So you aren't eligible for Medicaid? I did you check? The Medicaid rules vary by state, but the Feds did expand Medicaid coverage as part of the ACA. But you may live in a state that rejected the expansion in order to make the ACA more painful for people like you, so YMMV.
Aren't ERs and the like forbidden from turning away anybody who needs care, even if they can't pay?
ERs are kind of narrow in scope. Using the ER as your whole health care system basically means that you live with your tumor untreated until the symptoms become acute, and then the people in the ER will do their best to stabilize you when you're having serious problems. It's great for falling off your bike and breaking your arm. Not so much for serious chronic illness.
You can't eliminate the people who don't have the money to pay for care with a wave of the "false dicohtomy" hand. Let's say we get our less expensive urgent treatment facilities (a great policy, by the way). What do you do with people who show up and can't even pay for those?
If you're making the argument that the feds shouldn't provide tax credits for certain behavior, I'm generally in agreement with you. I don't think they violate the constitution, but let's ignore that for a second. Are you saying that tax credits for the ACA would be unconstitutional but all of the other tax credits are OK? Or are we just talking about striking down tax credits entirely?
It's not capitalist greed, it's anti-free-market greed. Note that non-essential medical services such as plastic surgery and laser eye surgery continuously get better and cheaper over time.
One important reason for that is that consumers can tell the producers of non-essential goods and services to get lost if they don't like the price. Essential goods and services, pretty much by definition, don't have that property.
The office door. Eich's employment shouldn't be based on what he's doing in his personal time. If he says something intolerant at work, then yeah, fire him.
You wouldn't be a bit concerned about the potential effects on the morale of your Jewish emloyees or the potential alienation of Jewish customers if he spent his personal time on anti semetic activism? No issues with him being the public face of your company from 9-5 and the public face of anti-semitism from 6-midnight?
... groups I am not going to do any business with... but not waste my time to advertise that fact, figuring they will do a good enough job of it themselves.
So it would be OK for you not to do business with him, but if a bunch of people agreed with you and stopped doing business with him as well, it would be a major moral problem and a crushing blow to free speech?
The rules are the same for all — anybody is entitled to marrying one person of the opposite gender. Some people aren't able to use that right, but that's not a reason to redefine the meaning of marriage.
Not long ago, everybody had the same right to marry a person of the same race. Some people didn't want to make use of that right, and it caused a ruckus, and eventually we granted them some crazy new rights. Was Loving v. Virginia decided incorrectly? Was the system fair and equitable as it was before Loving, and were the agitators agitating over nothing?
I'm totally with you that we shouldn't lynch or crucify people over their political beliefs. Once that happens, I'll be right beside you trying to put a stop to it.
This issue is a large group of people attempting to put pressure on a company to get rid of an employee based on their personal views. I don't care what you do but trying to use your social clout to strong arm a group is something we've seen in the past.
So it's OK for one person to boycott individually based on his beliefs, but once a lot of people start doing it it's a problem?
It requires a number n of users to log-in before any password can be checked! That is right, the first n-1 have to wait until n are there, because before n good (!) passwords are available to the server, it cannot verify even one.
It would be interesting to know what the dynamics are of password database size vs login frequency. A lot of systems get huge numbers of login requests in very short timeframes, so it may not be a problem for them. But the flip side is that user bases that huge often have large numbers of weak passwords floating around, so the hit rate for a password cracker would be much higher. I certainly wouldn't use it for any of the piddly little systems I put together, but larger sites may have better luck (or just have a bunch of different admins log in when they reboot a server).
That means if you require 10 different login-attempts before you can login anybody, you just get a factor of 10 in additional security.
What do you mean by a factor of 10, exactly? If your threshold is 10, you don't get any feedback on whether you got a password right until you get 10 passwords right, so it's a factor of 10 in effective password "length" but substantially more than that in work time. That's potentially a pretty big win.
And then there is the little problem that an attacker that gets root-access to the running system does not suffer this slowdown, as they can just read the secret the system computes from the first n passwords from its main memory.
They note in the paper that the "root access to the server and read from memory" problem is not one that this system is designed to solve. In fact, it's really not one that any system can solve. If anybody ever solves the "letting somebody have the information without actually letting them have any information" problem, we'll know about very quickly as DRM schemes that actually work will start to appear.
Unprecedented. We couldn't possibly have cordial relations with a country that points nuclear weapons at us. And barely over a half century ago! The wounds! So fresh!
There is a *lot* of research suggesting that the overall social problems caused by alcohol are vastly understated, itis just hidden because it happens at the family and individual level.
I fully agree with you there. But you seem to be assuming that prohibition actually reduces those problems in a significant way. I very strongly doubt it. I admit that I wasn't alive for prohibition, but the people I know who were don't remember it as a time when we had problems with organized crime but a lot fewer problems with alcohol abuse. They remember it as a time with both. Alcohol abusers remained alcohol abusers. We just added in the additional element of prohibition. I don't see why that wouldn't be true for any other type of drug.
A simpler question: Given what you know about the destructiveness of alcohol, would you propose that we bring back prohibition today? If not, why, and how does that reason differ from the reasoning on other controlled substances?
Finally, comparing the ability to enforce a law in the 1920s to today, a century later, is just folly. The circumstances are wholly different.
I'm not doing a thought experiment about whether or not we'd be able to effectively enforce our drug laws. I'm observing the fact that we clearly aren't and haven't been for decades.
The real problem underlying the ineffectiveness of today's drug "prohibition" is a lack of political will, conflicts of interest and outright corruption.
That's likely true in Mexico. I'm not sure exactly how we'd undo that. Encouraging people to be less corrupt and to stand up to militarized gangs sounds good on paper, but the reality seems to be that Mexico is unable to handle this issue. How do you solve endemic corruption driven by a hyper-violent criminal element with enough money and firepower to corrupt and tear down whatever you build?
If you're talking about our end, I'm really not seeing what we could do to escalate that wouldn't take us all the way to the dystopian endpoint. We already have ridiculously harsh sentencing, asset seizure, and a heavily militarized police force. We've essentially torched the Fourth Amendment as long as drugs are involved. What's left, and are the consequences of whatever escalation you have in mind really better than the consequences of legalization?
I don't think that the claim is that legalizing drugs will get rid of all of the problems associated with drugs. The position is that legalizing drugs trades the enormous problems caused by prohibition for the smaller problems caused by whatever marginal increase in usage repealing prohibition causes. Alcohol is a scourge, but I don't think that many people sincerely believe that we could generate a net improvement in our situation by driving it underground again.
If they could make the same profits in those other crimes, they would be doing so. They're not doing so because the drug trade is singularly profitable. Take away the drug trade and they're stuck with second and third best options. The mob didn't go away, but organized crime in the US is not as scary as it once was, and by far the scariest elements of it are the ones that make their money in the drug trade. Illegal gambling and prostitution operations just aren't that frightening.
If you can convert organized crime from something that has enough resources to dominate your government to something that exists off in the shadows and actually has to fear a government crackdown, that's a huge win.
The point is to make the business less lucrative by injecting competition into the system. Start with marijuana and go from there. It looks like about half of cartel revenue is marijuana. If you crash the price of marijuana by letting US producers start to produce it, you essentially turn it into the paperclip business. Yes, the paperclip business has a lot of money sloshing around in it and big producers could make quite a lot of money, but margins are so thin that there's no incentive for criminal activity and not enough profits to support it anyway. You never hear about organized crime and corruption in the paperclip business.
Other drugs may be stickier, but it seems to me like pot is a no brainer.
Of course it increases consumer demand, but not by enough to offset the eventual drop in price from a competitive market. Marijuana is ridiculously easy to produce. The only reason the prices are above the price of any cheap-ass plant is the short supply and lack of competition among producers. You'd be talking about a massive drop in total profits, not to mention competition from large producers in the US. Tobacco companies could bury the cartels in the marijuana market, especially if we put a tiny tariff on imported weed.
Realistically, I think that there's a difference between "people strongly disagree and try to take action against you" and "something of actual consequence happens to you to make your life measurably worse" that defines the line between persecution and something else entirely. Is a king persecuted if protestors crowd around outside the palace? Maybe, if they storm the gates and set up the guillotine. If they eventually leave and he goes back to being king? I'd call that more of an inconvenience.
I put "gay" in quotes, because the original meaning "happy" no longer applies.
If you put quotes around every word that has had an additional meaning added to it since its origins, you'd have quotes around a lot of words. But weirdly you don't. It's almost as if you do it in this one case to needle people, kind of like intentionally mispronouncing a person's name.
OK, let's see if we can connect these analogies. Gay people are like children how? Gay people are like the mentally ill how? Gay marriage is like marriage between siblings how?
We do deny those rights to those people, and it's ostensibly done for a good reason in any given case. So are the reasons that apply in those cases applicable to consenting gay adults? If your reasoning holds, we should be able to draw some strong parallels. At least, as long as your argument isn't something like, "We deny some rights to some people sometimes, so there's no limit to whose rights we can stomp on at any time."
Is it reasonable to say that a CEO or other publicly visible executive should be allowed to take part in any political activity he wants without fear that it will affect his job with the company? I'd be very concerned if this was some low-level backroom employee, but once you're the public face of a company, you're the public face of a company. If you do things that embarrass the company and turn off its constituents, even if those things are legal, you're at risk. It's the joy and the pain of being the CEO.
I mean, I believe it should be 100% legal for white supremacists to publish political materials, hold rallies, gather signatures, and march in parades. But if the CEO of a major company marched in one of those parades and got canned for it, I would not be surprised or shed a tear.
As a society, and therefore it's government, has a vested interest in the perpetuety of said society...doesn't it make sense that a government would put a union generally considered capable of procreation a class higher than one that can't?
Why? Does denying those rights to gay couples increase the fertility of heterosexual couples or something? I mean, it's in our best interests to have a strong and able-bodied workforce to build stuff, but I don't see us lining up to increase taxes on the handicapped or anything like that.
The US is having a hard enough time getting current citizens to birth at replacement rates to the point of importing third worlders, and now you want to incentivize GAURANTEED barren pairings at the same level as potential fecund ones?
Are you thinking that maybe if we keep gay people from getting married, they'll decide to find opposite sex partners and start having babies?
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So you aren't eligible for Medicaid? I did you check? The Medicaid rules vary by state, but the Feds did expand Medicaid coverage as part of the ACA. But you may live in a state that rejected the expansion in order to make the ACA more painful for people like you, so YMMV.
Not if you have an expensive preexisting condition.
The HHS has explicitly said private coverage in all of the releases I've seen. That wouldn't include Medicaid.
ERs are kind of narrow in scope. Using the ER as your whole health care system basically means that you live with your tumor untreated until the symptoms become acute, and then the people in the ER will do their best to stabilize you when you're having serious problems. It's great for falling off your bike and breaking your arm. Not so much for serious chronic illness.
You can't eliminate the people who don't have the money to pay for care with a wave of the "false dicohtomy" hand. Let's say we get our less expensive urgent treatment facilities (a great policy, by the way). What do you do with people who show up and can't even pay for those?
If you're making the argument that the feds shouldn't provide tax credits for certain behavior, I'm generally in agreement with you. I don't think they violate the constitution, but let's ignore that for a second. Are you saying that tax credits for the ACA would be unconstitutional but all of the other tax credits are OK? Or are we just talking about striking down tax credits entirely?
Primarily for political reasons. Because it would be SOCIALISM!
One important reason for that is that consumers can tell the producers of non-essential goods and services to get lost if they don't like the price. Essential goods and services, pretty much by definition, don't have that property.
You wouldn't be a bit concerned about the potential effects on the morale of your Jewish emloyees or the potential alienation of Jewish customers if he spent his personal time on anti semetic activism? No issues with him being the public face of your company from 9-5 and the public face of anti-semitism from 6-midnight?
So it would be OK for you not to do business with him, but if a bunch of people agreed with you and stopped doing business with him as well, it would be a major moral problem and a crushing blow to free speech?
Not long ago, everybody had the same right to marry a person of the same race. Some people didn't want to make use of that right, and it caused a ruckus, and eventually we granted them some crazy new rights. Was Loving v. Virginia decided incorrectly? Was the system fair and equitable as it was before Loving, and were the agitators agitating over nothing?
I'm totally with you that we shouldn't lynch or crucify people over their political beliefs. Once that happens, I'll be right beside you trying to put a stop to it.
So it's OK for one person to boycott individually based on his beliefs, but once a lot of people start doing it it's a problem?
It would be interesting to know what the dynamics are of password database size vs login frequency. A lot of systems get huge numbers of login requests in very short timeframes, so it may not be a problem for them. But the flip side is that user bases that huge often have large numbers of weak passwords floating around, so the hit rate for a password cracker would be much higher. I certainly wouldn't use it for any of the piddly little systems I put together, but larger sites may have better luck (or just have a bunch of different admins log in when they reboot a server).
What do you mean by a factor of 10, exactly? If your threshold is 10, you don't get any feedback on whether you got a password right until you get 10 passwords right, so it's a factor of 10 in effective password "length" but substantially more than that in work time. That's potentially a pretty big win.
They note in the paper that the "root access to the server and read from memory" problem is not one that this system is designed to solve. In fact, it's really not one that any system can solve. If anybody ever solves the "letting somebody have the information without actually letting them have any information" problem, we'll know about very quickly as DRM schemes that actually work will start to appear.
Unprecedented. We couldn't possibly have cordial relations with a country that points nuclear weapons at us. And barely over a half century ago! The wounds! So fresh!
I fully agree with you there. But you seem to be assuming that prohibition actually reduces those problems in a significant way. I very strongly doubt it. I admit that I wasn't alive for prohibition, but the people I know who were don't remember it as a time when we had problems with organized crime but a lot fewer problems with alcohol abuse. They remember it as a time with both. Alcohol abusers remained alcohol abusers. We just added in the additional element of prohibition. I don't see why that wouldn't be true for any other type of drug.
A simpler question: Given what you know about the destructiveness of alcohol, would you propose that we bring back prohibition today? If not, why, and how does that reason differ from the reasoning on other controlled substances?
I'm not doing a thought experiment about whether or not we'd be able to effectively enforce our drug laws. I'm observing the fact that we clearly aren't and haven't been for decades.
That's likely true in Mexico. I'm not sure exactly how we'd undo that. Encouraging people to be less corrupt and to stand up to militarized gangs sounds good on paper, but the reality seems to be that Mexico is unable to handle this issue. How do you solve endemic corruption driven by a hyper-violent criminal element with enough money and firepower to corrupt and tear down whatever you build?
If you're talking about our end, I'm really not seeing what we could do to escalate that wouldn't take us all the way to the dystopian endpoint. We already have ridiculously harsh sentencing, asset seizure, and a heavily militarized police force. We've essentially torched the Fourth Amendment as long as drugs are involved. What's left, and are the consequences of whatever escalation you have in mind really better than the consequences of legalization?
I don't think that the claim is that legalizing drugs will get rid of all of the problems associated with drugs. The position is that legalizing drugs trades the enormous problems caused by prohibition for the smaller problems caused by whatever marginal increase in usage repealing prohibition causes. Alcohol is a scourge, but I don't think that many people sincerely believe that we could generate a net improvement in our situation by driving it underground again.
If they could make the same profits in those other crimes, they would be doing so. They're not doing so because the drug trade is singularly profitable. Take away the drug trade and they're stuck with second and third best options. The mob didn't go away, but organized crime in the US is not as scary as it once was, and by far the scariest elements of it are the ones that make their money in the drug trade. Illegal gambling and prostitution operations just aren't that frightening.
If you can convert organized crime from something that has enough resources to dominate your government to something that exists off in the shadows and actually has to fear a government crackdown, that's a huge win.
The point is to make the business less lucrative by injecting competition into the system. Start with marijuana and go from there. It looks like about half of cartel revenue is marijuana. If you crash the price of marijuana by letting US producers start to produce it, you essentially turn it into the paperclip business. Yes, the paperclip business has a lot of money sloshing around in it and big producers could make quite a lot of money, but margins are so thin that there's no incentive for criminal activity and not enough profits to support it anyway. You never hear about organized crime and corruption in the paperclip business.
Other drugs may be stickier, but it seems to me like pot is a no brainer.
Of course it increases consumer demand, but not by enough to offset the eventual drop in price from a competitive market. Marijuana is ridiculously easy to produce. The only reason the prices are above the price of any cheap-ass plant is the short supply and lack of competition among producers. You'd be talking about a massive drop in total profits, not to mention competition from large producers in the US. Tobacco companies could bury the cartels in the marijuana market, especially if we put a tiny tariff on imported weed.
Realistically, I think that there's a difference between "people strongly disagree and try to take action against you" and "something of actual consequence happens to you to make your life measurably worse" that defines the line between persecution and something else entirely. Is a king persecuted if protestors crowd around outside the palace? Maybe, if they storm the gates and set up the guillotine. If they eventually leave and he goes back to being king? I'd call that more of an inconvenience.
If you put quotes around every word that has had an additional meaning added to it since its origins, you'd have quotes around a lot of words. But weirdly you don't. It's almost as if you do it in this one case to needle people, kind of like intentionally mispronouncing a person's name.
OK, let's see if we can connect these analogies. Gay people are like children how? Gay people are like the mentally ill how? Gay marriage is like marriage between siblings how?
We do deny those rights to those people, and it's ostensibly done for a good reason in any given case. So are the reasons that apply in those cases applicable to consenting gay adults? If your reasoning holds, we should be able to draw some strong parallels. At least, as long as your argument isn't something like, "We deny some rights to some people sometimes, so there's no limit to whose rights we can stomp on at any time."
Is it reasonable to say that a CEO or other publicly visible executive should be allowed to take part in any political activity he wants without fear that it will affect his job with the company? I'd be very concerned if this was some low-level backroom employee, but once you're the public face of a company, you're the public face of a company. If you do things that embarrass the company and turn off its constituents, even if those things are legal, you're at risk. It's the joy and the pain of being the CEO.
I mean, I believe it should be 100% legal for white supremacists to publish political materials, hold rallies, gather signatures, and march in parades. But if the CEO of a major company marched in one of those parades and got canned for it, I would not be surprised or shed a tear.
Why? Does denying those rights to gay couples increase the fertility of heterosexual couples or something? I mean, it's in our best interests to have a strong and able-bodied workforce to build stuff, but I don't see us lining up to increase taxes on the handicapped or anything like that.
Are you thinking that maybe if we keep gay people from getting married, they'll decide to find opposite sex partners and start having babies?