Sorry, FBI, but I don't trust you this > much. Based on experience.
(Not that I trust -- or somehow like! North Korean regime, mind you).
I agree with your premise but not your conclusion. They do lie a lot... but then we get to the whole "Why would they lie?" bit... We all already hate the DPRK. It's right to hate them, they're the most evil organization in the world. They still have concentration camps for Gods sakes. The US government gains nothing by this. They could pretty much do anything they wanted to, short of nuking the place, and I think the general US population would cheer. So this isn't some sort of FUD attempt. The American peoples levels of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in regard to North Korea is already at 100%
On top of that, if this really was some movie piracy group... that would definitely be something many people would absolutely love to leverage to get new legislation passed so I'm rather surprised they didn't bite on that...
And more importantly, who else on the entire planet would want to do this? Pirates do not care about attacking Sony... at all... they want movies to post so they can collect ad revenue from the comments/description section of the peer sites. Attracting the attention of the FBI/NSA is not in their business plan.
Not the porn companies. In most cases these aren't even the porn companies. It's a scam. If they can get the ISP to hand over your name... and they can in some cases... then they send you threatening letters: "On suchandsuch date you downloaded our film 'Priests and Alterboys 5' illegally. Pay us $5000 or we will sue you" And then they send it certified mail to your front door. The signature requirement means there's a 50/50 chance they get your wife and how much would you pay to avoid that happening?
There's no competition there - I think it'd be fine to be perfectly up front to say something like "While we're screaming across the earth defying gravity at 750 miles per hour, we do not have the ability to provide enough bandwidth so that everyone may watch Netflix. Streaming video sites are not accessible. You don't like it, don't buy it."
Everything people hate about business is Marketings fault in my opinion. Honesty doesn't make sales.
If you don't want to conform, don't buy a home there.
HOAs are completely up front about those things and if you don't read the bylaws before buying, you're a dumb motherfucker.
A compulsory regulation on your home that exists in nearly every neighborhood you could possibly buy in the town you live is in no way "Optional" In my opion HOA's should be illegal.
I would never sign an HOA, and when I buy a house that's usually a problem because there are very few houses in town that do not have them. On the bright side, they are not that hard to ruin should you so chose and not mind alienating your neighbors. There are always loopholes, and ways you can make your house so annoying they'll eventually relent and let you do what you want to do. For example, they cannot prevent the construction of an amateur radio tower unless it's unsafe. There are long and drawn out discussions out on the net about how to pull this off, so I'll not get into it. But if done correctly you have a giant geeky eysore up for under $1000
A fellow around here went to a lawyer and picked appart his HOA contract until he finally settled on blanketing his front yard with toilets. He put daisies in the bowl of each one and called them "Flower pots"
After hearing all that I almost wish I'd been stupid enough to sign one. I would thoroughly enjoy pranking them constantly.
No, they're afraid of saying there is life and being wrong. They're not currently saying there isn't life, they're saying they dont know either way. They have no definitive proof.
I don't think anyone in the scientific community has any doubts that there was life there at one time. It's just a matter of proving it. I think it's rather likely that there still is life on mars and it will be surprisingly similar to microbial life hear on earth. I suspect our two planets have been inoculating each other for a very very long time.
bad experiment. I was mostly wrong.. She's German though, I'm claiming a "Close enough" on that one. And the pictures are blurry and not helpful as well. 1.5 out of 3 ain't bad! She does have a real degree though... doh!
So I'm going to make a prediction here... I read the title but not the summary or the article and I'm going to predict: 1. The "Scientist" in question is not actually a scientist at all, or at least is only one in the loosest sense of the word. Like he's a "Xeno biologist" or "Crypto-zoologist" or something like that... 2. The pictures are blurry and undecipherable. 3. He's from Russia or the easter block countries. They tend to eat this sort of thing up.
Worstall has part of an argument against the Times opinion piece, but he makes an even bigger whopper with his "proof" that no one wants taxes raised, because people aren't voluntarily gifting their wealth to the Federal Government by the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
But he's right. No one wants their taxes raised. Everyone wants everyone else's taxes raised. His point is people will say lots of things because of their ideology when being polled. But when the tax man comes around, the tax hike aint fair! And when they need to get on a plane, they're getting on bundle or not.
Will al-a-cart be more expensive? That depends entirely how you look at it. You currently pay about $100 for around 350 channels. But, you absolutely cannot be watching all of those. In fact, you likely only watch less than a dozen. But they know what those dozen are and they organize those in such a way that you have to pay for all 350 to get the 12 you want. When it's Al-a-cart you'll likely pay around $5/channel on average. So now you'll be paying $60 for 12 channels instead of $100 for 350. Is that more or less expensive? It's more "per channel" but its less "per month" and you're not losing anything you were using.
But that's if prices remain the same. Which they absolutely will not. There is virtually no competition on the content side, they set a price and demand it. A company like Comcast can't just turn off "Comedy central" so they're stuck paying it. For evidence of this just check out Viacoms profit margin: http://ycharts.com/companies/V...
They're running at 22% profit... that's insane Most of the people out there paying for Viacom aren't even watching it! It's just part of a package they had to get to get some other channel. With a 22% profit margin and viewers that actually have a choice in the channels they pay for suddenly Viacom might decide the $7 they're charging might be a tad high.
Most stories omit his party affiliation. So pleased to see he is keeping up the (new) Republican tradition of being bat-shit insane.
There's only 1 party in this country that's allowed to run for office, so I don't see what the point of mentioning which wing of that party he belonged to.
Why is some local county councilman being stupid news? Do get elected to such a position you have to get what? About 100 people to vote for you? Even less depending on the county. lol
The funniest part was left out of the summary... the following day the papers lead article was titled:
what people dont like to talk about in the crusades, it was the christians fighting the muslims. which came first though the christian brutality or the muslim brutality? (in regards to the crusades)
Neither. There was terrible economic upheaval in Europe at the time. Wars had pretty much died down and things were stable... which is bad for aristocracies . All those new princes being born and not getting killed in war. No land to inherit. There was a lot of Machiavellian machinations going on at the time as the politically savvy manipulated the devout into a holly war that would benefit the Savvy in many ways: 1. Lots of royals would get killed opening up land. 2. Wars cost lots of money which had to be borrowed from those that stayed behind. 3. If they did win the war, lots of new trade would open up.
The wars in the middle east were for for the exact same reason they are today: Money and they were fought by the very same types of people: The naive and easily swayed.
Until forever, on it goes through the circle, fast and slow. I know; it can't stop, I wonder.
If all 1 billions Muslims were gun-wielding terrorists, you could be sarcastic about peace and Islam. Explain the Crusades, if Christians are so brotherly.
Right, the crusades... that was bad so clearly all Christians should be executed in the streets while on their knees begging for their life.
I read this and was like "WHAT?" That doesn't makes sense at all. It doesn't even pass as a terrible SciFi book.
Then I saw the link... medium.com... Oh.... Stop posting these stupid pay-for-link adds. That site sucks. It's like a bunch of Valley girls are trying to figure out what nerds would be interested in and getting it very very wrong.
Ok, there's a lot of nonsense on here about Hypocrisy... but I suspect he didn't even realize he was infringing.
But there's still plenty of room for getting him good here. Often the people they claim are pirates don't know they're pirating either... but they don't think that's an excuse. And your grandma ends up torrenting that movie for 6 months and thousands of people download it... they think those are all violations as well.
So Slashdot his site... hundreds of thousands of people read those "pirated" news articles... then demand he compensate the original authors...
every single person to investigate or own the island was a free mason. Including Franklin Roosevelt! [...] I'm pretty sure every rumor about the free masons ruling the world was likely started by an actual Free Mason.
You could fairly argue that FDR did rule the world.
Jus' sayin'.
Yea... but it wasn't a secret conspiratorial rule of the world though. So it doesn't count.:-p
Admittedly it's been a few years since I had cable TV, but have they really fallen that far? Back when we got rid of cable, the History Channel was more like The WWII Channel.
Oak Island is supposed to be a Mystery... and if you read many of the sensationalized accounts of it from many disreputable reporters that conveniently leave out certain facts about the place it sounds very intriguing. But the fact is, the place isn't a mystery at all.
Some kid swam out to it and found a tree with a pulley hanging from a branch a long time ago. That bit is likely true. But then, a guy heard about it and went out there. He was a Free Mason. And now, I don't mean the ones that rule the world. I mean the real ones that are basically like the Shriners that ware funny hats, drive gocarts and throw candy to kids in parades, and more importantly absolutely love secrets, mysteries, puzzles and hidden treasure. It's their bread and butter. They also like to relate all these mysterious stories to non-members to try and get you to join. If you ever meet someone at a party that starts talking about the Free Masons, run away. They'er either not a Free Mason and a conspiracy nut... or they are a Free Mason and a conspiracy nut.
Anyways, from that guy on, every single person to investigate or own the island was a free mason. Including Franklin Roosevelt! You cannot trust anything they say about the place. The crazy thing about free masons is that they are usually conspiracy nuts, and their conspiracies always involve their own club. Once you realize that every single person to investigate the island was a conspiracy theorist, and that you can't trust any of their accounts, it makes a lot more sense. I'm pretty sure every rumor about the free masons ruling the world was likely started by an actual Free Mason. Not only that, they do things to make themselves even more mysterious because they think that's cool. That rock kind of looks like a skull? Well, they'll report it as 100% a skull and they're pretty sure the shape of the eye sockets indicate it's a model of the first popes skull... clearly leading to some secret of the ages.
Long story short, Oak Island is what happens when you take a couple dozen conspiracy nuts and let them dig in the same hole for over 200 years and give them lots of media attention. The only thing buried on that island is all hope that those men would ever have to face reality.
I happen to know a couple of people that are involved in Cable contract discussions. From what they tell me (and hey, they could be totally wrong but it does make sense) the industry generally thinks that Discovery networks (discovery channel) is soon going to get cut from a lot of networks, soon followed by A&E (History channel) because people are getting fed up with the price of the different tiers. Cable companies have to cut something and those 2 networks are nothing more than reality show dustbins. Just like Fox is losing networks left and right now because the fact of the matter is most people just want a "news channel" and CNN is just fine for that and doesn't have a giant group of people that hate them like Fox does. These networks have to drastically cut their price or improve their content or they're not going to get carried anymore.
The companies themselves may be fine... they are making a lot of money in other things. Discovery holds patents on ebooks for some crazy reason. But the times of filling your entire channel with reality TV that costs you virtually nothing and has no depth is over. AMC has proven that even a small investment can have huge returns.
If there's anything that'll push forward legal restrictions on 3D printers/home CNC, it'll be assholes like this making a media push over how easy it is to make weapons and OMG THE CHILDREN. This is why we can't have nice things.
You don't get it. He's trying to force them to charge him. Because everything he's doing is protected by the constitution. If they did charge him, he'd get whichever law they tried to use struck down. He's trying to "Draw the foul" and he knows it.
This is not a terrible idea. The price is WAY off though. It needs to be in the $200 range. Include wifi and some way to sync it with your home audio collection automatically. The drive size is perfect. Give it a display port so I can plug it into a hotel television. Make sure I can use streaming services like pandora if wifi is available.
Yea yea, I know I can use my phone. But my phones full of stuff and hard to deal with in the car. I'd like something I could generally leave in the car that would sync my music collection over night, etc...
Physicians don't do diagnoses like they used to. They look at you, consider your condition for all of 5 seconds, and prescribe whatever will get you out of their hair. They don't diagnose, they don't think, they don't care. When I had my condition a couple of years ago, one of the doctors actually asked me what tests I wanted to run. I was like, what the fuck, how the fuck should I know? But that's how it is. So what is there to do? Do your own research on the internet and become your own pathologist.:( And unfortunately there are tons of spammer optimized-for-google pages out there for every medical condition in the world. They all have a few paragraphs of useless copy and tons of ads inline. Go to a forum? It's all the same, pages of questions and few answers. So you have to spend tons of time learning about your symptoms from the ground up, and then try to guess what you might have, and then go ask a doctor for those tests. Good luck diagnosing yourself, because doctors don't do that shit any more.
You're right. It's because doctors have "Stats" now. Like they're DSL tech support reps. The HMO's got tired of the doctors ordering all that expensive "Treatment"
Every time I go in I take in all my own literature, much to my doctors dismay who gets irritated and once even suggested that I had Hypochondria. I said, "Great, you finally made a diagnoses. Now treat me." Unsurprisingly he did not schedule a followup mental health appointment for me. When I got to the doctor I go well prepared like I'm about to file a lawsuit. You have to bully doctors into doing their jobs these days.
Slashdot Mirror
"We know it, but won't tell you. Trust us".
Sorry, FBI, but I don't trust you this > much. Based on experience.
(Not that I trust -- or somehow like! North Korean regime, mind you).
I agree with your premise but not your conclusion.
They do lie a lot... but then we get to the whole "Why would they lie?" bit...
We all already hate the DPRK.
It's right to hate them, they're the most evil organization in the world. They still have concentration camps for Gods sakes.
The US government gains nothing by this. They could pretty much do anything they wanted to, short of nuking the place, and I think the general US population would cheer. So this isn't some sort of FUD attempt. The American peoples levels of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in regard to North Korea is already at 100%
On top of that, if this really was some movie piracy group... that would definitely be something many people would absolutely love to leverage to get new legislation passed so I'm rather surprised they didn't bite on that...
And more importantly, who else on the entire planet would want to do this? Pirates do not care about attacking Sony... at all... they want movies to post so they can collect ad revenue from the comments/description section of the peer sites. Attracting the attention of the FBI/NSA is not in their business plan.
There is no Lollipop upgrade available for any of my devices yet.
There is... your cellphone company wont let you install it however. That needs to be addressed. Either by Google or Congress.
Not the porn companies.
In most cases these aren't even the porn companies. It's a scam. If they can get the ISP to hand over your name... and they can in some cases... then they send you threatening letters: "On suchandsuch date you downloaded our film 'Priests and Alterboys 5' illegally. Pay us $5000 or we will sue you" And then they send it certified mail to your front door. The signature requirement means there's a 50/50 chance they get your wife and how much would you pay to avoid that happening?
It's a scam, plain and simple.
There's no competition there - I think it'd be fine to be perfectly up front to say something like "While we're screaming across the earth defying gravity at 750 miles per hour, we do not have the ability to provide enough bandwidth so that everyone may watch Netflix. Streaming video sites are not accessible. You don't like it, don't buy it."
Everything people hate about business is Marketings fault in my opinion. Honesty doesn't make sales.
If you don't want to conform, don't buy a home there.
HOAs are completely up front about those things and if you don't read the bylaws before buying, you're a dumb motherfucker.
A compulsory regulation on your home that exists in nearly every neighborhood you could possibly buy in the town you live is in no way "Optional" In my opion HOA's should be illegal.
I would never sign an HOA, and when I buy a house that's usually a problem because there are very few houses in town that do not have them. On the bright side, they are not that hard to ruin should you so chose and not mind alienating your neighbors. There are always loopholes, and ways you can make your house so annoying they'll eventually relent and let you do what you want to do. For example, they cannot prevent the construction of an amateur radio tower unless it's unsafe. There are long and drawn out discussions out on the net about how to pull this off, so I'll not get into it. But if done correctly you have a giant geeky eysore up for under $1000
A fellow around here went to a lawyer and picked appart his HOA contract until he finally settled on blanketing his front yard with toilets. He put daisies in the bowl of each one and called them "Flower pots"
After hearing all that I almost wish I'd been stupid enough to sign one. I would thoroughly enjoy pranking them constantly.
No, they're afraid of saying there is life and being wrong. They're not currently saying there isn't life, they're saying they dont know either way. They have no definitive proof.
I don't think anyone in the scientific community has any doubts that there was life there at one time. It's just a matter of proving it. I think it's rather likely that there still is life on mars and it will be surprisingly similar to microbial life hear on earth. I suspect our two planets have been inoculating each other for a very very long time.
bad experiment. I was mostly wrong.. She's German though, I'm claiming a "Close enough" on that one. And the pictures are blurry and not helpful as well. 1.5 out of 3 ain't bad! She does have a real degree though... doh!
So I'm going to make a prediction here... I read the title but not the summary or the article and I'm going to predict:
1. The "Scientist" in question is not actually a scientist at all, or at least is only one in the loosest sense of the word. Like he's a "Xeno biologist" or "Crypto-zoologist" or something like that...
2. The pictures are blurry and undecipherable.
3. He's from Russia or the easter block countries. They tend to eat this sort of thing up.
Now to actually read it...
Well I hope diminished spelling isn't one of the side effects. ;-)
No, I spell worse than that all the time with no wires at all.
Neil Irwin is a talking head on CNBC, MSNBC, PBS, etc...
http://neilirwin.com/about-nei...
So he's not exactly unbiased. lol
For a decent counter to his stupid argument:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ti...
Worstall has part of an argument against the Times opinion piece, but he makes an even bigger whopper with his "proof" that no one wants taxes raised, because people aren't voluntarily gifting their wealth to the Federal Government by the hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
But he's right. No one wants their taxes raised. Everyone wants everyone else's taxes raised. His point is people will say lots of things because of their ideology when being polled. But when the tax man comes around, the tax hike aint fair! And when they need to get on a plane, they're getting on bundle or not.
Will al-a-cart be more expensive? That depends entirely how you look at it. You currently pay about $100 for around 350 channels. But, you absolutely cannot be watching all of those. In fact, you likely only watch less than a dozen. But they know what those dozen are and they organize those in such a way that you have to pay for all 350 to get the 12 you want. When it's Al-a-cart you'll likely pay around $5/channel on average. So now you'll be paying $60 for 12 channels instead of $100 for 350. Is that more or less expensive? It's more "per channel" but its less "per month" and you're not losing anything you were using.
But that's if prices remain the same. Which they absolutely will not. There is virtually no competition on the content side, they set a price and demand it. A company like Comcast can't just turn off "Comedy central" so they're stuck paying it. For evidence of this just check out Viacoms profit margin: http://ycharts.com/companies/V...
They're running at 22% profit... that's insane Most of the people out there paying for Viacom aren't even watching it! It's just part of a package they had to get to get some other channel. With a 22% profit margin and viewers that actually have a choice in the channels they pay for suddenly Viacom might decide the $7 they're charging might be a tad high.
Most stories omit his party affiliation.
So pleased to see he is keeping up the (new) Republican tradition of being bat-shit insane.
There's only 1 party in this country that's allowed to run for office, so I don't see what the point of mentioning which wing of that party he belonged to.
Why is some local county councilman being stupid news?
Do get elected to such a position you have to get what? About 100 people to vote for you? Even less depending on the county. lol
The funniest part was left out of the summary... the following day the papers lead article was titled:
"Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delaute"
http://m.fredericknewspost.com...
what people dont like to talk about in the crusades, it was the christians fighting the muslims. which came first though the christian brutality or the muslim brutality? (in regards to the crusades)
Neither.
There was terrible economic upheaval in Europe at the time. Wars had pretty much died down and things were stable... which is bad for aristocracies . All those new princes being born and not getting killed in war. No land to inherit. There was a lot of Machiavellian machinations going on at the time as the politically savvy manipulated the devout into a holly war that would benefit the Savvy in many ways: 1. Lots of royals would get killed opening up land. 2. Wars cost lots of money which had to be borrowed from those that stayed behind. 3. If they did win the war, lots of new trade would open up.
The wars in the middle east were for for the exact same reason they are today: Money
and they were fought by the very same types of people: The naive and easily swayed.
Until forever, on it goes through the circle, fast and slow. I know; it can't stop, I wonder.
Neil Irwin is a talking head on CNBC, MSNBC, PBS, etc...
http://neilirwin.com/about-nei...
So he's not exactly unbiased. lol
For a decent counter to his stupid argument:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ti...
Hopefully the bold tag?
If all 1 billions Muslims were gun-wielding terrorists, you could be sarcastic about peace and Islam. Explain the Crusades, if Christians are so brotherly.
Right, the crusades... that was bad so clearly all Christians should be executed in the streets while on their knees begging for their life.
I read this and was like "WHAT?"
That doesn't makes sense at all. It doesn't even pass as a terrible SciFi book.
Then I saw the link... medium.com... Oh....
Stop posting these stupid pay-for-link adds. That site sucks. It's like a bunch of Valley girls are trying to figure out what nerds would be interested in and getting it very very wrong.
Yea, but using wood in this context is stupid. They should use fiberglass, carbon fiber, or something else artificial.
Ok, there's a lot of nonsense on here about Hypocrisy... but I suspect he didn't even realize he was infringing.
But there's still plenty of room for getting him good here. Often the people they claim are pirates don't know they're pirating either... but they don't think that's an excuse. And your grandma ends up torrenting that movie for 6 months and thousands of people download it... they think those are all violations as well.
So Slashdot his site... hundreds of thousands of people read those "pirated" news articles... then demand he compensate the original authors...
every single person to investigate or own the island was a free mason. Including Franklin Roosevelt! [...] I'm pretty sure every rumor about the free masons ruling the world was likely started by an actual Free Mason.
You could fairly argue that FDR did rule the world.
Jus' sayin'.
Yea... but it wasn't a secret conspiratorial rule of the world though. So it doesn't count. :-p
Oak Island? WTF is that?
Admittedly it's been a few years since I had cable TV, but have they really fallen that far? Back when we got rid of cable, the History Channel was more like The WWII Channel.
Oak Island is supposed to be a Mystery... and if you read many of the sensationalized accounts of it from many disreputable reporters that conveniently leave out certain facts about the place it sounds very intriguing. But the fact is, the place isn't a mystery at all.
Some kid swam out to it and found a tree with a pulley hanging from a branch a long time ago. That bit is likely true. But then, a guy heard about it and went out there. He was a Free Mason. And now, I don't mean the ones that rule the world. I mean the real ones that are basically like the Shriners that ware funny hats, drive gocarts and throw candy to kids in parades, and more importantly absolutely love secrets, mysteries, puzzles and hidden treasure. It's their bread and butter. They also like to relate all these mysterious stories to non-members to try and get you to join. If you ever meet someone at a party that starts talking about the Free Masons, run away. They'er either not a Free Mason and a conspiracy nut... or they are a Free Mason and a conspiracy nut.
Anyways, from that guy on, every single person to investigate or own the island was a free mason. Including Franklin Roosevelt! You cannot trust anything they say about the place. The crazy thing about free masons is that they are usually conspiracy nuts, and their conspiracies always involve their own club. Once you realize that every single person to investigate the island was a conspiracy theorist, and that you can't trust any of their accounts, it makes a lot more sense. I'm pretty sure every rumor about the free masons ruling the world was likely started by an actual Free Mason. Not only that, they do things to make themselves even more mysterious because they think that's cool. That rock kind of looks like a skull? Well, they'll report it as 100% a skull and they're pretty sure the shape of the eye sockets indicate it's a model of the first popes skull... clearly leading to some secret of the ages.
Long story short, Oak Island is what happens when you take a couple dozen conspiracy nuts and let them dig in the same hole for over 200 years and give them lots of media attention. The only thing buried on that island is all hope that those men would ever have to face reality.
I happen to know a couple of people that are involved in Cable contract discussions. From what they tell me (and hey, they could be totally wrong but it does make sense) the industry generally thinks that Discovery networks (discovery channel) is soon going to get cut from a lot of networks, soon followed by A&E (History channel) because people are getting fed up with the price of the different tiers. Cable companies have to cut something and those 2 networks are nothing more than reality show dustbins. Just like Fox is losing networks left and right now because the fact of the matter is most people just want a "news channel" and CNN is just fine for that and doesn't have a giant group of people that hate them like Fox does. These networks have to drastically cut their price or improve their content or they're not going to get carried anymore.
The companies themselves may be fine... they are making a lot of money in other things. Discovery holds patents on ebooks for some crazy reason. But the times of filling your entire channel with reality TV that costs you virtually nothing and has no depth is over. AMC has proven that even a small investment can have huge returns.
If there's anything that'll push forward legal restrictions on 3D printers/home CNC, it'll be assholes like this making a media push over how easy it is to make weapons and OMG THE CHILDREN. This is why we can't have nice things.
You don't get it. He's trying to force them to charge him. Because everything he's doing is protected by the constitution. If they did charge him, he'd get whichever law they tried to use struck down. He's trying to "Draw the foul" and he knows it.
This is not a terrible idea.
The price is WAY off though.
It needs to be in the $200 range.
Include wifi and some way to sync it with your home audio collection automatically.
The drive size is perfect.
Give it a display port so I can plug it into a hotel television.
Make sure I can use streaming services like pandora if wifi is available.
Yea yea, I know I can use my phone. But my phones full of stuff and hard to deal with in the car. I'd like something I could generally leave in the car that would sync my music collection over night, etc...
But again, it'd have to be way cheaper.
Physicians don't do diagnoses like they used to. They look at you, consider your condition for all of 5 seconds, and prescribe whatever will get you out of their hair. They don't diagnose, they don't think, they don't care. When I had my condition a couple of years ago, one of the doctors actually asked me what tests I wanted to run. I was like, what the fuck, how the fuck should I know? But that's how it is. So what is there to do? Do your own research on the internet and become your own pathologist. :( And unfortunately there are tons of spammer optimized-for-google pages out there for every medical condition in the world. They all have a few paragraphs of useless copy and tons of ads inline. Go to a forum? It's all the same, pages of questions and few answers. So you have to spend tons of time learning about your symptoms from the ground up, and then try to guess what you might have, and then go ask a doctor for those tests. Good luck diagnosing yourself, because doctors don't do that shit any more.
You're right. It's because doctors have "Stats" now. Like they're DSL tech support reps. The HMO's got tired of the doctors ordering all that expensive "Treatment"
Every time I go in I take in all my own literature, much to my doctors dismay who gets irritated and once even suggested that I had Hypochondria. I said, "Great, you finally made a diagnoses. Now treat me." Unsurprisingly he did not schedule a followup mental health appointment for me. When I got to the doctor I go well prepared like I'm about to file a lawsuit. You have to bully doctors into doing their jobs these days.