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WWV Shortwave Time Broadcasts May Be Slashed In 2019 (qrz.com)
New submitter SteveSgt writes: A forum thread on QRZ.com indicates that the shortwave time broadcasts by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from stations WWV (Colorado) and WWVH (Hawaii) may be slashed in budget year 2019. [One of the proposed reductions includes "$6.3 million supporting fundamental measurement dissemination, including the shutdown of NIST radio stations in Colorado and Hawaii."] While the WWV broadcasts may seem like an anachronism to some Slashdotters, they remain a crucial component in many unexpected services, from over-the-air broadcasters and traffic signals, to medical devices, wall clocks, and wrist watches. The signals serve as standard beacons for radio propagation, and as a frequency reference for alignment of a broad range of communications equipment. It's easy to imagine that not even the NIST knows every service and device that could be impacted by this decision.
This, coincident with a $717B Defense Authorization?
We need to have a very serious conversation with the god who blessed America. Fucker's high on something.
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While WWV is a useful service, I have to question a cost of $6.3 MM/year. A rough calc says it costs less than $250K/yr in electrical power for both sites. I'll grant another $1MM for equipment maintenance and personnel. They already have to maintain time and frequency standards, by law.
As far as time and frequency dissemination goes, GPS does a vastly better job, with better coverage in almost all cases.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
As long as I find plans to create a short-range broadcaster / emulator out of a raspberry pi for my watch and clocks as well as one for all of my relatives and friends that I bought wall clocks for. ...but I'd rather it just stay.
The NIST is under the Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, who is a cryptkeeper who only stays alive through daily applications of graft and corruption. Here's an article about just how corrupt this ancient swamp thing really is.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/d...
The $6,3 million saved will pay for a lot of KFC Gravy Bowls on Air Force One. Plus, Colorado and Hawaii voted for Hillary, so fuck them libs, amirite? Trump is just that kind of petty degenerate..
You are welcome on my lawn.
I don't recall ever meeting a ham named Norma, but there are enough amateur radio operators that there probably is one. Or several.
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NIST is taking a gigantic budget hit. WWV/etc is just one victim. We are headed back to the scientific dark ages...
From what I've read, there was no mention of WWV-B, the VLF broadcast that such gadgets as people's clocks depend on. Is that on the chopping block too? (probably. grr)
My Casio Wave Ceptor 4756 still uses the WWV for keeping accurate time. Wrist watches on the hand have been on the downward trend in favor of cell phones for a while. So my alternatives are to use my cell phone or get some kind of smart watch like the Google Watch or the Apple Watch 3?
Yeah, sure. And let's replace the National Weather Service with The Weather Channel because hey, it's self-funding. And we could replace libraries with book stores too. And eventually you'll miss the point of why taxpayer-funded projects exist at all.
If it's so useful, it should be able to be self funding.
Like police and the military. They are useful, so maybe they should be self-funding too.
You really do not want to go there.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Any government service that isn't privatized or going to contractors will be cut in the near future.
If you're well connected to the political organs of our neo-consevative (and neo-liberal) empire, you can expect a fat paycheck from John Q. Taxpayer.
Anyone against globalization. Against austerity. Or against the currently administration has been clearly identified as an enemy of the state. Your execution papers are in the mail.
Right - if the NIST offered to privatize this, and have a company transmit the signal, with the same budget (or maybe higher, for that private sector profit incentive) then the Republicans would be fine with it. And the CEO of the company would of course kick back part of his salary from the venture to the party, just to show his appreciation. That's how it works with prisons.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
i have two radio controlled clocks i will have to throw out, both set their time by WWVB at 60_KHz, i can understand the need to cut back but dont eliminate WWV completely, get rid of 15 & 20 MHz, and just keep WWVB on 60_KHz, and WWV 2.5, 5 & 10 MHZ because 15 & 20 is rarely heard since propagation rarely favors those higher frequencies, and possibly switch to SSB because AM requires more power output so it could save a little on the electric bill, canada uses SSB on their time frequencies on HF 3.33, 7.85, 14.67 all on USB
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Some nation attacks US in the crypto battlefield: sats and .ip driven life stop.
With my battery driven sw I could at least know the time, important? Importand during that kind of crisis?
I remember a time when wwv had a strong signal, world wide - is it just me or have they really reduced powered? Last I checked while in Costa Rica 2.5 wasn't there 5 was weak 10 was weak and 15 didn't exist.
on 60 kHz. The WWV/WWVH services being cut are on HF (2.5-25 MHz).
The loss of those frequencies will obsolete the older HF clocks, like the Heathkit GC-1000 "Most Accurate Clock" I have in my ham shack. As well as removing the other functions they provided besides time, such as precision frequency reference (zero beat a signal generator or receiver VFO against WWV's carrier, and you know it is exactly on frequency), and the various frequencies throughout the HF band provide useful propagation checks, as well.
Oh well, the $6M they save can pay off a lot of porn stars, or cover the security detail for a couple rounds of golf in Bedminster...
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It's easy to imagine that not even the NIST knows every service and device that could be impacted by this decision.
It's easy to imagine that we'll find out in very short order what was impacted, when they turn off the service; and that the resulting lawsuits will end up costing them well over the amount they hoped to save.
Ready, fire, aim!
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
It's easy to imagine that not even the NIST knows every service and device that could be impacted by this decision.
There's no fucking way the NIST knows half the shit that could be impacted by this decision. [FIFY]
Nope, no sig
NTP will give you accurate time sync across your network of about 1 millisecond. Ntpd on your ntp server ( will keep your local network time to within a few milliseconds of worldwide network time. Frequently your DNS server or router will also serve as your DNS server.
You can of course connect a single GPS receiver to your NTP server and thereby keep your whole network within a millisecond or so of perfect time using just one GPS server.
Precision Time Protocol (PTP) provides much greater precision.
NTP is far more common.
The fact that we're bankrupting and sacrificing ourselves with illegal, immoral wars to prop up Nixon's petrodollar while allowing our social institutions and infrastructure to decay is very relevant to the discussion. The fact that this grotesque irresponsibility is the driver of capitalism's collapse and American social decay is very, very relevant. Personally, I consider these to be the most relevant aspects of the discussion.
I would be ashamed of myself were I one given more to reaction than reflection.
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WWV and WWVH are different from WWVB. WWV and WWVH are voice, WWVB is what the clocks are automatically set to. Still cancelling the voice service seems a little ridiculous to save 0000.1% of the federal budget, maybe what they should do is overlay the time signal on news and more informational broadcasts, i know there is already some informational broadcasting but it certainly could be expanded to justify the expense, however.
Traditionally in a lot of places "police" actually were self funding. All you had to do was pay them protection money.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I couldn't disagree more. From the NIST budget request summary:
This budget request is consistent with the administration’s priorities to redirect domestic discretionary resources to rebuild the military and make critical investments in the nation’s security, and keep the nation on a responsible fiscal path.
Funding for discretionary programs is being reduced to allocate more funding for the military and "national security", which I suspect refers largely to the President's idea of border security. That makes it fair game to discuss defense and border security when commenting on the proposed shutdown of the WWV stations.
While we can debate a reasonable level of defense spending, let's use NATO's 2% of GDP standard. US defense spending is around 3.6% of GDP, and President Trump's requested FY 2019 budget increases DOD spending by 13% over 2017 levels. Proposed military spending is outpacing GDP growth. At the same time, President Trump is requesting a long list of reforms and spending cuts.
In fairness, it's necessary to understand the context of proposed cuts. For example, NOAA is proposing to cut VORTEX-SE, which is a project that studies tornadoes in the Southeast US. Taken out of context, one might think NOAA isn't prioritizing the improvement of tornado warnings. In reality, VORTEX-SE was supposed to collect high quality in-situ data for a few events each spring over the span of 2-3 years and fund a number of related research projects, many of which use the data collected during the field campaign. Most field campaigns such as the original VORTEX (1994-5) and VORTEX2 (2009-10) have been just as short in duration. VORTEX-SE has run longer and wasn't cut in FY 2018 because Congress never passed the relevant appropriations bill and kept funding basically at FY 2017 levels in the continuing resolutions. Context is important to understand proposed cuts, such as if a program has already achieved its goals.
I looked for justification for the proposed cutting of WWV stations and I couldn't find anything that explains why these stations are being targeted for shutdown. Absent any good context for why funding cuts for these stations is requested, it's fair to assume it would be a casualty of the President's overall budget goals. For that reason, it's certainly fair game to criticize our excessive defense spending.
I understand that ham radio buffs tend to be older-bearded-ex-military-janes-reading-model-railroading-tabletop-wargaming-cessna owning sort of guys...but did you have to engage in casual homophobia?
After all, hams complain about their declining numbers, do you think that contributing to the stereotype of hams being right-wing bigoted jerks is going to encourage new blood....well except amongst the younger versions of guys like you of course.
Not even taking into account that the earliest users of the internet were bearded unix geeks, basically just like you, only doing computers more than radio and perhaps slighty less into Janes and wargaming.
Ham radio is a fairly common interest amongst older transfolk. And Cessna's amongst those with more money. And of course model railroading and trains in general. Linux and anime amongst younger ones. The ones who are transitioning young will probably have more tradtionally-gendered interests.
I used to call a bunch of upper-class crossdressers in a support group I was in "The Cessna's and Sailboats crowd"
The idea that "useful" things automatically -- or even can -- make money doesn't strike me as inherently true. And if it is we should start with grade schools and family households.
Grade Schools often are run for profit and much more efficiently than public schools. Family households used to be strictly for profit operations prior to the modern era. Children were your retirement policy.
If it's so useful, it should be able to be self funding.
Like police and the military. They are useful, so maybe they should be self-funding too.
You really do not want to go there.
Why wouldn't you want them to be self funding ? Police/military/Fire/emergency services could all be funded by insurance policies.
Internet time depends on infrastructure that can fail in a variety of ways that radio isn't vulnerable to. It's very useful, but has its limitations. GPS isn't vulnerable in the way internet-based infrastructure is. However, it's difficult to receive a GPS signal in many places that shortwave radio can still be received. It isn't redundant infrastructure.
Redundant infrastructure is exactly what you have described. It's a pain in the rear to get WWV devices to work in general and you will need an antenna where either can't be received.
Yeah, sure. And let's replace the National Weather Service with The Weather Channel because hey, it's self-funding. And we could replace libraries with book stores too. And eventually you'll miss the point of why taxpayer-funded projects exist at all.
Why do they exist at all ? Looking at California they exist so politicians can rob the public blind and do everything they can to encourage people to leave the state.
The weather service is something that could easily self fund, there's actually a large number of private services that sell their product on the basis of doing a better job.
Between Franklin and Carnegie libraries were privately funded, and just out of curiosity when was the last time you used one ?
Because it turns out having privately funded road, health, education, and defense systems are bad for various reasons. This extends out to other areas, like some branches of science.
Most of the devices mentioned use WWVB which I understand will continue to operate. It is the shortwave signal, WWV and WWVH that will be terminated.
Because it turns out having privately funded road, health, education, and defense systems are bad for various reasons. This extends out to other areas, like some branches of science.
Seems public funding isn't that great either. Matter of fact private schools are so much better that parents are willing to pay absurd amounts of money to send their kids to them. Toll roads work pretty well, and most of the problems with the medical system stem from the government limiting the supply of doctors.
There are 2 services
WWV + WWVH - which the NIST cut from their own budget. This is mostly the classic "At the tone, the time will be XXX", but includes some electromagnetic propagation reports etc. There are some tones with phase shift data
WWVB - The BINARY format version, which is NOT on the chopping block, and IS widely used!!
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
WWV/WWVH are outdated and were replaced by WWVB... so nothing of value seems lost.
It's all part of the process...
private schools are so much better that parents are willing to pay absurd amounts of money to send their kids to them
If public schools had access to the same absurd amount of money, they would be better too.
Only if it's mismanaged. Most western countries don't have the same problems as the US with their public health and education systems. You'd really be in favor of having all roads be toll roads? Including the one your house is on?
Mandatory insurance? Or when people call in to 911 for police or fire insurance, do they need to have their credit card ready?
If the former, well, we already have that, it's called 'taxes.' If the latter, well, it already works that way in quite a few places in America, and it's terrible.
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You like the "free market", right?
Hypocrite...
Unfortunately, it's NOT a free market. The low wages are subsidized by a host of benefit programs for housing, food, medical care, and what passes for education for the families of the underpaid "undocumented" workers; by effective waivers of minimum wage laws, workplace safety rules, working hour enforcement, auto insurance requirements, and so on.
Citizens and legal residents who WOULD be willing to do those jobs, even at the low pay, need not apply: The employers can't employ them on those terms, since they could later demand the remainder of the legal minimum pay and enforcement of working conditions. Better for the employer to pay cash and, if the worker were crazy enough to gripe, report him to la migra.
It's a government welfare program for large employers and corporations, not for the common man. We pay for it in taxes for direct programs. We pay for it in lowered wages and higher unemployment. We pay for it in astronomically higher health care costs. We pay for it in higher auto insurance rates. We pay for it in low quality education of our children in public schools or by paying private school tutition in addition to our school taxes. We pay for it in shoddy work that has to be redone.
And the next time you hire someone to install a new roof on your house, or put in a new driveway, you're going with the more expensive contractor who doesn't hire illegals, right?
Tried that. In our area we weren't able to find any. When the laws aren't enforced, in a highly competitive market like contracting the businesses are divided into two groups: Those who hire "undocumented" workers, and those who are out of business. So even the licensed, bonded, high-rep, high quality contractors use illegal immigrants. (We know of one exception - in Oregon. He hires only citizens and other legals. And he makes his living fixing up the botch jobs done by the shadier subset of contractors and the "out of a truck - can't find them when it falls apart" "contractors" from the hardware store parking lots.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The best quartz watch I had lost a little less than a second a month. Then I got too greedy and killed the golden goose - tried adjusting the quartz timing mechanism myself. After that I could never get it below 2 seconds of drift per month. What I didn't realize until it was too late was that as the error gets smaller, you have to wait longer between each adjustment (weeks) to determine if you had improved it or overshot.
Which is why, if you want to trim a watch crystal, you use a frequency counter against the 32,768 oscillator output. One second per month is one cycle per three seconds of error, so you can get a measurement better than that in a few seconds.
And you trim the frequency counter's reference by similarly using a radio to hear the "beat" of its reference oscillator output or spurious emissions against a WWV carrier. At 10 MHz a second-per-month accuracy would be about 90 beats per second.
(I seem to recall that there is, or was, at least one time reference transmitter at a power-of-two Hz that you could beat directly against harmonics from a watch. But I didn't find a reference to such a signal in a few minutes of net searching.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Trump likely has no fucking idea what the NIST does but he's willing to kill their budget. Fucking brilliant.
Everyone seems to think that GPS is the be-all/end-all solution for navigation and timing, but it just isn't - and redundancy is a critical infrastructure need. Perhaps NIST should pay more attention at what's transpiring with LORAN, which may be resurrected (heck, NIST even volunteered to help with the chips for eLORAN, look in your own backyard guys!) Or go hit up the Department of Transportation for a few bucks, in case the "National Timing Resilience and Security Act of 2017" ever passes - WWV/WWVH would seem to count as an alternate source of timing.
I remember finding WWV by chance when I got my first shortwave receiver as a kid, I probably still have my postcard from them up in the attic somewhere.
Explain to me why all appliances don't have self-setting clocks.
Radio time signals have been around for decades. Yet, almost every appliance with a clock needs to be manually set and adjusted. Would "self-setting clock" not be a prized marketing feature? Is it expensive or difficult to add time signal compatibility? Why is the year 2018 and I still need to manually adjust the clock on my microwave oven?
They would add ads every minute and self-promotions. "WWV all the time all the time", "This minute brought to you by Coca-Cola",.......
As a matter of national defense: the radio time sync is invaluable in the event that technology fails the nation or is compromised over a large area. Its kind of like the ham radio requirement (now gone) that anybody with a ham radio license be able to magyver a radio from a lot of wire and old bits of junk.
The more basic failsafe options we abandon, the more fragile our emergency response options become.
20 percent of last years graduating class had Amateur tickets.
Graduating class? "What" graduating class. Ham radio doesn't have a "Graduating class" Do you mean new or upgrade licenses?
And why focus on the Amateur tickets, that's the highest level isn't it? Isn't the Technician license the one new hams would get?
And the ARRL itself says numbers are a problem, sure there's been some increase in new hams but the number of licenses going away via expiration or "Silent keys" is also going up.
http://www.arrl.org/news/more-...
And I guess the hams on slashdot/websites/forums saying the hobby is graying and declining are wrong? I know someone who goes to Hamvention and has said themselves that the hobby is aging and in decline.
Why yes, but the US population is much higher than it was in 1914 when the ARRL was founded. 92 million or so versus over 308 million, So it's going to be higher, but what matters is the percentage. there's what, 752000 or so? That's not even 1 percent of the US population. How many of those are truly active and not people who've given up on the hobby due to age/money/time.
Sure the influx of cheap chinese equipment has helped...heck I've thought about picking up one of those 2 meter handhelds just to see what the Slashdot hams talk about. But there are ZERO license classes within 50 miles.
I can google and see a ton of blog posts and articles from hams saying how there's less activity and talking about how their friends are going "silent key" more and more.
The Hobby of Ham Radio is not a healthy one, maybe the ARRL needs to get more class sites and test sites out there. And it doesn't help the disdain some hams have for new people or for people who aren't one of those more affluent hams who can blow thousands of dollars on gear. Would you be one of those showing disdain for a new ham with one of those Baofeng BF-F8HP's
Although I omitted WWVB in the summary I submitted, there's no information that it wouldn't be included in the general statement:
...including the shutdown of NIST radio stations in Colorado and Hawaii.
Because WWVB is in Colorado [ https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-... ].
Unless "often" is some vanishingly small percentage, that's completely false.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/04/the-failures-of-for-profit-k-12-schools/
I guess while democracy dies in darkness facts die at the post
https://www.moneycrashers.com/...
private schools are so much better that parents are willing to pay absurd amounts of money to send their kids to them
If public schools had access to the same absurd amount of money, they would be better too.
Ignorant and stupid is no way to go through life son
https://www.moneycrashers.com/...
Public schools spend more and have worse results.
The road my house is on is owned by my home owners association and is maintained by dues and assessments.
So yes it does work well.
Mandatory insurance? Or when people call in to 911 for police or fire insurance, do they need to have their credit card ready?
If the former, well, we already have that, it's called 'taxes.' If the latter, well, it already works that way in quite a few places in America, and it's terrible.
It's terrible, the fact free diatribe of the brainwashed. Anyway if you want other people to make a profession out of being ready to help you why shouldn't you pay them for it ?
The idea that people should pay for what they use is so triggering it's considered flamebait.
The idea that people should get the government they're paying for, instead of the robber barons and other members of the leisure class, is apparently triggering you.
“We all too often have socialism for the rich, and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.” Martin Luther King Jr.
I'd be very happy to not get the government I pay for. Having elected officials being able to profit off of selling parts of the country to foreign powers, leaves me cold. The funding of "public education" to teach kids if they can shut up people they don't like it somehow makes their reasoning correct, just makes me happy I own guns.
Or just reading this thread, and the hypocrisy of people who would gladly burn books arguing how great public libraries are.
Since the original claim was a general statement about GPS not being a complete replacement of WWV, one specific counterexample doesn't really counter it. Any more than a claim that an astronaut who 'drops' a 50 pound weight on his foot doesn't get hurt doesn't really counter the statement "if you drop a weight 50 pound on your foot, it'll hurt." since for the other 99.99999% of us living on Earth, it will.
It would be more of a counter if the claim was "GPS can never be recieved inside any structure".
Do you really think I didn't check the ARRL before writing that? I could take the test closer though. It does surprise me that there aren't any classes/tests in the nearest college town. And bog knows what the local repeater situation is, I've only done a quick check but have seen only one listed and it appears to be offline.
So I'm rather disinclined to join the hobby for those and other reasons.
They do get paid, via taxes, in a group insurance setup.
Because things like fire, police, and health care are something that are commonly needed, but nobody quite knows when or where, it makes FAR more sense to charge everybody a little bit, then to charge rich people a lot, and deny service to people who can't afford it, or worse, to require them to provide the service anyway, forcing them to recoup their costs in other ways.
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They do get paid, via taxes, in a group insurance setup.
Because things like fire, police, and health care are something that are commonly needed, but nobody quite knows when or where, it makes FAR more sense to charge everybody a little bit, then to charge rich people a lot, and deny service to people who can't afford it, or worse, to require them to provide the service anyway, forcing them to recoup their costs in other ways.
Taxes don't charge rich people proportionately more. Matter of fact taxes shift most of the burden to the middle class. Insurance would tax people according to their need and their desire to protect what they have.
Optional insurance would either a) leave people unprotected, either because they're too stupid to buy insurance, or because they can't afford it, b) increase prices because you have a smaller pool of people to spread it out across, and c) probably result in higher prices because in practice, it would be treated like emergency care is now; they HAVE to treat you, but somebody's still gotta pay, and if it's not you, it's everybody else who IS paying for it.
The postulate here is that BECAUSE EVERYBODY will need emergency services at some point in their life, be it directly (your house is on fire) or indirectly (your neighbour's house is on fire, it would be awfully nice if it got dealt with before it spread to the whole neighbourhood) it's both cheaper, more efficient, and more humane, to just have everybody pay a bit into the fund to pay for those services, and for everybody to have access to them.
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That's not a toll road, that's actually socialist tax.
A toll road would require anyone driving on it, including people coming to visit you, to pay per use.
Words have meanings
Tax a compulsory contribution to state revenue, levied by the government on workers' income and business profits or added to the cost of some goods, services, and transactions.
maybe you can come back when you know what a tax is
a) leave people unprotected, either because they're too stupid to buy insurance, or because they can't afford it,
My how do people get through the day without you telling them what to do ?
Shutting down WWV* in the near term is bad.
Recommending shutting down WWV* in the near term is brilliant.
Shutting down WWV* in the long term is a reasonable possibility to consider.
Shutting down WWV* in the near term is bad.
Many things depend on them, without having time, plan, or anything leading to reducing dependency on them, by switching to the available alternatives.
Recommending shutting down WWV* in the near term is brilliant.
NIST and WWV* have very little in the way of name recognition let alone appreciation. Does the packaging on products that rely on WWV* mention WWV or NIST? Usually they call themselves "Atomic clocks" or say that they rely on radio signals, without saying from who or where.
The controversy raised by the recommendation will serve to raise awareness of the value provided by NIST to the USA and the world.
Shutting down WWV* in the long term is a reasonable possibility to consider.
There is an alternative radio time signal. Using signals from several satellites, GPS receivers figure out the time to within 100 ns. I believe this is more accurate than WWV* receivers can accomplish, due to propagation variations and not knowing where they are. Less expensive and lower power receivers could get just time at accuracy a little better WWV* receivers.
Who pays for replacing devices? In the consumer space, countries handle this for analog TV, and in some countries, AM and FM radio.
In both consumer and commercial space, vendors often drop support for older technologies: New applications that don't run on older hardware. Phones that don't get OS upgrades. Software that doesn't get security updates, etc.
What about technology that many users do not pay for, or at least not directly? This starts with non-toll roads funded by taxes & registration fees and extends through DNS to search engines funded by advertisements.
What obliges the provider of that technology to continue to do so at its own expense or when its funding runs out?
Is it reasonable for the transmitter of a streaming broadcast to encrypt it and charge a fee for the decryption key? Satellite and cable TV operators operate that way. Non-military GPS could become a fee service.
Compulsory dues are akin to a tax, the only difference is who is collecting it.
You focus on a word instead of the argument made... Congratulations: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.c...
Ah, now we're into the ad hominems. Excellent.
All you need to do is look at outcomes in insurance-optional regimes; say, American healthcare, versus outcomes in non-optional regimes, say, every other first-world country's healthcare.
Answer: in the non-optional countries, costs are lower, effectiveness is higher, lives are longer.
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a) leave people unprotected, either because they're too stupid to buy insurance, or because they can't afford it,
Yes ad hominem indeed. I mean there has to be a specific logical fallacy of deciding that entire groups of people don't know what's best for them.
All you need to do is look at outcomes in insurance-optional regimes;
Pre or post WWII ? Pre or Post Obamacare ?
It seems everytime we take decision making power away from people prices skyrocket.
Compulsory dues are akin to a tax,
Yes and paying my gardener is a tax by that reasoning, and paying my electric bill is a tax.
You focus on a word instead of the argument made.
Don't blame me because you can't say what you mean, and get upset when people respond to what you actually said.
It's established fact that people, by and large, are irrational, tend to make poor decisions, or make the best decisions they can based on the information they have available, but that information is incorrect, incomplete, or inaccurately interpreted.
Again, American healthcare is ridiculously fucked up, and if Obamacare had been straight-up single payer, things would have been different. Like every other country that does it. There's a reason Americans want cheap Canadian drugs. And I'll admit, there's a reason Canadians sometimes go to America to pay for non-critical surgery rather than wait their turn.
Nevertheless, in Canada, needing surgery never involves sitting down and deciding if you can afford the procedure, or if you need to just suffer whatever the surgery would correct.
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It's established fact that people, by and large, are irrational, tend to make poor decisions,
It is ? wow somehow civilization got built before you came along and will go on after you are out of the picture.
Again, American healthcare is ridiculously fucked up, and if Obamacare had been straight-up single payer, things would have been different
Yes it would have been much much worse. For someone who thinks the mass of people is stupid, you seem to suffer from magical thinking. Obamacare didn't add one doctor or one hospital bed to the system, there was no way prices would come down. Single payer would have had doctors retiring or going pay for service for the people that could afford it.
So why does socialized healthcare work in so many other countries?
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Well for one thing they have us footing the bill for pharmaceutical research.