Twenty years ago, people were saying the same thing about Internet bulletin boards, talkers, and MUDs becoming interactive video experiences. They were wrong then, and they're just as wrong now. The core problem isn't a technological issue; it's a biological one.
Allow me to explain. When you have a dozen friends, videos are a great way to keep in touch. When each friend posts a couple minutes worth of video every day, you're spending thirty minutes per day watching the video clips, which is doable... barely. By the time your friend count crosses into triple digits, it becomes infeasible. At a couple hundred friends, if everyone posted a couple of minutes of video every day instead of their normal text-based status messages, the average person's news feed would be unmanageable unless you quit your job and did nothing but watch Facebook clips all day long.
Text is simply orders of magnitude faster than video when it comes to consuming, filtering, and processing information quickly. And it is not possible to change that reality, because humans are not biologically capable of processing audio and video at the same speed that they can skim blocks of text. I mean, ostensibly they could perfect speech recognition, and could provide a text-based summary of the clip, which you could skim, but then why would anyone watch the video clip?
No, I can't foresee a future in which people will use video on Facebook orders of magnitude more than they already do. It is just too inefficient to be an effective means of communication. People will continue to use video (with descriptions) when they want to show something cool, but they'll continue to mostly use text for actual broadcast-style communication, because it just works way too much better than any other form of communication.
Many of my younger friends (the ones who aren't in college yet) keep trying to get me to join Vine. I think they also use Twitter and Instagram. I couldn't say whether any one of those qualifies as the Facebook of that generation, though.
On the flip side, just about everybody I know who is college age is on Facebook, because they come in as freshmen and find that all the sophomores, juniors, and seniors are on Facebook. Rinse and repeat with each successive year.
And that's where I think TFA gets it wrong. Network Neutrality cannot be about prioritizing one kind of traffic over another. The ISP's already lack the incentive to add more bandwidth. Even though that bandwidth is what they are selling. Allowing them to prioritize traffic means that they will be more incentivized to NOT add more bandwidth.
That was the problem that Netflix had with Comcast. And once Netflix coughed up some money, Comcast instantly found more bandwidth.
The problem that Netflix had with Comcast is that Comcast's own video-on-demand service was unaffected by the lack of bandwidth. If it had been, they would have magically found the bandwidth a long time ago. There's nothing wrong with prioritizing traffic based on content, so long as it is done even-handedly.
But at its core, the real problem in that particular case (and, for that matter, in most cases) is not a lack of net neutrality, but rather with monopoly abuse by the established cable and telco cartels. Comcast should not be allowed to have a video-on-demand service that competes against Netflix unless it divests itself of its wire infrastructure monopoly, because there is no feasible way to regulate Comcast in such a way that they can't take advantage of their government-granted wire monopoly to gain an unfair advantage over Netflix and others.
What this means is that at its deepest, the problem is not net neutrality at all, but rather an incompetent federal government that has been hopelessly lax at antitrust regulation for decades, and that needs to get off its lazy @$$ and impose common carrier provisions for communications infrastructure providers so that they'll no longer be allowed to simultaneously be content providers. One tiny change to the Federal Communications Act, and all these problems would be solved. Instantly. And we wouldn't even need to explain net neutrality to a bunch of computer-illiterate legislators to do it!
Not the "HD" part, but the whole: "why do I have to wait for broadcast when I can just download whatever I want. Everything should be on-demand."
Indeed. I wrote about it as part of a college scholarship application about 20 years ago. And it was obvious even way back then, including the HD part. The only things that weren't obvious were what HD-quality video would actually mean resolution-wise (because the standards were still in development), what sort of compression would be used, and what sort of networking hardware would be capable of delivering the necessary bandwidth.
Even before eternal September, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that high-definition video-on-demand content would be delivered over the Internet, and that it would bring about the gradual demise of broadcast and cable TV. Anybody who didn't recognize that inevitability back when gopher and NNTP were still popular was either not paying attention to the Internet yet or suffered from a serious lack of vision (or both).
That said, I expected fiber to the curb by 2005 or so, and I'm still waiting. I guess I didn't realize just how hard the entrenched monopoly interests would fight to preserve a doomed business model. But I digress.
This. Unfortunately, politicians and news media seem to lack the technical understanding to grasp this concept, as simple as it might seem to you or me, so here's a simple breakdown of what network neutrality is and is not, expressed using car analogies, for the technologically clueless:
The Internet is like a series of highways, interconnected. Your ISP is like a car dealer that sells you a vehicle that you can drive on those highways.
Under network neutrality, you can get in your car and drive somewhere, and your car gets roughly the same priority as every other car. However, if an ambulance comes, you still have to pull over to the side of the road, because the ambulance (a real-time video stream) getting to the heart attack victim (a video player) a few seconds sooner is more important than you getting to Wal-Mart (a web page) a few minutes sooner. Similarly, if you're driving a truck (bulk data), you might be delayed occasionally to make room for passenger cars.
With network neutrality, different roads have different speed limits (bandwidth). And automobile dealers (ISPs) can charge you more money for cars that can go faster, to take maximum advantage of those speed limits on distant roads.
With network neutrality, however, if your car dealer's owner also owns a grocery store, he or she cannot install a limiter that limits your car to 35 MPH when driving to a competing grocery store unless it also limits your car when driving to his or her own grocery store. Similarly, he or she cannot install a rocket engine that gives your car a speed boost when driving to his or her grocery store without designing it to also give the same boost when driving to other local grocery stores.
You do realize just how trivial it is today to generate lists of people and their addresses that are not likely to vote?
That's completely and utterly irrelevant. If you're even bringing up that issue, it means you completely misread what I said, which was that the people on the list are all legitimate voters, not the people voting under those names.
In fact, the very next paragraph began with "So assuming you live in one of the 33 states that require some form of ID...". If you couldn't read past the first paragraph before jumping to an invalid conclusion about what I said, I see little need to read past your first sentence to determine that you're wrong.
With that said, on the issue of voter ID laws, those are mostly unnecessary. Why? Because you only have to be wrong once, and then you're absolutely screwed, as in a felony conviction with a multi-year jail sentence. Nobody in his or her right mind would try to pull off a conspiracy of that sort, particularly given how likely it is that you'd get caught. After all, there would be witnesses to any such crime who could likely identify you, and you'd probably be on at least one security camera near the polling place, which means if you were wrong about that person not voting, your mug shot would end up on the evening news with a high degree of probability.
But again, I made perfectly clear in the original post that I don't have any objection to them making that airtight by assigning photo IDs for voting. (Such a system should, however, be entirely separate from drivers' licenses so that the database can be readily accessed by poll workers to look up voters by name and address if they forget to bring their cards.)
Article I, section 8.10 of the Constitution: "To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations" meaning that once you leave coastal waters you are explicitly under Federal jurisdiction.
Arguably, it says that the federal government is allowed to prosecute international law violations and serious offenses like felonies and piracy, but not penny-ante fishing regulations.
“What kind of a mad prosecutor would try to send him up for 20 years?” Justice Scalia asked.
Well, there are plenty of examples he can ask that question. Many other victims of mad prosecutors weren't so lucky, like Aaron Swartz.
And unfortunately, the fact that the chief justices don't seem to be aware that this is happening with alarming regularity is a big part of the reason that their decisions lately have seemed to side with just the sorts of mad prosecutors that do such things, with equally alarming regularity.
I do not believe that inventing the stupidest possible interpretation of a law and enforcing it with vigor is a very good approach.
I actually think perhaps we should. If enough Congresspeople got nailed for Sarbox violations every time they said something potentially libelous in their political speeches and then threw out a printed copy of those speeches, they would either start to improve upon the utterly excremental quality of legislation that they currently write and pass with regularity or end up in jail, making room for people with a little common sense to fill their seats. Either way, IMO, it's a win-win.
And if you can make it past that part, some of SJ's best ad lib followed just moments thereafter. His slide remote died, and he went into an anecdote about Woz and a TV jammer.
Yeah, no argument there. But I know better than to say, "how could they possibly do it worse" because as soon as I say that and go see it, there's a strong chance I'll find out.
I'm expecting a death star with a big round indentation and two smaller indentations to the upper left and right of it.
That and a shot of the Senate in which you can see Donald Duck in one of the distant seats.
And only open voting takes care of outright fraud (other than coercion, which is trivial with today's systems anyway, but almost unheard of). You can run reports on voters/votes after the elections and find the dead people/ineligible voters after the election, and remove just their votes.
Ineligible voters are a red herring. The way voting works is basically immune to ineligible voters, assuming a modicum of competence. To vote, you have to provide your name and address, which is cross-referenced against a list of known-eligible voters. Everyone who is on the voter list should be a legitimate voter. If they aren't, that's incompetence on the part of the people administering the voter roll, and is unlikely to be caught after the fact but before it would be too late to invalidate the votes anyway. If you are not on the list, you can vote provisionally. Provisional ballots are not anonymous (or at least they aren't supposed to be), and are validated before the vote is counted.
So assuming you live in one of the 33 states that require some form of ID, the only feasible way to game the system as it is currently designed would be to have a bunch of people vote provisionally for people they don't think will vote, and hope that they don't get caught, and hope that the people really don't vote. But that would be taking a *very* big personal risk. And even in the 17 states that don't require ID, it would still be taking a very big personal risk.
With that said, you can make it absolutely airtight by issuing free national photo voter IDs to everyone and electronically tracking whether they have been used in a particular election. If someone forgets his or her card, the polling place could look up the person by name and last registered address, then compare the photo. And you're done. There's no legitimate reason to tie that identifier to a vote at all. Even better, such a scheme would also eliminate the need to go to a particular polling place, in theory, assuming a hypothetical universal voting machine that could handle ballots for different districts... but I digress.
You also get a feature impossible today. It's possible to have a spoiled ballot not caught by the tabulating machine. How is that handled on a recount? With open voting the voter can correct a cast vote that's counted incorrectly. Today you can never know how your vote is counted.
Again, that's just as easily handled in other ways. It just requires voters to perform a two-stage voting process.
Step 1: Cast your ballot on an electronic voting machine. The voting machine prints a paper ballot with both human-readable information and a high-density bar code.
Step 2: Scan your ballot on a second machine in a separate booth. This machine ingests the ballot and displays a voting confirmation. After scanning the list, you push "accept" or "reject". If you push "accept", it keeps the paper ballot as a backup. If you push "reject", it spits the ballot back out. You then return to a voting machine, scan the ballot to invalidate it, and recast your vote. That machine prints "rejected" on the cancelled ballot and keeps it for auditing purposes.
This scheme has the advantage of providing instantaneous vote totals, while providing a fully auditable paper trail. And if you want even more robustness, the voting machines would also have an independent electronic log of all the ballots, including any invalidations thereof. When you play back the combined logs of the original voting machines, you should get the same number as you get when you play back the combined logs of the scanner machines.
More importantly, this prevents a problem that your approach could cause, depending on how you implement it—people changing their vote after the fact for reasons other than actual errors (e.g. voting for a third-party candidate, then change your vote because an undesirable candidate looks like he or she is in the lead because of the third-party candidate taking votes away from the less undesirable candidate), which could lead to arbitrarily long delays before you really know who the winner is.
Nice talking point, but it's inaccurate. There's a huge difference between being against people using birth control and being against paying for someone else's birth control.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying I hold that position at all. I was merely clarifying what I believed to be the previous poster's assertion.
The Pill costs about $8 for a month's supply without a prescription, and it isn't free with the copay required with insurance. Making it OTC would lower the cost from $8/month.
Actually, for those varieties, it would probably would have little effect on the price. That's lower than nearly anyone's copay, so the insurance company doesn't pay a penny of it; it just contributes towards the maximum total out-of-pocket cost, which most people young enough to need birth control are unlikely to ever reach anyway. At best, there's the extra overhead caused by the pharmacist handling it, but that's replaced with the extra cost of retail packaging and small-quantity shipping instead of bulk packaging, so I'd expect folks to roughly break even unless the OTC availability encourages other companies to start making the product in expectation of a surge in sales because young people won't have to ask their doctor, and even then, I doubt more competition will have a huge effect on the price.
Taking something that costs less than $10 per month and removing an upfront cost is NOT "reducing access" in any meaningful way.
Although you can get birth control pills for $8 per month from some locations, that's based on the price from (IIRC) Target, which mostly has a retail presence in medium to large cities. In rural areas, the average price is higher.
But even if we assume that such cheap prices are ubiquitous, that cheapness still only applies to standard birth control pills. For people who aren't able to take those for whatever reason, and have to take the more expensive varieties, that's not necessarily true. It depends on where they decide to draw the line for OTC status. And if the FDA makes the cheap stuff available OTC (which they probably should, to be perfectly honest), there's a good chance that Republicans will use that as an excuse to push for removing mandatory insurance coverage for the other varieties that aren't cheap, many of which have medical uses beyond birth control.
At least one engineer recommended against the launch for precisely that reason. He was overruled. I guess the military uses for that TDRS payload were more important than safety....
Like damn near everyone who wants to reduce the power of lobbyists, you have no fucking clue what makes them powerful. Lobbyists are not powerful because of Secret Plans. Their political donations help, but if just having a lot of money to donate guaranteed success we would have a second privately-owned span over the Detroit River rather then the DRIC project. They are powerful because they have the resources to participate in every single debate Congress ever has in a very meaningful way. They can send a dude to every Subcommittee meeting and have a very high-level discussion over whether obscure proposal X would hurt them. The People, as a body, have extremely limited bandwidth; and most of the time a lot of it is taken up by things that Congress has no control over.
A big part of that is because Congress meets physically in one place, far away from the governed. If Congress became virtual, the balance would tip significantly back towards the people. And it would also make it possible for Congress to do some actual work during the election cycle.
With that said, I agree with you about 180 days being too long, but not for that reason. There are a lot of bills, such as disaster relief bills, that simply cannot wait 180 days.
I think the point was that Republicans were suddenly in favor of it because the rules were forcing them to pay for it. Unless explicitly prescribed to treat a medical condition, insurance companies don't pay for OTC medication.
As a rule, U.S. conservatives have been against birth control. The recent turn appears to be motivated by preventing them from having to pay for it, and decreasing access (by making it more expensive for the consumer), rather than wanting to increase access as you seem to assume.
Most people don't get to choose their work hours. I realize that in high tech, folks insist on flexible work hours, but it isn't the norm in most industries, because most businesses are customer-centric, which tends to result in fairly rigid work hours built around when those customers need them.
Indeed, that's what this whole thread was about—adding DST in the winter, too, so that you'll have more light at the end of the day. Most folks who want all-year DST want it so that they'll still have daylight when driving home during the winter.
This entire thread was in response to a comment in the summary, which mentioned wanting to keep DST all year 'round because the submitter wanted more light at the end of the day. So taken in the proper context, what I said makes a lot more sense than it does when taken out of context.:-)
Then wake up earlier! Futzing around with the clock doesn't change the length of the day. I loose a little more respect for the entire human race every year when I have to hear "more sunlight in the evening" again.
Umm... that doesn't change the time when people get off work. The reason most people want more light at the end of the day is so they don't have to drive home in the dark.
Slashdot Mirror
Twenty years ago, people were saying the same thing about Internet bulletin boards, talkers, and MUDs becoming interactive video experiences. They were wrong then, and they're just as wrong now. The core problem isn't a technological issue; it's a biological one.
Allow me to explain. When you have a dozen friends, videos are a great way to keep in touch. When each friend posts a couple minutes worth of video every day, you're spending thirty minutes per day watching the video clips, which is doable... barely. By the time your friend count crosses into triple digits, it becomes infeasible. At a couple hundred friends, if everyone posted a couple of minutes of video every day instead of their normal text-based status messages, the average person's news feed would be unmanageable unless you quit your job and did nothing but watch Facebook clips all day long.
Text is simply orders of magnitude faster than video when it comes to consuming, filtering, and processing information quickly. And it is not possible to change that reality, because humans are not biologically capable of processing audio and video at the same speed that they can skim blocks of text. I mean, ostensibly they could perfect speech recognition, and could provide a text-based summary of the clip, which you could skim, but then why would anyone watch the video clip?
No, I can't foresee a future in which people will use video on Facebook orders of magnitude more than they already do. It is just too inefficient to be an effective means of communication. People will continue to use video (with descriptions) when they want to show something cool, but they'll continue to mostly use text for actual broadcast-style communication, because it just works way too much better than any other form of communication.
Many of my younger friends (the ones who aren't in college yet) keep trying to get me to join Vine. I think they also use Twitter and Instagram. I couldn't say whether any one of those qualifies as the Facebook of that generation, though.
On the flip side, just about everybody I know who is college age is on Facebook, because they come in as freshmen and find that all the sophomores, juniors, and seniors are on Facebook. Rinse and repeat with each successive year.
The problem that Netflix had with Comcast is that Comcast's own video-on-demand service was unaffected by the lack of bandwidth. If it had been, they would have magically found the bandwidth a long time ago. There's nothing wrong with prioritizing traffic based on content, so long as it is done even-handedly.
But at its core, the real problem in that particular case (and, for that matter, in most cases) is not a lack of net neutrality, but rather with monopoly abuse by the established cable and telco cartels. Comcast should not be allowed to have a video-on-demand service that competes against Netflix unless it divests itself of its wire infrastructure monopoly, because there is no feasible way to regulate Comcast in such a way that they can't take advantage of their government-granted wire monopoly to gain an unfair advantage over Netflix and others.
What this means is that at its deepest, the problem is not net neutrality at all, but rather an incompetent federal government that has been hopelessly lax at antitrust regulation for decades, and that needs to get off its lazy @$$ and impose common carrier provisions for communications infrastructure providers so that they'll no longer be allowed to simultaneously be content providers. One tiny change to the Federal Communications Act, and all these problems would be solved. Instantly. And we wouldn't even need to explain net neutrality to a bunch of computer-illiterate legislators to do it!
Indeed. I wrote about it as part of a college scholarship application about 20 years ago. And it was obvious even way back then, including the HD part. The only things that weren't obvious were what HD-quality video would actually mean resolution-wise (because the standards were still in development), what sort of compression would be used, and what sort of networking hardware would be capable of delivering the necessary bandwidth.
Even before eternal September, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that high-definition video-on-demand content would be delivered over the Internet, and that it would bring about the gradual demise of broadcast and cable TV. Anybody who didn't recognize that inevitability back when gopher and NNTP were still popular was either not paying attention to the Internet yet or suffered from a serious lack of vision (or both).
That said, I expected fiber to the curb by 2005 or so, and I'm still waiting. I guess I didn't realize just how hard the entrenched monopoly interests would fight to preserve a doomed business model. But I digress.
This. Unfortunately, politicians and news media seem to lack the technical understanding to grasp this concept, as simple as it might seem to you or me, so here's a simple breakdown of what network neutrality is and is not, expressed using car analogies, for the technologically clueless:
The Internet is like a series of highways, interconnected. Your ISP is like a car dealer that sells you a vehicle that you can drive on those highways.
Under network neutrality, you can get in your car and drive somewhere, and your car gets roughly the same priority as every other car. However, if an ambulance comes, you still have to pull over to the side of the road, because the ambulance (a real-time video stream) getting to the heart attack victim (a video player) a few seconds sooner is more important than you getting to Wal-Mart (a web page) a few minutes sooner. Similarly, if you're driving a truck (bulk data), you might be delayed occasionally to make room for passenger cars.
With network neutrality, different roads have different speed limits (bandwidth). And automobile dealers (ISPs) can charge you more money for cars that can go faster, to take maximum advantage of those speed limits on distant roads.
With network neutrality, however, if your car dealer's owner also owns a grocery store, he or she cannot install a limiter that limits your car to 35 MPH when driving to a competing grocery store unless it also limits your car when driving to his or her own grocery store. Similarly, he or she cannot install a rocket engine that gives your car a speed boost when driving to his or her grocery store without designing it to also give the same boost when driving to other local grocery stores.
That's completely and utterly irrelevant. If you're even bringing up that issue, it means you completely misread what I said, which was that the people on the list are all legitimate voters, not the people voting under those names.
In fact, the very next paragraph began with "So assuming you live in one of the 33 states that require some form of ID...". If you couldn't read past the first paragraph before jumping to an invalid conclusion about what I said, I see little need to read past your first sentence to determine that you're wrong.
With that said, on the issue of voter ID laws, those are mostly unnecessary. Why? Because you only have to be wrong once, and then you're absolutely screwed, as in a felony conviction with a multi-year jail sentence. Nobody in his or her right mind would try to pull off a conspiracy of that sort, particularly given how likely it is that you'd get caught. After all, there would be witnesses to any such crime who could likely identify you, and you'd probably be on at least one security camera near the polling place, which means if you were wrong about that person not voting, your mug shot would end up on the evening news with a high degree of probability.
But again, I made perfectly clear in the original post that I don't have any objection to them making that airtight by assigning photo IDs for voting. (Such a system should, however, be entirely separate from drivers' licenses so that the database can be readily accessed by poll workers to look up voters by name and address if they forget to bring their cards.)
Arguably, it says that the federal government is allowed to prosecute international law violations and serious offenses like felonies and piracy, but not penny-ante fishing regulations.
And unfortunately, the fact that the chief justices don't seem to be aware that this is happening with alarming regularity is a big part of the reason that their decisions lately have seemed to side with just the sorts of mad prosecutors that do such things, with equally alarming regularity.
I actually think perhaps we should. If enough Congresspeople got nailed for Sarbox violations every time they said something potentially libelous in their political speeches and then threw out a printed copy of those speeches, they would either start to improve upon the utterly excremental quality of legislation that they currently write and pass with regularity or end up in jail, making room for people with a little common sense to fill their seats. Either way, IMO, it's a win-win.
And if you can make it past that part, some of SJ's best ad lib followed just moments thereafter. His slide remote died, and he went into an anecdote about Woz and a TV jammer.
Including or not including that "The new AT&T" guy? (Starts at 1:32:35.)
I'm expecting a death star with a big round indentation and two smaller indentations to the upper left and right of it.
That and a shot of the Senate in which you can see Donald Duck in one of the distant seats.
Ineligible voters are a red herring. The way voting works is basically immune to ineligible voters, assuming a modicum of competence. To vote, you have to provide your name and address, which is cross-referenced against a list of known-eligible voters. Everyone who is on the voter list should be a legitimate voter. If they aren't, that's incompetence on the part of the people administering the voter roll, and is unlikely to be caught after the fact but before it would be too late to invalidate the votes anyway. If you are not on the list, you can vote provisionally. Provisional ballots are not anonymous (or at least they aren't supposed to be), and are validated before the vote is counted.
So assuming you live in one of the 33 states that require some form of ID, the only feasible way to game the system as it is currently designed would be to have a bunch of people vote provisionally for people they don't think will vote, and hope that they don't get caught, and hope that the people really don't vote. But that would be taking a *very* big personal risk. And even in the 17 states that don't require ID, it would still be taking a very big personal risk.
With that said, you can make it absolutely airtight by issuing free national photo voter IDs to everyone and electronically tracking whether they have been used in a particular election. If someone forgets his or her card, the polling place could look up the person by name and last registered address, then compare the photo. And you're done. There's no legitimate reason to tie that identifier to a vote at all. Even better, such a scheme would also eliminate the need to go to a particular polling place, in theory, assuming a hypothetical universal voting machine that could handle ballots for different districts... but I digress.
Again, that's just as easily handled in other ways. It just requires voters to perform a two-stage voting process.
This scheme has the advantage of providing instantaneous vote totals, while providing a fully auditable paper trail. And if you want even more robustness, the voting machines would also have an independent electronic log of all the ballots, including any invalidations thereof. When you play back the combined logs of the original voting machines, you should get the same number as you get when you play back the combined logs of the scanner machines.
More importantly, this prevents a problem that your approach could cause, depending on how you implement it—people changing their vote after the fact for reasons other than actual errors (e.g. voting for a third-party candidate, then change your vote because an undesirable candidate looks like he or she is in the lead because of the third-party candidate taking votes away from the less undesirable candidate), which could lead to arbitrarily long delays before you really know who the winner is.
He wouldn't have remembered them anyway.
(I normally wouldn't have posted a joke that tactless, but his brother already made that crack, so....)
Which only works if you get to choose when you drive home. Work a 9-to-5 job? Sorry, drive home in the dark.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying I hold that position at all. I was merely clarifying what I believed to be the previous poster's assertion.
Actually, for those varieties, it would probably would have little effect on the price. That's lower than nearly anyone's copay, so the insurance company doesn't pay a penny of it; it just contributes towards the maximum total out-of-pocket cost, which most people young enough to need birth control are unlikely to ever reach anyway. At best, there's the extra overhead caused by the pharmacist handling it, but that's replaced with the extra cost of retail packaging and small-quantity shipping instead of bulk packaging, so I'd expect folks to roughly break even unless the OTC availability encourages other companies to start making the product in expectation of a surge in sales because young people won't have to ask their doctor, and even then, I doubt more competition will have a huge effect on the price.
Although you can get birth control pills for $8 per month from some locations, that's based on the price from (IIRC) Target, which mostly has a retail presence in medium to large cities. In rural areas, the average price is higher.
But even if we assume that such cheap prices are ubiquitous, that cheapness still only applies to standard birth control pills. For people who aren't able to take those for whatever reason, and have to take the more expensive varieties, that's not necessarily true. It depends on where they decide to draw the line for OTC status. And if the FDA makes the cheap stuff available OTC (which they probably should, to be perfectly honest), there's a good chance that Republicans will use that as an excuse to push for removing mandatory insurance coverage for the other varieties that aren't cheap, many of which have medical uses beyond birth control.
Yes, it was. The top post in this thread is a response to a quote:
which is a direct quote from the summary:
all the way down to the exact punctuation. And it is the last half of a sentence, the first part of which sets the context for it.
You first.
At least one engineer recommended against the launch for precisely that reason. He was overruled. I guess the military uses for that TDRS payload were more important than safety....
A big part of that is because Congress meets physically in one place, far away from the governed. If Congress became virtual, the balance would tip significantly back towards the people. And it would also make it possible for Congress to do some actual work during the election cycle.
With that said, I agree with you about 180 days being too long, but not for that reason. There are a lot of bills, such as disaster relief bills, that simply cannot wait 180 days.
I think the point was that Republicans were suddenly in favor of it because the rules were forcing them to pay for it. Unless explicitly prescribed to treat a medical condition, insurance companies don't pay for OTC medication.
As a rule, U.S. conservatives have been against birth control. The recent turn appears to be motivated by preventing them from having to pay for it, and decreasing access (by making it more expensive for the consumer), rather than wanting to increase access as you seem to assume.
Most people don't get to choose their work hours. I realize that in high tech, folks insist on flexible work hours, but it isn't the norm in most industries, because most businesses are customer-centric, which tends to result in fairly rigid work hours built around when those customers need them.
This thread was replying to a comment in the summary, which was talking about extending DST to the winter, when it is not still light at 9 P.M.
Indeed, that's what this whole thread was about—adding DST in the winter, too, so that you'll have more light at the end of the day. Most folks who want all-year DST want it so that they'll still have daylight when driving home during the winter.
This entire thread was in response to a comment in the summary, which mentioned wanting to keep DST all year 'round because the submitter wanted more light at the end of the day. So taken in the proper context, what I said makes a lot more sense than it does when taken out of context. :-)
Umm... that doesn't change the time when people get off work. The reason most people want more light at the end of the day is so they don't have to drive home in the dark.