was going on back in England.
You need to reconsider what it actually means in this country to go bankrupt. Sure, in theory it means your debts are forgiven and you start over. However it also means your credit is destroyed (you'll likely never own a house or a car that is less than 15 years old again) and you have likely lost your health care coverage and under our current system you wouldn't be able to afford coverage for whatever caused you to go broke to begin with.
In other words, in the US if you go broke over health costs, you go broke and you die. I'm not sure that debtors prison was much worse, they probably gave you better (relative to the standards of the day) health care.
They couldn't even move to a new area to get a job, they had to keep their old house and keep paying on it.
Actually leaving the US for work, unless you have a standing job offer, is immensely difficult. Even moving from one state to another for work without a written offer is not trivial.
you meant that people go bankrupt over health care costs as
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.